ABSTRACT
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward tells the story of a young Bostonian, Julian West, who is frustrated by the poverty, disorder, and degeneration of society under the impact of industrial capitalism and is deeply disturbed by the complacency of the social elite in the face of this misery. Global capitalism made socialism untenable. It also eroded, and continues to erode, the New Deal legacy of a regulated capitalism. China is the most frontier of global capitalism, and so far the most fecund. The culture of capitalism that invades this new terrain is both a product of China's incorporation into capitalism and a necessity of its infrastructural preparation to attract capital. The material terrain for the cultural developments may be revealing about the cultural activity as well. The apparent cosmopolitanism of cultural production disguises simultaneous assertions of a Chinese exceptionalism that, refusing to engage the recent revolutionary history, finds its outlet in cultural abstractions of a remote past.
