When my parents visited us in England, one day my then 3-year-old son had a minor viral infection and a fever. We took him to the GP and, as expected, were told to give him paracetamol and monitor. My mother, like a good Chinese grandmother would, insisted he should get antibiotics. I explained it was viral and we can’t get antibiotics without prescription. The argument somehow went quite heated and mother ended up concluding with this: “You have been brainwashed by the West; I have been brainwashed by China”. I was left speechless. But she would soon be on the receiving end of this. On another day we went out on the car. Mother commented that the car, which is not Chinese branded, is more comfortable than what they had at home, which is apparently Chinese branded, judging from what my father said afterwards. Responding to the comment, father accused her of 崇洋媚外 (chongyangmeiwai, “worshipping all things foreign”).
As a student of discourse, we know that language does not belong to the individual; words have their social histories. Behind these anecdotal, slightly over-the-top, but deeply everyday utterances is a long-lasting, historically sedimented repertoire of talking about “China” and “the West” in oppositional terms.
Some of this discursive history is traced in the book, but it’s also a “strange” book that tries to do two slightly different things. The first thing is what I just described; the second is reading the postliberal conjuncture from digital China. I reckon the first could be more relevant to those in Chinese studies (and anyone interested in the jargon-ish idea of Occidentalism, quite a mouthful to say as well); and the second could be more relevant to those interested in thinking about reactionary cultural politics globally.
On the first theme, I talk about three interlinked “master-frames” (as Stuart Hall would say, “the masculine form is deliberate”) in imagining China/West difference: the advanced and the lagging behind; the aggressor and the victim; the declining and the ascendent. If I were to use Raymond Williams’ terms, maybe I would call the first residual, the second dominant, and the third emergent at this point in time. I didn’t use this in the book, because they don’t fit that neatly, but since this is a “casual” introduction it is fun to think of this. Anyhow, the important part is they are entangled, co-constitutive, inevitably contradictory. The most anti-Western sounding claims in most fervently nationalist narratives are often underpinned by Eurocentric developmentalist hierarchy. They were also given different meanings in different historical contexts of the twentieth century, which is what the first part of the book is about.
Reading the postliberal conjuncture
The second part of the book looks at the contemporary and the digital. While I do use this to sketch out the affective structure of contemporary Chinese nationalism (which is mostly found in Chapter 4), I also try to make the case for thinking about the postliberal from digital China as a constitutive site of ideological production in a shared global present. “Conjuncture”, of course, is borrowed from Stuart Hall, who adapted it from Gramsci. He talked about this not as a “slice of time”, but as the accumulation of contradictions, the fusion of different currents. The postliberal conjuncture then refers to the condensation of contradictions leading to the erosion of the normative authority of liberal projects at both domestic and international levels. It’s contested from both left and right, and these different currents sometimes resemble each other, and the right seems to be particularly successful at building powerful narratives that could redirect the disillusionment towards authoritarian and ethnonationalist projects.
Thinking about the postliberal from China means recognizing that instead of being outside of this world, it has been integral to both the relatively stable hegemony of liberal orders in the 1990s and 2000s, and to the intensification of postliberal contestations we now witness. The way I go about this is looking at the messy world of the digital. More specifically, the chapters feature a series of case studies revolving around internet neologisms since the mid-2010s: the term baizuo that became popularized around Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016; the geopolitical-historical meme of ruguanxue that had its viral moment in 2020; and the adoption of the political slur zhiren (colonized person) among nationalist influencers in more recent years. Beyond these there are also some minor commentaries on visual cultural artifacts on Bilibili and Weibo.
