What Is “China”?

What Is “China”?
Xin Liu<University of California, Berkeley>

SummaryThis article provides a reflection in the sense of deflecting or diverting the conventional thought on“China” to a different conceptualization, which would, hopefully, help us reorganize the notional field within which
the People’s Republic of China is placed or—rather—misplaced. My argument is that “China” is more than what it
is for itself and/or in itself; it is a symptomatic moment of the present age in globalization. I will start with areflection on the recent studies on “the urban question” in the People’s Republic; then provide a treatment of theincreasing difficulties in continuing the older language of the nationalistic identity-making of collectivity in the ageof transnational capital and digital capitalism; and finally offers an analysis of the Chinese internetwork, read asinter-network or even “enter-network”, which symptomizes the contemporary world in some decisive aspects of its
crucial transformations.

Key words: China, globalization, subjectivity, internetwork

1. The Problem of Method

When sociology returned to the scene of Chinese social sciences in the 1980s, it claimed tohave made an astonishing discovery—with all its delight and seriousness—that there was anunprecedented growth of towns and cities. The consequence of this, quite obviously, is the coming ofan unprecedented explosion of “urban studies”, however such a notion is understood or misunderstood.
Nevertheless, one must be aware of the fact that the attention to the problem of Chinese cities is notnew. Several major studies in the 1970s have already undertaken the path in trying to figure out thesignificance of urbanization in that unique socialist/modern development; and the attempt was madealongside a renewed interest in the cultural meaning of Chinese cities. The discovery would have beensomewhat belittled if one were not too eager to celebrate the recent expansion of sociologicalknowledge, for what defines an intellectual project is not simply its empirical validity but, more
important, its conceptualization. Is there anything new in this new wave of urban studies, sociologicalor not, in today’s China? How far has one moved away from “the urban question” as once raised byManuel Castells (1977)? Is it not an empirical fact that the city life in China, both historically andculturally, makes an interesting subject of study that goes a long way back to the days of Marco Polo
when he traveled in the empire? “‘Quinsai ... is the greatest city which may be found in the world,’
says Marco Polo, ‘where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.’”1
1 Quinsai, which is Hangzhou (or Hangchow), came from the Chinese term Hsing-tsai, meaning “temporary

residence (of the Emperor)”. In his work, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion (1962), Jacques
Gernet made frequent references to the Book of Marco Polo who, staying in Hangzhou for a considerable lengthof time during the years between 1276-1292, reiterated the image that urban life, with its amazing scale andintensity, was a significant feature of Chinese civilization. Gernet’s references to Marco Polo are spreadthroughout the whole book. For example, see pp.28-29 on city administration; p.31 on population and the size of
87

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

Our sociologists today, having indulged in the urban pleasures, have not yet figured out what is new
in a new round of urban studies. Plainly, what is new is not simply the scale of its development; it is

the form, both historically and culturally, by and with which such a fast growth of urbanity produces
and yet is produced. What needs to be done, therefore, is to sort out how such pleasures came toconstitute ourselves as what we are—our being in the contemporary world.
Our inquiry, whether sociological or historical, should not be simply about the various typesof urban transformation actually taking place in a vast social continent, nor with the divergent formsof expressions of the best or the worst extremes of human potentials in the development of large
metropolises, nor with the political effort made by the state to control and manage a growing urban
population; instead, a necessary step must be taken is to make an inquiry into “China” or “urban
China” as a problematic—not simply as an empirical entity but as an object of critique, as an object ofintellectual contemplation, that is, as an object of thought, so as to reflect on the condition of life in thecontemporary world as a whole.
Let us first take a brief detour in reviewing the conceptual development of sociological studies
in China as a point of departure to situate our below analysis, and then take a quick step in revisiting“the urban question” so as to make clear the genealogical tradition of sociological thought from which
our contemplation is derived.
As I argued elsewhere, there was a development of sociological thought in China thatprioritized the significance of village life and essentialized it as the nature of Chinese society (Liu
2002). Such an enterprise of conceptual scheme can be traced through the emergence of sociologicalthought in the early decades of twentieth-century China, especially via the missionary sociology, suchas shown in the works of Arthur Smith, de Groot, and perhaps also Granet. It went through the phaseof social surveys, such as those carried out by John S. Burgess, Sidney D. Gamble, and John L. Buck;and then arrived at, after a few decades, John King Fairbank’s synthesis: “To understand China today,
one basic approach is that of anthropology, which looks at the village and family environment fromwhich modern China has just begun to emerge” (Fairbank 1993, 17; emphasis added). Or, as a native
representative of this mode of sociological knowledge stated earlier: “Chinese society is fundamentallyrural. I say that it is fundamentally rural because its foundation is rural.... We often say that country

