The Chinese ring of time

Abstract

While Western thinking is a linear belief system set in motion by Christianity, Chinese reasoning conceives changes within a circular process that holds together repetition and transformation. Making sense of this is simply to recognize that depending on how we consider the nature of history, we will also partake in a different imprint on society as a whole. The transition from socialist to post-socialist China is also the drift from the stability guaranteed by Chinese philosophy to the individualism offered by the logic of marketization. Over the sociological implosion of Chinese cyclicity, China places its quest for a new identity.

The great wall of time

If referred to the Chinese discourse, Postmodernity has to be intended as the Post-Mao age. By the early 1990s, Chinese scholars began to distinguish the New-Era period (1978–89) from the Post-New Era period (1989-), both linked to different grades of the postmodern phase. ¹ The intellectual discourse engages with different aspects of Chinese postmodernity: The hedonism of post-socialist reality, the quest for a new identity, and the role of literature in the rise of mass culture. At the outset, the general idea of this essay is to present China as the product of a history that has little in common with that of the West; however, the evident process of cultural globalization makes the risk of an undiscriminating westernization dangerously possible. The argument itself is not new; scholarships have been dealing with it for the past two decades.

The likes of Jason McGrath and Paul G. Pickowicz argue that the cultural logic of China is not essentially postmodern but consistent with post-socialist dynamics similar to the experience of the ex-European Eastern bloc. With Xudong Zhang’s words: “Post-socialism is a conceptual framework by which to explore the possibility—and, to a certain degree, to theorize the pockets of realty—of a postmodernity compatible with socialist principle, and vice-versa” (2008, 150). To overcome the impasse, Wang Ning (2004) offered an enlarged classification so to present postmodernity as a global phenomenon; hence, he produced a neologism, glocalism, that includes both elements of globalization and localization. My interest is very much indebted to Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang’s collected essays in Postmodernism & China (2000) and Xiaobin Yang’s The Chinese Postmodern (2002). The texts clearly map out the creativity of Chinese postmodernity from a different angle. Arif and Xudong’s approach is wider and not necessarily literary; while sorting out the status of the novel, it simultaneously questions whether postmodernity is the sociological condition that best defines Chinese contemporaneity. Xiaobing’s research focuses on the avant-garde experience, and it has a specific approach depicting the experimental writing as a deconstruction of subjectivity that erupted after Mao-Deng’s politico-historical monopoly. Simultaneously, investigation into the Mao Wenti takes an original turn with the writing of Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg and Wendy Larson; it comes with a discourse on aesthetics and theory providing a juncture between feminism and postmodernism but also exploring cultural scenes and their political implications. More recently, Shi-xu in his monograph Chinese Discourse Studies (2014) aims to work out “local-global” approaches anchored in Eastern wisdom or Eastern philosophies, to counter “globalism in society” and “Westcentrism in scholarship” (2).

However, while scholarship engage in sociological dynamics, they all seem to overlook the fact that the introduction of consumer culture has challenged the harmony of Chinese philosophy. Specifically, it is the notion of time, in its historic-philosophical significance, to be re-discussed and re-framed. In this vein, this essay considers China as a civilization, rather than a nation, nestled in the historical present but spinning around a time conception that is circular in its axis. Yet, the market economy with the introduction of individualist behaviours has re-defied the circularity of Chinese time; competitiveness, and ego, have somewhat opened the ring of time into vectorial possibilities. By analyzing a few examples from postmodern fiction, I will be able to express the sense of crisis that constitutes the current debate intrinsic to China’s modernization, particularly in the realm of social values. The intellectual aim is to describe Chinese postmodernity not simply as the most remarkable economic miracle in human history, but also as a possible cultural breakdown. In order to do so, I will first define China’s circular conception of time and Western linear conception of time and their comparison made in a comprehensive and systematic way. This is because time is a philosophical construct representing a complex, multi-faceted, multi-level system of values, ideas, theories, and phenomena.

Time is an intellectual concept that requires a metaphoric model since time has no concrete reality. Besides its sociocultural dimension, time has a psychological pervasiveness that seems to be both a cause and a product of social behaviors. Indeed, human behaviors and weltanschauungs cannot possibly be understood without reference to the notion of time. Rather problematically we perceive the flow of time, but the exact nature of the mechanism by which this is done remains illegible. We engage in temporal experience, the notion of which accords well with Bergson’s characterization of inner durée (non-spatialized, “psychological time”) as a qualitatively differentiated experience from the temporal movement of watches and calendars. Accordingly, Dan Zakay, quoting T.R. Trautmann (1995), reminds us that “psychological time is a product of the mind more than a reflection of natural chronometric order” (1). Otherwise stated, our cognitive system uses psychological time to represent the environment and take appropriate action based on that representation. In modern times we conceived it as a fixed arena in which events took place without regard to anything external (Newton); then, we discovered that time is an intellectual construct, an a priori that it does not exist in itself but only as an offshoot of the way we represent reality (Kant). At last, we proved time being relative as an event that moves through our experiences (Einstein), expanding ad infinitum (Hawking). Notwithstanding the astronomical discoveries of the 20th century, the question is probably even more fascinating: How does time move? To remain on the Western side of the hemisphere, the ancient Hebrews of the Bible, the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, the Native Americans have always understood time, as a circular movement, consisting of repeating ages: Dark and Golden Ages swaying between birth and extinction. Plato illustrates the beginning of the world as the will of a Craftsman who fashioned the universe after a model and out of chaos. At the end of its cycle, 72,000 solar years, the world would dissolve into its original chaotic status for the whole process to begin again. The Old Testament brings forward a Ptolemaic conception, which is a circular perspective of time with a God that always will be and never changes. Wherefore the consecutio temporum between the past and the future is somewhat broken, for no longer the beginning is the beginning and the end is the end, but a continual cycle of simultaneous beginnings and endings. Such an understanding might be ascribed to the fact that at early ages, preliterate cultures, agrarian civilizations without a structured scientific system, had in the seasonal harvest the conditio sine qua non through which define the rhythm and expectations of life. Consequently, it was hard to visualize a future fundamentally different from the past. As elaborated by Henry-Charles Puech (1902–1986):

