China and Orientalism: Western knowledge production and the P.R.C. 9780415592208, 9780203145579, 9780415835381

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China and Orientalism Wes tern know ledge production and the P.R.C.

Daniel F. Vukovich

I~ ~~o~;!~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

A book of startling honesty and conviction. Writing from Hong Kong but not as a Sinologist, Vukovich presents an erudite case for re-thinking the lessons of Tiananmen, reassessing the legacy of Mao, and questioning the idea that China needs to be saved by becoming like "us." As a revisionist reading of post-war China, the book brims with antinomian vignettes on everything from Chinese cinema to the novels of De Lillo and the philosophy of Arendt. Vukovich blasts the new Orientalism that seeks to free China from its supposedly Borg-like past. A rare voice, and a welcome one. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA This is a unique critique of orientalism in contemporary Chinese studies. Daniel Vukovich argues that there is a new form of orientalism, which does not project China as an "other" as many traditional Sinologists did, but emphasizes "sameness" or general equivalence of China to the US-West. From this basic observation, the author highlights the cultural logic of capitalism in the new Orientalistic interpretation of China. A sharp, inspiring and timely book! Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, China, author of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, China's New Order, and The Politics ofImagining Asia Vukovich's tenacious critique of the China Studies field is by itself worth the price of admission. But the bonus for readers is his remarkable history of the complexities of post-liberation China. As timely as could be, and guaranteed to spark debate. Andrew Ross, New York University, USA, author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai An important intervention into the battle for China's past and present. At its heart is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the P.R.C since the I 980s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist, and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinologicalorientalism. Its framing of this knowledge as orientalist and "post-colonial" should cause a sensation. It may even finally trigger a sorely needed debate in the field. Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies & Director, Confucius Institute, University ofAdelaide, Australia

China and Orientalism

This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It has shifted from a logic of "essential difference" to one of "sameness" or general equivalence. "China" is now in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of orientalism to area studies and the pax Americana; the liberal triumph at the "end" of history and the demonization of Maoism; an ever closer Sino-West relationship; and the overlapping of anti-communist and colonial discourses. To make the case for this reconstitution of orientalism, this work offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the China field broadly defined. Vukovich takes on specialist work on the politics, governance, and history of the Mao and reform eras, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen, 1989; the Western study of Chinese film; recent work in critical theory which turns on "the China-reference"; and other global texts about or from China. Through extensive analysis, the production of Sinological knowledge is shown to be of a piece with Western global intellectual political culture. This work will be of great interest to scholars of Asian, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Daniel F. Vukovich teaches critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial and China studies at Hong Kong University.

Postcolonial politics Edited by: Pal Ahluwalia University of California, San Diego and University of South Australia

Michael Dutton Goldsmiths, University of London

Leela Gandhi University of Chicago

and Sanjay Seth Goldsmiths, University of London

"Postcolonial Politics" is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of "politics" is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the "New Humanities" have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said's binary of "Europe and its other" introduced us to a "style of thought" that was as much political as it was cultural, as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being. A new, broader, and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to "think" politics through postcolonial theory, and to "do" postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read "difference" concretely, and to problematize our ideas of the modem, the rational, and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where Postcolonial Politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political. 1

The Postcolonial Politics of Development flan Kapoor

2

Out of Africa Post-structuralism's colonial roots Pal Ahluwalia

3

The Everyday Practice of Race in America Ambiguous privilege Utz McKnight

4

The City as Target Edited by Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancy and John Phillips

5

China and Orientalism Western knowledge production and the P.R.C. Daniel F. Vukovich

China and Orientalism Wes tern know ledge production and the P.R.C.

Daniel F. Vukovich

I~ ~~o~;!~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXl4 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third A venue, New York, NY I 0017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. an informa business © 2012 Daniel F. Vukovich First issued in paperback 2013 The right of Daniel F. Vukovich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice.· Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-59220-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-14557-9 (ebk) ISBN: 978-0-415-83538-1 (pbk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

In memory of my father, Frederick Vukovich

One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental. This process of conversion is a disciplined one: it is taught, it has its own societies, periodicals, traditions, vocabulary, rhetoric, all in basic ways connected to and supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West. - Edward Said, Orienta/ism.

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

xii XV!l

Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era 2

Uncivil society, or orientalism and Tiananmen, 1989

24

3

Maoist discourse and its demonization

47

4

Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: missing millions, excess deaths, and a crisis of Chinese proportions

66

DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao: the "Sinologization" of global thought

87

5

6

Screening Sinology: on the Western study of Chinese film

100

7

The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy

126

Notes Bibliography Index

151 164 180

Preface

I came to the study of China and its representation by a circuitous route. I had long had an interest in Marxism and the centrality of the economic in social and cultural life, in part as a result of growing up working class in the Pittsburgh, PA area, and also due to some excellent political theory teachers at Lehigh University. Much later, during frozen winters in Urbana, I began to read on the Russian Revolution. I quickly became fascinated with the rise and fall of that momentous event. It was to be good preparation for an encounter with an even more complicated revolution and political trajectory, as well as its coding abroad. Cut to a later scene: my viewing of Chen Kaige's film, "Farewell My Concubine" at the New Art Theatre. Like many I was mesmerized by the film but also suspicious of its a-historical rendering of history. Chen's "Yellow Earth" later compelled me to pursue revolutionary China and its representation. This then led to years of reading and observation up to the present, in the specialized modem China field and more broadly in relation to China Watching and China-Writing. What I was struck by, and remain so, is what people are able to say about the P.R.C. as well as how they do so. Writings on China, even expert ones, seemed to me to be akin to the type of texts and discourse that Edward Said wrote about in the third and final part of Orienta/ism: not classical, literary types of discourse about an essential other, but a social-scientific, Cold War-inflected writing that is less overtly orientalist and racist and more full of detail. More modenizationist than exoticizing. A nonetheless problematic, interested, and often unreflexive body of work. Representations of the P.R.C. seemed a clear instance of positional superiority over and against some entity called China. Western understandings of China offer an example of what Gayatri Spivak memorably coined as sanctioned ignorance. I do not think the issue is only, or even primarily one of language - the lack of Chinese speakers in the U.S.-West. While that is surely a major obstacle it is also a simplification and does not challenge the orientalists' ground, or for that matter Chinese nativism. China for _the former is not a text or discursive construction but essentially a language and "specialization." The present author lacks both the specialized training- whatever that would be - and the impressive language skills of the official Sinologist. All I have had to rely on have been my own reading and thinking and observation. I remain convinced, however, that as valuable as specialization and multilingual training

Preface

xm

are, there remains a space and role for the generalist. The interdisciplinary humanities intellectual, able to move across different historical and cultural experiences of imperialism. Was this not the original promise ofpostcolonial studies? My approach is warranted in part because the question of China and its representation - the knowledge problem - is still not an objective or disinterested one. And it cannot be. It partakes of the long history of orientalism as discourse and traditional part of Western intellectual political culture. But that sanctioned ignorance also has to do with China specifically being an "enemy" in the Cold War (and earlier), and a racialized one at that. It is also, and was not-colonized. The latter freedom makes it fair game: one can speak to it guiltlessly, it can seem alien and in desperate need of Westemization, communism is like inhuman fascism, and so on. Put another way, what makes the P.R.C. different in this case is the Euro-American pursuit of leadership in Asia, i.e. hegemony. In short, my view is that the study of China - as with the study of any "foreign" area - should be and in fact is open to cultural and political critique from the barbarians outside the disciplinary gates. Not just the natives, but all and sundry. As Fredric Jameson once noted in another context, back in the day it was the philosopher's job to check up on what the various experts were doing, how they were thinking, by way of what categories, and so on. Consider this book, then, akin to such a critique of "China" and its place in intellectual political culture. It takes part of its inspiration not just from Edward Said and Jameson, but from the fact that if Foucault could talk so productively about so many alien discourses without being authorized by them (never a psychiatrist, linguist, and so on), then so might someone else. My point in this book then is not that generalizations are bad by definition but that intellectual labor requires labor, and thinking about thinking. Further reading convinced me that the study of China needed a Saidian or postcolonial, decolonizing moment. It still does. As far as I am aware, the present study is the first book-length, English-language critique of modem Sinology or China studies broadly understood. In one sense the modem colonial era or age of imperialism are over (even if one does not subscribe to the beyond-the-nation thesis). At least in regard to China visa-vis the West. Sooner rather than later the Western media and culture will have to start being influenced, in some substantial way, by Chinese views and perspectives. But it is still striking that one can speak so easily of the near total domination and brainwashing of hundreds of millions of people during and after Mao; that the years from 1949-79 were the Chinese Dark Ages; that one can comfortably speak of an alien history that is so little known in reality, i.e. in its complexity; that one simply need not take the P.R.C. seriously except as evidence of a priori knowledge about communism versus democracy, capitalism versus state planning, individual freedom versus despotism, bad tradition versus good modernity, and so forth. At the very least, such statements are chauvinistic and tendentious. I believe they add up to a discursive fonnation that precedes and in some sense determines, or exerts pressures and sets limits upon the speaking subject. What I hope to have shown is that they are also about positional superiority and, more broadly, Edward Said's real problematic: the phenomenon of uneven knowledge production in the world at

xiv

Preface

large. Uneven in the sense of imbalanced and hierarchical, and knowledge in the sense of interested and worldly "discourse" that ultimately tells us more about the U.S.-West and its intellectual and political preoccupations. It is these perennial and strongly political problems that make the critique of orientalism, and of representation and knowledge more broadly, an enduring concern that will outlast more ephemeral intellectual trends as well as the empiricist desire to tell things as they really are. It will also become quickly apparent that in one sense I do follow Said's method (historicist, textualist criticism) but in another do not. For this type ofbooklength project, and as Said braved, the critique of orientalism inevitably involves naming names, i.e. critiquing the writings of specific people in the various fields that I examine. This runs the risk of being dismissed as "too political" or "polemical." And yet polemics are an ancient form of critical inquiry and cultural-political critique, if not indeed the very definition of them. One question at stake here is the relationship between individual writers and the larger epistemological field. My point is simple: the question is not one of individual failing or bad faith, but how texts and statements are signs, part and parcel of a larger knowledge/power formation. This is the mode in which I am working, or attempting to, and as opposed to the practice of ad hominem. I am unconcerned with biography and can only work with what people say, or what I think they are saying. What I have tried to do is to bring the skills of close reading to bear on scholarly, literary, filmic, journalistic, and other texts that - taken and framed together like a constellation - signal the Sinological-orientalist formation. It is not the individual instance of colonial discourse that matters so much as their repetition across diverse fields. This is the main thrust of this book. I believe that if I can show this repetition and regularity then I will have made a case for the "new" orientalism vis-a-vis the P.R.C. As will become obvious, I am more sympathetic to the Chinese revolution, especially its post-1949 period, than the majority of people in the China field and the U.S.-Western intellectual political culture. I have nothing to confess. My position arises from study and contemplation of the era and its meaning, including its demonization in Western - and Chinese liberal - intellectual discourse. My sources and interlocutors will show up in my citations. I might add that my thinking flows out of what we might call the Hinton-Gao tradition of grass roots writings and perspectives from the land reform onwards. This is work that is concrete yet brave enough to generalize and read China politically against the grain of what we thought we already knew. It also is not the type of grass roots work that eschews or laments structure, the level of the state, geo-politics, and so on, but that retains a political edge. It is marginalized in the field for the same reasons. I do not think 1949-79 was utopia achieved or is the answer - in the sense of "going back" - for China or the world today, though it does have potential lessons as well as legacies of social justice, development, radical political culture, and so forth. My basic point is simplytwofold: one, its demonization reflects orientalist knowledge production (the triumph of Western, now global intellectual political culture) and not the Truth of the Mao or post-Mao eras; two, it has been most notoriously abused in scholarship as well as all sorts of other texts. Agreeing with such conclusions does not make one a "Maoist" or anything else for that matter. One can by now read any number of

Preface

xv

isolated accounts of the successful yet egalitarian Mao era economy, or its relative but important achievements in gender and social equality, workers' rights, life expectancy, mass literacy, and rural welfare. This type of perspective has not yet registered within the discourse on China, which turns on denigrating the entire era and revolution as more or less entirely failed, tragic, betrayed, fake, totalitarian, and so on. It would be hard to wage a secret, symbolic, unconscious, implied and selfrighteous "war" with the Party-state if it turns out to have done some real good and to have legitimacy among its people. (The problem is not so much the war, or the obsessive desire to change China, but the lack of honesty about it taking place.) Perhaps it is especially hard for academics in the over-developed world to appreciate what a strict national policy of egalitarianism and three decades of overall, massively successful industrial modernization and economic growth can mean for inhabitants of a poor and formerly Third World country. 1 That this also entailed, just as it does today, enormous sacrifices and hard labor on the part of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens does not seem to me to negate the achievement. It is rather all the more reason to register the difference this has made and to respect the effort. I do not offer a full-on defense of the Mao era and revolution as a whole - the historical record and its interpretation. That is a pressing task, and would require a crowd of books, articles, and people in addition to what has already been started by others in their own ways. This includes, of course, analysis of its failure, mistakes, and setbacks. But this book does seek to defend the complexity of that era as well as today's China in political as well as more general, intellectual terms and principles. I am countering what I take to be orientalist knowledge with a two-pronged approach. One is known as a "colonial discourse analysis." The second is to offer alternative accounts about, references to, or gestures towards the China that is left out or denigrated by the former. (For better or worse, this is not what Said does in Orienta/ism.) To do this I draw on work by others who have done empirical or theoretical work in this same direction of complexity. I am not only assuming such a critically positive understanding of the P.R.C. under Mao and beyond exists, but am also citing people. In fact, I do think something like a critical China studies "movement" is afoot in English scholarship alongside the dominant voices. Not as a unified voice but as a movement towards taking the revolution, Chinese Maoism, and the P.R.C. seriously. It seems to largely happen outside of the China studies field proper (their conferences, journals, programs, networks). This will only be abetted by, and in point of fact is connected to, the rise and continuing development of the so-called New Left and other critical, non-occidentalist intellectuals in China since the 1990s. China does not belong exclusively to the Sinologists and diaspora anymore. This is a good thing. As a global-cross disciplinary subfield in its own right, postcolonial studies has a role to play here, if it can continue to expand from (as opposed to abandon) its original roots within primarily South Asian and full-on British colonial contexts. To be able to better engage Chinese and East Asian contexts it will need as well to push beyond the by-now tired streams of quasi-libertarian post-structuralism and the language games and club by networks of the American and other academies.

xvi

Preface

Perhaps a return to the question of orientalism - recall that Said's book predates the rise of postcolonial studies - and the properly geo-political will help. I do not think the problematic of Sinological-orientalism is going away anytime soon. Perhaps there will come a time when the U.S.-West has to know as much about China as the latter now do about America and Europe - and in an enlarged and rich way, as opposed to the colonial/Cold War/universalist form of the present knowledge systems (or the ham-handed soft power efforts of the PRC). At that point we can begin to entertain the question of an end to orientalist knowledge production in the world. Even then, however, we would still need to think through the historical legacies of orientalist, racist, and imperial discourse and whether or not this still impacts the global Eastward shift and re-balancing. These have after all been the dominant ways of thinking the Other and the East for a very long time. This is precisely the power and tradition of orientalism as a material part of Westem and global intellectual political culture. I do not see China as exceptionalist in this sense. It is part of global history in these ways too. As for academic work proper, the dominance of empiricism and positivism over against more theoretically informed, self-reflexive approaches to China is still with us. There is as ever the refusal to broach "subjective" and speculative questions. The corporatization of the academy is almost complete. This is all to say that there will have to be a worldly, political solution to orientalism and that type of representation; a longterm project indeed. Intellectual labor, in other words, is still a part of the world that labor, trade and capital created. My point is that orientalism (as opposed to "bias") may not be eternal in the way Althusser talked of ideology, but even with the rise of China it is still on the table, only more so.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 2 first appeared in Cultural Logic in the 2009 annual issue and reappears here in lightly revised form. A few parts of my final chapter appear in "China in Theory: The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy" in Cultural Critique (Fall 2010), although the argument is different here. One's intellectual debts are innumerable, even beyond the revelations in your footnotes. But I still want to thank a number of people for their work, for comments on mine, or for other forms of support. Liu Kang has been a valuable interlocutor and advisor. Zhang Xudong has also been one, in the US and in China. I've learned a good deal from both of them and will continue to do so. Andrew Ross's support of the manuscript has meant a lot. Likewise for Timothy Brennan, whose work in my view sets the standard for cultural and "postcolonial," radical critique. Thanks, Tim, for all your help. Gao Moho's work is foundational to my thinking about the P.R.C. and its interpretation, as is Wang Zheng's and Han Dongping's. Mobo has been not only a former dissertation reader but an intellectual bulwark and inspiration. Several people residing within China have helped me think and sustain this project. The inimitable Han Yuhai and Liu Yuanqi have taught me a great deal - much more than they realize. Others include Shi Xu, Zhao Xun, and Ma Laoshi (via Nanjiecun). And of course my dear iconoclastic friends in Hong Kong, Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman. A roundtable with Wang Hui in Shanghai was most beneficial, as have been his defenses of the alternative complexity of the PRC and modem China. Elsewhere, ArifDirlik, Utsa Patnaik, and Jason McGrath also provided welcome and clarifying feedback on several different chapters in their own, diverse fields. All of the usual disclaimers apply for all of these interlocutors. From my old cohort in the China Study Group of days gone by I thank the late Joan Hinton (a most remarkable person indeed), Dale Wen, Matt Hale, Robert Weil, Joel Andreas, and Dong Xulin. It was first through the CSG, and then through later, more direct encounters with the "New Left" and "Old Left" perspectives emerging from China, that I first became aware that informed critical approaches to China existed and that William Hinton did. Conference interlocutors at several MLA conventions, at Nanjing University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, HKU, and Zhejiang University were all useful. I must sincerely thank Michael Dutton and an anonymous reader for the Postcolonial Politics

xviii

Acknowledgments

series, as well as Nicola Parkin and Craig Fowlie with Routledge. The draft of this book was first accepted back in June 2009 and I am still glad Michael and the Board took a chance on it. In Hong Kong I received a Research Grants Council award that provided teaching release in 2009-10. That and an earlier grant from Hong Kong University bought me time for revisions and helped me deliver parts of this book at various conferences in China and the U.S. Working in Hong Kong can be exceedingly wonderful and exceedingly trying. Getting work done here requires a lot of good faith and patience in the face of large linguistic, cultural, political, bureaucratic, and other boundaries; it takes a whole village, indeed, and I have depended on a lot of people from the ground level on up. I'd like to thank the entire HKU village in particular. I have benefitted from teaching students from all walks of life in China, Hong Kong, and the U.S. I must thank Liu Xi and especially Yu Xuying for help sustaining a mainland-oriented perspective. Henry Kwok and Jaymee Ng have helped me believe that my teaching here has been mutually beneficial. My greatest, happiest debt in Hong Kong and elsewhere has been to Vicky Lo, whose love, patience, and generosity have enabled me to rewrite this book and see it through the long march of publication. Without her, nothing, but with her, everything. The next one is for her and the Button. I dedicate this book to my father, who passed away before it came out. An American working-class hero of great adaptability, spirit and love, he taught me perhaps the most of all.

1

Sinological-orientalism now "China" and the new era

In "Orientalism Now," the concluding chapter of Edward Said's 1978 book, we are left with the migration of orientalism from European empires and philology to the U.S. imperium and the dominance of social scientific discourse. This project begins where Said left off. It argues that there is a new, "Sinological" form of orientalism at work in the world, one that takes as its object an "Other" that has since the 1970s occupied an increasingly central place within the world system and Western intellectual-political culture: the People's Republic of China. As with Said's formulation rooted in the Middle East and South Asia, Sinological-orientalism and its production of a textual "China" helps constitute the identity or "Self' of the West (what Balibar aptly calls the "WestemChristian-Democratic-Universalist identity") ("Difference" 30). The U.S.-West is what China is not, but which the latter will become. So, too, the new orientalism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: not just the production of knowledge about an "area" but the would-be management and administration of the area for economic, political, and cultural-symbolic benefit. But whereas orientalism in Said turned upon a posited, essential difference between Orient and Occident (as in Kipling's famous verse: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"), the new form turns upon sameness or more specifically, upon China's becoming sameness. China is seen as in a process of haltingly but inevitably becoming-the-same as "us": open, liberal, modem, free. Put another way, "China" is understood as becoming generally equivalent to the West. What this reflects, in part, is the by now familiar resurgence of modernization rhetoric under the cover of "globalization" and the end-of-history thematic famously captured by Francis Fukuyama. But that, in tum, was triggered by the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as by the fateful deployment of the market mechanism and the logic of capital within China. After a noble but brief interruption of the politics and discourse of modernization by Chinese Maoism and by the long decade of the 1960s and early 1970s, the former is back in charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual-political culture. When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of capital as such, namely as an historical force of abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of some third thing called the value-form (their "exchange value" or "general equivalent"), the relationship between this orientalism and global capitalism

2

Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era

appears in sharper relief. Sinological-orientalism is in an important sense a capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear (in at least my reading of him), orientalism and colonial discourse may precede the rise of capitalism, but in the modem era they are hand in glove. So, too, for the present moment, whereby Western investment and "constrainment" strategies are often rationalized on the basis of these being beneficial to the Chinese and their progression towards democracy and human rights (whatever these mean), as well as helping "balance" and protect the rest of Asia from China's rise. I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final chapter. My argument is a totalizing, "functionalist" one about the integral relationship between capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a global Sinological-orientalism are the momentous if not counter-revolutionary changes within China itself - its Dengist "era of reform and opening up" dating from 1979 - and the West's economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global prominence. This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becomingsameness: China is still not "normal" (and has been tragically different), but is engaged in a "universal" process such that it will, and must, become the same as "us." Whether it wants to or not. That is the present-future offered to China within this discourse, and - as anyone who watched the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies knows ("one world, one dream") - it is also one taken up within China itself. I tum to the question of Occidentalism below, and at other times make reference to Westernized/liberal views within China. But I only partially address the internalization of orientalism within China and the current Party state. That is surely an important matter worthy of its own book. But my focus here reflects in part my conviction that it is the Western - now fully global - dimensions and roots of orientalism that are the main problem underlying the often dysfunctional, neo-colonial relationship between China and the West. My concern is the production of knowledge about the P.R.C. outside of China and the cultural, ideological, and other politics that subtend this. One could write a different project focused on the representation of China from within the mainland; this would have to include indigenous constructions and essentializations of China outside of, as well as prior to, foreign imperialism or orientalism. But the impact in China of modern imperialism and "contact" remains decisive for all of us, and once we reach this era we need necessarily engage the orientalist and post-colonial questions. There will be no "new" Sinology until this conversation at least begins. As will quickly become clear, my analysis of Sinological-orientalism abounds with gestures and full-on references to what I take to be some of the complexities of Maoist and post-Mao China in political, ideological/cultural, and other terms. Contra Said's own practice in 1978, then, I do take it to be important to at least attempt to argue for some of those complexities and "brute realities of the Orient" (his words) that are occluded by the isolated details and positional superiority of orientalism. His decision not to do so has meant that his work

Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era

3

there is often reductively appropriated by cultural and postcolonial studies that reduce the problem of orientalism to some basic Freudian Othering process, the deployment of stereotypical images in film, a simple self/other identity dynamic, and so forth. While all of these are part of orientalism, to be sure, the larger problems and challenges of epistemology, political knowledge, and the constitution of discourse were too often obscured even within the postcolonial field. Positional superiority refers to that tactic or de facto strategy by which the object of study is kept in place, never allowed to challenge let alone displace the effectively a priori assumptions, conclusions, and discourse: it places "the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand" (Orienta/ism 7). It is not just a heuristic but the foundational rule of colonial discourse and orientalism. 1 For our purposes this means that the authority and a priori knowledge of the Sinologist-analyst-watcher reigns supreme and untroubled. For all its detailed knowledge, then, Sinologicalorientalism works as a circular, self-enclosed system. It is also paradoxical in that what I am calling its emphasis on China's "becoming-sameness" is also at odds with this flexible superiority, which is also to say the ultimate inferiority of the native, Chinese reality. For all of these reasons, one must take the risk of trying to argue for and signify these complexities, counter-factuals, and counterstories about the P.R.C. This is surprisingly difficult to do, in part because the language we have to describe such things fits not at all with the dominant, Western, liberal humanist paradigm of the humanities and human sciences. This is, I believe, also Wang Hui's problem in his brilliant and searching but difficult works on Chinese histories and Western theory. 2 My own emphases have been with the political, Maoist past as well as its traces today, even after its demonization at home and abroad. Others would certainly write all of this differently, and it is again something worthy of book-length treatment despite the professional risks involved (writing "positive" scholarship about the Mao era). Some already have. In addition to others cited in this study, Lin Chun's The Transformations of Chinese Socialism is another case in point (albeit focused on the reform era). But all of this work is of very recent vintage and remains marginal to the overall China field. Sinological-orientalism and its basic logic can be understood as a development within colonial discourse in the present, postcolonial era of intensive globalization. It is as if what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably described as the "waiting room of history" - or the continual saying of "not yet" to the colonized who would be free - has subtly but importantly shifted. 3 The time is at hand. The denouement has inched closer. The last real constraint remains the Party state which will depart from the historical stage with our help. This marks a shift from the essential difference between East and West to their - China's - general equivalence: a sameness structured by a hierarchical difference. The denigrating and condescending faith that they are, after all, becoming the same as us (or should be made so) has become stronger and is no longer simply the view of enlightened liberals like J. S. Mill. While a range of temporary - as opposed to essential - obstacles can be summoned up to explain why China is not yet free

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and normal, the main and seemingly most fungible one remains the Chinese Communist Party (state). Were it not for this anachronistic, evil institution, the logic goes, China would and will be becoming-the-same and joining the normal world. A Sinified, mainland Chinese path is more or less impossible, be it in the Maoist attempt at alternative modernity (itself a Western/Marxist hybrid) or in the various, nascent post-Mao efforts to reform and develop a Chinese state and society adequate to the nation's various, complex challenges, and that might catch up to the heretofore largely unchecked, rapid, and dislocating deployment of capitalism. 4

Periodizing Sinological-orientalism There seems to be a consensus within studies of globalization and the world system that the 1970s loom large today. Something changed then, even if the triumph of neo-liberalism and the commodification of everything appeared only later. Even as Vietnam was winning its war of national liberation, historical communism turns out to have been in its final throes, succumbing to its internal contradictions - chiefly the inability to institutionalize egalitarian growth and mass participation - and to the pressures of capital accumulation on a worldscale. David Harvey famously posited the floating of the dollar at Bretton Woods in 1972, and so the financialization of the globe as a benchmark for the full-on emergence of the condition of postmodernity or the "sea-change in cultural as well as political-economic practices" that we know as contemporary capitalism (whereas modernity is rooted in industrial capital and postmodernity in financial capital) (Condition vii). Harvey's text remains a rich and rewarding one, not least because it connected the culture of postmodernity to a global history, albeit an abstract and somewhat Eurocentric one (and one he has since de-provincialized).5 In the event, postmodernism - as a contested term and field of study turns out to have been something like the latest fashion he thought it to be, dissolving itself into "globalization" or "global studies." Or put another way, postmodernism - as discourse and as material, social reality - has morphed into "globalization," and it is this shift in history and academic focus that Harvey's book implicitly maps. I will return in a later chapter to theoretical takes on globalization and the place of"China" within them. But be it postmodernism or globalization, we are still working within the same sea-change of the 1970s. For all the attacks on Harvey's book and on Marxism by cultural studies avatars in the 1990s, it is his mode of analysis that is useful for understanding global problems like Sino-Western relations - not only in terms of political economy and finance capital, but in terms of politics, ideology, and space. What Harvey identified as the central dynamics of capitalism - the forces of abstraction and reification generated, the compression of space and time as capital expands globally - are still with us, only more so. Who could have imagined, in 1972 - also the moment of the P.R.C.-U.S. rapprochement - that the products of Chinese labor, from McDonalds' "Happy Meal" toys to the a-historical epic films of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, would flood the Euro-American

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5

markets and social imaginary? That China would host the international spectacle that was the 2008 Olympics? These same forces of abstraction and reification are not unknown in China, whose national economy by some estimates is now less state-owned than France's. The decades since Bretton Woods, then, have known a confluence of capital, China, and Sino-Western relations and flows; and it is this era to which Sinological-orientalism corresponds. In so far as it may obtain, this argument - the close, functional, articulated relationship between capital and this new orientalism - has consequences for both a postcolonial studies that sees only discontinuity between colonial discourse and capitalism, and for a Marxism that has yet to "de-Cold War" and de-provincialize, or to re-orient itself to the centrality of Asia and China, within historical and contemporary capitalism (and communism). 6 At the same time, for all the problems and lacunae of Marxist theory, in an age of neo-liberalism and full-on globalization, it remains indispensable, and its value theoretic and the critique of "socially objective" forms of thought - which I will later argue include orientalism - know a renewed lease on life. It is no accident that the orientalist logic of sameness dovetails with capital's own logic of a homogenizing, abstract sameness; they are of whole cloth, as is their epistemological violence. But the force of general equivalence within Sinological-orientalism is not only a capital-logic. It partakes of other histories, just as Sinology itself must be seen as part of the long history of imperialism, colonialism, and trade. 7 Thus this knowledge formation must be understood as a part of historical colonialism and its mission civilisatrice. The logic of sameness also dovetails with missionary discourse and the older French universalist logic of the civilizing mission (all "natives" can become the same as "us"). For all its at times explicit racism about Chinese cruelty and backwardness, missionary discourse in China also pre-supposed the belief that they were "equal," that they could and must be saved, and made the Christian-same. This is akin to French imperialism's own mission of bringing civilization to the colonized - who could and would reach the next level in due course, with the right (colonial) governance and administration. As anti-colonial theory has instructed from Lenin to Fanon and beyond, this evolutionary, teleological discourse of sameness, of bringing History and civilization to the colonized, both rationalized colonial rule and literally reshaped colonial and metropolitan societies. This emphasis on sameness, particularly in the contemporary moment, also points to a gap in Said's analysis: that in some colonial and neo-colonial contexts it is not simply allowed but mandated that the "Other" become the "Same." Standard developmental economics would be another case in point. The older, more racist logic of essential difference is here in abeyance. The work of James Hevia among others has accomplished the reinsertion of modem Qing and early Republican China back into the history of colonialism, a history that had been denied not just by the British and other colonizers, but by nearly all postwar area studies. 8 This is not to deny the honorable exception of the work of the former Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars. 9 It is also true that for a brief moment in the mid- l 970s, Modern China did on one or two occasions

6 Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era publish debates on Maoism and imperialism that included leftist/alternative perspectives. But today one would be hard-pressed to find current work in the mainstream/flagship presses and journals - or even in cultural studies venues - that takes the Chinese revolution seriously (as a complex, deep, and "positive" event). This void includes as well the anti-colonial nature of that revolution. As Tani Barlow has noted, it is still the case that within the disciplines, "China materialized as an essentially noncolonial national unit at the very moment academic scholarship on Asia turned to social science" [i.e. during the Cold War] (Barlow 374). This was also the very same postwar moment of modernization-discourse's ascendancy and the height of the Cold War and Red Scare. China studies was defined by the problematic of modernization and anti-communism. As I have argued at more length elsewhere, the non-theoretical (or non-philosophically trained) character of this earlier, nascent and radical or alternative movement helped pre-empt it from responding more creatively or self-reflexively to the tum to the right within China and the U.S. Partly due to the "shock" of post-Mao revelations of Chinese poverty, violence, and persecution (narrated by the very same Chinese intellectuals who were victimized), and in part due to this lack of"theory," the collective response to the great moving rightward show was to aspire to professionalization and objectivity. This meant, variously, de-emphasizing politics altogether, turning to anti-communism in a way reminiscent of an earlier generation's trauma over the Soviet God-that-failed, or embracing the Fukuyamian zeitgeist about the triumph of liberal-capitalist-democracy. "Modernization" and anti-communism won, both in China and virtually everywhere else. Hence the "new" orientalism. China went from being semi-colonial (and revolutionary) to non-colonial (and haltingly, ideally becoming the same) even amongst otherwise heterodox scholars. Save for occasional flashes in the pages of positions or in leftist screeds, earlier, beginning debates or perceptions about imperialism and the "writing" of the P.R.C. effectively disappeared. The problematic of knowledge production subtending the China-West problematic never quite emerged. 10 This is to say that what we have to attend to is the non-debate between "the China field" - understood in its broadest sense as knowledge about China produced outside of China - and various forms of postcolonial studies that have foregrounded the question of "the writing of the Other" and shown the centrality of colonialism in modem world history. China, as the object of inquiry, has so far proven resistant to the impacts of "theory" and critique (except for critique of the P.R.C. of course!). There are a number of possible explanations for this, and none of them would be flattering to the social-scientific and objective pretensions of area studies. But to be fair, there are a number of stumbling blocks for those who wish to bring postcolonial and critical theory to the "case" of China and its representation. Arguably the primary one is simply that China was - as Lenin first put it, to be followed by Mao et al. - only semi-colonial. While the great chaos and disrepair of China as a whole from 1911-49 is beyond question, it retained its political sovereignty at all times. This is true in a formal, significant sense, and is obviously a different scenario than that endured by the (future) nations of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America (or Hong Kong). Given that our basic working

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definitions of colonialism tum on this very distinction, there are logical grounds for seeing China's "problematic" as being after all closer to modernization than colonialism per se. This is the dominant coding of China inside and abroad, where the notion of "colonial modernity" has yet to disrupt the dominant ways China is written. I I This also seemingly undercuts even our received critical theories of colonialism and empire that flow out of chiefly British and French histories of empire and those experiences of colonial rule. The iconoclasts of the May 4th period as well as of the early Communist Party all embraced "Westernization" in a very conscious and deliberate, if also inevitably misinformed and utopian, way. (This is why the Maoist Sinification of Marxism was so difficult to achieve.) One would be hard-pressed to say that they were forced to think that way in the manner that the typical colonial subject was, or was supposed to be. Even here, however, is it not obvious that the very concept of ideology is lacking in such Sinological perspectives? Hence one can readily find histories of opium in China, of an age of openness before the so-called "take-over" in 1949, of Hong Kong developing more or less flawlessly prior to 1997, or of Shanghai's singular "cosmopolitanism" that avoid the imperialist/capitalist problematic entirely. One can contrast this, for example, with the largely unknown historical work of the Chinese radical historian Hu Sheng (1918-2000). Readily available even in English but predictably dismissed as a "Party" voice, his work on the destructive effects of imperialism from the later Qing through the Republican periods is serious scholarship that is emblematic of a considered and considerable "mainland" perspective on key "China-West" questions. In actuality, there is no good reason for defining colonialism as primarily an issue of political sovereignty and its loss or recapture. Sovereignty remains important, but twentieth-century colonial/imperial/geo-political conflicts and discourses are too complex and "messy" to be demarcated so clearly. For one thing, as Robert Young has noted, the historical and practical differences between the modem French and British empires (or between the projects of the civilizing mission and the white man's burden) made little difference from the standpoint of the colonized subjects. I2 Young's point is directed against efforts to disaggregate colonialism to the point of making it go away conceptually as a unified whole (or to outright defend it). It can apply as well to Hong Kong studies that valorize elite and comprador participation in so-called "collaborative colonialism". But Young's point also obtains for modem China, and even for current "nationalist" Chinese reactions to Westem media discourse and globalization (the "infamous" anger of the "netizens" of China, the protests against the freeTibet perspective, and so on). While China might appear to occupy an exceptionalist space vis-a-vis postcolonial theory (around sovereignty, cultural imperialism, colonial education, and so forth), it was nevertheless deeply affected by imperialist "contact" as well as the later, related Cold War - a war that was often hot, economically disastrous, and a cultural-ideological battle beyond mere propaganda broadsides. In an important sense, it is not the details of sovereignty and occupation that matter so much as the cultural-ideological conflicts and effects. Recall the seemingly inexplicable anger of Chinese people

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over, for example, anti-Olympics/free-Tibet protests, the awarding of Nobel prizes to exiled dissidents, currency devaluation pressures from the U.S.-West, and so forth. What is at stake here is not the Truth but a certain paternalist, even colonial arrogance from abroad and - for non-Western identified, and nondiasporic Chinese - the lack of permission to narrate within the "global" sphere. But the details do matter too. As Hevia has argued, and as with the case of colonial India, the production of an "imperial archive" of texts, translations, and knowledge about "China" was a concomitant part of the global colonial project of the foreign powers during the later Qing dynasty and Republican period ("Archive State" 236). Chief within this history are the missionary activities before and after the Boxer Movement and of a larger discourse that lives on today "in the pious moral tone of American foreign policy toward China" (Hevia, "Leaving a Brand" 325). Sinological-orientalism represents, in part, a redeployment of missionary and civilizing discourse, including its logic of sameness and equivalence. So, too, the academic and other texts examined in the following chapters should be seen as part of a neo-colonial, Cold-War-and-beyond archive formed in large measure in the U.S.-West but also globally. So, too, we might recall the impact of an older, philological Sinology in changing Chinese perceptions and practices of their own language: no less a radical Chinese patriot than Lu Xun would claim that unless the Chinese language were radically altered and "Westernized,'' it and the nation would die. All in all, then, the foreign powers and the "contact" with the West certainly left their mark on China - both materially and culturally - as did the later Cold War. The Cold War was in some sense the continuation of Western, chiefly American imperialism by other means - at the level of discourse, rhetoric, and knowledge as much as the more familiar realpolitik level. To sum up here: notwithstanding the empirical differences between "real" colonialism in South Asia and Africa versus the case of China, the fact of multiple imperialist adventures in China [as opposed to a single conquest] ... should not distract attention away from the fact that already well established colonial knowledges informed the Great Powers' experiments and contributed to 'development' in their 'spheres of influence'. (Barlow, "Eugenic" 377) Rather than argue further in general terms here for the import of the colonial/ imperial/orientalist problematic for China, I seek to make the case immanently through the pages that follow. My critique is aimed at the expanded China field (from specialist to popular writing) and takes the form of a colonial discourse analysis of what has been thought, said, and occluded about China since the Mao era up to the present (or early 2000s ). If my argument seems repetitive it is because I am trying to make it tenaciously and to substantiate my generalized critique. But it is also because the thing itself, the orientalist discourse, is repetitive (despite or because of its minute and sometimes valuable detail).

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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, creativeartistic (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

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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 modem 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 modem 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 modem colonialism within Western intellectual-political culture (the dominant knowledge producers). In this sense, then: for "Islam" read "China."

From London to Lhasa: making China the same I will return below to further characterizing and periodizing this new orientalism. But let us first illustrate this a bit by tracking a continuity to understandings of China and the P.R.C. Jack London's 1910 story, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (set in China in 1976), and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (on Tibet's current Dalai Lama) serve as useful signposts. London's story narrates the annihilation of the Chinese "race" through germ warfare, the dropping of infectious test tubes from Western planes and the colonization of China by nameless but clearly Western nations. 14 In classic fashion the text turns upon the ontological difference between Chinese "Orientals" and the rest of humanity. The Japanese are "progressive" Orientals whereas the Chinese, due above all to their "Chinese mind" and great numbers, are doomed to incompatibility and unfit for survival with the West. This reflects not just American anti-Chinese politics and London's Cali-· fomia, but the "China difference" more broadly (London, pars. 9, 3). With the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire, it is China that gradually becomes the perceived geo-political threat, just as the U.S. becomes the leading imperial power. Virtually all the old orientalist tropes and topoi are here: the great wall of the impenetrable, "hieroglyphic" language, impenetrable to "Western ideas"; the different

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"mental processes" and un-democratic political tradition; and the sheer numbers and massness of the Chinese (including their uncontrolled reproduction and emigration).15 Thus China poses a threat to the "United Powers" and is dangerously different. But even in this piece of "classic" orientalist fiction there is also a latent logic of sameness: the Chinese have to be exterminated, but "China" - that geographic, national space - must become the same as the West. Thus the other "nationalities" move in, and "mechanical, intellectual, and art output" flourishes there, "in China in 1982." 16 This is not completely removed from the celebrations of the "new" Chinese cinema in our own 1980s (the subject of an upcoming chapter) and the pre-Tiananmen love affair with Deng Xiaoping. London's story is remarkable for what it shares with a more enlightened, covert Sinological-orientalism today. A number of these same themes and statements about China and the Chinese - as later chapters will show - continue to circulate within the new Sinological-orientalism. Western work on the Great Leap Forward famine not only exaggerates the mortality (or so it reasonably seems), but shows a callousness towards real Chinese lives as well as an obsession with the sheer numbers of Chinese (living, dead, and purely imagined). As also in London's story, the Chinese will themselves be accused of inhuman indifference to life. As John F. Kennedy wrote to De Gaulle in 1959 about the P.R.C. developing an atomic bomb: "the Chinese would be perfectly prepared, because of the lower value they attach to human life, to sacrifice hundreds of millions of their own lives." 17 So, too, the "China threat" still looms not simply in mainstream political thought, but in esoteric, postmodern fiction like DeLillo's Mao II (the subject of Chapter 5 below). This Western anxiety about China is further indexed in the demonization of Maoism, as ifit were some residual, looming specter that could at any moment re-assert itself within China and the world. And the failed incompatibility of"the Chinese mentality" - its inferior rationality, both in broadly cultural and political terms - lives on in academic work as much as in the media and popular culture. Here the failure lies in China's failure to "democratize" and liberalize its polity as much as its booming economy, or to fully develop a civil society. This emerges most strongly in scholarship on the Tiananmen protests of 1989, including the documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which argues that "the Chinese mind" continues to be deformed by Maoist totalitarianism and revolutionary rhetoric. (This is addressed in Chapters 2 and 6 of the present study.) And yet there can be no mistake that the underlying logic and assumptions of Sinological-orientalism have shifted. Despite numerous analyses of what China lacks - and to posit lack is a crucial rule for China analysis - the P.R.C. is nonetheless becoming-the-same as the West, slowly following "normal" development. Thus even if Tiananmen did not result in the end of the CCP and the establishment of civil society, it nonetheless represents progress and will return again someday. The current regime may lack legitimacy in most Sinologists' eyes, but it is much closer to normal. This is all a type of historicist or at least stagist thinking: China has not been modem, free, and "normal," but is only now - after Mao and with the market - following the correct, same path as "us" and becoming-the-same. 18

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We can now jump ahead eight decades to a more respectable artist. Scorsese's 1997 bio-pic Kundun ("The Presence") received critical acclaim not only from the Dalai Lama's camp, but Film Comment and The Christian Century. But it has but little more to do with the historical Tibet and actual Sino-Tibetan politics than London's futuristic, homicidal fantasy. To some extent this a-historicism was intentional and typically Hollywood. 19 Nonetheless, there is a political unconscious and an interpretation of Chinese history in the movie. I will not belabor the obvious: it is a partisan text that mirrors the Tibetan nationalist, government-in-exile's line on independence and alleged Chinese colonialism and "genocide." 20 The film was made in direct consultation with the Dalai Lama and is based on his autobiography. 21 In a series of essays, Barry Sautman has corrected such charges against China, as well as the P.R.C. 'sown propaganda about "China's Tibet." I will not rehearse these arguments here, and I hold that they are only controversial because of the fetishistic adulation of "His Holiness" among the Western-educated middle class. 22 What is perhaps more interesting is the difference that Tibet and the Dalai Lama represent: an affirmative orientalism about Tibetans on the one hand, and on the other a portrayal of Mao and the Chinese as entirely deceitful, dirty, and murderous. The former is conveyed through the film's spectacle-value: the "exotic" rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai's supernatural "visions," the motif of mandala paintings, and so on. The film's final four minutes suggest that this Dalai is the incarnation of Buddha. His flight to India uses a repeated point of view shot from his childhood that establishes him as the unity of time and space: childhood, adulthood, the future, Tibet, India, Asia. Contrast this, then, with the demonization of the Chinese. They simply lie, as if their claims about Tibet's suzerain status and extreme feudal exploitation were simply untrue. Mao is represented as a duplicitous, greasy despot promising autonomy at one moment and invading the next. 23 Kundun thus represents a certain "progress" within American orientalism about Asian "Others." Here the mystical, benign Other of Tibet should naturally become a politically independent, concretely bounded and modem nation-state led by a freedom fighter. But this "progressive" message comes at the expense of China's valid claim to Tibet according to international law, 24 and to the P.R.C.'s representation as a "human" and sovereign space of its own. It is a case of the negative China difference and what it lacks. But there are also logics of equivalence at work here. Through purely visual signs, Kundun implicitly expresses a desire for becoming-sameness in regard to China: it should obey Western ideology about Tibet. Renounce despotism and follow the path of normalcy: recognize the natural independence of Tibet and the nationalism of the Dalai' s exiled group; allow them to form a modem nation-state with clear, strict boundaries. By no means does it suggest that Tibet become "Westernized": this would ruin the fantasy of Shangri La, if not the divine status of the Dalai Lama himself and his "transcendent" presence. The film follows American foreign policy as expressed in the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 that pronounces U.S. leadership in protecting Tibet and negotiating a settlement. 25 In this, then, Kundun follows a logic of sameness for China: that the P.R.C. must be stopped and, as in London's

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fable, made over in the image of the West (our political forms and our appreciation of the Dalai Lama). China may not yet be in the process of becoming-thesame, but it should be, and we can help. It is here, too, that we can see how the film's "statement" about China reveals the wide circulation of "Sinological" knowledge: the proffered history of SinoTibetan relations (e.g. that the Chinese invaded in 1950 and slaughtered untold numbers of Tibetans in 1959) reflects the influence of area studies and the close relationship this has with the U.S. state. What is more, we need to recall with Tom Grunfeld that it is precisely U.S. policy and Sinological knowledge that works against a negotiated solution to the Sino-Tibetan conflict. By explicitly taking up the Dalai Lama's cause, by treating the P.R.C. as a threat to the U.S. and "human rights," and by creating credible fears that the U.S. wants to break up China (indeed the CIA backed the Tibetans' 1959 rebellion and funded the Dalai Lama until 1971), Sinological knowledge and U.S. foreign policy do more harm than good. 26

Post-colonial critique and the China field: a brief history of a non-debate These two different texts, then, help illustrate the dynamic content of Sinological-orientalism as well as its dispersion. The critique of orientalism has, however, met with great resistance within the China field, and almost invariably takes the form of either flat-out dismissal or an uncomprehending caricature of Said's project that renders it an "exaggerated" critique of ethnocentric bias. An essay by historian Philip C. C. Huang will serve to illustrate the non-debate and the history of the logic of sameness within China studies. He notes that traditional thought invariably positioned China as the "Other," in that it was entirely different from the West.27 In response to this, Huang and some others in his generation - those in the wake of the 1949 revolution and the Cold War - took it as their task to prove that China was just like the West after all: [Our] well-intentioned efforts were perhaps motivated above all by the desire to assert China's equivalence to the West. ... [The] only way to counter the denigration of China as "the other" seemed to be to maintain that it was just like the West. 28 ("Theory" par. 24) Thus Huang evinces a tacit desire and theme in past scholarship: for equivalence or sameness. He implies this dynamic is no longer dominant in China studies, but it is the argument of the present study that it is so. Yet this sameness has shifted in political terms. Whereas for this earlier period the point (now seen by Huang as an "emotional dictate") was to counter a denigrating essential difference imputed to China, in the current phase it reflects an often explicitly neo-liberal and pro-Western politics (par. 27). Here the worst thing that could happen would be for China to "tum back" and away from capitalism. No one mentions that this might mean cutting off one's access to the field.

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Huang perceptively notes that this old approach remained as "Westemcentric" as its alternative (China as a copy of the West). But he follows this up with a call for "social history" and a return to the facts; these will show us what theories are valid. The status of the lying-in-wait "facts" is not addressed, and Said's challenges to conventional historicism and epistemology are ignored. Huang accuses Said of denying that "facts" exist prior to or beyond representations. But Orienta/ism's project was to present the constructed but real discourse on its own terms, and to show that it indexes the West more than any "Islam" or "Orient." And representations and knowledges, orientalist or otherwise, are not fake but are social facts themselves. My retorts here will seem familiar to scholars in cultural and literary studies, and this in itself is instructive. As Ravi Palat aptly summarizes the situation: "'Crisis' in Asian Studies denotes shortages of funds rather than an epistemological questioning of the field" (Palat 110). Palat diagnoses the basic dichotomy (extreme specialization/extreme generalization) and the cult of expertise underpinning Asian studies ( 110). This last is based in "field time" and native language-proficiency.29 These in tum provide "perfect-transparent knowledge as the only condition for gaining access to the real" (Harootunian, History 40). For China especially, language fluency is the sacred skeleton key, though to be fair this is itself part of nativist Chinese thinking. One could pile on here. There are the attacks on engaged, political scholarship from Simon Leys to Geremie Barme and Steven Mosher. 30 One tactic is to decide that orientalism is just selfdelusional bias, and then to tum this back onto un-named scholars who "supported" - whatever that means - Chinese communism. Such were blind to the true reality of China's complete repression and totalitarianism. 31 To be "in the true" of China studies and reportage, one has to be critical of the past and current regime because it has not yet broken free. Philosophical acumen, comparative and textual/interpretive skills, or self-reflexivity are not needed. Language training and field-time stand in for (adequate, rigorous) disciplinary and theoretical grounding. In a presidential address to the American Association of Asian Studies in 1980, Benjamin Schwartz responded to Said's book. He defended the "objective validity" of knowledge that can be used for "understanding in the Weberian sense." 32 More to the point here is his defensiveness about area studies and the "anti-Western" nature of Said's argument. He notes that the human and natural sciences are just as capable of being politically manipulated as orientalism and area studies. That is correct, but misses the point that Said would agree, and was moreover talking specifically about colonial forms of power and intellectual culture. Note, too, that Schwarz concedes Said's argument that the field of orientalism (and area studies) are "defined canonically, imperially and geographically" and not "disciplines defined intellectually" (Orienta/ism 326). 33 Schwartz, however, thinks this enables the area specialist, through comparative analysis, to see through and steer beyond a "spurious universality ... derived from the West" and the trap of an "ahistorical culturalism" (or relativism). 34 But surely this a false choice: comparative historicism or ahistorical relativism. And the former

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would need anyway to deal with the argument that comparativism smuggles in universal/Western norms and standards of comparison. 35 In the end, Schwarz recommends minor house cleaning. We should "rid ourselves of stale categories" and seek new "nomenclatures, some of them perhaps derived from the cultures we are studying." 36 Perhaps we can use some of their terms, but let us not go too far in a subjective direction. The basic Saidian question is elided: Who gets to write the Other, and how? The response to Said and postcolonialism was from the very beginning one of incomprehension. But there was Paul Cohen's appeal for a "China-centered" method. He not only criticizes the Eurocentrism of past approaches (where poor China was always responding to the West), but also claims that Said's basic insight applies to China studies: One need hardly agree with all of Said's strictures to accept the more general insight that all intellectual inquiry partakes of a kind of 'imperialism' and that the dangers of misrepresentation are greatest, the imperialism especially virulent, when the inquirer - or more precisely the cultural, social, or political world of which he or she is a member - has also had some part, historically, in shaping the object of inquiry. (Discovering 150) This admirably concise distillation of Said's argument is followed by a conventional alternative: "China-centered analysis" seems a plain historicism that simply seeks to be less chauvinist and more sensitive to the Chinese context. A decent and humane suggestion, but how? Harootunian argues that Cohen's model "rejects theory out of hand for the 'facts' and thus the authority of native knowledge and experience" ("Postcoloniality" 138). The discipline is still not defined intellectually, but linguistically and geographically. However much we might center ourselves in China, this nonetheless begs a lot of questions (and endless "facts") about which China. And then there are the irreversibly global and cross-cultural dimensions of both "China" and "the West." Orienta/ism and the postcolonial tum, then, have made little impact on the production of knowledge within the China field. That field thus stands in sharp contrast not only to, say, anthropology or literature, but also South Asian, African, and Latin American studies. But it is instructive to further see how this tum has been avoided. In a series of essays, Zhang Longxi argued that "Western theory" - he often singles out the Palestinian Said's work in particular - has had a pernicious effect within Chinese intellectual culture. Said himself noted that his work had at times - in the Middle East - been taken up by some in narrowly nationalist and nativist terms. 37 Zhang's complaint is the same, seeing the uses of Said and 'postmodern' theory as anti-Western, politically conservative and supportive of the dreaded Communist regime. Zhang thus equates nationalist and fundamentalist uses of Orienta/ism in Arabic countries to leftist or 'antiWestem' critical intellectuals in China. But it is hard to say what in principle is nationalist, 'nativist', or otherwise dangerous to such appropriations of Said. He

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Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era

singles out Rey Chow - as anti-communist a critic as they come - for criticizing the representation and whiteness of the Tiananmen event as broadcast to the world from CNN. Chow's use of Western theory is "misapplied" and unaware of the proper Chinese "context" in which criticisms of democracy are by definition conservative and beyond the pale (Zhang, 1992, 121 ). This appeal to the "Chinese context" and to "Chinese reality" surfaces in other essays by Zhang Longxi, including his criticisms of Zhang Kuan's influential essays on orientalism and Western hegemony in China studies and in the mainland 1980s. 38 The critique is again based on how Chinese reality - defined entirely by gestures to a repressive state - is by definition different than the Western one: such critical theory may be radical in the latter case, but not in China. Yet the question of which China - that of the middle class, the variegated intelligentsia, the urban workers, the migrant laborers, the peasants, the national minorities, and so on cannot be asked. "China" is represented by a sheer dichotomy between antiimperialists who tum out to be conservatives, and pro-capitalist/Western liberals who tum out to be the true, cosmopolitan voice of the people. What we have, then, are clear battle grounds underlying the use of theory and orientalism, especially amongst the diaspora or Western-based writers (i.e. the majority). "Pomo" theory is either misplaced or, if it is to be used, must be directed against the Party-state and not in the name of anti-imperialism, nationalism, or some other form of "pro-China" politics. (From within China this often plays out in the opposite direction.) Zhang .Longxi's work introduced the issue of cross-cultural analysis into Chinese literary studies, but it also is clearly overdetermined by a political agenda, even more than by its empiricism. That is, a strident anti-communist liberalism, a project shared by many others. 39 "Leftism" does not fit Chinese reality. Critiques of Western hegemony on the part of mainland Chinese intellectuals must be dismissed as nativist, nationalist, and so on. Thus it is the anti- anti-orientalists who seem far too confident about what the local, mainland context means and what it does to theory. For such intellectuals committed in the first instance to a largely imaginary battle with the Chinese state, it is at best premature to inveigh against Western imperialism and colonial discourse when what China needs first is good old (capitalist) democracy as found in the West. This type of reason reaches its apex in the Charter 08 group composed of mainland liberal and neo-liberal intellectuals, and their Euro-American scholarly cohort. The chief architect of the Charter is Liu Xiaobo, a currently imprisoned intellectual who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. His stakes are far different. There is something inspiring, or at least seductive, about the classical liberal, universalist language of the Charter (calls for freedom of speech, protest, and so forth in the context of the current Partystate) and in Liu's great personal courage. But what is most striking for my purposes is Liu's unrepentant stance on China needing "three hundred years of foreign colonization" so that it may politically, intellectually, and culturally catch up. Moreover, there is the Charter's insistence on privatizing the remaining public dimensions of the economy and instituting a complete system of private property. 40 Its substantive economic views are neo-liberal. Colonialism

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and more capitalism will bring forth "individual freedom" and human rights in China. At the risk of criticizing an unfairly imprisoned "dissident" this is an Occidentalism, an internalized orientalism writ large. It also follows the logic of becoming-sameness outlined here. It is no accident that Liu is close to several experts in the China field. When we recall the colonial roots of liberal thinking, from Locke to Liu, it is unsurprising that Zhang Longxi wants to ground cross-cultural analysis on humanistic and explicitly depoliticized grounds ("the variety of our world and the totality of what we may proudly call the heritage of human culture") ("Myth" 131). One sees this same gesture in a recent boundary2 paper extolling individualism and generic humanism as the way forward for China and the U.S. 41 Later, I map a similar, de-politicizing logic within "Sinography" - a far more "theoretical" venture - and its disavowal of orientalism and postcolonialism. What these diverse figures share, then, is not simply an anti-regime stance, but a politicized valorization of depoliticization.

