A roundtable with Wang Hui in Shanghai was most beneficial, as have been his defenses of the alternative complexity of the PRC and modern China. Elsewhere, Arif Dirlik, Utsa Patnaik, and Jason McGrath also provided welcome and clarifying feedback on several different chapters in their own, diverse fields. All of the usual disclaimers apply for all of these interlocutors. The draft of this book was first accepted back in June and I am still glad Michael and the Board took a chance on it.
- China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC.
- Chinese phrases 100 (Japanese Edition).
- .
- Shadow Warrior: Ninja Secrets of Invisibility, Mind Reading, and Thought Control;
- For the Love of Honey.
- Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well (The Political Economy Forum).
That and an earlier grant from Hong Kong University bought me time for revisions and helped me deliver parts of this book at various conferences in China and the U. Working in Hong Kong can be exceedingly wonderful and exceedingly trying. Getting work done here requires a lot of good faith and patience in the face of large lin- guistic, cultural, political, bureaucratic, and other boundaries; it takes a whole village, indeed, and I have depended on a lot of people from the ground level on up.
I have benefitted from teaching students from all walks of life in China, Hong Kong, and the U. I must thank Liu Xi and especially Yu Xuying for help sustaining a mainland-oriented perspective. Henry Kuok and Jaymee Ng have helped me believe that my teaching here has been mutually beneficial. My greatest, happiest debt in Hong Kong and elsewhere has been to Vicky Lo, whose love, patience, and generosity have enabled me to rewrite this book and see it through the long march of publication. Without her, nothing, but with her, everything.
The next one is for her and the Button. I dedicate this book to my father, who passed away before it came out. An American working-class hero of great adaptability, spirit and love, he taught me perhaps the most of all. This project begins where Said left off. So, too, the new oriental- ism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: But that, in turn, was triggered by the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as by the fateful deployment of the market mechanism and the logic of capital within China. After a noble but brief interruption of the politics and discourse of modernization by Chinese Maoism and by the long decade of the s and early s, the former is back in charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual—political culture.
Sinological-orientalism is in an important sense a capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear in at least my reading of him , orientalism and colonial dis- course may precede the rise of capitalism, but in the modern era they are hand in glove.
I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final chapter. But then, so is the thing. This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becoming- sameness: But I only partially address the internalization of orientalism within China and the current Party state. That is surely an important matter worthy of its own book.
But my focus here reflects in part my conviction that it is the Western — now fully global — dimensions and roots of orientalism that are the main problem underlying the often dysfunc- tional, neo-colonial relationship between China and the West. My concern is the production of knowledge about the P. One could write a different project focused on the representation of China from within the mainland; this would have to include indigenous constructions and essentializations of China outside of, as well as prior to, foreign imperialism or orientalism.
While all of these are part of orientalism, to be sure, the larger problems and challenges of epistemology, political knowledge, and the constitu- tion of discourse were too often obscured even within the postcolonial field. Positional superiority refers to that tactic or de facto strategy by which the object of study is kept in place, never allowed to challenge let alone displace the effec- tively a priori assumptions, conclusions, and discourse: It is not just a heuristic but the founda- tional rule of colonial discourse and orientalism.
For all its detailed knowledge, then, Sinological- orientalism works as a circular, self-enclosed system. For all of these reasons, one must take the risk of trying to argue for and signify these complexities, counter-factuals, and counter- stories about the P. This is surprisingly difficult to do, in part because the language we have to describe such things fits not at all with the dominant, Western, liberal humanist paradigm of the humanities and human sciences.
But all of this work is of very recent vintage and remains marginal to the overall China field. Sinological-orientalism and its basic logic can be understood as a develop- ment within colonial discourse in the present, postcolonial era of intensive glo- balization. The denouement has inched closer. The last real constraint remains the Party state which will depart from the historical stage with our help. The denigrating and condescending faith that they are, after all, becoming the same as us or should be made so has become stronger and is no longer simply the view of enlightened liberals like J.
Were it not for this anachronistic, evil institution, the logic goes, China would and will be becoming-the-same and joining the normal world. Something changed then, even if the triumph of neo-liberalism and the commodification of everything appeared only later. Even as Vietnam was winning its war of national liberation, historical communism turns out to have been in its final throes, succumbing to its internal contradictions — chiefly the inability to institutionalize egalitarian growth and mass participation — and to the pressures of capital accumulation on a world- scale.
