Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century 9780822388937

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Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

post-contemporary interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

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

Xudong Zhang

Duke University Press 2008

© 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper d Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Scala by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

For my parents

contents

Acknowledgments Introduction The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

ix 1

part i Intellectual Discourse: National and Global Determinations

One

The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field Two Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s Three

Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the “New Era”

25 102

136

part ii Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism

Four

Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s Five

Six

181

Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, “Minor Literature,” and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology

212

“Demonic Realism” and the “Socialist Market Economy”: Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

240

Contents

part iii Cinematic Discourse: Universality, Singularity, and the Everyday World

Seven

Eight

National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite 269 Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju

289

Notes

311

Bibliography

331

Index

341

acknowledgments

my intellectual debts are recorded in each chapter of this book. There are, however, a few people who deserve special thanks. Throughout my years of writing Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Fredric Jameson, Arif Dirlik, Gan Yang, Cui Zhiyuan, Rebecca Karl, Harry Harootunian, Thomas Bender, Michael Gilsenan, Perry Anderson, Bruce Robbins, Leo Lee, and Elizabeth Perry were among the first readers, indulging me by reading the drafts, offering valuable comments and challenging criticism. I also want to thank Yue Daiyun, Ban Wang, Wang Xiaoming, Leo Lee, Haili Kong, Xiaobing Tang, Ted Huters, Dai Jinhua, Hong Jiang, Gan Yang, Chen Sihe, Elizabeth Perry, John C. Y. Wang and Chao Fen Sun, Xu Jilin, Wendy Larson, and Ashok Gorung for inviting and hosting me to present various parts of this project at their institutions. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues, students, and friends at Rutgers University and New York University for making my home environment a place where I always felt supported, encouraged, free, and productive. I thank the Shanghai Collegiate E-Institute of Urban Culture Studies for supporting research related to this book. Thanks are also due to Mia Miao Feng for preparing the index, and to Agnes Zhuo Liu for help with references. An early version of chapter 1 was included in Whither China? Intellectual Politics of Contemporary China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001) as the editor’s introduction, with an excerpt published by East Asia International Quarterly 19.1–2 (2001): 3–57. Chapter 2 first appeared in Social Text, no. 55 (1998): 109–40. An abbreviated version of chapter 3 first appeared in New Left Review 237 (1999): 77–105. A fuller version was included in Postmodernism and China, ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham, N.C.:

Acknowledgments

Duke University Press, 2000), 399–442. Chapter 4 first appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique 8 (2000): 349–87. Chapter 5 first appeared in New Literary History (Winter 2002): 137–69. Chapter 6 was first published in Journal of Contemporary China 12 (2003): 623–38. Chapter 7 first appeared in Marxism and Cinema, edited by Michael Wayne (London: Pluto, 2005): 213–32. All the chapters have been freshly updated, edited, and, in many places, substantially revised or expanded for this book. For their unconditional love and support over the years, and for their energetic life in retirement, I dedicate this book to my parents, Zhang Mingyang and Sun Liangying. March 2007 Greenwich Village, New York x

introduction

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism Instead of intellectual history, instead of trying to re-construct basic images of history epoch by epoch, the issue is to grasp historical facticity in its historicity itself as natural historical. —T. W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History”

one

the chinese 1990s, as a cultural-historical decade I seek to define in this book, spans not ten but twelve years. China stumbled into this eventful period with the painful contraction, repression, and isolation that followed the military crackdown on the student protest in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The nation witnessed—from a distance and yet with watchful eyes—the first U.S. Gulf War in 1990 and the implosion of the Soviet Empire in 1991. It nursed a wounded national pride when Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games was frustrated by a U.S.-led campaign (Beijing finally succeeded, in 2002, in being named host of the 2008 Olympiad). It embraced another, more sweeping and relentless round of market-oriented reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992. It traversed the Taiwan missile crisis in 1996 (which brought two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups near the waters east of Taiwan). It ended, with much fanfare and celebration, British colonial rule in Hong Kong in 1997, then smoothly recovered Macao, a former Portuguese colony, in 1999, thus closing the chapter of colonialism in the history of modern China. It withstood and resisted the Asian financial meltdown, which in 1998 crippled the economies of many East and Southeast Asian countries. And, finally, on December 11, 2001, the People’s Republic concluded its second decade of post-Mao reforms with a hard-earned, controversial entry into the World Trade Organization as the wto’s 143rd member, seemingly anchoring the “Middle Kingdom” firmly if not irreversibly in the capitalist world market. The decade’s dramatic and often disruptive twists and turns were matched only by China’s amazingly consistent economic growth and political stability, both of which sat on top of increasingly uneven development and social polarization. The constant menace of unrest and chaos were coupled by a

Introduction

2

precarious, even mystifying order and normalcy in the midst of the radical reconfiguration of Chinese society and culture. Accompanying this tense process of relaxation was a silent revolution in every domain of Chinese life as the People’s Republic transformed from a centrally planned economy to the world’s new workshop and its most coveted market for international capital. The relatively monotonous social space controlled by the state and its intellectual high culture has metamorphosed into a boisterous, disorienting social sphere underscored by a carnivalesque consumer mass culture equipped with new information technology from the cell phone to the Internet. If the beginning of the Chinese 1990s marks a low point in contemporary Chinese history, the end of this decade of transition seems, to many inside and outside the country, to be a highly symbolic moment which indicated China’s continuous economic prosperity, cultural diversity, institutional rationalization, and even political stability, all of which promise both to help China integrate into the capitalist global system and to create deepening divisions and tensions in the space of the nation-state. This book builds on my analysis of the Chinese 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (1997). Following the themes and issues of the previous decade both provides a sense of historical continuity and constitutes a frame of reference by which to measure and weigh discontinuities, which are often radical and shocking. While many cultural-intellectual manifestations of the 1990s originated in the 1980s, what followed the New Era (1979–89) and its cultural-intellectual-aesthetic regime was no less dramatic, if lacking the sociomoral consensus and the overarching intellectual-philosophical themes of the Chinese 1980s. Meanwhile, the upheaval of commodity economy has made the new social relations and contradictions clearer than ever before, often through crude and appalling advances of capitalist relations of production and the corresponding power structure as their sociopolitical articulation in Chinese reality. Many of the overarching themes of the 1980s, such as modernization, “New Enlightenment,” and “opening to the outside world” are no less radically and aggressively manifest in the 1990s. In other words, the decade witnessed not the end of modernization and developmentalist ideology but rather their permeation and radicalization under the postsocialist and “postmodern” circumstances of globalization, commodification, individual freedom, private ownership and rights, social mobility, moral and value plurality, and cultural diversity. As I will show in the chapters to follow, the Chinese postmodern is characterized not by the dissolution of modernist ideologies but by their intensification and standardization. What complicates this transformation in the Chinese context,

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

however, is the fact that the survival or failure of Chinese socialism seems both to depend on this development and be the sociohistorical condition for it. Therefore, just as my analysis of Chinese modernism in the 1980s ultimately points to the residual and repressed sociopolitical content of Mao’s China as the true historical source for the post-Mao aesthetic and intellectual upheavals, my effort to understand Chinese “postmodernism” in the 1990s inevitably touches on the particular forms of Chinese socialism—as mode of production, forms of ownership, moral-political identity, sociopsychological experience, intellectual discourse, and everyday culture all at once—in much of its formal and stylistic analysis. And from the perspective of this analysis, it is clear that the Chinese economy, society, and culture as they are examined in this context will survive or fail with Chinese socialism as a postsocialism. In this process, the initial targets of the state-driven modernization project were no longer the only goals pursued so single-mindedly by a collective underpinned by an ideological consensus; and they were certainly not the only obsessions and convictions that shaped the moral compass and existential anxiety of a nation. In contrast to the linear, one-dimensional development model predominant throughout the 1980s, the 1990s as a period are so multifaceted, heterogeneous, “flexible,” and fuzzy as to defy any dogmatic or orthodox categorization. More relentless differentiations of the social sphere have led to more assertive expressions of class interests and ideological positions. The breaking of the social, conceptual, and imaginary totality of socialist modernity has resulted in the general disintegration of a real or imagined national political, intellectual, and cultural discourse. As terms like civil society and public sphere were ideological notions introduced in the 1990s to problematize and challenge the power monopoly of the state, they are not always useful and sufficiently supple categories by which to analyze and reflect on the emergence of the social in the sociospatial territory previously owned, and still shared, by the state. The liberating effect of the new capitalist economic reality, the newfound and often substantive social freedom based on a commodity economy must not be ignored and downplayed in order to defend the political and cultural legacies of Chinese socialism, because such freedom seems to come with new meanings of human activity and productivity (but also new limitations and distortions of them) under the new social condition, meanings which are not merely derived from the capitalist mode of production, but that more often than not result from negotiating with, resisting to, and even partially overcoming this condition. And actually existing socialism, even in its reduced and ambiguous

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Introduction

4

form in China today, remains a meaningful and vital source of legitimacy in the collective struggle against the abstract and generalizing tendencies of the logic of capital and commodity. Conversely, the struggle to formulate and articulate the legitimacy of revolution and socialism in the world historical context of modernity and capitalism must also be considered a constitutive element, if not a prominent feature, of the truth-content of postsocialist China, of its cultural production and cultural politics. If the 1980s gave China a foothold in a world transformed by postwar capitalist material and cultural production, then the 1990s are more like a moment of truth when China’s self-image and self-recognition—“time honored” and untested all at once—were put to the test through their bumpy and friction- and conflict-ridden encounter with the Other, above all the “universal” symbolic order laid down and embodied by the West led by a triumphant and ideologically aggressive United States. As a result, throughout the 1990s, China’s outward explorations and expansions were coupled with an inward search and self-reflection. The two movements were intertwined in such a way that an internally differentiated and fragmented notion of the national selfhood, rather than an overarching, cosmopolitan framework of the universal, has become the main source for the collective identity of postsocialist Chinese society. The historical and philosophical content of this new dialectic of the Self is often simplified and caricatured by the “nationalism as substitute for communism” theory, which, plainly stated, is what most of the current media and scholarly writings on contemporary China tirelessly and tiresomely seek to convey. It would be a truly challenging job for economists or economic historians to try not so much to analyze as to describe the rise of China—now in many crucial economic indicators comparable to Japan less than a quarter century ago, but a country ten times the size of Japan in population, twenty-five times in area—and its impact on the overall structure of the world economy (in terms of purchasing power parity or ppp , the Chinese economy is already more than twice the size of Japan’s, and it is projected to surpass the U.S. economy by 2020).1 It seems to me to be more daunting still to understand change and nonchange, continuity and discontinuity—or, rather, what moves fast and in a sweeping, clean-cut way and what moves slowly and in an uneven, sluggish fashion, in both relative and absolute terms—in a sociocultural discourse that vibrates with the inner determinations of history in a less discernible but more intimate fashion. It is the intervention of history itself that animates this period with a ruthless sense of reality. Not only unevenness, tensions, conflicts, contradictions,

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

but also coexistence, intermingling, and radical overlap and juxtaposition define the TimeSpace of the Chinese 1990s as part and parcel of the global situation, a new frontier, an indispensable building block, and a “weak link” at the same time in the world-historical chain of capitalist generality. The survival, persistence, adjustment, and innovation of the Chinese socialist state-form ensure vital sovereignty and autonomy in some spheres and domains while the Chinese government itself leads integration of the Chinese economy into the global market and division of labor. In the conceptual space of that sovereignty and autonomy, or, put differently, in the by now open boundary of China as a meaningful totality, the new defines and is defined by the old; contact zones shaped by the cutting edge of global capital and technology (with their attendant ideology) absorb and are absorbed by the hinterland of peasantry into the same process of dialectical contradictions which, in theory if not in reality, demand and anticipate a narrative interpretation, an epic wisdom that transcends the instrumental reason of the positivistic world. It is in this larger context, and against the grain of the conventional premise of “state versus society,” that many of the book’s topics—from nationalism to postmodernism, from narration of history to the imagination of the future, and from the ideal of the universal to the selfaffirmation of the singular—are explored and analyzed.

two

A critical narrative of the cultural-intellectual formulations from this decade must strive to account for the interactions between the lingering modernist “cultural consciousness” emerging from the 1980s and the hectic, unrelenting events of history; between a dazzling variety of political and intellectual positions searching for their ideological articulation and fortification on the one hand, and, on the other, the general intensification of Chinese social contradictions. The country is mired in increasing imbalance, disparity, conflict, and contradictions as it becomes an awkward new player in the global economy and in global power relations. In this process, various components of what used to be imagined as part and parcel of a congruent, uniform sociogeographic and cultural-ideological space called China are now moving in different, sometimes opposite directions. At the same time, there are political, social, intellectual, and artistic forces that are mobilized to articulate and justify the new coherence, new rationale, and new meaningfulness of China’s unity—as a nation, as an empire, as a “form of life,” or as a sociopolitical order (as disorder) which either sets the stage

5

Introduction

6

for the “last frontier of world capitalism” or holds on to the historical substance of revolution, socialism, and mass democracy. The cultural visions, intellectual discourses, and artistic expressions of the Chinese 1990s can be best understood in their involvement in and entanglement with the deeply political struggle in which all the lingering and emergent positions in the field struggle to formulate, with varying degrees of self-consciousness and conceptual clarity, their own stake as the stake of the collective, as the moral and cultural order on which the new Chinese society can be founded. The particular and specific intellectual and aesthetic rivalry in this sociopolitical contention, more often than not, lies in the contending parties’ competition to capture and formalize the richness and aesthetic appeal of the new experience, the exciting or traumatic impact of the adventure, while managing to anchor these events and happenings in the larger, “universal” frames of meaning and historicity. The specific topics, phenomena, discourses, and texts in this book are selected and discussed according to this narrative logic. What I find less interesting—not necessarily in the technical sense, but in a narrative, historical sense—are those inflated metaphors and swollen details in some of the stylistic experiments in contemporary Chinese art, poetry, philosophy, criticism, and historical research which appear to convey isolation rather than interaction, inaction rather than action, reification and fetishism (of the properly “autonomous” and “individual”; of the secured, disinterested specialization and professionalism, for instance) rather than freshness of uncharted experiences and willingness to confront the challenge of the times. Ironically, the “art for art’s sake” approach in contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual production seems more suited to a sociological analysis than to an “intrinsic” study of their formal features and properties, as its products tend to reveal more immediately the intensified division of labor and brand recognition governed by the capitalist mode of production, and in particular commodity fetishism and individuated mass consumption, than they reveal taste and judgment in the classical sense. Similarly, those products are subject to a more transparent ideological critique as they tend to subscribe to existing, prevailing ideologies about subjectivity, freedom, universality, artistic genius, the autonomy and abstraction of the work of art, the self-referentiality of language, and so forth. Compared to the euphoric and idealistic 1980s, when the Chinese state, ideologically and substantially far more socialist and dominant than it is today, was embraced by the West as a reformer, the Chinese 1990s witnessed a genuine schizophrenia in social reality and the collective mindset along

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

with the radical disintegration of traditional (both agrarian and socialist) social fabric, the decentralization of power, the loss of moral and theoretical authority, and China’s uneasy and often embattled relations with a reintegrated and expanded capitalist West after the Cold War.2 In this period, for the imagined historical subject of China, which is for its intellectuals something above and beyond concrete state-form, the sole legitimating and unifying force, namely, the rapid if uneven growth of the Chinese economy, is simultaneously a force of delegitimation and division. Compared to the previous decade of Chinese reforms, the post-Tiananmen growth and prosperity were accompanied by a very different historical tension, urgency, and anxiety, which in turn gave rise to a very different mode of perception, expression, and representation. But it is this ongoing socioeconomic and sociopolitical change that underlies my study of contemporary Chinese culture, more specifically, of Chinese cultural and intellectual sensibilities, styles, and nuances. The Chinese New Era as a cultural epoch gave rise to a “modernist” moment corresponding to the socialist reform as a systematic correction of the Cultural Revolution. Seeking to transcend the cultural paradigm of socialist realism, often by incorporating an international symbolic order of high culture, Chinese modernism in the era of reforms also unwittingly seized on and utilized the collective experience of socialist modernity as a political and aesthetic condition of possibility, albeit in the fashion of an individualistic appropriation. This central observation I made in my reading of 1980s Chinese culture is coupled with an analysis of a particular historic conjuncture: The Reform policies of depoliticization and opening to the outside world provided a window opportunity for a collective vision to map itself onto an imagined international—and purportedly universal—language. In this discursive space, local or national desires, with their unconscious links to the universal via the legacy of revolution and socialist modernity, quickly took hold in the realm of stylistic innovation and formal intensity, exemplified by earlier Euro-American modernism in literature, film, fine art, and philosophy. To call the New Era a window of opportunity is also to highlight its shortness and transitional nature, if not its internal political and formal precariousness, inconsistency, and contradiction. The 1980s may be remembered as the golden age of post-Mao Chinese cultural and intellectual freedom, but this view is understandable only in terms of unreflected nostalgia. A closer glance at the vicissitudes of that decade shows the 1980s as a rather repressive period by the standard of the Chinese late 1990s. The repression stemmed not only from routine, often ruthless government intervention but

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also from extreme, though decreasing, material and cultural austerity and deprivation. However, the irony of this modernist moment in contemporary Chinese history lies in the fact that its freedom (and notion of freedom) was conditioned, defined, and provided by the total and immediate rule of a reforming socialist state over not only the entire socioeconomic and socioideological space but also over the intimate fabric of everyday life and the people’s conception of the ultimate human-historical horizon. The nonfreedom of the total state remained the condition of possibility for freedom in two crucial, albeit unorthodox ways. First, this nonfreedom maintained a tightly woven collective life and its mutual dependency, whose internal socioeconomic equality and political-ideological homogeneity ensured initiatives and possibilities available only in a “mass democracy” or an “enlightened despotism.” Second, the state and its socialist infrastructure acted both as a mediator with and a buffer against the capitalist world market, thus effectively protecting a fledgling national market of economic and cultural production/consumption. Without taking into account the omnipresence of the Chinese state and the restrictions it imposed on the social desire and imagination, it would be impossible to understand the 1980s intellectuals’ holistic, intensely philosophical, but often abstract thinking— either in “reconstructing traditional culture” or in taking on the modern West “as a whole”—not to mention their unchallenged, often unexamined moral authority, social prestige, and cultural influence. In analyzing the selfpurported modernist subjectivity of early post-Mao China, the importance of these two factors can hardly be exaggerated.

three

The sociohistorical rupture of the 1990s, then, can be probed from the perspective of the newfound freedom and subjectivity, as both tend to dissolve in the new environment defined by the global market and the permeation of its ideologies and cultural symbols. If the political and material condition of 1980s China offers an explanation for the aesthetic intensity of a modernist movement, then that intensity became dispersed in the sociolibidinal maze of the 1990s, in the fashions and styles available in a global consumer market. Despite the Chinese government’s granting much more—and inconceivably more in certain areas—economic and social freedom to its people since the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, its presence has been considered increasingly anachronistic and redundant in the market environment of its own creation. The government has since withdrawn

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

from totally controlling the entire sociocultural space, even if it has not yet formally denounced the right to use arbitrary raw force in selectively enforcing a nebulous law. The sweeping marketization in anticipation of China’s full entry into the capitalist global economy seems to have strengthened the Chinese economy and in particular benefited the new ruling elite of a bureaucratic capitalism. With constant friction and grudging complaints, the People’s Republic has been accepted by the Western-dominated, rather exclusive “international community” as just another player in the world economy and political affairs, which means the country has practically shaken off its ideological distinctness as one of the handful of remaining communist states. A protourban middle class has flourished and is more vocally expressing its sociolibidinal desires and political longings. All this, however, does not seem to enhance those modernist notions of freedom and subjectivity but, to the contrary, threatens to suffocate them in the realized utopia of modernity—a modernity whose modernness increasingly depends on its deterritorialized and saturated forms, that is, on postmodernity. This is why this exploration of the 1990s’ cultural production and intellectual discourse takes as its central question the correlation between postmodernism and postsocialism. The question, more precisely, is how to understand the ways the more recent stages of what used to be called modern, namely the postmodern, and the more recent development and mutation of a form of life still shaped, at least partially, by socialist modernity and state-form, become embedded in and fused with one another in the Chinese context. Whereas postmodernism—specifically, Chinese postmodernism— signifies China’s overdetermination by the global historical conditionings of a locally produced form of daily life, postsocialism highlights the nationalhistorical lineage, casting into relief the global shift from modernity to postmodernity. It is admittedly a daunting task to pursue not one but two shifting and amorphous conceptual categories with theoretical and historical clarity and concreteness, but I find it intellectually productive to try to juxtapose the questions of (post)modernity with those of the (post)socialist everyday world and its initial intellectual formulations. In the interaction between the two, the epochal framework of change has been made more explicit and specific by economic, social, and political developments after the Cold War. In other words, the two theoretically entangled categories tend to give rise to a new historical narrative in which they both find concrete articulation. Between the theoretical foci of postmodernism and postsocialism, the latter requires a minimal working hypothesis if not definition to proceed. If

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we start with socialism as we know it, then the prefix post- invites a measure of comparison or cross-reference in the intellectual space of contemporary theoretical discourses. Like the post- in postmodernity or postmodernism, the prefix in postsocialism indicates simultaneously discontinuity and continuity. Postsocialism, obviously, does not mean “socialism at a higher stage,” which is ominously reminiscent of the Soviet jargon of “developed socialism” and forms a comical contrast to the now nearly forgotten Chinese Communist Party (c c p ) definition of post-Mao Chinese society as a “socialism in its preliminary stage” (shehuizhuyi chuji jieduan).3 The use of “postsocialism” does not suggest a more advanced, superior—or, for that matter, more backward and inferior—form of socioeconomic and political development. Rather, it is an experimental way to address a bewildering overlap of modes of production, social systems, and symbolic orders, all of which lay claim to a fledgling world of life. These contending socioeconomic and sociopolitical forces are somehow equalized in the postsocialist space by the global context of capitalist world market and ideological domination; they also enter a more level terrain of engagement guaranteed by the Chinese state apparatus as both a generator of bureaucratic capitalism and the inheritor of the revolutionary and socialist legacies of Mao’s China. The fact that the global capitalist context and the Chinese state-form fully interpenetrate and depend on each other does not mean that there is a well-synchronized, homogenous historical time by which to measure and evaluate things everywhere, or that the political economy of global capitalism is now solely responsible for explaining the totality of human history. Rather, the problematic of postsocialism emerges when a new round of sweeping “universal high culture”—this time in the form of globalized and “flexible” capitalism, information technology, the mass-culture industry, and a revised notion of bourgeois subjectivity—saturates the totality of the social space only to make visible, not obliterate, the engrained historicomaterial unevenness, class contradiction, and cultural differences. China’s uncomfortable and irritating place in the global capitalist system—as the biggest emerging market and the fast-growing economy, as the largest communist state, as a surviving empire or civilization which never forgets its old glory and the humiliating defeat in the recent past—may consolidate the internal homogenization of the rich and powerful, namely, the new entrepreneur class and its allies in the party and state bureaucracy, both of which are constantly “embarrassed” by the institutional, political, and cultural differences between China and advanced capitalist societies. Meanwhile, China’s uncomfortable perch in the world system may also bring into sharper

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

focus the same set of differences as historical conditions of possibility and as a moral-political necessity to resist free-market orthodoxy and its social policies as well as to search for a sociopolitical system that legitimates and makes effective such resistance. Indeed, China’s situatedness in global relations, as the latter are defined by the capitalist mode of production, political power, and cultural-ideological influence, is increasingly articulated by its “internal” socioeconomic and cultural-political contradictions, contradictions which call for a thorough reexamination of the revolutionary and socialist legacies as historical and collective answers to the same world-historical conditions and power relations but in an earlier historical moment. There are at least as many social groups and entire social strata clinging to the moral and political legacies of that historical answer as there are other groups and strata striving to go beyond it in search of a new anchor of universality in the global status quo or in the neoliberal utopia of the international managerial class. The moment of postsocialism, to this extent, is but a dialectical repetition of the singularity of the socialist question, while taking into account many of the lessons of twentieth-century state socialism. In this process of reflection, articulation, and emergence, new social subjects are bound to come into being, with their political agenda and cultural vision defining the historical substance of Chinese postsocialism. Without this historical substance in achieving its political and cultural clarity, the “socialist reform” engaged by the c c p since the end of the Cultural Revolution will be remembered as nothing but a sentimental, even vacuous naming of a predetermined merging with the capitalist world system. But the question of postsocialism is based not on an academic label but on a tension-charged reality of mixed modes of production and value systems, which in actuality absorbs as well as resists, adopts as well as transforms the abstract generality of capital and commodity in the extremely uneven and unruly terrain of today’s China. It is in the ecstasy and frustration, obsession and suspicion with which capitalism makes in roads into concrete Chinese economic, social, political, and cultural life that the discourse of postsocialism gains its traction in history. Its analytical and critical effectiveness can only be measured by how it can address the complexity of Chinese reality, above all the fascination with/resistance to the capitalist commodity economy and the attachment to/forgetfulness of the revolutionary and socialist experience. Postsocialism as a conceptual framework is also meant to be a theoretical amendment to the general discourses on postmodernity and postmodernism, highlighting the profound sociopolitical gaps and barriers that underlie

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the smooth and glossy surface of international consumer society. It is meaningful only insofar as it is conducive to the articulation of those unevennesses, contradictions, and differences which are embedded in and entangled with contemporary capitalism, but which nonetheless remain necessary for any realistic hope of a better social system and a more just order of international relations. The implications of postsocialism as a concept point to an intellectual liberation from the teleological historical determinism which, in the name of a rivalry between socialism and capitalism, tends to imprison the mind in a rigid and dogmatic notion of modernity defined by an earlier historical age (of imperialism, colonialism, the postcolonial nation-state, and socialist industrialization). To this degree, socialism, in the very HegelianMarxian meaning of the term, can be regarded as dependent on, if not parasitic to, capitalism as a mode of production. Such a dependency may explain the sometimes obsessive insistence by radical—Marxist or non-Marxist— intellectuals in both the East and the West that there is no human-historical horizon beyond capitalism; that there is no alternative to capitalist modernity (what they mean is, rather, modernity as capitalism) other than a forever postponed and forever abstract Messianic world revolution. To this intellectual enclosure and political pessimism, postsocialism as an ongoing socioeconomic process in China can offer a more complicated picture of reality. Like the prefix post- in postcolonialism, the post- in postsocialism indicates a new socioeconomic and cultural-political subjectivity which prefigures the new but is embedded in an order of things that does not readily recognize the ideological claim, political legitimacy, and cultural validity of capitalist globalization for the totality of human history and its future horizon. If the sweeping, far-reaching, and expeditious transformation of every aspect of Chinese sociocultural life by the Maoist revolution was an alternative to the process of colonization by the modern as such, then the political, cultural, and ideological idiosyncrasies of its ruthless rule in the name of liberation, democratization, and development still shape the collective unconscious and daily conduct of behavior of a post-Mao, “rationalized” Chinese society. I deal with the analytical qualification of the term postsocialist society throughout the book (especially in chap. 3). Suffice it here simply to mention the survival of the Chinese state after 1989 and its increasing adeptness in not only creating a mixed economy within but coexisting with a capitalist global economy without. The meaning of the state, to be sure, comes not from its recognized role as the legal monopoly of domestic violence but from a kind of sovereignty endowed in it by the community of the people. In the face of intensified imperial domination by global capitalism,

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

sovereignty marks the national-political situations whose semiautonomy (or semidependency on a larger totality) is a crucial, indispensable condition of possibility for systematic opposition and resistance.

four

The concept of postsocialism, therefore, seeks to tease out the resilient and the residual, the heterogeneous and the uneven—the negative supplement in the total truth-claim of capitalist globalization. This negative supplement serves as the productive, affirmative force for the activation, liberation, and coming-into-consciousness of what is qualitatively exogenous to capitalism but remains as the suppressed internal resources and energies of a diverse global condition defined in capitalist terms. The central component of any theoretical description of the postsocialist condition must face the mutual determination of the Chinese nation-state and the global capitalist economy in the specific Chinese context. Whereas the state-form, which is socialist in not all but a number of crucial ways, constitutes a “chamber of resonance” (Gilles Deleuze) in which the historical force of global capitalism orchestrates itself, the contemporary capitalist world market constitutes another overlapping “chamber of resonance” in which the national-political specificities of Chinese modernity/postmodernity are to be analyzed. Instead of offering an apology for what looks to many like a bureaucratic capitalism, I explore a new theoretical framework by which to count for the striking contradictions and complexities of the Chinese reality which defies label and category. For this purpose, neither anticapitalist moralizing nor procapitalist ideologizing proves productive. Similarly, the all-too-familiar intellectual and cultural tension between cosmopolitan universalism and national or parochial rootedness finds no playground in this book, as the very problematic of postsocialist postmodernity operates on a different historical and intellectual terrain. Instead, my central argument here is this: Chinese modernity (like any other national or regional form of modernity) does not disappear into but becomes intertwined with postmodernity, known variably as postindustrialization, the information age, the age of consumer society, and globalization. At the same time, Chinese socialism, which is the historical and, to some extent, cultural form of Chinese modernity, does not disappear into the new universal defined by global capitalism. Rather, it becomes embedded in the latter as a semiautonomy conditioned by its complex negotiations with world capitalism understood as its natural environment, but not as its

13

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14

sociocultural and moral constitution. But it is the concrete social, political, and material relations of individual but interrelated societies, not abstract and essentialized cultural truth-claims, that make possible the individual and communal perceptions and experience of the epochal material-technological determinations by capitalism as a natural-historical setting and not an ontological self-understanding of human beings. Thus the postsocialist discourse cannot base itself on any isolated concept of culture, state, or ethnicity. On the contrary, its very relevance lies in taking into account the intricate correlation of those institutions, concepts, and social forces so as to search for a more ruthlessly historical and radically constructed notion of culture as the politics of the collective which lingers as an allegorical, provisional stand-in for what cannot be explained away by other, more comfortable theoretical or ideological positions. One is tempted to wonder whether global domination by the capitalist mode of production and geopolitical deployment has always been the natural environment for socialist modernization and nation-building. Postsocialism, then, is equally defined by the global context of postmodernity. And in that light, it is the continued but radically changed imperatives regarding modernization and nation-building, more than any tuned-down slogans of socialist ideology, that provide a clue to understanding Chinese postsocialism as an economic reality, a state of politics, an intellectual discourse, and, above all, as an emergent culture or form of life. To this extent, postmodernity’s penchant against center, origin, presence, and hierarchy, and its taste for multiplicity, pluralism, and internal differentiation, mutation, deviation, and regeneration, must be grasped as internal to the historical dynamic of contemporary Chinese society and culture, and not something mechanically borrowed from a few postmodern artists or theoreticians in the West. By absorbing what is dynamic and productive in the contemporary world, which is defined, positively or negatively, by a revitalized and more brutal form of capitalism (globalization, flexible production, information technology, digital war machinery, and cultural and psychological programming of the mind by saturated media and advertising bombardment, etc.), postsocialism is a conceptual framework by which to explore the possibility— and, to a certain degree, to theorize the pockets of reality—of a postmodernity compatible with socialist principles, and vice versa. While postmodernity as a set of technological and material conditions has given rise to new forms of struggle for democratic participation, more equal distribution of material and cultural wealth, and reinvigorating communities in the advanced capitalist West, it also encompasses the former socialist states in its fold

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

and thus makes these enclaves registered space for economic, political, and cultural experiment in the uneven terrain of global capitalism. As a result, the surviving Chinese state infrastructure as a conditioning factor in the making of a “socialist market economy” is at the forefront of my study of the ideological expressions and intellectual discourses of the 1990s. From this perspective, the Chinese 1990s as a sociocultural moment have their dual origins in both the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and the “market frenzy” launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1992. But the question of Chinese postsocialism is not and should not be limited to the survival and the nimble or problematic transformations of the Chinese state. Equally important is the emergence of a Chinese everyday world and mass culture, which, conditioned by a market economy and a consumer environment as they are, nonetheless bring to the fore the realm of popular memory and collective psyche where Mao’s China finds its deep roots. These factors become increasingly pronounced whenever the state itself proves to be more capitalist than socialist, more a local broker for global capital than an upholder of the socialist commitment to the people. As the state positions itself as the force of socioeconomic rationalization, postsocialism takes hold in the realm of the “irrational” in the form of utopian longings for equality as well as a renewed militancy in popular protest and labor movement which challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese government. In their milder forms, mass culture and popular entertainment may serve as a way to legitimate the status quo of the new everyday sphere and its implicit political form. Whereas critical humanist intellectuals view the advertising and television industry as creating a culture of consumer hedonism and materialist corruption, thus representing the evil of the market, the political dissent communities inside and outside China see a sinister maneuver by the political state to cling to power and detract challenge to its legitimacy. Postsocialism, therefore, is a conceptual proposal to stay and live in contradictions and chaos in a mixed economy and its overlapping political and cultural (dis)order. It is a way to attend to a diverse and radically uneven geosocial terrain characterized by “synchronic noncontemporaneity” (Ernst Bloch) and coeval difference as deep-rooted contradictions are rendered more visible and unruly precisely by the equalizer of a globalized capitalist economy, which levels the plane in a far-reaching but still limited manner (through money, ideological doctrines, image and fashion production leading to consumer standardization, or world police actions supported by Star Wars–inspired military technology). Instead of searching for an alternative to the capitalist mode of production under the rubric of socialism, an attempt

15

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16

that produced little more than a state capitalism which occasionally outperformed its free-market rivals in the rat race of developmentalism, postsocialism is a system more open to the construction of a social world which transcends the dogmas of capitalism or socialism to get in touch with the productive forces of a world of life with all its social and cultural specificities and complexities. Postsocialism, in other words, is a result of the historical overlap between the socialist state-form and the era of capitalist globalization. The socially desirable survival of the Chinese state-form will necessarily drag the question of socialism into that of postmodernity and seek the articulation of the postsocialist qualities in the material environment of the postmodern. This continued, bifurcated modernity in the Chinese context, in a strange way, bestows the Chinese situation with both a radicality and a stability. What is radical is indicated, among other things, by Chinese intellectuals’ collective and visceral rejection of the gospel of “the end of history” preached by the likes of Francis Fukuyama, as ideological, political, and class conflict threatens to bring explosive paradigmatic change to China (and, through the Chinese lens, to other parts of the world). What is stable comes, paradoxically, from the steady activization and regeneration of all kinds of local, communal, and everyday connections and multiplicity as well as from the growth of the Chinese economy and of Chinese social freedom, which prefigures a postmodern restoration of the imperial or civilizational order suspended and repudiated by a single-minded modernization. This last development may or may not bring China into a head-on collision with the U.S.-dominated global-capitalist imperial overreach, which has been described and analyzed by such recent works as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire and Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback.

five

Chinese modernists from the 1980s rarely remember the New Era as the last decade of the Cold War as a global conflict. But Chinese “liberal intellectuals” and “postmodernists” in the 1990s were forced to realize that China’s integration into the “mainstream of world civilization” was conditioned by the end of Cold War and by what seemed to be a return to the pre-1917 world riddled with imperial and imperialist domination, national and ethnic conflict, and intracapitalist rivalry. Yet the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s was not so much a result of the partial dissolution of the state or the collapse of communist ideology; rather it was a direct response to a string of international frustrations and setbacks the country suffered, from the suc-

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

cessful Western campaign to block its hosting the 2004 Olympic Games, to the U.S. military deployment near the Taiwan Strait, to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the n a t o intervention in Kosovo. Nationalism can therefore be considered a bad form of expression of something not only legitimate, but also registering discontent with the new world order and hope for a more plural, democratic, and just world order. Such naive hope, to be sure, will sooner or later find its more elaborate formulations in political philosophy. The practical, minimal program for justice and equality in domestic as well as international power relations requires an equal status to begin with—as Carl Schmitt famously has said, there is equality only among equals, and inequality with unequals.4 Such Hobbesian intuition may constitute the “rational” core of various national obsessions with and fixations on continued “modernization” at whatever cost. The utopian maximum of such an effort, however, would have to be the recognition of the necessity to extend the benefits of democracy and equality to those who have been systematically denied the rights and freedom taken for granted by middle-class residents of the bourgeois society—a necessity to include the fourth estate on any platform of national and international politics. This utopian longing is not a reflection of moral-political virtue but the socioeconomic reality of contemporary China as one of today’s poor nations and as a nominally socialist country whose majority population—namely, the Chinese peasants—have rarely seen any substantial benefits promised by socialism in any shape or form. The critical pursuit of radically contemporary issues is aimed at grasping a petrified history—the history of modernity, revolution, and reaction, the selfassertion of the masses and the autonomy of the individual—all understood as myth and concrete politics at the same time. Using the critical discourse on postmodernism as its central conceptual framework, this book aims to analyze the dialectic between the loosening grip of a more classical notion of modernity on people’s minds, on the one hand, and the rise of an extremely uneven and heterogeneous socioeconomic, political, and daily reality in 1990s China, a “synchronic noncontemporary” hereby defined as postsocialism, on the other. If my concluding thoughts on the Chinese 1980s were that the aesthetic leap into the international institution of high culture offered a symbolic solution to the proposed integration into the capitalist world market, and that the ideological sublimation of Chinese modernism finds its historical truth-content—and its intellectual, artistic, and social energy—only retrospectively in Chinese socialist modernity, then my central observation on the 1990s is that the perceived dissolution and degeneration of the totality

17

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18

of a purported socialist reality opens a narrow gate on a reconfiguration of economic, social, political, and cultural powers in a moment of danger. The postsocialist question concerns itself simultaneously with what lies beyond the Maoist stage of Chinese socialism and a demystification of, and liberation from, the ideological doctrines and dogma of a triumphant global capitalism, namely, that of the total market and liberalism as the “end of history.” The Chinese dilemma, to be sure, is only a manifestation of a historically overdetermined “chamber of resonance” involving the gigantic undertaking of Chinese modernity, whose central contradictions came to be felt during the 1990s as those between the “autonomous” forces of the market and the interventions and projects of the state, and those between the construction of sociocultural spheres based on the “free individual” as a protobourgeoisie and the articulation of the political content of the newly emerged form of life. Such a form of life is collective in nature and historical in the making, most immediately rooted in the historical experience of socialist modernity, which nonetheless forged its own complex relations—as both rupture and continuity—to China’s precapitalist past. To formulate the above from a different standpoint, 1990s China constitutes an intensified moment of historical unfolding characterized by perpetual conflict between the development of forces of production and the relations of production. This Marxian perspective, however, needs to be supplemented by a politicoanthropological understanding of what is irreducibly human in its most historically conditioned form: the rise of the postrevolutionary or consumer masses; the survival and structural transformation of the nation-state; the self-assertion of the individual in his or her search for wealth, security, pleasure, and freedom; and this free individual’s intricate associations and conflicts with the hegemonic models of the epochal value systems and ideologies of capitalist globalization. To this extent, the postsocialist question poses itself alongside such essential “cultural” or “cultural-political” issues of our time as feminism, postcolonialism, discourses of racial and ethnic rights, multiculturalism, and environmentalism while the unsettled debate continues over the utopian prospect and realistic possibilities of a better social system.

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While my textual and discursive analyses engage ostensibly the question of postmodernity, the cultural and political challenge of the question of postsocialism becomes crucial in historicizing the critical framework and its ideo-

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

logical and theoretical assumptions. The concrete analyses in the chapters that follow are not evidence mustered to support this argument. Rather, they are readings on which such utopian hypotheses become discernible and even palpable in the first place. In other words, I take the cultural expression, intellectual debate, and ideological conflict of the Chinese 1990s as historical participants in the ongoing worldwide critical discourse on radical democracy, value-pluralism, and equality inherited from and still informed by the age of modernity. Postsocialism as an analytical framework is intended to bring a critical coherence to a radically contradictory reality resulting from the overlap of multiple socioeconomic and ideological paradigms. Whereas it is often observed that the symbolic-ideological shift from the modernist discourse to a postmodern one remains a contested and messy topic in the West, when coupled with a critical reading of contemporary Chinese economy, politics, and modes of cultural production and consumption, it can offer, paradoxically, an acute sense of history and referential concreteness. In other words, as the chaotic and productive forces of a postsocialist reality produce an imaginary and symbolic resonance in the abstract yet elaborate codes of the global postmodern, a new historical situation is already craving a critical practice which sets in motion such seemingly frozen categories as the particular and the universal, aesthetics and politics, the collective and the individual, the utopian and the reified, and so forth. In concrete politico-economic terms, this book seeks to show how the processes of marketization and social rationalization driven by a ruthless and often corrupt technocratic state also press into being a reactivated classconsciousness and cultural sensibilities which inform an intellectual rethinking of the existing dogmas of socialism and capitalism. In this area, the intellectual development of China in the 1990s provides an intense zone of engagement for global as well as national ideologies. Such convergence of ideas and discourses are not merely food for thought but correspond to historical forces which nourish new political and cultural opportunities for a postsocialist everyday world. In a sociological or cultural-sociological sense, this book stresses the profound ambiguity of the rise of consumer masses in the social space of a postsocialist state as democratization and commodification at once. It contemplates the implications of such ambiguity in the construction of a collective- and community-based culture, memory, and imagination beyond the individualistic conventions of liberal democracy. The historical content of the new social psyche is further elaborated in the realm of narrative and visual culture, where an unusual creativity and commitment to the artistic capture of historical truth-content find their

19

Introduction

manifestations in Wang Anyi’s fiction and Zhang Yimou’s films. In both cases, an active imagination keeps the past alive in the allegorical freedom of representation. In both cases, as I argue, a residual modernist passion toward form and autonomy dialectically gives rise to a new realist codification of change, persistence, and contradiction.

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Structurally the book is divided into three parts. Part 1 consists of three chapters dealing with the convoluted intellectual discussions during the 1990s, with Beijing as the epicenter. My analysis of this intellectual and cultural-political trajectory is historical in nature, narrative by design, and in its own discursive characteristics can be treated as a series of arguments and interventions. It does not claim to be neutral or “disengaged scholarship” but instead offers a critique, often with my own critical position placed in the same field of debate. Topically, this part of the book provides an in-depth (but inevitably partial) index to the major issues and debates that helped define Chinese intellectual life during the 1990s. The organizing principle is not to provide a comprehensive, empirical coverage of intellectual development but to confront central contradictions or conflicts around which the major battles of intellectual and cultural-political engagements of the Chinese 1990s played out. Those contradictions or confrontations include: (1) the challenge of neoliberal forces of market fundamentalism faced by the socialist state as well as by independent, critical intellectuals; (2) the challenge of the global postmodern turn faced by the Chinese political and cultural subjectivity; and (3) the challenge of democracy in the form of the second mass society (mobilized by the forces of the commodities in the marketplace rather than by the political party during the revolution) faced by Chinese intellectual discourses and institutions. Obviously, these questions are overdetermined by both global and national conditions and can and did reorganize previously existing intellectual and cultural-political alignment into new, sometimes unexpected groupings. For instance, nationalism could work both for and against socialism, and vice versa. Modernist elitism coexisted with postmodernist egalitarianism in their embrace of globalization, while the 1990s’ discourse on sovereignty relied on both postmodern rhetoric of difference and particularity and modernist mythology of unity, essence, and universality. Chapter 1 tackles the Left-Right demarcation, unmistakably a sign of the politicization of the social discourse emerging from a depoliticized society.

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

Rather than dwelling on the ideological essentialism implied by labels such as “the New Left” and “liberalism,” the chapter seeks to show a complex terrain of social conflict, political position-taking, and intellectual production opening up to more historically determined and deeply seated questions concerning Chinese modernity and revolution. Similarly, in the following two chapters, I treat nationalism and postmodernism as mainstream discourses or centrist ideologies not at face value but in the sense that they are deeply entangled with and overdetermined by the lingering socialist stateform and the cultures of socialist modernity as they formulate their sensecertainty and legitimacy in the general condition of world capitalism. Parts 2 and 3 may be read as further elaborations of some of the topics or phenomena I dwell on in the first part but somewhat insufficiently due to the structural and narrative design of the first three chapters. Part 2 deals with literary representations of the new global space anchored or embedded in the particular narrative discourse of modern Chinese “subjectivity”—as identity, selfhood, interiority, and self-image (or rather, self-imaging) according to the symbolic order of the post-1989 imagination of the universal history. The first two chapters, from different angles and tracing cultural genealogies, examine the 1990s’ imagination and narrative of Shanghai as the emotional center of an “alternative” of Chinese modernity. While nostalgia for a historical, indeed, ontological being-in-the-world of universal bourgeois civilization constructs a transcendental home for the Chinese bourgeoisie that never was, it also reveals a post–New Era melancholy of the urban middle class detached from its personal and collective identity defined historically in the project of Chinese revolution and socialism. This Shanghai-centered narrative is coupled with Mo Yan’s explosive, flamboyant, and grotesque “realism” of the Chinese social and moral landscape shaped by the onslaught of “socialist market economy.” Part 3 analyzes different ways of formulating the national situation and national self-identity in the truly international space: art film. Here the contrast between Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1994) and Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (1993) not only makes explicit different approaches of lingering Chinese cinematic modernism, but, more important, represents the more value-driven and politically self-conscious choices between generality and singularity, and between self-negation and selfaffirmation. The last, to be sure, has significant allegorical implications for the self-understanding of the moral-constitutional nature of postsocialist Chinese life.

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The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field

today, in media and academic discourses across the world, the image of China overwhelms our appetite for contradictory descriptions and frustrates our established analytical and conceptual framework. Amid dizzying change and radical uncertainty, however, an unruly and shapeless presence is confirmed and looming beyond doubt. The transformation of post-Mao China is widely seen as resulting from its irreversible integration with the world market and its tantalizing merge with the sociocultural conventions of global capitalism. Everyone agrees that this is a transitional period for China. No one is certain where it is leading China and the rest of the world. The lack of a cognitive road map for reading China has to do with the rapidity of change. It is also due to old assumptions and frameworks which are no longer adequate to address problems. More productive approaches to examining the Chinese situation are still hampered by ideologies and methodologies nourished by the Cold War and by a Eurocentric worldview entrenched in both China and the West. Mechanical and superficial views still boast empirical and ideological clarity, yet they invariably depend on obsolete binary opposites—state versus society, “official” versus “nonofficial,” dictatorship versus democracy, communism versus capitalism, hard-liners versus reformers, government intervention versus free market, etc.—which still obstruct our critical knowledge about the country in the multiplicity of contexts. We are experiencing an increasing and intensifying discrepancy between the perceived object called China and the lingering epistemological models rooted in the Cold War, backed by the even more time-honored machinery of “knowing the Other” of the long history of the global expansion of capitalism (colonialism, imperialism, etc.). As long as the old regime of knowledge and its reproduction holds

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sway, the emerging complexity and dynamism of the Chinese economy, society, politics, culture, and everyday life will remain concealed, distorted, and oppressed on the global symbolic terrain. This, however, indicates not so much an intrinsic crisis of knowledge production on China in the West as that production’s correlation with and corruption by power, which, when fully internalized, reveals the extent to which China as a subject of study is still being effectively “contained” within a particular theater of permanent ideological warfare by global capitalism and its “subjectivities,” which function through the state apparatus and the culture industry. Such institutional restraints may explain why the most dynamic and productive development in Chinese studies in the United States in the past decade is its integration with “disciplines” such as social history (a seemingly “conservative” turn), especially in works opening to approaches and methodologies of cultural studies and critical theory (from film studies to women’s studies, from the Frankfurt school to postcolonialism). The last phenomenon is especially noteworthy, as it is genuinely cross-Pacific and shared by the younger generation of scholars in the United States, the People’s Republic of China (pr c ), Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In terms of the generational politics and paradigmatic break this tendency implies, the development seems to be quite radical. But in terms of the “normalization” of scholarly research, it suggests nothing more radical than an institutional rationalization, namely, the need to engage Chinese studies in the same manner, and hopefully with the same intellectual and theoretical sophistication, as one would engage in, say, French studies or subaltern studies. Similarly, the disengagement from the various state or state-sanctioned discourses in both the People’s Republic and the United States should be regarded as pertaining to the same movement to carry the field beyond its overdetermination by the Cold War era and its ideological confines. This is not to suggest that the particular historical conditions of contemporary China should be considered in the even and homogeneous space of capitalist or bourgeois universality either as one more proof of sameness or as the exception that proves the rule. Rather, moving beyond the intellectualideological straitjacket of Cold War and Orientalist scholarship is intended precisely to refute the ideological homogeneity reinforced by the institutionalized compartmentalization and instrumentalization of knowledge imposed on the margins of the capitalist world system. The purpose is to reassert the internal difference of reality which in its self-affirmation, even celebration, of its own contradictions, prefigures a new social, political, and cultural horizon that is an integral part of a more plural, more democratic

The Return of the Political

world. The uneven development in this general tendency, ironically, is more pronounced in the reluctance of or difficulty for the U.S. China field as a whole to face its own formation in and overdetermination by the Cold War enterprise and to realize the intellectual or merely scholarly need to go beyond it. This, to be sure, has to do with the more intense mythology of freedom and autonomy in the so-called open society, a mythology of enlightenment which proves to be far more resistant to its own demystification; whereas in the so-called totalitarian societies, state repression is transparent while possibilities are opaque. Below I seek to provide a historical and theoretical overview of Chinese intellectual development in the 1990s with reference to the socioeconomic change, politico-ideological conflict, and cultural transformations in China after Tiananmen. Needless to say, this intellectual development and social transformation is integral to the global dynamism since the end of the Cold War. I intend to keep a chronological and thematic narrative clear; but this narrative is mixed with, and sometimes suspended by, a closer examination of particular phenomena, issues, topics, attitudes, and discourses which mark the new space of intellectual production and ideological position-taking in China today. If sometimes I appear more concerned with the contentious discursive “framework” than with a pedestrian chronology, it is because I think the articulation of the Chinese problematic is possible only in a process of working its way through—and along the way disrupting and reconstructing—some of the intellectual premises and ideological assumptions that still govern our understanding of the contemporary world.

Reading the Chinese State

It remains an unchallenged habit—both inside and outside China—to view everything in the pr c through the imagined totality of the government and its official policies and rhetoric. It is also customary, even a knee-jerk reaction, to see anything extragovernmental as instantaneously and naturally subversive, progressive, and good. As a result, new configurations of social space are often unaccounted for and new cultural-intellectual manifestations misread and willfully interpreted. New forms of material life, social power, and ideological legitimacy often remain invisible to eyes searching behind the veil of systematic dogma and bigotry. Take, for example, the emerging self-assertiveness of Chinese public opinion, which is often considered by Western students of China to be nationalistic, anti-Western,

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and orchestrated by the government. A closer look, however, will show that a wide range of popular and intellectual debates spawn from both the marketplace and the state-controlled media, and it is virtually impossible and meaningless to determine intellectual and ideological content by place of publication. Compared to the free-spirited discussions in “independent” journals (all of them produced by the state publishing houses, as there are no private publishers in China today) such as Dushu (Reading), Tianya (Frontier), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), Gonggong luncong (Res Publica), and numerous bbs s (Bulletin Board Systems), or Internet forums, the mouthpieces of state propaganda per se are the most consistently and single-mindedly pro-American voices in China today, despite their occasional protest against U.S. “hegemony.” Not that the Chinese state as a Realpolitik animal has any more faith in the “Sino-U.S. strategic partnership” than does its U.S. counterpart. Rather, it is the raison d’état of the Deng and post-Deng regime—namely, developmentalism—that sees the United States as the realization of that officially sanctioned “truth beyond dispute” (yingdaoli). The only thing the Chinese government does not readily take from the U.S. model is its political structure. Nor does it show any embarrassment when it turns to authoritarian capitalist societies in East Asia—Singapore, South Korea, and, until very recently, Taiwan—for political inspiration. Indeed, the anticlimactically smooth takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 testifies not so much to the working of the “one country, two system” principle envisioned by Deng Xiaoping as to the virtual continuity of authoritarian and colonial capitalism in the former British colony. The Chinese government, despite being credited with presiding over rapid economic growth, seems an anomaly in the post–Cold War “new world order” and is put on the defensive ideologically both at home and internationally.1 Its undemocratic qualities, however, require closer and more discriminating analysis. One may wonder, for instance, to what extent they are derived from the residual system of Mao’s “proletarian dictatorship” and to what extent they are redefined by the new technocratic-managerial regime. These two aspects are interrelated in the post-Mao Chinese social environment, to be sure, but they also have different socioeconomic origins and politico-ideological dispositions, which produce different effects in concrete sociopolitical terms. Where public opinion as refracted through intellectual debates is conflicting and schizophrenic, what may pass as a national ideology upheld by the state media is little more than a developmentalist and culturalist apology for political underdevelopment.

The Return of the Political

So politically deprived is its cultural-nationalist self-glorification that this national ideology invariably fails to inspire, as even the most unreflected cultural affirmation of the nation’s “way of life” would have at its core a moral passion for its political ideals. By denying the people the possibility of a passionate political debate over what kind of a social system they want to build, the Chinese state, still nominally communist, becomes increasingly dependent on a cynical pragmatism and opportunism as the sole source of its legitimacy. By effectively muffling the public articulation of the political vision of an actually existing but internally differentiating socialism, the new technocratic regime puts itself permanently on the ideological defensive vis-à-vis both the capitalist “new world order” and its own people. This internal fracture between daily reality and its theoretical formulations is by no means accidental or something to be explained away by the incompetence of the Chinese intelligentsia. On the contrary, it is an indication of the general disorientation and demoralization of the Chinese national elite amid increasing economic disparity and class stratification. To this extent, the Chinese state (and the conceptual space it still occupies as an empty shell) ceases to be a meaningful or effective framework of critical analysis of contemporary Chinese society and culture, and must be considered as a remaining or reinvented ideological sham necessary for real power operations at both the sub- and supranational levels. In other words, the uniformity and effect of control of the Chinese state must now be regarded as a function or agency of economic, social, and ideological reconfigurations driven by global and local forces and interests. The political and philosophical poverty of the Chinese state has not fully undermined its legitimacy. It merely allows the state to replace its moral authority with a legalistic, administrative, and technocratic function or indispensability, a tendency in accordance with the secularization and rationalization processes since the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The social acceptance of such new authority is ensured by the government’s willingness to muzzle public debate and exercise raw power brutally. But this is only half the story. The oppressiveness of the Chinese state in some areas is paralleled by unprecedented freedom and anarchism in other parts of the social domain. Even the political repression in China today has a self-righteous air, as if its acceptance by the general populace gave the state a mandate to achieve wealth and order through whatever means so long as economic growth vindicated the policies and ideologies of the government. As long as the government’s legitimacy comes exclusively from its function in maintaining economic growth and social stability, its official ideology will remain an empty shell

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awaiting appropriation by the newborn economic and class interests and positions in the differentiated social sphere. In fact, the state ideology is already intertwined with the forces of the capitalist global market and with the new social and class formations in the new economic condition. Often painted as a political dinosaur and public enemy by dissident and international opinion, the current Chinese government proves far more sophisticated, flexible, and dynamic than many of its opponents want to admit. This can be attributed in part to its unabashed pragmatism and its instinctual identification with China’s new urban middle class and with the global ideological mainstream. The Chinese state, however, needs a new ideological coherence which enables it to better identify, claim, or fuse with the emerging socio-ideological center. In this area its usual clumsiness reveals itself not so much in the rigidity of communist ideology as in the complexity, unevenness, and diversity of Chinese socioeconomic development. It also has to do, ironically, with its loyalty to a more classical or modernist model of capitalist development now being replaced in advanced capitalist societies by information technologies and a new bourgeois subjectivity. While paying lip service to the socialist legacies of the People’s Republic, the government is busy disengaging from society and the everyday life it inherited from Mao’s China. After two decades of efforts to relink the Chinese economy to the world system, it is already a consensus among the ruling technocratic elite that the socialist (let alone Maoist) moral-ideological framework will have to be dismantled one way or another to make room for the neoliberal theology of the free market, efficiency, competitiveness, and so on; and to rationalize the state form in the new global economy. Marxism as the official philosophy of Chinese communism has played an ambivalent and somewhat dubious role in this massive ideological reorientation. While state Marxism still provides theoretical justification for socialism in its historical confrontation with capitalism, in modern Chinese history it has also been the predominant discourse of modernization and modernity. The historico-materialist emphasis on the development of “forces of production” as the basis for all revolutionary changes in the “superstructure” of human society is a philosophical pillar of the Reformist ideology. Marxism as a state philosophy also functions as a power medium tying Chinese social history to the world-historical framework rooted in the experience of European modernity. The universalism, historical determinism, and teleology implicit or explicit in Marxism are ingrained in the modern Chinese intellectual tradition, which, after its repudiation of Maoism following the Cultural Revolution, embraces a deeply developmentalist ideology. Under

The Return of the Political

the cover of Marxist philosophy, the Chinese state, rooted in a Leninist party organization, becomes a ruthless promoter of capitalist-style development, and of the market revolution as it has prevailed in the Western world since the Reagan-Thatcher era. That Marxism’s function in concrete Chinese politico-economic reality was scrutinized critically by intellectuals in the 1990s testifies to the degree to which it has become the standard bearer of a modernization ideology and loses its analytical and critical relevance vis-àvis new social contradictions in China today.2 The making of state legitimacy in post-Tiananmen China can be summarized crudely, but effectively, I think, in terms of its self-definition or rationalization vis-à-vis society at large. The turning point was not the military crackdown in June 1989 but rather the months that ensued. This was when the government decided how to live with the consequences and reclaim popular mandate, and when the use-value of intellectuals during the New Era was quickly replaced by a new bureaucratic and technocratic elite, which stood by the government despite its loss of moral authority and respect. This bureaucratic and technocratic elite, itself the biggest beneficiary of the Reform policies, thus proved a conscious and prudent contender for state power, and since has degenerated into a political interest group concerned solely with staying in power. By devoting its political loyalty to the regime, the bureaucratic and technocratic elite became a major stabilizing force during the legitimation crisis after Tiananmen. Such political loyalty was then rewarded—in terms of power sharing, generous material benefits, and tolerance of corruption—in the market revolution that ensued, a shift which reflects the long-term rationality, interest, and ideology of the new ruling class. The combined effects of the June 4 military crackdown and the market upheaval following 1992 would leave ordinary citizens of the p r c wondering if their government had decided that its contract with or commitment to the Chinese people has either been terminated or undergone substantial, though undeclared, revision. For those who are openly critical of the current policies of Chinese reform, the Chinese Communist Party is not only becoming a “rational” technocratic state machinery, but a giant interest group, a c c p Inc. Thus, given the undemocratic environment, the central political tension in Chinese society today is not so much the discrepancy between a communist government and the market—as the two depend on each other. Rather, it increasingly displays itself as the conflict between the rational self-interest of this interest group and its unchecked power and corruption, which puts it in direct confrontation with

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the society at large. Such corrupt power not only deteriorates the sociopolitical legacy of the People’s Republic but poses a direct threat to the economic growth and social stability that the state depends on so desperately for its own political survival. What allows the current regime to ignore widespread social discontent and to suppress popular demand for political reform is, in addition to its consolidation and rationalization of the state bureaucracy, its de facto alliance with a protourban middle class—members of the new management, for example—whose material well-being, social privilege, and political power is tied to the Reform policy. However, the unfolding of intellectual debate in the 1990s betrays the disagreement between the state bureaucracy unable to curtail its corruption and a rising proto-middle class demanding more clarity and rationality in terms of rights and positive law. Moreover, the two groups both face the same dilemma as to whether, when, and how to convert economic power to political power, or vice versa, which is nothing more than a thinking-aloud about privatization as “rationalization” of a socialist prehistory of capitalist development. While such economic and political calculation poses a key test to the socialist commitment of the Chinese state, it also reveals the extent to which Chinese socialism is based on a mixed economy and draws on different sources for its legitimacy. Finally, the Chinese intellectual polemics in the 1990s reflect the larger social tension and ideological conflict stemming from the more profound divide between this upper class as a whole and the great majority of the Chinese population whose benefits from the earlier Reform years have been eroded and whose livelihoods are becoming increasingly precarious in the 1990s. Nominally communist, the Chinese state’s exercise of power in the process of radical marketization has acquired a different set of social and political implications.3 This unique configuration of power, capital, and class structure is central to any critical examination of postsocialist society and its cultural-intellectual life. It would be simple-minded to talk about a Chinese “public sphere” without cautious qualification. Equally ineffective would be to reduce the complex refigurations of social power and ideological alliance to a clear-cut division between state and civil society, or to focus exclusively on the state apparatus for all answers. The central dynamism of Chinese social and intellectual life in the 1990s is not so much the ideological confrontation between state and society as two conceptual categories in political theory. Rather, it is the new social and power relationship produced by a market economy initiated and administered by state bureaucracy. This shift of focus will bring a student of China face to face with many new players in

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old robes as well as old players under new banners. In the economy, society, and culture of today’s prc , global capitalism is in every sense an “internal” factor, and not least in the sense that it is mediated, sometimes enforced, by the Chinese socialist state. Similarly, the adjective in the term Western theory—the critical theoretical discourses vis-à-vis global capitalism—becomes a meaningless signifier except in self-critical terms, as Chinese intellectuals and their discursive and political struggles at home are now an integral part of a global terrain of engagement. In this light, the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 stands as a landmark not for the return of the totalitarian state countering the “universal current,” but rather for the supple combination of a rationalized state-form and the prevailing privatization, marketization, and commodification after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. What I am suggesting here is not a conspiracy theory. There is no historical evidence that the bloodshed in Tiananmen was the joint-work of communist “hard-liners” and the liberal marketeers in the party state. Rather, what needs to be recognized is the cunning of history, which turns both a Leninist party organization and neoliberal ideology into efficient vehicles for a dialectical third force, which is the actualization of a bureaucratic capitalism in the global context of economic, social, and political unevenness.4 An intellectual rethinking of political repression since Tiananmen would be fruitless without accounting for the market revolution since 1992, and vice versa. Reading this historical process in the global context allows us to face both the open wound and the ongoing shock in the national experience, and resist both their conservative-liberal appropriations and their erasure or rationalization by the state discourse. Chinese intellectual discourses in the 1990s are highly differentiated, but their politics are overdetermined by how they come to terms with 1989 and 1992 at once. The two historic landmarks not only signify a world historical conjuncture but replay the unsettled imperatives and contradictions in modern Chinese history, from the search for national wealth and strength to the pursuit of democracy, from the necessity to build a strong state to the longings for individual freedom.

Mixed Economy, Divided Nation

After two decades of phenomenal economic development, with an average annual growth rate around 10 percent, the quantitative goal of the Reform set by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, namely the quadrupling of Chinese per capita gross domestic product (g d p ) by the end of the twentieth

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century, seems to have been achieved. These are not merely abstract and impersonal figures, but testimony to the substantially higher standard of living now enjoyed by the majority of Chinese people now that hundreds of millions have been lifted out of extreme poverty. It also means that the country as a whole has reached a new plateau of material life which brings East Asia closer to becoming another gravity center of the world economy outside Western Europe and North America. One should also keep in mind that, despite phenomenal growth, China remains a poor country. Its g dp , measured according to exchange rate, is only on a par with that of France or Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century, although its population is more than twenty times as large. Still, the renewed foundation of material life and increasing exposure to a globalized economy and culture gives rise to new forms of human interaction and self-identity, underscoring the tension in every aspect of contemporary Chinese society, politics, and culture.5 The economic growth, however, also creates astounding disparities in distribution of wealth, ranking China today among the most unequal nations in the world.6 The polarization between China’s richest and poorest citizens, and between its richest and poorest regions, is considered by economists both outside and inside China to be not only worse than the United States, one of the most unequal of advanced capitalist countries, but on par with, in some areas more staggering than, oligarchic or crony-capitalist countries such as Russia or Indonesia.7 All this has been done not through the demise of a strong central government, but under the close watch and constant guidance of a socialist regime. The 1990s in particular witnessed the epidemic of corruption of power in the marketplace, or rather the “marketization of power” in the form of rent-seeking, insider trading, or stealing of public property, as described by the economist-journalist He Qinglian in her recent book.8 The lack of press freedom makes it difficult to mobilize social and popular forces against corruption. The rapid erosion of the basic rights of the working people established under Chinese socialism makes them powerless vis-à-vis capital and the new managerial class. It is widely agreed that China today has neither a clear-cut socialist economy nor a clear-cut capitalist one but consists of mixed modes of production pertaining to overlapping social, political, and administrative structures which offer a textbook example of what Ernst Bloch termed “synchronic noncontemporaneity.” It seems pointless to try to determine the extent to which the Chinese economy is still state-owned and to use the figure to determine if the country is socialist or capitalist.9 If the statistical percentage of the state share of the national economy were any standard, one would never

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be able to understand the “overnight” collapse of Soviet socialism when over 90 percent of the Soviet Union’s economy was under the absolute control of the state. As the state strives to learn to live by the market, nonstate economies rely deeply on the state for legal protection, infrastructure, and a supply of educated, low-cost labor, and for other day-to-day operational practicalities. Thus, for the advocates of more thorough market-oriented reform, the “old system” remains the general background of Chinese economic, social, and political reality.10 On the other hand, as long as the global environment of the Chinese socialist reform is the capitalist world market, as long as the Chinese economy is understood as but one competitor in the rat race of global capitalist competition, the entire national economic and sociopolitical structure will be overdetermined by a standard set by advanced capitalist economies, and even the most ardently socialist enterprises will have to be run in a way compatible with Western corporations. In this respect the Chinese economy is no different from other non-Western national economies linked to the global system. The disagreement among Chinese bureaucrats and intellectuals is not whether China should proceed with the experiment of the “socialist market economy.” Except for a thoroughly marginalized Old Left, nobody would want to return to the central-plan model. The difference of opinion, rather, comes from how to achieve the best economic result at the least social cost and political risk. The extensive role a socialist government plays in the creation and daily operation of a mixed economy has given rise to appalling corruption which prompts the call for economic and political democracy. Yet so pervasive is the state interest in such a mixed structure and so compatible is it with the Chinese political structure that they not only render economic and political democracy unlikely but also make a Russian-style privatization unappealing or unnecessary to the managerial class as a whole. As William H. Simon explains, “despite the enthusiasm of many segments of the population for capitalist institutions, private enterprise still lacks legitimacy in many quarters. Private enterprise also lacks the legal protection it enjoys in the West. Thus, privatization is rejected not only by those who oppose it on ideological and political grounds, but also by cadres and managers who feel that they can get rich more safely at the helm of a public, rather than a private, enterprise.”11 This is not only an incisive observation on the structure of the Chinese market economy itself, it shows that the interaction between the state and the market also resonates in the ideologico-intellectual space, to which I will turn in a moment.

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In today’s China, while there seems to be a politico-ideological consensus on “getting rich” by means of a mixed economy, the story of who is actually “making it” reveals a deeply divided nation. As the new, export- and consumer-oriented economic structure develops in the coastal regions, and all kinds of “made in China” products flood the shopping malls in American suburbia, the majority of the Chinese people are either too poor or feel too economically insecure to buy. Since the late 1990s, the Chinese economy has been plagued by industrial overcapacity and deflation of consumer prices due to unbalanced development and meager domestic consumption. U.S.trained economists work furiously to lower the interest rate so as to funnel national savings by individual residents (quanguo jumin chuxu)—at 16 to 17 trillion rmb , or 2 trillion usd at the end of 2001 at the then exchange rate—into the consumer market (the 2006 figure is 33 trillion r m b ). While the state banking system imposes a 20 percent tax on individual savings, the state-controlled media urge Chinese consumers to be optimistic and buy more. Both conveniently forget that over 80 percent of national private savings is in the hands of a tiny nouveau riche class that likely has governmentsupplied cars; multiple, oversubsidized homes; and foreign bank accounts—a class whose lavish spending rarely helps the national economy. While money pours into real estate speculation, creating economic bubbles in Chinese urban centers, fewer and fewer urban dwellers can afford health care and education for their children, and China’s rural inhabitants—still more than 70 percent of the population—are left to fend for themselves. The widening socioeconomic gap in the global socioeconomic system has been internalized in Chinese society. As a result, there is a China already integrated into the world market and a China still unable or unwilling to enter the field of finance capital, global competition, and neoliberal social policies. The overlap of preexisting social division, such as that between the rural and urban populations, with the new hierarchy and inequality established during the past two decades has greatly reduced popular support for economic reforms and rendered the current Chinese social and political environment sensitive, unstable, and potentially explosive. Social tension now comes not only from the aspiration for greater individual and political freedom, as liberal Chinese intellectuals recognize, but increasingly from the unequal distribution of wealth and power. The last development also renders obsolete the official assessment, made in 1979 at the beginning of the Chinese reform, of the “central contradiction” of a “classless socialist society,” which lies between “the people’s increasing material and cultural demand and the relatively underdeveloped capacity of production of a socialist economy.”12

The Return of the Political

One of the internal dilemmas of the economic reforms stems from the legal structure of a socialist state that is incompatible with the mixed mode of production, and in particular with private property and ownership. Wu Jinglian, a senior adviser at the State Council and one of the authorities on Chinese economic reforms, recently observed two risks imminent to the Chinese reforms: namely, the continuation of the central planning model and the pillaging of the masses in the name of the Reform. Wu, whose liberal, proreform credentials have won him the nickname Mr. Market, may astonish his audience by comparing the current economic reform to the Land Reform movement after the success of the Chinese communist revolution. For Wu, the Land Reform movement liberated the Chinese peasants from the landlord system, and then formed the historical force that sustained the early socialist industrialization of the People’s Republic. However, this “great liberation of forces of production” was cut short by a breathless sequence of “revolution of system of ownership,” meaning the Maoist campaigns “aimed at weeding out the bourgeois element in the socialist system.” The social basis of the Maoist idea of “permanent revolution,” Wu suggests, was the social groups who were not satisfied with gradually accumulating individual wealth by “playing by the rules.” Instead, they sought to enhance their wealth and power through a nonstop revolution in the domain of relations of production and superstructure. This time, however, Wu’s main target is not Maoism but the danger, indeed the grave reality, of a socially irresponsible right-wing revolution in economic and social policymaking. He observes that “prudent reformist regulations are now condemned as either too idealistic or too conservative. What has been praised to the sky, instead, are various forms of rent-seeking of the government branches; ownership reforms aiming at swallowing public wealth; lease of public land in a manner reminiscent of the Enclosure movement in English history; and financial tricks designed to rip off ordinary shareholders.” 13 Wu points out the daily making of an Indonesian type of “crony capitalism” in Chinese socialism, which is something “many old-generation Chinese will readily recognize as ‘bureaucratic capitalism.’” Wu deplores the superficial division between “conservatives” and “reformers” and calls for the construction of a solid and independent “middle force.” Wu’s analysis is an example of assessing Chinese socioeconomic reality in the liberal ideological discourse of antiradicalism. He is certainly right to worry about a radical right-wing movement pushing for Russian-style privatization, but his thinking does not go beyond the neoliberal framework. His prescription for social reform ends up reiterating the neoliberal orthodoxy of “creating an economic and

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social force independent of the state system” without analyzing the politicoeconomic condition of state capitalism and the lack of the political rights of the Chinese people in determining any redistribution of national wealth. The “official” reform ideology and the “nonofficial” liberal discourse converge in the necessity to create a propertied class that can function as the economic engine for growth and the social foundation for the new legalpolitical codes compatible with a market economy. What recent Chinese development has rendered transparent, however, is that such an artificial and hurried creation of a market environment relies on the bureaucratic and administrative system of the state working on behalf of the “invisible hand” of the market to achieve accumulation of economic and sociopolitical capital. What goes unspoken are the social and human costs of such fasttrack capitalization, as well as the function of an undemocratic system to guarantee the “freedom” of a new bureaucratic-capitalist class. The ideologicointellectual space of China today is filled with the resonance of not so much the interactions between the socialist state and the capitalist market but the conflict within a power-manipulated process of marketization or a marketbased reconfiguration of state and social power. It manifests itself as the tension between the masses and the elite, between the search for economic and political democracy and an aristocratic concept of “liberty.” The intellectual articulation of this central conflict has gone through different stages and acquired different aspects, to which I now turn.

Repudiating Radicalism

The popular as well as intellectual sentiment after June 4, 1989, was a repressed rage and a subdued antagonism toward the state. The humanistic intellectuals’ silent opposition was, in the face of the endorsement of the government by the technocratic elite, understood as liberal and pro-Western. The depth of such antagonism can be measured by the fact that the Gulf War and its interventionist principle were seen positively by, and were even popular among, the urban population. That would be something hard to imagine for a Western tourist watching Chinese students smash the U.S. embassy in Beijing in May 1999, after nato’s “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. But such hostility toward the regime is by no means a sign of reformist intellectuals’ ready embrace of the neoliberal gospel of the absolute free market. One suggestion of the contrary was the nationwide debate on the “loss of humanistic spirit” in the mid1990s. Waged by liberal cultural intellectuals in Shanghai, the discus-

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sion revealed a profound anxiety about and disgust with the governmentorchestrated market revolution, whose horrendous social effect was perceived by these intellectuals, who could only express their concern in a somewhat self-pitying lamentation on the general vulgarization of society, the demise of high culture, and humanistic intellectuals’ withering and irrelevance under the twofold monopoly of public space by the state and the commodity.14 The immediate post-Tiananmen years (1989–92) saw the collapse of the lively and polyphonic intellectual space of the late 1980s. For those still nostalgic for the euphoric New Era, the 1990s started as a depressing, bleak, disoriented period. What permeated the widespread sense of defeat, however, was the entrenched set of assumptions of the previous decade, which dispersed as the 1990s unfolded. These assumptions included: (1) that intellectuals and the bureaucratic state are natural, inseparable partners in herding the people through wholesale social change while maintaining order; (2) that intellectuals are the moral conscience of the people and have the ability and right to speak for the people’s desires and longings; and (3) that achieving modernity, understood as a set of unquestionable universal institutions and values, is the goal of the Chinese people, a cause for which intellectuals constitute the high priesthood. For the post-Mao Chinese intellectual elite, what was shattered by the gunfire of June 4, 1989, was not so much the prospect of Western-style democracy, which is a discourse projected by liberal intellectuals onto the Tiananmen movement retrospectively and from a changed socioeconomic and ideological context. It was, rather, the privileged and even monopolistic voice and vision of the intellectuals, whose power and feebleness both come from their parasitic and symbiotic relations with the state. Historically, the Chinese state alone has endowed its intellectuals—as a crucial state organ or function—with unchallenged moral and cultural authority over society at large. This tradition, of course, goes well beyond the history of the prc and of the modern Chinese nation-state; it lies at the heart of a Confucian cultural-political order that sustained imperial China.15 Indeed, throughout the history of modern China, the fate of modern intellectuals is intertwined with that of the nation-state; the sociopolitical content of the former tends to be exhausted in the realization and self-assertion of the latter. Thus, the systematic creation of a market economy by the state presents a new, unprecedented situation for Chinese social life in general and intellectual life in particular. Along with the growth of a market economy in a social space largely congruent with that of the state, the intelligentsia

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increasingly becomes as schizophrenic as the state itself. In other words, within the imagined interiority of the state, both the state and intellectuals find themselves exposed to a social and ideological environment outside itself. Put differently, the inside becomes the outside. Their interests, desires, and ideologies are related but no longer naturally and not always in agreement. The breaking of the broad socio-ideological consensus of the New Era reflects a new social sphere consisting of newfound material and social relations. In the initial post–June Fourth years, under the suffocating ideological policing of the state, the first “rethinking” by Chinese intellectuals was a theoretical critique of radicalism. Many Chinese intellectuals, who had encountered Western liberal and conservative discourses in the late 1980s, quickly came to the conclusion that the Tiananmen “democracy” movement was but one more ill-fated mass movement propelled by an intellectual belief in radical, total social change and lofty political ideals. For those whose attempt was, at least in retrospect, to replace stormy social revolution with piecemeal reform which, eventually, would replace the communist dictatorship with a bourgeois democracy, this had the effect of admitting that they had been thinking in revolutionary terms all along while struggling to put revolution to rest. On closer examination, one can find two crucial conceptual twists which distort the relationship between name and substance. First, the popular social protest against an increasingly antisocialist environment plagued by high inflation, worsening income disparity, and the rampant corruption of state capitalism is painted here as a popular demand by the Chinese people for more capitalism and individual liberty. Meanwhile, liberal intellectuals longing for an “enlightened despotism”—their political bet on the ill-fated Zhao Ziyang faction of the c c p , which was expected to carry out radical privatization and marketization—turn around and blame radicalism and revolution as such for an aborted “right-wing revolution.” The Chinese government in 1989 crushed the popular protest as a threat to “stability,” not as a crusade against neoliberalism. And what this stability would logically ensure socially, politically, and economically only becomes clear in the 1990s. In this picture, the ruthlessness of a rising technocratic regime is washed away in the muddy water of “communist hard-liners,” whereas the unapologetic advocacy for a more unequal and undemocratic China seeks to invent its pre-1989 history by appropriating the liberal mainstream of the New Era’s proreform intellectuals. The discursive slippage and manipulation of the discourse of democracy would play a central role in the so-called liberalism–New Left debate toward

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the end of the 1990s, to which we will turn in a moment. It is important here to point out the radicalization of the liberal discourse in the 1990s from a traditional liberalism (freedom, equality, social justice, etc.) to a neoliberal discourse corresponding to the conservative revolution of the Reagan-Thatcher period, and to the demise of the Soviet Bloc between 1989 and 1991. The increasing neoliberal militancy lies at the bottom of the repudiation of radicalism, which is an ideological clearing of the ground effected by discrediting utopian and revolutionary impulses toward social change as humanly naive, intellectually arrogant, and philosophically wrong. Whereas traditional or social-reformist liberal values overlap with the intellectual ideals and popular longings of the Chinese reform, the neoliberal stance demands a wholesale, systematic adoption of the ideologies and policies of the market revolution that has swept the world since the 1980s. As a result, an advocate for New Deal–style economic and social policies in China would be considered a liberal in the early 1990s but “New Left” by the end of the decade. Some of the issues in repudiating radicalism are leftovers from the late 1980s, when liberal discourse, at least in the realm of political theory, took the form of neoauthoritarianism. With the translation of Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Societies in Transition (1988), such liberal discourse was associated with the hope of the pro-Reform factions of the c c p for an “enlightened despotism.” Today’s Chinese liberals share with their preTiananmen precursors this neoauthoritarian legacy: both profoundly distrust social democracy (particularly mass democracy) while searching for an efficient and radical way to establish a new socio-ideological order based on the market and private ownership. They differ, however, in that the former considers itself a reformist movement within the framework of Chinese socialism, thus concerning itself with many issues—above all with political democratization and maintaining a socially just distribution of wealth—of the early economic Reform. By contrast, the latter not only openly challenges the very existence of Chinese socialism but also takes issue with the notion of the Western welfare state from an orthodox neoliberal standpoint. Among intellectual circles, the conservatism-radicalism (baoshouzhuyijijinzhuyi) debate unfolded mainly along a series of historical and intellectualhistorical reexaminations of, say, the One-Hundred-Day Reform (1898), the Republican Revolution (1911), the May Fourth Movement (1919), and so forth, and was characterized by a “conservative” challenge to the idea of revolution and radicalism which put the traditional radical discourse and putative contemporary “radicals” on the defensive.16 The “conservative” voice includes those cultural conservatives, such as Chen Lai, who mainly seek to preserve

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traditional Chinese culture, above all the relevance of Confucianism; and those revisionists, such as Wang Yuanhua, who see an overly narrow and restrictive discourse in the May Fourth legacy of Chinese enlightenment. Neither group, however, seems bent on challenging the philosophical and political legitimacy of Chinese modernity, revolution, and socialism.17 Indeed, “conservatism,” never a positive term in the modern Chinese intellectual history, seemed suddenly to have become not only a respectable concept but also a standard by which to measure previous failures and warn against upcoming dangers. The conservative reexamination is also pronounced in the literary-aesthetic domain, in which some century-long questions regarding Westernization and Sinicization, traditionalism and modernism, and so forth, are revisited, necessarily bringing some May Fourth or modernist veterans to question the conservative discourse in general.18 The 1990s antiradical and conservative discourse can also be considered a delayed response to a critical review of radicalism and conservatism in modern Chinese history by Yu Ying-shih, a historian of China at Princeton University who regularly publishes in Chinese. In an influential article published in 1988, Yu deplored the lack of a “defensible status quo” throughout modern Chinese history and the consequent escalation of radical political and intellectual revolutions.19 In this process, as he observed, the modern, bourgeois West fell from a shining ideal for the bourgeois revolutionaries in late Qing China to the embodiment of the most corrupt and reactionary forces during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. In his historical narrative, Yu pointed to the lack of a strong middle class as the main reason why a reasonable sociopolitical order could not be established or effectively defended. He also noted that the mere existence of a middle class does not guarantee democracy, as Germany and Japan in the interwar years testify. Yu never hides his own politics, which seek to combine a more prudent evaluation of the Chinese cultural tradition with the liberal tradition of the modern West. For this purpose, the reconstruction of the social sphere based on private property and its legal requirements must become a national priority, and the radical intellectual tradition must be repudiated. Yet in the ideological context of post-Tiananmen China, Yu’s cultural conservatism and political liberalism were taken by Chinese neoliberals as an intellectual and historical license against radicalism, idealism, and utopianism, all of which have henceforth become code words for equality, social justice, and mass democracy. After 1992, the conservative imperative to construct a “defensible status quo” of a middle-class society was quickly appropriated by Chinese neoliberals longing for a power-protected private property and its

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freedom in a market economy. The last is also the Chinese neoliberals understanding of Isaiah Berlin’s notion of “negative liberty.” In the late 1990s, the liberals’ pitching of freedom against democracy, and their categorical opposition to the ideas of equality and social revolution, addressed their socioeconomic agenda of sweeping privatization. They do not discuss the fact that, in the Chinese reality, how thorough privatization and marketization processes can be depends precisely on how much the state intervenes. What they demand, therefore, is a protected inwardness, to borrow Thomas Mann’s satirical phrase, which guarantees the privilege of the few against the political unworthiness of the many. Yu Ying-shih’s position, which stems from a convergence between (Chinese) cultural conservatism and (universal) political liberalism, understandably maintains the necessity of a defensible social mainstream as insurance against unstoppable radicalization of national political life. In its neoliberal appropriation in the current Chinese intellectual debate, however, this position reaches a distorted, “radicalized” form, as the liberal-conservative repudiation of radicalism gives way to an elitist demand for the implementation of a legal-political system in the service of the newly emerging upper class in a power-infested, unequal, and unjust space of “efficiency” and “free competition.” As a Chinese enclave of what Richard Rorty calls an “international superclass,”20 such a “middle class” will be in every way barricaded against the mass majority of the people in its own, economically underdeveloped country before it lifts them into the heaven of universal progress through a trickle-down system of distribution. The only link between these two different versions of liberal ideology is, of course, anticommunism, which still bestows legitimacy and moral righteousness on even the most neurotic and hysterical forms of antidemocratic and socially corrupt proposals and practices. Yu’s earlier reconsideration of radicalism in modern Chinese history attracted criticism from Chinese intellectuals still working within the state discourse. Interestingly, the main objection of state discourse to his liberal position is Maoism being considered as radicalism. For “official” intellectuals like Jiang Yihua, a senior historian at Fudan University, Maoism, characterized by its egalitarian utopia, must be understood as a form of “conservatism,” which is, in his lexicon, a diplomatic way to say feudalism.21 As a result, his rebuttal to Yu Ying-shih reads less like a critique of the liberal ideology than like a competing version of the same ideology offered by state discourse to legitimize the Reform. Here one gets a glimpse into the ideological structure of the post-Mao Chinese state: Only by redefining Maoism

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as feudal, “conservative,” and precapitalist, can post-Mao Reform ensure its legitimacy in the new ideological framework of universal progress. For liberal intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution marks the dead end of a selffulfilling and self-destructive radical tradition. For the ideologues of discursive officialdom, the same event serves as the rock bottom of a country’s modern fate, a psychological yardstick against which to mobilize the country to engage in modernization and upward mobility. In this particular respect, the ideological difference between the defenders of the “totalitarian state” and its critics seems both trivial and sentimental.

