China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions

Jie Lu · Ban Wang

Jul. 2012 · Lexington Books

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Against the dire consequences of China’s market development, a new intellectual force of the New Left has come on the scene since the mid 1990s. New Left intellectuals debate the issues of social justice, distributive equality, markets, state intervention, the socialist legacy, and sustainable development. Against the neoliberal trends of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerism, New Left critics launched a critique in hopes of seeking an alternative to global capitalism. This volume takes a comprehensive look at China’s New Left in intellectual, cultural, and literary manifestations. The writers place the New Left within a global anti-hegemonic movement and the legacy of the Cold War. They discover grassroots literature that portrays the plight and resilience of the downtrodden and disadvantaged. With historical visions the writers also shed light on the present by drawing on the socialist past.

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Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University and the Yangtze River Chair Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is the author of Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern Cinema (2004), and The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China (1997). He edited Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (2010) and co-edited The Image of China in the American Classroom: Personal Reflections by Chinese Scholars in the US (2006), and Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (2004). He has published numerous articles in the fields of Chinese literature and film, aesthetics and comparative literature.

Jie Lu is professor of Chinese studies & film studies at the University of the Pacific. She is the author of Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (2005) and has edited: China’s Literature and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century (2008); “Writing against Spectacular Reality: Cultural Intervention in China and Taiwan,” Journal of Contemporary China (2008); “New Literary and Culture Scene in Contemporary China,” Journal of Contemporary China (2003 & 2004); and “Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao China,” American Journal of Chinese Studies (1998).