Paradigm I: China Versus The West Or Tradition Versus Modernity?

The opposition between China and the West, "sinification versus westernization," evokes the familiar vista of resistance whose complexity is compounded when the antagonistic binary terms, formerly purely indigenous and local, now expand themselves toward the global. They immediately invite a series of dubious propositions and controversies cast in postcolonial idiom from Western sinologists—"Can we speak of China's subalternity as we do of India's?"—and from the home front—"Do we have an 'authentic' or a 'pseudo' modernism and postmodernism?" I have argued elsewhere that China can never be placed against the West, as India was positioned against Europe, in the ready-made Manichean allegory of opposition of the colonized and colonizer, inferiority and superiority, savagery and civilization, object and subject.^[30] There is much to be said about why Edward Said's Orientalism (the victimization of the "Orient" by the "Occident") did not strike a chord in the Chinese sensibility, and yet why books about futurology were promoted and translated at such a furious pace. The decision to import one particular theoretical model rather than another is never fortuitous but dependent upon how the Chinese position themselves in the global map in the first place and how efficiently, according to their own assessment, the model in question functions in consolidating or substantiating that position—whether it is a tangible or a merely imaginary position. I do not intend to reiterate here what I demonstrated elsewhere: Chinese intellectuals are acutely aware of China's positional superiority vis-à-vis the West, which however indubitably it poses itself as the conqueror in the last few centuries, has a historical subject that is nonetheless raw and depthless according to the Chinese standard. China's obsession with the future and subsequently with futurology—the science of the future—is symptomatic of a subject-position that authorizes itself not by looking back in anger nor by too deeply engaging itself in the self-reflection of a present riddled with anxieties and unfulfilled dreams. It is only the "looking forward" stance that enables the Chinese subject-position fully to articulate and reinvigorate itself. This is a stance unambiguously intertwined with the "leaping forward" mentality that invests the future with

a premium to be paid in one installment at a recoverable utopian moment of empowerment.

The voicing of such a sentiment—that "we may yet become the master of the future"—has indeed become part of the quotidian reality too familiar to an average Chinese citizen to attract much attention. But to those who are eager to relegate China to the postcolonial category of the subaltern, a typical quotation from a typical critic may yet raise a few eyebrows: "Toynbee, the most far-sighted historian in the West . . . was positive that the sun of the twenty-first century will absolutely not arise from the West. The future . . . will choose China eventually. . . . Of course this unification should not be seen as China's political or military conquest of the world, nor understood as the domination of the Eastern over the Western hemisphere. It should be taken as the choice made by the entire world to identify with Chinese culture. This is the sinification of global culture, the return of History itself."^[31] Simplistic as such a high-minded proclamation may sound, the conviction of the observer is not to be trifled with. Here the explicit alignment of the future with China and a cultural hegemony that haunts those who have not forgotten the bygone glories of Imperial China displays the Chinese historical imagination for a utopia that seems once again well within their reach.

Gan Yang's refutation of the binary paradigm "sinification versus westernization" represents one such attempt to envision and theorize that hegemonic moment. Gan's strategy is to discover the agency of change from within and redefine the terms of resistance as tradition (gu ) against modernity (jin )—gujin zhi zheng . He would thus deprive the West of its power to dictate the pace and agenda of China's modernization and move the entire arena from the global (zhong versus xi ) back to the local again.^[32] For those Chinese intellectuals whose "subjugation" to Western influences is perceived by themselves in purely technical terms at best, the compelling issue is not how to cancel out its subaltern position (it never sank into a colonial subject as such) but rather how to retrieve its earlier subject-position of the "dynasty of Heaven" (tianchao ).^[33] One can indeed denounce such a position as purely imaginary and empty. In fact, its hidden agenda of a sinocentric return seems to guarantee its quick reversal and retranslation into new terms of domination and subalternity (for instance, the agenda of the "Greater China" promises exactly such a configuration).^[34]

China's refusal to take up the position of colonial subject presents an intriguing problematic that cannot simply be dismissed in terms

of its cultural spokespeople's inadequate understanding of the theoretical and political radicalism set loose by Said's onslaught on "Orientalism."^[35] The examination of the routine practice of "colonialism under erasure" as a repressed problematic in China Studies^[36] therefore is doubly poignant if we include among its practitioners not only Western sinologists but also indigenous Chinese critics. The necessity of adopting different interpretive strategies in treating each phenomenon is compelling, for there is a danger of confusing the defensive gesture adopted by the real aggressor (Western sinologists: we are not colonizers) with that voiced by the imaginary victim (indigenous critics: we are not the colonized). The latter speaks from a subject-position that cannot be readily appropriated into the standard discourse of colonialism.

Given the contradictory agenda of postcolonialism—to cancel the subjectivity of the "Third World" by naming it as such—it is no accident that a small constellation of Chinese cultural and literary theorists have fought against it as hard, yet perhaps not as consciously, as they did against the flagrant infiltration of neocolonial discourses. They realized the urgency of retrieving the problematic of subjectivity from postcolonial discourse. Invariably, the binary paradigm of resistance (China versus the West) still retains its viability. But the terms of resistance are now transferred from the spatial and geopolitical to the temporal and historical. The struggle is no longer seen as the Orient versus the Occident, nor socialism versus capitalism. It is tradition rather than the West that is now perceived as the real opponent to China's emergent subjectivity. To better appreciate the insurgency of this new geocultural politics written against the discourse of postcolonialism, I need to quote Gan Yang at some length.