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The antiradical turn prepared an antitheoretical, anti–“grand narrative” sentiment which paved the way for a massive deintellectualization of Chinese cultural life in the 1990s. The immediate point of reference for such a shift was the Tiananmen military crackdown and a rethinking of the intellectual assumptions of the “new enlightenment” movement of the 1980s. In a larger historical context, however, that shift can also be regarded as a preemptive move by intellectuals to adjust themselves to upcoming commodification and globalization. In other words, it is a way to address the inevitable marginalization and professionalization of Chinese intellectual life and to search for a different way to define a universal framework for a particular Chinese intellectual reorientation. It is also a way to avoid a head-on political confrontation with the government, which shows no sign of backing down from its official position on the Tiananmen Incident. Finally, it reflects a collective effort to explore new discursive mechanisms by which to recapture the relevance and legitimacy of intellectuals in the upheaval of the market economy and rationalization of the state bureaucracy in the process of incorporation into global economic and cultural institutions. By emphasizing “scholarship” and “academic standards,” intellectuals wounded in 1989 and inspired by the political change of tide in Eastern Europe seek to gain a new symbolic foothold as professionals and specialists in the heightened division and specialization of intellectual labor. As many leading intellectual figures of 1980s China left the country after 1989, largescale discussions of Western theory no longer occupied the center of Chinese intellectual discourse in the 1990s. A new enthusiasm for detheorizing, positivism, and empirical research has led to a new type of “Chinese learning” (guoxue) growing in the barren landscape. As a result, scholastic research on Chinese social, cultural, and intellectual history has replaced discus-

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sions of the “Chinese problematic” with reference to Western intellectualtheoretical discourse to become the mainstay of Chinese humanities in the 1990s. “From intellectual history to the history of scholarship” even became a self-conscious marker of intellectual groupings in the early 1990s, which revealed a deep-seated longing for normative guidance and security in building autonomous scholarly communities and academic institutions in accordance with international professional codes.22 To the extent that a conscious antitheoretical stance led to an unconscious regression to more established, depoliticized, and “time-honored” approaches such as positivism and philology, the scholastic turn was a form of unthinking and a mirror image of the general ideological self-indoctrination by many Chinese intellectuals in the post–Cold War world. As a result, the hermeneutic quest of the 1980s was replaced by an exegetic obsession. Theoretically and politically informed criticism was succeeded by philology and empirical research as the proper academic mannerism in the age of professionalization. “Scholarship” thus marks a general framework with a new set of questions, approaches, and paradigms. It also registers a new economy of intellectual production in terms of career path, funding, international sponsorship, and state commission (particularly in social sciences). In this new mode of scholarly production, translations of works by U.S. China scholars have replaced Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, or Michel Foucault as the new framing of high academic discourse. The new symbolic capital reinforces a social ego taking place in the heightened social division of labor and a new middle-class ideology. The implicit politics of such newfound independent—which rarely means anything other than anti-Marxist— scholarship can be detected in its formal nuance and mannerism, which then become a discursive metaphor for international standards, the autonomous individual, and his or her institutionally protected private property. This worldly politics needs its own heroes and style. Chen Yinke, a traditional historian who lived through the early years of the People’s Republic, was rediscovered as an intellectual role model for his defiance of the communist regime and his attachment to prerevolutionary China. Such a moral self-image becomes intellectually vacuous when the communist state itself acts as the mover and shaker creating a market economy. Yet the selfglorifying and self-pitying tone in the Chen Yinke literature is indicative of the Chinese liberal scholars’ search for a moral and psychological anchor as well as symbolic power in a time of socioeconomic upheaval. If the Reformist intelligentsia in the 1980s was eager to define its agenda in a cosmopolitan context of “Western learning,” namely, the philosophical formulations

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of modernity (which itself reminds us of Hegel’s famous saying that modernity or the Age of Enlightenment “requires philosophy”), then self-styled liberals in the 1990s can only resort to inventing the “absolute” and the “universal” in the provincial field of “Chinese learning.” The degeneration from philosophy to philology, from hermeneutics to exegesis, and from narrative to anecdotes attests to the disappearance of intellectual ambition and energy in the Chinese 1990s, as collective social desire and imagination were sucked dry in the intellectual discourse’s yearning for its institutional certainty in a larger—namely, international—alliance of symbols and ideology. Just like the neoliberal battle cry for the free market needs the undemocratic intervention of the government, the fast-track professionalization in the Chinese intellectual world needs the disciplinary closure of Western Sinology. Interrogating the ideological content of the so-called New Chinese Scholarship (xinguoxue), one finds under its empirical excess an eagerness to set up a local franchise for a real or purported international establishment, which has become a far more tangible (and bankable) substitute for “philosophy.” Toward the end of the 1990s, the triviality and philistinism of Chinese liberal intellectual discourse reached epic proportions, complete with ritualized seriousness, elevated mannerism of “research,” and a metaphysics of “scholarly standard.” Despite its posing as a quasi-political dissent, the liberal discourse operated within the safe parameters of academic careerism and thorough marketization of knowledge, both of which are now official lines of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Obviously, collecting local footnotes for the newfound absolutes and eternalities not only constitutes a shortcut to the global mainstream but reflects a “rationalized” international division of labor, too. The withering of intellectual and theoretical ambition, the “inward” turn to positivism and global ideology have produced a new version of Chinaexceptionalism. Instead of placing China’s uniqueness and autonomy only in the cultural realm, this new discourse argues that China is unique and autonomous because it wants to be part of the universal so badly. It is as if saying that the collective obsession with continued modernization and an eventual merger with the “mainstream of world civilization” has endowed the Chinese with a new national essence immune to the historical contradictions of capitalism and, indeed, staying beyond politics and ideology as such. This transparent—though not necessarily self-conscious—political and ideological argument explains many Chinese liberal intellectuals’ quixotic obsession with and religious loyalty to Platonic categories, to a Realist notion of representation, and to such metaphysical notions as “essence”

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(benzhi) and “absolute truth” ( juedui zhenli). It also exposes the determinist and essentialist assumption behind all kinds of antiessentialist, antideterminist, antitotality rhetoric aiming at dissolving the historical experience of the Chinese revolution and modernity in the prevailing ideology of the free market. As a specimen of the global ideological drive against “grand narrative” (a code name for analyzing the problematic of capitalism dialectically), it offers in the Chinese context a metanarrative “grander than most of those it would consign to oblivion.”23 To participate in new global ideological mainstream via the rationalization of “local knowledge” also addresses the latent or explicit cultural nationalism of a developmentalist intellectual elite in China today. In this respect, “Sinology” functions as not so much a disciplinary shelter as an ideological filter by which to separate the “Chinese problematic” from its global context. Any intellectual debate that is political and theoretical in nature must then be suspended in a field which exists in the domain of nonchange and timelessness. Once again, the anti-intellectual fervor of the Chinese 1990s has its own intellectual and ideological foreground. This is the reason why in China today, discussions of democracy have to make a detour through Alexis de Tocqueville or Edmund Burke; why an analysis of current socioeconomic differentiations must resort to the jargon of Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, or Friedrich von Hayek; why the sociopolitical arguments of intellectuals are often articulated tortuously through the language of Heidegger or Walter Benjamin; and why the study of popular culture will have to borrow heavily from Fredric Jameson or the Birmingham school. State censorship plays a role in shaping the coded language of intellectual debate, of course. But that role should not be exaggerated now that the Chinese field of cultural production mirrors the country’s mixed modes of production and ownership. Rather, we should remember that the post-Mao Chinese “public sphere” is a sham whose only existence and festivities are in and of the ideology and fantasy.24 Its imagined existence throughout the 1980s was parasitic on the state-discourse of “reform” and “open door” policy; its way of corresponding to everyday life was to build aesthetic enclaves and philosophical trenches as isolated allegories of agitated but repressed social relations. Once the formulations via Western theory became constitutive of the symbolic space of the elite intellectuals of the New Era, they formed the discursive platforms on which ideological battles of the 1990s were fought. As an internalized space, theory or philosophy is not so much a bridge to global space, as the latter is equally an “internal” component of the Chinese situation; rather, it is a “dwelling” in and by which to negotiate between a whole range of histor-

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ical and geographical contexts and intellectual genealogies. Thus the intellectual tradition of the modern West becomes a contentious ground, which various ideological positions in China today seek to lay claim to and derive legitimacy from. As the collective experience of modern Chinese intellectuals is coded and indexed in a translated modernity, the latter also serves as an allegorical warehouse for their historically new imaginings. In Chinese academia in the 1990s, the ultimate academic stature and authority—not to mention considerable financial and career benefits—come from Western, predominantly American and, to a lesser degree, European and Japanese universities as international standard-bearers of professional training and institutional prestige. Through an intricate network of material and symbolic exchange, many scholars in China’s elite education and research institutions are now finding their place in an international system of division of intellectual labor. The newly adopted habitus prompts them into a transnational, translingual enterprise of inventing a “new Chinese studies” based on their understanding of the global power hierarchy and professional codes. The collective empathy toward the convention, jargon, and the institutional ideologies of highly professionalized Western academia creates a formidable magnetic field shaping the research agenda, methodological approach, and ideological thrust of elite intellectual and scholarly communities in China. In this sense, one can say that, despite its pretense about Chineseness (zhongguoxing) and “pure scholarship” (chun xueshu), the “new Chinese studies” is as much a product of globalization and the market environment as anything else in China today. While enhanced intellectual and scholarly exchange between China and the West is always vital to the intellectual well-being of Chinese society, under the current framework of transnational Sinology it has also become a distorting and restraining mechanism. The centrality of Chinese studies in the scholarly exchange with the West in the humanities could be taken as a sign that Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s are becoming less willing and able to engage in the study of the West as a historical totality and a defining moment of the contradictions of global modernity. Rather, in the new scholastic imagination, the West has been collapsed into a homogenous institution, a standard to meet, and a norm to observe; thoroughly deterritorialized and dehistoricized, it stands beyond time as an Ur-Space. As mathematically oriented and model-obsessed social sciences, above all economics, become the standard-bearers of knowledge production, intellectual discourse in China today has resigned from its participation in the global theoreticopolitical framework which might inform a critical examination of the

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Chinese situation. For more and more Chinese scholars in the 1990s, reading “Western scholarship” (xixue) meant reading “professionally” the works by Western China scholars, often their real or potential sponsors abroad. The journal China Scholarship (Zhongguo xueshu, edited by Liu Dong, published by the Commercial Press) is a case in point. While striving to maintain a cosmopolitan, international profile, the journal gathered around itself a group of Chinese studies scholars both inside and outside of China (the United States, Europe, and Japan). Ostensibly or at least rhetorically, this is designed to ensure that the journal represents cutting-edge scholarship in both empirical and theoretical areas, scholarship driven by questions rather than by positivistic, technical “scholarship.” The ironic, perhaps unintended outcome, however, is that most of the contributors who passed the “international” standard, consisting of two-way blind review, turned out to be scholars on China in Western academia, many of them Chinese. Consequently, a journal seeking to set the stand for scholarly and intellectual research in post-Tiananmen China ended up becoming a window display of small clusters of Chinese translation of academic papers from a small field (Sinological or Chinese studies) in the Western academia, while their contextual links to their own organic field of intellectual or knowledge production was rendered invisible to the Chinese readership by the editorial process. The irony is not lost on the editor himself, who has jokingly observed that China Scholarship is actually mostly about “foreign scholarship.” But this recognition has not changed the direction of the journal. Despite the initial fanfare (associated with its being published by a prestigious press known for translating Western classics; its funding by the Harvard-Yenching Institute; and the substantially higher pay it offers to authors and translators), the influence of China Scholarship has been gradually diminishing. To some extent, the “Fever of Chinese Scholarship” in the 1990s was reminiscent of, and constituted a countermovement against, the “methodology fever” or “theory fever” in the late 1980s, when various contemporary Western theoretical discourses—structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, Western Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism flooded the cultural and academic market and eventually circulated as symbols of cultural capital if not cultural commodity. This is not the paradigmatic “Western scholarship” or theory against which the scholastic turn to “Chinese learning” is critically examined. The larger issue, however, lies in the fact that a seemingly “inward” turn in Chinese knowledge and intellectual production is, rather, an anxious search outward for a new entry into the international hierarchy and division

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of labor governing the field of knowledge production, and into the system of representation and power in global space. While doing so, a more depoliticized, demoralized, and professionalistic Chinese academia decided that it was easier to forge international career alliances if they accepted their role in the international division of labor and did not challenge or seek to subvert it. Chineseness, in this context, is both a form of “local knowledge” and an identification with the global by renouncing the true universal potentials and aspirations of the local in its own historicity and concreteness. What is abandoned, to be sure, are the mediating processes which must be engaged theoretically and critically, an engagement which takes even the most local phenomenon to be an integral part of the totality of the historical condition of modernity and capitalism. “Chinese scholarship,” on the contrary, offers a refuge from such engagement and a comfortable niche in the status quo by resigning, even denouncing, the theoretical, political imperatives in contemporary Chinese intellectual life. Yet the case of China Scholarship seems to point to a dilemma: While theoretical discourses on “big questions” are no longer conducive to Chinese academia’s gaining professional entry into and recognition by highly specialized Western academia, directly associating with centers of knowledge production in Chinese studies, although a shortcut to the truly international, tended to produce a vertical and largely self-enclosed professional network whose internal exchange and circulation of prestige and symbolic capital often fails to address the larger intellectual and social issues facing the Chinese intellectual field. There is no need to stress that Chinese scholars have much to learn from their colleagues in Sinology and Chinese studies in the West. Indeed, as Gan Yang observes, “the phrase ‘the underdevelopment of Chinese scholarship’ usually refers to the fact that even in the area of Sinology and Chinese studies, Western scholars’ works are generally better in quality than those of Chinese scholars.”25 It is also obvious, however, that such interchange cannot and should not substitute for the interaction between Chinese and international intellectual worlds as a whole, let alone to let the Chinese intellectual and scholarly agenda be framed and dictated by Western academic specialization on and media representation of China. Here, too, what lies behind the seemingly innocent academic taste for Western Chinese studies is an interest in separating the critical knowledge of Chinese society from the ongoing theoretical and political debates in advanced capitalist societies. This interest reflects a unique combination of conservative and neoliberal tendencies to disengage from the sociopolitical and intellectual dynamism of the contemporary world so as to collapse a Chinese exceptionalism into

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a Western-defined universalism. The self-limiting mortifications of many Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s unwittingly achieved an academic model for the tunnel vision prescribed by the state philosophy of developmentalism beyond ideology. If the state advocacy for a “socialist market economy” still flirted with an unexamined hope for a “Chinese alternative” while resorting to the least desirable form of bureaucratic capitalism, then the liberal scholars in the Chinese 1990s merely sought to build sheltered academic inwardness as privileged and semicolonial enclaves of “negative liberty.” The 1990s’ new scholasticism should not be confused with, much less given credit for, the general professionalization of scholarly works, which was an inevitable result of the uneven and sometimes unreliable improvement of the Chinese university system. A heightened degree of intellectual division of labor, frequent and even regularized international exchange, and, toward the end of the 1990s, dramatically increased state funding all contributed to a sharp rise in theoretical sophistication and more sophisticated mannerisms in the execution of research and writing. This is especially true among younger generation scholars at top Chinese research and teaching institutions. Wang Hui’s work is exemplary in this regard. Conversant with the critical discourses in the West, in touch with the archival research model prevalent in Western Sinological research, and above all concerned with and committed to a more internationalized mode of scholarly production, Wang writes as though he has to pass the stringent examination of both the theory-driven academic Left and a text- and empirical data–obsessed Sinologist in the United States. To what extent Wang’s scholarship may enter meaningful dialogue with traditional scholars working on the same archival materials but from established, now nearly obsolete lineages of intellectual history (of either Marxist or non-Marxist persuasion, represented by, say, Li Zehou and Yu Ying-shih, respectively) remains to be seen, as his framing questions may be perceived as a hardened shell of unwanted terminological and discursive complications even by their implied audience in Western academic circles. However, by virtue of his success and recognition by Western academia, Wang seems to have provided a viable alternative, even an inspiration, to some younger scholars, especially those in the fields of modern Chinese intellectual history and literary studies, who now realize the importance of working through Chinese texts, albeit from “Western” or theoretical premises.26 Wang’s four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, partially completed in the 1990s but not published until 2005, thus can be considered the intellectual development and fruition of the promise of the Xueren group.

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On the whole, Wang Hui’s lone exception notwithstanding, one may suspect that the scholastic turn did little to improve intellectual productivity in the 1990s. In any event, the emphasis on empirical research, textual studies, professionalism, and so on, proved a woefully inadequate program by which to announce the arrival of a new intellectual paradigm after the 1980s, and by which to attack critical intellectuals who remained engaged in various big and intensively political questions vis-à-vis the radical transformation of the Chinese social and cultural landscape. In fact, most scholars dubbed “New Leftist” are extremely solid and rigorous researchers with convincing command of empirical data, textual familiarity, and thorough, even intimate knowledge of the topic, the discipline, and the field or profession (one needs to look no further than the authors discussed in the pages to follow, such as Gan Yang, Cui Zhiyuan, and Wang Shaoguang).27 However, since their work runs against the grain of the anti-intellectual, antitheory, and depoliticizing zealots of the New Scholasticism, they formed the target (for boisterous attack or deliberate silence), not the example, of the institutionalized professionalism of “solid scholarship” by 1990s Chinese academia.

The Neoliberal Discourse

While the repudiation of radicalism prepared the ground for an antidemocratic discourse of individual freedom, the “restoration of scholarly standards” established the hidden institutional codes for “independent” intellectuals. Both strategies face the rise of the masses and their everyday culture in the “socialist market economy.” Both seek to endorse the government policy of economic reform while posing as its critic by demanding legal-political freedom and protections compatible with the global capitalist system in which China is integrated economically but not yet politically. Both, moreover, aim at a fundamental intellectual reorientation through which to dislodge the Chinese problematic from its global context of modernity, anticolonialism, and social change throughout the twentieth century, so as to replant it in the posthistorical, universal order as an exception that proves the rule. Chinese liberalism in the 1990s can therefore be considered a discursive mechanism and ideological operation to solve a political and intellectual dilemma. Bluntly put, its question was how to secure the freedom of a few against the demands for equality by the many. The intellectual and ideological justification of such a position, however, unfolded along the binary opposites between liberty and equality, univer-

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sality and particularity, privatization and state control, integration and the search for alternatives. Contemporary Chinese liberalism as a self-conscious discourse came into being after Tiananmen, as a result of the hopeless disintegration of the broad social and ideological alliance of the New Era that was based on a consensus on the socialist Reforms. This disintegration, as I have discussed, should not be mistaken as indicating a radical break with or even a reversal of the Reforms policy, as the liberal reformers within the state bureaucracy have been able to carry on the postsocialist Reforms unabated. What has changed, rather, is the global ideological environment after 1989, in which socialist economic and political reforms are increasingly under pressure to follow the neoliberal orthodoxy of radical privatization and deregulation, and in which the political legitimacy of a socialist state is constantly under assault by a Western triumphalism which combines oldfashioned right-wing hostility toward communism and a liberal discourse of universal human rights that has become unabashedly jingoistic—an unmistakable sign of the coming into being of a new supranational empire.28 For Xu Youyu, for instance, it seems only natural to lay out a liberal intellectual agenda by attacking previously respected, even authoritative, intellectual discourse of leftist or Marxist persuasions, such as the Frankfurt school.29 Xu’s argument, crude in the theoretical sense, indicates the radical intellectual-political turn of the Chinese intellectual world after the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in and after 1989. By accusing the Frankfurt school thinkers (Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, etc.) of insufficiently reflecting on the difference between the German and U.S. situations, Xu tries to prove that critical social theory is itself historically and politically defined by its entanglement with totalitarian regimes, which members of the Frankfurt school wrongly thought to be the result of liberalism.30 Thus the attack on the Frankfurt school, Xu seems to think, is an effective way of aligning oneself with the postcommunist liberalization in Eastern Europe, hence siding with general liberal tendencies from John Locke to contemporary liberal democracy. Under the global ideological hegemony of the West, the general liberal tendency of the New Era intelligentsia has fragmented, giving rise to a radical neoliberal discourse as well as to its critics. Whereas liberal intellectuals in the 1980s still worked in the framework of socialist economic and political reforms, the neoliberals of the 1990s openly questioned the legitimacy of the socialist state. The intellectual openness of the 1980s was marked by a hermeneutic enthusiasm to rethink the Chinese problematic—above all the conflict between

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tradition and modernity and the difference between China and the West— with reference to Western theory. This was replaced in the 1990s by a neoliberal agenda for radically transforming the Chinese socioeconomic and political structure, which was inspired by the market revolution of the Reagan-Thatcher era and its intellectual justifications.31 In hindsight, the Chinese government’s behavior in 1989 was more effective in cracking down on the democratic initiative for economic equality, social justice, and political participation by the working people than in weeding out “bourgeois liberalism,” which surged back into the domestic mainstream in the form of neoliberal economics, and into the global context with the rhetoric of freedom and rights. This is the reason why in the 1990s, as economic inequality and political corruption worsened, the neoliberal discourse can endorse capitalist development and unequal distribution—both lie at the heart of the social tension and popular discontent in China today—while morally capitalizing on its championship of democracy and freedom, which are values increasingly appealing to the Chinese people, who are at once beneficiaries and victims of the uneven development of state capitalism. In any event, intellectual debate and conflict in the 1990s was not centered on liberal intellectuals versus the socialist state, but rather the internal fragmentation and polarization of the liberal intelligentsia. At the end of the 1990s, liberalism (ziyou zhuyi) in the Chinese context meant a militant neoliberal discourse; in opposition are several positions with populist, social democratic, or egalitarian tendencies in the field, generally labeled nationalist, postmodernist, and New Leftist. At the discursive level, liberalism in the 1990s often reveals its position and argument when it seeks to define its ideological opponents broadly under the rubric of the “New Left” (xin zuopai). In Ren Jiantao’s “Jiedu xin zuopai” (“Decipher the ‘New Left’”), the author maintains that the basic position of the “loosely knit alliances” of the New Left includes rejection of (1) liberal discourse, (2) free-market rationality, and (3) established social scientific approaches. Ren goes on to provide an index of the intellectual sources or “supporting network” (yituo) of the Chinese New Left: the Frankfurt school, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, the communitarians, analytical Marxism, critical legal studies, and so on, all of which Ren deems as too “Western” to speak to the genuine Chinese needs for reason, freedom, democracy, rule of law, and progress.32 While determining that the Chinese New Left derived its perspectives and even questions from its Western masters, thus suffering a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” when coming to examinations of Chinese problems, Ren, in

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very general terms, states the characteristics and virtues of liberalism as it is understood by contemporary Chinese liberals: 1

liberalism, as an effective way of advancing social accumulation of wealth, is beneficial to China as a poor country by pushing us to adopt a more efficient mode of economic construction and to overcome poverty;

2

as a way of advancing the maturity of social political life, liberalism is important to the Chinese people, who have long been trapped in despotic totalitarianism, allowing us to enter a proper political life;

3

as a tolerant, understanding mode of thinking, liberalism will advance science and technology, produce prosperity in intellectual and scholarly production, and lead China, a country suffering from prolonged ideological control and weak scientific development, into sustained national intellectual liberation.33

The utterly pretheoretical, uncritical, and ahistorical argument of the “liberal discourse” betrayed by both Xu’s and Ren’s writings does not prevent it from launching effective ideological offensives from the basis of its real social political situatedness and its claim to a rather state-based neoenlightenment and modernization discourse now reformulated in postcommunist or anticommunist terms. The increasing ideological and verbal antagonism between the two sides should not obscure the fact that they share a social and intellectual origin in Chinese modernism of the New Era. And the best minds on both sides should recognize their political and intellectual common ground, which is a belief that Chinese society needs more sociopolitical liberalization as well as more government interventions, regulations, services, and benefits. It needs more liberalism as a proto-middle class takes shape, and more social democracy as the people—still defined and understood, at least residually, in the Maoist tradition of revolution and socialism—reenter history under historically new economic, social, and cultural circumstances. Given the postsocialist fragmentation of Chinese society and the moral chaos that ensues, what is vital for the intellectual vocation is not to carve out and reinforce these incipient or entrenched positions “clearly,” that is, in academic and professional terms. What is imperative, both politically and intellectually, is to engage in the field of difference while articulating a raison d’être for the persistence of the socialist state, which proves indispensable in the construction of a new socioeconomic system and a new form of life. To this end, a new dialectic thinking must be called into being to formulate a national political consensus which underscores and anchors the lively debates on the future of the country. From the standpoint of

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critical intellectuals in China today, the crucial engagement is not securing a discursive space by all means in the larger ideological environment defined by the market and its attendant ideological hegemonies. Rather, it is a systematic, totalistic rethinking of the epochal determinations and mythologies whose internal differences, limitations, and dynamic energy make it possible to imagine the future. Qin Hui, an avowed believer in liberalism, has recently observed that in the face of the radically uneven and polarized Chinese reality, the liberal– New Left confrontation seems all but misplaced. Rather, he maintains, the real problems are internal to those discourses and doctrines, that is, in the discrepancy between the conventional liberal or leftist positions, and the Chinese reality, which falls far below the parameters of those positions. For Qin, what defines the Chinese intellectual 1990s is, rather, Chinese intellectuals’ indulgence in or inability to pull themselves out of false claims and invalid assumptions, in other words, a continued failure to negotiate between Western theory and Chinese reality. This serves Qin’s own ideological argument, which implicitly or explicitly calls for reliving the classical capitalist moment to compensate for modern China’s unnatural—in terms of the intervention of the revolutionary will power culminating in Chinese socialism— course and socioeconomic and political structure. What is interesting here is not Qin’s intellectual framework, which proves profoundly problematic, but his observations on a chronic disconnect between theory and practice, between a discursive, even professional allegiance to a purportedly symbolic order and a close encounter with a reality whose internal difference defies identity and category. Qin argues that “the underdevelopment of the Chinese socialist welfare system, the limited basic rights of the Chinese working people, would be appalling and intolerable to the archconservatives in Britain,” yet the Chinese liberals in economics have “gone beyond the Nozick principle, practically arguing that it is quite all right to do business even with money robbed from other people.”34 For Qin, the New Left’s call for democratizing management is intended to curb the clarification of property ownership, which indicates the New Left’s interest in introducing public participation and public choice in the domain of “private goods.” Qin rejects this view on the ground that “rights, responsibility, and interest” should be a unity; that such unity is crucial for economic operations in a market environment. Defending clear ownership in the “private domain,” he deplores Chinese liberals’ advocacy of “free trade” by the power holders in the domain of public goods, which opens the door to the scrambling for public wealth by the so-called servants of the

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people. This, Qin admits, would lead to a “quite horrifying” scenario. He points out a “curious fact” that characterizes Chinese society: namely, while would-be oligarchs repudiate the “Nozick principle” in the name of economic freedom, the New Left seems more willing to challenge the Rawls principle of justice. As a result, the voices calling for democratic choice in the domain of public goods and legal ownership in the private domain are the “weakest.” Qin suggests that the Nozick-Rawls dispute remains a “pseudo-question” for Chinese reality, where “the basic goals of liberalism and social democracy overlap,” and where “the large area opposed by both liberalism and social democracy needs to be opposed by Chinese intellectuals as a whole.”35 Shifting his focus outside what he perceives as the pseudo-“theoretical” debate between liberalism and the New Left, Qin proposes to “criticize Chinese [neo]liberals with classical liberalism and the New Left with Marxism.” In his gesture to “transcend the Left and the Right” as they are defined in the West, Qin argues for the necessity of China to adopt the “universal values of human civilization.” This benign slogan is, to be sure, aimed critically at the alleged postmodern mimicry of the Chinese New Left, which, in Qin’s eyes, suggests groundlessly the possibility of thinking beyond the confines of enlightenment and modernity in its classical European definition. Qin remarks that the Chinese New Left discourse does not have a “postmodern” background or condition at home; that, instead, the Chinese concern remains to “go beyond the Middle Ages.” Such adherence to a rigid chronological and paradigmatic order of capitalist progress becomes the hallmark of liberal thinking in China. To this extent, Qin’s call for realism and nonconformist thinking ends up becoming yet another proposal for social rationalization, for an intellectual and ideological return to “things as they actually are,” which inevitably signifies the emergence of a new ideologico-symbolic network. Qin’s blurring of the boundary between liberalism and social democracy shows why liberalism gained popularity among not only elite intellectuals but also the general educated population in China through the 1990s. However, as I have suggested, the ideological offensive of liberalism in the 1990s stemmed not from classical liberalism per se or the social reform/democracy tradition but from a neoliberal doctrine mingled with homegrown neoauthoritarianism. Qin’s hope for an intellectual united front does not seem to be materializing. Instead, one witnesses intensified sectarian factionalism, ideological dogmatism, and intellectual narrow-mindedness, all displayed dramatically in the controversy around the first Dushu award in the summer of 2000.

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In 1999, a major donation from Hong Kong businessman Lee Ka Shing’s foundation to the Joint Publishing Company (Sanlian Shudian) in Beijing enabled Dushu (Reading) magazine, a jpc unit, to establish a national book award for scholarly works, with its editorial office functioning as the organizing committee to lay out rules and procedures, to assemble (by invitation only) a selection committee, and to take care of the logistics. Not only was the Changjiang Award a first of its kind in the history of the prc, the millionyuan prize (the figure of 1 million carried symbolic weight, partly because it is also the amount of the Nobel Prize in U.S. dollars) also created high expectations, indeed, a national sensation in both scholarly communities and the mass media. The as-yet hidden (at least to the general public) fault lines eventually caused an earthquake that, as many in Beijing and Shanghai intellectual circles would note in the ensuing months if not years, was even more devastating to the intellectual world than that caused by the June Fourth Incident. At the center of the huge controversy lay Dushu magazine and its acting editors, Wang Hui and Huang Ping. Widely considered the flagship publication of “liberal” or “independent” intellectuals since the beginning of the New Era, Dushu at the beginning of the new millennium was a different journal altogether. After three years of editorship by Wang and Huang, both labeled New Left intellectuals by their fellow travelers during the 1980s and the early 1990s, Dushu was often spoken of by liberal intellectuals as a stronghold and mouthpiece of the New Left camp and its “Western (Marxist) handlers.” Yet the journal’s enormous prestige in the intellectual world and among the general educated public—as a result of its legacy from the 1980s and of its continued intense engagement with major intellectual and cultural issues—meant that even its critics would not give it up as a lost cause but rather tried to claim its legacy and share its influence whenever possible. A constant tug of war, with all the speculation, charges, and litmus tests, which were intellectual, political, and personal all at once, had already been going on around the journal for some time before the Changjiang Award was announced. The selection process and the result seemed bound to be a show of force, a race if not a battle between opposing armies eyeing the same trophy, a moment of truth laying bare the new power patterns and alliances that constituted the “independent” Chinese intellectual world of the 1990s. To make a long story short, in June 2000, after apparently serious rigorous processes of nomination and deliberation, the grand prize went to Wang Hui in recognition of his 1997 collection Wang Hui zi xuan ji (Wang Hui’s Self-Selected Essays).36 The liberal contenders and watchdogs immediately

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cried foul, charging that, since Wang was executive editor of the journal, and thus a central member of the organizing committee, the award was a breach of all procedural justice and tantamount to academic corruption. The field of “independent intellectuals” was immediately divided into two camps tirelessly exchanging charges, defenses, and countercharges. While the official national media remained curiously silent throughout the incident, the “semiofficial” or market-driven media had a field day, not to mention countless Web sites, a few of which were exclusively devoted to the development of the controversy.37 Nearly every major Chinese intellectual was asked to comment on the award. Wang, at the time a visiting scholar in the United States, was forced to issue a strongly worded self-defense. The controversy remains inconclusive, with few converts on either camp. But the upshot is that the thin veil of civility, often maintained by personal relations and a shared past, was completely blown and from that point on, the liberals and the New Left would have faced each other more or less as impersonal ideological and political opponents. The liberals seem to believe the controversy has worked out in their favor, as they were the ones who tried, often in a performative, even pedagogical way, to uphold procedural justice, public accountability, organizational transparency, and so on, and to rally against “academic corruption.” The New Left, for its part, shows little sign of defeat, however, as the moral clarity and intensity of the liberal attack only made many wavering New Leftists decide to come out of the closet and regroup around figures clearly identified as leaders of the New Left.38 Bitter and vociferous as it was during the Dushu controversy, the “liberal” position had and continues to have as its main ideological thrust the neoliberal economic discourse, which is more or less indifferent toward the “New Left” as long as it remains a cultural discourse.39 Despite its moral high ground and ideological tenacity, the Chinese neoliberal discourse shows an economic agenda overlapping with the official policies of the postsocialist state. Both sides believe that economic development means capitalist development; and in a poor and egalitarian society, the process of capitalization necessitates radical government creation and protection of private property and economic inequality. Both fetishize private ownership as the essential unit—as both motivation and rationality—for rational economic behavior and spontaneous social order. Both worship the “invisible hand” of the market, that supercomputer which can correct the folly and arrogance of central planning. And both are convinced that the market is the only way to growth. The two part company, however, when it comes to the political and discursive sphere. Whereas the technocratic liberals may consider the

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laissez-faire approach the most efficient way to development under the tutelage of an authoritarian government, neoliberal intellectuals prove to be more orthodox students of classical economics and liberal political philosophy, maintaining that the legitimacy and limit of the government should be given by a free society sustained by private economy and independent legislative and judiciary procedures.40 Under postsocialist conditions, as long as the radical redistribution of social wealth and power called for by neoliberal doctrines requires the forceful intervention of the state (the only existing form of legitimate violence), the neoliberal utopia can only be undemocratic, even antidemocratic. Advocates of radical privatization were not totally wrong when they proclaimed that the biggest event of Chinese intellectual life in the 1990s was the “emergence of the liberal discourse.”41 What needs to be brought to attention, however, is this neoliberalism’s dual position vis-à-vis the local/global context. The socioeconomic and political reality in China today dictates that neoliberalism cannot but be an elitist discourse; that its demand for “negative freedom” means not the state’s withdrawal from the social sphere, but its political intervention in a different kind of sphere, namely, its selective and preferential protection of the fittest in the market environment. Such a self-serving rhetoric of freedom would be rejected by the majority of the Chinese population if there were a democratic and well-informed public debate in China. The Habermasian assumption of a societal and communicative “openness” or publicness is idealistic and misleading in this context, where the interpenetration of the social and the state is constant and thorough, and, as a result, the state system, including the c cp party organism itself, is a battleground for fundamental ideological and political debates and conflicts. Instead of indicating the “backwardness” of Chinese political life, this merely reflects the general fragmentation of a political society and its continuing lack of public agreement on fundamental interests of contending parties in the new political sphere, save a symbolic national consensus implied by an abstract, opaque state-form. The theoretical fallacy of the liberal discourse in China in the 1990s lies precisely in its substitution of an analysis of the Chinese situation with the formal appearance of parliamentary democracy historically based on bourgeois society and its economic structure. Not only is this discourse unable to appreciate the internal contradictions or paradoxes of liberal democracy in the Western context, as Carl Schmitt’s work highlights in a provocative and penetrating way, it also fails to demonstrate a true appreciation, let alone a credible analysis, of the concrete economic,

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social, and political relations in China today. The subjectivism and self-pity we see in the arguments of contemporary Chinese liberalism therefore suggest not so much a sociological reality as an ideo-psychological state, which, at its most articulate, constitutes a fantastic and nominalist embrace of the existing institutions of the West not as historical products, but as timeless symbols of a teleological future. Meanwhile, this neoliberal discourse implicitly corresponds to the official ideology of modernization, and it has never hesitated to corner its intellectual opponents into giving a “yes or no” answer to the neoliberals’ political pop quiz on the evil of the Cultural Revolution, the necessity of the economic Reform, or on the presence of a universal law embodied by the free market. In fact, the neoliberal stand on the Cultural Revolution and the developmentalist social agenda overlap almost completely with the de facto official policy: authoritarian developmentalism. Differences between them often stem merely from different political priorities. Whereas the neoliberal view is based on an emphatic embrace of global ideology and a dogmatic reiteration of the marketeers abroad, the government has to attend to a vastly uneven Chinese reality and deal with many potentially explosive social problems, such as unemployment, overpopulation, and environmental deterioration. It may not be misleading, however, to consider the neoliberal discourse a radical version, a sentimental intellectual supplement, an ideological ego-ideal of the technocratic vision of the Reform regime. In light of William Simon’s observation, quoted above, that privatization, though understood as a principle of economic development, is sometimes rejected by cadres and managers, “who feel that they can get rich more safely at the helm of a public, rather than a private, enterprise,” we can say that the neoliberal discourse in the 1990s embodies a utopian idea about the free market and its “extended social order” (Hayek), which brings it into disagreement and even conflict with the realities of both the “socialist market economy” and “bureaucratic capitalism.” The utopian and fantastic element of the neoliberal discourse does not diminish its awareness of its advantage over the entire field of intellectual engagement in the 1990s. Such advantage or hegemony comes not only from the epochal ideological framework of global capitalism but also from an internal source of modern Chinese intellectual history, namely, the May Fourth tradition or paradigm of “science and democracy,” which remains the cornerstone of Chinese intellectual modernity and one of the fundamental legitimating sources of both liberal intellectuals and the ccp. The neoliberal position, when confused with liberalism in general,

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blurs its social Darwinian fervor for privilege and superiority, which appeals to the new elite. It therefore rubs along the grain of official and officially sanctioned popular sentiment against the revolutionary asceticism and egalitarianism of Mao’s China, especially the political potential and utopian impulse of the mobilized masses demonstrated during the Cultural Revolution. Through the philosophical discourse of liberalism in general, the neoliberal discourse of the 1990s became a self-styled inheritor of the enlightenment heritage of the modern Chinese intellectual tradition (minus radicalism), and catered to the prevalent social mentality, which is modernization ideology. Moreover, by means of the rhetoric of freedom, it not only shares the human rights discourse of Cold War liberalism in the West but also appeals to the general postmodern tendency toward social freedom, individual autonomy, and atomized self-interest, which underscore the postindustrial demand for economic redistribution or social and cultural wealth and power.42 The last, to be sure, is embraced by a Chinese urban proto-middle class that forms the social foundation of liberal sentiment, which is different in its economic condition, social aspiration, and political disposition from the neoliberal program. The internal paradox of the neoliberal discourse in the Chinese 1990s lies in its using the rhetoric of “negative freedom”—namely, the freedom from political intrusion—to advocate a “positive freedom” to take radical political action to advance the neoliberal agenda.

Liberalism and Its Discontents: Chronology and Demarcations

The neoliberal thrust in contemporary Chinese intellectual life pinpoints the structural discrepancies between the nominal-symbolic legitimacy of Chinese socialism and the messy and complex economic realities of a “socialist market economy,” between the Chinese world of life as an ongoing and unsettled sociopolitical experiment and its global, epochal context as a meaninggiving system. What makes the presence and assumptions of liberalism in the contemporary Chinese intellectual world “actual” is the realistic dynamism in the material world, which the liberal discourse distorts through its religious identification with the dogma and orthodoxy of the global neoliberal discourse. It is distorting because such identification proves neither capable of accounting for the social contradictions of Chinese reality nor prepared to examine changes in economy, technology, politics, management, everyday life, and culture taking place in today’s world societies for

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which “capitalism” as it is defined by neoliberal dogma often seems too crude a framework of critical analysis. Such a reductionist notion of capitalism (and, logically, of socialism as well) and philistine conformism, once combined with the developmentalist policies of a technocratic regime, could only suffocate the initiative, creativity, and innovativeness of an economic and social reform of socialist modernity. In today’s global environment, the failure of such reform can only mean chronic economic inequality and underdevelopment, appalling social injustice and instability, and unchecked political corruption and repression, which will in turn effectively exclude nearly a quarter of humanity from meaningful debates on and searches for alternative social, political, cultural, and quotidian arrangements. The coming into being of a neoliberal intellectual discourse in postTiananmen China has had a bumpy journey. An inventory of the sociopolitical events which may have hindered or frustrated the rise of the neoliberal ideology will help us understand its intellectual resilience and social-intellectual challenges that paralleled its development. In 1991, while still in the shadow of June Fourth, Chinese intellectuals— almost all of them liberal in the pro-Reform sense—experienced their first shock watching on television the Russian Parliament being bombarded by the pro-Yeltsin troops. The amiable silence with which liberal democratic world opinion met this antidemocratic state violence contrasted sharply with the boisterous protests and sanctions against the Chinese government after Tiananmen. The intellectuals’ initial relief after the resumption and acceleration of economic reform in 1992 was soon replaced with new anxieties brought about by all-embracing marketization and commodification, which shocked and traumatized many intellectuals. Then came the defeat of China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games by Western governments in 1994 (Beijing was narrowly defeated by Sydney). Originally, the bid and all the state-orchestrated festivities were received cynically at home, particularly by intellectuals. But the way Western countries joined hands to “deny China the prestige,” particularly the active roles the United States and Britain played to undermine China’s hopes, angered many Chinese, especially students and young urban professionals, who were sports fans and considered hosting the Olympics an excellent opportunity for China to “march into the world.” Nationalism, on this occasion combining sports and politics, economics and aspirations for recognition, found its first popular channel of expression in the 1990s. As the Jiang Zemin regime consolidated its power and economic liberalization deepened in China, Western sanctions gradually dissipated. In a few

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years, China’s international trade volume doubled; and domestic production was going full steam. Yet as many Chinese expected the world to open its arms once again to a China committed to economic development, in 1995– 96 the first Taiwan Strait crisis broke out. The visit of Lee Teng-hui, then president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, to America triggered a whole series of diplomatic conflicts and cross-strait tensions, which led to Chinese missile “testing” in the waters near the Taiwan coast. The U.S. government quickly responded by deploying two of its aircraft carrier battle groups outside the Taiwan Strait. This crisis not only brought China and the United States closer than ever to the brink of direct military confrontation since the end of the Vietnam War, at a deeper psychological level, it reopened a profound collective wound among Chinese intellectuals and the population as a whole, who learn by heart the history of humiliations of China by Western imperialism between the Opium War in 1840 and the Japanese surrender in 1945. The U.S. intention to divide and contain China out of both ideological difference and economic interest became a national consensus, its imperial design and the Chinese counterstrategy an open topic of discussion in Chinese media. An entire generation of Chinese students, including many who went to America to study, became increasingly nationalistic in the sense that a smooth integration with, if not an enthusiastic embrace by, the U.S.dominated world system was cast in doubt. The intellectual world was deeply divided. While the government policy of pressing forward with the reform and open-door policy which requires a stable and constructive Sino-U.S. relationship remained unchanged, it was also tinged with a weariness toward the United States and, at a more philosophical level, with a new anxiety over the emerging post–Cold War world order and China’s place in it. It is from this point on that the annual debate in the American Congress on normal trade relations with China, until recently known misleadingly as “Most Favored Nation” status, became a melodrama and a regular reminder to the Chinese population of how deeply ideological the U.S government and media are when it comes to dealing with China. Human rights rhetoric also came to be viewed cynically in China as cover for political or geopolitical concerns, of which Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis was regarded as a straightforward proof. For many Chinese intellectuals, the naïve ideological projection onto the United States of universalist liberal ideals was replaced with a more realistic reassessment of the economic, geopolitical, and cultural structures of the world today, in which old questions of imperialism and colonialism assume new forms instead of receding to the background of history. It was against this background that the 1997 Hong Kong “hand

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over” was experienced by many Chinese intellectuals with relative calm, even detachment, as Britain’s last-minute introduction of democracy into its colony was perceived as nothing more than a desperate move by a former colonial power to cling to its interest, whereas the festivities orchestrated by the Chinese government for this occasion were perceived as nothing more than the current regime’s opportunistic grab of legitimacy and popularity. Parallel to these developments, and throughout the 1990s, Russian economic and political liberalization was an important frame of reference through which Chinese intellectuals examined their own situations and weighed their options. The spectacular failure of “shock therapy” effectively set a limit to the radical advocates for neoliberal economic measures in China. And the Russian path became a living reminder of the road China must not go down. Attending to material production and political stability became the core of a new centrist ideology and the bottom line for any proposals of socioeconomic and political reform. While different parties drew different lessons from the Russian situation, a critical examination of laissez faire capitalism and its social philosophy found an empirical foothold, and a discourse of “Chinese alternative” took shape in both economic and intellectual circles. Indeed, the Russian situation has existed as a crucial frame of reference since 1989, and is a constitutive part of the socio-intellectual background against which the New Left thinking in China takes shape through a critical reexamination of the assumptions of neoclassical economics that have been informing the policymakers of the Reforms regime. “Drawing the Russian Lesson in Our Analysis of Chinese Situation” (Yi E wei jian kan zhongguo), is the title of an article coauthored by Cui Zhiyuan and Roberto Unger.43 Cui was soon to be regarded as a leading voice in the Chinese New Left. The financial meltdown that swept Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia between 1995 and 1998 further proved the predatory nature of financial capital and the ruinous implications of economic deregulation. The so-called Asian Financial Contagion particularly concerned Chinese policymakers, economists, and intellectuals, as Hong Kong, then already under Chinese sovereignty and which the central government vowed to protect, was a main target of the deliberate attack by international hedge funds. Moreover, many of those hard-hit countries, such as South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, had once been the shining models of rapid economic growth by means of fully integrating with global economic circulation and attracting large amounts of foreign investment. The collapse of those national currencies, the powerlessness of the national government in the face of deliberate assault by international financial

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speculators, and China’s ability to defend its currency amidst the domino effect of the financial crisis gave rise to a more positive and assertive notion of the role of the nation-state in a globalized economy as well as to a distrust of the conventional wisdom about financial deregulation, and indeed of the premises, terms, and consequences of globalization as such. The result is a deepened suspicion of the neoliberal orthodoxy and a renewed emphasis on the capacity of the state as the only mechanism by which to protect the fledging national market and to fight for just international and domestic economic and political relations. The last concern was central in the ongoing Chinese debate on the World Trade Organization (w t o ). Beneath the government’s steadfast effort to gain entry into the organization, public debate and discussion revealed deeply divided opinions. Once again, China’s integration with the world economy not only poses challenges to its existing socioeconomic (dis)orders and to its national political and cultural identity, it also makes explicit the social problems—unemployment, lack of a social security network, regionally uneven development, and so on—that have already reached a crisis level. It also raises fundamental questions about the general structures of an unequal and unjust world system of distribution, and about the rationale of China’s further integration with it. Meanwhile, in the intensified interchange within a globalized economy, the Chinese government assumes a new role as a mediator between global capital and domestic labor forces; between “international standards” and the Chinese realities; between universal tendencies toward democracy, freedom, equality, and self-realization and the particular agenda and priorities of the Chinese nation-state. Therefore the wto debate drove home the imperative of the nation-state in the new economy, and not the natural demise of it, even though the pressure on the Chinese government to “observe international standards” also increased popular suspicion that the government was working in the interest of multinational corporations. The Kosovo War in 1999 marked a watershed in independent Chinese intellectuals’ tantalizing romance with Western liberal-cosmopolitan ideas, an infatuation that has ended unpleasantly. It remains unexamined why and how China broke its usual detachment and indifference in international affairs and, quite “unwisely,” as many pundits have observed, came to the forefront of a futile international opposition to the U.S.-led n a t o intervention. And it will be a mystery for some time why and how the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by as many as five U.S. cruise missiles on May 9, 1999, killing three Chinese journalists and destroying the building. Nobody in China accepted the U.S. government’s public explanation (the old maps theory)

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and its reluctant, half-hearted apologies, and several U.S. diplomatic facilities in China were attacked by stone-throwing students. The war produced an unambiguous result in contemporary Chinese intellectual life, which is the thorough and perhaps irreversible discredit of the Western rhetoric of universal human rights, and its perception as a mere cover for the exercise of raw power out of sheer self-interest by an integrated West led by the United States, which, since the demise of the Soviet Union, no longer has a military and ideological rival. Jürgen Habermas, who had commanded enormous philosophical and moral authority among Chinese intellectuals since the 1980s, was dismissed overnight as a mere apologist for war. “Habermas and Imperialism” was the title of a review of his Die Zeit essay, “Humanity or Bestiality.” It was published in Dushu, the most influential intellectual journal in China.44 “It is ironic that the advocate for communicative rationality would support such a war. He seems to consider violence a necessary and acceptable way to a world government beyond the nation-state. His concern is confined to the building of a unified Europe, and he should get honest and drop the universal rhetoric. His philosophy might work for Europe, but it is certainly beyond what is humanly possible in this world as we know it,” wrote Gan Yang, in his widely read column in Mingpao.45 Only a handful of liberal intellectuals defended the legitimacy of the Kosovo intervention on the basis of universal human rights and the Western righteousness to police the world; these were then perceived as shameless lackeys of the West rather than as independent thinkers with moral courage to brave popular fury and reductionist thinking. This is reminiscent of the pejorative ring that the term liberalism had in the late 1940s, when a communist-led “New Democracy” prevailed over its enemies in a semicolonial China. Against the backdrop of a hectic intellectual journey through the eventful decade of the 1990s, a topological demarcation of new intellectualideological positions and groups becomes possible. Contrary to the conventional view of current Chinese intellectual politics, the crucial battle line here is not drawn between “communist hard-liners” and reasonable reformers, or between a totalitarian state and an alienated liberal intelligentsia, but rather within the socio-intellectual space produced by the general process of socioeconomic modernization defined by Max Weber early in the twentieth century, namely, the growth of a national capitalist economy protected and regulated by an administrative state.46 What distinguishes the Chinese process of social rationalization from its Euro-American prototype is (1) internally, the substitution of private and positive laws with administrative decrees of the party-state, and (2) externally, the truly global network of capitalist

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production, the increasing mobility of capital, information, and labor, and the planetary reach of the capitalist mass media and culture industry. All have suggested that the nation-state is no longer the basic unit of capitalism, and that traditional means of constructing and reinforcing the national space of common experience and imaginings prove ineffective. The key points of contention in current Chinese intellectual debate, as one would expect, lie between a “radical,” that is, dogmatic and wholesale, demand to legalize private property and the autonomy of the free market and a guarded faith in the state government to ensure basic social justice, political rights, and balanced economic growth by strengthening, not weakening, its legitimacy and functions. While the centrality of this profound intellectual and ideological divide lies in the domain of economics and politics, its peripheral conflicts in social and human sciences and in public media are around issues of freedom and liberty, individualism, and universalism. It is in these areas that the nonofficial or “independent” Chinese intellectual sphere as a product of the 1980s disintegrated into warring states and factions in the late 1990s. It is crucial, therefore, for an intellectual-historical analysis to acknowledge the liberal origin of the current debates as well as their ideologico-intellectual differentiation and conflict, which call for a comprehensive rethinking of Chinese modernity as a shock-ridden, rupture-infested construct of history. Despite the escalating moral and political accusations being exchanged between different positions, the theoretical spectrum of Chinese intellectual debate in the 1990s was relatively narrow and focused on some quite moderate options. Some voices still call for a complete “delinking” with the capitalist world system in order to pursue an independent, socialist alternative, but they have little relevance in current Chinese intellectual politics. Neither does the loud, populist nostalgia for Mao’s China. The latter phenomenon, as a sociological truth and a lively source of utopian idealism, proves hard to translate into a theoretical formulation that addresses the concrete economic, political, and cultural problems facing Chinese society as a whole. The central debate is, rather, about how to engage in the process of social modernization in a relatively efficient and just way or, to be blunt, how to avoid a major human disaster while embarking on this journey. The most active participants in this ongoing debate are, without exception, those whose personal wealth and freedom, material or otherwise, have multiplied in the past two decades: from an impersonal sociological point of view, they are the group that has benefited the most from the “reform and open door” policy, and whose political and intellectual vision is intimately linked to the future development of Chinese economy, society, and culture.

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Whereas the formulations of a middle-class ideology are sometimes hijacked by a neoliberal fervor resulting in a right-wing radicalism, the “leftwing” thinking is nonetheless part and parcel of the same rationalizing academia and, via academic politics, presents itself as a particular version of the general social ideology of post-Deng China. In the newly established academic enclaves and in a shadowy “public sphere,” these two tendencies have been competing for state, popular, and international support. Both sides, as a result, tend to make big claims on the social, either by an uncritical embrace of what is perceived to be the universal, the absolute (modernization), or by an unhistorical and undialectic adoption of critical stances toward modernity in general and, through such a conceptual framework, the daily reality of postsocialist China as well. Whereas the former speaks to the public desire to improve quality of life (both economically and politically, the latter being increasingly pronounced and appropriated by an intensified middleclass self-awareness as the 1990s unfolded), the latter taps the enormous, often explosive social suspicion of globalization and discontent with the appalling inequalities in China today. Their shared, though much shrouded and unacknowledged ideological common ground is revealed, however, by their attitude toward to the Chinese government and international symbolic and intellectual capital. As those in the liberal camp see everything the Chinese state represents— nominally and substantively—as anathema to the neoliberal utopia and thus an obstacle to progress, they rarely acknowledge the significant overlap between the neoliberal vision and the party line of the technocratic state behind the market reform. This overlap, however, underscores the legitimacy of the liberal discourse in the socio-ideological space and is crucial for its articulation and self-importance. Despite its occasional frontal assault on the power and fundamental legitimacy of the Chinese state, attacks that invariably prove sentimental and serve no purpose other than creating a couple of high-profile exiles or self-exiles in the West, the liberal camp seems to understand its parasitic relationship to, indeed, dependence on the state as the sole creator of the “socialist market economy.” If “human rights” and “freedom of speech” remain two focal points of Western support for a perceived liberal cause in China, then it must be acknowledged that the liberal discourse in China represents but one aspect of a structural tension in Chinese society which threatens to outgrow the state but in fact still remains under the latter’s tutelage. To what extent these issues as they are represented by liberal intellectuals in China capture national and international attention becomes a matter of not justice but privilege; and the

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privilege demanded by liberal intellectuals and their Western patrons tends to be eclipsed as a residual form of intellectual elitism by the widening social disparity in China, by the worsening economic and political condition of the working class, and by the rise of consumer society and its attendant mass culture among the incipient urban middle class. The paradox of Chinese liberalism is, therefore, illustrated by its nominal antigovernment rhetoric and its sharing of a market orientation in economic thinking and a penchant for social rationalization engaged by the new technocratic state. The notion of liberty implicit or explicit in the liberal discourse, therefore, contains fundamental ambiguities once its comes to the real configurations of economic, political, social, and cultural power in China today. When the market economy is defined in concrete social relations as bureaucratic capitalism, the radical call for a proper institutionalization of the market with its full legal and political self-assertion leads, inevitably as many suspect, to an autocratic freedom of privatization premised on robbing public wealth and suppressing popular dissent. And when socialism in the daily reality of post-Mao and post-Deng China means the minimal and only security of the working class and the only national platform—symbolic or political—on which to address the social and class conflict old and new, the battle cry to scrap the economic, political, and social infrastructure of the state manifests itself as not so much a pursuit of freedom but a wishful and egoistic attempt to carve out a self-enclosed, indeed barricaded bourgeois haven out of an unstable reality of irreducibly uneven development.

Postnationalism and Postmodernism

None of the various intellectual and cultural topics, sentiments, and attitudes that evolved in the 1990s has developed into a self-conscious discourse which offers a general framework for examining Chinese reality and the Chinese problematic; they do, however, reflect a diverse social political reality which proves unruly for the neoliberal tendency toward simplification and dogmatism. I discuss this topic further in chapters 2 and 3, in the contexts of the rise of Chinese consumer masses and their everyday culture, and the sociopolitical logic of Chinese postmodernism, respectively. Suffice it here to offer several sweeping general observations on Chinese nationalism in the 1990s as it both conditions and is mediated by the intellectual discourses. First of all, a new type of nationalist sentiment has been taking shape in the mixed environment of Chinese economy, society, politics, and culture.

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I detail in chapter 2 the crucial differences between this neo- or postnationalism and the old types of nationalism which still dominate our historical and critical discourse.47 Here I only want to differentiate further the postnationalist consciousness into its popular, consumer, cultural, economic, and political moments, and give a brief account of its evolution along that order. Popular nationalism can be considered a spontaneous reaction by the general populace to a world brought into the people’s everyday life by and through the nation-state. In China in the 1990s, popular nationalist sentiments were a product of the market reform, which reveals the uneven plane where a form of life shaped by Chinese socialism encounters its larger global context, which is mediated, filtered, and sometimes blocked by the nation-state. In post-Tiananmen China, this popular nationalism is more often than not triggered by a sense of frustration and humiliation, which the Chinese people share with their government when they confront outside pressure or rejection. As more and more urban, educated Chinese have gained access to the outside world, the buffer that used to be provided by state censorship and counterpropaganda is leveled by increasing commercial, information, and human interactions. The disappearance of such traditional sociocultural barriers, ironically, brings contemporary Chinese citizens face to face with a strange world which they enthuse about but in which they do not necessarily or always feel at home. In short, popular nationalism in China today is a form of postnationalism in an almost literal sense, insofar as it takes shape on an after-image of the vanishing medium that is the traditional nation-state, of which the political state of Chinese socialism was a strong version. The necessity for a repositioning of the individual and collective self in the international space of difference and uneven power parallels the increasing self-assertion of the Chinese proto-middle class supported by their newfound wealth and mobility. This combination then gives rise to a prepolitical and intellectually inarticulate nationalism that cuts across but is not congruent with the national imaginings in the boundary of state discourse. Apart from an enhanced sense of geopolitical and economic interest and a more assertive cultural self-identity vis-à-vis the West, this popular nationalist sentiment is little more than a reflection of a renewed national confidence based on the continued growth of the Chinese economy. The energy contained in such popular nationalist sentiment is not always confident and positive. Whenever the national modernity and strength imagined through and projected by the success story of contemporary China is not matched by the country’s performance in other areas or not fully recognized by foreign countries, such popular nationalism tends

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to surge to the fore in negative and destructive forms such as self-loathing, extremism, and provocative confrontation with the government. Residues of unreflected, thus seemingly “traditional,” ethnocentric, chauvinist, and patriotic sentiments are in fact constantly reinvented, reproduced, and modified by the new national and global relations of economy, power, and cultural dominance. What I describe as consumer nationalism in the Chinese 1990s is conditioned by the rise of an urban middle class. Its members’ effort to enter, not to challenge or disrupt, the Chinese and global social mainstream sometimes brings them into conflict with their image or representation in the Western media. Such consumer nationalism indicates the buying power and quotidian cosmopolitanism of the Chinese proto-middle class and its sense of being frustrated, even denied by the existing hierarchy and codes of distinction set globally, but elsewhere. In the realm of consumption and the kind of social freedom and fantasy it entails, they stumble on the question which, in a radically different context and at a higher intellectual awareness, has been theorized in Edward Said’s Orientalism, and in the writings of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and identity politics in U.S. academia. That is, the need for a postcolonial sensibility and a politics of difference based on ethnicity and gender (but not nation or class) indicates the postnationalist mapping of the imagined territories of selfhood in a global space. The fundamental difference, however, lies in the fact that Chinese consumers live in a material and commodity world compatible with global capitalism, yet the imagined “plane of consistence” (Deleuze) on which they operate and expect to be treated is, once again, mediated by the particularities and complexities of a socioeconomic and cultural space defined equally by the Chinese nation-state. The Foucauldian body as a form of biopower and affirmative individuality promptly clashes with the sociopolitical and moral confines of a collectivity molded in the national space of the socialist state. In other words, the new multitude produced by real or imagined social freedom in the market environment becomes reshaped by the coexisting, overlapping, and ultimately superimposing state-form before it exacts its reshaping power on the new national space as a “civil society.” New forms of national imaginings thus become yet another representation of the socioeconomic structure of postsocialist China, where the surviving socialist state takes the lead in the historic processes of social modernization or rationalization defined by Max Weber; and where state ideologies and functions permeate the new social space and economic relations which in classical bourgeois social development would have been mediated and “rationalized” by the private

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and positive laws. This, once again, should be understood as the reason why liberal Chinese intellectuals, whose discourse is but a thinly disguised call for a radical implementation of the bourgeois capitalist legal codes, are instinctively and politically opposed to, indeed, disgusted by, any symbolic or expressive affirmation of the existing sociopolitical relations, even though they in fact reflect the socioeconomic relations pertaining to the reality of a capitalist mode of production. This consumer nationalism also reveals the internal paradox of liberal cosmopolitanism and its discursive illusion of “civic nationalism,” whose notion of citizenship defines the exclusive political boundary of “universal rights” in a radically uneven and unequal world. The question of consumer nationalism or nationalism under the historical circumstances of the “socialist market economy” in the age of capitalist globalization distinguishes itself from both the kind of nationalism constitutive of the classical phase of modernity and a particular kind of cultural ethnocentrism which, under its universalist rhetoric, registers the historic conflict between the Chinese imperial or “civilizational” order and that of the nation-state.48 Interestingly, the world-historical spread of capitalism has not gotten rid of all the remnants of the Chinese Empire and turned the latter into a modern nation-state. Rather, it has been transforming the Western capitalist nation-states into a new, integrated imperial regime of power, legitimacy, and subjectivity which renders any terrain of heterogeneity and unevenness a double or twofold anathema. For both the practitioners of Chinese cultural nationalism and their Western commentators, the line between a cultural identity to be constructed in a democratic, pluralistic world culture and a Sinocentric worldview is often missed, hence the often wholesale and sometimes aimless diagnosis of “Sinocentrism.” Yet cultural nationalism is technically possible only when the productive, organizational, and class function of the modernist nation-state is taken over by global movements of capital, technology, information, and personnel, and when such movements make it possible for a deterritorialized economic interest and class identity. Without this condition of possibility, the “cultural” aspect of nationalism is no more than a subsidiary function, a metaphor of its political vocations. In other words, cultural nationalism is a particular national political response to the formation of a cosmopolitan bourgeois culture by those who do not consider the latter as merely cultural, and by those for whom “culture” is but one way to revive national politics or politics per se in the face of the universal claims of global capital and power relations. For Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s, the question of what it is to be human (the so-called Confucian question), while sounding universalistic,

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is more likely indicative of a particular Chinese ideology or ideological identification with the perceived mainstream; and what it is to be Chinese (in the age of global capital), while sounding provincial, is in fact part of the general problematic of culture, politics, and identity in the age of globalization which entails global standardization as well as global conflict. Cultural nationalism, which is by no means the most theoretically articulate expression of a subject-position resistant to the general-abstract universal, does contain in its crude forms a collective intuition that the cultural is political, and vice versa. As long as the self-affirmation, defense, and guarding of the particular community and forms of life are critically directed against the capitalistic, Eurocentric, or bourgeois-centered claims on the universal, they possess in themselves an as-yet unexhausted universalist value embodied by the particular as a register of resistance, even though the latter, while striving to achieve its own universal potentials and aspirations, must confront actualized forms of the universal not only as the self-legitimation, self-privileging, and self-abstraction of just another particular, but as concrete modes of production, sociopolitical institutions, and cultural productivity, in other words, as historical reality, as the activity of actual subjects. The most publicized, sustained, and substantial discussions of nationalism in the Chinese 1990s fall into the category of economic nationalism, which brings the above-mentioned forms of nationalist sentiments into a coherent formulation of government policy and an intellectual program. In a recent interview with the Far Eastern Economic Review, Wang Xiaodong and Fang Ning, two outspoken advocates for building a Chinese “national economy,” state that they are not against the market reform or economic globalization. What they oppose is “the naïve view that you do not need a national industry in the age of globalization.”49 They argue that in an ideal world of a global economic system based on a high-level division of labor and mutual dependence, globalization would be good and there would be no need for economic nationalism. But today China still needs an independent national economy, because “we cannot count on the United States to sell us supercomputers.”50 Economic nationalism reached its height in recent years during the Sino-U.S. negotiations on the terms of Chinese entry into the wto ; it is one of the crucial ingredients in the intellectual resistance to the liberal discourse. The argument of economic nationalism, to be sure, can also be used to support other positions critical of the liberal mainstream, although they sometimes come from radically different political and theoretical backgrounds which would set them in conflict in other contexts. The “if only we were in a neoliberal economic utopia” argument, however, does

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not come to terms with the real sociopolitical condition or contradiction of the age of global capitalism, namely, the contrast between the celebrated mobility of “free” capital and the immobility and helplessness of labor still restrained and isolated by all kinds of local, national, and traditional or “cultural” regimes of control, a contrast which seems to determine the role of national and local governments in a “rational,” that is, unapologetically procapital, promarket fashion. The solution, to be sure, cannot be expected from an ultimately free and happy participation of a global labor in a capitalist global market, for the very profit-seeking logic of capitalist economy denies such a possibility. Rather, any serious consideration of the fate of the Chinese working class and the peasantry as citizens of the nation-state facing the supranational structure of capitalist uneven development is forced to search for a new vision of democratic reorganization of the social system in both national and international domains. In this crucial aspect, the emerging discourse of Chinese nationalism makes itself available to a populist and even socialist vision of a sound national economy combined with a sound national politics. Or, rather, it is the socialist potential of this nationalist discourse that keeps it as a meaningful position in the Chinese intellectual field in the 1990s. The ideological, political, as well as intellectual future of such an alliance (or the lack of it) will play out in the years to come. The final stage of contemporary Chinese nationalism, namely, a political discourse, is a marked area filled with obscurity. Apart from Gan Yang’s call for a theoretical formulation of China as a “political nation” as opposed to a merely “economic nation,” there has been little intellectual discussion of the political constitution of the Chinese national community and its political and cultural self-understanding. Gan’s proposal reminds one of Max Weber’s calculated attempt to nudge a rising Germany onto the course of liberal democracy, although Gan is fully aware that the Chinese case cannot be effectively solved merely in a European or Western framework. Such effort would still be viewed as nationalist, thus belonging to the New Left, by Chinese neoliberals who seek to dissolve the particularities of the Chinese situation by redefining it as a rudimentary moment in the chain of universal progress—a move whose formulaic and dogmatic rigidity rivals that of the vulgar Marxist historians’ mechanical division of Chinese history into different teleological phases according to the pattern of social evolution found in Western Europe. Whereas its “national” aspect is rejected by the liberal discourse, the “political” element of a developed discourse on nationalism is still suppressed by the government because of its inevitable, immanent implication of a democratic reinvention of the p r c ’s national identity.

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Chinese nationalism in the 1990s has thus come full circle and becomes an allegory of the intellectual dilemma of the Chinese 1990s. If the United States as a polity can be considered a defining reference point by which Chinese nationalists elaborate their ideas of the nation, they will realize the different levels of politicization—in terms of participation, class and citizen consciousness, education, and identification with the system—at which the two national lives operate, and where they encounter or miss each other. The lack of a fully developed political discourse of Chinese nationalism will ensure a prolonged and undertheorized manifestation of the nationalist sentiment in all other forms. Along with the sociocultural subcurrent of postnationalism, there arose a discourse on Chinese mass culture which addresses the postsocialist logic of cultural production and national imagination. The effort to critique the teleological and Eurocentric notion of modernity as the ideological foundation of the New Era gives rise to a number of different discursive tendencies. One is an ephemeral, but by no means exhausted, discourse of Chinese postmodernism. Inspired by Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism and Third World literature, and by the discourses of feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies in Western academia (those of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, et al.), such a discourse of Chinese postmodernism celebrates the breaking of the foundational discourse of enlightenment and modernity and, with varying degrees of critical reservation, hails the coming into being of the postsocialist masses. Represented by such literary critics as Zhang Yiwu, Dai Jinhua, Chen Xiaoming, and Wang Yichuan, they recognize the creativity of Chinese mass culture as a democratizing, liberating development conducive to the building of a “popular memory” free from elitist restraints and the division between “high” and “low” cultures. This, as they envision it, would lead to a dynamic reconstruction of Chinese everyday life and would give rise to a new dialectic between individuality, based on newfound freedom in the marketplace, and community, which defines a new culture and social ethics of the collective.51 This intellectual discourse on postsocialist Chinese mass culture offers a preliminary framework for a Chinese postmodernism, which envisages a social and cultural horizon beyond the tunnel vision of a Eurocentric concept of modernity. Promising to shuffle past experience with a postmodern sensibility, such discourse nevertheless defines its intellectual agenda more in terms of its relationship to its immediate past, namely, the high modernism of the New Era, than in terms of its structural relationship to the global domination of capitalist modernity. It is, therefore, a postmodernism

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reflecting a newfound sense of freedom and self-assertion in the “socialist market economy” rather than a systematic critique of the institutions of modernity in terms of which the Chinese situation is but a local and internalized version of the contradictions of global capitalism. Even though the postmodernist discourse addresses the historic rise of a postsocialist mass culture and its role in shaping a new form of life, it remains vulnerable to the criticism that it does not take into account the complex relations between the everyday world and its media reproduction; between the operations of the culture market and the manipulations of the state apparatus of ideology; and between the state power and the social processes of capitalization, an interaction that thoroughly penetrates the making of postsocialist mass culture in China in the 1990s. Postnationalist and postmodernist sentiments have also given rise to a critical rethinking of modernity with a focus on the Chinese state’s modernization ideology, and with an intent to challenge the Western-dominated, hierarchical world-system. This discourse thoroughly criticizes optimistic views of rising Chinese mass culture. The view is represented by Wang Hui and his allies in cultural and literary studies, who tend to consider postTiananmen mass culture as the celebratory simulacra of a state-manipulated power-money complex, the transfiguration of an ideologically constructed social desire. Instead, they propose a more intellectually rigorous critique of modernity as an ideological paradigm whose transcendence is necessary for a new intellectual framework through which to examine the complex Chinese reality. In this regard they rely more on world-system theory and Samir Amin’s arguments about dependency and delinking, and are more inclined to appropriate postcolonialism as a deconstructive operation to “provincialize” Europe. The popularity of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, Said’s Orientalism, and André Gunder Frank’s Reorient among these thinkers becomes a way to distinguish them from other New Left intellectuals who seem to have been avoiding framing the Chinese problematic in terms of an ethnocultural “decolonialization” from the West. Whereas the postmodernist sense of freedom and postnationalist sense of belonging have produced an antihierarchical, populist thrust, as suggested by the contours of a new culture of community celebrated by Zhang Yiwu and other critics, the same social sentiment and ideology also articulate themselves in intellectual circles as a rethinking of the centrality, validity, and naturalness of modernity such as it is represented by a purified, indeed utopian image of the modern West. To this extent, the populist tendency in the discourse of postsocialist mass culture bears a family

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resemblance to the discourse of postcolonialism and, to a lesser degree, is influenced by its major proponents in U.S. academia, such as Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, and Rey Chow.52 It is obvious that the Chinese postmodernist-postsocialist turn in mass culture and its intellectual apologies shares with these postcolonial intellectuals in Western academia a theoretical imperative to decolonize and deessentialize the mind from Western metaphysics in general and from the predominant Western discourses of modernity in particular. The similarity, however, goes only so far. What distinguishes the potential, yet-to-be theorized Chinese discourses of postmodernism and postsocialism from the highly theoretized academic discourse of postcolonialism is the fact that the former does not aim to be an alternative to Marxist critique of the capitalist colonial system and its internal hierarchy, but is poised to formulate the continuity and discontinuity of an everyday world formed historically under the conditions of socialist modernity but developing in a market environment. In both cases, the decolonizing rhetoric is intertwined with an implicit or explicit recognition of an emergent national political and cultural space guaranteed by one of the central forces of Chinese modernity, namely, the Chinese state-form. This fundamental difference in terms of political economy and sociocultural condition is then coupled with a different subject-position. Rather than assuming the rhetorical figure of a European humanist who happens to have a minority status and thus a different identity politics in a purported universal civil society, the Chinese postmodernists usually identify themselves with a national tradition whose imagined space overlaps with both that of the state and that of the national market as its creation; this community’s internal difference and affirmativity constitute both its particularities and universality. A postsocialist conception of modernity can be inferred from this subjectposition as something pertaining to the fractured totality of a life-world that is one and many, negative and affirmative all at once without succumbing to the ideological superimposition of the subject-object divide or the false dialectic between the universal and the particular.53

The “New Left”

The position of the so-called New Left (xinzuopai), at least as it is defined in this context, seems a symmetrical opposite of that of the liberals (ziyouzhuyi zhe) in the same socio-ideological space of position-taking. Limited to a way of thinking in post-Tiananmen academia, the Chinese New Left, if one is to take this dubious label as a signifier, is a combination of a resistance to

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and a critique of capitalist globalization in China, on the one hand, and a conscious association with an international critical discourse, embodied by critical theoretical discourses in Western academia, on the other. Here a distinction between the academic New Left and populist sentiments against the ongoing marketization of the Chinese economy and the erosion of workingclass rights is important, as the two have little in common except for the moral self-image of the former and the lack of intellectual and political platform of the latter. The two, rather, form a dynamic in the larger social context when they are joined by the state discourse, the liberal discourse, and the discourse of consumerism and mass culture. What complicates the picture of this New Left is not so much its crossover with labor advocates or the inspiration of the teachings of Mao, which is superficial at best; rather, it is its internal heterogeneous intellectual components, above all its formulations made in Western academia by overseas Chinese scholars, and its domestic contingent that came into being after 1997. To understand the dynamism of the New Left intellectual discourse in the Chinese 1990s, it is important to bear in mind the general sociopolitical vicissitudes of the decade with which the theoretical and popular appeal of the New Left rises and falls. A chronological account of the major national and international events as they impacted the Chinese intellectual world has been given in previous sections and will be discussed in the chapters to follow; here it suffices to mention a few paradoxical developments that form the socio-ideological background of the emergence of the New Left discourse. One cannot overemphasize the loss of authority and credibility, both moral and intellectual, of the “Left” in the most general sense in the beginning years of the 1990s as a consequence of the relentless post-Mao depoliticization and technocratic modernization; of the disastrous collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states; and, most immediately, of the Tiananmen Incident and the severe political and intellectual environment that followed. At the same time, however, the very same development also paves the way for—if not gives rise to—the critical reflections of the post-1989 world that are not along the standard liberal lines. The social calamity and moral disintegration in Russia caused by the Yeltsin privatization; the increasingly unilateral and imperialistic behavior of the United States; the unchecked forces of the neoliberal market and the increased disparity and unevenness it creates between and within different nations caused increasing alarm and eventually became lived experience to various degrees in Chinese social, economic, and political life. Consequently, the surviving socialist state and its political sovereignty have come to be viewed as not a curse but a mixed

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blessing, often initially at an unconscious level. The harshly maintained stability and order, repressive as they were, did contribute to an unprecedented period of economic prosperity and rising living standards, which in turn allowed a renewed national confidence leading to a more affirmative, or sometimes merely more tolerant and generous, view of all sorts of traditions, heritages, and legacies ranging from the Confucian notion of culture and self to Maoist egalitarianism and the political subjectivity of the masses. This, to be sure, is less a matter of conscious, intellectual discourse than the result of a population’s feeling slightly but increasingly at home in its own world of everyday life, its collective being. The last development, obviously, is a social condition giving rise to very different ideological, cultural, and intellectual-political positions, from postmodernism to nationalism, from liberal cosmopolitanism to neo-Maoism, all of which, while pursuing their particular passions, make concrete a postsocialist culture that characterizes the Chinese world today. The New Left in the Chinese 1990s is not only a series of hasty, knee-jerk responses to the aforementioned events; as a cluster of loosely connected intellectual discourses and tendencies, it owes its existence to a truly international and historically embedded conceptual framework, theoretical arsenal, and symbolic power. This “intrinsic” dimension or the philosophical, epistemocritical aspect of the New Left is due in large part to the more critical and thorough components of the “cultural fever” of the 1980s, namely, those younger scholars and intellectuals who pursued a systematic study of contemporary Western philosophy, critical theory, and theoretical discourses in historical and social sciences. The fact that the liberal attack on the New Left often focuses on the latter, with the Frankfurt school, Foucault, Jameson, and Spivak as preferred targets (never mind the peculiar indiscrimination of lumping them together as though they were the same), is actually quite telling. From the perspective of the post-1989 liberal-modernist subjectivity embracing the new universal of progress and enlightenment à la free market, the Marxist analysis of totality, the poststructuralist analysis of power, or the feminist, postcolonial penchant for identities are all inconvenient, annoying distractions from the Absolute. In retrospect, however, this only shows the lingering importance of a post-Mao intellectual tradition rooted in the socialist (and still Marxist, however dogmatic or scholastic that Marxism might be) institutions of education and intellectual production. At the same time, and as yet another paradox, the massive flow of Chinese students to the Western, above all American, universities also exposes them to the theoretical and intellectual-political training in U.S. academia. Much to

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the annoyance and regret of Chinese liberal intellectuals, the more “elitist” the destination school and the more “prestigious” the department, the more “radical” and “leftist” it tends to be (with perhaps the single exception of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago), so much so that many of the best Chinese students become raging “New Leftists” by the time they complete their much envied education at, say, Berkeley or Duke. The first waves of publications in the Chinese world by these overseas Chinese students provoked the accusation that they were being “un-Chinese.”54 Toward the end of the 1990s, however, with heightened, even regularized exchange and cooperation between Chinese and overseas Chinese scholars, and with massive, nearly instant translations of Western critical, theoretical works into Chinese, it was no longer possible or meaningful to distinguish the “Chinese” from the “un-Chinese” elements in the New Left, which are intimately connected to Chinese reality. The first to be labeled as New Left intellectuals were Chinese students who studied social sciences and humanities in the West, primarily in the United States. Some of them have since returned to China; the rest have gone on to teach in U.S. universities. Most of them publish regularly in both English and Chinese. A list of some of the usual suspects—Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Shaoguang, Gan Yang, Huang Ping, Liu Kang, Lydia Liu, etc.—raises the curious question as to what intellectual criteria is used in handing out such a politically loaded label. The background of these people is all but diverse. Gan Yang, for example, was trained in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, by no means a bastion of radical leftist intellectuals. Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Shaoguang received their degrees in political science from Chicago and Cornell, respectively, both of which seem to offer mainstream, but still “cutting edge,” academic professional training in, say, rational choice and game theories. Huang Ping, a student of Anthony Giddens, may qualify as a New Left but only in a Western sense of the word, a term whose Blairean implications prove to be appealing, not offensive, to those who are alarmed by the emergence of a Chinese New Left discourse. The two literary scholars, Liu Kang and Lydia Liu, work along the Marxist or feminist/postcolonial lines which, although commonplace in U.S. literary and cultural studies, may seem to be the most “radical” and “leftist” for a particular Chinese intellectual taste. But that only reveals a hidden assumption which seems to underscore the invention of the New Left label: namely, the corruption of the Chinese intellectual mind by Western academia. Wang Hui, who in recent years has become a major voice for the supposedly New Left camp, was considered by his former liberal colleagues

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to be a solid Lu Xun and Chinese intellectual history scholar until his return from a year at Harvard and uc l a , after which point he seemed to have irredeemably slipped into the decadent discourse of Western leftist intellectuals who do not know and do not care about China. Such profound suspicion of and ignorance about Western academic life manifests itself in a fervent attack on Western Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and critical legal studies—anything perceived by liberal Chinese intellectuals as not conforming with an imagined, uniform, and homogeneous doctrine of liberalism as a Western-centered, universal truth. In their critique of the Chinese New Left, the liberal intellectuals completed a short-circuit which collapses the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the 1960s in the West. This convenient equation demonstrates, more than an intellectual and historical reductionism, an ideological presumption of a posthistorical age of capitalist growth. Like many other labels in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history, “New Left” was attached to a fuzzy and diverse phenomenon by its critics, who sought to stereotype and stigmatize. This intent, however, reveals unwittingly the Chinese sociopolitical overdetermination that gives rise to this phenomenon in a specific, decidedly and radically contemporary context, which is contrary to the suggestion that the Chinese New Left is unChinese. Unlike contemporary Chinese nationalism, which circulates as a social sentiment without politicotheoretical elaboration, the New Left stands for a number of distinct but related intellectual positions and theoretical discourses. Its alleged problem or weakness is not its lack of theoretical sophistication, but rather its “unrootedness” in, and thus irrelevance to, an “indigenous experience.” This makes such discourse guilty of importing “Western theory” without a sense of “what China really needs.” Coined by neoliberal intellectuals, the “New Left” label warns of a resurgence of leftist politics after two decades of state-sanctioned developmentalism, depoliticization, and integration with the global mainstream, a context which inevitably gives anything that can be, however vaguely, described as “Left” a pejorative significance and an alarming ring. This is the reason why most intellectuals labeled as “New Leftist” do not accept this naming and seem to guard against unintended or deliberate confusions of their positions with other intellectual and political traditions in the modern world. Neoliberal intellectuals are aware of this rejection; some of them even recognize it, noting that the “New” before the “Left” suggests a different ideological foreground, a different intellectual genealogy, and a different set of social and ideological imperatives. Still, on the whole, the neoliberal

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strategy is to collapse the New Left into categories with a clearly designated place in the mental-ideological map of post-Mao China and in the post– Cold War “new world order.” In the last few years of the 1990s, neoliberal critics repeatedly accused New Left intellectuals of rejecting (1) the idea of the free market, (2) the discourse of the “classical social sciences,” (3) the universality of the liberal discourse, and (4) the universal values and institutions represented by the West, such as liberal democracy. Therefore, in the eyes of Chinese neoliberals, even though the New Left no longer depends on absolute state power, a planned economy, and the primacy of ideology, it demonstrates “an affinity with traditional socialism; a nostalgia for Mao’s China; an affirmative attitude toward direct democracy, the centrality of politics, and public passion; a longing for a poetic and romantic idealism; and discontent with a practically oriented social transition of contemporary China.”55 If this description were accurate, however, the New Left would have posed a more immediate threat to the legitimacy of the Deng and post-Deng Chinese state than the neoliberals and overseas dissidents thought themselves to have posed. In fact, when it comes to debating the “New Left offensive,” the neoliberal position implicitly or explicitly adopts the mainstream discourse of the Chinese state, namely, the ideology of modernization and universal progress. But the neoliberals’ overlap with the state ideology goes only so far, as its identification with global ideology necessarily requires it to define the Chinese state as an anomaly or a resistance to the “universal trend.” As a result, to their neoliberal critics, the New Left intellectuals’ critique of the ideological mainstream of global capitalism is intellectually rooted in the exogenous context of Western academia, which is made available to the predominating power of the domestic totalitarian state. In other words, once “free market” and “liberal democracy” are accepted as the definitive characteristics of a more advanced historical paradigm, the reflections on its internal complexities and contradictions are declared unnecessary, intellectually counterproductive, and politically reactionary. Such a totalized notion of historicist time, viewed in spatial terms as the enclosed, completed frontier of global capitalism, underscores Chinese neoliberals’ conceptual hierarchy and ordering of reality. It is according to this worldview that China is understood by Chinese neoliberals in terms of a dichotomy between the enclaves of the total state and a universal civil society. What are left out of this picture, however, are the complex interactions—as both complicity and conflict—between the state and global capital, which mark the socioeconomic condition of possibility for critical intellectual discourses in China today.

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Whereas the neoliberals may consider any critique of developmentalism to be self-evidently wrong and politically suicidal in post-Mao China, and thus worth little attention, they do seem uncomfortable with and alarmed that the New Left is “backed by the theoretical resources amassed by the intellectual Left in the West; borrowing from multiculturalism as a form of intellectual self-assertion; and riding the tide of the national question in the age of globalization.”56 Instead of engaging the New Left discourse on its own intellectual and theoretical terms, the neoliberal position chooses to reduce the questions raised by New Left intellectuals into a number of ideologico-political fantasies to be refuted by reality and “common sense.” Their critical strategy, therefore, is often to show how mechanically the Chinese New Left adopts the discourse of its Western counterparts, allegedly without taking into account the profound, structural difference between the two movements’ socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts. This, to be sure, is also a way for neoliberals to neutralize the intellectual-theoretical “backing” of the Chinese New Left by the sophisticated critical-intellectual discourses in Western academia. In doing so they turn to a reductive version of classical liberalism and neoliberalism for help, while omitting the progressive, social-reform legacies of European and U.S. liberalism, such as the New Deal. As a result, there appears an intellectual and theoretical imbalance in the current liberalism versus New Left debate: As critical intellectuals in China today embark on a systematic and open-ended questioning of both the socialist and capitalist assumptions of modernity, partly by participating in critical theoretical discourses in Western academia, their liberal counterparts rely rather heavily on such “time-honored” concepts as positivism, historicism, absolute truth (i.e., “the invisible hand”), while ideologically embracing the Cold War rhetoric of human rights, open society, and individual freedom. The result is the closing of the social space for meaningful intellectual debate (opened during the 1980s) by an open challenge to the very legitimacy of the existing system in China or, more precisely, and given the fact that even antisocialist proposals in both socioeconomic and cultural-intellectual fields are to be carried out by the same state apparatus, an attempt to redefine the political nature, if not the constitution, of the prc itself, by demanding the reorganization of the entire social sphere according to neoclassical economic principles. I do not intend to reduce the current intellectual debate in China between liberalism and New Left into a “war of agents” fighting on behalf of their Western master narratives, as the literary critic Liu Zaifu once complained in a different

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context.57 Rather, I mean to show that the real intellectual and ideological conflict operates not so much in the discursive space of theory and intellect but along a sociogeological fault line between the prevailing global ideology and its “local” resonance and resistance. This intellectual-ideological engagement unfolds not outside but within the intricate complex of state and capital. To put it differently, the metamorphoses of the Chinese state from a socialist to a postsocialist one finds its sentimental footnotes in the Chinese neoliberals’ call to privatization, deregulation, and liberalization, while its social substance and its political, organizational articulation take place within the state-form and state policies under the rubric of “socialist reform.” This is indicated by the ambivalent and curious silence of the Chinese media—which, admittedly, is neither seamlessly controlled by the state nor completely driven by the market—on the neoliberal–New Left debate, and by the government’s decision to stay out of it, even during the escalating public debate on the first national book award organized by Dushu, an allegedly New Left–controlled magazine which accepted significant financial support from the Hong Kong business tycoon Lee Ka Shing for the purpose of this award. Despite its political sensitivity and the contending parties’ innuendo that their opponents are part of the corrupt regime, the debate seems to dwell outside the immediate concerns and priorities of the technocratic state, which seems equally aloof to and guarded against the “Right” and the “Left.” Despite being shunned by both the state and the mainstream in a marketdominated everyday world, both liberals and New Left intellectuals make competing and conflicting intellectual claims on the Chinese reality and on our perception of the world; and both are conscious inheritors of modern Chinese intellectual and political traditions reinterpreted and reinvented in radically different ways. The familiar landmarks along this fault line are the pronounced tension between economic liberty and political democracy, individual freedom and social justice, the universal and the particular, free market and state intervention, modernity and its critique. The theoretical frameworks of the New Left are indeed often borrowed from the intellectual Left in the West, through which they theorize the Chinese reality. The last was often dismissed by neoliberals as a “cunning of the reason” (lixing de jiaoxia ) which seems to be a misuse of Hegel’s concept to mean something cruder, namely, the “trick of the intellect” or “a mask of ideology.” Unlike cultural intellectuals during the 1980s, Chinese neoliberal intellectuals in the 1990s did not hesitate to attack or dismiss the Western intellectual Left as marginalized and irrelevant in a reality dominated by

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the free market and its mainstream ideologies, in the same way the New Left attacks and dismisses Hayek or Fukuyama as deplorable and uninteresting ideologues. Thus, for neoliberal intellectuals, the Frankfurt school is considered no more than a specific response to the particular situation of interwar Germany, a response whose critique of the U.S.-style “culture industry” constitutes a “misplaced” antitotalitarianism in a liberal democratic environment. And, the “Cultural Left” from the late 1960s, particularly its “theory” contingent—Foucault, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and, in the United States, Fredric Jameson—is painted as a unique form of bohemian decadence and utopian fantasy inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution.58 Other theoretical discourses from which the Chinese New Left derives— from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and Samir Amin’s dependency theory to analytical Marxism and critical legal studies, even communitarianism as a form of “antiliberalism”—are quickly dismissed by its “liberal” opponents as futile and helpless attempts to challenge the “longterm rationality” (changcheng helixing) of the capitalist system. The fully differentiated and politicized reality of 1990s China certainly penetrated the Chinese intellectual field, where there was no longer a uniform embrace of any value system or theoretical discourses, which is certainly a step forward from the still missed collective euphoria of the 1980s. As the global context of opposing positions and discourses were made increasingly clear throughout the 1990s, their social agency and interest also became unmistakable. While some of the neoliberal arguments came close to calling for the dissolution of the existing system, some of the New Left counterattacks have been pushed to the extreme and threatened to collapse into a simple appeal to the moral inspirations of Mao’s China. Both, however, indicate Chinese intellectuals’ participation in an increasingly differentiated social sphere and their identification with different social groups. At its most generous, the Chinese neoliberal denunciation grants a “reason for the existence of those leftist discourses in the West, whose utopian idealism and uncompromising critique of reality serve as a moral motivation for the perfection of social reality in the West.”59 But when such marginal utopian excess in advanced capitalist societies is transported to China to critique a “difficult transition into material prosperity and liberal democracy,” it loses both its utopian and practical validity. From the neoliberal perspective, the New Left concern with China, even if granted good intentions and respectable moral character, constitutes a “fallacy of misplaced

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concreteness.”60 The moral and political allegation that underscores criticism of the New Left, however, is its “implicit apology for socialism and aspiration for socialism to replace capitalism.”61 The ideological zeal to cut to the moral-political core of an intellectual debate reflects a triumphant self-consciousness of the historical condition giving rise to the worldwide dominance of neoliberalism. One such condition, observed by economist Arthur McEwan in his recent critique of neoliberalism, is the fact that the world economy today is “almost entirely capitalist” and that capitalism, for the first time in its history, has become “truly global; there is no longer any substantial part of the world that is generally outside the one international economic system.”62 The aggressiveness with which Chinese neoliberals attack their New Left opponents also supports McEwan’s general observation that “while the basic tenets of neoliberalism operate in the rich countries, the policy plays its most powerful role in many of the low-income countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.”63 By the same token, it also reflects the nation-state’s profound ambivalence toward and decreasing independence from capitalist globalization, to which a big and residually socialist national government like China’s is no exception. Under these circumstances, the search for an intellectual framework beyond the neoliberal dogma characterizes a loose but conscious alliance of New Left Chinese intellectuals. This is what makes it “New” and “Left” at the same time, despite its liberal critics’ intent to collapse it with various old—and failed—attempts to challenge capitalism politically, economically, or in cultural-intellectual terms. To this extent, the very socioeconomic reality of the world today that gives the neoliberal discourse its moral and ideological sense of certainty also gives its critics a valid and urgent intellectual and political agenda.64 The manifest goal of New Left Chinese intellectuals is to break the straitjacket of socialism and capitalism as two reified and fetishized social, political, and theoretical institutions. This tendency is most pronounced and self-conscious in Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, Wang Hui, and Wang Shaoguang, although their intellectual background and discursive enterprises are different. The centrality of the question of modernity, however, must be qualified with an account of the discontinuity of post-Mao Chinese intellectual and cultural history, which is marked by the sweeping changes of Chinese and world economy, politics, culture, and ideology, and by a heightened critical and analytical consciousness of many unexamined concepts, categories, and assumptions underscoring the modernization ideology of the New Era.