But be it postmodernism or glo- balization, we are still working within the same sea-change of the s. What Harvey identified as the central dynamics of capitalism — the forces of abstraction and reification generated, the compression of space and time as capital expands globally — are still with us, only more so. Who could have imag- ined, in — also the moment of the P. That China would host the international spectacle that was the Olympics? The decades since Bretton Woods, then, have known a confluence of capital, China, and Sino—Western relations and flows; and it is this era to which Sinological-orientalism corresponds.
But the force of general equivalence within Sinological-orientalism is not only a capital-logic. It partakes of other histories, just as Sinology itself must be seen as part of the long history of imperialism, colonialism, and trade. As anti-colonial theory has instructed from Lenin to Fanon and beyond, this evolutionary, teleological discourse of same- ness, of bringing History and civilization to the colonized, both rationalized colonial rule and literally reshaped colonial and metropolitan societies. The older, more racist logic of essential difference is here in abeyance.
The work of James Hevia among others has accomplished the reinsertion of modern Qing and early Republican China back into the history of colonialism, a history that had been denied not just by the British and other colonizers, but by nearly all postwar area studies. This void includes as well the anti-colonial nature of that revolution.
China studies was defined by the problematic of modernization and anti-communism. As I have argued at more length elsewhere, the non-theoretical or non-philosophically trained character of this earlier, nascent and radical or alternative movement helped pre-empt it from responding more creatively or self-reflexively to the turn to the right within China and the U.
China went from being semi-colonial and revolutionary to non-colonial and haltingly, ideally becoming the same even amongst otherwise heterodox scholars. The problematic of knowledge production subtending the China-West problematic never quite emerged. There are a number of possible explanations for this, and none of them would be flattering to the social-scientific and objective pretensions of area studies. Arguably the primary one is simply that China was — as Lenin first put it, to be followed by Mao et al.
While the great chaos and disrepair of China as a whole from —49 is beyond question, it retained its political sovereignty at all times. This is true in a formal, significant sense, and is obviously a different scenario than that endured by the future nations of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America or Hong Kong. This is why the Maoist Sinification of Marxism was so difficult to achieve.
One would be hard-pressed to say that they were forced to think that way in the manner that the typical colonial subject was, or was supposed to be. Even here, however, is it not obvious that the very concept of ideology is lacking in such Sinological perspectives? One can contrast this, for example, with the largely unknown historical work of the Chinese radical historian Hu Sheng — In actuality, there is no good reason for defining colonialism as primarily an issue of political sovereignty and its loss or recapture. In an important sense, it is not the details of sovereignty and occupation that matter so much as the cultural—ideological conflicts and effects.
But the details do matter too. Sinological-orientalism represents, in part, a redeployment of missionary and civilizing discourse, including its logic of same- ness and equivalence.
- China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC - CRC Press Book;
- Find a copy in the library.
- Roommate Survival Guide: 33 ways to stay sane and have fun.
- All the Colors of the Rainbow (The Adventures of Kyra, Cody and Ruby)?
So, too, the academic and other texts examined in the fol- lowing chapters should be seen as part of a neo-colonial, Cold-War-and-beyond archive formed in large measure in the U. So, too, we might recall the impact of an older, philological Sinology in changing Chinese perceptions and practices of their own language: The Cold War was in some sense the continuation of Western, chiefly American imperialism by other means — at the level of discourse, rhetoric, and knowledge as much as the more familiar realpolitik level.
To sum up here: My critique is aimed at the expanded China field from specialist to popular writing and takes the form of a colo- nial discourse analysis of what has been thought, said, and occluded about China since the Mao era up to the present or early s. If my argument seems repetitive it is because I am trying to make it tenaciously and to sub- stantiate my generalized critique. But it is also because the thing itself, the orientalist discourse, is repetitive despite or because of its minute and some- times valuable detail. This is part of my point in seeing the production of knowledge about China, even today, as being awfully similar to the older, more obviously orientalist mode.
The China field is in this sense an expanded and expansive one. In the texts I examine in this book there emerges a common statement: China is becoming-the-same as the liberal and modern West howso- ever haltingly , or it must and should and will do so; this is the chief statement of the new orientalism. This can, in turn, be seen as emerging from other, related discursive themes: This last aspect speaks to more than just the fact that area specialists and journalists often overlap and write cross-over — or identical — texts. The journalistic quality of much China studies can indeed be striking to observers of the discipline.
