Whither China?: Intellectual Politics in Contemporary ChinaXudong Zhang Whither China? presents an in-depth and wide-angled picture of Chinese intellectual life during the last decade of the millennium, as China struggled to move beyond the shadow of the Tiananmen tragedy. Because many cultural and intellectual paradigms of the previous decade were left in ruins by that event, Chinese intellectuals were forced in the early 1990s to search for new analytical and critical frameworks. Soon, however, they found themselves engulfed by tidal waves of globalization, surrounded by a new social landscape marked by unabashed commodification, and stunned by a drastically reconfigured socialist state infrastructure. The contributors to Whither China? describe how, instead of spearheading the popular-mandated and state-sanctioned project of modernization, intellectuals now find themselves caught amid rapidly changing structures of economic, social, political, and cultural relations that are both global in nature and local in an irreducibly political sense. Individual essays interrogate the space of Chinese intellectual production today, lay out the issues at stake, and cover major debates and discursive interventions from the 1990s. Those who write within the Chinese context are joined by Western observers of contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life. Together, these two groups undertake a truly international intellectual struggle not only to interpret but to change the world. Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Michael Dutton, Gan Yang, Harry Harootunian, Peter Hitchcock, Rebecca Karl, Louisa Schein, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Xudong Zhang |
Contents
The Making of the PostTiananmen Intellectual Field A Critical Overview | 1 |
Debating Liberalism and Democracy in China in the 1990s | 79 |
Whither China? The Discourse on Property Rights Reform in China | 103 |
The Changing Role of Government in China | 123 |
Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity | 161 |
King Kong in Hong Kong Watching the Handover from the USA | 211 |
The Burdens of History Lin Zexu 1959 and The Opium War 1997 | 229 |
Mao to the Market | 263 |
Chinese Consumerism and the Politics of Envy Cargo in the 1990s? | 285 |
Nationalism Mass Culture and Intellectual Strategies in PostTiananmen China | 315 |
Street Scenes of Subalternity China Globalization and Rights | 349 |
In The Tigers Lair Socialist Everydayness Enters the Market Economy in PostMao China | 371 |
Contributors | 383 |
| 385 | |
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Beijing British capitalist cargo cults central China China today Chinese history Chinese intellectuals Chinese modernity Chinese New Left Chinese social chubanshe commodification commodity Communist conservatism consumer consumerism consumption context Critical Overview critique Cultural Revolution debate democracy democratic discourse Dushu economic reform Enlightenment enterprises everyday film freedom French Revolution global capitalism historical Hong Kong human Ibid ideological industries institutions Kong's labor liberal Lin Zexu Mao Zedong Mao's Maoist market economy Marxism mass culture means ment modern Chinese nation-state negative freedom neoliberal nese nomic official opium Opium War ownership Party People's political popular position post-Mao postmodernism problem production property rights radical role rural scholars Shanghai Shaoguang Wang shareholding shares socialist space sphere strategy structure theoretical theory Tiananmen tion Tocqueville tradition transformation United University Press Wang Hui West Western Xudong Zhang Zhiyuan Zhongguo