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. Collectively, the essays in this volume question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music and film, in a post-socialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity - 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 grasp the condition of post-modernity world-wide.