China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Postcolonial Politics)

These are, additionally, the years of the birth and triumph of Maoism, of the P. Further on, with the defeat and removal of Maoism and the left in China, plus the open access of scholars, journalists, and others to their field, China itself sets the stage for the crystallization of Sinological-orientalism and its capital-logic of the P.

This also presumes the Sino-U. This sameness has its limits, and again I wish to emphasize the becoming logic as opposed to the belief that China has fully arrived where we are. One can still detect signs of an older, more openly racist logic of essential difference at times.

Totalitarianism-as-oriental-despotism, with all that says about native passivity or flat-out stupidity, certainly veers towards the latter. In any case, the standard of measure and positional superiority remain the same. My attempt is to show all of this in the following pages.

Deng led not just an ideological but a material de-Maoification, systematically eliminating every last vestige of leftist institutions, save the Party itself. Recall that orientalism posits the Other as radically and essentially different: East is East, and West is West. This Sinological form of orientalism marks a shift from the differentialist logic that Said documented, to one now turning upon sameness the becoming- sameness of China.

As befits the world system today, it also follows a capital logic of general equivalence. And yet if this much has changed within this new orientalism, its effects are in some crucial ways familiar: The social realities, texts, or contexts that the intellectual confronts are never allowed to make a difference in the pro- duction of Sinological knowledge. That there might be an incommensurability between Western theory or the methods of a discipline and the foreign reality is a very remote if not impossible notion within orientalism and mainstream China studies.

The bulk of this chapter will deal with the Tiananmen protests, and will argue that their interpretation by China studies and Western media are emblematic of this new form of Sinological-orientalism. This last turns upon traditional figures of colonial discourse — e. I refer of course to the Tiananmen protest movement, including the killings that concluded it. At least that is how the book has been received.

Thus Jeffrey Wasserstrom takes him to task simply for not citing the work of Geremie Barme, a prolific, famously fluent but also notori- ously condescending critic of virtually all things Chinese: While Wasserstrom grounds his criticism in only the proper name of Barme, Elizabeth J. Zhao analyzes how built-space on Beijing campuses literally enabled the movement and examines the social construction of public opinion in the Square. In regard to , this absence of discussion about epistemology and ideol- ogy in the forming of knowledge is all the more unfortunate.

In many ways, the true victor of the tragedy was the U. Contra an area studies that has yet to ques- tion its mediated sources of information, the televisual transmission of Tianan- men can hardly be assumed to be a neutral medium. Those images have become emblematic of what counts as post-Mao China — its real people so to speak, and the real, remorseless machinery of state oppression. Emblematic was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in , standing in front of the copy of the Statue of Liberty [sic] and claiming that this said it all about what the protesting students demanded in short, if you scratch the skin of a Chinese person, underneath you find an American.

I was never more proud to be an American than when the Goddess of Democracy statue, with its stunning resemblance to Lady Liberty. The latter attitude further calls to mind Western Marxist codings of Maoist China, whereby the Chinese like the Soviets before them and everyone else afterwards, distorted if not betrayed Marxism — that is, the real, authentic Marxism as it exists solely in the heads of Western Marxists, from the Frankfurt School to Trotskyism. The coding of the Tiananmen events back into another given social order recalls one of the crucial features of orientalism, namely, that in the last instance it is about the self-constitution and identity of the West.

If the Statue of Liberty reappears, but now coated in blood-red paint and draped in a swastika as it did , then civil society must be overrun with irra- tional, frenzied nationalists, manipulated by the state. For others, was brought up, but only to make the claim that the anti-NATO movement should not be compared to that because the former was real and spontaneous, and the latter government-organized or at least induced.

He instead grounds his analysis on the brief period — if half of the s can be called that — which best fits the Western civil society narra- tive. Wasserstrom says much the same about a dialogue on the meaning of between three prominent participants turned U. The Mao era is simply not up for discussion, despite the fact that it literally un-formed and re- formed much of Chinese culture and politics.

What is elided here is the very heart of the Maoist project in China: Signs of this are easily indexed: All of this was not mere state rhetoric, but deeply held belief and part of a popular Maoist discourse, and — moreover — were actually, if all too briefly, institutional- ized. So, too, it influenced when students and workers referenced Mao and Cul- tural Revolution era slogans even when their point was to say how the student movement was unrelated to that.

From here this essay will offer a critique of this last coding. But it is a critique meant to serve another, simultaneous purpose: 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.

The chief characteristics of the context of include runaway inflation in a stagnating economy; massive rural migration to the cities a result of de-collectivization ; skyrocketing unem- ployment in the State Owned Enterprises; rampant official corruption; and the ideological ferment of political and cultural activity on campuses and beyond. The incident triggered class boycotts and further demonstrations Zhao 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.

