The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (review)

Post-Deng Xiaoping China has been an intriguing subject of inquiry for scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences. Under the onslaught of capitalism and globalization, Chinese society since the 1980s has been undergoing tremendous sociocultural change. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature by Rong Cai is a study that focuses on the dissection of an important phenomenon pertinent to our understanding of contemporary China: an ideological vacuum after the bankruptcy of Maoism and how this void manifests itself in the troubled post-Mao subject. Taking root-seeking literature as her point of departure, Cai identifies the attempt to (re)construct the subject and to reassert humanist values as the central task for writer-intellectuals after the Cultural Revolution and during the optimistic 1980s, until the Tiananmen incident put an end to their effort and the idealism that permeated that decade. Cai extends her exploration to the 1990s, when commercialism came full swing and replaced the dominant place of political ideology in people's daily lives. It is within this milieu of consumerism that the earnest attempt of writer-intellectuals to construct a post Mao subject, or, in the author's words, "to offer a viable counter-model to the Maoist revolutionary archetype" (p. 23), was doomed to fail.

Historically, intellectuals in China have always been regarded as the conscience of society, and they have taken seriously the solemn responsibility of being the guiding light for the nation and the people. In recent times, from the late Qing to the May Fourth era to the Mao regime, Chinese intellectuals have not only shed their tears and blood in China's century-long struggle toward modernization, they have also devoted themselves to Mao's revolutionary causes, only to be silenced by the very government they supported. With the change of regime when Deng took over the reigns of power, not only was the May Fourth project of modernization resumed but the intellectual legacy of that era was also revived. After the short span of a little more than two decades, the country is booming with commercial activity. But Chinese intellectuals suddenly find themselves without a cause and unable to sustain their historically privileged position. How did this happen? And why? Situating itself in the context of the intellectual trends of the 1980s and the commercialism of the 1990s, The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature is a noteworthy attempt to answer these two fundamental questions.

Delineating the developments that led to the present predicament facing Chinese intellectuals, Cai centers her examination on the issue of the subject/subjectivity as reflected in contemporary Chinese literary writing. She contends that the rise of the discourse of subjectivity coincides with the promotion of modernization by the Deng regime. Cai argues that the government's "socialist modernization" program goes hand-in-hand with the intellectuals' project of subject/subjectivity reconstruction, which is owed precisely to the unique relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the state. Both the country and the intellectuals needed to rise from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution; for the country, it was to rebuild its economy and social infrastructures; for the intellectuals, it was to reconstruct their shattered sense of self or subjectivity and to define the post-Mao subject with new signification and meaning.

By linking the government's project of modernization and the attempt by intellectuals to reconstruct the subject/subjectivity, Cai analyzes the dynamics between the state and the intellectuals and how the state's reform policies—most notably its economic policy—have necessarily changed social realities and conditions, and how such changes have in turn affected the ways in which intellectuals have perceived and constructed their subjectivity in post-Mao China. This is the basic framework that Cai sets down in the introductory chapter of the book. In the subsequent five analytical chapters, she juxtaposes her reading of the texts...