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The amorphous presence of race in international relations might be traced to four sources. The first has to do with the genealogy of the discipline. International relations was founded largely in response to war and, as a result, the proper subjects of the field were defined largely in terms of war and peace. 6 The problems of war and peace, as Barry Buzan has pointed out, have crystallized into a subfield (after World War II), namely strategic studies, and this subfield according to Buzan has been privileged by the discipline as a whole – with the consequence that other significant entities have been ignored (Buzan 1991; Klein 1994). War studies did not necessarily have to ignore the problems of race, since a large number of wars were conducted along racial and cultural lines (Drinnon 1997; Horsman 1981; Dower 1986; Tinker 1977). For example, the expansion of European imperial power overseas, and particularly empire building, was largely justified on the basis of racial and cultural superiority. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, has shown through his “exemplary history” the ways in which the subjugation and eventual annihilation of the indigenous populations of the Americas were legitimated through pre-experiential notions of “spiritual expansion” and conquest (Todorov 1984). Wars were also racialized in the imperialist fight to beat back decolonization, and even some wars of liberation were explicitly racio-civilizational in nature (Fanon 1965; Doty 1996b). Yet the discipline ignored these racialized dimensions of international relations. Part of the reason why was neatly captured by P. Darby and A.J. Paolini: The root of the problem was that Asia, Africa, and other nonEuropean territories were seen to be outside the civilized world. The European states acquired title and ruled in their own right. Hence, imperial relations were not international relations and they fell outside the proper concerns of the discipline. It was thus left to other fields of study to grapple with the processes that played such a large part in determining the future of the peoples, societies, and states that now constitute more than two-thirds of the world. (Darby and Paolini 1994: 380) The second reason is directly related to the first. Given the overwhelming stress on security and strategy, and given that states have a monopoly of violence, the field has concentrated very much on state-to-state relations. The latter itself was theoretically legitimized by the near hegemonic position of realism in the discipline up to only a few years ago. Realism’s stress on inter-state relations, however, does not in and of itself lead to the exclusion of race. The problem is less a matter of emphasis and more one of ontology – the definitive objects of investigation that are deemed to be capable of revealing relevant and useful knowledge. As Robert Cox put it: ‘Ontology lies at the beginning of any enquiry. We cannot define a problem in global politics without presupposing a certain basic structure consisting of the significant kinds of entities involved and the form of significant relationships among them’ (Cox 1992: 132). For realist and neorealist theorists, states are containers of identities. There is an assumption that national identity is a privileged site that absorbs all other competing identity dynamics. As a result, the extra-national elements that go into the production of an overdetermined identity configuration such as race, gender, ethnicity, and class, are subsumed under a supposedly universal equivalent. The reconciliation of the multiplicity of elements is in fact a conscious strategy in nation-state formation, since the legitimacy of state power is directly related to domestic political support. The end product of the interpellative process is a political subject represented in purely national (if not nationalist) terms, viz., American, Canadian, Indian, etc. Having secured identity as national identity, the state retrieves its political subjects, that is its citizens, as resources in global competition. Given the definitive place of inter-state conflict in realist and neorealist problematizations, the state-produced notion of the domestic population as a single people whose identity is fixed in the national imaginary is accepted. The identity of citizens, therefore, is seen as mirroring the identity of the nation, which is assumed to have an essentialist essence. The internal differentiation of identities is thus displaced by the general category. Third, because the principal focus in the field has been understanding and managing the balance of power (and the balance of terror), only the relations among the Great Powers have been considered valuable in making general statements in the field as a whole. The neglect of the discipline actually mirrors the level of neglect in policy. The balance of power preoccupation by the Great Powers has meant that even when race (and even genocide) is directly part of war, unless it upsets the global balance it is ignored altogether or incorporated only tangentially. To the extent that race has figured in theorizing global politics, therefore, it has done so in the form of what Foucault has called “subjugated knowledge” or “disqualified knowledge” (Foucault 1980: 78– 84). Finally, the East– West superpower conflict was as much an intellectual and ideological war (of position) as it was a geostrategic confrontation with the threat of nuclear annihilation. On account of this, a good deal of the literature on international relations during this period was suffused with ideology. As used here ideology refers not merely to justification, but also to a set of constitutive practices that defined the contents as well as the parameters of common sense. For policymakers in the West, race was given some attention because it pointed to a major weakness in liberal democracies, and there was concern that the denial of civil rights (especially in the United States) might give the Soviets ammunition in their ideological campaign against racism and colonialism. 7 The Soviets saw a natural front between themselves and the Third World against racism and neocolonialism, and despite the Non-Aligned Movement, as late as 1975, Cuba was pushing this thesis. Ironically, Robert Gardiner has also pointed out that the Chinese used racial arguments against the Russians in their attempt to gain influence in the Non-Aligned Movement (Gardiner 1968).

As a transit passenger waiting out an hour or so at the Beirut inter- national airport, I was blissfully oblivious to the torment the city was going through and the turmoil that engulfed it. For Said, however, the French journalist’s remark leads to the observation that, paradoxically, what was not there in Beirut in 1975–76 was never there anyway, at least not in Chateaubriand’s and Nerval’s time, that the European represen- tation of the city had merely replaced one absence with another. The absurdity of this willful replenishment of nothing with nothing, this historical substitution of one vacuum with another, carefully orches- trated and progressively layered with fabricated ‘realities’, forms the 06 rath  12/8/04 1:14 pm Page 344 344Comparative American Studies 2(3) platform of Said’s critique of the west’s hegemonic malformation of the Orient, seemingly benign on the surface, but dehumanizing and even self- destructive in its essence. Without a doubt, Said’s psychoanalytic expose of the west’s skewed self-projection upon the east has had enormous impactin the last quarter century, at least in academic circles, if not in practical politics and diplo- macy, to the extent that it has made the idea real to the global conscious- ness. In America, the internment of people of Japanese origin during World War II and the ‘registration’ required for people (Muslim men) of middle-eastern origin in the post-9/11 months have revived the specter of the old Orientalism, yet the new east–west encounter has new shapes and colors. Said explains Orientalism as ‘a way of coming to terms with the Orientthat is based onthe Orient’s special place inEuropean Western experience’(p. 1), as a final product of a process one might call Oriental- ization. In the modern sense of an old fashioned word,it is an image of the east forged in the western mind over an extended period of time. Said holds that the west’s synoptic mythography of the east is carefully conceived and meticulously executed through long stretches of history in order to sustain and perpetuate a power-relationship beneficial toand privileging the west at the expense of the east.His goal is to take us away from that idea/abstraction of the Orient to a concrete reality of the place, from a fuzzy conception of the east to a clearer perception of it. Hence his opening assertion, the major premise of his syllogistic hypothesis: ‘The Orient is an integral part of Europeanmaterial civilization and culture. Orientalism expressesand represents that part culturally andeven ideologicallyas amode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucraciesand colonial styles’ (p. 2). Said elaborates three major aspects of Orientalism.It is, he says, an academic field of study about the Orient: ‘as much as the west itself, the Orientis an idea that has a historyand a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the west’(p. 5);a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and(most of the time) ‘the Occident’(p. 2): ‘ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied’. ‘The relationship between Occident and Orient isa relationship of power, of domination, ofvarying degrees of a complexhegemony. . .’ (p. 5).Orientalism is a political construct, a ‘corporate institutionfor dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, author- izing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (p. 3). Orientalism is ‘not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, buta created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied– indeed, made truly productive– the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture’(p. 6).

My suggestion here is that what we are witnessing today in the course of the U.S. war on so-called "terrorism," predicated on a mono-polar imperial imaginary that produces disposable knowledge at the rate of one military adventurism after another, is the sign of a complete paradigmatic meltdown of disciplinary formalism in knowledge production, which amounts to the normative dissolution of disciplines, and above all an epistemic endosmosis in which the public is mobilized as a weapon of mass deception for one military project or another. From Alexis de Tocqueville's assessment of the fate of knowledge in American democratic populism early in the nineteenth century, down to Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer's conception of the "culture industry," to our own time and Jean Baudrillard's notion of "the automatic writing of the world" ("the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning of reality and the extermination of the real by its double"),10 to Lyotard's notion of "legitimation by paralogy,"1l all might be cited as the visionary prophecies of what has now come to pass. And yet: From the ashes of disciplinary death of the scholar as author, one might take one's lead from Lyotard's playful paralogy and suggest the birth of the critical thinker as auteur. In cinematic lingo, we refer to a filmmaker with a sustained record of a rich visual and performative idiomaticity as being an auteur. In that vein, we might here point to a constellation of contemporary thinkers ranging from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Luce Irigaray, Avital Ronell, or Assia Djebar in whose work matters of Islam and "the Middle East" is beginning to sip through a similar act of endosmosis, and yet paramount in whose writings is a certain theoretical performativity, at once political and meta-political. Precisely in their formal destruction of disciplinary formalities, these auteurs point to the way in which from the epistemic dissolution of our disciplinary scholarship new modes of inquiry beyond Orientalism or Occidentosis, beyond the fake and falsifying binary of the East and the West, might in fact be emerging. The formal destructions and paralogical performativity in the theoretical idiomaticity of auteurs such as Gayatri Spivak or Avital Ronell are predicated on the epistemic breakthrough of scholars like Judith Butler, Zillah Eisenstein, Susan Willis, and Susan Buck-Morss who have successfully crossed the psychological barrier and begun valiantly to write about matters Islamic and "Middle Eastern" without being Islamist in their disciplinary training. The fact that all these thinkers as authors or auteurs in one way or another address the questions of women's rights within the shifting epistemics of critical thinking in pre- and post- 9/11 wars of terror and terrorism at once roots them in the immediate materiality of their time and yet points to manners of emancipatory thinking yet beyond our horizons.

