This Companion provides the opportunity to devote equal attention to modern China's revolutionary and involutionary traditions. Involutionary (inward-looking) literary practices such as modernism, popular fiction and pastoral nativism are often defined in opposition to a simplistic, monolithic conception of revolutionary literature. Here we have a chance to instead explore the complexities of the revolutionary tradition in Chinese literary history. However inflated the place of revolutionary literature may be in standard Mainland literary histories, and no matter how self-important leftist writers and critics may have been, the social realist and critical realist approaches in fiction, drama and film, and the rhetoric of revolutionary romantic fervour in poetry and music had a central shaping influence on the development of modern Chinese literature. Change is the defining feature/theme of all of the significant types of literary creativity in modern China. The wide spectrum of modern literary impulses in China, including the vernacularization of writing, anti-traditionalism in ideology, the depiction of modes of consciousness or lifestyles never written about before, the investigation of social problems in the field (sometimes involving the author's participation), the desire to transform the consciousness of the reader, to devote literary creativity to fulfilling political aims, or to completely reject political aims - all this grand variety of literary difference boils down to the impetus to create something new, and is the heart of modernity in Chinese literature.

More than thirty million people of Chinese descent live in over one hundred different countries and territories as migrants, settlers and sojourners. Most would qualify to be part of the diaspora and, insofar as people identify themselves as Chinese or have that identity ascribed to them, it can be said that they are bearers of Chinese diaspora cultures. The assumption that they all have something in common stems from their origins, whether distant or recent, in China. But some of them left China only recently while others have ancestors who have lived outside China for generations, often in different countries and even on different continents. Thus it would be misleading to think of them as having much in common. Also, Chinese people settled in lands as far apart as Indonesia and Canada, Tahiti and the Netherlands. To suggest that the Chinese who have lived among such different host peoples share the same culture would be unwarranted. However hard some Chinese might have tried to stay the same wherever they went, evidence can be found that some of them have distinct cultures. Some are complex and interconnected cultures that have grown over centuries in different communities while others are peculiar to small clusters of families that still claim to be Chinese.

Socialism in China has a history of almost a century, from its origins in the 1890s to its gradual abandonment by the end of the twentieth century. The Communist Party of China (CCP) still claims to lead a socialist society, but this claim has gradually lost its plausibility since the 1980s. Memories of socialism linger, and the achievements of the socialist revolution are regularly invoked in defence of the Party's legitimacy. But socialism in any meaningful sense has little to do with the everyday lives of the people in a society that has become a workshop of global capitalism, and shows every sign of becoming an integral part of a culture of consumption that characterizes contemporary culture around the world - at least for those who can afford to join in with the relentless urge to consume. The following overview of socialism in China is guided by two premises that need to be spelled out at the beginning. First, the socialist revolution in China was from the start entangled in questions of nationalism and nation-building. This has encouraged some scholars to view socialism merely as one more expression of a national search for 'wealth and power'. This view, while by no means wrong, is one-sided in that it ignores the utopian hopes that played a part in dynamizing the Chinese revolution, not just the socialist revolution but the revolution in general. Socialism, however, provided a vision that promised to transcend the ills of contemporary society. It also offered a means to this end: social and cultural revolution, which from the origins of socialism appeared as two sides of the same coin.

Over the course of China's twentieth century, the dynastic system crumbled; the traditional literati-gentry elite disappeared; state-society relations were transformed several times; three revolutions - of 1911, 1928 and 1949 - created new systems of governance; and a modernizing nation-state emerged. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, an economically dynamic China looked very different from the vast agrarian empire that had survived into the twentieth century. In many ways, the reforms that were under way by the early 1980s could be considered a fourth revolution: China opened up markets, welcomed foreign investment, and developed business opportunities - resulting in double-digit annual growth that released millions from poverty and turned China into a major trading nation. Nonetheless, in both its successes and failures, contemporary China still shows many legacies of the past. Above all, the political drive to make China into a world power has its roots in the sociopolitical transformations of the late nineteenth century, when Chinese elites first resolved to follow the path of 'wealth and power'. A brief chapter on such a large subject can only present an outline of key developments. This chapter focuses on attempts to build a new nation by extending the 'rights and duties' of citizenship to previously disenfranchised groups over the first half of the twentieth century. It then briefly discusses the changes of the Maoist (1949-76) and reformist (1978-) eras. During the twentieth century, membership in the nation came to count as a - if not the - primary marker of identity, along with family, class and locality.

The abolition of the imperial examinations in China in 1905 heralded, among many other things, a significant change in the Chinese practice and understanding of literature. Prior to 1905, knowledge of literary texts and the ability to compose essays and poems were crucial components of the education of any man wishing to advance himself in society, as well as of the home education of many women from gentry families. After 1905, this direct link between literary reading and writing on the one hand and social status and power on the other gradually disappeared, as did the privileged access of men to public education. Although literature continued to be accorded high value within modern culture, its position in modern society became more marginal, but at the same time more autonomous. A literary scene emerged, populated by literary figures, including an increasing number of women, who were no longer literati, or scholar officials, but 'literary intellectuals' (a term coined by Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie). Despite the increasing marginality of literature within society as a whole, many literary intellectuals continued to attach great social and political value to literary work. A very influential modern view of literature, first articulated by Liang Qichao at the start of the century, saw writing and especially fiction as a useful tool for transforming readers' mentalities and thereby bringing about social and political reform, or revolution. Indeed, early statements of modernity in Chinese literature seem to have centred on the notion of revolution. Liang Qichao proclaimed a 'poetry revolution', a 'fiction revolution' and a 'drama revolution'.

This chapter takes up some of the main genres of modern Chinese culture that come under the general heading of music and performing arts. The traditional forms include traditional theatre (xiqu); traditional dance; folk songs (min'ge); narrative singing (shuochang or quyi); and traditional instrumental music (qiyue). Modern forms include the modern spoken play called the huaju; several other forms that were influenced greatly by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as opera (geju, literally 'song drama') and 'dance drama' (wuju); and music introduced from outside China, especially the West. Some attention will be given to how the main forms have developed since the early years of the twentieth century, and to how these forms interacted with the society and the politics of the day. The chapter will adopt a basically, though not entirely, chronological structure. However, it will make no attempt at a consolidated discussion of all these genres. Rather, it will use examples from them to illustrate important themes. Since the early years of the twentieth century, three in some ways related themes have dominated China's music and performing arts. These are: how to reform or preserve them to maintain their popularity and relevance; the ability of the performing arts to change society; and the dichotomy between Chinese traditional and Western or Soviet forms. Some new genres have emerged under Western influence, but they have not simply followed the original models exactly. Although many traditions persist into the twenty-first century, no previous century has witnessed more thorough-going change in China's music and performing arts than the twentieth century.

Since the mid-1990s, contemporary Chinese art has been increasingly visible in European, North American and Australian venues. While the same period has also seen an equally unprecedented interest in the art of many other non-Western countries, indicating a more general waning of Western-centred conceptions of artistic contemporaneity, the sheer abundance of recent Chinese art is particularly striking. While it has long been acknowledged in the West that China has its own highly distinctive visual culture, this has often been presented as a largely monolithic and timeless tradition, distinct from the concerns of Western art. European art has generally been seen as having developed over time, whether the focus has been on the emergence of coherent perspectival space during the Italian Renaissance or on the apparent movement towards abstraction and formal purity in the modern era. Chinese art, at least from the point of view of the non-specialist Western observer, has by contrast seemed relatively static in terms of both its subject matter and its technique. With the irruption of recent Chinese art into Western exhibition venues, both the sense of Chinese art as occurring in some other cultural space and the sense of it as somehow not really having a historical development are no longer tenable. Chinese art now clearly exists in the present tense, rather than offering some unchanging timeless tradition that provides an exotic backdrop against which the historical evolution of Western art can be viewed, and it is perceived as taking place within the same globalized arena for art as that occupied by its Western counterpart.

Cinema arrived in China as a foreign import a little over a century ago. Today, 'Chinese cinema' travels the world as a culturally defined national brand. The turnaround can be traced quite precisely. It originated with the breakthrough screening of Yellow Earth [Huang Tudi], directed by Chen Kaige and shot by Zhang Yimou, at the 1985 Hong Kong International Film Festival. This launched the Fifth Generation of Chinese films and filmmakers as an arthouse line for the 'Chinese cinema' brand. (The term 'Fifth Generation' is generally understood as referring to the 1982 graduates of the Beijing Film Academy.) Unlike other export moments, such as Bruce Lee in the 1970s, Yellow Earth opened the door for various kinds of Chinese films. The works of Taiwan New Cinema directors such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien found themselves on the same arthouse shelves as those of the Fifth Generation. Nearby, Hong Kong action films associated with John Woo and stars such as Chow Yun-Fat established a cult niche alongside the Bruce Lee kung fu corner. More recently, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon [Wohu Canglong, 2000] has taken the martial arts blockbuster out of the niche market and into the multiplex theatres.

Media and communications have played a crucial role in China's historic transformation since 1979, especially as China has become increasingly involved in the globalization process. Revolutions in information and communication technology have both empowered and weakened the state, and China's reform and opening up policies have ushered in an era of unprecedented autonomy and diversity in Chinese media and communication, influencing public opinion, public policy, political, ideological and socioeconomic changes in this country of over 1,300 million people. Once a complete propaganda vehicle of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the state, media in China have now become increasingly market oriented and profit driven. Television is arguably the most important medium in China's social and cultural life, providing over one billion viewers with news, information, entertainment, points of view and lifestyles. The emergence and phenomenal growth of the Internet in China, on the other hand, promises to bring the information revolution to bear on social change in a more intense, often unpredictable fashion. The number of Chinese Internet users has grown from around 100,000 in 1996 to over 120 million in 2006 (an annual growth rate of more than 200 per cent). Surrounded by controversy and at times outrage from Western societies over the state's censorship and crackdowns on political dissent in cyberspace, the Internet has become an indisputable alternative medium, providing news and voicing public opinion largely unavailable in the state-owned media.

'The saturation of cultural texts with metaphors of masculinity and femininity is nowhere more obvious than in the case of the modern, perhaps the most pervasive yet elusive of periodizing terms.' These introductory words of Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity could just as easily apply to the complexities of China's twentieth-century articulations of the modern as to the European texts of Felski's study. From the outset, they broadly suggest that both concepts - the modern and gender - have acquired meaning through reference to each other. At the same time, they hint at the difficulties in defining them. Neither the modern nor gender refers to fixed or stable entities of time, social practice or representation. Neither can be defined through a lens focused solely on the contours of European trajectories of modernity and gender. 'Alternative' modernities can be seen in the commercial developments of China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the images of domestic spaces that featured in Shanghai's commercial print culture of the 1920s, or in the formation of the student as a political subject of anti-colonial struggle in the early part of the twentieth century. The meanings and forms of femininity and masculinity that configure social relationships and cultural practices, bodies and spaces in China's modern history have similarly been the subject of extensive scholarly debate. What forms have femininity and masculinity taken in the constitution of Chinese modernity?

The Chinese people's desire to host the Olympic Games is nearly as old as the modern Games (established in 1896) themselves. As early as 1907, patriots in the Chinese YMCA promoted a campaign that linked physical education to national strength, posing three questions: “1. When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests? / 2. When will China be able to send a winning team to the Olympic contests? / 3. When will China be able to invite all the world to come to Peking for an International Olympic contest . . . ?” The first two questions would be answered at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and the third will be answered at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The first member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from the Republic of China, C. T. Wang (Wang Zhengting) was coopted in 1922. China sent its first team to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Up to three IOC members were allowed from the one country, so in order to maximize China's influence on the IOC, Wang recommended two more members; H. H. Kung (Kong Xianxi) was coopted in 1939 and Shou-yi Tung (Dong Shouyi) was the third member coopted in 1947. It shows the relative strength of China's regional position in international sport that, on the eve of the establishment of the PRC, there were only eight IOC members from Asia, and three of these were Chinese (three were from Japan and two from India).

By the start of the twenty-first century, China's status as a major international economic and political power was beyond dispute. China now manufactures everything from microchips to motor vehicles, and the 'Made in China' label is found in all corners of the world. Along with this economic influence, China's role in global political and cultural affairs is becoming both more significant and increasingly visible. China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics is just one of the more obvious manifestations of this impact. Chinese cultural products, ideas, customs and habits are steadily spreading around the world in the wake of China's economic and political reach. The chapters in this book explore the key domains in Chinese culture and reveal the dynamism produced by a formidable culture's interaction with both its own ancient, albeit never static, traditions and the flood of new global cultural influences. The connection between global economic and political weight and the changes in China's cultural realm are complex and profound. To understand contemporary China - an absolute necessity if one is to understand the world today - it is vital to appreciate the evolution of modern Chinese culture. Interest in Chinese literature, philosophy, cinema, qigong and other cultural artefacts around the world is stronger now than ever before. There has been a plethora of books about Chinese culture published in anglophone countries and a steady increase in students enrolling in courses on Chinese language and civilization.

