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A Collective Fantasia of the Financial Age in Early 1990s China: Erotic-Speculative Sensation, Neoliberal Labor Heroine, and Presentist Worldly Wisdom
School of Chinese Seminar
A Collective Fantasia of the Financial Age in Early 1990s China:
Erotic-Speculative Sensation, Neoliberal Labor Heroine, and Presentist Worldly Wisdom
Speaker: Dr Yu ZHANG (PolyU)
Moderator: Professor Yan WEI (HKU)
Date: April 25, 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 14:15 - 15:45
Language: English
Venue: Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus
Registration Link: https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5upxpCcMDADX3Tw
Abstract
When the notion of “finance” re-entered ordinary Chinese people’s lives since the Reform and Opening Up, how were “finance and economics” (caijing) perceived and felt? This talk is situated in the intersection of finance and literary practice and focuses on the Mainland critics’ reviews of the “finance-themed” novels by the Hong Kong entrepreneur-cum-writer Leung Fung Yee (1949- ) and discusses how “Leung fever” (1992-1993) provided a medium for a collective imagination of the financial age. Leung’s fiction introduced “sensuous and lively” financial knowledge particularly attractive to a financially uneducated Mainland readership who nonetheless desired to engage in adventurous economic activities. This coming of the new financial age was first and foremost experienced as an “erotic-speculative sensation” in which an erotic adventure was experienced similar to the financial behavior of speculation. The critics envisioned what I call “the neoliberal labor heroine,” who creatively utilizes the intervals to maximize the productive value and performs “presentist worldly wisdom” to strategically navigate life and achieve optimal outputs and success in a disorienting world.
Bio
Yu Zhang is teaching in the Department of Chinese History and Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Stanford University. She is the author of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965 (The University of Michigan Press, 2020). Her other publications appear in Positions: Asia Critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Twentieth-Century China and others. Currently, she is working on a new book titled Wiring the Hearts: A Sentimental History of Phones in China.
