Modern China and the culture
Posted here Monday, December 01, 2003 at 7:21:53 PM 
From a Book, One China, Many Paths 2003 Verso press
Soon a wave of commercial euphoria caught up the big cities, creating a new cultural atmosphere in which market values became increasingly unbridied. In the tidal wave of mass culture unleashed by Deng Xiaoping's guideline of 'To Get Rich is Glorious', the whole nation was called to tne task of commercialization. It was in this context that, soon after the party's congress in late 1992, the writer Wang Meng, a former Minister of Culture, published his essay 'Avoiding the Sublime' in Dushu (Readings), the leading intellectual monthly in the mainland. In this, he extolled the self-proclaimed 'lout literature' (wanzhu wenxue) of Wang Shuo for its 'perfect fit with the Four Cardinal Principles and the market economy'. It is not surprising that this provocation caused a strong reaction.21 Intellectuals working in the humanities based in Shanghai and Nanjing, where commercialization ran far ahead of other parts of the country, were among the first to see the turn of the party towards garish popular entertainment as a big blow, and a dozen of them struck out against the new trends in Dushu.22 This was the background for the vigorous defence of the 'humanistic spirit' against the emergent culture industry, mounted by a group of Shanghai intellectuals in 1993, among them Zhu Xueqin and Wang Xiaoming. Neither official ideology nor popular opinion showed any relish for this discussion. In the same year, the literary critic Qian Liqun published a book, Fengfu de tongku (Intense Pain) on the trans-cultural reception of images of Quixote and Hamlet. One of the leading themes of this work, the need for intellectuals to accept the challenge of Hamlet in the spirit of Quixote, struck a comparable note of resistance to the new commercial culture.
Comment: paying attention to Chinese Culture is very interesting and challenging.
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