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Even if we accept the periodization marked by the date June Fourth 1989, we can also remark that Chinese avant-garde writers had already anticipated the arrival of posthistory before the world-appalling carnage of Tiennamen Square. “After June Fourth” can then serve as the Chinese postmodern index to the terminus of Far Eastern Marxism in its excessively ideological form—Maoism.
But also, the deconstruction of this ideological form had already been undertaken in the Chinese avant-garde literature which began to emerge in the mid-eighties.
It is not that the Chinese avant-garde witnessed the historical calamity and then wrote. On the contrary, it is June Fourth itself which functioned as a moment of witness to traumas already voiced by these avant-garde writers. The writing in question took on the unconscious effects of the discursive violence of the Cultural Revolution. The catastrophe of June Fourth took place in a cultural atmosphere already decayed by the Cultural Revolution.
Chinese writers and poets of the avant-garde circle—Can Xue, Xu Xiaohe, Yu Hua, Meng Lang, Wan Xia, to name just a few—all belong to the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution, their individual lives each marked by intense ideologically imposed duress. This duress, as a psychic assault, turns out to be the trauma each of them seeks to master.
My emphasis on the ideological quality of Chinese Marxism is certainly not intended to underestimate the political function of its claim to be the source of universal knowledge. I want to stress the fact that Marxism was more pervasively—and also perversively—“moralized” by the apparent propaganda of the party apparatus. It was imposed as a faith, as something beyond recognition or reason. In this sense, the discursivity of