Dear David and all,
This is one of the most fascinating discussions we have held on the forum in a long time -- and i welcome and congratulate members on the breadth and depth of the discussions. This wee contribution is perhaps only indirectly related to the current stooshie regarding Tibet and the Olympics, but i hope it contributes to in the spirit of critical engagement with the issues.
To begin with, i personally have taken to seeing the current 'Chinese' regime as the 'Han Imperial Empire'. I choose this term for several reasons. The first relates to the comments in this debate about the contestability of such a thing as a 'Chinese nation'. Like its great rival America, the size and scope of China naturally produces severe tensions across the breadth of the territory. Just as New York City and Oklahoma can be seen has having little in common, so Shanghai and Being have little in common with Lhasa or Urumqui. What keeps them together seems rather to be the constant articulation of discourses of national identity -- i.e. the Pledge of Allegiance or the ritualistic assertions of the discourses of the People's Republic. This is a critique, not a criticism. But as human geographers we can understand some of the relationships between discourse, identity and place and does it not seem, at least in this sense, that these large nation-states are a triumph of discourse over rationality (viz Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America)?
On my return from Chengdu in the mid-nineties i re-read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and was struck by the similarities between early-Victorian London and the Chengdu i had experienced. The initial impressions were those of the Industrial Revolution -- coal power (with it's concomitant soot, smog and labour-intensive logistics), the movement of surplus agricultural labour to the cities with their 'Satanic Mills' (everyone i met seemed to come from a western province where they had moved off the farm), to the presence of so many Artful Dodgers ("I came here to get rich like you! Would you like to see Schechuan Opera, i can arrange a special showing for you! Only 80 Yuan each...."). How like early Victorian Britain. Over the subsequent years those parallels have become even more apparent to me. The one which stands out the most vividly is the parallel between the senses of manifest destiny in the early British Empire and the current Han Empire. Everyone i met in Chengdu was convinced that their nation was meant to rule the world. Much like Victorian Britons. As only one example of this, i understand that when the American P-3 spy plane was brought down off Hainan Island there were demonstrations in over forty Chinese cities where people demanded that the Americans be punished for infringing on Chinese sovereignty, causing the government to change its initial softly-softly approach to one much more hard line.
This sense of collective purpose was both invigorating for a member of a 'decadent culture', and terrifying. The certainty, the normalization of aggression, the sublimation of the individual (within and outwith the culture) to the collective - and the consequent lack of individual rights -- created what were, to me, very strong parallels between the British Empire and this nascent Han Empire. Further parallels emerged from my engagement with a group of Tibetan nursing students at the university in which i was staying. If anything, their position reminded me of the position of peripheral Scots or, perhaps, Colonials, who, as an act of paternalistic generosity were being 'educated' into modern medicine. There were, by the way, about 25 of them in a medical teaching university of twenty-odd thousand and they were carefully watched by the institution.
Whilst each of these particularities is subject to debate, there are so many more parallels -- for example, the rapid economic growth which was concentrated in a small elite whilst the rest of the population struggled to make ends meet (how ironic that Marx formulated his understanding of capitalism from within one regime, whilst the other espouses the rhetorics of Marxism whilst creating, at least temporarily, a similar situation). Or the parallels between the religious discourses of moral certainty on one hand and the political discourses of moral certainty on the other -- both given their power by a sense of recent emergence from a peasant past and a possible sense of fragile grasp on 'progress' -- Moral certainly that supports the subjugation of 'others' through acts of discursive and physical violence.
i would, in fact, assert that the Han Empire is Modern in the sense that Victorian England was Modern -- technologically, morally and economically. We who have the luxury of living in a post Modern world, one of multiple values and one in which the 'rights' of the individual are, to a greater or lesser degree, hegemonic over the rights of the collectivity -- we must remember that the Han discourses coming to play here are similar to those of the society of our great-great-grand parents. On one hand, who are we to say that they are inferior? If not for one regime we might not enjoy the freedoms we now espouse. On the other, we cannot abide what we now would see as the oppression, physical violence and imperialism that their 'morals' engendered.
As i hope is apparent by my argument, i am not arguing for the superiority or inferiority of either regime. But rather, i am pointing to the difficulties in apportioning either value judgment. And this is not meant to take away from the great strides taken by the society from which my Chinese friends come, nor the progress of the British regime which generated such wealth and the relative freedom which i now enjoy. I came away from 'China' knowing that just as the 19th Century might be seen as the British Century and the 20th Century could be called the American Century, so the 21st Century will be seen as the Chinese Century. And i make this contribution in the hope that debate about the Han Empire, Tibet, and the Olympics remains particular, nuanced, and informed by critical geographic thought.
best regards
rhys
Dr. Rhys Evans
Integrate Consulting
Cruachan,
Blairgowrie
Scotland
www.integrateconsulting.co.uk
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