The circular movement which assures the survival of the same things by repeating them, by bringing about their continuous return, is the perfect and most immediate expression (hence that which is closest to the divine) of the absolute immobility at the summit of the hierarchy (40).

Based on these assumptions, ancient civilizations are not blamable for not knowing that the Heavens are not fixed and immutable, but because they seemed to ignore that the eternal return of the same brings severe consequences for the sense of history. If nothing new arises, history answers to laws of decadence rather than development. Furthermore, man is deprived of dignity. If life is repetition, man is somewhat of a melancholic being, fated to plagiarize himself rather than create his uniqueness. Above this passive object, the stars with their position and movement regulate men’s destiny, making the existence an immutable and inevitable submission to the laws of the universe. It was Christianity to break the everlasting renovation of events establishing a beginning with the act of creation, and an ending symbolized by the Final Judgment. Thus, it was Christianity to offer direction and significance to the human race in the realization of universal salvation. As the Epistle to the Hebrews contends, Christ died but once for humanity’s sins, once and for all; similarly, each individual enacts his destiny but once, once and for all. The West in order to avoid chaos and control a threatening nature, accepted man’s own finitude. In exchange for a final destination and the promise of immortality, Western societies learned to cope with the awareness of being mortal, the liability of life where every second is not just one second but the last one. The originality of the Judeo-Christian tradition is its eschatological character (eschatos lit. last); with the Judgment Day is established a horizontal sequence which makes the progression of time linear and irreversible rather than circular. Once more, the French historian Henry-Charles Puech (1958) pointed out some of the implications:

The vertical interpretation of the world's changing appearances through the fixed and atemporal, archetypal realities of the upper, intelligible world, gives way—in ancient Christianity at least—to a horizontal interpretation of the segments of time through one another: the past announces and prepares the future, the future accomplishes and explains the past; or, to use the technical terminology of the Christian authors of the first centuries, the earlier events are the "types" or "prefigurations" of the subsequent events, and these in turn are the realization of the events which precede them and which are related to them as the "shadow" is related to full, authentic reality (43).

Starting with the fall of man history becomes a chain of causes and effects whose ultimate goal is the progressive reconciliation with the original divinity of human nature. If time is a succession of unique events, if every single instant is decisive, it is man, not history, to be celebrated. By so doing, that is, by dethroning the hierarchical superiority of the Greek gods and by making the human creature object of the divine, the most exclusive of God’s creation, history becomes anthropocentric. Nor does the culture of the Enlightenment project change the linearity of the process. When the myth of progress emerged, modernity preserved the continuity and linearity of time with gradual changes involving the notion of progress in evolutionary terms, hence a transition from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity. By replacing the final kingdom of God with the final kingdom of science, what changes is the nature of history, no more divine but secular, and the historical aim, no more salvation but evolution. Grounded in the pillars of reason, science and progress, history becomes a mechanism of emancipation from savagery and ignorance toward peace and prosperity, from circumstantial happenings to personal choices. Nolens volens the inevitable Weberian process of disenchantment, shaped a Faustian civilization encaged in the notion of future: “For there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak that lies in infinity” (qtd. Karlberg 322). ² In other words, the gas chambers in Auschwitz might have as well proved the collapse of the Enlightenment project, but surely not the end of history.

