To orient
Faced with contagion, confrontation, conflict, how to avoid disorientation? And if that can be managed, how can we actively and positively orientate ourselves? A starting assumption here is that there are better and worse ways to orientate, and we should aim for better ones. And with that in mind, the prior note proposed that the ‘Cold War 2’ frame is not especially good, some could even say it is rather unhelpful, geopolitics in the register of kitsch. The analytical challenge is staying open to complexity, reckoning with difference, thinking with and thinking through the confusion of the contemporary.
With the hardening of differences comes the hardening of minds. To restate a claim from the previous note:
In adopting the Marvel movie approach to geopolitics, it places the United States and its concerns at the centre, it emphasises great power competition, encourages binary thinking, and keeps us comfortably tethered to the twentieth century.
A compliment to these dynamics is that China tends to be seen through an American lens, or in reference to American concerns. With this comes a tendency to view China as a monolithic actor, reducing a country of 1.4 billion people to a caricature capable of fitting into the kitsch role assigned to it. In making these observations, this is not to deny the real conflicts of interest and deep differences that exist; indeed, the purpose is quite the opposite. Ultimately, all sides would likely be better placed to mediate and manage these differences if they have a richer comprehension of the other, as well as a keener appreciation of genuinely shared challenges.
Befitting the Marvel movie approach to geopolitics, in this ‘Cold War 2’ sequel the part of ‘China’ suffers from insufficient character development. Much discourse on and around the country is produced at distance and with distance, increasingly filtered through the simplifying lens of great power rivalry. The closures and conflicts of the pandemic deepened this dynamic. China has also often acted in ways that have reinforced or exacerbated these impediments to better understanding. ‘Wolf-warriors’, in which diplomacy devolves into shit-posting, have done little to help matters. Few Western journalists are left in-country. Meanwhile, China scholars, those best placed to offer nuance and depth, face an array of impediments. Many are increasingly wary of traveling to the country. For instance, following a series of Japanese academics being detained during research trips, others are understandably hesitant to visit. Alternatively, those that offer sympathetic or nuanced readings of China are liable to be branded as apologists. The combined results are a wide and growing range of disincentives and impediments to careful, considered engagement with the country. In contrast to the career risks that come with offering complexity and care, the political and media environment is one that rewards simplicity and stupidity. None of these conditions are conducive to better understanding, as should be an aim, regardless of whether the country is viewed as friend or foe, marvel or monster. There are noteworthy exceptions, including podcasts such as Sinica, ‘The Little Red podcast’, ‘China and the Global South’; translation selections such as ‘Reading the China Dream’ and ‘The East is Read’; Dan Wang’s annual letters, and plenty more I am forgetting or not well acquainted with. Despite such efforts, there is a problem of knowledge and knowing when it comes to China.
With these thoughts in mind, I have spent the last few weeks visiting China, travelling to Yunnan, Sichuan and Beijing. Unfortunately, I was not in China for the World Economic Forum’s summer gathering of ‘the good and the great’, I will need to substantially increase my readership and recognition for that to happen. This was my first visit since December 2023, and my fourth trip to the country since pandemic restrictions eased. I make no claims to being a China scholar, my time there is experienced as a learner, with an eye and ear to the critical concerns motiving my work. Nor am I a disinterested observer, far from it: my wife is Chinese, I am a long-term resident in neighbouring Japan, and an Australian citizen with my work split between the Australian National University and Ritsumeikan University. The fate of East Asia is not abstract or far away; it is immediate and ever present. Moreover, a straightforward observation I repeat to students each year is that the world looks different from over here, the East looking West, and that matters. It is worth acknowledging and emphasising the point, as so many of the dominant voices speaking on and to Asia come from the North Atlantic, not the region itself. It is easier to blithely talk about the prospects of war when it is far away.
Recognising all of that, this is an introduction to a planned series of notes that will offer some (imperfect) observations from my trips to China, meant in the spirit of grappling with ‘the trap the world has become’, as Kundera put it. This extends notes from trips last year to Shanghai and Beijing. Thinking through and thinking with China, that is the intent.
The title of the series is ‘to orient’, consciously playing with the different meanings. As a verb, it is about locating, positioning, familiarising. In this sense, to speak of ‘Cold War 2’ undoubtedly orients. The concepts, analogies, ideas we pick up and use direct and point our thought in certain directions. We should be careful in how we orientate our thought, we should care. As a noun, the Orient is a place and space, real and constructed, that of the East – near and far, the other of the Occident, the West. That the term has become passé does not mean the accompanying ways of thought have disappeared, a point that invariably brings us to Edward Said’s influential book, Orientalism. In it, he stridently argued how ‘the Orient’ has been constructed and known by and through ‘the West’, shaped by material and ideational inequalities:
For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”).
The point in raising Said is not to directly apply his arguments to US – China relations, such a tiresome task is better left for undergraduate essays. Rather, it is to recall his claim that these modes of thinking are ‘persistent’ and that they actively impede understanding. ‘Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient’, Said judged. Indeed, much the same could be suggested about the way Orientalism has subsequently been understood and adopted. It is somehow fitting that we now have the worst of both worlds: a crude interpretation of Said soaking through institutions at the same time as a tired ‘East / West’ bipolarity is welcomed back by the kitsch commentariat. None of this fosters open thought, quite the opposite.
Returning to the original text:
Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.
This is an important, enduring insight: the frames we adopt can actively impede and prevent knowing. Thinking in cliches orientates away from comprehension, it locates the novel and the different in ready and repeatable tropes, it avoids the difficulties of reckoning with differences in all their details. Complexity replaced with simplicity, and not an elegant form of simplification that might assist comprehension, but a dulling one that forestalls knowing.
An important part of orienting oneself is determining which way not to go, what not to do. This seemingly simple task is more challenging than it might initially appear. Wallowing in kitsch analysis might offer comfort in confrontation, but such a disposition is poorly equipped for the uneven, confused realities we now face. Rather, there is a need to embrace and stay with the complexity and the detail, to avoid easy resolution, to actively stay with not knowing, to reckon with a genuine openness of thought and of possibility. Easier said than done, but worth aiming for.