Period-2

1950s-1960s (the 17 years)

Admussen, Nick. Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016.

[Abstract: Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes their answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry. Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s. Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.]

Altehenger, Jennifer and Denise Y Ho, eds. Material Contradictions in Mao’s China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.

[Abstract: The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to have had little material culture to speak of. Yet people attributed great meaning to materials and objects often precisely because they were rare and difficult to obtain. This first volume devoted to the material history of the period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough. Bringing together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more, this volume shares groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film. With engaging narratives and probing analysis, the contributors make a place for China’s experience in the history of global material culture and the study of socialist modernity.]

Arkush, David. “Introduction.” In Hua-ling Nieh, ed., Literature of the Hundred Flowers, Volume II: Poetry and Fiction. NY: Columbia UP, 1981, xiii-xxxviii.

Birch, Cyril. “The Dragon and the Pen.” Soviet Survey 14 (April/June 1958): 22-26.

—–, ed. Chinese Communist Literature. NY: Praeger, 1963.

—–. “Chinese Communist Literature: The Persistence of Traditional Forms.” China Quarterly 13 (Jan/March 1963): 74-91.

—–. “The Particle of Art.” China Quarterly 13 (Jan/March 1963): 3-14.

—–. “Literature Under Communism.” In Roderick MacFarquhar and John King Fairbank, ed., Cambrigdge History of China. Vol. 15, The People’s Republic of China, Pt.2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986, 743-812.

Boorman, Howard. Literature and Politics in Contemporary China. Jamaica, NY: St John’s UP, 1960.

—–. “The Literary World of Mao Tse-tung.” China Quarterly 13 (1963): 15-38. Rpt in Cyril Birch, ed., Chinese Communist Literature. NY: Praeger, 1963, 15-38.

Borowitz, Albert. Fiction in Communist China. Cambridge, MA: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1954.

Braester, Yomi. “The Political Campaign as Genre: Ideology and Iconography during the Seventeen Years Period.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (March 2008): 119-40.

[Abstract: The essay examines films produced during the Seventeen Years period (1949-66) and suggests that political campaigns may be akin to film genres. Insofar as generic distinctions of theme and style are produced according to the shifting interests of critics and producers, campaigns have produced a politically motivated typology. The examination of campaigns as genrelike offers an opportunity to rethink the connection not only between Maoism and its cultural manifestations but also between ideology and form in general.]

Button, Peter. Aesthetic Formation and the Image of Modern China: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Cai Yi. Ph.d. diss. Ithaca: Cornell Univerity, 2000.

—–. Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

[Abstract: The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understoodin light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept ofliterature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China’s unique, complex, and creative articulation of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q.” Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory of the type (dianxing) and the image (xingxiang) is then explored in relation to global currents in literary thought and philosophy, making possible a fundamental rethinking of Chinese socialist realist novels like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan’s Red Crag.]

Cai, Xiang. Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966. Eds/trs. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nicolai Volland]

[Abstract: Published in China in 2010, Revolution and Its Narratives is a historical, literary, and critical account of the cultural production of the narratives of China’s socialist revolution. Through theoretical, empirical, and textual analysis of major and minor novels, dramas, short stories, and cinema, Cai Xiang offers a complex study that exceeds the narrow confines of existing views of socialist aesthetics. By engaging with the relationship among culture, history, and politics in the context of the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society and arts, Cai illuminates the utopian promise as well as the ultimate impossibility of socialist cultural production. Translated, annotated, and edited by Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, this translation presents Cai’s influential work to English-language readers for the first time.]

Chan, Shau-wing. “Literature in Communist China.” Problems of Communism 7, 1 (Jan/Feb 1958): 44-51.

Chan, Sylvia. “The Image of a ‘Capitalist Roader’: Some Dissident Short Stories in the Hundred Flowers Period.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 2 (July 1979): 72-102.

—–. “The Blooming of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ and the Literature of the ‘Wounded Generation.'” In Bill Brugger, ed., China Since the ‘Gang of Four’. London: Croom Helm, 1980, 174-201.

Chan, Roy Bing. “Sleepless Nights in Fast Socialism: Dream Rhetoric and Fiction in the Mao Era.” In Chan, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 108-46.

Chao, Ts’ung. The Communist Program for Literature and Art in China. HK: Union Research Institute, 1955.

—–. “Literature and Art.” In Communist China: 1956. HK: Union Research Institute, 1957, 149-59.

Cheek, Timothy. Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. NY: Oxford UP, 1997.

Chen, A. S. “The Ideal Local Party Secretary and the ‘Model’ Man.” The China Quarterly 17 (Jan-Mar. 1964): 229-40.

Chen, Helen H. “Irony, Satire and (Un)reliability: Parodying the Genre of the Rightist Fiction.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 6, 1 (April 1999): 1-20.

Chen, S. H. (Shih-hsiang). “Metaphor and the Conscious in Chinese Poetry under Communism.” In Cyril Birch, ed. Chinese Communist Literature. NY: Praeger, 1963, 39-59.

—–. “Multiplicity in Uniformity: Poetry and the Great Leap Forward.” In R. MacFarquhar, ed., China Under Mao: Politics Takes Command. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966, 392-406.

—–. “Language and Literature Under Communism.” In Yuan-li Wu, ed., China: A Handbook. NY: Praeger, 1973, 705-36.

Chen, Sihe. “On ‘Invisible Writing’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature 1949-1976.” Tr. Hongbing Zhang. MCLC Resource Center Publication.

Chen, Xiaomei. “Worker-Peasant-Soldier Literature.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 65-83.

—–. “1964: The ‘Red Pageant’ and China’s First Atomic Bomb.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 656-62.

Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rosemarie Roberts]

[Abstract: The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.]

Chen, Xiaoming. “The Disappearance of Truth: From Realism to Modernism in China.” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 158-65.

—–. “Personal Recollections and the Historicization of Literature: Keep the Red Flag Flying as a Case Study of the Complexity of Revolutionary Literature.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 225-47.

—–. “Socialist Literature Driven by Radical Modernity, 1950-1980.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 81-97.

Chin, Luke Kai-hsin. The Politics of Drama Reform in China after 1949: Elite Strategies of Resocialization. Ph. D. diss. NY: New York University, 1980.

Chung, Hiliary and Tommy McClellan, “The Command Enjoyment of Literature in China: Conferences, Controls and Excesses.’ In Hilary Chung ed., In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996, 1-22.

—–. Newborn Socialist Things: Materiallity in Maoist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: Contemporary China is seen as a place of widespread commodification and consumerism, while the preceeding Maoist Cultural Revolution is typically understood as a time when goods were scarce and the state criticized what little consumption was possible. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, both the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. In Newborn Socialist Things, Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Cultural Revolution to show how it paved the way for commodification in contemporary China. Examining objects ranging from retail counters and porcelain statuettes to textbooks and vanity mirrors, she shows how the project of building socialism in China has always been intimately bound up with consumption. By focusing on these objects—or “newborn socialist things”—along with the Cultural Revolution’s media environment, discourses of materiality, and political economy, Coderre reconfigures understandings of the origins of present-day China.]

Cohen, Jerome. “The Party and the Courts: 1940-1959.” The China Quarterly 38 (April-June 1969): 120-57.

Crespi, John. “Calculated Passions: The Lyric and the Theatric in Mao-era Poetry Recitation.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 72-110.

Crozier, Ralph, ed. China’s Cultural Legacy and Communism. NY: Praeger, 1970.

Cultural Press. The People’s New Literature: Four Reports at the First All-China Conference of Writers and Artists. Beijing: Cultural Press, 1950. [with essays by Zhou Enlai, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, and Zhou Yang].

DeMare, Brian. “Local Actors and National Politics: Rural Amateur Drama Troupes and Mass Campaigns in Hubei Province, 1949-1953.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 129-178.

—–. “The Romance and Tragedy of Rural Revolution: Narratives and Novels of Land Reform in Mao’s China.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 43, 4 (Summer 2014): 341-365.

—–. Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

[Abstract: Charting their training, travels, and performances, this innovative study explores the role of the artists that roamed the Chinese countryside in support of Mao’s communist revolution. DeMare traces the development of Mao’s ‘cultural army’ from its genesis in Red Army propaganda teams to its full development as a largely civilian force composed of amateur and professional drama troupes in the early years of the PRC. Drawing from memoirs, artistic handbooks, and rare archival sources, Mao’s Cultural Army uncovers the arduous and complex process of creating revolutionary dramas that would appeal to China’s all-important rural audiences. The Communists strived for a disciplined cultural army to promote party policies, but audiences often shunned modern and didactic shows, and instead clamoured for traditional works. DeMare illustrates how drama troupes, caught between the party and their audiences, did their best to resist the ever growing reach of the PRC state.]

—–. “Drama from Beijing to Long Bow: Reforming Shanxi stages in socialist China.” In Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance, Practice, and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 187-215.

Denton, Kirk A. “Rectification: Party Discipline, Intellectual Remolding, and the Formation of a Political Community.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 51-63.

Eber, Irene. “Social Harmony, Family and Women in Chinese Novels, 1948-58.” The China Quarterly 117 (Mar., 1989): 71-96.

Farquhar, Mary. “Revolutionary Children’s Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 4 (July 1980): 61-84.

Fokkema, D.W. Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956-60. Hague: Mouton, 1965.

Gerth, Karl. Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruksana Kibria]

Giafferri-Huang, Xiaomin. Le roman chinois depuis 1949. Paris: Press Universitaire de France, 1991.

Goldman, Merle. Literary Dissent in Communist China. NY: Antheneum, 1971.

Green, Frederik H. “A Russian Hero’s Journey through Time and Space: Nicholai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered in China.” In Li Li Peters and Rosemary Roberts, eds., The Legacy of the Red Classics in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 136-155.

Greene, Maggie. “A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance: Meng Chao, Li Huiniang, and the Politics of Drama, 1959-1979.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 149-99.

—–. Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

[Abstract: Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Focusing on these concerns points to continuities and ruptures in the cultural history of modern China beyond the bounds of “campaign time.” Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, including that surrounding Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by exploring ghost plays such as Li Huiniang that at first appear more innocent. To the contrary, Greene shows how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.

Guo, Bingru. “Revolutionary Narrative in the Seventeen Years Period.” Tr. Michael Gibbs Hill. In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 305-18.

He, Qiliang. “Between Business and Bureaucrats: Pingtan Storytelling in Maoist and Post-Maoist China.” Modern China 36, 3(2010): 243-268.

[Abstract: This article examines the complex relationship of the state, market, and artists in pingtan storytelling in post-1949 China. By focusing on Su Yuyin, a pingtan storyteller, and his performing career, this article explores the persistence of cultural markets after the Communist victory in 1949 and argues that the market continued to play a significant role in shaping China’s popular culture, which the government was keen on patronizing and politicizing. By comparing the regime’s management of pingtan storytelling before and after the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976), this article further argues that the regime’s censorship of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was handicapped by its lack of financial resources and the continued existence of cultural markets. The result was that censorship was not as strictly and efficiently enforced as has been assumed.]

Hegel, Robert. “Making the Past Serve the Present in Fiction and Drama: From the Yan’an Forum to the Cultural Revolution.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 197-223.

Hendrischke, Hans J. Populare Lesestoffe: Propaganda und Agitation im Buchwesen der Volksrepublik China (Popular Reading Material: Propaganda and Agitation in Book Publishing in the People’s Republic of China). Bochum: Herausgeber Chinathemen, 1988.

Henningsen, Lena. “Tastes of Revolution, Change and Love: Codes of Consumption in Fiction from New China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 4 (2014): 575-97.

[Abstract: This paper analyses Socialist Realist novels from the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), focusing on scenes of food and drink consumption. While these scenes may appear marginal at first glance, the analysis demonstrates how food and its consumption function as codes to normative values. I am therefore proposing a reading of these texts based on the model of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva) and on an anthropological model on (food) consumption (Mary Douglas), advocating that acts of consumption reveal social hierarchies and the position of the individual therein. These fictional scenes of everyday activities construct fictional characters as heroes or villains. Given the normative value of this officially endorsed literature, these scenes at the same time prescribe (and, likewise, proscribe) certain behavior to their readers. On another level, however, these codes also convey information that could not be openly spelled out at the time, as when the sharing of food is the only way in which two fictional characters can express their love. Simple food can thus be the source of entertainment, enjoyment, suspense, and even nostalgia for contemporary readers, which, in turn, may be one of the reasons for the lasting popularity of the codes described and of a number of the texts presented in the analysis.]

—–. “Chairman Mao’s Good Reader: Mise en abyme in The Diary of Lei Feng.” Read China: The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China (Oct. 1, 2022).

Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Michael M. Day. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward Gunn]

Hsia, Tsi-An. “Twenty Years after the Yenan Forum.” In Cyril Birch, ed., Chinese Communist Literature. NY: Praeger, 1963, 226-253. Rpt. in Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 234-60.

—–. Heroes and Hero-Worship in Chinese Communist Fiction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

Hsu, Kai-yu. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Its Search for an Ideal Form.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 224-65.

Huang, Joe. Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life. HK: Heinemann, 1973.

Huangfu, Jenny. “Roads to Salvation: Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian, and the Problem of Non-Communist Celebrity Writers, 1948-1957.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 39-87.

Huerta, Elise. “Hands at Work: Labor, Hygiene, and Mechanization in Maoist Culture.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 22-33.

[Abstract: This essay focuses on the cultural representation of hands as a lens through which to examine the reappraisal of manual labor in the Mao era. Efforts to represent labor as “glorious,” I argue, required a two-pronged transformation from existing dominant discourses. First, cultural producers aimed to reverse the assumption that labor was “dirty” by rebranding workers’ hands as physically and ideologically pure against the polluted bourgeoisie. Second, I draw upon the Arendtian distinction between “labor” and “work” to argue that labor was transmuted from cyclical, meaningless toil into durable and expressive “work” through magical representations of the peasants’ touch. However, efforts to glorify labor as a clean, durable craft in the volatile political climate of the socialist period presented major challenges. Through careful analysis of a 1952 war poster Mao’s Quotations, shifting depictions of night-soil collector Shi Chuanxiang, and Zhao Shuli’s 1960 short story “The Unglovable Hands,” this essay illustrates how cultural producers grappled with unstable allegiances and paradoxes in the Party line, with hands repeatedly emerging as a fault line on which critical questions converged and political battles were waged.]

Hung, Chang-tai. “The Dance of Revolution: Yangge in Beijing in the Early 1950s.” The China Quarterly 181 (March 2005): 82-99.

Hutt, Michael. “Reading Nepali Maoist Memoirs.” Studies in Nepali History and Society 17, no. 1 (June 2012): 107–142.

Idema, Wilt. “1954, September 25-November 2: The Emergence of Regional Opera on the National Stage.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 585-90.

Inwald, Minerva. “The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses: Cultural Work in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward.” Modern China 49, 3 (2023): 290-319.

[Abstract: In the early 1960s, as part of a suite of policies intended to rectify the failures of the Great Leap Forward, the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture launched new cultural policies that inaugurated a relatively liberal period for the arts in the People’s Republic of China. This article explores how these new policies reconceptualized the relationship between art and politics to emphasize the importance of providing audiences with experiences of enjoyment, relaxation, and aesthetic pleasure, as well as how state-run media reporting on the newly opened Museum of Chinese Art and its inaugural exhibition embodied the aspirations of these new policies by describing and imagining visitors indulging in the beauty of the museum and the artworks on display. By examining the brief expansion of what it meant for art to serve socialism in the early 1960s, this article reveals that cultural officials experimented with multiple configurations of the relationship between art and politics during the Mao Zedong era.]

Ji, Fengyuan. Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.

Kan, Har Ye. “1949; 1958: A New Time Consciousness: The Great Leap Forward.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 550-56.

Kang, Xiaofei. Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Enchanted Revolution moves religion and gender to center stage in the Chinese Communist revolution, examining the mobilizational dynamics of anti-superstition propaganda in support of the Communist Party’s rise from rural backwaters to national dominance. Kang argues that religion was not merely adversary for the revolutionaries-it also served as a model for the ways in which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had long supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted these same religious resources for its own political ends. Kang demonstrates that the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Moreover, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new masculinist vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. Enchanted Revolution sheds light on the contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in China through a deft exploration of the complex interplay of religion, gender, and revolution.]

Kaufmann, Andrew. “Imagining the New Socialist Child: The Cultural Afterlife of the Child Martyr Wang Erxiao.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 34 (2020): 1-23.

[Abstract: Recent scholarship in modern Chinese studies has established the centrality of the figure of the child in modern configurations of nationhood. Yet very few studies have focused on the motif of child martyrdom and its place within Chinese socialist culture. By exploring the cultural afterlife of the socialist martyr Wang Erxiao in mid-twentieth-century China, this article shows how the heroic sacrificial death of the boy both powered and imperiled the Communist-led revolution and the construction of a new, socialist society. The author argues that, on the one hand, the figure of the socialist child martyr embodied the desire for the child to play a more active role in the Communist revolution and in the creation of a socialist utopia. On the other hand, in lionizing the heroic death of the child—the so-called revolutionary successor—stories like Wang Erxiao’s also posed an existential threat to the socialist community and brought to the fore tensions intrinsic to politicizing and aestheticizing the death of a child. By examining the relationship between children, violence, and sacrificial death, this article highlights the desires and anxieties embedded within the socialist project to create an image of the “new child.”]

Kindler, Benjamin. “Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form.” Modern China 48, 5 (2022).

[Abstract: Across an extended historical arc, Chinese writers and theorists were invested in new, short literary forms that would be able to intervene in the reorganization of social relations. These forms occurred under a range of names during the twentieth century—the wall story 墙头小说, the short short story 小小说, and the microstory 微型小说—but consistently marked a series of avant-garde experiments concerned with locating an alternative to the long-form novel. This article examines this history from its emergence amid the international proletarian movement of the 1930s, through the Great Leap Forward, and on to the early reform period, and does so through the theoretical lens of the everyday 日常生活 and the relation between literary texts and visual media. It demonstrates how the deployment of these forms shifted from an attempt to remake everyday life to their assimilation to a discourse of modernization in the reform period.]

King, Richard. “The Hundred Flowers.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 476-80.

—–. “The Hundred Flowers: Qin Zhaoyang, Wang Meng, and Lin Binyan.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 245-49.

—–. Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945-80. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Roy Bing Chan]

[Abstract: Literature created under and by a repressive regime is rarely accorded the same respect as works that go against the party line. Yet, as Richard King’s Milestones on a Golden Road argues, these works deserve serious attention as part of an attempt, however misguided, to create a Chinese socialist culture. King presents eight pivotal works of fiction produced in four key periods of Chinese revolutionary history: the civil war (1945-49), the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the post-Mao catharsis (1979-80). Taking its cues from the Soviet Union’s optimistic depictions of a society liberated by Communism, the official Chinese literature of this era is characterized by grand narratives of progress. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Early “red classics” were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering — a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.]

Knight, Sabina. “Moral Decision in Mao-Era Fiction.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 133-61.

Kraus, Richard. “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 249-62.

Kunze, Rui and Marc Andre Matten. Knowledge Production in Mao-Era China: Learning from the Masses. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Fa-ti Fan]

[Abstract: This book traces and analyzes the transformation of the public discourse of science and technology in Mao-era China. Based on extensive primary sources such as science dissemination materials and technical handbooks, as well as mass media products of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution periods, this book delineates the emergence of a pragmatic approach to knowledge in society. To achieve the goal of fast modernization with limited financial, human, and material resources, the party-state accommodated Western and local, “modern” and “traditional” knowledges in the fields of agricultural mechanization, steel production and Chinese veterinary medicine. The case studies demonstrate that scientific knowledge production in the Mao-era included various social groups and was entangled with political and cultural issues. This reveals and explains the continuity of scientific thinking across the historical divides of 1949 and 1978, which has hitherto been underestimated.]