It speaks to the fact that, as one Chinese Marxist might have put it, correct and incorrect ideas come from multiple places; this is what makes them the ruling discourses and difficult to change. The idea and knowledges of China we have do not stem only from specialists and the rarefied realms of Truth. Much of what I am saying here about how the China field cannot be delimited in the traditional, gate-keeping way has been better said by Aziz Al-Azmeh, whose critiques of orientalism should be much more widely known.
Pointing to shared conceptions of Islam in specialized and popular texts alike, he states: Regardless of access to real or specious facts, facts are always constructed and their construction is invariably cul- ture-specific. Orientalist scholarship is a cultural mood born of mythological classificatory lore, a visceral, savage division of the world, much like such partisanship as animates support for football clubs.
More on this below. Nonetheless, the preponderance of textual and political evidence is on the post- or anti-colonial side; at least the present study seeks to make this case. More- over, it is not an exaggeration to say that China and Islam share a certain, discursive history in Western intellectual—political culture, as does virtually every national culture subjected to the forces and significations of imperialism and modern colonialism.
And of course one cannot deny the import of modern colonialism within Western intellectual—political culture the dominant knowledge producers. In this sense, then: But let us first illustrate this a bit by tracking a continuity to understandings of China and the P. With the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire, it is China that gradually becomes the perceived geo-political threat, just as the U. Virtu- ally all the old orientalist tropes and topoi are here: A number of these same themes and statements about China and the Chinese — as later chapters will show — continue to circulate within the new Sinological-orientalism.
Western work on the Great Leap Forward famine not only exaggerates the mortality or so it reasonably seems , but shows a callousness towards real Chinese lives as well as an obsession with the sheer numbers of Chinese living, dead, and purely imagined. Kennedy wrote to De Gaulle in about the P. This Western anxiety about China is further indexed in the demonization of Maoism, as if it were some residual, looming specter that could at any moment re-assert itself within China and the world.
This is addressed in Chapters 2 and 6 of the present study. And yet there can be no mistake that the underlying logic and assumptions of Sinological-orientalism have shifted. Despite numerous analyses of what China lacks — and to posit lack is a crucial rule for China analysis — the P. Thus even if Tiananmen did not result in the end of the CCP and the establishment of civil society, it nonetheless represents progress and will return again someday. This is all a type of historicist or at least stagist thinking: To some extent this a-histori- cism was intentional and typically Hollywood.
I will not belabor the obvious: His flight to India uses a repeated point of view shot from his childhood that estab- lishes him as the unity of time and space: Contrast this, then, with the demonization of the Chinese. Mao is represented as a duplicitous, greasy despot promising autonomy at one moment and invading the next. It is a case of the negative China difference and what it lacks. But there are also logics of equiva- lence at work here. Through purely visual signs, Kundun implicitly expresses a desire for becoming-sameness in regard to China: Renounce despotism and follow the path of normalcy: The film follows American foreign policy as expressed in the Tibetan Policy Act of that pronounces U.
China may not yet be in the process of becoming-the- same, but it should be, and we can help. What is more, we need to recall with Tom Grunfeld that it is precisely U. An essay by historian Philip C. Huang will serve to illustrate the non-debate and the history of the logic of sameness within China studies. He implies this dynamic is no longer dominant in China studies, but it is the argument of the present study that it is so. Yet this sameness has shifted in political terms.
My retorts here will seem familiar to scholars in cultural and literary studies, and this in itself is instructive. As Ravi Palat aptly summarizes the situation: For China especially, language fluency is the sacred skeleton key, though to be fair this is itself part of nativist Chinese thinking. One could pile on here. Language train- ing and field-time stand in for adequate, rigorous disciplinary and theoretical grounding.
He notes that the human and natural sciences are just as capable of being politically manipulated as orientalism and area studies. That is correct, but misses the point that Said would agree, and was moreover talking specifically about colonial forms of power and intellectual culture. The basic Saidian question is elided: Who gets to write the Other, and how? The response to Said and postcolonialism was from the very beginning one of incomprehension. A decent and humane suggestion, but how? The discipline is still not defined intellectually, but linguistically and geographically. That field thus stands in sharp contrast not only to, say, anthropology or literature, but also South Asian, African, and Latin American studies.
