The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture
Series under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints of
this talk belong solely to the speaker. We hope you enjoy. So for this evening
for the final talk of the semester we're very happy to have Professor Shu-mei Shih who is with us from
UCLA where she has been teaching since finishing her PhD there in Comparative
Literature in 1992. She has a dual appointment in Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures and in Comparative Literature. She has also spent recently much time in
Hong Kong where she is the endowed chair of Chinese at University of Hong Kong since 2013 and
also a fellow at the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities since 2014. She has a
long list of impressive publications which all more or less contributes to
really to defining a new field, sort of an emerging field, of Sinophone Studies
which we will hear something about tonight I think as well as making major
interventions in global humanities and theoretical conversations about the
humanities. Some of her recent works include co-edited The Creolization of
Theory 2014, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone articulations across the Pacific in 2007
- it's been quite influential - and the list goes on and on but we'd rather hear her in a minute so please join me in welcoming Professor Shih Shu-mei. Thank you Professor Robyn
McNeal for that wonderful introduction and also to you
and to Professor Brett de Bary for the invitation. It's my first time at Cornell
and it's really a great pleasure to be here so the piece I'm presenting today
is drawn from the book I'm hoping to complete soon - "Empires of the Sinophone" -
and it is an intervention into two fields, mainly Post-colonial Studies and
Chinese Studies and as you can glean from the title of my talk today right
comparative post-colonial theory which is you know looking at Post-colonial
Studies and the question of Chinese Empire is a critique of Chinese Studies or
engagement with Chinese Studies comparative post-colonial theory points
to the necessity of broadening the post-colonial critique from the
privileged sites of Anglophone and Francophone Studies or Anglo-Franco
focus as some would say and the question of Chinese Empire is an invitation to
consider a post-colonial critique based on Chinese Empire in its intersection
with other empires that is a proposal for an inter-imperial approach to
Post-colonial Studies. The two interventions intersect in the field
that I have been calling Sinophone Studies where further intersectionality
was built in with Ethnic Studies and Diaspora Studies. From my since since
Sinophone communities or ethnic minority communities, you know, oftentimes
that are scattered around the world. From my talk today you will be able to glean
how Post-colonial Studies, Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies and Diaspora
Studies intersect within Sinophone Studies as well as, I would draw from these
fields and simultaneously putting pressure on them. As you know I'm not a
so called specialist, or expert of Southeast Asia but I'll be talking a bit
about Southeast Asia today and Southeast Asia will be in some way as a
point of departure for me today but it will be seen as not only as a geographical
category but also as a political category and a theoretical
category. Just as a footnote on Southeast Asia I'm thinking about Southeast Asia here
to include Taiwan and Hong Kong which is completely unorthodox for two
reasons: I contend that Maritime Southeast Asia including Brunei, East
Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore must include Taiwan if only
because the indigenous peoples of Taiwan the seafaring austronesians are
genetically linked to the majority populations in Malaysia, Philippines and
Indonesia and they have predominated in the history of Maritime Southeast Asia.
In Imperial Chinese records for it furthermore the notion of Nanyang the
South Seas which is generally equivalent to today's Southeast Asia included
Taiwan and Hong Kong since and we can look at the work of late 19th century
Chinese scholar Zheng Guanying who wrote a book called "盛世危言" (shèngshì wēiyán)
- "Advices during Prosperous Times" - for the definition of Nanyang or the South Seas which included
Taiwan and Hong Kong and if you also look at new world encyclopedia entry on
Southeast Asia, Taiwan is also often considered part of Southeast Asia so
this is an unorthodox, ok, cartography of Southeast Asia that I'm addressing today.
