Xudong Zhang: Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Between the massacres at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the people of China endured what Zhang calls a “tense process of relaxation,” “a silent revolution in every domain of Chinese life as the People’s Republic transformed from a centrally planned economy to the world’s new workshop and its most coveted market for international capital.” A “boisterous, disorienting social sphere underscored by a carnivalesque consumer mass culture equipped with new information technology from the cell phone to the Internet” appeared to herald “economic prosperity, cultural diversity, institutional rationalization, and even political stability”— likely to hasten Chinese integration “into the global system,” albeit with a concurrent “deepening of social divisions and tensions in the space of the nation-state.”
Some two decades later, we know that the Chinese Communist Party had other plans, which included a comprehensive system of surveillance, a state-controlled alternative ‘internet,’ and imperialist geopolitical extension throughout the world targeted ultimately at the United States. Zhang wants to prevent the realization some of this. He knows he may not succeed, writing, “my central observation on the 1990s is that the perceived dissolution and degeneration of the totality of a purported socialist reality opens a narrow gate on the reconfiguration of economic, social political, and cultural powers in a moment of danger.” A ‘postmodernist’ scholar tutored by the lit-crit scholar Fredric Jameson, he would advance some sort of socialism under the usual rubric of ‘cultural’ neo-Marxism. Hobbled by the cumbersome clogs of ‘postmodernist’ jargon, his book stands as a forlorn of embodiment of a dream opposed by a disciplined oligarchic regime that knows what it wants to do and steadily goes about doing it. If ever there was a narrow gate for such a thing to limp through, China’s rulers have closed it firmly. This notwithstanding, Zhang does know a lot about China, and one can learn from him.
China in the 1980s, he writes, featured “the unfreedom of the total state” in China. But this “total” (dare one say ‘tyrannical’?) regime preserved two kinds of freedom. It “maintained a tightly woven collective life” of “mutual dependency, whose internal socioeconomic equality and political-ideological homogeneity ensured initiative and possibilities available only in a ‘mass democracy’ or an ‘enlightened despotism.'” I think that means a centralized state controlled by an oligarchy kept ‘the ruled’ down, but not atomized; the ruled helped one another. “Second, the state and its socialist infrastructure acted both as a mediator with and a buffer against the capitalist world market, thus effectively protecting a fledgling national market of economic and cultural production/consumption.”
By the 1990s, “the sweeping marketization in anticipation of China’s full entry into the capitalist global economy seems to have strengthened the Chinese economy and in particular benefited the new ruling elite of a bureaucratic capitalism.” But China’s new middle class, non-ideological and pragmatic, did not act in the manner of Western liberals, esteeming individual freedom. It sought the “deterriorialized” world of “postmodernity,” by which Zhang means (among other things) “globalization.” How then does ‘postmodernism’ correlate with ‘postsocialism’? How do global capitalism and “the revolutionary and socialist legacies of Mao’s China” interact? Zhang takes the side of ‘postsocialism’ in this confrontation, asking his readers to think about, “how it can address the complexity of Chinese reality, above all the fascination with/resistance to the capitalist commodity economy and the attachment to/forgetfulness of the revolutionary and socialist experience.” He wants to avoid any recurrence to the “Hegelian/Marxist” rationalism, which purported to describe a linear (if dialectical) historical progress toward what Zhang calls “a forever postponed and forever abstract Messianic world revolution.” A bit like a left-wing version of President Donald Trump, he insists on the need for national sovereignty. Unlike Trump, however, he hopes that this nationalism will remain socialist in a regime “whose semiautonomy (or semidependency on a larger totality) is a crucial, indispensable condition of the possibility for systematic opposition and resistance” to the “capitalist global economy.” He wishes this sovereignty could be “endowed” by “the community of the people.” He imagines that this is possible if one takes on the ‘postmodernist’ project, eschewing “abstract and essentialized cultural truth-claims” (e.g., ‘all men are created equal’) and embracing “individual and communal perceptions and experience of the epochal material-technological determinations by capitalism as a natural-historical setting and not an ontological self-understanding of human beings”—”an emergent culture or form of life.” “Life” is indeed the criterion here, as it is with ‘postmodernists’ generally, who have taken Nietzsche’s aristocratic vitalism and made it egalitarian. Post-socialism rightly understood “transcends the dogmas of capitalism and socialism to get in touch with the productive forces of the world of life with all its social and cultural specificities and complexities.”
Zhang divides his book into three parts. The first part describes and comments on (‘critiques,’ as ‘postmodernists’ like to say) “the convoluted intellectual discussion during the 1990s, with Beijing as the epicenter.” Here Zhang “confront[s] central contradictions or conflicts around which the major battles of intellectual and cultural-political engagements of the Chinese 1990s played out.” These contradictions included that between “neoliberal forces of market fundamentalism” and “the socialist state”; “the global postmodern turn” and “Chinese political and cultural subjectivity”; and “democracy” in the sense of a “mass society” based on a market economy and “Chinese intellectual discourses and institutions.” Overall, these contradictions embodied both the conflict between, and the intertwining of, nationalist and socialist ideas.
In the second part of the book Zhang addresses these matters in terms of “literary representations of the new global space anchored or embedded in the particular narrative discourse of modern Chinese ‘subjectivity’—as identity, selfhood, interiority, and self-image (or rather self-imaging).” In these representations Zhang finds the “melancholy of the urban middle class detached from its personal and collective identity defined historically in the project of Chinese revolution and socialism.” The book’s third part “analyzes different ways of formulating the national situation and national self-identity in the truly international space: art film.”