Larson, Wendy. “Can a Revolutionary Be Happy? The Debate on Happiness in 1960s China.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, 1 (March 2019): 3-18.

[Abstract: In 1963, China Youth published letters from youth on the topic of happiness. While some agreed that following the model of self-sacrifice exemplified by Lei Feng was the only way to be a happy revolutionary, others brought up contradictions in the approach to happiness promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. Through an investigation of happiness in Marxism and Maoism, the author analyzes the arguments put forward in the letters, concluding that by the early 1960s any notion of a unified revolutionary subjectivity was riddled with cracks. The young letter writers question the panreligious embrace of self-sacrifice, struggle, and misery, which can then be transformed into revolutionary happiness through willpower.]

Laughlin, Charles. “Incongruous Lyricism: Liu Baiyu, Yang Shuo and sanwen in Chinese Socialist Culture.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 115-29.

Lekner, Dayton. The Writer and the Written: Literary Exchange and Political Campaign in the People’s Republic of China, 1955-58. Ph.D. diss. University of Melbourne, 2019.

[Abstract: This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between political campaign and literary exchange in the early People’s Republic of China. In contrast to narratives that characterize literature as a political tool wielded by Mao Zedong and the CCP leadership, or as a mode of dissent deployed by literati opposed to the regime, I suggest a model in which patterns of literary circulation, as well as bureaucratic discipline and charismatic mobilization, were central to the playing out of political campaigns in the Mao era. Through a study of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns, I show that intellectuals across the political spectrum met in textual exchanges and circulation that constituted, rather than lay in tension with, the ongoing campaigns.]

—–. “A Chill in Spring: Literary Exchange and Political Struggle in the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956–1958.” Modern China 44, 5 (2018).

[Abstract: Who had the power to innovate in the linguistic and literary realms in the high Mao era? To date, scholars have emphasized a top-down enforcement of formulaic language through a mixture of Communist Party organization and Maoist charisma. This article challenges the exhaustiveness of that model by articulating the circulation, appropriation, and modulation of literary tropes during the political campaigns of 1956–1958. To this end, it traces the widespread uptake of the titular metaphor of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and its proliferation throughout public debate. Troubling the top-down model is the challenge to this propagation posed by sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910–2005) with his essay “The Early Spring Weather of Intellectuals” and the impact that essay, and its central metaphor, had on public discourse. In exploring this battle over the metaphorical season, this article reimagines the Hundred Flowers, Rectification, and Anti-Rightist campaigns through the lens of literary exchange. It argues that in distinct cases it was control of public discourse through literary virtuosity that constituted a key battleground during the campaigns.]

—–. “Echolocating the Social: Silence, Voice, and Affect in China’s Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns, 1956–58.” Journal of Asian Studies 80, 4 (Nov. 2021): 933-53.

[Abstract: What is the catalytic element that brings about widespread participation in a mass campaign? Is it ideology? Self-interest? Emotional states of fear, hatred, or love? Taking into account the recent proliferation of sound studies approaches to the history of the People’s Republic of China, this article explores this question through the sonic experience of the campaign. Previous studies of the soundscapes of the Mao era have focused upon state initiatives of sound-borne propaganda and their role in the transmission of revolutionary ideas. Using a case study of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns of 1956–58, I examine the reception of such propaganda with a focus on silence, sound, and voice and their affective qualities. Through the use of diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews, I explore the extra-linguistic aspects of the campaign to ask what, outside of revolutionary words and emotions, brought the subjects of a campaign from silence to vocal participation.]

—–. “States of Diffusion: Ideology, Text, Voice, and Sound in Cold War Chinas.” Modern China 49, 2 (March 2023): 159-91.

[Abstract: From 1953 to 1991, speaker installations on the coasts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan sent audio signals back and forth between the two Cold War foes. This opposed amplification and diffusion of sound continued for nearly four decades, employed thousands of “callers,” technicians, station managers, scriptwriters, and other staff, and was heard by successive generations of troops and civilians on both sides. Previous research on the use of sound for mobilization and subjectification in China during this era has focused on the authoritarian, revolutionary, or even totalitarian nature of sonic statecraft. This article, drawing on state archives, memoirs, and interviews, compares the goals, infrastructure, and voices of the two sides to suggest a broader and more transnational framework for understanding acts of sonic propaganda and control, representative not of “communist” or “free” China, but as a diffusion of the state voice into acts of listening between states. It also explores how the opposed initiatives of both sides interacted and influenced each other over years of call and response. Finally, it examines the civilian response to the broadcasts, revealing plural modes of listening, and of apprehending both oneself and one’s enemy. I offer the metaphor of “diffusion” not only to describe the process by which states and individuals positioned themselves through the transmission and reception of sonic impulses, but as a way to do social history that focuses on the multiple receptions and reverberations of an event.]

Li, Chi. The Use of Figurative Language in Communist China. Studies in Chinese Communist Terminology, no. 5. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1958.

Li, Jie. “1965, July 14: Red Prison Files.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 663-68.

—–. “Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era.” Twentieth-Century China 45, 1 (2020): 25-45.

[Abstract: Providing a sound track to a previously silent historiography, this article excavates a media history of the wireless and wired soundscape in Mao-era China. In 1949, China had only about one million radio sets, concentrated in urban “bourgeois” homes, but the Communist Party quickly expanded its listening public through a “radio reception network” and by the 1970s had constructed a wired broadcasting infrastructure with more than 100 million loudspeakers that revolutionized time and space, politics and everyday life. Drawing on archives, gazetteers, memoirs, and oral histories, this article examines the state-sponsored development of radio broadcasting as well as grassroots listening experiences and practices. I argue that radios and loudspeakers— rather than enthralling the nation with the party’s monotonous voice—contributed to the Chinese revolution in heterogeneous ways, from political communication to labor mobilization, from propaganda to surveillance, from enhancing the Mao cult to engendering violence and terror.]

Li, Peter. “War and Modernity in Chinese Military Fiction.” Society 34, 5 (July 1997): 77-89. [deals in part with Du Pengcheng’s Defend Yan’an and Wu Qiang’s Red Sun]

Li, Ting-sheng. The CCP’s Persecutions of Intellectuals in 1949-1969. Taipei: Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, 1969.

Licandro, Daniela. “Beyond Overcoming: A Woman Writer’s Articulation of Pain in Socialist China.” Nan Nü 23 (2021): 301-336.

—–. “Affective Chinese Socialist Realism: A Reading of Zhao Shuli’s Sanliwan Village.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 55, 1-2 (2024): 67-79.

[Abstract: Socialist realism grew out of the political agenda of educating the masses on the inevitability of class struggle and out of the need of mobilizing them to contribute to the building of a socialist society. The targets of education were not solely the illiterate peasants but also the intellectuals who needed to overcome their petit-bourgeois outlook. Scholarship has elucidated the limits and potentialities of socialist realism as an aesthetic practice at the service of a political project, but the question of how socialist realism sought to educate both peasants and intellectuals begs for reflection. Focusing on Zhao Shuli’s (1906–70) 1955 socialist-realist novel Sanliwan Village, this article asks how the text responded to the task of transforming both the masses and the intellectuals. It argues that Zhao’s text performs the process underlying the subject’s transformation into a new socialist being. The analysis of nicknames, “cinematic storytelling,” speed and rhythm, and of tools as “touching things” sheds light on the textual strategies that produce an affective narrative. As such, Zhao’s novel points to socialist- subject formation not simply as an effect of discursive practices, but as the outcome of a renewed sensorial engagement with the material world.]

Link, Perry. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Liu, Kang. “Rethinking the Aesthetic Debate in the 1950s and 1960s.” Literature Review (2000): 34-59.

Liu, Lydia. “A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 553-609. [deals in part with film “Liu Sanjie” and its folk roots]

Liu, Siyuan. Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

[Abstract: Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research.]

Liu, Xiaobo. “Mutual Destruction and Mutual Purges in Academic Circles.” Chinese Law and Government 38, 5 (Sept-Oct. 2005): 58-77. [link is to a reprint on the Chinese Pen website]

Liu, Yu. “Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China.” Modern China 36, 3 (2010): 329-362.

[Abstract: This article focuses on how Maoist discourse engineered revolutionary emotions as a method of political mobilization. Based on personal memoirs and eyewitness accounts, it argues that the Maoist discourse can be disaggregated into three themes, each aimed at provoking one type of emotion: the theme of victimization, which mobilized indignation in struggle campaigns; the theme of redemption, which generated guilt in thought reform campaigns; and the theme of emancipation, which raised euphoria in social transformation campaigns. It also argues that Maoist discourse propagation employed three techniques—personalization, magnification, and moralization—and emphasizes that these techniques of propagation are as important as the content of the three themes in the production of passions.]

Leung, K. C. “Literature in the Service of Politics: The Chinese Literary Scene Since 1949.” World Literature Today 55, 1 (1981): 18-20.

MacFarquhar, Roderick. The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectual. NY: Praeger, 1960.

McConaghy, Mark. “Where You Labor Is Where you Sing: The New Folksong Movement of 1958 and the Fissured Mediascape of Maoist China.” Modern China 46, 6 (2020).

[Abstract: This article examines the New Folksong Movement (NFM) of 1958–1959, which was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign. It employs an analytical strategy called fissured reading, whereby a discursive assemblage that seems ideologically uniform can be made to reveal the myriad tensions that its own positive facade works to conceal. While the NFM seems suffused with songs of praise for the GLF, closer inspection reveals a project riven with tensions regarding the creative agency of the people, the persistence of “old” songs in popular culture, and dialects. Such methodological concerns were in fact foundational to modern folk study in China as it developed from the 1920s onward. Understanding such historical connections can help us rethink the cultural revolutions in modern China as fissured projects, with tense cracks just beneath their surface that indicate unresolved contradictions passed on from one generation of reformers and revolutionaries to the next.]

Mittelstaedt, Jean Christopher. “Culture for the Masses: Building Grassroots Cultural Infrastructure in China.” Modern China 50, 5 (2024): 607-40.

[Abstract: This article focuses on the development of “grassroots cultural infrastructure”—namely, “cultural halls” and “cultural stations”—at the county level and below since the Mao Zedong era. Since their formation, the party-state has accorded cultural halls and stations a critical role in propagating policies, educating citizens, and conducting cultural activities. Based on historical gazetteers, Chinese Communist Party histories, government policies, handbooks, and statistical yearbooks, this article shows that frequently changing policy priorities meant cultural halls and stations were wedged in between the demands of the party-state and the people and were ill-equipped to fulfill their role. Mass political campaigns during the Mao era wrought havoc, and commercialization during reform and opening up undermined their relevance. In the mid-2000s, a focus on service provision resulted in higher expectations that were impossible to fulfill. As a remedy, after 2015, cultural infrastructure has been reorganized and increasingly deployed via volunteers and technology. This article therefore sheds light not only on the history of grassroots cultural infrastructure but also its future.]

Mu, Aili. Mao Zedong’s Aesthetic Ideology and Its Function. Ph.d. diss. SUNY, Stonybrook, 1996.

Pang, Laikwan. “Can Dialectic Materialism Produce Beauty? The “Great Aesthetic Debates” (1956–1962) in the People’s Republic of China.” International Journal of Asian Studies 19, 3 (2022).

[Abstract: This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu’s aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.]

—–. “Making Sense of Labor: Works of Art and Arts of Work in China’s Great Leap Forward.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 151-73.

Pickowicz, Paul. Marxist Literary Thought and China: A Conceptual Framework. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1980.

Qian, Ying. “The Shopfloor as Stage: Production Competition, Democracy, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Red Flag Song.” China Perspectives 2 (2015): 7-14.

Roberts, Rosemary and Li Li, eds. The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics” Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yizhong Gu]

[Abstract: the first full-length work to bring together research on the “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to the reform era. It covers a representative range of genres including novels, short stories, films, TV series, picture books, animation, and traditional-style paintings. Collectively the chapters offer a panoramic view of the production and reception of the original “red classics” and the adaptations and remakes of such works after the Cultural Revolution. The contributors present fascinating stories of how a work came to be regarded as, or failed to become, a “red classic.” There has never been a single answer to the question of what counts as a “red classic”; artists had to negotiate the changing political circumstances and adopt the “correct” artistic technique to bring out the “authentic” image of the people, while appealing to the taste of the mass audience at the same time. A critical examination of these works reveals their sociopolitical and ideological import, aesthetic significance, and function as mass cultural phenomenon at particular historical moments. This volume marks a step forward in the growing field of the study of Maoist cultural products.]

Schwartz, Benjamin. “The Intelligentsia in Communist China: A Tentative Comparison.” In Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia. NY: Columbia UP, 1961.

Song, Mingwei. “The Taming of the Youth: Discourse, Politics, and Fictional Representation in the Early PRC.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 9, 2 (July 2009): 108-38.

—–. “The Taming of the Young: The Socialist Bildungsroman.” In Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015, 286-333.

Song, Mingwei and Shengqing Wu, editors. The Obscure Decade: Literary Imagination and Political Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC, 1949-1959. Special issue of Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 9, 2 (July 2009).

Song, Yongyi, chief editor. The Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database (1957-). HK: Chinese University Press, 2010.

Stuckey, Andrew. “Interlude: The Maoist (Anti)Tradition and the Nationalist (Neo)Tradition.” In Stuckey, Old Stories Retold: Narrative and Vanishing Pasts in Modern China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010, 59-79.

Su, Fei. “Market Success in a Planned Culture: Illegal Theatrical Performances in Post–Great Leap Forward China.” Modern China 49, 4 (2023).

[Abstract: After 1949, PRC sought to transform the production of popular culture from a market-based business into a section of the planned economy under the party-state. I term this new cultural system “planned culture,” as it followed the same practices as the planned economy system. But in practice, a strong planned culture was hard to maintain with scarce fiscal resources. It faced constant challenges from the cultural market in the Mao Zedong era, especially when the state temporarily retreated from the economic and cultural fields in the post–Great Leap Forward period. By depicting the different faces of unofficial culture, ranging from villages and suburban townships to big cities, this article argues that the state’s cultural reach in the Mao era was limited both by a lack of capacity and sometimes by preference, and that planned culture in the post–Great Leap Forward period was concentrated only in big cities, even after a decade of institutional expansion.]

Su, Wei. “The School and the Hospital: On the Logics of Socialist Realism.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 165-75.

Taylor, Jeremy. “The Sinification of Soviet Agitational Theatre: ‘Living Newspapers’ in Mao’s China.” Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies vol. 2 (July 2013).

[Abstract: The adoption and development of zhivaya gazeta (lit. ‘living newspapers’) in China follows a trajectory common to many forms of artistic expression that were introduced into that country by the Soviets in the early decades of the twentieth century. While the Soviet heritage of this theatre was at first celebrated, the Chinese Communist Party sought to tailor it to particular needs and to present it as a specifically Chinese innovation, rechristening it ‘huobaoju’. Despite dying out in the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, ‘living newspapers’ continued to be produced in China from the 1930s through until the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), with the form being employed in tandem with specific campaigns or attempts at mass mobilisation. Indeed, the very nature of Chinese communism under Mao provided the perfect environment in which this form of theatre could thrive]

Tiewes, Frederick C. Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950-1965. NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1979.

U, Eddy. “Third Sister Liu and the Making of the Intellectual in Socialist China.” Journal of Asian Studies 69, 1 (Feb. 2010): 57-83.

[Abstract: Through an analysis of Third Sister Liu, a popular musical of the early 1960s, this article illustrates how the Chinese Communist Party mobilized state and society to express disparaging ideas about the intellectual during the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese intellectual was not any specific social type, group, or individual, but a substrate upon which the party organized and promoted its vision and division of society. Official representations, organization, and the threat of punishment underpinned the party’s efforts and produced local resistance toward the party’s understanding of the intellectual. The author’s analytical approach stresses the social work of construction that reproduced the intellectual as a major political subject, an official classification, and an embodied identity in socialist China. The analysis illuminates heretofore obscured dimensions of Communist Party rule and experiences of those affected by the classification.]

—–. Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

[Abstract: Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, “the intellectual” was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities, forms of organization, and associations in Chinese society. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China.]

Van Fleit Hang, Krista. “People’s Literature and the Construction of a New Chinese Literary Tradition.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 9, 2 (July 2009): 87-107.

—–. Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966). NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Richard King]

[Abstract: In the Maoist period, authors and the communist literary establishment shared the belief that art could reshape reality, and was thus just as crucial to the political establishment as building new infrastructure or developing advanced weaponry. Literature the People Love investigates the production of a literary system designed to meet the needs of a newly revolutionary society in China, decentering the Cold War understanding of communist culture. Krista Van Fleit Hang shows readers how to understand the intersection of gender, tradition, and communist ideology in essential texts. Rather than arguing for or against the literary merits of the works of the early Maoist period, the book presents a sympathetic understanding of culture from a period in China’s history in which people’s lives were greatly affected by political events.]

—–. “Introduction: Reading People’s Literature.” In Van Fleit Hang, Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966). NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 1-22.

—–. “People’s Literature and the Construction of a New Chinese Literary Tradition.” In Van Fleit Hang, Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966). NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 23-56.

Volland, Nicolai. “A Linguistic Enclave: Translation and Language Policies in the Early People’s Republic of China.” Modern China 35 (2009): 467-494.

—–. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Tie Xiao]

[Abstract: Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As Nicolai Volland demonstrates, after 1949 China engaged with the world beyond its borders in a variety of ways and on many levels—politically, economically, and culturally. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, the young People’s Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter in China’s long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children’s literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.]

—–. “1952, March 18: Transnational Socialist Literature in China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 562-68.

Wagner, Rudolf. “The Cog and the Scout: Functional Concepts of Literature in Socialist Political Culture: The Chinese Debate in the Mid-Fifties.” In W. Kubin and R. Wagner, eds., Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism. Bochum, 1982.

—–. “Life as a Quote from a Foreign Book. Love, Pavel, and Rita.” In H.Schmidt-Glintzer (ed.), Das andere China. Festschrift für Wolfgang Bauer zum 65. Geburtstag, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen; vol. 62. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995, 463-476. [deals with the problems of handling love themes in PRC literature, and Soviet background of its treatment (especially Ostrovski, How the Steel was Tempered)]

—–. “Culture and Code. Historical Fiction in a Socialist Environment: The GDR and China.” In H. Chung (ed.)(with M. Falchikov, B. S. McDougall, K. McPherson), In the Party Spirit. Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Editions Rodopi: Amsterdam/Atlanta 1996, 129-140.

Wang, Ban. “Revolutionary Realism and Revolutonary Romanticism: Song of Youth.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 470-75. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 237-44.

—–. “Socialist Realism.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 101-118.

Wang, Ban, ed. Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

[Abstract: As China joins the capitalist world economy, the problems of social disintegration that gave rise to the earlier revolutionary social movements are becoming pressing. Instead of viewing the Chinese Revolution as an academic study, these essays suggest that the motifs of the Revolution are still alive and relevant. The slogan “Farewell to Revolution” that obscures the revolutionary language is premature. In spite of dislocations and ruptures in the revolutionary language, to rethink this discourse is to revisit a history in terms of sedimented layers of linguistic meanings and political aspirations. Earlier meanings of revolutionary words may persist or coexist with non-revolutionary rivals. Recovery of the vital uses of key revolutionary words proffers critical alternatives in which contemporary capitalist myths can be contested.]

Wang, David Der-wei. “Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 139-64.

Wang, Ning. Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness: Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.

—–. “Benevolent Reeducation and Active Remolding: A Perspective from Liu Yuxuan’s Diary and Correspondence.” Modern China 49, 2 (March 2023): 192-225.

[Abstract: Using recently published personal correspondence and a diary (supplemented by camp gazetteers, recollections, etc.), this article attempts to examine the experiences and inner world of Liu Yuxuan, an intellectual persecuted in 1950s China, during his internment in a reeducation-through-labor (laojiao) camp—his activism in ideological remolding, his perspectives on himself and his campmates, his wife’s role in his redemption, and some practices of and conditions in the Shandong First Laojiao Institution. While recent scholarship has noted the presence of relatively benevolent laojiao camps in the Mao Zedong era, this article shows what reeducation was like for a single individual. It also shows that, for certain types of victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s political campaigns, reeducation involved both genuine efforts for transformation and pragmatic concerns regarding surviving laojiao.]