people are figuratively as well as literally ‘soiled’ (tuqi). Although this label may seem disrespectful,
the character meaning ‘soil’ (tu) is appropriately used here. Country people cannot do without the soil

because their very livelihood is based upon it”(Fei 1992, 37). Such an opinion would have appeared
astonishing to Marco Polo and many others; however, it does illustrate the association created in a
specific historical context: the essentialization of Chinese society as rural.

If one were to place Fei’s work, with its emblematic title—From the Soil, against the image of

Marco Polo, one would feel compelled to raise the question about why and how such a change in theperception of Chinese society took place, despite of their differences in focus and perspective. What
was the sociological question for Fairbank or Fei? And how was it created in the context of a different
power relationship in the twentieth century? Could what we have witnessed today in China be simply
seen as another round of reincarnation of the spirit of Marco Polo? Or does it mean something
the city; p.39 on transportation; pp.40-41 on luxurious carriages on the streets; pp.41-42 on the quality of thepavement and the drainage system; pp.47-49 on markets; pp.49-51 on amenities of urban life; pp.53-54 on theparties of pleasure on the boats.
88What Is “China”?

different for us—not simply as subjects of the (Chinese) state but as a sign for the state of (subjective)
being in the contemporary world? This is the reason that we need to walk through an old lane ofthought.
“The urban question,” as Manuel Castells (1977) raised and tried to answer, is not simply aquestion about actual social formations and movements in urban settings or across urban/ruralboundaries; rather, it is an inquiry of theoretical specificity of the objective of urban sociology. It is notabout what “urban” sociologists do but about the conceptual enterprise of sociological studies on thesubject. His quotation from Max Weber in the beginning of an essay shows well his intellectual
agenda. “It is not the ‘actual’ interconnections of ‘things’ but the conceptual interconnections ofproblems which define the scope of various sciences” (Weber 1949, 68). It seems necessary for us tomake clear: What are the conceptual interconnections of the problems when we wish to explore thequestion of (urban) China?
Castells’s argument is couched in the Althusserian reading of Marx,2 of which a distinction isdrawn between a theoretical and a real object. This distinction comes from Althusser’s conception of
the “materialist” epistemology in opposition to the empiricist one. Put aside his dubious adoption of
the term “materialist”, the basic claim of Althusser is to deny any validity of the assertion thattheoretical concepts (or objects) are produced as a result of direct abstraction from real experiences.
Regarding Marx, Althusser argues that “the mode of production” does not appear in any immediate
experience; nor does it appear in any form of knowledge claiming to be part of the real object. Marx’s
revolution, according to Althusser,3 is his power to make an epistemological break, that is, to break
down the ideological bridge between knowledge and empirical facts, which are what Althusser called“real objects”. As in the case of most structuralist thinkers, Althusser is not interested in how a person
could have made such an epistemological break. Instead, he is concerned with how Marx’s theory
acts—in the very sense of the word—upon reality.
The real object—in a brutally generalized and simple manner—can be said to refer to some
aspect of reality, which is always wrapped in certain preconceptions that are usually “ideological”.
Althusser makes a rigorous distinction between science (or theory, i.e., Marx’s theory) and ideology,
and maintains that all action, including socialist revolution, is carried out within the province ofideology. This is an interesting intervention, which remains useful for our questioning. According to
Althusser, it is ideology that gives the human subject imaginary, provisional coherence to become apractical social agent. Therefore, ideology is not simply a false consciousness defined in terms that the
subject misrecognizes the world. The misrecognition in question is a self-misrecognition, which is aneffect of the imaginary dimension of human life. Here the introduction of the notion of the imaginary,
which came to be quite popular later on, is important. What is the relationship of the two, and how dothey come together? As Terry Eagleton explains:
Imaginary here means not ‘unreal’ but ‘pertaining to an image’: the allusion is to Jacques
Lacan’s essay ‘The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, in which he argues that thesmall infant, confronted with its own image in a mirror, has a moment of jubilant misrecognition of its
own actual, physically uncoordinated state, imagining its body to be more unified than it really is. In
2 For a critique of Castells’s critique of urban sociology, see Saunders (1986, esp.,162-70).
3 See Althusser and Balibar (1968); Althusser (1972).