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It is this complicated and problematized notion of both socialism and capitalism that prompts the so-called New Left intellectuals to reject the label, often by arguing that they are positioned vis-à-vis the neoliberal, not the liberal discourse. The latter in the post-Mao Chinese political and intellectual context remains an asset and an open horizon, whereas “Left” invariably invites popular as well as intellectual suspicion and triggers unpleasant memories and associations. Some have tried to clarify this New Left position by defining its intellectual opponent, which is the New Right (xin youyi) or the Far Right ( jiyou pai), not the liberal discourse. Others sought to rename the New Left the “Liberal Left” (ziyou zuopai) to highlight its link to the liberal social democratic tradition in the West and its intellectual origin in post-Mao China. But none of these efforts has changed the habitual and media-reinforced way of referring to the central intellectual conflict in China in the 1990s as the ongoing debate between Xinzuopai (New Left) and Ziyouzhuyi (liberalism). Distorting as it is, the conventional language unwittingly reveals the fact that, in China as elsewhere, it is neoliberal discourse and ideology that frame the intellectual and political environment, to which other positions are compelled to respond. The State Capacity Theory Since the late 1980s, as the pressure to decentralize, marketize, and privatize increases, neoliberal economics has been gaining influence both in policymaking communities and among independent-minded economists. After 1992, it became the prevailing mode in economic thinking and virtually the official economics of the postsocialist state.65 In this context, a critical and constructive discourse emerged in the early 1990s. The state capacity theory, formulated by Wang Shaoguang, then a political scientist at Yale, and his collaborator, Hu Angang, a professor at Tsinghua, argues for the imperative of a strong central government to regulate the market, curbing its tendency toward regional protectionism and fragmentation and toward monopoly and unequal competition. More important, it is up to a capable state to maintain a credible national defense, a socially just distribution of wealth, and the moral and political unity of the nation. The central argument of the state capacity thesis is deceptively technical: the state must retain a “powerful capacity in extracting tax” in order to fill its vital and indispensable role in fostering a meaningful and creative national life. Wang’s and Hu’s argument can be regarded as one of the first systematic considerations of the state-market interrelationship in the Chinese context and one of the early responses to the economic collapse, political failure,

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and social tragedy of those transitional societies in Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The imperative of taxation in their thesis was made vis-à-vis both the ruinous consequences of neoliberal orthodoxy in places like Russia and the relatively primitive mechanisms of the Chinese socialist state to secure tax revenues in an emergent market environment. Theirs is therefore not an argument against the market. Rather, the state capacity theory consistently stresses the imperative to explore the ways to an economically successful, socially just, and politically stable transition to the “socialist market economy.” They hold that the market economy China strives to build must be based on a modern institution of enterprise, finance, and taxation, not one based on petit agrarian production; that the Chinese market must be a unified domestic market free from local and regional division and protectionism; that this market must operate on the principle of equal competition guaranteed by tax policies and government services; and that such a modern, equal, and unified market must be regulated and protected by a legal structure based on a social contract. They further argue that this unified domestic market must be open to and compatible with the outside world and allow free flows of commodity, capital, technology, information, and personnel.66 The socioeconomic and political framework proposed by the state capacity thesis left room for various kinds of social and intellectual currents which surged into prominence in the late 1990s. Endorsing market reform and advocating the eventual compatibility of the Chinese domestic market with the global market, this position supports the main thrust of the Reform but with an emphasis on the state capacity to maintain a unified domestic market and to mediate between the domestic and international markets. Its difference from the economic nationalist view, which surfaced during the debate about the w t o , lies in its political commitment to building a socialist welfare state and a “socialist market economy,” as well as in its emphasis on the leadership of a socialist government in national economic and political life. Its comparative frame of reference, namely, the radical privatization and the disappearance of central authority from socioeconomic life in Russia, determines its position against the neoliberal doctrine, just as the majority of Chinese intellectuals were just about to embrace the Chinese market revolution in 1992 as a sign of Deng Xiaoping’s commitment to continued Reform. Despite its policy-oriented approach, the state capacity theory is one of the first attempts to voice an intellectual concern with political reforms of the Chinese state. Based on its empirical judgment that the Chinese transition into a market economy “will have to be under the direction of the

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central government,” it makes it a necessary condition for the success of such transition that (1) the function of central power must be transformed and reconfigured to give rise to a new, efficient macroadministrative framework; (2) the government must eradicate systematic corruption which inevitably leads to massive social instability and makes a socially just economic reform out of question; and (3) the government must allow free debate between different opinions and make policymaking processes more democratic. The state capacity theory opposes developmentalist ideology by stressing the sociopolitical imperative as well as economic rationality for a socially just distribution of wealth guaranteed by a strong but democratically operated state. This is the core content of a “political economy of unequal development” which addresses the inevitable income disparity and regional unevenness of market reform. Wang Shaoguang was also among the first to call for the construction of a comprehensive social security system as the Chinese economy became increasingly market-driven. Today the Chinese intellectual-ideological battle line is still centered on these issues, as the theoretical requirements these authors laid out are far from being met by the Chinese economic and political reality. To the intensified neoliberal assault on the legitimacy of the welfare state, Wang Shaoguang recently responded with a book review article on Stephen Holmes’s and Cass Sunstein’s new book, The Cost of Rights, in which the authors argue—a view with which Wang fully agrees—that all rights, including the so-called “negative rights,” depend on the state and its taxation; that all rights are public goods whose protection requires the government to make socially responsible and morally satisfying choices; and that, in view of the sorry reality in “free” Russia, “statelessness spells rightlessness.” Wang further points out that the Chinese liberals would be considered right-wingers and libertarians in the Western sociopolitical spectrum; and liberal economists like Holmes and Sunstein would be “sharing the same trench with the Chinese New Left.”67 Institutional Innovation and Intellectual Liberation The “second intellectual liberation” and “institutional innovation” discourse, put forth by Cui Zhiyuan, then a political economist at m i t , focuses on the dismantling of the fetishism of the absolute market and the absolute state, and calls for mass participation in innovating Chinese socioeconomic and political institutions. When Tang Tsou, the late political scientist at the University of Chicago, introduced Cui Zhiyuan’s writings to Chinese read-

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ers, he considered Cui’s theoretical point of departure as “the contradiction between ‘law’ and ‘liberation’; and the antagonism between universality and particularity.”68 For Tsou, what is courageous and controversial in Cui’s thinking is his reconsiderations of Maoism as an attempt to transcend the “law of natural historical progress” and return to the philosophical and political core of Mao’s belief that “it is the people who create history.” To Cui, the last is what allowed Mao to regard Chinese socioeconomic underdevelopment as “a blankness conducive to the painting of a magnificent picture” of human history. The same belief also prompted Mao to recognize the inability of public ownership of the means of production to solve the internal contradiction of socialist society and the new system’s tendency to create a new bureaucratic upper class, namely, the “bourgeois roaders within the Communist Party.” Mao’s solution was mass democracy, whose mobilization and involvement of the people in national politics was supposed to be the institutional guarantor of Chinese socialism.69 Meanwhile, and more important in Tsou’s eyes, Cui argues that Mao’s notion of “bourgeois roaders within the Communist Party” and his critical adoption of the notion of “bourgeois rights” to the socialist system reveal the limits of his attempt to break free from historical determinism. For instance, Cui thinks it wrong for Mao not to believe in elections as a way of expressing public and popular opinions; and Cui suggests that Mao “did not understand the connection between democracy and elections, and did not realize that you can have elections in both socialist and capitalist societies.”70 Thus, Cui concludes that “the Cultural Revolution is an aborted experiment in mass democracy,” which indicates Mao’s failure to find a solution to the contradictions of modernity via liberation.71 What exemplifies Cui’s notion of “intellectual liberation” and “institutional innovation” in this case is, in Tsou’s words, his “differentiating Mao’s thought into various components.”72 That makes it possible for Cui to analyze theoretically the reason for Mao’s intellectual defeat during the Cultural Revolution, while at the same time reconfiguring the positive elements of Mao’s thinking, his notions of mass democracy, into other theoretical, institutional categories, such as Roberto Unger’s notion of democratic society. Cui applies similar thinking to other categories. For instance, by defining the notion of property rights as a “bundle of rights” rather than a unified and mythologized entity, he shows how power, privileges, immunities, and subcategories such as the right to control residues, the right of residual claimant, and so on, can be brought into new configurations so as to address the interests of both stockholders and stakeholders, and to open new theoretical

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room for economic democracy under both private and public ownership. In his critical analysis of the notion of the free market, Cui dispels the myth of the “invisible hand” by referring to concrete cases of recent institutional and intellectual change in the United States (such as the new corporate law passed in 29 states in the 1980s) to shed light on Reform in the Chinese context. The implicit argument, therefore, is that the contemporary capitalist system as we know it is a result of its reaction to, compromise with, and management of the socialist challenges and working-class movements over a long period of time; that even the U.S. economy has a socialist component much more significant than admitted by its Chinese or Russian critics and admirers; and that the seemingly radical rejection of the reality under the rubric of capitalism is in fact giving “capitalism” as an ideological concept too much credit and putting an intellectual straitjacket on those who still want to search for an alternative. Analyzing the phenomenal growth of Chinese rural industry in the past two decades, Cui traces its origin to Mao’s failed idea of rural industrialization during the disastrous “Leap Forward” movement in the late 1950s, and its not so spectacular prehistory of infrastructure building under the People’s Commune system. He also notices its relations to the Japanese mode of rural industrialization, which parallels the process of massive urbanization, and to the Chinese policy of dissemination of industrial strength in the hinterland during the heyday of the Cold War as a national defense strategy. The success of Chinese village and township industry after 1978 shows that “the failure of previous practice does not prevent its positive elements from being absorbed and transformed under new circumstances.”73 To the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy in today’s world, Cui writes: What is interesting and thought provoking is that, while the new social elites and their intellectual spokesmen in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China regard private ownership as the new Bible, corporate law in America has undergone profound changes in the opposite direction. Private ownership has long been represented in corporate law as the following structure of corporate governance: The shareholders are owners, to whom and only whom the management must be held accountable in its service to maximize profit. However, since the 1980s, more than half the states in the United States (29 so far) have modified their corporate law. The new law requires management to serve stakeholders as well as shareholders. In other words, shareholders are now viewed as only part of the category of stakeholders, while the rest of the latter

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category consists of workers, creditors, and the community. Such reform in U.S. corporate law breaks through the seemingly axiomatic logic of private ownership, thus becoming the most significant event in recent U.S. politics and economy.74

Noticing that American economists traveling across the Pacific rarely mention these changes to their overseas audience, Cui quotes the joke about the U.S. advice to socialist countries given by Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the Economic Council under President Bill Clinton: “Do as we say, not as we do.” Cui is also inspired by the Chinese economist Lu Chongchang’s proposal for a Chinese approach to “modern institutions of enterprise” which is centered on handling the relations between three old “Huis” and three new “Huis.” The latter refers to dongshihui (board of trustees), gudong dahui (meetings of shareholders), and jianshihui (board of supervisors), all of which were institutionalized by the new Chinese corporate law of 1994. The former, on the other hand, means dangweihui (party committee), zhigong daibiao dahui (the workers’ congress), and gonghui (union). He shares Lu’s dissatisfaction that the new Chinese corporate law, while seeking to observe “international convention,” fails to follow the progressive trend to institutionalize workers’ participation in corporate decision making, allowing workers’ representation on the board of trustees only in state enterprises, thus cutting the ties between the workers’ congress and the board of trustees. Like Lu, Cui rejects the uniformity of obsolete ideas on the capitalist corporate system and calls for innovative explorations of a Chinese model for modern enterprise.75 What Cui means by “the second intellectual liberation” is a dialectic transcendence of “traditional binary opposites such as private ownership and state ownership, market economy and planned economy, Chinese substance–Western function versus wholesale Westernization, and reformism and conservatism,” all of which emerged during the “first intellectual liberation,” waged in the late 1970s against dogmatic adherence to Maoism, which paved the way for the socialist economic reform of the 1980s. The emphasis on the second intellectual liberation is no longer “the negation of [socialist] conservatism but the expansion of a new space for institutional innovation; instead of sticking with an either/or division, it searches for new opportunities for institutional innovation under the guiding principle of economic and political democracy.”76 Basing his analysis on a dynamic practice of dialectical thinking which is deconstructive and constructive at once, Cui examines a whole range of historical or contemporary cases from

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the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill to post-Fordist production, and from the Chinese village election to the Russian “shock therapy.” To be sure, his critique of institutional and intellectual fetishism is pointed toward the prevailing ideology of the free market and the intensified dominance of the entire world by an increasingly homogenous system of capitalism. Yet in the particular Chinese context, his analysis of contemporary capitalism as an ongoing historical dynamic calls for a continuing effort at understanding the historical complexity and sociopolitical contradictions of capitalism so as to capture—and appropriate—its democratic, liberating elements over the history of world capitalism, elements that move capitalism forward yet are constrained, repressed, and distorted by its reified institutions and ideologies. Such a stance against world capitalism’s totalizing power and frame of temporality sets the tone for a critical intellectual voice in China today, one based on a commitment to democracy and freedom as both institutional arrangements and intellectual utopias beyond the political horizon of the status quo or reifications of both capitalism and socialism. From Rural China to Cultural China: Toward a Political Nation Contrary to the widespread assumption that post-Mao Chinese economic development was due to privatization, many Chinese intellectuals acknowledge the fact that one of the most important propellers of robust growth over the past two decades has been Chinese rural industry, or the so-called village and township enterprises, which, inconsequential in the early 1980s, by the second half of the 1990s had grown to represent over a third of the Chinese domestic output. For Gan Yang, a veteran from the 1980s Cultural Discussions, a Tiananmen exile, and the general editor of the Shehui yu Sixiang (Society and Thought) book series of Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, the rise of the village and township enterprise is not just an economic phenomenon but an indication of the modern transformation of rural China, indeed the historic beginning of Chinese modernity defined against the Qin-Han model of the Chinese empire and the involutionary mode of preindustrial production, or what historian Philip Huang calls “growth without development.” The central concern of Gan’s thinking remains modernity. For him, the historic hint of the rise of the Chinese rural enterprise is a way of development different from the classical model of Western modernity. “The way Chinese peasants bid farewell to agrarian society is not to swamp the city as penniless proletarians eradicated from their rural homeland but rather

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to create a modern industry in the very rural community where they are rooted, and thus work in the factory without fleeing to the city [li tu bu li xiang; jin chang bu jin cheng]. This is indeed a unique mode of development. It does not result from the economists’ design but from a desperate choice under the pressure of survival.”77 The fate of Chinese rural industry in the face of the capitalist market’s heightened globality remains uncertain; and the intensified effort by the Chinese state to engage in social rationalization by “international” standards, that is, privatization, bodes ill for the development of a collective- and communally based economy. But Gan Yang’s observations remain important not as a microeconomic assessment but as a macrosociocultural vision of an alternative model of Chinese modernity. The profound historic significance of the rise of Chinese rural industry, Gan argues, is that “it provides the Chinese industrial transformation with a dependable foundation of microsocial organization.” In other words, the development of Chinese rural industry is not achieved at the price of weakening, undermining, and eventually destroying preexisting rural communities; rather, it thrives on the basis of its close ties to and mutual dependency on the rural community. Its prosperity reinforces the reconstruction of the communities of rural China. Gan observes, “If such historical experience proves feasible, its meaning to the continuation of a Chinese form of life will be unlimited; and its contribution to the history of civilization invaluable.”78 The implicit or explicit dialogue between Gan’s somewhat idealistic picture of Chinese rural industry with Wang Shaoguang’s rethinking of the Chinese state and Cui Zhiyuan’s critique of a uniform model of development is manifold. It is in this light that his notion of “Cultural China” proves to be a historical notion with reference to modernity as a historical experience of industrialization, not an ahistorical speculation on the revival of Confucianism via its invented compatibility with global capitalism. In fact, Gan’s “Cultural China” should be considered as a moment in the historical articulation of a socioeconomic transformation before its realization in the “political nation,” on the basis of which he criticizes the ideology of Chinese nationalism, as I discussed earlier. In other words, “Cultural China” prefigures the yet-tobe fulfilled sociopolitical content of Chinese modernity, which consists of “new local communities, new social organizations and networks, and new forms of everyday life.” In a fashion reminiscent of his call for a radical hermeneutic stance toward the tradition/modernity, East/West binaries that defined the intellectual landscape of the Chinese 1980s, Gan insists on keeping the historical process of the modern West as the frame of reference for

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grasping the Chinese problematic: “All of the Western notions of property relations, structure of rights, citizenship, democratic participation, and so on, are historically formed in Western modernity, namely, the transformation of Western rural societies into Western industrial societies; all of them evolved and improved as Western modernity unfolded. Thus we have reason to expect that the Chinese notions of property relations, structure of rights, citizenship, and democracy will gradually take shape as Chinese modernity ascends historically.”79 It is this historical framework that enables Gan Yang to consider such grand narratives or historical determinisms as “capitalism has overcome socialism” or “private ownership is the only choice and there is no alternative” as nothing more than the residue of Cold War ideology that needs to be transcended in the post–Cold War era. Rejecting the “unfeasibility of Cold War socialism” and the “irrationality of Cold War capitalism,” Gan intervenes in the intellectual debates of the 1990s in a zigzag way. This is why he first introduced the discourse of liberalism (including Isaiah Berlin’s idea of negative freedom) at the beginning of the 1990s yet, at the end of the decade, used the same intellectual source to attack Chinese intellectuals’ taste for an antidemocratic or aristocratic notion of freedom. For Gan, the Chinese liberal intelligentsia in the 1990s was characterized by its common emphasis on private property in a state capitalist environment, and by its ideological flight with the global power mainstream via the trope of individual freedom. All this puts their notion of “freedom” in conflict with the notion of social, political, and economic democracy. Under bureaucratic capitalist conditions, it stands as a tacit endorsement of the freedom of the privileged over the rights of the deprived, and of the unequal distribution of wealth in the name of the market principle.80 This is also why he advocates both the modern democratic idea of “one pull, one vote” and a large, united, and strong constitutional republic which keeps provincial oligarchies under control.81 That Gan Yang is labeled a New Leftist by his liberal critics only shows the radically conservative dogmatism subscribed to by Chinese neoliberals, thinly disguised under the philosophical vocabulary of classical liberalism. All three discourses came to the fore as ideological opposition and theoretical critique of the prevalent neoclassical economic orthodoxy, namely, the myth of market and private ownership. Wang and Hu focused on progressive government policymaking. Cui Zhiyuan sought to deconstruct problematic notions pertaining to the ideological totality of laissez-faire capitalism, and to reappropriate or theoretically develop innovative ideas and practices in contemporary socioeconomic and political life worldwide.

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Gan Yang, in addition to his attention to the sociocultural reconstruction of rural China, emphasizes the dialectic between popular democracy and social order. In many ways, their arguments can be regarded as a negative response to the disastrous Russian privatization after the Cold War, and as positive, occasionally idealistic views of Chinese economic strategy and its democratic potential. Theirs were the first attempts by Chinese intellectuals to evaluate and theorize Chinese reality in a global context but with a particular Chinese perspective and sensibility.

What Does It Mean to Talk about a Chinese Alternative?

Despite the wishful prediction of the doomsayers, the Chinese situation constitutes a problem not of “vanishing” or disintegration (of the cultural empire, of the nation-state, of socialist modernity, etc.) but of new sociocultural constructions symbiotic with and yet contradictory to the posthistorical world order. It is even premature, for instance, either to celebrate or mourn the disappearance of Mao’s China, which for the best historians and cultural critics always was a restoration and a reorganization of an old civilization in the new global context rather than merely a disruption, a “nightmare” (as it is so often described in writings on that period) of the continuum of Confucian or bourgeois universal history. The “Chinese way”—officially termed the “socialist market economy”— so far succeeds in neither reality nor theory and runs against the grain of the homogenous ideological mainstream in today’s world. Yet critical intellectuals who have a stake in formulating the progressive prospect of China’s social and cultural development may find it necessary to engage and appropriate this suspicious ground to turn it around in a battle against prevalent conformism, philistinism, and cynicism. Despite the cultural-nationalist trappings of such a discourse, a “Chinese alternative” is a discursive-political device by which to focus on the crucial differences between developed bourgeois socioeconomic and cultural systems and societies and forms of life still in the process of being transformed by them. The search for an alternative means a refusal to take the Eurocentric notion of modernity as modular or universal; it is an effort to analyze and break the colossal and often mythologized categories—capitalism, market, modernity, democracy, etc.—to see them as bundles of historical contingencies which can be selected and reorganized under different historical, social, and cultural circumstances and by means of the theoretical coming-into-being of a critical utopian

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consciousness. The “alternative,” therefore, is nothing more than the articulation of differences in concrete institutional, everyday, and theoretical terms. And it is with the recognition of a diverse and uneven world and the concrete historicities of the actually existing worlds of life that the rhetoric of the universal is both embraced and rejected. It is embraced because it speaks to an interrelated world of material production, and to the human interchange and self-understanding based on it. It is also rejected because such rhetoric is so tainted with the ideology of the ruling class of an unequal world and so vulnerable to the temptation to substitute the obscure horizon of human history with the robust, tangible cutting edge of capital. The discourse of alternative provides an imagined position from which to question the universal claim of the neoliberal horizon: that nothing matters unless it derives its meaning from a narrowly defined and fetishized ontology of capitalism. It constitutes a form of “strategic essentialism” (a term Gayatri Spivak coined in a different but related context) vis-à-vis the unapologetic Eurocentrism and historical determinism one encounters even in the most theoretically innovative works of the Western Left, not to mention the self-complacent discourse of the liberal mainstream.82 The slogan “there is no outside” (to a capitalist totality) is as vacuous and misleading as the clichés about “alternatives”—which mean nothing more than an assimilatory longing for inclusion in the capitalist sociopolitical mainstream with more racial, geographic, ethnic, or cultural equalities—as both recognize capitalism as universal and modular and have no intention to carry the political, social, and cultural singularities and creativity of a given historical conjuncture beyond the existing system.83 Both are too ready to submit themselves to the bourgeois notion of subjectivity, which in turn determines and overdetermines the value and meaning in the capitalist world system. Both, in particular, tend to chase the phantom of utopian promises in every round of capitalist selftransformation in the postindustrial, postmodern, or information age while in fact fastening themselves ever tighter to the homogenizing, essentializing oneness of a system of control. While battering down the religious, cultural, and traditional defense mechanisms of various yet to be fully assimilated communities, often by theoretically dismantling the “cultural,” the universalist discourses on both the left and the right are effectively reinforcing what might be called the cultural ethnocentrism of capitalism as a “body without organ” (as Deleuze termed it): the ontological primacy, the internal differentiation, and the self-affirmative energy of the negative spirit of capitalism. In doing so, they often confuse the ubiquity and flexibility of capital as new possibilities for local autonomy or heightened degrees of universalization, and

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misidentify the deepening of capitalist unevenness and colonization of the subconscious as new forms of freedom. To say there emerges a global imperial order is to say nothing more than that the United States is imposing its economic, political, and cultural forms on the entire world. Such a timeless and borderless empire, its global policing role, and its claim on humanity as a whole does not make capitalism as we know it more universal or totalistic; it merely reflects its continued and more efficient world domination and a bourgeois ideology in a triumphant and self-gratifying mood. In this context, the “Chinese way” constitutes a local battle in the global economic, political, and discursive striving for open historical horizons. In its very locality and national determination, it represents a politico-intellectual commitment to innovative thinking and social experiment against institutional and theoretical fetishism. If this as yet obscure and precarious platform can be taken as the basis of a loosely connected intellectual-political united front in China today, then it alone indicates the most fundamental paradigmatic shift in the contemporary history of Chinese intellectual and social thought. This development, rather than basing its popular mandate on the cultural-ethnocentric notion of the nation or the “world-historical” inevitability of the status quo, keeps alive the central historic promise of bourgeois revolution and modernity, namely, the liberty, equality, and selfrealization of mankind. In the more specific Chinese—but nonetheless equally “global”—context, this means the continued effort to extend the benefits of freedom (from oppression, deprivation, and coercion) and democracy to a perpetuated national and international underclass, to “minorities” who are in fact the overwhelming majority of the world population. On the intellectual front, even a mild version of such a social idealism requires a sustained and highly conscious effort to thoroughly demystify the historic paradigm of demystification, namely, our moral, political, and philosophical heritage since the Enlightenment, which constantly creates its own myth and own hegemony. To this extent, any alternative vision of modernity must consider itself as engaging not in particularizing the universal but rather, quite the contrary, in universalizing the particular and, ultimately, in negating the universal but as its self-negation. It must see its intellectual mission as constantly historicizing and contextualizing the particularities, arbitrariness, and intellectual closures of all these circulating universal claims while keeping the future-oriented, utopian horizons of history open. Not surprisingly, in China today, all the main positions in the field of intellectual production are defined in relation to this as yet underdeveloped discourse. It must be pointed out that the “Chinese way” as a mode of

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thinking does not stem merely from a utopian notion of History, which in this particular context is easily mingled with an ahistorical utopia of the nation and its culture. Rather, its intellectual articulation can be found among the most ardent Chinese students of Western philosophy, social theory, and political institutions, above all in those who are fascinated with the political history and social dynamic of an America beneath its media headlines and ideological rhetoric. To more and more critical intellectuals writing on China in the 1990s, democracy, understood economically, politically, and culturally all at once, is becoming a central issue. Their initial reflections on the Chinese reforms have touched the latter’s ideological core, which lies in the breaking of an egalitarian system and the nurturing of a new middle class and center of accumulation of social wealth. This, of course, is a deliberate disengagement from the commitment of the Chinese Revolution to the masses and their participation in the creation of a new social system. While acknowledging the necessity of market-oriented economic reform, critical Chinese intellectuals disagree with liberals, and sometimes among themselves, on the social political imperatives by which to redefine the role of the government and through which to explore new ways of making the mass majority of the Chinese people the subject, not the object, of the Reform. The ideological conflict between a Chinese liberalism and a Chinese New Left, which came to the center stage of Chinese intellectual life in the late 1990s, reflects the different sociopolitical groundings of this transformative project. We have examined this debate in previous pages, but it is worth summarizing here the main polemics regarding the notion of democracy. Whereas liberal thinking advocates the formation of an autonomous Chinese middle class, a protobourgeoisie to stimulate and stabilize a growth-oriented society, the New Left emphasizes that only the inclusion of the masses can ensure the success and politicomoral meaning of the Chinese Reform. What inevitably follows, then, is a systematic discourse on the limit of bourgeois democracy and capitalist development. In this way, the Chinese New Left’s thinking can be considered a continued socialist vision for the historical ascendance of the “fourth estate” in the context of democracy and more just material and social conditions. To this end, the analysis and assessment of Chinese national conditions—the nation’s demographic, environmental, socioeconomic, class, and cultural situation—once again become a priority. Unlike the liberals, the New Left does not see it as a solution to “join the mainstream of world civilization,” now a code word for an idealized Western model. Like their revolutionary parents and grandparents in the twentieth century, however, New Left intellectuals

The Return of the Political

realize that Chinese strivings must be defined in a way that speaks to other peoples in other parts of the world. This means they will have to articulate the national dilemma as a universal problematic, and vice versa. And their success depends to a considerable degree on whether they can transcend simultaneously the mythology of a self-contained Chinese culture and the closure of historical horizons in bourgeois civilization. In China today, as power and market pervade one another, a mixed mode of production, a new regime of rule, and a new socio-ideological framework is taking shape. Under the merciless pressure of the changing situation, the broad social and intellectual consensus of the New Era (1979–89) is rapidly dissipating, replaced by a whole variety of conflicting socio-ideological positions vis-à-vis an increasingly uneven Chinese society. Thus one faces a very different task in discussing the intellectual field of the Chinese 1990s. The ideological center of postsocialist China no longer holds, yet it evolves into something more flexible and pervasive. On the rubble of the 1980s—of which the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Incident remains an unexplained turning point—rise not only the glistening office buildings and shopping malls of Beijing and Shanghai, but also a radically different cultural and symbolic landscape. The China imagined and “contained” by the high modernist discourse of the 1980s is rendered a sentimental illusion by the leveling forces of commodities and global ideological saturation. The China produced and packaged in the new cultural market of the 1990s—in which state propaganda, the advertising industry, the popular, market-driven media, and the semiautonomous intellectuals all act as competing agents—has created a dazzling collage of images and a cognitive vacuum to be analyzed by a new critical practice.

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Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s

the tiananmen incident in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 dramatically changed post-Mao China’s perception by and relationship to the Western world. Throughout the 1990s, U.S. politics and media in particular were both alarmed by and fed into a “nationalistic” rhetoric in China, a symbolic and ideological realm in which a perceived aggressive, arrogant United States obsessed with imagining a new rival in the “new world order” seemed to find its perfect target in a perceived ambitious, resentful, undemocratic, and paranoid China. The high-pitched slashing between the “free press” of the “international community” and state-controlled ideological apparatuses such as China’s is hardly anything new. However, on closer examination, one finds that, in the 1990s, the “master China demonizers”— as Ross H. Monroe, Richard Bernstein, and the like have been referred to in a book published in China in 19961—confronted ardent and vociferous protesters who were not Chinese mandarins in Mao suits but young members of an urban proto-middle-class who wore blue jeans or business suits and had grown up in a mixed economy in the era of Reforms.2 Since then, the generally bad press that the pr c received in the United States has been replaced with a more complex, subtle, and paradoxical picture: harsh state censorship swamped by cell phone text messages, sent back and forth between members of the new urban middle class driving their Japanese-made cars to anti-Japanese rallies, which might be organized by or against the state; cheap Chinese commodities pouring into U.S. and European markets, manufactured by an even cheaper labor force under communism but without many labor rights or benefits; monolithic state propaganda in the midst of a virtually uncontrollable flow of information and public opinion in the Internet age; radical integration with the capitalist world system accompanied by an

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equally determined military buildup and ideologico-cultural self-affirmation which sets China apart from the rest of the world, and so on and so forth. Although lacking the political freedom to challenge the government, the urban middle or professional class nevertheless has been forming semiautonomous social and cultural spaces of its own. As a result, a new generation of Chinese nationalists are emerging from a nascent Chinese public sphere: the vast discursive space being created by a thriving, omnipresent market and a retreating, decentralized state power.3 In other words, if they are “nationalistic,” then their nationalism is formulated in terms of both private property ownership and a collective sense of belonging; both cosmopolitan aspirations and a nearly fatalistic sense of the limits of cosmopolitanism; both a rationalizing emulation of modern Euro-American nationalisms achieved in an earlier historical period and a desire to maintain some “Chineseness” in the age of equalized, flattened identities. The expanding gray area between the absolute state and the classical “civil society”—neither an effective framework to begin with—has dramatically changed the rules of the game in describing and analyzing the Chinese economy, politics, everyday world, and cultural life. It adds a crucial variant to the considerations of notions of nationalism and intellectual discourse in the Chinese context, and changes the historical and ideological implications of these notions in China today. In this chapter I focus on the first half of the 1990s to examine some of the central contentions of the post-Tiananmen intellectual field—above all that of nationalism and mass culture—in their incipient moments and initial expressions. This is for three reasons: First, the 1990s witnessed a dual process. On the one hand, it saw the fall of a universalistic high culture of humanism and modernism, the demise of philosophical discourses of modernity, and the virtual collapse of the intellectual elite in the human sciences that were formed during the 1980s, or the “New Era” (xinshiqi). On the other hand, during this time social spaces burgeoned alongside a rising consumer culture and a renewed popular nationalist sentiment. The correlation and separation between these two tendencies have yet to be examined in order to shed light on the social conditions and political implications of change. Second, since the mid-1980s, and most conspicuously since 1992, an increasingly diversified, multicentered, and export-oriented Chinese economy, and an increasingly differentiated social sphere had made visible a new terrain outside the institutions of the state and intellectuals. This terrain provides a new perspective from which to examine the intellectual field, that is, in terms of its interaction with the realm of daily life in addition to the

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conventional angle of gauging its relationship to the state. The emerging social space also allows us to rethink nationalism in socioeconomic terms and contemplate its more profound—rather than immediate and narrow— political significance in forging a new sense of equality, democracy, individualism, and community. Facing the bustling secular world of consumption, the hegemony of mass culture and a popular sentiment of nationalism, the “high culture” of the intellectual elite is experiencing dramatic internal transformations and differentiations. This process, in its own evasive and ambivalent terms, may dialectically—that is, through its own self-critique— set up a platform for a critical engagement and open up discussions on mass culture, nationalism, and social change. Third, the first half of the 1990s, still in the shadow of Tiananmen and 1 the 1980s ideologico-intellectual consensus on modernism and enlightenment, may offer some clarity on those central without blurring thisissues is a part openerthe page and distraction of the newfound wealth and increased professionalization that characterized the second part of the decade. Thus, the arguments and expressions made in this period may provide more chemically pure, that is, ideologically transparent, evidence for a critical reader on the social and intellectual development of contemporary China. While in chapter 1 I offer an overall analysis of the 1990s intellectual field but mainly from the vantage point of the end of the 1990s, this chapter can complement the general discussion with a supplementary reading of the earlier moments. Several of the phenomena or debates I discuss in this chapter—such as those on “scholarship versus thought” or “the loss of humanistic spirit”; the critique of postmodernism and mass culture offered by Lei Yi, Xu Ben, and Henry Y. H. Zhao, or Cui Zhiyuan’s rereading of the Anshan experience and Wang Ying’s conceptualization of “neocollectivism”; Wang Hui’s initial critical observations on the ideology of Chinese modernity—prefigured the large-scale, more politicized debates between “liberals” and “New Leftists” (a focus of chap. 1) and on Chinese postmodernism (the focus of chap. 3). In turn they have been elaborated in the latest round of intellectual engagements.

Secularization and the Limits of Civic Nationalism

As an indication of the popular or market origins of recent Chinese nationalist sentiment, all five coauthors of China Can Say No, the first in a string of defiant rebuttals of “American imperialism” issued in 1996, were college educated and mostly self-employed (a freelancer, a fruit-stand owner, a poet, and

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two journalists), working in partly market-driven newspapers, periodicals, and television stations.4 The book, hastily put together, consists of crude journalistic writing. Its genuine rage over what the authors saw as U.S. containment policy toward China is narrated with a bitter sense of disillusionment felt by this generation, which once had blindly loved America. Its members once had taken for granted that a “more open and outward-going China” would be embraced enthusiastically by the international community. The book came out during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a touchy time for many Chinese. They remembered Beijing’s frustrated bid to host the 2000 Olympics and had opened their eyes to the unapologetic patriotism and egocentrism of the United States, a country still admired by many as the land of free individuals. This timing itself has rich allegorical implications, among which is the emergence of watching televised sports as one of the quintessentially “apolitical,” “contemporary,” and “cosmopolitan” (most programs are recorded or satellite-transmitted foreign programs or matches) pastimes for city dwellers of post-Mao China. Several memorable eruptions of popular nationalism in the two decades before had much to do with sports, a connection which suggests the secular origin of this nationalism. The book became an instant best-seller in spite of the silence with which the official media received it and the overwhelmingly negative remarks from intellectuals. It never entered the official production, distribution, and review network, however. Instead, it was commercially circulated through nongovernmental venues constituted by the countless private bookstores and vendors who by then controlled most of the book market in China. The book’s dazzling media exposure, then, was carried out mainly by evening and weekend papers, readers’ digests, and leisure and consumer magazines. The avalanche of reports on the book by the Western media had certainly, if unwittingly, boosted its status at home. Its most conspicuous selling point—unmistakably printed on the cover of later editions—was that the book had captured the attention of the West to an unprecedented degree.5 The deliberately unorthodox authorial self-portrait, the prevalent use of contemporary slang, the intentionally provocative tone, and the short production cycle all betrayed a penchant for market sensation and an instinctive grasp of where to find the most sympathetic reader. If the authors’ wake-up call for a keener national consciousness could be exploited by the state rhetoric, then the verbal and experiential features in China Can Say No clearly indicate a realm of social existence decidedly outside the state that is striving for its own expression. Properly defined nationalism is a natural and necessary step toward this end. Precisely

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because of the structural differentiation in the social sphere suggested above, a discerned overlap between the state and the mass cultural reinvention of the nation indicates a broader basis of national experience in both real and imaginary terms. This basis is economic in nature and political in a different sense. Protoindividualistic and protocivic nationalism requires new considerations and new perspectives. Worrisome as the mounting verbal conflict might sound to those concerned about a healthy U.S.-China relationship on the threshold of the twenty-first century, common sense eventually prevailed. The media war in the first half of the 1990s was enacted largely by the “public sphere” of the two nations, while both governments stood above it on a “higher level” as “rational” champions of “long-term, strategic” national interests, content to allow “public opinions” to play foot soldier and do the dirty work so long as it did not interfere with the governments’ policy priorities. The modern economy (now in its contemporary phase as globalized, consumption-driven, and information-based) is an equalizer in the Gellnerian sense that it creates a more level and homogeneous Chinese domestic market and everyday culture.6 As modern transportation and communication reach the majority of the Chinese population, a modern, secular notion of the nation becomes possible for the first time in a land where it has historically been the political state, and not the “natural” socioeconomic relations of a community, that gives form to the nation. In 1990s China, the basically free flow of labor, goods, and capital, as well as the boom in information and cultural signs and images, undoubtedly presented the nation in vivid terms for the first time for the majority of Chinese people. Until this moment, the people’s sense of their nation had remained abstract and impersonal, as the state took national affairs exclusively in its own hands. When the Chinese state engineered a new round of economic liberalization in 1992, the state itself was by far the biggest shareholder, stakeholder, and employer in an already diversified, mixed economy. The state controlled key infrastructures such as energy, transportation, telecommunication, finance, and foreign trade; state enterprises still represented close to 50 percent of the gross national product (g n p ), and there were more than 100 million people on the state’s payroll. All this, combined with a modernizing socialist bureaucracy, allowed the state to be an integral, indeed omnipresent part of the new image of the nation. This does not mean, however, that the nationalism in the social sphere was always or necessarily in agreement with that in state discourse. The popular discourse of nationalism, fundamentally different from the state rhetoric of patriotism, indicates a voluntary, rather than coerced overlap between the nation and the state (as much as it does the discrepancy

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between the two). Even though the popular nationalist discourse might have the blessing of the state, this blessing had been extremely cautious, inconsistent, and highly selective, now that nationalism assumed the legitimacy of both the nation-state and civil society. Moreover, it also encompassed a populist impulse that was tightly controlled by the government in nationalist disputes with Japan over war compensation and Diaoyu Island. At the same time, the integration of the Chinese economy with the global market had multiple effects on Chinese social life. On the one hand, it exposed the Chinese market and the realm of daily life to global capital, and to international fashions and ideologies. This has created the impression that cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, now with the cityscape punctuated by McDonald’s golden arches and giant Panasonic neon signs, are nothing more than the Chinese enclaves of a global consumer society. On the other hand, the massive entry into and by the world market also enabled Chinese consumers to encounter a world of difference, often delineated in terms of nation-state borders. In this world Chinese were reminded of the “fatalistic” (Gellner) location in and belonging to a particular community identified by geography, economy, language, politics, a common history, and “culture.” The experience generated in the context of such a heightened degree of international exchange separates the blatant realism of the 1990s from the naive, fantastic cosmopolitanism of the 1980s. As a result, geopolitics, national interest, and sometimes cultural conflict have become handy frames of reference for the average Chinese city dweller—with the help of an ever more sensitive, active, and informed popular media—to interpret the constant U.S. pressure on China over human rights, nuclear proliferation, the trade deficit, and Taiwan as nothing more than the expression of U.S. self-interest and power diplomacy. More often than not, the ideological intensity and unrelenting national consciousness that inform many American writings on China were shocking to a people busy forgetting politics and ideology, and proud of covering themselves exclusively with their own mundane well-being. For a moment the postrevolutionary masses in China seemed to have slipped comfortably into an ideologyfree world of “market economy with Chinese characteristics.” There seemed to be still much to learn from the capitalist West. The equalizer of global capitalism has also made explicit the boundaries, unevenness, hierarchy, and raw power-relations of today’s world. How ironic it was that the “children of Mao” were reluctantly relearning the once all too familiar vocabulary of neocolonialism, neoimperialism, ideology, politics, and even class-struggle as they explored the brave new world that, for people like Francis Fukuyama, transcends the history of ideologies.

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In short, the nineteenth-century European industrialization and social mobility described by Ernest Gellner resonated in China at the end of the twentieth century. In the global system of capitalism, postrevolutionary China may find its situation similar to Gellner’s imagined Ruritania. Surrounded by the modern, dynamic Empire of Megalomania, the local, agrarian, and dialect-speaking Ruritarians not only find the will to modernize, that is, to join the “universal high culture” of industrialization, but they also discover the will to become a nation.7 Gellner narrates the emergence of a new national identity in this way: When labor migration and bureaucratic employment became prominent features within their social horizon, they soon learned the difference between dealing with a conational, one understanding and sympathizing with their culture, and one 108

hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of social mobility. In stable, self-contained communities culture is often quite invisible, but when mobility and context-free communication come to be of the essence of social life, the culture in which one has been taught to communicate becomes the core of one’s identity.8

Several modifications have to be added, of course. First, for China, unlike Gellner’s Ruritania, assimilation by other, more developed communities and cultures is not a realistic option. Quite the contrary, China has by far the longest and strongest continuous state tradition in documented history and an uncompromising pride associated with its regional hegemony and long cultural and political genealogy. This, combined with the memory of China’s near disintegration in the early twentieth century, and of the founding principles of the People’s Republic, makes popular sovereignty (one of the “twin core principles of nationalism” for Liah Greenfeld) a paramount concern. Second, in more general terms, the kind of “universal high culture” that levels differences now has a radically different meaning. As a consumer culture it functions in a way both more technocratic or “professional” and also more mundane and pleasure centered. In this respect, the sweeping modernization achieved by the socialist state in its early years paves the way for a connecting link, or jiegui (lit., the joining of railway tracks) with the cultural norms of post-Fordist production and postmodernism. In light of the persistence of the nation-state and its overlap with global capitalism and its cultural-ideological systems, Gellner’s observations on the modern media retain their sharp relevance. He writes:

Nationalism, Mass Culture, Strategies

The media do not transmit an idea which happens to have been fed into them, it matters precious little what has been fed into them: it is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centralized, standardized, one to many communications, which itself automatically engenders the core idea of nationalism, quite irrespective of what in particular is being put into the specific messages transmitted. The most important and persistent message is generated by the medium itself, by the role which such media have acquired in modern life. That core message is that the language and style of the transmissions is important, that only he who can understand them, or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic community, and that he who does not and cannot, is excluded.9

In this sense it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the media today is not only the contact zone between Chinese and American nationalisms but indeed the hotbed for the mass production of discourses like “China threat” or “American containment.” A new nationalist sentiment emerged in China when the postrevolutionary masses encountered Western images of and discourses on China—increasingly, this means the masses themselves, that is, as both consumers and citizens—through their own nascent, marketbased media. This new image of the nation is significantly different from the traditional, ethnocentric and culturalist view of tianxia. Literally meaning “under the heaven,” tianxia stands as a pre- or protonationalist notion of an empire, civilization, and universe, and thus runs against the grain of modern nationalism as a rational ideology of individual rights and change. Joseph Levenson rightly points out that a fundamental transformation of modern Chinese intellectuals in their century-long struggle to make China great again is their painstaking shift of loyalty and identity from the cultural codes of Confucianism to the modern nation-state. And this indicates a rational exchange intended, in Levenson’s useful phrase, to “snatch a victory as guo (nation-state)” from the “Chinese defeat of tianxia.”10 The rhetoric of “Greater China” or “Cultural China” proliferating since the 1990s cannot blur the distinction between notions of the nation based on culturalist ethnocentrism and on modern, if not postmodern, economic rationalism. As many theoreticians of postmodernity have told us, the latter has the distinct characteristic of incorporating culture in capitalist global strategies. “Greater China” and “Industrial East Asia” are but two among many new discursive inventions that respond to the socioeconomic forces driving new market and capital configurations across the Asia-Pacific.

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The current secular, postrevolutionary image of the nation also differs radically from the kind of traumatic experience of nationalism formed in modern China’s long, arduous quest for survival, change, and revolution in the age of colonialism and imperialism. That experience is yielding to an undivided loyalty to, and collective sacrifice for, the cause of the nation. If Chinese communism is the culminating form of this century-long ideology of national imperatives, then the general depoliticization of postcommunist China also dismantles the ideological and discursive infrastructure of the orthodox notion of nationalism in modern China. In its place rises a quiet yet aggressive new nationalism. While the political economy of this ideology is inconceivable without the background of global capitalism, nonetheless, it often expresses itself through a resistance, not submission, to the practice of secular nationalism by advanced nation-states in the West. This mode of interaction historically echoes the rise of nationalism in Europe during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as it is described by Lord Acton: “the nationalist sentiment was not developed directly out of the revolution in which it was involved, but was exhibited first in resistance to it, when the attempt to emancipate had been absorbed in the desire to subjugate, and the republic had been succeeded by the empire. Napoleon called a new power into existence by attacking nationality in Russia, by delivering it in Italy, by governing in defiance of it in Germany and Spain.”11 This observation also provides the historical context in which to examine the somewhat puzzling relationship between this protocivic nationalism and the arbitrary boundaries and powers of the state. In China today, for those whose individual livelihood cannot be separated from this community, real or imagined, the state is not always an oppressive, beastly regime (as painted by such journals as the Economist). Rather, it is first and foremost an essential guarantor of opportunity, order, rights, service, and justice in what has been rightly described as a highly competitive, risky, chaotic, often unfair, and outright ruthless scramble in an emergent national market. More economic and social liberty by itself does not accommodate the incipient yet basic political aspirations for justice, equality, and participation. Rather, the political awareness of a depoliticized population (a main achievement of the Deng era) must come from its imagination of the nation-state. In its own logic, this imagination borders on the conception of equality and participation, a conception which still maintains its legitimacy within the state and is valorized by nostalgia for the egalitarian past called Mao’s China. When the liberal media of the United States joined the ultra-conservatives in complaining about the ineffectiveness of the Clinton administration’s

Nationalism, Mass Culture, Strategies

“engagement” policy to bring down the Chinese regime, they also, paraphrasing Acton, “called a new power into existence” by attacking a nationality that is incipient and ancient, nebulous and self-evident all at once. Here the liberal claim to a moral high ground, and the expectation that economic liberalization would bring an end to ideological differences generated either a theoretical displacement or political wishful thinking. As Liah Greenfeld points out, in the age of the nation-state, existing liberal egalitarianism is a matter of “the fundamental equality of those defined as members of the nation.”12 For Jeffrey Friedman, this means: Only one’s fellow nationals are thought to be entitled to the nation-state’s protection of equal rights. Citizenship—the guarantor of equal entitlement to protection against rights violations; to the receipt of government health, educational, and welfare benefits; to the freedom to live and work within a nation-state’s borders, and to a voice in its governance—turns out to be an entitlement not of all human beings, but only of those born within a nationstate’s borders, and to the same numbers who manage to negotiate its naturalization procedures.13

This view is supported by Bernard Yack when he suggests that the liberalindividualist “transcendence” of the nation is readily available only to those who take their citizenship (and the civic rights implied) in the fully developed First World nation-state for granted. And, drawing from Judith Shklar’s comparative study of the trials of Themistocles and Alfred Dreyfus, Yack further argues that the modern nation-state tends to ask for a great deal more, not less, political loyalty and ideological commitment from its citizens than Greek polities ever did.14 The critical reflection on the limits of liberal assumptions of “civic nationalism” by the writers mentioned above is conducive to our reexamining nationalism in the present context. If the liberal notion of individual rights is in reality confined to members of the nation-state, so are its moral and ideological claims and demands—at least that is the kind of “nationalist” picture presented to people outside the protection of this particular nation-state. In today’s international community, the United States is probably the only nation to believe that, or act as if, it has the right and moral obligation to impose its own standards on other nations while at the same time fiercely promoting its own national interest, often under the same banner of American exceptionalism and supremacy. This approach is bound to backfire regardless of ideology, culture, or political system of the targeted country, as indicated by instances from Singapore’s defiance of American displeasure over its caning of a graffiti-painting

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American teenager in 1995 to the blunt criticism from the European Union, Canada, and Mexico that greeted enactment of the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton Law.15 Those events, in historical hindsight, only marked the trajectory of the United States’s transforming itself from the leading nation of the “free world” in the early years after the Cold War to the emporium of the whole universe. They thus pale in comparison to U.S. behavior under George W. Bush’s administration, which also brought into sharper focus various discourses—both inside and outside the United States—against perceived U.S. unilateralism and imperial hubris. The tension between universal principles and national boundaries is by no means unique to liberalism, to be sure. For all practical purposes, the Sino-Soviet conflict of the early 1960s was not only a dispute over Marxist principles and communist ideology, but ultimately a national conflict. It is the intuition into the unsolved—and probably unsolvable—national questions within and among socialist states that led Benedict Anderson to foresee the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into mere “republics.”16 In this sense, the inauguration of Chinese reforms in 1979 can be considered from a different angle, that is, as China’s declaration of independence from the so-called Strategic Triangle defined in ideological terms. During the Cultural Revolution, China as a nation was deeply politicized, yet in a sense China was also the first to depoliticize itself from the Cold War ideology by embracing the secular principles of the nation-state as defined by the late-twentieth-century global economy, culture, and geopolitical relations. The drive toward normalcy underlines the Deng period’s determined, indeed desperate disengagement from Mao’s revolutionary utopia.17 It helps explain the collective disgust with any attempt to repoliticize China’s image in the Western media, as well as the public indifference, suspicion, and occasional hostility toward any political readings of culture and the realm of daily life (such as those associated with critical, feminist, and postcolonial theories). Here, the post-Mao experience of secularization, with its peculiar intensity and obsession, lays the groundwork for a nationalist discourse, while decidedly excluding other modes of ideology and political thinking. The prevailing “culture” that arose in response to the new perception and imperative of the nation in the Chinese 1990s originates in mass culture or consumer culture, while the previous cultural norms held by elite intellectuals, “high” as they might still be, ceased to be “universal.” What is missing in this alliance between economic sphere and mass culture, then, is a theoretically articulate political philosophy and cultural vision. The rise of nationalism discloses this political and intellectual vacuum in the “fastest

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growing market” in the world. While nationalism in contemporary China encompasses a spontaneous, popular longing for equality and democracy, it also indicates the limits of its own political realization. While resisting “Western-style democracy,” the reform bureaucracy is on permanent alert against any attempt to redeem or appropriate the Maoist notion of mass democracy and participation.18 Yet without the grounding of the nation-state in a fully developed and institutionalized democracy and political participation, the reform project will continue to be imbalanced, and the emergent discourse on Chinese nationalism and mass culture will not be able to achieve its ultimate historical and political meaning.19

Mass Culture and Intellectual Discourses

The binary of rising nationalist sentiment in the social sphere and its lack of politico-intellectual formulations at a national level may be examined in the cultural space through a critical analysis of the tension between mass culture and high culture. In the new pattern of dynamics between the state (as the central power holder), the West (as the superimposing universal norm), and a yet-to-be-defined Chinese everyday world, a nebulous figure is the intellectual of post-Tiananmen China. Despite the tidal wave of mass culture and the new breed of what Antonio Gramsci termed “organic intellectuals,” the semiparalyzed state of elite intellectuals, alongside the ambiguous ideological doctrines of the state, constitute an obstacle to addressing the post-1989 complex of social relations and ideological conflicts, particularly since 1992. Without the full participation of its attendant “high culture,” the newly emerging social experience is hampered by a lack of cultural vision, ideological articulation, and political legitimacy; instead, it is forced into a probational state of namelessness and wordlessness, even though it is clearly the field in which the dazzling vocabulary of historical change reaches or, better still, creates a mode of language and representation. The subaltern condition of the cultural forms of the immediate daily realm presents itself as a matter of political urgency, given the fact that the Chinese social sphere is being rapidly “opened up,” “regulated,” and institutionalized by both the modernizing nation-state and by global ideologies of capitalism that are now in every sense an integral part of the Chinese context. Without an intimate contact with and political commitment to its present sociohistorical imperatives, however, high culture as an actually existing institution of social ideology risks (and already suffers from) an internal tendency toward antidemocratic self-reification.

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Both aspects of this disjointed relationship between intellectual discourse and the everyday sphere have an immediate, negative impact on notions of nationalism and mass culture circulating in social and discursive realms in China today. A deliberate disengagement or boycott, valorized by a wholesale intellectual transgression toward positivism and Hayekian conservatism, was the badge of a self-styled “liberal intellectual” in the 1990s. Consisting mostly of middle-aged “Cultural Fever” veterans who spent their more youthful years introducing Western ideas and discourses, “liberal intellectuals” still commanded considerable prestige in post-Tiananmen Chinese society. This prestige was enhanced by China’s renewed membership in the global ideology of market capitalism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such “liberal” positiontaking reinforced and institutionalizes the gap between “high culture” and mass culture. This in turn circumvented a much needed critical intervention into the everyday sphere, its ideological space, and its as yet latent political discourse. It affected even the most engaging cultural critics who maintained a keen interest in theory and evolved in the early 1990s to meet the challenge of secularization, globalization, and mass culture. The new critics were put on the defensive not only due to their connection to theoretical discourses of the Western Left, but also due to their resistance to a nativized, triumphant discourse of the new world order. Yet such intellectuals’ own populist tendency, and their discursive dependence on theory, weakened their often thoughtprovoking descriptions and analyses of the new sociocultural space. As a result, their self-positioning and formulations sometimes fell short of offering a qualified, nuanced treatment of such topics as globalization, market, and commodity; instead, they rushed toward theoretical generalizations about the “desire of the people.” The point of departure for intellectual-political differentiations, however, must be traced back to the shared assumptions of the postrevolutionary intelligentsia, and to this intelligentsia’s changing collective situation vis-à-vis consumerism and popular nationalism during the 1990s. It is no accident, therefore, that the powerless, disoriented, and sometimes alienated state of mainstream elite intellectuals waged its counteroffensive from within the discourses of enlightenment and humanism, two foundational discourses of New Era intellectuals. The vanguard of social change and the engineers of new social systems throughout the course of modern Chinese history, intellectuals in the early 1990s seemed to be a marginalized group having trouble with its own self-understanding and public role in a booming market and the sphere of everyday life. Between 1993 and 1995, almost immediately after the unleashing of market forces by Deng’s last push for continued economic reform,

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lamentations over “the loss of humanist spirit” (renwen jingshen de shiluo) by a few literary scholars and philosophers in Shanghai soon triggered the first—for many also the last—nationwide intellectual debate of the 1990s. Starting with a series of panel discussions published in Shanghai Literature and especially in Dushu,20 concerns about the crisis of literature as a serious, divine enterprise soon evolved into an overall reproach of commodification, mass culture, the vulgarization of public taste, and the degradation of national culture. Before long, an apocalyptic, heavily ontological contemplation on the “situation of being” (shengcun jingyu) set the moral and intellectual tone for the discussion of “the humanistic spirit.” Meanwhile, the discussion drew spirited supporters and bitter critics along the way and occasionally developed into a holistic evaluation of the history and culture of Chinese intellectuals and a critique of contemporary Chinese culture.21 In a panel discussion first published in Dushu in 1994, Cai Xiang offers an overall view of the “humanism” problematic, but in a somewhat less self-important (or self-pitying) fashion. For Cai, an essential feature of the 1980s, the first decade of post-Mao reforms, is the pioneering role of ideas in the process of social change. Propagating the ideas of enlightenment humanism, the intelligentsia addresses social desire by imagining a future Weltanschauung in terms of its own intellectual tradition and knowledge system. The unchallenged moral authority of intellectuals, as Cai suggested, is based on this deeply utopian imagination. But things were different in the 1990s, Cai noted: Once the market is motivated, it creates a realm of its own. The ensuing market economy, instead of accommodating the utopian imaginations of intellectuals, subverts once again the discursive power of intellectuals by its inclination to commodification and consumption. Such slogans as freedom, equality, and justice, once endowed by intellectuals with an idealist passion, now acquire their secular interpretations by the Bürger class [shimin jieji]. In those interpretations, the most primitive forms of money worship are reactivated or manufactured anew, selfish individualism is all but encouraged, body and soul become separable, the cruel law of competition is reinstated in social and personal relationships. Whereas a prosaic if not vulgar taste for life and value orientation is quietly being established, the spiritual [ jingshen] is subject to repudiation and ridicule. An age of vulgarization has descended.22

Anachronistic as they may sound, such cliché laments over body-soul separation, the loss of the spiritual, and the age of vulgarization suggest a radical, indeed violent historical overlap and rupture. Despite his distanced

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viewpoint, Cai’s observations are nevertheless directed at the radically contemporary situation of Chinese intellectuals as perceived by the humanists. What is more interesting in this perception is not its image of the masses in the marketplace, but the particular way in which the particular crisis of intellectuals is framed. Cai again: If an intellectual movement fails to transform itself into universal social praxis, its worldly significance is cast in doubt. Yet, once it leads to a vulgarized social praxis, we face a bitter, sour fruit. Intellectuals’ romantic imaginations of society and the individual are completely distorted in reality. Now the masses are manipulated by their spontaneous economic interests. Pursuing sensual pleasure, they turn their back on the preaching of intellectuals. The bell is ringing. Class is over. The intellectuals’ identity as “adviser” [daoshi] has al116

ready gone through its own deconstruction [xiaojie].23

For many liberal-humanist intellectuals, this “bitter, sour fruit” is the result of a mischievous postal error, borrowing Gellner’s “wrong address theory” out of context. Gellner tells us that Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history was intended for classes but delivered to nations by mistake.24 Throughout the 1980s, liberal-humanist intellectuals believed that history had a message for them to deliver to the Chinese nation, but the 1990s made it clear that the message was instead delivered to the marketplace by the joint forces of the state and global capitalism. It would not be surprising had the intellectual elites as losers expressed displeasure at unwanted competition. Instead, the intellectuals seem to be blaming the customer for receiving the package in the wrong place and from the wrong person. They cannot openly criticize the government. Not only does that involve real risks; more important, it contradicts intellectuals’ whole-hearted participation in the national project of modernization. The flip side of their verbal obsession with “civil society” is their tacit recognition that without this civil society national interest is virtually inseparable from state interest, even in domestic affairs, once the state is the mover and shaker in radical economic and social liberalization. They cannot blame global capitalism, either. Their universal claims and ideals rely heavily on their association with, and loyalty to, the symbolic and ideological institutions of the West. And from the beginning of post-Mao China, an anticipated integration with the contemporary world system has been the real, perhaps the only sociopolitical content of the enlightenment discourse of the New Era. Therefore, for Cui Yiming, there is a line to be drawn between the “mature consumer culture of the West,” whose sole purpose is to make a clean profit, and the “immature”

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one (in China in the 1990s) that meddles with and poisons the spiritual condition of a society by offering phony guidance.25 Li Tiangang, in another panel discussion published by Dushu, further argues that conspicuous consumption, an evil he calls unique to Chinese consumer culture, comes primarily from the “old habits” of Taiwan and Hong Kong, “where governments and laws do not protect private ownership.”26 The observation is particularly curious as well as revealing in its determination to separate irregularities from the “universal validity” of liberal-humanist teleology. However, the meaning of consumerism and mass culture must be understood in the discursive context laid out in the discussions of “humanistic spirit.” Yuan Jin places hedonistic consumerism against the background of a disintegrating orthodoxy of communist ideology and notes the “lack of institutional control on the booming desire” in the moment of power transition. This allows Yuan to define the heavily existential term “ultimate concern” (zhong ji guanhuai) of humanism by its oppression by, and proposed opposition to, an older genealogy of Chinese modernity. “Against the profound background of the loss of meaning, our ultimate concern has been suppressed by the national pursuit of wealth, strength, and regeneration, our reason based on value has been compromised to make room for instrumental reason; consumerism and hedonism will deal one more blow to the contemporary humanistic spirit.”27 What is noteworthy in this passage is the lining up of the forces that oppress “meaning and value,” in which consumer society is a logical successor to nationalism and modernization. Here the rising postrevolutionary masses and their everyday culture acquire their new implications in the standard liberal-humanist version of the experience of Chinese modernity culminating in communism. The implied “national” significance of mass culture also sheds light on the historical and ideological stake in interpreting the emerging secular world independent of both the state and intellectuals. Thus, a “reconstruction of the humanistic spirit,” in Cai Xiang’s words, has as its dual objective “resisting the prosaic and the vulgar consumer society” and, because of the oppressive nature of the state and its corrupt connection to market, “transcending the institutions (of the state).”28 The liberal-humanist agenda largely unfolded during discussions along explorations of different paths or strategies of resistance and transcendence. While metaphysical contemplations and moralist condemnations abound, a more concrete discourse is taking shape by grounding itself on two basic ideological systems: that of individuality and that of independent scholarship as an autonomous institution of knowledge.29 The latter is the path taken by the

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first pronounced intellectual group taking shape in Beijing after Tiananmen. Associated with the journal Xueren (Scholar), this diverse group gained its perceived—and to a certain degree distorted—identity as intellectuals seeking to replace a “history of ideas” (sixiang shi) with a “history of scholarship” (xueshu shi), theoretical innovations with solid study of Chinese texts, and hyperbolic intellectual agendas with normative research codes. Their methodology, which promises to transcend twentieth-century Western theory, eventually comes to rest on the eighteenth-century empiricism and positivism incorporated—and presumably purified—by the earlier, pre-1949 generations of “masters of Chinese scholarship.”30 This humanist stance draws criticism from two primary directions, both dissatisfied with its negative assessment of the market and the rising mass culture, and both impatient with its elitist, ontological posture of resistance and transcendence. The first, interestingly, comes from the old liberalhumanist establishment of the New Era and finds its spokesman in Wang Meng, one of the most accomplished contemporary Chinese writers and former prc minister of culture before 1989. In his 1994 article “Random Thoughts on Questions Concerning Humanistic Spirit,” published in the liberal intellectual journal Dong fang (Orient), Wang undercuts the discourse of “the loss of humanistic spirit” by questioning the use of the term “loss,” which implies the urgency of restoration. Appropriating the liberal-humanist denunciation of Maoist utopia (for Wang a “pseudo-humanistic spirit”), Wang highlights his reformist argument that the present moment is the most open, liberal, and human episode in the economic, social, and cultural history of modern China. Referring to the freedom and options now available in the marketplace, Wang relates, even equates the development of humanity to the market economy. Mixing sarcastic mockery and common-sense reasoning, Wang deplores the elitist, philosophical “antihumanism” displayed by the champions of high humanism, which tends to paint consumer crowds in subhuman terms and demonstrates an antagonistic absolutism and intolerance toward difference, pluralism, and diversity. In a relaxed, optimistic, and down-to-earth tone, Wang calls for intellectual respect for the “reasonable albeit prosaic need of the majority.”31 The market and its culture that Wang endorses here are ones in which “ideologues experience an unprecedented sense of loss.”32 Similarly, he sees a strong “spiritual civilization” as threatening to “get a few people so excited that they will grab their dust-covered labels and sticks to rekindle the passion for prosecution.”33 Wang may sound like an apologist for the status quo, but the likeness only suggests an intricate relationship between liberal-humanist intellectuals (Wang resigned as

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minister of culture after 1989) and the reform bureaucracy; it reveals the material interest and the kind of politics of depoliticization shared by both. Wang’s last remarks are intended to warn against lingering “communist hard-liners.” Driven from political and discursive power, this monstrous image is invoked from time to time to serve different political or culturalpolitical purposes. Its existence, in reality or in the liberal-humanist imagination, is still a potent historical landmark by which “independent” intellectuals define themselves as supporters of reform and critics of arbitrary power. The other critical direction comes from a younger generation of literary and cultural critics who came to prominence by engaging mass culture and “deconstructing” the aesthetic-philosophical discourse of 1980s high modernism. For critics like Zhang Yiwu, “humanistic spirit” is nothing more than “the last mythology” of the New Era.34 From a “postmodern” sensibility for heterogeneity, Zhang repudiates the effort by advocates of “humanistic spirit” to raise themselves into the realm of universal humanity from which to “observe human suffering and explore human destiny.” From a postcolonial perspective, Zhang offers his poignant remarks that the discursive setup of this “humanistic spirit” is such that its purported loss in the native Chinese context only reaffirms the supremacy of universal norms of humanity coded in “Western discourse.” By doing so, as Zhang argues, the humanist discourse effectively reinvents a subordinate “China” in order to resubmit this temporally lagged “other” to the hegemonic hierarchy and teleology of the present world. Many sharp observations withstanding, the main thrust of Zhang’s criticism lies in its assertion of the legitimacy and significance of the present, of the process of secularization, and of the consumer. This position allows him to view humanists as seeking to regain their lost subject-position at the expense of the rich meaning of the present and the productivity of the masses in the marketplace. According to this viewpoint, the humanists cling to their universal discourse in order to maintain their authority and privilege as enlighteners, or teachers, of the Chinese people. Zhang writes, “‘The humanistic spirit’ [discussion] never provides a solid analysis of current culture. Instead, it turns itself into a metaphysical and theological escape from a multiple global transformation. This is bound to become a negative element in the historical situation of China in the global context.”35 In crude terms, and often in a hasty fashion, the advocates of the “humanistic spirit” and their critics set straight a basic battle line drawn by various intellectual and ideological positions in the early 1990s. This objectively brings some clarity to an extremely uncertain and fluid situation, as

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the convergence and discrepancy between the state and the nation find their preliminary expressions in the conflicts between high culture and mass culture, intellectual discourses and the everyday sphere, universal claims and local imaginations and productions of the “present now.” From his position against universal claims of liberal humanism and high modernism (two pillars of the discursive “New Era”), Zhang Yiwu goes on to define what he calls the “new condition” (xinzhuangtai) of contemporary Chinese cultural life. Among the possibilities of this new condition, Zhang lists “the end of the grand narrative of Chinese modernity” and “the crisis of mythological construction of knowledge based on the idea of enlightenment.”36 All this, as Zhang tells us, is brought about by the progress of marketization, commodification, and consumption in Chinese society. As a result, the intellectual promise to individuality, diversity, pluralism, and the expansion of cultural life are being fulfilled in the market; or, in Zhang’s words, “the poetic aspirations for a ‘civilization’ and ‘life of abundance’ designed by the discourse of modernity now become a realistic choice in the everyday sphere itself.”37 This leads to a changed logic of cultural imagination and representation, which Zhang characterizes as a “postallegorical” mode of writing. Alluding to the Jamesonian notion of “national allegory” (but also in an idiosyncratic use of the notion), Zhang criticizes the kind of “Third World” cultural strategy that seeks to incorporate the global symbolic order by creatively identifying China with the “Other.” Contrary to the effort to exoticize and aestheticize China so as to insert the cultural spectacle of a “backward” society into the chain of universal progress, “postallegorical” writings intend to deconstruct this hierarchy by repositioning themselves in close contact with the immediate “conditions” of the everyday sphere. Zhang illustrates this “new condition” (xinzhuangtai) with two recent cultural developments. One is the rise of t v soap operas (in contrast to the allegorical trips of “going international” taken by Chinese film auteurs such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige); the other is the stylistic transformation of recent Chinese fiction from “experimentation” via “neorealism” to the “new condition” writings. Zhang applauds the recent mass media boom in general and t v soap operas in particular, and argues that a new, locally based, and communityoriented space of signification is being created. In Zhang’s view, t v soap operas have not only been the most successful form to project and capture the “new condition” of Chinese social life, they also prove to be a sophisticated way “to adapt to the cultural and value orientation of an emerging popular society [minjian shehui], to attract native audiences by understanding

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and managing the ‘state’ of their immediate life, their concerns, and their hidden longings, so as to provide the people with an imaginary solution.”38 In tv hits such as Kewang (Aspiration), Bianjibu de gushi (Stories from the Editorial Bureau), and Beijingren zai niuyue (A Beijing Man in New York),39 Zhang sees a representation of daily life, a reaffirmation of the language and living conditions of ordinary Chinese, and an attempt to “capture the mass imagination of China’s own social conditions and probe into its unconscious.”40 All this, Zhang acknowledges, is based on the commodification of present conditions, which gave rise to the emancipatory significance of mass culture’s subversion of the “allegorical mode” of representation. By tracing the metamorphosis of recent Chinese fiction from experimental to “the new condition,” Zhang notes many writers’ efforts to mix experience (in its Freudian-Benjaminian sense of Erlebnis) with “an objective,” that is, to achieve a juxtaposition between the “individualized imagination and the collective experience of ‘China’ in the present moment” (in this sense Zhang returns to the original meaning of Jameson’s “national allegory.”) In reading He Dun’s story “Shenghuo wuzui” (“Living Is Not a Crime”), Zhang observes that the subjectivist, modernist ambition to present a unified world of meaning is replaced by a “constant shift and slippage of viewpoint, which incorporates fragments of reality into the text: there is no redemption or transcendence, only a depiction of the ‘condition.’ ”41 For Zhang, the appearance of a “nonsubjectivist individuality” prefigures new possibilities of writing. In this mode of writing, language is not only the medium of aesthetic artifact; more important there is the “native tone” (muyu), which constitutes a vital link between individuality and the larger community sustained by “the memory of the people” (renmin jiyi).42 Obviously, the critical affirmation of mass culture draws its theoretical inspiration from postmodernism, postcolonialism, critical theory, and cultural studies in the West, particularly in the United States. In fact Zhang Yiwu and his comrades seem to have little choice but to rely heavily on “Western” theoretical discourses to describe and legitimize an emerging field whose cultural, ideological, and historical significance is supposed to come from the immediate everyday, from the unfolding historical drama that is China itself. This presents them with two challenging requisites. First, they need a theoretical qualification of globalization, or global capitalism, as a Chinese experience, and a close analysis of its relationship to the state as well as to the everyday sphere. This in turn sets up the social and political platform for their critical engagement. Second, they need a strategy of autoreflexive use of theory itself, which contains its own historicization in the application of

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theory. That would stabilize their positions in an intensely antitheoretical and increasingly conservative intellectual environment. However, in meeting these challenges they were often put on the defensive by their liberal and conservative opponents. This is partly due to Zhang’s and his proponents’ almost total absorption in charting an exciting, and indeed explosive, new cultural space. As pioneers exploring a puzzling new cultural space emerging from the “socialist market economy,” they were busy building advance posts rather than refining their discursive emblems. In doing so, they resorted to eye-catching terminologies from Western cultural studies as markers in a nameless terrain, sometimes even as temporary shelters in a theoretical wilderness. The dilemma of the new cultural critics was also due to a structural separation between “critics” on the front line of cultural studies (and cultural journalism) and “theoreticians” in the traditional disciplines of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory, a pattern formed during the 1980s, when “theory” enjoyed unchallenged authority in developing a semiautonomous intellectual discourse vis-à-vis the state apparatus of ideology. Last but not least, the theoretical discourse of mass culture had yet to clarify its own stand in a differentiated social sphere in political terms. Not surprisingly, from these weak spots liberals waged their attack on the new discourse on mass culture which they contemptuously labeled as “postism” or “post-ology” (houxue, the Chinese term for “theories with the prefix post-” could also mean “post-scholarship” or “late-born scholars”). In a widely quoted article published in Dushu, Lei Yi accuses the “post-” critics of confusing the “First World problematic” with “Third World situations,” and of universalizing theoretical discourses of postmodernism without a much needed process of “nativization.” The general and superficial validity of Lei’s point is obvious. However, his call for “study of the Chinese context” bears a pointed political implication that reveals what is truly at stake in this debate. By rhetorically praising the courage of confronting the epistemological hegemony of the West shown in the works of Foucault and Said, Lei is in fact deploring the lack of courage among Chinese “post-” critics to confront hegemony and power in their own, Chinese environment.43 This position and strategy are shared by other liberals. In an article published in Hong Kong, Henry Y. H. Zhao, who teaches Chinese literature in Britain, discerns an unholy alliance between Chinese postmodernism and mass culture that aims to “destroy elite culture.” By positioning elite intellectuals as a critical priesthood on the margins of modern society, Zhao defines the rise of mass culture and its theoretical discourse as “neoconservativism.” For him, there seems to be a ready short-circuit

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between a “conscious challenge to the global victory of late capitalism” and “an apology for the degradation of contemporary culture.”44 As if this were not clear enough, Xu Ben, who teaches comparative literature in the United States, further argues that a premodern-modern distinction is more crucial than an East-West opposition, and that the “chief form of oppression” in China is not the imperial or “postcolonial” West but the totalitarian regime at home. Xu rightly argues that the centrality of postcolonial criticism in the West is a resistance to hegemony rather than a selfassertion of indigenousness. Yet this leads to his unmediated speculation that the Chinese discourse of postcolonialism is centered on a celebration of indigenousness, not critical resistance, or at least that its resistance is directed to the “discursive oppression from the First World.” Thus in Xu’s writings, the “post-” discourse evolving from a study of the explosive postrevolutionary everyday sphere (as a culturally rich and politically ambivalent realm) is immediately subject to a trial of ideologico-political identity, or loyalty between the Chinese regime and the universal West. The verdict is by no means unpredictable. Attacking the Chinese discourse of postcolonialism, Xu writes that it is out of touch with Chinese reality. By elevating the discursive oppression from the First World into the chief form of oppression experienced in China today, it shuns away—unwittingly or not—from the violence and oppression that exist in native social reality. Although “Third World” criticism from China takes pains to keep a distance from the official discourse of nationalism, it nonetheless avoids any critical analysis of it. Its antagonism has international edge but no domestic pointedness. Therefore, not only can this discourse coexist peacefully with the official discourse of nationalism; it accommodates the latter’s interests. By ignoring immediate oppression at home and criticizing a “global” one at a distance, it developed a phony mode of resistancecriticism in the humanities that is extremely conducive to the state’s ideological control and appropriation.45

The debate between postmodernism, cultural nativism, and political “conservatism” in many ways can be regarded as a skirmish of the general eruption of intellectual conflict along the battle lines between “liberalism” and the “New Left” discussed in chapter 1. I will more closely analyze the implications of Chinese postmodernism in chapter 3, in which some of the still open and inconclusive dynamics described and examined in the present chapter will be brought to a closure, both in terms of their historical development and in terms of their ideological and political self-awareness.

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By placing the Chinese debate over theory, mass culture, and nationalism against the global background of capitalist euphoria and its ideological homogeneity, liberal criticism has had the final word even before its target returns fire. In a complicit political environment where even the mention of an alternative is subject to suspicion and ridicule, any argument for the possible cultural and political meanings of a new social sphere is an uphill battle, even without its own theoretical shortcomings and historical limitedness. The deliberate link between such an argument with that notorious thing called the “official ideology of the Chinese regime” therefore seems to be political overkill. In Xu Ben’s writings, liberal criticism reaches its political judgment on such matters without ever bothering to engage the everyday sphere, which constitutes the very historical and theoretical problematic of its object of criticism. For Xu, as for other Chinese liberal intellectuals, notions of both the West (or “the First World”) and China (“Third World” in this context) have their definite though different rankings in universal history, and this is taken as the sole standard of ideological evaluation. But in this respect the object of liberal criticism did return fire by attacking precisely the universal hierarchy to which the “Other” (that is China) is submitted, and by advocating a political mode of reading to meet the political aggressiveness of the liberal rhetoric of depoliticization. In this ideological (and sometimes “merely” cultural-political) dogfight, however, some deeper social, political, and cultural issues should be explored to rethink Chinese nationalism and mass culture from a critical viewpoint. In the early 1990s, the increasing homogeneity of global ideology was reflected in the Chinese context in an ever more simplistic and dogmatic alignment with laissez-faire economics and its social politics. The ideological stake of the liberal critique of Chinese mass culture and postmodernism can sometimes be illuminated by the former’s critique of Chinese nationalism. Not surprisingly, nationalism in its use in the Chinese intellectual lexicon after 1989 was invariably associated with ethnocentrism, xenophobia, nativism, parochialism, antiprogress, anti-Western, self-enclosure, and even fascism. This list bears striking similarity to the one complied in writings on this topic in the Western media. The fierce resistance met by postcolonial theory in China in the early 1990s was derived from its perceived origin in national liberation and nativist movements (rather than from its intimate participation in First World academia, as some would suspect). Postmod-

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ernism was greeted with open hostility by some Chinese intellectuals not because it presents a world more modern than modern and, to paraphrase a Toyota commercial, more American than American, but because it implicitly encourages a devious assertion of locality, difference, relativism, and a “deconstructive” mode of thinking. This is indicative of the liberal intellectuals’ negative perception of anything less than fully endorsing the mainstream discourse of universal modernity. Mindful of the harm that nationalism could inflict on a modernizing, Third World, and residually socialist country, liberal intellectuals were extremely cautious when discussing the historical, theoretical, cultural, and ideological challenges and implications of an emergent nationalist discourse. If mainstream liberal intellectuals interacted with the issue of nationalism at all, they did so from an entrenched position protected by the universal discourse of modernity. It would be unfair to say that liberal intellectuals always refused to see things in nationalist terms, since so much about nationalism was now economically determined, and increased social productivity and mobility only made national boundaries more explicit. In Qin Hui’s view, nationalism is based on an identity of interest, therefore it does not preclude conflict between different national interests. But for Qin, battles over national interest do not invalidate universal principles and institutions such as the free market; indeed, such struggles become sustainable and lawful precisely on the basis of these principles and institutions. Qin was absolutely right when he went on to suggest that reasonable nationalism therefore must base itself on civic rights, as the national subject must be first a subject of his or her own self-interest. Thus Qin rightly rejected the kind of nationalism that, as Lu Xun had sarcastically said more than half a century before, propagates the idea that “since it is no good to be slaves of foreigners, let us become slaves of our fellow countrymen.”46 Based on his belief in individual rights and liberal institutions, Qin Hui places universalism ( pushi zhuyi) above nationalism. For him, it is universal freedom (such as free trade), not nationalism (such as protectionism), that will “swiftly close the economic gap between rich and poor nations in the world by means of the invisible hand of the free market.”47 Moreover, for Qin, this prescription for global economic equality also indicates “a new, supranational and supracultural moral idealism, a prospect of universal freedom and fair competition, and a new ideal of ‘great commonality’ [datong] based not on equal distribution of wealth but on equal opportunity.”48 This euphoric vision of the future of the world finds its less intoxicated footnote in an article by Sun Liping, then a Peking University sociology

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professor. Titled “Joining the Mainstream of World Civilization: Three Questions Regarding Nationalism,” Sun’s essay identifies nationalism, particularly postindependence nationalism, as one of the major obstacles to integration with global capitalism. “In some countries, nationalist sentiments become the reason for self-enclosure, and thus an obstruction to social development. Look around the world. The most ardently nationalist countries are often those most resistant to the mainstream civilization of modernization, and some of them are, simply put, the poorest countries in the world.”49 Unlike Qin, Sun contends that nationalism is founded on deep-seated emotion, and therefore beyond rationalization. By defining Third World nationalism as the radical opposite of the “accumulation of human civilization in value, institutional arrangement, and operational rules,” Sun repudiates the longing for a “third way” by calling it a “nationalist utopia no different from the kind of ideological utopia we used to have.”50 One may note here that the main concern of liberal intellectuals of China after 1989 was a continued, undisturbed engagement in universal modernization and a fuller integration with the global system. For this ultimate purpose, the rise of popular nationalism in the social sphere, the making of a new “form of life” in the everyday sphere, its cultural selfassertion, and its protopolitical imagination of a new community will all have to be suspended and repudiated. Here, interestingly, the liberal rhetoric of civic rights, democracy, and resistance to the regime is in an awkward position, because its discourse of universal modernization finds its most enthusiastic, if not implied, listeners within the technocratic state. This provides a different perspective from which to look at the liberal “resistance” to the political state as the alleged patron of nationalism, mass culture, and “Chinese postmodernism.” In the everyday sphere, however, the political state acquired a dramatically different image: rather than a “neoauthoritarian,” state engineering an economic take-off, it now existed to hinder the universal progress of humanity. Since it is logical to assume that universal progress is poised to penetrate this local fortress, any criticism or “resistance” that by-passes the regime is considered a compromise. Thus, to “liberal intellectuals” postcolonial critique of Western cultural hegemony means but an explicit endorsement of the regime. Yet this aggressive questioning of the moral integrity of critics of the rising everyday sphere is at the same time the weakest: the reason why most Chinese critics were not too anxious to wage a frontal assault on the oppressive and relentless regime was precisely because the regime under which they lived could still punish relentlessly. There seemed even

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less reason to risk one’s good fortune when there were other spaces and opportunities for individuals to exercise their freedom and potential. This, of course, is not to turn a blind eye to those social imperatives, from political democracy to human rights. Rather, the intellectual situation in the early 1990s posed a basic question about the relationship between the state and the nation, a relationship that was being radically redefined as the Chinese market and consumer masses surged onto the center stage of history. Most Chinese liberal intellectuals nowadays still consider the nation in terms of the state. Their statist vision is rooted in their ideological participation in the state project of modernization, in their elitist attitude toward the people and society, an elitism sanctioned by the reform bureaucracy, and in their lack of any serious commitment to democracy. The “liberal” identity in political discourse is thus limited to an aristocratic enthusiasm with the so-called institutional separation of power between central and local governments. Wu Guoguang, one of the most visible spokesmen of this “liberal school” in the early 1990s, is featured in Carma Hinton’s documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace. Wu confesses in front of the camera that his political ambition is to “transform the party from within,” that is, to make the powerful party apparatus capitalist. For this envisioned bureaucratic capitalism, both a politically conscious nationalism and a politically articulate mass culture are more inconvenient than corruption, unemployment, and disparity of wealth, because they quietly push for the realization of freedom, equality, justice, and mass participation. Yet the latter must be seen as the ingredients of the “civic rights” being imagined in the changed social sphere and its popular culture. Throughout the 1990s, liberal intellectuals paid only sporadic lip service to such civic rights. For them, it naturally takes a new authoritarianism—a new ruling class constituted by technocrats in the central government, regional or provincial powers and interests groups, an emerging managerial class, and the intellectual elite—to carry out the incorporation of the country into “the mainstream of world civilization.” For what would be a critical, democratic discourse of contemporary Chinese nationalism and mass culture (for the purpose of which even the “postmodernists” remained inadequately prepared), the challenge of the present is to search for a new way of imagining the nation under new socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. This discourse would be based on a renewed utopian expectation that these circumstances, unprecedented in human history, are bringing with themselves a political message, if not an implicit political form. For all practical purposes, postrevolutionary secularization was not only tearing down the rituals and taboos of a semiagrarian society and

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a semi-Stalinist regime, it also was putting the time-honored institutions and ideologies of “civil society” to a historic test. Secularization not only disdained traditional politics by an almost selfless pursuit of a new, socioeconomically defined selfhood. It also, in its restless and mundane production, consumption, association, experimentation, and imagination, created new possibilities for community, participation, culture, and democracy. In the Chinese countryside, the need for a higher degree of specialization of labor created by rural industrialization was rediscovering the residual or persistent infrastructures of collectivization that were dominant during Mao’s China. Thus one witnessed vibrant community-building in semiindustrialized rural China, a tendency termed by Wang Ying, a young sociologist, “neocollectivism” (xinjiti zhuyi). Instead of returning to the Maoist people’s commune, she tells us, Chinese peasants in many rural areas were reorganizing themselves into new economic and social units. As a result, a new relationship appeared between individuals and the collective, a relationship that was based on the new market environment as much as on natural, social, political, and cultural-ethical topologies of tens of thousands of Chinese villages.51 In the industrial sector, the technological conditions created by post-Fordist or flexible production also met with the idea of workers’ participation in management (an idea originally created by Chinese workers in the Anshan Steel Corporation [Angang] in the late 1950s, which received Mao’s enthusiastic support).52 This stood in sharp contrast to labor conflicts in some joint-venture enterprises where authoritative, sometimes abusive management caused discontent, leading to occasional strikes. In the sphere of cultural studies and critique of ideology, liberal intellectuals were often unaware or refused to face the fact that the ideology they subscribed to was an integral, if not essential part of the state: modernization and integration. Throughout the post-Mao era, the liberal intelligentsia had always been an ideological ally of the reform bureaucracy with which it shared economic, social, and ideological privilege. It was widely acknowledged in both China and the West (particularly since Deng’s death in February 1997) that the oppressiveness of the regime primarily came from its determination to ensure social stability as a necessary precondition for economic modernization. This deprived the liberal rhetoric of resistance of its political substance, as the liberal intelligentsia fully supported and participated in the state project. In this context, the liberal observation of a secret connection between theoretical reaffirmations of mass culture (popular nationalism) and apologies for the political violence of the state was either a narcissistic fantasy (as suggested by Henry Y. H. Zhao’s perception of a conspiracy to destroy

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“elite culture”) or a sentimental gesture toward the prevalent global ideology of capitalism and its moral justification. In both cases, the rise of the masses was the source of profound intellectual unease and fear. Instead of analyzing the ideological complexities and contradictions of the mass culture in China today, many Chinese intellectuals scorned its not being a high culture. Rather than creatively accommodating the democratic longings in a postrevolutionary, protoconsumer Lebenswelt, they pledged their loyalty to the timehonored institutions of bourgeois society. Without the endorsement of the state and the participation of intellectuals, the emerging discourse of Chinese nationalism and mass culture in the 1990s was a social phenomenon unfolding primarily in the everyday sphere and through the medium of popular culture. Aristocratic in its class orientation and universalistic in its cultural outlook, the intellectual elite was ever wary of a tacit agreement between the state and the masses. Evolving from a postrevolutionary rationalization, “independent” or “liberal” intellectuals— the mainstream of the surviving cultural elite of the 1980s—instinctually denounced the rise of nationalism and the secular cultural sphere. The suspicion of an ideological collusion between absolute state power and the masses has its roots in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when Mao’s utopian vision and willpower fused with the popular homogeneity of socialist China. The force unleashed by popular participation in national politics or mass democracy (da minzhu) devastated the intellectual elite and its cultural institutions. The fear of this collusion might have its roots in the millennia of mandarin discomfort with any shortcut between the emperor (the beholder of the “mandate of the heaven”) and the nameless, voiceless people. Contrary to this elitist distance from the everyday sphere, Dai Jinhua, a leading critic in feminist theory and cultural studies in Beijing, presented a dazzling picture of what she defined as a “shared space,” or a “protopublic space,” constituted by an intricate relationship between the state, the domestic market, and global capitalism. Commenting on the market cult of Mao Zedong at the beginning of the 1990s, and the mass cultural production and consumption of the history of the Chinese Revolution, contemporary Chinese history, and the Cultural Revolution, Dai writes: As an overdetermined, satirical consumption of (state) ideology, political taboo and collective memory, these phenomena mark the first massive, successful manufacturing of cultural fashion by the cultural market or an incipient cultural industry of mainland China. Attaching itself to the state institutions and apparatuses of cultural production (by turning itself as a subordinate unit), this production process greatly promotes an “independent” cultural

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system. . . . which includes a great variety of “cultural companies” specializing in recording or advertising, book dealers, private book vendors, numerous “weekend editions” of (official) newspapers, newly launched scholarly journals or leisure magazines, the contracting-out of state television programs (the “program producer” system), “independent filmmakers,” consumer-oriented studios, workshops named after the artists themselves, freelancers, and so forth. Semi-independent as it is, this burgeoning “system” or market overlaps with the state apparatus of ideology. While expanding the gaps in the power structure, they provide an awkward yet vibrant “shared space” or “protopublic sphere.” The entry of global capital into the Chinese cultural market, because of its powerful operational mechanism and financial strength, reinforces this kind of consumption of ideology, memory, and taboo—a unique cultural resource in China. At the same time, the presence of global capital also reveals 130

the Chinese dilemma of getting caught between a preindustrial reality and a postmodern culture, state nationalism and postcolonial discourse, ideological control and the self-assertion of consumption.53

The massive invasion of the everyday sphere or “social capital” into the state system was accompanied by a radical commodification and capitalization of state apparatuses and institutions. After Deng’s tour of the south in 1992, Dai tells us, a frenetic merger between the market and the state took place. Amid political constraints, market demands, and the structural discontinuities between the existing system and a market economy, many state publishing houses, tv stations, and film studios started leasing their licenses and trademarks in exchange for cash, a necessary strategy for their employees’ economic survival. “On the one hand, mainstream ideology strengthened its control; on the other hand, the cultural market and industry increasingly shared the power of apparatuses of classical ideology and constantly transformed this power into capital.”54 Dai’s detailed observations made possible a more critical and nuanced analysis of a complex relationship. In the newly emerging social sphere, not only were the state and its ideological apparatuses fully participatory in the making of a consumer culture, they also penetrated its unconscious and exist in its innermost landscape as capital. A closer look at this unconscious and its political economy may also lead to a more constructive criticism of Chinese postmodernism. In this regard, Wang Hui’s observations are suggestive. In an article on Chinese cultural studies and criticism, he points out that while deconstructing all kinds of value systems in contemporary China, Chinese postmodernism “fails to analyze the activity of capital and account for its relationship to the Chinese reform movement.” The last relationship, for Wang, is a major aspect of contemporary Chinese social life.

