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POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS
China and Orientalism
Western knowledge production and
the P.R.C.
Daniel F. Vukovich
A book of startling honesty and conviction. 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.” As a revisionist reading of post-war
China, the book brims with antinomian vignettes on everything from Chinese
cinema to the novels of De Lillo and the philosophy of Arendt. Vukovich blasts
the new Orientalism that seeks to free China from its supposedly Borg-like past.
A rare voice, and a welcome one.
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA
This is a unique critique of orientalism in contemporary Chinese studies. Daniel
Vukovich argues that there is a new form of orientalism, which does not project
China as an “other” as many traditional Sinologists did, but emphasizes “same-
ness” or general equivalence of China to the US-West. From this basic observa-
tion, the author highlights the cultural logic of capitalism in the new Orientalistic
interpretation of China. A sharp, inspiring and timely book!
Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, China, author of The Rise of Modern Chinese
Thought, China’s New Order, and The Politics of Imagining Asia
Vukovich’s tenacious critique of the China Studies eld is by itself worth the
price of admission. But the bonus for readers is his remarkable history of the
complexities of post-liberation China. As timely as could be, and guaranteed to
spark debate.
Andrew Ross, New York University, USA, author of Fast Boat to China:
Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai
An important intervention into the battle for China’s past and present. At its heart
is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the
P.R.C since the 1980s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist,
and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinological-
orientalism. Its framing of this knowledge as orientalist and “post-colonial”
should cause a sensation. It may even nally trigger a sorely needed debate in the
eld.
Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies & Director, Confucius
Institute, University of Adelaide, Australia
China and Orientalism
This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in
the world. It has shifted from a logic of “essential difference” to one of “same-
ness” or general equivalence. “China” is now in a halting but inevitable process
of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the
cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse.
This shift reects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of oriental-
ism to area studies and the pax Americana; the liberal triumph at the “end” of
history and the demonization of Maoism; an ever closer Sino–West relationship;
and the overlapping of anti-communist and colonial discourses.
To make the case for this reconstitution of orientalism, this work offers an
interdisciplinary analysis of the China eld broadly dened. Vukovich takes on
specialist work on the politics, governance, and history of the Mao and reform
eras, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen, 1989; the Western study of
Chinese lm; recent work in critical theory which turns on “the China-refer-
ence”; and other global texts about or from China. Through extensive analysis,
the production of Sinological knowledge is shown to be of a piece with Western
global intellectual political culture.
This work will be of great interest to scholars of Asian, postcolonial, and cul-
tural studies.
Daniel F. Vukovich teaches critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial
and China studies at Hong Kong University.
Postcolonial politics
Edited by:
Pal Ahluwalia
University of California, San Diego and University of South Australia
Michael Dutton
Goldsmiths, University of London
Leela Gandhi
University of Chicago
and
Sanjay Seth
Goldsmiths, University of London
“Postcolonial Politics” is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection
of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely
existed; its recent emergence is enabled, rst, because a new form of “politics”
is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a
(yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working
within the “New Humanities” have now begun to migrate into the realm of poli-
tics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the
ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory
has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West.
At rst these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies,
but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of “Europe and its
other” introduced us to a “style of thought” that was as much political as it was
cultural, as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowl-
edge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being. A
new, broader, and more reexive understanding of politics, and a new style of
thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to “think” politics
through postcolonial theory, and to “do” postcolonial theory in a fashion which
picks up on its political implications.
Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive
practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read “difference”
concretely, and to problematize our ideas of the modern, the rational, and the
scientic by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocen-
tric and Eurocentric. This is where Postcolonial Politics hopes to offer new and
fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.
1 The Postcolonial Politics of Development
Ilan Kapoor
2 Out of Africa
Post-structuralism’s colonial roots
Pal Ahluwalia
3 The Everyday Practice of Race in America
Ambiguous privilege
Utz McKnight
4 The City as Target
Edited by Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancy and John Phillips
5 China and Orientalism
Western knowledge production and the P.R.C.
Daniel F. Vukovich
China and Orientalism
Western knowledge production and
the P.R.C.
Daniel F. Vukovich
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Daniel F. Vukovich
The right of Daniel F. Vukovich to be identied as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identication and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-0-415-59220-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-14557-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
In memory of my father, Frederick Vukovich
One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw
reality, changing it from free-oating objects into units of knowledge. The
problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human
mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have
always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures,
receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benet of the receiver,
they ought to be. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting
the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the
sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental.
This process of conversion is a disciplined one: it is taught, it has its own socie-
ties, periodicals, traditions, vocabulary, rhetoric, all in basic ways connected to
and supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West.
– Edward Said, Orientalism.
Contents
Preface xii
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 1
2 Uncivil society, or orientalism and Tiananmen, 1989 24
3 Maoist discourse and its demonization 47
4 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: missing millions,
excess deaths, and a crisis of Chinese proportions 66
5 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao: the “Sinologization”
of global thought 87
6 Screening Sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 100
7 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 126
Notes 151
Bibliography 164
Index 180
Preface
I came to the study of China and its representation by a circuitous route. I had
long had an interest in Marxism and the centrality of the economic in social and
cultural life, in part as a result of growing up working class in the Pittsburgh, PA
area, and also due to some excellent political theory teachers at Lehigh Univer-
sity. Much later, during frozen winters in Urbana, I began to read on the Russian
Revolution. I quickly became fascinated with the rise and fall of that momentous
event. It was to be good preparation for an encounter with an even more compli-
cated revolution and political trajectory, as well as its coding abroad. Cut to a
later scene: my viewing of Chen Kaige’s lm, “Farewell My Concubine” at the
New Art Theatre. Like many I was mesmerized by the lm but also suspicious
of its a-historical rendering of history. Chen’s “Yellow Earth” later compelled
me to pursue revolutionary China and its representation. This then led to years of
reading and observation up to the present, in the specialized modern China eld
and more broadly in relation to China Watching and China-Writing.
What I was struck by, and remain so, is what people are able to say about the
P.R.C. as well as how they do so. Writings on China, even expert ones, seemed
to me to be akin to the type of texts and discourse that Edward Said wrote about
in the third and nal part of Orientalism: not classical, literary types of discourse
about an essential other, but a social-scientic, Cold War-inected writing that is
less overtly orientalist and racist and more full of detail. More modenizationist
than exoticizing. A nonetheless problematic, interested, and often unreexive
body of work. Representations of the P.R.C. seemed a clear instance of posi-
tional superiority over and against some entity called China.
Western understandings of China offer an example of what Gayatri Spivak
memorably coined as sanctioned ignorance. I do not think the issue is only, or
even primarily one of language – the lack of Chinese speakers in the U.S.-West.
While that is surely a major obstacle it is also a simplication and does not chal-
lenge the orientalists’ ground, or for that matter Chinese nativism. China for the
former is not a text or discursive construction but essentially a language and “spe-
cialization.” The present author lacks both the specialized training – whatever that
would be – and the impressive language skills of the ofcial Sinologist. All I have
had to rely on have been my own reading and thinking and observation. I remain
convinced, however, that as valuable as specialization and multilingual training
Preface xiii
are, there remains a space and role for the generalist. The interdisciplinary
humanities intellectual, able to move across different historical and cultural expe-
riences of imperialism. Was this not the original promise of postcolonial studies?
My approach is warranted in part because the question of China and its repre-
sentation – the knowledge problem – is still not an objective or disinterested one.
And it cannot be. It partakes of the long history of orientalism as discourse and
traditional part of Western intellectual political culture. But that sanctioned igno-
rance also has to do with China specically being an “enemy” in the Cold War
(and earlier), and a racialized one at that. It is also, and was not-colonized. The
latter freedom makes it fair game: one can speak to it guiltlessly, it can seem
alien and in desperate need of Westernization, communism is like inhuman
fascism, and so on. Put another way, what makes the P.R.C. different in this case
is the Euro-American pursuit of leadership in Asia, i.e. hegemony. In short, my
view is that the study of China – as with the study of any “foreign” area – should
be and in fact is open to cultural and political critique from the barbarians
outside the disciplinary gates. Not just the natives, but all and sundry. As Fredric
Jameson once noted in another context, back in the day it was the philosopher’s
job to check up on what the various experts were doing, how they were thinking,
by way of what categories, and so on. Consider this book, then, akin to such a
critique of “China” and its place in intellectual political culture. It takes part of
its inspiration not just from Edward Said and Jameson, but from the fact that if
Foucault could talk so productively about so many alien discourses without
being authorized by them (never a psychiatrist, linguist, and so on), then so
might someone else. My point in this book then is not that generalizations are
bad by denition but that intellectual labor requires labor, and thinking about
thinking. Further reading convinced me that the study of China needed a Saidian
or postcolonial, decolonizing moment. It still does as far as I am aware, the
present study is the rst book-length, English-language critique of modern Sinol-
ogy or China studies broadly understood.
In one sense the modern colonial era or age of imperialism are over (even if one
does not subscribe to the beyond-the-nation thesis). At least in regard to China vis-
à-vis the West. Sooner rather than later the Western media and culture will have to
start being inuenced, in some substantial way, by Chinese views and perspectives.
But it is still striking that one can speak so easily of the near total domination and
brainwashing of hundreds of millions of people during and after Mao; that the years
from 1949–79 were the Chinese Dark Ages; that one can comfortably speak of an
alien history that is so little known in reality, i.e. in its complexity; that one simply
need not take the P.R.C. seriously except as evidence of a priori knowledge about
communism versus democracy, capitalism versus state planning, individual freedom
versus despotism, bad tradition versus good modernity, and so forth. At the very
least, such statements are chauvinistic and tendentious. I believe they add up to a
discursive formation that precedes and in some sense determines, or exerts pres-
sures and sets limits upon the speaking subject. What I hope to have shown is that
they are also about positional superiority and, more broadly, Edward Said’s real
problematic: the phenomenon of uneven knowledge production in the world at
xiv Preface
large. Uneven in the sense of imbalanced and hierarchical, and knowledge in the
sense of interested and worldly “discourse” that ultimately tells us more about the
U.S.-West and its intellectual and political preoccupations. It is these perennial and
strongly political problems that make the critique of orientalism, and of representa-
tion and knowledge more broadly, an enduring concern that will outlast more
ephemeral intellectual trends as well as the empiricist desire to tell things as they
really are. It will also become quickly apparent that in one sense I do follow Said’s
method (historicist, textualist criticism) but in another do not. For this type of book-
length project, and as Said braved, the critique of orientalism inevitably involves
naming names, i.e. critiquing the writings of specic people in the various elds
that I examine. This runs the risk of being dismissed as “too political” or “polemi-
cal.” And yet polemics are an ancient form of critical inquiry and cultural–political
critique, if not indeed the very denition of them. One question at stake here is the
relationship between individual writers and the larger epistemological eld. My
point is simple: the question is not one of individual failing or bad faith, but how
texts and statements are signs, part and parcel of a larger knowledge/power forma-
tion. This is the mode in which I am working, or attempting to, and as opposed to
the practice of ad hominem. I am unconcerned with biography and can only work
with what people say, or what I think they are saying. What I have tried to do is to
bring the skills of close reading to bear on scholarly, literary, lmic, journalistic,
and other texts that – taken and framed together like a constellation – signal the
Sinological-orientalist formation. It is not the individual instance of colonial dis-
course that matters so much as their repetition across diverse elds. This is the main
thrust of this book. I believe that if I can show this repetition and regularity then I
will have made a case for the “new” orientalism vis-à-vis the P.R.C.
As will become obvious, I am more sympathetic to the Chinese revolution, espe-
cially its post-1949 period, than the majority of people in the China eld and the
U.S.–Western intellectual political culture. I have nothing to confess. My position
arises from study and contemplation of the era and its meaning, including its demon-
ization in Western – and Chinese liberal – intellectual discourse. My sources and
interlocutors will show up in my citations. I might add that my thinking ows out of
what we might call the Hinton-Gao tradition of grass roots writings and perspectives
from the land reform onwards. This is work that is concrete yet brave enough to
generalize and read China politically against the grain of what we thought we
already knew. It also is not the type of grass roots work that eschews or laments
structure, the level of the state, geo-politics, and so on, but that retains a political
edge. It is marginalized in the eld for the same reasons. I do not think 1949–79 was
utopia achieved or is the answer – in the sense of “going back” – for China or the
world today, though it does have potential lessons as well as legacies of social
justice, development, radical political culture, and so forth. My basic point is simply
twofold: one, its demonization reects orientalist knowledge production (the
triumph of Western, now global intellectual political culture) and not the Truth of
the Mao or post-Mao eras; two, it has been most notoriously abused in scholarship
as well as all sorts of other texts. Agreeing with such conclusions does not make one
a “Maoist” or anything else for that matter. One can by now read any number of
Preface xv
isolated accounts of the successful yet egalitarian Mao era economy, or its relative
but important achievements in gender and social equality, workers’ rights, life
expectancy, mass literacy, and rural welfare. This type of perspective has not yet
registered within the discourse on China, which turns on denigrating the entire era
and revolution as more or less entirely failed, tragic, betrayed, fake, totalitarian, and
so on. It would be hard to wage a secret, symbolic, unconscious, implied and self-
righteous “war” with the Party-state if it turns out to have done some real good and
to have legitimacy among its people. (The problem is not so much the war, or the
obsessive desire to change China, but the lack of honesty about it taking place.)
Perhaps it is especially hard for academics in the over-developed world to appreci-
ate what a strict national policy of egalitarianism and three decades of overall, mas-
sively successful industrial modernization and economic growth can mean for
inhabitants of a poor and formerly Third World country.1 That this also entailed, just
as it does today, enormous sacrices and hard labor on the part of hundreds of mil-
lions of Chinese citizens does not seem to me to negate the achievement. It is rather
all the more reason to register the difference this has made and to respect the effort.
I do not offer a full-on defense of the Mao era and revolution as a whole – the
historical record and its interpretation. That is a pressing task, and would require
a crowd of books, articles, and people in addition to what has already been
started by others in their own ways. This includes, of course, analysis of its
failure, mistakes, and setbacks. But this book does seek to defend the complexity
of that era as well as today’s China in political as well as more general, intellec-
tual terms and principles. I am countering what I take to be orientalist knowledge
with a two-pronged approach. One is known as a “colonial discourse analysis.”
The second is to offer alternative accounts about, references to, or gestures
towards the China that is left out or denigrated by the former. (For better or
worse, this is not what Said does in Orientalism.) To do this I draw on work by
others who have done empirical or theoretical work in this same direction of
complexity. I am not only assuming such a critically positive understanding of
the P.R.C. under Mao and beyond exists, but am also citing people. In fact, I do
think something like a critical China studies “movement” is afoot in English
scholarship alongside the dominant voices. Not as a unied voice but as a move-
ment towards taking the revolution, Chinese Maoism, and the P.R.C. seriously.
It seems to largely happen outside of the China studies eld proper (their confer-
ences, journals, programs, networks). This will only be abetted by, and in point
of fact is connected to, the rise and continuing development of the so-called New
Left and other critical, non-occidentalist intellectuals in China since the 1990s.
China does not belong exclusively to the Sinologists and diaspora anymore. This
is a good thing.
As a global-cross disciplinary subeld in its own right, postcolonial studies has
a role to play here, if it can continue to expand from (as opposed to abandon) its
original roots within primarily South Asian and full-on British colonial contexts.
To be able to better engage Chinese and East Asian contexts it will need as well to
push beyond the by-now tired streams of quasi-libertarian post-structuralism and
the language games and clubby networks of the American and other academies.
xvi Preface
Perhaps a return to the question of orientalism – recall that Said’s book pre-
dates the rise of postcolonial studies – and the properly geo-political will help. I
do not think the problematic of Sinological-orientalism is going away anytime
soon. Perhaps there will come a time when the U.S.-West has to know as much
about China as the latter now do about America and Europe – and in an enlarged
and rich way, as opposed to the colonial/Cold War/universalist form of the
present knowledge systems (or the ham-handed soft power efforts of the PRC).
At that point we can begin to entertain the question of an end to orientalist
knowledge production in the world.
Even then, however, we would still need to think through the historical lega-
cies of orientalist, racist, and imperial discourse and whether or not this still
impacts the global Eastward shift and re-balancing. These have after all been the
dominant ways of thinking the Other and the East for a very long time. This is
precisely the power and tradition of orientalism as a material part of Western and
global intellectual political culture. I do not see China as exceptionalist in this
sense. It is part of global history in these ways too. As for academic work proper,
the dominance of empiricism and positivism over against more theoretically
informed, self-reexive approaches to China is still with us. There is as ever the
refusal to broach “subjective” and speculative questions. The corporatization of
the academy is almost complete. This is all to say that there will have to be a
worldly, political solution to orientalism and that type of representation; a long-
term project indeed. Intellectual labor, in other words, is still a part of the world
that labor, trade and capital created. My point is that orientalism (as opposed to
“bias”) may not be eternal in the way Althusser talked of ideology, but even with
the rise of China it is still on the table, only more so.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 2 rst appeared in Cultural Logic in the 2009 annual issue and reappears
here in lightly revised form. A few parts of my nal chapter appear in “China in
Theory: The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy” in
Cultural Critique (Fall 2010), although the argument is different here.
One’s intellectual debts are innumerable, even beyond the revelations in your
footnotes. But I still want to thank a number of people for their work, for com-
ments on mine, or for other forms of support. Liu Kang has been a valuable
interlocutor and advisor. Zhang Xudong has also been one, in the US and in
China. I’ve learned a good deal from both of them and will continue to do so.
Andrew Ross’s support of the manuscript has meant a lot. Likewise for Timothy
Brennan, whose work in my view sets the standard for cultural and “postcolo-
nial,” radical critique. Thanks, Tim, for all your help. Gao Mobo’s work is foun-
dational to my thinking about the P.R.C. and its interpretation, as is Wang
Zheng’s and Han Dongping’s. Mobo has been not only a former dissertation
reader but an intellectual bulwark and inspiration. Several people residing within
China have helped me think and sustain this project. The inimitable Han Yuhai
and Liu Yuanqi have taught me a great deal – much more than they realize.
Others include Shi Xu, Zhao Xun, and Ma Laoshi (via Nanjiecun). And of
course my dear iconoclastic friends in Hong Kong, Yan Hairong and Barry
Sautman. A roundtable with Wang Hui in Shanghai was most benecial, 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 elds.
All of the usual disclaimers apply for all of these interlocutors. From my old
cohort in the China Study Group of days gone by I thank the late Joan Hinton (a
most remarkable person indeed), Dale Wen, Matt Hale, Robert Weil, Joel
Andreas, and Dong Xulin. It was rst through the CSG, and then through later,
more direct encounters with the “New Left” and “Old Left” perspectives emerg-
ing from China, that I rst became aware that informed critical approaches to
China existed and that William Hinton did. Conference interlocutors at several
MLA conventions, at Nanjing University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Jiao-
tong University, HKU, and Zhejiang University were all useful. I must sincerely
thank Michael Dutton and an anonymous reader for the Postcolonial Politics
xviii Acknowledgments
series, as well as Nicola Parkin and Craig Fowlie with Routledge. The draft of
this book was rst accepted back in June 2009 and I am still glad Michael and
the Board took a chance on it. In Hong Kong I received a Research Grants
Council award that provided teaching release in 2009–10. 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.S. 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’d like to thank the entire HKU village in particular. I have benetted from
teaching students from all walks of life in China, Hong Kong, and the U.S. 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 benecial.
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.
1 Sinological-orientalism now
“China” and the new era
In “Orientalism Now,” the concluding chapter of Edward Said’s 1978 book, we
are left with the migration of orientalism from European empires and philology
to the U.S. imperium and the dominance of social scientic discourse. This
project begins where Said left off. It argues that there is a new, “Sinological”
form of orientalism at work in the world, one that takes as its object an “Other”
that has since the 1970s occupied an increasingly central place within the world
system and Western intellectual–political culture: the People’s Republic of
China. As with Said’s formulation rooted in the Middle East and South Asia,
Sinological-orientalism and its production of a textual “China” helps constitute
the identity or “Self” of the West (what Balibar aptly calls the “Western-
Christian-Democratic-Universalist identity”) (“Difference” 30). The U.S.-West
is what China is not, but which the latter will become. So, too, the new oriental-
ism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: not just the production of
knowledge about an “area” but the would-be management and administration of
the area for economic, political, and cultural–symbolic benet. But whereas ori-
entalism in Said turned upon a posited, essential difference between Orient and
Occident (as in Kipling’s famous verse: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and
never the twain shall meet”), the new form turns upon sameness or more speci-
cally, upon China’s becoming sameness. China is seen as in a process of halt-
ingly but inevitably becoming-the-same as “us”: open, liberal, modern, free. Put
another way, “China” is understood as becoming generally equivalent to the
West. What this reects, in part, is the by now familiar resurgence of moderniza-
tion rhetoric under the cover of “globalization” and the end-of-history thematic
famously captured by Francis Fukuyama. 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 1960s and early 1970s, the former is back in
charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual–political culture.
When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of capital as such, namely as
an historical force of abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of
some third thing called the value-form (their “exchange value” or “general
equivalent”), the relationship between this orientalism and global capitalism
2 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
appears in sharper relief. 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. So, too, for the present moment, whereby Western investment and “con-
strainment” strategies are often rationalized on the basis of these being benecial
to the Chinese and their progression towards democracy and human rights (what-
ever these mean), as well as helping “balance” and protect the rest of Asia from
China’s rise. I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital
logics in a nal chapter. My argument is a totalizing, “functionalist” one about
the integral relationship between capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the
thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a global Sinological-orientalism
are the momentous if not counter-revolutionary changes within China itself – its
Dengist “era of reform and opening up” dating from 1979 – and the West’s
economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global
prominence. This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becoming-
sameness: China is still not “normal” (and has been tragically different), but is
engaged in a “universal” process such that it will, and must, become the same as
“us.” Whether it wants to or not. That is the present–future offered to China
within this discourse, and – as anyone who watched the 2008 Olympics opening
ceremonies knows (“one world, one dream”) – it is also one taken up within
China itself.
I turn to the question of Occidentalism below, and at other times make refer-
ence to Westernized/liberal views within China. 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 reects 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.R.C. outside of China and the cultural, ide-
ological, and other politics that subtend this. 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. But the impact in
China of modern imperialism and “contact” remains decisive for all of us, and
once we reach this era we need necessarily engage the orientalist and post-colo-
nial questions. There will be no “new” Sinology until this conversation at least
begins.
As will quickly become clear, my analysis of Sinological-orientalism abounds
with gestures and full-on references to what I take to be some of the complexi-
ties of Maoist and post-Mao China in political, ideological/cultural, and other
terms. Contra Said’s own practice in 1978, then, I do take it to be important to at
least attempt to argue for some of those complexities and “brute realities of the
Orient” (his words) that are occluded by the isolated details and positional
superiority of orientalism. His decision not to do so has meant that his work
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 3
there is often reductively appropriated by cultural and postcolonial studies that
reduce the problem of orientalism to some basic Freudian Othering process, the
deployment of stereotypical images in lm, a simple self/other identity dynamic,
and so forth. 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 eld.
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 places “the Westerner
in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing
him the upper hand” (Orientalism 7). It is not just a heuristic but the founda-
tional rule of colonial discourse and orientalism.1 For our purposes this means
that the authority and a priori knowledge of the Sinologist-analyst-watcher
reigns supreme and untroubled. For all its detailed knowledge, then, Sinological-
orientalism works as a circular, self-enclosed system. It is also paradoxical in
that what I am calling its emphasis on China’s “becoming-sameness” is also at
odds with this exible superiority, which is also to say the ultimate inferiority of
the native, Chinese reality. 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.R.C. This is surprisingly difcult to do, in part because the
language we have to describe such things ts not at all with the dominant,
Western, liberal humanist paradigm of the humanities and human sciences. This
is, I believe, also Wang Hui’s problem in his brilliant and searching but difcult
works on Chinese histories and Western theory.2 My own emphases have been
with the political, Maoist past as well as its traces today, even after its demoniza-
tion at home and abroad. Others would certainly write all of this differently, and
it is again something worthy of book-length treatment despite the professional
risks involved (writing “positive” scholarship about the Mao era). Some already
have. In addition to others cited in this study, Lin Chun’s The Transformations
of Chinese Socialism is another case in point (albeit focused on the reform era).
But all of this work is of very recent vintage and remains marginal to the overall
China eld.
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. It is as if what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably described as the
“waiting room of history” – or the continual saying of “not yet” to the colonized
who would be free – has subtly but importantly shifted.3 The time is at hand. The
denouement has inched closer. The last real constraint remains the Party state
which will depart from the historical stage with our help. This marks a shift from
the essential difference between East and West to their – China’s – general
equivalence: a sameness structured by a hierarchical difference. 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. S. Mill. While a range of temporary – as opposed to
essential – obstacles can be summoned up to explain why China is not yet free
4 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
and normal, the main and seemingly most fungible one remains the Chinese
Communist Party (state). Were it not for this anachronistic, evil institution, the
logic goes, China would and will be becoming-the-same and joining the normal
world. A Sinied, mainland Chinese path is more or less impossible, be it in the
Maoist attempt at alternative modernity (itself a Western/Marxist hybrid) or in
the various, nascent post-Mao efforts to reform and develop a Chinese state and
society adequate to the nation’s various, complex challenges, and that might
catch up to the heretofore largely unchecked, rapid, and dislocating deployment
of capitalism.4
Periodizing Sinological-orientalism
There seems to be a consensus within studies of globalization and the world
system that the 1970s loom large today. Something changed then, even if the
triumph of neo-liberalism and the commodication of everything appeared only
later. Even as Vietnam was winning its war of national liberation, historical
communism turns out to have been in its nal throes, succumbing to its internal
contradictions – chiey the inability to institutionalize egalitarian growth and
mass participation – and to the pressures of capital accumulation on a world-
scale. David Harvey famously posited the oating of the dollar at Bretton Woods
in 1972, and so the nancialization of the globe as a benchmark for the full-on
emergence of the condition of postmodernity or the “sea-change in cultural as
well as political–economic practices” that we know as contemporary capitalism
(whereas modernity is rooted in industrial capital and postmodernity in nancial
capital) (Condition vii). Harvey’s text remains a rich and rewarding one, not
least because it connected the culture of postmodernity to a global history, albeit
an abstract and somewhat Eurocentric one (and one he has since de-provincial-
ized).5 In the event, postmodernism – as a contested term and eld of study –
turns out to have been something like the latest fashion he thought it to be,
dissolving itself into “globalization” or “global studies.” Or put another way,
postmodernism – as discourse and as material, social reality – has morphed into
“globalization,” and it is this shift in history and academic focus that Harvey’s
book implicitly maps. I will return in a later chapter to theoretical takes on glo-
balization and the place of “China” within them. But be it postmodernism or glo-
balization, we are still working within the same sea-change of the 1970s. For all
the attacks on Harvey’s book and on Marxism by cultural studies avatars in the
1990s, it is his mode of analysis that is useful for understanding global problems
like Sino–Western relations – not only in terms of political economy and nance
capital, but in terms of politics, ideology, and space.
What Harvey identied as the central dynamics of capitalism – the forces of
abstraction and reication generated, the compression of space and time as
capital expands globally – are still with us, only more so. Who could have imag-
ined, in 1972 – also the moment of the P.R.C.–U.S. rapprochement – that the
products of Chinese labor, from McDonalds’ “Happy Meal” toys to the a-histor-
ical epic lms of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, would ood the Euro-American
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 5
markets and social imaginary? That China would host the international spectacle
that was the 2008 Olympics? These same forces of abstraction and reication are
not unknown in China, whose national economy by some estimates is now less
state-owned than France’s. The decades since Bretton Woods, then, have known
a conuence of capital, China, and Sino–Western relations and ows; and it is
this era to which Sinological-orientalism corresponds. In so far as it may obtain,
this argument – the close, functional, articulated relationship between capital
and this new orientalism – has consequences for both a postcolonial studies that
sees only discontinuity between colonial discourse and capitalism, and for a
Marxism that has yet to “de-Cold War” and de-provincialize, or to re-orient itself
to the centrality of Asia and China, within historical and contemporary capital-
ism (and communism).6 At the same time, for all the problems and lacunae of
Marxist theory, in an age of neo-liberalism and full-on globalization, it remains
indispensable, and its value theoretic and the critique of “socially objective”
forms of thought – which I will later argue include orientalism – know a renewed
lease on life. It is no accident that the orientalist logic of sameness dovetails with
capital’s own logic of a homogenizing, abstract sameness; they are of whole
cloth, as is their epistemological violence.
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.7
Thus this knowledge formation must be understood as a part of historical colo-
nialism and its mission civilisatrice. The logic of sameness also dovetails with
missionary discourse and the older French universalist logic of the civilizing
mission (all “natives” can become the same as “us”). For all its at times
explicit racism about cruelty and backwardness, Chinese and missionary dis-
course in China also pre-supposed the belief that they were “equal,” that they
could and must be saved, and made the Christian-same. This is akin to French
imperialism’s own mission of bringing civilization to the colonized – who
could and would reach the next level in due course, with the right (colonial)
governance and administration. 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. This
emphasis on sameness, particularly in the contemporary moment, also points
to a gap in Said’s analysis: that in some colonial and neo-colonial contexts it is
not simply allowed but mandated that the “Other” become the “Same.” Stan-
dard developmental economics would be another case in point. 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.8 This is not to deny the honorable exception of the
work of the former Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars.9 It is also true that for a
brief moment in the mid-1970s, Modern China did on one or two occasions
6 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
publish debates on Maoism and imperialism that included leftist/alternative per-
spectives. But today one would be hard-pressed to nd current work in the main-
stream/agship presses and journals – or even in cultural studies venues – that
takes the Chinese revolution seriously (as a complex, deep, and “positive” event).
This void includes as well the anti-colonial nature of that revolution. As Tani
Barlow has noted, it is still the case that within the disciplines, “China materialized
as an essentially noncolonial national unit at the very moment academic scholar-
ship on Asia turned to social science” [i.e. during the Cold War] (Barlow 374).
This was also the very same postwar moment of modernization-discourse’s ascen-
dancy and the height of the Cold War and Red Scare. China studies was dened 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-reexively to the turn to the right within China
and the U.S. Partly due to the “shock” of post-Mao revelations of Chinese poverty,
violence, and persecution (narrated by the very same Chinese intellectuals who
were victimized), and in part due to this lack of “theory,” the collective response to
the great moving rightward show was to aspire to professionalization and objectiv-
ity. This meant, variously, de-emphasizing politics altogether, turning to anti-com-
munism in a way reminiscent of an earlier generation’s trauma over the Soviet
God-that-failed, or embracing the Fukuyamian zeitgeist about the triumph of
liberal-capitalist- democracy. “Modernization” and anti-communism won, both in
China and virtually everywhere else. Hence the “new” orientalism. China went
from being semi-colonial (and revolutionary) to non-colonial (and haltingly,
ideally becoming the same) even amongst otherwise heterodox scholars. Save for
occasional ashes in the pages of positions or in leftist screeds, earlier, beginning
debates or perceptions about imperialism and the “writing” of the P.R.C. effec-
tively disappeared. The problematic of knowledge production subtending the
China-West problematic never quite emerged.10
This is to say that what we have to attend to is the non-debate between “the
China eld” – understood in its broadest sense as knowledge about China pro-
duced outside of China – and various forms of postcolonial studies that have fore-
grounded the question of “the writing of the Other” and shown the centrality of
colonialism in modern world history. China, as the object of inquiry, has so far
proven resistant to the impacts of “theory” and critique (except for critique of the
P.R.C. of course!). There are a number of possible explanations for this, and none
of them would be attering to the social-scientic and objective pretensions of
area studies. But to be fair, there are a number of stumbling blocks for those who
wish to bring postcolonial and critical theory to the “case” of China and its repre-
sentation. Arguably the primary one is simply that China was – as Lenin rst put
it, to be followed by Mao et al. – only semi-colonial. While the great chaos and
disrepair of China as a whole from 1911–49 is beyond question, it retained its
political sovereignty at all times. This is true in a formal, signicant sense, and is
obviously a different scenario than that endured by the (future) nations of South
Asia, Africa, and Latin America (or Hong Kong). Given that our basic working
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 7
denitions of colonialism turn on this very distinction, there are logical grounds
for seeing China’s “problematic” as being after all closer to modernization than
colonialism per se. This is the dominant coding of China inside and abroad, where
the notion of “colonial modernity” has yet to disrupt the dominant ways China is
written.11 This also seemingly undercuts even our received critical theories of
colonialism and empire that ow out of chiey British and French histories of
empire and those experiences of colonial rule. The iconoclasts of the May 4th
period as well as of the early Communist Party all embraced “Westernization” in
a very conscious and deliberate, if also inevitably misinformed and utopian, way.
(This is why the Maoist Sinication of Marxism was so difcult 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? Hence one can readily nd histories of opium in China,
of an age of openness before the so-called “take-over” in 1949, of Hong Kong
developing more or less awlessly prior to 1997, or of Shanghai’s singular “cos-
mopolitanism” that avoid the imperialist/capitalist problematic entirely. One can
contrast this, for example, with the largely unknown historical work of the
Chinese radical historian Hu Sheng (1918–2000). Readily available even in
English but predictably dismissed as a “Party” voice, his work on the destructive
effects of imperialism from the later Qing through the Republican periods is
serious scholarship that is emblematic of a considered and considerable “main-
land” perspective on key “China-West” questions.
In actuality, there is no good reason for dening colonialism as primarily an
issue of political sovereignty and its loss or recapture. Sovereignty remains
important, but twentieth-century colonial/imperial/geo-political conicts and dis-
courses are too complex and “messy” to be demarcated so clearly. For one thing,
as Robert Young has noted, the historical and practical differences between the
modern French and British empires (or between the projects of the civilizing
mission and the white man’s burden) made little difference from the standpoint
of the colonized subjects.12 Young’s point is directed against efforts to disaggre-
gate colonialism to the point of making it go away conceptually as a unied
whole (or to outright defend it). It can apply as well to Hong Kong studies that
valorize elite and comprador participation in so-called “collaborative colonial-
ism”. But Young’s point also obtains for modern China, and even for current
“nationalist” Chinese reactions to Western media discourse and globalization
(the “infamous” anger of the “netizens” of China, the protests against the free-
Tibet perspective, and so on). While China might appear to occupy an exception-
alist space vis-à-vis postcolonial theory (around sovereignty, cultural
imperialism, colonial education, and so forth), it was nevertheless deeply
affected by imperialist “contact” as well as the later, related Cold War – a war
that was often hot, economically disastrous, and a cultural–ideological battle
beyond mere propaganda broadsides. In an important sense, it is not the details
of sovereignty and occupation that matter so much as the cultural–ideological
conicts and effects. Recall the seemingly inexplicable anger of Chinese people
8 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
over, for example, anti-Olympics/free-Tibet protests, the awarding of Nobel
prizes to exiled dissidents, currency devaluation pressures from the U.S.-West,
and so forth. What is at stake here is not the Truth but a certain paternalist, even
colonial arrogance from abroad and – for non-Western identied, and non-
diasporic Chinese – the lack of permission to narrate within the “global” sphere.
But the details do matter too. As Hevia has argued, and as with the case of
colonial India, the production of an “imperial archive” of texts, translations, and
knowledge about “China” was a concomitant part of the global colonial project
of the foreign powers during the later Qing dynasty and Republican period
(“Archive State” 236). Chief within this history are the missionary activities
before and after the Boxer Movement and of a larger discourse that lives on
today “in the pious moral tone of American foreign policy toward China”
(Hevia, “Leaving a Brand” 325). Sinological-orientalism represents, in part, a
redeployment of missionary and civilizing discourse, including its logic of same-
ness and equivalence. 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.S.-West but also globally.
So, too, we might recall the impact of an older, philological Sinology in
changing Chinese perceptions and practices of their own language: no less a
radical Chinese patriot than Lu Xun would claim that unless the Chinese lan-
guage were radically altered and “Westernized,” it and the nation would die. All
in all, then, the foreign powers and the “contact” with the West certainly left
their mark on China – both materially and culturally – as did the later Cold War.
The Cold War was in some sense the continuation of Western, chiey 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: notwithstanding
the empirical differences between “real” colonialism in South Asia and Africa
versus the case of China,
the fact of multiple imperialist adventures in China [as opposed to a single
conquest] . . . should not distract attention away from the fact that already
well established colonial knowledges informed the Great Powers’ experi-
ments and contributed to ‘development’ in their ‘spheres of inuence’ .
(Barlow, “Eugenic” 377)
Rather than argue further in general terms here for the import of the colonial/
imperial/orientalist problematic for China, I seek to make the case imma-
nently through the pages that follow. My critique is aimed at the expanded
China eld (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 2000s). 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).
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 9
As will quickly become evident, by “Sinology” and the “Sinological” I refer
to more than the original China-centered eld within the older orientalism (going
back at least to the early 1700s), and more than the specialized area studies insti-
tuted across the U.S.-West after the revolution of 1949. Note, however, that there
is no such thing as “China studies” within China. 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. While specialized work,
particularly within the social sciences and politics, occupies much of my atten-
tion, I also use texts from lm studies, literature, journalism, and current
“theory.” In doing so I mean to follow Adorno: his oft-stated desire to write
books that are constellations that make unlike things alike. But I also rely on
Foucault’s idea that the things that make up a discourse are dispersed across the
social eld, yet combine to form a common unit that has regularized “state-
ments” and effects of power. This combination is Foucault’s inescapable gesture
to the totality or interdisciplinarity. The China eld 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: that China is becoming democratic, normal, civil, creative–
artistic (avant-garde), liberal, and so on; that it still lacks something (often the
same items); that its Maoist, revolutionary past is something either in the dustbin
of history or must still be overcome. But “statement” here should be understood
in the Foucaultian sense: it is at times more or less explicit (as in a speech act),
but more often implied or signied indirectly and even non-linguistically. We
must emphasize the rhetorical, discursive function of the statement – less the
exact words, more its status as authorized “knowledge.”13 These are things that
can be signied as easily by the newscaster as by the specialist, and likewise for
the more popular “China Watching” cultural producer and citizen. 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 difcult to change. The idea and knowledges of China we have
do not stem only from specialists and the rareed realms of Truth. This is why
the critique of Sinological discourse has to engage demography as much as lm
studies, creative texts as much as “scientic” ones.
Much of what I am saying here about how the China eld 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:
We are not talking of two separate types and domains of knowledge about
Islam, one for the scholarly elect and another for the rude masses, but of the
10 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
coexistence within orientalism of two substantially concordant registers, one
of which – the scholarly – has greater access to observation . . . and which
looks all the more abject for this. . . . Regardless of access to real or specious
facts, facts are always constructed and their construction is invariably cul-
ture-specic. Orientalist scholarship is a cultural mood born of mythological
classicatory lore, a visceral, savage division of the world, much like such
partisanship as animates support for football clubs.
(Islams 127–8)
Certainly I do not quite mean to say “As for Islam so too for China and the
P.R.C.,” since China’s relationship to imperialism has its own historical specic-
ity, as does the largely American, Cold War-inected modern China studies
eld. Some will argue that since China was never “really” colonized and is so
much older and “intact,” orientalism is a non-starter. (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 signications of imperialism
and modern colonialism. If we cannot make connections – even at the level of
theory – between the West’s China and the West’s Islam, then we cannot speak
of a global history of colonialism and its aftermaths. And of course one cannot
deny the import of modern colonialism within Western intellectual–political
culture (the dominant knowledge producers). In this sense, then: for “Islam” read
“China.”
From London to Lhasa: making China the same
I will return below to further characterizing and periodizing this new oriental-
ism. But let us rst illustrate this a bit by tracking a continuity to understandings
of China and the P.R.C. Jack London’s 1910 story, “The Unparalleled Invasion”
(set in China in 1976), and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (on Tibet’s current Dalai
Lama) serve as useful signposts. London’s story narrates the annihilation of the
Chinese “race” through germ warfare, the dropping of infectious test tubes from
Western planes and the colonization of China by nameless but clearly Western
nations.14 In classic fashion the text turns upon the ontological difference
between Chinese “Orientals” and the rest of humanity. The Japanese are “pro-
gressive” Orientals whereas the Chinese, due above all to their “Chinese mind”
and great numbers, are doomed to incompatibility and unt for survival with the
West. This reects not just American anti-Chinese politics and London’s Cali-
fornia, but the “China difference” more broadly (London, pars. 9, 3). With the
eclipse of the Ottoman Empire, it is China that gradually becomes the perceived
geo-political threat, just as the U.S. becomes the leading imperial power. Virtu-
ally all the old orientalist tropes and topoi are here: the great wall of the impene-
trable, “hieroglyphic” language, impenetrable to “Western ideas”; the different
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 11
“mental processes” and un-democratic political tradition; and the sheer numbers
and massness of the Chinese (including their uncontrolled reproduction and emi-
gration).15 Thus China poses a threat to the “United Powers” and is dangerously
different. But even in this piece of “classic” orientalist ction there is also a
latent logic of sameness: the Chinese have to be exterminated, but “China” – that
geographic, national space – must become the same as the West. Thus the other
“nationalities” move in, and “mechanical, intellectual, and art output” ourishes
there, “in China in 1982.”16 This is not completely removed from the celebra-
tions of the “new” Chinese cinema in our own 1980s (the subject of an upcom-
ing chapter) and the pre-Tiananmen love affair with Deng Xiaoping.
London’s story is remarkable for what it shares with a more enlightened, covert
Sinological-orientalism today. 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). As also in London’s
story, the Chinese will themselves be accused of inhuman indifference to life. As
John F. Kennedy wrote to De Gaulle in 1959 about the P.R.C. developing an
atomic bomb: “the Chinese would be perfectly prepared, because of the lower
value they attach to human life, to sacrice hundreds of millions of their own
lives.”17 So, too, the “China threat” still looms not simply in mainstream political
thought, but in esoteric, postmodern ction like DeLillo’s Mao II (the subject of
Chapter 5 below). 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. And the failed incompat-
ibility of “the Chinese mentality” – its inferior rationality, both in broadly cultural
and political terms – lives on in academic work as much as in the media and
popular culture. Here the failure lies in China’s failure to “democratize” and liber-
alize its polity as much as its booming economy, or to fully develop a civil society.
This emerges most strongly in scholarship on the Tiananmen protests of 1989,
including the documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which argues that “the
Chinese mind” continues to be deformed by Maoist totalitarianism and revolution-
ary rhetoric. (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.R.C. is none-
theless becoming-the-same as the West, slowly following “normal” develop-
ment. 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. The current regime may lack legitimacy in most Sinologists’
eyes, but it is much closer to normal. This is all a type of historicist or at least
stagist thinking: China has not been modern, free, and “normal,” but is only now
– after Mao and with the market – following the correct, same path as “us” and
becoming-the-same.18
12 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
We can now jump ahead eight decades to a more respectable artist. Scors-
ese’s 1997 bio-pic Kundun (“The Presence”) received critical acclaim not only
from the Dalai Lama’s camp, but Film Comment and The Christian Century. But
it has but little more to do with the historical Tibet and actual Sino-Tibetan poli-
tics than London’s futuristic, homicidal fantasy. To some extent this a-histori-
cism was intentional and typically Hollywood.19 Nonetheless, there is a political
unconscious and an interpretation of Chinese history in the movie. I will not
belabor the obvious: it is a partisan text that mirrors the Tibetan nationalist, gov-
ernment-in-exile’s line on independence and alleged Chinese colonialism and
“genocide.”20 The lm was made in direct consultation with the Dalai Lama and
is based on his autobiography.21 In a series of essays, Barry Sautman has cor-
rected such charges against China, as well as the P.R.C.’s own propaganda about
“China’s Tibet.” I will not rehearse these arguments here, and I hold that they
are only controversial because of the fetishistic adulation of “His Holiness”
among the Western-educated middle class.22 What is perhaps more interesting is
the difference that Tibet and the Dalai Lama represent: an afrmative orientalism
about Tibetans on the one hand, and on the other a portrayal of Mao and the
Chinese as entirely deceitful, dirty, and murderous. The former is conveyed
through the lm’s spectacle-value: the “exotic” rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, the
Dalai’s supernatural “visions,” the motif of mandala paintings, and so on. The
lm’s nal four minutes suggest that this Dalai is the incarnation of Buddha. His
ight to India uses a repeated point of view shot from his childhood that estab-
lishes him as the unity of time and space: childhood, adulthood, the future, Tibet,
India, Asia. Contrast this, then, with the demonization of the Chinese. They
simply lie, as if their claims about Tibet’s suzerain status and extreme feudal
exploitation were simply untrue. Mao is represented as a duplicitous, greasy
despot promising autonomy at one moment and invading the next.23
Kundun thus represents a certain “progress” within American orientalism
about Asian “Others.” Here the mystical, benign Other of Tibet should naturally
become a politically independent, concretely bounded and modern nation-state
led by a freedom ghter. But this “progressive” message comes at the expense of
China’s valid claim to Tibet according to international law,24 and to the P.R.C.’s
representation as a “human” and sovereign space of its own. 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: it should obey Western ideol-
ogy about Tibet. Renounce despotism and follow the path of normalcy: recog-
nize the natural independence of Tibet and the nationalism of the Dalai’s exiled
group; allow them to form a modern nation-state with clear, strict boundaries.
By no means does it suggest that Tibet become “Westernized”: this would ruin
the fantasy of Shangri La, if not the divine status of the Dalai Lama himself and
his “transcendent” presence. The lm follows American foreign policy as
expressed in the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 that pronounces U.S. leadership in
protecting Tibet and negotiating a settlement.25 In this, then, Kundun follows a
logic of sameness for China: that the P.R.C. must be stopped and, as in London’s
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 13
fable, made over in the image of the West (our political forms and our apprecia-
tion of the Dalai Lama). China may not yet be in the process of becoming-the-
same, but it should be, and we can help.
It is here, too, that we can see how the lm’s “statement” about China reveals
the wide circulation of “Sinological” knowledge: the proffered history of Sino-
Tibetan relations (e.g. that the Chinese invaded in 1950 and slaughtered untold
numbers of Tibetans in 1959) reects the inuence of area studies and the close
relationship this has with the U.S. state. What is more, we need to recall with Tom
Grunfeld that it is precisely U.S. policy and Sinological knowledge that works
against a negotiated solution to the Sino-Tibetan conict. By explicitly taking up
the Dalai Lama’s cause, by treating the P.R.C. as a threat to the U.S. and “human
rights,” and by creating credible fears that the U.S. wants to break up China (indeed
the CIA backed the Tibetans’ 1959 rebellion and funded the Dalai Lama until
1971), Sinological knowledge and U.S. foreign policy do more harm than good.26
Post-colonial critique and the China eld: a brief history of a
non-debate
These two different texts, then, help illustrate the dynamic content of Sinologi-
cal-orientalism as well as its dispersion. The critique of orientalism has,
however, met with great resistance within the China eld, and almost invariably
takes the form of either at-out dismissal or an uncomprehending caricature of
Said’s project that renders it an “exaggerated” critique of ethnocentric bias. An
essay by historian Philip C. C. Huang will serve to illustrate the non-debate and
the history of the logic of sameness within China studies. He notes that tradi-
tional thought invariably positioned China as the “Other,” in that it was entirely
different from the West.27 In response to this, Huang and some others in his gen-
eration – those in the wake of the 1949 revolution and the Cold War – took it as
their task to prove that China was just like the West after all:
[Our] well-intentioned efforts were perhaps motivated above all by the
desire to assert China’s equivalence to the West. . . . [The] only way to
counter the denigration of China as “the other” seemed to be to maintain
that it was just like the West.28
(“Theory” par. 24)
Thus Huang evinces a tacit desire and theme in past scholarship: for equivalence
or sameness. 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. Whereas for this earlier period the point (now seen by
Huang as an “emotional dictate”) was to counter a denigrating essential differ-
ence imputed to China, in the current phase it reects an often explicitly neo-lib-
eral and pro-Western politics (par. 27). Here the worst thing that could happen
would be for China to “turn back” and away from capitalism. No one mentions
that this might mean cutting off one’s access to the eld.
14 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
Huang perceptively notes that this old approach remained as “Western-
centric” as its alternative (China as a copy of the West). But he follows this up
with a call for “social history” and a return to the facts; these will show us what
theories are valid. The status of the lying-in-wait “facts” is not addressed, and
Said’s challenges to conventional historicism and epistemology are ignored.
Huang accuses Said of denying that “facts” exist prior to or beyond representa-
tions. But Orientalism’s project was to present the constructed but real discourse
on its own terms, and to show that it indexes the West more than any “Islam” or
“Orient.” And representations and knowledges, orientalist or otherwise, are not
fake but are social facts themselves.
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:
“ ‘Crisis’ in Asian Studies denotes shortages of funds rather than an epistemo-
logical questioning of the eld” (Palat 110). Palat diagnoses the basic dichotomy
(extreme specialization/extreme generalization) and the cult of expertise under-
pinning Asian studies (110). This last is based in “eld time” and native lan-
guage-prociency.29 These in turn provide “perfect-transparent knowledge as the
only condition for gaining access to the real” (Harootunian, History 40). For
China especially, language uency is the sacred skeleton key, though to be fair
this is itself part of nativist Chinese thinking. One could pile on here. There are
the attacks on engaged, political scholarship from Simon Leys to Geremie Barme
and Steven Mosher.30 One tactic is to decide that orientalism is just self-
delusional bias, and then to turn this back onto un-named scholars who “sup-
ported” – whatever that means – Chinese communism. Such were blind to the
true reality of China’s complete repression and totalitarianism.31 To be “in the
true” of China studies and reportage, one has to be critical of the past and current
regime because it has not yet broken free. Philosophical acumen, comparative
and textual/interpretive skills, or self-reexivity are not needed. Language train-
ing and eld-time stand in for (adequate, rigorous) disciplinary and theoretical
grounding.
In a presidential address to the American Association of Asian Studies in
1980, Benjamin Schwartz responded to Said’s book. He defended the “objective
validity” of knowledge that can be used for “understanding in the Weberian
sense.”32 More to the point here is his defensiveness about area studies and the
“anti-Western” nature of Said’s argument. 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 specically about colonial forms of power and intellectual
culture. Note, too, that Schwarz concedes Said’s argument that the eld of orien-
talism (and area studies) are “dened canonically, imperially and geographi-
cally” and not “disciplines dened intellectually” (Orientalism 326).33 Schwartz,
however, thinks this enables the area specialist, through comparative analysis, to
see through and steer beyond a “spurious universality . . . derived from the West”
and the trap of an “ahistorical culturalism” (or relativism).34 But surely this a
false choice: comparative historicism or ahistorical relativism. And the former
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 15
would need anyway to deal with the argument that comparativism smuggles in
universal/Western norms and standards of comparison.35 In the end, Schwarz
recommends minor house cleaning. We should “rid ourselves of stale catego-
ries” and seek new “nomenclatures, some of them perhaps derived from the cul-
tures we are studying.”36 Perhaps we can use some of their terms, but let us not
go too far in a subjective direction. 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.
But there was Paul Cohen’s appeal for a “China-centered” method. He not
only criticizes the Eurocentrism of past approaches (where poor China was
always responding to the West), but also claims that Said’s basic insight applies
to China studies:
One need hardly agree with all of Said’s strictures to accept the more
general insight that all intellectual inquiry partakes of a kind of ‘imperial-
ism’ and that the dangers of misrepresentation are greatest, the imperialism
especially virulent, when the inquirer – or more precisely the cultural,
social, or political world of which he or she is a member – has also had
some part, historically, in shaping the object of inquiry.
(Discovering 150)
This admirably concise distillation of Said’s argument is followed by a conven-
tional alternative: “China-centered analysis” seems a plain historicism that
simply seeks to be less chauvinist and more sensitive to the Chinese context. A
decent and humane suggestion, but how? Harootunian argues that Cohen’s
model “rejects theory out of hand for the ‘facts’ and thus the authority of native
knowledge and experience” (“Postcoloniality” 138). The discipline is still not
dened intellectually, but linguistically and geographically. However much we
might center ourselves in China, this nonetheless begs a lot of questions (and
endless “facts”) about which China. And then there are the irreversibly global
and cross-cultural dimensions of both “China” and “the West.”
Orientalism and the postcolonial turn, then, have made little impact on the
production of knowledge within the China eld. That eld 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. In a series of essays, Zhang Longxi argued that “Western
theory” – he often singles out the Palestinian Said’s work in particular – has had
a pernicious effect within Chinese intellectual culture. Said himself noted that
his work had at times – in the Middle East – been taken up by some in narrowly
nationalist and nativist terms.37 Zhang’s complaint is the same, seeing the uses of
Said and ‘postmodern’ theory as anti-Western, politically conservative and sup-
portive of the dreaded Communist regime. Zhang thus equates nationalist and
fundamentalist uses of Orientalism in Arabic countries to leftist or ‘anti-
Western’ critical intellectuals in China. But it is hard to say what in principle is
nationalist, ‘nativist’, or otherwise dangerous to such appropriations of Said. He
16 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
singles out Rey Chow – as anti-communist a critic as they come – for criticizing
the representation and whiteness of the Tiananmen event as broadcast to the
world from CNN. Chow’s use of Western theory is “misapplied” and unaware of
the proper Chinese “context” in which criticisms of democracy are by denition
conservative and beyond the pale (Zhang, 1992, 121). This appeal to the
“Chinese context” and to “Chinese reality” surfaces in other essays by Zhang
Longxi, including his criticisms of Zhang Kuan’s inuential essays on oriental-
ism and Western hegemony in China studies and in the mainland 1980s.38 The
critique is again based on how Chinese reality – dened entirely by gestures to a
repressive state – is by denition different than the Western one: such critical
theory may be radical in the latter case, but not in China. 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. “China” is represented by a sheer dichotomy between anti-
imperialists who turn out to be conservatives, and pro-capitalist/Western liberals
who turn out to be the true, cosmopolitan voice of the people.
What we have, then, are clear battle grounds underlying the use of theory and
orientalism, especially amongst the diaspora or Western-based writers (i.e. the
majority). “Pomo” theory is either misplaced or, if it is to be used, must be
directed against the Party-state and not in the name of anti-imperialism, nation-
alism, or some other form of “pro-China” politics. (From within China this often
plays out in the opposite direction.) Zhang Longxi’s work introduced the issue
of cross-cultural analysis into Chinese literary studies, but it also is clearly over-
determined by a political agenda, even more than by its empiricism. That is, a
strident anti-communist liberalism, a project shared by many others.39 “Leftism”
does not t Chinese reality. 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 condent about what the
local, mainland context means and what it does to theory.
For such intellectuals committed in the rst 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 rst 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 2010 Nobel
Peace Prize. His stakes are far different. There is something inspiring, or at least
seductive, about the classical liberal, universalist language of the Charter (calls
for freedom of speech, protest, and so forth in the context of the current Party-
state) and in Liu’s great personal courage. But what is most striking for my pur-
poses is Liu’s unrepentant stance on China needing “three hundred years of
foreign colonization” so that it may politically, intellectually, and culturally
catch up. Moreover, there is the Charter’s insistence on privatizing the remain-
ing public dimensions of the economy and instituting a complete system of
private property.40 Its substantive economic views are neo-liberal. Colonialism
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 17
and more capitalism will bring forth “individual freedom” and human rights in
China. At the risk of criticizing an unfairly imprisoned “dissident” this is an
Occidentalism, an internalized orientalism writ large. It also follows the logic of
becoming-sameness outlined here. It is no accident that Liu is close to several
experts in the China eld.
When we recall the colonial roots of liberal thinking, from Locke to Liu, it is
unsurprising that Zhang Longxi wants to ground cross-cultural analysis on
humanistic and explicitly depoliticized grounds (“the variety of our world and
the totality of what we may proudly call the heritage of human culture”) (“Myth”
131). 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.S.41 Later, I
map a similar, de-politicizing logic within “Sinography” – a far more “theoreti-
cal” venture – and its disavowal of orientalism and postcolonialism. What these
diverse gures share, then, is not simply an anti-regime stance, but a politicized
valorization of depoliticization.
Occidentalism, or internalized orientalism
In Chen Xiaomei’s celebrated work, the problematic of orientalism is met by an
afrmation of “Occidentalism,” in direct response to Said’s charge that to
imagine a corresponding Occidentalism is absurd. Said’s point – ignored by
Chen and others – is not that the Eastern “others” are incapable of “othering” or
imagining their colonizers. (This was clear even to the old colonists themselves.)
But there simply is no institutionalized discourse and global, organized power/
knowledge formation called Occidentalism. We are not likely to see S.O.A.S.
morph into S.O.O.A.S. – the School of Oriental and Occidental and African
Studies. 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. Or as Timothy Brennan has put it, the “actual
conditions of knowledge” in the world are “nothing like [a] perfect see saw.”42
This point is lost, however, in many critiques – inversions – of orientalism. Thus
Edward Graham, writing some years before Chen et al., would claim that orien-
talism only partly applies to studies of China, because Said’s approach “can as
logically be taken to Chinese views of the non-Chinese world” (41).
Chen expertly analyzes post-Mao poetry and drama and the various imagin-
ings of the “Occident” that Chinese writers and artists, full of cultural capital,
deploy against the state. And as Chen aptly notes, the Dengist (and later) state
can be seen to have its own, “ofcial” occidentalist complex (now sitting awk-
wardly beside a neo-Confucian one). We can add that the catch-up mentality –
which presupposes material and cultural backwardness – stems not only from
the May 4 era but also from the 1980s up to the present; it continues its second
life after dying a rst death in the condent, radical, and embargoed Maoist
18 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
years. But it is difcult to see how contemporary Chinese Occidentalism stands
as a disproof of Said’s argument about the material and worldly phenomenon of
orientalism. Do they not conrm the power of orientalism and the history of
Western colonialism by showing the fetishistic but real existence of oriental-
ism’s indispensible ip-side? Occidentalism is not the equivalent of orientalism,
for the reasons of power and institutionalization. It is only notions of “level
playing elds” and the “free marketplace of ideas” that can make it seem so. 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.
