The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought

246 Pages·2001·1.035 MB·English

by  David Martin Jones (auth.)

The Image of China in Western Social
and Political Thought
Also by David Martin Jones
CONSCIENCE AND ALLEGIANCE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN PACIFIC ASIA
TOWARDS ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY IN PACIFIC ASIA
The Image of China
in Western Social
and Political Thought
David Martin Jones
Senior Lecturer
School of Government
University of Tasmania
© David Martin Jones 2001
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-91295-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones,David Martin.
The Image of China in Western social and political thought /
David Martin Jones.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Social sciences—Europe—History.2.Social sciences—North
America—History.3.Political science—Europe—History.
4.Political science—North America—History.5.China—Foreign
public opinion.6.Orientalism.I.Title.
H53.E8 J66 2001
300’.9181’2—dc21
2001032129
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: the Bewilderment of Names and Images:
East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought 1
1 East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination 14
Eighteenth century critics of virtuous China 28
Summary of the eighteenth century engagement 33
2 Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the
Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China 37
Ambassadors and oriental despots 38
Sinology, philology and China 52
Conclusion 64
3 Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations 67
Romanticism, authenticity and China 70
The Aryan myth, the yellow race and the problem of
degeneration 76
China and racial apotheosis in late nineteenth century
Germany 81
Comte, Darwin, Spencer and Chinese evolution 85
Racial determinism, the China case and late
nineteenth century thought 96
4 Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences
1890–1949 99
Sinology at the nineteenth century’s end 99
Weber, Durkheim, and Asia 119
v
vi Contents
Culture, psychotherapy, universal history and China
in the early twentieth century 125
A brief genealogy of western approaches to China
1895–1949 137
5 Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing:
China’s Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social
and Political Science 145
Comparative politics and the modernization paradigm 148
History, area studies and China 166
Peasant revolutions, dependencia and
developmental states 174
The developmental state, Asian values and the
deconstruction of post Maoist China 187
China wakes (again) 192
Nationalism and contradictions with Chinese
characteristics at the end of history 199
Toward a conclusion 201
Notes 204
Bibliography 207
Index 228
Acknowledgements
This book developed from a seminar given in the Political Science
Department at the National University of Singapore and subsequently
published in the Department’s working paper series in 1992. Papers ran-
domly delivered at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore)
and at the East Asia Research Institute (Singapore) eventually evolved
into discrete chapters. A number of colleagues in both Singapore,
London and Australia have generously offered advice and suggestions
for further reading. These include Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, James
Cotton, Baogang He, Kenneth Minogue, Terry Narramore, Roger
Sandilands and M. L. R. Smith. The errors and lacunae are, of course,
all of my own making. Tasmania, the sclerotic bureaucracy of its uni-
versity notwithstanding, provided a suitably bucolic setting in which to
complete the manuscript.
Note: Most western-authored books prior to the 1980s followed the
Wade-Giles system of Romanization of Chinese names and places. Since
the 1980s most follow the Chinese pin yin system of Romanization.
In a number of places in the book where a pre-1980s source is cited
I have placed the pin yin in parentheses, for example, Mao Tse-Tung
(Mao Zedong).
David Martin Jones, Hobart 2001
vii
Introduction:
The Bewilderment of Names and
Images: East Asia in Western Social
and Political Thought
Whoever orients himself to the Orient feels incapable of for-
mulating from the bewilderment of names and images that
come to him a clear figure and a definite thought.
Paul Valery Orientem Versus 1938
In these politically correct, ethically relativist and culturally confused
times, the popular discourses of cinema or advertising that saturate us
with images of sultry Singapore girls or untrustworthy Asiatics earn offi-
cial and academic condemnation. It is further maintained, by those who
detect a concealed prejudice in most European and North American aca-
demic comment on the Near and Far East, that a similar disposition has
long informed the discourse of ‘western’ political and social thought.
This work thus seeks to identify both how thinkers within the canon of
Enlightenment and post Enlightenment European political thought
have presented China and the Far East and the ideological implications,
if any, of their various interpretations. How, we might wonder, did Euro-
pean thinkers of the Enlightenment and after categorize the Orient in
its Chinese manifestation?
Such a question immediately evokes the postcolonial response that
they were orientalists, that is that representations of the East ‘were delib-
erately concocted...as instruments to contain and manage these cul-
tures and civilizations’ (Sardar 1999: 4). Indeed, this view of the western
encounter with the East has become something of a fashionable acad-
emic orthodoxy. For Ziauddin Sardar it became ‘a self-perpetuating and
closed tradition which aggressively resisted all internal and external criti-
cism; an authoritarian system that is flourishing as much as it ever did
in colonial times’ (5). Let us, then, first examine a little more closely the
character of this orientalism, before tracing the lineaments of the
1
2 The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought
western engagement with the idea of the east in its specific manifesta-
tion in China and the Chinese World.1
Post colonial theorists agree, almost to a woman, that ‘Edward Said’s
Orientalism...(1978), single-handedly inaugurates a new area of acad-
emic inquiry:...colonial discourse analysis’ (Williams and Chrisman
1994: 5). It was Said ‘who shifted the study of colonialism among
cultural critics towards its discursive operations, showing the intimate
connection between the language and forms of knowledge developed
for the studies of cultures’ and demonstrated the ‘complicity of
Western literary and academic knowledge with the history of European
imperialism’ (Young 1995: 159). Ultimately, Edward Said in his criti-
cally acclaimed polemicsOrientalism(1978) and Culture and Imperialism
(1993) and subsequent epigoni like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985,
1994), Homi K. Bhaba (1993) and Robert Young (1995) unmasked a
long established European penchant for representing non-western
civilizations as the ‘other’ of western values and practices whilst ren-
dering those so othered practically as well as metaphorically speechless.
Indeed, the success of this enterprise ‘can be measured by a change
in terminology’ (Freitag 1997: 620). Before Said orientalism merely
denotated oriental scholarship and knowledge of Eastern languages.
Post postcolonial discourse theory, it assumed a perjorative connota-
tion referring primarily to older European scholars whose conserva-
tive methodology reflected a ‘contemptuous...attitude’ toward
non-western peoples (Freitag: 620–1).
More precisely, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, out of Foucault
by Gramsci, contends that the popular image of a mysterious and exotic
orient is not merely a product of xenophobia, but in fact reflects an
academic discourse pertaining to the East and an ideology that it has
engendered, namely, orientalism. In Said’s view both a western dread of
the ‘Other’ combined with the rational need to contain it, informed the
academic study of the Orient as it developed in the course of the nine-
teenth century. Thus, the exploratory attempts to examine oriental lan-
guage in the early philological enquiries of William Jones, Sylvestre de
Sacy and later in the nineteenth century Ernest Renan, and the anthro-
pology that succeeded it were never purely scientific. This orientaliz-
ing science merely concealed prejudices that went back at least to the
earliest Christian European encounters with Islam. Not only did
nineteenth-century science mask this fear and loathing, it also, by an
apparently objective process of measurement and observation, smug-
gled it into its categories, descriptions and tables. The figure of the
East, then, was delineated, anaesthetized and dissected in the