Research abstract

Today not a movie, but my updated research abstract! Please dont be shy and comment when you dissagree or when you think that something is not clear (enough). I intend to provide this (probably with some ammendments) to compete for a scholarship at my uni.

Thanks a lot for any comments!

Introduction

My interest in analysing China’s post-modernity (through a progressive political-economic framework) is the logical consequence of the position I fulfilled as an urban planner in Changzhou (Jiangsu province). During my employment for the Chinese and German government I became aware of the intrinsic relation between China’s changing landscape and its paradoxical political-economic apparatus. This area of study has however been largely neglected by both economic sociologists and anthropological political-economists. I believe that an in-depth and progressive study on the functioning of capitalism and the effects it has on China’s modernisation project could allow for a greater understanding of its impact on the country’s urban society.

Background

China’s contemporary development towards a stage of modernity is in this research considered to be taking place under a dynamic, yet contradictory synthesis of a deceased communist ideology and a political apparatus which increasingly relies on a capitalist logic. A paradoxical situation, described as an ‘authoritarian state capitalism’, which compels the country to increasingly transition into spaces of modernity and post-modernity. These historical stages, which are understood to be temporal transitions within the expansive rationale of capitalism, have provided an environment for both an increasing commodification of the natural word and a cognitive instrumentalisation of human perceptions and aesthetics.

Hypothesis

The discussion on the country’s long and still ongoing twentieth century, characterised by its questioning of how to modernise, will serve as the key to an unlocking of the hypothesis that China’s integration in the world economy (and its concomitant embrace of the capitalist logic for the purpose of political stability) fundamentally alters the landscape of China into layers of a reproductive post-modernity. The validity and nature of this presupposition will be tested empirically on the basis of the increasing influence of European architecture on China’s urban landscape. The simulacrum of ‘Europeanness’ into an ever growing number of Chinese cities marks the growing estrangement of inhabitants from their local habitat and underpins the growing influence of capitalist Reason into the consciousness of China’s population.

Epistemology

The epistemological approach of this research finds its origin in the historical transcendence of the dialectic which is central to the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of capitalism and its instrumental reasoning. This historical narrative finds its support in a robust theoretical framework, which from the very onset of this research will conceptualise both the dialectics of capitalism and its role in the path to modernisation and post-modernity. Evidently, this causes the necessity to revaluate Marxism along lines which would enable it to come to terms with China’s internal contradictions in a world which is said to be increasingly ‘globalised’. The intended makeover, which will find its support in the works of progressive and philosophical Marxian theory, is not a rejection of Marxism, but rather a recognition and acceptance of its validity over the deterministic economic base that is increasingly intertwined with its super-structure.