Occidentalism, or internalized orientalism In Chen Xiaomei's celebrated work, the problematic of orientalism is met by an affirmation of "Occidentalism," in direct response to Said's charge that to imagine a corresponding Occidentalism is absurd. Said's point - ignored by Chen and others - is not that the Eastern "others" are incapable of "othering" or imagining their colonizers. (This was clear even to the old colonists themselves.) But there simply is no institutionalized discourse and global, organized power/ knowledge formation called Occidentalism. We are not likely to see S.O.A.S. morph into S.0.0.A.S. - the School of Oriental and Occidental and African Studies. Nor will we see Qinghua offering courses in Occidental Studies. Said argued that there is an unequal distribution of power - in terms of knowledge as much as capital and realpolitik - between the Occident and the Orient, or the core and its peripheries. He sought, in short, to produce a recognition that colonialism (the historical world system) also has to do with unequal knowledgeproduction and distribution. Or as Timothy Brennan has put it, the "actual conditions of knowledge" in the world are "nothing like [a] perfect see saw." 42 This point is lost, however, in many critiques - inversions - of orientalism. Thus Edward Graham, writing some years before Chen et al., would claim that orientalism only partly applies to studies of China, because Said's approach "can as logically be taken to Chinese views of the non-Chinese world" (41 ). Chen expertly analyzes post-Mao poetry and drama and the various imaginings of the "Occident" that Chinese writers and artists, full of cultural capital, deploy against the state. And as Chen aptly notes, the Dengist (and later) state can be seen to have its own, "official" occidentalist complex (now sitting awkwardly beside a neo-Confucian one). We can add that the catch-up mentality which presupposes material and cultural backwardness - stems not only from the May 4 era but also from the 1980s up to the present; it continues its second life after dying a first death in the confident, radical, and embargoed Maoist

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Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era

years. But it is difficult to see how contemporary Chinese Occidentalism stands as a disproof of Said's argument about the material and worldly phenomenon of orientalism. Do they not confirm the power of orientalism and the history of Western colonialism by showing the fetishistic but real existence of orientalism's indispensible flip-side? Occidentalism is not the equivalent of orientalism, for the reasons of power and institutionalization. It is only notions of "level playing fields" and the "free marketplace of ideas" that can make it seem so. As Said insisted, orientalism is not merely an idea. The production of knowledge is itself a material, institutional, and global affair that is bound up with not only educational institutions, but capitalism and, thus, colonialism and empire. Orientalism and Occidentalism are two halves of a whole that do not add up. In addition to Occidental ism's resurgence there is another development that seemingly calls into question the relevance of orientalism now. This is that it is often ethnically and even mainland-born Chinese intellectuals who are the purveyors of what I have been calling Sinological-orientalism. Examples of work from the former group would have to include Hong Kong scholar Rey Chow's corpus in cultural studies, widely influential in the U.S. But it must be said that her work on mainland China has often been conventionally tendentious vis-a-vis the P.R.C. (demonizing "Maoists' in China and in American English departments, reproducing Cold War accounts of totalitarianism, and so forth). 43 Examples of the more recent group of"representative Chinese" are numerous, but one cancertainly index a scholar like Pei Minxin who, like many of the Western experts I examine in Chapter 2, consistently argues along universalist lines for the necessity of a bourgeois civil society for the forward-development of China. 44 At any rate, this demographic development marks the passage of time - and progress from an older, more unambiguously colonial era of globalization and Sinology. But does it call into question the "model" of Said's book? For an overly historicist reading it may appear so. Orientalism is a white man's burden and the dominated do not have permission to narrate. We seem to have moved from this situation where "they must be represented" to one in which they, the Other, are doing it themselves. But this begs a number of questions as to what is being represented, i.e. the actual knowledge that is being produced as well as where it hails from (its genesis, as opposed to origin). There is also the Marxist question about such knowledge production: in whose interest is it conducted? This suggests continuities within Sinological-orientalism: the discourse of lack and China's tortuous path to normalcy, the Cold-War-meets-oriental-despotism dynamic, and so on. Moreover, given the American provenance/dominance of postwar China studies as well as cultural globalization since the early 1980s, Sinological-orientalism represents the triumph of one "Occidental' educational system as much as anything else. Sinification at the level of skin color only takes one so far. It must also be said that Chen's Occidentalism is overdetermined by the same anti-communist and anti-state agenda as Zhang's. Chinese fetishizations of the Occident are to be valued precisely because they are somehow used against the Party-state, a symbolic subversion of authoritarianism. The logic here is a direct legacy of the Cold War: if a text or figure "dissents" from the regime at hand, it

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is therefore "good," of aesthetic value, and certainly worth writing about. Antiofficial Occidentalism is subversive and resistant simply because it is anti-Partystate, and the latter is monolithically bad and illegitimate. This is, in short, characteristic area studies discourse and also of a piece with standard 1980s Chinese liberalism. What such occidentalist intellectuals are dissenting from, and in the name of what, are questions that go begging. No justification of this "obviousness" is necessary. The fact that a stridently elitist, liberal text like the documentary series He Shang - Chen's key example of "counter-discursive" Occidentalism - can be filled with the most dubious valorizations of Western colonialism and racist notions about the Chinese peasant mentality, is insignificant. Thus passages like the following from Zhang Gang and Su Xiaokang's script pass unmarked by Chen: In the vast, backwards rural areas, there are common problems in the peasant makeup [suzhi or "quality"] such as a weak spirit of enterprise, a very low ability to accept risk, a deep psychology of dependency and a strong sense of passive acceptance of fate. (Su 169) While such learned statements seek to diagnose the "feudal" mentality of the peasants and the "Chinese national character," they are nothing but the type of sanctioned discourse that the revolution had to overcome and that has known a new lease on life ever since the great reversal. Outside of the a priori belief that the Communist government is an unmitigated evil whose dissolution is to be desired by all right-thinking liberal democrats, it is hard to understand why this type of anti-peasant Occidental cosmopolitanism is to be valued. But it does make the case for understanding Occidentalism not as a "counter-discourse" but as an internalized orientalism. Or call it both if you like, but hold on to the basic contradiction that the "counter" aspects may be anti-Party but are also thoroughly reactionary. Elite occidentalist liberals may have permission to narrate, but questions about the class and political content of their discourse go begging. So, too, does Occidentalism's genesis and location within the global, uneven production ofknowledge. 45 The limits of Chen's approach are further revealed on the final page: If Chinese producers of culture choose Occidentalist discourse for their own utopian ends, it ill behooves those who watch from afar to tell them condescendingly they do not know what they are doing. I can only hope that the account given here ... might aid Orientalists and Occidentalists alike in understanding this fundamental axiom of any form of cultural studies that is faithful to its own founding notion of culture. (176)

There are a number of things to mine in this passage, starting with the very un-British cultural studies notion of culture (initially at least, an antagonistic,

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Sinological-orientalism now: "China" and the new era

Gramscian one). What is more striking is that the occidentalists are to be respected because it is their choice to hold forth dubious propositions about the West and peasants. Contrast this, then, with Said's goal: to eliminate "the 'Orient' and the 'Occident' altogether," and to advance "a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the 'unlearning' of 'the inherent dominative mode"' (Orienta/ism 28). 46 While this speaks to Said's avowed humanism, it is clearly of a different, politicized type as compared to the ones examined here. Said's humanism was in the end a rigorously textualist-secular attitude on the one hand, and on the other an anti-imperialist, anti-humanist humanism in the manner of Fanon or Aime Cesaire. Given what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as "the demand for humanism, with a nod towards Asia," 47 it is worth recalling Said's argument that "liberal humanism, of which Orientalism has historically been one department, retards the process of enlarged and enlarging meaning through which true understanding can be attained" (254). The systemic nature of Said's style of thought means that his real problematic - once last time - is not "bias" or even "Othering", but the uneven and combined, global production of knowledge. This is the real lesson of Occidentalism. This has immediate consequences for the China field. Questions about its actual practice, and the historical conditions of possibility for that practice, as well as its "right" to legislate and interpret China will remain - regardless of whether or not it chooses to take up the postcolonial tum or the critique of representation. Beyond the comparatively simple question of China's political sovereignty (past or present) lies the question of knowledge as a political and worldly entity. China can be wealthy, regionally powerful (even exploitative), and yet orientalized.

Cold War, hot colonial theory: totalitarianism as orientalism As my analyses above should already suggest, one of my themes in this study is that we can no longer separate the twin, inter-twined histories of the Cold War and postcolonialism, or in Brennan's felicitous phrase, the "East/West of North/ South" (decolonization was caught up in the Cold War; the Cold War was caught up within colonialism) (39). As is obvious yet unexplored within postcolonial studies, these two great events of the last century - the battle between historical communism and capitalism, and the epoch of decolonization - were coterminous, overlapping territories. And of course many of the national liberation movements and reconstruction projects of the global "South" were socialist, Marxist, or communist in nature, just as other "emerging" societies and Americanbacked regimes were fully anti-communist. That global capitalism "won" and even captured the de-colonial movements is no reason to cede the writing of history to the victors. We also do not need to cede the writing of China to those who - in the P.R.C., Hong Kong, or elsewhere - take symbolic or financial benefit from the collapse of actually existing socialism in the mainland. The present study does not reconstruct this global history or fully theorize the filiations between communism and postcolonialism. But it does show a part of it: the imbrication of colonial discourse with anti-communism in the representation of

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China in scholarship and other forms of writing. It argues that the discourse of anti-communism, and the lynchpin concept of totalitarianism, are part and parcel of Sinological-orientalism. "Oriental despotism" became "totalitarianism." Passive and irrational Chinese minds were easily "brainwashed." Orwellian oppression reigned, save for a few brave and inspiring stories of the human spirit (represented solely by film and literature of the 1980s and early 1990s). But this is being sloughed off, willy-nilly. Edward Said and those in his immediate wake may not have registered this adequately, but it should no longer be possible to speak of orientalism and China without also speaking of capitalism and the enduring presence of the Cold War, the specter of the East. For all the evident and iniquitous collaboration between classes and capital flows between China and the rest of the world, there is still a conflict here and a historical legacy of geo-political competition and struggle. Let me attempt to further clarify the connection I am drawing between the postcolonial/colonial and the communist/anti-communist. In an essay published in 1984 - early enough in the development of postcolonial studies to be entirely neglected - William Pietz brilliantly unpacked the racialist, orientalist thinking of George Kennan, Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. These were the founders of Cold War discourse and 'totalitarianism' their chief concept; it remains the lynchpin to the entire Cold War discursive edifice. Arendt's 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism endowed the concept and the entire project with an academic respectability that it still enjoys today. Pietz's argument, backed up through a rigorous explication of key texts, is that Cold War discourse displaced colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II (when not least thanks to China, decolonization was the order of the day). It substituted itself for "the language of colonialism" (55). By drawing on colonial discourse, albeit in a less immediately racist, modified disguise, Cold War, totalitarianist discourse became not just intelligible but persuasive and popular. Note that it is not that colonial discourse disappeared, but that it was articulated to the Cold War. As the postcolonial critique of "totalitarianism" is at the center of this book, it is worth pausing on Pietz's essay. As Kennan, Koestler, and arguably Orwell are of little scholarly value today, we will focus on Arendt. But the achievement of the first three was to map onto Russia classic orientalist stereotypes about despotism, inscrutability, deceit, detachment from the real world, disbelief in objective truth, and so on. For Kennan et al., totalitarianism was "traditional Oriental despotism plus modem technology" (Pietz 58). Here is Kennan writing in Foreign Affairs in 1947: [Russian] fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they had carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent or peaceful coexistence of rival forces .... Here caution, circumspection, flexibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind. (Pietz 59)

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Simply put: totalitarianism lies in the oriental mind (race). This raises a number of interesting questions about why the concept endures, and none of the answers would be flattering to the allegedly liberal, tolerant, and democratic nature of Western intellectual-political culture. But it is Arendt to whom we must attend. Here Pietz's critique, quoting Arendt at length, is especially strong in showing the centrality of an essentially racist understanding of Africa and "tribalism" to her theory of totalitarianism. Both racism - which Arendt clearly wishes to oppose - and totalitarianism have their origins in colonialism and in European (the Boers) contact with Africa and Africans. That is, "we" learned these things from "them." In short, Arendt offers a narrative about the African/Other's contamination of the white, decivilized European mob: When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin .... They had transformed themselves into a tribe and had lost the European's feeling for a territory, apatria of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the Dark Continent for centuries. (cited in Pietz 68) 48 My point is not the awful, Conradian diction or even the stark conceptual separation between the European and the African. It is the effect upon the Boers and thence - so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes - upon Europe. We "degenerate" into a race-based, primitive and nomadic, rootless "tribe" (or "race organization") no better than them. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not only do we come to think in terms of race (i.e. in a racist way), but this mode of thinking later morphs into a tribal nationalism that, in tum, becomes modem anti-Semitism and totalitarianism ("a whole outlook on life and the world"). 49 This last phenomenon "lies in the nature of tribalism rather than in political facts and circumstances" (Arendt, cited in Pietz, 69). Thus anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in general originally lie outside Europe (Pietz 69). This certainly helps "save" the West and helps constitute its identity as the better half of the Orient/Occident, North/South divides. This is all to say that, even in the relatively sophisticated hands of Arendt, totalitarianism is not only a concept with rather shaky logical foundations (turning upon a simplistic logic of contamination and diffusion), but one with a distinctly racist and colonial genealogy. We should therefore be far more circumspect in deploying the concept, if at all. It would be excellent philosophical hygiene to simply abandon the concept altogether, and give it a properly Christian burial. Understanding the colonialist roots of the concept perhaps makes it easier to see the types of work it does vis-a-vis China. Not only is totalitarianism simply a standin for an older notion of oriental despotism, it also necessarily assumes a striking

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lack of human agency on the part of hundreds of millions of "brainwashed" Chinese "under" Mao. As if all Chinese said and did whatever they were told to do; as if there were a massive uniformity of experience across so much diverse, complex social space; as if there were such an oriental surfeit of power that this was even possible. Even if one chooses to believe the absolute worst about Mao et al. - and most people in China still see him otherwise - this should still be an untenable notion on intellectual as well as ethical grounds. It is also preNietzschean in its notion of power as a solely top-down, repressive affair. In a later discussion in Chapter 3, I attempt to circumvent this coding of China via the notion of Maoist discourse. In the years following World War II, colonial discourse did not disappear. How could it have, after so many decades, indeed centuries of development across the globe? Though it became more difficult to voice in the age of decolonization, it was instead articulated to the Cold War. The two combined, making colonial discourse "vanish" in a relative sense but living on as a constituent, mediating part of the Cold War. Cold War discourse became a substitute for outright colonial discourse, and endowed the neo-colonial aspects - and U.S.-Westem hegemony - of the then New World Order with a desperately needed intellectual legitimacy. This was the chief function of the concept of totalitarianism, itself a colonial and racist notion. The end product helped usher in a new phase ofU.S.-Westem hegemony over the global East and South. These are, additionally, the years of the birth and triumph of Maoism, of the P.R.C., and - correspondingly - of China studies as we know it. In the U.S. that revolution then led from the quintessentially imperial debate over "Who lost China?" to, by the time of J. F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War, "Red China" becoming the "main enemy." 50 My argument is thus that "China" increasingly became the new object of this Cold War colonial discourse; with the further accumulation of knowledge in largely social-scientific and modemizationist form, there comes a "new" orientalism. Further on, with the defeat (and removal) of Maoism and the left in China, plus the open access of scholars, journalists, and others to their field, China itself sets the stage for the crystallization of Sinological-orientalism and its capital-logic of the P.R.C. becoming-the-same. This also presumes the Sino-U.S. rapprochement gradually making Red China seem less an enemy and more a friend (or future friend). The logic of China becoming normal like "us" a step away, if the C.C.P. will fall - came to seem like common sense. This sameness has its limits, and again I wish to emphasize the becoming logic as opposed to the belief that China has fully arrived where we are. One can still detect signs of an older, more openly racist logic of essential difference at times. Totalitarianism-as-oriental-despotism, with all that says about native passivity or flat-out stupidity, certainly veers towards the latter. In any case, the standard of measure and positional superiority remain the same. My attempt is to show all of this in the following pages.

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Uncivil society, or orientalism and Tiananmen, 1989

In the current conjuncture, typified as much by the rise of China (and China studies) as by the U.S. imperium, the social force called orientalism knows a new lease on life. Ranging from academic to media and state-policy as well as literary circles, it emerges where Edward Said's disseminative account from 1978 leaves off: its migration from Europe and philology to U.S.-based social science and area studies, to the pax Americana and a closer relation to the logic if not the actual policies of the state. In this chapter I begin to make my case for the existence of a "new," Sinological orientalism by way of an extended reading of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. 1978 also marks the end of the uncertain Hua Guofeng era, the subsequent rise of Deng Xiaoping, and the unleashing of the power of capital within China. Deng led not just an ideological but a material de-Maoification, systematically eliminating every last vestige of leftist institutions, save the Party itself. Deng's capitalistic policies and his de-politicization of state cultural and academic spheres were warmly received, not just by the Western powers and corporations who now had access to the fantasy of one billion consumers, but emphatically so by China studies. For Sinologists it was now open season on China and for the production of "new" knowledge about a China awakening yet again. 1 (The specter of a somnambulant China who might actually wake up is as old as Napoleon and as recent as the editorial page of the New York Times.) From this global yet orientalist perspective, shared by some of the liberal Chinese intelligentsia and vulgar modernizers like Deng as much as by area studies, China was en route to becoming "normal." The Other was finally changing and entering real history. Within this new orientalism, China is seen as evolving from a primitive, communist (and "despotic") Other to our distant cousin, one who is, willy-nilly, becoming-Western, becoming-"modern." China is graspingly putting its "Asiatic" past behind, becoming generally equivalent to the West. Recalf that orientalism posits the Other as radically and essentially different: different in mind, custom, politics, sexuality, and so on. It is a "style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'" (2). East is East, and West is West. But with the case of post-Mao, reform era China this form of orientalism turns upon its object

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of study - China and its victimized but "dissenting" masses - graspingly but inevitably becoming the same as "us." They are following in "our" wake, becoming the same as we modem, free subjects of an "open,'' liberal nation-state and "civil society,'' a teleological process which will, someday, follow from their capitalistic economy. This Sinological form of orientalism marks a shift from the differentialist logic that Said documented, to one now turning upon sameness (the becomingsameness of China). As befits the world system today, it also follows a capital logic of general equivalence. This historical shift has consequences as a critique ofSaid's and postcolonial studies' model of orientalism, for it shows us that they fail to deal with one of the principal contradictions of modem colonialism, namely, that in some absolutely crucial instances and projects - e.g. missionary projects, modernization theory - it is not simply allowed but mandated that the Other become the same, that it enter a process of becoming-the-same. That is, despite the sense of difference between one location of the "Orient" and the outside observer, an opposite logic - an opposite ontology and epistemology, one now rooted in equivalence - prevails. And yet if this much has changed within this new orientalism, its effects are in some crucial ways familiar: not only is it a misrepresentation of the P.R.C. and a part of a global and uneven production of knowledge that favors the West, it also produces what counts as the "Real China."2 It also retains the key rhetorical strategy of orientalism as Said theorized it: the positional superiority of the China watcher (or expert), such that China or things Chinese are never allowed to gain the upper hand by challenging received categories of thought. The social realities, texts, or contexts that the intellectual confronts are never allowed to make a difference in the production of (Sinological) knowledge. That there might be an incommensurability between Western theory or the methods of a discipline and the foreign reality is a very remote if not impossible notion within orientalism and mainstream China studies. Nowhere are the problems of traveling theory broached, and rarely if ever are contrasting, "local" knowledges consulted. The bulk of this chapter will deal with the Tiananmen protests, and will argue that their interpretation by China studies and Western media are emblematic of this new form of Sinological-orientalism. This last turns upon traditional figures of colonial discourse - e.g. despotism, passive, and irrational "native" subjects but the shift to sameness is brought home by the new dominance of social science rhetoric, in particular its emphasis on China now or in the near future finally producing a civil society and liberal individuals. It will thereby follow a "universal" pattern of modernization and "freedom." Rather than just being an affair of area studies, this orientalism is part of the U.S.-West's social imaginary and of contemporary intellectual-political culture. Tiananmen as the truth of civil society post-Mao has less to do with China than with the self-image of the West and its "leadership."

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Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989

Tiananmen, 1989 in Western minds Since the end of the Mao era, there has been one event - a global media event which has most forcefully secured the place of China within "Western minds." (My use of the latter phrase is meant to mark the type of semantic violence that subtends an old phrase of orientalism: the Chinese mind.) I refer of course to the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, including the killings that concluded it. For viewers ranging from CNN to Marxism Today, 3 those Spring events of 1989 represent a victimized Chinese people's thwarted attempt to enter political and social modernity, to achieve a liberal democracy and civil society alongside their newly free markets, or in sum to finish a telos that was rudely interrupted by- in the words of one Cold Warrior journalist - the "new emperors," Mao and Deng. 4 While in the initial decades after 1989 there was an enormous amount of scholarship on the movement, there has been scant critique of specifically "Western" understandings of the events. In fact, within China studies, Dingxin Zhao's recent book The Power of Tiananmen marks the first full-on engagement of Western Sinologists' work on Tiananmen. Zhao's meticulous sociological study makes this critique as much by pointed omission as by direct engagement with the most widely reputed of English language Sinology's doyens. At least that is how the book has been received. Thus Jeffrey Wasserstrom takes him to task simply for not citing the work of Geremie Barme, a prolific, famously fluent but also notoriously condescending critic of virtually all things Chinese: "This wouldn't matter except that some specialists (myself included) think him [Barme] among the most consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese culture and politics" ("Backbeat", par. 18). While W asserstrom grounds his criticism in only the proper name ofBarme, Elizabeth J. Perry rejects Zhao's own rejections ofculturalist and "elite factionalist" approaches to 1989. What emerges most sharply in her response to Zhao is that he has committed the sin of dismissing the major contributions of some of Sinology's luminaries, from former CIA consultant Lucian Pye to former Labour Party MP Roderick MacFarquhar. Perry concludes that "for a book bold in its criticism of alternative analytical approaches and parsimonious in its acknowledgment of the contributions of previous scholarship, one might be forgiven for expecting a little more methodological rigor" ("Response", 185). Yet Zhao's book is indeed a reflexive one, and it is specialized Sinologists like Perry who rely on a pre-theoretical empiricism. Zhao analyzes how built-space on Beijing campuses literally enabled the movement and examines the social construction of public opinion in the Square. This certainly marks an advance against the China field's Anglo-American hostility to theory. Thus Perry's point about "rigor" must actually be a point about something else: Zhao's rejection of Sinology as something not very useful for understanding Tiananmen. The point here is that ifthe first book to rebuke China studies' approaches to 1989 meets with such intransigence, it is less surprising that the crucial questions of how "we" see contemporary China have so far gone begging within the China field. In regard to 1989, this absence of discussion about epistemology and ideology in the forming of knowledge is all the more unfortunate. For in addition to

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the sheer complexity of the event, Tiananmen was the first and perhaps the most enduring "live" global media event. In many ways, the true victor of the tragedy was the U.S. Cable News Network. Contra an area studies that has yet toquestion its mediated sources of information, the televisual transmission of Tiananmen can hardly be assumed to be a neutral medium. Those images have become emblematic of what counts as post-Mao China - its real people so to speak, and the real, remorseless machinery of state oppression. Thus Time magazine includes on its list of "Top 100 People of the Century," the anonymous Tank Man who, plastic shopping bag in hand, seemingly held off a row of PLA tanks by zigzagging with their movement and refusing to step off, until some bystanders pulled him away. 5 In short, it was during that Spring that "we" learned that "the" Chinese were not only unhappy with Deng Xiaoping (Time's "Man of the Year" in 1984 and 1985), but were in effect "Americans in disguise" demanding our democracy, using our symbols (the famous Goddess of Democracy statue), even quoting Patrick Henry ("Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" was a favorite slogan), and dying to be free of totalitarianism (Zizek, "Against", 80). While Sinologists relish the opportunity to deride yesterday's progressive or sympathetic scholarship on China's revolution, 6 they have yet to be bothered with any methodological concern over their own embrace of this new "New China" and its "liberalizing," "becoming-modem" movement into Americanization. It thus falls to the unlikely figure of Slavoj Zizek, in an otherwise rank essay pleading for the virtues of Eurocentrism and the Western origin of democracy, to give the lie to this fantasy. He notes: [The media] saw in them the confirmation that the people of the East wanted what people in the West already had; that is, they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal democratic notion of freedom (the ... political game cum global market economy). Emblematic was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in 1989, standing in front of the copy of the Statue of Liberty [sic] and claiming that this said it all about what the protesting students demanded (in short, if you scratch the skin of a Chinese person, underneath you find an American). ("Leftist Plea", par. 23) Drawing on Etienne Balibar's notion of"egaliberte," the "unconditional demand for freedom and equality that explodes any positive social order," Zizek thus indicates how Rather et al. reinscribed this desire "into the confines of a given order" (liberal democratic capitalism) (par. 23). So, too, the perception that the Goddess statue "says it all" is a classic example of ideology at work, for as Althusser succinctly put it, ideology works by interpellating obviousnesses as such. 7 One can see this ideological reinscription at work in an Asia Times article: I was never more proud to be an American than when the Goddess of Democracy statue, with its stunning resemblance to Lady Liberty ... made its way through Tiananmen Square. That made it all the more frustrating to

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Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 see and hear the protest leaders bungle the principles for which they presumably stood. 8

This unhesitatingly assimilates the symbol to the author's own imaginary, and one-ups Rather in colonialist prerogative: not only was it "our" symbol, but the natives got it all wrong, and they simply must get it right the next time. The latter attitude further calls to mind Western Marxist codings of Maoist China, whereby the Chinese like the Soviets before them and everyone else afterwards, distorted if not betrayed Marxism - that is, the real, authentic Marxism as it exists solely in the heads of Western Marxists, from the Frankfurt School to Trotskyism. My interest here is neither in some contentless "egaliberte" nor on the alleged "utopian longing" Zizek sees at work in Tiananmen, but on the process of re-inscription. The coding of the Tiananmen events back into another given social order recalls one of the crucial features of orientalism, namely, that in the last instance it is about the self-constitution and identity of the West. Indeed, so strong is the impression that they were - almost - "our" dissidents and analogues, that the countrywide protests over the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7th 1999 were roundly condemned as a regression from 1989. If the Statue of Liberty reappears, but now coated in blood-red paint and draped in a swastika (as it did), then civil society must be overrun with irrational, frenzied nationalists, manipulated by the state. But scholars and the media linked the two events, and returned to the theme of China's long march to civil and modem society. For others, 1989 was brought up, but only to make the claim that the anti-NATO movement should not be compared to that because the former was real and spontaneous, and the latter government-organized or at least induced. "Civil society" remains the yardstick. In New Left Review, the selfprofessed "flagship journal of the English language left," Wasserstrom frames the two protests as a sign that, "xenophobic" rhetoric notwithstanding, the Chinese were still developing properly, and will eventually establish a truly liberal, cosmopolitan, and anti-regime pubic sphere and civil society ("Student Protests", 65). 9 Wasserstrom sees 1989, 1999, and the hope of China as resting in the latter, and I will return to this dominant coding of post-Mao China below. But here note that his historical overview's key dates are all before and after Mao: from the Nationalist era of Generalissimo Chiang to the mid-1980s. Wasserstrom skips the long revolution itself and the first three, radical decades of the People's Republic. He instead grounds his analysis on the brief period - if half of the 1980s can be called that - which best fits the Western civil society narrative. Wasserstrom says much the same about a dialogue on the meaning of 1989 between three prominent participants turned U.S. academics (Wang Dan, Li Minqi, and Wang Chaohua). 10 In the manner of a colonial, Oxbridge authority, he refers to their debate as "commendable" yet "wanting'', because their accounts did not quite fit "with [his] own vision of 1989," and because they paid "too little attention" to what he has already decided are the "two particularly relevant periods in China's history" (the pre-War Republic and the mid-1980s) ("Student Protests", 63). The fact that Wasserstrom can so easily dismiss the analyses of

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three actual democracy activists and fault them for being ignorant of their own history, says it all. There is much that could be said about Wasserstrom's (and others') modernizing periodization here, but in regard to orientalism the crux of the matter is that these rhetorical moves perfectly illustrate positional superiority. The Mao era is simply not up for discussion, despite the fact that it literally un-formed and reformed much of Chinese culture and politics. What is elided here is the very heart of the Maoist project in China: the pursuit, quite historically unprecedented, of an alternative modernity. As Liu Kang and Arif Dirlik have argued, and notwithstanding its grave mistakes and its foreclosure by Deng, Chinese Maoism was an active, real alternative to both Soviet and American "development" and modernity. Signs of this are easily indexed: the Maoist project of "Sinifying Marxism"; the radically egalitarian social policies centered on cooperative rural development and mass participation; the empowerment of an urban proletariat; the attempt to overcome the rural/urban and manual/intellectual labor split; the distinctively Maoist passion for the masses; the ethos of selfreliance and the refusal of the pax Americana; and the attempt, desired in China since the nineteenth century, to produce nothing less than a new culture. All of this was not mere state rhetoric, but deeply held belief and part of a popular Maoist discourse, and - moreover - were actually, if all too briefly, institutionalized. As Zhang Xudong has noted, Sinologists as well as the Chinese liberal intelligentsia have yet to come to terms with the fact that the Cultural Revolution remains China's most significant era of participatory democracy. 11 Thus any periodization of democratic movements in China should have to engage this era. So, too, it influenced 1989 when students and workers referenced Mao and Cultural Revolution era slogans (even when their point was to say how the student movement was unrelated to that). 12 Thus neither the experiences nor the project of the Mao era are allowed to challenge Sinological knowledge, including the truth of Tiananmen-as-civil society-as-modernization. From here this essay will offer a critique of this last coding. But it is a critique meant to serve another, simultaneous purpose: to reframe Tiananmen as in part rooted in the deeply political and deeply complex history and experience of the Mao era and its recent negation by the rise of capitalism in China. The immanent critique of orientalism, if it is to be more than the analysis of stereotype, also has to proceed by way of an analysis of the historical and cultural complexities that are negated by the former.

Overview of the protests Since Tiananmen is so widely invoked yet little studied, it is worth recalling a basic narrative of the protests before delving further into their place within Sinological-orientalism.13 They are typically dated from April 15th, with the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu was former heir to Deng Xiaoping, but was purged in 1987 in an "anti-bourgeois liberalization" campaign for being far too enamored of Westernization/marketization and as payback for purging unrepentant Maoists or

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so-called hard-liners remaining in the party. For the students, Hu's death merely provided the occasion to move up the demonstrations they had already been planning to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement, a long-standing occasion for commemorative protest. The chief characteristics of the context of 1989 include runaway inflation in a stagnating economy; massive rural migration to the cities (a result of de-collectivization); skyrocketing unemployment in the State Owned Enterprises; rampant official corruption; and the ideological ferment of political and cultural activity on campuses and beyond. These last ranged from the "democracy salons" at the universities and open letters from several intellectuals calling for an amnesty for all "political prisoners," to the more radical "Mao craze" and "cultural fevers" that preoccupied many others. 14 Thus one needs to recognize that the China of the early 1980s was - as always - far from a scene of mass conformity and control, and the protests were anything but a spontaneous manifestation of dissent, utopian longing, or millennial Zeitgeist. Within hours ofHu's death, posters were put up mourning him, calling for his second rehabilitation (he was first purged during the CR), railing against corruption, and appealing for a greater role for education and intellectuals. Over the following weeks and days, the number of posters would explode and their content would move from Hu's fate to more political and more specific demands, often attacking Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng (who would later declare Martial Law on May 28th). The first demonstrations in the Square were sparsely attended and did not escalate until after the "Xinhua Gate Bloody Incident" of April 20th. At this gate to the Central Committee's offices, students demanded dialogue but wound up fighting the police. The incident triggered class boycotts and further demonstrations (Zhao 150). From here the next key moment was Hu's state funeral on April 22nd, which the students, over 50,000 strong in the Square, were blocked from attending. After dialogue with officials, perhaps best remembered via three students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People to deliver a petition (a gesture Geremie Barme codes as "feudal"), student leader Wu' er Kaixi secured a promise to have the students' one, final demand met: for Li Peng to step out and talk. Peng did not. Hence the great anger and trauma (many students cried over this), and hence the emergence of new student organizations and the radicalization of the movement. 15 A call for a citywide class boycott was announced, and protests continued on campuses and in the Square. The regime issued its first public response: a denunciation of the anti-government "turmoil" (a code-word to signify the Cultural Revolution) carried out by an "extremely small" number of people. Broadcast on television and then printed as the April 26th editorial of People's Daily, this enraged the students because it accused them of being unpatriotic. It immedi~ ately led to large-scale demonstrations on the 27th, carried out by tens of thousands. By April 29th, the government started several dialogues with students. While amiable in tone, the initial dialogues lacked substance and led nowhere. 16 But it is worth noting that the government did concede the students' basic demand for recognition and acknowledged their grievances. Zhao Ziyang, the

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Premier and Deng's successor designate and top "reformer" (and liberal exponent of neo-authoritarianism 17 ), told a meeting of the Asian Development Bank that the students, as evidenced by their slogans ("Support Socialism!" "Uphold the Reforms," "Oppose Corruption," and the like), were "by no means opposed to our basic system" (cited in Zhao 158). Zhao also leaned on the state media to report the demonstrations more positively, which they indeed did, thus in effect reversing the infamous editorial. These gestures towards conciliation were too little too late, and the movement escalated. Not least because it was no longer in the students' hands. On the 2nd and 4th of May, there were large demonstrations reaching 100,000 on the latter, commemorative date. Meanwhile, urban workers, state journalists, and others began to join. In fact, the moment of workers' participation - completely missed in Western fascination with the students and "anonymous" citizens - is essential and what made Tiananmen a genuinely mass movement. I will return to this neglected area below. On May 13th, two days before the next official dialogue, the first, absolutely radicalizing hunger strike commenced, with up to 2,000 students participating. Zhao conservatively suggests that the hunger strike was a mistake, marking the beginning of the decline of the movement, its disorganization, and its co-optation by "radicals" such as female student leader Chai Ling; Maurice Meisner more perceptively notes that it was "a stroke of tactical political genius" that activated popular support and "politicized increasing numbers of Beijing's 10 million people" (Zhao 161-70; Meisner 427). The strike galvanized Beijing and brought the movement into sharp conflict with the regime. The historic visit of Mikhail Gorbachev had to be removed to the airport tarmac, far from Tiananmen. Three days into the hunger strike, in a sign of mass support for the movement and of the increasing tension, one million people filled Tiananmen Square. At this point, with the encouragement of a group of fifty intellectuals, some student leaders tried to persuade others to end the strike, not least because martial law itself seemed imminent (by the 20th the hunger strike had finished). Indeed, on the evening of the 19th PLA troops from the 38th Army entered Beijing from the suburbs, and early the next morning Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun declared martial law. Zhao Ziyang had voted against martial law and was forced to resign. That evening he bid his tearful farewell to the hunger strikers, after pleading with them to return to their campuses. The people of the city met the arrival of a mostly unarmed people's army with barricades, effectively cutting off the army's logistics. Yet the relations between the people and the army were remarkably peaceful, complete with singing competitions and only occasional violence breaking out. As a result, a stalemate was achieved, with the government withdrawing its troops on May 22nd. By this point numerous other student groups, many of them from well outside Beijing, also occupied the Square and challenged the authority of the original hunger-strike leaders. The latter failed in persuading all students to leave the Square. While many did leave, the Square was refilled by day with newly established workers' groups and other ordinary people. Two other notable arrivals, the Goddess of Democracy statue

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and Taiwanese rock star Hou Dejian (who performed enthusiastically) further drew people in. At this point "Tiananmen" was well and truly a mass movement. That evening new troops advanced on the Square. Details of the fighting remain somewhat obscure, but what we do know now is that no deaths occurred in the Square itself. The remaining students were allowed to leave, thanks in part to the intellectuals' and Hou's negotiations with the troops. The deaths occurred on the outskirts of the Square, chiefly on Chang'an Avenue towards the west. The great majority of victims were workers and other "ordinary" people involved in clashes with the troops or simply in harm's way. Over one hundred military vehicles were burned. The exact death toll is unknown, but has been revised downward from several thousands to several hundreds. 18 Riots broke out in faraway Chengdu, a train was burned in Shanghai, and there were reports of skirmishes among troops. In the months afterwards, the government arrested many students, workers, and people alleged to have fought on the streets. There were numerous post-June 4th executions (though I am unaware of any students killed after June 4th). Others managed to flee the country. Deng appeared in public on June 9th, praising the military. Contra many China experts, the Tiananmen event triggered neither the regime's collapse nor its international ostracization; it did not usher in an era of so-called hard-line brakes on the rapidly privatizing and globalizing economy. Deng launched his famous Southern Tour in 1992, greatly escalating the pace of economic liberalization, and by 2000 China joined the World Trade Organization with permanent "most favored nation" trading status with the U.S. The Party's legitimacy was hereafter indissolubly hitched to national economic performance.

Reinscribing Tiananmen as the stillbirth of civil society In what follows, I wish to show what is left out in standard accounts like the one above and in the re-inscription whereby Tiananmen serves to signify civil society and China's becoming-normal. I will critique this Sinological coding as akin to an old-fashioned colonial discourse, and will offer alternative aspects of 1989 that complicate and displace such knowledge. This alternative information is meant to suggest a counter-knowledge of the Tiananmen event, of Chinese political forms and reality, and of the present's connections to the Maoist past. As I've suggested, we can apprehend this form of orientalism in the ways that Tiananmen has been explained and constructed - what happened, why it did, and what it means for the future of China, as well as for how we understand its Maoist (or earlier) past. But what emerges from these standard analyses is the "knowledge" that China is in a world-historical process of becoming modem and generally equivalent to the West, and moreover that this must happen for it to progress, develop, or become free and modem. This statement cuts across virtually all explanations, within Sinology and without, and is perhaps the paramount element within Sinologicalorientalism and its global range - its global "system of dispersion" (Foucault 37). Of the major schools of Tiananmen interpretation - the elite-factional, culturalist, and civil society approaches - it is the latter which dominates, though they

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19

all overlap, often in the same analysis. Civil society is the subtext of the other two in that it serves as what is missing or lacking among the elites and within Chinese culture. Thus Jonathan Unger notes: What the urban populace of China was demanding, in short, was no less and no more than 'civil society.' When they plastered their banners with the word 'democracy,' what the word meant was not democracy in our terms but rather Civil Society. (5) Civil society is here defined (even capitalized) in the conventional liberal or Hegelian sense as it is everywhere in China studies, as the social "space" between the political sphere (society) and the populace at large, and is constituted by nonstate institutions; it further requires "an independent ethos" that Unger sees as heretofore lacking in several thousand years of Chinese history (5). 20 Thus within the students' and workers' creation of "autonomous" organizations, "a new consciousness [an 'independent ethos'] had been born," and yet, tragically, it was but "crudely formed" (as were their notions of democracy), and so the Chinese have "a great many more steps" to go before they reach the undefined promised land (Unger 5, 7). So, too, the eminent social theorist Craig Calhoun will proclaim that what the students truly desired, and what the event itself marks, was the emergence of a "public sphere" and civil society within the P.R.C. It is as if the bourgeois narrative of political and economic "development" was truly universal, and as if we know what "civil society" and "public sphere" truly are in the West let alone in the context of, say, contemporary China. Hence: "Student protest was shaped by the emergence of a civil society in which citizens were linked outside the direct control of the state and of a public sphere not restricted to intellectuals" (Calhoun 22). Moreover, the movement failed on account of China's longstanding, "totalitarian" negation of the private, familial sphere, and of the space for "rational-critical discourse" (Calhoun 22, 95). Calhoun will outdo Unger in finding what has always been lacking within the Chinese character and society, but which started to emerge in the student movement and helped drive it on: friendship. Due to cultural difference (a higher value placed on group membership than individuality), and past deformations inflicted by class struggles and class categories (the state), the "novel factor" of "ideals of friendship" only emerged in 1989 (Calhoun 170, 171). Calhoun does not define friendship here, but uses it in the sense of "personal ties" and "individual" feeling. Thus rather than, say, allowing his notion of friendship to be challenged by the Chinese context, or viewing Chinese culture in terms other than lack, Calhoun assumes that Chinese people have always been socially controlled by the state and friendless. So strong is his desire to code the Tiananmen event as an emergence of civil society and a public sphere (with the requisite "independent ethos" and "personal friendship networks") that the very psychology, culture, and character of his objects of study must be typified and fit into the model, into what he and the Sinologists see as the world-historical process of democratization.

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The coding of Tiananmen as the truth of civil society entails a striking cultural ism, pointing out what has always been lacking within Chinese culture, and a universalizing, untroubled application of concepts rooted in Western history to a docile Chinese reality. It also denies agency to Chinese people, who are seen as not just controlled but dominated by the despotic, totalitarian, and pre-modem state. These benchmarks of orientalist practice inform many of the analyses of Tiananmen in an influential collection, Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China. Elizabeth Perry, for example, refers to the "frailty" of civil society in China, as the "omnipresence" of the state has "inhibited" its "fluorescence" ("Casting" 78, 87). The protests of 1989 were doomed as much by Chinese culture as by the state's power itself. The state has, as ever, deformed the culture: the students' "traditionalism" explains their - failed, non-modem "stress on moralism" and feudal "style of remonstrance" (petitions and posters), and their "state-centric tendencies" (asking that their demands be recognized, their "deference to state authority"); all in all, the student movement was "remarkably Confucian" (86, 79, 88). Perry does note that the alleged "traditionalism" of the students was "not due to some immutable Confucian culture," but was rather the result of the age-old "state links between state and scholar." But blaming the "Confucian" state instead of "Confucian culture" is not much of an advance from the conventionally orientalist trope of using Confucianism to explain modem China. It also elides the work of scholars such as Vivienne Shue, who have argued persuasively that the Chinese Communist state is, or was, much less controlling than heretofore recognized by Sinology. 21 Shue argues that Deng's "webs of commerce," having replaced the "honeycomb polity" of the Mao era, actually result in greater state control and dominance, an analysis which could have provided fodder for Perry. She marks, however, no differences in the regimes, vis-a-vis the state. This same lack of ascribed agency and surfeit of state power - always constructed as a uniquely Chinese problem - informs the volume's analysis by Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. After noting that with the advent of the P.R.C. "the budding sprouts of republican civil society were cut off altogether," and so again implying the telos of bourgeois modernization, or Europe, they sum up their analysis of Tiananmen as a type of staged "theatre" and proclaim: "Without a civil society, only street theatre remains as a mode of political expression" ("Acting" 59). They begin by claiming that the Tiananmen protests cannot be labeled a "democracy movement" (for minzhu or "people rule" unfortunately had "various contours of meaning"); they then code the movement and all of modem Chinese politics as a form of "political theatre," full of rituals and "symbol-laden performances" to move "audiences" ("Acting" 36). My point is not that this trope is beyond the pale, but that it should be marked as such, as a trope. It is also one that would be more effective if it were properly theorized, drawing perhaps on the work of Erving Goffman on the "dramaturgy" of selfpresentation, or moreover of relevant Chinese theory. 22 In Esherick and Wasserstrom's essays, the modem Chinese polity really is a stage, and all its people merely players. It is as ifthe complex human and political reality of one event of

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1989, let alone the previous eight decades, was simply some grand Chinese opera, nothing more. It is a trivializing analysis at best, and at worst an exoticizing one in its reduction of China to the merely cultural. The thrust of the theatretrope is to show the lack of civil society, which is the point of their essay's comparison of China to the "successful" Eastern European revolutions. The irony of this comparison is especially striking given the comparison of the former bloc to China today. Pointing again to a lack at the heart of China, namely, the absence of Western public sphere institutions like the Church and "the culture of civil society" more generally, the Chinese are bereft. They are left with "street theatre" and rituals (a fascinating, spectacular, Hollywood-trumping but pre-modem and limited stage) ("Acting" 58). Needless to say, this fetishization of rituals and "surfaces" itself has a long history within writings of the East, ranging from Marco Polo up to Roland Barthes. Other reinscriptions of Tiananmen as the truth of Western civil society are less culturalist, but even here the point of the concept-model is not just to criticize the regime, but to show China as only slowly, begrudgingly entering modernity, and to show its deviation from the proper telos of progress and the modem. Thus Andrew Nathan will remark: "China is finally joining the world - economically, culturally, and politically. It will, eventually, become a democracy" (Transition 77). Nathan's and others' positioning of China as not - until recently - part of the world is of a piece with classical orientalist fantasies about ShangriLa (the West's Tibet), but the more salient point is that it denies not only Chinese history- for even the Maoist de-linked "autarky" was fully a part of the world system of trade, politics, and culture - but also the coeval nature of "Chinese" or real, shared time and space. 23 Ralph Litzinger nicely summarizes the problem here: European colonial anthropology tended to construct non-European others as objects of lack. These others, variously labeled the primitive, the nonliterate, and the underdeveloped, were seen to be outside the space and time of Western modernity; they were essentially denied any sense of shared contemporaneity. Culture was thus almost always situated in the realm of custom, festival, and ritual, all of which were seen to be outside the historical problematic of Western modernity. ("Theorizing" 44) While Nathan believes China will become a democracy someday (and it is obvious to him that neither the Cultural Revolution nor the "New Democracy" period up through the 1950s were in any sense democratic), he does take issue with Tony Saich and others who hail the "new class of small-scale individual entrepreneurs spawned by the reforms" as proof of a civil society in 1989 (Transition 79). For Nathan, this "class" lacked the requisite "level of coherence and social autonomy" that the term - again assumed to stand for a real thing that originated in the West - implies, once again indexing the "crudely formed" consciousness and actors Unger attributes to Tiananmen (Transition 79). But to say

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that the "proper" consciousness and polity was inchoate is still to say that the Chinese are nonetheless in a process of becoming-the-same. Thus it is the figure of lack that paradoxically underwrites the logic of equivalence, of a becomingsameness, that is the basis of the new orientalism. But whether conceived as entirely lacking, circumscribed, or nascent, Western civil society is in these analyses rarely if ever contrasted to indigenous discussions of an historically Chinese version of, or alternative to, civil society and the public. Wang Hui has, for example, argued that in China, the public sphere has for a long time existed "within the state's space" and so cannot be a "'natural deterrent'" to state power (China's New Order 179-80). Wang's point, shared by Zhang Xudong and others, is that democratic reform in China will necessarily have to work within and against the state and also against the market. 24 While one would have virtually no sense of this from the Sinological accounts which refuse to engage them, the questions of civil society and public sphere were the subject of intense debate within China in the 1980s as part of the cultural fever era. Haun Saussy's judgment that these debates were "vitiated" by their use as another thing China lacked (a civil society) is most insightful (238). But other analyses very productively recast the entire question of public sphere and democracy within actually existing Chinese history. In addition to Wang and Zhang, Liu Kang has argued that both the Maoist practice of cultural revolution and Hu Feng's theory of multiple "cultural centers" for China show the existence of Chinese alternatives to bourgeois modernity and its attendant civil society ("Hegemony" 83-4). Given what Kang aptly characterizes as "the liberal/totalitarian or anti-Marxist/Marxist dichotomies" that filter Sinological knowledge, the China field's hostility to Chinese Marxism comes as no surprise (82). Perhaps more surprising is the degree of positional superiority, the thoroughly consistent failure - among Chinese-fluent academics no less - to consult "native" sources that might challenge their reigning if also tacit assumptions. Kang's pair of dichotomies also alert us to the deep connections, especially in the case of China and Asia, between orientalism and anti-communism. Post-Mao Sinologists can work with such vulgar and uninterrogated notions of the Chinese Other precisely because their object of critique is not the Chinese people in general (whom they nonetheless often disparage by implication) but the Chinese state, or the Chinese polity and Chinese Marxism. They are part of the long history of orientalizing communists - from well before Wittfogel's branding of Stalin and Soviet Russia as "Asiatic" in the 1930s (e.g. Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 The Rising Tide of Color). Just as important, there were many things on the ground in Beijing that directly challenged the civil society interpretation. Foremost among these were the emergence, as early as April 22nd, of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation and its perhaps 20,000-strong membership, and the de facto general strike emerging across the city by the beginning of June. 25 Clearly, Deng et al. saw this as a most significant development: hence the "discrepancy" in who was killed and arrested, and the speed of Martial Law and the crackdown in the first place. For while the students could win the hearts and minds of global and local

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observers, particularly of Americans who saw "their" symbols being displayed, only the workers could pose a real threat to their Communist Party and its economy as such. While a few Sinologists have examined the formation of the BWAF and the role of workers in the movement, 26 to date no one has allowed this to recast the question of civil society as the truth of Tiananmen, or of China's past and future tout court. This, despite the fact that it is precisely the figure and place of the working class within European, if not global, history and theory that gives the lie to civil society and the public sphere as the realm of freedom and democratization. Recall that for Marx, writing from the standpoint of the proletariat, the historical emergence of the bourgeois epoch and the attendant emergence of formal equality and civil society entailed one step forward, two steps back. 27 For these only emerged once labor-power became a commodity and all concrete labor reduced to abstract, homogenous labor. This is to say, then, that civil society is predicated upon the capitalist class system, and that formal political and civil rights - as valuable as they can be - cannot result in social emancipation for the working class. For the latter would entail means of redress well beyond civil society, straight down to the labor process in the fields and factories and to the state administration of the economy. "Freedom and democracy," the alleged raison d'etre of civil society, thus appear as very much the empty signifiers they are, capable of being articulated within civil society to anything but the economic as such, at least for the great majority of laborers in China who spend the great majority of their time working and reproducing their labor-power. Now one could argue in the traditional liberal way that the state can be made to bend if not break in response to civil society, such that class bifurcation can be redressed if not transcended by the politics of the public sphere. But this perspective, whatever sense it made in the 1960s of the West, still presumes that civil society is independent of and ultimately stronger than the state. And it is precisely these two historical grounds and requirements that have been disputed by political theorists and historians as diverse as Sheldon Wolin, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. 28 Drawing on a genealogy of"postmodem" and American "communitarian" thought, Hardt and Negri argue that at this point in history, the state has subsumed civil society and is able to "legitimate autonomously the new social order," with class and other divisions intact (Labor 308). Or more specifically, capital has not only instrumentalized the state, but now the latter "shows a level of structural integration of civil society that nears the extreme foreseeable limits." In sum, "civil society no longer exists," as the state no longer needs it to deal with social antagonisms or to "legitimate its rule" (Labor 146, 261). 29 This theoretical and historical subsumption of civil society raises many questions in relation to the Chinese context. At one level it suggests that it is the U.S.-West that is following the Chinese path, rather than the other way around. But here I simply want to claim that Hardt and Negri's point, as well as the range of studies they draw on, call into question the applicability of the civil society model as applied to China. The implication is that the approach is anachronistic.

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Additionally, the global argument about the subsumption of civil society by the state dovetails with Marc Blecher's analysis of contemporary state-society relations in China. Blecher argues that while the Tiananmen protests suggest that "society" has in the Deng era achieved some autonomy from the state, the dialectical flip side of this is that "the state has also been acquiring new types of autonomy from civil society" (144). While this assumes that some unspecified form of civil society "fits" China, the larger point is that the state seems poised to simply ignore civil agitation. It can say that this imputed civil society no longer exists. And regardless of one's specific theorization of the matter, "civil society" is an unlikely vehicle for the political "liberalization" of the Chinese state that China studies, like the broader Western culture of which it is a part, so strongly desires.

Un-civility, Sinological anxiety, and a worker's Tiananmen But to return to the BWAF and workers' involvement in the Tiananmen protests, one can see how problematic it is to insert their demands and activities into a budding (or missing) civil society. For their demands were by and large for anything but their allotted, modest place within such a sphere: The working class is the vanguard of the People's Republic. We have every right to expel dictators .... With a great, concerted effort, we fight bravely to uphold the truth of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, and to overthrow the dictatorship of the aggressors Deng and Zhao. We will make them repay the ten-year debt of blood and tears. (Lu 188, 215) 30 What is clear from these and similar statements (from dazibao or big-character posters) is not just their Marxist (indeed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) rhetoric, but that the perspective and implied author embodied within them flies in the face of a merely civil, "independent ethos" that recognizes all "citizens" as equivalent in a "culture of civil society," one unmarred by such unfortunate traits as class hatred and resentment (to recall Calhoun's characterization of the Mao era). As another poster put it, their class is the vanguard precisely because "Wealth, created by our labour, is used to maintain the lifestyle of those overlords sitting on the backs of the people," and so their class has "a historical mission and a sacred duty" (Lu 226). 31 As with the above, this "uncivil" statement authored by "A Union staff member and 253 Workers" refuses any notion that the working class is simply one player among others in the game of civil society. Their standpoint recalls not just Lenin but Mao, and the decades-long positioning and privileging of workers - not least through trade union education and propaganda - as the leading class of the revolution and nation-state. But it also recalls Georg Lukacs' classic work on reification and class consciousness, which theorized how the proletariat, because of its historical positioning within the process of production, is uniquely able to see (totalize) the social totality and to lead to its

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32

transformation. But Lukacs' argument is larger than this, and related to the problematic of civil society in his justly famous dissection of the antinomies of bourgeois thought. From a Lukacsian perspective, the working class simply elides such antinomies as civil society, a sphere of freedom predicated upon class division and part and parcel of the anarchy and social differentiation that makes the totality so difficult to apprehend. Put another way, if an antinomy is an irresolvable contradiction between an idea of reason and a concept or fact of experience, then from the standpoint of the working class, civil society is an antinomy - a lie - in itself. What is also clear is that the workers and the BWAF rejected liberal rights discourse (a hallmark of the civil society model), and the myth that the Dengist reform era was all to the good. In fact, not only Deng (who the students avoided criticizing) but also the liberal "reformer" Zhao Ziyang, so admired by some students and intellectuals, are held responsible for the "ten-year debt of blood and tears." In fact, Zhao's penchant for golf was mocked by one early BWAF poster: "Mr. and Mrs. Zhao Ziyang play golf every week. Who pays the green fees, and other expenses?" (Lu 184). 33 The workers' rejection and deconstruction of the liberal/civil notion of rights can be seen in their texts. Rather than simply claiming, like the students, the right to have their demands recognized and addressed by the regime, they insist on the right to "expel dictators," very much a rejection of the right to mediation through civil society. Moreover, they refuse the right to self-preservation. As a worker's poem entitled "Fast Letter" put it: If the death of one or more/ enables many to live better/ and the motherland to prosper/ then we have no right to drag out an ignoble existence.

