Inequality is a structural determinant of life in contemporary China. It has been since Deng Xiaoping ushered in an age of developmental disparity by declaring “let some people get rich first” (rang yi bufen ren xian fuqilai), and remains so, as attested to by the current leadership's desire for greater wealth redistribution. But what are the cultural consequences of this condition? How do cultural workers in contemporary China engage with such inequality whilst also being shaped by it? These questions lie at the heart of Haomin Gong's book. Arguing that Chinese modernity is fundamentally uneven, the author draws on Slavoj Žižek to posit a discourse of modernization that is self-cancelling: fundamentally torn between a desire for closure – to achieve “modernity” – and the need to postpone this closure indefinitely, for the sources of China's current developmental vitality are precisely those social inequalities that Chinese modernization seeks ultimately to eliminate. The result is a dialectical tension that is central to “uneven modernity,” and which requires the relationships between the economic, political and cultural fields in the PRC to be constantly negotiated. The shift from the Culture Fever of the 1980s to the market-dominated 1990s entailed precisely such a recalibration. With politics and economics now marginalizing culture, intellectuals, writers and artists had to find new ways to make themselves socially and politically relevant. How they did so is what concerns the rest of this book.
The main body of Gong's argument is developed through four case studies. Chapters two and three address the literary scene. In the former, Gong considers the popularity of Yu Qiuyu's writings in the 1990s. He suggests this stemmed not simply from a particular zeitgeist – most obviously a growing nostalgia for 1980's ideals in the post-1992 landscape – but also Yu's canny repackaging of traditional literary forms and subjects, combined with a penchant for modern marketing strategies. Together, these allowed the writer to balance the conflicting demands of state and market, whilst asserting the continued value of classical culture. Chapter three turns to the rise of literary neorealism, specifically the work of Chi Li. Here, Gong argues that neorealism as a style must be understood both as a product of the market, and a reaction against it. A synthesis of residual avant-garde and socialist realist literary practices, Chi's Wuhan-based fiction reworks elements of these traditions in ways accessible to a popular, “petty urbanite” audience, whilst also providing a space within which the failures of marketization could be safely explored. Both Yu and Chi thus negotiated the uneven relationship between culture, politics and economic in post-1992 China in a manner that opened up new, if compromised, spaces in which the writer could work.
The next two chapters turn to the film industry. In chapter four, Gong considers the case of Feng Xiaogang's A Sigh (Yi sheng tanxi, 2000), Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003) and A World without Thieves (Tianxia wu zei, 2004). Using textual analysis, focused primarily on the director's representation of social space, everyday life and use of language, he argues that commercial filmmaking in China should be understood as a “survival strategy” (p. 88) within conditions of uneven political, economic and cultural development, but one in which there is still space for critical intervention and aesthetic experimentation alongside entertainment. Chapter five addresses art film. Through close readings of Wang Xiaoshuai's So Close to Paradise (Biandan, guniang, 1999) and Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de danche, 2001), Gong suggests how the complex and uneven network of relationships within which these films were produced and circulated – encompassing foreign critics and film festivals, domestic markets, and the state filmmaking system – encouraged Wang to deploy sentimentality as a marketing strategy, and claims to universal values as a defence against overt political readings of the films' subject matter. Usually positioned as quite distinct, Feng Xiaogang and Wang Xiaoshuai appear here to adopt similar strategies when negotiating the complex relationship between politics and the market in contemporary China. Finally, the conclusion extends a plea for the possibility of a more even model of development in the near future.
Though interesting, this ground is well trodden. Despite the initial emphasis on Žižek, explicit consideration of the tensions within developmental discourse is largely deferred after the book's first chapter. Instead, drawing on Bourdieu and David Harvey, Gong develops “uneven modernity” in primarily spatial terms, focusing on questions of social and geographical representation, and on spaces of cultural practice. But this approach is already well established in contemporary Chinese cultural studies, and addressed elsewhere in greater depth; the chapters on cinema, for example, suffer from comparison with Yingjin Zhang's more comprehensive Cinema, Space and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). Moving beyond film and literature to consider the newer cultural industries would have provided fresher material, but also complicated Gong's implicit assumption that all such workers constitute an intelligentsia. As a focused study of the tensions between state and market in Chinese cultural production since the 1990s, Uneven Modernity is a useful addition to the literature. As a critical intervention, however – the title of the series in which it appears – this book is perhaps less successful.
