China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century

Jie Lu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317969730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

China's literary and cultural production at the turn of the twenty-first century is marked by heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity. Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period perhaps can be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality.

The eleven essays in this book offer an introduction to some of the most important works published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In combining textual analysis of specific works with theoretical insights, and in locating the texts in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, the essays explore key theoretical issues and intellectual concerns of the time. They collectively draw a broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, capturing the intellectual and cultural Zeitgeist of the age. All in all, these essays offer new theoretical approaches to, and critical perspectives on, contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Introduction

JIE LU

The period since the 1990s in contemporary Chinese literature and culture is a time that resists mapping or grand narrative. Relentless moves towards marketization/capitalization, globalization, urbanization, and gradual dominance of a new technical order have fundamentally transformed Chinese society and its everyday life. A sense of millennial disruption occurring at the end of the twentieth century is the result of profound changes in every aspect of society and culture. Chinese writers and intellectuals have confronted a completely new social reality and cultural environment: cultural and literary markets, globally enhanced mass media and the Internet, a dominance of popular culture and a decline of interest in elite forms of culture. China’s literary and artistic production has largely lost its formerly imposed role of political propaganda and social/moral education. Instead, it has become a truly individual activity as well as a commercial endeavor. This means, in practical terms, that many writers and filmmakers, particularly those of the younger generation, have begun to work as freelancers—a new condition for cultural/literary production unprecedented in contemporary Chinese literary history. All this has profoundly challenged, liberated, and inspired Chinese writers and filmmakers, and affected contemporary Chinese literary and cultural thought, imagining, and writing. In art, literature, and films, the crossover decades from the twentieth to the twenty-first century mark a turning point in Chinese literary and cultural history.

If literary and cultural production of this period resists any totalizing narrative, it is because it is heterogeneous, plural, and diverse. Its ‘disparate multiplicity’ and cultural chronotope mirror and express multifarious and fragmented experiences of contemporary reality and the spatiotemporal movements of modernization, yet refuse to coalesce into an architectural whole. Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period can perhaps be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. Modernity is understood in our context as the totality of multifaceted and complex phenomena—socioeconomic, political, and ideological, as well as cognitive and cultural. Intensified and globally enhanced modernization has created a new phase of modernity since the 1990s; it has reshaped the physical and social geography and changed the direction of history. Literary and cultural production thus has to be understood in relation to the dynamics of global modernization as they impinge on the everyday reality and cultural consciousness of Chinese people.

To contemporary Chinese people, literature and films have constituted their imaginative lives, describing national life and articulating both their aspirations and anxieties. But most of all, they form a site for examining the past, for reflecting on the present situation, and for debating the course of future development. It is also a site for negotiating different ideas and intervening in social and cultural realities. While socioeconomic changes certainly provide a context for the appearance of new literary and cultural production, new aesthetic practices in turn have helped to shape the new cultural ethos and create the epistemological lenses through which people perceive and make sense of their lives and reality. As a form of cultural invention and cultural intervention, this cultural production is part of a ‘social praxis.’ Interestingly, as cultural activities have become truly individual and autonomous, they have achieved genuine social function and agency.

Offering diverse critical insights and theoretical perspectives on contemporary Chinese literary and cultural production, this anthology aims at providing a glimpse of this complex, fast changing, dynamic, and productive period by interpreting some of the most provocative, controversial, and non-mainstream works. In doing so, it hopes to enact, in its own diverse voices, the cultural and intellectual heteroglossia that marks the turn of the new millennium. In exploring the broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, this collection in general follows two interrelated but differently focused logics of time and space to reflect and understand the cultural and intellectual chronotope of global modernity. Here the logics of time and space will be discussed in terms of renewed engagement with history and historical imagination, and the effects of urbanization on Chinese national life. The profound rupture in historical development and fundamental change in urban geography brought about by intense modernization and globalization demand new representation, articulation, and theory; in short, a new structure of intelligibility and new understanding of the chronotope of global modernity.

Historical imaginations, as Walter Benjamin argues, are conjured up in response to critical change. In his famous passage on historical imagination, he claims that ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ The representation of the past, according to him, ‘does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.”’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up ‘at a moment of danger.’¹ What is significant in this passage is that historical imagination in its response to ‘a moment of danger’ is anti-nihilistic and inherently active/dynamic. In other words, in response to epochal changes—‘the moment of danger’—historical imaginations aim to redefine reality and reconstitute experience which is in danger of disintegration. To some extent, this view also reflects the age-old Chinese intellectual practice of using history to critique, to reflect, and to pass moral judgement upon the current situation, and to express philosophical thinking on history.