In addition to Occidentalism’s resurgence there is another development that
seemingly calls into question the relevance of orientalism now. 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. Examples of work
from the former group would have to include Hong Kong scholar Rey Chow’s
corpus in cultural studies, widely inuential in the U.S. But it must be said that
her work on mainland China has often been conventionally tendentious vis-à-vis
the P.R.C. (demonizing “Maoists’ in China and in American English departments,
reproducing Cold War accounts of totalitarianism, and so forth).43 Examples of
the more recent group of “representative Chinese” are numerous, but one can cer-
tainly index a scholar like Pei Minxin who, like many of the Western experts I
examine in Chapter 2, consistently argues along universalist lines for the neces-
sity of a bourgeois civil society for the forward-development of China.44 At any
rate, this demographic development marks the passage of time – and progress –
from an older, more unambiguously colonial era of globalization and Sinology.
But does it call into question the “model” of Said’s book? For an overly histori-
cist reading it may appear so. Orientalism is a white man’s burden and the domi-
nated do not have permission to narrate. We seem to have moved from this
situation where “they must be represented” to one in which they, the Other, are
doing it themselves. But this begs a number of questions as to what is being rep-
resented, i.e. the actual knowledge that is being produced as well as where it hails
from (its genesis, as opposed to origin). There is also the Marxist question about
such knowledge production: in whose interest is it conducted? This suggests con-
tinuities within Sinological-orientalism: the discourse of lack and China’s tortu-
ous path to normalcy, the Cold-War-meets-oriental-despotism dynamic, and so
on. Moreover, given the American provenance/dominance of postwar China
studies as well as cultural globalization since the early 1980s, Sinological-orien-
talism represents the triumph of one “Occidental’ educational system as much as
anything else. Sinication at the level of skin color only takes one so far.
It must also be said that Chen’s Occidentalism is overdetermined by the same
anti-communist and anti-state agenda as Zhang’s. 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: if a text or gure “dissents” from the regime at hand, it
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 19
is therefore “good,” of aesthetic value, and certainly worth writing about. Anti-
ofcial 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 1980s
Chinese liberalism. What such occidentalist intellectuals are dissenting from,
and in the name of what, are questions that go begging. No justication of this
“obviousness” is necessary. The fact that a stridently elitist, liberal text like the
documentary series He Shang – Chen’s key example of “counter-discursive”
Occidentalism – can be lled with the most dubious valorizations of Western
colonialism and racist notions about the Chinese peasant mentality, is insigni-
cant. Thus passages like the following from Zhang Gang and Su Xiaokang’s
script pass unmarked by Chen:
In the vast, backwards rural areas, there are common problems in the
peasant makeup [suzhi or “quality”] such as a weak spirit of enterprise, a
very low ability to accept risk, a deep psychology of dependency and a
strong sense of passive acceptance of fate.
(Su 169)
While such learned statements seek to diagnose the “feudal” mentality of the
peasants and the “Chinese national character,” they are nothing but the type of
sanctioned discourse that the revolution had to overcome and that has known a
new lease on life ever since the great reversal. 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. But it does
make the case for understanding Occidentalism not as a “counter-discourse” but
as an internalized orientalism. Or call it both if you like, but hold on to the basic
contradiction that the “counter” aspects may be anti-Party but are also thor-
oughly reactionary. Elite occidentalist liberals may have permission to narrate,
but questions about the class and political content of their discourse go begging.
So, too, does Occidentalism’s genesis and location within the global, uneven
production of knowledge.45
The limits of Chen’s approach are further revealed on the nal page:
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 . . . might aid Orientalists and Occidentalists alike in
understanding this fundamental axiom of any form of cultural studies that is
faithful to its own founding notion of culture.
(176)
There are a number of things to mine in this passage, starting with the very
un-British cultural studies notion of culture (initially at least, an antagonistic,
20 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
Gramscian one). 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. Contrast this, then, with Said’s goal: to eliminate “the
‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’ altogether,” and to advance “a little in the process of
what Raymond Williams has called the ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative
mode’ ” (Orientalism 28).46 While this speaks to Said’s avowed humanism, it is
clearly of a different, politicized type as compared to the ones examined here.
Said’s humanism was in the end a rigorously textualist–secular attitude on the
one hand, and on the other an anti-imperialist, anti-humanist humanism in the
manner of Fanon or Aime Cesaire. Given what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as
“the demand for humanism, with a nod towards Asia,”47 it is worth recalling
Said’s argument that “liberal humanism, of which Orientalism has historically
been one department, retards the process of enlarged and enlarging meaning
through which true understanding can be attained” (254). The systemic nature of
Said’s style of thought means that his real problematic – once last time – is not
“bias” or even “Othering”, but the uneven and combined, global production of
knowledge. This is the real lesson of Occidentalism.
This has immediate consequences for the China eld. Questions about its actual
practice, and the historical conditions of possibility for that practice, as well as its
“right” to legislate and interpret China will remain – regardless of whether or not it
chooses to take up the postcolonial turn or the critique of representation. Beyond
the comparatively simple question of China’s political sovereignty (past or present)
lies the question of knowledge as a political and worldly entity. China can be
wealthy, regionally powerful (even exploitative), and yet orientalized.
Cold War, hot colonial theory: totalitarianism as orientalism
As my analyses above should already suggest, one of my themes in this study is
that we can no longer separate the twin, inter-twined histories of the Cold War
and postcolonialism, or in Brennan’s felicitous phrase, the “East/West of North/
South” (decolonization was caught up in the Cold War; the Cold War was caught
up within colonialism) (39). 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. And of course many of the national liberation
movements and reconstruction projects of the global “South” were socialist,
Marxist, or communist in nature, just as other “emerging” societies and American-
backed regimes were fully anti-communist. That global capitalism “won” and
even captured the de-colonial movements is no reason to cede the writing of
history to the victors. We also do not need to cede the writing of China to those
who – in the P.R.C., Hong Kong, or elsewhere – take symbolic or nancial
benet from the collapse of actually existing socialism in the mainland. The
present study does not reconstruct this global history or fully theorize the lia-
tions between communism and postcolonialism. But it does show a part of it: the
imbrication of colonial discourse with anti-communism in the representation of
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 21
China in scholarship and other forms of writing. It argues that the discourse of
anti-communism, and the lynchpin concept of totalitarianism, are part and parcel
of Sinological-orientalism. “Oriental despotism” became “totalitarianism.”
Passive and irrational Chinese minds were easily “brainwashed.” Orwellian
oppression reigned, save for a few brave and inspiring stories of the human spirit
(represented solely by lm and literature of the 1980s and early 1990s). 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 ows between China
and the rest of the world, there is still a conict here and a historical legacy of
geo-political competition and struggle.
Let me attempt to further clarify the connection I am drawing between the
postcolonial/colonial and the communist/anti-communist. In an essay published
in 1984 – 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. These
were the founders of Cold War discourse and ‘totalitarianism’ their chief concept;
it remains the lynchpin to the entire Cold War discursive edice. Arendt’s 1951
Origins of Totalitarianism endowed the concept and the entire project with an
academic respectability that it still enjoys today. Pietz’s argument, backed up
through a rigorous explication of key texts, is that Cold War discourse displaced
colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II (when not least thanks to
China, decolonization was the order of the day). It substituted itself for “the lan-
guage of colonialism” (55). By drawing on colonial discourse, albeit in a less
immediately racist, modied 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 the postco-
lonial critique of “totalitarianism” is at the center of this book, it is worth pausing
on Pietz’s essay. As Kennan, Koestler, and arguably Orwell are of little scholarly
value today, we will focus on Arendt. But the achievement of the rst 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., totalitarianism was “traditional Oriental despotism plus modern
technology” (Pietz 58). Here is Kennan writing in Foreign Affairs in 1947:
[Russian] fanaticism, unmodied by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of
compromise, was too erce and too jealous to envisage any permanent
sharing of power. 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, exibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value
nds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind.
(Pietz 59)
22 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
Simply put: totalitarianism lies in the oriental mind (race). This raises a number
of interesting questions about why the concept endures, and none of the answers
would be attering to the allegedly liberal, tolerant, and democratic nature of
Western intellectual–political culture.
But it is Arendt to whom we must attend. Here Pietz’s critique, quoting
Arendt at length, is especially strong in showing the centrality of an essentially
racist understanding of Africa and “tribalism” to her theory of totalitarianism.
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. That is, “we” learned these things from “them.” In short, Arendt offers
a narrative about the African/Other’s contamination of the white, decivilized
European mob:
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 had transformed them-
selves into a tribe and had lost the European’s feeling for a territory, a patria
of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the
Dark Continent for centuries.
(cited in Pietz 68)48
My point is not the awful, Conradian diction or even the stark conceptual separa-
tion between the European and the African. It is the effect upon the Boers and
thence – so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes – upon Europe. We
“degenerate” into a race-based, primitive and nomadic, rootless “tribe” (or “race
organization”) no better than them. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not
only do we come to think in terms of race (i.e. in a racist way), but this mode of
thinking later morphs into a tribal nationalism that, in turn, becomes modern
anti-Semitism and totalitarianism (“a whole outlook on life and the world”).49
This last phenomenon “lies in the nature of tribalism rather than in political facts
and circumstances” (Arendt, cited in Pietz, 69).
Thus anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in general originally lie outside
Europe (Pietz 69). This certainly helps “save” the West and helps constitute its
identity as the better half of the Orient/Occident, North/South divides. 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. Under-
standing the colonialist roots of the concept perhaps makes it easier to see the
types of work it does vis-à-vis China. Not only is totalitarianism simply a stand-
in for an older notion of oriental despotism, it also necessarily assumes a striking
Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era 23
lack of human agency on the part of hundreds of millions of “brainwashed”
Chinese “under” Mao. 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. – and most people in China still see him otherwise – this should still be an
untenable notion on intellectual as well as ethical grounds. It is also pre-
Nietzschean in its notion of power as a solely top-down, repressive affair. 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 difcult to voice in the age of decolo-
nization, it was instead articulated to the Cold War. The two combined, making
colonial discourse “vanish” in a relative sense but living on as a constituent,
mediating part of the Cold War. Cold War discourse became a substitute for out-
right colonial discourse, and endowed the neo-colonial aspects – and
U.S.-Western hegemony – of the then New World Order with a desperately
needed intellectual legitimacy. 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.S.-Western hegemony over the global East and South. These
are, additionally, the years of the birth and triumph of Maoism, of the P.R.C.,
and – correspondingly – of China studies as we know it. In the U.S. that revolu-
tion then led from the quintessentially imperial debate over “Who lost China?”
to, by the time of J. F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War, “Red China” becoming
the “main enemy.”50 My argument is thus that “China” increasingly became the
new object of this Cold War colonial discourse; with the further accumulation of
knowledge in largely social-scientic and modernizationist form, there comes a
“new” orientalism. 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
eld, China itself sets the stage for the crystallization of Sinological-orientalism
and its capital-logic of the P.R.C. becoming-the-same. This also presumes the
Sino-U.S. rapprochement gradually making Red China seem less an enemy and
more a friend (or future friend). The logic of China becoming normal like “us” –
a step away, if the C.C.P. will fall – came to seem like common sense. 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
at-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.
2 Uncivil society, or orientalism and
Tiananmen, 1989
In the current conjuncture, typied as much by the rise of China (and China
studies) as by the U.S. imperium, the social force called orientalism knows a
new lease on life. Ranging from academic to media and state-policy as well as
literary circles, it emerges where Edward Said’s disseminative account from
1978 leaves off: its migration from Europe and philology to U.S.-based social
science and area studies, to the pax Americana and a closer relation to the logic
if not the actual policies of the state. In this chapter I begin to make my case for
the existence of a “new,” Sinological orientalism by way of an extended reading
of the 1989 Tiananmen protests.
1978 also marks the end of the uncertain Hua Guofeng era, the subsequent
rise of Deng Xiaoping, and the unleashing of the power of capital within China.
Deng led not just an ideological but a material de-Maoication, systematically
eliminating every last vestige of leftist institutions, save the Party itself. Deng’s
capitalistic policies and his de-politicization of state cultural and academic
spheres were warmly received, not just by the Western powers and corporations
who now had access to the fantasy of one billion consumers, but emphatically so
by China studies. For Sinologists it was now open season on China and for the
production of “new” knowledge about a China awakening yet again.1 (The
specter of a somnambulant China who might actually wake up is as old as Napo-
leon and as recent as the editorial page of the New York Times.) From this global
yet orientalist perspective, shared by some of the liberal Chinese intelligentsia
and vulgar modernizers like Deng as much as by area studies, China was en
route to becoming “normal.” The Other was nally changing and entering real
history.
Within this new orientalism, China is seen as evolving from a primitive, com-
munist (and “despotic”) Other to our distant cousin, one who is, willy-nilly,
becoming-Western, becoming-“modern.” China is graspingly putting its
“Asiatic” past behind, becoming generally equivalent to the West. Recall that
orientalism posits the Other as radically and essentially different: different in
mind, custom, politics, sexuality, and so on. It is a “style of thought based upon
an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of
the time) ‘the Occident’ ” (2). East is East, and West is West. But with the case
of post-Mao, in reform era China this form of orientalism turns upon its object
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 25
of study – China and its victimized but “dissenting” masses – graspingly but
inevitably becoming the same as “we.” They are following in “our” wake,
becoming the same as we modern, free subjects of an “open,” liberal nation-state
and “civil society,” a teleological process which will, someday, follow from their
capitalistic economy.
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 bets the world system today, it also follows a capital
logic of general equivalence. This historical shift has consequences as a critique
of Said’s and postcolonial studies’ model of orientalism, for it shows us that they
fail to deal with one of the principal contradictions of modern colonialism,
namely, that in some absolutely crucial instances and projects – e.g. missionary
projects, modernization theory – it is not simply allowed but mandated that the
Other become the same, that it enter a process of becoming-the-same. That is,
despite the sense of difference between one location of the “Orient” and the
outside observer, an opposite logic – an opposite ontology and epistemology,
one now rooted in equivalence – prevails. And yet if this much has changed
within this new orientalism, its effects are in some crucial ways familiar: not
only is it a misrepresentation of the P.R.C. and a part of a global and uneven
production of knowledge that favors the West, it also produces what counts as
the “Real China.”2 It also retains the key rhetorical strategy of orientalism as
Said theorized it: the positional superiority of the China watcher (or expert),
such that China or things Chinese are never allowed to gain the upper hand by
challenging received categories of thought. 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. Nowhere are the problems of traveling theory broached, and rarely if
ever are contrasting, “local” knowledges consulted.
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 gures
of colonial discourse – e.g. despotism, passive, and irrational “native” subjects –
but the shift to sameness is brought home by the new dominance of social
science rhetoric, in particular its emphasis on China now or in the near future
nally producing a civil society and liberal individuals. It will thereby follow a
“universal” pattern of modernization and “freedom.” Rather than just being an
affair of area studies, this orientalism is part of the U.S.-West’s social imaginary
and of contemporary intellectual–political culture. Tiananmen as the truth of
civil society post-Mao has less to do with China than with the self-image of the
West and its “leadership.”
26 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
Tiananmen, 1989 in Western minds
Since the end of the Mao era, there has been one event – a global media event –
which has most forcefully secured the place of China within “Western minds.”
(My use of the latter phrase is meant to mark the type of semantic violence that
subtends an old phrase of orientalism: the Chinese mind.) I refer of course to the
1989 Tiananmen protest movement, including the killings that concluded it. For
viewers ranging from CNN to Marxism Today,3 those Spring events of 1989 rep-
resent a victimized Chinese people’s thwarted attempt to enter political and
social modernity, to achieve a liberal democracy and civil society alongside their
newly free markets, or in sum to nish a telos that was rudely interrupted by – in
the words of one Cold Warrior journalist – the “new emperors,” Mao and Deng.4
While in the initial decades after 1989 there was an enormous amount of schol-
arship on the movement, there has been scant critique of specically “Western”
understandings of the events. In fact, within China studies, Dingxin Zhao’s recent
book The Power of Tiananmen marks the rst full-on engagement of Western
Sinologists’ work on Tiananmen. Zhao’s meticulous sociological study makes this
critique as much by pointed omission as by direct engagement with the most
widely reputed of English language Sinology’s doyens. 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 prolic, famously uent but also notori-
ously condescending critic of virtually all things Chinese: “This wouldn’t matter
except that some specialists (myself included) think him [Barme] among the most
consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese culture and politics”
(“Backbeat”, par. 18). While Wasserstrom grounds his criticism in only the proper
name of Barme, Elizabeth J. Perry rejects Zhao’s own rejections of culturalist and
“elite factionalist” approaches to 1989. What emerges most sharply in her response
to Zhao is that he has committed the sin of dismissing the major contributions of
some of Sinology’s luminaries, from former CIA consultant Lucian Pye to former
Labour Party MP Roderick MacFarquhar. Perry concludes that “for a book bold in
its criticism of alternative analytical approaches and parsimonious in its acknowl-
edgment of the contributions of previous scholarship, one might be forgiven for
expecting a little more methodological rigor” (“Response”, 185). Yet Zhao’s book
is indeed a reexive one, and it is specialized Sinologists like Perry who rely on a
pre-theoretical empiricism. Zhao analyzes how built-space on Beijing campuses
literally enabled the movement and examines the social construction of public
opinion in the Square. This certainly marks an advance against the China eld’s
Anglo-American hostility to theory. Thus Perry’s point about “rigor” must actually
be a point about something else: Zhao’s rejection of Sinology as something not
very useful for understanding Tiananmen. The point here is that if the rst book to
rebuke China studies’ approaches to 1989 meets with such intransigence, it is less
surprising that the crucial questions of how “we” see contemporary China have so
far gone begging within the China eld.
In regard to 1989, this absence of discussion about epistemology and ideol-
ogy in the forming of knowledge is all the more unfortunate. For in addition to
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 27
the sheer complexity of the event, Tiananmen was the rst and perhaps the most
enduring “live” global media event. In many ways, the true victor of the tragedy
was the U.S. Cable News Network. 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. Thus Time magazine
includes on its list of “Top 100 People of the Century,” the anonymous Tank
Man who, plastic shopping bag in hand, seemingly held off a row of PLA tanks
by zigzagging with their movement and refusing to step off, until some bystand-
ers pulled him away.5 In short, it was during that Spring that “we” learned that
“the” Chinese were not only unhappy with Deng Xiaoping (Time’s “Man of the
Year” in 1984 and 1985), but were in effect “Americans in disguise” demanding
our democracy, using our symbols (the famous Goddess of Democracy statue),
even quoting Patrick Henry (“Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” was a favor-
ite slogan), and dying to be free of totalitarianism (Žižek, “Against”, 80). While
Sinologists relish the opportunity to deride yesterday’s progressive or sympa-
thetic scholarship on China’s revolution,6 they have yet to be bothered with any
methodological concern over their own embrace of this new “New China” and
its “liberalizing,” “becoming-modern” movement into Americanization.
It thus falls to the unlikely gure of Slavoj Žižek, in an otherwise rank essay
pleading for the virtues of Eurocentrism and the Western origin of democracy, to
give the lie to this fantasy. He notes:
[The media] saw in them the conrmation that the people of the East wanted
what people in the West already had; that is, they automatically translated
these demands into the Western liberal democratic notion of freedom (the
. . . political game cum global market economy). Emblematic was the gure
of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in 1989,
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 nd an American).
(“Leftist Plea”, par. 23)
Drawing on Etienne Balibar’s notion of “egaliberte,” the “unconditional demand
for freedom and equality that explodes any positive social order,” Žižek thus
indicates how Rather et al. reinscribed this desire “into the connes of a given
order” (liberal democratic capitalism) (par. 23). So, too, the perception that the
Goddess statue “says it all” is a classic example of ideology at work, for as
Althusser succinctly put it, ideology works by interpellating obviousnesses as
such.7 One can see this ideological reinscription at work in an Asia Times article:
I was never more proud to be an American than when the Goddess of
Democracy statue, with its stunning resemblance to Lady Liberty . . . made
its way through Tiananmen Square. That made it all the more frustrating to
28 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
see and hear the protest leaders bungle the principles for which they pre-
sumably stood.8
This unhesitatingly assimilates the symbol to the author’s own imaginary, and
one-ups Rather in colonialist prerogative: not only was it “our” symbol, but the
natives got it all wrong, and they simply must get it right the next time. 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. My interest here is neither in some contentless “egaliberte” nor on
the alleged “utopian longing” Žižek sees at work in Tiananmen, but on the
process of re-inscription. 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.
Indeed, so strong is the impression that they were – almost – “our” dissidents
and analogues, that the countrywide protests over the bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade on May 7th 1999 were roundly condemned as a regression
from 1989. 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. But scholars and the media
linked the two events, and returned to the theme of China’s long march to civil
and modern society. For others, 1989 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. “Civil society” remains the yardstick. In New Left Review, the self-
professed “agship journal of the English language left,” Wasserstrom frames
the two protests as a sign that, “xenophobic” rhetoric notwithstanding, the
Chinese were still developing properly, and will eventually establish a truly
liberal, cosmopolitan, and anti-regime pubic sphere and civil society (“Student
Protests”, 65).9 Wasserstrom sees 1989, 1999, and the hope of China as resting
in the latter, and I will return to this dominant coding of post-Mao China below.
But here note that his historical overview’s key dates are all before and after
Mao: from the Nationalist era of Generalissimo Chiang to the mid-1980s. Was-
serstrom skips the long revolution itself and the rst three, radical decades of the
People’s Republic. He instead grounds his analysis on the brief period – if half
of the 1980s can be called that – which best ts the Western civil society narra-
tive. Wasserstrom says much the same about a dialogue on the meaning of 1989
between three prominent participants turned U.S. academics (Wang Dan, Li
Minqi, and Wang Chaohua).10 In the manner of a colonial, Oxbridge authority,
he refers to their debate as “commendable” yet “wanting”, because their accounts
did not quite t “with [his] own vision of 1989,” and because they paid “too
little attention” to what he has already decided are the “two particularly relevant
periods in China’s history” (the pre-War Republic and the mid-1980s) (“Student
Protests”, 63). The fact that Wasserstrom can so easily dismiss the analyses of
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 29
three actual democracy activists and fault them for being ignorant of their own
history, says it all.
There is much that could be said about Wasserstrom’s (and others’) modern-
izing periodization here, but in regard to orientalism the crux of the matter is that
these rhetorical moves perfectly illustrate positional superiority. 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: the pursuit, quite historically unprece-
dented, of an alternative modernity. As Liu Kang and Arif Dirlik have argued,
and notwithstanding its grave mistakes and its foreclosure by Deng, Chinese
Maoism was an active, real alternative to both Soviet and American “develop-
ment” and modernity. Signs of this are easily indexed: the Maoist project of
“Sinifying Marxism”; the radically egalitarian social policies centered on co-
operative rural development and mass participation; the empowerment of an
urban proletariat; the attempt to overcome the rural/urban and manual/intellec-
tual labor split; the distinctively Maoist passion for the masses; the ethos of self-
reliance and the refusal of the pax Americana; and the attempt, desired in China
since the nineteenth century, to produce nothing less than a new culture. 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 briey, institutional-
ized. As Zhang Xudong has noted, Sinologists as well as the Chinese liberal
intelligentsia have yet to come to terms with the fact that the Cultural Revolution
remains China’s most signicant era of participatory democracy.11 Thus any
periodization of democratic movements in China should have to engage this era.
So, too, it inuenced 1989 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).12 Thus neither the experiences nor the project
of the Mao era are allowed to challenge Sinological knowledge, including the
truth of Tiananmen-as-civil society-as-modernization. From here this essay will
offer a critique of this last coding. But it is a critique meant to serve another,
simultaneous purpose: to reframe Tiananmen as in part rooted in the deeply
political and deeply complex history and experience of the Mao era and its
recent negation by the rise of capitalism in China. The immanent critique of ori-
entalism, if it is to be more than the analysis of stereotype, also has to proceed
by way of an analysis of the historical and cultural complexities that are negated
by the former.
Overview of the protests
Since Tiananmen is so widely invoked yet little studied, it is worth recalling a
basic narrative of the protests before delving further into their place within Sino-
logical-orientalism.13 They are typically dated from April 15th, with the death of
Hu Yaobang. Hu was former heir to Deng Xiaoping, but was purged in 1987 in
an “anti-bourgeois liberalization” campaign for being far too enamored of West-
ernization/marketization and as payback for purging unrepentant Maoists or
30 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
so-called hard-liners remaining in the party. For the students, Hu’s death merely
provided the occasion to move up the demonstrations they had already been
planning to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement, a
long-standing occasion for commemorative protest. The chief characteristics of
the context of 1989 include runaway ination in a stagnating economy; massive
rural migration to the cities (a result of de-collectivization); skyrocketing unem-
ployment in the State Owned Enterprises; rampant ofcial corruption; and the
ideological ferment of political and cultural activity on campuses and beyond.
These last ranged from the “democracy salons” at the universities and open
letters from several intellectuals calling for an amnesty for all “political prison-
ers,” to the more radical “Mao craze” and “cultural fevers” that preoccupied
many others.14 Thus one needs to recognize that the China of the early 1980s
was – as always – far from a scene of mass conformity and control, and the pro-
tests were anything but a spontaneous manifestation of dissent, utopian longing,
or millennial Zeitgeist.
Within hours of Hu’s death, posters were put up mourning him, calling for his
second rehabilitation (he was rst purged during the CR), railing against corrup-
tion, and appealing for a greater role for education and intellectuals. Over the
following weeks and days, the number of posters would explode and their
content would move from Hu’s fate to more political and more specic demands,
often attacking Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng (who would later declare Martial
Law on May 28th). The rst demonstrations in the Square were sparsely attended
and did not escalate until after the “Xinhua Gate Bloody Incident” of April 20th.
At this gate to the Central Committee’s ofces, students demanded dialogue but
wound up ghting the police. The incident triggered class boycotts and further
demonstrations (Zhao 150). From here the next key moment was Hu’s state
funeral on April 22nd, which the students, over 50,000 strong in the Square,
were blocked from attending. After dialogue with ofcials, perhaps best remem-
bered via three students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People to
deliver a petition (a gesture Geremie Barme codes as “feudal”), student leader
Wuer Kaixi secured a promise to have the students’ one, nal demand met: for
Li Peng to step out and talk. Peng did not. Hence the great anger and trauma
(many students cried over this), and hence the emergence of new student organi-
zations and the radicalization of the movement.15
A call for a citywide class boycott was announced, and protests continued on
campuses and in the Square. The regime issued its rst public response: a denun-
ciation of the anti-government “turmoil” (a code-word to signify the Cultural
Revolution) carried out by an “extremely small” number of people. Broadcast on
television and then printed as the April 26th editorial of People’s Daily, this
enraged the students because it accused them of being unpatriotic. It immedi-
ately led to large-scale demonstrations on the 27th, carried out by tens of thou-
sands. By April 29th, the government started several dialogues with students.
While amiable in tone, the initial dialogues lacked substance and led nowhere.16
But it is worth noting that the government did concede the students’ basic
demand for recognition and acknowledged their grievances. Zhao Ziyang, the
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 31
Premier and Deng’s successor designate and top “reformer” (and liberal expo-
nent of neo-authoritarianism17), told a meeting of the Asian Development Bank
that the students, as evidenced by their slogans (“Support Socialism!” “Uphold
the Reforms,” “Oppose Corruption,” and the like), were “by no means opposed
to our basic system” (cited in Zhao 158). Zhao also leaned on the state media to
report the demonstrations more positively, which they indeed did, thus in effect
reversing the infamous editorial.
These gestures towards conciliation were too little too late, and the movement
escalated. Not least because it was no longer in the students’ hands. On the 2nd
and 4th of May, there were large demonstrations reaching 100,000 on the latter,
commemorative date. Meanwhile, urban workers, state journalists, and others
began to join. In fact, the moment of workers’ participation – completely missed
in Western fascination with the students and “anonymous” citizens – is essential
and what made Tiananmen a genuinely mass movement. I will return to this
neglected area below. On May 13th, two days before the next ofcial dialogue,
the rst, absolutely radicalizing hunger strike commenced, with up to 2,000 stu-
dents participating. Zhao conservatively suggests that the hunger strike was a
mistake, marking the beginning of the decline of the movement, its disorganiza-
tion, and its co-optation by “radicals” such as female student leader Chai Ling;
Maurice Meisner more perceptively notes that it was “a stroke of tactical politi-
cal genius” that activated popular support and “politicized increasing numbers of
Beijing’s 10 million people” (Zhao 161–70; Meisner 427). The strike galvanized
Beijing and brought the movement into sharp conict with the regime. The his-
toric visit of Mikhail Gorbachev had to be removed to the airport tarmac, far
from Tiananmen. Three days into the hunger strike, in a sign of mass support for
the movement and of the increasing tension, one million people lled Tianan-
men Square.
At this point, with the encouragement of a group of fty intellectuals, some
student leaders tried to persuade others to end the strike, not least because
martial law itself seemed imminent (by the 20th the hunger strike had nished).
Indeed, on the evening of the 19th PLA troops from the 38th Army entered
Beijing from the suburbs, and early the next morning Li Peng and President
Yang Shangkun declared martial law. Zhao Ziyang had voted against martial law
and was forced to resign. That evening he bid his tearful farewell to the hunger
strikers, after pleading with them to return to their campuses. The people of the
city met the arrival of a mostly unarmed people’s army with barricades, effec-
tively cutting off the army’s logistics. Yet the relations between the people and
the army were remarkably peaceful, complete with singing competitions and
only occasional violence breaking out. As a result, a stalemate was achieved,
with the government withdrawing its troops on May 22nd. By this point numer-
ous other student groups, many of them from well outside Beijing, also occupied
the Square and challenged the authority of the original hunger-strike leaders. The
latter failed in persuading all students to leave the Square. While many did leave,
the Square was relled by day with newly established workers’ groups and other
ordinary people. Two other notable arrivals, the Goddess of Democracy statue
32 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
and Taiwanese rock star Hou Dejian (who performed enthusiastically) further
drew people in. At this point “Tiananmen” was well and truly a mass movement.
That evening new troops advanced on the Square. Details of the ghting
remain somewhat obscure, but what we do know now is that no deaths occurred
in the Square itself. The remaining students were allowed to leave, thanks in part
to the intellectuals’ and Hou’s negotiations with the troops. The deaths occurred
on the outskirts of the Square, chiey on Chang’an Avenue towards the west.
The great majority of victims were workers and other “ordinary” people involved
in clashes with the troops or simply in harm’s way. Over one hundred military
vehicles were burned. The exact death toll is unknown, but has been revised
downward from several thousands to several hundreds.18 Riots broke out in
faraway Chengdu, a train was burned in Shanghai, and there were reports of
skirmishes among troops. In the months afterwards, the government arrested
many students, workers, and people alleged to have fought on the streets. There
were numerous post-June 4th executions (though I am unaware of any students
killed after June 4th). Others managed to ee the country. Deng appeared in
public on June 9th, praising the military. Contra many China experts, the
Tiananmen event triggered neither the regime’s collapse nor its international
ostracization; it did not usher in an era of so-called hard-line brakes on the
rapidly privatizing and globalizing economy. Deng launched his famous South-
ern Tour in 1992, greatly escalating the pace of economic liberalization, and by
2000 China joined the World Trade Organization with permanent “most favored
nation” trading status with the U.S. The Party’s legitimacy was hereafter indis-
solubly hitched to national economic performance.
Reinscribing Tiananmen as the stillbirth of civil society
In what follows, I wish to show what is left out in standard accounts like the one
above and in the re-inscription whereby Tiananmen serves to signify civil society
and China’s becoming-normal. I will critique this Sinological coding as akin to an
old-fashioned colonial discourse, and will offer alternative aspects of 1989 that
complicate and displace such knowledge. This alternative information is meant to
suggest a counter-knowledge of the Tiananmen event, of Chinese political forms
and reality, and of the present’s connections to the Maoist past. As I’ve suggested,
we can apprehend this form of orientalism in the ways that Tiananmen has been
explained and constructed – what happened, why it did, and what it means for the
future of China, as well as for how we understand its Maoist (or earlier) past. But
what emerges from these standard analyses is the “knowledge” that China is in a
world-historical process of becoming modern and generally equivalent to the
West, and moreover that this must happen for it to progress, develop, or become
free and modern. This statement cuts across virtually all explanations, within
Sinology and without, and is perhaps the paramount element within Sinological-
orientalism and its global range – its global “system of dispersion” (Foucault 37).
Of the major schools of Tiananmen interpretation – the elite-factional, cultur-
alist, and civil society approaches – it is the latter which dominates, though they
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 33
all overlap, often in the same analysis.19 Civil society is the subtext of the other
two in that it serves as what is missing or lacking among the elites and within
Chinese culture. Thus Jonathan Unger notes:
What the urban populace of China was demanding, in short, was no less and
no more than ‘civil society.’ When they plastered their banners with the
word ‘democracy,’ what the word meant was not democracy in our terms
but rather Civil Society.
(5)
Civil society is here dened (even capitalized) in the conventional liberal or
Hegelian sense as it is everywhere in China studies, as the social “space” between
the political sphere (society) and the populace at large, and is constituted by non-
state institutions; it further requires “an independent ethos” that Unger sees as
heretofore lacking in several thousand years of Chinese history (5).20 Thus within
the students’ and workers’ creation of “autonomous” organizations, “a new con-
sciousness [an ‘independent ethos’] had been born,” and yet, tragically, it was but
“crudely formed” (as were their notions of democracy), and so the Chinese have
“a great many more steps” to go before they reach the undened promised land
(Unger 5, 7). So, too, the eminent social theorist Craig Calhoun will proclaim that
what the students truly desired, and what the event itself marks, was the emer-
gence of a “public sphere” and civil society within the P.R.C. It is as if the bour-
geois narrative of political and economic “development” was truly universal, and
as if we know what “civil society” and “public sphere” truly are in the West let
alone in the context of, say, contemporary China. Hence: “Student protest was
shaped by the emergence of a civil society in which citizens were linked outside
the direct control of the state and of a public sphere not restricted to intellectuals”
(Calhoun 22). Moreover, the movement failed on account of China’s long-
standing, “totalitarian” negation of the private, familial sphere, and of the space
for “rational-critical discourse” (Calhoun 22, 95). Calhoun will outdo Unger in
nding what has always been lacking within the Chinese character and society,
but which started to emerge in the student movement and helped drive it on:
friendship. Due to cultural difference (a higher value placed on group member-
ship than individuality), and past deformations inicted by class struggles and
class categories (the state), the “novel factor” of “ideals of friendship” only
emerged in 1989 (Calhoun 170, 171). Calhoun does not dene friendship here,
but uses it in the sense of “personal ties” and “individual” feeling. Thus rather
than, say, allowing his notion of friendship to be challenged by the Chinese
context, or viewing Chinese culture in terms other than lack, Calhoun assumes
that Chinese people have always been socially controlled by the state and friend-
less. So strong is his desire to code the Tiananmen event as an emergence of civil
society and a public sphere (with the requisite “independent ethos” and “personal
friendship networks”) that the very psychology, culture, and character of his
objects of study must be typied and t into the model, into what he and the
Sinologists see as the world-historical process of democratization.
34 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
The coding of Tiananmen as the truth of civil society entails a striking cultur-
alism, pointing out what has always been lacking within Chinese culture, and a
universalizing, untroubled application of concepts rooted in Western history to a
docile Chinese reality. It also denies agency to Chinese people, who are seen as
not just controlled but dominated by the despotic, totalitarian, and pre-modern
state. These benchmarks of orientalist practice inform many of the analyses of
Tiananmen in an inuential collection, Popular Protest and Political Culture in
Modern China. Elizabeth Perry, for example, refers to the “frailty” of civil
society in China, as the “omnipresence” of the state has “inhibited” its “uores-
cence” (“Casting” 78, 87). The protests of 1989 were doomed as much by
Chinese culture as by the state’s power itself. The state has, as ever, deformed
the culture: the students’ “traditionalism” explains their – failed, non-modern –
“stress on moralism” and feudal “style of remonstrance” (petitions and posters),
and their “state-centric tendencies” (asking that their demands be recognized,
their “deference to state authority”); all in all, the student movement was
“remarkably Confucian” (86, 79, 88). Perry does note that the alleged “tradition-
alism” of the students was “not due to some immutable Confucian culture,” but
was rather the result of the age-old “state links between state and scholar.” But
blaming the “Confucian” state instead of “Confucian culture” is not much of an
advance from the conventionally orientalist trope of using Confucianism to
explain modern China. It also elides the work of scholars such as Vivienne Shue,
who have argued persuasively that the Chinese Communist state is, or was,
much less controlling than heretofore recognized by Sinology.21 Shue argues that
Deng’s “webs of commerce,” having replaced the “honeycomb polity” of the
Mao era, actually result in greater state control and dominance, an analysis
which could have provided fodder for Perry. She marks, however, no differences
in the regimes, vis-à-vis the state.
This same lack of ascribed agency and surfeit of state power – always con-
structed as a uniquely Chinese problem – informs the volume’s analysis by
Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. After noting that with the advent of
the P.R.C. “the budding sprouts of republican civil society were cut off alto-
gether,” and so again implying the telos of bourgeois modernization, or Europe,
they sum up their analysis of Tiananmen as a type of staged “theatre” and pro-
claim: “Without a civil society, only street theatre remains as a mode of political
expression” (“Acting” 59). They begin by claiming that the Tiananmen protests
cannot be labeled a “democracy movement” (for minzhu or “people rule” unfor-
tunately had “various contours of meaning”); they then code the movement and
all of modern Chinese politics as a form of “political theatre,” full of rituals and
“symbol-laden performances” to move “audiences” (“Acting” 36). My point is
not that this trope is beyond the pale, but that it should be marked as such, as a
trope. It is also one that would be more effective if it were properly theorized,
drawing perhaps on the work of Erving Goffman on the “dramaturgy” of self-
presentation, or moreover of relevant Chinese theory.22 In Esherick and Wasser-
strom’s essays, the modern Chinese polity really is a stage, and all its people
merely players. It is as if the complex human and political reality of one event of
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 35
1989, let alone the previous eight decades, was simply some grand Chinese
opera, nothing more. It is a trivializing analysis at best, and at worst an exoticiz-
ing one in its reduction of China to the merely cultural. The thrust of the theatre-
trope is to show the lack of civil society, which is the point of their essay’s
comparison of China to the “successful” Eastern European revolutions. The
irony of this comparison is especially striking given the comparison of the
former bloc to China today. Pointing again to a lack at the heart of China,
namely, the absence of Western public sphere institutions like the Church and
“the culture of civil society” more generally, the Chinese are bereft. They are left
with “street theatre” and rituals (a fascinating, spectacular, Hollywood-trumping
but pre-modern and limited stage) (“Acting” 58). Needless to say, this fetishiza-
tion of rituals and “surfaces” itself has a long history within writings of the East,
ranging from Marco Polo up to Roland Barthes.
Other reinscriptions of Tiananmen as the truth of Western civil society are
less culturalist, but even here the point of the concept-model is not just to criti-
cize the regime, but to show China as only slowly, begrudgingly entering moder-
nity, and to show its deviation from the proper telos of progress and the modern.
Thus Andrew Nathan will remark: “China is nally joining the world – econom-
ically, culturally, and politically. It will, eventually, become a democracy”
(Transition 77). Nathan’s and others’ positioning of China as not – until recently
– part of the world is of a piece with classical orientalist fantasies about Shangri-
La (the West’s Tibet), but the more salient point is that it denies not only
Chinese history – for even the Maoist de-linked “autarky” was fully a part of the
world system of trade, politics, and culture – but also the coeval nature of
“Chinese” or real, shared time and space.23 Ralph Litzinger nicely summarizes
the problem here:
European colonial anthropology tended to construct non-European others as
objects of lack. These others, variously labeled the primitive, the nonliterate,
and the underdeveloped, were seen to be outside the space and time of
Western modernity; they were essentially denied any sense of shared con-
temporaneity. Culture was thus almost always situated in the realm of
custom, festival, and ritual, all of which were seen to be outside the histori-
cal problematic of Western modernity.
(“Theorizing” 44)
While Nathan believes China will become a democracy someday (and it is
obvious to him that neither the Cultural Revolution nor the “New Democracy”
period up through the 1950s were in any sense democratic), he does take issue
with Tony Saich and others who hail the “new class of small-scale individual
entrepreneurs spawned by the reforms” as proof of a civil society in 1989 (Tran-
sition 79). For Nathan, this “class” lacked the requisite “level of coherence and
social autonomy” that the term – again assumed to stand for a real thing that
originated in the West – implies, once again indexing the “crudely formed” con-
sciousness and actors Unger attributes to Tiananmen (Transition 79). But to say
36 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
that the “proper” consciousness and polity was inchoate is still to say that the
Chinese are nonetheless in a process of becoming-the-same. Thus it is the gure
of lack that paradoxically underwrites the logic of equivalence, of a becoming-
sameness, that is the basis of the new orientalism.
But whether conceived as entirely lacking, circumscribed, or nascent, Western
civil society is in these analyses rarely if ever contrasted to indigenous discus-
sions of an historically Chinese version of, or alternative to, civil society and the
public. Wang Hui has, for example, argued that in China, the public sphere has
for a long time existed “within the state’s space” and so cannot be a “ ‘natural
deterrent’ ” to state power (China’s New Order 179–80). Wang’s point, shared
by Zhang Xudong and others, is that democratic reform in China will necessarily
have to work within and against the state and also against the market.24 While
one would have virtually no sense of this from the Sinological accounts which
refuse to engage them, the questions of civil society and public sphere were the
subject of intense debate within China in the 1980s as part of the cultural fever
era. Haun Saussy’s judgment that these debates were “vitiated” by their use as
another thing China lacked (a civil society) is most insightful (238). But other
analyses very productively recast the entire question of public sphere and
democracy within actually existing Chinese history. In addition to Wang and
Zhang, Liu Kang has argued that both the Maoist practice of cultural revolution
and Hu Feng’s theory of multiple “cultural centers” for China show the exis-
tence of Chinese alternatives to bourgeois modernity and its attendant civil
society (“Hegemony” 83–4). Given what Kang aptly characterizes as “the
liberal/totalitarian or anti-Marxist/Marxist dichotomies” that lter Sinological
knowledge, the China eld’s hostility to Chinese Marxism comes as no surprise
(82). Perhaps more surprising is the degree of positional superiority, the thor-
oughly consistent failure – among Chinese-uent academics no less – to consult
“native” sources that might challenge their reigning if also tacit assumptions.
Kang’s pair of dichotomies also alert us to the deep connections, especially in
the case of China and Asia, between orientalism and anti-communism. Post-Mao
Sinologists can work with such vulgar and uninterrogated notions of the Chinese
Other precisely because their object of critique is not the Chinese people in
general (whom they nonetheless often disparage by implication) but the Chinese
state, or the Chinese polity and Chinese Marxism. They are part of the long
history of orientalizing communists – from well before Wittfogel’s branding of
Stalin and Soviet Russia as “Asiatic” in the 1930s (e.g. Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920
The Rising Tide of Color).
Just as important, there were many things on the ground in Beijing that
directly challenged the civil society interpretation. Foremost among these were
the emergence, as early as April 22nd, of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Fed-
eration and its perhaps 20,000-strong membership, and the de facto general
strike emerging across the city by the beginning of June.25 Clearly, Deng et al.
saw this as a most signicant development: hence the “discrepancy” in who was
killed and arrested, and the speed of Martial Law and the crackdown in the rst
place. For while the students could win the hearts and minds of global and local
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 37
observers, particularly of Americans who saw “their” symbols being displayed,
only the workers could pose a real threat to their Communist Party and its
economy as such. While a few Sinologists have examined the formation of the
BWAF and the role of workers in the movement,26 to date no one has allowed
this to recast the question of civil society as the truth of Tiananmen, or of
China’s past and future tout court. This, despite the fact that it is precisely the
gure and place of the working class within European, if not global, history and
theory that gives the lie to civil society and the public sphere as the realm of
freedom and democratization. Recall that for Marx, writing from the standpoint
of the proletariat, the historical emergence of the bourgeois epoch and the atten-
dant emergence of formal equality and civil society entailed one step forward,
two steps back.27 For these only emerged once labor-power became a commod-
ity and all concrete labor reduced to abstract, homogenous labor. This is to say,
then, that civil society is predicated upon the capitalist class system, and that
formal political and civil rights – as valuable as they can be – cannot result in
social emancipation for the working class. For the latter would entail means of
redress well beyond civil society, straight down to the labor process in the elds
and factories and to the state administration of the economy. “Freedom and
democracy,” the alleged raison d’être of civil society, thus appear as very much
the empty signiers they are, capable of being articulated within civil society to
anything but the economic as such, at least for the great majority of laborers in
China who spend the great majority of their time working and reproducing their
labor-power.
Now one could argue in the traditional liberal way that the state can be made
to bend if not break in response to civil society, such that class bifurcation can
be redressed if not transcended by the politics of the public sphere. But this per-
spective, whatever sense it made in the 1960s of the West, still presumes that
civil society is independent of and ultimately stronger than the state. And it is
precisely these two historical grounds and requirements that have been disputed
by political theorists and historians as diverse as Sheldon Wolin, and Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt.28 Drawing on a genealogy of “postmodern” and Amer-
ican “communitarian” thought, Hardt and Negri argue that at this point in
history, the state has subsumed civil society and is able to “legitimate autono-
mously the new social order,” with class and other divisions intact (Labor 308).
Or more specically, capital has not only instrumentalized the state, but now the
latter “shows a level of structural integration of civil society that nears the
extreme foreseeable limits.” In sum, “civil society no longer exists,” as the state
no longer needs it to deal with social antagonisms or to “legitimate its rule”
(Labor 146, 261).29
This theoretical and historical subsumption of civil society raises many ques-
tions in relation to the Chinese context. At one level it suggests that it is the
U.S.-West that is following the Chinese path, rather than the other way around.
But here I simply want to claim that Hardt and Negri’s point, as well as the range
of studies they draw on, call into question the applicability of the civil society
model as applied to China. The implication is that the approach is anachronistic.
38 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
Additionally, the global argument about the subsumption of civil society by the
state dovetails with Marc Blecher’s analysis of contemporary state-society rela-
tions in China. Blecher argues that while the Tiananmen protests suggest that
“society” has in the Deng era achieved some autonomy from the state, the dia-
lectical ip side of this is that “the state has also been acquiring new types of
autonomy from civil society” (144). While this assumes that some unspecied
form of civil society “ts” China, the larger point is that the state seems poised
to simply ignore civil agitation. It can say that this imputed civil society no
longer exists. And regardless of one’s specic theorization of the matter, “civil
society” is an unlikely vehicle for the political “liberalization” of the Chinese
state that China studies, like the broader Western culture of which it is a part, so
strongly desires.
Un-civility, Sinological anxiety, and a worker’s Tiananmen
But to return to the BWAF and workers’ involvement in the Tiananmen protests,
one can see how problematic it is to insert their demands and activities into a
budding (or missing) civil society. For their demands were by and large for any-
thing but their allotted, modest place within such a sphere:
The working class is the vanguard of the People’s Republic. We have every
right to expel dictators. . . . With a great, concerted effort, we ght bravely to
uphold the truth of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, and to overthrow the dic-
tatorship of the aggressors Deng and Zhao. We will make them repay the
ten-year debt of blood and tears.
(Lu 188, 215)30
What is clear from these and similar statements (from dazibao or big-character
posters) is not just their Marxist (indeed Marxist–Leninist–Maoist) rhetoric, but
that the perspective and implied author embodied within them ies in the face of
a merely civil, “independent ethos” that recognizes all “citizens” as equivalent in
a “culture of civil society,” one unmarred by such unfortunate traits as class
hatred and resentment (to recall Calhoun’s characterization of the Mao era). As
another poster put it, their class is the vanguard precisely because “Wealth,
created by our labour, is used to maintain the lifestyle of those overlords sitting
on the backs of the people,” and so their class has “a historical mission and a
sacred duty” (Lu 226).31 As with the above, this “uncivil” statement authored by
“A Union staff member and 253 Workers” refuses any notion that the working
class is simply one player among others in the game of civil society. Their stand-
point recalls not just Lenin but Mao, and the decades-long positioning and privi-
leging of workers – not least through trade union education and propaganda – as
the leading class of the revolution and nation-state. But it also recalls Georg
Lukács’ classic work on reication and class consciousness, which theorized
how the proletariat, because of its historical positioning within the process of
production, is uniquely able to see (totalize) the social totality and to lead to its
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 39
transformation.32 But Lukács’ argument is larger than this, and related to the
problematic of civil society in his justly famous dissection of the antinomies of
bourgeois thought. From a Lukácsian perspective, the working class simply
elides such antinomies as civil society, a sphere of freedom predicated upon
class division and part and parcel of the anarchy and social differentiation that
makes the totality so difcult to apprehend. Put another way, if an antinomy is
an irresolvable contradiction between an idea of reason and a concept or fact of
experience, then from the standpoint of the working class, civil society is an
antinomy – a lie – in itself.
What is also clear is that the workers and the BWAF rejected liberal rights
discourse (a hallmark of the civil society model), and the myth that the Dengist
reform era was all to the good. In fact, not only Deng (who the students avoided
criticizing) but also the liberal “reformer” Zhao Ziyang, so admired by some stu-
dents and intellectuals, are held responsible for the “ten-year debt of blood and
tears.” In fact, Zhao’s penchant for golf was mocked by one early BWAF poster:
“Mr. and Mrs. Zhao Ziyang play golf every week. Who pays the green fees, and
other expenses?” (Lu 184).33 The workers’ rejection and deconstruction of the
liberal/civil notion of rights can be seen in their texts. Rather than simply claim-
ing, like the students, the right to have their demands recognized and addressed
by the regime, they insist on the right to “expel dictators,” very much a rejection
of the right to mediation through civil society. Moreover, they refuse the right to
self-preservation. As a worker’s poem entitled “Fast Letter” put it:
If the death of one or more/
enables many to live better/
and the motherland to prosper/
then we have no right to drag out an ignoble existence.
(Lu 227)
The extra length of the last line, following the shorter, qualifying, and prefatory
rst three lines, endows the rejection of “right” with an especial force.34 It is a
rejection of right as such, for no right is more basic than that of self-preservation.
The brief workers’ statements above have certainly shown their anger and
Marxist orientation, but what is remarkable in this short poem, beyond its com-
pression of a complex thought into so few lines, is the nal “ignoble existence.”
It is here where we feel the tragedy of the great reversal, the shift from a regime
which took the working class and peasants as its summum bonum, and had
inscribed the nobility of labor, the fundamental value of workers, and proletarian
militancy into all of its major institutions, from the arts to the constitution itself.
For even if one takes a dim view of Maoist and immediately post-Maoist regime
practice (and this would be decidedly one-sided), no one can dispute that urban
and rural labor and laborers were indeed endowed with a nobility and special
status, unmatched even by the early Soviet Union. So the poet’s reference to a
worker’s now “ignoble” life carries with it not just a ash of historical insight –
the Dengist “revolution” was for many a counter-one – but a felt sense of what it
40 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
means to go from the noble, symbolic vanguard to one of the powerless. It
clearly is a “citizen” uninterested in the game of civil society and negotiation
with the state. That option seems unavailable (given the class position of poet
and addressee), and in this poem as with other workers’ statements, there is
neither the students’ oft-noted demand for individual recognition and approval,
nor an “independent ethos.” Those decades of proletarian valorization in China,
and the special status of laborers, do not just go away with the Dengist attacks
on same. For the worker in this poem still sees him- or herself – and his or her
class – as having the crucial role to play: only with their ultimate struggle, to the
point of death if need be, will the “many” “live better” and the “motherland”
“prosper.” Indeed this “fast letter” is very much addressed to a collective desti-
nation: in place of the rst-person “I” seen so often in the students’ character-
posters (“I have a dream./For this dream I’m willing for my blood to be shed”),
or their familial rhetoric (“Mama, we’re not wrong”), here there is a pointed
“we” (Han 319, 127).35 And the logic of the poem’s “sentence” – the movement
from “If” to “then” – can be seen as an intersubjective hailing of the revolution-
ary working class, the proletariat as such. What this poem indexes, in sum, is not
an emergent civil or independent discourse, but a return of working-class mili-
tancy, and in place of reform and dialogue: angry, red revolution. It is this inci-
vility, and the workers’ militant and Marxist discourse in general that help give
the lie to the civil society coding. From the perspective of the workers in the
Square and the BWAF, the relevant problematic of Chinese politics and protest
is not civil and “normal” agitation and redress, but leftist revolution. Notwith-
standing the massive and institutional de-Maoication of the 1980s, here too we
see the legacy of the Mao era in Tiananmen, 1989.36 I return to these points in
what follows.
And yet Andrew Walder and Gong Xiaoxia have, for their part, coded the
BWAF and the workers themselves in terms of the conventional civil society
model, in this case via the Polish Solidarnos labor movement. While initially
critical of the BWAF (and the protests as a whole) for not being as active as Sol-
idarnos, they come to see the Beijing federation as more akin to its “natural”
analogue in Gdansk and the requisite “unabashed working-class trade-union
mentality” (“Workers” 4). Thus Tiananmen and the BWAF are evaluated on the
basis of an ideal type: a populism and trade-unionism that is anti-communist and
“democratic” as opposed to “socialist.” Thus any reservation about conventional
liberal and Western models is only about how well China and its workers
measure up, not how they might challenge let alone displace such knowledge
itself. This is positional superiority.
This technique is further revealed when Walder and Gong damn the 1989
workers with faint praise. Thus they refer to the 1989 workers as “sharp” but
“quite ordinary working people . . . with limited education and writing ability (as
their wall-posters and handbills make evident)” (4). Now, the rst thing that
strikes one about this description is that it in fact negates the creativity and
extraordinary quality of much of the writing in the BWAF’s posters. Take the
following statement from “Ten Strange Aspects of the Current Situation”: “5.
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 41
There are a lot of stylish new hotels. A crane standing among chickens catches
the wind. Houses for the people are insufcient. Slow is the intake of valuable
experience; yet the toilet attendants learn quickly to charge money” (Lu 199).
Here the author begins with an aspect of the Beijing cityscape in the “reform”
era that is so often noted by Sinologists and foreign correspondents as the most
obvious sign of the wisdom and success of the Dengist “revolution” – the explo-
sion of skyscrapers and new construction as places of multinational (or joint-
owned) business and tourism. But as if in direct, dialogic response to this
Sinological point of view, a response that internalizes the other’s discourse and
rearticulates it, the author upends it and turns the skyscrapers into a sign of the
great reversal. The author invokes the people’s perspective (and their lack of
housing) and in so doing demysties the “obvious” meaning of the hotels and
new cityscape. What the hotels signify is nothing less than the Dengist betrayal
of socialism and the Party’s mandate to “serve the people.” As with the “fast
letter,” this poster indirectly but powerfully documents the degradation of labor
and the status of the working class as the symbolic vanguard of the “ongoing”
revolution, hereby invoking the most menial, degrading type of labor to say, here
is what workers are today, mere janitors who have to charge a little extra money
just to get by.
But the statement also ambivalently characterizes the worker’s action of charg-
ing money to clean the toilet. It is poignant and shameful, yet perfectly reasonable
and natural, and merely shows the workers doing what everyone else is –
practicing capitalism. Moreover, by closing this brief but complex analysis with
the gure of the entrepreneurial janitor, the author thereby comments upon and
again debunks the bit of ofcial and intellectual discourse which precedes it. For
the awkward “intake of valuable experience” can only refer to the regime’s own
legitimation of the problems and social costs of neo-liberal privatization – that the
regime and putatively Chinese society as a whole is inevitably and simply going
through a learning curve in the great, historical process of modernization. Thus
according to ofcial discourse, the social costs of “reform,” from the smashing of
the iron rice bowl of social security to massive unemployment, are all unfortunate
but inevitable and temporary problems in the modernization process. For the so-
called “ordinary” author, then, this cerebral, ofcious discourse is invoked, but
only to be mocked as so much useless verbiage. What modernization and its legit-
imation amount to: a toilet attendant charging a bit on the side.
Finally, note the central conceit of the poem that drives the argument and
makes it so memorable: the remarkable metaphor, embodied in an old colloqui-
alism, that makes the new hotels in a city full of unemployment and lacking in
affordable housing akin to a crane standing among chickens. For the distant
bird’s-eye view of the “crane” leaves out all the telling detail and is blind to
ground-level reality. So, too, there is a clever pun on “crane” as bird and as con-
struction vehicle. Thus rather than indexing a lack of education and writing
ability, this rigorously ironic statement is indeed sharp in both content and form,
and poetic in its compact, dense expression of a complex thought, and range of
feeling within very few words.
