Issue 100: Fall 2009

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China

By David L. Eng on October 30, 2009
Abstract: How should we go about interpreting, reading, and understanding "China" as a social text, in the face of persistent Orientalism and self-Orientalism, in an age when the ghosts of socialism are still all around us? Given its semicolonial history and its passage through communist and capitalist visions of modernity, China cannot be studied in isolation, as a preexisting thing in itself. Instead of reducing it to a preconstituted object of knowledge, we must ask how China, and the objects in relation to which it exists, have come into being, and how they become stabilized discursively.
A revolution is not a dinner party. 
 -- Chairman Mao 

Whatever the Chairman might think of it, the Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater (紅色經典, literally, The Red Classics) is located east of the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, well beyond the newly constructed skyscrapers and glitzy hotels of the central Chaoyang business district as well as the private gated communities of the rich, both of which continue to creep eastward in Beijing's ever-expanding urban sprawl. We visited the theater one evening in early July, about a month before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (It took some cajoling as well as several 

detours before the taxi driver managed to deliver us to this freestanding building situated on the edge of yet-to-be-developed fields.) The Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater is a dark and cavernous rectangular space, constructed of rough-hewn lumber, with a large stage on one end, numerous circular banquet tables in the center, and a number of smaller dining areas on a U-shaped elevated platform surrounding this arrangement, lining three sides of the room. 

 

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