1. The Politics of Imagining Asia

Abstract

Wang Hui, Politics of Imagining edited by Theodore Huters, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2011, 360 pp.This substantive work representing Wang Hui's intellectual engage- ment is the second that Harvard University Press has published by this professor of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua Univer- sity, following China's New Order: Society, Politics and Economy inTransition (2003). In 2009, Verso published his End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. Like the other two, Politics of Imagining Asia is a collection of translated essays published between 1998 and 2008. first three in the book under review were published in English language jour- nals before publication in China. Wang's focus in this book is less on con- temporary social and economic problems than on historic questions, although some recent events such as the Tibetan riots of Spring 2008 are analysed.The book's aim is to study and place in context discourses from which descriptions and analyses of China were elaborated during the twen- tieth century. It thus follows the systematic approach of this best known member of China's New Left, who seeks to offer an alternative vision of his- tory and Chinese freed of the baggage of Western thought, which has long dominated representations of China and its history. For Wang, is a temporal concept used discriminatingly to cast other periods out of the modern; in this sense, is a discriminatory con- cept, rejecting all other elements present in the same space-time, and hav- ing established a hegemonic hierarchical structure. (1) It should be noted that while Wang's studies of modern literature, especially of Lu Xun, have been standard-setting,(2)it is due to his published work on intellectual his- tory and criticisms of liberalism, consumerism, globalisation, and imperial- ism that he has gained fame in China and abroad.The influence of Edward Said (invoked in a long polemical essay on West- ern representations of Tibet), Jacques Derrida, and Dipesh Chakrabarty are readily apparent in the first essay in the collection, The politics of imagining Asia, as well as in others devoted to Chinese modernity (How to explain 'China' and its 'modernity': Rethinking rise of modern Chinese thought and Weber and the question of Chinese modernity), to discussion of di- alects and the national language (Local forms, vernacular dialects, and the War of Resistance against Japan: 'national forms' debate), to the Tibet issue (The 'Tibetan question' East and West: Orientalism, regional ethnic autonomy, and the politics of dignity), and to the tribute system, especially between Okinawa and China (Okinawa and the two dramatic changes to the regional order). Wang Hui sets out to deconstruct the way in which foreign thinkers and scholars have conceptualised Asia (p. 16), in an attempt at revising world history, provincialising Europe, and challenging the univer- sality and relevance of the nation-state concept (p. 60), but also encourag- ing China's empowerment and agency over its own history. These essays are difficult to crack, rich in detail and often unexpected references. They describe a determined struggle for discursive equality and for the right to criticise Western theories on an equal footing with Western theoreticians, taking into account another political culture, especially that of China (and notably its imperial history, tributary system, defence of unity in diversity opposed to ethnic nationalism, etc.). book also denounces Eurocentrism, defined as the imposition of supposedly universal rules but established to respond to European needs and interests (p. 260), and mounts a struggle for liberating the concept of China as well as for complex ways of seeing:I examine the entity of 'China' and its implications from various an- gles in order to liberate the concept from a simplistic notion of Eu- ropean nationalism. …