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MAPPIN6 SITES OF STRU66LE : Representations of China in World History Textbooks

Pauline Fu

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

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Pauline Fu Master of Arts Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2008

Abstract

This thesis locates possibilities for social engagement at the intersections of historiography and critical pedagogy, by mapping representations of China in World

History textbooks as sites of struggle for decolonizing the production of knowledge about China. In Grade 11 textbooks, freestanding discussions of premodern China frequently negotiate the trope of "Traditional China" which becomes reinscribed in

Grade 12 textbooks, where narratives of modernity wedded to historicist thinking exclude China from the formative period of the making of the modern West and represent recent Chinese pasts as a history of lack inviting completion.

I venture that such theoretically problematic and empirically untenable representations reproduce geographies of space and mind, denying students the conceptual tools which would enable them to think about the past and visualize the future in more imaginative and emancipatory ways. Clearly, the present historical moment demands that we work towards alternative ways of knowing and pedagogies of dissent.

ii Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the encouragement I have received from members of faculty and staff associated with the departments of East Asian Studies, History, and the Asian Institute. I am indebted to Professor Vincent Shen who rendered possible this project in its present form and guided me with a profound humanity that I strive to emulate. Victor Falkenheim brought me into this field and department, Rick Guisso and Thomas Keirstead commented on an earlier version of this thesis and affirmed the importance of its central problematic. I am also grateful to Tong Lam who provided invaluable advice at many stages of this project and steered me through the historiography of China. I acknowledge with appreciation the love and support of my immediate and extended families. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my beloved partner, Noel, whose belief in me emboldened me to write this thesis and whose intelligence improved its articulation.

Finally, I thank my students from whom I have learned so much, and to whom my work inside and outside of the classroom remains dedicated.

iii Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter l The Production of "Traditional China" 13 in Grade 11 World History Textbooks

Odyssey through "Chinese Civilization" and Echoes of "Traditional China" 14 "The Middle Kingdom" and its Ahistorical "Society and Culture" amongst World Civilizations 21

Chapter 2 The Narration of Modern China as a History of Lack 38 in Grade 12 World History Textbooks

Positing China Outside of The Making of the Modern Age 38

China as an "Un-cooperative Colony" in Legacy 43

Historicism, China and Global Modernity in The West and the World 50

Chapter 3 Where do we go from here? 70 An Enquiry into Alternative Modalities of Thought

Conclusion 80

Bibliography 86

IV Introduction

/ have no fear that my subject may, on closer inspection, seem trivial. I am afraid only that I may seem presumptuous to have broached a question so vast and so important. - E.H. Carr, What is History?'

Teaching about histories of sexism, racism, imperialism, and homophobia potentially poses very fundamental challenges to the academy and its traditional production of knowledge, since it has often situated Third World peoples as populations whose histories and experiences are deviant, marginal, or inessential to the acquisition of knowledge. And this has happened systematically in our disciplines as well as in our pedagogies. Thus the task at hand is to decolonize our disciplinary and pedagogical practices. The crucial question is how we teach about the West and its others so that education becomes the practice of liberation.

- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders2

While the forms of knowledge and investigative modalities inaugurated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been pried open by scholars working on and writing from various enunciative sites, their afterlife in manuals produced for plebeian consumption has rarely been subjected to such vigorous historiographical examination.3

This project locates possibilities for social engagement and change at the intersections of historiography and critical pedagogy. It draws sustenance from emancipatory projects which have sought to contest naturalized forms of knowledge, to remember against the grain of elitist and masculinist histories, to wrestle our historical imagination from the

1 Carr, E. H. What is History? London : Penguin Books, 1961: 8. 2 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders : Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University, 2003: 200. 31 borrow the notion of the "afterlife" of forms of knowledge from : Harootunian, Harry D. and Masao Miyoshi. "Introduction : The 'Afterlife' of Area Studies" in Harootunian, H.D. and Masao Miyoshi eds. Learning Places : The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2002 : 1-18.

1 2 grasp of imperial narratives and institutional practices, and to think beyond the impasses posed by exhausted categories and stagnated semantics. From an engagement with these methodologies, I map representations of China in World History textbooks designated for secondary school classrooms as sites of struggle for decolonizing the production of knowledge about China.

Rather than impose a totalizing vision of the texts under consideration, I attempt to identify itineraries that will guide us past their most prominent sites of epistemological and historiographical concern. We shall pursue the first itinerary in chapter one, entitled "The Production of 'Traditional China' in Grade 11 textbooks".

Narratives of China in the premodern period converge on representations of its antiquity, authenticity, continuity, singularity and timelessness. As I shall argue in relation to the first and second World History textbooks, representations of an overly determined Confucianism nourish broadly held but deeply flawed notions of a Middle

Kingdom fated to clash with an Enlightened West. These representations frequently negotiate the trope of "Traditional China" where aspects associated with an essentialized

Han civilization are affixed onto its remote past and rendered as invulnerable to the effects of linear history. Our examination of the third textbook will further elucidate the limitations of the dynastic cycle as an organizing rubric and category of analysis which conceals more than it conveys about the heterogeneity of the past. Its bifurcated presentation of China will provide us with a stark example of the pitfalls of severing

"society and culture" from the specificities of their historical conditions, and of the drastic consequences of a transmission of received ideas without having questioned their imbrication in politics of scholarship and matrices of power. 3

The itinerary of chapter two, entitled "The Narration of Modern China as a

History of Lack in Grade 12 textbooks" will navigate us through representations of

China scattered throughout narratives of global modernity. China is excluded from master narratives of the formative period of the making of the modern West and is included in its unfolding only when China is interpreted as obstructing, hindering, or menacing the ascent of the West to modernity. As I shall put forth in my discussion of the fourth and fifth World History textbooks, these narratives posit China outside modernity and history. Problematic is the message that developments in late imperial

China were of little consequence to the rise of the (modern) West. Evermore problematic is that these narratives also obscure the West and the non-West as constructed categories and historical catachreses which have been exposed as analytically bankrupt as well as misleading for historical enquiries. Finally, our analysis of the sixth textbook will advance our comprehension of how a narration of modernity wedded to historicist thinking, regardless of any good intentions, ultimately re-presents recent Chinese pasts as a history of lack inviting completion by the West. For, legible in the subterranean text of these fragments of knowledge is a sense of the vast cultural distance between the modernizing West and "Traditional China". The violent and undemocratic tutorials in the name of establishing "freedom" and "modernity" hence become discreetly naturalized as unfortunate albeit indispensable for eliding this cultural distance on which historicisms are predicated. Moreover, this second itinerary will reinforce the necessity of interrogating the forms of knowledge enabled and sustained by colonialism as history, in order to expose the inadequacy of world histories for representing heterogeneous experiences and sociological formations constructed as

"discrepant", including those which sought an alternative to, and flight from, capitalism. 4

That such representations are empirically untenable and theoretically bankrupt has been aptly argued by historians of China and scholars whom we might associate with the linguistic, cultural, and imperial turns. Consider for example, that over two decades ago, Paul Cohen had condemned historical writings cloistered within the impact-response and tradition-modernity paradigms for circumscribing our understanding of what was important in the recent Chinese past.4 Although Cohen's critique remained vibrant well into the 1990s, his approach has likewise been challenged by subsequent scholars in the China field to whom my intellectual debt will be made explicit in chapters one and two.s Of course, the quintessential critique of the West's production of knowledge about the "Orient" was articulated by Edward W. Said in

Orientalism, in which he put forth that European imperialism was enabled and sustained by a discourse dominated by binary conceptions of the Orient which denied the latter of their agency. Beyond identifying the techniques of representation employed by Orientalists in their corpus of literature, Said proposed "to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle" in order to oppose these forms of knowledge and to work towards alternative ways of thinking about, studying, and representing the cultures

4 Cohen, Paul A. Discovering History in China : American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. See Introduction and chapter one. 5 Readers less familiar with the historiography of China might find the following outline useful when reading this Master's thesis. While the earlier scholarship on China often fixated on binaries and dichotomies as demonstrated in the writings of missionaries and social scientists, China-centered approaches emerged in the 1980's as exemplified by Cohen's work. Then, the 1989 social movement ignited debates on prospects for and histories of civil society in that place, and the pioneering constructionist work of Prasenjit Duara was published in the mid-1990's. Researching China from the "margins" (from its various theoretical approaches and an engagement with the contradictions of its categories of analysis) has now become the dominant paradigm and method of enquiry, which has led to productive ways of destabilizing histories and unthinking received wisdom preferred by agents of empire and the nation-state. Readers interested in these conversations about the historiography of China should consult the Bibliography which lists the scholarship on which this project has drawn sustenance. 5 which and peoples whom inhabit "the Orient".6 His message resonated with a generation of academics, including Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen who set out to debunk received concepts of metageography in their collaborative project. In The Myth of Continents, Lewis and Wigen contend that profoundly erroneous metageographical and metahistorical constructs remain embedded in and therefore continue to constrain enquiries in the social sciences, to float unabated in popular imaginings, and to underpin unequal relations of power between the shifting referents of "Orient" and

"Occident", "East" and "West"./

What I am not suggesting then, is any paucity of scholarship which seek to deconstruct or contest Western intellectual productions of China, and of "the Orient" more broadly. Instead, this research project is animated by the conviction that textbooks could, and should, be within the scope of the meaningful work that we do in the academy. What I am suggesting are possibilities for collaboration between China specialists and the authors of World History textbooks as well as for conversation between academics and classroom teachers. I will further argue that for these bodies to continue to write and teach about a static, undifferentiated Traditional China in

"perpetual repose" incapable of progress unless mentored by the West as if these constructions were theoretically unproblematic and empirically tenable, is to partake in the symbolic violence and unequal power relations between the "First" and "Third"

Worlds. We might situate Pierre Bourdieu's early interrogation of the education

6 Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978 : xvii-xviii, xxi-xxiii, xxviii, 24-25, and 325-326. For Said's definition of Orientalism and its four dogmas, see pp. 2-4 and 300-301 in his monograph. 7 Lewis, Martin W. and Karen E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents : A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. See Preface, Introduction, chapters two and three. 6 system's reproduction of class relations against the crisis of May 1968 and debate its transcendence beyond the specificities of that historical moment. Yet, Bourdieu's enduring words at the end of his career, that we each have a small margin of freedom and thus must do what we can to escape from reproducing the social order, reinforces the legitimacy of political projects such as the present which attempts to reinscribe the education system as a locus of ideological and political struggle.8

I write this essay from my intellectual and political location as a secondary school teacher trained primarily in European history and literature, who has been committed to contesting normative conceptualizations of la francophonie and pivoting studies in the French Immersion programme toward the literary and cultural production of its marginalized spaces. My courses have worked towards enabling students to envision futures in which the unequal power relations and symbolic violence between the "First" and "Third" Worlds will no longer be sustained economically and ideologically. Of great import to me in my reflective practice of teaching is listening and responding to my students' concerns of what they are learning or not learning. Thus, the itineraries I trace are informed by my politicized work in the classroom.

While I do not wish to conflate Chandra Mohanty's cartographies of struggle with the present cartography, I foregrounded a passage from her monograph, Feminism without Borders : Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity because I find useful her conceptualization of (feminist) praxis for my own conceptualization of praxis. Mohanty

8 Bourdieu, Pierre et Jean-Claude Passeron. "Le maintien de l'ordre" dans La reproduction : elements pour une theorie du systeme d'enseignement. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1970. La sociologie est un sport de combat. Dir. Pierre Carles. Videocassette. CP Productions, 2007. See also: Bourdieu, Pierre. Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2001. 7 does not theorize academic research in a separate space from social transformation but reinforces the interconnectedness of struggles at the ideological/discursive and material/experiential levels. Thus a critical pedagogy that confronts hegemonic and normalizing discourses within academic culture and that makes space for the formation of subjectivities cognisant of the relations between knowledge and power, is an integral part of her praxis.9 I posit a solidarity with the end users of textbooks, with students and teachers. My conviction that the narratives told in textbooks do affect how students learn to think about themselves in relation to those whom have been discursively constructed as Others is informed by my interactions with these end users. Moreover, the central problematic of this project has not been tackled in academic studies on textbooks which remain primarily interested in challenges posed to educators endeavouring to impart national history to learners belonging to subnational groups marked as ethnic.10

The third itinerary in chapter three, entitled "Where do we go from here?" will enquire about possibilities for alternative modalities of thought. We shall look briefly albeit with fond interest at the individual and collaborative efforts of academics from various enunciative sites who have wrestled with the vexing conundrums of reading

"lack" otherwise, unthinking colonialist forms of knowledge, tracing post-Orientalist histories, and narrating counter-hegemonic histories of global modernity. Many of these pieces privilege our practice of history, and that of the modern world in particular, as a political tool aimed at social transformation. The histories for which they advocate

9 Mohanty, chapters two and eight 10 The limited space at my disposal and the scope of this essay prevents me from providing a literature review that might substantiate the links in my chain of arguments. Indeed, a cognate avenue of research complementary would be to investigate the cognitive and sociocultural factors that mediate the processes of transmission and reception amongst adolescent learners in specific environments. 8 would come to grips with the injustices brought on by "contacts" and "encounters", and relate capitalist development to conditions now embedded in material existence. Prior to concluding, we will probe the intersections of historiography and critical pedagogy.

In the scholarship on modern China, Tani Barlow grasps and interrogates the problematic of historical catachreses in her The Question of Women in Chinese

Feminism. Although these analytic categories are not completely translatable, lack fixity, and are historically contingent, they pose limitations on the production of knowledge in social history and have tangible effects in the "real world". Barlow's monograph aims to decode and release the multiplicity of meanings that were arrested in the formation of catachreses within discourses on gender. Of particular interest to her are three historical moments when heterogeneity of thought was "momentarily obviated in a great ideological or discursive move that reimposes what will henceforth be natural".11 Of particular interest to me is Barlow's notion that certain practices of reading the archive can occlude retrieval of heterogeneity in thought and the cacophony of voices of the past, how these practices may impoverish our ability to imagine modalities of existence that defy categorization. In chapter three then, I shall also venture that the textual representations under consideration reproduce geographies of space and mind and thus deny our students the conceptual tools necessary for them to comprehend the past and visualize the future in more imaginative ways. Perhaps our objective should be to tap into the repositories of meanings that were crystallized and collapsed by analytic rubrics, in order to recuperate some of the alternative ways of belonging of the past. The present interrogation of the epistemology of China in World

11 Barlow, Tani E. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham: Duke University, 2004. See introduction and chapter one. 9

History textbooks is written out of a deep conviction in the urgency of enabling students to unthink much received wisdom about global modernity, a conceptual release that might then empower them to conceive of sustainable solutions to the attendant problems of the present and future.

Finally, the concluding essay will retrace the three itineraries with particular emphasis on those of chapters one and two. Moreover, the conclusion will purport to establish the relevance of the central problematic of this thesis to our contemporary period. With respect to our situation in Canada, I shall submit these textual representations as sites of struggle in multiculturalism's management and production of differential, shifting subject positions of "ethnic" and immigrant groups. I find useful

Richard Day's reading of the history of Canadian diversity which suggests that the embeddedness of multiculturalism as state policy in European colonialist discourses, its embodiment of the "constrained emergence theory of Canadian identity", and its continued production of hierarchical categories of citizenship continue to circumscribe its otherwise radical imaginary.12 Beyond our imagined community^, I shall argue that our shared situation reaffirms the legitimacy of this project. Media coverage of unfolding events, popular debates and discourses indicate that, as Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak had articulated, "Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual

12 Day, Richard J.F. Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2000 : 149-153,196-199, and 222-227. Throughout his monograph, Day also provides a historical overview of approaches to managing "Asian Otherness" within Canada from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. See chapters 6 and 7 in particular. For a conceptual framework of Canadian multiculturalism, see the foundational texts of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka. J31 borrow the notion of "imagined communities" from : Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities : Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. io as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish".^

Clearly, the present historical moment demands that we rethink how we write, teach, and learn about the West and its Others, to work towards alternative ways of knowing and pedagogies of dissent.