Reflexive Orientalism refers to the acceptance of Orientalism byChinese intellectualsand politicians and the development of new identities with a sense of subjectivity accordingly.As a result, the Orientalized Chinese may assert Orientalist images upon him/herself.Instead of seeing these images negatively, however, reflexive Orientalists establish their own justification for the imagesthat they accept. There is nothing bad about having backward economics, undeveloped civil society, collectivistic human rights, or relatively limited national defense capability.The key here is that reflexive Orientalists are able to jettison the teleology of linear modernity. In substitute, they place China in its historical path without specifying its definite destiny.One is able to explain away the seemingly backward images by stressing national uniqueness, which territorial sovereignty implicitly protects. The counter-state arises when the purpose of the state is no more than a deep-seated emotion to oppose the Orientalist prescription set by Western countries.For reflexive Orientalists, backwardness acquires new meanings that are not familiar to the sovereignty adherents for now backwardness no longer predicates upon a fixed direction.Since modernity had no fixed form for them, the advanced nature of Western countries in establish- ing civil liberty lose their advantage in China’s search for a remedy. China need not look to the West for models of development. This way, backwardness in China as indicated by the paradigm of sovereignty ironically proves the existence of alternative routes of development. Being an alternative further contributes to the sense of uniqueness in China. Reflexive Orientalism thus deprives sovereignty of its original taste for liberal democracy and market capitalism.What remains for reflexivists is the legitimacy to use force to exclude foreign influences that are judged not conducive to the Chinese alternative still under making.In this sense, globalization isneither a progressionist’s gospel, nor an indigenizer’s nightmare, but an opportunity to realize new possibilities.35 To force modernization modeled upon European experiences would be tantamount to distorting personality and culture.Chinese leaders shouldaccordingly pace modernization and democratization to avoid causing anxiety due to the rupture of the historical path.36 Furthermore, neither should a reflexivist trust liberal spontaneity, nor authoritarian leadership. Some combination of cre- ativity and intervention is inevitable. To gain room for trial and error sovereign defense is necessary to keep foreign intervention from tak- ing place. On the other hand, the political system in China should adapt to the new configuration of a state–society relationship brought about by economic changes. The role of the counter-state in foreign policy looms large in reflexive Orientalism.China’s sovereign territory must be well guarded before nationals have room for creative adaptation. However, what counts as foreign intrusion is not always clear under globalization. Negotiation between the locals and the Communist Party center as well as between the center and the foreign countries isequally importantin determining the perception of the Chinese leaders con- cerning foreign intervention. The opposite is true, too. When negoti- ations between China and the foreign countries encounter difficulties, differences between the locals and the center will more easily be interpreted as involving foreign intervention. Foreign policy usually appears to be lacking consistency as the mood varies with situations. A model of this position shifting in chapter 4 expresses the embedded inconsistency of postcolonial as well as reflexivist foreign policy. To begin with, the Orientalist definition of China’s backwardness is omnipotent because reflexivists, with some knowledge of modern- ization linearity, learn to internalize it.Then the dispute over the proper role of the Chinese state naturally arises between reflexivists and foreign Orientalists. Orientalists would consider the protective shield that the Chinese state presents in front of Western influences as a historically outdatedtool of control, believing that the fate of China lies in the transformation of backwardness into Western modernity. Reflexivists can counter that position out of a conviction that Western modernity at best suffocates other indigenous alternatives that may lead to some version of modernity with Chinese characteristics.In other words, reflexive Orientalism prepares interstate confrontation and interstate confrontation in turn consolidates reflexivists’ reliance on the mechanism of the state.On the one hand, reflexivists’ historical experiences produce very different feelings about state in China than in the Western countries. These feelings demand that reflex- ivists must not act in complete accordance to Western expectation. Without developing their own perspectives on the state system or appre- ciating their state being counter-state, however, reflexivists’ most expe- dient solution to the maintenance of uniqueness is to be confrontational.Reflexivists do not have an alternative conceptual framework to signify Chineseness except state sovereignty.This sovereignty-related sensitivity is exacerbated whenever interactions between China and the West escalate as if assimilation into Western modernity would be taking place. Compared with postcolonialists whose histories are composed of hybrid interpretation, reflexivists are clear about their wish to represent an authentic Chinaand therefore are not psychologically prepared to act dependently without hurting their self-dignity.On the other hand, modern knowledge of reflexivists alerts them to the backwardnessof China. This is why they are more tolerant toward new possibilities than indigenizers who feel antagonistic toward anything Western.Ambivalence of this sort can explain incon- sistencies and cycles in reflexivist foreign policy. There is a need to act independently, and there is also a need to act expediently. Sensitivity toward violation of sovereignty varies by mood or by situation. It is quite possible that something conceived of as a violation in one situation is accepted without being questioned in another.37 For a reflexivist, a sense of inferiority is inevitable because the sovereignty paradigm judges one’s ranking partly by looking at the strength of civil society. Reflexivists acknowledge that civil culture is not ripe in China, protection of individual human rights is flawed, and economic growth depends on the technology, market, and manage- ment of the outside world. Nonetheless, reflexivists maintain that civil society may not be the most appropriate form of participation in China.They further argue that collectivism, correctly identified by Western analysts as a feature of Chinese politics, is reality that is not subject to changes over night. In short, Orientalists and reflexivists agree on most observations that come out of Orientalist perspectives. Reflexivists try to overcome the sense of inferiority by stressing equal sovereignty.Progressionists are outcasts in Chinese politics even though they may be heard often and even loudly in the academic fields, both domestic as well as overseas. Postcolonials are rare in China because not many politicians in China have experienced colonial cultural con- quering. It is the battle between indigenizers and reflexivists that shapes the ups and downs in Chinese foreign policy. For reflexivists, the job is primarily defensive while for indigenizers there is a drive for offense, retaliation, or self-assertion. Reflexivists do not often assert specific solutions, at least not necessarily resulting in some sort of indigenous campaign, such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or the anti-bourgeois liberalization. The more moderate position often incorporates the reflexivists’ initial inferior position. On this moderate position, even China could not possibly remain static and has already witnessed tumultuous changes. Reflexivists believe that changes are irrevocable and the mission of the Chinese counter-state is to make sure that China does not sink once again to the status of colony.Reflexivists do not hesitate to use the state to mobilize economic production as well as anti-imperialist campaigns. Since the motivation is to substantiate the claim of Chinese characteristics vis-à-vis the West, the nature of being a counter-state remains true even in domestic politics. The substitution of counter- state for liberal-styled passive state in China insinuates reflexivists’ lack of confidence in Chinese nationals’ own initiative in finding solutions, hence the distrust toward spontaneity that powerless twenty-first- century progressionists/liberals always worship. In sum, reflexivists accept the Orientalist description, but not the Orientalist prescription. The acceptance is the result of their cognitive incapacity to move beyond the paradigms of modernity and sover- eignty. The refusal of prescription carries with it a kind of amorphous, atavistic resentment against historical imperialism and the suspicion that contemporary imperialism lingers on. Their knowledge about modernization alleviates the absurdity indigenizers may display in anti-Western campaigns. Their access to power leads them away from downgrading their own national identity through anti-Chinese campaigns. Finally, their historical memory of imperialist intrusion reduces sympathy toward hybrid postcolonials. As reflexivists, they are armed with a dubious hope for the future that is periodically relegated to oblivion due to the confrontational approach that the sensitive counter-state is made to adopt every once in a while.

A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of Orientalism. Orientalism was defined by Edward Said as the process of the West defining itself as a superior civilization by constructing itself in opposition to an "exotic" but inferior "Orient." (Here I am using the term "Orientalism" more broadly than to solely signify what has been historically named as the Orient or Asia.) The logic of Orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire. These peoples are still seen as "civilizations"-they are not property or "disappeared"-however, they will always be imaged as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements within the United States that target immigrants of color. It does not matter how long immigrants of color reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from enemies. For example, the United States feels entitled to use Orientalist logic to justify racial profiling of Arab Americans so that it can be strong enough to fight the "war on terror." Orientalism also allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide, as these practices enable the United States to stay "strong enough" to fight these constant wars. What becomes clear then is what Sora Han states the United States is not at war; the United States is war.4 For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war. Because we are situated within different logics of white supremacy, we may misunderstand a racial dynamic if we simplistically try to explain one logic ofwhite supremacy with another logic. For instance, think about the first scenario that )pens this essay: if we simply dismiss Latinolas or Arab peoples as "white," we fail to understand how a racial logic of Orientalism is in operation. That is, Latino/as and Arabs are often situated in a racial hierarchy that privileges them over Black people. However, while Orientalist logic may bestow them some racial privilege, hey are still cast as inferior yet threatening "civilizations" in the United States. their privilege is not a signal that they will be assimilated, but that they will be marked as perpetual foreign threats to the US world order.

In sum, it is this broad historical situation and these conditions of possibility that explain why China has become the center and object of this new form of orientalism. Why China? It’s the economy. It is thus not surprising – yet important to note – that key planks of Sinological discourse now, from its still strong anti-communism to its proffering of civil society, modernity, liberal individualism, and “freedom” owing out of marketization and “opening up,” are all perfectly “capitalist” and “bourgeois” in nature. One need not be a Third International Marxist to see this. Such topoi and themes correspond perfectly well to capitalism as a global mode of production and a social space. What this points to are the same, larger and historical conditions of possibility indexed above. They are a superstructure to an obvious base. This is thus an unrepentant argument from necessity: that this aspect of the current global conjuncture, of the historical present – Sinological-orientalism and its particular form and logic of sameness – in effect had to happen in the way that they did. In the pages that remain here I want to esh out the economics of the “new” orientalism. This is a sweeping claim and may raise familiar charges against Said’s “model”: that it is monolithic and all-powerful. Thus Said notoriously remarked that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (204). But critics of Said often fail to acknowledge his immediate qualification of this claim: that “advanced” cultures and societies have “rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures” (204). My claim that Sinolog- ical-orientalism is a constituent part of global capital may seem no less problem- atic. And there is not enough space here to untangle all of these issues and their philosophical roots. But we can address one question that should go some distance towards addressing the “totalizing” and “monolithic” charges. It will also return us to the issue of orientalism’s relationship not just to colonialism but to capitalism. A place Said himself did not really travel to, as many have pointed out. If so much of Sinological-orientalism tells us more about and indexes the West’s identity, social imaginary, and intellectual–political culture rather than China, then why does such knowledge about China seem true to so many? How to explain its status as a veridic discourse, if not common sense?

In other words, Said postulated that Orientalism exuded epistemic violence through its inherent relation with European colonial power. And, in turn, European colonial power could only dominate the region through Orientalism functioning as a technique and instrument of power. Here then Said’s third definition of Orientalism, drawing from the two previous epistemological definitions, demonstrates the intrinsically dialectical relation between knowledge and power. Said posits Orientalism is also: (3) The corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 2001, 69). Collectively Said conceptualises Orientalism as epistemological (both as a corpus of scholarly writings and a historical system of thought) and ontological (as in the nature of being, the structure and condition of power). Read critically, for Said the synthesis of Western power and knowledge had a singular ontological and teleological purpose; namely, the thingification or subjectivation of the colonized Oriental subject. This point is best demonstrated by William D. Hart’s analysis of Orientalism: In developing his description of discourse, Said appropriates Foucault’s ideas of discipline and power/knowledge. By discipline, Foucault [and by default Said] means those methods of modern punitive power that establishes meticulous control over the body, assuring its constant subjection by imposing a relation of “docility-utility”. Discipline, that is, makes human bodies docile and useful [thingifies], and advertises their availability for political, economic, and cultural uses of many kinds (2000, 70). And what of the latter Said’s “voyage in” and the powerful transformative attempt by the native to “write back” in the metropolis? Can this “contrapuntal reading” (Said 1994a, 288, 79), allow a discursive space where the native-intellectual, half involved and half-detached (Said 1996), rejects the “hail” and the Althusserian “quadruple system” of interpellation (Althusser 1969)? Does the deliberate attempt in Said’s words to “enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten history” (Said 1994, 260) effect this equation? This latter Said, moving away from Foucauldian discursive formation and utilizing Gramsci’s hegemony or direzione culturale [cultural direction], envisions social space alike a Bourdieuean field. Revalorizing culture, political space becomes an arena where subjects engage in competent action and deploy different modes of capital and strategies in order to advance their position within the framework of a shared system of meaning (Bourdieu 1977). In this sense, Said announces in Culture and Imperialism (1994a) that “… no matter how apparently complete the dominance of an ideology or social system, there are always going to be parts of the social experience that it does not cover and control. From these parts very frequently comes opposition Social Epistemology 715 both self-conscious and dialectical” (Said 1994, 289). Accordingly, Said posits that the “new receptivity to both liberation movements and post-colonial criticism” not only challenges the “monopoly of discourse by Eurocentric intellectuals and politicians” (Said 1994, 316), but also creates a new form of subjectivity residing at a “median state” whereby power’s Manichean dichotomies are obscured. More and more the denizens in charge of the production of the old Eurocentric-Orientalist discourse found themselves positioned in deflating hierarchical superordinate and subordinate circuits and micro-sites of power with unequal access to material resources and capital. Sites that were mere nodes within fields which were, in turn, engaged in brutal melees with other homologues fields (both socio-political and geographical) over imposing dominant principles of classification. Nevertheless, the latter Said’s celebration of the end of the monopoly of the Eurocentrist and the capability of the native-intellectual to resist/write back was somewhat premature and exaggerated—as attested by events such as nine-eleven and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the rise of xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia. This more relational and ubiquitous capillary power, whilst decentralising and dividing the process of discursive production into spaces of positions, always ensured the maintenance of the status quo and the superiority of positions of position-takings favorable to power.