Nationalism, Mass Culture, Strategies

Wang further points out that some Chinese postmodernists tend to “identify production and reproduction of desire as ‘demands of the people’ in the name of mass culture.” This, in his view, is “fiction” because it interprets social relations determined by capital in the process of marketization as a neutral, ideology-free “new condition.” The Marxist approach advocated by Wang here seems sound. On the other hand, however, Wang did not seem to go fully beyond the conventional liberal elitist position when he accused Chinese postmodernism of promoting nationalism and ethnocentrism, and especially when he suspected a collaboration with official ideology in order to “drive out the critical ideologies of [enlightenment] intellectuals.” But this much is right: “In the historical context of post-1989 China, the rise of consumerism is not merely an economic event; it is a political event as well.”55 If Wang’s suspicion was rooted in a perceived lack of critical, political consciousness in the “postmodern” celebration of mass culture, then his suspicion was not ungrounded and he certainly had a theoretical point. To highlight Wang’s call for a critical, political engagement in the field of cultural production, the discursive space of mass culture and nationalism in the early 1990s was indeed marked by a general disengagement. That left the field to be appropriated either by state discourse as an official ideology or by popular sentiments as a social desire. As the two came to be perceived as representative modes for experiencing and imagining the nation, nationalism became a theoretical taboo for intellectuals mindful of their “independent,” “cosmopolitan” image. Meanwhile, positive writings on nationalism were unable to separate themselves from the clichés of the official rhetoric of patriotism, or the culturalist, ethnonationalist praise of tradition. Pretheoretical in approach, they made little contribution to a critical discourse of Chinese nationalism.

The Necessity of Politics

Before concluding this chapter, I should return to a historical account of the making of the intellectual field in post-Tiananmen China. The determinedly apolitical features of market nationalism and the intellectual reluctance to politicize it are entangled with the political ruptures that have occurred since the end of the 1980s. The bloodshed in Tiananmen was widely thought to have ended the legitimacy of the post-Mao regime. However, the legitimation crisis of the state, far from preventing the state from responding to outside pressure and internal change, instead supplied it with new motivation, a sense of urgency to broaden and renew the basis of

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its rule. The invention of a “socialist market economy” in the early 1990s neutralized the moral appeal of liberal thinking by buying off the population, above all, the technocratic-managerial class. As the frozen political relationship between state and society finds its own theory in Dengism, the Chinese state, still more than nominally socialist, stands to win back popular support with rapid economic growth, and cash in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the ontological compromise” of a population’s recognizing the existing codes of a given social habitus.56 This sociological notion, when extended to a naturalhistorical scope, sheds light on the unsentimental aspect of nationalism, with which intellectuals are least comfortable for both class and symbolic reasons. In the 1980s, the intellectual and moral authority of liberal or independent intellectuals had three sources: (1) their semiautonomy from the state; (2) their simultaneous deep loyalty and commitment to the project of reforms (often by being critical but constructive partners of the state, a pressure group within the party, so to speak); and (3) their access to, and incorporation into, the cultural-discursive institution of the capitalist global system. Throughout the New Era, these elements intertwined with, and spurred the overarching ideology and euphoria of, modernization without activating their profoundly different ideological and political assumptions and possibilities. The unrelenting intervention by the state in 1989, itself an “inevitable result of the changing domestic and international environment” (as Deng put it), rendered that united front impossible. A tighter state control of ideology forced liberal intellectuals into a state of perpetual, although silent, dissent. However, this cleavage by no means invalidates the fundamental assumptions of the development of a Chinese society shared by the state and intellectuals, and by their seemingly conflicting political philosophies. In light of the emergence of an economically based nationalism, one may argue that 1992, not 1989, was the true watershed in the history of postMao China. After Deng toured the southern provinces to give his reform programs a final push, the state took the lead in an all-out embrace of the market and global capital. The new market-oriented campaign finalized and consolidated the mode of socioeconomic change since 1979, and legitimized an irreversible separation between the political sphere and the social sphere. While the change allowed more balance and flexibility in the organs of state power and more economic, social, and personal freedom outside of it, what has been effectively suspended is the socialist commitment to the people as a whole, and to the historical experiment to create a new kind of democracy, freedom, and equality that supersedes the bourgeois model.

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As a result, both the state and society could now afford to pursue and formulate their interests and ideologies separately, as long as the tensions or disagreements between the two remain manageable. The delinking of the state from society, and vice versa, in this particular fashion, was the condition of possibility for a new conception of the nation. It allowed the realm of socioeconomic activities to show its topologies and limits and, through its attendant mechanism of communication and cultural production, to project those activities and exchanges as a “form of life,” or as an imagination of a “community of destiny.” However necessary for the survival of the state and appealing to the average consumers, this delinking between political and socioeconomic spheres of national life prefigured the fundamental limits of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. It deprived the nation of its political foundation in popular participation, deprived material well-being and personal freedom of their social meaning, and blocked the interaction between “high” and mass cultures. In this respect, what risked being lost was not the “humanistic spirit” of high intellectuals but a collective passion for political and cultural democracy. Critical intellectuals, while acknowledging the significant step toward further liberation of the forces of production and increased social liberty, also faced the same challenge (although in their own way) experienced by those in different positions. It has to be said that the social desire to which the state appeals is oblivious of the political ideals that have given the reform project its historical horizon. As the decidedly postrevolutionary masses rushed toward xiaokang, the Chinese version of middle-class society, intellectuals as a social group were experiencing its unprecedented differentiation in social, ideological, and political terms. While some stood on the sideline, engulfed by a sense of alienation, others were busy navigating the new social space in search of new class affiliations. Far from recovering from the blow of 1989, intellectuals now faced the ever more ruthless forces of the market, forces that for many ordinary people—but certainly not all— were liberating and empowering. That they were becoming consumers en masse does not mean they have had any choice, although that they never had a choice does not mean they would not want to become consumers, either. But elite intellectuals might have a very real sense of irony and helplessness now that both the people and the state seemed to have figured out their ultimate purpose—stay in power and become rich fast (two of Deng’s legacies that promise to last for some time to come)—and nobody bothered to listen to the intellectuals anymore. They might have read their Hegel, but they never seemed to pay attention to his dim prophecy that modernity inevitably

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brings “vulgarization” (amplified and somewhat caricatured in postmodernity). Worse, unlike their First World colleagues, Chinese intellectuals do not have a fully institutionalized professional world to fall back to when they are caught in furious marketization, privatization, disparity of wealth, commodification, and ideological upheavals. With the economic bonanza, the rise of secular nationalism, and the domination of consumer culture in early and mid-1990s, Deng’s China finally and logically completed its ideological break from the Maoist utopia, although this was also the moment when a genuine continuity between the two eras had never been clearer in deeper historical terms. Throughout the 1990s, as the world approached the new century, the People’s Republic was swiftly mutating into but another nation-state defined by not the twentieth but the nineteenth century, and this tendency was consolidated both by the internal rationalization of the state and with the blessing of a homogenizing global ideology that presides over the withering of meaningful political life everywhere. The demise of the lofty humanist-modernist rhetoric of the New Era intelligentsia put an end to high philosophy as a paradigm in national cultural discourse. Without the culturalist dominance of the national elite, the everyday world surged into the cultural mainstream, offering itself as the chief mode of representing social life with its increasingly diverse yet flat, mobile yet pattern-forming activities of production and exchange. This, pretty much in the way Gellner describes it, gave rise to a new perception and new experience of the nation. To attribute the socioeconomic basis of the new nationalist outlook solely to the state’s ideological need to cling to power reflects only the habitual thinking of those China specialists who trained themselves to see everything through the prism of an absolute state. This mode of thinking also helps explain why intellectuals have been so reluctant to shift their attention and position to the social sphere, where true action was taking place and new questions were to be answered. For elite intellectuals in particular, the commitment to universal programs—be they the universal value of Chinese culture (Confucianism), the universal forces of production (Marxism), or the universal realization of individual freedom (liberalism)—enables intellectuals to put the particular, pluralistic, ephemeral, and mundane aspects of the everyday sphere on hold in anticipation of a grander drama of ideas and history. In this context, it is hardly surprising that nationalism was viewed negatively by mainstream Chinese intellectuals. This is not so much because nationalism was underdeveloped as a theoretical problematic (most intellectuals seemed unaware of relatively recent works on this topic by Ernest

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Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Eugen Weber, Benedict Anderson, Liah Greenfeld, etc.) but because nationalism was perceived as incompatible with the universal claims of modernity, Confucian civilization, or the posthistorical West. In the age of economic liberalization and social relaxation, there is a heightened political urgency to formulate a new national culture, including its political discourse, which will serve the popular struggle for a more just distribution of national wealth (which used to belong to “all Chinese people,” and which is now allotted through the scrambling of the privileged). In this sense the discursive debates among intellectuals are by no means made inconsequential by China’s becoming a consumer society. On the contrary, in a social space where mass culture and new imaginations of community are taking shape in the everyday sphere, such intellectual discourses or “high culture” matter because they are charged with a political as well as cultural task in formulating a political notion of national culture and addressing the rise of the ordinary people in the economic sphere. In this specific context, the political imperatives of the nation and its culture must be understood in democratic terms, just as democracy can only be anticipated through imaginations of the new nation and its new culture. In this respect, Gan Yang’s vision of a political nation coming out of an economic one (and his profound worry about this process going awry) bears a striking echo to that of his teacher in late nineteenth-century Germany, Max Weber.57

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Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the “New Era”

throughout this chapter I use two terms whose distinct meanings need to be made clear from the onset. I use “postmodernism in China” to signify a global discourse of postmodernism and postmodernity, which entered China via the intellectuals who seek theoretical inspiration from, and discursive synchronization with, the West, and which is largely limited to small circles of literary and art criticism. The discourse in this sense continues the modernist trend of the 1980s. Its currency in the 1990s indicates the rapid growth of a consumer-oriented economy and the relentless process of globalization. Its content, however, is strictly foreign and technical, corresponding to the gleaming enclaves of international economic and cultural capital amid the extremely uneven Chinese distribution of wealth. Its aesthetic and political excitement comes mainly from its vision (and, to an increasing degree, its daily experience) of China as an integral part of the global market. “Chinese postmodernism,” a far more nebulous yet productive discourse, is the focus of this chapter. “Chinese postmodernism” pertains to Chinese everyday life as a producer of a culture of the postmodern. However, “postmodernism” as a theoretical discourse in this context seems vacuous except as a deliberate signifier (or an ad hoc stand-in) for an unsettled, postponed, living, and reconfiguring collective experience of revolution, modernity, statehood, and the masses. To this extent the “post-” in “Chinese postmodernism” refers not so much to a sense that something is over, but that something is finally ready to begin along with the breaking of all kinds of rigid epistemological paradigms, aesthetic canons, historical periodizations, geographical hierarchies, and institutional reifications. Chinese postmodernism as a

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social discourse can therefore be considered to be a revolt against the modernist and modernization ideology of the New Era which, posing itself as the “new enlightenment” from Maoism as a form of Chinese feudalism, sealed the legitimacy of Deng’s China in the discourse of modernity. Modernity in the context of post-Mao Chinese history was thus centered in economic, bureaucratic, and social rationalization, which is increasingly reduced to a state-sanctioned integration into the capitalist world market and its hegemonic ideology. The social material environment created by the modernist thrust in the last two decades of the twentieth century also, dialectically, made it possible for Chinese intellectuals to seek a broader understanding of modernity which is both more historically complex and theoretically supple as a concept informing their daily encounter with change. The initial economic success of post-Mao Chinese society, the multicenteredness of global capital and production, and the survival of the Chinese socialist state allow ordinary Chinese to feel that one does not have to become a Westerner to enjoy the good life. This, to be sure, has profound implications for a whole range of quotidian, social, cultural, and political choices and aspirations. Like nationalism, postmodernism functions in China today as an empty net of “universal high culture” which often brings to the surface a heavy catch. Instead of projecting the Chinese reality into the timeless now, the notion of Chinese postmodernism, through its collective nostalgia and its struggle to break free from the high modernism of the New Era (1979–89), is haunting the Chinese consumer masses with the past which has never been put to rest. Moreover, Chinese postmodernism reveals the conditions of possibility for a world of life which has so far escaped analytical description. As the cultural form of the new market and consumer masses nurtured by the state, Chinese postmodernism became not only an important component of the mainstream ideology of Chinese society in the 1990s but also a utopian space for reconfiguring social and class relations, the imagination of community and nation, and democracy. In this chapter I explore the issue of Chinese postmodernism through four steps: (1) discussing its stylistic features, (2) locating the discourse in a particular modernism-postmodernism shift in the post-Mao Chinese context and beyond, (3) analyzing the political stakes the issue raises for positions involved in intellectual debates of the 1990s, and (4) acquiring a historical understanding of Chinese postmodernism as the cultural logic of a postsocialist society.

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Discussions of Chinese postmodernism often operate at multiple levels and in multiple dimensions merely to justify their own presence. To those who view the issue with doubt and suspicion, or who resist the notion of Chinese postmodernism altogether, any writing about the subject will inevitably be asked to document, illustrate, and explain the central texts unfamiliar to readers, regardless of the intention and position of the author. Yet, at a pedestrian, journalistic level, it has never been too difficult to describe something novel and tantamount to a radical paradigmatic break in the aesthetic or psychological sphere in China since the mid-1980s, as sweeping new fashions and profound ruptures are virtually the norm of post-Mao Chinese 1 social and cultural life. Nor is it particularly challenging to identify and inventory postmodern(ist) works in virtually allthis the is arts in China today a part opener pageby mechanically using the standards established in Western critical and theoretical discourses: the new generation poets subverting the high modernist canon of Yang Lian or Jiang He; the political pop artists with their quasi-Warhol portrait of Mao; Xu Bing and his production of fake Chinese characters; Cui Jian and Chinese rock after him; the return to the documentary style by the “Six Generation” after the global success of modernist filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou; the antiheroic fiction of Mo Yan and Yu Hua; and an avalanche of new writers trading modernist intensity and seriousness for depth-shunning depictions of everyday life in the Chinese 1990s. If one acknowledges that, despite the great theoretical sophistication seen in the past two decades, postmodernism is still understood by many as a cultural-aesthetic fashion with a Euro-American genealogy, then it is a natural, though unconvincing, first step to try to prove that there are credible, sufficient similarities between the postmodern fashion in China and its Euro-American archetypes. This is natural because there is no other way to enter the discursive or the symbolic system without a borrowed name. It is unconvincing because the question of Chinese postmodernism was born in the paradox that the technically postmodern features of contemporary Chinese culture and society, instead of qualifying the latter as postmodern, often highlight the sense of irony emerging from the gap between an economic reality and its image or self-image in the symbolic and imaginary spheres. Thus any argument for a Chinese postmodernism necessarily becomes an effort to bridge the opposites dialectically, to mediate between existing but ultimately distorting frameworks of experience and thinking in order to articulate something qualitatively new from them. And to this

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extent postmodernism, as an idea and as a discourse, whose intervention in Chinese cultural and intellectual life is as aggressive as it is precarious, can be used as a theoretical hinge between a nameless reality and the system of naming which connects uneven and often discontinuous historical times and spaces. Playing on the home ground of postmodernism, which is diverse, expansive, eclectic, and readily reproducible and disseminated, it seems trivial, indeed misleading, to list essential characteristics and qualities, formal or otherwise, in order to prove one’s authenticity, a notion dissolved by the very concept one tries to adopt. In practice, most critics and theoreticians of postmodernism in China seem to settle with a sort of loose family resemblance which for them justifies the debate on Chinese postmodernism as a cultural-political question. And, ever since Fredric Jameson’s signature linkage of postmodernism and consumer society—the notion of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”—was popularized in Chinese intellectual circles in the late 1980s, postmodernism has been seen by its Chinese students as primarily a sociohistorical change articulated culturally. That the Jamesonian thesis has become a particular Chinese problematic is conditioned, first, by the presence of a national discourse of high modernism, which the new rises to challenge and undermine; and, second, by China’s rapid economic growth, its decidedly mixed modes of production, and its incomplete but intensifying integration into the global capitalist market. Together, those two things provide a material, symbolic, and demographic environment for the postmodern generally and minimally defined. From this perspective, one would find that those postmodern images and logos in contemporary Chinese art and culture, rather than being a fantasy of a few desperate international fashion chasers, are an integrated part of the thoroughly commercialized Chinese urban landscape, complete with McDonald’s restaurants and Starbucks coffee, karaoke bars, pirated dv d s of Hollywood movies, shopping malls and wholesale clubs, advertisements of global brands, and omnipresent consumer crowds. But does that mean postmodernism in China is something for real? The question about the Real—to be precise, that the Real has become a question, ironically—is perhaps one of the surest signs that we are actually dealing with the “postmodern,” in and for which reality and history seem to have all but disappeared. That, however, should not divert us from the particularities of the issues coming with the as yet nebulous theoretical question of Chinese postmodernism. If postmodernism as such is widely understood in today’s media and academia as something, in its antiessentialist way, essentially

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of depthless surface, unlimited reproducibility, and radical decenteredness, as something sustained by its appeal to the consumer masses everywhere and, as Jean Baudrillard would tell us, containing virtually no relationship to reality whatsoever, this is not to say we should keep reporting on the new fashions succeeding one another on the Chinese streets. In fact, those who oppose even the appearance of the term postmodernism in China maintain that, by borrowing or (re)producing those (Western-originated) simulacra, Chinese postmodernism and its proponents are threatening to obscure the urgent Chinese social, economic, and political imperatives known as modernity. Based on their respective notions of the modern, which are intensely although often only implicitly political, opponents of postmodernism go on to press often contradictory charges, accusing Chinese postmodernism of being subversive (undermining the value system of the socialist state), complacent (legitimizing the state by affirming and celebrating the commercialized everyday culture under the former’s ideological control), too Westernized (whoring after the academic fashions of the Western theory), too Chinese (harboring haughty nativism and nationalism), too leftist (criticizing capitalism and undermining the universal truth of modernity), too rightist (celebrating desire and commodities), and so forth. One is tempted to admit that, in the Chinese context, it is sometimes more interesting to study the resistance to and dismissal of postmodernism than to catalogue its aesthetic achievements; that the more productive discussions of the formal innovations of Chinese postmodernism will sooner or later end up in the political. The strong, often bitter objections to the idea of Chinese postmodernism must be considered a constitutive part of it as a discourse; its ideologico-political contestedness must be understood as part of the familiar sensuous richness without which “Chinese postmodernism” as a term would be either too abstract or too matter-of-fact. To give the issue of Chinese postmodernism any historical and theoretical sense-certainty (Sinnlichgewißheit), one has to start with the widely held view—or rather, conviction—that, in China at least, the modern is far from over, or, as some still sincerely believe, has not yet begun. It is also important to remember that postmodernism, like other “-isms” and “-ologies,” is an import from the West. As the most recent and least time-honored theoretical discourse from a foreign land, it tends to be singled out to shoulder the usual suspicion, even hostility, from those who are increasingly frustrated by following the West at ever closer range, or those who resent Western discursive and theoretical licensing and hegemony, even though what they hold as good, solid, and genuinely Chinese knowledge is often little more than imports

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from nineteenth-century Europe, such as positivism, empiricism, and historicism. The intellectuals’ frustration reflects their powerlessness as a social group in the face of intensified globalization, on the one hand, and the increasing cultural and political self-assertion of the consumer masses, on the other. Once again, in the manner of previous generations of the Chinese enlightenment, they pledge their loyalty to the modern and, by doing so, denounce the postmodern as a harmful deviation or, at best, a premature, thus useless, gift from their Western contemporaries. But it is precisely in its resistance to the postmodern that the Chinese modern reveals itself not as a totality but as a differentiated, fragmented, and contradictory experience. Its prolonged discursive and ideological uniformity is not a historical given but a historical contingency made possible by the persistence of the truly “premodern” elements in Chinese society (poverty, ignorance, superstition, chaos, repression, and the backlash of the ultraconservative, who oppose not only the revolutions of 1919–49, but the republican revolution of 1911 as well), and, more recently, by the continued and renewed rivalry between socialism and capitalism, that is, between the two competing ideological claims on modernity in China in the post–Cold War years. This simply reminds us that the truth-content of Chinese postmodernism may very well lie in the intellectual and political stakes it has raised for all parties in the historical conjuncture of postsocialist China, in the ways it disrupts and demystifies entrenched positions in an increasingly differentiated cultural and social sphere after the disintegration of the Reform consensus among the state, intellectuals, and the masses, and among elite intellectuals themselves. To those who entertain the idea of Chinese postmodernism and its complex, far-reaching implications, a diligent description of postmodernism in China will almost immediately turn into an analysis of a dazzling overlap of forms, discourses, and histories, a project inevitably more historical, theoretical, and ultimately political than it is ready to admit. In order to make sense of Chinese postmodernism, we must show those Chinese images or—if they are as genuinely postmodern in every aspect as their Western “originals”—Chinese simulacra in a historical situation, as something produced by a changing life experience and mode of production, and something which in turn offers a picture, a narrative, an ideological proof of socioeconomic relations, instead of a mirage in the global mirror-house of symbolic inflation and commodity fetishism. This means that even to see how China receives postmodernism one has to show how China produces it. A meaningful notion of Chinese postmodernism must be in-itself and

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for-itself a historical coming to terms with Chinese modernity as an admittedly unfinished project but one whose legitimacy, validity, and universal claims have already, for better or worse, come under fire. The perception, experience, and anxiety that modernity as an organizing principle, an allencompassing, meaning-bestowing framework, is losing it grip on Chinese daily life lies at the heart of a Chinese discourse of postmodernism.

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Various artistic, literary, and theoretical styles in the Chinese 1990s were not only informed by postmodernism as an international discourse, but emerged more specifically against the cultural-intellectual mainstream of the Chinese 1980s, the so-called modernist-humanist paradigm of the New Era. While high modernism had become an intellectual and formal institution in the Chinese metropolis before the Tiananmen Incident, it was thoroughly dismantled in the 1990s by the joint force of the market and the ideological apparatus of the state, as well as by a rising cultural populism and nationalism closely associated with the nascent urban middle class, its economic interest, and its increasing cultural and political assertiveness. In literature, for example, the modernist cannon, established by waves of formal innovations in the post-Mao era from Misty Poetry via the Search for Roots Movement to experimental or avant-garde fiction, while maintaining its prestige supported largely by its international recognition, has been swamped by an explosive literary market catering to the new, wealthier, and thoroughly depoliticized (except for an increasing nationalist sentiment) reading public that has little patience for stylistic experimentation and transhistorical contemplation. The emblem of postMao Chinese intellectual discourse, its jargon à la Martin Heidegger or Walter Benjamin, and its metaphysical vision, is now replaced either by a journalistic genre designed for quick media exposure and consumer gratification or by a professionalist turn to the normality and standardization of academic production and promotion. All this passive or aggressive undermining of the previous cultural hegemony is true of Euro-American postmodernism, which came into being in the 1960s and 1970s by breaking free from the establishment of high modernism (of James Joyce, Le Corbusier, Vassily Kandinsky, etc.). Even those who carry on their uncompromisingly modernist or avant-garde style unabated—writers such as Ge Fei come to mind—are bound to be read in a different light, that is, in the context of the cultural market, in terms of a particular flavor or brand, of a

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uniquely marketable quality. The brief moment of Chinese high modernism as a whole has already been subject to academic canonization and has lost its shock value and subversiveness vis-à-vis the dominant taste and ideology of the reading public and officialdom.1 There are reasons to believe that the shift from modernism to postmodernism is more useful as a theoretical narrative pertaining to a sociohistorical periodization than a chronological, discipline-based description of the developments in literature and the fine arts, especially in a context, such as the present one, where both modernism and postmodernism are derivative frameworks. Where the sociohistorical periodization owes its explanatory clarity and persuasiveness to the paradigmatic shift from modernism to postmodernism in literary and art history, the convoluted TimeSpace implied in this formal change cannot be overlooked. Any critically meaningful study of Chinese postmodernism (or modernism, or, for that matter, realism and romanticism) would involve not one but two pairs of formal and social histories. Each of the four subcategories of this double binary—for instance, Chinese realism and the Chinese Revolution, European high modernism and European imperialism—strives for its own diachronic continuity and institutional realization while constantly getting mired in synchronic agitations and cross-cultural resonance. Together, they create an intense force field in which one thing readily becomes an allegory of another and in which historicity is overdetermined, over-represented, repressed, forgotten, and eventually comes back with a vengeance. Postmodernism, unlike previous styles in cultural history, does not seem to be conducive to the traditional comparative approach, such as studies of influence or parallelism, probably because its dependence on, indeed symbiosis with, technologies of instantaneous reproduction and dissemination render such efforts ineffective and unnecessary. That, however, only collapses the formal comparison into a laborious analysis of cultural fluidity conditioned by a multiplicity of socioeconomic and ideological contexts. With respect to the dialectic between form and content, one may contend that Theodor Adorno’s thesis, based on his study of European classical music, that each new artistic paradigm contains in and only in its aesthetic solution of tensions created in the history of form, a solution (or what we call articulation) of the social-moral dilemma of its time, still holds true, although only on an expanded historical horizon, with an added appreciation of the radical Other.2 Looking closely, many discussions of Chinese postmodernism actually talk about how postmodernism as such lands on Chinese shores and

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establishes beachhead positions, although the effort is often confused, by readers and authors alike, with the attempt to show that a particular Chinese cultural form has emerged to address and articulate the globally determined, but locally conditioned, socioeconomic reality with a distinct Chinese accent. Even the crudest opponents of Chinese postmodernism can recognize the implied causal relationship between this cultural style and a socioeconomic reality which must be somehow more than the merely classical modern, henceforth their dismissal of Chinese postmodernism as unwarranted for an economically and technologically backward society unworthy of (or unable to afford) the pleasure, freedom, and prestige of the postindustrial (or information, or consumer) societies with which these critics do not seem to have an argument. But if we focus on the deconstruction of the moral, philosophical, and political systems of the enlightenment and modernity, long seen as the core values and secret weapons of the modern imperial and colonial powers, and contemplate its effect on areas on the margins of an unevenly developed world system, then the turn from modernism to postmodernism offers the possibility for a new discursive and ideological framework through which to continue the search for an alternative to the classical blueprint of modernity. To this extent, postmodernism as an event may carry a revolutionary message in an era when October-style revolutions seem all but impossible and undesirable. Thus the intellectual decolonization from the ideology of modernization contains an inherent choice: Given the Chinese experience of socialist modernity, the “postmodern” inevitably points to a horizon beyond socialism as we know it. In the meantime, however, the obsessive reunion between prerevolutionary China, or the “repressed modernity” of the 1930s and earlier, and the postcommunist world order has made itself the norm of history which the “postmodern” seeks to transcend, often by reviving the socialist alternative in new configurations of traditions, memories, and social values and infrastructures heterogeneous to capitalism. To this extent, there is an elective affinity under the Chinese circumstance between (post)socialism and postmodernism, to which we will turn later. Such affinity comes not so much from a theoretical opportunism as from an expanded historical horizon, for the discourse of Chinese postmodernism, if only for its mere presence, must force open the internal periodization and contradictions of Chinese modernity and set different moments against one another in a radically synchronic fashion in the new environment. If revolution, socialism, and mass democracy are the ultimate negation of the bourgeois project of industrialization and nation-building before

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1949, then Deng’s New Era is a negation of the Maoist paradigm by means of Weberian rationalization, which leads logically to a market economy under the supervision of the bureaucratic state.3 While even the most ardent cultural conservatives of the 1920s were modernists by other standards (except for extremely rare cases like Wang Guowei and Gu Hongming, all of them supported industrialization and the republic), cultural conservatism, which seeks to define the Chinese future by revisiting its cultural tradition, is contained by and compatible with the loosely defined discourse of Chinese postmodernism. The cultural, intellectual, and political content of Chinese postmodernism depends to a significant degree on which particular modern it seeks to go beyond and/or return to. In any case, Chinese postmodernism offers itself as a cultural playground for “all the names of history” (as Friedrich Nietzsche put it) to lay their claims on the future once again. If “postmodern” means—as the Japanese kanji translation of the term tuo jindai literally conveys—departure, shedding off, coming out, breaking away, disengagement, exit, and freedom from the classical modern as the ruling ideology of the era of catch-up modernization and military dictatorship in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then Chinese postmodernism, while challenging the ephemeral high modernism in the 1980s, uncunningly extends the epistemological and empirical boundary of modernism and modernity into the entire history of modern China, which has the revolutionary and socialist experience at its core. By doing so, it implicitly deconstructs, complicates, and even historicizes the ideological and simplistic opposition between socialist modernity and its bourgeois or counterrevolutionary alternative, despite the intention of the “liberal” or, in this sense, modernist position to highlight the revolutionary and socialist periods as anomalies to the universal experience of modernity defined by the ideological hegemony of the post–Cold War West. By its participation in the contemporary circulation of terms and discourses, the arrival of “Chinese postmodernism” simply reveals and destabilizes the ideological assumptions embedded in the premodern-modern order around which the foundational discourse of modern China evolves. In other words, the emergence of the term Chinese postmodernism, like its Japanese counterpart which took root in an ultraindustrial country in Asia, “testifies not so much to a transition from one period to another as to the shift or transformation of our discourse as a result of which the supposed indisputable of the historico-geopolitical pairing (premodern and modern) has become increasingly problematic.”4 To this extent Chinese postmodernism, as reality or as fiction, adds a new twist, nuance, articulation to the tradition of

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antimodernist modernisms, including various forms of cultural traditionalism, nativism, rural communalism, nationalism, and populism, whose histories are as long as the history of modernity in China itself. Whereas the impulse to challenge Western modernity and search for an alternative evolved in Japan, in the form of kindai no chokoku, or “the overcoming of the modern,” during the Pacific War, in China the social energy and imagination found their political realization in socialism, which, in its Maoist form, brings a solution to the dilemma of non-Western modernities, which is how to address the geographical unevenness in terms of temporal evolution, and simultaneously to absorb the universal chronology hitherto invented and internalized in national-political terms.5 The socialist experience of Chinese modernity is central to the historical determination of the discourse of Chinese postmodernism. While the addition of the third term or stage to the premodern-modern chronology suggests that the modern itself should be freed from the straitjacket of ideologies and social imaginaries into a larger historical constellation, different narratives are constructed by different social positions in the effort to break the Eurocentric grip on the notion of the modern, which makes it possible for non-Europeans to imagine a native or modern in which one feels both contemporary and at home. All of them are predicated on the notion that modernity is an open-ended process which produces its own dispersal, alternative, subversion, and reversal, which has become popularized by the mass media. Thus the temporary discontinuity suggested by postmodernism allows one to pay attention to the spatial discontinuity or the uneven spread of the modern. This in turn gives rise to a world picture and a sense of one’s individual and collective location, which creates the internal tension between postmodernism as a more ruthless force of global standardization and postmodernism as a pluralistic system which tolerates, even appreciates, spatial and temporal differences, as various local architectural or fashion styles and the distinctly postmodern genre of nostalgia may testify. It is only in the context of postmodern nostalgia that we can explain the splashy return of Mao badges and Cultural Revolutionary songs to the streets of Chinese cities; the popularity and sometimes cult value of some Chinese socialist-realist film classics; the consumer appetite for yellowed black-andwhite family photos from the simple everyday life under Mao; and numerous bestsellers made from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the students sent down to spend their formative years in the remotest provinces of China during the Cultural Revolution, all of which are selflessly mingled with a flood of other cult images of nostalgia derived from the immediate past or

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the yesteryears of prerevolutionary China.6 One could even argue that it is only amid the postmodern, postsocialist ruins or prosperity (depending on one’s perspective) that Mao’s China obtains its afterlife as an epic monument, an empire with all its sublime grandeur.7 That such images and sentiments of nostalgia as a consumer-oriented cultural fashion should inspire alarm and worry, not to mention political denunciations, should remind us that the ghosts of the past have not been dead for long, that Mao’s China remains a huge presence in the collective unconscious of postsocialist China, capable of stirring up uncontrollable imagination, and, last but not least, that the Chinese modern defined in classical liberal-democratic terms is far from a long, stable, and fully institutionalized tradition. At the same time, the postmodern liberation from the modern also exposes China—as a discourse, an invention, and an ideology—literally both to an enlarged temporal genealogy and a geographical territory. Even within “cultural China,” it readily inserts the prc into the lingering, unsettled historical constellation of prerevolutionary China and postrevolutionary China and, geographically, in the context of other, usually much richer and intensely anticommunist, Chinese regimes, societies, and diasporic communities. Thus leaving the modern may also imply that the Chinese state is going through legitimation mutation. Where Chinese nationalists and critics of global capitalism want to emphasize that the economic transformation of China requires the strengthening of the nation-state and a pragmatic attitude toward the socialist legacy, for the enthusiasts of the global free market, a straight path to the future has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt. Not only did the furious technological innovation and financial speculation (on Wall Street and in the form of venture capital) in the United States in the second half of the 1990s set the tone for perpetual growth (and for the perpetual ideological present), the rise of Japan and later of the newly industrial countries in East and Southeast Asia in the postwar decades—through their protected participation in what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “Golden Age” of twentieth-century capitalism—has also proven that capital can be multicentered, multinational, and multicultural. The postmodern (as the symbolic order of late capitalism) and the premodern (traditional or, more precisely, prerevolutionary) tend to flirt with one another, as they do with the rhetoric of Neo-Confucianism, Confucian Capitalism, or Asian Values, in a way reminiscent of Freud’s famous observation that the superego and the id tend to team up against consciousness. And in reality they unfailingly find their common enemy in Chinese socialism as an inheritor of the Chinese enlightenment and modernity.

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Given the experience of Chinese socialism as a painful alternative and often desperate resistance to the hegemony of Western capitalism (and, one should add, “social imperialism,” as the state interest of the USSR was termed during and immediately after the Cultural Revolution), it should not be hard to understand that the unexpected arrival of the “postmodern” also keeps certain socialist imaginations and practices alive. In fact, Chinese postmodernism obtained its public fame or notoriety only when it had become an ideologico-discursive platform for the heated public debate about Chinese economic, political, and social development in the 1990s, in which all the previous debates regarding Chinese modernization, socialist or otherwise, were replayed against the incipient yet unmistakable background of new global configurations, to which we will turn later. The coexisting frames of reference result in shifting characteristics of Chinese postmodernism, often frustrating its most sympathetic beholders. For instance, if Chinese postmodernism is to be viewed as a specific reaction against the established forms of high modernism, then one needs to bear in mind that modernism as a specific historical-aesthetic style has never been an “established form” in the history of modern China but always a culturalintellectual striving and a transient, embattled, precarious movement, as in Beijing in the mid- and late 1980s, and, equally briefly, in Shanghai in the 1930s.8 Moreover, the socioeconomic condition of the ephemeral Chinese high modernism—namely, Chinese (bourgeois or socialist) modernity and modernization—is widely considered to be an ongoing project yet to run its full course in Chinese and world history. The fact that most of the criticism of the discourse of Chinese postmodernism (and its moral and political intensity) stems from an undivided loyalty to the unfinished projects of Chinese modernity and nation-state indicates a temporal axis which fully collapses the discourse of Chinese uniqueness into the (liberal or Marxist) discourse of universal progress, an ideological conviction and discursive practice since the turn of the century. Compared to those universal values and institutions entailed in the Enlightenment, which are yet to be fully implemented in China (or in the West, one may want to add, as Jürgen Habermas’s writings have reminded us), any celebratory and frivolous declaration that something is over will be cast in profound doubt and viewed as “ahistorical.” In his “Theories of Postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson reminds us of the “ungeneralizable” national situation in which Habermas offers his defense of high modernism against the ideological assault of the postmodern. Jameson seems to agree with Habermas that the classical European Bürgerlichkeit, or the bourgeois public sphere, remains to this day an only partially realized ideal even in the

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core Western democracies. That, however, does not prevent Jameson from analyzing the particular political and ideological repression in the former Federal Republic of Germany, where McCarthyism was a reality and where “intellectual intimidation of the Left and the silencing of a left culture (largely associated, by the West German Right, with ‘terrorism’) has been on the whole a far more successful operation than elsewhere in the West.”9 The self-styled liberals in China today quickly adopted the Habermassian model of the public sphere while preaching the Hayekian doctrine of the unlimited power of the free market based on the propertied individual. Through its political subversion of the discourse of socialist modernity, the liberal discourse has acquired not only a moral urgency but also a “forward-moving” posture (with a Fukuyama-style “end of history” as its goal) which allows it to see postmodernism as a main threat to the radical ideology of a conservative revolution, which seeks to reinsert China properly into the evolutionary chain of universal modernity. If the postmodern, in China as anywhere else, signifies a sense of the radically new and, paradoxically, a certain loss of destiny or direction sociopolitically and historico-philosophically speaking, it is little wonder that the term would annoy most of those who see an ever clearer picture of world history rising on the horizon. The impassioned opponents of Chinese socialism are seeking to build an “alternative,” that is, counterrevolutionary, discourse of modernization and modernity based on the law of the absolutely free market. To such a conservative utopia and its demand for ideological clarity, teleological certainty, and moral intensity, Chinese postmodernism is certainly guilty of muddying the waters, blurring the boundaries, and creating too much distraction, all of which seem to benefit both the survival of the current Chinese system and survival under it. What the champions of Chinese modernity are reluctant to acknowledge or fail to see is precisely the inconvenient fact that the “fiction” of Chinese postmodernism actually lays bare the very historical assumptions and teleology of modernity as such, and therefore exposes the question of Chinese modernity—its ruptures, omissions, discontinuities, and leaps—in the new socioeconomic and cultural conditions at the end of the twentieth century. It might be very unsettling for some to see that all the pillars of modern sociocultural institutions—from “nation-state” to “subjectivity,” from the utopian design for an ideal society (or social space) to the absolute free market, and from a Eurocentric universal order to the unquestioned affirmation of cultural-ethnocentrism—have now been dragged into a seemingly endless process of deconstruction. But one can hardly make a convincing argument that it is more historical to ignore the new than to

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forget the old, and that the rise of the (postsocialist consumer) masses in China in the 1990s does not carry its own democratic and historic implications without requiring the prior establishment of the economic privilege and political institutions of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.

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Indeed, the inherent paradox of Chinese postmodernism is that, by declaring the end of an era, it creates a sense of liberation from the past, hence of a limitless, indefinite future; yet by placing itself after something it intends to transcend, postmodernism—its novelty, innovativeness, and aesthetic appeal— can only be experienced and measured against the established, dominant norms and institutions. To this extent, postmodernism inherits all the internal and historical ambiguities of modernism, and thus becomes a new trope for the changing sociopolitical space of post-Mao China. In a general sense, postmodernism, like modernism, is an endless and sometimes selfdefeating struggle to become and remain the ever new. Like modernism, it lends its form to even its most determined opponents: there are postmodern antipostmodernists, in the same way that there have been modernists of antimodernism and revolutionaries of counterrevolution. Like modernism, postmodernism entails and is entailed by different socioeconomic and political orientations and positions. Like modernism, postmodernism encompasses radically different social ideals and political ideologies. Unlike modernism, however, postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation hinges on a sophisticated, almost cynical sense that all good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been somewhere, somehow, and sometimes before, tried, and what is left for contemporary men and women is nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation in the most literal sense. In this respect, nothing is more indicative of the aesthetics of the postmodern than fashion or its concept of what is fashionable, which is fundamentally cyclical. This sense of relaxation if not freedom from the pressure of linear temporality (progress) and singular spatiality (Europe) can create new breaks, ruptures, and fluctuations as it shakes the very foundations of our notions of history, selfhood, meaning, and just about everything else. Taking place in a real historical context, such shifts have profound political implications. One of the curious things about Chinese postmodernism is its being labeled as a “neoconservatism” (xin baoshou zhuyi) by its liberal-humanist

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critics. Initially coined by the London-based Chinese literary scholar Zhao Yiheng, “neoconservatism” as an attribute of Chinese postmodernism shows almost comically how stretched and misleading those Westernoriginated, Western-defined categories can be when enlisted in Chinese political and cultural-political battles. While deploring postmodernism’s fervor for replacing aesthetics and “ultimate truth” (zhong ji zhenli) with politics, the reformist-modernist position is unable to come up with any cultural vision, let alone theory, which is able to turn cultural jargon of subjectivity into historical register of emergent social contradictions and change.10 What Zhao meant by “neoconservatism” here is nothing more than an alleged apology for the status quo or, more precisely, the reluctance and hesitation to scrap the existing system and its cultural legacies by Chinese intellectuals who equipped themselves with Western theoretical discourses of “post-ology” (poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, etc.). Here, the backward-leaning tendency necessary to qualify the definition of “conservatism” is found by Zhao in two things: First, (postmodern) intellectuals have abandoned the elitist position independent and critical of state power, thus allowing themselves to celebrate a mass culture and everyday life in China manipulated by both the (impure and underdeveloped) market and the (more supple but equally intrusive) government. Second, the implicitly or explicitly populist, nationalist, and even socialist tendency in mass cultural affirmation of the everyday distracts, indeed hinders the forward motion of Chinese enlightenment and progress, which in Zhao’s context has become a code word for the political ideal of “market democracy,” and from the vantage point of which the everyday reality of China cannot but be characterized as “conservative.” The political sentiment and ideological conviction Zhao demonstrates had achieved their fantastic form in pre-1989 China as futurology, which has since evolved into a discourse of universal, realized truth embodied by the post–Cold War West. It will be hard to understand how “abandoning the elitist position” can be used as evidence to prove someone’s “conservatism” if the concrete ideological setting of Deng’s China is missing, but by “elitism” Zhao clearly refers to the intellectual-bureaucratic consensus during the New Era, which was carried out by the “neoauthoritarian” (xin quanwei zhuyi) state. Such an express train to the universal destiny of the global market and modernism as an international language can be a smooth journey only when operated by social engineers freed from the inconvenience of popular, local, and democratic debate on Chinese modernization and modernity. (Democracy, by the

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way, never figured prominently in the pre-1989 intellectual lexicon, contrary to the popular impression left by Western t v images of the Tiananmen “pro-democracy movement.”) That, in retrospect, may explain the obsession of Chinese modernism with such aristocratic and or politically reactionary modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Martin Heidegger, and the twentiethcentury Russian religious philosophers. The politicoeconomic message of such willed high modernism is, to be sure, a belated one, which finds its messengers in the latecomers to contemporary Chinese intellectual life, such as Friedrich von Hayek, even though in the economics and policy arena the penetration of neoliberal theology is earlier and more thorough, and is aided by another elitist intellectual camp, the “neoauthoritarianists” (xinquanweizhuyizhe). The emotional drama of Chinese high modernism in the “New Era” unwittingly travels along the historical path once described, with little emotional valorization, by the sociologist Karl Mannheim as but another route of capitalization (which Mannheim quickly added is not always necessarily in ideological agreement with the main push for modernization in the industrial, military, financial, and bureaucratic sectors).11 For these Chinese “postmodernists,” however, capitalization, marketization, privatization, and other forms of social rationalization are all part of the daily reality and thus need to be seen with critical skepticism rather than sentimental reaffirmation. Even though the modernist-postmodernist conflict is implicitly or explicitly predicated on economics, the battle line is not clear cut and is defined as much by taste and “common sense” as by ideological conviction. For instance, few modernists or former modernists in China were enthusiastic about the “Harvard boys do Russia” or “Chicago boys do Chile” models, even though Milan Kundera or Vaclav Havel remained their contemporary heroes. Still, it is clear that such accusations that Chinese postmodernism is “neoconservatism” (the prefix neo- refers to its “postmodern” appearance and postsocialist politics) can be established only in the ideological environment in which the radical, top-down revolutionary plan for sweeping, total socioeconomic change is desired. Such conservative revolution, intent on rooting out the evils of revolution and socialism once and for all, can find its model in (postcommunist) Russia’s Five-Hundred-Day Plan, better known as the Shock Therapy prescribed by a group of Harvard economists to convert the Soviet command system into a free market system. By qualifying the cultural manifestations of the changing, radically heterogeneous realities of a China in transition as “conservative,” Zhao reveals the fervor of Chinese liberals to embrace global post–Cold War ideology. This ideology, nurtured in

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the Reagan-Thatcher years, continues to loom along with the climbing stock index on Wall Street. Yet its posture as a utopia seeking realization in China today would be inconceivable without the “neoauthoritarian” state and its elite intellectuals. Such a conservative utopia, to be sure, can only be elitist, “independent,” and fundamentally antidemocratic in a big Third World and still residually socialist country like China, despite its advocates’ pretense to democracy. While many Chinese postmodern works of art and theoretical discourses are recognizably, indeed, helplessly symbiotic with a chaotic complex of economic and social relations in China today, their impatient and unimpressed critics seem to have a clean-cut, holistic plan which has formulated what to change and how to change it. Its implementation (i.e., the privatization of national wealth) would be inconceivable without the endorsement of powerful interest groups in the state bureaucracy, despite the “liberal intellectuals’ ” tired self-positioning as real or potential political dissidents.12 Before the new system is created from scratch, anyone who wants to live and work under postsocialist circumstances risks being an apologist for the status quo. Here, “status quo,” like its official name, “socialist market economy,” can stand for the irreducible messiness and chaotic energy from which Chinese postmodernism evolved into a cultural form. In today’s environment of thorough commodification and manufactured consensus, the sentimental posture of a self-privileging heroism in Zhao’s “insistence on the elitist position” and “critique of vulgar mass culture” reveals in retrospect the deep yet then-hidden divide in the Chinese high modernism of the 1980s. While the stylistic intensity and formal autonomy of Chinese modernism (from Misty Poetry to New Chinese Cinema) paradoxically make possible a posthumous articulation of the voluntarism and collective utopia of Mao’s China, they also prepared a formal-discursive institution, as a temporary ideological void in pre-1989 China, awaiting its material and political realization through the final implantation of China in the evolution chain of world capitalism. Whereas Chinese modernism could be and had a high cultural form of the collective, as indicated in the prevalent first-person-plural figure we in early Misty Poetry as well as in the sociopolitical orientation of early Fifth Generation film, it is also, historically speaking, the aesthetic den of privileged individuals and their inflated subjectivity in the imagined presence of global modernism and modernity, where the collective pronoun reveals the confidence of one’s agency and leadership in a national self-transformation and cultural rebirth.13 The grammatical figure of the discourse of Chinese postmodernism, however, is decidedly communal, if subjectless, which is illustrated by both the poetry

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of new generation wanderers’ tribes and the neorealist fiction of, say, Tan Ge and Liu Xinglong, a favorite subject of analysis by leading postmodernist literary critics such as Zhang Yiwu. The final split between the “New Left” (a pejorative label used by its ideological and theoretical opponents), which includes neo-Marxists, feminists, nationalists, as well as postmodernists, and the “New Right” vividly reveals the schizophrenic political unconscious of Chinese modernism and modernity and to this extent marks the beginning of the political coming-into-being of post-Mao Chinese intellectuals which is always, implicitly and explicitly, entangled with the question of Chinese socialism in the information age and the era of global capital. The postmodern deconstruction of Eurocentric universality is quickly picked up by the nativist current and various forms of intellectual, cultural “decolonization” in 1990s China. In theoretical discourse, this sociocultural turn was marked by the disappearance of Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, the Russian symbolists, Western Marxism, and the Vienna School as intellectual-cultural reference points, and their replacement in public discussions by Edward Said, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and postmodernism (whose first and by far most authoritative theoretician for the Chinese, Fredric Jameson, is among the very few who command intellectual respect and ideological relevance on either side of the modernist-postmodernist divide). The sociological or rather, politico-economical significance of the appearance of a Chinese postcolonial stance is unclear, however. While it maintains its obvious progressive, critical edge vis-à-vis the conservative notion of universal modernity, now embodied by the self-styled Chinese liberals advocating the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous free market, this posture may also reveal the emergence of new power elites in new national and international class reconfigurations, elites who, as Arif Dirlik reminds us, may feel alienated in some ways but share, indeed, depend on, the very power they criticize in other ways.14 Dirlik’s observation is particularly to the point given the structural disassociation of postcolonial discourse today from the earlier struggles of anti-colonial and national liberation movements. In China, the half-century of socialist rule has rendered even the memory of imperialism and colonialism vague and devoid of any concreteness, whereas the ahistorical comparison between, say, Shanghai and Hong Kong gave rise to the rampant philistine wishful regret that colonialism could and would have provided a better route to individual well-being than socialism. However, except for a few Hong Kong and Taiwanese scholars, the celebration of in-betweenness, hybridity, and rootlessness associated with international mobility, now seen as a badge of privilege and success, has not caught up with Chinese post-

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colonialism, or for that matter, Chinese postmodernism in general. More important, since the postcolonial critics in China, as elsewhere, are deeply committed to enlightenment and modernization purposes, the convenient, or even only, intellectual room for them to engage in a critical rethinking of modernity tends to be defined in such ethnic, racial, sexual, and “cultural” terms that their overall theoretical and political challenge to the ideology of the modern is limited. This might be the reason why among Chinese intellectuals, the postcolonial discourse, having no difficulty associating itself with other theoretical subject-positions such as feminism, cultural studies, and so forth, tends to disdain Marxist rhetoric of totality and its propensity to “grand narrative,” whereas Chinese postmodernism, more populist and utopian, and tied closely to the Chinese everyday world, has demonstrated no such tendency. As far as their knee-jerk reaction to Chinese postmodernism is concerned, however, the Old Left and the New Right have much in common, both showing an instinctive distrust and fear of the new and the unknown in their dogmatic loyalty to reified institutions and doctrines as the sole path toward “universal truth.” To this extent, despite its own ideological ambiguity, the theoretical discourse of Chinese postmodernism seems to touch on an enormous yet nameless domain of historical happening, namely, the ascendence of Chinese consumer masses and their incipient forms of life. In this sense the argument against Chinese postmodernism has turned itself, wittingly or not, into a contested claim on and bidding for this emergent style and its social agency. As the Old Left sees postmodernism as defying and undermining the discursive foundation of enlightenment, revolution, socialism, and the party-state, the New Right senses in the emerging ideological centrism of the “socialist market economy” an ominous return of various older forms, from realism in literature and art (as critics labeled the antimodernist genres “neorealism,” or xin xieshi zhuyi) to populism and consumer nationalism in the political domain. Whereas the Old Left perceives the changing fashions and unapologetic individualism in China today as indicating the penetration of Chinese society by global capitalism, the New Right discovers an alarming complicity between unchecked state power and the affirmative, playful nature of postmodern artworks and theoretical discourses which normalize and legitimize the local hegemony and oppression—namely, the state—by celebrating the popular and the everyday under its yoke. In this respect the conservative criticism in 1990s China also took its cue from its Western counterparts, who now frequently used the strategies, tactics, and rhetoric of the Left, in this case the

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intellectual obligation to critique power at home, to formulate the rightwing agenda. That postmodernism, or merely talking about it, has provided a new discursive, ideological, and cultural environment or atmosphere for living with the dilemma of Chinese modernity does not mean that what the latter entails can now be addressed or solved in a certifiably—that is, formally, superficially—postmodern fashion, if only because postmodernism as we know it has at its “cultural” core the assumption that politics, ideology, human experience, and history itself no longer matter, indeed, no longer exist, an assumption which underscores the rise of a variety of postmodern cultural identity (of ethnic or sexual varieties), or academic politics, often in the void of classically political categories such as class and nation. It is important to note that the strong form of intellectual opposition to postmodernism that can be found in China today is defined almost entirely in terms of national politics. It attacks postmodernism as a discourse of phantasmagoria, and by doing so defends the “enlightenment” agenda of the Chinese Reform which, in today’s global ideological environment, has acquired its actualized form in the free market, the international power structure, and consumer society. All of these fall under the descriptive or analytical rubric of postmodernism, whose cultural-psychological sedimentation, or episteme, is what the radical theory of postmodernism seeks to subvert and deconstruct. By “uncovering” the hidden kinship relationship between such radical postmodern theorists as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Fredric Jameson and the 1960s as a global period of radicalization, and between the 1960s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (which is thoroughly stigmatized by the official ideology of the Reform regime), the opponents of Chinese postmodernism suggest that postmodernism in China, in addition to being a frivolous academic mimicry of Western academic discourse, is a sinister reincarnation of the revolutionary and cultural revolutionary lunacy of Mao’s China, a specter of the old political fantasy under the guise of the fashionably new.15 In the context of intellectual politics of post-1989 China, the hostility toward Chinese postmodernism becomes a psychological and philosophical stand-in for something which is much older and has never made peace with the Chinese Revolution and socialism, two definitive elements of Chinese modernity.16 Indeed the attack on Chinese postmodernism reveals an unsettled confrontation with the Chinese Revolution, a confrontation which acquires its urgency in the intellectual impulse to “return” to universal normalcy, a long-delayed bourgeois modernity based on private ownership and

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parliamentary democracy, an otherwise “commonsensical” move now complicated by the ideological fuzziness of postmodernism and its incessant deconstructive operations. The Chinese critics of postmodernism are often expressly disinterested in cultural fashions from the West, so long as the latter do not, in their original or borrowed forms, interfere, problematize, or disrupt the world picture of progress and its believed universal validity. On the other side of the coin, and along the reverse order of the same logic, are arguments that Maoism, via the back door of 1960s radicalism, remains current, in fact, prophetically postmodern, showing Chinese intellectuals a shortcut to the cultural critique of contemporary capitalism pursued by Western Marxists. Such an argument also conveniently forgets the very different economic, social, political, cultural, and national situations facing Mao as the leader of a communist state and the Western Marxists, poststructuralists, and feminists as academics of late capitalism. But so long as postmodernism, as an everyday or popular cultural phenomenon, seems to nourish a socio-ideological consensus of the consumer masses (a topic to which we will turn later), and, as an intellectual discourse, interrogates the assumptions, hierarchies, and power relations in the bodies of “universal truth,” it will continue to be entangled with the issues of postsocialism, and, through this entanglement, lend a certain kind of legitimacy to the latter. To that extent, those who seek pleasure, freedom, and radical contemporaneity in Chinese postmodernism will continue to be bogged down and haunted by the specters of the Chinese Revolution as well as by their own desire and obsession to overcome or forget about it. Once the discourse of Chinese postmodernism is pitted against the holy trinity of modernization, modernity, and modernism, its aesthetic novelty and cultural gratification tend to disperse into a dense cloud of politics and underlying ideology. It is hardly surprising that postmodernism in China is facing harsh criticism from both the Left and the Right. In post-Mao, and now post-Deng, China, it is much easier to define the Right, comprised mainly of followers of the neoliberal orthodoxy of sweeping marketization and privatization, than the Left, which occupies a diverse terrain and a more or less centrist ideology in the domain of everyday life. For those who believe in the mandate of the enlightenment, modernization, and statehood, postmodernism is not only a heresy vis-à-vis the official or officially sanctioned intellectual discourse of the New Era, it is, more important, an alternative mode of cultural production in the realm of mass culture which threatens the cohesiveness of the ideologico-discursive hegemony of the state, including the technocratic and intellectual elite of the Reform

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establishment. The latter, through the voice of the self-styled “liberals” (ziyou zhuyi zhe) such as Xu Youyu and Zhu Xueqin, has been particularly bitter in its denunciations of postmodernism, in which its own authoritarian and dogmatic tone can barely be concealed.

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Such conservative critiques of Chinese postmodernism, with their ideological self-righteousness and moral-psychological intensity, often dislodge the postmodern debate by cornering it into reductionist choices between socialism and capitalism, despotism and liberal democracy, state command and free market, “official” and “unofficial,” popular culture and elitism, right and wrong. But to address the complexity and dynamism of the postmodern debate, it may be more productive to think not in terms of Left and Right, but in terms of the high and the low, that is, in terms of the structural transformation of Chinese society and culture in the 1990s, which allows us to consider the disoriented, divided intellectual discourse as a response to the everyday world of postsocialist China and its competing cultural and ideological currents. If it is a valid observation that the debate on Chinese postmodernism has more to do with the historic situation of contemporary China than general formalistic features of the global cultural fashion, then it is only logical to try to understand the socioeconomic condition of Chinese society since the late 1980s in order to set this particular brand of postmodernism on its feet. It does not take a Marxist to see that, so long as the Chinese economy remains a shortage economy, so long as the average Chinese citizen perceives the wealth gap between his or her country and the advanced industrial ones as cosmologically abstract, thus mythical and metaphysical, the nineteenthcentury discourse of modernity, with all its trappings of teleology and hierarchy, and all the mythologies of presence, origin, and center, will remain intact and be held with equal passion by both socialist and antisocialist, elitist and populist, nationalist and cosmopolitan elements of the Chinese state and society at large. It should be clear that Chinese postmodernism is not only conditioned by a fuller industrialization, a market economy, and, eventually, a commodity or consumer society, but the naming of Chinese postmodernism itself must be regarded as a cultural and political event made possible, even called for, by the socioeconomic changes and ideological imperatives of postsocialist China. The tunnel vision of a single-minded modernism and its discursive self-autonomy would not and indeed did not

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disintegrate in front of newspaper reports and tv images about a postmodern world, let alone by the appearance of a few postmodern hotels or office buildings in one’s childhood neighborhood, so long as the economic reality at home demanded undivided focus on and ideological valorization of modernization. Throughout the 1980s, such modernism, flanked by humanism in philosophy, realism in literature, and a reinvention of tradition in cultural discourse, was sustained by a social mentality compatible with the radical modernization or Reform programs. The first decade of China’s post-Mao encounter with the (already postmodern, and, given the closer contact with Japan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese investors and visitors, already geographically “multicentered”) West was dominated by the urgency of modernization and modernity in virtually all areas of social, cultural, and intellectual lives, which were still fully controlled by the newly established technocratic and intellectual elite of the Reform regime and their high cultural discourses. Simply put, a more relaxed and less simple-minded take on the ideal of the modern must be preconditioned by a certain degree of material wealth and security, which give rise to a certain degree of freedom and decadence, making it possible to look the other way, to wander, to explore or simply to entertain different options, that is, to think in terms of “culture,” not necessity. Before this moment arrives, the brutal, ruthless grip of the ideology of modernity on its believers is not something to be aware of, let alone talked away. Deng’s economic reform and his creation of a “modestly affluent” (xiaokang) society paved the way for the dissolution of not only Maoism as a utopianism, but also an early-twentieth-century type of ideology of modernization shared by both Mao and Deng. Where postsocialism designates the ambiguous place of Chinese society in the grand narrative of the modern which has never left us, postmodernism signifies an emerging vision of a form of life bringing cultural affirmation to this economic reality. At any rate, Chinese postmodernism is simply inconceivable without readily available commodity and capital (including symbolic capital) flows, without a new daily experience based on a changed, and changing, material environment. While in societies formerly isolated from the capitalist world system, a category China in the early years of the Reform era still qualified for, the mythological concept of wealth tends to be attached to concrete cult objects (from durable consumer goods such as television sets or refrigerators to the economic, political, and cultural institutions of contemporary capitalism), for a world of life intimately linked to the global market, for which post-1992 China also qualified, that mythology becomes focused on that “sensuous abstraction” (to borrow Paul Valéry’s phrase out of context): money. The social,

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collective recognition of money as the universally commensurate standard of wealth, success, freedom, and happiness in post-Mao China corresponds to the beginning of Chinese postmodernism, for under money the empirical world is once again unified, organized, and endowed with meaning, not by cargo worship of specific and arbitrary objects and institutions, but by a universally applicable, abstract concept. This heightened degree of abstraction enhances the social and capital mobility, thus intensifying unevenness. But this abstraction also levels the ground, allows new configurations of state or local resources and strengths, and legitimizes policies and strategies based on the interest of local or national communities. As a concrete abstraction of the extremely complex contemporary economic relations, money is a great equalizer which unifies an uneven socioeconomic terrain. Once the logic and practice of financial capital become the terms by which to understand the world and organize collective and individual experience, the cultural, psychological, and sociopolitical elements formerly considered incompatible with modernization and modernity can be incorporated with the system according to their market value. That, more than anything else, lends a historic confidence to the cultural and social assertions of the Chinese world of life still intertwined with socialism, and bestows the latter (as well as the presocialist and indeed, precapitalist historical moments which have never been fully put to rest by Chinese modernity) with a membership in the perpetual present of global economic growth. Thus the Pacific (and increasingly “Greater China” as a shadowy empire of free-floating capital, commerce, and professionals) seems to have replaced the “West” as the anchor of a national imaginary, in which the long, bloody centuries of (European) industrialization are rendered unnecessary by the shining examples of economic miracles in East Asian “Little Dragons” and “Little Tigers,” which exported their way into the American Age. Once China, with its extensive, if primitive, industrial power, educational capacity, bureaucratic network, and technological infrastructure, had committed itself to becoming the world’s leading manufacturer of cheap commodities, it rapidly took over its Southeast Asian neighbors as the biggest exporter to the West, mainly the United States, whose imports helped keep Chinese industry operating at full steam throughout the 1990s. Swelling Chinese foreign reserves (more than 400 billion U.S. dollars in 2005) and national savings (more than 10 trillion yuan, roughly 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars in 2005) indicate not so much the rapidity of Chinese economic growth as the daunting discrepancy between the massive accumulation of prod-

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ucts, services, and capital (all increasingly integral to the global market), on the one hand, and a populace (and labor and domestic market) that is still extremely poor and poorly protected by the state, on the other. Where, as many believe, the high inflation caused by an overheated economy and the lifting of price controls in 1988 may have contributed to the social disturbances resulting in the mass protest of 1989, a decade later the challenge facing the Chinese government was how to reverse a steady deflation, reduce huge factory inventory, and encourage Chinese consumers to buy anything from automobiles to stock shares to housing units. Somewhere in the process, the Chinese economy, whose core remained socialist or state-owned, became a surplus economy plagued by industrial overcapacity and insufficient domestic consumption. Given the economy’s huge exportoriented industrial structure, its low wages and standards of living, and climbing savings due to the working people’s heightened sense of insecurity, such overcapacity is as real as it is misleading. Once exports slow down due to fluctuations in the international market or intensified protection in the United States and the European Union, huge amounts of products would flood the domestic market, which is unable to absorb them, an inability guaranteed by an artificial exchange rate which deflates the Chinese currency, the extremely low basis and relative slow growth of wages, the artificially high real estate market due to land speculation often backed by government loans, and finally, the average consumers’ determination to hold on to their cash in a time of uncertainty and underdeveloped state welfare and labor security systems. This seems to be the way a phantom “postindustrial” prosperity has been created in China; it is characterized by a still very modest per capita income and limited consumption capacity, and an inflated hyperreality consisting of overinvestment, overproduction, conspicuous consumption by the new rich and corrupt bureaucrats (often the same), and of the enclaves of globalization such as special economic zones, luxury hotels and boutique stores, tourist-oriented service industry, extravagant malls catering to the new urban middle class, and so forth. The surplus of commodities and capital is accompanied, to be sure, by a bubble economy of images, signs, and discourses. The saturation of the media and the mass culture industry, the constant flow of international fashion and advertising, and the consumption of the latest m t v or Hollywood hits virtually simultaneously with the residents of U.S. suburbia thanks to digital technology and the Internet, all reinforce and amplify the impression that daily life in China today has been an integral part of the timeless Now of global capitalism. It is no surprise that China has become the world’s number

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one producer of video compact disc players, a cheap computer-based hardware popular in China but virtually absent in the West, whose software supply relies almost completely on piracy. Thanks first to v c d s, and then to pirated dvd s, a great number of Chinese urban consumers now share, up to the minute, the visual culture of the postmodern West at a much cheaper price. It was rumored that the v c d version of Titanic appeared on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai a few days before the film had been released in the United States. Despite repeated pledges by the Chinese government to eradicate piracy to protect U.S. intellectual property rights, in the early years of the twenty-first century it is routine to find big Hollywood hits being sold as pirated dvd s for under one dollar on the streets of Chinese cities while they are still playing in the movie theaters in Los Angeles and New York. Chinese postmodernism, like all varieties of this cultural trend, is made possible by and almost exclusively dependent on the technology of reproduction and representation, not that of production, where China has gained the reputation of being the world’s biggest labor-intensive, heavily polluting workshop, instead of a significant player in the contemporary advancement of science and technology. In this sense it might not be grossly inaccurate to call China a probational, virtual postmodern society. The huge discrepancy between daily life under residual socialism and the hyperreality of the fledging market is keeping Chinese society in a permanent state of economic mobilization and ideological agitation. At the same time, the market has made visible the persistence of the socialist system and the discourse of the unconscious of the rising consumer masses—their frustrations, fears, resentments, their newly achieved freedoms and sense of power, their obsessions with the here and now, as well as their need for a new collective identity and social ideal. Market forces, with the presence and blessings of the Communist party-state, have created a highly mixed mode of production. The coexistence of private, communal, state, and foreign joint-venture ownerships, the different forms of employment and job opportunities, the residual pockets of the rural economy and state welfare system, which one will hope to be able to fall back on, make visible the choices, options, and possible optimal combinations in economic life. In economic and sociological terms, it is the overlap and coexistence of a dazzling variety of modes of production, social structures, political lexicons, ideological discourses, and value systems, not the growth rate itself, that constitutes the conditions of possibility for Chinese postmodernism. Neither the state-regulated market economy nor a mixed mode of production is unique to China, of course, but it is important to remember that the

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Chinese “socialist market economy” is conditioned not only by its place in the multinational capitalist environment, but also by its actually existing socioeconomic infrastructure built over the previous decades of revolution and socialism. The internal ambiguity of the logic of the Reforms—in this case, of socialism understood as an ongoing historical experiment—lies in its double posture of transcending dogmatic socialism by embracing a contemporary capitalist mode of production, while, in theory as well as in practice, transcending dogmatic capitalism through innovative, unprecedented ways of deconstructing and reconfiguring old bundles of concepts, rights, and material forces. The implicit logic of the “advantages of the backward,” which assumes that the institutional arrangements of advanced capitalist societies are sometimes only “second best” and are distorted by internal flaws, is reminiscent of the historical appeal of socialism to Chinese intellectuals between the two world wars. Doubts about free-market capitalism, whose role in recent crises in Russia, Brazil, and East Asia has caused great alarm, can find their cultural, theoretical formulation in postmodernism, in which all kinds of ideologies—from anticapitalist, antienlightenment conservatism to hypercapitalist futurism—can find their niches only in a deessentialized fashion, and in which socialism, like Chinese postmodernism itself, cuts across the ideological lines rather than falling neatly along one and against the other. It seems reasonable to assume that in trying to catch up with the West, the comparative frame of reference for China is often not the West itself but China’s neighboring countries: South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and, in a different sense and with different ideological and psychological effect, India and Russia. The nearly double-digit average growth rate of the Chinese economy in the 1980s and 1990s is increasingly becoming a subject of study that cries for theoretical explanation. In the 1980s, the success of economic reforms was considered to be due to a structural disengagement from socialist dogma and the embrace of market mechanisms. In the 1990s, however, continued Chinese economic growth has more often been cast in stark contrast to the collapse of the Russian economy, and to the economic depression of East Asia as a result of the speculative attack by international capital. Where the Russian situation shows the bankruptcy of any utopian dogma of absolute private ownership and the power-corrupted free market, the East Asian economic crisis reveals the ruinous, predatory nature of the unchecked global financial market.17 In both cases, it is the socialist character of the Chinese economy, its mediated connections to the global system and its deliberate, state-directed “reforms,” that sustained economic

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development in China. By the end of the 1990s, more and more scholars were ready to take the Chinese economy neither as an ad hoc, patchy, and half-measure free market economy, nor as a chaotic, corrupt, and fading command system, but as an economic, social, and political alternative in the making, an experiment whose provisionality proves to be the norm. This way of thinking finds its most provocative voice in Cui Zhiyuan’s call for “intellectual liberation” and critique of “institutional fetishism.” Based on his collaborative research with Chinese scholars on the Nanjie Village in the central Chinese province of Henan, Cui observes that the socialist infrastructure, economic or otherwise, can be creatively transformed by building a collective, cooperative model of economic development, in which “group rationality” and “individual rationality” may reach an optimal equilibrium through group incentive and mutual dependence.18 This case study is but one example of Cui’s effort to formulate a new theory of China’s rural economy, which credits the phenomenal growth of the Chinese rural economy, above all rural industry, to an innovative system of flexible production and specialization, cooperative ownership and democratic distribution of wealth, and the organic integration of rural China and industrialization. In doing so Cui follows Fei Xiaotong’s life-long effort to theorize Chinese rural industrialization, which argues for the compatibility of modern industrial technology and a decentered, flexible, and cooperative rural network of production. Building on Philip Huang’s theory that ruralization of industry provides a way out of the “involution” of the rural Chinese economy in the past centuries, Cui stresses that socialist collectivization, accumulation, and protoindustrialization paved the way for rural China to revitalize in the contemporary market environment.19 For Cui, the innovativeness of rural Chinese industry lies in its being a de facto system of “flexible specialization” and “flexible production.” The fact that the workers at rural industrial enterprises are also peasants who still hold on to their land under the contract system—that is, their double identity as workers and peasants—enhances the competitiveness of rural industry in a fluid market environment. Rural and communal anchors allow rural enterprises to develop highly flexible technological, organizational, labor, and operation arrangements, thus giving them advantages through efficient production when demand is uncertain. Borrowing Charles Sabel’s notion of the “Moebius-Strip,” Cui thinks positively of the blurred, often messy, boundaries between enterprises and society, between private and collective ownerships, which are considered to be a bad sign of immature, insufficient privatization by neoclassical economics. Cui pays particular attention to the

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shareholding system developed by the Chinese peasants/workers, which, instead of dismembering and privatizing collective property of the former people’s communes, turns collective assets into “collective shares” independent of the individual shares on labor’s side, while the representatives of the local community (village or township governments) remain the legal owners, and coordinate the interests of their employees and those of other local residents. Cui extends his theory of flexible production in (post)socialist China into many other areas of the Chinese economy, but his choice of rural industrialization as an entry point reflects the theoretical and political importance of this issue in China today. Not only do rural enterprises now represent close to 40 percent of the Chinese g n p , absorb more than 100 million Chinese peasants, and remain the main driving force behind the improvement of the standard of living for the rural population, they are also poised to provide an alternative model of industrialization and urbanization, which, combined with the village election system, has far-reaching implications for the thinking on Chinese socialism as a form of postmodernity. What concerns the theory of Chinese postmodernism most in Cui’s writings are his two general concepts: “intellectual liberation” and “institutional fetishism.” By intellectual liberation, he means freedom from and more sophisticated ways to interrogate the traditional binary opposites such as private ownership versus state ownership, market versus plan, reformism versus conservatism, Sinocentrism versus wholesale Westernization. It is a way of thinking which, in Cui’s own words, “expands the imaginary space for institutional innovation guided by the commitment to both economic and political democracy.”20 Calling for such intellectual liberation inspired by innovative theories such as analytical Marxism and critical legal studies, and above all by the changing Chinese reality, Cui criticizes various forms of “institutional fetishism,” which “immediately equalizes concrete institutional arrangements with abstract ideas, that is, corporate America with ‘market economy,’ two-party system with democracy.” For Cui, such thinking bestows concrete, historically conditioned institutional arrangements with superhistorical, mysterious “inevitability,” thus fetishizing them.21 The main thrust of such critical thinking, to be sure, is directed against such dominant mythologies which equate private ownership with the market, and two- or multiple-party parliamentary politics or the appearance of a stable middle class with democracy. Here Cui’s theoretical operations draw inspiration from Adam Przeworski, who regards socialism as political democracy combined with economic democracy; and Jon Elster, who considers current institutional arrangements

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of free-market capitalism as only “second best” for the development of productive forces. Moreover, Cui’s wide ranging account of a complex, diverse, and historically uneven reality bears an unmistakable sign of “postmodernism” which deconstructs the previously held totalities into dividable bundles of qualities and relationships ready for reconfiguration under new historical circumstances, and which refutes the classical-modernist logic of identity to favor a more flexible, fuzzy, and dialectical thinking based on difference, resemblance, and free association.22 The “postmodern” logic of Cui’s arguments, or, conversely, the prosocialist logic of Chinese postmodernism as seen in Cui’s theoretical operations, is something more readily grasped by his liberal-conservative opponents than by his “New Left” or “postmodern” allies in China, who have devoted their energy almost exclusively to charting the contours of the newly emergent Chinese everyday life and its cultural manifestations. But Cui’s passionate commitment to economic and political democracy in China and his belief that socialism, via the route of intellectual liberation and institutional innovation, can create a better alternative to capitalism as we know it, proves to be an important (and for many far too radical) intellectual yardstick which stimulates the debate of Chinese postmodernism as a way of thinking beyond “institutional fetishism” in general and as a form of postsocialism in particular. Where multiple layers of private, communal, collective, and state ownership have been created and legitimized to free the productive forces from the command economy of a formerly quasi-military state organization, individuals, communities, local regions, and enterprises themselves become shareholders as well as stakeholders in the new economic, social, and political environment. Scholars, notably Western scholars, are often more eager to gauge the extent to which economic liberalization dismantles socialism and nurtures capitalism than to analyze how socialism, a system created as an alternative to the lack of economic democracy in modern capitalism, is revitalized and, in its more decentered, deessentialized, flexible forms, becomes an integral, constitutive part of the daily reality of Chinese economic, social, political, and cultural life. The politically contested nature of Chinese postmodernism is nothing but a reminder of the mixed mode of production, various articulations of a convoluted social and cultural history, of its many repressed and unrealized chapters and moments, their memory, and their participation in the new configuration of social and cultural forces of the present situation. Chinese postmodernism, by the same token, rose with a distinctly Chinese mass culture nourished in the marketplace. It entailed a conscious

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break from the previous modernist high cultural style. For those who want China to continue seeking to catch up with the phantom images of the nineteenth century, “classic” modernity, or for those who, uncritically accepting postmodernism as a graduation certificate from the mandatory course of modernization and an one-way ticket to the timeless Now, the subject of Chinese postmodernism either threatens a premature ending to the national discourse of modernization or gives China undue prestige and the harmful illusion that it has passed the ordeals and tests of the modern. In 1990s China, postmodernism as a sociocultural problematic stems from the various ways in which the ideology of the modern becomes decreasingly capable of functioning as the only temporal-experiential order and the ultimate historical horizon. In sociological terms, the arrival of the “postmodern” merely confirms the open secret that the Chinese economy and everyday life have already outgrown the bureaucratic control and ideological tutelage of the Reform regime, whose popular support if not political legitimacy was damaged by the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989, and whose ideological void and political beleagueredness were exposed by the perceived threat of Falun Gong in 1999. For both its proponents and opponents, Chinese postmodernism, as both a cultural vision and a social ideology, is intertwined with a Chinese experience for which neither socialism nor capitalism as we know it seems to provide satisfactory answers. It is connected to the conviction that innovative thinking is urgently needed to understand why, how, or how long the Chinese economic, social, and political structure can manage to muddle through and, ultimately, to articulate a new theory for a new social system, a new democracy, and a new cultural-intellectual program. The break between modernism and postmodernism, established in Western theoretical discourse, offers a symbolic framework through which to renegotiate the continuities and discontinuities of time and space, and therefore finds its currency in the intellectual effort to formulate a cultural, ideological reorientation, whose meaning in contemporary China is, however, always more political and socioeconomic than immediately “cultural.” If Chinese socialism is, as it is considered by Eric Hobsbawm, and, from the other end of the political spectrum, Lucian Pye, uniquely also a national and cultural (or “civilizational”) project, then something radically historical can and must be found in this otherwise “ahistorical” space of a civilizational nation.23 That is to say, if the political, historical meaning of Chinese socialism is not merely considered, rather cynically, as a disposable tool for the restoration and sustenance of a “form of civilization,” one must be ready to grapple with the changing Chinese politico-economic relations today. In

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the context of Chinese postmodernism, these relations point to the theoretical possibility, and its sociocultural implication, of a “socialist market economy,” of an alternative model of industrialization (via postindustrialization), and the material and political cultures of the postsocialist consumer masses. The formation of the national market, while involving the Chinese economy deeply in the world market, has also carved out a tangible national boundary, defined in terms of the economic interest of the populace and the reach of the state, in the mental map of the Chinese consumer masses, an imagination which was to be sharpened by the latter’s unhappy encounter with the Western mass media’s fixed and distorting image of China, a China in which the emerging urban middle class now has a stake, and on which it wants to lay claims.24 It is only fitting that such history or histories should find their new mode of expression in postmodernism, a style marked by internal schizophrenia, and which contains in its very texture a pastiche of previous and alien genres, styles, images, and languages. Where the historical legitimacy of Chinese postmodernism comes from both the realities of global capital and the realities of Chinese postsocialism, its imaginary self-affirmation often takes the form of a magical realist replaying of historical narratives, memories, and desires, which never want to miss any opportunity to seize on the flaring images and signs of the now to turn them into allegorical expressions of something else. To this degree, it is impossible to understand Chinese postmodernism as other than a historical event.

The Historicity of the Postmodern

A look into the history of modern China will make it clear that the particular Chinese route into the modern has been a painful one; in order to reorient a long, largely self-autonomous, and intensely self-centered civilization, modern Chinese intellectuals probably practiced the most radical form of collective rationalization in the history of modern culture by fighting a “cultural war” (against tradition) via a deceptively value-free, logical line, that is, by adopting and advocating evolution and pragmatism. This is the way Hu Shi defined and justified the Vernacular Revolution in the 1920s, as an attempt to create something plainly, unsentimentally useful.25 Thus the medium for modern Chinese intellectuals and modern Chinese culture, the vernacular language, is historically constructed as not only a signifying structure but a structure which signifies the metagrammar of a temporality understood in the world dominated by European powers and the iron law

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of instrumental reason. To this extent, the May Fourth Movement (1919– 27) shares the internal dialectic or dilemma of enlightenment in general: it is both elitist in its task to mold a new nation by fostering a new culture, and antielitist in its commitment to the vernacular. The ensuing historical moments, from the Chinese enlightenment in 1919 to the culmination of the Chinese Revolution in the creation of the p r c state (1949), are nothing more than moments of the actualization of this logic of the modern in the material and cultural space called China. The challenge of postmodernism to this strong historical-intellectual genealogy of modern China cannot be effectively analyzed without differentiating this genealogy itself. Obviously, there is something in this genealogy, and in the challenge it is now facing, which strictly parallels the history of the modern-postmodern West, a parallel which vividly spells out the extent to which China has always been part of the world under the tightening grip of a modernity steadily losing its European peculiarities to become something truly “universal,” by coercion, power, and violence as well as through internalization and assimilation. There is, however, something identifiably national, if not “local,” which stems from the particular, albeit by no means unique, Chinese response to the impact of the modern West, a response which always longs to “return” to its own identity and permanence at a projected future point on the other end of the alienating process of change. Indeed, the perception of the modern as not only constantly new and changing but ultimately ephemeral and merely transitional—a perception inconceivable without a long historical memory and an indication of the survival of a deeply rooted cultural ethnocentrism—determines that the Chinese modern is always on the lookout for something that comes after the modern, or rather, for an even yet more plural world in which one feels both modern and at home, for a contemporary identity thoroughly decolonized from the law of modernity as such. This deep-seated cultural unconsciousness can be found at work in the postmodern turn in contemporary Chinese culture, a paradigmatic shift from heroic creation (a classic modernist fixation) to enjoyment, pleasure, and suspicion of any coercive or superimposed uniformity, whether domestic or international, the last of which may explain the strong and emotional Chinese opposition to n a t o ’s “humanitarian” intervention in the former Yugoslavia, as the latter shatters the expectation of a more pluralistic world by the emerging Chinese urban middle class and reveals the new world order reminiscent of the one which, by means of its moral axiom that “might is right,” drove China into a century of radical nationalist and socialist revolutions.