Approach to (Primary) Sources The premise of this project is that the textbooks placed on The Trillium List according to the Ontario Ministry of Education's Guidelines for Approval of Textbooks are products of negotiated meanings between national and subnational groups and therefore communicate official knowledge about their curriculum areas. ^ My choice of textual representations should also be situated against the backdrop of changes in pedagogical and institutional practices which continue to influence how textbooks are employed by educators and what students hope to learn from these texts. I do not presume that text material is transmitted unmediated by teachers and received passively by students, but simply that the textbook is one of the resources available to both of them. Indeed, a cognate avenue of research would be to investigate the cognitive and sociocultural factors that mediate the highly contingent processes of learning amongst adolescents.16

Yet another complementary avenue of research would aim at a more nuanced

^ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Nelson, Cary and Larry Grossberg ed. Chicago : University of Illinois, 1988 : 308. Js To access the Trillium List and Ontario Ministry of Education's publications about textbooks, visit www.curriculum.org/occ/trillium/index.shtml Amongst the criteria enumerated in the Ontario Ministry of Education's published "Guidelines for Approval of Textbooks" are a textbook's : correspondance with curriculum policy, teacher's resource guide, "Canadian Orientation", status as a Canadian product, bias-free content, and suitable format. Canada. Ontario Ministry of Education. Guidelines for Approval ofTextbooks. Ottawa : Queen's Printer, 2006: 7-9. 16 In the Canadian context, Peter Seixas and his colleagues have attempted to theorize historical consciousness and to provide case studies of issues in teaching and learning history. Readers interested in the twin processes of transmission and reception might consult the collected essays in: Seixas, Peter ed. Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Stearns, Peter N., Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg eds. Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History : National and International Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 11 understanding of how official knowledge interacts with each student's knowledge of self and Others. Nonetheless, I would venture that in our contemporary secondary school environment in Ontario, the pressures of standardized knowledge and accountability is palpable to students. Combined with the narrowing of the means by which academic ability is being recognized at post-secondary institutions, our secondary school students are consulting their textbooks as the normative knowledge against which they compare their findings from resources available on the internet, such as Wikipedia.

The primary sources for this research project are the course manuals on the

Trillium List for (CHW3M) World History to the Sixteenth Century and (CHY4U)

World History : The West and the World in accordance with The Ontario Curriculum,

Grades 11 and 12 : Canadian and World Studies, Revised 2005.^ In addition to these four textbooks, I will review two additional textbooks that were previously approved for the Trillium List and remain in circulation amongst secondary schools in the Toronto region with little funds for the most up-to-date manuals. Given the limited space at my disposal in this essay, I restrict my purview to the gravest epistemological and historiographical problems in these six primary sources.18 Although I will endeavour to refrain from delving into the most glaring empirical problems, some of which may be

^ To access the Ontario Curriculum documents, visit www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary 18 More specifically, this essay will analyse material from the following textbooks in this order : Newman, Garfield and Christine De Geer. Odyssey Through the Ages. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992. Newman, Garfield, Elizabeth Graham, Rick Guisso et al. Echoes from the Past: World History to the 16th Century. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2001. Walker, Robert. World Civilizations : A Comparative Study. Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1998. Haberman, Arthur. The Making of the Modern Age : Europe and the West Since the Enlightenment. 2 ed. Toronto : Gage, 1987. Newman, Garfield, Usha James, Tom Cohen et al. Legacy : The West and the World. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2002. Haberman, Arthur and Adrian Schubert. The West and the World: Contacts, Conflicts, Connections. Toronto : Gage Learning, 2002. 12 traced back to the theoretical approaches under scrutiny, those few which I do permit myself to tackle I will attempt to do so productively and respectfully.

Readers should likewise be cognisant of the structural differences between the two sets of texts under consideration and their implications for research methodology.

While the Grade 11 textbooks present their narratives of premodern Chinese civilisation in autonomous chapters, the Grade 12 textbooks scatter fragments about late imperial and modern China throughout their master narratives of the ascent of the West to modernity. As the subsequent analysis will delineate, the conundrums with which the former textbooks present us differ in important ways from the perhaps more vexing conundrums with which the latter textbooks present us. Finally, I shall discuss my selected findings from each textbook in sequence with the exception of those taken from

Odyssey Through the Ages and Echoes from the Past : World History to the 16th

Century. Despite the nine years that had elapsed between the publication dates of these two textbooks, there is little variation between the content of their chapters on China.19

J91 have identified passages taken from Odyssey Through the Ages reprinted verbatim on glossier paper and reformatted to be more user-friendly in Echoes from the Past. 1 The Production of "Traditional China" in firade 11 World History Textbooks

This chapter's itinerary purports to navigate the most prominent sites of epistemological and historiographical contention throughout narratives of premodern China where the trope of "Traditional China" is frequently negotiated. As I shall explicate in my critical analysis of the production and reproduction of "China" and "Chineseness" in Odyssey

Through the Ages20 and Echoes from the Past: World History to the 16th Century21, these narratives converge on representations of China's antiquity, authenticity, continuity, singularity and timelessness. Their culmination in a dramaticized

"encounter" between an overly determined West and an undifferentiated China blurs the historicity of conditions and the contingency of developments during the Ming and

Qing periods. Finally, the sites we visit in the bifurcated story of China found in World

Civilizations : A Comparative Study will focus on the inadequacy of the dynastic cycle as a lens through which to view and relate the histories of that space, the hazards of setting concepts of the body social and culture in ahistorical splendour, and the embarrassing results of a transmission of received wisdom without having interrogated their imbrication in politics of scholarship.

20 "Chinese Civilization" in Newman, Garfield and Christine De Geer. Odyssey Through the Ages. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992. This textbook will hereafter be abbreviated as Odyssey. 21 "China" in Newman, Garfield, Elizabeth Graham, Rick Guisso et al. Echoes from the Past: World History to the 16th Century. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2001. This textbook will hereafter be abbreviated as Echoes.

13 14

Odyssey through "Chinese Civilization" and Echoes of Traditional "China"

Panels in the first textbook gloss Chinese "beliefs" as zodiac signs and the yin-yang,

Chinese "innovations" as the evolution of writing from pictographs, and Chinese "daily life" as banquet food, complete with recipes.22 A panel in the later textbook adds the invention of gunpowder while accentuating the "accidental" nature of its invention.^

Early on in these chapters, Confucianism is affixed as the essence of

"Chineseness" along with statements about its uniform effect:

Eighty generations of Chinese have followed Confucius and honoured him as their greatest teacher. Confucius defined the most distinctive hallmarks of Chinese civilization : filial piety, family-centered values, a thirst for education, a strong work ethic, and a belief in courtesy - not confrontation - to achieve final harmony in the family of humanity.2 «

The earlier text even refers to The Analects as "the 'Bible' of Chinese civilization", a statement massaged in the later text to "the guide to Chinese civilization". 25 Especially problematic is the patchy explanation of historical context. That Confucius was one of many peripatetic scholars pitching solutions to rulers of the four rival states during an

Age of Disorder, whose conversations were later transcribed as a praxeological text is crucial to comprehending to the appeal of his teachings to different socioeconomic groups at specific historical moments. As Benjamin Elman asserts in his preface to the

2001 edition of his foundational work on the intellectual history of late imperial China,

22 Odyssey, pp. 132-133,141,151, and 156-157- 23 Echoes, pp. 348 and 356-357 24 Echoes, p. 335 and Odyssey, p. 139 25 Odyssey, p. 138 and Echoes, p. 334 Arif Dirlik has warned that the discourse on Confucianism not only homogenizes and essentializes the society to which it refers, but also essentializes the West as its Other thus producing binary conceptions of the East and of the West. He refers to this phenomenon as "reverse Orientalism" or "Occidentalism". Dirlik, Arif. "Confucius in the Borderlands : Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism". boundary 2, Volume 22, No. 3. Autumn 1995 : 263-265. 15

"that philosophy - however influential - did not overdetermine Chinese history". In the case of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman puts forth that while Evidential studies emerged from an "intellectual evolution" internal to Chinese history, the professionalization of academics in the Lower Yangzi delta was made possible by forms of social patronage and research institutes.26 I cite From Philosophy to Philology here to demonstrate how foregrounding historical context can deepen our understanding of intellectual change as inextricably linked to contingent, social and political conditions in that place.27 Returning now to the text material, their discourse on Confucianism is especially privileged in comparison to their negative portrayals of Lao Zi as a scholar whom, we are told may or may not have existed, but has been nevertheless accredited with a "small book" in which he "opposed Confucian doctrines of social responsibility".

According to the textbook, Lao Zi's legacy to the world was the concept of wu-wei, mis translated in the text as "do nothing and nothing will not be done".28

A monolithic category of oppressed (Chinese) women also emerges from the pages of these textbooks. Students are told that with the exception of "women of the

Tang... [who] enjoyed a relatively high status", Chinese women were otherwise barred from the civil service examination system as were "persons of low professions" and confined to the inner quarters by an unspecified social custom. Therefore, the "women seen on the streets of Hangzhou, moreover, were not the most 'respectable' women of the city".2? Absent is historicized knowledge about the practice of foot-binding among

26 Elman, Benjamin A. From Philosophy to Philology : Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China. 2ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph, 2001: xii. 27 Elman, pp. vi-vii, 122,174. 28 Odyssey, p. 140 and Echoes, pp. 335-336 I thank Professor Shen for this translation of wu-wei: "with non-action, nothing will be left undone". 29 Odyssey, pp. 149,154 and Echoes, pp. 343,350 i6 elite women from the Song onwards that would situate it against a backdrop of increasing commercialization in China that diversified the means by which power could be attained. For instance, the scholarship on, and the primary sources from, the Song and the mid-Qing periods have argued that social practices of footbinding and the discourse on marriage reflected the anxieties of elite men and women over the blurring of boundaries between social classes as they sought to protect and reaffirm the legitimacy of their power.3° What I am suggesting is that the intersubjectivity of women in the premodern period is silenced.s1

Furthermore, the experiences of disparate women could be disaggregated along the axes of socioeconomic class, age and ethnicity. Consider for example, that even within household formations there were fine distinctions of power amongst the women who inhabited these spaces as wives, concubines, maids, and servants. Francesca Bray puts forth in chapter nine of her Technology and Gender that literate women wielded considerable agency within hierarchies of power in elite households determined by age and class. Thus an upper-class wife was a "matriarch ruling the inner quarters" who

I do not have the space to explicate my point here but I would like to add that there the textbooks likewise present a monolithic category of "the Chinese peasant". For example, "the Chinese peasant" is depicted as backward and superstitious whose "beliefs changed little over 3000 years" (Odyssey p. 140) 3° See for example : Yuan Cai. Family and Property in Sung China : Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life. trans. Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Princeton : Princeton University, 1984. Ko, Dorothy. "Introduction : Gender and the Politics of Chinese History" in Teachers of the Inner Chambers : Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China. Stanford: Stanford University, 1994: 1-28. Mann, Susan. "Grooming a Daughter for Marriage : Brides and Wives in the Mid Ch'ing Period" in Watson, Rubie and Patricia Buckley Ebrey eds. Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991: 204-30. Bray, Francesca. "Reproductive Hierarchies" in Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley : University of California, 1997: 335 - 368. 311 use the term "intersubjectivity" in this essay as per Mohanty in Feminism without Borders where she quotes Marnia Lazreg (but not exclusively in reference to gender in my case): "To take intersubjectivity into consideration when studying Algerian women or other Third World women means seeing their lives as meaningful, coherent, and understandable instead of being infused 'by us' with doom and sorrow. It means that their lives like 'ours' are structured by economic, political, and cultural factors. It means that these women, 'like us,' are engaged in the process of adjusting, often shaping, at times resisting and even transforming their environment" (192). 17 could delegate the menial tasks of maternal labour, such as procreating and breast feeding, to other women under her charge.32

One point of minor divergence between representations of China and

"Chineseness" in the two textbooks are the thematics I refer to as a "glimmer of hope" for Enlightened and modern ideals in the distant past of the premodern period in

Odyssey versus representations of the continuity of "daily life" from the Song dynasty to

"China today" in Echoes. Contributing to the first thematic are statements about the performative criteria of the Mandate of Heaven : "The people of China thus had a right of rebellion that was not part of other societies".33 We find nuanced statements that imagine China as a community moving up/down history : "Buddhism also acted as a cohesive factor... Along with Confucian family and state ethics, a common language, and the memory of Han dynasty glory, it helped to ensure that the Chinese Empire, unlike that of Rome, would endure and rise to even greater heights".34 The Tang dynasty is recalled as epoch of good governance : "nowhere else, and at no other time in history did a government show such concern for its humblest subjects'^, the Song dynasty is praised for its proto-capitalism : "it was the first and last time that private capitalism was allowed to flourish without government interference'^6, and the Ming dynasty is glorified for its maritime pre-eminence : "...the series of seven great maritime expeditions which took place between A.D. 1405 and A.D. 1433. They made China, for a brief time, the greatest of the world's maritime powers'^.

32 Bray, pp. 358 and 364 33 Odyssey, p. 145 34 Odyssey, p. 148 35 Odyssey, p. 150 36 Odyssey, p. 152 37 Odyssey, p. 162 18

Contributing to the second thematic is an attempt in Echoes to trace the

"underdevelopment" of EuroAmerican liberal concepts of human rights in the modern period back to the Han legal code : "Law, therefore, was a source of continuity for over

2000 years. Since the Han Code became the model, and since it failed to embody such principles as 'equality before the law', or 'innocent until proven guilty', it hindered the development of human rights over the entire span of dynastic China".38 Numerous statements in the text attempt to establish the consistency and continuity of "daily life" from the Song dynasty to "China today". The text even renders as mundane the practice of consulting "fortune tellers - often blind - who foretold the future using astrology or by feeling the shape of the skull, facial features, or bones of the arm. These methods remain popular in China today"39. Echoes also maintains that "the Chinese holistic view of wellness has become quite popular today"*0 and claims that the "one belief common to all classes", that of ancestor veneration, "even today these practices continue, whether in Toronto, Vancouver, or in Beijing"*1. Narratives of premodern China in Odyssey and

Echoes thus map the essential elements associated with Chinese culture and civilization onto its remote past, invulnerable to the passage of time and shifts in the specific circumstances which had framed such practices in that place.

Of grave concern to me are the sections entitled "The Chinese World View" which conclude the chapters and occlude consideration of the contingency of historical events.

Constructions of "the Chinese World View" are problematic for numerous reasons as was the Eurocentric scholarship that offered insights into how Orientals think, often

38 Echoes, p. 344 39 Echoes, p. 351 4° Echoes, p. 352 41 Echoes, p. 353 19 predicated on the assumption that "they" think differently than do "we". This particular construction of "the Chinese World View" as an essentialized identity which mutes the subjectivities of disparate peoples across geographic regions, genders, age, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes invokes Confucius for authority and authenticity. Both the

1992 and 2001 texts claim : "The Chinese, even before Confucius, had seen themselves as the Middle Kingdom" and proceeds to recall teachings that made the Chinese

Chinese.*2 Statements about their insularity and distaste for all things foreign punctuate the narrative leading up to the explanation of "The Chinese World View" and effectively serve to prepare the reader for the impending doom. Both texts state that "in the Ming and Qing, it seemed as if the Chinese had psychologically immunized themselves against foreign influence. There was no antagonism toward the rest of the world - only a growing sense of superiority. The Chinese became xenophobic (afraid of strangers)".43

Moreover, "on the eve of its first contact with the West, China was a civilization that was self-contained, inexperienced with Europe, and complacent in its success".44

These statements seem appropriate as a preamble to the following account of the

Middle Kingdom's fateful encounter with a monolithic West who would refuse to kowtow, depicted as "to kneel before the Emperor and bang their foreheads on the floor three times'^:

The tributary system was not imperialism as we usually define it, but simply an expression of cultural superiority. Its fatal flaw was that it refused to acknowledge equality in inter-state relations. Inevitably, there would be a clash with the West.46

42 Odyssey, p. 163 and Echoes, p. 359 43 Odyssey, pp. 161-162 and Echoes, p. 358 44 Odyssey, p. 163 and Echoes, p. 359 45 Odyssey, p. 163 and Echoes, p. 361 46 Odyssey, p. 164 20

I would venture that the "fatal flaw" of the above excerpt and its construction of "the

Chinese World View" is its entrapment in a teleology that precludes the possibility of interpreting the historical event as contingent on a convergence of global factors.4?

While the 2001 text ends slightly differently with three paragraphs on how "history continues to unfold", the concepts of inevitability and of confrontation still pervade statements about "China's complex sense of unity - along with its conviction of centrality" anchored in its imperial past and that the path to modern China would be

"slow and often violent".48

The above accounts of Traditional China's fateful encounter with the West is in some ways reminiscent of the impact-response and tradition-modernity paradigms employed in the foundational texts of John Fairbank and Joseph Levenson and which had dominated historical writing on China from the 1950s through the 1960S.49 But these ways of thinking and writing about China had already been problematized by historians since then. In his 1984 monograph Discovering History in China, Paul

Cohen condemned the conceptual frameworks of a historiography for circumscribing our understanding of what was important, and unimportant, in the history of China.

Beyond examining the epistemological issues of analyses that naturalized a West- centered template, Cohen proposed a "China-centered approach" that would acknowledge the internal logic and structure of the historical experiences of China.s0

47 See for example, chapter ten and Epilogue in : Hansen, Valerie. The Open Empire : A History of China to 1600. New York: W.W.Norton, 2000: 369-414. 48 Echoes, p. 361 49 Fairbank, John K. China's Response to the West: Problems and Suggestions. 1954: 381-406. Levenson, Joseph R. Confucian China and its Modern Fate. University of California Press, 1968. 5° Cohen, chapter four Specifically, the "China-centered approach" would : "look ahead" in Chinese history rather than "look back", abandon normative ways of assessing the significance of developments based on West-centered 21

While Cohen's critique remained vibrant well into the 1990s, his theoretical approach has likewise shown to be inadequate by subsequent historians of China and scholars whom we might associate with the linguistic, cultural, and imperial turns. The point I wish to reinforce without delving into the particulars of Cohen's work, most of which grapples with patterns of rendering the "recent Chinese past", is that many of the textual representations which I am tackling in the Grade 11 manuals have already been contested and at least partially deconstructed in what is now fairly dated scholarship on

Western intellectual productions of China, and of "the Orient" more broadly.

"The Middle Kingdom" and its Ahistorical "Society and Culture" amongst World Civilizations The third and final textbook under consideration for its representations of China in the premodern period is entitled World Civilizations : A Comparative Study.& A textbook written by a single author who claims authority over twelve "world civilizations" and published by Oxford University Press might arouse suspicion amongst those of us familiar with the Eurocentric, colonialist discourses produced by British scholar- officials and historians well into the 1980S.52 For, one might argue that the long shelf life of their dated scholarship suggests that the Orientalist paradigm still inhabits the thinking of British historians in the present historical moment. In the pages below, I

assumptions of "how history should go"; disaggregate analyses by geopolitical space; disaggregate analyses along the axes of socioeconomic class such as to write histories from below; adopt an interdisciplinary approach that would borrow theoretical tools from the social sciences; and conceptualize the history of China in terms of historical processes. si Walker, Robert J. "China : The Middle Kingdom" and "China : Society and Culture" in World Civilizations : A Comparative Study. Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1998 : 374- 387 and 388-404. This text will hereafter be abbreviated as World Civilizations. s2 See for example, Tsai Jung-Fang's critique in : Tsai, Jung-Fang. Hong Kong in Chinese History : Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 22 map sites of struggle in chapters 17 and 18 of this textbook, concentrating on their most prominent epistemological and methodological problems.

Several issues of historiography warrant vigorous scrutiny in the "historical overview" given in the chapter entitled "China : The Middle Kingdom".53 First of all is the author's blatant omission of seven centuries in the history of that space. While

World Civilizations is a textbook approved for the Trillium List for use in a course on

World History to the 16th century, its overview of the history of China terminates at the end of the Tang dynasty in 907. When the author finally mentions the Song, Yuan, and

Ming dynasties, they are allotted but one page and a half at the end of two chapters that span 31 pages and beneath the heading, "Looking Beyond".

Secondly, the narrative of premodern China that is told in chapter 17 focuses on political economy and from above. Never mind the historians who have laboured since the 1960s to write histories "from below" and thereby rescue from the margins the histories of the peasantry, the working classes, women and other subaltern groups. This

"historical overview" is one of "great" (male) leaders in which ordinary people only appear in the story at the point of their disappearance. Students might be bemused by how disenfranchised members of society perish en masse as a direct result of cruel practices of unreasonable emperors and how this phenomenon repeats itself dynasty after dynasty. Thus we are told of the building of the Great Wall during the Qin : "Work continued at all times, regardless of weather. Herded together in huge primitive camps with very little food, many thousands of workers died".54 And we are told of the building of the Grand Canal during the Sui : "Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to

53 World Civilizations, pp. 376-384 54 World Civilizations, p. 380 23 work on the public works programs in the cruellest of conditions, or were drafted into the army".55 When the people are not decimated, they are nonetheless erased from the historiographic record by the author's use of the passive voice. "The first books were written", "trade expanded"s6, "the water-powered mill was invented"57, "the uncertainties of the times enhanced the appeal of a religion [Buddhism] "s8, "the making of paper was refined", and "tea was introduced to China"59. We are not told however, who wrote books, who expanded trade, who invented technologies, who believed in

Buddhism, who refined paper, and who brought back tea. Which sociological formations were involved in these activities and what structures and processes enabled them to do so? My argument is that this narrative collapses the disparate experiences of diverse peoples into one undifferentiated mass of nameless, faceless people and denies them their agency in the making of "Ancient China".

The third and perhaps most vexing issue of historiography in relation to the

"historical overview" concerns its adoption of the dynastic cycle as lens through which to view the histories of China. For, as an organizing rubric and a "convenient fiction", the dynastic cycle conceals more than it conveys about the heterogeneity of the past.6o The author presents a Middle Kingdom where dynasties were founded by competent men such as the "Shang king", Shi Huangdi of the Qin, and Gaozu of the Han, then disintegrated under the weak grasp of their less competent successors such as the Zhou kings who fled eastward under siege, the last Han emperor who surrendered his throne,

55 World Civilizations, p. 382 s5 World Civilizations, p. 377 57 World Civilizations, p. 381 58 World Civilizations, p. 382 59 World Civilizations, p. 383 60 For a brief overview of the shortcomings of the dynastic model and an interesting attempt to work around it, see the Table of Contents and Introduction of Hansen's The Open Empire. 24 the Sui who were overthrown by mass discontent, and the later Tang rulers under whom the state was decentralized and fell to factionalism.61 Another limitation of the dynastic cycle as an organizing rubric and category of analysis is that it implies that advances and developments, be they labelled cultural, technological, political, or economic, that they proliferate during neatly bounded periods of unity and peace brought about by powerful rulers. The inverse implication or corollary is that little of lasting import was achieved during the interludes between the powerful dynasties. For instance, the text praises the

Han, Sui, and Tang for their legendary accomplishments, and belittles the Six Dynasties

Period from 220 to 589 as "the Period of Chaos". Given the political turmoil and disunity of the period, it must have been devoid of reason and productivity, as evidenced by the extraordinary appeal of Buddhism.62 Apparently, it does not occur to its author that perhaps we should be enquiring about how (what he represents as) interludes of

"chaos", fighting, and disunity might have been important and even productive periods in the history of premodern China. With respect to national narratives of Modern

China, Prasenjit Duara had posed the question, "Can we really recover the repressed voices from the totalizing discourse of History? "63 While it may be impossible to fully retrieve the experiences and modalities of existence of the past through the analytical categories and semantics of the present, Duara asserts that it is not however impossible to excavate "trap-doors through which we can understand history".64 I would argue that the dynastic cycle as a category of analysis is one practice of reading the archive which

61 World Civilizations, pp. 376-381 and 384 62 World Civilizations, pp. 381-383 63 Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation : Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995 : 47. 64 Duara, p. 48 25 occludes retrieval of the cacophony of voices of the past and may impoverish our ability to imagine modalities of existence that defy categorization.

Several matters of historiography likewise warrant vigorous scrutiny in chapter

18 entitled, "China : Society and Culture". While my intent is to elucidate the pitfalls/hazards of severing "society and culture" from historical context, and the drastic consequences of transmitting received ideas without questioning their imbrication in a particular politics of scholarship, it should also become apparent that my quibble with the text's use of the dynastic cycle is an interrelated problem.

World Civilizations' bifurcated story of China in the premodern period sets concepts of "China" and "Chineseness" in ahistorical splendour, thereby producing a

Traditional China in which the social and cultural aspects are constructed as essential to that civilization rather than recognized as conditional upon the availability of specific circumstances at a given time, in a region, for a specific gender, or socio-economic class.

From a theoretical perspective, this delinking of "society and culture" from historical context is untenable and displays ignorance of the scholarship which has aptly established and continues to stress the interconnectedness of aspects of change. From an empirical perspective, this approach nourishes deeply problematic but perhaps broadly held constructions of the body social and ahistorical, cultural essences, disseminates romanticized ideas and myths of structures of authority and governance, as well as reifies "China" as an absolute, authentic, singular/unitary and homogeneous entity. Consider the following examples. 26

World Civilizations presents a basic social structure set "in place" by the Han dynasty and that "existed until the twentieth century".6s In this account, "the social structure of China" was stratified unambiguously and the boundaries between the gentry and the commoners were clearly demarcated. Peasants and artisans could aspire to some level of respectability which was unfathomable for entertainers and servants.

Merchants, despite their wealth, were not respected members of society either, for as the text explains : "Confucian scholars believed that merchants contributed little to society.

They did not grow food or make useful products; they worked for profit. As a result, their social rank was low".66 Needless to say, the author's confident claim that sociological formations were stagnant and consistent for a period of over 2,000 years and in a changing geopolitical space merits the scepticism of any reader. This construction could easily be contested with reference to the numerous published studies of sociological formations that have disaggregated "society" by geographical region, for a specific time period, and often by socioeconomic class as well. For example, Elizabeth

Sinn put forth in her Power and Charity that merchants in Hong Kong, who were analogous to the literati in mainland China in terms of relative social status, found themselves in a position to mediate between the British personnel and the "whole

Chinese community" in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The accumulating and cumulative wealth of the merchant class enabled them to finance the construction of the

Tung Wah Hospital and advance philanthropic works in tandem with their social prestige.6? However lowly the "Confucian scholars" may (or may not) have beheld the

6s World Civilizations, p. 391 66 World Civilizations, p. 392 67 Sinn, Elizabeth. Power and Charity : The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989 : 1-6,82-83, and 209. Sinn's argument leads me to think that such opportunities would have been available to merchants in 27 merchants, that did not seem to stop the latter from propelling themselves forward in that society's continuum of respectability.

This interest in how official discourses were less than hegemonic and constantly negotiated by local actors is quite different however, from the romanticized notions of social mobility found in World Civilizations. Its author states : "During the Tang dynasty, peasant families could also aspire to improve their social status by sending a clever son through the examination system. If the son became a government official, the family entered the upper class".68 Question number three in the "Reflect and Analyze" section underneath even invites students to compare and contrast avenues of social mobility in premodern China and in contemporary Canada. While there was certainly some degree of social mobility, considerable if one accounts for the downward migration into destitution and vagrancy as well, upward migration was more complicated than conveyed by the above statement. For instance, the author does not consider questions of access; which households could afford to lose the labour of a son for several years, which families had access to the required reading, et cetera. Case studies of elite groups, such as that of Robert P. Hymes of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties, indicate that it took much more than simply passing the civil service exams to penetrate the upper echelons of society.6 9

These romanticized notions of social mobility are linked to myths about structures of governance and authority that are likewise woven into the text.?0 Towards

working in cities along China's coast during the same time period. 68 World Civilizations, p. 392 69 Hymes, Robert P. Statemen and Gentlemen : The Elite ofFu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 7° Throughout this essay, I intend for the term "romanticized" to mean "idealized" or "fetishized". 28 the end of chapter 17, the text represents a highly centralized, Chinese state headed by an emperor who wielded political and spiritual authority, and assisted by a roster of competent bureaucrats recruited through an equitable, civil service examination system.

The author even commends the examination system for "producing] a nation that was intellectually unified. Government officials helped to unify the nation even more. As they spread out from the capital to the far corners of the empire, they took with them the same vision of empire". The only reported downside is the intellectual continuity of

"Confucian ideals" amongst the officials which allegedly made them less adaptive to change.?1 Later at the end of chapter 18, this is reiterated as a defining feature of

"Ancient China" : "The successes of the later dynasties of China were due in no small measure to the centralized political authority and the bureaucracy based on merit".?2

Thus the author mythologizes a centralized state that presided over a unitary China in the premodern period as if it was a fait accompli, rather than a work in progress throughout that history as academics have argued.?3 I return to this point later in the present discussion.

With respect to household formations, the description beneath the heading

"Everyday Life" offers but a single template for "the ideal family". This "embodiment of

Confucian ideals" is said to comprise an extended family of three generations living under the same roof whose relationships were determined by age differentials and governed by "complex traditions" that were nonetheless formalized in the Tang legal

71 World Civilizations, pp. 384-387 72 World Civilizations, p. 403 73 In the context of the High Qing, Philip Kuhn puts forth that the sorcery scare of 1768 was consumed by the emperor as a pretext under which to advance his power struggle with a resilient bureaucracy. See : Kuhn, Philip A. Soulstealers : The Chinese Sorcery Scare 0/1768. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1990. See chapter one and p. 211. 29 code. Whereas the sixth and last paragraph does mention that "many families could not achieve the family ideal, especially those in the lower classes"^, the text does not indicate the proportion of families who strayed from the template. Nor does the text suggest how commonplace this template of "the ideal family" may (or may not) have been in the premodern period. In other words, could this representation of the ideal household formation have been prescriptive rather than descriptive, a normative template in official discourses rather than a normal pattern of association? Matthew

Sommer's research looking at legal documents from the Qing period has revealed evidence of alternative household formations that were more widespread than previously thought. Sommer posits polyandry, wife-sale, and same-sex unions on a spectrum of social practices amongst the impoverished and provocatively argues that these survival strategies were more commonly found than was the more widely acknowledged practice of polygyny.75 And in her Women and the Family in Chinese

History, Patricia Buckley Ebrey asserts the need to conceptualize the family, gender, and kinship systems as ideas and practices that were historical phenomena. While

Ebrey's collection of essays display a vivid interest in the social, cultural, economic and political agents of change, they also display an interest in tracing our knowledge to how

Neo-Confucian and Western discourses have framed our ways of interpreting and representing a static "Chinese family" and undifferentiated "Chinese women'V6

74 World Civilizations, p. 392 75 Sommer, Matthew. "Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China" in Goodman, Bryna and Wendy Larson eds. Gender in Motion : Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham : Rowman and Littlefield, 2005 : 29-54. And lecture given by Matthew Sommer for the Department of History at the University of Toronto, March/ April 2007. 76 Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Women and the Family in Chinese History. London : Routledge, 2003. See chapters one and nine in particular. 30

Scholars who work on gender would indeed cringe at the ahistorical constructions of "Women in Ancient China". There is some attempt to differentiate between the responsibilities and livelihoods amongst women of different classes, the purview is restricted to their gendered labour as wives and mothers. The textbook section nevertheless opens with two simplistic but contentious statements : "Women in

China occupied a subservient position, according to Confucian principles. They were expected to defer to men". Printed on the opposite page are tidbits from a loose translation of an undated poem by Fu Xuan who depicts the lives of Chinese women as replete with sorrow. Such representations float unrestrained in popular imaginings and fly in the face of the abundant scholarship produced by historians who have condemned monolithic categories of oppressed Chinese women as ill-conceived and deeply flawed.

Primary sources from, and secondary sources on, the premodern period permit us to glean much about the varying degrees of agency wielded by women of different socio-economic classes, the diversity of their gendered experiences across geographic areas, as well as the historicity of constructions and discourses that were at times appropriated and mobilized by women themselves. As early as the late Han dynasty, the acclaimed woman of talent, the cainii Ban Zhao ventured that the complementary and reciprocal relationship between husband and wife demanded that women be educated as well. She furthermore asserted that maintaining harmony between dualistic parts necessitated mutual respect with no place for domestic violence.77 Manuals of family instructions and precepts written by family patriarchs Yan Zhitui and Yuan Cai for their male descendants shed light on the differentiated roles of women in the family, and that

77 Ban, Zhao. "Admonitions for Women (Niijie)" in Sources of Chinese Tradition (Second edition). Vol. l New York: Columbia University, 1999 : 823. 31 wives, maids, and concubines were contesting and subverting discourses on Woman in the Song dynasty. Indeed, Yan Zhitui's detailed comparison of customs and female status between regions located north and south of the Yellow River remains an important record of the distance between the experiences of women and discourses on

Woman during the Six Dynasties period. ?8 Valerie Hansen argues that prior to the mid- fifteenth century, moral standards for women were looser. Prior to the Ming, widow remarriage "carried no stigma" and young women from prominent families were known to engage in sexual relations out of wedlock.^ These are but several examples of how situating studies of the experiences of women and the analytical category of Woman in premodern China within specific contexts would provide students with a more sophisticated picture.

The lack of specifics throughout this textbook's treatment of "society and culture" leads to terrible array of empirical problems some of which I have enumerated above.

The erasure of regional differences buttresses constructions of the body social as does the negligence of historical differences. Its author rarely refers to any specific dynasty and when he does, he vaguely cites the Shang, Zhou, Han, or Tang. In some cases, sweeping statements about one aspect of Chinese civilization in relation to a dynasty however distant in the past is asked to stand in for knowledge about that aspect for the entire span of premodern China.80 For a textbook written and approved for a Grade 11 course on World History to the 16th century, the author's partiality towards selected

78 Teng, Ssu-Yii transl. Family instructions for the Yen [Yan] clan. Yen-shih chia-hsun. An annotated translation. Toung pao. Monographie v. 4. Leiden : E. J. Brill, 1968. Yuan, Cai. Family and Property in Sung China : Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life. trans. Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Princeton : Princeton University, 1984. 79 Hansen, chapter ten 80 See for example : "Urban and Rural Living" in World Civilizations, pp. 394-395 and "The Arts", pp. 398-400 32 dynasties up until 907 and omission of the rest is presumptuous, preposterous and indefensible. Taken into consideration with the imprecise references scattered throughout, such as "from the earliest days of Chinese society", "during the early dynasties of China", "from the earliest times", and their variants, this rendition reinforces the trope of a Traditional Ancient China that is timeless, authentic, untouched, and original to the Han people. According to this textbook, this Traditional

China can be grasped by identifying and isolating unique characteristics of that society and culture, represented by singular nouns. And as made obvious by the mere page and a half allotted to the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties at the very end (and their erasure from the "historical overview" section in chapter 17), the apogee of this civilization was the Tang dynasty, after which everything went downhill.81

Hence we arrive at two interrelated epistemological issues that may be exemplified by a brief look at the textbook's representations of an essentialized "Chinese culture". Chapter 17 opens with an illustration of Confucius, generic statements about his timeless appeal in a "unique civilization" that was the Middle Kingdom, and a translated passage of the Analects lifted from an unnamed source. No attempt is made to situate the appeal of the praxeological texts of this peripatetic scholar in the context of the prolonged suffering during which Confucius lived and which led him to develop teachings grounded in social reality, until the next chapter.82 Chapter 18 opens with an attractive visual of the yin yang, generic statements about the deep spirituality of the Ancient Chinese, and a passage about the mystical forces of yin and yang recounted as a

81 World Civilizations, pp. 403-404 82 World Civilizations, pp. 374 and 389 There is one sentence that starts at the bottom of p. 377, traverses the timeline on pp. 378-379, and finishes on p. 380 which links Confucius to the Warring States period. 33 creation myth and simply cited as "Ancient Chinese beliefs". The section beneath entitled "Religion" portrays the Chinese "from the earliest days" as worshipping and leaving offrands for practically all things animate and inanimate without reference to any exact source of tradition.^ The subsequent section on "Religious Beliefs and

Practices" then pursues a partial discussion of the "two great philosophies and one religion [which] contributed to the rich cultural past of China". This account over- determines Confucianism as an uniform doctrine with a hegemonic effect on the populace, the values of which "knit China so closely together" that it should be comprehended as analogous to "legal codes or religious doctrines... in other early civilizations". To Confucius is attributed China's enlightened structures of authority and centralized governance.8* Daoism receives less favourable treatment by the author who depicts it as flaky and its followers as deviant. Its following amongst the (uneducated)

"common people" seems logical him but the only "educated elite" who would gravitate towards Daoism had to be those who sought (temporary) "relief from the rigidity of

Confucian society", a mental break from reason and morality.85 But the most slighted discursively is, without a doubt, Buddhism which according this narrative, only managed to penetrate Ancient China during the turbulent years of the "Period of Chaos"

(the Six Dynasties Period). It is clear that Buddhism is held in low regard, for readers are told that despite the wide acceptance of its teachings and the wealth of its monasteries, Buddhism "did very little to change Chinese society fundamentally in any

83 World Civilizations, pp. 388-389 84 World Civilizations, pp. 386 and 389 8s World Civilizations, pp. 389-390 34 respect". And although the author concedes that Buddhism made a lasting imprint on the visual arts, this imprint does not appear significant in his description of "The Arts".86

What is one to make of the fragmented discussion of a cohesive "Chinese culture" presented in World Civilizations and recalled above? Wrenched from their appropriate time and space, the representations produce simplistic cultural essences and terribly flawed myths that would be of little use to students with any prior knowledge of China, however rudimentary that knowledge may be.

Moreover, I would argue that the section on "Religious Beliefs and Practices" in particular reveals a grave epistemological and methodological problem that is omnipresent throughout both chapters on China in World Civilizations. This is a narrative that does not question received ideas about Chinese history. It therefore demonstrates insufficient historical intervention on the part of its author. Rather than being attentive to how his sources may have been written in a particular politics of scholarship and embedded in matrices of power, Robert Walker unwittingly transmits their biases and replicates their logic. Some of these biases are Orientalist as in the case of his category of "Women in Ancient China" that collapses differences between them.

However, some of the biases and received wisdom about an untouched, authentic and singular Chinese culture may be traced to Han Chinese sources and the legacy of a

Sinocentric, official historiography. This imperial historiography played a normative and normalizing role in editing and producing official knowledge about China in the premodern period that systematically undermined the contributions of non-Han and non-sedentary peoples associated with non-Confucian cultures marked as ethnic.

86 World Civilizations, pp. 390 and 398-399 35

Rather than exposing how much Han civilization was interconnected to and continuously influenced by those whom the Han constructed as Others throughout the premodern period, the imperial histories represented Han civilization as Absolute and singularly Chinese. Written out of the imperial narratives that consistently reflected the political and cultural agendas of elite men was the agency of local individuals and communities who participated in the formation of social identities and mediated ideas and practices of inclusion and exclusion. As Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald

Sutton contend in their collaborative project, Empire at the Margins, the historian must wrestle with the imperial records and its hold on historiography in order to arrive at more a nuanced understanding of the shifting relations between centers and peripheries and the mutability and permeability of constructed boundaries in the early modern period. Hence the authors reveal evidence from the sixteenth century of the coexistence of the official rhetoric of civilization alongside many other perceptions of and writings about cultural diversity, alternative interpretations that have since been downplayed and under-represented by literati agents of the empire.8?

These biases are evident in the author's adoption of the dynastic cycle as an organizing rubric, his privileging of Confucianism over Daoism, his misleading comments about the modest reach of Buddhism, his top-down approach to social history that marginalizes the people, and the very few innovations and developments he attributes to trade and empire, among other examples. He states, "Trade with other cultures remained relatively limited until the Han dynasty. The ancient Chinese were

87 Crossley, Pamela Kyle, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton. "Introduction" in Empire at the Margins : Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in early modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006: 1-25. 36 self-sufficient and remote from other culturally developed areas".88 The chapter's discussion of trade mentions but the Han dynasty's famed Silk Road, the Tang dynasty's maritime expeditions, and the expansion of trade during subsequent centuries. Rather than rendering explicit the pervasiveness of interactions between China and its Others, the Arabs for example, this description plays into the myth of a Middle Kingdom which emitted unidirectional vectors of civilization. Rick Guisso puts forth that in order to dismantle Chinese essences, textbooks should present a premodern China constantly influenced by Central and Inner Asia.8? Yet, World Civilizations permits its readers the luxury of forgetting those whom have and that which has been written out of the historiographic record of premodern China, effectively reifying constructions of "China" as an unitary and homogeneous entity.

Thus far in my summary of research findings of the Grade 11 textbooks I have avoided condemning any representations as Orientalist, at least not those printed in

Odyssey through the Ages and Echoes from the Past. This is deliberate on my part because while I find problematic their treatment of concepts of China and

"Chineseness", I am not convinced that they reflect any malicious intent on the part of their authors to substantiate the West's positional superiority in the contemporary world. One reason that authors may concede that premodern China was quite advanced relative to its contemporary civilizations could be that it is far removed from the present, safe in the remote past. More probable to me is the idea that academics who participate in projects destined for secondary schools are genuinely interested in sharing their

88 World Civilizations, p. 397 891 thank Professor Guisso for his comments on an earlier version of this paper presented at Mediations and Critique : Perspectives on East Asia, the 8th annual Graduate conference of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, held on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. 37 passion and intellectual interests with prospective university students. However, I cannot assume the same lack of manipulative intent on the part of the academics responsible for the Grade 12 textbooks where there is evidence of deliberate and sustained attempts to write China out of modernity and history. 2 The Narration of Modern China as a History of Lack in Grade 12 World History Textbooks

As we have seen in the previous chapter, freestanding discussions of imperial China reify constructions of an insular Middle Kingdom that can be known by stabilizing romanticized notions of the body social and setting cultural features in ahistorical splendour. We have seen repeated instances of a discursive erasure of temporal and spatial differences, such as when sweeping statements in relation to one dynasty however distant in the past stands in for historical knowledge of the entire span of premodern China. The trope of a Traditional China long past its apogee becomes reinforced and reinscribed in renditions of the naturalized master narrative of modernity found in Grade 12 textbooks, where China is systematically rejected from the sacrosanct story of European Enlightenment and Revolutions. These representations comprise the sites of struggle to be mapped in the itinerary of this chapter.

Positing China Outside of The Making of the Modern Age

The crux of The Making of the Modern Age can be gleaned from its table of contents where the progression of its thematic and its Eurocentric assumptions are clearly visible. Sections I through VII are titled as follows : "The Age of Enlightenment", "The

French Revolution and Napoleon", "Europe and the West, 1815-1848", "Nationalism,

Liberalism, and Socialism, 1848-1914", "European Hegemony, 1850-1919",

"Communism, Fascism, and Democracy, 1919-1945", "Contemporary Issues and

38 39

Ideas''.^0 China is excluded from the narrative of the formative period of the making of the modern West and is included in its unfolding only when China obstructs, hinders, or menaces the ascent of the West to modernity. The textbook's silence about the history of China from the Ming dynasty (where the Grade 11 textbook had signed off) to 1894 implies that none of what happened in late imperial China was of consequence to its thematic, "the making of the modern age".

The first mention of China is cursory and located under section IV in the chapter entitled "Nationalism and National Movements : 1848-1871" : "The Sino-Japanese war ended after nine months, with Japan the clear victor... Shimonoseki made the West sit up and take notice of Japan; but the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of

1904-05 startled the world".^1 The text provides neither the domestic factors which contributed to China's defeat nor the detail that the huge indemnity of 64 million yen paid out to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki accounted for one third of the income of the Japanese court, and was therefore one of the major factors which contributed to

Japan's subsequent victory over Russia.

The second mention of China in the textbook is also brief and situated under section V in the chapter entitled "Diplomacy and World War : 1871-1919" where

European imperialism in the nineteenth century is explained in terms of whites extending the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to non-whites which ultimately

"creat[ed] the 'global village' of the twentieth century".92 Once again, the ease with

9° Haberman, Arthur. The Making of the Modern Age : Europe and the West Since the Enlightenment. 2 ed. Toronto : Gage, 1987 : ix. This text will hereafter be abbreviated as Making. 91 Making, p. 141 92 Making, p. 190 40 which Japan won the Sino- Japanese war is reiterated irrespective of the weakness of the

Qing dynasty at that historical moment, implying that the reasons for Japan's victory were self-evident, perhaps a self-revealing truth. The United States receives positive evaluation in the text for its active role in ensuring equal access to (plundering and carving up) China, as do the European powers who step in to assist the Qing in quelling the Boxer Rebellion, for "as a nation-state, China was showing signs of political disintegration". Representations of Chinese people here as emotional and physical^ are particularly problematic in light of the scholarship on Modern China which has revealed the reasons why the British did not partition China after the Boxer Rebellion as well as the pretext of "retributive justice" deployed by the British and missionaries when punishing the Chinese.94

The third mention of China is under section VI in the chapter entitled "The

Russian Revolution and the Spread of Communism" where a narrative of "The Spread of

Communism in the Far East" occupies four and half pages, spanning more pages than

China occupies anywhere else in the textbook, even longer than the upcoming discussion of China as a nuclear threat. The narrative identifies an abrupt devolution in

Qing governance which culminated in a dramaticized 1911 revolution that apparently paved the way for and legitimized foreign intervention. Sun Yat-sen is appropriated by the authors for his enlightened (glossed as intellectual and progressive) thoughts

Question number 5 at the end of the chapter even invites students to compare "Dr. Sun

93 Making, pp. 194-5 94 In Culture and Imperialism, Said condemned European texts on the Far East that are marked by rhetorical figures evoking ideas of the civilizing mission of the West and disturbing justifications of corporal punishment when "'they' misbehaved or became rebellious, because 'they' mainly understood force or violence best; 'they' were not like us, and for that reason deserved to be ruled". Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993 : xi. 95 Making, p. 240 41

Yat-sen's... ideas of liberty with those of Western liberal thinkers such as John Locke or

John Stuart Mill".?6 This over-determined positive evaluation of Sun suggests that he would have been the ideal mediator between the Orient and the Occident, between

China's "old and cherished culture" and modernization projects. Mao Zedong, however, is subjected to negative evaluation and his appeal to the peasants is discounted as emotional, irrational, and cult-like. Statements about the attractiveness of communism to "'underdeveloped' countries" versus "'modernized', constitutional states" further suggest that China became communist because it was the easier option : "On the other hand, in those states which had few or no parliamentary institutions and an authoritarian government, communism provided a technique and an inspiration for bringing about a revolution".97 This narrative mutes the voices and denies the intersubjectivity of the peasants who are depicted as responding to their hearts and bodies instead of making free choices based on their intellect. For example, political scientists have produced scholarship useful to understanding the constellation of rational reasons for the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the Guomindang.

Of these is the idea that the nationalist Guomindang agenda was of primary interest to the elite in coastal regions, whereas the Communist agenda was attuned to the material conditions and "everyday politics" of agrarian livelihoods.?8

96 Making, p. 243 97 Making, pp. 241-3 98 See for example : Moore Jr, Barrington. "The Decay of Imperial China and the Origins of Communism" in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston : Beacon Press, 1966 : 200-227. Selden, Mark. "Conclusion" and "Epilogue" in China in Revolution : The Yenan Way Revisited. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995 : 220-252. Lieberthal, Kenneth. "The Maoist Era" in Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform. New York: W.W.Norton, 1995: 83-111. I borrow the term "everyday politics" from : 42

The fourth and fifth mention of China are under section VII in the chapters entitled "Europe and the West Since 1945" and "The West and the World Since 1945".

Passages in the former represent China as a possible nuclear threat, a "yellow peril" to be feared and controlled. The text states and repeats that in the context of the Cold War,

China had successfully developed nuclear weapons, as had France, but was unwilling to sign the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons that went into effect in 1970.99

In the penultimate chapter of The Making of the Modern Age, the modernization projects Mao devised for China are portrayed as driven by his feelings rather than his ideology : "Towards the end of 1966 Mao feared that opposition to his policies was developing within China. He felt that China was losing its revolutionary zeal, and in response to this he conducted a purge of the highest ranks of the party, the military, and the government".100 Furthermore, the assertion that "communist states were more concerned with national development than with a uniform ideology"101 is predicated upon an assumption of a coherent ideology which prevails over the materiality of national development in non-communist (read democratic) states. In the final analysis,

China is represented as an incomplete project of modernization in contrast to Japan, represented in subsequent paragraphs as having surpassed China in economic prowess, democratic governance, human rights, and arms control.

The conclusion of this textbook does not mention China but any reader who has taken note of its previous references to China in the modern period as essentially

Communist, should be able to read between the lines and translate accordingly :

Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Tria. The Power of Everyday Politics : How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy. Cornell University Press, 2005. w Making, pp. 331 and 335-6 100 Making, pp. 365-366 101 Making, p. 367 43

People in the West think historically and use the past to discuss and comprehend their own nature and their community... historical thinking continues to be an integral part of the intellectual life of people in the West. [...] Totalitarian systems, taking a rigid and deterministic view of history, offer to relieve people of the uncomfortable burden of making their own destiny.102

In the above excerpt and throughout the text, constructions of a binary opposition between a rational, democratic and modern West and a irrational, undemocratic and backward non-West are unambiguous. Problematic is the message that China only impacted the confidant, ideologically-driven West in matters of foreign policy.

Evermore problematic is that these narratives also conceal the constructedness of the

West and the non-West as categories constituted in the interactions between

EuroAmericans and the peoples they had constructed as Others, categories that have shown to be analytically bankrupt and misleading for historical enquiries.

China as an "Un—cooperative Colony" in Legacy

Published in 2002, Legacy : The West and the World develops its thematic through five units, entitled "The World Reinvented 1480-1715", "An Age of Enlightenment and

Revolution", "Modern Europe", "The World at War", and "The New World Order'V°3

This fifth textbook under scrutiny thus demonstrates an effort to link its narrative to that of the Grade 11 textbooks and introduces China earlier into its narrative, in comparison to more dated textbooks. On closer examination however, the crux of

Legacy is similar to that of The Making of the Modern Age. China is still represented as existing autonomously from the West in the formative period and all the primary source texts and "focus on genius" sections spotlight the ingenuity of a monolithic West.

102 Making, pp. 397-8 103 Newman, Garfield, Usha James, Tom Cohen et al. Legacy: The West and the World. Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2002 : v-ix. This text will hereafter be abbreviated as Legacy. 44

The first mention of China is in the last chapter of unit one, entitled "Contact and

Conflict 1450-1715". China is depicted as a distant land where Europeans equipped with astrolabes from an unspecified source (the Arabs) arrived in "search for wealth" : "... trade with India and the Orient was supplying Europe with spices for flavouring and preserving foods, silks for fine clothing, and herbs essential for medicine. The exotic nature of the goods imported from Africa and the Orient led many to imagine that a

Terrestrial Paradise existed". 1Q4 Readers are hence presented with constructions of the

"Orient" and its exoticism as if they were self-evident truths as well as a faulty causation; that a commerce in "exotic" goods preceded fantasies about the "Orient". While the narrative attempts to sidestep Eurocentric responses to classic questions such as, " Why were the Europeans able to conquer and colonize vast areas of the world?"105, its explication in terms of geographic fate, technological developments, and epidemics is reminiscent of the pseudo-scientific narrative elaborated in Guns, Germs, and Steel :

The Fates of Human Societies.106 Missing from the teleological narrative are the concepts of historical contingency and human agency. In this text, the "West meets

[the] East" as pre-constituted blocs via Europe's entry into the "Asian world economy", the details of which are not given until one hundred and thirteen pages later, after the chapters devoted to the "Age of Enlightenment and Revolution" and in the chapter entitled "The World in the Eighteenth Century".

104 Legacy, p. 107 1Q5 Legacy, pp. 107-114. 106 Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Diamond presents human history, particularly the rise of the West, as pre-determined by factors of geography, food production, domestication of plants and animals, "spacious skies and tilted axes" (189- 191). His account of the history of China comprises chapter 16. 45

Of particular interest to me is the second mention of China where the authors attempt to rationalize and legitimize the trade in opium. The narrative is articulated with care and unravels quite unexpectedly :

The Chinese had considered Europeans 'red haired barbarians' and refused to trade with them... The English bought silk, porcelain, and medicine from the Chinese and tried to sell them a number of things in return. They tried to sell woollens, but the Chinese had no interest. They tried to trade in lead, tin, and rattan from the Malay Straits, and pepper and rice from Java. The Chinese were not interested in English wares - they wanted silver. The demand for silver soon created a huge drain on British resources, especially when the English began buying tea from China in the middle of the eighteenth century... All this tea had to be paid for with silver, since the Chinese would not accept payment in anything else.10?

The basic message of this narrative is not hard to grasp. The British (we) tried really hard to trade with and please China but "the Chinese" (they) were being difficult and implacable. That tea was a staple in the British diet is common knowledge so China's unsubstantiated criterion of silver in trade presented the British with a conundrum. For a while the British were able to trade with China with Indian cotton but then "the

Chinese" began producing their own cotton which decreased their demand for cotton and meant that "Britain's financial problems were compounded".108 Opium then, is presented as a solution to a problem :

The British grew opium in India and sold it to the Chinese. Addiction to opium soon became a serious social problem in China - by the end of the nineteenth century, one in ten Chinese people were addicted to opium. Thus, the British had been able to create and assure themselves of a lucrative market for a drug that was highly addictive and the basis for the pain medication called morphine.109 Opium is reduced to a simple commodity and its evil is diminished by its modern day association with a prescription medication. A disturbing thought, given that trade and

10? Legacy, p. 229 108 Legacy, p. 229-230 109 Legacy, p. 230 46 its (mis)communications spurred several wars in its name, the link to which is not made. Not only are the Opium Wars not mentioned until one hundred and eight pages later in the textbook, this narrative of the trade in opium is situated snugly between accounts of European fascination with Jesuit transliterations of China and its "ancient script" and European admiration for chinoiserie produced by "sophisticated Oriental techniques".110 Also missing is contextualized knowledge about the Qing dynasty which would permit a less pro-British understanding of their interactions and decisions.111

China is folded into the master narrative again in the chapter entitled

"Imperialism, Colonialism, and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century" where it is represented as one of three "unco-operative colonies". The "unequal power relations" between Great Britain and China is infused with new meaning here, explained in terms of a British comparative advantage in manufacturing and military technologies.112 Once again, there is an attempt to legitimize British imperialism by invoking their (our) right to demand and "defend" free trade :

Many people today assume that free trade is within the natural order, and that economic interests are best served without government regulation. Yet, free trade was a form of commercial relationship created, sometimes by force, by the European powers, chiefly Great Britain. For example, although Western countries wanted access to the enormous market of China, the Chinese were relatively self-sufficient, and the Manchu dynasty discouraged Western trade. To remedy this situation, the British created a demand in China for opium..."3 Should the basic message be unclear, this passage is printed beneath a reproduction of

Chinese artwork, which is captioned : "During the Opium Wars, a Chinese artist,

110 Legacy, pp. 228-229 and 230-231 111 See for example : Liu, Lydia He. The Clash of Empires : The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge : Harvard University, 2004. 112 Legacy, p. 337 "3 Legacy, p. 338 47 perhaps under the influence of the drug, saw a Western soldier as a hairy, fire-breathing creature. Is there another explanation for this depiction?".n4 Conscientious editing truncated the original commentary so readers of Chinese are prevented from interpreting the artwork for themselves. Without being given the perspective of "the

Chinese" on this subject matter, without making space for their intersubjectivity and voices, without historicized knowledge about the domestic situation of mid-century rebellions in militia-dominated coastal regions, the reader is quite ill-equipped to draw alternative conclusions.

Furthermore, the short paragraph on the Opium Wars and Treaty of Nanking on the next page censors the extent of the damage inflicted on China and states that China was simply reacting to "alien influences" such as the enlightened "policy of free trade".n5

In fact, the "Review, Reflect, Respond" questions in the same chapter invite students to contemplate the "benefits of formal imperialism for colonized peoples" based on

"African and Asian examples".116 Indeed, I concur with Rick Guisso's assertion that "the nineteenth century needs to be rewritten" to reveal the sufferings of the peoples of China brought about by imperialism. "7

These bits and pieces of knowledge about the Opium Wars are evermore problematic when one skims the rest of the chapter for additional references to China.

The text cites staggering figures of impoverished Chinese men who, under "various

»4 Legacy, p. 338 "5 Legacy, p. 339 116 Legacy, p. 345 Consider for example the public debates in contemporary France in response to "la loi sur les rapatries" due to its emphasis in Article 4 on the "aspects positifs" of colonialism in North Africa. http://www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/o7i/article 4Qo87.asp n71 thank Professor Guisso for his comments on an earlier version of this paper presented at Mediations and Critique : Perspectives on East Asia, the 8th annual Graduate conference of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, held on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. 48 schemes of voluntary and indentured labour" travelled overseas for menial work and thereby established the major areas of Chinese diaspora.118 What Legacy fails to do is link the masses of impoverished men available for "recruitment" to the terms and conditions of the Treaty of Nanking which provided the legal basis, and the economic circumstances in China, for their substitution for African slavery. When the text does discuss the forms of resistance in China, it fixates on the Taiping Rebellion. The mention of the Taiping is not surprising; since the Taiping was based in Shanghai, it became the most scrutinized of all rebellions in China by Westerners. However, this over-determined discourse of the momentous impact of the West on China as a result of several fateful encounters fails to acknowledge that China was on its own trajectory when the British arrived.11^ Finally, Legacy converges with The Making of the Modern

Age on its disproportionally positive evaluation of Sun Yat-sen, identified as the "son of

118 Legacy, pp. 346-8 "9 Consider the primary source texts from mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, an important period of nationalism and radicalism for the intellectual production of China. The Self-Strengtheners put forth that China should learn and apply modern science but keep its civilization intact. See for example : Xue, Fucheng. Chou yang chu yi (Suggestions on Foreign Affairs). Feng, Guifen. Jiao bin lu kang yi (Protests from the Study ofJiaobin). Zhang, Zhidong. Quanxue pian (Exhortation to Learn). During the Hundred Days of Reform that followed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Chinese scholars asserted that national concepts were needed to ensure the survival and progress of China. See for example : Kang, Youwei. Kongzi gai zhi kao (Study of Confucius' Reforms). Kang, Youwei. Datong (Grand Commonality). Tan, Sitong. Ren xue. Liang, Qichao. Xinmin shuo (Renewing the People). Consider also the writings of elite women who reflected on their gendered identities and encouraged other women to rethink their self-concepts during a period of political and socioeconomic change. See for example: Dooling, Amy and Kristina M. Torgeson eds. Writing Women in Modern China : An Anthology of Women's Literature from the Early Twentieth Century. New York : Columbia University, 1998. Judge, Joan. "Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century". American Historical Review 103, 3 June 2001. 49 a peasant family who converted to Christianity as a teenager" and who "brought down the Manchu dynasty".120

As the narrative of Legacy : The West and the World concludes, China is once again mentioned in the last chapter of the textbook, entitled "Challenge and Change in the Global Village". There is a cursory mention of China's involvement in Vietnam as evidence of the former's status as a "yellow peril" to be feared and controlled. The text then proceeds to represent China as an area of domestic unrest and instability requiring the continual aid of the United States without disclosing the latter's political agenda.121

As in previous texts, Mao Zedong is depicted as driven by his feelings rather than by his ideology, in contrast to Sun Yat-sen. The Great Leap Forward is interpreted as a

"disaster", a failed attempt to modernize. During the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution, "no aspect of Chinese society remained unaffected".122 Mao's death in 1976 is portrayed as releasing China from his wrath which has "since that time" behaved much more appropriately in the international arena without reference to the controversial leader who succeeded him.123 Although Legacy was published in 2002, there is henceforth no mention of China in this narrative of world history. I would argue that this denouement is problematic because it precludes the possibility of interpreting the communist project as an attempt to escape from and find an alternative to capitalism and imperialism. At best then, China can only be viewed in this narrative as an incomplete modern.

120 Legacy, p. 365 121 Legacy, pp. 556-7 122 Legacy, pp. 557-8 wLegacy, p. 558 50

Historicism, China and Global Modernity in The West and the World

Perhaps the most vexing conundrum which continues to inhabit thinking and writing about global modernity is that of historicism. Dipesh Chakrabarty's monograph,

Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference offers useful theoretical tools for thinking with, through and past Eurocentric histories, a project he conceptualizes as a collaborative effort amongst historians working on and writing from various formerly colonized spaces. Historicism as a form of developmentalist thought

"posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance" that presumably existed between the West and the non-West. Much of contemporary historical writing remains fundamentally historicist, positing coherent, homogeneous entities which develop and evolve over and across empty, homogeneous and linear time. Hence, the worlds demoted to "third" are plotted along the transition narrative relative to their varying stages of capitalist development and modernization towards a known end on which all

History must converge.124 For, Chakrabarty argues that the "many Europes, real, historical, and fantasized" as the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories be they intended as Indian, Chinese, et cetera because these nonmetropolitan histories are interpreted and narrated to conform to a European template.

According to Naoki Sakai, it is from misconceptions of modernity as stasis that are derived chronologies of development presumed to have and represented as originated in the West and spread to the Rest. In his essay entitled "You Asians': On the

Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary", Sakai asserts that modernity should be conceptualized as a relational process, a "violent, transformative dynamic" that arises

124 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2000 : xiv, 7,17,22-23, and 30-32. 51 from contact between heterogeneous peoples and is experienced by all involved.12s The

"emanation model of modernity", transition narrative and their variants hence structure readings of nonmetropolitan pasts as histories of "lack", "failure", and "inadequacy"126,

(mis)conceptions which, as it should become transparent in the subsequent pages, continue unabated in textual representations of China in the modern period.

The introductory essay of The West and the World : Contacts, Conflicts,

Connections foregrounds an awareness of several historiographical issues relevant to narrating global modernity.127 "Introduction : Where and What is the West?" commences in the spirit of Lewis and Wigen by presenting the slipperiness of concepts of the West and its shifting and historically contingent, cartographic referents. The authors distinguish between spatial and cultural referents but appear to interpret the former as more "real". Next, Arthur Haberman and Adrian Schubert proceed to deconstruct and contest Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis by identifying three of his erroneous assumptions. Thirdly, they acknowledge the ideological challenge posed by those who, in the past two decades, have vociferously espoused "Asian values" over capitalist development, while remarking on the reductionism embedded in their propositions. Fourthly, a map printed in the introduction positions Europe on the fringes of the Old World economy and reinforces statements about the relatively minor role Europe occupied in global relations until the recent past. Finally, a programmatic statement at the end of the introduction puts forth that this textbook "tells two main

12s Sakai, Naoki. '"You Asians': On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary". Yoda, Tomiko and Harry D. Harootunian eds. Japan after Japan : Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham : Duke University Press, 2006 : 167-194. 126 Chakrabarty, chapter 1 127 Haberman, Arthur and Adrian Schubert. The West and the World: Contacts, Conflicts, Connections. Toronto : Gage Learning, 2002. This text will hereafter be abbreviated as The West. Readers should note that Arthur Haberman was also the sole author of the first Grade 12 textbook. 52 stories". "One" is indubitably the narrative of the ascent of the West between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and of "its offshoots and other areas, including the

United States and Japan"; the "other main story" is (an attempt to interweave) a social history of the "others" who populated the (colonial) Rest.128

The West and the World looks quite promising where it leaves us at the end of its introductory essay. Until we turn to the table of contents that is, where it is evident that the bulk of material on China remains cloistered in the last four units of the textbook, the structure of which resembles that of the previous textbook not mentioned in the present book. Parts I through VII are titled as follows : "Modernity and Encounter",

"The World and the West in the Early Modern Era", "Enlightenment and Revolution",

"Industrialization, Liberalism, and Nationalism, 1815-1871", "European Hegemony,

1871-1914", "The Weakening of Europe, 1914-1945", "The West and the World, from

1945"-129 We now turn to these representations of China with a keen interest in examining how a narration of modernity wedded to historicist thinking, no matter how well meaning, can ultimately narrate recent Chinese pasts as a history of lack inviting completion by the West. Up until the final unit, the narrative vacillates between cloistering China within the impact-response and tradition-modernity paradigms and reproducing the emanation model of modernity, theoretical frameworks which have long circumscribed our understanding of the histories of that place. Only by prying open to scrutiny the forms of knowledge enabled and sustained by colonialism as history, does it become visible how world histories underpinned by a teleological and singular logic are embarrassingly inadequate for representing heterogeneous histories

128 The West, pp. ix-i ™9 The West, pp.v-vi 53 and sociological formations constructed as "discrepant", including those which sought an alternative to, and flight from, capitalism.

The sole mention of China in part one of The West and the World, comprising six chapters on "Modernity and Encounter" is a two page spread on the former greatness of

Beijing during and of the Ming period. The authors refer to China as a "nation" with a

"history going back thousands of years, reifying "China" as an unitary and singular entity traveling through time. There is also the repeated (mis)use of the term "nation" :

"Beijing was the capital of a nation sure of itself, "Beijing was an exciting place, the capital of what many historians believe was then the greatest nation in the world".

Many historians have also contested the received wisdom about China as a nation in the early modern period, arguing that conceptualizing China as an empire would be more useful category of analysis. As Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton put forth in their collaborative project, Empire at the Margins, the historian must wrestle with the imperial records and its hold on historiography in order to arrive at more a nuanced understanding of the shifting relations between centers and peripheries and the mutability and permeability of constructed boundaries in the early modern period.^0

However, after praise for the aesthetics of the Forbidden City, the competence of China's bureaucracy, the centralization of its structures of governance, its maritime pre eminence, and its self-assured insularity, we lose sight of China until eight chapters later, w It would seem that the forces of modernity were internal to Europe and that

China but encountered, or more precisely reacted to them.

^o See my discussion of their "Introduction" to Empire at the Margins : Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in early modern China in the previous section on Grade 11 textbooks. J3! The West, pp. 10-11 54

When "the Europeans" arrived at the "empire of trade" that was East Asia, what did they encounter? The subtitles of chapter nine provide clues to this answer and to their impending historiographical problems, most notably "What is Confucianism?",

"Before the Europeans", "Asian Responses", "Religion and Culture", "The Policy of

Seclusion".^2 Consider for example, the freestanding discussion of Confucianism nourishes broadly held but widely recognized as profoundly problematic notions of

Confucianism as the essence of East Asian civilization(s), that the cultures of East Asia can be conflated and glossed as Confucian. I am not suggesting that Confucianism, as used in the most ambiguous and sweeping sense in the textbook, was not of influence on the scholastic traditions, systems of prestige and of governance in the region. What I protest are ahistorical constructions of "Confucianism" which neglect to enquire about the social, economic, and political factors that would contextualize this knowledge. x33

Yet, the first sentence of the description under question reads, "East Asia is home to a number of religions that surfaced over the centuries". From where then, did

Confucianism "surface"? From deep within the essential religiosity of China?

Also consider for example, the textbook's representations of China "before the

Europeans" incorporate and perpetuate romanticized ideas and myths about the Great

Wall, the meritocracy ensured by the civil service examination system, and the unidirectional vectors of sinicization. Arthur Waldron's scholarship on the Great Wall reveals the complexities involved in harnessing an edifice to serve of cultural nationalism, when the edifice has historically been a symbol not of national pride, but of dynastic evil. Waldron traces myth production to the romantic writings of the Jesuits w The West, pp. 120-127 ^3 See my discussion of constructions of Confucianism in the previous section on Grade 11 textbooks. 55 and other "Westerners" during the Enlightenment, since then appropriated by the

Chinese Communist Party in the twentieth century when there emerged a spiritual need for heritage sites during the turmoil of dynastic decline and civil war. While the state may try to rehabilitate the Great Wall as a national monument, will peasants ever forget the tale of Meng Jiangnu rendered heroic by her courage in face of ruthless tyranny?^

With respect to the meritocracy and structures of governance and authority, the text states that, "the Ming established the strongest, most centralized government yet", and in chapter one, that it was "a bureaucracy unmatched elsewhere" recruited through the equitable civil service examination system "designed to centralize and stabilize authority" then hand-picked by the emperor. *35 I have already tackled these myths earlier in this essay and I do not have the space to repeat my argument.^6 Nevertheless,

I would like to add that Philip Kuhn's thick description of the sorcery scare of 1768 offers counter-evidence to romanticized ideas about the relationship between the emperor and his scholar-officials. In particular, Kuhn puts forth that the sorcery scare was consumed by Emperor Hungli as a pretext under which to advance his power struggle with his local officials and to construct a Manchu identity by categorizing men who supposedly menaced or betrayed it. Framing "soulstealing" as a "political crime"

134 Waldron, Arthur. "Representing China : The Great Wall and Cultural Nationalism in the Twentieth Century" in Cultural Nationalism in East Asia : Representation and Identity. Berkeley: University of California, 1993 : 36-60. See also: Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China : From History to Myth. Cambridge University Press, 1992. x35 The West, pp. 121 and 10 136 With respect to romanticized ideas about (upward) social mobility, see also : Hymes, Robert P. Statemen and Gentlemen : The Elite ofFu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 56 thus provided the emperor with a context in which to reprimand and discipline a resilient bureaucracy, w

As I have put forth with regards to another text under consideration, some of these biases and received ideas about (a reified) China, (an over-determined)

Confucianism, (the myth of) the Great Wall, the (idealized) bureaucracy and centralized government, and (the supposedly unidirectional) vectors of sinicization may be traced to

Han Chinese sources and the legacy of a Sinocentric, official historiography. This imperial historiography played a normative and normalizing role in editing and producing official knowledge about China in the premodern period that systematically undermined the contributions of non-Han and non-sedentary peoples associated with non-Confucian cultures marked as ethnic. Rather than exposing how much Han civilization was interconnected to and continuously influenced by those whom the Han constructed as Others throughout the premodern period, the literati agents of empire represented Han civilization as Absolute and singularly Chinese. Written out of the imperial histories that consistently reflected the political and cultural agendas of elite men was the agency of local individuals and communities who participated in the formation of social identities and mediated ideas and practices of inclusion and exclusion. The representations above thus point to the complicity of a sinocentric historiography with the imperial aspirations of the geopolitical body simply referred to as "China" and the former's legacy on the epistemology of China in the premodern era.

Legible in the subterranean text of these fragments of knowledge about China is a sense of the vast cultural distance between the modernizing West and Traditional China,

J37 Kuhn, Philip A. Soulstealers : The Chinese Sorcery Scare 0/1768. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1990 : chapter one, 51,59, 70-72,211, and 220. 57 a trope familiar to students who have passed the prerequisite course in World History.

For, while the text concedes that China was one of the greatest civilizations in the premodern period, it locates the apogee of that civilization in the past as evidenced by its rejection from the sacrosanct story of "Enlightenment and Revolution, 1680-1840".

China would be permitted to modernize in this narrative, if not completely, but in a separate temporality and only after several violent tutorials with EuroAmerica. Having posited the cultural distance on which historicisms are predicated, the authors are now poised to recount and construct their "contacts, conflicts, connections" in terms of the impact of the modern West and the responses elicited from Traditional China. The extreme violence of the processes of modernity hence become concealed and naturalized as unfortunate albeit requisite to eliding the vast distance.

The first tutorial with the West is naturally the Opium War in 1840, the conventional temporal marker of modernity in China despite its open contestation by historians. In The West and the World, the narrative of the Opium War is situated in chapter sixteen, unit four entitled, "Industrialization, Liberalism, and Nationalism,

1815-1871", and beneath the subtitle, "Free Trade".^8 The passage commences with the sentence, "The freeing of economic activity from traditional constraints was central to liberalism" and enumerates protective legislation and tariffs that were repealed and lowered by Britain and France within their own sovereign states. The British then sailed to the shores of the Middle Kingdom to offer their enlightened ideals to the Chinese who, to their dismay, had "no use for [their] country's manufactures" as Emperor

Qianlong is quoted as saying, although his name is mis-spelled in the text. Luckily for

^s The West, pp. 226-227 58 them, "the British did find one product the Chinese wanted", the drug opium provided the parched British with a convenient substitute for the silver that had been pouring out of their coffers since the seventeenth century, as the textbook had explained in chapter nine beneath a map reprinted from Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT, although we were told the map is taken from an Andrea Gunder Frank's Reorientation.1^ When the

Chinese authorities who dared to criminalize opium and to ban imports, "this led Britain to declare war in 1840" on China who suffered a "humiliating defeat" in the form of the

Treaty of Nanjing. Subsequent references to the unequal treaties place the terms between parentheses such as imply that they were not unjust.1^

That this narrative of the Opium trade is partial and negotiates the trope of free trade in the name of liberalism is not particularly astonishing. What is unforeseen in a textbook that claims to present a social history of the "others" who populated the non-

West, is the repression of the heterogeneous interpretations of the encounters, and more specifically the subjectivities and experiences of "the Chinese". Did the British but passively "find" and supply the Chinese with something they already demanded? Robert

Marks argues in his monograph, The Origins of the Modern World : Fate and Fortune in the Rise of the West, that the British governor-general of India was "charged with increasing production of the drug there and pushing its sale in China". Marks describes the means used by the British to promote opium such as distributing free pipes, making opium more accessible by lowering prices, and selling the drug to new consumers at

!39 The West, p. 127 Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998. »4° See for example, the authors' use of "unequal treaties" three times on pp. 315-316. 59 discounted prices. 141 Commissioner Lin Zexu's impassioned letter addressed to Queen

Victoria is not simply lost in translation but erased from this narrative. Marks' discussion of the multiple and overlapping vested interests of British iron and steam producers, cotton manufacturers, colonial government in India, other European governments, all of whom clamoured for war against China also permits us to complicate the narrative beyond a binary logic of a liberal West giving lessons to a stubbornly closed China. From the perspective of this historian, the Opium trade and war was a case where the British government was willing and eager to use force in order to secure for its industries a comparative advantage in global trade. w

Without being told about China's conversion to a silver-based economy where even peasants had to remit their taxes in silver, a change that predated the overly determined arrival of the Europeans, what are students to make of China's unsubstantiated demand for silver?^ Moreover, how were "the Chinese" affected by the unequal treaties? The textbook poorly equips readers to understand how peoples of different ages, genders, socio-economic classes, ethnicities, and geographic regions experienced the Opium trade and its consequences. The text gives few indications beyond figures representing material losses and indemnities (over)paid by the late Qing government. And when the Opium War is mentioned again it is in chapter twenty-two, entitled "Imperialism, 1871-1914". This chapter opens with a historicist passage about

Europeans bringing "Westernization and industrialization" to the non-European world beneath which is printed a full-colour image of a white, female missionary teaching

'41 Marks, Robert. The Origins of the Modern World : Fate and Fortune in the Rise of the West. Lanham : Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007: 114. '42 Marks, chapter four '43 See for example the discussion of silver in : Pomeranz, chapters four and six 6o

"God is love" to children of colour who frame the rural and untamed setting. Thus the authors write, "in the nineteenth century, imperialism was also attacked by some in the

West, but the term was not generally associated with evils''.^ Indeed, primary sources from and the scholarship on colonial projects in the nineteenth century strongly suggest otherwise.

Their case for imperialism and its relative evil is further enforced visually and discursively by a "document in history" printed against a violet background, entitled

"The Case for Imperialism".^ Upon arrival at the end of chapter questions, we are asked to "focus [our] knowledge" on "How did many Chinese compete with and benefit from contacts with Western imperialists" and to "extend [our] thinking" to contemplate

(or in the case of ill-equipped students, speculate on) "Why did China find it hard to adapt Western culture". I am not suggesting that "colonized peoples" had no agency in their contacts with their "colonizers" nor am I suggesting that collaboration and complicity were not part of imperial projects everywhere.1^ My point here converges with that of Dipesh Chakrabarty who contends that histories which work towards decentering Europe would and should foreground how much violence, repression, and undemocratic processes were employed in the process of establishing "democracy",

"freedom", and "modernity".^

»44 The West, p. 300 !45 The West, p. 302 ^6 Elsewhere in another essay, I have engaged the scholarship of historians of colonial Hong Kong who contest the received notions of marginality and subalternity and I have argued that approaches to writing social histories of colonialized spaces must wrestle with romanticized ideas of struggle and resistance. See for example: Carroll, John M. Edge of Empires : Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2005. ^Chakrabarty, pp.43-45 6l

One indication of these heterogeneous experiences is tucked away in the section on migration in chapter nineteen as part of unit five entitled "European Hegemony, i87i-i9i4".148 Asians, Chinese people in particular, are depicted as simply lured to

Pacific coast of the United States by the Gold Rush of 1849. The text does cite the

"political instability in China, in part provoked by the Western presence" as one of the factors that made available masses of eager workers. However, the text does not cite the provisions of the unequal treaties which permitted transportation of human beings who became bonded labourers once aboard British vessels and who replaced the then outlawed slave trade. For example, the foundational text of Elizabeth Sinn recalls how the Tung Wah Hospital Committee members were involved in combating human trafficking from mainland China through Hong Kong, a lucrative trade in which the

European powers were actively involved. The Hospital Committee sought to eradicate the kidnapping of "coolies" and the illegal sale of young women for "emigration" to labour in distant lands such as Cuba, Peru, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and the West Indies, to repatriate those of whom had been transported against their free will and/or thought they were headed for San Francisco, the Gold Mountain.J49 Furthermore, this flow of persons from the non-West to the West appears almost commonsensical when situated within a narration of modernity wedded to historicist thinking. It would seem natural that migration proceeds from "less developed" to "more developed" countries in chapter twenty-nine entitled, "A Golden Age of Western Capitalism, 1945-1973".150

According to the authors of The West and the World, how did Traditional China react to Western imperialism? In a narrative that discursively replicates the logic of

!48 The West, pp. 269-270 !49 Sinn, pp. 89-117 is0 The West, pp. 420-422 62 colonialism as history, the authors direct our gaze towards the Boxer uprising, the Self-

Strengtheners, the Republican revolution, and the May Fourth. I will refrain from commenting on the problematic representation of the Self-Strengthening movement as

"not successful" and a failed attempt to "cop[y] Japanese models".^1 Nor will I risk repeating myself by tackling the overly positive evaluation of Sun Yat-sen's role in the

Republican revolution, related such as to make the revolution legible to the West and to appropriate it as a Western-inspired event in China. Their rendition occludes the possibility of conceptualizing the Republican revolution in terms of a power struggle between a reforming Qing dynasty and the local elites begun before the Europeans' arrival.^2

A note first on the historiography of the Boxers who are represented as a popular revolt, an emotional and physical response, directed against missionary and diplomatic personnel working in China. ^3 In Discovering History in China, Paul Cohen had put forth that such accounts of the nineteenth century should distinguish between "political" and "authentic" antiforeignism, and that the former was a response to primarily indigenous social, economic and political conditions, w In his later work, History in

Three Keys, Cohen exemplifies a "China-centered approach" to the Boxer uprising and addresses theoretical issues related to three alternative "ways of 'knowing' the past" as event, experience, and myth. Of most concern to Cohen is the Boxers as myth, the ways by which mythologizers have appropriated, reworked, and invoked the Boxers for

w The West, p. 51 w The West, p. 367 See for example: Cohen, chapters two and four '53 The West, p. 315 wCohen, pp.48-49 63 political mobilization in twentieth century China and its subsequent dissemination via the arts, literature, monuments in public spaces, acts of remembrance, and mass print media, ^s At issue in this text's representation of the Boxers is how this framework of analysis "discourages serious inquiry into those facets of the history of the period that were unrelated, or at best remotely related, to the Western presence".^6

I would however, like to comment on representations of the May Fourth and its politics of scholarship. This textbook gives little information about the movement, stating that it was essentially an instance where "students and their radical-minded teachers demanded cultural change to replace Confucianism with modern Western ideas, what they called 'Mr. Democracy' and 'Mr. Science"'.^ Printed on the next page against a violet backdrop is a translated excerpt of Chen Duxiu's "The Attack on

Confucianism" condemning the oppression of (Chinese) women. This "document in history" is juxtaposed with a black and white image of a Chinese woman posing for the camera with a thick volume in her lap and a canine by her side, accompanied by the caption, "A woman from Beijing, c. 1910. This photograph indicates how Chinese culture began adapting Western styles for its own purposes. The woman is dressed in

Western clothes and her surroundings reflect Western style of portraiture".^8 These representations are problematic for several reasons. For example, Dorothy Ko puts forth that the universalized image of victimized women in Traditional China dates to the

May Fourth-New Culture period when the victimized woman became a symbol for a

Chinese nation violated by foreign aggressors, a powerful symbol that was subsequently

15s Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys : The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York : Columbia University Press, 1997 : Preface, "Prologue : The Mythologized Past", and Conclusion. 's6 Cohen, Discovering, pp. 52-53 w The West, p. 367 is8 The West, pp. 367-368 64 appropriated and mobilized by the Chinese Communist Party and which permitted the

CCP to declare to have liberated women from the yoke of Confucian patriarchy and feudal traditions. Ko thus argues that historians must think and write against the powerful May Fourth legacy in order to retrieve social realities about how literate women enjoyed much agency and carved out meaningful lives for themselves in seventeenth century China. ^ My point here is that representations of cloistered

(Chinese) women oppressed under Confucianism and whose lives were replete with sorrow become accomplice to the perpetuation of biases imbricated in the source material as well as reify constructions of Traditional China, which hence render possible a narration of the vast cultural distance that must be elided for China to gain membership among "modern civilizations".

The last three sites of struggle I will map are located in The West and the World's discussion of "The Cold War in Asia" in relation to "The Chinese Revolution" and depiction of the People's Republic of China during the era of Deng Xiaoping.160 My contention is that once we interrogate these forms of knowledge complicit with world histories which impose a teleological and singular logic, we begin to see their inadequacy for comprehending and representing the heterogeneous experiences and forms of human association that existed in mid- to late twentieth century China denigrated as "discrepant", "totalitarian", and in the final analysis a youth aberration.

Hence, these representations become a form of symbolic violence that discreetly enable and sustain the unequal relations of power between the West and the Rest.

J59 Ko, Dorothy. "Introduction: Gender and the Politics of Chinese History" in Teachers of the Inner Chambers : Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1994: 1-26. 160 The West, pp. 408-410 and 437-439 65

Chapter twenty-eight entitled, "Peace and Cold War, 1945-1973" commences by naturalizing democracy as the most desirable form of human association and by equating communism with evil. To this end, the objective of the Truman Doctrine is recalled as to "help free people maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes".161 The two pages on China as the primary villain in the section on "The Cold

War in Asia" then proceed to offer a host of examples indicting communism during the

Mao era as one such "aggressive movement" and "totalitarian regime". Amongst the programmes and practices organized under the rubric of "the Chinese Revolution" are the invasion of Tibet and persecution of Tibetans, the removal of land from landlords, the imposition of "Soviet-style industrialization", the persecution and deportation of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, the "siphonfing]" of food from the rural regions which led to famine, the systematic extermination of Mao's opponents, and other

"disastrous" policies of Mao Zedong that marked China's descent into "chaos".162 At the end of the chapter, one of the "Make Connections" questions encourages students to compare and contrast the Cultural Revolution with "youth counter-cultures in the

West".l63

The final mention of China in this narrative is situated in chapter thirty where the authors praise the benefits of the Dengist era economic reforms and plot the development of its economy as a direct function of time. "Focus Your Knowledge" question number four even asks students, "How did economic reforms contribute to

161 The West, p. 407 162 The West, pp. 408-410 163 The West, p. 431 66 rising prosperity in China by the mid-i990s?"l64 Whereas the international community finally welcomed China into the organizations such as the World Bank, International

Monetary Fund, and the Asia Development Bank, members of the communist leadership and community were discontented. The story culminates with a rendition of the 1989 social movement, quoted at length below:

Economic change and political rigidity did not go well together. By the late 1980s, there were growing demands for greater freedom. In 1989, riots spread across the country. In Beijing, the capital, there were mass demonstrations in Tienamin Square. At first the government was tolerant; soon it turned to repression. On June 4,1989, it ordered the People's Liberation Army to clear the Square. It did so, killing thousands of demonstrators in the process. The West was outraged, especially the United States. This criticism had little effect on the government, which argued that there was a general threat of disorder.1^ The passage is accompanied by a full-colour reproduction of the highly mediatised image of a man who blocked the route of several tanks rolling towards Tiananmen

Square, captionned : "this powerful image dramatized the repression for the rest of the world". Indeed, students are urged to "debate whether nations should continue to trade with China or support its hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games, considering its human rights record".166 Taken together, the above representations of the 1989 social movement which essentialize it as a pro-democracy movement violently repressed by a totalitarian state perpetuate certain deep-seated myths about the historical moment and place that I do not wish to delve into here. Nor do I wish my comments to be mistaken as support for the Party's actions. What I am questioning is this textbook's narration of the social movement in a separate space from protests against globalization in the West, the latter of which are summarized in two paragraphs, a photograph, and a "document in history" in the next chapter. The reduction of the complexities of the historical l64 The West, p. 444 lf>5 The West, p. 439 166 The West, p. 445 67 moment to ahistorical binaries occludes the possibility of contemplating the 1989 social movement as part of our shared experiences of resistance against global capitalism.

My point here is informed by the collected essays of Wang Hui in China's New

Order. Wang Hui states that he writes from his location as one of the political dissidents of the June 4, 1989 movement who remains deeply concerned by how that historical moment has been framed as a "transitional" historical period towards a known end in China. His brief experience of exile in central China imprinted him with a sense of the distance between living standards in the metropole and the sheer poverty of the hinterland, and marks his writing with an urgency to palliate the social injustices brought on by uneven economic development and state complicity in the post-socialist period. What Wang purports to do in his first essay, "The Historical Conditions of the

1989 Social Movement and the Antihistorical Explanation of 'Neoliberalism'" is to reveal how the state-directed economic reforms from 1978 onwards brought about

"revolutionary" changes in social existence. More specifically, Wang identifies four categories of changes which became the catalysts for 1989 and its enduring social crises : the unequal distribution of resources and rent-seeking behaviour amongst officials, the withering of the socialist "iron rice bowl", diminishing returns on investment, and overall social insecurity and discontent, especially in the countryside where the gap between urban and rural standards of living continued to widen. Clearly, the state was in crisis of legitimacy by 1989. From the perspective of students (and workers) who felt that they had lost much and gained little from the "free" and "unregulated" market, they talked of saving China and conceived of their petition to the government as a patriotic 68 plea.16? Of course, other members of society who were attracted to and implicated in the movement often appropriated the students' trenchant critique of capitalism and utilized the movement for their own political gains, as did many interest groups and "public intellectuals". More importantly, Wang Hui posits a direct link between the 1989 social movement and the protests against the World Trade Organization and IMP that took place in Seattle, 1999 and in Washington D.C., 2000 respectively. In other words, Wang asserts the transcendence of the event beyond the specificities of Chinese history and its situation within a framework of global transformations.168

Throughout the three Grade 12 textbooks under consideration, constructions of a binary opposition between a rational, democratic and modern West and an irrational, undemocratic and backward non-West are clear. Problematic is the message that China only impacted the confidant, ideologically-driven West in matters of foreign policy, that developments in late imperial China were of little consequence to the making of the

West, and the reading of modern China as a history of "lack" inviting completing by the

West. Kenneth Pomeranz's scholarship has aptly demonstrated that levels of economic development in Europe and China were comparable until around 1750 and that the core of the polycentric world in the early modern period was not in the West. Pomeranz also emphasizes the importance of China's demand for silver in the making of the modern world and that it was empire that permitted England to escape ecological constraints on its development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.l69 Even more problematic is that these constructions and narratives also conceal the West and the non-West as

167 Wang, Hui and T. Huters. China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2003 : viii-ix, 43, 45, 67, and 57 168 Wang, pp. 58-59, 62-65 169 Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence : China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2000. 69 constructed categories that have been shown to be analytically bankrupt. For example,

Timothy Mitchell has criticized global narratives that simply multiply the locus of modernity because they are predicated on conceptualizations of the world as always having been divided into the West and non-West. Mitchell argues in his essay "The

Stage of Modernity", that in order to conceptualize an alternative narrative, the master narrative's concepts of time and space need to be uncoupled and complicated.^0 As such then, the Grade 12 textbooks' historicist narration of modernity present us with a different conundrum than do the Grade 11 textbooks' production of a Traditional China.

J7° Mitchell, Timothy. "The Stage of Modernity" in Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 : 1-34. Mitchell asserts that it is the repeated representation of modernity, of the differences between the non- West and the West, that gives modernity its artificial "universal certainty". Demarcating the space of the "constitutive outside", the non-West is indispensable to the production of the modern. Therefore, modernity is not a "stage of history but rather its staging" (27). 3 Where do we go from here? An Enquiry into Alternative Modalities of Thought

Where do these itineraries through secondary school manuals lead us? This chapter looks briefly albeit with fond interest at the individual and collaborative efforts of academics who, from various enunciative sites, wrestle with approaches to reading

"lack" otherwise, unthinking colonialist forms of knowledge, tracing post-Orientalist histories, and narrating global modernity in the interest of social justice. After sampling this scholarship, we shall probe the possibilities for social engagement in relation to three pieces written by academics likewise interested in politicized historiographies and critical pedagogies.

Amongst those whom have thought out loud about how we can "read 'lack' otherwise" is Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty puts forth that while it may be impossible and hypocritical to evacuate European thought from historical writings, especially those produced in the academy, it is not impossible for historians to work collaboratively towards "provincializing Europe". Academics engaged in the project of decentering Europe might investigate and contest how certain European notions of modernity and categories of analysis became naturalized in world histories. Another possible terrain of contestation would be to problematize the use of force, repression and undemocratic practices in the process of establishing "democracy", "freedom", and

70 71

"modernity" as we have already seen in relation to representations of imperialism in

China during the late nineteenth century. ^

The essays in Gyan Prakash's edited volume, After Colonialism : Imperial

Histories and Postcolonial Displacements similarly challenge the normalized understanding of "colonialism as history". From their diverse disciplinary fields, the contributing authors enquire about possibilities for liberating the subjugated histories of

(formerly) colonized spaces from colonialist forms of knowledge, such as the binaries of tradition and modernity. Prakash locates imperial histories at the intersections of knowledge and power and posits unthinking these histories as an emancipatory project to release "heterogeneous sources of knowledge and agency". By prying open to historical scrutiny received wisdom such as those proffered by imperial histories, it becomes evident that "universal" concepts of world history are inadequate for representing diverse experiences of identity and histories. ^ This, too, we have seen in relation to the heterogeneous experiences and sociological formations that had existed in mid- to late twentieth century China, hence relayed in teleological narratives as

"totalitarian", denigrated as "discrepant", or reduced to a transient youth aberration.

The hold of imperialism on the epistemology of East Asia is probed by Harry D.

Harootunian in an essay entitled, "Postcoloniality's Unconscious / Area Studies'

Desire", w Harootunian puts forth that Said's Orientalism had presented area studies

J7! Chakrabarty, pp. 41-45 Also see my comments on Provincializing Europe previously mentionned in chapter two of this thesis. J72 Prakash, Gyan. "Introduction : After Colonialism" in Prakash, Gyan ed. After Colonialism : Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1995: 3-17- ]73 Harootunian, H. D. "Postcoloniality's Unconscious / Area Studies' Desire" in Harootunian, H.D. and Masao Miyoshi eds. Learning Places : The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2002 : 150-174. 72 programmes with an important theoretical challenge in the former's assertion that the

Orientalist paradigm still inhabits the latter's structures of knowledge. Yet, Said's critique was not embraced by area studies programmes but by departments of English which seized the opportunity to renew their programmes from the margins.

Nevertheless, the enduring conundrums shared by area and postcolonial studies, including that of a vanishing subject previously produced through discourse and representation, their erasure of the history of capitalism, their fetishization of indigenous knowledge, and their reification of Western constructions; these lead

Harootunian to the assessment that the postcolonial has indicated a temporal marker rather than an alternative epistemology. He further denounces the poverty of theory in area studies where he sees a need for critical reflection on the social forces which continue to mediate the academy's production of knowledge, and advocates for more conscientiously critical epistemologies and pedagogies of East Asia. To complicate the binary categories and cultural essentialisms of the postcolonial, Harootunian elevates history as praxis.

What of "some alternative to Orientalism"?^ Gyan Prakash had put forth in

"Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World" that at issue is how to engage the relations of domination so that representations of Otherness become problematized as sites of contest.1^ Examining the historiography of India, Prakash had asserted that

™ Said, Orientalism, p. 325 »75 Prakash, Gyan. "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World : Perspectives from Indian Historiography". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 32, 2 April 1990 : 383-408. Also see the response to Prakash from Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook: O'Hanlon, Rosalind and David Washbrook. " After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 34,1 January 1992 : 141-167. and the conversation that ensued between them in the essays reproduced in : Chaturvedi, Vinayak ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 73 although nationalist historiography have challenged Orientalist representations of India as an object external to, autonomous from, and in contrast to Europe, its underlying assumption of an already constituted India as an ontological entity prior to its representation meant that it was nonetheless limited to the conceptual space of

Orientalism. Prakash had moreover insisted that area studies specialists' obsessive quest for an "authentic India" naively overlooks the relational aspect of knowledge, while post-nationalist foundational histories remain entrapped in a teleology which interprets India as an aborted modernity, an "incomplete narrative and unfulfilled promise". ^6 Thus, Prakash had called for a post-Orientalist historiography, the objective of which would be to historicize knowledge about the third world, to challenge its epistemology, and to target the production of knowledge in the academy. From this approach, "a post-Orientalist historiography visualizes modern India, for example, in relationships and processes that have constructed contingent and unstable histories".1??

We might enquire then, what a post-Orientalist history of China might look like.

It might tackle representations of Confucianism and demonstrate that it is misleading to reduce the history of China in the premodern period to Confucianism with B.C. now glossed as "Before Confucius". It might dismantle ahistorical constructions of cultural essences and disembodied social and ask whether there ever was an untouched Chinese civilization. It might grapple with accounts of the Opium trade and put forward a narrative that does not read as if it had been commissioned by the British Crown. It might even problematize representations of Mao Zedong that depict China in the modern period as stumbling downhill until his death and elucidate that non-democratic

!76 Prakash, pp. 384-5,390-2, and 396-8 !77 Prakash, pp. 399, 401-3 74 states are (also) governed by rational leaders and populations with agency. Over the past two and a half decades, scholars of China to whom my intellectual debt was rendered transparent in the previous chapters, have destabilized histories proffered by agents of empire and the nation-state.1?8 Some have investigated the potential of using gender as a category of analysis to remember against the grain of elitist and masculinist narratives, and yet others have tapped into the past from its peripheries such as to decenter China and to break free from paradigms which have long bestowed China with unidirectional vectors of civilization.