42 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
So much then for at least part of the lack that Walder and Gong attribute to
the workers themselves. But they see this as an advantage for the development
of civil society and democracy in China. They favorably contrast the “ordinari-
ness” and lack of education of the BWAF members with the “relatively literate”
workers’ protests and writings from the Cultural Revolution decade, the great
majority of which were radically socialist and Maoist (Walder and Gong,
“Workers” 4). For the latter were apparently too radical and militant altogether,
whereas the BWAF was properly Polish and “trade unionist” in its “mentality
and political orientation,” and therefore represents a new future for Chinese
democracy despite their comparative lack of literacy (“Workers” 3). And yet
this new formation ends up being the rather old one of “working-class popu-
lism,” and the incorporation of “ordinary citizens” and the working class within
a “democratic movement” – the program of the left-wing of the U.S.A.’s Dem-
ocratic Party before the mid-1980s (28). As something new and innovative, as
opposed to an imposition of the Euro-American way upon a recalcitrant Chinese
reality, this is pretty weak tea. As for the “populist” nature of the BWAF this
may be true in a banal sense, but virtually all the evidence of their actual posters
and statements reveals the specically Marxist and often avowedly Maoist ori-
entation of the BWAF as a whole. To be sure, not all members were radical in
this sense. Han Dongfang, one of the early leaders of the BWAF and still a
labor activist in Hong Kong, has ironically said he is a believer in “free”
markets and not socialism.37 I do not know if the admirable and important Mr.
Han still holds this view in general about markets, but as of the later 1990s and
today he is adamant about the necessity of working through the ofcial union
organizations in China, as opposed to the more ethically pure but certainly less
effective method of organizing labor outside these connes. But even if Han’s
view were representative at the time, this would hardly brand the BWAF as
embodying a universal – i.e. Polish – “trade union consciousness,” as if a con-
sciousness could have no national characteristics (such as the Catholicism of
Solidarnos). Moreover, the weight of the textual evidence and actions from
1989 suggests Han is more the exception that proves the rule of the socialist
and “vanguard” orientation of the workers’ protests. (Ascertaining their con-
sciousness may be less important than what they said and did.) Thus not simply
the repeated calls for a general strike, but the posters and appeals of the BWAF
reveal its radical roots. Indeed, it is unsurprising that Walder, Gong, and others
do not cite any of the documents referred to above (even though Lu’s BWAF
collection appears in their notes). So, too, there is no reference to workers’
posters like “An Ofcial Denunciation of Deng Drafted for Marx,” or “Lenin is
Crying in the Nether Regions”, or another BWAF poster, “Ten Questions,”
which mockingly asks the Party to step up and “explain the concept and
meaning” of “revolution” (Ogden 87–8).38 For to cite such published, public
statements would present the Sinologists with great difculty in squaring the
Solidarnos/civil society model with the workers’ own, stated political orienta-
tions.39 The latter’s intentions and their very self-understanding are simply not
part of the Sinological equation.
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 43
Walder and Gong’s method, that of conventional social science style inter-
views, in fact turns out to be anti-empirical and marks an attempt to have – to
incite – the workers say what they want them to: that they are pro-reform and
anti-communist “trade unionists.” This is indicated in the following admission:
“After some probing, our gongzilian [BWAF] informants admitted that despite
the severe ination of recent years, living standards had not actually declined
since the Mao era for most of them” (emphasis added) (Walder and Gong,
“Workers” 20).40 While their questions are not revealed to us, it is clear that for
the experts, the workers have something to admit. Or even confess: that any
number of real appearances to the contrary, the anti-Maoist and neo-liberal
“reforms” were all to the good, and the workers are plain down-to-earth folk, not
at all like the angry militant radicals of the Mao decades. Given the visible evi-
dence of radical militancy (the posters, the iconography, the rhetoric), Walder
and Gong’s analysis – as with most Sinological understandings of Tiananmen –
thus stands as anti-empirical, a knowledge based on how well such statements
and other signs t into the a priori schema of civility, civil society, and modern-
ization. As Said and others have noted, orientalism itself is profoundly anti-
empirical, and has “the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed
system” (Orientalism 70).
Walder and Gong’s dismissal of the Maoist rhetoric of the BWAF’s and
others’ posters, and of the 1970s workers, is a sign of positional superiority and
the unreexive imposition of foreign, traveling theories. But it is also perhaps an
anxiety with the “Chineseness” or “Maoist” nature of the workers. Indeed how
else to explain the blindness to such visible signs of old-fashioned, proletarian
militancy (e.g. the frequent rounds of “The Internationale”), of the specter of
Mao and communism? This is not to say that the whole Tiananmen event was
simply a “Maoist” or working-class movement, nor that there is some essence to
“Chineseness.” But there are certainly deeply held notions of the latter, and
among foreign observers at least, one of these has been that of the “fundamental-
ist” and menacing Maoist “Red Chinese.” It is this gure that haunts Walder’s
desire to make interviewees – constructed as anthropological objects – speak
against such an identity. They must reduce the writings and activities of the
workers to an interpretation that makes them t within a “normal” or universal
pattern of “democratic” protest, trade unionism, and modern “development.”
Even militant, proletarianized strikers must become-the-same.
A full analysis of the parallels between the Mao era and the 1989 movement
is beyond the scope of the present essay. But given the orientalist recoding of
1989 as a (failed) break with that era, some remarks are necessary. The essential
point here is that the 1989 event was not in fact a break, but rather conditioned
by the mass democracy of the Mao years and the Cultural Revolution. As noted,
the most visible signs of this range from Maoist iconography to rhetoric (red
books, badges, portraits, slogans, demands). While the BWAF posters speak for
themselves in this regard, equally striking is the popularity among students of
Mao’s Cultural Revolution slogans about Red Guard youth. As student leader
Shen Tong has recalled, referring to a march he led, megaphone in hand:
44 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
I walked up and down alongside the marchers, encouraging them by calling
out some of Mao’s sayings. . . . ‘Those who put down student movements
have a bleak future’ and ‘If the students don’t act, who will?’ – slogans that
seemed perfect for us now.
(Almost 180)
This is not to say that Tiananmen was simply the continuation of the CR. Some
students and virtually all the intellectuals explicitly contrasted their “pure,” patri-
otic movement from that of the Red Guards. This is to be expected given past
Maoist “punishments” of the intellectual class and the de-Maoication. But the
complex, paradoxical relationship between Tiananmen, Maoism, and the CR –
as evinced by the iconography and rhetoric – does indeed speak to a larger
history, or more specically to a certain Marxist or revolutionary construction of
this that remains available even decades after 1989.41
Here we need to return to Zhang Xudong’s point about the CR being China’s
largest, singular form of mass democracy. This point acknowledges the violence,
chaos, and ultimate failure of the CR, but also targets the reication of Western,
procedural democracy as the one true type. It posits instead the history of China
in the last century and emphasizes the mass and participatory aspects of “democ-
racy.” From here, one can indeed see Tiananmen as in part a legacy of the Mao
era, and the return of the CR’s massive, actualized “right to rebel.” The point
here is not just that the form of Tiananmen, qua protest, owes much to the CR
(the rhetoric, the enormous mobilization, the anger over corruption and bureau-
cracy). It is also part of the history of democratic or popular struggle since 1949
that was against the state bureaucracy and Maoist in inspiration. In short, in
telling the history of democracy in China as a failed but inevitable struggle
against a feudal and then one-Party state, of which Tiananmen is just one more
failed example, Sinological-orientalism elides the fact that Mao and his follow-
ers were also attempting to democratize the state and society he and they created.
To be sure, a multi-party voting system was never an option, for historical and
ideological reasons (the Cold War and the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) as
well as the quintessentially Maoist passion for a politics and democracy of com-
mitment, mobilization, and participation above all else. That most Westerners do
not share these beliefs, or that we can see the relative importance of the vote,
does not mean there was no democracy or rational political theory in China.
Thus Lin Chun, herself at times a critic of the Maoist state as a form of “patriar-
chal socialism,” notes that “the short-lived experiments encouraged by Mao in
workers’ participation and workplace democracy were truly valuable” even
though they did not last (“China Today” 39). And the reason they did not last
was the turn to the right after Mao’s death.
The essential point here, for our purposes, is that under Mao there were actu-
ally existing attempts at a greater worker’s democracy. The most famous/
infamous example of this remains the short-lived Shanghai Commune of 1967,
but one must also include the formation, over a period of eighteen months, of
mass organizations (such as the workers’ management groups documented by
Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 45
Charles Bettleheim42) and provincial “revolutionary committees” that were to
transform the existing Party structure (Gray, Rebellions 352–6). These organiza-
tions and committees included workers and allowed them a political voice within
their workplaces and communes. So, too, one should recall that it was during the
CR that Mao and the left pushed for the right to strike in the constitution (a right
later rescinded in 1980), in direct response to the strikes that erupted from time
to time during the CR decade, especially in the 1970s. In short, as Maurice
Meisner has noted, “the Cultural Revolution politically activated China’s urban
working class for the rst time since the proletariat had been so brutally crushed
by Chiang Kai-shek’s armies in 1927” (Mao’s China 311). These struggles for a
greater worker’s democracy ultimately failed because of Mao’s and the left’s
inability to institutionalize their programs and gains, and because the CR was
forcibly brought to an end by Hua Guofeng and Deng.
This failure – a noble failure – should not blind us to the history of this strug-
gle, or to its connections and inuences on Tiananmen, including its status as a
decades-long process of political education for the workers of Tiananmen and
even today. This aspect of Chinese and especially workers’ historical political
culture militates against the Sinological coding of Tiananmen as a failed yet
inevitable moment in China’s becoming-the-same as “us” through a universal
narrative of “normal,” “civil” democratization. So, too, it offers a counter expla-
nation for the so-called “nostalgia” that workers and some students felt for the
leadership and society of the Mao era. This is partly explained by the previous
decades of revolutionary culture and proletarian or Marxist education, including
the more benecial aspects of the Cultural Revolution (rural health, education
and development programs, agitation for women’s equality beyond labor-force
enrollment). Put another way, the decades-long struggles for a new, radically
egalitarian order, as well as still inuential symbols and mythemes like “the
Yan’an way”, persist even some twenty years after Tiananmen. And they persist
despite, or perhaps because of, the Dengist “some must get rich rst” propa-
ganda and the inuence of consumerism and neo-liberalism in China.
The so-called nostalgia for the Mao era – for the revolutionary passion, ideals,
and lack of corruption – is further explained by the return of massive economic
inequalities and exploitation already well under way by 1989 during Deng’s capi-
talist revolution from above and of a “highly elitist school system” that in effect
bars the working class (Meisner, Deng Era 345). For the economic injustices that
were already evident in 1989 have only grown worse in the ensuing decades.
Thus when Walder and Gong make a point of steering away their interviewees
from proclaiming that even economically things were better in the Mao era, they
miss the point that such nostalgia is not some fantasy, some mere yearning for a
Golden Age or an instance of residual brainwashing. It is rather a rational, ethical,
and yet passionately political response to real conditions of existence, and one
based on historical circumstances inherited from the Mao era, as opposed to the
ideal type of political protest as it exists in the heads of China experts.
As with 1989, there is no doubt that Mao’s imprint looms large even today;
that among peasants, urban workers, and even some intellectuals, Mao is still
46 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
seen quite positively, the efforts of Sinology, liberal “reformers,” and the Party
leadership itself notwithstanding.43 This is a dimension of Chinese political and
popular culture that Sinology, and the West more generally, have yet to deal
with, much preferring – needing – to see Mao as either a totalitarian monster just
like Stalin, or as a depraved despot (as in numerous “tell-all” biographies).44 In
short, given the “received wisdom” that constructs Maoism as totalitarianism or
“oriental despotism” (and these are synonymous in the present context), a crucial
bit of knowledge for shoring up the capitalist West’s self-constitution as the very
epiphany of reason, freedom, and democracy, it is no accident that the specters
of Mao and communism need to be exorcized. It is this dynamic, rooted in both
fantasy and knowledge production, that results in statements like Barme’s “Mao
bin Laden or is it Osama Zedong?” or Nathan’s dehumanizing summation of the
collectivist era: “Mao’s people complied out of patriotism, a sense of unworthi-
ness, faith in a despot’s wisdom, and because they preferred to be among the
victimizers than among the victims” (Nathan, “Epilogue” 215).45 While written
before the recent war on Iraq, such statements betray a neo-colonial arrogance as
well as anxieties about “terrorism” and fundamentalism in the pax Americana
and “post” Cold War order. They also underscore the fact that orientalism and
positional superiority continue to constitute the identity of the U.S.-West. With
this in mind, it is no accident that the civil society and “democratic” moderniza-
tion template are dominant within the China eld, as today that template and
American culture remain deeply informed by a Cold War triumphalism and a
mythic exceptionalism that the rest of the world must somehow follow.
3 Maoist discourse and its
demonization
You remember Kosygin at the 23rd Congress! ‘Communism means the raising of
living standards,’ of course! And swimming is a way of putting on a pair of
trunks!
– Mao Zedong, as told to (or imagined by) Andre Malraux
If it is repeated often enough will a truth-claim necessarily become a truth? Such
appears to be the case with the verdict on historical Maoism. The demonization
of the Mao era is a general, if under-explored feature of China studies and intel-
lectual-political culture around the world – not least among liberal Chinese intel-
lectuals.1 In this chapter I critique this production of truth about Chinese Maoism
by documenting where it has occurred, and what new knowledge and gures of
colonial discourse it turns upon. En route, I will argue that the “new” truth about
the Mao era – perhaps not new but what was always already “known” or at least
assumed by the U.S.-West – is an indispensible part of Sinological-orientalism.
Indeed the demonization of Maoism is arguably the lynchpin of the entire dis-
cursive edice surrounding the P.R.C. because it serves as what China is in the
process of overcoming on its road to normality and political modernity. In that
sense it is also a sign of what contemporary China still lacks. It is the presuppo-
sition of the construction of post-Mao China as becoming-the-same as “us.” The
Mao era of socialist construction and mass mobilization is what China is recov-
ering from; it is conceived of as some type of oriental aberration, a despotic
nightmare from which it is still trying to fully awake; at the very least it is a
space of negative difference from the present. Most simply put, the chief blame
for China’s lingering history of political, economic, and cultural deformation
and “lag” lies with Mao Zedong and his Party state. This in itself is a highly
interesting formulation. It is certainly better, in a liberal-humanist-Cold War
kind of way, than older traditions of blaming China’s problems on the Chinese
character, race, or even Confucianism. But what it shares with such older views,
in addition to an implicit teleology, is a refusal to take the actually existing,
“Chinese” realities and views seriously as something other than negativity and
lack. By this I mean that such views – the truth on Chinese Maoism – do not
take the Chinese revolution or Chinese–Marxist developmental/constructive
48 Maoist discourse and its demonization
efforts seriously. Not in terms of either what they achieved (or even failed in),
what was attempted or intended, the complexities and ambiguities of what
resulted, nor in terms of the self-understanding of the era and its partisans,
actors, or witnesses. Nor do the complexities and differences of contemporary
China fare too much better; it is allowed to be an emergent and rising economy,
but not so much an emergent society (to put this more conventionally). By
“taking it seriously” I refer then not only to the Maoist accomplishments – its
other failures notwithstanding – in political economy or social development, and
its achievements in egalitarianism and human welfare. I refer more fundamen-
tally and conceptually to the ways in which that revolution and post-1949 trajec-
tory until at least 1979 understood itself, so to speak: what it said and did, and
what it was trying to do. I want to emphasize its positive record, surely, but also
its positivity or complexity, including this level of self-understanding and
discourse.
Above all else, the hostile or demonizing knowledge about the Mao era is
premised upon the negation of Maoist discourse itself. By that, and following the
work of Gao Mobo among others, I refer to the rational–practical–affective
framework that enabled people to make sense of their lives and world during the
Mao years. I characterize this further below, momentarily. But it is the negation
of this discourse that, in turn, allows the Mao era to be re-coded as totalitarian-
ism, extremism, brainwashing, terror. Or in somewhat more sympathetic
codings: as sheer, sublime utopianism or something like a spiritualistic apotheo-
sis of collective desire. It produces the triumphalism of China discourse vis-à-vis
the Mao era: that we now know the awful truth. That discourse and that whole
era need not be taken seriously aside from its body counts because it was, in a
word, fake. That is a view that can be easily veried by liberal intellectuals on
the mainland and diaspora, or by self-professed “dissidents” of the current
regime. (It is not I think controversial to say that these largely Westernized and
English uent Chinese intellectuals, businessmen, and artists represent China to
the West.) But this shift and regime of truth is about still more than the triumph
of de-Maoication, the market mentality, liberalism, American education, the
Cold War victory of the U.S.-West, and so on: it reects not only a Cold War
perspective but – as my analyses below and throughout this book attempt to
show – is also a colonial discourse that turns upon orientalist tropes about despo-
tism, cruelty, passivity, and irrationality running rampant in China. It marks
China’s essential difference from the normative U.S.-West, and again it is this
Maoism that China must and is leaving behind. In short, this new knowledge of
the Mao era marks the imbrication of Cold War (“totalitarian”) and colonial dis-
course within an orientalist production of knowledge. It is “new” in the sense
that prior to the mid-1970s the “anti” views of the P.R.C. were always countered
to a certain extent by the very visible specter of the Maoist revolution and dis-
course: their existence in China at least implied that the self-understanding of the
Chinese – howsoever “brainwashed” – was different than that of the Cold War
and racist discourse about Red China. There were far fewer “dissidents” and
exiles, not to mention Sinologists, who could serve their representative functions.
Maoist discourse and its demonization 49
And one should not underestimate the (past) symbolic power and good name of
China in the former Third World and various postcolonial contexts. With the
Western triumphalism after the “end” of the Cold War as well as real de-Maoi-
cation in China, this is simply no longer the case. So, too, the resurgence of
modernizationist and liberal–humanist discourse around the world marks the
same eclipse.
It is this shift that I wish to document below by examining how knowledge of
the Mao era is produced in a way that smacks of colonial discourse – both in
terms of old-fashioned (Cold War) orientalism and the enumerative modality
investigated by Bernard Cohn among others in their studies of knowledge pro-
duction under British imperialism. I begin with a discussion of Maoist discourse
and of scholarship on the nature of Maoist governance; from there I will attend
to codings of the relatively under-studied yet crucial period of the Great Leap
Forward and its famine. While mapping the production of such Sinological
knowledge, I also broach a wider argument: that this is a global phenomenon, a
part of cultural/ideological globalization and its attendant spread of Eurocen-
trism and orientalism if also in liberal or other guises. What I am saying, in other
words, is that despite the obvious and in other ways welcome increase of ows
of information, commodities, and people in recent decades, what we have seen is
in fact an increase in the orientalist production of knowledge. In the case of
China, this turns fundamentally upon the negation of Maoist discourse in favor
of an orientalist coding of the Mao era as aberration or nightmare.
Maoist discourse and its abnegation
Immediately preceding his reference to the “unworthiness” and blind faith of
“Mao’s people,” Andrew Nathan nicely encapsulates the dominant Sinological
view of those Maoist decades in an ex cathedra pronouncement:
[The CCP] built a system that tied the peasants to the land, kept consump-
tion to a minimum, xed each person permanently in place in a work unit
dominated by a single party secretary against whom there was no appeal,
classied each individual as a member of a good or bad class, and called on
each citizen to show that he or she was progressive by demonstrating enthu-
siasm for disciplining himself and persecuting others.
(“Epilogue” 215)
Later, we will in passing cover some of the goals and historical record of
Maoism that Nathan runs roughshod over; but what is most pertinent here are
the assumptions which frame his account. In addition to being of bad character,
the Chinese have no agency and are entirely state-manipulated, willfully carry-
ing out repressive policy. That the majority of Chinese participants, even today,
do not remotely seem to see that era and their own activity in that way matters
not. I will return to this point about self-understanding shortly, in an excursus on
Maoist discourse. So, too, Nathan and others beg a number of questions about
50 Maoist discourse and its demonization
the remarkable mass mobilizations and “mass democracy” of the Mao years.
Those campaigns from the land reform onwards (excluding perhaps the late,
exhausted Cultural Revolution campaigns against Confucius and Lin Piao) were
remarkable not just for their affective intensity and violence, but for their popu-
larity and grass-rootedness: those forms of democratic and political legitimacy
elided by merely procedural notions of democracy. But the Sinologist knows the
native and the “truth” of the regime better than him- or herself.
Such rhetoric may seem familiar in the years following the “war against
terror,” and we should remind ourselves that it is not only Islam-centered area
studies that are in the business of documenting civilization-threatening “funda-
mentalists.” Recall, for example, Barme’s reference to “Mao bin Laden” or
Edward Friedman’s summing up of four decades of P.R.C. rule: “The Chinese
people, who fell a humiliating half-century behind their East Asian neighbours,
are still paying the heavy price for the crimes and errors of Mao’s fundamental-
ist ways” (“Flaws” 154). That the implicit facts of poor socio-economic develop-
ment under Maoism were and continue to be contradicted by, for example, the
World Bank and the U.S. government2 goes without saying. In recent years, as
assorted experts try to suss out the deeper, substantial reasons for China’s rise
(beyond market-magic, Asian values, and so forth), there has been a chorus of
voices attesting to the impressive economic and developmental growth of China
under Mao. Researchers as otherwise diverse as Chris Bramall, Maurice
Meisner, Jean C. Oi, Carl Riskin, Li Minqi, and Y. Y. Kueh among others have
all attested not only to the growth rates of the Maoist economy and its leaps
forward in infrastructure and “human capital,” but also how this was indispens-
ible for the later take-offs in rural and urban China.3 The neo-classical economist
Yueh will even argue that the Maoist economy was not only necessary for the
later explosions in growth, but that the Dengist reforms have numerous continu-
ities with it. Not a break, but a continuation and transformation. At any rate, if it
is true that the Maoist political–economic record was impressive overall (and in
context) and therefore improved the living conditions and lives of so many,
admittedly through an authoritarian but also egalitarian Party-state, then it ill
behooves comfortably middle-class, privileged scholars to cavalierly write off or
simply elide this achievement. Note, too, Friedman’s denial of the contempora-
neity (coevalness) of China – it exists in the past, stuck back there, and not yet,
not quite in the present. But what is remarkable is the gure of “fundamental-
ism” appearing in a Sinological text. It is as if the specter of radical Islam is ani-
mating Friedman, even to the point where the Kremlinological shibboleths of
totalitarianism and police-states are surpassed, now to fully racialize both Mao
and “Mao’s people”4 as benighted others, and to deny them any temporal simul-
taneity. This imaginary link between Maoism and (Islamic) fundamentalism can
be further seen – as will be detailed in the next chapter – in DeLillo’s postmod-
ern novel Mao II; it equates Maoism with the “cult” of the Korean “Moonies”
and a Lebanese “terrorist” group in war-torn Beirut. All of these representations
of Maoist China turn upon the threat to the autonomy of the liberal subject and
the American Dream of a life free of social determinants.
Maoist discourse and its demonization 51
So strong is the demonization of Maoism as akin to a retrograde Islamic fun-
damentalism that it appears in quite different types of scholarship. Take, for
instance, Dennis Klass and Robert Goss’s article in Death Studies that equates
Maoism with Wahhabi Islam. Both “movements” represent societies that “bru-
tally” “police” death and mourning rituals in the name of new, statist cultural
“grief narratives” that aim to destroy family identity (794, 807). What strikes
one about all of these pieces are less the ideas or facts that are marshaled (often
anecdotally) than the very positing of the general equivalence. They unreex-
ively yoke together radically different cultures, political programs, and moments
in history, all in the name of scoring points against an unholy trinity of Maoism,
“backwardness,” and fundamentalism. The problem is less one of comparison
than with abstract, reifying equivalence, and with the concomitant failure to take
seriously either pole of analysis, or to provide some measure of methodological
self-reexivity. What is further striking in such equations of Maoism with
extremism/fundamentalism is that the only – and unacknowledged – material,
concrete link between them is that the subjects are not white.
A further sign of the discursive articulation between Maoism and fundamen-
talist “extremism” is the oft-repeated equation of Maoism and the Nazi holo-
caust. Thus Vera Schwarz and neo-Confucianist Tu Wei-ming, echoing the
Readers Digest and some in the exiled dissident community, draw a straight line
not from Hegel to Marx to the Gulag, but from Hitler, the Storm Troopers, and
Auschwitz to the decades of Maoist rule and the Cultural Revolution in particu-
lar.5 Here the link is not argued so much as asserted as an obviousness; it rests
entirely on the fact that in both “cases” there were popular mobilizations, vio-
lence, and suffering. Under this criterion it is hard to imagine any signicant his-
torical period of change that would not t the bill, from the U.S. Depression to
anti-colonial wars of liberation around the globe. Note, too, that the death toll of
the CR decade seems to lie somewhere between 34,000 and as much as 400,000.6
A terrible toll, but simply of another, lesser order than the holocaust. Relatedly,
James Gregor has recently given the lie to that stream in Chinese historiography
that wants to equate Maoism (and the Guomindang) as of a piece with European
fascism.7 But Gao has most elaborately refuted the CR–Holocaust link, arguing
that the violence in China was not planned by the state but was committed by
various groups of Red Guards, Rebels, strikers, and the Army at different times
and for different reasons. These last range from personal revenge and revolution-
ary zeal to individual persecutions and civil-war-like battles between armed
groups.8 So, too, the CR – a left-wing, anti-bureaucratic mass democracy cam-
paign in so far as it was intended or directed by the state (the leftist/Maoist line
at any rate)9 – did indeed bring some unarguably democratic or otherwise impor-
tant benets to people. As Gao has argued, benets included:
the creation of a cheap and fairly effective health care system, the expansion
of elementary education in rural China, and afrmative-action policies that
promoted gender equality. . . . In terms of health and education many of the
rural poor are now worse off than they were during the Cultural Revolution.
52 Maoist discourse and its demonization
Similarly, many of the gains made in achieving gender equality have been
lost.
(Gao, “Debating” 424)
One can go on and list other positive developments during this time – scientic
and technological progress (in agriculture, medicine, industry, even archeology),
the development of still-interesting and valuable art forms (model operas, popular
music, poster art, and so on), and so on. The industrial economy grew by leaps
and bounds aside from one year, and agricultural production kept pace with a
booming population (i.e. grain yields increased signicantly) whilst communes
were working out new strategies for rural industrialization, irrigation, and so
forth. China sent massive amounts of aid to Vietnam, and also to Africa, while
brokering peace with the U.S. in 1972.10 So, too, the cultural revolution actually
has important or simply undeniable political legacies in China today. I have
briey considered these in relation to Tiananmen earlier. The Maoist “right to
rebel” against Party and other forms of authority is surely one of these, as are
various forms of protest today within China among workers, peasants, and others.
So, too, if there is to be another radical-left movement in the P.R.C., or simply
one that is mass democratic or aimed beyond electoral politics, it might nd its
roots within the rebels and so-called “ultra-leftists” from the CR decade as well as
within the heritage of socialist economics, the iron rice-bowl, and so on.11
These forced equivalences between “extremism,” Nazism, and Maoist China,
as well as the straightforward demonizations of Maoist rule, accurately reect
the current production of truth about that era. This is to say that such works
reect less the real Truth of Maoism as now revealed in the current period than
a shift in the very terms and ways of seeing the China of the revolutionary
period. Much the same could be said for global shifts in understanding the
entire radical postwar period of national liberations and revolutions. It is not the
truth of Maoist history but Maoist discourse itself that has been negated and
effaced. When we come upon such “links” or chains of equivalence between
radically different, discontinuous phenomena like Hitler, Wahhabism, Mao, Pol
Pot, and so on, we should see that this statement is only possible on the basis of
some larger discursive formation (and its positions of enunciation): Sinological-
orientalism. While in the form of knowledge and endowed with authority, such
statements do not reect some Real China or the Real CR and still less some
transcendent space of “extremists.” They speak instead to the self-constitution
of the putatively liberal, free, rational, modern West. That is, what in the last
instance makes these demonizations of Maoism possible is the emergence and
then dominance of Sinological-orientalism. This entails a subsequent fading of
Maoist discourse and China’s revolutionary problematic into a merely residual
form or status, a disappearance effected through the forcible, often violent de-
Maoication process in China and its capitalist “boom,” the end of the Cold
War, and the resurgent triumph of conservative, anti-communist, and arguably
colonialist thought within China studies and global intellectual–political culture.
This dominance represents the present outcome of what Stuart Hall has
Maoist discourse and its demonization 53
theorized as the fundamental mode of politics: the hegemonic struggle over the
legitimation or de-legitimation of discourse.12 Thus notwithstanding the trium-
phalism that prevails from Harvard’s Fairbank Center to elite, liberal circles
within the CCP and Chinese intelligentsia, it is not the real Truth which has
been revealed since the 1970s but the circulation of a new, largely unchallenged
form of Sinological-orientalism at work in the world. What one does have – in
addition to the traces, legacies, and facts of specic campaigns of which we do
have some record – is recourse to the Maoist discourse that existed at the time
and that still exists, albeit residually and increasingly in commodied form. It is
this that has been negated by Sinological-orientalism, and this that China
studies no longer has to take seriously in the “post” Cold War period, dened in
part by the turn to capitalism in China itself. Discourse, then, is not secondary
to the real history or facts but in some sense primary: no reality without
representation.
To see Chinese Maoism not as totalitarian madness, an assault upon liberal-
ism, common sense, and human rights, we need to put it back into its context as
a powerfully affective and rational way of thinking, acting, and being-in-the-
world. This requires a basic notion of Maoist discourse. Briey put, the rst step
to circumvent the demonization of the Mao era is to recover analytically the
complex discursive formation of Maoism: not simply Maoist ideology (Mao’s
thought and sayings, the Maoist line), but the “common-sense knowledge and
socially shared values, beliefs, practices, administrative measures, disciplinary
technology, education, and so on” that “provided a framework and standard for
the Chinese to relate to in their thinking and behaviour and to make sense of
their lives” (Gao, “Maoist” 14). To amend Lenin on Marxism, Maoist discourse
was all-powerful because it appeared to be true; it was the regime of truth that
powerfully held sway from, say, Yan’an until the great reversal effected rst by
Hua Guofeng and then Deng. This is a call to move from the vulgar notion of a
brainwashing totalitarianism to a more positive, Foucaultian notion of discourse
and power, one that includes three crucial dimensions of the power/knowledge
nexus: the non-discursive apparatuses of Maoist governance beyond liberal,
state-phobic notions of an all-powerful despotic state; the self-understanding of
Mao-era subjects; and the knowledge, statements, or content that Maoist dis-
course offered. I am arguing, then, for the necessity of a roughly Foucaultian and
historical–materialist account of Maoist discourse and revolutionary governmen-
tality. Put another way, to restore the complexity of the Mao era we need to deal
with its own self-understanding: what it did and what it said, or what it said it
did, and allow this to mediate our retrospective production of knowledge about
this most radical of eras.
Maoist discourse merits book-length treatment, but I will briey characterize
these three dimensions before moving on to their negation or elision in scholar-
ship today. To illustrate the rst of these we can do no better than to recall femi-
nist historian Wang Zheng’s pathbreaking essay on growing up as a
“revolutionary youth” during the Cultural Revolution. Wang explores the com-
plexity and positive aspects of the gender politics of Maoist discourse during
54 Maoist discourse and its demonization
these years. She nds it to lie precisely in the ultimately failed but nonetheless
real rejection of “femininity” and the category of “woman.” Her focus is on the
leftist state’s deployment of the early feminist concept of “gender neutrality” and
the proffered identity of “revolutionary youth,” “communist successor,” or
“socialist constructor” (51). (This concept signied the non-importance of
gender in terms of social and political roles and a rejection of traditional, Confu-
cian notions about the nature of women; like the goal of women’s liberation, it
was incorporated into the Party and movement during the 1920s.) As Wang
notes, the pull of femininity still existed outside of ofcial discourse and the
public sphere, and it is not as if patriarchy could just be abolished by decree. But
the state’s attempts to revolutionize the culture in part in the name of “gender
neutrality” were not mere rhetoric but institutionalized during the CR. The expe-
riences of going down to the countryside and working side by side with other
men, women, and peasants, the various forms of activism and political participa-
tion available to women, and the “exchanges of revolutionary experience” were
notable even beyond their obvious and important class egalitarianism. The aim
was:
to situate citizens in new kinds of social relationships, to pull both women
and men out of the web of Confucian kinship obligations and to redirect
their ethical duties from their kin to the party and the nation. Scholars may
call this statist scheme manipulation or domination, but few have noticed
that the enforcement of this scheme disrupted conventional gender norms
and created new discursive spaces that allowed a cohort of young women to
grow up without being always conscious of their gender.
(Wang, “Call” 52)
Rather than have us dismiss the enforcement of gender and other egalitarianisms
as totalitarian, Wang asks us to see the achievement and complexity of such
state-feminist schemes. Of course in the current intellectual climate in the China
eld and well beyond, from “postmodern” theorists to straight-up libertarianism
and neo-liberalism, a positive or nuanced understanding of the state is alien
indeed. But this has more to do with intellectual fashion and de-politicization
than with substantial political theorizing, more of a degradation of social democ-
racy than an insight into the nature of the state in the West or China. But the state
and its power and capacities remain the only game in town for social and demo-
cratic progress in China or otherwise. It is of course a staple of Sinological think-
ing to identify China in particular with an all-powerful and all-repressive state
apparatus. I remain convinced that this is largely untrue, except in the bad ways.
It remains unable to successfully govern across the vast space of China in the
better ways, aside from mobilizations for national disasters. The Maoist era was
if nothing else an attempt to nd a state-form appropriate to an egalitarian and
mass-democratic China; the promulgation of gender neutrality and state femi-
nism – as weak and unfullled as this ultimately was – was one instance of this.
The point then via Wang Zheng is that Maoist rhetoric was not mere rhetoric.
Maoist discourse and its demonization 55
There were real attempts and real successes, if also all too temporary, at the insti-
tutionalization of egalitarianism and revolutionary culture and identity. These
aspects of the CR were not fake, mere smokescreens for top-level politics within
the Party. They happened. They were actually existing social practices.
Relatedly, the self-understanding of Mao-era subjects is also different and
more complicated than we have assumed. We can again recall Wang Zheng’s
account and the taking up by “revolutionary youth” of the identities and dis-
courses of “communist successors” in a seless, zealous pursuit of social change
and self-transformation. A pursuit both at times difcult and labor-intensive, and
yet deeply meaningful and pleasurable. In a passage that illustrates the shift from
Maoist to post-Maoist (or “liberal” or “human rights”) discourse and self-under-
standing, Wang notes:
Everyone who was talking [by the late 1980s], including the once victimiz-
ing Red Guards, was a victim scarred by the Maoist dictatorship. But I could
not think of any example in my life to present myself as a victim or a victim-
izer. I did not know how to feel about my many happy memories and cher-
ished experiences of a time that most vocal people now called the dark age.
(“Call” 35)
Thus like the other contributors to the scholarly collection of memoirs in Some
of Us, Wang refuses the victimization narrative on the grounds that it did not and
does not t her and their experiences. Similarly, Gao Mobo has noted that while
the reasons for his own brief incarceration during the CR seem ridiculous to him
now (he was accused of hiding “feudal” kinship records in his village), at the
time they seemed normal. Both views here speak to the diversity of experiences
during the CR. But they illustrate as well a fundamental aspect of the CR in
context: that it was not terrifying madness but had its own logic and normality,
its own way of being in the true and own way of being.
That it may seem different now – that it only conjures up terror and denuncia-
tions, and again “extremism” – does not reect the real truth of the era having
been discovered and made known worldwide since the 1980s. It reects a change
in discourse, an historical shift from one discursive formation to another, from
Maoist discourse to what we can call a liberal humanist, even Dengist formation
that has swept the world since the 1970s with the rise of globalization and the
turn to the right in intellectual–political culture in China and the West. What has
changed is the end of an era and a fundamental rupture in the discourse available
to subjects, the collapse of the CR by the mid-1970s, and the shift to de-
Maoication, capitalist reform, and its attendant Dengist/neo-liberal rationality.
So, too, we should not underestimate the intellectual/artistic Occidentalism or
Western-fetishism of the 1980s and beyond (both ofcial versions and unof-
cial). As Gao sums this up:
Those who write . . . of the Mao era and the CR tend to recall their memories
with bitterness, condemnation and even horror as if what happened was a
56 Maoist discourse and its demonization
nightmare from which they had just woken up. This is because they are
using the current discourse to identify with certain values, doing that to con-
struct the past. In this enterprise of constructing the past through the dis-
course of the present, remembering the CR as a nightmare identies with
the West, its values and way of life, especially those of the United States.
(Battle 37)
Self-understanding under Maoist discourse, then, is at odds with current stories
of victimization and human rights abuses, not least because liberal notions of
human rights and the sacrosanct individual were simply not in circulation during
the highly politicized and Marxist/revolutionary context of the immediate
Chinese past (nor the further past). So, too, the limits and non-universality of
liberal individualism have long been exposed by the emphases on collective or
communal belonging and responsibilities in traditional Chinese culture. While
Sinology has long noted this last fundamental aspect, it has yet to deploy it
against the rewriting of the Mao era as an assault upon the former – the Western,
Judeo-Christian liberal subject.
Following Gao’s and Wang’s narratives, as well as emphatically positive,
“nostalgic” lms about the Cultural Revolution like 1975’s “Breaking With Old
Ideas” (Jue lie) or the more recent “In the Heat of the Sun” (Yangguang canlan
de rizi, 1994), we can more accurately characterize this self-understanding, albeit
briey. Certainly it has to turn upon the exercise of new practices: freedoms of
movement and political participation, in part due to a freedom from traditional
schooling and a relative absence of parental control for youth, or from status quo
workplace and administrative authority for others. But above all, such self-
understanding turns upon the identity of a “communist successor” who is
“making revolution” and remolding one’s self through dousipixiu or the ethical
mandate to “combat self, criticize revisionism.” While a deeply, passionately
held identity and while including radical, even violent forms of political partici-
pation like calling out those in authority and so on, this still has to be seen as a
rational and practical, if revolutionary, identity and interpretive framework. So,
too, we need to recall that for many, the CR period was simply a time of youth-
ful energy and exuberance – the “times of our lives” captured by “In the Heat of
the Sun.”
The third aspect of Maoist discourse – its statements or content at the level of
what is thought and said – can also be briey characterized. This includes, as
noted above, not only “Mao Zedong Thought”13 and Mao’s texts, but key planks
of the overall discourse, such as the famous emphases on contradictions, class
struggle, continuous revolution, serving the people, and so on. Perhaps the para-
mount element here – and it overlaps with the emphases on contradiction, class
and “two-line struggle” – is the friend/enemy distinction that Michael Dutton,
drawing on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, has recently explored in his rich
history of Chinese policing.14 (As will be recalled, Schmitt sees the friend/enemy
distinction as constitutive of political theory – indeed of the form of politics as
such.) The essential idea here – one that like “gender neutrality” was fully
Maoist discourse and its demonization 57
institutionalized in the Mao era from 1926 to the late 1970s – is that this basic
either/or, friend/enemy distinction is a foundational political binarism that lies at
the heart of the Chinese/Maoist revolution. From Mao’s own texts to the move-
ment’s response to the Kuomintang’s annihilation campaigns and the later heat
of the so-called Cold War, the revolution and all those involved in it understood
politics as being a politics of commitment that turned upon an early question
from 1926 of Mao Zedong, one shared exactly by Schmitt: “Who are our
enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the rst importance for the
revolution.”15
This question became the guiding one of the post-liberation era until the eco-
nomic reform of the 1980s. Before that era of depoliticization, the friend/enemy
distinction was mapped onto the class question (worker/capitalist, revolutionary/
revisionist) and made class a far from merely economic category but one that
turned on social and subjective factors and passions. This was an admittedly
reductive or dyadic division, but also an enormously productive and impassioned
one. Recall that for Schmitt as well as for much of the Marxist political tradition,
obviously so opposed in all other ways, politics are by denition, in their essence
and in their inner logic, fundamentally reductive and line-drawing. Even
“rainbow coalitions” have enemies, if they are to be political at all. As Dutton
notes, “the new Maoist revolutionary state was little more than a condensation of
the friend/enemy distinction as it was applied both to the question of government
and to the onto-political question of life” (“Passionately” 103). It produced a
uniquely Maoist form of governmentality: Dutton’s example is how the police
came not simply to preserve peace, the traditional function of policing, but to
protect the revolution and the Party from revisionism and death. It moreover pro-
duced a China that was:
a state of commitment politics lived on the knife-edge of a binary division.
It produced a life both extremely dangerous but also utterly life-afrming. It
gave purpose to one’s existence and offered a sense of belonging that would
ll one’s soul.
(Policing 313)
This lived and institutionalized binarism formed the basis of all political think-
ing and moreover made life a political project structured by an intense “dyadic
form” (Policing 313). It was used, paradoxically, to both ameliorate and produce
political passions and desires. But contra Dutton himself, we should also empha-
size the centrality of Marxism and class within – or indeed as – the friend/enemy
distinction within Maoist China. I will turn to the notion of two-line struggle
below. But the point here is that Maoist discourse and actually existing Maoist
China understood itself, and acted and lived along class lines (capitalist/socialist;
worker-peasant-soldier/bourgeois; revolutionary/“revisionist,” and so on). Class
lines understood in Marxist or, if you insist, in Chinese–Marxist discursive ways;
even the famous or infamous popular understandings of class in the Cultural
Revolution (“blood lines” and “family backgrounds”) were undeniably Marxist
58 Maoist discourse and its demonization
and theoretical in a real way. It follows from this that if Schmitt as well as Marx
and later Mao et al. were correct about the denition or essence of politics as
well as about the realities of class, then Maoist, revolutionary China was the
most political and most Marxist space on Earth; whether one likes this or not. To
describe all of this as totalitarian is to depoliticize it and to ignore the self-
understandings of the actual people involved.
This is all to say that those studies of Maoist China that do not take on board
this structuring, dyadic governmentality and way of life therefore leave a lot at
the door. They effectively depoliticize Chinese politics, even when analyzing the
– usually top-level, elite – political “facts” of the time (of purges, mobilizations,
factional disputes, and so on). Which is to say they often get the facts wrong as
well. Without some notion of Maoist discourse, of what being in the true of the
Mao era and revolution meant and including this structuring, supple friend/
enemy binarism, a void is produced. This void is quickly lled by notions of
despotic, personalized court-politics, and Cold War, illiberal notions of a duped,
terried, or passive populace of several hundred millions just doing what they
are told. One of the problems with orientalism, then, remains that it depoliticizes.
That is one way of seeing its sometimes sly, sometimes overt justications and
rationalizations of imperialism and colonialism in Asia over the last several
hundred years (as in Said’s analysis). In its Sinological form it depoliticizes the
Mao era and beyond, effectively removing the question of imperialism – or the
geo-political conict of the Cold War – from the China eld, and simply negat-
ing through elision both Maoist/revolutionary discourse and the real political
struggles and divides within China after 1949. One need not subscribe to
Marxism or Maoism (let alone to Schmittian politics) in order to appreciate this
point. A particular era or conjuncture is not in the end reducible to its own dis-
courses or our own retrospective ones, nor to its own self-understanding. But
these are nonetheless indispensible starting points for historical and materialist
understanding, as well as for circumventing the traps of an essentially colonial
or chauvinist, if not orientalist, historiography or anthropology. At the very least,
the past in this sense must be allowed to mediate our present understanding. If
we do not attend to the self-understanding of the past and past actors (or of the
historical present), as well as the governing discourses of the time, then what is
it that we are studying?
On Maoist governance as oriental despotism
Having established a basis for understanding the concept of Maoist discourse,
we can now see how this is negated in scholarship on the nature of governance
during the Mao era, and of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and its attendant
famine in particular. The idea of an essential continuity to the Mao years lies at
the heart of Roderick MacFarquhar’s three-volume survey of elite “court poli-
tics” under Mao (rendered as the new emperor of China), The Origins of the Cul-
tural Revolution. The subtitle of the last volume – “The Coming of the
Cataclysm” – shows his hand vis-à-vis popular Western views of the CR as an
Maoist discourse and its demonization 59
unspeakable horror (yet a veritable cottage industry). It also offers a naturalistic
metaphor to subtly “other” China and Chinese history. It is as if the decade, or
the previous one as well, were about the nature of an ancient land and people
unable to break out of a cycle of tragedies and cyclical catastrophes from oods
and famines to a mad emperor’s despotic rule.
But the claim for continuity between the Leap and the CR remains a sound one
for reasons other than what the author suggests (the power grabs and personalities
of Mao et al.). It is further supported by the very different, and politically opposed
work of William Hinton. Writing at the end of a decades-long career as the chief
chronicler of rural, grass roots change in China, Hinton came to see the dening
element of Maoism-in-power as the ideological and on-the-ground “two-line
struggle” between the leftist, anti-market, and mass line of Mao and the Soviet-
ized, pro-market, and vanguardist or top-down line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping. This was, in other words, a split between left and right within the Com-
munist Party itself that emerged for the rst time in full at the Lushan Plenum
during the crisis of the Great Leap Forward (about which, more below). It was a
struggle – a Schmittian binarism, we can say – over the priority to be given to
relations versus forces of production, planning versus markets, local control
versus Party centralization, and rural versus urban development. As Hinton’s eth-
nographic histories of Long Bow (Changzhi) and related villages makes clear, the
two lines were certainly part of the locals’ vocabulary and experience, albeit in a
complex and at times contradictory or over-lapping form.16 The “lines” were a
part of Maoist discourse and of actually existing Chinese political history.
But they have in recent years been suppressed within Sinological knowledge
production. So, too, the brute fact of Deng et al.’s enforced dismantling – often
at the expense of the peasants’ own preference – of the entire collective mode of
economy and governance for a more centralized and capitalist mode (rooted in
Liu’s helmsmanship in the early 1960s) should certainly make it quite clear that
there were two contested lines and development strategies. Maurice Meisner
further notes that “the egalitarian and populist thrust of the Great Leap Forward
had profound anti-bureaucratic implications – and encountered powerful bureau-
cratic resistance” (Mao’s China 262).17 This underscores the existence of line/
class struggle and helps explain the inefciency that led to a temporary but
drastic decrease in grain production and distribution. As Hinton has noted else-
where, one cannot explain away the famine itself in this way and there were bad
policies (e.g. over-deep planting, incentives to exaggerate grain production
reports). But the Liuists, after failing to prevent the Leap, did in effect work to
sabotage it by pushing directives to “ultra-left” extremes: e.g. if the Maoists said
to “take grain as the key link,” the Liuist cadres would rip out orchards to plant
more grain, or increase the depth of tilling from one foot to two, and so on
(Reversal 153–6). Thus the well-known problem of exaggerated reporting of
harvest gures can be explained by more than just excessive revolutionary
passion alone, though the latter was clearly a factor as well.
While this type of “line” analysis runs the risk of conspiracism, it offers
one neglected explanation for some of the Leap’s chaos, or how its rational
60 Maoist discourse and its demonization
directives morphed into chaos. So, too, there can be no denying that Liu, who
appointed most of the middle-level cadres, did have a history of such extremism,
and his most famous text, How to be a Good Communist, preaches absolute
fealty to the Party.18 But this struggle over class “line” – perhaps the chief, con-
crete content of the friend/enemy political form mentioned above, and a funda-
mental aspect of how the Chinese revolution understood itself – is precisely what
has been either conveniently dropped or attacked by contemporary Sinology.
This marks a regression from the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
especially the work of the former Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, who
published still-valuable work like Victor Nee and James Peck’s China’s Unin-
terrupted Revolution. This has happened despite the fact that an awareness of
“line struggle” hardly implies an endorsement of one over the other, nor that – as
Hinton makes clear – the lines and struggles were always clear-cut or undiffer-
entiated. Of course they were not, and there is nothing in Schmitt, Marx, or Mao
that suggests they would be so. A revolutionary, impassioned politics of com-
mitment dedicated to a transformation of self and society will not be as coolly
rational, pragmatic, and neatly civil as is the ideal-type in the liberal capitalist
democracies. This does not explain away the destructive aspects of factionalism
and of “political politics.” But it does point us to the culture of political belief in
China, during the Leap and afterwards. If line-struggle, or friend/enemy or other
forms of politics were a part of this political scene and a Chinese culture of
belief, then surely they should be engaged as opposed to ignored or written off
as “totalitarianism.” Howsoever simplifying the Maoist notion of line-struggle
was, it is hard not to see how well it worked to capture politics and social reality
in its time. Or even today: witness the following memorable comment from the
late “Gang of Four” member Yao Wenyuan:
If we do not act in this way [i.e., strengthen ‘socialist ownership’ and follow
the communist line], but instead call for the consolidation, extension and
strengthening of bourgeois right and the partial inequality it entails, the
inevitable result will be polarization, i.e., in the matter of distribution a
small number of people will appropriate increasing amounts of commodities
and money through some legal and many illegal ways; stimulated by ‘mate-
rial incentives’ of this kind, capitalist ideas of making a fortune and craving
for personal fame and gain will spread unchecked; phenomena like the
turning of public property into private property, speculation, graft and cor-
ruption, theft and bribery will increase; the capitalist principle of the
exchange of commodities will make its way into political and even into
Party life, undermining the socialist planned economy; acts of capitalist
exploitation such as the conversion of commodities and money into capital,
and labour power into a commodity, will occur; changes in the nature of the
ownership will take place in certain departments and units which follow the
revisionist line; and instances of oppression and exploitation of the labour-
ing people will arise again. As a result, a small number of new bourgeois
elements and upstarts who have totally betrayed the proletariat and the
Maoist discourse and its demonization 61
labouring people will emerge from among the Party members, workers,
well-to-do peasants and personnel of state and other organs.19
Yao is writing in 1975, on the eve of the nal throes of the Mao era, but his
words resonate well nigh prophetically. This remains a surprisingly well-known
passage amongst critical intellectuals in China and abroad. It represents the late
Maoist line and the temper of the times, but also shows us in perfectly clear,
Marxist terms what has transpired under the Dengist and later “reform and
opening up.” Regardless of whether one nds Yao and the Gang redeemable or
not as historical actors, the vision here is rooted in a rigorous analysis of the
nature of capitalism and the market as not just “scientic” matters (as they would
be to Deng et al.), but as a eld of social forces and of class and bureaucratic or
elite power. Howsoever “extreme” Yao’s diction may appear now, it neverthe-
less seems irrefutable that there were real differences in line in China. The left-
ists may have failed for a variety of reasons (again, the lack in institutionalization
was tragic), but they knew what they were going on about. The CR period and
other struggles and conicts were not simply the stuff of “court politics,” the
allegedly inevitable horrors of so-called social engineering or socialist planning,
and pathological personalities.
The elite/court method of interpreting China will be taken to extremes in the
hand of Frederick Teiwes, who in Politics at Mao’s Court and elsewhere rails
against the very idea that Mao ever had less than total control, and that there
were ever opposing lines within the Party.20 Note, too, that the notion of the CCP
as some oriental, feudal “court” comes from the Sinologists themselves, and that
one does not see, say, references to Castro’s or Chavez’s court. For Teiwes, any
reference to line-struggle is “perverse,” as Mao – both a “cruel . . . bastard” and
“patriarch of an extended family”21 – had only “alleged opponents” and could
“have any policy adopted merely by insisting on it” (“Paradoxical” 56).22 Given
Mao’s absolute power, the only mystery becomes why the – apparently mindless
– other leaders were unwilling “to stand up to Mao despite the gathering signs of
unprecedented disaster” (Teiwes and Sun, 19). There are obvious retorts to this:
that before, during, and after the Leap some people did voice opposition to Mao,
from Liang Shuming to Peng Dehuai to Peng Zhen and Deng Tuo, just as the
Liu-Dengists did, after all, pursue different paths while in power. So, too, the
enthusiasm for the Leap reected conscious agreement and not fear; it was not
just Mao, the Deng, and Liu who supported it fully, and who drew on the enthu-
siastic if not zealous participation of thousands of cadres. Once the grain-short-
falls and other problems of the Leap appeared in 1959, they were quickly
addressed if also not adequately corrected until the Leap was abandoned in 1960.
Thus contra the popular belief that the CCP was criminally unconcerned with
the Leap crises, by the Spring of 1959 Mao and the center began “tempering the
more extreme Great Leap policies,” acting on knowledge of the bad situation in
much of the countryside (Riskin, “Seven Questions” 119). When the extent of
the grain shortages and economic difculties were fully known in the Fall of
1960, Mao himself pushed for abandoning the Leap and recognized the failure
62 Maoist discourse and its demonization
of this over-ambitious, too-quickly implemented project of communalization and
rapid growth. We will turn in more detail to the Leap shortly.
But counterfactuals matter little in the face of colonial discourse about despo-
tism/totalitarianism. Thus MacFarquhar zeroes in on Zhou Enlai’s alleged obse-
quiousness – his “oriental” servility? – in the face of Mao, noting that
“independent personae do not necessarily entail independent attitudes” (Cata-
clysm 434). Thus the Premier Zhou, whom the world knew for four decades,
globally recognized as a leading diplomat, Bandung initiator, and left-wing cos-
mopolitan spokesperson for the P.R.C., turns out be a mere dissembling “role”
player without depth and substance. Here the court politics approach strikes one
as so much clichéd opera and again demonstrates that the Sinologist knows the
native better than him- or herself. It is based on anecdotal evidence, reminis-
cences by Zhou’s former secretaries who mention that after Mao criticized Zhou
for having too large a private ofce, Zhou then cut down his staff. As so often in
MacFarquhar’s “awe-inspiring work” (as Lucien Pye blurbs), the facts of Mao’s
dominance and others’ abjection is “proven” through anecdotes, anonymous
interviews, journalistic biographies, and memoirs.23 The author never problema-
tizes the adequacy of such historical data, nor addresses the sheer triviality of
such “facts” when the subject at hand is a decade of national governance.24 Both
authors’ texts are replete with references to “a senior cadre said,” “an anony-
mous source,” and the like, just as MacFarquhar will pass off as solid, scholarly
evidence such sensationalistic, mass market memoirs as Harry Wu’s Bitter
Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag, or Jean Pasqualini’s Prisoner
of Mao.25 That Zhou Enlai may have been a committed Marxist and supporter of
the Maoist line is not even considered, but remains the only reasonable interpre-
tation based on his consistent words and actions from the 1930s until his death.
Note how MacFarquhar codes this alleged incident. It is not that Mao was
actually opposed to bureaucratic privilege but was “annoyed that the premier had
many more secretaries than himself” (Cataclysm 434). Mao was merely acting,
nay embodying the “role” and subjectivity of no less an emperor than Qin Shi
Huangdi, the rst, allegedly despotic unier of ancient China:
Cf. the behaviour of Qin Shi Huangdi: ‘Once, looking from a mountaintop,
the emperor was displeased to notice that the carriages and riders of the
chancellor were very numerous. Someone told this to the chancellor, who
diminished his entourage accordingly.
(Cataclysm 642n26)
Exactly what Mao and Zhou, both twentieth-century Marxists, would have to do
with a 2,000-year-old emperor and mandarin (the author of the anecdote above)
remains a mystery. The only thing that connects them is their race and “Chinese-
ness.” Thus MacFarquhar reproduces the notion of a 2,000-plus-year-old contin-
uous culture of China, long a favorite mytheme of orientalists in and outside of
China. MacFarquhar’s other source here is – tellingly – an inuential yet very
dubious book by a former Dengist historian and advisor to one of the more
Maoist discourse and its demonization 63
fervently anti-communist human rights groups in the U.S. Gao Wenqian’s
exposé-style political biography of Zhou Enlai does not cite its sources, draws
on other “pulp” or gossipy biographies, and is clearly an exercise in character
assassination via hearsay – not only of Mao or even Deng, but of the still-widely
respected Zhou.26 There is little analysis other than to assert that Mao, Deng, et
al. were cruel and Zhou not a suave, worldly Marxist diplomat but a craven
coward. Leaving aside the putative psychological realities of these former world
leaders, the larger question is what such “evidence” and “analyses” are doing in
allegedly objective and authoritative scholarship. What can they actually tell us
about Maoist or Dengist governance, social history, culture, and real, lived poli-
tics and ideology? One does not need to have a rigor fetish or a belief scientic-
ity to deduce a paper-thin intellectual apparatus at work in even contemporary
Sinology or texts like Gao’s. Somehow, uency in Chinese, unique access to the
mainland, and even personal experience are not enough; they cannot substitute
for intellectual labor and patient observation. It is also notable that the connec-
tion to the Qin emperor is an automatic and damning critique for MacFarquhar
and everyone else in China Watching circles who recall Mao’s own positive
words and sense of connection to him, spoken partly in jest perhaps but also
because he seems to have meant it. Regardless of Mao’s true intentions and feel-
ings, what is striking is that a reference to a founding emperor – and political
gure of large historical import – is somehow an automatic discrediting of the
biographical Mao and proof of 1950s despotism. As a Chinese it can seem per-
fectly natural for Mao, or for other intellectuals today, to invoke Qin Shi Huang
in the way an American might invoke, say, Abraham Lincoln or for a French,
General DeGaulle.
But the crux of the matter is not diction or attitude, nor even the writing of
top-down history and denying local agency within mass movements. The
problem is this mode of emperor-obsessed, “court politics” itself. It is as if the
desire to prove the truth of oriental despotism must override all other epistemo-
logical concerns: the best history of such momentous periods will necessarily
have to focus on the emperor as the absolute locus of power, presiding over his
minions or what used to be called Mao’s “army of blue ants.”27 For while there
was always a key plank within China studies that saw the Mao era as the epitome
of despotism (“Red Chinese,” “ChiComm,” “blue ants” rhetoric), this was never
the whole story until fairly recently. It is instructive to recall the China hearings
before the U.S. Senate leading up to the establishment of diplomatic relations.
