Local Cadres, Collectivism, and the Allegory of Enlightenment: The Politics of Zhang Wei’s <i>The Ancient Ship</i>

Zhang Wei’s novel The Ancient Ship (Guchuan, 1986) was an important text of the Enlightenment campaign in the 1980s, but it deviates from the typical stance of the prevailing Enlightenment discourse that propelled the transformation toward individualization and de-collectivization. By reading this novel alongside other literary representations of local Communist cadres and delineating the genealogy of “protective cadres” and “predatory cadres” in socialist and reform literature, this essay examines Zhang Wei’s complex positioning within the reform discourse. Further, through a sociohistorical analysis of Zhang Wei’s imagination of a form of collective economy that is historically related to the township and village enterprises in the 1980s, this essay shows how Zhang Wei in The Ancient Ship presents an ambiguous longing for an alternative path of modernization entwined with a socialist past. This imagination of an alternative vision of modernity continues to influence Chinese society to this day.