The geographico-cultural differences between Chinese and Western culture were often exaggerated indefinitely at the expense of eclipsing the much more real and fundamental problematic of the cultural difference between "tradition" and "modernity," an issue about the necessary self -transformation of Chinese culture from its traditional phase to modern phase. It is exactly this conceptual exaggeration that contributed to our putting the cart before the horse, a syndrome that recurred in our cultural discussions throughout recent history. . . . That is, we always unconsciously resorted to the generalized comparison and sweeping discrimination between an abstract Chinese culture (which is, in fact, traditional Chinese culture, and to put it bluntly, Confucian culture in the main) and an abstract Western culture (which is actually the incarnation of a modern Western culture after its "epistemological break") as a means to evade, to overshadow, to displace, and even to obliterate, the more

concrete issue of the distinction between the Chinese traditional mode of culture and its modern counterpart. At the same time, we ignored the fact that within Western culture itself there exists a distinction between the traditional and modern modes.^[37]

By redefining China's modernization as the inevitable process of self-transformation rather than a reaction against colonialism, Gan Yang breaks the familiar equation between modernization and westernization and instills into an otherwise static subject—China locked into the fixed position of the victim—the drive and agency for change.

Gan Yang's proposal crystallizes and predicts the coming of a utopian moment in contemporary Chinese history when the empowerment of native discourse emerges as the new agenda that supersedes the vulnerable plea made by the veteran theorist Liu Zaifu to "walk out of the shadow" of Western fathers.^[38] The crucial question to address is the racial identity of the real oppressor that triggers this Oedipal rebellion. Is he, as Liu suggests, of foreign identity, or as Huang Ziping daringly announces, nobody else but the "'Father of Revolution' who has been constructed step by step during each historical movement staged throughout modern Chinese history"?^[39] The identity of the agonist—the allusion to Mao Zedong and the Maoist ideologues is unmistakably blatant—leads Huang to argue against the theoretical position that "attributes all of China's sufferings and misfortunes to the invasion of Western imperialism, while at the same time ignores the crises of tradition in Chinese history itself."^[40] The political implications of Huang's attempt to energize the indigenous discourse are apparent when he goes on to speak of the "historical desires" of China as a sovereign subject, while paring down the intrusive capacity of "Western discourse" to a mere "participatory" (canyu ) status in the construction of the authentic "Chinese story." To Zhang Xudong, the plot of this Chinese story consists of nothing other than the excursion of a "premodern subject" (qianxiandai zhuti ) set free at the postmodern juncture of the total linguistic liberation.^[41] A closer look at this enfranchised premodern subject reveals that it delivers a subject-position that is not only representable but overdetermined from within, a position that finds its cogent footnote in Zhang Xudong's account of the genesis of contemporary Chinese literature as the belated yet irrepressible self-expression of China's historical subject—metaphorically represented as the sum total of "national self-consciousness," "a non-Western logic of 'the imaginary' and system of signs," and "a mechanism of self -projection and self -disclosure" generated in "the context of global culture."^[42]

One can of course adopt a metacritical position of recontaining the subversive act of those Chinese theorists by unmasking their strategy of privileging the temporal paradigm of resistance (tradition versus modernity) over the spatial one (China versus the West) as the camouflage of an ominous return to sinocentrism. The seductive pull of a relapse into that ideological position must be enormous. It seems to present, at least to the Chinese insurgents, the only ready-made alternative to the post-colonial paralogic that, by bestowing upon the colonialist an absolutely unitary subject-position, paradoxically guarantees its continual dominance over the colonial subject who is sometimes seen as unpresentable on the discursive level and at other times merely "a subject-effect."^[43] It goes without saying, then, that at this particular historical juncture, mired in the antagonistic pressure from within and from without, advocates of the new paradigm cannot but choose to adopt a sinocentric posture that serves as a political metaphor while maintaining a radicalized intellectual position that can best be characterized as a metonymical relationship between the local and the global.

This nativist romanticization about the cultural subject as a fixed space of its own, from which it can speak in a sovereign voice, is rendered problematic by the increasing alacrity and ravenous appetite with which the program of global modernity swallows up space. The utilization of this shifting analytic language of the local and the global characterizes the approach of all three theorists to China as a discursive form under permutation rather than some recoverable emotive content. Thus we can say that theorists such as Gan Yang, Huang Ziping, and Zhang Xudong are not unaware of the danger that their very act of attributing China's cultural agency (selfsame and autonomous, an identity-in-itself) to the indigenous is open to essentialist recuperation. In contrast, the xungen school (both theorists and writers alike) see the symbolic violation of the Chinese grammar by the discourse of modernity as a threat that breaks down cultural identity rather than as a catalyst for discursive break-through. Thus for those root-searching advocates, the theoretical construction of the agency of China's cultural subject is considered inefficacious without a simultaneous reconstruction of an authentic and essentialist China. This is a China that could ultimately be retrieved through the xungen school's grand project of identity searching and structure formation. Theoretical distancing (as practiced by Gan, Huang, and Zhang) was no longer feasible. We now turn to the imaginary geography of a China that hems in both its depictors and spectators.