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This cultural collective unconscious which perceives modernity as a moment of alienation—even though Chinese intellectuals in effect embrace the fundamentals of the modern, from industrialization to social rationalization, with obsessive intensity—may help nurture a national consciousness more susceptible to the possibilities of eclecticism, synthesis, alternativity, pluralism, and negativity. Belief in evolution and pragmatism, although itself a product of an ideology of the modern, may also render the project of modernity more a matter of functional efficiency rather than deep emotional attachment when the rationale of the modern comes into doubt. Chinese communism, unquestionably the most radical and brutal form of Chinese modernity, is never a transparent unity but a bundle of sometimes contradictory ideals and convictions. Its mature and theorized form, Maoism, is itself a vernacular discourse of contradiction and praxis. Known as Marxismmade-Chinese or sinified Marxism (makesi zhuyi zhongguohua), Maoism is a result of complex and highly dialectical negotiations not only between the West and East, but between high and low cultures as well. With its built-in passion for the masses and constant innovation, its profound disdain for discursive or institutional reifications, Maoism may be one of the ideologicophilosophical foundations for the shift to the postmodern, whose utopian truth-content found its legitimation/distortion in market ideology during the commercial Mao craze of the early 1990s. Furthermore, Chinese postmodernism, as a liberating force conditioned by new socioeconomic relations, may put an end to the ideological and political taboos leading to a rigid understanding of Maoism as a utopian totalitarianism. Insofar as utopian totalitarianism remains the centerpiece of a socialist modernity that the New Right seeks to subvert and replace with its own, and as long as “alternative” or “oppressed modernity” are used as a shorthand for unrealized bourgeois longings, liberal discourse will be unwilling and unable to cope with the emergence of a postmodern, postsocialist mass culture in urban China today. This, however, may negatively endow Chinese postmodernism with a utopian, historic meaning it has so far been unable to harbor, namely, as the culture of the fourth estate ascending to the stage of world history. Thus Chinese postmodernism may ultimately be used as an instrument of periodization of modern Chinese social, cultural, and intellectual history, as a way to mark a paradigmatic shift in the history of ideas of the modern, if only because it dissolves all the periods and their metaphysical properties in a keen sense of the perpetual now. Such a temporal structure, devoid of dogmas and taboos, in turn, will provide us with a more effective frame-

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work to analyze the political ambiguities of Chinese postmodernism as an intellectual discourse and as a way to formulate a collective experience. In terms of the minute chronology of terminologies, the circulation of “postmodernism” is inseparable from the other, more historical marker, namely the “post–New Era” (hou xinshiqi). Coined by the literary critic Zhang Yiwu, a controversial, productive, and at times crude and superficial theoretician of Chinese postmodernism, “post–New Era” is a defiant term that marks the ideological, intellectual, and, in terms of taste, habit, and behavior, cultural break from the New Era and its high modernist-humanist discursive mainstream and hegemony. As a backlash against this nativist, plebeian celebration of the age of the masses and their everyday culture, there emerged an intellectual-cultural fashion of nostalgia for the New Era, that is, for the ideological, political, and intellectual consensus on “Reform,” for the protected freedom and inwardness of Chinese modernists, and for the self-exoticism of post-Mao Chinese society under the Western gaze. To this gaze, and to this nostalgia, Chinese postmodernism offers a rude estrangement via the familiar—namely, commodities and the market—and a radical secularization or demystification through the irreducibly mundane, plebeian, and popular. Here, however, postmodernism no longer means merely the particular intellectual discourse of China in the 1990s, but its own conditions of possibility, above all the rise of the consumer masses and their own mode of cultural production and consumption. It is important to keep historical perspective in understanding the Chinese approach to the market, which, for the Chinese intellectual and state elite, is always a matter of rational choice and social engineering, and the very content of a continued enlightenment, as evidenced in the intellectualsocial consensus of the New Era. Yet the expansion of the market and the consumer-oriented everyday world, and the impersonal, autonomous operations of market forces, have quickly made clear that those “spokesmen of the people” and pioneers of enlightenment, instead of controlling the system, are helplessly controlled, manipulated, and marginalized by a system which plays by its own rules. The day-to-day experience of many Chinese high intellectuals vis-à-vis the market is a textbook example of the destruction of the subject in posthumanist, poststructuralist terms. Thus resistance to the “postmodern” became part of an internal intellectual politics and anxiety in the 1990s, which often sacrifices the analysis of the new for the sake of a self-privileging moral heroism with various ideological affiliations (anticommunism, religious fundamentalism, Chinese cultural traditionalism, liberal enlightenment, nostalgia for Maoist utopian Puritanism, etc.).

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But those who declared war on rising consumer mass culture and its vulgarity often seemed to forget the fact that “postmodern” culture is merely a way to come to terms with a new economic, social, and political situation, and that the corrupt new culture is nothing more than the affirmation, celebration, self-indulgence, and self-projection of a nebulous new class occupying the social (and, implicitly, political) space which used to deny them entry. Contrary to the call for “opposing the secular world” (zhan zai sushi de duilimian) and “refusing to surrender” ( jujue touxiang) by writers such as Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Wei, and Han Shaogong, or the calls for “restoring the humanistic spirit” (chong jian renwen jingshen) by a group of scholars in Shanghai, Chinese postmodernists offered their defense of the everyday sphere. For Zhang Yiwu, the moral indignation expressed by some Chinese intellectuals against the vulgar cultural carnival of Chinese postmodernism revealed a “fear of freedom” and the “anxiety of modernity.” In his view, such anxiety is rooted in an “internal contradiction of modernity”: In fact, the objectives of the modern are quite concrete and tangible. The improvements of everyday life are indeed extremely secular, mundane goals. However, the processes by which those goals are to be achieved are of extreme grandeur and greatness. . . . If the worldliness of human pursuit can be seen right away, many will be disappointed. In short, the modern is the pursuit of the ordinary by means of the great and the sublime. Today, Chinese society is moving toward further improvement of life in a worldly atmosphere, and that creates an acute sense of loss and formidable resistance.26

Zhang, in his dialogue with writer Liu Xinwu, whom he credits with a literary chronology of the rise of commoners along with the transformation of the Chinese economy, is enthusiastic about the emergence of the masses out of the political shadow of the “people” in the 1990s, a process which can be traced to the economic and social reforms of the New Era despite the latter’s obsession with the sublime and a total solution for all problems. Observing the ways the new mass culture penetrates into and coexists with the state media, thus moving from the margins to the center, Zhang sees a “new relationship” between the state and civil society, whose “shared social space,” namely, the cooperation, consultations, and dialogue between the two, is the unique environment in which the culture of the “post–New Era” flourishes. Such a shared sociocultural space, argues Zhang, conveys the cultural demand and imaginations of the consumer masses while carrying on the propaganda function of the state. This arrangement not only allows a clear hearing of the voices from “civil society” but also helps nurture an “in-

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valuable social consensus” in the expanded and developed “public sphere.” Compared to the premature Chinese civil society of the late 1980s, which seemed all but convinced of its collision course with the state, today’s mature civil society is, Zhang argues, characterized by a “nonconfrontational” relationship to the state despite the different and sometimes conflicting interests of the two. For Zhang, a new, mass-oriented, democratic, and consensual cultural paradigm is undoubtedly being nourished, and the intellectual elite of the New Era will have little control over this booming field.27 Despite the predictable accusation of endorsing the government and catering to the mainstream, Zhang’s position is notably communitarian, populist, and nativist rather than explicitly political in its position vis-à-vis capitalism. In fact, it is the political ambiguity of the central figure of Chinese postmodernism—the postsocialist consumer masses—that determines the fundamental historical ambiguity of Chinese postmodernism as both a cultural paradigm and a social phenomenon. What Zhang shows us, often quite convincingly, is how the imaginations, tastes, and demands of the newly emerging masses fuse with the bureaucratic and ideological operations of the state, and the way the state and Chinese “civil society” sometimes find their expression—cultural or political—in each other. But what is missing in this picture is a potent analysis of the dubious, makeshift category of Chinese civil society, which requires the breakdown of the postsocialist masses in terms of class interest and ideology, that is, to see the new class as a community, a form of life, a culture, and, ultimately, a political force. Liu Xinwu, Zhang’s interlocutor in this context, occasionally tells a more detailed story of the rise of “civil society” from outside the state system and on the margins of it, to the center of Chinese social life in the 1990s, a status backed by its swelling wealth and a new social ideology. But that only makes the very notion of a postsocialist Chinese civil society all the more nebulous, and its cultural and political influence exaggerated. If this civil society did, as Liu sees it, consist initially of those who were “nowhere to be seen in the progress of history” and existed as “fodder of society” (shehui tianchongwu)— that is, the unemployed, temporary workers, and other unclassifiable elements—that the socialist economy and social organizations failed to absorb, then the dramatic rise of this social group, and its newfound wealth in the marketplace, does not seem to pose any major threat to the overall economic and social structure, despite its obvious, if traumatic, psychological effect on some state employees whose income fell or stagnated in relative terms.28 In fact, the very term shimin may unwittingly betray its literal meaning, “market people” or “street people” as opposed to those whose livelihood

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depends exclusively on the state system, and whose activities constitute a “biosphere” of society which can no longer be described, not to mention analyzed, in the old binary of “official” and “unofficial” that some China scholars still hold on to.29 But if the market is considered the very content of Chinese “civil society,” then the latter notion loses most of its classical social and political meaning as “bourgeois society,” as it is embedded in the European origin of the term. Moreover, it loses its most desired (by the Chinese followers of Hayek), immediately political suggestion that there is an autonomous “society,” based on and self-regulated by the market principle, which is subverting, replacing, and bringing an end to the Chinese state and the superstructures of socialist modernity. The most innovative part of Zhang’s and Liu’s discussion of Chinese culture in the 1990s lies in its recognition that the overall market environment in China today is a product of the state, and that the state shares the new economic, social, ideological, and cultural space being created in the market. That alone suggests very different implications for the rise of the postsocialist consumer masses, and of Chinese postmodernism. Thus the dramatic growth of the economic power of the former “social fodder” class, or the commoners at the bottom of the social hierarchy of Chinese socialism, their cultural affirmation as manifested in Chinese mass cultural works, particularly t v soap operas, in the 1990s, can be regarded as a social metaphor for the economic and ideological reorientation of postsocialist Chinese society as a whole. It is theoretically problematic, therefore, to celebrate the rise of the masses and their culture without questioning their implicit ideological affiliations or at the very least offering a critical analysis of the possibility of them. Thus, for Chinese intellectuals more critical of the process of globalization and suspicious of the state’s role in this process, Chinese postmodernism sometimes amounts to an uncritical celebration of the status quo, thus an implicit endorsement of the ideology of commodification by means of a populist affirmation of social desire.30 The critique of Chinese postmodernism from the Left is symmetrical to that from the Right, and reveals a different kind of political anxiety: the postsocialist state now functions as an agent of international capital and special interest groups at home. While it is evident that the rise of Chinese mass culture corresponds to a certain kind of upward social mobility of a certain social class, and that in this process a plebeian cultural imagination is steadily replaced by a middle-class aspiration, the newly emergent “social consensus” or the ideological mainstream is more complex in political as well as historical terms.

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Postmodern mass culture, with its built-in rejection of the enlightenment ideology of Chinese intellectuals, is proving to be more unruly and multidimensional than any other cultural paradigm in the history of modern China. At an existential level, Chinese postmodernism, as a spokesperson for Chinese mass culture and forms of everyday life in the 1990s, indicates the recognition of place and community as the only space or locale of collective survival and well-being, which is in stark contrast to the utopian embrace of and self-projection into the universal modern characteristic of the Chinese New Era. A regained sense of home, while vulnerable to all kinds of nativist, nationalist, and traditionalist impulses, does help nurture an appreciation of the particular, the local, the eclectic, the plural, and at the same time a disdain and profound suspicion of anything dogmatic and radical, thus frustrating both the Hayekian marketeers and the spiritual fighters against the vulgar money society. Such thoroughly secular, deromanticized, and plebeian “social consensus,” as manifested in 1990s Chinese mass culture, also indicates a continued national obsession with modernity, a modernity now understood in postmodern terms as “postenlightenment” (hou qimeng), “postutopia” (hou wutuobang), “postintellectuals” (hou zhishifenzi), “postsocialism” (hou shehuizhuyi), and equally “postcapitalism” (hou zibenzhuyi). This obsession constantly reminds us that the willingness to explore a way different from the world picture painted by the ideologues of “market democracy” is considered a heresy in the post–Cold War world; that if Chinese modernization stands a chance to succeed, it will only be by blazing its own path in the wilderness, and thus creating its own form of life, its own culture, its own ideological, intellectual, and aesthetic discourse. To this extent, the Chinese Revolution, the Maoist innovation of “making Marxism Chinese,” remains a potent source of confidence, if only in the realm of repressed collective unconscious. The collapse of the Soviet Union does not seem to have shaken that confidence but only reinforced it (as “not going down the Russian road” has become a national consensus). Such “belated” modernization, unfolding in the era of late capitalism, is bound to be “postmodern” if only thanks to its active imagination, which reevokes the old and the historical. For Gan Yang, Chinese postmodernism must be considered in the context of the historical arrival of Chinese modernity, namely, the beginning of the “self-transformation” of peasant China as hundreds of millions of Chinese peasant workers entered history and started rewriting it.31 In this respect, the ongoing Chinese Revolution, now concentrated in the economic and cultural sphere, sees its historical precedent not only in the Russian but more pertinently in the French and American revolutions. For

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Cui Zhiyuan, postmodernism would be the cultural expression of a new social system which combines economic democracy with political democracy, which the institutions of advanced capitalist societies fail to create. This, to be sure, is just a different way to say that the empty signifier of Chinese postmodernism can only be filled with the phenomenological richness of Chinese postsocialism. Chinese postmodernism, like China’s “post–New Era,” emerged with the anxiety-causing differentiation and fragmentation of Chinese society. While the tidal wave of globalization has created new nationalist and class consciousness, thus new social tensions at home, the persistence of socialism and national sovereignty has rendered China an anomaly in the “history after ideology,” and produced seemingly endless diplomatic and other frictions and confrontations with the United States, the self-appointed policeman of the post–Cold War world. What proves most unsettling to those Chinese who enjoyed more than two decades of rapid economic growth and relative social and international stability since the beginning of the New Era, is the looming of that old, loaded vocabulary including terms such as class, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, colonialism, hegemony, and power, for whose reappearance Chinese postmodernism is to blame. What is implied here, however, is not so much the return of the old political society but the arrival of a new age of politics, whose configurations of wealth, power, and social relations demand a deconstruction and reconceptualization of previous moments of history and their ideological valorizations. At a level of historical generalization, Eric Hobsbawm observes, “all ‘postmodernisms’ had in common an essential scepticism about the existence of an objective reality, and/or the possibility of arriving at an agreed understanding of it by rational means. All tended to a radical relativism. All, therefore, challenged the essence of a world that rested on the opposite assumptions, namely the world transformed by science and the technology based upon it, and the ideology of progress which reflected it.”32 In the Chinese context, this “essential scepticism” is directed against the mythologized objectivity of both socialism and capitalism, against various versions of “historical inevitability.” Obviously, such skepticism’s critical, if radically relativist, edge, is felt more acutely by those who think they have successfully replaced the official ideology of socialist modernity to claim the universal truth in its time-honored normality in liberal, freemarket capitalism. And in this particular sense, Chinese postmodernism, in its seemingly ahistorical affirmation of the new, maintains, not eliminates, a unique sense of time and history, a unique temporal and historical tension, so long as all these different layers of collective experiences and memories

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persist alongside the surviving “status quo” of Chinese socialism. In other words, Chinese postmodernism, as a Chinese vision of the new at the end of the twentieth century, unwittingly becomes a breathing space, an atmosphere, and a buffer against the more radical and universal claim of the absolute market as a negation of the historical experience of Chinese modernity. The fundamental irony lies in that, by endowing the “status quo” with an everyday form and a cultural discourse, Chinese postmodernism becomes a way of living history and its contradictions, rather than consuming it out of existence, and by being with and preserving contradictions, it holds onto a dialectic that retains its negativity in the affirmative, its politicality in the apolitical.

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Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s

1 Prologue: The City at a Standstill this is a partstory opener page Off ” in zhang ailing’s now classic 1943 short “Sealed (“Fengsuo”), Shanghai, the epitome of Chinese urban modernity, comes to a standstill. At the beginning of the story, as the kaleidoscopic images of the city converge on a moving tram car—the entry into the urban space in both fiction and reality—the bustling, sleepless commercial center of the Far East seems assured of its eternal motion and energy, of a rationality and temporal order that underscore the passion and chaos of a modern metropolis. The rhythm of modern Shanghai seems a certainty, its course as predetermined as the iron tracks blazing in the sun, stretching endlessly onward. “If there hadn’t been an air raid, if the city hadn’t been sealed, the tram car would have gone on forever,” the narrator tells us. Toward the end of the story, however, one wonders if the city existed at all, if the modern, with all its material monumentality and mundane concreteness, is nothing more than a fleeting sentimentality, a sham. What has happened in between, in the short period of time captured by Zhang in a few pages? As the siren goes off, the stream of life is halted and frozen into a frame; the expansive space of urban interactions is now crammed into a tram car; the movement, fluidity, and restlessness that characterize the city yield to immobility and fragmentation; the openness of the urban space is replaced by the city as a fortress; and the internal fractions—in economic, social, and class terms—of the city are amplified by its inhabitants’ instinct for selfpreservation. The surreal(ist) transition from restless energy to eerie quiet follows the impersonal image of the big city at the beginning of the story:

Gradually, the street also grew quiet: not that it was a complete silence, but the sound of voices eased into a confused blur, like the soft rustle of a

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straw-stuffed pillow, heard in a dream. The huge, shambling city sat dozing in the sun, its head resting heavily on people’s shoulders, its spittle slowly dripping down their shirts, an inconceivably enormous weight pressing down on everyone. Never before, it seemed, had Shanghai been this quiet—and in the middle of the day! A beggar, taking advantage of the breathless, birdless quiet, lifted up his voice and began to chant: “Good master, good lady, kind sir, kind ma’am, won’t you give alms to this poor man? Good master, good lady . . .” But after a short while he stopped, scared silent by the eerie quiet.1

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If one does not believe that the elaborate organism of the modern metropolis can be paralyzed by a single incident, not even one of the magnitude of the Pacific War, then the air raid that momentarily shuts down the city might seem more like a fire drill staged by a sharp-eyed, mischievous writer for the purpose of filling another page of her literary sketchbook. Yet in Zhang, a moment of interruption grows rapidly into a shock as the reader, along Zhang’s characters, is compelled to face a temporal abyss, indeed a different dimension of temporality, in which the empirical and ideological order by which we organize our sense of the world suddenly becomes precarious and quickly collapses into a frozen surrealist landscape. In a city at standstill, modernity finds its vivid allegory in the dispersal of urban middleclass reality into a daydream, as the hypocritical male facade of the city crumbles before a woman’s blush. Yet Zhang’s writings about Shanghai are anything but sentimental. Once the air raid alarm is lifted, the city goes back to business as usual. After an imagined romance runs its course, the protagonist, Lü Zongzhen, goes back to his seat. Thinking about the phone call that she knows will never come, the young lady (and the reader) realizes that what happens during the sealed-off hours does not really happen at all. Shanghai simply dozed for a moment; it had an unreasonable dream, a selfdissolving fantasy. By 1942, Shanghai, after the previous decades of explosive demographic and economic growth, had already become the undisputed center of trade, finance, production, consumption, and entertainment in China and the leading metropolis in the Far East. Its fashion and tempo of life closely followed that of London, Paris, and New York; its daily life was linked more closely to the West than to the rest of the country to which it geographically, that is to say, accidentally, belonged. Compared with Shanghai’s cosmopolitan glamour and decadent excess, Tokyo was provincial as an empirical capital, and Hong Kong too homogeneous and repressive as a colonial city.2 While Chinese realist writers during the 1930s and 1940s (most notably Mao Dun) tried, with varying degrees of success, to capture the sociological totality, the politico-economic

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and class logic of this monstrous urban complex, neoperceptionist writers (such as Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, and Shi Zhecun) wrestled with the sensuous light and sound of the cityscape and the psychological-aesthetic drama or trauma it produced. Both groups were inevitably drawn into the city at work. Intent on providing a panoramic picture of the metropolis, they encountered the city in its most alert and industrious mode. Unlike those realist or neoperceptionist writers, who were all immigrant men, Zhang Ailing, a twenty-two-year-old Shanghai native, seems determined to seize the city when it is off guard, off the job, absentminded, and dreamy—when it is pinned down and rendered helpless by some external, arbitrary accident such as war. In other words, for Zhang’s narrative enterprise, modernity is representable only as its own dream world, when it is stripped from the familiar mechanico-temporal order and exiled into the wilderness of allegory. To capture the city while it is dozing is to sneak into its unconscious and watch its dream. Zhang wastes no time in adjusting her focus onto the empty interiority of a now petrified city, the enclosed space inside the tram car where strangers, face-to-face at close range, are determined to ignore each other, struggling to be distracted from the maddening duration of an empty time devoid of the action of the normal world. The tram car, a quintessential symbol of urban, industrial modernity, is changed from a machine for entering the city into an apparatus for observing the temporal-psychological structure of the modern metropolis. The result is more than a snapshot offering a Simmelian picture of the city. As the passengers, from all walks of Shanghai urban life—businessmen, stockbrokers, bank accountants, medical students, teachers, housewives, and shoppers—are literally trapped in the unsettling, ruinous boredom, they scramble to fill the void of their trained experience (Erfahrung) in order to ward off the damaging, traumatic moments (Erlebnis) of silence and the city’s stasis. They read everything, anything, from the classified section of the newspaper to business cards, street signs, and receipts dug out of pockets, just to keep themselves from drowning in ennui, from falling into a strange temporality, an inverted world of the antimaterial. Zhang’s urban literary photography, employing negative print, has its grammatological counterpart in the story. Lü Zongzhen has nothing better to do inside the stopped tram car than scrutinize the steamed spinach buns wrapped inside the newspaper. When he pulls back the paper, the newspaper has left its ink imprinted on the buns, “with all the characters in reverse.” Thus utilitarian announcements “indispensable” to modern urban life turn into “a joke,”3 an uneasy reminder that the familiar order

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can be turned upside down and inside out; that reality retains a shadowy, ghostly double; that a slight disruption in the symbolic chain can knock seemingly secure subject-positions off balance, revealing their precariousness and even ridiculousness. The joke is, after all, an unconscious work of the mind, evading awareness of an alternative language in which senseless events make sense, an alternative temporality shattering chronology and replacing it with narrative and allegories.4 In “Sealed Off,” the phantasmagoric interiority of Shanghai emerges as an urban unconscious that functions as a language of the Lacanian Other. When this Other, in the image of a subversive allegorist, contemplates the petrified history of modernity as the city comes to a standstill, the frozen temporality and images of the modern city will flow into the open terrain of history. Through this language of the Other and in this image of the allegorist, Zhang Ailing is connected to, indeed anticipates, a later generation of Shanghai writers. Shanghai and the Chinese modernity it has crystallized in its own mundane concreteness is fated to be represented in this allegorized space of history, as nostalgia became a cultural fashion and mode of historical imagination through which Shanghai sought to reconnect to its own past while striving to regain its place in the national and transnational markets of the 1990s.

The Politics of Writing Shanghai

As Zhang Ailing joined the ranks of great modern Chinese writers in the late 1980s, the history of modern Chinese literature was going through a thorough “rewriting” (chongxie). The revisionist movement in the study of modern Chinese literature was itself a product of a larger project of rethinking the historical experience of Chinese modernity as defined by the periods and paradigms of enlightenment, revolution, and socialism. Disengaging sterile discursive officialdom; challenging the linear, teleological notion of modern Chinese history; and rejecting the dogmatic reduction of its sociocultural experiences into an orthodox illustration of the dominant ideology, new discourses and narratives emerged to create a more complex understanding of the past and a more polyphonic space of cultural production. The national priority of modernization and the stimulation by and absorption of the formal, stylistic, technical, discursive, and theoretical innovations of the West jointly produced a new cultural language of modernism, which in turn brought new articulations and nuances to the collective desire to become contemporaries of a universal history.

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Zhang herself would probably be surprised by her posthumous rise to a cult object in Chinese literary circles, fetishized by those seeking to define a cultural heritage of modern China beyond the official genealogy of the People’s Republic (for whom Shanghai is a stand-in for a modernity that is more “universal” than that claimed by the Chinese Revolution and socialism). The city she presented in “Sealed Off ” was soon to be remembered, reinvented, and reproduced by a generation of nostalgic revisionists with none of her dazzling sense of irony.5 In 1990s China, as nostalgia became entangled with a utopian/dystopian fervor to embrace global capital and its ideology, the appearance and normalcy of the Shanghai modern entered intellectual and commercial circulation as the standard version of historical memory. This ideological short circuit between an underdeveloped bourgeois modernity of pre-1949 China (which now freely borrows its sensuous glamour from colonialism and imperialism as thoroughly depoliticized categories, i.e., in developmentalist terms) and the post–Cold War euphoria of a capitalist hyper(post)modernity also gives rise to a literary-critical urgency (both inside and outside China) to establish a genealogy between Zhang Ailing and the contemporary literary discourses on Shanghai. Indeed, by defining Zhang as the origin of a particular literary mode of production—and by reducing to superficiality the complex inner conflict of her representations—the current craze for Zhang (and for her Shanghai) becomes a coercive ideological discourse whose freemarket dogmatism and empathy with a bourgeois universal history underscore the pleasure of the cultural fashion of nostalgia. A profound ambiguity in post-Mao Chinese social and cultural spheres stems from the ongoing intellectual struggle to come to terms with the origins of a Chinese modernity intertwined with, but not completely falling into or exhausted by, the history of the Chinese Revolution. The Chinese phase of “postmodernity,” if such a label is justifiable, corresponds with the particular daily experience of “leaving the Revolution,” namely, postsocialism in the context of market-oriented reform and the concomitant changes in politico-ideological structure. The disoriented sense that “something is over” has created a window of opportunity to redefine the Chinese modern by reconstellating the past in terms of a future nurtured in a global context of ideology.6 Shanghai and its rewriting become the focal point for this larger cultural-ideological realignment and repositioning.7 Shanghai reveals a moment of Chinese modernity defined as much by its tension with the rest of the nation as by its closer ties with the force field of world capitalism and by its matter-of-fact urban sophistication and rituals

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of everyday life based on consumption. Shanghai is often expected to offer an experience of a modernity dwelling on the material, social, and everyday culture of the city lived by autonomous individuals, as opposed to an intellectual project or political scheme, the mass mobilization and voluntarism of revolution and socialism. Thus, the cosmopolitan aura of current literature on Shanghai is underscored by a longing for locality, particularity, and rootedness, by the desire to define the modern culturally, that is, ahistorically, by ritualizing the consumption and quotidian forms of the semicolonial phase of the Chinese modern. Shanghai nostalgia, in other words, is inconceivable without a homecoming—imagined or real—of global capital and ideology in postrevolutionary China. Thus Shanghai has come to symbolize the nativization or internalization of the capitalist universal after the Chinese stage of revolutionary cosmopolitanism described so passionately by Joseph Levenson.8 From the return of the foreign banks to their original buildings on the Bund to the meticulous restoration of the 1920s-style lobby and jazz music tradition of the Peace Hotel (Heping fandian, known to Westerners as the Cathay Hotel), Shanghai’s embrace of the brave new world has been accompanied by a quaint colonial sophistication and narcissistic self-awareness unseen in the new business districts in Shenzhen or Beijing. The imagination of a global modernity is so completely accommodated or consumed by the “rediscovery” of the city’s past glory in the colonial/imperialist system that it suggests a collective mental blackout, properly described as a postrevolutionary melancholy. Thus nostalgia has become a way for Shanghai residents to absorb a socioeconomic shock, culturally, as the tidal wave of commodities and consumption is seen through the misty veil of past images made vivid by an avalanche of old photos, calendars, postcards, cigarette boxes, and advertisements beautifully reprinted and sold as “classics” ( jingpin). Indeed, contemporary Shanghai nostalgia emerges with the postsocialist urban consumer masses and their obsession with searching for a classical moment of Chinese bourgeois modernity, one whose feudal and colonial birthmarks are now indistinguishably mingled with commercial logos and signs. As a commercially viable fashion in China’s newfound mass cultural industry and an emotional valorization of the semiautonomous intellectual discourses in the 1990s, nostalgia can be considered a sentimental Chinese response to a global ideology, an answer whose singularity lies precisely in its homesick longing for a futurological utopia hinging on some earlier or more classical phase of world capitalism, on something Shanghai once was or at least could have been. In the Chinese context, the latter trend seeks to

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replace the incomplete, unsettled, and open-ended project of Chinese modernity with an empathic projection of the present onto the larger constellation of historical ages in which revolution and socialism are to be erased or suspended as a violent interruption. This is the context in which Zhang Ailing, a ruthless satirist of China’s “semifeudal, semicolonial society,” has nonetheless been appropriated as guardian angel of a city whose physical space and quotidian density are a timeless reminder of a historical temporal order undisturbed by revolution. Yet an allegorical reading revealing the convergence of social, political, psychological, and symbolic forces is needed to allow us to see not only “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled,” as Walter Benjamin wrote on the very last page of his essay “Paris: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” but also the laborious processes by which the monuments are imitated and rebuilt, symbolically and otherwise, in other parts of the world, as time moved on—and by which the bourgeoisie achieved its political afterlife in postsocialist China along with the “fluctuations of the market economy.”9

The City in Disorder: Class and the Continuum of History

Wang Anyi’s writings on Shanghai in the 1990s can be regarded as a forceful response to Zhang Ailing’s work on the besieged city half a century ago. This kinship relationship, however, is meaningful only with an explicit rejection of the superficial semblance and thematic continuity between the two. Wang herself is keenly aware of the differences. To media comparisons of her with Zhang—especially some critics’ labeling of her as an “heir” of a certain Shanghai-style literature—she bluntly replies that her personal and literary experiences were shaped by the collective history of the People’s Republic: that contemporary Chinese literature must somehow come to terms with its place in the neocolonial world system.10 Whereas the disturbances and destruction of bourgeois consciousness in Zhang Ailing are captured in the image of a city at a standstill, in Wang Anyi’s 1993 “A Tale from the Cultural Revolution” (“Wenge yishi”), this narrative logic is recapitulated in a different order. The disintegration of class codes, which alone proves the presence of class as a sociopolitical subjectivity, reveals the real sociopolitical dynamism of a seemingly ossified everyday world as the city plummets into the vortex of the Cultural Revolution. What in fact connects Zhang and Wang, therefore, is neither nostalgia nor a literary redemption of the city’s glamorous decadence, but an allegorical

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contemplation and a sustained narrative elaboration that transform the silence of a petrified history into a durée of concrete historical time. In Wang’s “Tale,” the city once again dozes—paralyzed, disgraced, brought to its knees—but here the cause is a political storm created by the Maoist revolutionary frenzy of 1966, seventeen years after the “Paris of the Orient” fell to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) divisions led by Marshal Chen Yi. But the city, as a few nostalgic wanderers in Wang Anyi’s stories discover to their disbelief, refuses to yield to the crippling effects of time, age, or bad luck. Resiliently, Shanghai appears and reappears throughout the story, often in the most unexpected moments, to threaten to outsmart and outlive its peasant conquerors and the brutal system they imposed on it. The city’s untold stories can be reorganized, to be sure, only as someone else’s language, its real temporal experience represented in someone else’s time. In Wang, the urban unconscious of Shanghai is indeed structured as a language, one of an Other so alien to the narcissistic collective consciousness of the city: that of socioeconomic history centered on class. Wang Anyi is unparalleled when it comes to recognizing the old in the new, or to be precise, the mingling and coexistence of different temporalhistorical structures in the fabric of the everyday life of Shanghai. “A Tale” opens with a Balzac-style introduction of its male protagonist, Zhao Zhiguo, and his fiancée, a former capitalist’s daughter, Zhang Siye: Zhao Zhiguo was an elite in the shabby alleys of Shanghai. On the barren, grayish streets of the city during the 1970s, he carried an elevated, even noble air. When he showed up, six-foot tall, whistling by on a three-speed bike, it seemed he could always take your breath away. His hairstyle, toned down by the revolutionary age, revealed a modern touch of the bygone era. His face bore a vague resemblance to that of Marlon Brando, a subdued version as well. When he entered a teachers’ college in Shanghai as a member of the Working Class Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team, Zhang Siye quickly revised her idea about the working class.

Unlike the proletarian described in school textbooks, in Shanghai a working-class young man was someone who could afford a bicycle and, the next year, a watch, and who could dress fashionably; in the provinces he was someone who lacked education or even aspiration. Zhang Siye would never have imagined herself with such a person, except in the current social conditions.11 It is, of course, these persisting economic and class relations that the new society’s ideological Puritanism sought to eliminate. But instead these relations constitute the city’s unconscious. It takes Wang’s observant eye

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to turn this unconscious into a narrative, in which class—its suppression, distortion, memory, and restoration—becomes the secret interior through which the invisible city reveals itself. In this regard Wang proves herself Zhang’s successor. The crossing of the class line, the exchange of places by members of different classes, is staged as a chaos that makes palpable an imagined order, a secular utopia. It is only fitting that Wang begins the story with a phenomenological reduction of a working-class young man into a consumer. More than in her blunt subversion of the official representation of the Chinese working class, the passage’s strength lies in Wang’s intimate knowledge of the culture of consumption and its psychology and ideology in the 1990s. By decoding the class-based language of Shanghai everyday life, Wang shows us the archeological layers of the city’s social history. As class serves as the entry point into Wang Anyi’s allegorical cycle of Shanghai, class analysis becomes a literary perspective that unravels the sentimental facade of the city created by memory and nostalgia. Like the tram car in Zhang Ailing and the “irrational” temporality within its space, class consciousness in Wang Anyi, often in the form of the self-consciousness of Shanghai’s petit bourgeoisie, turns the city inside out and reconnects it to its older and more durable—as it seems than class consciousness—order imagined by its nostalgic beholders, an order whose radical opposite, chaos, comes to life in the form of the Cultural Revolution. In Zhang, the city at a standstill destroys the middle-class normalcy and rationality of the modern metropolis at work; in Wang, the city in chaos falls back to its prehistory and mental underground with an unhappy consciousness and an unsettling, comical sense of mockery and irony. By the 1960s Shanghai already had been transformed into the sprawling manufacturing center of socialist China, with by far the largest, best-trained, best-organized, and most politically conscious working-class population.12 During the Cultural Revolution, the city once again took its pre-1949 place as a center of radical politics and mass movement. As Mao battled the state bureaucracy in the besieged capital, Shanghai took the lead in launching theoretical offensives in his spirit, preparing a cadre of radical intellectuals and leaders of workers’ organizations that later took over the power center of the Chinese Communist Party and mobilized tens of thousands of workers and students for the ever-renewing revolution. The Shanghai People’s Commune was founded in 1967, after the January Revolution, which overthrew the city government and party apparatus. Wang, however, is concerned with neither the statistical truth of Shanghai as the workshop of communist China nor its status as the center of working-class radicalism.

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Rather, she focuses on how Shanghai residents remain deeply embedded in consumerism and nostalgia for a consumer’s life-world despite Shanghai’s metamorphosis from a city of urban middle-class consumers to one of producers and from a cultural to a political center.13 Through this consumers’ nostalgia, Shanghai becomes a city resisting the nation, a culture resisting politics, a historical narrative resisting the imposition of a utopian design of social totality. It is the fascination with the superficial and frivolous that enables Wang to delve deep into the heart of Shanghai as a private interiority, a dream, and a nostalgic utopia. In Wang’s writings on Shanghai the irony and paradox of Shanghai’s anticollective, apolitical subjectivity is revealed with its fullest dramatic passion and intensity as an allegorical archetype of all postrevolutionary narratives of Chinese modernity mapping onto the natural-historical background of global capital. During the 1980s, the Fifth Generation filmmakers, in their effort to capture the “physical reality” of Chinese life, turned their eyes to the rugged yellow earth of the Chinese countryside for inspiration. For them the country, rather than the city, provided the milieu for an aesthetic flight of modernism in the absence of a developed urban, market economy. In the 1990s, however, the cultural-intellectual focus moved unequivocally to the city. Compared with the Bazinian ontological intensity of the cinematography of the early Zhang Yimou or Tian Zhuangzhuang, Wang Anyi’s Shanghai writing is decidedly Proustian. In the place of silent barren mountains rolling toward the sky, the houses and back lanes of the city are filled with witty conversations and relentless gossip; intricate codes of dress, dining, and socializing observed with religious care; and intricate patterns and mannerisms in both private and public domains that are taken as matters of life and death. In place of the forced philosophical mortification of the cultural 1980s, Wang conveys a sense of history through the thicket of literary and sociological concreteness, through the “trivial details” (suosui de xijie) that constitute the physical and mental life-world to which her characters are selflessly loyal. As she wrestles with the smooth, refined facade of the trained, ritualized appearance of Shanghai urbanites, Wang never loses her penetrating intuition of the fantasy world and political unconsciousness of this form of life. This makes her work appear anachronistic in the 1990s Chinese literary field, dominated by the glistening simulacra of the immediate present, in which the cultural fashion of nostalgia—and the cult objects invented by it—resides. For Wang Anyi, it is impossible to understand Shanghai without intimately knowing its elaborate class codes and its irrepressible passion for

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trivial details of mundane gratification grounded on this class-determined culture. The depth of the city lies in its middle-class longing (and its backward projection in the form of memory and nostalgia), in this imagined identity’s constant love affair with itself, and in its undivided loyalty to a lost form of life that once actually existed here. All of this explains Shanghai urbanites’ collective absentmindedness throughout the political and economic campaigns of the socialist nation-state, an aloofness in stark contrast to the city’s Cultural Revolution radicalism. For Wang’s typical Shanghai urbanite, the nation-state is a mysterious, Beijing-based network of bureaucracy, power, and politics in which Shanghai is helplessly captive. To the extent that Beijing defined the daily reality of the nation, Shanghai was in a perennial state of daydream and schizophrenia. The gap between reality and dream is measured not only by Shanghai’s detachment from the other national city, but even more so by its distance from those often underdeveloped, generic, vulgar, and shapeless provincial capitals—to say nothing of the countryside— constructed during the Maoist period.14 Thus, to read Shanghai as a city is to read the grudging marriage between its residual, actual (petit-) bourgeois/middle-class culture/everyday sphere and the abstract concepts, jargons, discourses, and politics of Chinese socialism. The introductory paragraph of “A Tale” soon evolves into an even more Balzacian analysis of class, a politico-economic assessment of the marriage between two people from different class backgrounds. Zhao’s working-class background offers protection to Zhang Siye, making it easier for her as a graduating college senior to remain in Shanghai, while the Zhang family’s old money and lingering social distinction make possible an imagined homecoming for Zhao as a free-floating individual, as well as an ideological legitimation of his search for a Shanghai identity beyond his membership in socialist industrialization. Although the Zhang family is politically defenseless, its symbolic prestige is as real as the solid family house in the “upper corner” of the city.15 This prestige had been protected by the communist government’s “new democratic” approach, which allowed members of the former “national bourgeoisie” (as opposed to colonial or bureaucratic capitalists) to live comfortably off the dividends of their shares in nationalized enterprises. The only “regrettable” thing is that Zhang Siye looks like “a girl of modest background,” whereas Zhao, on the contrary, “appeared as if he was a scion of business tycoons” (“Tale,” 426). A Marxist sociologist may be alarmed by Zhao’s class metamorphosis, but the author seems to tell us that this transformation merely indicates a stable ideological structure that the New Society never managed to uproot. The dramatic twist of this

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predictable, causal relationship between such ideological structures and a seamless economic rationality is that the latter is based on sheer chaos, on the destruction of the normalcy of socialist everyday life. The marriage looks so logical only because the times themselves are totally out of joint. “That they did come together was entirely because the times themselves became so absent-minded,” amid the larger “existing chaos” (“Tale,” 426). It is noteworthy that Wang often writes at the ground level, so to speak, making her narrative perspective virtually indistinguishable from that of an average Shanghainese. As a result, the ruthless sense of irony comes out of the depth of these alienated lives. Even though Zhao Zhiguo is “unparalleled in sensing the cream of life . . . no matter how deeply it is concealed,” when he faces the women of the Zhang family for the first time, he feels nervous. A casual smile appears on his face, as he is acutely aware that he “is confronting the other class camp in its entirety,” that this is “truly a class struggle” (“Tale,” 429). He is not alone in this struggle. Hu Dijing, Zhang Siye’s sister-in-law, immediately recognizes a “lower-class man” in Zhao’s handsome appearance, due in part to her own lower middle-class background and her precarious place in the family. Their mutual recognition is the basis of a bond, and soon of an “immoral entanglement” between the two, which does not prevent Hu from eventually driving Zhao, a potential threat to her husband’s inheritance, out of the Zhang estate. Thus Zhao ends up as an outsider of both working-class and bourgeois Shanghai. The story ends with Zhao roaming across the city day and night, finally realizing that there is no place for him and his wife in the city they thought was theirs by birthright. They finally leave Shanghai to work in a small town hundreds of kilometers away. Within this narrative framework Shanghai emerges as an object of nostalgia, a sentimental excess and melancholic loss. In this light the city also reappears as a cold, exclusive, class-coded castle; a network of conspiracy; and a site for a collective longing for the past. Contrasted with the loveless marriage between Zhao Zhiguo and Zhang Siye, the guarded adulterous intimacy between Zhao and Hu occupies the center of the drama. Both had spent their adolescence in the last days of old Shanghai, with their concept of romantic life shaped by Hollywood movies. Neither has forgotten the ballroom dance steps; the memory quickly comes back when they practice in the kitchen during family parties. It is, moreover, through this relationship of attraction and betrayal that the city looks like an “enormous stage setting of a foreign drama” in an era when “everything had reached its end,” as the city’s children prepare for their departure for the remote countryside.

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The Cultural Revolution, in which the past exists as longing and as a trace, “was also an era to say goodbye to the old days,” even as the ivy “grew particularly lush” on the colonial, European-style buildings (“Tale,” 443). To Zhang Siye and her naive younger sisters, this is the nightmare into which they sink. Equally out of synch with his time, Zhao Zhiguo walks amid the city’s ruins, paying his homage to Shanghai as a late-comer to global bourgeois modernity, awed by the city’s charm instead of threatening to blast the bourgeois values into pieces. In his empathic melancholy the exterior and the interior come together: “The [Zhang family] house was filled with residues of a bygone era, like a ruin of a once prosperous dynasty. The tile on the mantelpiece with European landscape paintings on it; the hot-water faucet covered with rust above the bathtub; the dust-piled heaters; . . . all this formed a solemnly graceful atmosphere.” In this atmosphere of degenerated prosperity, “he could not get rid of the feeling that nothing was real, that everything was floating, vacuous; he felt as if he were not part of reality” (“Tale,” 437). This can be considered a variation of the tram car theme in Zhang Ailing. The mode of existence of many of Wang Anyi’s Shanghai characters is inconceivable without this sense of alienation from real time. Wang’s Shanghai, like Charles Baudelaire’s Paris, not only is seen from the perspective of a flâneur, it is immersed in an ominous aura of historical terror. From such psychological distance, cast in the light of melancholy, the physical web and cultural institutions of the modern metropolis would look as ancient as a subterranean archeological site. Whereas in Baudelaire à la Benjamin the poetic perspective of an alienated man captures the allegorical truth of bourgeois civilization, in Wang the disintegration of the temporal order of socialist modernity becomes palpable in the returning gaze of the city so determined to escape or outlive the revolution. Both reveal the persistence of history underneath change, the constant amid the ephemeral. Yet, by means of allegory, Wang’s writing bestows the modernist fixation on history with a sense of irony that runs against the grain of the fashion of nostalgia in 1990s China. In Wang Anyi, Shanghai is equally adept in concealing its secrets as in revealing them, in the most trivial, sensuous manner and with an almost religious seriousness. In “A Tale,” as in several other stories written in the 1990s, Wang conjures a mysterious quality of city life beyond the vicissitudes of class and social change: the delicate mundane everyday life that dissolves or absorbs the shock of history and replaces the latter’s “grand narrative” with its own nostalgic supplement, a mode of consumption (instead

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of production) elevated to become an “art of life.” A passage extolling Shanghai middle-class cuisine begins with the declaration, “Everything here is rich in flavor and meaning.” It concludes, “Life in Shanghai turns itself into a form of art while transforming everything lofty into a concrete everyday matter. It surrounds you, covers you, leaving you no way out” (“Tale,” 467). The last refuge from history, the everyday sphere is also a training ground for a leap into an imagined universality that finds its vulgar version in Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the “end of history.”16 Zhao Zhiguo’s sorrow both offers an instant reflection of his own precarious situation, his homelessness in the class-determined social space, and is a premature, ill-fated invocation of the age of saturate consumption, the matter-of-fact reality of our present times, which is still experienced by him in vague, aesthetic obscurity. At what was once the Hardoon Garden, now a towering Soviet-style industrial exhibit hall, the very name brings “him a flavor of Shanghai’s origin and its adventure.” The red star twinkling in the foggy night somehow loses its immediate political significance and reminds him of “the city’s inexhaustible affection and charm, its enchanting atmosphere, even in its extraordinary decline” (“Tale,” 468). The nostalgic gaze searches for, to be sure, not the vainglory in the remains of the city but, rather, the tangible, physical proof that a bourgeois/ middle-class life-world once actually existed and still persists in the long night of revolution, as a “dim glow above the city.” Zhao’s sentimental excess responds to both the undeniable (pre)existence of that world and its equally undeniable deterioration. He feels truly at home only in this backward-looking utopia, which is mass-produced in the cultural market of the Chinese 1990s as one of the standard images of the future. He does not consider the socioeconomic reality of the nebulous class category to which he belongs, which has rendered him homeless. In fact, the sociological link between Zhao Zhiguo and the old Shanghai (and, by extension, between old Shanghai and its postsocialist revival) is none other than consumerism. As a social ideology, consumerism presents itself as a form of culture, in which individual consumers achieve a degree of freedom not readily available in economic or political reality. In this ideology one is not defined by the social class to which one belongs but, rather, by what one consumes. In the ideology of consumerism and its “aesthetic” aura, a member of the postrevolutionary masses is no longer a negligible number in the impersonal social organization of labor but the master of his or her self-image, self-production and reproduction, and of his or her “identity.” This idea of freedom via consumption defines the political content of

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the apolitical resignation of the Shanghai urbanites from national politics and from any concept of collectivity except that defined by consumption. In Shanghai nostalgia, the internal coherence and persistence of this culture often translates into a supernatural monument at which the past and the future converge in the varying constellations of history. In 1990, on the site of the former Hardoon Garden, one more luxury hotel was erected: the forty-eight-story, five-star Shanghai Portman, designed by the American architect Joseph Portman, son of the famous John Portman. Twice the height of the symbol of old Shanghai, the International Hotel (Guoji Fandian, known to Westerners as the Park Hotel) on the Bund, the new hotel drives home the city’s new image as the future financial center of Pacific Asia.17 A young scholar doing research for a book on the changing urban culture of Shanghai roamed from one luxury hotel to another. Amazed by their otherworldly extravagance, which would become part of the new urban legend of Shanghai in the 1990s, the author imagined what the city would look like from the window of the $1,500-per-night presidential suite on the fortysecond floor of the Garden Hotel. Inside is an “imported” vision seen “only in Western movies about upper-class life.” But outside is “a vast, grayish, dustcovered Shanghai, resembling the operating ground of a huge cement factory,” choked in smog, whose “proportion has long been destroyed by clusters of monotonous, coarse, unimaginative working-class residences.”18 The view from within this actualized space of global (post)modernity in 1990s Shanghai, in its crude symmetricality and complementarity, looks out on the physical environment in which Zhao Zhiguo, a working-class young man in Shanghai in the late 1960s, had once searched for nostalgic sublimation. Yet the contemporary journalist cannot sustain this vision, being “unable to determine the relationship between the hotel and the city.”19 The misty picture from Zhao’s earlier point of view becomes even more blurred, nostalgic vision being replaced by pollution and overconstruction as Shanghai furiously demolishes and rebuilds itself. In retrospect, Zhao’s sentimental moment on the rooftop above the former Hadoon Garden might have been the last time old Shanghai was still alive and visible. As global capitalism and postsocialist consumer masses rise on the horizon, Shanghai finally loses its identity, the tension-charged construct of history yielding to postmodern flatness and evenness as the past disappears into the future through the consumption of nostalgia. To this extent Wang Anyi’s writing is not only satirical but more urgently a rescue effort, an attempt to redeem the city as it dissolves into what Benjamin calls “empty, homogeneous time” measured by the fluctuations of the stock market.

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Shanghai Longtang, or the City as Natural History Longtang is the Shanghai locals’ term for lilong. As long means a lane and tang the front room of a house, longtang either refers to a lane that connects houses or a group of houses connected by lanes. Longtang however might not be so explicit as lilong for the li in lilong means neighborhood. People living in a longtang actually live in a neighborhood.—From Luo Xiaowei and Wu Jiang, eds., Shanghai Longtang

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While London, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo are forced to define themselves vis-à-vis their own medieval or ancient origins, Shanghai’s identity is thoroughly modern, with no significant past or memory prior to its founding as a treaty port, an event marking the global expansion of capitalism and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Compared to another quintessential modern metropolis, New York, which was initially defined against the wilderness and the frontier and through this tension participated in the building of a new republic, Shanghai’s self-consciousness is inconceivable without a negative notion of the nation and an ideological equation of the rest of the country with darkness, backwardness, and chaos. Unlike Saint Petersburg, another crucial point of reference, Shanghai was built not in an inhabitable marsh on captured land by an imperial monarchy trying to catch up with the West, but first by foreign traders on Chinese land leased in perpetuity and held beyond Chinese jurisdiction, and later by Chinese immigrants who were driven to this Western enclave in “armed neutrality” by a string of peasant uprisings, civil world wars, and natural disasters. From the beginning, Shanghai was called home by those who were too busy, smart, or desperate to care about the Chinese-barbarian division when envisaging the material attraction and opportunities of the city. Unlike Tokyo, finally, it was never the seat of imperial power driving a national project of modernization. Rather, it was a place more or less abandoned by the celestial kingdom to the foreign devils in order to contain their greed and influence, a place that prospered as the rest of China plunged ever deeper into endless chaos. Its order was made and reinforced by a self-governing, self-regulating city council that consisted of wealthy, predominantly foreign taxpayers who took full advantage of the power vacuum of the semicolony and wasted no time in creating a petit Etat dans l’Etat. Even though Chinese residents were treated at best as secondary citizens in the foreign concessions, the “tenmile foreign stretch” (shili yangchang) nonetheless constituted a TimeSpace outside the cycle of dynastic vicissitudes, despite—or because of—the secu-

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rity, lawfulness, convenience, and freedom that came with a modern urban infrastructure managed by a group of Western expatriates. Against the rural or precapitalist background of old China as a premodern swamp, the urban jungle of Shanghai was often perceived by its Chinese or Western residents as a dynamic vanguard of history, an island of civilization, and the ultimate embodiment of the true present of modernity. Against a corrupted history the vitality of Shanghai was seen as a force of nature whose explosive energy and transforming power were expected to forcibly yank China—or a particular group of Chinese—out of the vicious cycle of tradition. Such mechanisms of pop psychology and intellectual discourse have effectively translated the overdetermination of Shanghai by the force field of the modern capitalist world system into a miraculous work of spontaneous natural energy. Thus the classical stage of the capitalist free market achieves its fairy tale version in this “heaven for adventurers” (maoxianjia de leyuan). As the front-stage heroes and heroines of Shanghai—financial speculators, robber barons, gamblers, prostitutes, gang members and hooligans, businessmen, journalists, writers, movie stars, dandies, and fashion chasers—devoted themselves entirely to the eternal warfare of the urban jungle, middle-class Shanghainese constituted the quiet background as well as the silent audience for this drama of natural history. This theater effect, in turn, gives rise to a sentimental valorization of the mundane material culture based on a new mode of production, as if one can naturalize or internalize what is most artificial by turning it into a spectacle, a cult object. This sociocultural greenhouse explains the miniature sublimity Shanghai lovers never fail to find in the thickets of trivial mundanity and the total urban concealment of nature as such. In other words, the naturalhistorical sublimity of Shanghai is only attainable as a picture drawn from the massive and the inhuman, from the awe of the individual to whom the politico-economic forces at work are completely invisible. In Wang Anyi’s grasp of the fleeting moment of Shanghai sublimity, natural history is the mirror in which the melancholic subject sees his or her sociologically specific self-image as a consumer and in commodity fetishism. Only in the practice of commodity fetishism can the radically social be understood in purely cultural terms. Culture thus defined proves to be more natural, that is, determining and conditioning, than nature itself, which has practically been done away with. This is the reason why Wang never hesitates to cast Shanghai in the most sublimated light of a natural wonder, because against the vast background of natural history, the minute working of the everyday unfailingly takes center stage.

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To the beholders of its daily energy and architectural marvels, the modern big city unfolds like a sublime natural phenomenon. Boundless, invincible, passionate, commanding unthinkable energy, it is a greatness that touches, a beauty tinged with terror, evoking ecstasy, fear, reverence, and love. It thus offers moral catharsis for its tiny, fragile, rootless, free-floating, and insignificant inhabitants. This is the cult object, if not the religion, to which Zhao Zhiguo submits. The waning of the (bourgeois) city as a sublime object is the sociological and psychological cause for his melancholia. The loss of Shanghai as a sublime object threatens to remove the psychologically vital link between an isolated, precarious urban middle class and a universal high culture that gives meaning to its form of life and places this form in the larger framework of historical time. It is in the city as an allegorical fortress that a historically specific—and historically challenged—form of life is anchored and sublimated. To sublimate in this context is to transfigure the total organization of labor vis-à-vis nature, which is embodied by the modern industrial city. The ideological function of this sublimation—through urban planning, propaganda, strategies of representation, tourism, and above all consumption—becomes all the more important precisely because of urban life’s deliberate and seamless insulation from nature and from larger, diverse human communities and experiences. Nostalgia as a fashion in the Chinese cultural market in the 1990s sought to revisit and reactivate the sublime Shanghai by leaping back into the past, by re-creating the material-cultural atmosphere, thus overcoming loss in a virtual world of images and simulacra. A thoroughly postsocialist phenomenon, its indifference to the ideological, political struggle over the experience and representation of historical time is flanked by the radical conservatism of a post-1989 “liberal” Chinese intelligentsia, which called for an overall rethinking of the experience of Chinese modernity based on the universal, infallible mandate of the free market. The talk about a prerevolutionary Chinese civil society and public sphere, the search for a history without the (socialist) nation-state, and the thinking aloud of a neoaristocratic liberty based on the marketization of power are all part of an intellectual and ideological context that, directly or indirectly, anticipates new representations of Shanghai. In this sense, Wang Anyi’s 1995 novel Changhenge (Ballad of Eternal Sorrow), one of the most important Chinese literary works from the 1990s, is a critical breakthrough. The narrative’s main character is Wang Qiyao, a former Miss Shanghai and the mistress of a powerful bureaucrat of the Nationalist regime, who survives 1949 and goes on to lead a glamourless, often depressing life in

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Shanghai through the Maoist and early Dengist years. Formed in the last days of the old Shanghai and never fully adapted to the new society, Wang Qiyao lives in her own world of dreams and nostalgia and in the endless parties with a few like-minded people who, like herself, still live in the “good old days” and retain their allegiance to a particular way of life. After several unsuccessful romances and an illegitimate daughter, Wang enters middle age and meets her younger admirers. The party seems ready to resume in post-Mao China. But she becomes targeted for the gold rumored to be left to her by the bureaucrat and is killed in a bizarre robbery-turned-murder. Only with her death does the murderer find that his victim is already an ugly old woman. In the novel the detailed chronicle of the indulgence and waste of the city, the Proustian depiction of the endless chatter and intricate rituals of the leisurely urban life prefigured in Wang Anyi’s earlier writings about Shanghai, finds its more developed form. With its subdued impulse to deliver an epic of modern Shanghai, the novel sets out to “capture the eternal within the ephemeral, and vice versa,” as Baudelaire challenged all modern poets to do. On the one hand, the novel is an elegy for withering beauty, a recurring theme in classical Chinese literature immortalized by the long poem (from which the novel borrows its title) about the love and death of the Ming emperor of the Tang dynasty and his beloved concubine, Yang Yuhuan, written by the great eighth-century Chinese poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-i). On the other hand, it is a saga of modern Shanghai told ruthlessly and meticulously from the viewpoint of a class living in the heart of the dreams, fantasies, and everyday rituals of a Shanghai that ceased to exist after 1949. The fascination with details and the striving for a totality of Shanghai as a crystallization of historical consciousness sets Wang’s work apart from the overcrowded field of marketing/consuming Shanghai. Moreover, for Wang, the self-sublimation the city seeks can only be found in its ironic, degenerated form of melancholy, that is, in the mourning of the lost, in which a phenomenological restoration of the void, rather than the glorification of a mythological past, proves vital in acquiring an astute sense of time and history for a complacently atemporal city. This leads to the intertwining of a holistic, total picture of a natural-historical movement and the closerange observations of a real or self-styled urban middle class. The naturalhistorical totality in the novel is made vivid at its beginning by a bird’s-eye view of the city: At dusk, flocks of pigeons flew around in the sky of Shanghai, looking for their nests. The roofs of the houses formed an endless duration, rolling up

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and down, producing a changing image of mountains and hills. From this vantage point, they were all connected into a seamless mass, without boundary, making it impossible to tell the direction. . . . Massive and dense, [the rooftops] looked like a wheat field, sown and harvested; they also looked like a pristine forest, living and dying by itself.20

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Under this allegorical contemplation, a pigeon cage hanging under a roof is an “empty heart” (Ballad, 6), just as the city seen from this imaginary vantage point is a place where the master is not home. Hovering above and looking down at the oceanlike surface of roof tiles, the pigeons’ hearts are “broken by an astute pain” (Ballad, 7). And in this phenomenology of pain the secret of Shanghai everyday life is experienced as a historical decay, whose silence can be understood only in an inhuman language spoken by the city as a natural-historical being. Before this state of existence finds its own verbal expression, the heaps of human activities stand wordlessly in their irredeemable thingness, entering the world of language only as isolated fragments, as images seen through the rear window, under the lone streetlight on the corner, or in a dark, damp lot never exposed to the sun, scarred over with moss. In Wang Anyi, this world before language is bathed in the illumination of the sublime; it is “a sublimity consisting of countless trivial details, a mighty power drawn from limitless patience” (Ballad, 7). Shanghai viewed from this perspective is reminiscent of the Paris depicted by romanticists such as Victor Hugo (to whom Baudelaire dedicated his three Tableaux parisiens). Indeed it is noteworthy that Wang often sees the new in images of the old, and the historical in those of the natural. Comparing Baudelaire with Hugo, Benjamin observes that the latter’s poetic inspiration often comes from “the enormous antitheses” between naturalsupernatural images—the forest or the sea, for example—and images of the modern big city.21 In Wang Anyi’s work, the causal chain of socio-aesthetic production is often reversed. The elevated bird’s-eye view of the city that opens the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow can be seen as a literary or an aesthetic warm-up, so to speak, for the true heroes of Shanghai, the nameless, shapeless consumer masses. It is pertinent to add that this aesthetic prehistory of the notion of the masses (deriving from the history of form in the modern West) corresponds to the social, material history of contemporary China, where the historical emergence of the postsocialist consumer masses demanded and indeed reactivated the historico-aesthetic images that swim toward the mind’s eye of an allegorical contemplator. It is no accident that Wang’s novel—instantly ac-

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claimed as a long-awaited successor to Zhang Ailing’s writing about Shanghai in the 1940s, that is, as a welcome sign of restored historical and literary continuity—appeared in 1996, when the “socialist market economy” had hooked China securely into the productive and symbolic chain of the world market. After being the rear guard of Chinese economic reforms during the 1980s, Shanghai now spearheaded the new and most sweeping round of globalization in China in the 1990s. If one considers the new faceless consumer masses as the historical figure underscoring the images of the natural-historical sublime in Wang Anyi’s depiction of Shanghai, one can understand the deliberate absence of human presence, the lack of subjectivity in the beginning of the novel as the city unfolds in front of the reader. Again, Wang attempts to blend the sublime with melancholy, the mysterious natural world with the even more unfathomable social sphere. Thus the central symbolism of Shanghai in her novel is not the Bund with its glamorous banks, hotels, and parks, but the spider web of the modest residential lanes and buildings, the Shanghai of the longtang, where the bulk of the city’s middle-class population lived: The Shanghai longtang constitutes a sublime [zhuangguan] picture. This is the background of the city. . . . At dusk, as the city is lit up, all those lines and spots [of streets and houses] shone; behind the glittering facade lay a massive span of darkness—the Shanghai longtang. The darkness looked like raging waves, pushing the spots and lines of light up and down; the darkness has its masses, whereas the bright spots and lines are merely floating upon it, as if its purpose for existing is to divide the masses. . . . The darkness was an abyss. Even if you tossed a mountain into the abyss, it would disappear into its unfathomable depth without making a sound. (Ballad, 3–4)

Such natural, sublime images of Shanghai reveal the mental valorization constantly mobilized to hold off the sociopolitical vicissitudes against which the city is perceived as a cultural, civilized beachhead. The concept of natural history (Naturgeschichte), which in Benjamin and Theodor Adorno signals liberation from the anthropocentric iron cage of rationality, historicism, and subjectivism in order to envision a concrete history as dialectical nature, can also be employed for the opposite purpose of formulating a bourgeois—or any ruling class’s—social utopia of the city as an aestheticized world of unmediated nature by means of which an alienated way of life is perpetuated. So, too, the Marxist ideal of a naturalized humanity and a humanized nature transcending the modern “administered society” has its conservative counterpart in a social Darwinist picture of the world as a harmonious blending of

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nature and history into an insulated social sphere dominated by the “law of the jungle.” Moreover, Benjamin’s insight that “it is the fallen nature which bears the imprint of the progression of history” often meets its post-1992 Chinese appropriation in the effort to identify the age of revolution with totalitarian control and “disastrous historical time.”22 Taking the place of nature as a charged concept, the fallen city thus becomes the sphere of allegories, the pile of ruins of a historical catastrophe. If Max Pensky’s reformulation of the dialectic of natural history in Benjamin can be transferred to the ideological context of representing Shanghai, it will read like a posthistorical judgment on the past decades: “Petrified, transformed into the specter of repetition, history is transfigured into dead nature; mortified, nature becomes the elements of historical ruin and the universality of death.”23 Wang Anyi turns to concrete history, which reveals the dialectic of nature. The descent of the narrative viewpoint into the world of the longtang makes natural-historical time vivid in social, class terms. The sublimated images of the Shanghai longtang, the natural-historical aura bestowed on its massive physical span and its unfathomable storehouse of daily experiences of the modern big city, provide an allegorical substitute for the missing sociological account of its historical formation.24 As an architectural, social, and psychological space, the longtang is the embodiment of middle-class Shanghai, its privacy (or lack of it) and its material culture (or its “transcendence”); it records the ways and gestures by which this middle class shelters itself from the brutal forces of history. What is gestating in Wang’s natural-historical portrayal of the longtang is precisely the memory, repression, and violence of the city, filling the silence and omissions of the endless chatter of a declining Shanghai middle class. But a culture without a nation can only be defined and understood in terms of class, in terms of its identity with and aspiration for a transnational community as a way of life. The renewed enthusiasm over Shanghai, both inside and outside China, can thus be regarded as the reemergence of a particular class interest and identity in search of their spatial articulation, often by means of redefining history in terms of culture. In this sense the cultural pride of the Shanghai middle class, its endless love affair with its own form of life, is but a disguised and inarticulate (because it is so entangled with the day-to-day struggle to maintain this status) class consciousness. If the darkness of the world of the longtang behind the shining facade of the city looks mysterious to the narrator, the beholder of the naturalhistorical spectacle, it is because the veil of nostalgia and melancholy through which the city is revealed also functions as a screen obscuring the economic

Shanghai Nostalgia

and material basis of the urban maze. The logic of the market and commodity—let alone that of production—is often experienced with the least clarity by those who live it in the most bodily, mundane way as consumers. Their distance from production, their exclusion from the real mechanisms of power, and their comfortable distance from poverty make their mode of life “aesthetic” if not ritualistic. In Wang Anyi’s novel, a vague awareness of class emerges only briefly, in the form of envy and resentment. Weiwei, who grows up in the glamourless age of socialist industrialization, like all the teenage girls living in the central commercial section of Huaihai Lu (formerly Joffré Road in the upper-class French concession), is seduced by the store windows and hates the invisible residents of the quiet, shop-free Western section of the street where the real owners of the city live. It is worth noting that the city’s change of hands from business tycoons to communist bureaucrats, a transition that devastated Wang Qiyao, no longer matters to Weiwei and her friends. This ignorance of the economic and power structure conditioning their own mode of existence enables much of the sentimentalism of the story’s nostalgic dreamers. It also reveals their ignorance of the working-class reality that surrounds the orderly enclave of the International Settlement, not to mention the dark, rough ocean of peasant China that threatens to swallow the shiny, self-gratifying island of Shanghai. Wang Anyi’s natural-historical approach to Shanghai is not only indicated by its effort to intertwine the city’s contentless fantasy (its shining facade, its middle-class rituality, etc.) with its voiceless reality (mode of production, class relations, etc.); it is also illustrated, moreover, in an attempt to endow the voiceless with a language. In Benjamin the normal, oppressive relationship between nature and history is defined by the former’s muteness and the latter’s possession of a profane language. The idea of natural history, however, is based on a subversive reversal of this relationship, that is, on the critical hypothesis of nature being able to speak. The sigh of fallen nature or petrified history can be heard in the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, between the hovering pigeons and the world of the longtang, in the intermediary layer that brings the finishing touch of the natural-historical being that is the modern big city. This is the world of gossip (liuyan, lit., free-floating words). In a city so obsessed with its privacy, so determined to reject the notion of a meaningful public life, and so preoccupied with perpetuating its ritualistic mannerism of mundane enjoyment, gossip is the medium by which Shanghainese communicate and relate to one another. Indeed, in the absence of a developed public sphere, mass media define their community and culture. If the pigeon is the “only living thing that could overlook the

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city from above” (Ballad, 16), and if what is under the sky is nothing more than “a city of cement . . . an enormous abyss in which ant-like lives were struggling,” then the realm of gossip, the world of free-floating, subjectless language, brings the two spheres together and endows the city with not only a form of life but its expressivity. In longtang life, “gossip traveled from one backdoor to another . . . like silent electric waves, crossing and interacting with each other above the city.” Compared to “invisible clouds covering the city,” it “soak[s] the air” and “occupies every corner of the city” (Ballad, 8). Thus, the subterranean stream of free-floating words is to the Shanghai longtang as the disoriented signs inside the tram car are to the symbolic order of the city before it is sealed off. Both embody an inverted, dream logic of the daily, rational experience of modern city dwellers; both offer a subversive replacement of the legitimate temporality; both reveal the repressed unconscious as the obscure inner landscape of urban everyday life. Wang Anyi continues: “If the longtang of Shanghai could dream, its dreams would be filled with nothing but gossip” (Ballad, 8). Gossip is, moreover, both the “thought” and the “talk” of the longtang. This leads to the core of the historical time in the Ballad, a core consisting of sorrow and the mournful. For Benjamin, again via Pensky’s succinct summary, were nature endowed with language, its mournfulness would instantly spring forth into an endless lament. Insofar as nature could be imagined to take part in profane language, its mournful silence would find its natural counterpart in lament, understood both as a response to its loss and degradation (nature would lament language itself ) and as a mode of linguistic expression in its own right (“it would lament”). Relieving nature of its muteness does not relieve it of its mournfulness: since lamentation is conceived as a profane translation of mourning into the meaningless chatter of the human tongue, it is envisioned as “undifferentiated” and hence “impotent.”25

The Heart of the City: Postrevolutionary Melancholy

It is through the “profane translation of mourning into the meaningless chatter of the human tongue” that the central figure of the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow—beauty—emerges and shapes the narrative space and temporal structure of the novel. And it is through the work of mourning and melancholia that the natural-historical images of the city mingle with its sociohistorical counterparts. In a pedestrian sense, the novel is the life story of Wang

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Qiyao, former Miss Shanghai. It is mechanically divided into three parts: part 1 includes scenes from pre-1949 Shanghai; part 2 takes place between 1949 and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution; and part 3 covers the post-Mao era up to an unspecified, but readily recognizable, moment of the 1980s. Each part has four chapters consisting of a varying number of subtitled sections, forty-four in all. The subtitles are bluntly thematic, bringing allegorical punctuation and articulation to an evolving durée of storytelling and its motifs.26 Running throughout is the entanglement and intertwining of the images of a woman and the images of the city, to the extent that the two become inseparable, even indistinguishable. Effectively, the admiration and love of both men and women for Wang Qiyao is but an aestheticized, sometimes eroticized homage they pay to the city and its particular past. In the Ballad, Shanghai unfolds along with Wang Qiyao. Indeed, the city prospers and withers with its heroine: in her humble background, her five-minute glamour in the limelight, and her willing possession by the powerful; in her undeceivable sense of life’s persistent treachery, which contributes to both her calculated struggle for security and her submission to fate; in her impeccable command of details and her unfailing ability to charm; in her stoic survival as a part-time nurse in the “new society”; in her bizarre reunion with diehard Shanghai lovers of different periods (who seek the former Miss Shanghai in their quest for the bygone era); and in her reluctant, unthinkably slow but nonetheless irreversible process of aging in what she considers a coarse environment. One may agree that the old Shanghai, like Wang Qiyao herself, survived both the thuggish Nationalist regime and a more brutal People’s Republic like a tragic heroine, only to die a farcical death at the hands of a New Age hooligan called Long Legs, a money-changer who breaks into the home of a mysterious old lady looking for the universal currency of our time: U.S. dollars and gold. Not that her charm fails her this time, however. Before her death, Wang Qiyao, now in her late fifties, claims her last admirer-lover in a new generation dandy who, despite his formation during and after the Cultural Revolution, quickly recognizes in her the faded world of old Hollywood movies, jazz music, nightclubs, and upper-class society. For such young men (and women), it is an inspiration to discover that a more mature, subtle, and ritualized bourgeois form of life once actually existed in China as an obscured chapter of their own past. Corresponding to the allegory suggested by the story’s subtitles is a changing modality of the beautiful as seen through the eyes of Wang Qiyao’s male admirers and female friends and competitors. Her first appearance

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as an aesthetic object—the first registering of the beautiful in the city’s selfconsciousness as its own cherished mirror image—occurs fitfully, at a film studio, through the proper medium or technology of the camera (“Camera” [“Kaimaila”] is another subtitle in the novel). Wang Qiyao, then an eighteenyear-old student, soon learns that the moment the director cries “Camera!” a magic temporality starts; the camera filters a chaotic, shapeless reality, brightens up the dim, and produces a polished fantasy world that is always beautiful (Ballad, 30–31). Frequenting the film studio makes Wang feel that she is “behind the film screen,” and she “stumble[s] on the key to a big secret” (Ballad, 30). She becomes both an object of an aesthetic gaze and a witness to the unveiled interiority of the concealed, intimate daily world of the urban middle class. One day her eye is drawn to an interior set in which “everything . . . was extremely familiar.” The quotidian objects of “someone’s daily private life” are exposed as a “public spectacle” (Ballad, 28). From beginning to end, Wang Qiyao herself is not merely an exposed object of the male gaze, a mirror image produced by the fantastic mechanism of the city, but, more important, an object/image equipped with an inner camera of self-consciousness. This allows her to roam between the innermost dream objects of the city like a modernist poet. Only she neither writes poetry nor is interested in maintaining any critical distance from her surroundings. Yet by virtue of her double identity/function, Wang Qiyao becomes an agent of dream narrative, a vehicle for the portrayal of the allegorical dimensions of the physiognomy of the modern metropolis. Significantly, the inside/outside exchange, captured in the imagery of a three-walled room, becomes a landmark in Wang Anyi’s Shanghai landscape. Many chapters later, after Mr. Cheng, a dedicated photographer and lifelong admirer of Wang Qiyao, throws himself out the window of his apartment as the Cultural Revolution begins, the author of the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow once again allows her narrator to roam across the city and contemplate its ruins. The narrator muses on a building whose outer wall has been torn away: “All [the] rooms are naked, everybody is gone, the rooms have become rows of empty boxes. How can you imagine that once there were boiling scenes and matters of life and death inside those boxes?” Windows become “totally meaningless. The doors, too, become unnecessary, sentimental. . . . Oh, let us erect the wall once again, or else we can hear the sound of weeping, weeping for the disappearance of those days. Let the empty boxes be restored into a big building, and let the big buildings form a longtang. Let there be a main street before the longtang, and a back road behind it; let people and cars flow again on the streets” (Ballad, 262). Similarly, in its appalling nakedness, Shanghai during the Cultural

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Revolution is seen as “a network of underground cells and rat-burrows exposed to the sun.” The longtang houses, “with their roofs torn open, their disgusting interior revealed,” begin to “pollute the sky of the city with a flood of private secrets.” The sorrow, from this literary viewpoint, is not so much over the loss of beauty as the loss of interiority, privacy, dignity, and shame, which are laid bare or “penetrated (chuantou)” by the violence of the revolution (Ballad, 258). The death of the photographer Mr. Cheng, the only male who loves the former Miss Shanghai with all his heart (he never marries), marks the final, irreversible disintegration of the aesthetic spell cast on the city by its beholders. Mr. Cheng is a railroad engineer by training, but “what occupied his heart was photography.” So begins the section titled “Mr. Cheng” (“Cheng xiansheng”). “His idols were under the limelight, their images were always upside down; his idols were always in developing liquid, on a piece of paper, slowly taking shape in the red light” (Ballad, 67). The upside-down images in the camera eye strikingly recall the reversed, mirror image newspaper characters imprinted on the bun in Zhang Ailing’s “Sealed Off.” Both, in their orderly disorder, reveal the secret language that affords entry to the city’s unconscious. And like the bank accountant Lü Zhongzhen in “Sealed Off,” Mr. Cheng is a captive of the mysterious images he captures but does not know how to read. The images in the dark that constitute “the sole existence” in his world are “as empty as an abandoned cicada slough” (chantui yiban, neili shi yituan kongxu) (Ballad, 248). It is only logical that “Mr. Cheng was among the first who committed suicide in the summer of 1966” (Ballad, 257). The death of the aesthete is followed by the city reduced to rubble, with “torn photos scattered around the garbage can, on which the partial human faces here and there looked like herds of ghosts who died of unjust treatment” (Ballad, 259). The convolution of the female heroine and the city of Shanghai into a deadly seductress is perhaps best illustrated from a distance, in a passing yet important figure, Ah Er, a student living in the small town where Wang stays briefly on the eve of the “Communist takeover.” Like all melancholic lovers (of women and cities), Ah Er sees his object of love through the glorifying images of classical literature. He reads Wang Qiyao poems from the Book of Odes (Shijing), Li Bai (Li Po), and Bai Juyi’s The Song of Pipa (Pipa xing) and the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow. Yet the nostalgic, sorrowful images of the poems, with their allusion to changes of dynasties, the displacement of people, their exile, and their tragic death, cast an ominous shadow on the woman before him. All the poems he quoted and presented to his idol point to one old Chinese idiom: “Beautiful ladies are not favored by fate [hongyan boming]” (Ballad, 51).

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In his mind, Ah Er can never separate his love for Miss Shanghai from his worship of the city for which the woman is named. As a country boy, however, he knows by instinct that “this woman was sent to seduce him,” that “the religion he worshiped was an unlucky one—the pursuit of ephemeral pleasure, not eternal happiness” (Ballad, 142). Whereas Ah Er misses Wang Qiyao, Wang Qiyao misses Shanghai. Ah Er soon vanishes and never reappears. In the character of Sasha we find a comic variation of Ah Er, but unlike that member of the provincial “transitional class,” Sasha is a literary hybrid of the “superfluous man” in Russian realism and the rigid daily reality of the early years of the People’s Republic. Half-Russian and with no job, he receives government welfare as one of the “children of revolutionary martyrs,” but this barely covers his expenses at the pool table. His exotic appearance, deceptively childish innocence, love of delicate food, and abundant free time soon win him a regular seat at the mah-jongg party at Wang Qiyao’s apartment, attended by a small group of nostalgic, leisurely Shanghainese. In the feminine, domestic atmosphere of his room, this international superfluous man feels at home through the “enjoyment of a meticulously cultivated, carefully lived life” ( jingdiao xizuo de rensheng kuaile) (Ballad, 183). Living contentedly “contained in a snail’s shell,” he perceives “objects, space, voices, and atmosphere all . . . drifting apart, becoming misty and uncertain.” This “tender” and “sentimental moment by the fire melt[s] all kinds of desire into one single need to stick together, to depend on one another; it made everything else irrelevant. . . . No need to think about the past. No need to think about the future” (Ballad, 184). In such moments, the shadow binding these people together is the ineluctable passing of time. As if to stop the clock, they muddle through their days absentmindedly, so as to plunge into the night with energy, wit, bonhomie, and intimacy. They tell stories, solve riddles, invent silly games to play, and chat and eat endlessly. For Wang Qiyao, “it was like the Chinese custom of staying up all night on New Year’s Eve [shousui] to keep time from slipping away. Yet despite their . . . nightly effort, they could not keep time from passing by” (Ballad, 185). If parties are the heart of the night in Shanghai, then women like Wang Qiyao are the heart of the party. Perhaps it does take a drifter like Sasha to appreciate the Proustian indulgence of Chinese middle-class life most fully, with a sense of estrangement, exoticism, surprise, and gratitude for the memorial ritual, and with anticipation of the ephemeral life-form of an underdeveloped yet reified, long dead but still evolving protobourgeoisie, the Shanghai middle class. After a brief sexual relationship with the former Miss Shanghai, Sasha returns to the Soviet Union before the final break between the two communist states.

Shanghai Nostalgia

If the party in Wang Qiyao’s room constitutes a parody of the Parisian salon, then the reemergence of Miss Shanghai in the realm of memory bears the authentic aura of the mémoire involuntaire, as an unexpected reunion with the past considered forever lost. Kang Mingxun, another party regular and son of the mistress of a former Shanghai industrialist, finally completes the equation between Wang Qiyao and the former Miss Shanghai in one afternoon. For a long while he has been stirred by déjà vu at the sight of his graceful hostess at the nightly gatherings. Born at the juncture of the times, Kang “had seen many for whom the chain of history broke overnight, fell into pieces” irreparably. Yet the longtang where Wang Qiyao lived “was one of the cracks and gaps in the city, where some fragments and residue of a previous world were concealed.” Despite Wang Qiyao’s humble appearance, Kang perceives “something behind it . . . glowing and twinkling like a mirage” (Ballad, 190). In their intense affair, the woman, “a relic of the old days, brought back his heart” (Ballad, 190–91). But the love affair is hopeless because his family will never accept a woman with Wang Qiyao’s background and because Kang, as a mistress’s son, knows too well that he cannot do anything to harm his family’s interests. This dilemma allows Kang a momentary intuition into the vulnerability and helplessness of the class to which he and Wang Qiyao both belong: “Both Wang Qiyao and he himself were struggling for their survival in a narrow corner, and neither could afford extending help to others” (Ballad, 193). The hermeneutic circle in the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, and in virtually all of Wang Anyi’s Shanghai writings, always begins with aesthetics and love and ends with a cool-headed, unapologetic recognition of economic, social, and class positions and interests. Indeed, the longer the author allows the narrators to indulge in aesthetics and psychology, the more relentlessly the story swings back to the domain of calculation and “reality check” that constitute the philosophical core of the self-consciousness of the true Shanghainese. The femininity and emotional delicacy of Miss Shanghai portrayed in this novel are inseparable from her ability to hold on to a self-consciousness and self-pity in the most antinarcissistic, unsentimental way. This ability is best depicted at an early moment of the story, when Miss Shanghai, still a nineteen-year-old student, experiences “just a little bit of regret” before she gives her virginity to the rich, powerful, and older Director Li, as something “rightfully his.” From beginning to end, Wang Qiyao has a clear view of her own proper place—her class position—in the world. The secret of the city assumes some human proportion in part through pain; she is the heart of the city,

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weeping alone at night, when the concrete details of urban life have retreated. Recognizing themselves in each other, Wang Qiyao’s and Kang’s longing for a shared culture deposited in a past moment is sealed by an eternal sense of sorrow. The devastated Shanghai middle class finds its heir in the Shanghai dandy, who defines the 1980s and 1990s China of the postsocialist consumer masses in a caricatured but sociologically important way.27 Dandies are ironically described as “some refined elements in this vulgar age” (Ballad, 326). Their collective name is nostalgia, as they, though young and without their own memories, see “the Georgian-style buildings and the Gothic bell towers,” which are “like secret tunnels running through time. . . . The ivy on the gable, the piano music from a European-style building next [door], too, would make good food for nostalgia” (Ballad, 326). Wylie Sypher has pointed out that a dandy is “a substitute for the aristocrat who has lost its castle, . . . a middle-class aristocrat, a figure who could make his entrance only in the cities that were becoming the milieu for the bourgeoisie.”28 Building on this observation, Richard Lehan notes that Baudelaire’s dandyism is both a mockery and a by-product of middle-class values, that the poet as a dandy distances himself from the bourgeois values that brought his culture into being, and that the desire for distance led Baudelaire to explore new poetic possibilities for the huge modern metropolis, prominent among which is “nostalgia for a spiritual homeland or city that existed beyond the visible world,” which goes hand in hand with an internalized “sense of decay and decline” that colors perceptions of the city.29 What Old Class or Lao Kela and his fellow postrevolutionary dandies want, as the narrator in the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow reminds us, is “a sense of timelessness—not one in cosmological proportion, but one which smugly covers the past fifty years when they flared up like a flying lightning bug.” They are the “intimate sons of the city,” or, in the allegorical tone of the narrator, “it is the streets of West Shanghai that knew these kids best” (Ballad, 329). Like her literary ancestors in early European and American realism (such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Theodore Dreiser), Wang Anyi seeks to restore the city to human proportions, as she seeks to enter the soul of the city so as to dream its dreams and roam inside its unconscious. For early modernists like Baudelaire, to experience the modern city with a poetic freedom was to assume the allegorical angle of an alienated human being or, better still, an object, a commodity joining the global journey of commodity exchange. In Wang Anyi, the nostalgic interior of the Shanghai middle class becomes an allegorical stand-in for the world of things and commodities

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through which a narrative totality of a historical experience can be had. This is the reason why the aura of nostalgia meets its ultimate disintegration, as Shanghai finally “lives” its own past in the booming market economy of the 1990s, as the once-empty streets are flooded with commercial logos and consumer crowds in the age of globalization. In light of this dispersal of the historical aura, Wang Anyi’s narrative of Shanghai becomes entangled with a profound ambiguity. In all of Wang’s writings about Shanghai, the reader can sense the constant work of nostalgia and melancholy that weave together a tight allegorical space. Neither nostalgia nor melancholy, however, is merely a matter of formal technique; both constitute the emotional atmosphere and underscore a sense of history that cries out from the mundane concerns and strivings of Wang’s characters. Yet in these allegories of Shanghai one will not find any utopian gesture of redemption, not even a guarded optimism for a rising everyday sphere in a China that may be well on its way to creating a new urban and political culture precisely by incorporating a reinvented past into the undefined present. To this extent the allegorist herself becomes a participant in a collective melancholy, nostalgia, and mourning, in a more politically urgent sense. This, I suggest, has everything to do with the loss of the immediate past for the Cultural Revolution generation (to which Wang Anyi belongs), for the children of Mao and their experiences and memories, all yet to be fully renarrativized in world-historical time. In Wang Anyi, nostalgia and melancholy are at once directed, with a sense of irony, toward a past associated with the unfulfilled dreams of bourgeois modernity and flow, somewhat unconsciously, out of the mourning for a more recent past shaped by socialist modernity as both a political project and a form of life. It is the repression and resurgence of the latter in the political unconscious of postsocialist China that seems to shock even the nostalgic mourner. Thus, through shock, the ultimate allegorical figure in Wang Anyi’s Shanghai nostalgia reaches its radical Other, which it has been called forth to overcome in the first place. Wang’s writing of Shanghai is her personal battle against this shock in the late-twentiethcentury global socio-ideological environment mediated by two decades of Chinese economic reforms. It is an effort to come to terms with Chinese modernity, which, for the mournful storyteller, means to make positive all the negated in modern Chinese history.

