The production, consumption, and state control of Chinese TV serial drama can be seen as an instrument of power and profit maximization as well as a medium for mass education and homogenization in the form of popular culture. The serial drama Woju 蜗居 (Dwelling narrowness) (2009) exemplifies the ways in which a prime-time TV serial in twenty-first-century China is a politically, socially, and commercially significant enterprise. Since the 1980s, prime-time serials have emerged as a distinctly successful medium with and through which the Chinese party-state exercises ideological control by entertainment rather than oppression. Indeed, not only did Woju enjoy huge audience popularity, it also benefited from considerable tolerance of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), which, according to the website Danwai, allowed the drama to “slip” through its guidelines.

This essay departs from the figure of exoticism to theorize chinoiserie for the twenty‐first century, so we may better address the new realities and forces at work in the context surrounding the (re)creation and redefinition of the “orient.” The paper takes as its focus the cult of posthumous Mao that became fervent in the 1990s and has since the turn of the millennium created a nexus in which global capitalism and “effective authoritarianism” negotiate conflicting interests and, together, create a line of development in their search for a global modernity. I argue that Chinese state capitalism in the twenty‐first century took advantage of cultural consumerism made possible by global capital while working upon and with the genealogy of orientalism, of chinoiserie, in the so‐called West. I seek to show that the commodity industry of posthumous Mao today witnesses chinoiserie's transformation from a western fantasy into a policed imagination – a chinoiserie with Chinese characteristics. For the first time, perhaps, in the case of “China,” the orient constructs itself, for its own purposes, as the “Orient,” the product of a new chinoiserie that serves the state along the lines of its nationalist and universalizing ambitions.

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The notion that Deng Xiaoping had kept the PRC afloat both in Mao Zedong’s collapsing economy and away from the former Soviet Union’s suicidal “path to freedom” enjoys some popularity today. “To date, no socialist country had successfully—and without serious disruptions—made the shift from a planned economy to a sustained open, market-based economy,” writes Ezra F. Vogel. This essay reviews Vogel’s book, entitled Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. The essay has two tasks. The first is to look at how Vogel’s narrative identifies China’s recent “transformation” into a global economic power with Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Specifically, it lays out how Vogel celebrates Deng’s role as “the general manager” of China’s post-1978 “opening” and in so doing defines the temporal relation between China’s modernity and global capitalist modernity. The second task of this essay is to place Vogel’s interpretation of China against the ideological hegemony of global capitalism. Vogel enjoys marked success in spinning a legend out of China’s experience of “transformation” because, importantly, he contributes to the discourse of global capitalism. In Vogel’s legend, Deng appears as the corrector of Mao, who set China on the road to recovery and “rise.” What is missing in this legend are the legacy of China’s revolutionary past and the darker sides of Deng’s career, most notably June 4. In evaluating Deng’s historical place, Vogel ensures that people “concerned about human life and the pursuit of liberty” “know” about Deng’s contribution to China’s “spectacular” economic growth.