Abstract
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 173-184 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Cultural Studies |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 5 Jan 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2020 |
Funding
Imagination of the future East Asia spiritual space the youth reserves of hope relationship between today and past It’s already a key issue in today’s East Asia, and also in the whole world, to imagine the future. The first reason is that very few people think of themselves as living in a world that keeps getting better, as many people thought in the late 1940s and early 1990s; and on the contrary more and more people, especially young ones, believe they are living in a society that is getting worse and worse, and almost no light of hope can be seen in the whole reality. The second reason, and more important, is that Samuel Huntington-style view, based on the so-called clash of civilizations, has been increasingly accepted as fact since Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History became a bestseller. As one of the results, a cult of barbarization, mixed with jungle law and nearsightedness, which has rooted deeply in modern history, is openly returning to the centre of political thinking and policy making at both national and international levels. It’s this framework that more and more people, consciously or unconsciously, use today as their first model to conceive of tomorrow and thus give up their imagination of the future – if we define ‘future’ as something different from the continuing of reality. This giving-up of the imagination, or in other words, this ‘realization’ of the imagination of the future, has become back to be a very important part of the reproduction of reality. Certainly you will confidently stand on the side of various kinds of ‘We First’, or rather, of ‘I First’, if you believe that competition and the law of jungle are the nature of human life, and if you believe further that profit conflicts among people will become fiercer and fiercer with the limitation of natural resources, and it’s impossible for us to abate truly the conflicts through uniting, helping each other, revolution and Da-tong (大同, World Commonwealth) though we will keep yearning for those possibilities. Standing so, you will naturally see as hostile all the opinions and actions different from yours, including those who also stand on the side of ‘We First’ thus become ‘They First’ from your position. There is, and will be, only a true relationship between persons, and between peoples, that is, a competitive and even adversarial one with short-lived cooperation based on mutual gain. In summer 2019, someone criticized the official propaganda for its self-praising and suppression of critics at a private gathering in Shanghai. One of my old friends, who was warmly worshipped in the 1980s Western-style freedom of speech, refuted nervously: ‘We should do self-praise now, if we criticize ourselves, that is to offer a weapon to our enemy who will use it to attack us! … ’ Obviously, a political utilitarianism, and ‘enemy-us’ thinking, occupies the central position of his view of today and the future. Is he paranoid only? Certainly not! In Shanghai, and in almost every place in this world, so much similar thinking and doing is shaping, and strengthening deeply, this narrow reality that makes us more and more small-minded, though some of them don’t look that simple and rude. Under these circumstances, it becomes a particularly urgent task for left-wing intellectual activities – which is to say nothing of cultural studies – to break this ‘realization’ of the imagination of future, to re-motivate various dreamings of future, to enlarge continuously a spiritual space in which people scan, exchange, discuss and develop their thinking of future, and thus re-open the possibilities of improving the relationships between today and tomorrow, which is too narrow and passive now. Fully understanding that the existing relationships between today and tomorrow are shaped by many physical conditions, we still stress the pivotal function of spiritual, and thus cultural, conditions in shaping our society and our world. Human beings are, after all, a kind of cultural creature, and we will have a long-term future that is always different from, and better than, the reality only while keeping rich imaginations of the future. We should not be bound to live in a cyclical reality and thus stay alive only by virtue of our enormous population. One thing should be done first if the consideration above is right: to survey carefully what the real thoughts/assumptions about the future are today, by whom they are expressed, and more importantly, by whom they are shaped. As said above, we are strongly influenced by leading thoughts/assumptions about the future, while imaginations of ‘the future’, in its original meaning, are given up on an increasingly broadening scale. Thus, comes a key question: is ‘realization’, or similar words, conducive to understanding and covering today’s leading thoughts/ assumptions of the future? If yes, how does it happen? And if no, even in part, then what are those thoughts/assumptions that can’t be covered by the term, ‘realization?’ Shared and urged by this consideration, seven authors have worked with us to make a collection aiming at how the imagination of the future is in East Asia. They are from Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Guangzhou respectively, and the most of them are young scholars. The collection is composed of two parts: the first consists of five papers, all of which focus on current thoughts/assumptions of the future in different social contexts; the other part consists of two papers that introduce two very interesting historical cases of how the so-called ‘Chinese revolution’ was seen from perspectives outside of mainland China. We hope these two parts can form a productive dialogue between the current and past imaginations of the future to reflect each other’s characteristics and the rather complicated contexts of social changes of Northeast Asia and Chinese-speaking societies, in which the characteristics are being made. Atopic Moments in the Square: A Report on Despair and Hope after the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea, by Professor Jiwoon Baik at National Seoul University, starts with a vivid introduction of the ‘candlelight revolution’ in 2017 as well as a sharp question that was highlighted in the revolution: what’s wrong with the ‘Man in 20s’ in today’s South Korea? By a detailed analysis of three popular literary texts, two novels titled respectively Because I hate Korea and DD’s Umbrella, and a short story titled If There is Pyongyang in the Blue Marble, the author unfolds a deep discussion about the harsh conditions the youth, not only the ‘Man in 20s’, is facing in South Korea, and the complicated interactions between reality and youth, which are strongly shaped the feelings of young people toward the future. Please pay special attention to ‘Power of Friction’, a strong phrase Professor Baik quotes from DD’s Umbrella as an advisable strategy for fighting for tomorrow in the latter part of the paper. Compared with escaping from what we hated, this strategy – sticking to where we are and exerting the power of friction to change the reality inch by inch – seems very worthy to be tried, though it’s also very difficulty to be insisted upon. The paper of Professor Senno Takumasa at Waseda University, titled Where are we going now?: Subculture in East Asian cities and the heart of youth , and the one of Professor Luo Xiaoming at Shanghai University, Unlocking the Future: Characterizing ‘ Hope’ in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction , perform similar work but in very different ways: to check the messages about ‘ the future’ and ‘ hope’ sent from today’s urban youth culture in Japan and similar areas as well as science fiction, which is commonly thought of as the most interesting Chinese literature in the last 20 years. After outlining briefly the history of urban youth culture in East Asian cities since the middle of the twentieth century and introducing meticulously the current situation of the culture, Senno’s paper identifies some kind of prospect in the future, which is discreetly positive: there is some tendency made by today’s urban youth subculture to bring people together to share the cross-cultural or ‘cross-boundary’ experiences; there is even some rudiment of ‘ common culture’ – this, while governments and leading media are separating people and, as a matter of fact, making them senseless, even hostile, to each other. Compared to Senno’s paper, Luo’s seems a little pessimistic with regard to how people think and make assumptions about the future in today’s mainland China. Taking science fiction as an important representation of the society’s imagination of the future, the paper examines in a quite detailed way some representative pictures of the future drawn by science fiction and then offers a tentative judgment of how they imagine the future: on one hand, there are some remarkable factors opening to creative possibilities for human life given the ways science fiction makes the pictures; on the other hand, it’s clear science fiction ‘has in fact represented that all of Chinese society has actually derived their hopes and vision of the future from participating in economic reform’, and thus it shows how people’s imagination of the future has significantly narrowed. The author ends the paper with these words in an effort to explain what the paper’s title, Unlocking future , means: ‘as we become painfully aware of our lack of hope, we must continue to explore the reserves of hope in our imaginations and identify the work that still needs to be done’. Two Logics of Chinese Transnationalism: The Case of gangpiao (港漂) and Hong Kong is different from the above-mentioned papers. Instead of using literary/subcultural texts as the starting point for an analysis of today’s youth, Dr. Iam-chong Ip of Lingnan University, Hong Kong (HK), instead focuses directly on a special group of urban youth: the educated mainland Chinese youth who live in HK but may not see the city as their nesting site. The paper does a careful sifting of how these young people handle their real and imaginative relationships with the mainland and HK, and it outlines two contradictory logics of a special form of Sino-centric transnationalism shared by most of the gangpiao as the core of their imagination of both today and tomorrow. The author further invites readers to see the different faces of this transnationalism: it testifies to the production of neo-liberal subjectivity and practices in compliance with China’s authoritarian capitalism, on the one hand, and critical internationalism in defiance of the state power, on the other. As the author stresses, ‘the former is a disengaged form of cosmopolitanism while the latter serves as an alternative but risky way of political engagement’. The paper of