Can Marxism, liberalism, and Chinese neo-traditionalism co-exist/co-become (gongsheng)? Provisional reflections on Jon Douglas Solomon’s The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay engages with Jon Douglas Solomon’s The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, moving in two parts. It first provides an overview of the Solomon’s critique of Pax Americana: the way American economic, military, and diplomatic power is projected throughout the world to consolidate the interests of the neo-liberal capitalist system. Pax Americana operates through “colonial governmentality under erasure” (5), in which post-colonial nations becoming willing participants in a subordinate relationship to the United States. Taiwan is one such client-state, and Solomon seeks to challenge the “Taiwan consensus” (120), which presents Taiwan in the terms of a successfully transitioned liberal democracy rather than as a “laboratory of engineered self-determination” and “colonial governmentality under erasure” (29). For Solomon, the only way to move beyond Pax Americana is to critique the “modern regime of translation” (6), which imagines the world as divided by civilizational and national units grounded in notions of anthropological essence. Solomon calls for a decolonization of Area Studies through a repudiation of the regime of translation, a move born out of a desire to build a social critique grounded in “revolutionary demands for justice in the present” (217). The second section of this essay presents a series of questions I have regarding Solomon’s project, concerns which predominately revolve around the relationship between Marxism and the Chinese humanist tradition. These are questions that a Sinologist brings to their work, a field which is concerned with not just questions of revolutionary rupture but cultural continuity as well.