(SUNY Series in Global Modernity) Allen Chun - Forget Chineseness - On The Geopolitics of Cultural Identification-State University of New York Press (2017)

Forget Chineseness
SUNY series in Global Modernity

—————
Arif Dirlik, editor
Forget Chineseness
On the Geopolitics of
Cultural Identification
Allen Chun
Cover image: © Nagee, used with permission
The cartoon, by the artist Nagee, depicts the singer Chou Tzu-yu, who delivered a
formal apology in early 2016 for waving the flag of Taiwan while performing on a South
Korean television show. The words above the picture say, “Sorry, I’ve been Chinesed.
Today, it’s Chou Tzu-yu. Tomorrow, it will be you.” It is deliberately written in passive
tense (literally: “I was sorried, I was made to be Chinese”), which is not even proper
Chinese but corresponds to the forced, hostage-like nature of the illustration.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chun, Allen John Uck Lun, 1952– author.

Title: Forget Chineseness : on the geopolitics of cultural identification /
by Allen Chun.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2017] |
Series: SUNY series in global modernity | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031420 (print) | LCCN 2016059728 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438464718 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464732 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chinese diaspora. | Chinese—Foreign countries—Ethnic
identity. | Chinese—Ethnic identity. | National characteristics, Chinese.
Classification: LCC DS732 .C595 2017 (print) | LCC DS732 (ebook) | DDC
305.800951—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031420
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
ix
Introduction
1
Part One
Postwar, Post-Republican Taiwan:
Civilizational Mythologies in the Politics of the Unreal
13
Chapter 1
Chineseness, Literarily Speaking:
The Burden of Tradition in the Making of Modernity
15
Chapter 2
The Moral Cultivation of Citizenship as
Acculturating and Socializing Regime
39
Chapter 3
The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism:
When the Imagined Community Hits the Fan
57
vi Contents
Part Two
Hong Kong Betwixt and Between:
The Liminality of Culture Before the End of History
75
Chapter 4
Hong Kong before Hong Kongness:
The Changing Genealogies and Faces of Colonialism
77
Chapter 5
Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Birth of
Hong Kong Place-Based “Identity”
103
Chapter 6
Hong Kong’s Embrace of the Motherland:
Economy and Culture as Fictive Commodities
125
Part Three
The Reclamation of National Destiny:
On the Unbearable Heaviness of Identity
141
Chapter 7
From the Ashes of Socialist Humanism:
The Myth of Guanxi Exceptionalism in the PRC
143
Chapter 8
A New Greater China:
The Demise of Transnationalism and Other Great White Hopes
163
Chapter 9
Confucius, Incorporated:
The Advent of Capitalism with PRC Characteristics
179
Contents vii
Part Four
Who Wants to Be Diasporic?
The Fictions and Facts of Critical Ethnic Subjectivity
189
Chapter 10
The Yellow Pacific:
Diasporas of Mind in the Politics of Caste Consciousness
191
Chapter 11
Ethnicity in the Prison House of the Modern Nation:
The State in Singapore as Exception
209
Chapter 12
The Postcolonial Alien in Us All:
Asian Studies in the International Division of Labor
221
Afterword
239
Appendix
245
Notes
247
Bibliography
263
Index
283
Preface
Ethnicity as Culture as Identity:
Unpacking the Crisis of Culture in Culturalism
This book is in part a follow-up to a paper published in 1996, titled “Fuck

Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity.”1 At
the same time, it is a reply to many queries by scholars over the years who
were unsettled by aspects of that argument (including students who offered
to write a sequel to it) and my repeated tendency to decline invitations to
elaborate on the topic. I suspect that most of the commotion was caused
by the obscene title, in which case I would add that it has probably led
to many misreadings of the essay. The real subject matter was reflected
in the subtitle, which had less to do with Chineseness per se than with
muddles in the model involved, when sinologists and social scientists alike
transform culture into culturalism. Thus to answer the obvious question,
what does Chineseness say about China?, I would say little, at face value.
China has been changing, perhaps sui generis, and notions of Chineseness
have correspondingly changed as the subtle frame through which actors
and institutions ideologically validate their ongoing existence. The same can
be said about the various culturalist models that scholars deploy to make
sense of China or any other society; they validate in the first instance the
disciplinary mindset that inherently governs it.
In the same year, I presented essentially the same argument, albeit
directed to a cultural studies or social theory audience, in an essay titled
“Discourses of Identity in the Changing Spaces of Public Culture in Tai-
wan, Hong Kong and Singapore.”2 The ramifications here of Chineseness
or culturality as discourse are clearer, especially the politics of subjectivity
that invoke it. In both essays, I argue that discourses of Chineseness differ
significantly from the concepts of culture that theorists and Asian studies
scholars typically utilize in their study of Chinese culture(s) and society(ies).
In this regard, the comparison of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore was
ix
x Preface
deliberately chosen to emphasize that the different ways in which Chinese

in diverse societies articulate culturality are largely a product of its embed-
dedness in different sociopolitical processes, for which we lacked an adequate
conceptual language. It was only until later that I spelled out more precisely
the nature of this framework, namely geopolitics.3
Culturalism, of which Chineseness is a particular discursive representa-
tion, is less a social fact sui generis than a crisis invoked not necessarily by
the inherent nature of culture but by situations of context. In other words,
its imperative resides in essence outside culture. The fact that culture can
be codified, systematized, regulated, and even commoditized in ways that
are contrary to the spirit of lived experience is in short the source of many
crises of modernity, ranging from conflicts pertaining to national identity,
inventions of tradition, hegemonies of state, and the domination of culture
industries, including mass media. Chineseness has thus been constructed
in complex ways in diverse societies, the least of which is from the people
themselves. While it is possible and desirable to interrogate Chineseness, one
cannot do so without at the same time asking who is speaking for whom
and toward what ends? There are also places where Chineseness (and its
variants) has been so politicized that one can question whether its discur-
sive manifestation and propagation really has anything to do with culture.
Alternatively, one can look at the question in political terms too and ask,
is it really necessary to culturalize at all? The content of Chineseness is less
seminal than its form and function. On the other hand, it is possible to
problematize Chineseness; to demystify, reinscribe, even engender and queer
it. But explorations of alternative meanings as cultural critique have not
been my primary concern. In the meantime, the ambiguity of ethnicity as
culture as identity continues to be a problem endemic to social sciences,
which I have elaborated on separately.
In short, this book is no longer about the ambiguities of ethnicity as
culture as identity in a Chinese context but rather an effort to transcend
such literal discussions of Chineseness and situate them within their respec-
tive historical contexts and underlying geopolitical formative processes. To
problematize Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework,
from a comparative perspective and within a transnational or glocal con-
text, serves to problematize the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness
as an ethnic or cultural problem, among other things. In the long run,
Chineseness is just a superficial reflection of culture’s embeddness or ongo-
ing entanglement with more complex social institutional processes, such as
modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation and globalization. A deeper
probe into such institutions as processes per se should in turn offer a more
nuanced articulation of culturality.
Preface xi
Finally, why identify? Identity is, strictly speaking, a subjective rela-

tionship that does not by definition necessitate an inherent tie to culture,
although many seem to think it does. This marks the transition from geo-
politics to pragmatics. As Wang Gungwu rightly pointed out, “the Chinese
never had a concept of identity, only a concept of Chineseness, of being
Chinese and of becoming un-Chinese.”4 This then begs the question, what
is identity, as a concept and strategic process of negotiation? Erik Erikson,
who made identity crisis a keyword for our times, argued that it was not
just a marker of personal status but relations of “sameness” in a group,
if not shared values. If traditional Chinese lacked a concept of identity,
then without doubt it became a staple of culture in the era of modern
nation-states, where rentong literally means assimilation or boundedness to
a group. In this sense, the politics of identity should involve by definition
strategic choices about relations to groups and their underlying value judg-
ments. Thus, what is the relevance of Chineseness? It involves in sum the
construction of meaning and its relevance to the strategies of life choices
in relation to groups and values.
The subtitle of the book follows conceptually what I (Chun 2009) first
called “the geopolitics of identity.” The more explicit focus here on identifica-
tion underscores the point that identity is more than the fact of being or an
attribute of personal status. Identity is the product of a process of becoming
(socializing and assimilating). One rarely defines oneself ipso facto or sui
generis. On the contrary, the fact that modern identity (national above all)
compels one to have one implies that it is hardly a matter of negotiation or
personal choice. Identification as strategic negotiation is still rooted in our
boundedness to an ongoing social and political context. To term this larger
ongoing process geopolitics means first of all that it is concretely rooted in
what Dirlik (1999) aptly calls “the politics of place.” Whether politics is
framed by colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, or globalism is a matter of
definition that must be carefully distilled from ambiguities and contradic-
tions in the given literature. On the other hand, this process as a regime
of practice may resemble more closely what Foucault (1991) characterizes
as “spaces of dispersion” in the formation of socializing and culturalizing
possibilities that give birth to discursive identities.
Ten of the twelve chapters in this book are either updated revisions
or serious rewritings of essays that appeared in diverse academic journals,
namely History and Anthropology; Critique of Anthropology; Social Analysis:
The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice; Cultural Studies;
The Journal of the Hong Kong Sociological Association; Contemporary Asian
Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity; Suomen Antro-
pologi; Macalester International; Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational
xii Preface
& Crosscultural Studies; Theory Culture & Society; The Australian Journal of
Anthropology; and positions: east asia critique. Needless to say, they were
not written with area studies specialists as the main intended reader, but
motivated by dialogues with a wider multidisciplinary audience. The essays
presented herein are re-presented with the hope of making specific points
about the ongoing history, culture, and politics of respective societies, but
within a systematically consistent framework of analysis that may serve ulti-
mately as a more appropriate discourse of comparison.
Introduction
Beyond Chineseness:
Frames for a Differential Calculus of Historical Process
Textual regimes, documentary forms, and image repertoires work as

projects to socially organize our lives by decontextualising. This routin-
ised, pleasurable legitimation work all too often goes unremarked—e.g.,
tax forms, census returns, landownership registries, passport photo-
graphs, signatures and the murmuring volume around ‘I.D.’ (a word
we should always speak in full: Identification) are part of the taken
for granted mediations of modernity. They compel us . . . to represent
ourselves in certain, often minutely specific, ways; taken as a whole
cartography of power, they freeze us through these programs of power
into mythic statuses of sedimented language. We become our ID.
—Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer,
“From ‘The Body Politic’ to ‘The National Interest’ ”
Framing Cultural Discourses Within Situated,

Ongoing Sociopolitical Regimes
To lump together Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and overseas Chinese com-
munities or to define their shared characteristics and fate as Chinese-speaking
societies would invite easy criticism. Yet when looking seriously at any one of
them as discrete places and experiences, it is difficult to avoid essentializing
them in terms of given disciplinary frames of reference and inherent assump-
tions. From an Asianist perspective, presumed cultural affinities and shared
historical interactions usually form the basis of categorization and comparison,
even as the relative importance of other thematic considerations tempers one’s
interpretation of the above. Social scientific and historical analyses offer their
own theoretical grid but always within the framework of specific presumably
value-free concepts, definitions, and outcomes. The implicit framing of such
1
2 Forget Chineseness
societies or their populations as part of a Greater China or East Asia already

makes them relevant to each other in particularistic ways vis-à-vis societies
in different parts of the world. Needless to say, one cannot deny the overt
lineage of historical traditions and institutional systems that characterize text-
book accounts and provide a ground for the ongoing present. However, the
influence of such traditions as an a priori framework for that history can
be questioned. Similarly, East Asian models of culture or society within the
scholarly literature are typically coded in analytical terms whose legitimacy
is ultimately based on their presumed objectivity or value-free status. If any-
thing, identity is refracted, as though omnipresent and sui generis, from such
interpretations of history and civilization.
Identity is not synonymous with culture, history, or society. It is by
nature a discourse, a social construct whose emergence and change is grounded
in other deep frames of reference that have been evolving and remaking
themselves locally in response to mutating conditions at large. I argue that
encounters with modernity involve colonialism, nationalism, and global capi-
talism, among other conditions, which constitute a different point of depar-
ture, but the current interpretations prevailing in this literature are themselves
problematic, and thus require proper qualification. More importantly, the
ways in which these conditions at large impose themselves in any context are
also historically sensitive and inextricably intertwined with the specificities of
local practice, the engagement between which produces diverse experiences.
Concretely speaking, something must be said about colonialism in
Hong Kong, cultural nationalism in postwar Taiwan, the collusion of Party
and capitalist oligarchy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the state’s
disciplining of race and modernity in Singapore, and the shifting association
of Chinese overseas between diasporic and settler ethnicity. These condi-
tions at large are not mutually exclusive processes. Colonialism is present
in all the above contexts, albeit more as a state of mind or historical legacy.
Nationalism is present everywhere too, though in diverse forms. Above all,
it is important or necessary to view each societal context as a conceptual
frame of reference that can elucidate an underlying field of interaction
and articulate the particularity of experiences, which provide the basis for
engendering identifications of all kinds. In the end, direct relevance to shared
assumptions of Chineseness or culturality is at best secondary.
The Contradictory Tensions of Colonialism

as Inscribed and Practiced
The advent of postcolonial theory in cultural studies and humanities in

the 1990s raises pertinent questions as to what exactly is new not only in
Introduction 3
reference to earlier generations of colonial studies but also to an institution

that had effectively declined over a half century ago. Apt criticisms raised by
McClintock (1992), Shohat (1992), and Dirlik (1994) regarding the pitfalls
of the term postcolonialism suggest that one is dealing less with literal defini-
tions of the phenomenon, which has produced its own lineages of political
and intellectual discourse in the postcolonies, than a peculiar epistemic
mind-set that should be understood in its own terms, despite being flawed
by its inherent academic metropolitanism and subtle Eurocentricness (in
the sense that it was sparked by a crisis of mind within Western literature
rather than issues endemic to fields of colonial studies per se). McClintock
criticizes the narrow, distorted usages of the term postcolonial to assert that
the phenomenon of colonialism is perhaps more rampant than scholars have
recognized in order to suggest the wider relevance of postcolonial critique,
while Dirlik distances “Euro” postcolonialism from native traditions of post-
colonial critique, which on the contrary have always been rooted in ongoing,
local political struggles, and thus a different genre of postcolonial theoretical
agenda, in order to advocate the priority of thought in praxis. While there
are merits in an earlier, more literal and socially rooted postcolonial cri-
tique (postcolonialism1 ), notably in the form of critical Fanonism, subaltern
studies, and so on, that gave new impetus to the advent of a more recent
postcolonial theory (postcolonialism2 ), I think the latter postcolonialism2
also offers constructive avenues for theoretical development.
One way to define the advent of postcolonial2 theory is to view it as
a sophisticated take on the politics of difference, enhanced with reference
to its articulation of a notion of colonial subjectivity. It is not coinciden-
tal in this regard that the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks in particular
serves as the conceptual template on which a subjectivity of racial difference
becomes generalized. Whether one understands this in terms of Bhabha’s
poststructuralist reading of Fanon’s colonized subjectivity in the mirror of
self, JanMohamed’s rendition of Fanon’s Manichean allegory, or Spivak’s
tendency to view all discourse as colonialist, among other diverse inter-
pretations, the symbolic dynamics of difference that are abstracted from a
presumed situation of absolute power that is colonial domination become
in turn the basis of a global theory (see in particular Gates [1991]). This
then magnifies the role of culture.
In other words, culture in difference or the culture of difference
becomes the language for a new postcolonial2 speak. To some extent, this
is what scholars working in the field of colonial studies regard as the main
attribute of postcolonial2 theory. While this constitutes a dominant strain
of thought within the broad domain of postcolonialism2 , it is hardly the
most sophisticated or pathbreaking version of a postcolonialist2 paradigm.
The influence here of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in redefining the
field cannot be underestimated. Aspects of culture and difference are salient

to his interpretation of Orientalism and its relationship to colonialism, but
the collusive relationship between discourse and power or of the role of
discourse in obfuscating and sublimating the violence of domination adds
a rather different dimension to the presumed dialectics of difference between
colonizer and colonized.
While Orientalism operates at one level of creating difference through
the gazing of the Other in legitimizing the authority of self, it operates at
another level of negating difference or domination by colonizer of colonized
through the neutrality of discourse. The Orientalist describes and orders
reality through systemic observation, coding, and writing. The extent to
which he successfully dominates the Other and sublimates the violence of
colonial power is a function of the extent to which the Other acquiesces
to the system of knowledge within which he is inscribed, not unlike the
way people in a modern disciplinary society govern themselves in reference
to their conformity to or adoption of institutional norms of thought and
behavior. In short, postcolonialism2 can be about the dynamics of cultural
difference in the articulation of a critical theory. On the other hand, I
suggest also that postcolonialism2 can be about the critical articulation of
difference, where difference has already been discursively neutralized.
Needless to say, the history of colonialism everywhere has been amply
documented; at least, there is no dearth of primary materials and secondary
scholarly sources available. Yet one rarely assesses the facts in reference to the
authority or presumed objectivity that cloak the writings within which they
are embedded. It should be little surprise that even the best scholarly works
are written in a way that legitimate the inevitability of prevailing institutions
and mind-sets. It should be little surprise also that narratives championing
unilineal progress conveniently suppress at the same time exploitative and
contradictory aspects of the system. Finally, when the history of colonialism is
written as though colonialism does not exist or has been effectively sanitized
or purged of its violence, this is a further symptom of Orientalizing. In fact,
Orientalism is not peculiar to colonialism and should be a general, abstract
process. At issue then is the nature of colonial governmentality and its possible
collusive relationship with capitalism, nationalism, and other processes of rule.
As ongoing transformative system, it involves not only concrete policies in
practice but more importantly interactions at the local level that ultimately
engender changing cultural spaces, class dynamics, and public spheres.
From the perspective of institutional history, the evolution of colonial-
ism and empire can, of course, be viewed as a changing lineage of policies
and practices, which is a product of its relationship to ideologies and theories
of the times that diffused globally in particular ways. Yet at another level,
Introduction 5
these historical transformations have in the long run produced a complex

hegemonic process that is reflected in various regimes of rule. Insofar as
they overlap with other institutions, such as nationalism and capitalism,
they share a common field of discourse.
The postcolonial2 approach outlined above may be the product of
theoretical debates that seem to be most explicitly relevant to the study of
colonial societies, literally defined, but it is certainly not limited to them. The
general import of a cultural politics of difference and the collusive nature
of institutional ideologies and practices in the hegemonic construction of
its authority are pertinent also to nationalizing regimes and legitimizing
processes of the state.
Reading Nationalism as Culturalist Narrative

and Political Process
Before its rediscovery in the 1980s within critical circles of cultural studies,
historical theory, and literary theory, there had already been several genera-
tions of scholarship on nationalism. There has been no shortage of historical
ruminations in the 1950s and 1960s on the nature of nationalism, not to
its mention ideological roots in nineteenth-century philosophies of history.
The birth of the Republic of China in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolu-
tion made the nation-state an unambiguous presence both in China and
elsewhere in the world. The rise of nationalism has in many ways marked
the transition from tradition to “modernity” in standard narratives of world
history. To the extent that we attribute this historical rise to the effect of
concrete historical forces, such as colonialism and modernization, it has also
been easy to associate the form of the nation-state to its Western diffusion,
however defined. At the same time, the Chinese rendition of the nationalism
as “the principle of peoplehood” (minzu zhuyi) has been the end product of
intellectualizing by Chinese thinkers leading up to the fact. It intersects in
some ways with the nature of the general (abstract) phenomenon, but it is
also a peculiarly cultural definition that reflects interpretations of its essential
nature. The nation’s formation as a concrete sociopolitical institution has
been heterogeneous rather than uniform globally, and its intellectualizing at
a local level has always been intimately intertwined with, and thus directly
reflective of, its concrete particularities. The relationship between the general
nature of its diffusion (or modernity in its broadest sense) and its cultural
particularities has been the source of ongoing confusion in the literature,
insofar as such theorizing has usually been the primary result of one or the
other position. Everything is still open to question.
The transformation of China as a modern nation, its prominence in

the global arena and the wealth of prevailing scholarship on Chinese history,
especially with regard to nationalism, should be obvious reasons, on the
other hand, for being wary of alternative interpretations. Influential works
by John Fitzgerald, Prasenjit Duara, Peter Zarrow, and Wang Hui, among
others, cover in fact a wide diversity of approaches in this regard. Fitzgerald’s
(1996) work has focused largely on the role of social classes and political
actors eventually leading up to the Nationalist Revolution. Its emphasis on
concrete processes differs from Duara’s (1995) introspection on narratives
of history. The “Chinese narrative of History” can be juxtaposed not only
against European ones but also against multiple, competing narratives of
community. For Zarrow (2012), the same narratives of region, civil society
and the state become objects of intellectual rumination. Unlike Duara’s
system of nation-states, Zarrow’s is an abstract reflection on an underly-
ing “political culture” based on notions of citizenship and sovereignty,
among others, which legitimated the nation-state. These political principles
that gave birth to the Chinese state “after empire” become in Wang Hui’s
(2014) terms the basis of a deeper conceptual transformation from empire
to nation-state. In this regard, intellectual history becomes the terrain for
discoursing heavenly principle (tian li) as the cosmological nexus of empire.
While one cannot deny that such principles have been the source of ongo-
ing debate in successive eras of neo-Confucian thought, Wang’s discussion
of the emergence of modern identity, as though just the end products of
Western concepts of sovereignty and citizenship in a process of political
reconsolidation after the demise of empire, leaves much to be desired.
I am less interested in the grand transformation from empire to nation,
which is without doubt an undeniable aspect of an important political trans-
formation, than in the evolution of nationalism (ultimately “nationalizing”)
in the ongoing present and its interactional dynamics with political and
cultural processes. Without downplaying the role of concrete institutional
and other factors that have contributed to the specific historical emergence
of the nation-state globally, Anderson (1983) and Gellner (1983) have
pointed to its abstract cultural constitution as the inherent defining char-
acteristic. For Anderson, the modern nation might have been an imagined
community, but more importantly it was a genre of empty, homogenous
space that transcended whatever ethnic, religious or other attributes (even
citizenship and sovereignty) that scholars have typified as concretely essential
to nationalism. Community’s rootedness to a colloquially based imagination
was similar to Gellner’s understanding of this culture of the nation, which
not only contrasted with its hierarchical, specialized nature in the age of
empire but also had to be universally inculcated in the minds of citizens
in order for a nation to persist. The embeddedness of Anderson’s imagined
Introduction 7
community in political ideologies and Gellner’s emphasis on the primacy

of mass education both accented in different ways the function of politics
and policies in engendering various underlying cultural imaginations. The
nature of such legitimizing regimes should in turn highlight the politiciz-
ing constructions of citizenship but also the rationalization of distinctive
culturalizing mind-sets that drive them.
Geoffrey Benjamin (1988) aptly characterizes the nation-state as “the
unseen presence.” Contrary to social scientific definition, he argues that the
modern nation-state is an artifactual, imitable, and ideological institution,
maintained by processes of ideological mystification, in which both overt
politics and scholarship have been responsible for the active maintenance
of the nation-state’s invisibility. Philip Abrams (1988) has made similar
claims about the state in arguing that the state is not the reality that stands
behind the mask of political practice but rather the mask that prevents us
seeing political practice as it is. As he (1988:76) put it, the state is “a third-
order project, an ideological project. It is first and foremost an exercise in
legitimation—what is being legitimated is, we may assume, an unacceptable
domination.” Taken together, Benjamin and Abrams’s emphasis on the vari-
ous regimes of mystification that buttress its reified nature as territorially
discrete, systemically regulated standard linguistic community, bound by
uniform rights and identities, gives a rather different spin on the nature
and ideological function of citizenship and sovereignty. Needless to say,
prevailing theories of nationalism have, if anything, been obsessed with the
superficial presence of nation-states, marked by discrete territoriality, stan-
dard cultures or traits, and so on, even as they elude uniform definition in
such terms. What Anderson and Gellner do not emphasize explicitly enough
is that whatever this imagined community is, it had to be radically new,
to transcend the “primordial sentiments,” in Geertz’s (1963) terms, charac-
teristic of traditional societies. This novelty is at the same time the source
of its contested nature, its need for legitimation, and hence the basis of
ideological mystification that obscures its unacceptable domination. Culture
can in this sense be manifested in diverse discourses and practices. In other
words, the cultural aspects of this imagined community define not only the
distinctive or historically particular features of nation-state formation but
more importantly the nationalizing imperatives underlying it.
Disjunctures of Class and Ethnicity in an

Era of “Transnational” Globalization
Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) characterization of disjunctures in the global cul-

tural economy and Kenichi Omae’s (1990) account of the borderless world
have in different ways accented the metamorphosis of global capitalism in

the late twentieth century. Multinational corporations, for one thing, do
not appear to follow the flag anymore, and subcontracting of the produc-
tion process globally has made the notion of cultural origins anachronistic.
Appadurai’s accent on the chaotic flow of ethnoscapes, financescapes, and
so on is predicated in large part on Lash and Urry’s (1987) proclamation
of “the end of organized capitalism” and the breakdown between core and
periphery in the modern world system. But as in the case of Omae, the
literal focus is on the increasing demise of national barriers and boundaries
that has transformed in effect the nature of economies, societies, and cul-
tures. Not only have economies been transformed by labor migration (see,
e.g., Basch, Schiller, & Blanc 1994) and societies by changing patterns of
settlement and diasporic identity (see especially, Lavie & Swedenberg 1996).
Culture itself has moreover become the site of transnational hybridization
(Nederveen Pieterse 1995).
The advent of transnationalism as a challenge to nationalizing bound-
aries and orthodox political regulation has represented the underlying impe-
tus behind Greater China, the notion of cultural China, Sinophone theory,
and to a lesser extent the liminal status of Taiwan in the arena of interna-
tional relations and the global economy. Whether it ultimately represents
a destabilizing feature of a prevailing order or an emancipatory alternative
remains to be seen. The detotalizing tendencies of transnationalism have
always been the consequence of both decentralization of direct state control
from above as well as localized resistance from below.
The establishment of duty-free trade ports in Hong Kong and Singa-
pore can be viewed, through its denationalization of economic consumption,
as a commoditization of culture and society in general. From the perspective
of utilitarian economics and libertarian politics, the opening of the market
economy is an entity that enables the triumph of individual freedom. In
practice, it makes access to resources and power, whether it is in the form
of commodities, status, or influence, a consequence of class access or con-
trol. In the context of a preexisting colonialism and nationalism, social class
competes with political stratification or allocation of resources and power by
the state or other political organs. At least in most typical cases of market
liberalization, deregulation of the economy has been accompanied by decen-
tralization of political control from above. The exception to this rule is the
recent advent of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The applicability
of neoliberalism in specific contexts can also be debated. More importantly
in the context of overlapping and competing institutional processes, identity
in terms of nation, class, or ethnicity can be politicizing and depoliticizing.
Introduction 9
Epistemic Moments Within Transformations of Place:

A Schematic Outline
We live in an era of apps (that resist totalizing). Each of the places discussed
in the sections below represent autonomous societies in their own right and
have spawned their own histories and scholarly literature. My objective is
less to offer systemic interpretations of their history or culture or even to
suggest that there are integrated analytical frameworks that one can apply
for this purpose. Foucault defined discourses, strictly speaking, as “spaces of
dispersion.” In this same sense, there are in each venue epistemic moments
that depict or exemplify distinctive transitions. They constitute frames, epi-
sodes, or junctures for the interaction in the abstract of geopolitical forces.
It would not be imprecise to characterize these fields as spaces as well.
The establishment of the Nationalist (KMT) regime in Taiwan after
World War II is in a literal sense a continuation of the Republican gov-
ernment on the Chinese mainland. But the construction of its peculiarly
cultural nationalist policies and institutions is a complex product of its
relationship to many forces. The most obvious one was its Cold War engage-
ment with socialist China. Another was the challenge of recovering and
transforming fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. Juxtaposed against both
was its underlying relationship to the West, especially the constant shadow
of US military protectionism. It is not necessary to ruminate at length here
on the nature of geopolitics in the sense of international relations. My focus
is more on how geopolitics in these terms provides the ground for engender-
ing a polity defined by peculiar relationships between ethnicity, culture, and
nation. In the case of Nationalist Taiwan, Chineseness becomes a master
discourse that pits tradition against radical socialism and its culturalness
against Japaneseness. As a construction, it is systematically politicized, which
has ramifications for how it interprets traditions, such as Confucianism, as
a source of its conservatism. Through its dissemination of Sun Yat Sen’s
Three Principles of the People (filtered further by Chiang Kai-shek’s New
Life Movement ethics), Nationalist ideology is in strict terms an ambivalent
doctrine that weds conservative tradition and scientific modernity, uneasily
to say the least. Its rationalization is a product of its institutional inculcation
in all aspects of education, society, and politics. In light of all of the above,
national identity is not simply a politicized (Nationalist) worldview but more
precisely a cultural code of conduct that roots a sense of political commu-
nity to assumed ties to ethnicity and culture as totalizing entity. The latter
is hardly arbitrary; its legitimacy had to be newly imposed, systematically
inculcated and reinforced. Most importantly, its intrinsic dualism as cultural
mindset exudes a normative, hegemonic presence that has long survived its
Cold War origins, even after the emergence of Taiwanese consciousness, and
overlaps contradictorily now with the advent of the transnational economy
and, most recently, the evolution of an ever greater China
The historical transformation of Hong Kong is more complex than
has been portrayed by its superficial change from British colony to Special
Administrative Region (SAR) within China. Its nature as colony and its
ambiguous aftermath must be problematized in multiple ways. Its meta-
morphosis from a “barren island,” colonial trading post and cultural satellite
of Guangzhou into free trade port and dynamic center of cosmopolitan
hybridity, among other things, can viewed in the context of a mutating
colonialism at its fulcrum. On the surface of things, its social and economic
transformation has transcended the stereotypical analyses that have typi-
fied most theoretical discussions of colonialism elsewhere in the literature.
Even from the outset, Hong Kong has been an atypical colony. Its colonial
caste polity overlapped with its ongoing integration with China in all other
respects, marked by open borders and cultural continuity. Contrast with
British colonies elsewhere, however, begs critical scrutiny of the apparent fic-
tions of “indirect rule” as well as the incommensurable relationship between
policy and practices. Contrary to definition, colonialism does not disappear
after 1997, and simply mutates with the change of regime, along with the
collusive relationship of capitalism to politics. The polity is different from
the cultural nationalism engendered in Taiwan, characterized by different
relationships between ethnicity, culture, and nation, among other things,
which have spawned a different kind of identification, whose politicization
has continued to mutate after 1997.
In the PRC, the recent evolution from a Maoist socialist society to
one transformed by a free market capitalist economy has become a major
focus of debate. Theoretical discussions of an earlier era that explored “the
sprouts of capitalism” in grand theories of comparative modernization have
largely been replaced by those, on the other hand, emphasizing the policy
shift of Deng Xiaoping in kick-starting the free market economy and those
advocating a longue durée view of global capitalism, between which various
other institutional approaches tend to situate themselves. Political policies
and economic reforms aside, I argue that it is possible to view the under-
lying transformation in broader terms, of changing geopolitical spaces. In
the process, the breakdown of socialist humanism as a system of social and
political values eventually paved the way for a nationalist identity based on
the cultural legitimacy of history and civilization. If anything, nationalist
renaissance provided popular support for success of any economic develop-
ment, which in turn colluded with postcolonial narratives to reverse centu-
Introduction 11
ries of Western imperialist domination. Perhaps unlike the rise of capitalism

in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the determination of the state to
control economic development by regulating political access to privileged
resources made it especially prone to corruption and ties of guanxi. The
transformation of guanxi, which has traditionally been a secondary and
nuanced aspect of a cultural complex dominated by notions of face and
personal rapport (renqing), into a tactical strategy and life routine per se can
be seen as a paradigmatic feature of that broader sociopolitical transforma-
tion. In institutional terms, the focus of debate has been on a misplaced
neoliberal characterization of the new PRC policy. Unlike the state’s man-
agement of free market policy and economic development in Singapore, the
brunt of the PRC’s state domination has been on maintaining Party support
and political correctness as a compromise to profit maximization and on
promoting business collusion in political ventures abroad. Adam Smith in
Beijing has in the longer view been the least significant aspect of it.
With regard to the overseas Chinese, the emphasis, in reference to
sinological concerns, has mostly been on its marginality or removal from the
center, reflected best by the concept of diaspora. Correspondingly, appeals
to cultural China and Sinophone theory have in their own ways endeavored
to counter the privileging of the center by promoting multivocality and
cosmopolitanism. However, I argue that the concept of diaspora, like that
of the subaltern, has been maligned as an identity that symbolized ethnic
degradation. Its situation of social disenfranchisement can also be viewed
as a project of geopolitical positioning, which can by nature change. The
increasing unpopularity of diaspora as a term among Nanyang Chinese, once
called “Jews of the East,” can thus be contrasted with its increasing popular-
ity among Asians in North America. This change in cultural imagination,
where authorial subjectivity of speaking, writing, and intellectualizing is only
part of broad-based lifestyles and practices, is in the long run the product
of its positional situatedness in their respective societal regimes.
In Singapore, the dominant narrative centers on the birth of its mod-
ern, disciplinary society and the role of the state in engineering its under-
lying practices. In many respects, it runs counter to the prevailing model
of cultural nationalism. At the same time, the influence of postcolonialism
plays a rather different role in contrast to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The eth-
nic makeup of Singapore’s population in a dominant Malay, Muslim milieu
and the state’s strategy in balancing intrinsic tensions between tradition and
modernity in order to embrace a radical path toward national identification
represent a rather different terrain of geopolitics. In this regard, disinterested
domination by the state grounded in a British rule of law, micromanage-
ment of social organization and practices, a free market economy, and appeal
to Asian values of cultural community have been promoted as a uniquely

integrative framework. Its unusual geopolitics and the state’s role in forging
a unique strategy to it thus form a peculiar blueprint for socioeconomic
development, ethnic stratification, and its nationalizing mind-set.
In light of the above experiences, a postcolonial subjectivity can ulti-
mately be seen as an epistemic mind-set for Asian studies but only after
recognizing the latter’s groundedness in the division of labor of international
academia and its “ethnicizing” production of knowledge.
Part One
Postwar, Post-Republican Taiwan

Prisons serve as a clear example (of total institutions), providing we

appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions
whose members have broken no laws.
—Erving Goffman, Asylums
One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.

—Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”
Prologue
I argue that the dynamics of ethnicity in the context of Taiwan’s nation-

statism has been more thoroughly misunderstood than understood by schol-
ars. If anything, the Republic of China in Taiwan is the typical incarnation
of a monocultural nationalism, yet Taiwan’s experiences have clearly run
counter to the norm, especially in ethnic terms. In most other places, such
as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, as if to vindicate The End of History
in Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) terms, crumbling socialist regimes have given
way everywhere to the real face of ethnonationalism. In places such as
South Africa, after blacks were given the vote, they voted quite naturally
for majority rule. Only in Taiwan, where everyone knows that native Tai-
wanese constitute three-fourths of the population, did people (in its first
free elections in 1989) vote decisively for a KMT regime by a three-to-one
margin that was dominated by alien mainlanders. Any impartial analyst
would have concluded that ethnicity per se accounted for little. If anything,
Taiwan should have become independent long ago; so what is the real prob-
lem here? In actuality, ethnic realities have never been an object of doubt.
13
They have always, on the other hand, been clouded by political discourses
disguised as cultural realities. Yet scholars in and of Taiwan consistently
refuse to confront the fictive nature of these discourses for what they are.
A politics of ethnicity couched in such terms is driven at a deeper level by
an impoverished, even vulgar, definition of politics.
If normal politics is unreal, how unreal can it get? During the first
PRC missile crisis, while trying to explain the incomprehensible calm that
enveloped most of Taiwan in the face of PRC saber-waving and the West-
ern media’s depiction of an Iraqi-Kuwaiti‒like crisis in the making, I wrote
(mostly to the horror of PRC colleagues) that China would not invade.
This would be like cutting off one’s arm, just because it began to shake
uncontrollably. Yet in the midst of all this commotion about reunification
and independence, few of us bothered to ask, what kind of “unification”
were people really talking about? I think for many Chinese (on both sides),
500 years is not a long time to wait for reunification. One of the popular
myths about the fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty noted that someone
discovered a dusty placard in the imperial rubble, proclaiming “Restore the
Ming,” as if to suggest that it was worth waiting 268 years for this. In this
postmodern, globalized era, the very thought of it is totally unreal. What
are people fighting and dying for in actuality, if not an anachronistic fic-
tion? What deserves detailed scrutiny is the extent to which such fictions
are institutionally inscribed.
Chapter 1
Chineseness, Literarily Speaking

The Burden of Tradition in the Making of Modernity
In his passage about Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, Walter Ben-
jamin wrote that the appalled Angel of History, who seems to be
contemplating in dismay modernity’s piles of wreckage upon wreckage,
“would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed.” But through nationalism the dead are awakened, this is the
point—seriously awakened for the first time. All cultures have been
obsessed by the dead and placed them in another world. Nationalism
rehouses them in this world. Through its agency the past ceases being
“immemorial”: it gets memorialised into time present, and so acquires
a future.
—Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited
What is a nationalist ideology? By addressing this question, I seek to show

how the writing of political discourse reflects on the role of the state as a
thinking and practicing subject. In postwar Taiwan, the Kuomintang (KMT)
or Nationalist Party government took a heavy-handed role in invoking icons
of traditional authority, myths of civilizational unity, and the legitimacy of
shared values but primarily through the mediation of culture. Within a
process of cultural construction, the metamorphosis of Sun Yat-sen’s Three
Principles of the People typified the KMT’s attempt to impose its utopian
ideals not just in accordance with changing times but by reference to the
authority of texts that could not change. The KMT’s peculiar Orientalism
in a literal sense reflected an ambivalent project of tradition-qua-modernity.
More important than the content of its ideology, this imagined community
This is a major revision of “An Oriental Orientalism: The Paradox of Tradition and Modernity
in Nationalist Taiwan,” History and Anthropology 9(1):27‒56, originally published in 1995.
15
so engendered established the basis of a nationalizing mind-set rooted inher-

ently in ethnicity that transcended changes of political regime and has con-
tinued to frame the contemporary course of Taiwan’s culture and society.
The Objectification of Others in the

Writing of a National Self
The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism has in past decades sparked

sharp debate within academic circles. Area specialists engaged in the study of
Oriental history or society were among those most directly affected by Said’s
attack on Western scholarship on the non-Western world. Said’s contention
that Western scholars exoticized the Orient as an object of gazing, then with
the full force of their “authority” constructed a worldview out of it that
had little to do with the “real” Orient incited extreme reaction.1 Objectifi-
cation in this sense had a double entendre. By identifying the Orient as a
bounded object of discourse where none had existed, Orientalism was in the
first instance an imaginative, if not exaggerated, fiction of those societies.
Second, by virtue of its distancing, Orientalism was hardly an “objective”
account, despite its best intentions, and at worst a solipsistic projection of
its Occidentalism.2 Said’s explicit critique of Orientalism therefore resided in
his questioning of the subjective interpretation of the author and ultimately
the institutional legitimacy of his authority (not only as writer but also as
political actor and agent of those underlying interests).3
At the same time, it also became clear that Said’s criticism had serious
ramifications for humanistic and social scientific writing.4 Anthropologists
were implicated insofar as much of their work dealt explicitly with other
peoples or other cultures. While Said offered little to resolve the “authorial
dilemma” of the anthropologist’s attempt to decode, interpret, and analyze
the culture and society of other peoples as they “really” exist, except through
critical reflection of his own modes of interpretation or writing, he located
the problematic source of such study above all in the writing of such schol-
arship and in its inherent Eurocentrism.
By making Orientalism, at least in the first instance, a problem of the
West (rather than of its other), Said appeared to suggest that the Orient was
immune to the charges of exoticism and objectification that were intrinsic
to Western scholarship. According to Said (1978:2‒3), Orientalism is “a
style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction
made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.’ ” As “a corporate institution
for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about
it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling
Chineseness, Literarily Speaking 17
over it, Orientalism can be seen ultimately as tied into a larger political
and economic project of colonizing ‘the East’ ” (Said 1978:10).5 The focus
on othering made the idea of an Oriental Orientalism inconceivable. Said
never questioned native discourse, which he assumed to be the Orient as
itself, unadulterated by Orientalism.6
The issue of concern here then is namely those indigenous discourses
that are silenced by the citationary authority of Orientalism and referred to
by Said (1978:2) as the absent other.7 In the case of China, there is no lack
of native discourses on Chinese culture or civilization. Before the advent
of the nation-state, China was a cultural state of mind.8 The middle king-
dom, China’s traditional depiction of itself, should be distinguished from
its modern incarnation as territorially bounded nation-state characterized by
rights of citizenship, a standardized national language and uniform educa-
tional system. At best, it invoked a set of core values that linked persons in
time and place to an all-embracing cosmic hierarchy.9 The terms zhongguo
(middle kingdom) and huaxia (civilization as rooted in the mythical Xia
dynasty) are most widely used to characterize China or Chineseness; they
actually have their origins in a feudal past symbolized by a confederation
of states claiming to share a common culture or civilization.10 The sense of
unity engendered by this kind of cultural order easily explains the Chinese
perception of an unbroken historical continuity despite the rise and fall of
dynasties—indigenous and barbarian, the myth of a common ethnicity born
in the Yellow River valley, and an attachment to the languages and values
of an ongoing literary tradition.
This does not exhaust the range of possible native discourses on Chi-
nese culture and Chineseness. It suffices to say here that there are many
native discourses of the self that can be distinguished from Orientalist con-
structions of the Chinese other. These discourses have their own historicity,
but these images of timelessness or unbroken continuity with the past should
be distinguished from Eurocentric discourses of an unchanging Orient prev-
alent in the Enlightenment-era humanistic and social scientific literature
(culminating in the Asiatic mode of production, Oriental despotism, etc.).
The assumption of harmony with a primordial past, despite the real history
of dynastic upheaval, barbarian conquest, and alien religions, represents a
myth of or imagined communion with a sacred origin. This myth of shared
sacredness is a definition of Chineseness that also transcends ethnic identi-
ties and political realities.11 By transcending ethnic identity, Chineseness can
be viewed as a set of values that is distinct from considerations of material
customs. By transcending political realities, Chineseness in this sense does
not depend on the physical autonomy of a state or nation in order to be
effective. Such indigenous conceptions of (a cultural/civilizational) China
contrast sharply, on the other hand, with the way Europeans have attributed
the sociopolitical unity of China to its dynastic lineage. Ethnically rooted
national definitions of Chineseness are modern conceptions, which have a
different kind of historicity.
The points made above about native constructions of Chinese culture
and Chineseness have a seminal bearing on contemporary reality. Postwar
Taiwan—that is to say, the Republic of China as transplanted to Taiwan at
the conclusion of World War II, following Taiwan’s retrocession by Japan
back to China after a fifty-year interregnum—is an interesting example of
the crisis of culture in a Chinese context. As part of the KMT’s effort to
continue the legacy of the Republic in their retreat from the mainland and
in the process to nationalize Taiwan, the government embarked on a pro-
gram to resuscitate “traditional Chinese culture.” “Tradition” in this sense
represented a defense of political ideology (as opposed to “socialism”) but
more importantly by virtue of its defense of culture. The crisis of culture
involved first of all the KMT’s attempt to nationalize Chinese culture (by
making the latter a metaphor or allegory of that imagined community called
the nation-state) where no such culture (of the nation) really existed. By
invoking “tradition,” they appeared to resuscitate elements of the past, but
they were clearly inventing tradition (by virtue of their selectivity) in ways
that did not differ from “the invention of tradition” found elsewhere.12 The
ways in which culture was framed (as ideology), then strategically deployed
(in practice), reflected the distinctiveness of the Taiwan experience. The crisis
of traditional Chinese culture in contemporary Taiwan, not unlike the phe-
nomenon of Orientalism and the invention of tradition, was really a crisis
of modernity. In the case of Taiwan, I argue that this crisis of modernity
was precipitated by the need for the state to establish new foundations
of spiritual consciousness, ideological rationality, and moral behavior that
could conform to the dictates of the modern polity or nation-state, in ways
that primordial notions of Chineseness, strictly speaking, could not. This
need to forge a new hegemony ultimately prompted these (mystifying, hence
unnatural) discourses on culture.
The institution of nationhood necessitated novel forms of Chineseness
in many respects. Before the 1911 Nationalist Revolution, which resulted in
the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic, the
notion of society as a territorially distinct, politically bounded and ethnically
solidary community did not exist. Many terms were borrowed from Japanese
(Han & Li 1984). Up until the mid-nineteenth century, it was unnatural for
Chinese to call other ethnic groups “ethnic groups,” just barbarians. Only
during the early Republican era did intellectuals associate zhonghua minzu
(Chinese as ethnic group) with zhongguo ren (citizens of China), which tied
people of China territorially to a common polity.13 Moreover, Chineseness

in terms of material culture, ethnicity, or residence was never clearly defined
(Wu 1991:162). The Chinese rendition of nationalism (minzu zhuyi) as
the “principle of a common people” underscored the notion of a bounded
citizenry as the distinctive feature of nationhood (in contrast, for example,
to the purely institutional characteristics of the nation-state).14 This was
pointed out by Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic, who in a
famous phrase criticized the traditional Chinese polity for being “a dish of
loose sand” (yipan sansha). This can explain why the promotion of “societal
consciousness” (minzu yishi) and spiritual values has been repeatedly high-
lighted in the aftermath of nationalism as the primary obstacle to national
solidarity, in the face of both Communism and the modern world system.
If discontinuity brought about by the advent of nationalism was a
basis for reinvoking culture and tradition, one can also argue that the renais-
sance of traditional Chinese culture in postwar Taiwan had to be a modern
phenomenon as well. In this sense, by creating notions of collective identity
and societal consciousness that mirrored the boundedness of the nation in
ways that primordial notions of Chineseness could not, recourse to tradi-
tion relied less on authenticity of content than on novelty of form. As an
Orientalism in Said’s terms, Chinese culture became an object of discourse
not only in political terms (vis-à-vis Chinese socialist doctrine), but also
as objects of scholarly investigation (through the chronicling of history,
philological archiving, archaeological preservation, social scientific knowl-
edge), and habits of everyday practice (through family training, educational
cultivation, peer group socialization, workplace supervision).15 Tradition was
reinvented, and its mystification coincided with the hegemonic process of
state formation.16 More importantly, this mystification of Chinese culture,
in its capacity as imagined community, represented an orchestrated effort to
create a productive ideology of truth (about the Chinese self ) in a way that
simultaneously distanced itself from an implicit other, opposed not only to
a Communist China but also the world.17
Post Hoc Discourses on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles

and the Changing Utopianism of Nationalist Ideology
Aside from the substance of its political thought, the source of appeal of
any Nationalist ideology should entail to some extent the commensurabil-
ity of its cultural ethos. In postwar Taiwan, national culture as rhetorically
invoked and politically deployed by the state involved not only a multiplicity
of things (markers of national identity, icons of patriotic fervor, and national
treasures) but also the authority of different kinds of rhetorical statements

(shared myths, beliefs, and values; common language, ethnicity, and custom
as well as the codification of discursive knowledge) whose systematicity
reflected the utopianism of a Nationalist polity.
The writing of culture as national self should not be seen as peculiar
to Taiwan, but rather general to the modern nation-state. As Cohn (1988)
has argued, the state produced its own forms of knowledge, necessitating
documentation in the genre of statistics, investigations, commissions, and
reports pertaining to the accountability of its citizens in domains such as
finance, industry, trade, health, demography, crime, education, transporta-
tion, and agriculture. The need of the state to know and document laid
the basis of its capacity to govern. Thus, the will of knowledge to power
provided the state a mode with which to define and classify spaces, separate
public from private spheres, demarcate frontiers, standardize language, and
personal identity, as well as to license the legitimacy of certain activities
over others. Or as Corrigan and Sayer (1985:3) preferred to put it, “the
state never stops talking.”
The self-production of documentary knowledge, political discourse,
rituals of state, and routines of rule is then part and parcel of the state’s
project to define itself, and in the process rationalize its continued existence.
The multiplicity of representations and statements at its disposal extended
beyond the need to fabricate a sense of national identity and boundedness.
Although grounded in the empty, homogenous space of a standard linguistic
community and the synthetic commonality of a public culture in senses
already well described in the work of Anderson (1983) and Gellner (1983),
this imagined community of shared symbols and values also begged legiti-
macy that an imagined ethos of political ideology endeavored to appeal to.
In many respects, the Three Principles of the People by Sun Yat-sen
made sacred by the KMT as the founding doctrine of the Republic repre-
sented an important frame for conveying the imagination of a Nationalist
society. It was widely known that the doctrine of the Three Principles was
not a formal treatise but rather a series of lectures compiled in large part after
the death of its author. In his preface, Sun stated that rebel insurgents who
attacked his Canton headquarters in 1922 destroyed his original manuscript.
He resorted to giving lectures on topics, which became regrouped under
the rubrics of the Three Principles (nationalism, democracy, and livelihood).
However, Sun died before finishing all of the projected lectures.
Yet in spite of his death, these lectures became a point of departure
for continued writing and formulation of the Three Principles, and it was
really these post hoc discourses and their ongoing mutations that charac-
terized the changing utopian vision of a Nationalist ideology and national
culture. Of the continued changes in substance, the most important being

the appendage of two supplementary chapters by Chiang Kai-shek on the
principle of livelihood, which nearly equaled the length of Sun’s entire
manuscript, the Three Principles eventually became an important object of
educational dissemination as textbook knowledge taught at all levels of the
curriculum from elementary to university. This expanded discourse, rather
than the original text of the Three Principles, represented a continual process
of writing, to say the least, but one should really spell out in detail how
these permutations of substance and form were engendered as a function
of ideological investment and institutional normalization.
In essence, the malleability of Nationalist ideology, which suited dif-
ferent sociopolitical conditions, rather than its textual authenticity, was what
enabled the Three Principles to transform itself from political doctrine,
strictly speaking, into a broadly conceived cultural ideology consistent with
all other representations of the imagined community. For much of the early
history of the Republican era following the Revolution of 1911, National-
ist ideology served mainly as revolutionary agent of sociopolitical change.18
Party organization during this early era was influenced by the Soviet Leninist
model, which explains the propagandistic role of ideology. Shen Zongrui
(1991:5) has noted seven features of KMT Party‒controlled government
organization during this early period: (1) use of ideology by the Party as a
tool of articulation; (2) focus on the spirit of revolutionary nationalism; (3)
adoption of a centralized policy decision-making apparatus; (4) establish-
ment of a central standing committee (zhong chang hui), which functioned
as an administrative arm of centralized control to coordinate all activities
in the spheres of political culture, media dissemination, and intelligence
surveillance; (5) appropriation of the military as a subordinate agency within
the government; (6) creation and maintenance of a youth corps to promote
activities and recruit future party members from the youth; and (7) relega-
tion of autocratic control over the state apparatus to a single leader.19
Many aspects of the KMT’s revolutionary state apparatus in the sense
of its ideologically based, Party-dominated mode of governmental operation
carried over into later times, despite the KMT’s break with the Communist
Party (CCP). They included its continued centralized control over culture,
media, and security; increased institutional linkages between the party, gov-
ernment, military, and education; and a heightened emphasis on maintain-
ing a collective ethos based on the perceived synonymity of one people, one
race, one family, one language, one ideology, one culture, and one history.
On the other hand, some important differences in the KMT’s interpreta-
tion of the Three Principles enabled Nationalist policy to deviate from
socialist practice on the mainland. The first concerned the establishment
of constitutional government as a means by which popular representation

was accorded to the people, and the second was a belief in the principle of
equity in private property. The latter prompted the large-scale implementa-
tion of the Land Reform Act in 1950, which reapportioned land among
small landholders and tenant cultivators. Constitutional government and
private property no doubt paved the way for some degree of democratic
representation and a market economy, albeit still controlled by a centralized
bureaucratic system.
The shift in Nationalist ideology away from revolutionary pragmatism
had much to do with Chiang Kai-shek’s modern, scientific interpretation
of the Three Principles, and his particular emphasis on ethics, democracy,
and science.20 As the CCP continued to regard the Three Principles as a
revolutionary doctrine written mainly from a precommunist petty bourgeois
perspective, the ideological split between the two Parties intensified. More-
over, it was not until the KMT’s takeover of Taiwan that the systematic
transformation of the Three Principles into a doctrine of conservative tradi-
tionalism began to take place. Much had to do naturally with the continued
state of war, but more importantly it involved the changing uses of ideology
in this “war of maneuver,” using Gramsci’s (1971) terms.
In the early phase of Taiwan’s occupation from 1945‒67, officially
called “The Glorious Restoration” (guangfu) by the KMT, the basis for a
different kind of nationalist imagination was beginning to take shape. Dur-
ing the previous half-century from 1845‒1945, Taiwan had been ceded to
Japan. Despite the Han ethnic origins of its local Taiwanese inhabitants, the
radical nature of this new “imagined community” cannot be underestimated.
According to Anderson (1983), the establishment (in this case, forced impo-
sition) of a standard linguistic community was an important precondition
for the formation of a new national consciousness. In the case of Taiwan,
this new collective consciousness had to be by definition a cultural national-
ism insofar as it involved re-anchoring a local Taiwanese population to the
mythic origin of Chinese civilization, as implied by an essentialist notion
of huaxia. The shift back to a Chinese cultural holism was accompanied by
the rejection of Japanese culture, including a ban on all Japanese language
materials, such as films, literature, media, and so on, and reinforced by
the forward-looking spirit of ethics, democracy, and science that Chiang
Kai-shek wished to promote through the Three Principles. In a phase of
cultural unification, standardization of a new linguistic community based
on Mandarin Chinese (to the exclusion of Taiwanese and native dialects)
became the vehicle for legitimizing the continuity of Chinese history, habits
of ethnic custom, artifactual treasures of civilization, and traditional social
values as standard bearers for a new Chinese national identity. The kind of
culture being promoted during this initial phase of Taiwan’s reunification

into the Republic of China had to be qualified, however. Although the
imposition of culture was meant to invoke the highly literate civilization
of an imperial past and the legitimacy of the new regime as guardians of
that past, there was no serious effort to systematically reconstruct the nature
of that culture or tradition. Culture’s primary function in this regard was
to provide a myth of shared civilizational origin that could further serve
as the groundwork for instilling patriotic sentiment and a community of
shared values.
During 1967‒77, primarily in reaction to the Cultural Revolution
in the PRC, the KMT embarked on a second phase of cultural discourse,
explicitly titled “cultural renaissance” (wenhua fuxing). Cultural renaissance
was directed at the highest levels of government policy as a deliberately
heavy-handed mode of ideological warfare and carried out as a large-scale
social movement involving active coordination between the Party, media,
local level government, schools, and various grassroots organizations.21 It
was really during this phase that the activist revolutionary character of
Nationalist ideology began to be supplanted by a conservative rhetoric tied
fundamentally to the survival of Chinese tradition-at-large.
The cultural renaissance movement was promoted to coincide roughly
with the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen and formally
inaugurated by a four-page essay by Chiang Kai-shek, titled Zhongshanlou
zhonghua wenhuatang luocheng jinian wen (in short, Zhongshanlou Com-
memorative Essay). In the following year, a committee was established at
a provincial level to promote the Chinese cultural renaissance movement.
The provincial committee then set up regional committees at the city dis-
trict and rural township levels to carry out cultural renaissance activities,
primarily through the agency of the elementary and middle school. The fact
that schools were called on to serve as active centers for the promotion of
cultural learning and awareness in the daily curriculum and in extracur-
ricular activities was a central tenet of government policy to extend the
level of public consciousness to the local level. The government’s design of
cultural renaissance was far reaching and meant to combine administrative
planning, media dissemination, and scholarly research, as well as to engage
the coordinated efforts of the Party, newspaper and broadcasting industry,
and various state-sponsored “people’s interest groups” (grassroots organiza-
tions). The work of tradition in these domains was driven by four explicit
guidelines: (1) allow the media to sow the seeds of public dissemination
and incite education to take the initiative, (2) exemplify and actively lead
through the expression of social movement, (3) use the schools as activity
centers for the extension of the culture renaissance movement to the family
and society-at-large, and (4) use the full network of administration to step
up coordination and supervision.22
The promotion of the cultural renaissance movement beginning in the
mid-1960s was not a spontaneous discovery of traditional culture and values.
It was a systematic effort to redefine the content of these ideas and values,
to cultivate a large-scale societal consciousness through existing institutional
means and to use the vehicle of social expression as the motor for national
development in other domains, economic as well as political. In other words,
not only was there an organized effort to cultivate a spirit of national unity
through recourse to tradition, but there was also an effort to lead people to
believe that this spirit of cultural consciousness was the key to the fate of
the nation in all other respects. Thus, achievements as diverse as economic
progress and athletic success were all seen as consequences of this spirit of
national unity. That the cultivation of a spirit of cultural consciousness was
explicitly linked with the policy of cultural development in other aspects,
such as the extension of ties with overseas Chinese and foreign cultural
agencies, financing of grassroots cultural groups, development of the tourist
industry, increased publication of the classics, preservation of historical arti-
facts, large-scale promotion of activities in science, ethics or social welfare,
development of sports, and use of mass media to step up cultural coverage
and intensify anticommunist propaganda, was not accidental.23 This was the
first step in a program to objectify (commoditize) culture.
At the local level, cultural renaissance was in effect a three-step process
involving public dissemination, moral education, and active demonstration.
In the schools, courses on society and ethics as well as citizenship and moral-
ity were taught at elementary and middle-school levels, respectively. In high
school, introduction to Chinese culture, military education, and thought
and personality became a staple part of the curriculum in addition to regular
courses in natural and social science. Outside the classroom, essay and ora-
tory contests on topics pertaining to Chinese culture were regularly held as
well as peer-group study sessions to discuss current speeches and writings.
These were supplemented by occasional activities in all aspects of traditional
culture, such as music, dance, folk art, painting, calligraphy, and theater.
Moral education was not limited to schools and children and extended also
to the family and local community in the form of family training groups,
social work teams, and women’s and neighborhood associations. Local orga-
nizations regularly awarded prizes to model youth, model mothers, model
teachers and model farmers on occasions like Martyr’s Day and birthdays
of national heroes such as General Yuefei, the Qing dynasty naval warrior
Koxinga, and the penultimate teacher Confucius. Even teachers underwent
similar moral supervision and training by participating in occasional study

groups and various grassroots activities and attending talks given by scholars
on topics pertaining to Chinese culture.
In the cultural renaissance movement, there was clearly an attempt
by the government to (re)write “traditional Chinese culture” in postwar
Taiwan. Obviously, it was not the only attempt; it was only the most obvi-
ous attempt. Yet in order to assess its significance vis-à-vis other forms of
ideological writing, one should emphasize that the movement itself was
predicated on the need first of all to construct what Fox (1990:3) has called
“ideologies of peoplehood,” a common consciousness which persons could
identify with as being part of the same nation. This consciousness was not
just an esoteric, abstract sense of common identity; it had to be provoked
by feelings of social solidarity, which had roots in established symbols, myths
and narratives. Moreover, spiritual unity was not something provoked for
its own sake; it was presumably the key to defeating communism as well
as the cure for all problems of national development, economic, social, or
other. The way in which cultural renaissance was promoted in Taiwan, that
is to say, backed by the full force of institutional power, also had ramifica-
tions for the nature of cultural authority. It is not enough to say that the
writing of culture in Taiwan was political in origin and motivation. That
the cultural renaissance movement could not be spontaneously initiated and
defined from bottom up but had to be carefully orchestrated instead from
above meant, of course, that the state was the sole arbiter of culture. In
essence, the state defined culture by making culture (in terms of tradition)
conform to the exigencies of the new polity and the “rational” ethos of a
KMT worldview. Yet while the cultural renaissance movement was not the
sole definition of culture in postwar Taiwan, it was surely the basic frame-
work around which all other levels of public discourse revolved, especially
in relation to the construction of a national political culture.
Insofar as culture in Taiwan invoked tradition, it also invoked to
some degree a call to Confucianism as the rational basis of Chinese tradi-
tion. Not unlike other discourses of tradition, Confucianism was invoked
here not as a system in itself but as a set of stripped-down ethical values
that had a particular role in the service of the state. As a generalized moral
philosophy or a kind of social ethics that could be easily translated into
secular action, Confucianism here meant for the most part devotion to filial
piety, respect for social authority, and etiquette in everyday behavior.24 This
was a far cry from the permutations of Confucian ideology that emerged in
different schools of Confucian learning and that came to influence the prac-
tice of imperial government in past dynasties. Thus, recourse to Confucian
tradition, especially in its emphasis on filial piety, was actually an attempt

to extend feelings of family solidarity to the level of the nation thus could
not be viewed just as neutral cultural values.
The defense of Chinese traditional culture sparked by the cultural
renaissance movement later spawned the politicization of Confucian ideol-
ogy, the archivalization of historical and archaeological knowledge, a height-
ened emphasis on standardization of traditional thought, the sinicization of
Western science and modern life, custom and behavior, and other attempts
to “invent” tradition. This conservative turn of events sparked a basic refor-
mulation of the Three Principles from a doctrine of pragmatic revolutionary
nationalism to an ethical worldview steeped essentially in traditional, even
Confucian, values.
In this regard, it was well known that the original Three Principles
lacked a consistent philosophical framework, thus much attention was
devoted to developing its foundations in traditional Chinese thought.25 The
development of such a philosophical framework was an important step in
the ideological warfare being waged at the time. Underlying the rhetoric of
anticommunism was a perceived necessity to legitimize Nationalist political
ideology in terms of accepted social values. In other words, the fate of tra-
ditional Chinese culture and Nationalist ideology was intertwined insofar as
it could be seen as grounded in a set of social values within which appeal
to Confucianism played a part. In reality, the Three Principles was always an
uneasy mix of Western scientific pragmatism and Chinese ethical philosophy,
which made it open to interpretation from many angles.26 Sun’s spirit of
Western scientific positivism was pertinent to his anti-Manchu revolutionary
nationalism, yet, on the other hand, he also cast his faith in scientific posi-
tivism within a Confucian humanist (ren) framework in a way that was not
unlike the practitioners of the tiyong school. There were many attempts in the
early Republican era to synthesize a consistent philosophical framework from
Sun’s scattered writings and thoughts. In the politically edged atmosphere of
cultural renaissance, the influential voice that emerged was a collection of
essays on the philosophy of the Three Principles edited by Dai Jitao (1978),
prefaced in 1925 by Dai but became resurrected then reproduced widely in
KMT government publications. In a larger work, Dai (1954:34) cast Sun’s
thought squarely within a tradition of philosophy traceable from mythic
times through the era of Confucius and centered essentially on a morality
of livelihood. Others reiterated Sun’s explicit references to (primarily Sung)
Confucian concepts and placed them alongside his vision of a Chinese nation
linked to the continuity of history and civilization.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, there were many efforts to systemati-
cally cast the Three Principles as a coherent, consistent body of thought.
In many cases, works making explicit reference to the Three Principles

tended to be sweeping generalizations based on the entire corpus of Sun’s
work.27 Other attempts at synthesis focused on the perceived importance
of specific functional aspects of his work, such as his philosophy of liveli-
hood, scientific world view, political ideology, and economic theories.28 The
production of knowledge in relation to Sun’s thought also brought about
endless anthologies of his writings, most of which were used in conjunction
with courses.29 Yet despite the massive quantity of writing produced, very
few of these “scholarly” studies constituted serious or even original research,
choosing instead to standardize well-known material into an easily digestible,
politically correct form. Insofar as tradition was invoked, its reference to
the past (as might be the case of nostalgia) was clearly less important than
its selectivity and rhetorical use in the present.
In the 1970s, the government established graduate departments in
major universities and research centers like Academia Sinica to explicitly
promote the study of the Three Principles. Yet despite institutional promo-
tion of the Three Principles in the academy, scholarly writing within these
institutes has always displayed two divergent trends, which Zhang Zhim-
ing (1990:3) has referred to as “the Three Principalization of Scholarship”
(xueshu sanmin zhuyi hua) and “the scholarly transformation of The Three
Principles” (sanmin zhuyi xueshu hua). Much of the previous efforts to sys-
tematically reconstruct a Nationalist political ideology on the basis of Sun’s
scattered texts had been part of the former trend to rationalize and sanctify
the ideological purity of Sun’s thought. Without a doubt, work along these
lines continued in the academy and was consistent with the conservative
climate of ideological politicization and anticommunist sentiment. Yet at
the same time, these institutes became a venue for the scientific rationaliza-
tion of the Three Principles by adapting technical expertise from cognate
disciplines like political science, economics, and sociology then transforming
Sun’s thematic concerns with nationalism, democracy, and livelihood into
blueprints for modern practice.
The applied scientific nature of academic research conducted in these
institutes of the Three Principles became increasingly apparent with the
advent of reformist policies adopted at the end of the 1970s and into
the ’80s by Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor. The
younger Chiang gradually moved away from the heavy-handed politics that
had characterized the Cold War tensions of a previous era of cultural renais-
sance, choosing instead to promote full-scale economic growth, often at the
expense of ideological purity. It was generally during this phase of economic
liberalization and reformism that the face of the Three Principles shifted
from being standard bearer of Chinese traditional culture to a modern,
scientific blueprint for progressive society, with relevant functional applica-

tions for the future.
The gradual changes in research program at the Three Principles Insti-
tute at Academia Sinica clearly reflected the changing ethos of the Three
Principles and its practical role in the construction of the nation-state.
Created in 1974 as a preinstitute with thirteen research fellows, it was
established as a formal institute in 1981. By 1984, it expanded swiftly to
encompass a full-time research staff of thirty-four, eleven of whom were
economists, nine historians, six sociologists, five political scientists, one
philosopher, and only two specializing in the Three Principles. Despite the
professional composition of the research staff, the internal research sections
within the institute were still divided according to the Three Principles,
namely nationalism (composed of sociologists and historians), democracy
(composed of political scientists), and livelihood (composed of economists).
According to the institute’s research prospectus, its primary aims of develop-
ment were, first, to construct a theoretical framework based on the Three
Principles and, second, to conduct empirical studies with broad relevance
for national policy. Serving the nation-building principles of Sun’s Nation-
alist ideology, it also aimed to serve the needs of international scholarly
research and national reconstruction.30 In 1988, the disciplinary makeup
of the research staff changed negligibly, but research programs within the
institute were radically reorganized into five sections, named (1) the Three
Principles and historical research, (2) the Three Principles and sociological
research, (3) the Three Principles and political scientific research, (4) the
Three Principles and economic research, and (5) the Three Principles and
legal research. Its statement of purpose in the institute’s prospectus was now
revised to state that, in addition to research on the Three Principles proper,
focus was also placed on interdisciplinary research with adjoining functional
specializations, ultimately with a view toward expanding its theoretical hori-
zons and practical applications more in line with international research.31
By 1990, all five research sections dropped reference to the Three Principles
altogether, and the institute’s name was officially changed to Sun Yat-sen
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. The scientific rationalization of
the Three Principles thus became complete. By upgrading the Three Prin-
ciples, the rest of humanities and the social sciences now provided a direct
service in the making of a (progressive) national ideology.
The winds of change reverberated over to other departments and insti-
tutes involved in the teaching or promotion of the Three Principles to the
point of overhauling the content of courses and their required status at all
levels of education. Ironically, yet consistent with its orientation in an age
of reform, many of these institutes became a hotbed for developments in

postmodern and critical theory, regularly citing the likes of Giddens, Haber-
mas, and Gramsci. While calls for reform (including the abolition of the
Three Principles from the curriculum) increasingly came from the teaching
establishment, this was met surprisingly with counterappeals from the Min-
istry of Education to intensify propagation of the Three Principles.32 Thus
depending on one’s point of view, the Three Principles (in its conservative
form) had either become obsolete or (in its modern incarnation) a vehicle
for renewed Nationalism.
Political Thought as Cultural Pedagogy and Disciplinary Practice
In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson (1981:30‒31) described the

ideological investment that enabled Biblical narrative to be rewritten at
many different levels of textual transformation. Beginning with the collective
history of the people of Israel, the plight of the people became allegorically
represented in the form of biographical narrative through the life and suf-
fering of Christ. This allegorical interpretation was then the apparatus for
the writing of moral narrative through which historical events (e.g., the
deliverance of the people from Egypt) and heroic biography (resurrection
of Christ) became imbued with psychological meaning. Finally, the moral
narrative generated the analogical dimension of text, where the narrative
was transformed again into a genre of collective myth or universal history.
This mythical, universal form of narrative established the political legitimacy
of the people.
The rewriting of narrative and ideological investment enabling people,
events, concepts, and things to become imbued with different levels of
meaning was certainly not limited to Biblical myth. The writing and rewrit-
ing of culture in the process of nation-state formation in Taiwan was a
similarly complex process of ideological investment. It involved more than
just the manipulation of master symbols such as the flag, national anthem,
and other icons of patriotic fervor. Nor was there any single allegorical basis
that provided in Jameson’s terms the interpretive code or blueprint for all
subsequent transformations of text. To be effective, the political construction
of culture as representation of state and new societal consciousness had to
be sublimated and inscribed at many levels of writing. The fact that the
government was able to invoke many sources of tradition in this regard not
only established its legitimacy according to a set of accepted sociocultural
values, but more importantly made possible the construction of different
kinds of narrative outside the realm of politics per se, for example, popular
public discourse, scholarly treatises on history, and the culture industry, that
provided in turn a framework of writing from which cultural production
reinforced societal consciousness.
The teaching of Nationalist ideology was an example not only of how
national culture was rewritten at all levels of interpretation but also of how
its writing had to be viewed as the collective labor of various agents in the
system insofar as it involved the regulation of public behavior at all levels
of everyday practice. It was decided early on that public education would
be devoted primarily to political training and that the Party would be an
active agent in the writing of the curriculum. In 1919, the Ministry of
Education formally implemented a course on “Party ideology” (dangyi) as
the nucleus on which the government aimed to base its vision of Nationalist
education. In 1932, the course was renamed “citizenship” (gongmin) then
broadened to include topics on ethics, morality, politics, law, and econom-
ics. This was taught as a required course in high school. At the same time,
other courses on “common sense,” “health training,” and “civic training”
were created at elementary and middle-school levels. The guideline underly-
ing the mapping of the curriculum was clearly spelled out in Ministerial
directives: the focus at the elementary-school level would be on the applica-
tion of concrete life practices, in middle school on the correct learning of
concepts, and in high school on the study of underlying principles. Even
after courses shed the title of “party ideology,” it continued to be dissemi-
nated at all levels of education and expanded in content to include other
aspects of social life, ethico-moral values, and personal conduct, in other
words ultimately all aspects of public behavior. By the time the course on
“citizenship” was renamed “The Three Principles (of Sun Yat-sen)” in 1944
and again in 1950, following the restoration of Taiwan, the KMT govern-
ment had already begun to systematically program the focus of education
toward the long-term cultivation of a Nationalist worldview.
This systematic program was initiated by an essay in 1953 written
by Chiang Kai-shek, titled “Two Amendments to the Cultivation of the
Principle of Livelihood” (minsheng zhuyi yule liang pian bushu). The next
fifteen years saw experiments with courses at the elementary and middle- to
high-school level. Foundational courses on common sense and society at
the elementary-school level designed in the 1930s were renamed “knowl-
edge of citizenship” and “morality of citizenship,” and then amalgamated
into a single course on “citizenship and morality.” Upper-level courses at
middle- to high-school levels shifted between “rules of disciplinary practice”
(xunyu guitiao) and “rules of life routine” (shenghuo guitiao). In 1968, the
nature of the curriculum was revamped, this time for the next thirty years.
“Citizenship and morality” at the elementary school level was renamed “life
and ethics,” while its corresponding middle- to high-school course became
“citizenship and morality.”33
While the systematic reconstruction of the Three Principles at all levels
of education was in historical terms the direct consequence of an explicit
program to politicize education from the point of view of the Party, the addi-
tion of courses on personal conduct, moral behavior, and civic values made
clear that successful acquisition of correct political ideology was founded on
the prior cultivation of an ethico-moral lifestyle in all other respects. Thus,
piety, etiquette, and deference were not just limited to family virtues, as
might be the case of a Confucian notion of filial piety, in strict terms. They
were meant to be the moral foundation of all societal relationships. The
cultivation of these values in the practice of everyday life was the precondi-
tion for successfully inculcating the broader vision of Nationalist society as
well as orthodox political views. In other words, in order to achieve this
goal of politicizing education, it was important to see how political ideology
as theoretically conceived was the “natural” culmination of moral education
and the normal practice of everyday social life.34
Like the four-tiered transformation in Jameson’s interpretation of Bib-
lical narrative, the writing of nationalist ideology in Taiwan also manifested
a multi-level transformation. At the lowest level of elementary training, one
can see a focus on the practices of the individual body, personal hygiene,
and individual welfare as well as the acquisition of common sense.35 At the
intermediate level, with courses focusing more on civics and society, there
was further ideological investment of values previously at the individual-
experiential level to one where knowledge of interpersonal relationships in
society as things in themselves became the focus of education. The dis-
placement of learning from a collective-experiential domain to the level of
collective-theoretical knowledge became complete at the high-school level
with the teaching of Sun Yat-sen’s political thought (guofu sixiang).
The writing of national ideology in the context of education has been
from the outset a crucial dimension of the KMT’s attempt to define culture
and use the symbols of a common culture as the basis by which to cultivate
a unitary societal consciousness, thus legitimize or reproduce the nation-
state. Needless to say, the government’s political authority to construct and
define culture was one that was backed by the power of the totalitarian state,
but the construction of a culture of the nation (in all its flavors) through
the writing (and practice) of political ideology (as ethics and moral behav-
ior), promotion of master symbols of the body politic, and various rites of
national celebration and rituals of state as the basis on which to maintain

solidarity of the nation (in the process guarantee continued domination by
the state) was predicated by a different kind of politics altogether, namely
hegemony. Underlying the overt politicization of cultural renaissance in the
public arena of national ideology was the internal transformation of political
values in the context of education into sublimated form by invoking tradi-
tion or appealing to ethical virtue and moral conduct. The transformation
of political ideology at various levels of ethics/morality, followed by the
active promotion of the latter as “culture,” thus constituted the framework
on which hegemony was created.
The writing of culture/ideology in this hegemonic process can be
viewed as part of an even larger project of socialization in institutional terms.
For it was really within this larger framework of socialization that the active
promotion of culture represented in reality a crucial part of the govern-
ment’s effort to impose routines of disciplinary lifestyle in various domains
of social interaction, such as the family, school, military, and workplace. In
this regard, filial piety, moral codes of disciplinary conduct, national ideol-
ogy, work ethics, and contractual obligations were manifestations of a larger
set of life principles that had as its ultimate goal “the making of the moral
person” (zuoren). Literally speaking, the concept of zuoren simply meant
displaying the proper conduct, and in the context of specific institutions
zuoren became in practice a code word for conformity to the routines and
norms of the respective institution, whatever they were. Moral education
through display of correct attitudes and moral training (shouxun) through
emulation of proper conduct were thus inalienable aspects of socialization.
In practice, such moral regulation depended on the collusion of many
institutional agents at a local level, the most important being the Party and
the military. Given the single Party politics of the state, the line separating
Party from government was always ambiguous to begin with. Civil servants
were obliged to be active members of the Party. Party units were set up in
each institution, and members were not only actively engaged in recruiting
more members but were constantly on the outlook, supervising the actions
and thoughts of colleagues.36 The use of military personnel as jiaoguan
(“school officers”) or enforcers of correct moral behavior in the middle
school and university was an extension of the state into the disciplinary
apparatus of the school. One responsibility of the jiaoguan was to oversee the
activities of the China Youth Corps (literally Anti-Communist China Youth
for National Restoration Corps, a Party-sponsored youth activity group to
which many students belonged). The presence of the military, while seen
as a direct imposition of the Party in the operation of the school, was also
portrayed as part of the overall socializing environment of the school.
The reinforcement of everyday etiquette was not just limited to insti-

tutional socialization within the school. This same normalizing behavior
was a core feature of other institutions, where this socializing notion of
“training” was applicable, notably during military service and in the work-
place. The creation of disciplinary spaces with the advent of institutions
like the hospital, school, military, and factory are well-known to readers
of Foucault (1977:135‒94). Military training, KMT style, however, had as
much to do with training the soul as the body. Much of basic training was
spent in the classroom, and a large proportion of that time was devoted
to teaching political ideology and moral values, after which students were
instructed to write reports to “express heartfelt thoughts” (baogao xinde).
Similarly, organizational meetings were a regular activity within military
camp, during which everyone was expected to “speak out” (biaotai) much
in the way that students were expected to do so in public rallies during
the cultural renaissance movement. The purpose of such “confessional” rites
was to express outwardly one’s inner feelings, and performance of proper
moral behavior was one of the things usually taken into consideration
by supervisors when making periodic assessments (kaoji). In the work-
place, the importance of maintaining proper moral behavior or etiquette
in face-to-face interactions (renji guanxi) was equally pertinent, although
not necessarily to such a ritualistic extent. Bonuses were usually also based
on results of one’s kaoji.
In retrospect, there were three phases in the promotion of the Three
Principles, which corresponded to changing political-intellectual discourse in
the Nationalist era, namely that of revolutionary pragmatism, conservative
traditionalism, and scientific reformism. Its ongoing discourses were as much
a function of changing strategies of political survival as changing utopian
visions of the modern nation-state. In the formation of the state, political
ideology was part of a larger discourse of culture, whose existence epitomized
Party unity but in a way that relied on mutual support of other coexisting
discourses. In this sense, culture was not unlike what Foucault (1991:55)
aptly called a space of dispersion, an open and indefinitely describable field
of relationships. The formation of cultural discourses was in these terms a
play of specific remanences involving a multiplicity of different kinds of
rhetorical statements. As discursive formation, cultural renaissance showed
the relative influence of extradiscursive dependencies involving a panoply
of economic, political, and social practices. In the writing of the Three
Principles as Nationalist ideology, the transformation from cultural pedagogy
to disciplinary practice introduced intradiscursive dependencies that enabled
common elements to disperse across discursive fields, linking different levels
of ideological investment.
The Nationalist Ethic

and the Spirit of Chinese Rationalism
In his analysis of what he called “the paradox of rationalization” in Max

