Issue 190, October 2025
New Views From China – Postgraduate Perspectives From Chengdu
Guest Editors: Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski and Fu Qilin
Introduction
New views from China – Postgraduate perspectives from Chengdu
Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski and Fu Qilin
After a series of personal contacts with Peter Murphy about the late Ágnes Heller (12 May 1929–19 July 2019), which resulted in several Chinese papers in Thesis Eleven into the new century, Fu Qilin invited us to visit and teach at Sichuan University from 2016. A new world opened for us, leading to annual undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, major events in Chengdu, and exchanges across Melbourne and Chengdu. Fu’s major research project ‘Bibliography and Research of Eastern European Marxist Aesthetics’ (15ZDB022), blossomed. We organized four significant international conferences entitled ‘Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe’ together, on Ágnes Heller, with Ágnes in attendance; in memory of George Markus; and last year, a major event in memory of Zygmunt Bauman. We published several special issues of Thesis Eleven in the process, on: ‘Eastern European Marxist Critical Theory,’ #159, 2020; ‘George Markus – Our Contemporary,’ #160, 2020; ‘Eastern European Marxism,’ #171, 2022; and ‘From Marx to Markus,’ #178, 2023. And last year, at the Bauman event, Fu and his team launched a new journal of their own – Critical Theory: Chengdu Review (2024).
As our collaboration grew, a new idea came to us – to give publicity to the emerging generation of Chengdu scholars, our younger Chinese students. We workshopped the idea with Fu and a core group of postgraduates and agreed that this would best be developed as an invitation to Masters students, with a special encouragement that they might consider writing less directly in their immediate fields of research and more in terms of general and personal interest. This would add a new layer of fresh voices to our conversation, but also serve to complement the more strictly scholarly work we were sharing under the existing canopy of critical theory. It would extend our platform to young Chinese scholars at the beginning of their careers, and offer insights into worlds very different to our own, both by culture and by generation. So much of Chinese experience remains unknown to us, even considering this well exercised and highly productive relationship with Fu’s team in the College of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University.
This special issue of Thesis Eleven contains the results of this experiment. It offers at least two special levels of potential insight. First, it here lets our Chinese students speak for themselves, assisted only with a minimal level of practical editing. Second, it offers a window into some of the concerns and patterns of thinking of the next generation and the worlds that they inhabit, where tradition and modernity intersect with hyper-acceleration since the opening-up process initiated from 1978. Some papers therefore reach back, to revisit earlier moments in Chinese modern history, while others reach forward to contemporary developments in popular culture, what is palpably in China youth culture, and the effects of the rationalization process on work and everyday life in China.
We thank Professor Fu and Liu Songyang, who carefully mediated our relationship with our authors at every step of what was a complicated production process. We thank our authors for taking on a difficult task, often through yet unnavigated waters. We thank our fellow editors for forbearance over a two-year process, and our Chinese students for everything they teach us. We hope our readers will find interest and stimulation in the results of the project.
Articles
Aesthetic politics of the folk avant-garde art movement in Chinese wartime communist Yan’an
Songyang Liu
Following the distinction of ‘historical avant-gardes’ and ‘neo-avant-gardes’ drawn by Peter Bürger and the conception of ‘postsocialist avant-gardes’ from Aleš Erjavec, Chinese scholars have recently claimed that the fourth paradigm of avant-gardes emerged in communist Yan’an in the 1940s. These avant-gardes, shaped under the interpretation of art in Mao’s Yan’an Talk as well as in a militarily autonomous space, were endowed with the capacity of harmonizing avant-gardism with popular culture, aesthetics with politics, proletarian utopianism with national experience through the mediation of ‘folk forms’ by which peasants and workers were encouraged to be the primary creators of arts such as woodcuts and Yangko operas. Challenging against the elitist tendency of dadaism and surrealism, artists, as organic intelligentsias in Yan’an, sought their way to fulfil Lautréamont’s dream of ‘poetry for all’ within the context of ‘rural China,’ which constitutes in some senses the historical legacy of aesthetic revolutions in modern China.
On the alienation theme in China’s migrant worker poetry
Wen Shuwen
The poetry of migrant workers is a type of marginalized poetry rising in China in the 1980s. The poet expresses the individual’s real life experience through poetry, showing the alienated daily life of the migrant workers at the bottom of the process of modernization. Based on Marx’s theory of estranged labour, this paper explores the alienation theme of working poetry from four aspects: The alienation of human’s species being, the alienation of the relationship between people, the alienation of the relationship between people and society, and the alienation of the relationship between humans and nature.
History or game: Two aesthetic styles of parallel world novels in China
Zeng Han
The concept of parallel worlds was first proposed through theoretical hypotheses in quantum mechanics and later gained legitimacy in historical counterfactual narratives through possible worlds theory. Counterfactual historical narratives assert the equal status of the virtual and the real, presenting a historical aesthetic that blends reality and fantasy, as exemplified in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Similarly, in contemporary Chinese Internet literature, parallel world narratives embody a game aesthetic, where the interplay of the virtual and the real forms the basis of aesthetic style. This paper attempts to analyse the distinct logics behind these two aesthetic styles and explores the reasons for their formation as well as their forms of expression.
