This article is concerned with the Bishan Commune Project; a long-term socially engaged art project initiated in the southern part of Anhui province—it is concerned with the artists and intellectuals who were involved, the villagers they met and the local authorities they negotiated with. In 2010 artist, editor, curator and filmmaker Ou Ning drafted a notebook titled The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.[2] The notebook presents a utopian ideal of another way of life based on the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid as well as James Yen’s rural reconstruction practices of the 1930s.[3] The notebook thus presents a plethora of references from China and the rest of the world and as such places itself solidly within a global art world discourse of the local and the global, the place of the collective within surrounding society, as well as history as it is understood and reread in a very contemporary setting. In 2011 the Bishan Commune was established in the village of Bishan in rural Anhui Province and in 2013 Ou Ning left Beijing and moved to Bishan with his family. The main question of this article, fed by curiosity and wonder, is thus exactly the question of how the Chinese countryside (and political landscape) can provide the backdrop for an anarchist, utopian community? In other words: how do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside? This bigger question gives rise to a string of other questions such as: how can we see the utopian proposition of an anarchist commune in rural China vis-à-vis a Chinese countryside governed by shifting power bases, capital interests and central government policies? How did the relationship between the project and local authorities unfold? In what ways were local villagers included, and to what extent did they come to see the project as something they helped shape? And lastly, how did the Trojan Horse of the Bishan Commune manifest itself and engage in this matrix? In this sense, the article explores the Bishan Commune as a practical example of what happens when urban artists, activists and intellectuals practice in the face of both power and people in rural China.