Weber’s account of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Wolf-
gang Schluchter (1979:42) singled out three elements of the Calvinist world-
view that provided the basis for the inherent dissolution of a religious ethos
of radical world rejection and its transformation into a totally secularized
ethos of radical world domination. They were, namely, (1) the interpretation
of the secular “world” as a religiously worthless cosmos of things and events
to which the heterogeneity of natural and ethical causality applied; (2) the
idea of this “world” as an object of fulfillment of duty through rational
control; and (3) the compulsion to develop an ethically integrated person-
ality, which demanded one’s total commitment. The Calvinist worldview
attempted to fuse all three elements into a unified attitude, so that, in the
name of God, one had to exert rational, methodical control over one’s total
conduct and dominate the world through the incessant accumulation of
good works in one’s vocation. At this point, however, this ethos confronted
in practice a paradox, which led to the devaluation of the religious ethic
and its subordination to secular values of its modern vocational calling. This
religiously devalued “world” forced one to recognize its own laws; the more
this happened, the more independent the world became. In their mutual
confrontation, alienation between the religious ethos and the impersonal
ethic of capitalism became obvious. That is to say, by attempting to master
the world in its own terms, the overt religious meaning of inner-worldly
asceticism became displaced by the secular values of a routinized code of
rational conduct. It was in this sense that the accumulation of good works
as an ethical code of conduct became a self-motivated act or an ongoing
thing in itself even after it lost its intrinsic religious meaning.
I do not mean to suggest that Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles was
an Asian version of Weber’s Protestant ethic, despite close resemblance of
what Schluchter has called practical rationalism, metaphysical-ethical ratio-
nalism, and scientific-technological rationalism to what I characterized as
the revolutionary pragmatism, moral conservatism, and scientific reformism
of Sun’s thought. Yet there is clearly a paradox of traditionalism at the level
of discourse that must be spelled out in order to explain the nature of this
underlying Nationalist ideology.
First, one must stress again that Nationalist political ideology in post-
war Taiwan referred less to the Three Principles, as Sun Yat-sen had actually
conceived of it, which still remains a contested reality, than to the utopian
vision of it filtered through Chiang Kai-shek’s emphasis on ethics, democracy,
Preface xi
Finally, why identify? Identity is, strictly speaking, a subjective rela-

tionship that does not by definition necessitate an inherent tie to culture,
although many seem to think it does. This marks the transition from geo-
politics to pragmatics. As Wang Gungwu rightly pointed out, “the Chinese
never had a concept of identity, only a concept of Chineseness, of being
Chinese and of becoming un-Chinese.”4 This then begs the question, what
is identity, as a concept and strategic process of negotiation? Erik Erikson,
who made identity crisis a keyword for our times, argued that it was not
just a marker of personal status but relations of “sameness” in a group,
if not shared values. If traditional Chinese lacked a concept of identity,
then without doubt it became a staple of culture in the era of modern
nation-states, where rentong literally means assimilation or boundedness to
a group. In this sense, the politics of identity should involve by definition
strategic choices about relations to groups and their underlying value judg-
ments. Thus, what is the relevance of Chineseness? It involves in sum the
construction of meaning and its relevance to the strategies of life choices
in relation to groups and values.
The subtitle of the book follows conceptually what I (Chun 2009) first
called “the geopolitics of identity.” The more explicit focus here on identifica-
tion underscores the point that identity is more than the fact of being or an
attribute of personal status. Identity is the product of a process of becoming
(socializing and assimilating). One rarely defines oneself ipso facto or sui
generis. On the contrary, the fact that modern identity (national above all)
compels one to have one implies that it is hardly a matter of negotiation or
personal choice. Identification as strategic negotiation is still rooted in our
boundedness to an ongoing social and political context. To term this larger
ongoing process geopolitics means first of all that it is concretely rooted in
what Dirlik (1999) aptly calls “the politics of place.” Whether politics is
framed by colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, or globalism is a matter of
definition that must be carefully distilled from ambiguities and contradic-
tions in the given literature. On the other hand, this process as a regime
of practice may resemble more closely what Foucault (1991) characterizes
as “spaces of dispersion” in the formation of socializing and culturalizing
possibilities that give birth to discursive identities.
Ten of the twelve chapters in this book are either updated revisions
or serious rewritings of essays that appeared in diverse academic journals,
namely History and Anthropology; Critique of Anthropology; Social Analysis:
The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice; Cultural Studies;
The Journal of the Hong Kong Sociological Association; Contemporary Asian
Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity; Suomen Antro-
pologi; Macalester International; Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational
question the continuing validity of a worldview bound, as though frozen

in time, to the orthodoxy of Sun’s thought. Although much of the current
debate over the future fate of the Three Principles focused essentially on a
conflict of interpretation (as spirit of national unity), it would inevitably be
decided, on the other hand, by a conflict of interest, that is, between those
who did not find it necessary to make reference to the Three Principles in
order to embrace the virtues of modern progress and those within the KMT
who still found it necessary to continually upgrade the Three Principles in
line with the changing times in order to reiterate the continued coherence
and relevance of Nationalist ideology, and by implication, therefore the
legitimacy of the existing regime. It is clear then that the issue of textual
authenticity in Nationalist ideology has always been secondary to the func-
tion of ideology in making meaningful the cultural authority of texts to a
community constituted on the fiction of equal, autonomous individuals.
The secondary nature of the Three Principles as political thought inevi-
tably raised the question of to what extent credibility of this doctrine would
be affected by ongoing criticism of its substantive content and relevance for
the present. Despite its required status in the school curriculum, one could
question the degree to which students have been successfully influenced by
orthodox preaching in this regard. Clearly, the rumblings of discontent that
emerged from the practitioners of such knowledge within academia itself
suggested strongly that the effectiveness of political brainwashing per se
had been limited, except in its most general reading as an anticommunist
ideology. Yet, on the other hand, it would be difficult to underestimate its
embeddedness within a wider field of cultural ideology as well as in the
pattern of everyday social behavior that has been characteristic of society
in Taiwan vis-à-vis its Chinese counterparts in Hong Kong and the main-
land. In this regard, effective criticism of the status of the Three Principles
as Nationalist ideology would seem more likely to come from the realm
of public culture and underlying notions of national identity as a whole.
To say the least, the contagion of democracy that has afflicted many
parts of the globe in recent years has also brought about significant changes
in Taiwan’s political climate. The surge in ethnic nationalism has accelerated
the dismantling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe despite decades of
totalitarian rule. In Taiwan, these trends have been deflected by a policy of
political reform and economic liberalization. Thus in 1986, Chiang Ching-
kuo legalized the existence of opposition parties as a prelude to free legisla-
tive elections. This was followed by the lifting of strict censorship over the
press in 1987, and the lifting of martial law in 1988. Political liberation
not only allowed for the emergence of Taiwanese independence, formerly a
taboo topic of discussion; it allowed for the emergence of all other forms
of counterculture as well, namely the youth culture, intellectual dissidence,

artistic freedom, even the flourishing of tabloids and sexual liberation.
By far, the most explicit challenge to the KMT’s monopoly of political
power has come from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), running on
a platform of indigenous rule by ethnic Taiwanese, who constitute three-
fourths of the island’s population, and Taiwanese independence, in its more
extreme factions. Yet despite the DPP’s appeals for ethnic nationalism, the
KMT continued to do well against the opposition, garnering three-fourths
of the popular vote in the first free legislative elections of 1989, and two-
thirds support in the legislative elections of 1992. Despite appearances to
the contrary, this was clearly not an ethnically dormant Yugoslavia or USSR.
While the KMT’s apparent success was in no way synonymous with
popular support for its Party ideology, it nonetheless underscored broad
based acceptance of the cultural-national identity that had been inculcated
over decades of explicit cultural policy and institutional practice in ways,
which have subverted to a large extent indigenous ethnic sentiments that
had been suppressed throughout the postwar era. On the other hand, despite
the explicit challenge by the DPP to the KMT’s political agenda in at least
one respect, there was little indication that the opposition had been able to
put forth an alternative cultural vision, which could successfully unmask the
hegemonic fictions of the prevailing regime, choosing instead to advocate
a different homogenous ethnic nation-state to counter that of the KMT.
This reflected the tacit importance already built into a generation of KMT
cultural indoctrination, which had presupposed the imagination of a shared
cultural (both ethnic and historical) consciousness as the seminal condition
of national survival and societal progress in all other respects. Subsequent
changes of regime and political ideology later led to the decline of the
explicit legacy of Sun’s Three Principles and the rise of Taiwanese indigenous
consciousness, but the cultural nationalist mind-set has remained deeply
embedded in the politics of identity in Taiwan. Its inability to transcend
the prison house of identity makes it hopelessly tied to it.
Chapter 2

The very existence of obligatory schools divides any society into two
realms: sometime spas and processes and treatments and professions
are “academic” or pedagogic” . . . The power of school thus to divide
social reality has no boundaries: education becomes unworldly and the
world becomes non-educational.
—Ivan Illich, De-Schooling Society
The Norm and the Normal, or Education

as Social and Societalizing
In East Asia, education was not just the evolution of a modern regime
made compatible with all other socializing institutions, such as the fam-
ily, military, and workplace. Above all, it was a systematic construction of
the state, with historical lineages in an imperial system that reproduced a
meritocracy. The omnipresence of the Ministry of Education epitomizes
ultimately the hegemonic role of education, especially in the making of the
nation-state. More than socializing, it manufactures a normality of belong-
ing where culture, citizenship, and structured modes of routinized behavior
perform overlapping disciplinary functions.
There is an abundance of critical literature on education in sociol-
ogy and pedagogy. The work of Pierre Bourdieu as well as that of Michael
Apple, Henri Giroux, and Peter McLaren, following the footsteps of Paolo
Freire, to name a few, have underscored not only the role of education
This is an adaptation of a paper published in 2013, titled “De-Societalizing the School: On

the Hegemonic Making of Moral Persons (Citizenship) and Its Disciplinary Regimes,” Critique
of Anthropology 33(2):146‒67.
39
in reproducing the structure of class domination but also the function of

cultural production in this regard.1 However in this critical literature, there
is more attention to efforts to produce oppositional educational values and
practices that challenge hegemonic authority and less consideration of the
multiplicity of cultural practices that engender these institutions. In Taiwan,
mass education was part of a process of Westernization that brought about
the dissemination of the modern nation-state. Perhaps even more so than
in Europe, mass education was a top-down construction, regulated by the
Ministry of Education, which promoted a meritocratic government and
bureaucratic elites. Disciplinary institutions in this sense were not really
autonomously evolving modern processes but more precisely regimes that
were intimately tied to the maintenance of state power and the cultivation
of a particular ethos and culture (societal mind-set) compatible ultimately
with its nationalist worldview. Of the many “socializing” regimes, educa-
tion played a relatively important role. The norm did not simply mark the
legitimacy of social institutions and social values but more importantly
cultivated routinized cultural behaviors and thoughts in the conduct of its
everyday practice.
Education is “normal” in multiple senses. Modernity gave birth to a
notion of society as the social structural framework on which various insti-
tutions, behaviors, rites, and practices were seen as functionally integrative.
The idea that society in practice was normal rather than imaginative or
inherently violent was maintained by social scientific theories that made the
norm sacred (as a mode of thought).2 Objective description and statistical
analysis of various kinds reified societal institutions, as the product of a sui
generis evolution, when they were also impositions of political policy or
social order. Within the social “system” and in conjunction with the politics
of the state, some institutions are more “normal” than others.
In many modern societies, education epitomizes the realm of the nor-
mal. In Taiwan, the Normal University is perhaps patterned after les écoles
normales of France (otherwise called Teachers’ Colleges). Education not only
inscribes the normal; the normal itself becomes in turn the very essence
of pedagogy. Normal then is to pedagogy what the norm is to social sci-
entific theory. As methodology, it puts into practice the rites and routines
of normal life in ways that complement the ideology of the norm as it is
epistemologically constructed. By reinforcing in practice normative rules,
education is tied ultimately to socialization, which as a process embodies
society into persons, as citizens. Thus, citizenship inscribes socialization, by
inculcating in ontological terms the morality and ethics of being a citizen.
In the final analysis, education not only performs a seminal role. The normal
epitomizes the soci(et)al.
The Moral Cultivation of Citizenship 41
Yet in the realm of the state, normal becomes a political construction

par excellence. Its institutional existence and vitality are intertwined with
the exercise of political power. It relies not only on discipline as a mode of
administrative and social regulation, backed by sanction. Education is itself a
kind of policing that evokes various technologies of power that buttress the
state.3 The salience of education in the ideology of the state (and citizenship)
differs from place to place, but it can also be seen as a function of changing
principles and policies. At an ideological level, educational principles and
policies are products of specific cultural and intellectual influences. Their
moral and ethical substance is an integral part of the modern form that
gives it social shape as well as the process that maintains it in practice.
In this regard, cultural identity and political citizenship are not just
national in Taiwan but also Nationalist, insofar as they are in substance
products of changing political ideologies and perceptions of society.4 Within
the cultural geography of Nationalist identity, citizenship, culture, and ethos
occupy different niches yet are mutually intertwined at the same time. As
spaces within a social imaginary, they invoke distinct notions of person
and personhood that contribute somehow to a social commonality. But as
spaces within a political praxis, they entail an adherence to shared values
and beliefs that crosscut the hierarchy of social rank and political privilege.
In other words, identity aims to be communal within a real world marked
by distinctions of class and status. Its nature as discursive fiction should be
viewed in terms of its ideological substance as well as its politicizing func-
tions in maintaining social order.
Identity and citizenship tend to be the language of shared values
and mass society, and their relationship to the educational regime has a
complex history. In postwar Taiwan, which is in basic respects the continu-
ation of the Nationalist polity in early Republican-era China, nationalism
and nationalist identity have always played an explicitly significant role in
defining the nature of the state, even as the state in institutional terms
evolved from moments of feudal warlordism to centralized bureaucracy. The
evolution of a Nationalist state reached a degree of institutional maturity
in postwar Taiwan, and this maturation in institutional terms corresponded
to its increasingly explicit articulation of cultural policy in other respects.
The adoption of the calendrical system, capitalistic disciplinary routines and
new ontologies of the body were unconscious features of everyday life that
inculcated a modern social regime, and they corresponded with overt mili-
tarization of society and the development of new rules of social etiquette,
as embodied, for example, in Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement, in the
political realm. All of these things were encoded into what eventually became
known as “Three Principles Education” (sanmin zhuyi jiaoyu), following the
writings of Sun Yat-sen. Three Principles Education was not just the teaching
of Sun’s political ideology; its being synonymous with mandatory education
at all levels transformed the space of education into the regime within which
citizenship was taught and practiced, then reproduced in other domains.5
Instead of being the pure product of ongoing cultural influences, as
though reflective of a pan-Chinese experience, the discursive-institutional
relationship that ties notions of identity and citizenship to the educational
system and other regimes of socialization, such as military service, the work-
place, and bureaus of immigration and customs control, is in large part the
historical interplay of events and developments that are peculiar to early
Republican China, which carried over into postwar Taiwan. The Cold War
served to polarize such developments and politics. Thus if education has
epitomized the normal in Taiwan, it is primarily because it is the complex
nexus through which both socializing forces and conscious political ideolo-
gies collude to shape bodily ontologies and socializing routines of institu-
tional and cultural life.
Early works on the function of ritual in the socializing regime of the
school have pointed to the nature of culturalizing practices. Judith Kap-
ferer’s (1981) study of schools in Australia maintained that the institution
of ceremonial practices and ritual routines in private schools contrasted with
the secular policies of state schools by developing collective solidarity that
underscored family, class, religion, and social values in relation to support
communities. McLaren (1999) aptly labeled school ritual performance in
social reproduction hegemony. In Taiwan, where the role of the state in
standardizing the educational process is different, the same kinds of rituals
have had similar socializing functions in relation to the polity. In effect,
the state has articulated its modernity by actively cultivating personhood
through rituals.
Rituals of Belonging in the Making of Moral Persons
The educational system in contemporary Taiwan is the product of traditional

and modern institutions. The examination-based systems that form the
pedagogical framework in other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, are
without doubt a product of its Confucian heritage and Mandarin meritoc-
racy.6 As a competitive, achievement-based regime, this examination system
can be seen as the epitome of a standardized knowledge-based educational
system that has served as the framework for modernization and of the social
dissemination of skills in the postwar era. Pure reliance on standardized
examinations as an evaluative criterion of this system has tended to give
the impression that education in such a regime puts a high premium on

utilitarian aspects of knowledge acquisition. While one cannot doubt the
purely utilitarian aspects that seem to characterize the institutional back-
bone of this educational system, one cannot ignore as well the evolution of
modern Asian education as part of the process of nation building, generally
speaking, and the socializing functions of the latter.7 In this regard, the
functions of the central state in defining the content and form of education,
as epitomized by the dominant role of the Ministry of Education and the
hegemonic nature of the standardized curriculum, all point to the existence
of a direct relationship between nation-building interests and education in
general. The practice of education as an institutional regime shows that its
scope is not limited only to the utilitarian dissemination of knowledge and
skills within society. The broadly disciplinary functions of the school in the
regulation of everyday thought and behavior also underscore its seminal role
as an agent of socialization.8
In the context of Taiwan, this disciplinary regime, which is a general
feature of everyday life in schools everywhere, mimics not only the spread
of modernity as the basic pattern of routine life but is intertwined also
with militarization and politicization of all kinds. The wearing of uniforms,
the application of uniform codes of social conduct, and expected obeisance
to political authority all make school life a microcosm of a militarized
and politicized polity that is already being played out in society-at-large.9
Richard Wilson’s (1970, 1974) work on political socialization of children
in Taiwan, in the specific context of the school, has tended to overempha-
size the priority of politicization in the socializing process as a whole, with
its stress on allegiance and patriotism. It is clear that there is socialization
of all kinds, through inculcation of social values, assimilation to culture,
appropriation of a certain kind of moral conduct, active involvement in
sanctioned institutional activities, in addition to filial respect for authority,
from family to teachers other forms of political authority.10 The very fact
that socialization is part of a totalizing and systemic process that invokes
all kinds of cultural rules and moral behavior makes it important for one
to analyze this in its systemic totality.
Thus, if education in Taiwan is understood less as an autonomous
process of knowledge dissemination and instead as an integral part of the
state project of nation building, it will be easier to understand how the cur-
riculum is an important framework for the dissemination of social values,
cultural identity, and political ethos of citizenship. The structure of its con-
tent within the framework of mandatory education, otherwise titled “Three
Principles Education,” can be read as a process of national identity, or what
it takes to be a moral person in Nationalist society. More importantly, these
values, identities and concepts are inculcated in the process of routine life
and throughout the socializing regime of the school. The school, with direct
ties to the state in the form of regulation by the Ministry of Education, is
in turn a microcosm for Nationalist society-at-large, with its embodiment
of Nationalist principles.
So, what is Three Principles Education? Initial formulations can be
found in policy discussions of the early Republican era beginning in the
late 1910s and early 1920s. The extent to which Three Principles Educa-
tion derives from the Three Principles ideology of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the
founder of the Chinese Republic, is questionable. Its incompleteness and
ambiguity became a point of departure for its divergent interpretations on
mainland China as a bourgeois revolutionary ideology and in Nationalist
Taiwan as blueprint for scientific modernization. It then became part of
the implementation of Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement, which was
initially formulated in the 1930s, then became the vehicle for a revised
Nationalist ideology.
In its initial policy formulation as Three Principles Education, ideas
such as citizenship (gongmin), morality (daode), military training (junxun),
and health (weisheng) were touted as basic requisites of this moral educa-
tion, and early policy debates witnessed different attempts to implement
the teaching of such concepts. The emphasis on bodily health in terms of
personal hygiene, civilized etiquette, and physical training was part of Chi-
ang Kai-shek’s New Life ethos, which was inculcated at the primary level of
education. Military discipline became the focus in courses at middle- and
high-school levels, while courses on morality and citizenship were rooted in
Confucian ethics and modern political values and disseminated through the
middle- and high-school curriculum, which overlapped with more explicit
courses on Sun Yat-sen’s thought and political theory. Moral education in
the above senses was a seminal aspect of nation building that transcended
the pure dissemination of knowledge.
In this regard, the substance of citizenship and morality as concepts in
themselves was less important than their function in the process of socializa-
tion or the state’s project of moral regulation.11 What kind of person (or
citizen) is being cultivated here ontologically in the process of education
and morally in terms of ethical behavior? Such notions of citizenship went
beyond the overt pressures of political allegiance and respect for authority
that accented Wilson’s notion of political socialization. A citizen is a par-
ticular kind of thinking, acting, and feeling being. Political correctness is
only one aspect of being a citizen. He or she must act in a particular way
and in the right context of public expression. Identifying with a collectiv-
ity also involves appropriate sentiments of a kind that are often invoked in
moments of patriotic fervor and national pride. Such thoughts, actions, and
feelings are not simply taught in the substance of courses but also routinely
played out in the performance of everyday practice.
The transformation of moral education from its embodiment of
Nationalist ethics to its politicization of Chinese culture underscored in
the final analysis the key role of the school per se as a constant locus
in the construction of identity, the cultivation of moral persons, and the
socialization of citizens in the making. Its functional operation as a “total
institution,” in Goffman’s (1961) terms, made it an ideal site for using
disciplinary control of time (through regulation of curricular and activity
schedules) and space (through maintenance of social and spatial hierarchies)
to reproduce the existing sociopolitical order. Its direct relationship to state
control tied the school into the larger political space of the nation. In the
latter context, the school may be a privileged institution of socialization by
virtue of its omnipresence in the public domain, but it was at the same
time one of many institutional nodes of socialization regulated by similar
disciplinary regimes that could reinforce notions of cultural identity and
moral citizenship. More than just inculcating norms, practices made perfect.
In an early essay, Ruey Yih-fu (1972) argued that the Chinese notion
of culture (wenhua) was actually an abbreviation of a Confucian phrase
wenzhi jiaohua, meaning “to govern by literacy and transform by teaching.”
The heavy emphasis in Confucian thought on morality and ritual propriety
explains why Confucian traditions of education have always privileged moral
cultivation, in its diverse senses, over pure knowledge. Jiao, which serves as
the suffix ism in religion (or ideologies classified as such), also makes Chinese
notions of learning more rooted in notions of personal transformation than
assumptions of logos in Western notions of knowledge. While the focus on
morality and ritual propriety in modern Chinese educational regimes can be
seen as an extension of cultural traditions in this regard, I would argue that
it is important to show how they overlap with and become transformed by
other forms of moral regulation that emerge with modern nationalism and
are institutionalized by the state through imposition of political ideology and
implementation of socializing practices. In the end, such new constructions
of identity as citizen serve as seminal core features in this education. The
transformative role of education thus engenders acculturation in many senses.
Spatial, Temporal and Informational Distributions
The school is a moment in time and space. As social institution, it is char-

acterized by its neutrality. At the same time, it is a product of its times,
a creation of modern discipline as well as an agent of state hegemonic

control. The middle school in the northern Taiwan city of Hsinchu that I
observed during the academic year of 1991‒92 had been known locally as
a generally high achiever in national school exams, but otherwise it seemed
to be a typical state school of its type, whose students represented a broad
cross-section of city residents. Peiying Middle School was established in
1959. Built on the site of an old primary school with seven classrooms, it
went through minor name changes after its transformation from an all girls’
school to a mixed-gender school and as its administration shifted from the
county to the city government. The number of students expanded from 300,
occupying six classrooms initially, to about 2,640 thirty years later, totaling
fifty-eight classrooms. In 1990, the faculty and administrative staff members
numbered 139. Overall, it was an average-sized urban school.
Peiying is one of ten state schools in Hsinchu, and the principal of
the school there then, Mr. Xu, had served three years there, having been
appointed directly by the provincial Board of Education (jiaoyu ting), where
he served prior to being principal. Despite its appearance on the surface,
the school was anything but an island unto itself. Academic development
and school activities were tightly coordinated at three levels of bureaucracy
from the Ministry of Education (jiaoyu bu) down to provincial Board of
Education (jiaoyu ting) and local Bureaus of Education (jiaoyu ju). Even
education was not the exclusive domain of the school but one of many
various supporting institutions, which included county or municipal cultural
centers (shili wenhua zhongxin), Anti-Communist Youth Corps (jiuguo tuan),
Committee for Cultural Renaissance (wenhua fuxing weiyanhui), and PTA
family associations (jiazhang weiyanhui). The internal administrative struc-
ture of the school mirrored the fact that the school was only one node in
a tightly knit network. To facilitate vertical integration, each administrative
unit in the school answered directly to higher levels of office within the
Education bureaucracy. The provincial level Board of Education was com-
posed of twelve divisions (ke), which included a secretarial division, military
training division, general administration division, personnel division, finan-
cial division, and academic supervision division that had local offices down
to the lowest levels. Educational policy at the county or municipal level
was subdivided into five sections: general academic affairs, national educa-
tion, social education, physical education, and academic personnel affairs.
Within this hierarchy, municipal-level bureaus of education coordinated the
activities of a broad spectrum of institutions, such as schools, libraries,
social education agencies, youth corps groups, extracurricular activity com-
mittees, and cultural renaissance movement committees. The head of the
local Bureau of Education was the administrator in charge of putting into

practice educational policy originating from above.
Vertical integration of all administrative divisions from the highest
levels of educational bureaucracy to its lowest-level agencies enabled official
notices to be distributed seamlessly throughout the system and uniform
policy to be implemented at all schools. Not surprisingly then, one would
also expect the physical and social organization of the school to conform
to the same overall patterns and principles. Within such a system, innova-
tion and individuality were unwelcome elements that actually disrupted the
effective flow of things and activities.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of spatial and temporal organiza-
tion of the school is its compactness and an environment that is formed to
maximize productivity of movement and work. Its linearity and functionality
are obvious; peoples’ work lives are also organized in a way that deliberately
leaves little space for idle time. The main campus is a rectangular enclo-
sure that occupies 39,755 square meters total. Its fifty-eight classrooms and
various administrative offices as well as science laboratories and library are
largely spread across four rows of two- to three-story concrete buildings. Two
long rows of buildings run parallel to each other across the long rectangular
flat campus. Two other short rows of buildings are situated perpendicular
to each other along the front and side ends of the campus in a way that
envelops the rectangular public space in the center of campus. The main
entrance, which faces a major road and is at the base of a small incline on
which the campus rests, actually faces north (unlike Chinese ritual artifices,
there is no particular directionality for schools). It is situated to one side of
the center and opens into a short row of classroom buildings to the right,
a large rectangular grass court directly in front, and the auditorium and
large meeting hall complex to the left. The rectangular grass court, which
is the only large public space on campus, is marked by the placement of
three statues. The first one to be encountered, which is situated in the
middle of the walkway that leads up from the main entrance, is a statue
of Confucius. Further up the concrete walkway in the direction of admin-
istrative offices that occupy one end of the first row of long buildings, is a
bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen. In the center of the rectangular grass court
is a statue of Chiang Kai-shek. Classrooms are clustered according to year.
Year-one (grade 7) student classrooms occupy the front row of buildings
closest to the main entrance; year-two and year-three students’ classrooms
run sequentially along a line within the campus. The administrative wing of
offices is somewhat centrally located, in that it is the first set of offices one
encounters when walking directly from the main entrance up the concrete
walkway. It is composed of the principal’s office and the school archival

office on the first floor, which is surrounded on the ground floor directly
below by a general administration office, academic affairs office, extracur-
ricular activities office, student counseling office and teachers’ offices, joined
by the personnel office and financial affairs office in an adjacent wing.
Science labs and special function rooms such as the computer lab, music
conservatory and art room are located on various parts of the campus. The
track field and sports ground, which is used for schoolwide assemblies, is
located on the plateau above the main campus and is enclosed by surround-
ing hills. By the school’s own assessment, there is a shortage of classrooms
and special function rooms for students, not to mention specialized sports
facilities and technical classrooms. In short, the spatial organization of the
school exudes a sense of hierarchy, much of which is expected or obvious.
The clearest separation is that between students and school staff. There is
no sense of private space but instead different kinds of public or collec-
tive spaces. Its architectural design is functional by maximizing use value;
its public spaces are politicized. Teachers have desks in large, shared offices
that are arranged in rows. Students sit in numbered seats allocated by the
teacher according to rank.
Staff members also occupy particular niches within this spatial orga-
nization, and they can be differentiated according to rank and in terms
of the respective trajectories that define the course of the work. Of the
139 full-time staff, 132 are considered permanent employees, including
the principal, 118 teaching faculty, within which 58 concurrently serve as
tutorial supervisors, 13 serve as administrators in the school bureaucracy,
and 47 are engaged only in full-time teaching. There are also 13 full-time
nonacademic clerical staff members, and the remaining 7 nonpermanent
full-time employees are custodians, who may perform a number of mis-
cellaneous duties. Of those involved in administration, in addition to the
principal, five hold positions as division heads (zhuren), twelve are section
chiefs (zhuzhang), five are clerks (ganshi), and three are classed as assistants
(zhuliyuan). Finally, there is at least one military supervisor (jiaoguan), a
uniformed officer who is usually appointed directly by the armed forces.
Although the role of military supervisors has declined over the years, they
have been a permanent fixture in most schools beginning from the interme-
diate level, where courses in military training begin to be taught, up to the
university level, where they serve in secular capacity as masters of student
dormitories and assist in security. In the middle school, they are often called
on to serve as school policemen and to act as disciplinary (in Chinese called
xundao, “training and guidance”) advisors, whose role is more often one
of putting juvenile delinquents in place instead of offering psychological
help. The existence of such military supervisors and the principal, who is
appointed by the Board or Bureau of Education and not the school, clearly
illustrates the direct involvement of government bureaucracy and military in
the operation of the school. While many school principals are themselves
former teachers, they are in fact a class of bureaucrats who rarely return to
teaching. Their periodic training (shouxun) consists more of insuring that
they are politically correct (being active members of the Party) and are in
tune with various policies handed down from the Ministry of Education.
Of the thirteen nonacademic clerical staff, the four involved in the
personnel and financial accounting divisions were considered specialist jobs,
but this is a misnomer that reflects the different routes of specialization that
actually mark the work of different kinds of personnel. There is, on the one
hand, a distinct barrier between academic and nonacademic staff in terms
of their formal training. Academic faculty usually have academic degrees
that qualify them in specific fields of learning, and most gain promotion
on the basis of work performance instead of advanced degree learning.
Nonacademic clerical staff have their own formal merit criteria that may
suffice as certificate qualification, which they can attain by passing clerical
civil service examinations (gaokao), but the majority of the non-academic
clerical staff rarely pass such exams and move up the system on the basis
of work experience (or apprenticeship). Especially among those in the older
generation, many could have worked up to positions of high administrative
responsibility as a result of long years of apprenticeship, starting from low
entry-level jobs. There is a gray area within the administrative bureaucracy
that marks the boundary between administrators who have become divi-
sion or section heads as a result of full-time clerical work and academics
who also serve as head of administrative units such as library or academic
management on the basis of their overall leadership quality.
While the spatial organization of the school exudes an atmosphere of
total containment and internal separation between different strata of people,
the mobility of people within the social system, based on general distinctions
between academic staff, administrative clerks, and political appointees, is
in reality more fluid. Curricular and extracurricular activities usually entail
coordination and intense cooperation between all categories of people. Work
tends to be based on principles of functional integration instead of functional
specialization. Teachers do not merely teach. They actively take part in orga-
nizing extracurricular activities, most of which are initiated directly from
the Board of Education, and spend much time supervising students and
liaising with parents. Military supervisors do not just teach military train-
ing courses. They also serve as campus police and are present at all school
activities, especially when called on to exert “authority.” The school principal
also straddles many roles, not only as a role model of the ultimate educa-
tor but also in internal administrative functions and as interlocutor within
various outside educational and government agencies. In school activities
and sports contests, government agencies routinely send representatives to
“attend” these events to underscore their role as omnipresent sponsors and
promotional cheerleaders. Active participation by all walks of people in
school activities makes education by nature an act of socialization. Educa-
tion is not just about knowledge. This knowledge is officially sanctioned to
conform to standards and political correctness. Most extracurricular activi-
ties are similarly mandated from above and organized to promote spiritual
education (jingshen jiaoyu) and cultural enlightenment of all kinds, rather
than strict competition and professional sports achievement per se. There is
no school activity that does not entail active involvement by people inside
and outside. The practice of education makes it socializing.
The temporal organization of the daily schedule is also tightly regulated
and leaves little space for personal activity. From 7:00 a.m. to 7:20 a.m. stu-
dents are expected to come to school, and other “on-duty” students are seen
sweeping the school ground and picking up trash. Homeroom is from 7:20
a.m. to 7:50 a.m., during which time students are supposed to be reading. The
flag-raising ceremony is from 7:50 a.m. to 8:10 a.m., during which all students
report to the sports field, standing in class formation to observe the raising
of the flag. At this time, the principal usually makes a daily speech. He is
then followed by the disciplinary adviser (xundao zhuren), who makes assorted
announcements, after which the academic adviser speaks (jiaowu zhuren), if
necessary. While this goes on, the military supervisor monitors students’ dress
and hairstyle to pick out students who do not conform. From 8:10 a.m. to
12:00 a.m., there are four successive class periods, each of which is separated
by ten-minutes intersession. After lunch (12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.), there are
three successive class periods from 1:10 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (with an additional
hour for tutorial supervision or makeup examinations). On Saturday, there
is another half-day of classes, mostly devoted to extracurricular and tutorial
activities. There are generally no free or elective class periods.
Spatial containment, social hierarchy, and temporal regulation charac-
terize the essential framework by which to understand the ritualized behav-
iors and etiquettes that represent the nature of social relations between
teachers and students, as well as between staff members and the system.
While the educational system makes students the object of socializing dis-
cipline, with teachers and staff being agents of that system, the system also
disciplines staff members as well, in the process of work, through similar
regimes of supervision and evaluation. These disciplinary regimes operate in
parallel, but they are largely predicated by similar principles.
The kind of behavior that epitomizes the relationship of students to

teachers and staff in the school can be properly called etiquette. Etiquette
is not just another term for manners (limao) or ritual demeanor (liyi),
but invokes instead Elias’s (1978) conception of it—an expressive behavior
whose ritualized restraint is largely the end product of social control of
sentiment, as both phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes. Student-teacher
relationships are symbolized by a face-to-face decorum and attitude of ven-
eration, which reflect mutual hierarchical difference. Decorum dictates that
students greet teachers (laoshi), when meeting each other face to face. This
applies not just to teachers they know personally but also to all teachers in
general. Etiquette also extends to behavioral norms that are the product of
disciplinary routines of the system. Etiquette means in this regard knowing
when to be silent (sujing) and when to speak (biaotai). It means conforming
militarily to authority in some contexts and being religiously supportive in
other contexts. A more accurate way of explaining the kind of etiquette that
is cultivated is to say that the ultimate goal of such socialization (ultimately
acculturation, through the inculcation of core cultural values) is one of
learning how to “act as a person” (zuoren). “Acting as a person” is not just
a cliché for behaving properly, but more precisely acting appropriately in
ways that are consistent with norms and situations. In essence, citizenship
and morality (gongmin yu daode) form the content of moral education,
but the practice of moral behavior as everyday etiquette is the goal of this
sino-socialization.
The role of and pressures on teachers and staff in the system must also
be understood in light of the same morally regulative regime of discipline,
through its enforcement of spatial orders and temporal schedules. The way
in which people survive, adapt, and move through the system is also a
function of the way they perform or are expected to perform. In essence,
the same system of domination and vertical integration that puts students
in their place can be seen to put other people in their place as well. Their
everyday behavior and ritual demeanor must be seen in the context and as
a direct product of a total institutional discipline.
In both processes of socialization, the emphasis is less on work
performance in the sense of productive efficiency than moral reward or
spiritual gain (xinde). Constant self-evaluation through writing of reports
places a premium on making conscious one’s personal reflections on work
and study. The focus from within on moral cultivation is consistent with
Confucian values, as invoked in Three Principles Education. However, the
focus from above on total regulation is a product of a modern regime of
discipline, enhanced by inherent militarization and Cold War politicization.
Seen together, they constitute the crux of nationalizing impulses that are
societies or their populations as part of a Greater China or East Asia already

makes them relevant to each other in particularistic ways vis-à-vis societies
in different parts of the world. Needless to say, one cannot deny the overt
lineage of historical traditions and institutional systems that characterize text-
book accounts and provide a ground for the ongoing present. However, the
influence of such traditions as an a priori framework for that history can
be questioned. Similarly, East Asian models of culture or society within the
scholarly literature are typically coded in analytical terms whose legitimacy
is ultimately based on their presumed objectivity or value-free status. If any-
thing, identity is refracted, as though omnipresent and sui generis, from such
interpretations of history and civilization.
Identity is not synonymous with culture, history, or society. It is by
nature a discourse, a social construct whose emergence and change is grounded
in other deep frames of reference that have been evolving and remaking
themselves locally in response to mutating conditions at large. I argue that
encounters with modernity involve colonialism, nationalism, and global capi-
talism, among other conditions, which constitute a different point of depar-
ture, but the current interpretations prevailing in this literature are themselves
problematic, and thus require proper qualification. More importantly, the
ways in which these conditions at large impose themselves in any context are
also historically sensitive and inextricably intertwined with the specificities of
local practice, the engagement between which produces diverse experiences.
Concretely speaking, something must be said about colonialism in
Hong Kong, cultural nationalism in postwar Taiwan, the collusion of Party
and capitalist oligarchy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the state’s
disciplining of race and modernity in Singapore, and the shifting association
of Chinese overseas between diasporic and settler ethnicity. These condi-
tions at large are not mutually exclusive processes. Colonialism is present
in all the above contexts, albeit more as a state of mind or historical legacy.
Nationalism is present everywhere too, though in diverse forms. Above all,
it is important or necessary to view each societal context as a conceptual
frame of reference that can elucidate an underlying field of interaction
and articulate the particularity of experiences, which provide the basis for
engendering identifications of all kinds. In the end, direct relevance to shared
assumptions of Chineseness or culturality is at best secondary.
The Contradictory Tensions of Colonialism

as Inscribed and Practiced
The advent of postcolonial theory in cultural studies and humanities in

the 1990s raises pertinent questions as to what exactly is new not only in
by the Disciplinary Office (xundao chu), whose overlap in content has to

do with the fact that such activities are labeled a part of “honesty educa-
tion” (chengshi jiaoyu).13 The Bureau of Education holds activities relat-
ing to honesty education at least once a month. During academic year
1991‒92, this started with an announcement, on September 26, from the
Bureau of Education citing “Ministry of Education Special Action Plans
to implement the strengthening of honesty education at all school levels.”
This was followed, on October 8, by the Disciplinary Office’s installation of
an “Honesty Opinion Box” (chengshi yijianxiang) and the establishment of
“Public Statutes on Honesty” (chengshi gongyue). The Bureau of Education,
on October 17, then issued a register of names of heads for committees
“to strengthen the promotion of honesty education” and a notice from the
Board of Education “detailing matters for the supervision of honesty educa-
tion activities by Bureau of Education officers.” Saturday discussion groups
(banhui), on October 26, organized forums on honesty education. Officials
from both the Ministry and Board of Education, on October 29, visited
the school to view results of the promotion of honesty education activities.
The Office on Social Education (shejiao guan) sent a letter on the same day
to organize an “honest spirit, happy spirit” (chengshi xin, kuaile xin) activity
in relation with Ministry of Education directives. The Disciplinary Office’s
Bulletin of November 2 then asked tutors to use three to five minutes in
class to announce honesty education activities. The Disciplinary Office, on
November 3, set up a column on the corridor bulletin board to display
news of honesty education activities. The Social Education Office sent a
letter, on November 4, planning a forum discussion on honesty education.
The Bureau of Education sent a letter, on November 7, announcing that
“honesty education” should be included in the promotional activities of
family education (jiating jiaoyu). The Bureau of Education sent a letter, on
November 16, to explain assessment guidelines regarding special action plans
to strengthen honesty education in primary and secondary schools. The
Disciplinary Office, on November 17, held an art competition in relation
to honesty education. The Bureau of Education sent a letter, on November
21, to hold “honest spirit, happy spirit” writing competitions. It also sent,
on November 29, a letter to announce the fifth theme of Hsinchu’s liter-
ary education (leisure education and honesty education). It then sent, on
December 4, a timetable and report form to monitor honesty education
activities in all schools. It circulated to students, on December 4, bookmarks
printed by the Ministry of Education bearing the word “honesty” (chengshi).
The Office of Social Education sent, on December 24, a further notice on
“honest spirit, happy spirit” writing competitions. The Bureau of Educa-
tion then sent the Ministry of Education guidelines for promoting honesty
education. In this set of guidelines to implement honesty education, on

December 26, the Bureau of Education exhorts the school to be vigilant
of cheating, observe traffic rules and uphold respect for teachers. Jianguo
Middle School sent a letter, on December 30, to propose an open forum
to exchange ideas and experiences on honesty education.
The frequency, intensity, and coordination of activities pertaining to
“honesty education” ultimately illustrate how moral education in a broad
sense is used to encompass all manner of actions and behavior that are
nonetheless linked with school life. Its implementation also transcends the
work of each institution. Institutions interact not only in regard to activities
but also abstract processes. More than defining conditions of modernity, the
nation-state has welded the function of the school as a disciplinary regime to
other parallel institutions.14 The same kinds of socialization can be seen to
take place generally in other countries, but culture plays an important part
here by specifying the framework of power in which various social institu-
tions interact and overlap. It is too much of a cliché, following Rohlen’s
(1976) study of Japan’s high schools, to characterize Asian educational sys-
tems simply as collectivist, in the way it fosters both conformity to group
consciousness, through deference to authority and peer group pressure, and
uniform standards of education, reinforced by an all-determining mono-
lithic exam system.15 The Confucian notion of filial piety (xiao) encom-
passes various kinds of social hierarchies between ruler and subject, teacher
and student, father and son, and employer and employee, as a function of
the same essential ethical bonds that mirror or work in conjunction with
each other. It is not surprising thus that the state, school, family, and the
workplace function in the same way (as socializing regimes) by reinforcing
each other as a process through long-term cultivation of the same kind of
ethos, norms, and etiquette.
As has already been described in the case of Japanese schools, har-
monious relationships between teacher and student rely heavily on teachers
forming good working relationships with parents, who are viewed as an
extension of classroom teaching as well as the first line of communication
in matters of student behavior and performance. Parents are expected to
be an active participant in assisting with a child’s education, thus are seen
as morally responsible to some extent for his or her successes and failures.
Perhaps like Japan, in Taiwan the brunt of this responsibility usually falls
on the mother, especially if she is a housewife who is in charge of domestic
affairs. Her role in actively supervising homework is, on the other hand,
largely a function of the excessive amount of schoolwork that is usually
assigned to students, beginning from primary school and accelerating up
to the years preceding “examination hell.” However, the symbiotic relation-
ship between family and the state is in this regard a function of the fact
that these institutions view themselves as being based on the same ethical
principles thus should play supporting roles in the larger social order of
things. Peer pressure or allegiance to political authority is less relevant than
their ethical form and social practice.
Insofar as activities of the school and the Bureau of Social Educa-
tion overlap (through coordination and direct supervision by the Ministry
of Education or its local bureaus), one might say that there is already
a strong institutional working relationship between the school and vari-
ous government institutions regarding education in general. The school has
explicit functions to promote “social education” by taking leadership roles
in community education or social service in much the same way that fami-
lies are mobilized as an extension of classroom learning. This includes (1)
the advancement of citizenship training and lectures on improving various
aspects of national life while making available school facilities to residential
groups for certain sports and leisure activities; and (2) the offering of guid-
ance on matters pertaining to public health, emergency training, air defense,
prevention of epidemics, and dissemination of public information on events
and activities. According to policies of the Executive Yuan, on April 8, 1965,
themes included within the domain of community services performed by
the school include social insurance, employment, social assistance, public
housing, welfare services, social education, and community development.
The school is an activist in local life.
In ontogenetic terms, military service is in many ways a continuation
of the socialization process patterned in school. In addition to military and
physical training, conscripts spend time in the classroom. Shouxun (literally
“undergo training”) here means more precisely undergoing the same kinds of
spiritual indoctrination and political correctness that is part of learning as a
whole. The exact proportion of classroom training tends to be much higher
for officers undertaking military service (graduates of military academies as
well as postgraduate degree holders in general) than for regular recruits. The
term shouxun is also used to refer to periodic training that people in the
workplace undergo, especially after gaining promotion or transfer to new
positions. Classroom work includes not only learning of required skills but
also doing reports, written and oral, where one is typically forced to express
one’s feelings of accomplishment (baogao xinde). In a military context, alle-
giance is based just as much on political correctness as moral substance.
Both become intricately intertwined in the end.
Ultimately, the kind of socialization (with its emphasis on moral cul-
tivation in a Taiwan context) seen in the routinization of school life and
military service forms the rudiments of a disciplinary regime that is in
many ways replicated and expanded on in various kinds of workplaces. It

is impossible to generalize on the nature of the latter, given the diversity of
institutions that characterize any enterprise (civil service, private corporate,
family firm, not to mention its urban-rural setting and cultural (Chinese,
Western, and Japanese) influences), but in the case of the school it is clear
that teachers, clerks, and administrators are disciplined and socialized in a
work setting in ways that are similar to the way students are “subjected” (if
not objectified as well). Not only does the work regime reflect the moral
regulation of a school as a particular kind of workplace but also the influ-
ences of other institutions (the state and various bureaucratic appendages)
that constantly control, nurture, and interact with it.
In sum, the ethnography of everyday practice and the role of cultural
values and norms in sustaining them are not just objective descriptions of
life, as though taken for granted matters of fact. The school is in the long
run a microcosm of routines that form the pattern of ritual behavior and
normative worldview that in turn shape cultural identity in relation to the
polity. Their politicization, explicit and implicit, makes them anything but
neutral. Their hegemonic omnipresence makes their fact-ive existence prob-
lematic, if anything. It might be easier to argue, from a different perspec-
tive, that what we see in ethnographic fact is the end result of the complex
interplay of socially abstract forces, which through elaborate processes of
imagination and systematic regulation in practice produce fictions (that one
mistakenly calls cultural reality). Through identification with these values
and behaviors, one ultimately identifies with the underlying imagined com-
munity and one’s role in it. In this regard, ethnographic description can be
used not just to represent society, as though objective, but rather as a first
step that ultimately informs the reflexive, critical project of cultural studies.
In Taiwan, nation-state as imagined community has invoked more
specifically complex ethical visions of a polity, ideologically driven or discur-
sively framed in policy and practice, that in turn precipitated disciplinary,
socializing regimes of life thought and routine.
Chapter 3
The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism

When the Imagined Community Hits the Fan
A multiculturalism for which the unity of a given culture counts as an

established fact is still a disguised monoculturalism . . . Multicultural-
ism must not be a culturalism. It must be concerned neither with the
mere conservation of the purported integrity of cultures, nor with their
mere perpetuation. A culture that does this, that is not active—even if
inexplicably and in a mediated fashion—as a protest against social and
political injustice and which does not stand for a social and political
praxis of justice is nothing but an amusement park, a technique of
entertainment, “garbage,” as Adorno writes.
—Werner Hamacher, “One 2 Many Multiculturalisms”
Contrary to official, internationally recognized definitions, I argue that Tai-

wan may very well be the first “transnational nation.” Few noticed its pres-
ence internationally, until it became a major exporter to the world economy,
which was a change of policy prompted largely by its expulsion from the
United Nations (and diplomatic recognition of the PRC). Its subsequent
attempts to jockey for admission into the United Nations can largely be
seen as a strategy to build on its newly established role as a world economic
player. One significant feature of transnational capitalism is reflected in
Taiwan’s success, which demonstrates that the official status of nation was
not important or relevant to its success in economic and other terms. Thus,
in an era of transnational flows, one might say, national identity, cultural
consciousness, and territorial boundedness are clearly secondary. In some
This is an updated version of “The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism in ‘Transnational’

Taiwan,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 46(2):102‒22,
initially published in 2002.
57
senses, this seems to be true, but this is overly simplistic. The end of orga-
nized capitalism, as advocated by Lash and Urry (1987), has led many to
believe that the free flow of capital has broken down national barriers in
respect to all other kinds of flows, but in fact transnational flows of people
have been regulated by and subject to other kinds of forces, political as well
as cultural in nature, that have disrupted emerging forms of cosmopolitan-
ism and threatened to expose conservative, if not reactionary, biases in the
constitution of traditional society.1 In Taiwan, the growing emergence of
transnational cosmopolitanism has run parallel with the increasing rhetorical
importance of multiculturalism. But the latter is the product more pre-
cisely of a wave of “indigenization.” At a deeper level, both (cosmopolitan)
“transnationalism” and (indigenous) “multiculturalism” are in my opinion
incompatible and mask an imminent future crisis.
The Illusion of “Multiculturalism” in a

Newly “Indigenized” Taiwan
Multiculturalism is “in.” As an official policy, the advent of multicultural-

ism (duoyuan wenhua zhuyi) seems to have been a phenomenon that cul-
minated with, among other things, the election of the first president from
the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Its advent marked a
formal recognition of multicultural or multiethnic equality. Only a mere
decade ago, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s acclaimed film City of Sadness dared to invoke
memories of the holocaust of February 28, 1947 (called 2-28), in which
soldiers acting under orders of a newly installed Chinese Nationalist (KMT)
regime massacred thousands of Taiwanese under the pretense of suppressing
political rebellion. What is astonishing in retrospect is that, even though
local viewers knew that the events depicted were of 2-28, nowhere in the
film is 2-28 explicitly mentioned. Even in the early years of postmartial law
Taiwan, such a topic was still largely regarded as taboo. Much has changed
since then, of course. Not long afterward, demonstrations lambasting the
era of “white terror” (baishe kongbu) took place. President Lee Teng-hui
later publicly apologized for the tragedy of 2-28, prompting the declassifica-
tion of highly secret police archives on the subject, then open support for
multiculturalism rapidly spread in further light of the KMT government’s
official (post-1988) tolerance of dissent. Not only did it become politically
correct to promote Taiwanese culture and consciousness; support of other
ethnic minorities, in particular Hakka Chinese and Austronesian aborigines,
benefited as well. The election of President Chen Shui-bian, whose Party
platform was based on a policy of ethnic equality, was thus the culmination
of a process already in the making.2
The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism 59
In actuality, support for multiple ethnic identities had always been on

the rise, and such long-term events could be seen as a culmination of an
even longer-term process of political transformation and discursive mutation
within the KMT Party, beginning in the late 1970s. The trend toward recog-
nition of local Taiwanese identity and ethnic rights was a switch in position
from the staunch monocultural nationalist policies of the KMT, which was
not just predicated on a Republic of China that tried to subordinate regional
ethnic differences within a larger civilizational fold but more importantly
subjected native Taiwanese to the rule of “outsider” ethnic Chinese. At the
same time, such multiculturalism was a facet of Taiwan’s broader political
indigenization that directly followed from its expulsion from the United
Nations and a policy to promote market liberalization in the global econ-
omy. In this sense, multiculturalism represented the recognition of diverse
cultural or ethnic identities as basic political right, but this embrace of mul-
ticultural principles was more precisely a product of indigenization (Taiwan
for native Taiwanese) as a principle of ethnic equality. The growing influence
of a Taiwanese faction in the KMT led by Lee Teng-hui, following in the
footsteps of President Chiang Ching-kuo, simply accelerated eventual adop-
tion of multiculturalism.3 In the process, the Ministry of Education took
a major first step by establishing departments in teachers’ colleges devoted
specifically to the study and teaching of multiculturalism.4
One must qualify the notion of multiculturalism used here by say-
ing that it probably did not refer to some inherently universal embrace of
worldly values, which is usually invoked by such a term, but rather some-
thing whose meaning was largely a function of the speaker’s local frame of
reference. Due to its association with indigenization in Taiwan, the meaning
of multiculturalism could be rendered simply as a principle of equality for
ethnic minorities, but it did not by definition embrace all of humanity. In a
postcolonial setting such as Great Britain or the melting pot of the United
States, multiculturalism was juxtaposed semantically against the tradition of
essentialist cultural regimes but pragmatically in a domestic context that now
endeavored to recognize or incorporate the existence of nonnative cultures
(or ethnicities). In Taiwan, multiculturalism was semantically juxtaposed
against a monoculturalist national regime but pragmatically in a context that
only attempted to recognize or incorporate internal others. Multiculturalism
became in other words a closed, inward-looking concept.
Similarly, one illusion created by the advent of postmodern theory was
the misleading assumption that it had liberated the multiple identities in us
all. However, multiculturalism is hardly a new phenomenon. Most societies
from time immemorial have been multicultural or multiethnic. The reason
why we view multiculturalism and multiple identities as inherently new is
the fact that, in a short history of nationalism, we have come to believe
that persons ipso facto have a notion of identity built on the assumption
of shared values, a collective conscience and common traditions. The intensity
of postmodernity’s search for hybridity and multiple identities is in the first
instance less a function of the apparent proliferation of (latent) multicul-
turalism as a phenomenon everywhere than of problematic notions endemic
to the nation-state’s standard definition of culture and the state’s need to
discursively erase de facto ethnic or cultural differences, which has in turn
prompted a need to transcend them.
The resurgence (of a discourse) of multiculturalism within a context of
transnationalism has given the advent of borderless economies, glocal identi-
ties, and free flows of ideas and technologies (following global capital) every-
where the added impression that amorphous transnational flows of people will
eventually dissolve territorial rootedness and place-based identities altogether.5
New waves of migration to the United States and (to a lesser extent) Europe
have witnessed inflows of Mexican, Caribbean, or Turkish laborers; Asian
engineers; Filipino domestics; and astronaut expatriate businesspeople.6 These
movements have intensified with the general demise of centrally planned econ-
omies, relaxation of customs tariffs, and lifting of travel restrictions throughout
the world. In this recently evolved “mode” of transnational capitalism, core-
periphery relations, and implicit cultural imperialism that have characterized
the modern world system in a previous era have clearly been replaced by the
blurring of once-pristine cultural origins and discrete identities. Given Taiwan’s
active integration within the global capitalist order, there was every reason
to think that these same transnational flows of people seen elsewhere should
bring about the advent of a similar multiculturalism.
The process of globalization that has been invoked by transnational-
ism in the sense of chaotic flows of capital, ideas, and people (or scapes in
Appadurai’s terms7) can be attributed in large part specifically to the muta-
tions of this changing global capitalism, but contrary to assumptions of
inherent disorganization the flows of various commodities were unequal and
tended to be regulated by different processes and powers. Thus, the process
of glocalization has heretofore been seen as an attribute of the inherent
disorganization and hybridity brought about by the global “system” instead
of the selective process of cultural synthesis itself.
What Is a “Foreigner,” or the Politics of

Ongoing Nationality Debates
Recent social scientific work (especially in anthropology) has followed the

