As early as the mid-eighteenth century, Francois Quesnay recognized that Western accounts of China often were riddled with bias, and wrote an essay exposing Baron Montesquieu's sophistries one by one. His logic was impeccable, but his essay has been largely ignored while Montesquieu remains widely consulted. Hegel, Herder, Marx, and Weber perpetuated the baron's errors and added many more of their own. During the late twentieth century, the Cold War brought more of the same, but by that time a new generation of Quesnays—Paul Cohen, Jack Goody, and others—took on the task of exposing the looking-glass logic informing such studies. Nonetheless, by and large, it is the Montesquieus who have retained the biggest bullhorn. Ming Dong Gu's Sinologism is an ambitious attempt to investigate the root causes of this phenomenon. Like many in Chinese studies, Gu recognizes that neither Orientalism nor postcolonial theory really addresses the issue as it has evolved in China studies. The distortions peppering both the scholarship and the media coverage of China are persistent, systemic, and dangerous, considering China's substantive role in geopolitical affairs. This book aims to get to the bottom of the problem.
Sinologism makes four significant contributions to our understanding of this issue. First, Gu reviews some of the more egregious myths about China, beginning with Montesquieu and moving on to the Cold War and its legacy. Although others have undertaken similar work, Gu's book offers a relatively compact and comprehensive review that should be on the reading list of any graduate student in Chinese studies. Second, he exposes and illustrates what he calls the “masochistic” tendency of intellectuals in China to develop a loathing for all aspects of China's tradition while accepting all things Western uncritically as their model. Third, he attempts to explain both phenomena, not as symptoms of bias, but rather as the result of an epistemological mismatch between Western concepts of knowledge and epistemological assumptions underlying Chinese thought and institutions during the imperial era. Finally, he argues that this epistemological mismatch leads to faulty methodology that, ultimately, has generated the stunning caricatures we sometimes mistake for knowledge about China.
A key element in Gu's argument is his analysis of the epistemological problem. He sees Western thinkers from the Jesuits onward as attempting to assimilate “China” into a universalizing Western framework where the basic premise is that Western views set the standard and model for all other cultures. He readily shows that many of the most important thinkers in post-eighteenth-century Europe and America—from Montesquieu to Marx—attempted to demonstrate the universality of their systems by incorporating China into their theories. However, the refusal to understand China on its own terms, coupled with the unchanging presumption that the West is always best, invariably drives Western authors to adopt theoretical tools poorly suited to the analysis of Chinese practice. Professor Gu argues that reforming this centuries-old pattern of distortion will require frank recognition of the problem as distinct from Orientalism or postcolonial practices, as well as newer, less ideological, and more fact-oriented methodologies that will enable us to view Chinese history and thought in local and period terms rather than through a Western-colored lens.
Scholars familiar with translingual analysis may wax skeptical regarding anyone's ability to understand China in its own terms, but greater attention to period discourse and local motivation (as opposed to the impact-response model) seems like good advice. To his credit, Gu avoids demonizing Western scholars or valorizing China. “Self-colonizing” Chinese intellectuals come under fire as often as European nationalists, and he reviews and recognizes critical exposures of Cold War bias by such authors as Paul Cohen, Jack Goody, J. M. Blaut, Wang Hui, and many more (though he completely ignores a long history of critique, in both Chinese and English, by historians of art). At the same time, his analysis remains mired in the traditional assumption that European and American writings on China have been motivated by goals primarily internal to the West. He sees Western thinkers as repeatedly exerting control of universalizing social theory while Chinese thought comes across as more introverted. He speaks of Western epistemology in ways recalling the common assumption among Chinese scholars that East and West have remained fundamentally distinct throughout all time. Gu never quite descends to that level, but echoes of that sentiment inform his language on more than one occasion.
It is in this regard that one would hope Professor Gu might further refine his theories next time around, for despite the tone of overbearing confidence one finds in Montesquieu, Hegel, and Herder, I cannot help but detect the smell of fear. Their attacks on China might not be the result of an internal, “Western” epistemology so much as attempts to defend Europe's long tradition of hereditary privilege from the egalitarian implications of China's examination and legal systems. The claims of later writers, such as Marx, Weber, and Wittfogel, could be interpreted as attempts to deny the fact that Europe—in its post-revolutionary period—now in fact shared a number of new social practices with China, such as religious toleration; egalitarian access to political authority; graduated income taxes; and the distinction between court and state, or office and officer, to name but a few. Professor Gu exposes the vapidity of their claims regarding China's lack of these practices, which they now regarded as Western, but he does not treat those denials as a key part of their motivation. Such considerations could yield a more thoroughly dialectical account of the phenomena Gu exposes than what this book currently offers.
Having said this, there is more than a kernel of truth in Gu's analysis. The book should be read for its many poignant exposures of willful distortion on the part of China “experts,” as well as for its critique of the limitations of Orientalism and postcolonial theory. This book aims to inspire a fundamental reconsideration of the way we think and write about China. There is no denying that such reflection is well overdue.
