The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  My task here is not to write a review of Orientalism (thank God!), but merely to see whether Said’s arguments present any relevance for Chinese studies.

  Said seems to include “sinology” implicitly in his concept of “orientalism.” (I insist on the word seems; the point remains obscure, like a great many other points in his book.) Said’s contention is that whenever an orientalist makes a statement in his own specialised area, this statement accrues automatically to the broader picture of a mythical “East.” I do not know whether this is true for scholars involved with Near and Middle East studies, but it certainly does not apply to sinologists. The intellectual and physical boundaries of the Chinese world are sharply defined; they encompass a reality that is so autonomous and singular that no sinologist in his right mind would ever dream of extending any sinological statement to the non-Chinese world. For a serious sinologist (or for any thinking person, for that matter) concepts such as “Asia” or “the East” have never contained any useful meaning. No sinologist would ever consider himself an orientalist. (Some sinologists, it is true, may occasionally be seen participating in one of those huge fairs that are periodically held under the name of “International Orientalist Congress,” but this is simply because similar junkets undertaken under the mere auspices of the Club Méditerranée would not be tax-deductible.)

  Orientalism is a colonialist-imperialist conspiracy.[2] Quite possibly. To some extent, it may also be true for sinology. Who knows? One day it will perhaps be discovered that the best studies on Tang poetry and on Song painting have all been financed by the CIA—a fact that should somehow improve the public image of this much-maligned organisation.

  Orientalists hate and despise the Orient; they deny its intellectual existence and try to turn it into a vacuum. Whether most sinologists love China or hate it is largely irrelevant. One important fact is absolutely evident: Western sinology in its entirety is a mere footnote appended to the huge sinological corpus that Chinese intellectuals have been building for centuries to this day. The Chinese are our first guides and teachers in the exploration of their culture and history; fools who ignore this evidence do so at their own risk and pay dearly for it. Further, it should be noted that today a significant proportion of the leading sinologists in the Western academic world are Chinese; through their teaching and research, they play a decisive role in Western sinology.

  The notion of an “other” culture is of questionable use, as it seems to end inevitably in self-congratulation, or hostility and aggression. Why could it not equally end in admiration, wonderment, increased self-knowledge, relativisation and readjustment of one’s own values, awareness of the limits of one’s own civilisation? Actually, most of the time, all of these seem to be the natural outcome of our study of China (and it is also the reason why Chinese should be taught in Western countries as a fundamental discipline of the humanities at the secondary-school level, in conjunction with, or as an alternative to, Latin and Greek). Joseph Needham summed up neatly what is the common feeling of most sinologists: “Chinese civilisation presents the irresistible fascination of what is totally ‘other,’ and only what is totally ‘other’ can inspire the deepest love, together with a strong desire to know it.” From the great Jesuit scholars of the sixteenth century down to the best sinologists of today, we can see that there was never a more powerful antidote to the temptation of Western ethnocentrism than the study of Chinese civilisation. (It is not a coincidence that Said, in his denunciation of “illiberal ethnocentrism,” found further ammunition for his good fight in the writings of a sinologist who was attacking the naïve and arrogant statement of a French philosopher describing Thomistic philosophy as “gathering up the whole of human tradition.” Indignant rejection of such crass provincialism will always come most spontaneously to any sinologist.)

