UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates the crucial roles that the discourse and fantasies of a coming information society played in China's post-Mao transformations. In the late 1970s, "information" became a buzzword in both the official discourse of modernization and intellectual discourse of enlightenment, culminating with the introduction and translation of works by Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler as well as Toffler's visits to China in person. Reading across science fiction, modernist writing, films, scientific treatises, historical monographs and key intellectual debates, this project unearths a heretofore neglected history of China's participation in the global production and flows of discourses about "information," revealing the ideological entailments of "information" beneath its guise of neutrality, and most importantly, opening new possibilities for rethinking the historical and theoretical intermeshing between post-socialism and information discourses.

Chapter One outlines the historical background and my theoretical interventions. Chapter Two discusses the parallel crazes from the late 1970s onward for what was referred to as the "science of extraordinary powers" and qigong (a practice of breathing and meditation techniques based on Chinese philosophy) -- crazes which understood telepathy and other paranormal phenomenon as a key to the secrets of information transmission, and were rooted in a concurrent fascination with the centrality of information in the process of modernization. Examining how this scientific discourse was interwoven with the science fiction of the same period, I demonstrate the tension between the intellectual discourse of enlightenment and the technocratic rule of an information society, and reveal a new regime of controlling bodily affect as augured in these stories.

Chapter Three explores stories about robots in the context of Marxist humanist debates of the 80s, as well as the influx of Daniel Bell's and Alvin Toffler's "information theory of value" -- that value is no longer produced by labor but by information. These intellectual interests were concurrent with widespread discussions of the intelligentsia's status in the post-Mao restructuring of the division of labor. My reading of the linguistic characteristics of science fiction reveals that "information," presented as neutral, objective knowledge, allowed an increasingly specialized Chinese intelligentsia to advocate for their own autonomy. I am also engaging with the notion of "interface" in new media studies to rethink human-machine-communication in terms of affective labor, reflecting on current theoretical formulations of affective labor and interface in post-socialist context. By redefining interface as a productive site where communications between humans and machine-systems are constantly redefined, I argue that the notion of "human" also becomes fluid when merged by the way of the interface into information circuits.

The following two chapters focus on the new aesthetics of 1980s films. Chapter Four uncovers the intellectual ferment bridging the distinctive aesthetic of the fifth-generation films with a cybernetics-informed view of Chinese society represented by Jin Guantao's "ultrastable systems theory." Undergirding both the detached long-take aesthetic of the Fifth Generation and the scientific rationality of Jin's theory were a shared desire for modernization and a critique of Chinese culture as "an ultrastable structure of feudalism." I delineate how this view also influenced film critique and theories, which characterized Chinese cinema as "an ultrastable structure" mired in the "shadow-play" tradition and theatrical didacticism. The advocacy of "modernizing cinematic language" is examined against this backdrop. Ending this chapter with a close reading of Black Cannon Incident, I argue that its modernist cinematic language inadvertently provides a form for the structure of feeling in anticipation of the drastic changes as China was reincorporated into the global capitalism.

Chapter Five looks at how the proliferation of mediascapes and fantasies of new media technology expanded the very notion of cinema in this period. This effort to bring cinema into the "information age" and out of the confines of the theater, envisioned in both entertainment films and art films, generated a new aesthetic divorced from socialist realism and social realism, exploring instead the plasticity of cinema. This expanded, plastic cinema also provided a medium for fantasies and sentiments of this time, which on the one hand demonstrated the explosion of senses with the proliferation of media, and on the other hand signaled new ways of modulating affect that were increasingly channeled into marketization in post-socialist China.