(Lu 227) The extra length of the last line, following the shorter, qualifying, and prefatory first three lines, endows the rejection of "right" with an especial force. 34 It is a rejection of right as such, for no right is more basic than that of self-preservation. The brief workers' statements above have certainly shown their anger and Marxist orientation, but what is remarkable in this short poem, beyond its compression of a complex thought into so few lines, is the final "ignoble existence." It is here where we feel the tragedy of the great reversal, the shift from a regime which took the working class and peasants as its summum bonum, and had inscribed the nobility oflabor, the fundamental value of workers, and proletarian militancy into all of its major institutions, from the arts to the constitution itself. For even if one takes a dim view of Maoist and immediately post-Maoist regime practice (and this would be decidedly one-sided), no one can dispute that urban and rural labor and laborers were indeed endowed with a nobility and special status, unmatched even by the early Soviet Union. So the poet's reference to a worker's now "ignoble" life carries with it not just a flash of historical insight the Dengist "revolution" was for many a counter-one - but a felt sense of what it

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means to go from the noble, symbolic vanguard to one of the powerless. It clearly is a "citizen" uninterested in the game of civil society and negotiation with the state. That option seems unavailable (given the class position of poet and addressee), and in this poem as with other workers' statements, there is neither the students' oft-noted demand for individual recognition and approval, nor an "independent ethos." Those decades of proletarian valorization in China, and the special status of laborers, do not just go away with the Dengist attacks on same. For the worker in this poem still sees him- or herself - and his or her class - as having the crucial role to play: only with their ultimate struggle, to the point of death if need be, will the "many" "live better" and the "motherland" "prosper." Indeed this "fast letter" is very much addressed to a collective destination: in place of the first-person "I" seen so often in the students' characterposters ("I have a dream./For this dream I'm willing for my blood to be shed"), or their familial rhetoric ("Mama, we're not wrong"), here there is a pointed "we" (Han 319, 127). 35 And the logic of the poem's "sentence" - the movement from "If' to "then" - can be seen as an intersubjective hailing of the revolutionary working class, the proletariat as such. What this poem indexes, in sum, is not an emergent civil or independent discourse, but a return of working-class militancy, and in place of reform and dialogue: angry, red revolution. It is this incivility, and the workers' militant and Marxist discourse in general that help give the lie to the civil society coding. From the perspective of the workers in the Square and the BWAF, the relevant problematic of Chinese politics and protest is not civil and "normal" agitation and redress, but leftist revolution. Notwithstanding the massive and institutional de-Maoification of the 1980s, here too we see the legacy of the Mao era in Tiananmen, 1989. 36 I return to these points in what follows. And yet Andrew Walder and Gong Xiao xi a have, for their part, coded the BWAF and the workers themselves in terms of the conventional civil society model, in this case via the Polish Solidarnos labor movement. While initially critical of the BWAF (and the protests as a whole) for not being as active as Solidarnos, they come to see the Beijing federation as more akin to its "natural" analogue in Gdansk and the requisite "unabashed working-class trade-union mentality" ("Workers" 4). Thus Tiananmen and the BWAF are evaluated on the basis of an ideal type: a populism and trade-unionism that is anti-communist and "democratic" as opposed to "socialist." Thus any reservation about conventional liberal and Western models is only about how well China and its workers measure up, not how they might challenge let alone displace such knowledge itself. This is positional superiority. This technique is further revealed when Walder and Gong damn the 1989 workers with faint praise. Thus they refer to the 1989 workers as "sharp" but "quite ordinary working people ... with limited education and writing ability (as their wall-posters and handbills make evident)" (4). Now, the first thing that strikes one about this description is that it in fact negates the creativity and extraordinary quality of much of the writing in the BWAF's posters. Take the following statement from "Ten Strange Aspects of the Current Situation": "5.

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There are a lot of stylish new hotels. A crane standing among chickens catches the wind. Houses for the people are insufficient. Slow is the intake of valuable experience; yet the toilet attendants learn quickly to charge money" (Lu 199). Here the author begins with an aspect of the Beijing cityscape in the "reform" era that is so often noted by Sinologists and foreign correspondents as the most obvious sign of the wisdom and success of the Dengist "revolution" - the explosion of skyscrapers and new construction as places of multinational (or jointowned) business and tourism. But as if in direct, dialogic response to this Sinological point of view, a response that internalizes the other's discourse and rearticulates it, the author upends it and turns the skyscrapers into a sign of the great reversal. The author invokes the people's perspective (and their lack of housing) and in so doing demystifies the "obvious" meaning of the hotels and new cityscape. What the hotels signify is nothing less than the Dengist betrayal of socialism and the Party's mandate to "serve the people." As with the "fast letter," this poster indirectly but powerfully documents the degradation of labor and the status of the working class as the symbolic vanguard of the "ongoing" revolution, hereby invoking the most menial, degrading type oflabor to say, here is what workers are today, mere janitors who have to charge a little extra money just to get by. But the statement also ambivalently characterizes the worker's action of charging money to clean the toilet. It is poignant and shameful, yet perfectly reasonable and natural, and merely shows the workers doing what everyone else is practicing capitalism. Moreover, by closing this brief but complex analysis with the figure of the entrepreneurial janitor, the author thereby comments upon and again debunks the bit of official and intellectual discourse which precedes it. For the awkward "intake of valuable experience" can only refer to the regime's own legitimation of the problems and social costs ofneo-liberal privatization - that the regime and putatively Chinese society as a whole is inevitably and simply going through a learning curve in the great, historical process of modernization. Thus according to official discourse, the social costs of "reform," from the smashing of the iron rice bowl of social security to massive unemployment, are all unfortunate but inevitable and temporary problems in the modernization process. For the socalled "ordinary" author, then, this cerebral, officious discourse is invoked, but only to be mocked as so much useless verbiage. What modernization and its legitimation amount to: a toilet attendant charging a bit on the side. Finally, note the central conceit of the poem that drives the argument and makes it so memorable: the remarkable metaphor, embodied in an old colloquialism, that makes the new hotels in a city full of unemployment and lacking in affordable housing akin to a crane standing among chickens. For the distant bird's-eye view of the "crane" leaves out all the telling detail and is blind to ground-level reality. So, too, there is a clever pun on "crane" as bird and as construction vehicle. Thus rather than indexing a lack of education and writing ability, this rigorously ironic statement is indeed sharp in both content and form, and poetic in its compact, dense expression of a complex thought, and range of feeling within very few words.

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So much then for at least part of the lack that Walder and Gong attribute to the workers themselves. But they see this as an advantage for the development of civil society and democracy in China. They favorably contrast the "ordinariness" and lack of education of the BW AF members with the "relatively literate" workers' protests and writings from the Cultural Revolution decade, the great majority of which were radically socialist and Maoist (Walder and Gong, "Workers" 4). For the latter were apparently too radical and militant altogether, whereas the BWAF was properly Polish and "trade unionist" in its "mentality and political orientation," and therefore represents a new future for Chinese democracy despite their comparative lack of literacy ("Workers" 3). And yet this new formation ends up being the rather old one of "working-class populism," and the incorporation of"ordinary citizens" and the working class within a "democratic movement" - the program of the left-wing of the U.S.A. 's Democratic Party before the mid- l 980s (28). As something new and innovative, as opposed to an imposition of the Euro-American way upon a recalcitrant Chinese reality, this is pretty weak tea. As for the "populist" nature of the BWAF this may be true in a banal sense, but virtually all the evidence of their actual posters and statements reveals the specifically Marxist and often avowedly Maoist orientation of the BWAF as a whole. To be sure, not all members were radical in this sense. Han Dongfang, one of the early leaders of the BW AF and still a labor activist in Hong Kong, has ironically said he is a believer in "free" markets and not socialism. 37 I do not know if the admirable and important Mr. Han still holds this view in general about markets, but as of the later 1990s and today he is adamant about the necessity of working through the official union organizations in China, as opposed to the more ethically pure but certainly less effective method of organizing labor outside these confines. But even if Han's view were representative at the time, this would hardly brand the BWAF as embodying a universal - i.e. Polish - "trade union consciousness," as if a consciousness could have no national characteristics (such as the Catholicism of Solidarnos). Moreover, the weight of the textual evidence and actions from 1989 suggests Han is more the exception that proves the rule of the socialist and "vanguard" orientation of the workers' protests. (Ascertaining their consciousness may be less important than what they said and did.) Thus not simply the repeated calls for a general strike, but the posters and appeals of the BWAF reveal its radical roots. Indeed, it is unsurprising that Walder, Gong, and others do not cite any of the documents referred to above (even though Lu's BWAF collection appears in their notes). So, too, there is no reference to workers' posters like "An Official Denunciation of Deng Drafted for Marx," or "Lenin is Crying in the Nether Regions'', or another BWAF poster, "Ten Questions," which mockingly asks the Party to step up and "explain the concept and meaning" of "revolution" (Ogden 87-8). 38 For to cite such published, public statements would present the Sinologists with great difficulty in squaring the Solidarnos!civil society model with the workers' own, stated political orientations.39 The latter's intentions and their very self-understanding are simply not part of the Sino logical equation.

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Walder and Gong's method, that of conventional social science style interviews, in fact turns out to be anti-empirical and marks an attempt to have - to incite - the workers say what they want them to: that they are pro-reform and anti-communist "trade unionists." This is indicated in the following admission: "After some probing, our gongzilian [BW AF] informants admitted that despite the severe inflation of recent years, living standards had not actually declined since the Mao era for most of them" (emphasis added) (Walder and Gong, "Workers" 20). 40 While their questions are not revealed to us, it is clear that for the experts, the workers have something to admit. Or even confess: that any number of real appearances to the contrary, the anti-Maoist and neo-liberal "reforms" were all to the good, and the workers are plain down-to-earth folk, not at all like the angry militant radicals of the Mao decades. Given the visible evidence of radical militancy (the posters, the iconography, the rhetoric), Walder and Gong's analysis - as with most Sinological understandings of Tiananmen thus stands as anti-empirical, a knowledge based on how well such statements and other signs fit into the a priori schema of civility, civil society, and modernization. As Said and others have noted, orientalism itself is profoundly antiempirical, and has "the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system" (Orienta/ism 70). Walder and Gong's dismissal of the Maoist rhetoric of the BWAF's and others' posters, and of the 1970s workers, is a sign of positional superiority and the unreflexive imposition of foreign, traveling theories. But it is also perhaps an anxiety with the "Chineseness" or "Maoist" nature of the workers. Indeed how else to explain the blindness to such visible signs of old-fashioned, proletarian militancy (e.g. the frequent rounds of "The Internationale"), of the specter of Mao and communism? This is not to say that the whole Tiananmen event was simply a "Maoist" or working-class movement, nor that there is some essence to "Chineseness." But there are certainly deeply held notions of the latter, and among foreign observers at least, one of these has been that of the "fundamentalist" and menacing Maoist "Red Chinese." It is this figure that haunts Walder's desire to make interviewees - constructed as anthropological objects - speak against such an identity. They must reduce the writings and activities of the workers to an interpretation that makes them fit within a "normal" or universal pattern of "democratic" protest, trade unionism, and modem "development." Even militant, proletarianized strikers must become-the-same. A full analysis of the parallels between the Mao era and the 1989 movement is beyond the scope of the present chapter. But given the orientalist recoding of 1989 as a (failed) break with that era, some remarks are necessary. The essential point here is that the 1989 event was not in fact a break, but rather conditioned by the mass democracy of the Mao years and the Cultural Revolution. As noted, the most visible signs of this range from Maoist iconography to rhetoric (red books, badges, portraits, slogans, demands). While the BWAF posters speak for themselves in this regard, equally striking is the popularity among students of Mao's Cultural Revolution slogans about Red Guard youth. As student leader Shen Tong has recalled, referring to a march he led, megaphone in hand:

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I walked up and down alongside the marchers, encouraging them by calling out some of Mao's sayings .... 'Those who put down student movements have a bleak future' and 'If the students don't act, who will?' - slogans that seemed perfect for us now. (Almost 180) This is not to say that Tiananmen was simply the continuation of the CR. Some students and virtually all the intellectuals explicitly contrasted their "pure," patriotic movement from that of the Red Guards. This is to be expected given past Maoist "punishments" of the intellectual class and the de-Maoification. But the complex, paradoxical relationship between Tiananmen, Maoism, and the CR as evinced by the iconography and rhetoric - does indeed speak to a larger history, or more specifically to a certain Marxist or revolutionary construction of this that remains available even decades after 1989. 41 Here we need to return to Zhang Xudong's point about the CR being China's largest, singular form of mass democracy. This point acknowledges the violence, chaos, and ultimate failure of the CR, but also targets the reification of Western, procedural democracy as the one true type. It posits instead the history of China in the last century and emphasizes the mass and participatory aspects of"democracy." From here, one can indeed see Tiananmen as in part a legacy of the Mao era, and the return of the CR's massive, actualized "right to rebel." The point here is not just that the form of Tiananmen, qua protest, owes much to the CR (the rhetoric, the enormous mobilization, the anger over corruption and bureaucracy). It is also part of the history of democratic or popular struggle since 1949 that was against the state bureaucracy and Maoist in inspiration. In short, in telling the history of democracy in China as a failed but inevitable struggle against a feudal and then one-Party state, of which Tiananmen is just one more failed example, Sinological-orientalism elides the fact that Mao and his followers were also attempting to democratize the state and society he and they created. To be sure, a multi-party voting system was never an option, for historical and ideological reasons (the Cold War and the "dictatorship of the proletariat") as well as the quintessentially Maoist passion for a politics and democracy of commitment, mobilization, and participation above all else. That most Westerners do not share these beliefs, or that we can see the relative importance of the vote, does not mean there was no democracy or rational political theory in China. Thus Lin Chun, herself at times a critic of the Maoist state as a form of "patriarchal socialism," notes that "the short-lived experiments encouraged by Mao in workers' participation and workplace democracy were truly valuable" even though they did not last ("China Today" 39). And the reason they did not last was the tum to the right after Mao's death. The essential point here, for our purposes, is that under Mao there were actually existing attempts at a greater worker's democracy. The most famous/ infamous example of this remains the short-lived Shanghai Commune of 1967, but one must also include the formation, over a period of eighteen months, of mass organizations (such as the workers' management groups documented by

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Charles Bettleheim ) and provincial "revolutionary committees" that were to transfonn the existing Party structure (Gray, Rebellions 352-6). These organizations and committees included workers and allowed them a political voice within their workplaces and communes. So, too, one should recall that it was during the CR that Mao and the left pushed for the right to strike in the constitution (a right later rescinded in 1980), in direct response to the strikes that erupted from time to time during the CR decade, especially in the 1970s. In short, as Maurice Meisner has noted, "the Cultural Revolution politically activated China's urban working class for the first time since the proletariat had been so brutally crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's armies in 1927" (Mao's China 311). These struggles for a greater worker's democracy ultimately failed because of Mao's and the left's inability to institutionalize their programs and gains, and because the CR was forcibly brought to an end by Hua Guofeng and Deng. This failure - a noble failure - should not blind us to the history of this struggle, or to its connections and influences on Tiananmen, including its status as a decades-long process of political education for the workers of Tiananmen and even today. This aspect of Chinese and especially workers' historical political culture militates against the Sinological coding of Tiananmen as a failed yet inevitable moment in China's becoming-the-same as "us" through a universal narrative of "nonnal," "civil" democratization. So, too, it offers a counter explanation for the so-called "nostalgia" that workers and some students felt for the leadership and society of the Mao era. This is partly explained by the previous decades of revolutionary culture and proletarian or Marxist education, including the more beneficial aspects of the Cultural Revolution (rural health, education and development programs, agitation for women's equality beyond labor-force enrollment). Put another way, the decades-long struggles for a new, radically egalitarian order, as well as still influential symbols and mythemes like "the Yan'an way", persist even some twenty years after Tiananmen. And they persist despite, or perhaps because of, the Dengist "some must get rich first" propaganda and the influence of consumerism and neo-liberalism in China. The so-called nostalgia for the Mao era - for the revolutionary passion, ideals, and lack of corruption - is further explained by the return of massive economic inequalities and exploitation already well under way by 1989 during Deng's capitalist revolution from above and of a "highly elitist school system" that in effect bars the working class (Meisner, Deng Era 345). For the economic injustices that were already evident in 1989 have only grown worse in the ensuing decades. Thus when Walder and Gong make a point of steering away their interviewees from proclaiming that even economically things were better in the Mao era, they miss the point that such nostalgia is not some fantasy, some mere yearning for a Golden Age or an instance of residual brainwashing. It is rather a rational, ethical, and yet passionately political response to real conditions of existence, and one based on historical circumstances inherited from the Mao era, as opposed to the ideal type of political protest as it exists in the heads of China experts. As with 1989, there is no doubt that Mao's imprint looms large even today; that among peasants, urban workers, and even some intellectuals, Mao is still

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seen quite positively, the efforts of Sinology, liberal "reformers," and the Party leadership itself notwithstanding. 43 This is a dimension of Chinese political and popular culture that Sinology, and the West more generally, have yet to deal with, much preferring - needing - to see Mao as either a totalitarian monster just like Stalin, or as a depraved despot (as in numerous "tell-all" biographies). 44 In short, given the "received wisdom" that constructs Maoism as totalitarianism or "oriental despotism" (and these are synonymous in the present context), a crucial bit of knowledge for shoring up the capitalist West's self-constitution as the very epiphany of reason, freedom, and democracy, it is no accident that the specters of Mao and communism need to be exorcized. It is this dynamic, rooted in both fantasy and knowledge production, that results in statements like Barme's "Mao bin Laden or is it Osama Zedong?" or Nathan's dehumanizing summation of the collectivist era: "Mao's people complied out of patriotism, a sense of unworthiness, faith in a despot's wisdom, and because they preferred to be among the victimizers than among the victims" (Nathan, "Epilogue" 215). 45 While written before the recent war on Iraq, such statements betray a neo-colonial arrogance as well as anxieties about "terrorism" and fundamentalism in the pax Americana and "post" Cold War order. They also underscore the fact that orientalism and positional superiority continue to constitute the identity of the U.S.-West. With this in mind, it is no accident that the civil society and "democratic" modernization template are dominant within the China field, as today that template and American culture remain deeply informed by a Cold War triumphalism and a mythic exceptionalism that the rest of the world must somehow follow.

3

Maoist discourse and its demonization

You remember Kosygin at the 23rd Congress! 'Communism means the raising of living standards, ' of course' And swimming is a way of putting on a pair of trunks! - Mao Zedong, as told to (or imagined by) Andre Malraux

If it is repeated often enough will a truth-claim necessarily become a truth? Such appears to be the case with the verdict on historical Maoism. The demonization of the Mao era is a general, if under-explored feature of China studies and intellectual-political culture around the world - not least among liberal Chinese intellectuals. 1 In this chapter I critique this production of truth about Chinese Maoism by documenting where it has occurred, and what new knowledge and figures of colonial discourse it turns upon. En route, I will argue that the "new" truth about the Mao era - perhaps not new but what was always already "known" or at least assumed by the U.S.-West - is an indispensible part of Sinological-orientalism. Indeed the demonization of Maoism is arguably the lynchpin of the entire discursive edifice surrounding the P.R.C. because it serves as what China is in the process of overcoming on its road to normality and political modernity. In that sense it is also a sign of what contemporary China still lacks. It is the presupposition of the construction of post-Mao China as becoming-the-same as "us." The Mao era of socialist construction and mass mobilization is what China is recovering from; it is conceived of as some type of oriental aberration, a despotic nightmare from which it is still trying to fully awake; at the very least it is a space of negative difference from the present. Most simply put, the chief blame for China's lingering history of political, economic, and cultural deformation and "lag" lies with Mao Zedong and his Party state. This in itself is a highly interesting formulation. It is certainly better, in a liberal-humanist-Cold War kind of way, than older traditions of blaming China's problems on the Chinese character, race, or even Confucianism. But what it shares with such older views, in addition to an implicit teleology, is a refusal to take the actually existing, "Chinese" realities and views seriously as something other than negativity and lack. By this I mean that such views - the truth on Chinese Maoism - do not take the Chinese revolution or Chinese-Marxist developmental/constructive

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efforts seriously. Not in terms of either what they achieved (or even failed in), what was attempted or intended, the complexities and ambiguities of what resulted, nor in terms of the self-understanding of the era and its partisans, actors, or witnesses. Nor do the complexities and differences of contemporary China fare too much better; it is allowed to be an emergent and rising economy, but not so much an emergent society (to put this more conventionally). By "taking it seriously" I refer then not only to the Maoist accomplishments - its other failures notwithstanding - in political economy or social development, and its achievements in egalitarianism and human welfare. I refer more fundamentally and conceptually to the ways in which that revolution and post-1949 trajectory until at least 1979 understood itself, so to speak: what it said and did, and what it was trying to do. I want to emphasize its positive record, surely, but also its positivity or complexity, including this level of self-understanding and discourse. Above all else, the hostile or demonizing knowledge about the Mao era is premised upon the negation of Maoist discourse itself. By that, and following the work of Gao Mobo among others, I refer to the rational-practical-affective framework that enabled people to make sense of their lives and world during the Mao years. I characterize this further below, momentarily. But it is the negation of this discourse that, in tum, allows the Mao era to be re-coded as totalitarianism, extremism, brainwashing, terror. Or in somewhat more sympathetic codings: as sheer, sublime utopianism or something like a spiritualistic apotheosis of collective desire. It produces the triumphalism of China discourse vis-a-vis the Mao era: that we now know the awful truth. That discourse and that whole era need not be taken seriously aside from its body counts because it was, in a word, fake. That is a view that can be easily verified by liberal intellectuals on the mainland and diaspora, or by self-professed "dissidents" of the current regime. (It is not I think controversial to say that these largely Westernized and English fluent Chinese intellectuals, businessmen, and artists represent China to the West.) But this shift and regime of truth is about still more than the triumph of de-Maoification, the market mentality, liberalism, American education, the Cold War victory of the U.S.-West, and so on: it reflects not only a Cold War perspective but - as my analyses below and throughout this book attempt to show - is also a colonial discourse that turns upon orientalist tropes about despotism, cruelty, passivity, and irrationality running rampant in China. It marks China's essential difference from the normative U.S.-West, and again it is this Maoism that China must and is leaving behind. In short, this new knowledge of the Mao era marks the imbrication of Cold War ("totalitarian") and colonial discourse within an orientalist production of knowledge. It is "new" in the sense that prior to the mid-1970s the "anti" views of the P.R.C. were always countered to a certain extent by the very visible specter of the Maoist revolution and discourse: their existence in China at least implied that the self-understanding of the Chinese - howsoever "brainwashed" - was different than that of the Cold War and racist discourse about Red China. There were far fewer "dissidents" and exiles, not to mention Sinologists, who could serve their representative functions.

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And one should not underestimate the (past) symbolic power and good name of China in the former Third World and various postcolonial contexts. With the Western triumphalism after the "end" of the Cold War as well as real de-Maoification in China, this is simply no longer the case. So, too, the resurgence of modernizationist and liberal-humanist discourse around the world marks the same eclipse. It is this shift that I wish to document below by examining how knowledge of the Mao era is produced in a way that smacks of colonial discourse - both in terms of old-fashioned (Cold War) orientalism and the enumerative modality investigated by Bernard Cohn among others in their studies of knowledge production under British imperialism. I begin with a discussion of Maoist discourse and of scholarship on the nature of Maoist governance; from there I will attend to codings of the relatively under-studied yet crucial period of the Great Leap Forward and its famine. While mapping the production of such Sinological knowledge, I also broach a wider argument: that this is a global phenomenon, a part of cultural/ideological globalization and its attendant spread of Eurocentrism and orientalism if also in liberal or other guises. What I am saying, in other words, is that despite the obvious and in other ways welcome increase of flows of information, commodities, and people in recent decades, what we have seen is in fact an increase in the orientalist production of knowledge. In the case of China, this turns fundamentally upon the negation of Maoist discourse in favor of an orientalist coding of the Mao era as aberration or nightmare.

Maoist discourse and its abnegation Immediately preceding his reference to the "unworthiness" and blind faith of "Mao's people," Andrew Nathan nicely encapsulates the dominant Sinological view of those Maoist decades in an ex cathedra pronouncement: [The CCP] built a system that tied the peasants to the land, kept consumption to a minimum, fixed each person permanently in place in a work unit dominated by a single party secretary against whom there was no appeal, classified each individual as a member of a good or bad class, and called on each citizen to show that he or she was progressive by demonstrating enthusiasm for disciplining himself and persecuting others. ("Epilogue" 215) Later, we will in passing cover some of the goals and historical record of Maoism that Nathan runs roughshod over; but what is most pertinent here are the assumptions which frame his account. In addition to being of bad character, the Chinese have no agency and are entirely state-manipulated, willfully carrying out repressive policy. That the majority of Chinese participants, even today, do not remotely seem to see that era and their own activity in that way matters not. I will return to this point about self-understanding shortly, in an excursus on Maoist discourse. So, too, Nathan and others beg a number of questions about

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the remarkable mass mobilizations and "mass democracy" of the Mao years. Those campaigns from the land reform onwards (excluding perhaps the late, exhausted Cultural Revolution campaigns against Confucius and Lin Piao) were remarkable not just for their affective intensity and violence, but for their popularity and grass-rootedness: those forms of democratic and political legitimacy elided by merely procedural notions of democracy. But the Sinologist knows the native and the "truth" of the regime better than him- or herself. Such rhetoric may seem familiar in the years following the "war against terror," and we should remind ourselves that it is not only Islam-centered area studies that are in the business of documenting civilization-threatening "fundamentalists." Recall, for example, Barme's reference to "Mao bin Laden" or Edward Friedman's summing up of four decades of P.R.C. rule: "The Chinese people, who fell a humiliating half-century behind their East Asian neighbours, are still paying the heavy price for the crimes and errors of Mao's fundamentalist ways" ("Flaws" 154). That the implicit facts of poor socio-economic development under Maoism were and continue to be contradicted by, for example, the World Bank and the U.S. govemment 2 goes without saying. In recent years, as assorted experts try to suss out the deeper, substantial reasons for China's rise (beyond market-magic, Asian values, and so forth), there has been a chorus of voices attesting to the impressive economic and developmental growth of China under Mao. Researchers as otherwise diverse as Chris Bramall, Maurice Meisner, Jean C. Oi, Carl Riskin, Li Minqi, and Y. Y. Kueh among others have all attested not only to the growth rates of the Maoist economy and its leaps forward in infrastructure and "human capital," but also how this was indispensible for the later take-offs in rural and urban China. 3 The neo-classical economist Yueh will even argue that the Maoist economy was not only necessary for the later explosions in growth, but that the Dengist reforms have numerous continuities with it. Not a break, but a continuation and transformation. At any rate, if it is true that the Maoist political-economic record was impressive overall (and in context) and therefore improved the living conditions and lives of so many, admittedly through an authoritarian but also egalitarian Party-state, then it ill behooves comfortably middle-class, privileged scholars to cavalierly write off or simply elide this achievement. Note, too, Friedman's denial of the contemporaneity (coevalness) of China - it exists in the past, stuck back there, and not yet, not quite in the present. But what is remarkable is the figure of "fundamentalism" appearing in a Sino logical text. It is as if the specter of radical Islam is animating Friedman, even to the point where the Kremlinological shibboleths of totalitarianism and police-states are surpassed, now to fully racialize both Mao and "Mao's people" 4 as benighted others, and to deny them any temporal simultaneity. This imaginary link between Maoism and (Islamic) fundamentalism can be further seen - as will be detailed in the next chapter - in DeLillo' s postmodern novel Mao II; it equates Maoism with the "cult" of the Korean "Moonies" and a Lebanese "terrorist" group in war-tom Beirut. All of these representations of Maoist China tum upon the threat to the autonomy of the liberal subject and the American Dream of a life free of social determinants.

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So strong is the demonization of Maoism as akin to a retrograde Islamic fundamentalism that it appears in quite different types of scholarship. Take, for instance, Dennis Klass and Robert Goss' s article in Death Studies that equates Maoism with Wahhabi Islam. Both "movements" represent societies that "brutally" "police" death and mourning rituals in the name of new, statist cultural "grief narratives" that aim to destroy family identity (794, 807). What strikes one about all of these pieces are less the ideas or facts that are marshaled (often anecdotally) than the very positing of the general equivalence. They unreflexively yoke together radically different cultures, political programs, and moments in history, all in the name of scoring points against an unholy trinity of Maoism, "backwardness," and fundamentalism. The problem is less one of comparison than with abstract, reifying equivalence, and with the concomitant failure to take seriously either pole of analysis, or to provide some measure of methodological self-reflexivity. What is further striking in such equations of Maoism with extremism/fundamentalism is that the only - and unacknowledged - material, concrete link between them is that the subjects are not white. A further sign of the discursive articulation between Maoism and fundamentalist "extremism" is the oft-repeated equation of Maoism and the Nazi holocaust. Thus Vera Schwarz and neo-Confucianist Tu Wei-ming, echoing the Readers Digest and some in the exiled dissident community, draw a straight line not from Hegel to Marx to the Gulag, but from Hitler, the Storm Troopers, and Auschwitz to the decades of Maoist rule and the Cultural Revolution in particular.5 Here the link is not argued so much as asserted as an obviousness; it rests entirely on the fact that in both "cases" there were popular mobilizations, violence, and suffering. Under this criterion it is hard to imagine any significant historical period of change that would not fit the bill, from the U.S. Depression to anti-colonial wars of liberation around the globe. Note, too, that the death toll of the CR decade seems to lie somewhere between 34,000 and as much as 400,000. 6 A terrible toll, but simply of another, lesser order than the holocaust. Relatedly, James Gregor has recently given the lie to that stream in Chinese historiography that wants to equate Maoism (and the Guomindang) as of a piece with European fascism. 7 But Gao has most elaborately refuted the CR-Holocaust link, arguing that the violence in China was not planned by the state but was committed by various groups of Red Guards, Rebels, strikers, and the Army at different times and for different reasons. These last range from personal revenge and revolutionary zeal to individual persecutions and civil-war-like battles between armed groups. 8 So, too, the CR - a left-wing, anti-bureaucratic mass democracy campaign in so far as it was intended or directed by the state (the leftist/Maoist line at any rate )9 - did indeed bring some unarguably democratic or otherwise important benefits to people. As Gao has argued, benefits included: the creation of a cheap and fairly effective health care system, the expansion of elementary education in rural China, and affirmative-action policies that promoted gender equality .... In terms of health and education many of the rural poor are now worse off than they were during the Cultural Revolution.

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Maoist discourse and its demonization Similarly, many of the gains made in achieving gender equality have been lost. (Gao, "Debating" 424)

One can go on and list other positive developments during this time - scientific and technological progress (in agriculture, medicine, industry, even archeology), the development of still-interesting and valuable art forms (model operas, popular music, poster art, and so on), and so on. The industrial economy grew by leaps and bounds aside from one year, and agricultural production kept pace with a booming population (i.e. grain yields increased significantly) whilst communes were working out new strategies for rural industrialization, irrigation, and so forth. China sent massive amounts of aid to Vietnam, and also to Africa, while brokering peace with the U.S. in 1972. 10 So, too, the cultural revolution actually has important or simply undeniable political legacies in China today. I have briefly considered these in relation to Tiananmen earlier. The Maoist "right to rebel" against Party and other forms of authority is surely one of these, as are various forms of protest today within China among workers, peasants, and others. So, too, if there is to be another radical-left movement in the P.R.C., or simply one that is mass democratic or aimed beyond electoral politics, it might find its roots within the rebels and so-called "ultra-leftists" from the CR decade as well as within the heritage of socialist economics, the iron rice-bow 1, and so on. 11 These forced equivalences between "extremism," Nazism, and Maoist China, as well as the straightforward demonizations of Maoist rule, accurately reflect the current production of truth about that era. This is to say that such works reflect less the real Truth of Maoism as now revealed in the current period than a shift in the very terms and ways of seeing the China of the revolutionary period. Much the same could be said for global shifts in understanding the entire radical postwar period of national liberations and revolutions. It is not the truth of Maoist history but Maoist discourse itself that has been negated and effaced. When we come upon such "links" or chains of equivalence between radically different, discontinuous phenomena like Hitler, Wahhabism, Mao, Pol Pot, and so on, we should see that this statement is only possible on the basis of some larger discursive formation (and its positions of enunciation): Sinologicalorientalism. While in the form of knowledge and endowed with authority, such statements do not reflect some Real China or the Real CR and still less some transcendent space of "extremists." They speak instead to the self-constitution of the putatively liberal, free, rational, modem West. That is, what in the last instance makes these demonizations of Maoism possible is the emergence and then dominance of Sinological-orientalism. This entails a subsequent fading of Maoist discourse and China's revolutionary problematic into a merely residual form or status, a disappearance effected through the forcible, often violent deMaoification process in China and its capitalist "boom," the end of the Cold War, and the resurgent triumph of conservative, anti-communist, and arguably colonialist thought within China studies and global intellectual-political culture. This dominance represents the present outcome of what Stuart Hall has

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theorized as the fundamental mode of politics: the hegemonic struggle over the legitimation or de-legitimation of discourse. 12 Thus notwithstanding the triumphalism that prevails from Harvard's Fairbank Center to elite, liberal circles within the CCP and Chinese intelligentsia, it is not the real Truth which has been revealed since the 1970s but the circulation of a new, largely unchallenged form of Sinological-orientalism at work in the world. What one does have - in addition to the traces, legacies, and facts of specific campaigns of which we do have some record - is recourse to the Maoist discourse that existed at the time and that still exists, albeit residually and increasingly in commodified form. It is this that has been negated by Sinological-orientalism, and this that China studies no longer has to take seriously in the "post" Cold War period, defined in part by the tum to capitalism in China itself. Discourse, then, is not secondary to the real history or facts but in some sense primary: no reality without representation. To see Chinese Maoism not as totalitarian madness, an assault upon liberalism, common sense, and human rights, we need to put it back into its context as a powerfully affective and rational way of thinking, acting, and being-in-theworld. This requires a basic notion of Maoist discourse. Briefly put, the first step to circumvent the demonization of the Mao era is to recover analytically the complex discursive formation of Maoism: not simply Maoist ideology (Mao's thought and sayings, the Maoist line), but the "common-sense knowledge and socially shared values, beliefs, practices, administrative measures, disciplinary technology, education, and so on" that "provided a framework and standard for the Chinese to relate to in their thinking and behaviour and to make sense of their lives" (Gao, "Maoist" 14). To amend Lenin on Marxism, Maoist discourse was all-powerful because it appeared to be true; it was the regime of truth that powerfully held sway from, say, Yan'an until the great reversal effected first by Hua Guofeng and then Deng. This is a call to move from the vulgar notion of a brainwashing totalitarianism to a more positive, Foucaultian notion of discourse and power, one that includes three crucial dimensions of the power/knowledge nexus: the non-discursive apparatuses of Maoist governance beyond liberal, state-phobic notions of an all-powerful despotic state; the self-understanding of Mao-era subjects; and the knowledge, statements, or content that Maoist discourse offered. I am arguing, then, for the necessity of a roughly Foucaultian and historical-materialist account of Maoist discourse and revolutionary govemmentality. Put another way, to restore the complexity of the Mao era we need to deal with its own self-understanding: what it did and what it said, or what it said it did, and allow this to mediate our retrospective production of knowledge about this most radical of eras. Maoist discourse merits book-length treatment, but I will briefly characterize these three dimensions before moving on to their negation or elision in scholarship today. To illustrate the first of these we can do no better than to recall feminist historian Wang Zheng's pathbreaking essay on growing up as a "revolutionary youth" during the Cultural Revolution. Wang explores the complexity and positive aspects of the gender politics of Maoist discourse during

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these years. She finds it to lie precisely in the ultimately failed but nonetheless real rejection of "femininity" and the category of "woman." Her focus is on the leftist state's deployment of the early feminist concept of"gender neutrality" and the proffered identity of "revolutionary youth," "communist successor," or "socialist constructor" (51). (This concept signified the non-importance of gender in terms of social and political roles and a rejection of traditional, Confucian notions about the nature of women; like the goal of women's liberation, it was incorporated into the Party and movement during the 1920s.) As Wang notes, the pull of femininity still existed outside of official discourse and the public sphere, and it is not as if patriarchy could just be abolished by decree. But the state's attempts to revolutionize the culture in part in the name of "gender neutrality" were not mere rhetoric but institutionalized during the CR. The experiences of going down to the countryside and working side by side with other men, women, and peasants, the various forms of activism and political participation available to women, and the "exchanges of revolutionary experience" were notable even beyond their obvious and important class egalitarianism. The aim was: to situate citizens in new kinds of social relationships, to pull both women and men out of the web of Confucian kinship obligations and to redirect their ethical duties from their kin to the party and the nation. Scholars may call this statist scheme manipulation or domination, but few have noticed that the enforcement of this scheme disrupted conventional gender norms and created new discursive spaces that allowed a cohort of young women to grow up without being always conscious of their gender. (Wang, "Call" 52) Rather than have us dismiss the enforcement of gender and other egalitarianisms as totalitarian, Wang asks us to see the achievement and complexity of such state-feminist schemes. Of course in the current intellectual climate in the China field and well beyond, from "postmodern" theorists to straight-up libertarianism and neo-liberalism, a positive or nuanced understanding of the state is alien indeed. But this has more to do with intellectual fashion and de-politicization than with substantial political theorizing, more of a degradation of social democracy than an insight into the nature of the state in the West or China. But the state and its power and capacities remain the only game in town for social and democratic progress in China or otherwise. It is of course a staple of Sino logical thinking to identify China in particular with an all-powerful and all-repressive state apparatus. I remain convinced that this is largely untrue, except in the bad ways. It remains unable to successfully govern across the vast space of China in the better ways, aside from mobilizations for national disasters. The Maoist era was if nothing else an attempt to find a state-form appropriate to an egalitarian and mass-democratic China; the promulgation of gender neutrality and state feminism - as weak and unfulfilled as this ultimately was - was one instance of this. The point then via Wang Zheng is that Maoist rhetoric was not mere rhetoric.

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There were real attempts and real successes, if also all too temporary, at the institutionalization of egalitarianism and revolutionary culture and identity. These aspects of the CR were not fake, mere smokescreens for top-level politics within the Party. They happened. They were actually existing social practices. Relatedly, the self-understanding of Mao-era subjects is also different and more complicated than we have assumed. We can again recall Wang Zheng's account and the taking up by "revolutionary youth" of the identities and discourses of "communist successors" in a selfless, zealous pursuit of social change and self-transformation. A pursuit both at times difficult and labor-intensive, and yet deeply meaningful and pleasurable. In a passage that illustrates the shift from Maoist to post-Maoist (or "liberal" or "human rights") discourse and self-understanding, Wang notes: Everyone who was talking [by the late 1980s], including the once victimizing Red Guards, was a victim scarred by the Maoist dictatorship. But I could not think of any example in my life to present myself as a victim or a victimizer. I did not know how to feel about my many happy memories and cherished experiences of a time that most vocal people now called the dark age. ("Call" 35) Thus like the other contributors to the scholarly collection of memoirs in Some of Us, Wang refuses the victimization narrative on the grounds that it did not and does not fit her and their experiences. Similarly, Gao Mobo has noted that while the reasons for his own brief incarceration during the CR seem ridiculous to him now (he was accused of hiding "feudal" kinship records in his village), at the time they seemed normal. Both views here speak to the diversity of experiences during the CR. But they illustrate as well a fundamental aspect of the CR in context: that it was not terrifying madness but had its own logic and normality, its own way of being in the true and own way of being. That it may seem different now - that it only conjures up terror and denunciations, and again "extremism" - does not reflect the real truth of the era having been discovered and made known worldwide since the 1980s. It reflects a change in discourse, an historical shift from one discursive formation to another, from Maoist discourse to what we can call a liberal humanist, even Dengist formation that has swept the world since the 1970s with the rise of globalization and the tum to the right in intellectual-political culture in China and the West. What has changed is the end of an era and a fundamental rupture in the discourse available to subjects, the collapse of the CR by the mid- l 970s, and the shift to deMaoification, capitalist reform, and its attendant Dengist/neo-liberal rationality. So, too, we should not underestimate the intellectual/artistic Occidentalism or Western-fetishism of the 1980s and beyond (both official versions and unofficial). As Gao sums this up: Those who write ... of the Mao era and the CR tend to recall their memories with bitterness, condemnation and even horror as if what happened was a

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Maoist discourse and its demonization nightmare from which they had just woken up. This is because they are using the current discourse to identify with certain values, doing that to construct the past. In this enterprise of constructing the past through the discourse of the present, remembering the CR as a nightmare identifies with the West, its values and way of life, especially those of the United States. (Battle 37)

Self-understanding under Maoist discourse, then, is at odds with current stories of victimization and human rights abuses, not least because liberal notions of human rights and the sacrosanct individual were simply not in circulation during the highly politicized and Marxist/revolutionary context of the immediate Chinese past (nor the further past). So, too, the limits and non-universality of liberal individualism have long been exposed by the emphases on collective or communal belonging and responsibilities in traditional Chinese culture. While Sinology has long noted this last fundamental aspect, it has yet to deploy it against the rewriting of the Mao era as an assault upon the former - the Wes tern, Judeo-Christian liberal subject. Following Gao's and Wang's narratives, as well as emphatically positive, "nostalgic" films about the Cultural Revolution like 1975's "Breaking With Old Ideas" (Jue lie) or the more recent "In the Heat of the Sun" ( Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994 ), we can more accurately characterize this self-understanding, albeit briefly. Certainly it has to tum upon the exercise of new practices: freedoms of movement and political participation, in part due to a freedom from traditional schooling and a relative absence of parental control for youth, or from status quo workplace and administrative authority for others. But above all, such selfunderstanding turns upon the identity of a "communist successor" who is "making revolution" and remolding one's self through dousipixiu or the ethical mandate to "combat self, criticize revisionism." While a deeply, passionately held identity and while including radical, even violent forms of political participation like calling out those in authority and so on, this still has to be seen as a rational and practical, if revolutionary, identity and interpretive framework. So, too, we need to recall that for many, the CR period was simply a time of youthful energy and exuberance - the "times of our lives" captured by "In the Heat of the Sun." The third aspect of Maoist discourse - its statements or content at the level of what is thought and said - can also be briefly characterized. This includes, as noted above, not only "Mao Zedong Thought" 13 and Mao's texts, but key planks of the overall discourse, such as the famous emphases on contradictions, class struggle, continuous revolution, serving the people, and so on. Perhaps the paramount element here - and it overlaps with the emphases on contradiction; class and "two-line struggle" - is the friend/enemy distinction that Michael Dutton, drawing on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, has recently explored in his rich history of Chinese policing. 14 (As will be recalled, Schmitt sees the friend/enemy distinction as constitutive of political theory - indeed of the form of politics as such.) The essential idea here - one that like "gender neutrality" was fully

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institutionalized in the Mao era from 1926 to the late 1970s - is that this basic either/or, friend/enemy distinction is a foundational political binarism that lies at the heart of the Chinese/Maoist revolution. From Mao's own texts to the movement's response to the Kuomintang's annihilation campaigns and the later heat of the so-called Cold War, the revolution and all those involved in it understood politics as being a politics of commitment that turned upon an early question from 1926 of Mao Zedong, one shared exactly by Schmitt: "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution." 15 This question became the guiding one of the post-liberation era until the economic reform of the 1980s. Before that era of depoliticization, the friend/enemy distinction was mapped onto the class question (worker/capitalist, revolutionary/ revisionist) and made class a far from merely economic category but one that turned on social and subjective factors and passions. This was an admittedly reductive or dyadic division, but also an enormously productive and impassioned one. Recall that for Schmitt as well as for much of the Marxist political tradition, obviously so opposed in all other ways, politics are by definition, in their essence and in their inner logic, fundamentally reductive and line-drawing. Even "rainbow coalitions" have enemies, if they are to be political at all. As Dutton notes, "the new Maoist revolutionary state was little more than a condensation of the friend/enemy distinction as it was applied both to the question of government and to the onto-political question of life" ("Passionately" 103). It produced a uniquely Maoist form of govemmentality: Dutton's example is how the police came not simply to preserve peace, the traditional function of policing, but to protect the revolution and the Party from revisionism and death. It moreover produced a China that was: a state of commitment politics lived on the knife-edge of a binary division. It produced a life both extremely dangerous but also utterly life-affirming. It gave purpose to one's existence and offered a sense of belonging that would fill one's soul. (Policing 313) This lived and institutionalized binarism formed the basis of all political thinking and moreover made life a political project structured by an intense "dyadic form" (Policing 313). It was used, paradoxically, to both ameliorate and produce political passions and desires. But contra Dutton himself, we should also emphasize the centrality of Marxism and class within - or indeed as - the friend/enemy distinction within Maoist China. I will tum to the notion of two-line struggle below. But the point here is that Maoist discourse and actually existing Maoist China understood itself, and acted and lived along class lines (capitalist/socialist; worker-peasant-soldier/bourgeois; revolutionary/"revisionist," and so on). Class lines understood in Marxist or, if you insist, in Chinese-Marxist discursive ways; even the famous or infamous popular understandings of class in the Cultural Revolution ("blood lines" and "family backgrounds") were undeniably Marxist

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and theoretical in a real way. It follows from this that if Schmitt as well as Marx and later Mao et al. were correct about the definition or essence of politics as well as about the realities of class, then Maoist, revolutionary China was the most political and most Marxist space on Earth; whether one likes this or not. To describe all of this as totalitarian is to depoliticize it and to ignore the selfunderstandings of the actual people involved. This is all to say that those studies of Maoist China that do not take on board this structuring, dyadic governmentality and way of life therefore leave a lot at the door. They effectively depoliticize Chinese politics, even when analyzing the - usually top-level, elite - political "facts" of the time (of purges, mobilizations, factional disputes, and so on). Which is to say they often get the facts wrong as well. Without some notion of Maoist discourse, of what being in the true of the Mao era and revolution meant and including this structuring, supple friend/ enemy binarism, a void is produced. This void is quickly filled by notions of despotic, personalized court-politics, and Cold War, illiberal notions of a duped, terrified, or passive populace of several hundred millions just doing what they are told. One of the problems with orientalism, then, remains that it depoliticizes. That is one way of seeing its sometimes sly, sometimes overt justifications and rationalizations of imperialism and colonialism in Asia over the last several hundred years (as in Said's analysis). In its Sinological form it depoliticizes the Mao era and beyond, effectively removing the question of imperialism - or the geo-political conflict of the Cold War - from the China field, and simply negating through elision both Maoist/revolutionary discourse and the real political struggles and divides within China after 1949. One need not subscribe to Marxism or Maoism (let alone to Schmittian politics) in order to appreciate this point. A particular era or conjuncture is not in the end reducible to its own discourses or our own retrospective ones, nor to its own self-understanding. But these are nonetheless indispensible starting points for historical and materialist understanding, as well as for circumventing the traps of an essentially colonial or chauvinist, if not orientalist, historiography or anthropology. At the very least, the past in this sense must be allowed to mediate our present understanding. If we do not attend to the self-understanding of the past and past actors (or of the historical present), as well as the governing discourses of the time, then what is it that we are studying?

