High Culture Fever

High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China captures the vibrant and turbulent intellectual landscape of 1980s China, a decade where utopian visions and emergent crises coexisted in complex tension. This period witnessed the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitious pursuit of modernization through economic and political reform, creating a collaborative yet fraught relationship between the state and the cultural elite. Intellectuals, propelled by "methodology fever" and inspired by ideals of enlightenment, navigated the delicate balance of supporting and contesting the Party's modernization agenda. Key moments, such as the debates over "socialist alienation," the rise of "Culture Fever," and the controversies surrounding works like Heshang (Yellow River Elegy), reveal a landscape of ideological negotiation and cultural transformation. However, the euphoria of progress unraveled with the political and economic disillusionment of the late 1980s, culminating in the seismic events of the Tian’anmen Square crackdown, which shattered the utopian aspirations of the cultural elite.

This book examines the decade’s intricate interplay of modernity, cultural subjectivity, and intellectual ambition, as Chinese thinkers engaged in epoch-defining debates over Marxist humanism, modernism, and postmodernism. Through seven essays, it explores moments of ideological rupture, tracing how these disruptions reshaped cultural politics and the literary field in Deng's China. The author contextualizes these shifts within broader tensions between an elitist intellectual vision and the Party’s state-driven utopia, highlighting the inevitable collision of these projects in 1989. By juxtaposing the aspirations of the 1980s with the self-critical introspection of the 1990s, High Culture Fever provides a critical lens for understanding the enduring legacy of this transformative era in Chinese intellectual and cultural history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.