ABSTRACT
In “Orientalism Now,” the concluding chapter of Edward Said’s 1978 book, we are left with the migration of orientalism from European empires and philology to the U.S. imperium and the dominance of social scientific discourse. This project begins where Said left off. It argues that there is a new, “Sinological” form of orientalism at work in the world, one that takes as its object an “Other” that has since the 1970s occupied an increasingly central place within the world system and Western intellectual-political culture: the People’s Republic of China. As with Said’s formulation rooted in the Middle East and South Asia, Sinological-orientalism and its production of a textual “China” helps constitute the identity or “Self” of the West (what Balibar aptly calls the “WesternChristian-Democratic-Universalist identity”) (“Difference” 30). The U.S.-West is what China is not, but which the latter will become. So, too, the new orientalism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: not just the production of knowledge about an “area” but the would-be management and administration of the area for economic, political, and cultural-symbolic benefit. But whereas orientalism in Said turned upon a posited, essential difference between Orient and Occident (as in Kipling’s famous verse: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”), the new form turns upon sameness or more specifically, upon China’s becoming sameness. China is seen as in a process of haltingly but inevitably becoming-the-same as “us”: open, liberal, modern, free. Put another way, “China” is understood as becoming generally equivalent to the West. What this reflects, in part, is the by now familiar resurgence of modernization rhetoric under the cover of “globalization” and the end-of-history thematic famously captured by Francis Fukuyama. But that, in turn, was triggered by the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as by the fateful deployment of the market mechanism and the logic of capital within China. After a noble but brief interruption of the politics and discourse of modernization by Chinese Maoism and by the long decade of the 1960s and early 1970s, the former is back in charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual-political culture. When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of capital as such, namely as an historical force of abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of some third thing called the value-form (their “exchange value” or “general equivalent”), the relationship between this orientalism and global capitalism
appears in sharper relief. Sinological-orientalism is in an important sense a capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear (in at least my reading of him), orientalism and colonial discourse may precede the rise of capitalism, but in the modern era they are hand in glove. So, too, for the present moment, whereby Western investment and “constrainment” strategies are often rationalized on the basis of these being beneficial to the Chinese and their progression towards democracy and human rights (whatever these mean), as well as helping “balance” and protect the rest of Asia from China’s rise. I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final chapter. My argument is a totalizing, “functionalist” one about the integral relationship between capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a global Sinological-orientalism are the momentous if not counter-revolutionary changes within China itself – its Dengist “era of reform and opening up” dating from 1979 – and the West’s economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global prominence. This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becomingsameness: China is still not “normal” (and has been tragically different), but is engaged in a “universal” process such that it will, and must, become the same as “us.” Whether it wants to or not. That is the present-future offered to China within this discourse, and – as anyone who watched the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies knows (“one world, one dream”) – it is also one taken up within China itself. I turn to the question of Occidentalism below, and at other times make reference to Westernized/liberal views within China. But I only partially address the internalization of orientalism within China and the current Party state. That is surely an important matter worthy of its own book. But my focus here reflects in part my conviction that it is the Western – now fully global – dimensions and roots of orientalism that are the main problem underlying the often dysfunctional, neo-colonial relationship between China and the West. My concern is the production of knowledge about the P.R.C. outside of China and the cultural, ideological, and other politics that subtend this. One could write a different project focused on the representation of China from within the mainland; this would have to include indigenous constructions and essentializations of China outside of, as well as prior to, foreign imperialism or orientalism. But the impact in China of modern imperialism and “contact” remains decisive for all of us, and once we reach this era we need necessarily engage the orientalist and post-colonial questions. There will be no “new” Sinology until this conversation at least begins. As will quickly become clear, my analysis of Sinological-orientalism abounds with gestures and full-on references to what I take to be some of the complexities of Maoist and post-Mao China in political, ideological/cultural, and other terms. Contra Said’s own practice in 1978, then, I do take it to be important to at least attempt to argue for some of those complexities and “brute realities of the Orient” (his words) that are occluded by the isolated details and positional superiority of orientalism. His decision not to do so has meant that his work
there is often reductively appropriated by cultural and postcolonial studies that reduce the problem of orientalism to some basic Freudian Othering process, the deployment of stereotypical images in film, a simple self/other identity dynamic, and so forth. While all of these are part of orientalism, to be sure, the larger problems and challenges of epistemology, political knowledge, and the constitution of discourse were too often obscured even within the postcolonial field. Positional superiority refers to that tactic or de facto strategy by which the object of study is kept in place, never allowed to challenge let alone displace the effectively a priori assumptions, conclusions, and discourse: it places “the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand” (Orientalism 7). It is not just a heuristic but the foundational rule of colonial discourse and orientalism.1 For our purposes this means that the authority and a priori knowledge of the Sinologist-analyst-watcher reigns supreme and untroubled. For all its detailed knowledge, then, Sinologicalorientalism works as a circular, self-enclosed system. It is also paradoxical in that what I am calling its emphasis on China’s “becoming-sameness” is also at odds with this flexible superiority, which is also to say the ultimate inferiority of the native, Chinese reality. For all of these reasons, one must take the risk of trying to argue for and signify these complexities, counter-factuals, and counterstories about the P.R.C. This is surprisingly difficult to do, in part because the language we have to describe such things fits not at all with the dominant, Western, liberal humanist paradigm of the humanities and human sciences. This is, I believe, also Wang Hui’s problem in his brilliant and searching but difficult works on Chinese histories and Western theory.2 My own emphases have been with the political, Maoist past as well as its traces today, even after its demonization at home and abroad. Others would certainly write all of this differently, and it is again something worthy of book-length treatment despite the professional risks involved (writing “positive” scholarship about the Mao era). Some already have. In addition to others cited in this study, Lin Chun’s The Transformations of Chinese Socialism is another case in point (albeit focused on the reform era). But all of this work is of very recent vintage and remains marginal to the overall China field. Sinological-orientalism and its basic logic can be understood as a development within colonial discourse in the present, postcolonial era of intensive globalization. It is as if what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably described as the “waiting room of history” – or the continual saying of “not yet” to the colonized who would be free – has subtly but importantly shifted.3 The time is at hand. The denouement has inched closer. The last real constraint remains the Party state which will depart from the historical stage with our help. This marks a shift from the essential difference between East and West to their – China’s – general equivalence: a sameness structured by a hierarchical difference. The denigrating and condescending faith that they are, after all, becoming the same as us (or should be made so) has become stronger and is no longer simply the view of enlightened liberals like J. S. Mill. While a range of temporary – as opposed to essential – obstacles can be summoned up to explain why China is not yet free
and normal, the main and seemingly most fungible one remains the Chinese Communist Party (state). Were it not for this anachronistic, evil institution, the logic goes, China would and will be becoming-the-same and joining the normal world. A Sinified, mainland Chinese path is more or less impossible, be it in the Maoist attempt at alternative modernity (itself a Western/Marxist hybrid) or in the various, nascent post-Mao efforts to reform and develop a Chinese state and society adequate to the nation’s various, complex challenges, and that might catch up to the heretofore largely unchecked, rapid, and dislocating deployment of capitalism.4