In the 1990s, “the only thing the Chinese government does not readily take from the U.S. model is it political structure.” The regime wanted economic development, “turn[ing] to authoritarian capitalist societies in East Asia—Singapore, South Korea, and, until very recently, Taiwan—for political inspiration.” The regime’s “cynical pragmatism and opportunism” served as “the sole source of its legitimacy,” a “legalistic, administrative, and technocratic blanket” with which it attempted to muffle “the public articulation of the political vision of an actually existing but internally differentiating socialism.” It hadn’t fully succeeded. “The oppressiveness of the Chinese state in some areas is paralleled by unprecedented freedom and anarchism in other parts of the social domain.” But not for long, the rulers hoped. “Under the cover of Marxist philosophy, the Chinese state, rooted in a Leninist party organization, becomes a ruthless promoter of capitalist-style development, and of the market revolution as it has prevailed in the Western world since the Reagan-Thatcher era,” a “giant interest group” in its own right: “a CCP Inc.” The self-interest, the “unchecked power and corruption” of this oligarchy “puts it in direct confrontation with the society at large,” “pos[ing] a direct threat to the economic growth and social stability that the state depends on so desperately for its own political survival.” The “rising proto-middle class demand[s] more clarity and rationality in terms of rights and positive law,” but the “state bureaucracy” wants to such things.
Economic growth armed with political power “creates astounding disparities in distribution of wealth, ranking China today among the most unequal nations in the world”—”worse than the United States,” Zhang shudders, rivaling such oligarchies as Russia and Indonesia. “All this has been done not through the demise of a strong central government, but under the close watch and constant guidance of a socialist regime” via “rent-seeking, insider trading, or stealing of public property,” activities made easier by “the lack of press freedom” to expose them. “The rapid erosion of the basic rights of the working people established under Chinese socialism makes them powerless vis-à-vis capital and the new managerial class.” In view of the fact that the (supposedly secured) basic rights of the working people did not prevent the deliberate extinction by famine of millions of Chinese peasants under Mao, it’s hard to read that last locution with a straight or even a somewhat composed face, but Zhang prefers not to think that state socialism aiming at social equality may ‘need’ to kill a lot of people to get there, only to lead the killers to corruption and enrichissesez-vous-ing after the bloodbath is over. Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising to learn that in China “private enterprise… lacks the legal protection it enjoys in the West.” Money-making is for the oligarchs, not the ruled. “Eighty percent of national private savings is in the hands of a tiny nouveau riche class,” while “China’s rural inhabitants—still more than seventy percent of the population—are left to fend for themselves.” That is a bit better than being slaughtered by Maoist ideologues, but Zhang has more immediate issues to consider.
In the 1980s it still had been possible to think that Chinese intellectuals and the bureaucratic state were “natural, inseparable partners in herding the people through social change while maintaining order,” that “intellectuals are the moral conscience of the people and have the ability and right to speak for the people’s desires and longings,” and that the Chinese people want “modernity, understood as a set of unquestionable universal institutions and values.” Tiananmen Square exposed both the “parasitic and symbiotic relations” between intellectuals and the state. The modernizing adaptation of the ancient Confucian model of the wise emperor and his learned administrators, benevolently setting the moral tone for the Chinese people—an adaptation which oscillated between aspirations for “Western-style democracy” and “enlightened despotism” in China—proved illusory. The oligarchy didn’t even recognize those aspirations, “crush[ing] the popular protest as a threat to ‘stability,’ not as a crusade against neoliberalism” with all “the ruthlessness of a rising technocratic regime.”
Regrouping after this debacle ‘Nineties neoliberals redefined themselves. They shared the “neoauthoritarian legacy” of the ‘Eighties neoliberalism—by which Zhang means that both versions “profoundly distrust[ed] social democracy (particularly mass democracy) while searching for an efficient and radical way to establish a new socio-ideological order based on the market and private ownership.” However, the earlier neoliberals were reformers “within the movement of Chinese socialism” in the sense that they concerned themselves “with political democratization and maintaining a socially just distribution of wealth”; ‘Nineties neoliberals “not only openly challenge[d] the very existence of Chines socialism but also [took] issue with the notion of the Western welfare state from an orthodox neoliberal standpoint.” As part of “a massive deintellectualization of Chinese cultural life in the 1990s,” Chinese neoliberals turned away from Marxism and ‘postmodernism’ toward exegesis, positivism, and empiricism, evidently hoping to pass through the ideological filters of the oligarchic regime. (“State censorship plays a role in shaping the coded language of intellectual debate, of course.”) Indeed, “the post-Mao Chinese ‘public sphere’ is a sham whose only existence and festivities are in and of the ideology and fantasy,” something one might say of the Maoist Chinese ‘public sphere’ as well, although Zhang is too discreet to suggest it. Chinese neoliberals were thinking about “how to secure the freedom of a few”—themselves—against “the demands for equality by the many.” “The Chinese government’s behavior in 1989 was more effective in cracking down on the democratic initiative for economic equity, social justice, and political participation by the working people than in weeding out ‘bourgeois liberalism,’ which surged back into the domestic mainstream in the form of neoliberal economics, and into the global context with the rhetoric of freedom and rights.”
Zhang maintains that the voices against neoliberalism belonged broadly to what was called China’s “New Left.” One part of the New Left stance was nationalism, triggered by the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, precipitated by Chinese missile tests near the coast of Taiwan. When the United States responded by deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups outside the Strait, many intellectuals recalled the history of Western imperialism in China from the 1840 Opium War to the 1945 Japanese surrender. “Human rights rhetoric… came to be viewed cynically in China as cover for political or geopolitical concerns,” part of the “clash of civilizations” discussed by Samuel Huntington in his widely-read contemporaneous book. This view was confirmed in 1999 during the Kosovo War, when U.S. cruise missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; the Chinese rejected the American explanation that the attack was an error based on the use of old maps, taking the incident as an “exercise of raw power out of sheer self-interest by an integrated West led by the United States,” although Zhang leaves the definition of the supposed self-interest in destroying a Chinese embassy undefined.