Wang, Xian. “Writing against Peripheralization: Glorfying Labor in Chinese Socialist Literature.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 68-1 (2022): 173-194.

Wang, Xiaojue. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey C. Kinkley]

[Abstract: The year 1949 witnessed China divided into multiple political and cultural entities. How did this momentous shift affect Chinese literary topography? Modernity with a Cold War Face examines the competing, converging, and conflicting modes of envisioning a modern nation in mid-twentieth century Chinese literature. Bridging the 1949 divide in both literary historical periodization and political demarcation, Xiaojue Wang proposes a new framework to consider Chinese literature beyond national boundaries, as something arising out of the larger global geopolitical and cultural conflict of the Cold War. Examining a body of heretofore understudied literary and cultural production in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas during a crucial period after World War II, Wang traces how Chinese writers collected artistic fragments, blended feminist and socialist agendas, constructed ambivalent stances toward colonial modernity and an imaginary homeland, translated foreign literature to shape a new Chinese subjectivity, and revisited the classics for a new time. Reflecting historical reality in fictional terms, their work forged a path toward multiple modernities as they created alternative ways of connection, communication, and articulation to uncover and undermine Cold War dichotomous antagonism.

Wang, Zihan. “Revolutionary Appropriation of Disability in Socialist Chinese Literature and Film.” China Perspectives 1 (2021): 61-70.

Wei, Lousia S. “Incriminated Writers and Their Wives: Gendered Memory of a National Campaign in Mao’s China.” Memory Studies 17, 1 (2024): 39-55.

[Abstract: The primary source of this study is 76 video interviews concerning a political campaign by the Chinese Communist Party: the Anti-Hu Feng Counter-revolutionary Clique Movement (1955–1956). This campaign and the long incrimination of its central figures—Hu Feng (1902–1985), his wife Mei Zhi (1914– 2004), and other associates—have had an impact on Chinese intellectuals for nearly seven decades and generated hundreds of (auto)biographies, memoirs, critical writings, and scholarly studies since the 1980s. Victimized writers managed to publish again, but the stories of their wives remained obscured and marginalized for years. This article presents three research findings: first, the wives provide different but equally essential testimonies as do the writers; second, methods used by feminist historians can benefit oral history collection from all, but from women and the marginalized in particular; and third, gendered memory helps to bridge the gap between those who have and have not personally experienced specific historical events.]

Wilcox, Emily. “Teaching the Everyday: Socialist Culture as Lived Experience in the Classroom.” The PRC History Review 4, 2 (Aug. 2019).

—–. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaomei Chen]

[Abstract: Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.]

Windscript, Shan. “How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities.” Modern China 46, 2 (2020).

[Abstract: The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual’s role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer’s life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual’s conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the “how-to” books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable—albeit dangerous—to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism’s modern legacies.]

Wu, Guo. “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 1 (Spring 2013): 131-64.

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Sounding the Everyday: Gendered Acoustic Aesthetics of Immaterial Labor and Female Leadership in Socialist Shanghai.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 46-61.

[Abstract: aims to challenge the popular view that a highly abstracted and politicized socialist labor aesthetics exiles the category of everydayness. Using the 1959 film Colors of Spring (Wanzi qianhong zong shi chun) as an example, Xiao shows that the radical agenda of socialist revolution turns traditional “feminine noises” (including women’s everyday conversations and particular sonic elements related to their everyday labor) into revolutionary sounds. More importantly, women play an unprecedentedly active role in shaping the parameters of the new sociopolitical agenda not only through joining the labor force to produce material goods, but also through expanding their access to sound-producing practices that should also be recognized as essential forms of gendered labor (including reproductive and care work at home as well as emotional, intellectual, and organizational labor at work). Through a revisit to the aesthetics and politics of representing tangible sensory experiences of women’s immaterial labor in socialist cinema, we could better understand the sociopolitical significance of socialist women’s liberation that should not be reduced to a utilitarian top-down project of liberating the untapped potential of women’s labor power, but more of a biopolitical revolution through which women transform themselves into active agents in creating new sound practices, communicational networks, social relations, and subjectivities.]

Yang, Lan. “‘Socialist Realism’ versus ‘Revolutionary Realism plus Revolutionary Romanticism.'” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 88-105.

You, Ziying. “Tradition and Ideology: Creating and Performing new Gushi in China, 1962-1966.” Asian Ethnology 71, 2 (2012): 259-80.

Zhang, Yingjin. “1951, September; 1952, September: The Genesis of Literary History in New China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 556-62.

Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 147-207.

Zhao, Zhong. The Communist Program for Literature and Art in China. Kowloon: Union Research Institute, 1955.

Zhong, Yurou. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shuheng (Diana) Zhang]

Zhongguo wenxue yishu gongzuozhe di’erci daibiao dahui ziliao 中国文学艺术工作者第二次代表大会资料 (Materials from the second representatives meeting of China Literary and Art Workers). Beijing: Zhongguo wenxue yishu jielian hehui, 1953.

Zhu, Ping, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds. Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019

[Abstract: During the Mao years, laughter in China was serious business. Simultaneously an outlet for frustrations and grievances, a vehicle for socialist education, and an object of official study, laughter brought together the political, the personal, the aesthetic, the ethical, the affective, the physical, the aural, and the visual. The ten essays in Maoist Laughter convincingly demonstrate that the connection between laughter and political culture was far more complex than conventional conceptions of communist indoctrination can explain. Their sophisticated readings of a variety of genres— including dance, cartoon, children’s literature, comedy, regional oral performance, film, and fiction—uncover many nuanced innovations and experiments with laughter during what has been too often misinterpreted as an unrelentingly bleak period. In Mao’s China, laughter helped to regulate both political and popular culture and often served as an indicator of shifting values, alliances, and political campaigns. In exploring this phenomenon, Maoist Laughter is a significant correction to conventional depictions of socialist China.]

Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

Aijmer, Goran. “Political Ritual: Aspects of the Mao Cult During the Cultural ‘Revolution.'” China Information 11, 2/3 (Aut/Win 1996/97): 215-31.

Altehenger, Jennifer and Denise Y Ho, eds. Material Contradictions in Mao’s China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.

Bai, Di. A Feminist Brave New World: The Cultural Revolution Model Theater Revisited. Ph.D. diss. The Ohio State University, Columbus, 1997.

—–. “The Cultural Revolution Model Theater.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 496-501. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 267-73.

—–. “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Bergman, Par. Paragons of Virtue in Chinese Short Stories during the Cultural Revolution. Gotebord, Graphic Systems, 1984.

Bibliography on Chinese Cultural Revolution (Indiana University Library)

Borden, Caroline. “Characterization in Revolutionary Chinese and Reactionary American Short Stories.” Literature and Ideology 12 (1972): 9-16.

Braester, Yomi. “The Purloined Lantern: Maoist Semiotics and Public Discourse in Early PRC Film and Drama.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 106-27.

—–. “The Red Lantern: Model Plays and Model Revolutionaries.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 680–85.

Brown, Kevin. “Language Politics in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution.” Online resource.

Bryant, Lei Ouyang. New Songs of the Battlefield: Songs and Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ph. D. diss. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2004.

Cao, Zuoya. Out of the Crucible: Literary Works about the Rusticated Youth. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003.

Ch’en, Shih-hsiang. “Language and Literature Under Communism.” In Yuan-li Wu, ed., China: A Handbook. NY: Praeger, 1973, 705-36.

Chen, Sihe. “On ‘Invisible Writing’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature 1949-1976.” Tr. Hongbing Zhang. MCLC Resource Center Publication.

Chen, Xiaomei. “The Marginality of the Study of Cultural Revolution: The Neglected and the Privileged in the Making of Imagined Communities.” Historical Society of Twentieth Century China Annual Conference (Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sept/Oct. 1997).

—–. “The Making of a Revolutionary Stage: Chinese Model Theater and Western Influences.” In Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen, eds., East of West: Cross-cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference.NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 125-40.

—– Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]

—–. “Operatic Revolutions: Tradition, Memory, and Women in Model Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 73-158.

—–. “Family, Village, Nation/State, and the Third World: The Imagined Communities in Model Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 159-194.

—–. “Remembering War and Revolution on the Maoist Stage.” In Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict. New York: Routledge, 2006, 131-145.

Chen, Xiaoming. “Socialist Literature Driven by Radical Modernity, 1950-1980.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 81-97.

Cheng Shi 橙实, et al., eds. Wenge xiaoliao ji 文革笑料集 (A collection of Cultural Revolution jokes). Chengdu: Xinan caijing daxue, 1988.

Chin, Ai-li. “Short Stories in China: Theory and Practice, 1973-1975.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 124-83..

Chin, Luke Kai-hsin. The Politics of Drama Reform in China after 1949: Elite Strategies of Resocialization. Ph. D. diss. NY: New York University, 1980.

Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2008.

[Abstract: A groundbreaking study of cultural life during a turbulent and formative decade in contemporary China, this book seeks to explode several myths about the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966–1976). Through national and local examination of the full range of cultural forms (film, operas, dance, other stage arts, music, fine arts, literature, and even architecture), Clark argues against characterizing this decade as one of chaos and destruction. Rather, he finds that innovation and creativity, promotion of participation in cultural production, and a vigorous promotion of the modern were all typical of the Cultural Revolution. Using a range of previously little-used materials, Clark forces us to fundamentally reassess our understanding of the Cultural Revolution, a period which he sees as the product of innovation in conflict with the effort by political leaders to enforce a top-down modernity. Contents: Introduction; 1. Modelling a new culture; 2. Spreading the new models; 3. Fixing culture on film; 4. Elaborating culture: dance, music, stage, and fine arts; 5. Writing wrongs: public and private fictions and resistance; 6. Conclusion: forcing modernity.]

—–. “Model Theatrical Works and the Remodeling of the Cultural Revolution.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Clark, Paul, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

[Abstract: Bringing together the most recent research on the Cultural Revolution in China, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, and others discuss the music and its political implications. Combined, these chapters, paint a vibrant picture of the long-lasting impact that the musical revolution had on ordinary citizens, as well as political leaders.]

Coderre, Laurence. “Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the Hero in the Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 65-84.

—–. Newborn Socialist Things: Materiallity in Maoist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Dai Jiafang 戴嘉枋. Yangbanxi de fengfengyuyu: Jiang Qing, yangbanxi ji neimu 样板戏的风风雨雨: 江青, 样板戏及内幕 (The storm around model drama: Jiang Qing, model drama, and behind the scenes). Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe, 1994.

Denton, Kirk. “Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.” In Constantine Tung, ed. Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, 119-36.

—–. “What Do You Do with Cultural “Propaganda” of the Mao Era?” The PRC History Review 4, 2 (Aug. 2019).

Ding Wang 丁望, ed. Zhongguo wenhua da geming ziliao huibian 中国文化大革命资料汇编 (Documents on the Chinese Cultural Revolution). HK: Minbao yuekan, 1967-72.

Dittmer, Lowell. “Radical Ideology and Chinese Political Culture: An Analysis of the Revolutionary Yangbanxi.” In Richard Wilson, Sidney Greenblatt, Amy Wilson, eds., Moral Behaviour in Chinese Society. NY: Praeger, 1981, 126-51.

Dittmer, Lowell and Chen Ruoxi. Ethics and Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Berkeley: UC, Center for Chinese Studies, 1981.

Emerson, Andrew G. “The Guizhou Undercurrent.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 111-33.

Esherick, Joseph, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Fan, Xing. “The ‘Broken’ and the ‘Breakthroughs’: Acting in Jingju Model Plays of China’s Culture Revolution.” Asian Theatre Journal 30, 2 (Fall 2013): 360-389.

—–. “Revolutionary Femininity in Performance: Female Characters in Beijing Opera Model Plays during China’s Cultural Revolution.” In Ya-chen Chen, ed., New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics: The Centennial of the End of the Qing Dynasty. London: Routledge, 51-72.

—–. Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaomei Chen]

[Abstract: Staging Revolution refutes the deep-rooted notion that art overtly in the service of politics is by definition devoid of artistic merit. As a prominent component shaping the culture of the CR, model Beijing Opera (jingju) is the epitome of art used for political ends. Arguing against commonly accepted interpretations, Fan demonstrates that in a performance of model jingju, political messages could only be realized through the most rigorously formulated artistic choices and conveyed by performers possessing exceptional techniques. Fan contextualizes model jingju at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics. Integral to jingju’s interactions with politics are the practitioners’ constant artistic experimentation to accommodate the modern stories and characters within the jingju framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty. Therefore, a thorough understanding of model jingju demands close attention to how the artists resolved actual production problems, which is a critical perspective missing in earlier studies. This book provides exactly this much-needed dimension of analysis by scrutinizing the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage and by examining how major artistic elements interacted with one other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes antagonistically. Such an approach necessarily places jingju artists center stage. Making use of first-person accounts of the creative process, including numerous interviews conducted by the author, Fan presents a new appreciation of a lived experience that, on a harrowing journey of coping with political interference, was also filled with inspiration and excitement.]

Fokkema, D. W. Report from Peking: Observations of a Western Diplomat on the Cultural Revolution. London: C. Hurst, 1971.

—–. “The Forms and Values of Contemporary Chinese Literature.” New Literary History 4, 3 (Spring 1973): 591-603.

—–. “Maoist Ideology and Its Exemplification in the New Peking Opera.” Current Scene 10, 8 (1972): 13-20.

Galik, Marian. “The Concept of ‘Positive Hero’ in Chinese Literature of the 1960s and 1970s.” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 17 (1981): 27-53.

Gerth, Karl. Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruksana Kibria]

Gu, Yizhong. “The Three Prominences.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 283-303.

Guo, Jian. “Resisting Modernity in Contemporary China: The Cultural Revolution and Post-Modernism.” Modern China 25, 3 (July 1999): 343-76.

Guo, Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan Zhou, eds. Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lanham, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2006.

Hay, Trevor. China’s Proletarian Myth: The Revolutionary Narrative in Model Theatre of the Cultural Revolution. PhD thesis. Griffith University, 2000.

Henningsen, Lena. “Crime, Love, and Science: Continuity and Change in Hand-copied Entertainment Fiction (shouchaoben) from the Cultural Revolution.” In Daria Berg, Giorgio Strafella, eds., Transforming Book Culture in China, 1600-2016 (Kodex: Yearbook of the International Society for Book Science). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016, 101-122.

—–. “What Is a Reader? Participation and Intertextuality in Hand-Copied Entertainment Fiction from the Cultural Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 2 (Fall 2017); 109-158.

—–. Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Richard King]

[Abstract: This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past.]

—–. “Narrating Sweet Bitterness: Tasting and Sensing the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 174-198.

—–. “Chairman Mao’s Good Reader: Mise en abyme in The Diary of Lei Feng.” Read China: The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China (Oct. 1, 2022).

Henningsen, Lena and Duncan Paterson. “Authenticity beyond Authority? The Case of Handwritten Entertainment Fiction from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” In Anke Hein and Christopher J. Foster, eds., Understanding Authenticity in China’s Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge, 2023.

Ho, Denise Y. “Teaching China’s Cultural Revolution.” The PRC History Review 4, 2 (Aug. 2019).

Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Michael M. Day. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward Gunn]

Honig, Emily. “Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited.” Modern China 29, 2 (April 2003): 143-75.

Howard, Roger. Contemporary Chinese Theater. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978.

Hsu, Kai-yu. The Chinese Literary Scene: A Writer’s Visit to the People’s Republic of China. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Huang, Yiju. Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rebecka Eriksson]

[Abstract: Tapestry of Light offers an account of the psychic, intellectual, and cultural aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Drawing on a wide range of works including essay, fiction, memoir, painting and film, the book explores links between history, trauma and haunting. Challenging the leftist currents in Cultural Revolution scholarship, the tone pervading the book is a rhythm of melancholia, indeterminacy but also hope. Huang demonstrates that aesthetic afterlives resist both the conservative nostalgia for China’s revolutionary past as well as China’s elated, false confidence in the market-driven future. Huang engages with prominent Chinese intellectuals, writers, artists and filmmakers, including Ba Jin, Han Shaogong, Hong Ying, Zhang Xiaogang, Jiang Wen and Ann Hui.]

Ji, Fengyuan. Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.

Judd, Ellen. “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution.” In Constantine Tung, ed. Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, 94-118.

—–. “Dramas of Passion: Heroism in the Cultural Revolution Model Operas.” In William Joseph, et al. eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991, 265-82.

Kang, Wenqing. “Seeking Pleasure in Peril: Male Same-Sex Relations during the Cultural Revolution.” positions: asia critique 30, 1 (Feb. 2022): 61-84.

Kindler, Benjamin. “Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form.” Modern China 48, 5 (2022).

—–. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Revolution: Proletarian Aesthetics and the Challenge of Labor Humanism in the Thought of Yao Wenyuan.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 6-21.

[Abstract: Before his complex involvement in the events of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan emerged as a central figure in wide-ranging theoretical debates around questions of beauty under the aegis of the Aesthetics Debate of the 1950s and ’60s. This debate provided the conditions for a series of engagements on the part of Chinese and Soviet aesthetic theorists with the conceptual vocabulary of the “early Marx,” preceding the more famous embrace of humanist Marxist discourse in the 1980s. This article proposes to take Yao seriously as a theorist of an anti-humanist proletarian aesthetics, whose thought seeks to pose the relations between labor and aesthetics in terms strictly opposed to the philosophical figure of the human that emerged in the thought of more prominent figures such as Li Zehou. It does so by tracing Yao’s conception of aesthetics as a site of class struggle at the level of sensorial experience, in terms that suspended any attempt to articulate a universalist aesthetic according to humanist tropes of creative labor. The depth of Yao’s aesthetics not only demonstrates the theoretical underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution, but so too does it underscore the persistence of the problems of humanism and anti-humanism in engagements with Marxist thought.]

King, Richard. A Shattered Mirror: the Literature of the Cultural Revolution. Ph.D. thesis. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1984.

—–. “Revisionism and Transformation in the Cultural Revolution Novel.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 1 (1993): 105-130.

—–. “Writings on the Urban Youth Generation.” Renditions 50 (1998): 4-9.

—–. “A Fiction Revealing Collusion: Allegory and Evasion in the Mid-1970s.” Modern Chinese Literature 10, 1/2 (1998): 71-90.

—–. “Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

—–. Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945-80. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Roy Bing Chan]

King, Richard, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Knight, Sabina. “Moral Decision in Mao-Era Fiction.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 133-61.

Kong, Shuyu. “For Reference Only: Restricted Publication and Distribution of Foreign Literature During the Cultural Revolution.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 2 (Fall 2002): 76-85.

Kraus, Richard. “Arts Policies of the Cultural Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Culture Minister Yu Huiyong.” In William Joseph, Christine Wong, and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991, 219-41.

Kunze, Rui and Marc Andre Matten. Knowledge Production in Mao-Era China: Learning from the Masses. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Fa-ti Fan]

Landsberger, Stefan. “Mao as the Kitchen God: Religious Aspects of the Mao Cult During the Cultural Revolution.” China Information 11, 2/3 (Aut/Win 1996/97): 196-214.

Larson, Wendy. “Never This Wild: Sexing the Cultural Revolution.” Modern China 25, 4 (1999): 423-50.

