Chris Connery

Department of Chinese Literature
University of California-Santa Cruz
<Chris_Connery@FACULTY.UCSC.edu>

 

Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

 

British Prime Minister John Major went to Beijing in the summer of 1991 to talk with China’s leaders about Hong Kong–duty-free port, international city, and capitalist success story. As 1997 approaches–the year of the colony’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty– fears of total collapse have attenuated as Hong Kong has emerged as the banking and financial center for the growth of export-oriented capitalism and overseas investment in China’s most rapidly developing region– its southeastern coast. Hong Kong’s continuing status as financial and transportation hub for Southeast China will depend on construction of its new airport, and the details of the airport’s financing were the main items on the British PM’s agenda. Since he was the first Western leader to visit post-June 4, 1989 Beijing, though, PM Major also made the obligatory register of “concern” for the Chinese government’s violations of human rights that have continued in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident.

 

The airport discussion was concluded to China’s and Britain’s satisfaction. On the matter of human rights, though, PM Major got a stern dressing down from Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. The British leader, argued Li Peng, was singularly unqualified to comment on China’s treatment of its citizens. Britain had been the major player in imperialist aggression against China, in the Opium Wars (referred to in Britain as the first and second “Anglo-Chinese Wars”), in forcing unequal treaties on China, including extraterritorial rights and privileges for British subjects on Chinese soil, and in the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and adjacent territory. And moreover, added PM Li, Chinese and Western standards for human rights are not the same. The situation was a curious one. Both leaders were intent on maintaining Hong Kong’s status as an international and a Chinese city. Britain’s government has clear economic interest in preserving Hong Kong’s present character as completely as possible, but perhaps has an even larger stake in insisting on its Chineseness, stemming from the fear of the influx of hundreds of thousands of post-1997 refugees–whose legal status is currently “British Dependant Territories citizen”–“back home” to Britain. In admonishing China’s government on human rights, though, PM Major was castigating China for failure to adhere to international, i.e. Western, standards. Beijing in the spring of 1989 was the first counter- revolution to be televised. After Berlin, Bucharest, Prague, and Moscow showed how History should operate, though, China’s exceptionalism–its teleological failure–became more egregious.

 

In the summer of 1991, local news coverage in Hong Kong was dominated by the massive effort to raise funds for disaster relief in the wake of central China’s disastrous summer flooding and by the upcoming elections to Hong Kong’s legislative council (18 out of 60 seats are chosen by direct election). The capacity of the Hong Kong population to identify and sympathize with the sufferings of the Chinese people was indicated in the enormous success of the fund-raising drive– over six million dollars collected in a few weeks from a population of 3.5 million. (I will refer again to this capacity in a different context below.) The election in September resulted in a decisive defeat of candidates associated with either the Chinese Communist Party or with British colonial authority. The low voter turn-out–under 40%–also belied the colonial government’s claim that “voting is power.” Hong Kong’s citizens, in their rejection of the politics of both the Prime Ministers who met in Beijing, and in their identification with some idea of “Chineseness,” thus enacted the ambiguity of the soon-to-be-ex-colony and international city.

 

This ambiguity is symptomatic of the ambiguities which surface whenever “China” is enacted in contemporary discursive formations. It is from within this kind of ambiguity that Rey Chow writes. Rey Chow is originally from Hong Kong and is now Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her own situation–“a ‘Westernized’ Chinese woman who spent most of her formative years in a British colony and then in the United States” (xv)–informs her writing in the deepest way, a writing whose project is “an attempt to hold onto an experience whose marginality is embedded in the history of imperialism, a history that includes precisely the ‘opening up’ of Chinese history and culture for ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ academic research that thrives by suppressing its own conditions of possibility” (xvii). She is the only theoretically engaged scholar to have published widely on China in recent years in journals outside the East Asian Studies field, in writings on modern Chinese literature, Chinese and Western film, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Chinese popular music. Her book is a multiple interrogation: of theory’s resistance to China, of the China field’s resistance to theory, and of the location of “those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already ‘Westernized'” (xi) within the larger critique of Western cultural and discursive hegemony.

