High Culture Fever. Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China.

Berkeley.: University of California Press.. 1996.. x + 376pp, notes, bibliography, index, spine trifle sunned, a very good paperback copy. "An overview of the 1980s in China, from early re-examinations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, this text provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and an inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.

In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought - Li Zehou and the Marxist Recinstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School - that came into play in the "Culture Fever". A critique of the mini-series "Yellow River Elegy" is also included.

In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, the author introduces the debate ober "pseudo-modernism", refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese post-modernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s. The book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics and cultural critics that should give us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s and beyond." (Publisher's description). .