Can One Say No to China?

Author(s): Rey Chow

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 28, No. 1, Cultural Studies: China and the West
(Winter, 1997), pp. 147-151
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057406
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 Can One Say No to China?
Rey Chow

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 compa
rableness 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

New Literary History, 1997, 28: 147-151

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 148 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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 irrevo
cable turns toward postmodern consumerism, in particular that gener
ated by United States products, in the People's Republic. The preemp
tive "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-?-vis
the West in the past 150 years.
Foreseeably, then, the two essays by non-Chinese intellectuals, since
they are unburdened by the historicity of "China responding to the
West," contain very different kinds of emphases. While Flieger 's is a
meticulous attempt to theorize paranoia as a way to chart postmodern
subjectivity (as it appears in contemporary fiction), Terry Eagleton's
essay, which is relatively more concerned with China, offers a critique of
the contradictions inherent in the current academic endorsements of
"culture" and "history." Eagleton's essay, despite the title of the confer
ence, is the only explicit attempt to discuss the problem of culture and
culturalism, and his criticisms are astutely on the mark in regard to the
ideological sloppiness of much of postmodern academe.
As a leftist critic from the United Kingdom, however, Eagleton's
reflections also betray characteristics that remind us of, first, intellectu

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CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINA? 149

als looking at China from the West and, second, intellectuals looking at
China from the Western Marxist tradition. First, the offhand observation
that China leaps "directly" from totalitarian authoritarianism to post
modernism?from Mao to McDonald's, so to speak?can only come
from a certain lack of knowledge about the history of modern China,
which contains much more than such a quantum "leap"; or else it would
have to come from an unwillingness to acknowledge that "Mao" and
"McDonald's," however incompatible they may be, are both phenomena
of the ongoing, albeit problematic, efforts at modernization in the
"Third World." Second, as in the case of many Western Marxist critics for
whom "socialism" remains the good part of an otherwise evil European
Enlightenment?good in the sense of a salvageable Utopian hope for
things still to come?China presents a stumbling block for Eagleton
precisely because there socialism has already been; moreover, it is, as he
notes, clearly something in which "decent" Chinese people no longer
invest their hopes. To handle this somewhat embarrassing historical fact,
Eagleton resorts to a move that is, alas, typical of Western Marxists faced
with the contradictory realities of a "Third-World" nation: he clings to
the purity of "socialism" and invalidates the socialism that has been lived
by those in the "Third World"?in this case by suggesting that "Mao was
about as far from socialism as Newt Gingrich." The message he gives is
an unambiguous one: those in China, such as Mao and his followers,
have, in their practice, distorted and betrayed the true principle of
socialism as it is still found inside the heads of Western Marxist critics.
Instead of allowing the material instance of socialism as it has been
experienced in a "Third-World" nation to be a legitimate part of global
modernity in all its ironies, Eagleton's remarks have the effect of putting
China in its place, as the not-smart-enough apprentice of (the Marxism
that is understood in) the West. It is this type of Western cultural
arrogance?this attitude that "they have got it all wrong"?that ultimately
helps explain the almost unshakable paranoid mode in which Chinese
intellectuals continue to find themselves. In this uncanny manner, thus,
the essays by Chinese and non-Chinese participants at this conference
do share an overall coherence, albeit one that is visible only in retro
spect and perhaps only to those who were not present in Dalian such as
myself.
As readers have probably noticed, the problematic I have relied on for
my observations is that of ethnicity. I find it unfortunate that, even
though ethnicity is one of the foremost concerns of cultural studies, it is
noticeably absent from these essays. By ethnicity, I do not mean the
sentimental, "you have yours but I have mine" type of account of
heritage, but the politics involved in the artificial divisions, hier
archizations, and discriminations of populations according to "race" and