Meanwhile, China, not as a State but as a civilization in terms of sense of belonging, long-standing traditions, and size, does not deal with chaos but equilibrium. ³ Western societies relate themselves to God and therefore the philosophical speculation is either a denial or a reaffirmation of metaphysical elements; China relates itself to society itself, therefore the philosophical speculation rarely engages itself with metaphysics but with social ethics. Harmony is the Chinese understanding of time; cosmic equilibrium is given by a cyclic movement where life repeats itself. Everything comes from being and being comes from non-being is Lao Tzu endorsement of the doctrine of cyclicity, expressed through mystical, cryptic passages: “Being far-reaching means returning to the original point” (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit, 1973, 152-25). Stability is the key concept to decoding China and Chinese time. Confucianism is an ethical system concerned about the well ruling of the State; at its best, it draws a Plato-like ideal society in which the good relationship between the ruler and the citizens plays out as the main factor to ensure political solidity. So did Mencius focusing more on the goodness of human nature and people’s right to revolt. Yet both of them, Confucius and Mencius, are bearers of a philosophy of social organization. The principal aim was to form an ethical stratum of intellectuals who could lead the path for a just and durable government. Mohism enlarged the Confucian filial piety to a message of universal love but simultaneously emphasized the oligarchic order of the State as the only remedy against the proliferation of ideas, otherwise tantamount to disorder. Even more radical was the Legalist school: The adherents stressed the standardization of the process, which is devotion to the State, not through virtue but through laws reinforced by a system of rewards and punishments. With a lighter approach, Daoism reserved a room for metaphysics dusting off the notion of Yin, the female passive pattern, and Yang, the male dominating force. The dualist schema is used to explain practically every natural phenomenon: The alternation of day and night, the duty of a wife toward her husband, the seasonal changes, life cycles, the rise and fall of dynasties. On the one hand, the balance between the two elements maintains harmony, and on the other hand, it guarantees the permanence of the process. Yet because the constant is the movement itself rather than the changes it brings, nothing is final. Thus, although the outcome is a momentary equilibrium, the final goal reveals a society projecting itself into eternity. If we adjust the magic spell of circularity to the course of Chinese history, hence events repeating themselves toward another order, Daoism stands as the ideological justification of Chinese socio-political status. Looking backward, the course of Chinese history appears as an emerging conservative system taking over a dying conservative system. For instance, the transition from one dynasty to another one, or from an ideology, such as Confucianism, to another one, such as Communism.

This is, I reckon, the fault line between the Western and Chinese civilization: It is a different time conception the engine behind societies seemingly to the antipodes. Daoism conceived a reality based on alternated elements, either Yin or Yang, but it did not conceive the idea of synthesis between them. That is, Daoism does not contemplate anything that is neither Yin nor Yang. History has been deprived of movement for the repetition of the process is not enough to allow any real change. Some centuries later, Christian theology divided the circularity of Western time into three main segments: before-after Christ, and the historical present. Protected by God and in need to knowing God, Western civilization was metaphysically forced to study nature to unveil the secret held by the mysterious future. Therefore, the skies were opened to discover the universe above, and men dug up the earth to compete with nature and enrich themselves with a promise of Heaven. The Chinese case is different for China did not cope with the idea of future. In the early Chinese texts, no story describes the creation of the world out of nothingness and marked the beginning of time. ⁴ In Chinese chronologies, time is not counted from a single date, such as the birth of Christ, but from repeated historical beginnings, namely, the foundation of a dynasty, a royal family, or in recent times the foundation of the People’s Republic (1949). Individual lives are bounded by birth and death, each person’s life is the continuum of the ancestral lineage with the ritual as the sole conjunction between the ancestral spirits and the living. In the Han dynasty’s (206 BC–220 AD) death ceremony, called ‘The Summons of the Soul’ we are told of the existence of two souls, the hun (魂) and the p·o (魄) which after death may be rejoined together through a ritual. Ergo the dead may be brought back to life. ⁵ Underscored is the belief that there is not an unbridgeable gap between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular,’ and that is because these pairs of words embody a Christian dichotomy that had and has not equivalent in China. The very same character 神 (shen) numerates, among its meanings, human spirit (soul) and spirit/ghost, which again suggests how Chinese religious philosophy does not have an ontological distinction between ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal.’ Divine and humans are moderately placed on the same dimension. When Buddhism arrived in China and much later Christianity with the Jesuit missionaries, they ordered the world religiously and brought along with them the idea of a transcendent deity, hence the impossible gap between men and divine. Credence in the after-life comes with the concept of responsibility, the ability to plan the future and for human beings a chance to foresee themselves in it. But China did not accept it because from the very roots of Chinese philosophy nothing transcends humans, as to say China cannot conceive an existence beyond the realm of nature. How could China possibly believe in a God that resurrects on the third day? In this sense, Buddhist emphasis on reincarnation and metempsychosis was in China more successful than the Christian’s earthly ending and the harbor of Heaven or Hell. It simply made it easier to see in the ‘reincarnation-belief’ the cyclical changes of life together with the everlasting coming back of everything. Therefore, by not having a god to refer to, China has felt vulnerable in front of nature; out of fear China did not challenge it, did not compete against it but, perhaps more wisely, accepted it. This is, for instance, the reason why in traditional Chinese oil paintings, landscapes and bucolic scenes precede people and if there are human figures they appear very small compared to the whole. Ancient Chinese thinkers viewed the world as a complete and complex organism where events happen the way they happen because of their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe. Ergo, without chasing after the future, they based the core of a civilization essentially on the historical present.

