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Introduction Arif Dirlik The idea of putting together another special issue of boundary 2 on China had three sources. The most important (and serious) reason has to do with changes in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the last fifteen years and the intellectual retrospection they have provoked among Chinese intellectuals. While what is offered in the following pages is only a small sampling of contemporary discussions, they hopefully impart some sense of the range of inquiry that characterizes the Chinese intellectual scene. They also indicate, I hope, how much intellectual issues have changed since the boundary 2 special issue “Postmodernism and China” was published ten years ago (vol. 24, no. 3 [Fall 1997]). I will return to this question below. The celebrations of an abstract modernity in the 1980s in response to the loosening of the existing socialist structure are now tempered with an anxiety about modernity’s consequences that has come with success in the capitalist world economy. Enthusiastic participation in global capitalism has brought unprecedented wealth and power but also all the contradictions of a capitalism superimposed upon the ruins of a revolutionboundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-001 © 2008 by Duke University Press boundary 2 / Summer 2008 ary past that is increasingly a distant memory—and not even that to new generations brought up on a flourishing urban consumer society. But the anxieties have once again raised the issue of socialism as an integral part of the search for a Chinese modernity. The Chinese contributors to this volume represent important voices in these discussions, while the contributors from outside of China (or outside of the involvement in day-to-day debates over these issues) document some of the activity toward overcoming the problems occasioned by China’s incorporation in a global capitalist economy. These discussions are not always welcome to the authorities, who claim monopoly over the understanding of socialism, which in their case daily becomes indistinguishable from capitalism. Still, there is sufficient experimentation with economic and political forms to keep alive the idea of socialism and claims to an alternative modernity, partly cultural and partly organizational. How these changes have been received in the United States provides the other two reasons for the volume in the provocation they have offered. Anyone with any degree of familiarity with China and studies of China in North America and Europe will be aware of the role fantasies of one kind or another have played in the appreciation of that country. Even those who have devoted lifetimes to the study of that country are not immune to fantasizing or peddling their fantasies to the public at large, and there are always Chinese witnesses who, for reasons of their own, are anxious to authenticate such fantasies. Still, it is difficult not to be appalled by the simplification, to the point of simplemindedness, of Chinese com . This is commonplace in clichés concerning the longevity and the homogeneity of Chinese society, and even of the idea of China. It has been well documented in such studies of historical stereotyping of China and Chinese as Harold R. Isaacs, Images of Asia: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). As these works, and similar ones by Colin Mackerras and Jonathan Spence, demonstrate, such stereotyping may be positive or negative, often the one slipping effortlessly into the other, as recent swings between China adoration and China bashing testify. For some recent works noteworthy for their levels of viciousness and obfuscation, see Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States (Ne