ABSTRACT
The social and cultural positions of scholars and scholarships are key to understanding human knowledge and our knowledge of humans. This notion is true in modern China, which challenges not only the existing knowledge on the Chinese nation, Chinese people, and Chinese civilization but also the identity or self-identification of China watchers with these positions (Brook and Blue 2002; Culp, Eddy, and Yeh 2016; Hillemann 2009; König and Chaudhuri 2016; Manomaivibool and Shih 2016; Vukovich 2012). In other words, the identity of those who watch China, the Chinese people, and Chinese civilization make a difference in understanding the subjects and their objects. The challenge is surely different for watchers who watch China in an imagined external position and those who possess a certain type of self-perceived “Chineseness.” Another challenge for the latter is if they watch China outside the territorial, legal, and institutional barriers of the People’s Republic of China. The emerging identity crisis in postcolonial Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 21st century seemingly indicates a trend among those possessing Chineseness to seek an epistemologically external position. However, the lingering identity politics pertaining to a culturally, territorially, and economically diverse Chinese population in Southeast Asia illustrates no such definitive trend (Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011; Wang 2002).