“discovery” of globalization by shifting the primary frame of analytical ref-
erence away from the totality of self-contained societies to a more explic-

itly transnational, comparative perspective (and its functional disjunctures),
without really giving explanatory force to the selectivity of culture as an
actively appropriating and synthesizing factor in glocal interaction. The
sociopolitical ground (of which geopolitical forces and market demand are
seminal factors) constitutes, of course, a primary basis for the functioning
of ongoing institutional processes. However at the same time, this ground
can in different cultural contexts be perceived (and has in fact always been
mediated or accommodated) in different ways.8
Discursive constructions of social reality can run counter to how the
latter appears to be functionally constituted, and Taiwan’s experience is a
good case in point. Taiwan has made a quick transition to a free market
economy largely by successfully integrating itself into the transnational capi-
talist order, which in the process thus dismantled a preexisting centralized
economy based on protectionist barriers and strict border controls. Yet in
local discourse, its success seemed to be attributed less to Taiwan’s increasing
integration to the global system than to the inherent values of Confucian
discipline, democratization, or growth of indigenous Taiwanese conscious-
ness. Similarly, despite Taiwan’s de facto independence (in matters of institu-
tional and social life) from the PRC since 1949, it was not until Presidential
elections in 2000 that all political parties in Taiwan actually recognized its
“political separateness” from the mainland, primarily as a means of deflect-
ing the importance of countering China’s right of sovereignty. In large part,
the Republic of China has still continued as a legal and institutional fact in
Taiwan long after it became a fiction in international diplomatic circles, thus
the deep ongoing investment in this fiction has been in the long run the
major obstacle to official recognition of its de facto political independence
in everyday social life.
The discursive fiction of the “Republic of China” as the protector of
traditional Chinese civilization (vis-à-vis the People’s Republic) has also run
parallel to its other image as the embodiment of modern scientific values in
a Chinese context. Even more puzzling, the staunch monocultural national-
ism that buttressed modern nation-state formation in postwar Taiwan has
run parallel to the KMT’s ongoing defense of dual nationality (which may
be construed in literal terms as a recognition of multiple national identity).
In the context of the recent advent of transnationalism, it is significant to
carefully scrutinize how the coincidence of dual nationality with these other
forms of cultural conservatism has in fact exposed various contradictions in
Chinese cultural conceptions of identity and nationality (and its underlying
politics), which can in turn be used to shed new light on the current crisis
of multiculturalism in a newly transnational Taiwan.
The theme of Sinophobia seems to be a staple feature in (Western)

textbooks of Chinese history, which has conveniently explained China’s
encounter with the West and the nature of its subsequent transition to
modernity. In more recent times, it can perhaps be exemplified by the period
of Maoist isolation and in the current renaissance of Chinese nationalist
fervor. Such a concept of Sinophobia underscores a dualistic notion of us
versus them, whether it be East versus West, inner versus outer, or native
versus foreigner. No concept of nationality or citizenship can do without
some basic notion of insider-outsider dualism that presumably corresponds
with fixed definitions of boundary, and in the Chinese case one can easily
sense an even sharper sense of cultural dualism. If anything, the concept of
“foreigner” should be anything but ill defined. However, despite the rhetoric,
there are many layers of ambiguity (or ambivalence) in cultural and legal
terms that mark Chinese understandings of self and other, and especially in
postwar Taiwan these ambiguities have provoked repeated attempts to insti-
tute a rational policy of nationality prone to heated contestation, irresolvable
failures, and amendments of a patchwork nature.9 In the final analysis, like
the problematic notion of identity, these crises reflected less problems in defi-
nitions of “ethnicity” per se (which were fraught with enough inconsistencies
of their own) than underlying (and often changing) political considerations
that not only affected multiple boundaries that actually separated various
notions of self from other but also highlighted the socially stratified connota-
tions that were embedded in most, if not all, definitions of foreigner. Despite
the legal clarity that typically cloaks a definition of citizenship (hence, by
contrast foreignness), there is perhaps no nation in which the requisites of
these definitions did not change, and continued change accented the fact
that such laws regularly responded to changing political situations. More-
over, cultural definitions of self and other did not derive wholly from legal
definitions; this was an added source of confusion.
A more appropriate way of explaining why Chinese might have a
dualistic notion of self versus other that contributes (in an extreme case)
to a sense of phobia would be to say that such dualism per se is more pre-
cisely the product (or the perception) of a colonial situation instead of an
a priori cultural definition. If anything, such colonialism is largely political
by nature and can be exacerbated by the imposition of other overlapping
notions of boundary. The paradox that has ultimately confounded a national
definition of Chineseness in the Cold War era actually has to do with the
fictive status of the “Republic of China,” which is a definition of political
legitimacy instead of legality per se. While the international community
may recognize the difference between a PRC and ROC passport, technically
Taiwanese would consider it inappropriate to call people on mainland China
“foreigners” (waiguo ren). If one adopted the official jargon at the time, they
would be “Communist bandits” (gongfei), just as products originating from
the PRC would be labeled “bandit goods” (feihuo) and the country Com-
munist China (zhonggong). If the latter was a nation, it would be at best
an illegitimate one and not an other. The neutral terms mainland (dalu)
and mainlander (or mainland compatriot, dalu tongbao) were not considered
acceptable until the late 1980s, after Cold War tensions had already waned
and trade/contact restrictions were considerably relaxed.
The status of Hong Kong was perhaps even more ambiguous. While it
was recognized to be under British control, it was not considered a separate
nation by any official definition. Thus (prior to 1997), ROC citizens did
not need to use a passport to go to Hong Kong, but they still needed a
visa (issued by Hong Kong authorities). Like the PRC, Hong Kong was not
considered a “foreign” country in either official or popular parlance, and its
people were just called Hong Kongers, while neither of the dualistic terms
used to describe being “inside the country” (guonei), that is, domestically, or
being “outside the country” (guowai), that is, going abroad, was applicable
to Hong Kong. One could only say that one is going to Hong Kong.
Legally speaking, possession of a national identity card (shenfenzheng)
was probably the clearest proof of “citizenship,” but possession of a card
number was conditional on having permanent household registration (huji)
somewhere, this being a survival of the Japanese colonial administration sys-
tem. Citizenship, as inscribed on one’s identity card or passport, was certainly
one indicator of whether one was “foreign” or not, but it might not be the
most important or relevant one. To a fervent nationalist, this status may be
important, but in other contexts it was usually difficult to determine whether
foreignness (or Chineseness) referred to one’s nationality or cultural identi-
fication. For official purposes, since the ROC had always recognized dual
nationality, one’s nationality mattered less as a fixture of the person than as
element of supervisory control. As far as Immigration and Customs Bureaus
were concerned, the only thing that mattered was what passport one used
to enter and exit the country. A condition of maintaining ROC citizenship
was that one had to use an ROC passport to enter and exit Taiwan, and
control over exit and entry permits was what kept citizens in line, as long
as they were in the country. In the same way, attaining citizenship was just
a prerequisite for registering one’s household residence (huji), which was in
effect the agency for monitoring one’s movements within the country.
This might then lead one to ask: Who is eligible to attain ROC
citizenship? At the risk of pushing it to the extreme, one can say generally
that it is unusual for non-Chinese to apply for or to be granted citizen-
ship. This obviously raises the sloppier question of how one defines being
“Chinese.” In legal or other terms, there have never been good, unequivo-
cal criteria for determining who qualified as being Chinese, but this was
another way of saying that any acceptable standard (blood or descent tie)
only constituted a minimal criterion for attaining citizenship. Given that
there were Chinese everywhere (PRC, Hong Kong, and overseas), ethnicity
was obviously a minor, if not insignificant, criterion for determining citi-
zenship in the long run. If a wealthy overseas Chinese businessperson wished
to become a legislator, or if a Hong Kong scholar was offered employment
as a professor in a National University, they would generally find it easier
(if not automatic) to obtain citizenship than a transient laborer. Thus,
civil servants and those with official capacity in government service were
expected to become citizens, but this was a means of invoking privileges
as well as of maximizing control over those in roles of official responsibil-
ity. Otherwise, the rules and conditions for other kinds of people have
always been complex and ever changing, depending on one’s original abode,
occupational status, length of residence, and so on. Rules were obviously
different for mainland Chinese, Hong Kongers, and other overseas Chinese,
and they have always changed to reflect changing political situations and
exigencies. Being quintessentially political, nationality was hardly a good
criterion of “Chineseness.”
As far as Chineseness is concerned, it mattered little whether an over-
seas Chinese was a Chinese national or not, since overseas Chinese was an
independent legal status, which was determined in part by whether one
“identified” as such and in part by residence conditions that stipulated
whether such a person was entitled to remain in Taiwan (for work, study, or
other purposes). Those who opted to be overseas Chinese (regardless of citi-
zenship) were in turn regulated by the Bureau of Overseas Chinese Affairs,
and “Chinese” who held a foreign passport had an option of identifying as
an overseas Chinese or foreigner. This might be a matter of ethnic pride
for some, but it was more likely the case that people chose on the basis of
whatever benefited them most. Yet most importantly, one must stress that
the very term overseas Chinese was not just simply a Chinese who happened
to live abroad, but rather a category of persons, which by virtue of historical
origin had unavoidable social connotations that could change over time but
did not guarantee to be value-free or timeless. This term originated in the
late nineteenth century and was related to the rise of nationalism. Its politi-
cal association with patriotic, diasporic Chinese has been waning over time
to the extent where Chinese abroad have begun using more neutral terms,
such as huaren and huayu, to denote Chinese people and Chinese language.
Associations with migrant labor in a particular era of global capitalism have
also stuck with the term to the point where it seemed inappropriate to use
huaqiao to represent high-tech Chinese professionals working in Silicon Val-
ley who have been enticed by the reverse brain drain to return to Taiwan
in an elite or privileged capacity.
The use of huaqiao by the Sinocentric center to denote Chinese over-
seas will without doubt continue, despite its decreasing popularity among
overseas Chinese themselves, for the simple reason that it enhances the Sino-
center’s sense of ethnic pride, even though the ties of political solidarity are
dubious. Thus, the achievements of ethnic Chinese Corazon Aquino and
Michael Chang have continued to be embraced fervently and heralded by
the media, even though the source of their fame and success probably had
little or nothing to do with their Chineseness. With regard to countertrends,
the handover of Hong Kong by Britain back to China in 1997 resulted
in the abrupt abolition of overseas Chinese status for Hong Kong and the
adoption of Immigration and Customs rules that made it more difficult
for Hong Kong “Special Administrative Region” passport holders to enter
or travel through Taiwan, which reversed trends in the post‒Cold War era.
Similar arrangements then made it equally difficult for Taiwan citizens to
travel to Hong Kong. For a while, it was easier for Taiwan citizens to enter
PRC as “Taiwanese compatriots” (taiwan tongbao) than it was to go to Hong
Kong, but in the long-term transition, which accepted the PRC’s eventual
international legitimacy, Hong Kongers traded their ambiguous status as
overseas Chinese to ambiguous citizens of the PRC.
In recent years, the debate over official recognition of dual nationality
has intensified. It may seem ironic, especially in light of the KMT’s extreme
cultural nationalist construction of the polity (as Republic of China and
defender of traditional Chinese culture and civilization), that it would tac-
itly accept dual nationality. Such a policy was not simply to accommodate
Chinese everywhere, regardless of nationality. As previously noted, national-
ity was guided less by ethnic principles than political imperatives. While
presenting a monocultural face to the masses, who could not for the most
part (at least during the Cold War era) travel in or out of the country eas-
ily, dual nationality in essence enabled privileged elites, whether they were
overseas Chinese who were assimilated into civil service or children of high-
ranking officials (as well as wealthy businesspeople who had the means to
go abroad) to retain an exit ticket to a political safe haven in the event of
war. With the explicit attempt by the government in the early 1990s in a
reverse brain drain to attract Chinese abroad to return to the motherland
to serve as chaired academics, technical elites, and ministers, the numbers
of such dual nationals, especially in high positions of government, created
an apparent crisis of identity that became increasingly inconsistent with a
gradual trend toward indigenization and ethnic renaissance.10
In short, more important than the existence of multiculturalism itself
were the strategic intents that drove the system and its policies. If anything,
ethnic categories and rhetoric were superficial notions that by themselves

explained little. In the final analysis, the ambivalent status of overseas Chi-
nese could be viewed in two different ways: because ethnic Chinese can
always be embraced as Chinese nationals, an option that is not open to non-
Chinese, it makes the nation-state more of a primordial community that
contradicts its constitution as a modern entity. Yet, on the other hand, dual
nationality served in another sense to guarantee privileges of cosmopolitan
multiculturalism to overseas Chinese as well as local elites seeking a safe
haven on the outside, which at the same time prevented it from becoming
an asset accessible to the masses, as though invoked by identity (which one
expects from notions of citizenship). The political intents that drove the
system also made it prone to changing needs and times.
Invasion of the Invisible Others in the

Advent of Transnational Labor
Even before the advent of transnational capitalism, there had been a steady
presence of “outsiders” into postwar Taiwanese society, if one not only
included the gradual absorption of overseas Chinese (including from Hong
Kong/Macau), but also the marginal existence of longtime resident foreign-
ers (many of whom married local spouses, were employed and well settled).
To this, one could add in recent years the massive influx of contract labor-
ers (Filipino maids, Thai construction workers, PRC immigrants, expatri-
ate businesspeople, technical experts, etc.), as well as increased numbers of
Chinese abroad lured back by super-salary jobs and Chinese youth raised
abroad who “returned” to exploit a growing niche of professional work
requiring English-language fluency. All contributed in different ways to a
diversified and transnational local Taiwanese economy, albeit accommodated
within an ongoing stratified system.
In making sense of nationality issues and immigration policy in post-
war Taiwan, one must first of all acknowledge Chinese cultural definitions of
“Chinese” and “foreigner.” As previously noted, while ethnic notions of Chi-
neseness were intended to include all Chinese (however imperfectly defined),
regardless of nationality, they overlapped with practices of nationality that
were in essence politically motivated and largely exclusive of “foreigners.”
The dual nationality issue was in this sense less a debate about purging
foreign status and multiculturalism per se than about purging the possible
conflicts of interest precipitated by cosmopolitan elites within officialdom
who held dual nationality. This predicament was the result of government
policies that had from the beginning welcomed multiple “identities” into
its top ranks. On the other hand, the consequences of dual nationality for
average citizens and overseas Chinese were less important, except in a general
discourse of national identity.
In the context of nationality, there were many kinds of foreigners, and
they tended to be guided by different principles. As in English, different
terms for foreigners reflected different social connotations. An “expatriate”
tends to be understood, generally speaking, as a skilled technician who is
sent in by a home office of a corporation or government to perform a task
that a “local” is for most part incapable of performing. This term is largely
the product of a colonial age, as it is normally expected that an expatriate
will eventually be repatriated, thus will not (seek to) be a permanent fixture
in that society. On the other hand, a foreign laborer invokes a somewhat
different connotation of foreigner. Foreign labor in general is not a new
phenomenon to global capitalism, which was in fact responsible for orches-
trating the first major waves of ethnic migration in human history. However,
the role of foreign labor has clearly been transformed by the current phase
of transnational capitalism, characterized by disorganized flows of capital
and labor, borderless economies, and the withering away of nationalist pro-
tectionism of various sorts, not to mention the most recent evolution of
supra-national economic zones, such as EEC and NAFTA. The ramifications
of such developments have been experienced in different ways in different
nations of the world. The impact of transnationalism on the perception
of national identity and national borders, insofar as it has led to a wider
conscience of inseparable linkages within the global economy is, moreover,
analytically distinct from the sentiments that have given rise to multicultural-
ism everywhere. The former is in essence a product of what Appadurai aptly
called functional “disjunctures” inherent to the mutating world system; the
latter is, on the other hand, a product of the cultural decolonization attrib-
utable to changes in modern nation-states typically founded on cultural
nationalism, ethnic assimilation, and adherence to these standards. Former
colonizers, such as Britain, have embraced multiculturalism as a way of life,
rejecting assimilation to a dominant English culture. Australia’s multicultural
“postmodern republic” is another similar example.
In the transnational global economy, contrary to Appadurai’s overt
focus on its intrinsic “disorganization,” flows of capital and labor have tended
to be unequal in force or unequally determined by hierarchies of power.
While it is assumed that transnational labor circulation follows the needs of
capital, in fact different countries have, through control over boundaries and
immigration, responded differently to transnational labor flows. Some have
been open to the influx of human capital and their long-term integration,
while others have been less so.
Introduction 5
these historical transformations have in the long run produced a complex

hegemonic process that is reflected in various regimes of rule. Insofar as
they overlap with other institutions, such as nationalism and capitalism,
they share a common field of discourse.
The postcolonial2 approach outlined above may be the product of
theoretical debates that seem to be most explicitly relevant to the study of
colonial societies, literally defined, but it is certainly not limited to them. The
general import of a cultural politics of difference and the collusive nature
of institutional ideologies and practices in the hegemonic construction of
its authority are pertinent also to nationalizing regimes and legitimizing
processes of the state.
Reading Nationalism as Culturalist Narrative

and Political Process
Before its rediscovery in the 1980s within critical circles of cultural studies,
historical theory, and literary theory, there had already been several genera-
tions of scholarship on nationalism. There has been no shortage of historical
ruminations in the 1950s and 1960s on the nature of nationalism, not to
its mention ideological roots in nineteenth-century philosophies of history.
The birth of the Republic of China in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolu-
tion made the nation-state an unambiguous presence both in China and
elsewhere in the world. The rise of nationalism has in many ways marked
the transition from tradition to “modernity” in standard narratives of world
history. To the extent that we attribute this historical rise to the effect of
concrete historical forces, such as colonialism and modernization, it has also
been easy to associate the form of the nation-state to its Western diffusion,
however defined. At the same time, the Chinese rendition of the nationalism
as “the principle of peoplehood” (minzu zhuyi) has been the end product of
intellectualizing by Chinese thinkers leading up to the fact. It intersects in
some ways with the nature of the general (abstract) phenomenon, but it is
also a peculiarly cultural definition that reflects interpretations of its essential
nature. The nation’s formation as a concrete sociopolitical institution has
been heterogeneous rather than uniform globally, and its intellectualizing at
a local level has always been intimately intertwined with, and thus directly
reflective of, its concrete particularities. The relationship between the general
nature of its diffusion (or modernity in its broadest sense) and its cultural
particularities has been the source of ongoing confusion in the literature,
insofar as such theorizing has usually been the primary result of one or the
other position. Everything is still open to question.
and a turn toward hybridity of a kind championed by various genres of

postmodern theory, it was still in essence a multiculturalism that did not
include outsiders (foreigners) and made no attempt to absorb foreign labor
in a way that was by nature blind to ethnicity, which should be indicative
of transnational movements in an age of disorganized capitalism, driven
by needs of the global market rather than by the interests of global impe-
rialism or national protectionism. The essential distinction between these
genres of multiculturalism, no matter how they appeared on the surface, is
crucial, since it can explain why significantly increasing transnational flows
of outsiders into present-day Taiwan has continued to be marked by their
discursive absence or marginalized existence in relation to the constitution
of mainstream society. If anything, the dominant discourse of indigenization
conflicted fundamentally with the view that contemporary Taiwan was really,
if not primarily, the product of its role in the global economy, driven by
the easy flow of transnational capital and now by the transnational flow of
human capital. Taiwan has in fact never been monocultural, if one takes
into account the long history of Han-aboriginal interaction, interlude with
European traders, the Japanese colonial interregnum, and postwar influx of
overseas Chinese. But through the processes of historical erasure, political
assimilation, and official elitism, the modern KMT nation-state has man-
aged to absorb such outside influences and discursively portray them as the
achievements of a monocultural state, while at the same time marginalizing
“foreign” influences per se. Yet throughout the postwar era and accelerating
in an open global economy, the growing influx of transnational human
capital in particular has highlighted even more explicitly, in my opinion,
the essentialist nature of the Taiwanese state, much like Japan, where “for-
eigners” (by Asian cultural definition) will forever be considered ephemeral
fixtures of mainstream society, no matter how assimilated they happen to be.
Ironically, even with the superficial embrace of multiculturalism and ethnic
hybridity in Taiwan today, the blind eye that “indigenization” has turned
to the increasing transnational multiculturalism that has resulted from the
opening up of a global economy may in the long run represent a form of
erasure that will belittle the violence of the modern nation-state, by contrast.
Will this new wave of multiculturalism turn out to be the most exploitative,
despite its emancipatory claims of “hybridity”?
The point here is that, while the cultural ideal of multiculturalism has
been embraced everywhere as a keyword of our postmodern times, few if any
countries have fully embraced transnational multiculturalism as a way of life,
for this would engender a postnationalism or transnational nation that does
not yet exist. The evolution from a modern world system to transnational
capitalism is the product of many complex political and economic factors
that have shaped the course of nations everywhere, yet even fewer nations
can be seen as products of transnational capitalism itself. In fact, I would
argue that Taiwan comes close to being a “postnation.” Who says that the
victory of an independent Taiwan is the result of its sudden cognizance of
its indigenous reality? The reality is more like the following: Taiwan’s sudden
recognition in the international arena was the product of its success in a
transnational economy at a time when its existence as a nation had been
threatened by its expulsion from the United Nations. Its success had little
or nothing to do with its success as a nation, and more likely in spite of
it. The increasing turn toward indigenization was then, if anything, a step
backward. In light of its renewed confrontation with the PRC, its hopes of
gaining formal status as a nation in the United Nations on the basis of its
independent cultural existence are close to nil. The PRC’s track record in
defending its nationalistic sanctity is evidenced enough by its ongoing border
wars with India and its stern determination to keep Tibet “autonomous.” If
it could wait 50 years for the return of Hong Kong to the motherland, it
could just as easily wait 500 years for Taiwan’s eventual reunification. This
is a drop in the bucket in the myth of China’s long, “unbroken” lineage of
history and civilization.12 Taiwan’s possibilities for true independence would
stand a better chance, if it embraced transnationalism as a way of life in a
way that more accurately reflected its actual emergence in the late modern
global economy.
In the diplomatic arena, criteria for political independence are marred
by contradictions of their own. There are limits to cultural autonomy and
rights of political self-determination as principles for official separation. In
any event, the very notion of the modern nation-state has been challenged
even less, especially in this new era of transnational globalization.
The Primordial Imagined Community

and the Limits of Global Multiculturalism
Human history has to some extent been the history of globalization. Even
if one does not subscribe totally to Eric Wolf ’s (1982) dictum that there
have never been any societies without History, globalization and multicul-
tural interaction have long been staples of human existence that have had
long and significant impact on social processes and political institutions.13
Needless to say, the rapidity and degree to which globalization has affected
contemporary life has been in part the consequence of time-space compres-
sion, in David Harvey’s terms.14 Yet, like the transformations of colonialism
within a global context, the underlying process within political relations and
institutional change should perhaps been seen more significantly as a func-

tion of newly emergent ideologies and geopolitical changes of power. Such
paradigmatic shifts and discontinuous phases are a product of simultane-
ous imposition of hegemonic forces acting from above and local cultural
processes acting from below. Within this longue durée, the mutations of
global capitalism are only one element in this complex interactive process.
It is easy to write a history of globalization and multicultural interac-
tion in Taiwan. It is a well-documented fact that, in addition to the sev-
eral millennia of settlement by indigenous Austronesian peoples in Taiwan,
settlement by Han Chinese has had a history of over 400 years, which might
presumably include two periods of colonial rule by the Dutch (38 years)
and Spanish (18 years), 268 years of imperial rule by the Qing dynasty,
and, finally, 50 years of Japanese rule. In addition to these colonial encoun-
ters, there have been encounters between Chinese settlers and Austronesian
aboriginal societies, not to mention complex interactions between various
aboriginal groups and between diverse Chinese dialect groups.
Yet such accounts say intrinsically little about how such ethnic groups
and boundaries are discretely defined and how they may soften, harden or
mutate as a result of various kinds of power relationships. More importantly,
the reason why one tends not to write history as a long, uninterrupted
stream of globalization is that the frames of sociopolitical reference are
constantly altered by changes in discursive perception (and their underlying
politics). Just as we can be altered by global hegemonic changes from above,
local perceptions of these same processes alter the way in which societies
constitute, reconfigure, and interact with diverse agents in an ongoing politi-
cal and social competition for power and survival.
Perhaps a more constructive point of departure for writing a history of
this emerging era of transnational globalization is to take seriously in what
sense transnationalism is a product of a changing nationalism, a mutating
capitalist system, ongoing political imperialist orders and their impact on a
differential hierarchy that increasingly dichotomizes cosmopolitanizing sites
(like cities) as against nativistic, provincial survivals, and market-induced
class divisions both within and across societies. The dominant focus on bor-
derless economies and chaotic flows of capital and people in most accounts
of transnationalism has accented in large part the changing practices of
global capitalism that have transformed previously bounded notions of
political identity, cultural substance, and regulated flows of people, media,
and technology. The accent on the market has in turn made disorganiza-
tion and hybridity, among other things, key words for our times. However,
markets act in conjunction with and in competition with states, and a more
complex equation is needed to explain how these two forces interact. In the
global hierarchy of places, it is clear that this equation functions differently

everywhere, because different places react according to their relative position
in a geography of power. These relations are mediated by ongoing cultural
discourses and local systems of meaning.
Borderless economies and disorganized capitalism have broken down
prior relations of core and periphery in the modern world system, while at
the same time replacing the cultural imperialism of that older capitalism
with something else. But one might question whether such cultural hege-
mony has disappeared altogether or simply mutated into something more
sublime and complicated. In many quarters, despite the changing face of
global capitalism and increasingly apparent penetration of the global market
into the pulse of everyday life (to wit, the domino effect of the recent Asian
economic crisis of 1998), globalization has still been perceived as a force
that is fundamentally extrinsic to society, if not something that is inher-
ently culturally Western. Despite its best intentions (in deliberate blurring
boundaries), it still creates differences, not only between rich and poor
countries or cosmopolitanizing and indigenizing centers but also between
rich and poor classes. The disjunctures of the “system” that have produced
unstructured flows of capital are nonetheless analytically distinct from the
effects of the system that may engender sharper social divisions. How else
can one interpret the recent escalation of social movements against free trade
globalization (as though the latter solely represents large corporate interests
against the average citizen and the dispossessed)?
The intervention of states in the management of supply and demand
in the global market can also differ widely in different countries; it may
act not simply on the basis of economic calculation but also in order to
protect national and vested class interests or to conform to accepted cultural
rules. In some respects, Taiwan is remarkably globalized in ways that have
already irrevocably altered its social and economic landscape. In addition
to the ubiquitous institutional existence of Japanese consumer products,
mainstays of American culture such as McDonalds and creolized forms of
such institutions, few people have remarked that there are probably more
7-Eleven-type convenience stores in Taipei per capita than anywhere else in
the world. The reasons for its acceptance are many, but it has even more
remarkably and swiftly eradicated once commonplace neighborhood family
stores and street kiosks that had been extolled by many sociologists as the
“traditional” icon of Asian enterprise. Without a doubt, “convenience” and
rational calculation have played an important part in this demise, but at
the same time the lack of social resistance to the fate of small business is a
function as well of the state’s traditionally laissez-faire attitude toward the
Chinese private economy and the tendency of small business to turn over
with the times. In contrast to the easily commoditized nature of capital,

the social movement of people in the global labor market has always been
subject to differential rules not only within, but between societies as well.
The creation of supranational entities such as the European Union has
facilitated freer movement across once-rigid national borders, but they oper-
ate in conjunction with restrictions regulating the inflow, immigration, and
naturalization of outsiders. Most such laws are necessarily discriminating
in social terms in ways that respond to prevailing economic demand and
political priorities.
From the position of the state, all flows of capital, information, and
people are regulated, albeit according to different needs and standards. In the
short view of things, Taiwan has in the last decade considerably liberalized
the inflow of foreign labor in order to make up for a shortage of labor in
specific sectors in order to minimize the outflow of industries in constant
search of low labor costs. At the same time, it has adopted a stratified
policy toward different classes of labor. Transient or unskilled labor is sub-
ject to short-term contracts and restrictive conditions that are always prone
to revision, while those in more highly skilled professions or government
related institutions are subject to more liberal laws. The large increase in
foreign labor of all kinds in the last few decades eventually prompted the
first major revision of the Nationality Law (guoji fa) in seventy-one years,
put into effect on February 9, 2000, which restructured categories of resi-
dence by foreigners and instituted modified procedures for processing visas
and stays of residence. In a longer view of things, while such revised laws
were implemented to accommodate the flow of foreign labor for purposes
of residence, they did not radically alter existing laws with regard to Dual
Nationality and the inability of non-Chinese to gain permanent residence for
purposes of citizenship. The latter ultimately impinged on cultural notions
of primordial “community.” Although not immutable, they defined certain
limits to which notions of hybridity and (transnational) multiculturalism
could be applied. If anything, the experience of cultural nationalism, while
historically brief, has at least in Asia hardened the primordial constitution
of the nation as an imagined ethnic community, while secularizing its appa-
ratuses of state, which have rigidified through law its cultural boundaries.
In content, there should be as many different imagined communities
as there are different historically and culturally constituted societies. Many
are built on an ethnic ideal, others on different cultural principles, such
as religion or ideology that may ultimately transcend local, ethnic, or class
traditions.15 Some are relatively open to absorption by outsiders, while oth-
ers are firmly established in inherently closed communities. Regardless of
ideal, almost all nation-states are fraught with internal tensions that make
the nation-state an unstable entity, not to mention being transformed by

transnationalism. The hybridity of people and practices, which has always
been part of multicultural consumption, has in an era of transnational-
ism evolved to a new phase.16 Flows of people cannot create glocalized
multiculturalisms except by altering the fabric of society or its underlying
values. Even then, this will not prevent multiculturalism from being what
Nederveen Pieterse (2001:393) calls “a moving target.”
Part Two
Hong Kong Betwixt and Between

The Liminality of Culture Before the End of History
It could be said that there has been in Hong Kong a true marriage of
Confucian values and British colonial ethics. Indeed, the application
of the principles of nineteenth century laissez faire and, in more recent
times, positive non-intervention by the Hong Kong government has
provided an ideal environment for business, and thus for Hong Kong
as a whole, to prosper.
—Alan Birch, Hong Kong: The Colony That Never Was
Prologue
Despite the provocative title of Birch’s book above, the book itself was an
illustrated history of colonial Hong Kong, prompted by the eventual disap-
pearance of it after its return to China or its change of fate. The title hinted
at the author’s nostalgia for a place soon to be lost in history. But it was
tempered also by the recognition that Hong Kong was an atypical colony
that had already transformed itself into a cosmopolitan city. In this regard,
the government’s laissez-faire or noninterventionist policies reflected to some
extent this exceptionalism. In fact, official policy in the last few decades
of the colonial era was to refer to Hong Kong as a territory, not a colony,
as if to suggest the inapplicability or irrelevance of colonial domination.
The discursive disappearance of coloniality in Hong Kong is hardly
an irrelevant factor; it is part and parcel of the colonial regime’s ongoing
mutation in the larger scheme of things. Ackbar Abbas (1997:7) depicted
Hong Kong’s culture as one “from reverse hallucination, which sees only
desert, to a culture of disappearance, whose appearance is posited on the
immanence of its disappearance.” Caught between the tensions of a float-
ing identity that saw itself in essence as the product of a cultural desert
75
and the need to construct an explicit identity under conditions of political

uncertainty, Hong Kong saw “an expansion of culture throughout the social
realm,” amounting to an “explosion.” This culture of disappearance created
in actuality a misrecognition of presence, where ephemerality, speed, and
abstraction confounded the senses in a way that reflected the ambiguous
crisis of late colonial modernity.
It is easy to find disappearance in the cultural spaces of film, archi-
tecture, and writing in this liminal transition to 1997, but I argue that
the discourses and practices of disappearance have been a staple feature
of Hong Kong’s entire colonial history. Subjective effacement, institutional
codification, and political sublimation became techniques with which the
colonial government systematically downplayed or silenced the existence of
conflict, rationalized its own actions, and then negotiated the many con-
tradictions in practice that legitimated the rule of law, indirect rule, free
market rationality, and diverse forms of disinterested domination. The more
colonialism was seen not to exist or be replaced by its status of territory,
ruled by value-free systems of justice or administration and transformed by
the utilitarian rationale of modern capitalism, the more one would remain
blind to real colonial difference, polarizations of a market class economy,
and the disciplinary consequences of legalist and social regulation.
Chapter 4
Hong Kong Before Hong Kongness

The Changing Genealogies and Faces of Colonialism
The Nineteenth-Century Imperial Archive from the

Politics of Difference to the Sociology of Modern Power
Hong Kong was ceded in 1841 as a result of the Sino-British Opium War.
The New Territories was leased from China to Britain in 1898 for ninety-
nine years as an extension of the colony for purposes of military defense.
Hong Kong was “no more than a barren isle” when the British took it over.
The New Territories was, on the other hand, a larger land mass with settled
rural communities. In a sense, the history of rule in the New Territories
elucidates more clearly the changing nature of colonialism. At the outset,
it aimed to be a model of indirect rule, based on the maintenance of local
tradition and put into practice by the rule of law and its enlightened gov-
ernance. In this regard, one may question the objective and invisible nature
of this rational administration even as in the long run the New Territories
became absorbed into the general colonial rule of Hong Kong and its mode
of colonial governance appropriated by modernity, state power, and the free
market. At the same time, Hong Kong was transformed not only by its
status as a colony but also in the way its existence transcended its liminality
between two Chinas. In short, colonialism in Hong Kong was a cultural
project that contrasted with colonialisms elsewhere, which remade itself
with parallel geopolitical forces that in the long run engendered distinctive
societal consequences.
Much important work on colonialism and culture has appeared
recently in the historical and social scientific literature. Scholars writing
from the general vantage point of cultural studies have distanced themselves
This is a significant rewriting of “Colonial Govern-Mentality in Transition: Hong Kong as

Imperial Subject and Object,” Cultural Studies 14(3‒4):430‒61, published originally in 2000.
77
from a prior generation of scholars that has for the most part focused on the
economic and politically exploitative dimensions of colonialism. This is, of
course, not to downplay the obvious effect of domination and destruction
that has characterized colonial rule and which capitalized on the creation
and maintenance of difference in social, racial, and other terms, but rather
to highlight the role of explicit practices and their underlying mentalities
in legitimizing and normalizing the colonial project. Studies have diversely
pointed to the positive effects of diverse colluding factors such as religion,
language, history, and ethnicity that have made the colonial project a quint-
essentially civilizing as well as routinizing process in ways that have ulti-
mately contributed to the efficacy of rule. By cultural project, one can mean
many things, of course. Anthropological interest in the role of Christian
missions has situated colonialism within a wider civilizing process while at
the same time accenting the importance of symbolic systems in the political
process as a whole.1 Others have noted the strategic use of language in the
construction of colonial power.2 The emergence of discursive fields such as
historical writing and Orientalist writing can also be viewed as products of
colonialism, whereby the meaningful construction of knowledge constitutes
an integral part of an ongoing cultural struggle.3 To such examples of cul-
ture, one can add other forms of narration and representation, like travel
writing and art, as phenomena that emerge out of a colonial context.4
The collusion between colonialism and culture can be understood not
only in terms of how colonialism may be constituted as a cultural project,
but also as a function of the way the colonial experience has given rise to the
phenomenon of culture. Asad (1973:115), for example, has suggested that,
in addition to glossing over the disruptive effects of colonial domination
through recourse to images of functional integration, the cultural objecti-
fication implicit in ethnographic writing today reflects to a large extent a
situation of “routine colonialism.” Similarly, Dirks (1992b:3) has noted that
modern notions of public culture, of the kind that typically invoke some
systematic unity of language, race, geography, and history, may also have
been literal products of nationalism but were in essence claims encouraged
and facilitated by a history of colonialism. Without denying the utility of
the diverse notions of culture that have been invoked by recent writings
on colonialism, there is another aspect of culture implicit in the practices
themselves, a kind of mentalité, which can be seen as guiding the actions
of concrete agents and behavior of social institutions that shed significant
light on the nature and meaning of colonialism.
Thus, how one understands that culture (as mentalité) depends on how
one understands colonialism. Despite calls from certain quarters of literary
criticism to rally around the general label of “postcolonial” theory, rightly
Hong Kong before Hong Kongness 79
criticized by Gates (1991) as a kind of “critical Fanonism,” colonialism

in this context must be taken in the first instance literally as a historical
phenomenon. Whether or not it is desirable for us in the final analysis
to produce localized theories rather than general laws of colonialism, it is
necessary, methodologically speaking, to situate the colonial experience in its
proper geohistorical context. There are many kinds of colonial experience,
not only because different kinds of colonial agents inevitably invoke different
kinds of cultural and sociopolitical baggage, but also because, in each specific
situation, colonialism inevitably changes as a result of interaction with local
forces in ways that demand ongoing syntheses and shifting strategies. Each
colonial experience is in other words a narrative in itself. But this does not
mean, on the other hand, that such narratives should be understood only
at the level of events. On the contrary, one should understand such events
in the context of an interpretive framework by viewing action, discourse
and practice both in terms of their underlying motives and intentions and
as a function of inherently cultural rules and assumptions.
I think many of the essentializing tendencies of postcolonial theory
stem from a misleading preoccupation with explaining the politics of “dif-
ference.” Thus, racism has been conveniently viewed as a tool for making
manifest a process of political domination and cultural construction of alien
others, which appears to be universal to colonial regimes everywhere. It is as
though colonial institutions are themselves contingent on such sentiments,
cultural in origin, for their continued sustenance in sociopolitical terms.
Noting that it is something of a paradox that racial differences between colo-
nizer and colonized should become most prominent in precisely that period
of the late nineteenth century when technologies of disciplinary power were
deployed in the service of the colonial state, Chatterjee (1993:10) extends
this “rule of colonial difference” even further to explain the inner dynam-
ics of anticolonialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism. On the contrary,
I think it is easier to show that racism or ideologies of racial difference are
common to all cultures and are, if anything, analytically distinct from the
formation of colonial regimes.5 By noting in turn how “the quality and
intensity of racism vary enormously in different colonial contexts and at
different historical moments,” Stoler (1989:137) makes it possible to sug-
gest that the polarization of racial and other differences are instead arbitrary
signs or dependent variables of a sociopolitical institution whose nature is
grounded in specific places and times.
The same criticism can be brought to bear against Said’s Orientalism
(1978). Much more attention has been drawn to the objectification of
the other in the construction of hegemonic discourses than to the more
important point that such discourses have been made possible by the prior
existence of an “imperial contest.” Yet while Said has been content largely to
concentrate predominantly on texts of high colonialism and the production
of metropolitan knowledge, he has said much less about the institutional
realities of colonialism that have given rise to these possibilities of discourse
as well as those native realities that have been effectively obscured and
objectified by both the discourses and practices of colonialism.
If one can view the institutional realities of colonialism as an appropri-
ate point of departure for understanding the underlying mentalité of (local)
colonial regimes and the way it may differ from the mentalité of native
institutions and practices, one must then necessarily ask, what kinds of colo-
nialism are there, and how does the Hong Kong experience contrast with
other examples in reference to (cultural) origins and (historical) specificity?
What is it about the underlying mentalité of Hong Kong’s colonialism that
sheds light on its cultural uniqueness and makes it relevant to anthropologi-
cal misunderstandings of Chinese traditions?
At the risk of essentializing the nature of British colonialism in Hong
Kong as a bounded category (vis-à-vis French colonialism or the experience
of British colonies elsewhere and at other times), one must nonetheless
admit that it shares certain features of colonial experience found elsewhere.
Perhaps the most obvious was the implementation of what has been referred
to in the literature as the policy of indirect rule. Hong Kong society may
have been built from scratch since its cession by China in 1841, but given
the settled population of Kowloon, ceded in 1860, there was much more
to suggest that the overall disposition of the place resembled that of other
treaty ports in China than colonies like the Falkland Islands. This became
even more the case after the lease of New Territories in 1898. Even though
in strict legal terms, Hong Kong (and Kowloon) was a colony in terms of
its outright cession, while the New Territories was just a temporary lease,
where the colonial government assumed the role of manager-cum-taxlord,
in practice, this distinction eventually became blurred and for all intents
and purposes nonexistent. The New Territories may have been in fact a
lease, where the colonial government attempted to administer the territory
in accordance with native custom and tradition, but this policy of indirect
rule was in principle no different from that which guided administrators
elsewhere in the British empire. This being said, however, the faithfulness
to which individual colonial administrators regulated society in accordance
with local custom varied considerably, largely as a function of how strictly
policy was carried out.6 In the New Territories, indirect rule was largely
guided by purity of purpose but for complex reasons became subverted as a
result of many other mitigating factors. Given that colonial policy was as a
matter of principle guided by the aim of preserving traditional practices on
the basis of local custom, one can then ask to what extent did the colonial
government accurately understand the nature and operation of traditional
custom, and what were the consequences of its particular implementation
of tradition on the actual state of those beliefs and practices? Such ques-
tions have been posed already in the burgeoning literature on Fiji and India
in particular, but local historians and anthropologists of Hong Kong have
almost without exception taken the appearance of “traditional” custom and
social organization at face value.7
The flip side of the colonial government’s effort to administer society
on the basis of local tradition was the emergence of modern institutions,
most notably the state itself, that necessitated the disciplinary regulation
of those same local social organizations and practices. In a Fijian context,
Thomas (1990:170) has argued that colonialism was a “contradictory” proj-
ect that, on the one hand, encouraged nonintervention in the maintenance
of a customary order, yet, on the other hand, necessitated intervention to
subordinate that order to the disciplinary designs of the state. Similarly, in
his study of law in colonial India, Dirks (1986) has shown how legal efforts
to codify and legitimize existing institutions led to subtle changes in rural
society yet at the same time constituted the major failure of rural society to
effect a complete and fundamental change. Contradictory as it seems on the
surface, I argue that the aim to preserve tradition, which was a culturally
arbitrary feature of nineteenth-century British colonial policy, was ironically
part and parcel of the state’s hegemonic and disciplinary designs. More than
simply preserving tradition, it was the state’s implicit goal to systematize
and rationalize it, using the entire technology of modern objectification at
its disposal (law, statistical knowledge, economic management) to make it
optimally effective as a means ultimately of regulating it. At the heart of
the colonial regime and its desire or mandate to rule then was the notion
of governmentality (in a Foucaultian sense).
Chatterjee (1993:26) attempts to explain the essence of colonial rule
largely as a function of its inherent project to perpetuate cultural difference
and through the imposition of categories that mark the duality of colonizer
and colonized, such as tradition and modernity. He notes that from a Euro-
pean point of view, colonial rule was usually never about the imposition of
its own political institutions onto the other but the promotion of native
self-government; it really aimed toward the preservation of local tradition
instead of its destruction in the face of modernity. These claims that colonial
rule was always about “something else,” as if to deny the obvious fact of
political domination, was according to him a persistent theme in the rhetoric
of colonial rule (my emphasis). This has then coincided with his observation
that the more nationalism (anticolonialism) tried to contest colonial power
in the outer or material domain of politics, the more it met with efforts
by colonialists to harden the boundaries of cultural difference to keep the
inner or spiritual domains of self and other separate and sovereign.
Scott (1994) has tried to extend Chatterjee’s view of colonial govern-
mentality by showing how its intrinsic politics of cultural difference and
reconstruction is really the evolution of a rule of modern power. The implicit
contradiction that Chatterjee sees between the inner and outer domains of
colonial politics becomes in Scott’s terms a basic change in governmentality,
where modern power is characterized by its shift in point of application from
the economy to the body social, which includes customary or disciplinary
life routines invoked by tradition and modernity.
There is indeed much one can say about the “rhetoric” of denial
pointed out by Chatterjee as being fundamental to the contradictions of
colonial rule. While the masking of domination is an element of colonial
governmentality that is intrinsic to the efficacy of any kind of hegemonic
presence, in Gramscian terms, this deliberate process of cultural mystifica-
tion is in my opinion general to the emergence of state power rather than
peculiar to the colonial regime. Contrary to Scott, I regard the nature of
the modern project inherent to late-nineteenth-century British colonialism
to revolve around its discursive content and practical instrumentality rather
than its point of application. Without denying that all of society becomes
the site of power, much like the way anthropological views of a total and
systemic society later become galvanized through reference to the concep-
tual interlocking of “social structure” and “function,” what needs to be
explained in my opinion is why tradition, which is a culturally peculiar,
hence symbolically arbitrary, aspect of nineteenth-century British colonial
imagination, suddenly becomes incorporated into the colonial state’s project
of modernity, and then how the content of tradition becomes reconstructed
and given new meaning in light of the various technologies of legal codifi-
cation, administrative practice, and policing. It remains now to show how
this field of discourse is demarcated, then spell out in what sense it entailed
modern interventions through routines of state.
To reverse the Gramscian order of things, I argue then that the
empire is basically a (cultural) fiction whose reality is intertwined with
the process of state legitimation and methodologically put into practice by
its technology of legal apparatuses and disciplinary institutions. Richards’s
(1994:6) observation that the nineteenth-century British “imperial archive
was a fantasy of knowledge” and that it was a “paper empire” united not
by force but by “information” is quite germane in this regard. It was not
really the need for information that kept the empire unified in lieu of
actual control but rather the Victorian project of positive knowledge that
was appropriated within the overall colonial project. Institutions such as

the British Museum, which served as monument for the accumulation of
artifacts and documents, were clearly the product of this imagination. Like-
wise, the exhibitionary complex, which viewed the world as taxonomy, was
what Mitchell (1988) in an Egyptian context called “colonizing.”8 As Cohn
(1984) noted in his study of the census and social structure in late colonial
India, this process of objectification was part of the colonial government’s
need to define the nature of society as a prerequisite for administering it
in its own terms. In broader terms, one can argue that this imagination of
the universe as ordered taxonomy that had to be made visible through the
accumulation of information in order for it to be regulated systematically
or efficaciously was a peculiar kind of world ethos or cultural vision that
deeply influenced the conduct of government and by implication made all
dimensions of social routine subject to what Corrigan (1990) aptly called
“moral regulation.”9 Rather than being peculiar to colonial governmentality,
it was fundamental to the governmentality of modern society in ways that
became easily appropriated by the state. As Cohn (1988) phrased it, the
emergence of the state created its own forms of knowledge, necessitating
incessant accumulation of documentation in the genre of reports, investiga-
tions, commissions, statistics, histories, and archaeologies. Such knowledge
then complimented various imaginations of the social invoked by myths of
sacred origin, icons of national identity, shared values, ethnic traditions, and
political thought.10 This need to know, document, and imagine provided
a basis for its capacity to govern by classifying social spaces, separating
public from private, demarcating frontiers, standardizing language, defining
national identity, and licensing the legitimacy of certain activities over oth-
ers. It was an intrinsic part of the state’s project to legitimize its emerging
vision of rational order.
In order to govern efficaciously, it was necessary to “know”; the con-
tent of such knowledge was made possible by an ensemble of methodologies
that made visible the “structure” of society and put into functional operation
various components of social life. If colonial governmentality was part and
parcel of the state’s project, it also had to be to some extent intertwined
with the very conduct of a modern, disciplinary society. In this regard, law
played an important role, not only in terms of its ability to objectify in
reference to “value-free” codes and rules but also by virtue of its institutional
link to power. Far from being an “objective” institution, as perceived by
those in power, it should be the very source of conflict with “native” reality.
As Dirks (1986) notes for India, rule of law was the main reason why the
British failed to alter the basic character of society (through preservation of
tradition) yet explained why the (modern) changes that came about were
actually achieved with so little major disruption. The dual consequence of

legal rule is the ultimate source of contradiction that lies at the heart of
British colonial governmentality.
Land as Constituted: The Changing Mythologies

of Local Rule in the New Territories of Hong Kong
It is possible to view the experience of British colonialism in Hong Kong

from the late nineteenth century on as the playing out of a contradic-
tion in the colonial state’s effort to institutionalize the content of tradition
using the methodology of a modern, disciplinary society. This interaction
between colonizer and colonized was mediated by culture and manifested
in shifting contexts of power over time. The unfolding of events themselves
then became the medium on which second and third order narratives of
Hong Kong history and society were constructed. These latter narratives
then became in turn reifications of “routine colonialism.”
The territorial imperatives of local rule cannot be taken lightly. Colo-
nial domination has usually been viewed as the administration at a local
level of global policies that have explicit roots in political theory of the
time. Much less has been said, however, about the local practices them-
selves and the underlying mentalité invoked at a more unconscious level
of routine control. They constitute the taken-for-granteds of colonial rule
that are manifestations of a different kind of historically constituted global
ethos. At one level of generality, land and its people constitute an object
of knowledge and structuration in a system of control. At another level
of generality, the colony becomes an object of gazing and policing within
changing utopias of the “empire.”
The problematic nature of indirect rule, even in the “leased” New
Territories (as opposed to the terra nullus status of Hong Kong and Kow-
loon), exemplified the kind of administrative control central to the late
nineteenth-century imperial archive that entailed an imagination of both
land and people. Simply stated, land demarcation and village surveys were
not just prerequisite for the collection of tax revenue; they were the basis
of effective and orderly local administration in all other respects. As time
went on, the function of land in relation to the maintenance of the status
quo may have changed, but the extent to which the colonial government
regulated affairs of local society reflected the importance generally of native
knowledge to efficacy of rule.
One of the priorities which the British set out to accomplish immedi-
ately after occupying the New Territories was to undertake a detailed survey
of individual land ownership and tenure for each village in the territory. The
survey involved using specially trained Indian surveyors, assisted by Chinese
coolies, working continuously over a period of three years from June 1900
to June 1903. A map was drawn for each demarcation district, showing
physical boundaries for each plot of land. Each unit of land was categorized,
numbered, and registered in the name of a person or group that held a
claim and could furnish the proper deeds. On submission of the deeds, the
colonial government issued in return a Crown Lease or “license” (zhizhao).
These demarcation maps and the particulars of landownership provided the
basis for the Block Crown Lease, a land register numerically ordered by
lot for each demarcation district, and the Crown Rent Roll, which became
the instrument for tax collection. It took another two years to get the land
registers in order. All unclaimed land not duly registered was then declared
property of the Crown. Ordinance 18 of 1900 established a Land Court
to hear disputed landownership cases.
In his 1899 Report on the New Territories, J. H. Stewart Lockhart
summarized the task of setting up a system of land registration as follows:
“a perusal of this memorandum (on Chinese land tenure) will, I think,
show that, though the Chinese system may be excellent in theory, it has
not been well carried out in practice, with the result that the land ques-
tion has proved one of great difficulty” (RNT 1900:253). In other words,
the complexity of the Chinese land system in theory represented less of an
obstacle than the laxity and failure of the Chinese government to properly
“operationalize” principles, which led to widespread abuse and confusion in
the system. The British were frustrated by the state of affairs in the Xinan
County Land Registry, which registered only deeds and not titles to land.
The deeds never delineated exact land boundaries, peasants were often not
able to document rights to land, and sometimes two parties would claim
ownership rights simultaneously to the same piece of land (RNT 1900:278).
Meanwhile, large clans and rich landowners made it a practice to bribe
corrupt land officials so as to underreport actual ownership. Chinese also
lacked the custom of making wills, probates or other documents to verify
succession to property, and it was rare for one to officially register transac-
tions with the Land Registry for the purpose of documenting customary
arrangements between two parties. It was in reference to such haphazard
practices and the bureaucratic problems implicit therein that the colonial
government focused their energies on, when they set out to “operationalize”
the land system on the basis of local custom, in accordance with “the lease.”
However, after land surveys got underway, other problems slowed
up the progress of work. Reporting the results of the Land Court from
1900‒05, J. R. Wood cited several major problems (RLC 1905:146).
have in different ways accented the metamorphosis of global capitalism in

the late twentieth century. Multinational corporations, for one thing, do
not appear to follow the flag anymore, and subcontracting of the produc-
tion process globally has made the notion of cultural origins anachronistic.
Appadurai’s accent on the chaotic flow of ethnoscapes, financescapes, and
so on is predicated in large part on Lash and Urry’s (1987) proclamation
of “the end of organized capitalism” and the breakdown between core and
periphery in the modern world system. But as in the case of Omae, the
literal focus is on the increasing demise of national barriers and boundaries
that has transformed in effect the nature of economies, societies, and cul-
tures. Not only have economies been transformed by labor migration (see,
e.g., Basch, Schiller, & Blanc 1994) and societies by changing patterns of
settlement and diasporic identity (see especially, Lavie & Swedenberg 1996).
Culture itself has moreover become the site of transnational hybridization
(Nederveen Pieterse 1995).
The advent of transnationalism as a challenge to nationalizing bound-
aries and orthodox political regulation has represented the underlying impe-
tus behind Greater China, the notion of cultural China, Sinophone theory,
and to a lesser extent the liminal status of Taiwan in the arena of interna-
tional relations and the global economy. Whether it ultimately represents
a destabilizing feature of a prevailing order or an emancipatory alternative
remains to be seen. The detotalizing tendencies of transnationalism have
always been the consequence of both decentralization of direct state control
from above as well as localized resistance from below.
The establishment of duty-free trade ports in Hong Kong and Singa-
pore can be viewed, through its denationalization of economic consumption,
as a commoditization of culture and society in general. From the perspective
of utilitarian economics and libertarian politics, the opening of the market
economy is an entity that enables the triumph of individual freedom. In
practice, it makes access to resources and power, whether it is in the form
of commodities, status, or influence, a consequence of class access or con-
trol. In the context of a preexisting colonialism and nationalism, social class
competes with political stratification or allocation of resources and power by
the state or other political organs. At least in most typical cases of market
liberalization, deregulation of the economy has been accompanied by decen-
tralization of political control from above. The exception to this rule is the
recent advent of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The applicability
of neoliberalism in specific contexts can also be debated. More importantly
in the context of overlapping and competing institutional processes, identity
in terms of nation, class, or ethnicity can be politicizing and depoliticizing.
to the latter, usually absentee clan landlords, than they were paying tax on.
Thus in the final analysis, recognition of the institution was tantamount to
perpetuating a corrupt system that effectively coerced tenant cultivators into
accepting what was in practice spurious claims to landownership. As Orme
(RNT 1912:1) noted in his Report on the New Territories for 1912,
Before the New Territory was taken over, many Punti villages
were living on their capital, on ‘squeezes’ from their neighbors,
and on pay received from the government for collecting taxes.
Under British rule, these sources of revenue soon failed, and the
older families became impoverished: but their frugal neighbors,
especially the Hakkas, released from their former exactions,
thenceforward increased rapidly in numbers and riches at their
expense.
Regarding land administration, the colonial administration felt it

urgent to set up procedures to register inheritance, succession, and convey-
ances of sale in order to keep track of all changes in landownership. The
initial work of land demarcation and registration in the New Territories
was then an important first step in maintaining an orderly system of land
records. On the whole, the British were especially sensitive to Chinese cus-
tomary laws pertaining to the devolution of property in land. However,
given the high proportion of land owned by ancestral estates (zu) in rural
areas, the government had to concede to Chinese custom one important
aspect of English law, the Rule against Perpetuities. In order to accommodate
this practice, certain stipulations were added to administrative procedures
pertaining to land registration, which were subsequently written into the
New Territories Ordinance of 1910. They included the following:
1. (By-statute 15) Whenever land is held in the name of a

corporate group, a trustee must be appointed to represent
it. The trustee would be legally responsible for the land, as
if he were the sole owner.
2. (By-statute 17) The Land Officer is to ascertain the name
of the person entitled to succeed before registering any
succession.
3. (By-statute 18) Whenever land devolves on a minor below
the age of 21, a trustee must be appointed who will be
responsible for any transactions undertaken on behalf of the
minor.
The second of these by-statutes did not exist in Chinese customary

law and was stipulated simply to insure that all persons register transac-
tions with the government. As for the other two stipulations relating to
trusteeship, they enabled the government to accept the material existence
of perpetuities such as ancestral estates in accordance with local custom.
More importantly, the institution of trusteeship in administrative terms
transformed the perpetuity into the status of a legal person by making the
trustee legally responsible for actions of the entire group. For all intents
and purposes, the three amendments to land administration practice did
not really modify colonial policy on the basis of local custom and had the
converse effect, that of accommodating local custom into a system that
recognized only the legal status of individuals. In other words, the fact
that the trustee in his role as a legal person properly represented the group
meant that by the same token the perpetuity had no legal existence per se.
Nowhere in the New Territories Ordinance does one find any legal defini-
tion of a perpetuity, which is after all a matter of custom. The trustee may
be constrained by custom insofar as the decision making process was con-
cerned, but this was distinct analytically from the requirements of the legal
transaction itself, which held the person of the trustee solely responsible.
Nelson (1969:23) characterized this difference between legal procedure and
its customary referent accurately, when he stated,
The New Territories Ordinance, which lays down that a man-

ager shall be appointed for all property registered in the name
of an ancestral trust, does not lay down the responsibilities of
the manager to the other members of the tso (ancestral group).
In fact, the ordinance stipulates that he shall be treated as sole
owner of the property, subject only to the requirement that he
give notice of any transactions relating to the property and the
permission of the Land Officer for those transactions. . . . Any
instrument relating to the tso shall, when signed by the manager,
be ‘as effectual for all purposes as if it had been executed and
signed by all members’ of the tso.
The process of accommodating custom into a system of law points to

a central feature underlying the theory and practice of “indirect rule” in a
colonial context. Far from being seamless or neutral, it was by definition an
act of cultural translation that assumed the value-free nature of legal codes
in the practice of custom. In theory, such translation was rarely perfect,
but more importantly the process of legalization dictated that local custom
conform to a set of procedures, which was by nature modern. When backed
by state power, the legal machinery institutionalized with a vengeance the

absorption of custom into law and tradition into modernity.
The colonial government’s attempt to adopt Chinese categories of land
as a basis of taxation showed how translation, even at a literal level, produced
incompatibilities at a higher conceptual level. In an appendix to Report on
the New Territories for 1899, Lockhart attached a précis on Chinese custom-
ary law, titled “Memorandum on Land.” This and other Western scholarly
sources provided the basis on which the British adapted Chinese notions of
land taxation for their own use. First-class land (shangtian) included land
near villages in fertile valleys with a good depth of soil and good water sup-
ply, producing two crops of rice annually. Second-class land (zhongtian) was
rated less fertile, was generally situated higher up hilly slopes, did not have
as good water supply as first class, and usually produced one crop of rice
annually. Third-class land (xiatian) was situated on still higher slopes and
tended to be far removed from good water supply. It was thus more suit-
able for the cultivation of peanuts, sweet potatoes, millet, and other crops,
all of which required less water. In addition to the three classes, fish ponds
paid a tax slightly higher than first-class agricultural land, burial grounds
paid a one-time registration and stamp fee, while house land was exempt
from tax altogether. Land officers also noted that hills and wasteland that
were not necessarily cultivated were sometimes claimed by nearby villages
or powerful clans in the area. Land along the seashore under water, on the
other hand, was registered and taxed whenever they were put to productive
use (such as salt making). Finally, the notion of “crown land” among the
Chinese was vaguely defined, and wasteland surrounding villages, including
large tracts of virgin territory granted to families by imperial or provincial
decree, did not appear to be subject to land tax at all. In view of the above,
the colonial government modified the Chinese three-tiered land tax system
as follows: first-class land was to include choice paddy land and first-class
house land; second-class land included less fertile paddies, dry cultivation,
and less desirable house land; while third-class land included wasteland
and residual categories of nonagricultural or minimally productive land.
All unclaimed land was then declared “crown land.” These hard-and-fast
categories became “law” and were enforced by the land registration system.
In the process of “translation,” the colonial authorities rigidified the
categories and imputed rules of usage that did not exist within the system.
Two notable revisions of the Chinese three-class tax assessment scheme was
taxation of house land and the definition of crown land as that residual
category of all nonclaimed land. Using fertility as the taxable value of land
mirrored the Chinese emphasis on productivity, but the differences in prac-
tice became points of conflict in later years. In fact, the most expensive
land was usually the middle grade and not the most fertile land (Rawski
1972:21, citing Yang 1925:48‒50). Ch’en Han-seng explained it as follows:
The share rent does not . . . depend on the fertility of the soil
alone but largely on the respective amount of labor power and
fertilizer which the tenant puts into the land. In this particular
district, the tenant of good land often supplies more means of
production per mow than other tenants because such an invest-
ment is certain to pay. Improving the soil, he is actually in a
better position to bargain with the landlord who cannot afford
to lease his good land to tenants who cannot or will not keep
up the fertility of the soil. It is for this reason that the landlord
gets less rent from the tenant of the best land, paradoxical as
this may seem, than he gets from the tenant of medium grade
land. (Ibid.:50)
The most sorely disputed point of difference between the government

and rural inhabitants rotated around what the British called “crown land”
and what inhabitants called “people’s land” (mintian). The next most con-
tested point of conflict centered on the government’s decision to tax house
land. Its definition of land classification produced a volatile situation that
continued to reverberate for decades. Moreover, when disputes in this regard
took place, the government refused to yield. As early as 1905, inhabitants
of the territory protested against increases in Crown Rent, twice in the
space of six years, as well as against the imposition of a tax on houses and
buildings. As for increases in Crown Rent, the colonial secretary noted in
correspondence with the Governor that the thirty petitions submitted by
296 villagers to the government reflected agitation by a few, not general dis-
satisfaction among the populace. Despite recommendations by the registrar
general to lower taxes, he defended the increases, adding that “these people
who are obliged to be overtaxed can afford to offer a substantial fee” (CSO
3120/06). On the subject of house and building tax, petitioners claimed that
this tax had never been imposed and was thus unreasonable (CO 129/338).
The governor, Matthew Nathan, countered by arguing that the novelty of a
tax did not affect the validity of its imposition (CO 129/335). This position
was explained by the colonial secretary in official correspondence with the
governor as follows:
There is a house duty in England on inhabited houses occupied

as farm house, public house, copper shop, shop warehouse, lodg-
ing house, and I think on house let in tenements or flats over
certain amount. This is in addition to local rates. Unless we are

to go on the principle that no taxes are to be levied in the New
Territory other than such as were levied by the Chinese govern-
ment, a house tax is a usual tax. All the other taxes mentioned
are fair taxes. (CSO 3120/06)
The objection was circumvented and the complainants mollified in

part by a proclamation issued on July 11, 1906, which promised not to
raise Crown Rents during the term of the lease. Such a promise not only
deprived the government of large sums in revenue; it was also contrary to
specific instructions given in 1899 by Chamberlain, the former secretary
of state, stating in effect that the land tax must be subject to periodic
revision. Even when Crown Leases were renewed in 1973 after the initial
seventy-five-year lease had expired, the Crown Rent remained unaltered with
respect to most lots in the New Territories despite enormous increases in
the value of land. In short, in order to compensate for what appeared to be
a legal contradiction of the Convention, the government made a financial
concession. But in order to compensate for the obvious loss of revenue to
be suffered in the course of succeeding years, they would have to make
further revisions and restrictions in land policy and administration. All of
this produced a vicious cycle, the end result being the increasing rigidifica-
tion of those categories of land use, which they first modified on the basis
of custom then reimposed on an indigenous way of life.
Conflicts over land and housing policy became acute in the midst of
rural industrialization, population expansion and rapid modernization that
were endemic to the 1920s and 1970s. But more importantly, these crises
were prompted by the nature of the discourse. Far from being givens of colo-
niality, as might be suggested by notions of colonial governmentality predi-
cated on the inherent dualism between racial others, I argue, on the other
hand, that the dualism pitting colonizer and colonized that epitomized the
essence of indirect rule was generated in practice by the systemic differences
between custom and law and ultimately between tradition and modernity.
These systemic differences should not be reduced to inaccuracies of
cultural translation, although factual differences at this level no doubt served
to exacerbate deeper conceptual and institutional conflicts. Value judgments
by colonial authorities that led to the abolition of the dual landlord system
and introduction of new land taxes were strictly speaking contraventions of
the New Territories Lease that were neatly covered up or defended as actions
that contributed to necessary rationalization of the system, both in terms of
bureaucratic accounting and maintaining order. On the other hand, legal
codification and administrative routinization unconsciously transposed new
categories of use onto the practice of custom that in the long run trans-
formed the institution itself. In short, control over land was not simply a
tool of economic extraction but more importantly part of a total project of
policing that entailed the structuration of communities tied to land. It not
only transformed the relationship between land and its people but ironically
also facilitated the overhaul of those communities by disciplining the fabric
of society as a whole. In this regard, the state mediated not only in its role
as colonizing agent but more fundamentally by invoking in the process a
peculiar culturalizing ethos.
Land as Constitutive: The Ambiguities of Territoriality

in the Changing Globalism of British Colonial Rule
By definition, colonialism is the product of a global order. The rise of impe-

rial conquest, the modern world system and most recently transnational
capitalism represent different phases in the evolution of the global order
in historical terms. At the same time, there have been equally importantly
variations in genres of colonial rule that reflect specific globalizing visions.
In this regard, one can, of course, compare the British experience with
competing regimes as a function of relative repression or assimilation. The
technical challenges of achieving global domination led Cell (1970:220‒53)
to emphasize the seminal role of communications. At the same time, the
evolution of colonial hegemony in various forms became in the long run
a practice that relied ultimately on a mixture of force, legitimation, and
assuagement, as Low (1991:4) phrased it.
This intrinsic ambiguity of territorial rule was most evident in light
of the changing meaning of the New Territories “lease” and the changing
status of Hong Kong in a contracting “empire.” The events surrounding
the occupation of the territory exposed all the different interpretations of
the lease held by each side. After initial jubilation among the British in
Hong Kong subsided over the signing of the New Territories lease on June
9, 1898, referred to as the Convention of Peking, many details of its basic
conditions were still pending resolution, including, for example, the precise
demarcation of the northern frontier, the operation of Chinese customs
stations, and military garrison at Kowloon City as well as the scope and
nature of colonial administration. The northern boundaries were accepted
somewhat reluctantly by the British only in March of the following year and
ended up dividing the Shenzhen Valley and the market town of Shataukok
in half. There was still much debate on both sides over the presence of the
Chinese military and customs stations in Kowloon City, which the Chinese
government insisted on, while military skirmishes took place throughout

the territory over the construction of police matsheds prior to the formal
hoisting of the flag on April 17, 1899, resulting in many deaths. Appar-
ently, the Chinese provincial government failed to inform inhabitants that
the territory had already been relinquished to the British over a year ago.
Even after signing the treaty, the Viceroy at Canton continued to adminis-
ter the territory for months as though nothing really happened (Endacott
1958:25). Literal miscommunication aside, the deeper meaning of the lease
was still debatable.
As Wesley-Smith (1980:90) rightly cited, international leaseholds of
the type imposed on China by foreign powers in 1898 were inventions—
instant creatures adapted to the environment created by imperialist rivalry
in the Far East. Their status and effect in international law had not been
carefully worked out, but it was vital to colonial interests in Hong Kong
that subsequent practice affirm that the leased territory be transferred to
Britain in the same manner as Kowloon and Hong Kong. The New Ter-
ritories was not to be just another part of China administered by a Western
power, but an extension of Hong Kong; the convention was to be seen as
a treaty for the extension of established colonial boundaries, not just for
the lease of territory. Thus, the Colonial Office declared from the outset
that both countries would be administered in the same capacity and with
the full powers of legal jurisdiction. This “new” interpretation of the “lease”
was a post hoc imposition on the original convention. While it did much
to clear up whatever confusion the British initially had at the outset about
the status of the New Territory, it effectively widened the gap on both sides
on most of the other unresolved questions. After all, the Chinese still talked
about the leased territory as a lease, and this explained their insistence on
maintaining a military garrison, customs station, continued payment of
land tax by residents to the provincial government, and sovereignty over
land and its people. By this token, the Convention of Peking did little to
change their “business as usual” attitude toward the territory. The British
evicted the Chinese military and customs station at Kowloon Walled City
later as being inconsistent with the defense of the colony, even though they
continued to respect Chinese territorial sovereignty over the Walled City
in other regards throughout the Lease, contradictory as it may seem. This
intrinsic ambivalence of the lease paralleled the way in which the colonial
government set out to administer the leased territory on the basis of local
custom and through cultural translation.
However, as with the case of the colonial government’s legal codifica-
tion of Chinese custom, the nature of British administrative presence in
the territory was considered by native inhabitants as being anything but a
mindset exudes a normative, hegemonic presence that has long survived its
Cold War origins, even after the emergence of Taiwanese consciousness, and
overlaps contradictorily now with the advent of the transnational economy
and, most recently, the evolution of an ever greater China
The historical transformation of Hong Kong is more complex than
has been portrayed by its superficial change from British colony to Special
Administrative Region (SAR) within China. Its nature as colony and its
ambiguous aftermath must be problematized in multiple ways. Its meta-
morphosis from a “barren island,” colonial trading post and cultural satellite
of Guangzhou into free trade port and dynamic center of cosmopolitan
hybridity, among other things, can viewed in the context of a mutating
colonialism at its fulcrum. On the surface of things, its social and economic
transformation has transcended the stereotypical analyses that have typi-
fied most theoretical discussions of colonialism elsewhere in the literature.
Even from the outset, Hong Kong has been an atypical colony. Its colonial
caste polity overlapped with its ongoing integration with China in all other
respects, marked by open borders and cultural continuity. Contrast with
British colonies elsewhere, however, begs critical scrutiny of the apparent fic-
tions of “indirect rule” as well as the incommensurable relationship between
policy and practices. Contrary to definition, colonialism does not disappear
after 1997, and simply mutates with the change of regime, along with the
collusive relationship of capitalism to politics. The polity is different from
the cultural nationalism engendered in Taiwan, characterized by different
relationships between ethnicity, culture, and nation, among other things,
which have spawned a different kind of identification, whose politicization
has continued to mutate after 1997.
In the PRC, the recent evolution from a Maoist socialist society to
one transformed by a free market capitalist economy has become a major
focus of debate. Theoretical discussions of an earlier era that explored “the
sprouts of capitalism” in grand theories of comparative modernization have
largely been replaced by those, on the other hand, emphasizing the policy
shift of Deng Xiaoping in kick-starting the free market economy and those
advocating a longue durée view of global capitalism, between which various
other institutional approaches tend to situate themselves. Political policies
and economic reforms aside, I argue that it is possible to view the under-
lying transformation in broader terms, of changing geopolitical spaces. In
the process, the breakdown of socialist humanism as a system of social and
political values eventually paved the way for a nationalist identity based on
the cultural legitimacy of history and civilization. If anything, nationalist
renaissance provided popular support for success of any economic develop-
ment, which in turn colluded with postcolonial narratives to reverse centu-
Hong Kong continued to thrive in an era when the British empire

was already in permanent decline. The peculiar ongoing status of Hong
Kong in this evolving environment had much to do also with the relation-
ship of Hong Kong and its inhabitants to China, British interests vis-à-vis
China given the changing balance of power leading up to World War II
and into the Cold War era, then Hong Kong’s role as a free trade port in
an emerging global capitalist economy. The imperatives of indirect rule that
prioritized collaboration and assuagement in the context of the lease were
much less important here than the hegemonic functions of colonial control
that served ultimately to legitimize existing institutions of rule and their
underlying value systems. Control over the colony became, as time passed,
less a matter of Britain’s military ability to defend the territory than a result
of other factors, the most important of which was China’s intentions toward
the territory (or Britain’s ability to deflect China’s territorial concerns away
from Hong Kong).
The two most significant events that shaped Hong Kong’s peculiar
existence as a colony and its developing nature as a society were the nation-
alist movements of the Cold War era and the process of economic growth
after World War II. But unlike Britain’s other independence-prone colonies,
the predominantly Chinese population of Hong Kong had no independent
national identity to speak of. Consistent with the colonial status of Hong
Kong, the British administered it in accordance with their own judicial con-
ventions, like any other colony. Yet in spite of its colonial status, there was
no question as to the cultural identity of its inhabitants. Before 1950, most
people just called themselves Chinese; there was not even a notion of being
Hong Kongers. The border between Hong Kong and China was open, and
there was little to differentiate Hong Kong from foreign enclaves in other
treaty ports. The dualistic nature of Hong Kong’s colonial society was then a
function of the way in which the British demarcated the public and private
spheres. There was a strict separation between official culture, which was
carried out in the medium of English, and local culture, which was rooted
in Chinese tradition. Social intercourse was segregated along ethnic lines,
and the government did little to cultivate among the populace any national
affinity to Britain. The ongoing connection with Chinese culture and Can-
tonese regional tradition also made independence inconceivable as well as
unrealistic. The political rift between Nationalist and Communist China in
1949 transformed Hong Kong instead into a battleground for competing
national identities. Polarization of sentiment along ideological lines peaked
during the Cultural Revolution of 1966‒67 and erupted in fierce riots.
The Cold War tensions eventually catalyzed Hong Kong’s transforma-
tion into a free market port, which was a deliberate policy initiative by the
colonial government. A major consequence of this change in social terms

was the evolution of a utilitarian society that diverted energy away from
competing nationalist sentiments and led to the emergence of a mass media
culture in following decades that was deliberately apolitical, which made it
immune to direct control by the state.15 The colonial government in effect
took an active role in promoting economic growth in Hong Kong during
the early postwar era, not just for the sake of modernization itself but more
importantly as a means of steering Hong Kong away from ongoing national-
ist conflicts that had threatened at times to destabilize the colonial regime.16
From 1967 to 1984, influenced by the turn of events during China’s Cul-
tural Revolution and distracted by material progress at home, nationalist
sentiment began to wane to the point of not being anchored to any political
homeland (either to PRC, ROC, or UK). This contributed to the rise of a
peculiar kind of Hong Kong culture that was essentially syncretic in nature.
The promotion of consumer utilitarianism as a way of life also broke down
ideological distinctions between Chinese and Western culture. Thus, Hong
Kong’s hybrid culture, which effortlessly fused East and West, was brought
about by unrestrained capitalism’s wholesale demystification of those cultural
barriers that had been fostered by an earlier “colonialism.” Indeed, during
this period of political alienation from the two Chinas, British colonialism
softened considerably. The government facilitated the adoption of British
nationality, and the enticement of British nationality increased as sentiment
toward a remote Chinese homeland eroded and was combined with ben-
efits of emigration. This liminal public sphere that gave birth to a Hong
Kong “identity” ironically led in turn to the discursive disappearance of the
“colony” as well. They continued to be part of the same collusive process.
Narratives of Tradition and Modernity in the Domestication

of the Colonial Mind: Second- and Third-Order Abstractions
In the final analysis, the free market institution gave rise to an autonomous
culture industry. This autonomy was based in essence on representations
born out of a postwar media culture that was cosmopolitan and apoliti-
cal in nature. But this autonomy in a sociological sense effectively created
competing “imagined communities,” which were based on mentalities and
lifestyles that were divided on the basis of class and education. Those people
identifying primarily with this cosmopolitan, apolitical culture constituted
a liminal community vis-à-vis an older generation tied to a national Chi-
nese homeland and others drawn increasingly to Britain. Ironically, Hong
Kongers quite clearly had no identity as a people in the sense of sharing com-
mon ideologies and values. The vacuous social space so created as a result
of Hong Kong’s displacement from the Chinese political mainstream and
its caste-like status within the colonial system facilitated in the long run its
mutating and increasingly vague existence as a colony. Its increasing isolation
from the Chinese cultural sphere was without doubt a factor that acceler-
ated the development of an autonomous cultural identity that was rooted
in the popular culture of the mass media. But the fragmented nature of its
resulting public sphere accommodated continued coexistence among vari-
ous competing communities precisely because of its cosmopolitan, apolitical
disposition. In effect, radical transformations of a market society not only
insulated Hong Kong from actualities of an enveloping nationalist conflict
but also facilitated the illusion of colonial disappearance. During this era,
the word colony was stricken from official texts and replaced by territory. The
intrinsic ambivalence of its local public sphere made Hong Kong constantly
prone to crises of identity caused by shifting geopolitical disjunctures and
cultural discourses. In the culture of public spheres, new forms of identity
consciousness mimicked the rise of new social mentalities and the waning
of preexisting ones. The utilitarian, politically indifferent ethos of “Hong
Kong Man” was a combination of Hong Kong’s liminal status vis-à-vis both
Chinas and the colonial sublimation of politics. Colonialism appropriated
modernity and in so doing transformed itself.
The lack of a consistent cultural-political identity that could galva-
nize the formation of a unified, autonomous community of people vis-à-
vis China or Britain meant that the fate of Hong Kong continued to be
determined by the pushes and pulls of diplomatic interests originating from
London and Beijing. The contraction of the British empire elsewhere did
not necessarily, if at all, diminish its imperial aspirations. London’s desire
to regain British possessions in East Asia at the end of World War II was
just a matter of prestige (Tsang 1988:13, Chan 1990:293). The advent of
a communist regime on the mainland made territorial control of Hong
Kong even more imperative. On the other hand, China’s desire to recover
Hong Kong appeared to be lukewarm, or in Chan’s (1990:314) words,
subdued. Nonetheless, it was potentially threatening enough to persuade
London to recognize Beijing. Thus, diplomatic recognition of China was
the result of Britain’s desire to protect its commercial interests in Hong
Kong, and its desire to preserve Hong Kong in turn was seen as a defense
of Western interests against communism than as a defense of the empire
itself. Maintenance of a colonial status quo received tacit support from
the Chinese side during the postwar period well into the 1980s, largely in
view of the role of Hong Kong as entrepôt in China’s economy. As Tang
(1994:334‒35) argued, Britain’s adamant defense of Hong Kong as a colony
later retreated significantly in response to China’s resurging nationalism and

