Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China

by Longxi Zhang

This book transcends the boundaries of Chinese studies and scholarship on Western literature and critical theory, bringing together the two fields in a way that questions both the application of Western theory to Chinese materials and the resistance to theory in sinological scholarship. Recognizing that social and historical reality is external to discourse and that knowledge has an inevitable ethical import, the author argues for the importance of reality and lived experience in understanding a culture as well as the moral responsibility of such understanding. The book examines the discrepancies between various Western representations of China and the reality of China; inquires into the cultural, historical, and political contexts within which such discrepancies arise; and points out the distortion of reality in the tendency toward cultural dichotomies, the tendency to view China as the conceptual opposite of the West. From a comparison of biblical exegesis and commentaries on the Confucian classics to the contemporary assimilation of Western critical theories in China, this book discusses a wide range of topics that situates the understanding of China and Chinese literature and culture in the broad perspective of East-West comparative studies. It studies not only the Confucian tradition, modern Chinese literature, and the students' movement for democracy in China, but also such Western topics as Origen and biblical interpretation, Montaigne and cultural critique, Jameson and postmodern theory, and the reception of Said's Orientalism in China.

Genres: China

260 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1998

Reviews

[Richard Sjoquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zhang Longxi, formerly of UC-Riverside and now teaching at City University of Hong Kong, makes a supremely scholarly effort to bridge the yawning cultural gap between what many Western literary theorists imagine to be the contemporary condition of Chinese literary studies and what is in reality the case. In this collection of six previously published but edited essays, Professor Zhang brings the proverbial mirror closer to those who gaze on China with the distorting bifocals of binarism. While readily acknowledging that there are indeed important differences in philosophical outlook and historical experiences East and West and that these differences often distort the lenses of Western literary imaging, Zhang argues against making to much of this dichotomy, these mighty opposites.

Zhang is passionately devoted to opening an essentially Chinese path through the thicket of literary interpretation--a path that can borrow and appropriate theory from the West when needed but is not directed by a Western (re: Orientalist) compass. He imagines for Chinese literary scholarship a reclamation of the modern terrain so hard-won by Lu Xun and secured by Liu Zaifu and others. While its intellectual boundaries are as of yet to be ascertained, its direction is certain: away from wholesale investment in the latest Western theoretical project.

In his excellent essay, "Western Theory and Chinese Reality," Zhang sets about to critique critical theory itself, that meta-narrative that until now has been above reproach in the Left-laden academy which embraces it. In so doing, he makes well-reasoned forays into cross-cultural literary analysis (having lived and taught in both the West and mainland China) to reclaim Chinese space to question the merits of those like Prof. Rey Chow who appropriate Chinese-constructed symbolism for their own narrow ideological agendas. He reconstructs those who deconstruct without sufficient sympathy for or awareness of pressing Chinese political realities, aptly suggesting that their misplaced literary analysis ironically amounts to little more than neo-colonialism. In the process, here as elsewhere in these essays, he resituates Said and the latter's sense of postcolonial theory from a refreshingly Third World perspective.

In the next essay,"Postmodernism and the Return of the Native" he pummels the po-mo position on the absolute relativism of historical narrative (a topic which he takes up again in subsequent journal writing), among other matters of concern. And he revisits Said, arguing rather effectively that much in Western literary theorizing has unwittingly become a colonialist imposition on China.

That rare work of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary inquiry that deserves careful reading, Zhang's collection is bound to become a seminal text in the field of comparative literary analysis.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skipped the first 3 chapters about the Western discourses on China and jumped to the Chinese discourses on modernity, democracy, Westernization, and the West directly. Overall, it's a book in the same vein with Said's Orientalism, calling for dismantling of opposites by deconstructing the ontological bases of all binaries. More important, as indicated in the title, we can replace binaries with differences with grading shades and thereby learn more subtle and nuanced things about reality. Reality is nowhere and everywhere: nothing contain it in totality but everything shed lights on part of it. Similarities and differences always go in tandem, this opposite can be dismantled if we pay more attention to their relation instead of the polar ends. Categories have to be understood as provisional, subject to change in view of further evidence.