Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China

The evolution of this volume has paralleled the intellectual developments that it seeks to capture and analyze. At the book’s conception in 1996, Chinese intellectual life in the first half of the 1990s remained nebulous, its central contentions obscure. Scholars both inside and outside China still tended to view China in the shadow of Tiananmen and the cultural intellectual excitement of the 1980s, which that tragic event brought to an end. The renewed and intensified economic reform known as marketization (shichang hua)after 1992, and the end of the Cold Wara year earlier, have redefined the historical condition for intellectual discussions and a new everyday form of life in China. Whereas the new socioeconomic reality gave rise to an explosion of mass cultural production, Chinese intellectuals, at least for a moment, seemed at loss. Initial discussions among intellectuals primarily concerned positions, attitudes, and strategies by which to fend off or absorb excessive stimuli from the processes of social rationalization, commodification, and globalization.