Humanities scholarship has long engaged Bourdieu’s relevance to the modern Chinese literary field. Hockx (1999; 2003) identifies features of modern Chinese literary production that Bourdieu’s model does not fully capture: the relative fluidity of stylistic boundaries, the close linkage between authors’ personal characteristics and interpretations of their texts, and the pursuit of distinction through collective rather than individual agency. He further proposes political capital as a decisive vector in struggles over literary legitimacy. Marco Fumian (2009) argues that the limited autonomy of Chinese literary production in the 1980s and 1990s was shaped by the interaction between the official literary system and market mechanisms, with claims to autonomy functioning largely as rhetoric. Shao Yanjun (2003) similarly notes that this partial literary autonomy emerged from a temporarily relaxed political climate and deferred neoliberal restructuring, as writers remained institutionally tied to socialist work units.
More than two decades later, the Chinese cultural field has transformed dramatically, from the global recognition of elite writers such as Mo Yan to the rapid diversification of popular cultural production spanning web novels and video games. Sun and Liang (2024) draw on Bourdieu’s taxonomy of capital to examine the author–translator–publisher relationship in the canonization of Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction. Wu and Yi (2021) analyze the interplay of economic, cultural, symbolic, and social capital in the globalization of Chinese web novels. At the same time, scholars of premodern China have begun mapping elite cultural production through a Bourdieusian lens: Anna Shields’s One Who Knows Me (2015) explores mid-Tang literati strategies of identification and differentiation in the pursuit of literary fame, while Manjun Zhang’s dissertation Play and Prestige (2024) investigates how prestige was produced and circulated during the Wei-Jin period through the playful ludification and carnivalization of elite social interaction.
Against this backdrop, the session extends Bourdieu’s model beyond literature to encompass painting, mass media, cinema, and video games, while reflecting critically on adjustments required by particular socio-politico-historical conditions. Xiaoqing Wang returns to the first half of twentieth-century China to trace how the aesthetic nude, introduced from Western art, became a legitimate artistic category at institutional, symbolic, and material levels. Her paper engages critically with Bourdieu’s notion of legitimation alongside Shapiro and Heinich’s paradigm of artification, suggesting a more complex process than Bourdieusian recognition of a new artistic style. Renren Yang interrogates Bourdieu’s lack of sustained engagement with mass media in his model of literary consecration, proposing an analysis of the meta-capital exercised by mass media in the field of literary production. Tracing the delivery interfaces of literature from printed pages and theatrical stages to televisual and electronic screens in twentieth-century China, Yang examines how these interfaces facilitate or constrain the emancipation of celebrity authorship. Michael O’Krent examines videogame productions by designers in China and Taiwan since 2015, delineating the tension between aesthetic autonomy and political commitment in what he calls the avant-garde field of sinophone videogame production. This field is caught between games that accumulate cultural capital by subverting state political mythologies and those that accumulate it by promoting state-sanctioned narratives, with both camps deploying innovative designs. Jun Fang amends Bourdieu’s framework for transnational contexts by examining China–Hollywood film coproduction. Fang demonstrates how global creativity is organized not only through capital-driven competition and domination, but also through “asymmetrical collaboration”: a negotiated process unfolding at aesthetic, structural, occupational, and ideological levels through which participants in different art worlds form an integrated yet uneven network to coproduce cultural objects for heterogeneous global audiences.
Michel Hockx, an expert on modern Chinese literary communities, their products and values, and their relationship with the state, will serve as presider and respondent. He will lead a discussion on the challenges and strategies of sustaining field-specific symbolic values such as artistic autonomy and creative freedom while negotiating the state, the market, and global geopolitics amid growing uncertainty. Four papers will be circulated in advance for the respondent to read. Each presenter will speak for no more than 10 minutes, followed by a 10-minute response from the discussant, ensuring approximately 15-20 minutes for audience questions and discussion.