The Great Dragon Fantasy

China has undergone a unique path of development in the post-Maoist era. Especially, the last decade witnessed China's rapid rise to economic wealth and superpower status vis-à-vis the severe developmental predicaments of the West (financial crises, socio-political turbulences, etc.). This book analyzes how the leading Chinese thinkers understand China's prosperity and rapid development today, and whether there is any hidden mechanism that has been playing a crucial role of forming contemporary Chinese thinkers' shared passionate endeavor of resuscitating classical Chinese ideas, and thus shows how the fervor for discovering “essential characteristics” of Chinese thought reveals a hidden psychological mechanism.

Contents:

• The Fantasmatic Narrative of Contemporary Chinese Thought
• Descendants of a Blurry-Eyed Dragon
• New Enlightenment as Modernization
• “Traumatic” Encounters with Postmodernism
• Liberals and New Leftists as “Discursive Enemies”
• China's New Nationalism and Its Obscene Core
• Narrating the Fantasmatic Past: Ancient and Recent
• Traversing the Fantasy

Readership: Academics, professionals, Sinologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in China studies.
Key Features:

• Helps acquire a better understanding of China's developments and problems in the post-Maoist era and contributes substantial new knowledge about classical and contemporary Chinese ideas
• Offers critical analyses of various recent accounts of the “China path” or the “China model”
• Exemplifies that Lacanian psychoanalysis indeed can be a useful — indeed, powerful — methodological approach in the field of Sinology and China Studies