Western Perspectives On The People's Republic Of China: Politics, Economy And Society

Politics, Economy and Society

Colin Mackerras

• Editore: WSPC
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9789814566568
• Argomento: Biological Sciences
• Categoria: Science General

How have Westerners seen the People's Republic of China over the years? The question raises many important issues, which this book aims to present, analyze and explain. The basic conclusion is that Western perspectives are somewhat more complex than simply viewing China's realities. Involved also are politics and power relations, trends in journalism and scholarship, as well as individual and group personalities and psychologies.Based on extensive personal experiences in China dating back to 1964 and wide-ranging travel in Tibet and ethnic regions since the 1980s, the author attempts to distinguish trends in different Western countries. However, most of the material will concern the United States, which has been the dominant contributor to Western perspectives during the whole period of concern to this book.The perspectives are taken up by topic, including politics, economy, society, and ethnic minorities. Inherent in each topic is the way cultures see and react towards each other. Images and perspectives can affect policy, and have done so many times in the past, which adds to the importance of this book. It also takes up questions of the sources of Western perspectives, both in terms of direct sources, such as newspapers, television or the internet, and deeper ones, such as social values and temperament. Contents:

• Introduction
• Historical Background
• Political and International Relations Perspectives on China, 1949–1971
• Trends in Political and Foreign Relations Perspectives on China, 1971–2001
• Political and General Western Perspectives on China in the Twenty-First Century
• Perspectives on the Chinese Economy, Population Policy and Environment to the End of the Twentieth Century
• The Twenty-First Century: Perspectives on the Chinese Economy, Population Issues and Environment
• Socio-cultural Perspectives on the People's Republic of China
• Perspectives on the Ethnic Minorities
• Conclusion
• Readership: Undergraduates, graduates, academics and researchers who are interested in Chinese politics, economy and society, especially its ethnic minorities. Key Features:
  • The book deals with a range of perspectives/images on the People's Republic of China, including the highly important and controversial topic of Western perspectives on the ethnic minorities, especially Tibet and the Tibetans
  • The book incorporates the author's extensive personal experiences in the People's Republic dating back to 1964, and his extensive travel in Tibet and ethnic regions since the 1980s

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Italian Marco Polo, who has become legendary in both China and the West, spent decades in the great civilization that was China, and interpreted it to his own people. In particular, he is the first Westerner to leave a detailed account of China and consequently plays a major role in Western perspectives on China. For those achievements he deserves great credit.

He is the first in a long line of writers who have made China a part of the intellectual life of the West. At times this great East Asian country has been a model for the West, at others a negative example. At times it has loomed large in the imagination of the West, declining in importance at others.

This book focuses on Western perspectives on the People’s Republic of China, that is, of the country since 1949. It aims to relate and analyze some of the most important of these images, and to set them within an appropriate historical and intellectual context. It aims to explore who or which group has tended to create images and, to some extent, how they have done so. It adopts a chronological and topical approach, with consideration of political, economic and social images, as well as those relating to foreign affairs and ethnic minorities.

This is an important subject because it concerns cross-cultural relations and how peoples see each other. There has long been a tendency in the West to see China and other civilizations as “exotic”, which can signify a way of admiring something very strange but is more often a sign of criticism, even contempt. This trend may be weaker than it used to be, but it is far from dead. The policy one country adopts towards another can affect its perceptions, but the converse is also true; in other words, images can influence policy. This adds to the importance of the subject of Western perspectives on China, because how these two major civilizations see and relate to each other matters for the world as a whole.

So what precisely are the Western perspectives on China that are the subject of this book? I define images as perceptions that are important enough to impinge on the consciousness of the observer. Usually, they are recorded in some way that makes them accessible. A chance conversation by a Westerner about China might be considered a perspective and I feel entitled to include such conversations I have had myself, or those that are accessible to me in another way.

This is a large topic and it is not possible to deal with all kinds of perspectives. Those included are almost all of people or relevant to them. Many types are completely irrelevant to this coverage and largely or entirely ignored, despite their importance or interest, such as those dealing with scenery or biology. The iconic wild animal of China, the giant panda, comes up for occasional, but not frequent, consideration.

The Sources of Perspectives: Theoretical Framework

As suggested above, perspectives on China are part of the intellectual tradition of the West. What this means is that how the West views China depends not only on the realities of China itself but also to a large extent on the intellectual or ideological climate in the West. This raises difficult questions about what exactly it is that leads any observer or group of them to reach views about China. One early study of the topic concluded that the reasons had something to do with individual personality: “Our response to China (or any other civilization) is conditioned partly by the objective situation there and partly by the conscious interests and subconscious needs of our own personalities”.¹ To all observations, each person — no matter what their culture — brings experiences, ideological background, temperament and biases of various kinds. They may not be aware of what formulates their views, but influences operate on them all the same.

Looking at a level deeper than individuals, such as professional groups, classes, whole communities or even nations, the range of influences on perspectives may be much more complex. It is well beyond the scope of this book to enter into issues of individual or group psychology. However, there are some theories that go to questions of colonialism and power relations that appear to this writer to remain relevant to Western perspectives on the People’s Republic of China, even if they do not carry as much weight in the twenty-first century as they did in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

One writer to develop interesting ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge is the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), whose closely related notions of power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) and “the regime of truth” have become famous. He has summed up as follows: “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it”.²

There are several implications in this quite complex sentence. Truth rarely exists within a vacuum, but within societies. What is true depends to some extent on power systems, including those within the political, economic, social and cultural realms. Conversely, truth as produced by these power systems helps sustain the existing power relations. In particular, Foucault considers that society’s “regime of truth” determines “the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”,³ who in their turn contribute to maintaining power relations. Applied to Western perspectives on China, it would mean that power relations within Western societies and between the West and China would have some impact on the ways in which Westerners perceive China.

Another theory that presupposes the link between power relations and truth is orientalism, developed by the well-known Palestinian-American scholar and literary theorist Edward Said (1935–2003), also famous for his contributions to postcolonial theory. Although Said was most concerned with Western scholarship on the Palestinian question and Islam, his ideas apply also to Western perspectives on China. The essential core of “orientalism” is that Westerners produce scholarship and notions of “other” civilizations that show their own as more rational, more powerful, and more worthwhile, and that they do this as part of a political power relationship in which the West is superior and wishes to remain so. Western writing on Asia’s past and present tends very strongly to take the West as the norm, with Asia deviating in some way as “exotic” or “inscrutable”.⁴

I see a good deal of sense in these theories, arguing that it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to avoid bias of one kind or another. In defending these theories I do not imply that the writers who contribute to perspectives on China are not good at their job. I also believe that the great majority make an honest attempt to interpret or analyze what they see or read.

Sometimes political systems directly impose ideas. But I see most of the constraints imposed by Foucault’s “regime of truth” or Said’s orientalism to be much less direct and much vaguer than outright imposition of ideas. In other words, there is much validity in the Western claims of freedom of thought and expression. But I believe that freedom operates in a continuum. It is rarely possible to say one person or society is absolutely free, while another is totally enslaved. What Foucault’s and Said’s ideas imply is that there are usually far more constrictions on freedom than appears at first sight, including for those people that regard themselves as totally free.

So opinions or perspectives are more or less never as straightforward as they seem. They involve reality, of course, but many other factors as well. They come from the experience, ideology and biases of the observer, from power relations and power systems within societies and the international community, and from a range of other sources.

The Literature: Why Is This Book Different?

There is already a literature on images/perspectives on China, most of it dealing much less with the People’s Republic than with the history of China as a whole, including the present. One of the earlier studies is by Raymond Dawson, already quoted above. Entitled The Chinese Chameleon, it argued that China continually changed color like a chameleon. Dawson was thus a proponent of the “pendulum” idea that sees Western perspectives on China swinging from one side to another, from positive to negative and back again. I have not included this in my theoretical framework, because it is an observation of images or perspectives, not an explanation. It merely notes changes from one side to another, but makes no attempt to explain them.

Among recent publications, probably the best known and influential is The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (1998). By the very distinguished British-American historian Jonathan Spence, it “guides us from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries” emphasizing works of fiction on China. As one important reviewer has suggested, it takes up “the gradual transition away from whether particular events have actually occurred to the narrower problem of how value judgments are associated with all experience or contemplation of China”.⁵ In other words, it distinguishes realities in China from judgments or images made about the country. I also wrote a book entitled Western Images of China, which covered the whole range of images from the earliest times until just before publication. Its first edition came out with the Oxford University Press in 1989, with a second updated and revised edition in 1999.⁶

There are also studies of the People’s Republic that look at how the West represents very specific aspects of China. A very good example is the study by Chengxin Pan of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.⁷ This takes a theoretical framework that overlaps to some extent with the present work. It is a fine study that explores the contrasting Western sense of threat and opportunity that form the main responses to China’s rise. Another book, by Cao Qing of Durham University in England, takes up views of the big picture of Chinese civilization and history, but through just one medium in one country during a comparatively short period, namely British television documentaries from 1980 to 2000.⁸ Cao Qing also sees a good deal of politics in the way the West represents China.