 

Her project is thus allied with much recent work in post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. It raises familiar questions: Whose history is China’s? Who speaks it, and to whom? In what language? Do abstractions like “human rights”–and by analogical extension, Theory in general, posit their own rights of extraterritoriality? Work in cultural studies and post-colonial theory that proceeds from a critique of foundationalism and Western hegemony–political, theoretical, discursive, and subjective–naturally centers largely on particular locations where Western hegemony was and is most conspicuously practiced. This re-turning of theory has been situated in important work on and from Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and in minority cultures in Britain, Europe, and the United States. China, however, is curiously under- represented–in theoretical formations and as a site for application of theoretical constructs. Japan, whose status vis-a-vis the West precludes many of the analogical possibilities present in the areas above, has recently been constructed both in theoretical and popular discourse as a primary site of the postmodern (see, for example, Postmodernism and Japan , edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), and thus has a certain discursive prominence. Not so, China. Is this simply because, quoting George Bush, “China is different”?

 

Edward Said’s Orientalism, which, based on the monumental binarism of West and Other, would seem to brook no geographical limitation, is restricted in scope to “the Anglo-French-American experience of Arabs and Islam” Orientalism 17): it eliminates a large part of the Orient–India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East–not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss Europe’s experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient (17). The shift within this sentence from “Far East” to “Far Orient” underscores the merely practical character of the limitation. It is implied that China could have been in this book had the book been longer. There is, however, a political and strategic character to his limitation of the discussion of the West to Britain, France, and the USA: it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American Oriental position since World War II has fit–I think, quite self-consciously–in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers (17). The West is thus the colonizing West.

 

One of the most important critiques of Said’s binarism comes from Homi Bhabha, who faults the monolithic character of colonial power as represented in Orientalism: “There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is a historical and theoretical simplification” (Bhabha 200). Bhabha’s work, strongly informed, like Rey Chow’s, by psychoanalytic theory, posits a multiplicity of strategies by which colonial discourse is seen as a site of anxiety, slippage, displacement, and conflict. Yet Bhabha, like Said, takes as his object a specifically colonial discourse– a discourse that by its very nature functions concurrently in representation and administration. The Law of the Colonizer is the Law of the Father. Bhabha’s figures of resistance–mimicry, hybridity, and other effects that derive from the psychoanalysis of colonial discourse, are a re-turning of this Law. He is able to accomplish this because the Law functions not simply on the level of a discursive structure, but in the specific practices of colonial administration.

 

One conceivable location of the “China difference” is in the fact that, with the significant exception of Hong Kong and adjacent territories, China was never a Western colony. (Japanese colonization of China, which began with Taiwan in 1895, is a separate issue.) Western countries had “concessions” and monopoly rights in certain regions, and the British defeat of China in the Opium Wars, left the Qing dynasty government with limited ability to control its tariff and duty structures and other aspects of its economic relations with the West. The unequal treaties forced on China also granted Western missionaries certain inalienable rights to operate without significant governmental interference. But the central functioning of the Law of the Colonizer was not in administration per se, but in extra-territoriality. Extraterritoriality, whereby a foreign national in China was subject only to the law of his/her native country, has the effect of rendering problematic Bhabha’s “repertoire of conflictual positions that constitute the subject in colonial discourse” (204).

 

The Law of the Colonizer functions within the specific legal practice of colonial administration to underscore the verticality of domination. This vertical structure lends itself quite easily to Bhabha’s psychoanalytic framework. Crude parallels between colonial administrative structures and the psyche–the imperial super-ego and the native id– suggest one framing of the colonial subject’s contested terrain. Extraterritoriality’s positioning of two legal systems side-by-side, however, resists the strict simple verticality of the oppressor and the repressed. The spatializing project implicit in the term “extraterritoriality” effected a displacement of China’s legal and administrative structures into a position alongside the West’s, notwithstanding the structures of domination that marked China’s role in the global capitalist economy. Legally and administratively, China was not a colony, but it was hardly “China” either. “The empire speaks back” is one way of representing post-colonial discourse psychoanalytically as the “return of the repressed”; China’s horizontal displacement, figured in extraterritoriality, allows for a more complete “othering,” one which might help explain the continued absence of China in post-colonial theorizing and the non-allegorizability of China’s modern history.

 

Extraterritoriality was a central constitutive element of China’s experience of imperialism. The memory of extraterritoriality can help to explain much in recent history, including the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, the character of the negotiations over Hong Kong and the future of its political system after 1997, PM Li Peng’s resistance to admonitions about human rights, and government outrage over foreign journalists’ interference in China’s internal affairs during the 1989 student movement. The applicability of “Western” theoretical formulations or “Western feminism” to analyses of Chinese social and cultural formations is a subject of current debate in Chinese studies in China and in the West, and one cannot help but feel the traces of the extraterritorial in that debate as well. Extraterritoriality, marking China’s status as a “semi-colony” (the term used in official PRC historiography) is one potential marking of China’s difference. And with its long history of a literati-dominated elite bureaucratic culture, with its status as the victim primarily of Japanese rather than of Western military aggression in the twentieth century, and as the site of the world’s second major successful communist revolution, China would indeed resist many of the paradigms developed in cultural studies and post-colonial theoretical discourse.

 

My articulation of these markings of China’s difference, however, is not the same as a claim for a Chinese exceptionalism. Rather, it is an attempt to account for the absence of China in post-colonial theory, which is marked by its origins in the study of specific and localized colonial practices. Chow repeatedly emphasizes the point that Westernization is the materiality of Chinese modernity. The physical experience of modernity, and the terrible brutality that the West’s Othering always implies, is felt by the “semi-colonized” subject as acutely as by the colonized. And as can be demonstrated in the case of Hong Kong, the full experience of colonialism is not at all foreign to many Chinese. The polemical import of Chow’s book, indeed, is targeted far less on the absence of China in theory than on the dangers of proceeding from a positing of China’s exclusivity.

 

Chow’s project here is the predicament of a Chinese subjectivity whose entry into culture is always already Westernized. She explores this in readings of modern literature, and in her conception of the figure of the “ethnic spectator,” a position central to the book’s argument, and one to whose significance I will return later. The Westernized Chinese subject, though, is not only the content of the book, but Chow herself. Her analytical and political project is always presenced in large part as the enactment of that particular subject position. In a brilliant dialectical reading of theories of masochism, which she sees as constitutive of the Chinese reading of modernity, she traces the structure of masochism from Freud’s accordance of ontological primacy to sadism over masochism, through Laplanche’s revision which situates sadism as always belatedly constructed within masochism, to Deleuze’s location of masochism in the preoedipal, ideal fusion with the mother, and finally uses Laplanche again, on Deleuze this time, to free the mother from her Deleuzian immobility and construct her as passive and active simultaneously, while remaining within the Deleuzian maternally operated framework. Chow’s figuration of masochism has topical application in her discussion of literary tropes of sentimentality and self-sacrifice. But it also is an enactment of resistance to the denial of the complexity of Chinese subjectivity.

 

For Chow’s entry into academic culture is, by virtue of her subject matter, also determined by the institutional character of China studies, which has its own particular set of discursive characteristics and its own historical and ideological determinations. Although her work on psychoanalysis, film theory, “woman,” and subjectivity has much to offer any audience, many in the China field will ask, “But why do you use Western theories to explain China?” Chow’s justifiable antagonism toward nearly all aspects of China studies in the West permeates her book.

 

One target is Sinology, the location of classicists who combine their adherence both to the philological rigor of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Orientalists and to the conservative textual-verification practices of late Qing dynasty philologists with an Orientalist love for dynastic China and a concomitant disdain for China’s fallen, impure, modern state. Sinology, with its fetishization of “Chineseness,” conspires to deny the materiality of modern China, which, since “Westernized,” cannot be “Chinese.” As an example of this Chow cites the late James J.Y. Liu, who, in Chinese Theories of Literature, refuses to discuss modern literary theory since it has been “dominated by one sort of Western influence or another . . . and [does] not possess the same kind of value and interest as do traditional Chinese theories, which constitute a largely independent source of critical ideas” (Chow 29). Sinologists, self-designated conservators of a vanished great tradition, have an investment in their very marginality, a marginality they try to enforce in their concerted attacks on any incursions of Theory into their domain. Sinology’s ideological character, however, is becoming more and more clear. Although I never cease to be amazed at the readiness of many younger scholars of classical Chinese literature to reproduce Sinology’s hoary ideologies and prejudices, job vacancies in Chinese literature in American Universities have shifted in favor of modern literature in recent years, while many classically trained younger scholars, particularly those who are more engaged with theory, have branched out into modern literary or cultural studies. What has significantly altered the study of pre-modern China in recent years, though, particularly in the field of history, has been social science methodology. Demographic, economic, and data-driven social history are the latest transformative “advances” in the pre-modern field.

 

The hegemony of social sciences in the China field, particularly in studies of modern China, is another instance for Chow of Western discursive dominance. Social science’s domination of the field is evident in the most material ways–in publications like the Journal of Asian Studies, in research and conference funding, and in the preponderance of social science at annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies. Social science’s “cognitive hegemony of information” serves to colonize all of modern China. This is even witnessed in most studies of modern literature, which is read primarily for its “information,” and thus for its instrumental value. The second chapter of Chow’s book, “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: An Exercise in Popular Readings,” is a revisionist account of late Imperial and early Republican melodramatic fiction, which, along with translations from Western literature, was the most popular literature of its time. It is part of an important re-reading of the whole project of modern fiction, which I will discuss further below. Part of her project is to recuperate the study of “Butterfly literature” from its earlier Western defenders, who saw in it “unmediated access to the views of the non-elite” (quoted in Chow, 48). This sociological approach to popular fiction is condemned as imperialistic, because in an apparently well-intentioned attempt to salvage canonically obscure materials, the historian seems only to have neutralized those materials for the extension of that empire called “knowledge,” which is forever elaborated with different “national” differences. This means that the specificities of a complex cultural form would always be domesticated as merely “useful” by a method that claims to be scientifically objective simply because it is backed up by “factual” data (48- 49). The colonization of modern Chinese literature by valorizations of “knowledge” and instrumentality is particularly lamentable, because it is only through a consideration of language and representation that instrumentality can be problematized.

 

Another critique within the China field of the hegemony of Western discourse can be found in the decentering of Western feminism and the concomitant positioning of a “Chinese feminism” conceptualized around a notion of female identity rooted in Chinese culture. Chow cites a Western scholar who, in her work on the modern female author Ding Ling, disparages Ding Ling’s earlier fiction’s concerns with a bourgeois, Westernized feminism centered on issues of sexuality, in favor of later work, marked more clearly by nationalist and revolutionary goals and privileging a more “Chinese” feminism centered on political sisterhood and kinship. The danger here is of course that any positioning of the category “Chinese women” as a site of political agency will preclude the emergence of women on their own terms. The repression of the sexual, which is as analyzable in Ding Ling’s later work as in her earlier overt treatments, has the same consequences as the de-privileging of psychoanalysis as a tool for the analysis of Chinese modernity: “a non-West that is deprived of fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions” (xiii).

 

Chow’s multiple interventions in the West’s discursive construction of “China” or “Chineseness” serve to problematize “China” as a determinable category, and show the consequences of “the China difference,” which, whether posited from a nostalgic margin, an area of nationally defined “knowledge,” or a progressive-minded though essentializing critique of Western discursive hegemony, is always reducible to a gesture of denial. Those in the West who defend China against the assault of “Western theory” are inveighing against theory’s extraterritoriality. Within the curious logic of extraterritoriality, however, to invoke it is to inscribe it.

 

By titling her book “Woman…” rather than “Chinese women,” Chow is already signaling her rejection of other totalizing categories. It is in this figure of Woman that her book’s most productive and enabling interventions lie. That Chow is talking about “woman” not as a category but as a strategic constitution of subjectivity is evident in her first chapter’s lengthy analysis of Bertolucci’s film, The Last Emperor, whose subject is the “feminized” emperor Pu Yi. In a re-working of Laura Mulvey’s classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Chow extend[s] the interpretation of image-as-woman to image-as-feminized space, which can be occupied by a main character, Pu Yi, as much as by a woman. Once this is done, “femininity” as a category is freed up to include fictional constructs that may not be “women” but that occupy a passive position in regard to the controlling symbolic (18). Bertolucci’s feminizing gaze accords with his “love” for Chinese civilization, a love based on a positing of absolute difference. For Bertolucci, the Chinese people exist “before consumerism, before something that happened in the West” (quoted in Chow, 4). Bertolucci’s admiration for “Chinese passivity” partakes of the same allochronism. Chinese are passive because, being so intelligent and sophisticated by nature, they have no need for macho virility. In this context of her discussion of Bertolucci, Chow also demonstrates how Julia Kristeva, in About Chinese Women, otherizes and feminizes China in the service of her challenge to Western metaphysics. It would be inappropriate, however, to condemn Bertolucci and Kristeva for their mere sympathetic Orientalism. Kristeva’s China, an instrument in a critique of the West, is thus subsumed under the West in an instancing of the power relationship her project purports to condemn.

 

Chow operates from the notion of gender as the structuring of relations of power. The discursive prominence of the figure of “woman” in Chinese modernist writings, a modernity whose materiality is Westernization, is thus no surprise. Yu Dafu’s “Sinking,” published in 1921, was one of the most popular short stories of the decade. Its hero, an alienated, Romantic aesthete studying in Japan, mourns for weak, humiliated, distant China “like a husband mourning the death of a young wife” (quoted in Chow, 141). Impotent with Japanese women, ashamed of his voyeurism and masturbation, the hero longs for a self-strengthening through a strong China. Chow identifies the hero’s masochistic nationalism as being implicated in an ever-shifting array of psychic positionings. “China” is the mother to whose strength the hero would like to submit, but is also identified as object of desire, and thus with the actual women in whose presence our hero is impotent. The idealization of woman in Yu Dafu’s story is “at once active, passive, longing, and resentful–also at once masculine, feminized, and infantile” (144).

 

Chow’s consideration of Yu Dafu’s story in her book’s final chapter, “Loving Women: Masochism, Fantasy, and the Idealization of the Mother,” is one of three readings of stories by male writers who share an idealist yearning for fusion with the mother, but in resorting to varied strategies of disavowal or dissociation, enact the masculinist fetishization project which divides woman into the familial and revered or the exciting and degraded. The cogency of this structure of masochism and fetishization is supported by the notion of feminine self-sacrifice, which is also the major support of “traditional” Chinese culture. This masculine idealism, then, though finding affecting representations in the figures of women–society’s most oppressed–is both a reading and a re-enactment of the primacy of female self-sacrifice. In readings of two female authors, Bing Xin and Ding Ling, Chow sees, through Kaja Silverman’s elaboration of the negative Oedipus complex, a way to position a masochistic identification with the mother similar to Yu Dafu’s, but without the idealism. In reading the stories themselves, a reader, unless she has a taste for bourgeois sentimental excess, would find Chow’s claim somewhat extravagant. It is precisely the ideological character of “great” literature, though, that is deconstructed through Chow’s readings of these two writers, whose personal and social limits are precisely what give rise to their sentimental excesses.

 

Part of Chow’s re-reading of Bing Xin’s and Ding Ling’s stories is predicated on her positioning of reading. The phrase “loving women,” from her chapter title, is understood, through this positioning of a feminized reading, as a means to apprehend the complexities of identification and desire that center on the social demand for women’s self-sacrifice; but it also presents the possibility for an alternative aesthetic that is based on a sympathetic feminine interlocutor/spectator/reader (169). It is ultimately on the enabling and subjectivity-constitutive politics of reading and spectatorship that Chow’s project is centered. These politics are implicated in the objects of her analysis and in the enactment of subjectivity which her analysis performs. They are developed most fully in the book’s first chapter, “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship.” Should her book gain the wide audience outside the China field which it deserves, it will probably be due in large part to her elaboration of the theory of ethnic spectatorship.

 

The Westernized ethnic subject’s “givenness” is constituted in her position in world history and in her entry into “culture.” Writing of The Last Emperor, but in a language applicable to all of Chow’s readings, she states the problematic of analyzing The Last Emperor for a Chinese audience; the question is how “history” should be reintroduced materially, as a specific way of reading–not reading “reality” as such but cultural artifacts such as film and narratives. The task involves not only the formalist analysis of the producing apparatus. It also involves re- materializing such formalist analysis with a pregazing–the “givenness” of subjectivity–that has always already begun (19). The Last Emperor was tremendously popular among Chinese audiences. It might be tempting to attribute this popularity to a false consciousness. The global political economy of the entertainment industry is such that only with Hollywood’s backing can such lavish spectacles be produced. The popularity of The Last Emperor among Chinese audiences could then be read as another instancing of domination–of the power of the spectacle to authorize an othering in which even the “others” are passively complicit. Yet just as Teresa de Lauretis challenged Mulvey’s dichotomizing of the masculine gaze and feminine spectacle through her elaboration of female spectatorship, Chow similarly problematizes the Chinese reception of The Last Emperor.

 

Her argument for an ethnic spectatorship draws largely on Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. It retains the strategic value of Mulvey, and draws on a particularly Althusserian reading of Kaja Silverman’s notion of “suture.” It is an argument far too complex to be adequately summarizable, but its contours can be indicated in Chow’s analysis of her mother’s reaction to The Last Emperor: “It is remarkable that a foreign devil should be able to make a film like this about China. I’d say, he did a good job!” (24). Chow’s mother identifies unproblematically with the film’s narrative movement (recalling de Lauretis’s positioning of woman as the figure of narrative movement) even while she, in the phrase “foreign devil,” resists the structures of domination that frame its production. Her play of illusion, which, according to de Lauretis, enables spectatorship to serve as a site for productive relationships, is the site of “a desire to be there, in the film” (25), in all of Imperial China’s resplendent glory, in the unrecoverable state prior to dismemberment. The imaginary nationalism with which Chow’s mother identifies with Bertolucci’s spectacle is the very condition of the always belatedly recognized subjectivity of the Westernized Chinese subject.

 

In her discussion of ethnic spectatorship, Chow refers to the critic C.T. Hsia’s characterization of modern Chinese literature’s “obsession with China.” For Hsia, until recently the single most prominent scholar of Chinese fiction in the West, this is a marking of its parochialness. For Chow, it is the very result of “the experience of ‘dismemberment’ (or ‘castration’) [which] can be used to describe what we commonly refer to as ‘Westernization’ or ‘modernization'” (26). Chow’s reading of modern Chinese literature through the figure of “woman,” and her attention to the empowering potential of the ethnic spectator, leads to a major re-casting of modern Chinese literary history. The May Fourth Movement, the student-led protest in 1919 against Japanese Imperialism and the Chinese government’s collaborationism, which shortly afterward came to stand for a vast array of socially and culturally progressive reform movements, is the defining monument of Chinese literary modernity. This view is universal in Chinese studies, and is held equally strongly in Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Western academies.

 

China’s modernist canon, though, was very much a programmatic affair. It was fashioned throughout the twenties in literary societies, of which there were hundreds, in manifestoes prescribing form, content, voice, grammar, person . . . , in seemingly endless debates. Chow reads representatives of the modernist canon–Ba Jin, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun–through Butterfly literature, which she recuperates through the strategic operation of the figure of “woman.” Butterfly literature is the repressed of modern Chinese literature, for a variety of reasons. Its melodrama and overt sentimentality, and consequent huge popularity, relegate it to the uncanonizable. As a genre that, in language, content, and style has significant continuities with “pre-modern” popular fiction, it threatens the rigid break between “modern” and “pre-modern” that was the basis of the May Fourth modernizers’ self-conception and on which China studies’ division of labor depends. Chow demonstrates through several representative readings that Butterfly literature indeed constituted a “reading” of Chinese modern society and ideologies. Butterfly literature’s fragmentary and parodic character–its wild improbabilities of plot, its near contemporaneous salaciousness and moral didacticism, are read by critics as signs of its inferiority: Within the hierarchy of Chinese letters, Butterfly literature thus occupies a feminized position that carries with it the ironies of all feminized positions. While in its debased form it reveals the limits of the society that produces it, it is at the same time devalued by that society as false and deluded…. The visible “crudities” of Butterfly literature constitute a space in which the parodic function of literature is not smoothed away but instead serves to reveal the contradictions of modern Chinese society in a disturbingly “distasteful” manner (55).

 

Although she finds in the reading practices opened up by Butterfly literature an empowering critique, the more self-avowedly critical and reformist May Fourth writers, precisely through their overt self- positioning, offer the reader more limited possibilities. She demonstrates convincingly how two central platforms of May Fourth literature–its nationalism and the new nation’s requirements of a national literature–served in to establish a continuity between May Fourth writers and the classical literati elite. The performance of a national literature was in a sense a structural replacement for the imperial examination system, which gave classical scholars their ruling positions. The “nation” did not have the same problematics for classical literati as it did for modern intellectuals, though. Always constructed in the belated context of Westernization, where a modern nation was seen as requiring a modern literature, and where a modern literature depended on access to the “real,” and where the “real” was programmatically located in “inner life” (hence the profusion of autobiographical and confessional forms), May Fourth literature always came up against the uncommensurability of subject and nation. How can writing both determine membership in the literati class and serve the revolution? Writing itself is thus always ironic, and the deconstruction to which it lends itself also invites deconstruction of its potential for subversion.

 

The most relentless self-deconstructions in the May Fourth canon are found in the short stories of Lu Xun. In his stories there are no intellectual heroes; there are no proletarians or peasants who think in the language of educated Chinese. There is a constant presencing of the complicity with social injustice that is implicit in both the practice of representation and the position of the spectator. For Chow, this ironic horizon marks the intellectual impasse of all of May Fourth writing, though in no other writer is it recognized so explicitly. Her re-writing of modern literary history, where the failures and closures of May Fourth writers are judged in part against the strategic possibilities opened up to the reader of popular melodrama, is an important enabling tactic. I wonder, though, how Chow would read Lu Xun’s activities during the last few years of his life, after a decisive move to the left and a total commitment to the proletarianization of literature, a move which led to his canonization in the PRC.

 

One aspect of China conspicuously absent in Chow’s book is the 1949 revolution. Since one could view this revolution as one of twentieth-century Western hegemony’s most resounding defeats, it is an absence not without significance. I understand that it is under the Western banner of “revolutionary China” that China’s “difference” continues to be positioned in some quarters, and am sympathetic with Chow’s analysis which shows how that particular positing of China’s exclusivity replays old patterns of domination and denial. Her book is an extremely important attack on the destructiveness inherent in that othering, which not only structures “China studies” in the West, but which was the material condition of Chow’s own upbringing in colonial Hong Kong. But while Chow was being educated in Hong Kong in the late 1960s, many of her coevals across the border in China were throwing their teachers out of windows, burning books, setting up schools for peasants in the remote countryside, and dying for their faith in the revolution. It is important not to deny her experience, but neither should we deny theirs. If Westernization is the materiality of Chinese modernity, of what is revolution the materiality? It might be interesting to follow Chow’s recuperation of Butterfly literature, the most popular literature of China’s early twentieth-century modernity, with a recuperative exploration of the psychic life of the most poplular cultural productions of the late 1960s–revolutionary operas like The Red Detachment of Women, The White-Haired Girl, or Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

 

It was indeed within the context of China’s modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that categories like “China,” “the nation,” “the West,” and “woman” become problematized for the first time. This period is also the point at which China studies in the West divides China into “modern” and “pre-modern,” with the consequences Chow documents so forcefully. Chow’s book centers on that moment and its particular consequences, and I am not faulting her for failure of coverage. I cannot help feeling, though, that the revolution’s absence marks a particular strategic choice. Her reading of Butterfly literature, a sophisticated and empowering reading, resonates with the tendency in many current studies of the productive possibilities inherent in the reception of popular culture to locate a capacity for resistance-in-givenness in popular strategies of appropriation of mass culture. Here in the New World Order, perhaps one should be grateful for resistance where one can find it. It is the smallness of this resistance’s social scale, though, that leaves me sometimes pessimistic. Is revolution really unimaginable after Tiananmen Square, Eastern Europe, and 1991 Moscow? Given the state of many of the West’s Others, I hope not. Events in China over the last fifteen years should not cause us to forget China’s revolution, for the 1949 revolution was not just a marking of the China difference. It was also the hope of a global possibility.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bhabha, Homi. “Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker, et al. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1983.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.