With this renewed nationalism came a critique of neoliberalism provoked by the failure of capitalist ‘shock therapy’ in Russia. “The Russian path became a living reminder of the road China must not go down.” The New Left thus presents a renewal of national socialism, long discredited for its linkage to Nazism.
Zhang doesn’t put it that way. “The central debate” in 1990s China was “about how to engage in the process of social modernization in a relatively efficient and just way, or, to be blunt, how to avoid a major human disaster while embarking on this journey.” Zhang condemns the neoliberal side of the debate as “not so much a pursuit of freedom but a wishful and egoistic attempt to carve out a self-enclosed, indeed barricaded bourgeois haven out of an unstable reality of irreducibly uneven development.” Meanwhile, nationalism “takes shape on an after-image of the vanishing medium that is the traditional nation-state,” now seriously compromised by globalization. Zhang doesn’t mind nationalism at all, however, so long as it “makes itself available to a populist and even socialist vision of a sound national economy combined with a sound national politics”; “it is the socialist potential of this nationalist discourse that [kept] it as a meaningful position in the Chinese intellectual field in the 1990s.” As a ‘postmodern,’ Zhang would attempt to “de-colonize and de-essentialize the mind from Western metaphysics in general and from the predominant Western discourses of modernity in particular,” while retaining the “Marxist critique of the capitalist colonial system and its internal hierarchy,” not to mention socialism itself and “the Chinese state-form.” One might describe this set of aspirations as incoherent, but ‘postmodernism’ never claimed to esteem reason.
It soon transpires that the New Left is just as ‘internationalist’ or ‘globalist’ as neoliberals, and even more ideological, but in a different way. The Chinese New Left is “a cluster of loosely connected intellectual discourses and tendencies” owing “its existence to a truly international and historically embedded conceptual framework, theoretical arsenal, and symbolic power.” “Many of the best Chinese students became raging ‘New Leftists’ by the time they complete their much envied education at, say, Berkeley or Duke.” But no worry, it is “no longer possible or meaningful to distinguish the ‘Chinese’ from the ‘un-Chinese’ elements in the New Left, which are intimately connected to Chinese reality.” The “critical intellectuals in China today embark on a systematic and open-ended questioning of both the socialist and capitalist assumptions of modernity,” breaking “the straitjacket of socialism and capitalism as two reified and fetishized social, political, and theoretical institutions.” This seems to mean that the Chinese New Left rejects a civil society in which market relations dominate all other social relations (the straitjacket of capitalism) while affirming a civil society of communitarian mutual aid. It isn’t clear, however, in what way New Leftist differ from other socialists (except for their nationalism). They do not think the time is ripe to get rid of the state, as American and European New Leftists did in the 1960s. On the contrary, they endorse the view of Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein in their book The Cost of Rights, which argues that “all rights, including the so-called ‘negative rights,’ depend on the state and its taxation; that all rights are public goods whose protection requires the government to make socially responsible and morally satisfying choices; and that, in view of the sorry reality in ‘free’ Russia, ‘statelessness spells rightlessness.” This is of course quite consistent with the American Declaration of Independence, which affirms that governments are instituted to secure unalienable natural rights, although it is clear that neither Holmes nor Sunstein nor Chinese New Leftists regard rights as natural but rather as historical, changeable, ever-evolving.
The Chinese New Left would oppose the “global imperial order” of the United States and its “bourgeois ideology” with a “Chinese way” of “constantly historicizing and contextualizing the particularities, arbitrariness, and intellectual closures of all these circulating universal claims while keeping the future-oriented utopian horizons of history open.” This isn’t really a Chinese way at all, but the Western ‘postmodernist’ way instantiated in China. It is indeed as utopian as ‘postmodernism’ generally, which is why ‘postmodernism’ gets play primarily within universities and other schools, sometimes with an assist from mass media companies and political parties, when they find it useful to do so. Zhang admits the universalist ambition of the New-Left Chinese way when he stipulates that “Chinese strivings must be defined in a way that speaks to other peoples in other parts of the world” by “articulat[ing] the national dilemma [of China] as a universal problematic, and vice-versa,” “transcend[ing] simultaneously the mythology of a self-contained Chinese culture and the closure of historical horizons in bourgeois civilization,” the rival universalism. In this, it should be noticed, Chinese New Leftism dovetails rather well with the geopolitics of those soulless bureaucrats in Beijing that they deplore.
The 1990s saw “a thriving, omnipresent market and a retreating, decentralized state power.” If the latter claim is true, it was very much a matter of taking one step back in order to position oneself for two steps forward, but for the time the new middle class managed to form “semiautonomous social and cultural spaces of its own,” wherein they cultivated nationalism, private property ownership, and a cosmopolitanism understood as a desire to bring China out into the world as China. Nationalist and consumerist sentiments largely replaced the “universalistic high culture of humanism and modernism” of the 1980s. The “new terrain” in Chinese society established itself “outside the institutions of the state and intellectuals.” So, for example, the 1996 collection of “crude journalistic writing” titled China Can Say No, abominated America but did so without state sponsorship (although not without state “blessing”).
Beyond anti-Americanism, what did Chinese nationalism consist of? In the “new round of economic liberalization” undertaken in 1992, “the state itself was by far the biggest shareholder, stakeholder, and employer in an already diversified, mixed economy”; “combined with a modernizing socialist bureaucracy,” this “allowed the state to be an integral, indeed omnipresent part of the new image of the nation.” However, nationalism as understood in Chinese society differed from “the state rhetoric of patriotism.” It was more visceral. Such powerful sentiments might circle around to challenge the regime, and so were kept “tightly controlled by the government.” An oligarchic regime may foment nationalism, but it must remain alert to the risk of a nationalism that morphs into calls for popular sovereignty. The Chinese Communist Party has remained vigilant about such a prospect throughout its decades in power, and the ‘Nineties were no different.
