Seasons of China
27 April 2009
Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics has drawn the world’s attention to the unprecedented pace and scale of transformation in the People’s Republic of China and rekindled debates about what the public sphere, human rights, and democracy might mean under “market socialism.” Readers of Public Culture of course find themselves particularly well-placed to analyze the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts on display this summer, thanks to a wealth of previously published essays examining forms of cultural, economic, and ideological hybridity in the “New China.”
Contents
Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred Michael Dutton in Volume 16, Number 2
On 5 August 1968, Arshad Husain, the foreign minister of Pakistan, visited Mao Zedong and presented the chairman with a basket of red and gold mangoes. Or so one version of the story goes. Another equally compelling account claims the person was Burmese, while another suggests that this emissary of…Chen Danqing: Painting After Tiananmen in
It might be argued that there have been two or three moments in the past century when a nascent public sphere began to emerge in China—1880-1917, 1930s, and the mid-1980s—each time to be crushed. But it might also be argued that because no public sphere has had a chance to develop, because the struc…Etymologies: Is the Public Sphere Unspeakable in Chinese? Can Public Spaces... in
Chen Danqing’s New York Studio is on Forty Second Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a few steps from the urban maelstrom of Port Authority. He may not have it for much longer, as it is one of those “artist spaces” in midtown Manhattan facing demolition, to make room for the long delayed…Tiananmen, Television and the Public Sphere: Internationalization of Cultur... in
The day after the Tiananmen massacre of June 3-4 my friends and I began to feel an acute deprivation of news. We talked to everyone we could, especially anyone adventurous enough to have ridden into the center of Beijing to see the army deployments and the remnants of struggle. We tried to sort through…_Nannies for Foreigners_: The Enchantment of Chinese Womanhood in the Age o... in
The Corporeal Politics of Quality (_Suzhi_) in
Mingong: China's Indispensable Transient Fabricators in
Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China in
_Am I the Only Survivor?_ Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in ... in
Mediating Time: The "Rice Bowl of Youth" in Fin de Siècle Urban China in
Beijing Subnotebooks in
The Function of New Theory: What Does it Mean to Talk About Post-Modernism ... in