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 150 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"blood" as much as "culture," politics that often lead to the denial of

legal status, right of abode and of work, identity, and recognition. How
might we talk about "culture" and "cultural studies" not in the form of
schematic recapitulations of postmodernism, postcolonialism, or other
such metadiscourses, but in the form of ethical differences?ethical in
the sense of "ethos"?inscribed on a quotidian basis in global human
interactions? From the struggles for political self-determination among
former colonized territories, to the demands for reparation for crimes
of genocide committed during various periods, the exploitation of
subaltern labor for the smooth operations of capital within nation-states
and along their borders, and the conflicts and violence characteristic of
relations between diasporic populations and their hostlands, ethnicity
stands as an urgent and provocative issue of "culture," spanning most
known branches of knowledge. Whether or not we like it, we would be
hard put to find an area of intellectual inquiry today that is not affected
by it.
Given the fact that Chineseness remains something which is, even at this
conference, taken for granted, a focus on ethnicity in the context of
China would be salutary. In the many references to the "Chinese
people," "Chinese intellectual," "Chinese culture," and "Chinese cul
tural studies," "China" is assumed more or less as a stable and unques
tionable signified, which is hardly subjected to painstaking scrutiny the
way "the West" is. But how can this be so? The preoccupation with
responding to the West, symptomatic of paranoia as it may be, has also
served as a convenient means of postponing the much needed examina
tion of China's own hegemony?its cultural centrism.
In order to chart a course for cultural studies and "China," it seems to
me essential, first of all, to disengage from the monolithic notion that
China is one culture. This, however, does not simply mean that Chinese
intellectuals should adopt a "pluralistic" cultural approach, for in the
1990s even the authoritarian Chinese government has gone pluralistic.
It is well known that many previously forbidden "cultural" subjects (such
as sex) can now be openly discussed, as long as one keeps quiet about
the "political" ones, such as human rights. Under this permissive
"cultural" climate, even the espousal of the most decadent forms of
postmodernism or the most avant-garde forms of art cannot count as
real interventions in Chinese centrism. For, in even the most "subver
sive" representations or experimentations (in literature, music, art,
photography, journalism) from the People's Republic, what often re
mains elided is the fact of China's own cultural dominance, chauvinism,
indeed imperialism. In a claim such as "China can say no," for instance,
what we encounter is no more than a replication of an exhausted form
of "Third-World" nationalism, itself a vengeful echo to "First-World"

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CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINA? 151

imperialism. What is truly disturbing about this claim, however, is much

less its apparent extremism than the fact that it is the West, in particular
the United States, which remains its implied addressee and thus its
preferred Other (China can say no "to the West"). Contemporary Chinese
centrism, in other words, relies for its own anchoring precisely on a
perpetuated reactive relation to the West.
In this light, any discussion of cultural studies and China would be
inadequate without some attempt to address?not the well-worn theme
of China's relation to the West, but?the scarcely touched issue of
China s relation to those whom it deems politically and culturally subordinate. I
am referring, specifically, to Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, cultures
which, despite their own histories, are simply denied identity and validity
in the eyes of the People's Republic. These other "Chinese" cultures,
insofar as they constitute China's repressed, are and should be a vital
part of any consideration of "Chinese cultural studies."
For Chinese intellectuals to confront the realities of these other
"Chinese" cultural spaces would mean that they would need to abandon
the obligatory reactive position vis-?-vis the West that they have habitu
ally occupied due to the burden of history. While it places them in a
paranoid relation to the West, this reactive position also brings with it
the comfort of an illusory victimhood, making it unnecessary to interro
gate their own power and their complicity with a centrist regime that,
even as it opens its doors to the "cultural" influences of capitalism,
continues to dictate what it means to be "Chinese" and to suppress,
imprison, exile, or execute those who dare question its claims.
From the perspectives of those in Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the
predominant question is therefore not how and why China can say no to
the West. Rather, it is: Can one say no to China? The significance of this
question, which would require interested scholars to confront the
contradictions of Chineseness as a constructed ethnicity, is yet to be
recognized in the "cultural studies" relating to "China."

University of California, Irvine

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