This ambitious work offers a comprehensive mapping of the cultural landscape of China in the late twentieth century. By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the book dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era post-cold war, postsocialist, and postmodern in China s history. The author defines the emergent logic of Chinese postmodernity within a dominant system of global capitalism and points to the central role of the transnational flow of visual culture in the establishment of local and national identity. The Chinese case demonstrates that the old conceptual scheme of Euro-American postmodernism versus Third World national culture is no longer feasible.