Orientalism results in imperialism, racism and ethnocentrism and violent expansions of capitalism.

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?