The regime issued its first public response: 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. 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. On the 2nd and 4th of May, there were large demonstrations reaching , on the latter, commemorative date. Meanwhile, urban workers, state journalists, and others began to join. I will return to this neglected area below. On May 13th, two days before the next official dialogue, the first, absolutely radicalizing hunger strike commenced, with up to 2, stu- dents participating.

The strike galvanized Beijing and brought the movement into sharp conflict 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 filled Tianan- men Square. At this point, with the encouragement of a group of fifty 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 finished.

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. 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. That evening new troops advanced on the Square. Details of the fighting remain somewhat obscure, but what we do know now is that no deaths occurred in the Square itself.

Over one hundred military vehicles were burned. The exact death toll is unknown, but has been revised downward from several thousands to several hundreds. 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 flee the country.

Deng appeared in public on June 9th, praising the military. I will critique this Sinological coding as akin to an old-fashioned colonial discourse, and will offer alternative aspects of that complicate and displace such knowledge. Thus Jonathan Unger notes: Calhoun will outdo Unger in finding 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: 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.

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 influential collection, Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.

The state has, as ever, deformed the culture: 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. After noting that with the advent of the P. My point is not that this trope is beyond the pale, but that it should be marked as such, as a trope.

It is a trivializing analysis at best, and at worst an exoticiz- ing one in its reduction of China to the merely cultural. The irony of this comparison is especially striking given the comparison of the former bloc to China today. 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: 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. Thus it is the figure 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. But other analyses very productively recast the entire question of public sphere and democracy within actually existing Chinese history.

China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC

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. 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,strong membership, and the de facto general strike emerging across the city by the beginning of June. This, despite the fact that it is precisely the figure 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. 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 fields and factories and to the state administration of the economy.

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 s 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. At one level it suggests that it is the U. The implication is that the approach is anachronistic. It can say that this imputed civil society no longer exists. For their demands were by and large for any- thing but their allotted, modest place within such a sphere: We have every right to expel dictators.

With a great, concerted effort, we fight 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. 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.

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.

Zhao Ziyang play golf every week. Who pays the green fees, and other expenses? Moreover, they refuse the right to self-preservation. 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. For the worker in this poem still sees him- or herself — and his or her class — as having the crucial role to play: 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: Notwith- standing the massive and institutional de-Maoification of the s, here too we see the legacy of the Mao era in Tiananmen, 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.

This is positional superiority. This technique is further revealed when Walder and Gong damn the workers with faint praise. A crane standing among chickens catches the wind. Houses for the people are insufficient. 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 figure of the entrepreneurial janitor, the author thereby comments upon and again debunks the bit of official and intellectual discourse which precedes it.

What modernization and its legit- imation amount to: Finally, note the central conceit of the poem that drives the argument and makes it so memorable: 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.

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But they see this as an advantage for the development of civil society and democracy in China. 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. To be sure, not all members were radical in this sense.

Han still holds this view in general about markets, but as of the later s and today he is adamant about the necessity of working through the official union organizations in China, as opposed to the more ethically pure but certainly less effective method of organizing labor outside these confines. 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 how else to explain the blindness to such visible signs of old-fashioned, proletarian militancy e. A full analysis of the parallels between the Mao era and the movement is beyond the scope of the present essay.

But given the orientalist recoding of as a failed break with that era, some remarks are necessary. The essential point here is that the 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.

As student leader Shen Tong has recalled, referring to a march he led, megaphone in hand: Almost This is not to say that Tiananmen was simply the continuation of the CR. 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 specifically to a certain Marxist or revolutionary construction of this that remains available even decades after This point acknowledges the violence, chaos, and ultimate failure of the CR, but also targets the reification of Western, procedural democracy as the one true type.

It is also part of the history of democratic or popular struggle since 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.

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. 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 , in direct response to the strikes that erupted from time to time during the CR decade, especially in the s.

This failure — a noble failure — should not blind us to the history of this strug- gle, or to its connections and influences on Tiananmen, including its status as a decades-long process of political education for the workers of Tiananmen and even today. For the economic injustices that were already evident in 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. They also underscore the fact that orientalism and positional superiority continue to constitute the identity of the U.

China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC - CRC Press Book

And swimming is a way of putting on a pair of trunks! 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. Indeed the demonization of Maoism is arguably the lynchpin of the entire dis- cursive edifice surrounding the P. In that sense it is also a sign of what contemporary China still lacks. This in itself is a highly interesting formulation. 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. I refer more fundamen- tally and conceptually to the ways in which that revolution and post trajec- tory until at least understood itself, so to speak: 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: That discourse and that whole era need not be taken seriously aside from its body counts because it was, in a word, fake.

It is not I think controversial to say that these largely Westernized and English fluent 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-Maoification, the market mentality, liberalism, American education, the Cold War victory of the U.

