Daniel F. Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.

Excerpt

A few years ago at a meeting of senior scholars and officials in Beijing, after acknowledging China’s remarkable record of reform and adaptation, a respected American political scientist concluded his presentation by stating that all of his training, knowledge and research had convinced him that China’s Party-led government would collapse, indeed, should have collapsed already. His comments came at the height of a Western-induced, global economic crisis, and this irony was not lost on the audience. In contradistinction, many of China’s leading scholars began a critical turn towards an increasingly Sinified epistemology after spending much of the reform and opening period imitating Western discourses. Although Daniel Vukovich does not focus on such new developments in China, he notes this trend, rightfully citing the work of Wang Hui, Lin Chun, Mobo Gao and others. Unsurprisingly, this book reads well alongside Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past (2008) and Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution (2008), although those works suffer slightly from unbalanced polemics, which Vukovich largely avoids. …