LINCANG, China — Members of this idyllic utopian commune tucked away in the mountains of southwest China share an agrarian life that would probably have delighted Chairman Mao: Every day they volunteer six hours to work the fields, feed their jointly owned chickens and prepare enough food to fill every belly in the community. The bounty of their harvest is divided equally and apparently without strife, part of a philosophy that emphasizes selflessness and egalitarian living over money and materialism.

“What we’re doing here is basically communism,” said Xue Feng, 57, the soft-spoken founder of Shengmin Chanyuan, or New Oasis for Life, whose 150 members include illiterate peasants and big-city corporate refugees. “People do what they can and get what they need.”

But Marxism doesn’t often look like that in modern-day China, and New Oasis has unnerved local officials in Yunnan, a lush semitropical province that borders Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar.