Can the oriental know justice? Can the subaltern tell stories?

Abstract

In response to the contemporary American philosopher Michael J. Sandel’s tremendous popularity and ongoing engagements with Chinese philosophy, which are often offered as evidence of a deep resonance between his work and contemporary Chinese interests in justice, I argue that his conception of justice as a product of the storyteller’s narrative quest encounters two potential problems when considered from a Chinese perspective. The first is whether “Chinese” justice—which can be viewed substantially as a collective if not individual attempt to overcome subalternity as the Oriental subject—can be achieved through the foreign forms of moral reasoning that are perhaps guilty of consigning Chinese to their status as Orientals in the first place. The second questions whether the Western culture of storytelling, of the heroic subject who conquers the other (so often the Oriental in modern times), is not already a product and producer of injustice, and in its contemporary forms, a fantasy and fetish of capitalist society that is not only incapable of individual justice, but also complicit in injustices towards others. These points are raised in tandem with discussions of ongoing generational shifts in China largely attributable to the rapid expansion of a market economy and the growing normalization of Western-style heroic, justice seeking storyteller, which might in turn legitimize Sandel’s approach to justice. However, from a Marxist perspective, I argue that such developments might be Trojan horses for new forms of subjugation, alienation, and inauthentic being—in short, contra Western Orientalist universalism, the very injustices that China’s modernity project has aimed to overcome and with which it risks assimilation.