Fendou: una parola chiave della Cina moderna

Abstract «After more than 170 years of hard struggle since the Opium War, the Chinese nation
has bright prospects»: this is an excerpt of Xi Jinping’s speech, when he first introduced his Chinese
Dream slogan, late in 2012. Sure enough, whereas it is hardly true that a mentality of ‘struggle’
may have been internalized so early in Chinese history, it is nevertheless undeniable that the
imperative of «struggle» (fendou) has become, over time, a characterizing trademark of Chinese
modernity. Interestingly, the word fendou runs like a thread throughout the history of modern
China, changing its meanings along with the changes of the ideological paradigms and the mainstream
goals of Chinese modernity. Thus after the Darwinian struggle of the late Qing Era, and the
individualist struggle of the early New Culture period, we enter the age of the collective «objectives
of struggle» of the Maoist times, to go back to the «individual struggle for society» advocated by
Party ideologists in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. «Struggle», today, still remains
an imperative, but, suspended as it is between the private aspirations of the emerging middle class
and the public governmental projects of building a ‘well-off society’, it proves more and more uncertain
in front of the question: «struggle for what?»