The Mirage of China: Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World

221 Pages·2009·1.041 MB·English

by  Xin Liu

The Mirage of China
Culture and Politics / Politics and Culture
General Editors:
Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
Rik Pinxten, Ghent University, Belgium
Ellen Preckler, Ghent University, Belgium
Cultural Identity, whether real or imagined, has become an important marker of
societal differentiation. This series focuses on the interplay of politics and culture
and offers a forum for analysis and discussion of such key issues as multicultural-
ism, racism, and human rights.
Volume 1
Europe's New Racism: Causes, Manifestations and Solutions
Edited by The Evens Foundation
Volume 2
Culture and Politics: Identity and Conflict in a Multicultural World
Edited by Rik Pinxten, Ghislain Verstraete, and Chia Longman
Volume 3
Racism in Metropolitan Areas
Edited by Rik Pinxten and Ellen Preckler
Volume 4
When God Comes to Town: Religious Traditions in Urban Contexts
Edited by Rik Pinxten and Lisa Dikomitis
The Mirage of China
Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality
of the Contemporary World
Xin Liu
Berghahn Books
New York • oxford
Published in 2009 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2009 Xin Liu
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liu, Xin, 1957–
The mirage of China : anti-humanism, narcissism, and corporeality of the
contemporary world / Xin Liu.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-84545-545-3 (alk. paper)
1.Capitalism—China. 2. Capitalism—Social aspects—China. 3. Globalization—
Social aspects—China. 4. Globalization—Economic aspects—China. 5. China—
Economic conditions—2000–. 6. Social change—China. I. Title.
HC427.95.L588 2009
330.951—dc22
2008053755
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
If one may say of the revolutionary period that it runs wild, one would
have to say of the present age that it runs badly.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age
It seemed to me that one could set two intellectual projects in opposi-
tion. The first rightfully appears to have been a dead end: the project
of metaphysics of the present or of an epochal thinking. The second, I
believe, is endowed with a more solid philosophical basis and a clearer
signification: the project of an anthropology of modernity.
— Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason

Contents
R
Preface viii
Prologue: Making Up Numbers 1
Part I: Moral Mathematics
1. The Mentality of Governance 21
2. The Facticity of Social Facts 48
Part II: Statistics, Metaphysics, and Ethics
3. Discipline and Punish 67
4. The Specter of Marx 92
Part III: Reason and Revolution
5. The Taming of Chance 113
6. Interiorization 133
7. Exteriorization 172
Acknowledgments 199
References 200
Index 207
– vii –
Preface
R
The mirage of China, as both local metaphor and global reality, is a mirror
image in and for the contemporary world. As I shall argue, the world of China,
contrary to the common or journalistic view, is not the Chinese world; it is a
symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.1 Globalization as both
a discursive and a material force is historically produced, differently so in dif-
ferent social worlds, according to their different cultural schemes of significa-
tion. The converse is also true: histories of different social worlds are globally
made in and of specific places, for, to a greater or lesser extent, their cultural
schemes of signification are reproduced in the global production of different
local histories.2 Today’s world is one marked by signs of digital capitalism and
global capitalist expansion, and China has been increasingly integrated into
the global system of production and consumption. Nevertheless, what remains
uncertain or indefinite is our genealogical relationship to this staggering social
giant—“a new leviathan.”3 A genealogical relation, as exemplified in the seg-
mentary lineage organization of Southeast China, is both lived and written, for
it involves inevitably a hermeneutic production of oneself in relation to one’s
ancestors and siblings, consanguineous or affinal. A hermeneutic production
1. The term “moment” is used in the Aristotelian sense to indicate the inseparability of a part
from its whole, such as in the case of the color from a tree. In other words, what is conveniently
called “China” is a color—rather than a branch or a leaf—of the contemporary world. It is an
intrinsic part—an organic moment—of the world rather than an element or a separable part of
it. See Aristotle (1979, books 25 and 26, 97–98).
2. As an anthropologist might have noticed, these two sentences paraphrase Sahlins’s opening
words in his Islands of History (1985).
3. Hobbes’s Leviathan ([1651] 1962) is here invoked for the reason that the rise of this social giant
seems to pose, once again, the question of knowledge and governance as a generalizable political
inquiry into a new type of “commonwealth,” global or globalizing. See also Collingwood (1971).
– viii –
Preface ix
of self-understanding, as we have been reminded by Gadamer and Ricoeur,
would constitute a transformative practice of reciprocal conditioning in and
through which genealogical knowledge is produced in the production of the
subject of such knowledge. That is, the hermeneutic praxis would empirically
make the object of knowledge and analytically remake its subject at once.
The past couple of decades have witnessed an explosion in studies of China,
although in my opinion such studies have hardly improved our understanding
of that social elephant. A chief intellectual error lies in the positivistic-empiri-
cist presupposition adopted by those who would tend to assume that counting
or measuring various types of mushrooms alone could lead to a comprehension
of their organic nature as an edible plant. They presume that a purely empirical
accumulation of positive knowledge about China can lead to a proper compre-
hension of it. It is therefore no surprise that we are overwhelmed by the explo-
sive accumulation of empirical data, such as in measuring the rapidly growing
heights of China’s urban space or in calculating the slow declines of its Gini
coefficients. We seem to get lost in a jungle of data and facts of our own making.
However, such emerging empiricity and positivity, brought about by the global
conditioning of “local knowledge,” are not yet seriously questioned. These new
forms of life and knowledge that are shaping—and being shaped by—the data
and facts of contemporary China must be scrutinized. The coming of age in
modern development in and of the People’s Republic of China has reincar-
nated a positivistic spirit, for China has provided a new location for the global
application of an old set of conceptual schemes. In such an elephantine world
of material development, this neo-positivistic spirit—made by, and yet making,
global economic transformation—has generated a series of new empiricities
that have become the basis for studies of China. On such grounds, as we have
recently witnessed, new platforms of public debate have arisen and become
institutionalized; new modes of authority and governance have been made or
invented; new regions of knowledge and knowledge practice have been created
and produced; new disciplines and fields of social sciences have been put into
place; new forms of institutions and new modes of institutional practices have
come into being and been legitimized. These recent developments still await
an anthropological investigation, and such an investigation, going beyond the
conventional confines of anthropology (see, e.g., Rabinow 1999, 167–182; cf.
Cassirer 1944, 1–20), will make up the central focus of my study.4
This project was initially conceived more than a decade ago when the field
of anthropology was searching for an intellectual reorientation.5 The hope of
4. See Ong and Collier (2005) and Rabinow (1996, 2003) for other attempts to lay a new con-
ceptual groundwork for the discipline of anthropology.
5. A series of works could well indicate the path traveled by the anthropologist in the last
couple of decades of the twentieth century. See, for example, Boon (1982); Clifford (1986, 1988);
x Preface
developing “an anthropology of modernity” was one of its goals. This treatise,
as a patient reader will see, is a partial response to such a disciplinary reori-
entation that has sought to step away from older epistemological conventions.
However, my ideas have changed over the years, and as a result the conceptual
framework of the study has become broader than initially conceived, thus
delaying its completion. The original plan was to show how Chinese society
became statisticalized in the late twentieth century, and my thinking then fol-
lowed the line of Ian Hacking’s work on statistics and probability theory. His
studies of statistical governance and probabilistic logicality as a historically
specific mode of social practice, making new forms of authority and surveil-
lance possible in modern societies, continue to be relevant (see, e.g., Hacking
1975, 1990). However, due (and thanks) to the delay in writing it, this book,
instead of taking up China as yet another example demonstrating the effectivity
of modern technology, focuses on the problematic of life and knowledge in and
for the contemporary world by means of an anthropological exemplification of
what is called “China.” In other words, it is now less about a specific transforma-
tion in the world of China and more about the general condition of possibility
for “being in the world”—both within and outside the People’s Republic. The
global world is both larger and smaller than the world of China: larger because
the world of China is made within the historical horizons of a modern world;
smaller because a particular mode of historical development taking place in the
People’s Republic has enriched or will enrich the interior space of modernity.
This study will try to grasp the significance and signification of China’s particu-
lar mode of becoming as a symptomatic moment of our being in the world.
The immediate material impact of China is now felt almost everywhere in
the world. However, the importance of such an effect, resulting in sentiments
that are both old and new, is far from being clearly, or rightly, understood.
While the mirage of China is still alluring, we need to comprehend its signifi-
cance, to see it as a way of understanding our own life and reasoning. This is a
key intellectual task of our times.
* * *
Let us recapitulate the argument. This is a study of how China came to put a new
dress—seemingly scientific or modern—onto its not-yet-so-new gigantic social
body. The empirical object of inquiry is about how the world of China has become
statisticalized, that is, how a quantitative mode of self-objectification has come
Fabian (1983); Fardon (1990); Geertz (1988, 2000); Gupta and Ferguson (1997); James, Hockey,
and Dawson (1997); Marcus (1998); Marcus and Fischer (1986); Rabinow (1977, 1986); Sangren
(1988); Sperber (1985); Stocking (1992). For a synoptic overview of the four main anthropologi-
cal traditions, that is, British, German, French, and American, see Barth et al. (2005).