By virtue of language, groups distinguish themselves and define specific identities. Likewise, Chinese language itself seems to be the best evidence for the theory. Chinese is monosyllabic, there is equivalence between the sound and the idea, but because there are no strict rules governing the syntax, the meaning of a word is only comprehensible in the context of a sentence. The beauty of the language lies in the fact that the presence of some sort of vagueness in the sentence’s structure creates a level of indeterminacy around the final meaning. Corresponding to the imagistic quality of Chinese characters is the tense. Chinese verb tense, unlike Latin-derived idioms, knows only the present form: It contemplates neither past nor future, but it describes past and future by adding external prepositions and function particles. Depending on the circumstances, it is the content of a sentence to offer to the listener the guess of the historical momentum. In other words, the flowing of time exists and it is accepted only as a deviation from normality. And that would be the historical present. By the same token, if we ask a Westerner for the age, the person will reply by giving a specific number, indeed the exact age; but if we ask the same question to a Chinese, he/she will reply by giving the date of birth or the animal of the Chinese Zodiac under which he/she was born. That is because the Westerner travels on the line of history and history is a progressive development toward the future, thus in a sense by giving the specific age our interlocutor calls attention to the end, the point in time, in short, the momentary final destination. On the other hand, the Chinese, being time cyclical, a chain of events repeating themselves alike the fluctuation from one dynasty to another, does not have a destination, and thus cannot conceive of a destination different from the origin. The final destination is the origin.

As I discussed earlier in this manuscript, for the sake of stability history is deprived of movement. China has always been concerned about enduring rather than developing, unlike the West which understood endemic competition as the tool to overcome political fragmentation. When regularly in the 16th and 17th centuries the Ottoman army was at the gate of Vienna, threatening to march on Rome, no pan-European counsel ordered to suspend the maritime expeditions and focus on the enemy to the East. On the other hand, in 1424 China, after Yongle died, Zheng He’s oceanic voyages were suspended and maritime expeditions were banned. One of the reasons for such momentous decisions lies behind the fact that the Ming Dynasty was more concerned about defending the land of China than exploring new territories. Enduring, notably in historical terms, is often equivalent to repetition: Family systems, organized kinship, rituals, the dynastic political apparatus, are all attempts to maintain China as it is. By way of example, the imperial examination was a system that did not test the candidates’ ability to think or innovate, but rather their capacity to memorize the Confucian classics. By so doing, China succeeded in establishing a static bureaucracy, where conservatism shaped the soul of a civilization and together placed China out of historical contemporaneity. Of course, a philosophy gives a society what that society needs the most. From the Warring State period (475-221 BC) ⁶ to the foundation of the People’s Republic, Confucianism, The Legalist School, Buddhism, Daoism, broadly speaking the core of Chinese philosophy, offered to China the promise of permanence, so to speak the idea of an equilibrium ruling men’s destiny. And yet, China is changing. The transaction to the age of global capital, the once again impact of Western culture on the Chinese people has engulfed the country in controversial ideologies unleashing forces that call for a redefinition of sedimented historical structures. Post-Mao China met the coming of age of a new economy (capitalism), and a new philosophy (individualism), thus the intellectual concern is whether the race for material prosperity, the Epicureanism of modernity, will or not bring down the great wall of time.

The matrix of a civilization

Looking back to the past two centuries, we witness different waves of Western influences on Chinese soil. The Opium Wars (XIX century) shattered the previous demarcation between center and periphery, altogether the demarcation between self and the other, forcing China to reorganize itself into a new image. Thus, while rethinking its centralism China went from being the world to being a part of it. The May Fourth Movement (1919) brought in ideas of science and democracy and more recently, when Deng Xiaoping gave a start to the economic process of openness toward the world global market at the end of the 1970s, China became the world’s largest middle-class society. ⁷ The privatization of housing, education, and medical care increased pluralism, while the State and society remained controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP). On December 13, 1978, at the closing session of the preparatory conference for the historic Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP, Deng Xiaoping delivered a speech in which he ushered Chinese postmodernity: “[to the members of the Party] emancipate our minds, use our heads, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future.” ⁸ Facts then, economic and political solutions, rather than ideology, were going to be the criteria for a correct policy and the socialist program of modernization. Against this background, as the reform strategy gradually spread from regional experimentation to the whole country, the relation between rural producers and the State had to be redefined. The stimulation of private agricultural production and the success of the rural market economy were counterbalanced by a mass of individuals who every year, in number not inferior to 6 million, move into the cities to compete for the opportunities given by the private sector. Meanwhile, life’s aspiration pondering about happiness and freedom replaced the previous emphasis on self-sacrifice and utopian ambitions. In the same vein, the shift from a collective system of responsibility to an individualistic system of self-development brought new domestic issues. In terms of capitalist globalization, coastal regions have living standards at the level of advanced countries, while interior regions have structures at the level of underdeveloped nations. In terms of institutions, the economic shift has come with the loss of social security and a sense of general loss that Deng had foreseen it in his speech: “During the drive to realize the four modernizations, we are bound to encounter many new and unexpected situations and problems with which we are unfamiliar” (ibid). What I suggest is that the ascendancy of Western popular culture and consumerism invading China without being filtered by any ideological remark has to be considered among the ‘unfamiliar problems.’ The accomplishment of a modern and powerful socialist State is a serious trial for the 1898 slogan “Chinese learning as fundamental structure, Western learning for practical use.” ⁹ The road to a new world order, the new economy, regardless the socialist rhetoric that still fills the official discourse, de facto represents a structural change to China’s cultural landscape.

