ABSTRACT
In the covenant around technological fetishism married to an aesthetic ideology of global transition, one detects the model of an unwritten social contract concerning global population management. This social contract is enjoined around the founding exclusions of race and class with which the fields of East Asian, and particularly China, studies have never reckoned to this day. In other words, the intelligibility of East Asian area studies becomes politically legible only as the palimpsest of white settler colonialism's transformation into creedal nationalism without going through a process of decolonization. Postwar US creedal nationalism can only be fully understood from the perspective of the “Area Studies Social Pact” emblematized by Lucian Pye and Erik Erikson. Under cover of being devoted to the production of knowledge, Area Studies is, in truth, an apparatus for imperial population management.