Law, Kam-yee, ed. The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

[Table of Contents: Explanations for China’s Revolution at its Peak–L.T. White & K.Y. Law * Historical Reflections on the Cultural Revolution as a Political Movement–H.Y. Lee * The Structural Sources of the Cultural Revolution–S. Wang * Between Destruction and Construction: The First Year of the Cultural Revolution–S. Wang * Cleansing the Class Ranks: The Hidden Face of the Cultural Revolution–A.G. Walder * The Logic of Repressive Collective Action: A Case Study of Violence in the Cultural Revolution–X. Gong * The Cultural Revolution in Zhejiang Revisited: The Paradox of Rebellion and Factionalism and Violence and Social Conflict amidst Economic Growth–K. Forster * The Politics of the Cultural Revolution in Historical Perspective–A. Dirlik * The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of Post-Mao Reform–M. Lupher * Legacies of the Maoist Development Strategy: Rural Industrialization in China–C.P.W. Wong * The Strange Tale of China’s Tea Industry During the Cultural Revolution]

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Dissent Literature from the Cultural Revolution.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 1 (1979): 59-79.

Leese, Daniel. Performative Politics and Petrified Images: The Mao Cult during China’s Cultural Revolution. Ph. D. diss. Bremen: International University Bremen, 2006.

—–. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[Abstract: Although there have been many books that have explored Mao’s posthumous legacy, none has scrutinized the massive worship that was fostered around him at the height of his powers during the Cultural Revolution. This book is the first to do so. By analyzing secret archival documents, Daniel Leese traces the history of the cult within the Communist Party and at the grassroots level. The Party leadership’s original intention was to develop a prominent brand symbol, which would compete with the nationalists’ elevation of Chiang Kai-shek. However, they did not anticipate that Mao would use this symbolic power to mobilize Chinese youth to rebel against party bureaucracy itself. The result was anarchy, and when the army was called in, it relied on mandatory rituals of worship such as daily reading of the Little Red Book, to restore order. Such fascinating detail sheds light not only on the personality cult of Mao, but also on hero-worship in other traditions.]

Lekner, Dayton. “States of Diffusion: Ideology, Text, Voice, and Sound in Cold War Chinas.” Modern China 49, 2 (March 2023): 159-91.

Leung, K.C. “Literature in the Service of Politics: The Chinese Literary Scene Since 1949.” World Literature Today 55, 1 (1981): 18-20.

Leys, Simon. The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Trs. Carol Appleyard and Patrick Goode. London: Allison and Bushby, 1977.

Liu, Kang. “Hegemony and Cultural Revolution.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 69-86.

Liu, Xiao. “Red Detachment of Women: Revolutionary Melodrama and Alternative Socialist Imaginations.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 26, 5 (2015): 116-41.

Liu, Xiaobo. “Mutual Destruction and Mutual Purges in Academic Circles.” Chinese Law and Government 38, 5 (Sept-Oct. 2005): 58-77. [link is to a reprint on the Chinese Pen website]

Lu, Guang and Xiaoyu Xiao. “Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution: The Rhetoric of Ideological Conflicts.” In Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2000, 223-48.

Lu, Tonglin. “Fantasy and Ideology in a Chinese Film: A Zizekian Reading of the Cultural Revolution.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 2 (Fall 2004): 539-64. [mostly about Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun]

Lu, Xing. Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

[Abstract: identifies the rhetorical practices and persuasive effects of the polarizing political language and symbolic practices used by Communist Party leaders to legitimize their use of power and violence to dehumanize people identified as class enemies. In her preface to the new paperback edition, Xing Lu expresses deep concern about recent nationalism, xenophobia, divisiveness, and violence instigated by the rhetoric of hatred and fear in the United States and across the globe. She hopes that by illuminating the way language shapes perception, thought, and behavior, this book will serve as a reminder of past mistakes so that we may avoid repeating them in the future. Lu provides close readings of the movement’s primary texts—political slogans, official propaganda, wall posters, and the lyrics of mass songs and model operas. She also scrutinizes such ritualistic practices as the loyalty dance, denunciation rallies, political study sessions, and criticism and self-criticism meetings. Lu enriches her rhetorical analyses of these texts with her own story and that of her family, as well as with interviews conducted in China and the United States with individuals who experienced the Cultural Revolution during their teenage years.]

Lupher, Mark. “Revolutionary Little Red Devils: The Social Psychology of Rebel Youth.” In Anne Kinney, ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995, 321-44.

Ma, Nan. “Les Chinois à Paris: The Red Detachment of Women and French Maoism in the 1970s.” China Perspectives 1 (2020): 43-51.

Ma, Sheng-Mei. “Contrasting Two Survival Literatures: On the Jewish Holocaust and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, 1 (1987): 81-93.

MacKerras, Colin. “Chinese Opera After the Cultural Revolution (1970-1972).” The China Quarterly 55 (1973): 478-510.

McDougall, Bonnie. “Dissent Literature: Official and Nonofficial Literature In and About China in the Seventies.” Contemporary China (1979): 49-79.

Meserve, Walter J. and Ruth I. Meserve. “China’s Persecuted Playwrights: The Theater in Communist China’s Current Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 5 (1970): 209- 215.

Mittler, Barbara. “To Be or Not to Be: Making and Unmaking the Yangbanxi.” [manuscript in progress]

—–. “Cultural Revolution Model Works and the Politics of Modernization in China: An Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.” The World of Music. Special Issue, Traditional Music and Composition 2 (2003): 53-81.

—–. “Popular Propaganda? Art and Culture in Revolutionary China.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, 4 (Dec. 2008): 466-89.

—–. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xueping Zhong]

[Abstract: Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as nothing but propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. A Continuous Revolution sets out to explain its legacy. By considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art–music, stage works, prints and posters, comics, and literature–from the point of view of its longue duree, Barbara Mittler suggests that Cultural Revolution propaganda art was able to build on a tradition of earlier art works, and this allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory and its proliferation in contemporary China. Taking the aesthetic experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as her base, Mittler juxtaposes close readings and analyses of cultural products from the period with impressions given in a series of personal interviews conducted in the early 2000s with Chinese from diverse class and generational backgrounds. By including much testimony from these original voices, Mittler illustrates the extremely multifaceted and contradictory nature of the Cultural Revolution, both in terms of artistic production and of its cultural experience.]

—–. A Continuous Revolution [website accompanying publication of Barbara Mittler’s A Continous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Harvard University Press, 2012)]

Morning Sun: A Film and Website About Cultural Revolution (Longbow Group)

The Morning Sun (2003). Produced and directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton. Longbow Group. [two-hour documentary of the events and cultural context of the Cultural Revolution]

Mowry, Hua-yuan Li. Yang-pan hsi–New Theater in China. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1973.

Mullis, Eric. 2017. “Aesthetics, Ideology, and Ethics of Remembrance in Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun, 红色娘子军).” Dance Chronicle 40, no. 1: 53-73.

Ni, Hua-ying. The Treatment of Cultural Revolution in Post-Cultural Revolutionary Literature (late 70’s to early 90’s). PhD thesis. Canberra: Australian National University, 1997.

On-line Center of Cultural Revolution Studies

Pan, Yihong. Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: China’s Youth in the Rustication Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.

[Abstract: Yihong Pan tells her personal story, and that of her generation of urban middle school graduates sent to the countryside during China’s Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan’s book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate, believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-79 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong’s China.]

Perry, Elizabeth and Li Xin. “Revolutionary Rudeness: The Language of Red Guards and Rebel Workers in China’s Cultural Revolution.” Indiana East Asian Working Papers (July 1993): 1-17.

Pickowicz, Paul G. Literature and People in the People’s Republic. HK: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1971.

Pollard, David E. “The Short Story in the Cultural Revolution.” China Quarterly 73 (March 1978): 99-121.

Purtle, Jennifer and Elizabeth Ridolfo, with Stephen Qiao. Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China’s Cultural Revolution. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2016. [catalogue of an exhibition held at the University of Toronto in 2016]

Qian, Ying. “1967, April 1: The Specter of Liu Shaoqi.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 674-79.

Remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Two-day Multimedia Event (University of California, San Diego, Jan. 12-13, 2007).

Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture. Conference website (Heidelberg, Feb. 22-24).

Roberts, Rosemary. “Positive Women Characters in the Revolutionary Model Works of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: An Argument Against the Theory of Erasure of Gender and Sexuality.” Asian Studies Review 28, 4 (Dec. 2004): 407- 422.

—–. “Gendering the Revolutionary Body: Theatrical Costume in Cultural Revolution China.” Asian Studies Review 30, 2 (June 2006).

—–. “Performing Gender in Maoist Ballet: Mutual Subversions of Genre and Ideology in The Red Detachment of Women.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 16 (March 2008).

—–. “Maoist Women Warriors: Historical Continuities and Cultural Transgressions.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 139-62.

—–. Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Leiden: Brill, 2010.

[Abstract: Here is a convincing reflection that changes our understanding of gender in Maoist culture, esp. for what critics from the 1990s onwards have termed its ‘erasure’ of gender and sexuality. In particular the strong heroines of the yangbanxi, or ‘model works’ which dominated the Cultural Revolution period, have been seen as genderless revolutionaries whose images were damaging to women. Drawing on contemporary theories ranging from literary and cultural studies to sociology, this book challenges that established view through detailed semiotic analysis of theatrical systems of the yangbanxiincluding costume, props, kinesics, and various audio and linguistic systems. Acknowledging the complex interplay of traditional, modern, Chinese and foreign gender ideologies as manifest in the ‘model works’, it fundamentally changes our insights into gender in Maoist culture]

Russo, Alessandro. Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univerity Press, 2020.

[Abstract: presents a dramatic new reading of China’s Cultural Revolution as a mass political experiment aimed at thoroughly reexamining the tenets of communism. Russo explores four critical phases of the Cultural Revolution, each with its own reworking of communist political subjectivity: the historical-theatrical “prologue” of 1965; Mao’s attempts to shape the Cultural Revolution in 1965 and 1966; the movements and organizing between 1966 and 1968 and the factional divides that ended them; and the mass study campaigns from 1973 to 1976 and the unfinished attempt to evaluate the inadequacies of the political decade that brought the Revolution to a close. Among other topics, Russo shows how the dispute around the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was not the result of a Maoist conspiracy, but rather a series of intense and unresolved political and intellectual controversies. He also examines the Shanghai January Storm and the problematic foundation of the short-lived Shanghai Commune. By exploring these and other political-cultural moments of Chinese confrontations with communist principles, Russo overturns conventional wisdom about the Cultural Revolution.]

Schwarcz, Vera. “The Burden of Memory: The Cultural Revolution and the Holocaust.” China Information 11, 1 (Summer 1996): 1-13.

—–. Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Schrift, Melissa. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge. Piscatawy, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Shi, Yifan. “Exiting the Revolution: Alternative Ways of Life in Beijing, 1966–1976.” Modern China 48, 6 (2022): 1238–64.

[Abstract: During the Cultural Revolution, many young people in Beijing exited the revolution by engaging in alternative ways of life. Echoing the fledgling tendency of reassessing the underlying meaning of youth subcultures in the Eastern Bloc, this article discusses the diverse mentalities behind these alternative lifestyles and challenges the traditional wisdom that regards youth subcultures as an easy form of everyday resistance to the regime. It also challenges the traditional landscape of Cultural Revolution literature that mainly focuses on youth activism as a means of mass participation. Young people could make political but not subversive choices by exiting the revolution. While some people exited simply to entertain and socialize, others exited to obtain a better political position during the Cultural Revolution, and others to pursue a meaningful way of life influenced by orthodox ideology. Exiting the revolution was not an easy option as well and, on many occasions, the ability to live alternatively reflected certain young people’s privileged access to resources that others could not access in the PRC.].

Song, Yongyi. “A Glance at the Underground Reading Movement during the Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Contemporary China 16, 51 (May 2007): 325-333.

Tan, Hecheng. The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution. Trs. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Over the course of 66 days in 1967, more than 4,000 “class enemies”–including young children and the elderly–were murdered in Daoxian, a county in China’s Hunan province. The killings spread to surrounding counties, resulting in a combined death toll of more than 9,000. Commonly known as the Daoxian massacre, the killings were one of many acts of so-called mass dictatorship and armed factional conflict that rocked China during the Cultural Revolution. However, in spite of the scope and brutality of the killings, there are few detailed accounts of mass killings in China’s countryside during the Cultural Revolution’s most tumultuous years. Years after the massacre, journalist Tan Hecheng was sent to Daoxian to report on an official investigation into the killings. Tan was prevented from publishing his findings in China, but in 2010, he published the Chinese edition of The Killing Wind in Hong Kong. Tan’s first-hand investigation of the atrocities, accumulated over the course of more than 20 years, blends his research with the recollections of survivors to provide a vivid account exploring how and why the massacre took place and describing its aftermath. Dispelling the heroic aura of class struggle, Tan reveals that most of the Daoxian massacre’s victims were hard-working, peaceful members of the rural middle class blacklisted as landlords or rich peasants. Tan also describes how political pressure and brainwashing turned ordinary people into heartless killing machines. More than a catalog of horrors, The Killing Wind is also a poignant meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. By painting a detailed portrait of this massacre, Tan makes a broader argument about the long-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most violent political movements of the twentieth century. A compelling testament to the victims and survivors of the Daoxian massacre, The Killing Wind is a monument to historical truth: one that fills an immense gap in our understanding of the Mao era, the Cultural Revolution, and the status of truth in contemporary China.]

Thurston, Anne. F. Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Unger, Jonathan. “Grassroots Turmoil in China’s Cultural Revolution: A Half-Century Perspective.” 77th George E. Morrison Lecture. Chinoiserie.info (Nov. 9, 2016).

[Abstract: After Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, vast numbers of students, workers, peasants and other ordinary people divided into hostile groups that violently fought against each other for more than a year and a half. Each group claimed it was fighting out of loyalty to Mao’s teachings. But research by the speaker that included a large number of in-depth interviews in the 1970s and 1980s with former participants in these conflicts revealed that the fighting between groups was actually the consequence of mounting tensions within Chinese society prior to the Cultural Revolution. The upheavals in the Cultural Revolution pitted those who had earlier been favoured by Communist Party policies against those who had been disfavoured. But the nature of grievances and antagonisms differed from group to group—be they students, workers, peasants or government office workers. As a result, there were a number of different types of upheavals, generated by different reasons, in different sectors of society. Examining these provides insights into the complex fabric of Chinese society under Mao.]

Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution (CND).

Wagner, Vivian. “Songs of the Red Guards: Keywords Set to Music.” East Asian Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China, Indiana University.

Wang, Ban. “The Cultural Revolution: A Terrible Beauty is Born.” In Wang, The Sublime Figure of History Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997, 194-228. [online version by Morningsun.com]

Wang, Ban, ed. Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Wang, Ning. Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness: Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: After Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to “re-education” by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labor farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of these banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang’s use of newly uncovered Chinese-language sources challenges the concept of the intellectual as renegade martyr, showing how exiles often declared allegiance to the state for self-preservation. While Mao’s campaign victimized the banished, many of those same people also turned against their comrades. Wang describes the ways in which the state sought to remold the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival.]

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey and Sue Tuohy, eds. East Asian Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Wilcox, Emily. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaomei Chen]

Yang, Guobin. “Understanding the Cultural Revolution through Documents of Life.” The PRC History Review 4, 2 (Aug. 2019).

Yang, Guobin and Ming-Bao Yue, eds. “Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution,” special issue of The China Review 5, 2 (Fall 2005). [essays by Guobin Yang, Ming-Bao Yue, Xiaomei Chen, David Davies, Jennifer Hubbert, Lei Ouyang Bryant]

Yang, Jisheng. The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Cultural Revolution. Trs. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020.

Yang Jian 杨健. Wenhua dageming zhong de dixia wenxue 文化大革命中的底下文学 (Underground literature of the Cultural Revolution). Beijing: Zhaohua, 1993.

—–. Zhongguo zhiqing wenxue shi 中国知青文学史 (History of Chinese ‘sent down’ youth literature). Beijing: Zhongguo gongren, 2001.

Yang Kelin 楊克林, ed. Wenhua da geming bowuguan 文化大革命博物馆 (Museum of the Cultural Revolution). 2 vols. HK: Dongfang, 1995. [a beautifully illustrated–posters, photographs, film stills, etc.–history of the Culural Revolution]

Yang, Lan. Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution. HK: Hong Kong UP, 1998.

—–. “The Depiction of the Hero in the Cultural Revolution Novel.” China Information 12, 4 (Spring 1998): 68-95.

—–. “The Ideal Socialist Hero: Literary Conventions in Cultural Revolution Novels.” In Woei Lian Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 185-213.

—–. “Ideological Style in the Language of the Chinese Novels of the Cultural Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature 10, 1/2 (1998): 149-172.

—–. “The Language of Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution: An Anti-dialectal Style.” Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 15 (2001).

—–. “‘Socialist Realism’ versus ‘Revolutionary Realism plus Revolutionary Romanticism.'” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 88-105.

Yee, Law Kam, ed., The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered:Beyond Purge and Holocaust. NY: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2003.

Yung, Bell. “Model Opera as Model: Fron Shajiabang to Sagabong.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 144-64.

Zhang, Ling. “Revolutionary Aestheticism and Excess: Transformation of the Idealized Female Body in The Red Lantern on Stage and Screen.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 12, 1 (June 2010): 67-92.

Post-Mao (1976-89)

Admussen, Nick. Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016.

Anagnost, Ann. “Who is Speaking Here? Discursive Boundaries and Representation in Post-Mao China.” In John Hay, ed. Boundaries in China. London: Reaktion Books, 1994, 257-79.

Bachner, Andrea. “1986: The Writer and the Mad(wo)man.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 782-87.

Balcom, John. “Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Chinese Literature from a Translator’s Perspective.” Wasafiri 55 (2008): 19-23.

Barme, Geremie. “Flowers or More Weeds? Culture in China Since the Fall of the Gang of Four.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1 (1979): 125-33.

—–. “Chaotou wenxue: China’s New Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 2 (1979): 137-48.

—–. “The Chinese Velvet Prison: Culture in the New Age 1976-1989.” Issues and Studies 25, 8 (1992): 54-79; also in Bih-jaw Lin, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991, 45-70.

—–. “History for the Masses.” In Jonathan Unger, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present. M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, NY, 1993.

—–. “To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde Nationalists.” The China Journal 34 (July 1995).

Braester, Yomi. “Disjointed Time, Split Voices: Retrieving Historical Experience in Scar Literature.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 146-57.

—–. “The Aesthetics and Anesthetics of Memory: PRC Avant-Garde Fiction.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 177-91.

Brodsgaard, Kjeld Erik. “The Democracy Movement in China, 1978-1979: Opposition Movements, Wall Poster Campaigns, and Underground Journals.” Asian Survey 21, 7 (July 1981): 747-73.

Cai, Rong. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Cao, Zuoya. Out of the Crucible: Literary Works about the Rusticated Youth. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003.

Chan, Peter. “Popular Publications in China: A Look at ‘The Spring of Peking.'” Contemporary China 3, 4 (Winter 1979): 103-111.

Chan, Sylvia. “The Blooming of a ‘Hundred Flowers’ and the Literature of the ‘Wounded Generation.'” In Bill Brugger, ed., China Since the ‘Gang of Four’. London: Croon Helm, 1980.

—–. “Blooming and Contending: Chinese Writers’ Response on Chinese Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 8 (1982): 127-35.

—–. “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Towards a ‘Free Literature.'” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 19/20 (Jan/July 1988): 81-126.

Chang, Tze-chang. “Modern Literary Techniques in Mainland China’s Protest Literature.” Issues and Studies 21, 10 (October 1985): 123-40.

Chen, Dazhuan. “The Hunan Writers.” Tr. Alice Childs. Chinese Literature (Summer 1989): 3-11.

Chen, Dengke. “Some Suggestions Concerning Literary Work.” Tr. Maurice Tseng. In Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chinese Literature From the 1980s: The Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1982, 91-102.

Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao. From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation, 1979-1989. HK: Chinese University of HK Press, 1997.

Chen, Jianguo. The Aesthetics of the ‘Beyond’: Phantasm, Nostalgia, and the Literary Practice in Contemporary China. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009.

