MCLC: China and Orientalism review

Wed Apr 11 09:08:21 EDT 2012

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China and Orientalism review
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This review originally appeared in the journal Twentieth-Century China.

Kirk

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Source: The China Beat (4/10/12): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4244

Book Review: China and Orientalism

Vukovich, Daniel F. China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production
and the P.R.C. <http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415592208/>
Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. xviii, 185 pp. $130.00
(cloth).
By Fabio Lanza

This slim, sharply-argued volume should be a mandatory reading for all of
us who work on post-1949 China. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and
often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called “China”
has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism. That knowledge,
as Vukovich cogently demonstrates, is fundamentally flawed.

Writing as a “barbarian” outside the disciplinary gates— i.e. a
self-declared non-sinologist (pp. xii-xiii) —Vukovich argues that, since
the late 1970s, Western knowledge production about the PRC has been
dominated and defined by a new form of Orientalism. But while for Edward
Said the East was the irreducible “other,” the location of the absolute
difference, the new Sinological-Orientalism construes China as the place
of “becoming sameness” (p. 2). By this he means that China remains the
other—it is still not normal—but is now placed within a scale of
hierarchical difference, one in which it is always in the process of
becoming like the West: liberal, open, modern, and free. In Vukovich’s
essential re-formulation, this China is always the realm of the “not yet”
(p. 3). In this sense, Sinological-Orientalism, as embodied by the
scholarship of the China studies field, continues on the well-worn path of
Cold War discourse, which was in turn displacing and subsuming the
language of colonialism. With this novel incarnation of Orientalism, the
domination of modernization theory and anti-communism is even more total
and unopposed, Vukovich argues, because the actual existence of Maoist
China briefly allowed for the possibility of an alternative to this
domination, and that possibility is now irreparably gone. Also gone, one
may add, is the radical scholarship that China inspired in the West
throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Without that counterpart, the dominance of
the Sinological-Orientalist gaze is seemingly absolute and irrefutable.

Written with spunk and with attention to theoretical details, China and
Orientalism relies on an impressive array of examples and Vukovich’s solid
analysis. Vukovich is keen to show how the object “China” has not been
produced only or specifically in the hallowed halls of Western academia;
rather, the colonial discourse of Sinological-Orientalism is part of a
larger knowledge/power articulation. In fact, one added bonus of the work
is that it illustrates how this perception of China is manufactured
through the repetition, across different fields, of the same colonial
discourse. Vukovich moves with dexterity among literature, scholarship,
film, and journalism, from Don DeLillo’s MAO II to the documentary The
Gate of Heavenly Peace, from Slavoj Žižek to the pages of the New York
Times.

To take just one example, looking at the Tiananmen protests of 1989,
Vukovich singles out how the event has been recoded in Western
interpretations as the narrative of an always-emerging civil society. His
criticism is particularly biting when he illustrates how the statements of
the workers in the Square were twisted and re-interpreted because of their
criticism of the socio-economic effects of the reforms and their overtly
Maoist vocabulary. The latter can only be ignored or ascribed to
nostalgia, so that the workers can be incorporated under the civil society
model. No matter what they actually say or do, Vukovich argues, the people
of China are perceived by foreign observers as ultimately wanting to
become the same with the West—and thus they are always doomed to fail.

Vukovich’s examination of the recent outpouring of literature on the Great
Leap Forward and the ensuing famine is also particularly timely and
subtle. By scrutinizing the claims and the narrative strategies of works
such as Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts and Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great
Famine, Vukovich invites us to look at the meaning of the very act of
counting, behind the race towards generating the always-increasing death
toll accounts. He suggests that the drive to produce knowledge on the
Great Leap disproportionately in the form of numbers—rather than analyses
of its economy and the causes for its failure, as Jack Gray and Carl
Riskin have provided—might have a more profound significance, masked
behind the professed anti-theoretical empiricism of this scholarship. By
reducing the experiments of the Maoist period to a statistical set of
“excess deaths,” it becomes much easier to dismiss collectivism or
socialism in their entirety, and with that any residual challenge they may
still pose today to the neoliberal model. Moreover, as Vukovich
illustrates by referencing Bernard Cohn’s theory on British knowledge
production in India, this “enumerative modality” is essentially colonial.
It is also, and this is another crucial point of the book, essentially
anti-political. A fundamental aspect of Sinological-Orientalism in all its
manifestations is the denial of any political value to the Maoist and
post-Maoist periods, as though politics ceased to exist in China after
1949, or could exist only as failed mimicry of the liberal West (as in
1989).

Reading Vukovich’s book leads me to wonder what a volume about knowledge
production of the PRC within China would look like. Anecdotally, one could
cite examples of the penetration and absorption of Sinological-Orientalist
discourse in the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan; self-orientalizing is
nothing new, and Vukovich hints at it in his critique of Chen Xiomei’s
Occidentalism, but a more systematic analysis is needed. This obviously
exceeds the scope of China and Orientalism, but I hope that Vukovich might
take it up in a future project.

China and Orientalism is an essential contribution to our self-awareness
as producers of knowledge and offers a welcome and indispensable criticism
of the field. But Vukovich also provides examples throughout the volume of
how a non-orientalist approach can be formulated, be it in the analysis of
student protests or in film criticism, as in his appraisal of the movie
Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie). As for the prospects for a
post-orientalist practice in the field of knowledge production, I tend to
be more hopeful—or maybe I am simply more naïve: the very existence of a
book such as China and Orientalism demonstrates the fact that there are
scholars striving to construe, with the tools of theory and empirical
research, a different approach to the study of China.

Fabio Lanza is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at The
University of Arizona.