In the early 20th century, China was deeply influenced by Western colonialism and faced a dual crisis of national and individual anxiety. How to imagine and shape “new human”, or “new Chinese” in the context of modernization, was one of the important topics for Chinese intellectuals. This issue was also related to political, economic, cultural and other practices, and affected China's modern social transformation.

I want to turn to the important discourses on “new human” in the early 20th China's historical context, to explore the evolution and reasons of “new human” discourses, and the complex entanglement between the “new human” issue and the China/West, tradition/modernity issues under the theoretical lens of post colonialism. Therefore, I intend to describe this phenomenon in three stages, from Liang Qichao in the late Qing Dynasty, who urged to put forward the theory of “new people” because of people's lack of consciousness of publicity, to Lu Xun who fiercely criticized the traditional oppression of human nature and put forward the national criticism during the New Culture Movement, and to the ideological transformation proposed by the CPC after the 1940s, each with a particular emphasis on the physical and mental intervention of Chinese people. All of them tried to invent more modern and rational individuals and groups, so as to achieve respective national imagination and construction. 

With this historical study, I aim to propose that the “new human” discourse is a power discourse that in the name of evolution constructs an unseen language wall, and forces people to “spontaneously” self-reform through evolutionary thinking if they didn’t want to be excluded from the national community, for the purpose of a kind of political and historical utopia in specific periods.