| Sumario: | The Chinese intellectual circle, which used to be united in opposing reified Maoism in the 1980s, has split into two major intellectual factions since the 1990s: the liberals and the New Left. Because of his criticisms of the excesses of modernization, globalization and liberalization, the novelist Han Shaogong is widely regarded as a New Left intellectual. His fictional works are often interpreted as illustrations of pre-existing New Left positions. Instead of reading Han's works as manifesting any particular factional position, this article explores Han's larger non-factional contributions to the Chinese intellectual debate and discourse in post-Tiananmen China. This article argues that by resituating juxiang (concrete images, objects, scenes, events and specific human characters) into their specific material and existential contexts, Han seeks to transcend the narrow liberals versus New Left split and to retrieve individual things' and persons' complicated meanings, functions, sensibilities, subjectivities and social relations, which are missing from both the liberal and New Left discourses. In particular, Han's thematizing of the ignored contingent agency of concrete objects and inanimate matters, which make a difference to the state of political affairs, can complement the existing intellectual discourse that privileges abstract structural forces and open a new venue of research into contemporary Chinese politics and public events.
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