The Insufficiency of Binary Descriptions

That sort of deep and structural estrangement is insufficient to describe western encounters with China. Western knowledge of China is ancient; that knowledge may have often been inaccurate or even mythological, but the fact of a Chinese empire was not a secret in the West. China was not unknown in the way the western hemisphere, the so-called new world, was at one point unknown in Europe. The first encounter paradigm is additionally inappropriate for the relationship between the West and China because it assumes a significant gap in wealth and science, prosperity and technology; at stake, in other words, is the encounter between a notionally advanced western culture and the underdeveloped societies it deems primitive. This model does not work for China. China – initially viewed as an exemplar of non-religious, rational society in the West, especially during the early Enlightenment era – may have fallen behind western economic modernization in various ways, but the discrepancy with the West was never as great as was the gap between the West and the so-called ‘primitive’ world. The first encounter scene does not work for China, and the hypothesis of a ‘rediscovery’ does not depend on the crucial event that stands at the centre of post-colonial theory.

The distinctiveness of the relations between China and the West, which renders the post-colonial model insufficient as an analytic tool, becomes particularly apparent in the word choice ‘rediscovery’, displayed prominently in the title of this volume, and its stark, nearly polemical contrast to an alternative, ‘discovery’, with all of its colonial ramifications. Standard western historiography long spoke of the ‘discovery’ of America and, more broadly, the ‘age of discovery’, when European navigators explored the oceans, landing on islands and continental shores previously unknown to European travellers or geographers. No doubt that expansion of cartographic knowledge of the globe profoundly changed the worldviews of both the Europeans and – often in radically different ways – the indigenous peoples inhabiting those territories. This early phase of globalization, which established networks of travel and trade, laid the foundation for European colonialism and imperialism, which would eventually unravel after the world wars of the 20th century. The attendant politics of decolonization and the parallel literary-theoretical reflections labelled post-colonialism generated a critical review of the ideological framework of imperialism and its terminological linchpins, notably the notion of ‘discovery’. The term turned out to feign an innocence, as if only an increment in scientific knowledge were involved, rather than the foundation of an imperial system. Moreover, ‘discovery’ designated a one-way relationship – Columbus’ discovery of America – that denied the perspective of the indigenous peoples, as if they had only been waiting for Columbus in order to enter Hegel’s universal history.

For the contemporary relationship between China and the West, the term ‘discovery’ would be woefully inadequate. This was no first encounter, nor do the corollaries to that term apply: the assertion of an empty past on the part of the ‘discovered’ or a radical asymmetry in power. Yet to tease out the substance and historical standing of a ‘rediscovery’ is a complex task. By rights, it should begin with a foundational knowledge of the conditions prior to the hiatus, the ancient and premodern reciprocity when China was integrated into global networks of knowledge and commerce. As distant as China certainly was from the West, it was by no means unknown; hence the inappropriateness of first-encounter thinking. That archaeology of the distant past goes beyond the scope of this paper. Of greater pertinence however is the hiatus itself. What was the gap that yawned between China and the West and established a separation, only now being bridged?

The over-determined separation between China and the West has multiple components. Most immediately and politically most prominent, the antagonism between the two sides during the 1960s, in the era of the Cultural Revolution and its emphatic Maoism, was marked by a radical divide: anti-Westernism in China, compounded by the anti-Communism of the West, especially in the context of the US engagement in the Vietnam War (a war misunderstood to the extent that the West suspected a significant Chinese element driving the North Vietnamese). That era of radical separation came to an end with the waning of the Cultural Revolution, the ‘opening’ initiated by Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in July 1971 and Richard Nixon’s subsequent visit to China in February 1972, and later by the ‘Four Modernizations’ as articulated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978. These political and socioeconomic changes set the stage for a gradual opening on the intellectual plane between China and the West, which has led to a flourishing of Chinese studies in the United States and elsewhere. The global success of the Confucius Institute initiative is one indicator of this new openness, as is the current efforts by the Modern Language Association to add significantly to the Chinese presence in its divisional structure.

Yet viewing the current rediscovery primarily in terms of the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution understates the severity and historical scope of the rupture now being overcome. A more encompassing account would treat the full ‘century of humiliation’ as the specific Chinese experience of global imperialism, in addition to the post-revolutionary period up until the thaw that began in the late 1970s. The western colonial incursions into China in the 19th century, the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Japanese invasion, and western antipathy to Communist China frame a long period in which China and the West were at odds (with some counter-tendencies, such as positive relations with republican China or western support during the war against Japan). After that century-and-a-half of hostility, time came for a rediscovery, currently underway, part of a post-imperial reconfiguration of the world order.

