Culture Heroes 文化英雄 1: Shifty Uses

Dai Jinhua. "Culture Heroes of the 1990s: the Cases of Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun." In Writing Culture Heroes 書寫文化英雄.


What is a 'Culture Hero' 文化英雄? A stub in the Chinese wikipedia explains the term refers to heroes who have changed the world, such as the Yellow Emperor.

In a section from her essay on the subject, Dai Jinhua focuses on the ways that the reputations of modern cultural heroes including Chen Yinke, Gu Zhun, Qian Zhongshu, Wu Mi, Wang Xiaobo and others become stereotypical symbols for values that can be supplied by younger authors. They become pawns in the 1990s struggle for a dominant set of humanistic values in China.

Stereotypical and even inaccurate portions of a culture heroe's biography is often commonplace in 1990s humanities writing -- especially mainstream, popular portraits of humanities scholars. This is because general readers don't investigate the historical accuracy of what they read, but are willing to believe commonly told stories. Figures like Gu Zhun, Qian Zhongshu and Wu Mi had by the 1990s become 'brand names.' In 1998 two scholars, Han Dong and Zhu Wenzhi, protested that younger writers were making these 'cultural icons' 文化偶像 into 'man-beating stones' 打人的石頭 (i.e., unreasonable and innacurate examples for uncomplimentary comparison, weapons in character criticism). The backlash against this was considerable, with dozens of scholars launching into romantic paeans to the virtues of their favorite culture heroes. Over the course of many publications, 1997-1999, stereotypical conceptions of major figures solidified and became simply standard in meanstream media. Dai Jinhua:

During the 1990s, culture heroes as a topic of debate expanded from the most restricted field of production -- scholarly -- to the next field, highbrow literature, and finally they entered mainstream media. Subject to the forces of both nationalism and market reforms, the figure of the culture hero became more and more eroded, stripped. As culture heroes came more and more in the 1990s to symbolize a characteristic set of values, their use-value in political and cultural discussion also increased.

“文化英雄”作為90 年代文化圖景中重要的一環，從“學術界話題”過渡到“知識界討論”，再衍生為“大眾文化現象”，在國家意識形態和市場意識形態的雙重作用下，人物原型的意義發生了極大的磨蝕和剝離，眾多的解讀策略共同完成了對“90年代文化英雄”的構建，被符號的這些形象又為不同的使用方法提供了豐富和有效的精神資源和文 化依據。