Vis-a-vis that I actually had a caveat which I usually kind of announce at the
beginning of my classes in Sinophone Studies which is that I tell my students
please check your nationalism at the door like you check your backpack when
you go to the museum right so there's gonna be enough, enough affect produced
by any kind of nationalism to go around any room and so I am asking you for your
patience and to take care of nationalism at the door for the following
lecture. My hope is that Ackbar Abbas's notion of point of departure - this
category - would have the potential for what he calls centrifugal radiation for
rethinking post-colonial theory. So for for Ackbar the idea of the point of
departure is that when you're looking reading a novel how do you find out
how to enter into a novel and discuss it and he presents this notion of point of
departure which could be an image, which could be a scene, which could be a
character and through which, through engaging with this one image or
a scene, actually from there all the meaning generates and you're able to
encompass a discussion of the whole novel and he calls it the kind of
centrifugal radiation and so perhaps you know the Sinophone and Southeast Asia
especially in this context could be I'm hoping that it would serve as a kind of
point of departure. In Marguerite Duras's novel "The lover", the namesake lover lived
in an area of Saigon called Cho Lon. Cho Lon was a city built by the Hua or Chinese
Vietnamese people in the 18th century and later was incorporated into Saigon
by the French Colonial Government. It is the largest Chinatown in the world by
size now a part of Ho Chi Minh City. This is where I visited in the spring of 2015
searching for local publications in the sinitic script or Chinese. In the
bookstores along busy and dusty boulevards and I found scores of story
collections, poetry checkbox, and literary journals as vibrant examples of
contemporary Sinophone Vietnamese literature. If we were to
study Duras's "China Lover" from Sinophone perspective, one assumed, the
assumed main narrative of the poor fifteen-year-old French girl who
acquires a kind of sexual autonomy therein her relationship with the rich Chinese man
would have to be seriously interjected and intersected with a history of the
Chinese Vietnamese people, bringing to life the largely silent lover in the
novel, not least because of course in the movie the Chinese lover was played by
the amazing Tony Leung from Hong Kong. He was Vietnamese Chinese, not Chinese.
He's Chinese Vietnamese, sorry, not Chinese. His history was part
of Vietnamese history and if this were part of Chinese history it would have to
be a very inflected one. As another area of studies,
Sinophone Vietnam will be quite different from Francophone Vietnam
in focus even though they existed simultaneously. Or try the northern
Vietnamese city of Hanoi, much farther north where the French had its capital
for most of the 20th century hence much closer to China where I also visited.
Here the distance between the Temple of Literature to the Upper House is only
2.5 kilometres, that takes approximately 30 minutes by foot. the Temple of
Literature which is a misnomer for what in actuality is a Confucius Temple called
Imperial Academy and is modeled after similar Confucius temples in China, was
built in the year 1070 where the Hanoi Opera House
modeled on the Opera House Palais Garnier in Paris was erected in the early 20th century.
These two landmarks belied the inter imperial history of Vietnam where Chinese colonialism from
111 BC almost continuously to 938 AD and French colonialism 1887 to 1945 or 1954
depending on how you do the chronology occur consecutively but their
physical structures now coexist in time and space not merely as remains but as
active an integrated part of life in Hanoi as the tangible and intangible
legacies of the American War i.e Vietnam war. This interim period history Chinese,
French, American has left expected linguistic and literary consequences.
They used the classical sinitic script from China for two millennia in the
repurposed Sinitic characters called the Nom script for about three centuries
until the Latin alphabet was adopted as the sole form of orthography in the
twentieth century while Francophone Vietnamese literary tradition continues
to this day and spatters of English are found in stores, signs
and everyday speech. Within this history is situated the Sinophone community of
Vietnam of which Duras's China Lover was a part consisting of generations of
settlers and immigrants from China who speak several distinct sinitic languages -
Cantonese, Hokkien and Teochew for instance that are not the standard
language of China - Mandarin. In this way the modern Sinophone community is a
minority community within and across empires in Vietnam, activates a dynamic
distinct, a dynamic distinct from the usual colonizer and colonized dyad and
complicates colonial and postcolonial relationality from binarism to multi-angulation.