Such a longer historical view is appealing, but it could easily conceal an important paradox that goes to the heart of the specific engagement between the West and China in literary historical and theoretical fields. Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong famously shook hands in 1972, initiating dramatic changes in geo-political strategy and, one might assume, opening possibilities for enhanced understanding between China and the West. Yet not much later, in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared, a profound criticism of western scholarship concerning the ‘Oriental’ Other, effectively arguing that such scholarship remains inextricably tied up in the discourses of imperialism. So strong was the pull of Orientalism, that ‘no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by [the discourse].’Reference Said¹ In other words, Said maintained that it was impossible for the West to allude to ‘the Orient’ without succumbing to the pervasive ideological implications set forth by Orientalism. The Orient itself was, according to Said, ‘a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.’Reference Said²

Said’s work focuses explicitly on European scholars of the Arab world, but as a foundational text of post-colonial scholarship it has had a much wider influence. Moreover in the context of other theory of that era, including Michel Foucault’s discourse theory and the post-Heideggerrean critique of western metaphysics promulgated by deconstruction, the critique of Orientalism tended toward a cultural relativism that assumed a strict divide between the West and non-western cultures, including China. Just at the moment when the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger opened the door between the West and China, literary theory in western universities was beginning to shut it tightly. The underlying paradigm of Sino-western academic relations began to echo the binaries of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, the assertion of absolute adversity between colonizer and colonized. In other words, as China gradually gained the self-confidence to pull back from the rhetoric of radical anti-imperialism in order to move toward neo-liberal reforms, the western academy moved into a post-universalist radicalism that tended to preclude the possibility of the knowledge of the other. That neo-provincialism of western post-colonialism, characteristically masked as radicalism, would only begin to wane with the turn toward discussions of cosmopolitanism and world literature after the turn of the century and in the post-Marxist era initiated by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In fact, the binary division between East and West, the core of the Saidian critique of western scholarship and the colonial experience in general, was never as hermetic as its radical advocates claimed. If colonizer and colonized existed in separate spheres in the realm of ideology, in terms of lived experience more complex forms of contact and exchange prevailed. To speak of ‘rediscovery’ today does not mean that a previous knowledge was fully obliterated, requiring reconstruction from ground up. On the contrary, it is urgent to understand the ‘rediscovery’ against the backdrop of a separation that was never fully separate, despite Said’s division of the world into unequal ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ halves, each with its correspondingly unequal political, intellectual, cultural, historical, economic and sociological distribution of power.Reference Said³ In other words, to posit a current opening-up requires us to consider not only the reforms in China that have made it more amenable to contact with the West; we should also recognize nuances in the western perception of China that was never as exclusively imperialist as post-colonial theory would assert. Even at the height of imperialist adventure, there were possibilities for reciprocity and recognition.

At least as far as China and the West is concerned, Orientalism does not provide an accurate description. This is not to say that imperialism was not a relevant factor; yet simultaneous with imperialism and its ideological consequences – the radical binary structuring of space and experience – counter-tendencies toward a critique of imperialism and Orientalism, as well as toward universal human solidarity were also evident. It is against the background of that solidarity that the current rediscovery unfolds.

Imperialism and Recognition in Schnitzler’s ‘The Boxer Rebellion’

This ambiguity of the imperialist scene, in which colonizer and colonized achieve a modicum of reciprocal recognition despite the distortions of the oppressive political context, is expressed with extraordinary clarity, as well as with characteristic psychological complexity, in a prose fragment by Arthur Schnitzler entitled ‘The Boxer Rebellion.’

Arthur Schnitzler (1861–1931), Austrian author and dramatist, was known for his depictions of interpersonal relationships and the corresponding insights that they afforded into the human psyche. Through the exploration of themes such as love, desire, honour, betrayal and death, Schnitzler’s works probe the effects of modernity on the individual. Although he did not shy away from addressing societal, political and moral issues, his observations were often couched in the nostalgic sheen of fin-de-siècle Vienna, causing many commentators to view Schnitzler first and foremost as a chronicler of a bygone era. While ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ may appear as an unusual addition to Schnitzler’s oeuvre in terms of setting and subject matter, it nevertheless displays similar elements of psychological characterization and sociopolitical commentary found in many of the author’s other works. ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ reinforces Schnitzler’s position as a writer who was not only aware of, but also engaged with, the broader global and cosmopolitan issues at the turn of the century, especially with regard to militarism, war, and imperialism. He did so moreover in a specific literary idiom, at the cusp of realism and modernism, and coloured by the cultivation of subjectivity that defined Freud’s Vienna, providing a distinctive path to a rediscovery of China.

