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发帖数: 4637 | 1 老将们不敢直面
The west sees China as a ‘threat’, not as a real place, with real people
Yangyang Cheng
The worst abuses of my birth country’s government are used to advance
domestic agendas
Yangyang Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School
Last modified on Tue 5 Oct 2021 09.22 EDT
I was at dinner with a friend, and she asked about my work. “Name one thing
you wish Americans knew about China,” she said.
“That the Chinese people are people,” I replied.
She asked me to elaborate, and I said that the people of China are really
not so different from the people here, that we possess as much humanity as
people anywhere. It was an uncomfortable exchange. My friend is white and
American, and I’m neither. I regretted my response, that my answer to her
well-intentioned question implied an accusation. I had dropped the
unbearable weight of race into a lighthearted conversation. But race is
always on the table and in the air, even when only some of us are
conditioned to see it.
After more than a decade working on the Large Hadron Collider, I left
physics this year for a position researching science policy and Chinese
politics. I thought my time working in the US on a European-based experiment
had taught me well how to navigate a profession while being a “minority”.
I was wrong. As a Chinese woman studying China in the US, I’m constantly
stunned by the blinding whiteness in this field.
I’m not saying that only Chinese people can study China. Lived experience
does not equate to expertise, and diverse backgrounds bring fresh
perspectives. The metrics seen as criteria for “authenticity”, such as
being able to speak Chinese or having spent time in the country, can also be
used to exclude. The Chinese government routinely deploys self-
orientalisation – treating China as if it were radically different from the
west – to justify its policies, discrediting any external criticism as “
imperialism”. The state has also constrained the space for free inquiry
within its borders or by its citizens. Depending on the subject, a foreign
passport can grant access and protection in China, and a foreign land may be
the only safe place for independent research into the country.
The real issue, then, is not about who or where but how, and, more
importantly, why and what for? What kind of knowledge about China does the
west produce? According to a newly published survey by the National
Committee on US-China Relations), there’s a growing demand for work on
China in the US, but the discourse is increasingly dominated by national
security concerns and, as one respondent put it, the field “lacks diversity
in the extreme”. Filtered through the lens of state interests, a country
becomes a “challenge”, a “threat”, an “issue” to be solved. National
borders align with racialised boundaries of one’s imaginative sympathy, and
the Chinese people are morphed into a label, a statistic.
In the prevalent narratives about China, the central government is an
almighty monster embarking on world domination, imbued with ancient
foresight and effortlessly expressing its will through the vast bureaucracy
of government. Public expression in China is either protest or propaganda,
and the people are either helpless victims or mindless foot-soldiers of
state oppression. Politicians and commentators in the US boast of plans to
secure the South China Sea or protect democratic Taiwan with military force.
The potential loss of life on another continent is of little concern when
the real objective is maintaining American power. From Xinjiang to Hong Kong
, the worst abuses of the Chinese government are appropriated to advance
domestic agendas. Many postulate “punishing China” for its human rights
record; few pause to ponder whether the punishments might harm the very
people whose rights they claim to defend.
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At public forums and in private conversations, I’m often asked: What does
China want? How should we deal with them? The choice of pronouns is
revealing, placing me neither here nor there. I never know how to address
these comically broad questions, as if I’m some kind of dragon whisperer.
Those who default to such generalisations do not really want to know China
as a place. They much prefer it as an idea, a geopolitical concept that can
be distilled into soundbites and translated into policy. White men can
rebrand as “China experts” overnight and charge a fortune for their
insights, while a Chinese person is more likely to be heard as a “dissident
” than a scholar. A lone crusader against an oppressive superpower makes
for an appealing narrative. It substantiates the west’s notion of China as
the embodiment of authoritarian evil. It affirms to a western audience their
sense of superiority. Insufficient denunciation of the Chinese regime casts
doubt on one’s scholarship on China, regardless of its area of focus.
My disappointment with the biases of my profession is not a personal
grievance. The heart of the matter is not how much the west understands
China but how much the west understands itself. The rise of China and its
role in global capitalism have challenged the economic dominance of the west
, and shattered the convenient notion that the market necessarily brings
freedom. To create the impression that problems of political oppression or
technological abuse are uniquely Chinese is to refuse knowledge of the
complexity of governance, as well as of humanity. Instead of confronting the
truth about oneself, it’s much easier to collapse everything into a false
binary and project fears on to a faceless other. The west is not the only
party guilty of this logic.
With every passing news cycle carelessly talking up the latest Chinese “
threat”, as my birth country and my adopted home appear locked in “great
power rivalry”, I feel the ground splitting beneath my feet. I sometimes
wonder if this precariousness is the price I must pay for leaving my
homeland. Then I remind myself that generations have persisted in the
margins and contested the artificial divisions that discount their humanity.
If we gather enough of us and reclaim those margins, a new world may be
born where no one is an exile.
Yangyang Cheng is a particle physicist and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale
Law School |
