The state question in Chinese popular cultural studies

Abstract

The metonymical association between 'China’ and 'revolution' is a rhetorical game savoured by contemporary China observers. Ironical references in Western press to Chinese 'consumer revolution7 and 'pop cultural revolution, made a parade of global capitalism's victory. Indisputably, vast social, cultural, and economic transformations have swept over China since 1992 when Deng Xiaoping gave his strategic Southern Excursion Talks to salvage a market reform mired in a bottleneck phase. Post-1992 China witnessed a dramatic release of forces of production and a steady annual GDP growth. Accompanying this economic takeoff is the public's growing craze for consumption. A fully fledged buyers' market has come into being. Chinese consumers, budding desires for music CDs, fast and frozen food, and convertibles may indeed serve to validate the ascendance of a 'counter-revolution' to socialist ideology. Tugging economic and cultural indexes in tandem, Western journalists and pundits have shown us time and again: China illustrates a paramount example of crony capitalism's new conquest.