.... This article is a shortened version of a chapter in the author's recently published book. [email protected] Copyright 2024 by Duke University Press 2024 socialist abstraction contemporary art imagistic thinking Maoism scientism In January 1983 the Beijing-based, state-run art...

...Arve Hansen Abstract Vietnam's embrace of the Leninist-capitalist hybrid known as the socialist market economy has led to a number of food transformations. These include increasing food imports, heavy investment by powerful domestic and foreign actors in food production and retailing...

...Xiuying Cheng Abstract Based on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years...

...Christian Sorace Abstract After the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, democracy promised life after ideology. This article argues that what disappeared during the democratic transition was not ideology but a conceptualization of ideology as an explicit object, field of intervention...

...Jiazhi Fengjiang Abstract For ordinary people in late-socialist China, the good life seems to be singularly shaped: in the future and the elsewhere, it is oriented toward one's own well-being and the well-being of future generations. This article aims to open up discussion about the different...

...Elizabeth M. Elliott Abstract In rural lowland Laos, aspirations to a good life and visions of well-being are defined and impacted by the process of negotiating health. The state of sabai (well-being) situates the person in relation to their family, social, and spiritual worlds, and the associated...

...Inhye Han Abstract This article is the first study that excavates a Korean writer's Chinese‐language play based on Taiwanese farmers’ real‐life events and that identifies its author as playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Li Kyŏngson. During his Shanghai years (1929–32), Li encountered Japanese...

...Pun Ngai Abstract This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re‐departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired...

...Minh T. N. Nguyen; Phill Wilcox; Jake Lin Abstract The emergent quest for the good life in rapidly transforming China, Laos, and Vietnam can only be understood as part of the political economy of late socialism. This special issue critically engages with the notion of the good life and its...

...Laura Pozzi; Damian Mandzunowski Abstract This article examines how, in the years following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Jiang Qing 江青 (1914–91) became a negative icon of a liberated woman in high office in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang...

...Covell F. Meyskens Abstract This article examines two theoretical frameworks used to evaluate Maoist development. The first is based on neoclassical economic theory, and the second is rooted in the idea that the Chinese Communist Party made China into a state capitalist regime. Both...

...: “The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g., wage labor, capital, etc.” 6 Thus, for socialist reflection, the forms of knowledge that organize...

...Charlotte Bruckermann Abstract Faced with environmental degradation and atmospheric pollution, Chinese citizens increasingly envision the good life as a green life. Yet in cities and the countryside, understandings of environmental hardship and ecological redress diverge and at times even...

...Tong Lam Abstract In spite of their informal and substandard nature, Chinese urban villages are actually part of the infrastructure that institutionalizes and normalizes China's uneven development by providing cheap dormitory-style accommodations to the country's vast army of unskilled rural...

...Adhy Kim Abstract This article discusses how the historical experience of Zainichi (the postcolonial Korean diaspora in Japan) is represented through the fictionalized family history, set from the colonial period to the dusk of the Cold War. Looking at two post–Cold War novels across English...

... in money and interchangeable in the market. Here we have a picture of an abstracting process similar to Weberian rationalization. The “empty,homogenous history,” referring to both capitalist and socialist modernity,designates a process that strips...

... to a creature no less abstract than that to be found in bour- geois ideology. We made a mistake during the Cultural Revolution, Wang Wang I Voluntarism and “Socialist Alienation” 465 Ruoshui said, in setting up an antithetical...

... and tribulations between our entire age and one of its sharpest observers. The crux of the relation between Žižek and China lies in the social- ist background. The point in common is that both have stepped beyond the socialist experience of the past...

...Alexander F. Day Abstract This article explores the way PRC historians use analytical categories by looking at the emergence of a divide between production and the social reproduction of labor (all the work that goes into producing and raising laborers) that transformed and structured rural...

...Peter Button Duke University Press 2006 Aesthetics, Dialectics, and Desire in Yang Mo’s Song of Youth Peter Button No doubt, one of the numerous difficulties that remain in our account of the socialist realist literary canon in China lies in our...