Content area
Full Text
Jing Wang. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China. Berkeley. University of California Press. 1996. x + 376 pages. $50 ($20 paper). ISBN 0-520-20294-5 (20295-3 paper).
High Culture Fever is an expert intellectual history and critique of China's own "cultural studies," a long step toward a prosopography of the 1980s' vanguard intellectuals who appointed themselves China's spiritual and cultural saviors while the economy boomed and Marxist ideology and social relations dissolved without them. Their theories of sociocultural development, sometimes couched in recent Western "High Theory" vocabulary, and their contemporaries' literary works, popularly conceived as occurring in "waves" reflecting trends in cultural ideology, generated the headlines, slogans, and seminar topics for China's major debates in the humanities-in collaboration and competition with Communist Party precepts, Jing Wang...