Jing Wang's book as a whole constitutes a profound and intense analysis of cultural and ideological change in a decade of intellectual ferment probably unparalleled in China since the 1920s and 1930s. The work consists of seven essays dealing with aspects of cultural practices and intellectual debates that took place in the tumultuous 1980s, years of ideological adjustment not only to an altered political superstructure but also to a rapidly changing economic base.
Chapter One deals with the debate over socialist alienation; Twodescribes the cultural and theoretically lively moment known as wenhua re (the culture fever of the book's title); Chapter Three discusses the landmark televisual text Heshang or River Elegy; Chapter Four tackles the 1980s aesthetic modernisms, and in particular the generation of writers that included Liu Suola and Xu Xing; Five examines humanist scholar Liu Zaifu, the root-seeking writers and the 'experimentalists'; experimentalism again is the focus of Chapter Six in which Jing Wang discusses Ge Fei in terms of the 'mirage of postmodernism'; and the concluding chapter is centered on novelist Wang Shuo and the increasing importance of street-cred culture, what Wang, citing critic Zhang Yiwu, calls shimin wenhua or 'plebeian culture'. This is such a wide-ranging yet detailed and thoughtful book that it is hard to do it justice in a few hundred words, and only a few segments can be meaningfully discussed here.
Wang shows herself to be a perceptive and expert guide to, and archaeologist of, the subtexts and strategic machinations of contemporary Chinese cultural political discourse and practice. Such qualities enable a historically informed approach that avoids generalization of which she is particularly wary. For instance, in Chapter One Wang warns that "the quick conclusion drawn by some Western observers about the close resemblance between the [1980s] alienation school and the leftists of the cultural revolution should be re-examined carefully".
In the 1980s attempts to rethink Marxism and to introduce a critical understanding of alienation were of immense importance. Wang narrates the impact of Eastern European critics of official Communism on post-Mao Marxism. The debate was nevertheless limited on one level by the ideological conventions to which critics were still beholden, and on another by the lack of access to even more divergent left critiques of official Communism and bureaucrats, such as those developed in France from the 1940s onwards from Lefebvre, Castoriadis, and Lefort to Debord and Wolman. Of course, any critique based on such theoretical innovation would doubtless have led to even swifter purging of the critics of ‘socialist' alienation, Wang Ruoshui and Zhou Yang whose outflanking in that debate perversely led to the Marxist critique of alienation being constructed an obscenity on a level with pornography in the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983–94.
Wang is at pains to emphasize the oppressed's complicity in their own—‘the effects of internalized oppression' (18)—and cites as evidence popular support for the 1983–84 campaign. But just how widespread was that support, and can the coercion based on real material fears, tactics based on the lessons of experience really be constructed as "internalized oppression"? Perhaps, but even vulgar Marxist concepts of ideology could account for such reactions. It would have been different, Wang suggests, had the alienation school addressed the "problematic of emancipatory subjectivity" and stressed not the public sphere but emancipatory capabilities of "the subjective practice of the individual". While agreeing with Vaneigem that what can separate us from a passionate life is our fear of having to create it, can de-alienation be realistically achieved solely by an overthrow of "the faceless oppressor internalized within each individual". Wang's book is sustained by rigorous almost relentless desire to expose the mistakes, limitations, and irrealism of recent intellectual discourse in China, a discourse she ably analyzes and unpacks: With a naivete that characterizes both martyrs and victors alike, they revel in the reversibility of the subject positions of Power and Literature in China's existing power structure. (197)
There is an underlying pessimism to this book, as instanced in Jing Wang's analysis of the struggle between the imaginary and material reality, what Wang calls an "indulgence in the mutation of the imaginary". Invoking the history of 1989, she writes: "the real can be upstaged only for a fleeting moment before it returns to annihilate the imaginary with a vengeance" (229). But is it not surely that very imaginary, those triumphs of an instant's duration, that illustrate the possibility, and indeed the practice of de-alienation, of making ourselves more human in the face of capitalism's making itself more totally invasive? Jing Wang has produced a hard book, an honest book, in some ways a bleak book, but one that deserves to be widely read.
Professor of Chinese Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3, France