Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of literature, art and aesthetics. However, with political upheavals in the 1980s, the introduction of and reflection on Western literary theories were criticized as "bourgeois liberalization." In the 1990s, despite the fact that Chinese scholars ceased politically opposing the introduction of Western literary theory, there remains an "anti-Western" tendency. Contemporary Chinese literary theory in the new century continues the ideology of "de-Western-centralism" since the 1990s, but it goes further by completely reversing the "teacher-student" relationship between the West and China. If we shall no longer reject western discourse and strengthen the purity of Chinese discourse out of unwillingness to being "colonized," we would fall into another extreme but to construct a new system of discourse of Chinese literary theory with its global influence.