There, Warren Cohen and others gave a positive account of China, arguing that
Mao “hasn’t always been the sole dictator as we commonly think,” and that with
China “we are talking about a society in which the overwhelming majority . . .
have given up the right to starve, the right to throw their daughters in the canal,
these kinds of rights” (Schoenhals 280, 284). But within mainstream China
studies and intellectual–political culture today, one would search in vain for such
an alternative perspective, and it is the anti-China lobby, dubious human rights
groups, or liberal, anti-communist scholars that are more likely to appear in any
Congressional hearing. As if, for example, the persecution of intellectuals during
64 Maoist discourse and its demonization
the CR or the discovery of “scar literature” in the 1980s somehow discredits the
larger achievements and accomplishments of the revolution in toto. While intel-
lectuals and artists – of the independent, romantic, and humanist type especially
– were indeed persecuted during the revolution, this remains a problematic lens
through which to interpret the larger social reality or totality. This is true in any
case, but not least with a Maoist China that was consciously against such views
of art, intellectuals, and class in favor of Chinese proletcult, Marxism, and so on.
Narrating Chinese history from the standpoint of the elite, urban, male artist is,
however, a common mode of teaching Chinese history in Western (and Chinese!)
universities. This is also the mode of historian Jonathan Spence’s widely used
textbook In Search of Modern China. It is all the more surprising when much of
the rest of the academy has unlearned something about representing history in
almost exclusively elite and male terms.
I would submit, then, that complex and positive accounts of governance
during the Mao era – or even of the basic achievements and record of the
Chinese revolution itself – have little to zero purchase within dominant knowl-
edge production and culture. By “positive” I mean not only or indeed not even
“favorable” but attempting to understand the P.R.C. in its positivity, or at least
acknowledging that it too has its own positivity; this is an opposite approach to
the method of resolute debunking, symptomatic reading, or pathologization. One
needs to reafrm that this “new” discourse on Maoist governance and society
reects little more – in terms of what we know – than a larger shift of discourse
in history and the turn towards the right in global intellectual–political culture,
beginning in the 1970s. Again, this is not because we now have all the facts and
before we had only delusion. My point is that the interpretation or coding of
many of the same events and same basic “facts” has changed; more specically,
the interpretative, governing, orienting framework or discursive formation has
changed in China and globally (however much the local/national specics
vary).28 It reects the resurgence of liberal, if not neo- liberal, thought and the
free reign of a colonial discourse unchallenged by a critical scholarship or criti-
cal intellectual–political culture at large. In so far as neo-liberalism can be
thought of as a de-politicization, in part through the removal of the communist
or otherwise substantially democratic threat in favor of the near-total administra-
tion of things by the market and elites, then so, too, the eclipse of Maoist dis-
course and de-Maoication have a part in this story as well. More specically,
the larger function of the current demonization of the Mao era and discourse is
to establish what China lacked and still needs to overcome in order to become-
the-same as “us,” free subjects of capitalism: namely, liberal subjectivity and
normal “democratic” governance to go along with the spectacular market
system.
So, too, the negation of Maoist discourse, of the rationality and of the pas-
sions of revolutionary socialist construction and the Leap, is the necessary rst
step in producing a new, alternative discourse about the madness and tragedy of
the Great Leap Forward, the CR, and the entire communist revolution up to the
present. Ironically, given the near total abandonment of all things Maoist in the
Maoist discourse and its demonization 65
Chinese government and economy, as well as the hyper-capitalist expansion and
consumerist ethos prevailing in so much of the nation, it is the fact that the
P.R.C. is still nominally communist that explains some of the necessity for this
demonization of Maoism and the past discursive formation. It is less about the
true communist nature of the P.R.C. than about the self-constitution of the
West’s identity as freedom-ghter and purveyor of enlightenment and universal
human values. At the risk of sounding vulgar, it is also about the money: China’s
rise, the decline of the U.S. dollar and empire, and the growing economic and
other irrelevance of “Europe” for “Asia.” Which is to say it works in the manner
of orientalism with Western capitalist characteristics. Partly this happens through
a simple but total and devastatingly effective elision: one does not need to
address the self-understanding of either Maoist subjects or of the revolution
itself, its aims, rationality, and governmentality. These can be elided, or dis-
missed as insanity or a case of duping/brainwashing at world-historical levels.
And Chinese proportions. Yet even in the most seemingly obvious examples of
Maoist catastrophe, there is more than meets the eye. Let us now turn to the one
event that would seem to be the lynchpin of all that was wrong with the Mao era.
4 Accounting for the Great Leap
Forward
Missing millions, excess deaths, and a
crisis of Chinese proportions
Whoever says Great Leap Forward today says famine. It is surprising, then, that
this catastrophe in which somewhere between 10 million (the current Chinese
estimation) and 43 million people died has been so little studied. This enormous
range of estimates – others have suggested as few as 4 or as many as 60 million
– suggests something of the reliability of the knowledge about the Leap. But
such is the powerful appeal of a massive number of deaths that the upper
numbers have not only “won” hands down, but are repeated ad nauseum in
academe and popular discourse. Thus speaks as well the power of the emperor’s
appeal – it is all narrated as if Mao’s psychology and total personal responsibil-
ity is the sole issue, not the event of the Leap itself or the multiple causes of its
economic collapse. Before moving on then, we need to briey recover the
purpose or vision of the Leap as well as broach an alternative explanation for its
failure.
The Leap was rst and foremost an economic program and rural developmen-
tal strategy and vision. It was not intended to harm people, nor even to forcibly
collectivize agriculture in the manner of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. The whole
point of Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics was that Stalin did do so in a reac-
tionary fashion and without peoples’ participation. Economically, it attempted
an alternative to the market (material incentives and commodied labor) and the
large, top-down and nationwide planning apparatuses of the Soviet Union. So,
too, the Maoist line pushed for self-reliant economies in provinces and regions.
This was a security concern, given the U.S. presence in Taiwan and East Asia,
and a reection of the Maoist ethic of local autonomy. As the historian Jack
Gray has argued, “in economic terms the Leap was not irrational” but rather the
Chinese form of then-current planning theories, and of reactions against capital-
ist-developmentalism and centralized, Stalinist versions of rural collectivization
(307). More specically, the Leap was not only a bigger-is-better movement into
larger communes, but a three-pronged campaign: “labor-intensive farmland con-
struction” to prevent ood and draughts; “local [rural] industrial development”
organized through the communes; and the development of “the modern sector
[infrastructure] at the provincial level” so that each province would have “at the
disposal of local development a backbone of basic industries with whose assis-
tance counties could in turn create their own industrial minicomplexes to support
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 67
industries lower down” (Gray 307). What this amounts to, in short, is a relative
privileging of rural industry and peoples instead of the pursuit of heavy industry
in the urban centers; an emphasis on the interior, most backward provinces and
areas; an “awareness that increased agricultural production and peasant incomes”
were crucial to growth; a passion for “rural community development”; and the
belief that “popular participation in development was socially and economically
necessary” (Gray 307–8). What this implies is both an economic theory and an
ethical–political vision that actually privileges or centers on rural China and
peasants.1 Prosaically but importantly, it means seeing “surplus rural labor”
(massive numbers of poor and under- or unemployed) not as a curse, but as a
great resource to be used to develop the countryside industrially and in other
ways. In the context of the time – or within standard neo-liberalism today – this
was decidedly innovative. The essential idea was to turn China’s greatest liabil-
ity – a lack of capital and massive rural surplus labor – into an asset. As Patnaik
notes, by “directly transforming under-employed surplus labour into capital at
minimal extra cost, a rm basis was laid for agricultural productive transforma-
tion which fed into industrial growth, as well as for the gains in human develop-
ment indicators.”2 The conversion of surplus labor into capital amounted to the
employment of rural people in sideline industries; the resources gained were
ploughed back into production in the same communities.
The Leap marks a paradoxical but foundational aspect of Maoist governance
and discourse: it was actually an effort to decentralize or work against bureau-
cracy, and to insist on local participation and initiative in implementing and car-
rying out policy and developing that modern sector. This is the point to the
emphasis on the provinces, counties, and villages participating directly, as noted
above by Gray. As Riskin has further explained, Mao’s plans for sub-national
development were not only a solution to the problems of centralized planning
and a (lacking, weak) national domestic market, but also an explicitly anti-
bureaucratic program (China’s Political Economy 206–7). In keeping with the
Maoist mandate to make Marxism t specic, national conditions, the emphasis
on the provincial and local sought to eliminate “China’s long bureaucratic tradi-
tion, which had not vanished” (Riskin, China’s Political Economy 207). Not just
the critique, but also the active attempt to curtail and reform bureaucracy in
favor of the local is a legacy of Maoist discourse and governance.
Equally important to note here in the vision of the Leap are its more profound
socio-cultural and political dimensions. Take, for example, the use of crèches or
nurseries (what Americans would call daycare today) as well as the creation of
communal dining halls not as state-domination of individual freedom but as state
feminism: attempts to relieve women of the double-burden of domestic labor. It
was a rational and political response to the fact that “merely” empowering
women to work in the elds and factories was not enough to liberate them. So,
too, it is worth emphasizing the spatial analysis built into the Leap as strategy:
after centuries of urban and coastal dominance the interior and hinterland were
to get their due and to be integrated into the economy and now “nation,” freeing
them of dependence on the former. Overcoming the rural/urban divide in China
68 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
was at the heart of ending poverty, want, and inequality, and it remains so today.
The Dengist solution appears to be one of using the market to magically pull
people away from the rural areas and transform the countryside – or more accu-
rately the cities – in tried and true capitalist fashion: on the backs of rural
migrant labor, and with the abandonment of the countryside and rural/urban hier-
archy. There is something enormously callous and irresponsible to that, what-
ever the faults of the Leap may have been. And it is painfully obvious to any
observer of China that the cities and the rich coastal belt of the P.R.C. dominate
China as never before in its long history. The pursuit of rural industrialization, it
should also be noted, was furthermore an attempt to overcome the manual/
mental labor divide, whereby the farmers – the laborers of China – were always
and forever to be relegated to the latter category. This is not, then, a desire to
leave village China alone in its poverty and isolation, nor to make China one big
city. The emphasis on overcoming the intellectual/manual labor is something
deeply rooted in Marxism and the ethical critique of capitalism (as the work of
Alfred Sohn-Rethel made clear decades ago).3 It is also crucial for development,
which is to say for the elimination of poverty, and the raising of living condi-
tions and life chances for all. As every child knows, China overall has benetted
from the Dengist and later reforms and the deployment of capital. But poverty,
severe inequality, regional disparities, urban and elite dominance, centralized
bureaucracy, and so on are still enormous problems for China. From this stand-
point, the Leap’s vision and economic theories may not seem as bizarre and
aberrant as they once were in the heady days of the 1980s and early 1990s. So,
too, there is the argument advanced by Han Dongping among others that while
the rural economics of the Leap certainly failed, they returned in modied form
during the later Cultural Revolution and up through the 1980s. The Leap model
was behind the explosive rural growth of Township Village Enterprises during
those later years (TVEs).4 The organizational methods and market-distribution
mechanisms changed, but the collective form and the emphasis on rural industri-
alization and sidelines remained consistent. After decollectivization, TVEs and
related infrastructure were already in place. As with the rest of the Chinese
economy, the socialism that was in place could be used to build capitalism quite
quickly. Despite the disastrous aspects of the Leap (the famine mortality), the
basic rural, Maoist strategy eventually worked effectively in later decades until
it was dismantled in the return to household agriculture, the prot motive, and
the war of each against all.5
The above account of the rationality and vision of the Leap is obviously a
truncated one, but is hopefully enough to recall that it was not mad or foolish but
a part of Maoist discourse (and, as Gray noted, of broader trends in economic
thinking).6 As is well known – and by Mao’s own frank admission and standards
– the Leap was also a failure, even a catastrophic one. The controversy lies with
its causes and moreover with its mortality gures. We will cover some of this
ground below in an examination of the extent of the famine and the use of statis-
tics. But rst I want to recall what I take to be a persuasive and non-orientalist
account of the failure of the Leap, which is to say of the reorganization and
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 69
development of the rural economy and market system that existed prior to the
1950s. I refer here to the work of G. William Skinner and his spatial and regional
analyses of the traditional Chinese economy in terms of its distributional
systems. Skinner’s work is intricately detailed and rigorously structuralist (full
of grids, maps, and spatial metaphors), though does not address the Leap famine
and economic collapse head-on. This may in a sense be its advantage because it
allows us to see the 1958–61 experiment in a different type of context. What he
offers is in effect an image of “China” and the Chinese rural economy or struc-
ture as a complex and deeply rooted system of market towns (at local, intermedi-
ate, and central levels all beneath the city/urban level), distributional and
transport networks, regular and periodic markets, temple fairs, and so forth. All
of it rooted in and dependent upon the fundamental level of the village; the
people and economy at that level, as a whole, are what make the entire system
work. But it is a complex system and not a mere matter of kinship bonds and the
like, and this is also what makes it different than traditional, often ethnographic
Sinological analyses of village economies. What emerges from his work is a
rural economy – nearly all of China prior to the Leap years – that is a complexly
layered, interwoven “articulated marketing structure.” This is a system presum-
ably well beyond the immediate knowledge of previous governments and admin-
istrations over in Beijing or elsewhere, be they Communist or dynastic. But it is
also the type of knowledge they would necessarily need in order to even gradu-
ally develop a modern economy – especially a planned one.
What happens, then, is that this entire, traditional structure is in Skinner’s
words “wantonly abandoned” almost overnight in 1958 (109). Skinner’s diction
here may tip his hand as to his own economic philosophy, but this is perhaps
beside the point. The speed of the Leap Forward into greater communes and new
marketing/distributional systems was one condition of failure in itself – within
the “bigger, better, faster” slogan and mentality of the Leap it is the emphasis on
speed that was the most unfortunate. But the overall problem here, from the
standpoint of Skinner’s work, is that the previous rural marketing system that
had evolved over hundreds of years was disbanded too quickly and, moreover,
without any effective and organized structure in its place. The movement of
grain from places with a surplus to places with a decit, for example, was
affected by this.7 Market towns and the cycle of market days and so forth disap-
peared. Despite their undeniable production of inequality and of the power of
money, markets are after all efcient in signaling not just price information but
in effect coordinating distribution, helping make production decisions, relaying
information across great distances, and so on. In retrospect, without something
in place to substitute for and improve upon the traditional rural marketing struc-
ture, there were bound to be major problems. The point here, then, is not the
abandoning of the “free” market mechanism per se, but of the speed of this oth-
erwise just and rational decision, as well as the lack of a proper alternative
system and structure of knowledge in place. Skinner’s analysis is not in my view
Hayekian. This is in part a story about the difcult transition to a modern
economy from a traditional one (as Skinner argues). But it also conrms what
70 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
Gray for one has argued: it is not that the economic theory of the Leap was
unsound but that its implementation was very much so, and this in turn had to do
with the complicated and tumultuous politics of the time.8 Within the latter are
the well-known “facts” we already know: the Soviet split and pull-out from
China, the looming war with the U.S. and invasion from Taiwan, the line strug-
gles within the Party and the class conicts within the newly liberated country,
and so forth. All of this sped up the process. Gradualism was abandoned and the
Leap ended up in a paradoxically Stalinist mode or form (“gigantism” and
authoritarian implementation in some places) even as it attempted to carry out an
anti-Stalinist economic revolution (Gray 310).
We do not have the space to pursue this further here, and this is not to argue
for one, single-shot cause of the Leap’s economic collapse. But Skinner’s work
does cast light on the matter, and without delving into psychologizing, court pol-
itics, accounts of oriental despotism or cruelty, and various external, anachronis-
tic factors (as in the work of Amartya Sen discussed below), the Leap and its
failure becomes again a political–economic and intellectual problem from which
to study and learn, as opposed to an exemplum about the evils and insanities of
Mao, collective agriculture, communism, and so on.
Missing millions, missing data
But it is the mortality itself which is the most pressing issue about the Great
Leap. By critically reviewing current studies we can ascertain how Sinological-
knowledge production handles this, arguably the most important campaign and
aspect of Mao’s rule. To begin with the limit-gure of 43 million, it must be said
that this derives from either lurid imagination or from two problematic, unveri-
ed references located in a Washington Post article from 1994. There, Chen
Yizi, a former ofcial now in exile at Princeton University, simply throws out
that number as an “estimate” during an interview.9 Chen has not published an
actual study of the matter in either Chinese or English. The same Post article
contains a reference to Chinese academic Cong Jin’s claim that 40 million
people “died” during the famine. But as Carl Riskin notes, Cong’s gure in fact
refers to a hypothetical “total loss of population,” including actual but estimated
deaths and the decline in the birth rate (“Seven Questions” 113).10 I will return
shortly to this point. But note that to include among famine deaths those
“victims” of a declining birth rate is to include people who were – literally –
never born. This is a common strategy for accounting for what is commonly
referred to as the “missing millions” of famine victims: include the unborn. It is
not the only way in which scholars rack up the numbers over the ofcial esti-
mate of 15 million, but it is still common. References to thirty million or more
make virtually no reference to the distinction, because they are just passing on
the received wisdom. This is of course standard practice for the media.
Yet note a footnote in which Tu Wei-ming – the Confucian philosopher – uses
this same news-bite from the Washington Post: “My gure [43 million], based on
Chen Yizi’s analysis, is yet to be veried” (my emphasis) (“Destructive Will”
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 71
178n3). Thus the earlier, casual journalistic reference becomes an “analysis.” Tu
will earlier say that the GLF “claimed as many as forty-three million lives, mainly
due to starvation” (“Destructive Will” 152). Thus Tu’s footnoted qualication
pales in contrast to the fully condent and authoritative in-text cite of 43 million
starvation deaths, despite the fact that no actual demographic studies have arrived
at such a gure. In the same footnote, Tu also refers to a CCP report from 1961
which established 30 million deaths. It turns out, however, that the report did not
and could not have offered such a claim. It is a report found in the Annals of one
county in the Anhui province, not a national study. The authors who draw on this
document, and to whom Tu refers the reader, do not in fact say it is such a demo-
graphic report that contains the 30 million gure: it is simply a recording of inter-
views with people who witnessed or suffered hardship (Tu 178n3; Kleinman,
16–17, 22n30).11 Again, the question is not whether there were such instances of
hardship; based on the work of Bramall, among others, it seems clear that what-
ever the actual numbers of deaths may have been, and howsoever other regions
fared, Anhui and especially Sichuan were hit hard by hunger and apparent
famines during the Leap years. But with Tu and other casual inators of millions
of dead Chinese people, we are dealing here with work that frankly should be
embarrassing to the China eld. So, too, the “starvation” reference is gratuitous,
as during the Leap, as in nearly all historical famines, the great majority of deaths
come from disease among the very young or elderly. This is a gruesome thing to
parse, but such famine victims do not literally starve to death in the manner of,
say, a gulag prisoner deliberately deprived of food. They get sick and die –
brought on by malnutrition or more simply weakening from a lack of available
calories. More revealing is Tu’s comment that during the Cultural Revolution it
was not damage to what he calls “the body politic” that was “the most tragic form
of destruction,” but the destruction of “family treasures” by the family members
themselves (178n4). Thus it turns out that loss of life is not as important as those
things which can be measured in money, or which – for Tu and Sinologists like
Simon Leys12 – are after all the very quintessence of China: its ancient artifacts,
traditions, and culture. In this essay and elsewhere, Tu continually invokes Con-
fucian philosophy as not only co-extensive with ancient Chinese culture itself, but
as that which has been tragically lost or destroyed in the twentieth century, as if
the P.R.C. were an alien, non-Chinese, and inauthentic regime.13 Surely, then, it is
not analysis which subtends the 43 million gure, but something else. This thing
is, I will again argue, the production of orientalist knowledge as part of the West’s
fraught relationship to China. I will attend to this question and the lack of regard
for actual Chinese lives in a nal section.
In a sign of the global circulation of Sinological-orientalism, it is not a
Chinese ofcial or a Sinologist who is most responsible for producing the knowl-
edge of the famine’s alleged 30 million dead. It is really the work of the British
Indian economist and Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen. First, in the New York
Review of Books and then in subsequent work, Sen referred to the lack of
“democracy” and “free press” in China as causing the famine’s 30 million
victims and making it the greatest human disaster in history.14 In the second Cold
72 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
War of the 1980s this became a popular and widely cited argument against com-
munism and collective farming, just as the Chinese “ofcial” gure of 15 million
was a major tool in the Dengist de-Maoication in the 1980s. (At the time of
writing, 30 million is still the most commonly bandied about number, but there
is a denite race on to go higher.) But Sen was in fact taking as unquestionably
true the work of two demographers, Judith Banister and A. J. Coale. These last
are, in turn, taking the ofcial mortality statistics (very rough death rates) of the
Leap years from the 1983 Statistical Yearbook of China.15 The rst problem to
note, then, is the reliability of these fundamental gures, which were compiled
decades after the events. The issue is not simply one of bad faith. But given the
year of release (1983) and the well-known ideological pogrom of the Dengist
regime against Maoism and collective agriculture, and the Dazhai model,16 state
manipulation of the gures should by no means be dismissed out of hand. But
more specically, as Riskin notes, the larger issue is that “we can only guess
about the procedures that were used to reconstruct the death toll [from the 1983
Yearbook] and we know nothing about the raw materials on which it was based”
(“Seven Questions” 112). The previous three censuses were far apart in time – in
1953, 1962, and 1982 – and happened well after the upheavals and social dislo-
cations of the Leap and CR, during which statistical bureaus were at a standstill.
The 1953 census was also criticized from the very beginning as lacking social
scientic value.17 In short, it is simply a brute fact that there are no adequate
records – national censuses and demographic data, birth and death rates, and so
on – that would be needed to arrive at reasonably approximate, reliable analyses
of famine deaths. This information simply does not exist for at least two reasons:
one is that China, be it Republican or Communist, was simply in no economic,
political, or scientic/infrastructural position to carry out such studies; even after
1949 there were much more pressing matters at hand: land reform, reconstruc-
tion, war and potential invasion, and so on. Another reason not acknowledged in
the famine-accounting game is that China – unlike say colonial India or other
places of the British and French empires – was never colonized. This means that
there was no colonial archive constructed over the years by, say, the British,
which we could now raid to produce “better” knowledge of how many Chinese
were around in the 1940s, and so on. As the work of James Hevia has shown, the
British were in effect trying to follow their Indian example of producing a colo-
nial archive; but in the event this was not meant to be.18 A ruse of history for the
Sinologist, perhaps. But it allows us to see connections between the contempo-
rary practice of Leap/famine accounting and older, directly colonial modes of
investigation.
But rst note that the above “missing” archive of real data means that all
death gures have to be reconstructed retrospectively and on the basis of incom-
plete local statistics which are then projected nationally. Precisely no one should
speak with certainty about the total mortality of the famine. This has not pre-
vented anyone from using it to “know” Maoist China either. The information
upon which a denitive account need be based is simply unavailable and may
not exist. Riskin himself approaches this last point – but unfortunately backs
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 73
away – when he notes that the “raw materials” of the ofcial mortality rates
remain a “mystery,” and then calls on the Chinese government to release – that
is, produce – this information by identifying and allowing access to the people
who came up with the ofcial rates twenty years ago. This paucity of informa-
tion about the famine is, in sum, an intractable problem. Perhaps the chief conse-
quence of this situation is that accounts of the famine – perhaps the key black
mark against the Mao regime and one used to Other it as the horrible difference
that post-Mao China must overcome – must be read as exercises in producing
knowledge for a regime of truth and not as reliable information.
As Utsa Patnaik has argued in a series of essays, even if one takes the 1983
Yearbook gures at face value, the 30 million gure is wildly inaccurate (by a
measure of 18–20 million) and arrived at through two different, dubious routes.
The rst is to include a high decline in birth rates (in the numbers of people
born) within the famine deaths; the second is to construct a linear death rate grid
for the 1960s based on speculative, projected data. This last is then used to estab-
lish how many people died in the 1959–61 period. To clarify this rst route, the
death toll of 30 million is automatically inated by “over 18 million” because
many researchers are including “people” not born at all (“On Famine” 52). As
Patnaik puts it:
[Such scholars] take not only the actual excess mortality [based on] the
available information on the rise of the death rate, but add on to it the esti-
mated numbers of babies not born at all, owing to a fall in the birth rate
which was steep during this period. What is being done here is to estimate
the number of ‘missing millions’ in the population pyramid for these years,
but this is misleadingly designated as ‘famine deaths’. . . . This procedure
gives the total gure of a 27 million decit in the population by 1961 com-
pared to 1958, but over three-fths of the decit . . . arises from fall in the
birth rate and does not represent actually living people dying during the
famine.
(“On Famine” 52)
Thus the non-existent are included among the Chinese famine victims. Such schol-
ars provide no justication for the inclusion of the lowered birth rate, despite the
illogic of the move and the fact that, according to Patnaik, this is not common
practice in the study of famines in other countries. Here we have another instance
of the China difference, or the double-standard applied to China in particular. So,
too, one must note that the decline in birth rates can and must in part be explained
by obvious, well-known factors of the giant communalization of the Leap: the
massive mobilization of rural labor (longer work-weeks, even beyond the growing
season), resettlement to new work-sites, general social revolution, abrupt changes
in living and working patterns, and grain shortages. It is as if there is a certain will
to knowledge here, behind the sheer indifference to actual Chinese lives. The ana-
lysis must be made to t an a priori conclusion – that the Leap, Maoism, or collec-
tivization are the very epitome of evil or irrationality. That would be in keeping
74 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
with the closed, circular nature of orientalist thought, but there may also be some
type of perverse desire in piling on numbers of dead from the “teeming masses” of
the Orient. After all, would not 10 million famine victims (Patnaik’s revised gure)
be enough empirical “proof” to marshal in some argument against Maoism or to
show the scale of the famine? To adopt a classic phrase from Sinology, it is as if
the deaths must be “of Chinese proportions.”
And yet perhaps the 10 million gure would not sufce: the real horror of this
is that such a catastrophe is far from unusual in China’s past and for developing
nations more generally. It is this international context that one must attend to.
The old shibboleth of China as somehow separate from the rest of the world as
some Middle Kingdom should be negated. As Patnaik notes, even the ofcial
Chinese peak death rate of 1960 was only .8 percent higher than that of India in
the same year – in a non-famine year. This is, one should think, fairly shocking.
Nearly the same amount of people died in democratic-capitalist India during the
same year: an unpleasant but striking fact that Sen himself does not address. To
be fair, Sen has noted that when one compares China and India during all the
Great Leap years (1958–61), four million more people died in India per year.19
This does not change the point that apparently more people died in China as a
result of the Leap failure and economic implosion than would have otherwise.
But it too is striking and at the very least may be seen to greatly undercut the
claims for the Leap’s exceptionalism as the worst human disaster in history. So,
too, for all the falls in grain production within China, including government pro-
curement, the amount of food available per head – a crucial factor in measuring
hunger – was still “higher than in India” during the same time (“Republic” 12).
So, too, this last point perhaps adds more credence to the argument via Skinner
that the failure in China was distributional. In the international context of late
1950s China, the famine was scandalously “normal.” As Patnaik notes else-
where, China’s death rate during the famine was “lower than the ‘normal’
average crude death rate during 1955–60 in eighteen developing countries”
(“Economic Ideas” par. 25). Thus despite the fact that the famine remains an
indelible black mark on the impressive record of human welfare and develop-
ment under Mao, it simply cannot do the work that the Sinologists and China
Experts ask it to. If the mortality falls within the 10–15 million range, as Pat-
naik’s and others’ more rigorous estimations have it, it is far from the “greatest
famine in history.” It should be much more difcult to simply lay the blame on
Maoism, the biographical Mao himself, communism, or collectivized agricul-
ture. All of these are germane and therefore open to assignment of responsibility
– especially Mao as the leader of the nation and chief architect of the Leap. But
this is clearly more complex than has been recognized. It would seem that we
are dealing with a tragic event for which many people are responsible, but also
an aspect of economic or capitalist modernity as it spreads across and “colo-
nizes” the world: the heavy, even catastrophic costs born in the developing
world.
So, too, there were other factors that produced the famine but that cannot be
placed at the feet of Mao, cadres, and collectivization. These include two years
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 75
of severe oods and droughts nationwide. This is a potentially convenient excuse
and was one of the ofcial ones. But droughts and oods are also real, perennial
problems in China as elsewhere (this is one of the purposes of the Three Gorges
Dam project). Adrian Chan has argued that drought and ood “aficted almost
50 percent of the arable land” in 1959–60 (152). Shujie Yao has also argued that
the poor weather (in addition to wrong policies like deep planting) “played the
most important role in reducing grain production” (1369). It may be that we do
not know how reliable records of weather and drought are nationally. But severe
weather and its aftermath is surely a reasonable factor and potentially adverse
phenomenon, especially in the context of a chaotic period of national mobiliza-
tion when things are inevitably in disarray. And this natural aspect rarely crops
up in the scholarship; nor does the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of all its help –
aid, engineers, factory constructors, blueprints – in 1960, the height of the crisis.
Neither of these factors explains away the famine, but that is precisely the point:
it was caused by multiple factors. Neither the fervor nor the planning and poli-
cies can themselves account for the entire situation. As Riskin has noted, “both
natural conditions and human error contributed to the [crisis], although their rel-
ative shares of the blame cannot be assessed” (Riskin, China’s Political
Economy 137). Or as Eckstein noted long ago, “the failure of the Great Leap was
not primarily a failure in conception but a failure born of unrealistic expectations
on the one hand, and inadequate and technically decient implementation on the
other” (China’s Economic Revolution 59).20 There is as yet no good reason to
move beyond Eckstein’s, Riskin’s, or Patnaik’s balanced accounts. Assumptions
of despotism and frenzied irrationality – as opposed to revolutionary passions –
are inherently reductive, as are soliloquies on the evils of communism as such.
In this sense, the “revelation” of the “secret” famine has more to do with orien-
talism and residual or triumphant anti-communism than new, reliable
knowledge.
What we can do, however, is to recall and restore the discursive complexity
and self-understanding of the Leap and its participants. Should one, for example,
actually blame the amount of food that was eaten and “wasted” in the communal
kitchens on the irresponsibility of the government or the peasants, as have a
number of Sinologists?21 Again, these same communal kitchens, like the collec-
tivized nurseries, sewing groups, and so on, were meant to “remove the stigma
of triviality from ‘women’s work’ and facilitate the fuller participation of women
at all levels of the economy” (Riskin, China’s Political Economy 130). They
were in that sense part of the liberation of women within the revolution. So, too,
Han Dongping has argued in his ethnographic work that the farmers supported
the public dining halls early on because they wanted this same privilege of the
urban workers (free meals often of a better quality than they had ever had
before).22 And as noted above, the rural strategy of the Leap was returned to
during the CR and beyond; and according to many scholars, it was also the basis
for the famous rural “take-off” during the 1980s.23 The absence of such counter-
knowledge about the Leap suggests an imperative within Sinological-oriental-
ism: that the Leap, as signature a Maoist campaign as the Cultural Revolution,
76 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
must be actively demonized, its truth manufactured. Otherwise, the Maoist agrar-
ian strategy and Maoist discourse more broadly would have to be seen for their
achievements in rural development and human welfare and not just their failures.
Just as their failures would have to be seen as more human and explicable. So,
too, without extremely high, problematic famine death tolls, the TINA formation
(there-is-no-alternative) subtending the economic reforms and China’s alleged
becoming-the-same would be more open to contestation.
Lest this seem like foul play, let us return to mortality statistics and how Ban-
ister and Coale arrive at the 27–30 million death toll. The importance of their
work in establishing the “truth” of the famine – through the vehicle of Nobel
Laureate Sen – warrants a detailed analysis of their methodology. Theirs is, it
must be said, more complicated than those who simply add in the “unborn” or
non-existent. First, they reject the ofcial birth rates established by a massive
survey from 1953 and use instead the much later reconstructed 1982 census in
order to project backwards new, radically higher birth and death rates of their
own devise for the years 1953–64 (when there were no censuses).24 As noted
before, the hypothetical increase of births in China during these years is highly
unlikely and far outpaces the more stable India. While the authors reject the of-
cial birth and death rates from 1953 and 1964, they retain the ofcial population
totals of those years, as if those studies can be both entirely unreliable and com-
pletely trustworthy at the same time. This will also mean that since the total pop-
ulation was the same known amount (nearly 690 million by 196425), then all
those “new” people must have died. This raises the total deaths over this inter-
censal period by a whopping 60 percent (“On Famine” 60). The demographers
then arbitrarily26 insert those new deaths as occurring, of course, during the
Leap years. This is a strikingly circular argument: those deaths must have hap-
pened during the Leap because that was a known disaster, and it was a disaster
because that is when these deaths happened. Again, just what is it that we are
learning here?
Nor is this all. Both authors follow a procedure of “linear trend tting” to
arrive at the number of “excess deaths.” After establishing the new, high rates,
the authors must then show radical, progressive declines in the death rates in the
subsequent, post-Leap inter-censal years to arrive at the “known” gures for the
total population of China in the 1960s. The catch here, as Patnaik notes, is that
the death rate of any society “always behaves non-linearly”; death rates vary
from year to year and cannot progressively decline to some zero-point (“Repub-
lic” 12).27 The latter would presuppose an absence of death, i.e. immortality for
the Chinese. If one were to extend the falling death rate beyond the 1960s, the
P.R.C. would have achieved a zero death rate by 1990 (for Coale) or even by
1977 (Banister) (“On Famine” 63). It is, in short, literally absurd to project a
linear trend for the death rate and thereby to assume that it would continue to
decline at the very steep rate of the pre- and post-Leap years. Patnaik’s remarks
here are worth noting: this is a method of guring “excess” deaths that had never
been used before, and has only been used on China (“On Famine” 53).28 The
China difference strikes again, it would seem; in terms of knowledge production
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 77
as in other ways, China is treated asymmetrically and therefore prejudicially.29
Thus a method that produces the knowledge that the Leap famine was the worst
in human history also produces an achievement of equally mythic “Chinese pro-
portions.” Mao, one assumes, would be amused. But this method of linear-trend
tting is precisely what is utilized in these exact studies that have proven to
Amartya Sen and the world that the Leap famine was the worst of all time.
We thus have a remarkable irony in this case: the work of the scholarly spe-
cialist matches or even outdoes the alleged irrationality of even the most impas-
sioned or dogmatic Chinese revolutionary of the Leap or CR years, who never
actually predicted the elimination of mortality altogether. One can see the ironic
parallels between the area studies and other experts and the Dengists. Both
camps, from the latter’s famous, pragmatic, and anti-theoretical slogan to “seek
truth from facts” to the former’s social science profess an unreexive empiricism
that does not address how facts come to be, why some count more than others,
and whose interests they serve. But this is not simply, or not only, a case of a
common, universal epistemological and scholarly dilemma. It is a case of orien-
talism as such, not just knowledge but the power-knowledge imbrication that
Foucault and Althusser among others so memorably theorized, and that Said
took further. For what the demographers et al. in fact demonstrate is the posi-
tional superiority of the orientalists – foreign materials are never allowed to get
the upper hand over the ready-made conclusions. For all its claims to objectivity
and unique access to the “real” facts, such work is in fact anti-empirical, self-
enclosed, and circular.
Popular famine mechanics
There is another, recently reactivated genre of writing on the Leap – far more
inuential than the scholarly ones examined above. These are “cross-over” ana-
lyses that are meant to be cerebral while appealing to a mass audience – not
exactly airport-bookstore page rippers but more “engaging” than, say, the works
of G. William Skinner or Utsa Patnaik. Vis-à-vis the Leap, the key text here is
Jasper Becker’s journalistic expose of the Leap – the revealingly entitled Hungry
Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. Well before this book was published in 1996,
however, there was in a scholarly sense no secret that there was a famine in
China during this time; the questions have been about the extent and causes. The
Chinese state in effect said so in the early 1980s, and we have already discussed
the 1983 Yearbook. The idea that the Orient is a land of secrets (and unspeakable
horrors) and their people sly, dishonest, and so forth is standard fare within
Western popular culture, and it is not hard to see how Becker’s text – intention-
ally or not – plays to just such an audience and market. This is a separate issue
than the veracity or falsity of whatever is being presented, but it should not be
ignored either. Becker’s text, then, is most notable for its popularity; as we have
already seen, within China studies there is no taboo on relying on journalistic,
even gossipy types of texts as unquestioned, full-on evidence. Becker’s book ts
this mode: full of references to the darkest periods in China’s ancient history,
78 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
tales of cannibalism, stacked-up bodies lying everywhere, torture, death camps,
and so on. Aside from the lurid style, the issue here is simply one of – again –
unattributed sources and gures in an otherwise graphic text (the lurid details are
the point of the book): “interviewees” not named, “documents” mentioned
in-text but not cited (or available to other researchers), statistics and numbers
casually ung about, and so on.30 This is a text in the mode of yellow journalism,
with a heavy dose of orientalist sensationalism. The narrative piles on one hor-
ric anecdote or “fact” after another, though is especially obsessed with Chinese
people eating, trying to eat, or failing to eat other (dead) Chinese. But there is
little analysis connecting the alleged facts or in explaining the economic collapse
and famine – the casual factors appear to be evil, madness, and irrationality
engendered by the pursuit of the inhuman thing called communism/Stalinism.
For a book that strongly markets its scholarly credentials, it shows little aware-
ness of the intractable but crucial statistical dilemmas discussed above in regard
to death and birth rates and so on.
Mao’s Great Famine is a more recent text in the sensational cross-over mode,
but written by an acclaimed historian of modern China, Frank Dikotter. Com-
pared to Becker’s work, which it nonetheless recommends approvingly, this is a
more academic study. It is based in numerous archival materials previously
unavailable and from several areas of China. (But shortly we will need to address
what “based in” means here.) The discovery and use of these documents is no
small feat in itself and is the contribution to scholarship here. That it references
real documents – albeit ones that no one else can see – makes this book a differ-
ent sort than those of Becker, Gao Wenqian, Chang and Halliday, and the like.31
But it still relies at times on some of these same mass-market studies and its
analysis is virtually identical. The famous/infamous biography of Mao by his
former, temporary physician Li Zhisui, for example, is referred to often, but has
been criticized for being an exercise in vilication of Mao as entirely a creature
of “personal intrigue and [individual] power struggles,” sexual immorality, and
so on (Gao, Battle 115 and passim). But there is no caveat offered for using Li’s
book (which actually recreates verbatim conversations with Mao after two or
three decades), other than to say in an afterword that it has been “maligned by
some Sinologists” and that it can be veried by – unnamed – “party archives”
(346).
At the level of narrative analysis and representational strategy, Dikotter’s and
Becker’s et al.’s texts bear a striking resemblance. Thanks to these archival doc-
uments, the image of the Leap that emerges here is if anything more horrifying
and more graphic than even Becker’s text: cannibalism (again), violence (beat-
ings by cadres and police), murders, prison or labor camp death statistics, as well
as – more helpfully, if less luridly – reports of shoddy construction, unnecessary
tree felling, corrupt behavior, false or exaggerated reporting of outputs and
implementation of policies, and so on. There are parts of the study, in other
words, that corroborate the Leap’s economic collapse as broached above via
Skinner and Gray (the lack of a marketing structure to replace the previous
system; political turmoil; authoritarianism). But they do so only implicitly and
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 79
only if you know the previous, substantive analyses (that are not cited here). For
there is little provided in the way of sustained analysis or theorization of what
led to the collapse and famine.
The emphasis is on the local detail on the one hand, and reportage of Mao
and “court-politics” on the other. A local example – say of a human ear and nose
alleged to have been found in a package of meat – stands for cannibalism and
starvation sweeping the entire country, and as an implied yet direct result of mal-
feasance in Beijing (321). One learns in footnotes that two other references to
“real” cannibalism on the same page come from police confessions; given the
author’s other reports of state violence it is hard to know why these confessions
should be understood as automatically legitimate.32 The method of the book is to
reference Leap plans and discussions at the very top level on the one hand, and
then on the other to detail some of the local-level horrors or details that – it is
implied – resulted from these same, allegedly insidious decisions and actions of
Mao and other top ofcials. This is a very top-down mode of analysis. But the
question remains: what are the relations, the causal chain, or reasoning here?
There is, in short, a gap between the two levels and no sustained attempt to
mediate between them in a dialectical fashion or by some other analytic, other
than on occasion to offer gestures like “the net effect of,” “for example,” or “for
instance” after a sweeping claim is made about total, national conditions.
To take one specic example of the representational problems, Dikotter refer-
ences a document that records what Mao is alleged to have said at a high-level
meeting in 1959: “It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can
eat their ll” (134). This is immediately damning and seems inhuman. But it
must also be said that this quote from Mao (recorded second-hand, by an
unknown writer), like other quotations and archival citations in this book,
appears out of context and with neither explanation nor explication: it speaks for
itself in a universal way. It appears in a paragraph on grain requisitions, in a
short chapter on these and national agricultural production. An immediately pre-
ceding quote from Deng Xiaoping comes from 1961 – two years later and at a
different meeting – that actually refers more to Sichuanese peoples’ fortitude.
The implication – again not spelled out – is that Mao et al. knew of grain short-
ages from 1959 onwards but kept requisitioning more and more grain because,
after all, life is cheap to them. But there is no stated evidence that they knew
early on of the severity of the famine, nor that they did not try to alleviate it.33
This is the same logic of U.S. President Kennedy as well as of Jack London
about the lack of value the Chinese place on human life. It is a sentence that does
the same type of work that other decontextualized references to Mao’s sayings
do: most famously, the atom bomb is a paper tiger because there are so many
Chinese compared to Americans (“so let them bomb us”), political power grows
out of a barrel of a gun (sounds “fascist,” but said to soldiers at the height of
Japanese invasions and Guomindang attacks), it is right to rebel (therefore
“throw your teacher out of the window”), and so on.
More specically, Mao’s reference here is in fact ambiguous, as we don’t know
the context of the conversations at that meeting. We have no idea what came before
80 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
or after this line from Mao, or what the document looks like. Mao was often ironic
and ippant (at least one reading of the Qin Shi Huang references, the joking with
Nixon, and so on) as well as earthy and coarse in his speech and habits. Between
the cults of personality around him and the ip-side demonizations, we have no
good sense of his personality. There are in short multiple Maos, but only one Fu
Manchu-esque one in this cross-over genre.34 This is not meant as apologetics: we
actually have no clear idea what Mao meant here. It may have been a cold and ruth-
less calculation, an anguished utterance, a hypothetical statement of the obvious,
and so forth. We cannot tell without seeing the document itself as well as knowing
the context of its occasion. This would, in turn, occasion a trip to the archive in
Gansu to get some sense of the document as a whole. Gansu is not only remote, but
one would need considerable guanxi (connections) to get access to the document.
Much the same could be said for many if not most of the documents cited in this
study. Partly this is due to the nature of archival research, not least in the context of
China; but it also makes them unveriable. But there is also a problem with how the
documents are represented, explicated, or synthesized (or how they are not so), as I
have been trying to argue above. We do know, however, that Mao did not actually
want China to be bombed in a nuclear war, to starve the masses, and so on. For that
matter, we do seem to know that at a different occasion during the crisis Mao pro-
claimed that he hoped that reports of some peasants raiding granaries was true,
because they might starve otherwise. It will generally be admitted that during his
long career, Mao’s approval of various rebellions or even “rightist” behavior among
more ordinary citizens was quite consistent. This does not disprove any report of
local beatings, hunger, or so forth. But it does suggest that there is a gap between
the top level of policy and command and what actually happens locally. This is a
standard problem in governance, and one massively more difcult in a country the
size and diversity of China. The effect in this study is again to demonize Mao the
cruel dictator at the expense of a sustained analysis of the speeches or meetings, or
moreover of the process of economic and grain failure.
Part of the problem here is a perennial issue with conventional historiography:
narrating archival stories, reports, or anecdotes about a necessarily local event or
statistic, which then stand in for the whole country, in an unnamed pattern that is
assumed to have been repeated everywhere. But can facts speak for themselves –
even disturbing, vividly rendered facts about, say, beatings or cannibalism? And
what would a representative fact be that can stand in for the whole nation of
several hundred million people and thousands upon thousands of local contexts?
Following the method employed in this book, in order to arrive at a fair and ade-
quate representation of the famine and Leap as a whole, one would have to have
similar reports at all local levels across China – not just provincial but county,
town, and village. In short, the map would have to be co-extensive with the terri-
tory, as in Jose Luis Borges’s classic tale.35 There is a brute impossibility to this, as
much for representational limits adhering to this method as for the Party-state con-
trolling access to archives. China is simply too big, so to speak, and we may well
not have adequate records of all such activities, especially for the tumultuous Leap
and CR years, at even the local level that Dikotter is focused on. This mapping
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 81
problem is also why nationally aggregated statistics of population and death rates
are necessary; but as noted above by Patnaik, Riskin, and others, we do not ade-
quately have these, and for the Leap and Mao years they are often retrospective at
best. Hence, the problem of mediation between levels is fundamental.36 Or put
another way there is also a question of scale here: given the massive size of China
it is possible for all of these selected archive-based stories to be true and yet to be
far from exhaustive as an image, let alone an account of the Leap famine/collapse.
One could no doubt arm another raft of graduate researchers, send them into the
eld, and eventually come up with an uneventful or even idyllic record of the same
years. This is why the national numbers-question (famine mortality versus regular
mortality, population, etc.) is so important and yet so frustrating and frustrated.
In two short nal chapters on the death tolls and the archives, Dikotter seems to
imply that such a denitive account of the Leap (at local and national levels) and
presumably the mortality would be possible – despite his own detailed description
of how poor the records, estimates, and archives are to date overall (especially the
national and ofcial ones) and how tightly controlled. This is an interesting desire
and will to knowledge in itself, though characteristic of the logic of the modern
historical and social scientic disciplines and of the subeld of the Leap famine.
His own gure for the mortality is “at least” 45 million, thus raising the ante from
even Bannister and Coale and the previously ubiquitous gure of 30 million. The
problem is that the chapter on “the nal tally” only offers an exercise in addition
without interrogating the local-archival or national sources as to their reliability;
there is no acknowledgment of the debates on the total death rates, the inclusion of
“missing births,” the differences between “premature” and “excess” deaths, and so
on. For the death rate during the Leap years, Dikotter takes the word of one Liu
Shaoqi that it should be a “normal” rate of about one percent (329). Leaving aside
Liu’s own expertise, this is problematic as noted before: death rates are inherently
non-linear, so we cannot say what a “natural” or “normal” one is in advance, espe-
cially for China at this time; the 1983 Yearbook gures of ofcial mortality rates
for the Leap (15 million) may well be misleading and are admittedly “crude”;
given all of this and the lack of census data between 1953 and 1964, we do not
really know how many were alive and where they were (the mass mobilizations
and relocations make this even more difcult to guess). The author then compares
this rate from Liu to various provincial reports of specic numbers of deaths or
approximate death rates in a given county or locality. The difference or “discrep-
ancies” between Liu’s “normal” death rate and the local documents adds up to
approximately 45 million (333).
The references to archives here are impressive at one level (they seem so spe-
cic and immediately real) and problematic at another. How reliable, for example,
are reported calculations of death rates in a random county in the countryside,
which may well not have had resources to construct one adequately? What per-
centage of those 45 million would have been “missing births,” or is this not
germane at all here? To again cite Riskin: “the Great Leap was attended by statisti-
cal breakdown and the complete politicization of information” (“Seven Questions”
119). Much the same could be said of the Mao era in general, and it is certainly
82 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
conceivable that some of Dikotter’s local documents may have been altered after
the fact or inuenced at the time of recording/composition as a result of political or
ideological struggle (e.g. over “lines”) and “fever.” To arrive at the 45 million
gure, Dikotter also relies on the work of Cao Shuji and Chen Yizi. We have
already attended to the reliability of Chen’s work, which remains at the level of
hearsay about what he allegedly saw or read in a high-level report in the early
1980s. The mainland scholar Cao has estimated 32 million deaths, on the basis of
“over a thousand” ofcial local gazetteers (329, 332). This toll number may be
accurate, or it may not be. There is little discussion of Cao’s methods here or how
he arrived at this gure, though Dikotter does take his county-level gures as given
in a number of instances, thus adding them to his own documents’ numbers. But
the questions remain: with the individual local documents we cannot see or read
for their reliability, with the lack of all – or even a majority – of counties and larger
localities being represented/archived (the perfect map of the territory), with the
unknown or unreliable national death rate, or even population total, and so on. At
the very least, Dikotter’s claim that “the death toll thus stands at a minimum of 45
million excess deaths” is far too condent (333).37 Equally valid cases have been
made for 10, 15, 30 million, and so on. Indeed, the ones veering towards the 10
million account seem far more rigorous and semantically rich. In theory at least,
the toll could be higher still. But this seems highly unlikely without the existence
of mass graves or some recorded, collective memory of massive starvation; these
are yet to be discovered, perhaps because they do not exist. Dikotter notes the
higher possibility but not the former, lower ones. Nor is there a discussion – à la
Patnaik – of what counts as an “excess” death versus a “normal” one, just as there
is no comparative and global analysis offered even by the Smithian Amartya Sen.
None of this is to deny the existence of an apparent catastrophe. But it is to ask
what we talk about when we talk about the famine’s mortality gures.
A global enumerative modality?
The obsession with nding the number of “excess deaths” of a Chinese propor-
tion will no doubt continue. Given what seems to still be the great uncertainty
over the exact gure, perhaps the more interesting or pressing question is why
there is such an intense effort to do the accounting or – still more problemati-
cally – to promulgate the much higher estimates? Among other things, the record
of Maoism or the revolution is at stake, as well as the value of collective agricul-
ture and communism in general, and even the legitimacy of the current govern-
ment. There is also an older, less Cold War-inected structure or phenomenon:
the positional superiority of the West and of the expert, and so on. Thus while
there is a consensus that a famine occurred and that Mao and the Party are
responsible for this (be it 10 or 45 million excess deaths), the scholarship on the
gures and on the causes of the catastrophe – and this last is still far less ana-
lyzed than the numbers question – are still highly political issues open to a
number of competing interpretations. And within this question – why the
accounting obsession? – there may well be another, hidden dynamic which we
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 83
can now explore. It returns us to the question of colonial legacies in the world
today, even at the level of knowledge production.
First let us return to Sen and the global context of Leap/famine knowledge. We
are now in a better position to query the worldwide appeal of his argument about
China, food, and famines, for Sen not only popularized the inated famine gures,
but also their causes and cure: the lack of “democracy” and a “free press”. The
closest Sen comes to dening democracy is to invoke “opposition parties” and the
cliché of “government by discussion” (“Food” 776). But it is not at all clear what
form other Chinese parties could have taken at this time, other than something
further to the right of Liu Shaoqi et al. The nationalist, capitalist, and anti-commu-
nist Guomindang was just defeated in a long and horrid civil war. It is a bit much to
expect them to have been allowed back into the game. Given the amount of discus-
sion leading up to the Leap,38 as well as the quick recognition of the problems early
on in 1959 by the center,39 it is hard not to see Sen’s causal factors as seductive but
empty platitudes. His leftist critics in India have certainly seen them thus, for the
very good reason that India – unquestionably a democracy with a free press – has
had a far worse record in infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, food availability,
and economic development than China since the 1960s.40 Indeed, by his own admis-
sion (noted above) there were more deaths in India during the Great Leap years of
1958–61 than in China (including the alleged 30 million excess famine victims). His
notion of the “free press” is even more underdetermined, and is presented by Sen as
an obviousness, but one on which much of his argument depends. It is thus a pity
that he did not consult Jean-Luc Domenach’s 1982 study of the famine in one hard-
hit province in China (Henan). While meant as a riposte to revolution-sympathetic
scholars (seeing the Leap as an irrational “frenzy”), it draws extensively on provin-
cial and local newspapers from the 1950s and Leap years that document the emer-
gence of the economic crisis (167). What is interesting and not without irony is that
Domenach’s work shows us that the problems and crises of the communalization
process were literally inscribed in the pages of the local press and print media, as
propagandistic as they were. Information about the emerging crises was not
repressed, or at least not as fully repressed as one might think after reading Sen.
There were certainly information problems during the Leap crisis, but it is not
obvious to see how a “free press” – whatever that means exactly – could have pro-
duced faster or more accurate information during the Leap vis-à-vis the state author-
ities and as compared to the bureaucratic chain of command already in place. The
communication problems were deeper than this and again refer us back to the too-
fast and “wanton” abandonment of the marketing and distribution structures across
the countryside. If the local cadres and leaders could not or did not nd and relay
that correct information, then how might some putative investigative journalists do
so (and where would they have come from)?
None of this is to rescue the propagandistic, didactic Chinese press or the “dicta-
torship of the proletariat” as state-form (particularly for today). But it is to compli-
cate the debacle of the Leap, to strongly suggest that Sen’s two factors could hardly
have prevented the famine by themselves, no more than they could have stopped
the severe droughts and oods. It further is to expose the platitudinous nature of
84 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
Sen’s argument. Given the self-attering nature of Sen’s keywords – China tragi-
cally lacked what we and modern India have – it is not hard to see the immediate
appeal of the argument. It ts a late or “second” Cold War context of the 1980s as
well as the dizzy-with-success atmosphere of the 1990s and the end of communism
(albeit crucially excluding China). All the more so, then, when we recall the
appeal’s sub-text: that free markets, a free press, and liberal capitalist democracy
are necessary to avoid famine and to socially pro gress in a truly enlightened way.41
For whoever says “democracy” and “free press” says capitalism. As the old saying
from A. J. Liebling goes, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who
own one.” Sen’s and others’ professed faith in the free press/markets/democracy is
in the present age quaint: states if not national sovereignties are being captured by
the market, civil societies are being subsumed or simply ignored by the state (as in
the invasion of Iraq), there are huge income gaps around the world, and so forth. In
China the Party is as much in danger of being captured by the market and capital as
it is desperately trying to expand and advance these. I would like to think that the
Chinese as well as other revolutionaries and radical national leaders of the time
knew something about the problem of the Western/colonial and Soviet forms of the
state and civil society, and tried to nd an alternative path, including through a jour-
nalism and state-form that felt a certain responsibility towards safeguarding and
“vanguarding” the national and populist interests. That they may have failed in that
search does not mean their decision was irrational or that their analysis of the previ-
ous capitalist/colonial forms was wrong. Sen, then, is unhelpful on the Leap famine
and more a sign of the times than otherwise, his Nobel Prize and his reputation as a
humane and welcome “macro” economist notwithstanding.
The China-reference – especially the gure of 30+ million dead Chinese – is
crucial to Sen’s own work and is omnipresent in it since the 1980s. But he has yet to
address the lower mortality estimations, or the problematic nature of the available
raw data and censuses. We have to see his work vis-à-vis China, then, as of a piece
with the shift in Western or global understandings: to a logic of sameness whereby
the P.R.C., having broken with the Mao years, is following or must follow the uni-
versal path to development and modernization (free markets, free press, free democ-
racy). Certainly this is how a recent article on Chinese governance sees the matter.
The title reveals the normalizing ambit of knowledge production about China: “The
Paradoxical Post-Mao Transition: From Obeying the Leader to ‘Normal’ Politics.”
“Normal” is in scare-quotes because the P.R.C. has not yet but will someday make
the transition from blind obedience and government by emperor’s decree.42
In Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Bernard Cohn theorized a number
of investigative modes the British used to govern India in part through the produc-
tion of knowledge. One that seems especially relevant in the present context is the
enumerative modality: for the famine scholars and their will to knowledge, China is
in some sense a “vast collection of numbers” that can and must be objectied, clas-
sied, and administered (Cohn 8). The archives must be opened, statistics and death
rates must be generated where there were none before. Entire teams of research
assistants must be sent out across China to nd documents and archival information
that – in many cases – only conrms an a priori conclusion about communism
Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 85
versus democracy or markets, the nightmare of 1949–79, what is wrong with or
lacking in China, and so on. Real, imagined, projected Chinese lives and deaths
during the Leap period, from the unborn to the unknown “excess,” must be pro-
duced and then counted. The drive to produce such numbers – which far outweighs
causal analyses of the Leap failure or its economics – is curious indeed. As noted
above, this has to do with China being or having been Communist. The China eld
may be the one place left where there are some stakes involved – albeit largely sym-
bolic stakes – in regard to the battle for or against communism, collective agricul-
ture, alternative versus universal modernity, and so on. This is the appeal of the
eld, at least for those not xated on the ancient and essential Chineseness of things.
“China” may be the last place left where one can take up the enunciative position of
he-who-speaks-the-truth against an Orwellian regime past and/or present. At the risk
of psychologizing, this is an enormously seductive subject position (for left and
right). It is an area – China and its interpretation – where the political still obtains.
The numbers game and the interpretation of China t into a friend/enemy dyad vis-
à-vis the Party-state as such. Especially in reference to the Mao era and the revolu-
tion. It is as if such China scholarship and broader China-imaginings must respond
unconsciously to its own friend/enemy distinction – where the latter continues to
stand as “communism” and “collectivization,” and the former is either the generic
human or the quiet, suffering Chinese who secretly hates the regime whether he or
she knows it or not. Such a dynamic does not obtain in the comparatively more
scholarly world of South Asia studies, for example. There are relatively no stakes
there in this geo-political sense. But there are around the “China problem,” and in
this case just how tragic and horrifying the Leap was or not. The Cold War is still
with us, not just as a project of U.S.-Western political and economic hegemony but
at the level of discourse and ideas. It overlaps with the colonial, and this desire to
count and document and quantify China seems to me to indicate this fairly clearly.
