Remapping China: Boundaries, Identities, Difference 

The processes of reflection involved in teaching and learning about China challenge our often simple assumptions about our object of study, assumptions about where and what 'China' is and about who the 'Chinese people' are. These include ideas we associate with 'Chinese culture', such as food, ancestor worship, Confucian family traditions, and an emphasis on the group; the wonders of Chinese civilisation: Chinese poetry and medicine, and the fact that gunpowder , the wheelbarrow and printing were invented in China; and images of Chinese brutality: women's bound feet, the rampaging hoards of Red Guards, and so on. We rarely come across references that disturb our acceptance of these 'facts'.

The vulgarity of these kinds of generalisations has led to some ridiculous inconsistencies which a more critical sense would be able to avoid. The 'Chinese family', for example, is at one moment interpreted as totally unconducive to the competitive pressures of market capitalism, and at another as custom-made for it.

One factor that obscures what we mean by 'China' relates to the question of how to speak about another culture without doing violence to it through exclusions and distortions, and without falling into the dangers of cultural relativism and its attendant orientalising imaginings.

This kind of epistemological problematic is associated with a tendency to essentialise China's cultural difference and to interpret that difference through simplistic binary categories. Whether the text is Wild Swans or Radio 4 news comments about the wholesale 'collapse' of the 'Asian economies', there is an assumption that there is a basic, and unalterable, difference between 'us' and 'them', whichever way round the 'us' is conceived.

The challenge in Chinese studies is to avoid what Frank Dikotter, in Sex, Culture , and Modernity in China  (1995), has called the 'ontological dichotomy' of East and West, according to which Chinese authenticity and tradition are contrasted with an imposed, and therefore 'unreal' process of Westernisation; in which China's modern history is conceived of as a set of 'responses' to the 'impact of the West'; and according to which, in an attempt to steer clear of creating China as a subaltern subject, China's cultural specificity is singled out in ways which remove it from the kinds of critical analyses applied to cultures apparently nearer to home. How might we think about 'remapping China' (the title of a book edited by Gail Hershatter et al  and published by Stanford University Press in 1996) so that we can see China's differences without falling into these dichotomising traps?

This challenge is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, the needs of a changing world, with the increasing global prominence of China, oblige us to acquire at least a basic literacy in our understanding of China. Second, there is a clear interest on the part of the public to find out more about China, evidenced in the extraordinary status of Wild Swans  as a best seller, and in the popularity of Chinese films by directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Third, a political commitment to equality and democracy means that we should be self-critical in the assumptions and categories we use in talking about the 'other'. Proper identification of the forces and tendencies of political change in contemporary Chinese society requires us to move beyond simple assertions of Western and Eastern difference to identify the hierarchies of difference within China.

Current Maps

With few exceptions, contemporary European and American perceptions of China inherit a history dominated by a dualistic vision of China as culturally 'exotic' but materially 'backward' and 'stagnant', politically despotic, and morally objectionable.

There has been little public interest to date in autonomous Chinese articulations of its own realities. The increasing polarisation of positions 'for and against' China--particularly prominent in media and policy debates in the USA--has not taken place in isolation of political and cultural developments in China. From Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai (1986) to Red Azalea  (1994), many recent autobiographical accounts of life in China are examples of how selective memories reproduce stereotypes. These works construct China as a state divided by forces of good and evil (the people and the party) in which innocent victims fight against persecution and oppression, with the struggle resolved on a happy note of success in America or Europe. They define the boundaries and identities of China and Chinese people with reference to set cliches which authorize their (Western) readers as particular kinds of knowers, reinforcing many of the messages of Western discourses.

The boundaries and identities of China and 'the Chinese people' that emerge from Western and Chinese discourses also reinforce the Chinese party-state's position on a number of key issues. In the human rights debate with the USA, these boundaries and identities have served to sustain the Chinese government's often spurious assertions of cultural difference in the interpretation and practice of human rights protections.

Redrawing Boundaries

In common with dominant intellectual tendencies in the humanities and social sciences in general, the focus of China studies in the past two decades has moved away from the grand narratives of Chinese history and Chinese culture. The fixed assumptions of the early 1970s that China was a unitary political, geographical, and cultural entity, defined by clear boundaries, have given way to an emphasis on interrogating the meanings of boundaries and identities, which shift and change depending on the perspective from which they are viewed.

There are some distinct debates in Chinese studies where such an exercise in reconceptualising borders and identities is important. One concerns the changing character of the Chinese state and its relation to informal constituencies outside the formal state structure.

The old generation of revolutionary leaders has finally gone to its grave, leaving a China with an uncertain political future. The entire range of political meanings, from order, through control, authority, legitimacy, are currently in the balance, even if not quite up for grabs. Many of the current political configurations in China date from the early days of the communist state in 1949 and the early 1950s. One of the key themes in the debate about China's changing political character, particularly since the late 1980s, has been the attempt to identify the emergence of practices and discourses contributing to the formation of new spaces of cultural and social production removed from state control. Considerable research has been conducted on the formation of regional associations, guilds, social clubs, and film as sites conducive to the contestation of state authority. A number of writers have further suggested that the expansion of the market economy has eroded both the possibility and the desire on the part of the state to maintain its former authority.

Yet many observations made about state-society relations in this recent period echo a view which belongs more to the earlier period: the Chinese state, it is claimed, is 'totalitarian' in the exercise of power and unrelenting in denying legitimate spaces to the expression of popular, and possibly antagonistic, opinion. A more flexible interpretation of the boundary between state and society would enable us to identify with greater clarity the multiple ways in which the state may intervene in non-state affairs--for example, in private enterprises, women's self-help groups, legal advisory groups for rural migrants--that seem to question, even erode, its own authority.

In another area of debate, recent research about women and gender relations in China has challenged the still widely applied grand narratives about women's subordination in Chinese society. This research has reformulated the concepts of gendered boundaries and identities to highlight ways in which women may be seen not only as beneficiaries (the woman who became a millionaire by setting up a chicken farm), nor just as victims of particular social and political structures (for example, of the single-child birth control policy, or of female illiteracy in rural areas) but as all these things, the particular significance of which depends on contingent factors of social context, physical location, mode of relationship, generation, and so on.

China is not just a multiplicity of diversities. To assert this is to offer an interpretation of difference that is little more than liberal relativism. Nor can we dispense with the notion of 'China'. But we need to inject a new criticality into our discussions about China, as a condition for 'de-essentialising' China's differences as the 'Other' to the West's centre.

Dr Harriet Evans is Head of the Chinese Section in the University of Westminster's School of Languages and a Senior Research Associate at CSD. This is an extract from the CSD Annual Lecture given in December 1997.