On Maoist governance as oriental despotism Having established a basis for understanding the concept of Maoist discourse, we can now see how this is negated in scholarship on the nature of governance during the Mao era, and of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and its attendant famine in particular. The idea of an essential continuity to the Mao years lies at the heart of Roderick MacFarquhar's three-volume survey of elite "court politics" under Mao (rendered as the new emperor of China), The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. The subtitle of the last volume - "The Coming of the Cataclysm" - shows his hand vis-a-vis popular Western views of the CR as an

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unspeakable horror (yet a veritable cottage industry). It also offers a naturalistic metaphor to subtly "other" China and Chinese history. It is as if the decade, or the previous one as well, were about the nature of an ancient land and people unable to break out of a cycle of tragedies and cyclical catastrophes from floods and famines to a mad emperor's despotic rule. But the claim for continuity between the Leap and the CR remains a sound one for reasons other than what the author suggests (the power grabs and personalities of Mao et al.). It is further supported by the very different, and politically opposed work of William Hinton. Writing at the end of a decades-long career as the chief chronicler of rural, grass roots change in China, Hinton came to see the defining element of Maoism-in-power as the ideological and on-the-ground "two-line struggle" between the leftist, anti-market, and mass line of Mao and the Sovietized, pro-market, and vanguardist or top-down line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. This was, in other words, a split between left and right within the Communist Party itself that emerged for the first time in full at the Lushan Plenum during the crisis of the Great Leap Forward (about which, more below). It was a struggle - a Schmittian binarism, we can say - over the priority to be given to relations versus forces of production, planning versus markets, local control versus Party centralization, and rural versus urban development. As Hinton's ethnographic histories of Long Bow (Changzhi) and related villages makes clear, the two lines were certainly part of the locals' vocabulary and experience, albeit in a complex and at times contradictory or over-lapping form. 16 The "lines" were a part of Maoist discourse and of actually existing Chinese political history. But they have in recent years been suppressed within Sinological knowledge production. So, too, the brute fact of Deng et al.' s enforced dismantling - often at the expense of the peasants' own preference - of the entire collective mode of economy and governance for a more centralized and capitalist mode (rooted in Liu' s helmsmanship in the early 1960s) should certainly make it quite clear that there were two contested lines and development strategies. Maurice Meisner further notes that "the egalitarian and populist thrust of the Great Leap Forward had profound anti-bureaucratic implications - and encountered powerful bureaucratic resistance" (Mao's China 262). 17 This underscores the existence of line/ class struggle and helps explain the inefficiency that led to a temporary but drastic decrease in grain production and distribution. As Hinton has noted elsewhere, one cannot explain away the famine itself in this way and there were bad policies (e.g. over-deep planting, incentives to exaggerate grain production reports). But the Liuists, after failing to prevent the Leap, did in effect work to sabotage it by pushing directives to "ultra-left" extremes: e.g. if the Maoists said to "take grain as the key link," the Liuist cadres would rip out orchards to plant more grain, or increase the depth of tilling from one foot to two, and so on (Reversal 153-6). Thus the well-known problem of exaggerated reporting of harvest figures can be explained by more than just excessive revolutionary passion alone, though the latter was clearly a factor as well. While this type of "line" analysis runs the risk of conspiracism, it offers one neglected explanation for some of the Leap's chaos, or how its rational

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directives morphed into chaos. So, too, there can be no denying that Liu, who appointed most of the middle-level cadres, did have a history of such extremism, and his most famous text, How to be a Good Communist, preaches absolute fealty to the Party. 18 But this struggle over class "line" - perhaps the chief, concrete content of the friend/enemy political form mentioned above, and a fundamental aspect of how the Chinese revolution understood itself - is precisely what has been either conveniently dropped or attacked by contemporary Sinology. This marks a regression from the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially the work of the former Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, who published still-valuable work like Victor Nee and James Peck's China's Uninterrupted Revolution. This has happened despite the fact that an awareness of "line struggle" hardly implies an endorsement of one over the other, nor that - as Hinton makes clear - the lines and struggles were always clear-cut or undifferentiated. Of course they were not, and there is nothing in Schmitt, Marx, or Mao that suggests they would be so. A revolutionary, impassioned politics of commitment dedicated to a transformation of self and society will not be as coolly rational, pragmatic, and neatly civil as is the ideal-type in the liberal capitalist democracies. This does not explain away the destructive aspects of factionalism and of "political politics." But it does point us to the culture of political belief in China, during the Leap and afterwards. If line-struggle, or friend/enemy or other forms of politics were a part of this political scene and a Chinese culture of belief, then surely they should be engaged as opposed to ignored or written off as "totalitarianism." Howsoever simplifying the Maoist notion of line-struggle was, it is hard not to see how well it worked to capture politics and social reality in its time. Or even today: witness the following memorable comment from the late "Gang of Four" member Yao Wenyuan: Ifwe do not act in this way [i.e., strengthen 'socialist ownership' and follow the communist line], but instead call for the consolidation, extension and strengthening of bourgeois right and the partial inequality it entails, the inevitable result will be polarization, i.e., in the matter of distribution a small number of people will appropriate increasing amounts of commodities and money through some legal and many illegal ways; stimulated by 'material incentives' of this kind, capitalist ideas of making a fortune and craving for personal fame and gain will spread unchecked; phenomena like the turning of public property into private property, speculation, graft and corruption, theft and bribery will increase; the capitalist principle of the exchange of commodities will make its way into political and even into Party life, undermining the socialist planned economy; acts of capitalist exploitation such as the conversion of commodities and money into capital, and labour power into a commodity, will occur; changes in the nature of the ownership will take place in certain departments and units which follow the revisionist line; and instances of oppression and exploitation of the labouring people will arise again. As a result, a small number of new bourgeois elements and upstarts who have totally betrayed the proletariat and the

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labouring people will emerge from among the Party members, workers, well-to-do peasants and personnel of state and other organs. 19 Yao is writing in 1975, on the eve of the final throes of the Mao era, but his words resonate well nigh prophetically. This remains a surprisingly well-known passage amongst critical intellectuals in China and abroad. It represents the late Maoist line and the temper of the times, but also shows us in perfectly clear, Marxist terms what has transpired under the Dengist and later "reform and opening up." Regardless of whether one finds Yao and the Gang redeemable or not as historical actors, the vision here is rooted in a rigorous analysis of the nature of capitalism and the market as not just "scientific" matters (as they would be to Deng et al.), but as a field of social forces and of class and bureaucratic or elite power. Howsoever "extreme" Yao's diction may appear now, it nevertheless seems irrefutable that there were real differences in line in China. The leftists may have failed for a variety of reasons (again, the lack in institutionalization was tragic), but they knew what they were going on about. The CR period and other struggles and conflicts were not simply the stuff of "court politics," the allegedly inevitable horrors of so-called social engineering or socialist planning, and pathological personalities. The elite/court method of interpreting China will be taken to extremes in the hand of Frederick Teiwes, who in Politics at Mao's Court and elsewhere rails against the very idea that Mao ever had less than total control, and that there were ever opposing lines within the Party. 20 Note, too, that the notion of the CCP as some oriental, feudal "court" comes from the Sinologists themselves, and that one does not see, say, references to Castro's or Chavez's court. For Teiwes, any reference to line-struggle is "perverse," as Mao - both a "cruel ... bastard" and "patriarch of an extended family" 21 - had only "alleged opponents" and could "have any policy adopted merely by insisting on it" ("Paradoxical" 56). 22 Given Mao's absolute power, the only mystery becomes why the - apparently mindless - other leaders were unwilling "to stand up to Mao despite the gathering signs of unprecedented disaster" (Teiwes and Sun, 19). There are obvious retorts to this: that before, during, and after the Leap some people did voice opposition to Mao, from Liang Shuming to Peng Dehuai to Peng Zhen and Deng Tuo, just as the Liu-Dengists did, after all, pursue different paths while in power. So, too, the enthusiasm for the Leap reflected conscious agreement and not fear; it was not just Mao, the Deng, and Liu who supported it fully, and who drew on the enthusiastic if not zealous participation of thousands of cadres. Once the grain-shortfalls and other problems of the Leap appeared in 1959, they were quickly addressed if also not adequately corrected until the Leap was abandoned in 1960. Thus contra the popular belief that the CCP was criminally unconcerned with the Leap crises, by the Spring of 1959 Mao and the center began "tempering the more extreme Great Leap policies," acting on knowledge of the bad situation in much of the countryside (Riskin, "Seven Questions" 119). When the extent of the grain shortages and economic difficulties were fully known in the Fall of 1960, Mao himself pushed for abandoning the Leap and recognized the failure

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of this over-ambitious, too-quickly implemented project of communalization and rapid growth. We will tum in more detail to the Leap shortly. But counterfactuals matter little in the face of colonial discourse about despotism/totalitarianism. Thus MacFarquhar zeroes in on Zhou Enlai's alleged obsequiousness - his "oriental" servility? - in the face of Mao, noting that "independent personae do not necessarily entail independent attitudes" (Cataclysm 434). Thus the Premier Zhou, whom the world knew for four decades, globally recognized as a leading diplomat, Bandung initiator, and left-wing cosmopolitan spokesperson for the P.R.C., turns out be a mere dissembling "role" player without depth and substance. Here the court politics approach strikes one as so much cliched opera and again demonstrates that the Sinologist knows the native better than him- or herself. It is based on anecdotal evidence, reminiscences by Zhou's former secretaries who mention that after Mao criticized Zhou for having too large a private office, Zhou then cut down his staff. As so often in MacFarquhar's "awe-inspiring work" (as Lucien Pye blurbs), the facts of Mao's dominance and others' abjection is "proven" through anecdotes, anonymous interviews, journalistic biographies, and memoirs. 23 The author never problematizes the adequacy of such historical data, nor addresses the sheer triviality of such "facts" when the subject at hand is a decade of national govemance. 24 Both authors' texts are replete with references to "a senior cadre said," "an anonymous source," and the like, just as MacFarquhar will pass off as solid, scholarly evidence such sensationalistic, mass market memoirs as Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag, or Jean Pasqualini's Prisoner of Mao. 25 That Zhou Enlai may have been a committed Marxist and supporter of the Maoist line is not even considered, but remains the only reasonable interpretation based on his consistent words and actions from the 1930s until his death. Note how MacFarquhar codes this alleged incident. It is not that Mao was actually opposed to bureaucratic privilege but was "annoyed that the premier had many more secretaries than himself' (Cataclysm 434). Mao was merely acting, nay embodying the "role" and subjectivity of no less an emperor than Qin Shi Huangdi, the first, allegedly despotic unifier of ancient China: Cf. the behaviour of Qin Shi Huangdi: 'Once, looking from a mountaintop, the emperor was displeased to notice that the carriages and riders of the chancellor were very numerous. Someone told this to the chancellor, who diminished his entourage accordingly. (Cataclysm 642n26) Exactly what Mao and Zhou, both twentieth-century Marxists, would have to do with a 2,000-year-old emperor and mandarin (the author of the anecdote above) remains a mystery. The only thing that connects them is their race and "Chineseness." Thus MacFarquhar reproduces the notion of a 2,000-plus-year-old continuous culture of China, long a favorite mytheme of orientalists in and outside of China. MacFarquhar's other source here is - tellingly - an influential yet very dubious book by a former Dengist historian and advisor to one of the more

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fervently anti-communist human rights groups in the U.S. Gao Wenqian's expose-style political biography of Zhou Enlai does not cite its sources, draws on other "pulp" or gossipy biographies, and is clearly an exercise in character assassination via hearsay - not only of Mao or even Deng, but of the still-widely respected Zhou. 26 There is little analysis other than to assert that Mao, Deng, et al. were cruel and Zhou not a suave, worldly Marxist diplomat but a craven coward. Leaving aside the putative psychological realities of these former world leaders, the larger question is what such "evidence" and "analyses" are doing in allegedly objective and authoritative scholarship. What can they actually tell us about Maoist or Dengist governance, social history, culture, and real, lived politics and ideology? One does not need to have a rigor fetish or a belief in scientificity to deduce a paper-thin intellectual apparatus at work in even contemporary Sinology or texts like Gao's. Somehow, fluency in Chinese, unique access to the mainland, and even personal experience are not enough; they cannot substitute for intellectual labor and patient observation. It is also notable that the connection to the Qin emperor is an automatic and damning critique for MacFarquhar and everyone else in China Watching circles who recall Mao's own positive words and sense of connection to him, spoken partly in jest perhaps but also because he seems to have meant it. Regardless of Mao's true intentions and feelings, what is striking is that a reference to a founding emperor - and political figure of large historical import - is somehow an automatic discrediting of the biographical Mao and proof of 1950s despotism. As a Chinese it can seem perfectly natural for Mao, or for other intellectuals today, to invoke Qin Shi Huang in the way an American might invoke, say, Abraham Lincoln or for a French, General DeGaulle. But the crux of the matter is not diction or attitude, nor even the writing of top-down history and denying local agency within mass movements. The problem is this mode of emperor-obsessed, "court politics" itself. It is as if the desire to prove the truth of oriental despotism must override all other epistemological concerns: the best history of such momentous periods will necessarily have to focus on the emperor as the absolute locus of power, presiding over his minions or what used to be called Mao's "army of blue ants." 27 For while there was always a key plank within China studies that saw the Mao era as the epitome of despotism ("Red Chinese," "ChiComm," "blue ants" rhetoric), this was never the whole story until fairly recently. It is instructive to recall the China hearings before the U.S. Senate leading up to the establishment of diplomatic relations. There, Warren Cohen and others gave a positive account of China, arguing that Mao "hasn't always been the sole dictator as we commonly think," and that with China "we are talking about a society in which the overwhelming majority ... have given up the right to starve, the right to throw their daughters in the canal, these kinds of rights" (Schoenhals 280, 284). But within mainstream China studies and intellectual-political culture today, one would search in vain for such an alternative perspective, and it is the anti-China lobby, dubious human rights groups, or liberal, anti-communist scholars that are more likely to appear in any Congressional hearing. As if, for example, the persecution of intellectuals during

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the CR or the discovery of "scar literature" in the 1980s somehow discredits the larger achievements and accomplishments of the revolution in toto. While intellectuals and artists - of the independent, romantic, and humanist type especially - were indeed persecuted during the revolution, this remains a problematic lens through which to interpret the larger social reality or totality. This is true in any case, but not least with a Maoist China that was consciously against such views of art, intellectuals, and class in favor of Chinese proletcult, Marxism, and so on. Narrating Chinese history from the standpoint of the elite, urban, male artist is, however, a common mode of teaching Chinese history in Western (and Chinese!) universities. This is also the mode of historian Jonathan Spence's widely used textbook In Search of Modern China. It is all the more surprising when much of the rest of the academy has unlearned something about representing history in almost exclusively elite and male terms. I would submit, then, that complex and positive accounts of governance during the Mao era - or even of the basic achievements and record of the Chinese revolution itself - have little to zero purchase within dominant knowledge production and culture. By "positive" I mean not only or indeed not even "favorable" but attempting to understand the P.R.C. in its positivity, or at least acknowledging that it too has its own positivity; this is an opposite approach to the method of resolute debunking, symptomatic reading, or pathologization. One needs to reaffirm that this "new" discourse on Maoist governance and society reflects little more - in terms of what we know - than a larger shift of discourse in history and the tum towards the right in global intellectual-political culture, beginning in the 1970s. Again, this is not because we now have all the facts and before we had only delusion. My point is that the interpretation or coding of many of the same events and same basic "facts" has changed; more specifically, the interpretative, governing, orienting framework or discursive formation has changed in China and globally (however much the local/national specifics vary). 28 It reflects the resurgence of liberal, if not neo-liberal, thought and the free reign of a colonial discourse unchallenged by a critical scholarship or critical intellectual-political culture at large. In so far as neo-liberalism can be thought of as a de-politicization, in part through the removal of the communist or otherwise substantially democratic threat in favor of the near-total administration of things by the market and elites, then so, too, the eclipse of Maoist discourse and de-Maoification have a part in this story as well. More specifically, the larger function of the current demonization of the Mao era and discourse is to establish what China lacked and still needs to overcome in order to becomethe-same as "us," free subjects of capitalism: namely, liberal subjectivity and normal "democratic" governance to go along with the spectacular market system. So, too, the negation of Maoist discourse, of the rationality and of the passions of revolutionary socialist construction and the Leap, is the necessary first step in producing a new, alternative discourse about the madness and tragedy of the Great Leap Forward, the CR, and the entire communist revolution up to the present. Ironically, given the near total abandonment of all things Maoist in the

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Chinese government and economy, as well as the hyper-capitalist expansion and consumerist ethos prevailing in so much of the nation, it is the fact that the P.R.C. is still nominally communist that explains some of the necessity for this demonization of Maoism and the past discursive formation. It is less about the true communist nature of the P.R.C. than about the self-constitution of the West's identity as freedom-fighter and purveyor of enlightenment and universal human values. At the risk of sounding vulgar, it is also about the money: China's rise, the decline of the U.S. dollar and empire, and the growing economic and other irrelevance of"Europe" for "Asia." Which is to say it works in the manner of orientalism with Western capitalist characteristics. Partly this happens through a simple but total and devastatingly effective elision: one does not need to address the self-understanding of either Maoist subjects or of the revolution itself, its aims, rationality, and governmentality. These can be elided, or dismissed as insanity or a case of duping/brainwashing at world-historical levels. And Chinese proportions. Yet even in the most seemingly obvious examples of Maoist catastrophe, there is more than meets the eye. Let us now tum to the one event that would seem to be the lynchpin of all that was wrong with the Mao era.

4

Accounting for the Great Leap Forward Missing millions, excess deaths, and a crisis of Chinese proportions

Whoever says Great Leap Forward today says famine. It is surprising, then, that this catastrophe in which perhaps somewhere between 10 million (the current Chinese estimation) and 43 million people died has been so little studied. This enormous range of estimates - others have suggested as few as 4 or as many as 60 million - suggests something of the reliability of the knowledge about the Leap. But such is the powerful appeal of a massive number of deaths that the upper numbers have not only "won" hands down, but are repeated ad nauseum in academe and popular discourse. Thus speaks as well the power of the emperor's appeal - it is all narrated as if Mao's psychology and total personal responsibility is the sole issue, not the event of the Leap itself or the multiple causes of its economic collapse. Before moving on then, we need to briefly recover the purpose or vision of the Leap as well as broach an alternative explanation for its failure. The Leap was first and foremost an economic program and rural developmental strategy and vision. It was not intended to harm people, nor even to forcibly collectivize agriculture in the manner of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. The whole point of Mao's Critique of Soviet Economics was that Stalin did do so in a reactionary fashion and without peoples' participation. Economically, it attempted an alternative to the market (material incentives and commodified labor) and the large, top-down and nationwide planning apparatuses of the Soviet Union. So, too, the Maoist line pushed for self-reliant economies in provinces and regions. This was a security concern, given the U.S. presence in Taiwan and East Asia, and a reflection of the Maoist ethic of local autonomy. As the historian Jack Gray has argued, "in economic terms the Leap was not irrational" but rather the Chinese form of then-current planning theories, and of reactions against capitalist-developmentalism and centralized, Stalinist versions of rural collectivization (307). More specifically, the Leap was not only a bigger-is-better movement into larger communes, but a three-pronged campaign: "labor-intensive farmland construction" to prevent flood and draughts; "local [rural] industrial development" organized through the communes; and the development of "the modem sector [infrastructure] at the provincial level" so that each province would have "at the disposal of local development a backbone of basic industries with whose assistance counties could in tum create their own industrial minicomplexes to support

Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 67 industries lower down" (Gray 307). What this amounts to, in short, is a relative privileging of rural industry and peoples instead of the pursuit of heavy industry in the urban centers; an emphasis on the interior, most backward provinces and areas; an "awareness that increased agricultural production and peasant incomes" were crucial to growth; a passion for "rural community development"; and the belief that "popular participation in development was socially and economically necessary" (Gray 307-8). What this implies is both an economic theory and an ethical-political vision that actually privileges or centers on rural China and peasants. 1 Prosaically but importantly, it means seeing "surplus rural labor" (massive numbers of poor and under- or unemployed) not as a curse, but as a great resource to be used to develop the countryside industrially and in other ways. In the context of the time - or within standard neo-liberalism today - this was decidedly innovative. The essential idea was to tum China's greatest liability - a lack of capital and massive rural surplus labor - into an asset. As Patnaik notes, by "directly transforming under-employed surplus labour into capital at minimal extra cost, a firm basis was laid for agricultural productive transformation which fed into industrial growth, as well as for the gains in human development indicators." 2 The conversion of surplus labor into capital amounted to the employment of rural people in sideline industries; the resources gained were ploughed back into production in the same communities. The Leap marks a paradoxical but foundational aspect of Maoist governance and discourse: it was actually an effort to decentralize or work against bureaucracy, and to insist on local participation and initiative in implementing and carrying out policy and developing that modem sector. This is the point to the emphasis on the provinces, counties, and villages participating directly, as noted above by Gray. As Riskin has further explained, Mao's plans for sub-national development were not only a solution to the problems of centralized planning and a (lacking, weak) national domestic market, but also an explicitly antibureaucratic program (China's Political Economy 206-7). In keeping with the Maoist mandate to make Marxism fit specific, national conditions, the emphasis on the provincial and local sought to eliminate "China's long bureaucratic tradition, which had not vanished" (Riskin, China's Political Economy 207). Not just the critique, but also the active attempt to curtail and reform bureaucracy in favor of the local is a legacy of Maoist discourse and governance. Equally important to note here in the vision of the Leap are its more profound socio-cultural and political dimensions. Take, for example, the use of creches or nurseries (what Americans would call daycare today) as well as the creation of communal dining halls not as state-domination of individual freedom but as state feminism: attempts to relieve women of the double-burden of domestic labor. It was a rational and political response to the fact that "merely" empowering women to work in the fields and factories was not enough to liberate them. So, too, it is worth emphasizing the spatial analysis built into the Leap as strategy: after centuries of urban and coastal dominance the interior and hinterland were to get their due and to be integrated into the economy and now "nation," freeing them of dependence on the former. Overcoming the rural/urban divide in China

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was at the heart of ending poverty, want, and inequality, and it remains so today. The Dengist solution appears to be one of using the market to magically pull people away from the rural areas and transform the countryside - or more accurately the cities - in tried and true capitalist fashion: on the backs of rural migrant labor, and with the abandonment of the countryside and rural/urban hierarchy. There is something enormously callous and irresponsible to that, whatever the faults of the Leap may have been. And it is painfully obvious to any observer of China that the cities and the rich coastal belt of the P.R.C. dominate China as never before in its long history. The pursuit of rural industrialization, it should also be noted, was furthermore an attempt to overcome the manual/ mental labor divide, whereby the farmers - the laborers of China - were always and forever to be relegated to the latter category. This is not, then, a desire to leave village China alone in its poverty and isolation, nor to make China one big city. The emphasis on overcoming the intellectual/manual labor is something deeply rooted in Marxism and the ethical critique of capitalism (as the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel made clear decades ago). 3 It is also crucial for development, which is to say for the elimination of poverty, and the raising of living conditions and life chances for all. As every child knows, China overall has benefitted from the Dengist and later reforms and the deployment of capital. But poverty, severe inequality, regional disparities, urban and elite dominance, centralized bureaucracy, and so on are still enormous problems for China. From this standpoint, the Leap's vision and economic theories may not seem as bizarre and aberrant as they once were in the heady days of the 1980s and early 1990s. So, too, there is the argument advanced by Han Dongping among others that while the rural economics of the Leap certainly failed, they returned in modified form during the later Cultural Revolution and up through the 1980s. The Leap model was behind the explosive rural growth of Township Village Enterprises during those later years (TVEs). 4 The organizational methods and market-distribution mechanisms changed, but the collective form and the emphasis on rural industrialization and sidelines remained consistent. After decollectivization, TVEs and related infrastructure were already in place. As with the rest of the Chinese economy, the socialism that was in place could be used to build capitalism quite quickly. Despite the disastrous aspects of the Leap (the famine mortality), the basic rural, Maoist strategy eventually worked effectively in later decades until it was dismantled in the return to household agriculture, the profit motive, and the war of each against all. 5 The above account of the rationality and vision of the Leap is obviously a truncated one, but is hopefully enough to recall that it was not mad or foolish but a part of Maoist discourse (and, as Gray noted, of broader trends in economic thinking). 6 As is well known - and by Mao's own frank admission and standards - the Leap was also a failure, even a catastrophic one. The controversy lies with its causes and moreover with its mortality figures. We will cover some of this ground below in an examination of the extent of the famine and the use of statistics. But first I want to recall what I take to be a persuasive and non-orientalist account of the failure of the Leap, which is to say of the reorganization and

Accounting for the Great Leap Forward 69 development of the rural economy and market system that existed prior to the 1950s. I refer here to the work ofG. William Skinner and his spatial and regional analyses of the traditional Chinese economy in terms of its distributional systems. Skinner's work is intricately detailed and rigorously structuralist (full of grids, maps, and spatial metaphors), though does not address the Leap famine and economic collapse head-on. This may in a sense be its advantage because it allows us to see the 1958-61 experiment in a different type of context. What he offers is in effect an image of "China" and the Chinese rural economy or structure as a complex and deeply rooted system of market towns (at local, intermediate, and central levels all beneath the city/urban level), distributional and transport networks, regular and periodic markets, temple fairs, and so forth. All of it rooted in and dependent upon the fundamental level of the village; the people and economy at that level, as a whole, are what make the entire system work. But it is a complex system and not a mere matter of kinship bonds and the like, and this is also what makes it different than traditional, often ethnographic Sinological analyses of village economies. What emerges from his work is a rural economy - nearly all of China prior to the Leap years - that is a complexly layered, interwoven "articulated marketing structure." This is a system presumably well beyond the immediate knowledge of previous governments and administrations over in Beijing or elsewhere, be they Communist or dynastic. But it is also the type of knowledge they would necessarily need in order to even gradually develop a modem economy - especially a planned one. What happens, then, is that this entire, traditional structure is in Skinner's words "wantonly abandoned" almost overnight in 1958 (109). Skinner's diction here may tip his hand as to his own economic philosophy, but this is perhaps beside the point. The speed of the Leap Forward into greater communes and new marketing/distributional systems was one condition of failure in itself - within the "bigger, better, faster" slogan and mentality of the Leap it is the emphasis on speed that was the most unfortunate. But the overall problem here, from the standpoint of Skinner's work, is that the previous rural marketing system that had evolved over hundreds of years was disbanded too quickly and, moreover, without any effective and organized structure in its place. The movement of grain from places with a surplus to places with a deficit, for example, was affected by this. 7 Market towns and the cycle of market days and so forth disappeared. Despite their undeniable production of inequality and of the power of money, markets are after all efficient in signaling not just price information but in effect coordinating distribution, helping make production decisions, relaying information across great distances, and so on. In retrospect, without something in place to substitute for and improve upon the traditional rural marketing structure, there were bound to be major problems. The point here, then, is not the abandoning of the "free" market mechanism per se, but of the speed of this otherwise just and rational decision, as well as the lack of a proper alternative system and structure of knowledge in place. Skinner's analysis is not in my view Hayekian. This is in part a story about the difficult transition to a modem economy from a traditional one (as Skinner argues). But it also confirms what

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Gray for one has argued: it is not that the economic theory of the Leap was unsound but that its implementation was very much so, and this in turn had to do with the complicated and tumultuous politics of the time. 8 Within the latter are the well-known "facts" we already know: the Soviet split and pull-out from China, the looming war with the U.S. and invasion from Taiwan, the line struggles within the Party and the class conflicts within the newly liberated country, and so forth. All of this sped up the process. Gradualism was abandoned and the Leap ended up in a paradoxically Stalinist mode or form ("gigantism" and authoritarian implementation in some places) even as it attempted to carry out an anti-Stalinist economic revolution (Gray 310). We do not have the space to pursue this further here, and this is not to argue for one, single-shot cause of the Leap's economic collapse. But Skinner's work does cast light on the matter, and without delving into psychologizing, court politics, accounts of oriental despotism or cruelty, and various external, anachronistic factors (as in the work of Amartya Sen discussed below), the Leap and its failure becomes again a political-economic and intellectual problem from which to study and learn, as opposed to an exemplum about the evils and insanities of Mao, collective agriculture, communism, and so on.

Missing millions, missing data But it is the mortality itself which is the most pressing issue about the Great Leap. By critically reviewing current studies we can ascertain how Sinologicalknowledge production handles this, arguably the most important campaign and aspect of Mao's rule. To begin with the limit-figure of 43 million, it must be said that this derives from either lurid imagination or from two problematic, unverified references located in a Washington Post article from 1994. There, Chen Yizi, a former official now in exile at Princeton University, simply throws out that number as an "estimate" during an interview. 9 Chen has not published an actual study of the matter in either Chinese or English. The same Post article contains a reference to Chinese academic Cong Jin's claim that 40 million people "died" during the famine. But as Carl Riskin notes, Cong's figure in fact refers to a hypothetical "total loss of population," including actual but estimated deaths and the decline in the birth rate ("Seven Questions" 113 ). 10 I will return shortly to this point. But note that to include among famine deaths those "victims" of a declining birth rate is to include people who were - literally never born. This is a common strategy for accounting for what is commonly referred to as the "missing millions" of famine victims: include the unborn. It is not the only way in which scholars rack up the numbers over the official estimate of 15 million, but it is still common. References to thirty million or more make virtually no reference to the distinction, because they are just passing on the received wisdom. This is of course standard practice for the media. Yet note a footnote in which Tu Wei-ming - the Confucian philosopher - uses this same news-bite from the Washington Post: "My figure [43 million], based on Chen Yizi's analysis, is yet to be verified" (my emphasis) ("Destructive Will"

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l 78n3). Thus the earlier, casual journalistic reference becomes an "analysis." Tu will earlier say that the GLF "claimed as many as forty-three million lives, mainly due to starvation" ("Destructive Will" 152). Thus Tu's footnoted qualification pales in contrast to the fully confident and authoritative in-text cite of 43 million starvation deaths, despite the fact that no actual demographic studies have arrived at such a figure. In the same footnote, Tu also refers to a CCP report from 1961 which established 30 million deaths. It turns out, however, that the report did not and could not have offered such a claim. It is a report found in the Annals of one county in the Anhui province, not a national study. The authors who draw on this document, and to whom Tu refers the reader, do not in fact say it is such a demographic report that contains the 30 million figure: it is simply a recording of interviews with people who witnessed or suffered hardship (Tu l 78n3; Kleinman, 16-17, 22n30 ). 11 Again, the question is not whether there were such instances of hardship; based on the work of Bramall, among others, it seems clear that whatever the actual numbers of deaths may have been, and howsoever other regions fared, Anhui and especially Sichuan were hit hard by hunger and apparent famines during the Leap years. But with Tu and other casual inflators of millions of dead Chinese people, we are dealing here with work that frankly should be embarrassing to the China field. So, too, the "starvation" reference is gratuitous, as during the Leap, as in nearly all historical famines, the great majority of deaths come from disease among the very young or elderly. This is a gruesome thing to parse, but such famine victims do not literally starve to death in the manner of, say, a gulag prisoner deliberately deprived of food. They get sick and die brought on by malnutrition or more simply weakening from a lack of available calories. More revealing is Tu's comment that during the Cultural Revolution it was not damage to what he calls "the body politic" that was "the most tragic form of destruction," but the destruction of "family treasures" by the family members themselves (l 78n4 ). Thus it turns out that loss of life is not as important as those things which can be measured in money, or which - for Tu and Sinologists like Simon Leys 12 - are after all the very quintessence of China: its ancient artifacts, traditions, and culture. In this essay and elsewhere, Tu continually invokes Confucian philosophy as not only co-extensive with ancient Chinese culture itself, but as that which has been tragically lost or destroyed in the twentieth century, as if the P.R.C. were an alien, non-Chinese, and inauthentic regime. 13 Surely, then, it is not analysis which subtends the 43 million figure, but something else. This thing is, I will again argue, the production of orientalist knowledge as part of the West's fraught relationship to China. I will attend to this question and the lack of regard for actual Chinese lives in a final section. In a sign of the global circulation of Sinological-orientalism, it is not a Chinese official or a Sinologist who is most responsible for producing the knowledge of the famine's alleged 30 million dead. It is really the work of the British Indian economist and Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen. First, in the New York Review of Books and then in subsequent work, Sen referred to the lack of "democracy" and "free press" in China as causing the famine's 30 million victims and making it the greatest human disaster in history . 14 In the second Cold

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War of the 1980s this became a popular and widely cited argument against communism and collective farming, just as the Chinese "official" figure of 15 million was a major tool in the Dengist de-Maoification in the 1980s. (At the time of writing, 30 million is still the most commonly bandied about number, but there is a definite race on to go higher.) But Sen was in fact taking as unquestionably true the work of two demographers, Judith Banister and A. J. Coale. These last are, in tum, taking the official mortality statistics (very rough death rates) of the Leap years from the 1983 Statistical Yearbook of China. 15 The first problem to note, then, is the reliability of these fundamental figures, which were compiled decades after the events. The issue is not simply one of bad faith. But given the year of release (1983) and the well-known ideological pogrom of the Den gist regime against Maoism and collective agriculture, and the Dazhai model, 16 state manipulation of the figures should by no means be dismissed out of hand. But more specifically, as Riskin notes, the larger issue is that "we can only guess about the procedures that were used to reconstruct the death toll [from the 1983 Yearbook] and we know nothing about the raw materials on which it was based" ("Seven Questions" 112). The previous three censuses were far apart in time - in 1953, 1962, and 1982 - and happened well after the upheavals and social dislocations of the Leap and CR, during which statistical bureaus were at a standstill. The 1953 census was also criticized from the very beginning as lacking social scientific value. 17 In short, it is simply a brute fact that there are no adequate records - national censuses and demographic data, birth and death rates, and so on - that would be needed to arrive at reasonably approximate, reliable analyses of famine deaths. This information simply does not exist for at least two reasons: one is that China, be it Republican or Communist, was simply in no economic, political, or scientific/infrastructural position to carry out such studies; even after 1949 there were much more pressing matters at hand: land reform, reconstruction, war and potential invasion, and so on. Another reason not acknowledged in the famine-accounting game is that China - unlike say colonial India or other places of the British and French empires - was never colonized. This means that there was no colonial archive constructed over the years by, say, the British, which we could now raid to produce "better" knowledge of how many Chinese were around in the 1940s, and so on. As the work of James Hevia has shown, the British were in effect trying to follow their Indian example of producing a colonial archive; but in the event this was not meant to be. 18 A ruse of history for the Sinologist, perhaps. But it allows us to see connections between the contemporary practice of Leap/famine accounting and older, directly colonial modes of investigation. But first note that the above "missing" archive of real data means that all death figures have to be reconstructed retrospectively and on the basis of incomplete local statistics which are then projected nationally. Precisely no one should speak with certainty about the total mortality of the famine. This has not prevented anyone from using it to "know" Maoist China either. The information upon which a definitive account need be based is simply unavailable and may not exist. Riskin himself approaches this last point - but unfortunately backs

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away - when he notes that the "raw materials" of the official mortality rates remain a "mystery," and then calls on the Chinese government to release - that is, produce - this information by identifying and allowing access to the people who came up with the official rates twenty years ago. This paucity of information about the famine is, in sum, an intractable problem. Perhaps the chief consequence of this situation is that accounts of the famine - perhaps the key black mark against the Mao regime and one used to Other it as the horrible difference that post-Mao China must overcome - must be read as exercises in producing knowledge for a regime of truth and not as reliable information. As Utsa Patnaik has argued in a series of essays, even if one takes the 1983 Yearbook figures at face value, the 30 million figure is wildly inaccurate (by a measure of 18-20 million) and arrived at through two different, dubious routes. The first is to include a high decline in birth rates (in the numbers of people born) within the famine deaths; the second is to construct a linear death rate grid for the 1960s based on speculative, projected data. This last is then used to establish how many people died in the 1959-61 period. To clarify this first route, the death toll of 30 million is automatically inflated by "over 18 million" because many researchers are including "people" not born at all ("On Famine" 52). As Patnaik puts it: [Such scholars] take not only the actual excess mortality [based on] the available information on the rise of the death rate, but add on to it the estimated numbers of babies not born at all, owing to a fall in the birth rate which was steep during this period. What is being done here is to estimate the number of 'missing millions' in the population pyramid for these years, but this is misleadingly designated as 'famine deaths' .... This procedure gives the total figure of a 27 million deficit in the population by 1961 compared to 1958, but over three-fifths of the deficit ... arises from fall in the birth rate and does not represent actually living people dying during the famine. ("On Famine" 52) Thus the non-existent are included among the Chinese famine victims. Such scholars provide no justification for the inclusion of the lowered birth rate, despite the illogic of the move and the fact that, according to Patnaik, this is not common practice in the study of famines in other countries. Here we have another instance of the China difference, or the double-standard applied to China in particular. So, too, one must note that the decline in birth rates can and must in part be explained by obvious, well-known factors of the giant communalization of the Leap: the massive mobilization of rural labor (longer work-weeks, even beyond the growing season), resettlement to new work-sites, general social revolution, abrupt changes in living and working patterns, and grain shortages. It is as if there is a certain will to knowledge here, behind the sheer indifference to actual Chinese lives. The analysis must be made to fit an a priori conclusion - that the Leap, Maoism, or collectivization are the very epitome of evil or irrationality. That would be in keeping

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with the closed, circular nature of orientalist thought, but there may also be some type of perverse desire in piling on numbers of dead from the "teeming masses" of the Orient. After all, would not 10 million famine victims (Patnaik's revised figure) be enough empirical "proof" to marshal in some argument against Maoism or to show the scale of the famine? To adopt a classic phrase from Sinology, it is as if the deaths must be "of Chinese proportions." And yet perhaps the 10 million figure would not suffice: the real horror of this is that such a catastrophe is far from unusual in China's past and for developing nations more generally. It is this international context that one must attend to. The old shibboleth of China as somehow separate from the rest of the world as some Middle Kingdom should be negated. As Patnaik notes, even the official Chinese peak death rate in 1960 was only .8 percent higher than that of India in the same year - in a non-famine year. This is, one should think, fairly shocking. Nearly the same amount of people died in democratic-capitalist India during the same year: an unpleasant but striking fact that Sen himself does not address. To be fair, Sen has noted that when one compares China and India during all the Great Leap years (1958-61 ), four million more people died in India per year. 19 This does not change the point that apparently more people died in China as a result of the Leap failure and economic implosion than would have otherwise. But it too is striking and at the very least may be seen to greatly undercut the claims for the Leap's exceptionalism as the worst human disaster in history. So, too, for all the falls in grain production within China, including government procurement, the amount of food available per head - a crucial factor in measuring hunger - was still "higher than in India" during the same time ("Republic" 12). So, too, this last point perhaps adds more credence to the argument via Skinner that the failure in China was distributional. In the international context of late 1950s China, the famine was scandalously "normal." As Patnaik notes elsewhere, China's death rate during the famine was "lower than the 'normal' average crude death rate during 1955-60 in eighteen developing countries" ("Economic Ideas" par. 25). Thus despite the fact that the famine remains an indelible black mark on the impressive record of human welfare and development under Mao, it simply cannot do the work that the Sinologists and China Experts ask it to. If the mortality falls within the 10-15 million range, as Patnaik' s and others' more rigorous estimations have it, it is far from the "greatest famine in history." It should be much more difficult to simply lay the blame on Maoism, the biographical Mao himself, communism, or collectivized agriculture. All of these are germane and therefore open to assignment of responsibility - especially Mao as the leader of the nation and chief architect of the Leap. But this is clearly more complex than has been recognized. It would seem that we are dealing with a tragic event for which many people are responsible, but also an aspect of economic or capitalist modernity as it spreads across and "colonizes" the world: the heavy, even catastrophic costs born in the developing world. So, too, there were other factors that produced the famine but that cannot be placed at the feet of Mao, cadres, and collectivization. These include two years

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of severe floods and droughts nationwide. This is a potentially convenient excuse and was one of the official ones. But droughts and floods are also real, perennial problems in China as elsewhere (this is one of the purposes of the Three Gorges Dam project). Adrian Chan has argued that drought and flood "afflicted almost 50 percent of the arable land" in 1959-60 (152). Shujie Yao has also argued that the poor weather (in addition to wrong policies like deep planting) "played the most important role in reducing grain production" (1369). It may be that we do not know how reliable records of weather and drought are nationally. But severe weather and its aftermath is surely a reasonable factor and potentially adverse phenomenon, especially in the context of a chaotic period of national mobilization when things are inevitably in disarray. And this natural aspect rarely crops up in the scholarship; nor does the Soviet Union's withdrawal of all its help aid, engineers, factory constructors, blueprints - in 1960, the height of the crisis. Neither of these factors explains away the famine, but that is precisely the point: it was caused by multiple factors. Neither the fervor nor the planning and policies can themselves account for the entire situation. As Riskin has noted, "both natural conditions and human error contributed to the [crisis], although their relative shares of the blame cannot be assessed" (Riskin, China's Political Economy 137). Or as Eckstein noted long ago, "the failure of the Great Leap was not primarily a failure in conception but a failure born of unrealistic expectations on the one hand, and inadequate and technically deficient implementation on the other" (China's Economic Revolution 59). 20 There is as yet no good reason to move beyond Eckstein's, Riskin's, or Patnaik's balanced accounts. Assumptions of despotism and frenzied irrationality - as opposed to revolutionary passions are inherently reductive, as are soliloquies on the evils of communism as such. In this sense, the "revelation" of the "secret" famine has more to do with orientalism and residual or triumphant anti-communism than new, reliable knowledge. What we can do, however, is to recall and restore the discursive complexity and self-understanding of the Leap and its participants. Should one, for example, actually blame the amount of food that was eaten and "wasted" in the communal kitchens on the irresponsibility of the government or the peasants, as have a number of Sinologists?21 Again, these same communal kitchens, like the collectivized nurseries, sewing groups, and so on, were meant to "remove the stigma of triviality from 'women's work' and facilitate the fuller participation of women at all levels of the economy" (Riskin, China's Political Economy 130). They were in that sense part of the liberation of women within the revolution. So, too, Han Dongping has argued in his ethnographic work that the farmers supported the public dining halls early on because they wanted this same privilege of the urban workers (free meals often of a better quality than they had ever had before). 22 And as noted above, the rural strategy of the Leap was returned to during the CR and beyond; and according to many scholars, it was also the basis for the famous rural "take-off' during the 1980s. 23 The absence of such counterknowledge about the Leap suggests an imperative within Sinological-orientalism: that the Leap, as signature a Maoist campaign as the Cultural Revolution,

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must be actively demonized, its truth manufactured. Otherwise, the Maoist agrarian strategy and Maoist discourse more broadly would have to be seen for their achievements in rural development and human welfare and not just their failures. Just as their failures would have to be seen as more human and explicable. So, too, without extremely high, problematic famine death tolls, the TINA formation (there-is-no-alternative) subtending the economic reforms and China's alleged becoming-the-same would be more open to contestation. Lest this seem like foul play, let us return to mortality statistics and how Banister and Coale arrive at the 27-30 million death toll. The importance of their work in establishing the "truth" of the famine - through the vehicle of Nobel Laureate Sen - warrants a detailed analysis of their methodology. Theirs is, it must be said, more complicated than those who simply add in the "unborn" or non-existent. First, they reject the official birth rates established by a massive survey from 1953 and use instead the much later reconstructed 1982 census in order to project backwards new, radically higher birth and death rates of their own devise for the years 1953-64 (when there were no censuses). 24 As noted before, the hypothetical increase of births in China during these years is highly unlikely and far outpaces the more stable India. While the authors reject the official birth and death rates from 1953 and 1964, they retain the official population totals of those years, as if those studies can be both entirely unreliable and completely trustworthy at the same time. This will also mean that since the total population was the same known amount (nearly 690 million by 1964 25 ), then all those "new" people must have died. This raises the total deaths over this intercensal period by a whopping 60 percent ("On Famine" 60). The demographers then arbitrarily26 insert those new deaths as occurring, of course, during the Leap years. This is a strikingly circular argument: those deaths must have happened during the Leap because that was a known disaster, and it was a disaster because that is when these deaths happened. Again, just what is it that we are learning here? Nor is this all. Both authors follow a procedure of "linear trend fitting" to arrive at the number of "excess deaths." After establishing the new, high rates, the authors must then show radical, progressive declines in the death rates in the subsequent, post-Leap inter-censal years to arrive at the "known" figures for the total population of China in the 1960s. The catch here, as Patnaik notes, is that the death rate of any society "always behaves non-linearly"; death rates vary from year to year and cannot progressively decline to some zero-point ("Republic" 12). 27 The latter would presuppose an absence of death, i.e. immortality for the Chinese. If one were to extend the falling death rate beyond the 1960s, the P.R.C. would have achieved a zero death rate by 1990 (for Coale) or even by 1977 (Banister) ("On Famine" 63). It is, in short, literally absurd to project a linear trend for the death rate and thereby to assume that it would continue to decline at the very steep rate of the pre- and post-Leap years. Patnaik's remarks here are worth noting: this is a method of figuring "excess" deaths that had never been used before, and has only been used on China ("On Famine" 53). 28 The China difference strikes again, it would seem; in terms of knowledge production

Accounting/or the Great Leap Forward 77 as in other ways, China is treated asymmetrically and therefore prejudicially. 29 Thus a method that produces the knowledge that the Leap famine was the worst in human history also produces an achievement of equally mythic "Chinese proportions." Mao, one assumes, would be amused. But this method of linear-trend fitting is precisely what is utilized in these exact studies that have proven to Amartya Sen and the world that the Leap famine was the worst of all time. We thus have a remarkable irony in this case: the work of the scholarly specialist matches or even outdoes the alleged irrationality of even the most impassioned or dogmatic Chinese revolutionary of the Leap or CR years, who never actually predicted the elimination of mortality altogether. One can see the ironic parallels between the area studies and other experts and the Dengists. Both camps, from the latter's famous, pragmatic, and anti-theoretical slogan to "seek truth from facts" to the former's social science profess an unreflexive empiricism that does not address how facts come to be, why some count more than others, and whose interests they serve. But this is not simply, or not only, a case of a common, universal epistemological and scholarly dilemma. It is a case of orientalism as such, not just knowledge but the power-knowledge imbrication that Foucault and Althusser among others so memorably theorized, and that Said took further. For what the demographers et al. in fact demonstrate is the positional superiority of the orientalists - foreign materials are never allowed to get the upper hand over the ready-made conclusions. For all its claims to objectivity and unique access to the "real" facts, such work is in fact anti-empirical, selfenclosed, and circular.

Popular famine mechanics There is another, recently reactivated genre of writing on the Leap - far more influential than the scholarly ones examined above. These are "cross-over" analyses that are meant to be cerebral while appealing to a mass audience - not exactly airport-bookstore page rippers but more "engaging" than, say, the works of G. William Skinner or Utsa Patnaik. Vis-a-vis the Leap, the key text here is Jasper Becker's journalistic expose of the Leap - the revealingly entitled Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine. Well before this book was published in 1996, however, there was in a scholarly sense no secret that there was a famine in China during this time; the questions have been about the extent and causes. The Chinese state in effect said so in the early 1980s, and we have already discussed the 1983 Yearbook. The idea that the Orient is a land of secrets (and unspeakable horrors) and their people sly, dishonest, and so forth is standard fare within Western popular culture, and it is not hard to see how Becker's text - intentionally or not - plays to just such an audience and market. This is a separate issue than the veracity or falsity of whatever is being presented, but it should not be ignored either. Becker's text, then, is most notable for its popularity; as we have already seen, within China studies there is no taboo on relying on journalistic, even gossipy types of texts as unquestioned, full-on evidence. Becker's book fits this mode: full of references to the darkest periods in China's ancient history,

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tales of cannibalism, stacked-up bodies lying everywhere, torture, death camps, and so on. Aside from the lurid style, the issue here is simply one of - again unattributed sources and figures in an otherwise graphic text (the lurid details are the point of the book): "interviewees" not named, "documents" mentioned in-text but not cited (or available to other researchers), statistics and numbers casually flung about, and so on. 30 This is a text in the mode of yellow journalism, with a heavy dose of orientalist sensationalism. The narrative piles on one horrific anecdote or "fact" after another, though is especially obsessed with Chinese people eating, trying to eat, or failing to eat other (dead) Chinese. But there is little analysis connecting the alleged facts or in explaining the economic collapse and famine - the casual factors appear to be evil, madness, and irrationality engendered by the pursuit of the inhuman thing called communism/Stalinism. For a book that strongly markets its scholarly credentials, it shows little awareness of the intractable but crucial statistical dilemmas discussed above in regard to death and birth rates and so on. Mao's Great Famine is a more recent text in the sensational cross-over mode, but written by an acclaimed historian of modern China, Frank Dikotter. Compared to Becker's work, which it nonetheless recommends approvingly, this is a more academic study. It is based in numerous archival materials previously unavailable and from several areas of China. (But shortly we will need to address what "based in" means here.) The discovery and use of these documents is no small feat in itself and is the contribution to scholarship here. That it references real documents - albeit ones that no one else can see - makes this book a different sort than those of Becker, Gao Wenqian, Chang and Halliday, and the like. 31 But it still relies at times on some of these same mass-market studies and its analysis is virtually identical. The famous/infamous biography of Mao by his former, temporary physician Li Zhisui, for example, is referred to often, but has been criticized for being an exercise in vilification of Mao as entirely a creature of "personal intrigue and [individual] power struggles," sexual immorality, and so on (Gao, Battle 115 and passim). But there is no caveat offered for using Li's book (which actually recreates verbatim conversations with Mao after two or three decades), other than to say in an afterword that it has been "maligned by some Sinologists" and that it can be verified by - unnamed - "party archives" (346). At the level of narrative analysis and representational strategy, Dikotter's and Becker's et al. 's texts bear a striking resemblance. Thanks to these archival documents, the image of the Leap that emerges here is if anything more horrifying and more graphic than even Becker's text: cannibalism (again), violence (beatings by cadres and police), murders, prison or labor camp death statistics, as well as - more helpfully, if less luridly - reports of shoddy construction, unnecessary tree felling, corrupt behavior, false or exaggerated reporting of outputs and implementation of policies, and so on. There are parts of the study, in other words, that corroborate the Leap's economic collapse as broached above via Skinner and Gray (the lack of a marketing structure to replace the previous system; political turmoil; authoritarianism). But they do so only implicitly and

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only if you know the previous, substantive analyses (that are not cited here). For there is little provided in the way of sustained analysis or theorization of what led to the collapse and famine. The emphasis is on the local detail on the one hand, and reportage of Mao and "court-politics" on the other. A local example - say of a human ear and nose alleged to have been found in a package of meat - stands for cannibalism and starvation sweeping the entire country, and as an implied yet direct result of malfeasance in Beijing (321 ). One learns in footnotes that two other references to "real" cannibalism on the same page come from police confessions; given the author's other reports of state violence it is hard to know why these confessions should be understood as automatically legitimate. 32 The method of the book is to reference Leap plans and discussions at the very top level on the one hand, and then on the other to detail some of the local-level horrors or details that - it is implied - resulted from these same, allegedly insidious decisions and actions of Mao and other top officials. This is a very top-down mode of analysis. But the question remains: what are the relations, the causal chain, or reasoning here? There is, in short, a gap between the two levels and no sustained attempt to mediate between them in a dialectical fashion or by some other analytic, other than on occasion to offer gestures like "the net effect of," "for example," or "for instance" after a sweeping claim is made about total, national conditions. To take one specific example of the representational problems, Dikotter references a document that records what Mao is alleged to have said at a high-level meeting in 1959: "It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill" (134). This is immediately damning and seems inhuman. But it must also be said that this quote from Mao (recorded second-hand, by an unknown writer), like other quotations and archival citations in this book, appears out of context and with neither explanation nor explication: it speaks for itself in a universal way. It appears in a paragraph on grain requisitions, in a short chapter on these and national agricultural production. An immediately preceding quote from Deng Xiaoping comes from 1961 - two years later and at a different meeting - that actually refers more to Sichuanese peoples' fortitude. The implication - again not spelled out - is that Mao et al. knew of grain shortages from 1959 onwards but kept requisitioning more and more grain because, after all, life is cheap to them. But there is no stated evidence that they knew early on of the severity of the famine, nor that they did not try to alleviate it. 33 This is the same logic of U.S. President Kennedy as well as of Jack London about the lack of value the Chinese place on human life. It is a sentence that does the same type of work that other decontextualized references to Mao's sayings do: most famously, the atom bomb is a paper tiger because there are so many Chinese compared to Americans ("so let them bomb us"), political power grows out of a barrel of a gun (sounds "fascist," but said to soldiers at the height of Japanese invasions and Guomindang attacks), it is right to rebel (therefore "throw your teacher out of the window"), and so on. More specifically, Mao's reference here is in fact ambiguous, as we don't know the context of the conversations at that meeting. We have no idea what came before

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or after this line from Mao, or what the document looks like. Mao was often ironic and flippant (at least one reading of the Qin Shi Huang references, the joking with Nixon, and so on) as well as earthy and coarse in his speech and habits. Between the cults of personality around him and the flip-side demonizations, we have no good sense of his personality. There are in short multiple Maos, but only one Fu Manchu-esque one in this cross-over genre. 34 This is not meant as apologetics: we actually have no clear idea what Mao meant here. It may have been a cold and ruthless calculation, an anguished utterance, a hypothetical statement of the obvious, and so forth. We cannot tell without seeing the document itself as well as knowing the context of its occasion. This would, in tum, occasion a trip to the archive in Gansu to get some sense of the document as a whole. Gansu is not only remote, but one would need considerable guanxi (connections) to get access to the document. Much the same could be said for many if not most of the documents cited in this study. Partly this is due to the nature of archival research, not least in the context of China; but it also makes them unverifiable. But there is also a problem with how the documents are represented, explicated, or synthesized (or how they are not so), as I have been trying to argue above. We do know, however, that Mao did not actually want China to be bombed in a nuclear war, to starve the masses, and so on. For that matter, we do seem to know that at a different occasion during the crisis Mao proclaimed that he hoped that reports of some peasants raiding granaries was true, because they might starve otherwise. It will generally be admitted that during his long career, Mao's approval of various rebellions or even "rightist" behavior among more ordinary citizens was quite consistent. This does not disprove any report of local beatings, hunger, or so forth. But it does suggest that there is a gap between the top level of policy and command and what actually happens locally. This is a standard problem in governance, and one massively more difficult in a country the size and diversity of China. The effect in this study is again to demonize Mao the cruel dictator at the expense of a sustained analysis of the speeches or meetings, or moreover of the process of economic and grain failure. Part of the problem here is a perennial issue with conventional historiography: narrating archival stories, reports, or anecdotes about a necessarily local event or statistic, which then stand in for the whole country, in an unnamed pattern that is assumed to have been repeated everywhere. But can facts speak for themselves even disturbing, vividly rendered facts about, say, beatings or cannibalism? And what would a representative fact be that can stand in for the whole nation of several hundred million people and thousands upon thousands of local contexts? Following the method employed in this book, in order to arrive at a fair and adequate representation of the famine and Leap as a whole, one would have to have similar reports at all local levels across China - not just provincial but county, town, and village. In short, the map would have to be co-extensive with the terri~ tory, as in Jose Luis Borges's classic tale. 35 There is a brute impossibility to this, as much for representational limits adhering to this method as for the Party-state controlling access to archives. China is simply too big, so to speak, and we may well not have adequate records of all such activities, especially for the tumultuous Leap and CR years, at even the local level that Dikotter is focused on. This mapping

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problem is also why nationally aggregated statistics of population and death rates are necessary; but as noted above by Patnaik, Riskin, and others, we do not adequately have these, and for the Leap and Mao years they are often retrospective at best. Hence, the problem of mediation between levels is fundamental. 36 Or put another way there is also a question of scale here: given the massive size of China it is possible for all of these selected archive-based stories to be true and yet to be far from exhaustive as an image, let alone an account of the Leap famine/collapse. One could no doubt arm another raft of graduate researchers, send them into the field, and eventually come up with an uneventful or even idyllic record of the same years. This is why the national numbers-question (famine mortality versus regular mortality, population, etc.) is so important and yet so frustrating and frustrated. In two short final chapters on the death tolls and the archives, Dikotter seems to imply that such a definitive account of the Leap (at local and national levels) and presumably the mortality would be possible - despite his own detailed description of how poor the records, estimates, and archives are to date overall (especially the national and official ones) and how tightly controlled. This is an interesting desire and will to knowledge in itself, though characteristic of the logic of the modem historical and social scientific disciplines and of the subfield of the Leap famine. His own figure for the mortality is "at least" 45 million, thus raising the ante from even Bannister and Coale and the previously ubiquitous figure of 30 million. The problem is that the chapter on "the final tally" only offers an exercise in addition without interrogating the local-archival or national sources as to their reliability; there is no acknowledgment of the debates on the total death rates, the inclusion of "missing births," the differences between "premature" and "excess" deaths, and so on. For the death rate during the Leap years, Dikotter takes the word of one Liu Shaoqi that it should be a "normal" rate of about one percent (329). Leaving aside Liu's own expertise, this is problematic as noted before: death rates are inherently non-linear, so we cannot say what a "natural" or "normal" one is in advance, especially for China at this time; the 1983 Yearbook figures of official mortality rates for the Leap (15 million) may well be misleading and are admittedly "crude"; given all of this and the lack of census data between 1953 and 1964, we do not really know how many were alive and where they were (the mass mobilizations and relocations make this even more difficult to guess). The author then compares this rate from Liu to various provincial reports of specific numbers of deaths or approximate death rates in a given county or locality. The difference or "discrepancies" between Liu's "normal" death rate and the local documents adds up to approximately 45 million (333). The references to archives here are impressive at one level (they seem so specific and immediately real) and problematic at another. How reliable, for example, are reported calculations of death rates in a random county in the countryside, which may well not have had resources to construct one adequately? What percentage of those 45 million would have been "missing births," or is this not germane at all here? To again cite Riskin: "the Great Leap was attended by statistical breakdown and the complete politicization of information" ("Seven Questions" 119). Much the same could be said of the Mao era in general, and it is certainly

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conceivable that some of Dikotter's local documents may have been altered after the fact or influenced at the time of recording/composition as a result of political or ideological struggle (e.g. over "lines") and "fever." To arrive at the 45 million figure, Dikotter also relies on the work of Cao Shuji and Chen Yizi. We have already attended to the reliability of Chen's work, which remains at the level of hearsay about what he allegedly saw or read in a high-level report in the early 1980s. The mainland scholar Cao has estimated 32 million deaths, on the basis of "over a thousand" official local gazetteers (329, 332). This toll number may be accurate, or it may not be. There is little discussion of Cao's methods here or how he arrived at this figure, though Dikotter does take his county-level figures as given in a number of instances, thus adding them to his own documents' numbers. But the questions remain: with the individual local documents we cannot see or read for their reliability, with the lack of all - or even a majority - of counties and larger localities being represented/archived (the perfect map of the territory), with the unknown or unreliable national death rate, or even population total, and so on. At the very least, Dikotter's claim that "the death toll thus stands at a minimum of 45 million excess deaths" is far too confident (333). 37 Equally valid cases have been made for 10, 15, 30 million, and so on. Indeed, the ones veering towards the 10 million account seem far more rigorous and semantically rich. In theory at least, the toll could be higher still. But this seems highly unlikely without the existence of mass graves or some recorded, collective memory of massive starvation; these are yet to be discovered, perhaps because they do not exist. Dikotter notes the higher possibility but not the former, lower ones. Nor is there a discussion - a la Patnaik - of what counts as an "excess" death versus a "normal" one, just as there is no comparative and global analysis offered even by the Smithian Amartya Sen. None of this is to deny the existence of an apparent catastrophe. But it is to ask what we talk about when we talk about the famine's mortality figures.

