Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

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Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review

ISSN: 0314-7533 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casr19

Orientalism and sinology

Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys)

To cite this article: Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) (1984) Orientalism and sinology, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review, 7:3, 18-20, DOI: 10.1080/03147538408712296

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03147538408712296

Published online: 27 Feb 2007.

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8. John K. Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York: Harper & Bow), 1982) , p . 458; 445; 125.

9 . Said, Orientalism, p. 326.

ORIENTALISM AND SINOLOGY

Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) Australian National University

Edward Said's main contention i s that 'no production of know- ledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim the author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances' - translated into plain English, this would seem to mean simply that no scholar can escape his original condition: his own national, cultural, p o l i t i c a l and social prejudices are bound to be reflected in his work. Such a common-sense statement hardly warrants any debate. Actually Said's own book is an excellent case in point: Orientalism could obviously have been written by no one but a Palestinian scholar with a huge chip on his shoulder and a very dim understanding of the European academic tradition (here perceived through the distorted prism of American universities, with their brutish hyper-specialisation, non-humanistic approach, and close, unhealthy links with Government).

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.

Orientalism and sinology

Said seems to include implicitly 'sinology' 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 mythi- cal '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 autono- mous 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' never presented 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 under- taken under the mere auspices of the Club Mediterranee would not be tax-deductible.)

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Orientalism is a Colonialist-imperialist conspiracy:*

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 had all been financed by the C.I.A. - 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 which Chinese intellectuals have been building for centuries up 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. Furthermore, it should be noted that today a significant proportion of the leading Sinologists in the Western academic world are Chinese: both by their teaching and research, they play a decisive role for 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 well end in admiration, wonderment, increased self-knowledge, relativisation and re-adjustment of one's own values, awareness of the limits of one's own civilization? Actually, most of the time, all these seem to be the natural outcome of our study of China (and it is also the reason why Chinese should be taught 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 civilization 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 16th 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 civilisa- tion. (It is not a coincidence if Said, in his denunciation of •illiberal ethnocentrism' , found further ammunition for his good fight, in the writings of a sinologist who was attacking the naive 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.)

*The passages in italics summarize various points made by Said (when quotation marks are used, they reproduce his own words). Some readers may rightly feel that my approach to this very serious topic is selective, arbitrary, incoherent and flippant. I could not agree more with such criticism -- I merely tried to imitate Said's method.

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'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, defined either canonically, imperially or geographi- cally' s

The sinological field is defined linguistically; for this very reason, the concept of 'sinology' is now being increasingly questioned (actually, a few months ago, in the J.K. Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, I have heard it used as a term of abuse). We ought perhaps to rejoice now as we see more historians, philosophers, students of literature, legal scholars, economists, political scientists etc., who venture into the Chinese field, equipped with all the intellectual tools of their original disciplines. Still, this new trend is encoun- tering 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. In order 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, solely based upon a specific language prerequisite. Actually, this situation which is imposed by the nature of things does have its advantages. Chinese civilization has an essentially holistic character which condemns all narrowly specialized approaches to grope in the dark and miss their target - as it was well illustrated a few years ago by the spectacular blunders of nearly all the Contemporary China Specialists. (In this respect, it is ironical to note that it was precisely the so-called 'Concerned Asia 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 the most scandalously in their moral responsibilities towards 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 University1 has rested for some seven hundred years on the absolute autonomy 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 three hundred pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.

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