1989 was a historical watershed; nearly a century of socialist experimentation came to an end. Two worlds became one: a global-capitalist world. Although China’s socialism did not collapse as did the Soviet Union’s or Eastern Europe’s, this was hardly a barrier to China’s rapid joining the globalizing process in the fields of the economy, production, and trade. Indeed, the Chinese government’s continued support for socialism does not pose an obstacle to the following conclusion: In all of its behavior, including economic, political, and cultural – even in government behavior – China has completely conformed to the dictate of capital and the market. If we aspire to understand Chinese intellectual and cultural life in the last decade of the twentieth century, we must understand the transformations mentioned above and their corresponding social manifestations. The present article is an abridged version of Wang Hui’s text Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity in the volume Social Text – Intellectual Politics in the post-Tian An Men China.