The confetti of empire is everywhere but it is, even as a metaphor,
of diverse kinds, shapes, colours, of varying densities and mixtures and of
different degrees of heaviness and light. Unlike any other part of the world
Southeast Asia, where the Sinophone has been apart for centuries, has seen
the historical convergence of both European and Asian empires and the
Chinese, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, French, Japanese, Americans
and Russians all came to Southeast Asia where they contended, competed, imitated
and colluded with each other. Unlike the 19th century rush to carve up and
colonize Africa where Western European colonialism lasted for about 70 centuries,
70 years, sorry, imperialism in Southeast Asia with or without formal
colonization occurred over centuries. It is not an exaggeration to say that the
region has been subjected to almost all major waves of imperialism from all
around the world and over a long delay. Given this remarkable history Southeast
Asia offers unique sites for the study of imperialism and colonialism in their
aftermath. The extent duration and complexity of such a condition
undoubtedly provides protean possibilities for theorizing the
post-colonial. This however has not been the case - the prevailing model of
post-colonial theory has privileged Western European empires of the 19th
century with an almost complete neglect of Asian empires
especially those of China and Japan. It also appears that in Post-colonial
Studies oceanic empires are preferred over continental empires such as that of
China , perversely echoing Hegel's celebration of
Europe's maritime principle and its love of flux and adventure that needed and
justified outlets overseas. The asiatic according to Hegel was limited by his
landlord status and elects the outlet for life
to step beyond itself because to Asia the sea is of no significance. Even among
Western European colonies there has also been a geographical favoritism that
sanctioned the study of particular colonies over others. South Asia, the
Caribbean and Africa have received most emphasis with some attention paid to
such Commonwealth countries as New Zealand and Australia which were
to my mind mistakenly studied under the post-colonial framework when in fact a
more ethical framework would have been settler colonial studies in due
recognition of the contested sovereignties
by the colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. With rare
exceptions Southeast Asia where both the British and the French established
extensive colonies was largely marginalized in Anglophone and
Francophone post-colonial studies and instead relegated to Area Studies under
the name of Southeast Asian Studies. If one studies Anglophone or Francophone
African or Caribbean the work belongs to Post-colonial Studies. If one studies
any part of Asia except South Asia then the work belongs to Area Studies, even if
this Asia was deeply touched by both the British and the French. This is why to
the post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak the Asia beyond South
Asia is ironically called the other Asias as you know that's a title of one of her
books. To whom is the West Asia beyond South Asia the other? Such has been the
particular temporal and spatial fixes of post-colonial theory as we know it in
the disciplinary division of labor. Besides the privileging of specific
former Western European colonies over others, say India over Burma and Malaya, even
though of course Burma was part of British India, the Francophone Caribbean
over Indochina when in fact Indochina was much
larger than all of the Francophone Caribbean islands combined. There has
also been a scholar of Latin America had pointed out the privileging of Western
European empires over Southern European empires from the early modern period.
Latin Americanist have thus usefully made a distinction between what they
call the first colonial modernity - Spanish in Portuguese - and the second
modernity - Western European - and tried to correct the displacement of the former
by the latter. For Southeast Asia the first colonial modernity was also a
crucially formative moment with the arrival of the Dutch, the Spanish, and the
Portuguese. However as Western European empires came and went
their timelines are messier than those of South America. The Dutch
was a nineteenth-century power in the Netherlands East Indies while the
Spanish in the Philippines and the Portuguese in Macau and East Timor
equally spent the periods of first modernity, second modernity and beyond as
we know Hong Kong and Macau were two of the last colonies given up by the
Europeans in 1997 and 1998 respectively. The complex temporal reality of
colonialism and the sheer diversity and multiplicity of imperial colonial
formations is understandably challenging to study, yet the most crucial factor for
the marginalization of this region of the world in post-colonial studies is, I
believe, language. Across the British and French post colonies in South Asia,
Africa and the Caribbean the languages of the colonial masters have for the
large part remained de facto lingua franca whether creolized or not and to
different degrees and whether there continues to exist
numerous other local languages as in the case of South Asia so the linguistic
access is so to speak for you know for the researchers from the West
you know, like, apparently easier if, that is, if you limit your study of Anglo-
South Asia, Anglophone South Asia, not the other languages. One can study global
angle from literature without necessarily knowing any other languages but English
and the same goes for Francophone literature and French. Knowing English
alone however will not give the researcher any reliable access to the ex-British
colonies of Burma and Malaysia where English no longer works so to
speak and strong and vibrant local languages exist and are shared by the
majority of the populations. For most of these countries colonial languages have
