Culture As Leisure and Culture As Capital

My goal in this essay is to track the new career of the old buzzword culture (wenhua) in post-1992 China. Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Excursion Talks marked a turning point, as portentous as the 1989 crackdown, on the calendar of China’s market reform and cultural transformation. What do economists and humanist elites mean when they talk about this historical “transition” (zhuangui) inChina, in celebratory or condemning rhetoric, and each in their own disciplinary perspective? Can such a transition be characterized as China’s “progressive” movement from socialist state-planned economy to capitalist market economy, or in terms of a cultural transformation, from elitist to popular? Neither of those cliched formulas is of much explanatory value. Old dichotomous paradigms, steeped in cold war ideology (i.e., socialism versus capitalism) and imbued with culturalist aesthetics (i.e., high versus low culture), are inadequate conceptual tools for our task of capturing the

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