Introduction

Whereas the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to indicate the end of socialism, China, one of the largest socialist countries in the Cold War era, has been undergoing a very different transition in the past three decades. Alongside China’s recent economic success, its Communist Party–controlled state features a Leninist political structure and relatively strong support from the mass society. After Mao Zedong’s demise in 1976, the Party-state not only survived the 1989 Tiananmen Movement but also continued to function as the prime protector of China’s burgeoning market economy. In recent scholarship, “postsocialism” has become a seminal term to characterize the years of mainland China’s effort to construct “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—per official terminology—since 1978. Compared to other terms such as “postmodernism” and “postcolonialism,” postsocialism captures the immensity of China in transition—from a homogeneous, Maoist Party-state to an increasingly heterogeneous nation-state that is an integral part of the global capitalist order—while fully acknowledging the historical continuity that makes the current country the inheritor of legacies of Chinese socialism. This book investigates the cultural consequences of the dynamic relationship between the Chinese state and society in this transition through the lens of mass nationalism as expressed in aestheticized public discourses.