ABSTRACT
At the close of the twentieth century, there were several self-declared endings: the end of ideology, the end of history and the end of revolution. In fact, a millenarian aspiration for an end of 100-year chiru (humiliation) and luohou (lagging behind) characterised Chinese thought throughout the twentieth century. The aspiration for an end was a two-sided coin: it was matched by an aspiration for a new beginning. The call for an end and a beginning was best exemplified in the new millennium celebration (2000). As a media event situated at the historical juncture of two centuries and millennia, the celebration was an exemplary occasion to examine the narratives and counter-narratives about nation, history and culture. The new millennium celebration was one of a series of media events that
were celebrated at the end of the twentieth century, among which were also the return of Hong Kong to China in July 1997 and the return of Macao in December 1999. As the last media event of the twentieth century and the first media spectacle in the twenty-first century, the new millennium celebration was not therefore an isolated media spectacle, but a consummation of a series of fin-de-siècle spectacles that all led to the counting down to the zero hour of China’s new beginning in the new century. This was explicitly stated in the ‘Epilogue’ of the CCTV special programme Meeting the Year
2000, as quoted above. As a media event, it was preplanned and broadcast live on television, both manipulative and hegemonic in its intrusion into and interruption of the routines of everyday life. It was a grand show of festive performances that aimed at reconciling differences among different social players. It called upon all members of society (organisers, broadcasters and audiences) to celebrate national solidarity and collective aspirations. The new millennium celebration was an occasion to think about history
and time, nation and narration, nostalgia and revolution. It was an occasion to reflect on the different narratives of Chinese modernity expressed by the state, intellectuals and the general populace. This chapter uses the new millennium celebration to examine how the media event elicited and accommodated narratives and counter-narratives about nation, history and culture in conjuring a newmillennial discourse about China’s rejuvenation. It examines the politics of temporality (integration of linear time with cyclical time) and historicity (revisiting history in order to remake history) in order to highlight the rejuvenation discourse embodied in the new millennium countdown. It shows how the rejuvenation discourse was invoked to pull social, cultural and political resources together to serve the party-state in the name of nation and culture. The interplay of the state narrative with non-state narratives about history, nation and culture produces rejuvenation millennialism. Rejuvenation millennialism is expressed as a complex of millennial moods
and narratives such as nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism. It signifies a ‘second coming’, not just of Jesus to earth and a 1000-year golden age in the Christian sense of millennialism, but of the ‘Central Kingdom’ on earth and another 1000-year golden age of Chinese civilisation.1 Rejuvenation millennialism is hence underscored by a collective desire to redefine Chinese identity vis-à-vis China’s internal ‘Other’ – not other ‘places’ but other ‘times’. In such a discourse, Chinese modernity is not only imagined as something that has happened elsewhere, but as something that has its precedence at other times in Chinese history and, more significantly, is re-appearing in renewed and rejuvenated forms. This rejuvenation discourse provides a new point of departure to project Chinese modernity in relation to China’s cultural history, socialist experience and post-socialist condition. It pronounces the cultural politics of China’s post-socialism.
