Postmodernism and China Quotes

“Scholars, notably Western scholars, are often more eager to gauge the extent to which...economic liberalization dismantles socialism and nurtures capitalism than analyze how socialism, a system created as an alternative to the lack of economic democracy in modern capitalism, is revitalized and, in its more decentred, de-essentialized, flexible forms, becomes an integral, constitutive part of the daily reality of Chinese economic, social, political, and cultural life.”
― Xudong Zhang , Postmodernism and China

“[M]ore and more scholars are ready to take the Chinese economy neither as an ad hoc, patchy, and half-measure free-market economy, nor as a chaotic, corrupt, and fading command system, but as an economic, social, and political alternative in the making, an experiment whose provisionality proves to be the norm.”
― Xudong Zhang, Postmodernism and China

“Unlike modernism...postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation is hinged on a sophisticated, almost cynical, sense that all the good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been tried, somewhere, somehow, and sometime before, and what is left for contemporary men and women is
nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation in the most literal sense.”
― Xudong Zhang, Postmodernism and China