A global enumerative modality? The obsession with finding the number of "excess deaths" of a Chinese proportion will no doubt continue. Given what seems to still be the great uncertainty over the exact figure, perhaps the more interesting or pressing question is why there is such an intense effort to do the accounting or - still more problematically - to promulgate the much higher estimates? Among other things, the record of Maoism or the revolution is at stake, as well as the value of collective agriculture and communism in general, and even the legitimacy of the current government. There is also an older, less Cold War-inflected structure or phenomenon: the positional superiority of the West and of the expert, and so on. Thus while there is a consensus that a famine occurred and that Mao and the Party are responsible for this (be it 10 or 45 million excess deaths), the scholarship on the figures and on the causes of the catastrophe - and this last is still far less analyzed than the numbers question - are still highly political issues open to a number of competing interpretations. And within this question - why the accounting obsession? - there may well be another, hidden dynamic which we

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can now explore. It returns us to the question of colonial legacies in the world today, even at the level of knowledge production. First let us return to Sen and the global context of Leap/famine knowledge. We are now in a better position to query the worldwide appeal of his argument about China, food, and famines, for Sen not only popularized the inflated famine figures, but also their causes and cure: the lack of "democracy" and a "free press". The closest Sen comes to defining democracy is to invoke "opposition parties" and the cliche of "government by discussion" ("Food" 776). But it is not at all clear what form other Chinese parties could have taken at this time, other than something further to the right of Liu Shaoqi et al. The nationalist, capitalist, and anti-communist Guomindang was just defeated in a long and horrid civil war. It is a bit much to expect them to have been allowed back into the game. Given the amount of discussion leading up to the Leap, 38 as well as the quick recognition of the problems early on in 1959 by the center, 39 it is hard not to see Sen's causal factors as seductive but empty platitudes. His leftist critics in India have certainly seen them thus, for the very good reason that India - unquestionably a democracy with a free press - has had a far worse record in infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, food availability, and economic development than China since the l 960s. 40 Indeed, by his own admission (noted above) there were more deaths in India during the Great Leap years of 1958--61 than in China (including the alleged 30 million excess famine victims). His notion of the "free press" is even more underdetermined, and is presented by Sen as an obviousness, but one on which much of his argument depends. It is thus a pity that he did not consult Jean-Luc Domenach's 1982 study of the famine in one hardhit province in China (Herran). While meant as a riposte to revolution-sympathetic scholars (seeing the Leap as an irrational "frenzy"), it draws extensively on provincial and local newspapers from the 1950s and Leap years that document the emergence of the economic crisis ( 167). What is interesting and not without irony is that Domenach's work shows us that the problems and crises of the communalization process were literally inscribed in the pages of the local press and print media, as propagandistic as they were. Information about the emerging crises was not repressed, or at least not as fully repressed as one might think after reading Sen. There were certainly information problems during the Leap crisis, but it is not obvious to see how a "free press" - whatever that means exactly - could have produced faster or more accurate information during the Leap vis-a-vis the state authorities and as compared to the bureaucratic chain of command already in place. The communication problems were deeper than this and again refer us back to the toofast and "wanton" abandonment of the marketing and distribution structures across the countryside. If the local cadres and leaders could not or did not find and relay that correct information, then how might some putative investigative journalists do so (and where would they have come from)? None of this is to rescue the propagandistic, didactic Chinese press or the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as state-form (particularly for today). But it is to complicate the debacle of the Leap, to strongly suggest that Sen's two factors could hardly have prevented the famine by themselves, no more than they could have stopped the severe droughts and floods. It further is to expose the platitudinous nature of

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Sen's argument. Given the self-flattering nature of Sen's keywords - China tragically lacked what we and modem India have - it is not hard to see the immediate appeal of the argument. It fits a late or "second" Cold War context of the 1980s as well as the dizzy-with-success atmosphere of the 1990s and the end of communism (albeit crucially excluding China). All the more so, then, when we recall the appeal's sub-text: that free markets, a free press, and liberal capitalist democracy are necessary to avoid famine and to socially progress in a truly enlightened way. 41 For whoever says "democracy" and "free press" says capitalism. As the old saying from A. J. Liebling goes, "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Sen's and others' professed faith in the free press/markets/democracy is in the present age quaint: states if not national sovereignties are being captured by the market, civil societies are being subsumed or simply ignored by the state (as in the invasion of Iraq), there are huge income gaps around the world, and so forth. In China the Party is as much in danger of being captured by the market and capital as it is desperately trying to expand and advance these. I would like to think that the Chinese as well as other revolutionaries and radical national leaders of the time knew something about the problem of the Western/colonial and Soviet forms of the state and civil society, and tried to find an alternative path, including through a journalism and state-form that felt a certain responsibility towards safeguarding and "vanguarding" the national and populist interests. That they may have failed in that search does not mean their decision was irrational or that their analysis of the previous capitalist/colonial forms was wrong. Sen, then, is unhelpful on the Leap famine and more a sign of the times than otherwise, his Nobel Prize and his reputation as a humane and welcome "macro" economist notwithstanding. The China-reference - especially the figure of 30+ million dead Chinese - is crucial to Sen's own work and is omnipresent in it since the 1980s. But he has yet to address the lower mortality estimations, or the problematic nature of the available raw data and censuses. We have to see his work vis-a-vis China, then, as of a piece with the shift in Western or global understandings: to a logic of sameness whereby the P.R.C., having broken with the Mao years, is following or must follow the universal path to development and modernization (free markets, free press, free democracy). Certainly this is how a recent article on Chinese governance sees the matter. The title reveals the normalizing ambit of knowledge production about China: "The Paradoxical Post-Mao Transition: From Obeying the Leader to 'Normal' Politics." "Normal" is in scare-quotes because the P.R.C. has not yet but will someday make the transition from blind obedience and government by emperor's decree. 42 In Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Bernard Cohn theorized a number of investigative modes the British used to govern India in part through the production of knowledge. One that seems especially relevant in the present context is the enumerative modality: for the famine scholars and their will to knowledge, China is in some sense a "vast collection of numbers" that can and must be objectified, classified, and administered (Cohn 8). The archives must be opened, statistics and death rates must be generated where there were none before. Entire teams of research assistants must be sent out across China to find documents and archival information that - in many cases - only confirms an a priori conclusion about communism

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versus democracy or markets, the nightmare of 1949-79, what is wrong with or Jacking in China, and so on. Real, imagined, projected Chinese lives and deaths during the Leap period, from the unborn to the unknown "excess," must be produced and then counted. The drive to produce such numbers - which far outweighs causal analyses of the Leap failure or its economics - is curious indeed. As noted above, this has to do with China being or having been Communist. The China field may be the one place left where there are some stakes involved - albeit largely symbolic stakes - in regard to the battle for or against communism, collective agriculture, alternative versus universal modernity, and so on. This is the appeal of the field, at least for those not fixated on the ancient and essential Chineseness of things. "China" may be the last place left where one can take up the enunciative position of he-who-speaks-the-truth against an Orwellian regime past and/or present. At the risk of psychologizing, this is an enormously seductive subject position (for left and right). It is an area - China and its interpretation - where the political still obtains. The numbers game and the interpretation of China fit into a friend/enemy dyad visa-vis the Party-state as such. Especially in reference to the Mao era and the revolution. It is as if such China scholarship and broader China-imaginings must respond unconsciously to its own friend/enemy distinction - where the latter continues to stand as "communism" and "collectivization," and the former is either the generic human or the quiet, suffering Chinese who secretly hates the regime whether he or she knows it or not. Such a dynamic does not obtain in the comparatively more scholarly world of South Asia studies, for example. There are relatively no stakes there in this geo-political sense. But there are around the "China problem," and in this case just how tragic and horrifying the Leap was or not. The Cold War is still with us, not just as a project ofU.S.-Westem political and economic hegemony but at the level of discourse and ideas. It overlaps with the colonial, and this desire to count and document and quantify China seems to me to indicate this fairly clearly. This is not to say such China scholars are akin to British colonial officials and old-fashioned orientalists, nor that contemporary China - the world's second largest economy, though not by per capita standards - is subjugated in the manner of colonial India. But it is to say that our knowledge of the Leap and its famine is not innocent. The power/knowledge relationship, and the problems of writing the Other, apply to China and its discursive production in the West and globally. So, too, as the work of James Hevia in English Lessons has shown, the question of the impact and effects of colonialism has to be extended to China, despite it having never lost its formal political sovereignty in the early modem period. As Hevia notes, "China knowledge was produced in ways identical to those found in other colonial settings" (English 348). In my argument, then, the accounting game around "excess deaths" is an instance of this, albeit in the contemporary, postcolonial world. Of course the enumerative modality does not operate in the same way as, for example, in colonial India or even the age of semi-colonialism in China. But the will-to-knowledge - and the dynamics of knowledge/power - is in my view strongly similar. The structural and "interested" or worldly aspects of knowledge production vis-a-vis China and the West are still in play.

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China kept its sovereignty and that is a good thing; but it was enormously impacted by the imperialists' attempts as well as by the contact with the West and the perceived need to Westernize and modernize. As any student of the Chinese 1920s and 1980s can attest, the desire for Westernization/Occidentalism can be so strong as to evince self-loathing on the part of some Chinese intellectuals (and academics), just as the rise of official and unofficial nationalisms in China today can be signs ofreaction-formations against Western chauvinism and hegemony (from CNN to currency pressures and so on). So, too, the West's failure to colonize China or to install the Guomindang, or its pyrrhic victory in the Cold War, hardly means it stopped being so imperious, orientalist, and hegemonic towards the P.R.C. That would be to take "politics proper" and sovereignty-retention far too seriously. Surely the notions of totalitarianism and oriental despotism, and of Chinese inhumanity and great tragedy, still have to be acknowledged as part of the China-West, neo-imperial problematic, including at the level of knowledge production. Much of the knowledge produced about China is willy-nilly caught up in the demonization not just of Maoism and collectivization, but of the Party-state and its history. Even its failures - of which the Leap stands out by far - are treated simplistically and do not call for sympathy so much as horror or handkerchiefs. How else to explain, in the last instance, the production of inflated mortality figures, the desire to produce censuses where none exist, to include the unborn, and to project a death trend tending towards zero/immortality? Or the veritable certainty amongst some, beyond all demonstrated evidence and argumentation, that the deaths must be whole orders higher than 10-15 million? Recent appeals to 45 million will likely be surpassed in the near future by figures much higher, regardless of whether the archive floodgates are opened or old census data appears out of nowhere. The accounting phenomenon, then, is not only, not even about the actual excess deaths, but something else.

5

DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao The "Sinologization" of global thought

The previous chapter examined a Cold War-colonial production of knowledge about the Mao era in general and the Great Leap Forward in particular. Of particular importance is not just the enumerative modality in general, but more specifically the work of American demographers and the British Indian, Nobel Laureate Sen in propagating a regime of truth about Mao and the famine of 1959-61. This is all to say, then, that this coding is indeed a global phenomenon and not limited to China experts. Given the long-standing importance of China to twentieth-century politics as well as the global influence of Maoism itself, from South Asia to Latin America and beyond, it is to be expected that there is such a thing as a global production of knowledge - a regime of truth - about Mao and Maoist China. And yet this phenomenon is rarely remarked upon as such within the academic field, not least because of the belief in objective or neutral knowledge. What this chapter aims to do is to make the case for the global distribution of such knowledge and to show that it does not simply hail from truth and expertise. What we have to deal with, instead, is the Sinologization or orientalization of global thought about China. By that I mean both the influence of authorized, "expert" knowledge and the imbrication - or inseparability - of this with more popular and self-evidentially orientalist/colonial forms of knowledge. What is at stake here are two standard problems from within the postcolonial and Marxist traditions, respectively, that have not been adequately addressed to the subject of modem China: the writing of the Other, and where incorrect ideas come from. It is here, then, where we can begin to track the global circulation of Sinological-orientalism, its system of dispersion, in this case the demonization of Chinese Maoism as a nightmarish aberration within China's incomplete but inevitable long march to Western modernity and liberal, democratic capitalism. But this abstract coding of China and the Mao period is subtended by a deep anxiety and at times paranoiac fear of its "massness," and of its perceived threat to the West, especially its "freedom" and liberal individualism. 1 Much of this discourse can be seen reflected and refracted in Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991), arguably his most prescient novel, at least in a symptomatic sense, in its obsession with the "threat" that global, non-Western "terrorism" presents to authorship, freedom, the liberal individual, and "modernity."

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The novel's protagonist, Bill Gray, is a reclusive, Pynchonesque writer with severe writer's block. His two closest friends are his publisher Charles Everson and his live-in assistant Scott Martineau, whose girlfriend, Karen Janney, he has an affair with. Gray agrees to be photographed by a New York City photographer named Brita, who is doing a series of portraits of important writers. In a conversation with Brita and others, Gray laments the declining significance of literature in an age where "terrorists" and "crowds" have supplanted novelists' function as the conscience and brain of a culture. The future belongs to crowds, as the text famously puts it in its opening prologue (itself a televisual scene of a mass wedding ceremony of the Unification Church, aka the "Moonies" of old). After this, Gray disappears again and secretly decides to go to the UK to speak on behalf of a Swiss poet who has been kidnapped and held hostage in war-tom Beirut. He then meets George Haddad, a representative of the Maoist group responsible for the kidnapping, and secretly agrees to go to Lebanon to negotiate the poet's release. En route, he is hit by a car in Cyprus, unknowingly lacerates his liver, and dies in the night. His last coherent thoughts are of wanting "devoutly to be forgotten," as if in the end the crowds are victorious. The fate of the poet is left ambiguous. The novel ends with the photographer in Beirut, snapping photos of the Maoist leader of the same group (as if a confirmation of Gray's earlier remark about "terrorists"). With perfect American-colonial arrogance, for the last snap she suddenly tears off the hood of a boy, the leader's son, who has been guarding the door. Later, she more happily photographs a random wedding party on the streets outside her hotel, as if to say small apolitical crowds are still okay. Through it all, the novel is delivered in DeLillo's characteristically televisual imagery, his rich, minimalist dialogue, and omnipresent indirect discourse. Yet while the theme of crowds is central to the novel, with all the depth of some l 950s-era screed about mass society, it is in fact fully articulated to the theme of terrorism - of leftist, Maoist so-called "terrorism" in particular. The bulk of the novel's plot is centered on the "terrorist" kidnapping of the Swiss poet by a Lebanese resistance group in Beirut (one with a "Marxist component") (124). The Swiss detail is significant when we recall that that place, for a certain imagination, remains the very paragon of neutrality and social, liberal democracy. Utopia achieved for the Europhilic intelligentsia perhaps. But for all the novel's resonances with the post 9/11 U.S.-West - and these are what make it prescient indeed - "terror" here signals less Islam than the very massness, the overwhelming numbers of "others" who seemingly refuse "individuality" or the autonomous self for a communal, collective identity, cause, and way of life - be it nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Maoism, and so on. Or alternatively this is what makes the novel resonate so strongly with the new, postcolonial world system after 9/11. As one ofDeLillo's editors put it: "Long before he had written anything Don told me he had two folders - one marked 'art' and the other marked 'terror'."2 The collective and the communal, while a seductive threat everywhere, just so happen to belong in the East. They are also seen as "backward" by all the

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major characters, including the narrator and implied author. The emotionally disturbed Karen is the only possible exception, and she is nonetheless pathologized throughout the text. To a significant extent, then, we also have to see the novel's lament about Maoist and other forms of terrorism as of a piece with the older, more familiar bogey of communism and the specter of the Red East. There is again an articulation between the colonial and the Cold War worldviews at work in this novel. Whether it affirms this or simply ambiguates it in more "postmodern" fashion is not our concern here. The fact that in the novel's Beirut there are other, "real" or Islamic fundamentalists in existence, as opposed to the Maoists/ political radicals, underscores what I am claiming here. For the novel and presumably Delillo, there is not much difference between the leftists and the fundamentalists, the Iranians and the Lebanese, or between the Moonies and the Maoists. This is what Spivak once pithily called an assimilation of the Other through non-recognition. Thus the first chapter opens inside a packed Yankee Stadium, as 6,500 "anonymous" couples (anonymous to whom?) and followers of Reverend Moon get married all at once; it ends with the narrator's ominous prognostication about the future belonging to crowds (16). By the end of the novel, with Brita watching that small wedding party in the streets of "the dead city" Beirut, we have been taken around much of the world outside the West (241 ). En route, and as noted earlier, the novel establishes a chain of equivalence between the Moonies, the various groups of the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian "masses" of the revolution and later of the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Peruvian Maoists, and China. But it is a specifically Maoist China, even when the much-later Tiananmen protests are signified. The latter is established by both the image of the massive protest in Tiananmen Square, which occupies the novel's front pages in a cinematic "opening credits" form, and Karen's witnessing on television the aftermath of the bloody crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping (in reality the anti-Maoist par excellence). And yet, it is in fact impossible to say for certain that the opening, unspecified photo is in fact of Tiananmen 1989. It could just as easily be one of any number of Cultural Revolution rallies from decades before. So, too, Karen is enthralled by the portrait and name of Mao, as well as by "Mao suits" (fairly anachronistic by 1989) and the crowds. That, perhaps, is the point: it is all one, an undifferentiated mass society cathected to a Great Leader, external to and threatening the West. Clearly the 1991 novel is obsessed with Mao/ Maoism, and its overall image of China is akin to the older, Cold War vision of an "army of blue ants." What we have again, then, is an abstract and reductive yoking together of radically different - but all non-white - groups, cultures, nations, and moments in time. They form one chain of equivalence that is seen here as a vague but powerfully looming threat. It is a threat not just to individual lives (e.g. Karen's, Bill's, the poet's) but to an entire way of life and to the "self' as such. More specifically, this is the self - independent, coolly rational, introspective, and autonomous - of both Western liberal capitalism and, relatedly, of an earlier modernism and the figure of the artist-writer as the conscience or legislator-interpreter of

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"mankind." The threat against this imaginary institution is establis1ied and made immanent to the U.S. in several ways. In addition to the opening "cult" ceremony, there is the presence of the name "Sendero Luminoso" (the Shining Path of Peruvian Maoism) spray-painted on ruined buildings in Tompkins Square Park in New York. When Karen asks someone where these guerrillas are, she is told "everywhere" ( 175). As Jeoffrey Bull has aptly noted, the novel then brings together these Maoists and the Beirut war by having, two pages earlier, people saying "Beirut, Beirut, it's just like Beirut" when they see fireballs from nearby gas main ruptures ( 173 ). As to the substance of the threat, this is left vague overall but still menacing (or perhaps menacing because vague). This is done in part through the invocation of the violence of the crowd as such, whether it is the Ayatollah's frenzied mourners nearly pulling his limbs apart, the violence in Tiananmen (burnt bodies), or the Swiss poet's likely demise at the hands of the terrorists/kidnappers. Moreover, the novel articulates this threat through - self-indulgent - dialogues on the eclipsed role of the artist/novelist. Thus Gray will comment to Brita that: Years ago I used to think it possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (41) The so-called terrorists, then, have stolen the artists' thunder and this privileged stratum has been "incorporated" to boot. Not incorporated by capitalism but by a certain shift in the Geist of the world: a rising, soon to be triumphant practice of and desire for "absolute being" and "All men one man" for "the end of time"; this is how Delillo characterizes what the Maoists, Moonies and the like desire (163, 235, 16). They seek an erasure of the self through "cultish" belonging and through experiencing the "link to the fate of mankind," and thereby living "in history" (82, 235). To be fair, Mao II sees this as a universal, not explicitly "Oriental" Geist and problem, just as Karen serves in some sense as a foil character and moral antithesis to the narcissistic, and eventually quite pathetic protagonist and his assistant, Scott. But on the other hand, Karen is nonetheless consistently pathologized as being merely "postcult," and it is no accident that, save for one photo of a European soccer crowd crushed against a fence, all the "terrorists" (Mao, the Ayatollah, Abu Rashid, the Shining Path) and their slavish followers or crowds are not-white (82). Not unlike how Kennan et al. saw totalitarianism, the threat originates in the "Asiatic" East. There is clearly an asymmetry and therefore a prejudice here, one rooted at the very least in anxiety if not the paranoia characteristic of much Western postmodern fiction. 3 Bull, too, is almost on to this point when he notes - albeit uncritically - that "terrorists have taken control of the West's narrative (as Bill [Gray] predicted)" (222). Within this orientalist bifurcation of the world, China occupies the paramount place. As I will go on to explain shortly, it is a dichotomy that the novel unsettles

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and disturbs, or cannot quite contain. As Ryan Simmons has cogently argued, the "Salman Rushdie affair" following the Ayatollah's fatwa against the great Indian novelist is an important backdrop to the book; Rushdie may well be imaged in the protagonist himself as well as in the Swiss poet-kidnappee (Simmons 677). But few have commented on the centrality of "Maoism" and China in the novel, and when this has been done it is mostly along the lines of the above equivalence. The real, historical Mao and the P.R.C. are indeed assumed to be part of the same, naturalized chain and threat. Thus Mark Osteen will refer to Bill Gray's (and the novel's) opposition to "Maoist or terrorist monologism" in favor of "Bakhtinian heteroglossia" (661 ). This ahistorical conflation of Maoism and China with the Shining Path, revolutionary Iran, the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, and Abu Rashid (whose characterization as a Maoist has no historical basis itself) - in the novel and its scholarship - is, in short, deeply misleading as well as surprising in work as erudite as DeLillo's. But it is perhaps to be expected, given the status of a demonized Maoism as the limit-case of"extremism" in (Left) politics, and of the P.R.C. as future superpower rival and current threat. Thus one will still find references in U.S. media to the "Maoism" of Afghanistan's Taliban, or to the "Maoism" of their former opponents, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. The latter have been criticized for this "extremism," even by some liberal publications. 4 So, too, this equivalence between Maoism and "terrorism" has become a global phenomenon, given an additional boost from the opportunism of retrograde states after 9/11. Thus even the now-incorporated Maoists of Nepal, despite their democratic credentials in ending the Nepalese monarchy's grasp on power, continue to be blackballed by the U.S. and other governments. And India has led the charge in making their own Maoist groups in Bihar and elsewhere official "terrorists" and enemies of the state now akin to Al-Qaeda. In addition to the Chinese photographs and televisual images in Mao 11 mentioned above, the centrality of Maoism in the novel is established through various other means. Indeed, the image of Mao himself graces the cover no less than thirty-two times, thanks to its reproduction of Andy Warhol's Mao series of silk screenprints (1972-4). And of course there is also the novel's title. This last in fact refers back to Warhol, and the title of one of his own Mao works (though not from the same series). 5 Yet Warhol's characteristic playfulness and fascination with simulacra for their own sake should not allow us to lose sight of the importance of Maoist politics in DeLillo's text. Osteen, for example, does this when he remarks that "Rashid is not Mao, but Mao II - a simulacrum, a circulating image soon to be supplanted by another" (665). But this novel is not DeLillo's influential ur-postmodern text, White Noise, but a different creature; and Rashid is replaced by no one but made generally equivalent to Maoism aka antiWestern "terrorism." It is true that - as befits DeLillo's political formation in the anti-intellectual American 1960s - the Lebanese Maoist Rashid sounds more like a hippie than the Chinese Marxist leader who was a "social constructionist" avant la lettre. Rashid: "The force of nature runs through Beirut unhindered .... It cannot be opposed, so it must be accelerated" (234). Nevertheless, some

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images and figures matter more than others here. In the logic of the book, Chinese Maoism is the original upon which the other "simulacra" follow. Additionally, even if one were to see all these "other" masses and leaders as simulacra, there is no denying that they all form one whole - a not-white, non-Western and looming, ominous mass. That is the pattern and that is the problem, beyond the verisimilitude of the text to real histories. Even in the case of Warhol's work itself, the many "Maos" are not pure simulacra and indeed have their referents and political determinations. As Fredric Jameson put it, Warhol's oeuvre is about nothing if not commodity fetishism, though in an anti-political way (Postmodernism 158). Take, for example, the consistent use of pale blues in his Mao series, particularly the 1972 portrait with Mao entirely in not black- but "blue-face." Regardless of how a particular viewer might "take up" or experience such work today, there is no doubt that what motivates the blue-face Mao, what it reflects, is that same stereotype of the Maoist/Chinese "army of blue ants" (this was the color of Mao-era distributed clothing). Perhaps this was some type of fairly insipid, depoliticizing social commentary - as if the free distribution of clothing in a desperately poor, hugely populated country were some type of "commodification" and assault upon "individual choice." That there were other ways of seeing the formerly ubiquitous Mao suits is demonstrated by the comments from the great liberal economist J. K. Galbraith, writing at the same time as Warhol began his series, and well before Delillo: There has been too much snobbish comment about the uniformity of Chinese clothing. General appearance is better, as noted, than on the American campus. But that is not the point. In a poor country an arrangement by which every person gets two sets of sound basic garments every year at low prices seems to me an exercise in the greatest good sense. The proper comparison of the comfortably clad Chinese is not with Americans ... but with the huddled and half-clad people of northern or upland India in the winter months. (126) One can, then, compare Galbraith's great, good sense with the "blue ants" dehumanization. Or more specifically with DeLillo's own, explicit obsession with "Mao suits" and the pseudo-philosophical opposition between the "motley crowd against the crowd where everyone dresses alike" (or "that great mass of blueand-white cotton") (177, 163 ). At another point the novel equates the uniform attire of the "Moonie" grooms - dark blue suits and maroon ties - with the unifmm Mao suits, as if they were slightly different manifestations of the same oriental conformity (183). Further evidence of the real, historical Mao and the specter of Maoism haunting the novel may be found in Gray's comments on the two signature post-1949 campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Thus Gray will offer the following in response to his interlocutor's (George Haddad's) more positive, leftist comments on the Maoists in China and Beirut. In response to the

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latter's affirmation of Mao, the Little Red Book, and the prospect that people may have had sex while holding the bound quotations, the protagonist Gray responds: "Incantations. People chanting formulas and slogans.... Bad sex. Rote, rote, rote" (162). The elitism of such comments should go without saying, as if deep affect articulated to a "great leader" - be it Mao, Malcolm X, the Beatles or the Dalai Lama - must necessarily be inauthentic. And so must be such people's sex. That the novel further reflects a specifically Cold War, Sinological-orientalist mentality is shown in Gray's retort to Haddad's upholding of Mao as both someone "dependent on the masses" and an "absolute being" (the latter being an orientalist conceit itself in this case): The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the Cultural Revolution ... after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the millions they kill? ... The point of every closed state is now you know how to hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the truth isn't realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing and the bodies themselves .... And it begins with a single hostage, doesn't it? (163) At the most evident level this is simply a type of conspiratorial thinking that is endemic to U.S. popular political culture, applied to China and the so-called "closed societies" of the East and South - everything is orchestrated from above and in secret. Moreover, with this passage our examination of the demonization of Maoism comes full circle as it encapsulates several of the themes of Sinological-orientalism. The invocation of a key plank of Cold War discourse - the Popperian notion of the "open" (Western, liberal) versus "closed" (Soviet-Asiatic) society- signifies the alleged totalitarianism of China. It was (is?) closed because their truths are not open to contestation and because they are a society cut off from the rest of the world. It is as ifthe older P.R.C.'s relationships and exchanges with Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, and the Southern "Third World" matter not. It was - even in 1991 - an oriental despotism in which the state exerts total, top-down power to control and subjugate its docile citizens. The putative extremism and fundamentalism of Maoist China is further signified by the conspiracist vision or equation of Mao et al. with other terrorists ("these men" and their premeditated "setup"), and the fantasy of hidden mass graves in China. This last is, indeed, particularly paranoid: untold numbers of dead who - as Gray bemoans - have never actually been found, so well hidden are they. As one recent Chinese Marxist critic has noted, despite de-Maoification there has never been any mass grave or famine-related burial ground discovered anywhere in China. This may well be further evidence that the famine statistics of some 30 million dead are indeed deceptive. 6 Where indeed are the bones in such a densely populated country? For the novel, as for the famine scholars, the striking, potential implication here - that the "bodies" have not been discovered because they largely did not in fact exist - is inadmissible,

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unknowable within the orientalist/Cold War problematic. Ironically, so is Gray's/ DeLillo's "scandalous" question. We must note as well the figure of the oriental despot in the text, one of exceptional cruelty and dishonesty, a figure which arises again when the novel has Rashid sell the poet-hostage to "the fundamentalists" (235). As for the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution in particular as scenes where this despotism and mass murder took place, the previous chapter has already attempted to complicate and displace our knowledge of these. Suffice it to mention, again, that the violence of the Cultural Revolution was not orchestrated by the state, that it was nothing if not a chaotic, bottom-up epoch of both intermittent but real violence and mass democratic participation. As for the bad Leap years of 1959-61, the question of its mortality rates is important, as is government culpability. But we have also seen that the numbers of deaths may well be dramatically less than the alleged 30 million and overall fewer than occurred in democratic India during the same years. And regardless of the real numbers, which we may never know because of a lack of data, we do know that the methods used to get to 30 or more million are often quite dubious (including the unborn, for example), and seem motivated by some other agenda than disinterested truth. There was clearly nothing planned about the famine; if anything it suffered from a lack of planning, implementation, and reliable information. And so on. But for Gray and the novel, the inflated mass-death must, naturally, all be laid at the foot of the emperor who planned them. What is striking, in other words, is the absence of even a faint notion of Maoist discourse. There is a denial that the Chinese of Mao's era, like their counterparts elsewhere, must have had some rational, practical, and affective knowledge-framework by which they made sense of the world. That an awareness of Maoist discourse is lacking in so much specialized academic work on China should not be an excuse for DeLillo reproducing an essentially orientalist view of the world. It is the vocation of literature, after all, to illustrate and amplify human and social experience, including the complexities of self-understanding. Clearly the novel is drawing upon the dominant, dispersed, Sinological knowledge of the alleged world-historical death toll under a nightmarish Maoist rule. What is more interesting than DeLillo's lack of knowledge here - which I would still insist is significant for a famously erudite author - is Gray's fascination with the sheer numbers, the massness of the Chinese "victims." He, too, operates within the terms of an enumerative modality. It is as if there have to be massive numbers of secret dead, because everything in China involves massiveness just as everything is usually secretive. A flip-side but equivalent cathexis of this sheer "mass" is found in Gray's agent Haddad, who not only loves the "great mass of blue-and-white cotton," but is almost happily resigned to this same specter of mass death: The killing is going to happen. Mass killing exerts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and space. The leader only interprets the forces. (163)

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Such a comment betrays a certain callousness towards death as well as, again, a certain quasi-spiritual, hippie-ish belief in historical fate dressed up in Stalinist, dialectical-materialist drag. But more to the point here is that the emphasis on numbers ("great," "mass," "unnumbered") reveals the fascination with the amount, the mass itself. The Chinese cannot enumerate themselves; they must be enumerated. Even if Haddad suggests they are too great to count, there is still the desire to do so, to know the amount, and still the image of China as a place of vast numbers and immense quantities. This is also connected to the primordial force, or Geist behind the "great death" - which is located outside the West, in Asia (China and the Middle East especially). In this passage it is articulated through Haddad's (DeLillo's) uniquely American "Stalinist-hippie" point of view. But it is also something hard-wired into Gray's speech and into the novel's chain of terrorist-equivalences located outside the West. The specificity of China in all of this, the imputed Chineseness of the looming global mass/crowd, is further signified by Karen's viewing of the CNN broadcasts from Tiananmen. There, shortly after the narrator's powerful, lyrical depiction of the everyday miseries of the homeless in the park, Karen is mesmerized by the portrait of Mao in the Square, the blue suits, "a million Chinese," the "rows and rows of jogging suits," "troops ... in jogging cadence," and "bodies" everywhere (176-8). Each of these images is repeated several times in less than three pages. It is the proper name of "Mao" that is used the most (e.g. "Mao Zedong. She likes that name all right") (178). In fact, DeLillo will alter the Tiananmen protests' chronology to drive the name home all the more, as Karen watches the paint-splattered portrait of Mao being replaced with the clean, new one, even though this had taken place weeks before the crackdown. So, too, what would have been an empty Square in the aftermath of the military assault is here made to be full of people, bodies, action, as if this scene were metonymically linked with the mass-rally photo on the very first pages of the novel. What is surprising, given the overall logic of the text, is that Karen's mesmerization is not pathologized - at least not to the extent that Gray's and DeLillo's affirmation of the autonomous individual against the "mass" would seem to necessitate. On the one hand, the narrative codes Karen's experiences in Tompkins Square Park and her viewing of the Tiananmen event as an identification with mass-belonging, a messianic dissolution of the self and a concomitant embracing of a "great leader." It is therefore a reversion and regression to her brainwashed days in the Unification Church. Returning to the park and the homeless after viewing the Tiananmen footage, the Mao portrait, the suits, and the Chinese masses, as well as after the footage of the Iranian mourners, Karen tells them: "'We will all be a single family soon .... Because the total vision is being seen.' ... She had the Master's total voice ready in her head" (193-4 ). This return is clearly the denouement of her character-arc, which goes from negative ("brainwashed") to positive ("postcult" life with Gray et al.) and then back to negative (apocalyptically awaiting the power of the crowd). While we are asked to sympathize with the complex Karen, this return is still constructed

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as a negative development within her characterization and a signification of the ominous power of mass politics. And yet, recalling the poetic power of her point of view on Tiananmen, the homeless, and the dispossessed, and further reading her characterization against the grain of the rest of the novel's hierarchical bifurcation of the world, we can see an affirmation of her desire for oneness if not of her implied "mass politics." This is against the grain because of the centrality of the protagonist Gray and also because of the fact that the novel ends with the photographer Brita, the moral center of the narrative who stands up, in a colonial-arrogant way, to the Maoist Rashid and his young son. Karen's desire speaks to a different type of need, the human as a social and community-centered animal on a large, deeply meaningful and not small scale (as with Brita's wedding-goers on the final page). Jeoffrey Bull again approaches this dynamic within the text when he argues that while the novel itself supports Gray's "politics of inclusion and individuality," an "openness" against Haddad's radical and (as argued above) orientalist absolutism, "Karen Janney's uncanny spiritual encounters with mass man ... suggest that the longing of many humans for the 'symbolic immortality' offered by totalist rulers and their 'immortal' - that is, impregnably monologic -words certainly cannot be ignored" (225). But this interpretation also presumes the "self-evident" truth of coding Mao, China, and mass politics as a form of extremism and totalitarianism. For Karen's "uncanny" spirituality - and framing it thus depoliticizes her desire and compassion - is coded as an understandable but ultimately dangerous, false consciousness. Here the bugbear is "monologism" or "totalism"; the implicit term of value, as in Osteen's reading of the novel, is the pluralistic and anti-political notion of heteroglossia. This is a familiar, cultural-studies Bakhtin made palatable for the liberal worldview in an age of Cold War. 7 As Timothy Brennan has argued, the "many misperceptions ofBakhtin's [work on hybridization and heteroglossia] are themselves informed by Cold War protocols of interpretation" ("Cuts" 55). They have made Bakhtin into an allegorical, ethical argument against Stalinist/totalitarian "monologism" and for an open-ended, pluralistic mode of understanding and politics. This is ironic in that in reality, Bakhtin, a staunch Christian socialist and "enemy" of Russian formalism (modernism), meant his work to serve as an affirmation of ordinary, crude, unruly speech, populist rebellion, and mass, socialist politics (Brennan, "Cuts" 55). The Cold War boilerplate that subtends the liberal-Bakhtinian readings of Mao II is also revealed by the very source of Bull's notion of "totalism" and "immortality": a work in the very dated genre of psycho-history by "an authority on contemporary psychological patterns in East Asia." 8 This is Robert Jay Lifton's Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a mass-market paperback published a mere two years into the Cultural Revolution itself (Bull 225nl3). This book, which reads today like a period piece of the 1960s in its Jungian, archetypal psychologism, grounds Mao as a "divine" emperor, the P.R.C. as a "closed," dynastic regime, and the Chinese as caught in a doomed, primitive quest for "symbolic immortality" (Lifton xviii, 46, 63, 153).

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This is to say that the unreflexive universality of Lifton 's psychologism is undercut by the China difference. While such a quest for "totalism" is allegedly universal, it is the Chinese whom are (still) stuck. 9 Despite the dated nature of this work, it comes as little surprise that Lifton is also a source for Roderick Macfarquhar's influential volumes on "court-politics" under Mao (examined previously) and, perhaps, for DeLillo's novel. What happens when one recognizes and unlearns the Cold War, orientalist roots of such scholarship on Mao II and the text's chain of equivalence between Reverend Moon, Mao, Rashid et al., and the specter of the mass? One can return to the dynamic introduced by Karen's point of view and discern a systematic other-message. That is, read a certain way, these mass- and "China"-centered passages cut against the orientalist demonization of a "brainwashing," terroristic mass politics and of, in a word, Maoism. What we have is not just yet another modernist case of ambiguity and openness. The case for that and its attendant affirmation of openness or "hope" in fact lies not with Karen but with Brita - the other artist and paragon of individuality - and the small wedding party in the streets of Beirut. This final scene recalls the mass-marriage of the opening; it serves not only as a positive contrast to it but as fleeting evidence that not everything in the non-Western world is threatening. Perhaps some groups - if small and temporary, a party as opposed to a Party - are not a threat: "they [the wedding party] all look transcendent, free of limits" (240). The issue of scope and scale is key here; Beirut remains a "dead city" (214 ). This is, such as it is, the intended if ambiguous hope and resolution of the novel, an affirmation of the quotidian and the individual in small groups at best. The problems with this ending are multiple, but one in particular stands out for the present study. Given the preponderance of the novel's significations of the looming mass - of the "other" from the global South articulated in the image of Maoist China - this final moment amounts to weak tea. That so-called threat, rooted in Sinological and other orientalisms, still looms, and the racial and cultural politics of the novel's representation of the Other are left in tact. Moreover, the ending here is not only anti-climactic but politically quietist and indeed de-politicizing in the way that liberalism so often is. It is rather the affirmation of Karen's desire for "oneness" and her point of view in general that resonates more strongly once the novel is put down. These pose the more interesting questions and lines of flight outside the text, or rather back in to its worldliness. One could trans-code Karen's resonance as a revolutionary or utopian impulse, towards a form of collective belonging, politics, and real, large-scale community. We might well call this the political unconscious of the text. But there is also a larger political and interpretive issue here, and it is one of historical mediation, of reflection and refraction of the very history that the text reifies and orientalizes. This is the history of American anomie and bourgeois self-alienation, of traditional romantic/aesthetic discourse that centers the artist-individual as the heart and mind of culture and society, and of mass, commitment politics and Maoism in particular. It is that type of politics and Maoism more generally from which the text cannot in the last instance entirely divorce

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itself - i.e. cannot fully repudiate and demonize. This is of course not to argue that there is indeed some real Orient or essential "substance" behind the novel's reification of Maoism and the global South. But it is to argue that there are historical traces one can discern within this same orientalist discourse, and that there is an urgent, yet perennial historical problem that the Karen-related pas· sages and the text as a whole index. This is the problem of the neo-colonial world system and the U.S.-West's hierarchical relationship with the Rest. This latter problem may be further specified as the need of the dispossessed nations and peoples of the world, including within the U.S., to find some alternative path to development, prosperity, and community, some alternative to pax Americana and global capitalist modernity. And it is, or was, actually existing Chinese Maoism that most vigorously and plausibly presented such an alternative modernity. That this noble experiment failed, for its own internal as well as external world-systemic reasons, matters not. For the need - and historical problem - endures, and it is this which helps to explain the adoption of Maoism by various groups around the world (e.g. from the former Black Panthers of the U.S. to the Naxalite groups of India), as well as the persistence of the desire for collective identity/community and praxis. The novel and the author's sensibility may castigate such groups and desires as cultish, but still they persist and will continue to do so until there is indeed some alternative to liberal capitalism on a global scale. The discourse and politics of Maoism answer a real need in the world, and will continue to do so for quite some time, even in an age of depoliticization such as ours. In short, these real Maoist and mass-political traces and problems form a historical substratum that the novel cannot abstract or incorporate into its overriding logic of Orientalization. Put another way, there is a certain historical specter haunting the novel as a whole, from its front and back covers full of Maos, to its photos and other invocations of the global, Other mass. Hence the numerous references to Mao, his image or his state, and his people. This specter is, most visibly, the very image and proper name of Mao Zedong and Maoism. 10 And hence the final setting of the novel - in what Haddad earlier calls the "rat warrens of Beirut" (163). That is indeed an apt tum of phrase that speaks to the very ground and necessity of revolution and mass politics. Thus it is here where we can ascertain the import and legacy of Maoist discourse. This is a discourse that the novel - a Ia Sino logy - on the one hand refuses to grant to the Chinese people in its demonization of Mao and historical Maoism. But on the other hand, this is also a specter that comes back to haunt the text, its orientalist bifurcation of the world, and its proffering of an anti-political, ambiguous hope and openness. It is not so much that the novel shows us the deprivation, misery, neo-colonial racism, and urban/rural divide that so often breeds Maoism - though this is at times signified - but that it shows the intellectual and emotional poverty of a liberal alternative and worldview that is in fact premised upon a demonization of Maoism and "crowds." The text cannot not show the emptiness of the Gray/Brita/liberal worldview; it cannot help but show, as well, the rationality and moral appeals of its "Maoism" in both affective/psychological and political terms.

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There would be no Maoist discourse, even in its contemporary, oft-commodified form in China, without the movement and history from which it originally derived. It is then in some sense a tribute to Mao and Maoist China that they can still animate a specter, even in an anti-political, postmodern text like Mao II. As we have seen, the demonization of Maoism as with the knowledge production about China more generally is indeed a global yet strongly American phenomenon. This is in part what makes it in an important sense a legacy of imperialism and orientalism. It is not a free-floating phenomenon unmoored from geo-political history and the U.S.'s twentieth century. But it would be a mistake to see this as a complete victory against Maoism, as the latter's specter will continue to haunt the liberal-capitalist ecumene. Despite their erasure or denigration, Mao and Maoism name something important that the developed and developing worlds lack, both culturally or ecologically as well as politically.

6

Screening Sinology On the W estem study of Chinese film

If there is one thing that rivals the importance of the 1989 Tiananmen protests as

a watershed in global, Western understandings of China, it would have to be the international success of mainland Chinese film, from the now-classic "fifth generation" films onwards. It is as if these celluloid representations were a welcome herald of good tidings; having sloughed off the grey-blue dreariness of the Mao years, China was finally on the right, modem and liberal-artistic path. 1 From Maoism to the market to M.O.M.A. Indeed, after the "Tank Man" of 1989, the predominant image of China in the Western mind would have to be not a televisual but a cinematic one, from close-ups of Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi to the spectacular imagery of a Zhang Yimou, from his early work to the opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics (itself a cinematic tour de force). The "discovery" of Chinese film was an event and sea-change in Western attention to modem Chinese culture that still lives on in the international reputations of directors Chen Kaige and Zhang, as well as the ascent of so-called "Sixth Generation" directors like Jia Zhangke or Wang Xiaoshuai. 2 Clearly the P.R.C.'s cultural production still encounters a number of orientalist and other market-driven expectations - above all else the real Chinese artist must depict suffering, totalitarianism, and "the human spirit" - but it has never been as globally successful (popular) as today. Thus a Chinese artist - albeit an exile with little critical acclaim - has finally won a Nobel Prize. 3 From at least the mid-1990s, mainland Chinese culture and especially its art-house films have been global, transnational commodities and "flows." When one factors in the larger field of greater China or Chinese language cinema in particular, then we can see the veritable explosion of Chinese culture globally, well beyond the Olympics spectacle. What the rise of Chinese language film studies points us to is - for my present purposes - the question of institutionalization, and specifically the knowledge of mainland China that it produces and reproduces. My argument here is that as the field has developed it has borrowed from and reproduced an area studies-based, orientalist and Cold War-inflected discourse about modem China. It is as if film studies needed - since we are after all dealing with "the Other" in a sense that does not apply to, say, French cinema - a certain amount of historical and allegedly objective detail to serve as a necessary interpretive framework, backdrop, or context for the study of the new Chinese

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cinema. But in assuming or reaching out for this it never interrogated the fields of Chinese history and politics proper. Despite or perhaps because of its attention to world/other/third cinema, film studies has not had a postcolonial moment. This importation from area studies has happened despite the more theoretical, reflexive, and "progressive" aspects of the field as compared to the conventional social sciences. In short, as a discipline film studies certainly interrogates and unpacks those celluloid artworks by drawing on numerous sources of theory, but - even when it does venture outside film history, film aesthetics, and so-called "film culture" - it rarely interrogates its own sources of information and context either pertaining to China or to the U.S.-West. The film field's more or less direct, un-problematized "borrowing" of Cold War/orientalist statements and knowledge about the P.R.C. from other, largely empiricist disciplines or the larger intellectual-political culture speaks to what Foucault called regularity in dispersion: that discourses are produced across a range of sites; knowledges are always multiply constituted, not hermetically sealed, and it is paradoxically this dispersion that gives them their strength and unity and that constitutes a discursive formation like orientalism in Said's sense. An exclusive focus on the film text and purported viewing experience - as opposed to a more considered contextualization - narrows the social field of vision. In the rush to develop a "transnational" Chinese language cinema studies, we not only need to guard against the notion of a singular "cultural China" (or "Chineseness") but also against losing sight of the asymmetries and dense relations of (normative) power that necessarily subtend films' institutionalization and reception. 4 More simply, we need to interrogate the knowledge of China that the films as well as ourselves draw on and produce. That place is bewitched by Cold War orientalist thinking. Whereas the film field has productively broached the question of the orientalism within Chinese films themselves, it has yet to adequately address this type of question about itself. While the alleged orientalism of the fifth generation films was an initial aspect of their contentious reception within China and abroad, this fundamental aspect of their Western, global reception and context has yet to be adequately developed within Chinese film and cultural studies. 5 But as its institutionalization proceeds apace - there is now, for example, a Journal of Chinese Cinemas - it is perhaps the ideal time to interrogate the production not of images but of knowledge within the field. As Zhang Yingjin has argued in regard to Zhang Yimou's work, the "seductive power of signification" in his films including their ability to be appropriated by orientalist discourse and desire "relates more to the Western than to the Chinese audience" (222). But audience here also means the space of film scholars and their works, and not simply the ordinary film-goer. In other words, if there is a visual basis to Sinological-orientalism - and there surely is - it lies not simply in images themselves as much as in their academic and institutional reception, as well as the larger discourses that subtend this process. And there can be no denying the importance, even the dominance, of film studies within the larger China field, especially in regard to the humanities and "soft" social sciences. Curricula, syllabi, and journals worldwide are far more likely to contain analyses of Chinese films - usually seen as

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more or less an open window into Chinese reality - than of, say, Chinese literature, intellectual or political history, ethnographies and oral histories, and so forth. This of course has something to do with the "universal" but undeniably more accessible nature of film language as opposed to Chinese language proper, and as opposed to reading books. But it is decidedly dangerous and one-sided. In what follows I will make the case for such a wide-ranging and subtle Sinological-orientalist discourse, and I will seek to counter it by alternative readings of four important films and their systematic other-messages about the complexity and positivity of the Chinese revolution and its post-1949 trajectory: Li Wenhua's Breaking With Old Ideas, Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou's To Live, and Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun. First, however, to establish the presence of this discourse and to show the imbrication of area and film studies, and of Sinological-orientalism and film more generally, I want to examine what is perhaps the most critically acclaimed, influential, and controversial Western documentary on the P.R.C., namely Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon's Tiananmen film The Gate of Heavenly Peace ( 1995). This will then set the stage for an examination of some of the foundational films - and film studies - of the "new" cinema. My emphasis on earlier films and earlier scholarship may seem anachronistic to some, but I think it is nonetheless important to focus on these early, pioneering works and texts for historical reasons, and because they can show us the formation of that Sinological discourse and - in my against-thegrain readings - some of what it leaves out or misreads.

Sinology meets cinema: an area studies film Gate was co-produced by many well-established China experts, the names of whom will be familiar to readers of the present study. 6 These include renowned, journalistic "popularizers" of the current doxa on the P.R.C.: that its modernizing "reform era" is most welcome, but is still a regime and society tethered-down by the legacy of revolution and Maoism. There were overall nearly two dozen professional China experts involved in the film at some level. It achieved great press from the P.R.C. 's typically ham-handed attempts to stop its circulation, and from the responses from the exiled Chinese student leaders themselves (mostly in the U.S.). They almost unanimously disliked or even condemned the film for its harsh attacks on their efforts. It is a common film on Chinese history and cultural studies syllabi; so, too, is its accompanying website that features numerous writings from the Sinologists who helped make the movie. Gate, then, prides itself on a putative sensitivity, expertise, and "insider" viewpoint. Co-director Carma Hinton, the daughter of the radical and ethnographic historian William Hinton, grew up in the P.R.C. herself. As a privileged foreigner, she has (or had) unique access to the cultural-elite within China. Thanks to its academic armor, the film has a certain insider status and cultural capital. While Gate is about the 1989 Tiananmen movement, it is concerned less with Deng Xiaoping and the killing of hundreds if not thousands of workers

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and students than with the far more charismatic and, to the film-makers, far more frightening figure of the former Chairman. What is remarkable is not the attempt to narrate "what really happened" through some of the participants' own words, as there is little in the film's presentation of "facts" that was not well known before its release. The main talking-heads are elite "dissident" intellectuals and a few of the student leaders, but zero ordinary workers and students. 7 What is striking, however, is the omnipresence of Mao. From references via the intellectuals to frequent cut-aways to and close-ups on the famous Mao portrait in Tiananmen, as well as historical footage, Mao is central to the film's narrative. The narration itself drives home two essential points: that the emperor Mao still haunts China; and that the Chinese people must "get over it" and become modern, free-thinking, and autonomous subjects who no longer think and speak in the language of revolution and mass mobilization. 8 Thus near the finale of the film the narrator moves from the introduction of the "Goddess of Democracy" statue to the specter of Mao. During an extreme close-up on the Mao portrait, she notes: "If democracy came to China, what would she look like? There seemed a chance at least that her face would look all too familiar." The film betrays no awareness that this return might seem welcome to workers and others in the Square, nor that - as film-advisor Geremie Barme most surely was aware - by 1989 there was already a "Mao craze" under way in China. This consistent cutting back to the image of Mao in the Square and in the minds of the intellectuals - the only stylistic flourish in the nearly three-hour film - reflects the film's coding of a democratizing, liberalizing China still trapped in its past (an historicist, orientalist logic). The interviews after this final pan and close-up of Mao and the final voice-over drive home the point all the more: When people abandon hope for a perfect future and faith in great leaders, they are returned to the common dilemmas of humanity. And there - in personal responsibility, in civility, in making sacred the duties of ordinary life - a path may be found. While no one would deny that there was a "cult" of Mao during the CR, it is altogether something else to code this as inhuman, and to assert that there was no "personal responsibility" or civility - not even "sly civility" - in the twentyseven years of Mao's rule. The return-to-sameness is here signified by the Chinese's deferred but inevitable return to common "humanity." This is also shown by the film's critique of the students. For the film's point - later further articulated by script-writer and associate director Barme9 - is that the students failed, not because of the tanks, but because their minds and language were still "deformed" by Maoist totalitarianism and revolutionary rhetoric. This led to the "extreme" decision not to leave the Square during martial law. But this was not in fact a "decision" made by any one leader or by the original Beijing students, but afait accompli brought on by

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the late-May arrival of hundreds of thousands of new students, workers, and citizens from across the city and country. There was in effect a de facto general strike emerging in Beijing. That the film-makers might know less about what is to be done than the participants themselves, fails to register. The most specific target of this "critique" is of course Chai Ling, whose figure as the scapegoat in the film (and of the massacre) has been persuasively detailed by Ralph Litzinger in an essay that exposes the 'juridical gaze" of the film's camera work, the placing of the participants "on trial." 10 It is precisely in this obsession with individuals - be they Chai Ling, Mao, or Wang Dan - as the locus of history and the future that belies the film's normative, judgmental liberalism. The specific "failure" of "the" Chinese to unshackle their minds from Maoist extremism comes near the film's denouement and right after the close-up on Mao's portrait, from native informant Wu Guoguang, former aide-de-camp of "reformer" and neo-authoritarian Zhao Ziyang 11 : ... the way the whole nation thinks has not yet broken free of the mold created by Mao ... What the Chinese lack is not ideals, but the means through which to realize them [and] the wisdom necessary to achieve their goal. What the Chinese lack is not a heart, but a mind. After Mao's death, hundreds of millions of minds needed to start functioning again. Wu's words are the film's final analysis of Tiananmen. The elitism of this goes without saying, and its implicit assumption of totalitarianism - the absence of intelligence in a primitive mind - says much about the nature of such liberalism. The film offers no substantial thinking - as if the content of the American, new age self-help rhetoric of freeing one's mind, having faith, holding the everyday "sacred" were transparent. Its reading of China is based on lack. But as impoverished a "method" as it is, this assumption is also of a piece with the liberal notion of power in the film. This is revealed in the focus on the individual as such, and in the film's notion of a purely negative relationship between the state, history, and subject. The opening voice-over says: "When individuals stand up to power, they bring to the encounter the lessons that power has taught them, and the harm it has done them. Merely to stand up does not free us from these things." This platitude assumes that power is only negative, that it holds one down and prevents the natural, human course of things, the flow of history towards freedom, democracy, and whole families shopping at night. This is what Foucault theorized as the repressive hypothesis, as opposed to the productive, dispersed notion of power he championed. 12 Power, in others words, is inhuman and outside of the subject. Even when it has been internalized, it unnaturally originates from without, like a shackle. In the Sinological case at hand, this necessarily means that the locus of power is, as the narrator puts it early on and right after footage of the Tank Man: "the remorseless machinery of [the] state." Which is also to say, then, that even after the last emperor, China and its ineffectual, mindcontrolled people have yet to shed the burden of oriental despotism, or Maoism and revolution.

