ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the best-known online queer novels (often known as ‘comrade literature’) in China and popularised by its filmic adaptation Lan Yu, Beijing Story is a narrative of how one becomes gay in postsocialist China. This chapter offers a critical analysis of the novel, informed by the Marxist approach of ‘symptomatic reading’. Drawing on the Derridian notion of ‘hauntology’, this chapter considers the intersectionality of sexuality and class in contemporary China in the context of neoliberal globalisation. While it delineates the complicity of gay identity and queer desire with global capitalism in postsocialist China, this chapter also identifies possible resistances to neoliberal capitalism and gay reification through queer haunting and socialist nostalgia.