On the reception of Chinese television’s Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace in Japan
Yuping Huang
Since entering the 21st century, the iteration of new media technology has reconstructed global cultural communication patterns, film and television. As the core carrier of cultural soft power, these media forms have played an increasingly critical role in international communication. Among them, the film and television adaptations of online literature intellectual property (film and television dramas created and adapted on the basis of domestic original web novels, games, animation, etc., which have a certain number of fans) have gradually become the core carriers of cross-cultural communication, and through the creative transformation of visual symbols and narrative strategies, they have successfully built bridges of cultural dialogue. In this paper, we focus on the phenomenal communication case of Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace in the East Asian cultural circle, and analyse how the resonance of aesthetic narratives and cultural symbols achieves the emotional resonance and value recognition of foreign audiences from the dual perspectives of cultural identity and cross-cultural communication, and then reveals the deep-seated mechanism of minimizing the ‘cultural discounting’ of Chinese stories in the international communication arena.
A study of the construction of subjectivity in Internet-based Chinese fantasy novels
Jing Zhou
This article explores the construction of subjectivity in Internet-based Chinese fantasy novels and their connection to the spirit of enlightenment and posthumanism. These novels re-examine the validity of scientific civilization and enlightenment reason, deconstructing and rewriting grand narratives through individualism in the pre-modern magical world. Moreover, this literary genre, rooted in a posthumanist perspective, challenges traditional concepts of the body with technologies that enhance strength and offer immortality. Chinese fantasy novels open up a path for the decentralized, anti-anthropocentric revolution of subjectivity, leading toward a world that fully activates material vitality and embraces equality among all beings.
The turn of Chen Duxiu’s literary view from democracy to Marxism
Xu Weicong
Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) was the standard-bearer and main force of the New Culture Movement, an ideological liberation movement against feudalism initiated by some advanced intellectuals in China since 1917. He was the commander-in-chief of the May Fourth Movement – a patriotic movement dominated by young students, the broad masses, citizens, businessmen and other classes, and a figure of significance in modern Chinese history (1840–1949) who cannot be ignored. The literary revolution he led was a crucial driving force behind the political revolution in modern China, and his political beliefs greatly influenced his literary views. Chen Duxiu’s early guiding ideology was democracy, which later shifted to Marxism, and he widely disseminated Marxist theory through platforms such as New Youth (La Jeunesse). How did Chen Duxiu’s thoughts transition from democracy to Marxism, and how did his political advocacy affect his literary and artistic outlook? During the New Culture period, Chen Duxiu’s literary and artistic thoughts played a programmatic and decisive role, and they still have significant reference value today for the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics under the guidance of Marxism.
UGC user-generated content (UGC): Digital laborers’ immaterial labor in virtual cultural spaces. The ‘Eggy Party’ online game as a Chinese media phenomenon
Simin Zhang
This paper takes the Chinese videogame Eggy Party as the research object and analyzes in depth the behavior and production characteristics of game players under the user-generated content (UGC) ecological model. Against the background of online games as a virtual cultural space, this paper describes Eggy Party’s characteristics of breaking the limitations of real space, carrying multi-cultural connotations, and promoting cultural exchange and integration. From the perspective of digital labor, it reveals that players become digital laborers under the UGC model, investing their time, emotions and social resources to carry out non-materialized production, and their production is characterized by intangibility, intertwining of labor and entertainment, and indirect value creation. Based on Marxist theory, it points out the nature of exploitation of labor by capital and the irrationality of value creation and distribution behind this phenomenon. This raises issues of the protection of the rights and interests of digital laborers and the sustainable development of the digital economy, with the aim of providing inspiration for the further theoretical research and practical improvements in the era of digital economy.
On Ferenc Tőkei’s trans-cultural interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long
Fu Qilin
This paper analyzes Ferenc Tőkei’s trans-cultural interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long (《文心雕龙, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) from the perspective of the ‘Variation Theory of Comparative Literature’. Ferenc Tőkei, an academician of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was an important Sinologist, Marxist philosopher and literary theorist. His interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long has been noted by some Chinese scholars, but not investigated in detail. With the emergence of Variation Theory, the significance of Tőkei’s interpretation is revealed. On the basis of György Lukács’s aesthetics of genre and of the comparison between western and Chinese culture, Tőkei reveals his conceptualization of Liu Xie’s theory of genre and raises it to the level of universal value in world literature. Tőkei’s trans-cultural interpretation, one of the theories of genre of Marxist aesthetics in Eastern Europe, demonstrates the Variation Theory of Comparative Literature.
Review Essay
Sovereignty, state of exception, and the politics of the pandemic: Where is Agamben now?
Mikkel Flohr
Book Reviews
Book Review: Max Weber’s Sociology of Civilizations: A Reconstruction
Book Review: Postcritical Management Studies: Philosophical Investigations
Book Review: Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It
Book Review: The Invention of Marxism – How an Idea Changed Everything
Book Review: UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History
Book Review: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics
Peter Beilharz
thesis eleven 