Subjectivity, Marxism, and Culture Theory in China

• DOI: 10.2307/466221
• Publication Date: 2006-04-25T14:35:36Z
• Authors: Liu Kang
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0507 social and economic geography

Subjectivity as a humanist concept has been under assault in the current debates about contemporary "postmodern" culture in the west. Its fate in China, however, seems to have taken just the opposite direction. Following the resurgence of the humanist May Fourth (1919) tradition in literature and the arts in the wake of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and the subsequent debates in philosophical and economical circles about modernization, the concept of subjectivity has gained a centrality in recent debates about culture in China, starting in the mid-1980s. The May Fourth Movement, a watershed in modern Chinese history, was initiated by the demonstration of Beijing students against the government's humiliating concession to Japan after World War I. It then turned into a nation-wide cultural movement for a radical break with the Confucian tradition, as well as for a transformation of Chinese culture into a modern and global one.' As western humanist values of "democracy" and "science" were hailed as liberating forces by May Fourth intellectuals, radical social theories such as marxism and anarchism made a tremendous im-