| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday, December 9, 2008 | 11:00AM - 1:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Asian Modernities Job Talk
China’s post-Mao reforms provide a great opportunity to explore a number of important historical, political, and theoretical issues with respect to postsocialist transitions. Focusing on the late 1970s, this talk situates the inaugural moment of China’s liberalizing turn in the context of the organic crisis of the party-state and its ideological apparatus in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The early post-Mao years of the late 1970s is extremely important, as it was the time when ideological possibilities contrasting sharply from what was to become the new hegemonic formation of the 1980s and 1990s flourished briefly in what was a spontaneous movement of popular activism and criticism, cultural renaissance, and social mobilization. I examine the state’s maneuver as tactics of crisis management aiming to contain and neutralize the emergent opposition from below. As the combined results of political repression, ideological appropriation, and socioeconomic incorporation, a new “reform” model emerged to rearticulate popular demands and initiatives to a vulgar, official vision of “socialism” centering on market liberalization and economic modernization. In scrutinizing a key historical juncture in Chinese postsocialism, this paper interrogates the political and ideological meanings of the “post-Mao reforms” that have led to the Chinese present.
Dr. Yiching Wu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor in Anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture, he is interested in popular social movements, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and resistance. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the popular transgressions and radicalization within the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.
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