Chinese history and the question of orientalism

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 96-117

  Dirlik, Arif ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001859386     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505446     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979).
2. Edward W. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976-84, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London, 1986), 211.
3. Said, Orientalism, 118.
4. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).
5. I borrow this subtitle from Yang Congrong, "Dongfang shehuide dongfanglun" (The Orientalism of Oriental Societies), Dangdai (Contemporary) 64 (August 1, 1991), 38-53.
6. This argument is developed fully, if somewhat tendentiously, in J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, 1993). For "our contemporary ancestors," see 16.
7. China's Modernisation: Westernisation and Acculturation, ed. Kurt Werner Radtke and Tony Saich (Stuttgart, 1993), 1.
8. Orientalism provides instances of such "orientalization." Also important for an account of many orientalists in Europe is Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, transl. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, with a foreword by Edward Said (New York, 1984).
9. Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (Boston, 1969),
10. offers insightful portraits of Westerners involved in China whose activities provide insights into the workings of power at the ground level, as does Randall E. Stross, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898-1937 (Berkeley, 1986).
11. For a recent work on the Jesuits, see East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582-1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago, 1988), which contains a number of articles of great interest.
12. For Lawrence, see his autobiography, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York, 1964),
13. and for William Jones, see Garland Cannon, Oriental Jones: A Biography of Sir William Jones (1746-1794) (New York, 1964).
14. Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat), Persian Letters, transl. with an introduction by C. J. Betts (New York, 1993);
15. Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World: Or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to His Friend in the East, in Collected Works, ed. A. Friedman. 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966);
16. Andre Malraux, The Temptation of the West, transl. with an introduction by Robert Hollander (New York, 1961);
17. America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on US-Asian Relations, ed. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York, 1971). It is important to underline that, as with the oriental Renaissance, works such as Montesquieu's and Goldsmith's display an "ethnocentric cosmopolitanism," in other words, employ Asia to European ends. They also render Asians into caricatures of sorts. My concern here, however, is with pointing to varieties of orientalism, and what this variety might imply for the connection between orientalism and power.
18. Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York, 1984),
19. and John Schrecker, The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective (New York, 1991).
20. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), 175-176.
21. See Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 34-35. Of Tagore and orientalism, more below.
22. Tu Wei-ming, "Cultural China: The Periphery as Center," Daedalus 120 (Spring, 1991), 13.
23. Tu Wei-ming has recently initiated a new journal with the title "Cultural China" (Wenhua Zhongguo).
24. Wang Jiafeng (Wang Jia-fong) and Li Guangzhen (Laura Li), Dang xifang yujian dongfang: Guoji hanxue yu hanxuezhe (Taipei, 1991). This title, revealingly, conveys a sense of "going West to meet with the East."That this is the sense is confirmed by the editors' introduction, "A Sinological 'Journey to the West.'"
25. Schwab, 246.
26. For the Bengal Renaissance, see Studies in the Bengal Renaissance, ed. Atulchandra Gupta (Jadavpur, Bengal, 1958),
27. and, David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley, 1969).
28. It may be worth noting that another Indian intellectual and political leader, who would play an even more important part in asserting the contemporary relevance of ancient Indian values, Gandhi, first discovered the significance of those values and the texts in which they were embedded during his years of education in London. In his case, in addition to the Theosophists, European intellectuals such as John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy would play a significant role in his reading of these Indian traditions. See Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (New York, 1983), especially 59-61.
29. In later years, in his critique of capitalist modernity and his pursuit of an alternative path for India, Gandhi did not hesitate to call upon orientalist authorities to justify his advocacy. See the appendix to his Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, rev. ed. (Ahmedabad, 1921), 170-180.
30. Lionel Jensen, "Manufacturing 'Confucianism': Chinese and Western Imaginings in the Making of a Tradition" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1992). It is noteworthy that before they came to realize the importance of Confucianism through acquaintance with the Chinese scene, the Jesuits first attempted to enter China through Buddhism, no doubt on the basis of everyday encounters. "When they realized the low esteem in which Buddhism was held by the literati and saw the lifestyle and ignorance of some of the Buddhist monks, they adopted at the urging of some of their literati friends, the attire and lifestyle of the literati."
31. See Joseph Sebes, S.J., "The Precursors of Ricci," in Ronan and Oh, 19-61, 40.
32. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 47, 62-63, 76.
33. John W. Witek, S.J., "Understanding the Chinese: A Comparison of Matteo Ricci and the French Jesuit Mathematicians Sent by Louis XIV," in Ronan and Oh, 71.
34. Theodore N. Foss, "A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography," in Ronan and Oh, 209-251. See 223 for the Kangxi Emperor and the Great Wall.
35. Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge, Eng., 1990).
36. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1993), offers a stimulating critique of nationalism that incorporates the spatial and temporal implications of nationalism.
37. To my knowledge, Partha Chatterjee, in his analyses of Indian nationalism, has provided the most astute analyses of the problems presented by orientalism to national consciousness. See, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis, 1993),
38. and, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993).