largely lost practical relevance by the 21st century except of course the global
now lingua franca of American English. Scholars who study these
postcolonies therefore must do the hard work of learning additional languages other
than English French Dutch or Spanish such as Thai, Bahasa Indonesia Tagalog
Burmese and what have you. The marginalization of
Southeast Asia in post-colonial studies is due to the inertia as well as
indifference of scholars who are not willing to take on the difficult task of
learning languages other than the major Western European languages. Cornell of
course is the storied place where Southeast Asian Studies has been very
prominent and I will take you Cornell as an exception. For Area Studies
scholars who study Asia and spend long years learning Asian languages it is not
surprising that their linguistic investment can at times transform our
transition into effective and even libidinal investments which in turn
partially conditioned the kind of scholarship produced, the methods
deployed and the perspectives preferred. I don't have time here to offer a
critique of Area Studies, suffice it to say that the issue of linguistic access
lies at the core of the disjunctive relationship between post-colonial
studies and area studies there's a special issue being planned by Naoki
Sakai and Kevin Walker, one of his former students called "At the end of Area" and
it's a critique of Area Studies at the moment at the present moment and it's
coming out hopefully soon and I have an essay in it that critiques Area Studies
from racialized perspectives. Now from Sinophone perspective, given the limits
of Anglo-Franco focus, the desire to expand the post-colonial critique has
been rather au courant these days such as one - the call for attending to the other
Europe that has been marginalized - Eastern Europe and the rest -
negotiating post-socialism with post- colonialism, minor and major empires and
countries without colonies. Two: the call to attend to the entire post-Soviet
sphere of 28 countries including the former Soviet Republic. Three: the call
particularly important for my purpose to consider the Americas most seriously
especially the Spanish Empire. Most crucially for my purpose here I want to
highlight the work of Breny Mendoza who hasn't published a lot in English
but some of her essays in Spanish and her reminder that the conquest of the
Americas by the Spanish was crucial to the configuration of capitalism in
Europe and without the rise and expansion of European capitalism there
would not have been the colonization of Asia. In short the colonization of
Asia was mediated by the colonization of the Americas and this is the relational
history that undergirds my intervention into post-colonial critique. As it's well
known the Spanish silver dollar, minted from silver from the Americas, and
transported by Manila aliens also known as China ships for mainly carrying
Chinese goods to Spain was the first global currency accepted by China for
about two hundred years between the 17th and 19th centuries. This is a well known
example of how Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia and China had been
connected in the global economic relations which were colonial relations
involving Spanish America as well as the Spanish Philippines. The discovery of
silver in the Americas of course also accentuated the growth of the African
slave trade. Colonialism is produced out of global relations period. Robert Young
has in this regard usefully call for a tri-continental orientation - Latin
America, Africa and Asia in post-colonial studies in his book "Post-colonialism and
historic construction". Young's main focus however remains the European empires of
the British and the French, again centering his critique against the same
essentialized west in this case including the United States. Southeast
Asia received very brief treatment in the book, all in less than a few pages
in terms of the obligatory reference to the Bandung Conference in 1955 and of
course also obligatory reference to the Vietnam War. When the account of history
zoomed out, you know, to this tri- continental or tetra-continental or
world and global level Southeast Asian countries are usually even more readily
relegated to insignificance. Sinophone studies, defined as a study of synergic
language communities and cultures around the world and on the margins of China
and Chineseness. So this definition has been very much you know engaged with
contested with and and so forth and I intentionally leave the phrasing on the
margins of China and Chineseness ambiguous in order to leave room for, you
know, greater flexibility in talking about Sinophone framework. What's
important to me is not what Sinophone is but what Sinophone does right so if
we're coining new concepts, the concepts have to work, they have to do the work
and it's not for you know no reason we need new concepts. With new concepts come
new ways of looking at the world hopefully. So Sinophone Studies has been a
one effort that not only aims to expand the post-colonial critique but to
go beyond it as a Sinophone use imbricated in divergent, multiple and
layered colonial conditions that exceed the post-colonial framework and
is also inherently inter-imperial. In Southeast Asia the Sinophone with
the exception of Singapore has been a minority in community during the
colonial period and after and this is the history of the China lover in Cho Lon,
in Margarite Duras's novel "The Lover". Before the European arrival, traders and
immigrants from China started arriving in Southeast Asia since at least the
13th century and by 1700 were unrivaled as the preeminent commercial minority
everywhere in Southeast Asia. Historical records show that they were originally
very welcomed for their wealth, skills and international connections and there is
no distinct notion that these people were Chinese in
any specific way. The early settlers became the so-called Straits Chinese.
