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Zweig’s female protagonists have become famous in China as the “Zweig-style female figures” (Ciweige shi de nüxing xingxiang). Chapter Five asks what role the portrayal of femininity has played in Zweig’s poetics and their reception in post-Mao China. Employing a longstanding rhetoric that correlates the status of society and the status of women, Chinese critics argued that the depiction of suffering, emotional, and self-sacrificing female figures was the most powerful tool in Zweig’s critique of bourgeois society. Similar to female Chinese writers of the 1980s, such as Zhang Jie, feminist intellectuals thus started to return to a seemingly anachronistic concept of femininity. In this way, however, they were able to express their rejection of the Maoist gender policy and its promotion of gender sameness, thus also supporting a new regime that was eager to distance itself from its Maoist past. A discussion of how Zweig’s “women novellas” also crossed the Taiwan Strait and served the leadership under Deng Xiaoping in its new “peaceful” strategy to promote reunification concludes the chapter.

The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the 1950s through the1980s, showing that Chinese socialist culture participated in an imagination of the future shared across the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. Overcoming distinctions between mental and manual labor was central to the Maoist vision of a future society. Various science-related genres considered this issue, especially at moments of intensified utopian aspirations: the Great Leap Forward (late 1950s) and the beginning of the Reform Era (late 1970s and early 1980s). While narratives of the Great Leap Forward glorify physical labor, post-Mao science fiction subverts this hierarchy by associating manual labor with vulgarity, primitive stages of human evolution, and with defective female robots. The laboring body becomes the residue of a technological regime about to be overcome.

This chapter reviews the things the author has learned about the Tibetans. It presents a record of her interview with one of her friends, Kazang, and takes a look at the Tibetans' Buddhist revival efforts in post-Mao China, re-examining the gender dynamics among Tibetans and the gendered nature of the post-Mao Buddhist revival. The chapter also considers the configuration of sex and gender categories among Labrang Tibetans, and the socioeconomic encounters since the founding of the Labrang monastery.

This chapter examines Jia Zhangke’s “home” trilogy: Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), Xiao Wu (1997), and Platform (2000), which take a symbolic man’s journey across a ruined post-Mao China. The first shot of Xiao Shan Going Home is a wood block print that depicts a young man facing Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen, and in this print, the late chairman appears like a ghostly father figure to the bewildered youth. In an introductory sequence of Xiao Wu, however, the wandering protagonist’s theft on a bus is intercut with Mao’s portrait hanging at the driver’s seat. Here the irony is quite clear: without Mao’s guidance, the country has turned pathetically “lawless,” especially for the lost young generation that concerns the Sixth Generation directors. In a similar fashion, Platform begins with a stage performance titled A Train Traveling toward Shaoshan, meaning a pilgrimage to Mao’s birthplace.

Through reviewing the development of plastic surgery from Republican China to contemporary China, this chapter discusses how plastic surgery was transmitted from the West and adopted into China’s social and political settings. How plastic surgery was appropriated into China’s social contexts demonstrates that the boundaries crossed over are not only regional, but also national, political and ideological.