Britain’s recognition of the growing importance of China vis-à-vis Hong
Kong politically and economically, culminating in its decision in 1984 to
return all of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
The changing colonial character of Hong Kong during the postwar
era viewed in light of its discourses of identity constitutive of the evolving
worldview of its constituent population, on the one hand, and the geopoli-
tics of territorial control and trade domination, on the other, represented
a frame of reference that revealed a rather different dimension to the his-
tory of modernization and democratization. Contrary to typical positivist
readings of the contribution of Western progress and its influence on the
history of Hong Kong culture and society advanced by most officials and
scholars, the advent of the modern world system that gave rise to a free
market society and its peculiarly depoliticized media-based culture during
the postwar period was not just the natural outcome of a rational desire
for material progress. Rather, it was the result of a systematically orches-
trated strategy by the colonial government to carefully maneuver through
an unstable global political context. During most of the Cold War period,
microeconomic laissez-faire was conducted in the service of a highly regu-
lated macroeconomic policy, just as the capitalist nature of media culture
was fostered largely under the auspices of an autocratic political system that
limited political rights in most other regards. The subjective effacement of
a colonialism that now began to see Hong Kong as a territory in an era
of progressive modernization in turn made utilitarian notions of culture so
engendered once removed from the source of state hegemony.
Not unlike colonial discourses of indirect rule that claimed to have
reproduced and put into practice traditional principles of land and social
organization in the administration of the New Territories, narratives of uni-
lineal progress in postwar Hong Kong showcased by government policy-
makers and echoed by social scientists waving various banners of economic
modernization theory have in effect neatly masked the hegemonic conse-
quences of autocratic rule characteristic of Cold War politics and exploitative
consequences of class inequality partly responsible for the emergence of a
fractured public sphere and competing cultural identities. While the images
of political stability and economic prosperity have no doubt enhanced the
successes of Hong Kong vis-à-vis its communist counterpart, fraught by
endless power struggles and the disincentives of economic socialism, the
promotion of such discourses in itself in public or academic circles reflected
no less than in the case of structuralist or functionalist theories a situation
of routine colonialism. King’s (1975) focus on the “administrative absorp-
tion of politics” and Lau’s (1981) emphasis on “utilitarian familism” were
typical of efforts by Hong Kong sociologists to interpret the nature of Hong

Kong culture and society. King’s attempt to attribute Hong Kong’s postwar
political stability to the importance of co-optation as a grassroots political
strategy was really a result in part of the growth of local administration dur-
ing the postwar era and the government’s effort to transfer the authority of
official-mandarins to routine clerical-managers. Similarly, Lau’s characteriza-
tion of Hong Kong Chinese social relationships as an extension of utilitarian
familism was less an essentialization of Hong Kong Chineseness than the
successful adaptation to a peculiarly commercialistic, cosmopolitan lifestyle
that came about only during the postwar era. More important than the
accuracy of all these second-order abstractions of everyday life, ephemerally
constituted in the sense of being moments of a particular time and place,
such intellectual discourses also served a hegemonic role by sublimating
the essential violence of colonial rule, the power of the state, and modern
economic survival. As post hoc rationalization of a routine situation of
stability and prosperity, which was hygienically purged of other inherent
repressive and divisive elements of the “system,” the authority of local social
scientific discourse can be questioned in much the same way as the legal
codes and administrative practices that the British used to operationalize
Chinese traditional customs on the land and maintain the status quo. By
refining the colonial mentalité, it had domesticated its very source of insti-
tutional violence.
In sum, Hong Kong’s history is less the product of British-Chinese
interactions per se than the consequence of overlapping colonialisms, nation-
alisms, and modernities. These overlapping processes made manifest, on the
one hand, the complexity of changing global political forces that have given
birth to these phenomena as well as the complexity of cultural conflict and
interaction that has taken place in specific local contexts. In the case of Hong
Kong, the ambiguities of colonial-cum-modern rule manifested themselves
during the postwar era. At the same time, the blurred boundaries between
these overlapping processes exposed the complex interrelationship between
colonial discourse and practice that has been neatly purged and glossed
over by simple unilineal narratives of economic progress and social stabil-
ity inscribed in orthodox histories and prevailing theoretical accounts. This
effacement at the level of writing, once removed from the level of events,
has in turn obscured our perception of the complex changes in colonial
discourse and practice that have occurred over the long term (as events
twice removed from our present understanding). In terms of territoriality,
which was supposed to be the essence of colonial rule, one of the ironies
of Hong Kong and the advent of 1997 was that reality of colonialism has
been absorbed by the fiction of the lease. The paradox of “indirect rule,”
even in the “leased” New Territories, has shown, on the other hand, that in
addition to the various political machinations and cultural misperceptions at
the time, both society and its people had already in fact been administered
for all intents and purposes as a colony. Despite the brute force and hierar-
chical stratification that buttressed this regime, I argue that the effectiveness
and pervasiveness of colonial rule began to change. It continued to evolve
in the process of systematic codification and institutionalization as well as
in response to changing global imperatives.
Far from being a simple phenomenon, the intertwined relationship
between the political processes of colonial rule, their underlying cultural
constructions and the embeddedness of both in specific historical and local
contexts has scarcely been systematically or rigorously analyzed. Without
interrogating the explicit nature of what constitutes nationalism or moder-
nity, I think the question of what constitutes colonial rule in Hong Kong
is problematic enough. It is necessary first of all to view colonialism, not as
an abstract force but as the interplay of concrete discourses and practices. As
a historical imagination, it shares common features with British colonialism
elsewhere. It is important to see, at each point in time, how it was a product
of global political forces, while invoking a global vision, as a precondition
of its imposition in a specific cultural context. Yet despite the common
conceptual and institutional framework, British colonial rule everywhere
differed widely in its actual deployment. Uniqueness of experience was the
result less of its confrontation with different cultures in different contexts but
rather the specificity of diverse situations of practice, within which cultural
perception was one of many relevant factors. In theory, the explicit nature
of the lease should have made Hong Kong’s New Territories no different
from Weihaiwei (a territory in north China leased by the British in 1898
but abandoned and relinquished in 1930). Comparisons with imperialist
or extraterritorial situations in other parts of China likewise made the Chi-
nese cultural factor per se a poor constant in explaining the nature of this
colonial experience. On the other hand, the role played by various agents
in their specific interpretations of the situation on the ground underscored
even more the negotiable and oftentimes negotiated quality of the events
that have contributed to the manifest contradictions, deep seated ambigui-
ties, and cumulative systematicity that eventually became institutionalized
in everyday practice. Over time, it became impossible to isolate colonialism
from other processes.
More than just the fact of economic exploitation or a product of
ethnic discrimination, not to mention the imagination of postcolonial the-
ory, the concept and practice of colonialism must be viewed literally, as a
sociopolitical manifestation of a peculiar, ongoing global contest, whose
mentalities and strategies are the end product of negotiated and culturally
constituted actions. Yet despite the real violence characteristic of such rule
(as though backed by the appearance or threat of force), even less has been
said regarding its efficacy of governance, not only as a mode of subjection
but also social and moral regulation. The hierarchical order so imposed
seems quite contradictory at first glance, based at one level on a set of
values that attempted to maintain separation between different classes of
the population yet at another level on a civilizing ethos whose ultimate
goal was the assimilation of citizens into a larger, all-inclusive polity. It
would appear that, at some point, these implicit contradictions of politics
and culture should have sown the seeds of its own self-destruction. Much
can also be said about the peculiarity of a policy of indirect rule, which
has likewise relied on the maintenance (if not invention) of tradition as a
condition for success of its own existence. In sum, the uniqueness of Hong
Kong’s experience is rooted in part in the mutation of colonial rule and its
appropriation of modernity, in many senses of the term. The evolution of
the state apparatus altered the essential character of rule by replacing the
spectacle of power with a system of local, routine control that was sup-
posedly self-regulating in nature. The rise of a free market society radically
transformed the contradictions of a system built on political difference and
replaced it with class struggles based on differential access to capital. The
discursive effacement that followed mutations of the colonial system in terms
of official policy and popular identity, epitomized by self-congratulatory
imperial histories that reproduced narratives of pacification or unbroken
unilineal progress and scholarly analyses that extolled the pristine structures
of local society, represented the final stage of “colonialism.”
Chapter 5
Critical Cosmopolitanism in the

Birth of Hong Kong Place-Based “Identity”
To say that the 1980s spawned the advent of a unique Hong Kong culture
and an intrinsically diverse way of life there is an understatement. There is
already an overwhelming literature that attests to Hong Kong’s paradigmatic
development in urban, pop cultural, cosmopolitan, capitalistic, colonial,
and postmodern terms, among others. Such developments have given rise
to mind-sets and lifestyles that have begun to impact worldwide as well. I
suppose much of this began to emerge in that era of Hong Kong that one
has typically ascribed to its status as a free market port, but it was an era
where one began to see the birth of a local (place-based) Hong Kong culture,
that is, one constructed not only in the context of explicit Westernization
but also in a liminal space between two nationalistic forces. To confront
such a large topic would seem on the surface vague and overly ambitious,
but I think there are many reasons why this evolution should be unusual,
if viewed from the perspective of prevailing theories.
If tradition is ongoing, there would be seem to be every reason to
believe that local Hong Kong culture and society is the result of intrinsic
developments or extensions thereof instead of impositions from the outside.
However, when placed in a historical context and at the apex of overarch-
ing political forces, there are actually many more reasons to believe that
this emergence is a result of unlikely circumstances and global, nationalist
struggles within which the impulses of self-determining autonomy are mini-
mal at best. I would argue that much of this initially has to do with the
This chapter was first published in 2009 as “Sketching the Discursive Outlines of Cosmo-
politan Hybridity in Postwar Hong Kong: City Magazine in the Emergence of 1980s Popular
Culture and Culture Industry,” Journal of the Hong Kong Sociological Association 4:189‒213.
Research on various aspects of City Magazine has benefited from conversations with Chan
Koon Chung, Lui Tai Lok, Peter Wong, Leo Lee, and Cheung Likkwan.
103
situatedness of Hong Kong at the intersection of overlapping frames of refer-

ence or governance, one being colonial and the other being nationalizing.
Interstices of Colony, Nation, and Modernity

in the Making of a Popular Culture
To say that Hong Kong is/was a colony is to say little or nothing at all. In
both theory and practice, colonialism has always been an evolving institu-
tional phenomenon. British colonialism may be intrinsically different from
French or Dutch colonialism in many respects, but it has also evolved as
the result of changing political ideological imperatives at home as well as
in nuanced response to expedience and feasibility in each colony in ways
that has had more abstract consequences for local culture and society than
just literal ones. In any case, it has been much more than just the politics
of difference, as postcolonial theorists argue. Hong Kong’s colonial polity
was in many regards a caste society, especially in an administrative sense,
which allowed for peaceful coexistence with a majority of inhabitants who
still lived as though they were part of China. The borders were open until
well into the Cold War era, and the rise of Chinese nationalism, in many
senses, enveloped people in Hong Kong despite its colonial status. Region-
ally speaking, Hong Kong had been at best a marginal satellite of a Can-
tonese sphere of influence based in Guangzhou. In short, there were many
hegemonic forces working against the self-determination of a Hong Kong
culture, represented especially by the kinds of hybridized, pop cultural,
irreverent, and egotistical lifestyles and mind-sets that people now take for
granted and unabashedly champion. How then did this all come about?
I approach this question not as a historian but more as a culturolo-
gist. I think too many books are written about Hong Kong in the genre
of unilineal narrative of progress, triumph of Westernization, inevitability
of a free-spirited can-do determinism, and postcolonial liberation of vari-
ous sorts. The formation of a Hong Kong identity and the evolution of a
mass culture, among other things, are all complex sociological phenomena
in their own right that are more importantly made possible by politico-
institutional transformations and corresponding change in the geo-cultural
landscape. They may be invoked from above, but they respond to local
needs. Men make history, as Marx astutely put it, but not necessarily of
their own free will.
At this point, one may ask, why cosmopolitanism? In this regard, I
am less interested in exploring cosmopolitanism as a theoretical problem
or general sociocultural phenomenon than in using cosmopolitanism as a
Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Birth of Hong Kong Place-Based “Identity” 105
reference point for understanding the unique and complex changes that
precipitated the rise of a place-based Hong Kong culture and identity dur-
ing the postwar era. It does not comprise all the seminal transformations
that took place, of course, yet on the other hand, the peculiarities of Hong
Kong’s experiences can also shed light on the content and form of the culture
that ultimately emerged. In short, what is cosmopolitanism?
Needless to say, cosmopolitanism is not unique to Hong Kong. One
can view it as an intrinsic feature of the global city, of which there is a
long history and for which there are many prominent examples, even before
capitalism. The very idea of a city as a cosmopolis suggests that its scope of
ambition and imagination aims to transcend secular and territorial boundar-
ies. Its quest of worldly consumption and sacred communion reinforces its
political elitism or vice versa. It should in literal terms be something quite
contrary to an indigenous identity and popular culture. In the context of
Hong Kong, if its colonial governance counts for something, one cannot
consider cosmopolitan or Western influences alien either. It was, above all,
a trading entrepôt and a base of regular interaction between Europeans and
Chinese at all levels. Hong Kong has a long history of cultural exchange, if
this is cosmopolitanism, at least in part.1 Yet, at the same time, there is a
sense in which for a long time cosmopolitan exchanges neither fundamentally
disrupted the caste-like relationships between Europeans and Chinese nor
fundamentally changed cultural perceptions of the polity until much later.
In the long-term transition into the postwar era, many things changed.
In addition to the task of reconstructing society from ravages of war and
economic deprivation, the British Empire had already entered the final stages
of an irrevocable decline. Despite its liminality, Hong Kong was a Cold War
battleground for competing nationalisms. Whether colonialism was subsumed
by nationalism or was eventually the pivotal factor that enabled Hong Kong
to transcend nationalism is a matter of interpretation, but I mention these
historical conditions to argue that these changes beneath the geopolitical
ground ultimately played an important role in establishing the conditions by
which a place-based Hong Kong identity was able to emerge and in carving
out a framework within which cosmopolitan influences ushered in a new
kind of popular culture. Within this geopolitical process, the concrete agency
of institutions and the creative force of culture were important vehicles in
defining new lifestyles and mind-sets, but I think it is crucial to dissect the
complex interplay between them in its historical context.
My (Chun 1996) comparative analysis of the emergence of public cul-
ture in contemporary Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore outlines for present
purposes a framework for articulating a role for geopolitics.2 Among other
things, it shows how three Chinese-populated societies can have radically
different notions of ethnicity and cultural identity, resulting from the way in
which nationalism, colonialism, and market capitalism interact. In the case of
Hong Kong, its transformation into a free market port was prompted by a
colonial regime determined in essence to neutralize nationalist conflict in the
territory. It brought about a depoliticization of public culture that spawned,
among other things, the emergence of a mass-mediated Hong Kong cultural
identity, but the way in which explicit Westernization formed in collusion
with the evolution of a class-based, market society were unintended conse-
quences of this kind of top-down state politics and were in actuality products
of a different dynamic interaction. It is easy to say that utilitarian capitalism
translates everything into monetary terms, but when culture begins to be seen
as commodity in a kind of identity space that becomes deracinated from the
politics of nation, strange things happen. For one thing, it makes possible
forms of culture, ways of thinking, and lifestyles that are forced to negotiate
themselves on the basis of some kind of transnational, intercultural logic, and
this is the unique matrix of what I see as Hong Kong’s diverse yet inherently
fractured public sphere. Among other things, it is easy to understand why,
by contrast, the sort of ethnic politics that characterized Taiwan is wholly
absent. One tends to forget that, in terms of ethnic composition, Hong Kong
and Taiwan are similar (25% of their postwar inhabitants are from other
provinces of China), but in Taiwan everything (politics as well as culture)
is ethnically dualized, or at least people seem to think so. In Hong Kong,
“borrowed place and a borrowed time” is a cliché that reflects its liminal
status vis-à-vis conflicting and overarching national spaces, but it ultimately
marks the advent of a locally born generation increasingly estranged, on
the one hand, from an older diasporic generation yearning to return to the
motherland, and a growing proportion of people who, on the other hand,
began to identify with Britain (mostly those who by class, education, political
affiliation, or through migration benefited most from ties to Britain). The
geopolitical spaces are important, but the way in which people negotiate
these spaces is equally important.
Cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity can in theory be the product
of many possible reasons and intentions, but in practice they had to compete
with prevailing cultural mind-sets in Hong Kong and in the end transcend
or overcome the latter. As cultural agency, it is both the result of people
being able to create new forms of cultural sensibility that can successfully
capture elements of such a complex, unsettled space as well as the result of
social institutions successfully targeting the tastes and interests of a newly
emerging public. In this interaction between people and institutions, I think
the discursive and representational aspects of such a changing culture are
worth careful scrutiny. This is the point of departure for my analysis.
It is possible to produce an exhaustive list of unique features about

Hong Kong’s culture and diverse lifestyles in the early 1980s. This has already
been the object of countless essays in a massive journalistic and scholarly
literature. But since I began by focusing on issues of identity and how forces
such as nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism can craft perceptions toward
ethnicity, regardless of actual demographic origin, I think it is equally relevant
to ask how and why certain forms of identity (especially politicized ones)
find it necessary to invoke culture as an explicit label (and discourse), while
consumption of culture in other respects (as goods, ideas, values, or lifestyles)
does not necessarily invoke culture as a marked category. In short, I argue
that cosmopolitanism and creolism are inherently different forms of cultural
appropriation, as they differ less because of any inherent cultural attributes
than because they represent different practical strategies of “culturalizing.”
To promote cosmopolitanism as the ethos of a mass culture should be a
contradiction in terms, at least on the surface. One is an effort to maintain
social exclusivity, and the other intrinsically sublimates difference.
I do not mean to say that cosmopolitanism is undesirable or impos-
sible as cultural ideal. We all wish to be cosmopolitan, multilingual, multi-
national, and multicultural, all the while consuming the original and unique.
Yet in real life, we all know that this is available only to a privileged few;
otherwise we accept it as purely imaginative. On the other hand, creolism
operates on a different cultural logic. Here, cultural mixing is a norm, but
without regard to the conditions of use attached to it or nuances implied
by its explicit marking. In practice, cultural interchange and hybridity of all
kinds operate between both extremes, but I suggest that, rather than view
them as different forms of cultural mixing, one can see them as diverse
strategies of culturalizing, within which pragmatic intents and social mean-
ings are implicitly embedded. For example, hybridity can be used to rein-
vent staple and nouvelle haute cuisine but the underlying strategies in each
case are quite conscious of their accommodation of local or original taste
and the sacrifices involved in each case. The transformation of McDonald’s
from American hamburger to transnational staple is an example of selective
accommodation.
Intellectual Salon “Culture” in the

Transformation of the Public Sphere
Locating the discursive origins or representational aspects of cosmopolitan-

ism or hybrid culture in Hong Kong involves in the first instance articulating
the possible contours of that culture and secondly defining the agency of
persons and institutions in that process of cultural construction. Culture is

an ongoing phenomenon everywhere, and while it is not necessary to single
out a culture’s uniqueness in order to recognize the nature of its existence,
it is fair to say that Hong Kong’s imagined community as a culture began
in large part with a growing awareness of its autonomous identity. Like
Anderson’s (1983) abstract nationalism, it can be seen as a positional break
vis-à-vis given sociopolitical frames of reference, but positional autonomy
can be a function of many situational forces.3 In this case, rootedness in
the local imposed by its deracination from traditional frames of reference
cultivated the formation of a liminal identity space that then cultivated
assumed sharedness through a colloquial language, mass media, and other
popular values rooted in the ongoing present. Despite the liminal nature of
its identity, this was not unlike the way the consciousness of shared nation-
hood eventually occupied through the spread of mass literature and collo-
quial language the empty, homogenous time-spaces of Anderson’s imagined
communities. That Hong Kong culture became firmly rooted in a concrete
sense of place or locality should not be regarded as a natural given, but rather
as the end product of ongoing sociopolitical forces and strategic practices
by people to define and reshape mutating life conditions. The complex of
institutions that one has typically associated with this newly emerging Hong
Kong culture, without a doubt, produced novel mind-sets and life practices
that later became a cultural hub for “Greater China,” but this novelty, at
least at the outset, along with its appeal to cosmopolitanism and moder-
nity, was more precisely the apt confluence of factors that actively induced
or prompted the autonomy of a depoliticized, colloquially local culture in
ways that contrasted forcibly with hegemonic, nationalist cultures rooted in
ethnic and other orthodoxies of state-based identity prevalent elsewhere in
Asia. Consonant at the same time with the evolution of cultural institutions,
lifestyles, and behavior that broke away from traditional spheres of influence
typical of Chinese societies elsewhere was thus the conscious emergence of
an indigenous Hong Kong (bengang) identity. Insofar as it reflected the
subjective autonomy of a shared community vis-à-vis the outside world,
identity was by definition a conscious and unconscious set of life choices
and value judgments that had to negotiate between alien and native, elite
and popular, old and new. Some distinctive features or institutions often
noted in this regard include its utilitarian commercialistic ethos that in many
ways devalued cultural markers and national origins, a depoliticized mass
culture rooted in a popular media industry that was deracinated from his-
torical or intellectual tradition, finally the advent of Westernized influences
that reiterated through its modernity the disappearance of colonialism. In
such a cultural terrain, cosmopolitan and hybrid processes occupied many
Part One
Postwar, Post-Republican Taiwan

Prisons serve as a clear example (of total institutions), providing we

appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions
whose members have broken no laws.
—Erving Goffman, Asylums
One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.

—Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”
Prologue
I argue that the dynamics of ethnicity in the context of Taiwan’s nation-

statism has been more thoroughly misunderstood than understood by schol-
ars. If anything, the Republic of China in Taiwan is the typical incarnation
of a monocultural nationalism, yet Taiwan’s experiences have clearly run
counter to the norm, especially in ethnic terms. In most other places, such
as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, as if to vindicate The End of History
in Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) terms, crumbling socialist regimes have given
way everywhere to the real face of ethnonationalism. In places such as
South Africa, after blacks were given the vote, they voted quite naturally
for majority rule. Only in Taiwan, where everyone knows that native Tai-
wanese constitute three-fourths of the population, did people (in its first
free elections in 1989) vote decisively for a KMT regime by a three-to-one
margin that was dominated by alien mainlanders. Any impartial analyst
would have concluded that ethnicity per se accounted for little. If anything,
Taiwan should have become independent long ago; so what is the real prob-
lem here? In actuality, ethnic realities have never been an object of doubt.
13
and diversely as a trendsetting cosmopolitan cultural magazine. The next

twenty years saw at least two succeeding generations of writers, and the
successful marketing of the magazine established it in the long run as a
systematic, important beacon of Hong Kong contemporary culture, with
interests in all aspects of pop culture, mass media, fine arts, lifestyle, taste,
and modern fashion. In a word, if any magazine exemplified the ongoing
pulse of a uniquely Hong Kong culture, reflected most typically by the
gradually dominant tastes, attitudes, and consumption patterns of locally
bred Hong Kong people, this was definitely one, if not, it. There are without
a doubt many features of City Magazine that deserve detailed attention in
this regard, but the very evolution of the magazine in the context of larger
ongoing social and political changes is itself a noteworthy development that
ultimately has important resonances for understanding the profound forma-
tive relationship between culture and the public sphere as well as the seminal
role of discursive and representational imagination in that social agency.
At least in its mature evolution, the magazine captured in many obvi-
ous respects diverse aspects of Hong Kong’s newly emerging culture, namely
its open embrace of a cosmopolitan ethos, its extensive appeal to latest
currents in film, music, fashion, the arts, and other aspects of progressive
(commercialist-oriented) culture and its inherent cultivation of a public
culture identified with and intricately tied to a popular and Cantonese-
speaking TV and film industry. In various regards, it overlaps with many
competing publications. In terms of cosmopolitan appeal, it is probably not
the first or most prominent magazine to promote elite Western tastes, if this
is what cosmopolitan means. The Hong Kong Tatler, an English-language
magazine published by and mostly for British expatriates, devoted primarily
to reportage of happenings in the West and information about expatriate
social events and culture in Hong Kong, has had a longer existence as a
publication, but its relationship to the lives and interests of local Hong
Kong people is minimal. While cosmopolitan in one respect, its definition
and tastes tend to be exclusively colonialist in nature. City Magazine was
not the first publication to promote cosmopolitan fashion either. Style Hong
Kong (shishi) is a bilingual, largely women’s magazine devoted to cosmopoli-
tan high fashion with a long history of publication and broad commercial
appeal. The Chinese edition of Esquire debuted in 1984, and clearly catered
to cosmopolitan tastes of educated, professional males. Like the two other
magazines, it was successful in attracting people with culturally eclectic
taste and high-end consumer lifestyles. Yet on the other hand, the clientele
drawn to such publications seemed limited to a privileged niche and did
not seem representative of cultural sensibilities among the populace at large.
The role that Haowai has played in the development of local popular
culture has already been discussed by various writers in the cultural studies
literature on Hong Kong.5 However, its significance must be seen first of all in
the framework of the magazine’s metamorphosis over the decades. The maga-
zine began as something quite different from what it eventually evolved into,
despite the continued guidance of the first generation of editors and writers
for most of its initial decade. As mentioned above, it was founded explicitly
in the style of the Village Voice, and its English title, the Tabloid, was meant
to embody a socially critical ethos and its explicit penchant for countercultural
currents and alternative intellectual perspectives, whatever their origin. The
contents of its inaugural 1976 issue are illustrative in this regard:
1. Featured Essays
a. Tabloid Report: “Maternity hospital makes wrong transfu-
sion of blood, resulting in death”
b. Essay: “The psychological burden brought about by super
(successful) women”
c. Essay: “Reflections of a methadone user”
d. Essay: “Dale Carnegie should teach a course on how to
deal with salesmen”
e. Essay: “Local community support organizations—are they
activist groups”?
2. Centerfold (Five short columns)
a. Literary review
b. Introduction to yijing hexagrams
c. Survey of late night eating
d. Listing of concerts, dance, film, and art events
e. “Jest Set”
3. Book Review Section
a. Review essay on Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the
Human Prospect and Gordon Taylor, Rethink Radical Pro-
posals to Save a Disintegrating World
b. Review essay of two novels by Zhou Shou-zhuan
c. Review essay on critical theory titled “Some problems in
Marxist theories of the state”
4. Arts Section
a. Review of Art Garfunkel’s album Breakaway
b. Review of jazz albums by Gabor Szabo, Maynard Fergu-
son, Herbie Mann, and Pat Rebillot
c. Review of an out of print album by Josh White

d. Commentary on the creative syncretism of the Hong
Kong Youth Ballet Theater Troupe
e. Commentary on the past and future of domestic
handicrafts
f. Two reviews of the film Tiao hui
g. Essay on the diverse uses of classical music in some films
5. TV Program Commentaries
a. One titled The Existence of Zhong Ding-dang
b. One titled Let Go of Francis Lai
A brief perusal of the above contents shows that it began less as a

trendy cosmopolitan lifestyle magazine than as an intellectually flavored
journal grounded in contemporary social and cultural currents, not unlike
the Parisian Le Nouvel Observateur. If it was cosmopolitan in outlook, it
shared little with the colonialist expatriate tastes of the Hong Kong Tatler.
In cultural content, it was not exclusively devoted to fashion and fine arts
of a kind that typically dominated women’s magazines, such as Style Hong
Kong. Even in its refined style, culture here appealed less to the professional
elite who tend to read Esquire and catered explicitly to countercultural influ-
ences or alternative lifestyles. The five main essays also aptly reflected the
socially critical and investigative spirit of its title the Tabloid. This was not a
magazine for popular consumption that attempted to appeal to mainstream
interests. Its readers were most likely intellectual eclectics who shared similar
sociopolitical viewpoints. As a Chinese language publication, it was remotely
distanced from the traditional and nationalist concerns that dominated most
other Hong Kong intellectuals and activists. In such a context, it would have
been difficult to imagine this magazine appealing to anyone who was not
already highly Western educated, if not literate in English as well. In fact,
when Haowai first appeared, it was viewed as perilously alien by students
belonging to various nationalist (guocui) cliques.6
Thus, from the Chinese mainstream, it is easy to regard Haowai as a
Western-influenced magazine with radically different cultural interests that
did not seem relevant to Hong Kong at that time. If it was cosmopolitan, it
should really be seen as an effort to introduce a larger worldly outlook into
a Hong Kong context. Despite its attention to Western pop music and art,
there was also little explicit concern to developments in local Hong Kong
popular culture, which were firmly Cantonese, if anything. Western pop
culture appeared here as an eclectic element from a Hong Kong cultural
point of view and was something still alien to most there. Culture here
was treated as largely literary and intellectual in nature; at least, its atten-
tion to more mundane aspects of lifestyle, most notably as fashion, cuisine,
and material consumption of various kinds did not appear until somewhat
later. Its subtle social criticism should also be regarded as a mind-set that
deliberately set itself apart from the popular public or the mass, whatever
that was. Even the satirical cartoons that were interspersed along with the
essays resembled manga but probably took their inspiration more from the
underground comics of R. Crumb. In short, its underlying cosmopolitanism
and critical ethos set it apart from popular culture, as it had existed “locally”
at the time, even as it appeared to articulate the grounds for a different kind
of popular culture or everyday lifestyle. Yet more importantly, in assessing
the nature of this cosmopolitanism, perhaps its most significant feature was
the way in which it tended to routinely embrace both Western and Chinese
culture as equals, with little attempt to dualize or categorize them separately.
There was also little attempt to cultivate hybridity, through mixing; there is
at least a clear sense in which both represented compatible elements within
the larger view of things. Even in the texts themselves, English terms were
routinely interspersed with Chinese ones (without translation or romaniza-
tion), which was disorienting, if not unacceptable and incomprehensible
as well, in terms of conventional Chinese writing.7 In sum, at the time of
Haowai’s appearance, there were many more reasons for viewing it as some-
thing consciously alien and removed from the mainstream than anything
constitutive of a newly emerging popular culture or public sentiment. Many
things changed in due course.
Over the next five years, Haowai expanded its cultural coverage to
include fashion, fine cuisine, and subtle changes in the arts, most impor-
tantly developments in the emerging film and mass media industry. Atten-
tion to intellectual developments in contemporary theory continued to be
strong along with reporting on social issues. The combination of its esoteric
interests and concern with alternative cultural and social lifestyles was a
potentially explosive mix, but what characterized its underlying ethos was a
unique mind-set, perhaps best reflected in the keywords invoked throughout
the magazine: fashion (shizhuang), consumption (xiaofei), vogue (chaoliu),
sensuality (qingse), culture (wenhua), middlebrow (zhongchan), style (zitai),
perspective (jiaodu), objectivity (zhongxing), high class (guizu), taste (pinwei),
form (xingge), image (xingxiang) and brand respectability (qipai).8 In terms
of content, it was probably the first magazine in Hong Kong to directly
address and openly discuss topics such as 1960s counterculture, the disco
scene, homosexuality, feminism, not to mention sexuality in general, and
other explicitly irreverent issues, including bad taste. It was very conscious
of its contemporaneity, occasionally reflecting on the passing of les temps

perdu, even speculating about the advent of upcoming times. In fact, the
potpourri of essays and regular columns on diverse aspects of culture, from
literary thought to practical lifestyle, reflected interest in a wide range of
issues, but its manifest representations of worldly sophistication and progres-
sive alterity were always driven by a distinctly irreverent attitude or ethos of
nonconformity that seemed less driven on changing the public as a whole
than on giving voice to a heretofore unrepresented niche community, while
ramifying its worldview.
That niche community was, of course, a generation of Hong Kong‒
bred youth that was disenfranchised from the public by other more domi-
nant sectors of the population, namely, the diasporic interests of a refugee
constituency caught between two sides of a nationalizing Cold War, colonial-
ist interests of the government and a resident populace that still viewed itself
as a satellite city within Guangdong and its Cantonese sphere of influence,
albeit in increasingly unsettling terms. Haowai’s cosmopolitan eclecticism
was radical for its time, and one can ask whether it actually influenced the
emergence of new cultural sensibilities or just blended in with the times.
Over time, I argue that prevailing nationalizing forces, traditional spheres of
influence and diasporic ethnic elements began to wane not because of any
inherent demise but because of fundamental paradigmatic shifts toward a
geopolitical ground that necessitated a new place-based imagination. What-
ever these cosmopolitan forces were, in the long run they had to be accom-
modated by or assimilated in line with this emergent sense of community
that was increasingly dominated by a locally bred population explicitly
identifying with Hong Kong as its primary cultural frame of reference. In
short, postwar Hong Kong was a setting that witnessed diverse, competing
cultural forces and had ramifications in all aspects of local thought and
lifestyle, but what impacted the most were those elements that eventually
melded best (most successfully) into the institutions and mind-sets of that
emerging public culture.
The Aesthetics of Cultural Eclecticism

in an Emerging Culture “Industry”
The early evolution of Haowai invokes a familiar question prompted first by

Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, namely, what
is the role of the salon and critical discourse in the creation of a space of
rational communication that eventually became the basis for the emergence
of a public sphere by galvanizing a practical field of opposition to hege-
monic domination by the state and other vested interests in society?9 In

many respects, Haowai seemed to provide a discursive space for such critical
communication, whether or not it actually was able to promote effectively
the content of this ideology. Its later evolution, if anything, manifested
growing interest in and cultivation of a locally emergent popular culture
influenced heavily not only by cosmopolitan ideals, utilitarian values and
modern lifestyles but also by identification with a mass media industry that
gradually became the “colloquializing” framework for a new public and its
imagined sensibilities. In this regard, the transformation of the magazine
was perhaps significant less for its change in content than in form. A major
turning point that propelled it into a successful widely read magazine and
firmly established it as a representative voice of a newly emerging public
culture was a decision by the editors in April 1982 to radically alter the
magazine’s design from a text-based journal focused on the literal content of
its essays, printed in A4 format, to a glossily illustrated magazine, doubled
to A3 size, with restyled headers and a considerably more spacious aesthetic
look. A crude comparison of the two issues before and after the new design
exemplifies the essence of this structural change. Another significant out-
come here was a marked increase in full-page ads.
March 1982 (Issue 67)

Number of pages devoted to the following content categories:
Text-based essays: 59 pages
Noncommercial promotion (mainly public service announcements,
event listings): 8 pages
Feature cartoons: 4 pages
Full-page photographs: 5 pages
Full-page commercially paid advertisements: 4 pages
April 1982 (Issue 68)

Number of pages devoted to the following content categories:
Text-based essays: 41 pages
Noncommercial promotion (mainly public service announcements,
event listings): 5 pages
Feature cartoons: none
Full-page photographs: 23 pages
Full-page commercially paid advertisements: 13 pages
The number of full-page ads in issues 69‒71 occupied 11, 22, and
20 pages, respectively, and continued in general to increase in subsequent
issues. Full-page photographs increased many times over and became a staple
feature of its new look. The number of pages devoted to text essays tended
to decline slightly as a result of the new design, but this was offset also by
its switch to A3 format. Equally importantly, the proportion of pictures to
text in essays increased drastically from 20 percent to 30 percent in the old
format to 40 percent to 60 percent in the new format, with blank space
accounting for 20 percent on average (as aesthetic enhancement). While font
size remained the same, the amount of space and pictures that occupied each
page, more than the number of pages itself, tended to overwhelm the impact
of the text on the page. The table of contents, which usually appeared just
inside the cover, was now also buried inside the magazine, under six to eight
pages of full color picture ads, mimicking standard commercial magazines.
Whether this revolution in form fundamentally changed the impact of the
magazine in substance can be debated, but it is clear that the feel of the
magazine altered by its format changes introduced subtle changes in the way
the magazine (as writers, editors, and owners) perceived its relationship to
the kind of cultural values, trends, lifestyles, and institutions that it actively
wrote about and promoted.
Without a doubt, the new format magazine sold well, and its com-
mercial success was the most important factor that guaranteed its continued
survival. In comparison to competing magazines at the time, Haowai was
much less commercial. The April 1982 issues of Style Hong Kong and the
Hong Kong Tatler devoted the same overall number of pages to essays, while
carrying fifty-one and eighty-four pages of full-page ads, respectively, and
burying their table of contents under sixteen pages of ads. The proportion
of illustrations to text in essays tended to average 30 percent to 40 per-
cent in the latter two magazines, which should have made Haowai, with
its more aesthetic format, even more out of character with the suppos-
edly serious, intellectual content of its writings. Its trend toward aesthetic
appeal was inextricably related to a greater reliance on commercial appeal
as a principle of operation, and both factors had inevitable and subtle
influences on the content and form of its writing in the long run. As the
baton passed to succeeding generations of writers and editors, the com-
mercial viability of Haowai allowed it to expand in volume as well as to
intensify its focus on high fashion, haute cuisine, cutting-edge technology,
and esoteric dimensions of the good life in general, all driven by urban
chic, trend pacing, heuristic consumption, and cosmopolitan eclecticism
as the ethos of the new age. While its editors proclaimed in March 1982
that Haowai’s eccentric worldview would remain unchanged, in the long
run one could unavoidably witness a gradual disappearance of writing on
trendsetting developments in intellectual theory and the blunt investigative
journalism that had represented a more staple presence in its early issues.
What does all this really mean?
The constraints of space cannot do justice to the complex evolution
that Haowai actually underwent during its heyday in the latter half of the
1980s and into the 1990s. By 1988, one might venture to say that it became
a full-fledged commercial enterprise, after its conscious editorial makeover to
promote a haute couture cosmopolitan lifestyle that was combined with the
advent of computerized typesetting and its embrace of digital technology as
the staple of everyday life. Surveys conducted by the magazine also revealed
that its readers tended to be predominantly yuppie professionals, with many
of them claiming to drive BMWs.10 It also underwent several organizational
changes, witnessing a change of publisher from Seven Hills, Ltd. to City
Howwhy, Ltd. in 2000, then its purchase and absorption by the mainland
Chinese conglomerate Xiandai Chuanbo in 2003, which made it a flagship
publication within a family of magazines devoted largely to modern life-
styles. In content, one witnessed without doubt a refinement and expansion
of existing coverage in cultural tastes and social lifestyles that it had already
promoted extensively since its inception, even though the relative proportion
of attention to various fields of interest changed gradually in the long run.
One might also say that the change in form primarily enhanced the appeal
of such interests to a wider readership. However, in attempting to appeal
to that broader public, one can question whether its success was really the
result of its aesthetic and sophisticated effectiveness in promoting the critical,
intellectual values that primordially drove its writing or whether it success-
fully transformed itself in a way that made it acceptable and digestible to
an emerging public that was changing of its own accord. That is to say,
who was accommodating whom, and what really changed in the process?
Despite the many distinctive features of mind-set or ethos that characterized
the early evolution of Haowai, as noted above, and appeared to presage the
behavior, thought patterns, and practical outlooks that later became com-
monplace in subsequent decades, I am more inclined to believe that the
emergence of a new public imagination rooted largely in the development
of a mass media industry provided the primary institutional frame of refer-
ence through which new cultural sensibilities and practical lifestyles became
galvanized. In this regard, one can also detect a subtle change over time in
Haowai’s critical relationship to the rest of society and its emerging culture
at large. As cosmopolitan thinking and commercial consumption became
more socially commonplace and extolled as the new gods of everyday life
(as a result of depoliticizing tendencies of unregulated utilitarian capital-
ism and moves away from prevailing nationalistic struggles), the critical
sharpness that initially characterized Haowai (represented by differences that

it cultivated vis-à-vis the mass) softened correspondingly, too.
One can undeniably say that Haowai continued to promote (even
more successfully) the inherent interests, tastes, and values of a locally bred
generation of Hong Kong youth who at the same time were increasingly
distanced from an older generation of diasporic residents, on the one hand,
and those people associated primarily with a mutating colonial regime and
other expatriate interests, on the other hand. However, rather than directly
influencing this new local generation, it appeared that the latter matured
of its own accord and that its interests became shaped largely by a (politi-
cally desensitized and commercially oriented) mass media industry. This
locally bred generation embraced many of the interests, tastes, and values
promoted by Haowai, and Haowai in turn successfully transformed itself by
accommodating those interests, tastes, and values and shaping them into a
systematic worldview at the expense of other interests, tastes, and values that
happened to reflect its more socially activist, critical intellectual perspectives.
Haowai actively embraced and inevitably became an integral part of
that popular culture emerging from this new entertainment media and film
industry, which cultivated a distinctive Hong Kong style or ethos of its
own. Such a culture industry may or may not have entirely resembled
that archetypically described by Horkheimer and Adorno, but it played
to a large extent an important role in commoditizing a heuristic, mass-
mediated lifestyle that served as a “standard linguistic community” for local
culture.11 Unlike elsewhere, this popular culture served in the absence of a
political community, defined typically by common citizenship and shared
social values. By virtue of its being an object of popular veneration and
commercial consumption, driven by the imperatives of profit maximization
through mass appeal, such a culture was correspondingly less moved by
esoteric, intellectual trends or fine-tuned aesthetic norms. Thus, was com-
mercial desirability or viability the new guiding principle that in the long
run softened the critical edge and eclectic quality that epitomized Haowai’s
initial years and subtly transformed the underlying mind-set of the magazine
in subsequent phases?
Subjective changes of mind-set are difficult to gauge and interpret, but
it is clear that the gradual shift in Haowai’s detached eccentricity or eclec-
tic intellectualism inherent before the 1980s contrasts with its progressive
posture in promoting the film and mass media industry in later years and
collusive involvement in its institutional development. This gradual shift in
subjective positioning was in effect a direct consequence precipitated by the
radical changes in format and aesthetic design that restructured the magazine
in 1982, changes that apparently took on a life of its own. At this point,
one should ask in what sense this burgeoning mass media entertainment
industry was able to represent an emerging “public” sensibility, which at
the same time served as a standard lingua franca for a distinctive “local”
cultural imagination.
In many respects, the development of Hong Kong film and TV cap-
tured public appeal in terms of broad popular acceptance and its ability to
transcend class differences and political ideologies. Insofar as depoliticiza-
tion of culture was implicitly enforced by colonial policy, one can say that
a certain kind of public already predicated to some extent a certain genre
of cultural landscape. At the same time, the development of the local was
less a rediscovery or invention of such traditions than an explicit break
away from prevailing national and regional spheres of influence. In the
case of film, Hong Kong “style” established itself in contrast to Mandarin
and Cantonese genres while at the same time rooting itself either in the
place-based contemporary or in abstract mind-sets peculiar to Hong Kong
sensibilities. TV also emerged at a time when the mass media began to play a
dominant role in establishing a standard public community and institutional
frame of reference for a shared culture. That both TV and film adopted
Cantonese as their lingua franca was not an insignificant factor, even as the
content of popular culture was continuously drawn from the outside and its
constructive synthesis of many unlikely elements. Huanle jinxiao, a nightly
entertainment show, was by far the most heavily watched TV program in
Hong Kong in the 1970s and ’80s, and perhaps best epitomized the cultural
sensibilities of Hong Kong’s general populace. Cosmopolitan influences were
certainly one aspect of this creative mix but so were commoditizing forces
imposed by the ethos of a market-dominated way of life as well as nomadic
or liminal impulses derived from living in a borrowed place and time that
glossed over a surreal, apathetic political worldview.
The commercial superficiality of popular culture cultivated by the mass
media has been criticized typically as an intellectual desert, and this contrasts
with the intellectual seriousness (albeit irreverent) that has always been char-
acteristic of Haowai, but the media industry drew on mind-sets, behaviors,
and values that happened to connect with a newly emerging cultural land-
scape that was already in the making as a result of diverse and complex forces.
Like the mass media, Haowai also connected with part of that landscape
of public imagination, which it iconically defined as synonymous with the
“City.” In the process of successfully tapping into these currents, it began
deliberately or unwittingly to transform itself. It lent a uniquely sophisticated
voice in promoting this City lifestyle and ethos, to say the least, but its
collusive relationship with the evolution of mass-mediated popular culture
made it an inherent part of the latter’s development as a mainstream that
contrasted with its critical distance in an earlier era and contributed in the
long run to a subtle metamorphosis in its overall guiding principles.
The geopolitical creation in Hong Kong of a depoliticized public paved
the way for the wholesale transformations spawned by utilitarian capitalism
and its commoditizing ethos as a staple lifestyle, which in turn enabled
Hong Kongers to redefine themselves in multicultural terms and through
cosmopolitan consumption. These developments were consonant with an
emerging consciousness of a local Hong Kong identity. Like all the above,
this identity was not just a realization of its place-based existence or a dis-
covery of its indigenous essence but rather a complex subject positioning
that by force of circumstances made peculiar life choices in a process of
strategic rationalization or selective accommodation. Although the inven-
tion of the local was not the product of intentioned free will, the advent
of such an identity as well as the processes by which it became discursively
articulated and institutionally disseminated took on a dynamic of its own
that transcended simple appropriations of the global order.
The Birth of “Local” Popular Culture in the

Context of Cosmopolitan Hybridity
On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Haowai, Joint Publishing Co.,

Ltd. compiled a three-volume selection of exemplary essays and materials
from its thirty years of publication.12 Edited by Lui Tai Lok, a senior soci-
ologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who was an avid reader of
and keen contributor to the magazine throughout its history, this collection
of material and supplementary commentaries provided rich insights into the
complex, diverse history of the magazine and its extensive connections to
Hong Kong culture and society. An artistic collage reproduced from issue
225 (1995) prefaced one section, titled “Hong Kong Style.” Perhaps more
interesting than the collage itself, which was meant clearly to reflect the
inherent hybridity of Hong Kong culture, was an editorial footnote: “Finally,
Haowai is a Hong Kong magazine.”13 Echoing Lui’s introductory essay in the
three-volume set, it was as if to suggest that, despite the magazine’s explicit
focus on cosmopolitan hybridity and its claim to represent a local generation
of Hong Kong and Hong Kongers throughout its long history, it was only in
the mid-1990s, according to Lui, that the magazine had accomplished this
vision in practice. What cosmopolitan hybridity really means in a Hong Kong
context and in what senses this has come about is, rightly so, a question of
interpretation and continuing debate. It is possible to read the magazine’s
overt representations as well as the intentioned meanings of its writers in
many ways, especially after the fact.14 Among other things, the long list of
contributors to the magazine have gone on to other ventures, while moving
on to other related publications, evolving into important commentators on
Hong Kong pop culture and society in general, and becoming involved in
other media institutions, such as filmmaking and TV.
Underscoring Lui’s argument is less the claim that contemporary Hong
Kong society is rooted intricately in its hybridity that his questioning of
whether cosmopolitanism, especially of the kind espoused by Haowai in its
early years, was really consistent with its intention to fashion a uniquely
Hong Kong culture. As Peter Wong, one of Haowai’s later editors, aptly
remarked, in relation to the magazine’s routine usage of bilingual heteroglos-
sia in its writing, its founding editors, Chan Koon Chung and Peter Dunn,
in particular, usually thought things out in English and wrote them out in
Chinese.15 Much of how they viewed the direct import of things Western
onto the Hong Kong scene can thus be interpreted in the same vein. On
the other hand, the question of how they actually thought is in my opinion
less relevant than our understanding of social processes underlying such
cosmopolitanism. Even if the hybrid nature of their writing was a result of
their ambidexterity in English and Chinese, one cannot say the same for a
later generation of Hong Kongers who adopted linguistic heteroglossia as a
routine mode of communication; likewise for the trend of youths to adopt
English names and other hybrid practices. The latter were consequences of
a broader mind-set that was already in the making and was not necessarily
the product of cosmopolitanism, strictly speaking, or Haowai’s radical chic,
which was truly premonitory in many senses. It is not surprising that, espe-
cially in its early years, Haowai was more often viewed as culturally elitist.
Many of its cosmopolitan tastes were simply alien to those less sophisticated
in general and could not have been viewed otherwise as long as such culture
remained objects of limited (esoteric) consumption.
Orlando Patterson’s work on Jamaican “cosmopolises” provides a con-
trasting reference point.16 By focusing on an alternative facade of Gilroy’s
Black Atlantic, namely, the role of West Indian black intellectuals in the
development of British philosophy and their active promotion of colonialist
lifestyles there, Patterson has instead emphasized the overlapping coexistence
of all kinds of cosmopolitan and transnational worldviews.17 This has con-
trasted with the inherent creolism of working-class lifestyles. The develop-
ment of reggae, which began as bad imitations of African music, then
evolved into a hybrid cultural creation of its own and became exported
globally as a genre of popular music, followed a different ideology of “mix-
ing.” Nonetheless, both approaches to intercultural practice coexisted as local
cultural lifestyles but remained sociologically distinct.
In the context of Hong Kong, the transformation brought about by its

development into a free port has been universally acknowledged as a seminal
factor underscoring the utilitarian radicalization of local lifestyles and social
values in general, but this in turn enabled, through market accessibility
to foreign goods and ideas and commoditized consumption, the inherent
demystification of cultural dualisms and nationalist markers.18 Cosmopoli-
tanism ushered in hydridity as an acceptable way of life, but the degree to
which a cosmopolitan-based cultural ethos or indigenous syncretism pre-
vailed was still a function of differential access to cultural consumption. That
Haowai positioned itself both in relation to cosmopolitan values and the
emerging sensibilities of popular culture makes its perspective on “cosmo-
politan hybridity” ambivalent and prone to differing interpretations. With
the growing affluence of the general public, one can see a general embrace
of cosmopolitanism as well as a tendency to define the local in such terms,
the latter being, in strict terms, a geopolitical product of identity position.
In assessing the important contributions of Haowai, Lui’s problematiz-
ing of whether it played in fact a direct role in the formation of a locally
bred, uniquely syncretic Hong Kong culture is probably relevant but is not
necessarily the right question to ask. One should ask whether the force of
ideas and culture alone, either through rational discourse or imaginative
representation, can actively transform the public sphere and the popular
landscape. Despite Haowai’s relatively late embrace of the notion of hybrid-
ity in the form of “Chinese-barbarian half breed” (bantangfan), attention to
the Hong Kong scene had always been an intimate concern of the magazine
since its origin.19 If anything, it had always promoted a clear social realist
stance combined with an articulate intellectual viewpoint and a flair for
cultural eccentricity, which can be regarded as primordial elements of a
socially critical imagination. Its concern with the practice of contemporary
life was probably what distanced it from serious, scholarly journals, but it
certainly did not lack in intellectual content or wit. Its intellectual quali-
ties and esoteric remove from the tastes of a general populace tended, if
anything, to guarantee it a niche readership. The magazine’s transformation
over the years was indeed complex, but the context in which it was embed-
ded was more complex and deserves primary consideration, in my opinion.
Despite the many growing linkages between the magazine and the emerging
popular culture it seemed to nurture, one can ironically witness a gradual
decline of precisely those elements that made it an intellectually critical
and eccentrically positioned magazine to begin with. This was implicitly
also part of Lui’s chagrin in selecting presumably the most exemplary essays
over those thirty years, which tended to favor the high-minded writings of
the early years over the staple, well-known, and more widely read writings
that established it as a successful, long-running magazine. The question of

who really championed hybridity in the birth of the uniquely local pales
in comparison to the way the eclectic, intellectual qualities of the magazine
were in the long run sublimated and disappeared in the formation of the
popular culture industry, dominated largely by the imagination of various
mass media institutions.
The ways in which such institutions eventually define the cultural
landscape and capture the public imagination thus represent the framework
within which one can appropriately ask, what is cosmopolitan hybridity in
a Hong Kong context? Its process of cultural negotiation is predicated first
of all on complex changes in the geopolitical landscape that make possible
the acceptability of different cultural forms, which then invoke the agency
of various kinds of institutions and its vested interests, within which dis-
cursive imagination plays an important albeit lesser role in the long run.
Cosmopolitan hybridity ultimately takes on different forms, and perhaps
more importantly they all have different sociological functions and rami-
fications. In this regard, nouvelle haute cuisine and McDonald’s are both
cosmopolitan hybrid in their approach to cuisine. Both respond to local
acceptability, albeit differently classed niches of the local. Cosmopolitanism
functions differently in each case, and the nature of their hybrid practices,
both explicit and implicit, is determined by the way it perceives culture as
an object of promotion and consumption. Both can make equally strong
claims of being local in ways that implicitly accent different definitions of
uniqueness. In the final analysis, the important issues center not on how
prevalent cosmopolitan hybridity is, or even whether, as a concept, it is
worth championing, but rather the ways in which it has complexly shaped
social processes.
Chapter 6
Hong Kong’s Embrace of the Motherland

Economy and Culture as Fictive Commodities
History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable

limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn
into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this His-
tory can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly
as some reified force.
—Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act
1997: A Year of No Significance
The renowned sociologist Wong Siu-lun (1999:181) opened his essay,

“Changing Hong Kong Identities,” by declaring, “the year 1997 is a year
of significance for Hong Kong. The long anticipated rite of passage is over.
With the change of flags at the handover ceremony on 1 July of that year,
Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony. It acquired the new status of a
Special Administrative Region [SAR] of China.” As if to point to the sub-
jective complexity underlying an objective reality, he cited remarks made
by Chief Secretary Anson Chan, who, in reflecting on personal experiences
gained in the first year after the handover, said, “[the] real transition has
been much more complex, subtle and profound . . . That is because the
real transition is about identity and not sovereignty.”1 In other words, real
identities lurk beneath. One might then wonder what is so fictive about
sovereignty that makes identity so real.
This is a rewriting and significant update of “Hong Kong ‘Identity’ after the End of His-
tory,” which appeared in Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and
Hybridity, eds. Chu Yiu-wai and Eva Kit-wah Man, Bern: Peter Lang (2010), pp. 167‒90.
125
I argue on the contrary that history is in the first instance more about
fictions than about realities. The historical irony of Hong Kong’s official
handover to China on July 1, 1997 (or “return to the motherland,” depend-
ing on one’s point of view) was that the future of Hong Kong, which had
been a cession in perpetuity, was made to coincide with the end of the
ninety-nine-year lease of the New Territories. Few people remember anymore
that the New Territories was supposed to be administered as an extension of
Hong Kong, with due respect to native (presumably unchanging) tradition,
even though the reality of modern expansion effectively incorporated it later
into the larger colonial history of Hong Kong. One might add to this the
mystery of why the Chinese government, on the other hand, continued to
play along with the official reality of the lease, denying all the while the
validity of Hong Kong’s status as a ceded colony (being the result of a treaty
signed under duress). It not only made Handover Day a Chinese national
holiday, whose media hype became an industry in itself, moreover the coin-
cidence of Hong Kong’s celebration of Queen’s Elizabeth’s Birthday on the
eve of the handover canonized the five-day weekend into an event of unreal
proportions many times over. Thus, the reality of Hong Kong’s colonial
existence, already mystified by its official disappearance, was suddenly resur-
rected by the fiction of a lease that had been meaningless, if not long dead.
If sovereignty is rooted in such a fiction, then how unreal can identity be?
Identities can easily be driven by illusions, and postwar Hong Kong is
an ideal example of how identities have been constantly made and remade.
With ties to a culture industry and other institutions of authority, the history
of Hong Kong identity(ies) can be seen in some instances more fittingly
as a history of hype. As we all know, public sentiment in Hong Kong has
always been prone to what Gustav Le Bon once called “the psychology of the
crowd” (la psychologie de la foule), which can perhaps be deliberately misread
as a crude pun on mass mentality. The stock market has been known to
plunge drastically during moments of mass hysteria, and the slightest rumors
of scandal have been known to cause a run on local banks, with nervous
clients lining up for days to empty their savings accounts. Sentiments can
swing from one extreme to another. Anti-PRC sentiment was, of course,
strongest in reaction to the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, but it has been
countered also by waves of nationalistic fervor, judging at least from the
euphoria created by Beijing’s almost successful bid, in 1994, for the (Sydney)
Olympics. In the long run, these moments are precisely that; that is, they
come and go. But more importantly, the volatile and fragile nature that
seems to characterize Hong Kong public sentiment (of which identity is a
specific politicized manifestation) is as much a reflection of its arbitrariness
or unpredictability on the surface as a function of an institutional system
Hong Kong’s Embrace of the Motherland 127
that appears to make real the collective ramifications of individual desires

and fears. The market has made what Hong Kong is today, where utilitarian
rationality is not only an economic logic that drives the value of commodi-
ties and property but also a kind of ethos that dictates entire lifestyles, even
though we tend to forget that global politics of the 1960s was what really
transformed Hong Kong into a market society. In this sense, fear of capital
flight that often epitomizes the seeming fragility or ephemerality of Hong
Kong’s economy is really a function of the absence of a place-based rural or
industrial infrastructure that is the basis of economies elsewhere. In other
respects, microeconomic laissez-faire is tempered by macroeconomic state
intervention. The volatility of the HK dollar in 1984 led eventually to its
currency peg to the US dollar, while the colonial government’s regulation
of land policy became a crucially important aspect of Hong Kong’s planned
urban and industrial modernization.
In short, the more one has been led to believe that identity in Hong
Kong is a product of inherently individual desires and rational intents, the
more it tends to take on, on the contrary, a fictive character. In the pre-
1997 era, one has been led to believe that a concrete Hong Kong identity
exists or is important in some respect, even though we all know that this
identity is an invention that is less than fifty years old. Its distinctiveness
is in effect less a product of its unique inventive quality than, in the first
instance, of a changing sociopolitical landscape that has defined its param-
eters and shaped its possibilities of meaning. Moreover, in order to ask what
post-1997 identity is or whether it exists at all, one must first ask whether
1997 really marks a significant change in sociopolitical terms. This remains
a matter of debate and interpretation.
1997 is a year of no significance, it can be argued. Or to put it in
another way, it is one that marks a potentially significant transition but at
a deeper underlying level masks sociopolitical processes whose nature is still
unclear or in the midst of being played out, in my opinion. In actuality,
the hype of 1997 did not begin in 1997, or in the carnival atmosphere that
led up to its ritual handover on July 1. It had been thirteen years in the
making. Some of the changes in mind-set that predicated this new iden-
tity had been put into place during the “transitional” years, and to some
extent have simply continued into the post-1997 era. But the sociopolitical
circumstances of the transition itself in the larger flow of things have been
unpredictable and are worth careful scrutiny. They are the end point of
analysis instead of its point of departure.
Not surprisingly, the most heated debates and crises over identity took
place in the mid-1980s, then again in the year leading to the handover itself.
Nonetheless, in the entire transitional era, one can detect a subtle shift of
sentiment with regard to definitions of the self that have been cultivated
and reproduced in different regimes of subjective identification and cultural
representation. This has already been the subject of many surveys as well
as semiotic analysis of various kinds. It is not my intention to review the
literature in this regard, except to say that all these popular discourses and
analyses focus too much on deconstructing in a literal sense the superficial
definitions of Hong Kongness vis-à-vis China and the West in order to
uncover the underlying substance of these identities. In the final analysis,
the existence of colonialism and nationalism is always inferred but never
directly confronted as an institution of practice. In what senses do the
facts of colonialism depend on its fictions, and vice versa? In what senses
is nationalism dualistically opposed to colonialism, and in what senses is
it a neo-colonialism? The transition signified by the year “1997” invokes
many possible political processes, but in order to understand colonialism
and nationalism it is necessary to unpack the relationship between their
ongoing discourses and practices in a Hong Kong context.
The ethos of utilitarian familism and the myth of apolitical man tend
to be the most often cited metaphors (myths) to characterize the culture
and lifestyle of people living in postwar Hong Kong.2 Without a doubt,
the utilitarian lifestyle for which Hong Kong is so famous was largely the
product of the 1970s. However, the free market economy that gave rise
to this lifestyle was also the consequence of a complex political struggle
to transcend the nationalist strife that enveloped Hong Kong, as well as a
moment in the evolution of the modern world system. The fact that we
view this utilitarian ethos merely as a manifestation of the modern life-
style is at the same time a fiction that has neatly disguised the exploitative
aspects of the capitalist system. Eugene Cooper (1982:25) perhaps phrased
it best, when he said that free market development in Hong Kong was “a
veritable proving ground for Marxist theory, where the enterprising student
of Marxist political economy can literally watch chapters of Capital unfold
before his eyes.” The assertion that the typical Hong Konger was apolitical
was also without doubt a product of that same modern, materialistic era,
but few people note that this apolitical façade was strictly enforced by a
colonial government bent on deflecting nationalist conflict from the territory
to the extent of suppressing all political dissent. The institutionalization of
an apolitical mentality and lifestyle had the ultimate goal of deflecting the
essential violence of colonial power that maintained the system, like the way
the virtues of modernization have obscured the exploitative dimensions of
capitalism. One cannot in practice neatly separate colonialism from national-
ism or modernity. I submit that their mutually collusive nature constitutes
its sociopolitical ground, which in the final analysis engenders “identity.”3
People who write about identity speak as if we are ipso facto supposed
to have one; if not one, then many. Life is thus a process through which
we negotiate on the basis of our presumed identity(ies). Yet it is harder to
systematically say precisely when and why we should invoke identity(ies),
if at all. We think we know who we are, when in fact our situatedness
within a larger geopolitical order of things limits our scope of choices and
strategies rather than vice versa. Unlike history, in Jameson’s formulation,
we can consciously apprehend identity only through its reified forces while
being in turn transformed unconsciously by its effects.
“Postcolonial” Hong Kong:

What’s Culture Got to Do with It?
In the year preceding the handover, after years of official disavowal by the
government of Hong Kong’s colonial existence, a large stream of publica-
tions in both the English and Chinese scholarly literature appeared, dealing
precisely with topics in relation to colonialism. Whether this explosion of
interest was an attempt to cash in on a trendy topic in the wake of colo-
nialism’s demise or the result of other more serious intellectual concerns is
anyone’s speculation, but it was also without a doubt fueled to some extent
by corresponding realizations of cultural difference. I hesitate to say that
such discoveries of difference are sentiments of nationalism, but it is clear
that the appearance of an explicit positionality about colonialism as a real
(discursive) other marks a subjective distance or removal from its object, as
though the latter can now be “gazed,” both in light of impending transition
and people’s attachment or identification to it. It is as if one said, “colo-
nialism has now become history.” Thus, the end of history marked (if not
championed) the arrival of a different future while at the same time relegat-
ing colonialism to its destined fate in the sociopolitical evolution of things.
The plethora of retrospective publications on colonialism that appeared
in anticipation of the handover actually covers a wide range of critical
perspectives. In addition to books that dealt with issues of sovereignty, the
“one-country, two-systems” framework, Hong Kong Basic Law, and calls for
democracy, there was no shortage of publications in English alone ruminat-
ing on the historical legacy of colonialism in Hong Kong, both positive
and negative.4
Colonial difference aside, it is important to note that the inevitability
of 1997 in the years leading up to the handover did indeed invoke attempts
by China, at least rhetorically, to cultivate nationalist sentiment at a local
level as well as attempts by institutions in Hong Kong to cultivate favor
with its Chinese counterparts, in the interest of future constructive engage-

ment. Needless to say, the resurgence of cultural nationalism in China in
that last decade had often become the source of the government’s appeal to
popular support among its masses. While sometimes seen as a heavy-handed
tactic in a Hong Kong context, the rhetoric of nationalism also had to be
viewed in the manner it overlapped with the discourse of democracy and
the collusion of capitalist interests. As constructive engagement, conformity
to nationalist pressures (imagined or real) had not just taken the form
of positive initiatives, as evidenced by the fast-growing numbers of PRC
scholars invited to and students enrolled by universities in Hong Kong
prior to the handover, but had also taken the form of negative sanctions,
evidenced by the increasing prevalence of self-censorship that was imposed
during the same period within media, political, and intellectual circles. In
this sense, increasing pressure to conform, whether one called this explicit
or implicit nationalism or not, already began to be rooted in pre-handover
Hong Kong, and this trend corresponded simultaneously with a phase of
overt anticolonialism or impending postcolonialism.
Thus, nationalizing sentiments in the transitional era leading up to
1997 had as its goal the objectification of colonialism as a real other and the
inculcation of a different kind of identity. In effect, some sense of identity
had to be heightened, not only in reference to a newly objectified other
but also in contrast to an apolitical other of the prior era, which became a
source of cultural ambiguity during the transitional era.5 But more impor-
tantly, with these nationalizing sentiments came the fiction that identity
was somehow necessary for survival in the inevitable future. There are no
hard-and-fast rules that dictate that identity is necessary for the survival of
anything; it is a function of “the system” per se. Western identity was not
necessary for people’s survival under a colonial system that tried in fact
to maintain the separations of social hierarchy. Similarly, the absence of a
higher abstract identity in the apolitical 1970s may have been a cause of
what some saw was the source of Hong Kong’s cultural and intellectual
desert, but in another sense it served as an appropriate vehicle for institu-
tionalizing another kind of social system driven by divisions of class and
differential access to cultural resources. Impending nationalism played on the
resurrection of a colonial other and incipient cultural identity, not because
political change was inevitable but rather because it viewed shared identity
as a necessary foundation for that new political order.
Yet the question is not why or if identity is really necessary, but rather
what is it for? One might also add, who is it for and to what extent do
alternative notions of culture provide the basis of effective counteridenti-
ties? I think the developmental trends leading up to 1997 that invoked a
nationalistic mind-set were enough to presage the order of things to come.