They were a large group of mixed people such as Baba Nyonya, the locally
born Peranakans who spoke their distinctive languages then mix different sinitic
languages such as Hokkien and Cantonese with Malay. In other words it was not the
European colonizers who have created the conditioned racial and cultural mixing as
has been theorized in post-colonial studies, rather they were already mixed
before the European arrival. Mixing of course is one of the most important if
not the most popular concepts in post-colonial theory with correlates in
three imperial languages - the French: "metissage", the English: "hybridity" and the
Spanish: "mesti- zaje". In all these instances the emphasis is on the mixing of
Europeans and the native, not the mixing that had already been going on for
centuries on the ground among more than two groups of non-european people and
Ann Stoler, when discussing the issue of metissage in Indochina for instance,
does not even make one mention of the Hua people. In a book-length study on
the racial relations of desire in colonial Southeast Asia her emphasis is again on
Europeanness and whiteness. In one sense the Chinese Southeast Asians were twice
denied their hybridities - they were denied a chance to be metis
mestizo, mestiza, Baba Nyonya when in fact there already have been these
before the European arrival. In the Philippines for instance the term
mestizo mestiza actually is exclusively used to designate those filipinos with
some Chinese ancestry so mestizo is actually Chinese in the Philippines.
Before Benedict Anderson in this regard argues that it was actually the
arrival of the Europeans that turned these people into Chinese
I think this argument is made by others as well but you know as a non Southeast
Asian specialist so much of our, you know, knowledge of Southeast Asia or
inspiration is gained from reading Ben Anderson who was one of your colleagues
and I know that's a complicated issue within Southeast Asian Studies how that
really works. European colonizers instituted various policies of racial
divide, insisting that even those who had been there for generations and spoken no
sinitic language of any kind or Chinese, the Dutch for instance had a
strict policy of governance of the Indies Chinese with sanctuaryy codes,
quote from Ben Anderson, sanctuary codes, residential sequestration,
imposed inheritance regulations while creating collaborationist
business elites. And in these they imitated British practices. Fearing that
their Chinese minorities who collude with China or gain too much dominance in
their colonies, the colonial powers exercised hysterical control, in many
cases leading to massacres of the Chinese minorities as early as the 16th
century most notably in Manila in 1586, 1603, 1639, in 1662 and 1686 and
in Batavia, today's Jakarta, in 1740 while Brunei Cambodia Vietnam Siam and Malaya
also saw many incidents of racial killings of Chinese minorities during the
colonial period. By 1920 a specific discourse of a Chinese imperialism
emerged in the Dutch East Indies expressing the fear that the massive
migration of Chinese who bring Chinese imperialist thinking with them and those
Indies-Chinese already there would support such expansionism. They consider
such a scenario to be, quote, faithful for the Dutch future which is a quote from colonial government document regarding this issue
in the post-colonial period Southeast Asia's anti-sinicism, so this is a new
term coined by scholars who've studied this instead of semitism
anti-sinicism meaning the racism against the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia.
Anti-sinicism against the Chinese minorities in their midst continued
unabated until as late as 1998 with numerous incidents of racial killings in
Indonesia including the death of about 300,000 in the 1965 communist
purge. So imagine, right, because China was a communist country if you're
Chinese in Southeast Asia you can be easily considered, right, you can make
that conflation very easily and and in their name you can be persecuted and
this happened to a lot of Chinese minorities across Southeast Asia of
course with the exception of Cambodia and Vietnam because they have Communist
you know sympathies and regimes but let's say Malaysia, Malaya, especially
because the Malayan Communist Party the membership of the Malayan Communist party
established in 1930 was half Chinese Malaysians and half Malays and you know
after the colonizers after the British left Malayan Communist Party was basically
you know persecuted and you know in very bloody fashion and many of them became
guerilla fighters in the rainforest of the Borneo and are hiding in
northern parts of Malaya Malaysia and and they didn't know that things
have changed in Malaysia and there are interesting narratives about these
people who emerge in the 1990s yeah they've been hiding from the communist
purge and these are Chinese Malaysians who could been hiding from
the communist purge for decades.
The 1965 Communist purge, the May 1969 racial program in Jakarta and
Vietnam expulsion of the Hua in the hundreds of thousands in 1978-79
to name just a few, an argument can be made that post-colonial Southeast Asian
states' s anti-sinicism is a legacy of colonial policies that scapegoated the
Chinese minorities in the face of fear and anxiety due to an imagined or real
Chinese imperialism so if so what about this Chinese imperialism in Southeast
Asia. Is it imagined or is it real? This is a second story I'm trying to tell in
the beginning of my talk with regards to Hanoi - Chinese empire and its
cultural consequences in Vietnam. These consequences are so pervasive that a
recent book by a scholar at Vanderbilt Ben Tran calls modern Vietnam
he calls modern Vietnam "post-Mandarin Vietnam". So why would you call
modern Vietnam a post-Mandarin Vietnam right basically it's post Chinese
Vietnam. Indeed European fears had their
historical precedence. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans during the
early and relatively open stage the Chinese had actually created ruling
dynasties in Southeast Asia notably in Ayutthaya, Brunei, Malacca and Demak. They
also established autonomous Chinese polities at Ha Tien in Vietnam, in
Vietnam-Cambodia borderland and in the goldfields of Western Borneo
and part of some burial Bangkok Dynasty in Siam were themselves half
Chinese. Among them the independent republic in
western Borneo the LanFang Republic. LanFang Gongheguo for instance lasted
over 100 years - 1777 to 1884 - and it's one of the earliest republics in
the world. Scholars have argued that these can variously consider settlers'
dynasties, settlers' colonies or tributaries'
states to China. The relations between China and Southeast Asia in the
post-colonial period have been nothing but turbulent right after the Europeans
have fled even among even if when we figure in the Bandung conference and the
so-called sort of non-aligned countries and you
know countries of color or people of color's solidarity. The Chinese economic
support as it's known was crucial in sustaining the Pol Pot regime. China
fought a border war with Vietnam in 1979 and continues to have military
skirmishes along the border including border skirmishes with Myanmar which
continues at this moment. There are also the famous conflicts that everybody
reads in the news about in the South China Sea involving the Philippines
Vietnam Malaysia but in effect China has territorial disputes now with
almost all of its neighbors. Okay, so the question of Chinese Empire if there's
relatively no doubt that Britain and France were empires that behaved
imperialistically, so empires that behave imperialistically
are empires, see the tautology here. The question of Chinese Empire
persistently marginalizing post-colonial studies has been beset by ambiguity if
not controversy. The two words - China and Empire - have both been
to different degrees unstable and problematic and particularly so when
they're placed together into the compound term Chinese Empire and we also
of course we all understand the pressure that one must feel when
calling China an empire today. China of course is a self-signifier as
not only that what constitutes China geographically has changed dramatically
over time but also that the name China itself is a construction with a
contested historical and textual genealogy. Each instance of construction
implicating the questions of who defines it, who claims it, and doing so on what
grounds.
Even if put in the most general terms they are both spatial and temporal
variations to this construction. Spatially what we call China has been
a changing geographical entity with dramatically different territory
boundaries over time and it is smallest - it was perhaps one-tenth of today's
China. What territorial China has been over
history therefore not a given but a process as scholar a Chinese scholar
living in Shanghai Ge Zhaoguang claims - actually this is not his own original
claim although he's known for this claim so recent studies have shown that
actually he's, he's gotten this claim from the German scholar Rolf Trauzettel
well I don't know how to pronounce his name - T-R-A-U-Z-E-T-T-E-L - Trauzettel.
That the consciousness of China - Zhongguo - is a national identity or a proto-national
identity really only began or began as early as in the Song Dynasty
960 to 1279. Temporally what we call China may not even be the correct nomenclature
for certain periods of history of the changing geographical area especially
when it comes to those historical periods prior to the Sui dynasty 581-618
when the territory about the size of 1/4 of today's China was unified under
ethnic Han rule as well periods of non-Han rule so especially in regards to
periods of non-Han rule right so the so-called Han Chinese were not the rulers of
these places then does that mean that it's a Chinese place right? These include
such times of intense fragmentation as the Six Dynasties and those eras of
non-Han rule such as the Mongol Empire, aka Yuan Dynasty so if you're Chinese you
say Yuan Dynasty if you're not Chinese you say Mongol Empire and the Manchu Empire
right aka Qing Dynasty similarly if you are
Chinese it's Qing Dynasty if you're not Han Chinese it's Manchu Empire, right?
For our purposes here the crucial question is whether we can
consider today's China as Empire and this question must be related
to the other question of whether Yuan Dynasty - Mongol Empire - and the Manchu
Empire are Chinese or not but because Manchu Empire immediately precedes the
Han rule that began in 1912 with the Republic of China which then later of
course was inherited by people at PRC today's China and so the crucial
question is you know immediately relevant question is to ask the question
"Is the Manchu Empire Chinese?". This question was the topic of an
intense debate in the field of Chinese Studies in the United States between the
proponents of the sinicization thesis and the scholars of the so-called New
Qing history. It has bearings- this question is not merely who claimed
otherwise the new Qing history who claim otherwise this question is not
merely an academic one however it has bearings on whether
contemporary China is an empire or not on the one hand and the strategic
strategic answers to the question have been deployed by both the Chinese state
and its intellectual apologists for specific purposes amounting practically
to how the state defined sovereignty as well as national security on the other.
Briefly the sinicization thesis is basically a uni-directionness
uni-directional assimilationist thesis as summarized by crustless
Yuen sudden it assumes that the inherent charisma of Chinese culture as the
single civilizing force emanating from the Chinese imperial center has
assimilated all alien cultures and people throughout history including
the appearance of alien rule. For this narrative not only that the history of
military conquests are minimized and displaced but also their local societies
and indigenous populations are detached from and denied their participation as
well as credit in the state making process. According to this thesis then
-the sinicization thesis- everyone ineluctably becomes Chinese thanks to
the superior civilization that is Chinese. How many of us have become
Chinese because you study China right and this is that of course Du Weiming's
cultural China's model. New Qing historians disagree. First and foremost,
they argue for the Manchuness of the Qing Empire. Evidence after evidence
shows how the Manchus deliberately maintained their unique ethnicity
language and culture through for instance the ethnicity-specific and
hereditary eight banners system which began as military divisions but ended up
being mainly identity markers for the Manchus who through the system were
granted land and income for no other reason than their ethnicity. The Chinese
land conquered by the Manchus was only the seventeen provinces of the Ming
Dynasty and to this were added the vast lands of XinJiang, right?
Literally means new dominion so unless it is new why would it be called new
dominion right? XinJiang, Tibetan Mongolia, which along with Manchuria
constituted about five eighths of the entire empire territorially then the so
called China proper was less than half of the Empire so if I answered
positively to the question is mentioned by Chinese meaning yes mentioned prior
to Chinese then the fact that the Republic of China and the People's
Republic of China have inherited all the territories conquered by the Manchus
except Outer Mongolia unequivocally shows that contemporary China has
inherited the Empire right in a historical succession right if we say
Manchu Empire was Chinese then contemporary China inherited the
Empire. Just a fact. So if I say no, the PRC, that Manchu Empire was not
Chinese then the PRC is a success history, story,
of Chinese nationalism, Han Chinese nationalism, overcoming an alien regime
right the Manchus and restoring a sovereignty from a victimized state, all
the more successful for claiming to have driven out Western imperialists too.
