The State Question in Chinese Popular Culture (Paperback)

The "State Question in Chinese Popular Culture" presents a series of groundbreaking essays that challenge the paradigm dividing Chinese culture into "official" and "unofficial" categories. This binary, which mirrors the "high/low" dichotomy familiar to all practitioners of cultural studies, finds its roots in Cold-War Western romanticization of a Chinese popular culture that stood in defiant opposition to the Communist state. This special issue disputes such simplistic representations and offers new critical trajectories crucial to the study of contemporary Chinese popular culture. By reinscribing the state into a discussion of popular culture, these articles reach beyond the postmodernist and transnational trends in analyzing the pop syndrome and engage in methodological questions specific to post-socialist China. Locating intellectual agendas in history and locality while interrogating theorization for theory's own sake, they shed new light on how we interpret the Chinese "consumer and cultural revolution" of the 1990s. Featuring articles on contemporary self-health literature, advertising, best-selling novels, religious rituals, leisure culture, and religious tourism, this special issue illuminates the complex diversity of popular culture and thus reveals the dangers inherent in maintaining the official/unofficial split. As the first collection made under the auspices of the collaborative Luce Project, this special issue brings together China scholars from across national and disciplinary borders to shape an intellectually responsible agenda for Chinese popular studies.