  “Interesting work is more likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a field like Orientalism, [which is] defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically.” The sinological field is defined linguistically; for this very reason, the concept of sinology is now being increasingly questioned (in fact, in the John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, I recently heard it used as a term of abuse). Perhaps we ought to rejoice now as we see more historians, philosophers, students of literature, legal scholars, economists, political scientists and others venturing into the Chinese field, equipped with all the intellectual tools of their original disciplines. Still, this new trend is encountering one stubborn and major obstacle that is not likely ever to disappear: no specialist, whatever his area of expertise, can expect to contribute significantly to our knowledge of China without first mastering the Chinese literary language. To be able to read classical and modern Chinese it is necessary to undergo a fairly long and demanding training that can seldom be combined with the acquisition and cultivation of another discipline. For this reason, sinology is bound to survive, in fact, if not necessarily in name, as one global, multidisciplinary, humanistic undertaking, based solely upon a specific language prerequisite. Actually, this situation, imposed by the nature of things, does have its advantages. Chinese civilisation has an essentially holistic character that condemns all narrowly specialised approaches to grope in the dark and miss their target—as was well illustrated a few years ago by the spectacular blunders of nearly all the “contemporary China” specialists. (In this respect, it is ironic to note that it was precisely the so-called Concerned Asian Scholars—on whom Said set so much store in his book, as he saw in them the only chance of redemption for the orientalist establishment—that failed most scandalously in their moral responsibilities toward China and the Chinese people during the Maoist era.)

  “We should question the advisability of too close a relationship between the scholar and the state.” You bet we should! On this point I could not agree more with Said—yet it is hardly an original conclusion. The very concept of the “university” has rested for some 700 years on the absolute autonomy and freedom of all academic and scholarly activities from any interference and influence of the political authorities. It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.

  1984

  *Reply to an inquiry launched by the Asian Studies Association of Australia: scholars involved in different areas of Asian studies were invited to comment on the relevance of Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979) to the problems entailed in the approaches and methods of their respective fields.

  THE CHINA EXPERTS

  PARIS taxi drivers are notoriously sophisticated in their use of invective. “Hé, va donc, structuraliste!” is one of their recent apostrophes—which makes one wonder when they will start calling their victims “China Experts”!

  Perhaps we should not be too harsh on these experts; the fraternity recently suffered a traumatic experience and is still in a state of shock. Should fish suddenly start to talk, I suppose that ichthyology would also have to undergo a dramatic revision of its basic approach. A certain type of “instant sinology” was indeed based on the assumption that the Chinese people were as different from us in their fundamental aspirations, and as unable to communicate with us, as the inhabitants of the oceanic depths; and when they eventually rose to the surface and began to cry out sufficiently loudly and clearly for their message to get through to the general public, there was much consternation among the China pundits.

  Professor Edward Friedman, a teacher of Chinese politics at an American university, recently wrote a piece in the New York Times that informed its readers that various atrocities had taken place in China during the Maoist era. That a professor of Chinese politics should appear to have discovered these facts nearly ten years after even lazy undergraduates were aware of them may have made them news only for the New York Times; nevertheless, there was something gen
uinely touching in his implied confession of ignorance.

  Madam Han Suyin, who knows China inside out, seldom lets her intelligence, experience and information interfere with her writing. One rainy Sunday I amused myself by compiling a small anthology of her pronouncements on China and learned that the “Cultural Revolution” was a “Great Leap Forward” for mankind, and that it was an abysmal disaster for the Chinese; that the Red Guards were well-behaved, helpful and democratic-minded, and that they were savage and terrifying fascist bullies; that the “Cultural Revolution” was a tremendous spur for China’s economy, and that it utterly ruined China’s economy; that Lin Biao was the bulwark of the revolution, and that Lin Biao was a murderous warlord and traitor; that Jiang Qing tried hard to prevent violence, and that Jiang Qing did her best to foster violence.

  Professor Friedman and Madam Han Suyin represent the two extremes of a spectrum—the first one apparently in a state of blissful ignorance, the other knowing everything—yet the way in which both eventually stumbled suggests that, in this matter at least, the knowledge factor is, after all, quite irrelevant. What a successful China Expert needs, first and foremost, is not so much China expertise as expertise at being an Expert. Does this mean that accidental competence in Chinese affairs could be a liability for a China Expert? Not necessarily—at least not as long as he can hide it as well as his basic ignorance. The Expert should in all circumstances say nothing, but he should say it at great length, in four or five volumes, thoughtfully and from a prestigious vantage point. The Expert cultivates Objectivity, Balance and Fair-Mindedness; in any conflict between your subjectivity and his subjectivity, these qualities enable him, at the crucial juncture, to lift himself by his bootstraps high up into the realm of objectivity, whence he will arbitrate in all serenity and deliver the final conclusion. The Expert is not emotional; he always remembers that there are two sides to a coin. I think that even if you were to confront him with Auschwitz, for example, he would still be able to say that one should not have the arrogance to measure by one’s own subjective standards Nazi values, which were, after all, quite different. After every statement, the Expert cautiously points to the theoretical possibility of also stating the opposite; however, when presenting opinions or facts that run counter to his own private prejudices, he will be careful not to lend them any real significance—though, at the same time, he will let them discreetly stand as emergency exits, should his own views eventually be proved wrong.

  Ross Terrill, an Australian writer now settled in the United States, has been acclaimed there as the ultimate China Expert. I think he fully qualifies for the title.

  Between the Charybdis of Professor Friedman and the Scylla of Madam Han Suyin, Mr. Terrill has been able to steer a skilful middle course. I would not go so far as to say that he has never imparted to his readers much useful insight on China (actually, I am afraid he has misled them rather seriously on several occasions); nevertheless, unlike his less subtle colleagues, he has managed to navigate safely through treacherous and turbulent waters and to keep his Expertise afloat against tremendous odds. By this sign you can recognise a genuine Expert: once an Expert, always an Expert.

  When I was invited to review Terrill’s biography of Mao (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), I initially declined the suggestion; it seemed to me that the book in itself hardly warranted any comment. However, its significance lies more in what it omits than in what it commits. If I eventually accepted the task, it was not merely to offer a few observations on the “physiologie de l’Expert” but rather to take the opportunity to correct a bias of which I may have been guilty in the past when reviewing some of Terrill’s earlier works. (These works include 800,000,000: The Real China (1972), Flowers on an Iron Tree (1975), The Future of China (1978), and The China Difference (1979), which, like China and Ourselves (1970), is a collection of essays by various authors, edited and with an introduction by Terrill.)

  My first encounter with his writings was inauspicious. Opening at random his Flowers on an Iron Tree, I came upon a passage in which he described, as if he had visited it, a monument in China that had been razed to the ground years before. After that, it was hard for me to conjure away a vision of Terrill at work on his travelogue, busying himself with the study of outdated guidebooks without actually leaving his hotel room. For a long time this unfortunate fausse note was to colour (unfairly, no doubt) the impression I had formed of Terrill’s endeavours. Now, not only do I feel that my indignation was somewhat excessive, but I begin to see that in all the liberties Terrill takes with reality, there is always a principle and a method, both of which I completely overlooked at the time: when he sees things which are not there, at least he recognises that these are things that should be there. This gives a kind of Platonic quality to his vision—it may be of little practical value, but it certainly testifies to the essential goodness and idealistic nature of his intentions.

  All too often his statements are likely to provoke strong reactions in any informed reader; but these reactions, in their very violence, appear at once so totally out of tune with the style of this gentle and amiable man that one feels immediately ashamed of them. To attack Mr. Terrill seems as indecent as to kick a blind man’s dog.

  His basic approach is that of the perfect social hostess guiding the dinner-table conversation: be entertaining, but never controversial; avoid all topics that might disturb, give offence or create unpleasantness; have something nice to say to everybody. (His Mao, for instance, is dedicated “To the flair for leadership which is craved in some countries today, and equally to the impulse of ordinary people to be free from the mystifications of leadership.” His next work will probably be dedicated “To the Hare—and to the Hounds.”)

