The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era (review)

How much time must pass before a satisfactory intellectual history of a given era can be written? There is no fixed answer, but, judging from the book under review, contemporary attempts are bound to be disappointing or misleading.

Min Lin, in unexplained collaboration (not coauthorship?) with Maria Galikowski, has, in the words of the preface, made "a tentative attempt to historicize some of the key issues, ideas, and figures that are significant to our understanding of Chinese modernity" (pp. xi-xii). It is based on a "ten year intermittent journey of personal reflection" (p. xi), that is, the decade following the Tiananmen crisis of 1989, and "a long continuous process of interaction between the subject and the object of inquiry" (p. xii).

In other words, he has been closely and personally involved with the issues and figures he discusses, and it shows. Most of the book, in fact, is derived from a series of articles on literary and philosophical developments that he published from 1990 to 1997.

That is the other limitation on this as an intellectual history of "the Post-Mao Era." It is rather disjointed, necessarily unbalanced in its coverage, and, what is more serious, needlessly repetitive. Parts 1 and 6 are broader thematic overviews that attempt to integrate the varied content of the seven in-between chapters dealing with more specific issues and authors. This organizational principle is sound enough, but a lot more editing should have gone into making all these pieces into a book.

It is not long—just over two hundred pages of text—but the repetitions, rather portentous prose, and heavy-handed invocations of theory make it seem longer. It is not, therefore, what it could and, to this reader's mind, should have been: a personalized and readable contemporary report on what undoubtedly is an exciting and important new chapter in China's intellectual and cultural life.

The material is interesting; many of the insights and interpretations are valuable, especially Lin's stress on the change from the infatuation of the 1980s with a Western-defined modernity to a more nuanced, critical, and particularized "Chinese modernity"—in a nutshell (or a buzzword), the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Of course, seeing this as a reassertion of Chinese subjectivity or recovery of agency may seem somewhat problematic when the intellectual sources are still so overwhelmingly Western, but the greater confidence and sophistication with which post-Tiananmen intellectuals handle a variety of discourses is undeniable. Lin makes that point effectively.

So, there is valuable material in a book not easily digestible as a whole, and perhaps St. Martin's has done the China field a service by making available essays that originally appeared in rather obscure sources such as The New Zealand Journal of East Asian Studies, although a glossary of Chinese names would have made it more useful for the serious researcher.

I would advise the less-specialized reader to sample the chapters. The conclusion, for instance, on "Chinese Intellectuals' 'New Identity' and 'Self Awareness'" might be read with more enjoyment if one had not encountered many of the most interesting points several times before in earlier chapters.

Not all "books" have to be read as books.