Public Discourses of Contemporary China

The Narration of the Nation in Popular Literatures, Film, and Television

Y. Shen

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137496270
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film & Video

Analyzing contemporary Chinese literature, film, and television, Shen shows the significance of nationalism for the mass imagination in post-socialist China. Chapters move from the intellectual idealism of the 1980s, through the post-Tiananmen transition, to the national cinema of the 1990s, and finally to the Internet literature of today.

C H A P T E R 1

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Heshang: Socialist Historical Consciousness in Transformation and the 1980s Pedagogy of Reform

A critical moment of history arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century when China embarked on her fast modernization under the influence of a variety of internal and external factors, among which were the long and gradual decline of her traditional society and the new threat of Western imperialism. The search for modernity continued in the twentieth century, when Chinese people, actively or passively, were deeply involved in the historical swirl of revolutions and efforts at national salvation. The PRC was founded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 in the wake of the May Fourth New Culture Movement (1915–24/25), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and the Civil War between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang (1946–49). The socialist reconstruction of the means of production and the ownership system by the Communist Party-state in the 1950s concluded the first phase of the twentieth-century Chinese revolution.

In the second phase of the revolution, from the 1950s to the demise of Communist China’s first supreme leader Mao Zedong in 1976, Chinese people continued to modernize their state and society by investing in transforming themselves. The Leninist CCP succeeded in defeating the Kuomintang and founding the PRC partly through ingenious utilization of a Sinicized version of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, to mobilize the “energy, capabilities, and creativity” (Tsou 1986, 260) of the Chinese masses. Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) “mass line” (qunzhong luxian), or “from the masses and to the masses,” was a central ideological strategy and political practice of the Communist Party to systemize and apply ideas solicited from the people in governance.¹ This strategy of implementing class struggle and preserving the socioeconomic interests of the masses gradually lost its role in directing the state-led modernization after the late 1950s. The supreme leader, Mao, and his radical followers thrust decisively toward leftist extremism and waged the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. Based on the theory of “continued revolution” under the “proletarian dictatorship,” the Cultural Revolution legitimized mass movement regardless of the law and resulted in significant damage to the institutional structure of the state and society.

It was in the post-Mao milieu of replacing ultra-leftism and rationalizing reform that Heshang came to public attention. Mao Zedong’s demise in 1976 provided Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) an opportunity to end the decade-long, class struggle–focused Cultural Revolution and start a new phase of the historical course of China’s modernization. At the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party’s Central Committee in 1978, Deng and his cohorts officially abandoned Mao’s ultra-leftist policies and began to implement—with caution, especially given the premise of the unchallengeable status of the Party’s political leadership—various political,² economic, and social reforms to normalize the state–society relationship and inject capitalism into the state structure.

In the late 1980s,³ reform-germinated social anxiety motivated “establishment intellectuals” (Barlow 1991)—largely scholars and teachers at universities and state-sponsored research institutes—to create new discourses for the reinvigoration of the masses. The most prominent product of this effort is Heshang, a “TV politico-commentary” (dianshi zhenglunpian) that aired on Chinese Central Television in 1988. “He” in Chinese denotes a river, particularly the Yellow River, generally believed to be the origin of Chinese civilization. “Shang” means a premature death. Divided into six TV episodes, Heshang’s figuration of a premature death of Chinese civilization and yearning for Westernized modernization triggered lasting debates inside and outside the nation-state, making the politico-commentary one of the most significant public phenomena of 1980s China. Descriptively speaking, the issues broached in Heshang and the ensuing debates include “a view of politics and history that advanced historical fatalism, geographical determinism, the ‘fallacious backward ideology’ of ‘grand unification’ (dayitong), Eurocentrism, total westernization, elite culturalism” (Wang 1996, 118), and so on.

