Postmodernism and China

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernisation. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodisation and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernisation as modernity, this volume's diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism. Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a post-socialist society. Some essays address China's complicity in - as well as its resistance to - the culture of global capitalism.Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of post-modernity world-wide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose post-modernity has so far been confined - in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds - to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism.First published as a special issue of boundary 2, "Postmodernism and China" includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with post-socialism and by analysing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the post-modern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies. Contributors of this title are: Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, and Xudong Zhang.