The Chinese Popular Culture and the State

The State Question in Chinese Popular Culture presents a series of essays that aim to challenge the paradigm dividing Chinese culture into official and unofficial categories. This binary, which mirrors the high/low dichotomy familiar to all practitioners of cultural studies, finds its roots in Cold War Western romanticization of a Chinese popular culture that stood in defiant opposition to the Communist state. This special issue disputes such simplistic representations and offers critical trajectories which should be crucial to the study of contemporary Chinese popular culture. By reinscribing the state into a discussion of popular culture, these articles reach beyond the postmodernist and transnational trends in analyzing the pop syndrome and engage in methodological questions specific to post-socialist China. Locating intellectual agendas in history and locality while interrogating theorization for theory’s own sake, they aim to shed new light on how we interpret the Chinese consumer and cultural revolution of the 1990s. Featuring articles on contemporary self-health literature, advertising, best-selling novels, religious rituals, leisure culture, and religious tourism, this special issue illuminates the complex diversity of popular culture and thus reveals the dangers inherent in maintaining the official/unofficial split. The issue brings together Chinese scholars from across national and interdisciplinary borders to shape an intellectually responsible agenda for Chinese popular studies.