[Abstract: This book is about an alternative mode of reading, thinking, and representing the intricacies of human experience in Chinese literature of the late twentieth century, which the author calls the aesthetics of the “beyond.” It investigates how contemporary Chinese writers, by means of dynamic interface of literary practice and cultural philosophical considerations, engage the reader in critical reflection on and aesthetic appreciation of the complexity of human conditions. By studying the “beyond” in its various manifestations: the semiotics of human embodiment, the discourse of the phantasm, the politics of nostalgia with regard to “origin” and “center,” and the metaphysics of death in the writings of some major contemporary Chinese writers, the book explores the ways in which the “beyond” is constructed as a new paradigm of critical thinking in literary, aesthetic, and philosophical terms. It examines how its discursive strategies, structural features, and aesthetic possibilities are presented and how varied literary tropes are used in an attempt to unravel human experience in all its aspects.]

Chen, Jo-hsi. Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1982.

Chen, Lingchei Letty. The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]

Chen, Xiaomei. “Misunderstanding Western Modernism: The Menglong Movement in Post-Mao China.” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 143-63.

—–. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counterdiscourse in Post-Mao China. NY: Oxford UP, 1995.

—–. “Women as Dramatic Other in the Body Politics of Post-Mao Theater.” In Gerd Kaminski, Barbara Kreissel, and Constantine Tung, eds., China’s Perception of Peace, War, and the World. Wien: Ludwig Bolzmann Institut fur China, 1997, 160-67.

—–. “Introduction to Occidentalism.” In Diana Bryden, ed., Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge, 2000.

—–. “Audience, Applause, and Actor: Border Crossing in Social Problem Plays.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 195-234. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]

—–. “A Stage of Their Own: Feminism, Countervoices, and the Problematic of Women’s Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 235-60. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]

—–. “From Discontented Mother to Woman Warrior: Body Politics in Post-Maoist Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 261-90. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]

—–. “A Stage in Search of a Tradition: The Dynamics of Form and Content in Post-Maoist Theater.” Asian Theatre Journal 18, 2 (2001): 200-21. [Project Muse link]. Also in Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 291-330.

Chey, Jocelyn. “Chinese Cultural Policy–Liberalization?” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1 (Jan. 1979): 107-112.

Chih, Pien. “The ‘Wound’ Debate.” Chinese Literature 3 (March 1979): 103-05.

Chiu, Ling-yeong. “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword: A Study of the Wounded Literature in China Since 1976.” In: Chen, Edward K.Y., and Steve S.K. Chin, eds. Development and Change in China. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1981, 313-326 .

Chou, Yu-shan. “Communist China’s ‘Scar Literature.'” Issues and Studies (Taipei) 16, 2 (Feb 1980): 57-67.

—–. “Change and Continuity in Communist Chinese Policy on Literature and Art.” Issues and Studies 22, 9 (Jan. 1986): 9-12.

Choy, Howard Yuen Fung. Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979-1997. Ph. D. diss. Boulder: University of Colorado, 2004.

—–. Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979-1997. Leiden: Brill, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Andrew Stuckey]

Chung, Hilary and Tommy McClellan. “The ‘Command Enjoyment’ of Literature in China: Conferences, Controls and Excesses.” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 1-23. [deals with the Yan’an Forum and the 1979 Fourth Congress of Chinese Writers and Artist and compares them to similar conferences in the Soviet Union]

Clarke, Donald C. “Political Power and Authority in Recent Chinese Literature.” The China Quarterly 102 (1985): 234-52.

Davies, Gloria. “1983, January 17: Discursive Heat: Humanism in 1980s China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 758-64.

Day, Michael. China’s Second World of Poetry: The Sichuan Avant-garde, 1982-1992. Leiden: Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS). Leiden University, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Heather Inwood]

Diefenbach, Thilo. Kontexte der Gewalt in moderner Chineschiche Literatur. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004. [deals primarily with Mo Yan, Su Tong, Zhang Wei, and Chen Zhongshi]

Doar, Bruce. “Speculation in a Distorting Mirror: Scientific and Political Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 8 (1982): 51-64.

Duke, Michael S. “Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era: The Return of ‘Critical Realism.'” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 16, 3 (1984): 2-5.

—–. “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” In Bih-jaw Lin, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991, 23-44.

Eber, Irene. “Old Issues and New Directions in Cultural Activities since September 1976.” In Jurgen Domes, ed., Chinese Politics after Mao. Cardiff: University of Cardiff Press, 1979.

Emerson, Andrew G. “The Guizhou Undercurrent.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 111-33.

Edwards, Louise. “Consolidating a Socialist Patriarchy: The Women’s Writers’ Industry and ‘Feminist’ Literary Criticism.” In Antonia Finnan and Ann McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 183-97.

Ferrari, Rossella. “Avant-garde Drama and Theater: China” In Cody, Gabrielle and Sprinchorn, Evert, eds., The Columbia Encyclopaedia of Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Meng Jinghui and Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Theatre. PhD diss. London: SOAS, 2007.

—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China. London, NY, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012.

[Abstract: The first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the PRC since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China’s major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China’s most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui¡Xthe former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia’s foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct¡Xthe pop avant-garde¡Xand exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.]

—–. “Contemporary Experimental Theaters in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 320-26.

Fokkema, D. W. “Chinese Literature since the Death of Mao Tse-tung: A Comparison with the Russian ‘Thaw’ and Its Aftermath.” In Ying-hsiung Chou, ed. The Chinese Text: Studies in Comparative Literature. HK: CUP, 1986, 159-76.

Goldblatt, Howard. “Fresh Flowers Abloom Again: Chinese Literature on the Rebound.” World Literature Today 55, 1 (1981): 7-10.

—–, ed. Chinese Literature From the 1980s: The Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1982.

—–, ed. Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990.

Goodman, David S. G. Beijing Street Voices: The Poetry and Politics of China’s Democracy Movement. London: Marion Boyers, 1981.

—–. “To Write the Word for Man Across the Sky: Literature and its Political Context in the People’s Republic of China, 1978-1982.” The Journal of Communist Studies (March 1985).

Gu, Edward X. “Cultural Intellectuals and the Politics of the Cultural Public Space in Communist China (1979-1989): A Case Study of Three Intellectual Groups.” Journal of Asian Studies 58, 2 (May 1999): 389-431.

Gunn, Edward. “Perception of Self and Values in Recent Chinese Literature.” In Robert Hegel and Richard Hessney eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 1985, 308-41.

Haishi Zou Hao: Chinese Poetry, Drama and Literature of the 1980’s. Bonn: Engelhardt-NG, 1989.

Harnisch, Thomas. Chinas neue Literature: Schrifsteller und ihre Kurzgeschicten in den Jahren 1978-1979. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1985.

He, Yuhuai. Cycles of Repression and Relaxation: Politco-Literary Events in China, 1976-1989. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1992.

Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Michael M. Day. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward Gunn]

Huang, Yibing. Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. [publisher’s blurb]

[Chapters: (1) Rethinking the Legacy of the Cultural Revolution; (2) Duo Duo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism; (3) Wang Shuo: Playing for Thrills in the Era of Reform, or, A Genealogy of the Present; (4) Zhang Chengzhi: Striving for Alternative National Forms, or, Old Red Guard and New Cultural Heretic; (5) Wang Xiaobo: From “Golden Age” to “Silver Age,” or, Writing Against the Gravity of History; (6) Revising a Double-Faced Chinese Modernity]

Huang, Yiju. Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rebecka Eriksson]

Huot, Marie Claire. La petite revolution culturelle. Arles: Philippe Picquier, 1994.

—–. China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

—–. “Literary Experiments: Six Files.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 7-48. [deals mostly with avant-garde writers]

Huters, Theodore. “Contemporary Chinese Letters.” In Barbara Stoler Miller, ed., Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1994, 330-44.

Iovene, Paula. “Why Is There a Poem in this Story? Li Shangyin’s Poetry, Contemporary Chinese Literature, and the Futures of the Past.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 71-116.

—–. Tales of Future Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nathaniel Kenneth Isaacson]

[Abstract: Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces “anticipation”—the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds—as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China. This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors’ and editors’ efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.]

Jenner, W. J. F. “1979: A New Start for Literature in China.” The China Quarterly 86 (1981): 274-303.

Jin, Siyan. “Subjective Writing in Contemporary Chinese Literature: The ‘I’ Has Taken Over from the ‘We’ Omnipresent until the Late 1970s.” China Perspectives 54 (2004).

Jones, Andrew F. “Avante-Garde Fiction in China.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 554-60. Rpt. as “Avant-gard Fiction in Post-Mao China.” In Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 313-19.

Kahn-Ackerman, Michael. “Issues in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Jochen Noch et al., eds., China Avant-Garde. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1993, 67-72.

Kindler, Benjamin. “Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form.” Modern China 48, 5 (2022).

—–. “Factory Humanisms: Technical Aesthetics, Sino-Soviet Encounters, and the Fashioning of the Postsocialist Factory in Reform-Era China.” Modern China 51, 1 (2025).

[Abstract: The reemergence of aesthetics in China’s early reform period witnessed a wide-ranging embrace of the early Marxist vocabulary of species-being, alienation, and unalienated labor, in tandem with a wave of interest in developments in Soviet aesthetics that had arisen over the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, Chinese aestheticians were enthused by the Soviet field of “technical aesthetics,” which marked those currents in Soviet aesthetic thought that extended the possibilities of beauty beyond the delimited space of the artwork or literary creation to envision how factory labor might become an aesthetic process, simultaneously productive and artistic. By tracing the trajectory of these currents of aesthetic thought against the background of Marxist humanism, I show the ways in which Soviet–Chinese aesthetic encounters conditioned the fashioning of the post-Maoist factory as creative space and the postsocialist figure of the human as creative laborer.]

King, Richard. “‘Wounds’ and ‘Exposure’: Chinese Literature after the Gang of Four.” Pacific Affairs 54, 1 (1981): 92-99.

—–. “Writings on the Urban Youth Generation.” Renditions 50 (1998): 4-9.

—–. “Models and Misfits: Rusticated Youth in Three Novels of the 1970s.” In William A. Joseph, ed., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991,

Kinkley, Jeffrey, ed. After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978-1981. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.

—–. “New Realism in Contemporary Chinese Literature” (review article). Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 17, 1 (1982): 77-100.

Klein, Lucas. “1976, April 4: Poems from the Underground.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 718-25.

Kleinman, Arthur. “How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily Experience of Criticism, Resistance and Deligitimation Following China’s Cultural Revolution.” New Literary History 25, 1 (Winter 1994): 27-48.

Knight, Deirdre Sabina. “Scar Literature and the Memory of Trauma.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 527-32. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 293-98.

—–. “Historical Trauma and Humanism in Post-Mao Realism.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 162-90.

Korenaga, Shun. “The Growing Acceptance of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in Japan.” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 106-16.

Kraus, Richard. “China’s Cultural ‘Liberalization’ and Conflict over the Social Organization of the Arts.” Modern China 9, 2 (April 1983): 212-27.

—–. “Four Trends in the Politics of Chinese Culture.” In Bih-jao Lin and James T. Meyers, eds., Forces for Change in Contemporary China. Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1992, 213-24.

Larson, Wendy and Richard Krauss. “Chinas Writers, The Nobel Prize, and the International Politics of Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 21 (1989): 143-60.

—–.. “Realism, Modernism, and the Anti-‘Spiritual Pollution’ Campaign in Modern China.” Modern China 15, 1 (Jan. 1989): 37-71.

Lau, Joseph. “The Wounded and the Fatigued: Reflections on Post-1976 Chinese Fiction.” Journal of Oriental Studies 20, 2 (1982): 128-42.

Laughlin, Charles. “Literature and Popular Culture.” In Robert E. Gamer, ed., Understanding Contemporary China. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999.

Lee, Gregory. Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Masks: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

—–. China’s Lost Decade: The Politics and Poetics of the 1980s in Place of History. Lyon: Editions Tigre de Papier, 2009. 2nd Edition. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2012.

[Abstract: The period in China’s recent history between the death of Mao and the debacle of 1989 can be seen as a “lost” decade: “lost” in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; “lost” also in that tis memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; “lost” also in the embarassed silence of those who prefer to focus on the economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today’s more prosperous Chna; and “lost” as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen. Calling on over thirty years of acquaintance with China including five years spent studying the cultural scene in Beijing during the 1980s, the author here traces the imbrication of culture, politics, and history of a decade when everything seemed possible.]

Lee, Gregory. “Between the Fall of the Gang of Four and the Rise of Best-Sellers: Modern China’s Long Decade.” Wasafiri 55 (2008): 5-12.

Leenhouts, Mark. “Culture Against Politics: Roots-Seeking Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 533-40. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 299-306.

Li, Peter. “War and Modernity in Chinese Military Fiction.” Society 34, 5 (July 1997): 77-89. [deals in part with Li Cunbao’s Wreath at the Foot of the Mountain and Xu Huaizhong’s Anecdotes on the Western Front]

Li, Tuo. “The New Vitality in Modern Chinese.” In W. Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Inside Out: Modern and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 1993, 65-77.

Li, Xia. “Confucius, Playboys and Rusticated Glasperlenspieler: from Classical Chinese Poetry to Postmodernism.” Interlitterraria 4 (1999): 41-60.

—–. “Fractured Perspectives and Visions: Literary Representations of Chinese Intellectuals in Post-Mao Fiction.” In Discontinuities and Displacements: Studies in Comparative Literature. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2009, 116-125.

Li, Xiaojiang. “Resisting While Holding the Tradition: Claims for Rights Raised in Literature by Chinese Women Writers in the New Period.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter, 1999): 99-110. Rpt. in Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 109-116.

Lin, Bih-jaw, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taipei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991.

Lin, Min and Maria Galikowski. The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Link, Perry. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

La Litterature chinoise contemporaine, tradition et modernite: colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, le 8 juin 1988. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 1989.

Liu, Bai. Cultural Policy in the People’s Republic of China: Letting a Hundred Flowers Blossom. Paris: Unesco, 1983.

Liu, Jianmei. “The Resurrection of Zhuangzi in the 1980s.” In Liu, Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Oxford University Press, 2016, 163-85.

Liu, Kang. “Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory in China.” In X. Tang and K. Liu, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1993, 23-54.

Liu, Lu. “Toward the Demythification of US Images in Chinese First Person Books.” In Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2000, 119-38.

Liu, Toming Jun. “Uses and Abuses of Sentimental Nationalism: Mnemonic Disquiet in Heshang and Shuobu.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 169-209.

Liu, Yuanhang and Michael Seats. “Can a Chinese Subaltern Speak?: A Study on Writings About Female Aging in China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2 (Fall 2021): 98-126.

Liu, Zaifu. “Chinese Literature in the Past Ten Years: Spirit and Direction.” Chinese Literature (Autumn 1989): 151-77.

Lo, Dennis. The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020.

[Abstract: the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s Dennis Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive and disorienting social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing engaged in location shooting to transform sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations ese production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and cross-strait communities in novel and contentious ways.]

Lo, Man-wa. “Female Initiation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” Comparative Literature and Culture 3 (Sept. 1998): 74-87.

Louie, Kam. “Discussions of Exposure Literature Since the Fall of the Gang of Four.” Contemporary China 3, 4 (1979): 91-102.

—–. “The Uses of Literature as Social Commentary in Present Day China.” China in the Eighties Conference Papers. Goulburn: Goulburn College of Advanced Education, 1980, 22-33

—–. “Between Paradise and Hell: Literary Double-Think in Post-Mao China.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 10 (1983): 99-113.

—–. Between Fact and Fiction: Essays on Post-Mao Chinese Literature and Society. Broadway, NSW: Wild Peony, 1989.

—–. “Educated Youth Literature: Self-Discovery in the Chinese Villages.” In Louie, Between Fact and Fiction: Essays on Post-Mao Chinese Literature and Society. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1989, 91-102.

—–. “Discussion of Exposure Literature in the Chinese Press, 1978-1979.” In Louie, Between Fact and Fiction: Essays on Post-Mao Chinese Literature and Society. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1989, 1-13.

—–. “Love Stories: The Meaning of Love and Marriage in China, 1978-1981.” In Louie, Between Fact and Fiction: Essays on Post-Mao Chinese Literature and Society. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1989, 41-75.

Lu, Jie. “Cultural Invention and Cultural Intervention: Reading Chinese Urban Fiction of the Nineties.” Modern Chinese Liteature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 107-39.

Lu, Tonglin. Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction. Stanford: SUP, 1995.

Ma, Sheng-Mei. “Contrasting Two Survival Literatures: On the Jewish Holocaust and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, 1 (1987): 81-93.

MacKerras, Colin. “Drama and Politics in Mainland China, 1976-89.” In Bih-jaw Lin, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991, 109-38.

Mandzunowski, Damian. “Factory State of Mind: Spreading ‘Three Ardent Loves’ via Collective Reading Activities in Tianjin, 1983-1985.” In Martin Hofmann, Joachim Kurtz, eds., Wissensorte in China. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2023, 165-192

Martin, Helmut. Origins and Consequences of China’s Democracy Movement 1989 : Social and Cultural Criticism in the PRC. Köln: Bundesinstitut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien,1990.

—–. “China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan During the 1980s and 1990s.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 758-81.

Martin, Helmut, ed. Cologne-Workshop 1984 on Contemporary Chinese Literature: Chinesische Gegenwartsliterature. Koln: Deutsche Welle, 1986.

—– and Karl-Heinz Pohl, eds. Chinesische Schriftsteller der 80er Jahre. Special issue of Akzente (Munich) 2 (April 1985).

McDougall, Bonnie. “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Chinese Poetry and Fiction.” In McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 205-24.

—–. “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Susan Whitfield, ed., After the Event: Human Rights and their Future in China. London: Wellsweep, 1993, 73-90.

—–. “Poems, Poets, and Poetry 1976: An Exercise in the Typology of Modern Chinese Literature.” Contemporary China 2, 4 (Winter 1978).

—–. “Dissent Literature: Official and Nonofficial Literature In and About China in the Seventies.” Contemporary China 3, no. 4 (1979): 49-79.

—–. “Underground Literature: Two Reports from Hong Kong.” Contemporary China 3, 4 (1979): 80-90.

—–. “Breaking Through: Literature and the Arts in China, 1976-1986.” Copehagen Papers in East and Southeast Asian Studies 1 (1988): 35-65. Rpt. in McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 171-204.

—–. “Problems and Possibilities in Translating Contemporary Chinese Literature.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 25 (Jan. 1991): 37-67.

Mi, Jiayan. “Poetics of Navigation: River Lyricism, Epic Consciousness, and Post-Mao Sublime Poemscape.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 91-137.

Misra, Kalpana. From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China. NY: Routledge, 1998.

Mok, Ka-ho. Intellectuals and the State in Post-Mao China. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Neder, Christina. Lesen in der Volksrepublik China: eine empirisch-qualitative Studie zu Leseverhalten und Lektürepräferenzen der Pekinger Stadtbevölkerung vor dem Hintergrund der Transformation des chinesischen Buch- und Verlagswesens 1978-1995. Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, 1999. [empirical study of reading habits in the post-Mao period]

Palandri, Angela Jung. “The Polemics of Post-Mao Poetry: Controversy over Meng-lung shih.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 19, 3 (1984): 67-86.

Pan, Yuan and Jie Pan. “The Non-Official Magazine Today and the Younger Generation’s Ideals for a New Literature.” In J. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978-1981. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985, 193-219.

Roberts, Rosemary A. “Politics and Pathos: The Reappearance of Tragedy in Chinese Rural Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 13 (Jan. 1985): 85-95.

Siu, Helen. “Social Responsibility and Self-Expression: Chinese Literature in the 1980s.” Modern Chinese Literature 5, 1 (1989): 7-32.

Sun, Lung-kee. “Contemporary Chinese Culture: Structure and Emotionality.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (July 1991).

Sun, Teresa Chi-ching. A Study of Literary Trends in China Since 1980s: The Revival of Classical and Modern Literature. Hamilton Books, 2019.