But it is instructive to further see how this turn has been avoided. Said himself noted that his work had at times — in the Middle East — been taken up by some in narrowly nationalist and nativist terms. Yet the question of which China — that of the middle class, the variegated intelligentsia, the urban workers, the migrant laborers, the peasants, the national minorities, and so on — cannot be asked. What we have, then, are clear battle grounds underlying the use of theory and orientalism, especially amongst the diaspora or Western-based writers i.
From within China this often plays out in the opposite direction. That is, a strident anti-communist liberalism, a project shared by many others. Critiques of Western hegemony on the part of main- land Chinese intellectuals must be dismissed as nativist, nationalist, and so on. Thus it is the anti- anti-orientalists who seem far too confident about what the local, mainland context means and what it does to theory.
For such intellectuals committed in the first instance to a largely imaginary battle with the Chinese state, it is at best premature to inveigh against Western imperialism and colonial discourse when what China needs first is good old capitalist democracy as found in the West. This type of reason reaches its apex in the Charter 08 group composed of mainland liberal and neo-liberal intellectu- als, and their Euro-American scholarly cohort.
The chief architect of the Charter is Liu Xiaobo, a currently imprisoned intellectual who won the Nobel Peace Prize. His stakes are far different. It also follows the logic of becoming-sameness outlined here. It is no accident that Liu is close to several experts in the China field. One sees this same gesture in a recent boundary2 paper extolling individu- alism and generic humanism as the way forward for China and the U.
What these diverse figures share, then, is not simply an anti-regime stance, but a politicized valorization of depoliticization. This was clear even to the old colonists themselves. We are not likely to see S. Nor will we see Qinghua offering courses in Occidental Studies. Said argued that there is an unequal distribution of power — in terms of knowledge as much as capital and realpolitik — between the Occident and the Orient, or the core and its peripheries. He sought, in short, to produce a recognition that colo- nialism the historical world system also has to do with unequal knowledge- production and distribution.
Thus Edward Graham, writing some years before Chen et al. Occidentalism is not the equivalent of orientalism, for the reasons of power and institutionalization. As Said insisted, orientalism is not merely an idea. The production of knowledge is itself a material, institutional, and global affair that is bound up with not only educational institutions, but capitalism and, thus, colonialism and empire. Orien- talism and Occidentalism are two halves of a whole that do not add up. This is that it is often ethnically and even mainland-born Chinese intellectuals who are the pur- veyors of what I have been calling Sinological-orientalism.
For an overly histori- cist reading it may appear so. But this begs a number of questions as to what is being rep- resented, i. There is also the Marxist question about such knowledge production: This suggests con- tinuities within Sinological-orientalism: Sinification at the level of skin color only takes one so far.
China and Orientalism
Chinese fetishizations of the Occident are to be valued precisely because they are somehow used against the Party-state, a symbolic subversion of authoritarianism. The logic here is a direct legacy of the Cold War: Anti- official Occidentalism is subversive and resistant simply because it is anti-Party- state, and the latter is monolithically bad and illegitimate.
This is, in short, characteristic area studies discourse and also of a piece with standard s Chinese liberalism. What such occidentalist intellectuals are dissenting from, and in the name of what, are questions that go begging. Outside of the a priori belief that the Communist government is an unmitigated evil whose dissolution is to be desired by all right-thinking liberal democrats, it is hard to understand why this type of anti-peasant Occidental cosmopolitanism is to be valued.
Elite occidentalist liberals may have permission to narrate, but questions about the class and political content of their discourse go begging. If Chinese producers of culture choose Occidentalist discourse for their own utopian ends, it ill behooves those who watch from afar to tell them conde- scendingly they do not know what they are doing. I can only hope that the account given here. What is more striking is that the occidentalists are to be respected because it is their choice to hold forth dubious propositions about the West and peasants.
This is the real lesson of Occidentalism. This has immediate consequences for the China field. China can be wealthy, regionally powerful even exploitative , and yet orientalized. Cold War, hot colonial theory: As is obvious yet unexplored within postcolonial studies, these two great events of the last century — the battle between historical communism and capitalism, and the epoch of decolonization — were cotermi- nous, overlapping territories.