The deconstruction of European narratives around the risks associated to the MSP has consequently pointed to three major implications of institutional orientalism. In the politico-normative sphere, institutional orientalism constitutes a power discourse that arbitrarily defines the meaning of “rationality”, based on self-referred parameters. In transnational infrastructure projects involving both developed and developing nations, it allows Northern countries to present their own regulatory framework as the most suitable for the common enterprise and eventually also compels Southern countries to modify their domestic rules. In the economic sphere, institutional orientalism reproduces mutatis mutandis the colonial mechanisms of wealth transfer from Southern to Northern countries because it legitimizes subjective risk narratives that make Southern countries' access to international finance significantly more difficult and expensive. Finally, in the politico-cultural sphere, the concept enables us to identify the essentialization of identities in which MENA countries are all similarly associated with violence, terrorism and turmoil. The orientalist literature ignores the negative role played by European governments – during as well as in the aftermath of the colonial period – in sowing regional conflicts. It also represents as a permanent condition those cyclical unrests rooted in economic circumstances that could rather be mitigated by investments in strategic sectors such as the RE industry

Oregon’s Jade District is a 10-block area neighborhood in East Portland that is home to dozens of Asian-owned businesses, from grocery stores to herbal markets, bakeries and restaurants that include a James Beard-recognized Vietnamese soup spot. But in the first two months of the year, at least 13 businesses there had their windows smashed, which community leaders say was the result of anti-Asian hate fueled by misguided scapegoat rhetoric about COVID-19. A month after the fatal March 16 shootings at Atlanta-area spas that left eight people dead, including six Asian American women, Asian American businesses across the country are reeling from the spate of hate and violence, and some say they’re operating in fear — adding to the economic crisis many businesses have been grappling with since the beginning of the pandemic. “We don’t have a peace of mind to sleep,” said Rosaline Hui, a retail store owner in the Jade District and owner and editor of the Portland Chinese Times newspaper. “The first time it happens to you, maybe you feel it’s so scary. The second time and third time and fourth time, what do you feel? You feel numb.” Hui has heard from Asian-owned businesses around the district that say they’ve been vandalized multiple times — rocks thrown in windows or doors broken in — and she believes reports to police are going nowhere. The Portland Police Bureau said it is in the midst of a staffing shortage and prioritizes situations that involve life safety over property crimes. “At times our ability to do followup investigation on vandalism is limited … unless there is clear indication of a bias motivation as that would elevate the investigative response,” Sgt. Kevin Allen said in a statement. While the issue has pervaded communities for decades, the pandemic has brought renewed attention to the issue, as groups like Stop AAPI Hate have documented upwards of 3,800 incidents — more than a third of which occurred at businesses. “We’re working with small business owners who feel concerned about their business, that are dealing with this on top of all of the other challenges of the pandemic right now,” said Allie Yee, development and communications director of the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO). In 15 of the United States’ largest Chinatown neighborhoods, businesses are slowly rebounding from the initial pandemic hit and a winter slump — especially in Hawaii and Nevada, according to data provided to the PBS NewsHour from business reviews platform Yelp. In Chinatown business reviews around the country, mentions of the pandemic — including keywords like “virus,” “corona” and “COVID” — are also down about 50 percent since April 2020. But, in Washington, D.C., Chinatown has had the largest drop in customer interest (defined as viewing a business page, posting a review or posting a photo) — down about 63 percent since March 2020.While business is mostly rebounding, the hate is persisting. In San Antonio, Texas, Mike Nguyen’s ramen restaurant was vandalized with phrases like “Go back 2 China” and “Ramen noodle flu” in mid-March after he reiterated the restaurant’s mask-wearing policy after the Texas governor ended the statewide mandate. “[Even] if my business were to close, at least I can walk away saying that I contributed to keeping the community safe and not endangering them,” said Nguyen, whose restaurant is back open after a brief closure in early April. “We had the most powerful man in America call [COVID-19] the ‘China virus,’ the ‘Kung Flu,’ … When you say stuff like that, you don’t think people are going to not say the same thing?” “It’s been devastating, humiliating, dehumanizing,” said Susan Au Allen, the CEO and national president of the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce Education Foundation (USPAACC), the largest organization representing Asian American businesses. “[Asian Americans] truly are afraid of getting out, but they have to make a living — they got to go and do what they have to do, with the best safety measures they can take.” After three years of operating their Vietnamese and Thai cuisine establishment, working seven days a week, Riverside, Ohio, restaurant owner Noppadol Mangmeesub and his wife Kanokwan Mangmeesub said the economic realities of the pandemic, coupled with the fears around anti-Asian sentiment, have led them to decide to close their business at the end of May. The restaurant shares a building with an Asian grocery store next door. In January, a vehicle on the property was vandalized with profanity-laden graffiti and the term “Chinese virus.” In February, there was a fire on the building’s roof, which police say was arson but have not identified any suspects. The City of Riverside Police Department said it’s still working with the FBI on investigating these cases and has increased patrols in the area. But Noppadol said he doesn’t feel safe in the meantime. “I don’t know who is going to come in and harm us,” said Noppadol, who is originally from Thailand and has lived in the U.S. for about 15 years. “I no longer want to deal with this.” Between March 2020 and February 2021, about 35 percent of discrimination reported to Stop AAPI Hate happened at businesses, the top location for reports. “We’ve always known that essential workers — people who continue to have to work outside of the home — have always been in danger, not just of COVID, but of course, because of the surge in anti-Asian racism,” Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Cynthia Choi told the PBS NewsHour. “[Asian Americans] had nothing to do with [the virus],” Nguyen said. “We’re going through the same issues that everyone else is going through — the same heartache, the hardships.” President Joe Biden’s administration is actively working to address xenophobia against Asian Americans, as the Senate advances hate crime legislation But advocates say the condemnation of hate must come from not only national leaders, but local leaders, too. “We need local elected officials in all communities across the country to be reaching out, because I can guarantee that many Asians in all communities have experienced some form of discrimination or hate in the last year,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent racial justice organization. “It is unbelievable how widespread this is.” Governors from more than half the nation’s states have publicly condemned anti-Asian sentiments and violence. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state has the highest Asian American population in the U.S., passionately denounced the hate in a March news conference, saying it was “painful and infuriating.” Mayors of both political parties from Fresno, California, to New Orleans to Dallas to Madison, Wisconsin, have all called for an end to the harassment. Huang says while people might be paying attention when the hate has risen to the level of a criminal act, violence is usually preceded by lower-level discrimination. “It could be slurs, it could be name-calling, it could be vandalism,” she said. “Those precede the larger incidences of violence across history.” By the time Colorado went under its stay-at-home order in March 2020, Asian-owned small businesses were already 30 to 40 percent behind because of misguided fears around COVID, business leaders there said. That could be why Asian-owned businesses are now seeing government resources in a new light — beyond just a regulatory function or tax collection entity. “Some of our work during the pandemic has been to help small business owners navigate business grant relief programs, and help distribute some of those dollars to these small businesses,” Yee of APANO said. “That was like the first time that they realized that there are resources available to them that people wanted to help them through this time. That’s been pretty profound.” A Bloomberg analysis of the first round of Payment Protection Program loans, for example, found more businesses in majority-white congressional districts were receiving loans than businesses in districts where the majority of residents were people of color. The business community is also learning more about what their responsibilities are in this current climate, said Choi of Stop AAPI Hate. She said some restaurants, for example, have been concerned about their staffers commuting at late hours in the evening for fear they might be targeted. “You have a high turnover rate, because it’s like, what job is worth getting attacked? This is a major concern … folks are taking very, very seriously,” Choi said. The responsibility also carries over to protecting customers. “We’ve had situations where employees have conducted themselves in ways that are problematic, or in situations where they haven’t intervened,” Choi added. In New York City, two doormen were fired after not helping an Asian American woman who was brutally attacked on the sidewalk in March. And similar incidents have occurred at businesses from coast to coast. “I was standing in an aisle at [a hardware store] when suddenly I was struck from behind,” a 67-year-old Asian American in San Francisco reported to Stop AAPI Hate, which shares anonymized firsthand accounts in its public reports. “Video surveillance verified the incident in which a white male used his bent elbow to strike my upper back. Subsequent verbal attacks occurred with ‘Shut up, you Monkey!,’ ‘F**k you Chinaman,’ ‘Go back to China’ and ‘Stop bringing that Chinese virus over here.’”Allen of the USPAACC believes younger, more social media-savvy generations have helped bring anti-Asian hate to the public eye. “The older generation will be very hesitant in saying anything — sometimes they won’t even tell relatives. They suffer in silence,” she said. “I think it took this newer, younger generation to start what I call a revolution in thinking and reaction.” Yee doesn’t believe more policing is a long-term solution and instead advocates for nearby communities to build trust and strengthen ties to one another. While there are a lot of Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants in Portland’s Jade District, there are also several Latinx, Black, Russian and Slavic people, Yee says. “If you look at the history of Oregon, Asian-owned businesses have been targeted and vandalized — that’s been the thread of intimidation,” she said. “You overcome that by continuing to be here and to rebuild with each other … I think that very much requires solidarity across Black, Indigenous and people of color.”

