The China Question

For centuries, Western scholars portrayed China either as a land of superior morality, economy, and governance or as a formidable country of pagans posing a global threat to Western values. Idealized images of China were used to shame rulers for incompetence, while China was demonized as an external threat to exonerate ruling elites for domestic problems. In the twentieth century, the geopolitics of global capitalism enabled more reflexive perspectives on China, but the de-orientalization of knowledge is far from complete. In this thoughtful study, Ho-fung Hung shows how both Western elites and China's authoritarian regime continue to promote many orientalist stereotypes to advance their economic interests and political projects. He argues for seeing macro-historical political-economic changes as related to changes in the relative dominance of different ideas and suggests how open debate can overcome the extremes of fantasy and fear.