‘The Boxer Rebellion’ is a literary fragment, written perhaps as early as 1900 or as late as 1926; the precise dating has not been determined, and the work was published posthumously in the German literary publication Neue Rundschau in 1957.Reference Schnitzler⁴ The narrative, which engages with Chinese themes and images, strategically utilizes its subject matter to reflect and comment upon the European perception of China in the early 20th century. Schnitzler’s short story reflects less on China than on the European perception of China, or rather the limits of European (mis)perceptions of the other, as it structurally aspires to a negation of the negation, a surpassing of prejudice. Through its deliberate implementation of Orientalist tropes such as the European Self and the Chinese Other, ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ questions the rhetoric used to justify and validate the West’s military actions in China during the age of imperialism. Schnitzler employs techniques including the historical mode, irony, ambiguity and polemical debate both to conceal and reveal his criticism. From a Western perspective, the text raises the possibility of acknowledging China and the Chinese outside of a purely imperialist context. Furthermore, by demonstrating the ambiguity of the Orientalist moment, the narrative suggests that universal humanity may exist despite – or perhaps especially in the face of – seemingly insurmountable political, national and cultural differences.

Set in a small town two hours outside of Beijing during the summer of 1900, at the height of the Boxer Rebellion, the narrative is structured primarily as a first-person account told from the viewpoint of a European officer, whose nationality is left unspecified.⁵ Responsible for issuing the command to execute 17 Chinese prisoners, the lieutenant finds himself strangely drawn to one of the captives, who is absorbed in reading a novel during what he must assume to be his last hours. Unlike the other prisoners, this one, the object of the lieutenant’s scrutiny, appears blithely indifferent towards his surroundings as well as towards his upcoming execution. The officer, who becomes more and more agitated by the thought that the Chinese figure will be executed before finishing his novel, finds himself defying strict military protocol by approaching his superior officer and pleading for the prisoner’s pardon: this despite a reference to the declaration that ‘no pardon will be given’, a clear allusion to the German Kaiser’s notorious ‘Hun speech’ delivered to German forces in July 1900, shortly before their departure for China to suppress the rebellion.Reference Soesemann⁶ Ultimately, the lieutenant secures the prisoner’s release, only to experience feelings of alienation and shame as he watches the freed captive walk away.

Schnitzler’s ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ questions the validity of Orientalism as an ideological discourse by carefully constructing ambiguities in the text. The narrative begins with a brief description of the current situation in China. The tense atmosphere of the Boxer Rebellion is conveyed through the use of descriptive phrases, incomplete sentences and short paragraphs. While it is possible to read these lines through the perspective of an objective, third-person narrator, a first-person voice weaves in and out of the first few paragraphs, obscuring the straightforward narrative mode and tone of the work from its opening lines. The voice presumably belongs to the lieutenant, whose first-person perspective emerges clearly only in the fifth paragraph of the text and carries through the remainder of the narrative. From the outset, then, the encounter with the imperialist adventure has already disrupted the subject position of narration.

Schnitzler’s narrative is not only a commentary on ‘all politically motivated executions’ or a ‘broader attack on all imperialism,’ as Adrian Clive Roberts has suggested,Reference Roberts⁷ but it also draws specific attention to the political situation in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. After a series of terse statements describing the rebellion as both a ‘nationalistic movement’ as well as a ‘freedom movement’, the narrative abruptly switches to the first person: ‘but we do not want to talk about politics’.Reference Schnitzler⁸ The political disclaimer, presumably issued by the lieutenant, has the ironic effect of calling even greater attention to the inescapably political nature of the text; that is, the lieutenant as narrator misunderstands his own speech acts, just as he may, by extension, misunderstand the substance of the imperial expedition. More importantly, the aforementioned introductory lines to the text destabilize the typical Orientalist structure found in western literature at the time in multiple ways: not only do they hint at a possibly sympathetic stance towards the Boxer Rebellion, but they do so by thematizing the viewpoint taken by Chinese proponents of the rebellion.

