Abstract
Recent reports of the HIV infection spreading through blood collection centers in China signal particularly troubling uncertainties about the effects of market transition on the bodies of Chinese citizens. Although health officials estimate that 840,000 Chinese citizens are HIV positive1, some doctors working in Henan Province worry that more than a million people there may have contracted the AIDS virus through selling blood.2 In light of these prognoses, a harrowing set of questions arises concerning what might have been taken as ironic metaphor in Yu Hua’s (1960-) prescient novel, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji (Xu Sanguan the blood merchant, literally Record of Xu Sanguan selling [his] blood) (1995).3 If the prospect of economically desperate peasants contracting HIV provokes a sense of outrage, the unease derives from convictions that the state should regulate such practices to protect its citizens. Yet, transition from Communist Party dominance over economic planning and industry to a still undefined mix of socialism and capitalist markets demands new negotiations of norms and values that can either enhance or jeopardize precisely such protections.
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Notes
G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Cohen’s book begins with a critique of Robert Nozick’s work, particularly Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Habermas, “Modernity versus postmodernity”, trans. Seyla Benhabib, in New German Critique 22 (winter 1981), 3–15.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);
Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity, trans. David Macey (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995) and The Post-industrial Society; Tomorrow’s Social History: Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society, trans. Leonard F.X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971);
and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
For a general survey, see Jun Ma, The Chinese Economy in the 1990s (London: Macmillan Press, 2000).
For a critical account, see He Qinglian, Xiandaihua de xianjing: dangdai zhongguo de jingji shehui wenti (Pitfalls of modernization: contemporary China’s economic and societal problems) (Beijing: Jinri zhongguo chubanshe, 1998).
Geographer David Harvey refers to the restructuring of the global economy since the late 1970s as the regime of “flexible accumulation” to emphasize corporations’ greater geographical mobility and flexibility in employment arrangements, markets, products and consumption practices. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), The Theory of the Leisure Class; an Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899).
Xiong Yuezhi, Xixue dongjianyu wan Qing shehui (The dissemination of Western learning and late Qing society) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1995).
See, e.g., Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the Seventeenth Century ‘Enlightenment’”, in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
See Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),
and John Fitzgerald, Awakening China. Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
For a substantive, nuanced discussion of the heterogeneous nature of the May Fourth Movement and literature’s subordination to political agendas, see the general introduction in Kirk Denton ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–61, 113.
Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 9.
Ben Xu, Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 90–91.
Ben Xu, “Contesting Memory for Intellectual Self-Positioning: The 1990s New Cultural Conservatism in China”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 11.1 (spring 1999), p. 169.
Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 10–20.
See Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
For an analysis comparing negative visions of market reforms in Jiang Zilong’s “Shoushen ji” (Records from a trial, 1989) and Liu Heng’s novel Daydream on the Cang River with more optimistic portrayals in Jia Pingwa’s stories, see Melinda Pirazzoli, “The Free-Market Economy and Contemporary Chinese Literature”, World Literature Today 70.2 (spring 1996), 301–310.
Prime examples of Yu Hua’s early stories that can be read as nihilistic include “Shiba sui chumen yuan xing” (On the Road at Eighteen, 1986), “Yijiubaliu nian” (1986, 1986), and “Xianshi yizhong” (One Kind of Reality, 1988), collected in Shiba sui chumen yuan xing (On the Road at Eighteen, Taipei: Yuanliu, 1990). For English translations of the first two stories and six other good examples, see Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments, trans. Andrew F. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996).
See, for example, Tom R. Tyler, Roderick M. Kramer, and Oliver P. John, ed., The Psychology of the Social Self (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
All translations from the novel are my own. Page numbers refer to Yu Hua, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji (Taipei: Martian chubanshe, 1997).
This formulation was inspired by economist Amartya Sen’s redefinition of development as a process of expanding the capabilities that people enjoy. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999).
For example, see Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 74.
Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 198.
For a thoughtful critique of universal commodification by a legal scholar, see Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
For theoretical discussion of a key legal debate surrounding the appropriation of human tissue from an unknowing patient after a splenectomy, see the passages on Moore v. Regents of the University of California in John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 154–161,
and James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 97–107.
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© 2005 Charles A. Laughlin
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Knight, D.S. (2005). Capitalist and Enlightenment Values in Chinese Fiction of the 1990s: The Case of Yu Hua’s Blood Merchant. In: Laughlin, C.A. (eds) Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981332_13
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