  Most of Terrill’s utterances come across as bland and irresistible truisms. (For which he seems to share a taste with some famous statesmen. Remember de Gaulle: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese”; or Nixon’s comment on the Great Wall: “This is a great wall.”) Here is a sampling from his books: “A billion people live in China, and we don’t”; “Chopsticks are a badge of eternal China, yet it seems that eternal China might now be changing into another China”; “It is not very startling to say that China needs peace; so does every other country. But not every country gets peace.” “Change will not make China like the United States. But it will make post-Mao China different from Mao’s China” (change generally does make things different from what they used to be, while different things are seldom similar); “Mao rules them, Nixon rules us, yet the systems of government have almost nothing in common”; “Could the Congo produce a Mao? Could New Zealand?” (One is tempted to add: Could Luxembourg produce a Mao? Could Greenland? Or Papua New Guinea? The possibilities of variation on this theme are rich indeed.)

  Under this relentless tir de barrage of tautologies the reader feels progressively benumbed. Sometimes, however, he is jerked out of his slumber by one of Terrill’s original discoveries: “Superstitions are gone that used to make rural people of China see themselves as a mere stick or bird rather than an aware individual.” If he genuinely believes that in pre-Communist China people saw themselves as “a stick or bird,” we can more easily understand why he deems Maoist society to have achieved such a “prodigious social progress.”

  Terrill claimed that he was not a proponent of Maoism, but he made no secret of his admiration and sympathy for the regime (“[it is] somewhat absurd for non-Chinese to think of themselves as ‘Maoists.’ To be Maoist—when far from China—is hardly helpful to China, one’s own society, or the relationship between the two. The editors of this book [China and Ourselves] are certainly not Maoists. They admire the Chinese revolution”)—this very regime which, as we now learn from the People’s Daily and from Deng Xiaoping himself (and even, to some extent, from Terrill’s latest writings!) went off the track as early as 1957 and ended up in a decade of near civil war and of “feudal-fascist terror.”

  Terrill visited China several times; his most extensive i
nvestigations, resulting in his influential 800,000,000: The Real China, were conducted during the early 1970s—a time that was, by the reckoning of the Chinese themselves, one of the bleakest and darkest periods in their recent history. The country that had been bled white by the violence of the “Cultural Revolution” was frozen with fear, sunk into misery; it could hardly breathe under the cruel and cretinous tyranny of the Maoist gang. Though it is only now that the Chinese press can describe that sinister era in full and harrowing detail, its horror was so pervasive that even foreigners, however insensitive to and well insulated against the Chinese reality, could not fail to perceive it (though it is true, sadly, that too few of them dared at the time to say so publicly). Yet what did Terrill see? “To be frank, my weeks in China exceeded expectations . . . The 1971 visit deepened my admiration for China and its people . . .” In that hour of ferocious oppression, suffering and despair, of humiliation and anguish, he enjoyed “the peace of the brightly coloured hills and valleys of China . . . the excellence of Chinese cuisine . . .”

  Do not think, however, that his enjoyment was merely that of a tourist: “I happen, too, to be moved by the social gains of the Chinese revolution. In a magnificent way, it has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man of China.” Maoism was “change with a purpose . . . the purposive change bespeaks strength, independence, leadership that was political power in the service of values.” “China is a world which is sterner in its political imperatives but which in human terms may be a simpler and more relaxed world.” How much more relaxed? Even though the country is tightly run, “this near total control is not by police terror. The techniques of Stalinist terror—armed police everywhere, mass killings, murder of political opponents, knocks on the door at 3 a.m., then a shot—are not evident in China today . . . Control is more psychological than by physical coercion . . . the method of control is amazingly light-handed by Communist standards . . .” “The lack of a single execution by the state of a top Communist leader is striking . . . even imprisonment of a purgee is rare . . . Far more common has been the milder fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in 1966 . . . They lived for many months in their own homes. No doubt they lounged in armchairs and read in the People’s Daily the record of their misdeeds . . . Liu was sent to a village, his health declined and in 1973 he died of a cancer . . .” (Actually, if one did not know of Terrill’s essential decency, one might suspect him of making here a very sick joke indeed; Liu, who was very ill, was left by his tormentors lying in his own excrement, completely naked on the freezing concrete floor of his jail, till he died. As for Deng, though it is true that he was less roughly treated, he confessed in a recent interview that he spent all those years in constant fear of being assassinated.)