David Kang's claim, in the preface to his engaging examination of China's tribute system, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute, that it is a work “…of political science, not history” (p. xi), is not entirely convincing. The central thesis of the book is that the prevalent 20th century “world systems” theoretical trope that continues to inform today's discourse(s) on international relations has reduced five centuries of a nuanced and stabilizing model of inter-state relations (the book focuses on Chinese trade and diplomatic relations from the onset of the Ming dynasty to the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1841) down to our stereotypic notion of pre-modern China's system of master-vassal tributary relationships—relationships that amounted to nothing more than a purely symbolic and simplistic hegemony.
In fact, as Kang reveals, China was able to establish with its three principal neighbors—Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—a remarkably enduring and prolonged period of trade and regional stability based on a Confucian hierarchal model that allowed these “vassal” regional entities to develop their own cultural and political legitimacy as states as well as trading partners. These five centuries of essentially peaceful and mutually profitable relations—albeit within a relatively benign cultural and military hegemony, characterized by Kang in a perhaps overly sanguine way as a legitimizing “social system”—is contrasted with the European “Westphalian” model of formally equal and sovereign states co-existing in a delicate, and bloodily unsuccessful, “balance of power.”
Kang completes his brief contextual surveys of the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese cases (with particularly interesting data specifying the diversity of Chinese commodities trading with each) with too brief a look at China's more problematic engagements with the nomadic peoples and quasi-states on its peripheries. It is here that he extends the western analogy to contrast China's turbulent frontier experiences with those of the current American “wall-building” southwestern border with Mexico (without a corresponding contemporary look at Tibet or other western Chinese ethnic enclaves, for example)—the result feels like too facile an analysis that seems vulnerable to the same reductionist historical compression that left us with a one-dimensional stereotype of the tribute system in general.
The volume ends with the emergence of the looming subtext of the work: can contemporary China retrieve the “legitimacy” of its Ming and Qing dynasty status as the stabilizing and, ultimately, nurturing cultural, economic, and military hegemon of East and Southeast Asia, or, as the author puts it, its “…self-confidence of centuries ago”? (p. 170) One can almost hear the echoes of Joseph Needham's Science in Traditional China (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press and Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press,1981) with its singular focus on an inexplicably “lost” Chinese superiority in science and technology to the competing “West.” Here also Kang's analysis seems a bit hurried, particularly in his characterization of Japan's “leadership” status in Asia, as well as the glaring omission of any mention of North Korea as the probable crucible of future emergent Chinese assumption of the regional diplomatic and military power and influence still retained by the United States.
The strength of the work, however, remains its revelation, new to general western readers, of the sophistication, complexity, and effectiveness of China's model of diplomatic and trade relations with its neighbors over five centuries of remarkably stable and (when contrasted with its European counterparts) peaceful interactions. Kang's accessible, succinct prose and deft use of key secondary sources (particularly Takeshi Hamashita's work on the tribute system and East Asian regional economic history) combine to provide a useful tool in efforts to correct the prevalent western essentialist view (often shared by contemporary Chinese) that misunderstands and ultimately diminishes China's past accomplishments as wells as its future potential in regional and international leadership roles.
In terms of social and economic theory, the editors of the second volume of this review, From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineage of Difference, begin where David Kang's critique of a worldview that privileges western perspectives ends.
The volume is a collection of eight essays that attempt to address what an introductory epigraph asserts is “…the scandalous persistence of Orientalism in the human sciences” and how “…postcolonialism institutionalizes the very formation it claims to critique” (flypage). In fact, an apt sub-title of collection might well have been “Whither Subaltern Studies?” Like Kang, the fundamental theoretical lens or point of departure for the authors of these essays is the contestation of “…'Europe' as the site of differentiation par excellence” (p. 12).
The essays are organized under three categories: “Geographies of Otherness,” “Spectres of Revolution and the Orientalist Turn,” and “The Dialectic of Capital and Community-Authenticity.” In the first category two of the editors, Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, examine the historical origins of Orientalism, rehearsing previous analyses of British scholarship emergent from the economic prerogatives of the East India Company through the completed colonial projects' accompanying liberating nationalist movements' selective appropriation of elements of the Orientalist project—essentially, the romanticized colonial subject. A parallel evolution is also traced in a second essay through a rambling evolution of western concepts of civilization, race, and the construction of Chinese and American competing civilizations and “traditions.”
The second grouping of essays continues the general interrogation of what was earlier characterized as “Orientalism-in Reverse” within three locales of discourse: India/Europe, Pan-Islamic cultures, and a critical and informative précis of an orientalist-inflected “Iranian modernity.” Whatever thematic trajectory the collection had established is unfortunately lost here with the inclusion of an oddly out-of-place anecdotal and self-referential essay entitled “Marxism, Revolution, and the Third World.”
The collection regains a footing of sorts with a long a thoughtful piece by one of the editors, Thierry Labica, that engages critical tools provided by Raymond Williams, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson in an analysis of state formation, culture, work, and accumulation. The book ends, inevitably, with an essay on hybridity—a predictably accommodating syncretic, theoretical “cul-de-sac” for the remarkably wide-ranging and interdisciplinary discourse of post-colonial/cultural studies criticism represented in this collection.
While the editors claim that the “…critical program of this volume prolongs the research agenda” of a group of theorists—Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Daniel Bensïd, and Étienne Balibar—and focuses on “regimes of belonging (régimes d'appartenances)” (p. 13), the apparent theoretical progenitors of the critique adopted by this work—who themselves comprise the interdisciplinary nexus of cultural studies—are by now quite familiar: Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Ranajit Guha, and David Harvey. The overall project of the book seems admirable in its ambition to show fidelity to the “founding” confrontational and de-stabilizing tenets and strategies of postcolonial critical thought, yet the reader seeking a unity or trajectory of theme or analysis is ultimately frustrated: concluding only that the editors objective was to maintain, in the wake of Edward Said's Orientalism and Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a kind of ongoing, open-ended self-interrogation of the derivative work those theorists spawned—to sustain, in effect, a kind of perpetual, and endlessly repetitive, Althusserian “epistemological break” with emerging contemporary political, economic, and cultural theory.
