Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Xudong Zhang is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at New York University.

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Whither China?

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface.....................................................................................................................................vii1. The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview, Xudong Zhang...................................................12. Debating Liberalism and Democracy in China in the 1990s, Gan Yang........................................................................793. Whither China? The Discourse on Property Rights Reform in China, Zhiyuan Cui.............................................................1034. The Changing Role of Government in China, Shaoguang Wang.................................................................................1235. Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity, Wang Hui.....................................................................161Post-Tiananmen Art..........................................................................................................................1996. King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the "Handover" from the U.S.A., Rey Chow................................................................2117. The Burdens of History: Lin Zexu (1959) and The Opium War (1997), Rebecca E. Karl........................................................2298. Mao to the Market, Peter Hitchcock.......................................................................................................2639. Chinese Consumerism and the Politics of Envy: Cargo in the 1990s?, Louisa Schein.........................................................28510. Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in Post-Tiananmen China, Xudong Zhang............................................31511. Street Scenes of Subalternity: China, Globalization, and Rights, Michael Dutton.........................................................349Appendix In the Tiger's Lair: Socialist Everydayness Enters the Market Economy in Post-Mao China, Harry D. Harootunian,.....................371Contributors................................................................................................................................383Index.......................................................................................................................................385

Chapter One

Xudong Zhang

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 it looms beyond doubt. The transformation of post-Mao China is widely credited as a result of its irreversible integration with the world market and its tantalizing merger with the social-cultural conventions of global capitalism. Everyone agrees that this period is transitional for China. Nobody is certain about where it is leading and what it really means, either for China or for the rest of the world. The lack of a cognitive road map for reading China results from the rapidity of change. It also stems from old assumptions and frameworks that no longer are adequate to address these problems. More productive ways to examine the Chinese situation are still hampered by ideologies and methodologies nourished in the heyday of the Cold War and by an entrenched Eurocentric worldview prevalent 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 a free market, etc.-opposites that still obstruct our critical knowledge of the country in seemingly countless 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" that is integral to the long history of the global expansion of capitalism (colonialism, imperialism, etc.). As long as the old regime of knowledge and its reproduction holds sway, the emerging complexity and dynamism of the Chinese economy, society, politics, culture, and everyday life will remain concealed, distorted, and oppressed in the symbolic global terrain. This situation, however, indicates not so much an intrinsic crisis among Western scholars in the production of knowledge about China as it indicates the corruption of that knowledge-gathering by power. At its core, this process reveals the extent to which China as a subject of study is still effectively "contained" inside a theater of a permanent ideological warfare about global capitalism and its "subjectivities."

Such institutional restraints may explain why the most dynamic and productive development in Chinese studies in the United States during the past decade can be found in the integration of those studies with "disciplines" such as social history, and especially in works grounded in 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 younger scholars in the United States, the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In terms of the generational politics and paradigmatic break that this tendency implies, its development seems 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 a scholar would engage in, say, French studies or subaltern studies. Similarly, disengagement from the various state or state-sanctioned discourses in both the People's Republic and the United States should be regarded as part of the same movement to carry the field beyond its overdetermination by the Cold War era and that period's ideological limitations.

No suggestion is being made that the historical conditions of contemporary China should be considered in the homogeneous space of capitalist or bourgeois universality, either as one more proof of sameness or as an exception that proves the rule. Rather, a move beyond the intellectual and ideological straitjacket of Cold War and Orientalist scholarship refutes the ideological homogeneity reinforced by rigidly fixing compartmentalized and instrumentalized knowledge imposed on the margins of the capitalist world system. Instead, such a movement beyond fixed positions is an attempt to reassert the internal differences of reality, which in the self-affirmation-even celebration-of its own contradictions prefigures a new social, political, and cultural horizon integral to a more plural, more democratic world. Ironically, the uneven development within this general tendency is more pronounced in a reluctance by the U.S. field of Chinese studies to face its own formation in and overdetermination by the Cold War enterprise and...