Professor He Guimei is a quintessential academic. She has spent virtually her entire academic life at Peking University, advancing all the way to her Ph.D. and professorship since being accepted into the prestigious Beijing institution’s Chinese Department as an undergraduate in 1989.

Despite her extended time studying literature, the 55-year-old has never confined herself to “pure literature.” Instead, she advocates expanding what she calls “the imagination of the humanities” to better situate literary questions within the broader matrices of social structures and understand contemporary China from a more holistic viewpoint.

This approach has defined much of her academic career as she researched larger bodies of scholarship to examine narratives on what it means to be Chinese throughout history. Her books have explored Chinese literature from the 1940s to the 1990s, redefining the concept of “contemporary literature” itself and the complex forms of contemporary Chinese literary practices within a global framework.

With her book — “China Retold,” released in 2023 — He introduces a new dimension to her scholarship as she analyzes intellectual and cultural studies during 21st-century China. With a work focused on the present, she is much closer both in time and personal experience, writing that she is “both a participatory audience member and a reflective researcher.”

The modern standpoint has inspired a fresh take on Chinese literary studies. Now she argues that contemporary ideas and narratives around “China” are distinct from those of the 1990s and much of the 20th century. She challenges the framework of “Chineseness” at its core, highlighting a need to frame it in terms of civilization, rather than nation, and to change how we talk about tradition when constructing ideas of the present.

It’s a fascinating concept that could redefine the very idea of what it means to be Chinese in the literary world. To better understand her scholarship and the generational shift she has coined “civilization self-awareness,” Sixth Tone sat down with Professor He.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Sixth Tone: Professor He, the subtitle of “China Retold” is “Self-awareness of Civilization and the Research on Ideology and Culture in the 21st Century.” Could you explain “civilization self-awareness?”

He: “Civilization self-awareness” foregrounds a conscious recognition of China as a civilizational entity, rather than merely a nation‑state or an ethnic collective. It uses two main methods to construct a renewed narrative of China. First, to consider ways to establish Chinese subjectivity within global configurations and the modern world order — which entails reexamining modernization and clarifying what kind of modernization we’re seeking. Second, to understand China, moving beyond an “anti‑tradition” stance and instead linking antiquity and the present, interpreting today’s China through the longue durée of Chinese cultural formation and development.

Sixth Tone: Why do you consider this narrative new? Where does it differ most from the past?

He: The primary difference lies in attitudes toward traditional Chinese culture. Throughout the 20th century, we often struggled to peacefully engage with tradition. People would repeatedly ask: “Why is China not as modern as the West? Why have we not modernized?” A quintessential 20th‑century metaphor might be Lu Xun’s “iron house” (Editor’s note: Lu Xun’s description of the paradox of recognizing what he saw as the enclosed and backward nature of Chinese society, written in 1922). From that image to Chen Kaige’s 1980s film “Yellow Earth,” China was frequently depicted as a static, unchanging entity outside of time. In the 1980s, invoking “tradition” often triggered an almost reflexive sense of burden — even pathology — which impeded modernization.

Against this backdrop, sociologist Fei Xiaotong proposed the notion of “civilization self-awareness” in the mid- to late-1990s, defined as people within a given culture possessing awareness of its origins, formation, distinctive features, and developmental tendencies — without implying any restorative return. It rejected both a call to “go back” as well as programs of wholesale Westernization or “Otherization.” His framework emphasized that in an age of globalization and intercultural encounters, we must reinterpret how Chinese culture formed, how to characterize it, and how it might evolve.

For those of us born in the 1970s and intellectually maturing in the 1980s to 1990s, Fei’s theory opened a new exploratory path and a fresh narrative of China. Entering the new millennium, multiple influential scholars proposed new political and cultural vocabularies for articulating China. They share a common feature: taking “civilization” as the principal analytical framework for 21st‑century Chinese issues, because it is an interpretive category simultaneously encompassing the classical, the modern, and the contemporary.

Sixth Tone: I noticed that in “China Retold,” you devote considerable space both to sorting through those theories and to analyzing contemporary mass‑cultural products. Why this dual emphasis? How do you view the relationship between intellectual theories and broader cultural phenomena?

He: We must recognize that “civilization self-awareness” is not merely a shift within intellectual circles: It represents a broader transformation of national mentality. To a significant extent, government agencies, the cultural market, and popular identifications are all reengaging Chinese tradition.