[Abstract: This book intends to trace the revival of traditional literary works since the 1980s in China as it is revealed on the revitalized College Entrance Examination (CEE). In order to show how these changes reflect China’s altering ideology after the fall of Communism, selections from the CEE’s literary portion will be examined. Taking advantage of the resurrection of the powerful CEE, test creators have composed the literary portion as an education tool to shape public opinion in the post-Communist era. Literature in China have never been an independent art but had shared the responsibility for transmitting China’s intellectual and ethical traditions. The introduction of Communism to China silenced these traditions and made literature the servant of political ideology. This book traces the chronological process of restoring modern vernacular literature from the pre-Communist era and the ways in which traditional literature is being used for modern purposes. For many Chinese intellectuals, the gradual withdrawal of literature for serving political causes and the reinstatement of classical literature and early vernacular works to on the CEE bring to light the recovery of the aesthetic literary tradition and a return to normalcy. When students take the CEE, they not only mentally scrutinize literature that they first read during their secondary education, but also experience an assertive presentation of current Chinese cultural values and outlooks on life. This study argues that in the post-1980s CEE literary selections, students experience a variety of texts that summon up China’s pre-Communist literary tradition in order to serve as an intellectual guiding light for future social development. For those interested in comparative higher education, a particular area of interest may be the book’s singular consideration of the science and technology passages in connection with the restructuring of higher education in China as a remedy of China’s cultural tradition.]

Tan, Chee Lay. “An Attempt to Read Mistiness: Examining the Imagery of Chinese Misty Poetry from an Eastern-Western Comparative Perspective.” Korean Journal of Chinese Linguistics and Literature 58 (2014): 105-28.

Tao, Dongfeng. “Thirty Years of New Era Literature: From Elitization to De-Elitization.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 98-115.

Tsai, Yuan-huang. “The Second Wave: Recent Developments in Mainland Chinese Literature.” In Bih-jaw Lin, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991, 5-22.

Twitchell, Jeffrey and Huang Fan. “Avant-Garde Poetry in China: The Nanjing Scene 1981-1992.” World Literature Today 71, 1 (1997): 29-35.

Unofficial Poetry Journals from China: Publishing outside the System in Post-Mao China [Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections)

[Abstract: Unofficial or “underground” poetry publications—especially journals, but also one-off multiple-author anthologies and individual collections—play an important role in contemporary Chinese culture. They are comparable to Soviet-Russian samizdat publications, and to the “little magazines” often associated with early modernism in the West. The Leiden University collection is internationally unique. It was built by Maghiel van Crevel, who donated it to the library in 2006 and has continued to add new acquisitions. The help of Chinese poets and scholars has been invaluable throughout. The journals are hugely influential but difficult to access. In order to address this paradox and to advance research, teaching, translation, and use by the general reader, Leiden University Libraries is working to digitize the collection, in collaboration with the Fudan University Library. A first set of key items was digitized with the generous support of Freerk Heule . For some quick tips on using the collection, watch this video.]

van Crevel, Maghiel. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money. Leiden: Brill, 2008. [open access through Brill website]

[Abstract: Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship, well-suited to classroom use in that it combines rigorous analysis with a lively style. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, it is organized around the notions of text, context and metatext, meaning poetry, its socio-political and cultural surroundings, and critical discourse in the broadest sense. Authors and issues studied include Han Dong, Haizi, Xi Chuan, Yu Jian, Sun Wenbo, Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, Bei Dao, Yin Lichuan, Shen Haobo and Yan Jun, and everything from the subtleties of poetic rhythm to exile-bashing in domestic media. This book has room for all that poetry is: cultural heritage, symbolic capital, intellectual endeavor, social commentary, emotional expression, music and the materiality of language – art, in a word.]

Visser, Robin. “Privacy and its Ill Effects in Post-Mao Urban Fiction.” In Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, eds., Chinese Concepts of Privacy. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 171-94.

—–. “Post-Mao Urban Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 570-77.

—– and Jie Lu. “Contemporary Urban Fiction: Rewriting the City.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 345-54.

Vittinghoff, Natascha. “China’s Generation X: Rusticated Red Guards in Controversial Contemporary Plays.” In Woei Lian Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 285-318. [discusses Sha Yexin’s New Sprouts from the Borderlands, Wang Peigong’s We, and Xun Pinli’s Yesterday’s Longan Trees]

Wagner, Rudolf. “Der chinesische Autor im eigenen Licht. Literarische Selbstreflexion über die Literatur und ihren Zweck in der VR China” (The Chinese writer in his own light: literary self-reflections on literature and its purpose in the PRC) . In W. Kubin (ed.), Moderne Chinesische Literatur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, l985, 75-101.

—–. “The Chinese Writer in his Own Mirror: Writer, State, and Society–the Literary Evidence.” In Merle Goldman, Timothy Cheek and Carol Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987, 183-231.

—–. “The PRC Intelligentsia: A View from Literature.” In J. Kallgren, ed., Building a Nation-State. China After Forty Years. China Research Monograph 37. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1990, 153-183.

Walsh, Megan. The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2022.

[Abstract: The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China’s people, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it’s important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction—an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative—perhaps truer—way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself.]

Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Wang, Mason Y.H., ed. Perspectives in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Michigan: Green River Press, 1983.

Watson, James L. “The Renegotiation of Chinese Cultural Identity in the Post-Mao Era: An Anthrological Perspective.” In K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 364-86.

Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. “The Changing Concept of Self as Reflected in Chinese Literature of the 1980s.” In Viviane Alleton, ed., Notions et Perceptions du Changement en Chine. Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, College de France, 1994.

—–. “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural.” International Fiction Review 32, 1-2 (2005): 21-31.

Wilcox, Emily. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaomei Chen]

Williams, Philip F. “Some Mainstream Features and Divergent Currents in Post-Mao Stories from 1979-80.” Journal of Chinese Studies 2, 1 (1985): 1-15.

—–. “Divergent Portrayals of the Rustication Experience in Chinese Narrative After Mao.” Contrastes: Revue de linguistique contrastive (Paris) 18/19 (1989): 89-97.

—–. “Some Provincial Precursors of Popular Dissent Movements in Beijing.” China Information 6, 1 (1991): 1-9. [analyzes Hu Ping’s 1989 reportage novel, Zhongguo de mouzi, among other matters relevant to contemporary Chinese literature and culture].

—–. “Migrant Laborer Subcultures in Recent Chinese Literature: a Communicative Perspective.” Intercultural Communication Studies 8, 2 (1998-99): 153-161. [discusses the literary portrayal of contemporary rural mangliu, esp. in Zhang Mingyuan’s 1989 play, The Rainy Summer 多雨的夏天].

—–. “Ingraining Self-Censorship and Other Functions of the Laogai, as Revealed in Chinese Fiction and Reportage.” In Voices from the Laogai: Fifty Years of Surviving China’s Forced Labor Camps. Washington: Laogai Research Foundation, 2000, 97-104.

—–. “Remolding and the Labor Camp Novel.” Asia Major 4, 2 (1991): 133-149.

Williams, Philip F. and Yenna Wu. The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage. Berkeley: UCP, 2004. [contains a history of incarercation in China, as well as an overview of prison camps in the PRC, but it’s main focus is to look at post-Mao literary representations of prison camps] [MCLC Resource Center review by Maghiel van Crevel]

Wu, Liang. “Re-membering the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Avant-garde Literature of the 1980s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 125-36.

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Science and Poetry: Narrativizing Marital Crisis in Reform-Era Rural China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 2 (Fall 2011): 146-74.

—–. Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.

[Abstract: As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution–an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary “freedoms” of economic and affective autonomy, women’s roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal “iron girl” of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented “?good wife and wise mother.” Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China’s soaring divorce rate. Reading popular “divorce narratives” in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present women’s cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.]

Xu, Jilin. “The Fate of Enlightenment–Twenty Years in the Chinese Cultural Sphere, 1978-98.” East Asian History 20 (Dec. 2000): 169-86.

Yang, Daniel S.P. “Theater Activities in Post-Cultural Revolution China.” In C. Tung and C. Mackerras, eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, 164-80.

Yang, Haiou. “‘Cultural Fever’: A Cultural Discourse in China’s Post-Mao Era.” In Virginia R. Dominguez and David Y. H. Wu, eds., From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998, 207-45.

Yang, Min and Don Kuiken. “‘Scar’: A Social Metaphor for Working Through Revolution Trauma.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 2 (2016): 318-42.

[Abstract: This article examines the social and psychological function of the “scar” metaphor at the turn from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. We propose that the widely employed scar metaphor, which was first created in the scar literature movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, enabled Chinese readers to “work through” the blend of psychological and ideological disquietude that lingered after the Cultural Revolution. We will first clarify how the scar metaphor facilitated this process of “working through,” using as an example Lu Xinhua’s “The Scar” (Shanghen). We will then describe how the scar metaphor became dispersed throughout Chinese popular culture and enabled a broad spectrum of Chinese readers to participate in a similar process. At both levels of analysis, we will argue that the scar metaphor simultaneously provides a literary space for working through personal trauma and related anxieties about the ideological transition during this socio-political change.]

Yang, Xiaobin. Selections from Lishi yu xiuci (History and rhetoric). Contemporary Chinese Literature, 1999. [in Chinese, browser required]

—–. The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-garde Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

—–. “Toward a Theory of Postmodern/Post-Mao–Deng Literature.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 81-97.

Yeh, Michelle. “Misty Poetry.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 520-26. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 286-92.

Yu, Hua. “1987, September: The Birth of China’s Literary Avant-Garde.” Tr. Carlos Rojas. In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 787-91.

Zhang, Xudong. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Culture Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Zhang, Yu and Calvin Hui. “Postsocialism and Its Narratives: An Interview with Cai Xiang.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (June 2018).

Zhao, Henry. “New Waves in Recent Chinese Fiction.” In Henry Zhao, ed., The Lost Boat: Avant-garde Fiction from China. London: Wellsweep, 1993, 9-18.

—–. “The River Fans Out: Chinese Fiction Since the Late 1970s.” European Review 11, 2 (May 2003): 193-208.

Zheng, Yiran. Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Zhong, Xueping. “Shanghai Shimin Literature and the Ambivalence of (Urban) Home.” Modern Chinese Literature 9, 1 (1995): 79-99.

—–. Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the late Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Zhou, Xiaoyi. “The Ideological Function of Western Aesthetics in 1980s China.” Literary Research / Recherche Litteraire 18, 35 (Spring-Summer 2001): 112-19

Zhou, Zuyan. “Dao and Reconstruction of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Chinese Literary and Mass Media Products.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 2 (Fall 2016): 223-284.

Post-1989/Postsocialist

Admussen, Nick. Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016.

Balcom, John. “Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Chinese Literature from a Translator’s Perspective.” Wasafiri 55 (2008): 19-23.

Barme, Geremie. “Soft Porn, Packaged Dissent, and Nationalism: Notes on Chinese Culture in the 1990s.” Current History (Sept. 1994).

—–. Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader. NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

—–. In the Red, Contemporary Chinese Culture. NY: Columbia UP, 1999.

Baranovich, Nimrod. “Inverted Exile: Uyghur Writers and Artists in Beijing and the Political Implications of Their Work.” Modern China 33 (2007): 462-504.

Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. NY: Columbia UP, 2008.

[Abstract: The portrayal of historical atrocity in fiction, film, and popular culture can reveal much about the function of individual memory and the shifting status of national identity. In the context of Chinese culture, films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness and Lou Ye’s Summer Palace and novels such as Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo’s The Golden Age collectively reimagine past horrors and give rise to new historical narratives. Table of Contents: Prelude: A History of Pain. Part I: Centripetal Trauma: 1. Musha 1930; 2. Nanjing 1937; 3. Taipei 1947. Part II: Centrifugal Trauma: 4. Yunnan 1968; 5. Beijing 1989; Coda: Hong Kong 1997]

Cai, Rong. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Chao I-heng [Zhao Yiheng].”Post-Isms and Chinese New Conservatism.” New Literary History 28, 1 (Winter 1997): 31-44.

Chao, Shih-Chen. “The Re-institutionalisation of Popular Fiction–The Internet and a New Model of Popular Fiction Prosumption in China.” Journal of the British Association of Chinese Studes 3 (Dec. 2013).

Chen, Dandan. “The Spread of Leo Strauss’s Thought and the Flowering of Classical Political Philosophy in Post-Socialist China.” Intertexts 19, 1-2 (2015): 39-65.

Chen, Jianguo. “The Logic of the Phantasm: Haunting and Spectrality in Contemporary Chinese Literary Imagination.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, 1 (Spring 2002): 231-65. [deals with texts by Mo Yan, Chen Cun, and Yu Hua]. Rpt. in Chen, The Aesthetics of the ‘Beyond’: Phantasm, Nostaligia, and the Literary Practice in Contemporary China. Newark: University of Deleware Press, 2009, 62-90.

—–. The Aesthetics of the ‘Beyond’: Phantasm, Nostaligia, and the Literary Practice in Contemporary China. Newark: University of Deleware Press, 2009.

Chen, Jianhua. “Local and Global in Narrative Contestation: Liberalism and the New Left in Late 1990s China.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 9, 1-2 (1998).

Chen, Lingchei Letty. The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]

Chen, Thomas. Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film. NY: Columbia University Press, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeremy Brown]

[Abstract: The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created. Chen explores a wide range of works made despite and through censorship, including state propaganda, underground films, and controversial best-sellers. Moving across media, from print to the internet, TV to DVD, fiction to documentary, he shows the effects of state intervention on artistic production and consumption. Chen considers art at the edge of censorship, reading such disparate works as a queer love story shot without permission that found official release on DVD, an officially sanctioned film that was ultimately not permitted to be released, a novel built on orthographic elisions that was banned and eventually reissued, and an internet narrative set during the SARS epidemic later published with alterations. He also connects Tiananmen with the story of COVID-19 in China and considers the implications for debates about the reach and power of the Chinese state in the public realm, both domestic and abroad. A bold rethinking of contemporary Chinese literature and film, this book upends understandings of censorship, uncovering not just what it suppresses but also what it produces.]

Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]

Chen, Xiaoming. “The Chinese Perspective and the Assessment of Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Tr. Nancy Tsai. Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 23-27.

Cheng, Yinghong. “Che Guevara: Dramatizing China’s Divided Intelligentsia at the Turn of the Century.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 2 (Fall 2003): 1-44.

Choy, Howard Yuen Fung. Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979-1997. Ph. D. diss. Boulder: University of Colorado, 2004.

—–. Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979-1997. Leiden: Brill, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Andrew Stuckey]

Conceison, Claire. “Hot Tickets: China’s New Generation Takes the Stage.” Persimmon 3, 1 (Spring 2002): 18-27.

Dai, Jinhua. “Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in the 1990s.” positions east asia cultures critique 4, 1 (Spring 1996): 127-43.

—–. “Invisible Writing: The Politics of Chinese Mass Culture in the 1990s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11,1 (Spring 1999): 31-60.

—–. “Rewriting the Red Classics.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, eds., Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon. NY: Routledge, 2009, 151-78.

Davies, Gloria. “Anticipating Community, Producing Dissent: The Politics of Recent Chinese Intellectual Praxis.” The China Review 2, 2 (Fall 2002): 1-35.

[Abstract: This paper explores the ongoing debate between the “liberals” and the “New Left” in relation to the rhetorical and discursive strategies adopted by various authors on both sides of this “ideological” division. In articulating the need for greater democracy and social justice in present-day Mainland Chinese society, these authors deploy tropes and concepts drawn from a wide range of Chinese and EuroAmerican sources. Their common anticipation of community—the word that is now most frequently used in Anglophone scholarship to signify the common good—has produced dissent and debate, primarily because of the different ways in which these authors have formulated their vision of the common good. This paper also examines the foundational concepts and values that underpin “liberal” and “New Left” conceptualizations of the common good, and situates their differently formulated concerns in the context of both globalization and a transformed Chinese party-state, whose current ideology shares much in common with the economic rationalistic doctrine of neo-liberalism.]

—–. Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. [HUP webpage]

[Abstract: As an intellectual mandate, “worrying about China” carries with it the moral obligation of identifying and solving perceived “Chinese problems”–social, political, cultural, historical, or economic–in order to achieve national perfection. In Worrying about China, Gloria Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.]

Davis, Edward, ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.

Day, Michael. “Introduction: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Literature on the Internet.” Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS), Leiden Division. [study of contemporary Chinese poetry websites]

—–. China’s Second World of Poetry: The Sichuan Avant-garde, 1982-1992. Leiden: Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS). Leiden University, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Heather Inwood]

Des Forge, Roger and Luo Xu. “China as a Non-Hegemonic Superpower? The Uses of History among the China Can Say No Writers and Their Critics.” Critical Asian Studies 33, 4 (Dec. 2001).

Dong, Jian. “Withering of the Spirit of Contemporary Chinese Drama.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 4 (Oct. 2007): 571-80.

Feng, Jin. “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese Danmei Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 1-41.

—–. “Cong Jinjian danmei wen kan Zhongguo nuxing xingbie shenfen de goucheng” 从晋江耽美文看中国女性性别身份的构成 (Constructing female gender identities through Danmei at Jinjiang). Zhongguo xing yanjiu 30, 3 (2009): 132-153.

—–. The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China. Ann Arbor: AAS Shorts, 2024.

[Abstract: What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century? The first book-length account of university-based creative writing programs in China, this book reveals how Chinese intellectuals adapt American-style writing programs such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Writing Program at Chinese universities to seek agency and literary innovation in the last two decades. The rise of creative writing programs in China explains broader issues of cultural production in an increasingly authoritarian and market-oriented postsocialist state. By telling a unique story of Chinese intellectuals’ interactions with an influential Western cultural institution, this book also shows how varied cultural and geopolitical priorities can rewrite the story of the global influence of the United States.]

Ferrari, Rossella. “Avant-garde Drama and Theater: China” In Cody, Gabrielle and Sprinchorn, Evert, eds., The Columbia Encyclopaedia of Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Meng Jinghui and Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Theatre. PhD diss. London: SOAS, 2007.

—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China. London, NY, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012.

Ferry, Megan M. “Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 59-80.

Fokemma, Douwe. “Chinese Postmodernist Fiction.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 141-65.

[Abstract: The title of this essay implies that there is a Chinese postmodernism that differs from American or European postmodernism. But the different postmodernisms also have a common basis, which can be found at the level of unstable signification. First the author briefly sketches how the concept of postmodernism traveled from the United States to western Europe and Russia, with key roles for American critics such as John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and Matei Calinescu and, in Europe, writers such as Umberto Eco and the reception of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. To the author, Chinese postmodernism differs from other variants of postmodernism because of its different cultural-historical and literary-historical background. With few exceptions, modernism was a late discovery in China. After 1978 Wang Meng, Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and others wrote fiction in a modernist style. The simultaneity of modernism and postmodernism is a clue to the interpretation of Chinese fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernist exuberant fabulation, partly inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and partly by traditional Chinese fiction, can be found in fiction by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Han Shaogong.Please Don’t Call Me Human (Qianwan bie ba wo dang ren, 1989), by Wang Shuo, who was recently honored with a Chinese compilation of “research material concerning Wang Shuo” (Tianjin, 2005), is also discussed.]

Friedman, Edward. “Democracy and ‘Mao Fever.'” Journal of Contemporary China 6 (Summer 1994): 84-95.

Fumian, Marco. “The Temple and the Market: Controversial Positions in the Literary Field with Chinese Characteristics.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 126-66.

—–. “Chronicle of Du Lala’s Promotion: Exemplary Literature, the Middle Class, and the Socialist Market.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 1 (Spring 2016): 78-128.

Gan Yang. “A Critique of Chinese Conservatism in the 1990s.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 45-66.

Goldblatt, Howard. “Border Crossings: Chinese Writing, in Their World and Ours.” In Timothy B. Weston and Lionel Jensen, eds., China Beyond the Headlines. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000, 327-45.