We might also enquire what an alternative history of global modernity might look like, how we might escape from naturalized and normalizing modalities of thought. The collaborative project of Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong with Columbia University to address this need at the secondary school level is an important step in this direction,

"China and Europe, 1500-2000 and Beyond : What is 'Modern'?"1^ Another important step in this direction is the textbook written collaboratively by members of the department of History at Princeton University, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart : A

History of the World from the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present. Although intended as a college textbook, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart thoughtfully narrates divergent yet overlapping histories of exchange and migration, conflict and resistance,

J78 Amongst these historians of China on whose work this thesis draws sustenance, figure : Tani Barlow, Francesca Bray, John Carroll, Paul Cohen, Pamela Crossley, Arif Dirlik, Prasenjit Duara, Patricia Ebrey, Benjamin Elman, Valerie Hansen, James Hevia, Joan Judge, Dorothy Ko, Philip Kuhn, Kenneth Pomeranz, Matthew Sommer, Helen Siu, Jonathan Spence, Michael Szonyi, Jung-Fang Tsai, Michael Tsin, and Arthur Waldron. x791 thank Professor Pomeranz for directing my attention to this on-line resource for educators, during a conversation after having given a lecture at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, on January 25, 2008 : China and Europe, 1500-2000 and Beyond: What is "Modern"? http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/chinawh/web/si/index.html 75 and changing balance of power, in ways that should prove useful to textbook authors in the future.180

We turn now to two combative essays written by academics who embrace historiography of the modern as praxis for social change. In the introductory essay for their edited volume, History after the Three Worlds : Post-Eurocentric

Historiographies, Vinay Bahl and Arif Dirlik argue that history should be a political practice grounded in the materiality of social existence and that confronts the problems and contradictions brought on by capitalist development and globalization.181 For, the contemporary historical moment requires a rethinking of the practice of history. Dirlik and Bahl foreground three disconcerting conditions for the crisis in history : the depletion of natural resources; the pervasiveness of developmentalist thinking amongst

American social scientists, economists especially, seeking a solution to the problems of population growth and the environment; and the intellectual colonization implicated by

English as the lingua franca of the Internet.182

Their contention, however, is not that there are insufficient numbers of critics of modernity capable of devising solutions to the above situations in less exploitative ways.

Rather, their contention is that the voices of the most revolutionary of these critics are condemned to inaudibility, and their ideas for alternatives smothered, by the unequal relations of power between the "First" and "Third" worlds. For, scholarship and

180 Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, et al. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present. 2ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2008. The other authors of the text are : Stephen Aron, Peter Brown, Benjamin Elman, Stephen Kotkin, Xinru Liu, Suzanne Marchand, Holly Pittman, Gyan Prakash, Brent Shaw, and Michael Tsin. 181 Bahl, Vinay and Arif Dirlik. "Introduction" in Dirlik, Arif, Vinay Bahl et al eds. History after the Three Worlds : Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Lanham : Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000 : 3-23. 182 Bahl and Dirlik, pp. 3-4 and 7 76 research originating from Third World locations are rarely included in academic discourse. Scholars from the Third World who are included are those whom Dirlik and

Bahl refer to as postmodernists and postcolonialists who are the exception, not only because of the enthusiasm with which the "First" World embraces their publications to the point of emulation, but also because of their complicity with the capitalist modernity to which they claim to be opposed, a critique explicated in considerable length by the co authors in their essay. Bahl and Dirlik depict postmodernists, postcolonialists, and subalternists as an "international babu class" complicit with global hegemony akin to the Bengali "babu class" that had collaborated with the British colonial government in

India. The evasion of these scholars from historicization of the structural inequities around the world and their retreat to the cultural realm has defused their potential for radicalism and collective resistance. Thus Bahl and Dirlik assert that while the Third

World once designated a location for the conceptualization and elaboration of alternative visions of modernity, the Third World now but denotes areas plotted behind the "First" in capitalist development toward a known end.l8s

The thrust of History after the Three Worlds and the contention of its contributors is that the practitioners of the linguistic and cultural turns have failed to liberate collective thought from Eurocentrism. Moreover, the former share a profound skepticism about the ability of such ways of thinking to decenter or provincialize Europe and assert the urgency of devising new investigative modalities that would permit us to palliate the resulting conditions now embedded in social existence as well as the contemporary crisis in historical consciousness. l84 The inadequacy of current forms of

183 Bahl and Dirlik, pp. 5-8 and 11 184 Bahl and Dirlik, pp. 14 and 18 77 knowledge and investigative modalities to excavate the past and to provide sustainable solutions to attendant problems in the future similarly preoccupies Roxann Prazniak whose essay focuses on one specific form of knowledge, that of world history.

In her contribution to their volume, "Is World History Possible? An Inquiry"

Roxann Prazniak enquires about the prospectives for a "genuine" world history course given its situation in American universities that take as unproblematic their enduring structures and institutions of power. l8s Her state-of-the-field article begins by tracing the genealogy of the World History course to its predecessor the Western civilization course, which discursively positioned the United States as the beacon of the free world after the Second World War, then proceeds to problematize its politics of funding and curriculum development complicit with American interests in the Cold War. Prazniak's assessment is that while Europe may be decentered in World History and Global History courses, their naturalization of an European template of modernity in relating and making legible the growth of industrial capitalism in disparate places means that

Eurocentrism has not been transcended. Whereas the attention given to retracing processes of transformation in Comparative History courses implies opportunities to contest Eurocentric categories of analysis, the conceptual framework of such courses restrains its potential for humanitarian critiques of industrial capitalism.186

Prazniak's essay is thus written out of a deep conviction in the need for the writing and teaching of world histories to come to terms with the violence and injustice brought about through "contacts" and "encounters", to include stories of dissent and

185 Prazniak, Roxann. "Is World History Possible? An Inquiry" in Dirlik, Arif, Vinay Bahl et al eds. History after the Three Worlds : Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Lanham : Rowman and Littlefleld Publishers, 2000 : 221-239. 186 Prazniak, pp. 221-234 78 resistance to these processes, and to be grounded in the social realities of the present historical moment. She writes :

We have lost a sense of this kind of truth grounded in humane action and social responsibility. Perhaps it lies buried beneath fragmented postmodern heaps. If there is any 'celestial perspective' or principle around which to organize multiple visions, it has roots in the realities that embody alternative ways of viewing the momentum of the present.18?

From these conceptualizations which privilege historiography as a political tool for social transformation we turn briefly to a piece which elevates critical pedagogy as praxis, "Who Will Educate the Educators? Critical Pedagogy in the Age of the New

Imperialism".188 Without delving into the particulars of Peter McLaren and Ramin

Farahmandpur's essay which discusses some of the effects of globalization and capitalism on the politics of an American public education system complicit with neoliberalism in the contemporary period, I wish to emphasize their argument that teachers' work can have a potentially destabilizing effect on capitalist relations and a revolutionary impact on society. Their argument, of course, converges with my own conceptualization of critical pedagogy which I had foregrounded in the introduction of this essay and at which I had arrived not by theorizing but through my own reflective practices of teaching. While I disagree with romanticized notions of the classroom as a laboratory to experiment with Marxist theories of the social, I find interesting the co authors' vision of "revolutionary critical pedagogy" articulated as follows: "Whereas liberal approaches to education and self-development attempt to liberate individuals from the social, revolutionary critical pedagogy attempts to help individuals liberate

187 Prazniak, pp. 235-6 188 McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. "Who Will Educate the Educators? Critical Pedagogy in the Age of the New Imperialism" in Dirlik, Arif ed. Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest. Boulder : Paradigm Publishers, 2006 : 19-58. 79 themselves through the social, through challenging, resisting, and transforming commonly held discourses and practices".l89 Thus, they endeavour to mobilize teachers as intellectual workers to engage in political projects aimed at the emancipation of labour and consciousness from global capitalism and to render possible forms of human association in the interests of the multitude.

Our short excursion into the discontinuous approaches to elaborating alternative modalities of thought should leave us with several impressions of pertinence to the central problematic of this thesis. Of these is firstly, the controversial work of the practitioners of the linguistic and cultural turns indicates that the task of decentering our transcending Europe in histories of the modern world is not a fait accompli. And secondly, the urgency for secondary school teachers to embrace a critical pedagogy that would cultivate students equipped intellectually to make sense of the transformative processes of capitalism and committed to socially responsible agendas for the future.

l89 McLaren and Farahmandpur, pp. 19-21 and 50-51 Conclusion

I write this conclusion amidst much excitement amongst nationals tallying up their medals lost and won and speculating vociferously about the currency of the 2008

Olympics for "the Chinese". From China's lavish opening ceremony that mobilized

15,000 bodies in synchronization with tactically applied cinematic technologies to their zealous campaign to protect the value of corporate sponsorships by covering up the logos of non-sponsored brands, few aspects of the Beijing games have been spared from re-presentation.^0 Coverage of the highly mediatized opening ceremony by national broadcast networks were commented on by "China specialists" conveniently nearby, poised to translate and interpret "fundamental" aspects of "the inner nature of the

Chinese civilization" for spectators. During NBC's televised broadcast for example, their

"China specialist" Joshua Cooper Ramo told us that:

One of the wonderful things about China, frankly is just their incredible attention to tiny details. Watch the way these women move their hands! You can see this in teahouses and even in McDonald's in China - just the leftover cultural emphasis on the way the tiniest gestures matter so much.1?1

Ramo and his colleagues then proceeded to emphasize the significance of this "coming out party" for a "historically insular country" and to recall the "Tiananmen Square crackdown" from twenty years ago as if it could re-occur anytime. Articles published in

^° See for example : "Games in Beijing Open With a Lavish Ceremony" in The New York Times, August 9 2008. "The Beijing Games begin" in The Globe and Mail, August 8 2008. "Ignore that logo under the tape!" in The Wall Street Journal, Europe edition, August 18 2008. w 2008 Beijing Opening Ceremony. NBC. WGRZ, Buffalo. August 8 2008.

80 8i leading newspapers have not been much better, where columnists attribute and reduce the success of the opening ceremony to totalitarianism and masses regimented by fear rather than individually motivated out of their free will.1?2 I would venture that what is latently manifested in these re-presentations is Orientalism and a singular, historicist logic which continue to inhabit thinking about China in the present historical moment.

In other words, media coverage of these unfolding events might be grasped in relation to the central problematic of this thesis and suggest its applicability beyond the representations found in manuals produced for plebeian consumption.1^

This project has located possibilities for social engagement at the intersections of historiography and critical pedagogy. By mapping representations of China in World

History textbooks as sites of struggle in the production of knowledge about China and global modernity, I have pried open to historiographical examination forms of knowledge and investigative modalities inaugurated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have enjoyed a long afterlife in secondary school manuals.

Chapter one problematized freestanding discussions of China in the premodern period which frequently negotiate a trope of "Traditional China" that nourishes deeply flawed yet broadly held misconceptions of a Middle Kingdom destined to clash with an overly determined West. These histories reify constructions of an untouched and unitary China that can be known by stabilizing romanticized ideas of a disembodied social and setting cultural aspects in ahistorical splendour. We have seen how routinely

1^2 See for example : "China Games a tour de force" in The Globe and Mail, August 23 2008. *93 Although my specific comments here pertain to North American media reports on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, I do not wish to be mis-interpreted as denying the extremely essentialist representations provided by the (Chinese) architects of the ceremony, and approved by the CCP, of the histories and cultures of the geopolitical territory now known as China. 82 used practices of reading the archive, such as "the Chinese worldview" or the dynastic cycle as analytic categories, may preclude us from comprehending how much agency and contingency had existed in the premodern period as well as impoverish our ability to imagine ways of being and belonging that defy categorization. In narratives little concerned with those whom had been written out of the imperial historiographic records, the heterogeneous experiences of disparate peoples, some of whom were neither Han nor Confucian nor sedentary, are collapsed into one monolithic mass of nameless, faceless people without agency and without history.

Chapter two demonstrated how narratives of modernity wedded to historicism exclude China from its formative period and ultimately re-present recent Chinese pasts as a history of lack inviting completion by the West. We have seen, for example, how the familiar trope of Traditional China is reinscribed in representations of cloistered women oppressed under Confucian patriarchy and whose lives were replete with sorrow, representations which then render possible a narration of the vast cultural distance that must be elided for China to gain membership among "modern civilizations". We have likewise read accounts of the Opium war that negotiate the trope of "free trade" in the guise of liberalism in rather feebly disguised attempts to justify imperialism.

Interrogating the forms of knowledge enabled and sustained by colonialism as history exposes their embarrassing inadequacy for re-presenting the heterogeneous experiences and sociological formations that had existed in twentieth century China, including those which sought an alternative to, and escape from, capitalism. Our itinerary has shown us multiple instances where China is represented as an area of domestic unrest and instability under the wrath of an emotionally driven Mao. Hence, these textual 83 representations should be problematized as a form of symbolic violence which discreetly perpetuates the unequal relations of power between the West and the Rest.

Chapter three enquired about alternative modalities of thought that might permit us to tap into the repositories of meaning of the past which have since been collapsed and crystallized by analytical categories and semantics. We thus sampled the scholarship of academics writing from various enunciative sites, practitioners of the various turns, who wrestle with approaches to reading "lack" otherwise, unthinking colonialist forms of knowledge, tracing post-Orientalist histories, and narrating global modernity in the interest of social transformation. I have further argued that conceptual release from geographies of space and mind in our symbiotic practices of history and teaching are vital to enabling our students comprehend the past, and visualize the future, in more imaginative and emancipatory ways. This conceptual release would then empower our students to conceive of sustainable and humanitarian solutions to attendant problems in the future.

While I may not be ready to substantiate the relationship between textbook material and the formation of national loyalties as has Aron Shai in the case of Israel and has Keith Darden in the case of the Ukraine^, I remain steadfast in my contention that the textual representations examined above lead to problematic ways of thinking about China, and global modernity more broadly. Given our situation in Canadian multiculturalism's management of differentiated subject positions as well as in a global context of changing constellations of power, there are significant implications for

^4 Lectures given by guest speakers at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto : "Textbooks for All? Negotiating the Textbook Controversy in Israel Today" (November 19, 2007), "Mass Schooling and the Formation of Enduring National Loyalties : The Case of Ukraine" (December 6, 2007) 84 reforms in public education and policy. Consider for example, that the 2005 Ontario

Curriculum revised its goals for the Canadian and World Studies programme, adding to its programmatic statement that students should "develop the knowledge and values they need to become responsible, active, and informed Canadian citizens in the twenty- first century."1^ This recent addition to the course's learning expectations seems oddly reminiscent of the mandate of area studies in the United States during the Cold war period. ^6 Consider also the narrowing of concepts of quebecois identity as witnessed during the recent discourse on religious education in schools, or the outpouring of shamelessly opinionated essays about multiculturalism in Toronto in response to the release of the 2006 census report.197 Lest we forget the lingering public debates about the Toronto District School Board's approval of an Afrocentric, alternative school in response to declining retention rates among marginalized students marked as ethnic. ^8

Clearly, our shared situation in the present historical moment reaffirms the legitimacy of this project. Rethinking how we write and teach about the West and the

Rest necessitates wrestling our historical imagination from the grasp of imperial narratives and institutional practices, thinking beyond the impasses posed by exhausted categories and stagnated semantics, and tracing historiographies which would connect the dots between discourse, representation, and relations of power. It demands that we teach our students to unthink much received wisdom about these spaces in order to

195 www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary !96 See for example : Rafael, Vicente L. "The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States". Social Text 41.1994:92-7. w See for example : L'actualite, March 1 2007 issue L'actualite, November 15 2007 issue The Globe and Mail, December 8 2007 issue The Walrus, January/February 2008 issue !98 "Black-focused school wins approval" in The Globe and Mail, January 30 2008. "Multiple Afrocentric schools suggested" in The Globe and Mail, January 312008. 85 develop "une pensee neuve".1^ From this location, it appears that interrogating textual representations of China would be an appropriate point of departure for unleashing the radical imaginary of critical historiographies and pedagogies.

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