Zhang rightly distinguishes “this new image of the nation” from the traditional, Confucian motif of tianxia. “Literally meaning ‘under the heaven,’ tianxia stands as a pre- or protonationalist notion of an empire, civilization, and universe, and thus runs against the grain of modern nationalism as a rational ideology of individual rights and change.” Very oddly, Zhang entirely omits the longstanding rivals of Confucianism in traditional Chinese politics and culture—not only Taoism and Buddhism but (more pertinently) the set of views often called ‘Legalism’—a sort of Realpolitik discourse that emerged in the ‘Hobbesian’ Warring States period of 453-221 BC. Modern Chinese intellectuals struggled for a century “to make China great again” after its loss of power, and of ‘face,’ to modern empires. This “painstaking shift of loyalty and identity from the cultural codes of Confucianism to the modern nation-state” ranged from republicanism to the ‘authoritarianism’ of Chiang Kai-Shek to the Marxism-Leninism of Mao Zedong; the Chinese oligarchy of the ‘Nineties had no taste for such variety of opinion in the civil society it oversaw. What would China’s “quiet yet aggressive new nationalism” become, be allowed to become?
Zhang shares its anti-Americanism. “In today’s international community, the United States is probably the only nation to believe that, or act as if, it has the right and moral obligation to impose its standards on other nations while at the same time fiercely promoting its own national interest, often under the same banner of American exceptionalism and supremacy,” he sniffs. He is sufficiently honest to admit that “the tension between universal principles and national boundaries is by no means unique to liberalism,” the Marxism-Leninism promoted in Mao’s widely distributed ‘Little Red Book’ being a conspicuous instance thereof. The departure from Maoism begun in 1979 and continued throughout the ‘Eighties, a departure based on pragmatism and the desire for economic development, appeals to Zhang for its non-universalist character, but worries him because the bureaucracy which implemented it opposes “any attempt to redeem or appropriate the Maoist notion of mass democracy and participation.” Zhang’s ‘postmodernist,’ pick-and-choose Maoism—a neo-Maoism pretending that Marxism tolerates popular sovereignty as a sound feature of state socialism—wants “the emergent discourse on Chinese nationalism and mass culture” to “achieve its ultimate historical and political meaning,” a somewhat vague prospect which he quite sensibly fears the oligarchs may block.
Here is where intellectuals like, well, Zhang himself come in. “Without the full participation of its attendant ‘high culture,’ the newly emerging social experience is hampered by a lack of cultural vision, ideological articulation, and political legitimacy; instead, it is forced into a probational state of namelessness and wordlessness, even though it is clearly the field in which the dazzling vocabulary of historical change reaches or, better still creates a mode of language and representation.” This is nothing less, or more, than a new vanguardism, albeit one animated by ‘postmodernism’ instead of ‘scientific socialism.’ With the cleverly-designed tools of ‘deconstructionism’ in hand, ‘postmodern’ intellectuals like Zhang intend to guide the masses not by dictatorship according to the ‘iron laws of History’ but by rhetoric according to the great unquestioned universalist assumption of our contemporary ‘postmodernists’: egalitarianism or ‘democracy’ camouflaged by the rigorously anti-universalist valorization of “locality, difference, relativism, and a ‘deconstructive’ mode of thinking.” Such intellectuals can pummel pro-capitalist, ‘neoliberal’ intellectuals as universalizing, aristocratic pawns of the bureaucratic state, paying “only sporadic lip service” to civil rights in their striving for “a new authoritarianism.” Given the tendency of ‘authoritarian’ capitalist regimes in some other countries to ‘liberalize’ the political sphere as well, bringing in the regimes of commercial republicanism ‘postmodernists’ detest, such a pummeling is de rigeur.
By the 1990s, the Chinese state had begun “neutraliz[ing] the moral appeal of liberal thinking by buying off the population, above all, the technocratic-managerial class,” aiming “to win back popular support” in the wake of Tiananmen “with rapid economic growth.” On the coercive side of the equation, “tighter state control of ideology forced liberal intellectuals into a state of perpetual, although silent, dissent.” The Communist Party’s state “took the lead in an all-out embrace of the market and global capital,” suspending “the commitment to the people as a whole, and to the historical experiment to create a new kind of democracy, freedom, and equality that supersedes the bourgeois model.” “As long as the tensions or disagreements” between state and society “remain manageable,” the two spheres could “pursue and formulate their interests and ideologies separately.” But “what risked being lost” was “a collective passion for political and cultural democracy.” In the years since Zhang has published his book, the regime has ‘managed’ dissent with fair success and with little interest in indulging any collective passion for democracy, if such exists. “Throughout the 1990s… the People’s Republic was swiftly mutating into but another nation-state defined by not the twentieth but the nineteenth century, and this tendency was consolidated both by the internal rationalization of the state and with the blessing of a homogenizing global ideology that presides over the withering of meaningful political life everywhere.” Post-socialist or not, modernity’s most recent turn has led not to the withering away of the state but the withering away of politics, suffocated by the knee of administrative (that is to say, oligarchic) states which tolerate capitalism insofar as it provides them with revenue and, in the West, tolerates ‘postmodernism’ insofar as it is congenitally incapable of exercising anything resembling rule in the real world.