In an effort to generate critical self- reflexivity on practices of Orientalism and Occidentalism there has been a proliferation of discourses on ‘strategic Orientalism’, ‘techno Orientalism’ and ‘military Orientalism’ as discussed below. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham (1998) argue that practices of ‘strategic orientalism’ constitute the ‘foundation of Western security culture’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 41). They assert that strategic orientalism is premised on the ‘pervasive and axiomatic belief that the West (or occasionally the United States) as a civilization has a special role to play in global security affairs’’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, pp. 41, 37). This is based on ‘a reading of the politico-strategic objectives and purposes of Third World states that is informed more by Western fears and prejudices than by the realities of politics in these states’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 38). The deep-rooted fear of the attacking Asian hordes and their ability to industrialize and develop sophisticated weapons reinforces twenty-first century concerns about the ‘Rising East’. This ‘phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo-or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse’ is understood as ‘techno-Orientalism’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 2). Practices of techno-Orientalism driven by ‘imperial aspirations’ and ‘appetites of consumerist societies’ are ‘infused with the languages and codes of the technological and futuristic’ and in ‘digital spaces abound with reinscribed racial tropes and stereotypes; these are sites in which racialization is more likely reinforced than challenged’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 14). Scholars developing the concept of techno-Orientalism observe its ‘growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness’ and suggest that the ‘US techno Orientalist imagination has its roots in the view of Asian body…as a form of expendable technology’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 7–11). Nevertheless they insist that the scope of techno-Orientalism is ‘expansive and bi-directional’ and ponder on the ‘danger that Asian and Asian American creators…might internalize techno Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 3, 7). In investigating the intimacy of a relationship it might be possible to glean and ‘retrieve recessive images and practices’ that have been historically constituted through a network of social relations and processes (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 191). These might present creative opportunities to move beyond ‘policing boundaries of self as an exclusive and homogenous space’ and instead ‘appreciate and claim the self that exists as part of the other beyond those boundaries’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 204). Porter insists on ‘the interactive and power-political nature of war, which has a culture of its own that can change all parties to a conflict’ (2013, p. 55). Porter claims that, ‘paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together’ (2013, p. 33). This is because, ‘war…is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself’ (Porter, 2013, p. 34). He also argues that an engagement with, ‘the foreign “Other” can be treated as a superior model to inform self-examination’ (2013, p. 108). But this hopeful promise of Military Orientalism has not stemmed the tide of populist discourses deploying the dynamic of difference between ‘The West and the Rest’ in the aftermath of the Cold War to wage and perpetuate a global War on Terror. On the contrary it is possible to argue that there is deliberate and contingent deployment of a ‘decivilizing rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness’ and give ‘unwarranted authority and autonomy’ to ‘militarist and imperialist discourses of national security’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 670). There is ‘sustained use of decivilizing imagery’ that ‘represents the United States as a virtuous nation reluctantly but legitimately fulfilling its divine mandate to use civilized reason and superior force’ vis-a vis ‘nuclear capable and aspiring nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ depicted in a ‘racist, sexist language that reproduces colonial ideology. As such it rejects the authority and legitimacy of these nations as potential possessors of nuclear weapons and solidifies continued dominance by the United States of the nuclear strategic environment’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). The strength of these populist discourses reinforcing a dynamic of difference and denial is exhibited with the contemporary ‘malpractice’ of the Trump administration to not respect the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran (Kimball, 2018). Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as ‘a new technological deity’ and ‘a divinely offered gift that endorsed American exceptionalism and imbued its creators with God-like power and the mission to restore order and justice in a fallen world.’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 677). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) defines nuclear exceptionalism as ‘insistence on an essential nuclear difference – manifested in political claims, technological systems, cultural forms, institutional infrastructures, and scientific knowledge’ and insists ‘nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade’ as ‘for all efforts at making nuclear things exceptional, there were opposing attempts to render them banal’ (Hecht, pp. 6– 8). It is important to bear this in mind as this pernicious dynamic of difference and exceptionalism becomes even more acute with current US President Donald Trump’s everyday populist declarations. He is on record for stating that the US will be at the ‘top of the pack’ ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes’ (Holland, 2017). In his recent visit to Poland ‘to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization’ Trump (2017) claims ‘there are dire threats to our security and our way of life’ and argues, ‘the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ There is little doubt in his mind of the ‘triumph’ of the West (Holland, 2017). It is therefore helpful to pause in this tumultuous ‘history of the present’ and suggest that ‘every identity owes a debt to alterity’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 8). Thus it is interesting to observe how the existing literature on ‘dynamic of difference’ between Orientalism and Occidentalism has expanded its arsenal with a more complex conceptual apparatus of Strategic Orientalism, Techno Orientalism and Military Orientalism to helps us grasp the everyday practices of techno-racial dynamic of differences that cultivate and nurture techno-racial stereotypes. These stereotypes more often than not dictate modes of behavior that make the Other ‘a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed…an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only’ (Schmitt, 2007). It is this ‘dynamic of difference’ with its persistent desire to annihilate the Other, makes one wonder, whether it is not a complementary sub-text for an increasingly alarming and growing superstructure of a ‘dynamic of denial’ in weapons control? A dynamic of denial so petulant that it casts its shadow in celebrating the recent success of a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (2017).

"In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East," writes Michelle L. Woodward, "it has become al- most a cliché to describe many oftheseimages as 'Orientalist'—that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the 'Orient' and the 'West'"(363). This claim aptly captures the predominant anti-Saidian sentiment among art historians and curators who work on representations of the Middle East created by both European and indigenous painters and photographers. To be sure, responses to Said's discussion of Oriental- ism as a discourse of colonial power span the critical spectrum, from more rigorous and subtle critiques articulated from the left to the sometimes facile and reactionary from those of an opposing political orientation. On one side are art historians such as Zeynep Çelik, Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, and Woodward who argue that "the trend to extend Said's analysis to apply equally to visual representations has . . . been used too broadly, obscuring nuances and inconsistencies, not only between different photographers' bodies of work but also within them" (Woodward 363). These scholars typically aim to con- structively revise Orientalism to encompass "a disparate and disputed set of discursive constructions" while at the same time acknowledging "Orientals" as "participants in the production of counternarratives or resistant images" (Bealieu and Roberts 3). On the other side are writ- ers, such as John MacKenzie and Ken Jacobson, who betray a marked suspicion of theory and seek to return the term "Orientalism" to its prior usage as an art historical term that could be deployed without suggestion of a broader political or ideological critique. In Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, MacKenzie argues against Linda Nochlin that "there is little evidence of a necessary coherence between the imposition of direct imperial rule and the visual arts," claiming that "Orientalism celebrates cultural proximity, historical parallelism and religious familiarity [with the Middle East and North Africa] rather than true 'Otherness'" (51). Given such perceived "misconceptions inherent in postcolonialist analysis," Jacobson similarly suggests that "a return to more traditional methods is desirable for the study of 19th- and early 20th-century photography in North Africa and the Near East," urging commentators to focus more single-mindedly on the "notable aesthetic, as well as documentary and historical merit" when analyzing visual representations (88). In what follows, I argue that Orientalism should not be under- stood merely as an ideological discourse of power nor as a neutral art historical term, but rather as a network of aesthetic, economic, and political relationships that cross national and historical boundaries. Understood in this way, Orientalism is indispensible to understanding nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East. Whether consid- ered in the context of their production and dissemination in the nine- teenth century or in relation to their current afterlives as collectable objects or archives, photographs of the Orient become meaningful and legible only if they are considered in terms of the specific geopolitical distinctions, economic interests, and cultural assumptions about the Middle East and its people. While insisting that Orientalism offers a crucial perspective from which to comprehend the meaning and significance of photographic representations of the Middle East, I do not mean to suggest that such images should be understood merely as a reflection of Europeans' racial prejudice against "Orientals," or that these images simply validate European imperial dominance over the region. Nor would I wish to argue that Orientalist photography entails a binary visual structure between the Europeans as active agents and "Orientals" as passive objects of representation. Rather, I hope to provide an alternative view of Orientalistphotography that focuses on nodes and ties that bind artists, collectors, and museums across historical and national boundaries, which are productive of a distinctly exotic vision of the region, a vision at once embraced and perpetuated by the elite in the Middle East .Indigenous photography in and of itself, I maintain, does not constitute an oppositional locus or resistant iconography, for it too belongs to the Orientalist network that mediates its vocabulary and thematics of representation.1 A network theory of Orientalism concerns itself neither with the motivations of individual artists nor with the attributes of art objects, but instead studies the symmetric and asymmetric relations between discrete objects, specific individuals, and concrete practices.

Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at Brunel University London.)

Popular media has reinforced simplistic notions of radicalization, and played an influential role in securing consent for racialized counterterrorism strategies. Numerous studies outline the hostile representation of Muslim migrants, particularly in promoting spurious links to terrorism (cf. Nacos, 2016; Said, 1997). Furthermore, increasingly gendered accounts of radicalization have circulated, including those concerning so- called “Jihadi brides,” which play on Orientalist tropes of the fervency, culpability, and inscrutability of believers of Islam (Jacoby, 2015). These discourses of radicalization have legitimized an increasingly preemptive and militarized model of law enforcement. “What we ... see is a profound sway in the tenor of temporality: the realignment from reactive to preemptive is a conversion from past- tense subject formation to future-tense subject anticipation” (Puar, 2007, pp. 154–155). Indicative of the blurring of the lines between police and military action, war and peace, and domestic and foreign policy (Graham, 2011; McCulloch & Pickering, 2009) is the institutionalization of a mass counterterrorism surveillance agenda. The revelations by Edward Snowden exposed the illicit surveillance practices of Western states, especially the National Security Agency (NSA) and the “Five Eyes alliance,” involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Farrell, 2013). In Britain, the multi-intelligence gathering and analysis practices of counter- terrorism policing are coordinated with daily procedures of other public and private bodies through Prevent, a controversial strand of the British government’s counter- terrorism strategy. Prevent purports to “reduce the threat to the UK from terrorism by stopping people becoming terrorists and supporting terrorism” (HM Government, 2015, p. 2). However, it stems from the racializing, depoliticizing, and pathologizing notion of radicalization discussed above. While Prevent officially looks to disrupt all forms of extremism across all communities, it inevitably institutionalizes a strategy of surveillance that primarily impacts Muslim communities (Murtuja & Tufail, 2017).

