ABSTRACT
This brief essay, introducing the collection of essays on cultural studies in mainland China and the Chinese-speaking societies, relates the emergence and development of Chinese cultural studies to changes in society. It documents the twin pulls in cultural studies between analyzing what is happening and intervening into society with idealistic possibilities for the future. It lays out how ‘the Chinese modern legacy’ and the Chinese Revolution provide resources for cultural studies and offers some analysis of the social changes that currently confront cultural studies.
One of the biggest global matters in the past 30 years is the tremendous change of mainland China. It is said China changed to be a capitalist country with Chinese characteristics, and that it is creating some unique model of development (‘Chinese Model’) which was difficult to name with existing concepts, and certainly also that it is still a communist totalitarian country … The change has deeply influenced Hong Kong (HK), Taiwan and Macau by pushing these Chinese societies into different gloomy-prospected situations. How to realize today's mainland China is already a great challenge for global intellectuals.
The Chinese, not only the ones in the mainland, are especially oppressed by the challenge. What kind of society is this? Where will it go? Should I have a baby? Is it right to invest in this project? The situation is so bad, what can we do to change it? Should I give up on the mainland (or HK or Taiwan) to immigrate to other places? … You must start with understanding ‘what is today’s mainland China’ if you want to reply seriously any of these different-size questions.
In the late 1990s, about 10 years later than in HK and Taiwan, cultural studies boomed in the mainland with the above-mentioned challenges as its most important motivation, at the time that the challenges grew very apparent.
By now, the cultural studies of the mainland has mainly developed in university campuses: first, in the eastern and coastal cities such as Harbin, Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Haikou, and then the inland ones such as Wuhan, Chongqing and Xi-an … Various academic works keep going: research programmes, degree courses, book series, translations, conferences and institutions … The collaborations of cultural studies between the mainland and other Chinese societies have also developed. My colleagues at Shanghai University and I, for example, have received various support from Taiwan and HK since the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, a common understanding has quickly grown among the cultural studies circle of the mainland: the fact that almost all the important matters are continuously changing, many of which can be seen as to be growing worse, offers the possibility of turning the reality to be better, and thus what cultural studies should do is not just analyse what was done but get involved in what is happening, though it is clearly known that academic style cultural studies has very small power to intervene in the reality. Similar understandings, I think, have also grown in different ways in those Chinese societies out of the mainland.
It is the common understanding that has pushed more and more cultural studies people to create out-of-campus spaces in the mainland: websites, citizen forums, study classes for workers, online radio stations, village cultural constructions, public numbers in WeChat … and in Taiwan and HK, what cultural studies has accumulated through participating in social movements is far richer. The more these sorts of activities flourish, the more they urge cultural studies people to develop their research in order to reply to the challenge presented by the social reality.
Cultural studies of the mainland China seem at a crucial moment in analyzing the contemporary society. On the one hand, various analytical perspectives have been established: not only of cultural symbolizing, but more of social reproduction, not only of the urban, but also of the rural, not only for mainstream groups such as ‘the white collar’, but also for marginal ones like migrant workers … On the other hand, what is gained as research results is uneven – it is rather rich in some fields but very initial in other ones such as the relationships between the urban and the rural.
Related to this situation, the more you know the local conditions, the more you understand that many key matters are not only of the local, but also of the whole mainland, the other Chinese societies out of the mainland, and, even further, of East Asia. So, cultural studies of the mainland should take itself and similar activities in Taiwan, HK and Macau as a whole, and work together more with cultural studies and other similar activities out of the Chinese world. I still remember what Han Shaogong, a Chinese writer said 15 years ago: ‘Capitalists have united all over the world while exploitees divided’. This sad situation must be ended as soon as possible, and cultural studies should not fall behind in idealistic and intellective struggles for the end.
That is why I’m grateful to Cultural Studies for its suggestion of making a special issue of cultural studies in the Chinese world, and to the authors for their contributions that shape the issue as below: four papers are from Taiwan, HK and Macau, while the six other ones are from the mainland; eight papers focus on the social problems that cultural studies is confronting as the other two reflect on cultural studies itself by reviewing respectively the pasts of cultural studies in Taiwan and the mainland; and among those eight papers, seven talk about what is going on while the other talks about what happened 40 years ago.
Please allow me to say something more about ‘history’. Since the very beginning, cultural studies has not focused on the present reality only. The more we realize our duty of intervening in reality as well as our need to inspire idealities for the future, perhaps the more we should look back on our histories to get spiritual and practical resources from what is unconsciously forgotten and intentionally wiped out. It is in this sense I talked about ‘the Chinese modern legacy for cultural studies’ and ‘Chinese Revolution’.