89

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

this imaginary condition, no real distinction between subject and object has yet set in; the infant
identifies with its own image, feeling itself at once within and in front of the mirror, so that subject
and object glide ceaselessly in and out of each other in a sealed circuit. In the ideological sphere,
similarly, the human subject transcends its true state of deffuseness or decentrement and finds a
consolingly coherent image of itself reflected back in the ‘mirror’ of a dominant ideological discourse.
Armed with this imaginary self, which for Lacan involves an ‘alienation’ of the subject, it is then able
to act in socially appropriate ways.
Ideology can thus be summarized as ‘a representation of the imaginary relationships ofindividuals to their real conditions of existence’. In ideology, Althusser writes, ‘men do indeed express,
not the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation

and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation ... In ideology, the real relation is inevitably invested in theimaginary relation. (Eagleton 1994, 214, emphasis original)
Plainly, the real object is ideological in the sense that it is always embedded in an imaginary
relationship. An immediate implication of such a theoretical position is that, to begin with, one shouldtake the real object of any kind as an object of epistemological critique. One cannot, or should not,simply dive into the world of urban development without rendering it, in the first place, to a criticalexamination, for all such feelings or observations, which seem empirically grounded and natural tothe observer, are indeed ideological in nature. One must stand back, take a deep breath, seriously
think about what sort of imaginary relationship with which one is embracing the world. What
Castells elaborated in a series of essays, a few decades back in time, meant precisely to develop such a
critique (Castells 1976a and 1976b); and his target is that of urban sociology, to which he asks two

fundamental questions. First, does urban sociology have a real theoretical object? Second, does urbansociology have an urban real object? Let us reverse the order of these two questions and ask: first, isthere an urban phenomenon, exemplified by the real object of China, that indicates a new mode ofsocial existence in today’s world? In other words, when turning our attention to the real object ofChina, are we contemplating on something that is problematic and indicative of the contemporary
experiences of our time? Second, what kind of imaginary relationship do we carry into such studies asthese? In other words, how is it possible to undo an ideological embodiment within which we are given
an imaginary relationship to the world? What is the theoretical object in and for our inquiry?
The purpose of this detour does not mean to review an old debate but to pose the question:
How can we problematize the real object of China as a way of thinking about ourselves/Ourselves in
the contemporary world? What are the interconnected problems of our conceptualization through areal object, which is already ideological in the Althusserian sense? What is the imaginary relationshipwithin which we are implicated as such? How is it possible to develop a critique of the misrecognition
that is a self-misrecognition? It is a meaningless statement to say that urban studies study what ishappening in an urban setting. Or China studies study China. Such claims as these are no more thansaying that all fish should be studied as aquatic animals. Our inquiry must take China as atheoretical object, with which we hope to enrich our understanding of ourselves/Ourselves in thecontemporary world. This is the necessary starting point for our inquiry; it is also the reason forrevisiting an old neighborhood of thoughts and ideas as the departure for a new reflection.

90

What Is “China”?

2. The Question of the “We”

Starting from the mid-1990s, Japan Foundation and the International House of Japan

initiated a fellowship program, targeting primarily Southeast Asian scholars and hoping to build analternative platform for a different kind of intellectual exchange. I joined the program in 1998-99.
Below was originally written for the program’s Ito workshop, and I am still grateful for theopportunity provided for me. It was truly a unique experience, one of the very first such experiences
for myself, of being able to get out of the overarching shadow of Sino-European/American vision of theworld. It was a good place to hear “little voices” or “not-commonly-heard concerns” of those scholars
and activists from such as Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian

countries. It was an other occasion, outside the normal range of one’s usual sojourns, that brought
forward a different view of intellectual questioning.
In our discussions and exchanges, either among the program fellows themselves or between
the fellows and Japanese scholars, the word “we” was often employed in a particularly emphasizedway. More often than otherwise, it was not just used as a pronoun in the convention of the English
language (i.e., “we”); instead, it tended to be employed as a notion (i.e., “We”), in order to mean or
imply a certain socioeconomic or political position, presupposing that such a position was conceptuallyclear and theoretically unproblematic. At the time, as it is now, it was quite often heard such as thatin order to resist some evil aspects of globalization, “We” must act in such and such a way. Or, in orderto protect our environment, “We” have to fight against the selfish interests of transnational
corporations. So on and so forth. There may be different purposes or intentions behind such uses ofthe pronoun; however, for this group of scholars and activists, it is undeniably true that such
employment of the term signified a strong desire for collective action. This desire was most commonly
articulated in relation to the various situations of local struggles against the penetration oftransnational capitalism. Specifically, in the late 1990s, the question of the “We” was often raised
against the background of the Asian economic crisis.
This question of the “We” concerned every fellow of the program; it particularly concerned
those who have actually engaged in the struggles of everyday life in their home countries. Sylvia
Mayuga, Endo Suanda and Suwanna Satha-anand, among others, defended the view that
globalization must also be understood from the perspective of a local people in their everyday
struggles. It is in such a theoretical orientation, which has emphasized the significance of “local
people” and “everyday struggle”, that both the meaning and function of the “We” can be understood.
Some immediate questions may arise. What are the implicit connotations of such an emphasized“We”? In other words, when it is employed as a notion rather than a pronoun, what kind of conceptual
implication is introduced? Or what kind of presupposed meaning do we mean? Do we really
understand what is happening around us? What is happening in the contemporary world within
which we area struggling? What do we mean to say about the condition of life in today’s world by sucha usage? Furthermore, are these conceptual implications still adequate for everyday struggles of ourtime, which are by no means similar to the older kinds of struggles characterized by the revolutionary
sentiment, either nationalist or socialist for example, in the twentieth century?
My tentative answer to these questions is that, more often than otherwise, when such a
notion was employed, the implicit connotation is of an older kind, deriving its theoretical justificationand conceptual energy from the struggles of the past, which are not similar to those of our time, i.e.,
91

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

the time of transnational capital and digital capitalism. In my view, it is practically dangerous as wellas theoretical unproductive to emphasize the “We” without a critique of its inadequate associations
with a set of old problems. That is, in order for the “we” to be emphasized for today’s struggles ineveryday life, its connotation has to be enriched in the first place.
Several layers of its meaning, which are contained in the emphasized “We”, relate in acomplex way to the functions of this phrase in the actual struggles of various social groups. My first
proposition is that a proper understanding of these layers of meaning is indispensable for any serious

attempt in making it function as any part of any political strategies, either for or by the very groupindicated by such an “We”. My second proposition is that, although it is difficult to generalize theactual relationship of the meaning of the emphasized “We” to its function, it is possible to analyze
these layers of meaning with reference to the structure of its internal coherence, which is the productof a long history. Let us start with three most important layers of its meaning. They respectively
mean: “‘We’ must”; “‘We’ are”; and “‘We’ know (what/who) ‘We’ are.”1) In a most common way, the employment of the emphasized “We” is meant to indicate theexistence of a collective group as social entity, which can be defined in a number of ways, such as interms of gender or ethnicity. The assumed intention of such usage is to emphasize the solidarity of asocial group or to reaffirm the awareness of its identity. The presupposed meaning of such anemphasis is calling for action, that is, suggesting the possibilities of collective action by this “We”, i.e.,
as a recognizable or recognized social subject. In other words, such uses of the pronoun mean toreaffirm the possibilities of agency in the collective identity thus announced. That is, such usage
presupposes the justification for social or collective action. Or, more adequate, it calls for action and,
therefore, can be understood as if it were saying “we must” or “we should”.
2) Such usage provides a good example of what may be called “dividing practice”. It creates a“non-We” as its opposite. It excludes by means of including and, therefore, creates boundaries which
may or may not be necessary. It is necessary when the boundaries are useful in demarcating a battle
line for social struggles; it is harmful when these boundaries, after having been invented, are taken as
fixed or unchangeable. When it is necessary to assert oneself as a collective identity, it is also
important to remember that these identities are situational, i.e., dependent upon the occasions
whereby such identities are called upon for action. In other words, it is the cultural difference or thepolitical need that calls for the usage but not the other way around. There is no such collective identity
as given nor should it be taken for granted. This is to say that the emphasized “We” may, as it often is
in its daily usage, presuppose that we are what we are as pre-given. In fact, identities are made rather
than given.
3) Epistemologically, such a usage further indicates that the subject is conscious of who it is

and what needs to be done: “‘We’ know (what/who) ‘We’ are.” It is We, rather than You or They, thatknows its condition of existence; it is We, rather than You or They, that is conscious of our own subject
position from which our identity is proclaimed. This consciousness is self-consciousness, which camefrom the real historical struggle that entails a particular conception of history and society. In otherwords, this self-consciousness is the child of a particular mode of subjectivity, i.e., “consciousness of
consciousness”, which is historically valid. What kind of assumptions are beneath it, and how theseassumptions are themselves historically limited to their own social conditions are questions that need
to be raised.
92

What Is “China”?

If one wishes to continue to employ such a usage, one must raise the question of the extent towhich it is still adequate for today’s cultural or political struggles. My contention is that thecontemporary world, i.e., the one that we are now inhabiting, is no longer the one that had made thisusage historically valid. What needs to be done is to provide a critical re-examination of its
connotation in order to talk about new forms of subjectivities and collectivities characteristic of thecontemporary conditions in our time, i.e., the time of transnational capital and digital capitalism.

1) On the question of action
In its most popular form, the use of the emphasized We means to call for collective action. For
example, as one often hears, we have to protect our environment; we have to protect our own culture;
we have to protect our own national industries; etc. This way of using the pronoun presupposes thesolidarity of a social group, through which collective action is always seen as potentially possible. Sucha social group taken as a collective agent is most commonly conceived in terms of local communities orcultures, just as what we have usually seen in daily conversations or scholarly communications.
However, a difficulty may arise if following such an assumption in today’s situation. Due to thetechnological innovation of late capitalism, particularly in the sphere of telecommunication andinformational technology, the conventional definition of local community or culture, which had been
defined largely on the basis of real geography, began to lose its significance as a natural grounding forcollective representation or action. Plainly, in today’s context, it has become increasingly difficult torest collective representation on real geography. Things are more and more translocal ortranscommunal or transcultural. This experience is evident in at least two senses. First, in theactual sense, people move around and transgress communal or cultural boundaries that used todefine their identities. Traveling and migration have become a common experience for many people
whose identities used to be clearly local or communal. Second, in the symbolic sense, electronic media,
such as television or internet, has invaded every bedroom of local people in such a way that there is nolonger a secured sense of our culture or even ourselves. It creates further difficulty in announcing theemphasized We even if we remain in the same local community, because people are no longer unitedby the “We” defined and enforced by the face-to-face communication that used to be essential to thecommunal life.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that collectivity itself cannot be defined in any specific way;
instead, it means that there is an increasing difficulty in defining it in general forms conceived interms of those theoretical concepts such as locality, community, or culture. All these notions are
essentially based on real geography, which has become less a natural starting point for understanding
our contemporary experience. Local struggles continue to go on, and people continue to fight against
the various kinds of exploitation, real or imagined. What has been transformed is not the content ofcollective action but its form. The form of collectivity is the way in which collective action is shaped,
rather than the actual manifestation of collective activities or struggles. Therefore, the question is: In
what way can one continue to employ the emphasized “We”, if not in its old fashion, to refer to thetranscultural experiences so typical of our time?
2) On the question of identity
The emphasized “We” presupposes “You” or “They” as subjects being demarcated by clear-cut
93

