Rethinking the Rise of China: A Postcolonial Critique of China and a Chinese Critique of the Postcolonial

Abstract

This article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi-faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi-)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world-system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world-system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East-West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post-revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross-fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only between the postcolonial and post-revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.