The Great Leap Forward And The Formation Of The Pseudobinary

Both in real life and in cultural studies, Chinese intellectuals and citizens in urban centers alike adhere to a notion of progress that pursues a straight or spiral course at ever escalating speed. This is an earthy approach to the elimination of poverty of all kinds—material destitution and cultural and ideological vacuity. To counter the image of backwardness, one has no other choice but to leap forward. It is a notion that acquired incentive on its own and grew into something bountiful, boundless, and almost irreversible, until its momentary setback on June Fourth in 1989.

An extremely progressive, aggressive attitude toward the future is not new or peculiar to China in the 1980s. Underlying the mainland Chinese notion of progress is that ever prevailing Maoist utopianism that propels Chinese to seek for and yet fail to achieve every political dream for the nation. This teleology, rooted in the discursive practices of Chinese modernity, reaches back to the Darwinian meditations of Yan Fu and Kang Youwei. Whether we label it cultural utilitarianism or simply the utopian vision of a Chinese modernity, the rationality has an unmistakably close resemblance to the Maoist Great Leap Forward mentality. We can perhaps designate this irrationally optimistic mode of self-introspection as "characteristically Chinese."^[4] The "wounded literature" comes to mind as a good illustration of the irrational emotionalism and political pragmatism that triggered the post-Maoist examination of the Cultural Revolution. Such introspective writing was a pragmatic and instrumental legitimation of Hua Guofeng's regime because, by simple logic, it imputed all evils to the Gang of Four. Sentimental grumblings about fate and the writers' self-indulgent portrayal

of their own suffering fell far short of a genuine introspection or interrogation of the historical past and every individual's own complicity in the revolutionary politics of victimization. The forward leap that the wounded literature once promised is hardly a qualitative leap in self-evaluation or historical reflection.

It was unexpected frustration of this forward leap mentality that plunged the nation in late 1987 into a deep discontent. In the immediate wake of the Party's Thirteenth Congress in October, the entire nation was seized by a late-blooming consciousness of the impending socioeconomic crises, which was intensified by Premier Zhao Ziyang's announcement in the congress that Chinese society was still lingering at the threshold of "the primary stage of socialism."^[5] Zhao Ziyang's assessment revealed the illusory nature of the Maoist Great Leap, but it also returned the collective dreamers to where they in fact stood—in a depleted present. For one rare moment in the history of Chinese communism, genuine nihilism pervaded the minds of the young. "A stunning spectacle it was indeed," recalled an observer at Cui Jian's rock concert, after witnessing millions of Chinese, men and women, chiming in involuntarily to the tune of "I Have Nothing at All" (yi wu suo you ), one of the rock star's most popular songs in the latter half of the decade.^[6]

Everyone seems to be a loser in this crude awakening. Intellectuals had envisioned a future in which they would emerge as the privileged center controlling the flow of information and knowledge. In this new epoch, a longed-for and profound shift in class structure would enable intellectual laborers to dominate manual labor so that, just as in the West, technological knowledge would emerge as the major productive force. Obsessive interest in this future during the early and mid-1980s was widespread. The concept of "cultural capital" particularly intrigued investors, who promoted global cultural practices and the distribution of knowledge to other power centers, particularly college campuses and urban salons.^[7] Groups of intellectuals engaged in the making of this new utopian discourse. They launched mega-projects such as the "Toward the Future" series edited by Jin Guantao and Gan Yang's journal and translation series entitled Culture: China and the World .

The prevailing zeitgeist prior to the Thirteenth Party Congress undoubtedly privileged the future and viewed the present as a mere transition to be consumed by the masses in their consciousness of a rapidly sped-up future. Nothing is more important to the Chinese elite than the constant reassurance that they, too, are moving with the current,

carrying on a dialogue with the world, and keeping up with the world—"the world" in this context, of course, being none other than "the wealthy and powerful" West.

