Contesting Chinese modernity? Postcoloniality and discourses on modernisation at a Chinese university campus

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses debates found on Chinese university discussion boards, and considers why narratives about ‘modernisation’ and Chinese ‘deficiency’ and ‘backwardness’ constitute such powerful discourses at the grassroots level in China. This is notable because these discourses adapt a hierarchy of modernity from colonial discourses and they refer to colonial experiences in order to prove that a backward China has to change urgently. The article argues that discourses about modernisation and Chinese deficiency can become immensely pervasive because they are reproduced by authors on the internet in their attempts to produce a counter-discourse against either Western or Chinese institutional discourses. These counter-discourses are, however, caught within a dual power structure: on the one hand, the dominance of Chinese state discourse within China itself, and, on the other hand, the global dominance of Western discourses, often set in opposition to the Chinese government. In order to articulate a critique of either of these discourses authors appropriate concepts from the oppositional institutional discourse. Yet both of these seemingly ‘contradictory’ institutional discourses reproduce a hierarchy of modernity in which China is portrayed as backwards and therefore inferior. Thus while apparent counter-discourses are trapped between seemingly alternative positions they nevertheless both reproduce the same discourse of modernity and backwardness.