In the waning years of the transition, different rhetorical contests were
played out on different levels that continued well into the post-1997 era.
Aside from the debate over how and to what extent the one-country, two-
systems rule would be implemented, the other debate that invoked much
discussion involved the rule of democracy. The notion of identity impinged
on both debates but in different ways. Seen from the perspective of “one-
country, two-systems,” culture appeared to enjoy some kind of autonomy,
in the sense that it only seemed to be a matter of political affiliation and
not a matter of social and economic lifestyle. However, in the context of
democracy debates, culture seemed to be an irrelevant factor, secondary
to the criterion of political participation, which was seen as the defining
characteristic in relation to the perceived importance and continued main-
tenance of local autonomy.
One can debate at great length as to whether the principle of “one-
country, two-systems” actually guarantees autonomy of the political sphere
from the economic. However, the great tide of nationalism that continued
to swell in the waning years leading up to 1997, manifested in overt dis-
course as well as in implicit action (through constructive engagement of
various kinds and the imposition of self-censorship), should have indicated
that, if anything, the post-1997 years would see more of the same. In light
of the resurrected anticolonialism, the label “Royal” had already begun to
be deleted from all government and other affiliated institutions, sometimes
amid the clamor of protest to replace all icons of colonial legacy with
Chinese ones. In the aftermath of the “glorious restoration” (guangfu) of
Taiwan by China, the KMT government renamed all the major streets there
with names extolling Confucian virtues, such as Renai (benevolence) and
Zhongxiao (loyalty) Road, or with names memorializing Chinese places and
people. Nationalist revolutions everywhere else caused streets to be renamed,
routinely, one might add. This systematic swelling of nationalist sentiment
that was being cultivated in the transition years should have easily spilled
into the educational sphere, with increased emphasis on learning Chinese
language and history.6 Given popular acceptance of the handover’s inevita-
bility and the change of political sovereignty, the mood should have been
ripe for the imposition of a new, if not different, “identity.” Indeed, several
writers have gone further by predicting the radical penetration of Party,
military, and other bureaucratic institutions after the handover.7 Jamie Allen
(1997) perhaps put forward the most pessimistic view, when he predicted
that, after the Party sets up shop, the party would be over.
Despite the inevitability of the handover and presumed public accep-
tance of the change of sovereignty, if not identity as well, one might wonder
why, on the contrary, so little has changed in post-1997 Hong Kong. The
People’s Liberation Army, under the intense scrutiny of the handover media,
entered Hong Kong, but little else to signal the advent of military or Party
domination materialized.8 Despite the fears of political oppression that
prompted the media to adopt self-censorship, the relative freedom of the
press in airing critical views of official government policy after the establish-
ment of the SAR regime ran counter to all the trends anticipated by this
heightened nationalism, which was supposed to be the point of departure
for other all institutional changes.9 If all these changes predicated by the end
of colonial history and advent of a new cultural identity failed to material-
ize, then one might ask further—what, if anything, does culture have to
do with “postcolonial” Hong Kong? Even the nationalizing rhetoric seemed
to diminish accordingly.
Culture is rarely a politically neutral entity; identity is even less so.
Rising nationalist sentiment in mainland China has often served an impor-
tant function, especially in recent decades, in providing necessary popular
support for the government’s actions and policies. In the case of Hong Kong,
it could have effectively served to facilitate political integration.
The Public Sphere in Search of a “Structural” Transformation
One can easily speculate on the possible reasons why so little has changed in
the sociopolitical order of things, especially in light of various indicators to
the contrary. The Chinese government made several official proclamations,
perhaps in countering fears of anticipated suppression of press freedom,
that it would adopt a position of noninterference in local affairs. In light
of assorted events that have taken place in Hong Kong after 1997, there
will always be disagreement on the degree to which Beijing is perceived to
have or has actually interfered in the running of Hong Kong. It is not my
intention to offer any interpretation of these events; rather, I merely wish to
point out that things could have radically changed just on the basis of the
critical mass that had accumulated to disassemble the legacy of colonial cul-
ture, install new beginnings by gradually reorienting Hong Kong back to its
political roots, and institutionalizing the means by which a newly emerging
identity could be fostered and put into practice. All these things had already
been successfully inculcated into individual thought and behavior long in
advance of the handover. Why did the government then kill the momentum
that would have facilitated such (presumably desirable) integration?
In support of Beijing’s noninterference policy, many observers had
also hinted that the insistence on keeping a good face on the “one-country,
two-systems” rule had to do instead with the PRC’s attempt to woo the
confidence of people in Taiwan to return to the motherland under the same

kind of setup. This is rather dubious, as Hong Kong was the not the first
or only example where the PRC has claimed to guarantee local “autonomy”
(Tibet being the other), and because its hard line tactics, which threatened
Taiwan militarily in the event of independence, were largely inconsistent
with its soft-sell pitch. Besides, political priorities can always change China’s
view of or policy on anything, as has already been demonstrated on many
occasions during the past few decades.
In all this, the democratization movement in Hong Kong govern-
ment seemed to have an uncertain future. Thanks to the colonial legacy
of autocratic rule in Hong Kong, the post-1997 administration found it
more convenient to maintain the status quo, while championing the rule of
Hong Kong by Hong Kongers. Efforts to demand increased direct demo-
cratic participation in the election of legislators and running of government
continued to be fought for and frustrated, and such efforts have mostly
been pursued without regard to culture and identity issues. In other words,
unlike Taiwan, where the national independence movement had derived its
energy from efforts to demonstrate the existence of a separate Taiwanese
ethnic-cum-cultural consciousness vis-à-vis Chinese ethnicity, the democracy
campaign in Hong Kong had largely been a political or legal issue, devoid
of cultural content. This also colored the way in which issues regarding the
public sphere have developed, in contrast to Taiwan. In Hong Kong, there
was a sharper contrast between the state (and its functional interests) and
elements of a public effectively excluded from democratic participation.
In Taiwan, ethnic coloration of political issues was largely a survival of a
cultural nationalist policy of the former KMT regime that can mutate, if
ideological difference between various parties becomes articulated in increas-
ingly political terms. Moreover, in Hong Kong, there was no firm indication
that local identity could or would ever have useful political leverage.
I deliberately point to the question of identity, the principle of local
autonomy, and issues of democratization to show that, in discussions of the
Hong Kong public sphere, they are and have been seen largely as mutually
distinct factors. They tend to represent different struggles and were not
mobilized to influence each other, whereas in other venues, such as Taiwan,
it can be argued that these factors have always been mutually intertwined
(if not hopelessly entangled). Moreover, I would argue that the cultural
arbitrariness of Hong Kong’s situation is a discursive fiction that obscures
other facets of institutional reality that are relevant to the emergence of a
very different kind of structural transformation in the public sphere.
First, whatever role a “new” national identity was meant to play or
could have played after 1997 was effectively undermined by the Asian
financial crisis in late 1997, which continued well into 1998. At least in
a political arena, identity issues receded far into the background with the
onset and deepening of economic recession that made societal survival the
prime substance of public discourse. In the face of international attacks on
the Hong Kong dollar, which threatened to destabilize the Asian economy,
Beijing allied with the Hong Kong government, but primarily to present
a unified political front that was based solely on economic considerations
(such as defending the currency peg). The pivotal position of Hong Kong
in insulating mainland China from the Asian recession strengthened, if any-
thing, the autonomy of the Hong Kong government in establishing policy
and controlling the fiscal crisis. The Tung Chee-hwa administration suffered
a sharp loss of confidence during this crisis, but it probably had more to
do with his performance in handling political affairs than attacks on the
nature of his autocratic rule. In effect, issues of identity, local autonomy,
and democratic rule would appear to be distinct, discursively speaking, but
their significance in any political context can and does in fact change vis-
à-vis other issues.
Official noninterference in the media had also appeared to enhance
the existence of Hong Kong autonomy, but this was actually only a partial
reality that disguised the changing nature of Hong Kong’s “public” sphere.
The fiction that contributed to the notion that Hong Kong was an autono-
mous “region” was reflective to some extent of the PRC’s position that, at
least in some functional respects, Hong Kong could be seen as separate from
China. Economically, China was linked integrally to the global economy
through Hong Kong, and the most recent fiscal crisis had demonstrated that
Hong Kong still played a major role in this regard. But in social and local
political matters, Hong Kong’s autonomy impacted less on developments
on the mainland. As long as the ongoing state of political affairs favored
the appointment of Beijing-sympathetic cliques in power, media opposition
was a matter for local government to handle and did not directly impact
Beijing. However, freedom of the press was curiously enough restricted only
to “local” affairs. As Frank Ching (1998:50) keenly noted, the Hong Kong
media tread more cautiously in news pertaining to China, or, to be more
precise, news and information requiring the cooperation of Chinese agencies
and China-backed companies. Some topics were too sensitive or were seen
as totally taboo, such as the activities of official agencies that fronted for the
Communist Party. As Michael Curtin (1998:288) also noted, the boundar-
ies of media openness and closeness were a function of the fact that the
Hong Kong media was not a local entity but one whose market depended
on expansion into China. As he put it, “this strategy of expansion into the
mainland market thus requires the cooperation of government officials, if
the industry is going to reap the benefits of its popularity.” The principle
of media freedom was thus compromised to satisfy the reality of market

access and control. This reinforced the necessity of self-censorship as well.
In short, business interests have in fact always been intertwined
with politics in ways that influenced at an underlying level support for or
compromising of certain ideological principles (whether it be identity or
democracy). This realization then solidified “the rules of the game.” This
complicit relation of power (and guanxi) is in the end the largest threat to
the emergence of a democratic public sphere. This is the real face of post-
1997 Hong Kong.
Apprehending History Through Its “Effects”
One of the strange surprises of a short visit I made to Hong Kong in

November 1994 during the intense bidding for the 2000 Olympics (which
was eventually won by Sydney, Australia) was not so much the fact that once
“apolitical” Hong Kongers now seemed to be awash in a euphoric patriotic
fervor but rather how all this came about. It surprised me even more that
a politically neutral Hong Kong friend, who was a long-term Australian
resident, was also swept up by the prevailing current of opinion and media
hype to admit as well that Beijing would almost surely win the Olympic
bid. Of course, the intensity of “nationalistic” sentiments had its roots in
a rising and ongoing renaissance of Chinese consciousness that covered the
transitional era, which ranged from a quiet resurgence of interest in lost
historical and intellectual roots to overt expressions of political solidarity.
Yet, one should also not lose track of the fact that this sudden outpour
of nationalist sentiment was as much the product of an inherent Chinese
consciousness that Hong Kongers have always had (even during the colonial
era) as it was the machination of sophisticated media hype. Hong Kong
business interests had the most to gain from a successful bid by Beijing
to hold the Olympics, and it was essentially the same interest that drove
them to seek guanxi alliances with important officials and entrepreneurs in
the PRC. In other words, they were not simply motivated more by profit
motives than nationalistic feelings per se, but more importantly they were
quite able and often willing to manipulate such sentiments (up and down)
purely for the sake of self-interested commercial gain. Hence, the economy’s
new tie to culture.
Thus, it is not really surprising, in retrospect, that the first people
who ardently supported reunification of Hong Kong with China or at least
expressed confidence in the future of a postcolonial Hong Kong were rich
capitalists. At the same time, these same people were most likely to steer
clear away from any overt conflict with Beijing, especially in the face of
democratization movements and campaigns for increased local autonomy.
In this context, unlike the “apolitical” capitalism that was characteristic
of the 1970s, capitalist interests of the postcolonial era may have been
driven by the same purely self-interested profit motives of capitalists found
elsewhere, but in a Hong Kong context specifically it was clear that such
capitalists would knowingly, if not willingly, subordinate democratic ide-
als and manipulate nationalist sentiments in order to protect their own
vested interests, if necessary. This unholy alliance between business and the
new regime was not only designed to be the foundation of the new order.
More importantly, its success depended on suppressing those (democratiz-
ing) forces that represented a challenge to this power relationship.
Quite clearly, the kind of structural transformation that was required
in order to give rise to a democratic public sphere in post-1997 Hong Kong
involved not only the advent of open, rational communication, but more
importantly a challenge to the various forces that had resulted in the insti-
tutional collusion of big business and political bureaucratic interests. The
predominance of commercial interests in government was nothing new to
Hong Kong, given its founding in the history of global trade and the strong
representation of major corporate interests in the colonial government, but
the policy of the SAR government to divide legislative representation accord-
ing to functional constituencies at the expense of direct democracy thus
insured corporate interests a direct and omnipresent role. In the era leading
up to 1997, nationalistic fervor was a useful mode of representation to pro-
mote their own interests as well as to curry favor with counterparts within
the PRC. In the ensuing Asian recession, the mood of societal survivalism
forced the government to prioritize purely economic interests at the expense
of other values but in a way that made identity, among other things, second-
ary concerns. Moreover, not unlike the market sensibilities that had forced
the media to mute its criticism when transcending local boundaries, the
expansion of Hong Kong corporate interests into China that had co-opted
them into toeing the line in Hong Kong also showed that the domain of
the public sphere had effectively transcended a local Hong Kong context.
Despite its fictional autonomy (under the one-country, two-system scheme),
the reality of its post-1997 existence thus thrust Hong Kong society into
a mutually dependent economic and political relationship with the PRC.
The Hong Kong media (and film industry) now had to expand its market
into the PRC just to survive locally, and Hong Kong corporate interests
viewed control of the PRC market in turn as a larger priority than the local
Hong Kong one. In short, the reality of this larger sphere of economic and
political dependence was eventually the bottom line that in turn forced
compromises made at a local level. In the final analysis, who cared about
identity, as long as everyone could make ends meet and got what he or she
sought, despite the various facades?
At one level, the appearance of official autonomy did not prevent
Beijing from trying to impose laws to repress acts of dissent or seditious
behavior. Pro-democracy forces could also counter by rallying in the streets,
especially if they were stifled in efforts to make changes in the system, but
strategies of collusion have inculcated a new mode of dependency relations.
To call this newly evolving system of social relations guanxi capital-
ism would be overly simplistic. As a mode of capitalism, it was driven by
a utilitarian logic that understands the dominant power of the market in
controlling the flow of capital. China is consciously aware that it was at the
center of an expanding global market, both in terms of outsource produc-
tion for the developed nations and the consumption of global products,
and this awareness has in turn allowed it to use its pivotal role to control
people’s access to desired resources or benefits of the system by making people
conform to the rules of the game in all other respects. Thus, the media
has learned that it is free to print whatever it pleases in matters pertaining
to Hong Kong (and, hence, is autonomous), but that in matters involving
China or cooperation with Chinese agencies it is forced accordingly to toe the
proper ideological line as one’s price of admission. Increasingly, they toe the
line, especially when they discover that the economic survival of their own
enterprise is dependent on expansion into the China market. The willingness
of Western global media, such as STAR-TV, to censor BBC news and other
programs, when they comment unfavorably on China, as a condition of their
continued access, demonstrates that it was not just a local policy specific to
Hong Kong. Taiwanese businesspeople, entertainers, and professionals of all
sorts have learned to mute any expressions of or sympathy for Taiwanese
independence so as not to jeopardize their own prospects for cashing in
on the lucrative China market, especially when it has become obvious that
this market is much richer than their own. PRC authorities also revoked a
tourist visa to Hong Kong for Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou for making politi-
cally incorrect remarks. Such sanctions seem superficial and frivolous, but
they underscore the main point that, while the market is in principle open,
people are free to make money, and there is no attempt by the government
to control the redistribution of income, as has been the case of old socialist
economies, access to the market is in practice a privilege that can be politi-
cally controlled, if deemed desirable or necessary. Hence, the economy’s new
tie to political ideology. To say the least, it is clearly antidemocratic as well.
More fundamentally, the subjective positioning behind this new capi-
talism is hardly the kind one would expect from a poor Third World nation.
contrast sharply, on the other hand, with the way Europeans have attributed
the sociopolitical unity of China to its dynastic lineage. Ethnically rooted
national definitions of Chineseness are modern conceptions, which have a
different kind of historicity.
The points made above about native constructions of Chinese culture
and Chineseness have a seminal bearing on contemporary reality. Postwar
Taiwan—that is to say, the Republic of China as transplanted to Taiwan at
the conclusion of World War II, following Taiwan’s retrocession by Japan
back to China after a fifty-year interregnum—is an interesting example of
the crisis of culture in a Chinese context. As part of the KMT’s effort to
continue the legacy of the Republic in their retreat from the mainland and
in the process to nationalize Taiwan, the government embarked on a pro-
gram to resuscitate “traditional Chinese culture.” “Tradition” in this sense
represented a defense of political ideology (as opposed to “socialism”) but
more importantly by virtue of its defense of culture. The crisis of culture
involved first of all the KMT’s attempt to nationalize Chinese culture (by
making the latter a metaphor or allegory of that imagined community called
the nation-state) where no such culture (of the nation) really existed. By
invoking “tradition,” they appeared to resuscitate elements of the past, but
they were clearly inventing tradition (by virtue of their selectivity) in ways
that did not differ from “the invention of tradition” found elsewhere.12 The
ways in which culture was framed (as ideology), then strategically deployed
(in practice), reflected the distinctiveness of the Taiwan experience. The crisis
of traditional Chinese culture in contemporary Taiwan, not unlike the phe-
nomenon of Orientalism and the invention of tradition, was really a crisis
of modernity. In the case of Taiwan, I argue that this crisis of modernity
was precipitated by the need for the state to establish new foundations
of spiritual consciousness, ideological rationality, and moral behavior that
could conform to the dictates of the modern polity or nation-state, in ways
that primordial notions of Chineseness, strictly speaking, could not. This
need to forge a new hegemony ultimately prompted these (mystifying, hence
unnatural) discourses on culture.
The institution of nationhood necessitated novel forms of Chineseness
in many respects. Before the 1911 Nationalist Revolution, which resulted in
the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic, the
notion of society as a territorially distinct, politically bounded and ethnically
solidary community did not exist. Many terms were borrowed from Japanese
(Han & Li 1984). Up until the mid-nineteenth century, it was unnatural for
Chinese to call other ethnic groups “ethnic groups,” just barbarians. Only
during the early Republican era did intellectuals associate zhonghua minzu
(Chinese as ethnic group) with zhongguo ren (citizens of China), which tied
of the state, structurations of modernity, and constructions of identity. His

observations about cultural and social objectification that he argued were
seminal to British colonial rule in India has proved to be broadly endemic
to diverse forms of modern govern-“mentality” throughout the world. More
than just castes of mind or imagined communities in the making, identities
have always been cultural fictions predicated on the assumption of real roots
and the need to reaffirm them. The tendency to objectify “ethnic” iden-
tity in particular has been in effect symptomatic of attempts to define the
illusory nature and form of such an ethnos, but it is perhaps characteristic
of society’s need to inculcate the ethos of its own modernity, whether it is
encoded in the rule of law, civilizing imperatives, moral regulation, person-
hood or the etiquette of everyday interaction. Such changing discourses of
identity supplement (rather than conflict with) the extraordinary extent to
which state apparatuses have labored to compel people into “becoming their
ID.” Taken as an entire cartography of power, they freeze us, as Corrigan
and Sayer (1985:211) phrased it, through these programs of power, “into
mythic statuses of sedimented language.” Why identify? I personally do not
believe that it is necessary to identify with anything. Yet, people everywhere
go to great lengths to prove that identities are real, even worth dying for.
If identity, like Cohn’s colonial impositions of caste and social struc-
ture, are fictions or inventions, then history must be seen as the ongoing
institutional and political embodiment of fiction as fact and the constant
interaction of discourse and practice. Fictions can run deep, and it is in the
process of institutionalization that its political violence becomes “normal-
ized.” Hong Kong Colonial Secretary of State, Philip Haddon-Cave, joked
in 1985 (Birch 1991:1):
When Sir John Bremridge [the Finance Minister] came to see

me about the [Chinese] banks he was in a rage.
“I’ve told them,” he spluttered, “they’ve got to toe the line,

otherwise . . . otherwise, we’ll nationalise them!”
“Oh, no Sir John,” I said, “you can’t say ‘nationalise’—we’re

not a nation.”
“Well, we’re a colony, aren’t we?” he said, “so we’ll colonise them!”
“Oh no, Sir John,” I explained, “you can’t say that, we never
refer to Hong Kong as a ‘colony’ these days.”
“Well then,” he replied, “what are we called now?”

“Well,” I explained, “these days we call ourselves a ‘territory.’ ”
“Right then,” said Sir John, “we’ll terrorise them!”
Statements about what is or what is supposed to be, when Hong Kong

was literally a colony, should raise similar questions about what post-1997
Hong Kong is or is supposed to be after the end of colonialism. Names are
only part of the story, but they are an important preamble to how people
construct their identities, and then in turn tie them into the practices and
politics of a deeper struggle to define and regulate a particular ethos of life
or mode of survival.
Underlying these complex interactions between culture and politics,
facts and fictions, and strategic intents of agents located within this geometry
of power, colonialism can be regarded here above all as a regime of political
practice that depends to some extent on the efficacy of modernity as culture.
The dynamics of this power geometry requires a critical epistemology that
can transcend the rhetoric of colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and the
ends of history.
Part Three
The Reclamation of National Destiny

On the Unbearable Heaviness of Identity
Because China is so vast, its successes can be attributed to whatever

your pet cause is. Do you oppose free markets and privatization, like
John Ross, former economic policy adviser for the city of London?
Then China’s success is because of the role of the state. Do you favor
free markets, like the libertarian Cato Institute? Then China’s success
is because of its opening up. Are you an environmentalist? China is
working on huge green-energy projects. Are you an energy lobbyist?
China’s building gigantic pipeline projects. Are you an enthusiast for
the Protestant work ethic, like historian Niall Ferguson, who describes
it as one of his “killer apps” for civilizations? Then credit China’s manu-
facturing boom to its 40 million Protestants—even though they’re less
than 5 percent of its 1.3 billion people.
—James Palmer, Washington Post Opinion
Prologue
China claims to be the longest continuous civilization in the world. Its aura
of legitimacy and destiny is to a large extent invested in the mandate of an
unbroken history. In light of this kind of tradition, or the perception of it,
Chinese unsurprisingly tend to think that it is not possible to understand
its culture and society without reference to its civilization as a whole or the
weight of its influence up to the present. Equally unsurprisingly, courses on
Chinese culture and civilization are taught precisely in this way. The same
sense of Sinocentrism is also the basis of which we tend to view Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and other Chinese communities, that is, primarily in reference
to that shared legacy or as a link/break to/with a common lineage.
Continuity with a shared legacy would be incompatible with an
approach that views the history of an ongoing present as a function of
141
distinctive epistemic or geopolitical moments. On the contrary, there is no

reason why one’s embeddedness to an ongoing globalized context might
not serve as a more appropriate frame for discrete localizing experiences.
If colonial rule in Hong Kong can be seen as a juncture for situating the
course of its latter formation, parallel to other frames, one can also view
the formative experiences of the PRC and ROC as a primary function of
its opposition as modern nation-states in a Cold War setting. Without
denying their common legacy, one could question to what extent culture
as shared substance, even if it happens to be represented as tradition, serves
in fact as a continuity or extension, instead of as a dependent factor within
a discrete formative frame. In postwar Taiwan, the revival of Confucian
tradition was at best an invention of tradition that serviced an emerging
cultural nationalism. Similar things can be said about culture in the PRC’s
formative regimes.
Much can be said about the evolution of the PRC from the Mao-
ist era to its subsequent transition under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping and
beyond. Perhaps the single most dominant force within this transition was
not the emergence of market capitalism itself but the collusion of govern-
ment policy and oligarchic entrepreneurial interests to consolidate domina-
tion by a single-Party state, reinforced at a popular level by a resurgent
cultural nationalism. National identity has in effect played a legitimating
role in filling the void created by the demise of socialist-class values.
Chapter 7
From the Ashes of Socialist Humanism

The Myth of Guanxi Exceptionalism in the PRC
The publication of Mayfair Yang’s (1994) book on guanxi, or what she calls
“the art of social relationships in China,” can be viewed as a landmark study
of a changing PRC. If anything, it sparked an awareness of an increasingly
omnipresent social phenomenon in China, which in turn created a burgeon-
ing social scientific literature on it. A conference in March 2015 at UC
Berkeley on The Field of Guanxi Studies shows that both the phenomenon
as well as attention devoted to it has grown rapidly in recent years, which
has also spawned comparison with similar phenomena elsewhere. Without
a doubt, guanxi, especially in combination with corruption, has prolifer-
ated with the opening up of a market economy in the post-Deng era, but
despite the seemingly unique attributes of the term, there is little to suggest
that the kind of social relationship invoked by it is in actuality a distinc-
tively Chinese phenomenon and more to indicate that it is the product of
institutional incongruences that are common to many, if not most, societ-
ies. The problematic of guanxi has in fact a long history in the sinological
literature in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese business culture.
More importantly, as part of a cultural complex, I argue that guanxi is only
one of three seminal concepts in a Chinese power theory of culture, not
even the most important one of them. This chapter is in essence a thick
description of that cultural complex. On the basis of this interpretation, one
can meaningfully infer on the problematic of guanxi in the PRC today as
a crisis rooted along institutional fault lines, which in turn reflects directly
on capitalism with “Chinese” characteristics.
This is a revised adaptation of an essay published in 2002 as “From Culture to Power (and
Back): The Many ‘Faces’ of Mianzi (face), Guanxi (connection), and Renqing (rapport),”
Suomen Antropologi 27(4):19‒37.
143
From Mianzi to Guanxi to Renqing :

Outlines of a Power Theory of Culture
In his treatise on “the native’s point of view,” Geertz (1974) argued that
the uniqueness of social experience and organization resides ultimately in
our understanding of its primordial constitution in culture and language.1
In this regard, I argue that the literature on mianzi (“face”), guanxi (“rela-
tionship”), and renqing (“rapport”), which has been the object of heated
debate by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists of Chinese society,
represents an ideal case in point for bringing to the fore our understanding
of cultural meaning within the primary context of practice and ritual behav-
ior. Sinological experts have tended to view the meaning and operation of
the above concepts as characteristic of behaviors and institutions unique to
China, thus unwittingly highlighting the marked or distinctive features of
culture, when it is in fact the institutional and perceived practices of power
interaction that situate cultural meaning that are unique. The semantic
or epistemological specificity encoded in such terms presumably provides
the key for understanding the uniqueness of experience in any particular
society. What is interesting about the three terms discussed here is that, to
any native Chinese speaker, they are easy enough to define and use. More
importantly, the sociological significance that resonates from such notions
as public face, moral rapport, and social networks should be familiar to
many other societies as well. But a brief look at this literature will show
that there is much more than meets the eye, even in semantic terms. The
fact that these terms routinely appear italicized in scholarly writings on
China reiterates a cultural specificity that is difficult to translate. The practi-
cal difficulty in interpreting these notions, on the other hand, is that they
constantly overlap in usage and that they can all invoke each other at some
more abstract level. Contrary to Geertz, I also argue that it is impossible to
explain the nature and process of social relations invoked by these concepts
simply on the basis of their symbolic negotiation as primordial meanings.
The systematic interrelations of social or institutional-qua-political practice
offer instead a more useful framework of analysis that not only explains
possible permutations of meaning in any concept, but also determines why
certain concepts are relevant for invoking specific kinds of behavior in a
given context.
There has been most recently, especially from contemporary work done
in the People’s Republic of China, a virtual explosion of writings focus-
ing on guanxi. In actuality, it is probably more accurate to say that, over
the past few decades, there has been increasing attention devoted to the
phenomena of mianzi, guanxi, and renqing in the social science literature
From the Ashes of Socialist Humanism 145
that has broadly encompassed Chinese society in general but has witnessed
different disciplinary perspectives grappling with different combinations of
issues. The evolution of this literature as a whole is noteworthy in the sense
that it reflects different problematics that have in turn shed increasingly
clearer light on the subtle semantic relationships between these concepts.
However, in taking stock of many of the issues therein, I would argue that
we are perhaps looking at something larger than the sum of its component
parts. In synthesizing different disciplinary perspectives on the matter, it is
important to understand the nuances between these concepts as a further
function of how we understand their possible systematic interaction in the
context of practice. However contrary to prevailing views in the literature,
I submit that our ongoing failure to recognize the salience of contexts of
practice (driven by intentionality and power) in determining meaning and
engendering social relationships based on these concepts has in turn led us to
underestimate the dynamics of subjective perception in dyadic interaction. I
conclude that such a sophisticated framework of pragmatic meaning, more
than “webs of significance,” can explain the problematic crisis of guanxi in
the PRC today.
At first glance, the semantics of the three concepts seem to be some-
what unambiguous and unproblematic. Mianzi literally means “face” (as in
saving or losing . . .), renqing means “human emotion” or moral rapport,
and guanxi means “relationship” or connection (i.e., in the sense of network
connections).2 To the average native Chinese speaker, it is easy for one to
spell out what these terms mean literally and recognize which terms should
be used in which contexts of speech. Their literal meaning differs little from
their equivalent English counterparts. At the same time, it seems that at
a deeper level of comprehension each term involves specific cultural rules
about the conduct of social behavior, exchange, and etiquette. In other
words, at one level, the field of linguistic usage invoked by these terms
seems to be clearly demarcated, but at the same time the scope of social
behavior, exchanges, and etiquette that engender these notions in fact over-
laps considerably. That is to say, if one turns the question around and asks
instead, which of the various kinds of behaviors, exchanges, and etiquette
are relevant to face, moral rapport, and social connectedness, respectively?,
one will discover that these concepts are not easy to distinguish. Similarly,
if one probes the average Chinese speaker beyond the usual conventions
of speech and practice by delving precisely into the cultural specificity,
social rationality, and ethical values underlying these concepts, he or she
not surprisingly gets lost. In posing the question in this manner, I do not
mean to be evasive but to suggest instead that, from the recent literature on
mianzi, renqing, and guanxi, one can clearly see that each of these terms is
a permutation of a larger complex of cultural rules. The question then is,

how can one understand this larger complex, and how does it invoke the
appropriate conduct of behavior in different contexts of social practice? In
order to answer this question, I think it is necessary first to look at each
of these concepts in their respective discourses of analysis then show how,
despite what one sees on the surface, everyone has been pointing to the
same interrelated nature of culture and power in Chinese society.
The Chinese concept of face (mianzi) has long been an object of
scrutiny by sinologists. As if to emphasize that Chinese notions of face
are anything but superficial, writers usually begin by asserting that there is
more than meets the eye. Thus, Lu Xun once wrote, “what is this thing
called face? It is very well if you don’t stop to think, but the more you
think about it, the more confused you grow.” Similarly, Lin Yutang argued
that face was impossible to define. Being “abstract and intangible, yet it
is the most delicate standard by which Chinese intercourse is regulated.”3
Perhaps contrary to its literal reference to egoism, Hu Hsien-chin (1944:45)
stressed the socially normative aspect of face. It “represents the confidence
of society in the integrity of ego’s moral character, the loss of which makes
it impossible for him or her to function properly within the community.”
In other words, face is a prestige or reputation achieved through success
and its display; it is the projection and maintenance of a public image.
The linguistic permutations of the two Chinese terms for face (mianzi and
lian), both literal and figurative, are endless, but it is clear that the focus of
attention is on the processes of saving and losing face and the way that they
invoke underlying moral or ethical codes of behavior. Thus, face is, crudely
speaking, less psychological than sociological in function, and there have
been tendencies by some to overemphasize the status maintenance aspect
of face, especially given the hierarchical nature of Chinese society, such as
when Stover (1962:375) noted, “face is the social ideology which legitimizes
status rectitude.” At other times, subsequent commentators point to what
Erving Goffman would have called the social interactionist dimension of
“face-works.” David Ho, a social psychologist, has taken the discourse on
Chinese notions of face a step further by arguing that face is not simply a
personality variable, as though a pure attribute of individual behavior, nor is
it simply a status maintenance mechanism, as though people are expected to
conform to ascribed or invariable social standards. There is always in essence
an intertwined relationship between these two aspects of face in the same
way that shame is both an attribute of individual behavior and the product
of moral or public values.4 Ho then negotiates between the individual and
social by emphasizing the reciprocity of social expectations (bao in Yang
Lien-sheng’s [1957] terms), or what Ho perceives to be the binding aspect
of social control. There is the appearance of subjective volition, but this is

really circumscribed in or constrained by social expectation. This is the rea-
son why there is generally more concern with losing face than gaining face.
Psychologists in Hong Kong and Taiwan have devoted much attention
to discussions of face. They note, first, that like the Confucian concept of
li (ritual propriety), face has two mutually intertwined aspects, a ritual-
symbolic one that internalizes ethical or moral norms and an external one
that conforms to the expectations of social status and political authority. But,
as if to counter the excessive emphasis placed on social factors that seem to
force the individual to conform to the expectations of public performance,
psychologists have tended to stress the interpersonal dependence that allows
for the individuality of others in society to express their public face. In other
words, part of the interpersonal performance of face-works is the need to
give other people face, namely by suppressing one’s own egoism. Or as Zhu
Ruiling (1988:243) has neatly phrased this, “the essential feature of mianzi
is its interdependent nature; it functions by responding to intercourse with
others or a public audience. In this process of mutual interaction, there is
no such thing as an absolute face (as though fixed and predetermined); the
owner of that face is not just a social role player.”5
The focus on social interaction explains why psychologists have tended
to view face ultimately in terms of a kind of egocentric, decision-making
model of behavior, one that effectively gives primary weight to individual
selectivity and strategic control. Thus, it should come as little surprise
that, when Hwang Kwang-kuo (1985, 1987) interprets face and favor as
“the Chinese power game,” he is implicitly intersecting with the writing
of scholars studying similar related concepts of Chinese social behavior,
notably guanxi and renqing. For Hwang, social behavior can be reduced to
a dyadic interaction. In an actual interaction, which may involve two or
more people, each party holds the power of allocating some kind of social
resource that may satisfy the needs of the other, while each dyad expects
the other to distribute resources under his or her control in a way that is
favorable to the allocator. The individual’s reason for employing this power
to influence other people lies in the desire to obtain social resources con-
trolled by reciprocating others. Likewise, others consent to ego’s influences,
because the allocator can foresee that this strategy will in turn bring a certain
reward or help in evading some kind of punishment. In this model, Hwang
not only deals with face, which is a superficial aspect of this interaction,
but more significantly tries to incorporate related notions of guanxi and
renqing within the total picture of social relations. He recognizes that this
interaction can be driven either by (1) expressive or socially altruistic ties;
(2) instrumental or utilitarian-individualistic ties; as well as what he terms
(3) mixed ties, controlled by renqing or the need to maintain social rap-
port.6 What is noteworthy about renqing here is that it is ambivalent; that is
to say, it can cut both ways. Hwang understands guanxi in this model in its
broad denotation as a moral desire to establish and maintain ties or social
connections with others. Without these implicit relationships, there can be
no dyadic interaction to speak of. One can perhaps rephrase Hwang’s model
as follows: face-work is an important way of showing off one’s power. As
a strategy for manipulating and allocating resources to one’s own benefit,
it is basically a power game played out in Chinese cultural rules. Although
he does not say so, the focal element driving the system at an underlying
or abstract level is the dilemma of renqing. Although he is able to define
renqing in terms of its implicit moral sentiment or need to maintain favors
in ongoing, reciprocal relationships, his dilemma of renqing is something
that is calculated ultimately in terms of its cost-benefits from an egocentric,
decision-making perspective. There is little consideration by Hwang of the
concrete, sociological factors that influence renqing or in contrast to other
sociopolitical values. We get instead the ego making rational sense of the
world around him on the periphery.
Psychological models of this sort have their utility, but I have delib-
erately exaggerated their methodological individualism to suggest also that
these models lack much that requires qualification too. Without doubt,
certain important trends in this discussion of face carry over in actuality to
a discussion of other related concepts in a constructive way. First of all, face
has aptly highlighted the importance of reciprocity as a seminal aspect of
Chinese social relationships, at least vis-à-vis modern individualism. Second,
Hwang has introduced the existence of power as a primary force that drives
the process of reciprocity. Third, Hwang sees all of the above as embedded
at a more abstract level in renqing or the need to maintain moral rapport.
These three themes pervade the literature on guanxi as well, but I think it
is necessary to rephrase the present discussion and ask at this point, what
are the differences between face and guanxi in terms of renqing, or what
are their effects on renqing, and how does one define renqing, not so much
in terms of semantic or cultural substance but rather in the context of
practice or as a negotiation of competing values and institutional forces?
As a footnote to the literature on face, one should mention that Hwang,
King (1988, 1991) and others emphasize that these notions are everyday
values that ultimately owe their ideological substance and social legitimacy
to Confucianism and other jewels of civilizational thought. Needless to say,
such concepts are rooted in intellectual tradition and embedded in culture,
but in my opinion their inherent relationship to social exchange, the prac-
tice of power and embeddedness in moral rapport invoke more important
theoretical issues that have never been posed in the literature. A power
theory of culture opens up an even larger Pandora’s box.
Guanxi as Phenomenon versus Guanxi as Problematic
First, one must point out that the concept of guanxi being invoked in the
literature is less the broader notion of “relationship” or network ties per se
than the more instrumental or utilitarian denotations of guanxi, in the sense
of relying on personal connections.7 Mianzi and guanxi do not contrast
directly, but it is useful to note that, as mechanisms that cultivate implicit
social bonds in order to gain or wield power, they both have significant
superficial differences. Guanxi has negative connotations that one does not
find in mianzi. Because face is largely a response to social expectation,
having too much face is not necessarily a bad thing. There are some who
would literally “die to obtain face” (siyao mianzi), but excessive egotism in
this regard is not necessarily the same as selfishness. On the other hand,
the connotation of gaining connections by pulling strings suggests a kind of
back-door facade that is anything but public or openly cultivated (as a self-
interested act). The open denial of self-interest, even though people cultivate
guanxi precisely for instrumental reasons makes it by nature a private rather
than public act. In other words, it is not important whether the gift-giving
and other forms of amicable exchange that are employed often to cultivate
guanxi relationships are openly seen or practiced; it is more important that
neither of these parties publicly recognize them as deliberate acts of favor
that mask an instrumental intent. This back-door dimension (which face
does not have) also implies that guanxi is really a tie that is always some-
thing other than what is desirable or relevant in a given context of speech
or practice. That is to say, kinsmen have kin relationships (qinshu guanxi),
but in a context that requires display of kin solidarity, saying that one is
“pulling on a connection” (la guanxi) is somewhat nonsensical. On the
contrary, pulling on my kin connections to get my friend a job means that
I do not have the required criteria or resource to do this in the proper con-
text of employment, and that is what guanxi is for. Network building may
be a desirable feature of social relationships everywhere, but the discursive
focus on guanxi in the social scientific literature is largely or solely based
on the pejorative aspect of personal connection in the context of a given
institutional framework defined normatively by other sociological criteria.
There has been a long-established cottage industry of scholars study-
ing Chinese business organizations, focusing on the predominance of family
ties.8 The ubiquitous usage of the term guanxi to depict these relationships
in its personal, connective sense is not inaccurate here, but it highlights

in effect the cultural uniqueness of the “Chinese” enterprise in contrast to
economic organizations that are normatively defined by other econometric or
sociological criteria. A paradigmatic example of the way guanxi has become
a framework for explaining Chinese social institutions and behavior comes
from the political science literature. Bruce Jacobs, in his study of Taiwan
local politics, was perhaps the first person to make this term fashionable.
Jacobs was not trying to inject a pejorative view of Taiwanese politics, but
his characterization of these particularistic ties as guanxi marked the cultural
uniqueness of the phenomenon vis-à-vis his own (structural-functionalist)
expectations of political behavior.9
Related to and feeding on the initial impetus that has led one to
focus on guanxi as a culturally specific and pervasive phenomenon in Chi-
nese society is the recent explosion of writing on the contemporary PRC
that has viewed guanxi as a phenomenon intrinsic to or deeply rooted in
the fabric of social and political life there. Andrew Walder’s (1983) classic
study of work and authority in post-Maoist mainland China is clearly an
early and systematic analysis of the way guanxi has tended to work in the
institutional setting of a workplace. In the workplace, guanxi aptly repre-
sents what Walder calls “private strategies,” as opposed to public strategies
of the official reward system. He remarked that Chinese employees tended
to perceive the formal hierarchy of offices as a hollow shell, overlaid with
networks of guanxi and feelings of renqing that determined the actual opera-
tion of the organization as well as the way in which social interaction was
conducted, how decisions were made, if not also who got what. A worker
stated, “this kind of thing, using human sentiments (renqing), is common.
It is a form of ‘going through the back door’ (zou hou men). This sort of
practice influences everything, including raises, bonuses, and promotions.”10
While Walder does not assert that guanxi wholly dominates the workplace,
he pits private cultivation of guanxi against what he calls biaoxian, literally
performance. Work performance here can concretely mean many things,
ranging from actual work achievement to performance as a kind of acting
or going through the motions. The reason Walder chose to preserve the
Chinese term rather than to gloss it in English has little to do with the
semantics of the word, whose meaning is unambiguous. The uniqueness of
biaoxian in the Chinese context has to do with the fact that the system
of rewards and punishments that epitomizes the work regime is based not
only on objective merit but more often on “subjective” factors such as work
attitude, political correctness, going through the motions, and displaying the
proper deference to authority. In sum, being rexin (fervent) in one’s work
are expressions of renqing that make the system run.
However, what I find particularly noteworthy in Walder’s description

is that biaoxian is not all that dissimilar from “face.” In a work context,
one’s face, from the perspective of the system, is in short the product of
one’s biaoxian in all the above senses, and it is important to give each other
face. But the point that I wish to make ultimately is this: in any context
of practice, face and guanxi operate in distinct but parallel niches; what
ties them together is that they are simply different strategies for cultivating
rapport (renqing). What determines how important renqing is or what area
it should be applied to has nothing to do with the intrinsic meaning of the
terms and has more to do with the definition of that underlying context
of practice. While I think that the importance of guanxi is prevalent in all
Chinese societies, I also think that the heavy attention paid to guanxi in
studies of PRC society in particular is warranted as well. That is to say,
there is something peculiar about the nature of the guanxi phenomenon in
PRC society that explains why it has attracted so much attention there and
relatively less discursive attention in Taiwan or Hong Kong, by contrast.
The question, then, is what? Walder has already hinted that the flexibility of
work reward systems provides fertile institutional ground for the growth of
informal guanxi ties, in addition to the fact that the work regime in PRC, at
least vis-à-vis other societies, is highly dependent on the general maintenance
of tight interpersonal ties. But rather than characterizing the system as being
“neo-traditional,” in the sense of having constructed socialist institutions on
the backbone of traditional (hierarchically ascribed) social relationships, I
tend to see the growing prevalence of the guanxi phenomenon in the PRC
as a by-product of those changing regimes themselves.
At this point, one cannot overlook the fact that the three most impor-
tant ethnographies to appear in recent studies of PRC society happen to be
on guanxi. I refer especially to works by Mayfair Yang (1994), Yan Yunxiang
(1996a), and Andrew Kipnis (1997). There are many merits to Yang’s book,
but the single most significant factor in my opinion has to do with the line
of analysis that begins with making sense of the proliferation of a complex
discourse called guanxixue (“guanxiology”), then links the production of this
discourse to the intricate micropractices of guanxi found in her case study,
and finally juxtaposes the ritual construction of this guanxi subjectivity
against the institutional practices of the Maoist and post-Maoist state. As
Yang (1994:286) articulates it, “guanxi subjectivity does not oppose the
state directly, but forges a multiplicity of links through and across state
segments.”11 Juxtaposed against Walder’s analysis of the work regime, her
analysis of the pragmatic etiquette and strategies of guanxi offers a much
more fertile ground for explaining the complex relationship between the
official regime of institutional practice and the space of personal power
games encompassed by guanxi. Viewed in this light, I see the emergence of

guanxi less as neotraditional in Walder’s terms and more as radically reap-
propriating. This radical transition has less to do with the substantive nature
of guanxi, which has, of course, deep roots in Chinese social relations, than
with the radical changes at the level of macro-institutional values and prac-
tices after the Maoist era that enabled guanxi to take on a life of its own
as an acceptable tactic of survival or desirable mode of instrumental gain.12
On the twentieth anniversary of Ezra Vogel’s (1965) “From Friendship to
Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in Communist China,”
Thomas Gold (1985) remarked on the radical changes that emerged after
the Cultural Revolution in an essay appropriately titled “After Comrade-
ship.” Of course, the changes described there did not simply involve changes
in personal relations per se but encompassed more precisely a complex
series of institutional changes in the everyday regime of life that was the
consequence at a macrosocial level of engagement between the state’s redis-
tributive economy and commodity capitalism. Gold singled out from this
entire social complex as the predominant characteristic of personal relations
in PRC the rise of instrumental ties in the form of guanxi, but somewhat
disappointingly, like Walder, he concluded that these changes revealed the
staying power of a revived traditionalism.13 As Gold (1985:674) explained
it in cross-cultural perspective, “traveling in Chinese societies with diverse
economic and political systems, such as the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong
and Singapore, the striking thing is not the difference but the similarity of
personal interaction despite other variances.”
His empirical observations may be correct, but theoretically he misses
the point totally. Guanxi relations are ubiquitous in Chinese-speaking societ-
ies, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, thus it is more pertinent
to ask, why has the problematic of guanxi become so acute in present-day
PRC in a way that is totally absent in these other “Chinese” societies?14 In
other words, especially given the ubiquitous existence of the phenomenon
everywhere, the absence of this unusual discourse of guanxixue is not a
trivial matter. If guanxi (in the sense of personal connection) is a dirty
word in common parlance, it is an even dirtier word in light of the kind of
sociopolitical and value changes that these other societies are undergoing.15
In Taiwan, which claims to be the most “traditional,” guanxi prolifer-
ates in the same institutional cracks that Walder observed was part of the
flexible system of rewards in a work regime. This is a general rule that
explains the proliferation of guanxi in a Chinese cultural context. Especially
in a society that emphasizes the importance of Confucian benevolence and
morality, what outsiders might call guanxi, Chinese in Taiwan would just
call renqing.16 Even in a professional context, the rapport runs deep, but
these relationships can still be and are very often a power game. In Tai-
wan, people prefer generally not to do things according to hard-and-fast

rules, because official bureaucracy tends to be inflexible and impersonal.
Imperfections in the system can be smoothed over by personal negotiation,
but this “humane” intervention also has a dark side.17 When one says, “I
do you a favor,” and “you do me a favor,” it makes everything prone to
manipulation. More importantly, the very insinuation that these relations
are actually guanxi runs counter not only to traditional ethics but also the
ethics of modern society. With increasing emphasis on professionalization,
especially in an evolving service economy, relying on guanxi connections in
routine life has likewise been regarded unfavorably, which may differ from
the high life of business and politics.
In quintessentially modernizing Hong Kong and Singapore, renqing in
actuality still runs deep in many quarters, but it has been also appropriated
by the norms of modernity, or at least one of its variants, namely British
legalism. The existence of the guanxi phenomenon (as connection) here is
in turn no different from that found elsewhere in the Chinese world, which
demonstrates that such kinds of relationships are important everywhere.
However, whether such behavior is termed guanxi or renqing is in fact an
important consideration, since it reflects the kind of normative value that
predicates the context of social practice and underlies the strategic choices
that makes such behavior appropriate or not. One person’s guanxi may be
another’s renqing, but its meaning is hardly a function of the acts themselves.
In comparing the broad range of Chinese “societies,” I argue instead
that the kinds of institutional and other changes that have contributed to
a proliferation of guanxi relations as a way of life in PRC contrast with
different institutional trends taking place in other Chinese societies and
that the latter can explain the absence of a guanxi problematic there. As a
corollary, I think perception plays an important role here too. In the strict
sense, guanxi is a value judgment. Only when renqing becomes perceived as
being negative or inappropriate is it termed guanxi. I find guanxi easier to
interpret than renqing. I do not know of any actual guanxi tie that is not at
the same time an attempt to cultivate renqing, no matter how instrumental
its intent. It is harder, on the other hand, to determine when renqing is in
fact an attempt to cultivate guanxi (instrumentally) or just a friendly act,
since it is a value judgment.
Culture as Meaning Versus Culture as Practice
Returning to the PRC literature, due to the acute problematic of guanxi,

I sense a certain danger toward guanxi overdetermination. I have serious
reservations about Yang’s dualism of guanxi and renqing as urban/rural or
even male/female phenomena, partly because it is a value judgment, as

noted above, but I sense an even greater danger of viewing everything as a
function of guanxi. Yan’s (1996a) work is an attempt to show that guanxi
is a ubiquitous aspect of rural life, among other things. The pervasive-
ness of guanxi in diverse aspects of local social life there is indisputable.
Yan focuses to a larger extent than Yang on exchange, which is indeed a
clear and significant expression of guanxi or renqing relationships. There are
some differences in the approaches adopted by Yan and Yang with regard
to exchange theory, but there is especially in Yan’s case a danger of read-
ing social reciprocity and gift giving solely through the eyes of guanxi. The
intensity and complexity of gift giving in his village case studies are indisput-
able. As one reads his monograph, one gets the impression that gift giving
is a systematic, widespread social practice that is driven at an interpersonal
level by guanxi networks and at an ethico-moral level by abstract notions
of renqing. But in a later paper, Yan (1996b) terms gift exchange as the
“culture” of guanxi, which appears to reiterate the sociological functions of
the latter. Kipnis (1996:301) is even more to the point in characterizing gift
giving as a “language” for “managing” guanxi. As he puts it, “the first point
that could be made is that the closer the guanxi the bigger the gift. Close
relatives tended to give more than friends, and those who wished to claim a
close friendship gave more than those who didn’t.” It is important to point
out that, when Kipnis says “the closer the guanxi the bigger the gift,” he
is referring to guanxi in its general sense as “relationship.” Chinese have a
more precise term for “closeness,” namely qin. Close relations are generally
expected to give proportionately more. This is straightforward customary
practice in almost all other societies as well. Especially on ritual occasions
such as weddings and funerals, it is necessary to know what the norm is in
relation to one’s closeness and other considerations, such as relative wealth
or personal affinity. Giving beyond the scope of customary norm will raise
suspicions about instrumental intent, thus when Kipnis says, “those who
wished to claim a close friendship gave more than those who didn’t,” this
is really the realm of guanxi in the strict sense alluded to in the literature.
In the contemporary PRC, the pervasiveness of guanxi as a tactic of social
relations that straddles all walks of life seems to have taken on a life of
its own to a point where we see everything in terms of guanxi. In other
parts of the Chinese-speaking world, the same acts of gift reciprocity are
just called custom or the norm, not guanxi. Guanxi is not the custom. By
its very instrumental intent, guanxi represents an attempt to cultivate favor
beyond the scope of existing customary and other social ties; this aberrational
strategy and its widespread acceptability is the product of peculiar institu-
tional changes in PRC. Gift giving is an obvious manifestation of guanxi,
but too much attention has been devoted to using exchange as a way of
magnifying guanxi, when in fact gift giving is a key constituent of many
aspects of Chinese social life. Even given our more immediate concerns, I
think that it is more difficult to distinguish when gift giving is an expres-
sion of renqing, an act of guanxi or a bribe.18 That which is being circulated
here is not just things, but the perception of things.19 The efficacy of the
gift as pure renqing is dependent on the degree to which one recognizes
or is willing to admit the instrumental nature of the act. The ability to
recognize it as an altruistic or instrumental act is a significant one, because
they can ultimately distinguish between different kinds of social relations.
Anyone who has lined up to visit a doctor in China will know that one
way of getting to the head of the line is to grease his palms with a carton
of cigarettes. Although this may be perceived as an explicit bribe, showering
a surgeon with liquor (and money) to ensure success in a life-threatening
operation is not normally viewed in suspicious terms and can be viewed
both as guanxi or renqing.20
Thus, the key to understanding guanxi should really be a function
first of our ability to interpret its implicit intentions and strategies and
differentiate it from other kinds of relations, not just by reference to its
semantic meaning or literal manifestations. Guanxi is a peculiar kind of
social relationship that inculcates a peculiar kind of behavior. If I wish
to cultivate favor with someone for instrumental purposes, I may go to
great lengths to mute criticism of that person for fear of damaging these
ties, even go out of my way to keep up a nice facade.21 There are com-
plex permutations of such behavior that transcend mere gift giving. More
importantly, the efficacy of such ties will also depend on their acceptability
in a particular social-political-institutional context vis-à-vis other kinds of
behavior. The problem with gift giving, on the other hand, is that it has
existed long before guanxi and is analytically distinct from it. It is not just
the language of social relations. Gift exchange is the basic structure of
social organization and ritual process. In this regard, there are significant
differences in the way anthropologists interpret social exchange that can
easily highlight the multifaceted complexity of the phenomenon. Jonathan
Parry (1986) has distinguished between “the gift” and “the Indian gift” to
accentuate the sociological and cultural dimensions of exchange. Marshall
Sahlins (1972) has, in reinterpreting “the spirit” of the gift, on the other
hand, been less interested in gift giving per se than in showing how exchange
engenders social structure itself. In this context, I am less concerned with
showing how guanxi or renqing has invoked all manner of gift exchange
than in showing how it is a complex and pervasive kind of ritual act whose
permutations of behavior must be seen as a function of perceptions and
intentions, not just material transactions. More than the literal calculus of
social relations, exchange is a constitutive element of the ritual process.
The symbolic complexity of gift exchange in domestic rites did not begin
in post-Maoist PRC, as though discovered by a recent explosion of writing
in the social scientific literature. Most contemporary customary practices
pale in complexity in contrast with the esoteric ritualism of gift exchange
in late traditional China.22 Nowhere in this literature are they referred to as
guanxi; they are customs par excellence.
Exchange as Ritual Behavior in the Interpretation of Practice
Marcel Mauss’s classic book Essai sur le Don was less about The Gift, as
it was literally translated into English, than about the morally obligatory
nature of reciprocity in exchange or acts of donation (hence, le don). Acts
of gift giving, even donation, demanded reciprocal acts or gestures; this
was the nature of social solidarity. Chinese customs were predicated on gift
giving, typically of cash. To say the least, commoditizing customary gift
giving as guanxi is a gross mischaracterization. Chinese refer to gift giving
literally as song liwu (“give material gift”) and sung li (“give ritual”), where
li can mean both gift and ritual. The equivalence of gift giving as ritual
etiquette and social reciprocity lends a different spin to the renqing (rap-
port) that inherently drives such acts. Mauss begins his book with a quote
about friendship.23 It would not be inaccurate to render it into Chinese as
“what is renqing?” To infer that an act is instrumentally driven by guanxi
has less to do with its nature as custom than the field of relations within
society or politics that makes gift giving an acceptable mode of strategically
manipulative behavior. At issue in this regard are the various permutations
in a specific context of practice (in the PRC, Taiwan, or Hong Kong) that
situate these acts.
In a context of practice, the issue is not just one of deciphering the
meaning of renqing but also unpacking the ensemble of acts and behaviors
associated with “acting like a person” (zuoren). In the abstract, zuoren may
mean that “he understands the principles of cultivating renqing”; in the
concrete, it may just mean that “he knows how to go through the motions.”
To use an academic example, one might ask, “What does it take to get
tenure”? In Chinese, one might say knowing how to zuoren. Concretely
speaking, that might mean, in addition to publishing the right stuff (an
esoteric book produced by a university press or papers, ideally in refer-
eed international journals), performing visibly on the conference circuit,
altruistically “making contributions” to administrative work, and placating
influential senior professors. I would call this biaoxian in Chinese. How is
this any different from the Communist Chinese work regime that Walder
has described, with its emphasis on work attitude, going through the right
motions, and showing the proper deference to authority? Without a doubt,
there is also a difference of quantity as well as quality, but degree of rigid-
ity in the system would determine to a large degree the appropriateness of
various interpersonal strategies and demeanors.
Whether one begins from the principles of moral-ethical necessity,
which invokes social and transactional behavior, or the acts themselves that
implicitly cultivate moral rapport, it is clear that in a Chinese context renq-
ing and zuoren are inextricably linked as permutations of culture and prac-
tice (or culture into practice and vice versa). The moral weight of renqing,
expressed in large part by the quantity and intensity of its acts of “doing,”
is an important basis for understanding in turn the cultural specificity of
social exchange and face relations in a Chinese context. On the other hand,
institutional regimes of power predicate these social relations by transform-
ing goal-oriented behavior into survival strategies within a framework of
practice. In this sense, moral exchange can be transformed by inherent
tensions of power.
In sum, it is futile to debate whether face, social relations of guanxi
and its complex acts of material and symbolic exchange are really about
culture or power. In a Chinese context, one should say that these actions
and behaviors are in essence about cultivation of renqing and that what
constitutes friendship (or power) is in actuality a matter of value judgment
and perception. The principles are the same everywhere, but the terms and
primordial meanings still constitute an important basis for assessing the
variability of possible intentions.
The ambivalence of friendship and power in a Chinese cultural setting
means that one can never be sure of an actor’s intentions and meanings,
despite the neat picture of social interactionist strategies depicted by psy-
chologists, and this is precisely the cause of social tension in practice. In
professional settings, such as one of work, where determination of merit is
based on ethical standards of behavior that contribute to social rapport, in
addition to objective markers of achievement, it is difficult for all intents
and purposes to determine whether work performance (in the maintenance
of the institution as a whole) is a power game (as might be fought between
cliques competing to cultivate favor) or simply a matter of doing one’s job.
Not only is there a thin line between altruism and egotism in the cultivation
of renqing, but this basic tension mirrors in a similar way the ambivalence
of face relations. This tension is not inherently Chinese, as though cultural
in origin; it is a problematic of practice.
The ambiguity of cultural terms has important theoretical ramifica-
tions for reassessing the sociological nature of exchange.24 Perhaps contrary
to Mauss’s (largely Durkheimian) assumptions about the necessity of reci-

procity in society (as social solidarity), which became the platform on which
later anthropologists posited the (structuralist) rationality of kinship systems
and other elaborate ritual institutions, one can cite the Chinese case as a
paradigmatic example of how sophisticated and prone to endless interpre-
tation and manipulation simple acts of reciprocity and exchange can be,
even when they are cloaked literally in the language of etiquette. Who says
that societies in general, and social institutions in particular, must intrinsi-
cally be built on principles of social solidarity, without which they would
dissolve into dysfunctional or structural chaos, this being the imagination
of grand theories predicated on the existence of sociocultural “systems”?
Changes in contemporary Chinese societies are shaped by different socio-
political conditions and as a result of negotiation within intrinsic systems
of values and by people in relation to institutions. They reflect as well as
disguise intentions and strategies for which we still lack a clear framework
and language of practice.
By shifting the basic framework of reference to these ongoing regimes
of practice, the main epistemological problematic is one of identifying the
locus of institutions that produces a field of distinctive behaviors and vis-
ible actions, of which terms such as renqing, guanxi, and mianzi are spe-
cific expressive manifestations or cultural rationalizations. I do not think
that the problematics that have arisen in debates regarding guanxi or biaox-
ian are exclusively Chinese, in a cultural sense. Dilemmas engendered by
“connections” are no different from endemic crises of bribery and crony
capitalism in the Third World or scandals that plague the conduct of high
politics in “civilized” countries. Each must be viewed in the context of its
own ethico-institutional framework, where guidelines of acceptable behavior
may not always be unambiguously defined. In any case, the perception of
“corruption” is in essence a value judgment. Even if guanxi is the same
everywhere, the extent to which guanxi is construed as a problematic must
first be viewed as a function of prevailing values and practices. Such actions,
exchanges, and relationships then constitute a staple framework on which
one can ultimately assess the processes of cultural desire, social cohesion,
and will to power.
The Guanxi Problematic in the Fault Lines

of an Emerging Capitalist Regime
The immense sinological literature on guanxi can easily attest that network
relations in general have always been part of Chinese everyday life, especially
of constitutional government as a means by which popular representation

was accorded to the people, and the second was a belief in the principle of
equity in private property. The latter prompted the large-scale implementa-
tion of the Land Reform Act in 1950, which reapportioned land among
small landholders and tenant cultivators. Constitutional government and
private property no doubt paved the way for some degree of democratic
representation and a market economy, albeit still controlled by a centralized
bureaucratic system.
The shift in Nationalist ideology away from revolutionary pragmatism
had much to do with Chiang Kai-shek’s modern, scientific interpretation
of the Three Principles, and his particular emphasis on ethics, democracy,
and science.20 As the CCP continued to regard the Three Principles as a
revolutionary doctrine written mainly from a precommunist petty bourgeois
perspective, the ideological split between the two Parties intensified. More-
over, it was not until the KMT’s takeover of Taiwan that the systematic
transformation of the Three Principles into a doctrine of conservative tradi-
tionalism began to take place. Much had to do naturally with the continued
state of war, but more importantly it involved the changing uses of ideology
in this “war of maneuver,” using Gramsci’s (1971) terms.
In the early phase of Taiwan’s occupation from 1945‒67, officially
called “The Glorious Restoration” (guangfu) by the KMT, the basis for a
different kind of nationalist imagination was beginning to take shape. Dur-
ing the previous half-century from 1845‒1945, Taiwan had been ceded to
Japan. Despite the Han ethnic origins of its local Taiwanese inhabitants, the
radical nature of this new “imagined community” cannot be underestimated.
According to Anderson (1983), the establishment (in this case, forced impo-
sition) of a standard linguistic community was an important precondition
for the formation of a new national consciousness. In the case of Taiwan,
this new collective consciousness had to be by definition a cultural national-
ism insofar as it involved re-anchoring a local Taiwanese population to the
mythic origin of Chinese civilization, as implied by an essentialist notion
of huaxia. The shift back to a Chinese cultural holism was accompanied by
the rejection of Japanese culture, including a ban on all Japanese language
materials, such as films, literature, media, and so on, and reinforced by
the forward-looking spirit of ethics, democracy, and science that Chiang
Kai-shek wished to promote through the Three Principles. In a phase of
cultural unification, standardization of a new linguistic community based
on Mandarin Chinese (to the exclusion of Taiwanese and native dialects)
became the vehicle for legitimizing the continuity of Chinese history, habits
of ethnic custom, artifactual treasures of civilization, and traditional social
values as standard bearers for a new Chinese national identity. The kind of
guanxi has become an object of analytical overdetermination. Starting from

the literature on Chinese management and organization, it is not surprising
that the basis on which it conceptualizes a guanxi frame of analysis is built
mainly on its networking ties, the nature of social capital and the role of
cultural and ethical values in reinforcing these various relational processes
and practical strategies. From the perspective of business management and
entrepreneurial relations, the focus is largely on its impact vis-à-vis other
aspects of economic performance and organization. While noting that atten-
tion to guanxi as widespread phenomenon has increased exponentially in
recent decades, it attempts primarily to develop a comprehensive framework
for understanding it by showing how it is essentially an outgrowth of tra-
ditional Chinese social practices and cultural values; it is less concerned,
on the other hand, with showing how the phenomenon, as practiced, is
in fact the consequence of broader underlying social transformations that
have given rise to it.
Other works have attempted to transcend the framework of guanxi per
se to elucidate the broader sociological ramifications of its inherent principles.
Lo and Otis (2003) attempt to explain how the market in postsocialist China
has been redefining guanxi and in the process provides something analogous
to a culture of civility. In the historical long-term, the market expedited the
modularization of guanxi, transforming its “generalized particularism” from
its ritualistic nature in a Confucian moral economy and its informal work-
ings in a Maoist society into a flexible regime of practices that has had clear
social ramifications beyond the economic realm, allowing it to flourish in
extra-institutional domains. I have strong reservations about how the authors
view this modularization as a gradual emergence of informal social relations
in the Maoist economy, much less a continual adaptation of a Confucian
moral practice in the context of market modernity. The idealization of such
flexible relations as a kind of civility also ultimately accentuates the authors’
normative view of current developments in the PRC. On the other hand, Qi
Xiaoying’s (2013) effort to view guanxi as a social capital theory in a global-
ized social science highlights an attempt to broaden the relevance of culturally
specific concepts to other societies. While recognizing guanxi’s conceptual
embeddedness in other concepts, such as renqing and xinyong (trust), the
author less convincingly reconciles its dual aspects of “notoriety and nobility,”
opting to distinguish instead its generality in principle and particularity in
form, ultimately reflecting a normative approach to this “globalized” theory.
In accenting China’s transitional economy, Chang Kuang-chi (2011)
develops a slightly different sociological approach to the above literature.
Noting that the literature is divided among culturalist, institutional, and net-
work theory paradigms, he differentiates between three guanxi strategies that
inherently invoke them. He calls the instrumentalist guanxi associated most

with bribery an “accessing” strategy, the general network guanxi indicative of
business relationships based on personal trust a “bridging” strategy and the
guanxi seminal to complex institutional relationships such as in a capitalist
economy an “embedding” strategy. He then shows in the context of China’s
changing economy how each strategy responds to different actor-centered
decision making rationales. In the context of his historical evolution, guanxi
forms change generally from the prevalence of accessing strategies to embed-
ding ones. The transformation that he envisages conforms intricately to his
interpretation of the institutional history but is inconsistent with the blatant
reality of instrumental guanxi that is intricately tied to the growth of cor-
ruption in China’s emerging capitalism. The guanxi problematic in the PRC
is different from its relative demise in other Chinese speaking societies and
is endemic to the institutional context that gives birth to it. As a private
nepotistic strategy, it contrasts with the institutional economy and is more
importantly a product of its systemic fault lines.
In retrospect, much of the confusion pertaining to our understanding
of guanxi derives from the hysteria created by the prevailing literature about
its problematic exceptionalism. It just means “relationship”; there is nothing
in the meaning of the word that justifies glossing it in Chinese to denote
a uniquely cultural concept, much less a philosophy, as though rooted in
Confucianism. As a cultural code of conduct in a Chinese setting, the con-
cept of renqing is what regulates mianzi and guanxi in a power theory of
culture; renqing is what initiates and maintains the exchange relationships
that define guanxi in the concrete. Its association with bao makes such
exchange relationships no different from others found elsewhere; reciprocity
or the commitment to it is what makes social exchange ongoing, regardless
of instrumental intent. The inherent association of gift giving and ritual
in most traditional Chinese customs has made it a ubiquitous staple from
the outset, not a recent invention. If it has always been customary to give
gifts on ritual occasions, since when did it become a matter of guanxi? It
is necessary first of all to understand its cultural meanings before articulat-
ing its functions. In terms of cultural substance, the function of renqing
(or guanxi) is actually no different for a businessman building relationships
of trust and someone engaged in gift giving as a bribe. As a strategy for
cultivating favor, it is by nature politicizing. It is also possible, of course, to
view its instrumental intent as strategies of accessing, bridging or embed-
ding, in Chang’s terms, but this is above all a value judgment on the part
of the analyst, not something that the participant need readily concur with.
Nonetheless, it is apparent that a diversity of guanxi behavior characterizes
different Chinese speaking societies as well as changes within them.
The early literature on Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere has been
full of references to the rampant existence of guanxi, whether it be in the
form of vote-buying in politics or norms of doing business. What deserves
mention is not just the demise of guanxi in the historical long-run but
more importantly the basic transformation of the societal or institutional
ground that made guanxi incompatible with normative life strategies. In
other words, this was not simply the product of changes in guanxi alone,
as though evolution sui generis. Whether it is attributed to the advent of
a service economy or system of governance, it should prompt us to assess
the sociopolitical ground that frames guanxi and other life practices. In the
PRC, it is obvious that a different set of sociopolitical transformations has
grounded the emergence of guanxi as a dominant or prevalent life strat-
egy. Guanxi seems exceptional, but it is merely a surface phenomenon that
epitomizes the rumblings of a deeper transformation. What needs further
scrutiny is the advent of nepotistic forms of guanxi from general ones. It
paralleled the demise of Maoist era society and polity as well as the rise
of the post-Deng economy; the focus of discussion should really shift to
articulations of the latter and their systemic regimes. Ultimately, guanxi in
its pejorative sense is not a Chinese phenomenon per se. It can be found
in any society, marked by a variety of local terms and practices, where the
institutional fault lines allow for it.
Chapter 8
A New Greater China

The Demise of Transnationalism and
Other Great White Hopes
The term Greater China was used primarily in the 1980s to denote a newly
emerging China spawned by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of economic liber-
alization and the diverse transnational influences to follow. Hong Kong
and Taiwan became major sources for a renaissance of all sorts, economic
and cultural. Greater China thus represented this greater cultural-economic
domain that seemed to transcend political boundaries, but it was an entity
centered outside China or between “the triangle.” Reference to Greater China
has gradually faded out, while giving birth ironically to an even “greater”
China. The nature of this social transformation is without a doubt worth
investigating, not simply in the context of broader geopolitical changes
but more importantly with reference to the embeddedness of theories in
geopolitical practice.
East Asian Fantasies in Perspective
It is difficult to view the development of China apart from its inclusion

within a wider regional sphere. Its civilizational ties to Korea and Japan were
perhaps the closest, but it has also enjoyed centuries of trade with Southeast
Asia, prior to mass emigration of laborers from southeastern China from the
nineteenth century. In past decades, (Western) scholars have looked at China
and East Asia in general from a variety of regional or global lenses. Such
This is a revision and expansion of a paper, first published in 2007 as “What Happened
to ‘Greater China’? Changing Geopolitics in the China Triangle,” Macalester International
18:28‒44.
163
societies, especially in the postwar era, have been the foci of what William
Callahan (2004) has called “social science fantasies.” The rise of “miracle
economies” in East Asia, first Japan, then Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong,
and Singapore gave birth to the so-called The Four Little Dragons. Since
this rise corresponded closely with the stagflation of Western capitalism in
the 1970s, many scholars singled out culture as a prime determining factor
in this distinctive development. Peter Berger (1987:7) coined the notion of
economic culture. In a book (Berger and Hsiao 1988) titled In Search of
an East Asian Development Model, he noted the “comparative advantage of
Sinic civilization,” but the first to underscore the role of Asian values in the
rise of East Asia was the political scientist, Roderick MacFarquhar (1980),
who wrote an essay in The Economist titled “The Post-Confucian Challenge.”
Models of East Asian capitalism filled the scholarly literature in the 1980s
but shifted in the ’90s to focus more on overseas Chinese capitalism, which
corresponded, on the one hand, with the bursting of the Japanese economic
bubble followed by a rise of transnational Chinese capitalism throughout
East and Southeast Asia. At the same time, scholars began to compare Japa-
nese models of capitalism with Chinese ones, but all of these discussions
hinted at distinctive features, that is, unique ideologies, institutions, and
practices that supposedly drove these discrete economies. As variations on
the theme of this Sinic mode of production, there were diverse tendencies as
well. Gordon Redding (1993) has taken Berger’s notion of economic culture
most seriously, by attempting to show how distinctive ideologies or insti-
tutions can be elucidated to shed light on Chinese business organizations
and practices everywhere. Gary Hamilton (1996:331), on the other hand,
while recognizing the relevance of cultural influences on Chinese economic
organization, has argued against the danger of relying on a sociocentric
model, noting that “Chinese capitalism cannot be understood apart from
the dynamics of the global economy, because . . . Chinese capitalism is not
a domestic capitalism (i.e., the product of indigenous economic growth), but
rather is integral to world capitalism itself.” Ezra Vogel (1991), a sociologist,
has tended to see a balanced role between culture and sociopolitical context,
which can be used to contrast the industrializing experiences of Hong Kong,
Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, while anthropologists Aihwa Ong
and Don Nonini (1997), from the vantage point of Southeast Asia, have
viewed the success of Chinese capitalists mostly as an extension of inherently
transnational tendencies and skills. Finally, there have been many scholars
who take seriously the role of Confucianism in the development of capital-
ism, either in Weberian or other terms. In the 1980s, even the Singapore
government actively explored the applicability of Weber’s Protestant ethic
to Confucianism, which helped to promote the primacy of Asian values in
A New Greater China 165
cultural policy, in the form of ideology or religion, as a prime mover in

economic development. In raising all these examples above, I am not par-
ticularly interested in pursuing any of these complex themes, any of which
can easily be the subject of separate books. My point is to suggest, by way
of background discussion, that the way in which scholars look at China is
often the product of inherently larger concerns. The debate regarding East
Asian capitalism is as much reflective of a deeper debate about the nature
of capitalistic development as it is inflective of the way scholars generally
perceive the role of culture in constituting society or driving institutional
life practices. In the end, they are not end points in themselves but are
intended to have ramifications that disguise the way that we contrast the
relative economic and political potentialities of East versus West (or what
Samuel Huntington [1996] has ominously called “the clash of civilizations”),
while serving as foci for extending academic debates over the nature of
capitalism or revitalizing Confucianism.
Greater China as Transnationalizing Imaginary
The concept of Greater China is a product of somewhat different concerns

and different circumstances. Since I already mentioned the ominous specter
of Samuel Huntington, it is not by coincidence that he also happens to
have a position on Greater China. He (1996:238) has argued that, through
what he calls “Greater China and its co-prosperity sphere,” “China is resum-
ing its place as regional hegemon, and the East is coming into its own.” It
reflects also a Yellow Peril Orientalism that was promoted avidly by Cold
War‒era polemicists and now by their descendants in the CIA and Penta-
gon. On the other hand, Greater China, as I understand the term here, was
initially coined in the 1980s and became popular in the ’90s to represent
what seemed to be a newly emerging phenomenon at that time. A major
journal on contemporary Chinese affairs, the China Quarterly, devoted a
special issue to this in 1993. As its editor, David Shambaugh (1993:653),
neatly put it, “Greater China is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon
which exists even if the term to describe it is not entirely apt.” In effect,
the phenomenon that Shambaugh alludes to here refers not just to the face
of a newly emerging China, as though it is the product of its own internal
political struggles and social transformations. I would say also that this newly
emerging phenomenon took on distinctive meaning in the context of subtle
unconscious changes taking place at the same time within the modern world
system, during which one can also see a renewed importance in the role of
cultural forces and relationships. I deliberately phrase my description of the
phenomenon in this way, because, first, I think it is crucial to explain what

was really old or new about it; second why we tend to see the inherent
influence of cultural factors; and third what happened when use of Greater
China began to fade into obscurity toward the end of the millennium.
One should begin with the phenomenon itself: it is generally rec-
ognized that, in the 1980s, one began to see growing interactions and
interdependencies between China and its neighbors, Hong Kong and Tai-
wan, initially, then broadly expanding outward in Asia through links with
other ethnic Chinese. Harry Harding (1993) notes that first reference to
a notion of greater China most likely occurred in journalistic articles in
Taiwan and Hong Kong, that foresaw and advocated the emergence of a
“Chinese common market” that would link Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau,
Singapore, and PRC, using terms like zhongguoren gongtongti (Chinese com-
munal entity) and zhongguoren jingji jituan (Chinese economic corporation).
I emphasize the advent of the phenomenon as described above and initial
attempts to characterize it as a term rather than the appearance of the term
itself, because I do not think that the term for Greater China, at least in
Chinese (da zhonghua), was ever popular or useful in Chinese intellectual
circles, unlike in the West. One can debate the hypothetical question of
whether Greater China is actually an Orientalism, but the phenomenon
itself is real. As cursory attempts to phrase it suggest, the phenomenon
began initially in earnest with the increase of economic flows and relations
between China and its neighbors. These economic bonds developed into a
broader community that encompassed common cultural interests and politi-
cal sentiments. In other words, it became more than an EU- or NAFTA-like
common market. Its multidimensionality also raises obvious questions about
its ramifications for other domains of life, society, and polity. At the same
time, while one can recognize that this is a complex economic, cultural,
and political phenomenon, our attempts to understand it functionally have
invoked debate and confusion about the concepts and interpretations used
to define the term. In other words, are we looking at interaction, integration,
or reunification? This confusion in conceptualization in functional terms
underlies the controversy over Greater China as a problematic idea, much
more than the understanding of what constitutes “Greater” and why. In
geographical terms, the nucleus of Greater China has been unambiguously
Hong Kong and Taiwan, but how far one can extend it elsewhere in Asia
through the network of Chinese is a matter of definition.
Nonetheless, the phenomenon of Greater China emerged clearly in
the 1980s and into the ’90s, followed by a growing awareness and atten-
tion to it in intellectual circles in the ’90s. In economic terms, we see in
this period of expansion greater flows of capital between the three places
that constitute what I prefer to call the China Triangle, and the nature of
these flows is very uneven. In the post‒WWII era, Hong Kong had always
been heavily engaged in and dependent on trade with PRC for goods of
all kinds, principally for subsistence, while serving as an entrepôt for China
trade going to and from the rest of the world. But active investment by
Hong Kong entrepreneurs in China was made possible in the post-Maoist
era by the change in policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping. This coincided
symbolically with the Sino-British agreement in 1984 to return Hong Kong
to Chinese sovereignty in the sense that it ironically signaled the opening up
of capitalism in China and Hong Kong’s role in it. This change in policy
not only opened the floodgates of capital but also opened up flows of people
and other things between China and Hong Kong. Most of the movement
was unidirectional; special economic zones in Shenzhen (bordering Hong
Kong), and then elsewhere, acted as magnets to attract Hong Kong invest-
ment, which in later years spread everywhere else in China. The outflow of
capital from Hong Kong to China has continued unabated to the present
to the point where Hong Kong manufacturers today employ more workers
in south China than in Hong Kong itself. How it has changed the exis-
tence and operation of Hong Kong’s manufacturing industry, among other
like industries, does not require elaboration here. The case of Taiwan is
slightly different. In 1981, the PRC’s no-tariff policy for Taiwan imports,
followed by the creation of a special economic zone in Fujian, served as
initial incentives to attract Taiwanese investment. The flow of Taiwan goods
and capital into China was mostly unidirectional too, in the sense that the
KMT government on Taiwan was slow to open up its Cold War embargo
against PRC goods until much later. But like in the case of Hong Kong,
the opening up of economic trade on both sides eventually increased the
flow to the point today where it is getting just bigger and bigger. So on the
economic face of things, Greater China is supposed to be getting greater and
greater. More interaction should bring about more dependence, but does
this bring about more integration, and is more integration the backdrop
eventually for more reunification, as though to suggest that this is really
what PRC had in mind when they first coined such meaningful terms as
socialism with Chinese characteristics and one country, two systems? The inter-
face where phenomenon meets concept is unfortunately also the interface
where fact meets (discursive) fiction. At the outset, I deliberately set aside
this problematic, because this is where the confusion starts, and this is where
the phenomenon starts to get complicated, beyond anyone’s imagination, in
my opinion. If we stay only at the descriptive level of phenomenal change,
Greater China has never stopped getting greater, but this already contradicts
our later discovery that the concept has most recently faded away.
The cultural phenomenon of Greater China moreover referred in the

1980s to the emerging popularity of Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop culture,
despite official disdain by the CCP. Canto-pop and Mando-pop have diverse,
complex origins in Hong Kong and Taiwan. One should not assume ipso
facto that they are just indigenous creations of an ongoing folk culture. In an
early essay, I (1996) have argued that popular culture in both places is in fact
the unique consequence of changing geopolitical forces. The advent in the
1970s and ’80s of what we recognize today as Hong Kong and Taiwan pop
culture was made possible by overt depoliticization of the cultural domain;
mass-mediated culture emerged against the current of more dominant forces
like Mandarin and Cantonese cultural spheres, as well as Western ones. But
despite its actual origins, the cultural face that was presented in the context
of PRC took on a different tune. Pop culture was not just the conduit for
the influx of modernity; its political subversive nature made its channels
even more blatant than those of the informal economy. The cultural flows
that defined Greater China in this regard were without a doubt unidirec-
tional, almost exclusively. Thomas Gold (1993) correctly called this Greater
China culture gangtai (literally, Hong Kong‒Taiwanese). Perhaps even more
so than in the case of Greater China’s economy, the cultural affinities were
more apparent. The fact that it was a Chinese language medium culture
made the cultural content of this Greater China unabashedly modern, if
not Westernized. Reverse cultural flow from PRC back to Hong Kong and
Taiwan did not occur until much later, and this was obviously a consequence
of the emergence of pop culture in China precipitated in part by gangtai
culture. One can ruminate on cultural developments in this regard, which
as in the case of the economy will inevitably invoke questions of presumed
integration, synthesis, and resistance, but it was clear that economy and
culture did not seem to work in exactly the same way, and thus should
have different implications for a Greater China.
An interesting spin-off from the cultural dimension of Greater China
described above is the idea of cultural China invoked by Tu Weiming (1991).
Although his use of cultural China was not meant to coincide with Greater
China, it was motivated by the same perceptions that saw a greater com-
munity of mind that transcended China per se and by values that advocated
a renaissance from the outside that could serve as paradigmatic model for
“a declining core.” As a neo-Confucian intellectual historian, he was not
referring to pop culture as the great synthesizer but a set of civilizational
values that could in theory unite Chinese and Sinophiles everywhere and
whose center of gravity was perhaps closer to Cambridge, Massachusetts,
that is, in the global center.
The political dimension of Greater China, in contast to the economic

and cultural, was perhaps the most dubious, but if one reads the literature,
one gets the sense that the political is unavoidably intertwined with other
dimensions of Greater China. On the surface, Greater China is not about
political relations binding PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. If anything, it is
a communal entity built on informal, extra-political, or transnational ties
relying on concrete economic and cultural bonds that simultaneously seem
to have political ramifications. The diverse politicized readings invoked by the
literature were really a function of how diverse people read the significance of
its economic and cultural relations. The astute sinologist Harding (1993:673)
concluded his analysis of Greater China by saying: “the re-creation of a
global Chinese culture has been a natural process: the product of a common
ancestry, facilitated by modern communications.” At least in cultural terms,
the institutional developments in relation to a more universalistic Chinese
culture seemed to suggest that increased communicability could lead to dis-
solution of physical and bureaucratic obstacles, while linguistic and cultural
affinities between people could also exploit common values in tradition or
interests in modernity to create such a global village. More importantly, the
cultural aspect of Greater China seemed to have only positive effects that
would facilitate any eventual reunification. In the realm of economy, Harding
(1993:666) argued that the emergence of a transnational Chinese economy
was not just about the progressive embrace of a capitalist way of life to raise
one’s standard of living and that its political strategies in Greater China were
played differently by all sides of the China Straits:
From Beijing’s perspective, economic interaction is viewed as a

way of facilitating the eventual political reunification of China.
The mainland Chinese government has therefore adopted a
series of policies to stimulate commercial relations with Hong
Kong and Taiwan, most notably the creation of special economic
zones directly opposite them, for political as well as for purely
commercial reasons. Hong Kong, in turn, regards economic
ties with the mainland as a way of cushioning its return to
Chinese sovereignty in 1997, in that they will give Beijing
a large and direct stake in preserving the territory’s political
viability and economic prosperity throughout the transition.
On Taiwan, in contrast, economic interaction with the main-
land is seen in the short term as a lever for extracting political
concessions from Beijing, especially with regard to renouncing
the use of force against the island and allowing Taiwan a larger
voice in international affairs, and possibly a way of promoting

democratization.
I think that the complicated relationships that Harding projects reflect

less the complex nature of the phenomenon than the complicated nature of
his thinking. More importantly, it is not possible to divorce his complicated
logic from his political reading of real or imagined intents of policy strategy
on different sides of the divide. I do not deny that there is politics in the
way policies are practiced on all sides of this battle; I spell them out merely
to suggest that there are other kinds of politics at work here too, that is, a
more abstract kind of geopolitics.
At this point, it might be useful just to underscore and problema-
tize certain aspects of Greater China, as depicted here. First, it is without
a doubt a transnational phenomenon, but I would argue that this is the
product of changes in both the local and global environment. To be sure,
none of this would have been possible without the post-Maoist transition
in PRC that not only gave rise to capitalism but also actively engaged
interaction with the rest of the world. This change of policy garnered the
active support of rich Hong Kong capitalists who ended up being the big-
gest promoters of reunification with the motherland and toeing the line to
suppress democracy. However, in its overt transnationalism, scholars tend
to neglect that the border-crossing nature of Chinese capital and people is
no different from the transnational transformations of Western capitalism
seen elsewhere. That is to say, in the demise of Cold War and imperial
politics, the opening up of the market in China has generally followed the
path, at first glance, of what Lash and Urry (1987) called “disorganized
capitalism,” or “disjunctures” in Appadurai’s terms. Flows were not liter-
ally random or chaotic, but this implicit decentralization effectively broke
down standard norms of political, economic, or cultural affiliation, and this
is what Greater China predicated, namely a mobile transnational cultural
economy defined by porous borders and free flow of people, ideas, and
capital. What Greater China was supposed to signal was the breakdown of
closed, traditional identities through constant deracination and hybridiza-
tion, which in turn constituted the engine of change for the rest of China.
Second, despite the cultural facade of Greater China, I argue that the unify-
ing effect of a common culture was highly exaggerated and played at best a
secondary role. I doubt that a common pop culture could unify anything
political (Tu’s Confucianism actually stands a better chance), and nepotistic
ties that bound Chinese entrepreneurs to their ethnic origins were equally
exaggerated. Chinese businesspeople, like those Chinese traders who domi-
nated commerce for 300 years in Southeast Asia, were, according to Wang
Gungwu (1991), penultimate multiculturalists. Successful survival required

adaptability to diverse local conditions, including assimilation, if necessary.
The first principle of any entrepreneur, even in multinational corporations,
was usually to exploit the markets that were most familiar. In this sense, the
rapid expansion of overseas Chinese interests into Greater China was simply
a natural reaction prompted by the dismantling of political or bureaucratic
barriers. Third, I think that an obvious feature of Greater China that hap-
pened to be more salient than culture itself was its center of gravity. Whether
it is economic, cultural, or political, its critical mass was always centered
outside China, if not in Hong Kong then somewhere within the Triangle
(and presumably rooted in modern values).
In short, I would argue that, whatever made Greater China what it
was, its driving force, however defined, was in essence located outside the
PRC. More importantly, the thing that created this gravitas was not any one
factor, although scholars usually underline the economy. It was more precisely
the unique confluence of both local and global forces: on the one hand, the
ideological or political forces transforming PRC society and polity as a whole
and, on the other hand, the changing face of transnational capitalism that
in many senses accommodated the fluid nature of transborder flows globally,
which nurtured in turn the informal economy and hybridized identities that
began to develop and mutate in PRC, expanding back outward.
At this point, one must really ask, does Greater China exist anymore?
If we define the phenomenon superficially as that transnational entity char-
acterized by increasing cultural and economic flows between extrapoliti-
cal Chinese-speaking societies, then Greater China should, if anything, be
greater and greater. But this does not accord with the declining popularity
of the concept itself. Without a doubt, something else has fundamentally
changed. The center of gravity has clearly shifted. Hong Kong and Taiwan no
longer represent the driving force or foci behind the system, as though they
were models for “a declining core” in Tu Weiming’s terms. The center has
definitely moved into the PRC itself, and the rules of the game that define
the system have been rewritten. In the year leading up to the Hong Kong
handover of 1997, while many have been debating the future of capitalism
and democracy in Hong Kong, others have been debating whether Hong
Kong would maintain its status as an important hub of capitalist develop-
ment and pivotal entrepôt for international trade. Some argued that the
continued support for capitalism in PRC policy would ensure Hong Kong’s
ongoing dominant role. Others argued that Hong Kong would eventually
be overshadowed by Shanghai’s rise.
Shanghai’s rise to prominence as an unrivaled cosmopolitan center is
a story in itself, but I think there is much substance to the contention that
Hong Kong has already lost its role as prime mover within Greater China.
I would argue that much of it has to do with a simple fact: the develop-
ment of capitalism in China. It is not just that capitalism was transforming
a traditional way of life. Capitalism itself has taken on a life of its own,
and in rewriting the rules of the game it has in the process increasingly
sucked in the rest of the world. One of the things that drives the logic of
this new capitalism can be summarized in Reaganite terms: It’s the market,
stupid. The way in which the centripetal pull of a limitless market has
been wielded to make people conform to political correctness should make
utilitarian theory proud.
The Changing Geopolitics of the China Triangle
In any event, the geopolitics of the China Triangle has continued to mutate
to a point which eventually brought about the demise of (transnational)
Greater China as a phenomenon. These underlying processes in essence
transcended the apparent features of Greater China as an ongoing regional
entity per se. Moreover, in my opinion, the fundamental transformation in
geopolitical relationship between Hong Kong and PRC presaged best the
evolving nature of PRC capitalism, in general, which in the long run has
not only formed the basis of political economic relations with Hong Kong
and Taiwan but ultimately the rest of the world as well.
Most importantly, these processual developments ran counter to explicit
policy positions and scholarly assessments that served in effect as convenient
fictions. The first such fiction involved the relative autonomy of “one country,
two systems.” Much of the energy devoted to the Sino-British Agreement in
1984 to guarantee the preservation of its capitalist economy for fifty years
after its repatriation to China proved to be a futile exercise. The commitment
in post-Deng PRC to liberalize the market economy made the maintenance
of a capitalist system in Hong Kong a moot point. What started as free trade
zones in Shenzhen, Xiamen, Zhuhai, and so on simply expanded elsewhere to
become the standard mode of production in China. The relative autonomy
of Hong Kong (and Taiwan) vis-à-vis China was never a significant point of
contention. Hong Kong’s economic influence or dominance in this regard
began to be challenged at the same time by the rise of Shanghai. At least, the
economy in a superficial sense did not represent obstacles to a transnational
Greater China characterized by free flows. Whether this was a consequence
or attribute of “one country, two systems” is another matter.
The second fiction was the anticipation of socialist or nationalist
integration. In fact, the mood in Hong Kong prior to 1997 for eventual
repatriation in a cultural sense was rather accommodating. The transitional

era from 1984 to 1997 may have been marked by Hong Kong’s discursive
“disappearance,” in Abbas’s (1997) terms, but it was also characterized by a
search for lost or forgotten cultural and historical origins brought about by
a previous decade or more of overt Westernization and modernizing hydrid-
ity. The momentary euphoria of the impending Beijing Olympics further
enhanced cultural sentiment into nationalizing ones. This may have been
combined to some extent with decolonization in a literal sense, but the
media even adopted self-censorship in order to accommodate increased ties
with the mainland and offset potential political repression. Ironically, few
of these developments continued after 1997. The People’s Liberation Army,
under the intense scrutiny of the media, entered Hong Kong, but little else
to signal the advent of military or Party domination materialized. Despite all
the fears of political oppression, the relative freedom of the press in airing
critical views of official government policy after the establishment of the
SAR regime ran counter to the trends prompted by heightened nationalism,
which was supposed to be the point of departure for other all institutional
changes. Policies to increase the use of Mandarin in general and reforms
to change the educational system to make it more “inclusive” of national
culture and history inevitably provoked local reaction and debate, but all
of this arrived somewhat later.
The fiction contributing to the notion that Hong Kong was an autono-
mous “region” was reflective to some extent of the PRC’s position that, in
some functional respects, Hong Kong could be regarded as separate from
China. Economically, China was linked integrally to the global economy
through Hong Kong, and the 1998 Asian recession had demonstrated that
Hong Kong still played a major role in this regard. In social and local politi-
cal matters, Hong Kong’s autonomy impacted less on developments on the
mainland. As long as the political scheme of things insured the appointment
of Beijing-sympathetic cliques in power, media opposition was a matter for
local government to handle and did not directly impact Beijing. Yet freedom
of the press was ironically restricted only to local affairs.1
The third fiction involves the emancipatory and colonizing potenti-
alities of the capitalist revolution in transforming China, which implicitly
hinted to some extent at the demise of the socialist regime. Foreign capital
and enterprises in PRC continued to grow unabated during this period,
but its effects on transforming other aspects of society and politics were
to say the least debatable. On the other hand, Law Wing-sang’s (2000)
“northbound colonialism” was a projection of capitalism’s advance into the
mainland and its exploitative consequences for class conflict and future social
relations. None of this seems to have panned out, however.
similar moral supervision and training by participating in occasional study

groups and various grassroots activities and attending talks given by scholars
on topics pertaining to Chinese culture.
In the cultural renaissance movement, there was clearly an attempt
by the government to (re)write “traditional Chinese culture” in postwar
Taiwan. Obviously, it was not the only attempt; it was only the most obvi-
ous attempt. Yet in order to assess its significance vis-à-vis other forms of
ideological writing, one should emphasize that the movement itself was
predicated on the need first of all to construct what Fox (1990:3) has called
“ideologies of peoplehood,” a common consciousness which persons could
identify with as being part of the same nation. This consciousness was not
just an esoteric, abstract sense of common identity; it had to be provoked
by feelings of social solidarity, which had roots in established symbols, myths
and narratives. Moreover, spiritual unity was not something provoked for
its own sake; it was presumably the key to defeating communism as well
as the cure for all problems of national development, economic, social, or
other. The way in which cultural renaissance was promoted in Taiwan, that
is to say, backed by the full force of institutional power, also had ramifica-
tions for the nature of cultural authority. It is not enough to say that the
writing of culture in Taiwan was political in origin and motivation. That
the cultural renaissance movement could not be spontaneously initiated and
defined from bottom up but had to be carefully orchestrated instead from
above meant, of course, that the state was the sole arbiter of culture. In
essence, the state defined culture by making culture (in terms of tradition)
conform to the exigencies of the new polity and the “rational” ethos of a
KMT worldview. Yet while the cultural renaissance movement was not the
sole definition of culture in postwar Taiwan, it was surely the basic frame-
work around which all other levels of public discourse revolved, especially
in relation to the construction of a national political culture.
Insofar as culture in Taiwan invoked tradition, it also invoked to
some degree a call to Confucianism as the rational basis of Chinese tradi-
tion. Not unlike other discourses of tradition, Confucianism was invoked
here not as a system in itself but as a set of stripped-down ethical values
that had a particular role in the service of the state. As a generalized moral
philosophy or a kind of social ethics that could be easily translated into
secular action, Confucianism here meant for the most part devotion to filial
piety, respect for social authority, and etiquette in everyday behavior.24 This
was a far cry from the permutations of Confucian ideology that emerged in
different schools of Confucian learning and that came to influence the prac-
tice of imperial government in past dynasties. Thus, recourse to Confucian
then guaranteed a proportional functional constituency in the post-1997

legislature. This was the cost (and benefit) of being able to do business
in PRC. In the transformation of Hong Kong’s public sphere, the politi-
cal free rein given to oligarchic capitalist interests facilitated suppression
of democratic opposition. The same could be said about the operation of
capitalism in China.
In short, business interests were in fact intertwined with politics in
ways that influenced at an underlying level support for or compromising
of certain ideological principles (in this case, democracy). This collabora-
tion increasingly solidified “the rules of the game.” This complicit relation
of power (or guanxi connections) was thus the real face of Hong Kong
capitalism after 1997. This then became the model for doing business gen-
erally in China, regardless of with whom. Yahoo, Star-TV, Microsoft, and
Google have all given way to political correctness as the price of admission
to the China market. While this did not affect global capitalism, as prac-
ticed elsewhere, its ramifications for Greater China, where culture and the
economy were defined by increasing flows of capital and people as well as
ever-increasing bonds of interdependence, cannot be understated. What can
this say about Greater China as an ever-mutating entity?
To call its mode of operation guanxi capitalism (pejoratively, crony
capitalism) would be too simplistic. China was consciously aware that it
was at the center of an expanding global market, both in terms of out-
source production for the developed nations and the consumption of global
products, and this awareness then in turn allowed it to use its pivotal role
to control people’s access to desired resources or benefits of the system by
making people conform to the rules of the game in all other respects. Thus,
the media has learned that it is free to print whatever it pleases in mat-
ters pertaining to Hong Kong (hence is autonomous), but that in matters
involving China or cooperation with Chinese agencies it is forced to toe
the proper ideological line as one’s price of admission. Increasingly, they
toe the line, especially when they discover that the economic survival of
their own enterprise was dependent on expansion into the China market.
Similarly, Taiwanese businesspeople, entertainers, and professionals of all
sorts have learned to mute any expressions of or sympathy for Taiwanese
independence so as not to jeopardize their own prospects for cashing in on
a lucrative China market, especially when it has become obvious that this
market was much richer than their own. These sanctions underlined the
point that, while the market was in theory open, and people were free to
make money, there was no attempt from above to control the redistribu-
tion of income, which had been the case with orthodox socialism. On the
other hand, access to the market was in practice a privilege that could be
politically controlled, if deemed desirable or necessary. In policy terms, this

could be called socialism with Chinese characteristics.
If the advent of a new kind of capitalism was the real engine that drove
both China and Greater China at the core, at least in economic terms, one
might then ask, what ramifications did this have for the politics of Greater
China, if not for the rest of the world? In fact, are there intended or poten-
tial ramifications for Hong Kong’s eventual reintegration and the prospects
of Taiwan’s reunification, independence, or its continued ambiguous status
vis-à-vis China? Despite the rhetoric of one country, two systems, which
has as its ultimate goal reunification, economic power nonetheless plays a
crucial role in leveraging political interests of the center.
In the evolution of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement, what
began as a critique of global capitalism and of issues central to its emergence
in a PRC context eventually mutated to become the platform for its democ-
ratization movement. Taking its cue from the Occupy Wall Street move-
ment, through its demands for universal suffrage, it directly challenged the
politics of Hong Kong’s presumed autonomy in a system where oligarchic
economic interests were already firmly entrenched. The latest metamorphosis
in 2014 of the occupy movement into the Umbrella Movement might seem
on the surface to be the natural culmination of Hong Kong’s campaign of
antiglobal capitalism and a link to its ongoing democratization struggle.
To say the least, international media coverage of Hong Kong’s Occupy
(Umbrella) sit-in has heightened exponentially parallel to one’s general hos-
tility toward PRC rule or the latter’s domination of Hong Kong’s “autono-
mous” governance. But the democratization movement in Hong Kong has
had a long history, with roots in the late British colonial era, and escalated
in the wake of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen suppression, memorialized by
yearly vigils in Victoria Park. More importantly, this struggle for democra-
tization had always been a purely political movement, with little connection
to culture or Hong Kong’s autonomous identity in any sense. Nonetheless,
the process that brought together democratization in general and its renais-
sance in alliance with the Occupy Central demonstration is worth further
scrutiny, if just to question whether its prime objective was motivated by
anticapitalism, democracy, or both in tandem.
The Occupy Central movement officially began in October 2011, and
its first occupying protests were forced to disband in September 2012. The
second movement began in 2013, eventually became labeled the Umbrella
Movement and ended in December 2014. The two movements differed in
content, despite the continuity in name. The first was similar to the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Its occupation of Central District, Hong Kong’s
financial hub, represented a direct confrontation with “Central District Val-
ues,” the strong governance policies of Hong Kong’s previous Chief Execu-
tive Donald Tsang. Its object of criticism was the exploitative consequences
of neoliberal capitalism, as reflected mainly in growing income inequality
between the rich and poor. It was generally perceived to be a politically
radical movement and did not really achieve a mass following, which could
make the problem attributable to society-at-large.
The second movement gradually became dominated by pro-democ-
ratization forces as a referendum on universal suffrage in Hong Kong. Its
tie to the Occupy Central movement was its appropriation of its tactics of
protest resistance and mass demonstration to galvanize widespread political
support in the name of democratic freedom and universal human rights. In
practice, its object of attack was the determination of legislative seats based
on functional constituencies, which favored corporate interests with ties to
the PRC’s central government.
One might ask in turn whether the democratization movement’s
cooptation of Occupy Central resulted in the lifting of antiliberal capitalist
critique to a higher level or subsumed it for the purpose of promoting its
own cause. From the point of view of democratization, it is clear that the
oligarchic corporate interests that dominate the legislature represent a real
threat to democratic ideals and aspirations, but it is unclear to what extent
Central District Values in fact represent a threat to its own ideology of
governance, economic policy, and societal norm.
In the midst of its metamorphosis in the Occupy Central movement,
democratization has ironically taken on an explicitly cultural tone. As a
political battle, it has become the literal front for a direct confrontation
between Hong Kong and PRC, a conflict between local and national inter-
ests and an incommensurable difference in cultural mind-sets or traits. Cul-
tural differences have exacerbated Hong Kongers’ criticisms of uncivilized
behavior by mainland tourist “locusts” and their mundane habits, which are
equally countered by mainland Chinese criticisms of Hong Kong people as
corrupted by Western values that require moral correction. In other words,
it has increasingly evolved into a minor and dualistic clash of civilizations.
One should contrast the rise of anti-PRC sentiment in Hong Kong
with that in Taiwan. Against a preexisting backdrop of tension between calls
for independence versus reunification at a rhetorical level, which has inten-
sified the trend toward the autonomy of Taiwanese cultural consciousness
vis-à-vis a mainland that is viewed as “Chinese” in extreme circles, this trend
has in general heightened the significance of indigenization as a cultural
norm in many senses of the term. The explicit emphasis on Taiwanese-
ness and concern with the rights of ethnic Hakka and indigenous peoples,
combined with recognition of the historical legacies of Dutch, Spanish,
and Japanese colonialism, thus underscore the primordial existence of Tai-

wan prior to Chinese domination, contrary to the sinicizing narratives of
Chinese history and tradition propagated by early postwar KMT rule. This
trend toward cultural autonomy has coexisted uneasily with the intertwined
growth of Taiwanese capital and enterprise in Greater China. The advent
of the Sunflower Movement, initiated by student protesters in 2014, was
a protest against the implementation of the Service Trade Agreement pro-
posed by the government of Ma Ying-jeou, which in the spirit of NAFTA
called for deregulation of economic relations on both sides of the Straits.
On the surface, this protest was not a demonstration against PRC political
domination, as in the case of Hong Kong, but rather the veiled threat of
increased political control by the PRC through the institutionalization of
Chinese corporate interests in the Taiwan economy, which among other
things would have allowed the ownership of stock in Taiwanese corporations
and the establishment of Chinese banks and other vested interests.
Political movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan thus contested the
penetration of Greater China in their local economy, politics, and society,
but in characteristically different ways. If anything, the Sunflower Movement
actually represented a more direct and salient attack on the collusion of big
business and PRC policy that was the core of a newly emerging Chinese
capitalism, through which the PRC central government disseminated and
carried out political designs. This could hardly be called “soft power”; it
was based on institutional leverage.
On the PRC front, support for the government’s political and eco-
nomic policies was also buttressed by a growing nationalist identity, some-
thing quite alien to an earlier era of Maoist class-based socialism. This kind
of mass nationalist sentiment was anything but banal, to mimic Michael
Billig’s (1995) famous phrase. The search for national identity, which in
its extreme forms of ritual effervescence gave way to patriotic fervor of all
kinds, was inscribed in what Callahan (2010) aptly termed the cultural
psychology of “the pessoptimist nation,” which was ultimately driven by
the manifest destiny of China’s imperial civilization, which in its more
recent historical manifestation exuded the subconscious desire and need to
reverse the humiliation or shame brought about by a century of Western
imperialist domination. If this is real face of the new Greater China, then
what are the global ramifications of it all?
Chapter 9
Confucius, Incorporated
The Advent of Capitalism with PRC Characteristics
According to International Monetary Fund figures, China’s gross domestic

product has grown annually at an average rate of 9.91 percent from 1978
to 2012. At this rate, China will surpass the US in Gross Domestic Product
within five years. The current fixation with the rise of China, especially after
its transition to a free market economy, overlooks the fact that a long tradition
of historical scholarship has always been concerned with the reasons for the
rise and fall of China’s civilization (and economy) over the last millennia of
global history. The rise of the West in the nineteenth century may have given
birth to the othering of Asiatic modes of production in the global scheme of
things, but it is probably harder to show when there was ever a lack of such
comparative gazing. Even Mark Elvin’s (1973) The Pattern of the Chinese Past
was less a civilizational discourse per se than a sophisticated effort to develop
conceptual models for the rise and fall of the economy. In the PRC, in an
attempt to offer a different spin on China’s demise in the face of the West,
Marxist historians engaged in debates on “the sprouts of capitalism” (that
apparently failed to bloom). Later generations of theoretical discourse over
the same terrain have seen the publication of Andre Gunder Frank’s (1998)
ReOrient and Kenneth Pomeranz’s (2000) The Great Divergence, among many
others. I am interested less in engaging in such economic debates than in inter-
rogating the emergence of a particular regime marked by a policy of economic
development linked intricately to the maintenance of a single-party state and
its legitimation in the public sphere grounded in a nationalist identity.
The Renaissance of National Identity in the

Politics of Colonial Difference
In China: The Pessoptimist Nation, William A. Callahan (2010) depicts China’s

national vision of itself in the world as one of “pessoptimism,” an ambivalent
179
facade more importantly rooted in deep-seated “structures of feeling.” From a

broader perspective, I think that this represents a more constructive approach
to understanding its political, economic, and cultural dynamics, all of which
tightly reinforce each other in policy and practice. A strong reading of the
sustained interest in the liberalization of the Chinese market economy, espe-
cially as a Western-centered, inevitable process of globalization, is typically
driven by an undercurrent of assumptions about the inevitability of a rule of
law, political deregulation of the economy, the triumph of individual interest,
and institutional rationalization in other regards. These are not unreasonable
expectations, given transformations of the modern world system elsewhere.
China’s “pessoptimism” is colored, on the one hand, by its belief in
the manifest destiny of its long civilization and record of achievement then
reflected, on the other hand, by the stain of “national humiliation” (guochi)
inflicted as a result of imperialist domination and the loss of status, power,
and economic wealth suffered in the process. Callahan documents in detail
the myriad ways in which national humiliation has been instilled into nar-
ratives of history, the writing of educational textbooks, notions of territorial
legitimacy, and the celebrating of national holidays. More than the overt
promotion of patriotic fervor, there is a systematic investment into cultivating
and sustaining such sentiments as part of a collective conscience. Although
superficially similar to Raymond Williams’s (1987) notion of “structures of
feeling,” Williams intended it to refer to the cultural existence of a popular
abstract consciousness that was naturally opposed to representations of elite
society or the institutional establishment, otherwise called hegemony. In
the Chinese case, it was clear that this collective conscience was officially
sanctioned and broadly promoted, even as social movement, if necessary.
As official rhetoric, it seemed to hit a feverish peak during the late Qing
and early Republican eras as well as from the 1990s, both paralleling a
resurgence in nationalist identity as a whole.
The direct connection between the postcolonial trauma of national
humiliation and the fermenting of national consciousness as general struc-
ture of feeling that transcended patriotic fervor and became the mental
template for various genres of territorial boundedness or social belonging
grounded ultimately in a common lineage of civilizational values closely
mirrors the “the rule of colonial difference” that Partha Chatterjee (1993)
argued was intrinsic to the birth of nationalism, at least in a Third World
context. Rejecting the modular nature of the nation that Benedict Anderson
(1993) argued made possible the widespread dissemination of nationalism,
as though divorced from its inherent embeddedness in the politics of cultural
resistance, Chatterjee’s critical intervention can also be used to show the
counterhegemonic roots of national imagination, even in its most abstract
Confucius, Incorporated 181
or neutral form. Moreover, I argue that national consciousness invoked as

collective belonging and driven by the postcolonial politics of memory can
and has been used in the context of China to galvanize mass support for
state policy. The rise of China’s economy in the global pecking order has
also acquired the status of national obsession (and pride) in contemporary
Chinese “structures of feeling.” This has in turn enabled the state to use
such popular support to reinforce political correctness in other regards, not
as soft power but as part of a systematic regime of hard‒ball domination.
The relative decline of humiliation as nationalist discourse in later
Republican China in postwar Taiwan as well as through much of Maoist
China can been explained as a function of larger geopolitical factors. In
contrast to his anti-imperialist exuberance in the Republican era, Chiang
Kai-shek’s generally pro-Western stance in postwar Taiwan had much to do
with maintaining the protectionist role of the US military, which has been
tacitly supported to the present, despite the overt withdrawal of US bases
and direct military presence. In the PRC, it can be argued that national
identity was a relatively insignificant consideration in a Maoist socialist soci-
ety vis-à-vis the formation of an egalitarian class consciousness. Especially in
its purest ideological form, conformity to socialist values linked the destiny
of workers of the world everywhere more than it separated nations on the
basis of identity. Needless to say, all forms of traditional culture were deni-
grated as feudal and systematically purged. In such a mind-set, history and
civilization played little or no role; identity was an empty signifier.
One of the least-noticed trends that paralleled Deng’s liberalization
of a market economy in China was the gradual renaissance of all forms of
Chinese culture and civilization. It may be viewed as a symptom of the
decline of socialist humanist ethics as political dogma but also a reversal of
socialism’s explicit suppression of “tradition,” which above all represented
a conflicting social ideology. The gradual emergence of “identity” can be
reflected in the lifting of the taboos on tradition, history, custom, and
most importantly, in their promotion as politically neutral or sociologically
legitimizing attributes of the nation. The long-term investment made by the
government in archaeological discovery and preservation became not only a
showcase for domestic pride but also a powerful symbol of outward unity.
This has been accompanied by an obvious intensification of patriotic fervor
in politics and education and heightened anxiety over borders protectionist
diplomatic policies. These were not isolated developments.
The fermenting of a new national consciousness was not a mover in
the liberalization of the market economy, but it served as a crucial basis of
popular legitimation in the aftermath of the economy’s success. Policy did
not have to be based on a belief in individual freedom.
Confucius Institutes in the

Cultural Policy of State: A Fatal Attraction
In a comparative study of cultural governance and place-making in Taiwan

and PRC, Selina Chan (2011) argues that, contrary to expectation, Tai-
wan’s government has generally used cultural policy to cultivate heritage and
regulate locality, while the PRC has adopted a minimalist approach to the
same. In many regards, these two divergent perspectives were in response to
different sociopolitical transformations. Simply put, Taiwan’s heavy-handed
cultural policy was the evolution of a changing identity politics, whereas
the PRC’s approach facilitated the profiteering interests of its local residents
in a way that was consistent with the values of its emerging market society.
In the PRC case, heritage making resembled more a culture industry in a
crass materialist sense that colluded conveniently with tourism. If it did not
primarily serve to protect cultural interests per se, then it represented at best
a front that benefited from official approval and sanction. While it is true
that the PRC did not witness the kind of cultural engineering experienced
in Taiwan that was driven implicitly by identity politics, heritage preserva-
tion and gentrification of traditional towns were equally prevalent in Taiwan
and exploited by resident merchants in particular for the same commercial
reasons. In each case, the government did not take a direct role in advancing
economic interests, but to imply that economic promotion was a primary
motivation is probably an overstatement. In the PRC, heritage making in
general served the larger interest of promoting national identity. Heritage
towns, ethnic cultural centers, and sanctification of Confucius’s ancestral vil-
lage are obvious exemplars amenable to the promotion of a culture industry,
but other seminal aspects of cultural promotion have had a longer history,
with less obvious or immediate commercial value. The time and money
that has already been invested in archeologically restoring sites of historical
importance, such as imperial tombs, ancient monuments, and so on will in
the long run far surpass its commitments to other instances of superficial
heritage preservation, and none of this was imaginable or possible in the
Maoist era, where tradition was devalued and taboo.
I argue that culturalizing as a mode of politicizing has been as inherent
in the promotion of state policy in the PRC as Taiwan, if not even more
prevalent and hegemonic. A scathing article by Marshall Sahlins (2013) on
Confucius Institutes aptly illustrates the extent to which culture represents
a front for the promotion of state interests. In this instance, the Confucius
Institute is less an instrument of cultural policy than an instantiation of
culturalizing within the politics of the state. Sahlins’s critique of the way
Confucius Institutes act as a front for coercing host institutions to toe the
political line focuses primarily on the threat to academic freedom that such
Institutes pose to the university within which they are directly situated. In
the long run, however, its underlying politics has been rooted in a broader,
ongoing regime.
Since the Confucius Institute program was launched in 2004, there
are now about 400 Institutes worldwide as well as 600 “Confucius class-
rooms” in elementary and secondary schools. It provides accredited Chinese
language instruction and sponsors activities relating to Chinese culture and
sinological scholarship. Unlike other cultural foundations, such as Goethe-
Institut and Alliance Francaise, the Confucius Institutes tend to have a
direct presence on the campuses that they occupy and have been known
to wield strong opinions in matters pertaining to China, sometimes backed
by veiled retaliatory threats and negative sanctions.
Needless to say, the Confucius Institutes are directly subsidized by the
PRC government, and the extent of their funding often commands respect
for their opinion in matters that they perceive as impinging on their national
authority. In those universities that host a Confucius Institute, an official
organization referred to simply as Hanban regulates matters pertaining to
classroom instruction, including the appointment of teachers, use of text-
books and design of the curriculum in all courses that they sponsor. Cultural
promotion as a mode of cultivating political favor is typically termed soft
power, but the extent to which Hanban influences all matters pertaining to
China on their host campuses has frequently taken the form of hard sell.
Sahlins notes that the precise agreement that Confucius Institutes
enter into with specific universities vary in fact, but all contracts are enforced
by strict confidential, nondisclosure conditions. The University of Sydney
was pressured by its Confucius Institute to move an event involving the
Dalai Lama off campus. Other universities have been threatened with ret-
ribution for sponsoring pro‒Falun Gong activities. It is possible to add to
this list other taboo topics, such as the Tiananmen Incident and Tibet/
Taiwan independence, then reinforce these taboos with a strong atmosphere
of self-censorship. Although Confucius Institutes involve Chinese language
and culture, it could just as easily be about heritage protection. What drives
the institution and its policies is a deeper-seated ethos and a distinctive
regime of politicization.
As Christopher Hughes (2014) has argued, one must distinguish the
political mission of Confucius Institutes from its cultural mission, at least in
the formation and practice of policy. In content, it is easy enough to spell
out the academic nature of the Confucius Institutes and the general impor-
tance of cultural dissemination in government policy that has motivated the
promotion of such exchanges. To characterize this as “soft power” in Joseph
Nye’s (2004) terms has been really to suggest that the Institute and its
practices have primarily been based on goodwill, assuagement, co-optation
and various forms of positive persuasion rather than force, coercion, and
other more hard-ball political tactics. Funding for educational programs and
support for academic research have without a doubt been substantial. On
the other hand, its political mission or protection of its political interests
has also influenced its scope of operation in ways that have transcended
the literal wording of their institutional contracts to “not contravene con-
cerning the laws and regulations of China.” In practice, the coercive tactics
that Institutes have applied to protect their political positions in relation to
China have, on the contrary, been anything but soft. Is this just a differ-
ence between policy and practice, literal content and actual intent, or ideal
principles and ulterior motives?
Heritage, culture, Confucius: does it matter?1 The example of Con-
fucius Institutes can be used to demonstrate the soft side of political aims,
insofar as it involves the role of culture. But more importantly, it underscores
the fictions that drive policy discourse and the widening gap with practical
reality. No one seems to take seriously the resurrection of Confucius and
the relevance of Confucian ideology in the operation of any Confucius
Institute in the same way that no one takes seriously the ongoing salience
of socialism with Chinese characteristics in a society increasingly dominated
by crass materialism and unimpeded capitalist oligarchy. The point regarding
culture is that its power was never soft. Far from being a neutral entity,
both national identity and Chinese studies served as tools for enforcing
political correctness.
The Great Collusion: Capitalist Oligarchy and Party Domination
As Rajesh Venugopal (2015:165) interestingly put it, “neoliberalism is every-

where, but at the same time, nowhere.” The role of government in the rise
of the Chinese economy has invoked much discussion in the literature about
the relevance of neoliberalism. If anything, the debate over neoliberalism as
a recent phenomenon in the West, especially in the context of a mutating
modern world system, made comparison inevitable. Like earlier discussions
of Greater China, which implicitly promoted the power of transnationalism
in China through Hong Kong and Taiwan, the application of neoliberalism
in a PRC context masked indirect concerns with the nature of government
intervention in the market economy. However, the literature on neoliberal-
ism was clouded by its own conceptual ambiguities. In a strict sense, as
Ha-joon Chang (2003:47) correctly defines it, neoliberalism was “born out
of an unholy alliance between neoclassical economics and the Austrian-Lib-

ertarian tradition.” This strict definition of its school of thought overlapped
over time with political ideological trends in the 1980s that began to favor
market deregulation, privatization, and retrenchment of the welfare state.
This represented a convergence between the phenomena of free market capi-
talism and state control, which were typically viewed as dualistic opposites,
but it resulted in divergent theoretical approaches, one focused on newly
emerging capitalist systems per se and the other focused on regulative aspects
of governmentality. In this regard, the “millennial capitalism” of Jean and
John Comaroff (2000) and Colin Crouch’s (2011) evolution of the corpo-
rate state differ from approaches accentuating free market trade that have
centered more on the broader restructuring of regulatory processes of the
state and regimes of fiscal discipline, for example, Gordon Burchell (1993),
Nikolas Rose (1993), and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2013).2 Yet
despite the unambiguous relationship between market deregulation and
governmentality, the literature on neoliberalism has been fraught with con-
ceptual ambiguities and conflicting generalizations. Perhaps to defy systemic
totalization, Jamie Peck (2010:7) has argued that neoliberalism is a decen-
tralized force that produces heterogeneous outcomes and “can only exist
in messy hybrids.” Aihwa Ong (2007:1) similarly emphasizes that it is an
amorphous phenomenon, “a migratory set of practices . . . that articulate
diverse situations and participate in mutating configurations of possibil-
ity.” But decentralization and heterogeneity ultimately beg the question of
whether it is driven primarily by the market or its regulatory institutions.
In the context of China, Ong, and Zhang (2008) seem to be the
most ardent supporters of the position that China is a mix of privatization
and state control in the sense that the state requires neoliberalism to be
managed by socialism “from afar,” as though indirectly. On the other hand,
Kipnis (2007) follows from his comparison of neo-Marxist cultural neoliber-
alism (especially of the Comaroffs’ millennial kind) and the governmentality
approach to suggest that their symptoms, outcomes, and policies are mutu-
ally contradictory, thus criticizing in the process their confused application
to the Chinese context. Nonini (2008) sharply criticized even more explicitly
the applicability of neoliberalization to developments in China, arguing
that the proliferation of guanxi has produced instead the blurring of state
and market or public and private in the operation of capitalism. Economic
growth as a result of free trade and an uninhibited market created instead
a conflict between the interests of a new cadre-capitalist elite and the dis-
position of increasingly dispossessed classes of people. Contrary to the lack
of state intervention, the belief in free markets led instead to the building
of large state-owned enterprises. If anything, it facilitated the designs of an
oligarchic corporate state. The state was not becoming a corporation per se,
but was nonetheless buttressed by corporatization in the market economy.
Rational utilitarianism of the market helped to regulate social interest.
Nonini’s critique of neoliberalist interpretations of the Chinese econ-
omy and the role of the state has ironically accentuated the consequences
of the free market economy in a classic Marxist sense, namely the political
economic disparity between the haves and have nots. In the context of post-
Maoist socialism, the tendency of the state to align itself with oligarchic
capitalist interests over individual rights, especially in matters pertaining to
development, has pit capitalism squarely against the ideology of socialism
in a way that has set the scene for an impending conflict between the dis-
enfranchised class and the state. This problematizes not only in short the
fictitious slogan of socialism with Chinese characteristics but also reiterates
the need to understand more precisely the nature of capitalism with Chinese
characteristics.
Huang Yasheng’s (2008) analysis of the transition from early private
entrepreneurialism in rural China to a later phase of state-controlled urban-
based capitalism, appropriately called Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics,
provides in my opinion the basis for reconciling the seemingly overlapping
aspects of this economy, which has been oversimplistically miscast in neo-
liberalist terms. Huang’s empirical reconstruction of that economic growth
was intended initially to highlight the success of initial rural reforms, while
privileging the role of private, small-scale entrepreneurialism in the takeoff
process. His criticism of state-owned, guanxi based enterprises or corporatist
state capitalism of this genre provides a historical link to the emergence of
guanxi as a prevailing practice of everyday life and more importantly the
basis of corporate capitalism itself. It is obvious to Huang that corruption
has also become part of a systematic feature of such capitalism, but he stops
short of identifying corruption as a core element or distinctive feature of this
guanxi capitalism. As a systemic phenomenon, he adds the persistence of
pollution, corruption, inefficient capital use, and state expropriation of land.
In a scathing essay, Richard Smith (2015) begins with what he calls
China’s “ecological apocalypse” to uncover its causal roots in the political
economy. In a radically different take on the nature of this capitalism-
socialism, he argues that the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid
economy have been the product of how market reforms have compounded
the irrationalities of both the old bureaucratic collectivist system and a
systemically corrupt “gangster capitalism.” The consumption of planetary
resources fueled in the first instance the first wave of China’s unsustainable
growth. The global relocation of manufacturing and assembly industries
there made environmental pollution the major by-product of this industrial
revolution. The production of cheap goods made in China has exacerbated

the trend toward a disposable consumption economy, leading to more mate-
rial waste. Government planners invested heavily into new infrastructure,
new housing, and social support, but this has been characterized more by
vanity, redundancy, overproduction, and waste to the point of unusable
excess. Empty highways, high-speed trains, and subways have led to con-
struction frenzies, ghost towns, and vacant office-commercial complexes, all
waiting for the real estate bubble to burst. In short, this vicious cycle was
driven by an out-of-control economy and state excess.
Private corporate enterprises have thrived, but they are still dwarfed
by the domination of state-owned enterprises, whose viability and fortune
often rests on ties to the government or Party. As Smith (2015:49) succinctly
states it, “life in the Communist Party is not so different from life in the
Mafia: it’s a constant, treacherous, and highly dangerous non-stop factional
struggle between crime family-based groupings in struggle with one another
over top offices and treasure. The key to safety is building unshakable vertical
and horizontal networks of support and protection—of guanxi. And the key
to solidifying those networks is sharing the loot from corruption.” China’s
economy mirrors its politics, not vice versa.
Smith then proceeds to extensively document the extent of collusion
between business and politics. Those in government did not profit from
or run enterprises directly, but it did not prevent family members to be
appointed corporate heads and enjoy access to government funding and
assets. The extent of connections to power and money exceeds all definitions
of customary trust in Chinese business. If anything, the systemic corruption
makes guanxi more than just an instrument of patronage. By giving prior-
ity to the state-owned economy, the aim of China’s state-owned enterprises
is not profit maximization. Their ultimate aim is the security, wealth, and
power of the Party. Even the anticorruption campaigns have less to do with
cleansing of corruption per se than the purging of competing, undesirable
cliques. In short, it is superficial and misleading to describe the system as a
socialist-capitalist hybrid. The market economy is free, but privileged access
to its resources is politically controlled.
In my opinion, Smith’s depiction of this political economic complex
accurately captures the intertwined relationship tying rampant environment
degradation, a guanxi-based corporate economy, and the state’s overinvest-
ment in infrastructure development, which has in effect exacerbated the
cumulative crisis of an accelerated growth economy. More than the product
of guanxi capitalism or neoliberal governmentality, it is a regime grounded
ultimately in the continued maintenance of the state or Party. It did not
invest directly into the economy, but it manipulated access to resources in
the market in ways that ultimately favored and protected its own interests,
which included above all its policy and political positions. In this regard,
perestroika or democracy of any kind also represented an inherent threat
to its viability.
From a larger perspective, the system in question involves not simply
the economy or nature of governmentality but a set of relationships linking
the work of economy and culture to the process of state legitimation. Social-
ism with Chinese characteristics is a fiction that obfuscates the existence of
an endemically corrupt, guanxi-based regime. Confucius, Inc. may represent
an equally fictitious depiction of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, but
fictions nonetheless underscore the importance of culture in legitimating the
system, not just as “soft power.” Driving support for the growth economy is
not simply state policy but also the “structures of feeling” associated with a
reinvented national consciousness. The rising discontent from an impending
bubble economy and environmental crisis may in fact counter in the long
run the general mass support that the regime still seems to enjoy, but this
popular support has served in turn to lend credence to the state’s suppres-
sion of democratic dissent. This systemic regime has become most explicitly
institutionalized in the PRC, but its effects can be seen in Hong Kong and
other “autonomous” regions, even globally, as “Chineseness.”
scientific blueprint for progressive society, with relevant functional applica-

tions for the future.
The gradual changes in research program at the Three Principles Insti-
tute at Academia Sinica clearly reflected the changing ethos of the Three
Principles and its practical role in the construction of the nation-state.
Created in 1974 as a preinstitute with thirteen research fellows, it was
established as a formal institute in 1981. By 1984, it expanded swiftly to
encompass a full-time research staff of thirty-four, eleven of whom were
economists, nine historians, six sociologists, five political scientists, one
philosopher, and only two specializing in the Three Principles. Despite the
professional composition of the research staff, the internal research sections
within the institute were still divided according to the Three Principles,
namely nationalism (composed of sociologists and historians), democracy
(composed of political scientists), and livelihood (composed of economists).
According to the institute’s research prospectus, its primary aims of develop-
ment were, first, to construct a theoretical framework based on the Three
Principles and, second, to conduct empirical studies with broad relevance
for national policy. Serving the nation-building principles of Sun’s Nation-
alist ideology, it also aimed to serve the needs of international scholarly
research and national reconstruction.30 In 1988, the disciplinary makeup
of the research staff changed negligibly, but research programs within the
institute were radically reorganized into five sections, named (1) the Three
Principles and historical research, (2) the Three Principles and sociological
research, (3) the Three Principles and political scientific research, (4) the
Three Principles and economic research, and (5) the Three Principles and
legal research. Its statement of purpose in the institute’s prospectus was now
revised to state that, in addition to research on the Three Principles proper,
focus was also placed on interdisciplinary research with adjoining functional
specializations, ultimately with a view toward expanding its theoretical hori-
zons and practical applications more in line with international research.31
By 1990, all five research sections dropped reference to the Three Principles
altogether, and the institute’s name was officially changed to Sun Yat-sen
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. The scientific rationalization of
the Three Principles thus became complete. By upgrading the Three Prin-
ciples, the rest of humanities and the social sciences now provided a direct
service in the making of a (progressive) national ideology.
The winds of change reverberated over to other departments and insti-
tutes involved in the teaching or promotion of the Three Principles to the
point of overhauling the content of courses and their required status at all
levels of education. Ironically, yet consistent with its orientation in an age
for racial equality. Protection of Asian tradition and tacit promotion of its
values was combined with the value-free adoption of rule by law, economic
modernization, and progress. Asian values also had another face, one that
prioritized social cohesion over individual voice. The nation was thus literally
a search for modernity, but it was one that had to deny ethnic cultural-
ism as a foundational principle. In many senses, Singapore fits Foucault’s
disciplinary society to a tee, even more so when it is viewed as a top-down
state project. The relative effects of postcolonialism, nationalism, and social
workfare ethics constitute seminal formative aspects in the state’s project
of modernity.
The distinctive features of Singapore’s experience have important rami-
fications for the meaning of Chineseness in a non-Chinese context. What-
ever it is, it occupied a dependent position within a nation-state driven by
its primary identification with modernity. The idea of Asian values was also
a selective definition, if not Orientalizing as well, which epitomized the
priority of collective values over individualist (i.e., Western) ones. Appeals
to Sinophone theory and a cultural China have explicitly emphasized the
multiplicity of Sinitic voices and the priority of a transnational periphery
over a Sinocentric core, but they still privilege above all the authority of
voice over its embeddedness in a grounded context as a prime determinant
in Chinese identity formation. To be or not to be; that is not the question,
but why identify?
Chapter 10
The Yellow Pacific

Diasporas of Mind in the
Politics of Caste Consciousness
The concept of cultural China has attempted to champion diasporic values

in the construction of new Chinese identities, and, thus, resembles the cos-
mopolitanism of Black Atlantic, which has become Paul Gilroy’s paradigm of
countermodernity, both through its appeal to hybridity and the emancipatory
power of culture. Despite superficial similarities between both concepts, the
relevance of diaspora here resides less in its capacity to invoke ethnic realities
than its particular situatedness in a field of sociopolitical relations. On the
one hand, while Chinese, Black, and other diasporas differ with reference
to their situatedness to a local sociopolitical ground, they expose, on the
other hand, the general limitations of diaspora as a phenomenon engendered
by the rigid peculiarities of a(n increasingly anachronistic) stratified society.
The Double Consciousness of a Transnational Modernity
It is remarkable what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen

the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech
and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and
Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I
have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with
the exception of the pigtail.
—James Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
This is a revision of a paper published in 2001 as “Diasporas of Mind, or Why There Ain’t
No Black Atlantic in Cultural China,” Communal/ Plural: Journal of Transnational & Cross-
cultural Studies 9(1):95‒110.
191
In the progression from postmodern to postcolonial to transnational world,

it is easy to track the plethora of concepts that have emerged, but it is
somewhat difficult to determine whether the invention of these concepts has
followed the manifestation of social phenomena or the other way around.
As human beings, we live in the real world, but as intellectuals we articulate
our relationship to reality in reference to those discourses within which we
are embedded. As soon as one has been led to believe that multiculturalism
was invented by postmodern theory, one has then been led to believe that
postcolonial theory finally liberated the multiple identities in us all.
Like the assumption of shared values and a collective conscience under-
lying the nation-state that has made culture, ethnicity, and national identity
problematic issues, postcolonialism’s need to recognize multiple identities in
the present is, on the other hand, the recognition of an empire of mind that
has subordinated and negated difference. In effect, if celebration of hybridity
and championing of diasporic interests are a consequence of our need to
decolonize, then one must first ask whether there are significant differences
between our problematic need to invoke hybridity and diaspora and the
phenomena that have given rise to them. Equally important, the universal-
izing tendencies of postmodernism, postcolonialism, or transnationalism as
theoretical trends that have stemmed from an intellectual mainstream should
make one highly suspicious of whether the meanings of these terms are
similar to their usages in a local or indigenous context. The celebration of
postmodernism, which gives the illusion that it can be transposed anywhere
with the same effects, regardless of their cultural specificity, is an often-cited
case in point.
Decolonization has similarly become a figurative code word for resis-
tance everywhere, regardless of whether the context of its application is liter-
ally colonial or not. Transnational capitalism, characterized by disjunctures
in Appadurai’s (1990) terms, has enjoyed the same trendy status, to a point
where scholars have begun to see transnationalism in earlier historical eras
too, before the rise of nations, strictly speaking. One can attribute the prob-
lem to slippage between the concept as strictly conceived and actually used,
but there are significant differences between various theories, all of which
champion cultural hybridity and transnational identities in a postcolonial
context. Theories represent different discursive positionings vis-à-vis dilemmas
of culture, and it is equally important to spell out the underlying ground
on which these terms are meaningfully invoked and strategically articulated.
Paul Gilroy’s (1993) notion of “the Black Atlantic” offers a pow-
erful counternarrative to Western modernity not only by challenging the
dominance of cultural nationalism or ethnic absolutism as core metaphors
or paradigms of that experience, but also by recasting in the process the
The Yellow Pacific 193
centrality of (African) Black experience in the modern history of the West.

Key to his examination of “double consciousness” among Blacks in the
West is his celebration of hybridity, which he (1993:3) characterizes as “the
stereophonic, bilingual or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer
the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling,
producing, communicating, and remembering.” For Gilroy, the need to
break away from the discrete national dynamics of culture and the presumed
integrity and purity of ethnicity in the construction of that culture was a
prerequisite for understanding the Black experience and its impact on the
process of Western modernity. Instead of monolithic modernity creating
hybridity as its other, one sees hybridity giving rise to modernity itself.
Hybridity in this regard is not just the individualistic and arbitrary
synthesis of cultural forms. Through his depiction of important Black writers
and thinkers, Black hybridity can perhaps be best characterized as a histori-
cal transition from a conscious formulation of dual identities to one which
in which the basic features of Black experience become stripped of their
explicit ethnic qualities and dialogue with the philosophical and universal-
ist languages of modernity. In other words, what begins as an essentialist
discourse inscribed in racial or political terms becomes eventually an integral
part of the structures of modernity.
But far from simply being appropriated by modernity, Gilroy argues
that the Black experience becomes an alternate discourse that also influences
the Western experience of modernity. Hybridity’s relationship to diaspora
is based on the latter’s disposition within the context of social subordina-
tion, terror, and emancipation that evokes the articulation of allegorical
forms and ideologies by expanding on the underlying structures of feeling,
expression, and memory. This process of hybridity can be traced clearly in
the literature and thought from W. E. B. DuBois to Richard Wright and
in the evolution of Black music.
The transformative nature of that hybrid experience is described in
detail by Gilroy and can be read in many ways, but it is clear that the
formation of this Black “nationalism” has transcended the political bound-
aries of the nation-state, while at the same time it has become an integral
part of the culture within which it is embedded. Moreover, this hybridity
seems to be predicated less on the authenticity of its voices than on the
ongoing interpretation of the structures of feeling in Black experience that
later becomes the basis of a Black politics of authenticity. Gilroy thus views
modernity as a quintessentially bottom-up process, one in which the local
informs the global and where the polyphonic nature of Black social reali-
ties becomes the basis for an imagined community that is represented by
the Black Atlantic.
The way in which Gilroy has championed hybridity and diaspora

differs, on the other hand, from the genre of Chinese modernity character-
ized by Aihwa Ong and others in their volume of essays titled Ungrounded
Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (Ong &
Nonini 1997). Like Gilroy, by accenting transnationalism, Ong et al. point
to the existence of forces intrinsic to the Chinese experience that have eluded
disciplining by nation-states while building on relations that intrinsically
differ from Western narratives of modernity. Underlying their narrative of
transnationalism in a Chinese context as an alternative modernity is their
attempt to view Chinese cultural politics as an extension of diasporic identi-
ties rather than as the diffusion of an essentializing hegemony. But unlike
Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, which overlaps with and is embedded within West-
ern modernity, the Chinese transnational modernity envisaged by Ong and
Nonini competes with its counterpart. Both celebrate multiculturalism, but
the diasporic identity invoked in the Chinese case seems to be predicated
less by a “double consciousness” that leads explicitly toward hybridity than
by a determination to maintain autonomy vis-à-vis the Sinocentric core and
its host society. Ungrounded and constantly shifting, Chinese transnational
modernity, as portrayed by Ong and Nonini, resists the absolutism of the
state yet maintains a collusive relationship with it in both Chinese and
foreign contexts. Thus, hybridity is part and parcel of being transnational.
Transnationalism requires careful qualification here, but it is apparent
that it differs from essentialist formulations of a pan-nationalist Confucian
ethics in the emergence of East Asian economies. It is not at all evident at
first glance if Ong and Nonini attribute the success of a Chinese transna-
tional modernity to the recent success of Chinese transnational entrepre-
neurs or to the rise of a new global capitalism that has enabled such Chinese
transnationalists to flourish. In their rhetorical emphasis on diaspora, they
appear to favor the former by seeing Chinese transnational capitalism as
the end product of ongoing cultural practices. After all, Southeast Asia
has witnessed centuries of Chinese comprador traders. As Trocki (1997:71)
argues for the early history of Chinese enterprise in Southeast Asia, “it was
the British flag that followed the Chinese coolies,” thus the key organiza-
tional structures that drove Chinese capitalism were built on multiethnic
alliances well prior to the advent of British colonialism. If so, it would be
possible to view the later development of large-scale Chinese capitalism as
the basic extension of a multicultural mode of production, writ large. Ong
(1997:171‒202) expands this thesis into a full-fledged alternative theory
of Chinese modernity that celebrates the flexibility of hybrid or multiple
identities and the fluidity of constant deterritorialization.
Ong juxtaposes the PRC’s state project of Chinese modernity against

this moment of “triumphalist capitalism” and views the diverse experience in
Asian modernity as the result of ongoing tension between these two forces.
It is the influx of Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and overseas Chinese capital into
the PRC that then represents the driving force behind another multinational
entity popularly called “Greater China.” In championing the “triumphalist
capitalism” of transnational, multicultural Chinese entrepreneurs, she privi-
leges a late form of global capitalism, which is the result of fundamental
changes in the modern world system, thus anything but local and diasporic
in origin, and omits a whole history of Asian capitalism that was not trans-
national. Chinese capitalism is not the end product of transnationalism.
It is easy to romanticize in our current climate of transnational capital-
ism tycoons such as Li Ka-shing and the Riady family, but early Republican
China and postwar Taiwan were full of rich capitalists and large enter-
prises. Far from being the culmination in transnational terms of a kind
of utilitarianism that begins as pariah capitalism in Weber’s terms, it is
easier to understand the emergence of Chinese transnational capitalism as an
ephemeral moment made possible by the end of organized capitalism, which
emancipated rational organization from the strictures of a nation-based cul-
tural economy. Despite the rhetoric focus Ong et al. place on diaspora and
hybridity, one should note how Chinese cosmopolitanism invoked by such
modernity differs from Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. Contrary to the bottom-up
process that contributed to a Black Atlantic cosmology, the transnational
modernity that Ong and others celebrate in fact is one where the global
informs the local and where an imagined community of multicultural Chi-
nese capitalists becomes the basis for an alternative Chinese modernity.
Diaspora: A Term for All Seasons?
Fascists operate from a narrow, limited basis; they preach nationality,

race, soil and blood, folk feeling and other rot to capture men’s hearts.
What makes a Fascist and another a Communist might be found in
the degree to which they’re integrated with their culture. The more
alienated a man is, the more he’d lean toward Communism.
—Richard Wright, The Outsider
I have deliberately contrasted Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Ong’s Ungrounded

Empire of Chinese transnational capitalism to suggest that hybridity and
diaspora can mean different things, despite being celebrated by the same
postnational, postcolonial counterhegemony of multiple identities and deter-

ritorialization. For Gilroy, diaspora represents the primordial situation of
deracination, inflicted through the common social reality of enslavement,
which bound the experience of Blacks in a transnational Atlantic. Despite
a common experiential framework, the culture that developed on the basis
of these structures of feeling is multivocal and decentered, thus eventually
contributing to intrinsic hybridity. This hybridity is less a function of iden-
tifying per se than of the social context of deracination and oppression that
shapes the marginality and double consciousness of Blacks. It is significant
also to point out that this cultural hybridity (of which Black music is an
example par excellence) is built on the social experience of enslavement and
alienation (and feelings thereof ) rather than with reference to cultural tradi-
tions of an imagined homeland. This is a cultural nationalism that lacks a
political nation and can transcend it precisely because of its transnational
wanderings and influences, which then derives its identity by amplifying
diasporic sentiments rather than by exploiting its alienation from a presumed
cultural core. More importantly, its dialogue with modernity ties it more
intricately to the West than to a history of Africa.
Ong’s example of Chinese transnational modernity differs from Gil-
roy’s, in part because of the recent emergence of disorganized, transnational
capitalism that has made the success of Chinese transnational capitalists
prominent and in part because the history of the Chinese diaspora, espe-
cially in Southeast Asia, has been inextricably tied to its politico-economic
relationship to or imagined communion with a Chinese homeland, at least
until most recently.
The long history of Nanyang Chinese traders in Southeast Asia is
incontestable. Their separateness as ethnic group vis-à-vis Europeans and
indigenous populations is heightened by their attachment to their provincial
homeland as well as to their sojourning intentions as traders. Although Chi-
nese ethnic settlements were established in major port cities, they were rarely
if ever accompanied by migration of women or families. Over time, there
were, of course, large numbers of Chinese who intermarried and became
indigenized, such as the Peranakans in Indonesia and Babas in Malaya, but
this simply accented the polarization of the Chinese population in contrast
to other ethnic groups. In fact, their separateness was not just a function of
ethnic differences but also their status as traders who operated in personal
networks. The preoccupation of Chinese with business in the Philippines
led Filipinos to use the Spanish term to refer to Chinese, namely sangley
(“merchant” in Chinese). This was not unlike the pre-nineteenth-century
term Malay to denote the Muslim (Arab) trading diaspora.
The applicability of the term diaspora to describe Chinese in the Nan-

yang region, even during this premodern era, is debatable. In light of the
heavily Biblical connotations of the Jewish diaspora, the notion of dispersal
and forced exile from a sacred homeland cannot be avoided, not to mention
the themes of suffering and social memory that have without a doubt paral-
lels with the Black slave experience but have little in common with Chinese
experiences, except to accent the element of detachment from a homeland
and separateness vis-à-vis its host society. This sense of detachment or separ-
ateness that epitomizes an ethnic diaspora is similar to anthropological uses
of the term, notably in Cohen’s (1971:2) definition of trading diaspora as
“a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities.”
Yet, ethnic separateness in this regard is not merely the function of
self-identification but can also be a function of external factors in society
that aim to maintain a stratified hierarchy between groups or prevent their
accommodation and integration into the polity at large. As Curtin (1984)
has described in his study of cross-cultural trade in history, trading diasporas
were a long staple phenomenon throughout world history, whose promi-
nence began to decline with the domination of a modern world system
and the spread of industrialization. In other words, the caste-like, marginal
status of diaspora is as much the function of a social system that reifies
and hardens ethnic boundaries as it is the product of ethnic identification.
The fictive quality of diaspora is best exemplified by the anachronistic
nature of the Jewish diaspora today, especially in America. One may question
its applicability to those persons who have consciously disavowed attach-
ments to an ethnic or religious homeland or chosen to assimilate to the cul-
tural mainstream of its host society. For similar reasons, it would be unusual
to speak of an aristocratic French or Anglo-Saxon Protestant diaspora. If
an ethnic group ceases to become diasporic, because it has transcended its
socially marginal status, then there is nothing ethnic about diaspora. One
does not call the capital that fuels corporate America diasporic, even if it
happens to have Japanese or Jewish origins. Given the extent of foreign
influence in Hollywood culture, one would not call it diasporic either.
Diaspora thus has its limits, even as an “ethnic” concept, which it is
not, strictly speaking, as I have argued above.1 Gilroy’s appeal to diaspora was
based on the development of a Black consciousness that was built directly
on those experiential sentiments of political oppression and social estrange-
ment and was not a function of territorial dispersal per se. Yet, the political
connotations of diaspora are still evident today in the way contemporary
postcolonial theory has tended to champion diaspora in order to emanci-
pate the (suppressed) multiple identities in us all. Reid (1997:36) has also
noted, for example, that its popularity as a term to symbolize the condition
of Chinese everywhere (outside China) was heightened considerably during
the first International Conference on the Chinese Diaspora, in Berkeley,
California, in November 1992. Its reception of use was found to be more
favorable among North American Chinese than among the Southeast Asian
Chinese, where ironically diaspora was used first and most prominently to
depict the sojourning communities of Chinese traders. Its popularity now
is attributable to those conditions that have created barriers and alienation.
The historicity of the term reveals in the final analysis less the primor-
dial semantic meaning of a term than the restrictions imposed on its use
by its underlying sociopolitical context, the latter being more important.
A clearer case in point involves the changing use of terms for “overseas
Chinese.” In the premodern, prenational period, Chinese sojourners in the
Nanyang region were less citizens of some unified polity (speaking a single
language [Mandarin] and sharing ties to a civilizational ideal) than dispa-
rate dialect groups bound together by familistic ties and attachments to a
provincial homeland. As Wang Gungwu (1998:1) rightly pointed out, “the
Chinese never had a concept of identity, only a concept of Chineseness,
of being Chinese and of becoming un-Chinese.” The concept of Chinese-
ness at the time was not one invoked now by the politically neutral term
huaren (being culturally Chinese). Southern Chinese at the time referred to
themselves as tangren (people of the Tang dynasty) who spoke tanghua (Tang
language), which to them just meant “Chinese,” when in fact they were
regional groups speaking local dialect. There was less a notion of overseas
Chinese here than just a notion of Chinese living overseas. The nationalistic
term huaqiao to denote “overseas Chinese” as a group did not appear until
the late nineteenth century.
During a premodern era, the multicultural skills of Chinese traders
were less a function of their multiple “identities” than of strategic qualities
based on occupational and political necessity. Success in social intercourse
and economic exchange demanded fluency in many dialects and languages,
as well as familiarity with many customs. As Wang Gungwu (1991:139)
aptly phrased it, “for most of these merchants and entrepreneurs, being
Chinese had nothing to do with becoming closer to China. It was a private
and domestic matter only manifested when needed to strengthen a business
contact or to follow an approved public convention.” In the colonial era,
the role of Chinese as compradors tended to enhance their separateness as
an ethnic community. In this regard, the functional specialization of other
traders, notably Indians and Arabs, added to their separateness as diasporic
communities, not just their ethnic differences, the latter then becoming a
phenotypical marker.
The meaning and use of the concept of “overseas Chinese” also can-
not be divorced from the conditions of global capitalism that brought
about large-scale immigration of Chinese laborers to Southeast Asia, start-
ing toward the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them had been
sojourners, at least initially, and their identity as a group was galvanized by
Chinese nationalist sentiment that began to grow during the early twentieth
century and culminated in the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing
dynasty. Through education in standard Mandarin and learning of Chinese
history and civilization, the overseas Chinese considered themselves, prob-
ably for the first time, as identifying as Chinese (despite regional and dialect
nuances), not only vis-à-vis a national homeland but also in contrast to their
host society. But the use of this concept changed over time, and its popu-
larity waned during the Cold War, which not only fractionalized identity
among Chinese along political lines but also saw sentiments to homeland
and host society shift as a consequence of changing socioeconomic condi-
tions. It continues to be used by Chinese at the Sinocentric core (PRC and
ROC) to denote Chinese living outside its national boundaries proper, to
which anyone of Chinese descent is eligible. Use by Chinese living abroad,
however, tends to be a function simply of “identifying.”
The nationalistic connotations of the term overseas Chinese (huaqiao),
along with the changing perceptions of Chinese living in Southeast Asia
vis-à-vis their host societies, have in recent years led Chinese elsewhere
to increasingly use huaren to refer to ethnic Chinese who speak huayu,
standard Chinese which is literally the same as the Mandarin referred to
on mainland China as putonghua (“the common language”) or in Taiwan
(following Republican usage) as guoyu (“the national language”). In short,
terms differ significantly, less because of their semantic content than because
of their pragmatic context of use. This parallels the recent aversion by
Chinese outside China proper to calling themselves zhongguoren (Chinese)
who speak zhongguohua (Chinese language), because of the nationalistic,
essentially patriotic, associations of zhongguo with the Chinese polity.
In fact, the highest degree of resistance to both the old term overseas
Chinese and new term diaspora comes from the Chinese living in Southeast
Asia. As Wang (1995:13) argued, “I do not agree to the word [diaspora]
being used for the Chinese because it has implications which may have
applied to some aspects of the sojourners in the past but do not apply
to ethnic Chinese today. In many ways, diaspora is a word that has the
kind of political content comparable to the term huaqiao.” Similarly, Leo
Suryadinata (1997) also asked in more systematic terms whether it is more
accurate to call ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia overseas Chinese, Chinese
overseas, or Southeast Asians.
It is clear in any event that those solidary sentiments that once bound
Chinese together as a group in its overseas environment and in relation
to a patriotic homeland had withered as a result of Chinese geopolitics
and changes in Southeast Asian nationalism, especially in its sociopolitical
accommodation of the Chinese. As Tan Chee Beng (1997) remarked in his
comment on Suryadinata’s article, it is not just a matter of possessing mul-
tiple identities, as if one could simply put on and take off different cultural
faces. The divisions among Chinese themselves show that they make explicit
choices in cultural orientation, and even more importantly these choices
are grounded in a context of territorial settlement, cultural assimilation, or
political incorporation to local society rather than in their diasporic exten-
sion to a previous homeland.
Celebrating Hybridity in an Era of Invented Indigenization
It matters a great deal whether modern racial slavery is identified as a

repository in which the consciousness of traditional culture could be
secreted and condensed into ever more potent forms or seen alterna-
tively as the site of premodern tradition’s most comprehensive erasure.
—Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness
The current resistance to diaspora experienced by Chinese overseas on the

immediate periphery, most notably Southeast Asia and Taiwan as well, is
less a declaration of their changing ethnic “Chineseness” than a crisis of
identifying in the sense of having been bound morally or politically to a
cultural core. The tendency of Chinese to increasingly identify with their
settled nation as citizens, despite their minority status and continued main-
tenance of cultural difference vis-à-vis their host culture, has important
ramifications for the meaning and use of the term hybridity. Different from
Gilroy’s formation of a pan-national cultural consciousness, hybridity here is
in essence an act of political decentering that will in the long run lead to
the absorption of Chineseness into increasingly local or indigenous frame-
works of meaning. Tan Chee Beng (1997:31) noted, “President Corazon
Aquino has acknowledged that she has Chinese ancestry, and the Chinese
press has written of her as if she is an ethnic Chinese. But how has she
identified herself? Has she ever identified herself as an ethnic Chinese? As
far as I know, she is just Filipino.” This contrasts with the case of the Baba
Chinese of Malaysia, whom Tan regards as Chinese, despite their heavily
creolized lifestyle.
The (indigenizing) trend of Chinese outside China to identify with

their settler societies, despite the ongoing tradition of ethnic Chinese cul-
ture there, should also make the kind of appeal that Tu Wei-ming (1991)
has made to “cultural China,” something that is hopelessly out of touch
with the real world, despite its call for hybridity and for diasporic voices
to offer new models for a declining Sinocentric core, spirited by the suc-
cess of “neo-Confucian” East Asian economies and built on corresponding
sentiments of togetherness.
According to Tu (1991:22), “cultural China” was coined in the late
1980s by concerned Chinese intellectuals writing in overseas journals. It
consists of three cultural universes: the first encompassing societies populated
primarily by ethnic Chinese, such as mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Singapore; the second covering overseas Chinese communities, notably
in Southeast Asia; and the third comprising scholars and professionals con-
cerned with the Chinese-speaking world in general. However, in practice,
it refers to a single community whose common interest in Chinese society
transcends national boundaries and discourses, a kind of Yellow Pacific. In
a changing global system that witnessed once-patriotic overseas becoming
more permanently settled in their host countries and massive migration of
Chinese professionals to the West, followed by decline of the Sinocentric
core as a sphere of influence, Tu’s message of multivocality has as its main
goal a cultural renaissance at the Sinocentric core, as represented by the
theme “The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today,” which graced two
special issues of Daedalus in 1991 and 1993. Whether this is an alterna-
tive modernity is dubious, to say the least, but it is founded largely on a
nonexistent transnational community or collective consciousness.
In the context of “indigenizing” Chinese communities in Southeast
Asia, it is clear that the nationalist imperative to identify has become prob-
lematic. Or to put it in a somewhat different way, it has become increasingly
apparent that the maintenance of a bounded ethnic identity has been seen
as an irrelevant, if not incompatible, aspect of the conduct of economic
and political life in these various societies. Much of the success of Chinese
entrepreneurs (past and present) in these Southeast Asian venues had been
achieved through multicultural skills, more often by downplaying ethnic dif-
ference. In the political domain, cooptation and networking have been con-
stant features of social mobility strategies by Chinese, even if it resulted in
cultural assimilation. Successful examples of ethnic Chinese, such as Chuan
Leekpai, the prime minister of Thailand, and the various tycoons who made
their fame and fortune by cultivating favor with native elites, have shown
that maintenance of ethnic identity and lifestyles is largely irrelevant, if not
secondary, to these politico-economic concerns.
Divergent paths of cultural discourse in Hong Kong and Taiwan show

how inaccurate ethnicity is in reflecting sociopolitical reality. In Hong Kong,
despite the large proportion of non-Cantonese immigrants to the colony
after the war (making up about 25% of the total population), regional ethnic
nepotism has never been problematic. In fact, the emergence of a Hong
Kong identity for the most part created divisions between older-generation
refugees still attached to the motherland and a local generation raised in
the liminal spaces created by Chinese nationalist conflict. After the Sino-
British Declaration of 1984 leading up to 1997, Hong Kong underwent a
phase of reverse indigenization, as though attempting to rediscover its lost
Chineseness. The recent discovery of Hong Kongers that they are really
Chinese is less a sudden prise de conscience than a reflection instead of the
primary embeddedness of ethnic identity to changes in the underlying and
constantly shifting sociopolitical ground.
In postwar Taiwan, on the other hand, the proportion of local versus
outsider ethnic groups (75% Taiwanese vs. 25% from elsewhere in China)
mirrored that of Hong Kong, but in the era of post‒Cold War “democratiza-
tion,” Taiwan has largely been undergoing a process of ethnic decolonization.
Their later rediscovery of Taiwaneseness parallels its hypersensitive aversion
to Chineseness, which it currently associates primarily with mainland China.
The ironic fallacy of Taiwan’s ethnic reality resides in the fact that
it has been slow to recognize the existence of a Taiwanese consciousness,
despite the obvious demographics. It has struggled to advocate a political
platform of majority rule, when nations based on less dominant ethnic
imbalances (such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and South Africa) have
in fact achieved political independence. Either appearances are deceiving,
or the possibilities of ethnic discourse in Taiwan have been complicated by
a different kind of political reality. Contrary to the emancipatory claims of
postcolonial theory, Taiwan has already undergone many phases of indi-
genization. The first, termed sinicization, was part of a broad defense of
traditional China vis-à-vis both the West and the PRC. Native Taiwaneseness
then, like its earlier phase, reflects less a discovery of ethnic truths than a
changing political landscape.
Toward a New Politics of Place in the

Cosmopolises of Changing Identities
There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For
true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group.
Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which the artist
challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like
the canvases of a painter) a definition of his [sic] identity: as individual,
as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition.
Thus because jazz finds its life in improvisation upon traditional materi-
als, the jazz man must lose his identity even as he finds it.
—Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
The question is not one of whether it is possible to have multiple identities

or whether hybridity can create new identities, but whether one can justifi-
ably understand them without reference to the sociopolitical structures that
contain and define them in fact. The changing nationalist spaces of identity
discourse along with the shifting parameters of ethnic-cultural boundedness
that characterize the process of identifying have in recent years fundamen-
tally altered the framework for place-based imagination that is really at
the core of community and diasporic affiliation. It is not insignificant that
Chinese in Southeast Asia have begun to see themselves increasingly as
subject-citizens of their host settler societies, just as Taiwanese have viewed
themselves in relation to a reinvented but still indeterminate sense of place
(to replace the spaces of a polity, discourse, and culture represented by the
“Republic of China”). These changes in situatedness have important ramifi-
cations for how new cultural discourses will form and what role hybridity
will play in shaping the scope and relevance of identity.
Contrary to the imaginary transnational fundamentalism that Tu Wei-
ming’s notion of cultural China advocates, which seems to include Chinese
everywhere, it is very easy to show how such an imagined community is
really limited to a small group of diasporic intellectuals in the ivory tower
and is really far removed from the diverse kinds of geopolitical shifts that
have influenced Chinese in different social settings. The fictive nature of
the nation-state, for one thing, has been problematized in different ways
in different venues.
The more Chinese “identify” with the various national regimes in
which their routine of life is situated, the less likely it will be in the long
run that one can view them as being part of a single universe of discourse,
regardless of the disposition of their ethnic culture. Even in the case of
Taiwan, the possibilities for identity can change radically not just as a func-
tion of how native Taiwanese consciousness comes to be defined, but rather
to the extent that it can alter its boundedness to the cultural nationalist
framework in which its fate has now become hopelessly entangled. Appadu-
rai (1991:209) attributes many of these shifts in situatedness to the recent
effects of globalization or what he calls “genealogies of cosmopolitanism.” In
any ethnoscape (which may be discreet localities or higher level communi-
ties), genealogies can reveal the cultural spaces within which new forms are
indigenized (Appadurai notes how tourism invaded the space of pilgrimage
in India). While any one place can alternatively become the site of functional
disjuncture or the object of appropriation by other disruptive forces, the flip
side of this is to recognize equally that any one place can be imbued with
multiple meanings. The nation can thus be for some people a source of roots
in a historical or political sense and for others a convenient abode or place
of exile. Similarly, sacred sites can be seen by some as objects of pilgrimage
and by others a tourist attraction. The tyranny of a hegemonic, collective
“identity” associated with homogenous nation-states has given place a fixed
or incontestable meaning, while, on the other hand, the fact that places
can under different sociopolitical conditions adopt multiple meanings makes
the choice of identifying with different moral communities an even more
strategic and context-sensitive one.
Multiple meanings of place differ from multiple identities in the sense
that they accent the primordial importance of context rather than ethnicity or
culture in the construction of identities. Rather than viewing the substance
of one’s ethnicity or culture as a natural point of departure, more impor-
tantly it is necessary to see how context invokes the relevance of culture,
as function of strategic choice, to the processes of identifying. Positionality
within a context then becomes the subjective framework of power. In this
regard, perception also plays a salient role. It is and can become the very
source of cultural diversity.
An alternative approach to a cultural study of place (and its ramifica-
tions for identity construction) comes from Patterson’s (1994) concept of
“cosmopolis.” Although less celebrated than Gilroy’s analysis of the Black
Atlantic, Patterson’s sociohistorical analysis of the origins of reggae in the
complex interactions of global culture and in the formation of the American
cultural cosmos shows how multiple flows (rather than the singular threat
of a homogenizing cultural “imperialism”) have contributed to the inven-
tion of new cultural forms, while at the same time calling into question
the meanings of place accorded to fixed cultural origins, which casts in a
rather different light the status of musical culture in both the American
and Jamaican cosmos. Like Gilroy, Patterson clearly describes the forma-
tion of an alternative modernity, one in which working-class Rastafarian
culture becomes a local site of hybridity, whose actual sources of influence
are global. In tracing its external influences to the West, one discovers
instead that this musical culture has become the site of a different kind of
globalization and synthesis.
Patterson contrasts the local assimilative strategies of these working-
class Jamaicans with the cultural cosmopolitanism of Jamaican intellectual
nature of the curriculum was revamped, this time for the next thirty years.
“Citizenship and morality” at the elementary school level was renamed “life
and ethics,” while its corresponding middle- to high-school course became
“citizenship and morality.”33
While the systematic reconstruction of the Three Principles at all levels
of education was in historical terms the direct consequence of an explicit
program to politicize education from the point of view of the Party, the addi-
tion of courses on personal conduct, moral behavior, and civic values made
clear that successful acquisition of correct political ideology was founded on
the prior cultivation of an ethico-moral lifestyle in all other respects. Thus,
piety, etiquette, and deference were not just limited to family virtues, as
might be the case of a Confucian notion of filial piety, in strict terms. They
were meant to be the moral foundation of all societal relationships. The
cultivation of these values in the practice of everyday life was the precondi-
tion for successfully inculcating the broader vision of Nationalist society as
well as orthodox political views. In other words, in order to achieve this
goal of politicizing education, it was important to see how political ideology
as theoretically conceived was the “natural” culmination of moral education
and the normal practice of everyday social life.34
Like the four-tiered transformation in Jameson’s interpretation of Bib-
lical narrative, the writing of nationalist ideology in Taiwan also manifested
a multi-level transformation. At the lowest level of elementary training, one
can see a focus on the practices of the individual body, personal hygiene,
and individual welfare as well as the acquisition of common sense.35 At the
intermediate level, with courses focusing more on civics and society, there
was further ideological investment of values previously at the individual-
experiential level to one where knowledge of interpersonal relationships in
society as things in themselves became the focus of education. The dis-
placement of learning from a collective-experiential domain to the level of
collective-theoretical knowledge became complete at the high-school level
with the teaching of Sun Yat-sen’s political thought (guofu sixiang).
The writing of national ideology in the context of education has been
from the outset a crucial dimension of the KMT’s attempt to define culture
and use the symbols of a common culture as the basis by which to cultivate
a unitary societal consciousness, thus legitimize or reproduce the nation-
state. Needless to say, the government’s political authority to construct and
define culture was one that was backed by the power of the totalitarian state,
but the construction of a culture of the nation (in all its flavors) through
the writing (and practice) of political ideology (as ethics and moral behav-
ior), promotion of master symbols of the body politic, and various rites of
ethnicity (even indigenous ones) can be shown to be inventions and fictions

that must be constantly created, legitimized, and institutionalized in social
practice. Meanwhile, the applicability of multiple identities must be viewed
within the specific confines of those institutional regimes that attempt to
define and regulate them.
Diaspora is in the final analysis a concept whose origins and con-
notations show it to be the product of a stratified system, which is itself
subject to ongoing institutional change. Thus, its appropriateness is largely
a function of the power relations that effectively drive institutions and of
the perception of people within that geography of power. Of course, one
can champion the bottom-up process of hybridity as a means to decenter
the hegemony of cultural authority, even to the point, as Gilroy does, of
showing rather convincingly that the Black experience has contributed more
to the construction of modernity than has previously been recognized by
the center. But this will not detract from the other fact that, in the modern
(and postmodern) world, there may always be tension between forces of
hybridity and the need to establish orthodox authority (through mainte-
nance of standards, canons of correctness, and lineages of purity). In any
place, politics is not irreducible but certainly attempts to present itself as
an a priori given. Yet like Patterson’s notion of cosmopolis, there appears
to be no a priori reason why one should believe that this coexistence of
forces is by nature conflictual or must lead to the desirability of one over
the other. Between the different social strata and the various domains of
the lifeworld, there is always room for overlap, separation, and convergence.
They are ongoing, changing products of subjective perception and political
negotiation for which there can hardly be a priori rules.
The politics of place that give rise to cosmopolises in the above sense
contrast with Shih Shu-mei’s appeal to the Sinophone. The use of Sinophone
in a literal sense to denote speech or writing especially in discussions of
Chinese literature is standard, however, Shih is clearly motivated by other
critical concerns. While Sinophone designates “Sinitic-language cultures and
communities outside China where Sinitic languages are either forcefully
imposed or willingly adopted” (Shih 2010a:36), Sinophone studies is more
narrowly defined as the study of Sinitic language cultures “on the margins of
geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic production,” which “locates
its objects of attention at the conjuncture of China’s internal colonialism”
(Shih 2011:710). As a celebration of multiculturalism, transnationalism,
and postcolonialism, it is inherently a critique of Sinocentrism, in fact all
centrisms. Although Shih bases her critical intervention on the “miscon-
ceived” notion of diaspora, the real object of criticism is the Sinocentric,
patriotic notion of huaqiao, with its implicit ties to a national homeland,
which has reinforced racialized constructions of Chineseness. If anything,
this notion of huaqiao is a peculiarly politicized term that hardly represents

any of its strict usages (even as ethnic stereotype). Ironically, the concept
of Sinophone has privileged what used to be called the study of Chinese
literature in the diaspora by championing its sense of authority as a voice
of Sinitic culture. As a voice of cultural authenticity, its authority would
seem to be limited to literature, despite Shih’s lofty intentions. In the realm
of culture, which could include all genres of lifestyle, it would be difficult
to justify the privileged status of language.
In a broader perspective, as a marker of identity, the Sinophone accents
the overarching salience of ethnic consciousness. As speech act inextricably
bound to meaning in language, can literature or cultural imagination ever
transcend its Sinitic nature? Perhaps contrary to the place-based logic Shih
attempts to invoke, there is a sense in which the Sinophone reifies the inher-
ent relevance of ethnicity to all things cultural. In an essay titled “Theory,
Asia and the Sinophone,” Shih (2010b) explores the possibility of “Asian”
theory (as opposed to Western universalism), informed by the critical inter-
vention of the Sinophone as method. If she takes for granted that theory is
by nature Orientalist, which invokes the need to reconcile its Asianness of
place, when or how is it possible for knowledge to de-essentialize in eth-
nic terms? The problem of Chineseness involves in part the way in which
we unconsciously (or presumably) view it as inextricably tied to all other
aspects of culture. The Sinophone, as a concept, rightfully challenges its
hegemonic constructions, as if to privilege the legitimacy of alternative voices
and meanings, but as method it accents the disenfranchised, reiterating the
marginal and the multivocal, instead of directly engaging the institutional
(political) source of that hegemony. How does this significantly differ from
Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora?
The mutation of the concept of diaspora from religious to ethnic and
other caste status shows that it is intrinsically tied to perceptions of social
marginality. Why is it necessary to invoke the Sinophone to reiterate the
obvious, when the more important question is when and how people de-
essentialize diasporic status through identification, prompted by the changing
politics of place that Shih claims to be epistemologically privileged? Pat-
terson’s concept of cosmopolis shows that imagined communities need not
be ethnic in nature and are more often than not class based, accenting the
dynamics of social relations within a geography of power. Even the dynam-
ics of settler identification have important ramifications for the relevance
of Sinophone identity in literature. Should we classify Ha Jin’s, or Kazuo
Ishiguro’s relation to literature in relation to who they happen to be ipso
facto or how they identify? Ang Lee is proudly Taiwanese, but is there a
point where his work transcends his presumed ethnicity (his direction of
Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility being an appropriate case in point)?
Chapter 11
Ethnicity in the Prison House

of the Modern Nation
The State in Singapore as Exception
Singapore is a case of a reluctant nation in search of a cultural identity.

Established in 1819 as a trading post, Singapore was a British colony until
it was granted self-government in 1959, with Lee Kuan Yew as prime min-
ister. The fact that Singapore was a small island with few natural resources
for economic self-sufficiency made the very idea of political independence
unthinkable. The vast majority of its inhabitants were ethnic Chinese in
a region located in the heart of an indigenous Malay tradition. At a time
when import substitution was the major development strategy of decolo-
nized states, Singapore, faced with high unemployment and a rapidly grow-
ing population, needed a market larger than itself for its industrialization
program. This market was supposed to be Malaya (Drysdale 1984:249).
Its strategy was thus to try to seek membership within the Malaysian Fed-
eration. However, the Malayan political leadership was never warm to the
prospect of a merger, which would have added a million Chinese to the
Malayan population and exacerbate existing ethnic tensions. The presence of
a Chinese-influenced Communist Party also represented a potentially desta-
bilizing threat to the proposed federation. Singapore was included within
the Confederation in 1963, but the strained relationship led to Singapore’s
expulsion in 1965 and a reluctant independence.
This essay is based in parts on “Discourses of Identity in the Changing Spaces of Public
Culture in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Theory Culture & Society 13(1):51‒75, and
“On the Politics of Culture, or the State of the State, in Singapore,” Australian Journal of
Anthropology 20:369–78.
209
The Invention of Nationalism
The nation there was forced to invent nationalism, where the basis of such
consciousness did not appear to exist, contrary to the “normal” scheme
of things, according to Gellner (1964:169). Perceptions held at the time
that Singapore lacked a unique sense of cultural identity rooted in history
and that the population was itself an immigrant society within a Malay
environment made the possibility of a collective identity and consciousness
an uncertain thing. Yet while a national identity had to be “constructed,”
the form of this constructed ideology and its process of institutionalization
were still inextricably linked to the same kind of ideological project of state
formation that has been described in the other previous cases.
The Singapore government took a heavy-handed approach to the pro-
motion of culture by setting out explicit policy perspectives and actively
launching mass campaigns in accordance with official government directives.
There were roughly three phases of cultural discourse. The first, from 1965
to 1982, focused on promotion of values of “rugged individualism,” which
accentuated the cultivation of a disciplined, achievement-oriented work ethic.
The second, from 1982 to 1990, was spawned by the search for an Asian
ethic, using indigenous religion and ideologies as the basis for promotion of
an Asian mode of modernization. The third, from 1990 onward, focused on
“shared values” and attempted seriously to formulate in secular (value-free)
terms a set of pan-ethnic social principles with which people could identify
and on which one could construct a genuinely national identity.
Ethnicity in Place
The most problematic concern in defining culture as national identity in

Singapore had to do with the constant need to address social issues in terms
of the multiethnic composition of its population (Benjamin 1976; Chiew
1983; Clammer 1985:162). Despite the numerical superiority of ethnic
Chinese (70%) in proportion to Malays (15%) and Indians (8%), it was
necessary to openly recognize ethnic equality as a means of neutralizing
ethnic nepotism in matters pertaining to national interest. While it would
have been easy to deal with national issues in direct proportion to ethnic
representation, there was the greater danger of being influenced by ties to
a mother country as well as to communism, which made ethnic identity
a potentially troublesome factor. Moreover, as Chan and Evers (1978:121)
have pointed out, the cultural divide between Western-educated individuals
and those educated in their native language and tradition often tended to be
Ethnicity in the Prison House of the Modern Nation 211
greater. Following independence, there was also a gradual trend among all
ethnic groups to gravitate toward English-stream education. The complexi-
ties of the ethnic situation actually made it desirable for the government to
promote economic utility, disciplinary work ethics, and pan-ethnic values
during the early postwar decades as the basis of cultural identity (Chua
& Kuo 1998:41). This pan-ethnic policy thus effectively relegated ethnic
identity and matters relating to customary practice to the private realm of
culture in spite of its explicit attention in national politics. Ironically, the
excommunication of ethnicity from the public realm shows that it was
hardly a neutral entity.
The adverse consequences of modernization as “Westernization,” that is,
liberal freedom, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and rampant consumerism,
were of constant concern to the government, but it was not until the early
1980s that it proposed to actively promote an Asian ethic of modernization
as a cure for this virus. Increased emphasis on multilingualism in education
was one aspect of this indigenization policy (Kuo 1985). The introduction
of mandatory courses titled Religious Knowledge in secondary schools as
part of a larger program to strengthen moral education was another aspect
of this policy. The promotion of religious knowledge and moral education
was the result of a perception of incipient moral decay, which came about as
a result of lifestyle changes stemming from rapid modernization and which
prompted the need to boost pride in one’s own tradition. Following a Report
on Moral Education in 1979, efforts were made not only to promote changes
in the secondary curriculum but also to initiate mass campaigns touching on
ethical themes, like the National Courtesy Campaign, Senior Citizen’s Week
Campaign, and Speak Mandarin Campaign.
The Sterilization of Religious Values
As part of the promotion of religious knowledge and moral education, a

more ambitious program was undertaken to revitalize Confucianism as an
Asian ethic, in order to capitalize on the economic success of Asia’s “four
dragons” and with the hope of unlocking the secrets of this Asian spirit of
capitalism. While not a religion per se, Confucianism was portrayed as a
kind of secular ethical philosophy compatible with Christianity, Buddhism,
Islam, Hinduism, and World Religion. Starting in 1982, overseas Confucian
scholars were recruited to set up a conceptual framework for promoting
Confucianism in ideology and practice.1 The Ministry of Education orga-
nized a Confucian Ethics Project Team to oversee curriculum development
in this field, and the Institute of East Asian Philosophies was established in
1983 with heavy government backing to sponsor intellectual research and

activities on Confucianism.
From Singapore’s attempt to Asianize the process of economic mod-
ernization, one can see that it has generally recognized modernity as the basis
of its cultural identity. On the other hand, its fears regarding “Westerniza-
tion” also show that its attempts to define cultural identity were at the same
time a search for a sense of uniqueness that could make up for its lack of
historicity in a way that would neutralize the potential divisiveness of its
ethnic composition. Ten years of experimentation with indigenization as cul-
tural policy eventually produced disastrous results. A Report to the Ministry
of Community Development in 1988 on religion in Singapore showed a
disturbing rise in religious revivalism, especially in New Christianity, which
was attributable directly to government promotion of religious knowledge
(Kuo et al. 1988) Moreover, despite the government’s efforts to promote
Confucianism in particular, only a small fraction (17.8%) of secondary
students, almost all Chinese, actually chose Confucian ethics, in contrast
to 44.4 percent for Buddhism and 21.4 percent for Bible Knowledge (Kuo
1991:16). Dangers of religious fanaticism combined with the government’s
failure to promote Confucianism as an appealing pan-ethnic cultural ideal
for modern society led the government to scrap religious education from
the curriculum altogether. The Institute of East Asian Philosophies was
transformed into the Institute of East Asian Political Economies, and its
library was dismantled accordingly. This policy reversal provided the point
of departure for a later phase of cultural discourse centering on “shared
values,” beginning in 1990.
As a statement of policy, the aim of this National Ideology (later
renamed Shared Values) was to sculpt a Singaporean identity by incorpo-
rating relevant components of various cultural heritages as well as attitudes
and values that would help promote survival of the nation. On January
15, 1991, the government formalized a set of principles that could reflect
traditional Asian ideas of morality, duty, and society while accommodating
the face of changing society. The White Paper on Shared Values outlined
five such values: (1) nation before community and society above self, (2)
family as the basic unit of society, (3) regard and community support for
the individual, (4) consensus instead of contention, and (5) racial and reli-
gious harmony. One might argue that it represented as much an attempt
to abstract a general ethos of Asianism in ways that transcended its spe-
cific differences, especially in emphasizing the primacy of social collectivity,
as a deliberate effort to spurn Westernized, individualistic versions of
the same.
Discourses of Public Culture in

Comparative Geopolitical Perspective
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore depict three different ways in which
public culture has been demarcated and defined in relation to language,
historical origin, ethnic tradition, political ideology, intellectual expression,
and various other traits. In each case, global political factors like the Cold
War and regional ethnicity helped to play an important role in creating a
“space of dispersion,” in Foucault’s (1991:55) words, which cultural dis-
courses operated on and cultural policies aimed to institutionalize a par-
ticular utopian vision of a just, rational polity. These attempts to define
the specific content of culture were predicated by the perceived necessity to
impose a homogenous sense of national identity that could also engender
social solidarity. This homogeneity was reinforced by the state’s control over
the media in a way that severely restricted civil participation in cultural
discourse while at the same time framing the possibilities of alternative
constructions of identity.
Somewhat like Taiwan, the Singapore government consciously
attempted to construct a set of shared ideals that could absorb everyone
regardless of ethnic disposition. This set of ideals was not prone to the latent
contradictions that gave rise to ethnic fragmentation in Taiwan, because the
hegemony of Chinese culture in Taiwan also happened to be tied to the
legitimacy of a fictitious entity called Republic of China. Nonetheless, the
lack of a shared past or civilization in Singapore meant that the legitimacy
of this constructed culture had to depend on the legitimacy of social values
that could not by definition be fixed to a sacred aura, and, thus, by nature
were always changing in response to the possibility of change. Singapore’s
response to cultural syncretism was a function of its love-hate relationship
with the West and its attempt to strike a meaningful symbiosis between
indigenous values and material progress. Moreover, contrary to global trends,
democratization has not followed economic growth in a way that gener-
ally defies Huntington’s thesis. In light of the apparent authoritarian style
of government and its continued reproduction, it suffices to say that the
legitimacy of national culture in Singapore has always and will continue to
be determined by the ability of public discourse to achieve consensus over
the meaning of modernity, on which the government has placed consider-
able importance in its construction of the polity.
In sum, public culture has been crafted by certain unconscious designs
of the state, in an era marked by the growing importance of civil partici-
pation in the construction of the public sphere in a Habermasian sense
(through rational communication). It would appear that the possibilities

for change must be viewed in relation, first, to the discursive relationships
between various sorts of cultural statements, and second, to the way in
which the actions of the author or agent are tied into the production of
such statements in order to reproduce a certain power relationship. Culture
is not simply a neutral marker of one’s identity; in the hands of the state, it
is the very mechanism by which meaning is given to the nature of the polity
and legitimacy is given to the apparatuses and routines of rule.2 In order
for effective counterdiscourse to exist, one must first grasp the imaginative
process of cultural authority.
The construction of identity is more precisely a process of identifying,
where cultural notions are not just selectively constituted but deliberately
crafted from given elements to convey a particularistic ethos. Circumstances
of historical moment and geopolitical place may explain to some degree the
nature of strategic possibilities, but they invoke a global framework within
which local factors ultimately play a key and decisive role in determining
the politics of choice. If one can view discourses of identity as interpretive
mechanisms through which specific people, institutions, or cultures local-
ize (or indigenize) diverse global flows in order to negotiate a meaning-
ful life space or position themselves within a situation of power, then it
would be possible to see how in different localities specific institutions and
practices serve as strategic sites for meaning and power. In Singapore, the
imposition of a standard mass media and the use of mass campaigns to
promote a collective consciousness have in the final analysis made all man-
ners of behavior, such as work ethics, courteousness, and health, along with
social policy issues, including family planning, marriage, and housing,
matters of “public” concern that impinge on notions of a shared cultural
identity.
The diversity of cultural responses to conceptions of identity authored
in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore and their choice of strategic imple-
mentation in institutional terms show that culture and identity are much
more than knee-jerk reactions to the homogenizing threat of globalization.
Perhaps more than just a diversity of flows and disjunctures, it is equally
important to understand how such diversity in cultural response is a func-
tion of different modes of accommodation or negotiation.3 Underlying
characterizations of globalization and their inherent concern with homog-
enization and heterogeneity, cores, and peripheries, or pushes and pulls is
a somewhat skewed vision of the “world” from the center of things. There
tends to be relatively less concern, on the other hand, with the diverse
ways in which the same threats from the “outside” are locally synthesized
in order to produce reactions as varied as ethnic nationalism, pan-national
fundamentalism, supra-nationalism, cult fanaticism, and cultural creoliza-

tion, all of which impinge ultimately on notions of identity.
The State of the State
As a matter of general principle, public culture is in the first instance shaped

by certain unconscious designs of the state, but there is a sense in which
the state in Singapore plays an extraordinarily prominent role in all aspects
of societal life. The (omni)presence of the state is indirectly reflected in
three recent books on Singapore: Cherian George’s (2000) Singapore, The
Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control; Yao
Souchou’s (2007) Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; and Wee
Wan-ling’s (2008) The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Sin-
gapore. Each book presents in its own way a subtle interpretation of con-
temporary Singapore culture and society, with reference to the peculiarities
(or distinctive features) of Singapore society, seen in the context of historical
practice and epitomized by seminal forces that have driven these events
and their underlying institutions. At the same time, they challenge prevail-
ing notions of modernity, nation-state, and ethnic identity inherent to the
theoretical literature, especially pertaining to Asia.
On the surface, the three books cover different topics. George’s book
is a compilation of newspaper essays written as a journalist from 1990 to
2000, which dealt strictly with the Goh Chok Tong era. Capitalizing on a
remark by Lee Kuan Yew that “there are few metaphors that more evocatively
crystallize the essence of Singapore politics” than the air conditioner, George
argues that the evolution of Singapore was ultimately about the mastery of
nature, not only of the environment but of the human kind, that was in
turn predicated on the desirability of progress. Comfort and control went
hand in hand; one was the means to the ends, and the substance of the
book, in its ruminations on politics, was less about theory than underlying
mind-sets that guided concrete practices and contributed to the develop-
ment of society/culture.
George’s thematic focus on governmentality, the mind-sets and prac-
tices that guided its relationship with the political opposition, its handling
of the emergence of civil society and the debates over ethnic and national
identity substantiate the familiar images of Singapore as a cosmopolitan,
multiethnic city-state managed by a strong technocratic central government
and governed by an ethos of utilitarian efficiency through collective disci-
pline. The state’s domination has been, for most part, the single-handed
achievement of the People’s Action Party (PAP). The PAP’s “success” can be
seen as the result of its effective articulation, on the one hand, of a politi-
cal ideology that best mirrored the ideals of its mass constituency and its
ruthless ability, on the other hand, through legal and institutional manipula-
tion to eradicate and assuage opposition. Journalistic commentaries on daily
politics tend to represent narrow views on society fixated disproportionately
on the actions of people and institutions in power, but George’s account
reveals salient aspects of the subjective identity of the modern nation-state
at a deeper level of reflection that provide a common ground with the
observations of Yao and Wee.
Yao Souchou’s book is an overtly symbolic analysis of Singapore society
that begins by acknowledging the influence of Marshall Sahlins, but whose
polemic style resembles Roland Barthes’s Mythologies more in its effort to
isolate epitomizing spectacles of everyday mind-set and lifestyle, and then,
through demystifying and destabilizing tactics of writing, unmask various
fictions of culture routinely promoted by the State as taken for granted
norms. Singapore may be epitomized by its culture of excess, but Yao’s
critical facades, which shift randomly from discursive deconstruction to psy-
choanalytic interpretation, Orientalist decolonization, and literary catharsis,
are also modes of exaggeration that deliberately create spectacles of excess
by exhaustively overdetermining such banalities of culture. Ironically, in
contrast to George, who as a journalist writes more like an ethnographer,
with his attention to factual and historical details, and from which he
abstracts a generalized account of society and its culture, Yao, who is an
anthropologist, writes more like Homi Bhabha or Michael Taussig. With
clear disdain for official narratives and their perspectives, he tortures the
reader with mind-blowing exegeses of events, ulterior motives, and acts of
mental terror disguised as secular rationality.
Yao’s object of criticism is clearly the State, insofar as its authority is
forcefully stamped in the spaces of everyday culture. The culture of excess
is thus the product of its excessive omnipresence in these spectacles of
everyday life. Disciplinary control and smooth society in George’s depic-
tion of Singapore are replaced in Yao’s by accounts of naked violence and
hegemonic terror subjectively driven by psychological anxieties. To counter
the depiction of a squeaky-clean society and the rationalist intentions of
government policy, Yao calls this brand of governmentality “useless prag-
matism.” Having subjected his patient (and reader) to psychoanalytic shock
treatment, the fact that pragmatism is useless is an understatement, to say
the least. As a political ideology, it “conceals and mystifies,” thus in the
final analysis it “also blinds the State to its moral defects” (Yao 2007:186).
Magic then becomes tragic.
In contrast, Wee’s book is an ambitious attempt to rethink the crises

of global capitalism or modernity in a Singapore context. Despite his the-
matic focus on Asia, the book is less about Asia per se than its recognition
that Singapore’s experiences are inextricably entangled with discourses on
Asia or comparative developments therein. His focus on the modern is an
attempt to confront the broader issue of modernity, as understood in the
complex interplay between culture, economy, and politics. Wee’s deep play
on the changing terrritorializations of Singapore culture is rooted, on the
one hand, in his discussions of ideological visions that drove state policies
in various dimensions of economic development and social planning, as
personified in part by the influence of influential figures in the PAP, such
as S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee, and the work of urban planners in
the Housing and Development Board (HDB), who transformed the city
into what Rem Koolhaas called a “Potemkin metropolis,” and his readings
of literary syntheses of these cultural landscapes. In the end, he attempts to
tie these developments to abstract crises within global capitalism.
For Wee, culture is in effect a space that comprises ethnicities, identi-
ties, representations, social values, political ideologies, and imaginations of
all genres constituting the substantive logic that drives the quest for moder-
nity. In its reterritorialization, culture is an active object of discourse and
appropriation within a changing capitalism. As Wee (2008:105) phrases it,
“capitalism must homogenize—it must deterritorialize—while also produc-
ing difference—it must reterritorialize—and become a ‘multicultural’ capi-
talism,” echoing similar arguments put forth by Zizek on the cultural logic
of multinational capitalism. In this regard, many kinds of reterritorialization
seem to overlap and interact. Wee discusses here the advent of Asian values
as a cultural discourse of modernity, the government’s management of race
or multiethnicity in a multinational capitalism, the imagination of national
culturalism within the capitalist order, and the use of Asian religions to
foster neotraditional links to modernity.
Despite the different approaches that each author takes in articulating
certain distinctive features of Singapore’s modernizing experience, the same
subtext emerges each time. It is not enough to say that the state plays a
domineering role in these developments; the state is in each case a prime
object of gazing and critique. Each author confronts the state directly but
stops short of theorizing the state in a Singaporean context. George’s obser-
vations remain largely at the level of practice, and his abstractions remain
close to the mind-sets of actors in power. Yao psychoanalyzes Singapore
from afar, but his critique of state is personified for most part in his diag-
nosis of “the sick father” whose sickness is ramified through the excesses
of culture and spectacles of society. Wee’s account is discursively grounded,

but his critique of state is embedded largely in society’s entanglements with
modernity as global capitalism.
A recent paper by Chua Beng Huat (2010) confronts state capitalism
by characterizing it ideologically as “hegemonic liberalism.” But despite the
hegemonic facade, for Chua, the state’s direct investment in enterprises
and industries has been a success story, driven largely by its ethos of profit
maximization and market discipline, which subsequently made possible and
socially desirable its imperative of social communitarianism that underlay
cultural policy in other regards. Such success suggests in turn that there
are viable alternatives to Western models of liberal-democratic-capitalism
that are typically characteristic of the modern state, but they coexist with,
if not mutually reinforce as well, the taken for granted paternalism and
authoritarianism of the state that subtly engenders and legitimates routinized
cartographies of power endemic to those various mediations of modernity
that equally effectively compel us, through identity, to conform to the norm,
perhaps even more successfully than in the West.
The various debates that have energized the recent literature on
“global” or “neoliberal” capitalism have accented important issues in the
contemporary world, but reterritorialization in one sense is geographically
literal. One may argue, contrary to Appadurai’s depiction of transnational
disjunctures, characterized by chaotic flows or scapes, while parallel more
with Deleuze’s smooth society, which presaged Hardt and Negri’s “empire,”
that this transnational (multinational) capitalism produced a new form of
imperialism.4 How else do we reconcile the widening gap between rich
and poor nations that has fueled anti-WTO movements everywhere? Yet
how relevant is this mode of capitalism to the discourse and policy of the
Singapore state? Despite Wee’s (2008:148) contention that “the PAP govern-
ment has acknowledged for some years that the Fordist-Taylorist machinery
of disciplinary modernization that it had so successfully used was start-
ing to creak,” leading to greater investment in a knowledge economy, the
machinery remains largely unchanged. In its enticement of foreign capital
investment in exchange for tax incentives, second perhaps only to Dubai,
Singapore seems to be a willing partner to free market capitalism, on the
receiving end. Its prime minister earns a millionaire salary, closer to CEOs
of major corporations, and is expected to run the nation like a business,
which would make Reaganites or Thatcherites blush. Recently, the embar-
rassment of national wealth has aggravated the extreme gap between rich
and poor to such an extent that it has prompted the government to defend
even more the sanctity of its workfare (antiwelfare) policies. Shades of classi-
cal Marxism—there still seems to be a long way to liberal, not to mention
neoliberal, capitalism. As Singapore moves into the next stage of economic

development, much can be said about its strange combination of microeco-
nomic laissez-faire, macrosocial regulation, and illiberal democracy, which
are seminal constituents of its unique capitalist order, but to lump all of
culture then recast it as reterritorializations of modernity is to overgeneral-
ize the nature of the problem, which centers really on making sense of the
distinctive features of Singapore.
As a theoretical problem, I think the experiences of Singapore have
been overlooked in the literature. Dennis H. Wrong (1961) criticized socio-
logical theory for its oversocialized conception of the individual, but he
never looked at Singapore. Foucault’s genealogy of the disciplinary society
made it the paradigm of Western modernity, but few mention Singapore,
where disciplinary regulation has been fine-tuned to a degree of efficiency
unseen elsewhere, largely as a project of the State. Gellner’s (1964) argu-
ment that nationalism creates nations where they do not exist finds a perfect
example in Singapore, whose search for identity has prompted unending
reconfigurations of culture in materialist and abstract senses. Singapore has
in many cases worn out established theoretical paradigms of all kinds, while
spinning life into higher states of unreality. Yet few scholarly observers seem
to notice or care. While I appreciate Wee’s ambitious attempt to concep-
tualize the broader ramifications of Singapore’s experiences, I think he has
misleadingly situated the heart of the problem in a crisis of global capitalism,
which I tend to view, after Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) “Provincializing
Europe,” as a problem of a “local” West extending outward. Singapore, as
other nations, is conscious of its “being in the world,” in Friedman’s (1990)
terms, but an abstract understanding of its sociocultural processes should
proceed from the ground up, distinctive excesses above all.
The experience of Singapore has been paradigmatic of many theoretical
trends, despite being overlooked in the literature. To say that Singapore is
a modern disciplinary society in a Foucaultian sense would be an under-
statement; efficiency is largely a project of the state. At issue ultimately
are the nature of domination and the role of critical theory in unmasking,
through cultural representation, the bases of social and political power. In
Singapore’s case, all roads lead inevitably to the state. For better or worse,
the omnipresence of the state is the product of its specific formative history,
the embeddedness of ethnicity, economy, and culture to each other and
everyday life regimes have made the state part of a disinterested process of
moral regulation, and its relationship to capitalism and democracy is cor-
respondingly related.
The Nationalist Ethic

and the Spirit of Chinese Rationalism
In his analysis of what he called “the paradox of rationalization” in Max

Weber’s account of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Wolf-
gang Schluchter (1979:42) singled out three elements of the Calvinist world-
view that provided the basis for the inherent dissolution of a religious ethos
of radical world rejection and its transformation into a totally secularized
ethos of radical world domination. They were, namely, (1) the interpretation
of the secular “world” as a religiously worthless cosmos of things and events
to which the heterogeneity of natural and ethical causality applied; (2) the
idea of this “world” as an object of fulfillment of duty through rational
control; and (3) the compulsion to develop an ethically integrated person-
ality, which demanded one’s total commitment. The Calvinist worldview
attempted to fuse all three elements into a unified attitude, so that, in the
name of God, one had to exert rational, methodical control over one’s total
conduct and dominate the world through the incessant accumulation of
good works in one’s vocation. At this point, however, this ethos confronted
in practice a paradox, which led to the devaluation of the religious ethic
and its subordination to secular values of its modern vocational calling. This
religiously devalued “world” forced one to recognize its own laws; the more
this happened, the more independent the world became. In their mutual
confrontation, alienation between the religious ethos and the impersonal
ethic of capitalism became obvious. That is to say, by attempting to master
the world in its own terms, the overt religious meaning of inner-worldly
asceticism became displaced by the secular values of a routinized code of
rational conduct. It was in this sense that the accumulation of good works
as an ethical code of conduct became a self-motivated act or an ongoing
thing in itself even after it lost its intrinsic religious meaning.
I do not mean to suggest that Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles was
an Asian version of Weber’s Protestant ethic, despite close resemblance of
what Schluchter has called practical rationalism, metaphysical-ethical ratio-
nalism, and scientific-technological rationalism to what I characterized as
the revolutionary pragmatism, moral conservatism, and scientific reformism
of Sun’s thought. Yet there is clearly a paradox of traditionalism at the level
of discourse that must be spelled out in order to explain the nature of this
underlying Nationalist ideology.
First, one must stress again that Nationalist political ideology in post-
war Taiwan referred less to the Three Principles, as Sun Yat-sen had actually
conceived of it, which still remains a contested reality, than to the utopian
vision of it filtered through Chiang Kai-shek’s emphasis on ethics, democracy,
work of Spivak and Bhabha, by concluding that Sakai was not one of “us”
(Asians). I underscore “us” here, because the question that I wish to pose
here is, who are us and them in this global division of intellectual labor?
The hard-and-fast identities that characterize us all are a function of our
institutional situatedness rather than ethnic affinity per se. Nonetheless, what
polarizes our institutional positionality is an ethnocentrism that is largely
rooted in ongoing institutional practices. In other words, the dualism of
us/them is much more deeply rooted than one thinks, especially because it
is not a matter of identifying choice. A division of labor that is maintained
by an implicit ethnocentrism in its categories makes academia, as practiced,
much more caste-like than one stratified by other forms of power, even global
capitalism, which was the focus of Dirlik’s critique of the “postcolonial aura.”4
There are ramifications for global capitalism as discursive imagination, but it
is necessary, first, to explain how identities derive from our institutional situ-
atedness, which is in my opinion anything but obvious or taken for granted.
The most seminal aspect of Sakai’s (2001) essay, “Dislocation of the
West and the Status of the Humanities” is his critique of an implicit eth-
nocentrism in humanitas and anthropos. It is a dualism that pervades not
only the division between philosophy and anthropology or area studies
as the other of the social scientific and humanistic self, but also the very
notion that separates the West from the Rest, even us versus them. His
central thesis/argument regarding the dislocation of the West and its mutual
relation to the objectivizing gaze of Asia resonates not only in Asian area
studies and civilizational studies in general but in most social sciences too.
One cannot underestimate the impact of Said’s critique of Orientalism in
this sense, not only in his attack on the legitimacy of the author as writer
but more importantly as a political and institutional agent of a colonialist
imperative.5 One can view the rise of Asian studies as a product of American
imperialism in a Cold War era, and the extent to which the negativity that
defined Asia as a mirror image of the West is dependent on and reinforces
the hegemony and separateness of the West is worth debating. But as a
critique of Eurocentrism in theory, he was hardly the first. In anthropology,
the work of Lévi-Strauss (1963) and Dumont (1980), writing in a mode
of cultural relativism, had made systematic critiques of precisely the same
ethnocentrism. In large part, Sakai’s (or Said’s) critique has focused more
on the way Asia in area studies has been constituted as objects of a Western
gaze, then reflect back ultimately on its own humanitas, and less on the
parameters of indigenous discourse in this imperial contest. The problem is,
in essence, one of Eurocentric subjectivity. This epistemological dilemma of
Asia then invokes a need to problematize the West and Western studies. Or
as Sakai (2001:71) asks, why is there an “absence of any serious attempts to
The Postcolonial Alien in Us All 223
build ethnic-study programs dealing with Americans whose ancestors came

from Europe”? Moreover, “why are there no urgent demands from European
Americans for European American studies programs at universities and col-
leges in the U.S.” (Sakai 2001:72)? Or to rephrase it in the line of thought
that has predicated these questions, why hasn’t the West and knowledge
of the West been problematized in a way that by contrast gave rise to the
Orient and Orientalism as object and discourse? As Sakai (2001:74) finally
poses it, why is a Western humanitas dualistically opposed to the anthropos
of the other in this stratified order of things, as though to suggest that its
refusal to be gazed is really a function of its inherent subjective faculties,
its authority to evaluate and its right to reflect?
The critique of Eurocentric humanitas as a hegemonic mind-set and
unreflective ego is worthy, yet there is little effort by Sakai to view this
Occidentalism as something more than just a problem of representation.
Sakai’s emphasis on the effects of speaker distancing that result in the mirror
image of Asia serving as the prima facie discourse in Europe’s hegemonic
construction of self is in my opinion just a metaphorical device for explain-
ing the imaginative quality of the discourse; it is no substitute for unpack-
ing the institutional regimes of practice that ground these projections of
meaning. In other words, I agree with Sakai that there is a curious absence
in the West of any serious attempt both to objectify itself and to challenge
the hegemony of its humanistic subjectivity. But he fails to ask further,
what are the sources of institutional resistance in political practice to the
above? It is not enough to attribute this to a failure of imagination. Second,
authorial identity/subjectivity never goes away, in light of his enlightened,
critical prise de conscience. Thus, his identity claim of being one of “us”
is in turn relevant as well, which was something he parlayed into a later
paper, called “You Asians: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia
Binary,” which was written initially for a conference held in Singapore in
February 2000, appropriately titled We Asians.6 In his later work, he tries
to reshape his critique of Eurocentric subjectivity within a framework that
accentuates the centrality of authorial identity. In my longer commentary, I
problematize some of his efforts in this regard, partly because I think there
are aspects he omits that others develop more fully and partly because there
are contradictions in regard to his own identity. It is interesting to note that
Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) starts with a quote from Sakai,
as if to suggest that the main challenge is one of regarding Europe as a
provincial local, whose claims to historical destiny simply universalized its
own cultural values into the status of theory and truth. Equally importantly,
the enunciation “you Asians” does not necessarily assume a speaking posi-
tion of “we Europeans.” As Sakai (2000:811) clearly states, discourse can
“be construed in many other terms than ‘Western’ as opposed to ‘Asian.’ It

could be construed in terms of gender, economic status, profession, social
class background, level of education, and so forth.” It is easy to indict
ethnic Western scholars for evoking “you Asians,” but if one subscribes to
the position that such enunciations are ultimately rooted in “the imperial
contest,” in Said’s terms, then it would be more accurate to say that the
institutional system in which we are embedded ultimately defines who “we”
are subjectively and regardless of what we happen to be ethnically.7 As an
Asian studies scholar, Sakai is really one of “them” and cannot possibly be
one of “us.” I argue that there is a significant difference between the two
speaking positions, which becomes evident, only if one can divest oneself
of the superficial illusion that they represent two ethnic modes of subjec-
tivity. The key to understanding this can be seen in Sakai’s (1997) essay
“The subject and/or shutai,” where he distinguishes between two notions
of subjectivity, the first reflecting the positionality of the epistemic observer
(shukan) and the second reflecting the positionality of the practical agent
(shutai). This is an important distinction, because among other things it can
provide one with a way to transcend the Eurocentric hierarchical distinction
between humanitas and anthropos. The epistemic observer and the practical
agent do not refer to different persons, which is the impression that Sakai
gives in his paper, but differ really as a function of the quality of their
engagement with the context of speaking and practice in which they are
embedded. Epistemic observers will think/act on the basis of their identity
as both shukan and shutai, but it is more likely that their subjectivity will
be the result of how they compromise the different interests and values that
shape their identities for any particular context (which is the case of the
native scholar). I shall raise concrete examples of this later.
The Complicity of Epistemic Identities and

Discourses as Signifying Regimes
Let me approach this issue from a different vantage point. The crisis of glo-
balization has become a seminal theme or fulcrum to characterize the recent
dilemma that has plagued political economic relations between peoples in
the world as well as between academics in different venues. When boundary
2 held its conference in Hong Kong, one of many that it has held in vari-
ous places in the world, it was an honest attempt to explore the future of
humanities in dialogue with culturally diverse scholars, mostly in the liter-
ary field (English), but it too was predicated to a large extent on implicit
differences of identity that separated its participants. In the current era of
globalization, there are many incongruous elements. Despite debates about

our understanding of the concept itself, I do not doubt that the phenomenon
referred to here is a new one. If we view it in Appadurai’s (1990) terms,
as transnational disjunctures, prompted by Lash and Urry’s (1987) “end of
organized capitalism,” then this globalization is fundamentally different from
the modern world system, as coined by Wallerstein (1974), for at least two
reasons. First, the center of gravity has shifted, or one is led to believe so,
second, the cultural imperialism of an earlier era has been replaced by free-
flowing waves of multicultural hybridity (or scapes in Appadurai’s terms).
Yet what is overtly paradoxical about the discourse of globalization, as seen
from the periphery (global South), especially if one considers increases in
anti-WTO movements that have surfaced, is that globalization is almost
universally perceived as a new wave of cultural imperialism or Western-
ism. This is paradoxical, because globalization as a general phenomenon
in human history is not new; neither is capitalism—capitalism has always
been global. Globalization should have little to do with Westernism, espe-
cially as a cultural force. I raise these incongruent perspectives, based on
one’s positionality in the global order, which Friedman (1990) aptly calls
“being in the world,” to suggest in the first instance that ethnic marking
of globalization still has much to do with its implicit stratified hierarchy,
contrary to the theoretical claims of disorganized capitalism and celebratory
hybridity, and to suggest, second, that the Eurocentrism inherent in these
concepts extends further than the meanings of these terms; they are part
and parcel of the constitution of institutions that unwittingly tie all of us
within a global division of labor.
I think there is more truth in Dirlik’s (1994:328) facetious remark
that the postcolonial began at a time when Third World intellectuals became
embraced and celebrated in the First World, than many will care to admit.
But if this defines the postcolonial moment, then what exactly is postco-
lonialism? Is it defined by articulation of postcolonial discourse, as marked
by one’s identity, or is it really the content of postcolonial discourse? There
is a sense in which it refers mainly to the former, but as I have argued
elsewhere, it cannot be defined by identity alone.8 On the other hand, the
content of this discourse remains in my opinion ill-defined, if anything. I
argue that the relevance of any identity, in this case postcolonial, is in the
first instance a function of how one defines a (post)colonial situation. There
is an implicit relationship between postcolonial identification and content of
postcolonial thought, but identities are never ipso facto. They are invoked
by context and change with changing situations. This same point can be
applied to globalization and the question of who we are in the global
ecumene. I find it ironic, especially in an age of increasing transnational
flows and cultural hybridity, that identities (academic ones too) have hard-
ened instead of softened.
To ask whether there are common themes of discourse, especially
among those who share the same discipline but are divided by the identities
of its participants, is really to imply that differences of identity or context
are relevant differences. In questioning the suggestion, I am not directly
questioning who we are per se. I am suggesting instead that the question
is relevant in certain fields and perhaps less so in others. Or to rephrase it
from a different vantage point, authorial subjectivity seems to be relevant for
some and not others. We are also too familiar with the artificial boundar-
ies that divide the disciplines within the academy, so much so that people
do not find it necessary to overstate the obvious. In the social sciences,
Wallerstein (2001) has argued that this division of labor is the creation of
nineteenth-century liberalism, which is maintained with even greater force
today by institutions that we now call academic capitalism. By contrast,
how does one know that similar forces are not at work to maintain the
hierarchical division of labor that positions academia in the West vis-à-vis
the rest, one of which contributes to an implicit, lingering ethnocentrism,
not unlike the kind that Sakai sees as being endemic to the humanities?
Do identities matter? I would say, in theory, not necessarily, and where they
appear, coded in terms of a celebratory multiculturalism and emancipatory
postcolonialism in particular, they disguise potential inequities of speaking
position that serve in effect to harden existing regimes of academic practice
and discourse. The fact that people continue to talk in terms of hard-and-
fast identities is a sign, in my opinion, that the implicit stratified hierarchy
and imperialistic exploitation prevalent more typically to a classic-era of
unfettered capitalism and colonial imperialism still thrive today, albeit in a
more sophisticated or sublimated form.
The least convincing aspect of Sakai’s (and Said’s) critique of Occiden-
talism relates to the silent other. The other may have been silent but only
in Western discourse, which is a valid critique of the latter, but it does not
resolve the question of what indigenous discourse amounts to. The latter
is hardly silent, it may be in many cases uninteresting and uncritical in
theoretical terms; I would add that its authorial authenticity is probably
the least significant aspect of it. I have explored this problem elsewhere (see
Chun 1995). Nonetheless, native discourses, especially prima facie Oriental
Orientalisms, deserve to be critically examined in the same manner that
Said and Sakai have problematized Occidental ones. Anticolonialist nation-
alist discourse often takes the form of a prima facie Oriental Orientalism,
however, the main difference between these two forms of Orientalism is
that ethnocentrism tends to be implicit in one case and overtly (if not
blatantly) politicized in the other. Despite superficial, discursive differences,

the authorial functions within a larger regime of institutional practices are
probably very similar. However, in my opinion, the institutional functions
are primary, because they are the source of authorial subjectivities. One
should really be deconstructing in turn underlying institutional regimes and
not simply conceptual representations.
I deliberately juxtapose the epistemological critique of Occidentalism
with its nativist counterpart not just to contrast such discursive forms as
two sides of the same colonialist coin but more importantly to argue that
the relationship between the two, as signifying regimes, is mutually complicit.
While I understand the pragmatic arguments about speaker distancing, I
would argue that there are limits to which one can extend the meaningful-
ness or usefulness of speaker positionality, or for that matter any kind of
subjectivity. Any dualism is dependent on both sides playing the same game,
or both sides accepting the terms of its rules, as well as their respective
roles. In this sense, the recognition of the global should at the same time
be reciprocated by some recognition that others knowingly or unwittingly
play the role of local.
If Eurocentric constructions of Oriental others and Oriental construc-
tions of a cultural self are inherently different, as a function of speaking posi-
tion, should one conclude that they must be different? Sakai’s paper “You
Asians” was first written at a conference held in Singapore, and provocatively
titled “We Asians,” without a doubt to suggest there is a difference between
the two. Is there thus a difference between you Asians and we Asians,
when one is supposedly gazing at the same object, and more importantly
why should there be? I do not necessarily think that there should be any
difference, but not for the usual empiricist reasons. I eventually argue that
Sakai, despite his native sensibilities, really speaks from the position of you
Asians, hence my rude attack on his own subjectivity. But by subjectivity
I refer here to the positionality of the epistemic observer, or what he has
termed shukan, in contrast to the positionality of the practical agent, which
he has termed shutai. We have all heard similar criticisms voiced by Indian
scholars about postcolonial theorists like Spivak and Bhabha. A cultural
critic Evans Chan (2000) has referred to Rey Chow as “an American of
Hong Kong origin,” which among other things problematizes her particular
notion of diasporic identity.
In short, why do we continue to assume that our ethnic identity is
what determines our authorial subjectivity ipso facto, especially as intellectu-
als, all the while turning a blind eye to the equally (if not more) relevant
forces that have shaped our epistemic subjectivities as Asian studies scholars,
literary critics, social scientists, and so on? In our current era of politically
enlightened criticism, which has rightly exposed the illusions of a previous

era of scientific objectivity and naïve liberalism in various forms, we advocate
speaking from positions of gender, class, ethnicity, or nation, as well as any
combination of the above, as a function of how we perceive the nature of
our complex engagement with the practical lifeworld. This subjectivity oper-
ates at a different level from the critical engagement that defines our identity
as epistemic observer. It is easy to recognize that the values that define our
subjectivity as epistemic observer and practical agent are different (they differ
as a function of the quality of their engagement with the context of speaking
and practice in which they are embedded), but it is more difficult to ascertain
how to negotiate these different value systems in any context, because these
situations are in fact different for different people. Just as the subjectivity of
a practical agent is the product of multiple interests and intentions, which
can conflict in any context of practice, there are always conflicts of interest
between the values that influence my position as epistemic observer vis-à-vis
those that influence my identity as a practical agent in my own life world.
Of the two, it is more difficult to demarcate and spell out the values that
define the position of the epistemic observer, but in the end it is always
a process of strategic compromise. In short, discursive content, subjective
positioning and quality of engagement with one’s life world are in practice
intertwined, often hopelessly so. That is the crux of it.
Globalization and Ethnicization as Entangled Processes
It is not necessary to invoke complex Deleuzian arguments about smooth

society here. As a layman, it is easy to raise a few incongruous examples
of what I mean, as an entrée for more serious discussion. In the current
debate over globalization, one seems to waver often between definitions that
attribute the global to the nature of the phenomenon, as distinct from its
mode of institutional operation. McDonald’s seems to be the typical global
phenomenon, but McDonaldization refers in actuality to a particular mode
of operation, which results in a genre of standardization or commoditiza-
tion that is quintessential to globalizing processes. In this sense, the expan-
sion of IBM or SONY and their products can be rightly characterized as
globalizing. More importantly, there is nothing explicitly cultural about
this globalization. Cultural promotion does not seem to be a prerequisite
for this kind of capitalism; if anything, its mode of operation seems to
be pan-cultural and glocal. Yet, as we all know, hamburgers were not the
first food phenomenon to spread globally. Chinese cuisine has spread to
more places throughout the globe and much earlier in history than the Big
Mac. The spread of New World spices to the Old World and the diffusion
of European food that followed the first global traders in a classic era of
Western imperialism have brought about much more change in the nature
of traditional cuisines everywhere in the world than McDonald’s, so why
does one continue to assume that McDonald’s is the first or paradigmatic
example of global food?
Even though hamburgers and hot dogs have become the quintes-
sential American food, we all know that they originated from Germany.
Their diffusion from their ethnic homeland to the United States would at
best be called an example of ethnicization, their creolization into a generic
fast food product might be called Americanization, while their mass mar-
keting throughout the rest of the world is called ipso facto globalization.
The transformation of pizza from Italian ethnic food to its dissemination
as globalized Pizza Hut product is equally paradigmatic. In effect, there is
little in their transformation of substance that distinguishes these processes,
yet we seem to think that ethnicization and globalization are inherently dif-
ferent, so much so that they cannot be used interchangeably. Is it not like
the dualism of humanitas and anthropos?
Even more disturbingly, one seems to know a priori what is global
and what is local, even before the phenomenon is invoked. There are even
many global phenomena that have literally become universal, but they are
rarely characterized as such. One does not call cars or phones global, much
less Western; they are just modern. We seem to think that Japanese tempura
and tonkatsu are quintessentially ethnic, despite their European origin, but
will sushi ever become global? Some people think so, and it is not just
a matter of substance or ethnic origin. In short, there are implicit value
judgments associated with global and local, despite our best attempts to
define them in neutral, analytical terms. Their relative positional status is
one that inscribes or reflects a caste-like hierarchy. One might add to this
the question of why these rankings become ethnically marked or culturally
coded, when they are clearly not.
The Identity Crisis of Asian Studies

within the Postcolonial Aura
Shifting from thoughts of food to food for thought, I think it is fair to ask
analogous questions. Who are we in this globalized arena? Who are they?
Why does one think that it is still important to refer to speaking positions?
Finally, what is one talking about, really? The postcolonial aura has given
many a misleading impression that Third World intellectuals have never
been embraced or celebrated in the First World. Of course, they have. We

all know that there have been at least several generations of Third World
academics in the First World. The vast majority of such people has always
worked in the natural sciences and will continue to do so. But this is irrel-
evant to postcolonialism, since there should be something about the nature
of knowledge that makes postcolonialism what it is, other than one’s identity,
even though one is still hard pressed to say what it is. But to cite the example
of humanities and social sciences, we know that the vast majority of ethnic
Asian scholars in the West have always played a prominent role in Asian-
related fields. They are, after all, the native or local experts. Yet ironically,
a survey of many Asians there teaching Asian literature and history now or
in the past will show that many (if not most) of them more typically had
backgrounds in Western literature or history than in Asian studies per se.
In my own case, although my region of expertise happens to be China, I
have never considered myself a student of anything other than cultural stud-
ies or social science, broadly defined. I have never taught courses on Asia,
although in the West this would be my expected area of expertise. When I
taught most recently in the UK, I was classed ipso facto into Asian stud-
ies. The novelist Wole Soyinka’s story is better known. Cambridge’s English
department routed his position to anthropology. African literature is appar-
ently more African than it is literature. Even professors who had supervised
me in anthropology never thought twice about my choice of area study,
since presumably I was the native expert. Ironically, in fact, if one looks at
anthropology in most of the Third World, one will find that the vast major-
ity of Third World anthropologists end up studying their own society. One
textbook definition of anthropology is that it is the study of other cultures,
yet why do native anthropologists actually study their own society? One
way of rephrasing this would be to say, anthropology is typically the study
of other cultures, but only if one happens to be a white European. For all
others, once a local, always a local. In the final analysis, these examples are
not about code switching. The same displacement that invites Third World
anthropologists to study their own culture also legitimizes the epistemic
authority of Western anthropologists to study other cultures. It is the same
for area studies. In Sakai’s case, the global displacement that casts me as
an Asian studies scholar in the West can also transform an Asian studies
scholar in the West into a theoretician in the context of Asia, regardless
of what we actually teach, write, or think. I raise such trivial experiences
to show that choice or intention in identity in the larger order of things
probably counts for very little. The institutional regimes that produce such
categories of meaning are powerful and can be deeply embedded, especially
when intertwined with other regimes and practices.
In order to satisfy my curiosity about the role of native scholarship

in the production of global knowledge, I surveyed the history of Chinese
students in the West, in reference to both their backgrounds and later pro-
fessional transformations. The bibliographer Yuan Tongli compiled several
volumes listing PhD dissertations by Chinese students from 1905 to 1964
in the United States and Europe.9 The vast majority of students pursued
degrees in science and engineering, but from the titles of PhD theses in
these compilations, it is possible to see what proportion of them in social
science and humanities is China related, how this proportion changes over
time and between different fields, and whether these proportions differ in
different countries. I did a simple comparison of three countries (USA, UK,
and France) in reference to historical change and discipline (see Appendix
table 1). I take China related in its broadest sense to mean anything related
to China. I displayed the ratio of China-related to non-China-related the-
ses both over history and across different disciplines. In general, the ratio
hovers around fifty/fifty, although the ratio in France has consistently been
closer to three to one. One can speculate about numerical differences here,
but it is possible to view these ratios as being high or low. If one takes for
granted that people study fields that are most directly relevant to their own
interests or fields of knowledge, then this ratio may seem normal or low.
After all, I doubt if the ratio of US students studying fields outside their
own history or society is more than 20 percent. I expected the ratio of
China-related theses to increase in the postwar era as well, which parallels
the rise of area studies in the West, but this was apparently not the case,
at least for Chinese students.
The breakdown by discipline, however, is more revealing. First, I
should point out that only one of Yuan’s volumes was subdivided according
to discipline, yet I thought the disciplinary distinctions important enough to
warrant a subjective determination. I stress subjective here, because I had to
force categories on it on the basis of perceived relevance, in spite of where
the degree was offered. I tended thus to classify topics like international
law in Confucian thought under philosophy and Feng Hanyi’s The Chinese
Kinship System under anthropology. In assessing disciplinary breakdown in
Europe, where the primary distinction is between the faculty of arts and
the faculty of law (which incorporates the social sciences minus history and
anthropology), it was necessary to use US-centric definitions for the sake
of consistency. So said, there are fields that tend not to invite particular
relevance to native knowledge, such as psychology, economics, business,
and law. At the other extreme, there are fields that encourage students to
work on their own culture and society, notably education, history, sociol-
ogy, anthropology, and geography. Last, there are fields that could go either
way, for example, political science, philosophy, linguistics, divinity, fine arts,
and literature. The case of anthropology is quite peculiar. As one knows,
anthropologists in China work on non-Han Chinese cultures; technically,
this is called ethnology, but scholars working on Chinese rural communities,
especially those trained by Fei Xiaotong, Malinowski’s student in anthropol-
ogy at LSE, tend to call themselves sociologists. Even with the non-Han
ethnographies, it would be unusual to know that most Chinese anthropolo-
gists still end up studying their own society, especially, since we all know
that anthropology is the study of other cultures. I would go as far to say
that 100 percent of Chinese anthropologists work on their own society, or,
put another way, their research, regardless of whether it is on Han or non-
Han minority culture, is driven more by its direct or integral relevance to
their own society. Moreover, if a study on China’s border minorities were
actually classed under any other discipline, in the West one would call it
China related. Even if 99 percent of Chinese anthropologists study non-
Han minorities, I would call it an aberration, contrary to strict disciplinary
definitions. This is akin to saying that 99 percent of US anthropologists
study American Indians, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. I have
explored this particular problem elsewhere.10 Nonetheless, it suffices to say
here that such instances of disciplinary cross-dressing are hardly trivial or
exceptional. They are in fact central to contradictions within the disciplines
and to the way we (are forced to) identify.
I leave further discussion of these and other statistics to scholars on
Chinese education, which allows me to focus further on the fetish of dis-
ciplinary cross-dressing. It is surprising perhaps to note that many of the
best-known sinologists in the United States were not originally trained in
fields or topics related to China. The most prominent examples include
the following:
Ho, Ping-ti (professor of Chinese history, University of Chicago),