Nolens volens, to discuss currently China is to argue about Chinese identity. Western civilization based the concept of identity on the solid platform of truth. Assuming religion, science, and art in this order to constitute the cultural skeleton of the West, truth has been simultaneously a religious understanding of human expectations, a scientific approach able to explain man’s position in the universe, and an artistic attempt to reconnect, through beauty, man to the original perfection. But Chinese identity had none of it. In the Western counterpart first came religion and then society and therefore Christianity had the chronological advantage of shaping a civilization; in contrast, monotheistic beliefs entered China only after a society was already established. Hence, religion never had the strength, the imprimatur to unify a country otherwise so vast and different. Modern science is of recent introduction in China. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was one of the most advanced empires of all ages. Still in the late 18th century, Adam Smith referred to China as “one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world … a much richer country than any part of Europe” (qtd. Ferguson 35). Chinese achievements were celebrated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; Voltaire in 1764 declared that “[o]ne need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese, to recognize … that their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen” (ibid. 53). But following the Ming’s fall, and the lack of a real industrial revolution, China was left behind in the technological race. Famously, in the mid-eighteenth century the Qianlong Emperor rebuked the Macartney Embassy, which was carrying the marvels of the scientific revolution, by declaring “strange and costly objects do not interest me” (qtd. Gentzler, 1997, 70). In the 19th century, at the dawn of ‘the century of humiliation,’ science appeared again together with the Western powers and the idea of material progress. Not surprisingly, the conservative wing saw in it an artificiality contrary to nature and Chinese spiritual philosophy.

At last, neither art nor beauty could represent an amalgam for the scattered Chinese identity. In ancient China, art has never been a substitute for the category of ‘truth’ in the sense of Western aestheticism, but a mimic for goodness and beauty. The image in traditional Chinese aesthetics never transcended the idea to the level of Western abstraction for instance, and that was because the artistic expression bore a social synthesis, rather than metaphysical, between man, reality, and the world. Accordingly, beauty, the space of art, is in China a historical reality more than an aesthetic aim, revitalized every so often as a political instrument. Consequently, spoiled by its cultural arena, art becomes an imperfect concept too liable, too weak to resist the proof of time. And while Europe, under the threat of WWII, prompted a large-scale evacuation of public art collections, a few years later, Chinese art was smashed and torn apart, silenced as an enemy of the masses by the Cultural Revolution. China, history retells, has always been engaged with the tragedy of unity, and because beauty could not console China, in order to survive, China took a more solid background, a frame to hold on to while dynasties, invaders, and regimes would rapidly alternate. It is ideology. The cultural matrix on which Chinese identity is based has always been ideology. Willing to plant a common understanding so to keep together settlements and kinships otherwise so different from each other, the central State had to produce an original pattern, an ethical code able to regulate every single relationship. At first, it was Confucius to settle the frame of what was moral and what was not; his universal values of righteousness and benevolence have been in China as Christianity has been in the West, the common framework holding a civilization. Then it was Maoism, -that is, Chinese Marxism-to point out what right is and what wrong is. At the millennium’s turning, capitalism arrived to indicate the difference between success and failure, with a set of new values and ethics. When it was only Confucianism or even Confucianism and Communism together, due to their common attitude toward social order, collectivism and hierarchy, Chinese identity was somewhat preserved. However, with the introduction of the logic of marketization, Chinese identity rapidly entered a phase of cultural schizophrenia. The shining outcomes of modernization quite successfully hid the contradictions of a society where nowadays individualism and competition have to go along with collectivism and unity. Cultural chaos finally took the resemblance of peace.

The hammer of asceticism and the sickle of hedonism

I intend the notions of collectivism and individualism in terms of cultural psychology. Harrison and Huntington, (2000) define culture “in purely subjective terms as the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society” (xv). However, culture is also, and undeniably, a system of belief that has a pattern of political interaction and economic institutions. In this vein, culture not only is “the property of a collectivity” such as nation, region, class, or a race (Elkins and Simeon, 1979, 127) but it is also proper to remind that “culture presupposes a collectivity” (Hofstede 5). The correlation between the individual and the collective in the definition of culture is one that follows psychological patterns in terms of action, attitude, cognition, evaluation, feeling, and orientation. At some stage, society’s institutions, beliefs, values and knowledge are internalized by the individual through a system of coercion or exchange to an extent that the “constraining effects” (Almond and Powell 1978: 1925) of culture on individual’s cognition create a social mechanism in which causes and effects are no longer distinguishable. As observed by the anthropologist Kluckhohn: “culture is to society what memory is to individuals” (qtd. Triandis and Suh, 2002, 13).

In terms of cultural analysis collectivism and individualism are separate dimensions: “two opposing cultural frames deemed as a major new source of the world conflict in the future” (Yoon, 2014). From an economic perspective, collectivism is attached to totalitarian, command economies, while market economy is supposedly favorable to individualism. However, I am here interested in the socio-psychological aspect of the phenomenon. As far as definitions go:

Individualism stands for a society in which ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and her/his immediate family only. Collectivism stands for a society in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in -groups, which throughout people's life time continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty (Hofstede, 2001).

