Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century

In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China’s entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China’s uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity.Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political conflicts in China during the 1990s. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the postsocialist realism of the era through readings of Mo Yan’s fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang applies the same keen insight to China’s long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Socialism 1 Part I. Intellectual Discourse: National and Global Determinations 1. The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field 25 2. Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s 102 3. Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the "New Era" 136 Part II. Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism 4. Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory in Wang Anyi's Literary Production in the 1990s 181 5. Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, "Minor Literature," and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology 212 6. "Demonic Realism" and the "Socialist Market Economy": Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine 240 Part III. Cinematic Discourse: Universality, Singularity, and the Everyday World 7. National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite 269 8. Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju 289 Notes 311 Bibliography 331 Index 341