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Mitter's study argues that until the late Qing, concepts of international order and justice were alien to China's imperial rulers. Subsequently, however, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China perceived itself to be the victim in an unjust world of aggressive, powerful, Western states. Contemporary Chinese perceptions of a just international order have been shaped by such past experiences and encompass a strong element of restitution. Its justice claims start with the Chinese state itself rather than with the needs of a broader global community.

This chapter focuses on Butler's writings after the Second World War and his efforts to confront the impact of totalitarian thought on Western society. It offers close readings of some of his most prominent post‐war writings, and in the process, introduces his preoccupation with exposing the compulsory conversion campaign waged against Orthodox Serbs in Croatia during the war. It accounts for how this concern led to the most traumatic experience of his public life, the so‐called ‘Papal Nuncio Incident’ of 1952. It explores his concern with the creeping anonymity of modern life, exploited by totalitarian regimes before and during the war but also evident after the war in the capitalist West. His travels in China in the fifties, as well as in Europe and the USA in the sixties, confirmed for him this assessment.

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 discusses three 2005 films made by independent directors: Gu Changwei’s Peacock, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams, and Li Shaohong’s Stolen Life. A central character in the three movies is a young daughter who is alienated from her family, especially her working-class parents. The parents find it difficult to understand their children who have grown up under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and openness,” which has transformed a “puritan” Maoist socialist China into a country infested with all the malignant ills of new Chinese capitalism. In such a postsocialist family drama, the female protagonist is drawn into a traumatic conflict with her working-class father, who seems to embody a repressive old socialist regime in an economic and moral decline. The chapter then analyzes the three films in terms of “postsocialist trauma,” a psychological and emotional trauma that a working-class Chinese family has to endure to survive new Chinese capitalism.