Sinological-orientalism: The production of the West's post-Mao China

This project begins where Edward Said left off in 1978: the migration of orientalism from Europe and philology to the U.S. and social science discourse, and from the Middle to the Far East. Recent decades are marked by the rise of the People's Republic of China to global economic prominence, the 'end' of the Cold War and the globalization of American culture and power. I argue that there is a new, specifically Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It marks a shift within orientalism from a logic of an essential difference between East and West (as in Said's analysis, or classic colonial discourse) to one of sameness. The West's 'China' is now seen as haltingly but inevitably becoming-the-same as the West: 'liberal,' 'modern,' 'free.' This new orientalism is rooted as much in popular culture as in academe and policy formation, and is driven by capital's force of general equivalence.; To show this re-constitution of orientalism, I draw on Marxist and post-colonial theory in an inter-disciplinary analysis of several fields. These include Area Studies work on the Mao and 'reform' eras, from the Great Leap Forward famine to the 1989 Tiananmen event and beyond; the reception of new Chinese cinema (1984-); current work on modernity, civil society, and globalization where China serves as paradigmatic example; and U.S. media, fiction, and film, ranging from Jack London to Don DeLillo and Martin Scorsese, that offers an historicist interpretation of China. The emergence of this new orientalism---documented at length for the first time here---has multiple consequences for Cultural, American and Area Studies, and for post-colonial theory. Contra the consensus within China Studies, the Saidian problematic of orientalism is still with us, albeit in a new, more global and 'Americanized' form. But we must return to one of the primary contradictions of colonialism: that in some cases it is mandated that the 'Other' can and must become the same. And we need to engage the intertwined histories of the Cold War and post-colonialism. For this project demonstrates that Cold War discourse is a colonial discourse, and part of the new orientalism.