1952, Land and State in Great Britain, 1873‒1910, PhD
Columbia
Hsia, C. T. (professor of Chinese literature, Columbia), 1952,
George Crabbe 1754‒1832, PhD Yale
Hsiao, Kung-chuan (professor of Chinese history, University of
Washington), 1926, Political Pluralism: A Study in Contem-
porary Political Theory, PhD Cornell
Cheng, Chung-ying (professor of Chinese philosophy, University
of Hawaii), 1964, Pierce’s and Lewis’ Theories of Induction,
PhD Harvard
Mei, Tsu-lin (professor of Chinese linguistics, Cornell), 1962,

Towards a Foundation for a Logic of Grammar, PhD Yale
Yang C. K. (professor of Chinese sociology, University of Pitts-
burgh), 1940, Marketing Institutions in Jackson Trading Area
as Agencies of Community Integration, PhD University of
Michigan
Tsou, Tang (professor of Chinese politics, University of Chicago),
1951, A Study of the Development of the Scientific Approach
in Political Studies in the US, with Particular Emphasis on the
Methodological Aspects of the Works of Charles E. Merriam and
Harold D. Lasswell, PhD University of Chicago
Fei, John Ching-han (professor of Chinese economics, Yale),
1952, A Diagrammatic Representation of Certain Problems in
General Equilibrium Theories, PhD MIT
I cite these examples less to underscore scholarly dexterity by academic

superstars (I think the most enviable example is Chao Yuen-ren, the father
of Chinese linguistics, who earned a BA in math at Cornell and PhD in
analytical philosophy at Harvard), than to suggest, first, that their ability
to switch to sinology had to come from other than their academic train-
ing, strictly speaking, which was facilitated to a large extent by their native
expertise. Needless to say, the primitive state of Asian studies could have
been a deterrent or opening. Second, and more importantly, I doubt whether
their PhDs in those topics could have gotten them jobs in China, especially
in Chinese history or literature, which were ivory tower orthodoxies in their
own right. I am sure that the considerations that led these people to switch
to sinology were complex, to say the least. The Cold War and anti-Asian
racism that continued into the early postwar era were explicit factors that
could have contributed to stratification in US academia, either by limit-
ing their future in Western studies or by facilitating their entry as native
experts into sinology, yet this was a clear instance where identity counted
for something, but only in a Western context. The only Chinese-born aca-
demic in the West I know who excelled in a field not related to sinology
is Tuan Yi-fu, a well-known geographer and spatial theorist, who ironically
is little-known in Chinese academia.
A student at Teachers College, Columbia, Kao Lin-ying, undertook
an informative PhD thesis called “Academic and Professional Attainments
of Native Chinese Students Graduating from Teachers College, Columbia
University, 1909‒1950.” Although his study was limited to graduates of
Teachers College, his depiction of the backgrounds and career transforma-
tions of those students were broadly applicable to most Chinese students

at that time. Especially in the early years, students going overseas for study
tended to be from a coastal city in China, and attend a Mission school
and/or Mission college. As undergraduates, they tended to major in educa-
tion or English. Thus, in comparison with other students, they had a solid
grounding in English and were more cosmopolitan in influence. English
language competence cannot be underestimated, even in later years. Kao
(1951:65) explained this logic bluntly: “a very good student in China might
turn out to be a very poor student in the US, simply because of his lack
of English, and the reverse might also be true.” Of those who graduated
then went back to China, ironically few returned to teach in secondary
schools, which should have been their goal of professional training at Teach-
ers College.11 Many used their US degrees to gain professorial positions;
others secured administrative headships such as dean, principal, or college
president; some became government ministers.12 Most who remained in the
United States abandoned education for business careers, while many women
became housewives.
In short, posteducation professional transformations of all kinds
tended to be the norm rather than the exception, and not all of them
involved social climbing. One of the surprises in my crude tabulation of
Chinese PhD recipients in the West was my discovery that literature degree
holders accounted for very few of them. Especially given the postwar advent
of area studies in the United States, this meant that teachers of Asian lan-
guage and literature had to be one of the more expansive fields. But who
were these people, and where did they come from to get to where they
eventually went? Unfortunately, given the lack of exact data from 1964 on,
one can just speculate, but my intuitions mostly parallel Kao’s findings. As
we know, many of the native Chinese-language teachers who stayed in the
United States did not initially have relevant degrees in language training,
which is a recent development. Many were graduate students in diverse other
fields who for equally diverse reasons gave up other professions to become
language teachers. Similarly, many students who finished their degrees and
eventually stayed in US universities to teach Chinese literature did not ini-
tially have degrees in Chinese at all. Many had degrees in foreign literature
or comparative literature, arguably more than Chinese literature. Some may
have switched from foreign to Chinese literature after the MA degree, but
few of them were top students in Chinese literature for the simple reason
that even fewer were good enough in both Chinese and English to pursue
Chinese literature overseas. In the same way, graduates in English litera-
ture switching to social science or humanities of all sorts while studying
overseas were not an uncommon phenomenon at all. These are not just
cases of code switching. Identification in such cases is really a product of

institutional relevance.
Let me cite one other set of examples about disciplinary cross-dressing.
I mentioned that many of the “native” experts teaching various fields of
Chinese language and civilization in the United States could have originated
from fields other than sinology, even English, but what about the Chinese
students who pursued degrees in European literature and civilization there
then eventually returned to their home country? Many, as one might expect,
did in fact teach their strict fields of expertise, but not all. Few of them have
recently become “postcolonial” intellectuals. I say this facetiously in Dirlik’s
sense of it. These examples say much about the meaning of “postcolonial,”
of the kind that has been invoked in the aftermath of Said’s brilliant cri-
tique of Orientalism and that has been rightly criticized by McClintock,
Shohat, Dirlik et al. as that theoretical mind-set, which has in turn been
used to invoke an emancipatory imagination of various sorts, ranging from
subaltern studies to nativist literature and native anthropology.13 First, the
object of criticism was really a narrow mind-set in Western literature. Sec-
ond, I argue that there is nothing inherently emancipatory about nativism.
Many Asian academics in history and anthropology who advocate so-called
indigenous points of view and practice typical sinological research also hap-
pen to be theoretically uninteresting and critically unreflective. For those of
us (including myself ) who tend to be classified as “postcolonial,” it refers
to a species of “native” academic who publishes on the international circuit
(i.e., in English), and more facetiously walks the walk and talks the talk. If
I identify as postcolonial in these terms, albeit reluctantly, then it is mostly
out of aversion to what I perceive as nativism. At the same time, there
is nothing privileged about native knowledge. In criticism also of Dirlik’s
“postcolonial aura,” which gives the impression that Third World scholars
are recent mainstays in the metropole, nothing is further from the truth.
The West has had generations of native scholars. More importantly, even if
they began in academia by pursuing universal knowledge, they still ended
up playing the role of local scholar in the larger stratification of things. This
stratification is not the function of an inherent dualism between humanitas
and anthropos per se. It is in reality a function of the institutional web of
power that situates us all in an ongoing, evolving international division of
academic labor.
My personal aversion to anything global is thus related to my fierce
refusal to accept the role of local. It is a curse created by the global. The
very use of these terms in a dualistic sense unwittingly maintains the caste-
like hierarchy that stratifies all of us in a larger global division of labor. It
is also a trap played equally unwittingly on both sides. I have been to too
of counterculture as well, namely the youth culture, intellectual dissidence,

artistic freedom, even the flourishing of tabloids and sexual liberation.
By far, the most explicit challenge to the KMT’s monopoly of political
power has come from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), running on
a platform of indigenous rule by ethnic Taiwanese, who constitute three-
fourths of the island’s population, and Taiwanese independence, in its more
extreme factions. Yet despite the DPP’s appeals for ethnic nationalism, the
KMT continued to do well against the opposition, garnering three-fourths
of the popular vote in the first free legislative elections of 1989, and two-
thirds support in the legislative elections of 1992. Despite appearances to
the contrary, this was clearly not an ethnically dormant Yugoslavia or USSR.
While the KMT’s apparent success was in no way synonymous with
popular support for its Party ideology, it nonetheless underscored broad
based acceptance of the cultural-national identity that had been inculcated
over decades of explicit cultural policy and institutional practice in ways,
which have subverted to a large extent indigenous ethnic sentiments that
had been suppressed throughout the postwar era. On the other hand, despite
the explicit challenge by the DPP to the KMT’s political agenda in at least
one respect, there was little indication that the opposition had been able to
put forth an alternative cultural vision, which could successfully unmask the
hegemonic fictions of the prevailing regime, choosing instead to advocate
a different homogenous ethnic nation-state to counter that of the KMT.
This reflected the tacit importance already built into a generation of KMT
cultural indoctrination, which had presupposed the imagination of a shared
cultural (both ethnic and historical) consciousness as the seminal condition
of national survival and societal progress in all other respects. Subsequent
changes of regime and political ideology later led to the decline of the
explicit legacy of Sun’s Three Principles and the rise of Taiwanese indigenous
consciousness, but the cultural nationalist mind-set has remained deeply
embedded in the politics of identity in Taiwan. Its inability to transcend
the prison house of identity makes it hopelessly tied to it.
manifested the stalemate of 1789 Republicanism after its 20th

century defeats—and so on. What philosophy was ‘about’ in
that sense has never been just ‘industrialization’ (contra Ernest
Gellner) but the specific deep-communal structures perturbed or
challenged by modernization in successive ethnies, and experienced
by thinkers as ‘the world.’ (Nairn 1998:17)
Thus, to rephrase Nairn in Sakai’s terms, I would add that what starts
out as anthropos in the subjective reflection of shutai in their engagement
with local life eventually becomes generalized or made worldly by shukan as
humanitas. There are similar cases of epistemic transformation in every cul-
tural tradition of thought. “Abstract” social theory also started out as reflec-
tions on capitalism and modern reality. It is not enough to say that ideology is
colonially hegemonic. In the process of epistemic transformation, it is possible
to discover the roots of cultural value and reflective standard. Cultural value
is by nature egocentric but reflective standards can be sociocentric, hence
neutrally defined. If there is any meaning to intercultural/ interdisciplinary
dialogue, it is because the possibilities of method are limitless.
I would argue that we are far from determining the parameters of our
epistemic values and standards, even for our own intellectual disciplines,
because we are still too enmeshed in the overt ethnicization of intellectual
identity, when it is ultimately about how our disciplines and specializations
force us to “subjectivize” and “evaluate,” strictly speaking. I think part of
the problem has to do with the distancing mechanism that dichotomizes the
cultural other as a means of underscoring the superiority of the subjective
self, which by extension would make anthropology Orientalist by virtue
of its reification of other cultures. Such criticism is misplaced. As Tzvetan
Todorov (1988) aptly phrased it, the distance between observer and observed
is analytically distinct from the detachment from one’s personal or cultural
values that the epistemic observer must have in order to evaluate the objects
of one’s observation or study. The teaching of theory in its own terms is
predicated on detachment, not distance. Otherwise, one would call it politi-
cization. Misplaced reification of this kind in the long run mystifies the real
nature of subjective reflection—and most importantly its critical function.
Epistemic subjects in various places in the world will continue to be
separated by their positionalities within a hierarchy of power. How one
defines the nature of epistemic method will in large part be decided ulti-
mately by how one is able to negotiate one’s interests or aims within this
larger order of things. Distancing is a given, but there is always space for
critical reflection, if that is what cultural studies is about, crudely defined. In
this regard, epistemic observers, of all kinds, continue to play an important
role in this, arguably much larger than the identity politics of recent debates
surrounding postcolonial theory would seem to suggest.
There are ramifications here for Asian studies. The Orientalizing of
Asian studies has its limits, thus by implication postcolonial calls for criti-
cal reflexivity. On the other hand, one cannot deny the influence of a
different kind of ethnicization that has marginalized Asian studies within
mainstream knowledge and stratified identity within an international divi-
sion of academic labor. I argue ultimately that critical epistemic reflection
is a function more of our engagement with the minefields of our respective
discursive niches than how we happen to be positioned as persons within
“the world.” In any event, discursive content, subjective positioning, and
practical encounter with one’s lifeworld will remain hopelessly intertwined.
Afterword
From Geopolitics to Geopragmatics as a
Mode of Subjective Engagement
Regardless of how one views the world theoretically, one is inevitably posi-
tioned implicitly or explicitly with reference to existing genres of thought or
interpretation. In 1996, when I advocated defining identity as a discourse
for representing public culture, it went contrary to prevailing notions of
culture as “native’s point of view” or subjective realities in the politics of
identity.1 By arguing that culture was a discursive instead of analytical cat-
egory, I was, on the one hand, implying that culture was politicizing in
ways that were incommensurable with basic anthropological definitions and,
on the other hand, suggesting that it was a fiction that was constructed less
with regard to any rooted, taken for granted reality than to ever-changing
sociopolitical formations or geopolitical regimes. These discursive construc-
tions reveal at a deeper level subjectivities of rule while mapping out the
regimes and routines that define one’s imaginative possibilities of being and
acculturative processes of becoming, otherwise called identification. In an
institutional sense, the nature of these formative regimes invokes in the first
instance questions of the state and governmentality. They are rooted globally,
insofar as the geopolitics of the state, nation, and empire must inherently
be viewed in such a context. At the same time, this geopolitics is always
locally grounded and negotiated.2
The incommensurabilities of culture and identification across societal
boundaries derive in large part from the diverse specificities of these his-
torical experiences and local grounds. Nonetheless, much of Asian studies
continues to be framed within variations of the same generalized paradigms.
Tradition versus modernity and the West versus East have given way to
the imposition of East Asian models and recourse to neo-Confucian influ-
ences. Even if it is possible to divorce societal experience from the lineage
of tradition and place, the history of societal transformations everywhere
239
240 Afterword
has been inextricably linked to larger narratives about nationalism, colonial-

ism, capitalism, and globalization, which have been fraught with their own
inconsistencies of definition and uncertainties of relevance. It is possible at
the same time to regard Hong Kong, Taiwan, PRC, Singapore, and elsewhere
as venues for problematizing the above processes and their mutually collusive
relationships. One should instead argue that each represents an exemplar in
its own terms of the permutation of general processes. In many respects,
Hong Kong’s transformation as both imperial subject and object established
a unique dynamic that molded changing relationships between the polity,
economy, and culture. The same can be said for nationalizing regimes in
Taiwan and Singapore or the evolution of capitalism with Chinese char-
acteristics. At the same time, our attempts to understand these distinctive
features of historical experience have been marred by Eurocentric projec-
tions and flawed “theories.” The writing of Hong Kong postwar history as a
unilineal narrative of progress has in many respects sanitized the violence of
colonial rule in the same way that it now portrays post-1997 Hong Kong
as the battlefield for an inherent struggle over autonomy and democracy.
The advent of capitalism in the PRC is embedded in changing narratives
of capitalist theorizing that straddle neoclassical machinations about the
market to neoliberal projections about the role of the state and rule of law.
In addition to superficial accounts of guanxi capitalism, they fail to capture
the formation of institutional regimes in their own terms.
If anything, this institutional context provides the point of departure
for understanding identity formations and its inherent politics, which in
turn demarcates the possibilities for pragmatic engagement. The systemic
inculcation of cultural nationalism in Taiwan as a life regime has in many
ways hardened the avenues of engagement with the PRC. Even with the
indigenization of Taiwanese cultural consciousness, the prospects for effec-
tive autonomy remain dim. But on the other hand, who says that this
relationship must be discursively rooted in such “truths” and cannot be
actualized in other more constructive ways? Post-1997 Hong Kong and its
relationship to the PRC are defined by another kind of entanglement. The
emergence of an explicit identity conflict where none has existed previously
or where differences were encoded in other terms inscribes the consequences
of a relatively distinct kind of geopolitical terrain. I submit that this entan-
glement should invoke a different kind of pragmatic politics, one that is
not necessarily determined by dualistic opposition (as is often implied by
the emancipatory trajectories of a pure democratization movement). In any
case, the politics of the China Triangle has long transcended the era of a
Greater China fueled by hopes of transnational hybridity and multivocal
appeal to the margin. Needless to say, the main factor is the shift in gravity
Afterword 241
created by a newly emergent China. It is difficult to ascertain to what extent

the system can successfully maintain its intricate balance between a growth
economy and ties linking capitalist interests to the politics and policies of
state. It is evident only that its operation is governed by a different set of
rules. It is first necessary to wake up to Chineseness. On the other hand,
the prospects for change still depend to a large extent on what happens at
its center. If geopolitics engenders by definition the diverse specificity of his-
torical experience and local ground, then the pragmatics of social action can
only follow from similarly or alternatively grounded identity constructions
and life strategies. They cannot be predetermined or imposed by principle.
One can also ask in this regard to what extent identity, whether as ethnicity,
class, or human being, is in fact relevant as a political factor?
From the perspective of critical cultural theory from multiculturalist
identity politics to postcolonial theory, the pragmatics of cultural resistance
is largely based on oppositional politics. I would argue that a geopolitical
approach to culture suggests the need for more complex practical (pragmatic)
strategies. It may be the case that the development of postwar Taiwan society
has predominantly been conditioned by the imposition of monocultural
nationalism and the transformation of KMT rule to the present, which
can easily explain the rigid, still largely inflexible ways that ethnicity and
national identity have become intertwined. This may in the long term limit
the parameters of ongoing change, but none of it is structurally preordained.
They were the products of systemic sociopolitical forces, and it would take
as much to undo or redo them. There were opportunities in the past for
the Republic of China to become politically independent, if this is what the
current desire is, and each time the force of predetermined intentions and
impositions worked against it. The first was in 1949, when it abandoned
the mainland, the second was after its ouster from the United Nations, and
the third perhaps was during the Cultural Revolution. In each case, Chiang
Kai-shek’s resolve to recover the mainland and reunite China was the obvi-
ous reason why they were unthinkable options, in which case Taiwan has
no one else to blame for losing the future. The breakdown in the PRC of
a Maoist society was the turning point for a resurgent nationalist identity,
but this emergent mind-set is the basis of popular support against threats
to its perceived unity, rooted now in 3,000 years of historical civilization.
Against this kind of identity mind-set, the emergence of Taiwanese con-
sciousness may have successfully emancipated Taiwan from its oppression
by alien mainlander rule, where “Chinese” is increasingly synonymous with
foreign. But the extent to which such indigenous emancipation can be
parlayed into legitimation rationale for national independence is, at least
in the current climate, minimal. As I have argued, there is no reason why
Chapter 2

The very existence of obligatory schools divides any society into two
realms: sometime spas and processes and treatments and professions
are “academic” or pedagogic” . . . The power of school thus to divide
social reality has no boundaries: education becomes unworldly and the
world becomes non-educational.
—Ivan Illich, De-Schooling Society
The Norm and the Normal, or Education

as Social and Societalizing
In East Asia, education was not just the evolution of a modern regime
made compatible with all other socializing institutions, such as the fam-
ily, military, and workplace. Above all, it was a systematic construction of
the state, with historical lineages in an imperial system that reproduced a
meritocracy. The omnipresence of the Ministry of Education epitomizes
ultimately the hegemonic role of education, especially in the making of the
nation-state. More than socializing, it manufactures a normality of belong-
ing where culture, citizenship, and structured modes of routinized behavior
perform overlapping disciplinary functions.
There is an abundance of critical literature on education in sociol-
ogy and pedagogy. The work of Pierre Bourdieu as well as that of Michael
Apple, Henri Giroux, and Peter McLaren, following the footsteps of Paolo
Freire, to name a few, have underscored not only the role of education
This is an adaptation of a paper published in 2013, titled “De-Societalizing the School: On

the Hegemonic Making of Moral Persons (Citizenship) and Its Disciplinary Regimes,” Critique
of Anthropology 33(2):146‒67.
39
Afterword 243
ably easier than directly confronting the institutional power that drives its
politics. But the recognization of its inherent politicization is more relevant
and seminal than the intense attention paid in the literature to the economic
development of capitalism in the PRC or continued future in Hong Kong
and the fictitious diversions of “one country, two systems,” however defined.
The nature of geopragmatics ultimately should have ramifications out-
side a Chinese sphere; it should be equally applicable to everywhere else in
the world, characterized by one’s distinctive geopolitical constitution. Asian
studies has been especially complicit in perpetrating the cultural community
of East Asia, driven by fictive neo-Confucian lineages and other models of
affinity. If it is more productive to view relations within an ever changing
greater China in terms of their distinctive geopolitical formations than
presumed cultural affinities, the same can then be applied to a transnational
context. The challenge is ultimately one that necessarily encourages us to
think beyond the simplistic cultural critique of prevailing identity politics
and postcolonial theories. It has always been one based on the politics of
place and discursive imaginations and is one that leads ultimately to open-
ended, localizing and differentiated geopragmatic strategic practices.
Appendix
Table 1. Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese Students, 1905‒1964
US UK/NI France
China Non- China Non- China Non-
Year Related China Related China Related China
1905‒19 22 15 1 1 5 1
1920s 70 73 3 4 51 15
1930s 95 104 16 13 156 44
1940s 104 77 9 16 33 17
1950s 149 138 20 7 25 16
1960s 69 80 1 1 1 1
China Non- China Non- China Non-
Discipline Related China Related China Related China
History 95 14 15 5 36 4
Education 105 60 2 0 7 2
Political Science 88 95 9 8 68 23
Economics 88 170 6 8 50 13
Psychology 9 44 0 5 0 4
Sociology 29 17 1 2 17 6
Anthropology 11 0 4 0 3 0
Geography 8 2 5 3 4 1
Philosophy 33 19 0 3 15 9
Linguistics 5 6 3 0 8 0
Literature 12 19 0 3 21 6
Fine Arts 4 2 0 0 3 0
Divinity 5 5 0 0 0 0
Law 18 27 5 5 39 26
Business 0 5 0 0 0 0
Journalism 0 2 0 0 0 0
TOTAL 509 486 50 42 271 94
245
Notes
Preface
1. “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Iden-

tity,” boundary 2 23(2):111‒38 (1996).
2. “Discourses of Identity in the Changing Spaces of Public Culture in
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.” Theory Culture & Society 13(1):51‒75 (1996).
3. “On the Geopolitics of Identity,” Anthropological Theory 9(3):331‒49
(2009).
4. See Wang Gungwu, “The Study of Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia,”
in Changing Attitudes of the Southeast Asian Chinese Since World War II (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 1988), 1.
Chapter 1
1. Pierre Ryckmans (1980:20) wrote that the book was “300 pages of
twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed, and badly-written diatribe.”
2. As Said (1978:4‒5) stated, “we must take seriously Vico’s great observa-
tion that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have
made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to say
nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’
and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is
an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that
have given it reality and presence in and for the West.”
3. In the case of China, Western Orientalist scholarship can be viewed in
this light. Changing views of China from the Enlightenment onward were more
often a function of changing views than of a changing China. The discourse of
Oriental despotism and hydraulic society is a case in point (March 1974). Early
views of civilized China were based on favorable reports by Jesuit missionaries. This
enlightened view suffered an eclipse by the eighteenth century. During this era,
China was increasingly seen as the mystical, unchanging Other, paralleling Said’s
observations on Orientalist writings on the Arab world (see Zhang 1988, Qian
1940, 1941a, 1941b).
247
in reproducing the structure of class domination but also the function of

cultural production in this regard.1 However in this critical literature, there
is more attention to efforts to produce oppositional educational values and
practices that challenge hegemonic authority and less consideration of the
multiplicity of cultural practices that engender these institutions. In Taiwan,
mass education was part of a process of Westernization that brought about
the dissemination of the modern nation-state. Perhaps even more so than
in Europe, mass education was a top-down construction, regulated by the
Ministry of Education, which promoted a meritocratic government and
bureaucratic elites. Disciplinary institutions in this sense were not really
autonomously evolving modern processes but more precisely regimes that
were intimately tied to the maintenance of state power and the cultivation
of a particular ethos and culture (societal mind-set) compatible ultimately
with its nationalist worldview. Of the many “socializing” regimes, educa-
tion played a relatively important role. The norm did not simply mark the
legitimacy of social institutions and social values but more importantly
cultivated routinized cultural behaviors and thoughts in the conduct of its
everyday practice.
Education is “normal” in multiple senses. Modernity gave birth to a
notion of society as the social structural framework on which various insti-
tutions, behaviors, rites, and practices were seen as functionally integrative.
The idea that society in practice was normal rather than imaginative or
inherently violent was maintained by social scientific theories that made the
norm sacred (as a mode of thought).2 Objective description and statistical
analysis of various kinds reified societal institutions, as the product of a sui
generis evolution, when they were also impositions of political policy or
social order. Within the social “system” and in conjunction with the politics
of the state, some institutions are more “normal” than others.
In many modern societies, education epitomizes the realm of the nor-
mal. In Taiwan, the Normal University is perhaps patterned after les écoles
normales of France (otherwise called Teachers’ Colleges). Education not only
inscribes the normal; the normal itself becomes in turn the very essence
of pedagogy. Normal then is to pedagogy what the norm is to social sci-
entific theory. As methodology, it puts into practice the rites and routines
of normal life in ways that complement the ideology of the norm as it is
epistemologically constructed. By reinforcing in practice normative rules,
education is tied ultimately to socialization, which as a process embodies
society into persons, as citizens. Thus, citizenship inscribes socialization, by
inculcating in ontological terms the morality and ethics of being a citizen.
In the final analysis, education not only performs a seminal role. The normal
epitomizes the soci(et)al.
Notes to Chapter 1 249
ing overseas. Zhang Hao (1987:189) noted here that the Three Principles focused
in large part on the revolutionary character of nationalism and anti-imperialism. In
contrast, emphasis on democracy (minquan) and livelihood (minsheng) was second-
ary. See Chen Yishen (1987:742‒43).
19. For a discussion of the “corporatist” nature of the KMT government and
its relationship to Sun’s thought, see Shen Zongrui (1990:19‒24). Sun’s emphasis
on centralized control was based on his belief in the ability of strong government
to combat imperialism in the larger global struggle for self-determination.
20. This was most clearly spelled out in a 1952 lecture titled “The Essence
of the Three Principles” (sanmin zhuyi de benzhi), an excerpt of which is reprinted
in Chen Yishen and Liu Arong, eds. (1987:107‒20).
21. The policy of using the Three Principles as an ideological weapon against
communism followed the overall practice of “using ideology to decide policy and
using policy to decide human affairs.”
22. Taiwan Provincial Government News Agency (1970, section 18, p. 2).
A collection of essays written on the occasion of the Chinese cultural renaissance
movement is reproduced in Taiwan Provincial Government (1967).
23. See Taiwan Provincial Government (1978).
24. As Huang Chun-chieh (1992:218‒20) pointed out, even Confucian aca-
demic discourse in postwar Taiwan tended to rally around a search for cultural
identity, with factual investigation being a secondary concern.
25. As Wu Kunru (1981:72) remarked, “the present situation underlying the
philosophy of The Three Principles is that it clearly lacks a holistic systematicity. Its
scattered texts were mostly of a style that was consistent with a (Western) philosophi-
cal framework. They were assembled to put forth an epistemology, a core ideology
and a philosophy of life, but there was never an attempt to view the substance of
The Three Principles as a primary consideration and to abstract from it an inherent
mode of philosophical thought.”
26. For a view of the influence of Confucianism and science on Sun’s think-
ing, see Shen Zongrui (1986:89‒145).
27. These included works of a polemical nature such as Ye Qing’s Sanmin
zhuyi gailun (A General Treatise on the Three Principles), Fu Qixue’s Sanmin zhuyi
dagang (An Outline of the Three Principles), and Guofu yijiao gaiyao (An Overview
of Sun Yat-sen’s Teachings), Ren Ruoxuan’s Sanmin zhuyi xinjie (New Perspective
on the Three Principles), Tao Tang’s Sanmin zhuyi zonglun (A Synthetic Discussion
of the Three Principles), Ye Shoukan’s Sanmin zhuyi tong lun (An Introduction to
the Three Principles), Liang Yaokang’s Sanmin zhuyi sixiang tixi (The Intellectual
Framework of the Three Principles), Zhang Yihung’s Sunxue tixi xin lun (New Look
on Sun Yat-sen’s Thought), Cui Chuiyan’s Guofu sixiang shenlun (A Treatise on Sun
Yat-sen’s Thought), Jin Pingou’s Sanmin zhuyi conglun (A Comprehensive Account
of the Three Principles) and others bearing general reference to Sun’s thought.
28. According to Liu Arong (1987:765‒66), the most noteworthy of these
included Cui Daiyang’s Guofu zhexue yanjiu (A Study of Sun Yat-sen’s Philoso-
phy) and Guofu sixiang zhi zhexue tixi (The Philosophical System of Sun Yat-sen’s
Thought), Jiang Yian’s Guofu zhexue sixiang lun (A Discussion of Sun Yat-sen’s
250 Notes to Chapter 1
Philosophical Thought), Zhou Shifu’s Sanmin zhuyi de zhexue xitong (The Philo-
sophical Framework of the Three Principles), Jin Pingou’s Guofu zhexue sixiang tiyao
(A Synopsis of Sun Yat-sen’s Philosophical Thought), Ren Ruoxuan’s Guofu kexue
sixiang lun (Sun Yat-sen’s Scientific Thought), Jiang Yian’s Guofu kexue sixiang lun
(A Discussion of Sun Yat-sen’s Scientific Thought), Lin Guibu’s Minquan zhuyi xin
lun (New Perspective on Democracy), Yang Yujiong’s Guofu de zhengzhi sixiang (The
Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen), Lo Shishi’s Minsheng zhuyi xin lun (New Perspec-
tive on Livelihood), He Haoruo’s Minsheng zhuyi yu ziyou jingji (Livelihood and
Liberal Economics), Ren Joxuan’s Minsheng zhuyi zhen jie (The Truth of Livelihood),
Zhou Jinsheng’s Sun Zhongshan xiansheng jingji sixiang (The Economic Thought of
Sun Yat-sen), Zhou Kaiching’s Guofu jingji xueshuo (The Economic Principles of
Sun Yat-sen), Su Zheng’s Pingjun diquan zhi lilun tixi (The Theoretical Framework
of Equal Land Rights). There were many other scholarly works specifically covering
sociological, educational, legal and historical aspects of the Three Principles.
29. Major compilations included those edited on the occasion of Sun’s nine-
tieth and one hundredth birthdays, such as Guofu xueshu sixiang yanjiu (Research
into Sun Yat-sen’s Intellectual Thought), edited by the Guofu yijiao yanjiu hui (Sun
Yat-sen Studies Research Committee); Guofu sixiang yu jindai xueshu (Sun Yat-
sen’s Thought and Recent Scholarship), edited by Zhengzhong Publishing Co.; and
anthologies brought out by Wenxing Publishing Co. titled Sunwen zhuyi lun ji
(Essays on Sun Yat-sen’s Thought), Yanjiu Sun Zhongshan de shixue yu shiliao (His-
torical Studies and Documentary Materials on Sun Yat-sen), and Sun Zhongshan
minsheng yanlun (Sun Yat-sen’s Lectures on Livelihood).
30. In his discussion of the various methodological techniques employed by
scholars to do textual analysis of the Three Principles, Ge Yongguang (1990:491‒95)
has suggested that the looseness of interpretation used to force a meaningful syn-
thesis of Sun’s scattered texts also permitted scholars in a subsequent era to conduct
social scientific research in fields loosely subsumed under the name of the Three
Principles where in fact little or no reference to Sun’s work was ever made.
31. This was taken directly from Academia Sinica’s General Information Hand-
book 1984 and 1988, published and updated regularly by Academia Sinica.
32. See the forum discussion in Hung Quanhu et al., eds. (1990:529‒31).
33. The explicit emphasis in all these courses on cultivation of a higher
national collective conscience cannot be understated. In chapter 72 of volume 6 of
the textbook Citizenship and Morality, used at the elementary-school level, no less
than 1,387 references can be found to words invoking nationhood, China, patrio-
tism, society, and world (not even counting less exact references to Chinese culture,
the people, etc.). In contrast, only 298 references were found to words invoking
individuals and individuality (see Zheng Rongzhou 1989:40).
34. As Liu Dingxiang (1989:65) clearly noted, “from the goals and aspirations
of this kind of education, it would appear that ‘party-based education’ [danghua
jiaoyu] did not have a strong aim of creating an ideological regime; on the con-
trary, one could even say that the enlightenment of democracy [minzhu qimeng]
and the development of rationality [lixing de zhankai] were the means to promote
the education of political liberation. In this regard, the primordial meaning of

Party-based education was to view education as the agent of revolutionary change,
democratization, scientific progress and socialization.”
35. The influence of Chiang Kai-shek’s particular focus on personal hygiene
and practices of the body in relation to Sun’s understanding of livelihood cannot
be exaggerated. Perhaps not unlike Elias’s (1978) understanding of the civilizing
function of etiquette and manners, which prefigured the control of the emotions
crucial to the evolution of a rational disciplinary lifestyle, clearly from an ontogenetic
perspective, the health of the body was prerequisite to the practice of moral conduct
and in turn became the basis for understanding civics and society.
36. Lin Yuti (1985:29) noted that merit points were earned on one’s achieve-
ment report (chengji kaohe) for these two activities.
Chapter 2
1. In cultural studies, Willis’s Learning to Labour (1981) is cited as a pioneer-

ing work in education, even though it was less about the school than the making
of class culture in E. P. Thompson’s terms.
2. The later work of Emile Durkheim (1961) stressed the moral nature of
education, which explicitly accented its ethical content and disciplinary function.
Shoko Yoneyama’s (1999) study of school violence in Japan focused on authoritarian
intensity rather than normative “rationality” as the inherent source of institutional
domination.
3. As Weber (1976:332) pointed out for France, “we come to the greatest
function of the modern school: to teach not so much useful skills as a new patrio-
tism beyond the limits naturally acknowledged by its charges. The revolutionaries of
1789 had replaced old terms like schoolmaster, regent and rector, with instituteur,
because the teacher was intended to institute the nation. But the desired effect,
that elusive quality of spirit, was recognized as lacking in the 1860’s and 1870’s.”
4. Paul Bailey (1990) aptly characterized the evolution of popular education
in early Republican era China as one of “reforming the people,” which underlined
its focus on mass education. In this sense, education was not just nationalist in
a broad sense but also Nationalist, insofar as it was interpreted and disseminated
ideologically by the KMT, literally Nationalist Party.
5. Ruey Yih-fu (1972) once argued that jiao (education as “teaching”) was
an important counterpart to a Chinese understanding of culture, different from
the term wenhua (which tended to invoke the notion of a literary based culture).
Acculturation was not just dependent on concrete institutions of learning but more
precisely education in the abstract, as ritually transformative practice.
6. For a detailed history of Chinese education from ancient to present times,
see Cleverley (1991).
7. There were many ethnographic studies that have dealt with education
in contemporary China, most notably the collection of essays by Liu et al., eds.
(2000). One can compare this with the essays in Postiglione and Lee, eds. (1998),
which focused more on pedagogical aspects of school in Hong Kong.
8. Frederick Wiseman’s film High School suggested that discipline is a staple
fact of all schools.
9. Perhaps contrary to McVeigh’s (2000) description of Japan’s cult of school
uniforms, students in Taiwan generally wore uniforms with reluctance and disdain
associated with state control.
10. Schoenhals’s (1993) ethnography of a school in the PRC has focused
largely on face relationships and the way such cultural behavior complemented or
stemmed from socialization within the family.
11. Following Corrigan’s (1990) use of the term, moral regulation should be
understood here in a Durkheimian sense, where the obligatory nature of moral
rules necessitates social control.
12. See Hughes and Stone (1999:985‒89) for an overview of policy changes
in the curriculum.
13. It is difficult to translate the term chengshi, except to say that it means
honesty in the sense of being sincere (as an attribute of one’s moral behavior) rather
than being epistemologically true.
14. The socializing role of schools was what Weber (1976:303) neatly called
“civilizing in earnest.”
15. Japanese scholars, such as Iwama (1995), reiterated the collectivist ethos
of conformity. For China, Gardner (1989) reproduced the same kinds of dualisms
between Western individualism and traditional Chinese discipline through appren-
ticeship and pattern maintenance.
Chapter 3
1. This was, of course, an extension of ideas initially presented by Claus

Offe (1985). My usage of transnational capitalism follows from discussions therein.
Contrast this with Held et al. (1999).
2. The DPP, founded largely in opposition to the ruling KMT (hence dan-
gwai), was quite explicitly founded on a policy platform of “Taiwan for the Tai-
wanese.” Without a doubt, factions within the DPP represent different variations
of Taiwanese ethnic nationalism. On the surface of things, there has been much
overlap in the ethnic positions advocated by both the KMT and DPP. This was
partly a deliberate attempt by the (Taiwanese faction of the) KMT to co-opt “the
middle ground” of the Taiwanese populace. The KMT has generally tended to
view local culture and identities as constituent elements within a more inclusive
Nationalist polity.
3. Ethnic indigenization started actually in the pre‒martial law era during
the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo, who proclaimed himself to be Taiwanese,
despite his ethnic roots in Zhejiang. He picked Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese
(Hakka), as his successor in order to ease tensions between native Taiwanese (ben-
sheng ren) and Chinese mainlanders (waisheng ren). Lee Teng-hui in turn organized
a predominantly Taiwanese faction within the KMT, which for many years held
ground against a DPP that was born from grassroots Taiwanese sentiments. Cultural
centers devoted to the archivalization of Taiwan history and culture were created as
part of larger efforts at social reconstruction directed by the Committee for Cultural
Development (wenhua jianshe weiyanhui).
4. Following official directives by the Ministry of Education, departments
for multicultural studies (duoyuanzhuyi wenhua yenjiusuo) were established in sev-
eral teachers’ colleges to promote the study of multiculturalism (which means here
aboriginal minority studies), even though no one had ever been trained in such a
discipline and its practitioners had come from various other fields.
5. The notion of borderless economies follows Kenichi Ohmae’s (1990)
usage. The term glocal has been used widely, but its actual or exact origins are
uncertain. See Roland Robertson (1992).
6. The most comprehensive treatment of transnational migration is perhaps
Glick-Schiller et al. (1994). While such transnational labor movement within Asia
has also been intense, it has not led to the fluid migration patterns characteristic
in the West. See, for example, essays in Kris Olds et al. (1999).
7. See Appadurai (1990) for a paradigmatic statement.
8. I have made this general point in a paper written in 1996.
9. It is interesting to note that, since the establishment of the Chinese
Republic in 1911, there has only been one systematic revision of the Basic National-
ity Law of 1929, this being in 2000.
10. Unlike the multiculturalism of marginalized “foreigners,” such as Japanese
spouses from the colonial era, who decided to settle down in postwar Taiwan and
whose assimilative fate relegated them to a cruel nonexistence, the blind eye turned
to the multicultural status of the privileged was designed to enable those at the top
strata of society to maintain their cosmopolitan elitism.
11. The Sinicization of the social sciences movement first took off with the
publication of a series of essays edited by Yang Kuo-shu et al. (1982). Psychologists
have in recent years organized an ongoing forum on “indigenous psychology,” with
publications appearing in their journal Bentu xinlixue.
12. See my 2000 essay for full details of this argument.
13. See Wolf (1982). The problem of linkages is different from that of sys-
temic transformation.
14. This oft-cited term first appeared in Harvey (1989).
15. Thus, the challenge of globalization and multiple or truly fluid nationali-
ties is less a problem of realizing a global ideal than one of directly confronting
deeply embedded cultural definitions.
16. In this regard, there is no reason to believe that even strict definitions
of the bounded nation-state, which are a product of modernity, cannot be funda-
mentally altered in legal-political terms.
Chapter 4
1. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these studies is the two-volume work

by Jean and John Comaroff (1991).
2. Representative works here are those of Fabian (1986) and Viswanathan
(1989). Fabian is interested particularly in showing how choice of language was a
means to maintain hierarchical distance between colonizers and colonized, while
Viswanathan shows that literary study of English served technocratic, utilitarian
and civilizing functions in the maintenance of colonial hegemony.
3. The work of Said (1978) has spawned a minor cottage industry that does
not need elaboration here. Likewise, colonialism has made the writing of history
and resistance to imperial history (as in subaltern studies) important and inevitable
enterprises in the process of political legitimation and public reconstruction.
4. See especially the works of Pratt (1992) and Thomas (1994).
5. The work of Burrow (1966) and Stocking (1968) in particular shows
that the Victorian concept of race has roots in ideologies and institutions quite
independent of colonialism, although there can be no doubt that colonialism can
be used to institutionally intensify racial differences, among many other things.
6. France’s (1969) analysis of the changing discourse of land policy in the
construction of a Fijian tradition shows how such indirect rule was the cumulative
result of individual interpretations of policy principles and native custom.
7. In addition to the work of France (1969), Clammer (1973) has detailed
the role of colonialism in inventing Fijian tradition on the basis of their perception
of social organization and their synthesis of a unified set of customary laws. Also,
Thomas (1990) has noted contradictions of the state’s nonintervention in “preserv-
ing” Fijian custom and their intervention in the disciplinary reordering of routine
life in other regards. In the context of India, Dirks (1992a) has emphasized that caste
was a political construction of the colonial state, paralleling earlier arguments put
forth by Cohn (1984) regarding the objectification of social structure in the census.
8. See Bennett (1988) and Stocking (1987) for different views on the evolu-
tion and function of archivalization and cultural classification, which emerged with
the birth of the museum in the Victorian era.
9. According to Corrigan, this notion has roots in Durkheim’s arguments
about the obligatory nature of moral rules that are really at the heart of social norms.
10. As Corrigan and Sayer (1985:3) put it, “the state never stops talking.”
11. The British were probably wrong in their “assessment.” As Rawski
(1972:19) pointed out, the longer the period of the lease and especially in the
case of perpetual leases, the greater the degree of freedom exercised by the ten-
ant over the land vis-à-vis the landlord. Economically, it provided cultivators with
incentives to increase productivity, given guarantees of fixed rent for the duration
of the lease (Kamm 1977:63, Rawski 1972:18), and politically it provided a high
degree of autonomy and self-regulation in everyday affairs. This self-assertion and
independence on the part of the tenant was a result of the contractual nature of
such a “one-field, two-lord system” (yitian liangzhu) and led Rawski (1972:20) to
remark in conclusion, “custom was on the side of tenant and not the landlord.”
12. The Chinese government repeatedly maintained that the leased terri-
tory had the same status as trade concessions or “settlements” at the treaty ports.
It never relinquished its right of sovereignty over the territory and its citizens. As
late as the 1930s, China continued to assert its “landlord” status, one instance of
which involved the granting of mining licenses in the territory and fishing licenses
in the waters of the Colony. Dr. Philip Tyau, special delegate for foreign affairs
for Guangdong and Guangxi argued that the Chinese government held authority
to grant licenses in both cases on grounds that the New Territories and Kowloon
City were not part of the Colony proper of Hong Kong and that, as the British
consul-general at Canton paraphrased him, “China has by no means forfeited all her
rights as ground landlord in these territories, and the adjoining waters under the lease
agreement” (Wesley-Smith 1980:167, compare to CO129/564, emphasis mine).
13. As Groves (1969:48) rightly pointed out, both the tone and content of
these proclamations more often than not had an effect that was contrary to intended
aims. Instead of advocating noninterference with local practices on the land, for
instance, proclamations appeared to advocate more stringent control over them, and
instead of advocating self-government they made village elders appear like pawns
within an autocratic system of administration. Or as Groves (ibid.) put it, “control
over both land and political institutions appeared to be at risk.”
14. The reaction by Ping Shan villagers to an announcement of the construc-
tion of the first police station was explicit:
It says that land, buildings, and customs will not be interfered with
but will remain the same as before. Why should they therefore, when
they first come into the leased area, wish to erect a police station on
the hill behind our village? When has China ever erected a police sta-
tion just where people live? The proclamation says that things will be
as before. Are not these words untrue? (CREBC 1900:261)
15. See King’s (1975) discussion of “administrative absorption of politics,”

which was quite relevant to the common perception of an innately “apathetic”
political culture in Hong Kong, especially during the 1970s.
16. Law Wing-sang (1992:5) attributed the colonial government’s policy of
promoting economic growth through administrative efficiency and autocratic control
to a strategy or rhetoric of “managerial-corporatism.”
Chapter 5
1. Matthew Turner’s “Made in Hong Kong” exhibit is influential in this

regard (Turner and Ngan [1995], eds.).
2. My notion of geopolitics follows from the above.

3. The notions of imagined community and cultural identity here are
intertwined.
4. See Kam Kin Hung (1988). In its early years, editors had ownership shares.
5. See in particular the special issue on Hong Kong culture edited by Leung
Ping Kwan (1995) for Haowai, issue 226 that focused primarily on the role of
Haowai.
6. See especially Siu Kwok Wah (1984). One could also call this “academic
non-academicism.”
7. See Yau Sai Man (1995).
8. One in-house ad is reproduced in Lui Tai Lok (2007), ed., p. 188.
9. Jurgen Habermas (1989). Gramsci resonates here too.
10. Chan Koon Chung (1988). The Attitude and Style Manual served as an
editorial preface in each issue.
11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1989), pp. 120‒67. Criticism
focused on the inherent tendency within capitalism as industry to transform mass
culture into objects of commoditized consumption.
12. Lui Tai Lok (2007) ed. This compendium was initiated by the publisher,
not the magazine.
13. Lui Tai Lok (2007) ed., p. 238, originally Haowai, issue 225 (1995).
14. Lui is probably correct to argue that Haowai’s promotion of a uniquely
hybrid Hong Kong culture was not an explicit program designed from the outset
but rather something that became consciously apparent many years after the fact.
See also Chan Koon Chung’s (2007) essays.
15. Peter Wong (1992). Wong served as managing editor of the magazine
for much of the last two decades.
16. See Patterson (1994). Any society can thus be viewed as a set of overlap-
ping and competing cosmopolises.
17. Gilroy (1993) underscored the contribution of Blacks to the development
of modernity in the West.
18. Leo Lee (1999) argues that Shanghai served as a nostalgic “other” for
Hong Kong. Postwar Hong Kong was, in my opinion, largely a forward-looking
entity; its cosmopolitanism transcended urban modernity.
19. Chan Koon Chung (1982); he has recently focused more explicitly on
urban hybridity and cosmopolitanism.
Chapter 6
1. For a report on Chan’s talk, see the essay by Chris Yeung titled “Role of
Civil Servants Comes Under Scrutiny” (South China Morning Post, July 1, 1998).
2. In this regard, the most representative works are Hugh Baker (1993) and
Lau Siu-kai (1981).
3. I have made this basic argument more systematically in a previous pub-
lication (Chun 1996).
4. Writings by Western authors can be divided into two camps, those sym-
pathetic to the British legacy, such as Adley (1984), Lamb (1984), Johnson (1985),
and Rabushka (1997), and those critical of the colonial sellout of Hong Kong, such
as Nicholson (1992), Atwood and Major (1996), Thomas (1996), and Ingham
(1997). Local writers, such as Wong (1984), Liang (1995), Kwok (1996), and Lau
(1998), have, on the other hand, tended to be more concerned with the ability of
Hong Kong to remain autonomous and threats of Chinese hegemony.
5. Much has been said about the search for an unknown Chineseness that
dominated Hong Kong films in the transitional era as well as the sense of ambiguity
that a generation of youth brought up in colonial Hong Kong felt in being forced
to identify with an alien culture. On handover night (Lilley 2000:179), reported a
fifteen-year-old girl’s dream where “she is on stage about to sing the Chinese national
anthem. She is holding a flag and the audience is muttering in putonghua. Suddenly
she realizes that she knows neither the melody nor the words.”
6. As a result of the Sino-British Declaration of 1984, the Hong Kong
Education Department drew up guidelines on civic education, one in 1985 and
another in 1996. The priority of more recent guidelines was clearly the inculca-
tion of values pertaining to the national community. As a PRC educator, Li Yixian
(1996:254), put it, the curriculum should be refocused to accent “love of the country
and nation, as well as education in the proper social behavior.” Hughes and Stone
(1999) note important parallels in the relationship between nation-building and
curriculum reforms in Hong Kong and Taiwan, despite their concrete differences.
The implementation of the actual guidelines in Hong Kong during the post-1997
era remains unclear and unexplored, however.
7. Chinese dissidents represented the harshest critics of China’s intentions,
citing political motives of various sorts. See, for instance, Yao Biyang (1995) and
Ho Ping and Gao Xin (1998).
8. Even Martin Lee, leader of the democratic movement in Hong Kong was
surprised. In late July, he noted that Chinese government officials had been quiet
on Hong Kong issues and “we no longer hear intimidatory remarks from Beijing
as we did when the last governor was here.”
9. Frank Ching (1998:218) noted that the preparatory committee created
in 1996 to oversee the handover was abolished, as were other bodies that had been
seen as potential instruments for interfering in Hong Kong affairs.
Chapter 7
1. Geertz’s choice of terms such as lek and nisba to reflect underlying features
of Balinese and Moroccan life, respectively, has underscored his primary emphasis
on language as a methodological point of departure.
2. Renqing is similar to what Fried (1953) termed ganqing (sentiment in
an emotive sense).
3. Both quotations were cited in Ho (1976:867).
4. The work of King and Myers (1977) is a paradigmatic example in this regard.
5. The ambivalence between altruistic and egoistic dimensions of face is

typified by political leaders who claim to “serve the people,” yet are at the same
time “power hungry,” for example, Willy Stark in the novel All the King’s Men.
6. Hwang’s (1987:948, fig. 1) theoretical model of face and favor illustrates
the dyadic interaction between these kinds of ties, insofar as they are driven by
what he calls “the dilemma of renqing.”
7. In other words, if guanxi just refers to ties of personal trust, it would not
be necessary to invoke its cultural specificity, because this sentiment is probably uni-
versally present in every culture. It would not be necessary to gloss it by highlighting
the Chinese term. The sociological necessity of networking and moral sentiment
has already been well articulated by social theorists beginning from Durkheim on.
8. See, for example, Hamilton ed. (1996), which epitomizes the efforts
of many transnational projects. Other recent works include Redding (1993) and
empirical studies in Yeung and Olds, eds. (2000).
9. Later works, such as Bosco (1993), reiterate the predominance of guanxi
as a phenomenon.
10. Cited in Walder (1983:61).
11. Her argument in this regard is a significant expansion of an earlier paper
(Yang 1989).
12. It is not my aim to speculate on the nature of this socio-politico-economic
system, except to say that the use of guanxi in a newly emerging institutional
regime is less a deliberate recourse to traditional ethics than a function of shifting
spaces within the system that must be viewed as a synthetic response or attempt
at reconstruction. Essays by Pieke (1995) and Dirlik (1997) offer differing views
on the appropriateness of socialist capitalism, capital socialism or other terms to
characterize the nature of this presumed “fit” between guanxi and capitalism.
13. Douglas Guthrie’s (1998) counterargument that the guanxi phenomenon
has actually declined in the period where others have seen a renaissance is bit mis-
leading. His narrow focus on a privileged strata of modernizing state apparatuses
takes Shanghai as the model, which is hardly representative of general patterns
seen elsewhere.
14. This being the real topic of my essay, all of the above can be considered
a long preamble.
15. The open and public nature of discussing guanxi strategies in newspapers,
which then gave rise to the term guanxixue, is similar to the uninhibited nature of
sex advice columns written by Ann Landers or Dr. Ruth. It is predicated on the
acceptance of what was taboo behavior as now normal, if not morally condoned.
16. In my academic workplace in Taiwan, I am supposed to refer to my
colleagues, especially in a public context, such as an Institute meeting, as tongren
(the Confucian equivalent of comrade).
17. “Crony capitalism” is a paradigmatic case in point. The humane, “altru-
istic” intentions that drive the process of gift reciprocity should not detract from
the fact that it is socially corrupt.
18. It is interesting to note that both Kipnis (1997) and Smart (1993) invoke
Bourdieu, but in different ways. In my opinion, neither of them exploits successfully
the concept of practice to explain how guanxi is a function of changing contextual

strategies and perceptual meanings.
19. The complexity of gift-giving behavior, even as guanxi, is attributable to
the fact one can never be sure of the intentions of the other, yet the significance
of the act depends precisely on claiming to be able to understand its intentions
and meanings. Shifts between altruistic acts of friendship and attempts to gain
instrumental favor are subtle, complicated by the fact that both are manifested by
the same visible sometimes intense acts of gift reciprocity. See Smart (1993) for an
account of gifts, guanxi, and bribes, from a “Bourdieuan” perspective.
20. To demonstrate the complexity of possible permutations, I can cite a per-
sonal experience. On the eve of an operation to remove a spleen from my sister-in-
law, my father-in-law went to the house of the surgeon. Both were professors at the
same university in Taiwan, but they did not know each other personally. In paying a
personal call, my father-in-law exchanged courtesies and gave the surgeon two bottles
of whiskey and a large sum of cash. Neither the gift nor money was considered an
inappropriate thing to give a doctor in this context, as a matter of customary prac-
tice. While the surgeon accepted the gifts, that next morning his wife went to my
father-in-law’s house to return the money, because it was inappropriate in light of
their collegial relation (as tongren). In Japan or Singapore, as in most modern societies,
such gift-giving would be considered improper. In all the above, traditional custom
is not a given fact but must always be viewed vis-à-vis professional and other ethics.
21. At academic conferences, it is common knowledge or accepted etiquette
not to openly criticize colleagues, even if papers are bad, for the same reasons of
saving face and maintaining amicable relations.
22. The ritual revivalism of late Qing Confucianists sparked a popular pro-
liferation of customary etiquette handbooks, many of which prescribed in intricate
detail the nature and precise amount of gifts that had to be given at particular
stages of various domestic rituals. See the case examples presented in Chun (1992).
23. Mauss (1967, xiv) cites a passage from The Havamal, the first few lines
of which read as follows:
I have never found a man so generous and hospitable that he would

not receive a present, nor one so liberal with his money that he would
dislike a reward if he could get one. Friends should rejoice each other’s
hearts with gifts of weapons and raiment, that is clear from one’s own
experience. That friendship lasts longest—if there is a chance of its
being a success—in which friends both give and receive gifts.
24. Despite Duran Bell’s (2000) attempt to transcend a transactionalist

approach to gift exchange, his emphasis on guanxi as a nesting of groups based
on an extensionalist notion of relationship that goes beyond the personal scope of
connection is misguided. First, I fail to see how tribute-for-protection is a general
extension of guanxi relationships in any of the Chinese contexts that I am familiar
with. He also fails to account for the dimension of power that is central to Hwang’s
analysis of face, which the latter sees as culturally motivated.
Chapter 8
1. As Frank Ching (1998) noted, the Hong Kong media tread more cau-
tiously in news pertaining to China, that is, news and information that required the
cooperation of Chinese agencies and China-backed companies. As Michael Curtin
also noted, the boundaries of media openness and closeness was a function of the
fact that the Hong Kong media was not a local entity anymore but one whose
market depended on expansion into China. As he (1998:288) put it, “this strategy
of expansion into the mainland market thus requires the cooperation of government
officials, if the industry is going to reap the benefits of its popularity.”
Chapter 9
1. As Kam Louie (2011:77‒78) put it, “China’s recent economic and politi-
cal rise has produced a concomitant surge in interest in ‘Chinese’ culture. Into
this discursive space, the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has
offered Confucianism to domestic and international audiences hankering to locate
‘China’s uniqueness’ as the key emblem of Chinese culture and paramount symbol
of Chinese civilization. Confucius and Confucianism have become China’s ‘brand’
in a world where national identity is marketed for political spin.”
2. As Jamie Peck (2010:9) phrases it, “neoliberalism, in its various guises,
has always been about the capture and reuse of the state in the interests of shaping
a pro-corporate, freer-trading ‘market order.’ ”
Chapter 10
1. James Clifford’s “Diasporas” (1994) is an attempt to extend the usage of

diaspora beyond its literal status to accent its role in articulating difference, sutur-
ing fractures, and engendering new connections and communities by celebrating its
tacking gestures, border crossings, strategies of negotiation, and counterhegemonic
challenges.
Chapter 11
1. Various Confucian scholars weighed in on the Asian values discourse and

included, perhaps most prominently, Tu Wei-ming (see Tu Wei-ming et al., eds.
1992) and Wm. Theodore deBary (1998).
2. Or as Gupta and Ferguson (1992:19) aptly put it, in the context particu-
larly of a culture industry dominated overwhelmingly by multinational corporate
interests and promoted in the mass media, “the ‘public sphere’ is therefore hardly
‘public’ with respect to control over the representations that are circulated in it.”
Notes to Afterword 261
3. Friedman’s (1992:360‒62) useful attempt to schematize a panorama of

cultural strategies represents an important contribution toward outlining how dif-
ferent local impulses, practices, movements, and strategies are implicated in global
processes that distribute fields of immanent identification in the world arena.
4. See Appadurai (1990), Lash and Urry (1987), Deleuze (1988), and Hardt
and Negri (2000), in particular.
Chapter 12
1. See Chun (2004).

2. See Chun (2006).
3. The most representative work is Clifford (1983).
4. See Dirlik (1994); the essay was reprinted in his book of the same name
(Boulder: Westview, 1997), 52‒83.
5. See Said (1979) (one of many versions).
6. See Sakai (2000) (first given at We Asians: Between Past and Future: A
Millennium Regional Conference).
7. This term was articulated clearest in Said (1989).
8. Chun (1996); see last section in particular.
9. Yuan (1961, 1963, 1964); Li (1967).
10. See Chun (2001).
11. Kao (1951:97).
12. Kao (1951:98).
13. McClintock (1992); Shohat (1992).
Afterword
1. See “Discourses of Identity in the Changing Spaces of Public Culture in

Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Theory Culture & Society 13(1):51‒75 (1996).
There are ramifications here also for the politics of difference.
2. Rather than view nationalism, colonialism, globalization, and capitalism
as specific niche processes, I suggest viewing them as broader institutionalizing,
acculturating, and normalizing regimes, which have ramifications for the nature
of identification. See “On the Geopolitics of Identity,” Anthropological Theory
9(3):331‒49 (2009).
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the impression that education in such a regime puts a high premium on

utilitarian aspects of knowledge acquisition. While one cannot doubt the
purely utilitarian aspects that seem to characterize the institutional back-
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modern Asian education as part of the process of nation building, generally
speaking, and the socializing functions of the latter.7 In this regard, the
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In the context of Taiwan, this disciplinary regime, which is a general
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sanctioned institutional activities, in addition to filial respect for authority,
from family to teachers other forms of political authority.10 The very fact
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all kinds of cultural rules and moral behavior makes it important for one
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Principles Education,” can be read as a process of national identity, or what
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a creation of modern discipline as well as an agent of state hegemonic

control. The middle school in the northern Taiwan city of Hsinchu that I
observed during the academic year of 1991‒92 had been known locally as
a generally high achiever in national school exams, but otherwise it seemed
to be a typical state school of its type, whose students represented a broad
cross-section of city residents. Peiying Middle School was established in
1959. Built on the site of an old primary school with seven classrooms, it
went through minor name changes after its transformation from an all girls’
school to a mixed-gender school and as its administration shifted from the
county to the city government. The number of students expanded from 300,
occupying six classrooms initially, to about 2,640 thirty years later, totaling
fifty-eight classrooms. In 1990, the faculty and administrative staff members
numbered 139. Overall, it was an average-sized urban school.
Peiying is one of ten state schools in Hsinchu, and the principal of
the school there then, Mr. Xu, had served three years there, having been
appointed directly by the provincial Board of Education (jiaoyu ting), where
he served prior to being principal. Despite its appearance on the surface,
the school was anything but an island unto itself. Academic development
and school activities were tightly coordinated at three levels of bureaucracy
from the Ministry of Education (jiaoyu bu) down to provincial Board of
Education (jiaoyu ting) and local Bureaus of Education (jiaoyu ju). Even
education was not the exclusive domain of the school but one of many
various supporting institutions, which included county or municipal cultural
centers (shili wenhua zhongxin), Anti-Communist Youth Corps (jiuguo tuan),
Committee for Cultural Renaissance (wenhua fuxing weiyanhui), and PTA
family associations (jiazhang weiyanhui). The internal administrative struc-
ture of the school mirrored the fact that the school was only one node in
a tightly knit network. To facilitate vertical integration, each administrative
unit in the school answered directly to higher levels of office within the
Education bureaucracy. The provincial level Board of Education was com-
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training division, general administration division, personnel division, finan-
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to the lowest levels. Educational policy at the county or municipal level
was subdivided into five sections: general academic affairs, national educa-
tion, social education, physical education, and academic personnel affairs.
Within this hierarchy, municipal-level bureaus of education coordinated the
activities of a broad spectrum of institutions, such as schools, libraries,
social education agencies, youth corps groups, extracurricular activity com-
mittees, and cultural renaissance movement committees. The head of the
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Zhu Ruiling (1988) Zhongguoren de shehui hudong: Lun mianzi de wenti (Social
Interaction among Chinese: On the Problem of Mianzi), in Zhongguoren
de xinli (The Psychology of the Chinese People), ed. Yang Guoshu, Taipei:
Guiguan.
Index
apolitical man, myth of, 96–98, 128, end of organized capitalism, 8, 58, 69,
130, 135–36 72, 170, 196, 213, 225
Asian values, 12, 164, 190, 210, 212,
217, 260 Fuck Chineseness, ix
bantangfan (half-breed), 122, 264 Gellner’s cultural nationalism, 6–7, 20,

“being in the world,” 219, 225 210, 219, 237
Black Atlantic, 121, 191, 192–95, 205 Geopolitics of Identity, xi, 261
geopragmatics, 242–43
capitalist oligarchy, 2, 142, 175–77, global capitalism, 8, 10, 60, 64, 67,
184, 186 71–72, 138, 175–76, 194–95, 199,
clash of civilizations, 165, 177 217–19, 222
colonial governmentality, 4, 81–84, globalization (cultural), x, 14, 60,
91, 138 70–72, 142, 180, 203–204, 214,
colonial politics of difference, 3, 5, 77, 221, 225, 228–29, 240, 253
79, 129, 179, 180, 261 Great Collusion, The, 2, 10–11, 32,
Confucius Institutes, 182–83 96, 130, 136–38, 142, 174, 178,
cosmopolis, 105, 121, 204–207, 254 184, 187
cosmopolitanism, 10–11, 58, 66, guanxi, 11, 33, 135, 137, 143–62,
71–72, 75, 96–97, 99, 103–17, 175, 185–88, 240, 258–59
119–23, 171, 195, 203, 204–205,
215, 234, 253, 256 heritage making, 20, 22, 35, 42,
Crown Lease, 85, 89–91 182–84, 212
Cultural China, 8, 168, 190–91, 201, huaqiao, 64–65, 198–99, 206–207
203, 248 huaren/huayu, 64, 198–99
cultural renaissance, Taiwan, 23–26, humanitas/anthropos, 222–24, 229,
32–33, 46, 62, 239 235–37
culture as mentalité, 78, 80, 84, 99 hybridity/hybridization, 8, 10, 60–61,
69, 71, 73–74, 96, 104, 106–108,
Discourses of Identity, ix, 98, 214 113, 120–23, 170–71, 191–96,
dual landlord system, 86–87, 91, 94, 200–201, 203–206, 225–26, 240,
255 256
283
284 Index
imagined community, 6–7, 13, 15, “postcolonial aura,” 222, 229, 235
18–22, 35, 56–57, 70, 73, 96, 108, Principle of Livelihood, 21–22, 30,
193, 195, 203, 256 34, 251
imperial archive, 82, 84
indigenization, 35, 52, 58–59, 65, renqing, 11, 144–45, 147–48, 150–58,
68–70, 72, 177, 196, 200–202, 160–61, 257–58
204, 211–12, 214, 240, 252 “routine colonialism,” 78, 84, 98
indirect rule, 10, 76–77, 80, 84, 88, rule of law, 11, 76, 83, 139, 159,
91, 94–95, 98–99, 101, 254 240
invention of tradition, x, 18, 35, 101,
119, 139, 142, 206 self-censorship (media), 130–32, 173,
183
laissez-faire policy, 72, 75, 98, 127, 219 shouxun, 32, 49, 55
shukan/shutai, 224, 227, 237
mianzi, 144–47, 149, 158, 161 Sinophone theory, 8, 11, 190,
multiculturalism, 57–61, 65–71, 206–207
73–74, 107, 120, 171, 192, 194–95, spaces of dispersion, xi, 9, 33
198, 201, 206, 217, 226, 241, 253 Sun Yat-sen Three Principles, 9,
19–22, 26–31, 34, 36–37, 41–42,
“national humiliation,” 180 44, 51–52, 248–50
neoliberal governmentality, 8, 11, 174,
177, 184–88, 215–16, 218–19, transnational disjunctures, 7–8, 57–58,
239–40, 260 60–61, 67, 69, 71–74, 97, 166–68,
New Life Movement, 9, 41, 45 170–72, 175, 192, 204, 214, 218,
225–26
Orientalism, 3–4, 15, 16–19, 78–79, tso (ancestral perpetuity), 87–88
165–66, 207, 216, 222–23, 226,
235, 237, 247–48 “ungrounded empires,” 194–95
utilitarian familism, ethos of, 98, 128
politics of place, xi, 202, 205, 206,
207 zuoren, 32, 51, 156–57

(SUNY Series in Global Modernity) Allen Chun - Forget Chineseness - On The Geopolitics of Cultural Identification-State University of New York Press (2017)

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Forget Chineseness

SUNY series in Global Modernity

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2017 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production, Ryan Morris

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chun, Allen John Uck Lun, 1952– author.

This book is in part a follow-up to a paper published in 1996, titled “Fuck

deliberately chosen to emphasize that the different ways in which Chinese

Finally, why identify? Identity is, strictly speaking, a subjective rela-

Textual regimes, documentary forms, and image repertoires work as

Framing Cultural Discourses Within Situated,

societies or their populations as part of a Greater China or East Asia already

The Contradictory Tensions of Colonialism

The advent of postcolonial theory in cultural studies and humanities in

reference to earlier generations of colonial studies but also to an institution

field cannot be underestimated. Aspects of culture and difference are salient

these historical transformations have in the long run produced a complex

Reading Nationalism as Culturalist Narrative

The transformation of China as a modern nation, its prominence in

community in political ideologies and Gellner’s emphasis on the primacy

Disjunctures of Class and Ethnicity in an

Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) characterization of disjunctures in the global cul-

have in different ways accented the metamorphosis of global capitalism in

Epistemic Moments Within Transformations of Place:

ries of Western imperialist domination. Perhaps unlike the rise of capitalism

to Asian values of cultural community have been promoted as a uniquely

Postwar, Post-Republican Taiwan

Prisons serve as a clear example (of total institutions), providing we

One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.

I argue that the dynamics of ethnicity in the context of Taiwan’s nation-

Chineseness, Literarily Speaking

What is a nationalist ideology? By addressing this question, I seek to show

so engendered established the basis of a nationalizing mind-set rooted inher-

The Objectiﬁcation of Others in the

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism has in past decades sparked

people of China territorially to a common polity.13 Moreover, Chineseness

Post Hoc Discourses on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles

treasures) but also the authority of different kinds of rhetorical statements

culture. Of the continued changes in substance, the most important being

of constitutional government as a means by which popular representation

culture being promoted during this initial phase of Taiwan’s reunification

similar moral supervision and training by participating in occasional study

tradition, especially in its emphasis on filial piety, was actually an attempt

In many cases, works making explicit reference to the Three Principles

scientific blueprint for progressive society, with relevant functional applica-

of reform, many of these institutes became a hotbed for developments in

Political Thought as Cultural Pedagogy and Disciplinary Practice

In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson (1981:30‒31) described the

national celebration and rituals of state as the basis on which to maintain

The reinforcement of everyday etiquette was not just limited to insti-

The Nationalist Ethic

In his analysis of what he called “the paradox of rationalization” in Max

Finally, why identify? Identity is, strictly speaking, a subjective rela-

question the continuing validity of a worldview bound, as though frozen

of counterculture as well, namely the youth culture, intellectual dissidence,

The Moral Cultivation of Citizenship as

The Norm and the Normal, or Education

This is an adaptation of a paper published in 2013, titled “De-Societalizing the School: On

in reproducing the structure of class domination but also the function of