Chapter 2: New Enlightenment as Modernization

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)…