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Celluloid mirror: Chinese film history as Cold War history Gate's demonization of Maoism as a great historical burden that must be overcome; the Cold War discourse of totalitarianism and its inscription of a lack of agency, modernity, and contemporaneity to its Eastern other; 13 the liberal humanist paradigm that isolates individuals and relies on impoverished notions of power and politics: all of this can be found in varying degrees in the majority of Western scholarship on Chinese film. We can now tum to how Maoist and post-Mao film has been coded. Western fascination with contemporary Chinese film has several dimensions, from the aesthetic appeals of spectacles like Farewell My Concubine (1993) or Hero (2002) to outright sexual desire or scintillation. As Zhang Yingjin has argued, "oriental ars erotica as a mythified entity is fixed at the very center of Western attention" to Chinese film, and is in fact "deliberately cultivated" by the media (Screening 28). And yet, it is the sign of "history" that is paramount in these texts' reception, just as their perceived erotics cannot be divorced from their historical newness. What was most distinctive about the fifth-generation films was that they represented a perceived breakthrough, not only within cinema but more grandly. Moreover, they were and continue to be seen as deeply, mimetically historical, signifying the Real China and its past, from the era of concubinage to the Cultural Revolution. As Wendy Larson argues, fifth-generation films are often taken by reviewers and audiences as historical epics and as exhibiting "Chinese history and thus, China" (332). Moreover, the subtext of this historicist view on post-Mao films is that the nightmarish history they represent is some type of scandalous secret, unknown or unutterable to the vast majority of the Chinese populace itself who, due to censorship may never see the films themselves and so therefore remain ignorant of their own history. A New York Times review of Zhang Yuan's Sons ( 1996), for example, describes it as a representation of the real China "never seen in China" itself (Klawans 23). There is thus a central irony to this reception. For as Larson goes on to argue, a film like Farewell (and arguably all films of that generation) substitutes an analysis of socio-historical events for a depiction of an ahistorical "crisis of consciousness" (the fractured subjectivity and sexuality of Cheng Dieyi) (334). So, too, Yuejin Wang has noted that while "fifthgeneration" films construct a "cultural identity that the current Chinese public are reluctant to identify with" and do not share, the films themselves are - abroad - taken to be a "cinematic representation of Chinese culture" and therefore, one may add, a reflection of Chinese history (36). The crucial assumption that enframes this narrative of the "break" and historical mimesis is that the previous (Maoist) decades were all but a cultural wasteland. As Rey Chow puts it, the 1980s films followed "three decades of propaganda-filled media" (Primitive 26). For Chow and much of film studies, then, the tired opposition between art and propaganda has not been thoroughly problematized over the course of the last century. It is as if left-wing artists in China, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere (e.g. the Black Arts movement in the U.S.) were not in fact quite avowedly making "agitprop" and so do not need

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to be taken on their own terms for even a single moment of analysis. Implicit to this dismissal, beyond Chow's classically Hong Kong hostility to "mainland" politics, is the assumption that such Mao-era texts were "bad" and that the hypothetical and monolithic - Chinese "audience" saw them as such. Thus John Howkins, in a so-called "pioneering study" within mass communications, casually remarks that "some films were produced during the Cultural Revolution, but I have been told ... that they were so dull nobody watched them" (Briggs vii; Howkins 67). Paul Clark will remark that "audiences yawned in vast numbers" at such films, and only attended them out of "boredom" or fear; he bases this "analysis" on his own observations as a student in the P.R.C. during the midl 970s (Clark 128, 202n5). One wonders what such critics would make of the revivals and popularity of the "revolutionary model operas" (and films) in China today, or of the similar ongoing appeal of the songs, food, and memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution. What is striking, then, is the assumption that Chinese audiences must have seen such texts like "we" would, and the "proof' of this in mere anecdote or hearsay. It is also worth noting that the fully "artistic" films of the 1980s and beyond have in fact had, generally speaking, very little commercial success and critical acclaim within China itself. This failure to take such radical era texts seriously at all, let alone on their own, revolutionary terms, is reflected in the dearth of attention given to the cultural production of this era in standard textbooks and surveys of Chinese literature and culture. 14 My own reading of Li Wenhua's most famous film is meant to address this gap shortly. But first, we should further establish the reception of such texts within Chinese film history as written in the West. In a widely used anthology on film history, Chris Berry presents the cinema of the leftist decades as a space of lack, such that after the late 1930s, "an opportunity" for "talent to make itself visible" was not to present itself again for another forty-five years, "until One and Eight and Yellow Earth" arrived ("China Before" 413). The implicit modernization-narrative here - where the Westernized, cosmopolitan film-makers of the l 930s- l 940s and then of the 1980s are the only relevant artists - is made explicit in Esther Yau's contribution in the same volume: "Until ... 1984 attempts to modernize film language did not go beyond that of humanist realism" ("China After" 699). Thus the different Maoist aesthetics - first "socialist realism" and then the later combination of "revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism" - are assimilated to a vague humanist realism despite the critique of humanism within Maoist discourse. 15 Moreover, the key assumption within Berry's and Yau's accounts is that Mao-era films were lacking something - a something never substantiated, but which we assume is the conventional standard of formalism and "creativity." Into this posited void steps the fifth generation in a spectacular sign that China is now producing authentic art/film. The modernization teleology reaches its full expression in Ying Zhu's argument that Chinese New Wave cinema represents the successful quest for cinematic modernization - signified by the birth of the Chinese "art film" as such, and by the rejection of socialist "pedagogy" and financial "dependence" on the state. It is as if Chinese cinema were a child

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who must go beyond schooling and dependence on his or her parents ("Cinematic Modernization" 451 ). This rhetoric of maturity and pop-developmental psychology is common in Chinese cinema studies, from Jianying Zha's tabloidesque China Pop to Paul Clark's coding of Chinese film history as the striving for "maturity" on the part of both film-makers and audiences (Clark 94, 181). To be sure, this is or was common to indigenous film discourse at the time, and reflects the complicity between Western film studies and current intellectual fashion on the mainland (the uncritical embrace of "humanism," modernization, anti-Maoism, and so forth). Even in the rare cases where the Mao period is not elided entirely, as in Clark's influential Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949, the films themselves are subjected to a harsh criticism as "art" in the conventional, "bourgeois" sense of what real film/art should be: ambiguous with an "innovative style" and answerable to no one, let alone one class. Additionally, one can see this refusal to address the "red and expert" films on their own terms in Clark's recourse to a conventional, "universal" genre classification and analysis. Since the films of the 1950s-1970s do not at all fit squarely into standard genres, he must come up with vacuous genre-types, e.g. the "cheerful types" or "serfs and smiles" films. In a common bifurcation of Chinese film history, 16 Clark speaks of two "camps" within the artistic and Party intelligentsia: Yan'an (Maoist, radical) versus Shanghai (cosmopolitan, "modern"). 17 The former represents conformity, the workers-soldiers-peasants aesthetic and the Party line, and the latter artistic autonomy and the modern and "mature." This speaks to both the resurgence of Shanghai itself in the 1980s as a "booming" global city during the Dengist "open-door" policy, and the scholarly recovery of a cosmopolitan - semicolonial - Shanghai culture. 18 While this division is problematic and should not be seen as mutually exclusive in the way Clark implies - a point even made by one of the former participants whom Clark interviews 19 - the larger issue is how this opposition is coded. The "cosmopolitan" Shanghai tradition is clearly the term of value, despite or perhaps because Yan'an is "more Chinese" (2). Moreover, Yan'an is consistently described as a "faction," a "paternalistic" "regime" obsessed with controlling the work of film-artists, as "promulgators" of"dogma" and "narrowness," and so on (56, 86, 131 ). The Shanghai "mentality" is represented favorably; there the people are always "artists" with "sensibility" (52, 181). The specter of Yan'an looms so large that this fundamental split grows into a "Yan'an-versus-the-rest" formulation, pertaining not just to the film world but all of China (34). It is as if nearly everyone were secretly opposed to the CP and Maoism and the regime had no legitimacy. 20 The normative split between Yan'an and Shanghai that governs the history of Chinese film does not code this split in terms of the "two-line struggle" - that is, the class-based, friend/enemy ideological conflict between the leftist-Maoist line and the more bureaucratic, "capitalist" and Stalinist line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao-ping. As will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter, the two-line struggle was a fundamental aspect of Maoist discourse, governmentality, and the self-understanding of Mao-era subjects. The absence of this dynamic political

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division within standard Chinese film history is striking because much of revolutionary culture, including Mao-era films like Breaking With Old Ideas, were centrally concerned with it. So, too, the Yan'an/Shanghai split cries out to be articulated to this basic dyad of political China. It is especially pertinent here because these two place-names themselves signify not the "Party versus artistic freedom" or state versus the individual, but these intense two "lines" and development strategies for post-liberation China: the Maoist agrarian strategy centered on the North and interior regions and based in communization, work points, and radical egalitarianism, and the more Sovietized vision centered on the rich urban centers of Southern and coastal China, based in the use of markets and material/profit incentives. "Yan'an/Shanghai" was part of this same problematic and conflict. It was a political conflict between left and right and not simply an aspect of film/cultural history in their narrow senses, or some dubious opposition between "official" and "independent" artists. The Maoist concept of two-line struggle, then, can be seen as an invitation to situate film and other texts in their own history, as a first step of placing them back into their own revolutionary context. It is one way to begin to take Mao-era texts seriously and to see what they have to say, beyond their too-easy Cold War dismissal as inauthentic art.

Breaking with an old idea: Jue Lie as Maoist art Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie, ;;R:~) was released in 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, but is set during the height of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, at a remote agricultural college in a mountain village in the Jiangxi province in southern China. This dual context is already of import because it suggests that the CR is less of a break within Chinese Maoism than it is often assumed to be; from this standpoint, both the Great Leap and the CR are continuations or resurgences within the drive to institutionalize Maoism as against revisionism or the more Soviet/"capitalist" line as noted above. It turns upon the struggle to emphasize poor peasants and workers in education (to open admission based on class), and to integrate study with labor. More grandly it is about fomenting a revolution in the educational system along Maoist, Cultural Revolution, or Yan'an lines. But education also here refers to cultural reproduction in general: as the protagonist Lung puts it, the aim is to create "socialist consciousness and culture." Principal Lung, who was with Mao at Yan'an, has been appointed to the college and quickly enters into conflict with the existing administrative hierarchy. The latter wish to emulate the elite urban universities by admitting students based on standard exam results (bourgeois "merit") and following an international curriculum (read: Russian and Western). The most humorous sign of the latter is when Dean Sun lectures on horse anatomy to his students, though that particular animal does not exist in this part of China. Thanks to Lung and an old peasant whom Lung recruits as his Admissions staff officer, fourteen lower peasants are admitted to the new school on the basis of their family background and class consciousness. (This dovetails with the "affirmative

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action" class-based system of preference advocated during the CR.) The students and Lung then lobby to have the curriculum fit their local and peasant needs, including having farming lessons in the actual fields. At one point Lung is sent away by the Party on a tour of other agricultural colleges. During this time, an exam is scheduled in an attempt to have the peasant students fail out of college. The night before, insects are discovered in the brigade's rice paddies while most of the villagers are away buying fertilizer. The students, led by peasant woman Li Chin-feng, go the fields to handle the pests, but in so doing miss the important exam. More accurately, they turn in blank exam papers and are promptly expelled. (This is an allusion to the famous "blank exam paper" of Zhang Tieshang, who in 1973 turned one in while writing on the back that the exam system was unfair to the rusticated youth who had been working for the collectives.) With peasant and lower-level cadre support, Lung reinstates the students. But tensions remain, and at a later point the District Committee announces that some collective land will be privatized and the individual household responsibility system will prevail (this indeed happened some few years later in the 1980s Deng-era countryside). Student Li condemns the new policy as a "poisonous weed" and is jailed. A public meeting is held to criticize her. She remains opposed, and two other non-radical students have a change of heart and step forward to criticize both themselves and their fathers. (One student, at his father's behest, has been charging money to castrate pigs, whereas the other's father has used his connections to secure her admission to an elite urban university.) The Party hierarchy prevails, however, and gives the order to close down the college. Lung promises the students to appeal to Mao. In a last twist of the conventionally crisis-driven plot, before Lung can act again, word arrives from Beijing that in a letter Mao has already approved the students' actions and the labor college's policies. The film ends in images of a joyous mass rally. This outline is worth detailing because it suggests something of the force of the film: it lies less in characterization, ambiguity, and formal experimentation than in practice (action), and the political thematics that such an exclusive emphasis is meant to convey. What is of interest is the way in which the film offers a sharp popularization of Maoist ideas about education and the new China's developmental strategy, including cultural revolution in general. It is a concrete but rigorous induction into late Maoism: theories of permanent revolution, two-line struggle, agrarian strategy, and even gender neutrality. Breaking With Old Ideas is thus a uniquely valuable asset in providing for posterity just such an artwork. If you want a propagandistic but rigorous, ideal-type yet deeply historical representation of what Maoism was, from Yan'an to the Great Leap through the CR, turn to this 1975 film. It is in this sense deeper than the model operas yet more accessible than, say, the works of Zhao Shuli or Hao Ran. Or to put it another way, "Breaking" offers us an image of the self-understanding of late Maoism, or the Cultural Revolutionary vision as articulated from Yan'an onwards. It is worth, then, unpacking some of the thematics of the film.

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As can be seen from the plot, the film turns upon the notion of the two-line struggle between leftism ("Maoism") and revisionism ("capitalism"). Lung and the peasants (students and villagers) represent the former, while Dean Sun (initially), Chao, and the higher-level Party officials as well as the two errant students represent the latter. It is in the depiction of this struggle and especially the depth of the leftist line that the film is genuinely illuminating. The revisionist side is essentially the old guard and elite who were already in place after the revolution in 1949; they represent the old way of education and of money-making and upward-mobility as a way of life, the old culture. This side is not simply demonized but is given substantial screen time. While they are types, they are not simply immoral villains: Dean Tsao, for example, is given full lines and rationality, and has a point when he says that he has served the revolution for decades. He and Dean Sun also have a point when they claim that copying the elite/urban universities, admitting only on "merit"/exams, and teaching a universal curriculum is the only way that this new school will produce the "best" students. It is not that the film agrees with such statements, let alone with the explicit move towards privatization/capitalism by the District Committee. Indeed the leftist line simply speaks in an entirely different vocabulary as to what things like "best student" means, or about what the purpose of education is (to serve and protect the revolution and the working classes). But it is the case that this "capitalist" line is adequately presented, and in a rational if revisionist way (as when Deputy Chao says, a la Deng Xiaoping, that under the new rural system everyone will become prosperous). 21 Dean Sun is a middle character who undergoes self-reform and learning through labor while conversing with and observing Lung, as well as through practicing veterinary medicine for the village. (Initially he had chased away a peasant who brought a sick buffalo to class and interrupted his horse lecture.) This is fairly unusual for a CR-era text, which tended to exclude middle characters and ambiguity in favor of all the more intense and emphatic political expression (as in the model operas like The Red Lantern). The purpose of the film is to induct viewers into taking up the revolutionary leftist line and subject/viewing position; it is resolutely pedagogical. It does this not simply by explicating what Mao would have said but by presenting a whole series of oppositions that subtend the basic leftist/revisionist one. For what the leftist line amounts to is nothing less than the valued term in the following hierarchies (which themselves mark a reversal of the typical and capitalist/modem way of viewing the world): rural/urban; manual/intellectual labor; class/liberal autonomy; politics/knowledge; work/study; "gender-neutrality"/patriarchy; participatory or mass democracy/bureaucracy; practice or "history"/theory; particular/universal; and so on. While each of these pairs could be explicated in detail, I want to focus on two: gender neutrality or the proto-feminism of the film, and its historicism versus its theoreticism. It is clear that while the "feminism" of this film is less strong than in, say, some of the model operas or a film like Xie Jin's The Two Stage Sisters (1964), it is nonetheless significant. When the lead student radical,

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Li Chin-feng, is admitted to the college on her revolutionary and classconsciousness credentials, the old peasant admissions officer begins to make her case by saying that she had been a child-bride under the old system. She later became a leading figure in the Women's Association during the land reform. In short, her specifically gendered conditions of oppression as well as her feminist credentials are made equivalent to her working-class and revolutionary credentials. They are of whole cloth. Furthermore, she brings her infant to the admissions meeting, thus making visible her gendered body. She then becomes the leading student and the subject of frequent high-angle close-ups. While her body is not objectified, her intense, even angry visage is, the very sign of militancy and "serving the people." The fact that her husband is nowhere present - not mentioned once - is also a significant absence; for all intents and purposes she is a single mother. But the child also does not reappear; nor is their any reference to child-rearing and domestic labor. Just as her leadership role - with Lung she is the film's protagonist - signifies the CR slogan that women can do whatever men do, these absences register the gender-neutrality of her representation: that is, to signify the concept of gender-neutrality within Chinese feminist/Marxist discourse of the time. Under this problematic but sincere state, feminist discourse gender is simply supposed to not matter, and it does not do so in the world of this film. What matters is political line. A utopian but significant gesture. The historicism of this film, sitting side by side with its ideal-type typology a la Eisenstein, begins as noted above with its very setting in the Great Leap Forward, and the resultant signification that there is a strong continuity and consistent concern for cultural revolution from Yan'an to the Leap to the CR. That in itself calls into question the Sinological coding that Mao was only ever after complete and total personal power in these three major campaigns; in a circular and logical non sequitur, it is as if Mao had total power at all of these moments and yet used them to gain that. By historicism here I refer to two things. The first is the film's radical historicization of the Cultural Revolution and of P.R.C. history from Yan'an until 1975. The second is the film's historical or contextual and Marxist logic, i.e. its analysis of education and Chinese development along Maoist lines - the famous need to Sinify Marxism by making it speak to Chinese and not universal conditions. 1975 is the key date despite the Great Leap setting, because while this makes the point about continuity as mentioned above, the real aim of the film seems to be to offer an analysis of, and intervention into the CR itself. Several scenes are clearly of specifically CR provenance, perhaps most memorably the first meeting about the new economic policy and then the large public criticism meeting against Li Chin-feng. In both instances she stands up to ranking Party officials and criticizes the new policies in Marxist terms (that they will lead to a return to the old days of exploitation and a culture of each against all). By having her defiance serve as the key to the film's denouement (the survival of its new, peasant and rural-based educational system), there is an inescapable message about the place of the CR in Chinese history: not just that "it is right to rebel," but that the CR is the logical outcome of China's drive towards

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continuous revolution and the achievement of a Marxist/Maoist state. 22 Coming at the end of the era when many participants are burned out, and at a time when the future of the revolution is very much in doubt, the film makes an emphatic, impassioned argument for the necessity and justness of the CR. So, too, the basic plot of educational reform fits the CR above all else in that era's renewed drive to increase rural education and to admit students from working-class and peasant stock. Even more specifically, there is a reference to "work teams" being sent down from higher levels of the Party to disseminate the new economic policy. While not mentioned by name, it is hard not to read this as a reference to Liu Shaoqi's work teams sent down by Liu at the beginning of the CR to quell student and worker rebellion and therefore escalating the line struggle. As several reviewers have noted, there is also a brightly colored, poster-like quality to the film's visuals. The motif of zoomed-in facial close-ups is of a piece with this poster-like quality, and is used to express either joy or anger in the deeply binary, affective world of the film's politics. So, too, the body language used in the film, especially Lung's and Li's slow, strong, deliberate turns towards the camera, resembles the stage movements of model opera actors, as when Li clenches her fists against her sides after she is shoved into jail. For the film's other historicist dimension or logic, we need simply to follow Lung's (and Li's) arguments for developing the labor college in the first place. Just as the Party had to eventually break with the guidance of the Soviet Comintern to Sinify its Marxism in order to achieve victory and liberation, higher education needs to fit the specific conditions and places of China. Not least for a would-be Marxist developmental state, this means unifying labor with study since they are organically related and also because what China needs above all is development, i.e. effective labor. (And clearly in this film, labor - even or especially hard, rural labor - is seen as a dignified and ennobling end in itself.) This means that the aim of education is to produce workers with "socialist consciousness and culture." So, too, it means admitting the poor and working classes above all, since the last must now go first. In the context of a desperately poor and sharply unequal Third World society, it is simply absurd, not to mention anti-democratic, to take, say, Harvard or Qinghua Universities as the model for the rest of China to follow. As the case of postcolonial India shows, that will do little to develop literacy and the national economy, and it is further axiomatic from the Marxist perspective that exams based on "merit" will only reproduce the class system, not end it. This is all a very simple but profound and profoundly democratic philosophy of education. And it is one of the real merits of "Breaking" in that it allows us to see that this was the leftist/Maoist philosophy of China during the CR, just as the revisionist line of Dean Tsao et al. represents the Liu-ist emphasis on specialized knowledge (as opposed to general education) and the culture of"experts" (as opposed to the "red and expert" line of the left). Far from an anti-intellectual program (and despite the persecutions of elite intellectuals), the upheavals in the educational system were meant to empower the working classes, and to develop universities and secondary schools that actually fit China's urgent needs, as in the famous practice of barefoot doctors. They

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were also real struggles over competing visions of education and indeed of Chinese development and modernity. The film makes this argument in several ways, from the humor of teaching irrelevant zoologies to Lung's trenchant criticisms of teaching about Russian birches and Siberian soils in a land of clay and bamboo. (In the Chinese context of the late 1950s, these are not as exaggerated examples as they might seem.) The unity of labor with study is also signified in several visually striking panorama shots of the students building classrooms out of bamboo forests, taking agricultural classes in the fields, and working together to spray the fields after the enemy insect invasion. The unity of work/study as well as the organic connections between subject matter and local context all make the educational philosophy seem perfectly natural and democratic - a far cry from current images of what Maoist education in the CR was all about. Whatever else we can say about such a historicizing logic, itself pitted against the theoreticism of following Harvard/Qinghua, the film offers an emphatic case of the self-understanding of the Maoist/leftist line during the CR. It may well seem like a "period piece" in many ways today in that it captures the political vision and passion of the era. But it is far from the empty, "bad" propaganda that Western film studies posits about the post-1949, pre-l 980s eras.

Reviewing Yellow Earth: from anti-communism to the politics of ambivalent discourse The above reading of "Breaking" hopefully suggests something of the complexity of such Mao-era artworks - especially but not exclusively at the level of political theory - and how they diverge from Sinological-orientalist, Cold War discourse. But in the present context it is the fifth-generation cinema that put Chinese cultural production back on the map of the Westem imagination. In what follows, I focus on this moment as represented by Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), and I want it to show the divergence between the standard film studies codings of these films as subtly but openly "subversive" or "dissident" texts on the one hand, and their actual, complex and ambivalent depiction of the Chinese revolutions on the other. A brief but detailed reviewing of Zhang Yimou's To Live follows suit. Even in these texts, which supposedly offer a radical break with the Chinese cinematic and political-historical past, there is a deep, profound, and partial but significantly positive understanding of the revolution and its aftermaths. Let us tum to Yellow Earth. As is well known, this breakthrough film of the fifth generation has nearly always been taken as not just a revolution in Chinese cinematic language, but as an indictment of the Communist-led revolution itself. The chief evidence for this indictment is said to be that the film shows a still poverty-stricken countryside (as ifthe film's 1930s setting matters not) and that the heroine Cuiqiao dies in an attempt to join Yan'an. Comrade Gu, a low-level Maoist, 8th Route Army cadre, does not return in time to save her. From this standpoint, he is beholden to an allegedly bad party discipline that requires that

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she must first be approved before she joins the communists in Yan' an. But even here it must also be said that in the violent, militarized context of such revolutions and liberation movements, no party ever functioned without such rules. Reading this aspect of the film as a critique of the Party is in this sense more a sign of our own, depoliticized times than otherwise. Thus in an otherwise insightful analysis of the "Western analysis" of the film, Yau locates its "critique of Chinese culture and history" in the "proposition of capitalist-democracy as an alternative" to communism; she also refers to the prose article on which the film is based as a "trite" glorification of the peasants during the revolution (a story of one peasant girl's struggle to break away from "her feudal family") ("Yellow Earth" 76, 63). In another throwaway reference to the film's source, Mary Ann Farquhar refers to it as "superficial" and "a Communist literary cliche" (222). 23 The stylistic, cinematic transformation of this story - a heroic struggle against "feudal" patriarchy and poverty - by the film is thus key to its perceived achievement and breakthrough. But it must also be said that at the level of plot, the film does little more than simply change the original text's resolution. But there is an obvious question that goes begging: What is wrong with texts about revolution, peasant women, and the real, historical successes of the CP in winning them over in the pursuit of national liberation and egalitarian development? The P.R.C. itself is literally inscribed with such stories, and it would simply not exist if they did not contain a good bit of actually existing truth. In this context, further characterized by the predominance of elite, urban, aristocratic cultural texts before the revolution, the subject matter and plot of Yellow Earth's source-text are far from trite, banal, or omnipresent. Non-elite histories and cultural texts remain a minority discourse in China today, too. This is all to say, then, that much of the appeal of Yellow Earth - its historicity and rich content - has much to do with this source-text. Dismissive, casual remarks like those above are disavowals of China's own, actually existing revolutionary and nationalist history and its socio-economic conditions. It is also impossible to say what evidence there is for the charge that the film offers capitalist democracy as an alternative to Yan'an. That the film, under a certain and I think dubious reading, offers a critique of communism and the revolution, does not mean it therefore holds forth the great American way as the alternative. One is tempted here to invoke Zhang Yimou's criticism, in a letter to Cannes, that his and other Chinese films are always reductively critically received abroad as either for or against the government, never as something in-between or simply other than this. 24 Other assumed evidence of the film's "subversive" critique of the state and, presumably, nationalism/patriotism turns upon the its characterizations and plot as much as its visual style. Thus for Yau, Gu is "ignorant ofCuiqiao's dilemma" - as if poverty, lack of political power and representation, as well as patriarchal customs (dowry, child marriage) were somehow not her primary conditions of oppression ("Yellow Earth" 74). Gu makes all of this clear in dialogues between her and her father. Her disappearance on the river while singing a Communist song discloses, for Farquhar, the truth that "the male world of revolutionary

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ideology brings disappointment and death" (227). For all the remarkable achievements of Chinese state feminism before and after 1949, one can of course not proclaim that the Party eradicated patriarchy. But one can still wonder what was specifically "male" about Chinese Marxism, let alone the character of Gu, aside from his sex. This is not a transparent notion. In all the film's numerous, long close-ups and silences between shots, Quiqiao is not eroticized and objectified by the "male gaze" that Laura Mulvey theorized via classical Hollywood cinema. The proposition that Gu's "gaze" is male, and Cuiqiao the "objectified" victim, neglects the fact that it is the audience, and not Gu, whom the camera most often places as the point of view or "gaze." Such is the power of this filmstudies trope - which Martin Jay has argued is a key piece of the strident denigration of vision within contemporary theory 25 - that even in a decidedly non-Western context the concept has not traveled to so much as occupied the field of analysis. So what motivates the above critiques appears to be a universalizing film-studies-inspired feminism. 26 It is hard to see how Cuiqiao's death can be taken as a rebuke of Maoism and the Party, who never claimed that victory or revolutionary consciousness would be or was easy to achieve. Quite the opposite, which is indeed the point of the glorification of the Long March and of revolutionary martyrs before and after the revolution. The difficulty and grandeur of the struggle to achieve socialism goes a long way towards explaining the persistence, the affective incitement, of "permanent revolution" and "going to and learning from the masses." While there can be no denying the lack of a happy ending or reunion between Quiqiao and the Party (Gu), one can nonetheless see her death and plot-strand as a deeply realistic depiction of tragic rural conditions and lives. Moreover, Quiqiao's and Hanhan's identification with Gu's ideas, personal example, and revolutionary cause is nowhere ironized or subverted by the film or camera. When we recall that the Cultural Revolution itself was premised upon the Maoist idea that China was only ever on the transition to socialism, and had not achieved it but was in fact in danger of moving towards "revisionism" or capitalism, then the fact that Yellow Earth does not show impending national victory like, say, The Red Detachment of Women (ballet), cannot be taken as proof of some "subversive," dissident critique. In short, as the film passes its twenty-fifth anniversary, it should no longer be possible to see Yellow Earth as "against" the Party-state and revolution. It is simply not, on its own terms, part of some Cold War discourse of good and evil; but its critical reception has been. It of course remains an art-house style film and neither agit-prop nor commercial cinema, and it may be symbolically, subtly, and cryptically pointing to a gap between the Party's ideals and its rural realities. But this is all fairly banal, and it must also be said that for actually existing Maoism and the Chinese left, pointing to such gaps was part of what they did. So, too, the film resists Western colonialist and Chinese elite-urban (and zhiqing) assumptions and understandings about rural China being a space of utter lack, of "feudalism" and backwardness. The alleged exposure of these last two qualities was seen by many critics as part of the film's "critique" of

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communism. 27 The two siblings' character development belies this (they come to a political, radical consciousness) as does the father's compassion for Cuiqiao's plight and for Gu's song-collecting task (he finally sings for him on the eve of Gu' s departure). So, too, the somber and poignant rain prayer at the end of the film is a fascinating ritual that ends with a rich emotional ambivalence. The father, his face streaming with tears in extreme close-up, is surrounded by the other, actually joyous peasants. With such complexities in mind, recall the film's final movement. Gu is in Yan'an viewing a fabulously energetic waist-drum performance; these are the loudest moments in the film and the only fast, rapid camera movements. This is the type of organic, local folk art that the Maoists valorized. The energy, vitality, and spectacle-value of the scene establish Yan'an as a place of energy, hope, and community. Gu then returns to the village to help in the fields and to pick up Cuiqiao; on the way, he approaches the farmers' rain prayer ritual that closes the film. Here Hanhan runs towards but does not reach Gu. Meanwhile, sometime before this and unbeknownst to Gu, Cuiqiao disappears on the Yellow River on the way to Yan'an. This all happens as a sped-up denouement of an otherwise slowly paced film famous for its static camera. The energy and affective force of the overall "movement" is not in my view subverted by Hanhan's or Gu's "failure" to reach one another on screen or by the final shot of the horizon. These are obviously deliberate gestures and may have been intended to suggest some type of allegory or metaphysical point (just as Chen may have meant to suggest the rain prayer indexes feudal primitiveness). But I am less interested in an intentionalist reading than in the overall feel of the film and its internal logic. The unfulfilled reunions only add to the dramatic tension and suspense, and the message they should have and must unite. One can read these final sequences, capped off by the rousing Yan'an drum music that plays during the credits, as producing a third, dialectical meaning. This is that it is in the tragedy of the film's ending, in the contradiction between revolutionary desire and its obstruction, wherein lies the revolutionary hope. This is the properly utopian, radical impulse. What I am suggesting, then, is that the film takes the need for, and difficulty of revolution in the countryside quite seriously - as something desperately difficult but desperately needed. It has not yet arrived, but should and must. In this sense, and as with Gu's sympathetic characterization, the truth-value of his messages, and the energy of the drum corps, the very idea and project of Maoism come off well indeed. From this angle, the film starts to appear very different from the Cold War discourse's simplifications. For Gu is not a Liang Shuming-style liberal-reformer against land reform; and the Rain God prayer is not validated as authentic, real, "oriental" China. And since the film was made at the very height of de-collectivization, it is at least as much a meditation on the post-Mao era as on the Maoist one. It cannot, then, be seen as some transparent endorsement ofDengist "reform" or capitalism. It is true that the film refuses the socialist-realist demand for plot-resolution (the happy endings of the model operas, or of Xie Jin-style melodrama), and opts instead for a more ambiguous finale. But not all ambiguities and modernisms are the same; for every T. S. Eliot

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there is a Lu Xun or Mao Dun. Yellow Earth, then, is neither for nor against its government and resists predictable allegorical readings, perhaps the dominant mode of analysis in a Chinese film studies ever compelled to suss out "pro" or "anti" government positions. It clearly, visibly affirms the need, ethics, and rationality of the revolution.

When tragedies are not what they seem: on To Live One could multiply instances in fifth-generation cinema that are not nearly or at all anti-communist. We can at least suggest some of this diversity and complexity by briefly examining the one fifth-generation classic - Zhang Yimou's 1994 To Live, based on Yu Hua's novella - that seems all about the evils and tragedies of Maoist communism and the Party state. 28 While the film is not as political and affirmative as Yellow Earth, one can and should perceive visible, cinematic evidence that contradicts the harsh condemnations of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution found in, to take two notable examples, the CCP's official "Resolution of Party History" in 1981 and the liberal documentary series He Shang. At a surface level, To Live seems to move in step with the media-sanctioned, anti-Maoist discourse of the West (and differently, of elite China). Thus in a sweeping, allegorical reading of incidental details and one minor character (Chunsheng), Rey Chow argues that the film is deeply anti-regime and antitotalitarian. In her view, the film subverts its own principal thematic - the characters' virtuous ability to survive allegedly "traumatic" hardship - by criticizing this same ability as the lynchpin of Chinese/Maoist totalitarianism. 29 For Chow, the ability to live through hardship is a political and ethical failure, a curious valuation indeed. She will even code Chunsheng's desire to suicide ("to die" versus "to live") as a subversion of the totalitarian desire and ability to endure, that is, as a subversive gesture within the film. Thus a classic stereotype about passive, anonymous if not mindless Chinese masses - recall the "army of blue ants" - is not only invoked here but yoked to a Cold War, anti-communist notion of totalitarian "brainwashing" and the lack of some normative, proper mode of subjectivity. As if the Chinese ("Mao's people") are so lacking that death is the only way out. But this allegorical surface-level is nothing but that which a quick and easy allegorical mode of analysis produces, particularly when it is under the pressure of a Sino logical, Cold War discourse premised upon a Mao era that by definition cannot have what Zhang Xudong likes to refer to as an "irreducibly complex world of life." What is remarkable about this film is that it plays with this very same cultural Cold War discourse, and moreover with our predisposition to use it to read "things Chinese" in symptomatic fashion. To illustrate, recall the suspenseful if not foreboding first scenes of the daughter Fengxia's proposed, arranged marriage to factory worker and Cultural Revolution Rebel Wan Erxi. There is much silence in the sequence when Wan meets her parents. This is most notable when, during a discussion of Wan's impressive

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working-class lineage, Fengxia's mother Jianzhen points to the father Fugui's certificate of service from the PLA. Wan reads it carefully, pauses, says "good," and then leaves abruptly. A sense of impending doom is thus set up for the Sinological viewer anxiously awaiting a horrendous scene of violence or betrayal "typical" of the CR. This is then catalyzed in the next scene when Fugui and Jianzhen are out shopping and then told that a group of Red Guards is on their roof, taking it apart, and making all manner of noises. We then cut to a tracking shot of the parents walking down their dark, narrow entrance-way, on into the inevitable scene of cruelty. But the "inevitable" does not occur; instead we cut to Wan and Fengxia (now in Red Guard apparel) painting a brilliant red wall-mural of Mao. We soon learn that Wan and his comrades have repaired the roof and furniture. They leave abruptly. This sequence amounts to more than a neat trick. For what produces the tension and eventual relief is more precisely "our" collective sense that something horrid must follow any setting of the Cultural Revolution and its youth. Our sense here is not innocent but ideological; it is our incitement to a Cold War-orientalist discourse. The real achievement of this sequence is the film's subtle calling forth, and subsequent mocking, of ourselves, that is the Sinological viewer who has a certain "knowledge" of the Real China. For there is literally nothing in the scenes that should produce this sense of impending doom, nothing in the earlier silences, in the camera angles or points of view, or in the parents' conversation, nothing that - save for our tacit knowledge of what happened during the CR - should seem ominous. Another example would be the shadow-puppets Fugui used to make his living in gambling dens and then for the PLA. Here, the delightful figures are almost collected (confiscated) for the Great Leap's iron-smelting program. But when Fugui suggests he should entertain the workers with them instead, this is readily agreed to by the neighborhood cadre. This presentation of "good," sincere, non"brainwashed" Rebels, Red Guards, citizens, and cadres is, in fact, of a piece with the rest of the film's representations of personal tragedy through the Maoist and pre-Maoist decades. For only the daughter Fengxia's death during childbirth can be reasonably ascribed to Maoist governance, in that the doctor who could have saved her was being "struggled against" by Red Guards. (Mao initiated the CR and sustained it.) But the doctor's incapacitation was also tragically brought on by the father, Fugui, who gave him too many steamed buns and too much water to eat on an empty stomach. This inadvertently immobilized him and prevented him from operating. The death of their youngest child Youqing, on the other hand, cannot be laid at the feet of the Maoists and "totalitarians" - unless random vehicle crashes and construction accidents are in fact part of some Orwellian conspiracy. The car does not hit Youqing himself but the wall he is leaning on at the time. Again, our tacit knowledges and expectations of tragedy and Communist malfeasance are at the very least in tension with what is actually visible. But the film also raises complicated ethical and interpretive issues about who is responsible for what during the Maoist campaigns or in life in general. The Red Guard scenes are crucial here - they are rendered as human youth. The

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film makes a certain cosmic, perhaps fatalist or even Daoist perspective. This may be apolitical, quietist, or profound, but it is not a secretly subversive, dissident-style text about totalitarianism, and nor does it attempt to be. None of this is to suggest that To Live is somehow a leftist or even progressive film in the manner of Yellow Earth, let alone Breaking With Old Ideas. It is in the end a melodramatic, humanistic, but metaphysical tragedy that does not say Yes or No to the revolution, let alone "subvert" it. This in itself can be seen as something of an intervention into the utter demonization of the red years in China and abroad. But does one read Hamlet as a faithful rendering of Denmark, or The Dream of the Red Chamber as a crypto-documentary about the Qing dynasty? Chinese history, too, is only illuminated textually and in a highly mediated fashion. Any resultant interpretation will necessarily be political. Such "theoretical" truisms need to be repeated in the context of film studies and cross-cultural challenges. The field is in too much of a rush to code its films as either for or against the government and/or Maoism (to be good they must be "subversive"). It is precisely contemporary (1980s-) Chinese films' positive and, at other times, ambivalent representations of revolutionary history that have passed unnoticed in their celebration in W estem film studies. This is to suggest, then, that To Live's depiction of Maoist history is both more and less than what it seems to its Western critics. It is more than an historical epic of the Mao years, for it is primarily a melodramatic, cosmic narrativization of Fate and the "human spirit." It is less in that the film's Maoist citizens hardly fit the brainwashing code of totalitarianism, just as the individual tragedies that do happen to take place during key Maoist periods (the Leap, the CR) nonetheless cannot be ascribed to political repression, totalitarianism, or even government malfeasance. The film toys with just this Sinological expectation/anxiety. Thus the desire of oriental, Cold War discourse to flatten out and reduce Chinese history to a moralistic dualism - despotism, passivity, domination versus dissidence, or a presently lacking liberalism and modernity - reveals itself in the academic reception of such films. Of course for all their distance from Sinological-orientalist condemnations of Maoism, films like To Live and even Yellow Earth are still hardly Maoist/ Marxist agit-prop like Breaking With Old Ideas. They are not nearly so political and passionate. They are in fact closer to the liberal-humanism of film studies itself, though it must also be said that Chinese 1980s humanisms were more diverse than the tacit humanism of U.S.-Western academe. 30 This difference between the films' views of Maoism and those of the West is instructive. It reveals the limit of universal (Western), liberal humanism itself, its incapacity to deal with historical and cultural difference. This difference in approach, or in how the Mao era is understood, also reflects the presence and power of Sinological-orientalism, a discourse in which the difference and complexity of China cannot override the desire to code it (including its cinema) as finally becoming-the-same, becoming modem like "us," and overcoming its revolutionary past.

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CODA: the closed system of film studies, or no light for In the Heat of the Sun Even in contemporary film that departs radically from the stylistic, thematic, and political concerns of the fifth generation, one can discern a similar, Sinological reception, and a certain Cold War and crypto-colonial discourse. While this is not the place to survey the so-called sixth-generation films, we can nonetheless revisit Jiang Wen's early and remarkable contribution, Jn The Heat of The Sun (1994). It can illustrate its departure from the fifth generation and yet the strikingly similar coding, on the part of Western film studies, of the film's representation of Maoist history. (Jiang, it should be noted, is one of China's more popular actors.) Whilst the film had commercial success at home and critical appreciation in festivals abroad, it has received much less attention than any of the fifth-generation classics. And except for the notable contributions of Wendy Larson and, more briefly, of mainland scholar Chen Xiaoming, the film has been subjected to an all too familiar coding as yet another secretly subversive, dissenting critique of Maoist and Cultural Revolution totalitarianism. And this for a film that was controversial in China for its nostalgic and positive portrayal of the CR as the "best time of our lives." My emphasis in this brief section is thus on the film's coding in scholarship, but first not without establishing the film's plot and chief thematic concerns, and what made it controversial in China. A frankly homosocial, coming-of-age story focused on the youthful experiences and libido of protagonist Ma Xiaojun (notably portrayed by Xia Yu), the film is roughly based on Wang Shuo's novel Ferocious Animals. But director Jiang makes the characters not violent hooligans but a small group of male friends, plus one female "comrade," who grow up in a military neighborhood in a fairly empty Beijing. The large majority of the film takes place in the summer of 1975, very late in the Cultural Revolution (well past its radical, violent activist phase in 1966-8) and at a time when Ma and the others are free from school and from their parents. (Ma's are off participating in the "real" CR.) Hence, they spend most of their time fooling around, getting into fights with rival "gangs" (only one of which is actually violent), and chasing girls. Ma in particular likes to break into people's houses, though without stealing anything. Ma et al. are in their early teens that summer, though the film does flash back briefly to Ma's pre-teen years. Moreover, it is narrated by the adult Ma (Jiang Wen himself), and the important final scene, shot in black and white in contrast to the rich colors and bright lighting of the teenage years, is a contemporary 1994 reunion of the male friends. They drink whiskey and drive around in a Cadillac (a high-status brand at the time). At that final moment, a character from their past, the mentally handicapped neighborhood boy named Gulunmu, emerges on the sidewalk right by their car and swears at them (calls them "fucking stupid"). 31 Before we get to that denouement, much of the film involves Ma's comingof-age and in particular his ardent pursuit of the slightly older, female comrade of the group, Milan (played by Ning Jing). (Earlier in the film Milan suddenly

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and randomly replaces the first female friend of the group, Yu Beipei; this is part of one of the film's themes, namely the elusiveness of memory.) Ma falls madly in lust with Milan. But for all his efforts to woo her beyond their mutual friendship, she chooses the eldest of the gang, Liu Yiku. In a fit of jealous rage Ma sexually assaults her, but Milan quickly overpowers him. While this is clearly a reactionary moment, it must also be said that the film does not condone the sexual violence, even as it does objectify Ning's body in several earlier shots. Moreover, the whole film is also framed by the narrator's consistent questioning of the veracity of his own memories: did his stabbing of Liu Yiku happen at all? Was Milan a real person, or just Yu Beipei? After the assault Ma is apparently excommunicated from their group and we never see Milan again. Cut then to the final, black-and-white scene in the present and Gulunmu's damning verdict on the reunited, well-off youth. Well-off except for Liu Yiku, who has become speechless and catatonic since his service in the invasion of Vietnam. For all the narrator's admissions that his memories might be unreliable, he is nonetheless quite clear as to how that lost era felt: despite his parting of ways with his friends (due to his attack on Milan and the Den gist end of the CR itself), it felt exciting, alive, full of hope, and represented the freedom to do as he pleased. In this Ma indeed represents any number of actual, former Cultural Revolution youth. 32 As for themes the film clearly turns upon also not only nostalgia for the CR and a free youth as opposed to the grey present, but on sex and "radical" passion specifically. Chen Xiaoming takes "sex" (and sexual awakening) to be the dominant theme of the film and argues that it "guarantees the successful evasion of the political allegory" (Chen 136). 33 That is, it enables the film to offer an alternative, nostalgic take on the Cultural Revolution that is clearly at odds with the dominant coding of the CR in China, particularly among the urban elite and especially abroad - that it was solely a time of scarring, national catastrophe, and so on. Wendy Larson takes this insight further in her illuminating and characteristically rigorous account of the film's interpretation of the CR: Wang Shuo and Jiang Wen both show how the attitudes associated with revolutionary romanticism - a fearless disregard for danger in pursuit of victory, goal-oriented persistence, lyricism in spirit, and loyalty - have infiltrated the consciousness of the young men ... and have easily been transferred into semi-revolutionary ... or unrevolutionary milieu. (Larson, Ah Q to Lei Feng 159) That is, the teenage Ma and the rest of his gang demonstrate such a spirit, a spirit which is not directly political as it is for the older generations but which is nonetheless radical in that it derives from the "heroism revolutionary life exemplifies and its liberatory potential for all people and nations" (161 ). It is also a spirit oriented towards the future as Larson notes, or more accurately towards making the future a part of one's "existential perspective" ( 161 ). The larger point here is that the film's so-called nostalgia for the CR - its positive valuation of it - lies in it being the source of this not-political (for Ma et al.) but radical spirit and openness

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towards the future. And it is precisely the present's distance from such possibilities and spirit that mandates it being shot in black and white and capped off by Gulunmu's curse. Post-Mao China may by rich (for some), but it is decidedly poor and inferior in other, existential ways. Not the least of which is spirit and affect. Again, while not a political, radical film like Breaking, we thus have to see Heat as a commercial but fairly bold intervention into the demonization of the CR by scar-type narratives and area-studies discourse. This has not, however, enabled the film to escape a predictable Sinological coding. As Liu Kang notes, even the title of the film reveals such a struggle: the multi-national producers made the English title In the Heat of the Sun as opposed to the more fitting "Bright Sunny Days" (Liu, "Popular Culture" 114). 34 This was a profit-oriented allusion to Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun (1994), a film literally about Stalinist terror and the great purges in 1936. But as Liu notes, this was also a political decision as the title was also changed - and its sympathies for the CR "underplayed" - to court favor and pre-empt a predictable anti-Maoist backlash at a Taiwanese film festival ("Popular Culture" 113). What is more, the film has actually been taken up - in W estem film studies - in just such a backlash fashion. In a Zizekian reading of the film, Lu Tonglin attempts, as psychoanalytical criticism apparently must, to prove the truth of Lacan/Zizek at the expense of the film and its Chinese context. Faced with a film that clearly in some sense celebrates the CR, the critic reads it not against the grain in a conscious manner but perversely as a "subversive" critique of the CR. She begins by trying to circumvent Wang Ban's and others' arguments that CR ideology and culture, including the cult of personality, was deeply held in a conscious and sincere way. For Wang this is what totalitarianism was, and Lu seems appropriately aware of how theoretically underdetermined this concept is. But her attempt to get around this reading of the CR winds up in a strikingly similar place indeed. For Lu, what is wrong with Wang Ban's as well as others' more conventional take on the term is that it does not recognize that participation in the CR was often ironic in the wellknown Zizek/Lacan sense: that people were aware that what they were saying and doing was wrong (they still held the dominant ideology at a certain inner distance), but they still did it anyway. It was not totalitarian (for Lu) because they did not really believe in it after all. One is not sure if this is better or worse, or makes them more or less duped, cynical, or postmodern before-the-letter. While this Zizekian re-description of classical Marxism's "ideology" is certainly clever in so far as it goes (while still a model of false consciousness), it is hard to say what it has to do with the two crucial matters at hand: In the Heat of the Sun and the CR itself. So, too, there is the significant question of how well any film, of all mediums, can serve as a reflection or index of social and historical reality. But to deal with the former first: Lu's reading is unsurprisingly ahistorical and in terms of the film very brief. Her essay dwells mostly on Zizek and the usual explications of key psychoanalytic concepts; when it broaches the film it sticks to relatively insignificant moments and details, such as the minor, supporting character of Liu Yiku (the gang leader and rival of the younger Ma) and a swimsuit portrait of Milan.

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Both of these details, like most others in the film, fall within the thematics of sex, radical desire/passion, and the elusive, lost quality of memory. For Lu, however, they all signify specifically Zizekian/Lacanian truths about the real, universal nature of ideology, fantasy, enjoyment, desire, and the like. Thus for example: Liu is the Thing par excellence, whose relationship with the protagonist is unsymbolizable. In this sense, he functions as the real, serving both as an insurmountable obstacle to Ma's erotic fulfillment and as an obscene gaze that inspires and stirs his desire for that fulfillment. (Lu 548) But in their totality, all these bits and bobs of "perfect" examples of Lacanian theory are meant to serve one point: not just the truth of psychoanalysis (as always), but that "a collective frenzy [the CR] provides its participants with an opportunity to experience pleasure in pain, or surplus enjoyment" (Lu 555). Not unlike Jung Chang, she refers to the CR as a frenzy of "generalized victimization" (557). By providing a Lacanian perspective on ideology-and-enjoyment, the film is somehow subversive of the CR. As if such criticisms of the CR were somehow progressive, let alone radical. Heat reveals the dangers of "collective frenzy" in overriding individual "responsibility for [one's] own conduct" (Lu 561). Despite the Zizekian provenance of the essay, its conclusions serve the depoliticizing ambit of much Cold War scholarship. With hints of sadomasochism, this description of the entire decade and the activities, let alone psyches, of hundreds of millions of Chinese is rather familiar after all. It is nothing but the conventional, totaliatarianist "account" of the CR as a nightmare of, in this case, slightly more sophisticated brainwashing and violent, "theoretical" perversion. For the collective "frenzy" is also an undifferentiated, collective "fantasy" of a cynical but still false consciousness. The elitist and orientalist nature of this understanding becomes clearer when we recall Lu's gestures to historical sources for this view of the CR: Roderick MacFarquhar's histories and a conversation with the decidedly elite film-maker Chen Kaige. 35 This coding of the CR, in other words, comes from very conventional social science and a bit of personal reflection. As with the area studies documentary (Gate) and film studies more broadly, the dominant, unsophisticated knowledge of the CR is uninterrogated. It is incorporated into the film analysis as the necessary "background" and historical "proof' that the otherwise - actually - pro-CR film somehow illustrates. There is simply no cognition of the alternative, critical and left-leaning scholarship on the CR that flies in the face of such standard accounts, a body of work that one can reasonably expect authors in positions and film studies to know because of their progressive nature. Even in a more conventional study of Heat with more due attention to the film itself, we see a similar coding. Thus Yomi Braester argues - against the film's "nostalgia" for the CR and its freedom and radical spirit - that it is a critique of the era and an allegedly totalitarian Maoism. Tellingly, Braester himself notes in passing Feng Jicai's great displeasure with the film's affirmative, pleasurable

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depiction of the CR, as well as mainland scholar Huang Shixian's similar remarks (192, 200). 36 This is direct evidence from mainland China that the film was notorious for its positive portrayal; but none of this leads Braester or Lu to question their reversal of the film's intentional point. Nor does the Chinese context bother a Time magazine reviewer who argues that it depicts "the fratricidal madness of the Cultural Revolution" (Corliss 66). This, despite the fact that there is very little violence in the film and zero factional struggle; the only death - of a minor character played by Wang Shuo - takes place off screen, in passing. Part of the problem here is simply the parochial nature of film studies and film culture. For all their claims to a cosmopolitanism and an appreciation for the foreign, these have yet to adequately decolonize or go through a postcolonial moment. Consider, for example, a review-essay on the recent anthology of writings by the Marxist-feminist, mainland critic Dai Jinhua (Cinema and Desire). In a manner consistent with area studies discourse, it faults Dai for not citing enough Western film scholars and for not being a dissident. 37 There are a number of debatable readings in Braester's essay, from the technical to the ideological. For example, he codes the film's trope of bright-lighting and sunny, outside locations as somehow "Mao's relentless light ... [and] the scorching of memory" (emphasis added) (203). To be sure, Mao was often represented as the sun in communist iconography and the film's title connotes this. But this seems ironic (the youth are apolitical and fun/sex-seeking, not revolutionary), and "sun" does not necessarily imply anything unpleasant, let alone sinister. But for Braester here the summer sun - and one not depicted as noticeably hot - must signify a dictator. However well this allegorical claim might pertain to Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun - explicitly dedicated to "those who were burnt by the sun of the revolution" 38 - the fact remains that the lighting in Heat is never harsh or glaring, just as Mao was not Stalin and China not Russia. Here the lighting is simply warm, bright, and luminous, of a piece with the narrator's own sense of his youth as the lost but most special time of his life. Again, the black-and-white final scene punctuates this. The light is gone, and it is a pity. For Braester, Ma's questioning of his ability to know the past amounts to a subtle critique of communism and totalitarianism. Here the reference is not Lacan but the Sinologist Barme. 39 His point is that Heat shows that one "cannot free the collective memory from the spell of past images but" can be "aware of their compromised position, unable to create an idiom free of Maospeak and Maohistory" (205). The last two neologisms are simply cheap Orwellian metaphors for radical rhetoric and historiography in China, two things that the current regime loathes as much as do liberal intellectuals. But this claim for a totalitarian prison-house of language is for Braester the film's message and - beyond this the specific, real ontological condition in which Jiang Wen and writer Wang Shuo find themselves. This makes the two popular artists into classic anthropological subjects (i.e. objects). And it is a problematic summation of the film. One might begin with the assumption that there should and can be memory without images of the past. So, too, in the film the type of revolutionary rhetoric voiced by Ma and others is not unrealistic or ironic, but is if anything underplayed.

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What is more, the assumption that there is such a thing as a singular form of Chinese speech, 40 and that this is still tragically deformed by the Maoist past, takes us back to the orientalism of the Gate film and the notion that "the Chinese mind" (to adopt a classic orientalist phrase) is not only unitary but lacks some crucial thing, is almost but not-quite modem. 41 So, too, from at least the Boxer Rebellion onwards, Chinese political rhetoric (if not all revolutionary rhetoric everywhere) has very often taken - to a liberal ear at least - an "extreme" form of appearance. We are thus presented with a problem of analysis, rather than an opportunity for liberal posturing. One can either lament such rhetoric, as do Gate and Braester, or try to approach it on its own terms, as impassioned and rationalpractical language with "Chinese characteristics" and its own political-cultural roots. That would seem to be the approach of the film-maker, as Jiang Wen revises Wang's satiric novel. Finally, Barme/Braester's "Maohistory" appears to refer here to the "official" line on Mao's national greatness. But this ignores the brute fact that it is the Party - and liberal intelligentsia - that condemns the Cultural Revolution and virtually everything else Mao did except founding the nation-state. Braester's point seems rather anachronistically directed against the disgraced and scapegoated Gang of Four, who long ago passed from the historical stage. What in the end are we to make of such problematic readings of Jiang Wen's film, and the limits of Chinese film studies more broadly? What such misreadings and limiting framings of Chinese political history reveal are not personal failings but the force of Sinological, Cold War discourse and politics. The specter of Maoism or the Party-state must be exorcized. This occurs not only in area studies proper, but also in film work. And even when - or because - the P.R.C. itself repudiates Maoism, and even with a film (Heat) where the Chairman is signified only in passing through fleeting shots of wall-murals and one statue. That specter is in a very real sense the very framework of modem China studies, including film scholarship. The dubious figure of totalitarianism (oriental despotism) is indispensable to how both fields produce knowledge about China. The Mao era must be represented as a lack, a difference that must be and is being overcome in China's process of becoming-the-same. Thus Heat can be reframed as a "subversive" critique of a Maoism - apparently still alive and well in Braester's analysis - that seeks to violently impose a monolingual, monolithic, and completely transparent society. This is ColdWarspeak and it conflicts with a Maoist discourse that was premised upon the ceaselessness of contradictions and historical change, not to mention continuous revolution. Heat can be recoded as a correct, right-thinking critique of Maoism only if this was the a priori conclusion posited at the very beginning. Thus speaks the circular, selfreferential system of Sino logical thought.