Zhang exemplifies the latter mentality, hoping that somehow Chinese nationalism might turn democratic. He distinguishes “postmodernism in China”—the “global discourse of postmodernism and postmodernity, which entered China via the intellectuals who seek theoretical inspiration from, and discursive synchronization with, the West, and which is largely limited to small circles of literary and art criticism”—from “Chinese postmodernism”—which “pertains to Chinese everyday life as a producer of a culture of the postmodern,” in opposition to “economic, bureaucratic, and social rationalization.” As mentioned, Zhang numbers among those intellectuals who are eager to describe and define that democratic “everyday life,” maybe not so much on its own terms but on the terms of the “global discourse of postmodernism and postmodernity.” He divides his discussion into “four steps”: the “stylistic features of Chinese postmodernism”; the shift from modernism to postmodernism; the “political stakes” involved in the debates resulting from that shift; and the achievement of “a historical understanding of Chinese postmodernism as the cultural logic of a postsocialist society.” Notice that ‘postmodern’ historicism adds to the Marxist dialectical logic of socioeconomic class conflict a “cultural logic” that emphasizes art criticism of a certain kind as a supplement to, even a partial displacement of, the social ‘sciences.’ How logical will “cultural logic” turn out to be?
Regarding the “style” of Chinese postmodernism, Zhang nods to his teacher, Fredric Jameson, who links postmodernism to “consumer society.” Jameson is well known in American lit-crit circles for his attempt to understand literature as a means of encoding political and social commands and demands; in this, he led the charge in American New Left discourse as it held up ‘the young Marx’—the more Hegelian/’idealistic’ Marx—against the mature Marx who propounded ‘scientific socialism’ and spawned what was, by the 1960s, the ‘old’ Left lumbering toward its international extinction in the next generation. “Postmodernism is seen by its Chinese students as primarily a sociohistorical change articulated culturally.” That is, the cultural “logic” the course of social events, although that course may not be described fully by Marxian dialectic, which would give the enterprise a bit more rationalism than ‘postmoderns’ like. Be this as it may, in China ‘postmodernity’ features the undermining of high modernism by mass culture and the nation’s “rapid economic growth, its decidedly mixed modes of production, and its incomplete but intensifying integration into the global capitalist market.” The situation is complex, not only because socialism and capitalism have renewed their rivalry in post-Mao China but because “truly ‘premodern’ elements in Chinese society” haven’t gone away: “poverty, ignorance, superstition, chaos, repression, and the backlash of the ultraconservative” (by which Zhang means Confucianism). “To see how China receives postmodernism one has to show how China produces it”; Chinese postmodernity is “an admittedly unfinished project but one whose legitimacy, validity, and universal claims have already, for better or for worse, come under fire.”
As in Europe and America, where the “high modernism of James Joyce, Le Corbusier, Vassily Kandinsky, etc.” was challenged by the cultural-political revolution typified by ‘May ’68’ in France, ‘Nineties China saw a similar ‘democratization’ or vulgarization, sometimes by “a journalistic genre designed for quick media exposure and consumer gratification,” sometimes by an attempt to establish a Western-style academia, complete with scholarly production and regularized promotion. Zhang argues that since ‘history’ (conceived as the course of events) accelerates with democratization, shifting with popular sentiments, an analytical approach emphasizing quick construction of cultural products and their equally quick critical deconstruction will track the permutations of Chinese society better than more traditional scholarly practices, such as ‘comparative literature,’ which requires stable bodies of work to compare and contrast with one another. At least as pertinently for his purposes, ‘postmodernism’ “may carry a revolutionary message in an era when October-style revolutions”—efforts of the ‘old’ Left—now “seem all but impossible and undesirable,” given the massive power of the oligarchic surveillance state. ‘Postmodernism’ and it alone “points to a horizon beyond socialism as we know it.” Before the Maoist regime was founded in 1949, “revolution, socialism, and mass democracy” served as the Marxist “negation of the bourgeois project of industrialization and nation building”; Deng’s “New Era” pragmatism was “a negation of the Maoist paradigm by means of Weberian rationalization,” leading “logically to a market economy under the supervision of the bureaucratic state.” Chinese postmodernism now aspires to be the negation of the negation, as Marxists like to say, thanks to the wedding of the ‘young Marx’ to a democratized Nietzscheism. It “historicizes the ideological and simplistic opposition between socialist modernity and its bourgeois or counterrevolutionary alternative” by ‘deconstructing’—”reveal[ing] and destabiliz[ing]”—the “ideological assumptions embedded in the premodern-modern order around which the foundational discourse of modern China evolves.” This, Zhang hopes, will “break the Eurocentric grip on the notion of the modern, which makes it possible for non-Europeans to imagine a native or modern in which one feels both contemporary and at home,” protected from the “ruthless force of global standardization” and defending a worldwide (but not universalistic) pluralism. It is of course a question whether relativism holds up against ‘local’ cultures such as those seen in Muslim countries or indeed in China, neither of which seems any less expansionist in ambition than the United States of today or the Europe of yesterday. ‘Clash of civilizations,’ indeed. Zhang wants ‘postmodernism’ to subvert globalism, the clash of civilizations it engenders, and the contemporary Chinese statism which purports to face off against globalism and foreign civilizations. Waxing eloquent, he avers, “One could argue that it is only amid the postmodern, postsocialist ruins or prosperity (depending on one’s perspective) that Mao’s China obtains its afterlife as an epic monument, an empire with all its sublime grandeur.”
This suggests that what Zhang calls the “political stakes” entailed in the struggle of Chinese postmodernism might be substantial. Chinese post-modernism “can only be experienced and measured against the established, dominant institutions” of the Chinese regime. Like modernism, postmodernism consists of “an endless and sometimes self-defeating struggle to become and remain the ever new”; like modernism, “postmodernism encompasses radically different social ideals and political ideologies”; “unlike modernism, however, postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation hinges on a sophisticated, almost cynical sense that all good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been somewhere, somehow, and sometimes before, tried, and what is left for contemporary men and women is nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation.” Postmodernism takes ‘history’ to be “fundamentally cyclical,” not progressive. Zhang suspects that even if ‘postmodern’ egalitarians prevail in China against “the Old Left and the New Right” (the latter being the neoliberals), “new power elites in new national and international class reconfigurations” may result. This is a welcome touch of sobriety, although one might regret that it took the detour of ‘postmodernism’ to arrive at it.
