Organizer and Discussant: Haun Saussy, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Susan Blum, University of Colorado at Denver
Among scholars who deal in cultural contact, "essentialism" is hardly a value neutral term: it almost always designates an explicitly exclusive identity claim (we are who we have always been, our purity is not to be contaminated by newcomers) or a form of sham inclusivity (as when the universal extension of terms such as "man," "history," "civilization," etc., is not accompanied by a parallel extension of their meaning, so that the purportedly essential and universal properties prove to obtain only for a privileged subgroup). In the specific case of the episodic history of Sino Western cultural encounter, essentialism has been both enlisted in the service of a nativist cultural defense and used to frame a vision of China as an enlightened exception to modern European history with its conflicts between faith and reason. Rather than participate in the ritual denunciation of such positions, these papers examine the careers of various versions of essentialism in Chinese history, ranging from the late Ming to the present and from "tribal" villages to political centers. Susan Blum concentrates on the values (most interestingly for a modern state, moral values) affirmed by the persistent contrast of "China" and its internal and external "others." Lionel Jensen examines the association of Chinese versions of nationalism and patriotism with political crisis rhetoric, and finds more than one response to crisis. In another study of scholarship in a state of emergency, Zhang Longxi assesses the ideas and impact of the Gu shi bian historians earlier in this century, a group whose critical theses about China's cultural origins still inspire controversy some seventy years after their initial formulation. Lisa Raphals observes the considerable evolution of Chinese gender ideals over time, with particular attention to the descriptive and normative associations of "intelligence" in the two sexes. Our purpose is to take stock and estimate consequences. If our China is plural, and thus cannot be conceived of as Europe's single other, what is entailed for the whole methodology of cultural study?
Lionel M. Jensen, University of Colorado at Denver
In the last decade national salvation and enlightenment (jiuguo and qimeng), terms that framed nationalist/nativist discourse over a century ago, have again become salient among Chinese intellectuals. One might conclude from the resurgence of this terminology that the matter of China's self definition in the twentieth century remains open, undetermined. Considering as well the official debates conducted in Renmin ribao over the meaning of aiguo zhuyi, the intent of which appears to be the necessary conflation of "nationalism" and "patriotism," China's national identity, indeed, continues to be contested. This paper, though not specifically concerned with the contemporary contestation of national self definition, takes the evident doubt behind the debate and efforts to resolve this doubt interpretively through assertions of an inviolable, continuous history linking the present with antiquity, as a ground for a consideration of an enduring tendency in China and the west to define China as essentially other. It is a meditation on the difficulty of representing China as an immensely varied and variable, cultural ecology wherein the distinctions between Chinese and other were never very clear. By examining Chinese denunciations from the Poxie ji (1635) of Matteo Ricci's fundamentalist claims on behalf of a primordial "Confucianism" (xianru), and letters and essays of Hu Shi from the 1930s in which he reconceptualized the history of Chinese culture and its imminent salvation through analogy with the decline of Judaism and the rise of Christianity, the paper will offer an alternative representation of China as the locus of a cultural diversity and ecumene where native self and foreign other were intricately intertwined, not dramatically opposed.
Susan D. Blum, University of Colorado at Denver and University of Denver
Anthropologists in the West have in recent years shied away from "essentializing" any given culture, questioning the very notion of a billiard ball model of autonomous and distinct societies, emphasizing rather interpenetrability, influence, and variation within national boundaries. It has become a commonplace to demonstrate the artificiality of the entity of "nation state" and to stress the imminent deterioration of many of the world's nations. Yet for many people in many nation states, the question of how to create, maintain, and foster a national identity is critical. Criticizing a priori such an endeavor is to impose a set of externally derived goals on another intellectual tradition. In this paper I take this goal seriously as one that engages a number of people in China, describing and seeking to explain the form that Chinese intellectuals' quest takes. Since the waning years of the Qing dynasty, intellectuals and later the party state as well have sought the proper formulation by means of which to set China, Chinese people, Chinese culture, and "Chineseness" apart from the rest of the world. Though most people pay little attention to conceptualizing "China," those charged with "leading" the "masses" have devoted much effort to just this enterprise. One of the principal forms this takes is contrasting "China" with various "others," most notably the internal others called ethnic minorities (or minority nationalities) and the external others of other nation states. The contrasts especially concentrate in their most substantive form on morality; the Chinese or the Han inevitably come out on top. There is another discourse of self criticism in which other nations surpass China in every respect. In this paper I look at recent publications and media presentations, and sort out the various ways in which the language of difference is used to highlight a manageable Chinese essence in the service of nation building.
Zhang Longxi, University of California, Riverside
The Revolution of 1911 put an end to the last dynasty of imperial China, and some years before that, the abolition of the traditional examination system and the establishment of new schools with Western style curricula deprived the Confucian classics of their sacred status. Suffering from Japanese imperialist invasion and the threat of Western colonialism, and fragmented and overrun by despotic warlords, China was on the brink of total collapse. Chinese intellectuals, who were modern day literati scholars and maintained the traditional sense of social responsibility, felt the onus of preserving, redefining, or reforming the tradition of Chinese culture. The crisis of survival of the Chinese nation compelled them to take an extremely hard look at the cultural tradition in order to understand the course of history and see what had gone wrong. Without the constraints of one particular intellectual orthodoxy, a variety of responses to the crisis arose: while radical Westernizers advocated total Westernization as a means to modernize China, and conservative traditionalists put up last ditch resistance, the most effective response that has had an enduring impact on modern Chinese culture and history was the effort to re examine traditional culture in order to salvage whatever was relevant to contemporary situations and viable for building a strong China in modern times. This paper attempts to evaluate that effort, especially as represented by Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) and the intellectual movement known as Gu shi bian [Discriminations of Ancient History], which undertook to rethink cultural identity through a critical re examination of Chinese historiography and came to realize the ambiguity and conflict between nationalism and national culture.
Lisa Raphals, Bard College
The view that men and women are essentially different is a commonplace in Chinese civilization. In the cosmological system of the Yi jing, the feminine is the inferior yin complement of masculine yang. This complementary hierarchical view of male and female essences has been used to justify (and been attacked for justifying) the social and political submission of women to men, the exclusion of women from a direct role in public life, and much else besides, including the assertion that women were intellectually or morally inferior to men: "Lack of talent is a virtue in a woman." By Ming times if not earlier, this intellectual, as well as social and political, separation of women and men was widely accepted as an eternal and essential feature of Chinese civilization. We see its manifestations in such diverse sources as: The Four Books for Women and other instruction manuals on female virtue; the relegation of women poets to the "aesthetic" sphere; and doctors' complaints on the difficulties of treating women patients.
A different view emerges if we examine the changing presentation of sagely, wise and prescient women in collections of exemplary biographies. Warring States and Han biographies in the Zuo zhuan, Zhanguo ce and Guo yu present the intelligence, and intellectual skills, of women as identical to those of their male counterparts, most forcefully so in the Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang. Ming compendia, such as the Gui fan of Lü Kun, retell the Han and pre Han biographies according to different criteria of female virtue, and reinterpret them according to the assumption of an essential difference between male and female intellect.
The seventeenth century European debate about the intelligence of men and women provides an instructive contrast. The new epistemologies of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz rejected the Aristotelian cosmological opposition of masculine and feminine. The ex Jesuit François Poullain de la Barre used Cartesian arguments to contend that the mind has no sex: "l'esprit n'a point de sexe." Far from having been resolved, the question of whether men and women reason differently remains a vexed (and unresolved) one in such fields as psychology and education. Here a long historical view attempts to de-essentialize essentialism itself.
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