ABSTRACT

In the current conjuncture, typified as much by the rise of China (and China studies) as by the U.S. imperium, the social force called orientalism knows a new lease on life. Ranging from academic to media and state-policy as well as literary circles, it emerges where Edward Said’s disseminative account from 1978 leaves off: its migration from Europe and philology to U.S.-based social science and area studies, to the pax Americana and a closer relation to the logic if not the actual policies of the state. In this chapter I begin to make my case for the existence of a “new,” Sinological orientalism by way of an extended reading of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. 1978 also marks the end of the uncertain Hua Guofeng era, the subsequent rise of Deng Xiaoping, and the unleashing of the power of capital within China. Deng led not just an ideological but a material de-Maoification, systematically eliminating every last vestige of leftist institutions, save the Party itself. Deng’s capitalistic policies and his de-politicization of state cultural and academic spheres were warmly received, not just by the Western powers and corporations who now had access to the fantasy of one billion consumers, but emphatically so by China studies. For Sinologists it was now open season on China and for the production of “new” knowledge about a China awakening yet again.1 (The specter of a somnambulant China who might actually wake up is as old as Napoleon and as recent as the editorial page of the New York Times.) From this global yet orientalist perspective, shared by some of the liberal Chinese intelligentsia and vulgar modernizers like Deng as much as by area studies, China was en route to becoming “normal.” The Other was finally changing and entering real history. Within this new orientalism, China is seen as evolving from a primitive, communist (and “despotic”) Other to our distant cousin, one who is, willy-nilly, becoming-Western, becoming-“modern.” China is graspingly putting its “Asiatic” past behind, becoming generally equivalent to the West. Recall that orientalism posits the Other as radically and essentially different: different in mind, custom, politics, sexuality, and so on. It is a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” (2). East is East, and West is West. But with the case of post-Mao, in reform era China this form of orientalism turns upon its object

of study – China and its victimized but “dissenting” masses – graspingly but inevitably becoming the same as “we.” They are following in “our” wake, becoming the same as we modern, free subjects of an “open,” liberal nation-state and “civil society,” a teleological process which will, someday, follow from their capitalistic economy. This Sinological form of orientalism marks a shift from the differentialist logic that Said documented, to one now turning upon sameness (the becomingsameness of China). As befits the world system today, it also follows a capital logic of general equivalence. This historical shift has consequences as a critique of Said’s and postcolonial studies’ model of orientalism, for it shows us that they fail to deal with one of the principal contradictions of modern colonialism, namely, that in some absolutely crucial instances and projects – e.g. missionary projects, modernization theory – it is not simply allowed but mandated that the Other become the same, that it enter a process of becoming-the-same. That is, despite the sense of difference between one location of the “Orient” and the outside observer, an opposite logic – an opposite ontology and epistemology, one now rooted in equivalence – prevails. And yet if this much has changed within this new orientalism, its effects are in some crucial ways familiar: not only is it a misrepresentation of the P.R.C. and a part of a global and uneven production of knowledge that favors the West, it also produces what counts as the “Real China.”2 It also retains the key rhetorical strategy of orientalism as Said theorized it: the positional superiority of the China watcher (or expert), such that China or things Chinese are never allowed to gain the upper hand by challenging received categories of thought. The social realities, texts, or contexts that the intellectual confronts are never allowed to make a difference in the production of (Sinological) knowledge. That there might be an incommensurability between Western theory or the methods of a discipline and the foreign reality is a very remote if not impossible notion within orientalism and mainstream China studies. Nowhere are the problems of traveling theory broached, and rarely if ever are contrasting, “local” knowledges consulted. The bulk of this chapter will deal with the Tiananmen protests, and will argue that their interpretation by China studies and Western media are emblematic of this new form of Sinological-orientalism. This last turns upon traditional figures of colonial discourse – e.g. despotism, passive, and irrational “native” subjects – but the shift to sameness is brought home by the new dominance of social science rhetoric, in particular its emphasis on China now or in the near future finally producing a civil society and liberal individuals. It will thereby follow a “universal” pattern of modernization and “freedom.” Rather than just being an affair of area studies, this orientalism is part of the U.S.-West’s social imaginary and of contemporary intellectual-political culture. Tiananmen as the truth of civil society post-Mao has less to do with China than with the self-image of the West and its “leadership.”