I would like to approach Don DeLillo's relationship with media culture somewhat obliquely through Samuel Beckett's early thoughts on the aesthetic possibilities of nonexpression. On July 9, 1937, a young Beckett wrote to his friend Axel Kaun:

A certain reading of Beckett's oeuvre would suggest that these early thoughts on the goals of literature turned out to be a manifesto or a statement of intent. Beckett's works get shorter as his career progresses, in the main, working toward the extremely brief texts such as Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ping (1966), and Breath (1969). In these works Beckett appears to be abiding by his intention to come as close as possible to eliminating language. These bleached-out late works barely happen; they are works in which literature comes as close as it is perhaps conceivable to come to nonexpression and silence, works in which the nothingness that language struggles to disguise begins to “seep through.”

Don DeLillo once suggested that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy made him into the writer he became – shaped, that is, the novelist who wrote Libra (1988), a charged historical novel about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK. “As I was working on Libra,” DeLillo told an interviewer, “it occurred to me that a lot of tendencies in my first eight novels seemed to be collecting around the dark center of the assassination.” By the time he set to work on his first direct treatment of the assassination, an essay published in Rolling Stone under the title “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK,” DeLillo had already written at length of violence, conspiracy, and the seductive lure of paranoia. Libra, which followed DeLillo's breakthrough novel White Noise (1985), took a little more than three years to write, a remarkably short period of time given the extensive research the book demanded, and was published in 1988, in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. In Libra DeLillo approached recent American history directly for the first time, drawing from the evidence, testimony, and analysis compiled in the aftermath of Kennedy's murder. The novel recreates the traumatic moment in Dallas, the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (L 181), and offers, as the author's note appended to the first edition puts it, “a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years” (L 458). But the novel is more than just the imaginative recreation of a particularly important and troublingly elusive historical event; it is also a speculative study of the origins of our own historical and cultural moment.

Although celebrated as a great postmodernist, Don DeLillo resists the label. As he told an interviewer in 1998:

Reluctant to classify his work, DeLillo nonetheless admits an affinity to modernism. He has a point. Because DeLillo seeks the epic in the mundane, embraces a modernist avant-garde, writes a tightly controlled prose, and densely layers his allusive novels, modernism may be at least as important as postmodernism for understanding DeLillo's achievement.

For the richness of his language and the scope of his literary ambition, James Joyce looms largest in DeLillo's imagination. As he said in 1993, “it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history.” Although Joycean turns of phrase recur throughout his work, DeLillo's earliest novels make the most conspicuous allusions. In Americana (1971), for example, several major characters demonstrate detailed knowledge of either Ulysses (1922) or Finnegans Wake (1939).

When Don DeLillo was asked in a 1979 interview – the first he ever gave – why he shunned publicity and rarely spoke about his work, he replied, “Silence, exile, cunning, and so on.” He was quoting James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), wherein protagonist Stephen Dedalus famously vows to use those three “arms” to defend his art from the intrusions of nationalism, religion, and domesticity. DeLillo's novels about artists – Great Jones Street (1973), Mao II (1991), and The Body Artist (2001) – sustain a dialogue with these modernist, “Dedalian” aesthetic principles. Each novel depicts the lure of silence and exile, as each artist figure coils inward in order to spring outward, often with a new work that redefines his or her artistic practice.

This pattern indeed forms a link in an intertextual chain that leads back to the Greek myth from which Stephen takes his name. Daedalus was, of course, the artificer who built a nearly inescapable labyrinth for King Minos of Crete, where he kept the half-bull, half-human Minotaur and fed him human sacrifices. Taking one victim's place, the Athenian prince Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped afterward using a thread given to him by Minos's daughter, Ariadne. Later, Daedalus himself was imprisoned in the labyrinth but, by fashioning wings from feathers and wax, escaped with his son, Icarus. Failing to heed his father's warnings, Icarus flew too close to the sun; his wax wings melted and he fell into the sea. Daedalus subsequently put aside his wings, but after enviously murdering his clever nephew Perdix, he was transformed by Athena into a bird.