Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing: China’s Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social and Political Science

Abstract

It is a fashionable contemporary orthodoxy that the engagement of the social sciences with the East is eurocentric and ultimately orientalist. To modify the thought of the formerly great helmsman, China, it seems, represented a clean sheet of paper upon which western commentators expressed their dread of the other. This understanding further maintains that the putative objectification and categorization of the East, implicit in the methods of the human sciences, concealed an ultimately imperialistic project of exploiting or appropriating the non western world for western consumption. Consequently, much contemporary theorizing, drawing on the anti-method of poststructuralism and the unfalsifiable claims of postcolonial theory, purports to deconstruct or expose this process of ‘othering’, in the contradictory endeavour to allow the silenced subaltern voice to articulate its apparently endless oppression.

China’s … people have two remarkable peculiarities … they are first of all poor and secondly blank … Poor people … want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it.

Mao Tse-tung (1958) in Schram ed. 1966: 352