The cultural dimension of China is centered on a relationship between the individual and the group in which the individual is always in a position, empirical and theoretical, of dependency. The Ring of Time (1956) is an essay written by perhaps the most distinguished essayist in American history, Elwyn Brooks White (1988-1985). The narrator is watching a circus rehearsal. At first, time is circular. We are given to read words, nouns and verbs, such as ‘circle,’ ‘circumference,’ ‘counterclockwise’, ‘revolving,’ that clearly express the idea of circularity. At last, it is the movement of a 16-year-old barefoot girl to shape on the uneven ground “a ring of ambition, of happiness, of youth” (Gilbert & Crooks, 1994, 48). But as he watches the performance and the calm pleasure of her beauty, he becomes painfully conscious of the element of time: In a week or two all would be different, she would wear makeup, she would be wearing sleepers, and the circus would be ready to perform. Suddenly time breaks into vectorial possibilities, she will grow old and travel outside the ring of time “[b]ut she was too young to know that time doesn’t move in a circle at all (…) She will never be as beautiful as this again” (ibid). It seems to me that the metaphor of the circus well applies to China. There is a saying, that goes along these lines: “In 1949, only socialism can save China; in 1979, only capitalism can save China; in 1989, only China can save socialism; in 2009, only China can save capitalism,” as to mark the role that China has come to play in contemporary world’s market economy. What happened in the past 40 years is that the economic growth and the magnet of materialism have opened the metaphorical ring of time, hence questioning the circularity of Chinese time and therefore the very essence of Chinese identity. In Jiwei Ci (1994)’s analysis, once the regime has failed to realize the communist utopia, the sudden lack of revolutionary utopianism leads to hedonism and its political ideology, liberalism. Possible. In this swing of excesses, my stance is that Chinese postmodernity is the implosion of Maoist civilization (ascetic morality, self-denying excess) and simultaneously the shattering of that eternal recurrence the cyclicity of Chinese time was the bearer of. It should be self-evident by now that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ frames an additional version of Chinese postmodernity whose outcome was very much unexpected indeed. ¹⁰ This is no longer the age of ideology, but that of aesthetic drills in which the vulgar customer takes the place once occupied by the loyal comrade. Postmodernity develops into postmodernism, an aesthetic moment of disintegration of patriarchal values, a collage of weltanschauungs assimilated into the global space that China is quickly becoming. In this regard, postmodern fiction is a useful tool to observe the transition from the collective spirit of the revolutionary years to the public entertainment of KTV and dance parties. The new entertainment industry is in unison with the displacement from Maoist asceticism to postmodern hedonism. ¹¹

Emotions and desires are not new to Chinese people, but during the decades of Maoist indoctrination, they were severely discouraged so to place full attention on the cause of the revolution. It is only recently, in the 1980s, that libido, unconscious, and desire invade the narrative restoring the discourse over self, initiated, although suspended, with Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia Diary (1922). ¹² So far, within a post-revolutionary discourse, the self becomes the base of real. Accordingly, the body emerges as a counterpoint to the sexual repression of the revolutionary era, expression of rebellion against the authority, a moment of resistance against the inertia of time, and a metaphor for identity in an age where expressing one’s own identity is guilt no more. Heroes of the revolution disappear; protagonists are no longer examples of morality, but wicked and dumb ordinary characters. The epic of one-man show fighting off invaders and injustice changes its disguise, the body, instead prevails as an apolitical power. In terms of female writing, nudity defies the historical grandeur promised by ideology. If the 1980s produced Wang Anyi (1954) and Can Xue (1953), witnesses of the revolution, the 1990s produced Wei Hui (1973) and Mian Mian (1970), daughters of commercial popular culture. Hereby, while literature unmasks the hidden practices of capitalism on Chinese ground and the degeneration of those unable to filter it, writers manipulate the body to replace the logic of ideology. The physical journey of Mian and Wei Hui and the detailed radical introspection of Chen Ran (1962) and Lin Bai (1958) set the guidelines for the next generation. The aesthetic of modernity they performed, as an alternative existence to the politicized Maoist years, is all along the narration of an alternative China. Time becomes vectorial rather than circular, breaking into myriads of possibilities: individualistic, nostalgic, hedonistic, numb, depending on which side of the postmodern ambiguity we stand on. With the Open-Door Policy, millions of migrant workers participate in the process of reconstruction, reshaping China under economic chances. They moved back from the county side, from third line cities to the metropolitan coastal cities. ¹³ They were told that in a free market economy it is easy to get rich; instead, they will struggle to survive. ¹⁴ The new entrepreneurs, who did indeed achieve wealth, are sided by an intervening social phenomenon, a disillusioned labor force, described as ‘floating population.’ They reach now the number of 200 million, unemployed workers searching for equilibrium, enlarging the substrata of macro and micro criminality, they become transitional people in a transitional zone. Contingency stands as another marker of the urban surrounding. The unnamed workers all have unstable, seasonal jobs, they all share a room with a few other people, an endless multitude sharing the same experience of loneliness. And while men, for better or worse, are engaged in the destruction and construction of the city, women enter the entertainment industry. The whole society is in turmoil dealing with new types of inequalities: The intellectual class calling for intellectual freedom, the middle class soliciting additional needs, and disadvantaged groups asking for public funds. Between the deregulation of costumes and privatization, people strive to define a new space of action, a legal understanding of life. Meanwhile, literature moves toward them becoming the messenger of a silent protest, sharing the same need for an alternative space. Popular culture is the outcome of liberal cultural policies; evident is the campaign of negotiation between the State ideological control and the anomie of unexpected elements within the layers of a prospering society. Geremie R. Barmé, describes the coexistence between official and mass culture as a compromise at the end of the century:

It was, rather, a syndrome that combined hopelessness, uncertainty, and ennui with irony, sarcasm, and a large dose of fatalism. It was a mood that enveloped both the individual and an ambience that suffused the urban world. It was a zeitgeist that was noticeably prevalent in youth culture. It was the temper, in particular, of the capital, Beijing (100).

