Front. Lit. Stud. China 2012, 6(1): 78–94 DOI 10.3868/s010-001-012-0006-9 Pu Wang (,) Department of East Asian Studies, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA E-mail: fourquartets@gmail.com RESEARCH ARTICLE Pu Wang Ren, Geren and Renmin: The Prehistory of the New Man and Guo Moruo’s Conception of “the People” Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the “socialist New Man” in modern Chinese literature. Focusing on the ideas of humanity, individuality and the people, it attempts to show the prehistory of the “New Man,” i.e., the emergence of the concept-figure of “the people” out of the discourse of humanity. The making of a new historical subjectivity of “the people” was part and parcel of the singular historical experience of the Chinese Revolution and the precondition for its social experiments. Yet this issue receives insufficient critical attention. This paper gives an outline of this idea’s genealogy, by concentrating on Guo Moruo’s literary-intellectual trajectory. It will show how the enlightenment project and romantic historical imagination paved the way for the concept of the people, and how the new subjectivity of the people prepared for the ideal of the new man. Keywords the people, humanism, New Man, Chinese Revolution, Guo Moruo The Concept of Humanity: A Problematic Idea In 1959, Guo Moruo and Zhou Yang, two then literary leaders of PRC, edited Folk Songs of the Red Flag (Hongqi geyao), an official collection of the “new folk songs.” Its publication concluded the “new folk songs movement” that was initiated by Mao Zedong’s call for the collection of the folk songs of Chinese people participating in the Great Leap Forward. Both Guo and Zhou declared, on various occasions, that in the new folk songs the “new people” were taking shape. They believed that, under communism, “everyone is a poet,” while being a laborer at the same time. 1 The new folk songs, in their celebration of the Party, 1 Zhou Yang, 2002, 467.