Quotes from Xudong Zhang

Unlike modernism...postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation is hinged on a sophisticated, almost cynical, sense that all the good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been tried, somewhere, somehow, and sometime before, and what is left for contemporary men and women is nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation in the most literal sense.

M]ore and more scholars are ready to take the Chinese economy neither as an ad hoc, patchy, and half-measure free-market economy, nor as a chaotic, corrupt, and fading command system, but as an economic, social, and political alternative in the making, an experiment whose provisionality proves to be the norm.