This book examines how China’s new generation of avant-garde writers and artists are pushing the boundaries of vernacular culture, creatively appropriating artistic and literary languages from global cultures to reflect on reform-era China’s transformation and the Maoist heritage. It explores the vortex of cultural change from the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 to Xi Jinping establishing his leadership for life in 2018. The book argues that China’s new avant-garde adopt transcultural forms of expression while challenging the official discourse of Xi Jinping’s regime, which promotes cultural nationalism and demands that cultural production in China embodies the essence of the "Chinese nation". The topics range from body art, women’s poetry and boys’ love literature to Tibetan fiction and ceramic art. The book shows how the avant-garde use the new digital media to bypass government censorship, transcending China’s virtual frontiers while breaking new ground for an emerging public sphere. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the nature of China’s avant-garde art and literature and the challenges it poses for the Chinese government. The introduction and chapter 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book explores intellectual discourse in reform era China by analysing the so-called "debate on the spirit of the Humanities", which occurred in the years 1993-95, and which is recognised by scholars as one of the most interesting, influential and important debates of the 1990s. This debate, in which Chinese intellectuals reflected on reform-era mass culture and on their role in society, was the first debate in China after the crackdown of 1989 and the launch of new economic reforms after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "southern tour". The book, drawing on a large corpus of texts and a wide range of individual positions, demonstrates how Chinese intellectuals, having to face the combination of political repression and economic liberalisation, conceptualised and reacted to both. The book reveals the scale and complexity of the debate, the nature of intellectual life in China, the status and relevance of intellectual voices in society, the divisions within the intellectual sphere as well as shared concepts and ideals, and how the key factors of political repression and economic liberalisation which remain central in China today were defined and articulated.

This book explores intellectual discourse in reform era China by analysing the so-called "debate on the spirit of the Humanities", which occurred in the years 1993-95, and which is recognised by scholars as one of the most interesting, influential and important debates of the 1990s. This debate, in which Chinese intellectuals reflected on reform-era mass culture and on their role in society, was the first debate in China after the crackdown of 1989 and the launch of new economic reforms after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "southern tour". The book, drawing on a large corpus of texts and a wide range of individual positions, demonstrates how Chinese intellectuals, having to face the combination of political repression and economic liberalisation, conceptualised and reacted to both. The book reveals the scale and complexity of the debate, the nature of intellectual life in China, the status and relevance of intellectual voices in society, the divisions within the intellectual sphere as well as shared concepts and ideals, and how the key factors of political repression and economic liberalisation which remain central in China today were defined and articulated.