Also to be noted are the personal, political, and ontological connections of the Heshang intellectuals with the history of the PRC in the twentieth century. Heshang was a collective project produced by prominent Chinese intellectuals such as Jin Guantao (b. 1947), Su Xiaokang (b. 1949), and Wang Juntao (b. 1958), who were the first generation of Chinese intellectuals completely growing up under the Communist rule. Having personally lived through the Maoist years from the 1950s to the 1970s, they understood the nature and operations of Maoist socialism very well, and since Maoism was the only system they grew up within, deeply identified with some of its core values and perceptions of history despite their harsh intellectual criticism of the Cultural Revolution. Probably there were also political and ideological connections between the Heshang intellectuals and the reformist faction of the Party elites in the 1980s, which have been mentioned in some unconfirmed personal narratives of ex-Party elites like Bao Tong (b. 1932).⁴ After the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Movement by the conservative faction of the Party, Su Xiaokang and Wang Juntao, who actively participated in the Movement, were forced into exile by the government and Heshang became part of their “political crimes” in the official narrative.

Existing studies of Heshang reflect particular ontologies of modernization and enlightenment informed by Western modern history. An influential opinion by Jing Wang (1996) argues that the potency and limits of Heshang derive from its paradoxical understanding of the relationship between nationalism and enlightenment (121). Heshang’s cultural enlightenment degenerates into a new form of imperial nationalism because of the ideological unconscious that prompted the intellectuals and masses alike to identify with the imperial past. Underlying Wang’s critique is a cultural belief in the innate deficiency of a Chinese enlightenment, compared to a Western paradigm, that stipulates the internalized oppression of a nondemocratic, nonetheless modernizing, state. The 1910s–1920s May Fourth Enlightenment was therefore a positive but far from complete experience for 1980s China, whose social anomie is traceable back to the failure of individual emancipation “from within” under various historical pressures in premodern and socialist periods. Another representative argument is made by Ann Anagnost (1997), who notes in Heshang a discursive opposition between the technological advancement of material wenming (civilization) and the reinvigoration of a national identity through spiritual wenming, which is attributable to the anticolonial nationalisms of Asia and Africa. After all, Heshang’s wenming discourse is a contemporary practice of the state to associate China with the global reorganization of capital. A significant subtext for Anagnost’s argument is a universalist understanding of Western capitalism’s regulatory power over history. Western or non-Western, nineteenth-century India or twentieth-century China, global capitalism constructs the metahistorical movement of modernization that renders non-Western anticolonialisms and socialisms temporary deviations from—and eventual ways of catching up with—a universalist closure of history. From the perspective of Wang’s Western humanism or Anagnost’s universalist modernizationism, the 1980s mass cultural project of Chinese modernization, as exemplified by Heshang, either risks the continuance of a monolithic hegemony that dictates internal submission to and co-optation by institutional power on an individual level, or redresses solely the historical mistakes of Chinese socialism according to a universalist capitalist model.

It seems to me that these studies are deeply informed by the Foucauldian genealogical approach to deconstructing history, which is nevertheless not sufficient to elucidate the complexity of China’s historical imagination in the 1980s. The Foucauldian approach serves to disclose the hidden oppression within grand narratives such as modernization and nationalism but easily constructs a victimization narrative for the influence of such narratives on non-Western audiences. As a result, the genealogical studies simplify non-Western national struggles for independence and alternative modernization as familiar drills of domination and manipulation by modern nation-states in another context. This approach enabled Wang and Anagnost to deconstruct through Heshang the supposed victimizing hegemony of the postsocialist, modernizing Party-state while largely leaving untheorized its constructive possibility for Chinese history. I disagree with their premise that individual emancipation can only be achieved “from within,” and instead try to discover in public discourses the alternative possibilities of emancipation through the performative interaction of the individual self with institutions of power.

A fundamental historical imperative of postsocialist Chinese mass nationalism is to articulate China with the West while maintaining its alternativity to the Western capitalist order.

Informed by this imperative, Heshang’s pedagogical promotion and modification of a Party-state–led mode of reformist socialism were not only to reorganize the politico-economic interests of the society, but also to project a new roadmap for configuring the historical consciousness and national identification of the masses. As probably the first mass cultural phenomenon of postsocialist nationalism, Heshang should not be taken as a purely rhetoric service to regulate the national body for global capitalism, and is better conceived as a discursive search for alternative possibilities of emancipation through promoting the 1980s politico-economic reforms as a new mode of modernization with a socialist vision of the future. Thus I propose to investigate Heshang as an effort to construct an alternatively socialist—or, non-Maoist in the context of 1980s China—history and create public space for individual emancipation. In this light, Chinese socialism is no longer just a disastrous relapse of the ideological unconscious (Wang) or a state rhetoric masking the real intent to thrive in global capitalism (Anagnost), but is also a serious attempt of subjectivization to mediate Maoist voluntarism vis-à-vis the 1980s historicity and articulate cultural differences against the backdrop of a capitalist world order.⁵

