ABSTRACT
In Defunct Capital Jia Pingwa creates an urban environment for the first time. The shift occurred for a number of reasons, primarily as a result of Jia Pingwa’s accumulation of urban experiences and his observation of the threat to Chinese cultural traditions and intellectual life in China’s rapid marketization in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Unlike his previous depiction of the Shaanxi village imbued with vitality and energy, Jia Pingwa’s cityscape is a forecast of the doomsday of Chinese high culture. Xijing, the narrative location, is set out as a defunct capital, exemplifying the connection between China’s cultural past and present as well as the social displacement of literati. Xijing city and its cultural scenes are laid out through a system of codes and symbols, using cultural activities as the vocabulary of cultural traditions. Shaanxi’s local cultural traditions are sites where the ‘authentic’ China is located. The system of cultural signification through the central metaphor of ‘defunct capital’ presents a pessimistic projection of China’s social and cultural reality at the end of the twentieth century.