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

cultural or communal boundaries. To emphasize it often means to claim for oneself a coherent
collective identity. Embedded in the very notion of identity, there is inevitably a conception ofdifference. In fact, the notion of difference may be a better place for us to understand what is meant by
the emphasized We. However, we often start from a wrong direction: we tend to take who we are as agiven cultural fact. For example, as we may hear, “We Chinese” are proud of our own cultural
traditions. Yes, we are proud of our own traditions, but we will never say this to simply pleaseourselves; instead, whenever we want to say this, it is usually because we find an occasion, facing an
addressee, that creates the need for us to say this, that is, to defend ourselves in the face of our
traditions. In other words, the need for uttering the emphasized We is always rooted in a situation of
making a difference, either cultural or political. A question that needs to be asked here, however, is
how the globalizing process has affected our identity making practices.
Let us take an example. As part of the fellowship program of the 1998-99 group, we attended
a conference on migration in the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. It was a productive
conference that focused on groups or individuals traveling cross various kinds of local or regional or
national boundaries. The central theme of the conference was about the translocal experience inSoutheast Asia. As it is shown, when people traveled from their own local communities to other places,
searching for new opportunities in life, they had to deal with the differences between the world they
were familiar with and the world they newly encountered. A translocal world of culture is one inwhich one’s neighbors eat different types of food, wear different types of clothes, speak different
languages, etc. It is needless to say that these cultural differences are always engraved or prescribedwith social power. As the scholars at the Osaka conference have shown, at the turn of a century, thismode of everyday life has become a dominant form of cultural experience for many people inSoutheast Asia. One of the most significant implications is that, in such a world of everyday life as this,the meaning of identity has shifted from its conventional sense of identifying oneself with one’s own
tradition to one of constantly differentiating oneself from others. In other words, in a translocal worldof everyday experience, the meaning of identity can only be understood as a means for struggling for
one’s place in the hierarchy of difference.
A further question, in relation to what we have just said, concerns the plurality of the “We”.
Diana Wong, a known sociologist from Malaysia, has explicitly raised the question of the meaning ofdifference in plural society. What is a plural society? How can we conceive it? What is the difference
between plural and democratic society? How can we think about democratic practice in plural society?
These questions go beyond the scope of my discussion here. Simply, I think that part of the answer toher question lies in a reconceptualization of the “We” in a new sense of plurality. The conventional
plurality of the “We” means that it consists of a bundle of individuals, that is, many individual “I”.
That is, the We is plural in the sense that it consists of many individual persons. However, the idea ofplural society or plural We, in our attempt of a new formulation, which should convey the sense ofplurality at another level, indicates the reality of constant formation and reformation of “trans-We”
within a given historical context. The basis of a plural society is no longer the “I” but the “We”, alreadya cultural unit, though it is constantly in formation and reformation through transcultural practices.
The essence of the question concerns how to conceptualize the plural of the plural.

94

What Is “China”?

3) On the question of subjectivity
Finally, the employment of the emphasized We presupposes a conventional humanistic
conception of history and society. This is not to deny that such a conception was indeed useful ornecessary for the successful organization of social or political struggles in the past. And it may
continue to be necessary or useful for our current or future struggles. However, it does have its own
limitations because it is based on a conventional set of assumed relations of Man to History andNature. If we look around today, obtaining a contemporary view of the technological development of
our world where technology has changed the way in which we relate ourselves to the world, we should
become cautious of such a presupposition. In other words, one should realize that this particularly
humanistic way of seeing things is itself a historical phenomenon. That is, one should be aware of thehistorical conditions under which such a conventional humanistic conception of history and society
emerged. Human subjectivity is made in history. That is, the very possibility of uttering the We insuch a way is a product of a violent history. To understand history does not only mean to understand it
from this particular humanistic perspective; it also means to understand how human subjectivities
are historically produced. Therefore, for the present moment, in order to be able to utter the We more
effectively, one must try to understand the formation of new subjectivities effected by the globalizing
process transforming local or communal life in a particular historical way. This on-goingtransformation has changed the relations of ourselves to the world which in turn produces new formsof collectivity, sociality, and subjectivity. To understand these new forms correctly is a precondition for
the employment of the emphasized We. My contention is that, without being able to realize theobjective character of the globalizing process as a historical fact, it is quite impossible to utter anemphasized “We” effectively for the struggles of our time.

3. A Chinese Symptom of the WorldAt the present moment, in trying to capture our own experiences in a shifting world of

economy and society, the idea of “society” or “the social” in general, which has been central to ouranalysis, may need some critical reexamination. From Capital to The Order of Things, that is, from“the mode of production” to “the archaeology of knowledge”;4 or from A Natural Science of Society to

The Interpretation of Cultures, that is, from the Radcliffe-Brownian understanding of “social
structure” to Clifford Geertz’s idea of “deep fight” or “thick description”;5 there seem to have existed

diehard assumptions about the social world conceived as a depth, a deep structure, hidden andbeyond our daily experience and vision. In different traditions of sociocultural analysis, there is often
this assumption about the social world as organized according to a structural depth. This depth isoften defined as a hierarchical arrangement of institutions and organizations, economic and/or
political, within which people are united and divided, in conjuncture with a matrix of norms andvalues supported by and supporting these institutions and organizations. And this complexity of thesocial world is not directly accessible by the everyday experience. The social world thus conceived

seems to consist of a depth in both epistemological and ontological terms. Therefore one would often
conceive of whatever on the surface of the social world as the appearance of a deep structural cleavage
4 See Marx (1967); Foucault (1970).