In fact contemporary Chinese nationalism has often utilized both positions even
though they're apparently contradictory with each other
namely Manchu Chinese hence Manchu territory is Chinese right
otherwise how do you say those territories are Chinese unless you say
Manchu Empire is Chinese yes okay see the logic? And simultaneously the Manchu
Empire is not Chinese hence the Chinese were not
imperialists right? They they were and they're not imperialists because Manchu Empire was
is not Chinese, does that make sense? Okay so use two contradictory
statements. The effective use of both positions allows contemporary China to
claim inheritance and legitimacy without taking responsibility. This is the China
that is comprehended within China as a natural consequence of five millennia of
continuous history and political unity and the China as it is attributed as such
and sanctioned by the international community. By this logic if the Mongol
Empire was also Chinese, remember Mongol Empire, you know, rich Persia right?
So if Mongol Empire was also Chinese shouldn't Chinese sovereignty today
extend to today's Iran or was China simply a part of the Mongol Empire right?
So, was Mongol Empire Chinese or was Mongol Empire not Chinese,
depending on which position is taken we can draw dramatically different
political implications. Similarly the term empire has been put into question
in terms of whether Empire and imperialism belong to the same semantic
category and whether then they imply each other or not. Evicting
imperialistically is what makes one an empire then the argument goes
imperialism is a distinctly Western behavior that China has not engaged in
hence China is not an empire right? From within China either Empire
-帝国- is categorically denying to have anything to do with contemporary China
are replaced by other terminologies such as the revived notion of the Chinese
world order known as all under heaven -天下- discourse. The arrival of the new
age of power - 盛世 - or the pursuit and fulfillment
of the Chinese dream - 中国梦 - in an attempt to account for the supranational
multicultural multi-ethnic and multilingual entity that is today's
China that exceeds the modern notion of the nation-state and while insisting on
Westphalian notion of sovereignty and refusing the term Empire Chinese
intellectuals have had to offer various new concepts to describe the Chinese
state form calling it for instance a multi-systemic state so it's one state
with many systems - a multi-state system - China is a system with many
states - or a civilizational state right so instead of a civilizational
empire it has a state form and so it's a civilizational state where the logic of
belonging of the West frontier especially the greater Tibet and
Xinjiang to China is supposedly totally unique to China. Here is a new version of
Chinese exceptionalism which is crucially calibrated with what Rey Chow
has called in 1998 the logic of the wound. The logic of the wound -
so I've been wounded by you know Western empires right so I am justified
in expressing my ressentiment, my anguish, my anger in however form it
takes in whatever form it takes - that's sort of the logic of the wound. The logic
of the wound makes a fetish of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western
imperialism since the Opium Wars to such an extent that China can only be the
object of empire and not the subject of empire. This essentially is the Chinese
post-colonial position so in the 19
I think 90s and 2000s within China within PRC there was an emergence of
Chinese post-colonial critique which is basically anti-Western imperialist
critique so Han Chinese intellectuals claimed that they were the victims of
Western imperialism and and that's the Chinese and so
China was post-colonial. The euphemization of Chinese power and
fetishization of Chinese victimhood - both are in fact discourses of Chinese
exceptionalism - vouchsafe the condition in which China is now and forever beyond
reproach leading to the injunction that in so many, so many forms and practices
declares China cannot be criticized. This injunction might have begun as a
psychological need based on past victimhood but given China's economic
and political power with an ever expanding ability to pressure and to
censor is no longer merely psychological. This is the history of the present
connected with the long history of the past. In the longer durée of history, the
100-year history of China being the attack of Empire from mid 19th to mid
20th century is a short and finite duration now given a proper name as one
hundred years of shame - 百年国耻 - it's a proper term to describe
this 100 years of shame. The question we need to ask is this : for how much longer
is the present and the future, for how much longer in the present and the
future should the logic of the wound govern Chinese relations with the rest
of the world? What are the responsibilities of Chinese Studies
scholars or any scholar in such a present? Crucially also what are the
responsibilities of post-colonial critique when Chinese intellectuals have
already hijacked this critique in their criticism of Western imperialism and
claimed of Chinese post-coloniality? Finally, how would a globally oriented
post-colonial critique that takes Southeast Asia and Chinese Empire
seriously look like? I hope I have gestured towards it that in my talk
today in however a small way. Thank you for being such a great audience.