39. Jiang Tingfu, Zhongguo jindaishi dagang (Outline of Modern Chinese History) (Taipei, 1968), 4-5.
40. For the relationship between Jiang and Fairbank, see John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty Year Memoir (New York, 1982), 85-90,
41. and Paul M. Evans, John King Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China (New York, 1988), 50-51.
42. What Jiang said in a lecture in England of returned students like himself is revealing: "we read foreign books and are engrossed in things in which the people have no interest . . . [We can be] eloquent in the class room, in the Press in Shanghai and Beiping, even come to Chatham House and make you think we are intelligent, and yet we cannot make ourselves understood to a village crowd in China, far less make ourselves accepted as leaders of the peasants" (Fairbank, 90). The statement may distinguish the Chinese intellectual from the foreign, even when they hold similar views.
43. See for an example, Capitalism in Contrasting Cultures, ed. Stewart R. Clegg and S. Gordon Redding (Berlin, 1990).
44. See Cultural Nationalism in East Asia, ed. Harumi Befu (Berkeley, 1993),
45. and Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Inquiry (London and New York, 1992).
46. Arif Dirlik, "Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism," boundary 2 22 (Fall, 1995), 229-273.
47. Confucianism and Economic Development: An Oriental Alternative?, ed. Hung-chao Tai (Washington, D.C., 1989), 3. Ironically, Tai agrees with Said's thesis on orientalism, and sees the "oriental alternative" of Confucianism as a means to counter Eurocentric orientalism. Not all those who write of Confucianism engage in this kind of reductionism. An example is Yu Ying-shih's Zhongguo jinshi zongjiao lunli yu shangren jieji (Modern Chinese Religious Ethic and the Merchant Class) (Taipei, 1987). While Yu subscribes to Weberian ideas of modernization, he offers a more nuanced analysis of Confucianism, which accounts both for change in Confucianism over time, and for its different appropriation by different classes, in this case the merchants.
48. Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism: Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York, 1994), introduction.
49. See also her "Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: 'He Shang' in Post-Mao China," Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer, 1992), 686-712.
50. I may take note here of an important observation that Yang makes: "If we take the situation in Taiwan as a concrete example, it is very difficult in everyday life now to distinguish clearly what is typically Chinese culture from what is typically Western culture; but a clear distinction between Chinese and Western cultures seems to persist in people's minds. If they cannot refer something to a past that is no longer retrievable, then they insist on finding it in an inexhaustible West with an indistinct visage" (50). Yang describes the role the government and the tourist industry have played in the production of "Chinese culture," much to the denial of the complexities of the living culture of the present. A similar argument is offered by Allen Chun, "The Culture Industry as National Enterprise: The Politics of Heritage in Contemporary Taiwan," Culture and Policy 6 (1994), 69-89. Both authors cite Sinorama magazine, cited above in connection with Sinology, as one of the major organs of such "cultural production."
51. The emergence of Eurocentrism, as an autonomous, self-contained development from ancient Greece to modern Euro-America, has been examined incisively by Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York, 1989),
52. and Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987).
53. Blaut describes this as "the myth of emptiness" (15), which included the absence of working over the environment in European ways; in other words, living in harmony with nature.
54. Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992), 6.
55. This is very much the case with Tu Wei-ming's advocacy of a "Cultural China." See Tu, "Cultural China," 2.
56. Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars, The Seven Cultures of Capitalism: Value Systems for Creating Wealth in the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands (New York, 1993).
57. For an interesting take on this problem, from an entirely different perspective, see, J. G. A. Pocock, "Deconstructing Europe," History of European Ideas 18 (1994), 329-345.
58. I have addressed this question of "contact zones" or "borderlands" extensively in Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, N.H., 1994). The notion of " borderlands" is quite pervasive in our day in all manner of cultural criticisms.
59. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 38.
60. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, 1992), especially chapter 5.
61. Needless to say, this is not accepted universally, and has produced predictions of new kinds of conflict in the world. The foremost example, by an influential US political scientist, may be Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer, 1993), 22-49.
62. An example of a history-less Asia that is nevertheless modern is to be found in Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority, by the political scientist and China specialist Lucian W. Pye, with Mary W. Pye (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Pye argues for differences among Asian societies, but differences on a common site marked by a culture of "paternalism and dependency." Pye's argument is echoed by many advocates of Confucianism. I noted Yu Ying-shih's study of Chinese merchants above as an example of a different, more historical, approach to the problem of Confucianism and capitalism. It is necessary, in my opinion, to distinguish economic change from capitalist modernization. That Chinese society at different points had dynamic economic change does not imply that it was therefore headed for capitalism; just as the absence of capitalism does not imply that it was therefore stagnating. Such conclusions follow only from a hindsight application of the teleology of capitalism, as in the "sprouts of capitalism" idea in Chinese Marxist historiography.
63. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," 228.