Identity and Nostalgia in Chinese Zhiqing Literature
Identity and Nostalgia in Chinese Zhiqing Literature

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary China has turned its recent traumatic history, namely, the Cultural Revolution, into a mere product of commodification, a good source of income based on elderly people’s memories of things past, or youngsters’ tendencies of reconstructing and reimagining it as a symptom of discontentment with the capitalist, alienating moral values. A dark moment of Chinese history has thus become the symbol of an idealized world, which, at the end of the 90’s, started creating a wave of pureblood nostalgia for it, especially among those very people and victims who experienced this gigantic human tragedy. The zhiqing generation, or the young intellectuals dislocated for hard labor and reeducation in remote parts of the Chinese countryside, transcend the painful memories about their own past and reinvent it through a kind and nostalgic light, within long series of equally nostalgic memoirs that boomed in the Chine literary landscape at the end of the 90’s. This essay tries to explore the socio-psychological reasons that led to such a flabbergasting attitude during the post-Mao era, at a time when China becomes more and more visible culturally and economically on the global scene.

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