Dr. Wen Cuiyan at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, At the juncture of reform, heritage making of an industrial town in Pearl River Delta region , offers a detailed case study of how the Chinese government at both national and local levels uses ‘heritage making’ to serve its aims of economic development that, as explored in Luo Xiaoming’a paper, is by now the main way of China to realize its dream of ‘re-rising’ in the world. The study deals with many political and cultural factors, which are all far beyond the local; for purposes of background, let us provide a brief introduction of the factors, especially the historical traces of them. The craze of cultural heritage coincides with the emergence of two other significant agendas. One is China’s increasing involvement in the global economic system, with its entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001 as a signature event. The other is the promotion of ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ as a high-profile national cultural strategy since the early 2000s. The two agendas, correlating with each other, have emerged against the rise of China as a potential superpower. Instead of the market-oriented discourse of Deng Xiaoping’s reform, the ‘new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics’ under Xi Jinping bears such discursive markers as ‘China Dream’, ‘cultural confidence’ and ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. It presents a new national identity on the global scene as China aspires and emerges to become a potential superpower. In this light, Wen traces the important evolution since the 1990s of a certain ‘culturally-based nationalistic discourse’ that began to interweave with the hegemony of economic reform. What is noteworthy, according to Wen, is that, as China can now ‘enter into the world’ with remarkably visible footsteps, cultural heritage triggers effectively a signature movement nationally at this contemporary juncture of China’s reform. The discourse of cultural heritage, conceived since the mid-1990s, allowed China to consolidate its commitment to economic growth via a strong dose of nationalism. Wen’s analysis of the heritage-making of the town of Dongkeng, an ordinary industrial town located in the Pearl River Delta area, provides insights into the entangled discourses of China’s reform in the age of neo-liberal globalization. Since being released from the ideological war of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people have resorted to holding their beliefs in the mundane realm of material life. Moreover, as Wen reminds us, in the wake of the 1989 democratic movement in Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party had to consolidate and justify its ruling position through economic growth. With persistent economic reform and involvement in the global capital market, Chinese people’s everyday lives have become increasingly tied down (almost exclusively) with consumption indicators and market values. ‘Beliefs in market-oriented economy and consumerism, instead of communist ideologies, became the new dominant ideology of contemporary mainland China’ (Wen). Significantly, Wen sees ‘a major shift in cultural identity, and a new discourse of cultural heritage’. This would be a continuation of the times when Chinese intellectuals became suspicious of the modern western thoughts they had espoused before. The outcome, in our contemporary time when talk of a new phase of Cold War has become common, was to resort to traditional thoughts and values (especially Confucian thoughts) for China’s ‘solution’. The argument, according to Wen, is that Chinese cultural tradition and civilization, with its inherent coherence, offers a new narrative paradigm based on historical values and experiences for the re-affirmation and, indeed, reinforcement of China’s history, present and future. She contends that this position establishes ‘an unprecedented stance in promoting Chinese traditions by Chinese state-owned media’. Effectively, in the decade that followed, cultural and educational policies were re-organized to enhance social recognition of the Chinese tradition. Accordingly, national studies are strategically articulated to the campaign of ideological reconstruction under the new era. The consequential development by the state machinery to reinforce cultural values of ‘third-world’ countries in opposition to western-centric heritage values materialized soon in the country’s proactive engagement with traditional Chinese intangible heritage. And moving from a critique of western-centric (‘global’) heritage discourse to the fight for rights to local interpretations of tradition and culture, intangible heritage allowed the Chinese authorities to de-centralise the prevalent heritage discourse and bring in a domestic agenda via the global narratives. Through ‘a process of reshuffling cultural resources based on the undercurrent shifts of political and economic power’, China became ‘the biggest winner in intangible heritage with the highest number of inscribed items’. Cultural heritage and intangible heritage are not simply a process of reviving tradition, ‘but one of re-organising and re-hierarchizing traditional cultural practices according to China’s current economic and social demands’. Wen, as noted earlier, examines the heritage-making process in the town of Dongkeng, an industrial town of the Pearl River Delta area, and focuses on the heritagisation of muyuge , literally, ‘wooden fish song’, a local form of narrative