The original, intended temporal focus of my current book project was on the period 1976 to 2020. Even when writing about the contemporary there needs to be a cut-off point, so I'd fixed the end of the second decade of the twentieth-first century as the limit so as to account for the massive changes that Chinese politics and culture have undergone since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012; I planned an afterword that would cover the past few years. The events that took place in Hong Kong and on mainland China after 2020 prompted me to extend the scope up of the work to the "present moment". That choice placed me in the uncomfortable position of writing an almost immediate history of the past decade or so without the benefit of an extended critical distance. The first few months of 2025 have revealed how perilous the decision to take the present moment as the point of perspective on the past can be.
The current Trump administration's positioning in global affairs, not to mention its domestic agenda, fundamentally changes the outlooks of both the US and Chinese regimes, and, at the very least, demands a revision of my previous descriptions of them. The nature of American regnant power today also necessarily sheds a different light on the entire trajectory of global politics and international relations of the past fifty years. These changes and the shape of the world's new spectacular politics now necessarily needed to be addressed in my book.
My original aim was to allow hindsight and fresh insights to shape the narrative space in the telling of what is a long moment in which change and chaos are in large part constitutive of a kind of stability. Some twenty years ago, in my book Chinas Unlimited (2002), I wrote that "the cultural and intellectual history of twentieth-century China can be read as a linear history which parallels the history of China's efforts to compensate for the effects of the technological and economic uneven development so brutally foregrounded by Western and Japanese, but in particular British, imperialist aggression in 'opening up' China. This would be a linear, nationalist, grand narrative, or metanarrative, extending over a hundred and fifty years and interrupted with regularity by internal struggles and wars."1
I also saw in "the attempt to break out of feudal modes of thought and their cultural reproduction, and simultaneous attempts to mediate and assimilate a model of modernity imposed from outside", not a linear model, but "more a conceptualization of this period of time as a long moment, a longue durée". Alongside, the concept of the longue durée, we might expect "the notion of stable history. But in the history of modernity such stability has become increasingly rare. The histories of the twentieth century are complex and stability cannot be understood in the same way; especially for the semi-colonized, semi-modernized society that has been China. In the field of cultural production such historical conditions have produced cultural histories of instability [sic]."2
Agrandissement : Illustration 1
At the turn of the twentieth/twenty-first century, then, I identified several "specific and shorter moments" within the overall long moment of the emergence and the making of China the nation state:
In terms of major political, social and cultural crises and turning points, there would be perhaps 20 to 30 such moments since the mid-nineteenth century, and 10 to 15 such moments over the forty years separating 1949, the year of the establishment of the People's Republic of China and 1989 the year of its ultimate ideological unmasking in the debacle at Tiananmen Square.3
My current book project then, seeks to dovetail the politico-cultural moment that spanned the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries into a phase that started with the ascent to power of the current President Xi Jinping in 2012 and continues to 2025. It is a contradictory phase where change seems to constantly accelerate, but where the constraints and the contradictions persist as before, where decolonization – even in the narrow sense of Xi Jinping’s post 2012 anti-western pro-sinicization policies – merely reinforces extant ‘foreign’ paradigms, practices and techniques, where the globalized is a ‘becoming Chinese’, and sinicization is itself a form of globalization of bad practices.
The prevalent techno-logico-economic system: an immense accumulation of nightmares
A year ago, this book was intended to lead the reader up to the politico-cultural dimensions of China and its impact around the world in 2025. The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and 2025 constituted convenient bookends to a half-century of post-Mao China. And yet the year 2025 has not been anodyne. The year 2025 has indeed dug even deeper the perverse and frightening furrows of the first quarter of the twenty-first century addressed in my book China Imagined (2018). The beginning of 2025 presented us with a scenario similar to 2018. We now find ourselves in a moment that can best be described, albeit somewhat slickly, as "back to the future", except such would imply a circularity or repetition which is never in fact what happens. Extending the Debordian trope that analyses and describes society as a spectacle, I wrote in 2018 of a new form of political show involving "a set of practices that are common currency not only in China, but also in Russia and Turkey."5 After a half-decade marked by the drama of COVID-19, of anti-vaccine crusaders, and of climate change deniers, we now are living through an extreme form of its continuity.
Seven years on, I take neither pride nor satisfaction in observing that these countries' authorities have continued to indulge in brutal and bellicose practices, and that what I termed then "'hoodlum diplomacy’" has become even more virulent and widespread. In 2018, during the first Trump administration, I commented that "the power that is meant to counter such behaviour, the United States, has been under Donald Trump’s administration little better." Under the second Trump administration, such "hoodlum diplomacy" relying on bullying and strong-arm tactics is being drastically exacerbated. Trump's "MAGA", is a call to re-establish the Utopia that Baudrillard once identified as the hallmark of American society; the promised land is not ahead it has already been achieved, it only needs to be preserved and reasserted.6 Trump's promise is simply to re-establish the "already-thereness" of American Utopian vision. Xi Jinping's "China Dream" goes somewhat further, since it relies on exploitation of a mythic golden era of an "eternal" China.
