In After the Post–Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.

"This volume is one of the best publications of its kind, not only because of the brilliance of the original essays, but also because of the excellent translation and editing that come across as judicious as one reads it." - China Perspectives

"This is a challenging book by an author at the top of her game. Insightful and cosmpolitan in its range, the book shows that public intellectuals in China are managing to find a voice. The editors have done the author and readers a fine service." - China Journal