The European lieutenant issues the political disclaimer, seemingly in an effort to avoid politics altogether in his subsequent first-person account. However, the disclaimer does not enable the officer to hide successfully behind a façade of political neutrality. At best, it leaves the narrative cloaked in a tone of effete ambivalence while appearing to offer indirect criticism of Western imperialist actions in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Confusion, shame, wonderment and disgust belie the lieutenant’s abilities to fully deny his own sense of personal moral responsibility with regard to the Chinese prisoner. Instead, the depiction of his inner turmoil hints at the effects of military policy upon the individuals tasked with carrying out its directives, and at the ostensible legitimacy of the imperial incursion into China in particular.

‘The Boxer Rebellion’ establishes paradigmatic dichotomies of Orientalism such as the European Self and the Chinese Other, only to question their validity throughout the course of the narrative. As a criticism of Orientalist ideology, it also necessarily subverts the substance of the Orientalist critique itself. Before examining more examples in the text, it is useful to refer briefly to Abdul R. JanMohamed’s theory of Manichean aesthetics as it applies to colonialist literature. JanMohamed describes colonialist literature as literature in which the Western Self responds to the colonized, non-western Other in terms of identity and difference. His characterization provides an effective method for considering the implications of Orientalist discourse, which similarly places the European Self in opposition to the Oriental Other. By ignoring the significant divergences in culture and by judging the Other according to the cultural values of the Self, the western colonizer is able to assume an irremediable difference between himself and the subjugated Other. In the process, the colonizer gives himself little incentive to adopt the viewpoint of the colonized. JanMohamed suggests that colonialist literature articulates and justifies the moral authority of the colonizer, and further masks the enjoyment derived by the colonizer from wielding such authority.Reference JanMohamed⁹ This corresponds well to the ideology behind Orientalism, which strives to validate the imperialist and colonialist aspirations of the West through its discursive portrayal of the East. Schnitzler’s narrative, which centres upon a clash between the imperialist European officer and the subjugated Chinese prisoner, appears at least superficially to participate in the genres of both colonialist literature and Orientalist discourse.

Towards the beginning of ‘The Boxer Rebellion’, the European protagonist attempts to distance himself from the Chinese prisoners under his command. However, the lieutenant’s inability to remain fully detached from the novel-reading captive demonstrates the breakdown of supposedly fixed boundaries between the European Self and the Chinese Other. The subtle movement of the text begins to erode the viability of the critical framework. After observing the Chinese prisoner calmly reading a novel in the face of his impending execution, the officer cannot leave the captive alone. Instead, the soldier finds himself inexplicably drawn to him. Unable to explain his reaction towards the captive, the lieutenant can only state, ‘I found myself in such a strange state of mind.’Reference Schnitzler¹⁰ The feeling of strangeness here refers not to the Fremdheit, or foreignness, common to the colonial encounter with the exotic, but rather to the Seltsamkeit, or peculiar nature, of the lieutenant’s confrontation with his psychological self. Unsettling the colonialist perspective, the officer’s reaction towards the prisoner hints at a ‘rediscovery’ of human solidarity in the midst of the imperialist moment.

The lieutenant, who is accustomed to observing Chinese prisoners impersonally as statistical numbers, appears unprepared to deal with his human feelings of sympathy, empathy or even possible identification with the captive. He attempts to explain his feelings through a preoccupation with the prisoner’s actions, as opposed to a deeper consideration of the prisoner himself. ‘I couldn’t stand it. I found it outrageous that someone was to shoot this man, before he had even finished reading the novel. Yes, that is really what I thought.’Reference Schnitzler¹⁰ The protagonist displaces his sentiments towards the prisoner onto the novel and the act of reading instead. The officer’s preoccupation with the prisoner’s novel allows him to avoid considering the far-reaching implications of his fascination with the Chinese prisoner, and demonstrates his difficulty and discomfort in dealing with figures who fall outside of previously established relationship boundaries.

The Grammar of Domination

The lieutenant’s complicated stance towards the novel-reading Chinese captive is further illustrated by fluctuations in register and address between the two of them. In the beginning of the fragment, the lieutenant refers to the prisoner with the familiar second-person pronoun du, or ‘you’. However, as the officer becomes increasingly concerned with the ability of the prisoner to finish his novel before the hour of the execution, he begins referring to the prisoner as Sie; that is, he invokes the formal second-person pronoun ‘you’ in place of the previous, informal du. The adoption of Sie by the lieutenant when speaking to the prisoner continues throughout the remainder of the text. The utilization of the formal register is ambiguous in and of itself, but even more so when placed in contrast with the du form found earlier in the narrative.

In the context of the power relationship between the European lieutenant and the Chinese prisoner, it appears likely that the lieutenant’s use of du indicates his position of superiority over the subaltern captive. Almost certainly carrying undertones of disrespect, this usage alludes to the attitude that many European military forces took towards the native Chinese population during the Boxer Rebellion.Reference Fehl and Fehl¹¹ However, it is also possible that du demonstrates a sense of familiarity between the two figures, especially because of their presumably mutual appreciation for literature. Further complicating the narrative, though, this shared interest in reading is clearly shown as a one-sided construction on the part of the officer. His fascination towards the Chinese prisoner is repeatedly left unacknowledged and unreciprocated by the captive, undermining the appropriateness of the du form in such a situation and further contributing to its equivocal nature.

The ambivalent circumstances under which the lieutenant employs the informal du form is further compounded by the ambiguity pertaining to the Sie form that he deploys shortly afterwards. The soldier addresses the prisoner as Sie to ask about the prisoner’s reading material, and also to enquire about his personal life. Later, he uses the Sie form to inform the prisoner of his release. In these instances, the lieutenant’s use of the formal register may signify a newfound respect for the captive. One might conjecture that the officer is impressed with the Chinese captive’s resolve and his insistence on reading, even in the face of the impending execution. Interpreting Sie as a sign of respect also draws attention to the subjectivity by which people may bestow esteem on certain individuals and not others. It highlights the arbitrary nature of distinction created by the officer between ‘his’ Chinese prisoner, whom he refers to in the narrative as ‘my Chinese,’ and ‘the others’; that is, the other Chinese captives in the group.

However, the use of the formal Sie simultaneously signifies a growing distance between the lieutenant and the captive as events continue to unfold. The soldier, who becomes ever more aware of the inexplicable nature of his feelings towards the captive, experiences emotions of doubt and shame as he requests, receives and grants the pardon. Employing the formal Sie reflects the officer’s increasing estrangement towards the prisoner and his own actions towards the prisoner. The officer, who must re-approach and re-evaluate the line of distinction between himself and the Chinese captive on multiple levels, is perhaps resorting to the formal register of speech in an attempt to preserve some of the distance between them.

In contrast to the uneasy relationship between the lieutenant and the novel-reading Chinese prisoner, the lieutenant’s attitude towards the other captives is far more straightforward, conforming to a more typical Orientalist understanding of the Chinese people and conversely emphasizing the atypical nature of his regard for the novel-reading captive. ‘The lot of the sixteen others was actually all the same to me. I felt sorry for them, no, scarcely that.’Reference Schnitzler¹² The remaining condemned prisoners have no emotional effect on the officer. Like the hundreds of other Chinese prisoners that he has been responsible for executing in the past, these 16 are easily categorized and held distinct from the novel-reading figure simply as ‘the others’.

In the original German, ‘the others’ are always referred to as die Anderen. According to the rules of German grammar, ander, the indefinite determiner meaning ‘other’, is never conventionally spelled with a capital letter. This applies even when the determiner is used as a substantive adjective. In other words, ander and its inflected form anderen should remain non-capitalized at all times, regardless of the presence or absence of an immediately following noun or pronoun.Reference Durrell¹³ Thus, the nonstandard capitalization of die Anderen in Schnitzler’s narrative is most accurately transcribed into English as ‘the Others’, and must be understood as an intentional orthographic marker of difference open to multiple layers of interpretation. On a broader level of the narrative, the use of the term ‘the Others’ distinguishes the lieutenant, a European, from all of the prisoners, who are Chinese. Seen in this manner, the term defines the non-European Other in clear opposition to the Western European Self. The capitalization of ‘the Others’ in ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ thus acknowledges the Self/Other binary that has since become an identifying feature of colonialist literature and Orientalist discourse, especially when viewed through a postcolonial lens. However, it is important to note how Schnitzler’s text uses the explicit vocabulary of ‘the Others’ long before literary criticism integrated the term into its terminological toolkit.

Although the capitalization of ‘the Others’ appears to signal a divide from an implicit Western Self represented by the first-person narrative voice of the European lieutenant, this binary distinction is destabilized and problematized early on in the text. The lieutenant first mentions ‘the Others’ in order to differentiate the 16 remaining captives from the novel-reading prisoner. However, the officer remains unable to define or quantify that difference within the structural confines of Orientalist binaries such as Self/Other and East/West. The prisoner in question does not readily belong with ‘the Others’, whom the lieutenant dispassionately observes in activities such as letter-writing, speaking with one another, crying, lying on the ground or squatting and staring blankly in front of them. Nor does the novel-reading captive correspond easily to categorization in terms of the Western Self, despite the lieutenant’s apparent feelings of self-identification with him, and grounded as they are in a mutual interest in literature. Instead, the novel-reading Chinese prisoner seems to occupy an ambiguous, undefined middle ground, as the lieutenant attempts to apply Orientalist standards to the captive, only to find that they are ultimately inapplicable.

