ABSTRACT
Recent disputes in the Korean literature over the cultural ownership of the dragon boat festival, as well as the Gugoryeo relics located in Chinese Manchuria, challenge the long-established myth of center role dominated by Mainland China in East Asian History. A Chinese rumor further claims that even soy milk, one of the most popular Chinese breakfast beverages, could be declared in Korea to be the invention of Korean ancestors. While most Chinese may laugh with disbelief when hearing about the Korean origins of “their” cultural legacy, we must be reminded that this is not the first time similar contentions have occurred. Huang Chun-Chieh, a leading Confucian scholar of National Taiwan University, studies with curiosity the issue of how and why pre-modern Japanese intellectuals in the 17th century could have advocated the view that Japan is the real China.1 It has not occurred to him that, from the perspective of puzzling bystanders, his home country of Taiwan had – for over four decades – also insisted that Taipei was the real capital of China since 1949. How should and could China be represented? The answer depends on who wants
to represent it. That is why views arguing studies of China should be Chinacentered, instead of Euro-centered, US-centered or Japan-centered, still exist separately. The scholars giving birth to the notion are not Chinese writers, but English and Japanese ones.2 In Taiwan, for example, there was the call for the establishment of a Chinese social science in the 1980s. These efforts seek to ameliorate the bias in the universal claim of “Western” behavioral pattern by supplying a “Chinese” perspective which is epistemologically different. Applying the Chinese perspective allegedly enhances universality of knowledge.3 However, no China-centrism could be fully China-centered when its primary purpose is to improve the universality of social science, which is dear to Western academics. It is the recent Korean challenge to China’s centrality that finally shifts people’s attention to a different, contending representation of China that aims for something other than the bettering of social science. Accordingly, the thinking process of China-centrism involves a decision between
identity and image. The choice of an individual’s identity is about achieving a
perspective on “China” that establishes his or her difference from either “China” or the “West,” hence Korea-centrism, Singapore-centrism, Vietnam-centrism, Indiacentrism, and so on. The choice of image, in contrast, is about how well this added perspective on China contributes to a reflexive “Western” social science, so it is an image of being universal rather than being different. To receive a better image is therefore to evaluate China-centrism against the self-criticism of “Western” social science, nevertheless aimed to enhance universality, hence ultimately epistemological Euro-centrism. For most Chinese social scientists,4 the image problem is of uttermost importance, while the identity problem takes a back seat. Paradigms in contemporary Sino-phone China studies are copies ofWestern paradigms. In the study of Chinese foreign policy, for example, one sees the familiar (or copied) division among realism, idealism and constructivism. Sino-phone International Relations scholars simulate the debate by providing either the Chinese “case” (when confirming a theory) or the Chinese “anomaly” (when denying one). While more andmore Chinese social scientists develop their career in Anglophone
academia (so they would need to care for their image), most Chinese obviously do not appreciate the Korean re-presentation of “their” cultural heritage. The Korean challenge creates an identity dimension for the Chinese social scientists, predominantly also China experts, because the China they want to present to the Korean colleagues is not the same one they want to present to the Anglophone world. The Korean challenge, or, along the same line, the Vietnamese, Indian, Singaporean, or perhaps simply the Asian challenges, all provide an incentive for the Chinese intellectuals to look away from the Anglophone world; instead, it redirects them toward a self-knowledge that comes from within. Only then is an epistemic community embedded in Chinese China-centrism possible. The excitement that the ‘Tianxia’ (literally all under heaven) rhetoric has taken on some momentum in the past few years is a clear indicator of this trend. With the exception of the once predominant debate on the Sinification of
Marxism in China,5 signs of Chinese China-centrism in the non-Marxian social sciences in China can be traced back to the mid-1990s.6 However, the awareness of a need for a transnational China-centric epistemic community has been far from reality. These domestic traces were largely responses to the challenge of representing China in the Anglophone world. Note that before the nascent Asian challenges, the stage predominantly centered upon the China threat and the clash of civilizations discourses in the aftermath of Tiananmen in 1989. There was also the unresolved civil war between Beijing and Taipei; as the rivalry entered into a fresh stage of peaceful competition, intellectual representation of China became a point of contention between the two sides – as well as for forces within Taiwan. These occurrences prompted self-reflections amongst Chinese social scientists. This chapter will show how these early traces may or may not serve as the foundation for a China-centric epistemic community in the future. Without such foundation, it would be difficult for Chinese social scientists to make effective adjustment to the
Asian challenges or to the China threat discourse. Put differently, this chapter will examine how an image problem for the Chinese social scientists to become universal has a chance of evolving into a quest for pursuing a entirely different identity.