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: What I am saying, in other words, is that despite the obvious and in other ways welcome increase of flows 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.

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. 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: 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.

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. 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.

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. 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-reflexivity. 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.

Under this criterion it is hard to imagine any significant his- torical period of change that would not fit the bill, from the U. 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, and as much as , 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.

These last range from personal revenge and revolution- ary zeal to individual persecutions and civil-war-like battles between armed groups. As Gao has argued, benefits included: In terms of health and education many of the rural poor are now worse off than they were during the Cultural Revolution.

The industrial economy grew by leaps and bounds aside from one year, and agricultural production kept pace with a booming population i. China sent massive amounts of aid to Vietnam, and also to Africa, while brokering peace with the U. I have briefly considered these in relation to Tiananmen earlier. So, too, if there is to be another radical-left movement in the P. This is to say that such works reflect 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.

China and Orientalism : Western knowledge production and the P.R.C.

That is, what in the last instance makes these demonizations of Maoism possible is the emergence and then dominance of Sinological-orientalism. What one does have — in addition to the traces, legacies, and facts of specific 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 commodified form. Discourse, then, is not secondary to the real history or facts but in some sense primary: 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. Briefly put, the first step to circumvent the demonization of the Mao era is to recover analytically the complex discursive formation of Maoism: 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: Maoist discourse merits book-length treatment, but I will briefly characterize these three dimensions before moving on to their negation or elision in scholar- ship today.

As Wang notes, the pull of femininity still existed outside of official discourse and the public sphere, and it is not as if patriarchy could just be abolished by decree. 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. 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 find a state-form appropriate to an egalitarian and mass-democratic China; the promulgation of gender neutrality and state femi- nism — as weak and unfulfilled as this ultimately was — was one instance of this. The point then via Wang Zheng is that Maoist rhetoric was not mere rhetoric.

These aspects of the CR were not fake, mere smokescreens for top-level politics within the Party. They were actually existing social practices. Relatedly, the self-understanding of Mao-era subjects is also different and more complicated than we have assumed. A pursuit both at times difficult and labor-intensive, and yet deeply meaningful and pleasurable. Everyone who was talking [by the late s], 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. 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: It reflects 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 s with the rise of globalization and the turn to the right in intellectual—political culture in China and the West.

As Gao sums this 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 identifies with the West, its values and way of life, especially those of the United States.

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. Certainly it has to turn upon the exercise of new practices: Who are our friends?

This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. 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 definition, in their essence and in their inner logic, fundamentally reductive and line-drawing. It produced a uniquely Maoist form of governmentality: It moreover pro- duced a China that was: It produced a life both extremely dangerous but also utterly life-affirming.

It was used, paradoxically, to both ameliorate and produce political passions and desires. I will turn to the notion of two-line struggle below. It follows from this that if Schmitt as well as Marx and later Mao et al.

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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. Which is to say they often get the facts wrong as well. This void is quickly filled by notions of despotic, personalized court-politics, and Cold War, illiberal notions of a duped, terrified, or passive populace of several hundred millions just doing what they are told. One of the problems with orientalism, then, remains that it depoliticizes.

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 —61 and its attendant famine in particular.

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. This was, in other words, a split between left and right within the Com- munist Party itself that emerged for the first 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. But they have in recent years been suppressed within Sinological knowledge production.

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So, too, the brute fact of Deng et al. As Hinton has noted else- where, one cannot explain away the famine itself in this way and there were bad policies e. Thus the well-known problem of exaggerated reporting of harvest figures can be explained by more than just excessive revolutionary passion alone, though the latter was clearly a factor as well. 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.

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. If we do not act in this way [i. This remains a surprisingly well-known passage amongst critical intellectuals in China and abroad. 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.

There are obvious retorts to this: So, too, the enthusiasm for the Leap reflected 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 , they were quickly addressed if also not adequately corrected until the Leap was abandoned in We will turn in more detail to the Leap shortly.

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. Note how MacFarquhar codes this alleged incident. Someone told this to the chancellor, who diminished his entourage accordingly. Cataclysm n26 Exactly what Mao and Zhou, both twentieth-century Marxists, would have to do with a 2,year-old emperor and mandarin the author of the anecdote above remains a mystery. What can they actually tell us about Maoist or Dengist governance, social history, culture, and real, lived poli- tics and ideology?

Somehow, fluency in Chinese, unique access to the mainland, and even personal experience are not enough; they cannot substitute for intellectual labor and patient observation. 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. It is as if the desire to prove the truth of oriental despotism must override all other epistemo- logical concerns: It is instructive to recall the China hearings before the U.

Senate leading up to the establishment of diplomatic relations. 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. 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!

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.

