Cultural Tours and the Spiritual Home: On Yu Qiuyu and Contemporary Chinese Cultural Essays

Abstract

The essay explores the public social dimension of the “great cultural essays” as a popular post-socialist genre. It looks into the genre’s emergence and popularity as part of the making of a middleclass taste in contemporary China and its claim to a re-imagined cultural national inheritance. In particular, the discussion focuses on the example of essayist Yu Qiuyu and examines the implications of his successful transformation of an obsolete historical “Culture” into a desirable commodity that offers spiritual home to the aspiring and successful of a “Greater China”.