Xudong Zhang

Bio: Xudong Zhang is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Ideology & Film studies. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 78 citations.

Chinese modernism in the era of reforms: cultural fever, avant-garde fiction, and the new Chinese cinema.

Abstract: Blending history and theory, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China's post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979-1989) through a critical reading of the various "new waves" of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse. In examining the aesthetic and philosophical formulations of the New Era's intellectual elites, Zhang first analyses the intense cultural and intellectual debates, known as the "Great Cultural Discussion" or "Cultural Fever" that took place in Chinese urban centers in the mid - and late 1980s. Chinese literary modernism is then explored, specifically in relation to Deng Xiaoping's sweeping reforms and with a focus on the changing literary sensibility and avant-garde writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong. Lastly, Zhang looks at the the making of New Chinese Cinema and films such as Yellow Earth, Horse Thief, and King of the Children - films through which Fifth Generation filmmakers first developed a style independent from socialist realism. By tracing the origins and contemporary elaboration of the idea of Chinese modernism, Zhang identifies the discourse of modernism as one of the decisive formal articulations of the social dynamism and cultural possibilities of post-Mao China. Capturing the historical experience and the cultural vision of China during a crucial decade in its emergence as a world power, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms will interest students and scholars of modernism, Chinese literature and history, film studies, and cultural studies.

Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China

Abstract: Introduction: What the Olympic Games Mean to China Chapter 1: Europe and the People without Sport History, or What Hosting the Olympic Games Means to China Chapter 2: The Clash of Cultures: Martial Arts and Olympic Sports Chapter 3: Symbols of State Power: Stadiums and National Identity in Beijing Chapter 4: What Women's Sports Mean to China Chapter 5: Mixing Sport and Politics: China and the International Olympic Committee Chapter 6: "China Bashing" at the Olympic Games: Why the Cold War Continues in Sport Journalism Chapter 7: Will the Olympics Change China, or Will China Change the Olympics?

China's Provincial Identities: Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing “Chineseness”

Abstract: In His Science-Fiction Novel The Diamond Age (1995), Neal Stephenson envisions a post—nation-state world of the future, where countless fragmentations of cultural identity differentiate humanity into spatially discrete tribal zones. Identity has become entirely spatialized, rendering its historical basis—that is, the experiences that generate a “collective memory” for a community—into a decontextualized montage of nostalgia. Stephenson writes a world where modernist notions of progress and development through linear time have been replaced by cultural differentiation across space: history has been conquered by geography. History has become little more than a resource for borrowed cultural traits that are mapped onto discrete territories, and identity is self-consciously constructed by adopting the ready-made form of a particular cultural group. As Stephenson allows us to observe the excesses of this kind of postmodern tribalism, China comes to represent the ultimate form of spatialized cultural identity. In The Diamond Age, China is represented more as an organic cultural system than a historically progressing nation. But it is only China's interior that is represented as such. The People's Republic has been splintered into an extremely wealthy coastal strip—essentially one big export processing zone—and an increasingly impoverished interior, which, in a self-orientalizing twist, now calls itself the “Celestial Kingdom,” and is ruled not by a Communist Party leader (Marxism having long since been denounced as a Western plot to undermine Chinese values) but by a self-proclaimed “Chamberlain to the Throneless King,” that is, a minister representing Confucius himself. Whereas the coast has rich and cosmopolitan cities that are among the finest in the world, the interior claims a moral superiority that comes only from its assertion of cultural purity; the interior is the “true” organic China.

Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late‐Socialist China

Abstract: A new master plan to restructure the city of Kunming in southwestern China in the context of Chinas transition to a progrowth, commercialized consumer society has led to massive destruction of centuryold innercity neighborhoods and the displacement of tens of thousands of families. The combination of a sense of lateness (lagging behind national and global development) and an emerging progrowth coalition between local governments and real estate developers is shaping postMao urban redevelopment. Several forms of civic opposition and popular discontent have been elicited by the restructuring. Although largely marginalized, these alternative views of urban forms and counterpractices help sustain a muchneeded critical point of view that questions and destabilizes the seemingly inescapable machine of development. The insights emerging from the Kunming example help deepen our understanding of latesocialist power dynamics and suggest a new way of understanding stateinitiated projects of modernity and development...

Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World

Abstract: In recent years, historians across the world have become increasingly interested in transnational and global approaches to the past. However, the debates surrounding this new border-crossing movement have remained limited in scope as theoretical exchanges on the tasks, responsibilities and potentials of global history have been largely confined to national or regional academic communities. In this groundbreaking book, Dominic Sachsenmaier sets out to redress this imbalance by offering a series of new perspectives on the global and local flows, sociologies of knowledge and hierarchies that are an intrinsic part of historical practice. Taking the United States, Germany and China as his main case studies, he reflects upon the character of different approaches to global history as well as their social, political and cultural contexts. He argues that this new global trend in historiography needs to be supported by a corresponding increase in transnational dialogue, cooperation and exchange.

Digitized parody: The politics of egao in contemporary China

Abstract: This article investigates egao—technology-enabled online parody in contemporary China. Egao is a site where issues of power struggle, class reconsolidation, social stratification, (online) communit...