High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China

by Jing Wang

Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.

In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought—Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School—that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy . In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.

This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.

Genres: China, Asia, Cultural

399 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Jing Wang is Professor of Chinese media and Cultural Studies and S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language & Culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is jointly appointed to MIT's Comparative Media Studies and Global Studies & Languages.

Jing Wang is the founder and organizer of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. In spring 2009, Professor Wang launched an NGO2.0 in collaboration with four Chinese universities including the University of Science and Technology of China, two Chinese NGOs, and corporate partners including Ogilvy & Mather China and Milward Brown. The project, funded by Ford Foundation in Beijing, is designed to enhance the digital and new media literacy of grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China and deliver an interactive mapping platform built on Ushihidi, complete with Web 2.0 training courses and a Chinese field guide to best practices and software of social media for nonprofits.

Professor Wang started working with Creative Commons in 2006 and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons Mainland China. She was appointed to serve on the Advisory Board for Wikimedia Foundation in 2010. She serves on the editorial and advisory boards of ten academic journals in the US, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UK, which include journals such as Global Media and Communication; Advertising & Society Review; positions: east Asia cultures critique; Chinese Journal of Communication; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal: Movements; The Chinese Journal of Communication and Society, etc.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Стефан Русинов]

Brilliant exploration into the cultural debate in the Chinese 80s.