This includes institutional practices that construct national image and soft power — such as policy support for guoxue (classical learning) or reinterpreting Confucianism and Confucius. It also encompasses how tourism, the film and television industry, and consumer culture within global economic circuits produce and consume “Chineseness.”

Institutional, theoretical, and market forces participate together, albeit in different ways, in the new narrative of China as a civilization. I describe the relationship between intellectual theories and cultural‑sphere phenomena as “resonance.” Through distinct modalities and trajectories, they coproduce a new cognitive framing of 21st‑century China. Two key dynamics drive the shift: externally, China’s growing presence in the global order; internally, the gradual shedding of a tragic, backward‑nation consciousness, generating new perceptual and cognitive modes of Chinese subjectivity.

Sixth Tone: You mentioned that Fei Xiaotong emphasized how “civilization self-awareness” was not about a push to “go back” or for “revival.” In your view, are current fixations on classical learning, tradition, and traditional clothing forms of revival? If not, why?

He: They do not constitute “revivals” in a restorative sense. They are reinvented traditions — selective reconstructions of elements, resources, and symbols of traditional culture within contemporary horizons and 21st‑century interpretive frameworks. The reconstructed forms differ fundamentally from their original historical configurations.

Such adaptive usage is common globally. Yet Chinese society differs in another respect: Due to civilizational continuity, many traditional practices have settled into daily life. People may perform them regularly without conscious reflection — what I call “unconscious action.” “Civilization self-awareness” seeks a shift to “conscious action” — practicing while interpreting, and adjusting traditions to contemporary relevance.

Sixth Tone: Is this renewed recognition of tradition mainly a result of China’s recent economic and national rise?

He: That is certainly a factor. The emergence of “civilization self-awareness” discourse is primarily a response to a new historical situation. China’s economic ascent has drawn intensified global attention. For China itself, shaping national image within this configuration requires cultural construction. In the interplay between the external gaze and internal self‑scrutiny, China’s multiplicity surfaces: an ancient civilizational power of 5,000 years, a socialist state with a revolutionary past, and a newly rising modern economic actor.

However, I would stress that this historical situation should not be reduced to a political-economic rise. More decisive, in my view, is the pattern of how economic globalization drives differentiation, recombination, and shifting identifications among domestic social groups.

In this sense, “civilization self-awareness” is both a method for asserting Chinese subjectivity globally and a conceptual path for integrating domestic groups and regional differences into a renewed Chinese identity.

Sixth Tone: Intellectuals may be striving for such integration, but in the broader culture, isn’t plurality more visible than unity? For instance, in 2023 and 2024, the two hugely popular TV dramas “The Long Season” and “Blossoms” both revisited the 1990s in utterly different styles. Are these distinct yet widely popular series also a form of reframing China?

He: Although there are phases of dominating tendencies in the intellectual world or the mass-cultural sphere, both are pluralist. It is hard to force unity or uniformity. Your assessment differs from mine: I think, in fact, the mass‑cultural field often shows a more pronounced tendency toward uniformity, perhaps because of the industrialized and typified nature of mass culture.

The two hit dramas you mentioned, “The Long Season” and “Blossoms,” were produced and broadcast close in time, and both involve retelling stories from the history of ’90s reforms. Stylistically, they indeed differ: director Wong Kar‑wai used an arthouse approach to make “Blossoms,” narrating the legendary story of a figure maneuvering a commercial jianghu (a semi-mythical, lawless land of rogues and heroes popularized in “The Legend of the Condor Heroes”). “The Long Season” employs the popular suspense‑drama format to tell the tragic story of a laid‑off worker in the 1990s.

However, that is only a difference in narrative style and focus. In fact, both dramas are stories that can only be told in the context of China’s 21st‑century rise. The key point is that only now can the market reforms, financial reforms, and state‑owned enterprise restructurings of the 1990s be told as a complete story. Don’t forget, the 1990s remained open-ended and thus hard to narrate for a long time. The content of the two dramas is the history of the 1990s, but their narrative mode and the emotions they express are those only the 21st century could produce. This is, of course, also a form of retelling China.

As (Italian idealist philosopher) Benedetto Croce said, “All true history is contemporary history.” Today’s context determines what — and how — we tell stories, especially in realistic mass‑cultural forms.

(Header image: A still from the 1984 film “Yellow Earth.” From Douban)