This is not to say such China scholars are akin to British colonial ofcials and
old-fashioned orientalists, nor that contemporary China – the world’s second
largest economy, though not by per capita standards – is subjugated in the
manner of colonial India. But it is to say that our knowledge of the Leap and its
famine is not innocent. The power/knowledge relationship, and the problems of
writing the Other, apply to China and its discursive production in the West and
globally. So, too, as the work of James Hevia in English Lessons has shown, the
question of the impact and effects of colonialism has to be extended to China,
despite it having never lost its formal political sovereignty in the early modern
period. As Hevia notes, “China knowledge was produced in ways identical to
those found in other colonial settings” (English 348). In my argument, then, the
accounting game around “excess deaths” is an instance of this, albeit in the con-
temporary, postcolonial world. Of course the enumerative modality does not
operate in the same way as, for example, in colonial India or even the age of
semi-colonialism in China. But the will-to-knowledge – and the dynamics of
knowledge/power – is in my view strongly similar. The structural and “inter-
ested” or worldly aspects of knowledge production vis-à-vis China and the West
are still in play.
86 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward
China kept its sovereignty and that is a good thing; but it was enormously
impacted by the imperialists’ attempts as well as by the contact with the West
and the perceived need to Westernize and modernize. As any student of the
Chinese 1920s and 1980s can attest, the desire for Westernization/Occidentalism
can be so strong as to evince self-loathing on the part of some Chinese intellec-
tuals (and academics), just as the rise of ofcial and unofcial nationalisms in
China today can be signs of reaction-formations against Western chauvinism and
hegemony (from CNN to currency pressures and so on). So, too, the West’s
failure to colonize China or to install the Guomindang, or its pyrrhic victory in
the Cold War, hardly means it stopped being so imperious, orientalist, and hege-
monic towards the P.R.C. That would be to take “politics proper” and sover-
eignty-retention far too seriously. Surely the notions of totalitarianism and
oriental despotism, and of Chinese inhumanity and great tragedy, still have to be
acknowledged as part of the China-West, neo-imperial problematic, including at
the level of knowledge production. Much of the knowledge produced about
China is willy-nilly caught up in the demonization not just of Maoism and col-
lectivization, but of the Party-state and its history. Even its failures – of which
the Leap stands out by far – are treated simplistically and do not call for sympa-
thy so much as horror or handkerchiefs. How else to explain, in the last instance,
the production of inated mortality gures, the desire to produce censuses where
none exist, to include the unborn, and to project a death trend tending towards
zero/immortality? Or the veritable certainty amongst some, beyond all demon-
strated evidence and argumentation, that the deaths must be whole orders higher
than 10–15 million? Recent appeals to 45 million will likely be surpassed in the
near future by gures much higher, regardless of whether the archive oodgates
are opened or old census data appears out of nowhere. The accounting phenome-
non, then, is not only, not even about the actual excess deaths, but something
else.
5 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter
of Mao
The “Sinologization” of global thought
The previous chapter examined a Cold War-colonial production of knowledge
about the Mao era in general and the Great Leap Forward in particular. Of par-
ticular importance is not just the enumerative modality in general, but more spe-
cically the work of American demographers and the British Indian, Nobel
Laureate Sen in propagating a regime of truth about Mao and the famine of
1959–61. This is all to say, then, that this coding is indeed a global phenomenon
and not limited to China experts. Given the long-standing importance of China
to twentieth-century politics as well as the global inuence of Maoism itself,
from South Asia to Latin America and beyond, it is to be expected that there is
such a thing as a global production of knowledge – a regime of truth – about
Mao and Maoist China. And yet this phenomenon is rarely remarked upon as
such within the academic eld, not least because of the belief in objective or
neutral knowledge. What this chapter aims to do is to make the case for the
global distribution of such knowledge and to show that it does not simply hail
from truth and expertise. What we have to deal with, instead, is the Sinologiza-
tion or orientalization of global thought about China. By that I mean both the
inuence of authorized, “expert” knowledge and the imbrication – or insepara-
bility – of this with more popular and self-evidentially orientalist/colonial forms
of knowledge. What is at stake here are two standard problems from within the
postcolonial and Marxist traditions, respectively, that have not been adequately
addressed to the subject of modern China: the writing of the Other, and where
incorrect ideas come from.
It is here, then, where we can begin to track the global circulation of Sinolog-
ical-orientalism, its system of dispersion, in this case the demonization of
Chinese Maoism as a nightmarish aberration within China’s incomplete but
inevitable long march to Western modernity and liberal, democratic capitalism.
But this abstract coding of China and the Mao period is subtended by a deep
anxiety and at times paranoiac fear of its “massness,” and of its perceived threat
to the West, especially its “freedom” and liberal individualism.1 Much of this
discourse can be seen reected and refracted in Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991),
arguably his most prescient novel, at least in a symptomatic sense, in its obses-
sion with the “threat” that global, non-Western “terrorism” presents to author-
ship, freedom, the liberal individual, and “modernity.”
88 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
The novel’s protagonist, Bill Gray, is a reclusive, Pynchonesque writer with
severe writer’s block. His two closest friends are his publisher Charles Everson
and his live-in assistant Scott Martineau, whose girlfriend, Karen Janney, he has
an affair with. Gray agrees to be photographed by a New York City photogra-
pher named Brita, who is doing a series of portraits of important writers. In a
conversation with Brita and others, Gray laments the declining signicance of
literature in an age where “terrorists” and “crowds” have supplanted novelists’
function as the conscience and brain of a culture. The future belongs to crowds,
as the text famously puts it in its opening prologue (itself a televisual scene of a
mass wedding ceremony of the Unication Church, aka the “Moonies” of old).
After this, Gray disappears again and secretly decides to go to the UK to speak
on behalf of a Swiss poet who has been kidnapped and held hostage in war-torn
Beirut. He then meets George Haddad, a representative of the Maoist group
responsible for the kidnapping, and secretly agrees to go to Lebanon to negotiate
the poet’s release. En route, he is hit by a car in Cyprus, unknowingly lacerates
his liver, and dies in the night. His last coherent thoughts are of wanting
“devoutly to be forgotten,” as if in the end the crowds are victorious. The fate of
the poet is left ambiguous. The novel ends with the photographer in Beirut, snap-
ping photos of the Maoist leader of the same group (as if a conrmation of
Gray’s earlier remark about “terrorists”). With perfect American-colonial arro-
gance, for the last snap she suddenly tears off the hood of a boy, the leader’s son,
who has been guarding the door. Later, she more happily photographs a random
wedding party on the streets outside her hotel, as if to say small apolitical crowds
are still okay. Through it all, the novel is delivered in DeLillo’s characteristically
televisual imagery, his rich, minimalist dialogue, and omnipresent indirect
discourse.
Yet while the theme of crowds is central to the novel, with all the depth of
some 1950s-era screed about mass society, it is in fact fully articulated to the
theme of terrorism – of leftist, Maoist so-called “terrorism” in particular. The
bulk of the novel’s plot is centered on the “terrorist” kidnapping of the Swiss
poet by a Lebanese resistance group in Beirut (one with a “Marxist component”)
(124). The Swiss detail is signicant when we recall that that place, for a certain
imagination, remains the very paragon of neutrality and social, liberal democ-
racy. Utopia achieved for the Europhilic intelligentsia perhaps. But for all the
novel’s resonances with the post 9/11 U.S.-West – and these are what make it
prescient indeed – “terror” here signals less Islam than the very massness, the
overwhelming numbers of “others” who seemingly refuse “individuality” or the
autonomous self for a communal, collective identity, cause, and way of life – be
it nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Maoism, and so on. Or alternatively this
is what makes the novel resonate so strongly with the new, postcolonial world
system after 9/11. As one of DeLillo’s editors put it: “Long before he had written
anything Don told me he had two folders – one marked ‘art’ and the other
marked ‘terror’.”2
The collective and the communal, while a seductive threat everywhere, just
so happen to belong in the East. They are also seen as “backward” by all the
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 89
major characters, including the narrator and implied author. The emotionally dis-
turbed Karen is the only possible exception, and she is nonetheless pathologized
throughout the text. To a signicant extent, then, we also have to see the novel’s
lament about Maoist and other forms of terrorism as of a piece with the older,
more familiar bogey of communism and the specter of the Red East. There is
again an articulation between the colonial and the Cold War worldviews at work
in this novel. Whether it afrms this or simply ambiguates it in more “postmod-
ern” fashion is not our concern here. The fact that in the novel’s Beirut there are
other, “real” or Islamic fundamentalists in existence, as opposed to the Maoists/
political radicals, underscores what I am claiming here. For the novel and pre-
sumably DeLillo, there is not much difference between the leftists and the fun-
damentalists, the Iranians and the Lebanese, or between the Moonies and the
Maoists. This is what Spivak once pithily called an assimilation of the Other
through non-recognition.
Thus the rst chapter opens inside a packed Yankee Stadium, as 6,500 “anon-
ymous” couples (anonymous to whom?) and followers of Reverend Moon get
married all at once; it ends with the narrator’s ominous prognostication about the
future belonging to crowds (16). By the end of the novel, with Brita watching
that small wedding party in the streets of “the dead city” Beirut, we have been
taken around much of the world outside the West (241). En route, and as noted
earlier, the novel establishes a chain of equivalence between the Moonies, the
various groups of the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian “masses” of the revolution
and later of the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Peruvian Maoists, and
China. But it is a specically Maoist China, even when the much-later Tianan-
men protests are signied. The latter is established by both the image of the
massive protest in Tiananmen Square, which occupies the novel’s front pages in
a cinematic “opening credits” form, and Karen’s witnessing on television the
aftermath of the bloody crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping (in reality the
anti-Maoist par excellence). And yet, it is in fact impossible to say for certain
that the opening, unspecied photo is in fact of Tiananmen 1989. It could just as
easily be one of any number of Cultural Revolution rallies from decades before.
So, too, Karen is enthralled by the portrait and name of Mao, as well as by “Mao
suits” (fairly anachronistic by 1989) and the crowds. That, perhaps, is the point:
it is all one, an undifferentiated mass society cathected to a Great Leader, exter-
nal to and threatening the West. Clearly the 1991 novel is obsessed with Mao/
Maoism, and its overall image of China is akin to the older, Cold War vision of
an “army of blue ants.”
What we have again, then, is an abstract and reductive yoking together of rad-
ically different – but all non-white – groups, cultures, nations, and moments in
time. They form one chain of equivalence that is seen here as a vague but power-
fully looming threat. It is a threat not just to individual lives (e.g. Karen’s, Bill’s,
the poet’s) but to an entire way of life and to the “self” as such. More speci-
cally, this is the self – independent, coolly rational, introspective, and autono-
mous – of both Western liberal capitalism and, relatedly, of an earlier modernism
and the gure of the artist-writer as the conscience or legislator-interpreter of
90 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
“mankind.” The threat against this imaginary institution is established and made
immanent to the U.S. in several ways. In addition to the opening “cult” cere-
mony, there is the presence of the name “Sendero Luminoso” (the Shining Path
of Peruvian Maoism) spray-painted on ruined buildings in Tompkins Square
Park in New York. When Karen asks someone where these guerrillas are, she is
told “everywhere” (175). As Jeoffrey Bull has aptly noted, the novel then brings
together these Maoists and the Beirut war by having, two pages earlier, people
saying “Beirut, Beirut, it’s just like Beirut” when they see reballs from nearby
gas main ruptures (173).
As to the substance of the threat, this is left vague overall but still menacing (or
perhaps menacing because vague). This is done in part through the invocation of
the violence of the crowd as such, whether it is the Ayatollah’s frenzied mourners
nearly pulling his limbs apart, the violence in Tiananmen (burnt bodies), or the
Swiss poet’s likely demise at the hands of the terrorists/kidnappers. Moreover, the
novel articulates this threat through – self-indulgent – dialogues on the eclipsed
role of the artist/novelist. Thus Gray will comment to Brita that:
Years ago I used to think it possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of
the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They
make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we
were all incorporated.
(41)
The so-called terrorists, then, have stolen the artists’ thunder and this privileged
stratum has been “incorporated” to boot. Not incorporated by capitalism but by a
certain shift in the Geist of the world: a rising, soon to be triumphant practice of
and desire for “absolute being” and “All men one man” for “the end of time”;
this is how DeLillo characterizes what the Maoists, Moonies and the like desire
(163, 235, 16). They seek an erasure of the self through “cultish” belonging and
through experiencing the “link to the fate of mankind,” and thereby living “in
history” (82, 235). To be fair, Mao II sees this as a universal, not explicitly “Ori-
ental” Geist and problem, just as Karen serves in some sense as a foil character
and moral antithesis to the narcissistic, and eventually quite pathetic protagonist
and his assistant, Scott. But on the other hand, Karen is nonetheless consistently
pathologized as being merely “postcult,” and it is no accident that, save for one
photo of a European soccer crowd crushed against a fence, all the “terrorists”
(Mao, the Ayatollah, Abu Rashid, the Shining Path) and their slavish followers
or crowds are not-white (82). Not unlike how Kennan et al. saw totalitarianism,
the threat originates in the “Asiatic” East. There is clearly an asymmetry and
therefore a prejudice here, one rooted at the very least in anxiety if not the para-
noia characteristic of much Western postmodern ction.3 Bull, too, is almost on
to this point when he notes – albeit uncritically – that “terrorists have taken
control of the West’s narrative (as Bill [Gray] predicted)” (222).
Within this orientalist bifurcation of the world, China occupies the paramount
place. As I will go on to explain shortly, it is a dichotomy that the novel unsettles
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 91
and disturbs, or cannot quite contain. As Ryan Simmons has cogently argued,
the “Salman Rushdie affair” following the Ayatollah’s fatwa against the great
Indian novelist is an important backdrop to the book; Rushdie may well be
imaged in the protagonist himself as well as in the Swiss poet–kidnappee
(Simmons 677). But few have commented on the centrality of “Maoism” and
China in the novel, and when this has been done it is mostly along the lines of
the above equivalence. The real, historical Mao and the P.R.C. are indeed
assumed to be part of the same, naturalized chain and threat. Thus Mark Osteen
will refer to Bill Gray’s (and the novel’s) opposition to “Maoist or terrorist
monologism” in favor of “Bakhtinian heteroglossia” (661). This ahistorical con-
ation of Maoism and China with the Shining Path, revolutionary Iran, the Uni-
cation Church of Reverend Moon, and Abu Rashid (whose characterization as
a Maoist has no historical basis itself) – in the novel and its scholarship – is, in
short, deeply misleading as well as surprising in work as erudite as DeLillo’s.
But it is perhaps to be expected, given the status of a demonized Maoism as
the limit-case of “extremism” in (Left) politics, and of the P.R.C. as future super-
power rival and current threat. Thus one will still nd references in U.S. media
to the “Maoism” of Afghanistan’s Taliban, or to the “Maoism” of their former
opponents, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. The latter
have been criticized for this “extremism,” even by some liberal publications.4
So, too, this equivalence between Maoism and “terrorism” has become a global
phenomenon, given an additional boost from the opportunism of retrograde
states after 9/11. Thus even the now-incorporated Maoists of Nepal, despite their
democratic credentials in ending the Nepalese monarchy’s grasp on power, con-
tinue to be blackballed by the U.S. and other governments. And India has led the
charge in making their own Maoist groups in Bihar and elsewhere ofcial “ter-
rorists” and enemies of the state now akin to Al-Qaeda.
In addition to the Chinese photographs and televisual images in Mao II men-
tioned above, the centrality of Maoism in the novel is established through
various other means. Indeed, the image of Mao himself graces the cover no less
than thirty-two times, thanks to its reproduction of Andy Warhol’s Mao series of
silk screenprints (1972–4). And of course there is also the novel’s title. This last
in fact refers back to Warhol, and the title of one of his own Mao works (though
not from the same series).5 Yet Warhol’s characteristic playfulness and fascina-
tion with simulacra for their own sake should not allow us to lose sight of the
importance of Maoist politics in DeLillo’s text. Osteen, for example, does this
when he remarks that “Rashid is not Mao, but Mao II – a simulacrum, a circulat-
ing image soon to be supplanted by another” (665). But this novel is not DeLil-
lo’s inuential ur-postmodern text, White Noise, but a different creature; and
Rashid is replaced by no one but made generally equivalent to Maoism aka anti-
Western “terrorism.” It is true that – as bets DeLillo’s political formation in the
anti-intellectual American 1960s – the Lebanese Maoist Rashid sounds more like
a hippie than the Chinese Marxist leader who was a “social constructionist”
avant la lettre. Rashid: “The force of nature runs through Beirut unhindered. . . .
It cannot be opposed, so it must be accelerated” (234). Nevertheless, some
92 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
images and gures matter more than others here. In the logic of the book,
Chinese Maoism is the original upon which the other “simulacra” follow. Addi-
tionally, even if one were to see all these “other” masses and leaders as simula-
cra, there is no denying that they all form one whole – a not-white, non-Western
and looming, ominous mass. That is the pattern and that is the problem, beyond
the verisimilitude of the text to real histories.
Even in the case of Warhol’s work itself, the many “Maos” are not pure simula-
cra and indeed have their referents and political determinations. As Fredric
Jameson put it, Warhol’s oeuvre is about nothing if not commodity fetishism,
though in an anti-political way (Postmodernism 158). Take, for example, the con-
sistent use of pale blues in his Mao series, particularly the 1972 portrait with Mao
entirely in not black- but “blue-face.” Regardless of how a particular viewer might
“take up” or experience such work today, there is no doubt that what motivates the
blue-face Mao, what it reects, is that same stereotype of the Maoist/Chinese
“army of blue ants” (this was the color of Mao-era distributed clothing). Perhaps
this was some type of fairly insipid, depoliticizing social commentary – as if the
free distribution of clothing in a desperately poor, hugely populated country were
some type of “commodication” and assault upon “individual choice.” That there
were other ways of seeing the formerly ubiquitous Mao suits is demonstrated by
the comments from the great liberal economist J. K. Galbraith, writing at the same
time as Warhol began his series, and well before DeLillo:
There has been too much snobbish comment about the uniformity of
Chinese clothing. General appearance is better, as noted, than on the Ameri-
can campus. But that is not the point. In a poor country an arrangement by
which every person gets two sets of sound basic garments every year at low
prices seems to me an exercise in the greatest good sense. The proper com-
parison of the comfortably clad Chinese is not with Americans . . . but with
the huddled and half-clad people of northern or upland India in the winter
months.
(126)
One can, then, compare Galbraith’s great, good sense with the “blue ants” dehu-
manization. Or more specically with DeLillo’s own, explicit obsession with
“Mao suits” and the pseudo-philosophical opposition between the “motley crowd
against the crowd where everyone dresses alike” (or “that great mass of blue-
and-white cotton”) (177, 163). At another point the novel equates the uniform
attire of the “Moonie” grooms – dark blue suits and maroon ties – with the
uniform Mao suits, as if they were slightly different manifestations of the same
oriental conformity (183).
Further evidence of the real, historical Mao and the specter of Maoism haunt-
ing the novel may be found in Gray’s comments on the two signature post-1949
campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Thus Gray will
offer the following in response to his interlocutor’s (George Haddad’s) more
positive, leftist comments on the Maoists in China and Beirut. In response to the
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 93
latter’s afrmation of Mao, the Little Red Book, and the prospect that people
may have had sex while holding the bound quotations, the protagonist Gray
responds: “Incantations. People chanting formulas and slogans. . . . Bad sex.
Rote, rote, rote” (162). The elitism of such comments should go without saying,
as if deep affect articulated to a “great leader” – be it Mao, Malcolm X, the
Beatles or the Dalai Lama – must necessarily be inauthentic. And so must be
such people’s sex. That the novel further reects a specically Cold War, Sino-
logical-orientalist mentality is shown in Gray’s retort to Haddad’s upholding of
Mao as both someone “dependent on the masses” and an “absolute being” (the
latter being an orientalist conceit itself in this case):
The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the
Cultural Revolution . . . after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he
hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the mil-
lions they kill? . . . The point of every closed state is now you know how to
hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the
truth isn’t realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing
and the bodies themselves. . . . And it begins with a single hostage, doesn’t it?
(163)
At the most evident level this is simply a type of conspiratorial thinking that is
endemic to U.S. popular political culture, applied to China and the so-called
“closed societies” of the East and South – everything is orchestrated from above
and in secret.
Moreover, with this passage our examination of the demonization of Maoism
comes full circle as it encapsulates several of the themes of Sinological-oriental-
ism. The invocation of a key plank of Cold War discourse – the Popperian notion
of the “open” (Western, liberal) versus “closed” (Soviet-Asiatic) society – signies
the alleged totalitarianism of China. It was (is?) closed because their truths are not
open to contestation and because they are a society cut off from the rest of the
world. It is as if the older P.R.C.’s relationships and exchanges with Russia, parts
of Eastern Europe, and the Southern “Third World” matter not. It was – even in
1991 – an oriental despotism in which the state exerts total, top-down power to
control and subjugate its docile citizens. The putative extremism and fundamental-
ism of Maoist China is further signied by the conspiracist vision or equation of
Mao et al. with other terrorists (“these men” and their premeditated “setup”), and
the fantasy of hidden mass graves in China. This last is, indeed, particularly para-
noid: untold numbers of dead who – as Gray bemoans – have never actually been
found, so well hidden are they. As one recent Chinese Marxist critic has noted,
despite de-Maoication there has never been any mass grave or famine-related
burial ground discovered anywhere in China. This may well be further evidence
that the famine statistics of some 30 million dead are indeed deceptive.6 Where
indeed are the bones in such a densely populated country? For the novel, as for the
famine scholars, the striking, potential implication here – that the “bodies” have
not been discovered because they largely did not in fact exist – is inadmissible,
94 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
unknowable within the orientalist/Cold War problematic. Ironically, so is Gary’s/
DeLillo’s “scandalous” question.
We must note as well the gure of the oriental despot in the text, one of excep-
tional cruelty and dishonesty, a gure which arises again when the novel has
Rashid sell the poet-hostage to “the fundamentalists” (235). As for the Great Leap
and the Cultural Revolution in particular as scenes where this despotism and mass
murder took place, the previous chapter has already attempted to complicate and
displace our knowledge of these. Sufce it to mention, again, that the violence of
the Cultural Revolution was not orchestrated by the state, that it was nothing if not
a chaotic, bottom-up epoch of both intermittent but real violence and mass demo-
cratic participation. As for the bad Leap years of 1959–61, the question of its mor-
tality rates is important, as is government culpability. But we have also seen that
the numbers of deaths may well be dramatically less than the alleged 30 million
and overall fewer than occurred in democratic India during the same years. And
regardless of the real numbers, which we may never know because of a lack of
data, we do know that the methods used to get to 30 or more million are often
quite dubious (including the unborn, for example), and seem motivated by some
other agenda than disinterested truth. There was clearly nothing planned about the
famine; if anything it suffered from a lack of planning, implementation, and reli-
able information. And so on. But for Gray and the novel, the inated mass-death
must, naturally, all be laid at the foot of the emperor who planned them. What is
striking, in other words, is the absence of even a faint notion of Maoist discourse.
There is a denial that the Chinese of Mao’s era, like their counterparts elsewhere,
must have had some rational, practical, and affective knowledge-framework by
which they made sense of the world. That an awareness of Maoist discourse is
lacking in so much specialized academic work on China should not be an excuse
for DeLillo reproducing an essentially orientalist view of the world. It is the voca-
tion of literature, after all, to illustrate and amplify human and social experience,
including the complexities of self-understanding.
Clearly the novel is drawing upon the dominant, dispersed, Sinological
knowledge of the alleged world-historical death toll under a nightmarish Maoist
rule. What is more interesting than DeLillo’s lack of knowledge here – which I
would still insist is signicant for a famously erudite author – is Gray’s fascina-
tion with the sheer numbers, the massness of the Chinese “victims.” He, too,
operates within the terms of an enumerative modality. It is as if there have to be
massive numbers of secret dead, because everything in China involves massive-
ness just as everything is usually secretive. A ip-side but equivalent cathexis of
this sheer “mass” is found in Gray’s agent Haddad, who not only loves the “great
mass of blue-and-white cotton,” but is almost happily resigned to this same
specter of mass death:
The killing is going to happen. Mass killing exerts itself always. Great
death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and
space. The leader only interprets the forces.
(163)
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 95
Such a comment betrays a certain callousness towards death as well as, again, a
certain quasi-spiritual, hippie-ish belief in historical fate dressed up in Stalinist,
dialectical-materialist drag.
But more to the point here is that the emphasis on numbers (“great,” “mass,”
“unnumbered”) reveals the fascination with the amount, the mass itself. The
Chinese cannot enumerate themselves; they must be enumerated. Even if Haddad
suggests they are too great to count, there is still the desire to do so, to know the
amount, and still the image of China as a place of vast numbers and immense
quantities. This is also connected to the primordial force, or Geist behind the
“great death” – which is located outside the West, in Asia (China and the Middle
East especially). In this passage it is articulated through Haddad’s (DeLillo’s)
uniquely American “Stalinist-hippie” point of view. But it is also something
hard-wired into Gray’s speech and into the novel’s chain of terrorist-equiva-
lences located outside the West.
The specicity of China in all of this, the imputed Chineseness of the looming
global mass/crowd, is further signied by Karen’s viewing of the CNN broad-
casts from Tiananmen. There, shortly after the narrator’s powerful, lyrical depic-
tion of the everyday miseries of the homeless in the park, Karen is mesmerized
by the portrait of Mao in the Square, the blue suits, “a million Chinese,” the
“rows and rows of jogging suits,” “troops . . . in jogging cadence,” and “bodies”
everywhere (176–8). Each of these images is repeated several times in less than
three pages. It is the proper name of “Mao” that is used the most (e.g. “Mao
Zedong. She likes that name all right”) (178). In fact, DeLillo will alter the
Tiananmen protests’ chronology to drive the name home all the more, as Karen
watches the paint-splattered portrait of Mao being replaced with the clean, new
one, even though this had taken place weeks before the crackdown. So, too, what
would have been an empty Square in the aftermath of the military assault is here
made to be full of people, bodies, action, as if this scene were metonymically
linked with the mass-rally photo on the very rst pages of the novel.
What is surprising, given the overall logic of the text, is that Karen’s mes-
merization is not pathologized – at least not to the extent that Gray’s and DeLil-
lo’s afrmation of the autonomous individual against the “mass” would seem to
necessitate. On the one hand, the narrative codes Karen’s experiences in Tomp-
kins Square Park and her viewing of the Tiananmen event as an identication
with mass-belonging, a messianic dissolution of the self and a concomitant
embracing of a “great leader.” It is therefore a reversion and regression to her
brainwashed days in the Unication Church. Returning to the park and the
homeless after viewing the Tiananmen footage, the Mao portrait, the suits, and
the Chinese masses, as well as after the footage of the Iranian mourners, Karen
tells them: “ ‘We will all be a single family soon. . . . Because the total vision is
being seen.’. . . She had the Master’s total voice ready in her head” (193–4).
This return is clearly the denouement of her character-arc, which goes from
negative (“brainwashed”) to positive (“postcult” life with Gray et al.) and then
back to negative (apocalyptically awaiting the power of the crowd). While we
are asked to sympathize with the complex Karen, this return is still constructed
96 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
as a negative development within her characterization and a signication of the
ominous power of mass politics.
And yet, recalling the poetic power of her point of view on Tiananmen, the
homeless, and the dispossessed, and further reading her characterization against
the grain of the rest of the novel’s hierarchical bifurcation of the world, we can
see an afrmation of her desire for oneness if not of her implied “mass politics.”
This is against the grain because of the centrality of the protagonist Gray and
also because of the fact that the novel ends with the photographer Brita, the
moral center of the narrative who stands up, in a colonial-arrogant way, to the
Maoist Rashid and his young son. Karen’s desire speaks to a different type of
need, the human as a social and community-centered animal on a large, deeply
meaningful and not small scale (as with Brita’s wedding-goers on the nal page).
Jeoffrey Bull again approaches this dynamic within the text when he argues that
while the novel itself supports Gray’s “politics of inclusion and individuality,”
an “openness” against Haddad’s radical and (as argued above) orientalist abso-
lutism, “Karen Janney’s uncanny spiritual encounters with mass man . . . suggest
that the longing of many humans for the ‘symbolic immortality’ offered by total-
ist rulers and their ‘immortal’ – that is, impregnably monologic – words certainly
cannot be ignored” (225).
But this interpretation also presumes the “self-evident” truth of coding Mao,
China, and mass politics as a form of extremism and totalitarianism. For Karen’s
“uncanny” spirituality – and framing it thus depoliticizes her desire and compas-
sion – is coded as an understandable but ultimately dangerous, false conscious-
ness. Here the bugbear is “monologism” or “totalism”; the implicit term of
value, as in Osteen’s reading of the novel, is the pluralistic and anti-political
notion of heteroglossia. This is a familiar, cultural-studies Bakhtin made palat-
able for the liberal worldview in an age of Cold War.7 As Timothy Brennan has
argued, the “many misperceptions of Bakhtin’s [work on hybridization and het-
eroglossia] are themselves informed by Cold War protocols of interpretation”
(“Cuts” 55). They have made Bakhtin into an allegorical, ethical argument
against Stalinist/totalitarian “monologism” and for an open-ended, pluralistic
mode of understanding and politics. This is ironic in that in reality, Bakhtin, a
staunch Christian socialist and “enemy” of Russian formalism (modernism),
meant his work to serve as an afrmation of ordinary, crude, unruly speech, pop-
ulist rebellion, and mass, socialist politics (Brennan, “Cuts” 55). The Cold War
boilerplate that subtends the liberal-Bakhtinian readings of Mao II is also
revealed by the very source of Bull’s notion of “totalism” and “immortality”: a
work in the very dated genre of psycho-history by “an authority on contempo-
rary psychological patterns in East Asia.”8 This is Robert Jay Lifton’s Revolu-
tionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a
mass-market paperback published a mere two years into the Cultural Revolution
itself (Bull 225n13). This book, which reads today like a period piece of the
1960s in its Jungian, archetypal psychologism, grounds Mao as a “divine”
emperor, the P.R.C. as a “closed,” dynastic regime, and the Chinese as caught in
a doomed, primitive quest for “symbolic immortality” (Lifton xviii, 46, 63, 153).
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 97
This is to say that the unreexive universality of Lifton’s psychologism is under-
cut by the China difference. While such a quest for “totalism” is allegedly uni-
versal, it is the Chinese whom are (still) stuck.9 Despite the dated nature of this
work, it comes as little surprise that Lifton is also a source for Roderick MacFar-
quhar’s inuential volumes on “court-politics” under Mao (examined previ-
ously) and, perhaps, for DeLillo’s novel.
What happens when one recognizes and unlearns the Cold War, orientalist
roots of such scholarship on Mao II and the text’s chain of equivalence between
Reverend Moon, Mao, Rashid et al., and the specter of the mass? One can return
to the dynamic introduced by Karen’s point of view and discern a systematic
other-message. That is, read a certain way, these mass- and “China”-centered
passages cut against the orientalist demonization of a “brainwashing,” terroristic
mass politics and of, in a word, Maoism. What we have is not just yet another
modernist case of ambiguity and openness. The case for that and its attendant
afrmation of openness or “hope” in fact lies not with Karen but with Brita – the
other artist and paragon of individuality – and the small wedding party in the
streets of Beirut. This nal scene recalls the mass-marriage of the opening; it
serves not only as a positive contrast to it but as eeting evidence that not every-
thing in the non-Western world is threatening. Perhaps some groups – if small
and temporary, a party as opposed to a Party – are not a threat: “they [the
wedding party] all look transcendent, free of limits” (240). The issue of scope
and scale is key here; Beirut remains a “dead city” (214). This is, such as it is,
the intended if ambiguous hope and resolution of the novel, an afrmation of the
quotidian and the individual in small groups at best. The problems with this
ending are multiple, but one in particular stands out for the present study. Given
the preponderance of the novel’s signications of the looming mass – of the
“other” from the global South articulated in the image of Maoist China – this
nal moment amounts to weak tea. That so-called threat, rooted in Sinological
and other orientalisms, still looms, and the racial and cultural politics of the
novel’s representation of the Other are left in tact. Moreover, the ending here is
not only anti-climactic but politically quietist and indeed de-politicizing in the
way that liberalism so often is.
It is rather the afrmation of Karen’s desire for “oneness” and her point of
view in general that resonates more strongly once the novel is put down. These
pose the more interesting questions and lines of ight outside the text, or rather
back in to its worldliness. One could trans-code Karen’s resonance as a revolu-
tionary or utopian impulse, towards a form of collective belonging, politics, and
real, large-scale community. We might well call this the political unconscious of
the text. But there is also a larger political and interpretive issue here, and it is
one of historical mediation, of reection and refraction of the very history that
the text reies and orientalizes. This is the history of American anomie and bour-
geois self-alienation, of traditional romantic/aesthetic discourse that centers the
artist-individual as the heart and mind of culture and society, and of mass, com-
mitment politics and Maoism in particular. It is that type of politics and Maoism
more generally from which the text cannot in the last instance entirely divorce
98 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao
itself – i.e. cannot fully repudiate and demonize. This is of course not to argue
that there is indeed some real Orient or essential “substance” behind the novel’s
reication of Maoism and the global South. But it is to argue that there are his-
torical traces one can discern within this same orientalist discourse, and that
there is an urgent, yet perennial historical problem that the Karen-related pas-
sages and the text as a whole index. This is the problem of the neo-colonial
world system and the U.S.-West’s hierarchical relationship with the Rest.
This latter problem may be further specied as the need of the dispossessed
nations and peoples of the world, including within the U.S., to nd some alterna-
tive path to development, prosperity, and community, some alternative to pax
Americana and global capitalist modernity. And it is, or was, actually existing
Chinese Maoism that most vigorously and plausibly presented such an alterna-
tive modernity. That this noble experiment failed, for its own internal as well as
external world-systemic reasons, matters not. For the need – and historical
problem – endures, and it is this which helps to explain the adoption of Maoism
by various groups around the world (e.g. from the former Black Panthers of the
U.S. to the Naxalite groups of India), as well as the persistence of the desire for
collective identity/community and praxis. The novel and the author’s sensibility
may castigate such groups and desires as cultish, but still they persist and will
continue to do so until there is indeed some alternative to liberal capitalism on a
global scale. The discourse and politics of Maoism answer a real need in the
world, and will continue to do so for quite some time, even in an age of depoliti-
cization such as ours. In short, these real Maoist and mass-political traces and
problems form a historical substratum that the novel cannot abstract or incorpo-
rate into its overriding logic of Orientalization.
Put another way, there is a certain historical specter haunting the novel as a
whole, from its front and back covers full of Maos, to its photos and other invo-
cations of the global, Other mass. Hence the numerous references to Mao, his
image or his state, and his people. This specter is, most visibly, the very image
and proper name of Mao Zedong and Maoism.10 And hence the nal setting of
the novel – in what Haddad earlier calls the “rat warrens of Beirut” (163). That
is indeed an apt turn of phrase that speaks to the very ground and necessity of
revolution and mass politics. Thus it is here where we can ascertain the import
and legacy of Maoist discourse. This is a discourse that the novel – à la Sinology
– on the one hand refuses to grant to the Chinese people in its demonization of
Mao and historical Maoism. But on the other hand, this is also a specter that
comes back to haunt the text, its orientalist bifurcation of the world, and its prof-
fering of an anti-political, ambiguous hope and openness. It is not so much that
the novel shows us the deprivation, misery, neo-colonial racism, and urban/rural
divide that so often breeds Maoism – though this is at times signied – but that it
shows the intellectual and emotional poverty of a liberal alternative and world-
view that is in fact premised upon a demonization of Maoism and “crowds.” The
text cannot not show the emptiness of the Gray/Brita/liberal worldview; it cannot
help but show, as well, the rationality and moral appeals of its “Maoism” in both
affective/psychological and political terms.
DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao 99
There would be no Maoist discourse, even in its contemporary, oft-commodi-
ed form in China, without the movement and history from which it originally
derived. It is then in some sense a tribute to Mao and Maoist China that they can
still animate a specter, even in an anti-political, postmodern text like Mao II. As
we have seen, the demonization of Maoism as with the knowledge production
about China more generally is indeed a global yet strongly American phenome-
non. This is in part what makes it in an important sense a legacy of imperialism
and orientalism. It is not a free-oating phenomenon unmoored from geo-politi-
cal history and the U.S.’s twentieth century. But it would be a mistake to see this
as a complete victory against Maoism, as the latter’s specter will continue to
haunt the liberal-capitalist ecumene. Despite their erasure or denigration, Mao
and Maoism name something important that the developed and developing
worlds lack, both culturally or ecologically as well as politically.
6 Screening Sinology
On the Western study of Chinese lm
If there is one thing that rivals the importance of the 1989 Tiananmen protests as
a watershed in global, Western understandings of China, it would have to be the
international success of mainland Chinese lm, from the now-classic “fth gen-
eration” lms onwards. It is as if these celluloid representations were a welcome
herald of good tidings; having sloughed off the grey-blue dreariness of the Mao
years, China was nally on the right, modern and liberal-artistic path.1 From
Maoism to the market to M.O.M.A. Indeed, after the “Tank Man” of 1989, the
predominant image of China in the Western mind would have to be not a televi-
sual but a cinematic one, from close-ups of Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi to the spec-
tacular imagery of a Zhang Yimou, from his early work to the opening ceremony
of the 2008 summer Olympics (itself a cinematic tour de force). The “discovery”
of Chinese lm was an event and sea-change in Western attention to modern
Chinese culture that still lives on in the international reputations of directors
Chen Kaige and Zhang, as well as the ascent of so-called “Sixth Generation”
directors like Jia Zhangke or Wang Xiaoshuai.2 Clearly the P.R.C.’s cultural pro-
duction still encounters a number of orientalist and other market-driven expecta-
tions – above all else the real Chinese artist must depict suffering, totalitarianism,
and “the human spirit” – but it has never been as globally successful (popular) as
today. Thus a Chinese artist – albeit an exile with little critical acclaim – has
nally won a Nobel Prize.3 From at least the mid-1990s, mainland Chinese
culture and especially its art-house lms have been global, transnational com-
modities and “ows.”
When one factors in the larger eld of greater China or Chinese language
cinema in particular, then we can see the veritable explosion of Chinese culture
globally, well beyond the Olympics spectacle. What the rise of Chinese language
lm studies points us to is – for my present purposes – the question of institution-
alization, and specically the knowledge of mainland China that it produces and
reproduces. My argument here is that as the eld has developed it has borrowed
from and reproduced an area studies-based, orientalist and Cold War-inected dis-
course about modern China. It is as if lm studies needed – since we are after all
dealing with “the Other” in a sense that does not apply to, say, French cinema – a
certain amount of historical and allegedly objective detail to serve as a necessary
interpretive framework, backdrop, or context for the study of the new Chinese
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 101
cinema. But in assuming or reaching out for this it never interrogated the elds of
Chinese history and politics proper. Despite or perhaps because of its attention to
world/other/third cinema, lm studies has not had a postcolonial moment. This
importation from area studies has happened despite the more theoretical, reexive,
and “progressive” aspects of the eld as compared to the conventional social sci-
ences. In short, as a discipline lm studies certainly interrogates and unpacks those
celluloid artworks by drawing on numerous sources of theory, but – even when it
does venture outside lm history, lm aesthetics, and so-called “lm culture” – it
rarely interrogates its own sources of information and context either pertaining to
China or to the U.S.-West. The lm eld’s more or less direct, un-problematized
“borrowing” of Cold War/orientalist statements and knowledge about the P.R.C.
from other, largely empiricist disciplines or the larger intellectual–political culture
speaks to what Foucault called regularity in dispersion: that discourses are pro-
duced across a range of sites; knowledges are always multiply constituted, not her-
metically sealed, and it is paradoxically this dispersion that gives them their
strength and unity and that constitutes a discursive formation like orientalism in
Said’s sense. An exclusive focus on the lm text and purported viewing experi-
ence – as opposed to a more considered contextualization – narrows the social eld
of vision. In the rush to develop a “transnational” Chinese language cinema
studies, we not only need to guard against the notion of a singular “cultural China”
(or “Chineseness”) but also against losing sight of the asymmetries and dense rela-
tions of (normative) power that necessarily subtend lms’ institutionalization and
reception.4 More simply, we need to interrogate the knowledge of China that the
lms as well as ourselves draw on and produce. That place is bewitched by Cold
War orientalist thinking.
Whereas the lm eld has productively broached the question of the oriental-
ism within Chinese lms themselves, it has yet to adequately address this type of
question about itself. While the alleged orientalism of the fth generation lms
was an initial aspect of their contentious reception within China and abroad, this
fundamental aspect of their Western, global reception and context has yet to be
adequately developed within Chinese lm and cultural studies.5 But as its insti-
tutionalization proceeds apace – there is now, for example, a Journal of Chinese
Cinemas – it is perhaps the ideal time to interrogate the production not of images
but of knowledge within the eld. As Zhang Yingjin has argued in regard to
Zhang Yimou’s work, the “seductive power of signication” in his lms –
including their ability to be appropriated by orientalist discourse and desire –
“relates more to the Western than to the Chinese audience” (222). But audience
here also means the space of lm scholars and their works, and not simply the
ordinary lm-goer. In other words, if there is a visual basis to Sinological-orien-
talism – and there surely is – it lies not simply in images themselves as much as
in their academic and institutional reception, as well as the larger discourses that
subtend this process. And there can be no denying the importance, even the
dominance, of lm studies within the larger China eld, especially in regard to
the humanities and “soft” social sciences. Curricula, syllabi, and journals world-
wide are far more likely to contain analyses of Chinese lms – usually seen as
102 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
more or less an open window into Chinese reality – than of, say, Chinese litera-
ture, intellectual or political history, ethnographies and oral histories, and so
forth. This of course has something to do with the “universal” but undeniably
more accessible nature of lm language as opposed to Chinese language proper,
and as opposed to reading books. But it is decidedly dangerous and one-sided.
In what follows I will make the case for such a wide-ranging and subtle Sino-
logical-orientalist discourse, and I will seek to counter it by alternative readings
of four important lms and their systematic other-messages about the complex-
ity and positivity of the Chinese revolution and its post-1949 trajectory: Li Wen-
hua’s Breaking With Old Ideas, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou’s To
Live, and Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun. First, however, to establish the
presence of this discourse and to show the imbrication of area and lm studies,
and of Sinological-orientalism and lm more generally, I want to examine what
is perhaps the most critically acclaimed, inuential, and controversial Western
documentary on the P.R.C., namely Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s
Tiananmen lm The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995). This will then set the stage
for an examination of some of the foundational lms – and lm studies – of the
“new” cinema. My emphasis on earlier lms and earlier scholarship may seem
anachronistic to some, but I think it is nonetheless important to focus on these
early, pioneering works and texts for historical reasons, and because they can
show us the formation of that Sinological discourse and – in my against-the-
grain readings – some of what it leaves out or misreads.
Sinology meets cinema: an area studies lm
Gate was co-produced by many well-established China experts, the names of
whom will be familiar to readers of the present study.6 These include
renowned, journalistic “popularizers” of the current doxa on the P.R.C.: that
its modernizing “reform era” is most welcome, but is still a regime and society
tethered-down by the legacy of revolution and Maoism. There were overall
nearly two dozen professional China experts involved in the lm at some level.
It achieved great press from the P.R.C.’s typically ham-handed attempts to
stop its circulation, and from the responses from the exiled Chinese student
leaders themselves (mostly in the U.S.). They almost unanimously disliked or
even condemned the lm for its harsh attacks on their efforts. It is a common
lm on Chinese history and cultural studies syllabi; so, too, is its accompany-
ing website that features numerous writings from the Sinologists who helped
make the movie. Gate, then, prides itself on a putative sensitivity, expertise,
and “insider” viewpoint. Co-director Carma Hinton, the daughter of the radical
and ethnographic historian William Hinton, grew up in the P.R.C. herself. As a
privileged foreigner, she has (or had) unique access to the cultural-elite within
China. Thanks to its academic armor, the lm has a certain insider status and
cultural capital.
While Gate is about the 1989 Tiananmen movement, it is concerned less
with Deng Xiaoping and the killing of hundreds if not thousands of workers
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 103
and students than with the far more charismatic and, to the lm-makers, far
more frightening gure of the former Chairman. What is remarkable is not the
attempt to narrate “what really happened” through some of the participants’
own words, as there is little in the lm’s presentation of “facts” that was not
well known before its release. The main talking-heads are elite “dissident”
intellectuals and a few of the student leaders, but zero ordinary workers and
students.7 What is striking, however, is the omnipresence of Mao. From refer-
ences via the intellectuals to frequent cut-aways to and close-ups on the
famous Mao portrait in Tiananmen, as well as historical footage, Mao is
central to the lm’s narrative. The narration itself drives home two essential
points: that the emperor Mao still haunts China; and that the Chinese people
must “get over it” and become modern, free-thinking, and autonomous sub-
jects who no longer think and speak in the language of revolution and mass
mobilization.8 Thus near the nale of the lm the narrator moves from the
introduction of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue to the specter of Mao.
During an extreme close-up on the Mao portrait, she notes: “If democracy
came to China, what would she look like? There seemed a chance at least that
her face would look all too familiar.”
The lm betrays no awareness that this return might seem welcome to
workers and others in the Square, nor that – as lm-advisor Geremie Barme most
surely was aware – by 1989 there was already a “Mao craze” under way in
China. This consistent cutting back to the image of Mao in the Square and in the
minds of the intellectuals – the only stylistic ourish in the nearly three-hour
lm – reects the lm’s coding of a democratizing, liberalizing China still
trapped in its past (an historicist, orientalist logic). The interviews after this nal
pan and close-up of Mao and the nal voice-over drive home the point all the
more:
When people abandon hope for a perfect future and faith in great leaders,
they are returned to the common dilemmas of humanity. And there – in per-
sonal responsibility, in civility, in making sacred the duties of ordinary life
– a path may be found.
While no one would deny that there was a “cult” of Mao during the CR, it is
altogether something else to code this as inhuman, and to assert that there was
no “personal responsibility” or civility – not even “sly civility” – in the twenty-
seven years of Mao’s rule.
The return-to-sameness is here signied by the Chinese’s deferred but inevi-
table return to common “humanity.” This is also shown by the lm’s critique of
the students. For the lm’s point – later further articulated by script-writer and
associate director Barme9 – is that the students failed, not because of the tanks,
but because their minds and language were still “deformed” by Maoist totalitari-
anism and revolutionary rhetoric. This led to the “extreme” decision not to leave
the Square during martial law. But this was not in fact a “decision” made by any
one leader or by the original Beijing students, but a fait accompli brought on by
104 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
the late-May arrival of hundreds of thousands of new students, workers, and
citizens from across the city and country. There was in effect a de facto general
strike emerging in Beijing. That the lm-makers might know less about what is
to be done than the participants themselves, fails to register. The most specic
target of this “critique” is of course Chai Ling, whose gure as the scapegoat in
the lm (and of the massacre) has been persuasively detailed by Ralph Litzinger
in an essay that exposes the “juridical gaze” of the lm’s camera work, the
placing of the participants “on trial.”10 It is precisely in this obsession with indi-
viduals – be they Chai Ling, Mao, or Wang Dan – as the locus of history and the
future that belies the lm’s normative, judgmental liberalism.
The specic “failure” of “the” Chinese to unshackle their minds from Maoist
extremism comes near the lm’s denouement and right after the close-up on
Mao’s portrait, from native informant Wu Guoguang, former aide-de-camp of
“reformer” and neo-authoritarian Zhao Ziyang11:
. . . the way the whole nation thinks has not yet broken free of the mold
created by Mao . . . What the Chinese lack is not ideals, but the means
through which to realize them [and] the wisdom necessary to achieve their
goal. What the Chinese lack is not a heart, but a mind. After Mao’s death,
hundreds of millions of minds needed to start functioning again.
Wu’s words are the lm’s nal analysis of Tiananmen. The elitism of this goes
without saying, and its implicit assumption of totalitarianism – the absence of
intelligence in a primitive mind – says much about the nature of such liberalism.
The lm offers no substantial thinking – as if the content of the American, new
age self-help rhetoric of freeing one’s mind, having faith, holding the everyday
“sacred” were transparent. Its reading of China is based on lack. But as impover-
ished a “method” as it is, this assumption is also of a piece with the liberal notion
of power in the lm. This is revealed in the focus on the individual as such, and
in the lm’s notion of a purely negative relationship between the state, history,
and subject. The opening voice-over says: “When individuals stand up to power,
they bring to the encounter the lessons that power has taught them, and the harm
it has done them. Merely to stand up does not free us from these things.” This
platitude assumes that power is only negative, that it holds one down and pre-
vents the natural, human course of things, the ow of history towards freedom,
democracy, and whole families shopping at night. This is what Foucault theo-
rized as the repressive hypothesis, as opposed to the productive, dispersed notion
of power he championed.12 Power, in others words, is inhuman and outside of
the subject. Even when it has been internalized, it unnaturally originates from
without, like a shackle. In the Sinological case at hand, this necessarily means
that the locus of power is, as the narrator puts it early on and right after footage
of the Tank Man: “the remorseless machinery of [the] state.” Which is also to
say, then, that even after the last emperor, China and its ineffectual, mind-
controlled people have yet to shed the burden of oriental despotism, or Maoism
and revolution.
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 105
Celluloid mirror: Chinese lm history as Cold War history
Gate’s demonization of Maoism as a great historical burden that must be over-
come; the Cold War discourse of totalitarianism and its inscription of a lack of
agency, modernity, and contemporaneity to its Eastern other;13 the liberal
humanist paradigm that isolates individuals and relies on impoverished notions
of power and politics: all of this can be found in varying degrees in the majority
of Western scholarship on Chinese lm. We can now turn to how Maoist and
post-Mao lm has been coded. Western fascination with contemporary Chinese
lm has several dimensions, from the aesthetic appeals of spectacles like Fare-
well My Concubine (1993) or Hero (2002) to outright sexual desire or scintilla-
tion. As Zhang Yingjin has argued, “oriental ars erotica as a mythied entity is
xed at the very center of Western attention” to Chinese lm, and is in fact
“deliberately cultivated” by the media (Screening 28). And yet, it is the sign of
“history” that is paramount in these texts’ reception, just as their perceived
erotics cannot be divorced from their historical newness. What was most distinc-
tive about the fth-generation lms was that they represented a perceived break-
through, not only within cinema but more grandly. Moreover, they were and
continue to be seen as deeply, mimetically historical, signifying the Real China
and its past, from the era of concubinage to the Cultural Revolution.
As Wendy Larson argues, fth-generation lms are often taken by reviewers
and audiences as historical epics and as exhibiting “Chinese history and thus,
China” (332). Moreover, the subtext of this historicist view on post-Mao lms is
that the nightmarish history they represent is some type of scandalous secret,
unknown or unutterable to the vast majority of the Chinese populace itself who,
due to censorship may never see the lms themselves and so therefore remain
ignorant of their own history. A New York Times review of Zhang Yuan’s Sons
(1996), for example, describes it as a representation of the real China “never
seen in China” itself (Klawans 23). There is thus a central irony to this reception.
For as Larson goes on to argue, a lm like Farewell (and arguably all lms of
that generation) substitutes an analysis of socio-historical events for a depiction
of an ahistorical “crisis of consciousness” (the fractured subjectivity and sexual-
ity of Cheng Dieyi) (334). So, too, Yuejin Wang has noted that while “fth-
generation” lms construct a “cultural identity that the current Chinese public
are reluctant to identify with” and do not share, the lms themselves are – abroad
– taken to be a “cinematic representation of Chinese culture” and therefore, one
may add, a reection of Chinese history (36).
The crucial assumption that enframes this narrative of the “break” and histori-
cal mimesis is that the previous (Maoist) decades were all but a cultural waste-
land. As Rey Chow puts it, the 1980s lms followed “three decades of
propaganda-lled media” (Primitive 26). For Chow and much of lm studies,
then, the tired opposition between art and propaganda has not been thoroughly
problematized over the course of the last century. It is as if left-wing artists in
China, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere (e.g. the Black Arts movement in
the U.S.) were not in fact quite avowedly making “agitprop” and so do not need
106 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
to be taken on their own terms for even a single moment of analysis. Implicit to
this dismissal, beyond Chow’s classically Hong Kong hostility to “mainland”
politics, is the assumption that such Mao-era texts were “bad” and that the –
hypothetical and monolithic – Chinese “audience” saw them as such. Thus John
Howkins, in a so-called “pioneering study” within mass communications, casu-
ally remarks that “some lms were produced during the Cultural Revolution, but
I have been told . . . that they were so dull nobody watched them” (Briggs vii;
Howkins 67). Paul Clark will remark that “audiences yawned in vast numbers”
at such lms, and only attended them out of “boredom” or fear; he bases this
“analysis” on his own observations as a student in the P.R.C. during the mid-
1970s (Clark 128, 202n5). One wonders what such critics would make of the
revivals and popularity of the “revolutionary model operas” (and lms) in China
today, or of the similar ongoing appeal of the songs, food, and memorabilia from
the Cultural Revolution. What is striking, then, is the assumption that Chinese
audiences must have seen such texts like “we” would, and the “proof” of this in
mere anecdote or hearsay. It is also worth noting that the fully “artistic” lms of
the 1980s and beyond have in fact had, generally speaking, very little commer-
cial success and critical acclaim within China itself.
This failure to take such radical era texts seriously at all, let alone on their
own, revolutionary terms, is reected in the dearth of attention given to the cul-
tural production of this era in standard textbooks and surveys of Chinese litera-
ture and culture.14 My own reading of Li Wenhua’s most famous lm is meant to
address this gap shortly. But rst, we should further establish the reception of
such texts within Chinese lm history as written in the West. In a widely used
anthology on lm history, Chris Berry presents the cinema of the leftist decades
as a space of lack, such that after the late 1930s, “an opportunity” for “talent to
make itself visible” was not to present itself again for another forty-ve years,
“until One and Eight and Yellow Earth” arrived (“China Before” 413). The
implicit modernization-narrative here – where the Westernized, cosmopolitan
lm-makers of the 1930s–1940s and then of the 1980s are the only relevant
artists – is made explicit in Esther Yau’s contribution in the same volume: “Until
. . . 1984 attempts to modernize lm language did not go beyond that of humanist
realism” (“China After” 699). Thus the different Maoist aesthetics – rst “social-
ist realism” and then the later combination of “revolutionary romanticism and
revolutionary realism” – are assimilated to a vague humanist realism despite the
critique of humanism within Maoist discourse.15 Moreover, the key assumption
within Berry’s and Yau’s accounts is that Mao-era lms were lacking something
– a something never substantiated, but which we assume is the conventional
standard of formalism and “creativity.”
Into this posited void steps the fth generation in a spectacular sign that
China is now producing authentic art/lm. The modernization teleology reaches
its full expression in Ying Zhu’s argument that Chinese New Wave cinema rep-
resents the successful quest for cinematic modernization – signied by the birth
of the Chinese “art lm” as such, and by the rejection of socialist “pedagogy”
and nancial “dependence” on the state. It is as if Chinese cinema were a child
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 107
who must go beyond schooling and dependence on his or her parents (“Cine-
matic Modernization” 451). This rhetoric of maturity and pop-developmental
psychology is common in Chinese cinema studies, from Jianying Zha’s tab-
loidesque China Pop to Paul Clark’s coding of Chinese lm history as the striv-
ing for “maturity” on the part of both lm-makers and audiences (Clark 94, 181).
To be sure, this is or was common to indigenous lm discourse at the time, and
reects the complicity between Western lm studies and current intellectual
fashion on the mainland (the uncritical embrace of “humanism,” modernization,
anti-Maoism, and so forth). Even in the rare cases where the Mao period is not
elided entirely, as in Clark’s inuential Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics
since 1949, the lms themselves are subjected to a harsh criticism as “art” in the
conventional, “bourgeois” sense of what real lm/art should be: ambiguous with
an “innovative style” and answerable to no one, let alone one class. Additionally,
one can see this refusal to address the “red and expert” lms on their own terms
in Clark’s recourse to a conventional, “universal” genre classication and analy-
sis. Since the lms of the 1950s–1970s do not at all t squarely into standard
genres, he must come up with vacuous genre-types, e.g. the “cheerful types” or
“serfs and smiles” lms.
In a common bifurcation of Chinese lm history,16 Clark speaks of two
“camps” within the artistic and Party intelligentsia: Yan’an (Maoist, radical)
versus Shanghai (cosmopolitan, “modern”).17 The former represents conformity,
the workers-soldiers-peasants aesthetic and the Party line, and the latter artistic
autonomy and the modern and “mature.” This speaks to both the resurgence of
Shanghai itself in the 1980s as a “booming” global city during the Dengist
“open-door” policy, and the scholarly recovery of a cosmopolitan – semi-
colonial – Shanghai culture.18 While this division is problematic and should not
be seen as mutually exclusive in the way Clark implies – a point even made by
one of the former participants whom Clark interviews19 – the larger issue is how
this opposition is coded. The “cosmopolitan” Shanghai tradition is clearly the
term of value, despite or perhaps because Yan’an is “more Chinese” (2). More-
over, Yan’an is consistently described as a “faction,” a “paternalistic” “regime”
obsessed with controlling the work of lm-artists, as “promulgators” of “dogma”
and “narrowness,” and so on (56, 86, 131). The Shanghai “mentality” is repre-
sented favorably; there the people are always “artists” with “sensibility” (52,
181). The specter of Yan’an looms so large that this fundamental split grows
into a “Yan’an-versus-the-rest” formulation, pertaining not just to the lm world
but all of China (34). It is as if nearly everyone were secretly opposed to the CP
and Maoism and the regime had no legitimacy.20
The normative split between Yan’an and Shanghai that governs the history of
Chinese lm does not code this split in terms of the “two-line struggle” – that is,
the class-based, friend/enemy ideological conict between the leftist–Maoist line
and the more bureaucratic, “capitalist” and Stalinist line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiao-ping. As will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter, the two-line
struggle was a fundamental aspect of Maoist discourse, governmentality, and the
self-understanding of Mao-era subjects. The absence of this dynamic political
108 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
division within standard Chinese lm history is striking because much of revolu-
tionary culture, including Mao-era lms like Breaking With Old Ideas, were cen-
trally concerned with it. So, too, the Yan’an/Shanghai split cries out to be
articulated to this basic dyad of political China. It is especially pertinent here
because these two place-names themselves signify not the “Party versus artistic
freedom” or state versus the individual, but these intense two “lines” and devel-
opment strategies for post-liberation China: the Maoist agrarian strategy cen-
tered on the North and interior regions and based in communization, work
points, and radical egalitarianism, and the more Sovietized vision centered on
the rich urban centers of Southern and coastal China, based in the use of markets
and material/prot incentives. “Yan’an/Shanghai” was part of this same prob-
lematic and conict. It was a political conict between left and right and not
simply an aspect of lm/cultural history in their narrow senses, or some dubious
opposition between “ofcial” and “independent” artists. The Maoist concept of
two-line struggle, then, can be seen as an invitation to situate lm and other texts
in their own history, as a rst step of placing them back into their own revolu-
tionary context. It is one way to begin to take Mao-era texts seriously and to see
what they have to say, beyond their too-easy Cold War dismissal as inauthentic
art.