Their recent forward-looking stance, however, is some distance from the complex earlier modern Chinese attitude about sinification. At first glimpse, treading the world stage of progress means learning new and foreign dance steps and leaving behind bound feet and all that. It would seem that the present rhetorical march toward the future symbolizes nothing less than a self-conscious parting of ways with China's earlier articulations of its own image. And yet every Chinese cultural renaissance in this century has ended in a resurgence of traditionalism. The restoration of Confucianism, a slogan raised at the heyday of the Culture Fever, does not merely reflect the political agenda of the dogmatic Marxists in power. It reminds us of the recurring collective impulse of Chinese intellectuals to invoke a historical past in which China positioned itself as the cultural and spiritual center of the world. Both Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming dwelt at length on the post-World War I myth of Eastern spirituality versus Western materialism and redirected the drive of sinification from its retrogressive self-immersion to an outbound salvational project. In the words of Guy Alitto, Liang Shuming's prophecy on the imminent Confucianization of the West served the same logic as Liang Qichao's 1919 call for the Chinese "to rush to the West's spiritual salvation."^[8]

Both Liangs sought to undermine the symmetrical superior versus subordinate binary configuration by which the West mapped its hierarchical relationship to China since the late nineteenth century. And yet no matter how humiliating China's encounter with the West has been throughout modern history, the Chinese formulation of the mental geography of China versus the West never fails to incorporate the reverse configuration that its premodern history serves with such royal conviction: China is self-positioned politically and culturally as the center that looks out at its exteriors as a margin to be annexed and homogenized. The unflagging argument for the inverted pattern of hegemony is indeed very treacherous, if not downright illogical: It is that modern power relations between the West (the center) and China (the margin) are capable of undergoing an instantaneous inversion simply because history is said to be capable of reproducing its precedents verbatim.

I might condemn as "reverse Orientalism" this crude salvational appropriation of a degraded West into Eastern spirituality. My question at this moment, however, is a problematic of a different order. I am curious about this formulation of a pseudobinary China versus the West in

the first place. Fraudulence surfaces immediately in the conceit that China can speak of its own cultural interior as an autonomous territory separable from the capitalized exterior known as the West. Based on the assumption that Western culture is the antithesis of, and hence exterior to, Chinese culture, the imaginary project of the "spiritual sinification of Western culture" proposed by the two Liangs fails to reflect on the dilemma of how China can speak of the desire to project its own position when such a position already contains within it an internalized Occidental discourse.

This dilemma has intensified in the post-Mao era because nationalism in the 1980s has functioned less efficiently to buffer the Chinese against the insidious infiltration of the foreign than it did in the 1920s. The salvational vision of sinification that both Liangs addressed then was pared down to an earnest defensive strategy in the new epoch. One can no longer take the position of the self for granted. No one can retreat to an unadulterated self-image. Unsurprisingly, anxiety about self-positioning (dingwei ) has plagued Chinese ideologues, intellectuals, writers, and critics alike since the mid-1980s.

Two recent examples will suffice to demonstrate the formulaic emergence of the issue of self-positioning at every ideological crisis in the post-Mao era. Deng Xiaoping's call for a "socialism with Chinese characteristics" in 1982 stands out as one typical case in point. Ironically, Deng's self-centered ideological repositioning coincides in spirit with the search of Marxist humanists into Zhuang Zi's philosophy as the Chinese original source for the Sartrean concept of alienation.^[9] In both cases, the underlying political agenda of sinification lies not in the allegedly Chinese impulse to harmonize, but in a nationalist defense mechanism that seeks to neutralize and eventually to dissolve the alien. I cannot help but side with Gan Yang, who condemned his fellow intellectuals for their conventional, "typical" habits of "view[ing] all imported foreign cultures as fundamentally originating in China."^[10]

Underlying the alleged academic interest in the discovery of a comparative idiom of indigenous and foreign discourses is nothing less than the irresistible impetus to self-position, an activity often indistinguishable from (indeed achievable only through) the subjugation of the alien. It is particularly intriguing to witness the resurgence of the issues of self-positioning in Deng's China whenever an emerging ideological crisis brings to the fore the perennial conflict between tradition and modernity, which the ideologues mistakenly translate into the simple terms of China versus the West.

In literary as opposed to ideological terrains, the phenomenon of sinification takes a different route. It no longer perceives itself as a mere strategy. The concept of self-positioning is not resolved in the coining of trendy slogans, nor does it circulate undisguised among the literary elite. It is revealed most clearly in the literary critics' penchant for the naming, renaming, and summing up of each particular school, roughly every two years—the Misty poetry, the wounded literature, the literature of retrospection, root-searching literature, modernism, neorealism, and the experimentalists. In fact, even before the emergence of the "literature of roots" in the mid-1980s, a thick profusion of neologisms delineated the spectacle of a China caught up in ecstatic self-exposure. The emotional energy that the long revolutionary years had pent up was unleashed at last. The elites now promoted Chinese poets and writers as commodities to the world cultural market. And they courted almost unabashedly the Occidental gaze without any qualms about globalizing (shijie hua ) their own cultural discourse.

Yet the seeds of repositioning, the desire to catch up with the literary-cultural fashion of the day, and hence the fetish for renaming the newest trend and reshaping one's identity in accordance, were planted deep in all these indigenous showcases of the literary ingenuity of post-Mao China. Around the time when the concept of root-searching blossomed, a vigorous critical discourse began to grow around the controversy over the self-positioning of contemporary literature. One should pause here for a moment to note the subtle difference between the subtext for "self-positioning" and that for "repositioning." The absent term in the binary diagram of the former is viewed as an antagonistic term (the confrontational Other) that points less to the alien (the West) than to the indigenous agonist (Maoism), especially when it is literature rather than culture that serves as the point of reference. Politicized literature is seen as the orthodox Other to "unfettered writing" (if there is such a thing to start with). In contrast, the absent term (the global and the foreign) on the conceptual axis of "repositioning" is one to be aligned rather than contested with, at least in the 1980s. When the Chinese writer speaks of self-positioning literature in the post-Mao era, she or he has in mind combat against the tyrannical Mao Style. In comparison, the spectacle of the intellectuals' concern with the repositioning of culture is symptomatic of the leaping forward mentality.

Although the theorists are increasingly aware that the self-positioning of Chinese literature is different from the repositioning of Chinese culture, the confusion, complexity, and difficulty of the new theoretical dis-

course consists precisely in the allegedly mutual (if only imperceptible) arising and stimulation of these two mutations. Thus for the xungen writer A Cheng, the locale for the emerging Chinese modern consciousness in contemporary literature is to be found in the collective cultural background of the Chinese people.^[11] Critic Zhang Yiwu precludes the possibility of any transcultural text of Third-World literature.^[12] For both critics, it is inconceivable that a literary self-positioning can occur without being accompanied by a cultural repositioning. And regardless of whether the literary trend of root-searching indicates an anticultural drive or return-to-culture approach,^[13] its deep structural obsession with the category of culture is irrevocable.

The anxiety for a repositioned literary culture reveals the profound discomfort that writers and critics felt about the shifting duality of its local and global discursive grounds. The catching-up craze toward the latter half of the 1980s could no longer sustain its earlier faith in the potential of the local to usurp the global, whose welcome intrusion inevitably precipitated an identity crisis in the former. All of a sudden, critics became obsessively focused on the discursive impasse of indigenous writers. Everything had apparently become an inauthentic copy of the foreign. Amid the rapid expansion of China's global vision based on the dialogical principle, which includes a craving for a Nobel prize in literature, there grew an increasingly strong consciousness of an emotional need for a fixed center, a kind of a local subject-position. This position, according to some critics, should continue to converse with, but need not fully comprehend, the global discourse.^[14] This is a sinified vision. It emphasizes difference rather than the dialectics between the two poles and hence proclaims: "The finer our national literature is, the finer it can become as world literature."^[15]

Optimism notwithstanding, this reintroduction in the late 1980s of the thesis of sinification and of China's subject-position has sustained in the process a certain ambivalent revalorization of the indigenous. This triggers a process of self-introspection rather less self-assuring than usual. This time around, critics are more acutely aware of the negative implications that such a process may evoke. As one of them puts it, "Thanks to the stimulus provided by modern Western cultural traditions, Chinese culture finally and gradually grew a new kind of spiritual power—namely, its drive toward self-negation and self-revival."^[16] His emphasis on an inner, irreversible order between negation and revival is illuminating. Self-positioning defined in such terms (in stark contrast to the earlier ones of the "negation of the alien") can no longer be taken as

a mere disguise of the nationalist sentiment of self-aggrandizement. It incorporates new content into the old familiar process of sinification. Most significantly, it reveals that such a process could be humiliating rather than self-congratulatory.

Does a cultural repositioning (that is, that self-revival will follow self-negation), resuscitate literary culture? Do these two mutations, cultural and literary, necessarily go hand in hand? Putting aside the problematic achievement of the root-searching literature, let us examine another literary orientation that refutes the hypothesis of the mutual arising of those two mutations. I refer here to the new school that emerged in the pervasive dystopian climate of the late 1980s: the so-called avant-garde fiction (xianfeng xiaoshuo ), later renamed "experimental fiction" (shiyan xiaoshuo ), a highly provisional project that self-consciously underwent the process of self-positioning while turning impervious to the issue of cultural repositioning.