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Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, “Minor Literature,” and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology

one

in his essay “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Raymond Williams demonstrates how the historical symbiosis between the modern and the urban can be reconstructed, both historically and conceptually, in five successive steps. It all starts with a historical experience whose novelty has all but escaped us: a “crowd of strangers” on the street which is unknown, indeed, mysterious. In this crowd emerges the lonely individual, whose paradox of self-realization in isolation culminates in an “extreme and precarious form of consciousness,” the monad of subjectivity. The third moment can be found in the imagined objectivity confronting the newborn subjectivity, which Williams calls the “concealment” and “impenetrability” of the city. This would be the London in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle— foggy, dark, intricate, a huge crime scene necessitating an isolated but penetrating rational intelligence that finds its form in the detective novel.1 Williams’s conceptualization of the city/modernity then takes a sharp, dialectic turn, as the alienating concentration of men and women in the city also gives rise to a new unity or “human solidarity.” Cast in this light, the image of the mob turns into that of the “masses” and the “multitude” with democratic and revolutionary potential. Finally, the modern metropolis becomes “the place where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed” (“mp ,” 44). The initial strangeness seems to find its sublation in “the vitality, the variety, the liberating diversity and mobility of the city” (“mp ,” 43). Williams’s tone is not celebratory. Immediately he points out that one cannot separate the new metropolitan form from the uneven development of capitalism, from imperialism and colonialism whose “magnetic concentration of wealth and power” in imperial capitals underlies the

Toward a Critical Iconography

“cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures” (“m p ,” 45). This hierarchy is not understood in merely military terms but “in terms of development and thence of perceived enlightenment and modernity” (“mp ,” 44). All this, however, does not invalidate the cosmopolitan culture of the bourgeois metropolis, as the latter’s complexity and sophistication of social relations are usually “supplemented by exceptional liberties of expression” where “diversity and dissent [take] hold” (“m p ,” 44). This duality of the metropolitan character shows a family resemblance that leads to two crucial issues of modernity. One is the still mystifying operations of commodity, market, and capital, whose unrelenting raw force as well as nimble capacity to generate new forms, desires, and ideologies remain at the center of a monumental intellectual enterprise of historical cryptography, phenomenology, and narratology. In this respect, Jacques Derrida’s astonishing work Specters of Marx (1994) is not only a timely reminder of the ghost of an oppressed past that never left us but first and foremost an intellectually conscientious evocation of the ghost, indeed, a spectrology of capital itself, which must inspire a new reading of the city: it is impossible to have a fruitful reading of the modern metropolis without a historico-material analysis of capitalism.2 This leads to the second point of reading the metropolis, which is simultaneously a reading of culture at its most intricate and monumental. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin observes that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”3 In the urban context, violence goes far beyond the brutal physical destruction, reconstruction, and decay of cities throughout their existence, or the institutionalized control or “administration” of their residents. Violence is to be understood not only in terms of economic and power relations underscoring the city as a text and a cultural monument, but also in the realm of the city’s symbolic representation and organization, in terms of the willful erasure of community, experience, memory, and narrative by the victorious conquerors who, as Benjamin tells us, form a chain of succession of power, by which not only the “cultural treasures” themselves but their transmission from one generation to another are tainted (i , 75). No other sociocultural artifice fits more pertinently in the Benjaminian concept of the human cultural heritage, from which historico-materialists must strive to keep a “cautious detachment” and which they must “contemplate with horror” as much as with admiration and fascination. Williams’s reflections do not stop with fascination. Instead, the new urban form reached at the end of a historical description serves him as a starting

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point for a new round of formal-historical analysis, the site of contention this time being culture in a more narrow but crucial sense—form. Metropolis as form is for Williams not a social custom but a “community of medium” to be shaped and reshaped by generations of immigrants, literally and metaphorically speaking. In this process, the formal history of the metropolis is not an end, aesthetic or otherwise, but opens up new critical vistas by replaying the contradictions of social history with heightened psychological, artistic, and linguistic fluidity, intensity, and durability. Thus it is quite obvious that the ultimate theoretical interest of Williams’s discussion of the city overlaps with his subtle but ruthlessly historical reading of modernism, the centrality of which is the question concerning universality and change:

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The power of metropolitan development is not to be denied. The1 excitements and challenges of its intricate processes of liberation and alienation, this is a part opener page contact and strangeness, stimulation and standardization, are still powerfully available. But it should no longer be possible to present these specific and traceable processes as if they were universals, not only in history but as if it were above and beyond it. The formulation of the modernist universals in every case is a productive but imperfect and in the end fallacious response to particular conditions of closure, breakdown, failure, and frustration. From the necessary negations of these conditions, and from the stimulating strangeness of a new and (as it seemed) unbonded social form, the creative leap to the only available universality—of raw material, of medium, of process— was impressively and influentially made. (“m p ,” 47)

What has been captured by early modernists like Charles Baudelaire as the central task of the modern poetic intuition into the modern big city— namely, the perception of the eternal in the ephemeral, and the ephemeral in the eternal—becomes a critical, analytical question in Williams. For him, the new problematic seems to be a subtle yet powerful tension in the metropolitan experience, a tension formed between its simultaneous tendencies to liberate and to alienate, to stimulate and to standardize, to differentiate and to reify. The social, intellectual, and artistic dilemma of the modern as such, in this context, unfolds as it is being brutally overdetermined by historical immediacy while longing to stay “above and beyond it.”

two

The emergence of Shanghai as a subject—in socioeconomic history but especially in its symbolic reproduction—can be considered with reference to

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Williams’s notion of the politics of the modern as a politics of the universal. It is widely observed that in this most modern (the meaning of the word now becoming a question rather than a given) of all Chinese cities, different ideologies and material forces converge, take hold, and battle each other over physical space and population as well as their representations. What is less discussed, however, is the historical condition that gives rise to and shapes the urban text of Shanghai and its unique intensity in both stylistic and political terms. In a prose poem called “The Spring of Shanghai,” written in 1931, Zhou Leshan, a now obscure writer, depicts his personal encounter with the modern big city in a way readily reminiscent of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Loss of Halo” in his The Spleen of Paris.4 With the simple poetic-narrative design of a bored, melancholic, yet still sentimental city dweller looking in vain for the traces of spring in an inhuman city where nature is all but eliminated, the author wanders across the urban space to contrast its alienation and decadence with an absent ideal. Even the plot is similar to Baudelaire’s fictional yet autobiographical poet figure looking for his lost halo amid the lifethreatening traffic in the streets of Paris. Whereas Baudelaire’s poet ends up seeing the loss of his halo as a bad omen, Zhou Leshan’s first-person narrator finally finds the sign of the spring but only in the marketplace. At the end of “The Spring of Shanghai,” the narrator buys an overpriced oleander from a mean street vendor and then goes home on foot as he can no longer afford a bus ticket.5 By enumerating the obvious reasons why people in every walk of life in the modern city are either denied or barricade themselves against even the faintest exposure to nature, the author concludes that nobody in Shanghai can ever see the spring. Instead, they live in an urban enclosure which seamlessly condemns them to a dazzling succession of events—motion pictures, theater, horse races, department store sales, gambling, dance hall parties, not to mention business fluctuations, war, and urban crime, all of which are overwhelmingly reported and advertised in the newspapers—that their coping with city life is no more than powerlessly absorbing the shock of these events in their isolated individual and private domains, cut off from the very social interactions that make the city possible in the first place. As a man of letters longing for connection to a larger community (for which the spring or nature stands as an allegorical substitution), the author finds his daily life reduced to the endless reading of newspapers: “Most of the readers simply read ‘Local News’ as if they were fiction, and I am one of them. For instance, stories on kidnapping read like Water Margins [Shuihuzhuan]; stories on opium, gambling, and

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prostitution read like The Dream of Shanghai [Haishang fanhuameng]; news on adultery and polygamy reads like The Soul of Jade Pear [Yulihun]; the bitter lawsuit papers brought by those abandoned women read like Dream of the Red Chamber [Honglou meng]; advertisements for calligraphy and art works read like Scholars [Rulin waishi]” (75). Among the many things the author singles out, his reading of newspaper stories as if they were classical vernacular fiction (lao xiaoshuo) is worth noting. It highlights a peculiar way the shockexperience and the excessive stimuli of the modern big city are absorbed by the Shanghainese through a narrative and psychological mediation between the traditional and the modern. The free allegorical substitution of things that are radically discontinuous in sociohistorical time and space indicates the abruptness and the lack of mediation of the Shanghai modern as a daily experience, as though the traditional novel still constitutes the “background of the Shanghai educated class” as they are thrown into the whirlwind of the city’s new material civilization. The discontinuity highlighted by the ad hoc allegorical substitution between the old and the new manifests itself throughout “The Spring of Shanghai” as extreme economic, social, class, and even racial disparity and contradiction. “Spring may have arrived in those graceful parks in the foreign concessions; but they are reserved for white people and the upper-class Chinese and not something to be enjoyed by those who live in the filthy longtang buildings” (74). It is obvious that, for the author, what is unmistakably and distressingly modern about Shanghai is not only its urban population’s being “sucked into a machinery [moxing] in which they are condemned to nonstop work” (72), but also its internal fragmentation—it is the strangeness, isolation, and utter incompatibility between the different parts of an internally fractured whole that is the modern metropolis. The same kind of allegorical mediation by “old-fashioned” imagery can also be found in Zhang Ailing’s writings, but working in the opposite direction. Zhang, who grew up in Shanghai and Hong Kong, belonged to the first generation of modern Chinese writers whose life experience was essentially and thoroughly urban, whereas, in contrast, Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly writers, as well as their Vernacular Revolutionary opponents such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun, were immigrants with rural or small town backgrounds. But Zhang’s love of the radically urban requires an artistic frame, a poetic filter which is formed through a unique, often ironic continuity with traditional taste and sensibilities. In a personal essay titled “What Is Interesting about Apartment Life” (“Gongyu shenghuo jiqu”), she writes how much she likes the noise of the city, which sounds to her “more poetic than the whispers of pine trees and the howling of the ocean on the pillow”; and how “only the

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noise of the trolley car can put [her] to sleep.” In a way reminiscent of Marcel Proust, she remarks: “The urban mind has as its background the arabesque curtains and draperies, the bland, white strips of which would be a trolley car in motion—smooth and level, it is a river of noise, gently flowing into our subconscious.”6 Those who are familiar with Zhang’s unrelentingly refined style know how much her language and sensibility are shaped by “oldfashioned” Chinese literature. The nearly suffocating density and intricacy of her intertextual relationship with the latter, as well as the impenetrable distance of irony of her writings, seem to lie at the core of her intimate representation of the city. Zhang observes rather matter-of-factly that Shanghai is a twisted product of the overlap of cultures old and new; that the Shanghainese are simply “traditional Chinese put through the grind mill of the modern, high-pressured life.”7 This, conversely, also means that for Zhang, every modern Chinese is, technically, a Shanghainese. It may not be too reductive a generalization to argue that the intensity of the Shanghai modern comes not so much from its actualized modern enclaves, but from its preliminary, precarious, and probative status. The intensity of its representation, then, seems always to lie in a perpetuated encounter—a traumatic or ecstatic one depending on the particular angle of entry. From the beginning passages of Mao Dun’s critical-realist novel Midnight (Ziye) onward, Shanghai has become the contact zone par excellence, whose edginess and provisionality are constitutive of its increasingly mythologized perception as the mirror image of an imagined universal modernity. The obsession with which Shanghai searches for a self-image—in a totality as well as in endless details and fragments—is matched in the history of modern world culture probably only by that of Paris, even though Shanghai’s modernity in both material and representational terms has never reached the Parisian level of articulation and elaboration. For instance, Victor Hugo’s majestic chapter, “A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris,” in Notre Dame de Paris, Balzac’s panoramic study of Parisian “custom,” or Proust’s endless mimesis of the empty chatter of the Parisian salon have no equivalent in modern Chinese literature (although the literary sketches in Mao Dun, Zhang Ailing, the new-perceptionist writers, and especially Wang Anyi’s writings in the 1990s make comparison possible). Neither has Shanghai been so thoroughly and meticulously painted and photographed as Paris has been by the likes of Edouard Manet and Eugène Atget. Nonetheless, the radical unevenness, heterogeneity, and self-contradiction of the Shanghai modern, its sharp contrast to the rest of the country, and its precarious, transient if not marginal place in the capitalist world system

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seem to perpetuate the city’s insatiable desire for its coherent picture, its essence, its nature. In contrast to the sociocultural density of the Parisian or New York modern,8 the urban text of Shanghai seems to achieve a level of formal and ideological intensity mainly through the feebleness of an utterly schizophrenic and constantly threatened modernity in material, social, and political senses. Therefore, it seems to me that the centrality of a critical study of Shanghai urban modernity does not lie in a derivative inventory of the modern and the metropolitan, as the attempt to describe a modernlooking Shanghai often slips into an unreflected nominalism in urban sociology and cultural studies, which substitutes a historical analysis of the urban text with a kind of bean-counting of the signs—architecture, consumer fashions, entertainment, literary styles, and so forth—that will fit in the stereotypical image of the modern metropolis. I would suggest, rather, that the intensity of the Shanghai modern, underdeveloped in almost every aspect, is more fully articulated in the intellectual-ideological battles of the modern and the universal, in the brutal, unrelenting succession of discursive and political paradigms throughout the history of modern China. In other words, the Shanghai modern is not thoroughly modern, but modern in an uneven and overcoded way in that the very concept of the modern is always subject to fundamental suspicion, challenge, and critique while passionately embraced and defended; it is always radically relativized and absolutized at the same time, and each tendency only feeds the ideological fervor of its opposite. In this convoluted and chaotic TimeSpace, modernity as such is always a sheer fiction—an ideology and utopia at the same time—to be read in a diverse and contradictory context which necessarily destabilizes its mythological and ontological certainty while creating more reified—and in this sense, more modern—forms of mythologies and ontologies. In this sense, Shanghai may be a privileged site to witness the central dilemma of modernity as it is described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: it is a historical process which enlightens by mythologizing; that Enlightenment always creates its own myth that is the mythology of the modern.9 Indeed, the unproductive mode of representing and reproducing Shanghai modernity mentioned above is itself part of this intellectualideological conflict, unwittingly or not, because the enjoyment of an imagined geographical adventure and cultural archeology can only be fully realized and justified in systematically rewriting not only the political history of modern China but the history of its everyday world and private life as well. The urban text of Shanghai is not only a product of different writing machines marking their forever deterritorializing territories, it is itself a “body

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without organs”10 whose rhizomes and assemblages expand endlessly to maintain its consistency and intensity. In other words, the Shanghai modern is always already a deterritorialized modern and can be captured only in its flight to becoming something different, in its mutations and variations. The mythological picture of Shanghai compensates for this flight and absence, often by means of a metaphysical notion of the modern as such. By producing an intricate network of signs, images, and narratives, Shanghai, like other major modern metropolises, becomes a living creature whose existence is inseparable from and incomprehensible without its own mirrorimages and myths. The goal of a critical reading of such a text is not seeking refuge in the psychological or mythological “interpretations” but grasping the politics by which the city as a sensuous abstraction captures its material relevance and forms its own fetishism. This is the reading on Kaf ka—and of Paris as “the capital of the nineteenth century”—exemplified by Walter Benjamin. Whereas others seek to argue that Kaf ka is to modernity what classical myths were to traditional society, Benjamin suggests that we take him “literally.” Thus he reads the omnipresent father-son relationship in Kaf ka not as a psychoanalytical trope but as overdetermined by the juridico-political system in human history. Father is “the one who punishes”; “there is much to indicate that the world of the officials and the world of the fathers are the same to Kaf ka” (i , 113). To take Shanghai “literally,” then, is not to throw ourselves into the mass production of the city as a modern mythology which appears in its purest form in advertising that saturates the urban space. Rather, it is to read the city against the grain to expose its ruthless and irreducible overdetermination by its changing material, social, and political context. More specifically, it means to read and write about Shanghai between, beneath, and beyond the existing genres, styles, and discourses to create the peculiar linguistic, intellectual, and political spaces for the deconcealment of the dualisms, ambiguities, overlaps, hybridities, and rifts rendered invisible by various grand narratives of history, including the anti–grand narrative rhetoric of returning to the private, the quotidian, the normal, which, as Peter Osborne observes, has become the greatest and least tolerant grand narrative of our times.11 If there is to be a “minor literature” of Shanghai, then it does not have a new ontological shelter in either intellectual schemes or in “apolitical” empiricism, which invariably bears a hidden or not-so-hidden ideological edge. The material concreteness and allegorical multiplicity of history cannot be preserved merely by isolating a text, an event, or an epoch from abstract frameworks of concepts and ideologies. Rather, they can only be maintained

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by a critical effort to retain the historical tensions, passages, and contingency of both continuity and discontinuity. The Benjaminian approach to the city shows as its historico-philosophical core a complex and productive notion of time, which is spelled out in his readings of Kaf ka: “What has been forgotten . . . is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products. Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kaf ka’s stories presses toward the light” (i , 131). We may, in a Benjaminian spirit, consider a minor literature of Shanghai to be as much about forgetting as it is about memory, about a phenomenological and political restoration of the concrete images of Shanghai as they flare up in every historical moment of danger. What is to be achieved here is not so much a chronological account of the rich repertoire of the literary and visual representations of Shanghai, but rather a critical iconography which places the fragmented and multilayered image of Shanghai in the allegorical mosaic of the modern and the ideological history of the universal. This means to wrestle with the mythological self-understanding of this modern metropolis as it is formed, circulated, and recycled in the competing and overlapping paradigms and discourses of modern Chinese history, which is riddled with rupture, shock, repression, and phantasm. Viewed as a picture, a Darstellung, the image of Shanghai returns the gaze of historical contemplation. The aura generated in this exchange is not so much of a purported authenticity of the universally modern, be it the immediacy of Western enclaves or the everyday world of a home-grown urban middle class. Rather, it is the radically and irreducibly historical, whose mobility, complexity, and internal differentiation simultaneously construct and deconstruct the phantasmagoria of space, culture, and commodity.

three

A critical iconography of Shanghai must start with the historico-intellectual origin of the city as an image and a conception, which is something embedded in and symbiotic with the discourse of Chinese modernity. In 1904, Jingzhong ribao (The Tocsin), a newspaper controlled by the anti-Manchu revolutionaries and edited by Cai Yuanpei, among others, published an article called “The New Shanghai,” which identifies the city as the hope for a new Chinese civilization, a place which prefigures a “dazzlingly splendid new world in the heart of darkness.” The abstractness of such a utopian

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vision is, interestingly, supplemented with a cartographical appearance of Shanghai. Rendered in flamboyant classical Chinese, this geographical description highlights the city’s central place in remapping China in the new national consciousness and in the global space: Where is this new world? It is in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River facing the East China Sea. The ocean currents knock at the coastline along the edges of the foothills which are flanked by Baoshan on the left and Chuansha on the right. With the Huangpu River circling nearby and the Tai Lake further inland forming its cushion, the region extends freely to the south toward the sea, encompassing a massive stretch of magnificent land. Riding the currents and protected by three islands, it occupies the center of a 15,000-li long coastline of East Asia, constituting the foremost city among the eighteen provinces of China proper. What is this place? It is called Shanghai. What a beautiful place! What an unthinkable fortune with such a natural environment!12

From this point on, Shanghai could no longer be seen as a dubious place on the muddy river band infested with foreign devils; instead, it was a spearhead of a nation’s destiny in the modern age. The city on which the coming “new world” depends, just as nations and empires, are not natural entities but human inventions, to be sure. It is as yet visible only on a mental map, and in the monumental human endeavor of cognitive mapping. Parallel with and indifferent to that is another chain of events which hinted at the persistent development of a different kind of history: three years before Shanghai leaped into the consciousness of the revolutionaries, in 1901, Shenbao, the largest modern newspaper in Shanghai, already celebrated the publication of its ten thousandth issue. Three years later, in 1907, the Waibaidu or Wellesley Bridge was completed on the Suzhou River. In the early morning of March 5, 1908, Shanghai saw the first trolley car rolling out of the International Settlement. It was greeted by a series of outlandish traffic accidents in the months to come. In the summer of 1909, electrically lighted gardens in foreign concessions became a favored rendezvous for Shanghainese to spend the long nights. To compete with the better illuminated Western settlements and concessions (zujie) for commercial interests, evening markets (yeshi) were established in the Chinese city, followed by the first Commodity Exhibition (shangpin zhanlanhui) a few months later. In November of the same year, the North Train Station (Beihuochezhan) was completed, equipped to handle twenty cargo trains and about one thousand passengers per day. At the same time, the Shanghai Club (also known as the Royal Club, the English Club) was founded in a magnificent building

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on the Bund, boasting its 110-foot-long bar. Reserved only for Western merchants in Shanghai but sharing membership with other English clubs in Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, and Kobe, it was a reminder of Shanghai’s place on a different map and in a different kind of global space. By 1910, one year before the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty, Shanghai was already a city with over one and a quarter million people (including about fifteen thousand foreign, mostly Western, residents). Despite the momentous growth of the city in the decades that followed, the New Culture intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s held a largely, sometimes intensely negative view of Shanghai. One year after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Fu Sinian, still a Peking University student running the radical magazine New Wave (Xinchao), wrote that Shanghai “stinks” because it lacked social organization and originality, its residents capable of nothing more than imitation and bad taste.13 Zhou Zuoren, in a famous essay in 1926, defined Shanghai culture as one “of compradores, hooligans, and prostitutes,” whose superficiality, hastiness, and decadent excess were the polar opposite of the “rational and aesthetic” culture of an enlightened world of everyday life. Although Zhou attributed the tastelessness of Shanghai culture to its colonial origin and its overcommercialized environment, he saw it not as anything new but rather as an “exaggeration of what is inherently vulgar in Chinese culture.”14 Chen Duxiu, a regular, scathing Shanghai basher, regarded the city as socially filthy and culturally fraudulent. Following this tradition, Qian Zhongshu sarcastically wrote that “to expect Shanghai . . . to be a producer of culture would be to expect ideas to come out of body parts other than the brain.” Liang Yuchun simply called Shanghai a “dog.”15 What strikes us in this iconographic survey of Shanghai, however, is the passivity of Shanghai as it is being “shaped and reshaped” in the changing “community of medium” of modern Chinese intellectuals and its ideological identity. Through exhaustive archival research, the Shanghai historian Xiong Yuezhi shows us that the naming, definition, and the becoming-of-image of Shanghai has been almost exclusively the work of competing literary and artistic circles; that, beyond the narrowly defined “Shanghai school” as a style in fine art and Beijing opera in late Qing period, the “Haipai” title, never accepted, let alone invented, by those who were in Shanghai, was invariably a pejorative label. Despite some secondary writers such as Zhang Ziping, Ye Lingfeng, and Liu Na’ou, who were widely regarded as “Shanghai-style” writers, the “school” decidedly lacked leaders or followers. Lu Xun, for instance, flatly rejected both the “Beijing school” and the “Shanghai school” as meaningful signifiers. From a detached position, he tried to redirect the petty and

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misleading rivalry between the two to a more socially concrete understanding of their economic and political conditions of possibility. He pointed out that Beijing was the imperial capital of Ming and Qing, and Shanghai the concession to Western powers; whereas the capital city boasted a mob of officials, the foreign concessions were jammed with merchants. Hence his widely quoted observations: “In a nutshell, the ‘Beijing school’ consists of the lackeys of officialdom, and the ‘Shanghai school’ is made of the rented hands of the business class. . . . With officials looking down on merchants being a time-honored Chinese custom, the Shanghai school tends to fall even lower in the eyes of the Beijing school.”16 Lu Xun’s observations allow Xiong Yuezhi to comment on the revival of Shanghai as a cultural style and an intellectual discourse since the late 1980s. Xiong maintains that, in the 1930s, nobody would accept the banner of the “Shanghai school”; yet half a century later, not only were the cultural circles of Shanghai willing to accept it, they wanted to raise the banner sky high. In other words, unlike the debate in the 1930s, which was provoked by others, the current discussion on Shanghai is being waged by Shanghainese themselves. Xiong then suggests that reintroducing the Shanghai school as a subject for public discussion reflects the attempt by the Shanghainese to regain certain characteristics, a certain identity, and a certain lost glory, although, as he remarks, “it is a road taken by mistake” (“h s ,” 182). Shanghai nostalgia as both an intellectual discourse and a cultural fashion reached the level of an obsessed frenzy only in the 1990s, with globalization (now a household word in Shanghai) mandating a new round of penetration of space and a fundamental temporal reconfiguration. But Xiong Yuezhi’s observations in the late 1980s proved insightful. There is much that is interesting and productive in the late 1990s media and scholarly rediscovery of Shanghai from underneath the master narrative of Chinese enlightenment and revolution, but the drive to restore the “authenticity” of a native urban and bourgeois everyday culture—as indicated by Cheng Naishan’s writings about old Shanghai, and by the culture industry’s producing the stereotypical images of old Shanghai for mass consumption—betrays an ideological fervor and metaphysical grammar, both of which rely on the same abstraction which subjected a large part of Shanghai to oblivion. This should turn our attention to the missing link in the historical continuity and discontinuity of the Shanghai image as a subject of critical iconography. It is commonly believed that Shanghai remains an interesting subject of study so long as it is different. The difference is usually understood and measured vis-à-vis the rest of the country, contrasting Shanghai’s

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cosmopolitan glamour not so much with the country’s dull provincialism as with its uniformity forged by Chinese socialism. But in this way the conventional discourse on Shanghai reveals its ideological assumption that limits the scope of its historical and theoretical investigation. It is a revisionism intended to reverse the strong universal claim of the discourse of Chinese enlightenment and revolution by an ideological counteroffensive, but without considering Chinese communism an integral part of the historical problematic of Chinese modernity. Content with linking the 1990s and the 1930s, the revisionist discourse repudiates the ideological formulations of the previous paradigm but inherits its philosophical syntax while constructing a new picture of Shanghai as the image of the universal. But nowhere does the image of Shanghai pertain more intimately to the politics of the universal and become more articulated than when a sudden release of sociopolitical energy erupts to change radically not only the sociopolitical landscape but the mental form by which the physical world is perceived and understood. The Shanghai image is riddled with internal ruptures, gaps, and overlaps between different sociogeological layers and temporal structures. Its political and discursive construction, its mythological image-formation, therefore, must be considered a narrative and ideological solution to the unsettled and discontinuous movement of historical time and space.

four

Given the predominance of pre-1949 Shanghai in commercial as well as academic discourses on the city (nostalgia being its conspicuous logo), on the one hand, and a futurological utopia of the city sanctioned by the technocratic government at the end of the twentieth century on the other, the year of 1959 may seem to be an unlikely entry into the historico-hermeneutic circle of reading Shanghai. Yet the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic did create a Shanghai image according to the nation’s own self-image, which makes explicit a gigantic reframing of historical time. Such a picture is attainable only at a historical rupture; its coming into being marks, more than anything else, the arrival of a new historical subject understood socially, politically, and culturally. It is only fitting that this picture finds its beholder—in the same way a text finds its author—in Zhang Chunqiao, then already a rising star in the propaganda branch of the Shanghai Party organizations, who later surged into national prominence as the de facto leader of the Shanghai Commune (1967) and then of the Cultural Revolutionary government of Shanghai, and whose political career culminated

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in—and ended with—his central role in the powerful radical Maoist clique known as the Gang of Four (Sirenbang). Titled “Climbing New Peaks of Victory” (“Pandeng xinde shengli gaofeng”), Zhang Chunqiao’s article is placed at the beginning of a collection of essays by prominent writers (Ba Jin), literary critics (Jin Yi), artists (Hu Wanchun, Tong Zhiling, Huang Zongying), and national capitalists (minzu zibenjia, Liu Hongsheng) celebrating the first decade of liberated Shanghai. It starts with an elevated subject-position that is at once trite and striking: “There is a difference between climbing mountains and traveling on the ground. After you mount a high hill, wiping the sweat from your face, greeted by the cool breeze on the top, you can look back and see the path you have just covered. You realize: the journey behind you was a hard one, but what an unthinkable height we have overcome!”17 Such a dramatic image of modern subjectivity confronting a sublime nature could have been inspired by romantic art such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), only it is, in Zhang Chuqiao, designed to present a political subject of history facing down a conquered sociomaterial being, which is the city of Shanghai itself—a Shanghai image sublimated by its conquest by that new subject. The “peak” Zhang Chunqiao mounted that day was the former Broadway Building (renamed “Shanghai dasha” or the Grand Building of Shanghai in 1951), a landmark twenty-one-story building overlooking the Waibaidu Bridge on the Suzhou River. The riot of clouds in the iconic German romantic oil-painting was replaced by an ocean of roofs and spider web of streets of Shanghai, the biggest and most industrialized city in China.18 Zhang did not forget to bring a witness to share the spectacle and, more important, to provide a frame of reference and a sense of distance in which to better present the picture. His honored guest was none other than W. E. B. Dubois, “the well-known black scholar and an eyewitness to many historic events of our times,” who, Zhang tells us, had just celebrated his ninetieth birthday in Beijing. He has been to Shanghai. In 1936, he stayed in a place near the Bund for several days. Now, here we are, twenty-three years later, on the terrace on top of the Grand Building of Shanghai, enjoying a bird’s-eye view of the city as a whole. He pointed to a green area just over the Waibaidu Bridge and asked me repeatedly: “Is that really the Bund?” Yes, there are no more warships and sailors of Western imperialist countries; there are no more gangsters and prostitutes. That would be easy for most people to imagine. What is less imaginable is that the place has become so clean, so beautiful, so charming. This is why Dubois could not believe that what he saw was indeed the

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Bund where he had visited before. When he received yet another affirmative answer, he said: “Great change.” It was windy. We asked him to go inside to take a break. Yet this historian just stood there and refused to move. It looked as if he had entered a giant book depicting earthshaking, sky-turning events of great historical significance and simply did not want to stop reading. (“px ,” 3)

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Zhang does not allow himself merely to be intoxicated with the sight. His task is not only to behold the new but to turn a moment in history into something “above and beyond it,” something that marks a profound rupture of time such that an ontological chasm proves to constitute a configuration of experience sustaining and sustained by a new political unconscious. The proposed new Shanghai image must then set itself up as the true beginning of time; it must outshine and indeed completely engulf the old image of the city as a negated prehistory. If the presence of the now requires the reduction of the past into a nonentity, then Zhang does not waste any time questioning “exactly how heavy and how big this industrial base of old China was.” Zhang tells his readers with great detail that, according to “reliable statistics,” Shanghai’s total industrial output in 1949 was a mere 390 million yuan, roughly the equivalent of the value produced by the Shanghai Light Industry Bureau alone in 1957. He quickly adds that this is not to say that the Chinese people have toiled over the past century only to build such a meager industrial base. Rather, “the wealth we have created, in fact, can be found in New York and London, Tokyo, and Paris, in those splendid palaces of the millionaires.” Such a class-based international perspective, to be sure, is not aimed at achieving a self-image of the city that contributes to a dubious cosmopolitanism, but prefigures a return of the city to the nation now politicized, consolidated, and understood in terms of class politics. In this light, the following discursive officialdom of the Chinese communists may acquire a strategic relevance: The blood of the Chinese working class can be found in the most beautiful diamond of the imperialist crown. What is left here is nothing more than the prisons and slaughterhouses by which the imperialists exploited the Chinese people; the factories and enterprises in which the Chinese workers were subject to utter slave labor. Only after the Chinese people took their destiny into their own hands did Shanghai become the industrial base and cultural center of the new nation. And only when people realized that they were working for themselves, that their labor was used to create their own happiness did Shanghai start rapidly to change its appearance. (“p x ,” 3)

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The robust orthodoxy in Zhang Chunqiao’s historico-epistemological imaging, when mediated by a quarter century of post-Mao reform and its own ideological orthodoxy, developmentalism, amounts to an estrangement or defamiliarization. In an odd way it reminds the people of another equally important historical origin of the Shanghai problematic (as it was developed by the radical left-wing intellectuals of modern China) in the colonialist and imperialist framework of capitalist uneven development— the material condition and sociopolitical context for the question of the modern metropolis as such. At the same time, however, Shanghai under such a willful gaze also stands as a mirror-image which separates the newly emerging subject of history from its past as a constructed picture of sheer alienation. It is this transhistorical divide, not the concrete historical and material differentiations, that perpetuates the fracture of time. Yet the Now which emerges from such a nihilist abyss deprives itself of a more concrete history; hence it is not a moment of history but a moment of ahistoricity inscribed in the notion of the eternal, timeless new. Indeed the past’s becoming invisible is the prerequisite of the making of the new Shanghai image as an idea: the idea of politico-economy, class struggle, universal liberation, and above all of a teleology of progress. One can find in the large-scale industrialization after 1949 the tireless work of such a teleology, whose utopian intensity quickly transformed Shanghai from a consumer-oriented, diverse city into the workshop of socialist China marked by uniformity.19 Zhang’s article unambiguously lays down the grammar of the new Shanghai narrative, the centrality of which is to contrast the old and the new. Thus we get to read the tedious statistics of industrial output (increased 5.5-fold between 1949 and 1958), steel production (18.5-fold), textile production (twofold), and the “exciting decline” of Shanghai’s share in industrial output of the country as a whole (from 30% in 1949 to 14.3% in 1958).20 This effort is carried through by other contributors to the book, from Ba Jin’s rather generic depiction of the new Shanghai as “one big sunny park” in sharp contrast to the evil darkness of the old Shanghai, where Chinese residents were routinely harassed by gangsters and humiliated by foreigners, to Liu Hongsheng’s refreshingly simple and frank account of his own conversion from a legendary capitalist entrepreneur to a willing “supporter of the Communist Party.”21 These discursive devices expose the grammar of “contrasting the old and the new,” which is raised to a metaphysical level by Zhang’s triumphant tone to provide the deeper moral and political justification for the new

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master narrative. Nonetheless, it was historically a discourse shared by most Chinese intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, a culmination of the discourse of Chinese modernity as enlightenment, liberation, and the “advancement of forces of production.”22 And it is the same metaphysical assumption that foreshadows the political downfall of such a masculine master narrative which seeks to supercede its prehistory and class enemy by sweeping them into the “dustbin of history.” Against this ideological backdrop, a more feminine, more “minor” literature of Shanghai is called forth to account for the stubborn and irreducible residues of the past that coexist with the now, and with the historically new whose abrupt coming into being suddenly changes the constellation of the present and the past, as well as of the future. Along with the search for a more intimate and “down to earth” image of Shanghai there emerges a new dialectic, a new battle of the universal. It is in the wake of the feebleness of the rhetoric of either “the beginning of history” (Zhang) or “the end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) that conflicting and intertwining modes of representation flourish and new orders of signs begin to emerge.

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Detached from the small-circle rivalry between the Beijing-based and Shanghai-based men of letters, and shunning away from a holistic picture of Shanghai in developed realist form (as attempted by Mao Dun), Lu Xun nonetheless remained a sharp observer of Shanghai in its most quotidian complexity and melodramatic excess. His essayistic sketches of the nittygritty of a twisted yet thriving everyday world, more than any sweeping representational scheme, prefigure a Shanghai in a minor literature. In his 1935 short essay “The Young Ladies of Shanghai” (“Shanghai shaonü”), Lu Xun paints an intimate portrait that should claim its place in the gallery of urban literature next to those of Parisian streetwalkers and domestic maids in Baudelaire and Proust. The essay starts with a sociological observation of the snobbish dress codes of Shanghai, a matter of life and death for the socially mobile and financially precarious Shanghai middle class. Quickly it moves on to the shopping rituals and taboos practiced to perfection—and held as the vital secret of the city—by those young, fashionable women of Shanghai looking for bargains. “Usually the shop clerks are patient if you have a hard time making up your mind while picking and choosing, but not if you drag on for too long. There is only one way to save the situation: you have to be a little flirty and capable of swallowing

Toward a Critical Iconography

some teasing. Otherwise, the regular contemptuous glimpse will quickly come your way.” Lu Xun then continues his observation: The women accustomed to Shanghai living have long been aware of their glamour, as well as of the danger that comes with it. The air those fashionable ladies put on is certainly boastful, but it is also a way to defend, to muster, and to resist, as if they are at once the darling and the enemy of everybody of the opposite sex; as if they are pleased and annoyed at the same time. This air also has those underaged teenage girls infected, as we see them shop in the stores with their head tilted to the side, pretending to be slightly unhappy, as if they are facing a ferocious enemy. The shop clerks, of course, poke fun at them just as they do at the grown-up women. But these young ladies already understand what that means. In short, they have prematurely matured.23

In Lu’s portrait, a critical poetic image of the city is formed drawing on the irreducible entanglement and ruthless overdetermination of an urban sociology, psychology, and economics. Relating the image of the Russian young girls in Fyodor Sologub, who have the bodies of children but eyes that are fully mature, Lu observes that the young ladies of Shanghai are constantly placed in dangerous situations of the modern big city. Indeed, the paradoxical beauty of these young women becomes the aesthetic space in which the city’s harsh sociological truth is restored with its phenomenological richness and sensuous cruelty. This relatively obscure two-page piece by Lu Xun may be regarded as the marker for a hidden origin of a minor literature about Shanghai. Such a minor literary tradition, which is also a feminine discourse, is intertwined with the subaltern realms and forms that undergird a sharp contrast to the phantasmagoria of the Shanghai modern. More often then not, it has as its subject matter the hardships of everyday life, the endurance and the cleverness of diverse human groups coexisting in a cramped social space, the fleeting happiness and sorrow in the domestic interior, fashion gossip, and, most notably, women. In Wang Anyi’s literary production in the 1990s, the image of Shanghai via that of women achieved its narrative elaboration and symbolic differentiation. In the 1995 novel I Love Bill (Wo ai bi’er), Wang Anyi recounts the romantic yet strenuously calculated love affairs between the female protagonist, Ah San, an art school dropout, and a series of foreigners in Shanghai in the 1980s. Dwelling in her own imagination and her longing for an idealized life that seems possible only with Westerners, Ah San, after a brief romance with an American diplomat, starts making contacts with foreigners

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in public spaces until she is arrested in a luxury hotel lobby as a prostitute. Denying the charges, she tells the investigator that she does not have sex with foreigners for money, an explanation which earns her no more than the nickname “Do-It-for-Nothing” (baizuo) among other female inmates. Depicting Ah San’s dubious mode of existence, Wang writes: Now Ah San had been classified among those who prepared themselves only for foreigners, and Chinese boys had given up on her. This was why she did not even have a Chinese admirer. They lived inside a mysterious circle, inaccessible by strangers. Nobody knew anything about how they lived day in and day out. The truth is: sometimes they stayed in the most luxurious hotels, eating oysters that had just been flown in; sometimes they lived in a transient house in the outer suburbs, having instant noodles and using candles during 230

power outages. Their outfits hung on brick walls whitewashed with lime, underneath a gauze kerchief. Their fashionable shoes were just scattered on the cement floor, one here, one there.24

While the fragmented, precarious life lived by Ah San pulls together in its immediate incoherence a coherent image of the city, she is also watched by an urban gaze that readily reminds one of the shop clerks’ stare in Lu Xun, under which the young ladies of Shanghai quickly reach their maturity. As Ah San, all dressed up, tries to make a decision at the tourist store across the street from a luxury hotel, her hesitation looks like a required moment in a preprogrammed game: One of her delicate shoes with a thin heel and an elegant stripe extended over the curb of the street, like a person about to wade feeling the speed and temperature of the flowing water. From behind, her body looked like a frozen moment in a dance scene. Suddenly, her body leaped forward, and she stepped down the sidewalk and quickly crossed the street toward the hotel. A smile appeared on the face of the female shopkeeper, as if things happened just as she had expected. (83)

Yet for Ah San, the luxury hotel is not just another building in the urban space, it is something of existential, indeed utopian, significance: “She liked this place. Although separated from the outside only by a glass wall, it constituted a completely different world. She felt that this architecture was a glass dome of fate, and everyone wrapped underneath it had a covert relationship to one another, a relationship that would become clear when the right moment came” (86). The “covert relationship” to be realized under that glass dome of fate, to be sure, is also the way Shanghai’s collective

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imagination relates itself to an imagined, idealized modernity. This is the reason why each time Ah San tries to escape from her imperfect reality, embodied by her dusty room piled with garbage and plastic bags, she finds herself in the lobby of a luxury hotel. The “frequently established and frequently vanished intimacies with those foreigners eroded her confidence, making her forgetful about what exactly she was looking for,” but “the more obscure those things were, the more hope they gave you” (106). It is just like the alien languages she uses to communicate with her lovers/customers but never truly masters, tongues whose “pronunciation and grammar, always a step ahead of her and demanding her extra attention, were the materials for her dreams: they made her dreams concrete” (98). Perhaps nothing makes more vivid the sense- and detail-obsession of the Shanghainese than Ah San’s indulgence with the “Hellenic facial profiles” and linguistic exoticism of her foreign bedfellows in those calculated love affairs with something fundamentally abstract and symbolic. In a rare moment, Ah San and Martin, a French art dealer, embrace each other passionately as they finally get to spend the night together. Wang Anyi interrupts unsentimentally, “But the reasons for their affection were different. Martin held in his arms a moment, whereas Ah San held in her arms her entire life” (73). The intensity of Shanghai’s love affair with phantoms of modernity can be seen in how it tries to seize/cease universal history to turn it into something timeless and dependable. For the nostalgic Shanghai, what is held by the history of world capitalism as a moment in its global adventure is embraced as the city’s entire life—its past glory, its present anxiety, as well as its future meant as the recapitulation of its Golden Age. The perseverance with which the middle-class Shanghainese build and live their minute everyday life into a concrete abstraction is a recurring theme in Wang Anyi’s recent work, in which that model of bourgeois life—as the pattern, the original copy, the Idea—becomes paradoxical only retrospectively. In an essay in memory of a Shanghai that never was, she describes her unexpected encounter in the middle of the Cultural Revolution with Shanghai bourgeois interiority in an old apartment building, where the parents of her fellow sent-down youth lived: “I was stunned to see such a scene. . . . [the bourgeois life] was so well-preserved; there was not a single scratch on the surface of it! Time and change had no effect on it!”25 The living room could have been placed in any decade—the 1930s, 1940s, even the 1950s and the early 1960s—and yet it was placed during the early 1970s, during the historical upheavals caused by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In a nominally communist, classless society, class, as both a political concept and a culture,

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as it is embodied by the Shanghai bourgeoisie, is perceived to be holding on to its wounded yet actually existing social prestige and distinction. Even at the end of its rope, the bourgeoisie effectively fights back from the ground zero of everyday life against the newly endowed yet largely symbolic status of the working class. “They still lived their lives as if nothing had happened,” Wang exclaimed, “they just quietly passed yet another narrow gate of history. They could be considered to be out of joint with our times, but they looked completely self-sufficient; without depending on the times, they lived on from one generation to the next” (161–62). The silent, ghostly movement of the Shanghai bourgeoisie in the passage of time is certainly one of the memorable images in Wang Anyi’s writings during the 1990s. Her elegy for this class, which is at once sincere and ironic, can be understood equally well in that class’s simultaneous living and dying. Proving itself “above and beyond” even the Maoist revolution, the Shanghai bourgeoisie seems to die a weird death, that is, in its revival and triumph. The residual, actually existing bourgeois culture, not as a concept or image but in material concreteness, is deterritorialized—deferred, multiplied, ritualized, disseminated, universalized, and hollowed out—as it is copied and consumed by the middle-class urbanites of the 1990s as both the ghost and the guardian angel of Shanghai. This is the specificity in which the Shanghai bourgeoisie reaches its afterlife: by becoming a “body without organs,” an urban legend, a mythological machine. In the 1990s, when Mao’s China had been all but buried by the new round of commodification and “globalization,” it was the working class, as both a political concept and a culture—as it was engrained in Shanghai’s concrete, irreducibly local and national everyday life without its superficial glamour as a “global city”—that found its place switched with that of the Shanghai bourgeoisie during the Cultural Revolution. Whereas bourgeois Shanghai embraces its future through a willful nostalgia for its anchor in a more classical moment in the imagined universal history of the bourgeois civilization (e.g., colonialism or semicolonialism), the working class has retreated to the everydayness of a postsocialist world bearing the imprint of a suppressed history and its memory. In what has become a self-conscious production of a literary saga of the city and women, Wang Anyi has continued her representation of Shanghai as a labyrinth of change and nonchange, melancholy and ideal, sobriety and myth. In her 1999 novel, Meitou, the heroine, a “tough darling” (shuaishuai dada de baobei) of the lower middle-class residents of the Shanghai longtang, becomes a memorable image of the city which passionately, persistently builds its quotidian concreteness according to the obscure model

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of the bourgeoisie. After giving a detailed account of the furniture and the interior arrangement of the “big room” in Meitou’s parents’ apartment, which is living room, dining room, and bedroom all in one, Wang writes that the decorations bore a splendor on top of a classical prudence. Even the two beds in the room did not look vulgar and improperly familiar as privacy exposed; on the contrary, they endowed the room with a warm and practical atmosphere of everyday living. They also reduced the frivolous touch of the room to a certain degree—after all it was overstuffed and looked excessive. Yet, since everything was solid and substantial, they reflected a simple, even naive heart: All it wanted was to paint its own life according to the middle-class model, following the principle of diligence and hard work.26

The study of the social custom of the Shanghai lower middle class brings Wang Anyi to a close-range depiction, astonishingly detailed and precise, of the material space of its everyday sphere. In her 1991 essay, “The WesternStyle Houses of Shanghai” (“Shanghai de yangfang”), she presents a portrait of Shanghai everyday life under socialism as a charnel house of allegorical images of overlapping historical, political, and social paradigms: Today, life in the Western-style houses in Shanghai has become suspicious. The hot water hoses installed on the bathtub and the washing basin are rusting away after years of being completely idle. The hot water for a bath has to be carried in a kettle and poured into the bathtub, which means that it can barely cover the surface of its enormous bottom. In those houses the kitchen is usually on the first floor, thus carrying a kettle of hot water upstairs always amounts to an adventure. The fireplaces in the rooms are now sheer decoration and reduce the useful square footages, too. The pretty picture of a pensive face next to the fire has long retreated into the remote, distant past.27

With a relentless sociological interest in the detail, Wang Anyi tells us that such houses were originally designed for a single family, but now each of them is shared by several, sometimes many.28 Indeed, the multiplication or multiplicity of Shanghai residents contained or confined in the same space not only suggests the impossibility of a properly bourgeois way of life, but further implies the inevitable arrival of the postsocialist consumer masses in the not-so-distant future. Put differently, when the proletarian cause of Mao’s China was replaced by the state-sanctioned sociolibidinal fervor for the bourgeois or the protobourgeois during Deng’s China, the proletarian sneaks back with a vengeance at the allegorical and the “cultural” heart of modernization

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ideology: it thoroughly and radically turns on its head the properly—namely, individualistic, private, self-interested but with some measure of cultural vanity or pretense—bourgeois self-image of modernization and yields the floor of historical happening to the masses of postsocialist China. All this, to be sure, is only hinted at here, and the hint can be read probably only in a historical hindsight available to those who witness the explosive development of Shanghai in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century. The aging face of the city, on which an urban legend selflessly and even happily thrives and multiplies, is mingled with its literary counterpart, the aging woman, the former Miss Shanghai, in Wang Anyi’s Changhenge (Ballad of Eternal Sorrow). What links the city and the aging beauty to each other is an abstract machine of faciality, a prosopopoeia which posits a face and a voice to the deceased, absent, or dead and a meaning where there really is no meaning at all. Prosopopoeia, as Gilles Deleuze observes, is a trope of giving shape and meaning to an otherwise shapeless and incomprehensible world; it is a figure marked and haunted by its own figurality which, in reality, only vaguely disguises the dark world of nothingness behind language as such (tp , 188). As Paul de Man puts it, a prosopopoeia is “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.”29 Does the decaying body of Shanghai carry a message behind its faciality? Does the voice that comes out of the open mouth mean anything? The pervasive melancholy registered in Wang Anyi’s most important novel must be understood in terms of this struggle against the nothingness of meaning—or simply the horror of facing this nothingness—behind the death mask of history.30 This is the urban background against which Wang Anyi’s portrait of Shanghai women becomes clear. Virtually all of her female heroines have something in common which Wang Anyi herself considers to be anything but the stereotypical Shanghai femininity. Rather, she tells us that it is decidedly antiromantic but entangled with the brutal material and social conditions of Shanghai everyday life: That there are some plane trees in the city does not mean that Shanghai is a romantic city. Everything here is tough inside, built up brick by brick. If you sniff the air hard enough, you can sense the flavor of asphalt and the salty, bitter ocean in the wind as it caresses your face gently. If you climb on the top of a building and look around, you have an eyeful of the city’s utter coarseness—the tightly packed cement boxes, like beehives or anthills, looking rather hideous and horrifying. Do not be nostalgic for the old dreams of the

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1920s and 1930s, as they were only the lights in the front stage, rendering invisible the tightly packed beehives and anthills which conceal inside themselves a vengeful determination and a restless energy.31

Wang Anyi never fails to see the inverted image of the city in that of the Shanghai women. In such an allegorical identification and signification, discontinuous time and space finds a narrative and a language. In her essay “In Search of Su Qing,” written in 1995, the same year she published the Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, Wang captures, in the image of this female popular fiction writer of the 1940s, the spatiotemporal construct of Shanghai as a “legend” deconstructed: How many people’s experiences and stories have been lost in this city! Even though everything belongs to the category of gossip and seems unworthy of a place in the history book, nonetheless, in their absence many things about Shanghai become inexplicable and, therefore, legendary. This is what people mean when they say that the history of Shanghai is a legend. In fact, every single day of this city is spent carefully on the nitty-gritty of everyday life without any inappropriate fantasies; yet once you look back all of a sudden, it has already turned into legend. . . . Elsewhere history seems to move on in an orderly fashion, but in Shanghai, history moves in a hop, step, and jump, and one has to grasp the most concrete life has to offer in order not to live in a dream.32

The toughness and practicality of Shanghai women contrast with the standard image of men of the Shanghai middle class—the men of letters as both a caricature and a culmination of the city’s literary self-image—which 1940s writers like Shi Tuo in his “Notes from Shanghai” (“Shanghai shouzha”) repeatedly referred to as “petit bourgeois fantastic daydreamers” (xiaozichanjieji kongxiangjia).33 What is perceived, with amiable self-contempt, by Shi Zhecun as the “sentimentalism of Shanghai” is seen by Wang Anyi as, rather, the quotidian concreteness mustered and collected meticulously by the middle-class Shanghainese as a source for “secret” or “illegitimate” (tou) enjoyment. This is the subject-matter as well as the truth-content of a minor literary tradition by which Wang Anyi attempts to create a sociocultural genealogy of Shanghai as a modern metropolis. While the adjective “minor” implies illegitimacy vis-à-vis history as it is depicted by major literary and ideological discourses, it also indicates a persistence, endurance, and survival that sustains the city. Shanghai everyday life, Wang remarks, scrapes all the little pleasures from every corner for its own patient, slow enjoyment. The stormy changes of the outside world are abstract and alien to it,

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as it only acknowledges what can be experienced intimately and sensuously. You can call that a secret enjoyment, but it proves to be full of life, strong and stubborn, and would rather die than give up. This is not a life in which heroes are nourished, rather, it is meant for the faceless crowd that constitutes the pedestal on which the heroic statue stands. Such a life is neither poetic nor tragic; its representation does not make grand literature, but only fills the marginal space of the newspaper supplements; indeed, even its language is made of leftovers, scraps, crumbs. (“x sq ,” 44–45)

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In this literature of “leftovers, scraps, crumbs,” the image of Su Qing crystallizes that of the Shanghai women, which in turn makes visible—and durable—the city they inhabit. What is important about this cycle of literary allegorization, however, is the final appearance of the constant and structural that underlies the frivolous surface of Shanghai urban culture: All people could see was how modern and graceful the Shanghai women were, because their fashion came from Europe and America, especially from Paris. Nobody seemed to know how bold, vigorous, and pungent [ pola] they could get. In Su Qing, such pungency becomes convincing. They were sharptongued and eloquent, often getting the upper hand while dealing with men. They knew everything, and nothing tricky could ever fool them. They were tough, sharp, but never annoying, which indicated a deep-seated smoothness and an intimate knowledge of the way things were, which was something only experience could nourish. On the surface, they were carefree and adventurous, but in their mind they were always measuring and calculating, knowing only too well that a small imprudence could spoil a big plot. This was living in its most meticulous, with the knowledge that, even though the world appeared to have no set rules, deep inside, there were giant, unbendable, iron-clad laws and principles governing everything. This world might show you some good humor, but you should know better never to push your luck. Therefore the Shanghai women did not make good revolutionaries, as none of them had the ambition for subversion. (“x sq ,” 47–48)

Through the concreteness of everyday images of Shanghai, above all of Shanghai women, Wang Anyi patiently approaches a biopolitics at work which fills the gaps, omissions, and void of forgetting of the modern metropolis. Between the feminine wisdom and its inexhaustible vigor, cunning, and persistence and the “giant, unbendable, iron-clad laws and principles,” a new dialectic and a new language of the urban/modern is taking shape.

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An often unspoken assumption of various discourses on Shanghai lies in the city’s intertwining and blurring of what is considered Chinese (but not modern) with what is modern (but not Chinese). This assumption underlies the fascination with or distaste for a culture of Shanghai generated in the national and global contexts throughout modern Chinese history. Among them, the radical, metaphysical image-making exemplified by Zhang Chunqiao marks the lone attempt to go beyond this binary opposite, but only by collapsing a Chinese problematic into the absolutized discourse and teleology of the universal. Various counterdiscourses, especially those which emerged in the 1990s, seek an ideological reversal of a metahistorical narrative, but only by identifying with and universalizing a repressed and underdeveloped Chinese bourgeois culture, which was cut short, then erased by the previous paradigms of enlightenment, revolution, nation-state, the masses, and socialism. But Shanghai can do better by showing that it is neither a reified, reduced, and twisted version of the modern or of the Chinese as such, nor a muddy, undifferentiated mix of the two. Rather, the existence of Shanghai urban culture lies in a deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which follows a different route of flight and forms a different plane of consistency. That is to say, the modernity and Chineseness of Shanghai can be understood only as something more modern than the modern and more Chinese than the Chinese. To do that, however, Shanghai has to find a way to become smaller, meaner, more “down to earth,” less formed, less significant, less territorialized than the images imposed or self-imposed on it, images that themselves have formed a “community of medium” shaped and reshaped by generations. The unmaking of Shanghai as its own myth prepares for its participation in a larger and more vital context. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give a long quote from Henry Miller about something that does and does not have to with China. He may as well be talking about Shanghai, or modernity as such, and in a way reminiscent of Wang Anyi: China is the weed in the human cabbage patch. . . . The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor. . . . Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Sermons on the Mount. . . . Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is

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the only way out. . . . The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank growth . . . . it points to a moral. (tp , 18–19)

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Not to be fooled or outdone, Deleuze and Guattari quickly ask, “Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?” These are, of course, great questions. However, I want to end with a different topic: language, writing, and literature. In Kaf ka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari define “minor literature” as having the following characteristics: (1) its language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization; for example, it is written by a minority within a major language, such as the Prague Jew Kaf ka writing in German; (2) everything in it is political; and (3) everything in it takes on a collective value.34 But what is the language in which Shanghai is written? Is it written by a minority (Shanghainese) within a major language (Chinese)? Or, rather, is the major language, in the specific TimeSpace of the Shanghai modern, something other than Chinese which, after all, is not the lingua franca of the universal? When Meitou interrupts her husband’s philosophical babbling in Mandarin, is she disturbed by the dialect that is not her own, or by what the dialect conveys that is alien and even threatening to her well-being in daily life? Is Ah San’s attraction to foreign languages a sign of her dis- and misplaced cultural and political identity or merely the fascination of a provincial girl with the speech of the cosmopolitan? If the writing machine of the Shanghai discourse comes from a minority position, what is the politics and collective value of this minority construct? What is that whole other story vibrating within it that contrasts this minor literature to major literature, namely, the literature of the properly individual, the Oedipal, the bourgeois? Or, is this minor literature in fact a major literature but in its negative form, or does it want to be one in its dreams? Wang Anyi’s writings of Shanghai everyday life from a feminine—but not feminist—viewpoint uncover a theoretical and political entanglement or contradiction that is historical in nature: instead of asking what her writings can do for women’s literature, we should ask what women’s literature can do for a radical rethinking of the gigantic frameworks of history embedded and engrained in the irreducibly material(ist) and “minor” texture of everyday life. It is this materialist grasp of everyday life in both its concrete detail and holistic irony that allows Wang Anyi’s writings to

Toward a Critical Iconography

transcend the academic confines of feminism and ideological criticism as we know them in the Western context. Such a transcendence, moreover, shows its route of flight or “deterritorialization” through the traditional terrain of realism henceforth endowed with new vitality, rigor, and dynamism. It is realism as a revitalized force of representation and cognitive mapping that makes explicit a critical refiguration of the dialectic of “major” and “minor” literatures as it unfolds in Wang Anyi’s writing about Shanghai. The relevance of the concept of minor literature to a critical reconsideration of modern Chinese literature may be highlighted by Fredric Jameson’s controversial notion of national allegory, by his assertion that all Third World literatures are necessarily collective stories about a life-and-death struggle in the political situation. In this light, the May Fourth literary-cultural tradition, including its extension into prc literary production, must be considered a textbook example of a minor literature. The literary discourse of Shanghai, however, emerges as a minorian construct and a politically motivated aesthetics within an international minority which exists as a national majority—the New Literature and the discursive modernity of left-wing Chinese intellectuals. It also, by its deterritorialization, shows its escape from the nation and reunion with the universal, the properly “major” or bourgeois individualistic tradition against which the leftist literary mainstream of modern China defines itself as a “minor” tradition. Wang Anyi’s writings can then be understood as a radical turning of the table on the stable and ideologically entrenched binary hierarchy between “major” and “minor” literatures. That is, her narrative must be viewed as a stunning appropriation of the bourgeois literary and aesthetic arsenal for the self-assertion of a collective literary enterprise. To this extent, her writings bear a meaningful testimony to the legitimacy—to avoid the term historical necessity—of Chinese socialism not only as a social project, but also as a culture and a form of life. The brutal interpenetration of history, culture, class-consciousness, and political identity in this context indicates the coexistence, overlapping, even symbiosis between different discourses, paradigms, and symbolic orders in modern China. It also shows the ruthless movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, by which different ideological systems seek their own life and afterlife at others’ expense. Amid all this, the story of Shanghai becomes a problem for all of us. Thence Deleuze’s questions and his rhetorical answer: “How to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language? Kaf ka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope” (19).

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“Demonic Realism” and the “Socialist Market Economy”: Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

for those who strive in vain for a definition or a mere coherent description of post-Tiananmen China, Mo Yan’s Jiuguo (The Republic of Wine) offers an imaginary solution, aesthetic pleasure, and even moral catharsis. This, of course, does not mean that one sees a clear picture of what China actually is in Mo Yan’s fiction. Rather, in The Republic of Wine, all the murkiness, contradictions, and chaos associated with contemporary China that prove so frustrating to analytical reason become the poetic norm within the confines of a narrative artifice and thus reach a state of autonomy in the world of the probable (as opposed to the actual)—the more philosophical in the Aristotelian sense. The novel, which is grotesque, hilarious, nauseating, and seductive all at once, is an experiment of literary coarseness and stylistic boundlessness. In this experiment, the sheer energy, variety, and playfulness of the writing open up new possibilities for representation while constantly driving the very form of the narrative to the brink of collapse. Within this fictitious space, which borders on the fantastic at one end and reportage on the other, there is always something thrillingly “realistic” both in terms of the familiar and recognizable and in the stronger sense of historical truth and value judgment. All this makes the reader wonder if the intense languageand formalistic game in The Republic of Wine is mobilized just to provide an aesthetic sanctuary from which to launch the most ruthless and irreverent social satire and moral-allegorical assault vis-à-vis the social landscape of the “socialist market economy.” One must observe from the onset, however, that Mo Yan, a modernist with a peasant background, has never been explicitly associated with the realist penchant for social analysis, moral critique, and political engagement; nor has he committed himself to any entrenched position with regard to the

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

dazzling variety of styles available to the Chinese field of literary production. Even though there is obvious stylistic continuity in Mo Yan’s literary production, which dates back to the mid-1980s when he was dubbed as a “magical realist,” in Mo Yan one tends to see a literary guerrilla warrior with peasant wisdom and cunning, who keeps a weary eye on the rapid urbanization and commodification of Chinese everyday life, and whose evasiveness and aloofness on the sociopolitical level are only matched by his intensity, radicality, and boldness at the formal and allegorical level. The phenomenological world is rarely represented in Mo Yan’s writing, instead, it is devoured by the formal-narrative space and turned into allegorical images by an unrelenting logic of fabulation. To this extent, the reverse seems to be true: Rather than a vehicle for representing the real, the narrative enterprise in Mo Yan is where the fragmented realities of postsocialist China find their own formal and moral certainty, even meaningfulness—often in the form of dazzling ambiguity, excess, blasphemy, and nonsense. It is, for an age without sociohistorical framing and moral-political constitution, a privileged if not destined symbolic dwelling for all the eradicated, homeless, and roaming experiences, images, memories, and specters in the Chinese 1990s. In this light, the Liquorland in The Republic of Wine is, quite literally, what China may appear to be to the eyes of the intoxicated: blurred and yet vivid; bizarre, absurd, and yet singularly logical; maddeningly incoherent and yet astonishingly, shamelessly articulate. On the one hand, this is a swamp of natural history with all the mumbo jumbo of outdated or freshly minted expressions, gestures, and logos. On the other hand, the Liquorland is also, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s observation on the unconscious, organized as a language. To read The Republic of Wine beyond cynicism or the temptation to endorse the most negative and subversive possible view of China today is to grasp this language at work and to figure out its grammar, which defies the conventional, rational language of communication, representation, and codification. The world captured in The Republic of Wine is a dream world mapped against sober consciousness. It is also a disoriented, schizophrenic, and defeated state of mind projected onto the objective world of postsocialist China. In this mirror house, both the internal and external realms are reduced to scattered “body parts” of shock experience, floating helplessly in the sociocultural phantasmagoria where all those who dare not speak their own names during the daytime of the “socialist market economy” find freedom and ecstasy in the nocturnal, underground (but legitimate) world of debauchery, binge drinking, cannibalism, sycophancy, seduction, lust, bribery, conspiracy, brutality, and death.

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Division of Narrative

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The Republic of Wine consists of not one but three concurrent and interrelated narratives. The division and unity of the narratives lie at the heart of the novel’s structural design, which in turn gives rise to a dialectical tension conducive to its allegorical poignancy and representational productivity. At the forefront is the main text, so to speak, which is about Special Detective Ding Gou’er’s investigation on a case of alleged cannibalism in the Liquorland. We can call it narrative 1, “the properly fictional.” The second narrative is constituted by a series of correspondences between “Mo Yan” the writer and a would-be writer, Li Yidou, or Doctor Liquor, a researcher at the Food Institute in Liquorland. The content of the 1 letters back and forth is mostly about Li Yidou’s asking “Mo Yan” to help him get his writings published in a nationalthis literary magazine, completed is a part opener page with Mo Yan’s eventual trip to Liquorland and his meetings and activities there at the very end of the novel. Like most personal correspondence, these letters touch on a wide range of issues large and small, with references to and comments on contemporary Chinese society. Among the sundry topics, mentioned in passing in most cases, two consistent veins of development are noticeable: One is Mo Yan’s mostly discouraging advice on Li Yidou’s literary career, which are as self-referential or even autobiographical as they are socially critical—in both “real” and doubly fictional terms. The other is Li Yidou’s tireless linguistic idiosyncrasies and excesses: a flood of anecdotes, gossips, complaints, reports, and introductions made by a self-appointed native informant and a pushy, flattering amateur writer in the provinces begging for help and favor from a major writer. Here we have the author of a fiction using his real name to communicate with a fan who is not only a fictional creation in the general sense, but a “real person” living, working, and reporting from the fictional place featured in narrative 1—the Liquorland. We can call this narrative 2, “the fictional nonfiction.” The third layer or dimension is constituted by a miniseries of nine semiconnected short stories written by Li Yidou, the supposedly real person or nonfictional character in narrative 2. These stories can be properly described as creatively bad writing, whose singular failure to achieve any fictional coherence, or even basic formal adequacy, let alone autonomy, betrays a whole network of overlaps, parallels, blanks and omissions, and cross-references among the three narratives. To this extent, something bad or substandard by the conventional notion of fiction writing turns into something hilarious, productive, and enjoyable in the realm of allegory. In a way these short

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

stories constitute a semisystematic parody of the major paradigms of modern Chinese literary history, with its mimicry of the major styles and topical concerns, most notably that of Lu Xun’s “Medicine” in Li Yidou’s “Meat Boy.” But in a more immediate sense, those stories seem to mock the breathless chase of the international literary trends throughout the Chinese Reform era in the name of “innovation” and “modernization.” A combination of the most “realistic” portrayal of things real and surreal in Liquorland, on the one hand, and the most fantastic, shapeless, or unconventional form of storytelling, on the other, these stories offer a manual of ham-handedness in literary writing, and a bombastic dropping of “experiment” of stylistic attempts and labels called variably—by Li Yidou, the author—“severe realism,” “demonic realism,” “magical realism,” “neorealism,” “the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism,” and so forth. We can call this narrative 3, “the fictitious fiction.” The division of narrative as well as the overlap and interpenetration of the three differentiated, semiautonomous narrative domains are central to the organizational structure and representational-allegorical ambition of this novel. First of all, this technique expands and deepens its formal space by internal differentiations which correspond to the complexity and multifacetedness of the socio-experiential totality that is the referent of a symbolicallegorical totality. Not only the multiple as opposed to single narrative voices or viewpoints—Mo Yan, Mo Yan–Li Yidou, and Li Yidou—create a highly supple and productive perspectival fluidity, which allows repeated entry into the same allegorical space (but from different angles and with different moral and representation interests)—this narrative design also initiates and generates the subfictional and the metafictional out of an otherwise conventional fictional operation trapped in its own formal-stylistic confines, however “modernistic” or “experimental” that might be. The invention of the subfictional (the “fictional nonfiction,” the “journalistic,” etc.) and the metafictional (suggested by Mo Yan’s fictional dilemma about the writing of this novel, or the narrator’s exposure, display, and demonstration of the entire productive process of the making of the novel, among them the author as producer at work), interestingly, do not undermine the fundamentally realist nature of fiction as mimesis and representation but rather reinforce it, repositioning and reestablishing the properly fictional as the properly realist (the “main text” or narrative 1 in The Republic of Wine) vis-à-vis the journalistic, the documentary (narrative 2), on the one hand, and the fantastic and the allegorical (narrative 3), on the other. If Mo Yan’s most ambitious stylistic experiment in the 1990s can be regarded as a persistence

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of modernism, then it is a kind of late modernism willing and able to form a historically and politically necessitated alliance with realism: In the case of Mo Yan’s writing in the 1990s, the two traditions seem to reunite in the more “severe” and “demonic” land of allegory, a mode of writing which is both far more ancient and yet, at least potentially, far more “modern” in the sense of the postmodern. This is evidenced by The Republic of Wine’s wide-ranging presentation of postsocialist actuality, above all its incredible representational capacity to accommodate and cover a bewilderingly discontinuous, schizophrenic, and yet productive and energetic reality by means of narrative expansion through its internal division, fragmentation, and radical piling and stretching into the allegorical, which borders on the collapse and dispersal of form itself. The aesthetic adventure or gamble seems nearly to pay off, as the loss of subject-position or self-consciousness, its breakdown, stoppage, dissolution, and appropriation by the world of alienation—including its becoming animal, becoming an object, becoming the other, and becoming the antiself by exchanging its qualities with its opposite—all become meaningful and active elements of narrative mobilized to present a disjointed age comprehended in thought or, to be exact, in allegorical contemplation. Notably, this representational totality is achieved not by falling back to any fixed moral, ideological, or aesthetic position and uniformity, but by living with or being-in the world shared by new demons of the commodity economy as well as old ghosts of a multiplicity of traditions—dynastic as well as revolutionary, Maoist as well as post- or anti-Maoist, urban as well as rural, rational as well as irrational, cosmopolitan as well as provincial. All of these prove to have a claim on social and everyday life in China today, and an invitation to participate in Mo Yan’s allegorical carnival which wholeheartedly, though with a tinge of allegorical cunning, sarcasm, and distance, welcomes them all.

The Breaking of the Subject

The detective story as a genre is quickly reduced to a pastiche in the opening chapters of The Republic of Wine. Everything that could go wrong does for this crack investigator. Before even reaching Liquorland, Ding Gou’er finds himself flirting with a female truck driver, whom later he sleeps with, only to realize that the vulgar and yet irresistible seductress is the wife of Diamond Jin—the deputy head of the Party Propaganda Department, and the chief suspect of Ding Gou’er’s special investigation on cannibalism— who works as a bait. The investigator’s wanton behavior is, throughout the

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

narrative, accompanied by sober, often self-critical and self-mocking reflections and assessments of the situation. It is interesting to notice that Ding Gou’er, though intensely self-conscious, never even tries to resist the temptation, and he would probably not be willing or able to had he known the truth beforehand. The inevitability is suggested, indeed, defined, when, after a vulgar round of exchange, Ding Gou’er, with barely repressible excitement, feels “like a budding potato that had rolled into her basket” (2/2).1 This apparent failure of judgment and self-control results not from a lack of experience and professionalism, but rather, paradoxically, from too much of them. From the outset, Ding Gou’er’s lustful attraction to the sensuous lady truck driver is mixed with guardedness, suspicion, and even disgust—at her coarseness, propensity to rough, even violent moves, and her physical peculiarities, such as her lips feeling “cold and mushy, not resilient; freakish, like puffs of cotton waste” (4/3). And yet the cat-and-mouse game continues unabated, following its predestined route of boredom, instantaneous gratification of desire, jealousy, and drive toward self-proof, all of which play only a formalistic role to get the narrative going at the allegorical level, rather than drawing critical attention to these motifs. “Your task may be important, but no investigator of his caliber would allow those tasks to be in conflict with women”—the thought passes through Ding Gou’er’s mind as a reminder of his abovenormal skills and professional pride, which are confirmed by his reputation among his colleagues that he can “solve cases with his dick” (3).2 The special investigator eventually falls in love with the female trucker and shoots her between the eyes out of jealousy, when he realizes that she is also the Concubine No. 9 of Yu Yichi, the dwarf owner of Yichi Tavern. The special investigator’s entire submission to lust or his overconfidence in his own experience and skills, which justifies his unprofessional, reckless behavior, is not portrayed in the novel as a personal weakness but as a central characteristic of the protagonist. And, given the fact that this is not a realist hero but an allegorical figure in an ambitious, innovative work by a veteran modernist writer, the central characteristic must be in turn understood as a representational and allegorical device conducive to social satire and moral critique, as well as pertaining to the formal necessity of narrative. The subversion of the conscious-unconscious hierarchy, or the breakdown of authority in the face of the libidinal is accompanied by the reversal of the gender role, even body position, in the steamy, bizarre, and violent sex scene between the special investigator and the lady trucker, in which the lustful and weary male pursuer of the lady trucker is portrayed as a powerless rape

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victim, not to mention the mouse in a trap. Even his pistol is captured by the lady trucker and pointed at him during foreplay. While chasing the object of his desire and trying to legitimate the deviation, the special investigator is totally at the mercy of a nebulous criminal world and completely pre- and overdetermined by a more mysterious force field of fatal attraction. The same logic can be seen in his relationship to alcohol. If the special investigator’s appetite for sex prey is as casual as it is insatiable, then he should be on more solid ground when it comes to binge drinking, as his status always puts him in a perfect position to refuse. If the special investigator falls into the sex trap voluntarily, then he can be credited as putting up some fight against alcohol—if only because banqueting is invariably close to the lion’s lair and the issue of cannibalism—only to lose miserably each and every time. The first encounter is a full-blown battle, a fierce duel of words, cunning, wit, and skills of mobility, bending and twisting written or unwritten social customs, cultural norms, and the moral-emotional constitution to one’s advantage and the opponent’s submission, all of which explodes in endless verbal fireworks, a signature Mo Yan moment. The drinking scene in the first section of chapter 1 unfolds along the familiar Chinese pattern of tirelessly proposing toasts and forcing the guest to drink at a banquet. The special investigator has explained his mission to his hosts, the Party secretary and director of the Luoshan coal mine on the outskirts of Liquorland, followed with a no-nonsense declaration of his nodrinking policy. Yet the pages to follow are filled with various ways by which the local hosts persuade or trick the special investigator into drinking more and more, until he is drunk as a fish. The process of Ding Gou’er’s letting down his guard and his loss of consciousness through steady increasing alcohol intoxication or poisoning is meticulously, hilariously, and religiously documented in wave after wave of verbally dazzling proposals for yet another round of bottoms-up toasts. The reasons to drink are, to be sure, as numerous as they are convincing: The rhetoric of patriotism (resist foreign liquor, drink Chinese!); contribution to the state (the liquor tax being an important source revenue for the central government); improvement of the relationships of leaders to the masses; local customs (drink in even numbers); workingclass solidarity in a toast for the charcoal-faced coal miners who cannot be at the banquet; filial piety (in the name of aging mothers), and so on and so forth, all the while with the necessary erotic distraction in the form of eager young waitresses “flutter[ing] around the room like so many bright red flags blown in the wind” (44/41; translation modified). The list of proposals stands as an objective index of the messy, conflicting, and overlapping

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

social, ethical, cultural, and psychological codes of persuasion and legitimation available or at work in postsocialist China. Each time someone proposes and urges, Ding Gou’er ends up having to drink the hard liquor in front of him, one cup after another. Before long, he is no longer dealing with potential criminals but rather his own brothers, as all he can hear is this: Comrade Old Ding, in fact we are family, we are dear brothers coming from the same mother, brothers as we are, we must drink together to exhaust the fun of drinking, as in this life we must explore pleasure fully, and happily we will go on to our graves together. . . . Here we go again, thirty cups, on behalf of Deputy Head Jin, thirty cups in your honor, drink drink drink . . . whoever doesn’t drink does not deserve to be called a man . . . Jin Jin Jin . . . Diamond Jin can drink an ocean of liquor, vast and boundless. (49/46; translation modified)

The moral and consumer equalization in the banquet scene is only a hint of what is to come in Mo Yan’s allegorical representation of China today. The general exchange and reversal of the roles—legal, moral, and of value and power—also finds its prelude in the way the special investigator is escorted into the underground banquet room, which makes him uneasy, as if he, not they, is the suspect, if not the criminal. Totally defeated by alcohol, the special investigator finds himself at the mercy of his dubious local hosts, the Party secretary and the director, who prop him on either side, “thumping him on the back as they fed encouraging remarks into his waiting ears, like country doctors trying to save a drowned child or teachers trying to educate a wayward youth” (50/46). While drinking and sleeping with the enemy do in a way lead him to the heart of darkness, represented by the triad of Diamond Jin the party leader/ ringleader (and the uncrowned king of drinking), the legendary dish of grilled baby boy, and Yichi Tavern on Donkey Avenue, his arrival invariably resembles that of a loser, a victim, a deserter, a captive, if not a de facto complicit and defector. That is to say, his painstaking push toward the center of the crime scene seems to have the sole purpose of declaring victory for the criminal world and presenting a case for why it must be so. In the end, in his imaginary pursuit of criminals, who all party together on a boat, “our long-suffering special investigator” falls into an open-air privy “filled with a soupy, fermenting goop of food and drink regurgitated by Liquorland residents, plus the drink and food excreted from the other end, atop which floated such imaginably filthy refuse as bloated, used condoms . . . a fertile ground for all sorts of disease-carrying bacteria

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and microorganisms, a paradise for flies, heaven on earth for maggots” (338–39/330). Before the “irresistible gravity [draws] him under” and the “pitiless muck seal[s] his mouth,” he shouts his last words: “I protest, I pro-” (338/330). While the dissolution of the Subject in the properly fictional is narrated in terms of the special investigator’s demise, whose allegorical significance is transparently embedded in storytelling, the theme or argument is shown in the fictional nonfiction as well as the fictitious fiction, in the form of the formless verbal and imaginary excesses of Li Yidou, which requires a different kind of hermeneutic approach. In both his letters to Mo Yan and his own short stories, Li Yidou demonstrates a tendency to bundle vocabularies, idioms, and expressions from vastly different social, political, historical, and cultural contexts; wander in and out of them without any qualification or discrimination; allude to them and quote them completely out of context; and twist and bend them to the purposes of his own observations and arguments. Howard Goldblatt, the able English translator of The Republic of Wine, acknowledges that “Mo Yan has filled his novel with puns, a variety of stylistic prose, allusions—classical and modern, political and literary, elegant and scatological—and many Shanghdong localisms,” but concludes that “it would serve little purpose to explicate them here, particularly since a non-Chinese reader could not conceivably ‘get’ them all” (v). For the critical audience, however, such explication might be necessary and plausible, if one can gain an appreciation of the interconnection between the linguistic level and the semantic level; between verbal constructions and social experiences; between discursive sedimentations and the multiplicity of historical memories—all of which correspond to the interconnection between the allegory of the breaking of the Subject and the breakdown of its sociomoral as well as cultural-intellectual form. An example of Li Yidou’s use of language can be found in his early letter to Mo Yan expressing his resolve to become a writer: “Your comment was like a clarion, a solemn wake-up call for our fighting spirit. I want to be just like you were then: sleeping on brushwood and eating gall; sparks leaping from your eyes; tying your head to the roof beam and stabbing your hip with an awl; using your pen as a weapon; preferring death over retreat; either success for the present or honor in eternity” (58/54–55; translation modified). At first glance, this seems sheer nonsense, and to this extent the English translator is right in deciding that it would make little sense to the nonChinese reader. What is registered in this sequence, however, is something readily recognizable and identifiable as verbal usages rooted in particular and

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

distinctly different historical periods. “Clarion,” “wake-up call,” and “fighting spirit” are all stock quasi-military language or imagery of Cultural Revolutionary–era editorials and propaganda materials. It is followed, however, by a five-character couplet and a slew of three-character phrases, a pastiche of the classical form of five-character verse and the Three-Character Classic, a popular children’s primer in imperial China. “Sleeping on brushwood and eating gall” stems from the ancient proverb woxin changdan, which refers to the Warring States–period story about Gou Jian’s (the King of Yue’s) daily reminder of his own humiliation as a prisoner of Fu Chai (the King of Wu) and his determination to take revenge. This allusion to the classical texts, however vulgarized, is followed by a surprising, completely flat, mundane line, albeit in five characters, which is a more than ordinary way of describing stars popping up in front of one’s eyes after some head concussion. The “tying your head to the roof beam and stabbing your hip with an awl” is lifted from the Three-Character Classic, which describes the drastic measures by which a would-be scholar keeps himself from dosing off while preparing for the civil service examination. This popular form of “classicism” is followed by a sudden leap into a revolutionary call to arms, perhaps a corrupted form of Mao’s praise of Lu Xun’s unrelenting, uncompromising writings as “daggers and javelins aimed at the enemy.” This, again, abruptly turns into something military about holding one’s position till death, with the truly comic twist in the last couplet of a three-character phrase (buchenggong, bianchengren), which is known to be Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s expectation from or decree to his generals in case they face a choice between death and surrender, a phrase popularized by all those early prc war movies depicting the corrupt Nationalist military defeated by the Communist troops in the battlefield. There are many other examples, as this is the way Li Yidou writes, not only in his letters to Mo Yan, but also in his short stories. The straying, deviating, flattening, and collapsing of language as a social convention, its decentralization, dehistoricalization, excessive-obsessive prolongation, and its ultimate free-floating dispersal in the timeless space of the now in narratives 2 and 3 are in themselves and by themselves a potent allegorical supplement to the representation of the destruction of the self in narrative 1. The subjectless plethora of wanton energy seems to be the invisible force appropriating and manipulating these linguistic residues and wastes from all past eras, ancient and modern, and across the political spectrum. Embodied by Li Yidou, the wannabe writer of China today, it registers the breaking of form, subject, and tradition during the upheaval of the 1990s commodity economy. But as Mo Yan’s invention, however, Li Yidou seems also, in his

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cheerful, mindless way, to make possible a melancholy contemplation on the swamp of forgetting which, dialectically and allegorically speaking, is also a channel house of memory.

Homelessness and Nostalgia

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Paradoxically, for the special investigator, the seal of fate is not death drive but rather attraction and love, to be precise, a peculiar longing for love and belonging framed and defined by his adventure in the Liquorland. If it seems strange that the sight of the well-illuminated city of Liquorville at a distance makes him sentimental, it is because the secret longing for a home is mixed with a fatalistic intuition or presentiment that this is going to cost him his life. It is only fitting that the special investigator enters the city accompanied by a femme fatale, a dubious woman from a dubious place, whose being available as an object of desire gives an otherwise purposeless drifting and roaming a purpose, even though it works against the mission and the goal of the investigation. This supplement to the lack of purpose in the sociomoral sense by means of a purpose in an existential, libidinal sense highlights the alienation of the individual from the collective in a didactic sense extrinsic to the narrative, and in a hermeneutic sense that is intrinsic to the texture of the narrative. The latter is made explicit by the special investigator’s mood oscillating back and forth between the gloomy and brooding, on the one hand, and the utopian and optimistic, on the other. The sense of loss and aimlessness is registered in the following: The dog ran off, leaving Ding Gou’er standing there in disappointment. If I thought things out objectively, he was thinking, I’d have to say I’m a pretty sorry case. Where did I come from? I came from the county seat. What did I come to do? Investigate a major case. On a tiny speck of dust somewhere in the vast universe, amid a vast sea of people stands an investigator named Ding Gou’er; his mind is a welter of confusion, he lacks the desire for selfimprovement, his morale is low, he is disheartened and lonely, and he has lost sight of his goal. Bereft of that, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose, he headed toward the noisy vehicle at the coal-loading area. (125/118)

What is remarkable is not the sudden absence of worldly motivation and sense of direction, but, rather, the vanishing of all social and ethical ties to the community to which the special investigator belongs. From the leap from the mechanical memory of the “county seat” as a nexus in the social organization, which designates Ding Gou’er’s institutional power, prestige,

Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

and duty, to the cosmic image of “a tiny speck of dust somewhere in the vast universe,” the move completes the transformation from history to natural history that corresponds to the general breakdown of any collective conception of time, history, and value. Such radical nihilism sets the stage for the seemingly unexplainable transition from an existential mood of ennui to an erotic jouissance from working with or for the lady trucker, a bodily plaisir whose articulation is as expressive as it is socio- and culture-specific: “It was an extraordinary appealing, wholesome, lively night in which exploration and discovery went hand in hand, study and work stood shoulder to shoulder, love and revolution were united, starlight above and lamplight below echoed one another from afar to illuminate dark corners” (134/126). The familiar binaries of “exploration and discovery,” “study and work,” “love and revolution” constitute the ironic justification of the libidinal by the moral codifications of the revolutionary and socialist tradition, as well as a paradoxical valorization of libidinal value to the pale, nominalistic signifiers of the empty shell of the official state discourse, which functions more like a flashback from a previous life in the strange landscape of the “socialist market economy.” Even though the siren songs of temptation are correctly perceived by the special investigator as an omen and a star of bad luck, he no longer has the energy or resolve to muster the epic will or discipline of an Odysseus who ties himself to the mast. Instead, the rudderless drifting across the treacherous sea of the early years of postsocialist China is experienced by the special investigator as a rather shock-riddled but amorous adventure of self-exploration and self-realization through temptation and seduction, whose pleasure and gratification are rhythmically disturbed by boredom, self-doubt, and melancholy. The lady trucker, instead of embodying a home away from home, is a nihilistic phantom leading to the next nihilistic phantom. After embracing the lady trucker with a passionate kiss, the special investigator climbs into the cab with her, like a wolf collecting his newest prey. Gazing at the bright lights of Liquorland in the distance, however, he is “struck by feelings of loneliness, like a lamb that’s strayed from the flock” (173/165). Through a series of twists and turns, the investigator finally acknowledges that things are much worse than he initially thought: “The worst possible has happened: He had fallen in love with this demonic woman, and now their lives were bound together like a pair of locusts on a string” (240/231; translation modified). Once this fateful bond is established and recognized, the centrality of this illicit relationship shifts from the collapse of conscious into unconscious, the rational into the irrational, to the mind’s eye of this

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unconscious and the irrational as an allegorically truthful viewpoint of representation. Thus, the more bizarre, twisted, incredible, and surreal the images appear to be in the fictional dimension, the more objective, lucid, credible, and real they become in the socio-allegorical dimension. From this moment on, the female truck driver is transformed from a sex trap into a tour guide and travel companion through whom and with whom Ding Gou’er experiences the Kafkaesque urban labyrinth of Liquorville. This repressed homesickness seems to be the content of his feeling “sentimental,” which can be glimpsed through the image of his son flaring up before him as he is driven deeper and deeper into the unfathomable province of alienation and self-alienation. On the way to this irreversible exile or self-exile, even the most familiar becomes estranged, as embodied by those by-now period-specific proper names associated with the socialist organization of production, technology, state institutions, and the work-unit system—such as Liberation truck, Victory Avenue, Hero 800 gold fountain pen, and c c p central committee directive, including a whole, nearly exhaustive list of various bureaucratic sections (Technical Section, Production Section, Accounting Section, Financial Section, Dossier Room, Reference Room, Laboratory, Video Room) of a certain Special Food Cultivation Institute in the middle of nowhere, which Ding Gou’er bumps into on his way into the Liquorland along with the lady trucker (137/129). It must be added that if there is a tinge of nostalgia in this enumeration, it is a nostalgia barely separated from the familiar and the ongoing, which still repulses and even disgusts the senses. A more vivid picture of the mixed, lawless state of postsocialist or “preliminary socialist” (shehuizhuyi chujijieduan) mode of production can be found in the following description of the road leading to Luoshan Coal Mine on the outskirts of Liquorville: The narrow road twisted and turned like an intestinal tract. Trucks, tractors, horse carts, ox carts . . . vehicles of every shape and hue, like a column of bizarre beasts, each linked by the tail of the one in front and all jammed up together. The engines had been turned off in some, others were still idling. Pale blue smoke puffed skyward from the tractors’ tin exhaust stacks; the smell of unburned gasoline and diesel oil merged with the stink of ox and horse and donkey breath to form a foul, free-floating miasma. At times he brushed against the vehicles as he shouldered his way past; at other times he had to lean against the squat, misshapen roadside trees. Just about all the drivers were in their cabs drinking. Isn’t there a law against drinking and driving? But these drivers were obviously drinking, so the law must not exist, at least

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not here. The next time he looked up, he could see two-thirds of the towering iron frame of the windlass at the mouth of the coal mine. (6/5)

In fact, this strain of hidden codes—embodied by the specific administrative units, ranks, and zoning, means of transportation, and social organization of socialist industrial production—can be found in the very first sentence of the novel: “Special Investigator Ding Gou’er of the Higher Procuratorate climbed aboard a Liberation truck and set out for the Luoshan Coal Mine to undertake a special investigation” (1/1). These names, in their strange and estranged way, are proper names of nostalgia and forgetting at one and the same time. Always popping up in the middle of nowhere and completely out of context, these proper names or lists of names encircle and mark the isolated, petrified space of the socialist past, as ruins in the wilderness of commodity and desire, to be encountered unexpectedly by the special investigator in pursuit of his phantom happiness. In this light, the missing link or the mediation between the existential “bad mood” and the erotic “good mood” of the special investigator can be located very precisely, that is, in the spatial passage through which the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. It is fitting that this middle place is the outskirts of the city, where the disappearance of the countryside of Mao’s China meets the emergence of the shapeless, unpleasant urban development of the Chinese 1990s: Reluctantly, Ding Gou’er picked up the bucket, parted the yielding roadside shrubbery, stepped across the shallow, bone-dry roadside ditch, and found himself standing in the middle of a harvested field. It was not one of those fields to which he was accustomed, where you can see for miles in every direction, like a vast wilderness. Having made it to the outskirts of the urban center, he could see signs of where the city’s arms, or at least its fingers, had reached: here a lonely little multistory building, there a smokestack belching smoke, dissecting the field in crazy quilt fashion. Ding Gou’er stood there feeling unavoidably, if not overwhelmingly, sad. After a reflective moment, he looked up into the setting sun and its layers of red clouds on the western horizon, which effectively drove away his melancholy; he turned and strode in the direction of the nearest, and strangest-looking, building he saw. (132/124)

The barren, harvested field perturbed by the fingers of the extending city now stands as a passage of time connecting the past and the future; it is also, literally, a maze in which a lost special investigator experiences a lost sense of belonging, a profound sadness which gives rise to an unsuccessful,

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misplaced search for a home. As proper names they are more like ghosts and specters visiting the living from the by-gone era. Instead returning to claim their right in the world of being, they blend thoroughly into the ghostly landscape of demons and monsters of Liquorland, utterly undistinguishable from what constitutes its natural-historical swamp. This repressed homesickness cannot be quenched by the special investigator’s getting lost in the labyrinth of Liquorland, not even by the companionship and guidance of the lady trucker. Most immediately and in a technical sense, the special investigator’s fall from hero to criminal, his aimless and futile flight in Liquorland, is not caused by the traps and pursuits of the enemy, but by his own murder of the “demonic woman,” his femme fatale.