singing and everyday practice. New terms such as ‘information society’, ‘knowledge-based economy’, ‘cultural industry’, and ‘creative industry’ arose to indicate promising economic growth points. Adjacent to the cultural and economic province capital of Guangzhou, Dongguan had been a peripheral country area where agriculture made up the majority of its economic production. Like many other areas in the Pearl River Delta, it began to experience substantial changes since the end of the 1970s. In the early 2000s, labour-intensive enterprises began to transfer manufacturing bases to inland cities and Southeast Asian countries where land and human resources were cheaper. Dongkeng had to look for alternative development models. Since 2001, the Dongkeng government began to play a strong role in the town’s overall development planning. It aimed to set up management and investment standards, and more importantly, to create a ‘pleasant environment’ for investment and production. As ‘a ready-made cultural category’ to re-organise local cultural resources, this intangible heritage used to be popular in Guangdong Province, serving as a touchstone in the process of weighing the potential values of cultural practices against local economic interests. Rather than cultural accumulation in everyday life, the making of intangible heritage is based on a set of top-down administrative procedures, serving to re-organise everyday traditions and practices to local economic schemes while ‘it also reshapes cultural identities mutually at both local and national levels’. The final two papers of the collection, Imagining a National/Local Identity in the Colony: The Cultural Revolution Discourse in Hong Kong Youth and Student Journals, 1966–1977 , by Dr. Shuk Man Leung at Hong Kong University, and Bridging ‘New China’ and Postcolonial India: Indian Narratives of the Chinese Revolution , by Dr. Brian Tsui at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, are worth introducing by outlining some of the background against which these two papers unfold. In her paper, Leung proceeds from the recognition that Hong Kong had grown into a ‘cosmopolitan colony’ in the post-war period. She proceeds to argue that, while the current scholarship attributes the emergence of a local Hong Kong identity in the 1960s and 1970s to ‘the economic growth, social and educational reforms, and administrative arrangements during the MacLehose years (1971–1982)’, the politically and socially stable environment following the end of the 1967 riots had not readily ‘nurtured a sense of belonging within the Hong Kong community’, as the prevailing views go. The latter is flawed on two accounts, in Leung’s view. First, it regards the emergence of a local identity mainly as an outcome of the colonial government’s effective policies. Secondly, it marginalizes the role of China as ‘the Other’ in the construction of a local Hong Kong identity by demonizing Cultural Revolution. Her argument is unique: Even though it is commonly accepted that Hong Kong identity has a nationalistic nature, scholars have largely overlooked the role Cultural Revolution played in fostering youthful identification with the Chinese nation in the course of Hong Kong’s identity formation during the 1960s and 1970s. This historical perspective opens up a complex question for us today, as we try to understand the distinctive impact of Chinese state-nationalist ideology upon youth in Hong Kong. With meticulous archival work, Leung studies how Undergrad and Chinese University Student Press , the official publications of the student unions of the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, respectively, provided the platform during the first half of the 1970s for ‘pro-Communist students’ – referring to the pro-China faction (Guocui pai, 国粹派) and the social action faction (Shehui pai , 社会派) – to advocate ‘fanatical nationalism in support of the Communist regime’. Outside of the student community, another magazine, Panku, also helped to cultivate among Hong Kong’s educated youth ideological alignment and affection with the Chinese nation during the post-riots period in the British colony. Regardless of the fact that Panku had subsequently taken a pro-Communist stance and ‘eventually [in 1971] became ‘a mouthpiece of the pro-Communist China faction’, Leung investigates how the emergence of political consciousness against the ruling colonial regime led to a national identity crisis in which young people had to face ‘fear, frustration, and confusion over the disappearance of a shared idea of a Chinese nation that perhaps had never existed among them’. The result was a sense of historically unique cultural-political ambivalence – about being Chinese and about seeing themselves as ‘Hong Kong people’, the local identity working against full alignment with any iteration of national identity, in any historical conjuncture. Thus, by examining how their understanding of Cultural Revolution influenced young Hong Kong people’s thinking on issues of Chinese nationalism and colonialism, Leung probes the ways in which the Maoist campaign ‘profoundly affected them’, so that the making of ‘their national and local identities at the intersection of political, ideological, cultural, and geographical perspectives’ could be accounted for. Through the peculiar lens of the localized Maoist discourse, framed in and by the post-1960s youthful generation, Leung concludes that ‘the formation of Hong Kong identity [which] emerged in the 1960s and 1970s amid negotiations