Below, a fascinating talk from Geremie Barmé (author of the forthcoming Wonders of the World volume on The Forbidden City) delivered at the Australian launch of Gloria Davies' Worrying about China, a book that explores the way perfectionism permeates and ultimately propels Chinese
intellectual thought:
The creation and repeated evocation of rhetorical enemies is
a powerful tactic in the realm of intellectual contestation. It relies on a
language rich in the vocabulary of moral evaluation, a language in which
practitioners employ their ideas to give careful expression to unarticulated
aims. Judgments are offered or passed by means of either positive or pejorative
adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. The ground for critical debates about
social justice, political process, freedom of expression, diversity, openness
and cultural possibility is turned into a treacherous topography marked out by
confusing signs. A lazy dichotomy between left and right is constantly
presented, allowing for entrenched positions with decades-long lineages to find
seemingly new expression and easy advantage. In these distorting clashes among
concerned individuals, issues both of the moment and the monumental rise and
fall in importance. All the while the marketplace of ideas with its media
outlets celebrates those whose rhetorical flights generate sales, even if they
narrow the horizons of how people can think.
I could be glib and point out that this is not some prolix
description of the vista of our own discursive terrain—although the long decade
of Coalition rule and its intellectual legacy share some bleak similarities
with the charged atmosphere of debate nurtured by China’s party-state over the
past 10 or so years.
Rather, I am talking about the intellectual landscape through
which Gloria Davies’s subtle yet magisterial, elegant yet demanding book, Worrying About China: The Language of
Chinese Critical Inquiry allows its readers to travel and learn.
In this new book, and her other work, Gloria is critically
engaged and engaged critically with a close reading of the writings of leading
Chinese thinkers, the men and women who are searching for contemporary meaning
in the context of the struggle for the modern in the Chinese, or Sinophone
world. It is a struggle that dates back to the first Opium War in the 1840s. It
is a struggle that sees thinking men and women who articulate their ideas in
Chinese ensnared in a web of discursive practices that are at times profoundly
familiar to non-Chinese readers, and at times powerfully different from the
conduct of the EuroAmerican intellectual world. To be engaged with thinking
China’s worries is to participate in them, to be enmeshed, to be tantalized,
aggravated, enlightened and repelled. It is, however, a task that Gloria undertakes
in a serious manner that I believe has not been attempted by any other writer
working on contemporary Chinese thought, be they working in Chinese, English,
or Japanese.
The result of Gloria’s painstaking—and I do mean
painstaking—work, Worrying About China,
will elicit unease, stir debate and produce wonderment among all of those who
devote themselves to a close and careful reading of this marvelous text.
This is neither an easy nor a happy account. It is a brave
intervention in the thinking world of China that helps readers understand what
and how Chinese thinkers worry about China. Their worrying is not only about a
nation beset for nearly two centuries with a myriad of problems, social,
cultural, political and economic, but also about the future prospects of a
civilization with its own means of generating value and meaning. More broadly,
these are thinkers who confront the profound issues of China’s humanity and its
place in the human predicament of the rest of the world. Their worrying is
undertaken in a language and within a linguistic context that accentuates those
worries, while creating ‘the worrier’, the writing intelligentsia, as the
fulcrum of both being and change.
Gloria, like me, was trained in the multivalent pursuit that
is known by the term ‘Sinology’. A word frequently derided by those who are
generally ignorant of its complex history and meanings, ‘Sinology’ is itself
based on a Chinese-centric approach to intellectual activity. It is one in
which literature (the whole range of literary expression from prose writing to
drama), history and philosophy intermingle and exchange with each other to make
sense of the world. It is an approach that easily confounds those who vaunt the
disciplinary narrowness of the modern academy. Gloria combines the fundaments
of Sinology—although she kindly invokes my concept of ‘New Sinology’ when
talking about doing so—with a guarded appreciation of the codes and practices
of China’s literary language and the beguiling way its practitioners lure one
towards a holistic worldview. While doing so she is keenly aware of and engaged
with the protocols of contemporary international academic practice. It is this
tension, one that reverberates throughout Gloria’s own intellectual history,
that has created this extraordinary book, a work of profound sympathy and
critical strength.
Gloria’s prose is lucid, and painstakingly balanced. She
writes with intellectual precision, as well as with a measured sympathy for her
notional interlocutors. It is common in theory-friendly renderings of the
Chinese intellectual scene for Western-based academics—be they ethnically
Chinese or not—to allow for a certain lassitude and even indulgence. Too many
writers pursue intellectual agendas of the Western academy in the guise of
thoughtful engagement with the Sinophone thinking world. Gloria pays due heed
to these tendencies, and is ever alert to their pitfalls in her own writing.
Whereas some readers—like myself—might enjoy a stronger whiff of revolutionary
gunpowder emanating from the pages of her book, or less measure and empathy, it
is Gloria’s aim to traverse the intellectual landscape of contemporary China
along with those whose ideas and words evoke that landscape, engaging with them
and allowing us to appreciate their varied travails. This is no easy task,
especially as she appeals to the different constituencies of our own academy
and the imperatives of Chinese intellectual engagement.
Gloria moves with grace,
finesse and a powerful understanding. This is a book that has taken years to
write and it will repay readers who approach it with due seriousness, thought
and time. Each sentence is carefully wrought and the whole demands the
attention of any who would understand the ways that meaning is generated in China today.
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