The Great Dragon Fantasy

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• Dedication
• About the Author

China has undergone a unique path of development in its post-Maoist incarnation. The decades since 1978 witnessed China's rapid rise to economic wealth and superpower status. The 2000s have seen China's national prosperity being frequently contrasted with the severe recessions that have troubled the West. Chinese thought or critical inquiry (pipanxing de sixiang) in the last three decades has also developed new outlooks: indeed, there is even a radical break between the intellectuality of the Maoist time (1949–1978) and that of the post-Maoist era (1978–present). One major difference between the two periods is that the latter saw the rise of intellectuals as a leading group in mainland society. Whereas it was the Party leadership that had previously set the tone of cultural and intellectual life, academics and independent scholars now guided the production of Chinese social and political thought. Another key feature of the post-Maoist era is the development of critical independence that enabled intellectual discourse to flourish once more after the strict ideological control of the Maoist era…

The following sections are included:

• The Dragon That Lost Its Glory
• The Fantasmatic Core of Clear-Sightedness
• “There Is No Such Thing, Yet It Is True!”
• The West That Makes the Chinese “Chinese”

Many Chinese intellectuals who were active during the 1980s now refer to that decade as a “golden age.” In recent years, reminiscing about the age of the 1980s has become something of an intellectual fashion. Around this topic, numerous essays and books have been produced since the late 2000s (especially in 2006 and 2007). Participants of the 1980s Chinese intellectual scene like Gan Yang now describe the intellectual discussions of that era as “pure, sincere, simple” (see, for example, Gan Yang 2006b: iii). In Chapter 6, I will discuss how this retrospective view of the 1980s as a “golden age” offers a new kind of fantasy within Sinophone intellectual discourse of the 2000s. In this chapter, let me first note that this nostalgia for the 1980s is intended to send the message that the 1990s and the 2000s cannot compare with the intellectual activities in the eighties. In this context, the eighties is being retroactively constructed as unique and unusually vibrant. Xu Jilin observes that the distinctive characteristic of the 1980s intellectual movement is the “homogeneity of attitude towards culture” (wenhua taidu de tongyixing). According to Xu, it is precisely this “homogeneity” that makes the intellectual activities of the 1980s a unified “movement” (which has been termed as the “New Enlightenment movement”) (Xu Jilin 2000: 177)…

The following sections are included:

• The Arrival of a “Post-New Era” and the “Loss of the Humanistic Spirit”
• Richard Rorty Must Leave!
• Post-modernization, or, Traditionalization?

The following sections are included:

• Liberalism and Its Critics
• An Intellectual Debate Turning into a Spitting War
• “The Question of Modernity”: From Theoretical Critique to Linguistic Politics

The following sections are included:

• Nationalism at the Gates
• The “Bio-Operations” of Nationalist Discourse
• Why Is Nationalism an Obscene Discourse?
• What the Facts Do Not Tell Us…

The following sections are included:

• China's Civilizational Subjectivity: The Dragon Rises Again?
• That Which Fixes the Splitting Between Knowledge and Belief
• The Fantasy of the Eighties: “Self-Castration” and Perversion
• Cynicism qua Pseudo-Activity

The following sections are included:

• Hegel's Two Faces
• The End of Analysis

The following sections are included:

• Glossary
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index