From Beijing Dayuan: Mass Culture and Imagined Modernity in 1980s China

The 1980s marked a significant pivot in Chinese society, as it signaled the inception of China's participation in the global market, concluding the "isolated" era crafted by Cold War alignments with the banners of "modernization" and "reform and opening up." This paper engages with the emergence of mass culture and examines the "Anti-Fengjian" and "Humanistic Discourse" it carries in the 1980s. Through a critical discourse analysis of novels, films, and music—pioneering mass cultural production predecessors generated by the "Dayuan Second Red Generation"—this paper contends that the socio-structural changes occurring both globally and domestically during the 1980s fostered a phase of new social anomie under Deng Xiaoping, compared to the anomie created by socialist revolutions under Mao Zedong, in China. It is a period that emerged after Chinese citizens lost the national identity constructed through class/revolutionary discourse in Mao's time, during which the Chinese people were compelled to face global realities and reconstruct their relationship with the state. Mass culture, along with elite intellectual and state discourse, advocated for a potent alternative ideology as "modernity." This ideology offered a vision for the Chinese people, one deeply constructed through capitalist productive foundations that endorse individualism and portray it as humanism. Three key power holders direct this process: the Dayuan Second Red Generation, who spearheaded and advanced China's mass culture; elite intellectuals, who sparked the "Culture Fever" discussions around modernity; and the state, which collaborated with the aforementioned groups and jointly restructured the relation between individual and state in the post-revolution China.