| This project examines the cultural preoccupation with desire in post-reform China. Through combining literary textual analysis, film criticism, TV and popular cultural studies, and cultural theory with the "social constructionist" theory of desire, and through examining prominent post-reform urban cultural phenomena, such as the TV romance and Chi Li phenomenon, the Body-writing Phenomenon, the 6th Generation Urban Cinema, and the New Urban Cinema, I investigate complicated and inconsistent implications of desire from diverse urban social-cultural perspectives. Contemporary China's cultural prominence of desire is part of a historical swing in urban society, where economics have pushed politics to the background, shattering political and moral homogeneity. Economic forces reorganize society, and result in social-cultural preoccupation with the private rather than the public side of life, after decades of disregard of individual fulfillment by socialist ideology and socialist morality. Prominent in contemporary cultural construction and imagination is the new social rhetoric that posits the value of the personal/private as the ground for social presuppositions. This historical swing coincides with the emerging ethos of capitalism in urban China, which establishes personal gratification as the most prominent social-cultural principle. Desire is increasingly linked with transnational capitalist practices and global consumer cultural values. The consumerist value system has co-opted the immediate post-Mao elite discourse of desire, which linked ideas of sexual rights, sexual liberation, and romantic humanism to progressive social change, political liberation, and human rights morality. Instead, personal fulfillment, in the forms of instant gratifications and commodity desires, now compensates for the erosion of the public agenda. Moreover, the dynamics of desire are also intimately bound up with a particular stage of social development in China, when the nation's shift from an isolationist discourse toward an outbound global focus expresses a cultural inclination to be reconnected with traditional heritage. Although global consumer culture has played important roles in post-reform cultural construction, there are also elements that suggest a new cultural vision associated with the benevolent aspects of Chinese cultural heritage. |
