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Encountering the World: China and Its Other(s) in Historical Narratives, 1949–89
Q. Edward Wang1
Rowan University
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In this article I attempt to critically examine historical discourses in Imodern China and their complex relations with the outside world, most notably the West. I intend to delineate three noticeable changes in twentieth-century China, but concentrate on the later two in the period covered here and analyze their causes and implications in a large social and political context. The Chinese experimentation of modern historiography, defined by and large by the experience of Euro-American historians of the late nineteenth century, was closely associated with their country's experience in encountering with the West from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The Qing Dynasty's (1644–1911) defeat in the Opium War (1838–42) by Britain, for example, first opened the eyes of some Chinese to see the rising Western world, whereas the Dynasty's subsequent defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1895) turned their eyes also to Japan, which resulted in a wave of cultural exchanges that reoriented the direction of both Chinese history and historiography. Beginning in the early twentieth century, many Chinese had come to the realization that in order to understand this newly expanded world and broaden their worldview, there was a compelling need to incorporate the Western historical experience in their historical writing. Drawing on the ideas of nationalism and historicism, they pitted China against the West and distilled and essentialized China's past cultural tradition as well as modern Western culture. In their consideration, China and the West formed a dichotomy, much like the East-West dichotomy in Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism. Most advocates of this kind of thinking were nationalists, so while they pitted China against the West, they also hoped that China could emulate and extend the Western success in modernization.2 As China's "returning" to its past glory and power was their ultimate goal, some of them also sought alternatives to reach it. The triumph of Bolshevism in Russia in 1917 seemed to have offered such a viable alternative to Western liberalism. From the early 1920s onward when Marxists gradually became a visible force in China's political and cultural arena, it changed the country's cultural relations with the outside world from the dichotomous one to a triangular one; while Marxism originated also from the West, it was regarded by many Chinese, regardless of their attitudes toward it, as a separate entity from the liberal West. |
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In order to better understand this triangular cultural relationship, perhaps it is useful to borrow the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, particularly in the way as most postcolonial theorists read and interpret it. What is unique in Lacan's theory is that he not only notes the distinction between Self and Other, but also the distinction between the "Other" and the "other." The Other, with the capital "O" or grande-autre by Lacan, stands in direct opposition to Self, through its gaze the Self gains its identity. By comparison, the other is a mere reflection of the Self. What the other represents is something the Self desires to become, like a child standing in front of a mirror, seeing him /herself yet at the same time hoping to find his/her better image in it. Moreover, in Lacan's discussion of these three concepts, he stressed that their relationships are not fixed, nor are they represented only by one object; the Other for example can be either the child's mother or father.3 |
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