Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New Literary History
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Can One Say No to China?
Rey Chow
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
148 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
possible fissures in this Other that is the West, what remains unchanged,
it seems to me, is a tendency to attribute to the West the a priori status
of the Subject-supposed-to-know, who, behind the stage of global
ideological affairs, is pulling all the strings. The paradigmatic symptom
of this (involuntary) paranoia is none other than the serious and
painstaking attentiveness given to Western trends, an attentiveness that
is obviously not being reciprocated on the other side by its recipients?
Gramsci, Lyotard, Derrida, Jameson, Habermas, Spivak, Bhabha, to
name^just a few. Because of this asymmetry between "China" and "the
West," a more accurate subtitle of the conference would have been
"China and Chinese intellectuals responding to the West, but not vice
versa."
The flipside of this paranoia-cum-reaction to global modernity is a
sentiment that never surfaces in these essays but that appeared as the
title of a collective volume published in Beijing in 1996?Zhongguo keyi
shuobu ("China Can Say No"). A mimicry of books such as Shintaro
Ishihara's controversial book, The Japan that Can Say No: Why Japan Will
Be First among Equals (1989; English, 1991), this recent volume from
China expresses the fiercely nationalistic impulses among certain sectors
of the Chinese intellectual community against what are probably irrevo
cable turns toward postmodern consumerism, in particular that gener
ated by United States products, in the People's Republic. The preemp
tive "No," intended to display feelings of annoyance, repulsion, resistance,
and rejection, cannot help but become at the same time a display of
hysteria (in the form of nationalism). Even though such hysteria is by no
means a universal phenomenon among Chinese intellectuals, what I
wish to underscore is the historicity that lies behind its emotional
outburst, a historicity that is part and parcel of the prolonged reactive
position in which China and Chinese intellectuals have been put vis-?-vis
the West in the past 150 years.
Foreseeably, then, the two essays by non-Chinese intellectuals, since
they are unburdened by the historicity of "China responding to the
West," contain very different kinds of emphases. While Flieger 's is a
meticulous attempt to theorize paranoia as a way to chart postmodern
subjectivity (as it appears in contemporary fiction), Terry Eagleton's
essay, which is relatively more concerned with China, offers a critique of
the contradictions inherent in the current academic endorsements of
"culture" and "history." Eagleton's essay, despite the title of the confer
ence, is the only explicit attempt to discuss the problem of culture and
culturalism, and his criticisms are astutely on the mark in regard to the
ideological sloppiness of much of postmodern academe.
As a leftist critic from the United Kingdom, however, Eagleton's
reflections also betray characteristics that remind us of, first, intellectu
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINA? 149
als looking at China from the West and, second, intellectuals looking at
China from the Western Marxist tradition. First, the offhand observation
that China leaps "directly" from totalitarian authoritarianism to post
modernism?from Mao to McDonald's, so to speak?can only come
from a certain lack of knowledge about the history of modern China,
which contains much more than such a quantum "leap"; or else it would
have to come from an unwillingness to acknowledge that "Mao" and
"McDonald's," however incompatible they may be, are both phenomena
of the ongoing, albeit problematic, efforts at modernization in the
"Third World." Second, as in the case of many Western Marxist critics for
whom "socialism" remains the good part of an otherwise evil European
Enlightenment?good in the sense of a salvageable Utopian hope for
things still to come?China presents a stumbling block for Eagleton
precisely because there socialism has already been; moreover, it is, as he
notes, clearly something in which "decent" Chinese people no longer
invest their hopes. To handle this somewhat embarrassing historical fact,
Eagleton resorts to a move that is, alas, typical of Western Marxists faced
with the contradictory realities of a "Third-World" nation: he clings to
the purity of "socialism" and invalidates the socialism that has been lived
by those in the "Third World"?in this case by suggesting that "Mao was
about as far from socialism as Newt Gingrich." The message he gives is
an unambiguous one: those in China, such as Mao and his followers,
have, in their practice, distorted and betrayed the true principle of
socialism as it is still found inside the heads of Western Marxist critics.
Instead of allowing the material instance of socialism as it has been
experienced in a "Third-World" nation to be a legitimate part of global
modernity in all its ironies, Eagleton's remarks have the effect of putting
China in its place, as the not-smart-enough apprentice of (the Marxism
that is understood in) the West. It is this type of Western cultural
arrogance?this attitude that "they have got it all wrong"?that ultimately
helps explain the almost unshakable paranoid mode in which Chinese
intellectuals continue to find themselves. In this uncanny manner, thus,
the essays by Chinese and non-Chinese participants at this conference
do share an overall coherence, albeit one that is visible only in retro
spect and perhaps only to those who were not present in Dalian such as
myself.
As readers have probably noticed, the problematic I have relied on for
my observations is that of ethnicity. I find it unfortunate that, even
though ethnicity is one of the foremost concerns of cultural studies, it is
noticeably absent from these essays. By ethnicity, I do not mean the
sentimental, "you have yours but I have mine" type of account of
heritage, but the politics involved in the artificial divisions, hier
archizations, and discriminations of populations according to "race" and
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
150 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINA? 151
This content downloaded from 211.116.138.18 on Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:03:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms