ABSTRACT
The most frequently encountered common-sense explanation for post-1949 China's supposed anti-urbanism lies in the means to state power taken by the Chinese Communist Party. If anti-urbanism had become a discernible trait in the China of the 1840s, a further half-century and more of military defeat, and the rude designation of ancient Chinese cities as foreigners' 'Treaty Ports' was to bring it to a much greater pass. Incipient anti-urbanism was born of the fact that the urban-based merchant and artisan classes occupied a lesser status, and were thus 'less virtuous' than the peasantry in general and the scholar-gentry in particular. Engels' anti-urbanist position of forty years before had been very different from that of the utopian socialists, who hoped their rural-based experiments would take root within the interstices of capitalism and gradually displace it. It is important to bear in mind that Marx and Engels were adamantly opposed to premature efforts to build a collectivist socialist society.