Such "dream" narratives stretch back well into the twentieth century. The twenty-first century has merely seen popular disillusionment with the unrealized blueprints of what Castoriadis termed "instituting imaginaries", so that the yearnings and expectations that were written into such imaginaries are now expressed in increasingly violent and virulent forms of nationalistic, identitarian politics, and "in re-emergent racist and anti-immigrant ideologies; in neofascist and populist political parties gaining electoral ground; in the disastrous consequences of Western-engineered upheaval in Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, resulting in a migration crisis unparalleled since World War II; and in ‘home-grown’ Islamist jihadists engaging in terror in the West."7 The enchantment of unrealized dreams whether they be America's, or the promised post Berlin Wall new dawn, have been irredeemably tarnished in the popular imagination and their failures to yield an acceptable instituted imaginary, a lived reality, have become more pronounced. National populations, or at least whole swathes of them, are now subjected to nightmare projects promising to realize the dream anew:
The dream-turned-nightmare of the technical, the technological and the economic now serves only the aggrandizement of the state and its ambitions of political and territorial expansion, whether in the South China Sea or on the Ukrainian borderlands. The spectacle of dreams has mutated systemically into an unmediated show of fear: the society of the spectacular Incubus. The systemic demon that tyrannizes and subjugates—the seductive and phoney harmony of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the long-cherished and nourished simulacrum of normality—has spawned a nightmare society of ‘enriched privation’, marked by technologically maintained insecurity, fear and brutality. As Debord might have said, the spectacular poverty of those societies in which the convergence of totalitarianism with the techno-logico-economic system prevails now presents itself as an immense accumulation of nightmares.8
Decolonization, Woke, and China
Another sea change that has taken place since I originally conceived of this book some seven years ago stems from recent debates that have fuelled a controversy in the worldwide political-cultural environment. Various articulations of "decolonization" are currently promoted or decried. Part of the current populist far-right project that has rapidly gained traction around the globe, is the onslaught against so-called "Woke" politics. Woke, at the outset was simply an African American usage meaning being awake to social and political injustice. In the 2010s, it came to be associated and used negatively to describe those who advocated not merely social justice, but positions that were anti-colonialist, anti-racist and supportive of tolerance towards sexual and gender pluralism. Without knowing they were "woke", people "woke" in the 2010s to being told they were. In academic circles, and I speak in particular out of a longer acquaintance with France where so-called "universal" values dominate the political and academic world, those seeking to challenge ingrained colonialist, Orientalist and otherwise institutionally racist ideologies, are frequently criticized for being "Islamo-gauchiste" or Islamo-leftist. The underlying accusation is that to seek to nuance or otherwise challenge entrenched "universalism" in denial of the fundamentally colonialist issue of France's past and present attitudes to the non-white world, is tantamount to advocating Islamist attacks on the French Republic and its "values". Again in the academic study of China, the accusation echoes an old-fashioned leftist claim that those such as this author fail to understand reality because we are focused on the "cultural" (the non-material, imaginaries and discourse), while those making the accusation are realists, basing themselves on economics and the material. And yet, as I attempted to show in a recent article on the displaying of China and things Chinese by Western white institutions and scholars, there remains a problem of some magnitude that has not been adequately addressed.10
The campaign against so-called "Woke" in France has been promoted by the right, and in particular has become the hobby-horse of former "socialist" politician Manuel Valls who poses as the champion of French laicism.11 In academic circles, Walter Mignolo and the Latin American vision of decolonization have been the prime targets in France with several recent attacks being launched on Latin American decoloniality, where the latter stands metonymically for decolonial thought in France.12
Major issues of French politics, in particular the position of postcolonial French subjects in metropolitan France or in still colonized Overseas Departments and territories of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, New Caledonia/Kanaky, Reunion and Mayotte, thus become taboo subjects. Emmanuel Macron, following this ideological trend in reaction to several African countries asking the French to pull out their troops, at the beginning of 2025 accused African countries of ingratitude: "Je crois qu'on a oublié de nous dire merci" (I think they forgot to thank us.)13 This ideological position was bolstered by the appointment of Manual Valls as Minister for Overseas, responsible for France's "former" colonies around the world.
