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In Mao’s era, China’s policy makers and intellectuals viewed aesthetic experience and thought as handmaidens in the service of the political order. As China opened up and engaged more inten...

Examining the 1959 film Five Golden Flowers (Wuduo jinhua), this chapter claims that eulogistic comedy propagates the principle of national unity in ethnic diversity by rallying popular passion and joy, and that a new comic aesthetic arose in Mao’s era from an understanding of the dignity of labor. The new comedy challenges the shopworn dichotomy between the official and unofficial, the ethnic and the national, the lighthearted and the serious. In the 1950s through 1960s, far from being in opposition to the official, the comic is to bridge the gap between ethnic diversity and the emergent nation-state in search of socialist identity in the international arena. Rather than defined by ethnicity and culture, film comedy encourages men and women’s equal participation in socialist labor and the fun-filled ordinary life of love and work. The socialist concept of the Chinese people offers the image of an inclusive world where different ethnic groups can live together and mingle without domination.

It has been a routine practice to draw a clear line between two parts of historical discourse. The history of historians is taken to be archival and narrative labor seeking to discover new data and to register an objective concatenation of occurrences in the past. The other part is theoretical labor, which expounds the principles and models for explaining historical change. Some historians complain that all too often in modern Chinese historiography theoretical labor has tended to get the upper hand of empirical work. Yu Ying-shih remarks that Chinese historians in the Mainland have often gone too far in pursuing theoretical models in historical inquiry, privileging a Hegelian or Marxist style of abstract discourse at the cost of objectivity. 1 Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik uses the familiar distinction of lun and shi to define two parts of history writing in socialist China. While in premodern China the discussion of the dao, or principles that inform change, never ceased to animate the literati, in the twentieth century Chinese historians have embarked on theoretical pursuits with greater urgency. 2 Wang Hui gives credit to this pursuit with the observation that the development of modern Chinese historiography lies not in the accumulation of knowledge about the past, but rather in the constantly renewed efforts to explain historical changes and reformulate historical outlooks. 3

Motion trajectory is the fundamental basis for the design and research of parachute. The fall state, the minimum safe altitude and airborne site are closely associated with the motion trajectory. Particularly due to rapid changes in these parameters such as canopy shape, velocity, dynamic load of the parachute, it is very difficult to determine the motion trajectory of parachute inflation process. Currently, the trajectory is mainly obtained by airdrop tests or wind tunnel tests. The tests are very expensive. Based on the force analysis and mathematical model of a certain type of parachute, we used the computer system to study the motion trajectory of parachute.

During his tenure in the Lu Xun Academy in Yan'an, the center of the Chinese Revolution, the novelist Zhou Libo ran a seminar on world literature. While teaching masterpieces of European novelists, Zhou developed a theory of the novel that inherited themes of liberal humanism and appropriated them for a burgeoning revolutionary culture. In his teaching notes, Zhou upholds the people as the transformative engine for social progress: they are authors of their own culture, the political subjects of popular democracy, and in solidarity with the working classes of the world. This essay considers Zhou's fiction theory as a part of the transition from the old democratic revolution led by the Chinese bourgeoisie to the new democratic cultural initiative carried out by the enlightened intelligentsia and progressive working people.

By addressing the sex-centered mode in psychoanalytical criticism and by tracing certain fraught moments in Ding Ling’s fiction, this chapter suggests that private love can be an integral part of collective solidarity, that unconscious drives can propel the impulse for social change, and that libidinal energy can fuel political passion and collective action. Following Marcuse and Castoriadis, who enlist psychoanalysis for a socially transformative agenda, I call the process whereby libidinal energy translates into political passion “positive sublimation.” By clarifying this term in Chinese cultural studies and analyzing Ding Ling’s fiction, the chapter questions the rigid separation of libidinal life from social commitment, love from politics, and the individual from the collective.

