Just re-read Edward Said’s Orientalism a couple of days ago. Wondered what would he say about what is going on in Tibet?
I am afraid his strong identification to the Palestinian cause would compell him to side with the Tibetans. But ironically, it is his argument in Orientalism that helps me to justify my identification with the Chinese cause.
Said’s work builds on Foucault’s discourse/power/knowledge concept, as Said himself acknowledges (I also flipped through some chapters in “The Archaeology of Knowledge” and “The Foucault Reader” and did see the connections). A discourse, according to Foucault, is a process of contention that solidifies a loosely developed narrative and transforms it into knowledge. Said applies this model in the Middle East study and claims that knowledge about the Orient (i.e. Orientalism) is the by-product of colonialism, as he illustrates through Belford’s speech in the Parliament. However, Said struggles to establish whether Orientalism is created out of subjective desire or objective necessity. In other words, he cannot just say Orientalism is NOT the result of a grand conspiracy of the colonialists.
This hermeneutical ambivalence makes me cringe. If anything, Foucault is very clear that the creation of prison (in Discipline and Punish), like the creation of morden military, is out of necessity rather than planning. It is precisely this author-less-ness of modern knowledge (particularly socio-political disciplines) that makes the knowledge so authoritative and so powerful. Social Darwinism was consider a true knowledge because it was NOT a creation out of the Colonial Office. Rather it was advanced by a hermit-like scholar (Hubert Spencer) who was known to be a nerdy and detached observer. Social Darwinism was de-scienced only after the collapse of the colonial system.
What really bothers me is not what actually happened in Tibet, but how it is interpreted by the West and the Chinese, and how profoundly different the interpretations are. If I apply the Said/Orientalism model in Tibet, it is apparent that each interpretation fills a need, just as Orientalism fills the need of the colonizing enterprise.
My hypothesis is that the Western interpretation is the by-product of an effort of “integrating China”. And the Chinese one fills the need of nation building, both internally and externally.
First of all, it is apparent that media on both sides tell the same story differently by selectively pick and choose facts. Once the narrative is tested on the market, so to speak, and is accepted, it becomes knowledge (e.g. as part of the education system).
Secondly, each narrative/knowledge is developed as a result of political power relations. The West is unconfortable with China’s rise to prominence and wants to co-opt China by forcing it to conform not only to the “international” economic and financial system, but also to the value system of the West by worshiping the same symbols and using the same lexicon. In other words, China can never be granted a world power status unless it speaks the same language of human rights. Yes, even the grand ideal of the liberals is in fact a means of domination: it is something “we” have but “you” don’t.
In fact, Western political science studies have shown that there are many ways to achieve political/economic order. In the short term, it is heavily path-dependent (a la Robert Putnam). Just as Foucault argues in “Archaeology”, before a dominant narrative emerges, there are many alternatives. In the West, the dominant narrative is that liberalism is a necessary condition for economic superpower status. A typical example is the myth that England modernized first because of Magna Carta. Or the U.S. becomes what she is today thanks to a priori liberalism.
However, this narrrative has failed to explain what happened in China. As a result, the Chinese rightfully question its knowledge-worthiness and seeks to establish their own “truth”, except China is not yet strong enough to transform it into knowledge. For example, the Chinese learned from their own experiences that it pays to tolerate an authoritarian government to lead economic development at all costs. It is a legitimate alternative, one may say that the history of Germany, Japan and S. Korea can back it up too. However, China is still too weak to declare it the “right way out of poverty” for other poor countries (i.e. a knowledge, see Said’s quote of Nietzsche on p203).
The West certainly doesn’t like being contested. The unorthodoxiness of the Chinese success story challenges not only the dominant narrative, but also the West’s image of itself (in Orientalism, Said points out that the Orient exists in opposition but symbiotically with a Occident). And the worst of it all is that the West can’t accept that it is the Chinese who are challenging it. Hence, I can see the spite, the outrage, and the schadenfreude from the reactions after Tibet.
Just as Said says in Orientalism, every Orientalist, consciously or not, is a racist. Every free-Tibetaner (except the Tibetans themselves) is one too for they consider the Chinese not qualified to rule peoples who don’t share the East Asian heritage. “The Tibetan culture is a world heritage and China has the responsibility to maintain it” sounds like a flawless statement until one questions why Tibetan or Uyghur is a “world heritage” but the Three-Gorge, now flooded by a giant dam, is not as deserving?
It is too late and I am too tired to continue. I know full well no one will have the appetite to read this posting. That is the position I am in and I am strangely comfortable with it. Whatelse can I do? Cling to guns and religion?
By the way, I tested this idea with Joel. He shut me down even before I could finish. “Stick with the coal.” He said succinctly.
Afterword
I just found out that Said was dismayed that Foucault was a pro-Zionist. How ironic: Said admires Foucault but has to live witht the fact that the originator of his reasoning actually doesn’t share the same belief with him. In that case, I should not feel bad that Said might have sided with the pro-Tibetan movement:)
This is not the first time I imagine a dialogue with Said. In fact, after 9.11, I wrote him an email asking how he would explain the tragedy. Little did I know he was already very ill then (he died soon after). I am sure my email, unopened and unread, may still reside somewhere on a lonely server in Columbia.