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So far we have focused on China discourse in variously specialized, journalistic, popular, and creative texts within Western but also global intellectual political culture. I have argued that Sinological-orientalism - evidenced in the representation and codings of Tiananmen in the Western imaginary, in the demonization of the Mao era and Chinese governance, in the elision of Maoist or radical discourse, in the enumerative modality producing dubious Great Leap Forward scholarship, and in the totalitarianist codings of China in film studies and in DeLillo - pervades and helps form that culture and politics today. There is a weight to the construction and place of "China" across these different sites - a formerly benighted and oppressive China now slowly becoming modem and on our normal path. Sinological-orientalism, in short, is a discursive formation that is rendered visible and made coherent by its "system of dispersion." 1 Such a formation is constituted across different fields and discliplines, and derives its identity, power, and systematicity from this. I have argued that the regularities ofSinological-orientalism can be found in certain tropes, interpretive themes, and concepts: the totalitarian or oriental-despotic, and with this the construction of the Chinese as brainwashed, duped, or enthralled to a Great Leader/emperor and authoritarian governance; the coding of the mass campaigns as well as Tiananmen 1989 and after (e.g. anti-N.A.T.O. protests) as irrational or at best not-quite normal; and the denial not just of complexity but of coevalness. China is or has not until recently been modem; culturally and politically (but no longer economically!) it lags behind its Asian neighbors and the West; it is still in the process of leaving its past behind, so as to follow normal development and fully join the global community. China has been tragically different and lacking (a lack of modernity and "normality" above all); but it is now slowly becoming-the-same as "us." Either the difference or the sameness may be emphasized in a given analysis but these remain the normative poles, and it is assumed that China can and someday will finally become like us. 2 It is in this sense that the new orientalism marks a shift from the essential difference between East and West to their - China's - general equivalence: a sameness structured by a hierarchical difference. And there is, within all these shared and homologous accounts or uses of China, a common heuristic strategy: not just the authority to speak for Chinese pasts, presents, and futures (the common position of enunciation), but the positional superiority of the Sinologist. As noted before, we can see this as more akin to the civilizing mission of the French

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empire than to the differentialist, British logic of the white man's burden. But it also specifically reflects American political-economic "leadership" (hegemony) and thinking (fetishizations of markets, "freedom," and so forth). Now I want to examine yet another subfield and dispersion of Sinological-orientalism - namely, contemporary theoretical discourse about globalization and the "new" world order after the end of historical communism. It is "Western" work by theorists as diverse as Laclau and Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri, and Slavoj Zizek - that uses particular and seemingly slight references to China, but these moments are in fact crucial for consolidating the argument and project at hand. I will interrogate the increasing presence of "China," of its histories, problems, and achievements, of "China" as historicist or empiricist referent and as an "example" of some other global truth. I will then follow up on this high-powered theoretical work with an interrogation of recent literary studies that, while fully Derridean, seek to de-politicize the representation of China and keep post-colonial critique at bay. The chapter and book then concludes with a return to questions of social space, capital, and the limits of Sinological-orientalism. I do all of this in part to again help make the case for the orientalist dispersion at work in the world. But I also wish to return to two broad and enduring problems of Said's model of orientalism and of Western knowledge about China. The first problem, one largely unexplored within postcolonial studies, is the relationship between orientalism and capitalism. Beyond the theft and conquest of resources and labor entailed by colonialism or imperialism and prepared and rationalized by orientalism, how are we to understand the relationship between this last and capitalism? And how is this specifically "Sinological" or China-centered now, standing as we are beyond the overt or "high" colonial/extractive eras of the British and French empires? While it has not escaped anyone's attention that the West's relationship to China is overwhelmingly an economic one, we have yet to examine how our very understandings of China - or Sino-orientalist knowledge - might in some sense be economic or "capitalist." The second, and I will argue related problem refers to the ontological ("real") and veridical status of Sinological-orientalism and of its constructed post-Mao "China." Why do such reductive, tendentious, or often sheerly ideological accounts of China seem true and real to so many? A related question here is simply, Why China? Why is China - formerly only semi-colonial - singled out as the vehicle for such knowledge production? Of all these questions, more later. As befits an era in which it seems impossible not to believe that China has all but assumed - or resumed - a pre-eminent role in the world system, recent years have witnessed increasingly frequent "China references" in the fields of cultural studies and current theory about globalization or politics (as opposed to area studies proper). This is an inevitable historical shift brought to us by increased globalization. It is most welcome, given the importance of China globally, the lack of interdisciplinarity in area studies, and the isolation of the China field from the linguistic and theoretical turns within the humanities. China is no longer just for the Sinologists and "experts'', and this is a good thing. However, ifthe question of China (and the Sino-Western dynamic) has never been problematized theoretically then it behooves us to attend to how "China" is used, to

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attend to not only what the China-reference is meant to say, but to the work that it does. This work is, I would submit, to help constitute the identity of the U.S.West and its intellectual-political culture. The function of the China-reference is not to actually say something insightful or even thoughtful or accurate about China, but to help prove the truth of said theorists' theoretical and political claims. What we can witness in the historicist or empirical reference is the reduction of a Chinese event to a particular - and often ill-considered - "fact" and the insertion of this "Real" China into a historical teleology that has culminated in the current global conjuncture (the postmodern Empire, the new global order, and so forth). This, in tum, raises those above questions about capital and orientalist logics working together. The problem here is not simply one of generalization and abstraction, because theoretical critique is necessarily both of these things. The problem rather is that such usages are often self-referential and, in a word, superficial; they betray no serious engagement with the question of China through intellectual labor, even eliding the abundant English language studies cited throughout this study. Hence the remaining problems of positional superiority and the politics of knowledge.

"China" in theory Let us begin with an influential, even foundational theoretical text that would seem to have little to do with China and globalization, but which did convince many that there was, or could be a "politics" to postmodemism: Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. This text offered a Derridean critique of classical Marxism by looking at how the logic of hegemony emerged within Marxism, so as to deconstruct the concepts of totality and historical necessity. While this is not the space to rehearse the book's reception, it is worth noting that Marxism in this book is of the Westem, if classical kind. But the figure of Mao does pop up several times, and it will be instructive to briefly map this. Mao's writings on the ceaselessness of contradictions - as Althusser aptly put it, his submitting of the dialectic to the dialectic 3 - are treated thus: "despite their near-to-zero philosophical value," they nonetheless unintentionally have the "great merit of presenting the terrain of social struggles as a proliferation of contradictions, not all of them referring back to the class principle" (64). Later in a one-paragraph dismissal of Marxian dialectics tout court, they refer to Mao's "picaresque notion of dialectics: his very incomprehension of the logical character of dialectical transitions enables a logic of articulation to be introduced, in a dialectical disguise, at the politico-discursive level" (95). There are two things worth noting here. One is simply the arrogance typical of colonial discourse in its condescension towards other, native sources: Mao - one of the most educated and erudite thinkers of his generation, an acknow !edged master of Chinese prose and poetry - is simply not an intellectual, let alone a "real" philosopher. This is a minor tradition within Western Marxism in regard to Maoism. Suffice it to mention Leszek Kolakowski's ethnocentric screed in Main Currents of Marxism (Maoism reflects "traditional Chinese xenophobia" and a crude peasant mentality),

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or Isaac Deutscher's calling Maoism half-full of "Oriental conceit" and the Cultural Revolution the last stage of "oriental despotism" in China (Kolakowski 514; Deutscher, Unfinished 94 ). 4 What is of greater note, however, is that Laclau and Mouffe insult Mao's intelligence and yet take one of his most basic and explicit themes as their own: that the dialectic and contradictions have no end, that not all struggles are class struggles, that one has to deal with the multifarious masses and not just classes. 5 They take Mao's pamphlet-style essay on contradictions as an unintentional but real proof of the logic of articulation and the impossibility of any objective, complete mapping of the "social totality." There is a certain historicist gesture here: Mao unwittingly arrives at the correct interpretation of theory and dialectics before the later, full-on poststructuralist/"French" Enlightenment. Despite their withering critique of one type of stagist Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe adopt their own notion of progress here. They are also unable to see Mao (or his predecessors and collaborators) as someone who creatively developed and pushed Marxism and dialectical thought into a more encompassing, worldly, and effective direction fit for a largely rural or Third World world. (This is also why Maoism - despite its real limits in a world featured by powerful military-industrial states - remains the only "live" revolutionary theory.) Mao thus falls into the category of the "not yet": someone who just could not possibly have willfully arrived at a philosophical position shared by contemporary, modem (or postmodern), sophisticated, radical intellectuals. Mao and they were, unknowingly and unintentionally, only almost "there." We should also recall that it was Althusser who, via Marx's Grundrisse, introduced the concept of articulation to contemporary theory, and thence via Laclau, Mouffe, and most notably Stuart Hall, into cultural studies. 6 Althusser was strongly influenced by Mao's essays on philosophy and by the Cultural Revolution, the era that gave the lie to the idea that severe contradictions and political struggles were more or less resolved after the initial, "real" revolution, and that societies moved in sure, dialectical stages. If any leader of state knew something about articulation - that links, movements, and struggles have to be assembled, that there are no laws of historical necessity, that the superstructure can determine the base - it was Mao. As Robert Young among others 7 has noted, Maoist theory became highly influential among radical left intellectuals in the 1960s .... The degree to which French poststructuralism more generally involved what amounted to a Maoist retheorization of European political and cultural theory, as well as its complex connection to Indian postcolonialism, which has also been deeply affected by Maoism, remain as yet unexplored. (Postcolonialism 187) In an important sense, then, one of the fruits of Maoism in the West may well be post-structuralism. Or at least its anti-essentialist, "articulatory" bent, arguably the most useful aspect of the entire, hugely influential enterprise. And yet it is not so much that this issue has been unexplored as almost willfully denied, in the

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West as in Laclau and Mouffe's deconstructive genealogy of Marxist thought. By the later 1980s it became and remains rather bad form to refer positively to Maoism or Mao's China. The complex record of Maoism in China and elsewhere admits a number of interpretations. But the erasing or demonization of it and the P.R.C. from important historical, political, and intellectual developments in the West is orientalism. A return to the essential distinction between an uncomprehending China and a rational West. This landmark poststructuralist text, then, does have to do with globalization in that it disavows but reveals the absent presence of Maoist theory and the Cultural Revolution: their impact on Western thought, which last was in itself in part animated by the great ideological and political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and what is now disparagingly called Third Worldism. Notwithstanding the ultimately failed attempts of China and newly independent states across the Third World to delink from the capitalist world system, this era must be seen as a key moment within the history of globalization and internationalist political thought and culture. Even in the West today the impact of Maoism lives on and takes new, if often negative forms (as in DeLillo's Mao II, news media, and so on). When current theoretical discourse turns to the study of globalization it necessarily if often unconsciously arrives with its past in tow, and more to the point here, with the residues of a "China" or "Maoism" on board. But if China, Maoism, and the P.R.C. were a marked and positive influence on theory in the past, they- as in Laclau and Mouffe's later, piggybacking text- become a much less inspired, and frequently negative presence in current global work. In the concluding chapter of The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben turns to Tiananmen 1989 to demonstrate the actuality and worldliness of the new global situation and of his chief concept in the book: "whatever singularity" (84 ). 8 The latter refers to a community without "determinate contents," without a defining essence or identity, without "conditions of belonging," and beyond any national ascription. Agamben's project here is to find an ethics that can ground community, but one not based on ideology or, apparently, history. As with his later work, Agamben attempts to privilege ethics over politics, expressing a refusal of national belonging and the salience of the nation-state that clearly is shared somewhat later by Hardt and Negri's work. This non-identitarian community of what he calls "the Chinese May" is, in his opinion, a new development to the extent that it was not a struggle for the "control or conquest of the State," but stood opposed to it as the "non-State" (Coming 85). This last is a term he equates, appositionally, to nothing less than "humanity" itself. It is this lack of an identity and belonging that the state - qua state - found most intolerable in the protestors' actions, and it is this that it was attempting to suppress. Right off, however, we should note a striking discrepancy between the "China" of the U.S.-West and the "China" within the mainland. Tiananmen remains the most emblematic event of Post-Mao China from the point of view of those living outside of the People's Republic. In part due to state censorship, 1989 - while hardly unknown - has nowhere near the iconic status within China as it does outside. For better and for worse, and in part due to mainland state

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censorship, it is simply not the Sinified analogue of, say, the Prague Spring, and within China the anonymous Tank Man is not, as he is for Time magazine, one of the last century's greatest, most iconic heroes. My point here is not to downplay the significance of Tiananmen in an absolute sense, nor to excuse Deng Xiaoping et al. from their criminal violence. It is, though, to mark the difference between an inside and an outside, and to mark the Western fixation on an event that serves as the key event of post-Mao China and the emblem of China's perfidy in an era when it "threatens" the U.S.-West's political-economic dominance. But while the choice of Tiananmen is itself significant here, the larger issue is the content of what Agamben and other theorists have to say. And striking in this regard is very simply the matter of historical accuracy and, by extension, of knowledge. Whatever the merits of Agamben's sentiments, he is uninformed when he claims that the only concrete demand of the movement was the rehabilitation of the recently deceased General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. Historians of the event concur that the student movement as a whole was actually patriotic (the youth insisted on this) and wanted above all recognition by the Communist Party - which it by and large did not oppose or demand to abdicate. Their demands included treatment as an equal, valued partner in carrying out the official state policies of modernization and reform. Within China studies, the consensus laments these characteristics, seeing in them the lack of a more Western, proceduralist understanding of democracy and civil society, and identifying this lack as the reason for the movement's failure. So, too, the notion that this "community" lacked a representable identity would come as news to the participants, or to readers of Zhao Dingxin's book on the subject, which thickly describes the turbulent and fractious jockeying for personal and ideological control within the leadership. 9 This internal struggle within the student movement, and their external conflicts with the Party and at times with the workers' groups on the Square, were certainly about identity and recognition as much as about ideology, policy, and social justice. Tiananmen contained the inevitable mix of factors in a protest movement and a struggle over representation. The students' demands for the reversal of the April 26th People's Daily editorial that called them unpatriotic, for official dialogues with CCP leaders, and for the dismissal of Premier Li Peng (who declared martial law), have to be seen as in part a struggle over identity. 10 So, too, for the workers' calls to have Deng's and others' finances publicized, and for their own big-character posters that (contra Agamben) made specific demands for, say, the right to form their own unions and get paid, and that moreover proclaimed themselves as the vanguard of the nation and revolution. 11 Such fundamental aspects of the protest movement find no space within Agamben's analysis of the Chinese March-to-June event, and his positing of a communal "singularity" beyond identity and against the state is simply asserted as a romantic obviousness. It is just something that is known, without the need for research and elaboration. The Tiananmen events, then, here become a floating signifier, whose only concrete meaning is precisely its rhetorical function as the historical proof of

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Agamben's conceptual work: that we are beyond the nation, that traditional forms of politics, ethics, identity, and collective struggles are anachronistic, but we are witnessing, messianically, the birth of singularities and new forms of global community. Agamben's use of China - and he concludes his study with Tiananmen, one of the few, specific, contemporary examples in his text - must be seen not as a measured analysis of the actual events but as of a piece with the popular images of Tiananmen 1989: the Tank Man, the Goddess of Democracy statue, the spontaneous explosion of common humanity underneath the visible foreignness of China, and so forth. For Agamben, as for Hardt and Negri as discussed below, this is Tiananmen as spectacle. As Rey Chow once put it: China is that thing that "facilitates the production of surplus-value in the politics of knowledge-as-commodity": "it becomes ... the 'Other' onto which the unthinkable is projected" (87). This is, before the letter so to speak, a sharp critique of the autonomist/Deleuzian/singularity romantic theory-stream in general. But the larger point is that China - like the classical "Orient" - has often served as a screen for attempts to think the not-here, not-Western, wholly Other. So, too, as we have examined in an earlier chapter, the great majority of China studies scholarship still codes the protest movement as the birth and then termination of (bourgeois) civil society that stands opposed to the state and that is disconnected from class. Agamben's text may be poeticizing Tiananmen, but practically speaking it ends up in that far more familiar and depoliticizing "global civil society" mode of analysis. Far closer to the events themselves would be to read the crackdown as a panicked response to the general strike emerging in Beijing due to the activities of the workers more than to the students and intellectuals on which the West fixates. The movement and the workers' overwhelming presence in it are best seen as a class-based response to unemployment and "structural adjustments" to a formerly planned, socialist welfare system. From a Marxist or worker's perspective, 1989 was a response to an increasing political authoritarianism linked to the state's abdication of social welfare and a rising neo-liberalism. 12 Hence the absence of an anti-state position, and rather demands for inclusion by students and workers. As for the civil society interpretation, or Agamben's similar but more profound anti-state one, Wang Hui has argued against both on the grounds that in China, the public sphere has for a long time existed "within the state's space" and so cannot be a "natural deterrent" to state power (China's New Order 179-80). 13 Wang consistently defends the capacity and necessity of the nation-state and socialist ideology to foster social justice in China. His own complex reading of the Tiananmen movement - couched in neutral prose argues that its denouement was ultimately about the restoration of "links among market mechanisms that had begun to fail" in the late 1980s, and that created the social dislocations and discontent behind the protests (New Order 117). In the event, 1989 marked the coming onslaught of neo-liberalism and the eventual weakening of the state. Empire is a similar text in its Zeitgeist-style and its case for nothing less than a new communist manifesto for the global communities or "multitudes." Hardt

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and Negri revise the metaphysically anthropological mode of Agamben's The Coming Community by emphasizing "immaterial labor" and post-Fordism, and declaring that the new global community has already arrived. But they share with Agamben a highly challenged use of China. Here, too, Tiananmen presents itself in unexpected places, again turning on what the movement lacked: this struggle, like the Intifada of 1989 and the Zapatistas' uprising to which it is equated, is characterized above all by its "incommunicability," or its "failure" to communicate at a "local level" and to other, global struggles. Hardt and Negri do not see this as a flaw but as a sign of the times: in the new age of empire what such struggles lack in communicability and duration they make up for in "intensity," and point to a new (or future) type of communication based "not on resemblances but ... differences": "a communication of singularities" (Empire 57). And yet, the question of who is communicating what to whom goes begging. Moreover, despite or rather because of its inability to "communicate" locally or globally, Tiananmen nonetheless leaps "vertically," "touches" "the global level," and "attacks ... Empire" (55, 57). This may be a poetics, but it is nonetheless odd to hear that a mass movement that spread across several provinces and rapidly mobilized much of Beijing's population, not least through big-character posters, handbills, and pirate broadcasts, was not communicating anything even to the Chinese. I would submit that, just as the Mao period is represented as identical to Soviet Russia (and surely Negri should know the Maoist critique of Stalinist economics 14 ), the reference to Tiananmen is simply a convenient vehicle. It is an ahistorical proof or exemplum that functions to show the truth of "empire." Precisely because the text seeks to convince us that the new empire, its multitudes, and their common resistances do actually exist and form a whole, it is crucial to ask what such struggles as Tiananmen, the Intifada, and so on have in common. But Tiananmen, invoked in Deleuzian language, is something that we are just supposed to know. "China" is ready-made to fit the theory in a seamless way. This logic of equivalence is again shown when the authors suggest a "parallel" between the twin "bureaucratic dictatorships" of China and Russia, and that as with the case of Russian culture during the last throes of the USSR, the "Chinese proletariat" showed "fabulous creativity" in the 1980s (278, 460n29). I leave to one side the description of elite Chinese intellectuals and artists as proletarians. While one of the merits of Empire is its avowedly synthesizing method, it is nonetheless marred by an assimilation of foreign contexts and by a lack of mediation that is rooted in the anti-dialectical sources of their thinking. What is further striking is the cursory gloss of the challenges to historicism by postcolonial critics or their antecedents, or of the challenges to orientalist historiography by, say, Edward Said or Andre Gunder Frank. If in their major programs of research Said and Frank threw down major challenges to how we have written the history of the Other, then this is a call that, in the current conjuncture, most producers of knowledge and new theory simply do not hear. As I have argued elsewhere, the type of "theorizing" within Empire and some of the other texts examined here indexes material transformations within intellectual labor

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and the larger economy. These traits reveal an increase in the force of abstraction within thought under contemporary capitalism, a development that goes hand in hand with the expansion of the commodity relation into more and more spheres of intellectual life and the speeding-up of intellectual labor. But more to the point right now: Empire's refusal to engage with concrete situations and political events is crucial for establishing its chain of equivalence between Soviet Russia, 1980s China, the Intifada, and "Seattle." It is what produces the concept of a decentered, non-national, and global empire encompassing everything. As Zhang Xudong has argued, this concept of empire is also a "normative" one grounded by "a voluntarist and ahistorical Left vision of global utopia," and not the empirically true one they claim (2004, 47). To which we can also add that China, be it of the Great Leap or the 1980s, can really make no difference in this analysis. In recent writings on totalitarianism, Lenin, and the state of the "global Left," Zizek (to take a rather different wing of cultural theory) displays a similar use of China. The reference is most often to the Cultural Revolution, which reduces to the stereotype of entranced "Red Guards ecstatically destroying old historical monuments ... desecrating old paintings," and to Mao's emperor-like "extreme" pursuit of "full personal power," after which he quickly restores order (2001 b). For Zizek, what this image proves, against the Chairman and Stalin (whom he thoughtlessly equates), is the proper autonomy of the "sphere of material production"; ifthe latter is subordinated to "the terrain of political battle or logic," it can only result in "terror" (2001a, 139). Totalitarianism, in this view, is the result of the primacy of the political over the economic, and not the other way around (as Hannah Arendt would have it). Zi:Zek thus uses China to counter the misuse of totalitarianism as a politically quietist notion devoid of economic mediation. Yet the more salient, useful points about this slipshod concept are not broached: that in the case of China, where genuinely popular Maoist mobilizations were as common as conflicts within the party and society, the attribution of totalitarianism implies "brainwashing" and oriental-despotic control of a perennially passive populace. It is not a critical concept so much as part of colonial discourse.15 That China was and is totalitarian, that its populace is largely quiet, passively suffering, and state controlled even when it is rebelling, is a standard part of orientalist common sense and area studies discourse. But it is contradicted by, for example, China's long history of peasant rebellions, the "mass democracy," strikes, and so forth of the Cultural Revolution, the new regime's widely felt legitimacy through the early 1970s at least, and the skyrocketing of mass incidents since the 1980s. 16 What we have here, then, is not an interrogation of Arendt and others or of China, but a dressed-up "vulgar" Marxism that emphasizes the primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production. Zizek thus shares this belief with Deng Xiaoping and Soviet or Stalinist Marxists. As it was for them, it remains a strongly depoliticizing type of rationality that is just as quietist as "totalitarianism." Whatever else one might say of his critique of Arendt, the point here is that his uses of China have little to do with what the Cultural Revolution

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was really like. Thus, his notion that Mao was only after full personal power is belied by the fact that by late 1967 Mao had already resecured that. This leaves Ziiek with nine-tenths of the complex era to account for. This is Mao as despot and not historical figure, thinker, or rational political leader. It comes as no surprise, then, that Zizek can cite a pulp-orientalist biography as an authoritative text on the Great Leap Forward and Mao's thought.17 Another indication of superficiality or flippancy here would be Zizek's parallel between Mao dissolving the Shanghai Commune during the CR, and Lacan's closing his Ecole Freudienne (which is also chronologically wrong). It must also be said that when he writes on the Cultural Revolution as a hopeless entanglement of politics and economics (the "terror" of politics in command of production) he reproduces a key element of colonial discourse. As George Steinmetz has noted, characterizing pre-modem and socialist societies as muddled, confused, and backward in this way - as opposed to the rationally differentiated spheres of the West - has long been a staple of orientalist thought (22-3). One might easily contrast Zizek's work on China with, for example, Arif Dirlik's and others' interpretation of the Cultural Revolution. Dirlik argues that the CR and Maoism must be thought through rather than merely demonized or dismissed: In a historical perspective that takes them seriously as events in the history of modernity, however, the same events appear otherwise: as the constituents of a final effort - the most impressive of all such efforts - to create an alternative Third World modernity based on socialism. ("Revolutions" 80) This is a different approach than using China as a purely negative "example" or moral exemplum. The point here is simply that Dirlik takes China more seriously, i.e. tries to insert the complexities of the Chinese revolution within the revolution back into history, and to use this as way to write a global history of modernity that is informed by Chinese Maoism and the latter's varied influences on, for example, contemporary politics in Peru (the Sendero Luminoso) and Mexico (the Zapatistas). The coding ofTiananmen as civil society- global or otherwise - and of Maoism as a twin of Soviet-like totalitarianism (or worse) is part of that global tum to the right and the eclipse of Maoist discourse.

Orientalism now, Maoism then Now my point here is not just that Zizek would benefit from reading, say, Gao Mobo, Chris Bramall, or Han Dongping on the socio-economic achievements of the CR, or Wang Zheng's and others' nuanced, feminist accounts of their experiences during these years, or Joel Andreas's work on bona fide class struggles over symbolic power and cultural capital during the Cultural Revolution. 18 Nor is my point just that an otherwise heterodox Marxian thinker like Zizek refuses

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to engage Maoist discourse or Asian Marxisms. 19 What interests me more is the rhetorical work that the problematic China reference does (here and in the above). While these passages are not actually about some "real" China, "they have to seem to be so in order to do the critical work they do" (Saussy 150). 20 They all have to seem to refer to the real, historical China in order to consolidate the argument about the state of the left, the "new" global conjuncture, and the nature of the political or the economic. There is a reality-effect brought to us by the China-reference. For the producer of theory, China's inescapable global presence today (or under Mao) simply must be acknowledged. But it does not require a substantive or even thoughtful engagement, let alone an interrogation of what difference China might make in terms of "global" critical theory. In all these cases the positional superiority of the theorist is taken for granted. The complexity ofTiananmen or the CR is not allowed to even briefly challenge the theorists' overall claims or analysis. They do not warrant extended discussion at all - just a China-reference. Please note that there is no language requirement being implicitly invoked here. The texts and sources referenced above and throughout this study - many of them heterodox, alternative, and critical in ways that should be ripe for the radical theorist at large - were all either written in English or have been translated from Chinese. Thus state censorship within China - as real as it is - is not the immediate problem. The failure to engage such texts or perspectives takes us back not only to the question of intellectual labor (there is little of it on display in this regard), but also to the sanctioned ignorance of the First World, Western intellectual. It reveals as well the uneven imbalance in terms of knowledge production globally. What we are witnessing here is the influence of Sinological-orientalism on contemporary theory. It would thus be instructive to juxtapose such texts with past, heterodox China references during the Mao years. 21 These last were more positive about the perceived realities and projects of Maoism, including the Cultural Revolution. Maoism, in short, seemed to signify radical or even absolute egalitarianism (an actual slogan of the Cultural Revolution); it had to do with the wretched of the earth standing up. And also just common sense for the Third World. There was a voluminous amount of work, done by a diverse set of authors ranging from factory workers in Pennsylvania, Italian journalists, and Marxist activists to China-residing "foreign experts" and first-tier intellectuals as diverse as J. K. Galbraith, Arthur Miller, and William Hinton. We cannot review such a body of literature here. But I nonetheless want to refuse the common gesture of deriding such past writers who supported Chinese Maoism, or looked to that China as a herald of what could be, or as actually existing socialism's and the developing world's - best hope. Whatever else we might say of such texts, some of them did powerfully register and detail certain aspects and potentialities of that era. William Hinton, for example, remains an important social and oral historian of the grass roots in rural China; famed economists Joan Robinson and J. K. Galbraith wrote insightfully on Mao-era economics. 22 They certainly, often carefully, presented China as an instructive and productive space, and sometimes used China as a way to imagine better, egalitarian, or alternative

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worlds. They were also the result of sustained engagements with and in China, rooted in intellectual labor beyond televisual images and media reportage. Contrast this, then, with the current construction of China in Zizek among others: here China becomes if not always a dystopic space or negative example, a superficial blip on the screen or a casual - if also crucial - reference. So, too, we need to recall the salutary influence of Maoism on the imaginaries of radical movements across the world at this time (the 1960s and 1970s). While the Maoist component of "May 1968" in France is fairly well known, Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch have recalled how for the Black Panthers and many in the Black Power movement, Mao was "Black like us." Mao and China were not only a point of identification, but also helped radicals understand their own conditions of struggle against racism and inequality. The P.R.C. helped them reject stagist notions of change and the cult of expertise among "sociologists, psychologists, economists and others whose grand pronouncements on the causes of poverty and racism often went unchallenged" (Kelley and Esch 39). Along with the Cuban Revolution and African nationalism, Maoist China - "the most powerful 'colored' nation on earth" - offered a point of international solidarity and an understanding of geo-politics. It "internationalized the black revolution in profound ways" (38). And Roderick Bush notes that: Maoism has exerted a tremendous attraction for people of color who have been victims of racist humiliation in the pan-European world, especially in the United States. For many of us, Maoism stood with the 'wretched of the earth.' This constituted a conscious stand that did not flow simply from selfdefinition as a Marxist or from being a revolutionary in the third world. It seemed to most of us that Maoism expressed our desire for a just, democratic, and egalitarian world and also recognized the more subtle humiliations reinforcing the sense of pan-European supremacy among all sectors of the population. (110) There is much to mine in this passage and in the larger topic of Maoism abroad. Whatever "China" may mean to Western Marxists, it may well mean something else to Black or non-Western identified ones. But let us contrast the appropriation of Mao and China noted by Kelley, Esch, and Bush with that of the above theorists today. Here the usage does not have to do with doxa or a priori knowledge, nor with an historicist template, or even with specific events. It is, if you will, an imagined community. But also not false and inauthentic. Mao and China here stand for something, a Fanonian, Marxist, and globe-straddling political project, what used to be called "Third Worldism," and an alternative, global modernity. Whatever else we might make of these appropriations, in comparison to the vision of the "new" world order offered by Hardt and Negri among others, and the a priori nature of the truths that Chinese "facts" confirm, they index not only the radical milieu of the l 960s- l 970s, but also a strong imaginative power and

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the raced nature of cross-cultural communication. While Mao's China may in this case have served to "prove" the truth of Black liberation and the interconnectedness of global struggles, the larger point here is that Maoism had specific functions and effects on such groups' practices and their encompassing, global vision. The relationship to and understanding of China was not a casual reference. In comparison, then, the new zeitgeist and theoretical statements offered by Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Zizek, all of whom share a remarkably if un-reflexively totalizing vision of a global and virtual capitalism, 23 indexes what Fredric Jameson has referred to as the "widespread paralysis of the collective or social imaginary" (Geopolitical 9). But whoever speaks of global capitalism also speaks of the Cold War, specifically of the intertwined histories of communism and decolonization or what Timothy Brennan aptly calls "the East/West of North/South" ("Cuts" 39). What helps to explain the presence and assimilating force of Sinological-orientalism is the lingering presence of the Cold War. As William Pietz argued, Cold War discourse and the rhetoric of totalitarianism became a "substitute" for outright colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II, and yet both share homologous views of the irrationality, primitivism, archaic polities, and danger of the "Other" (55). I do not suggest that the theorists examined here directly reproduce colonial discourse in the manner of Hannah Arendt's claim that the mob mentality, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism ultimately derive from European contact with Africa and Africans. 24 But in all of these texts one can discern the influence and presence of Sinologica!, academic knowledge - the triumph of the Cold War, or even Dengist interpretation of the Mao era and beyond. Where do "correct" ideas about the P.R.C. come from? Even in the present theoretical works, they come from a Cold War area studies, albeit one equally filtered through the media and the broader intellectual-political culture. For as I have tried to show throughout these pages, media and China studies "knowledge" of China are intimately related and in many cases indistinguishable not least in their shared discourse of totalitarianism and despotism. Both spheres should be seen as a relay through which China-knowledge flows and is produced. So, too, it is striking that all of these texts elide the very fact of the P.R.C.'s status as a "communist" state, and how this might itself challenge theories of globalization and the alleged end of the Cold War. My point here is not that China is somehow a secretly left-wing regime, but that its history and trajectory since the late 1930s is quantitatively and qualitatively different from those of Russia or the former bloc countries, let alone the U.S.-West. It simply does not fit well into the conventional narrative of contemporary globalization, as an historical break following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of actually existing socialisms. The equation of Mao with Stalin, or of Tiananmen and China's political future with the Eastern bloc dissident movements (civil society), is a sign of Cold War coding and intellectual impoverishment. Like it or not, and despite the longstanding defeat of left forces within the Party, the P.R.C. remains a "socialist" state in at least a discursive and historical sense. That may be for good or for ill. But as Liu Kang among others has argued, China presents a fundamental challenge to theories of globalization and to a global capitalism led by the West;

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"revolution" remains its "central problematic" in the pursuit of its own, alternative modernity ("Alternative" 168). This is also a perspective echoed by Wang Hui. Even when revolution has been abandoned like it has by the current Dengist or post-Tiananmen regime, it remains as an absent presence and historical residuum in a stronger and more political way than, say, the French or American revolutions for their nations. The so-called New Left intellectuals in China, for example, as well as the "old left," certainly stem from this tradition and difference even if they are largely unknown or ignored by heterodox theorists who invoke the P.R.C. Economically the post-Mao "miracle" was built on the Maoist foundations it raided (and destroyed) to help achieve its world-historical growth rates. It surely did not follow neo-liberal doxa until recently, did not implode with the Soviet empire, and has not transformed into the free liberal "democratic" society that the end of history and rush of free markets was to bring. This all suggests that China's revolution may have something to do with its actuality today, and that Cold War narratives may have little to tell us about this. But these differences do not register in theory. The specter of the Cold War, then, lingers on in these global critical theory texts, just as it does in globalization itself. On the one hand, they assume the Cold War has been "won" and is quite finished, leading to a new era of globalization which demands new forms of politics and theory (and which tum out to be fairly conventional, albeit in "French" postmodern form). On the other, they draw on - depend upon - certain "knowledge" from Cold War discourse about what China was and is really like. What this further suggests, as Brennan and Pietz themselves do, is the impossibility of separating anti-communism from orientalism or colonial discourse. Thus while China has long been a fount for leftist theory and critique, current critical-theory work on globalization, while still drawing on the China reference, leaves much to be desired.

"Writing" "China": erasing the political But however weak the use of"China" is within current theory, what is striking is that China continues to function as a magnet for theoretical reflection. The question that must now be posed to these writers and to my previous chapters is: Why China? Why the China-reference? If the historical referents are ultimately dubious and fungible, then why China in particular, and not, say, India or South Africa? This is a large question, but it is one that is beginning to be asked within a certain strand of post-structuralist inspired "China" studies, i.e. of scholarship on Wes tern understandings of China. Early on in his study of the "Chinese dreams" of Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the Tel Que! group, Eric Hayot claims that this specific question is probably a bad one, or rather, it is good only inasmuch as it opens up discussion about the relation between geopolitical space - an area on the Pacific side of the Eurasian landmass with a more or less continuous history of being conceived as a political identity - and the realms of thought. (ix)

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The question of why China in particular - the specificity of China within the various "Chinese dreams" of Western writers - is thus displaced. The aim is to tum the question into one of "intellectual history and cross-cultural reading" in general (ix). Thus for the great bulk of his text, Hayot adroitly unpacks the "dreams" of "China" in Brecht et al. and only returns to this theoretical - and political - question and problem in the conclusion. Here the resolution - as with Saussy and Chow - turns out to be a poststructuralist and relativist one directed against critique of the West and of misrepresentation. Such politicized work e.g. the critique of orientalism, the work of the negative - in Hayot's view can only be "moralistic" "debunking" and can only falsely grant to China or the West "an ontological stability" that neither have (xiv, 180-1). Hayot like Saussy is at pains to announce that the West has no such stability and is just as constructed and changing at different moments and in different texts as is China. 25 While valid at a formal level of the signifier, this claim misses the point of Marxist-inspired work on globalization: the world remains structured neo-colonially by a core/periphery division centered on the West and First World, which exercises economic and political, if not cultural hegemony, over "the Rest." Indeed Saussy will claim that the phrase "the West and the Rest" is "mythology" (182). What explains this perspective, aside from the substitution of ethics for politics a la Agamben, is a strident poststructuralism that presents itself as more "complex" and ethically sensitive than postcolonial or other critiques. It is as if facts, beliefs, or identities, accessible only through language, do not acquire material force and have real effects in the world; as if all constructions of China are the same. Indeed at one point Hayot suggests that the "latent and the manifest content [of 'Chinese' dreams] might be the same thing" (187). Hence the unavoidable charge of relativism. The alternative to critique offered here is "Sinography": "the study not simply of how China is written about, but the ways in which that writing constitutes itself simultaneously as a form of writing and a form of Chineseness" (185). Thus despite the caveat that Sinography would proceed "without abandoning the question of reference altogether," Chinese Dreams and Saussy's Great Walls of Discourse indeed abandon this, save for a few potshots at Maoist baddies, "nationalist" intellectuals, and the Party-state ("the shadow of realpolitikal China") (Hayot 182). Such shots further indicate that the eschewal of reference allows Sinography and other poststructuralist "new" readings of China to conceal their essentially Cold War political dimensions and interpretations. All forms of knowledge - of writing China - are generally equivalent, as they are all "graphesis" (Hayot 185). Here China ceases to exist outside of dreams or writings of "China." For a theoretical tum that aims to be more sophisticated than Saidian critique, we are left with a China - and Sino-West encounter - that is an abstract thought experiment. This is preordained in the original transformation of the topic of Western understandings of China into an act of generic crosscultural reading. The problem arises in part with Hayot's positioning of China as only a space in Eurasia with a "more or less continuous history of being conceived as a political identity"; from this standpoint, the study of representations

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of China can only be an exercise in "intellectual history and cross-cultural reading" in general (Hayot ix, my emphasis). As is often the case with strict "social constructionist" modes of criticism, the only reality is that of perception and form. My point here is not just that there is a difference between such constructions of reality and reality itself. That, as Roy Bhaskar reminds us, is the epistemic fallacy: mistaking our knowledge of reality for the "thing," reality itself ( 111-12, 397). Saussy's book reaches back to the Jesuit missions in China and on up to Chinese debates on postmodemism. The focus is again on foreign/Western writings of China, but not on judging or evaluating these in terms of their truthvalue, their politics, or their relationship to colonial discourse, geo-politics, and so forth. This fetishization of abstract form or "writing" suggests, again, a certain paralysis of the social or political imaginary. It is as if all one can do is keep discovering the truth of poststructuralism, the quaintness of critique, the anachronism of engaged literature. The few actual judgments that are made amount to digs at the Chinese regime past and present, at anti-Western Chinese intellectuals (for their "defensive" nationalism), and even at Edgar Snow for "truckling to Mao" (131-9, 121). Thus even in these texts there is a political unconscious. By this last I mean the poststructuralist ethos ("free play") that places not politics but "ethics" in command. This is a liberal position that is all about openness and tolerance - except, of course, for Maoists, leftists, and so-called "nationalists." It is a view of Chinese history that places the "post" -condition - the eschewal of the true and the false, of the critique of representation, of the politics of interpretation - as the end of history and a universal condition that is demonstrated through the (second-hand) example of China. Thus we are presented in the end with a closed system of discourse - or the human condition for Hayot and Saussy - that like orientalism is ultimately selfreferential. "Whatever distinction exists between the West and 'China' - and surely there must be some distinctions! - nonetheless reveals itself ... to be caught up in the ephemerality of self-recognition" (Hayot 188). This statement echoes Saussy's final, depoliticizing claim against critique: Have we been missing something all these centuries, so that we take a work of critique to be the archetypal project of logical construction? Or is the difference (between philosophy as foundation and philosophy as therapy) merely illusory? (Saussy 189-90) There is a long view of history here, resulting in a "postmodern condition" that can no longer say what China or "China" refer to, beyond the process of writing/ dreaming/signifying. This is a postmodemism writ large - a triumphant textuality reminiscent of the American Modem Languages Association. The positional superiority of the Sinographer is as strong here as it is in Agamben through Zizek. It is assumed that this "graphing" framework fits China seamlessly, and virtually all writings of China at any point in time (from Ricci and the Jesuits up

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to Derrida and Chinese nationalist bogeymen). We can thus say of these global literary studies directed against postcolonialism and critique, what Timothy Brennan has said of Rey Chow's deconstruction of the "myth of origins" and "Chineseness": that they do not deconstruct reference so much as "efface" it; and having done this, "there is no outer tribunal to compare China against the West's 'translation' of it" ("Cuts" 54). This is not to appeal to an unmediated reality but to a mediated one, to the context and constitutive outside of interpretation and cultural "translation." Without such ground, not just critique but understanding becomes impossible. Thus there is no answer, for these texts or from their mode of analysis, to a number of important questions that their topic - Western understandings of China, Chinese understandings of the West - inherently raises. Why do Sinography, other than to show that "China" is "written"? Why is one "graphing" of China more valuable than another? Whither the geo-political? And most fundamentally again: Why China? "Sinography," like the one-sided post-structuralism it draws on, cannot help us discern what is being constructed or pose such questions.

"Why China?" redux: the economic and the intellectual The rise of China and its economy must have its effects on intellectual production. Why China, then? Let us begin by assuming the antagonisms and epistemological challenges - such as orientalism - that have subtended the China-West relationship for, say, three hundred years. Let us assume these exist and that they have something to do with China in theory. (If nothing else, the entirety of the preceding pages has tried to make this case.) So, too, let us recall that "our" relationship to China is overwhelmingly an economic (and political) one. China's rise, its status as the "next" superpower, the manufacturer of the world, the new Asian hegemon, the world-historical consumer market, the buyer of last resort for U.S. dollars, the second largest economy- and so forth. This brute fact - the rise of China, the transformation of the Sino-West "love-hate" relationship into one of greater "intimacy" - ultimately explains the existence of Sinological-orientalism, and the necessity of its critique. It also helps us answer the question Why China? in a materialist and historical way. Sinological-orientalism exists because it can. Orientalism, it should be recalled, is not simply about stereotypical thinking, or some Self/Other dialectic of identities, or simply a prejudice or desire. It may partake of all of these, surely, and we always have to allow for the place of imagination and the will-to-knowledge/ power. But in the end, orientalism was and is about knowledge production and its distribution, the accumulation of information about an area/Other for the purposes of control, management, administration, and profit financial as well as profit symbolic. 26 It is a material phenomenon, the production of a multifarious discourse that becomes institutionalized and that is articulated to global politicaleconomy and imperialism even as it takes the form of intellectual and scholarly

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knowledge. Said famously argued that orientalism preceded and prepared the ground for the modem colonial project. But this also needs to be understood dialectically: for without the political-economic drive to control - the appropriation of land and labor, the overthrow of native regimes, primitive accumulation and the accumulation of "primitives" - "orientalism" would only be a variant of Eurocentrism or simply chauvinist scholarship. This is how our above theorists and the China field seem to understand the term. But that will to, and production of knowledge are still with us. Not to justify and administer colonialism, as in the old days, but to get on with the business of business, as part of the global capitalist totality. The core of the world system still administers the development and governance of subject nations - often, as in the case of China, with the assent of the power-elite (and Party) within the periphery. That, too, is an old story of collaborations and compradors. It is no accident that the emergence of Sinologicalorientalism coincides with the era of a globalizing neo-liberalism. That in itself may have started in South America (via American economist ideologues) in some sense, but as David Harvey has pointed out, the rise of Dengist "crony" capitalism, the market mechanism, and free-market ideology in China is part of this same history of capitalist expansion and accumulation by dispossession. 28 Global capital has definite Chinese characteristics, just as Dengist China and the core all share a certain "de-Maoification" and an antipathy to redistributive, not to mention communist economics and social justice ideology. And this moment of neo-liberal, expanded capital accumulation has also meant greater contact, conflict, and co-operation between the capitalist West and China in all kinds of ways. This was a process begun in some sense with the 1972 Sino-U.S. rapprochement, but more crucially with the ready and increasing access of Sinologists to their anthropological "field" in the 1980s and beyond. 29 The meant an open season for Sinological knowledge production. 30 I am suggesting, then, that China's transformation by capitalism and the increasing global flows - including of authorized knowledge producers - between it and the West are the necessary background and conditions of possibility for Sinological-orientalism in its current form. Without the genuinely remarkable, even epochal but brutally inegalitarian rise of post-Mao China, and without the West's ambivalent relationship to this, Sinological-orientalism would not have happened. This is all another way of saying that the new era has not resulted in the real truth of China and progress having been discovered, but simply a new regime of truth that corresponds to a new political-economic conjuncture. If in the past a minority of (young) China experts, writers, and watchers "tailed" the Chinese state and the Maoists in particular, then this is an intellectual behavior with a greater majority and strength today when it comes to the direction of the Chinese economy and the Dengist verdict on the red decades and Mao Zedong. The point here is not the lack of so-called "independent" intellectuals (whatever this would mean), but how a discursive machine works to produce knowledge in the real world. 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

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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" flowing 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 flesh 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 Sinological-orientalism is a constituent part of global capital may seem no less problematic. 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? Here, too, there are a number of paths one could explore, not least a psychoanalytic one along the lines of Alain Grosrichard's The Sultan's Feast: European Fantasies of the East. This text ably deconstructs Montesquieu's, Rousseau's, and Voltaire's fascination with the seraglio and the perceived oriental despotism of the Ottoman Empire; it shows how this fantasy constituted their projects for an enlightened, rational society and, by extension, constituted modem Western political thought. All of this should be taken as axiomatic. Sinology's obsession with "despotism," "totalitarianism," and the Chinese lack of freedom must be seen as a variation on this trope, and an attempt to validate the universal truth of liberalism and Western forms of governance. Given the perceived threat of China that reigns within the leadership of the labor-movement and in otherwise politically antithetical organizations (e.g. U.S. Republicans and the Dalai Lama), one need not be a Lacanian to perceive an unconscious fear and loathing of China. 31 The reality of the West's "China" can be said to lie in the workings of fantasy. But psychoanalysis cannot press beyond a symptomatic and

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ahistorical reading. Once one maps the fantasy, there is not much else to say. The worldly connections to capitalism and geo-politics cannot register. So, too, psychoanalysis' positing of lack as an absolute condition of being sits uncomfortably with Sinological-orientalism's own positing oflack as China's own condition of being. One still needs to deal with the veridical status of this new orientalism, the seemingly objective status of the discourse. It relies on its detail about China to demonstrate its truthfulness, and so masks the assumptions, methods, or strategies, and larger structures that subtend the production of knowledge. To stop at the level of fantasy, then, is to leave those - often tendentious - "facts" intact, outside of the psychoanalytic narrative. This is the Zizek problem. Better, then, to tum to a different theoretical source, the figure who made philosophy worldly and the world philosophical. The rich tradition of ideologycritique in Marxism has based itself in various parts of his writings (or early, middle, and late Marx), perhaps most notably in Capital's discussion of commodity fetishism and the triumph of exchange value over use-value. But recently, Marx's value-theoretic, understood as a broadly social, but still material process akin to Lukacs' concept of reification, has again been opened up, including by a few scholars within China studies. 32 Fredric Jameson's work is crucial here. 33 But let us get to the heart of the matter, and recall Marx on coats and boots: "If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident" (Capital 169). And yet the absurdity matters not. For when the producers of these commodities bring them in relation to some general equivalent - be it linen, gold, money, or so forth - the relation between their own, private, concrete labor (the actually existing reality of their work or practice) and the collective labor of their society embodied in the general equivalent (in some form of exchange value), this relation "appears to them in exactly this absurd form" (Capital 169). That is, the fundamental absurdity, the irreality and arbitrariness of exchanging unlike objects, and of measuring and evaluating them on the basis of some third thing - the general equivalent - is for them completely natural, and has all the force of an obviousness. In short, the money-form or the general equivalent is completely naturalized, perfectly real and proper, "ontologically correct." Now this can hardly be understood as an ideological phenomenon in some simple, camera obscura sense of inversion. It is not as if participants in market exchange are "duped" into thinking in terms of (exchange) value. Money is a real enough thing indeed. From this example of how coats and boots stand in relation to one another, Marx immediately offers one of his grand generalizations: The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of production, i.e., commodity production. (Capital 169)

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There is much to mine in this passage, this situating of economic categories as both absurd and valid and "objective." They are neither False nor True in the conventional ways we still think of such matters, but nor are they neutral and scientific. Such categories cannot be demystified in some total sense; they actually do work, in the sense of being productive and actual as opposed to whether or not they are true in some absolute sense. We might think of Sinological categories or usages in this way - "civil society" may not be True in the sense that it is meant by some, but it certainly does a lot of work in knowledge production and perhaps even among the liberal and neo-liberal intellectuals and "dissidents" within China and elsewhere. Its falsity does not matter in that sense. What is most striking in Marx here is the paradoxical but emphatic insistence that these forms of thought are not false, at least not in any simple sense. One can only outflank, situate, and critique them by appealing to other, historical - and noncapitalist/commodity - forms of production. Or perhaps we can say: to other social and historical spaces. I will eventually return to this aspect of space and history below. But first I want to emphasize that categories of thought are serious things, and not simply beliefs: one cannot think without them; they themselves "think," as if on their own. As Lukacs noted in his own genealogy of the history of capitalism, "all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence)" (159). For Marx, as for Lukacs and Said, knowledge cannot be neutral or merely descriptive and simply a matter of accuracy; nor will it blow away once demystified. These economic categories, within a given mode of social production, make perfect sense and cannot simply be dismissed as false consciousness. It is only within the context of other modes of production that they are revealed in all their "magic and necromancy," the reification reversed (169). Again, I think we can, today, take the latter "mode of production" concept to include other social spaces of productive activity, including of knowledge/ power. As Etienne Balibar puts it, Marx recasts "the question of objectivity" such that the categories or forms of thought "express a perception of phenomena, of the way things 'are there', without it being possible to change them at will" (Philosophy 65). Again, then, this is not the false consciousness model of ideology that always presupposed a fairly strict appearance/reality divide. 34 And yet - and this is the heart of the matter - such "objective" perceptions and forms of thought "immediately combine ... the real and the imaginary (or what Marx terms the 'suprasensible' or 'fantastic form' of autonomous commodities)" (Philosophy 65-6). They are, in short, constituted realities that can become internalized and naturalized. Thus these categories or forms of thought are akin to commodities, are real and imaginary, both True and False. Or to invoke Althusser, such categories of thought contain within them a recognition of something real - the ways in which capitalism is institutionalized, the ways it works on its own terms - and a misrecognition. 35 An ideological or orientalist account of the Cultural Revolution, for example, may recognize certain undeniable

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aspects and events: e.g. the violence, the passionate friend/enemy politics of class struggle, the cult of Mao. But it will fundamentally misrecognize others: e.g. rural development in education, the return of the barefoot doctors, or that most participants, at the time, did not see or perceive that era as repressive or as madness. Or it will recognize the violence but interpret it in sentimental, humanistic, or outright orientalist terms; the cult of Mao becomes "brainwashing" and/ or mass idiocy and passivity. What I will now claim, then, is that Sinological-orientalism or the "real China" that is leaving its past behind, and haltingly but inevitably becoming-thesame as the U .S.-West, is precisely a "socially valid, therefore objective" category of thought in the Marxist sense. It thinks. It does a certain amount of worldly work; it produces knowledge and careers as well as art. It thus has an effectivity quite beyond or separate from its Truth; it works as a regime of truth. It is also capitalist - in its function and, as I will try to argue below, in its genesis and inner logic. But to say it is capitalist means not only that it corresponds to the current, globalized mode of production, but is also to say that it is political and socially constructed. It is again no accident, then, that it crystallizes with the birth of de-Maoification and China's full-on engagement with global capital. Recasting orientalism as a category of thought, in Marx's sense, helps us to apprehend its veridical power as well as its filiations with capitalism. Balibar offers an analysis of orientalism parallel to mine here: Said also provides the most convincing demonstration that there is a racist thought, therefore that racism does think .... 'Orient' is not only a fiction and an image, it is a thought category .... [Said] clearly implies that the imaginary of which the idea of 'Orient' is the product, contradictorily combines a real encounter (if only an encounter with real texts ... ) and a denial of the reality of the encounter. ("Difference" 29-30, original emphases) What enables the denial of the reality of that encounter - that it is a crosscultural, conflictual encounter and challenge, and not a mythical free marketplace of ideas and "Sinography" - is, I would submit, the "socially valid, objective" status of the Sinological knowledge. This, in addition to the welter of detail that masks the assumptions, interpretive strategies, and partisanship of Sinological analysis. Balibar moves from here to the well-known function of orientalism in constituting the self-identity of the West (again, "the WesternChristian-Democratic-Universalist identity") ("Difference" 30). But we are concerned with the economic here, and to better see this category as part and parcel of contemporary capitalism, we need to again briefly return to Marx on what drives the process of the production of such "objective" forms of thought. How do certain categories come into the world and correspond to capital? (We do not say all do.) It is the totality of the political-economic activity over time and space. But there is also a more specific albeit theoretical explanation to be found in Marx. I refer here to what Marx calls the total

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value-process, or more specifically the social process by which labor-power defined as the "living personality" of the human being and as "the living, form giving fire ... the transitoriness of things, their temporality ... their formation by living time" - becomes abstract labor or more simply just abstracted (Capital 270; Grundrisse 361). As this rich language suggests, we are dealing not with a scientific Marx but a poetic-philosophical one who is interested in the formation of social forms as much as in surplus value and exploitation. These social forms, as I am calling them, can include our categories or discourses. There is a larger process of abstraction here that subtends productive activity. Labor-power - i.e. laborers - undergoes a social or real process of abstraction, such that all forms, all concrete manifestations of labor-power are rendered the same, reduced to the same substance. That is, they are made generally equivalent to abstract, homogenous labor. This last aspect takes us to more familiar ground, namely the critique of the force of capitalist exchange or the unleashing of a calculating, quantitative rationality into the culture and society of capitalism. Much of our understanding of the culture of capitalism derives from the Marxist theory of the commodity form as the triumph of exchange value (the money form) over use-value in production for the market. The institutionalization and constant expansion of exchange not only represents a negation of use-value - where this last signifies experience and difference, not just "utility" - but the type of thought that makes the incommensurable comparable. 36 This analysis remains indispensable, not least with a homogenizing globalization in full force. It also allows us to see a homology between the Sino-orientalist logic of sameness and capital's logic of equivalence. This has been an implicit theme to the entire present study, but we can now perhaps better see how it arises from exchange - old-fashioned commodity/ money exchange but also expanded exchanges of an untold amount of flows. If we do virtually live within the commodification of everything, in a knowledge economy or "cognitive capitalism" filled with more immaterial forms of labor than ever before, then it should not be too "vulgar" to suggest an equivalential logic of sameness underpinning orientalist discourse. But to return to forms of thought. Again speaking of linen, Marx notes that in exchange, the value/substance of a thing consists of an amount of abstract labor and necessarily takes on an "objective" form/status: "The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an 'objectivity,' a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commodities" (Capital 142). What this shows us is that the Marxist notion of capitalist objectivity is hard-wired into the mode of production and the creation of value at a more micro-level. This happens with commodities proper like the linen example, but also - by extension - with those categories and forms of thought specific to the "bourgeois" world or mode of production. Marx has in mind a ("value") process that explains and produces both entities or social forms. From this compressed and truncated tour through Marx's philosophy, we can better appreciate what he insisted was the object of Capital: "What I have to

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examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it" (added emphasis) (90). Marxist thinkers have understandably focused on the mode, but it may be high time to focus on the corresponding intercourse. Sinological-orientalism, then, as a form of thought, is one such "form of intercourse" between the West and China. It is one, even on those rare occasions when it is not implicitly or explicitly promoting more free trade, marketization, and liberalization. The preceding discussion does, I hope, flesh out in what sense we can see this discourse existing in a structural or functional and "organic" relationship to the classically capitalist value-process. But as noted above, Marx wisely insists on raising the question of other "historically determined modes of production"; thinking this way can arrest the reifying powers of socially "objective" categories of thought. I have suggested that we can expand the "mode" concept to include social space and productive activity; 37 this is further warranted by the expansion of capitalism (and knowledge production) itself since Marx's time, including the commodification of discourse. This brings us to the question of China in space, so to speak. Let us begin with a perennial but still-useful truth from classical Sinology: the thing about China is that it is very big and very old. Which is a way of saying that it is an exceptionally dense and diverse space. Much of it is no doubt capitalist space, including most obviously its economy (much of it), its urban centers, and the results and artifacts of its epochal growth, from art house cinema to liberal intellectual discourse and consumerism. These are the sites of most China-Western exchanges and flows, overwhelmingly the urban centers and the rich, southern and coastal belts of the land. This is the social, global space that is represented by the "China" that experts and observers travel to and produce knowledge about. It should not be controversial to describe this as specifically capitalist. Within such contexts and spaces, then, Sinological-orientalism functions as a "socially valid, therefore objective" form of thought. Its detail, applicability, explanatory and "objective" powers (such as they may be) in some sense derive from these places. They are not pure fantasy or only false consciousness. These qualities and the discourse/knowledge itself are a result of the encounter there between Chinese and Western/postcolonial spaces, discourse, and realities. It can still be unpacked through critical analysis. But of course the above are not the contexts and social spaces of all of modern Chinese history (let alone the longue duree), nor of the Mao or revolutionary era. There are other histories, temporalities, social imaginaries, discourses, and spaces at work. (China is not fully capitalist to the degree that the U.S. or UK or Hong Kong are.) Understanding this helps one see the discursive violence of Sinological-orientalism vis-a-vis China's past as well as the places and people that have not benefited from the "era of reform and opening up." Even within one urban center - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, anywhere - there are layers of social space and history at work, counter-factuals and differences that resist, contradict, or escape normative Sino-orientalist codings. To take an obvious but symbolically significant example from southern Henan:

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Nanjiecun, the neo-Maoist, collectivized village of 12,000 people that is a site of red tourism, a bane of liberal intellectuals, and an actually existing marketsocialist and re-distributive enterprise dating from the mid-l 980s. 38 I am not speaking of local "color" or differences, or individual Chinese self-understandings that are at odds with the orientalism I have examined (though these are important). When we follow Marx's point that thought categories are historical and economic we can better see the non-capitalist and non- or differently global aspects of China. We can discern systematic or otherwise abundant other-messages about the meanings, realities, and "significations" from within China and between it and the rest of the world. These are not "in the true" of China studies and the knowledge of China produced within Western, now global intellectualpolitical culture. But still it is impossible to not know the differences between - for example the P.R.C. of Mao's time or of today and the China of certain, most "Western minds." This remains true even if the China field and intellectual-political culture refuse to dwell on the matter, or refuse to begin a debate on their "writing of the Other." The production and preservation of dense, diverse Chinese "space" may in the end be the largest or most enduring contribution of Maoism and the long revolution. Beyond the modernization and industrialization, beyond the political, cultural, and ideological legacies, ideals, and discourses, and beyond the residua of the attempts at the socialist transition and permanent revolution. This is admittedly abstract, and we do not want to over-state the case or deny the longue duree of Chinese cultures, specificities, and social forms. But there can be no denying that the event of 1949 happened, that the P.R.C. developed, modernized, and still moves forward under a different mode of production and social formation than that of the capitalist West and their forms of thought. The best readers of the Maoist trajectory have always understood that it was, perhaps most fundamentally, an attempt to preserve - or cancel and preserve, i.e. sublate - a very old, very big, and diverse national-civilizational space in the face of global onslaughts under the name of capitalism, semi-colonialism, and imperialism. This in addition to, even through its Marxist egalitarianism, passion for the masses and class justice, and respect for farmers and the rural generally. In so far as it was successful in this production and preservation of space, of non-capitalist and non-occidentalist/colonial space, it made an undeniable contribution to China and to "difference," but also to the critique of orientalism, imperialism, and capitalist modernity. It also reminds us that these last are - to adopt Said one more time - "alterable by intention." 39

Notes

Preface While I return to these issues elsewhere, the single best place to begin remains Maurice Meisner's chapter, "The Legacies of the Maoist Era" in Mao's China and After.