I said a bunch of things about why I think they have wider implications beyond the Chinese context, which I’ll not repeat in detail here. One thing I try to spell out is how actors across usual geopolitical and ideological boundaries could have converging postliberal sensibilities – not concrete policies, but certain claims to “common sense” regarding gender, nation (as rightfully owned by a majority ethnicity, or zhuti minzu in Chinese. zhuti also means subject and zhuti minzu carries more normative weight than “majority ethnicity”), order, rationality, culture, so on and so forth. And how geopolitical rivalry becomes useful for reactionary discourse on both sides of the fault line, whereby “culture wars” and geopolitical imaginaries are intertwined. Another thing I try to underscore is the repurposing of critique, such as the critique of “liberal hypocrisy” in the anti-baizuo discourse; the critique of coloniality in the zhiren slur; and the critique of the stigmatization of China in the liberal international order in the ruguanxue meme. On the one hand, this repurposing is structurally enabled by contradictions and inequalities of the liberal order itself. On the other, it’s pretty clear that the rejection of some kind of hierarchy and domination in itself isn’t necessarily emancipatory; it may well be justification of hierarchy and domination in other places. One must look carefully at how critical, anti-imperialist, decolonial language is deployed.
A note on the epigraph
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Audre Lorde, 1979In short, we must take things into our own hands. We must either make use of them, store them away, or destroy them. Then, the master will be a new master, and the house will become a new house.
Lu Xun, ‘Grabbism’, 1934
I love this juxtaposition, but I didn’t explain in the book what I mean by this (lol).
I think they’re both right, of course. The master’s tools are a mixed bag. Audre Lorde’s point is reflected when I say postcolonial nationalism’s desire to reject “the West” may take the form of mirroring the very hierarchical and racist logics in the structures it claims to oppose.
But Lu Xun had a different concern. I was reading Sumi Madhok’s Vernacular Rights Cultures recently (which I wish I had encountered earlier), which actually gave me a language to reformulate Lu Xun’s idea in this quote: it’s a critique of what Madhok calls the politics of origin. In her book’s context, it is the story of human rights as “originated in the West”, talked about as “Western values” and so on. She invites us to think of how rights claims taking place across the world remake the idea of rights without losing sight of the very real geopolitical power relations in global human rights discourse. Throughout the book I engage with various ways supposedly “Western-originated” ideas, but also the idea of “the West” itself, are deployed in different projects. In the most recent examples, across state discourse, digital culture, and some decolonial theory talk, what is striking to me is how the designation of Westernness turns decolonization into an originary politics of purity and closure. This is a particularly prominent trope in contemporary anti-feminist and anti-gender movements across the world, where feminism and “gender ideology” are easily labeled “Western”. In the naming politics of the zhiren slur, “master’s tools” becomes an accusation to police the moral boundary of the postcolonial nation that is necessarily gendered.
Writing from the diaspora
Over the course of writing the book I grew to love writing from the diaspora, making space for oneself and each other in in-between, marginal places (this realization wasn’t because of the book project per se). This hasn’t always been the case. Not fully “belonging” anywhere isn’t fun. Being called a traitor in home country and racialized as potential extension of a geopolitical threat in host country isn’t fun. Edward Said’s intellectual in exile sounds too good to be true:
Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because you cannot follow a prescribed path. If you can experience that fate not as a deprivation and as something to be bewailed, but as a short of freedom, a process of discovery in which do things according to your own pattern, as various interests seize your attention, and the particular goal you set yourself dictates: that is a unique pleasure.
I like the idea of being freed from a prescribed path, but I’m also cautious about not celebrating marginality for its own sake – so as not to indulge in a “marginality fetish”. Another useful quote comes from bell hooks: “I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility”. I think what matters is what we do with the location and positionality we happen to occupy. Thinking about and through this location, and studying emerging spaces of diasporic Chinese activism (a tiny bit of this is in the book, but more in the making), have made me hopeful. It is a hopeful place for generating political analysis of different and interconnected structures of power and sites of struggles grounded in meaningful connections to them. As feminists remind us, theorizing is always from somewhere, even though people at the centre often present their theorizing as universal. I see this somewhere a good place to be; you don’t cross oceans to say conventional things.
Where to read
This “casual” introduction has probably become less casual along the way – bravo if you’ve made it this far!
The digital version is here, and the Introduction is free to read until mid-July. Recommend to your library here.
I hope this will make it to your summer reading list!
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