Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

Volume 75, No. 2

 

Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China
By Hanchao Lu

 

Abstract

This article looks into the nostalgia in present-day Shanghai, including an emerging "coffee culture" that symbolizes the return of the city's once celebrated Western influence and business practices. This nostalgia is part of the resurgence of the city's old cosmopolitanism and commercialism. While the nostalgia in Shanghai, which has been caused in part by the wholesale destruction of the city's physical past in recent years, shares some sentimentality commonly associated with nostalgia in general, it is far from a desperate, lost anomie. Unlike nostalgia that in most cases rejects mainstream culture, the Shanghai nostalgia is part of it. Unlike nostalgia that usually protests about the present, the Shanghai nostalgia celebrates it. Unlike nostalgia that is commonly negative, dispirited and withdrawn, the Shanghai nostalgia is positive, spirited and receptive. The author suggests that this nostalgia and its characteristics are not just a local phenomenon, but part of the nostalgic culture that has emerged in China's reform era, in particular after the Mao fever waned in the late 1990s. In a political environment where, not long ago, longing for the past was the most-watched sentiment, the nostalgia of today still needs a foundation of political correctness. In the end, the boom of nostalgia in China reflects today's greater freedom of self-expression as much as it does a wrangling with ideological justification and legitimacy, essential features of China's political culture.