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Natural History

If alcohol intoxication lubricates the narrative, enabling the special investigator to stumble into a blurry-eyed discovery of the world of alienation, it is also the natural historical constant which equalizes all things in the present and anchors them in a borderless, timeless past extending back into time immemorial. Quoting from an authoritative scholar in liquor studies, Li Yidou lists names for various alcoholic drinks in different languages (li in ancient Chinese; bojah in ancient Hindu; bosa in an Ethiopian tribal language; Cer visia in old Gallic; Pior in old German; eolo in old Scandinavian; bere in old Anglo-Saxon; koumiss in a language spoken by an ancient Mongol tribe; mazoun in Mesopotamian; melikaton in ancient Greek; aqua musla by ancient Romans; chouchen by the Celts) and goes on to conclude: “The natural appearance of liquor and the emergence of plants with sugar content probably occurred at about the same time. So it is safe to say that, before there were humans, the earth was already permeated with the aroma of liquor” (281/291). This natural-historical framing quickly unfolds beyond a mere imagined viewpoint, into the allegorical correlations which form the narrative substance of The Republic of Wine. In “Ape Wine,” one of Li Yidou’s subfictions, the mutual borrowing, exchange, and appropriation between man and animal, culture and nature evolve into satirical hilarity: but even more inspiring is the fact that my father-in-law, Professor Yuan, went up to White Ape Mountain alone, his hair matted, his face dirty, an old man with a ruddy complexion, making friends with the apes and learning from beasts in the wild, absorbing the apes’ wisdom, continuing his ancestor’s tradition, and drawing lessons from outsiders’ experience, making the

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past serve the present, foreign things serve China, and apes serve humans, until, at last, success was his and he could take his place as a world leader with his city-toppling ape wine. (331/322–23)

If Professor Yuan, the quoted authority, needs to go primitive in order to recover the recipe of the legendary “Ape Wine” in Li Yidou’s severedemonic-neorealist fiction, then in Liquorland in Mo Yan’s properly fictional, the special investigator must be driven by a similar obsession into a natural historical setting to retrieve the treasures of allegory. Here the luring mechanism beyond rational resistance is, obviously, sex—sex not as an end but as a trigger for a semiabstract pursuit and state of anxiety, absent-mindedness, void, and aimlessness. From the distance of detachment, loss, boredom, and melancholy, the road to Liquorland opens up a strange yet familiar landscape: “Powdery black smudges disfigured the leaves and weeds. Beyond the ditches lay autumnal dry fields, their withered yellow and gray stalks standing ethereally in the shifting winds, looking neither cheery nor sad. . . . A mountain of waste rock pierced the sky ahead, releasing clouds of yellow smoke” (4/3). Against this sullen background the city (Liquorville) is experienced. The bizarre love affair, which turns the investigator’s mission on its head, brings him, at long last, from the “periphery” to the center of consumption, decadence, conspiracy, gore, and mystery in the capital city of Liquorland: “Donkey Avenue was virtually deserted. Potholes filled with water like frosted glass gave off a dull glimmer. Just how long he’d been in Liquorland he couldn’t say, but he’d spend all that time on the periphery of the city; the city itself was a mystery, one that finally beckoned to him on this later night. For the investigator, Donkey Avenue, with its long history, brought to mind the sacred conduit between the legs of the lady trucker” (212/204). Dark and narrow, Donkey Avenue appears to be “a place of horror, a lair of criminal activity” (213/205). Given the fact that Donkey Avenue is the center of consumption and entertainment in the Liquorland, it is a plain observation that the “heart of darkness” is nothing else than the mysterious power and “soul” of commodity. The “theological clothing” provided by commodity fetishism observed by Karl Marx in the early European context finds its substitution or allegorical variation in the fantastic, the bizarre, the grotesque, and all kinds of precapitalist or postsocialist corruption, indulgence, and power relations. The cobblestones on Donkey Avenue therefore can be just as mysterious to the special investigator as those in the streets of nineteenth-century Paris were to bourgeois observers when the stones were

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moved around during the construction of barricades. In the latter case, what remained unseen, as Walter Benjamin sharply points out, is the hands of the proletarian rebels who moved them. In the former case, the mystery is, ultimately, endowed by an incipient commodity economy and all the social, political, and sexual energy and activities it mobilized, to which the cobblestones on Donkey Avenue serve as passive, ancient, and timeless witnesses, an allegorical viewpoint, even an aesthetic form by which to comprehend the utter formlessness of a historical substance. After a nasty fall on the slippery cobble street, Ding Gou’er has to lean on the lady trucker who now, ironically, looks like a “battlefield nurse.” Moreover, as the female body now finds its socio-allegorical counterpart in the city (and vice versa), the adventure into this body-polity unveils, through the sentimental eyes of the special investigator, an unsentimental metaphysical picture of the natural-historical being of Liquorland cast in the illuminating shadow of defeat, decay, and melancholy: Arm-in-arm they strolled out onto Donkey Avenue under a dark sky; the investigator’s gut feeling told him that the sun had already settled behind the mountains—no, it was just then sinking behind them. Drawing upon his imagination, he pictured the fabulous scene: the sun, an enormous red wheel, forced earthward, radiates thousands of brilliant spokes to dress the rooftops, the trees, the faces of pedestrians, and the cobblestones of Donkey Avenue in the tragically valiant colors of a fallen hero. The despot of the Kingdom of Chu, Xiang Yu, stands on the bank of the Wu River, holds his spear in one hand and the reins of his mighty steed in the other as he gazes blankly at the angry waters rushing by. But at this moment there was no sun above Donkey Avenue. Immersed in the enveloping mist, the investigator was mentally engulfed by melancholy and sentimentalism. Suddenly he was struck by the absurdity of his trip to Liquorland—absolutely ridiculous, a ludicrous farce. Floating in the filthy water of a ditch running alongside Donkey Avenue were a rotten head of cabbage, half a clove of garlic, and a hairless donkey tail, silently clumped together and giving off muted rays of green, brown, and blue-gray under the dim streetlights. The investigator mused agonizingly that these three lifeless objects should be taken together as emblems on the flag of a kingdom in decay; even better, they could be carved on his own tombstone. (210–11/202–3)

The sun is setting on Liquorland as the investigator contemplates the strange place, which is in turn reduced by his vision to a sheer natural, that is, dehistoricized landscape: external, timeless, and yet enveloping him in an enormous, meticulously planned conspiracy, so much so that it almost feels

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like home in transcendental homelessness or, more concretely, a tomb in the graveyard. The stock image of the King of Chu bidding farewell to his concubine, Yu, leaps into the investigator’s mind’s eye, a hint of the impossibility of return to homeland and, with that, death in a strange, accidental place. Yet the most astonishing images in this land of ruins are not even the emblems of decay and death, they are the silent herd of donkeys passing down Donkey Avenue on their way to being slaughtered at the numerous restaurants specializing in donkey dishes: The donkeys were huddled closely together. A rough count revealed twentyfour or twenty-five of the animals, every one of them glossy black, down to the last hair. Drenched by the rain, their bodies glistened. Well fed, with handsome faces, they looked to be quite young. Either to combat the cold or because they detected something frightful in the air of Donkey Avenue, they huddled as closely together as possible. . . . They pressed forward, squeezing in and being squeezed out, their hoofs clip-clopping and sliding on the cobblestone road, raising a sound of the masses clapping. The herd was like a mountain in motion as it passed in front of [Ding Gou’er]. (213/205; translation modified)

It is hard to determine the full or exact content of the symbolic association, resemblance, and thus empathic identification between the special investigator and the herd of donkeys traveling silently to their slaughter, but a partial list would not be difficult. First of all, through his adventure, Ding Gou’er demonstrates an intense, if unreflected, interest in the animals, obsessed not so much with their animality as with their nonhuman perspective and mysterious depth. When a dog runs away from him, he feels like “asking it why” (8/7; translation modified). It may not be far-fetched to assume that this fascination with the animal is born out of a narrative search—not necessarily Mo Yan’s, but out of the formal necessity of his fiction—for an “objective,” that is to say, allegorical, framework by which the utter chaos of the social world can be organized through a drifting, subhuman viewpoint in order to make sense but only in terms of natural history, in terms of alienated experiences. Second, beyond the formal concern with narrative and representation, the man-animal association seems to confirm the hero’s scattered experiences, often reduced to the sheer abstract, that is, bodily and neurobiological level (pain, fear, anxiety, euphoria, intoxication, depression, etc.), in which the only consistent and reflective element is an ominous presentiment about his own being hunted and ultimate downfall. Third and strikingly, one may

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find it hard not to read the herd of donkeys on their way to the slaughterhouse transparently as a metaphor for the masses silently going through the chute of a new, social-Darwinian arena of division of labor, competition, exploitation, and victimization. This moral-allegorical critique, though thinly disguised, functions at the same level of explicitness as the allusion to Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman (in one of the short stories composed by Mo Yan’s literary fan, Li Yidou, the “doctor of liquor studies” from Liquorland) and its central theme of cannibalism and paranoia. If the special investigator’s last utterance (“I protest. I pro-”) can be read as a comic repetition and pastiche of the tragic battle cry, “Save the Children!” in Lu Xun’s masterpiece, then the symbolic equalization and identification are pointedly and ingeniously differentiated with a sensitivity to changed historical circumstances. That the hoofs clip-clopping and sliding on the cobblestone road raise a sound of “the masses clapping” is an unmistakable reference to the socialist political culture and social condition which by now serve as the point of departure for the new capitalist development. Once again, we see the overlap and juxtaposition of socialist-era sensibilities and formal memories with the shock of the new, with the former functioning now as a shelter and a screen of protection, now as a representational tool and channel house of stock images. It is the reconfiguration of those stock images as scattered, freefloating linguistic, visual, or symbolic residues which objectively gives shape to an otherwise unrepresentable reality of postsocialist China.

Allegorical Exchange and Moral Critique

The allegorical tension in Mo Yan’s juxtaposition of man and animal does not stop at implicit or explicit moral, political intuitions and accusations. For at a higher level of ironic intensity, the natural-historical allegorization of man by means of his becoming animal and the social allegorization of animal by means of its becoming human seem to be deliberately blended with one another: they are one and the same thing. They are both produced, traded, mutilated, slaughtered, and eaten up by a ruthless and completely amoral force, of which the underworld of consumers and criminals in Liquorland is but one comic embodiment. Therefore, the moral as well as formal-aesthetic certainty of Mo Yan’s narrative can be found most readily not in the properly fictional of narrative 1 by the modernist Mo Yan, but in the fictitious fictional of narrative 3, that is, in Li Yidou’s “demonic realism” which, in its shamelessly bad writing, offers an “objective,” transhistorical, wanton, mindlessly playful and yet allegorically exact list or index of the

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sociohistorical content of the natural-historical swamp. In “Donkey Avenue,” nature and history are thoroughly blended in a chronicle of slaughter and consumption, a memory preserved in the very form of forgetting that is the timeless and yet astonishingly time-specific celebration of the scope and intensity of social production and consumption that is particular to the Chinese 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Donkey Avenue is Liquorland’s great shame as well as its great glory. You might as well not come to Liquorland if you never stroll down Donkey Avenue. This street boasts the shops of twenty donkey butchers. Ever since the Ming Dynasty, owners of these shops have butchered their way through the entirety of the Manchu dynasty, plus all the years of the Chinese Republic. When the Communists came to power, donkeys were labeled a means of production, and slaughtering them became a crime. Donkey Avenue fell on hard times. But in recent years, the policy of “revitalize internally, open to the outside” has sparked a rise in the people’s standard of living and an increase in meat consumption to improve the quality of the race. Donkey Avenue has sprung back to life. . . . When you stand on Donkey Avenue, you see delicacies that cover Liquorland like clouds, more than the eyes can take in: Donkeys are slaughtered on Donkey Avenue, deer are butchered on Deer Avenue, oxen are dispatched on Oxen Street, sheep are killed on Sheep Alley, hogs meet their end in pig abattoirs, horses are felled in Horse Lane, dogs and cats are put to the knife in dog and cat markets . . . in mind-boggling numbers, so many the heart is disturbed, the mind thrown into turmoil, the lips chapped, the tongue parched. In a word, anything that can be eaten in this world of ours— mountain delicacies and dainties from the sea, birds and beasts and fish and insects—you will find right here in Liquorland. Things available elsewhere are available here; things unavailable elsewhere are also available here. And not only available, but what is central, what is most significant, what is truly magnificent is that all these things are special, stylistic, historical, traditional, ideological, cultural, and moral. While that may sound boastful, in fact, it’s anything but. In the nationwide craze over getting rich, our Liquorland leaders had a unique vision, a pioneering inspiration, a singular plan to put us on the road to wealth. (146/138–39)

What this long, wordy passage makes clear is, among many other things, the fact that in the making of The Republic of Wine, there is no Mo Yan without Li Yidou, even though the former has to invent the latter. Once he comes into being, Li Yidou instantaneously gains his own life and seizes on reality in a way Mo Yan himself, while being properly or only Mo Yan,

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cannot achieve. Li Yidou is not a mere extension of the author, a narrative proxy in the technical sense, because what he has to offer is not only a perspective, not even in the fullest allegorical sense. Rather, he is an objectified consciousness, a being-in-itself, a ghostly, selfless subject after the breaking of subject in terms of position, experience, cunning, and politics all at once, which, as an organic voice from the womb of nature that is the Liquorland, stands as a crystallization of a corrupted, distorted, opposite, or negative form of epic wisdom necessary for a critical comprehension of China not only in its own terms, but in terms of the larger natural historical context (of which the force field of global capital is a key component). Such corruption, distortion, opposition, and negativity as a mode of experience and perception are hinted and illustrated, repeatedly and strategically, throughout The Republic of Wine. Thus in the moment following the special investigator’s nasty fall on the slippery cobbles of Donkey Avenue, he suffers a possible concussion, during which time everything he sees looks like “a photographic negative,” and the lady trucker’s hair, eyes, and lips are all “pale as quicksilver” (214/206). Unlike Li Yidou, the invented interlocutor, who simply is, Mo Yan’s hero, the special investigator, has to argue and strive to know who he is and what he is becoming. To become, for Ding Gou’er, means to become his own opposite, a process he both accepts and resists, but in the end with the frightful and self-pitying realization that he is turning into something alien while pursuing the irresistible which is against his own interest and his own being, like “a moth drawn to the light” (243/233). The light in this case is “sinister” (242/233), a combination of the neon advertising and the well-lit interior of the Yichi Tavern; the city of Liquorville glowing in the dark; and the lady trucker brightened by the flame of the special investigator’s lust. In the face of this light, the special investigator feels that he is turned into “a pile of urban garbage” (242/233). Through dramatic and shocking allegorical empathy and metamorphosis, the special investigator perceives the street of Liquorville from the perspective of the thing: The forces of agony pried open his mouth; he felt like howling, but as soon as the first howl broke from his throat, it rolled and rumbled atop the stones in the roadway like a wooden-wheeled water wagon. Prompted by the rumbling sound, his body began to roll around on the ground uncontrollably, first chasing the wooden wheels, then rolling out of the way so they wouldn’t crush him, then being transformed into a wooden wheel and fastening itself to other wooden wheels; as he rumbled along with those other wooden wheels,

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he could see the street, the wall, trees, people, building . . . all turning around and round, over and over, in an endless revolution, from zero degrees to 360 degrees. (241–42/232–33)

It seems that only from this alienated perspective, in the special-investigatorturned-wooden-wheels’ rolling, rumbling, and turning against the hard, wet stones of the street, in this endless, dizzying revolution, can a panoramic view or some visual coherence of the urban landscape become possible. A key word revealed in this passage is “uncontrollably” or buyouzizhu, literally, “not governed by oneself.” As if to make the intertextual cross-reference between the three narratives even tighter, Mo Yan uses the word buyouzizhu repeatedly in the last scene of Mo Yan’s own arrival in the Liquorland. At the welcoming banquet, he “uncontrollably slides under the table” trying to greet the female party leader; “uncontrollably opens up his mouth” for more hard liquor offered by her; and, within close range to her “angelic face” and immersed in her body scent, uncontrollably (zhibuzhu) sheds some happy, grateful tears (365–66).3 It is through the uncontrollable, which signifies the overdetermination of the natural-historical, that allegory exercises its power and supremacy throughout The Republic of Wine at all levels. Such allegorical ambiguity, metamorphosis, equalization, or identification supplies a kind of narrative motivation driving toward an allegorical synthesis of all the symbolic fragments, wastes, and body-parts floating around in Liquorland, a synthesis whose critical rage in the moral dimension can be fully grasped only through the formal playfulness in the stylistic, aesthetic dimension. Thus the blunt, rough-edged old revolutionary’s scornful observation in narrative 1, which is made in reference to the “demon-obsessed” special investigator, must be taken literally, as the collective generational judgment of Mao’s China on post-Mao China in a caricature: “We take the seeds from tigers and wolves, and all we get are some snotty worms” (257/247). The same satirical, allegorical logic, however, allows Li Yidou’s mother-in-law, a cutting-edge researcher at the Brewer’s College in narrative 3, to remind her students in a professional manner that the babies they are about to slaughter and cook are not human, but “small animals in human form that are, based on strict contractual agreement, produced to meet the special need of Liquorland’s developing economy and prosperity. In essence, they are no different than the platypuses swimming in the tank waiting to be slaughtered” (231/222). Dubious resemblance and identity can be found in many places in The Republic of Wine: The lady trucker (in narrative 1) and the female sedan driver (in narrative 3) look like twin sisters; so

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do the two kindergarten teachers who appear in passing in chapter 1. The Party secretary and the director of Luoshan Coal Mine can never by distinguished by the special investigator, so much so that Mo Yan has to resort to “the Party secretary or the director” each time he mentions either one of them in narrative 1. The description of the two dwarf waitresses at the front door of Yichi Tavern goes like this: “Standing beside the flower-bedecked front door were two serving girls less than three feet tall. They wore identical red uniforms, sported the same beehive hair style, had nearly identical faces, and wore the same smile. To the investigator, extreme similarity only betrays artificiality; they looked like mannequins made of plastic or plaster. The flowers between them were so lovely they, too, seemed artificial, their perfection lifeless” (214–15/207; translation modified). The “extreme similarity” not only suggests a kind of interchangeability and lack of quality, substance, and identity; by the perception of the artificial, it also exposes the manufactured nature of the individual akin to that of lifeless commodities. These pairs of semblance and similarity contribute to a perception of hallucination based on the experience of simulacrum, uniformity, and fakeness in a more general sense. Gazing at the young lady working on the boat, the investigator feels that her labors are somehow artificial, as if “she were acting on stage, not performing her task on the boat.” “Her boat glided past, followed by another, and another and another and another. All the passengers were love-struck young men and women, and all the women on the sterns performed their tasks with the same artificial air. The investigator felt sure that the passengers and the women sculling them along must have undergone some sort of rigorous training in a technical school” (336/328). This perception forms the backdrop of his experience of the city, in which he senses a “a fake, ahistorical atmosphere,” with “pedestrians glid[ing] along like ghosts” and the observer himself “feel[ing] as light as a feather,” as if “his feet didn’t touch the ground” (337/328; translation modified). The artificial, standard, plastic, and ghostly feel of the facade of Liquorville is only matched by a singular organization and productivity behind the scene, in this case, in the kitchen of Yichi Tavern. The legendary delicacy made of donkey vagina and penis and the equally legendary dish featuring something that resembles a baby-boy do belong to the same allegorical realm, but not because in both cases one sees the boundary between man and animal, civilization and savagism, legitimate world and illegitimate world are blurred and ultimately erased. Rather, it is because they both, as a product of a process, point to a busy, vigorous, and elaborate world of social organization of labor. Running for his life from the crime scene, the special investigator finally

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stumbles into the inner space of Yichi Tavern and gives the reader a rare and hasty glance at the kitchen as opposed to the banquet room, the equivalent of a workshop as opposed to the front store, with his peripheral vision: Finally reaching the end of the corridor, he turned the corner and pushed open a greasy door, where he was greeted by a potpourri of smells—sweet, sour, bitter, spicy—and a cloud of hot steam that swallowed him up. A bunch of little men were rushing around in the steamy room, coming in and out of view as they bustled about like a covey of little sprites. Some, he saw, were carving, others were plucking hairs and feathers, yet others were washing dishes, and others still were mixing ingredients. Chaotic at first appearance, there was a distinct sense of order there. (238–39/229)

This distinct sense of order, to be sure, stems from a chaotic mode of production in China today, which mixes the cutting-edge technology, organization, and management and advertising skills of a developed consumer society with local features of the astonishingly “primitive” and “exotic” raw materials such as the frozen donkey genitalia lying on the floor, to be turned into Dragon and Phoenix Lucky Together at the all-donkey banquet. It is this order, which is captured by Mo Yan’s allegorical logic of narrative, that absorbs the hard actuality underneath this order into its irreverent, carnivalesque, playful equilibrium of disorderly, heterogeneous, and explosive images, anecdotes, and stories.

“Nothing but beauty”

“Don’t accuse me of being magical, what I am doing is actually realism” (Bushi wo mohuan, ershi wo xieshi, 325/315; translation modified), proclaimed Li Yidou in his last short story sent to Mo Yan, “Liquorville,” before he describes the Boeing jets doing loop-the-loops “in spry yet intoxicated innocence” over Liquorville with the fragrance of liquor hitting the high heaven. And it is indeed with attention to and fascination with graphic details that he depicts the minute processes by which cross-gendered donkey genitalia are, step by step, turned into Dragon and Phoenix Happy Together. Li Yidou, moreover, has a general theory and methodological reflections on what literature is or, to be exact, an understanding of literature in terms of preparing the culinary delicacies of the Donkey Avenue: What we are pursuing is beauty, nothing but beauty. It is not true beauty if we didn’t create it. Creating beauty with beauty is not true beauty either; real

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beauty is achieved by transforming the ugly into the beautiful. . . . Sir, suddenly I sense how similar the process of producing Donkey Avenue’s most famous culinary dish is to the creative process in literature and the arts. Both originate from life yet transcend life. Both transform nature to benefit the human world. Both elevate the vulgar and obscene to the level of nobility, convert sensual desire into art, convert grain into alcohol, and turn grief into power. (168/160–61)

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In the world of allegorical ambiguity, ambivalence, and irony established in The Republic of Wine, “transcending the ugly into the beautiful” easily gets mixed with other signs, meanings, and gestures. If one sees the ongoing modernization or capitalization of China as the transformation in question, then the beautiful or the aesthetic can be regarded as but one of the metaphysical forms or appearances by which the concept of time becomes palpable. And in this regard, there is indeed no difference between the process of producing Donkey Avenue’s most famous dish and the creative process of literature and arts, or that of advertising and other forms of the culture industry, or that of the production of ideology, be it state sanctioned or market driven, or both. But the eerie, surreal, fantastic and yet “severely realistic” scenes presented by Li Yidou’s demonic realism, along with its parallel in or confirmation by Mo Yan’s properly fictional world, makes one wonder if the reverse is more true: As the Liquorland strives for its aesthetic form, what is originated from everyday life seems transcended by life in its alienated forms; the human, historical world overcome by nature or natural history; the noble is elevated—concretized and allegorized—into the vulgar and obscene; art is converted to sensuous desire or uncontrollable intoxication; and power, in both individual and collective senses, is turned into grief—the mournful fixation and the melancholic void, which constituted the allegorical truth-content of the fictional and metafictional carnival in The Republic of Wine. If the beautiful in the sense of appearance and form (Schein) provides an as yet preconceptual grasp of historical movement, then the critical observation and the penetrating allegorical perspective in the following passage below, more so than an obsession with the purely aesthetic, seem to capture not only the sensuous form but the ruthless law of our natural-historical age: “None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading qualities with its enemy or neighbor, none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or

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hierarchy is impossible here.”4 This, of course, is Walter Benjamin remarking on the world of Franz Kafka, compared to which even the world of myth that promises us redemption is “infinitely younger” (Illuminations, 121). That the paragraph reads as if tailored for Mo Yan’s fictional world of The Republic of Wine is as accidental as it is thought-provoking. Everything is certainly exchanging qualities with everything else in Liquorland; everything is either rising or falling, either hanging on to its borrowed time or striving to break free from its old confines. None is exhausted or ready to settle, which hints at the beginning of a long existence whose meaning must be read against and redeemed from all the chaos and meaninglessness of the now.

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National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite

1 this is a part pagein “Inin this chapter i examine the ideological use opener of history ternational Film Festival Films” from mainland China in the early 1990s. I observe that films like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live all share the postrevolutionary assumption and seek to deconstruct the “grand narrative” of social revolution and idealism by constructing a counternarrative of national trauma and traumatized individual life. Analyzing the filmic text of The Blue Kite shows us that, instead of exploring the complexity of social change and everyday life of the Chinese twentieth century, the former Fifth Generation auteurs resorted to a visual ontology or mythology of the present, which in turn invents its past as a melodrama of “human nature” or “art as such.” The reason why moments of these films remain compelling is not because of the new metaphysics and ahistorical conclusions at the superficial level but because the visual and narrative logic of the “new cinematic language” (as a result of the aesthetic and political upheaval of the Chinese 1980s) resists the formula of “healing” and captures the irreducible complexity of a world of life (i.e., Mao’s China) despite the ideological tendency of the global 1990s. The 1990s saw a string of films from the People’s Republic which deal with personal and family life with reference to the political history of Chinese revolution and socialist modernity. The most conspicuous among these award-winning films, shown at international festivals and circulating commercially, are Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1993), and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993– 94). Together they mark and culminate a cultural and intellectual trend of pursuing cinematic narrative of a traumatic experience of the past or,

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more precisely, a visual reconstruction of the national memory through a postrevolutionary catharsis of trauma. In these films, as trauma deconstructs History with a capital H, a new, somewhat ontological meaning of personal, ordinary, or aestheticized life emerges to fill the vacuum of a past without history, so to speak. Banned or subject to heavy censorship in China, they have been celebrated by critics in the West and often used as a source of standard images in media commentary on current Chinese social and political developments. Thus, by providing a handle on the unstable and even impenetrable aesthetic styles of the former Fifth Generation filmmakers, these post-1989 epics or antiepics also manage to insert themselves in the public consciousness as a common point of reference for literary, cinematic, and intellectual discussion of the historical experience of Chinese modernity. Before we go into detailed analyses, a few things should be said about the general ideological and social context in which these film texts were produced. The intellectual environment of China in the early 1990s lay in the shadow of the Tiananmen Incident, the military crackdown of mass protest in Beijing on June 4, 1989. The incident itself marked the end of the so-called New Era and all its popular and intellectual euphoria about modernity, progress, and subjectivity. The anticipated incorporation with the global system, uninterrupted economically as we now see in historical hindsight, was abruptly and violently set back, politically and ideologically. That was viewed by liberals inside and outside China as moving against the global wind of change which completed the destruction of the Soviet Empire, gave rise to the metaphysics of market, consumption, free-floating capital and, along with all these, the victorious melancholy of the free world called “the end of history.” In other words, the Chinese situation was and must be viewed as a shocking and painful anomaly. Privately conceding a disastrous defeat, “liberal intellectuals” of post-Mao China have been reorienting themselves through a renewed association with international ideological institutions and symbolic orders. To the extent that the notion of “universal history” provides the norm by which to reflect on the Chinese situation, it also promises a way to relive the traumatic experience with a postrevolutionary sensibility, aesthetic, moral, or otherwise. While notions like “natural law” or universal order are seasoned ones ingrained in the Chinese discourse of modernity, their contemporary connotations, such as developmentalism, are firmly rooted in the age of global consumption and capital. The particular flatness and timelessness of the last can sometimes be quite liberating and exciting, however, if the popular

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sentiments or ideology are firmly set on depoliticization, secularization, on freeing everyday life of the individual from the straitjacket of any utopian project of the collective. The “opening-up” of Mao’s China at the end of the 1970s created such a historical and sociopolitical conjuncture (and rupture) that a predictable integration into the “universal” and the “natural” would have had to be a collective passion, a utopia against utopia. The pursuit of material well-being and social liberty, both institutionalized to the point of being mundane in the postindustrial West, would have had to be accompanied by elevated intellectual arguments, artistic dramatization, and philosophical glorification, to the degree that the concretely material concerns have acquired their proper form in the epic, the aesthetic, and the ontological. While the absence or impossibility of fully developed public debate, let alone political discourse, has been a constitutive part of the condition of possibility for the cultural sphere of the 1980s, in postTiananmen China what used to be merely fantastic or “aesthetic” is increasingly acquiring a political vocabulary, if not philosophy. A systematic notion of what life ought to be informs and inspires the patient, laborious depiction of an oppressed longing for normalcy during the years of social turbulence and revolutionary fanaticism. Or, to put it differently, what has been called forth to deconstruct the teleological grand history of revolutionary China is nothing more than a postrevolutionary teleology of perpetuated growth and universal humanity modeled after the West. This new idealism (disguised as a search for normalcy) drives the literary and cinematic search for an authentic experience of time and history, an ontological meaning of existence amid change (or no change). The first step toward restoring the past as fulfilled time (or lack of it) confronts the illusion of the collective eventfulness created by state discourse. In doing so, liberal intellectuals in China have made it clear that to rewrite history is to make the past narratively available for the current politics of memory and imagination. Whereas liberal intellectuals, by their passionate advocacy of the reform policy, won open or tacit endorsement of the state throughout the 1980s, their involvement in the 1989 protest put an end to its political use-value. As long as the Chinese government is constantly on guard against “peaceful evolution”—a code word for subverting the socialist system in China through internal mutation—“liberal intellectuals” in China remain the prime suspects of a “fifth column” in the eyes of an ideologically besieged state. Partly to offset and neutralize the ideological offensive waged by the West, the Chinese state now grounds its legitimacy solely and defensively on economic growth, social rationalization, and its own monopolistic role

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in order maintenance. Growth without democracy therefore becomes the unfortunate solution to the legitimation crisis of Chinese socialism, which has long been forced to compete with multinational capitalism on the latter’s terrain. Since Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 tour of the southern provinces to initiate an all-out effort at marketization, China has been rapidly entering its own “postmodern” stage called market socialism. The discourse of modernity, underpinned by the intellectual battle cry for a new Chinese enlightenment, has lost both its state sanction and its popular mandate. The binary opposite between China and the West, tradition and modernity, no longer captures public enthusiasm and collective imaginations. The mythology of subjectivity and individual creativity was replaced by a sense of fragmentation and helplessness, of being outdone by the nebulous yet overwhelming power of natural history which now bears not only the emblem of the political state, but the logos of commodities as well. The formal achievements of the 1980s—experimental fiction, the new wave cinema, the avant-garde art movement, the properly philosophical language, the elevated mannerism of intellectual discourse, and above all the revered institution of the aesthetic—seemed to be a useless surplus under the new circumstances. Even the gesture of radical Westernization is rendered sentimental now that the socialist state itself takes the lead in a massive integration with global capitalism. Notably, in the cultural sphere in the broadest sense, the last turn has produced a proto-nativist sentiment, a need for some notion of “Chineseness” in the age of multicentered, multicultural uniformity of capitalization and consumption. The twin forces of commodification and state intervention are closing up a real or imagined public sphere which once existed for the liberal intellectuals of the New Era. Genuine intellectual and ideological chaos and confusion are seen in a radically redefined space of cultural production. Former pupils of Western theory are now arduous advocates of neo-Sinology and neo-Confucianism, former “intellectuals” or “philosophers” have turned to “scholarship” for inspiration, forsaking the thin air of “ideas” for the solid pleasure of positivism and empiricism. As neoliberal economics carries the day by preaching radical marketization and privatization, its less fortunate allies in the humanities and social sciences find themselves condemned to an eternal Quixotic battle against totalitarian repression. When Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, two leading intellectuals of the 1980s, launched their “philosophy of eating” (the Chinese equivalent of “the economy, stupid”) in their hasty book A Farewell to Revolution (Gaobie geming),1 they were greeted with an organized attack by the Chinese government and unani-

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mous condemnation by overseas Chinese dissidents. Whereas the former recognized in the “peaceful evolution” argument a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, the latter would not agree with what they saw as a shameless apology for the regime’s authoritarian developmentalism. The desperate need for moral certainty and symbolic privilege by Chinese intellectuals ended up creating new icons out of the dead. Hence the bizarre cult of Chen Yinke, a traditional historian whose dogged resistance to Marxism during his latter years under communism found its posthumous glory and worship in liberal and conservative intellectual circles during the mid-1990s. As the commercial promotion of a biography, The Last Twenty Years of Chen Yinke, became the topic of the day for elite intellectuals,2 t v sitcoms, personal essays (such as the “Little Women Series”), pop music, Hollywood imports, fashion magazines, Qigong classes, and McDonald’s restaurants have quietly completed their conquest of the cultural landscape of contemporary China. Modernism, or the symbolic institution of the postrevolutionary Chinese cultural elite, now must seek its own dwelling in the environment of so-called market socialism. Amid the general disintegration of intellectual discourse, narrative and stylistic adjustments are underway, and new ideological positions and perspectives are being formed. The filmmakers in question constituted an elite group which was among the best positioned to respond to this situation in its own “professional” terms, that is, by means of the material and symbolic capital available to the particular field it has created and to which it belongs. Representatives of the so-called Fifth Generation, the Chinese new wave cinema of the 1980s, they embody a cinematic language that absorbs local and national vocabulary while remaining compatible with the international grammar of symbols and ideology via the highway of modernism. Historical drama has been a mainstream genre for the p r c film industry, and previous works on the traumatic experience of national events, such as Xie Jin’s 1987 film Hibiscus Town (Furongzhen), have taken on the same historical period, such as the Cultural Revolution, and used the same kind of cinematic style, mixing the melodramatic with the epic. The post-1989 trend, however, seems to have little to do with the tradition of “scar” literature and film in early post-Mao China. The cinematic richness, readability, and docudramatic flavor or historical authenticity demonstrated in these festival films also mark a decisive departure from the early modernist monuments such as Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1984) and King of the Children (Chen Kaige, 1987), which are preoccupied with

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creating a system of signification for the new social experience of postMao China. Melodrama, the formal enterprise of Xie Jin’s “socialist humanism,” is embedded in the realist or studio tradition of Chinese cinema challenged by the Fifth Generation. When adopted by Fifth Generation veterans in the 1990s, melodrama is not only meant to remedy the “narrative” or “storytelling” deficiencies of high modernism; it is also a reminder of the completion of the aesthetic and intellectual disengagement from socialism. In an emergent consumer society, the gesture to transcend modernism as a cultural passion has its unmistakable formal and ideological meaning. If there is such a thing called Chinese postmodernism, then what it takes to be over is not the age of modernity, but the age of revolution and radicalism. The juxtaposition of the melodramatic and the epic exposes an ongoing effort to transport the symbolic capital of a local new wave to the international network of review, consumption, recognition, and patronage. If the melodramatic ensures the consumability of the epic, then the epic provides the political and aesthetic supplement to and sublimation of the melodramatic. In this way, the post-Tiananmen transformation of new wave Chinese cinema stands as an allegory of the rapid incorporation of the Chinese national economy with the capitalist world system. In all three above-mentioned films, an overt desire to reconstruct collective memory and rewrite national history finds its objectification in the melodramatic, but this mode of representation is intertwined with the cinematic mannerism or sophistication emblematic of the Fifth Generation auteurs. While the professional visual quality of these films is considered worthy of a cosmopolitan spectator, the “political” side of the story adds a reassuring flavor of postmodern authenticity, even a self-gratifying sense of moral relevance, to the riot of colors, images, and unheard-of stories. In other words, our enjoyment comes partly unconsciously from answering to the invitation to participate in the minute process of creating national memory and its “historical” meaning. The very last, to be sure, can be understood only to the extent that this memory and meaning reflect the global ideology in which we dwell. The very enjoyment in watching these films involves participating in creating the memory of catastrophe by associating trauma with images. In this sense, the birth of trauma itself is a cultural event of the postrevolutionary age. What is truly traumatic, then, is not so much the horrors to be relived visually as the moment of discovery and shock when one finally comes up with a narrative, a picture of the past from a distance. It is in this distance that the past, in the form of memory, suddenly becomes morally and ideologically unbearable. Here, what makes a “traumatic expe-

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rience” emotionally and sometimes physically possible is the overlap of two temporalities, two historical paradigms which have been separated by, or rather sealed into, a timeless instant of shock and agony which is the work of trauma itself. The trauma, in other words, is reserved for the radically contemporary viewer as a shock generated in their reencounter with the past, a past from which concrete experience of history is removed to create the homogeneous space of “memory.” Commenting on The Blue Kite, one of the Maoist groups in the United States suggested defensively—but nevertheless correctly—that the way these political events are represented here is not the way they were experienced by the vast majority of the people, not even those who were directly involved in and suffered from that involvement.3 To a secured citizen of the postrevolutionary age, all this offers a comforting assurance that this spectatorship somehow holds a clue to the real, or rather it invents the real through the effect of a postrevolutionary catharsis. While the “serious” cinematic working serves as the even, homogeneous space of aesthetic pleasure, the documented traumatic experience or trauma memory offers a roller coaster ride through the terrifying terrain of personal suffering and collective disaster. Simply put, in the cinema of disengagement, politics, or History to be transcended is the only source of the thrill, the pleasure of watching. After seeing Farewell My Concubine, a U.S. film critic said she felt “emotionally drained.”4 Since watching The Blue Kite, Roger Ebert thinks he now has a better grasp of the rumored ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”5 In these films, personal trauma is the site for the latent content of history to come into being. That is to say, history appears only when the empty, traumatic instant of time is filled with images of personal, intimate experience, when the individual starts to bring trauma a narrative form through the work of memory. While all three films set up the political context for their reception, it is oversimplistic to say that using personal experience as political condemnation is what they are all about. Rather, the undeniable strength and the mesmerizing magic of these films lie in their treating personal experience as autonomous, that is, in the disinterested realm of the aesthetic. Or, one may say that their political poignancy is realized precisely by its insistence on being viewed not as a political indictment but as an ontological speculation of the ultimate meaning of existence. The ontological fervor of these films becomes evident in their obsession with portraying and valorizing the intimate, the ordinary, the mundane, the normal (as in To Live and The Blue Kite), or with the psychoanalytical and the aesthetic (as in Farewell My Concubine). Indeed “obsession” in the last film is the running motif by

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which temporal change is to be represented cinematically and judged morally or, to be precise, politically. If a metahistorical critique is intended, then it is carried out through the duration of the intimate interactions of personal everyday life, which dissolves the false temporality imposed by the official discourse of national history of modern China. In their presentation of the constant, that is, love, human decency, the humble desire for survival, and the irrepressible longing for freedom and happiness, change in terms of modernity and revolution is shown to be phony and ephemeral, not to mention violent. Both the flamboyant exoticism and high stylistic mannerism in Farewell My Concubine and the deliberate blandness in To Live and The Blue Kite question the legitimacy of national sacrifice in the name of revolution. Indeed, what is defiant and potentially subversive in the new trauma genre is its fusion with the veritable existence as such, its contemplation of what Jean-Luc Nancy called the “unsacrificeable.”6 As the idiom goes, those who go back to the crime scene are always the victims. In The Blue Kite, as in To Live and Farewell My Concubine, rewriting of the past and exploration of meaning are conducted in the name of the victim and the survivor. History thus conceived is not a process, a continual flow, but a rupture: it is history at a standstill. Time thus experienced is not fulfilled in the richness of life, it is arrested as an eternal instant of shock. Such a past yearns for an image, a narrative mode, and a cultural form to perpetuate itself as memory. This memory, although reconstructed in the radically personal, even private domain, is, in Benedict Anderson’s language, “saturated with national imaginings.” It proposes a meaningful history beneath the otherwise meaningless index of national political events. For such a project, victimization and traumatization are privileged modes of experience, which promise psychological and formal solutions to an ideological disorientation. In other words, trauma and victimization must also be understood literally, that is to say, allegorically, as a product of the general pessimism and sense of defeat permeating the post-Tiananmen liberal intellectual world. In its peculiar penchant for authenticity of history and time experience, the post-1989 cinematic chronicle of modern China is part of an overall intellectual and political struggle to establish a new temporal order, a new concept of normalcy and an antiutopian meaning of life through which the Chinese world retains its hope for redemption. So far as the memory of the past is morally, ideologically, and symbolically anchored in the continuum of experience to be restored, and to the extent that this restoration implies a vision transcending the abnormal, senseless, and crazy moment of the Chinese Revolution, the construction of the trauma-riddled personal

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memory is an invention under the Western gaze. The aesthetic investment in rewriting a national history finds its way into major international festivals and distribution networks. Through the mediation of the latter, the latent traumatic experience comes into consciousness in the form of visual spectacles of global cinema. A more critical (and at the same time more sympathetic) reading of these films must be a critique of their political ontology concerning history and individual experience. The problem with such a mode of representation is not its immediate ideological limitations but its willed transcendence of its own position with all its materiality and objectivity in the existing space of ideological position-takings. The self-enclosed world of visual spectacles and melodrama greets a thoroughly secular world of consumption by invoking the normal, the constant, and the irreducible as opposed to the overcoded world of ideology, politics, social movement, and all the irrational, inhuman excess of collective madness. The longing for a meaningful and orderly historical tempo is underpinned by an empathy with universal progress and its standard values, claims, and assumptions. By casting the ruins of history in a melancholy light, the timeless instant of trauma mingles with the timeless spread of the now, also known as “the end of history.” If the “opening up” of the wounds forecloses an ongoing struggle for the future, then trauma points not to the productive tension of different historical experiences and temporalities, but the homogenizing normalcy of the now. As the latter returns the gaze, the cultural monument of Mao’s China is seen to have crumbled even before its completion. In this exchange, reification obtains an exotic sense of vitality and dynamism, the “empty, homogeneous” (Walter Benjamin) time of the bourgeois century overcomes its internal homogeneity and hollowness. The politico-economic explanation of this historical imagination and aesthetic valorization is nothing sentimental: capitalism conquers not only space but also time as it invades and incorporates new territories. Liberal ideologies rejuvenate through venturing into the uneven terrain of time and memory. The reconstruction of memory through screening trauma is embedded in the traumatic recognition of one’s absence in universal history and humanity. In its own anxiety over backwardness, abnormality, and lack, the critique of national history becomes a global allegory. The Blue Kite (Grand Prize winner, Tokyo International Film Festival, 1993; Critic’s Award, New York Film Festival, 1994) was the first and only film made by Tian Zhuangzhuang in the 1990s. Whereas the bulk of the work was done in China by 1992, the postproduction was not finished until a year later in Japan. The Chinese government practically banned the

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film even before its appearance at the 1993 Tokyo international film festival, where it won the top award. When the film made its way to the 1994 New York Film Festival, it became a hot ticket and received rave reviews in the United States. Tian, a classmate of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, was at the forefront of the Fifth Generation revolution in the Chinese film industry during the 1980s. In The Blue Kite, Tian once again teamed with Hou Yong, director of photography for Tian’s landmark works, Horse Thief (Daomazei, 1985) and On the Hunting Ground (Liechang zhasa, 1984), two films widely acclaimed for their uncompromisingly disengaging the theatricality of film narrative and for inventing a cinematic language based on the thingness of the objective or physical reality. If that credit can be attributed to Tian’s early films, then The Blue Kite constitutes a radical departure from, even a reversal of his early style, as the film is in every sense a melodrama with the ambition of being viewed as an epic, or, to be precise, an epic whose ontology or “jargon of authenticity” comes squarely from the world of melodrama, its ritualistic clichés, its popular psychology, and its conventional wisdom regarding memory, politics, and collective history. It is noteworthy that the lead actress (Lü Liping, as Shujuan) and actor (Li Xuejian, as Li Guodong, or “uncle”) are both popular stars in several successful teleseries in the early 1990s, such as Aspiration (Kewang) and Stories from the Editorial Office (Bianjibu de gushi), both of which are based on the best-sellers by Wang Shuo, the cultural hero of antiheroism in the fashion market after 1989. The casting indicates the intention to draw the audience “closer” to the story and to develop a certain level of intimacy between the two. In other words, the living rooms of the rising Chinese urban middle class are, to a certain degree, the imagined spaces in which a metahistorical critique of Chinese revolution, or representation of national events as traumatic experience is to unfold. Whereas the world of Horse Thief, like that of many Fifth Generation monuments, is decidedly removed from the densely populated secular world and its daily politics in order to expand its horizon willfully on the margins of civilization, The Blue Kite takes as its milieu the everyday life of Beijing, the political center of communist China. Instead of the wilderness of the Tibetan plateau, a self-referential cosmos of high modernism in Horse Thief, a certain Dry Well Lane in a bustling residential quarter in Beijing constitutes the stage on which intricate personal, social, and political relations converge in a melodramatic fashion. However, the first thing we notice is that Dry Well Lane is curiously ahistorical: visually, one cannot tell to which time period it belongs. Even though the subject matter

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is highly time specific, there are simply no traits of temporality in terms of the way people dress, means of transportation, architectural style, and so on. Rather, everything seen in this setting—from the traditional-styled residential courtyard, chimneys and smoke in the coal-burning winter of Beijing, a cart pulled by a donkey, to children playing on the street—gives rise to a sense of timelessness. Notably, winter is the only season in this film, which covers the span of an era. This is ordinary folks’ Beijing, a strange rendezvous of the eternal Chinese countryside and the fragile, flat Chinese city; a place immune to and untouched by dynastic vicissitude and its contemporary variations. A screen wall can be seen standing in the middle of the open space, painted with unrecognizable characters in red paint. Yet the mark of the times here is negligible, even though soon it is about to join the things of its own rank such as morning news on state radio broadcasts, political slogans and banners, mass parades, political meetings, drums, and red flags. Simple and modest as it is, Dry Well Lane is a reminder of a swamp of mundane life-world, which lies beyond change and in which the imposition of any teleological pattern is bound to be futile. It is the womb of nature for which the birth of history is a traumatic moment to be resisted, and, through this resistance, remembered. It is this organic wholeness that is to be penetrated by the political storms that strike over and over again. What is unchanging therefore serves as a tranquil and passive ground on which catastrophe acquires its moral and narrative drama. If extremes do meet, then this melodramatic setting of contemporary Chinese life must be appreciated in the light of the natural historical melancholy that dominates the physical landscape in Horse Thief. The allegorical resemblance between the two betrays the political–ontological setup of the cinematic narrative of The Blue Kite: it aims at revealing the constant beneath the whirlwind of change, the timelessness that underscores the turning of social and political fashions, the absence of history that underlies the eventfulness of modernity and revolution. The allegorical meaning presented by the beginning is confirmed repeatedly as the film goes on. The first image of the empty, barren, and inhumane room of the newlyweds leaves a visual residue. It is also a constant reminder of the politico-economic truth-content underneath the frivolous ornamentation and forgetful indulgence of individual life. The carefully chosen wedding date, March 8 (International Women’s Day) is read by the politically illiterate landlady, Ms. Lan, simply as a date of good fortune since it is an even number. This ominous misreading, however trivial and

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unnoticeable, reveals the slight yet fatal discrepancy between a seamlessly codified world of social rituals and political taboo and the blindness, stubbornness, and stability of the mundane. This discrepancy is from the onset suggested by two sets of characters in the film. One consists of those who, like Ms. Lan, exist beyond the political sphere and are confined to the insignificant state of nature. Children and old people are the main inhabitants in this realm. The other is represented by those whose entire existence is spent being nothing more than the organs of a nebulous power machine, such as Party bureaucrats, small cadres in the work unit, and neighborhood activists. However, the main characters in the film are those who get caught in-between, those who live in a dangerous world yet fail to see the coming danger or find a way out of it. Liu Yunwei is prosecuted for his naive enthusiasm in responding to the Party’s call for criticism. Han Shaolong, Tietou’s father, becomes a “rightist” for he is so relaxed or oblivious as to visit the toilet at the wrong moment. Shuyan (the younger brother of Shujuan) is sent to the remote countryside as punishment for his pride and unruliness. The punishment follows all the way through his joyless marriage with a country girl and his shattered ambition. Zhuying, the attractive actress in the military song and dance troupe, is thrown into hard labor, and ultimately into jail for her reluctance to dance with the mysterious “leader.” Shusheng (the nice elder brother) is passed over for promotion and then discharged from the military because of his previous career in the nationalist army. The landlady’s son finds himself unable to change his hereditary class status, no matter how hard he tries to prove himself worthy of the new society. The rigidity of the class-line gives the impression that this is a fundamentally immobile and hierarchical society, despite its own rhetoric of equality and radical change. Similarly, the fact that the law is never written but to be deciphered according to the political atmosphere suggests a primordial state of lawlessness, in which punishment is bound to be mysterious and arbitrary. The film is dedicated to these small people’s innocence, their personal idiosyncrasies, their helplessness, and their modest hope to live an undisturbed, self-sufficient life. This unconscious “resistance” to the grand and the heroic leads them to their inevitable misfortune, and, as catastrophe strikes, reveals the truth of ordinary life as it is. In her reading of To Live, Rey Chow questions the moral and ethical validity of such a philosophy of survival, implying that, unwittingly or not, it paves the way for the perpetuation of a violent political system based on a national moral paralysis and slave mentality.7 For a different (namely, anticommunist) political agenda, Chow touches on

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the ideological homology between the ontological presentation of veritable existence and the Chinese intellectuals’ political endorsement of the social program called “development without democracy,” or “modernization without the people.” The prevalence of the last as a universal rationality, however, renders superficial both the praise of the filmmakers’ moral courage (as part-time political dissidents) in Western media and the critique of the immanent complicity of a national culture offered by the postrevolutionary and postcolonial critics. Once that awkward, sometimes comical overlap between the present time and a more arcane and persistent calendar is put in place, the film takes a sharp turn, with escalating rapidity and intensity, toward a breathless chronicle of disasters, of personal and family lives intruded on and destroyed by politics as an external and omnipresent violence. A portrait of Mao is seen between the bride and the groom who are paying homage to the great helmsman, a substitution for the traditional practice of kowtow to the Heaven, the Earth, and parents. The innocent yet nevertheless bizarre wedding song goes like this: On the peaceful soil of the Motherland Life gets better everyday Lofty ideals for the young and youthfulness for the old Our workers love labor Production soars The peasants work together and harvest ever more We are peace loving and never invade others But we don’t give peace to invaders and bad people

Blatant political clichés give lie to popular nostalgia about the 1950s as the golden age of Chinese socialism equipped with its own humane and spontaneous everyday culture. Instead we see party ideology, state propaganda, and rhetoric of class struggle permeating the entire public and domestic space, demanding that they be internalized by the individual. Repression and asceticism are the main ingredients of the famed innocence of the early years of the People’s Republic. In the film, no privacy or intimacy is permitted or even looks desirable. Even the birth of the narrator, Tietou, is delayed due to Joseph Stalin’s death. The moments of intimacy between the newlyweds are enjoyed secretively, in the absent presence of moral and political authority, and on constant alert against others. What

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is noteworthy is that the content of the spontaneous pleasure seeking, or rather their undying will to happiness invokes the old, the traditional, and the folkloric: traditional wedding dress, red veil, carrying the bride, and so forth. The groom’s “who is there” tricks rather scare the bride with the red veil on. The two burst into laughter. But the joke and the fun of this intimate moment lie strictly in the recognition of the illegitimacy of this kind of self-indulgence. The family in the film is in a sense an ideal and “representative” one: people of different generations, professions, and political tendencies form a somewhat realist convergence of diverse individual and class positions. Yet The Blue Kite shows little interest in presenting a Lukácsian picture of historical movement. Instead, it focuses on the withering of the family by means of a patient, melodramatic casualty count, in which trauma becomes the rule. The family always gets together, often for dinner at grandma’s, after each blow it endures, with decreasing family members and increasing worry and fear. The tradition starts with a full house in celebration of Shujuan and Shaolong’s marriage and ends with a private, tearful conversation between two bewildered and desperate women, Shujuan and her mother. Despite being shaken by political storms, grandma’s house remains a refuge for the young, a “transcendental” home to return to (plus a safe place to deposit the money left by “stepfather,” now a “counterrevolutionary”). In contrast to grandma’s house, Shujuan’s apartment is ultimately abandoned after “uncle,” her second husband, dies. The recapitulation of the empty, barren room finishes the circle by going back to its original state. The only surplus that can be seen is the waste or garbage on the ground, a reminder of all the senseless suffering the innocent people have endured. No meaning or redemption is in sight. The only person who walks on the rubble is Ms. Lan, the harmless and insignificant landlady, who herself is about to disappear for good. The chronicle of withering family and social life keeps a meticulous index in terms of national political events. At the same time, the national political events are themselves represented or remembered in terms of their devastating impact on, and amazing absorption by, life as usual. The film is divided into three episodes, “Father,” “Uncle,” and “Stepfather.” Each corresponds to a particular moment of national history: the purge of intellectuals in 1957, the three years of Natural Disaster, code word for the massive famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward (Li Guodong, or “uncle,” dies of overwork and malnutrition), and the Cultural Revolution. The death of fathers punctuates Tietou’s trauma-laden childhood memory, which in turn becomes the frame by which the national events are

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screened in a way irreconcilable with orthodox historiography. From the “Reform Privately Owned Industrial and Commercial Enterprises Movement” to the “Antirightist Campaign,” from the farcical mass participation in exterminating sparrows to the horror of the Cultural Revolution, the film retains the rhythm which can be considered a textbook example of the Jamesonian notion of national allegory, which swings regularly between traumatic personal experience and memories of national disasters. It is not so much that in order to tell the story of personal life one must tell the story of the national situation; quite the contrary, in The Blue Kite the deconstruction of the mythology of national history is impossible without accounting for the traumatic experience of innocent individuals. Here, the reconstruction of national memory is engaged in the private and domestic space; the critique of the extraordinary unfolds in the realm of the ordinary; the repudiation of the myth of utopia and revolution finds its way in the mundane everyday sphere. As I mentioned above, Dry Well Lane represents a subterranean sphere of everyday life politics can destroy but cannot transform. When film critic Roger Ebert compared The Blue Kite with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, a film which for him “came cloaked in the exoticism of the sexual and personal intrigues at the Peking Opera,” he rightly pointed out that “The Blue Kite is a movie about people who never go to the opera, who live in one room, but whose lives would nevertheless be warm and rewarding if society would only leave them alone.”8 The world of The Blue Kite is one constituted by the whistle of pigeons in the winter sky, the small line formed in front of the soybean sauce stand, watching over a child, putting one more bowl on the table in anticipation of a friend coming for dinner, mail delivery, New Year celebration, and so forth. The passive gesture of those small lives is disengagement from public space, even though everyone is caught in the whirlwind of political movement and, in Ebert’s language, “becomes a little crazy.” The contrast between the unpredictable change of political fashion and the constant human values and needs leads Ebert to suspect that The Blue Kite “would touch a nerve something like ‘Forrest Gump’ touched here” had the Chinese government allowed its domestic release.9 The film has created this distance between the daily experience of a recent past and what is suggested to be ontological, universal, and constant, precisely the intellectual and political space sought by Chinese liberalism after 1989. The film offers more than a depiction of the silent endurance of violence and horror. It occasionally takes a close-up shot at horror as an institution.

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The shot/reverse shot during Shusheng’s prison visit sutures together layer after layer of bars of the state prison and the distorted face of Zhuying, the embodiment of innocence and nameless fear. The most mysterious case in the film is also the one that involves the most arbitrary and ruthless form of power, conspiracy, and punishment. In this respect, Shusheng’s lost eyesight is by no means accidental. One of the memorable scenes in the film is Shusheng, or Staff Officer Shen, dazzled by the daylight pouring into the air force maintenance building as the huge slide door opens up. He stands still, all by himself, his tiny, nervous body showered in the overwhelming brightness, his hands up in the air, trying in vain to block the light. As Zhuying’s lover, he later tells her about his possible future blindness and jokes that his “telescope vision” will only be better for him to look at her. In reality, Shusheng is dazzled by the intensity and omnipresence of the political power, which is too strong and brutal for him to bear. Zhuying’s fate is a footnote to the prevalence and ruthlessness of this power. Another graphic scene of violence (or merely an allusion to violence) also has to do with Shusheng. While the list of “rightists” is being announced, someone in his unit whose name is called has a nervous breakdown. For a moment, we are left guessing about whether it is a bottle of red ink spilled on the floor or blood flowing out of a dead body. The moment of suspense has its own symbolic meaning: the fear of or anxiety over punishment is more overwhelming than violence itself. The doctor’s advice to Shusheng is to avoid stress, anxiety, and irritation, which is itself a piece of irony in the “interesting times.” Thus Shusheng is doomed to become blind, as he cannot see and cannot take what is happening around him. All he can sense is “there is something missing.” His nervous and pained gesture of trying to block the light cascading from the giant sliding door of the aircraft hanger is an allegory of all who share his situation: a shock in its classical psychoanalytic sense as excess of stimuli causing mental and physical damage; a traumatic moment of lived experience frozen in time. It is this unconscious and powerless gesture of desperate fending and futile resistance that lies at the center of the visual-symbolic world in The Blue Kite. In the meantime, (melo)dramatic moments like these may also provide a clue for the unraveling of the cinematic mechanism of this remarkably slow and antidramatic film. To call it slow, however, is not to say that its narrative steps are slow-paced. Quite the contrary, the film, under the disguise of melodrama, offers a sweeping epic with many leaps and blanks which sometimes create difficulty for viewers unfamiliar with the sociopolitical history of that particular time period. Indeed, what tends to break

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out of the melodramatic format is an epic viewpoint that simultaneously runs along with the dazzling flow of national events and tries to capture the traumatic moment in frozen frames. Discussing the Zapruder Film of the Kennedy assassination, Marita Sturken tells us that, when photographic images coincide with traumatic events of historical rupture, they can play a central role in constructing national meaning. Sturken points out that “for twelve years, [the Zapruder film] was seen in public only as a series of stills. [It] represents history as a succession of individual frames sliding forward in slow motion, offering only fragments of clues to what happened. It is a secret image, hidden from view, imbued with a kind of sacred status, as if it holds within it an essential clue to the meaning of this event . . . [as if] a truth existing somewhere between the frames.”10 Evoking Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Sturken further suggests that “the still image carries a particular power, in its arrested time, to evoke the what-has-been; it seems to have an aura of finality. Stillness is precisely what allows the photograph to be . . . ‘the uncanny tomb of our memory.’ ”11 In this light, the cinematic, above all photographic, slowness of numerous moments throughout The Blue Kite betrays an impulse to freeze the cinematic–melodramatic flow into a series of stills so as to create a transhistorical, ontological picture or meaning of mundane, everyday life of the ordinary people. The slowness of the film lies not in its narrative tempo but in its photographic suspension and expansion of temporality. Memory thus preserved, captured, or rather invented, exists as a series of stills which await metaphysical contemplation. To create an ontological truth between the frames is an old passion of the Fifth Generation, whose initial goal is to unravel the narrative-montage texture of a routinized socialist realism through its modernistic “sculptural consciousness,” its antitheatrical style, and above all its Bazinian ontology of photography which once took the world by storm. In The Blue Kite, the epic ambition to rewrite history is, aesthetically speaking, the radical opposite of melodrama. Even though melodrama is accepted as the cultural and political norm, and the ahistorical tempo of the melodramatic is the only tempo in the film, the concealed deep shots of a yesterday modernism show their subversiveness. The absent-minded, stray moments are those which tend to stick in one’s mind, not so much as haunting images of trauma, but as figures of the irreducibly allegorical richness of the past as it becomes available to a Proustian mémoire involontaire. The residue of modernism not only disrupts the melodramatic flow, it leaves a signature of the filmmaker’s out-of-date subjectivity; moreover, it preserves in the realm of aesthetics the very complexity, tension, and

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contradiction of a life experience which politics is threatening to iron out. Eventually it is this cinematic slowness which gives rise to a grainier, more truthful picture of history at a standstill. Viewed in this light, the ontological passion becomes its dialectical opposite: they stand not only for reification and fantasy but utopian yearning as well. The opening up of the realm of subjectivity leads us to trace the allegorical multiplicity of its meaning as fantasy, ideology, narcissism, and nostalgia. The ontological gaze at the constant existence frees itself from the burden of mechanical time of national history. But the still images are not only the “uncanny tomb of our memory,” they also, in their preservation of an eternal instant, unpack memory for nostalgia. The paradox and the paradoxical beauty of The Blue Kite lie in the duality of images as the bearer of both traumatic witness and nostalgic remembrance. As in the love between Shujuan and Li Guodong (“uncle”), even though love is embedded in guilt and betrayal, it still opens the door to the future, because the surest ticket to the future is an embrace of the present, which is the essence of love. Tian Zhuangzhuang the filmmaker is no doubt at his best when he unwittingly “transgresses” toward an “anthropological” documentation of ordinary life in Beijing in the 1950s and 1960s, a passion reminiscent of his early filmic prose on the simple yet highly ritualistic life on Tibetan plateau and Mongolian grassland. Those moments of absence of mind in a film of witness put the politics of representation in perspective. In nostalgia, the death of the fathers becomes a trauma in a very different sense. Tietou’s memory of Shaolong must be vague, if he has any. His friendship with “uncle,” warming as it is, depends on the very fact that he is not seen as father, but a friend to count on. Tietou’s relationship with his stepfather starts with a hatred that is both Oedipal (indicated by the close mother-son relationship) and class-based (Tietou sees mom as a “servant” to Wu Leisheng, apparently a high-ranking bureaucrat) and ends with a crude awakening to youth rebellion at the onset of the Cultural Revolution. If the mother-son relationship constitutes the constant state of veritable existence, that is, family and unconditional love, then the traumatic experience of this family lies not only in its fragility in the face of national politics, but also in its constant need for a father figure. The weakness and precariousness of the father figure highlights the fact that the mother-son relationship is the constant (see figure 1) against which the sociopolitical turmoil of Mao’s China is represented in Tìan Zhuangzhuang’s film. For Tian Zhuangzhuang and other members of the Red Guard generation, the oppressive nature of fatherhood is to be overcome by the youthful

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1 The mother-son relationship is the constant against which the sociopolitical turmoil of Mao’s China up to the early years of the Cultural Revolution is represented and measured in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite. Courtesy of Photofest.

power authorized by a higher authority, namely the Father or the Name of the Father, which solely determines the meaning of history. In The Blue Kite, the voluntary memory construction centering on enduring the imposition of external violence reveals an involuntary reliving of the traumatic search for an internalized order, authority, and ideal. It remains a moral question whether one has the right to probe into another person’s mental wound, analyze it, and pass judgment on it. Yet one has every right, even moral obligation, to inquire, to analyze, and to evaluate the proposed way of healing. One should ask to what ideological and political end the process of sublimation and transference is devised, what kind of mythology or fantasy is created, and to whose interest. What makes The Blue Kite a compelling film is the fact that it offers no ready catharsis, no instant relief, no psychological drama or cultural exoticism which channels shock to its articulation in the world of commodities. With a residual modernist mannerism and a new political fervor, it intends to present a state of life “as it was.” The very last effort also creates a problem, however, a problem which becomes vivid in the cluster of recent Chinese festival films to which it belongs, as well as

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in the general intellectual and ideological environment of both China and the post–Cold War world. By presenting a distorted mode of life “as it was,” the film anticipates a new law, whose content or implications can be found in the “natural law” of an economic (that is, capitalist) society. In her reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Cathy Caruth argues that what underlies the collective memory of the Jewish people is not so much a trauma of return, but a trauma of departure.12 In reading the cinematic rewriting of the national history of modern China, we can argue that the trauma of modern China is not so much the ennui of history, nor even the melancholy of revolution and modernity, but, rather, the anxiety that history has not yet truly begun. What is traumatic, in other words, is not the survivors’ recollection of a by-gone era but the unsettled imagination of the future. Against this palpable “pressure of time” from the horizon of the future a new temporality emerges to be the judge of history.13 In this sense, the New Chinese Cinema’s narrative logic, ironically, has returned to its socialistrealist forebears’ method of “contrast the old and the new”—a cinematic storytelling technique perfected by Xie Jin—albeit for opposite ideological and political effects. In light of this willful contrasting of the old against the new, the traumatic past basking in an existential mournfulness must have its exuberant origin in a resolute embrace of the new universal—market, consumption, private property, and all the fantasies about freedom related to that economic bottom line—rather than in the hyperbolic and hypocritical eventfulness of history captured by Tian Zhuangzhuang’s deliberately subdued, even eventless, camera movement.

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Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju

Modernism and Its Afterlife

since the late 1980s, Zhang Yimou has established himself as the most recognized filmmaker from the People’s Republic and a celebrated name brand in world cinema. His works now invite an approach rarely afforded to prc film artists (except perhaps in the case of Xie Jin): his entire corpus is studied as a singular visual world bearing the signature of its auteur. Such recognition, to be sure, represents the pinnacle of an inherently aesthetic hierarchy that is nominally but not substantively repudiated by today’s literary criticism, film studies, and cultural studies. It comes with a tacit acceptance of the film authors’ insistence that they be read within the parameters of the world of their own creation, and with the foremost resistance to any attempt to collapse the visual and the aesthetic into the immediate sociopolitical.1 Rather than reject such modernist mythology from the outset, which today no longer seems to be a challenging intellectual task, I would like to use the residual values of such notions as autonomy, freedom, and creativity to trace and reconstruct an intricate apparatus and procedure of codifying in film texts the economic, social, and cultural-ideological while establishing a critical distance between a necessarily politicized world of life and its necessarily aestheticized representation. Such a distance, while determined by the nature of artistic production, is above all mandated by the logic of historical analysis. One simply cannot tackle the historical overdetermination and political complexity of the “content” of Zhang Yimou’s recent films— understood here as something pertaining to the more general questions of the continuity and reinvention of tradition, the legacy of Chinese socialism, and the political nature of contemporary China—without a radical detour via or mediation of the realm of “form,” in this case the minute cinematic operations in both visual and narrative terms.

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In addition to providing another example of the dialectic between the aesthetic and the political, the formal and the historical, Zhang Yimou’s work must also be seen as subversive to both the ideologically driven “representation” of China and the desire of securing cinematic modernism as the purportedly universal language of individual creativity. It is intriguing to note that, although the modernist aesthetic (notions of symbolism, aesthetic intensity, stylistic innovation and self-consciousness, and formal autonomy or self-referentiality, etc.) remains crucial in Zhang’s competitive edge vis-àvis other entrants at international film festivals and his claims to represent China, its centrality can no longer be limited to a photographic ontology aimed at capturing the “physical reality” of a historical moment of post-Mao Chinese reforms, as was the case during the 1980s. Rather, in his work in the 1990s, the ontological dimension mingled seamlessly with the political, understood not so much in terms of government policies and political doctrines but the emergent mainstream ideology of the everyday world framed by Chinese society’s massive transition into the market system guided by an authoritarian party-state. The stylistic gain of high modernism, the hard-earned semiautonomy enjoyed by a mere handful of elite Chinese writers and filmmakers with international recognition, now faces a social and formal challenge for it to address the complex historical conditions and an emergent world of daily life by inventing an artistic rhythm and image which resonates and vibrates with them. This also means to face the internal pressure from within the space of modernistic form to substitute the sculptural monumentality of the early Fifth Generation (demonstrated in Yellow Earth [1983, Chen Kaige], Red Sorghum [1987, Zhang Yimou], or To Live [1994, Zhang Yimou]) with a more subtle and supple narrative. This new narrative mechanism, often mislabeled or misleadingly labeled as Chinese postmodernism, suggests a paradigmatic shift and a new collective sensibility embedded in Chinese everyday life conditioned by the “socialist market economy.” The formal, stylistic articulation of this new collective sensibility concerns not only the aesthetic and philosophical innovativeness of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, but can indeed provide a way to rethink intellectual and political issues related to the larger context of the nation-state versus global imperial order, community and culture versus the prevailing rhetoric of the universal, historical continuity and discontinuity, and the singularity of the sovereign versus the generality of the abstract and the exchangeable. With these questions in mind I turn to a close analysis of Zhang Yimou’s award-winning 1994 film, The Story of Qiu Ju.

Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy

Cultural Politics of Daily Life

The Story of Qiu Ju is based on a story written by a neorealist (xin xieshi) Chinese writer, Chen Yuanbin, titled The Wan Family’s Lawsuit (Wanjia susong), published in 1992.2 In the title of the literary version, the character wan is both a common family name (therefore my above translation) and means “ten thousand.” The resulting meaning, tinged with homophonic playfulness, is “a myriad of lawsuits,” which is never lost in the uniquely sensitive background of Zhang Yimou’s deceptively relaxed filmic version. Neither would his film or the literary original be random or capricious. For a number of years between the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and the fullfledged market boom in the late 1990s, which witnessed a near total col1 lapse of the Chinese literary market and productivity, Zhang Yimou, with this isand a part page need his accelerating success in the global film market hisopener ever urgent for a steady supply of original screenplays to keep his production line busy, was dubbed in literary circles as the one and only fiction reader in all of China. The degree to which Zhang Yimou overshadowed the Chinese literary world in the early 1990s was evidenced by his ethically questionable commissioning of the screenplay for a film on Wu Zetian (the legendary empress of high Tang) simultaneously to three leading Chinese writers, Yu Hua, Su Tong, and Ge Fei, all revered figures in the modernist camp. (Zhang later abandoned the project, leaving all three humiliated.) Zhang Yimou, who has a record of butchering the literary text to suit his own cinematic vision, proves quite loyal to the story of the Wan family lawsuit, whose simple thematic and narrative structure is centered on stubbornness, repetition, contradiction, and the dialectic between multiplicity and singularity, which also constitute the formal and moral substance of his film adaptation. The story is about a peasant woman, Qiu Ju, who is determined to see justice done after her husband is kicked between the legs by the village chief as a result of a minor dispute. The dramatic substance of the film comes almost entirely from Qiu Ju’s repeated—and repeatedly frustrated—journeys to appeal to ever higher offices for justice. The film’s self-consciously documentary style marked a sharp turn in Fifth Generation cinematic language. It allows the film to descend from a compulsive aesthetic and philosophical height to address important social issues such as rural justice and government, and Chinese legal and political reform in general. It continues the Fifth Generation tradition of observing Chinese rural life with an anthropological, sociological fervor and seriousness, but what sets The Story of Qiu Ju apart from Yellow Earth is the fact that rural

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life, stylized by a modern cinematic language, no longer serves as the aesthetic basis for a fundamentally political and philosophical critique of tradition or the political culture of the communist state. Instead, rural or peasant life occupies the film screen as a being-in-itself, that is, as a form of life with its own historical and moral substance, even aesthetic self-sufficiency. The early Fifth Generation poetics of backwardness, so central to its cinematic distinction, is here replaced by a narrative form of daily life, whose aesthetic autonomy is not something one strives for in the name of high modernism, but which is embedded in the historical and material specificity and concreteness, as they are suggested in passing but strikingly in the film by those “red chili peppers” (see figure 2). One may notice that these red chili peppers exist in perfect harmony between use-value (i.e., value determined by quality and usefulness) and exchange-value (prevailing market price), and between exchange-value and aesthetic value. While hung to dry outside the house, they are “self-sufficient” symbols of a peasant form of life; when sold in the market they generate cash that funds Qiu Ju’s repeated pursuit of justice as she understands it. A daily necessity and a reminder of material production, the red chili peppers are an indication of the inherent aesthetic texture of manual labor and village life, even the latent moral dignity, unruliness, and defiance of the Chinese peasantry. In a purely formal sense, the film is a textbook example (of Proppian structuralist narratology) that—with unexpected twists and turns, and in a comic way—shows a delayed process of achieving one’s goal in the form of the heroine’s overcoming mighty obstacles. Along with seemingly endless deferral and repetition, every detail takes on its own life in a state of suspension before it falls into a narrative framework on its completion. In this process, the grainy, “unmediated” visual details of the documentary style in which the film was made achieve a kind of symbolic whole. That is to say, everything that works for the narrative design in a formalistic sense also works simultaneously for the “content,” whose everydayness and mundane concreteness, because of its overdetermination by the larger sociopolitical context, itself becomes the driving force propelling the narrative development. In simple and misleading terms, the film is a legal drama culminating in the court decision. The centrality of the legal, however, comes with its own ambiguity, even subversion. The sheer focus and intensity of the story gives rise to a kind of allegorical flight, as if everything in this film means something else. The central plot of the film, a lone peasant woman’s taking on the state apparatus in pursuit of justice, only triggers a different chain reaction leading to a different set of questions. If the film were about (in)justice

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2 In The Story of Qiu Ju, red chili pepper alludes to the allegorical blend of the formaldecorative penchant for the modernist cinematic style—a residue of the director’s early

style—and the interest in the socioeconomic and ethico-cultural issues that characterizes several Zhang Yimou films from the 1990s. Courtesy of Photofest.

and (il)legality in Chinese society, it would be nearly impossible for it to avoid the simplistic themes of state versus society, official versus nonofficial, modernity versus tradition, city versus country, and so forth, that is, binary opposites which still hold sway in much of the conventional media and academic writings about contemporary China. The fact that The Story of Qiu Ju does not seem to fall into the usual and uninteresting traps of those binaries has caused much unease among its critics. In vague terms, some have suggested that the film (and Zhang Yimou as an increasingly successful filmmaker in China today) can be read as an endorsement of the Chinese government because it presents a somewhat humane, at least stable and redeemable, image of the everyday world in contemporary China. Such a transparent reading lacks resonance with and misses the complexity of a cultural text. It is imaginable, though, that the critics from both the Far Right and the Far Left, who, for radically different reasons, are unwilling to concede any legitimacy to the postsocialist state in name or in substance, will find their own ideological frameworks unfit for handling both the simplicity and the complexity of Zhang’s cinematic narratives and, by extension, his latent cultural politics.

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Before we address the central questions regarding this film, let us look at the way it begins, which offers a clue to the significant change in the filmmaker’s style and cultural politics. The opening of The Story of Qiu Ju readily reminds us of the opening of Zhang Yimou’s first film, Red Sorghum (1988). That is to say, the opening shots of the two films are diametrically opposed to one another. Red Sorghum notoriously starts with a sensuous, voyeuristic close-up of Gong Li trapped inside a wedding sedan, basking in amorous red color. The striking image unmistakably announces the arrival of Zhang Yimou, who has just created another aesthetic and political dimension of the Fifth Generation, which is invariably underscored by erotic, violent, and philosophico-mythological excess. It serves not only as a sign of social desire thus objectified, but also as a recognizable, indeed unforgettable visual archetype and cinematic logo of many of Zhang Yimou’s works to follow. This naked, overaestheticized human face can be read as a not-so-subtle Mona Lisa of a post-Mao Chinese secularization. It reveals a social landscape, indeed a social libido, by its concealment under the aesthetic veil called the “modern cinematic language,” in this case a shot-and-reverse shot (between Gong Li and her object of desire, the half-naked sedan carrier), the standard Hollywood technique for suturing together a desiring subject and his or her “object of desire” (the message: one is not a subject until one starts desiring!). The shock effect was largely confined to the early years of the Chinese economic reform. For the jaded eyes of today’s film critic, what is noteworthy about that image in a formalistic sense is its situational exclusiveness: the scene’s being inside the wedding sedan, a thoroughly enclosed space, and its relentless visual focus and homogeneity; the female face, the color red, and the symbolic uniformity which gives the sequence both a visual pleasure almost in a commercial sense and a reassuring touch of high modernism, not to mention the implicit political rebelliousness in unleashing the mechanism of daydream in the face of the still rigid, clumsy state discourse of “Four Adheres” (to Marxism and Leninism; to the socialist system; to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party; and to proletarian dictatorship). In retrospect, the political ontology of early post-Mao culture requires such a sharply concentrated and ruthlessly exclusive optical situation to accomplish its aesthetic-philosophic buildup for the clearing of the social desire.3 The opening scene of Qiu Ju, no less shocking, can be read as a clearing or social deconcealment of a different kind. It reveals, better still, opens up quotidian concreteness and irreducibility by means of a patient and fascinated sociologico-anthropological observation. One will recall the visual resemblance of the opening scene of Qiu Ju to a documentary on small town

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life in rural China. Unlike the scene discussed above, in which the camera penetrates deeply into the physical texture of the everyday world and is literally “inside” the wedding sedan, moving among objects of desire themselves (reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s famous observation that photography is a surgeon’s scalp cutting into the human body, whereas traditional oil painting is a witchdoctor’s hand moving around it), the opening shot of Qiu Ju, instead, is made with a fixed hidden camera whose presence is predicated on its presumed absence or, better still, its secured, unnoticed being within or being part of the site. What faces the audience, what is presented by a supposedly passive camera that seeks to capture the world intact, is the continuous, endless flow of the crowd in a generic village bazaar. The shot lasts as long as two minutes (an eternity for a fixed shot in which “nothing happens”), with Gong Li appearing, barely recognizable at first, in the last ten seconds. Revealed as a pregnant peasant woman, with her injured husband on a pushcart accompanied by her sister-in-law, an amateur actress, she thoroughly blends into the background. She comes to the fore not by means of a cinematic zoomin, but rather through a patient, almost leisurely long-take in which she approaches the hidden camera in the least “self-conscious” manner. In the meantime, life swirls by, as indicated by the swarms of relaxed, slow-moving, and semi-indifferent crowds in a small town marketplace. It takes a following series of horizontal-movement shots to set the main protagonists apart from the rest of the crowd, and at this point the narrative succession of the story begins. If the initial shot is a declaration of the film’s documentary impulse, the following shot makes clear its melodramatic intent. In doing so, the frontal encounter with the crowd that they represent is replaced by a scroll picture depicting a stream of quotidian life, of which shapelessness and irreducible contingency constitute the formal(istic) property of the cinematic. In other words, the cinematographic device used to separate the central character is also meant to press her evenly and more firmly into the mosaic of the everyday world to which she belongs and from which it emerges indiscernibly as one world among many. One may be tempted to speculate that such a nonjudgmental and provisional perspective allows Zhang Yimou to take a seemingly more sympathetic view of the Chinese state, as it is itself considered a cluster of conflicting and coexisting moral and cultural codes from within and but one participant in the emerging and reconfiguring social sphere from without. It is in this light that such secondary characters in the film as the local policeman, the village chief, and the director of the city’s Public Security Bureau must be viewed, that is, not as mere organs of an indifferent and abstract modern

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bureaucracy, but as mediators of an integrated yet internally differentiated, even fragmented social totality, whose own livelihood and value judgment are embedded in the quotidian specificities and the internal contradictions of that totality. To these characters, and to Zhang Yimou as their fascinated observer, there is simply no external vantage point by which to represent, let alone regulate or even out the world in which they live other than devising a visual framework by which the immediacy, intensity, and singularity of a particular form of life finds and articulates itself through its own narrative and emotional rhythm. To those utopian neoliberal revolutionaries impatient with the existing Chinese sociopolitical reality, Zhang’s film certainly would look like an apology for the status quo, which is too sluggish, messy, and backward for a clean-cut free market complete with clear legal codes protecting private ownership and the political procedure of parliamentary democracy. Zhang may as well be considered guilty as charged, but his real or potential accusers easily forget that his films are equally subversive to the unreformed loyalists for the old party-state, its fantastic central plans, and its unmediated, indifferent, and often brutal reach into the social space. Indeed it is precisely the fantastic absolutism, demonstrated in both the planners of socialist modernity and the visionaries of global capitalist homogeneity, that is cast in doubt by Zhang Yimou’s films about the commoners in the postsocialist Chinese everyday world. Against the ideological excess there emerges a new horizon and a new cultural politics that exist as the invisible social referent of his cinematic narrative.

Legality versus Legitimacy

In The Story of Qiu Ju, one must realize that the central polemic, the “end” being pursued by the narrative, is not justice in a legalistic sense of the word, but something prior to it, which forms its historical and moral preunderstanding and constitutes its social, political, and even cultural (one may dare to say) foundation. The conflict or antagonism cannot be described as a pristine, spontaneous civil society (one must not forget this concept’s original Hegelian-Marxian connotation, namely, bourgeois society) facing the grim superimposition of law by a modernizing bureaucratic state. Nor can it conversely be viewed as a chaotic, backward peasant world indulged (at least for a few decades) by Chinese socialism and impossible to modernize, that is to say, to be brought into a commercial society complete with positive or procedural law as legal elaboration of the new socioeconomic contracts

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based on private property. What is deceptive—deception here constitutes the drama and provides the clue to putting together a narrative puzzle—in the film of The Story of Qiu Ju lies in its cinematic drama focusing on the legal mechanism or, rather, the comic ways by which a simple-minded peasant woman keeps missing it and missing its point in the same way as she keeps getting lost in the modern big city. Yet any careful and fruitful reading of the film will have to base itself on the plain observation that the film is about anything but formal, instrumental procedures and formulas (of law as well as of ideology). In The Story of Qiu Ju, the subject matter, which is legal, even legalistic, serves its truth-content, which is decidedly nonlegalistic and indeed against abstract generality, positivism, and exchangeability. The law to be understood in Zhang Yimou’s film is not a legal coding: It is not even culture—understood either naively in a psychological (i.e., “unconscious”) sense, or, with more intellectual sophistication, in terms of Jacques Lacan’s “symbolic order” (which turns the cultural back to the legal, albeit only “metaphorically”).4 Rather, the law here is something prior to the legal codes and yet rooted in and expressive of something not yet linguistic in the formalistic sense but constituted like a language. I want to get into this analysis by noticing a slight yet crucial translation problem (isn’t it true that, literally, one can say that all the problems of Chinese modernity, as a translated modernity, were caused by translation!). It comes with the film’s international release, thus its transnational afterlife. The keywords in the film are “justice” and “apology,” two things Qiu Ju is so determined to obtain and around which the film narrative unfolds. Whereas English subtitles render the keyword smoothly as either “justice” or “apology,” often alternating the two as if they were interchangeable, the word consistently, stubbornly repeated by Qiu Ju throughout the film is, actually shuofa, whose meaning and implications are not so much legal but moral, not putative but persuasive, not authoritative but communitarian and consensual, not judgmental but descriptive (or, better still, narrative). It is, indeed, close to something like “explanation,” since, literally and in everyday usage, shuofa means the way things are discussed, talked about, and, eventually, understood and accepted without coercion. The moral-cultural point of shuofa is that the way things are must be accepted by those to whom it is explained; that the politicolegal order must rest on a tacit agreement, a consent given by those to whom things are explained. Notably and importantly, the English translation in the subtitles is a mistranslation because it ably and precisely “translates”—anticipates and captures—the ways shuofa is understood in the contemporary Chinese context

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and by the average Chinese audience as well—that is, as “justice” and “apology.” This observation may preempt any tendency to formulate the “cultural”—here as a mere shorthand for the moral-political constitution of a people shaped by revolution and socialism—in terms of a false opposition or conflict between Chinese and Western societies or “ethics.” In light of this close linguistic pragmatic examination, what Qiu Ju demands, first and foremost, is not justice in the sense that an abstract general law must apply to all equally and indifferently, as a peasant-versus-mayor story seems to suggest, but for her values defined by her immediate surroundings to continue to make sense. It may not be academic hyperbole to suggest that Qiu Ju’s is not a legal battle but a hermeneutic struggle to ensure the coherence and integrity of the world of meaning and value, of understanding and, indeed, of being. She is there not so much to litigate as to heal, above all her own peace of mind, in which an adequate notion of justice and individual dignity is indispensable but hardly sufficient. The main thrust of the film runs against the grain of the notion of “rule of law” introduced by the modernizing state for its political legitimacy, but whose philosophical justification lies historically in the bourgeois pursuit of indifferent abstract generality based on exchange-value and the universal individual as the social figure of property rights. Why does the husband get into a fight? It has to do with the fuzzy and overlapping property rights in rural China, a gray area between the government and the written law, on the one hand, and peasant culture, everyday practice, and the plebian sense of right and wrong as a sedimentation of Mao’s China, on the other. The fact that the dramatic logic of the film is completely beyond the realm of the legal does not mean that the unfolding of the dramatic tension can develop without a legalistic logic. While the film covers Qiu Ju’s fight at all levels of political administration below and at the provincial level (hence its everyday if not comic flavor), the real legal consequence that forces all the characters eventually to take Qiu Ju seriously is the possibility that she might and indeed threatens to take her fight beyond the relative autonomy and normality of the local. This possibility is indicated, comically and in passing, by a neighbor’s cracking a joke on Qinglai, Qiu Ju’s injured husband, by warning him to keep his legs tightly closed, lest he get kicked again, sending Qiu Ju to sue all the way to Beijing. The sense of entitlement in, and the real probability for, a peasant to go to Beijing to appeal to the highest authority reveals a crucial and vital link of the individual to the absolute sovereign which exists above and beyond the rules, regulations, due process, and proper proce-

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dures.5 In purely formalistic terms, this shows a resemblance to a peasant’s belief in the good and benevolent emperor, and to the popular practice of “appealing to the emperor” (gao yu zhuang) in imperial China. Yet the history and socio-ideological density of the Chinese Revolution and socialist modernity have given new substance to this belief and, at least in theory, maintain the presence of the sovereign above the law, a figure implicit and central in Mao’s notion of mass democracy and proletarian dictatorship. Here lies the narrative device responsible for the film’s comic touch as well as its intellectual-theoretical complexity: Qiu Ju perceives and fights against a lawlessness at the lower level of government where law, procedure, and rules prevail as normality; but she seeks the rule of law at the highest level of government, that is, the realm of the sovereign, which is, by definition, outside and above the law but defines its moral-political constitution. In other words, she looks for justice in terms of moral substance where only justice defined by procedure and positivity can be given; and she searches for law where the law simply does not exist, that is, it exists only as something to be shaped, animated, and simultaneously dissolved by the absolute concept of the sovereign. This is the legal-philosophical reason why Qiu Ju’s repeated trips are doomed to fail. There is no villain in this film; nor is there any indignant denunciation of lawlessness under totalitarianism. In that sense it is not a frontal assault on the Communist regime. Yet the film puts the entire rational-legal foundation of the modern state system on trial at a deeper level and in an intellectually and politically more compelling way. Here the irony is threefold. First, the peasant fails the state by not understanding its effort to modernize its legal system, which alone protects the peasant’s rights. Second, the state fails the peasantry by not understanding their inarticulate moral and political codes that constitute and underscore any real, substantial order. Third, Qiu Ju’s quest for justice is bound to fail because a general, indifferent, legalistic justice is not what she wants and does not solve her problem, and yet it is all that the modern rational social and state organization has to offer. One may say that she fails a structuralist failure, as Qiu Ju is a sign of the unconscious fighting its own becoming-a-language, as becoming-a-language entails in itself and often manifests itself in reification and alienation. That is the reason why throughout the film we the audience are both amused and frustrated, as Qiu Ju is either aiming too low or too high; she is either being too kind or too unrelenting, either too generous or too unforgiving; she is either asking too much or too little. Her stubbornness drives everyone crazy, inside and outside the film!