between Chinese nationalism, local consciousness, and colonial rule’ needs to be revisited within the particular conjuncture of cultural-historical transformation we discuss here. Regardless of the ideological stance on Maoism in Hong Kong during the period, there is a strong case for one to share Leung’s view that the 1960s riots ‘enhanced the nationalistic consciousness that sprouted among educated youth and students’ against the Star Ferry’s fare increase of five cents. For while the colonial government suppressed the Maoist protests, the youth’s discontent with British colonial governance led them to search for a national identity through learning about the motherland. Note that a significant majority of the protestors were students (including secondary students) who tended to identify with the city as their home and later became average, middle-class people in Hong Kong society. Unlike their parents, who had fled to Hong Kong to escape Chinese Communism, the idealistic younger generation yearned for ‘the imagined motherland’, thus aligning themselves with Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Hence, the gap between where they lived and what they perceived to be their motherland opened, for any Hong Kong protestor, an unprecedented inner struggle that ‘exacerbated their discontent with colonial governance’. The irony of history is that, however closely we study it, one can never straightforwardly learn from its failure nor from the disillusionment it brings. As if recognizing the tragic fight of young people, Leung identifies what she calls the territorial dimension of nationality and its lived experience for people of the community – which, for the youth then, was none other than the colony. Growing up in Hong Kong, the post-war generation had little experience or understanding of the Chinese nation as a source, if not resource, of the individual self; it was therefore natural, though historically simplistic it might now seem, for them to posit the other in and as the colony. Seen in this analytical light, coloniality was not so much the oppressive experience of the colonized as the desire for autonomy that gave rise to a longing for what they belonged and had an obligation to – the place they lived in, where one leads the life of a colonized subject and must hopefully, in an utopian leap, be de-colonized in order to become free, and to be oneself again. Drawing on nationalist and anti-imperialist history, the enlightened youngsters now viewed the contemporary situation of Hong Kong in the framework of imperialism. For them, fostering national identity hinged on the consolidation of a local consciousness. Leung’s critical move here articulates their nation-building project to ‘a duty towards city-building’. Citing a 1968 Undergrad editorial registering young students’ emerging sense of belonging to the Chinese nation, she locates their allegiance to Hong Kong where ‘the locality was perceived to be an integral part of the nation’. In a further surprise move, Leung stresses that if local experience and sentiment were instrumental in nation-building as an ideology, nationalism in Hong Kong would not only aim for a stronger nation; it would help fulfil one’s responsibility to the local as well. We are enlightened, thus, by the Chinese Language Movement, which Leung examines from a dialectically-posited national perspective to symbolize Chinese culture and history. For as it invokes an emblem of national authenticity in Hong Kong for nurturing a sense of national unity and closeness with China, it served simultaneously, from a local perspective, as the daily communicative tool ready to be utilized to construct a sense of local consciousness. Hence, young people’s concern for disputes over territorial sovereignty underlines a statist orientation in their nationalist discourse. Nation-state building was coupled with city-society building because the young people then saw the institutions of state and society as intertwined. In short, the Cultural Revolution appeared to stand for modernization, a forward-thinking reform initiated by a regime in possession of the Maoist spirit of ‘self-reliance’ and ‘serving the people’. Arguably, Leung concludes, Cultural Revolution acted as a catalyst in the emergence of a national identity among educated youth and students in Hong Kong, because it offered models for building perfect social institutions and fighting colonialism. The national argument calling for Chinese modernization through Cultural Revolution led young people to believe in China as a utopia-in-progress, while their interpretation of China and Cultural Revolution constructed the imaginary relationship of themselves to their lived world of Hong Kong (Althusser). Perhaps this is the most provocative part of Leung’s argument: that substantial interaction between Chinese nationalism and Maoism in Hong Kong had contributed to the growth of a local identity, against the discursive hegemony emerging and disseminating amid the seemingly irrevocable spread of the peculiar (post)colonial ideology for Hong Kong to stay put as a stable, prosperous and apolitical city. While Leung’s article allows us to rethink the complexity of coloniality in the post-1960s riots period of Hong Kong, in Bridging ‘New China’ and Postcolonial India: Indian Narratives of the Chinese Revolution , Brian Tsui examines the basis of an Asianist sympathy for ‘New China’ in the early 1950s, with reference to the writings of Indian diplomats, journalists and academics. Much like the Indian