China began its modern history and developed its modern ideas under the pressure of invading Western imperialist powers. In these circumstances, China’s modern ideas were developed from the perspective of the oppressed. Chinese thinkers strongly expressed the view that China did not accept the modern order’s ‘law of the jungle’ and should seek to create a more democratic social structure than that of the West. From the end of nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, this broadly speaking leftist ideal dominated modern Chinese thought. This same ideal inspired different parts of society and generated social reforms and liberation movements that lasted for at least half a century. This is what I mean by the ‘Chinese Revolution’.Footnote1
After reflecting on the present reality and reviewing modern Chinese history, we have come to believe that this ‘Chinese Revolution’ represents a most precious tradition for Chinese intellectuals today, providing both spiritual resources and a social legacy still traceable in real life. Over the past 20 years, it has seemed that the revolution has been driven underground but, as Lu Xun (the greatest modern writer of China) once wrote, its flame has not died out but still burns somewhere in the dark as a ‘subterranean fire’ (Lu Citation1927). In fact, the academic activities of the self-proclaimed cultural studies circle are among the results of this subterranean fire. Marxism and the different Western critical theories and practices of the Birmingham school give us important intellectual resources but, comparatively speaking, the Chinese revolutionary tradition is the spiritual pillar that is at once more substantial and closer to us (Wang Citation2010).
Seven years past, it still seems very necessary to emphasize the need to continuously do the work.
From a broader cultural perspective, a utility-first social orientation has been formed and expanded boldly within the past 30 years. By carrot and stick, it leads and forces Chinese people to converge in such a direction: valuing the material and despising the spiritual, skilful at competition while unused to mutual assistance, self-centred and ignoring others, focusing on the present without caring for the future … in other words, it continuously shapes Chinese people to be a small-minded nation. A similar situation could be seen in the other Chinese societies as well, though the reasons are different.
Roughly summarizing the key things of the mainland's ‘rising’ in the past 30 years, I think, the two most important are the nation being small-minded and the high-speed growth of the GDP-oriented economy.
What makes it terrible is that many in the rest of the world are seemingly going in a similar direction. It is by the mutual stimulation of the small-minded from place to place that a global human life has been formed, a whole trend of falling to be re-barbaric, that is, to be interest-first, to look at the immediate benefit only and care nothing of the rest.
Yes, a small-minded China is partly caused by the stimulations of the global law of the jungle. But the stimulations of the kind an economically rising but small-minded China gives back to the rest of the world is, or will be, bigger.
Of course, the world is so huge and human beings have so long a history towards progress, though heavily forced by the harsh reality to be spiritually re-barbaric, that people will grow in their opposition to those forces. This is after all an unfinished game of chess, we go up or go down, we break the trend of being small-minded or submerged by the trend that, at least a big part of that, will depend on how we think and what we do today. It is in this sense I want to say cultural studies, and similar activities, are of great value. Because they believe firmly that human beings serve a life much better than satisfactorily smacking in the hog house or fearfully growling in jungle.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Wang Xiaoming, Professor of Program in Cultural Studies, and Director of Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, at Shanghai University; also Distinguished Adjunct Professor (2013–2019) of Department of Cultural Studies of Lingnan University, HK. His current research interests include contemporary urban culture and Modern Chinese thought. His recent books include Stand sideways (Taipei, 2013) and Short sight & far-sighted (Shanghai, 2011; Seoul, 2014). What he recently edited includes Selected essays of modern Chinese thought (Shanghai, 2013), Genealogies of the Asian present: situating inter-Asia cultural studies (with T. Tejiasvani, Delhi, 2015) and Citta Senza Limiti: Studi Culturali sull Urbanizzazio ne Cinese (Venice, 2016).
Notes
1. The establishment of the people’s republic of China in 1949 is the first epoch-making triumph of the ‘Chinese Revolution’. During the 1950s, the many radical policies implemented by the Chinese communist party to remake the society continued this revolution. However, from the mid-1950s, the ‘socialist’ project led by the Chinese communist party gradually turned sour. Conflicts within the society became serious and led to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution; the failure of the Cultural Revolution triggered the ‘Reform’ in the 1980s and this resulted in the ‘Fourth of June’ tragedy in 1989. By this point, all energy for the intellectual and social movements of the ‘Chinese Revolution’ was used up and society turned to the right. China entered the first ‘anti-revolution’ or ‘post-revolution’ phase dominated by the right wing in its modern history. From this perspective, the 1950s–1970s was the period when the Chinese Revolution started to decline. Therefore, I fix the end of the high tide of the Chinese Revolution in the middle of twentieth century.
References
- Lu, Xun. 1927, Wild grass, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003, p. 2.
- Wang, Xiaoming. 2010, Three tough questions of cultural studies, Shanghai: Academic Journal of Shanghai University, the first issue of 2010, 3–5; Its English version see Creativity & Academic Activism, M. Morris and M Hjort, eds. Hong Kong/Durham: HKU Press/Duke U Press, 2012.