Decentering the “West” and “China” in China–West Comparison

As the organizers of the series “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” have rightly noted, there is abundant scholarship comparing the cultures of “China” and the “West,” or more specifically Han Chinese cultural production and that of Russia and certain Western European nations. A common approach to China–West comparison is examining cases of cross-cultural engagement, in the form of textual reception, translation, transculturation, travel logs, cultural assimilation, and related dynamics. One of the pitfalls of such comparison is that it frequently takes Western cultural production as the norm, the standard against which most everything else is measured. As Shu-mei Shih persuasively argues, “When we put two texts or entities side by side, we tend to privilege one over the other. The grounds are never level. … It is the more powerful entity that implicitly serves as … the presumed, usually Eurocentric, standard.”1 And as R. Radhakrishnan likewise declares, “Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”2 To be sure, Radhakrishnan cautions that centrisms can and do go in many directions; he speaks of “awareness of centrism, whether Euro-, logo-, Afro-, Sino-, Indo-, gyno-, or andro-.”3 But in comparative literature, as practiced in the United States and Europe, and even sometimes in China and other parts of the “non-West,” the presumed standard is all too frequently Euro-American.4