case, communism, subsumed through accounts of New China for nation and society-building, got mediated in the different national contexts of resistance against European colonial domination. In that process, the Chinese revolution, the nature of which still in flux, was re-interpreted through the Indian struggle for national identity. At the turn of the twentieth century, China was the emerging site of nationalism where a strong critical awareness against imperialism captured a country in which capitalism was ‘under-developed’. As Tsui argues, as a result of this, what Xiaoming Wang calls ‘third world’ consciousness was taking shape amid a range of revolutionary strategies in the region, distinct from those of the West. In this light, according to Tsui, Chinese intellectuals came to see their predicament in terms of global imperialism and, through such identification, align with the colonized peoples of India, Asia and beyond. The twist, of course, was that the China with which India came to terms was a Communist Party-led state in a polarizing Cold War order. Being the first Asian state created by a revolution, the People’s Republic of China began as a largely rural resistance movement which, under Mao, embodied a nation and society-building model that has since defined New China as a significant point of reference for the emerging Third World. Here, through an inter-referencing articulation, the Indian decolonization movement was seen to be experimenting with society-building strategies endogenous to the recent historical experiences in the region. Thus, in this sense, the 1951 goodwill mission was taken to be a concrete example of what Kuan-Hsing Chen famously calls ‘Asia as method’, in an ongoing intellectual project whereby critical scholars across the continent, fighting the domination of colonizing histories, oppose new the new energy and dynamics of global domination in the twentieth-first century. A key source of this long-standing effort was revolution, conceived as one important way for third world nationalists to struggle against domination and move toward some sort of matching with China’s revolutionary model in its prolonged nation- and society-building enterprise. Tsui writes: In their description of New China, Sundarlal, Abbas and Karanjia encapsulated an aspiration to deploy China as method. The three Indian thinkers form a common legacy with Japanese thinkers such as Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) and Mizoguchi Yûzô (1932-2010), whose works greatly influenced Chen and continues to inspire critical intellectuals today. By writing on New China, visitors from a fellow-Asian country dislodged the historical experiences of Euro-America as universal norms. They therefore connected with and gave flesh to the ‘proposition’ that the early PRC presented during the mission’s trip. First, they underscored the commonalities between India and China as postcolonial societies with similar challenges and approaches to nation and society-building. The generous use of vocabulary from India’s experience fighting the British Raj bridged the Chinese revolution with the Indian freedom movement. This self-reflexivity helped break the divide between the socialist camp and the ‘free’ world in Asia. Second, by framing New China under the narrative of a decolonizing India, the Chinese and their Indian visitors interpellated an Asia defiant of Euro-American power, even though the continent was divided along ideological lines between the Soviet and Western blocs … This pan-Asianism later formed the basis of the Bandung Conference, a strident, if fleeting, expression of Third World solidarity in a decolonizing world. (Tsui) Tsui thus examines how the new Communist state earned the support of mild Confucianist social leaders like Liang Shuming (1893–1988), a critic of class struggle. Liang supported the PRC, Tsui points out, ‘not because of its Marxism but because it successfully appealed to longstanding aspirations for national and social resurgence among Chinese intellectuals’. The assessment of New China offered by Liang was typical of Republican China’s ‘middle forces’ – urban, foreign-educated intellectuals of liberal persuasion, many of whom were members of smaller political parties that were highly critical of one-party rule. These Chinese intellectuals were, in many mays, analogous to the movers and shakers of postcolonial India in their urban, progressive and nationalist background. (Tsui) In the latter case, nation-building capacities were based on criteria with which societies struggling with colonialism would readily identify. Abbas credited the PRC’s industrial improvement, convinced that the country’s industrial sector could satisfy its people’s needs without foreign import. Like many newly independent nations, the PRC’s desire for and attempt to attain economic self-efficiency was admirable. Tsui discusses how Abbas praised the PRC’s industrial prowess through the comparison between the consumer market in the late 1930s and that of the early 1950s, centring his observations on the major Shanghai department store, Wing On. The Indian visitor remembered that in 1938, Wing On department store on Nanjing Road was swamped with consumers’ objects imported from abroad. It testified to China’s sorry state that it ‘was not a country – only a market’, a ‘semi-colonial’ economy fused by conspicuous consumption. Th
Keywords
- East Asia
- Imagination of the future
- relationship between today and past
- reserves of hope
- spiritual space
- the youth