Modern Chinese history has been marked by a series of epochal changes— gigantic moments of danger; most recently the end of Mao’s socialist era in the late 1970s. However, the end of Mao’s socialist period is more than the end of an age; it is also the end of an idea—the idea of History. In tracing the historical development of this closure, we can detect a trajectory from initial skepticism toward Chinese Marxist historicism, to downright deconstruction of the concept of History, and finally to a re-imagining and rethinking of history informed by the globalization paradigm. This conceptual trajectory in fact sums up both developments in and empirical experiences of contemporary Chinese history. Twenty-five years earlier, the excruciating experiences of the Cultural Revolution led people to sense something wrong with Maoist-Marxist historicism, but the firm belief in History made them hope that the progressive history of genuine Marxism would bring the ultimate correction and guide history to the right track. However, as economic reform and globalization deepened in the 1990s, Marxist historicism was felt to be inadequate to explain contemporary experiential reality, and this led to speculation about the future historical orientation of China. In practical terms, Chinese socialist utopian ideals and socioeconomic practices have proven unable to create a livable society. In a broader sense, the 1990s experienced the real historical closure of China’s socialist era. It is certainly true that parts of the socialist ideology, political system, and social structure are still in place, yet they have lost much of their practical functions. Large-scale economic privatization, relentless social reformation, and close links with world trade have landed China squarely on the path to global capitalism.

The deepening historical rupture between the pro-capitalist present and socialist past can be seen as another phase of the ‘moment of danger’ in its accelerated economic reform and transition to marketization. At the time of breakneck transformation and temporary convolution, Chinese intellectuals and cultural workers are more than ever acutely conscious of history. History, disappearing in a rapidly changing reality and globalization, seems to have reasserted its critical capacities in their historical imagining and thinking since the mid-1990s. This response, nevertheless, differs significantly from the literary and cultural deconstruction of Chinese Marxist historicism in the 1980s and early 1990s. The earlier historical representation, mostly exemplified by experimental literary writings and some of the Fifth-generation films, tended to focus on private perspectives on and immanent experiences of history, as well as transgressive representational strategies. In retelling personal, family, and regional histories, these works represented material histories that existed but had been suppressed by the hegemony of official history. Their historical concerns, on the one hand, coincided with the postmodernist collapse of various grand narratives, and with the rise of historical investigations of dispossessed and marginalized social groups and individuals. On the other hand, their rewriting of the Chinese historical past is also a critique of Chinese Marxist historicism. Although lacking an overt political and social engagement or agenda, their radical historical representation has fundamentally changed the way of thinking about Chinese Marxist historicism, and led to a disenchantment with History itself.

As for the interrogation of history, the current historical engagement represents efforts to rethink and re-imagine the ambivalent relationship between the socialist past and pro-capitalist present, not so much to rebuild a historical continuity as to make sense of this historical rupture for future reorientation. The historical closure of the socialist era does not simply mean the disappearance of socialism as a historical process, only its social and historical negation. In other words, this historical closure is not a static one. The apparently bygone socialism is still an active construct in the theoretical concept of post-socialism, as well as in the ongoing context of the capitalist process. The ambivalent historical status of contemporary China resulting from this historical rupture has reoriented the investigation of history.

