Alt: Individual Rejections Break Down Imperialism

Discourse Key

( ) Criticizing discourse surrounding IR scholarship is essential to understand our relationship to China and to build effective policies.

[Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University. Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise. 2012, pg vii-viii]

Though it may appear that way in the eyes of some, going along this path is not a cunning attempt of finding a literary niche in an increasingly crowded field to score some cheap points all the while dodging the heavy lifting of tackling complex ‘real-world’ issues surrounding China. Nor is it to deliberately court controversy or strike an affected pose of malaise about an other-wise vibrant field of study. To me, this book is a necessary move justified on both theoretical and practical grounds. Theoretically, the book rejects the prevalent assumption about the dichotomy between reality and representation. Contra positivism, we cannot bypass thoughts and representations to come into direct contact with China as it is. What we see as ‘China’ cannot be detached from various discourses and representations of it. Works that purport to study China’s rise, as if it were a transparent and empirically observable phenomenon out there, are always already inextricably enmeshed in representations. In all likelihood, those works will then become themselves part of such representations, through which still later studies will gaze at ‘China’. In this sense, my focus on representation is less an expedient choice than ontological and epistemological necessity.¶ On practical grounds, given the inescapable immanence of representation and discourse in the social realm, a proper study of discursive representation is not a retreat from the real world but a genuine engagement with it in the full sense of the words. Perhaps with the exception of sleepwalking or unconscious twitching, no human action (let alone social action) can do without thought and representation. Constructivists are right in saying that words have consequences. But we may add that all social domains and human relationships are mediated through and constituted by thought and representation. China’s relationship with the West is certainly no exception. With regional stability, prosperity and even world peace at stake, there is now an urgent, practical need to understand how the various strains of representation and discourse pervade and condition this critical and complex relationship.¶

Epistemology Key

( ) Empirics by themselves are misleading – we need critical epistemic reflections.

[Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University. Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise. 2012, pg 4-5]

Critical epistemological reflection on the field of China’s international relations is anything but trivial. At one level, some measure of self-reflectivity is not only necessary but also unavoidable. It pervades all literary works, as literature is always implicitly a reflection on literature itself.25 All forms of knowledge contain within themselves some conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, autobiographical accounts of the knowing/writing self at either individual or certain collective levels. As evidenced in the self-image of positivist knowledge in general, the very absence of critical self-reflection in China watching already denotes a particular way of speaking about itself, namely, as a cumulative body of empirical knowledge on China. The problem is that this scientistic self-understanding is largely uncritical and unconsciously so. If Pierre Macherey is right that what a work does not say is as important as what it does say,26 then this curious silence and unconsciousness in the writing of China’s rise needs to be interrupted and made more conscious, a process which Jürgen Habermas calls reflection.27 Besides, it seems impossible for China watching to watch only China. Aihwa Ong notes that ‘When a book about China is only about China, it is suspect’.28 We may add that it is also self-delusional. China as an object of study does not simply exist in an objectivist or empiricist fashion, like a freefloating, self-contained entity waiting to be directly contacted, observed and analysed. This is not to say that China is unreal, unknowable or is only a ghostly illusion constructed entirely out of literary representation. Of course China does exist: the Great Wall, the Communist Party, and more than one billion people living there are all too real. And yet, to say something is real does not mean that its existence corresponds with a single, independent and fixed meaning for all to see. None of those aforementioned ‘real’ things and people beam out their meaning at us directly, let alone offer an unadulterated, panoramic view of ‘China’ as a whole. China’s existence, while real, is better understood, to use Martin Heidegger’s term, as a type of ‘being-in-the world’. 29 The ‘in-the-world-ness’ is intrinsically characteristic of China’s being, which always needs to be understood in conjunction with its world, a world which necessarily includes China-bound discourse and representation.