—–. “Fictional China.” In Lional M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston, eds., China’s Transformations: The Stories beyond the Headlines. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

Goldman, Merle. “Poltically-Engaged Intellectuals in the 1990s.” The China Quarterly 159 (Sept. 1999): 700-711.

Gong, Haomin. Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

[Abstract: Postsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production. He begins his investigation of “uneven modernity” in China by constructing a critical framework of unevenness among different theoretical schools and expounding on how dialectical thinking points to a metaphysical paradox in capitalism and modernity: the inevitable tension between a constant pursuit of infinite fullness and a break of fullness (unevenness) as the means of this pursuit. In the Chinese context, this paradox is created in the “uneven developmentalism” that most manifestly characterizes the postsocialist period. Gong goes on to investigate manifestations of the dialectics of unevenness in specific cultural events. Four case studies address respectively but not exclusively literature (the prose of Yu Qiuyu), popular fiction (Chi Li’s neorealist fiction), commercial cinema (the movies of Feng Xiaogang), and art-house cinema (Wang Xiaoshuai’s filmmaking). Representing different aspects of cultural production in postsocialist China, these writers and directors deal with the same social condition of uneven development, and their works clearly exhibit the problematics of this age. Uneven Modernity makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of China studies as well as the study of uneven development in general. It addresses some of the most popular, yet understudied, cultural phenomena in contemporary China. Specialists and students will find its insights admirable and its style accessible.]

Guo, Yingjie. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

—–. “Pushing the (Red) Envelope.” Time Asia 156, 16 (Oct 23, 2000). [ part of a special issue on youth in China, includes brief looks at works by Wei Hui, Mian Mian, Yu Xiu, Han Han, and Zhu Wen.]

Hao, Jin. “The Myth of Shangri-La and Its Counter-discourses: (Anti-)Utopian Representations of China’s Southwest.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 1 (Summer 2022): 202-237.

Hao, Zhidong. Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

He, Baogang and Yingjie Guo. “Patriotic Villains and Patriotic Heroes: New Trends in Literary Nationalism.” In Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2000, 53-78.

He, Ping. China’s Search for Modernity: Cultural Discourse in the Late 20th Century. Houndmills: PalgraveMacmillan, 2002.

Henningsen, Lena. “Harry Potter with Chinese Characteristics, Plagiarism between Orientalism and Occidentalism.” China Information 20, 2 (2006): 275-311.

—–. Copyright Matters: Imitation, Creativity and Authenticity in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center review by Krista Van Fleit Hang]

[Abstract: Henningsen offers five studies that challenge the wide-spread prejudice among the Western Press that China is an empire of plagiarism, sometimes even referred to as the “People’s Republic of Cheats”. By analyzing the cases of convicted plagiarist Guo Jingming, the victim of plagiarism Han Han, the follow-up publications to Jiang Rong’s Wolf’s Totem, the Harry Potter fakes and fan fiction, as well as discussions of academic plagiarism, Henningsen proves that copyright increasingly matters to Chinese writers. Confronted with instances of copyright infringements on their own works, they voice their opposition and fight for their rights, be it through legal action or their writing. At the same time, the author demonstrates that a text that is commonly considered to be “plagiarized” or “imitated” may turn out to be a highly creative work in its own right, for example when Harry Potter appears as a timid exchange student in China. Therefore, Henningsen opts for a literary reading of these “derivative” works and argues that imitation may, at times, be a creative tool. While these two central arguments appear to be contradictory, the author shows that they represent two sides of the same coin: the emergence of a new self-conception among Chinese authors, as they struggle to recast their relationship with society and state.]

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Beleaguered Husbands: Representations of Marital Breakdown in Some Recent Mainland Fiction.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (1999).

—–. “Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Asian Studies 68, 3 (2009): 715-747. [deals in part with Chun Shu, Mian Mian, Wei Hui, Chungking Express, and Taiwan Internet literature]

Hockx, Michel. “Links with the Past: Mainland China’s Online Literary Communities and their Antecedents.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 38 (Feb. 2004): 105-27.

[Abstract: This article compares Chinese literary journals from the early twentieth century with a Mainland Chinese literary website from the early twenty-first century. In both these periods, literary practice underwent significant changes as a result of major changes in the technological processes involved in the production and distribution of texts. Five aspects of these changes are examined: the mixed media environment, the provision of information about authors’ identities, engagement with social issues, community building, and the relationship with serious literature. The article argues that a very traditional Chinese view of literature as a socially embedded act of communication continued to play a significant role in both periods, and was even further enhanced through interaction with the new technologies. Despite the fact that both types of publication appeal(ed) to large readerships, it is argued that it is not helpful simply to consider them as ‘popular literature’. Both the journals from 100 years ago and the website of today represent literary communities that share a serious view of literature, albeit one that is not compatible with the familiar New Literature paradigm.]

—–. Internet Literature in China. NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

[Abstract: Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, this book presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still attempting to draw a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Readers interested in encountering these new forms of writing, some of which are no longer available online, will value this book. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China–and across Asia.]

—–. “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: Literary Policy in Xi Jinping’s China.” Law and Literature 34, 2 (2022).

Hockx, Michel and Julia Strauss, eds. Special Issue: Culture in the Contemporary PRC. The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005). Rpt as Culture in the Contemporary PRC. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hai Ren]

[Abstract: articles by Jing Wang, Michel Hockx, Yomi Braester, Kirk A. Denton, Antonia Finnane, Jeroen de Kloet, Maghiel van Crevel, and Deborah Davis].

Hong, Zhigang. “Another Look at Subjective Self-Consciousness and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Tr. Ronald Kimmons. Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 36-39.

Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Michael M. Day. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward Gunn]

Hu, Andy Yinan. Swimming Against the Tide: Tracing and Locating Chinese Leftism Online. MA Thesis. Simon Fraser University, 2006.

Hu, Ying. “Writing Erratic Desire: Sexual Politics in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” In Xiaobing Tang and S. Snyder, eds., In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, 49-68.

Huang, Yibing. Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Darryl Sterk]

Huang, Yiju. Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rebecka Eriksson]

Hunt, Pamela. Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jun Lei]

[Abstract: Masculinity, fast-changing and regularly declared to be in the throes of crisis, is attracting more popular and scholarly debate in China than ever before. At the same time, Chinese literature since 1989 has been characterized as brimming with countercultural ‘attitude’. This book probes the link between literary rebellion and manhood in China, showing how male writers, as they critique the outcomes of decades of market reform, also ask the same question: how best to be a man in the new postsocialist order? In this first full-length discussion of masculinity in post-1989 Chinese literature, Hunt offers a detailed analysis of four contemporary authors in particular: Zhu Wen, Feng Tang, Xu Zechen, and Han Han. In a series of insightful readings, she explores how all four writers show the same preoccupation with the figure of the man on the edges of society. Drawing on longstanding Chinese and global models of maverick and marginal masculinity, and responding to a desire to retain a measure of masculine authority, their characters all engage in forms of transgression that still rely heavily on heteronormative and patriarchal values. Rebel Men argues that masculinity, so often overlooked in literary analysis of contemporary China, continues to be renegotiated, debated, and agonized over, and is ultimately reconstructed as more powerful than before.]

Huot, Claire. “Here, There, Anywhere: Networking by Young Chinese Writers Today.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 198-215.

—–. China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

—–. “Literary Experiments: Six Files.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 7-48. [deals mostly with avant-garde writers]

Inwood, Heather. On the Scene of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Ph. D. dissertation. London: SOAS, 2008. [mainland poetry scene from 2000-2008]

—–. Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014

[Abstract: examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of death, poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.]

—–. “Internet Literature: From YY to MOOC.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 436-40.

—–. Tales of Future Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nathaniel Kenneth Isaacson]

“Issues in Contemporary Chinese Literature: Informal Roundtable Discussion by Three Authors: Wang Meng, Liu Sola, Zha Jianying.” Tr. Marshal McArthur. Baker Institute, Rice University (March 10, 1998).

Jiang, Hong, ed. “The Cultural Configuration of Literature and Film in the 1990s China: A New Perspective,” a special issue of The China Review 3, 1 (Spring 2003).

Jiang, Hong. “The Personalization of Literature: Chinese Women’s Writing in the 1990s.” The China Review 3, 1 (Spring 2002).

Jones, Andrew F. “Avante-Garde Fiction in China.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 554-60. Rpt. as “Avant-Garde Fiction in Post-Mao China.” In Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 313-19.

Jose, Nicholas. “Contrary Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” In Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead, eds., The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2018, 121-38.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

—–. “Modernity and Apocalypse in Chinese Novels from the End of the Twentieth Century.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 101-20. [deals with Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril, Lu Tianming’s Heaven Above, Zhang Ping’s Choice, and Mo Yan’s Liquorland]

—–. Corruption and Realism in Late Socialist China. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007. [Publisher’s blurb]

—–. Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels. NY: Columbia University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Michael S. Duke]

[Abstract: The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and most Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei scramble common conceptions of China’s modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly “un-Chinese” dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, these novels deeply reflect China’s turbulent recent history, re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China’s industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China’s highbrow historical novels from the 1990s to the mid-2000s as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.]

Knight, Sabina. “Self-Ownership and Capitalist Values in 1990s Chinese Fiction.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 222-58. [deals with Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan the Bloodseller and Weihui’s Shanghai Baby]

Kong, Belinda. SARS Stories: Affect and Archive of the 2003 Pandemic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.

[Abstract: Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.]

Kong, Shuyu. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Chinese Literary Journals in the Cultural Marketplace.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, 1 (Spring 2002): 93-144.

—–. Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Kramer, Oliver. “No Past to Long For?: A Sociology of Chinese Writers in Exile.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 161-77.

—–. “Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Exile Literature.” Paper presented at EASC in Prague 1994.

Kraus, Richard. “Public Monuments and Private Pleasures in the Parks of Nanjing: A Tango in the Ruins of the Ming Emperor’s Palace.” In Deborah Davis, ed., China’s Consumer Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

—–. “China in 2003: From SARS to Spaceships.” Asian Survey 44 (Jan./Feb. 2004): 147-157.

—–. The Party and the Arty in China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Matthew D. Johnson]

[Abstract: In this original exploration of the dynamic and potent interface between Chinese culture and politics, Richard Kraus examines the impact of the market on the once-comprehensive system of state patronage of the arts in the PRC. The author uses all genres of art to explore the changing nature of politics, seen through such phenomena as ideology, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship of artists to the state. Kraus makes three provocative arguments: First, the commercialization of China’s cultural life has been intellectually liberating, but also poses serious economic challenges that artists are sometimes slow to master. Second, despite conventional wisdom in the West that China’s economic reforms have not been followed by serious political reform, he shows that the shift from state patronage to a mixed system of private and public sponsorship is in fact a fundamental political change. Third, Western recognition of the reformation in China’s cultural life has been obscured by a combination of ignorance, ideological barriers, and foreign policy rivalry. Cogent, witty, and deeply informed, this comprehensive overview of the Chinese arts scene will be an essential text for all observers of contemporary China.]

Krenz, Joanna. Life on a Strip: Essayism and Emigration in Contemporary Chinese Literature. PhD Diss. Leiden University, 2018.

Larson, Wendy. “Never This Wild: Sexing the Cultural Revolution.” Modern China 25, 4 (1999): 423-50.

Laughlin, Charles. “Literature and Popular Culture.” In Robert E. Gamer, ed., Understanding Contemporary China. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999.

Laurence, Patricia. “Beyond the Little Red Book: Literature in China Today.” The Nation (Sept. 4-11, 2000): 31-37.

Lei, Guang. “Rural Taste, Urban Fashions: The Cultural Politics of Rural/Urban Difference in Contemporary China.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 613-46.

Li Fukan and Eva Hung. “Post-Misty Poetry.” Renditions 37 (1992): 93-98.

Li, Jie and Enhua Zhang, ed. Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xing Fan]

Li, Xia. “Metropolis in Twilight: Urban Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Interlitteraria 6 (2001): 19-45.

Li, Xia. “Bulldozing Pudian Street: Destruction or Renewal? Ambiguities in Big City Novels in Late 20th Century Chinese Literature.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4, 1 (Jan. 2007): 1-12. [In Chinese]

[Abstract: There is little doubt that the most cogent literary representation of the experience of modernity has been realised in big city fiction and cinematographic masterpieces such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis(1926). Despite the formal and aesthetic incompatability of early twentieth century (predominantly Western) works of this literary genre and more recent ones, East and West, the underlying dialectic tension between progressive optimism and disorientation, existential up-rootedness, alienation and angst (Rilke’s loss of soul) as archetypal manifestation of mega-city reality and its social structure and organisation, constitutes a generic hallmark, regardless of time and place. Significantly, the relevance of this problem is reinforced, theoretically and practically, by the eminent scholar and architect Rem Koolhaas whose reflections have China as a principal reference point of the global “out-of-control process of modernisation”. This paper focuses on the literary representation of the complexity and universality of the problem and the social implications of the blurred and ambiguous vision of urban reality with particular reference to contemporary Chinese literature.]

Lin, Min and Maria Galikowski. The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Lin, Qingxin. Brushing History Against the Grain: Reading the Chinese New Historical Fiction, 1986-1999. HK: HK University Press, 2005. [includes discussion of Mo Yan, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Chen Zhongshi, etc.]

Linder, Birgit Bunzel. “Metaphors unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics and Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” In Howard Y. F. Choy, ed., Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2016, 90-120.

Liu, Kang. “Is There an Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization?: The Debate About Modernity in China.” In Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998, 164-90.

—–. “What Is ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’? Issues of Culture, Politics, and Ideology.” In Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2004, 46-77.

—–. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honlulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.

—–. “Reinventing the “Red Classics” in the Age of Globalization.” Neohelicon 37, 2 (Spring 2010): 329-347.

[Abstract: The resurgence of revolutionary literature or Red Classics at the turn of the century is indicative of the cultural logic of the revolutionary hegemony during Mao and post-Mao China. Revolutionary hegemony served quite effectively to legitimate Mao Zedong’s, and much of Deng Xiaoping’s reign, but it has become increasingly difficult to sustain its viability and efficacy. From the beginning of the new century, both the state and consumer popular culture sectors have pushed for a Red Classic resurgence. While the ideological content and styles of the Red Classics are apparently incommensurable to China’s social reality today, their current popularity suggests a success in capturing or eliciting emotional responses from the audience primarily derived from their lived and felt experience during the Mao era. For the state, the Red Classics and the entire revolutionary legacy can now exist only as mummies of history, serving as a nationalist, “patriotic” narrative of the recent past. Meanwhile, the Red Classics is reinvented as nostalgia, a commodity in China’s cultural market. The paper examines the genealogy and current reinvention of the Red Classics, in order to shed some light on China’s post-revolutionary cultural politics.]

Liu, Lydia. “What’s Happened to Ideology? Transnationalism, Postsocialism, and the Study of Global Media Culture.” Duke Working Papers in Asian / Pacific Studies (Spring 1998).

Liu, Qingfeng. “The Topography of Intellectual Culture in 1990s Mainland China: A Survey.” Tr. Gloria Davies. In Gloria Davies, ed. Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2001, 47-70.

Liu, Toming Jun. “Uses and Abuses of Sentimental Nationalism: Mnemonic Disquiet in Heshang and Shuobu.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 169-209.

Liu, Yuanhang and Michael Seats. “Can a Chinese Subaltern Speak?: A Study on Writings About Female Aging in China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2 (Fall 2021): 98-126.

Lo, Dennis. The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020.

Lu, Jie. “Exploration of Language: The Foregrounding of Style in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5, 1 (1998): 111-30.

—–. “Cultural Invention and Cultural Intervention: Reading Chinese Urban Fiction of the Nineties.” Modern Chinese Liteature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 107-39.

Lu, Jie, ed. China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008.

[Contents: Introduction: China’s New Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century; (1) History in a Mythical Key: Temporality, Memory, and Tradition in Wang Anyi’s Fiction; (2) National Trauma, Global Allegory: Reconstruction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite; (3) Globalizing Chinese Literature: Toward a Rewriting of Contemporary Chinese Literary Culture; (4) The Quest of Ma Lihua, a Han Intellectual in Tibet; Who Is Afraid of Lu Xun?—Politics of ‘Debates about Lu Xun’ and the Question of His Legacy in Post-Revolution China; (5) Shanghai Cosmopolitan: Class, Gender and Cultural Citizenship in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe; (6) Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioninl (7) From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese Cinema in the Internet Age; (8) Links with the Past—Mainland China’s Online Literary Communities and their Antecedents; (9) Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning; (10) Spectacles of Remembrance: Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Art; (11) Rewriting Beijing: A Spectacular City in Qiu Huadong’s Urban Fiction]

Lu, Sheldon H. “Literature: Intellectuals in the Ruined Metropolis at the Fin-de-siecle.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, 239-59.

—–. “Popular Culture and Body Politics: Beauty Writers in Contemporary China.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 167-85.

[Abstract: This essay is a study of a group of women writers who emerged on the Chinese literary scene in the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. They have been called beauty writers (meinü zuojia), referring to the authors themselves being beautiful women. Their writings are characterized by an unabashed, unprecedented foregrounding of female sexuality. While their novels were censored by the state now and then, they circulate on the Internet and contribute to the formation of China’s booming Internet literature. The initial core group of beauty writers has made a large impact on other aspiring female writers eager to explore and expose their sensuality and sexuality. The parading and pandering of female subjectivity via a body politics have become a major literary fad in contemporary mainland China.]

Lupascu, Victoria. “Plasma Economy, the Biopolitics of Blood and the Literary Specter of AIDS in China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 42 (2020): 133-57.

Ma, Shu Yun. “The Rise and Fall of Neo-Authoritarianism in China.” China Information 5, 3 (Winter 1990/91).

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Susan Whitfield, ed., After the Event: Human Rights and their Future in China. London: Wellsweep Press, 1993: 73-90.

—–. “Literary Decorum or Carnivalistic Grotesque: Literature in the People’s Republic of China after 50 Years.” The China Quarterly 159 (Sept. 1999): 723-33.

—–. “Discourse on Privacy by Women Writers in Late Twentieth Century China.” China Information 19, 1 (March 2005): 97-119.

McGrath, Jason. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.

[Abstract: This book examines Chinese culture under the age of marke reforms. Beginning in the early 1990s and on into the new century fields such as literature and film have been fundamentall transformed by the forces of the market as China is integrated eve more closely into the world economic system. As a result, the formerl unified revolutionary culture has been changed into a pluralized stat that reflects the diversity of individual experience in the reform era New autonomous forms of culture that have arisen include avant-garde as well as commercial literature, and independent film as wel as a new entertainment cinema. Chinese people find their experience of postsocialist modernity reflected in all kinds of new cultural form as well as critical debates that often question the direction of Chines society in the midst of comprehensive and rapid change]

Misra, Kalpana. From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China. NY: Routledge, 1998.

Mok, Ka-ho. Intellectuals and the State in Post-Mao China. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. [discusses Yan Jiaqi, Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan, and Liu Xiaobo]

Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2021.

[Abstract: Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, this monograph provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, Sensing the Sinophone engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei—three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity thatc comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.]

—–. “Take the Elevator to Tomorrow: Mobile Space and Lingering Time in Contemporary Urban Fiction.” Prism 19, 1 (2022): 86-101.

[Abstract: What if, in the encounter between the subject and the city, it is the buildings, the streets, the rooms that are moving and the human beings who are at a standstill? Inspired by the efforts of literary scholars and human geographers to apply a unified understanding of space and time to the study of the (fictional) city, this article employs an analysis centered on the figure of the elevator to explore how literary narratives can help expand our understanding of space-time as an intuitive and quotidian fact of existence. In a comparative study of Taiwanese author Wu Mingyi’s short story “The Ninety-Ninth Floor” and Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s “Mute Doors,” this article proposes the term time-space as a suitable concept for dealing with discrete sections of space-time in literature and goes on to explore the elevator as a prime example of such an explicitly temporal, and spatially confined, time-space.]

