When 20-year-old Guo Jingming published his first novel Enchanted City, in 2003, a myth was immediately created. The symbols communicated both by the novel and by the author provoked a deep identification among the readers, who were, for the most part, middle and high school students of the urban middle stratum. Guo Jingming, as many were to proclaim, had given representation to the sensibility of a whole generation. But what were the specific conditions that spurred the emergence of such a sensibility? What was the social dimension that lay beneath the construction of Guo Jingming’s myth? In order to answer these questions, my essay interprets Guo Jingming’s parable in the framework of the material and ideological reality of the “socialist market economy.” It does so, firstly, examining the circumstances that contributed to constitute the subjectivity of the first generation of urbanites who were born under the “one-child policy” and attended the competitive and selective national school system. Secondly, it seeks to reconstruct the parable of Guo Jingming as a writer and a phenomenon of mass culture, who, being produced and promoted by the Chinese culture industry, contributed in turn to the dissemination and promotion of the “new” dominant ideology of the Chinese “socialist market.”
All representations of the Other, adopt similar strategies, which emphasize the difference between the Other and Self, and are recognized as symbolic expressions of supposed superiority of Self over the Other, thus serving to legitimize any attempts to civilize or rule the Other. Such strategies, often applied by the West to describe the uneven East- West relations in the colonial literary discourse, can also be found in contemporary Chinese literary representations of “minority nationalities.” Representations of landscape are among the most important symbols that are used in the process of “othering” of the non-Self, and are especially relevant for Chinese representations of Tibet. The article examines the representation of Tibetan landscape in Chinese and Tibetan literatures, from the 1980s, written by both Han and Tibetan authors. Han writers have used the Tibetan landscape as a symbolic expression of the imaginary distance between themselves and Tibetans, while Tibetan authors stress the aspects that can help in an identification with the environment. The analysis reveals the symbolic function of landscape in relation to the newly (re)constructed Tibetan identity within the context of the multiethnic China at the end of the 20th century.