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Ben Xu. Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 1999. xiii + 271 pages. $47.50. ISBN 0-472-11062-4.
DISENCHANTED DEMOCRACY IS ONE of the best and most lucid of recent analyses in English of mainland Chinese cultural and literary debates of the 1990s. All the critical and intellectual shibboleths that have dominated recent Chinese critical discourse (there are only so many of them) are here: modernity, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-neweraism, subjectivity, national studies, humanism, sublimity, new conservatism, antirevolution,...