We also do not need to cede the writing of China to those who — in the P. The present study does not reconstruct this global history or fully theorize the filia- tions between communism and postcolonialism. But it does show a part of it: It argues that the discourse of anti-communism, and the lynchpin concept of totalitarianism, are part and parcel of Sinological-orientalism.
But this is being sloughed off, willy-nilly. Edward Said and those in his immediate wake may not have registered this adequately, but it should no longer be possible to speak of orientalism and China without also speaking of capitalism and the enduring presence of the Cold War, the specter of the East. For all the evident and iniquitous collaboration between classes and capital flows between China and the rest of the world, there is still a conflict here and a historical legacy of geo-political competition and struggle.
In an essay published in — early enough in the development of postcolonial studies to be entirely neglected — William Pietz brilliantly unpacked the racialist, orientalist thinking of George Kennan, Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. By drawing on colonial discourse, albeit in a less immediately racist, modified disguise, Cold War, totalitarianist discourse became not just intelligible but persuasive and popular.
Note that it is not that colonial discourse disappeared, but that it was articulated to the Cold War. As Kennan, Koestler, and arguably Orwell are of little scholarly value today, we will focus on Arendt. But the achievement of the first three was to map onto Russia classic orientalist stereotypes about despotism, inscrutability, deceit, detachment from the real world, disbelief in objective truth, and so on.
For Kennan et al. Here is Kennan writing in Foreign Affairs in From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they had carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent or peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Here caution, circum- spection, flexibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind.
This raises a number of interesting questions about why the concept endures, and none of the answers would be flattering to the allegedly liberal, tolerant, and democratic nature of Western intellectual—political culture. But it is Arendt to whom we must attend. Both racism — which Arendt clearly wishes to oppose — and totalitarianism have their origins in colonialism and in European the Boers contact with Africa and Africans. When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin.
They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the Dark Continent for centuries. It is the effect upon the Boers and thence — so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes — upon Europe. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not only do we come to think in terms of race i. Thus anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in general originally lie outside Europe Pietz This is all to say that, even in the relatively sophisticated hands of Arendt, totalitarianism is not only a concept with rather shaky logical foundations turning upon a simplis- tic logic of contamination and diffusion , but one with a distinctly racist and colonial genealogy.
We should therefore be far more circumspect in deploying the concept, if at all. It would be excellent philosophical hygiene to simply abandon the concept altogether, and give it a properly Christian burial. As if all Chinese said and did whatever they were told to do; as if there were a massive uniformity of experience across so much diverse, complex social space; as if there were such an oriental surfeit of power that this was even possible. Even if one chooses to believe the absolute worst about Mao et al.
In a later discussion in Chapter 3, I attempt to circumvent this coding of China via the notion of Maoist discourse. In the years following World War II, colonial discourse did not disappear.
How could it have, after so many decades, indeed centuries of development across the globe? Though it became more difficult to voice in the age of decolo- nization, it was instead articulated to the Cold War. Cold War discourse became a substitute for out- right colonial discourse, and endowed the neo-colonial aspects — and U.
This was the chief function of the concept of totalitarianism, itself a colonial and racist notion. The end product helped usher in a new phase of U. These are, additionally, the years of the birth and triumph of Maoism, of the P. Further on, with the defeat and removal of Maoism and the left in China, plus the open access of scholars, journalists, and others to their field, China itself sets the stage for the crystallization of Sinological-orientalism and its capital-logic of the P. This also presumes the Sino-U. This sameness has its limits, and again I wish to emphasize the becoming logic as opposed to the belief that China has fully arrived where we are.
One can still detect signs of an older, more openly racist logic of essential difference at times. Totalitarianism-as-oriental-despotism, with all that says about native passivity or flat-out stupidity, certainly veers towards the latter. In any case, the standard of measure and positional superiority remain the same. My attempt is to show all of this in the following pages. Deng led not just an ideological but a material de-Maoification, systematically eliminating every last vestige of leftist institutions, save the Party itself. Recall that orientalism posits the Other as radically and essentially different: East is East, and West is West.