What makes the present book distinctive is that it attempts a comprehensive view on how the West has perceived China since 1949. This means almost entirely the mainland of China, and does not include Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau. Western perspectives on these three territories have tended very strongly to be different from those of the mainland, because of the different political systems that have characterized the People’s Republic of China since 1949, the Republic of China in Taiwan, and the colonial situations that have predominated in Hong Kong and Macau for most of the period under discussion in this book.

Methodology

The methodology of this book is threefold. The main one is to choose representative and important illustrations of Western perspectives on China since 1949. I have chosen them largely because of the influential position of the relevant author, book, article, newspaper or magazine. However, in some cases I have made choices according to judgments I have made over how representative an image may be. The same choices are made whether the images are through printed text, pictures or derived orally.

Another is to appeal to surveys that others have undertaken. I have not sought or had the opportunity to undertake such surveys myself. The reason for this is that I do not believe it either necessary or desirable to supplement the professional surveys that others have carried out, especially since my own skills in this area are inferior and not well-developed.

However, one methodology adopted is to appeal to some extent to my own personal experience and impressions. I first visited China in 1964, teaching for two years at what was then the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (Beijing Waiguoyu xueyuan) and is now the Beijing Foreign Studies University (Beijing Waiguoyu daxue). I have been witness to changes over some 60 visits to China ranging from that time until the present. Over that half-century or so I have talked to numerous Westerners on their perspectives on China, both inside China and outside, and shall mention some of them in this book. However, one methodology not undertaken seriously is formal structured interviews, either with individuals or with groups.

Development of the Media

In terms of the media that express and represent images, there has been change as well as continuity since 1949. Some media predate the People’s Republic by a long time, and a newspaper like The New York Times has been published continuously since 1851. Time magazine, the most important publication of the media empire founded by Henry Robinson Luce (1898–1967), dates from 1923 but has remained highly influential down to the present time, claiming a global readership of some 25 million people. It is certainly the West’s most image-formulating and representative weekly. The published paper book is many centuries old as a medium and is still a major form of communication, even though there is a school of thought that considers that in the long term the electronic book might replace it altogether. Radio is not nearly as old as the book, but it predates the People’s Republic by a long time.

However, other types of media are somewhat newer. Television was still a very new medium in 1949 and had not yet reached a mass audience. By the time of the US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, it had become profoundly influential in the process of shifting Western views from negative to positive.

In the twenty-first century, the most representative medium is the Internet, which did not become part of the mass media until the 1990s. The Internet has exerted the most profound effect on communications throughout the world, and contributed to globalization in a way the world has never seen before. It is possible to write to somebody on the other side of the world and get an immediate response. Of course, that was already possible with the telephone, but for images the Internet is far more significant. Newspaper articles and television programs can be seen on the Internet, which means that other kinds of mass media can lose their exclusive impact. But there is another point that needs highlighting: the Internet is open to anybody who is literate. You do not need to be a professional journalist or a published writer to put your view forward on the Internet. The comments from ordinary readers of newspaper articles or viewers of television programs reflect opinion and perspectives in a way that has hardly been possible until the twenty-first century.

Some General Points

A few general points are relevant regarding the formulators of Western perspectives. Perhaps the main one is that, by far, the dominant country during the whole period since 1949 has been the United States. The Americans have the networks in terms of news, publishing, television, radio and the Internet that have made their influence by far the greatest of any Western country. There will, of course, be reference to other countries in this book. Not surprisingly, there are non-American Western perspectives on China, and not all countries ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Historical Background
• Chapter 3. Political and International Relations Perspectives on China, 1949–1971
• Chapter 4. Trends in Political and Foreign Relations Perspectives on China, 1971–2001
• Chapter 5. Political and General Western Perspectives on China in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 6. Perspectives on the Chinese Economy, Population Policy and Environment to the End of the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 7. The Twenty-First Century: Perspectives on the Chinese Economy, Population Issues and Environment
• Chapter 8. Socio-cultural Perspectives on the People’s Republic of China
• Chapter 9. Perspectives on the Ethnic Minorities
• Chapter 10. Conclusion
• Brief Timeline
• Works Cited
• Index