Abstract:

In China' s mainland, as a largescaled movement of learning and ideology, cultural studies didn' t commence actually until the late 1990s and the early 20th century. And up to 2004, there was a "boom of cultural studies", which still continues. Chiefly, there are two reasons for this: first, the requirement of system operation for research or academy; secondly, the stimulation of social reality. In a sense, the latter is more important and more complex. It was in this context that, in Shanghai, not only the research and teaching of cultural studies but also the accompanying academic system operation started out one after the other. In 2001, Shanghai University established the Center for China' s Contemporary Cultural Studies, which is the first institute of cultural studies in China' s mainland. And during the subsequent four years, the similar institutions were gradually established in all the other universities in Shanghai. Those scholars, who were interested in cultural studies and came from such circles as literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and mass media, were admitted into the institutions, but maybe there was an overlap. In the course of these studies, arise a series of problems both in theory and practice. The first problem concerns about the relation between cultural studies and existing university systems. On the one hand, cultural studies are against any systems; and on the other hand, China' s existing systems are relatively unchanged. Therefore, the scholars, while helplessly squeezing into the existing university systems, try hard to develop and maintain the "interdisciplinarity" of cultural studies, thus the "production mechanism of contemporary dominant culture" as well as the interactional relation between this culture and that period of the history of "socialism" being defined the main target of the current cultural studies in China' s mainland. If we want to outline this kind of methodology, the "double lines" may be proper, that is, the "critical analysis" and the "promotive intervention", or, borrowing from two political terms in 1950s, the "destroying" and the "establishing". These two are interdependent, supplementing each other. In the next place, it is by what means that we can, continuing to concern about the urban culture, pay more attention to the countryside culture so as to mend the relation between the teaching of cultural studies and the social improvement. Finally, it is how to maintain the native characteristics of cultural studies in China' s mainland. Of course, the most important for this is to face the Chinese daily experience and draw from the rich resources of the Chinese revolutionary ideology and practical history. In other words, it is by virtue of daily life experiences that we can inherit the rich memories of the "Chinese Revolution" and pursue for the oppressive structure of internal reality.

Key words: cultural studies; academic system; social improvement; Chinas native experience