ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined a Cold War-colonial production of knowledge about the Mao era in general and the Great Leap Forward in particular. Of particular importance is not just the enumerative modality in general, but more specifically the work of American demographers and the British Indian, Nobel Laureate Sen in propagating a regime of truth about Mao and the famine of 1959-61. This is all to say, then, that this coding is indeed a global phenomenon and not limited to China experts. Given the long-standing importance of China to twentieth-century politics as well as the global influence of Maoism itself, from South Asia to Latin America and beyond, it is to be expected that there is such a thing as a global production of knowledge – a regime of truth – about Mao and Maoist China. And yet this phenomenon is rarely remarked upon as such within the academic field, not least because of the belief in objective or neutral knowledge. What this chapter aims to do is to make the case for the global distribution of such knowledge and to show that it does not simply hail from truth and expertise. What we have to deal with, instead, is the Sinologization or orientalization of global thought about China. By that I mean both the influence of authorized, “expert” knowledge and the imbrication – or inseparability – of this with more popular and self-evidentially orientalist/colonial forms of knowledge. What is at stake here are two standard problems from within the postcolonial and Marxist traditions, respectively, that have not been adequately addressed to the subject of modern China: the writing of the Other, and where incorrect ideas come from. It is here, then, where we can begin to track the global circulation of Sinological-orientalism, its system of dispersion, in this case the demonization of Chinese Maoism as a nightmarish aberration within China’s incomplete but inevitable long march to Western modernity and liberal, democratic capitalism. But this abstract coding of China and the Mao period is subtended by a deep anxiety and at times paranoiac fear of its “massness,” and of its perceived threat to the West, especially its “freedom” and liberal individualism.1 Much of this discourse can be seen reflected and refracted in Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), arguably his most prescient novel, at least in a symptomatic sense, in its obsession with the “threat” that global, non-Western “terrorism” presents to authorship, freedom, the liberal individual, and “modernity.”