Ni, Zhange. “Steampunk, Zombie Apocalypse, and Homoerotic Romance: Re-writing Revolution-Plus-Love in Contemporary China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020): 179-229.

Pirazzoli, Melinda. “Free Market Economy and Chinese Literature.” World Literature Today 70 (1996).

Rojas, Carlos. “Discourses of Disease: Representations of Cancer and Viral Infection in Contemporary China.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 53-59.

[Abstract: Through a discussion of several recent novels by Hu Fayun, Bi Shumin, and Yan Lianke—including Hu’s 2005 novel Such Is This (); Bi’s 2003 novel Saving the Breast (Zhengjiu rufang) and her 2012 novel Coronavirus (Huaguan bingdu); and Yan’s 1998 novel Streams of Time (Riguang liunian), his 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses (Shouhuo), and his 2006 novel Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng)—this article examines how these authors a set of disease-inspired metaphors to explore potential responses to the medical concerns in question. More specifically, the article argues that, in each of the works in question, the authors use a set of disease-inspired to propose a productive means by which society might respond to the threat posed by disease itself.]

Schaffer, Kay and Xianlin Song. Women Writers in Postsocialist China. London: Routledge, 2014.

[Abstract: What does it mean to read from elsewhere? Women Writers in Postsocialist China introduces readers to a range and variety of contemporary Chinese women’s writing, which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The book addresses the different ways women’s issues are understood in China and the West, attending to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas with existing Chinese understandings of gender, feminism, subjectivity, consumerism and (post) modernism. By focusing on women’s autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing, the book engages in a transcultural flow of ideas between western and indigenous Chinese feminisms. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends, cultural formations and ways of thinking, it asks how the texts and the concepts they negotiate might be understood in the social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently elsewhere in the global locations in which they circulate. The book argues that women-centred writing in China has a direct bearing on global feminist theory and practice. This critical study of selected genres and writers highlights the shifts in feminist perspectives within contemporary local and global cultural landscapes.]

Scheen, Lena. Shanghai Literary Imaginings: A City in Transformation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Andrew David Field]

Schwieger, Irmy. “From Representing Trauma to Traumatized Representation: Experiential and Reflective Modes of Narrating the Past.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 3 (2015): 345-68.

[Abstract: In contrast to history, which strives for a neutral and objective stance from which to narrate the past, literature can be thought of as multi-functional when it comes to traumatic history: as healing, in that it restores meaning where it has been destroyed; as subversive, in that it tells counter-histories of the master-narrative; as complementary, in that it integrates suppressed voices and painful experiences into the collective memory; or as disturbing, in that it narrates trauma as a persisting condition that continues into the present. This article looks into literary representations of trauma that make use of different narrative modes to reconstruct the past and to deal with collective trauma in 20th-century China. In order to understand the relationship between historical trauma and collective memory and to demonstrate the way in which memory relates to the past and to what extent memory shapes the collective identity of the present, the paper utilizes the concepts of communicative and cultural memory, as formulated by Jan and Aleida Assmann.]

Shi, Anbin. A Comparative Approach to Redefining Chinese-ness in the Era of Globalization. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2003, 129-206.[a general introductory chapter, with chapters on Cui Jian, Wei Hui and Wang Xiaobo, and Zhaxi Dawa]

Shu, Yunzhong. “New Historical Fiction in China.” Chinese Culture 37 (1996): 87-110.

Sautman, Barry. “Sirens of the Strongman: New-Authoritarianism in Recent Chinese Political Theory.” China Quarterly 129 (March 1992): 72-102.

Song, Mingwei. “How the Steel Was Tempered: The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 1 (2012): 95-111.

[Abstract: Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao’s era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation’s self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang’s film Becoming a Man (1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context.]

—–. “Popular Genre Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 394-99.

Strafella, Giorgio. Intellectual Discourse in Reform Era China: The Debate on the Spirit of the Humanities in the 1990s. London: Routledge, 2017.

[Abstract: This book explores intellectual discourse in reform era China by analysing the so-called “debate on the spirit of the Humanities”, which occurred in the years 1993-95, and which is recognised by scholars as one of the most interesting, influential and important debates of the 1990s. This debate, in which Chinese intellectuals reflected on reform-era mass culture and on their role in society, was the first debate in China after the crackdown of 1989 and the launch of new economic reforms after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 “southern tour”. The book, drawing on a large corpus of texts and a wide range of individual positions, demonstrates how Chinese intellectuals, having to face the combination of political repression and economic liberalisation, conceptualised and reacted to both. The book reveals the scale and complexity of the debate, the nature of intellectual life in China, the status and relevance of intellectual voices in society, the divisions within the intellectual sphere as well as shared concepts and ideals, and how the key factors of political repression and economic liberalisation which remain central in China today were defined and articulated.]

Sun, Teresa Chi-ching. A Study of Literary Trends in China Since 1980s: The Revival of Classical and Modern Literature. Hamilton Books, 2019.

Tang, Yijie. “Some Reflections on New Confucianism in Mainland Chinese Culture of the 1990s.” Tr.Gloria Davies. In Gloria Davies, ed. Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2001, 123-34.

Tao, Dongfeng. “When a Red Classic Was Spoofed: A Cultural Analysis of a Media Incident.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 247-70.

—–. “Thirty Years of New Era Literature: From Elitization to De-Elitization.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 98-115.

Tao, Naikan. “Going Beyond: Post-Menglong Poets.” The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 27/28 (1995/96): 146-53.

Twitchell, Jeffrey and Huang Fan. “Avant-Garde Poetry in China: The Nanjing Scene 1981-1992.” World Literature Today 71, 1 (1997): 29-35.

van Crevel, Maghiel. “The Horror of Being Ignored and the Pleasure of Being Left Alone: Notes on the Chinese Poetry Scene.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (April 2003).

—–. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money. Leiden: Brill, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center review by Christopher Lupke]

[Abstract: is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship, well-suited to classroom use in that it combines rigorous analysis with a lively style. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, it is organized around the notions of text, context and metatext, meaning poetry, its socio-political and cultural surroundings, and critical discourse in the broadest sense. Authors and issues studied include Han Dong, Haizi, Xi Chuan, Yu Jian, Sun Wenbo, Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, Bei Dao, Yin Lichuan, Shen Haobo and Yan Jun, and everything from the subtleties of poetic rhythm to exile-bashing in domestic media. This book has room for all that poetry is: cultural heritage, symbolic capital, intellectual endeavor, social commentary, emotional expression, music and the materiality of language – art, in a word.]

Veg, Sebastian. Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals. NY: Columbia University Press, 2019.

[Abstract: Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati or pronouncing on democracy and modernity like 1980s public intellectuals, they derive legitimacy from their work with the vulnerable and the marginalized, often proclaiming their independence with a heavy dose of anti-elitist rhetoric. They are proudly minjian—unofficial, unaffiliated, and among the people. . . Veg explores the rise of minjian intellectuals and how they have profoundly transformed China’s public culture. An intellectual history of contemporary China, Minjian documents how, amid deep structural shifts, grassroots thinker-activists began to work outside academia or policy institutions in an embryonic public sphere. Veg explores the work of amateur historians who question official accounts, independent documentarians who let ordinary people speak for themselves, and grassroots lawyers and NGO workers who spread practical knowledge. Their interventions are specific rather than universal, with a focus on concrete problems among disenfranchised populations such as victims of Maoism, migrant workers and others without residence permits, and petitioners. Drawing on careful analysis of public texts by grassroots intellectuals and the networks and publics among which they circulate, Minjian is a groundbreaking transdisciplinary exploration of crucial trends developing under the surface of contemporary Chinese society.]

Visser, Robin. “Privacy and its Ill Effects in Post-Mao Urban Fiction.” In Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, eds. Chinese Concepts of Privacy. Leiden: Brill, 2002,171-194. [deals with texts by Chen Ran and Liu Heng, with bits on Sun Ganlu, Qiu Huadong, and Zhu Wen]

—–. “Post-Mao Urban Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 570-77.

—–. “Urban Ethics: Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernity in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 193-216. [deals with Qiu Huadong, Zhu Wen, and He Dun]

—–. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Paul Manfredi]

—– and Jie Lu. “Contemporary Urban Fiction: Rewriting the City.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 345-54.

Wang, Ban. “Memory as History: Making Sense of the Past in Contemporary China.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5, 1 (1998): 49-67.

—–. “From Historical Narrative to the World of Prose: The Essayistic Mode in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 173-88.

—–. “In Search of Real-Life Images in China: Realism in the Age of Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary China 17 (56) (2008): 497-512.

Wang, Ban and Jie Lu, eds. China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Xiaobing Tang]

Wang, Chaohua, ed. One China, Many Paths. London: Verso, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ban Wang]

[contains articles by and interviews with Wang Hui, Zhu Xueqin, Chen Pingyuan, Qian Liqun, He Qinglian, Qin Hui, Wang Yi, Li Changping, Xiao Xuehui, Wang Anyi, Gan Yang, Wang Xiaoming, etc; a good introduction to cultural discourse of 1990s PRC]

Wang, David Der-Wei. “Return to Go: Fictional Innovation in the Late Qing and the Late Twentieth Century.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 257-97.

—–. “Red Legacy in Fiction.” Korea Journal of Chinese Language and Literature 1 (2011): 213-48.

—–. “Utopian Dream and Dark Consciousness Chinese Literature at the Millennial Turn.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 61, 1 (March 2019): 136-56.

[Abstract: This article seeks to analyze the contested conditions of modern and contemporary Chinese utopia, as a political treatise, a literary genre, and a social imaginary. It takes a historical perspective from which to describe the rise of utopia in the late Qing era and ponders the contradictions and confluences of its narrative and intellectual paradigms. It proposes that we engage with “dark consciousness,” an idea that deals with the polemics of crisis and contingency ingrained in Chinese thought, in light of modern Chinese literary sources. The last part turns to the scene of the new millennium, observing the dystopian and heterotopian inclinations in fictional practice as opposed to the utopian aspiration in political discourse.]

Wang, Hui. “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 9-44.

—–. “PRC Cultural Studies and Cultural Criticism in the 1990s.” Tr. Nicholas Kaldis. positions: east asian cultures critique 6, 1 (1998): 239-51.

—–. “Challenging the Eurocentric, Cold-war View of China and the Making of a Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field.” Xudong Zhang, ed. East Asia (Spring/Summer 2002).

—–. China’s New Order: Society, Politics and Economy in Transition. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.

—–. “The New Criticism.” In Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths. London: Verso, 2003, 55-86.

—–. “The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 1 (Spring 2004): 1-69.

Wang, Lingzhen. “Reproducing the Self: Consumption, Imaginary, and Identity in Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernity in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 173-92. [deals primarily with Chen Ran’s Private Life and Lin Bai’s Self at War]

Wang Shaoguang, Deborah Davis, and Yanjie Bian. “The Uneven Distribution of Cultural Capital: Book Reading in Urban China.” Modern China 32, 3 (2006): 315-348.

[Abstract: Drawing on interviews with 400 couples in four cities in 1998, this exploratory study focuses on variation in reading habits to integrate the concept of cultural capital into the theoretical and empirical analysis of inequality and social stratification in contemporary urban China. Overall, we find that volume and composition of cultural capital varies across social classes independent of education. Thus, to the extent that cultural capital in the form of diversified knowledge and appreciation for certain genres or specific authors is unevenly distributed across social classes, we hypothesize that the possession of cultural capital may be a valuable resource in defining and crystallizing class boundaries in this hybrid, fast-changing society.]

Wang, Xiaoming. “China on the Brink of a ‘Momemtous Era.” positions east asia cultures critique 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 585-611.

Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. “Chinese Literature and Film in the 1990s.” In Robert Benewick and Paul Wingrove, eds., China in the 1990s. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995, 224-33.

—–. “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural.” International Fiction Review 32, 1-2 (2005): 21-31.

Williams, Philip F. “The Rage for Postism and a Chinese Scholar’s Dissent.” Academic Questions 12, 1 (Winter 1998-99): 43-53. [discusses Liu Zaifu and various debates over modern Chinese literary theory].

—–. “Migrant Laborer Subcultures in Recent Chinese Literature: a Communicative Perspective.” Intercultural Communication Studies 8, 2 (1998-99): 153-161. [discusses the literary portrayal of contemporary rural mangliu 盲流, esp. in Zhang Mingyuan’s 1989 play, Duo yu de xiatian 多雨的夏天].

Winter, Martin. “Chinese Literature Since 2000: A Continuing Miracle, Fostered by International Connections?” In Jana S. Rošker and Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, eds., Modernisation of Chinese Culture: Continuity and Change. Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, 147-69.

Wong, Lisa Lai-ming. “Examples of Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry.” Modern China 32, 3 (2006): 385-408.

[Contemporary critics who study women’s literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a voice. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as well as Hélène Cixous’s notion of “writing the body, ” this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining “liberated” selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women’s freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women’s predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China.]

—–. “Imagined Future in Chinese Novels at the Turn of the 21st century: A Study of Yellow Peril, The End of Red Chinese Dynasty and A Flourishing Age: China, 2013.” ASIANetwork Exchange 20, 1 (2012): 47-56.

Xiao, Hui Faye. Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.

Xu, Ben. “‘From Modernity to Chineseness’: The Rise of Nativist Cultural Theory in Post-1989 China.” positions east asia cultures critique 6, 1 (1998): 203-37.

—–. Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

—–. “Contesting Memory for Intellectual Self-Positioning: The 1990s’ New Cultural Conservativism in China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 157-192.

Xu, Jian. Deleuze and Chinese “Pure Literature”: Literary Worlding from History to Becoming. Lexington Books, 2024.

[Abstract: probes into the potentialities of a new conception of literature obscured by the critical ambivalence in China’s literary field around the turn of the century. With the help of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, this book articulates many of the latent social, political, and cultural ideas embedded in “pure literature” subsisting as a literary sensibility waiting to be expressed. The specific practices and works of “pure literature” analyzed in the book also serve as instances of what Deleuze’s creative concepts can address, testing and fleshing out their efficacy. Identifying shared problem-solving areas between Deleuze’s philosophy and Chinese “pure literature,” Jian Xu uses them to shed light on the hidden edges of Chinese “pure literature.” Through such Deleuzian theses as the immanence of becoming, the need of the nonhistorical, the virtual real and pure event, the ills of representationalism, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, pre-individual singularities, and so forth, the book sets about creating a new critical vocabulary to help “pure literature” become self-conscious of its own political creative potentials.]

Xu, Jilin. “The Fate of Enlightenment–Twenty Years in the Chinese Cultural Sphere, 1978-98.” East Asian History 20 (Dec. 2000): 169-86.

Yang, Guobin. “China’s Zhiqing Generation: Nostalgia, Identity, and Cultural Resistance in the 1990s.” Modern China 29, 3 (July 2003): 267-96.

Yang, Xiaobin. “Maoist Discourse, Trauma and Chinese Avant-Garde Literature.” American Imago 51, 2 (1994).

—–. Selections from Lishi yu xiuci (History and rhetoric). Contemporary Chinese Literature, 1999. [in Chinese, browser required]

—–. “Whence and Whither the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng Historical Subjectivity and Literary Subjectivity in Modern China.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 379-98.

—–. The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-garde Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

—–. “Toward a Theory of Postmodern/Post-Mao–Deng Literature.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 81-97.

Yang, Xin. From Beauty Fear To Beauty Fever: A Critical Study of Contemporary Chinese Female Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

[Abstract: looks at a «glamorous» literary and cultural moment in China at the turn of the twenty-first century, namely that of the high-profile female writers born in the 1970s. Dubbed as «beauty writers», they brought to light a series of literary, cultural, and social issues at an important moment of institutional and ideological transformation, when China was more actively participating in the global market economy. The discourse of beauty writers is closely related to the changing ideology from «beauty fear» to «beauty fever». Beauty fear resulted from the revolutionary ambition of denouncing the old institutionalized ideologies and embracing gender equality. Beauty fever was driven by commercialization in the mid- and late 1990s, when globalization became the new social reality and broke the boundaries of world/China, official/folk, and elite/mass. After years of revolutionary policies of gender erasure, beauty fever was the product of the intertwined narratives of resistance politics, feminism, capitalism, consumerism, and the postmodern ludic carnival.]

Yee, Winnie L. M. “Ghostly Chronotopes: Spectral Cityscapes in Post-2000 Chinese Literature.” Prism 19, 1 (2022): 28-45.

[Abstract: Although the exhaustion and brutal exploitation of nature in the name of progress has been decried in recent decades, post-socialist China continues to use economic gains to justify the destruction of the majority of the populace and their environment. This article focuses on the lives of Chinese people and the ways in which urban spaces, which are the result of a long-term ideologically and economically driven development paradigm, are rendered spectral and uncanny by contemporary Chinese writers. Specters serve as common tropes for social injustice, personal vendettas, or unspeakable traumas. Di qi tian 第七天 (The Seventh Day, 2013) by Yu Hua 余華 (1960–) and Yuese liaoren 月色撩人 (Seductive Moon, 2008) by Wang Anyi 王安憶 (1954–) are analyzed in order to expose the dire effects of the urbanization of post-socialist China on the everyday lives of people of every profession, age, class, and gender.

Zhang, Ning. “Garbage or Gold: Two Extreme Assessments of Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Tr. Denis Mair. Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 28-30.

Zhang, Xudong. “Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in Post-Tiananmen China.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 109-40.

—–. “Challenging the Eurocentric, Cold War View of China and the Making of a Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field.” East Asia 19, 1/2 (2001): 3-57. [available online through Ingenta Select]

—–. “Multiplicity or Homogeneity? The Cultural-Political Paradox of the Age of Globalization.” Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004): 30-55.

—–. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008.

[Abstract: Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China’s entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China’s uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity. Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political conflicts in China during the 1990s. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the postsocialist realism of the era through readings of Mo Yan’s fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang applies the same keen insight to China’s long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.–from Duke UP website]

Zhang, Yu and Calvin Hui. “Postsocialism and Its Narratives: An Interview with Cai Xiang.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (June 2018).

Zhang, Zhen. “The World Map of Haunting Dreams: Reading Post-1989 Chinese Women’s Diaspora Writings.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 308-35. [deals with disporic writings of Liu Suola, Zha Jianying, Hong Ying, and You You]

—–. “Commercialization of Literature in the Post-Mao Era: Yu Hua, Beauty Writers, and Youth Writers.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 386-93.

Zhao, Bin. “Consumerism, Confucianism, Communism: Making Sense of China Today.” New Left Review (March-April 1997): 43-59.

Zhao, Henry Y.H. [Zhao Yiheng]. “Those Who Live in Exile Lose Belief But Create Literature.” In Breaking the Barriers: Chinese Literature Facing the World. Stockholm: The Olof Palme International Center, Sweden, 130-50.

—–. “The River Fans Out: Chinese Fiction Since the Late 1970s.” European Review 11, 2 (May 2003): 193-208.

Zheng, Yiran. Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Zhu, Xueqin. “For a Chinese Liberalism.” In Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths. London: Verso, 2003, 87-107.

Zimmer, Thomas. Erwachen aus dem Koma? Eine literarische Bestimmung des heutigen Chinas (Awakening from the coma? A literary destiny of today’s China). Tectum, 2017.

[Abstract: The Frankfurt Book Fair of 2009 is a few years back. At that time, China was a guest country and has shown its best side. So why write a book about contemporary Chinese literature today? The answer to that is brief: Because in 2009 too little was said. China is a land of contradictions, and censorship, concealment, and beautification still play a big role. However, if you want to understand the country, you are well advised to understand its literature and the conditions under which it exists today: how strong is the official governance – is there censorship, and how does it work? What about the publishers – are they still in the grip of the party? And how does the interaction between authors Publishers and readers? With the help of well-known older and younger authors from the People’s Republic, the sinologist Thomas Zimmer attempts for the first time to discuss the scope of literature, art and culture in the field of tension of state control, market constraints and increasing international networking in present-day China.