Undoubtedly, the novelist Wang Shuo (1958) is the cultural icon that symbolizes at best the postmodern pastiche between high and popular culture, an authentic image and not definitive of contemporary urban Chinese culture. His characters came straight up from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, not equipped for any profession, young and unemployed, improbable protagonists reemerged roaming the streets of urban China. Defined as ‘hooligan culture,’ a product of the socialist market reforms, they emerge as idlers, outlaws, disenchanted urban youth whose blasphemy and concerns deconstruct from the roots the ideological Chinese discourse, the allegory of the grand myth, tradition, nationalism, history, and morality. The sinologist John Minford is the first scholar to have used the word ‘liumang’ in 1985, loosely translated as hooligans to describe China’s urban life:

Rapist, whore, black-marketeer, unemployed youth, alienated intellectual, frustrated artist or poet—the spectrum has its dark, satanic end, its long middle band of relentless grey, and, shining at the other end, a patch of visionary light. It is an embryonic alternative culture (qtd. Barmé, 1999, 398)

Incapable of floating on the surface of legality, they went underground, surviving out of more or less illegal activities, pimping, gambling, betting on the circumstances, composing at last a crude and pitiless image of the post-reform period. In Playing for Thrills (2008), the background is China in the late 1980s, a promised land for those willing to conquer it. Middle lower-class characters waste their time playing cards and drinking for hours on end. Not devoted to the Party or the country, emblem of a slide of society, urban bandits, youngsters getting by how they can, skilled in robbery and plundering, involved in petty crimes of everyday life. The anti-hero Fang Yan, alter-ego of the author, grew up during the Cultural Revolution, served in the army for a few years, worked in a pharmacy, became one of the leaders of some street gangs. He indulges in gambling and womanizing until when the atony of his vain existence is broken by a Kafkaesque moment. Back at his apartment, he is interrogated by the police regarding a murder that happened some 10 years before, and before any accusation is formulated he finds himself the prime suspect of it. But the protagonist, as much as China, suffers from historical amnesia. The images of the past are fused within dreamy sequences. People seem real but essentially, they are ghosts; events well recollected just so never took place. In his knotty recollection of the past there is a gap of 7 days following the disappearance of the victim and in this infinite space of possibilities goes off the split between the present and the past. The narration walks backward toward a journey of self-discovery, the re-discovery of sentiments long forgotten clash into the cynicism of the new tide. History sinks once more into the present; the murder was just an empty farce. Someone actually died in a game of death, but it is no longer tragedy: playing for thrills, trifling with life to confront the ennui of everyday, is what it is all about. In a similar fashion, Please Do Not Call Me Human (2000), maintains the same atmosphere of numbness. Another super anti-hero Tang Yuanbao is the fake living symbol of the national spirit. Created to avenge China’s Orwellian present and Chinese sense of honor, the allegorical outcome of his training is the destruction of everything China holds sacred in the present as much as in the past: ¹⁵

That’s what’s missing from today’s writers. Oh, sure, they make a lot of noise, call themselves new wave, a little modernism here, some root-seeking there, but if you ask me, those so called modernists are just playing games with our scraps. When we were young, we knew what it meant to do something new. I admit that social conditions were a lot better back then, what with opium dens, whorehouses, gambling, casinos, you name it. And America? A dark society, you say? They could not hold a candle to our old China. When you talk about eating, drinking, whoring, gambling, and smoking, that China of ours led the rest of the world, we were the gold standard (127)

