Communism is not ‘Other’. This is the key message of Yinghong Cheng’s Creating the ‘New Man’: from Enlightenment ideals to socialist realities. During and after the Cold War, many have sought to portray communism as a foreign, exotic phenomenon of underdeveloped societies with deeply autocratic traditions. This was and is a convenient way of imposing a figurative Iron Curtain between Western political and social ideals – as well as Western movements for social change, economic equality, and the moral improvement of society – and their communist counterparts. In response, Cheng’s book narrates the story of the origins of the communist project of remaking humanity from the same Enlightenment intellectual milieu in which the ideas of contemporary liberal democracy originated through to the enthusiastic reception of many Western intellectuals for the efforts of fully formed communist regimes. He uses the cases of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castroite Cuba in the 1960s as his examples to illustrate the efforts and ideals that went into reforming humanity on a grand scale in each of the three countries, thereby attempting to examine the continuities and coherence within the communist project itself across both time and space. In the process, he has made a valiant attempt to rescue the ‘New Man’ from the dustbin of history by refocusing our attention on the meaning of the communist experiment, both politically and ideologically, outside the global power struggle of the Cold War.

In addition to the Enlightenment ideals mentioned in the subtitle, Cheng examines more particular sources of these transformative efforts in each of his three cases, including the tradition of the Russian Populists in the Soviet Union, Confucian notions about human nature, perfectability, and education in China, and the anti-imperialist imaginings of Jose Marti in Cuba. While these particular traditions affected both the goals of the project as well as the means employed in each country, Cheng argues that ‘the goal of making people better or more virtuous … is one of the fundamental human passionate impulses’ (p. 215) and that the twentieth century project of remaking humanity constitutes a ‘world historical phenomenon’ (p. 223).

Despite the particularities of the projects of reforming humanity in each country, a broader picture emerges in which each effort ultimately rests on two primary goals: the sublimation of individual ambition into devotion towards communal goals and the remaking of humanity through intense physical, and often agricultural, labour. While Cheng locates the general impulse to reform humanity, along with the idea that it would be possible to do so through environmental changes, in the Enlightenment, the common origin of these two aspects as the central elements in that reform is less clear in his book. Instead, they seem to emerge largely independently in each of the three countries, though he does point to the influence of Russian populism on key figures in China’s May Fourth Movement. This issue remains a source of ambiguity throughout the book, as Cheng leaves it unclear exactly how much he sees the project to create the ‘New Man’ as being fundamentally international in both scope and origin, how much is related to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, and how much comes from the particular cultural traditions of each of his three cases. Furthermore, the Chinese and Cuban efforts are linked very clearly to both Mao’s and Castro’s self-conceptions as teachers and reformers of humanity, while no similar claim is made regarding Lenin, Stalin, or any other figure in the Soviet case. The Soviet case in general is given less attention than the other two and consequently fails to give the reader a complete sense of either the seriousness of the efforts devoted to remaking humanity in the Soviet Union or the tremendous explosion of ideas of how to do so in the initial years after the Bolshevik revolution, when not only Party and state officials but writers, artists, and thinkers of all sorts saw themselves as engaged in a project that was totally unprecedented.

A major lacuna in Cheng’s work is the issue of the harsher methods used to remould humanity, especially in the Soviet case. While his discussion of the origins of the project gives the reader the impression that it was based on the idea that humanity was infinitely malleable, in practice each of the regimes found whole population groups – economic, ethnic, and religious ones – that it did not wish to incorporate into the creation of the ‘New Man’. In fact, the destruction of undesirable elements through massive purges and violence was an essential part of the re-creation of humanity, as well as another international inheritance from the Enlightenment shared by many states in the early twentieth century. This phenomenon was termed the ‘gardening state’ by Amir Weiner.Footnote ⁴ Even the countless thousands who were shot in the course of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s were not beyond the bounds of this project, as the great efforts devoted to obtaining confessions attest. Interrogation itself was a method of reform, as Igal Halfin has shown.Footnote ⁵ It is hard to paint a complete picture of the effort to reform humanity without presenting the full spectrum of methodologies employed, as well as examining those that each regime did not see fit to reform.

One of the key contributions of Cheng’s work is its attempt to reintegrate the history of international communism with that of leftists in the West, as well as pointing to its connections with the concurrent phenomenon of decolonization. Unfortunately, the attention devoted to these connections is rather sparse, and the ‘Third World’ is represented in this book almost exclusively by Tanzania and Cambodia. The question of the appeal of the ‘New Man’ for Western intellectuals is interesting, but Cheng does not ask a key question: was the appeal for Western intellectuals truly about a socialist future, or rather about a pre-capitalist past that had disappeared in the face of Marcusean industrial society? In other words, were Western intellectuals really looking for a ‘New Man’ or was this nostalgia for an even older Man?