Breaking with an old idea: Jue Lie as Maoist art
Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie, 决裂) was released in 1975, near the end of
the Cultural Revolution, but is set during the height of the Great Leap Forward of
1958–61, at a remote agricultural college in a mountain village in the Jiangxi
province in southern China. This dual context is already of import because it sug-
gests that the CR is less of a break within Chinese Maoism than it is often
assumed to be; from this standpoint, both the Great Leap and the CR are continu-
ations or resurgences within the drive to institutionalize Maoism as against revi-
sionism or the more Soviet/“capitalist” line as noted above. It turns upon the
struggle to emphasize poor peasants and workers in education (to open admission
based on class), and to integrate study with labor. More grandly it is about
fomenting a revolution in the educational system along Maoist, Cultural Revolu-
tion, or Yan’an lines. But education also here refers to cultural reproduction in
general: as the protagonist Lung puts it, the aim is to create “socialist conscious-
ness and culture.” Principal Lung, who was with Mao at Yan’an, has been
appointed to the college and quickly enters into conict with the existing admin-
istrative hierarchy. The latter wish to emulate the elite urban universities by
admitting students based on standard exam results (bourgeois “merit”) and fol-
lowing an international curriculum (read: Russian and Western). The most
humorous sign of the latter is when Dean Sun lectures on horse anatomy to his
students, though that particular animal does not exist in this part of China. Thanks
to Lung and an old peasant whom Lung recruits as his Admissions staff ofcer,
fourteen lower peasants are admitted to the new school on the basis of their
family background and class consciousness. (This dovetails with the “afrmative
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 109
action” class-based system of preference advocated during the CR.) The students
and Lung then lobby to have the curriculum t their local and peasant needs,
including having farming lessons in the actual elds.
At one point Lung is sent away by the Party on a tour of other agricultural
colleges. During this time, an exam is scheduled in an attempt to have the
peasant students fail out of college. The night before, insects are discovered in
the brigade’s rice paddies while most of the villagers are away buying fertilizer.
The students, led by peasant woman Li Chin-feng, go the elds to handle the
pests, but in so doing miss the important exam. More accurately, they turn in
blank exam papers and are promptly expelled. (This is an allusion to the famous
“blank exam paper” of Zhang Tieshang, who in 1973 turned one in while writing
on the back that the exam system was unfair to the rusticated youth who had
been working for the collectives.) With peasant and lower-level cadre support,
Lung reinstates the students.
But tensions remain, and at a later point the District Committee announces
that some collective land will be privatized and the individual household
responsibility system will prevail (this indeed happened some few years later
in the 1980s Deng-era countryside). Student Li condemns the new policy as a
“poisonous weed” and is jailed. A public meeting is held to criticize her. She
remains opposed, and two other non-radical students have a change of heart
and step forward to criticize both themselves and their fathers. (One student, at
his father’s behest, has been charging money to castrate pigs, whereas the
other’s father has used his connections to secure her admission to an elite
urban university.) The Party hierarchy prevails, however, and gives the order
to close down the college. Lung promises the students to appeal to Mao. In a
last twist of the conventionally crisis-driven plot, before Lung can act again,
word arrives from Beijing that in a letter Mao has already approved the stu-
dents’ actions and the labor college’s policies. The lm ends in images of a
joyous mass rally.
This outline is worth detailing because it suggests something of the force of
the lm: it lies less in characterization, ambiguity, and formal experimentation
than in practice (action), and the political thematics that such an exclusive
emphasis is meant to convey. What is of interest is the way in which the lm
offers a sharp popularization of Maoist ideas about education and the new
China’s developmental strategy, including cultural revolution in general. It is a
concrete but rigorous induction into late Maoism: theories of permanent revolu-
tion, two-line struggle, agrarian strategy, and even gender neutrality. Breaking
With Old Ideas is thus a uniquely valuable asset in providing for posterity just
such an artwork. If you want a propagandistic but rigorous, ideal-type yet deeply
historical representation of what Maoism was, from Yan’an to the Great Leap
through the CR, turn to this 1975 lm. It is in this sense deeper than the model
operas yet more accessible than, say, the works of Zhao Shuli or Hao Ran. Or to
put it another way, “Breaking” offers us an image of the self-understanding of
late Maoism, or the Cultural Revolutionary vision as articulated from Yan’an
onwards. It is worth, then, unpacking some of the thematics of the lm.
110 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
As can be seen from the plot, the lm turns upon the notion of the two-line
struggle between leftism (“Maoism”) and revisionism (“capitalism”). Lung and
the peasants (students and villagers) represent the former, while Dean Sun (ini-
tially), Chao, and the higher-level Party ofcials as well as the two errant stu-
dents represent the latter. It is in the depiction of this struggle and especially the
depth of the leftist line that the lm is genuinely illuminating. The revisionist
side is essentially the old guard and elite who were already in place after the rev-
olution in 1949; they represent the old way of education and of money-making
and upward-mobility as a way of life, the old culture. This side is not simply
demonized but is given substantial screen time. While they are types, they are
not simply immoral villains: Dean Tsao, for example, is given full lines and
rationality, and has a point when he says that he has served the revolution for
decades. He and Dean Sun also have a point when they claim that copying the
elite/urban universities, admitting only on “merit”/exams, and teaching a univer-
sal curriculum is the only way that this new school will produce the “best” stu-
dents. It is not that the lm agrees with such statements, let alone with the
explicit move towards privatization/capitalism by the District Committee. Indeed
the leftist line simply speaks in an entirely different vocabulary as to what things
like “best student” means, or about what the purpose of education is (to serve
and protect the revolution and the working classes). But it is the case that this
“capitalist” line is adequately presented, and in a rational if revisionist way (as
when Deputy Chao says, à la Deng Xiaoping, that under the new rural system
everyone will become prosperous).21 Dean Sun is a middle character who under-
goes self-reform and learning through labor while conversing with and observ-
ing Lung, as well as through practicing veterinary medicine for the village.
(Initially he had chased away a peasant who brought a sick buffalo to class and
interrupted his horse lecture.) This is fairly unusual for a CR-era text, which
tended to exclude middle characters and ambiguity in favor of all the more
intense and emphatic political expression (as in the model operas like The Red
Lantern).
The purpose of the lm is to induct viewers into taking up the revolutionary
leftist line and subject/viewing position; it is resolutely pedagogical. It does this
not simply by explicating what Mao would have said but by presenting a whole
series of oppositions that subtend the basic leftist/revisionist one. For what the
leftist line amounts to is nothing less than the valued term in the following hier-
archies (which themselves mark a reversal of the typical and capitalist/modern
way of viewing the world): rural/urban; manual/intellectual labor; class/liberal
autonomy; politics/knowledge; work/study; “gender-neutrality”/patriarchy; par-
ticipatory or mass democracy/bureaucracy; practice or “history”/theory; particu-
lar/universal; and so on.
While each of these pairs could be explicated in detail, I want to focus on
two: gender neutrality or the proto-feminism of the lm, and its historicism
versus its theoreticism. It is clear that while the “feminism” of this lm is less
strong than in, say, some of the model operas or a lm like Xie Jin’s The Two
Stage Sisters (1964), it is nonetheless signicant. When the lead student radical,
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 111
Li Chin-feng, is admitted to the college on her revolutionary and class-
consciousness credentials, the old peasant admissions ofcer begins to make her
case by saying that she had been a child-bride under the old system. She later
became a leading gure in the Women’s Association during the land reform. In
short, her specically gendered conditions of oppression as well as her feminist
credentials are made equivalent to her working-class and revolutionary creden-
tials. They are of whole cloth. Furthermore, she brings her infant to the admis-
sions meeting, thus making visible her gendered body. She then becomes the
leading student and the subject of frequent high-angle close-ups. While her body
is not objectied, her intense, even angry visage is, the very sign of militancy
and “serving the people.” The fact that her husband is nowhere present – not
mentioned once – is also a signicant absence; for all intents and purposes she is
a single mother. But the child also does not reappear; nor is their any reference
to child-rearing and domestic labor. Just as her leadership role – with Lung she
is the lm’s protagonist – signies the CR slogan that women can do whatever
men do, these absences register the gender-neutrality of her representation: that
is, to signify the concept of gender-neutrality within Chinese feminist/Marxist
discourse of the time. Under this problematic but sincere state, feminist dis-
course gender is simply supposed to not matter, and it does not do so in the
world of this lm. What matters is political line. A utopian but signicant
gesture.
The historicism of this lm, sitting side by side with its ideal-type typology à
la Eisenstein, begins as noted above with its very setting in the Great Leap
Forward, and the resultant signication that there is a strong continuity and con-
sistent concern for cultural revolution from Yan’an to the Leap to the CR. That
in itself calls into question the Sinological coding that Mao was only ever after
complete and total personal power in these three major campaigns; in a circular
and logical non sequitur, it is as if Mao had total power at all of these moments
and yet used them to gain that. By historicism here I refer to two things. The rst
is the lm’s radical historicization of the Cultural Revolution and of P.R.C.
history from Yan’an until 1975. The second is the lm’s historical or contextual
and Marxist logic, i.e. its analysis of education and Chinese development along
Maoist lines – the famous need to Sinify Marxism by making it speak to Chinese
and not universal conditions. 1975 is the key date despite the Great Leap setting,
because while this makes the point about continuity as mentioned above, the real
aim of the lm seems to be to offer an analysis of, and intervention into the CR
itself. Several scenes are clearly of specically CR provenance, perhaps most
memorably the rst meeting about the new economic policy and then the large
public criticism meeting against Li Chin-feng. In both instances she stands up to
ranking Party ofcials and criticizes the new policies in Marxist terms (that they
will lead to a return to the old days of exploitation and a culture of each against
all). By having her deance serve as the key to the lm’s denouement (the sur-
vival of its new, peasant and rural-based educational system), there is an ines-
capable message about the place of the CR in Chinese history: not just that “it is
right to rebel,” but that the CR is the logical outcome of China’s drive towards
112 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
continuous revolution and the achievement of a Marxist/Maoist state.22 Coming
at the end of the era when many participants are burned out, and at a time when
the future of the revolution is very much in doubt, the lm makes an emphatic,
impassioned argument for the necessity and justness of the CR.
So, too, the basic plot of educational reform ts the CR above all else in that
era’s renewed drive to increase rural education and to admit students from work-
ing-class and peasant stock. Even more specically, there is a reference to “work
teams” being sent down from higher levels of the Party to disseminate the new
economic policy. While not mentioned by name, it is hard not to read this as a
reference to Liu Shaoqi’s work teams sent down by Liu at the beginning of the
CR to quell student and worker rebellion and therefore escalating the line strug-
gle. As several reviewers have noted, there is also a brightly colored, poster-like
quality to the lm’s visuals. The motif of zoomed-in facial close-ups is of a piece
with this poster-like quality, and is used to express either joy or anger in the
deeply binary, affective world of the lm’s politics. So, too, the body language
used in the lm, especially Lung’s and Li’s slow, strong, deliberate turns towards
the camera, resembles the stage movements of model opera actors, as when Li
clenches her sts against her sides after she is shoved into jail.
For the lm’s other historicist dimension or logic, we need simply to follow
Lung’s (and Li’s) arguments for developing the labor college in the rst place.
Just as the Party had to eventually break with the guidance of the Soviet Comint-
ern to Sinify its Marxism in order to achieve victory and liberation, higher edu-
cation needs to t the specic conditions and places of China. Not least for a
would-be Marxist developmental state, this means unifying labor with study
since they are organically related and also because what China needs above all is
development, i.e. effective labor. (And clearly in this lm, labor – even or espe-
cially hard, rural labor – is seen as a dignied and ennobling end in itself.) This
means that the aim of education is to produce workers with “socialist conscious-
ness and culture.” So, too, it means admitting the poor and working classes
above all, since the last must now go rst. In the context of a desperately poor
and sharply unequal Third World society, it is simply absurd, not to mention
anti-democratic, to take, say, Harvard or Qinghua Universities as the model for
the rest of China to follow. As the case of postcolonial India shows, that will do
little to develop literacy and the national economy, and it is further axiomatic
from the Marxist perspective that exams based on “merit” will only reproduce
the class system, not end it. This is all a very simple but profound and pro-
foundly democratic philosophy of education. And it is one of the real merits of
“Breaking” in that it allows us to see that this was the leftist/Maoist philosophy
of China during the CR, just as the revisionist line of Dean Tsao et al. represents
the Liu-ist emphasis on specialized knowledge (as opposed to general education)
and the culture of “experts” (as opposed to the “red and expert” line of the left).
Far from an anti-intellectual program (and despite the persecutions of elite intel-
lectuals), the upheavals in the educational system were meant to empower the
working classes, and to develop universities and secondary schools that actually
t China’s urgent needs, as in the famous practice of barefoot doctors. They
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 113
were also real struggles over competing visions of education and indeed of
Chinese development and modernity.
The lm makes this argument in several ways, from the humor of teaching
irrelevant zoologies to Lung’s trenchant criticisms of teaching about Russian
birches and Siberian soils in a land of clay and bamboo. (In the Chinese context
of the late 1950s, these are not as exaggerated examples as they might seem.)
The unity of labor with study is also signied in several visually striking pan-
orama shots of the students building classrooms out of bamboo forests, taking
agricultural classes in the elds, and working together to spray the elds after
the enemy insect invasion. The unity of work/study as well as the organic con-
nections between subject matter and local context all make the educational phi-
losophy seem perfectly natural and democratic – a far cry from current images
of what Maoist education in the CR was all about. Whatever else we can say
about such a historicizing logic, itself pitted against the theoreticism of follow-
ing Harvard/Qinghua, the lm offers an emphatic case of the self-understanding
of the Maoist/leftist line during the CR. It may well seem like a “period piece” in
many ways today in that it captures the political vision and passion of the era.
But it is far from the empty, “bad” propaganda that Western lm studies posits
about the post-1949, pre-1980s eras.
Reviewing Yellow Earth: from anti-communism to the
politics of ambivalent discourse
The above reading of “Breaking” hopefully suggests something of the complex-
ity of such Mao-era artworks – especially but not exclusively at the level of
political theory – and how they diverge from Sinological-orientalist, Cold War
discourse. But in the present context it is the fth-generation cinema that put
Chinese cultural production back on the map of the Western imagination. In
what follows, I focus on this moment as represented by Chen Kaige’s Yellow
Earth (1984), and I want it to show the divergence between the standard lm
studies codings of these lms as subtly but openly “subversive” or “dissident”
texts on the one hand, and their actual, complex and ambivalent depiction of the
Chinese revolutions on the other. A brief but detailed reviewing of Zhang
Yimou’s To Live follows suit. Even in these texts, which supposedly offer a
radical break with the Chinese cinematic and political–historical past, there is a
deep, profound, and partial but signicantly positive understanding of the revo-
lution and its aftermaths.
Let us turn to Yellow Earth. As is well known, this breakthrough lm of the
fth generation has nearly always been taken as not just a revolution in Chinese
cinematic language, but as an indictment of the Communist-led revolution itself.
The chief evidence for this indictment is said to be that the lm shows a still
poverty-stricken countryside (as if the lm’s 1930s setting matters not) and that
the heroine Cuiqiao dies in an attempt to join Yan’an. Comrade Gu, a low-level
Maoist, 8th Route Army cadre, does not return in time to save her. From this
standpoint, he is beholden to an allegedly bad party discipline that requires that
114 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
she must rst be approved before she joins the communists in Yan’an. But even
here it must also be said that in the violent, militarized context of such revolu-
tions and liberation movements, no party ever functioned without such rules.
Reading this aspect of the lm as a critique of the Party is in this sense more a
sign of our own, depoliticized times than otherwise. Thus in an otherwise
insightful analysis of the “Western analysis” of the lm, Yau locates its “critique
of Chinese culture and history” in the “proposition of capitalist-democracy as an
alternative” to communism; she also refers to the prose article on which the lm
is based as a “trite” glorication of the peasants during the revolution (a story of
one peasant girl’s struggle to break away from “her feudal family”) (“Yellow
Earth” 76, 63). In another throwaway reference to the lm’s source, Mary Ann
Farquhar refers to it as “supercial” and “a Communist literary cliché” (222).23
The stylistic, cinematic transformation of this story – a heroic struggle against
“feudal” patriarchy and poverty – by the lm is thus key to its perceived achieve-
ment and breakthrough. But it must also be said that at the level of plot, the lm
does little more than simply change the original text’s resolution.
But there is an obvious question that goes begging: What is wrong with texts
about revolution, peasant women, and the real, historical successes of the CP in
winning them over in the pursuit of national liberation and egalitarian develop-
ment? The P.R.C. itself is literally inscribed with such stories, and it would
simply not exist if they did not contain a good bit of actually existing truth. In
this context, further characterized by the predominance of elite, urban, aristo-
cratic cultural texts before the revolution, the subject matter and plot of Yellow
Earth’s source-text are far from trite, banal, or omnipresent. Non-elite histories
and cultural texts remain a minority discourse in China today, too. This is all to
say, then, that much of the appeal of Yellow Earth – its historicity and rich
content – has much to do with this source-text. Dismissive, casual remarks like
those above are disavowals of China’s own, actually existing revolutionary and
nationalist history and its socio-economic conditions. It is also impossible to say
what evidence there is for the charge that the lm offers capitalist democracy as
an alternative to Yan’an. That the lm, under a certain and I think dubious
reading, offers a critique of communism and the revolution, does not mean it
therefore holds forth the great American way as the alternative. One is tempted
here to invoke Zhang Yimou’s criticism, in a letter to Cannes, that his and other
Chinese lms are always reductively critically received abroad as either for or
against the government, never as something in-between or simply other than
this.24
Other assumed evidence of the lm’s “subversive” critique of the state and,
presumably, nationalism/patriotism turns upon the its characterizations and plot
as much as its visual style. Thus for Yau, Gu is “ignorant of Cuiqiao’s dilemma”
– as if poverty, lack of political power and representation, as well as patriarchal
customs (dowry, child marriage) were somehow not her primary conditions of
oppression (“Yellow Earth” 74). Gu makes all of this clear in dialogues between
her and her father. Her disappearance on the river while singing a Communist
song discloses, for Farquhar, the truth that “the male world of revolutionary
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 115
ideology brings disappointment and death” (227). For all the remarkable
achievements of Chinese state feminism before and after 1949, one can of course
not proclaim that the Party eradicated patriarchy. But one can still wonder what
was specically “male” about Chinese Marxism, let alone the character of Gu,
aside from his sex. This is not a transparent notion. In all the lm’s numerous,
long close-ups and silences between shots, Quiqiao is not eroticized and objecti-
ed by the “male gaze” that Laura Mulvey theorized via classical Hollywood
cinema. The proposition that Gu’s “gaze” is male, and Cuiqiao the “objectied”
victim, neglects the fact that it is the audience, and not Gu, whom the camera
most often places as the point of view or “gaze.” Such is the power of this lm-
studies trope – which Martin Jay has argued is a key piece of the strident deni-
gration of vision within contemporary theory25 – that even in a decidedly
non-Western context the concept has not traveled to so much as occupied the
eld of analysis. So what motivates the above critiques appears to be a univer-
salizing lm-studies-inspired feminism.26
It is hard to see how Cuiqiao’s death can be taken as a rebuke of Maoism and
the Party, who never claimed that victory or revolutionary consciousness would
be or was easy to achieve. Quite the opposite, which is indeed the point of the
glorication of the Long March and of revolutionary martyrs before and after the
revolution. The difculty and grandeur of the struggle to achieve socialism goes
a long way towards explaining the persistence, the affective incitement, of “per-
manent revolution” and “going to and learning from the masses.” While there
can be no denying the lack of a happy ending or reunion between Quiqiao and
the Party (Gu), one can nonetheless see her death and plot-strand as a deeply
realistic depiction of tragic rural conditions and lives. Moreover, Quiqiao’s and
Hanhan’s identication with Gu’s ideas, personal example, and revolutionary
cause is nowhere ironized or subverted by the lm or camera. When we recall
that the Cultural Revolution itself was premised upon the Maoist idea that China
was only ever on the transition to socialism, and had not achieved it but was in
fact in danger of moving towards “revisionism” or capitalism, then the fact that
Yellow Earth does not show impending national victory like, say, The Red
Detachment of Women (ballet), cannot be taken as proof of some “subversive,”
dissident critique.
In short, as the lm passes its twenty-fth anniversary, it should no longer be
possible to see Yellow Earth as “against” the Party-state and revolution. It is
simply not, on its own terms, part of some Cold War discourse of good and evil;
but its critical reception has been. It of course remains an art-house style lm
and neither agit-prop nor commercial cinema, and it may be symbolically,
subtly, and cryptically pointing to a gap between the Party’s ideals and its rural
realities. But this is all fairly banal, and it must also be said that for actually
existing Maoism and the Chinese left, pointing to such gaps was part of what
they did. So, too, the lm resists Western colonialist and Chinese elite-urban
(and zhiqing) assumptions and understandings about rural China being a space
of utter lack, of “feudalism” and backwardness. The alleged exposure of these
last two qualities was seen by many critics as part of the lm’s “critique” of
116 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
communism.27 The two siblings’ character development belies this (they come
to a political, radical consciousness) as does the father’s compassion for
Cuiqiao’s plight and for Gu’s song-collecting task (he nally sings for him on
the eve of Gu’s departure). So, too, the somber and poignant rain prayer at the
end of the lm is a fascinating ritual that ends with a rich emotional ambiva-
lence. The father, his face streaming with tears in extreme close-up, is sur-
rounded by the other, actually joyous peasants.
With such complexities in mind, recall the lm’s nal movement. Gu is in
Yan’an viewing a fabulously energetic waist-drum performance; these are the
loudest moments in the lm and the only fast, rapid camera movements. This is
the type of organic, local folk art that the Maoists valorized. The energy, vitality,
and spectacle-value of the scene establish Yan’an as a place of energy, hope, and
community. Gu then returns to the village to help in the elds and to pick up
Cuiqiao; on the way, he approaches the farmers’ rain prayer ritual that closes the
lm. Here Hanhan runs towards but does not reach Gu. Meanwhile, sometime
before this and unbeknownst to Gu, Cuiqiao disappears on the Yellow River on
the way to Yan’an. This all happens as a sped-up dénouement of an otherwise
slowly paced lm famous for its static camera. The energy and affective force of
the overall “movement” is not in my view subverted by Hanhan’s or Gu’s
“failure” to reach one another on screen or by the nal shot of the horizon. These
are obviously deliberate gestures and may have been intended to suggest some
type of allegory or metaphysical point (just as Chen may have meant to suggest
the rain prayer indexes feudal primitiveness). But I am less interested in an
intentionalist reading than in the overall feel of the lm and its internal logic.
The unfullled reunions only add to the dramatic tension and suspense, and the
message they should have and must unite. One can read these nal sequences,
capped off by the rousing Yan’an drum music that plays during the credits, as
producing a third, dialectical meaning. This is that it is in the tragedy of the
lm’s ending, in the contradiction between revolutionary desire and its obstruc-
tion, wherein lies the revolutionary hope. This is the properly utopian, radical
impulse. What I am suggesting, then, is that the lm takes the need for, and dif-
culty of revolution in the countryside quite seriously – as something desper-
ately difcult but desperately needed. It has not yet arrived, but should and must.
In this sense, and as with Gu’s sympathetic characterization, the truth-value of
his messages, and the energy of the drum corps, the very idea and project of
Maoism come off well indeed. From this angle, the lm starts to appear very dif-
ferent from the Cold War discourse’s simplications. For Gu is not a Liang
Shuming-style liberal-reformer against land reform; and the Rain God prayer is
not validated as authentic, real, “oriental” China. And since the lm was made at
the very height of de-collectivization, it is at least as much a meditation on the
post-Mao era as on the Maoist one. It cannot, then, be seen as some transparent
endorsement of Dengist “reform” or capitalism. It is true that the lm refuses the
socialist–realist demand for plot-resolution (the happy endings of the model
operas, or of Xie Jin-style melodrama), and opts instead for a more ambiguous
nale. But not all ambiguities and modernisms are the same; for every T. S. Eliot
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 117
there is a Lu Xun or Mao Dun. Yellow Earth, then, is neither for nor against its
government and resists predictable allegorical readings, perhaps the dominant
mode of analysis in a Chinese lm studies ever compelled to suss out “pro” or
“anti” government positions. It clearly, visibly afrms the need, ethics, and
ration ality of the revolution.
When tragedies are not what they seem: on To Live
One could multiply instances in fth-generation cinema that are not nearly or at
all anti-communist. We can at least suggest some of this diversity and complex-
ity by briey examining the one fth-generation classic – Zhang Yimou’s 1994
To Live, based on Yu Hua’s novella – that seems all about the evils and tragedies
of Maoist communism and the Party state.28 While the lm is not as political and
afrmative as Yellow Earth, one can and should perceive visible, cinematic evi-
dence that contradicts the harsh condemnations of the Great Leap Forward and
Cultural Revolution found in, to take two notable examples, the CCP’s ofcial
“Resolution of Party History” in 1981 and the liberal documentary series He
Shang.
At a surface level, To Live seems to move in step with the media-sanctioned,
anti-Maoist discourse of the West (and differently, of elite China). Thus in a
sweeping, allegorical reading of incidental details and one minor character
(Chunsheng), Rey Chow argues that the lm is deeply anti-regime and anti-
totalitarian. In her view, the lm subverts its own principal thematic – the char-
acters’ virtuous ability to survive allegedly “traumatic” hardship – by criticizing
this same ability as the lynchpin of Chinese/Maoist totalitarianism.29 For Chow,
the ability to live through hardship is a political and ethical failure, a curious
valuation indeed. She will even code Chunsheng’s desire to suicide (“to die”
versus “to live”) as a subversion of the totalitarian desire and ability to endure,
that is, as a subversive gesture within the lm. Thus a classic stereotype about
passive, anonymous if not mindless Chinese masses – recall the “army of blue
ants” – is not only invoked here but yoked to a Cold War, anti-communist notion
of totalitarian “brainwashing” and the lack of some normative, proper mode of
subjectivity. As if the Chinese (“Mao’s people”) are so lacking that death is the
only way out.
But this allegorical surface-level is nothing but that which a quick and easy
allegorical mode of analysis produces, particularly when it is under the pressure
of a Sinological, Cold War discourse premised upon a Mao era that by denition
cannot have what Zhang Xudong likes to refer to as an “irreducibly complex
world of life.” What is remarkable about this lm is that it plays with this very
same cultural Cold War discourse, and moreover with our predisposition to use
it to read “things Chinese” in symptomatic fashion.
To illustrate, recall the suspenseful if not foreboding rst scenes of the daugh-
ter Fengxia’s proposed, arranged marriage to factory worker and Cultural Revo-
lution Rebel Wan Erxi. There is much silence in the sequence when Wan meets
her parents. This is most notable when, during a discussion of Wan’s impressive
118 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
working-class lineage, Fengxia’s mother Jianzhen points to the father Fugui’s
certicate of service from the PLA. Wan reads it carefully, pauses, says “good,”
and then leaves abruptly. A sense of impending doom is thus set up for the Sino-
logical viewer anxiously awaiting a horrendous scene of violence or betrayal
“typical” of the CR. This is then catalyzed in the next scene when Fugui and
Jianzhen are out shopping and then told that a group of Red Guards is on their
roof, taking it apart, and making all manner of noises. We then cut to a tracking
shot of the parents walking down their dark, narrow entrance-way, on into the
inevitable scene of cruelty. But the “inevitable” does not occur; instead we cut to
Wan and Fengxia (now in Red Guard apparel) painting a brilliant red wall-mural
of Mao. We soon learn that Wan and his comrades have repaired the roof and
furniture. They leave abruptly.
This sequence amounts to more than a neat trick. For what produces the
tension and eventual relief is more precisely “our” collective sense that some-
thing horrid must follow any setting of the Cultural Revolution and its youth.
Our sense here is not innocent but ideological; it is our incitement to a Cold
War–orientalist discourse. The real achievement of this sequence is the lm’s
subtle calling forth, and subsequent mocking, of ourselves, that is the Sinologi-
cal viewer who has a certain “knowledge” of the Real China. For there is liter-
ally nothing in the scenes that should produce this sense of impending doom,
nothing in the earlier silences, in the camera angles or points of view, or in the
parents’ conversation, nothing that – save for our tacit knowledge of what hap-
pened during the CR – should seem ominous.
Another example would be the shadow-puppets Fugui used to make his living
in gambling dens and then for the PLA. Here, the delightful gures are almost
collected (conscated) for the Great Leap’s iron-smelting program. But when
Fugui suggests he should entertain the workers with them instead, this is readily
agreed to by the neighborhood cadre. This presentation of “good,” sincere, non-
“brainwashed” Rebels, Red Guards, citizens, and cadres is, in fact, of a piece
with the rest of the lm’s representations of personal tragedy through the Maoist
and pre-Maoist decades. For only the daughter Fengxia’s death during childbirth
can be reasonably ascribed to Maoist governance, in that the doctor who could
have saved her was being “struggled against” by Red Guards. (Mao initiated the
CR and sustained it.) But the doctor’s incapacitation was also tragically brought
on by the father, Fugui, who gave him too many steamed buns and too much
water to eat on an empty stomach. This inadvertently immobilized him and pre-
vented him from operating. The death of their youngest child Youqing, on the
other hand, cannot be laid at the feet of the Maoists and “totalitarians” – unless
random vehicle crashes and construction accidents are in fact part of some
Orwellian conspiracy. The car does not hit Youqing himself but the wall he is
leaning on at the time. Again, our tacit knowledges and expectations of tragedy
and Communist malfeasance are at the very least in tension with what is actually
visible. But the lm also raises complicated ethical and interpretive issues about
who is responsible for what during the Maoist campaigns or in life in general.
The Red Guard scenes are crucial here – they are rendered as human youth. The
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 119
lm makes a certain cosmic, perhaps fatalist or even Daoist perspective. This
may be apolitical, quietist, or profound, but it is not a secretly subversive, dissi-
dent-style text about totalitarianism, and nor does it attempt to be.
None of this is to suggest that To Live is somehow a leftist or even progres-
sive lm in the manner of Yellow Earth, let alone Breaking With Old Ideas. It is
in the end a melodramatic, humanistic, but metaphysical tragedy that does not
say Yes or No to the revolution, let alone “subvert” it. This in itself can be seen
as something of an intervention into the utter demonization of the red years in
China and abroad. But does one read Hamlet as a faithful rendering of Denmark,
or The Dream of the Red Chamber as a crypto-documentary about the Qing
dynasty? Chinese history, too, is only illuminated textually and in a highly medi-
ated fashion. Any resultant interpretation will necessarily be political. Such “the-
oretical” truisms need to be repeated in the context of lm studies and
cross-cultural challenges. The eld is in too much of a rush to code its lms as
either for or against the government and/or Maoism (to be good they must be
“subversive”).
It is precisely contemporary (1980s–) Chinese lms’ positive and, at other
times, ambivalent representations of revolutionary history that have passed
unnoticed in their celebration in Western lm studies. This is to suggest, then,
that To Live’s depiction of Maoist history is both more and less than what it
seems to its Western critics. It is more than an historical epic of the Mao years,
for it is primarily a melodramatic, cosmic narrativization of Fate and the “human
spirit.” It is less in that the lm’s Maoist citizens hardly t the brainwashing
code of totalitarianism, just as the individual tragedies that do happen to take
place during key Maoist periods (the Leap, the CR) nonetheless cannot be
ascribed to political repression, totalitarianism, or even government malfeasance.
The lm toys with just this Sinological expectation/anxiety. Thus the desire of
oriental, Cold War discourse to atten out and reduce Chinese history to a mor-
alistic dualism – despotism, passivity, domination versus dissidence, or a pres-
ently lacking liberalism and modernity – reveals itself in the academic reception
of such lms.
Of course for all their distance from Sinological-orientalist condemnations
of Maoism, lms like To Live and even Yellow Earth are still hardly Maoist/
Marxist agit-prop like Breaking With Old Ideas. They are not nearly so politi-
cal and passionate. They are in fact closer to the liberal-humanism of lm
studies itself, though it must also be said that Chinese 1980s humanisms were
more diverse than the tacit humanism of U.S.-Western academe.30 This differ-
ence between the lms’ views of Maoism and those of the West is instructive.
It reveals the limit of universal (Western), liberal humanism itself, its incapac-
ity to deal with historical and cultural difference. This difference in approach,
or in how the Mao era is understood, also reects the presence and power of
Sinological-orientalism, a discourse in which the difference and complexity of
China cannot override the desire to code it (including its cinema) as nally
becoming-the-same, becoming modern like “us,” and overcoming its revolu-
tionary past.
120 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
CODA: the closed system of lm studies, or no light for In
the Heat of the Sun
Even in contemporary lm that departs radically from the stylistic, thematic, and
political concerns of the fth generation, one can discern a similar, Sinological
reception, and a certain Cold War and crypto-colonial discourse. While this is
not the place to survey the so-called sixth-generation lms, we can nonetheless
revisit Jiang Wen’s early and remarkable contribution, In The Heat of The Sun
(1994). It can illustrate its departure from the fth generation and yet the strik-
ingly similar coding, on the part of Western lm studies, of the lm’s represen-
tation of Maoist history. (Jiang, it should be noted, is one of China’s more
popular actors.) Whilst the lm had commercial success at home and critical
appreciation in festivals abroad, it has received much less attention than any of
the fth-generation classics. And except for the notable contributions of Wendy
Larson and, more briey, of mainland scholar Chen Xiaoming, the lm has been
subjected to an all too familiar coding as yet another secretly subversive, dis-
senting critique of Maoist and Cultural Revolution totalitarianism. And this for a
lm that was controversial in China for its nostalgic and positive portrayal of the
CR as the “best time of our lives.”
My emphasis in this brief section is thus on the lm’s coding in scholarship,
but rst not without establishing the lm’s plot and chief thematic concerns, and
what made it controversial in China. A frankly homosocial, coming-of-age story
focused on the youthful experiences and libido of protagonist Ma Xiaojun
(notably portrayed by Xia Yu), the lm is roughly based on Wang Shuo’s novel
Ferocious Animals. But director Jiang makes the characters not violent hooli-
gans but a small group of male friends, plus one female “comrade,” who grow
up in a military neighborhood in a fairly empty Beijing. The large majority of
the lm takes place in the summer of 1975, very late in the Cultural Revolution
(well past its radical, violent activist phase in 1966–8) and at a time when Ma
and the others are free from school and from their parents. (Ma’s are off partici-
pating in the “real” CR.) Hence, they spend most of their time fooling around,
getting into ghts with rival “gangs” (only one of which is actually violent), and
chasing girls. Ma in particular likes to break into people’s houses, though
without stealing anything. Ma et al. are in their early teens that summer, though
the lm does ash back briey to Ma’s pre-teen years. Moreover, it is narrated
by the adult Ma (Jiang Wen himself), and the important nal scene, shot in black
and white in contrast to the rich colors and bright lighting of the teenage years,
is a contemporary 1994 reunion of the male friends. They drink whiskey and
drive around in a Cadillac (a high-status brand at the time). At that nal moment,
a character from their past, the mentally handicapped neighborhood boy named
Gulunmu, emerges on the sidewalk right by their car and swears at them (calls
them “fucking stupid”).31
Before we get to that denouement, much of the lm involves Ma’s coming-
of-age and in particular his ardent pursuit of the slightly older, female comrade
of the group, Milan (played by Ning Jing). (Earlier in the lm Milan suddenly
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 121
and randomly replaces the rst female friend of the group, Yu Beipei; this is part
of one of the lm’s themes, namely the elusiveness of memory.) Ma falls madly
in lust with Milan. But for all his efforts to woo her beyond their mutual friend-
ship, she chooses the eldest of the gang, Liu Yiku. In a t of jealous rage Ma
sexually assaults her, but Milan quickly overpowers him. While this is clearly a
reactionary moment, it must also be said that the lm does not condone the
sexual violence, even as it does objectify Ning’s body in several earlier shots.
Moreover, the whole lm is also framed by the narrator’s consistent questioning
of the veracity of his own memories: did his stabbing of Liu Yiku happen at all?
Was Milan a real person, or just Yu Beipei? After the assault Ma is apparently
excommunicated from their group and we never see Milan again. Cut then to the
nal, black-and-white scene in the present and Gulunmu’s damning verdict on
the reunited, well-off youth. Well-off except for Liu Yiku, who has become
speechless and catatonic since his service in the invasion of Vietnam. For all the
narrator’s admissions that his memories might be unreliable, he is nonetheless
quite clear as to how that lost era felt: despite his parting of ways with his friends
(due to his attack on Milan and the Dengist end of the CR itself), it felt exciting,
alive, full of hope, and represented the freedom to do as he pleased. In this Ma
indeed represents any number of actual, former Cultural Revolution youth.32
As for themes the lm clearly turns upon, not only nostalgia for the CR and a
free youth as opposed to the grey present, but on sex and “radical” passion spe-
cically. Chen Xiaoming takes “sex” (and sexual awakening) to be the dominant
theme of the lm and argues that it “guarantees the successful evasion of the
political allegory” (Chen 136).33 That is, it enables the lm to offer an alterna-
tive, nostalgic take on the Cultural Revolution that is clearly at odds with the
dominant coding of the CR in China, particularly among the urban elite and
especially abroad – that it was solely a time of scarring, national catastrophe, and
so on. Wendy Larson takes this insight further in her illuminating and character-
istically rigorous account of the lm’s interpretation of the CR:
Wang Shuo and Jiang Wen both show how the attitudes associated with rev-
olutionary romanticism – a fearless disregard for danger in pursuit of
victory, goal-oriented persistence, lyricism in spirit, and loyalty – have inl-
trated the consciousness of the young men . . . and have easily been trans-
ferred into semi-revolutionary . . . or unrevolutionary milieu.
(Larson, Ah Q to Lei Feng 159)
That is, the teenage Ma and the rest of his gang demonstrate such a spirit, a spirit
which is not directly political as it is for the older generations but which is none-
theless radical in that it derives from the “heroism revolutionary life exemplies
and its liberatory potential for all people and nations” (161). It is also a spirit ori-
ented towards the future as Larson notes, or more accurately towards making the
future a part of one’s “existential perspective” (161). The larger point here is that
the lm’s so-called nostalgia for the CR – its positive valuation of it – lies in it
being the source of this not-political (for Ma et al.) but radical spirit and openness
122 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
towards the future. And it is precisely the present’s distance from such
possibilities and spirit that mandates it being shot in black and white and capped
off by Gulunmu’s curse. Post-Mao China may by rich (for some), but it is decid-
edly poor and inferior in other, existential ways. Not the least of which is spirit
and affect. Again, while not a political, radical lm like Breaking, we thus have
to see Heat as a commercial but fairly bold intervention into the demonization of
the CR by scar-type narratives and area-studies discourse.
This has not, however, enabled the lm to escape a predictable Sinological
coding. As Liu Kang notes, even the title of the lm reveals such a struggle: the
multi-national producers made the English title In the Heat of the Sun as opposed
to the more tting “Bright Sunny Days” (Liu, “Popular Culture” 114).34 This was
a prot-oriented allusion to Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning
Burnt by the Sun (1994), a lm literally about Stalinist terror and the great
purges in 1936. But as Liu notes, this was also a political decision as the title
was also changed – and its sympathies for the CR “underplayed” – to court favor
and pre-empt a predictable anti-Maoist backlash at a Taiwanese lm festival
(“Popular Culture” 113).
What is more, the lm has actually been taken up – in Western lm studies – in
just such a backlash fashion. In a Žižekian reading of the lm, Lu Tonglin attempts,
as psychoanalytical criticism apparently must, to prove the truth of Lacan/Žižek at
the expense of the lm and its Chinese context. Faced with a lm that clearly in
some sense celebrates the CR, the critic reads it not against the grain in a conscious
manner but perversely as a “subversive” critique of the CR. She begins by trying to
circumvent Wang Ban’s and others’ arguments that CR ideology and culture,
including the cult of personality, was deeply held in a conscious and sincere way.
For Wang this is what totalitarianism was, and Lu seems appropriately aware of
how theoretically underdetermined this concept is. But her attempt to get around
this reading of the CR winds up in a strikingly similar place indeed. For Lu, what is
wrong with Wang Ban’s as well as others’ more conventional take on the term is
that it does not recognize that participation in the CR was often ironic in the well-
known Žižek/Lacan sense: that people were aware that what they were saying and
doing was wrong (they still held the dominant ideology at a certain inner distance),
but they still did it anyway. It was not totalitarian (for Lu) because they did not
really believe in it after all. One is not sure if this is better or worse, or makes them
more or less duped, cynical, or postmodern before-the-letter.
While this Žižekian re-description of classical Marxism’s “ideology” is certainly
clever in so far as it goes (while still a model of false consciousness), it is hard to
say what it has to do with the two crucial matters at hand: In the Heat of the Sun
and the CR itself. So, too, there is the signicant question of how well any lm, of
all mediums, can serve as a reection or index of social and historical reality. But to
deal with the former rst: Lu’s reading is unsurprisingly ahistorical and in terms of
the lm very brief. Her essay dwells mostly on Žižek and the usual explications of
key psychoanalytic concepts; when it broaches the lm it sticks to relatively insig-
nicant moments and details, such as the minor, supporting character of Liu Yiku
(the gang leader and rival of the younger Ma) and a swimsuit portrait of Milan.
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 123
Both of these details, like most others in the lm, fall within the thematics of sex,
radical desire/passion, and the elusive, lost quality of memory. For Lu, however,
they all signify specically Žižekian/Lacanian truths about the real, universal nature
of ideology, fantasy, enjoyment, desire, and the like. Thus for example:
Liu is the Thing par excellence, whose relationship with the protagonist is
unsymbolizable. In this sense, he functions as the real, serving both as an
insurmountable obstacle to Ma’s erotic fulllment and as an obscene gaze
that inspires and stirs his desire for that fulllment.
(Lu 548)
But in their totality, all these bits and bobs of “perfect” examples of Lacanian
theory are meant to serve one point: not just the truth of psychoanalysis (as
always), but that “a collective frenzy [the CR] provides its participants with an
opportunity to experience pleasure in pain, or surplus enjoyment” (Lu 555). Not
unlike Jung Chang, she refers to the CR as a frenzy of “generalized victimiza-
tion” (557). By providing a Lacanian perspective on ideology-and-enjoyment,
the lm is somehow subversive of the CR. As if such criticisms of the CR were
somehow progressive, let alone radical. Heat reveals the dangers of “collective
frenzy” in overriding individual “responsibility for [one’s] own conduct” (Lu
561). Despite the Žižekian provenance of the essay, its conclusions serve the de-
politicizing ambit of much Cold War scholarship.
With hints of sadomasochism, this description of the entire decade and the
activities, let alone psyches, of hundreds of millions of Chinese is rather familiar
after all. It is nothing but the conventional, totaliatarianist “account” of the CR
as a nightmare of, in this case, slightly more sophisticated brainwashing and
violent, “theoretical” perversion. For the collective “frenzy” is also an undiffer-
entiated, collective “fantasy” of a cynical but still false consciousness. The elitist
and orientalist nature of this understanding becomes clearer when we recall Lu’s
gestures to historical sources for this view of the CR: Roderick MacFarquhar’s
histories and a conversation with the decidedly elite lm-maker Chen Kaige.35
This coding of the CR, in other words, comes from very conventional social
science and a bit of personal reection. As with the area studies documentary
(Gate) and lm studies more broadly, the dominant, unsophisticated knowledge
of the CR is uninterrogated. It is incorporated into the lm analysis as the neces-
sary “background” and historical “proof” that the otherwise – actually – pro-CR
lm somehow illustrates. There is simply no cognition of the alternative, critical
and left-leaning scholarship on the CR that ies in the face of such standard
accounts, a body of work that one can reasonably expect authors in positions and
lm studies to know because of their progressive nature.
Even in a more conventional study of Heat with more due attention to the lm
itself, we see a similar coding. Thus Yomi Braester argues – against the lm’s
“nostalgia” for the CR and its freedom and radical spirit – that it is a critique of the
era and an allegedly totalitarian Maoism. Tellingly, Braester himself notes in
passing Feng Jicai’s great displeasure with the lm’s afrmative, pleasurable
124 Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm
depiction of the CR, as well as mainland scholar Huang Shixian’s similar remarks
(192, 200).36 This is direct evidence from mainland China that the lm was notori-
ous for its positive portrayal; but none of this leads Braester or Lu to question their
reversal of the lm’s intentional point. Nor does the Chinese context bother a Time
magazine reviewer who argues that it depicts “the fratricidal madness of the Cul-
tural Revolution” (Corliss 66). This, despite the fact that there is very little vio-
lence in the lm and zero factional struggle; the only death – of a minor character
played by Wang Shuo – takes place off screen, in passing. Part of the problem here
is simply the parochial nature of lm studies and lm culture. For all their claims
to a cosmopolitanism and an appreciation for the foreign, these have yet to ade-
quately decolonize or go through a postcolonial moment. Consider, for example, a
review-essay on the recent anthology of writings by the Marxist–feminist, main-
land critic Dai Jinhua (Cinema and Desire). In a manner consistent with area
studies discourse, it faults Dai for not citing enough Western lm scholars and for
not being a dissident.37
There are a number of debatable readings in Braester’s essay, from the tech-
nical to the ideological. For example, he codes the lm’s trope of bright-lighting
and sunny, outside locations as somehow “Mao’s relentless light . . . [and] the
scorching of memory” (emphasis added) (203). To be sure, Mao was often rep-
resented as the sun in communist iconography and the lm’s title connotes this.
But this seems ironic (the youth are apolitical and fun/sex-seeking, not revolu-
tionary), and “sun” does not necessarily imply anything unpleasant, let alone
sinister. But for Braester here the summer sun – and one not depicted as notice-
ably hot – must signify a dictator. However well this allegorical claim might
pertain to Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun – explicitly dedicated to “those who
were burnt by the sun of the revolution”38 – the fact remains that the lighting in
Heat is never harsh or glaring, just as Mao was not Stalin and China not Russia.
Here the lighting is simply warm, bright, and luminous, of a piece with the nar-
rator’s own sense of his youth as the lost but most special time of his life. Again,
the black-and-white nal scene punctuates this. The light is gone, and it is a pity.
For Braester, Ma’s questioning of his ability to know the past amounts to a
subtle critique of communism and totalitarianism. Here the reference is not
Lacan but the Sinologist Barme.39 His point is that Heat shows that one “cannot
free the collective memory from the spell of past images but” can be “aware of
their compromised position, unable to create an idiom free of Maospeak and
Maohistory” (205). The last two neologisms are simply cheap Orwellian meta-
phors for radical rhetoric and historiography in China, two things that the current
regime loathes as much as do liberal intellectuals. But this claim for a totalitarian
prison-house of language is for Braester the lm’s message and – beyond this –
the specic, real ontological condition in which Jiang Wen and writer Wang
Shuo nd themselves. This makes the two popular artists into classic anthropo-
logical subjects (i.e. objects). And it is a problematic summation of the lm. One
might begin with the assumption that there should and can be memory without
images of the past. So, too, in the lm the type of revolutionary rhetoric voiced
by Ma and others is not unrealistic or ironic, but is if anything underplayed.
Screening sinology: on the Western study of Chinese lm 125
What is more, the assumption that there is such a thing as a singular form of
Chinese speech,40 and that this is still tragically deformed by the Maoist past,
takes us back to the orientalism of the Gate lm and the notion that “the Chinese
mind” (to adopt a classic orientalist phrase) is not only unitary but lacks some
crucial thing, is almost but not-quite modern.41 So, too, from at least the Boxer
Rebellion onwards, Chinese political rhetoric (if not all revolutionary rhetoric
everywhere) has very often taken – to a liberal ear at least – an “extreme” form
of appearance. We are thus presented with a problem of analysis, rather than an
opportunity for liberal posturing. One can either lament such rhetoric, as do Gate
and Braester, or try to approach it on its own terms, as impassioned and rational–
practical language with “Chinese characteristics” and its own political–cultural
roots. That would seem to be the approach of the lm-maker, as Jiang Wen
revises Wang’s satiric novel. Finally, Barme/Braester’s “Maohistory” appears to
refer here to the “ofcial” line on Mao’s national greatness. But this ignores the
brute fact that it is the Party – a liberal intelligentsia – that condemns the Cul-
tural Revolution and virtually everything else Mao did except founding the
nation-state. Braester’s point seems rather anachronistically directed against the
disgraced and scapegoated Gang of Four, who long ago passed from the histori-
cal stage.
What in the end are we to make of such problematic readings of Jiang Wen’s
lm, and the limits of Chinese lm studies more broadly? What such misread-
ings and limiting framings of Chinese political history reveal are not personal
failings but the force of Sinological, Cold War discourse and politics. The
specter of Maoism or the Party-state must be exorcized. This occurs not only in
area studies proper, but also in lm work. And even when – or because – the
P.R.C. itself repudiates Maoism, and even with a lm (Heat) where the Chair-
man is signied only in passing through eeting shots of wall-murals and one
statue. That specter is in a very real sense the very framework of modern China
studies, including lm scholarship. The dubious gure of totalitarianism (orien-
tal despotism) is indispensable to how both elds produce knowledge about
China. The Mao era must be represented as a lack, a difference that must be and
is being overcome in China’s process of becoming-the-same. Thus Heat can be
reframed as a “subversive” critique of a Maoism – apparently still alive and well
in Braester’s analysis – that seeks to violently impose a monolingual, mono-
lithic, and completely transparent society. This is ColdWarspeak and it conicts
with a Maoist discourse that was premised upon the ceaselessness of contradic-
tions and historical change, not to mention continuous revolution. Heat can be
recoded as a correct, right-thinking critique of Maoism only if this was the a
priori conclusion posited at the very beginning. Thus speaks the circular, self-
referential system of Sinological thought.
7 The China-reference and
orientalism in the global economy
So far we have focused on China discourse in variously specialized, journalistic,
popular, and creative texts within Western but also global intellectual political
culture. I have argued that Sinological-orientalism – evidenced in the representation
and codings of Tiananmen in the Western imaginary, in the demonization of the
Mao era and Chinese governance, in the elision of Maoist or radical discourse, in
the enumerative modality producing dubious Great Leap Forward scholarship, and
in the totalitarianist codings of China in lm studies and in DeLillo – pervades and
helps form that culture and politics today. There is a weight to the construction and
place of “China” across these different sites – a formerly benighted and oppressive
China now slowly becoming modern and on our normal path. Sinological-oriental-
ism, in short, is a discursive formation that is rendered visible and made coherent by
its “system of dispersion.”1 Such a formation is constituted across different elds
and discliplines, and derives its identity, power, and systematicity from this. I have
argued that the regularities of Sinological-orientalism can be found in certain tropes,
interpretive themes, and concepts: the totalitarian or oriental-despotic, and with this
the construction of the Chinese as brainwashed, duped, or enthralled to a Great
Leader/emperor and authoritarian governance; the coding of the mass campaigns as
well as Tiananmen 1989 and after (e.g. anti-N.A.T.O. protests) as irrational or at
best not-quite normal; and the denial not just of complexity but of coevalness. China
is or has not until recently been modern; culturally and politically (but no longer
economically!) it lags behind its Asian neighbors and the West; it is still in the
process of leaving its past behind, so as to follow normal development and fully join
the global community. China has been tragically different and lacking (a lack of
modernity and “normality” above all); but it is now slowly becoming-the-same as
“us.” Either the difference or the sameness may be emphasized in a given analysis
but these remain the normative poles, and it is assumed that China can and someday
will nally become like us.2 It is in this sense that the new orientalism marks a shift
from the essential difference between East and West to their – China’s – general
equivalence: a sameness structured by a hierarchical difference. And there is, within
all these shared and homologous accounts or uses of China, a common heuristic
strategy: not just the authority to speak for Chinese pasts, presents, and futures (the
common position of enunciation), but the positional superiority of the Sinologist. As
noted before, we can see this as more akin to the civilizing mission of the French
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 127
empire than to the differentialist, British logic of the white man’s burden. But it also
specically reects American political–economic “leadership” (hegemony) and
thinking (fetishizations of markets, “freedom,” and so forth).
Now I want to examine yet another subeld and dispersion of Sinological-ori-
entalism – namely, contemporary theoretical discourse about globalization and the
“new” world order after the end of historical communism. It is “Western” work –
by theorists as diverse as Laclau and Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri,
and Slavoj Žižek – that uses particular and seemingly slight references to China,
but these moments are in fact crucial for consolidating the argument and project at
hand. I will interrogate the increasing presence of “China,” of its histories, prob-
lems, and achievements, of “China” as historicist or empiricist referent and as an
“example” of some other global truth. I will then follow up on this high-powered
theoretical work with an interrogation of recent literary studies that, while fully
Derridean, seek to de-politicize the representation of China and keep post-colonial
critique at bay. The chapter and book then concludes with a return to questions of
social space, capital, and the limits of Sinological-orientalism. I do all of this in
part to again help make the case for the orientalist dispersion at work in the world.
But I also wish to return to two broad and enduring problems of Said’s model of
orientalism and of Western knowledge about China. The rst problem, one largely
unexplored within postcolonial studies, is the relationship between orientalism and
capitalism. Beyond the theft and conquest of resources and labor entailed by colo-
nialism or imperialism and prepared and rationalized by orientalism, how are we
to understand the relationship between this last and capitalism? And how is this
specically “Sinological” or China-centered now, standing as we are beyond the
overt or “high” colonial/extractive eras of the British and French empires? While it
has not escaped anyone’s attention that the West’s relationship to China is over-
whelmingly an economic one, we have yet to examine how our very understand-
ings of China – or Sino-orientalist knowledge – might in some sense be economic
or “capitalist.” The second, and I will argue related problem refers to the ontologi-
cal (“real”) and veridical status of Sinological-orientalism and of its constructed
post-Mao “China.” Why do such reductive, tendentious, or often sheerly ideologi-
cal accounts of China seem true and real to so many? A related question here is
simply, Why China? Why is China – formerly only semi- colonial – singled out as
the vehicle for such knowledge production? Of all these questions, more later.
As bets an era in which it seems impossible not to believe that China has all
but assumed – or resumed – a pre-eminent role in the world system, recent years
have witnessed increasingly frequent “China references” in the elds of cultural
studies and current theory about globalization or politics (as opposed to area
studies proper). This is an inevitable historical shift brought to us by increased
globalization. It is most welcome, given the importance of China globally, the
lack of interdisciplinarity in area studies, and the isolation of the China eld
from the linguistic and theoretical turns within the humanities. China is no
longer just for the Sinologists and “experts”, and this is a good thing. However,
if the question of China (and the Sino–Western dynamic) has never been prob-
lematized theoretically then it behooves us to attend to how “China” is used, to
128 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
attend to not only what the China-reference is meant to say, but to the work that
it does. This work is, I would submit, to help constitute the identity of the U.S.-
West and its intellectual–political culture. The function of the China-reference is
not to actually say something insightful or even thoughtful or accurate about
China, but to help prove the truth of said theorists’ theoretical and political
claims. What we can witness in the historicist or empirical reference is the reduc-
tion of a Chinese event to a particular – and often ill-considered – “fact” and the
insertion of this “Real” China into a historical teleology that has culminated in
the current global conjuncture (the postmodern Empire, the new global order,
and so forth). This, in turn, raises those above questions about capital and orien-
talist logics working together. The problem here is not simply one of generaliza-
tion and abstraction, because theoretical critique is necessarily both of these
things. The problem rather is that such usages are often self-referential and, in a
word, supercial; they betray no serious engagement with the question of China
through intellectual labor, even eliding the abundant English language studies
cited throughout this study. Hence the remaining problems of positional superi-
ority and the politics of knowledge.