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The dramatic and philosophical complexity of the film, in a way, is captured by the linguistic ambiguity of the term shuofa. The combination of the characters shuo (to say, speak, and talk about) and fa (law; method; the way) produces the following three semantic possibilities: (a) “speaking of law”; (b) “a way of explanation” (discussed above); and (c) “to talk about, or to comment on the law.” One can see that the dramatic as well as philosophical unfolding of the film follows the ways the meaning of shuofa evolves from a to c: It starts with a question regarding the law, in terms of a perceived injustice; it quickly moves on to become a persistent demand for an explanation; ultimately, the film becomes a commentary, a reflection on law and its limits. This is well beyond a problem of translation, but the difficulty of translation stands as a perfect metaphor for the multiplicity of forms of life and conflict of value which always pronounce themselves as a challenge to meaning and interpretation. It proves nearly impossible to render an explicit and precise semantic meaning, let alone the pragmatic significance of this peasant usage, shuofa in this context. In a sense, the film of Qiu Ju is a sustained cinematic effort—a trial-by-error experiment of the “uses of language” worthy of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s definition—to determine the meaning of shuofa by examining its use in different everyday situations and contexts. To want an “explanation” in these contexts, as it gradually dawns on us, is to set in motion the quest for truth in a larger context as the articulation of something as yet undefinable, as something prior to the symbolic order but already structured like a language. Thus, the difficulty the heroine encounters in this film is not so much the difficulty of the legal order understood as an abstract and general norm, but the value system of everyday life in contemporary China struggling with its own fundamental moral and political self-understanding. In the film narrative, the decisive conflict takes place in the city, in terms of an encounter between the urban and the rural, between formal-procedural law and the unwritten moral-ethical codes of the peasantry tinged with the political legacy of Chinese socialism, and between modern rationality and what it sets out to overcome, which includes but is not limited to conventional rubrics such as “popular habit,” “social custom,” “natural right,” or “tradition.” This is the site in which the bureaucratic-legalistic machinery of the modernizing state tries to show itself in abstract yet specific, impersonal, yet socially “responsible” terms. The reading of this effort by popular wisdom, the substitute for “public opinion” where free media is not in place, adds another comic twist to the drama. The elderly manager at the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inn confidently and, in fact, quite sensibly predicts that Qiu Ju is going to win the lawsuit because, he believes, the government, seldom known for promot-

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ing the rule of law, needs to lose a few publicized trials to the ordinary folks to convince the public that it is being serious and playing fair. Yet the fact that Qiu Ju ends up losing the case only shows that the government is in fact more fair and more serious than conventional wisdom expects. The government, despite its sympathy for Qiu Ju—this sympathy embodied by the director of the Public Security Bureau—cannot do anything about the legal procedure. This time the legal system seems all but determined to run its own course independent of meddling officialdom, personal sentimentalities, and moral inclinations. Yet the healing, the solution in real ethical and moral senses, is attainable only within the parameters of village life. If there is an emotional turning point in Qiu Ju’s pursuit of “justice,” it is when the village chief saves her and her baby’s life on New Year’s Eve. For the village chief, that is merely the right thing to do as a fellow and elderly villager. It has nothing to do with the ongoing legal dispute between him and Qiu Ju. Yet this moment of harmony in the value system of daily life, so to speak, also provides a narrative solution outside the legal framework. The New Year, just as the birth of the baby boy, is not a mere coincidence. For the festival and the delivery of Qiu Ju’s baby emphasize community, mutual dependency, and rebirth. Yet the ending of the film is nonetheless a harmony tinged with unresolved conflict—that between a “premodern” harmony in a rural community and the spread of modern positivistic rationality; the conflict between a culturally embedded notion of justice that remains prior to law and the modern realization of law at a necessarily abstract, overcoded level. Within this general ideological, or, better still, cultural political framework a misplaced lawsuit sets in motion the fundamental discrepancies, conflict, and coexistence of different systems of value, culture, and social conduct—as a comedy but not a tragedy, in a documentary not modernistic style. This, to be sure, is but another way to look at the historical conflict between the world of use-value and that of exchange-value. Notably, the classical Marxist definition of use-value not only dwells on the “physical usefulness” of the commodity, but also emphasizes that “the useful thing is a whole composed of many properties.” Furthermore, Marx points out that “the discovery of . . . the manifold uses of things is the work of history” and hence that things are “the invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects.”6 Exchange-value also is understood as “the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another.”7 Qiu Ju’s demand for an explanation, before and beyond its legal

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implications, must be understood in the socioeconomic context of the structural change and differentiation of mode of production in postsocialist China, where the mutual dependency of producers, the wholeness of their form of life, and its value-system (based on the historically formed and understood, manifold and diverse usefulness of things) is being eroded by a more general, abstract, and positivistic system of capitalistic exchange-value. In light of this widening gap, the peasant concept of justice, as we realize in the film, is both less strict and rigid than the law and, simultaneously, more demanding and inflexible than the law in that it entails punishment from a higher, more internalized authority. So for people like Qiu Ju, the problem is not that the system is not modern or modern enough, but that it is so modern in an abstract, autonomous, impersonal, or “neutral” fashion that it threatens to separate itself from a concrete yet inarticulate value system which defines their daily life. Their lack of a modern distinction between state and law in this case only highlights the historical and philosophical ambiguity, even the confusion intrinsic to the modern discourse of legitimacy and sovereignty, to which postsocialist China constitutes no exception but a case in point.

Repetition and Singularity: Further Thoughts on the Self-Affirmation of Everyday World and People’s Sovereignty

Eventually it dawns on the audience that Qiu Ju’s fixation with “getting an explanation” is not the truth-content but rather a narrative device of the story, a device which does not have to explain itself but makes visible the sociopolitical entanglement of a collective situation. This process of invisible made visible is subtle, ambiguous, but never disorienting. Along with the female protagonist’s repeated trips (see figure 3), which culminate in a lawsuit against the government, what is laid bare is not so much the ways the legal-political-bureaucratic machinery works in China today, or its nebulous nature even to many of its functionaries, let alone the simple peasants from the mountain village. One should recall that the final verdict, which gives the village mayor a two-week jail term, is rendered belatedly and based on the new medical “evidence,” an X-ray photo showing broken ribs which elevates a civil dispute into “aggravated assault.” The timing of the emergence of this new piece of legal evidence could not be worse. Indeed it seems ridiculous, at least from the standpoint of a by-then reconciled village community. The X-ray photo proves to be an uncanny reminder—if not a metaphor in itself— of the philosophical differentiation between the legal and the legitimate as

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3 In search of shuofa, Qiu Ju hits the mountain trail again. From Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju. Courtesy of Photofest.

the distinction between two language systems. As a negative picture and a mirror image of an isolated, “deeper” and abstract fact, the X-ray photo speaks the positivistic language of technology and legal procedure, yet it is a language invisible and incomprehensible to the peasants, as they still live in a pretechnological, prelegalistic world. It registers a happening in a realm and a logic almost completely outside and independent of the Lebenswelt of the peasants. The only way by which the peasant world participates in the world of abstraction and positive law is linguistic mimicry and cultural pastiche, as performed by the old man in the marketplace who “lends his pen” to the illiterate villagers seeking satisfaction in court. The hilariously hyperbolic but deadly precise legalistic-bureaucratic mimicries such as “in gross violation of the national birth control policy,” “intent on homicide,” and “must be punished with the full force of the law”—all in reference to Qinglai’s being kicked between the legs during his fight with the village chief—capture the comic but absurd discrepancy between abstract legal codes and the everyday world lived by the villagers, who cannot find their representation in the former. The law and the justice it promises to all, once so remote and unattainable, becomes available to this peasant woman, except that what it delivers is

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contrary to what she wants in the first place. Those who habitually and compulsively read anything from the prc transparently as either progovernment or antigovernment messages are understandably baffled and disappointed; and they are not alone in trying to decide whether this Zhang Yimou film is just an unabashed apology for the lingering communist state by bestowing it with a touch of normalcy, or, conversely, whether the unexpected twists and turns of the story of Qiu Ju in fact reveals a complicated and yet-to-be-defined mix of forces at work in China today. Few, however, can dispute that there is a discrepancy between the independent, impersonal legal(istic) procedure and what actually does and does not work for people like Qiu Ju in today’s China. What is clear, then, is that justice in the legalistic sense is not the point in this film. In that light, the female protagonist’s desire to “find an explanation” must be seen as an allegory of the socio-intellectual search for meaning, based on which what is going on in contemporary China can be understood as realistic, even reasonable, provided that the unreasonable (such as corruption) must be, by the same token, seen and treated as unwarranted, even “illegal.” The critical edge of the film is therefore not its exposing the rudimentary state of rule of law in China. In fact the film casts a generally benevolent, or at least understanding, eye on the somewhat hasty implementation of a modern legal structure in a postsocialist society. Rather, what is critical and provocative is how the film situates its dramatic intensity squarely in the structural gap between the legal and the political. The latter is no longer narrowly limited to mean party-politics but ranges from value judgment based on a particular form of life to the moral courage and assertiveness by which to justify and defend it. This invisible and inarticulate framework is prior to the legal and the legalistic order, yet it constitutes the very foundation of the latter. It persists in the rising money society in the form of Qiu Ju’s pigheaded rejection of any abstract or formal equation between prelegal and legal orders, between the unwritten law governing her universe and the elaborate and impersonal rules and codes which guarantee the smooth yet abstract functioning of a modern society. If we understand the unwritten law as the self-assertion, and not the self-negation, of a peasant world of life, then the dramatic viability and philosophical probability of the film can only come from this simple recognition: It is not about justice done in legalistic terms but about “right-and-wrong” in terms of “natural right” rooted in the singularity (not generality) of a peasant community. In one occasion early in the film, Qiu Ju’s husband fumes that “you ren guan ta” or “there will be someone to set [the village mayor] straight,” which

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is translated, again quite mistakenly, as “justice will be done” in the English subtitles. In that light, the ultimate message or the central conflict of The Story of Qiu Ju is that the positivistic concept of a law is alien to the Chinese peasants, who uphold a notion of justice (and equality) which, as unwritten law, governs their world of everyday life and informs their moral and political behavior. This unwritten law does not easily find its articulation in the symbolic order of modern legal-social-political structure but somehow can be converted to and achieve currency in the world of the modern as a relevant form of utopian idealism of collectivity. An allegorical image of this seemingly impossible communication is available in the repeated selling of the red chili peppers in the market place; in Qiu Ju’s finding her way in the maze of the modern big city and the modern bureaucracy; and in a translation mechanism maintained in the social texture by the common people. All of which, by the way, make perfect cinematic sense in Zhang Yimou’s visual construction of the story of Qiu Ju. She is still not happy at the end of the film, but that is not a problem. Once the sociomoral chiasm—which is merely alluded to by the distinction between the legal and the legitimate— becomes pronounced in social terms, she will never be happy anymore. But the last hint of this Zhang Yimou film seems to be that even the impossibility of happiness is not really a problem, as long as the subject here is not a bourgeois individual but something embedded in and constituted by a collective. The being-in-the world with a larger social being does not alter the life situation Qiu Ju faces, but the presence or survival of the concept of the people’s sovereignty might change the ways it is approached, recognized, and even transformed. The socioethical analysis of the film can and does have a parallel movement along a twisted or “underdeveloped” notion of bourgeois selfhood. In terms of gender identity, Qiu Ju’s subjectivity is constantly frustrated, even denied. Her pregnancy seems to be a not so subtle hint of the denial of her femininity and sex appeal, if only in line with Zhang Yimou’s consistent obsession with production (often visualized in terms of precapitalist technology and manual labor, here as the close-up shots of the grinding of the red chili pepper) and reproduction (which is cast in doubt after the husband’s injury). But Qiu Ju’s decisions and actions are not quite family-based and family-driven, as she does not always have support from her husband. Her individual free will, rather, is the site for discussions of gender identity and gender trouble. In this context, Qiu Ju’s challenge to the male-centered system, her unsuccessful passing into the world of law (as it is defined by Foucault and Lacan) is defined not so much by her unconscious-formation,

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her frustrated desire. Quite the contrary, the film offers few hints about Qiu Ju’s unconscious or desire: There is no permanent split, an alienation of self from desire, within the subject. Instead, in the film, Qiu Ju’s desire is socially and politically overdetermined: the pursuit of justice; the demand for an explanation; the insistence of the validity of the moral constitution in which she is formed and which defines the social order where her recognized place, her identity, is placed and recognized. In The Story of Qiu Ju, it is the prebourgeois subjectivity that turns out to be oversocialized, overculturalized, overcoded, and thus denied the internally differentiated, alienated ego-space of the subject. The unwritten law in the realm of daily behavior and ethics of ordinary people is sometimes mingled seamlessly with the equally amorphous organs of the state and its politico-legal codes. These codes inevitably give rise to a sense of legitimacy and sovereignty of the daily reality of China today. Rather than endorsing or denouncing the thorough mix of state and society, The Story of Qiu Ju reveals the scrambling of the politicolegal codes of the state with the moral-ethical codes of the daily sphere through a cinematic language which is naturalistic and stylistic at the same time. The hidden politics of such aesthetics is deceptively innocent, as the semiautonomy of “independent” film production in the Chinese 1990s proves more capable in making an inarticulate and undertheorized politico-economic reality visible. Rather than using the term independent uncritically, we must understand its ironic meaning with regard to the very politico-economic reality which determines its dependency and situatedness (as well as its illusory identity as something “independent” assumed by its international beholders). A deceptively “cultural” use of the concept of the political as Carl Schmitt defines it—as a will to live and die for one’s way of life—can therefore be found in the realm of the form of life. In this light, the conflictridden formalization of what is prior to law is the political significance of Zhang Yimou’s film in the context of the massive transformation of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism. Like many great works in film history, The Story of Qiu Ju has its amusing and explosive energy tinged with slowness and boredom. The latter can be regarded as a result of the film’s formal design, which is based on deliberate repetition and alterity. Zhang Yimou, one should remember, emerged from the Fifth Generation movement by breaking away from its intellectual heavy-handedness, authorial self-indulgence, and excessive stylistic mannerism. That his deviation ends up reinforcing and consolidating the aesthetic emblem of that movement, garnering international prestige

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for Fifth Generation cinema, does not diminish the internal tendency of virtually all his films toward a straightforward, visually effective, and emotionally strong storytelling and characterization. The fundamental dualism of Fifth Generation aesthetics is represented by the first works of its two foremost auteurs, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum. Yet it is precisely in this sense The Story of Qiu Ju creates a new cinematic-narrative space. It is also the only work whose structure and spirit are imitated or expanded on by the filmmaker himself, in Not One Less, which can be seen as a not-so-veiled compliment paid by Zhang Yimou to his own innovation. For the filmmaker, the sociological reality of contemporary China, just as the mental world of Qiu Ju, simply exists. What is represented, then, is rather something unrepresentable, something which rejects mediation in the abstract of “symbolic” sense, but demands its own articulation through a different logic of narrative and expression. This, I would like to propose, is the logic of repetition and immediacy; of singularity and its irrepressible return. Zhang Yimou’s approach to this narrative logic is that of comedy rather than tragedy. But in doing so he unambiguously indicates that the Chinese state form and peasant world must be viewed as actually existing forms of life whose justification (shuofa) comes from their own internal differentiations, contradictions, unevenness, and constant negotiations with one another. This perception of a mixed mode of production and its overlapping social, ideological, and moral orders is made explicit by the random coexistence of political and commercial logos. One example is the “cheapest inn in town” where Qiu Ju stays, which is called “Workers and Peasants’ Guest House” (gongnong lüshe). The image not so much stands out in its own glaring and ironic anachronism as it calmly and unselfconsciously exists next door to a generic “New Fashion Salon” (xinchao fawu). This “flat” model of coexistence is coupled with a sort of “depth” model that works only by means of its not working: While wandering on the street, utterly disoriented, Qiu Ju and her sister-in-law are told by wellmeaning people to “dress up like an urban dweller” so as to avoid being ripped off, which means to cover up their country-bumpkin clothes with fashionable urban attire. But when they reemerge from the department store, new dresses on top of the old, they do not look a bit more urban, but just with more layers of what Ernst Bloch famously called “synchronic noncontemporaneity.”8 The multiple trips Qiu Ju takes to search for an explanation may feel repetitive. However, repetition can be said to be the most effective narrative

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device, helping the evolution of the idea which is represented with astonishing immediacy as something uncoded and thus prelinguistic. Each round of negotiation, mediation, or conflict excludes one possible solution and by exclusion sharpens the film’s focus on the nameless “way of things” as an explanation. Money, or financial compensation, is the first to go, as Qiu Ju does not accept the compensation the village chief insultingly pays. That is followed by the idea of a kind of culture-based rationalizing effort made by the village policeman. The gift (two boxes of cakes) Officer Li brings to Qiu Ju, a reverse bribe, so to speak, is a comic but poignant way of highlighting the communal wisdom underlying the legalistic thinking required by the policeman’s sociopolitical and bureaucratic functionality. It does not work, either. The last casualty in Qiu Ju’s dogged pursuit of “explanation” is, as we have discussed, the modern legal system itself (see figure 4). Indeed, repetition as a narrative design seems to break its own formal rhythm to suggest something that pertains to the philosophical and to what Roman Ingarten once called the “ontological” or evaluative dimension of the work of art. In light of the film’s tendency against the abstract and the general and in favor of the particular, repetition is a narrative device in service to the self-affirmation, if not self-assertion, of an as-yet-undefined and undefinable quality. In Repetition and Difference, Gilles Deleuze provides a unique intuition into the repetitive as conducive to the evolving, self-differentiating, multiple, affirmative, and productive dynamism of sameness as opposed to the Hegelian dialectic which relies on negation and the negative. He writes: “To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular.”9 Deleuze, by reestablishing the conceptual and categorical links between his work and the questions of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Baruch Spinoza, allows us to see the crucial historical, political, and philosophical mutual relevance between our own times and their prehistories, which together form the discontinuous continuity of the modern, capitalist society in its own “eternal return.” Here, at a dizzying conceptual height but with sharp references to history, Deleuze shows how the residues of the past, the overcome, the redundant, the repressed, and the premature are always part and parcel of time and experience, which we try in vain to regulate, formalize, and generalize first in the name of mythology and metaphysics (culture), then in the name of rationality and the modern (history).

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4 The film ends with a still image of a confused Qiu Ju, surprised by the arrest of the village mayor over new, but seemingly dated and insignificant legal-medical evidence. From Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju. Courtesy of Photofest.

Yet in light of Qiu Ju, what Deleuze seeks to show is that all the identities and forms of life, like all the desires, fantasies, symptoms, and unfulfilled wishes, always come back in disguise for their own satisfaction and selfassertion instead of being happily “negated” and disappearing into the dustbin of universal history for good. It is in the unruliness of those identities and forms of life that their respective, singular political nature manifests itself through repetition. And in light of Deleuze, the story of the Wan family’s lawsuit is a fable of a historically, politically shaped form of life in search of its own affirmation, its own “eternal return.”10 In The Story of Qiu Ju, each time the peasant woman in pursuit of justice comes home empty-handed, the audience is, in frustration and in awe, one step closer to capturing the meaning of that amorphous concept and to understanding the possibility of the impossible. Each repetition on Qiu Ju’s part affirms something that is nonexistent, missing, or denied by the order of the world as a coding system for the general and the exchangeable; yet it is something concrete and singular which vibrates with a larger context beyond the formal institutions of modern rationality. In a literary sense, repetition in Zhang Yimou’s film is a “transgression [which] puts law into question, it denounces its nominal

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or general character in favor of a more profound and more artistic reality.”11 Each repetition is to “repeat the unrepeatable,” which is the singularity of a concrete form of life. Thus, each trip made by Qiu Ju does not merely add one more time to the previous one, but, as Deleuze puts it, carries the first time “to the nth power.”12

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notes

introduction

The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism

The 2001 Chinese gross domestic product (gdp) was estimated at 9 trillion rmb (or People’s Currency) (1.2 trillion U.S. dollars by exchange rate). The cia’s early 2007 estimate of the Chinese gdp is 2.5 trillion dollars in terms of the exchange rate, but 10 trillion dollars in terms of purchasing power parity (ppp), compared with Japan’s 4.2 trillion and the United States’ 12.8 trillion. See The World Factbook. 2 The process was set back dramatically by the Bush administration’s unilateralism and by its invasion and occupation of Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. 3 The notion of “socialism at its preliminary stage” was coined by Ye Jianying, then chairman of the National People’s Congress, in a 1979 speech marking the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. It was elaborated as a theoretical discourse in 1987 at the Thirteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) by then–party secretary general Zhao Ziyang. The official status of this term, which seeks to rationalize Chinese economic, political, and social life according to the reality thus defined, should caution us against any attempt to get ahead of the actual historical stage of development of Chinese socialism. The centrality of this discourse, however, lies in its stagist model of development. Specifically, this preliminary stage is marked by the transition from poverty and backwardness to prosperity; from agricultural and artisan to modern industrial society; and from “natural or seminatural” to developed commodities economy. The dual goal of the stagist development model is to “establish and develop vibrant and vigorous socialist economic, political, and cultural institutions through reform and exploration” and to “achieve the great Chinese national renaissance through mass mobilization and hard entrepreneurship.” Notably, the concept of “socialism at its preliminary stage” is integral to the overall theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which extends into the 1990s in the forms of “socialist market economy” and Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” discourse (2002), that is, that the ccp represents (1) advanced forces of production in China, (2) the future direction of advanced Chinese culture, and (3) the 1

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fundamental interest of the majority of the Chinese people. The core of the “Three Represents” theory is radically historicist, as Jiang explicitly emphasizes the primacy of “moving along with times” (yushi jujin). 4 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 70.

one The Return of the Political 1

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President Bill Clinton, during a state visit to China on the eve of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a trip he seemed to have enjoyed fully, did not hesitate to tell his host in a speech broadcast live that “China is on the wrong side of history” when it comes to human rights and the political freedom of its citizens. See Wang, “Contemporary Chinese Thought.” For a courageous, though theoretically simplistic analysis of the “marketization of power,” see He, Zhongguo xiandaihua de xianjing. For a useful discussion of the notion of bureaucratic capitalism in China, see Meisner, Deng Xiaoping Era. Meisner does not pay enough attention to bureaucratic capitalism’s adaptability to the postmodern or global stage of capitalism, which gives rise to a new regime of flexible production, legitimation, culture, and subjectivity. In other words, bureaucratic capitalism is the mode of production which sustains an empire in the global empire. The frictions, conflicts, and interactions between the two systems, or in a dominant system and a semiautonomous subsystem, need to be analyzed with more intellectual rigor. The growth of Chinese economy has shown no sign of slowing since 2001. For 2007 figures provided by the cia in The World Factbook, see intro. note 1. According to certain statistics, China’s regional and individual income disparity is worse than the “transitional societies” in Eastern Europe and most of Latin America and Southeast Asia. See Wang and Hu, Bupingdeng fazhan de zhengzhijingjixue. Ibid. See He, Zhongguo xiandaihua de xianjing. According to state statistics, by the end of 1999, the state sector constituted only 28.5% of the national economy, the rest being communal or collective economy ( jiti jing ji, 38.5%), and private economy (including foreign direct investment, 33%). In terms of the percentage of the state sector, China seems no more socialist than France or Italy; yet when it is combined with the communal or collective economy—township and village enterprises, urban collective cooperatives, and so on—whose property ownership and management are unclear, though they are believed to be semiautonomous from the state system, the nonprivate sector still represents two-thirds of the national economy. Even though the private economy in China is already larger than the state economy (in retail sales its proportion is 51.5%, compared to 24.3% for the state sector), the state maintains its monopoly in key sectors of the economy, such as energy, communication, banking, transportation, research and development, and most capital- and technology-intensive areas of production.

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Wu, “Zhongguo jingji gaige huigu yu zhanwang.” Simon, “Legal Structure,” 270. ccp Central Committee, Resolutions of the Third Plenary Session. Wu and Wang, “Dialogue.” For discussions related to the “loss of humanistic spirit” debate, see Wang Xiaoming, Renwen jingshen xun si lu. For English-language discussions of this phenomenon, see Zhang, “Mass Culture.” There is also a correcting mechanism “outside of the system,” namely, the idea of “the mandate of the heaven” that places the people, the “way of the heaven,” higher than the emperor himself. This potentially subversive idea is carried within the Chinese intellectual tradition. For instance, see Xiao Gongqin’s essays on the Wuxu Reform and on the famous “Issues versus -Isms Debate,” between radical and moderate May Fourth intellectuals in the 1930s; Xiao, “Wuxu bianfa de zaifanxing” and “Jindai sixiangshi shang ‘wenti yu zhuyi’ zhenglun de zaisikao.” Both pieces aim to tease out and critique the “cultural origins of political radicalism” among modern Chinese intellectuals. See, e.g., Wang and Li, “Duiyu ‘Wusi’ de zairenshi dakewen”; Chen Lai, “20 shiji wenhua yundong zhong de jijin zhuyi”; and Chen Shaoming, “Didiao yixie.” See, e.g., Zheng, “He wei ‘dalu xin baoshouzhuyi’?” Zheng, a major modernist poet and a scholar of English literature, offers a scathing critique of “neoconservatism,” by which she means the intellectual retreat from the commitment to Enlightenment ideals and to cosmopolitan, modernist aesthetics and cultural politics. For Zheng, this accusation is both groundless and misleading, as it collapses modernist-postmodernist stylistic and intellectual development (including the poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial politicization of culture) with the historical targets of the Chinese enlightenment and post-Mao New Enlightenment discourses, above all the radicalist tradition that is the historical and political content of alleged “neoconservatism.” Zheng’s position as a veteran modernist makes explicit the ideological underpinnings of the discursive effort to repudiate radicalism despite the latter’s self-positioning in liberal-modernist discourse. For a more detailed examination of this issue, see the section “Political Stakes” of chap. 3. Yu, “Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi shang de jijin yu baoshou.” Rorty, Achieving Our Country. Jiang, “Jijin yu baoshou.” This tendency is registered in the general topics (Chinese studies) and features (including empirical and philological ones) of the articles published in Xueren (Scholars). The journal also published several discussions on the “history of scholarship”; see no. 1 (1991): 2–48; no. 2 (1992): 377–405; and no. 5 (1994): 449–64. When Xueren suspended operation in the late 1990s, Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), a publication in Chinese funded by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, took its place. Osborne, Politics of Time, 27. Osborne’s immediate context is a critique of JeanFrançois Lyotard’s position against the “grand narrative.”

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The discourse on Chinese public sphere emerged in the early 1990s as an echo of the discussion of the public sphere and the demise of state communism in East European countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. The literature on this topic illustrates how ideological assumptions, wishful thinking, and bias define seemingly objective and empirical research. See “Symposium: ‘Public Sphere/Civil Society’ in China?” Gan, “Yangjingbang yu ‘women.’ ” Wang Hui’s two-part, four-volume Xiandai zhongguo sixiang de xingqi was not published until 2004. However, the prolonged period during which the project was researched, drafted, and revised, with many publications in the essay and article form, helped sustain Wang Hui’s influence in scholarly circles and on intellectual-political battlefields. Gan Yang is a philosopher by training; Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Shaoguang are political scientists. In literary and cultural studies, Wang Xiaoming, Cai Xiang, and Dai Jinhua are examples of theoretical intellectuals rooted in rigorous research. See Negri and Hardt, Empire. See Xu Youyu, “Ziyou zhuyi, Falankefu xupai ji qita.” Ibid., 182–86. A recent example is Brooks, Bobos in Paradise. Ren, “Jiedu ‘Xin zuopai.’ ” Ibid., 212–13. Qin, “Liberalism.” Ibid. Wang Hui zi xuan jiu. On August 1, 2007, a Google search under “Changjiang Dushu jiang” showed some 118,000 results. For a few examples of the liberal analysis of the “Dushu award incident,” see Xu Youyu, “Zhishifenzi yu gongquan”; He Weifang, “Cong chengxu jiaodu kan ‘Changjian Dushu Jiang’ de queqian”; and Qin, “Dangdai zhongguo sixiangshi shang de Dushu jiang shijian.” A few words need to be said about liberalism’s overlap with—and difference from—the earlier discourse of neoauthoritarianism. Both are rooted in a wholesale repudiation of revolution and radicalism as such. Both see hope in the peaceful transition of Chinese society into a capitalist market economy. The two differ in their choice of political model and value system to govern and justify such a transition. The “neoauthoritarianists” or the conservatives, who used to gather around several think tanks of the Reform contingent of the party bureaucracy before 1989, were and are convinced that a strong, coercive government is best equipped, politically and culturally, to oversee massive, radical economic and social restructuring. While impatient with the rhetoric of individual freedom and social democracy, they are engaging in the same social transition based on the market economy. They converge in their support of an increasingly unequal distribution of social wealth in favor of competition and efficiency. Where for Chinese liberals, social liberty of the new bourgeoisie

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class outweighs democracy, for the neoauthoritarianists it hardly matters as long as the state can maintain order which governs the spontaneous growth of the market economy. Since there is no legal protection for open discussion of such political blueprints, the liberal political-philosophical discussions are undertaken in translations of Western texts, a tradition inherited from the 1980s. The major venue for such discussions is Gonggong luncong (Res Publica), a quasi-journal edited by liberal intellectuals including Liu Junning, Wang Yan, and He Weifang and published by the prestigious Sanlian Shudian, a leading publisher of Chinese translations of Western intellectual works. The first issue came out in 1996. To date there have been seven issues, containing both articles and translations (of Hayek, Berlin, Rawls, etc.). Zhu, “1998.” This demand is eloquently argued in Fogel, Fourth Great Awakening. Cui and Unger, “Yi e wei jian kan zhongguo.” Zhang Rulun, “Habeimasi yu diguozhuyi.” The Chinese translation of Habermas’s “Humanity or Bestiality” is published in the same issue of Dushu. Gan Yang, Mingpao, special column, September 1, 2000. Weber, Protestant Ethic. For a good summary of Weber’s thesis, see Habermas, “Concept of Modernity.” See also Xudong Zhang, “Nationalism and Contemporary China.” This is the crucial tianxia/guo (empire/nation) dichotomy described by Joseph Levenson in his Confucian China. Lawrence, “Say No Club.” The U.S. government currently bans the sale of supercomputers to China, for national-security reasons. See chap. 2. The importance of these writers’ works is occasionally acknowledged in the writings of Zhang Yiwu, Wang Ning, Wang Yichuan, Dai Jinhua, and Chen Xiaoming. The postcolonial flavor of this tendency is viewed unfavorably by people like Gan Yang and Cui Zhiyuan, who go so far as to suggest that the Chinese problematic can only be defined and reflected critically in terms of a creative engagement in and radical innovation of “Western learning,” for them a makeshift signifier of a world-historical intellectual conflict which involves all seemingly local issues. As mass cultural production in the Chinese 1990s becomes increasingly commercialized and complicit with the state ideology (despite the superficial disagreement between the official rhetoric of the state and the market orientation of everyday life), the postmodernist celebration of postsocialist secularization yields to a more critical and theoretically prepared analysis of the complex power relations that characterize 1990s cultural production. See Liu Dong, “Jingti renwei de ‘yangjingbang’ xuefeng.” By labeling the overseas Chinese students’ publications in Chinese as “yangjingbang” (“pigeon English”), Liu claims an exclusive notion of Chineseness available only to those

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who live the particular national situation of China today. However, for Liu, China needs particularly badly such universal values as progress, freedom, and democracy. In other words, anything that deviates from or is critical of that universal path is deemed “un-Chinese.” In late 1990s Liu became the editor of Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), a journal promoting “authentic” Chinese scholarship. But, funded by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, it caters more to the international Sinological community than to “authentic” Chinese scholars toiling at Chinese institutions. For a scathing critique of Liu’s piece, see Gan, “Yangjingbang yu ‘women.’ ” Ren, “Jiedu ‘Xin zuopai,’ ” 193. Ibid., 192. See Liu Zaifu, “Farewell to the Gods.” See Guo, “Zhanmingxin yu wenhua da geming.” For a critical review of the article, see Zhang Xudong, “Quanqiuhua shidai de sixiang fengbizheng.” Ren, “Jiedu ‘Xin zuopai,’ ” 200. Ibid. Ibid. MacEwan, Neo-liberalism or Democracy, 27. Ibid., 4. Fredric Jameson, in his defense of Marxism’s relevance in the face of the failure of the world communist movement, has made this argument clear. See Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism.” The disciplinary environment in Chinese economics today is such that Keynes is “no longer studied or even tolerated,” whereas “Hayek can be praised boundlessly.” See Guan, “Kai’ensi sixiang yanbian de guiji,” 92. Merely a decade and a half ago, Keynes was considered by mainstream Chinese economists to be a standard-bearer of anti-Marxist, bourgeois economics. Wang and Hu, Zhongguo guojia nengli baogao, 159. Wang Shaoguang, “Ziyoupai?” Tsou, “Di er ci sixiang jiefang yu zhidu chuangxin,” ix–xliv. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 358–63. Ibid. Ibid., xxix. Ibid., 5. Cui, “Meiguo gongsifa biange de lilun beijing ji dui woguo de qifa,” ibid, 197–98. Ibid., 212–13. Ibid., 13. Gan, “Wenhua zhongguo yu xiangtu zhongguo,” 186. Ibid., 186–87. Ibid., 190. Gan, “Ziyouzhuyi.” For the English translation, see Gan, “Debating Liberalism.” Gan, “Gongmin geti weiben, tongyi xianzheng liguo.” See Spivak, In Other Worlds.

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“There is no outside” (to global capitalism) is a proposition in Negri and Hardt, Empire.

two Nationalism, Mass Culture, Strategies See Li, Liu, et al., Yaomohua zhongguo de beihou. Monroe and Bernstein both wrote on China for the New York Times. In 1997, they coauthored The Coming Conflict with China. Even though the predicted conflict did not materialize in the late 1990s or the first years of the twenty-first century, Sino-U.S. relations did become tense in 1996 and have remained more or less uneasy since. While the Taiwan independence issue continues to be central, other points of dispute such as trade imbalance (in China’s favor), currency exchange rate (with the yuan deemed artificially low by the United States), North Korean nuclear weapons project, insufficient degree of openness of Chinese society, and China’s criticism of U.S. unilateralism and hegemony have been more and more pronounced in recent years. 2 The Chinese rural reform officially started in 1979, the year that began the New Era. The urban—industrial and political—reforms were introduced in 1984. The first Special Economic Zone (sez) was established in Shenzhen in 1980. By 1997, private and communal enterprises represented about half of the Chinese gnp and the more than a dozen sezs were playing a major role in expanding China’s share in international trade. “Socialist market economy” has been the official definition of China’s mode of production. 3 Dushu, perhaps the most influential intellectual journal in China today, is widely regarded as a semi-autonomous forum, even though it is officially a branch of the state-owned Joint Publishing Co. (Sanlian Shudian), whose reputation in post-Mao China largely has come from its massive publication of translated twentieth-century Western philosophical and cultural works. China Central Television (cctv), a stronghold of the state media, is now dependent on the “independent producer system” for many of its increasingly popular tv magazine shows and cultural programs. Glamorous as their title may sound, these independent producers are basically the same kind of people who had been referred to as “cultural hustlers” in the chaotic cultural market of the 1980s, which underwent its own ups and downs outside state regulation. In the 1990s, they functioned in roughly the same way as their colleagues in Hollywood: spotting hot-selling topics and packaging the best hands, or wan’er in Chinese, available in the market. These scriptwriters, cameramen, newswomen, and so on themselves tended to be freelancers, working several jobs at the same time for such employers as cbs, nhk (Nihon Ho¯so¯ Kyo¯kai), or cctv. Their daily operations were quite different, however, involving dealings with state or local bureaucracies and their baroque regulations and rhetorical idiosyncrasies. This means, of course, to bring the latter onto their home court of the market. Beyond this semi-autonomous circle lies the wilderness: privately owned bookstores and distribution networks, coffee shops, teahouses, music or karaoke bars, rock bands, showing rooms of pirated cds and computer software, and countless 1

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legal, semilegal, or illegal publication venues of an amazing variety, from tabloid magazines to soft porn, on topics from tai chi to preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Song, Zhang, et al., Zhongguo keyi shuobu. The different responses to the book by the Chinese and U.S. governments is noteworthy. While the U.S. embassy rushed to invite the writers to an embassy dinner and reportedly offered them a tour of the United States (an offer they reportedly declined), the Chinese government, after a brief period of hesitation, put a virtual ban on any discussion of the book in the official media. Defying the official displeasure, China Still Can Say No, a sequel, a was published six months later in 1996. After a few weeks of robust sales, the government reportedly ordered the confiscation of the copies still in stock. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Ibid., 58–62. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 127. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 100. Acton, “Nationality,” 25. Greenfeld, “Modern Religion?,” 177. Friedman, “Nationalism,” 156. See Yack, “Myth of the Civic Nation.” In March 1994, Michael Fay, an 18-year-old U.S. resident of Singapore was jailed for vandalism, fined, and received six floggings by Singapore authorities despite U.S. appeals for mercy and protest against “excessive” punishment. For a detailed report and analysis, see “Rough Justice,” by Alejandro Reyes, Asia Week, Hong Kong, May 25, 1994. Officially the “Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996,” the Helms-Burton law strengthens the U.S. embargo on Cuba by allowing U.S. citizens to sue international businesses that trade with Cuba, thus “benefiting from seized properties.” In 2001 the Bush administration waived the Helms-Burton law under pressure from the European countries and Canada. See John King, “Bush to Waive Helms-Burton Law,” CNN InsidePolitics, July 1, 2001, archives. cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/07/13/bush.cuba/. Anderson, Imagined Communities, xi. However, if we consider the year 1972 (marked by Richard Nixon’s visit to China) as the beginning of this process, then Mao himself seems to be a visionary of the nationalist worldview. The “four modernizations,” China’s state project to modernize its economy and defense, were laid out in 1974 under Mao’s auspices. This is particularly true in the realm of political discourse, in which antidemocratic measures are reinforced by the so-called liberal intellectuals’ continued critique of the Cultural Revolution and mass democracy and by their tacit endorsement of technocratic rule. However, at the local level in rural China, democracy is steadily gaining ground. By the end of the 1990s, more than ten thousand Chinese villages had held direct elections by secret ballot. According

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to the Jimmy Carter Center, the Chinese government invited the staff members at the center to observe and monitor the Chinese elections at the village level. See “Carter Center Monitors Chinese Township Elections,” People’s Daily, Jan. 14, 1999. The most eloquent argument for the relationship between political stability of the nation and its commitment to democracy in the Chinese context is Gan Yang’s 1996 essay, “Gongmin geti wei ben, tongyi xianzheng li guo.” It is noteworthy that Gan draws heavily from the early American federalists to make his case. In the 1990s, publishing minutes of panel discussions became a common technique for raising public issues, setting theoretical agendas, and forming group identities. Favored by many Chinese intellectuals, it was used in such areas as cultural studies, film criticism, and theory. This is in sharp contrast to the iconoclastic individual heroism and religious passion for authorship prevalent during the Great Cultural Discussion and various modernist movements in the 1980s. For a selection of essays from this debate, see Wang Xiaoming, Renwen jingshen xun si lu. Cai Xiang, “Daotong, xuetong yu zhengtong,” in Wang, Renwen jingshen xun si lu, 48. Ibid., 49. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 129. From “Kuangye shang de feixu,” a panel discussion with Wang Xiaoming, Zhang Hong, Xu Lin, Zhang Ning, and Cui Yiming, in Wang, Renwen jingshen xun si lu, 15. From “Renwen jingshen xunzong,” a panel discussion with Gao Ruiquan, Yuan Jin, Zhang Rulun, and Lit Tiangang, in Wang, Renwen jingshen xun si lu, 44. Ibid., 44. Cai Xiang, “Daotong, xuetong yu zhengtong,” 54. The individual(ist) position is elaborated in many writings of Wang Xiaoming, a leading figure in this debate. For a panel discussion on building a tradition or institution of independent learning as the dwelling space for the “humanistic spirit,” see “Daotong, xuetong yu zhengtong.” For a panel discussion on the “history of scholarship” (xueshu shi) as a form to disengage from the “history of ideas” or “intellectual history” (sixiang shi), see Chen Pingyuan, Wang Shouchang, et al., “Xueshushi taolun.” Wang Meng, “Renwen jingshen wenti ougan,” 115. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 119. Zhang Yiwu, “Zuihou de shenhua.” Ibid., 140–41. Zhang Yiwu, “Xinzhuantai de jueqi.” Ibid. Ibid., 117. Geremie Barmé, an Australian cultural journalist, portrays the teleseries A Beijing Man in New York as an ugly show of Chinese nationalism, chauvinism, and

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xenophobia in his essay “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic.” For a rebuttal of Barmé’s view, see the last two sections of a book review of Chinese Nationalism, ed. Jonathan Unger (which includes Barmé’s essay) in Zhanlüe yu guanli (Strategy and Management), no. 1 (1996): 23–26. This reminds us of the link between the rise of nationalism and the rise of mass culture in China during the 1990s. Zhang Yiwu, “Xinzhuantai de jueqi,” 117. Ibid., 118. Zhang Yiwu, “Renmin jiyi yu wenhua de mingyun,” 82. See Lei Yi, “Beijing yu cuowei.” Zhao Yiheng, “Houxue yu xinbaoshouzhuyi,” 11. Xu Ben, “ ‘Disan shijie piping’ zai dangjin zhongguo de chujing.” See Qin, “Ziyou zhuyi yu minzu zhuyi de qihe dian zai nali,” 47. Ibid. Ibid. Sun Liping, “Huiru shijie wenming zhuliu,” 19. Ibid. See Wang Ying, Xinjitizhuyi. The content of the so-called Angang Constitution is: Managers take part in production; workers take part in management and reform unreasonable regulations and systems; technical specialists, managers, and workers interact with one another in the process of production and technological innovation. For a theoretical discussion on this topic, see Cui Zhiyuan, “Angang xianfa yu houfute zhuyi.” Dai, “Tuwei biaoyan.” Ibid., 101. Wang Hui, “Jiushi niandai zhongguo dalu de wenhua yanjiu yv wenhua piping.” See Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices.” See Gan, “Zouxiang zhengzhi minzu.”

three Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society In an article recently published in the Research Series of Modern Chinese Literature (Xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan), one of the founding publications of modern Chinese literary studies, Yu Hua, the wonder boy of the avant-garde fiction in the 1980s, who spearheaded the violent “subversion” of the humanist-realist canon, is compared to Lu Xun, the ultimate canonical figure in modern Chinese literature; both are seen as contributing to the paradigmatic development of modern Chinese literature. See Geng, “Shilun Yu Hua xiaoshuo zhong de hou rendaozhuyi qingxiang ji qi dui Lu Xun qimeng huayu de jiegou.” 2 See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music. 3 In this China is following the developmental model of Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. The socialist label of “state regulations” has often been eclipsed by the more triumphant—until the Asian financial crisis in 1998— rhetoric of “East Asian model” or “Confucian capitalism.” The Chinese state’s 1

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tight regulation of global financial speculation not only protected the Chinese economy against international predators such as George Soros’s Quantum Fund, it also helped stabilize the financial and economic environment throughout East Asia. It is widely thought in the business world that China emerged as the region’s de facto economic leader during and after the Asian financial crisis by rejecting the United States’ laissez-faire approach, which slowed its response to the crisis. Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique,” 94. For an incisive analysis of the Japanese discourse of “the overcoming of the modern,” see Harootunian, “Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies.” See Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia.” Svetlana Boym, in Common Places, initially argues that the “sentiment of nostalgia is ancient and originates somewhere in the Homeric epic” (247), but later admits that she was “surprised to find out that, in fact, the word ‘nostalgia’ was invented in the seventeenth century, roughly around the time of the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, and that it is therefore only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek” (290). Nostalgia as a cultural fashion in postsocialist China, then, is a decidedly postmodern phenomenon, whose appearance is inconceivable without the disappearance of memory and the past in the process of rapid commodification. For a critical examination of the Beijing-centered Chinese modernism of the 1980s, especially its formal-political negotiations with socialist modernity and global capitalism, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. For a historical study of the Shanghai-based modernism and middle-class urban culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, see Lee, Shanghai Modern. See Jameson, “Theories of Postmodernism,” 25–26. In this particular sense, this “neoconservativism” label reminds us of the Nationalists (the Guomindang) calling the Communists “reactionaries” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For a useful discussion of Mannheim’s observations, see Ringer, Decline of German Mandarins, 2. An in-depth analysis of Chinese liberalism as an antidemocratic conservatism can be found in Gan, “Debating Liberalism.” For the paradox of Chinese modernism as expressive vehicle for both a collective and an individual subjectivity, see relevant chapters on Misty Poetry, Ge Fei and experimental fiction, and Fifth Generation film, esp. chap. 10, “A Critical Account of Chen Kaige’s King of the Children,” of Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. See Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura.” For a particularly crude attack on Chinese postmodernism as Western theory, a critique indebted to the Chinese Cultural Revolution repudiated by Deng’s officialdom, see Guo, “Wenge sichao yu ‘houxue.’ ” Guo did not bother to make the fine distinction between the poststructuralists’ debt to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and their response to the global events of 1968, a cultural revolution in its own right and in a vastly different social and intellectual context. Similarly,

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he sees no need to discuss the difference between theory rooted in this context and theory appropriated by a particular Chinese discourse in response to its own situation. For a discussion of postmodernism as a philosophy of defeat, see Eagleton, Illusion of Postmodernism. For a collection of essays analyzing the political differentiations of post-Mao Chinese intellectual discourse, see Xudong Zhang, Whither China? The Russian economy is believed to have shrunk about 50% between 1991 and 1999. In early 1998, as the artificially high real estate and stock market collapsed as a result of speculative attack by free-floating international capital, almost all newly industrialized countries in East Asia suddenly entered deep recession. In seven months, the “Asian Contagion” wiped out 30% to 50% of the currency and stock values of the “miracle economies” of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Singapore and Japan were also hard hit. Malaysian premier Mahathir bin Mohamad bitterly accused international financial speculators, led by George Soros, of robbing the savings of an entire generation in his country, thus setting the clock of its economic development back nearly thirty years. One estimate puts the loss of market value of the East Asian economies (excluding mainland China) on par with Europe’s total economic loss during the Second World War. See Cui et al., Nanjiecun. Cui Zhiyuan’s view is widely criticized in China and characterized as a defense of the Cultural Revolution. See Fei, Peasant Life; Fei, Xiang tu chung jian; and Fei, Rural Development in China; and Huang, Peasant Family. Cui repudiates the prevalent view that economic vitality in rural China is a result of decollectivization and the reinstallation of private ownership, or the “family responsibility system,” by showing that the key to rural economic development is not increased agricultural production but the industrialization of rural China, which requires a heightened degree of social organization, specialization, and the concentration of capital. He also rejects the equally conventional view that the rural economic reforms amount to nothing more than local state corporatism, a view which, while admitting the huge productivity of rural industrialization, deplores insufficient privatization or marketization due to the presence of state and local government and the latter’s command and control of resources, production, population mobility, and economic opportunities. For an example of such a view, see Oi, Rural China Takes Off. Zhiyuan Cui, Di er ci sixiang jiefang yu zhidu chuangxin, 13. Ibid. Cui alludes to the philosophy of Mo Zi to highlight his position that “part of the effort of the second intellectual liberation is to rediscover the contemporary significance of ancient Chinese thought.” Mo Zi, incidentally, is also the fictional sage featured in Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti, a recent study of which can be found in Jameson, Brecht and Method. In his book on the “short twentieth century,” Eric Hobsbawm observes that the sweeping success of Chinese communism after World War II may be due to the Marxist-Leninist party organization’s capacity to “bring . . . government policy from the centre to the remotest villages of the giant country—as, in the mind of

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most Chinese, a proper empire should do”; Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 465. Hobsbawm observes that Chinese socialism benefited from the enormous continuities of Chinese history and is likely to survive as the national ideology. This can be regarded as a development of Hobsbawm’s own theory of nation and nationalism from his earlier Nations and Nationalisms, which contains only brief and scattered discussions of China. Lucien Pye, from an opposite ideological position, and based on the assumption that the realization of universal modernity requires the actualization of the modern bourgeois nation-states, argues that China is “really a civilization pretending to be a nation-state,” and that it still needs to turn itself from a political dinosaur into a qualified nation-state by following the classical European model. See Pye, “How Chinese Nationalism Was Shanghaied.” For a discussion of market-born Chinese nationalism (with the global media as its midwife), see chap. 2. Hu Shi, “Bishang liangshan.” Liu and Zhang, Liu Xinwu Zhang Yiwu duihualu, 40. Ibid., 56–57. Ibid., chap. 3, “Shimin shehui de chengzhang” (the development of civil society), 43–61. Two recent works, namely Dutton, Street Life China, a theoretically inspired sociological survey, and Barmé, In the Red, an intimate cultural journalistic exposé, are among the first in English to grapple with those unclassifiable elements (such as liumang) in contemporary Chinese social and cultural life. Wang Hui, “prc Cultural Studies.” Gan, “Shehui yu sixiang cong shu yuanqi.” Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 517.

four

Shanghai Nostalgia

I want to extend my sincere gratitude to Rebecca Karl, Keith McMahon, Zhen Zhang, Svetlana Boym, Nicole Huang, Leo Lee, the fellows and participants at the “Cities and Nations” project of the International Center for Advanced Studies (icas) at New York University (1998–99), and the organizers of the icas events, Thomas Bender and Harry Harootunian, for their invaluable comments, suggestions, criticism, and support as I researched and wrote this chapter. It originally appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique 8 (2000), 349–87. 1 Zhang Ailing, “Fengsuo,” 1:97–98. An English translation by Karen Kingsbury is in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph Lau and Howard Goldblatt, 188–89. 2 By the end of the 1940s Shanghai was by far the largest city in China and one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population over 5 million. Meanwhile, the International Settlement expanded from 330 mu (.6 square mile) in 1843 eventually to 48,653 mu (8.67 square miles), an area ten times larger than the old Chinese city of Shanghai (Xu Run, Shanghai gonggong zujie shigao, 13, 16). Before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, 81.2% of China’s foreign

323

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324 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

trade and commerce, 79.2% of foreign bank investment, 67.1% of industrial investment, and 76.8% of real estate investment were concentrated in Shanghai. Shanghai also represented half of Chinese (excluding Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Manchuria) industrial output, workforce, and capital value, as well as threequarters of China’s banking industry (Tang, Shanghai shi, 9). In 1933 there were 3,421 factories and 34,000 stores in the International Settlement (Zhang Zhongli, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 171). In the early decades of the twentieth century Shanghai published more than 85% of all China’s books, and 12.5% of Chinese women living in the International Settlement in Shanghai were believed to be prostitutes (Shanghai Historical Society, Shanghaishi yanjiu, 2:131). Zhang Ailing, “Sealed Off,” 98–99; translation modified. The dazzling literary debut of Zhang Ailing in isolated, besieged Shanghai during the Pacific War for many also marks the apex of her literary career, despite her later works (some bordering on crude anticommunist propaganda) written outside the mainland in the early years of the Cold War. With the publication of Hsia, History of Modern Chinese Fiction, she became the standard-bearer of a literary legacy erased from the media of Communist China. For a critical analysis of the revisionist literary historiography, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, 101–21. For an account of Chinese postmodernism and its political implications, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, chap. 3. For an analysis of the dialectic between socialist modernity and postsocialist modernism, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, esp. chap. 10, “A Critical Account of Chen Kaige’s King of the Children,” 282–306. See Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism. Benjamin, “Paris: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Baudelaire, 176. Wang Anyi, “Wang Anyi yanzhong de dangjin wentan.” This is reminiscent of the position of some of the Taiwanese nativist writers in the 1970s. Wang Anyi, “Wenge yishi,” 425–26. Henceforth only page numbers are given in the text. The translation is mine. According to recent studies, between 1953 and 1978 the Shanghai economy grew at a rate of 8.8%. This refutes the Deng regime’s propaganda that the economy was sluggish due to Mao’s incessant mass movements and Stalinist central-planning system. Ironically, the city’s 7.5% growth rate during the period of reform and opening to the outside world (1979–90) was slower, as well as below the national average during the same period. The relatively slow growth during the New Era is commonly held to be a result of Shanghai’s being the “rear guard of Reforms”; with the largest concentration of state-owned enterprises, Shanghai was forced to adopt a conservative economic policy. Furthermore, home to only 1% of the Chinese population, the city shouldered roughly 15% of the tax load of the central government up to the late 1980s. After 1992, when Deng Xiaoping pushed for even bolder reforms and Shanghai was allowed more financial latitude, both domestic and foreign investment soared. In 1993 Pudong (the area east of the Huangpu River) became the newest and

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14

15

16

17

18 19

20

most aggressive of the special economic zones (sezs), and the city saw the most intensive urban construction in its history. As the business and administrative elite envision the city as the future economic center of East Asia, the public discourse on “revitalizing Shanghai” suggests that the new Shanghai draws its self-image from its own prerevolutionary past. Contrary to the pop culture depiction of the Cultural Revolution as “ten years of calamity,” the city maintained high productivity, sustained growth and technological innovation, a good education system, and a vibrant mass-oriented cultural life. In fact, it was the success of socialist industrialization that destroyed old Shanghai. The thorough nationalization of the presocialist economy was completed in the 1950s, leaving virtually no room for the private sector. Remarkably, 54% of the economic growth during the Maoist period was achieved thanks to technological innovation, compared with only 19.3% during the New Era. But most telling about the structural transformation of the Shanghai economy is the increase of heavy manufacturing from 52.4% of the city’s gross product in 1952 to 77.4% in 1978 and, correspondingly, the decline of the service industry from 41.7% of the city’s gross product in 1952 to a mere 18.6% in 1978. These statistics show clearly that during the Maoist decades, Shanghai was transformed into the workshop of socialist China. This rapid growth, combined with the gradual deterioration of the infrastructure and architectural grace of the former foreign concessions, made Shanghai look “provincial,” “vulgar,” and “uncultivated” to many of its nostalgic beholders throughout the 1980s. See Gao and Yu, “Shanghai jingji,” 79. “To be someone not from Shanghai [zuo waidi ren] is the most, most unfortunate lot assigned to people,” thinks a teenage girl in Wang Anyi’s Changhenge (276). “Upper corner” (shangzhijiao) refers to the fashionable, expensive neighborhoods in the former French Concession in West Shanghai, whereas the “lower corner” means the lower- and working-class neighborhoods in the vast northern, eastern, and southern districts of the city. Before 1949 the rent for houses and apartments in the two corners could differ by as much as ten times. See Luo and Wu, Shanghai Longtang (1997), 6. Fukuyama, End of History. Jacques Derrida argues that Fukuyama often “goes beyond nuance and is sometimes suspensive to the point of indecision.” See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 56. Built in 1934, the International Hotel was the tallest building in Shanghai (at 83.8 meters) for the next fifty years. But during the 1980s it symbolized the city’s stagnation. In the late 1990s, it disappeared into the massive, permanent construction site that Shanghai had become. Wang Weiming, Yuwang de chengshi, 64. Ibid. In 1990 a college graduate in Shanghai made about $250 a year based on the exchange rate at that time. The per capita living area in what was by far the most crowded city in China was about 50 square feet, or one-tenth the size of the bathroom in the presidential suite at the Garden Hotel. Wang Anyi, Changhenge, 5. The translations are mine.

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22

23 24 326

25 26 27

28 29

The natural-supernatural, Benjamin writes, “presents itself in the forest, in the animal kingdom, and by the surging sea; in any of those places the physiognomy of a big city can flash for a few moments” (Baudelaire, 60–61). The relationship between aesthetic forms and the urban experience in his comments on Impressionist painting is even more explicit: “The daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a spectacle to which one’s eyes had to adapt first. . . . One may assume that once the eyes had mastered this task they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired faculties.” Thus Impressionist painting “would be a reflection of experiences with which the eyes of a big-city dweller have become familiar” (ibid., 130n). For Benjamin’s idea of Naturgeschichte, see Origins of German Tragic Drama, esp. “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 159–235; for an illuminating discussion of the concept, see Adorno, “Idee der Naturgeschichte,” 1:351. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 120. See Luo and Wu, Shanghai Longtang. Although catering to foreign tourists, the book provides perhaps the best social, cultural, and architectural descriptions of the longtang. A “native” phenomenon shortly after Shanghai’s forced opening to the West, longtang houses “were native products of Shanghai soon after the city was forced open to the West as a treaty port.” While at first Chinese were prohibited from residing in the foreign concessions, the British motivation to develop the city into a metropolis and the large number of wealthy Chinese refugees from the civil wars who requested residence in the foreign concessions led the colonial authorities to open those neighborhoods to the Chinese. To manage this influx, “large numbers of collective dwellings were built in designated lots of land enclosed by walls.” Combining English and Chinese elements (such as a front courtyard) and arranged in rows with sublanes, such housing became dominant throughout the city by the 1940s, when longtangs were home to nearly 3 million of the total population of 4.2 million people (6; translation modified). Pensky, Melancholic Dialectics, 57. E.g., “Liuyan” (“Gossip”), “Gezi” (“The Pigeons”), “Xiawucha” (“Afternoon Tea”), and “Biluo huangquan” (“Death of the Old Beauty”). This is seen in the character and circle of Lao Kela (literally, old class, kela being a Shanghai Pidgin English word for class, in the sense of personal elegance; Wang Anyi traces it to the word color, by mistake). See Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian, app. 1, p. 725. Sypher, Loss of the Self, 36. Lehan, City in Literature, 75.

five Toward a Critical Iconography I want to thank Kristin Ross and Caren Irr for their detailed criticism and suggestions, from which I greatly benefited. I am grateful to Leo Ou-fan Lee and Wang Ning for inviting me to present an earlier version of this chapter at a seminar on Chinese urban culture at Harvard and an international conference

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

on theory at Tsinghua University, Beijing, respectively. Thanks are also due to Thomas Bender, Richard Sieburth, Margaret Cohen, Theodore Huters, Rebecca Karl, Lindsay Waters, Michael Holquist, Richard Brodhead, Kang-i Sun Chang, Song Mingwei, and the participants in the New York University conference on Shanghai urban culture in April 2001 for their comments, encouragement, and help with references. This chapter first appeared in New Literary History 33, no. 1 (2002): 137–69. Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions,” 39–41, hereafter cited in text as “mp.” See Derrida, Specters of Marx. Benjamin, Illuminations, 256; hereafter cited in text as i. This prose poem by Baudelaire is discussed in detail in the last section of Benjamin’s now classic essay, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Zhou Leshan, “Shanghai de chuntian”; hereafter cited in text. All translations from the Chinese in this essay are mine. Zhang Ailing, “Gongyu shenghuo jiqu.” Zhang Ailing, “Daodi shi Shanghairen.” Thomas Bender, comparing New York and Parisian urban modernities, argues that New York was modern in sociological terms long before Paris and that the latter’s urge to “order and conceptualize the modern as a whole” was conditioned not by its being thoroughly modern but by its coexistence with an entrenched and culturally significant traditional order. This observation is certainly relevant to a Shanghai-Paris or Shanghai–New York comparison. See Bender, “Modern City.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3–42. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 149–66; hereafter cited in text as tp. Osborne, Politics of Time, 27. Originally published in Jingzhong ribao, June 26, 1904, “The New Shanghai” is also quoted in Xiong, “Haipai sanlun,” 186. Fu Sinian, “Zhi Xinchao she,” quoted in Xiong Yuezhi, “Haipai sanlun,” 184. Zhou Zuoren, “Shanghai qi,” 157–60. For Chen, Qian, and Liang, see Xiong, “Haipai sanlun,” 184; hereafter cited in text as “hs.” Lu Xun, “Jingpai yu haipai.” Zhang Chunqiao, “Pandeng xinde shengli gaofeng,” 1; hereafter cited in text as “px.” The Broadway Building was completed in 1934 and is regarded as an early example of the International Style in Shanghai. One of the three tallest buildings on the Bund, it remained until the early 1980s a major luxury hotel. Before the Oriental Pearl (Television Broadcast) Tower was built in the 1990s, the building’s spacious terrace on the eighteenth story was a privileged elevation point where an aerial view of the Bund and all of downtown Shanghai was available and regularly presented to visiting foreign and domestic dignitaries. Zhou Shoujuan, the principal writer of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School of popular fiction was so pleased to be led there when attending Lu Xun’s reburial ceremony in 1956 that he wrote an article admiring the building. By the 1970s, however,

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

the increasingly unbearable stench of the Suzhou River, caused by unregulated industrial pollution, had diminished the building’s appeal. See Yang, Shanghai laofangzi de gushi, 79–81. This is evidenced by the change in Shanghai’s economic structure between 1952 and 1978. For more detailed information see chapter 4, note 13. In 1999, Shanghai’s share in China’s gdp was 4.9%, placing it eighth among 32 provincial and province-equivalent municipal economies. From 1958’s 17 billion yuan, Shanghai’s total industrial output reached 125 billion yuan in 1990, averaging an 8.2% annual growth rate. From there it skyrocketed to 620 billion in 1999, a 14% annual growth rate. See the Shanghai Economy Year Book 2000, 66–67. It is noteworthy that during the period 1979–1990, the first decade of post-Mao economic reform, Shanghai’s economy grew at an average 7.5%, below the national average, indicating Shanghai’s function as a conservative “rear guard for the socialist economic reform” during that period. See Gao and Yu, “Shanghai jingji,” 74, 82. See Ba, “Shanghai, meili de tudi, womende!”; and Liu Hongsheng, “Weishime wo yonghu gongchandang.” In the autumn of 2000, when a wistful Xie Jin, a loyal Shanghainese and the foremost filmmaker of the prc before the Fifth Generation took the world by storm, looked back at his own long, complicated career, he told his U.S. audience that the Cultural Revolution divided his corpus into two parts, and every film in the first part was obsessed with one theme and one theme only: the contrast between the old and the new (xinjiu duibi). Xie’s remarks were made at a conference on Chinese cinema organized by Haili Kong at Swarthmore College, October 7, 2000. Lu Xun, “Shanghai de shaonü.” Wang Anyi, Wo ai bi er; hereafter cited in text. Wang Anyi, “Shengsi qikuo, yuzi xiangyue,” published in her novel Meitou, 161; hereafter cited in text. Wang Anyi, Meitou, 8. Wang Anyi, “Shanghai de yangfang,” 50–51. A lengthier quote from the text may be needed here: “the back of the main door is now fully occupied by mailboxes, milk-bottle holders, and electric bells, with labels on each of them saying the Zhao’s, the Li’s, the Wang’s, and Zhang’s, the Sun’s, and maybe the Gu’s and the Liu’s as well. . . . As each floor is perched over by a different family, there are three or four stoves in the kitchen, each with a light bulb hanging above it. As there are also several water hoses over the sink, the plumbing and the wiring form a spider web by themselves. The bathroom is, of course, shared. During the summer season there is a constant flow of people in and out till late at night, with sewage water coming out of the tube on the other end of the house, running on and on like background music in the quiet night. . . . As people multiply, not every household is guaranteed a spot in the kitchen, thus the hallways and balconies are all turned into kitchens. In the evening, people come home from work. As adults start cooking and kids play around, there is an atmosphere of communal life. All those houses look

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decayed because of lack of renovation. Outside, the stucco surface on the walls is crumbling, exposing the bricks underneath; inside the house, all the hardwood floors have loosened up, with rats running between the floor and the ceilings below, which invariably show watermarks as evidence of leakage somewhere. The Western-style residential houses in Shanghai have only their names left. Their interiority has turned so shabby that it can no longer bear a closer check.” De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 75–76. For a detailed discussion of Changhenge, see chap. 4. Wang Anyi, “Shanghai de nüxing,” 359–60. Wang Anyi, “Xunzhao Su Qing,” 45; hereafter cited in text as “xsq.” Shi Tuo, “Shanghai shouzha,” 223. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka; hereafter cited in text.

six Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine Mo Yan, Jiuguo, 2/2. Throughout this chapter, the page numbers for quotations from the Chinese and U.S. editions are separated by a slash, the Chinese page number given first. Henceforth these indications are made in the text. 2 This final phrase does not appear in the English translation. 3 The English version, based on the Taiwanese edition, has a different ending. The mainland edition ends with “Mo Yan” confessing that he is “in love” with the seductive female mayor but without the long, stream-of-consciousness-style monologue. 4 Benjamin, Illuminations, 117. 1

seven National Trauma, Global Allegory

1 2

3 4 5 6

The initial draft of this chapter was presented at the Humanities Institute of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in October 1997 and at Colorado College in April 1998. I would like to thank Ban Wang and Hong Jiang for their invitations and comments. A revised version was first published in the Journal of Contemporary China 12 (2003): 623–38. Li and Liu, Gaobie geming. Lu Jiandong, Chen Yingke de zuihou ershi nian. As a political liberal, Chen was opposed to the intellectual and ideological hegemony of Marxism. As a cultural conservative, however, Chen was well known for his rejection of or disinterest in modern Western thought as a whole. Chen spent more than a decade in Europe and was said to be fluent in both English and German and functional in many other languages. Yet he never seemed to bother to pay any attention to the cultural West. This is why Hu Shi, the liberal intellectual of modern China and a disciple of John Dewey, calls Chen a “yishao,” or “a leftover of the by-gone era.” Maoist International Movement, review of Lan Feng Zheng. Lopez McAlister, review of Farewell My Concubine. Ebert, “Blue Kite.” See Nancy, “Unsacrificeable.”

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Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Chow, “We Endure.” Ebert, “Blue Kite.” Ibid. Sturken, Tangled Memories. See esp. the section on the Zapruder film in chap. 1. Ibid. Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience.” See Habermas, “Conceptions of Modernity,” 132.

eight Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy 1 2 3 330 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12

For a critical study of Chinese cinematic modernism, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, part 3, “Politics of a Visual Encounter.” Chen, Wanjia susong. For a fuller analysis of Red Sorghum, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, chap. 11, “Ideology and Utopia in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum.” See Lacan, “Agency of the Letter.” Here my discussion of the extralegal nature of the sovereign, therefore the limits of the bourgeois positive law, is inspired by Carl Schmitt’s intellectually brilliant but politically dubious works on the subject, organized around his proposition that “the sovereign is that which decides on the exception.” Particularly relevant to the issues at stake are two of Schmitt’s seminal texts: The Concept of the Political and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Marx, Capital, 1:125. Marx, Grundrisse, 156. See Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, part 2, esp. 97–116. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1. Seeing “Zarathustra’s moral test of repetition as competing with Kant,” Deleuze continues to suggest that “the form of repetition in the eternal return is the brutal form of the immediate, that of the universal and the singular reunited, which dethrones every general law, dissolves the mediations and annihilates the particulars subjected to the law”; Difference and Repetition, 7. The subversion of the Kantian notion of law and the Hegelian notion of mediation may thus open up a theoretical vista for the imagination of a revolutionary form of collectivity which unites the universal and the singular in the contemporary context of capitalist globality and its discontent. Difference and Repetition, 3. Ibid., 9.

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index

absolute truth ( juedui zhenli), 46–47 Acton, Lord, 110 Adorno, Theodor, 143, 201, 218 allegory, 182–83, 193, 205–6, 274, 276– 77, 292, 304; in Mo Yan, 240–41, 245, 255, 258–63; “national allegory” (Jameson), 239, 283–84 alternative: “Chinese alternative,” 97–98; “Chinese way” as, 97, 99; discourse of, 98, 149 Althusser, Louis, 86, 156 “American imperialism,” 104–5 Amin, Samir, 77, 86 Anderson, Benedict, 112, 135, 276 Appadurai, Arjun, 76 Aspiration, 121, 278 Atget, Eugène, 217 Bai Juyi (Po Chu-i), 199 Ba Jin, 227 Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, 198, 200, 203–6, 209–10, 234–35 Balzac, Honoré de, 217 Barthes, Roland, 86, 156 Baudelaire, Charles, 193, 199, 210, 214–15 Baudrillard, Jean, 140 Beijingren zai niuyue, 121 Beijing school, 222–23 Benjamin, Walter, 121, 142, 187, 200–203, 213, 219–20, 256, 265, 277, 295; on Baudelaire, 193, 326

n. 21; on Naturgeschichte, 326 n. 22; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 285 Bergson, Henri, 308 Berlin, Isaiah, 43 Bernal, Martin, 77 Bhabha, Homi, 76, 78 Bianjibu de gushi, 121, 278 Bloch, Ernst, 15, 17, 34 “body without organ,” 98, 219 Bourdieu, Pierre, 132, 156 Bush, George W., 112 Cai Xiang, 115–17 Cai Yuanpei, 220 Capitalism: bureaucratic, 33, 37, 127, 312 n. 4; Confucian, 147, 320 n. 3; “crony,” 37; global, 10, 13, 18, 33, 107, 110, 116, 129; modernity as, 12 Caruth, Cathy, 288 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 78 Changhenge, 198, 200, 203–6, 209–10, 234–35 Chen Duxiu, 222 Cheng Naishan, 223 Chen Kaige, 120, 138; Farewell My Concubine, 269, 275–76, 283; King of the Children, 273, 275; Yellow Earth, 290–91, 307 Chen Lai, 41–42 Chen Xiaoming, 76

Index

342

Chen Yinke, 45, 273 China Can Say No, 104–5, 318 n. 5 China Scholarship, 49–50 “Chinese alternative,” 97–98 Chinese learning (guoxue): 44–46; New Chinese Scholarship (xinguoxue), 46; “new Chinese studies,” 48. See also intellectual “Chinese way,” 97, 99 Chow, Rey, 78, 280 Chun Yuanbin: The Wan Family’s Lawsuit (Wanjia susong), 291. See also Zhang Yimou: The Story of Qiu Ju civil society, 32, 72, 103, 107, 116, 128, 154, 172–73 “Climbing New Peaks of Victory,” 225 Cold War, 112 conservatism-radicalism debate (baoshouzhuyi-jijinzhuyi), 41–44 continuity: discontinuity and, 2, 4, 10; rupture and, 18 corruption: power and, 31–32 Cui Jian, 138 Cui Yiming, 116–17 Cui Zhiyuan, 65, 81, 87, 90–96, 104, 164–66, 176 “cultural fever”: of the 1980s, 80 Cultural Revolution, 7, 44, 62, 112, 129, 156 Dai Jinhua, 76, 129–30 dandyism, 210 Deleuze, Gilles, 72, 98, 234, 239, 309; “body without organ” concept of, 98, 219; “chamber of resonance” concept of, 13, 18; “minor literature” defined by, 238; “plane of consistence” concept of, 72; Repetition and Difference, 308, 330 n. 10 (chap. 8); A Thousand Plateaus, 237–38 de Man, Paul, 234 Derrida, Jacques, 156; Specters of Marx, 213 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 218 Dickens, Charles, 210 Dirlik, Arif, 154

Dongfang, 118 Dreiser, Theodore, 210 Dubois, W. E. B., 225 Dushu, 58–59, 67, 115, 117, 122, 317 n. 3 Ebert, Roger, 275, 283 Eliot, T. S., 152, 154 Elite: bureaucratic and technocratic, 31 Elster, Jon, 165–66 Empire, 16 End of History, 325 n. 16 “enlightened despotism,” 41 essence (benzhi), 46–47 everyday sphere: 15, 106, 114, 120, 129–130, 191, 194, 283; everyday culture, 117; everyday life, 107, 136, 138, 175, 186, 300; everyday life of Shanghai, 188–89, 234–35; everydayness, 292; everyday world, 103, 134, 220; “form of life” in, 126, 133; mundane in, 108 Falun Gong, 167 Fang Ning, 74 Farewell My Concubine, 269, 275–76, 283 Fei Xiaotong, 164, 322 n. 19 “Fengsuo,” 181, 184, 207 Fifth Generation filmmakers, 153, 190, 269–70, 273–74, 285, 290–92, 294, 306–7 Foucault, Michel, 45, 54, 80, 86, 122, 156 Frank, André Gunder, 77 Frankfurt school, 54, 80, 86 French Revolution, 110 Freud, Sigmund, 121, 147; Moses and Monotheism, 288 Friedman, Jeffrey, 111 Friedrich, Caspar David, 225 Fukuyama, Francis, 16, 86, 107, 149, 194, 228; End of History, 325 n. 16 Furongzhen, 273 Fu Sinian, 222 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 45 Gang of Four (Sirenbang), 225 Gan Yang, 50, 67, 75, 81, 87, 94–97, 135, 175

Index

Gate of Heavenly Peace, The, 127 Ge Fei, 142, 291 Gellner, Ernest, 106–8, 116, 134–35 “Gongyu shenghuo jiqu,” 216–17 Gramsci, Antonio, 113 great commonality (datong), 125 Greenfeld, Liah, 108, 111, 135 Guattari, Fèlix, 237–38 Gu Hongming, 145 Habermas, Jürgen, 67, 148–49 Han Shaogong, 172 Hardt, Michael, 16 Hayek, Friedrich von, 61, 86, 114, 124, 149, 152, 174–75 He Dun, 121 Hegel, G. W. F., 133 Heidegger, Martin, 45, 142, 152, 154 Helms-Burton Law, 112 Hibiscus Town, 273 Hinton, Carma, 127 Hobsbawm, Eric, 135, 167; “Golden Age” concept of, 147; on “short twentieth century,” 322 n. 23 Holmes, Stephen, 90 Hong Kong, 64–65 Horkheimer, Max, 218 houxue (post-ism or post-ology), 122–23 Huang, Philip, 164 Hu Angang, 88, 96 Huang Ping, 58, 81 Hugo, Victor, 200, 217 “humanistic spirit”: “loss of,” 38, 115; “reconstruction of,” 117 Huntington, Samuel: “clash of civilizations” thesis of, 64; Political Order in Societies in Transition, 41 Hu Shi, 168 I Love Bill, 229–31 “In Search of Su Qing,” 235 intellectual: deintellectualization of Chinese cultural life, 44; relation with the nation-state of, 39–40 Jameson, Fredric, 54, 76, 80, 86, 139, 148–49, 154, 156; “national allegory”

concept of, 120, 239, 283; on Third World literatures, 239 Jiang He, 138 Jiang Yihua, 43 jiegui (connecting link), 108 Jiuguo, 240–44, 254, 259–61, 264–65 Johnson, Chalmers, 16 Kafka, Franz, 219–20, 239, 252, 265 Kewang, 121, 278 kindai no chokoku (“the overcoming of the modern”), 146 King of the Children, 273, 275 Kosovo War, 66 Kristeva, Julia, 86, 156 Lacan, Jacques, 241; “symbolic order” concept of, 297 Lebenswelt, 129 legal structure: of a socialist state, 37 Lehan, Richard, 210 Lei Yi, 104, 122 Levenson, Joseph, 109, 186 Liang Yuchun, 222 liberalism: “New Left” debate, 40–41 Li Tiangang, 117 Liu, Lydia, 81 Liu Dong, 49–50 Liu Hongsheng, 227 Liu Kang, 81 Liu Na’ou, 183, 222 Liu Xinwu, 172–74 Liu Zaifu, 85 Li Zehou, 51 Lu Chongchang, 93 Lu Xun, 125, 216, 222–23, 228–30, 243, 249, 258 Manet, Edouard, 217 Mann, Thomas, 43 Mannheim, Karl, 152 Mao Dun, 182, 216; Midnight (Ziye), 217 Maoism, 43–44, 137, 157; Maoist form, 146; Maoist paradigm, 145 Market economy: with Chinese characteristics, 107

343

Index

344

Marx, Karl: commodity fetishism observed by, 255; Marxism, 134; sinified Marxism (makesi zhuyi zhongguohua), 170 mass culture: 103–4, 124, 131, 172; elite vs., 112–18, 120, 122, 127–29, 133, 174–75 mass democracy (da minzhu), 129 May Fourth Movement, 169; “science and democracy” paradigm of, 61 McCarthyism, 149 McEwan, Arthur, 87 Meitou, 232 melancholy, 199; allegory and, 255–56; loss of home and, 250–54 middle class, 42–44; urban protomiddle class, 62 Midnight, 217 Mingpao, 67 minor literature (Deleuze), 219–20, 238–39; and Lu Xun, 228–29 Misty Poetry, 153 modernity: Chinese, 13, 87; dependence on postmodernity of, 9 Moses and Monotheism, 288 Mo Yan, 138, 243–47, 249, 257; allegory in works by, 240–41, 245, 255, 258–63; Jiuguo (The Republic of Wine), 240–44, 254, 259–61, 264–65 Mu Shiying, 183 nation, 120, 127, 133; form of, 106; guo (nation-state), 109–11, 113, 134 nationalism, 4, 16–17, 63–64, 103–7, 109–14, 117, 124–25, 127, 129–30, 132, 134–35; civic, 111; consumer, 72–73; cultural, 73–74; economic, 74; as political discourse, 75–76; popular, 71–72, 114; postnationalism, 71–72; third world, 126 natural history (Naturgeschichte), 196–204; defined by Benjamin and Adorno, 201–2, 254–58, 264, 272, 279 Negri, Antonio: Empire, 16 neoauthoritarian (xin quanwei zhuyi),

41, 151, 314 n. 39; 1990s liberalism and, 57 neocollectivism (xinjiti zhuyi), 104, 128 Neo-Confucianism, 147, 320 n. 3 neoconservatism (xin baoshou zhuyi), 150–51 neoliberalism: discourse of Chinese, 59–62; discourse of militant, 43, 53; ideology of, 33, 37, 41 neorealism (xin xieshi zhuyi), 155 New Chinese Scholarship (xinguoxue), 46 New Era (1979–89), 2, 16, 116, 132, 145, 157, 272; demise of, 101, 103, 134, 172, 270; modernism and, 7, 118–20, 137, 142, 151–52, 175 New Left, 40–41, 55–59, 77–88, 90, 100 New Right, 88 New York City, 182, 196, 226 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145, 308 nostalgia, 186, 190–91, 198, 202–3, 211, 223–24, 250–54, 321 n. 7 “Notes from Shanghai,” 235 Nozick principle, 56–57 Osborne, Peter, 219 “Pandeng xinde shengli gaofeng,” 225 Paris, 182, 193, 196, 200; representation of, 217, 226 parliamentary democracy, 60 Pensky, Max, 202, 204 Political Order in Societies in Transition, 41 postcolonialism, 72, 78, 123–24, 126; Chinese, 155 “post-ism,” 151 postmodernism (postmodernity), 9, 104, 123, 125, 127, 130–31, 156, 159, 167, 171–72, 185; Chinese, 2–3, 76–77, 122, 136–42, 144–46, 149–50, 154–55, 157–58, 160, 162, 165–66, 168, 170, 173–74, 176–77; nationalism and, 70–78; the Real and, 139, 143, 148 post-New Era (hou xinshiqi), 171–72 post-ology (houxue) 151, 122–23 postrevolution, 107–10, 117, 129

Index

postsocialism, 3, 9–16, 18–19 Pound, Ezra, 152 privatization, 35, 61 Proust, Marcel, 199, 217 Przeworski, Adam, 165 public opinion, 27–29; Habermasian assumption of “openness” and, 60; “protopublic” or “shared space” and, 129–30; “public sphere” and, 32, 47, 148, 173 Pye, Lucian, 167, 322 n. 23

radicalism: repudiation of, 41, 43; theoretical critique of, 40 rationalization: Max Weber and social, 67, 72; postmodern economic, 109; of the state, 31, 33 Rawls principle of justice, 57 Reagan-Thatcher era, 41, 54, 153 Red Sorghum, 290, 294, 307 Ren Jiantao, 54–55 Repetition and Difference, 308, 330 n. 10 (chap. 8) Republic of Wine, The, 240–44, 254, 259–61, 264–65 rewriting (chongxie), 184 right-wing radicalism, 43, 69 Rorty, Richard, 43 Russia, 34; privatization (“shock therapy”) in, 65, 94, 152

Shi Tuo, 235 Shi Zhecun, 183, 235 Shklar, Judith, 111 Simon, William H., 35, 61 social: Chinese social and intellectual life, 32; interpenetration of state and, 60 socialism: “at its preliminary stage,” 311 n. 3; Chinese, 3, 13 “socialist market economy,” 15, 132, 153, 155, 163, 168, 240–41, 290, 317 n. 2 Specters of Marx, 213 Spinoza, Baruch, 308 Spivak, Gayatri, 76, 78, 80, 98 “Spring of Shanghai, The,” 215–16 state, 8, 12, 83, 106, 110, 116–17, 120, 126–133; Chinese, 29–30, 85; legitimacy of, 31–32, 53; state-form, 5, 13–15, 33, 72, 78, 85 Stories from the Editorial Office, 121, 278 Story of Qiu Ju, The, 290–91, 293–94, 296–97, 305–7, 309 Sturken, Marita, 285 sublimity: 197; self-sublimation of the city, 199; sublimation, 17, 198 Sun Liping, 126 Sunstein, Cass, 90 “superfluous man,” 208 Su Tong, 291 “synchronic noncontemporaneity,” 15, 17, 34 Sypher, Wylie, 210

Sabel, Charles, 164 Said, Edward, 54, 72, 76–77, 122, 154 Saint Petersburg, 196 Schmitt, Carl, 17, 60, 306, 330 n. 5 “Sealed Off,” 181, 184, 207 secularization, 127–28 secular nationalism, 131, 134 “Shanghai de yangfang,” 233 Shanghai Literature, 115 Shanghai school, 222–23 “Shanghai shouzha,” 235 “Shenghuo wuzui,” 121 shimin (market people), 173–74

“Tale from the Cultural Revolution, A,” 187–95 Tang Tsou, 90–91 “third way,” 126 Thousand Plateaus, A, 237–38 Tiananmen Incident, 1, 33, 39, 167, 270; post-Tiananmen China (1989–92), 31; Tiananmen “democracy” movement, 40 tianxia (under the heaven), 109 Tian Zhuangzhuang, 190, 286, 288; The Blue Kite, 269, 277–79, 282–85, 287; Horse Thief, 273, 275–76, 278–79

Qian Zhongshu, 222 Qin Hui, 56–57, 125–26

345

Index

Tokyo, 217, 226 To Live, 269, 275–76, 280, 290 trauma, 269–70, 273–79, 282–88

World Trade Organization (WTO), 66 Wu Guoguang, 127 Wu Jinglian, 37

ultimate truth (zhongji zhenli), 151 Unger, Roberto, 65, 91 “universal high culture,” 137 universalism (pushi zhuyi), 125 “universal truth,” 155

xiaokang (Chinese middle-class society), 133, 159 Xie Jin, 288–89; Hibiscus Town (Furongzhen), 273; “socialist humanism” of, 274 Xiong Yuezhi, 222–23 Xu Ben, 104, 123–24 Xu Bing, 138 Xueren, 51, 118 Xu Youyu, 53, 55, 158

Valéry, Paul, 159 vulgarization, 115–16, 134

346

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 86 Wan Family’s Lawsuit, The, 291 Wang Anyi, 187–93, 197, 199, 202, 211, 231–39; Changhenge (Ballad of Eternal Sorrow), 198, 200, 203–6, 209–10, 234–35; I Love Bill (Wo ai bi’er), 229–31; “In Search of Su Qing,” 235; Meitou, 232; “A Tale from the Cultural Revolution” (“Wenge yishi”), 187–95; trivial details (suosui de xijie) in works by, 190–91, 193; “The Western-Style Houses of Shanghai” (“Shanghai de yangfang”), 233 Wang Guowei, 145 Wang Hui, 51–52, 58–59, 77, 81, 87, 104, 130–31 Wang Meng, 118 Wang Shaoguang, 81, 87–88, 90, 95–96 Wang Xiaodong, 74 Wang Yichuan, 76 Wang Ying, 104, 128 Wang Yuanhua, 42 Wanjia susong, 291 Weber, Eugen, 135 Weber, Max, 67, 72, 135 “Wenge yishi,” 187–95 “Western-Style Houses of Shanghai, The,” 233 “What Is Interesting about Apartment Life,” 216–17 William, Raymond, 212–15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 300 Wo ai bi’er, 229–31

Yack, Bernard, 111 Yang Lian, 138 Ye Lingfeng, 222 Yellow Earth, 290–91, 307 Yu Hua, 138, 291 Yu Ying-shih, 42–43, 51 Zhang Ailing, 181–85, 187, 189, 193, 201, 217; “Sealed Off ” (“Fengsuo”), 181, 184, 207; “What Is Interesting about Apartment Life” (“Gongyu shenghuo jiqu”), 216–17 Zhang Chengzhi, 172 Zhang Chunqiao, 224–28, 237; “Climbing New Peaks of Victory” (“Pandeng xinde shengli gaofeng”), 225 Zhang Wei, 172 Zhang Yimou, 120, 138, 190, 289, 293–97, 304–6; To Live, 269, 275–76, 280, 290; Red Sorghum, 290, 294, 307; The Story of Qiu Ju, 290–91, 293–94, 296–97, 305–7, 309 Zhang Yiwu, 76–77, 119–21, 154, 171–74 Zhang Ziping, 222 Zhao, Henry Y. H., 104, 122, 128 Zhao Yiheng, 151–53 Zhongguo xueshu, 49–50 Zhou Leshan, 215–16 Zhou Zuoren, 222 Zhu Xueqin, 158 Ziye, 217

Xudong Zhang is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at New York University. He is the author of Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Duke University Press, 1997); and, in Chinese, of Traces of Criticism: Critical Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (Sanlian shudian, 2003) and Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization: A Historical Rethinking of Western Discourses of Universalism (Peking University Press, 2005).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhang, Xudong, 1965– Postsocialism and cultural politics : China in the last decade of the twentieth century / Xudong Zhang. p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4212-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4230-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1 Politics and culture—China. 2 China—Politics and government—1976–2002. 3 Chinese literature—Political aspects. 4 Motion pictures—Political aspects—China. 5 Postmodernism—China. 6 Post-communism—China. I. Title. II. Title: China in the last decade of the twentieth century. jq1516.z437 2008 951.05’9—dc22 2007043852