China reps first - Our argument is that your ballot is a referendum on the right of the affirmative to speak as an authority on how China is or should be.

As will quickly become evident, by “Sinology” and the “Sinological” I refer to more than the original China-centered field within the older orientalism (going back at least to the early 1700s), and more than the specialized area studies instituted across the U.S.-West after the revolution of 1949. Note, however, that there is no such thing as “China studies” within China. This is part of my point in seeing the production of knowledge about China, even today, as being awfully similar to the older, more obviously orientalist mode. While specialized work, particularly within the social sciences and politics, occupies much of my attention, I also use texts from film studies, literature, journalism, and current “theory.” In doing so I mean to follow Adorno: his oft-stated desire to write books that are constellations that make unlike things alike. But I also rely on Foucault’s idea that the things that make up a discourse are dispersed across the social field, yet combine to form a common unit that has regularized “statements” and effects of power. This combination is Foucault’s inescapable gesture to the totality or interdisciplinarity. The China field is in this sense an expanded and expansive one. In the texts I examine in this book there emerges a common statement: China is becoming-the-same as the liberal and modern West (howsoever haltingly), or it must and should and will do so; this is the chief statement of the new orientalism. This can, in turn, be seen as emerging from other, related discursive themes: that China is becoming democratic, normal, civil, creative– artistic (avant-garde), liberal, and so on; that it still lacks something (often the same items); that its Maoist, revolutionary past is something either in the dustbin of history or must still be overcome. But “statement” here should be understood in the Foucaultian sense: it is at times more or less explicit (as in a speech act), but more often implied or signified indirectly and even non-linguistically. We must emphasize the rhetorical, discursive function of the statement – less the exact words, more its status as authorized “knowledge.”13 These are things that can be signified as easily by the newscaster as by the specialist, and likewise for the more popular “China Watching” cultural producer and citizen. This last aspect speaks to more than just the fact that area specialists and journalists often overlap and write cross-over – or identical – texts. (The journalistic quality of much China studies can indeed be striking to observers of the discipline.) It speaks to the fact that, as one Chinese Marxist might have put it, correct and incorrect ideas come from multiple places; this is what makes them the ruling discourses and difficult to change. The idea and knowledges of China we have do not stem only from specialists and the rarefied realms of Truth. This is why the critique of Sinological discourse has to engage demography as much as film studies, creative texts as much as “scientific” ones. Much of what I am saying here about how the China field cannot be delimited in the traditional, gate-keeping way has been better said by Aziz Al-Azmeh, whose critiques of orientalism should be much more widely known. Pointing to shared conceptions of Islam in specialized and popular texts alike, he states: We are not talking of two separate types and domains of knowledge about Islam, one for the scholarly elect and another for the rude masses, but of the coexistence within orientalism of two substantially concordant registers, one of which – the scholarly – has greater access to observation .. . and which looks all the more abject for this... . Regardless of access to real or specious facts, facts are always constructed and their construction is invariably culture-specific. Orientalist scholarship is a cultural mood born of mythological classificatory lore, a visceral, savage division of the world, much like such partisanship as animates support for football clubs. (Islams 127–8) Certainly I do not quite mean to say “As for Islam so too for China and the P.R.C.,” since China’s relationship to imperialism has its own historical specificity, as does the largely American, Cold War-inflected modern China studies field. Some will argue that since China was never “really” colonized and is so much older and “intact,” orientalism is a non-starter. (More on this below.) Nonetheless, the preponderance of textual and political evidence is on the postor anti-colonial side; at least the present study seeks to make this case. Moreover, it is not an exaggeration to say that China and Islam share a certain, discursive history in Western intellectual–political culture, as does virtually every national culture subjected to the forces and significations of imperialism and modern colonialism. If we cannot make connections – even at the level of theory – between the West’s China and the West’s Islam, then we cannot speak of a global history of colonialism and its aftermaths. And of course one cannot deny the import of modern colonialism within Western intellectual–political culture (the dominant knowledge producers). In this sense, then: for “Islam” read “China.”