The essays in this special issue of Social Text explore the fields of cultural and intellectual production in post-Tiananmen China and address the discrepancy between the growth in critical studies of China and the virtually untouched terrain of China’s ideological-intellectual dimension.
Creating a platform for further theoretical discussion about the ongoing struggle to bring about a new social system, the contributors grapple with the internal crisis or disorientation of the Chinese intellectual world as a distorted, but telling picture of the complexity of contemporary Chinese economics, politics, society, and culture. Essays offer a critical examination of the current state of Chinese intellectual discourse; a challenge to mainstream liberalism in China today and its commitment to democracy; a summary of reconsiderations of property rights, economic democracy, political participation, and the meaning of socialism in the age of flexible production; a reflection on the handover of Hong Kong in the context of a general discussion of Western colonialism in China; and an analysis of the rise of consumer nationalism and mass culture in China since the early 1990s. Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China sheds light on the evasive nature of Chinese society, and the contributors engage the Chinese problematic not only as a crisis but also as an ongoing historical dynamic.

Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Wang Hui, Gan Yang, Xudong Zhang