Post-Isms and Chinese New Conservatism

In the last twenty or so years during their ascension to predominance in Western cultural studies, the three schools of contemporary cultural studies in the West—poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism—have frequently been accused of being too radical. What is surprising is that the new trend of conservatism that has emerged in the last several years in Chinese intellectual circles has often called up those theories to its support. The Chinese new conservative trend has hardly won sufficient critical attention, and the paradox that it draws support from Western radicalist theories has so far remained unnoticed.

The teasing word hou xue (poststudies) can often be heard in Beijing’s intellectual circles. Apart from all kinds of loan terms prefixed with post-, in China hou- has had an indigenous history of its own: Post-Misty poetry rose in 1984, and what is being written today is called Post-Post-Misty poetry; Post-Roots-Seeking fiction appeared in 1986, and 1992 saw the early Post-New Era literature, of which one of the major characteristics is the employment of postvernacular. But this new literature has fallen into the hands of postintellectuals or postliterati—the tycoons of the new cultural industry. As for the intellectuals, apart from engaging themselves in trivial postscholarship, they can only be languishing in post-tragic sentiment. For this is indeed an epoch of postrevolution, which, it is said, leads to not much more than a post-Utopia. ¹

The word “post-isms” does not yet appear in Western languages, though the word “postpeople” appeared in Calinescu’s book. ² The fact that the three major schools of contemporary cultural studies are all prefixed in the same way can hardly be a coincidence. Some scholars have pondered whether this post- is the same as that post-. The answer in all cases seems to be “yes.” ³

The coexistence of the three posts- is far from a compromise; they are almost the three sides of a unified theory. In fact each of the three could be said to be conditioned by the other two. “Post-colonialism is a concept intended to summarize the cultural-political characteristics of the non-Western world during the transition towards postmodernity”; ⁴ postmodernism is best “defined as European culture’s awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant centre of the world”; ⁵ and “post-modernism needs its (post-)colonial Others in order to constitute or to frame its narrative or referential fracture.” ⁶ Though poststructuralism concentrates on subverting the modernist project, this subversion leads by necessity to postmodernism, because of the death of the modernist project which “always upheld a vision of a redemption of modern life through culture. That such a vision is no longer possible to sustain may be at the heart of the postmodern condition.” ⁷

If the triad of posts- is not a temporary alliance, the term “post-ism” could, I suggest, be allowed into currency in the West. There have been many posts- in modern Western history, but only as makeshifts, waiting to be replaced by formal terms. There have never been a group of posts- standing so firmly in Western thought. This cannot but be an era of the posts-.

The awakening of Chinese scholarly circles in recent years commands attention. The Chinese intellectuals, it seems have regained their voice after years of silence imposed on them since 1989, and tried to find a new foothold in a culture now quite different from that of the 1980s and never seen before in China. In the last two years we read in Chinese journals a series of debates on pressing issues in Chinese culture today, most of them citing explicitly Western post-isms as their support.

No Western doctrine, once put to use in China, can avoid being sinicized. This is by no means strange, with Marxism among the most prominent precedents. What interests us here is why so many Chinese scholars are capable of using post-isms to support their conservative arguments. Is it because they themselves should be blamed for reading their own ideas into Western theories? Or is it because...