China and Orientalism - Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Hardcover, New)

This book argues, in short, that there is a new, specifically Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. This marks a shift within orientalism from a logic of an essential difference between East and West (as in Said's analysis, or classic colonial discourse, a la Kipling), to one of sameness. China -- the West's "China" -- is now seen as caught up in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the West: liberal, modern, normal. The shift reflects the transition to an era of increasing globalization, the resurgence of modernization rhetoric within China Studies, the influence of anti-historicist, post-modern thought and of course changes within an ever closer Sino-West relationship since the Nixon-Mao d tente and the Dengist turn to capitalism. So too the predominance of the logic of sameness, of a "China" caught up in becoming like "us," reflects capital's force and logic of abstract equivalence. The abstract form of the "China" within this orientalism indexes and in part derives from what Immanuel Wallerstein memorably summarizes as the commodification of everything' within the world system and which according to Alfred Sohn-Rethel also includes an increasing abstraction within intellectual labor and thought. This "new" form of orientalism, then, also necessitates critical and scholarly attention to the political-economic dimensions of colonial or oriental discourse -- something that has long been called for within postcolonial studies. Sinological- orientalism is rooted as much in literature, film and intellectual-political culture as in area studies and Western foreign policy. This is both an American yet truly global orientalism. While it serves a variety of U.S interests and remains rooted in a culture of imperialism, it also circulates globally and is in part produced by texts from across Europe, Australia, India and China itself. Indeed this study shows that self-orientalization, or the internalizati