For decades, scholars in various fields of the humanities and social sciences have criticized the unidirectional epistemological framework which posits non-Western material as objects to be examined based on a Western-originated theory. In this context, prominent studies have been published on indigenous theoretical engagement with different areas of human endeavor in non-Western traditions. Some of those studies benefitted from comparison with canonical Western theory, shedding refreshing, critical light on the latter. But in her edited volume Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Leigh Jenco ventures to go even beyond those efforts to tackle, with a focus on Chinese thought, the ambitious question of how non-Western traditions can themselves produce “more generally applicable social and political theory” (p. 2). “Chinese Thought as Global Theory”: envisioned under this banner is a level scholarly playing field on which Western and Chinese “experiences” would carry equal “authoritative generality” (ibid.). Her vision is inspired by the recent rise of China on the world stage. The contemporary actualities notwithstanding, the problem of possible other theories or reasons has quite deep roots within Western traditions, dating back at least to Leibnitz with regard to China. More recently, many moments of postwar “critical theory” and its precedents are fundamentally informed by the haunting possibilities of such otherness. Derrida, for instance, in a foundational text of deconstructionism, the 1962 “Introduction” to Husserl's “The Origin of Geometry,” elaborated on the irreducibly twofold – de jure and de facto – origins of geometry, attributing an origin of the ideal object in general to the latter's factual (événementielle) exemplarity.Footnote ¹ Jenco, to articulate her collective project, invokes the French Revolution as an “example” in which a particular historical event “embod[ies]” universal ideals such as democracy (ibid.). The French Revolution can indeed be regarded precisely as such a historical exemplar in which originated, thanks to works like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, ideas underlying many threads of contemporary social and political theory. Then, Jenco's problem can translate as the question of what “Chinese experiences” would serve as such historical exemplars for new global theory: The emergence of the Song dynasty (as it was for Naitō Konan)? The Cultural Revolution (as it has been for Alain Badiou)? The Beijing Spring? China's twenty-first-century globalization?

Rather than directly grappling with this question, however, some of the eight papers collected in this volume seem to revolve around the parallel, if equally important, problem that the editor also broaches in her introduction: the meta-question about the conditions for Chinese thought to become global theory. “Contributors inquire specifically about the conditions, both domestic and international, under which scholars within and outside the Sinophone academic world can move Chinese theories and experiences from ‘local knowledge’ to ‘universal knowledge,’” she writes (ibid.). A notable exception is Michael W. Dowdle's “China's Present as the World's Future: China and ‘Rule of Law’ in a Post-Fordist World,” which argues that the local regulatory regimes in contemporary China in fact provide a generalizable, more effective prescription for regulating industry in a broader post-Fordist world. Guanjun Wu, on the other hand, considers post-1989 Chinese nationalism in his paper “A (Psycho)Analysis of China's New Nationalism,” claiming that contemporary nationalism in China amounts to a discourse of “hidden displacement” – one that “displaces the socioeconomic struggles with ethnic hatred” in order to sustain “the existing symbolic order” (pp. 124–45). Wu's analysis of the “local” nationalism certainly appears to exhibit wider relevance in a world of Brexit and Trumpism, even if his discussion relies on an application of a famous “Western” theory, namely that of Žižek. “Being in Time: What Medieval Chinese Theorists Can Teach Us about Causation” by Ignacio Villagran and Miranda Brown teases out non-teleological conceptions of time in the Tang debates on the fengjian 封建 and junxian 郡縣 polities. But their conclusion leaves the generalizability of those conceptions hypothetical, while raising fascinating heuristic questions: “Can we interpret historical developments in Latin American or African polities with reference to Liu Zongyuan's notions of shi 勢 and zheng 爭? What can be gained by discussing centralization in the Mughal empire with reference to junxian instead of Weber's bureaucracy?” (p. 199). These should be exactly the kind of novel questions that Jenco's program promises to ask and yet falls short of sufficiently addressing, at least in the present volume. Villagran and Brown crucially call attention to resonances between the “margins” in order to “move beyond” the constraints of Western theory (ibid.). Indeed, it may well be on the margins that historical exemplars for new global theory can be found, as minor cultural formations that undercut the dichotomous structure of “the West” versus “China,” upon which some of the collected papers still draw rather uncritically.

The contributions that the rest of the papers in this volume make mostly reside in considering the meta-question about the conditions for a locally-originated theory to gain general relevance with regard to particular Chinese contexts. In doing so, these papers, echoing Derrida's argument, reconsider the historicity of theory, or theory as a product of the practice of “theory-making” (p. 9). Jenco's own “New Communities for New Knowledge: Theorizing the Movement of Ideas across Space” explores the notion of “qun 群” in Yan Fu and Liang Qichao to foreground “communities” that need to be created and self-reflexively studied (in qunxue 群學) in order for new ideas to be transported into culturally distant locations. While the actual applicability to a global context of the Chinese theory of knowledge mobility that she conceptualizes remains to be proven, it offers a convincing picture of how late-Qing thinkers self-consciously regarded community as a sociopolitical condition necessary for ideas to transcend locality. “The Evolution and Identity of Confucianism: The Precedence Principle in Reforming Tradition” by Chenyang Li also focuses on a “cultural community” that shares certain “sensus communis” (pp. 164–65) on “precedence” (xu 序) as the essential institutional condition for Confucianism to form and transmit its universalist ideas of the Way. If Jenco and Li center their arguments on community, the first three papers in this volume share an emphasis on the idea of affect. Gloria Davis, in her “Knowing How to Be: The Dangers of Putting (Chinese) Thought into Action,” explores “the affective energies of Chinese thought” (p. 32) that furnish knowledge with a moral drive to achieve a good in society, thereby complicating the notion of “global theory.” “Grounding Normativity in Ritual: A Rereading of Confucian Texts” by Takahiro Nakajima revisits Confucian classics to put forward an alternative conception of normativity as grounded in “the culturally or artificially altered affections” (p. 60). Timothy Cheek's “Attitudes of Action: Maoism as Emotional Political Theory” zeroes in on the concept of taidu 態度, translated as “cognio-affective disposition” (p. 75), in Maoist literature as an integral subjective condition for actualizing universalist Marxist-Leninist ideas for particular political actions. These discussions on diverse historical periods – from pre-Qin to late Qing to the Maoist era – converge on the question of the irreducible, historically-situated origin of theory, whereas the actual functionality of the Chinese thought that they elucidate as global theories remains to be demonstrated. If theory, as Jenco stresses, is “always sustained by comparative judgments” (p. 16), these papers offer excellent starting points for further comparisons with contexts beyond China.

While tackling the challenge of presenting Chinese thought as global theory, many of the contributors, including the editor, symptomatically express cautions through frequent usage of terms like “may,” “might,” “could,” “potential,” and “heuristic.” But are such self-reflexive gestures, rather than self-affirmative application of existing theory, not a necessary condition for opening up the possibility of “revers[ing] the historical directional arrow” (p. 4) and reinventing the way in which scholarly knowledge is produced and circulated? Jenco's collective project has created such an interesting opening.