The contrast between the officer’s conflicted attitude towards ‘his’ Chinese prisoner and his indifference towards ‘the Others’ illustrates the subjective and clearly callous nature of demarcation regarding all of the condemned prisoners. The text also calls attention to the arbitrary way that binary distinctions may be created in the first place. Furthermore, it encourages the reader to reassess the qualities of Orientalism as a means of justifying imperialism. Schnitzler’s narrative indirectly encourages the reader to consider alternative forms of categorization regarding the politics of identity and representation. His text depicts the officer’s inabilities to reconcile his feelings towards the novel-reading Chinese captive with the values he is expected to possess as a Westerner, as a member of the European military power, and as a participant in the imperialistic forces occupying China during the Boxer Rebellion. The literary fragment depicts the problems inherent within the ideological Orientalist framework, and indirectly poses an open-ended question within the text: can we ever fully extricate ourselves from binary structures in the quest for identity and a more authentic understanding of other cultures?

While the prisoner’s apparent lack of interest in the overtures of the lieutenant further strengthens the ambiguity of the imperialist and Orientalist moment in ‘The Boxer Rebellion’, it is perhaps all the more striking that it is the officer who, by means of expressing his conflicted feelings, raises the possibility of recognizing a more universal humanity that connects the colonizer to the colonized, and the oppressor to the subjugated. Tracing the European lieutenant’s psychological struggles, Schnitzler’s narrative examines the tenuous nature of binary distinctions and the difficulties in transcending them. The text engages familiar Orientalist tropes, but utilizes them in ways that demonstrate their shortcomings and limitations in terms of interpersonal and intercultural relationships, as well as within the context of western imperialist ideology. Corresponding to Schnitzler’s general views on war and imperialism, ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ expresses anti-Orientalist sentiments that speak out against western military action in China during the age of imperialism. The narrative’s complicated stance towards Orientalism – simultaneously recognizing, utilizing and subverting it – suggests that certain representations of China in western discourse of the early 20th century were nuanced in ways that both predate and prefigure similarly complex portrayals of China in the world today.

The close analysis of the vicissitudes of Orientalism in Schnitzler’s prose fragment provides an opportunity to return to the opening question as to the nature of the ‘rediscovery’ of China. The term implies, as discussed above, an original familiarity – akin to the lieutenant’s initial use of the informal du – followed by a historical process of distancing and loss which, however, is currently being overcome in a recognition regained. In addition to our earlier efforts to parse this trajectory across historical developments of the past two centuries, ‘The Boxer Rebellion’ provides another perspective: at stake is not ‘post-Deng’, ‘post-Mao’, or ‘post-Nixon’, not even ‘post-Soviet Union’ or ‘post-Communist’, but rather: post-Orientalism in its broadest sense – the importance of moving beyond the boundaries of Orientalism and the Orientalist critique.Reference Wang¹⁴ The current rediscovery of China transpires in the context of the obsolescence of the Orientalist thesis that projected an excessively binary paradigm onto the complexities of international and cross-cultural relations, and its insufficiency is no more evident than with regard to China and its encounter with West. The dichotomous world of the anti-imperialist imagination never could understand the semi-permeable character of the divide and the complexity of relations of culture and power in colonial settings. Hence the predisposition for the harshness of anti-imperialist judgement on figures who did not fit neatly into either camp, even though the mass of human experience transpired in such grey zones.

The binaries of the Orientalist thesis were, when all is said and done, the western academic articulation of the ideological formulations of a dogmatic anti-imperialism for which figures such as Arthur Schnitzler or – to name an analogous Chinese counterpart – Zhang Ailing were too ambiguous, ideologically elusive, and dangerously close to the politically unstable dimensions of lived life. The rediscovery of China may, perhaps, have something to do with convergences in the economic systems, although China and the West remain very far apart in terms of institutional structures. What drives the rediscovery more strongly, however, is the collapse of the ideological blinders of the Orientalism paradigm, as it unravels due to its own internal inconsistencies, in the same way that Schnitzler’s lieutenant found his own subject position untenable as imperialism at its height was already beginning to collapse.