It is one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the late 1980s Chinese
socio-cultural context that “Cultural Reflection” (wenhua fansi) on the Cultural Revolution became a great trend on the literary scene with a post-revolutionary mentality. Through a various form such as “Scar Literature (shanghen wenxue),” “Roots-seeking Literature (xun gen wenxue),” and “Educated Youth Literature (zhi qing wenxue)”, this debate is related to the discourse of rethinking Chinese modernity and subjectivity. The efforts to rethink history or memory of a collective past address the present in a different voice.
“This history is evoked not only through a painful questioning of ‘master narratives’
such as those of national identity and collective movements, but also by means of reconstructing the micro-narratives of personal memories” (Liu and Tang 1993: 16-17)
However, the rapid capitalization and commodification of the early 1990s has practically made the 1980s cultural discourse impotent to some extent. As Zhang Xudong (1997) describes, the pre-1989 cultural sphere has been destroyed “not by the terror of a totalitarian regime, but by the forced uniformity of the collective resolution to
‘get rich fast’.” (18) With the dominance of consumerism accelerated by the growth of Chinese capitalism, “Cultural Fever” of the 1980s has been absorbed into “Market Fever (shichang re)” of the 1990s. Dai Jinhua (2002) depicts the 1990s Chinese culture through reading of “Mao Zedong fever” as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism.
She points out that in the beginning of Mao Zedong fever, Mao Zedong’s image of cars, beepers and windproof lighters was a symbol of fashion, signifier of consumerism. “It was more the revelation of a political unconscious than some kind of clearly conscious political behavior: the displacement and identification of political power with consumerism” (174). Thus, Mao Zedong’s fever as a desire for consumption of the prohibited object is the dissolution of the sacred and the untouchable, and shows a reconstruction and a parody of ideology.
Her analysis of the term “guangchang” (plaza) could be another good example to understand an aspect of consumerism in the 1990s Chinese culture. Since the mid-1990s, there has appeared a new type of shopping center in China, which combines retail stores, supermarkets, fast-food restaurant, and fitness center. “Guangchang (literally, broad place) superseded the more familiar names for shopping areas, dasha (mansion) and zhongxin (center).” (213) This term “guangchang” suddenly has been popularly used for any kind of shops, as for instance Dianqi guangchang (Electronics Plaza) and Shizhuang guangchang (Fashion Place). However, “guangchang not only refer to a modern space, it also closely linked to the remembrance of modernity and revolution, leading ideas in the great political and cultural movements of the twentieth century.”
(214) In Chinese, “guangchang” directly means Tiananmen Guangchang (Square), which has been a political stage since the May Fourth Movement 1919. Tiananmen Guangchang signifies revolution, progress, reform, passion, youth, and blood. It is the symbol of New China (214-215). In this regard, Dai observes that “the contemporary usage of guangchang, a term that once had such special significance, exposes the passing of the revolutionary era and the arrival of the age of consumerism” (217).
Obviously, it is one of the most symptomatic landscapes in the 1990s Chinese culture that “going to guangchang” means going to shopping plazas which is overlapped in the trace of political memories of Tiananmen Square.
These social phenomena of Mao Zedong fever and the transition of guangchang’s meaning in the 1990s not only imply the consumption of the past political prohibition, the parody of traumatic memories, and the subversion of the classical authority, but also signify the rise of the Chinese mass culture, which is generated by the brand-new consumerism. As the prevalence of popular culture and challenge to traditional authority,
the “Wang Shuo Phenomenon” in the late 1980s29, a series of commercial success and controversies around his novels, would be one of the most noteworthy events in the 1990s Chinese literature. This not simply means a rise of the Chinese popular culture, but implies the subversion of center and mainstream, the transition to a new order. Dai (1999) argues that the publication of the collection of Wang Shuo works 1992 could rewrite the relation between the classic literature and the popular literature, because the personal collection of literary works had been considered as only mainstream writers’
privilege till then (52). In the sense of market, Wang Shuo is a bestselling native writer since 1949, and becomes a cultural icon of the 1990s Chinese consumerism. The significance of this phenomenon thus is understood as a new order between social transition and ideological change rather than the social margin or subculture against the traditional social order. Moreover, Wang Shuo himself could be considered as an icon of success in the Chinese cultural market rather than an anti-hero against the previous order (Dai 2000: 202-203).
Besides the transition to market, Wang Shuo’s novels have an important meaning as the writing of allegory” in the 1990s. Zhang Yiwu (1997), considering the “anti-allegory” (fan yuyan) as a new type of the 1990s writings, argues that Wang Shuo’s novel Never deceive me (Qianwan Bie Bawo Dangren) in 1989 is the first writing of showing “anti-allegory”. He suggests that the anti-allegorical writing is to reflect and appropriate the “national allegory” through rewriting the “national allegory” itself (105).
