The cover of Xudong Zhang's new book is dominated by a reproduction of a portrait by the prominent “cynical realist” painter Fang Lijun (1963– ). The portrait, which features one of Fang's iconic bald men peering back over his right shoulder, is very apropos here, given that Zhang's volume is structured around a series of retrospective glances. Gesturing back at his own account of 1980s Chinese culture and politics in his previous English-language book, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), Zhang's latest work is a retrospective examination of China's political culture and cultural politics in the 1990s. Surveying the roughly twelve year-period bookended by the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrators in June 1989 and China's admittance into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001, Zhang examines the emergence of postsocialist and postmodernist trends and argues that they continue to be inflected by the socialist and modernist paradigms that preceded them. He contends that Chinese socialism and modernity “do not disappear into the new universal defined by global capitalism,” but rather become “intertwined with postmodernity” and “embedded in [global capitalism] as a semiautonomy” (p. 13).

One of the greatest strengths of Zhang's study lies in its exploration of the intricate imbrication of political discourse, literature, and cinema in fin-de-siècle China. The book comprises three parts. Part I considers 1990s political culture, particularly debates between neoliberals and New Leftists; part II looks at literary works by Wang Anyi and Mo Yan; and part III turns to films by the directors Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Part I makes up roughly half of the volume, and presents a magisterial survey of many of the central political and intellectual concerns that dominated the period. The textual analyses in parts II and III, meanwhile, are uniformly incisive, though it is striking that the four 1990s authors and artists whom Zhang analyzes here are all rooted very directly in the 1980s. Both Wang Anyi (to whom Zhang devotes not one, but two chapters) and Mo Yan initially achieved prominence in the 1980s, as did the two fifth-generation directors (so called because they were members of the first graduating class of the Beijing Film Academy following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976) whom Zhang discusses in his final two chapters. While these specific choices of artists and texts allow Zhang to underscore the underlying connections in cultural production between the 1980s and the 1990s, he arguably misses an opportunity to examine some of the distinctive new cultural trends that emerged in the latter decade.

To return to the image on the cover of the book, Fang Lijun's bald man is not only looking over his shoulder, but is simultaneously turning into the plane of the painting—making his face invisible to us, the viewers of the portrait. This faceless portrait, moreover, is rendered ironically “faceless” within Zhang's book, given that neither the work nor the artist is identified anywhere in the volume. Read allegorically, the Fang Lijun portrait suggests the degree to which the general retrospective focus of Zhang's volume has resulted in a series of figurative blind spots in his coverage. For instance, not only does Zhang not include any discussion of Fang Lijun (one of China's most recognizable and influential contemporary painters), but his cultural analysis is limited to literature and cinema, and consequently overlooks an explosion of dynamic and innovative work in other media, including photography, video, graphic art, installation art, performance art, and Internet culture.

Similarly, while Zhang, on the first page of the book, identifies Hong Kong's return to China in 1997 (which, coincidentally, was also the year in which Fang Lijun painted the portrait that Zhang uses for his cover) as one of the key historical landmarks of the “cultural-historical decade” that is the subject of his study, Hong Kong nevertheless barely figures in the book. To the extent that Hong Kong is mentioned, furthermore, the emphasis tends to be on the “relative calm, even detachment” with which the “handover” was experienced by “many Chinese intellectuals” (p. 65). This latter formulation is revealing, insofar as its reference to “Chinese intellectuals” presumably excludes “Chinese intellectuals” from Hong Kong (who by and large did not feel particularly “detached” about the former colony's impending reattachment to China), just as the volume's analysis of the “Chinese 1990s” (p. 1) does not include any substantive discussions of “Chinese” literature, cinema, or political discourse from Hong Kong. Needless to say, one cannot, in a volume like this, aspire to “provide comprehensive, empirical coverage” (p. 20) of all relevant subject matter. However, it would seem that a more systematic engagement with, at the very least, Hong Kong and nontraditional cultural media would have facilitated Zhang's goal of “confront[ing] central contradictions or conflicts” (p. 20) inherent in the very concepts of China and cultural production themselves.