China: A Decolonization Condemned to a Circularity of Failure
In Chinese studies, in the study of China, where sinological ideology still holds a certain sway, how can the past five hundred years of history of the place the West named China ever be adequately addressed without confronting the history of imperialism and colonialism? For, the story of what we in the West termed China from the sixteenth-century onwards, and of the polity that emerged first in the imaginary and then as a political institution in what is now China, is one first of colonization both material and intellectual, and then of local attempts to decolonize that were made from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Indeed, at a metalevel, the story of the past century and a half of the making of China the nation-state, is the story of a failed attempt at decolonization. To decolonize, to break free from the West's political and economic domination, the chosen path of nation-state sovereignty – as was the case with many a post-World War One liberation movement – meant that the task of Westernization first needed to be culminated. This translated as the self-defeating emulation of a West seen contradictorily from then until now as both demonic invasion, and utopian grand design whether that be American-style democracy or Marxist-Leninist utopia.14
New Focus
The refocussed ambition of my book, then, remains a discussion of a long moment in China's recent history from the beginning of the final quarter of the twentieth century to the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century; a span of fifty years.The half-century opens with the officially decreed end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The instant of uncertainty between the demise of Mao in September 1976 and the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 when Deng assumed the status of paramount leader, allowed a widespread intellectual and cultural effervescence, at least in urban China, and encouraged a new collective imaginary filled with optimism and the ambition re-found the modern nation-state.
The decade that followed Deng Xiaoping’s consolidation of power has been described as a 'long decade', but also as a ‘lost decade’. It was lost in the sense that the post-1980s regnant authorities wished it to be forgotten, with its import and its lived experience officially occulted ever since the massacre at Tiananmen. As with the rest of the revolutionary period of the People’s Republic of China, its recollection has been either manipulated or buried in silence. The memory of that decade has been abandoned even by many who lived through it. When writing China's Lost Decade, I attempted to record the optimism and immediacy of the 1980s. Now, especially given the ever more concerted and programmatic attempts of the Xi presidency to re-invent the past, the decade can be seen in a longer perspective. After all, three and half decades have past since the 1980s crashed into a bloody and sorrowful ending. In the decade that followed, a sentiment of irony and injustice hovered over attempts to account for the events of 1989. The lamentable fate of the people of the largest Communist country on earth who had been the first to challenge what was still essentially a Stalinist order stood out starkly against the rapid, subsequent fall of all of the USSR’s satellite states in Eastern Europe that same year, and in 1991 the winding-up of the Soviet Union itself. But in hindsight, that “New World Order” heralded by George Bush Sr. failed to materialize, or rather what it proved to be was far from the promised installation of what then was understood as American-style democracy. In retrospect, its shining promise could never have been realized around the globe for in reality it depended and depends on a rapport de forces in which United States interests are privileged and dominant. The storyline that was propagated was based on the premise that the mere absence of Stalinist-style communism, the adoption of more capitalist-friendly economics would deliver democracy, or at least the minimalist version of democracy that is Western liberal democracy. And yet in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, autocratic regimes came to the fore throughout former Eastern Europe, and increasingly nationalist-populist regimes are taking control of nation-states throughout the former Third World. New alliances have emerged stretching from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing and to Pyongyang. Communism may have fallen, but its geopolitical heartlands have emerged as authoritarian as ever. Thus, to understand the 1980s and the decades that followed we need to look again at the preceding decades; the Mao-dominated China of 1949-1975, which now constitutes a shorter period than the thirty five years that followed: 1989-2025.
This view of China's twentieth-century – my critics would call it "culturalist" – does not seek to challenge the centrality of political economic questions in China's recent history, it does intend to foreground the fact that in the process of building and consolidating a nation so much depends on cultural and ideological construction and that the importance of, what Marx classically termed, the "superstructure" of culture and other non-material institutions has been as important as the economic base. In so saying, there is no intention here of defending Mao Zedong's and Mao's followers' attempts to make ideology and culture supreme. Here the desire is rather to illustrate the power of ideology to motivate China's intelligentsia and the historical importance of this culturalist perspective in its intellectual imaginary.
The reimagined book maintains the serious objective of attempting to apprehend, to “make sense” of, a stretch of time in a "post-historical" world, or rather in a present moment marked by an abandonment of historicity as a public and intellectual priority. In China, this non-historicity is pushed to the extreme of an almost total effacement of the pre-capitalist revolutionary past by the acrobatic strategies of China's authorities.
Henri Lefebvre in his 1970 La Fin de l'histoire (The end of history) wrote that history would “not simply be institutionalized but consolidated repressively." He predicted that the "course of time will be fixed by decree and the past will be programmed.”16 His 1970s vision of the future is already our present.
The fact that my earlier analysis – China Imagined (2018) – is not only still relevant but has been outstripped by the course of world political events demonstrates, if that were still needed, how difficult it is for the academic writer to keep up, to stay abreast of the rapid and widespread and constant flow of words, largely of misinformation, masquerading as fact and history.
