Meng Jinghui and His Contemporary Avant-Garde Drama

Contemporary Chinese culture is imbued with many postmodern elements. Some of those elements are, for example, the postmodern features reflected in avant-garde literary texts that have exhibited antagonism against mainstream culture and conformist language in terms of engaging with “playfulness,” “pastiche,” and “parody” (Sheldon Lu 1996: 145). This observation may contradict Fredric Jameson’s (1991) claims that postmodernism usually exists in highly developed capitalist countries, however, the actual existence of representative postmodern features in contemporary Chinese cultural expression verifies Edward Said’s conviction that “like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel” (Said 1983: 226), and thus postmodernism has become a universal phenomenon rather than a specific one. Unlike the wholesale transformation of Western postmodernism as a concept containing philosophical thought, (such as those of Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault), socioeconomic transformation, (such as postFordism as proclaimed by David Harvey), and artistic experimentation, (as explored by Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon), the Chinese postmodern concept largely concerns itself with using the postmodern ethos to “dissolve” and “decenter” the “hegemonic discourse,” such as that of enlightenment, humanism, or subjectivity, and to deconstruct any “central discourse” and any “authoritative ideology” (Sheldon Lu 1996: 146).