Crip China

Why is modern Chinese literature, since its very inception, densely populated with disabled characters? How can we explain this persistent aesthetic investment in disability? In Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics , Hangping Xu offers a compelling account of Chinese modernism and modernity through the lens of disability, or what he calls "a cripistemology of modern China." At the heart of the book is a critique of "ablenationalism" as a recurring ideology in modern China: a national fantasy that imagines ideal citizens as productive, disciplined, often masculine, and physically and mentally able. Within this cultural logic, Xu argues, disability repeatedly emerges as a thematic and aesthetic device that shores up normative subjectivities always already on the verge of collapse. Through close readings of literature, film, and digital media, he shows how disability at once sustains and disrupts this national fantasy. Xu refuses to reduce disability to stock narratives of pathology,pity, and pathos, framing it instead as an intersectional political identity and embodied experience—one that enables alternative forms of collectivity and articulates an ethic of care for a more hospitable world beyond ablenationalism. By placing Chinese literary studies in conversation with critical disability studies, Crip China both reexamines modern Chinese literature through a crip lens and reorients disability studies beyond its Euro-American genealogy. Comparative in scope and method, the book also brings crip Chinese literature into broader debates in comparative and world literature.