The strategy of highlighting cultural difference enables Karnow to argue that America's democratizing mission largely failed because of the strength of Filipino traditions. American colonial officials became enmeshed in the same sorts of patronage relationships Filipinos "naturally" formed among themselves. Manuel Quezon, the most vibrant and bombastic of the Filipino politicians, was really a client of the Americans while such a dominating figure as General Douglas MacArthur became entangled in the Filipino web through his role of godfather to Quezon's son. Because Americans in the Philippines tended to become part of the ruling Mafia, they let the oligarchs remain in power. Thus, nothing was done to solve fundamental social problems. In the end, argues Karnow, Americans cannot be blamed for the failures of their ex-colony. No matter how much advice and support they gave to such political stalwarts as Magsaysay and Marcos, all this came largely to naught thanks to the enduring Philippine value system, and the tenacity of the ruling oligarchy. The sense of negative otherness is reinforced by Karnow's descriptions of his frequent trips to the Philippines. Instead of order, he saw and experienced chaos: "The disarray was visible, widespread and, after a while, monotonous. The port of Manila was a hive of graft, with gangs protected by politicians working with customs officials to smuggle in everything ... Violence had reached epidemic proportions ... Ninoy Aquino ... cruised around town in a bulletproof limousine, its upholstery fitted with slots for machine guns ... [President] Macapagal concocted nationalist issues as a distraction." (1989:364) Not even the Communists are exempted from this picture of chaos: ''-{The Communists were] scarcely Robin Hoods, they murdered, plundered and feuded among themselves. But they were far better disciplined than the police and the army, whose abuses drove numbers of normally passive peasants into the Communist ranks ... "(1989:386). All this endemic chaos, tyranny, and abuse "left [Karnow] doubting whether American institutions, implanted there at the turn of the century, could really take root in its soil."(1989:360) What I find intriguing is this so-called Filipino tradition that had always been there, that survived centuries of colonialism and now supposedly underpins a flawed democracy. The Filipino actors in Karnow's text are doomed from the start because they are ruled by their passions, kinship ties, debts of gratitude and personal loyalties, and even exhibit such petty defects as vanity and the propensity to lie. In order to give his view of culture some structure and authority Karnow harnesses highly contentious and often outdated social values and personality studies from the 1960s. There is much to be explored in, say, Tagalog notions of utang no loob ("inner debt") and hiya ("shame") upon which reciprocal social relationships are constructed. Karnow, however, ignores more recent and nonessentializing studies of Filipino culture and politics. His aim is to establish a binary opposition between positive 'American" and negative "Filipino" values and this resonates well with his audience, for much of what he claims to lie beneath Filipino exteriors conforms by and large to Euro-American myths of backward, undeveloped peoples. Karnow, in effect, constructs Filipinos in terms of a variant of America's classic image of their Pacific wards. Images of the Filipino elite (oppressive caciques, bosses, patrons) and masses (blindly loyal and manipulated tao, clients of the bosses) constructed by James Le Roy, Fred Atkinson, David Barrows and many other American writers a century or so ago reappear in modern journalistic garb. But just as these older images are complicit with the colonial project to pacify and tutor the Filipinos, Karnow's portrayal of a starkly different Filipino tradition h6s its political implications. In the book, though the physical setting is the Philippines, the Filipino actors in the drama are outnumbered at least two to one by Americans. The Filipinos are nevertheless crucial to the narrative, as the negative "others" of the Americans whose story the book is really about. The American national imaginary is established and continually reinforced in writings about its cultural"others," and the Filipinos have occupied this position since the so-called imperial "blunder" of 1899.

Less than three months into Pres. Donald Trump’s reign we can already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war.The threat is still remote, but all the pieces are in place. An aircraft carrier group en route to North Korea, anonymous sources threatening a preemptive strike against them, a recent unilateral attack on the Syrian government and the dropping of a 21,000 pound conventional bomb in Afghanistan — interpreted by many as a message for North Korea. Any misjudgments or mistakes could easily spark a shooting war in which the North Koreans will face an existential threat they can only resist with their nuclear weapons. The United States would be likely to respond in kind. The main thing standing between us and this scenario? The cooler heads and good judgement of Trump and Kim Jong-Un. This is deeply concerning, but to hear the U.S. media tell it all of the irrationality and risk in this is on the North Korean side. NBC News, in the very article announcing the United States’ threat of unauthorized aggression against North Korea, called it “volatile and unpredictable.” Australia’s defense industry minister called North Korea “the world’s greatest threat”less than a week after the United States escalated the major power conflict in Syria with little warning. And The New York Times spoke of China’s need to “rein in” the childish North Koreans, even if the United States is the one that’s killed at least 1,000 civilians in combat since the beginning of 2017.Western propaganda draws from a deep well of racist “yellow peril” prejudice to stoke irrational fears against this tiny, poor, isolated country, and it amplifies this paranoia with long-standing stereotypes of East Asian “oddity” to dehumanize North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against them. In the hands of a war-horny bigot like Trump, this well-established, bipartisan narrative poses a fearsome threat of making nuclear war inevitable. It’s imperative that we answer these lies immediately if we are to minimize this risk. There are three basic pieces to the West’s slander of North Korea — that the whole country is “crazy” and especially dangerous, and that North Koreans are treacherous and untrustworthy. They can’t be reasoned with, they won’t honor any diplomatic agreements, and any moment they could fly off the handle and kill millions of people for no reason whatsoever. This demands extraordinary military pressure from the United States and allies and may, alas, require us to destroy them. Each of these is a perverse misrepresentation. The claim that they are insane in particular is a terrific example of gaslighting — an abuse tactic where the perpetrator takes steps to make their victim act or feel crazy and then uses those responses as proof of the victim’s irrationality, a justification for further abuse. North Korea, by way of context, is bordered on the north by China and the south by South Korea. South Korea hosts 28,500 U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, many of them literally amassed at the border with the North. On their east is the Sea of Japan (known to Koreans as the East Sea), and across that is a nation which brutally occupied Korea for decades. The North Koreans are surrounded on all sides by countries that have invaded or occupied them in living memory, and the world’s most powerful military is still technically at war with them and poised to invade at moment’s notice. This is the sort of scenario that would make any country not merely paranoid, but legitimately insecure. In light of U.S. military aggression against countries that choose to resist our global order — see Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. — North Korea can choose to capitulate or focus tremendous resources on building up their defensive capabilities. Also in living memory there is the time the United States killed a quarter of the North Korean population and leveled the country’s urban centers, leaving almost no structures standing in Pyongyang. The North Koreans didn’t capitulate then and it isn’t on the table now — defense and defiance it is, and this is hardly “crazy” in context. The U.S. media, however, never provide this context and instead they present North Korean military propaganda as being unhinged and aggressive. They never compare this, of course, to U.S. military flyovers at sporting events or the ceremonial induction of new soldiers at halftime, or even to our National Anthem with its celebration of bombings and rockets and warfare. If North Korea is “crazy” for its militarism, then the United States is downright certifiable. U.S. propaganda can dismiss North Korea’s legitimate concerns so easily because of the underlying racist assumption that these are a bizarre and simple-minded people that believe in things like unicorns. This feeds off of and into orientalist logic that sees East Asians as a nearly subhuman “other” that can’t be reasoned with and so must be handled with force. It worked when we needed to justify violence against immigrant laborers in the 19th century and it works to justify our imperialist expansion today. As for claims about North Korea’s unique danger to the world, this too is divorced from reality. The country has no meaningful power projection capability — its naval surface vessels can’t operate more than about 50 kilometers off the coast — and the U.S. military has them contained to the south. China is still North Korea’s ally and does not view it as a significant military threat. North Korea is contained. But what about those missiles and nukes? The North Koreans could maybe lob a missile at Japan — or maybe not, a missile test on April 15, 2017 failed — and they could level Seoul with artillery alone. But why would they ever do this? The only way to explain such a unilateral assault on any of their neighbors — which would prompt either U.S. or Chinese military assets to overwhelm and destroy them — is to go back to that same baseless “crazy” claim. They could miscalculate of course, but claims that they are especially dangerous almost always rely upon the assumption that they might just wig out and bomb everybody for no reason at all at any moment. Again, this is rooted in an infantilizing, dehumanizing, racist logic. And any claims of a direct North Korean threat to the United States is ludicrous bullshit. They have no weapons capable of reaching anywhere within thousands of miles of the United States, and are years away from developing it, at best. Even if they reach that goal — which their very uneven history of missile tests indicates will be very difficult — they would still have thousands of fewer weapons than we do. Any launch of that sort would represent an act of mortal desperation — again, it would be totally delusional to launch it offensively. Cable news is a much bigger threat to U.S. security than North Korea ever will be. So if North Korea’s military threat is totally derived from their desire to preclude a US attack why not negotiate a peace between our country and theirs? If they had that sort of assurance we could both back away from the brink and perhaps even provide space for an opening in North Korean society. Conventional wisdom answers that the North Koreans have reneged on every agreement ever made with them. But if the “crazy” claims are an example of gaslighting, this answer is a textbook case of projection. It’s not the North Koreans who have betrayed past agreements, but the United States. To cover this up we repeat the same racist logic we used against Native Americans — we broke the treaties, but they were the “Indian givers.” The main incident here has to do with the “Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” signed between the two countries in 1994.The Agreed Framework — as it is usually called — basically traded the end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for normalized economic and diplomatic relations with the United States. As a good faith step to spur the negotiations North Korea submitted to limited weapons inspections while the United States cancelled military exercises with South Korea. North Korea also used its plutonium production plants for energy, so the United States agreed to work with allies to provide them with fuel oil until two light water nuclear reactors — nuclear power plants that cannot be weaponized — could be built. The United States failed to uphold its end of the agreement almost immediately. Two weeks after it was signed, Republicans took back Congress and labeled the agreement “appeasement.” They never provided sufficient funds for providing the fuel oil and the United States never met the obligations set in the Agreed Framework.The Americans also failed to take even the first preliminary steps in building the light water reactors for over four years, and then moved at such a slow pace that there was no chance of meeting the timelines set in the Framework. Finally, and most significantly, Congress blocked any attempts to begin normalizing relations between North Korea and the United States and Pres. Bill Clinton never pressed it to do so. North Korea played along for at least four years and even warned us that it was going to restart its nuclear program a year before it actually began a pilot program. According to Leon Sigal, author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, the North Koreans did not shift from this pilot effort to a full-scale weapons program until Pres. George W. Bush refused new negotiations in 2001. North Korea “was playing tit for tat — cooperating whenever Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington reneged, in an effort to end enmity,” Sigal wrote in 2007. This extended to the later Six Party Talks between North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia which almost brought North Korea back into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Talks broke down when the United States refused to release $24 million frozen in a Macau bank account, and North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon six months later. But for that $24 million there might be no nuclear threat from North Korea today. The fact is that America sets such a low priority on disarming North Korea because it isn’t dangerous to the United States because it has nukes. The North Koreans are dangerous because they refuse to submit to our imperial authority and play ball with our global order.Notice how much less hand-wringing you hear about Pakistan, even though it does have a nuclear arsenal probably 15 times the size of North Korea’s, while also actively collaborating with jihadists. The Pakistanis are subject to the U.S. empire, however, and they buy their weapons from the U.S. military-industrial complex, so they are no big deal. North Korea dares to not only maintain its independence, but to defend it by any means necessary. It can’t be rewarded with negotiation. America has to destroy North Korea to teach the rest of the world a lesson, and this means preparing the U.S. public for nuclear war, painting the country as a bunch of war-crazed military aggressors whose word can’t be trusted. Again, this is the definition of projection, taking advantage of racist assumptions baked into U.S. politics and culture. The good news is that it appears that North Korea is acting both rationally and politically — not militarily — right now. The country is playing the present crisis in such a way as to encourage a favorable outcome in South Korea’s upcoming snap presidential election. A friendlier government there could mean new economic and political opportunities as well as new diplomatic backup that could help shift the balance in any future negotiations with the United States. Unfortunately the North Koreans are lined up against the regime of an insulated, ignorant, white supremacist warmonger who has learned in the last few weeks that the same forces lying about North Korea kiss his ass when he escalates military conflicts around the world. It’s our responsibility to push back against our government and against the institutions lying their way into nuclear war. It’s our responsibility to speak the truth about North Korea — even if it challenges our most deep-seated political assumptions — and it’s our responsibility, always, to stay defiant.

