Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Can One Say No to China?

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1997.0004

1080-661X

Rey Chow,

Japanese History and Culture

Can One Say No to China? Rey Chow (bio) I thank Professor Ralph Cohen for inviting me to write a response to the set of essays presented at the conference “Cultural Studies: China and the West.” For those who have undertaken the study of China, whether in Asia, Europe, North America, or Australia, “China and the West” is a familiar theme, one that has recurred with remarkable tenacity. A significant number of questions, each probably deserving a conference on its own, has been raised on this occasion: the comparableness between Chinese and Western revolutionary thinkers such as Mao and Gramsci (Liu Kang); the legacy of Hegel, through Marxism, in contemporary Chinese philosophy and the germaneness of Habermas’s theory of communicative action to Chinese postmodernity (Ersu Ding); the increasing prominence of postmodernism and postcolonialism in Chinese intellectual circles, and the problems arising therefrom (Henry Y. H. Zhao, Wang Fengzhen, Shaobo Xie); the validity and relevance of postcolonial criticism, including the concepts of the nation, the “third world,” and “indigenous culture” (Shaobo Xie, Sheldon H. Lu, Wang Fengzhen); the viability of “occidentalism” as a response to “orientalism” (Wang Ning). Their range and diversity notwithstanding, these suggestive essays also project, once again, that ongoing collective need, felt by Chinese intellectuals since the turn of the twentieth century, to come to terms with “the West.” This “coming to terms” has long placed China and Chinese intellectuals in a position not of action but of reaction—with the understanding that what they must react to is an Other whose power is nonnegotiable. In Wang Ning’s description of this old theme (of obligatory reaction) within the theme of “China and the West,” to “succeed in the West, a non-Westerner should first of all identify himself/herself as a Westerner at the expense of one’s own national and cultural identity.” In the psychoanalytic terminology provided by Jerry Aline Flieger, the space occupied by Chinese intellectuals in modernity is thus by necessity that of the paranoiac: the feeling of persecution, triggered by the apparent omnipotence of the West, goes hand in hand with the unconscious assumption that somehow, “they have already figured it all out ahead of us”—the Other always has something we don’t. Even though the current essays are all intelligently alert to the [End Page 147] possible fissures in this Other that is the West, what remains unchanged, it seems to me, is a tendency to attribute to the West the a priori status of the Subject-supposed-to-know, who, behind the stage of global ideological affairs, is pulling all the strings. The paradigmatic symptom of this (involuntary) paranoia is none other than the serious and painstaking attentiveness given to Western trends, an attentiveness that is obviously not being reciprocated on the other side by its recipients—Gramsci, Lyotard, Derrida, Jameson, Habermas, Spivak, Bhabha, to name just a few. Because of this asymmetry between “China” and “the West,” a more accurate subtitle of the conference would have been “China and Chinese intellectuals responding to the West, but not vice versa.” The flipside of this paranoia-cum-reaction to global modernity is a sentiment that never surfaces in these essays but that appeared as the title of a collective volume published in Beijing in 1996—Zhongguo keyi shuobu (“China Can Say No”). A mimicry of books such as Shintaro Ishihara’s controversial book, The Japan that Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First among Equals (1989; English, 1991), this recent volume from China expresses the fiercely nationalistic impulses among certain sectors of the Chinese intellectual community against what are probably irrevocable turns toward postmodern consumerism, in particular that generated by United States products, in the People’s Republic. The preemptive “No,” intended to display feelings of annoyance, repulsion, resistance, and rejection, cannot help but become at the same time a display of hysteria (in the form of nationalism). Even though such hysteria is by no means a universal phenomenon among Chinese intellectuals, what I wish to underscore is the historicity that lies behind its emotional outburst, a historicity that is part and parcel of the prolonged reactive position in which China and Chinese intellectuals have been put vis-à-vis...