“China” in theory
Let us begin with an inuential, even foundational theoretical text that would
seem to have little to do with China and globalization, but which did convince
many that there was, or could be a “politics” to postmodernism: Laclau and
Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. This text offered a Derridean cri-
tique of classical Marxism by looking at how the logic of hegemony emerged
within Marxism, so as to deconstruct the concepts of totality and historical
necessity. While this is not the space to rehearse the book’s reception, it is worth
noting that Marxism in this book is of the Western, if classical kind. But the
gure of Mao does pop up several times, and it will be instructive to briey map
this. Mao’s writings on the ceaselessness of contradictions – as Althusser aptly
put it, his submitting of the dialectic to the dialectic3 – are treated thus: “despite
their near-to-zero philosophical value,” they nonetheless unintentionally have
the “great merit of presenting the terrain of social struggles as a proliferation of
contradictions, not all of them referring back to the class principle” (64). Later in
a one-paragraph dismissal of Marxian dialectics tout court, they refer to Mao’s
“picaresque notion of dialectics: his very incomprehension of the logical charac-
ter of dialectical transitions enables a logic of articulation to be introduced, in a
dialectical disguise, at the politico-discursive level” (95). There are two things
worth noting here. One is simply the arrogance typical of colonial discourse in
its condescension towards other, native sources: Mao – one of the most educated
and erudite thinkers of his generation, an acknowledged master of Chinese prose
and poetry – is simply not an intellectual, let alone a “real” philosopher. This is a
minor tradition within Western Marxism in regard to Maoism. Sufce it to
mention Leszek Kolakowski’s ethnocentric screed in Main Currents of Marxism
(Maoism reects “traditional Chinese xenophobia” and a crude peasant mentality),
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 129
or Isaac Deutscher’s calling Maoism half-full of “Oriental conceit” and the
Cultural Revolution the last stage of “oriental despotism” in China (Kolakowski
514; Deutscher, Unnished 94).4 What is of greater note, however, is that Laclau
and Mouffe insult Mao’s intelligence and yet take one of his most basic and
explicit themes as their own: that the dialectic and contradictions have no end,
that not all struggles are class struggles, that one has to deal with the multifari-
ous masses and not just classes.5 They take Mao’s pamphlet-style essay on con-
tradictions as an unintentional but real proof of the logic of articulation and the
impossibility of any objective, complete mapping of the “social totality.” There
is a certain historicist gesture here: Mao unwittingly arrives at the correct inter-
pretation of theory and dialectics before the later, full-on post-
structuralist/“French” Enlightenment. Despite their withering critique of one
type of stagist Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe adopt their own notion of progress
here. They are also unable to see Mao (or his predecessors and collaborators) as
someone who creatively developed and pushed Marxism and dialectical thought
into a more encompassing, worldly, and effective direction t for a largely rural
or Third World world. (This is also why Maoism – despite its real limits in a
world featured by powerful military-industrial states – remains the only “live”
revolutionary theory.) Mao thus falls into the category of the “not yet”: someone
who just could not possibly have willfully arrived at a philosophical position
shared by contemporary, modern, or postmodern sophisticated, radical intellec-
tuals. Mao and they were, unknowingly and unintentionally, only almost “there.”
We should also recall that it was Althusser who, via Marx’s Grundrisse,
introduced the concept of articulation to contemporary theory, and thence via
Laclau, Mouffe, and most notably Stuart Hall, into cultural studies.6 Althusser
was strongly inuenced by Mao’s essays on philosophy and by the Cultural Rev-
olution, the era that gave the lie to the idea that severe contradictions and politi-
cal struggles were more or less resolved after the initial, “real” revolution, and
that societies moved in sure, dialectical stages. If any leader of state knew some-
thing about articulation – that links, movements, and struggles have to be assem-
bled, that there are no laws of historical necessity, that the superstructure can
determine the base – it was Mao. As Robert Young among others7 has noted,
Maoist theory became highly inuential among radical left intellectuals in
the 1960s. . . . The degree to which French poststructuralism more generally
involved what amounted to a Maoist retheorization of European political
and cultural theory, as well as its complex connection to Indian postcolo-
nialism, which has also been deeply affected by Maoism, remain as yet
unexplored.
(Postcolonialism 187)
In an important sense, then, one of the fruits of Maoism in the West may well be
post-structuralism. Or at least its anti-essentialist, “articulatory” bent, arguably
the most useful aspect of the entire, hugely inuential enterprise. And yet it is
not so much that this issue has been unexplored as almost willfully denied, in the
130 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
West as in Laclau and Mouffe’s deconstructive genealogy of Marxist thought.
By the later 1980s it became and remains rather bad form to refer positively to
Maoism or Mao’s China.
The complex record of Maoism in China and elsewhere admits a number of
interpretations. But the erasing or demonization of it and the P.R.C. from impor-
tant historical, political, and intellectual developments in the West is orientalism.
A return to the essential distinction between an uncomprehending China and a
rational West. This landmark poststructuralist text, then, does have to do with
globalization in that it disavows but reveals the absent presence of Maoist theory
and the Cultural Revolution: their impact on Western thought, which last was in
itself in part animated by the great ideological and political ferment of the 1960s
and 1970s and what is now disparagingly called Third Worldism. Notwithstand-
ing the ultimately failed attempts of China and newly independent states across
the Third World to delink from the capitalist world system, this era must be seen
as a key moment within the history of globalization and internationalist political
thought and culture. Even in the West today the impact of Maoism lives on and
takes new, if often negative forms (as in DeLillo’s Mao II, news media, and so
on). When current theoretical discourse turns to the study of globalization it nec-
essarily if often unconsciously arrives with its past in tow, and more to the point
here, with the residues of a “China” or “Maoism” on board. But if China,
Maoism, and the P.R.C. were a marked and positive inuence on theory in the
past, they – as in Laclau and Mouffe’s later, piggybacking text – become a much
less inspired, and frequently negative presence in current global work.
In the concluding chapter of The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben turns
to Tiananmen 1989 to demonstrate the actuality and worldliness of the new
global situation and of his chief concept in the book: “whatever singularity”
(84).8 The latter refers to a community without “determinate contents,” without a
dening essence or identity, without “conditions of belonging,” and beyond any
national ascription. Agamben’s project here is to nd an ethics that can ground
community, but one not based on ideology or, apparently, history. As with his
later work, Agamben attempts to privilege ethics over politics, expressing a
refusal of national belonging and the salience of the nation-state that clearly is
shared somewhat later by Hardt and Negri’s work. This non-identitarian com-
munity of what he calls “the Chinese May” is, in his opinion, a new develop-
ment to the extent that it was not a struggle for the “control or conquest of the
State,” but stood opposed to it as the “non-State” (Coming 85). This last is a
term he equates, appositionally, to nothing less than “humanity” itself. It is this
lack of an identity and belonging that the state – qua state – found most intoler-
able in the protestors’ actions, and it is this that it was attempting to suppress.
Right off, however, we should note a striking discrepancy between the
“China” of the U.S.-West and the “China” within the mainland. Tiananmen
remains the most emblematic event of Post-Mao China from the point of view of
those living outside of the People’s Republic. In part due to state censorship,
1989 – while hardly unknown – has nowhere near the iconic status within China
as it does outside. For better and for worse, and in part due to mainland state
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 131
censorship, it is simply not the Sinied analogue of, say, the Prague Spring, and
within China the anonymous Tank Man is not, as he is for Time magazine, one
of the last century’s greatest, most iconic heroes. My point here is not to down-
play the signicance of Tiananmen in an absolute sense, nor to excuse Deng
Xiaoping et al. from their criminal violence. It is, though, to mark the difference
between an inside and an outside, and to mark the Western xation on an event
that serves as the key event of post-Mao China and the emblem of China’s
perdy in an era when it “threatens” the U.S.-West’s political–economic domi-
nance. But while the choice of Tiananmen is itself signicant here, the larger
issue is the content of what Agamben and other theorists have to say. And strik-
ing in this regard is very simply the matter of historical accuracy and, by exten-
sion, of knowledge.
Whatever the merits of Agamben’s sentiments, he is uninformed when he
claims that the only concrete demand of the movement was the rehabilitation of
the recently deceased General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. Historians of the event
concur that the student movement as a whole was actually patriotic (the youth
insisted on this) and wanted above all recognition by the Communist Party – which
it by and large did not oppose or demand to abdicate. Their demands included
treatment as an equal, valued partner in carrying out the ofcial state policies of
modernization and reform. Within China studies, the consensus laments these
characteristics, seeing in them the lack of a more Western, proceduralist under-
standing of democracy and civil society, and identifying this lack as the reason for
the movement’s failure. So, too, the notion that this “community” lacked a repre-
sentable identity would come as news to the participants, or to readers of Zhao
Dingxin’s book on the subject, which thickly describes the turbulent and fractious
jockeying for personal and ideological control within the leadership.9
This internal struggle within the student movement, and their external con-
icts with the Party and at times with the workers’ groups on the Square, were
certainly about identity and recognition as much as about ideology, policy, and
social justice. Tiananmen contained the inevitable mix of factors in a protest
movement and a struggle over representation. The students’ demands for the
reversal of the April 26th People’s Daily editorial that called them unpatriotic,
for ofcial dialogues with CCP leaders, and for the dismissal of Premier Li Peng
(who declared martial law), have to be seen as in part a struggle over identity.10
So, too, for the workers’ calls to have Deng’s and others’ nances publicized,
and for their own big-character posters that (contra Agamben) made specic
demands for, say, the right to form their own unions and get paid, and that more-
over proclaimed themselves as the vanguard of the nation and revolution.11 Such
fundamental aspects of the protest movement nd no space within Agamben’s
analysis of the Chinese March-to-June event, and his positing of a communal
“singularity” beyond identity and against the state is simply asserted as a roman-
tic obviousness. It is just something that is known, without the need for research
and elaboration.
The Tiananmen events, then, here become a oating signier, whose only
concrete meaning is precisely its rhetorical function as the historical proof of
132 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
Agamben’s conceptual work: that we are beyond the nation, that traditional
forms of politics, ethics, identity, and collective struggles are anachronistic, but
we are witnessing, messianically, the birth of singularities and new forms of
global community. Agamben’s use of China – and he concludes his study with
Tiananmen, one of the few, specic, contemporary examples in his text – must
be seen not as a measured analysis of the actual events but as of a piece with the
popular images of Tiananmen 1989: the Tank Man, the Goddess of Democracy
statue, the spontaneous explosion of common humanity underneath the visible
foreignness of China, and so forth. For Agamben, as for Hardt and Negri as dis-
cussed below, this is Tiananmen as spectacle. As Rey Chow once put it: China is
that thing that “facilitates the production of surplus-value in the politics of
knowledge-as-commodity”: “it becomes . . . the ‘Other’ onto which the unthink-
able is projected” (87). This is, before the letter so to speak, a sharp critique of
the autonomist/Deleuzian/singularity romantic theory-stream in general. But the
larger point is that China – like the classical “Orient” – has often served as a
screen for attempts to think the not-here, not-Western, wholly Other. So, too, as
we have examined in an earlier chapter, the great majority of China studies
scholarship still codes the protest movement as the birth and then termination of
(bourgeois) civil society that stands opposed to the state and that is disconnected
from class. Agamben’s text may be poeticizing Tiananmen, but practically
speaking it ends up in that far more familiar and depoliticizing “global civil
society” mode of analysis.
Far closer to the events themselves would be to read the crackdown as a pan-
icked response to the general strike emerging in Beijing due to the activities of
the workers more than to the students and intellectuals on which the West
xates. The movement and the workers’ overwhelming presence in it are best
seen as a class-based response to unemployment and “structural adjustments” to
a formerly planned, socialist welfare system. From a Marxist or worker’s per-
spective, 1989 was a response to an increasing political authoritarianism linked
to the state’s abdication of social welfare and a rising neo-liberalism.12 Hence
the absence of an anti-state position, and rather demands for inclusion by stu-
dents and workers. As for the civil society interpretation, or Agamben’s similar
but more profound anti-state one, Wang Hui has argued against both on the
grounds that in China, the public sphere has for a long time existed “within the
state’s space” and so cannot be a “natural deterrent” to state power (China’s New
Order 179–80).13 Wang consistently defends the capacity and necessity of the
nation-state and socialist ideology to foster social justice in China. His own
complex reading of the Tiananmen movement – couched in neutral prose –
argues that its denouement was ultimately about the restoration of “links among
market mechanisms that had begun to fail” in the late 1980s, and that created the
social dislocations and discontent behind the protests (New Order 117). In the
event, 1989 marked the coming onslaught of neo-liberalism and the eventual
weakening of the state.
Empire is a similar text in its Zeitgeist-style and its case for nothing less than
a new communist manifesto for the global communities or “multitudes.” Hardt
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 133
and Negri revise the metaphysically anthropological mode of Agamben’s The
Coming Community by emphasizing “immaterial labor” and post-Fordism, and
declaring that the new global community has already arrived. But they share
with Agamben a highly challenged use of China. Here, too, Tiananmen presents
itself in unexpected places, again turning on what the movement lacked: this
struggle, like the Intifada of 1989 and the Zapatistas’ uprising to which it is
equated, is characterized above all by its “incommunicability,” or its “failure” to
communicate at a “local level” and to other, global struggles. Hardt and Negri
do not see this as a aw but as a sign of the times: in the new age of empire what
such struggles lack in communicability and duration they make up for in “inten-
sity,” and point to a new (or future) type of communication based “not on resem-
blances but . . . differences”: “a communication of singularities” (Empire 57).
And yet, the question of who is communicating what to whom goes begging.
Moreover, despite or rather because of its inability to “communicate” locally or
globally, Tiananmen nonetheless leaps “vertically,” “touches” “the global level,”
and “attacks . . . Empire” (55, 57). This may be a poetics, but it is nonetheless
odd to hear that a mass movement that spread across several provinces and
rapidly mobilized much of Beijing’s population, not least through big-character
posters, handbills, and pirate broadcasts, was not communicating anything –
even to the Chinese. I would submit that, just as the Mao period is represented as
identical to Soviet Russia (and surely Negri should know the Maoist critique of
Stalinist economics14), the reference to Tiananmen is simply a convenient
vehicle. It is an ahistorical proof or exemplum that functions to show the truth of
“empire.” Precisely because the text seeks to convince us that the new empire,
its multitudes, and their common resistances do actually exist and form a whole,
it is crucial to ask what such struggles as Tiananmen, the Intifada, and so on
have in common. But Tiananmen, invoked in Deleuzian language, is something
that we are just supposed to know. “China” is ready-made to t the theory in a
seamless way. This logic of equivalence is again shown when the authors
suggest a “parallel” between the twin “bureaucratic dictatorships” of China and
Russia, and that as with the case of Russian culture during the last throes of the
USSR, the “Chinese proletariat” showed “fabulous creativity” in the 1980s (278,
460n29). I leave to one side the description of elite Chinese intellectuals and
artists as proletarians. While one of the merits of Empire is its avowedly synthe-
sizing method, it is nonetheless marred by an assimilation of foreign contexts
and by a lack of mediation that is rooted in the anti-dialectical sources of their
thinking.
What is further striking is the cursory gloss of the challenges to historicism
by postcolonial critics or their antecedents, or of the challenges to orientalist his-
toriography by, say, Edward Said or Andre Gunder Frank. If in their major pro-
grams of research Said and Frank threw down major challenges to how we have
written the history of the Other, then this is a call that, in the current conjuncture,
most producers of knowledge and new theory simply do not hear. As I have
argued elsewhere, the type of “theorizing” within Empire and some of the other
texts examined here indexes material transformations within intellectual labor
134 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
and the larger economy. These traits reveal an increase in the force of abstrac-
tion within thought under contemporary capitalism, a development that goes
hand in hand with the expansion of the commodity relation into more and more
spheres of intellectual life and the speeding-up of intellectual labor. But more to
the point right now: Empire’s refusal to engage with concrete situations and
political events is crucial for establishing its chain of equivalence between Soviet
Russia, 1980s China, the Intifada, and “Seattle.” It is what produces the concept
of a decentered, non-national, and global empire encompassing everything. As
Zhang Xudong has argued, this concept of empire is also a “normative” one
grounded by “a voluntarist and ahistorical Left vision of global utopia,” and not
the empirically true one they claim (2004, 47). To which we can also add that
China, be it of the Great Leap or the 1980s, can really make no difference in this
analysis.
In recent writings on totalitarianism, Lenin, and the state of the “global Left,”
Žižek (to take a rather different wing of cultural theory) displays a similar use of
China. The reference is most often to the Cultural Revolution, which reduces to
the stereotype of entranced “Red Guards ecstatically destroying old historical
monuments . . . desecrating old paintings,” and to Mao’s emperor-like “extreme”
pursuit of “full personal power,” after which he quickly restores order (2001b).
For Žižek, what this image proves, against the Chairman and Stalin (whom he
thoughtlessly equates), is the proper autonomy of the “sphere of material pro-
duction”; if the latter is subordinated to “the terrain of political battle or logic,” it
can only result in “terror” (2001a, 139). Totalitarianism, in this view, is the result
of the primacy of the political over the economic, and not the other way around
(as Hannah Arendt would have it). Žižek thus uses China to counter the misuse
of totalitarianism as a politically quietist notion devoid of economic mediation.
Yet the more salient, useful points about this slipshod concept are not broached:
that in the case of China, where genuinely popular Maoist mobilizations were as
common as conicts within the party and society, the attribution of totalitarian-
ism implies “brainwashing” and oriental–despotic control of a perennially
passive populace. It is not a critical concept so much as part of colonial dis-
course.15 That China was and is totalitarian, that its populace is largely quiet,
passively suffering, and state controlled even when it is rebelling, is a standard
part of orientalist common sense and area studies discourse. But it is contra-
dicted by, for example, China’s long history of peasant rebellions, the “mass
democracy,” strikes, and so forth of the Cultural Revolution, the new regime’s
widely felt legitimacy through the early 1970s at least, and the skyrocketing of
mass incidents since the 1980s.16
What we have here, then, is not an interrogation of Arendt and others or of
China, but a dressed-up “vulgar” Marxism that emphasizes the primacy of the
productive forces over the relations of production. Žižek thus shares this belief
with Deng Xiaoping and Soviet or Stalinist Marxists. As it was for them, it
remains a strongly depoliticizing type of rationality that is just as quietist as
“totalitarianism.” Whatever else one might say of his critique of Arendt, the point
here is that his uses of China have little to do with what the Cultural Revolution
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 135
was really like. Thus, his notion that Mao was only after full personal power is
belied by the fact that by late 1967 Mao had already resecured that. This leaves
Žižek with nine-tenths of the complex era to account for. This is Mao as despot
and not historical gure, thinker, or rational political leader. It comes as no sur-
prise, then, that Žižek can cite a pulp-orientalist biography as an authoritative text
on the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s thought.17 Another indication of superci-
ality or ippancy here would be Žižek’s parallel between Mao dissolving the
Shanghai Commune during the CR, and Lacan’s closing his École Freudienne
(which is also chronologically wrong). It must also be said that when he writes on
the Cultural Revolution as a hopeless entanglement of politics and economics (the
“terror” of politics in command of production) he reproduces a key element of
colonial discourse. As George Steinmetz has noted (22–3), characterizing pre-
modern and socialist societies as muddled, confused, and backward in this way –
as opposed to the rationally differentiated spheres of the West – has long been a
staple of orientalist thought.
One might easily contrast Žižek’s work on China with, for example, Arif
Dirlik’s and others’ interpretation of the Cultural Revolution. Dirlik argues that
the CR and Maoism must be thought through rather than merely demonized or
dismissed:
In a historical perspective that takes them seriously as events in the history
of modernity, however, the same events appear otherwise: as the constitu-
ents of a nal effort – the most impressive of all such efforts – to create an
alternative Third World modernity based on socialism.
(“Revolutions” 80)
This is a different approach than using China as a purely negative “example”
or moral exemplum. The point here is simply that Dirlik takes China more seri-
ously, i.e. tries to insert the complexities of the Chinese revolution within the
revolution back into history, and to use this as way to write a global history of
modernity that is informed by Chinese Maoism and the latter’s varied inu-
ences on, for example, contemporary politics in Peru (the Sendero Luminoso)
and Mexico (the Zapatistas). The coding of Tiananmen as civil society – global
or otherwise – and of Maoism as a twin of Soviet-like totalitarianism (or
worse) is part of that global turn to the right and the eclipse of Maoist
discourse.
Orientalism now, Maoism then
Now my point here is not just that Žižek would benet from reading, say, Gao
Mobo, Chris Bramall, or Han Dongping on the socio-economic achievements of
the CR, or Wang Zheng’s and others’ nuanced, feminist accounts of their experi-
ences during these years, or Joel Andreas’s work on bona de class struggles
over symbolic power and cultural capital during the Cultural Revolution.18 Nor
is my point just that an otherwise heterodox Marxian thinker like Žižek refuses
136 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
to engage Maoist discourse or Asian Marxisms.19 What interests me more is the
rhetorical work that the problematic China reference does (here and in the
above). While these passages are not actually about some “real” China, “they
have to seem to be so in order to do the critical work they do” (Saussy 150).20
They all have to seem to refer to the real, historical China in order to consolidate
the argument about the state of the left, the “new” global conjuncture, and the
nature of the political or the economic. There is a reality-effect brought to us by
the China-reference. For the producer of theory, China’s inescapable global pres-
ence today (or under Mao) simply must be acknowledged. But it does not require
a substantive or even thoughtful engagement, let alone an interrogation of what
difference China might make in terms of “global” critical theory. In all these
cases the positional superiority of the theorist is taken for granted. The complex-
ity of Tiananmen or the CR is not allowed to even briey challenge the theorists’
overall claims or analysis. They do not warrant extended discussion at all – just
a China-reference. Please note that there is no language requirement being
implicitly invoked here. The texts and sources referenced above and throughout
this study – many of them heterodox, alternative, and critical in ways that should
be ripe for the radical theorist at large – were all either written in English or have
been translated from Chinese. Thus state censorship within China – as real as it
is – is not the immediate problem. The failure to engage such texts or perspec-
tives takes us back not only to the question of intellectual labor (there is little of
it on display in this regard), but also to the sanctioned ignorance of the First
World, Western intellectual. It reveals as well the uneven imbalance in terms of
knowledge production globally.
What we are witnessing here is the inuence of Sinological-orientalism on
contemporary theory. It would thus be instructive to juxtapose such texts with
past, heterodox China references during the Mao years.21 These last were more
positive about the perceived realities and projects of Maoism, including the Cul-
tural Revolution. Maoism, in short, seemed to signify radical or even absolute
egalitarianism (an actual slogan of the Cultural Revolution); it had to do with the
wretched of the earth standing up. And also just common sense for the Third
World. There was a voluminous amount of work, done by a diverse set of
authors ranging from factory workers in Pennsylvania, Italian journalists, and
Marxist activists to China-residing “foreign experts” and rst-tier intellectuals as
diverse as J. K. Galbraith, Arthur Miller, and William Hinton. We cannot review
such a body of literature here. But I nonetheless want to refuse the common
gesture of deriding such past writers who supported Chinese Maoism, or looked
to that China as a herald of what could be, or as actually existing socialism’s –
and the developing world’s – best hope. Whatever else we might say of such
texts, some of them did powerfully register and detail certain aspects and poten-
tialities of that era. William Hinton, for example, remains an important social
and oral historian of the grass roots in rural China; famed economists Joan Rob-
inson and J. K. Galbraith wrote insightfully on Mao-era economics.22 They cer-
tainly, often carefully, presented China as an instructive and productive space,
and sometimes used China as a way to imagine better, egalitarian, or alternative
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 137
worlds. They were also the result of sustained engagements with and in China,
rooted in intellectual labor beyond televisual images and media reportage. Con-
trast this, then, with the current construction of China in Žižek among others:
here China becomes if not always a dystopic space or negative example, a super-
cial blip on the screen or a casual – if also crucial – reference.
So, too, we need to recall the salutary inuence of Maoism on the imaginaries
of radical movements across the world at this time (the 1960s and 1970s). While
the Maoist component of “May 1968” in France is fairly well known, Robin D.
G. Kelley and Betsy Esch have recalled how for the Black Panthers and many in
the Black Power movement, Mao was “Black like us.” Mao and China were not
only a point of identication, but also helped radicals understand their own con-
ditions of struggle against racism and inequality. The P.R.C. helped them reject
stagist notions of change and the cult of expertise among “sociologists, psychol-
ogists, economists and others whose grand pronouncements on the causes of
poverty and racism often went unchallenged” (Kelley and Esch 39). Along with
the Cuban Revolution and African nationalism, Maoist China – “the most pow-
erful ‘colored’ nation on earth” – offered a point of international solidarity and
an understanding of geo-politics. It “internationalized the black revolution in
profound ways” (38). And Roderick Bush notes that:
Maoism has exerted a tremendous attraction for people of color who have
been victims of racist humiliation in the pan-European world, especially in
the United States. For many of us, Maoism stood with the ‘wretched of the
earth.’ This constituted a conscious stand that did not ow simply from self-
denition as a Marxist or from being a revolutionary in the third world. It
seemed to most of us that Maoism expressed our desire for a just, demo-
cratic, and egalitarian world and also recognized the more subtle humilia-
tions reinforcing the sense of pan-European supremacy among all sectors of
the population.
(110)
There is much to mine in this passage and in the larger topic of Maoism abroad.
Whatever “China” may mean to Western Marxists, it may well mean something
else to Black or non-Western identied ones. But let us contrast the appropria-
tion of Mao and China noted by Kelley, Esch, and Bush with that of the above
theorists today. Here the usage does not have to do with doxa or a priori knowl-
edge, nor with an historicist or template, or even with specic events. It is, if you
will, an imagined community. But also not false and inauthentic. Mao and China
here stand for something, a Fanonian, Marxist, and globe-straddling political
project, what used to be called “Third Worldism,” and an alternative, global
modernity.
Whatever else we might make of these appropriations, in comparison to the
vision of the “new” world order offered by Hardt and Negri among others, and
the a priori nature of the truths that Chinese “facts” conrm, they index not only
the radical milieu of the 1960s–1970s, but also a strong imaginative power and
138 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
the raced nature of cross-cultural communication. While Mao’s China may in
this case have served to “prove” the truth of Black liberation and the inter-
connectedness of global struggles, the larger point here is that Maoism had spe-
cic functions and effects on such groups’ practices and their encompassing,
global vision. The relationship to and understanding of China was not a casual
reference. In comparison, then, the new zeitgeist and theoretical statements
offered by Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Žižek, all of whom share a remark-
ably if un-reexively totalizing vision of a global and virtual capitalism,23
indexes what Fredric Jameson has referred to as the “widespread paralysis of the
collective or social imaginary” (Geopolitical 9).
But whoever speaks of global capitalism also speaks of the Cold War, speci-
cally of the intertwined histories of communism and decolonization or what
Timothy Brennan aptly calls “the East/West of North/South” (“Cuts” 39). What
helps to explain the presence and assimilating force of Sinological-orientalism is the
lingering presence of the Cold War. As William Pietz argued, Cold War discourse
and the rhetoric of totalitarianism became a “substitute” for outright colonial dis-
course in the aftermath of World War II, and yet both share homologous views of
the irrationality, primitivism, archaic polities, and danger of the “Other” (55). I do
not suggest that the theorists examined here directly reproduce colonial discourse in
the manner of Hannah Arendt’s claim that the mob mentality, anti-Semitism, and
totalitarianism ultimately derive from European contact with Africa and Africans.24
But in all of these texts one can discern the inuence and presence of Sinological,
academic knowledge – the triumph of the Cold War, or even Dengist interpretation
of the Mao era and beyond. Where do “correct” ideas about the P.R.C. come from?
Even in the present theoretical works, they come from a Cold War area studies,
albeit one equally ltered through the media and the broader intellectual–political
culture. For as I have tried to show throughout these pages, media and China studies
“knowledge” of China are intimately related and in many cases indistinguishable –
not least in their shared discourse of totalitarianism and despotism. Both spheres
should be seen as a relay through which China-knowledge ows and is produced.
So, too, it is striking that all of these texts elide the very fact of the P.R.C.’s
status as a “communist” state, and how this might itself challenge theories of glo-
balization and the alleged end of the Cold War. My point here is not that China is
somehow a secretly left-wing regime, but that its history and trajectory since
the late 1930s is quantitatively and qualitatively different from those of Russia or
the former bloc countries, let alone the U.S.-West. It simply does not t well into
the conventional narrative of contemporary globalization, as an historical break
following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of actually existing social-
isms. The equation of Mao with Stalin, or of Tiananmen and China’s political
future with the Eastern bloc dissident movements (civil society), is a sign of Cold
War coding and intellectual impoverishment. Like it or not, and despite the long-
standing defeat of left forces within the Party, the P.R.C. remains a “socialist”
state in at least a discursive and historical sense. That may be for good or for ill.
But as Liu Kang among others has argued, China presents a fundamental chal-
lenge to theories of globalization and to a global capitalism led by the West;
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 139
“revolution” remains its “central problematic” in the pursuit of its own, alterna-
tive modernity (“Alternative” 168). This is also a perspective echoed by Wang
Hui. Even when revolution has been abandoned like it has by the current Dengist
or post-Tiananmen regime, it remains as an absent presence and historical resid-
uum in a stronger and more political way than, say, the French or American revo-
lutions for their nations. The so-called New Left intellectuals in China, for
example, as well as the “old left,” certainly stem from this tradition and differ-
ence even if they are largely unknown or ignored by heterodox theorists who
invoke the P.R.C. Economically the post-Mao “miracle” was built on the Maoist
foundations it raided (and destroyed) to help achieve its world-historical growth
rates. It surely did not follow neo-liberal doxa until recently, did not implode with
the Soviet empire, and has not transformed into the free liberal “democratic”
society that the end of history and rush of free markets was to bring. This all sug-
gests that China’s revolution may have something to do with its actuality today,
and that Cold War narratives may have little to tell us about this. But these differ-
ences do not register in theory. The specter of the Cold War, then, lingers on in
these global critical theory texts, just as it does in globalization itself. On the one
hand, they assume the Cold War has been “won” and is quite nished, leading to
a new era of globalization which demands new forms of politics and theory (and
which turn out to be fairly conventional, albeit in “French” postmodern form). On
the other, they draw on – depend upon – certain “knowledge” from Cold War dis-
course about what China was and is really like. What this further suggests, as
Brennan and Pietz themselves do, is the impossibility of separating anti-commu-
nism from orientalism or colonial discourse. Thus while China has long been a
fount for leftist theory and critique, current critical-theory work on globalization,
while still drawing on the China reference, leaves much to be desired.
“Writing” “China”: erasing the political
But however weak the use of “China” is within current theory, what is striking is
that China continues to function as a magnet for theoretical reection. The ques-
tion that must now be posed to these writers and to my previous chapters is:
Why China? Why the China-reference? If the historical referents are ultimately
dubious and fungible, then why China in particular, and not, say, India or South
Africa? This is a large question, but it is one that is beginning to be asked within
a certain strand of post-structuralist inspired “China” studies, i.e. of scholarship
on Western understandings of China. Early on in his study of the “Chinese
dreams” of Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the Tel Quel group, Eric Hayot
claims that this specic question
is probably a bad one, or rather, it is good only inasmuch as it opens up dis-
cussion about the relation between geopolitical space – an area on the
Pacic side of the Eurasian landmass with a more or less continuous history
of being conceived as a political identity – and the realms of thought.
(ix)
140 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
The question of why China in particular – the specicity of China within the
various “Chinese dreams” of Western writers – is thus displaced. The aim is to
turn the question into one of “intellectual history and cross-cultural reading” in
general (ix). Thus for the great bulk of his text, Hayot adroitly unpacks the
“dreams” of “China” in Brecht et al. and only returns to this theoretical – and
political – question and problem in the conclusion. Here the resolution – as with
Saussy and Chow – turns out to be a poststructuralist and relativist one directed
against critique of the West and of misrepresentation. Such politicized work –
e.g. the critique of orientalism, the work of the negative – in Hayot’s view can
only be “moralistic” “debunking” and can only falsely grant to China or the
West “an ontological stability” that neither have (xiv, 180–1). Hayot like Saussy
is at pains to announce that the West has no such stability and is just as con-
structed and changing at different moments and in different texts as is China.25
While valid at a formal level of the signier, this claim misses the point of
Marxist-inspired work on globalization: the world remains structured neo-colo-
nially by a core/periphery division centered on the West and First World, which
exercises economic and political, if not cultural hegemony, over “the Rest.”
Indeed Saussy will claim that the phrase “the West and the Rest” is “mythology”
(182). What explains this perspective, aside from the substitution of ethics for
politics à la Agamben, is a strident poststructuralism that presents itself as more
“complex” and ethically sensitive than postcolonial or other critiques. It is as if
facts, beliefs, or identities, accessible only through language, do not acquire
material force and have real effects in the world; as if all constructions of China
are the same. Indeed at one point Hayot suggests that the “latent and the mani-
fest content [of ‘Chinese’ dreams] might be the same thing” (187). Hence the
unavoidable charge of relativism.
The alternative to critique offered here is “Sinography”: “the study not simply
of how China is written about, but the ways in which that writing constitutes
itself simultaneously as a form of writing and a form of Chineseness” (185).
Thus despite the caveat that Sinography would proceed “without abandoning the
question of reference altogether,” Chinese Dreams and Saussy’s Great Walls of
Discourse indeed abandon this, save for a few potshots at Maoist baddies,
“nationalist” intellectuals, and the Party-state (“the shadow of realpolitikal
China”) (Hayot 182). Such shots further indicate that the eschewal of reference
allows Sinography and other poststructuralist “new” readings of China to
conceal their essentially Cold War political dimensions and interpretations. All
forms of knowledge – of writing China – are generally equivalent, as they are all
“graphesis” (Hayot 185). Here China ceases to exist outside of dreams or writ-
ings of “China.” For a theoretical turn that aims to be more sophisticated than
Saidian critique, we are left with a China – and Sino–West encounter – that is an
abstract thought experiment. This is preordained in the original transformation
of the topic of Western understandings of China into an act of generic cross-
cultural reading. The problem arises in part with Hayot’s positioning of China as
only a space in Eurasia with a “more or less continuous history of being con-
ceived as a political identity”; from this standpoint, the study of representations
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 141
of China can only be an exercise in “intellectual history and cross-cultural
reading” in general (Hayot ix, my emphasis). As is often the case with strict
“social constructionist” modes of criticism, the only reality is that of perception
and form. My point here is not just that there is a difference between such con-
structions of reality and reality itself. That, as Roy Bhaskar reminds us, is the
epistemic fallacy: mistaking our knowledge of reality for the “thing,” reality
itself (111–12, 397).
Saussy’s book reaches back to the Jesuit missions in China and on up to
Chinese debates on postmodernism. The focus is again on foreign/Western writ-
ings of China, but not on judging or evaluating these in terms of their truth-
value, their politics, or their relationship to colonial discourse, geo-politics, and
so forth. This fetishization of abstract form or “writing” suggests, again, a certain
paralysis of the social or political imaginary. It is as if all one can do is keep dis-
covering the truth of poststructuralism, the quaintness of critique, the anachro-
nism of engaged literature. The few actual judgments that are made amount to
digs at the Chinese regime past and present, at anti-Western Chinese intellectu-
als (for their “defensive” nationalism), and even at Edgar Snow for “truckling to
Mao” (131–9, 121). Thus even in these texts there is a political unconscious. By
this last I mean the poststructuralist ethos (“free play”) that places not politics
but “ethics” in command. This is a liberal position that is all about openness and
tolerance – except, of course, for Maoists, leftists, and so-called “nationalists.” It
is a view of Chinese history that places the “post”-condition – the eschewal of
the true and the false, of the critique of representation, of the politics of interpre-
tation – as the end of history and a universal condition that is demonstrated
through the (second-hand) example of China.
Thus we are presented in the end with a closed system of discourse – or the
human condition for Hayot and Saussy – that like orientalism is ultimately self-
referential. “Whatever distinction exists between the West and ‘China’ – and
surely there must be some distinctions! – nonetheless reveals itself . . . to be
caught up in the ephemerality of self-recognition” (Hayot 188). This statement
echoes Saussy’s nal, depoliticizing claim against critique:
Have we been missing something all these centuries, so that we take a work
of critique to be the archetypal project of logical construction? Or is the dif-
ference (between philosophy as foundation and philosophy as therapy)
merely illusory?
(Saussy 189–90)
There is a long view of history here, resulting in a “postmodern condition” that
can no longer say what China or “China” refer to, beyond the process of writing/
dreaming/signifying. This is a postmodernism writ large – a triumphant textual-
ity reminiscent of the American Modern Languages Association. The positional
superiority of the Sinographer is as strong here as it is in Agamben through
Žižek. It is assumed that this “graphing” framework ts China seamlessly, and
virtually all writings of China at any point in time (from Ricci and the Jesuits up
142 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
to Derrida and Chinese nationalist bogeymen). We can thus say of these global
literary studies directed against postcolonialism and critique, what Timothy
Brennan has said of Rey Chow’s deconstruction of the “myth of origins” and
“Chineseness”: that they do not deconstruct reference so much as “efface” it;
and having done this, “there is no outer tribunal to compare China against the
West’s ‘translation’ of it” (“Cuts” 54). This is not to appeal to an unmediated
reality but to a mediated one, to the context and constitutive outside of interpre-
tation and cultural “translation.” Without such ground, not just critique but
understanding becomes impossible.
Thus there is no answer, for these texts or from their mode of analysis, to a
number of important questions that their topic – Western understandings of
China, Chinese understandings of the West – inherently raises. Why do Sinogra-
phy, other than to show that “China” is “written”? Why is one “graphing” of
China more valuable than another? Whither the geo-political? And most funda-
mentally again: Why China? “Sinography,” like the one-sided post-structuralism
it draws on, cannot help us discern what is being constructed or pose such
questions.
“Why China?” redux: the economic and the intellectual
The rise of China and its economy must have its effects on intellectual
production.
Why China, then? Let us begin by assuming the antagonisms and epistemo-
logical challenges — such as orientalism — that have subtended the China–West
relationship for, say, three hundred years. Let us assume these exist and that they
have something to do with China in theory. (If nothing else, the entirety of the
preceding pages has tried to make this case.) So, too, let us recall that “our” rela-
tionship to China is overwhelmingly an economic (and political) one. China’s
rise, its status as the “next” superpower, the manufacturer of the world, the new
Asian hegemon, the world-historical consumer market, the buyer of last resort
for U.S. dollars, the second largest economy – and so forth.
This brute fact – the rise of China, the transformation of the Sino–West
“love–hate” relationship into one of greater “intimacy” – ultimately explains the
existence of Sinological-orientalism, and the necessity of its critique. It also
helps us answer the question Why China? in a materialist and historical way.
Sinological-orientalism exists because it can. Orientalism, it should be recalled,
is not simply about stereotypical thinking, or some Self/Other dialectic of identi-
ties, or simply a prejudice or desire. It may partake of all of these, surely, and we
always have to allow for the place of imagination and the will-to-knowledge/
power. But in the end, orientalism was and is about knowledge production and
its distribution, the accumulation of information about an area/Other for the pur-
poses of control, management, administration, and prot nancial as well as
prot symbolic.26 It is a material phenomenon, the production of a multifarious
discourse that becomes institutionalized and that is articulated to global political-
economy and imperialism even as it takes the form of intellectual and scholarly
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 143
knowledge.27 Said famously argued that orientalism preceded and prepared the
ground for the modern colonial project. But this also needs to be understood dia-
lectically: for without the political–economic drive to control – the appropriation
of land and labor, the overthrow of native regimes, primitive accumulation and
the accumulation of “primitives” – “orientalism” would only be a variant of
Eurocentrism or simply chauvinist scholarship. This is how our above theorists
and the China eld seem to understand the term. But that will to, and production
of knowledge are still with us. Not to justify and administer colonialism, as in
the old days, but to get on with the business of business, as part of the global
capitalist totality.
The core of the world system still administers the development and gover-
nance of subject nations – often, as in the case of China, with the assent of the
power-elite (and Party) within the periphery. That, too, is an old story of collab-
orations and compradors. It is no accident that the emergence of Sinological-
orientalism coincides with the era of a globalizing neo-liberalism. That in itself
may have started in South America (via American economist ideologues) in
some sense, but as David Harvey has pointed out, the rise of Dengist “crony”
capitalism, the market mechanism, and free-market ideology in China is part of
this same history of capitalist expansion and accumulation by dispossession.28
Global capital has denite Chinese characteristics, just as Dengist China and the
core all share a certain “de-Maoication” and an antipathy to redistributive, not
to mention communist economics and social justice ideology. And this moment
of neo-liberal, expanded capital accumulation has also meant greater contact,
conict, and co-operation between the capitalist West and China in all kinds of
ways. This was a process begun in some sense with the 1972 Sino-U.S. rap-
prochement, but more crucially with the ready and increasing access of Sinolo-
gists to their anthropological “eld” in the 1980s and beyond.29 The meant an
open season for Sinological knowledge production.30 I am suggesting, then, that
China’s transformation by capitalism and the increasing global ows – including
of authorized knowledge producers – between it and the West are the necessary
background and conditions of possibility for Sinological-orientalism in its
current form. Without the genuinely remarkable, even epochal but brutally ine-
galitarian rise of post-Mao China, and without the West’s ambivalent relation-
ship to this, Sinological-orientalism would not have happened. This is all another
way of saying that the new era has not resulted in the real truth of China and
progress having been discovered, but simply a new regime of truth that corre-
sponds to a new political–economic conjuncture. If in the past a minority of
(young) China experts, writers, and watchers “tailed” the Chinese state and the
Maoists in particular, then this is an intellectual behavior with a greater majority
and strength today when it comes to the direction of the Chinese economy and
the Dengist verdict on the red decades and Mao Zedong. The point here is not
the lack of so-called “independent” intellectuals (whatever this would mean), but
how a discursive machine works to produce knowledge in the real world.
In sum, it is this broad historical situation and these conditions of possibility
that explain why China has become the center and object of this new form of
144 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
orientalism. Why China? It’s the economy. It is thus not surprising – yet impor-
tant to note – that key planks of Sinological discourse now, from its still strong
anti-communism to its proffering of civil society, modernity, liberal individual-
ism, and “freedom” owing out of marketization and “opening up,” are all per-
fectly “capitalist” and “bourgeois” in nature. One need not be a Third
International Marxist to see this. Such topoi and themes correspond perfectly
well to capitalism as a global mode of production and a social space. What this
points to are the same, larger and historical conditions of possibility indexed
above. They are a superstructure to an obvious base. This is thus an unrepentant
argument from necessity: that this aspect of the current global conjuncture, of
the historical present – Sinological-orientalism and its particular form and logic
of sameness – in effect had to happen in the way that they did. In the pages that
remain here I want to esh out the economics of the “new” orientalism.
This is a sweeping claim and may raise familiar charges against Said’s “model”:
that it is monolithic and all-powerful. Thus Said notoriously remarked that “every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an
imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (204). But critics of Said often fail to
acknowledge his immediate qualication of this claim: that “advanced” cultures
and societies have “rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism,
and ethnocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures” (204). My claim that Sinolog-
ical-orientalism is a constituent part of global capital may seem no less problem-
atic. And there is not enough space here to untangle all of these issues and their
philosophical roots. But we can address one question that should go some distance
towards addressing the “totalizing” and “monolithic” charges. It will also return us
to the issue of orientalism’s relationship not just to colonialism but to capitalism.
A place Said himself did not really travel to, as many have pointed out. If so much
of Sinological-orientalism tells us more about and indexes the West’s identity,
social imaginary, and intellectual–political culture rather than China, then why
does such knowledge about China seem true to so many? How to explain its status
as a veridic discourse, if not common sense?
Here, too, there are a number of paths one could explore, not least a psycho-
analytic one along the lines of Alain Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Feast: Euro-
pean Fantasies of the East. This text ably deconstructs Montesquieu’s,
Rousseau’s, and Voltaire’s fascination with the seraglio and the perceived orien-
tal despotism of the Ottoman Empire; it shows how this fantasy constituted their
projects for an enlightened, rational society and, by extension, constituted
modern Western political thought. All of this should be taken as axiomatic.
Sinology’s obsession with “despotism,” “totalitarianism,” and the Chinese lack
of freedom must be seen as a variation on this trope, and an attempt to validate
the universal truth of liberalism and Western forms of governance. Given the
perceived threat of China that reigns within the leadership of the labor-movement
and in otherwise politically antithetical organizations (e.g. U.S. Republicans and
the Dalai Lama), one need not be a Lacanian to perceive an unconscious fear and
loathing of China.31 The reality of the West’s “China” can be said to lie in the
workings of fantasy. But psychoanalysis cannot press beyond a symptomatic and
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 145
ahistorical reading. Once one maps the fantasy, there is not much else to say.
The worldly connections to capitalism and geo-politics cannot register. So, too,
psychoanalysis’ positing of lack as an absolute condition of being sits uncom-
fortably with Sinological-orientalism’s own positing of lack as China’s own con-
dition of being. One still needs to deal with the veridical status of this new
orientalism, the seemingly objective status of the discourse. It relies on its detail
about China to demonstrate its truthfulness, and so masks the assumptions,
methods, or strategies, and larger structures that subtend the production of
knowledge. To stop at the level of fantasy, then, is to leave those – often tenden-
tious – “facts” intact, outside of the psychoanalytic narrative. This is the Žižek
problem.
Better, then, to turn to a different theoretical source, the gure who made phi-
losophy worldly and the world philosophical. The rich tradition of ideology-
critique in Marxism has based itself in various parts of his writings (or early,
middle, and late Marx), perhaps most notably in Capital’s discussion of commod-
ity fetishism and the triumph of exchange value over use-value. But recently,
Marx’s value-theoretic, understood as a broadly social, but still material process
akin to Lukacs’ concept of reication, has again been opened up, including by a
few scholars within China studies.32 Fredric Jameson’s work is crucial here.33 But
let us get to the heart of the matter, and recall Marx on coats and boots: “If I state
that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal
incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evi-
dent” (Capital 169). And yet the absurdity matters not. For when the producers of
these commodities bring them in relation to some general equivalent – be it linen,
gold, money, or so forth – the relation between their own, private, concrete labor
(the actually existing reality of their work or practice) and the collective labor of
their society embodied in the general equivalent (in some form of exchange value),
this relation “appears to them in exactly this absurd form” (Capital 169).
That is, the fundamental absurdity, the irreality and arbitrariness of exchang-
ing unlike objects, and of measuring and evaluating them on the basis of some
third thing – the general equivalent – is for them completely natural, and has all
the force of an obviousness. In short, the money-form or the general equivalent
is completely naturalized, perfectly real and proper, “ontologically correct.”
Now this can hardly be understood as an ideological phenomenon in some
simple, camera obscura sense of inversion. It is not as if participants in market
exchange are “duped” into thinking in terms of (exchange) value. Money is a
real enough thing indeed.
From this example of how coats and boots stand in relation to one another,
Marx immediately offers one of his grand generalizations:
The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this
kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore
objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically deter-
mined mode of production, i.e., commodity production.
(Capital 169)
146 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
There is much to mine in this passage, this situating of economic categories as
both absurd and valid and “objective.” They are neither False nor True in the
conventional ways we still think of such matters, but nor are they neutral and
scientic. Such categories cannot be demystied in some total sense; they actu-
ally do work, in the sense of being productive and actual as opposed to whether
or not they are true in some absolute sense. We might think of Sinological cate-
gories or usages in this way – “civil society” may not be True in the sense that it
is meant by some, but it certainly does a lot of work in knowledge production
and perhaps even among the liberal and neo-liberal intellectuals and “dissidents”
within China and elsewhere. Its falsity does not matter in that sense. What is
most striking in Marx here is the paradoxical but emphatic insistence that these
forms of thought are not false, at least not in any simple sense. One can only
outank, situate, and critique them by appealing to other, historical – and non-
capitalist/commodity – forms of production. Or perhaps we can say: to other
social and historical spaces. I will eventually return to this aspect of space and
history below.
But rst I want to emphasize that categories of thought are serious things, and
not simply beliefs: one cannot think without them; they themselves “think,” as if
on their own. As Lukacs noted in his own genealogy of the history of capitalism,
“all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the
determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that
existence)” (159). For Marx, as for Lukacs and Said, knowledge cannot be
neutral or merely descriptive and simply a matter of accuracy; nor will it blow
away once demystied. These economic categories, within a given mode of
social production, make perfect sense and cannot simply be dismissed as false
consciousness. It is only within the context of other modes of production that
they are revealed in all their “magic and necromancy,” the reication reversed
(169). Again, I think we can, today, take the latter “mode of production” concept
to include other social spaces of productive activity, including of knowledge/
power.
As Etienne Balibar puts it, Marx recasts “the question of objectivity” such
that the categories or forms of thought “express a perception of phenomena, of
the way things ‘are there’, without it being possible to change them at will” (Phi-
losophy 65). Again, then, this is not the false consciousness model of ideology
that always presupposed a fairly strict appearance/reality divide.34 And yet – and
this is the heart of the matter – such “objective” perceptions and forms of
thought “immediately combine . . . the real and the imaginary (or what Marx
terms the ‘suprasensible’ or ‘fantastic form’ of autonomous commodities)” (Phi-
losophy 65–6). They are, in short, constituted realities that can become internal-
ized and naturalized. Thus these categories or forms of thought are akin to
commodities, are real and imaginary, both True and False. Or to invoke
Althusser, such categories of thought contain within them a recognition of some-
thing real – the ways in which capitalism is institutionalized, the ways it works
on its own terms – and a misrecognition.35 An ideological or orientalist account
of the Cultural Revolution, for example, may recognize certain undeniable
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 147
aspects and events: e.g. the violence, the passionate friend/enemy politics of
class struggle, the cult of Mao. But it will fundamentally misrecognize others:
e.g. rural development in education, the return of the barefoot doctors, or that
most participants, at the time, did not see or perceive that era as repressive or as
madness. Or it will recognize the violence but interpret it in sentimental, human-
istic, or outright orientalist terms; the cult of Mao becomes “brainwashing” and/
or mass idiocy and passivity.
What I will now claim, then, is that Sinological-orientalism or the “real
China” that is leaving its past behind, and haltingly but inevitably becoming-the-
same as the U.S.-West, is precisely a “socially valid, therefore objective” cate-
gory of thought in the Marxist sense. It thinks. It does a certain amount of
worldly work; it produces knowledge and careers as well as art. It thus has an
effectivity quite beyond or separate from its Truth; it works as a regime of truth.
It is also capitalist – in its function and, as I will try to argue below, in its genesis
and inner logic. But to say it is capitalist means not only that it corresponds to
the current, globalized mode of production, but is also to say that it is political
and socially constructed. It is again no accident, then, that it crystallizes with the
birth of de-Maoication and China’s full-on engagement with global capital.
Recasting orientalism as a category of thought, in Marx’s sense, helps us to
apprehend its veridical power as well as its liations with capitalism. Balibar
offers an analysis of orientalism parallel to mine here:
Said also provides the most convincing demonstration that there is a racist
thought, therefore that racism does think. . . . ‘Orient’ is not only a ction
and an image, it is a thought category. . . . [Said] clearly implies that the
imaginary of which the idea of ‘Orient’ is the product, contradictorily com-
bines a real encounter (if only an encounter with real texts . . .) and a denial
of the reality of the encounter.
(“Difference” 29–30, original emphases)
What enables the denial of the reality of that encounter – that it is a cross-
cultural, conictual encounter and challenge, and not a mythical free market-
place of ideas and “Sinography” – is, I would submit, the “socially valid,
objective” status of the Sinological knowledge. This, in addition to the welter of
detail that masks the assumptions, interpretive strategies, and partisanship of
Sinological analysis. Balibar moves from here to the well-known function of ori-
entalism in constituting the self-identity of the West (again, “the Western-
Christian-Democratic-Universalist identity”) (“Difference” 30).
But we are concerned with the economic here, and to better see this category
as part and parcel of contemporary capitalism, we need to again briey return to
Marx on what drives the process of the production of such “objective” forms of
thought. How do certain categories come into the world and correspond to
capital? (We do not say all do.) It is the totality of the political–economic activ-
ity over time and space. But there is also a more specic albeit theoretical expla-
nation to be found in Marx. I refer here to what Marx calls the total
148 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
value-process, or more specically the social process by which labor-power –
dened as the “living personality” of the human being and as “the living, form
giving re . . . the transitoriness of things, their temporality . . . their formation by
living time” – becomes abstract labor or more simply just abstracted (Capital
270; Grundrisse 361). As this rich language suggests, we are dealing not with a
scientic Marx but a poetic–philosophical one who is interested in the formation
of social forms as much as in surplus value and exploitation. These social forms,
as I am calling them, can include our categories or discourses. There is a larger
process of abstraction here that subtends productive activity. Labor-power – i.e.
laborers – undergoes a social or real process of abstraction, such that all forms,
all concrete manifestations of labor-power are rendered the same, reduced to
the same substance. That is, they are made generally equivalent to abstract,
homogenous labor.
This last aspect takes us to more familiar ground, namely the critique of the
force of capitalist exchange or the unleashing of a calculating, quantitative ratio-
nality into the culture and society of capitalism. Much of our understanding of
the culture of capitalism derives from the Marxist theory of the commodity form
as the triumph of exchange value (the money form) over use-value in production
for the market. The institutionalization and constant expansion of exchange not
only represents a negation of use-value – where this last signies experience and
difference, not just “utility” – but the type of thought that makes the incommen-
surable comparable.36 This analysis remains indispensable, not least with a
homogenizing globalization in full force. It also allows us to see a homology
between the Sino-orientalist logic of sameness and capital’s logic of equivalence.
This has been an implicit theme to the entire present study, but we can now
perhaps better see how it arises from exchange – old-fashioned commodity/
money exchange but also expanded exchanges of an untold amount of ows. If
we do virtually live within the commodication of everything, in a knowledge
economy or “cognitive capitalism” lled with more immaterial forms of labor
than ever before, then it should not be too “vulgar” to suggest an equivalential
logic of sameness underpinning orientalist discourse.
But to return to forms of thought. Again speaking of linen, Marx notes that in
exchange, the value/substance of a thing consists of an amount of abstract labor
and necessarily takes on an “objective” form/status: “The value of the linen as a
congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an ‘objectivity,’ a
thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the
linen and all other commodities” (Capital 142). What this shows us is that the
Marxist notion of capitalist objectivity is hard-wired into the mode of production
and the creation of value at a more micro-level. This happens with commodities
proper like the linen example, but also – by extension – with those categories
and forms of thought specic to the “bourgeois” world or mode of production.
Marx has in mind a (“value”) process that explains and produces both entities or
social forms.
From this compressed and truncated tour through Marx’s philosophy, we can
better appreciate what he insisted was the object of Capital: “What I have to
The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy 149
examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of
production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it” (added emphasis)
(90). Marxist thinkers have understandably focused on the mode, but it may be
high time to focus on the corresponding intercourse. Sinological-orientalism,
then, as a form of thought, is one such “form of intercourse” between the West
and China. It is one, even on those rare occasions when it is not implicitly or
explicitly promoting more free trade, marketization, and liberalization. The pre-
ceding discussion does, I hope, esh out in what sense we can see this discourse
existing in a structural or functional and “organic” relationship to the classically
capitalist value-process.
But as noted above, Marx wisely insists on raising the question of other “his-
torically determined modes of production”; thinking this way can arrest the
reifying powers of socially “objective” categories of thought. I have suggested
that we can expand the “mode” concept to include social space and productive
activity;37 this is further warranted by the expansion of capitalism (and knowl-
edge production) itself since Marx’s time, including the commodication of dis-
course. This brings us to the question of China in space, so to speak. Let us begin
with a perennial but still-useful truth from classical Sinology: the thing about
China is that it is very big and very old. Which is a way of saying that it is an
exceptionally dense and diverse space. Much of it is no doubt capitalist space,
including most obviously its economy (much of it), its urban centers, and the
results and artifacts of its epochal growth, from art house cinema to liberal intel-
lectual discourse and consumerism. These are the sites of most China–Western
exchanges and ows, overwhelmingly the urban centers and the rich, southern
and coastal belts of the land. This is the social, global space that is represented
by the “China” that experts and observers travel to and produce knowledge
about. It should not be controversial to describe this as specically capitalist.
Within such contexts and spaces, then, Sinological-orientalism functions as a
“socially valid, therefore objective” form of thought. Its detail, applicability,
explanatory and “objective” powers (such as they may be) in some sense derive
from these places. They are not pure fantasy or only false consciousness. These
qualities and the discourse/knowledge itself are a result of the encounter there
between Chinese and Western/postcolonial spaces, discourse, and realities. It
can still be unpacked through critical analysis.
But of course the above are not the contexts and social spaces of all of
modern Chinese history (let alone the longue durée), nor of the Mao or revolu-
tionary era. There are other histories, temporalities, social imaginaries, dis-
courses, and spaces at work. (China is not fully capitalist to the degree that the
U.S. or UK or Hong Kong are.) Understanding this helps one see the discursive
violence of Sinological-orientalism vis-à-vis China’s past as well as the places
and people that have not beneted from the “era of reform and opening up.”
Even within one urban center – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, any-
where – there are layers of social space and history at work, counter-factuals and
differences that resist, contradict, or escape normative Sino- orientalist codings.
To take an obvious but symbolically signicant example from southern Henan:
150 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
Nanjiecun, the neo-Maoist, collectivized village of 12,000 people that is a site of
red tourism, a bane of liberal intellectuals, and an actually existing market-
socialist and re-distributive enterprise dating from the mid-1980s.38 I am not
speaking of local “color” or differences, or individual Chinese self-understand-
ings that are at odds with the orientalism I have examined (though these are
important). When we follow Marx’s point that thought categ ories are historical
and economic we can better see the non-capitalist and non- or differently global
aspects of China. We can discern systematic or otherwise abundant other-mes-
sages about the meanings, realities, and “signications” from within China and
between it and the rest of the world. These are not “in the true” of China studies
and the knowledge of China produced within Western, now global intellectual–
political culture.