Tarak Barkawi is associate professor in the Department of Politics, New School for Social Research. He earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota and specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South. He has written on colonial armies, "small wars" and imperial warfare, the Cold War in the Third World, and on counterinsurgency and the War on Terror. More generally, he is interested in the place of armed force in histories and theories of globalisation, modernisation and imperialism, especially from a postcolonial perspective.

Once again, the Crazy Emperor of the Hermit Kingdom - North Korea - is threatening nuclear war. Or so the media would have us believe. The BBC and other news outlets have taken to publishing maps with concentric rings donating the speculative ranges of North Korea's creaky missile systems. One never tested missile might possibly reach Alaska and do for Sarah Palin and the polar bears. The basic idea purveyed by the media and by US spokespersons is that Oriental despotisms -as Iran and North Korea are regularly portrayed - cannot possibly be trusted with nuclear weapons. Accordingly, US policy, to which the UN and much of the world have subscribed, is that it will "never accept" an Iranian or North Korean bomb. While rational people would never use a nuclear weapon except in circumstances in which it was rational to do so, unbalanced, crazy types might decide to unleash their nuclear arsenals, or turn them over to terrorists, or what not. It would seem that only rational Western nations like the US can be trusted with nukes. Images of Mad Mullahs and Asiatic Despots aside, there are obvious reasons why Iran and North Korea would want nuclear weapons. Most significantly, a nuclear weapon is a guarantee that they will not suffer the same fate as Iraq in 2003. One of the only times it is rational and credible to make nuclear threats is in a situation of existential crisis - when regime survival is at stake. For this reason, no one invades or pushes too far a power armed with nuclear weapons. Were Iran or North Korea to use a nuclear weapon in any other circumstance, they would face obliteration. Since nuclear weapons can be traced to their origin, it would be suicidal for these countries to provide weapons to terrorist groups. Such groups do not have a country to lose, unlike the leaderships of Iran and North Korea. So if Iran and North Korea turn out to have rational reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, and are likely to be governed by the same realities of nuclear deterrence that constrained the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, what about the rationality of US policy? For one, for the US to say it will "never accept" what is already a reality is an absurdity: North Korea already has the bomb. It must now be treated as a nuclear power.More broadly, the recent history of US foreign policy is not exactly a testament to rationality. In response to a terrorist attack which killed nearly 3,000 of its citizens, the US invaded two countries, starting wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Ten years later, it has lost both of those wars and broken its budget. Luckily, not every country that suffers from terrorism reacts with such deadly and self-defeating spasms of revenge and blood lust. North Korea has in living memory suffered from the wanton destructiveness of US policy. This is a fact which must be remembered in the face of media images of North Korea's supposedly irrational militarism and aggressiveness. Over the three years of the Korean War, in the words of General Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force "burned down every town in North and South Korea". The US used 12,000 pound "Tarzan" bombs until there were no more targets for them, in addition to thousands upon thousands of bombing sorties. Thousand pound napalm bombs were dropped from B-29s to "wipe out all life" in tactical localities. Towards the end of the war, the US bombed North Korea's dams. One resulting flood "scooped clean" 27 miles of river valley. Moreover, it is the US which has made repeated nuclear threats against North Korea, despite the fact that North Korea has never posed a serious threat to the US. The use of nuclear weapons was considered several times during the Korean War, both tactical and strategic. In April 1951, B-29s with nuclear weapons were deployed to Guam, ready for use if China escalated its conventional involvement in the war. Later in the war, lone B-29s simulated nuclear attack runs on Pyongyang. Over the course of the war, a million North Korean civilians were killed by US, UN and South Korean forces. This history offers some perspective on the recent crisis,which began not with North Korean threats but with US and South Korean war games and manoeuvres. These included practice sorties by two nuclear capable B-2 stealth bombers sent over South Korea, loudly announced in the media so that the point would not be lost on North Korea's leaders. North Korea responded with bombast, including the incredible notion that it was preparing an amphibious invasion of the US. Guam, still a base for US nuclear bombers, was "threatened" by North Korea's jury-rigged missiles. In turn, the US deployed its equally ineffective but much more expensive THAAD missile defence system to Guam. One wonders what is more laughable: the idea that North Korea could hit a speck in the Pacific like Guam or that the boondoggle offspring of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars might actually work. What is not laughable is the fact that it is the US, which has a consistent pattern of threatening the use - including first use - of nuclear weapons. No one is in doubt that US nuclear weapons actually work, and the US remains the only power ever to have used them in anger. Notably, it used them in a situation in which it was itself no longer threatened. The North Korean bomb may be an uncomfortable fact of life. But so too is the US bomb. And none of us should make any easy assumptions about the rationality of the leadership of either country, however. 

Early do we see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day; for [...] every change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical. China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World’s History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be waited for to constitute vital progress. (Hegel, 2004, p. 29) Hegel clearly defines the mechanisms of representation of the Chinese world and East Asia, which remained in force for many decades: China is an empire that remains outside historical Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... processes, with neither evolution nor progress, inert, passive and unable to assume Western modernity by itself. And it is the West that can make the Chinese emerge from this lethargy. The Western world, therefore, becomes a factor –a necessary and sufficient factor– in the transformation of East Asian countries, which becomes the intellectual justification for the colonial actions of the great Euro-American powers in the Pacific and Asia. All the texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyse the modern history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an apprentice of the civilising lessons of Western countries.6 China –and East Asia in general– is always described as the passive and feminine part in the relationship it has with the civilised and masculine West (Guarné, 2005). And it is from this perspective that, in the colonial context of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are described as inferior and barbarous, narrow-minded and xenophobic. This is how one of the few texts of the time published in Spain about China describes them, introducing the Fu Manchu stereotype that first literature and then cinema would feed off for decades: Despite everything, critical voices could be heard regarding the colonial actions in East Asia, which attempted to overcome this strongly Eurocentric, even racist, view and during the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th an effort was made to transform China into an object of academic study. Oxford University, to offer a distinguished example, was the first to offer Chinese classes in 1876.8 The first lecturer was James Legge, a Protestant missionary who led an ambitious translation project of the great Chinese classics and is the embodiment of the erudite Western figure who approaches Chinese culture with honesty and passion.9 These first Sinologists, despite the fact that they do not actively participate in the colonial intellectualism defined by Said, do unconsciously assume the epistemological categories that drive the colonial discussion of the age in which they lived. It is significant, for example, that the renowned translation by Legge of the Chinese classics should be financed by Joseph Jardine, a member of one of the most important British merchant clans working in China in the 19th century, whose fortune was linked directly to the lucrative opium trade.10 These experts in the Chinese world, of which Legge is only an example, take on a dual function of representation: on the one hand, they become the authorised ambassadors in the West of Chinese civilisation, spokespersons and often defenders of the cultural principals that they take from the Chinese world, even though, on the other hand, they do so always clinging to their own almost pedagogical stance as standards of Western enlightened ideals. This is how a figure still around today was born: that of the expert in the Chinese world, which constitutes a discipline different form –apart from– the other academic disciplines, which generally left the Chinese and the non-Western world beyond their sphere of research. The study of Chinese history in the early decades of the 20th century was in the hands of these Sinologists, missionaries, diplomats and functionaries who knew the Chinese world in person, in the hands of more or less well intentioned representatives of the imperial powers in Asia. It is a history that is clearly centred on the actions of the Western countries in the Chinese world, which are interpreted, albeit often critically, as the unleashing that allowed the Chinese to enter modernity, admitting the technological and scientific superiority of the West, which emerges as a civilising model and pedagogue. The same historical processes are sought in Chinese history that affected the Western countries: for this reason, these historians reflect on the non-development in China of a European-style industrial revolution or on the reasons for the lack of capitalist-oriented forms of economic organisation. The West, then, is the norm and yardstick of historical progress, and in this comparative perspective, Chinese history shows a series of shortcomings and anomalies in its development.11 In spite of everything, however, this paradigm that we could call imperialist makes China a historical object in its own right and, therefore, overcomes the Sinophobic thought that we can still find in some writers at the start of the 20th century. Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... The sociocultural approach After the Second World War, a new generation of completely professional historians began to emerge, who had studied at the modern universities of the United States and Europe, with a much more solid and attentive training in the discipline, and this led to the modern development of the history of China and East Asia. However –despite the systematic study of Chinese archives, the application of scientific text analysis and less Eurocentric comparative research methodologies– emphasis continued on the role of Western aggressions in China. The whole of Chinese history was interpreted on the basis of the significance of these agressions by studying the impact of modernisation imposed by Euro-American countries –viewed as a necessary phenomenon for the activation of Chinese history– in traditional East Asian societies, despite certain aspects of Western imperialism being explicitly criticised. In fact, concepts such as change and transformation, true emblems of enlightened modernity, took on an extraordinary cultural value for the historians of the time, forming the basis for their entire research and the interpretation of Chinese history. This had a perverse effect, as numerous aspects of the history of Chinese society that have nothing to do with the colonial aggressions of Western nations disappear from historical contemplation and, therefore, are implicitly denied. Required reading for this historiographical context is the text quoted above by John K. Fairbank, the leading Chinese historian from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, a long period during which modern Chinese history took on meaning on the basis of the question of its response to Western aggressions. This perspective throws up a number of quite obvious problems. On the one hand, it takes on an active role for the West compared with a solely reactive China. In other words, despite the fact that it was no longer a question of the passive reality as discussed by the enlightened figures of the 19th century, China continued to be denied the possibility of acting for itself, without stimulation from the West. In addition, as we saw in the text cited above, the West was seen as a reified entity, a block with very few differences, that shares unique aims and the same colonial enterprise and whose spatial and temporal complexity is often overlooked. Likewise, China was, in the work of the historians of the time, a construct, a simplifying abstraction that sidelines the exceptional diversity of the Chinese world, which puts the validity of a large part of the generalisations made about it in doubt. This explains the fact that in the historical discourse maintained during these decades, a significant number of the historical processes that affect modern Chinese history go unnoticed and are not studied by historians, simply because they have nothing to do with the presence of foreign countries on the Chinese coast. Some events are even interpreted as a reaction to Western actions that were in fact an evolution of internal forces and processes with their origins in a period long before the arrival of foreign powers in China.