One might regret this because it’s obvious that ‘postmodernism’ will prove a feeble weapon against something like the Chinese regime. The “core assumption” of ‘postmodernism’ is “that politics, ideology, human experience, and history itself no longer matter, indeed, no longer exist, an assumption which underscores the rise of a variety of postmodern cultural identity (of ethnic or sexual varieties), or academic politics, often in the void of classically political categories such as class and nation.” Not surprisingly, Chinese nationalism “attacks postmodernism as a discourse of phantasmagoria,” while ‘postmodernists’ attempt to undermine the regime with the denial that realist epistemology has validity. An epistemological realist will refute these latter-day Berkeleys in much the same way as Dr. Johnson did, although in this case the stone they kick may be aimed at the shins of ‘postmodernists.’ Deconstruct that.
Zhang contends that Chinese postsocialism and Chinese postmodernism go together. A ‘money’ economy enhances ‘postmodernity’ because “money is a great equalizer which unifies an uneven socio-economic terrain.” When the new economy collides and entwines with China’s “residual socialism” it “keep[s] Chinese society in a permanent state of economic mobilization and ideological agitation,” with the “frustrations, fears, resentments” of “the rising consumer masses,” their “newly achieved freedoms and sense of power, their obsessions with the here and now, as well as their need for a new collective identity and social ideal” all percolating amidst “a dazzling variety of modes of production, social structures, political lexicons, ideological courses, and value systems.” This should provide “conditions of possibility for Chinese postmodernism,” he hopes, by suggesting that socialism can be “understood as an ongoing historical experiment” rather than a fixed concept in support of a fixed institutional system. Zhang cites the Chinese scholar Cui Zhiyuan’s “call for ‘intellectual liberation’ and critique of ‘institutional fetishism'” as way forward toward the construction of “a collective, cooperative model of economic development” with special emphasis on the much-neglected and indeed much-abused rural population. Zhiyuan envisions an economics and a politics of fluidity instead of institutionalism, a sort of historicist Heracliteanism. This, Zhang bravely insists, comports with “the Chinese economy and everyday life” of today, which “have already outgrown the bureaucratic control and ideological tutelage of the Reform regime, whose popular support if not political legitimacy was damaged by the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989.” What is needed is “a new theory for a new social system, a new democracy, and a new cultural-intellectual program.” Zhang deplores any “rigid understanding of Maoism as a utopian totalitarianism,” insisting that it too can be deployed ‘postmodernly,’ as in its simultaneous legitimation and distortion “during the commercial Mao craze of the early 1990s,” wherein Mao’s image became a popular imprint on merchandise. The real Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant, but the magic wand of postmodernism can deconstruct and reconstruct him as the fairy godfather of a future Chinese democracy.
Good luck with that.
Given his ‘postmodernist’ predilections, it makes sense that Zhang turns away from politics (recall that it no longer exists) to contemporary Chinese literature and film. He begins with the fiction of Wang Anyi, who sets her plots in Shanghai. Prior to World War II, Shanghai was China’s most cosmopolitan city, ‘the Paris of Asia,’ “the epitome of Chinese urban modernity.” Since then, the Maoist revolution has come and gone, and in Wang’s account the city now “threaten[s] to outsmart and outlive its peasant conquerors and the brutal system they imposed on it.” She nonetheless retains the Marxist framework of “class analysis,” as “Shanghai residents remain deeply embedded in consumerism and nostalgia for a consumer’s life-world despite Shanghai’s metamorphosis from a city of urban middle-class consumers to one of producers and from a cultural to a political center.” Shanghai’s “anticollective, apolitical” sensibility can find no resources in a pre-modern past, having “no significant past or memory prior to its founding as a treaty port, an event marking the global expansion of capitalism and colonialism in the nineteenth century.” Shanghai residents have long associated “the rest of the country with darkness, backwardness, and chaos,” even as residents of the rest of the country think of Shanghai as the place where the mercantile “foreign devils” were allowed well-contained access to China. Pre-Mao, the city regime “was made and reinforced by a self-governing, self-regulating city council that consisted of wealthy, predominantly foreign taxpayers who took full advantage of the power vacuum of the semicolon and wasted no time in creating a petit État dans l’État.” The regime and those it governed thought of Shanghai “as a dynamic vanguard of history, an island of civilization, and the ultimate embodiment of the true present of modernity,” set “to forcibly yank China… out of the vicious cycle of tradition.” The Maoist defined the vanguard of history rather differently; they won, but not simply and not permanently.
Zhang takes Wang’s fiction itself as a sort of vanguard. In her “allegories of Shanghai one will not find any utopian gesture of redemption”—as one finds in partisans of capitalism and communism alike—and “not even a guarded optimism for a rising everyday sphere in a China that may be well on its way to creating a new urban and political culture precisely by incorporating a reinvented past into the undefined present.” Firmly anti-utopian, she holds herself open to the way in which the present may define itself in the future, so long as China resists the too-rigid over-defining ideologies of the past, and their sometimes brutal practices. ‘Postmodern,’ indeed. In his discussion of Shanghai’s ‘minor literature’ of the ‘Nineties, Zhang leans heavily on such ‘postmodernists’ as Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, claiming that “Shanghai may be a privileged site to witness the central dilemma of modernity,” defined by those writers as “a historical process which enlightens by mythologizing,” sweeping aside previous mythologies while producing its own “intricate network of signs, images, and narratives.” Modernity contradicts itself, not merely in the dialectics of class struggle, as Marxists say, but in language, symbols, sentiments. Modernity’s constant change, seen in Shanghai, frustrates hierarchies: “None is exhausted or ready to settle, which hints at the beginning of a long existence whose meaning must be read against and redeemed from all the chaos and meaninglessness of the now.”