In the broadest sense, the crucial difference between the 1980s/early 1990s and contemporary historical writing also lies in the globalization that is both the historical context and critical focus of the latter. Deconstructing the hegemony of official historical discourse and reconstructing China’s rural past beyond the confines of communist revolutionary history in works of the 1980s and early 1990s focused almost exclusively on China. This centripetal tendency has betrayed the long-standing Chinese intellectual tradition. This exclusive engagement with China certainly has resulted from the historical context of the early post-socialist period when China was just beginning to open up to the outside world. As the 1990s drew to a close, China, out of its necessity of economic reform, entered the global capitalist trajectory; its economy has become an integral part of the world economy. The impact of globally enhanced economic reform, however, goes far beyond economics; it has affected all aspects of society, the textures of everyday life, and spaces of subjectivity. Its accumulated effects have deepened the historical rupture discussed above. If it is impossible to separate contemporary China from the global economy, then it is equally impossible to analyze and critique China’s issues without global perspectives. This centrifugal turn also characterizes the contemporary intellectual engagement with history informed by the global discourse. However, the important point that has to be emphasized at this juncture is that the contemporary rethinking/re-imagining of history is also a radical critique of globalization as a hegemonic force that erases local, regional, and national differences and seeks only to smooth the flow of capital. In promising a better life and more prosperity, globalization has in fact increased inequality and uneven development among and within nations and regions. In doing so, its forces have further deepened the disjuncture between its promises, for instance, in media images of well-being and prosperity, and the actual existential conditions and consumer capacities of the local.² Moreover, although the global has created multiple spatiotemporalities, it cannot encompass the lived experiences of the local and national. In responding to global challenges to China’s historical development, the contemporary historical imagination also represents a social force that resists the negative impacts and consequences of globalization, and continues the historical interrogation of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Perhaps the most striking outward change in contemporary China is its cities. We may describe the turn of the twenty-first century as an era of great cities: large-scale urbanization has been unknown in Chinese history. However, the city is more than a crucible of economic production, social reformation, and mass consumption. It is the very locale where global modernity is experienced and negotiated, and where our sense of historical discontinuity and rupture is registered. The city, as a social totality, represents the accumulative realities of temporal and spatial changes. The rise of the city and emergence of the new urbanism has reshaped all aspects of Chinese life. The city is replacing rural experience in representing Chinese national life. This observation certainly does not mean the disappearance of the rural and its ideological, cultural, and discursive significance; rather it points to the city as the main direction of future national development in the age of globalization; the city is almost synonymous with global modernity. Nevertheless, embedded in the reality of urbanization also lies this negative spatial dialectic—the country-city dialectic—in that the rise of the urban is at the expense of the rural.

If economic reform and globalization have created a historical moment of danger, then the dramatic reconfiguration of the urban space has caused a no less profound break with the past in terms of social experience, urban culture, and urban life. The former spatial order has broken down. The unified view of the physical and social environment in the harmony of communist portrayals of the walled compound is effectively effaced. The glamorous public space of commercialization and corporation dominates and redefines the urban space and culture. Urban life and culture have become multifaceted and diversified. On the one hand, the city is identified as a site of global modernity, associated with exciting changes, new modes of life, new technologies, and metropolitan culture. On the other hand, alongside these phenomena are no less conspicuous sights/sites of tumbledown slums and quarters of poverty. Existing side by side with the fabulous department stores and skyscrapers are the inhuman subterranean city spaces of the urban poor and the ‘floating population.’ Meanwhile, there have also emerged multiformed subcultures that exist in the shadow of mainstream culture and at the edge of the urban center. The spatial configuration of myriad cityscapes thus registers and mirrors the uneven development of modernization as well as the complexity of global modernity. This ambience of physical space is also an exteriorization of inner experiences and feelings such as anxieties, alienation, disorientation, dislocation, and identity crises. The utopian/dystopian urban topography spatializes the historical ambience and temporal convolution.

As the site that represents the global phase of modernity and modernization, the city itself also demands re-imagining, rewriting, re-symbolization, and a new structure of vision/intelligibility. The changed urban topography, altered character, culture, ethos, new concepts and forms of urban everyday, and emerging urban subculture all demand a new form of urban identity, one that should be defined on a basis different from the old dichotomy of the city and country. In other words, being the ‘Other’ of the rural is no longer adequate to define the present-day city. In the broad context of urban cultural imaginaries, we find that modernity and globality, or the new global system, have given rise to an autonomous form of urban identity. And, to a certain extent, the urban has become the ‘norm’ with the rural becoming its ‘Other.’ The general direction of urbanization in China also reveals the country’s search for national/cultural identity within global modernity. Nevertheless, in the fragmented spatial history epitomized by urban spaces of old and new temporalities, neither continuities nor discontinuities are readily apparent. The altered urban reality and complexity have to be re-represented before they can be legible because the production of the city is both material/physical and imaginary/discursive. The dual dimensions of the city are best captured by James Donald’s phrase that describes the city as ‘an imagined environment.’³ Thus the emergence of the new urban cannot be separated from its representation. The symbolic cultural products intersect with the built environment and material social realities to form an urban totality, in that the city forms the texture of the text, the text is actively constitutive of the city.