Ever since the mediaeval period, China has been an empire of mythical characteristics in the European imagination: the utmost representation of the so-called Far East. Marco Polo had defined a number of traits that would remain unaltered for centuries in the European portrayal of the Chinese world: the luxury and refinement, the culture of exoticism, the mysterious nature of the women, the unheard-of ingenuity and invention, etc. make China an unknown, distant and mysterious world, yet one that is admired and attractive, as suggested by one of the titles of the work by the Venetian, The Book of Wonders.2 The lack of direct contact between the two ends of the Eurasian continent, as a consequence of the fall of the Mongol Empire, which had managed to unify this vast area, contributed to the reification of these ideas, which were applied to everything that extended from the east of the Mediterranean, beyond the known world. The 16th century represented a point of inflection in this trend. The Portuguese route that had led Vasco da Gama to the coast of India skirting the African continent and which continued as far as the ports of Japan and China brought Europe and East Asia into contact once again. And it was by this route, which was completed by the one that the Spaniards opened up through America and the Philippines, that not just goods but cultural products and ideas, including religious ones, circulated. For almost two centuries, the Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... Catholic missions acted as the utmost exponent of the relations between the Chinese Empire and Europe. The missionaries, especially those of the Society of Jesus, became high-level cross-cultural agents, to the point where some of them attained a position of privilege and entered the court of the emperor as astronomers, engineers or painters.3 Thus, they offered China the friendlier face of the European world, that of the arts and sciences, which they used as an advertisement to spread Christian doctrine among Chinese intellectuals, at the same time conveying to the West a benevolent and friendly view of the Chinese world, interested in justifying their mission and their method. The Jesuits believed that the most effective way of entering the Chinese world meant first converting its governors to the Christian cause; the people then converting should only be a question of time. To do this, they had to adapt to an elaborate and complex culture like that of the Chinese. Consequently, they abandoned their religious habits to adopt the ceremonial robes of the Chinese officials, they learned cultured language, they studied Chinese history and they analysed and translated the Confucian classics. We should not be surprised, then, that the treatises that they wrote about the Chinese world were extremely well documented and that, moreover, they often portrayed the reality of East Asia in sincerely laudatory terms. Confucianism, for example, reached Europe as a moral philosophy that predated the values of Christianity, an idea that was very well received among some 17th-century intellectuals who began to preach the need for a natural religion outside the domain of the Church and who saw in Chinese thought a source of inspiration. (Zhang, 1988, p. 118). This perception gave birth to the Sinophile thought of the 17th and early 18th centuries, which boasted representatives of the intellectual stature of Leibniz, Wolff, Rousseau and Voltaire, who, in their works, praised very diverse aspects of the Chinese world, such as the language, the political system and education. In their works, China became a country governed by a philosopher king with the assistance of literati who are selected by taking into consideration nothing more than their intellectual and moral standing. The respect for laws, the tolerance in ideas and the political excellence are virtues that eclipse the shortcomings –which, nevertheless, did not go unnoticed by some of these thinkers. However, circumstances changed radically in the second half of the 18th century, in both Europe and China, and the Western portrayal of the Chinese world underwent a radical volte-face. On the one hand, the method of the Jesuits of fitting in with Chinese culture was strongly criticised by the other orders, giving rise to the so-called Rites Controversy: the Society of Jesus ended up being dissolved by the Papacy, and the less tolerant Catholic orders expelled by the Chinese emperor. Meanwhile, in Europe the ideas of rationalism gave way to the crystallisation of the enlightened thought of modernity, with its faith in progress. Leibniz and Voltaire were concerned with showing the universality of reason and China was an ideal example of their proposals. Yet, from this point on, enlightened Europeans submitted China to their ideas on historical progress: the stability that had previously been interpreted as an example of the virtues of its political system would become regarded from the mid-18th century onwards as a sign of its lack of evolution and modernity.4 One of the most classic formulations of this Sinophobic thought is seen in J. G. Herder, who in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1787) said: “The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy painted with hieroglyphics and wrapped in silk; its internal life is like that of animals in hibernation” (XIV, p. 13).5 For Herder, Chinese culture is one that has not evolved for centuries, the vestiges of a distant past, a country without a present, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which belong to a dead culture. And it was this stereotyped vision that, reproduced and amended, resonated throughout the work of most European intellectuals at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, from Adam Smith to Marx. However, the one who best defined it was Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), in which he dedicated an entire section to China. Hegel feels that China represents the starting point of the history of humanity, in a formulation that we can consider one of the intellectual bases of the Orientalist representation of Asia: “The History of the World travels from East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning” (Hegel, 2004, p. 13). And he adds: Early do we see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day; for [...] every change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical. China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World’s History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be waited for to constitute vital progress. (Hegel, 2004, p. 29) Hegel clearly defines the mechanisms of representation of the Chinese world and East Asia, which remained in force for many decades: China is an empire that remains outside historical Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism... processes, with neither evolution nor progress, inert, passive and unable to assume Western modernity by itself. And it is the West that can make the Chinese emerge from this lethargy. The Western world, therefore, becomes a factor –a necessary and sufficient factor– in the transformation of East Asian countries, which becomes the intellectual justification for the colonial actions of the great Euro-American powers in the Pacific and Asia. All the texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyse the modern history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an apprentice of the civilising lessons of Western countries.6 China –and East Asia in general– is always described as the passive and feminine part in the relationship it has with the civilised and masculine West (Guarné, 2005). And it is from this perspective that, in the colonial context of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are described as inferior and barbarous, narrow-minded and xenophobic. This is how one of the few texts of the time published in Spain about China describes them, introducing the Fu Manchu stereotype that first literature and then cinema would feed off for decades:

China’s economic ascendency has generated a lot of attention in the Western media, particularly in the United States. In recent years, China has emerged as a key player in the balance of powerand economic relationships in the global landscape, serving as a space for global investments of capital, a resource for labor, as well as a Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 281 massive market for products and services manufactured by foreign corporations (Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). Economists have pointed to the instability of a world economic orderthat is dominated by ‘‘Chimerica’’: thesupplementary economic and trade relationship between China and the United States on the global landscape(Ferguson & Schularick, 2011). The emergence of Chimerica has also sparked renewed media interest in the ‘‘Chinese success story’’ within the United States. ‘‘Knowing’’ China has emerged as a crucial objective of the tumultuous Chimerican relationship. Set against this backdrop, we argue that contemporary forms of knowledge production on and about China represent the contemporary face of Orientalism, ‘‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient*by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it,by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, the Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). Rather than a vestigial, historical form of knowing harking back to colonial times, we contend that Orientalism has been reinvigorated, resurrected in the backdrop of neoliberalism*the zeitgeist of global capitalism today. In this paper, through an analysis of contemporary accounts of China in popular U.S. news discourse, we explore the connections between Orientalism and neoliberalism.In particular, our analysis documents how Orientalist ‘‘cultural knowledge’ ’about China is constructed within U.S. news discourse. Our ideological analysis points to how Orientalist knowledge claims situate China within the broader economic narrative of neoliberalism, at the center of which is the notion of Chimerica. Neoliberalism and the U.S.􏰀China Relationship Chimerica’s emergence has been intrinsically tied to the neoliberal project, with the increasing articulation of policy and intervention plans that construct China discursively and materially in the agendas of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Ban & Dutta, 2012). Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is embodied within a globalization logic that supports political-economic configurations of control in the hands of TNCs on the basis of free markets with minimum state involvement. This logic is played out through privatization, deregulation, withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision, and the opening up of nation states to foreign investment and foreign capital (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Neoliberalism involves political and economic logics that emphasize the creation of free-market conditions across national boundaries for TNCs to operate under the purview of international financial institutions like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Giroux, 2008). While it is clear that neoliberalism is associated with global capitalism, the two are often mistakenly equated. Capitalism is an ‘‘assemblage of economic, technical, legal and political arrangements’’ [emphasis ours] (Nonini, 2008, p. 150), concerning the appropriation of surplus value by owners of the means of production; neoliberalism refers to a set of epistemic commitments [emphasis ours] 282 Z. Ban et al.(Mirowski, 2009) about the ‘‘relationships between capitalist markets, the individual, and the state’’(Nonini, 2008, p. 150). There is debate as to whether China’s enthusiastic participation in global capitalism through ‘‘radical marketization’’ (Wang, 2004, p. 7) and structural transformations indicate that it is neoliberal(or at least ‘‘neoliberal with Chinese characteristics’’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 120)); or whether China’s approach warrants re-conceptualizing the theoretical scope of neoliberalism itself (Ong, 2006).

Since historically China was not understood as a territorial state, students of China who treat it as a piece of sovereign territory and claim knowledge of China cannot be exempted from Orientalism. All of us use “China” in our daily language even though some of us are consciously aware of the problem of the term.6 Nowadays, the spatial dimension has dominated the temporal dimension when speaking of China. This is especially true in foreign policy analysis because the term “foreign” presupposes territorial limitation of China. What ostensibly exists inside of territorial China accordingly attracts more attention than how celestial China has become territorial China. This quest for an objective China typically examines China in terms of its distance from the model of liberal state, hence the operation and existence of civil society is critical to all political analysis.7 The concern for civil society in China culminates once a year in the U.S. human rights report, which painstakingly details cases involving violations in China. Stories of violations such as slaughter of female babies, jailing of dissidents, and suppression of religious freedom, and so on, easily take up front pages. All this portrayal of lacking civility carries with it a referential power that determines the location and the angle from which one approaches China as a territorial state.

