ABSTRACT
The period since the 1990s in contemporary Chinese literature and culture is a time that resists mapping or grand narrative. Relentless moves towards marketization/capitalization, globalization, urbanization, and gradual dominance of a new technical order have fundamentally transformed Chinese society and its everyday life. A sense of millennial disruption occurring at the end of the twentieth century is the result of profound changes in every aspect of society and culture. Chinese writers and intellectuals have confronted a completely new social reality and cultural environment: cultural and literary markets, globally enhanced mass media and the Internet, a dominance of popular culture and a decline of interest in elite forms of culture. China’s literary and artistic production has largely lost its formerly imposed role of political propaganda and social/moral education. Instead, it has become a truly individual activity as well as a commercial endeavor. This means, in practical terms, that many writers and filmmakers, particularly those of the younger generation, have begun to work as freelancers—a new condition for cultural/literary production unprecedented in contemporary Chinese literary history. All this has profoundly challenged, liberated, and inspired Chinese writers and filmmakers, and affected contemporary Chinese literary and cultural thought, imagining, and writing. In art, literature, and films, the crossover decades from the twentieth to the twenty-first century mark a turning point in Chinese literary and cultural history.