Unlike the cultural production of the city in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which the urban space, still in its traditional form, exists simply as a background or a setting for the stories to happen, contemporary literature and films foreground the urban space as a dominating force that has shaped all aspects of reality and given rise to entirely new forms of social existence. Indeed, the dominance of the urban space in cultural texts is only possible since the late 1990s when Chinese cities have finally gained metropolitan forms. In this new urban context, the urban space has become a point of convergence for cultural representations to reframe questions of identity, place, citizenship, subjectivity, and interstitiality. The city has thus acquired major social and artistic importance as a locus of writings, cultural intervention, and sociopolitical praxis. Nevertheless, it is also through narration and representation that the new city and new urban are produced and made intelligible. Chinese global modernity distinguishes itself as a contradictory phenomenon, containing both traditional and contemporary elements, socialist and capitalist features that are not in an obvious teleological relationship. If urban space manifests this ambivalent history of globalized modernization, then literature and culture have surmounted the illegibility embedded in the moments of danger resulting from constant historical transformations and drawn a broad chronotope of China’s global modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.

In this anthology, each of the fourteen essays emphasizes one dimension of the literary/cultural chronotope, which, in turn, represents the larger spatiotemporal movement of global modernity. In re-imagining and rethinking History in the globalized age, our contributors look at this most complex and ambivalent historical moment of transition from different aspects. Ban Wang’s ‘History in a Mythical Key: temporality, memory, and tradition in Wang Anyi’s fiction,’ and Xudong Zhang’s ‘National Trauma, Global Allegory: reconstruction of collective memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite’ deal primarily with historical representation. In Wang Anyi’s fiction and short stories, Wang sees a renewed effort to recapture history from a rampant consumerism that is threatening to erase it, and to account for the fast changing present. History in Wang Anyi’s texts, Wang argues, is located in memory—personal life, tradition, everyday practices, and a mythical past. Memory is thus a critique of consumerism, a locale for re-engaging with history, and a source for forming community bonds. Xudong Zhang’s essay is a study of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s cinematic representation of revolutionary communist China. History appears in Tian’s film as a series of traumatic moments that invade the mundane world, which, in its destruction, becomes a witness to the futility of this History. The mundane world of The Blue Kite—both constant and anti-utopian—however, confirms the present ideology of smooth (capitalist) development.

Preoccupation with history takes a different turn in studies of literary theory. Literary scholars have responded to the challenges of the global age by rewriting literary history, re-examining theoretical concepts, and re-evaluating literary debates. Xueping Zhong, in her essay ‘Who Is Afraid of Lu Xun? Politics of “Lu Xun lunzheng” and the question of his legacy in post-revolution China,’ speculates on the political implications and cultural issues involved in the Lu Xun debates. These debates reflect the uneasy and complex relationship with global modernity in contemporary Chinese intellectual history. Wang Ning’s essay, ‘Globalizing Chinese Literature: toward a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture,’ re-examines Chinese literature of the entire twentieth century from a global perspective, and yet strongly criticizes cultural globalization.

Gang Yue’s ‘Echoes from the Himalayas: the quest of Ma Lihua, a Chinese intellectual in Tibet’ is a pioneering study of literary writings about Tibet by a Han Chinese. In this essay, Yue discusses the ethical dilemma, epistemological quandary, and aesthetic issue of distance a Han-Tibetan intellectual has encountered in making sense of her experiences in Tibet and in writing about Tibet. In narrating the history of contemporary literature about Tibet (by Tibe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History in a Mythical Key: temporality, memory, and tradition in Wang Anyi’s fiction
• 3 National Trauma, Global Allegory: reconstruction of collective memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite
• 4 Shanghai Cosmopolitan: class, gender and cultural citizenship in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe
• 5 Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning
• 6 Who Is Afraid of Lu Xun? Politics of ‘Lu Xun lunzheng’ and the question of his legacy in post-revolution China
• 7 Globalizing Chinese Literature: toward a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture
• 8 Echoes from the Himalayas: the quest of Ma Lihua, a Chinese intellectual in Tibet
• 9 From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese cinema in the Internet age
• 10 Links with the Past: mainland China’s online literary communities and their antecedents
• 11 Lower Body Poetry and Its Lineage: disbelief, bad behavior and social concern
• 12 The New Formalism: mainland Chinese cinema at the turn of the century
• 13 Spaces of Disappearance: 1990s Beijing art, film, and fiction in dialogue with urbanization
• 14 Spectacles of Remembrance: nostalgia in contemporary Chinese art
• 15 Rewriting Beijing: a spectacular city in Qiu Huadong’s urban fiction
• Index