Again, this is not because we now have all the facts and before we had only delusion. 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-Maoification have a part in this story as well.

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 first 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.

It is less about the true communist nature of the P. At the risk of sounding vulgar, it is also about the money: Partly this happens through a simple but total and devastatingly effective elision: 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. 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. Before moving on then, we need to briefly recover the purpose or vision of the Leap as well as broach an alternative explanation for its failure. The Leap was first 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 s.

Economically, it attempted an alternative to the market material incentives and commodified 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. More specifically, the Leap was not only a bigger-is-better movement into larger communes, but a three-pronged campaign: What this implies is both an economic theory and an ethical—political vision that actually privileges or centers on rural China and peasants.

In the context of the time — or within standard neo-liberalism today — this was decidedly innovative. The Leap marks a paradoxical but foundational aspect of Maoist governance and discourse: This is the point to the emphasis on the provinces, counties, and villages participating directly, as noted above by Gray. 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. So, too, it is worth emphasizing the spatial analysis built into the Leap as strategy: 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: 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. This is not, then, a desire to leave village China alone in its poverty and isolation, nor to make China one big city. As every child knows, China overall has benefitted 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. 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 modified form during the later Cultural Revolution and up through the s.

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 profit motive, and the war of each against all. The controversy lies with its causes and moreover with its mortality figures.

We will cover some of this ground below in an examination of the extent of the famine and the use of statis- tics. 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. This may in a sense be its advantage because it allows us to see the —61 experiment in a different type of context. 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. 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. The movement of grain from places with a surplus to places with a deficit, for example, was affected by this.

Despite their undeniable production of inequality and of the power of money, markets are after all efficient 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.

This is in part a story about the difficult transition to a modern economy from a traditional one as Skinner argues. All of this sped up the process. Missing millions, missing data But it is the mortality itself which is the most pressing issue about the Great Leap. To begin with the limit-figure of 43 million, it must be said that this derives from either lurid imagination or from two problematic, unveri- fied references located in a Washington Post article from It is not the only way in which scholars rack up the numbers over the official 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: In the same footnote, Tu also refers to a CCP report from 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 figure: But with Tu and other casual inflators of millions of dead Chinese people, we are dealing here with work that frankly should be embarrassing to the China field. 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. 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: 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.

I will attend to this question and the lack of regard for actual Chinese lives in a final section. At the time of writing, 30 million is still the most commonly bandied about number, but there is a definite race on to go higher. But Sen was in fact taking as unquestionably true the work of two demographers, Judith Banister and A. These last are, in turn, taking the official mortality statistics very rough death rates of the Leap years from the Statistical Yearbook of China.

The issue is not simply one of bad faith. But given the year of release and the well-known ideological pogrom of the Dengist regime against Maoism and collective agriculture, and the Dazhai model,16 state manipulation of the figures should by no means be dismissed out of hand. The previous three censuses were far apart in time — in , , and — and happened well after the upheavals and social dislo- cations of the Leap and CR, during which statistical bureaus were at a standstill.

The census was also criticized from the very beginning as lacking social scientific value. This information simply does not exist for at least two reasons: 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. 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.

Precisely no one should speak with certainty about the total mortality of the famine. The information upon which a definitive account need be based is simply unavailable and may not exist. 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 Yearbook figures at face value, the 30 million figure is wildly inaccurate by a measure of 18—20 million and arrived at through two different, dubious routes. The first 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 s based on speculative, projected data.

This last is then used to estab- lish how many people died in the —61 period. As Patnaik puts it: This procedure gives the total figure of a 27 million deficit in the population by com- pared to , but over three-fifths of the deficit. Such schol- ars provide no justification 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: It is as if there is a certain will to knowledge here, behind the sheer indifference to actual Chinese lives. 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 official Chinese peak death rate of was only. This is, one should think, fairly shocking. Nearly the same amount of people died in democratic-capitalist India during the same year: To be fair, Sen has noted that when one compares China and India during all the Great Leap years —61 , four million more people died in India per year. So, too, this last point perhaps adds more credence to the argument via Skinner that the failure in China was distributional.

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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. 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. So, too, there were other factors that produced the famine but that cannot be placed at the feet of Mao, cadres, and collectivization.

At its heart is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the P. C since the s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist, and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinological-orientalism. It may even finally trigger a sorely needed debate in the field. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called "China" has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism…China and Orientalism is an essential contribution to our self-awareness as producers of knowledge and offers a welcome and indispensable criticism of the field.

Uncivil Society, or, Orientalism and Tiananmen, 3. Maoist Discourse and Its Demonization 4. Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: DeLillo, Warhol, and the Specter of Mao: On the Western Study of Chinese Film. Vukovich teaches critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial and China studies at Hong Kong University. 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 first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

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