What might that meaning be? Zhang turns to ‘Nineties filmmakers for suggestions. He selects several that “share the postrevolutionary assumption and seek to deconstruct the ‘grand narrative’ of social revolution and idealism by constructing a counternarrative of national trauma and traumatized individual life.” As not only post-revolutionary but post-Tiananmen films, films made after the regime halted its apparent liberalization of the ‘Eighties stopped, they also register “the end of the so-called New Era and all its popular and intellectual euphoria about modernity, progress, and subjectivity.” The regime’s crackdown on dissent “was viewed by liberals inside and outside China as moving against the global wind of change which completed the destruction of the Soviet Empire”; therefore, “the Chinese situation was and must be viewed as a shocking and painful anomaly,” as Chinese liberals went down to “disastrous defeat” and attempted to recover through “renewed association with international ideological and symbolic orders.”
For their part, filmmakers sought “an authentic experience of time and history, an ontological meaning of existence amid change (or no change).” But “as long as the Chinese government is constantly on guard against ‘peaceful evolution’—a code word for subverting the socialist system in China through internal mutation—’liberal intellectuals’ in China remain prime suspects of a ‘fifth column’ in the eyes of an ideologically besieged state.” The regime “now grounds its legitimacy solely and defensively on economic growth, social rationalization, and its own monopolistic role in order maintenance”—in sum, “growth without democracy” or “market socialism,” a strategy which Zhang supposes has been “forced” upon the regime because it is “compet[ing] with international capitalism on the latter’s terrain.” In the ‘Nineties, “the socialist state [took] the lead in a massive integration with global capitalism,” he writes, although a generation later it has become obvious that “integration” was the beginning of a play for dominance. But Zhang could see that “the twin forces of commodification and state intervention [were] closing up a real or imagined public sphere which once existed for the liberal intellectuals of the New Era,” who turned to “neo-Sinology and neo-Confucianism” in “an eternal Quixotic battle against totalitarian repression.”
Zhang prefers the filmmakers’ strategy, which comports with his ‘postmodernist’ sensibilities. In Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, three episodes in the film correspond to moments of recent Chinese history: Mao’s 1957 purge of intellectuals; the “Natural Disaster, code word for the massive famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward,” the Second Five Year Plan imposed by the Maoist regime between 1958 and 1962; and the Cultural Revolution of the late ‘Sixties. Tian presents each of these events “in a way irreconcilable with orthodox historiography,” deconstruction “the myth of national history” by “accounting for the traumatic experience of innocent individuals.” Titling his three episodes “Father,” “Uncle,” and “Stepfather,” Tian hopes to overcome “the oppressive nature of fatherhood”—under Chairman Mao it was Saturnine—with “the youthful power authorized by a higher authority, namely the Father or the Name of the Father, which solely determines the meaning of history.” But despite the presence of this Father of fathers, what makes The Blue Kite a compelling film is the fact that it offers no ready catharsis, no instant relief, no psychological drama or cultural exoticism which channels shock to its articulation in the world of commodities.” In this, Tian captures the way in which Chinese postmodernism reversed the teaching of Maoist Marxism by using a Maoist-Marxist technique. He shows the contrast between the old and the new, as the Maoists did, but “for opposite ideological and political effects.” “In reading the cinematic rewriting of the national history of modern China, we can argue that the trauma of modern China is not so much the ennui of history, nor even the melancholy of revolution and modernity, but, rather, the anxiety that history has not yet truly begun,” that the true intentions of the true Father have yet to be revealed. Although Zhang doesn’t mention it, one should notice that many Chinese of the next generation would establish underground Christian churches consisting of persons who hold that the true Father has indeed revealed Himself. Whether Tian may share this conviction is impossible to say; he does show why it might find ready listeners in contemporary China.
Zhang devotes his main interpretive energies to The Story of Qiu Ju by the well-known filmmaker Zhang Yimou. This film, and Zhang Yimou’s films generally, demand to be ‘read’ on their own terms, resisting ‘deconstruction.’ Xudong Zhang nonetheless determines to soldier on, intending to interpret the film in accordance with the (‘postmodernist’) “logic of historical analysis.” He will make The Story of Qiu Ju a reflection of “the emergent mainstream ideology of the everyday world framed by Chinese society’s massive transition into the market system guided by an authoritarian party-state.” “It is precisely the fantastic absolutism, demonstrated in both the planners of socialist modernity and the visionaries of global capitalist homogeneity, that is cast in doubt by Zhang Yimou’s films about the commoners in the postsocialist Chinese everyday world.”
As in The Blue Kite, in The Story of Qiu Ju the filmmaker insists that there is something more than the existing Chinese regime and its ‘laws’ (such as they are). There is “something prior to” these laws, to any laws, and even to the regime, to any regime. Qiu Ju is a young woman seeking justice in the broader sense, and the film narrates “the comic ways by which a simple-minded peasant woman” persistently misunderstands the Chinese legal system, “missing its point in the same way as she keeps getting lost in the modern big city.”
“The keywords in the film are ‘justice’ and ‘apology,’ two things Qiu Ju is so determined to obtain and around which the film narrative unfolds.” The two English words translate the same Chinese word, shuofa. “Shuofa means the way things are discussed, talked about, and eventually, understood and accepted without coercion”—more, “the way things are must be accepted by those to whom it is explained; the politicolegal order must rest on a tacit agreement,” on what Americans would call the consent of the governed, reasonable assent. But Qiu Ju doesn’t seek justice in the American or Western sense, either; she seeks not “an abstract general law” that applies “to all equally and indifferently,” but for a way to make sense of things, a way of “ensur[ing] the coherence and integrity of the world of meaning and value, of understanding and, indeed of being. She is there not so much to litigate as to heal, above all her own peace of mind.” Her husband had gotten into a fight with the village chief over the hazy property rights that prevail in rural China, “a gray area between the government and the written law, on one hand, and peasant culture, everyday practice, and the plebian sense of right and wrong” that persists despite the Communist regime’s assiduous efforts to erase it. The dispute had escalated into a (mis)perceived challenge to the reputation, the ‘face,’ of the chief, who kicked Qiu Ju and (it eventually transpires) broke one of his ribs. Despite being in the third trimester of pregnancy, Qiu Ju embarks on her quest.
The film thus “runs against the grain of the notion of ‘rule of law’ introduced by the modernizing state for its political legitimacy, but whose philosophical justification lies historically in the bourgeois pursuit of indifferent abstract generality,” a “generality based on exchange-value and the universal individual as the social figure of property rights.” It equally challenges the regime that has been flirting with such a conception of rights. As Qiu Ju stubbornly works her way up the legal-administrative Chinese food chain, she exhibits something like “a peasant’s belief in the good and benevolent emperor,” to whom she feels entitled to appeal, as per the practice of classical imperial China. And indeed under Mao, the “notion of mass democracy and proletarian dictatorship” hovered “above the law.” Qiu Ju “seeks the rule of law at the highest level of government, that is, the realm of the sovereign, which is, by definition outside and above the law but defines its moral-political constitution.”
There are three reasons “why Qiu Ju’s repeated trips are doomed to fail.” “First, the peasant fails the state by not understanding its efforts to modernize its legal system, which alone protects the peasant’s rights.” That is, even insofar as the post-Maoist Chinese state really does attempt to protect property rights, the peasant whose rights it seeks to protects doesn’t understand what it’s trying to do. Second, “the state fails the peasantry by not understanding their inarticulate moral and political codes that constitute and underscore any real, substantial order.” It doesn’t know what it would take to win the consent of the peasants. Third, “Qiu Ju’s quest for justice is bound to fail because a general, indifferent, legalistic justice is not what she wants and does not solve her problem, and yet it is all that the modern rational social and state organization has to offer.” The drama of the film consists a sort of dialectical examination of shuofa. Starting “with a question regarding the law, in terms of a perceived injustice,” it moves to “a persistent demand for an explanation,” but culminates in “a commentary, a reflection on law and its limits.” “The difficulty the heroine encounters in this film is not so much the difficulty of the legal order understood as an abstract and general norm, but the value system of everyday life in contemporary China struggling with its own fundamental and political self-understanding.”
Whereas the most obvious conflict the film portrays consists of the confrontation between “the unwritten moral-ethical codes of the peasantry tinged with the political legacy of Chinese socialism”—including “but not limited to conventional rubrics such as ‘popular habit,’ ‘social custom,’ ‘natural right,’ or ‘tradition'”—and “modern rationality” instantiated in “the bureaucratic-legalistic machinery of the modernizing state” as it “tries to show itself in abstract yet specific, impersonal, yet socially ‘responsible’ terms,” the genuine healing, “the solution in real ethical and moral senses, is attainable only within the parameters of village life.” There, neither habit nor custom nor tradition but nature prevails, as Qiu Ju goes into labor on New Year’s Eve. The village chief intervenes and gets her to the hospital, saving her life and the life of her boy. “For the village chief, that is merely the right thing to do as a fellow and elderly village,” quite apart from his dispute with Qiu Ju and her husband. In the village, conventional behavior looks to nature as its guide. In the final comic twist, as a gesture of reconciliation the family invites the chief to the traditional party celebrating the one-month anniversary of the child’s birth, but he’s nowhere to be found. Belatedly, the legal system has caught up with him, arresting and imprisoning him for a short period as punishment for his assault. Tellingly, the regime’s verdict isn’t too little, too late but too late and no longer necessary.
“The film situates its dramatic intensity squarely in the structural gap between the legal and the political,” and especially the political understood as “judgment based on a particular form of life,” justified and defended with “moral courage and assertiveness.” This “invisible and inarticulate framework is prior to the legal and the legalistic order, yet it constitutes the very foundation of the latter,” the consent of the governed based not on “justice done in legalistic terms” but “‘right-and-wrong’ in terms of ‘natural right’ rooted in the singularity (not generality) of a peasant community,” a form of right or justice that governs the peasants’ “world of everyday life and informs their moral and political behavior.”
Here is where Zhang seizes the opportunity to extract a socialist-‘postmodern’ lesson from what is quite evidently a pre-modern understanding of right. Qiu Ju “is still not happy at the end of the film”—she had reconciled with the village chief, no longer wanted him punished—but “that is not a problem” because “as long as the subject here is not a bourgeois individual but something embedded in and constituted by a collective,” the problem disappears. The right to life of the individual person, the right to the individual’s liberty, the right of the individual to his property and to pursue happiness—none of these matter in a tight-knit village community. And how could the world of the peasant village somehow overcome the impersonal power of the modern state and become the world of some post-post-socialist society? “The subversion of the Kantian notion of law and the Hegelian notion of mediation”—the philosophic preludes to Marxism and ‘progressive’ contemporary liberalism alike—may “thus open up a theoretical vista for the imagination of a revolutionary form of collectivity which unites the universal and the singular in the contemporary context of capitalist globality and its discontent”—the “possibility of the impossible.”
Or not. Zhang’s ‘postmodern’ politics does indeed recall the communitarianism of the American New Left of the ‘Sixties, when the first wave of American ‘postmodernism’ gathered the strength it took to flood the schools with its doctrines of anti-statist and utopian egalitarianism. More interesting is his recognition of the interplay between natural right (without the scare quotes) and convention. This recognition eventually led him to political philosophy as understood by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to such commentators on that philosophy by Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss.
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