At the very least, the current situation obliges us to confront our theoretical paradigms with reality, and to as plainly as possible "put out there" the quintessence of our understanding however partial or feeble it may be. This should be easier for older scholars and thinkers, if we don’t know what we came to say – to paraphrase Raymond Williams – by now, we never will. This newly imposed logic is guiding this reformulated book project, and without doubt means my monograph as conceived in its original form will not see the light of day. But, the world is full of abandoned books. If it was not the book that was needed, another is now taking its place.
1 Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness, Honolulu University of Hawai'i Press: London, Routledge, 2002; e-book Taylor & Francis 2021 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315028996, see also https://archive.org/details/chinasunlimitedm0000leeg, pp 5-6.
2 Chinas Unlimited, pp 5-6.
3 Chinas Unlimited, p.5.
4 China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power, London, Hurst, December 2018.
5 Chinas Imagined, p. 169.
6 "America is neither dream, nor reality, it is hyperreality. It's a hyperreality because it is a utopia which since the beginning was lived as if accomplished. Everything is real, pragmatic, here, and everything leaves you dreaming." Jean Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Grasset, Livre de Poche, biblio, essais, 1986) p. 32. Cited in Lee, Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers (1996), Chapter 8.
7 China Imagined, pp.169/170.
8 China Imagined, p. 170.
9 See Florent Villard and Gregory B. Lee, "'Islamo-Leftism' – Hobby Horse of the Ideologues of French Universalism", Postcolonial Politics, 6 July 2021 https://postcolonialpolitics.org/islamo-leftism/
10 Gregory B. Lee, "Narrating and Displaying China and Chineseness: White Dominance, White Saviourism and Decoloniality", Postcolonial Politics, 6 August 2023, https://postcolonialpolitics.org/narrating-and-displaying-china-and-chineseness-white-dominance-white-saviourism-and-decoloniality/
11 Mathieu Dejean, "Dix ans après l’attentat de « Charlie Hebdo », le camp laïciste étend ses attaques à toute la gauche", Mediapart, 9 janvier 2025 à 20h09; https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/politique/090125/dix-ans-apres-l-attentat-de-charlie-hebdo-le-camp-laiciste-etend-ses-attaques-toute-la-gauche.
12 See the collectively written (Pierre Gaussens, Gaya Makaran, Daniel Inclán, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Bryan Jacob Bonilla Avendaño, Martín Cortés et Andrea Barriga) Critique de la raison décoloniale : Sur une contre-révolution intellectuelle [Critique of decolonial reason: On an intellectual counter-revolution] translated into French from the Spanish by Mikaël Faujour and Pierre Madelin, Paris, Éditions L’échappée, 2024.
See also the original Spanish edition Gaya Makaran & Pierre Gaussens (coord.), Piel blanca, máscaras negras. Crítica de la razón decolonial, México, Bajo Tierra ediciones y Centro de investigaciones sobre América Latina y el Caribe-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2020, and the commentary by Ludovic Lamant, "Les pensées décoloniales d’Amérique latine violemment prises à partie depuis la gauche" [Decolonial thinking in Latin America violently attacked from the left], Mediapart, 27 December 2024 https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/271224/les-pensees-decoloniales-d-amerique-latine-violemment-prises-partie-depuis-la-gauche
13 Emmanuel Macron, Discours du Président de la République à l'occasion de la Conférence des Ambassadrices et des Ambassadeurs, 6 janvier 2025, available on the website Elysée, https://www.elysee.fr/front/pdf/elysee-module-23793-fr.pdf
The condition of "denial" that shrouds the issue of France's colonial past, and its present, has recently been magisterially addressed by Edwy Plenel in "Le négationnisme français des crimes coloniaux : La négation des crimes contre l’humanité qui ont accompagné la colonisation française fragilise notre démocratie en faisant le lit des idéologies racistes, suprémacistes et fascistes", Mediapart, 13 March 2025 https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/130325/le-negationnisme-francais-des-crimes-coloniaux
14 It's worth noting that Lenin himself had denounced the pursuit of utopia: "Utopia is a Greek word, composed of ou, not, and topos, a place. It means a place which does not exist, a fantasy, invention or fairy-tale. In politics utopia is a wish that can never come true—neither now nor afterwards…" V.I. Lenin, written in October 1912, first published in Zhizn No. 1, 1924. See Lenin Collected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, Volume 18, pp. 355-359.
15 See Gregory B. Lee, China's Lost Decade - Cultural politics and poetics 1978-1990: In place of history, Lyon, Tigre de papier, 2009; Brookline, MA, Zephyr, 2012 (revised edition).
16 Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1970, p. 209.