In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's "long 1990s," the tumultuous years between the 1989 and China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state's cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China's entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China's uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity.

Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political conflicts in China during the 1990s. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the postsocialist realism of the era through readings of Mo Yan's fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang applies the same keen insight to China's long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.

张旭东，纽约大学（NYU）比较文学系、东亚学系教授，北京大学“长江学者”讲座教授，重庆大学人文社会科学高等研究院名誉院长（兼职），纽约大学-东京大学-北京大学-华东师范大学联合国际批评理论中心（ICCT）主任。中文著作包括《批评的踪迹》、《纽约书简》、《全球化时代的文化认同》、《对话启蒙时代》、《我们时代的写作》等。译有《发达资本主义时代的抒情诗人》、《启迪》。编有《晚期资本主义时代的文化逻辑》、《后现代主义与中国》（英文）、《中国何处去——当代中国思想论争》（英文）、《在全球化时代反思启蒙》（英文）等。