When most Westerners think of China right now, says Chinese-American journalist Jianying Zha, they think of cliches: Communist power, Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms, and most recently the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Those archetypical images are part of the story, she admits, but they do not tell the whole story of China’s dynamic society. So Zha, a journalist originally from Beijing who lives jointly in Hong Kong and the United States, has written about the quickly- changing Chinese cultural world in her new book ‘China Pop’.

‘China Pop’, available from The New Press for 20 U.S. dollars, shows a People’s Republic facing a new era changed dramatically by state-controlled capitalism and a flood of new money.

Everything forbidden or distrusted under the Maoist era — from weepy soap operas to lurid pornography, and from Hong Kong cultural entrepeneurs to the U.S. McDonald’s conglomerate — is part of the new landscape of post-Tiananmen China.

But the most dramatic change, Zha writes, is that the idealism of the democratic protestors crushed at Tiananmen has been replaced by a “get-rich-quick” boom, among many of those same shattered idealists.

The world she shows is one in which former Red Guards and pro- democracy activists alike have conceded the Communist Party’s power — but the Party, in turn, has allowed a more sweeping transformation of society than previously imagined. The struggle for democracy, she contends, has been supplanted by the race for money.

“Instead of the dramatic, exhilarating breakdowns of old regimes, as occurred in Eastern Europe and Russia, what we witness in China is a slow, soft, and messy meltdown of the old structure,” Zha says. She calls it “the Whopper effect” — the replacing of the certainties of Mao’s world with the polyglot, trashy chaos of modern capitalism.

Part of that key difference, she adds, is that, unlike the Soviet bloc nations, “the revolution failed in 1989, and the Communist Party (stayed) on to guide and control the reform process.”

Some of the effect of that continuing control shows up strongly in the cultural sphere, she notes, pointing to the irony that the Party encouraged a non-ideological soap opera, ‘Yearning’, in the post-Tiananmen days, to demonstrate traditional “family values” at a time of great divisions.

The Party, she says, used the soap opera brilliantly as a token of reconciliation for the younger pro-democracy crowd: it conveyed a message of seeking to unify the nation, even if only to see a corny story of innocent lovers thwarted, rather than to argue ideology further. (MORE)

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