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2 3

4

5 6

7

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This rule is akin to what Partha Chatterjee later theorized as the "rule of colonial difference," whereby the essential difference/inferiority oflndia always trumped various British efforts to govern its colony liberally and bring it into the modern fold. See his The Politics of Imagining Asia as well as other citations here. Chakrabarty: "Historicism - and even the modern, European idea of history - one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else" (8). I have in mind things like village-level elections, co-operatives and the "New Rural Reconstruction Movement," or various ideological streams such as the New Left, neoConfucianism, neo-Legalism, and so forth. But my point is the objection to even the idea of a Chinese alternative to liberal capitalist democracy (or other Western idealtypes). For introductions see Daniel A. Bell, China's New Confucianism, and Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? The single best anthology is Wang Chaohua's One China, Many Paths, but see as well Gloria Davies' Voicing Concerns. New and Old Left perspectives from the "Utopia" salon are at www.wyzxwyzx.com/ (in Chinese) and in part in archives here (translated): http://chinastudygroup.net/. See Harvey, The New Imperialism. To "de-Cold War" is to disarticulate the Eurocentric and binary approach to historical communism (good/evil) lurking within political-intellectual culture as well as to see how the CW affects our understandings of Asia and the world. I take the phrase from Chen Kuan-Hsing, but also have in mind Andre Gunder Frank and critiques of the Cold War university. By the Cold War, the U.S. was the center for the production of knowledge. "China" has a long history of being a politicized object of knowledge for Western powers, and the oscillation of Sinophobic and Sinophilic responses follows domestic politics. For earlier periods, see Gregory Moore and Hung Ho-Fung. See English Lessons. My point is that earlier, nascent debates disappeared with the rightward drift in China and the West in the late 1970s. See as well Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), for a rich global-historical analysis of early Chinese nationalism and Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (New York: Columbia UP, 2006) for an emphatically post-structuralist/ semiotic analysis of Qing/British imperial history. While these studies do not broach

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10 11 I2 I3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

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the PRC as such, or even orientalism, they do bring the colonial/imperial back in a compelling way. Hevia is closest to the Saidian mode I am working in. Nor is it to deny the value of the largely social-scientific Critical Asian Studies especially in regard to other Asian countries. I am bracketing the open-ended and progressive, journal positions, which is where postcolonial work about the P.R.C. can be found, though not necessarily in a leftist way. The Chinese New Left movement might influence critical discourse globally, and a certain limited range of it is getting published. But there is also the translation problem and the positional superiority problem. So it is too soon to tell. I have discussed the fate of the critical field more in "China in Theory," 161-2. On colonial modernity and China, see Barlow (I 997) and other essays in that volume. See Young's second and third chapters in Postcolonialism. For a useful account of his "enonce"/statement, see Carole Blair. I am aware that for Foucault these are not meant to be propositions at all, but I remain unconvinced. Japan drops out of the story early on, and the final international Convention takes place in Copenhagen. All in-text quotes from the online edition (37 pars.). Pars. 3, 12, 22. Par. 36. As quoted in Connelly, "Taking Off the Cold War Lens." By historicist I mean the grounding of events, concepts, etc. to their "objective" history and thus their "reality." See Scorsese's comments on wanting to keep things "personal" in his interview with Gavin Smith, p. 24. Mark Abramson's "Mountains, Monks and Mandalas" discusses this too. As Scorsese makes clear with Gavin Smith in Film Comment. He and the script-writer met with the leader and his group in Colorado, Los Angeles, and Dharamsala. For an overview of Sautman's work, see his "Tibet: Myths and Realities" and the subsequent exchange of letters in the same journal (Feb. 2002), as well as "The Tibet Question." Tom Grunfeld's The Making of Modern Tibet is apposite. One reviewer, Douglas Imbrogno, notes the oiliness. The image of Mao as a dirty, crude peasant and unfit world-leader has become popular within Chinese liberal circles and elsewhere, and the film clearly taps into anti-Chinese racism in the U.S. Sautman clearly presents the legal issue. In addition to the Act, see its endorsement by numerous celebrities and anti-China politicians. I am here paraphrasing Grunfeld's argument, in "Reassessing Tibet Policy" and "The Question of Tibet." Huang mentioned Marx and Weber here, but we can also include the traditional "China responds to the West" paradigm. Philip C. C. Huang, "Theory and the Study of Modern Chinese History." See as well Harootunian and Sakai, "Japan Studies and Cultural Studies." The institutional and political-economic critiques of Asian Studies by Bruce Cummings and Moss Roberts are invaluable. I take them as given. See, respectively, "Boundary Displacement" and "Bad Karma." See also Tani Barlow, "Colonialism's Career," and Zhang Xudong, "Challenging the Eurocentric, Cold War View of China." See Leys, The Burning Forest, Mosher China Misperceived, and Barme, Jn the Red. See, for example, David Martin Jones, The Image of China; David Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist, and Nicholas R. Clifford, "The Long March of 'Orientalism.'" Schwarz, paragraph 24. No page numbers in the electronic copy of this article are available through the Journal of Asian Studies. Op. cit. Schwarz, para. 20. Schwarz, para. 32. See for example Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: UMP, 1993), as well as Grounds for Comparison:

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36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

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45 46 47

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Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, ed. Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (New York: Routledge, 2003). Schwarz, para. 32. Said discusses this in "East lsn 't East," an Afterword to a new edition of Oriental ism in 1995. See Zhang Kuan, "Predicament." Zhang's work was widely debated at the time within China, as was Said and postcolonialism (that Said was read as "post-modern" is not my concern here). See for example Ben Xu, "Postmodem-Postcolonial Criticism" as well as the final chapter's analysis of"Sinography." Quoted in Carine Defoort, "ls there such a thing as Chinese philosophy? Arguments of an implicit debate," 404. For more on Liu, including his current and unrepentant views on colonialism, free-markets, and U.S. imperialism, see bilingual materials here: http://chinastudygroup.net/2010/IO/debate-about-liu-xiaobo/ Accessed May 29, 201 I. See Lindsay Waters. See Brennan, "Scholars and Pretenders." See for example her remarks about Chinese socialism as "clearly something in which decent Chinese people no longer invest their hopes" (Chow, "Can One Say" 149). Other examples are too numerous to mention. I address her representations of "mainlanders" in a forthcoming article on China and Hong Kong's globalization. Currently a senior associate at a U.S. foreign policy think-tank, Pei has written often on this. For a version in the Financial Times, see "China's repression of civil society will haunt it": www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=20346. (August 4, 2008). For "genesis" read "process." See Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx. The reference here is to Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, 376. See Spivak's passage in full: "Today the backlash is on the rise. There is a demand for humanism, with a nod toward Asia; for universalism, however ambiguous; for quality control; to fight terrorism" (21). Said's last, posthumous book was a defense of humanism. This does not contradict the argument here. See The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Publishing, I 958), 194, I 96. Arendt, as cited in Pietz, 69. This can be seen in a now declassified National Security Council document from I 949, "NSC-48," which predated the more well-known "NSC-68" that laid down the blueprint for the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Even at the origin of the Cold War, Asia and China in particular were at the forefront of U.S. concerns.

2 Uncivil society, or, orientalism and Tiananmen 1989 I "Sinology" and "China studies" are synonymous for my purposes. 2 Real China is the supremely confident title of a book by John Gittings. 3 See Gareth Steadman Jones, "The Crisis of Communism." Jones refers to the CCP "abdicating" its "mandate from heaven," for want of"any source of legitimacy in civil society" (230). Such "civil society discourse" flourished in Europe in the wake of the dissident movement in Poland and Czechoslovakia, radically different contexts than that of China. 4 See Harrison Salisbury, The New Emperors. 5 See Richard Gordon's brief words on him, "One Act, Many Meanings." Still an unknown figure, several have claimed to be him, just as Benetton and the Chinese authorities have used his image to their own ends." 6 See Steven Mosher's China Misperceived and contributions to the "Trends in China Watching" symposium at www.gwu.edu/~sigur/research/asia_papers.cfm. As Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner note: "The dominant ideological orientation ... is all the

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more powerful because its negative assessments of socialism in China ... are not offered in explicit arguments but rather find expression in a general orientation that is more a 'structure of sentiment' [sic] than one of ideas. This consists of an allegation here and a suggestion there and takes hold of our consciousness." "Politics, Scholarship, and Chinese Socialism," 7. See "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 171-2. Gary LaMoshi, "Echoes ofTiananmen." It is no accident that the trope of an alleged Chinese xenophobia has its roots in the nineteenth-century Chinese resistance to missionaries and imperialists. For the excellent discussion, see "A Dialogue on the Future of China." Zhang Xudong, "Nationalism, Mass Culture." See as well James R. Townsend, Political Participation in Communist China. On the GPCR and later democracy movements, see Lee Feigon, China Rising, and Mao. The key collections of documents are: Lu Ping et al., A Moment of Truth; Mok Chiu Yu et al., eds., Voices from Tiananmen Square; Han Minzhu, ed., Cries for Democracy; Michael Oksenberg et al., Beijing Spring, 1989; and Suzanne Ogden et al., eds., China's Search for Democracy. The most detailed history is Zhao, Power of Tiananmen. In addition to studies referenced below, see Feigon's China Rising and Hinton's The Great Reversal. See Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, and Geremie Barme's anthology, Shades of Mao. Kalpana Mishra, Post-Maoism, and Liu Kang in Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism anlayze the intellectual milieu. In addition to Zhao Dingxin, see Shen Tong's Almost a Revolution. The dialogue was broadcasted and is available in Oksenberg. "Neo-authoritarianism" referred to the political control of the populace during the "necessary" period of social dislocation and discontent during the Dengist "reforms." What was wanted was a strong and "liberal" leader to force the refroms. See Sautman, "Sirens of the Strongman." Zhao notes the government tallies 300, including soldiers' deaths, and Timothy Brook in Quelling the People has accounted for 478. The toll may well be higher due to undocumented executions afterwards. The predominance of this approach is revealed in the number of publications on the subject. See the special issue of Modern China (19.2 April 1993) on "Public Sphere/ Civil Society in China?," and books by Baogang He, Gordon White et al., and Ding Yijiang among others. A central assumption here is that the economic sphere - the market system - is a foundation for the development of civil society, in the form of "independent" (nonstate) unions and other activities. It is only the Marxist view that sees the economic sphere as antagonistic, not merely symbiotic to civil and political society. See Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State. The authors do briefly reference Clifford Geertz's work on Bali and note Chinese theatre terms, though none of this advances their analysis. Geertz's work has often been taken to task for its alleged ethnocentrism. See Mark Woodward's Islam in Java and Andrew Gordon, "The poverty of involution." We owe the critique of (non)contemporaneity to Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. See Zhang Xu dong, footnote I 0 above. The figure of20,000 registered members comes from Ching Kwan Lee, "Pathways of Labor Insurgency," 56. Calhoun, however, refers to 5,000 members. I refer to a de facto general strike, because while the BWAF's repeated calls for an official strike, from April through June 3rd did not materialize, by June 4th production in Beijing, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in China, was severely affected by the amount of people - primarily workers and ordinary citizens - in the Square or joining the BWAF or other workers federations.

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26 In addition to Walder and Gong, see Wang Shaoguang, "From a Pillar of Continuit) to a Force for Change," and Lu Ping. 27 Marx's most searching treatment of these and related questions is in volume I of Capital, particularly Chapter I and the "Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production." See also "On the Jewish Question" and "Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State," in Early Writings. 28 See Wolin, The Presence of the Past. 29 The point of the genealogy is an unacknowledged consensus on the eclipse of civil society. Their Empire repeats much of this analysis. 30 The first quote is from "The Workers Manifesto" of the BWAF, which genre also helps to explain the Marxist rhetoric, and the latter is from "Psalm to the Beijing People" by "a Chinese Worker." 31 This document dates from May 20th, the moment of martial law, and is entitled, "The Working Class Will Not Stand By Indifferently." 32 Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat." 33 This dazibao was entitled "Ten Questions for the Chinese Communist Party." 34 I am thus assuming that this line-length argument holds true for the Chinese version of the poem, though I have not found the original. 35 The poem "Mama, We're Not Wrong" is by Ye Fu from May !st. But this phrase appeared early in the movement (April 9th). This poem likewise uses the first-person and calls for personal recognition and approval. "I Have A Dream" by Jie Fu was posted at Nanjing University on May 21st. It is striking to compare Jie to King's own, universal appeal. Whereas the author brings this line back to himself, King's address hails a collective entity of all Americans. 36 The influential documentary on Tiananmen, Gate of Heavenly Peace, also connects the movement to Mao but in a purely negative way. See Chapter 6 for more. 37 See the interview with Han, and another BWAF activist in Lu Ping. I do not know if the important Mr. Han still holds these views, but as of the later 1990s he is adamant about working through the official union organizations in China. 38 The "Denunciation ... for Marx" and "Lenin is Crying" posters can be found in Ogden et al., 310-11 and 111. The former was published at Beijing University, and the latter in the Square. "Ten Questions," from the BWAF, is in the same volume, 87-8. 39 They do refer to a few BWAF handbills, but the bulk of their evidence comes from interviews with two "activists," one a small-scale entrepreneur. They also translate a document that resembles "Ten Strange Aspects," but if these are the same then it is clear they have made it pro-reform in sentiment. Compare to Lu Ping's version. 40 The "standards of living" question here is complicated, for the iron-rice bowl welfare system had also been eliminated, and there is always a difference between "proper" workers and the floating or migrant labor population. See also "Activist #I" in Walder and Gong: "After the reform, we have refrigerators; but look, what are we going to put in them? ... And the refrigerators are bought with loans anyway" (20). 41 In a recent article, "Legacies of Radicalism," Calhoun and Wasserstrom address the relations between Tiananmen and the CR but in a negative and symptomatic way. Civil society remains the yardstick. For liberal sinologists, 1980s students, and the CCP, the CR was one long national trauma. 42 See Bettleheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China. 43 "Mass incidents" over social justice issues often use Maoist iconography/slogans to remind the state of its obligations. Barme's Shades of Mao details the chairman's complex life after death. 44 For a critique of such pulp-orientalist texts, see Gao Mobo, The Battle for China's Past. 45 Geremie Barme, "Over 30 Years of China and Australia."

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3 Maoist discourse and its demonization

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The most common sound-bite version of this is "Mao-the-Murderer." See Jonathan Mirsky, "Mao the mass murderer." In response to a Beijing academic who asks him whether he is accusing the millions of Chinese who love Mao of revering a mass killer, Mirsky replies "such veneration [is] China's tragedy." See for example the U.S. Congress's Chinese Economy Post-Mao. Oi's work in my reading suggests the institutional links between the local and state structures in the leap of the 1980s and early 1990s - again, a correction and development form the previous era less than a break. See B. Michael Frolic's Mao's People. Vera Schwarcz, "The Burden of Memory: The Cultural Revolution and the Holocaust," cited in Gao, "Debating," 421. Tu Wei-ming, "Destructive Will and Ideological Holocaust." Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era, 47; and Meisner, Mao's China and After, 371-3. I have also heard of higher estimates, sometimes 1-2 million, but can find no verification. It is generally accepted, however, that most deaths came at the hands of the PLA during their suppression of "rebels" - and this was opposed by the Maoist/ leftist line within the Party. See A. James Gregor. Gao Mobo, "Debating," 419-34. Lee Feigon's Mao argues forcefully for this thesis, as does his documentary film The Passion of the Mao. These are all known aspects, but can be found cited and discussed more in Gao, Battle and Gao "Manufacturing Truth," as well as the history texts of Gray and Meisner. Again, the best introduction to these issues that I know of is Gao, The Battle for China's Past, as well as the others he draws on. See also Wu Yiching. See Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists." Recall that "Mao Zedong Thought" means not simply Mao's words, but something more like an entire ideological stream created jointly by an entire generation of revolutionaries but represented the most by Mao. See his Policing Chinese Politics. Mao, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society." Dutton aptly notes that this line expresses the "quintessence of politics" or the concept of the political (Policing 3). After the Dengist "reversal" and later periods of working in China, Hinton criticized himself for being insufficiently aware of the two-line struggle at Long Bow and elsewhere, from the early land reform onwards. See "Mao, Rural Development and Twoline Struggle." See as well his comments on "the lines": "the differences between what came to be known as 'the two roads,' between 'Liuism and 'Maoism,' were profound, and the policies dominant in the early 1960s had significant social consequences [return to hired labor, school closings, removal of barefoot doctors, autocratic cadre behavior] and ones which Maoists found repugnant and intolerable" (275). Early in the revolution Liu initially opposed carrying out land reform, but then aggressively went after all - already sympathetic - middle-peasants; before the CR and during the Socialist Education Movement he infamously sent in "work teams" to quell workers' dissent and leftist lower-level cadres. See Hinton, Reversal, for more. Yao Wenyuan, "On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique." Teiwes, Politics at Mao's Court, and Teiwes and Sun, China's Road to Disaster. The bastard reference is from Teiwes and Bakken, "Memoirs," par. 5. On the same page, Teiwes writes: "The most obvious example [of problems in Sinology] is the discredited but perversely still influential 'two-line struggle' interpretation of the pre-Cultural Revolution period." Teiwes casually asserts that Mao's absolute dominance and lack of opposition is somehow shown by official "Party histories" and

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"less official sources," and so betrays an utter disregard of the context of these sources. Examples here would be such "scholarly" tomes as Nixon's and Khrushchev's memoirs, or Li Zhisui's Mao bio. The latter text, full of specific dialogue written thirty years after the fact on the sole basis of memory, has been criticized even within Sinology, as well as by people who worked with Mao over the years. See Wasserstrom 's review essay: "Mao Matters." A probing analysis of Dr. Li's "biography" can be found in Gao, Battle for China's Past. Thus one can easily note that while the bibliographies in MacFarquhar's and Teiwes' works are long, the sources are predominantly memoirs and - often anonymous interviews from elite sources who were either "victims" or opponents of Mao and the left. For a thorough critique of the use of memoirs in scholarship of the Mao years, see Gao Mobo, "Debating," "Memoirs," "Chinese Reality," and "Maoist Discourse." Gao Wenqian's book, like Li Zhisui's even more sensationalist one, was published in English through the help of American China studies avatars. See George Paloczi-Horvath. The insect metaphor still circulates, as in W. van Kemenade's references to "the Chinese people" "evolving" from "Mao-worshipping blue ants" to "nihilistic, ultra-individualistic, money-worshiping hedonists" who might yet "revert to a dreary mass of blue and gray ants, driving out foreign investors" (x, 216). For more, see Gao Mobo, "Maoist Discourse."

4 Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: missing millions, excess deaths, and a crisis of Chinese proportions

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Nonetheless, through the Mao era the rural "sector" received less benefits than the urban in terms of welfare and access to social goods. This may be seen as a matter of bias. But it is also a problem having to do with a long, historical contradiction between the urban and rural in old, agrarian societies that inevitably need to modernize. Patnaik, "The Economic Ideas of Mao Zedong," par. 28. See his Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Han's most recent statement on these questions is "Farmers, Mao, and Discontent in China from the Great Leap Forward to the Present." See as well his earlier book, The Unknown Cultural Revolution. Hinton claimed that 30 percent of the new communes were successful, 30 percent failing, and 70 percent muddling along. Far from utopian, this was nonetheless effective given the population increases and global economic blockade. Even the now infamous backyard steel furnaces - admittedly a failure - worked where there was already a tradition and expertise in this very old technology of China. See the discussion in Donald Wagner. As suggested by Gray, 313. Again, see Gray's chapter on the Great Leap in Rebellions and Revolutions, especially 308-15. As noted in Riskin, "Seven Questions." See D. Southerland, "Repression's Higher Toll." Riskin's dating of the famine from 1959 is also worth emphasizing, as many scholars will often start the famine in 1958, despite the facts that the harvest was good that year and in 1957 - a key reason for the Leap' s enthusiasm and "speed" - and that there seems to have been no spike in the death rate. See Tu, "Destructive Will," footnote 3. The article he references in regard to the report is Kleinman and Kleinman, "The appeal of experience." Had it actually been a 1961 CCP report citing 30 million national deaths, it is safe to say that it would have been quite the archival coup. See Simon Leys (aka Pierre Ryckmans), Chinese Shadows. Perhaps Leys's most

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famous tirade against Maoism involved his bemoaning the destruction of Beijing's imperial, fortress-like city walls. That such walls ran counter to democratic, let alone communist society, seems incomprehensible to the Belgian antiquarian. For a critique of Leys's work, see an early essay by Edward Friedman: "Simon Leys Hates China." See for example Tu's Humanity and Self-Cultivation. See Sen, Development As Freedom, and "How ls India Doing?" Coale, Rapid Population Change in China. Banister, China's Changing Population. As Riskin notes, there were just two articles in China on the subject (in 1981) before the Yearbook published its crude (rough) death rates. On the destruction of Dazhai itself, and of the career of its proletarian leader, Chen Yonggui, see Qin Huailu's Ninth Heaven to Ninth Hell: The History of a Noble Chinese Experiment, and on the top-down destruction of the rural communes, see William Hinton, The Great Reversal, and Carma Hinton's documentary, All Under Heaven ( 1985). As far back as 1959, Ping-ti Ho, a U.S. demographer and historian, noted that the 1953 census, again based on regional samples, was plagued with numerous "flaws" and its estimation of a 30 percent increase in China's population from 1947-53 is hard to believe, given that these were years of"heavy revolutionary struggle," including the civil war. See Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China. Willem Wertheim recalled a conversation with the P.R.C. demographer Chen Ta in 1957, who had likewise criticized the original census for lacking scientific validity. See Wertheim, "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy." My thanks to Frank Willems for procuring this article from the Netherlands for me. See his English Lessons. As cited by Antony C. Black, "Black Propaganda," The Guardian Weekly 24 February 2000. I owe this reference to Gao, "Debating," 425. See as well the discussion of the Leap and the defense of its economic sense in Jack Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions: China 1800-1990s. See for example Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China, and Gene H. Chang and G. James Wen, "Communal Dining and the Chinese Famine of 1958-1961." Han, "The Great Leap Famine," par. 9. See as well William Hinton, "A Response to Hugh Deane" and his preface to the Chinese edition of Shenfan, published as "Mao, Rural Development and Two-line Struggle." Jack Gray's comments on the Leap in his Rebellions and Revolutions are apposite, 307-15. As Patnaik notes, the increases in both rates represent increases in tens of millions of births and deaths; in this period such huge increases in births are highly unlikely in these years of wide-scale social mobilization. Fubin Sun, "Ageing of the Population in China," gives the figure of 689,705,000 for 1964 from the census of that year. It is an arbitrary insertion because no one knows when these hypothetical, "new" deaths occurred. See "On Famine," 53-64, for the extended, technical discussion. See her "Republic" for a telling critique of the failure of this same coterie of scholars to even acknowledge the demographic collapse in Russia, after the "fall," and the onset of U.S.- and IMF-induced free-market shock therapy. Thus it became perfectly acceptable - even among "progressives" or union leaders to militate against including China, but not, say, India within the World Trade Organization. For a recent critique of Becker, see Joseph Ball. For a collection of academic responses to Chang and Halliday, see Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, eds. Dong Xulin's and Q. M. DeBorja's Manufacturing History is also useful here, in response to Li Zhisui. See notes 6 and 7, p. 402.

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33 As noted earlier, Riskin and others argues otherwise, though do recognize that such efforts were not fully successful until 1961. 34 See for example Wasserstrom, "Mao Matters." 35 Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," a story from 1946 and online https://notes.utk. edu/bi o/green berg. nsf/O/f2d03 25229 5e0d05 85256e l 20009adab?OpenDocument. 36 Yet another indication of the deceptively complex issues here is indicated by another representational strategy. At some points in this study a given paragraph will contain many claims and yet will end with only one citation referring to the last claim; in-text, this gives the impression that the last citation backs up all the claims in the paragraph. 37 For a critical review of the book from a demographer, see O'Grada, who also mirrors Patnaik. 38 If nothing else, David Bachman's detailed Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China on the long policy debates between the "planners" and market-"gradualists" in the run-up to the Leap shows quite a bit of discussion within the government. Locallevel self-governance is another issue, though not broached by Sen. Note, too, that one of Mao et al. 's inspirations for the Leap was the spontaneous formation of communes in Henan and Hebei. See Meisner, Mao's China, 231. 39 This is something recognized by MacFarquhar and Teiwes, who use it to focus on Mao's alleged obsession with his own power (in the Peng Dehuai affair). They miss the opportunity to deal with the complex issues of the famine's causes. 40 See Utsa Patnaik's "Food and Famine: A Longer View" as well as various articles on Sen in the Indian Frontline magazine over the years. 41 Sen's works are rife with positive references to "the market," so there is little need to illustrate this here. Take, for example, "Food and Freedom" (769, n68) on China's growth being the result not of three decades of rural-industrial development, but of "the freeing of markets." 42 Frederick Teiwes, "Paradoxical," argues that governance was never "institutionalized" and there was no "political jockeying" or "calculation" (only obedience/despotism).

5 DeLillo, Warhol, and the specter of Mao: the "Sinologization" of global thought 1 For a review of reportage that shows the antagonistic and often hostile U.S. depiction of the P.R.C., see Alexander Liss. 2 Remarks by his editor Nan Graham, as noted in the New York Times, "Dangerous Don DeLillo," 19 May 1991. 3 On paranoia and postmodern literature, see Jerry Aline Flieger. 4 For the Taliban "connection," see Franz Schurmann. On the red-baiting of RAW A, see their "Answer." 5 I owe this insight to Osteen, 678n9. 6 See the anonymous article on the Chinese leftist website, Utopia: www.wyzxsx.com/ Article/Classl4/200901/66880.html 2009-1-21. My thanks to Chen Anya for help with the translation. 7 See as well Bull's own use and celebration of Bakhtin, 217-18. 8 Quote from the back-cover. 9 Within Western China studies, this type of psychologism - but in an ego-psychology vein - is best represented by the late Lucien Pye. 10 For more on the "haunting" of a Western text by the specter of Mao, see the discussion of The Gate of Heavenly Peace in the present chapter.

6 Screening Sinology: on the Western study of Chinese film Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984) was the first success, though it was its acclaim in film festivals abroad that made it bigger at home. The biggest "breakthroughs" were

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the prizes awarded thereafter to other fifth-generation films, from Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum at Berlin in 1988, his The Story of Qiu Ju at Venice in 1992, and Chen Kaige's at Cannes in 1993 for Farewell. Chronologically, Zhang Zhunjao's 1983 One and Eight is the first. Of course other and older film-makers were at work in this time. The "generational" label signifies a shared training and historical experience, though it started only with the fifth and only applies well to them. For background on Gao Xingjian, see Lyall, "Chinese Born Writer," and the People's Daily, "Nobel Literature Prize Politically Used." For an account of Gao as "an individual who has the courage not to represent, or identify with, any group whatsoever," see Burckhard!, 54. Liberalism perfected. This is not to argue against "trans-national Chinese cinema" studies. But it is to call for further interrogation of the field's fundamental assumptions (e.g. about "Chineseness" and totalitarianism), and for retaining the specificities of Hong Kong and Taiwan. For the notion of a transcendental "cultural China," see Tu Wei-ming, "Cultural China." Zhang's important study has gone the furthest along these lines. The present study departs from his in its focus on the discourse of a Sinological, Cold War orientalism as such. The list includes the following: Michael Frisch, Merle Goldman, Gong Xiaoxia, Harry Harding, Ellen Laing, Leo Lee, Andrew Nathan, Barry Naughton, William Parish, Elizabeth Perry, Jonathan Spence, Andrew Walder, Marilyn Young, and especially Geremie Barme, Gail Hershatter, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and Orville Schell. There are, however, brief sound bites from the trade union activist Han Dongfang. For more on Han, and the workers movement to the left of him, see Chapter 2. Both Wu Guoguang's and Han Dongfang's final comments reveal this conflation, and their opposition to all three. See Geremie Barme's essay "Totalitarian Nostalgia," in his In The Red. I return to this point later in my discussion of In the Heat of the Sun. Ralph Litzinger, "Screening the Political." On Zhao, see Sautman, "Sirens." See his The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. For the argument about "totalitarianism" as colonial discourse, see the Introduction. Compare Kai-Yu Hsu's out-of-print anthology, Literature of the People's Republic of China, which collects the left-wing literature people actually read over several decades, with the current anthologies available from Cambridge, Columbia, and Oxford University Presses. Mao's early formulations are available in Talks at the Yan 'an Conference. For a fascinating reading of the Talks, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 202-5. The later combined formulation came in 1958. One can of course see these as not mutually exclusive or even overlapping aesthetics, but they were anti-humanist in any case. Yau, "China After," refers to this hierarchical split, as does Zhang Yingjin, in the other English language history of, Chinese National Cinema. Berenice Reynaud claims Yan'an represents the "interference of politics into film-making," 163. Chris Berry likewise buys into this dichotomy/hierarchy in his more recent Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China. The best known of such work is Leo Ou-fan Lee's Shanghai Modern. Lee does not examine the elite/colonial nature of Shanghai's riches, nor how, in the context of communist revolution and national liberation Shanghai had to change. See Chen Jinhua's comments as paraphrased by Clark on pp. I 89-90n9, and Zhang's Chinese National Cinema, 199. One sees this same implicit hierarchy (the "faction" versus the "Shanghai artists") in Yau's "China After," 694. Deng's famous or infamous lines were actually "to get rich is glorious" and "some must get rich first," which moves him even further to the right of Chao!

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22 See the anonymous review of the film at www.socialistfilms.org/2007/12/breakingwith-old-ideas-prc-1975.html for a parallel reading. 23 Farquhar, "The 'Hidden' Gender in Yellow Earth." Page numbers refer to the Celluloid China edition. 24 See Zhang's "Open Letter." 25 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. 26 Shuqin Cui's transhistorical text, Women Through the Lens, is in the same mode. 27 For translations of Chinese criticism on these grounds - that it unfairly shows the "dirty laundry" of rural China - see Barme and Minford, Seeds of Fire. This critique should be distinguished from the charges of misrepresentation of Yan'an. For the latter, see the comments by Xia Yan in the same volume. 28 I leave to one side here Tian Zhuangzhuang's 1993 The Blue Kite, which is essentially the cinematic version of Jung Chang's Wild Swans. 29 Rey Chow, "We Endure, Therefore We Are." 30 On the Chinese debates and cinema generally, see the superb discussions in McGrath. Again, one can see how Western film studies often buys wholesale Chinese liberal views or film discourse. 31 While the subtitles translate Gulunmu's curse as "cretins!," I am following Liu Kang's and Anbin Shi's translation in Chen Xiaoming's essay, "The Mysterious Other." 32 For more on the self-understanding of CR participants, see the discussion in Chapter 3. See as well David Davies' 2002 dissertation, "Remembering Red: Memory and Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China." 33 Cf. Dai Jinhua, 1997, pp. 153-4. 34 Heat was co-produced by companies from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. 35 See pages 540 and 557-8. Note, too, that Wang Shaoguang, also cited here by Lu, would not agree at all with her account of the CR. 36 Feng Jicai is a mainland writer whose career is, or was founded upon producing CR "scar" texts. 37 See Marchetti, "Chinese Film Criticism." 38 This is the Russian film's closing dedication and tag-line. 39 Braester's source for this and for his orientation to Chinese history it seems, rs Barme's Shades ofMao. 40 On this question, see Han Yuhai, "Speech Without Words." 41 On the not-quite-white logic of British colonial discourse, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 7 The China-reference and orientalism in the global economy I See Foucault's Archaeology, 31-9. 2 As noted before, we can see this as more akin to the civilizing mission of the French empire than to the white man's burden of the British; on this see Young's early chapters in Postcolonialism. But it also specifically reflects American political-economic "leadership" and exceptionalism. 3 As he put it in "Marxism Today": "This is what constitutes the grandeur of Mao: that he practically questioned the metaphysical idea of the dialectic by audaciously submitting the dialectic to the dialectic (in his theory of 'contradiction'), and thus broached the nature of ideological relations and put his finger on the separation and power of the party apparatus, in the ambitious project of a cultural revolution, designed to change the relation between Party and masses" (278-9). 4 See as well the entire synopsis of Maoism and the P.R.C. in Kolakowski, 494-522, and for Deutscher's recourse to oriental despotism, see his Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, 181-217. 5 Balibar's remarks on Mao in Masses, Classes, Ideas, e.g. 172, are apposite. Though this has been argued in China, my point is not that Mao and Maoism were postmodern

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"before the letter." Mao's best essay indicating his views remains 1957's "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions." See Jameson, "On 'Cultural Studies'," 30-3. See as well Belden Fields, "French Maoism." "Whatever [qualunque ]," as the translator notes, "refers precisely to that which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic" (I 07). See Zhao Dingxin. For the tensions between the workers groups and the students, see Lu Ping et al. See Part 2 of Zhao's Power, and the documents in Michael Oskenberg et al., eds., Beijing Spring, 1989, especially the talks between Li Peng and student leaders, 269-81. See the anonymous poster from a workers' federation, "Ten Questions for the Chinese Communist Party," collected in Lu Ping, Moment, 184. Chapter 2 of the present study examines Tiananmen in more detail. See Meisner, Mao's China and After, and Hinton, The Great Reversal. The right to strike was eliminated in 1982. See mainland scholar Wang Hui, China's New Order, 179-80. Atthe level of theory, the key source here is Mao's Critique ofSoviet Economics. See Pietz, and the discussion in Chapter 1 here. For a history of such rebellions, see Jack Gray. In 2005 the number of official, recorded "mass incidents" was 87,000. There were I 0,000 recorded in 1994. This is - predictably - Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story. See Benton and Chun. I have discussed such work in Chapter 3, but see also Andreas's Rise of the Red Engineers. He does offer a reading of Mao's "philosophy" essays in Zi:Zek, 2007, but these are akin to Laclau and Mouffe's "readings" discussed above. Hardt and Negri in later work (Multitude) do engage Maoist guerilla warfare strategy and thus "China." I am borrowing Saussy's insights here, in reference to Sollers' and Tel Quel's Maoist moment in the late 1960s and 1970s. In light of my critique this may seem like foul play. But the question is also one that the Marxian Barthes called reality-effect, and is an excellent insight regardless. I should note that these were always marginal and alternative - hence heterodox views. The dominant ways of seeing Maoist China were always the Cold War colonial ones of today. See works cited. Robinson's work showed the economic rationality of Mao-era economics and- like Hinton's work- attempted to move Western opinion beyond simple demonizations. See Timothy Brennan, "The Empire's New Clothes." See Pietz, "Post-colonialism," and Chapter 1 here. See for example, Hayot, xii-xiii, 180-1; and Saussy, 853-4, 885n 14. I am here following the interpretation of Said's work offered by James Hevia and Timothy Brennan. This can also be called a discursive formation in Foucault's sense, which includes the non-discursive articulated to it. See Harvey, 2003 and 2005. We are ignoring a much longer history. Frank's last book is helpful here for the longer economic sweep. More or Jess open access among "experts" and students to the "field" of the mainland. The U.S. Congress's Cox Committee Report is an emblematic text here. I am thinking in particular of work by Lydia Liu and Han Yuhai. See especially Late Marxism. However, it is important to not collapse these two things either. Again, Bhaskar is useful here. See Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." What Althusser calls

Notes

36 37 38 39

163

ideology and "the problematic" is close to what Foucault later calls discourse (and previously "episteme"). The work of Adorno and Lukacs is paramount here, as well as Jameson's Late Marxism. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, for elaborate accounts as to why. For an account of the economics of Nanjiecun and its important/Maoist cadre-mass relationship, see Cui Zhiyuan. On Said's use of this last phrase, see Brennan, "Edward."

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Index

Adorno, T. 9 aesthetics I 06 Agamben, G. 130--2 aid 52 Al-Azmeh, A. 9-10 Althusser, L. 77, 129 anti-colonial theory 5 anti-empiricism 43 anti-Semitism 22 archive material: access to 80; lack of 72; reference to 81 Arendt, H. 21-2, 138 articulation 129 Asian studies, dichotomy of 14 Bakhtin, M. 96 Balibar, E. I, 146, 147 Banister, J. 72, 76 Barlow, T. 6 Barme, G. 26, 46, 50, 103 Becker, J. 77-8 becoming-sameness 2; see also sameness Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation 36,39,40-2 Berry, C. I 06 Bhaskar, R. 141 binarism 57-8, 59 Blecher, M. 38 Braester, Y. 123-5 brainwashing 21, 23, 48, 65, 95, 134 Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie) 56, 108-13 Brennan, T. 17, 20, 96, 138, 139 Bretton Woods 4 Bull, J. 96 Bush, R. 137 Calhoun, C. 33 Cao Shuji 82

capital, Marxist analysis 1-2 capitalism: and civil society 37; dynamics of 4-5; effects on China 143; forms of intercourse 149; modes of production 149; and orientalism 127 capitalist objectivity 148 catch-up mentality 17-18 categories of thought 146--7, 150 censuses 72, 81, 84 Chakrabarty, D. 3 Chan, A. 75 changes, counter-revolutionary 2 Charter 08 group 16--17 Chen Xiaomei 17-19 Chen Xiaoming 121 Chen Yizi 70, 82 childcare, provision of 67 China: Cold War colonial discourse 23; constructions of 136-7; in contemporary discourse 127; effects of rise on scholarship 142; as object of academic study 4-1 O; as object of orientalism 143-4; relationship with West 127; representations of 140-1; theoretical approaches 128-35; as thought experiment 140-1 ; as threat 10-11 China difference I 0-11 China references 127-8; reasons for 139-42 China studies, mode of definition 6 Chinese, demonization of 12 Chinese culture, as global 100 Chinese Embassy bombing 28 Chinese mentality 11 Chinese New Left xv, 139, 151n4, 152n9 Chinese New Wave 106-7 Chinese revolution, attitudes to 6 Chinese space 150

Index

181

de-Maoification 24, 52, 64 DeLillo, Don 50, 87 democracy: Cultural Revolution 29, 44-5; Western 44 democratic modernization 46 demonization: of Chinese 12; Great Leap Forward 75--6; and knowledge production 80; of Mao 80; of Maoism I I, 87, 93, 99, 105, 130; overview 47-9; summary and conclusions 64-5 Deng Xiaoping 24, 45 depoliticization 58, 64 despotism 21, 23, 46, 48, 63, 75, 86, 93, 94, 144; governance as 58-64 Deutscher, I. I 28-9 development: of rural communities 66-7; socio-economic 50 dichotomies: of Asian studies 14; liberal/ totalitarian or anti-Marxist/Marxist 36 difference I 0-11 Dikotter, F. 78-82 Dirlik, A. 29, 135 discourse, contemporary, China in 127 dispossession 98 Domenach, J.-L. 83 dousipixiu 56 droughts 75 Dutton, M. 56--7

Chinese state, intellectual battle with xv, 16, 19, 54, 140 Chow, Rey I 6, I 8, I 05--6, I I 7, 132 civil society 33-8, 36-8; as antinomy 39; and capitalism 37; as dominant approach 46; indigenous 36; and state 37; truth of 146 civilizing mission 5, 8 Clark, P. 106, 107 class 57-8 class consciousness 38-9 clothing, distribution of 92 Coale, A.J. 72, 76 Cohen, P. 15 Cohen, Warren 63 Cohn, B. 82--6 Cold War 7-8; communism and decolonization 138-9; legacy I 8-19; and postcolonialism 20-3 collectivity, dismantling of 59 colonial discourse, attitude of 128-9 colonialism 6--8; impact and effects 85-6; modern 25 Colonialism and its Forms ofKnowledge (Cohn) 84 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars 60 commodity fetishism 92 commodity form 148 communal kitchens 75 communism, and decolonization 138 communist successor 56 communitarianism 37 community 130 conflicts, cultural-ideological 7-8 Cong Jin 70 consciousness 42 conspiracy theory 93 contemporary discourse, China in 127 continuity 58-9 cosmopolitanism, anti-peasant 19 counter-revolutionary changes 2 court/elite interpretation 61-4, 79 creativity, ofBWAF 40-1 cross-over analyses 77-82 cultural centers, multiple 36 cultural-ideological conflicts 7-8 Cultural Revolution: benefits 51-2; nostalgia 56; participatory democracy 29, 44-5; and Tiananmen 43-5; violence 94

Eckstein, A. 75 economic categories 145-7 economic injustices 45 economics, of new orientalism 144 education, representation in film 108-13 egaliberte 27 egalitarianism 54-5 elision 29, 65 elite/court interpretation 61-4 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 132-4 end-of-history I enumerative modality 82--6, 87, 95 epistemic fallacy 141 equivalence 8, 13, 24, 51-2; Mao II (DeLillo) 90-2 Esch, 8. 137 Esherick, J. 34-5 ethical mandate 56 ethics 130 exchange I 48 extremism 48, 51, 52, 55, 91, 93, 96

Dai Jinhua 124 data, unreliability 70-7 De Gaulle, Charles 1 I

facts, ignoring of 62-3 famine 59; contributory factors 74-5; cross-over analyses 77-82; deaths 70-4,

182

Index

famine continued 76, 81-2, 93-4; enumerative modality 82-6 fantasy 144 Farquhar, M.A. 114-15 fascism 51 fear 144-5 feminism: in film 110-11; state 67, 75, 115 fetishism 92 fetishization, of Occident 18-19 fifth generation cinema 101, 105, 106, 113 film: audiences 101-2; bifurcation of history 107; Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie) 56, 108-13; Chinese New Wave 106--7; as Cold War history 105-8; feminism 110-11; fifth generation cinema 101, 105, 106, 113; The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Hinton and Gordon) 102-5; In The Heat of The Sun (Jiang Wen) 56, 120; idea of maturity I 06--7; international success of I 00; Kundun (Scorsese) I 0, 12; To Live (Zhang Yimou) 117-19; overview I 00-2; Yan' an/Shanghai split I 07-8 film studies: approach to Chinese film 100-1; importance of 101-2; limits of 125 floods 75 foreign policy, United States 12-13 forms of intercourse 149 Foucault, M. 9, 77, I 0 I free press 83-4 freedoms 56 Friedman, E. 50 friend/enemy distinction 56--7, 58, 85 friendship 33 Fukuyama, F. I fundamentalism 46, 50-1, 93 Galbraith, J.K. 92, 136 Gao Mobo 51-2, 53, 55-6 Gao Wenqian 63 gender neutrality 54 general equivalence 5 global flows 143 globalization I, 127; China as challenge 138-9; Marxian view of 140; significance of 1970s 4 Goddess of Democracy statue 3 I Goffman, E. 34 Gong Xiaoxia 40-3, 45 Goss, R. 51 governance: as despotism 58-64; positive accounts of 64; Western forms 144

Graham, E. I 7 Gray, J. 66--7, 70, 78 Great Leap Forward 59-60, 61-2; crossover analyses 77-82; deaths 70-4, 76, 81-2, 93-4; demonization 75-6; enumerative modality 82-6; failure of 75; feminism 67, 75; lack of reliable data 70-7; media representations 83; purpose and vision 66--8; selfunderstanding 75; Skinner's account of failure 68-70; socio-cultural and political dimensions 67; spatial analysis 67-8; see also Mao II (DeLillo) Gregor, J. 51 Grosrichard, A. 144 Grunfeld, T. 13 Hall, S. 53 Han Dongfang 42 Han Dongping 68, 75 Hardt, M. 37, 132-4 Harootunian, H. 14, 15 Harvey, D. 4-5, 143 Hayot, E. 139-41 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 128-30 Hevia, J. 5, 8, 72, 85 Hinton, C. I 02 Hinton, W. 59, 60, 136 historicism, Breaking With Old Ideas (Jue Lie) 111 history, selectivity of 5-6, 7, 64 Holocaust 51 Hou Dejian 32 Howkins, J. I 06 Hu Feng 36 Hu Sheng 7 Hu Yaobang 29-30 Huang, P.C.C. 13-14 humanism 20 hunger strike 31 Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (Becker) 77-8 identities: collective 98; constitution of I; Western 65 In The Heat of The Sun (Jiang Wen) 56, 120 . India 83 inequality 68 injustices, economic 45 institutionalization 100 interdisciplinarity 9 internalization, of orientalism 2

Index Islam 50-1 Jameson, F. 92, 138, 145 Jay, M. 115 Kelley, R.D.G. 137 Kennan, G. 21 Kennedy, John F. 11, 23 Klass, D. 51 knowledge: and demonization 80; filtering 36; global production 87; production of 9, 15, 18, 25, 64, 84, 142-3, 146 Kolakowski, L. 128 Kundun (Scorsese) I 0, 12 labor, nobility of 39 lack 145 Laclau, E. 128-30 language, Westernization 8 Larson, W. 105, 121 liberal humanism 20 liberal thought, colonial roots of 17 liberalism 144 Liebling, A.J. 84 Lifton, R.J. 96-7 Lin Chun 3, 44 line struggle 59--61 Litzinger, R. 35, I 04 Liu Kang 29, 36, 122, 138-9 Liu Shaoqi 59-60, 81 Liu Xiaobo 16-17 local participation 67 London, Jack 10-11, 12-13 Lu Ping 38, 39, 41 Lu Tonglin 122-4 Lu Xun 8 Lukacs, G. 38-9, 146 MacFarquhar, R. 58-9, 62-3 Mao II (DeLillo) 50, 87-99; linkages 90-2; oriental despotism 94; story 88; themes 88-9; see also Great Leap Forward Maoism: as alternative to Soviet and US approaches 29; defining element 59; democracy 44-5; demonization of 11, 47-9,64-5, 87,93, 99, 105, 130;and economic growth 50; elision of29, 65; global influence 137-8; governance as despotism 58-64; influence on Western thought 129-30; nostalgia for 45; popular attitudes to 46; representations of 46; self-understanding 53--6; and Tiananmen 43-5

183

Maoist discourse 49-58; lack of awareness of94; legacy 98; scholarly negation of 58-64 Mao's Great Famine (Dikotter) 78-82 mapping, problems of 81 martial law 3 I, 36 Marx, Karl 37, 145-9 Marxism: analysis of capital 1-2; class 57-8; hostility to 36 mass democracy 50, 94 mass mobilizations 50 mass organizations 44-5 maturity, of film 106-7 media 83-4; Tiananmen 27-8; United States 91 Meisner, M. 31, 45, 59 missionary discourse 5, 8 modern colonialism 25 modernization: pressure for 86; rhetoric of I modes of production 149 monologism 96 mortality, Great Leap Forward 72-4, 76, 81, 93-4 Mouffe, C. 128-30 Mulvey, L. 115 Nanjiecun 150 Nathan, A. 35, 46, 49 nationalisms 86 Nazism 51 Negri, A. 37, 132-4 neo-liberalism 64, 143 New World Order 23 nobility of labor 39 non-recognition, of other 89 nostalgia: in film 56; for Maoism 45 objectivity 146-8; capitalist 148 occidentalism, as internalized orientalism 17-20 open vs. closed society 93 opposition, voicing of 61 oriental despotism, 18, 21-3, 46, 58-65, 86, 93, 144 orientalism: and capitalism 127; changed model of25; as closed, circular system 3, 43, 74, 77, 125; critiques of Said's work 13-15, 144; internalization of 2; as knowledge production and distribution 142-3; post-Mao 24-5; proliferation of 24; understandings of 143; see also positional superiority

184

Index

Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 21 Osteen, M. 91 other, non-recognition of 89 othering 3, 13, 17, 132 overseas aid 52 Palat, R. 14 participatory democracy, Cultural Revolution 29 Patnaik, U. 67, 73-4, 76 Pei Minxin 18 Perry, E.J. 26, 34 persecution 63-4 Pietz, W. 21-2, 138, 139 political theatre 34-5 "Pomo" theory 16 Popper, Karl 93 positional superiority 3, 25, 29, 36, 43, 46, 82, 126-7 post-colonial critique 13-17 post-colonial studies xiii, xv, 2-6, 13-17, 20-1, 25, 127 post-structuralism 129, 140 postcolonialism, and Cold War 20-3 postmodernism 141 postmodernity, emergence of 4 poverty 68 power, unequal distribution of 17 power/knowledge nexus 53, 77 press 83-4 proletariat, vision 38-9 psychoanalysis 144-5 public sphere 33, 36 question of objectivity 146-8 racism 5 raw data 84 reform, social costs of 41 regularity in dispersion 101 reification 38-9 representation, nature of 18 Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lifton) 96-7 revolutionary youth 53-5 right: rejection of 39; turn to 6, 64 rigor, lack of in scholarship 63 Riskin, C. 67, 70, 72-3, 75, 81 Robinson, J. 136 rural economy, complexity 69 rural marketing system, effects of disbanding 69 Rushdie, Salman 91

Said, E. 1, 2-3, 14, 17-18, 20, 25, 144 sameness 1, 5, 8, 10-13, 25, 84 Saussy, Haun 36, 136, 140, 141 Sautman, B. 12 Schmitt, C. 56-7, 58 scholars, negation of Maoist discourse 58-64 Schwartz, B. 14-15 Schwarz, V. 51 Scorsese, Martin I 0 self-understanding 49, 53-6, 65; Great Leap Forward 75 semi-colonialism 6 Sen, A. 71-2, 74,82-4,87 Shanghai Commune 44 Shen Tong 43-4 Shue, V. 34 Shujie, Yao 75 Simmons, R. 91 Sinography 140-2 sinological orientalism: economics of 144; nature of 147; overview 1-4; summary of discussion and argument 126-7; underlying assumptions 11 Sinology, use of term 9 Skinner, G.W. 68-70, 78 social constructionism 141 socio-economic development 50 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred (intellectual labor) 68 Solidarnos, and BWAF 40 sources 9; unreliable 63 sovereignty 6- 7 Soviet Union, withdrawal of help 75 space, social and "Chinese" 4, 144, 146, 149-50. spatial analysis, Great Leap Forward 67-8 Spivak, G. 89 state feminism 67, 75, 115 statement: and civil society 37; use of term 9 Steinmetz, G. 135 Stoddard, L. (The Rising Tide of Color) 36 student movement, demands of 131 Su Xiaokang 19 subject nations, development and governance 143 Teiwes, F. 61 television, Tiananmen 27 terrorism 46, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93 The Coming Community (Agamben) 130-2 The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Hinton and Gordon) 11, 102-5

Index The Origins ofthe Cultural Revolution (MacFarquhar) 58-9 The Power ofTiananmen (Zhao) 26 The Sultan's Feast: European Fantasies of the East (Grosrichard) 144 The Transformations of Chinese Socialism 3 "The Unparalleled Invasion" (London) 10-11, 12-13 theoretical approaches 128-35 Third Worldism 130 thought, categories of I 46--7, I 50 thought experiment, China as 140-1 Tiananmen II;Agamben'sview 131-2; civil society interpretation 33-8, I 32; context of29-30; counter-knowledge 32; demands of movement I 3 I; Hardt and Negri's view 132-4; interpretations 32-3; and Maoism 43-5; martial law 3 I; media representations 27-8; protests 29-32; Western view 26--9; worker participation 3 I; workers' involvement 38-43 Tibet, portrayal of I 2 Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 12 To Live (Zhang Yimou) I I 7-19 total value-process 147-8 totalitarianism 21-3, 34, 46, 48, 53, 54, 58, 86, 93, 96, I 05, I 22, I 34, I 38, I 44 Township Village Enterprises (TVEs) 68 traditionalism 34 truth 53 Tu Wei-ming 51, 70--1 Unborn "deaths" 70, 76, 85, 94 Unger, J. 33 United States: foreign policy 12-13; media 9 I; Senate hearings 63 U.S.-Western hegemony 23 utopianism 48 value (forms of, process of) 1, 145-6, 148-9

victimization 55 violence, Cultural Revolution 94 Wahhabi Islam 51 Walder, A. 40-3, 45 Wang Ban 122 Wang Hui 3, 36, 132, 139 Wang Zheng 53-5 Warhol, Andy 91-2 Wasserstrom, J. 26, 28-9, 34-5 weather, and famine 75 West, relationship with China 127 Western-centrism 14 "Western-Christian-DemocraticUniversalist identity" I Western democracy 44 Westernization 7, 86 Williams, R. 20 workers, in Tiananmen 38-43 Wu Guoguang I 04 Xinhua Gate Bloody Incident 30 Yao Wenyuan 60- I Yau, E. 106, 114 Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige) 113-17 YingZhu 106 Young, R. 7, 129 youth, revolutionary 53-5 Yueh, L. 50 Yuejin Wang 105 Zhang Gang 19 Zhang Longxi 15-17 Zhang Xudong 29, 36, 44, 117 Zhang Yimou 101 Zhang Yingjin 101, 105 Zhao, Dingxin 26 Zhao Ziyang 30-1, 39 Zhou Enlai 62 Zizek, Slavoj 27-8, 134-6

185