But still it is impossible to not know the differences between – for example –
the P.R.C. of Mao’s time or of today and the China of certain, most “Western
minds.” This remains true even if the China eld and intellectual–political
culture refuse to dwell on the matter, or refuse to begin a debate on their “writing
of the Other.” The production and preservation of dense, diverse Chinese
“space” may in the end be the largest or most enduring contribution of Maoism
and the long revolution. Beyond the modernization and industrialization, beyond
the political, cultural, and ideological legacies, ideals, and discourses, and
beyond the residua of the attempts at the socialist transition and permanent revo-
lution. This is admittedly abstract, and we do not want to over-state the case or
deny the longue durée of Chinese cultures, specicities, and social forms. But
there can be no denying that the event of 1949 happened, that the P.R.C. devel-
oped, modernized, and still moves forward under a different mode of production
and social formation than that of the capitalist West and their forms of thought.
The best readers of the Maoist trajectory have always understood that it was,
perhaps most fundamentally, an attempt to preserve – or cancel and preserve, i.e.
sublate – a very old, very big, and diverse national–civilizational space in the
face of global onslaughts under the name of capitalism, semi-colonialism, and
imperialism. This in addition to, even through its Marxist egalitarianism, passion
for the masses and class justice, and respect for farmers and the rural generally.
In so far as it was successful in this production and preservation of space, of
non-capitalist and non-occidentalist/colonial space, it made an undeniable con-
tribution to China and to “difference,” but also to the critique of orientalism,
imperialism, and capitalist modernity. It also reminds us that these last are – to
adopt Said one more time – “alterable by intention.”39
Notes
Preface
1 While I return to these issues elsewhere, the single best place to begin remains Maurice
Meisner’s chapter, “The Legacies of the Maoist Era” in Mao’s China and After.
1 Sinological-orientalism now: “China” and the new era
1 This rule is akin to what Partha Chatterjee later theorized as the “rule of colonial dif-
ference,” whereby the essential difference/inferiority of India always trumped various
British efforts to govern its colony liberally and bring it into the modern fold.
2 See his The Politics of Imagining Asia as well as other citations here.
3 Chakrabarty: “Historicism – and even the modern, European idea of history – one
might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody’s way of
saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else” (8).
4 I have in mind things like village-level elections, co-operatives and the “New Rural
Reconstruction Movement,” or various ideological streams such as the New Left, neo-
Confucianism, neo-Legalism, and so forth. But my point is the objection to even the
idea of a Chinese alternative to liberal capitalist democracy (or other Western ideal-
types). For introductions see Daniel A. Bell, China’s New Confucianism, and Mark
Leonard, What Does China Think? The single best anthology is Wang Chaohua’s One
China, Many Paths, but see as well Gloria Davies’ Voicing Concerns. New and Old
Left perspectives from the “Utopia” salon are at www.wyzxwyzx.com/ (in Chinese)
and in part in archives here (translated): http://chinastudygroup.net/.
5 See Harvey, The New Imperialism.
6 To “de-Cold War” is to disarticulate the Eurocentric and binary approach to historical
communism (good/evil) lurking within political–intellectual culture as well as to see
how the CW affects our understandings of Asia and the world. I take the phrase from
Chen Kuan-Hsing, but also have in mind Andre Gunder Frank and critiques of the
Cold War university.
7 By the Cold War, the U.S. was the center for the production of knowledge. “China”
has a long history of being a politicized object of knowledge for Western powers, and
the oscillation of Sinophobic and Sinophilic responses follows domestic politics. For
earlier periods, see Gregory Moore and Hung Ho-Fung.
8 See English Lessons. My point is that earlier, nascent debates disappeared with the
rightward drift in China and the West in the late 1970s. See as well Rebecca Karl,
Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
(Durham: Duke UP, 2002), for a rich global-historical analysis of early Chinese
nationalism and Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern
World Making (New York: Columbia UP, 2006) for an emphatically post-structuralist/
semiotic analysis of Qing/British imperial history. While these studies do not broach
152 Notes
the PRC as such, or even orientalism, they do bring the colonial/imperial back in a
compelling way. Hevia is closest to the Saidian mode I am working in.
9 Nor is it to deny the value of the largely social-scientic Critical Asian Studies espe-
cially in regard to other Asian countries. I am bracketing the open-ended and progres-
sive, journal positions, which is where postcolonial work about the P.R.C. can be
found, though not necessarily in a leftist way. The Chinese New Left movement might
inuence critical discourse globally, and a certain limited range of it is getting pub-
lished. But there is also the translation problem and the positional superiority problem.
So it is too soon to tell.
10 I have discussed the fate of the critical eld more in “China in Theory,” 161–2.
11 On colonial modernity and China, see Barlow (1997) and other essays in that volume.
12 See Young’s second and third chapters in Postcolonialism.
13 For a useful account of his “enonce”/statement, see Carole Blair. I am aware that for
Foucault these are not meant to be propositions at all, but I remain unconvinced.
14 Japan drops out of the story early on, and the nal international Convention takes
place in Copenhagen. All in-text quotes from the online edition (37 pars.).
15 Pars. 3, 12, 22.
16 Par. 36.
17 As quoted in Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens.”
18 By historicist I mean the grounding of events, concepts, etc. to their “objective”
history and thus their “reality.”
19 See Scorsese’s comments on wanting to keep things “personal” in his interview with
Gavin Smith, p. 24.
20 Mark Abramson’s “Mountains, Monks and Mandalas” discusses this too.
21 As Scorsese makes clear with Gavin Smith in Film Comment. He and the script-writer
met with the leader and his group in Colorado, Los Angeles, and Dharamsala.
22 For an overview of Sautman’s work, see his “Tibet: Myths and Realities” and the sub-
sequent exchange of letters in the same journal (Feb. 2002), as well as “The Tibet
Question.” Tom Grunfeld’s The Making of Modern Tibet is apposite.
23 One reviewer, Douglas Imbrogno, notes the oiliness. The image of Mao as a dirty,
crude peasant and unt world-leader has become popular within Chinese liberal
circles and elsewhere, and the lm clearly taps into anti-Chinese racism in the U.S.
24 Sautman clearly presents the legal issue.
25 In addition to the Act, see its endorsement by numerous celebrities and anti-China
politicians.
26 I am here paraphrasing Grunfeld’s argument, in “Reassessing Tibet Policy” and “The
Question of Tibet.”
27 Huang mentioned Marx and Weber here, but we can also include the traditional
“China responds to the West” paradigm.
28 Philip C. C. Huang, “Theory and the Study of Modern Chinese History.”
29 See as well Harootunian and Sakai, “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies.” The institu-
tional and political–economic critiques of Asian Studies by Bruce Cummings and
Moss Roberts are invaluable. I take them as given. See, respectively, “Boundary Dis-
placement” and “Bad Karma.” See also Tani Barlow, “Colonialism’s Career,” and
Zhang Xudong, “Challenging the Eurocentric, Cold War View of China.”
30 See Leys, The Burning Forest, Mosher China Misperceived, and Barme, In the Red.
31 See, for example, David Martin Jones, The Image of China; David Shambaugh, Beau-
tiful Imperialist, and Nicholas R. Clifford, “The Long March of ‘Orientalism.’
”
32 Schwarz, paragraph 24. No page numbers in the electronic copy of this article are
available through the Journal of Asian Studies.
33 Op. cit. Schwarz, para. 20.
34 Schwarz, para. 32.
35 See for example Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: UMP, 1993), as well as Grounds for Comparison:
Notes 153
Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, ed. Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (New
York: Routledge, 2003).
36 Schwarz, para. 32.
37 Said discusses this in “East Isn’t East,” an Afterword to a new edition of Orientalism
in 1995.
38 See Zhang Kuan, “Predicament.” Zhang’s work was widely debated at the time within
China, as was Said and postcolonialism (that Said was read as “post-modern” is not
my concern here).
39 See for example Ben Xu, “Postmodern–Postcolonial Criticism” as well as the nal
chapter’s analysis of “Sinography.”
40 Quoted in Carine Defoort, “Is there such a thing as Chinese philosophy? Arguments
of an implicit debate,” 404. For more on Liu, including his current and unrepentant
views on colonialism, free-markets, and U.S. imperialism, see bilingual materials
here: http://chinastudygroup.net/2010/10/debate-about-liu-xiaobo/ Accessed May 29,
2011.
41 See Lindsay Waters.
42 See Brennan, “Scholars and Pretenders.”
43 See for example her remarks about Chinese socialism as “clearly something in which
decent Chinese people no longer invest their hopes” (Chow, “Can One Say” 149).
Other examples are too numerous to mention. I address her representations of “main-
landers” in a forthcoming article on China and Hong Kong’s globalization.
44 Currently a senior associate at a U.S. foreign policy think-tank, Pei has written
often on this. For a version in the Financial Times, see “China’s repression of
civil society will haunt it”: www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?-
fa=view&id=20346. (August 4, 2008).
45 For “genesis” read “process.” See Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx.
46 The reference here is to Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950, 376.
47 See Spivak’s passage in full: “Today the backlash is on the rise. There is a demand
for humanism, with a nod toward Asia; for universalism, however ambiguous; for
quality control; to ght terrorism” (21). Said’s last, posthumous book was a defense
of humanism. This does not contradict the argument here.
48 See The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Publishing, 1958), 194, 196.
49 Arendt, as cited in Pietz, 69.
50 This can be seen in a now declassied National Security Council document from
1949, “NSC-48,” which predated the more well-known “NSC-68” that laid down the
blueprint for the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Even at the origin of the Cold War,
Asia and China in particular were at the forefront of U.S. concerns.
2 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989
1 “Sinology” and “China studies” are synonymous for my purposes.
2 Real China is the supremely condent title of a book by John Gittings.
3 See Gareth Steadman Jones, “The Crisis of Communism.” Jones refers to the CCP
“abdicating” its “mandate from heaven,” for want of “any source of legitimacy in civil
society” (230). Such “civil society discourse” ourished in Europe in the wake of the
dissident movement in Poland and Czechoslovakia, radically different contexts than
that of China.
4 See Harrison Salisbury, The New Emperors.
5 See Richard Gordon’s brief words on him, “One Act, Many Meanings.” Still an
unknown gure, several have claimed to be him, just as Benetton and the Chinese
authorities have used his image to their own ends.”
6 See Steven Mosher’s China Misperceived and contributions to the “Trends in China
Watching” symposium at www.gwu.edu/~sigur/research/asia_papers.cfm. As Arif
Dirlik and Maurice Meisner note: “The dominant ideological orientation . . . is all the
154 Notes
more powerful because its negative assessments of socialism in China . . . are not
offered in explicit arguments but rather nd expression in a general orientation that is
more a ‘structure of sentiment’ [sic] than one of ideas. This consists of an allegation
here and a suggestion there and takes hold of our consciousness.” “Politics, Scholar-
ship, and Chinese Socialism,” 7.
7 See “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 171–2.
8 Gary LaMoshi, “Echoes of Tiananmen.”
9 It is no accident that the trope of an alleged Chinese xenophobia has its roots in the
nineteenth-century Chinese resistance to missionaries and imperialists.
10 For the excellent discussion, see “A Dialogue on the Future of China.”
11 Zhang Xudong, “Nationalism, Mass Culture.” See as well James R. Townsend, Politi-
cal Participation in Communist China.
12 On the GPCR and later democracy movements, see Lee Feigon, China Rising, and Mao.
13 The key collections of documents are: Lu Ping et al., A Moment of Truth; Mok Chiu
Yu et al., eds., Voices from Tiananmen Square; Han Minzhu, ed., Cries for Democ-
racy; Michael Oksenberg et al., Beijing Spring, 1989; and Suzanne Ogden et al., eds.,
China’s Search for Democracy. The most detailed history is Zhao, Power of Tianan-
men. In addition to studies referenced below, see Feigon’s China Rising and Hinton’s
The Great Reversal.
14 See Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of
Reforms, and Geremie Barme’s anthology, Shades of Mao. Kalpana Mishra, Post-Mao-
ism, and Liu Kang in Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism anlayze the intellectual milieu.
15 In addition to Zhao Dingxin, see Shen Tong’s Almost a Revolution.
16 The dialogue was broadcasted and is available in Oksenberg.
17 “Neo-authoritarianism” referred to the political control of the populace during the
“necessary” period of social dislocation and discontent during the Dengist “reforms.”
What was wanted was a strong and “liberal” leader to force the refroms. See Sautman,
“Sirens of the Strongman.”
18 Zhao notes the government tallies 300, including soldiers’ deaths, and Timothy Brook
in Quelling the People has accounted for 478. The toll may well be higher due to
undocumented executions afterwards.
19 The predominance of this approach is revealed in the number of publications on the
subject. See the special issue of Modern China (19.2 April 1993) on “Public Sphere/
Civil Society in China?,” and books by Baogang He, Gordon White et al., and Ding
Yijiang among others.
20 A central assumption here is that the economic sphere – the market system – is a
foundation for the development of civil society, in the form of “independent” (non-
state) unions and other activities. It is only the Marxist view that sees the economic
sphere as antagonistic, not merely symbiotic to civil and political society.
21 See Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State.
22 The authors do briey reference Clifford Geertz’s work on Bali and note Chinese
theatre terms, though none of this advances their analysis. Geertz’s work has often
been taken to task for its alleged ethnocentrism. See Mark Woodward’s Islam in Java
and Andrew Gordon, “The poverty of involution.”
23 We owe the critique of (non)contemporaneity to Johannes Fabian, Time and the
Other.
24 See Zhang Xudong, footnote 10 above.
25 The gure of 20,000 registered members comes from Ching Kwan Lee, “Pathways of
Labor Insurgency,” 56. Calhoun, however, refers to 5,000 members. I refer to a de
facto general strike, because while the BWAF’s repeated calls for an ofcial strike,
from April through June 3rd did not materialize, by June 4th production in Beijing,
and to a lesser extent elsewhere in China, was severely affected by the amount of
people – primarily workers and ordinary citizens – in the Square or joining the BWAF
or other workers federations.
Notes 155
26 In addition to Walder and Gong, see Wang Shaoguang, “From a Pillar of Continuity
to a Force for Change,” and Lu Ping.
27 Marx’s most searching treatment of these and related questions is in volume 1 of
Capital, particularly Chapter 1 and the “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process
of Production.” See also “On the Jewish Question” and “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine
of the State,” in Early Writings.
28 See Wolin, The Presence of the Past.
29 The point of the genealogy is an unacknowledged consensus on the eclipse of civil
society. Their Empire repeats much of this analysis.
30 The rst quote is from “The Workers Manifesto” of the BWAF, which genre also
helps to explain the Marxist rhetoric, and the latter is from “Psalm to the Beijing
People” by “a Chinese Worker.”
31 This document dates from May 20th, the moment of martial law, and is entitled, “The
Working Class Will Not Stand By Indifferently.”
32 Georg Lukács, “Reication and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”
33 This dazibao was entitled “Ten Questions for the Chinese Communist Party.”
34 I am thus assuming that this line-length argument holds true for the Chinese version
of the poem, though I have not found the original.
35 The poem “Mama, We’re Not Wrong” is by Ye Fu from May 1st. But this phrase
appeared early in the movement (April 9th). This poem likewise uses the rst-person
and calls for personal recognition and approval. “I Have A Dream” by Jie Fu was
posted at Nanjing University on May 21st. It is striking to compare Jie to King’s own,
universal appeal. Whereas the author brings this line back to himself, King’s address
hails a collective entity of all Americans.
36 The inuential documentary on Tiananmen, Gate of Heavenly Peace, also connects
the movement to Mao but in a purely negative way. See Chapter 6 for more.
37 See the interview with Han, and another BWAF activist in Lu Ping. I do not know if
the important Mr. Han still holds these views, but as of the later 1990s he is adamant
about working through the ofcial union organizations in China.
38 The “Denunciation . . . for Marx” and “Lenin is Crying” posters can be found in
Ogden et al., 310–11 and 111. The former was published at Beijing University, and
the latter in the Square. “Ten Questions,” from the BWAF, is in the same volume,
87–8.
39 They do refer to a few BWAF handbills, but the bulk of their evidence comes from
interviews with two “activists,” one a small-scale entrepreneur. They also translate a
document that resembles “Ten Strange Aspects,” but if these are the same then it is
clear they have made it pro-reform in sentiment. Compare to Lu Ping’s version.
40 The “standards of living” question here is complicated, for the iron-rice bowl welfare
system had also been eliminated, and there is always a difference between “proper”
workers and the oating or migrant labor population. See also “Activist #1” in Walder
and Gong: “After the reform, we have refrigerators; but look, what are we going to
put in them? . . . And the refrigerators are bought with loans anyway” (20).
41 In a recent article, “Legacies of Radicalism,” Calhoun and Wasserstrom address the
relations between Tiananmen and the CR but in a negative and symptomatic way.
Civil society remains the yardstick. For liberal sinologists, 1980s students, and the
CCP, the CR was one long national trauma.
42 See Bettleheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China.
43 “Mass incidents” over social justice issues often use Maoist iconography/slogans to
remind the state of its obligations. Barme’s Shades of Mao details the chairman’s
complex life after death.
44 For a critique of such pulp-orientalist texts, see Gao Mobo, The Battle for China’s
Past.
45 Geremie Barme, “Over 30 Years of China and Australia.”
156 Notes
3 Maoist discourse and its demonization
1 The most common sound-bite version of this is “Mao-the-Murderer.” See Jonathan
Mirsky, “Mao the mass murderer.” In response to a Beijing academic who asks him
whether he is accusing the millions of Chinese who love Mao of revering a mass
killer, Mirsky replies “such veneration [is] China’s tragedy.”
2 See for example the U.S. Congress’s Chinese Economy Post-Mao.
3 Oi’s work in my reading suggests the institutional links between the local and state
structures in the leap of the 1980s and early 1990s – again, a correction and develop-
ment form the previous era less than a break.
4 See B. Michael Frolic’s Mao’s People.
5 Vera Schwarcz, “The Burden of Memory: The Cultural Revolution and the Holo-
caust,” cited in Gao, “Debating,” 421. Tu Wei-ming, “Destructive Will and Ideologi-
cal Holocaust.”
6 Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era, 47; and Meisner, Mao’s China and After,
371–3. I have also heard of higher estimates, sometimes 1–2 million, but can nd no
verication. It is generally accepted, however, that most deaths came at the hands of
the PLA during their suppression of “rebels” – and this was opposed by the Maoist/
leftist line within the Party.
7 See A. James Gregor.
8 Gao Mobo, “Debating,” 419–34.
9 Lee Feigon’s Mao argues forcefully for this thesis, as does his documentary lm The
Passion of the Mao.
10 These are all known aspects, but can be found cited and discussed more in Gao, Battle
and Gao “Manufacturing Truth,” as well as the history texts of Gray and Meisner.
11 Again, the best introduction to these issues that I know of is Gao, The Battle for
China’s Past, as well as the others he draws on. See also Wu Yiching.
12 See Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists.”
13 Recall that “Mao Zedong Thought” means not simply Mao’s words, but something
more like an entire ideological stream created jointly by an entire generation of revo-
lutionaries but represented the most by Mao.
14 See his Policing Chinese Politics.
15 Mao, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” Dutton aptly notes that this line
expresses the “quintessence of politics” or the concept of the political (Policing 3).
16 After the Dengist “reversal” and later periods of working in China, Hinton criticized
himself for being insufciently aware of the two-line struggle at Long Bow and else-
where, from the early land reform onwards. See “Mao, Rural Development and Two-
line Struggle.”
17 See as well his comments on “the lines”: “the differences between what came to be
known as ‘the two roads,’ between ‘Liuism and ‘Maoism,’ were profound, and the
policies dominant in the early 1960s had signicant social consequences [return to
hired labor, school closings, removal of barefoot doctors, autocratic cadre behavior] –
and ones which Maoists found repugnant and intolerable” (275).
18 Early in the revolution Liu initially opposed carrying out land reform, but then aggres-
sively went after all – already sympathetic – middle-peasants; before the CR and
during the Socialist Education Movement he infamously sent in “work teams” to quell
workers’ dissent and leftist lower-level cadres. See Hinton, Reversal, for more.
19 Yao Wenyuan, “On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique.”
20 Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, and Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster.
21 The bastard reference is from Teiwes and Bakken, “Memoirs,” par. 5.
22 On the same page, Teiwes writes: “The most obvious example [of problems in Sinol-
ogy] is the discredited but perversely still inuential ‘two-line struggle’ interpretation
of the pre-Cultural Revolution period.” Teiwes casually asserts that Mao’s absolute
dominance and lack of opposition is somehow shown by ofcial “Party histories” and
Notes 157
“less ofcial sources,” and so betrays an utter disregard of the context of these
sources.
23 Examples here would be such “scholarly” tomes as Nixon’s and Khrushchev’s
memoirs, or Li Zhisui’s Mao bio. The latter text, full of specic dialogue written
thirty years after the fact on the sole basis of memory, has been criticized even within
Sinology, as well as by people who worked with Mao over the years. See Wasser-
strom’s review essay: “Mao Matters.” A probing analysis of Dr. Li’s “biography” can
be found in Gao, Battle for China’s Past.
24 Thus one can easily note that while the bibliographies in MacFarquhar’s and Teiwes’
works are long, the sources are predominantly memoirs and – often anonymous –
interviews from elite sources who were either “victims” or opponents of Mao and the
left.
25 For a thorough critique of the use of memoirs in scholarship of the Mao years, see
Gao Mobo, “Debating,” “Memoirs,” “Chinese Reality,” and “Maoist Discourse.”
26 Gao Wenqian’s book, like Li Zhisui’s even more sensationalist one, was published in
English through the help of American China studies avatars.
27 See George Paloczi-Horvath. The insect metaphor still circulates, as in W. van Keme-
nade’s references to “the Chinese people” “evolving” from “Mao-worshipping blue
ants” to “nihilistic, ultra-individualistic, money-worshiping hedonists” who might yet
“revert to a dreary mass of blue and gray ants, driving out foreign investors” (x, 216).
28 For more, see Gao Mobo, “Maoist Discourse.”
4 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: missing millions, excess
deaths, and a crisis of Chinese proportions
1 Nonetheless, through the Mao era the rural “sector” received less benets than the urban
in terms of welfare and access to social goods. This may be seen as a matter of bias. But
it is also a problem having to do with a long, historical contradiction between the urban
and rural in old, agrarian societies that inevitably need to modernize.
2 Patnaik, “The Economic Ideas of Mao Zedong,” par. 28.
3 See his Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology.
4 Han’s most recent statement on these questions is “Farmers, Mao, and Discontent in
China from the Great Leap Forward to the Present.” See as well his earlier book, The
Unknown Cultural Revolution.
5 Hinton claimed that 30 percent of the new communes were successful, 30 percent
failing, and 70 percent muddling along. Far from utopian, this was nonetheless effec-
tive given the population increases and global economic blockade.
6 Even the now infamous backyard steel furnaces – admittedly a failure – worked where
there was already a tradition and expertise in this very old technology of China. See
the discussion in Donald Wagner.
7 As suggested by Gray, 313.
8 Again, see Gray’s chapter on the Great Leap in Rebellions and Revolutions, especially
308–15.
9 As noted in Riskin, “Seven Questions.” See D. Southerland, “Repression’s Higher
Toll.”
10 Riskin’s dating of the famine from 1959 is also worth emphasizing, as many scholars
will often start the famine in 1958, despite the facts that the harvest was good that
year and in 1957 – a key reason for the Leap’s enthusiasm and “speed” – and that
there seems to have been no spike in the death rate.
11 See Tu, “Destructive Will,” footnote 3. The article he references in regard to the
report is Kleinman and Kleinman, “The appeal of experience.” Had it actually been a
1961 CCP report citing 30 million national deaths, it is safe to say that it would have
been quite the archival coup.
12 See Simon Leys (aka Pierre Ryckmans), Chinese Shadows. Perhaps Leys’s most
158 Notes
famous tirade against Maoism involved his bemoaning the destruction of Beijing’s
imperial, fortress-like city walls. That such walls ran counter to democratic, let alone
communist society, seems incomprehensible to the Belgian antiquarian. For a critique
of Leys’s work, see an early essay by Edward Friedman: “Simon Leys Hates China.”
13 See for example Tu’s Humanity and Self-Cultivation.
14 See Sen, Development As Freedom, and “How Is India Doing?”
15 Coale, Rapid Population Change in China. Banister, China’s Changing Population.
As Riskin notes, there were just two articles in China on the subject (in 1981) before
the Yearbook published its crude (rough) death rates.
16 On the destruction of Dazhai itself, and of the career of its proletarian leader, Chen
Yonggui, see Qin Huailu’s Ninth Heaven to Ninth Hell: The History of a Noble
Chinese Experiment, and on the top-down destruction of the rural communes, see
William Hinton, The Great Reversal, and Carma Hinton’s documentary, All Under
Heaven (1985).
17 As far back as 1959, Ping-ti Ho, a U.S. demographer and historian, noted that the
1953 census, again based on regional samples, was plagued with numerous “aws”
and its estimation of a 30 percent increase in China’s population from 1947–53 is
hard to believe, given that these were years of “heavy revolutionary struggle,” includ-
ing the civil war. See Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China. Willem
Wertheim recalled a conversation with the P.R.C. demographer Chen Ta in 1957, who
had likewise criticized the original census for lacking scientic validity. See
Wertheim, “Wild Swans and Mao’s Agrarian Strategy.” My thanks to Frank Willems
for procuring this article from the Netherlands for me.
18 See his English Lessons.
19 As cited by Antony C. Black, “Black Propaganda,” The Guardian Weekly 24 Febru-
ary 2000. I owe this reference to Gao, “Debating,” 425.
20 See as well the discussion of the Leap and the defense of its economic sense in Jack
Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions: China 1800–1990s.
21 See for example Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China, and Gene H. Chang and
G. James Wen, “Communal Dining and the Chinese Famine of 1958–1961.”
22 Han, “The Great Leap Famine,” par. 9.
23 See as well William Hinton, “A Response to Hugh Deane” and his preface to the
Chinese edition of Shenfan, published as “Mao, Rural Development and Two-line
Struggle.” Jack Gray’s comments on the Leap in his Rebellions and Revolutions are
apposite, 307–15.
24 As Patnaik notes, the increases in both rates represent increases in tens of millions of
births and deaths; in this period such huge increases in births are highly unlikely in
these years of wide-scale social mobilization.
25 Fubin Sun, “Ageing of the Population in China,” gives the gure of 689,705,000 for
1964 from the census of that year.
26 It is an arbitrary insertion because no one knows when these hypothetical, “new”
deaths occurred.
27 See “On Famine,” 53–64, for the extended, technical discussion.
28 See her “Republic” for a telling critique of the failure of this same coterie of scholars
to even acknowledge the demographic collapse in Russia, after the “fall,” and the
onset of U.S.- and IMF-induced free-market shock therapy.
29 Thus it became perfectly acceptable – even among “progressives” or union leaders –
to militate against including China, but not, say, India within the World Trade
Organization.
30 For a recent critique of Becker, see Joseph Ball.
31 For a collection of academic responses to Chang and Halliday, see Gregor Benton and
Lin Chun, eds. Dong Xulin’s and Q. M. DeBorja’s Manufacturing History is also
useful here, in response to Li Zhisui.
32 See notes 6 and 7, p. 402.
Notes 159
33 As noted earlier, Riskin and others argues otherwise, though do recognize that such
efforts were not fully successful until 1961.
34 See for example Wasserstrom, “Mao Matters.”
35 Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” a story from 1946 and online https://notes.utk.
edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/f2d03252295e0d0585256e120009adab?OpenDocument.
36 Yet another indication of the deceptively complex issues here is indicated by another
representational strategy. At some points in this study a given paragraph will contain
many claims and yet will end with only one citation referring to the last claim; in-text,
this gives the impression that the last citation backs up all the claims in the paragraph.
37 For a critical review of the book from a demographer, see O’Grada, who also mirrors
Patnaik.
38 If nothing else, David Bachman’s detailed Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in
China on the long policy debates between the “planners” and market-“gradualists” in
the run-up to the Leap shows quite a bit of discussion within the government. Local-
level self-governance is another issue, though not broached by Sen. Note, too, that
one of Mao et al.’s inspirations for the Leap was the spontaneous formation of com-
munes in Henan and Hebei. See Meisner, Mao’s China, 231.
39 This is something recognized by MacFarquhar and Teiwes, who use it to focus on
Mao’s alleged obsession with his own power (in the Peng Dehuai affair). They miss
the opportunity to deal with the complex issues of the famine’s causes.
40 See Utsa Patnaik’s “Food and Famine: A Longer View” as well as various articles on
Sen in the Indian Frontline magazine over the years.
41 Sen’s works are rife with positive references to “the market,” so there is little need to
illustrate this here. Take, for example, “Food and Freedom” (769, n68) on China’s
growth being the result not of three decades of rural–industrial development, but of
“the freeing of markets.”
42 Frederick Teiwes, “Paradoxical,” argues that governance was never “institutionalized”
and there was no “political jockeying” or “calculation” (only obedience/despotism).
5 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao: the “Sinologization” of
global thought
1 For a review of reportage that shows the antagonistic and often hostile U.S. depiction
of the P.R.C., see Alexander Liss.
2 Remarks by his editor Nan Graham, as noted in the New York Times, “Dangerous Don
DeLillo,” 19 May 1991.
3 On paranoia and postmodern literature, see Jerry Aline Flieger.
4 For the Taliban “connection,” see Franz Schurmann. On the red-baiting of RAWA,
see their “Answer.”
5 I owe this insight to Osteen, 678n9.
6 See the anonymous article on the Chinese leftist website, Utopia: www.wyzxsx.com/
Article/Class14/200901/66880.html 2009-1-21. My thanks to Chen Anya for help
with the translation.
7 See as well Bull’s own use and celebration of Bakhtin, 217–18.
8 Quote from the back-cover.
9 Within Western China studies, this type of psychologism – but in an ego-psychology
vein – is best represented by the late Lucien Pye.
10 For more on the “haunting” of a Western text by the specter of Mao, see the discus-
sion of The Gate of Heavenly Peace in the present chapter.
6 Screening Sinology: on the Western study of Chinese film
1 Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) was the rst success, though it was its acclaim in
lm festivals abroad that made it bigger at home. The biggest “breakthroughs” were
160 Notes
the prizes awarded thereafter to other fth-generation lms, from Zhang Yimou’s Red
Sorghum at Berlin in 1988, his The Story of Qiu Ju at Venice in 1992, and Chen
Kaige’s at Cannes in 1993 for Farewell. Chronologically, Zhang Zhunjao’s 1983 One
and Eight is the rst. Of course other and older lm-makers were at work in this time.
2 The “generational” label signies a shared training and historical experience, though
it started only with the fth and only applies well to them.
3 For background on Gao Xingjian, see Lyall, “Chinese Born Writer,” and the People’s
Daily, “Nobel Literature Prize Politically Used.” For an account of Gao as “an indi-
vidual who has the courage not to represent, or identify with, any group whatsoever,”
see Burckhardt, 54. Liberalism perfected.
4 This is not to argue against “trans-national Chinese cinema” studies. But it is to call
for further interrogation of the eld’s fundamental assumptions (e.g. about “Chinese-
ness” and totalitarianism), and for retaining the specicities of Hong Kong and
Taiwan. For the notion of a transcendental “cultural China,” see Tu Wei-ming, “Cul-
tural China.”
5 Zhang’s important study has gone the furthest along these lines. The present study
departs from his in its focus on the discourse of a Sinological, Cold War orientalism
as such.
6 The list includes the following: Michael Frisch, Merle Goldman, Gong Xiaoxia, Harry
Harding, Ellen Laing, Leo Lee, Andrew Nathan, Barry Naughton, William Parish,
Elizabeth Perry, Jonathan Spence, Andrew Walder, Marilyn Young, and especially
Geremie Barmé, Gail Hershatter, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and Orville Schell.
7 There are, however, brief sound bites from the trade union activist Han Dongfang. For
more on Han, and the workers movement to the left of him, see Chapter 2.
8 Both Wu Guoguang’s and Han Dongfang’s nal comments reveal this conation, and
their opposition to all three.
9 See Geremie Barme’s essay “Totalitarian Nostalgia,” in his In The Red. I return to
this point later in my discussion of In the Heat of the Sun.
10 Ralph Litzinger, “Screening the Political.”
11 On Zhao, see Sautman, “Sirens.”
12 See his The History of Sexuality, vol. 1.
13 For the argument about “totalitarianism” as colonial discourse, see the Introduction.
14 Compare Kai-Yu Hsu’s out-of-print anthology, Literature of the People’s Republic of
China, which collects the left-wing literature people actually read over several
decades, with the current anthologies available from Cambridge, Columbia, and
Oxford University Presses.
15 Mao’s early formulations are available in Talks at the Yan’an Conference. For a fasci-
nating reading of the Talks, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 202–5.
The later combined formulation came in 1958. One can of course see these as not mutu-
ally exclusive or even overlapping aesthetics, but they were anti-humanist in any case.
16 Yau, “China After,” refers to this hierarchical split, as does Zhang Yingjin, in the
other English language history of, Chinese National Cinema. Berenice Reynaud
claims Yan’an represents the “interference of politics into lm-making,” 163.
17 Chris Berry likewise buys into this dichotomy/hierarchy in his more recent Post-
socialist Cinema in Post-Mao China.
18 The best known of such work is Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern. Lee does not
examine the elite/colonial nature of Shanghai’s riches, nor how, in the context of
communist revolution and national liberation Shanghai had to change.
19 See Chen Jinhua’s comments as paraphrased by Clark on pp. 189–90n9, and Zhang’s
Chinese National Cinema, 199.
20 One sees this same implicit hierarchy (the “faction” versus the “Shanghai artists”) in
Yau’s “China After,” 694.
21 Deng’s famous or infamous lines were actually “to get rich is glorious” and “some
must get rich rst,” which moves him even further to the right of Chao!
Notes 161
22 See the anonymous review of the lm at www.socialistlms.org/2007/12/breaking-
with-old-ideas-prc-1975.html for a parallel reading.
23 Farquhar, “The ‘Hidden’ Gender in Yellow Earth.” Page numbers refer to the Cellu-
loid China edition.
24 See Zhang’s “Open Letter.”
25 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes.
26 Shuqin Cui’s transhistorical text, Women Through the Lens, is in the same mode.
27 For translations of Chinese criticism on these grounds – that it unfairly shows the
“dirty laundry” of rural China – see Barme and Minford, Seeds of Fire. This critique
should be distinguished from the charges of misrepresentation of Yan’an. For the
latter, see the comments by Xia Yan in the same volume.
28 I leave to one side here Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1993 The Blue Kite, which is essentially
the cinematic version of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans.
29 Rey Chow, “We Endure, Therefore We Are.”
30 On the Chinese debates and cinema generally, see the superb discussions in McGrath.
Again, one can see how Western lm studies often buys wholesale Chinese liberal
views or lm discourse.
31 While the subtitles translate Gulunmu’s curse as “cretins!,” I am following Liu Kang’s
and Anbin Shi’s translation in Chen Xiaoming’s essay, “The Mysterious Other.”
32 For more on the self-understanding of CR participants, see the discussion in Chapter
3. See as well David Davies’ 2002 dissertation, “Remembering Red: Memory and
Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China.”
33 Cf. Dai Jinhua, 1997, pp. 153–4.
34 Heat was co-produced by companies from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.
35 See pages 540 and 557–8. Note, too, that Wang Shaoguang, also cited here by Lu,
would not agree at all with her account of the CR.
36 Feng Jicai is a mainland writer whose career is, or was founded upon producing CR
“scar” texts.
37 See Marchetti, “Chinese Film Criticism.”
38 This is the Russian lm’s closing dedication and tag-line.
39 Braester’s source for this and for his orientation to Chinese history it seems, is
Barme’s Shades of Mao.
40 On this question, see Han Yuhai, “Speech Without Words.”
41 On the not-quite-white logic of British colonial discourse, see Homi Bhabha, The
Location of Culture.
7 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy
1 See Foucault’s Archaeology, 31–9.
2 As noted before, we can see this as more akin to the civilizing mission of the French
empire than to the white man’s burden of the British; on this see Young’s early chap-
ters in Postcolonialism. But it also specically reects American political–economic
“leadership” and exceptionalism.
3 As he put it in “Marxism Today”: “This is what constitutes the grandeur of Mao: that
he practically questioned the metaphysical idea of the dialectic by audaciously sub-
mitting the dialectic to the dialectic (in his theory of ‘contradiction’), and thus
broached the nature of ideological relations and put his nger on the separation and
power of the party apparatus, in the ambitious project of a cultural revolution,
designed to change the relation between Party and masses” (278–9).
4 See as well the entire synopsis of Maoism and the P.R.C. in Kolakowski, 494–522,
and for Deutscher’s recourse to oriental despotism, see his Marxism, Wars and Revo-
lutions, 181–217.
5 Balibar’s remarks on Mao in Masses, Classes, Ideas, e.g. 172, are apposite. Though
this has been argued in China, my point is not that Mao and Maoism were postmodern
162 Notes
“before the letter.” Mao’s best essay indicating his views remains 1957’s “On the
Correct Handling of Contradictions.”
6 See Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies’,” 30–3.
7 See as well Belden Fields, “French Maoism.”
8 “Whatever [qualunque],” as the translator notes, “refers precisely to that which is
neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic” (107).
9 See Zhao Dingxin. For the tensions between the workers groups and the students, see
Lu Ping et al.
10 See Part 2 of Zhao’s Power, and the documents in Michael Oskenberg et al., eds.,
Beijing Spring, 1989, especially the talks between Li Peng and student leaders, 269–81.
11 See the anonymous poster from a workers’ federation, “Ten Questions for the Chinese
Communist Party,” collected in Lu Ping, Moment, 184. Chapter 2 of the present study
examines Tiananmen in more detail.
12 See Meisner, Mao’s China and After, and Hinton, The Great Reversal. The right to
strike was eliminated in 1982.
13 See mainland scholar Wang Hui, China’s New Order, 179–80.
14 At the level of theory, the key source here is Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics.
15 See Pietz, and the discussion in Chapter 1 here.
16 For a history of such rebellions, see Jack Gray. In 2005 the number of ofcial,
recorded “mass incidents” was 87,000. There were 10,000 recorded in 1994.
17 This is – predictably – Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story. See Benton
and Chun.
18 I have discussed such work in Chapter 3, but see also Andreas’s Rise of the Red
Engineers.
19 He does offer a reading of Mao’s “philosophy” essays in Žižek, 2007, but these are
akin to Laclau and Mouffe’s “readings” discussed above. Hardt and Negri in later
work (Multitude) do engage Maoist guerilla warfare strategy and thus “China.”
20 I am borrowing Saussy’s insights here, in reference to Sollers’ and Tel Quel’s Maoist
moment in the late 1960s and 1970s. In light of my critique this may seem like foul
play. But the question is also one that the Marxian Barthes called reality-effect, and is
an excellent insight regardless.
21 I should note that these were always marginal and alternative – hence heterodox
views. The dominant ways of seeing Maoist China were always the Cold War colo-
nial ones of today.
22 See works cited. Robinson’s work showed the economic rationality of Mao-era eco-
nomics and – like Hinton’s work – attempted to move Western opinion beyond simple
demonizations.
23 See Timothy Brennan, “The Empire’s New Clothes.”
24 See Pietz, “Post-colonialism,” and Chapter 1 here.
25 See for example, Hayot, xii–xiii, 180–1; and Saussy, 853–4, 885n14.
26 I am here following the interpretation of Said’s work offered by James Hevia and
Timothy Brennan.
27 This can also be called a discursive formation in Foucault’s sense, which includes the
non-discursive articulated to it.
28 See Harvey, 2003 and 2005.
29 We are ignoring a much longer history. Frank’s last book is helpful here for the longer
economic sweep.
30 More or less open access among “experts” and students to the “eld” of the mainland.
31 The U.S. Congress’s Cox Committee Report is an emblematic text here.
32 I am thinking in particular of work by Lydia Liu and Han Yuhai.
33 See especially Late Marxism.
34 However, it is important to not collapse these two things either. Again, Bhaskar is
useful here.
35 See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” What Althusser calls
Notes 163
ideology and “the problematic” is close to what Foucault later calls discourse (and
previously “episteme”).
36 The work of Adorno and Lukacs is paramount here, as well as Jameson’s Late
Marxism.
37 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, for elaborate accounts as to why.
38 For an account of the economics of Nanjiecun and its important/Maoist cadre-mass
relationship, see Cui Zhiyuan.
39 On Said’s use of this last phrase, see Brennan, “Edward.”
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Index
Adorno, T. 9
aesthetics 106
Agamben, G. 130–2
aid 52
Al-Azmeh, A. 9–10
Althusser, L. 77, 129
anti-colonial theory 5
anti-empiricism 43
anti-Semitism 22
archive material: access to 80; lack of 72;
reference to 81
Arendt, H. 21–2, 138
articulation 129
Asian studies, dichotomy of 14
Bakhtin, M. 96
Balibar, E. 1, 146, 147
Banister, J. 72, 76
Barlow, T. 6
Barme, G. 26, 46, 50, 103
Becker, J. 77–8
becoming-sameness 2; see also sameness
Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation
36, 39, 40–2
Berry, C. 106
Bhaskar, R. 141
binarism 57–8, 59
Blecher, M. 38
Braester, Y. 123–5
brainwashing 21, 23, 48, 65, 95, 134
Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie) 56,
108–13
Brennan, T. 17, 20, 96, 138, 139
Bretton Woods 4
Bull, J. 96
Bush, R. 137
Calhoun, C. 33
Cao Shuji 82
capital, Marxist analysis 1–2
capitalism: and civil society 37; dynamics
of 4–5; effects on China 143; forms of
intercourse 149; modes of production
149; and orientalism 127
capitalist objectivity 148
catch-up mentality 17–18
categories of thought 146–7, 150
censuses 72, 81, 84
Chakrabarty, D. 3
Chan, A. 75
changes, counter-revolutionary 2
Charter 08 group 16–17
Chen Xiaomei 17–19
Chen Xiaoming 121
Chen Yizi 70, 82
childcare, provision of 67
China: Cold War colonial discourse 23;
constructions of 136–7; in
contemporary discourse 127; effects of
rise on scholarship 142; as object of
academic study 4–10; as object of
orientalism 143–4; relationship with
West 127; representations of 140–1;
theoretical approaches 128–35; as
thought experiment 140–1; as threat
10–11
China difference 10–11
China references 127–8; reasons for
139–42
China studies, mode of denition 6
Chinese, demonization of 12
Chinese culture, as global 100
Chinese Embassy bombing 28
Chinese mentality 11
Chinese New Left xv, 139, 151n4, 152n9
Chinese New Wave 106–7
Chinese revolution, attitudes to 6
Chinese space 150
Index 181
Chinese state, intellectual battle with xv,
16, 19, 54, 140
Chow, Rey 16, 18, 105–6, 117, 132
civil society 33–8, 36–8; as antinomy 39;
and capitalism 37; as dominant approach
46; indigenous 36; and state 37; truth of
146
civilizing mission 5, 8
Clark, P. 106, 107
class 57–8
class consciousness 38–9
clothing, distribution of 92
Coale, A.J. 72, 76
Cohen, P. 15
Cohen, Warren 63
Cohn, B. 82–6
Cold War 7–8; communism and
decolonization 138–9; legacy 18–19;
and postcolonialism 20–3
collectivity, dismantling of 59
colonial discourse, attitude of 128–9
colonialism 6–8; impact and effects 85–6;
modern 25
Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge
(Cohn) 84
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars 60
commodity fetishism 92
commodity form 148
communal kitchens 75
communism, and decolonization 138
communist successor 56
communitarianism 37
community 130
conicts, cultural–ideological 7–8
Cong Jin 70
consciousness 42
conspiracy theory 93
contemporary discourse, China in 127
continuity 58–9
cosmopolitanism, anti-peasant 19
counter-revolutionary changes 2
court/elite interpretation 61–4, 79
creativity, of BWAF 40–1
cross-over analyses 77–82
cultural centers, multiple 36
cultural–ideological conicts 7–8
Cultural Revolution: benets 51–2;
nostalgia 56; participatory democracy
29, 44–5; and Tiananmen 43–5;
violence 94
Dai Jinhua 124
data, unreliability 70–7
De Gaulle, Charles 11
de-Maoication 24, 52, 64
DeLillo, Don 50, 87
democracy: Cultural Revolution 29, 44–5;
Western 44
democratic modernization 46
demonization: of Chinese 12; Great Leap
Forward 75–6; and knowledge
production 80; of Mao 80; of Maoism
11, 87, 93, 99, 105, 130; overview 47–9;
summary and conclusions 64–5
Deng Xiaoping 24, 45
depoliticization 58, 64
despotism 21, 23, 46, 48, 63, 75, 86, 93,
94, 144; governance as 58–64
Deutscher, I. 128–9
development: of rural communities 66–7;
socio-economic 50
dichotomies: of Asian studies 14; liberal/
totalitarian or anti-Marxist/Marxist 36
difference 10–11
Dikotter, F. 78–82
Dirlik, A. 29, 135
discourse, contemporary, China in 127
dispossession 98
Domenach, J.-L. 83
dousipixiu 56
droughts 75
Dutton, M. 56–7
Eckstein, A. 75
economic categories 145–7
economic injustices 45
economics, of new orientalism 144
education, representation in lm 108–13
egaliberte 27
egalitarianism 54–5
elision 29, 65
elite/court interpretation 61–4
Empire (Hardt and Negri) 132–4
end-of-history 1
enumerative modality 82–6, 87, 95
epistemic fallacy 141
equivalence 8, 13, 24, 51–2; Mao II
(DeLillo) 90–2
Esch, B. 137
Esherick, J. 34–5
ethical mandate 56
ethics 130
exchange 148
extremism 48, 51, 52, 55, 91, 93, 96
facts, ignoring of 62–3
famine 59; contributory factors 74–5;
cross-over analyses 77–82; deaths 70–4,
182 Index
famine continued
76, 81–2, 93–4; enumerative modality
82–6
fantasy 144
Farquhar, M.A. 114–15
fascism 51
fear 144–5
feminism: in lm 110–11; state 67, 75, 115
fetishism 92
fetishization, of Occident 18–19
fth generation cinema 101, 105, 106, 113
lm: audiences 101–2; bifurcation of
history 107; Breaking With Old Ideas
(Jue Lie) 56, 108–13; Chinese New
Wave 106–7; as Cold War history
105–8; feminism 110–11; fth
generation cinema 101, 105, 106, 113;
The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Hinton
and Gordon) 102–5; In The Heat of The
Sun (Jiang Wen) 56, 120; idea of
maturity 106–7; international success of
100; Kundun (Scorsese) 10, 12; To Live
(Zhang Yimou) 117–19; overview
100–2; Yan’an/Shanghai split 107–8
lm studies: approach to Chinese lm
100–1; importance of 101–2; limits of
125
oods 75
foreign policy, United States 12–13
forms of intercourse 149
Foucault, M. 9, 77, 101
free press 83–4
freedoms 56
Friedman, E. 50
friend/enemy distinction 56–7, 58, 85
friendship 33
Fukuyama, F. 1
fundamentalism 46, 50–1, 93
Galbraith, J.K. 92, 136
Gao Mobo 51–2, 53, 55–6
Gao Wenqian 63
gender neutrality 54
general equivalence 5
global ows 143
globalization 1, 127; China as challenge
138–9; Marxian view of 140;
signicance of 1970s 4
Goddess of Democracy statue 31
Goffman, E. 34
Gong Xiaoxia 40–3, 45
Goss, R. 51
governance: as despotism 58–64; positive
accounts of 64; Western forms 144
Graham, E. 17
Gray, J. 66–7, 70, 78
Great Leap Forward 59–60, 61–2; cross-
over analyses 77–82; deaths 70–4, 76,
81–2, 93–4; demonization 75–6;
enumerative modality 82–6; failure of
75; feminism 67, 75; lack of reliable
data 70–7; media representations 83;
purpose and vision 66–8; self-
understanding 75; Skinner’s account of
failure 68–70; socio-cultural and
political dimensions 67; spatial analysis
67–8; see also Mao II (DeLillo)
Gregor, J. 51
Grosrichard, A. 144
Grunfeld, T. 13
Hall, S. 53
Han Dongfang 42
Han Dongping 68, 75
Hardt, M. 37, 132–4
Harootunian, H. 14, 15
Harvey, D. 4–5, 143
Hayot, E. 139–41
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau
and Mouffe) 128–30
Hevia, J. 5, 8, 72, 85
Hinton, C. 102
Hinton, W. 59, 60, 136
historicism, Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue
Lie) 111
history, selectivity of 5–6, 7, 64
Holocaust 51
Hou Dejian 32
Howkins, J. 106
Hu Feng 36
Hu Sheng 7
Hu Yaobang 29–30
Huang, P.C.C. 13–14
humanism 20
hunger strike 31
Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine
(Becker) 77–8
identities: collective 98; constitution of 1;
Western 65
In The Heat of The Sun (Jiang Wen) 56,
120
India 83
inequality 68
injustices, economic 45
institutionalization 100
interdisciplinarity 9
internalization, of orientalism 2
Index 183
Islam 50–1
Jameson, F. 92, 138, 145
Jay, M. 115
Kelley, R.D.G. 137
Kennan, G. 21
Kennedy, John F. 11, 23
Klass, D. 51
knowledge: and demonization 80; ltering
36; global production 87; production of
9, 15, 18, 25, 64, 84, 142–3, 146
Kolakowski, L. 128
Kundun (Scorsese) 10, 12
labor, nobility of 39
lack 145
Laclau, E. 128–30
language, Westernization 8
Larson, W. 105, 121
liberal humanism 20
liberal thought, colonial roots of 17
liberalism 144
Liebling, A.J. 84
Lifton, R.J. 96–7
Lin Chun 3, 44
line struggle 59–61
Litzinger, R. 35, 104
Liu Kang 29, 36, 122, 138–9
Liu Shaoqi 59–60, 81
Liu Xiaobo 16–17
local participation 67
London, Jack 10–11, 12–13
Lu Ping 38, 39, 41
Lu Tonglin 122–4
Lu Xun 8
Lukács, G. 38–9, 146
MacFarquhar, R. 58–9, 62–3
Mao II (DeLillo) 50, 87–99; linkages
90–2; oriental despotism 94; story 88;
themes 88–9; see also Great Leap
Forward
Maoism: as alternative to Soviet and US
approaches 29; dening element 59;
democracy 44–5; demonization of 11,
47–9, 64–5, 87, 93, 99, 105, 130; and
economic growth 50; elision of 29, 65;
global inuence 137–8; governance as
despotism 58–64; inuence on Western
thought 129–30; nostalgia for 45;
popular attitudes to 46; representations
of 46; self-understanding 53–6; and
Tiananmen 43–5
Maoist discourse 49–58; lack of awareness
of 94; legacy 98; scholarly negation of
58–64
Mao’s Great Famine (Dikotter) 78–82
mapping, problems of 81
martial law 31, 36
Marx, Karl 37, 145–9
Marxism: analysis of capital 1–2; class
57–8; hostility to 36
mass democracy 50, 94
mass mobilizations 50
mass organizations 44–5
maturity, of lm 106–7
media 83–4; Tiananmen 27–8; United
States 91
Meisner, M. 31, 45, 59
missionary discourse 5, 8
modern colonialism 25
modernization: pressure for 86; rhetoric of
1
modes of production 149
monologism 96
mortality, Great Leap Forward 72–4, 76,
81, 93–4
Mouffe, C. 128–30
Mulvey, L. 115
Nanjiecun 150
Nathan, A. 35, 46, 49
nationalisms 86
Nazism 51
Negri, A. 37, 132–4
neo-liberalism 64, 143
New World Order 23
nobility of labor 39
non-recognition, of other 89
nostalgia: in lm 56; for Maoism 45
objectivity 146–8; capitalist 148
occidentalism, as internalized orientalism
17–20
open vs. closed society 93
opposition, voicing of 61
oriental despotism, 18, 21–3, 46, 58–65,
86, 93, 144
orientalism: and capitalism 127; changed
model of 25; as closed, circular system
3, 43, 74, 77, 125; critiques of Said’s
work 13–15, 144; internalization of 2; as
knowledge production and distribution
142–3; post-Mao 24–5; proliferation of
24; understandings of 143; see also
positional superiority
184 Index
Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 21
Osteen, M. 91
other, non-recognition of 89
othering 3, 13, 17, 132
overseas aid 52
Palat, R. 14
participatory democracy, Cultural
Revolution 29
Patnaik, U. 67, 73–4, 76
Pei Minxin 18
Perry, E.J. 26, 34
persecution 63–4
Pietz, W. 21–2, 138, 139
political theatre 34–5
“Pomo” theory 16
Popper, Karl 93
positional superiority 3, 25, 29, 36, 43, 46,
82, 126–7
post-colonial critique 13–17
post-colonial studies xiii, xv, 2–6, 13–17,
20–1, 25, 127
post-structuralism 129, 140
postcolonialism, and Cold War 20–3
postmodernism 141
postmodernity, emergence of 4
poverty 68
power, unequal distribution of 17
power/knowledge nexus 53, 77
press 83–4
proletariat, vision 38–9
psychoanalysis 144–5
public sphere 33, 36
question of objectivity 146–8
racism 5
raw data 84
reform, social costs of 41
regularity in dispersion 101
reication 38–9
representation, nature of 18
Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung
and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
(Lifton) 96–7
revolutionary youth 53–5
right: rejection of 39; turn to 6, 64
rigor, lack of in scholarship 63
Riskin, C. 67, 70, 72–3, 75, 81
Robinson, J. 136
rural economy, complexity 69
rural marketing system, effects of
disbanding 69
Rushdie, Salman 91
Said, E. 1, 2–3, 14, 17–18, 20, 25, 144
sameness 1, 5, 8, 10–13, 25, 84
Saussy, Haun 36, 136, 140, 141
Sautman, B. 12
Schmitt, C. 56–7, 58
scholars, negation of Maoist discourse
58–64
Schwartz, B. 14–15
Schwarz, V. 51
Scorsese, Martin 10
self-understanding 49, 53–6, 65; Great
Leap Forward 75
semi-colonialism 6
Sen, A. 71–2, 74, 82–4, 87
Shanghai Commune 44
Shen Tong 43–4
Shue, V. 34
Shujie, Yao 75
Simmons, R. 91
Sinography 140–2
sinological orientalism: economics of 144;
nature of 147; overview 1–4; summary
of discussion and argument 126–7;
underlying assumptions 11
Sinology, use of term 9
Skinner, G.W. 68–70, 78
social constructionism 141
socio-economic development 50
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred (intellectual labor) 68
Solidarnos, and BWAF 40
sources 9; unreliable 63
sovereignty 6–7
Soviet Union, withdrawal of help 75
space, social and “Chinese” 4, 144, 146,
149–50.
spatial analysis, Great Leap Forward 67–8
Spivak, G. 89
state feminism 67, 75, 115
statement: and civil society 37; use of term
9
Steinmetz, G. 135
Stoddard, L. (The Rising Tide of Color) 36
student movement, demands of 131
Su Xiaokang 19
subject nations, development and
governance 143
Teiwes, F. 61
television, Tiananmen 27
terrorism 46, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93
The Coming Community (Agamben)
130–2
The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Hinton and
Gordon) 11, 102–5
Index 185
The Origins of the Cultural Revolution
(MacFarquhar) 58–9
The Power of Tiananmen (Zhao) 26
The Sultan’s Feast: European Fantasies of
the East (Grosrichard) 144
The Transformations of Chinese Socialism
3
“The Unparalleled Invasion” (London)
10–11, 12–13
theoretical approaches 128–35
Third Worldism 130
thought, categories of 146–7, 150
thought experiment, China as 140–1
Tiananmen 11; Agamben’s view 131–2;
civil society interpretation 33–8, 132;
context of 29–30; counter-knowledge
32; demands of movement 131; Hardt
and Negri’s view 132–4; interpretations
32–3; and Maoism 43–5; martial law 31;
media representations 27–8; protests
29–32; Western view 26–9; worker
participation 31; workers’ involvement
38–43
Tibet, portrayal of 12
Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 12
To Live (Zhang Yimou) 117–19
total value-process 147–8
totalitarianism 21–3, 34, 46, 48, 53, 54, 58,
86, 93, 96, 105, 122, 134, 138, 144
Township Village Enterprises (TVEs) 68
traditionalism 34
truth 53
Tu Wei-ming 51, 70–1
Unborn “deaths” 70, 76, 85, 94
Unger, J. 33
United States: foreign policy 12–13; media
91; Senate hearings 63
U.S.-Western hegemony 23
utopianism 48
value (forms of, process of) 1, 145–6,
148–9
victimization 55
violence, Cultural Revolution 94
Wahhabi Islam 51
Walder, A. 40–3, 45
Wang Ban 122
Wang Hui 3, 36, 132, 139
Wang Zheng 53–5
Warhol, Andy 91–2
Wasserstrom, J. 26, 28–9, 34–5
weather, and famine 75
West, relationship with China 127
Western-centrism 14
“Western-Christian-Democratic-
Universalist identity” 1
Western democracy 44
Westernization 7, 86
Williams, R. 20
workers, in Tiananmen 38–43
Wu Guoguang 104
Xinhua Gate Bloody Incident 30
Yao Wenyuan 60–1
Yau, E. 106, 114
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige) 113–17
Ying Zhu 106
Young, R. 7, 129
youth, revolutionary 53–5
Yueh, L. 50
Yuejin Wang 105
Zhang Gang 19
Zhang Longxi 15–17
Zhang Xudong 29, 36, 44, 117
Zhang Yimou 101
Zhang Yingjin 101, 105
Zhao, Dingxin 26
Zhao Ziyang 30–1, 39
Zhou Enlai 62
Žižek, Slavoj 27–8, 134–6
