Link – The Aff’s Chinese relations scenarios are particularly pernicious. Their over totalizing rhetoric posits China as irrational, barbaric, and inferior, making their policy failure inevitable

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.