Postmodernists view all reality as representation and visual spectacle. This essay challenges this claim through film analysis of third world cinema and by tracing the tension between photography and history to the earlier debate of modernity in Siegfried Kracauer's work. The essay goes on to show the possibility of historically grounded visual images. By looking at the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi's photo narratives, the essay argues for a photographical image capable of fostering a sense of history deeply rooted in everyday life, communal practice, and social reality. Instead of being the inauthentic mirror of consumer culture, the photographical image is integral to historical imagination, narratives of everyday practice, and cultural memory.

In current discussions, diaspora is associated with population movement, the expansion of world markets, advances in communications technology, and flows of capital and labour. The diasporic spread of people seems to move in tandem with the decline of the nation-state as a dominant political system.1 Evelyn Hu-DeHart has linked the rise of diasporic conditions and sensibility in Asia to the expansion of trade and markets. Chinese businessmen and professionals, for instance, seem to be riding the wave of the diasporic boom. As economic tigers and dragons, the overseas Chinese are poised to enter a free-floating, prosperous orbit of trade and growth. Shedding their national identities and “freely” crossing territories, they “identify first with their co-ethnics wherever they are rather than submit to the hegemonizing claim of exclusive citizenship demanded by a single country or nationstate”. With flexible citizenship, unanchored to a specific national community, Asian diasporics take great strides in uprooting themselves, trotting the globe, and in times of vulnerability, resorting to families and kin and to a wide-ranging network of personal and professional connections.

Ban Wang's tribute to Chu T'ien-wen not only praises Chu's work for capturing the spirit, smells, colors, and textures of the transitioning modern Taiwan, but also identifies Chu's roots in Chinese...

Ruptures of the social fabrics accompany China's rapid pace of development and its integration into the global market, severing the connection between cultural memory and history. Increasingly abstracted into economic, administrative, and exchange processes, the matrix of meaning and values that used to connect individuals to society and the past to the present has lost its self-evidence and cohesive power. In the emergent society of consumption and mass media the older Marxian notion of history as social and political practice is receding from public purview and China's past is being dissolved into spectacles. The 1980s critique of the grand narrative was taken over by the liberal-consumerist erasure of history under the spell of global capital. Cultural production has exhibited a downturn to the immediate and the everyday, to consumptive practices and frivolous pleasure. In opposition to this there arose a striving for renewed engagement with history, an intensified attempt to seek possibilities in the ...

In my local library in East Brunswick, New Jersey, military artifacts, weapons, and photos are on prominent display as a reminder of the days of the world wars, the military interventions of the postwar era, and the sacrifice of young men who grew up in local neighborhoods. If you want to know Chinese culture and history, you have no difficulty finding about thirty or forty books just a few steps away. These books can be readily divided into two categories. One set idealizes a long tradition of Chinese cultural heritage and the other is mostly narrative accounts of harrowing experiences of living in contemporary China. Books like Red Azalea by Anchee Min, White Swan by Jung Chang, and Red Flower of China by Zhai Zhenhua form a genre of semiautobiography. They tell stories of personal tragedy, tortuous bildungsroman, the purgatory experience under the “totalitarian regime.” The first set seems to freeze China in a comfort zone of ancient civilization; the narratives appeal to an audience that would still like to see a “Red China” with demonic intents of the enemy. In the wake of September 11, the proximity of the military memorabilia to books about China takes on uncanny significance. If the unconscious structure can be traced in physical layout of mundane objects, we may detect a hidden standoff between the weapons for national security and the fantasies of China or other foreign countries as real or imagined threats. The memorabilia testify not just to the world wars but also to the more extended agenda of national security through military interventions during the Cold War. We have been told that the Cold War ended in 1989 and things have moved on to the globalization track. The Cold War, with its confrontation between sovereign nation-states of leviathan power, its mutually assured destruction policy, and its ideological conflict, has gone the way of the dinosaurs. We are entering into a new age relieved of big power’s confrontation and threat, blessed with accelerated economic momentum and free flows of capital without borders: where the modernist style of international politics is obsolete, taken over by the postmodern fluid dynamics of trade and commerce, under the imperial supervision of the supranational jurisdiction of an international system. Events since September 11 came as a shattering blow to this myth of globalization. By conjuring up the specter of the Cold War, they compel us to question the neoliberal forecast of the global circuit of capital accu