This Sinological form of orientalism marks a shift from the differentialist logic that Said documented, to one now turning upon sameness the becoming- sameness of China. As befits the world system today, it also follows a capital logic of general equivalence. And yet if this much has changed within this new orientalism, its effects are in some crucial ways familiar: The social realities, texts, or contexts that the intellectual confronts are never allowed to make a difference in the pro- duction 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. 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. I refer of course to the Tiananmen protest movement, including the killings that concluded it. At least that is how the book has been received. Thus Jeffrey Wasserstrom takes him to task simply for not citing the work of Geremie Barme, a prolific, famously fluent but also notori- ously condescending critic of virtually all things Chinese: While Wasserstrom grounds his criticism in only the proper name of Barme, Elizabeth J.
Zhao analyzes how built-space on Beijing campuses literally enabled the movement and examines the social construction of public opinion in the Square. In regard to , this absence of discussion about epistemology and ideol- ogy in the forming of knowledge is all the more unfortunate. In many ways, the true victor of the tragedy was the U.
China and Orientalism : Western knowledge production and the P.R.C.
Contra an area studies that has yet to ques- tion its mediated sources of information, the televisual transmission of Tianan- men can hardly be assumed to be a neutral medium. Those images have become emblematic of what counts as post-Mao China — its real people so to speak, and the real, remorseless machinery of state oppression. Emblematic was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in , standing in front of the copy of the Statue of Liberty [sic] and claiming that this said it all about what the protesting students demanded in short, if you scratch the skin of a Chinese person, underneath you find an American.
I was never more proud to be an American than when the Goddess of Democracy statue, with its stunning resemblance to Lady Liberty. The latter attitude further calls to mind Western Marxist codings of Maoist China, whereby the Chinese like the Soviets before them and everyone else afterwards, distorted if not betrayed Marxism — that is, the real, authentic Marxism as it exists solely in the heads of Western Marxists, from the Frankfurt School to Trotskyism.
The coding of the Tiananmen events back into another given social order recalls one of the crucial features of orientalism, namely, that in the last instance it is about the self-constitution and identity of the West. If the Statue of Liberty reappears, but now coated in blood-red paint and draped in a swastika as it did , then civil society must be overrun with irra- tional, frenzied nationalists, manipulated by the state. For others, was brought up, but only to make the claim that the anti-NATO movement should not be compared to that because the former was real and spontaneous, and the latter government-organized or at least induced.
He instead grounds his analysis on the brief period — if half of the s can be called that — which best fits the Western civil society narra- tive.
China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC, 1st Edition (Hardback) - Routledge
Wasserstrom says much the same about a dialogue on the meaning of between three prominent participants turned U. The Mao era is simply not up for discussion, despite the fact that it literally un-formed and re- formed much of Chinese culture and politics. What is elided here is the very heart of the Maoist project in China: Signs of this are easily indexed: All of this was not mere state rhetoric, but deeply held belief and part of a popular Maoist discourse, and — moreover — were actually, if all too briefly, institutional- ized.
So, too, it influenced when students and workers referenced Mao and Cul- tural Revolution era slogans even when their point was to say how the student movement was unrelated to that. From here this essay will offer a critique of this last coding. Home China and Orientalism: Add to Wish List. Toggle navigation Additional Book Information.
Description Table of Contents Author s Bio. Summary This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. This work will be of great interest to scholars of Asian, postcolonial and cultural studies. Table of Contents 1. Author s Bio Daniel F. Request an e-inspection copy. The Bookshelf application offers access: Offline Computer — Download Bookshelf software to your desktop so you can view your eBooks with or without Internet access.
The country you have selected will result in the following: To make the case for this re-constitution of orientalism, this work offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the China field broadly defined. Through extensive analysis, the production of Sinological knowledge is shown to be of a piece with Western global intellectual political culture.
Writing from Hong Kong but not as a Sinologist, Vukovich presents an erudite case for re-thinking the lessons of Tiananmen, reassessing the legacy of Mao, and questioning the idea that China needs to be saved by becoming like "us. Vukovich blasts the new Orientalism that seeks to free China from its supposedly Borg-like past. A rare voice, and a welcome one. From this basic observation, the author highlights the cultural logic of capitalism in the new Orientalistic interpretation of China.
A sharp, inspiring and timely book! But the bonus for readers is his remarkable history of the complexities of post-liberation China.
Recommended For You
As timely as could be, and guaranteed to spark debate. At its heart is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the P. C since the s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist, and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinological-orientalism.