On November 14, 2022, during the G20 summit, President Biden said to President Xi Jinping there ‘need not be a new Cold War’ between the US and China. The ongoing geopolitics in which we situate our analysis involves the bi-directional US-China geopolitical tensions over ideologies and technology and economic leaderships, fueled by the global COVID-19 epidemiological crisis and surging anti-China sentiments (Sanger, 2021). As Biden’s latest remark makes clear, on both sides many have described the current geopolitical climate as the ‘New Cold War,’ despite that today’s context differs drastically from the Cold War of the last century. The invocation of the ‘Cold War’ imagery, however, is telling in that it frames the US–China antagonism as one between two purportedly opposite politico-economic systems – liberal democracy and capitalism on one side, and authoritarianism/totalitarianism and socialism/communism on the other – each advancing their own version of modernity, development, and progress (Dai, 2021; Brands and Gaddis, 2022).3 That China has incompatible national goals and values with the US is a bipartisan consensus in the US, despite domestic political polarization (Hirsh, 2022).Behind anxieties over ideological divides lie deeper concerns over military, economic and technological leadership. The China-US trade war has escalated since 2018. In the latest, ‘tech arms race,’ American media jump to stories about China outstripping the US and Europe in AI products and scientific publications (Li et al., 2021). The discourse revolves around the legitimacy of innovation and national security concerns. According to NATO, China is the ‘global security threat.’4 The US government has increased institutional surveillance over ethnically Chinese or China-related researchers. Under the ‘China Initiative’ (dropped in March 2022 but with lingering repercussions), numerous scholars were arrested on the false charge of ‘IP thefts’ or ‘scientific espionage’ (Subbaraman, 2021). Recently, through the CHIPS Act – which commentators identify as the ‘cold-war era strategy’ – Biden administration tightened restrictions on exchanges and trade of semiconductor technologies, including prohibiting US citizens and residents working for chip plants in China (Mihm, 2022; Herman, 2022). Meanwhile, blaming the US for escalating tensions, China launched ‘Global Security Initiative’ to promote its own vision of global order and partnership (Eguegu, 2022). China’s surveillance industry has been expanding globally at a stunning rate (Huang & Tsai, 2022).This antagonism in the ‘tech arms race’ is preoccupied with national data infrastructures, regarded as the game changer (Liu, 2021). The US and many other countries banned Huawei’s 5G technology, while also accusing China of ‘exporting digital authoritarianism’ to the West and Africa via its ‘surveillance technologies,’ including FinTech, facial recognition technologies, and platforms such as TikTok (Edel & Shullman, 2021). Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies strive to attract transnational venture capitalists by boasting their exceeding wealth of data (e.g., Lee, 2018). Indeed, Chinese data-driven enterprise has benefitted from structural reasons conducive to data accumulation: an enormous population, lax market regulations, the relative absence of public organizing about data privacy, and long-term infrastructural investments from the state (Wu, 2020). This preoccupation with data infrastructures is almost allegorical for us to think about how regulated sanctions and exclusions of datafication are constitutive of knowledge enterprises generically. The COVID-19 pandemic, while fueling global anti-Asian hate crimes, has further deteriorated China’s already-intense international relations. From Trumpian racism to the later ‘lab-leak theory,’ the rhetoric of blame frames China as a biotechnological threat, extending a longer history of an orientalist imagination of ‘the East’ in relation to ‘contagion’ and ‘contamination’ (Wald, 2008). Age-old Orientalism has also converging with a relatively recent exoticization of Asia as a hypermodern alien existence looming over the West (Siu & Chun, 2020). Meanwhile, both governments seek to enlist already monopolistic AI tech companies for public health management. Beijing, in particular, has been calling upon Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu to utilize their existing technological setup and data science experiments to track populations in the name of national security and citizen care (Kim et al., 2021). The persistent weaponization of data infrastructures, which is integral to the ‘tech arms race,’ further focuses societal attention to the pandemic accumulation of digital data. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has posed severe, but unevenly distributed, material restrictions over China research, scholarly and journalist alike. On top of the increased risks of international border-crossing, China, adhering to a ‘zero-COVID’ policy after reigning in the initial outbreak in a stunning manner, has closed in onto itself with draconian measures. With rare exceptions, obtaining Chinese visas has become a daunting task for non-citizen researchers. Foreign journalists from major press outlets such as New York Times were expelled since the outbreak (Munroe et al., 2020). Those with the access must overcome strenuous and unpredictable testing and quarantine requirements, skyrocketing costs, and extraordinary time commitment to make their way in. These constraints amount to limited physical access to fieldwork, informants, and archives. This level of limitation, some argue, is comparable to what previous generations of Western social scientists experienced prior to China’s reform and ‘opening up’ (Millwood, 2022). Amid the rhetoric of the ‘New Cold War,’ we should recall that, during the (actual) Cold War, US social sciences underwent significant restructuring, incentivized to serve war agendas against the East Bloc (Gilman, 2016). It is also instructive to note that, during the same period, the US also saw an outpouring of government funds and private philanthropy to support ‘area studies,’ aimed to gather intelligence and develop so-called ‘indigenous knowledge’ of foreign territories, including China. Such support has been dwindling in the post-Cold War era (Feng et al., 2021). As academic jobs have become fast-paced and competitive, graduate mentors in the social sciences discourage students from spending time on foreign language study and fieldwork (Stevens et al., 2018). In short, as the anglophone social sciences are caught up in the ongoing geopolitical crisis and embedded in its incentive structures, various types of contextual, embodied knowledge about non-EuroAmerican areas are being diluted, warped, and marginalized. Adding to this shift away from ‘older’ methods is the expansion of ‘computational social science’ and the embrace of STEM talent without social science training. This forms an extraordinary academic ecology when it comes to China, which the broader anglophone discourse projects as an antagonistic and othered state (Siu & Chun, 2020). The conditioning effect is particularly salient in Media and Communication Studies and Information Sciences, which, compared to other social science disciplines, lack the tradition of localized area-specific research (Chakravartty et al., 2018). For example, in this literature, China’s political system is typically both the by-default condition for, and the significance of, the empirical study. This research design formula reflects what Guan (2019) calls ‘authoritarian determinism,’ which assumes that the ‘authoritarian apparatus determines the fundamental logic and operational mechanisms of China’s communication sphere’ (p. 739). As embodied, contextual understandings of Chinese society decrease both in proportion and in legitimacy, this enduring power dynamic in the West/US-centric academia gets accentuated, making China-related accounts extra-conducive to the imperatives of the Cold War mentality. Communication Studies and Information Studies gravitate towards digital media and technologies as both the sites and means of research (see, Hargittai & Sandvig, 2015). These fields’ growing research interest in digital surveillance, reflective of societal concerns, also plays a role. China has become a free-floating signifier for the omnipotent digital dystopia, without history, culture, or institutional complexity. In its extreme rendering, China is equated with (the equally acontextual) totalitarian Nazism or Stalinism, defined by an all-crushing state – the ‘Big Brother’ – that controls every aspect of citizens’ life and mind; all this hides in the dark that requires heroism to infiltrate (Li & Nardi, 2021). This genre proliferates especially around China’s Social Credit System, despite scant evidence for empirical analysis (e.g., Zuboff, 2018). Many are fixated on ‘thought experiment,’ aiming to deduce a dystopian alternative to mobilize protection of the liberal West’s purported integrity. These writings exhibit what Roh et al. (2015) call ‘technoorientalism,’ where China is a technical myth, where Chinese technologies, the Chinese society, and the Chinese state are conflated into one monolith. This amounts to a striking case where blackboxing a political and racial Other, and blackboxing nefarious new technologies, converge. We should note that in academic outputs, there is a mirroring, but equally simplified, image of China without ‘authoritarian determinism’ or its relevant features. Here, Chinese digital data are posited as ready proxies for studying generic social constructs. Such constructs, like ‘public sphere’ and ‘agenda-setting,’ are usually developed from examining phenomena in Western contexts and presume particular institutional conditions that China lacks. In Information Studies, more particularly, Chinese users are often categorized under the generic umbrella of ‘non-Western users,’ whose data supposedly offers design implications for better ‘support’ abstracted user needs. This treatment is not dissimilar to computational social science research within the PRC, which tends to stay away from ‘politically sensitive topics’ and concentrates on narrow, so-called ‘application’ problems (Stockmann, 2018). Importantly, what this China shares with the above ‘techno-orientalist’ China is its ‘digital simulacrum’ quality, devoid of local textures and multi-layered power relations (also see Wu, 2020). Broader geopolitical forces and particular academic environments have both conditioned the enactment of ‘China as a blackbox’ that centers on an open/close dichotomy. We begin with questioning the ‘openness’ of platform data and its deployment to ‘disclose’ China.In the past decade, the proliferation of datasets amassed from Chinese platforms, such as Weibo and WeChat, has served as a window via which China is seen and made sense of. Since COVID-19, restrictions over scholars’ physical mobility have further nudged them toward digital data, while restrictions over ordinary people’s physical mobility boost their virtual activities in digital environments – the production of such data (see Hargittai, 2022). To be clear, using platform trace data to study human conduct is a global trend (Wu & Taneja, 2020). Such data, which continue to flood our world in novel forms of granularity, tend to be seen as ‘unobtrusive’ recordings of our activities and behaviors. In recent proposals to develop computational social science, much effort is concentrated on expanding data collaborations and data infrastructures with platform companies (Lazer et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020). Admittedly, there has been major pushback that addresses issues of representativeness, privacy, and precarious access controlled by platforms (for a brief review, see Wu & Taneja, 2020). Besides these concerns, more pertinent to our intervention are what Wu and Taneja (2020) call the ‘measurement regimes’ of platform trace data, by which they mean the structural arrangements via which platform data materializes into its final form. Similarly drawing on STS perspectives, their analysis historicizes the measurement of user behavior across media and markets to show that it is always designed and executed to serve a given institutional context. As its latest regime, platform datafication is also not a ‘neutral’ process, Rather, the authors demonstrate that platform data are generated as platforms’ records of their own behavioral experimentation, calibrated to answer questions germane to these companies. Simply put, a platform sets up its measurement infrastructure to create data that ‘improve’ design features, fuel advertising analytics, and please investors. In truth, platform governance boils down to the platform’s numerous strategies for managing data on user behavior, as well as utilizing such data to influence user behavior. In any society, platform datafication also operates under broader structural and infrastructural forces. Indeed, Chinese platform governance involves the commercial platforms’ ever-shifting architectures and modulations. But additionally, it also involves the platforms’ often hidden attempts to fulfill political directives from government agencies through content curation and removal – what Guobin Yang (2022, p. 36) calls ‘party-sponsored platformization.’ For example, Weibo’s Trending list, which researchers often cite to indicate the center of public attention, is constantly doctored. On Xinjiang policies or Russia’s war on Ukraine, for another example, can we deduce Chinese popular sentiment from social media expressions? A Chinese user deep in the weeds knows how relentless the platforms have been downplaying voices dissenting to the official line. This is what we must confront: academic researchers who acquire platform datasets seldom have such information about platform governance. This is unsurprising, as this information may breach platforms’ business secrets, compromise political control, and is especially removed from the orbit of quantitative researchers operating from afar.5 As a result, as researchers draw conclusions from this data – which is not necessarily fungible from one moment to the next – they are also drawing on a historical set of conditions and decisions made by the tech platforms. Consider such topics as dynamics of ‘diffusion of ideas,’ influencer economy, and digital activism, etc. What researchers identify and interpret as correlations within platform trace data thus amount to partial and contorted accounts of human conduct, which essentially conceal platform interventions – rankings, recommendations, display aesthetics, and so forth, including content moderation under mutating rules and censorship directives. Moreover, when platform data serves as the only data source, their intrinsic features also limit knowledge production. Platform trace data and data scraped from online venues are typically about the behavior of individual user accounts or the semantic content of sprawling textual fields. Lacking direct measures for gender, income, ethnicity, and so forth, these data – despite their abundance – are ‘unfriendly’ to the investigation of structural inequality (Wu, 2020). In short, since platform design and interventions follow the logics of both commerce and state governance, without thoughtful measures to countervail their constitutive roles in platform trace data, repurposing this data will reproduce what these powers uphold as the normative façade of China. Notably, all the above limitations are not restricted to quantitative studies. Likewise, as we may imagine, our caution against the negligence of institutionalized – yet often opaque – processes of datafication applies to research relying on other forms of digital data that avail itself as ‘open source’ – a term doing rhetorical work by pr esenting data as ‘transparent’ and ‘available to all.’ The question is: How can we pursue and present accounts approximating ‘truth,’ if we rely on data that is being obliquely manipulated and managed? This is exactly the conundrum of blackboxing China: The attempts to open the black box of China effectively lead us to another black box, that of Chinese platform governance via digital systems. Rethinking this sociotechnically is the way out.