Zhang points out that the anti-allegorical writing is a new literary trend of post-New Era (hou xin shiqi) and a distinguished mark of the 1990s culture. He also argues that the
29 Especially, 1988 is called “the year of Wang Shuo films.” There were 4 films adopted from Wang Shuo’s novels only this year: Mi Jinshan’s Wanzhu, Huang Jianxin’s Lunhui, Xia Gang’s Yiban Shi Huoyan, Yiban Shi Haishui, and Ye Daying’s Da Chuanqi.
appearance of the anti-allegory implies the exhaustion of the third world’s modernity as the national allegory, and the rejoinder to the 1980s master narrative. He figures out the characteristics of the anti-allegory as followings: First, the anti-allegory transcends the mythical image of China, and constructs the returning gaze of the “national allegory.”
Thus China no longer exists as the other of the West, and could be understood as the substance over-determined by the complex of multiple structures. Second, the anti-allegorical writing signifies a parody of the past style. This means the subversion of the sacred of national allegorical writing in the sense of Bakhtin’s “carnival” (108-109). As Zhang illustrated, the anti-allegory is the new formation of the 1990s Chinese culture, and interrogates the discourse of Chinese modernity which was centered by the
“national allegory.” In this respect, it might be noteworthy that the 1990s Chinese narratives, escaping from the frame of the national allegory or master narrative, have appeared in various voices.
Dai Jinhua (2002) depicts the 1990s Chinese socio-cultural environment as the complicated cultural landscape of the expression “a scene in the fog,” which is
“transfixed between orientalism and occidentalism, interpellated by different, diametrically opposed power centers, existing in a proliferating, multiple, overlapping cultural space” (72). In some sense, the 1990s Chinese socio-cultural change put an end to the decade of the 1980s and entered into the ambiguous postmodern culture, and the so-called Chinese Sixth Generation Film has appeared under these circumstances. As Dai argues, “the Sixth Generation, unlike its predecessors (Third, Fourth, and Fifth Generation), does not refer to a specific group of creators, aesthetics, or even a sequence of works. Even before its appearance, the Sixth Generation was already predicted and outlined in various cultural yearnings and lacks.” (74) Thus “the Sixth Generation” film
actually is engaged in an entangled cultural phenomenon of various names, discourses, cultures, and ideologies. In this respect, the various terms referring to the Sixth Generation film might show their socio-cultural status and contexts. In brief, for instance, “Chinese underground films” (dixia dianying) indicates their political status that their films are prohibited to screen in the Chinese domestic theaters, “independent films” (duli dianying) means the way how they raise the fund for their films, “new documentary movement” (xin jilupian yundaong) implies the filmic style that they prefer realism like documentary style, and “urban film” (chengshi dianying) refers to the place that they takes as film’s background. Among them, two most famous nicknames might be “underground film” and “independent film.” They imply that the Sixth Generation makes their own stories a film in their own ways. In other words, the Sixth Generation, in contrast to the Fifth Generation, tells and displays their own stories and surroundings in an objective way. A Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan confesses:
The allegory is the Fifth Generation’s core. They have done a terrific job writing history as an allegory. But I can only be objective. Indeed, to me objectivity is crucial. Each day I pay attention to what happens immediately around me. I can not see beyond a certain distance (Dai 2002: 94)
They frequently use amateur actors or their friends for the main characters. They themselves often play a role in their films, on one hand because of a lack of financial resources to employ professional actors/actresses, on the other hand because of their intention to show real figures and situations in their films. In most cases, the characters
of their films represent director’s identities as avant-garde artists and minority figures in the margin of modern Chinese society: a retarded child of Mother (Mama, dir. Zhang Yuan, 1992), a psychotic patient in Red Beads (Xuan lian, dir. He Jianjun, 1993), rock and roll musicians in Dirt (Toufa luanle, dir. Guan Hu, 1994) and Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong, dir. Zhang Yuan, 1993), a drug addict of Yesterday (Zuotian, dir.
Zhang Yang, 2001), a part-time construction worker in Xiaoshan Going Home (Xiaoshan huijia, dir. Jia Zhangke, 1995), a pickpocket and a sex worker in Xiao Wu (dir.
Jia Zhangke, 1997), and homosexual people in East Palace, West Palace (Donggong xigong, dir. Zhang Yuan, 1996) and Fish and Elephant (Jinnian xiatian, dir. Li Yu, 2001). As Wang Xiaoshuai remarked that “producing this film [The Days] (Dong chun de rizi, 1993) is like writing our own diary” (Dai 2002: 94), the Sixth Generation film signifies the emergence of the individual with numerous micro narratives of the 1990s Chinese culture unlike the grand narrative in the Fifth Generation. In other words, their concerns are the objective description of particular lives of individuals and their surroundings instead of representing something “Chinese,” and their camera plays a witness as a kino-eye of the 1990s cultural scene.
In the 1990s Chinese cultural contexts of the anti-allegory writing, the rapid capitalization and consumerism, and the emergence of micro-narratives, the questions would be how the film of the 1990s could construct the Chinese new subjectivity, or whether these various voices in their films could be understood as “polyphony” in terms of Bakhtin’s term, or how we should understand this subject formation in the contexts of the new global order.