Intriguingly, mass culture and mass historical agency are rarely a focus of mainstream intellectual conceptualization of 1980s China. Two frequently mentioned themes of the decade as an era of freedom are modernization and cultural enlightenment, which have painted a picture of China’s embrace of global capitalism and Western democracy, abruptly halted by the 1989 Tiananmen Movement. Enlightenment scholars in the 1990s, probably still traumatized by the Party-state’s brutality in 1989, tended to give a negative evaluation of the 1980s culture framed by the state-dictated modernization. Jing Wang (1996) impassionedly writes, “Modernization for modernization’s sake, rather than for humanity’s sake, has given birth to a monster named Development that will in no time witness the reenactment of alienation in the Deng era in different ideological terms” (24). A more balanced view was offered by Marxist historians. Arif Dirlik (1996) suggests that the 1980s culture witnessed the success of a modernizationist notion of history that is more than ever convergent with state goals and discourses on the historical inevitability of global markets.⁶ However, for some unknown reasons, enlightenment scholars and, particularly, Marxist historians did not cover more ground than the field of intellectual high culture when analyzing the nonstate discursivity in the 1980s cultural reorientation.

In a recent study, Prasenjit Duara (2009) broaches the issue of mass agency in 1980s China. From the vantage point of 30 years of experience with the Dengist reform, Duara submits that Heshang as the first mass media event of the era offers a counternarrative of world civilization to the official revolutionary nationalist history. Duara’s hindsight helps elucidate the grand trajectory of the Dengist reform and particularly facilitates the new millennium understanding of the initial moments of China’s postsocialist transition. My analysis is informed by his notion that Heshang mobilizes “historical perceptions of the self in order to move the future” (68). However, my analysis also premises that a comprehensive understanding of Heshang’s mass agency can only be achieved through resituating Heshang in its particular context of the late 1980s—the historical juncture preceding the 1989 Tiananmen Movement and the neoliberalization since the 1990s, when the latter, now seemingly an obvious trajectory of China, was but one of the many possibilities for the country’s future.

The central argument of this chapter is that Heshang’s intellectual pedagogy of reform embodies a complex transformation of socialist historical consciousness that constructed mass political agencies not only through discursive struggles to reformulate interests, but also through contingent processes of historical imagination and identification. This chapter has two aims: to demonstrate how Heshang’s understanding of history has negotiated with the past and present of Chinese socialism to produce new discourses of modernization to reformate politico-economic interests through spiritual initiatives, and to show the contingency—the circumstantial, unpredictable, and collective possibilities—in the ways Heshang and its derivative discourses engaged the national imagination of the masses in the late 1980s. My goal is therefore not to overthrow the deconstructionist reading of Heshang but to add to our understanding of the dialectics between socialist voluntarism and postsocialist developmentalism from a constructionist view of history. In other words, this chapter attempts to delineate through the case of Heshang the larger picture of power relations between national identification and historical dialectics of socialism/capitalism in late-1980s China.

Youhuan yishi, the Chinese National Character, and an Alternative to Ritualized Socialism

Heshang aired right after a critical moment of Chinese socialism in the 1980s. Then-premier Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) proclaimed at the Thirteenth Party Congress in October 1987, “China is now in the primary state of socialism.” Jing Wang (1996) suggests that, together with other ominous social events from 1987 to 1988, Zhao’s authoritative claim intensified a sense of crisis pervading the society that was later translated into Heshang (119). Wang is certainly right in elucidating the immediate sociopolitical milieu for Heshang, but does not seem to have considered the broader meanings of the theory of “the primary state of socialism” (shehuizhuyi chujijieduan) to the historical and ontological continuation of the construction of Chinese socialism in the 1980s. Zhao’s claim exemplifies the practice of the post-Mao reformist state to emphasize economic development by relegating to a remote future the ultimate socialist goal of replacing capitalism, and marginalizing the functionality of human will and consciousness in the construction of socialism to avoid a total political reverse...