CHINA....AND WESTERN 'LIBERAL ORIENTALISM'.
Warwick Powell argues that when we in the west look at China we do so in a patronising way he calls 'Liberal Orientalism'. In doing so we dismiss the Cultural Revolution as an aberration rather than a crucial break with the past. He contrasts China with India - the so-called 'worlds largest democracy' where the form of Government was inherited from British Colonialism and is chaotic.
This raises the whole idea of governance. If the aim is effective government, India simply doesn't compare to China.
And so is western democracy the ONLY way in which good governance can be achieved? It clearly is not - especially in the days of mass propaganda dominated by wealth and associated corruption. What the festishisation of western democracy does is place 'democracy' above effective government. People are increasingly irritated by the so-called deomocratic process because it frequently fails to address their needs.
'Liberal Orientalism differs from classical Orientalism in tone but not in structure. Where the latter often justified domination through caricature and exoticism, Liberal Orientalism expresses sorrow rather than contempt. It mourns China’s “descent” into authoritarianism, regrets the “loss” of cultural continuity and eulogises a generation of persecuted intellectuals. But this grief is not politically neutral. It expresses a longing for a China that embraced Western liberalism; that is, a China that never came to be, but which remains emotionally central to the liberal imagination....Liberal Orientalist discourse elevates dissident figures - whether writers, artists, or exiled intellectuals - as symbols of the liberal China that might have been. These dissidents are often valorised for their alignment with Western liberal narratives. They are framed as Solzhenitsyn-like figures, exiled prophets warning the world of totalitarianism. But, as critics have observed, this discourse often extracts dissent from its material context. It ignores the class position, historical contingency or even political ambiguity of dissidents. The result is a symbolic economy in which China’s revolutionary history is reduced to a morality tale, and dissent becomes the site of Western identification and fantasy....Liberal Orientalism is seductive because it flatters the liberal Western subject. It transforms China into a space of moral clarity, cultural tragedy and political disappointment. All judged by Western standards. But in doing so, it silences the complexity of Chinese history, the agency of its people, and the dialectics of its revolution.....If the West is serious about understanding China, it must abandon the vanity of Liberal Orientalism and approach China not as a failed Europe, but as a society with its own revolutionary logic, contradictions and historical necessity. The case of India as a foil exemplifies the economy of Liberal Orientalism’s aesthetics......Revolution is a conscious act of negation and reconstitution. On these terms,China’s revolution was a rupture that enabled the rejection of dynastic fatalism, colonial humiliation and semi-feudal structures. The Cultural Revolution, for all its contradictions, attempted to mobilise mass participation to confront bureaucracy, hierarchy and political complacency. India’s postcolonial transition, by contrast, represented a deferral of rupture, substituting elite negotiation for social transformation. Its liberal continuity is a form of negated reckoning, an avoidance of trauma rather than its politicisation.