Satire and mockery overturn everything between Confucius and Mao, between philosophy and history. To a higher degree of abstraction, the Chinese Post-New Era, in its anti-allegorical expression, tends to commercialize time, to ironize as much as postmodernism does, over the inviolability of the past. All at once, China is compelled to face the other. The reflection comes at the risk of seeing secular distortions and defects. A disenchanted tone absorbs Yu Hua’s (1960) probably most political novel, The Seventh Day (2015), in which corruption contributes to shoving national allegory out of the way. Allegedly, an alternative journey in the afterworld impressed with streaming water and trees of heart-shaped leaves, de facto, a critical, inspection of Chinese modern vices, the human cost of Chinese modernity. The novel starts from the end; the protagonist Yang Fei, has already died, his cremation is scheduled for the early morning and he is late. We are given to understand that unable to afford a grave, he will not be cremated for the time being but forced to roam, among those sharing his grave-less condition, in the land of the unburied. A beautiful and excruciating limbo, a Neverland where life is finally explained just to increase the unbearable weight of some regrets. He places back his whole life while looking for his father; eventually, he comes across those he once loved, not many, and those who neighbor-hooded his life and a similarly tragic ending. As a new character appears, the narration switches from the blooming growth of the afterworld back to the rainy, foggy, smoky city he just left. And it is in this back and forth displacement that the narration fills the gaps. Yang Fei was born by accident in a toilet on a moving train. ¹⁶ Adopted by a railway switchman, he never truly found his place in a society that in the 1990s does not have a definite shape. Not to know any better he remained at the edge of life anchored to the group of those who are carried along by their fate rather than shaping their destiny. Fate seemed to be benevolent when he married a beautiful and ambitious woman, Li Qing, -a morally advanced version of Yufen in Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Clock (2012)- who, however, 2 years later will decide to run off with a promising PhD 10 years her elder. At the age of 41, parentless and childless, he dies as he was born, accidentally. Fate again plays a trick on him. While reading on a local newspaper about his ex-wife’s suicide, he is caught by a fatal, sudden, explosion. Time in Yu Hua’s intellectual vision of China is not numb, but a rationalized form of violence. Indeed, death is constantly present. Li Qing, slit her wrists open following a corruption scandal, Liu Mei, the mouse girl living underground, jumped, perhaps slipped, from a skyscraper distressed for not having received the latest, original, iPhone. Wu Chao, her scrubby boyfriend, is victim of a black-market organ transplant. Yang Fei’s adoptive mum is knocked off just before flying to America by a speeding BMW and then run over by a truck and a delivery van. A couple refused to move out while bulldozers, under the plan of forcible demolition, brought down the three apartment buildings; 27 unwanted babies, disposed by the hospital as ‘medical refuse’ float in the river, they are the aborted fetuses of China’s one-child policy. In this modern Chinese vision of Dante’s Purgatory, the equality of death is only apparent, in fact, even in its purgatory China has a VIP zone with armchairs beside the plastic chairs for basic arrivals. Realism also is an illusion; behind the aimless roaming of the skeletons and the regrets of their accounts, Yu Hua concedes a worthy outline of some casualties of post-Mao China. The estrangement from the market dominion of the organ sellers matches the profit of unscrupulous kidney vendors, governmental cover-ups, innocent convicts wrongly executed by the State, the overrunning effects of the one-child policy and the forcible demolition. At times, the row display of the chronicle takes the turn of a sociological analysis when the desire for material objects, strictly direct to the increasing power of consumerist society, becomes the trigger that casts aside common decency.

Chinese novels must be read on two semantic levels, imagining a sociological base and the literary superstructure. This is because fiction in China is never just fiction but real-politic in disguise. Yan Lianke (1958) is another master of imaginative satire. Moved by an instinct for anthropological truth, Lianke has consistently confronted the whole biography of the People’s Republic. In Lenin’s Kisses (2013), the government’s plan to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russia and use it as the basis for a tourist site in the mainland is a mockery to China’s move to capitalism. Serve the People (2005), a close refrain of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is a parody of Maoist rhetoric, the tale of a young woman who takes an older lover who can be aroused only when she smashes portraits and statues of Chairman Mao. Dream of Ding Village (2011) explores the AIDS blood-contamination in Henan province, not much of fiction but the outcome of Lianke’s 3-year research in ‘AIDS villages’ in Henan. It starts as an attempt of bribery and bullying to collect blood from as many people as possible, as often as possible, to be sold to government blood banks. Once the business is on the move, the disease spread unchecked because of local ‘blood-heads’ who use contaminated needles. The final image is the deserted village and a dream of resurrection. Out of fiction, Lianke is making a clear statement about the personal and spiritual price China has paid for an unrestrained economic growth. Evidence is the final allegorical image of a coffin lavishly decorated with grand Chinese cityscapes replacing the legend of Meng Jiangnu who, while mourning her husband, cried down a section of the Great Wall:

But the engravings on Uncle and Lingling’s caskets were mostly big-city scenes depicting famous landmarks: Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl television tower, Guangzhou’s high rise hotels, and various bustling commercial districts, department stores, suspension bridges (…) The engravings presented an idyllic portrait of big-city life: a flat with refrigerator, washing machine, television set, home-entertainment centre, microphone, speakers and karaoke machine (272)

In the triumphs of consumer society, the intervention of commercial principles has a postmodern boomerang effect. On one side, they enlarge the space occupied by popular culture, and on the other side, they erode the space once occupied by the elite culture. In the past three decades, Chinese fiction clearly observes that when the classical notion of commodity fetishism stormed over the Chinese landscape a false consciousness took over the idealism of the revolutionary years. In this respect, the ‘post-everything’ period, both radical and apolitical, cannot be adequately comprehended if we ignore its relation to the revolutionary Maoist legacy. According to Liu Kang (2004) the market has accomplished what Mao had left uncompleted: “[i]n contrast to Mao’s culture of the masses, the contemporary culture industry, or commercial popular culture, succeeds precisely in producing a social relevance to the everyday life, despite its overt objectives of making profits or commodity fetishism” (100). On this very fragile historical stage, China is due to meet its most delicate challenge, which would be avoiding cultural hybridization, erosion of traditional models so to speak. China does not have to prevent economic globalization, but rather cultural globalization, otherwise stated, preventing culture from being colonized by the logic of marketization. The hedonism of postmodernity might not necessarily be a sign of decadence; when people’s sensual needs are satisfied self-fulfillment is virtually within reaching distance. What remains to be seen is whether the cultural overlapping will turn into a new creation, or China’s Big Bang.