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For several years now, with much fanfare and controversy, what is generally known as theory-by which is really meant poststructuralist theory, even though other types of discourses are sometimes included-has made its way into modern Chinese literary (and, of late, cultural) studies. Numerous publications, issued by university presses such as Stanford, Duke, California, and others, seem to respond to the consensus, among the younger generations of scholars at least, that some use of or reference to theory is a necessity.' While the most prominent example is probably feminist theory and its corresponding investigations of women,2 buzzwords such as postcolonial, postmodern, the body, the subject, interdisciplinarity, and so forth also seem ubiquitous and popular. The hostility toward Western theory, which merely a decade ago was still predominant in the field of China studies, has, apparently, all but become marginalized to the point of insignificance.
This enthusiasm for theory coincides, in many ways, with enthusiasm at a different, though not unrelated, level-that of realpolitik. With the modernization campaign introduced by Deng Xiaoping after he resumed political centrality in the late 1970s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing rapid, radical economic reforms, so much so that, by the early fall of 1997, a massive plan to convert most of China's stateowned enterprises into share-holding ones was announced at the Fifteenth Communist Party Congress, leaving many to wonder exactly what would still be left of the Chinese government's avowedly socialist or communist ideological commitment. Taken in the broad sense of the word economy, such openness toward economics may be understood, though with much debate, of course, as a pragmatic acceptance of an order that is capable of managing things so that they work. For China at this historical juncture, the economic order that works is one that is capable of successfully transforming the existing, stored-up power of labor into energy that mobilizes and propels-into capital.
Much the same can be said about theory. As speculative labor, theory, too, seems to have acquired in the field of China studies something of the aura of a managerial economy that works, an economy that can transform the substantial accumulation of labor-in the form of knowledge-into a new type of force: cultural capital, the chief characteristic of which is its...