5 See Radcliffe-Brown (1957); Geertz (1973).

95

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

or an archaeological movement.
The surface of society, like that of the sea, may, the anthropologist admits, be in perpetualmotion, but its depths, like the depths of the ocean, remain almost unmoved. (Odgen and Richards
1969, 25)
The metaphor, which to a large extent still occupies the habitat of our intellectual tradition, is“deep ocean”: to understand the social world is to dive into it, in order to discover the rules and norms,
rather stable and constant, of an underlying universe. “I remember a night near Bahia, when I wasenveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone
again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow,
darkness prevails” (Braudel 1980, 10-11). Here is another powerful metaphor for the social world as
the prevailing darkness. Are these metaphors adequate for us to think about what is emerging intoday’s world? As I shall argue, both the prevailing darkness and the unmoved ocean, as metaphors,
are the counter-images of our time—the time of transnational capital and digital capitalism whichhave created an economy of surface. What was implied by the depths of the ocean or the darkness ofthe night is that something, which cannot be directly experienced, must lie beneath the senses of ourempirical faculties. According to this mode of thinking, what is moving fast, that is, traveling on thesurface of the social world, such as jumping waves or glowing fireflies, should be considered superficial
and meaningless.
There is a danger in the employment of such metaphors today, because they would make us
miss some crucial aspects of change in the contemporary world, introduced and supported by a newtechnological development especially in the field of mass communication. There is no doubt that one’s
intellectual curiosity should not stop short of deep reflections on our world; that is, intellectuals should
not all become short waves or fireflies; however, what is also important to note is the emergence of a
new mode of social existence, that is, to be or to dwell on the surface of either a social or a discursive
world. This new way of surviving on the surface of a world, which is characteristic of our experiencesof everyday life at the present moment in history, may be called—properly or not—the phenomenon of

surface.

This phenomenon, placed in contrast to the image of unmoved ocean or prevailing darkness,registers a moment of difference in a long historical transformation: What is happening around us haschanged our relations to others; it has affected the way in which we are able to relate ourselves toothers; it has altered our relationships to the past and the future; it has modified our senses of reality;
in short, it has made an impact on our being in the world. Even from today’s prospect, whereas
tomorrow is not yet clear enough to our vision, it is quite certain that, in terms of making senses toourselves and others, there is a new possibility for a different economy of discourses or a different

discursive formation. That is, there came the economy of surface. The typical experience of thiseconomy is that of surfing on the internet. This is indeed part of the real economy inoperation—corporate and transnational in investment and capital accumulation—supporting and yet
is supported by the existing world market into which the People’s Republic of China is drawn.
The habitat of this economy is “there and now”, rather than “here and now” or “there andthen”. In this economy, “there” or “out there” understood in real spatial or physical terms, just as whatanthropologists used to say about other people or cultures when they set off to do field research in
far-away places, is always constituted in a moment of now-ness for oneself being in time. That is, the96What Is “China”?

constitution of the now moment of oneself is inevitably connected to other such now-ness in otherplaces, which can be reached and are always available on line. The other is always there for oneself
due to the slippery surface produced by the mass communicational means, which allows the constantcontact with others by ourselves in the moment of now. From such a perspective, one can see that theidea of area studies has become very problematic, because the physical distance, which was essential
to the definition of regional geographies, is virtually reduced to the moment of now, to be part of a new
economy based on “now” and “there”.

For those who could read in what used to be called ideographic (now more often logographic)
writing, and specially those who were reading or, perhaps more accurate in the point of speaking,surfing, in the internet space of a new continent of signification and significance, recently discoveredby a huge number of Columbus in the People’s Republic of China, a kind of sensation, which certainly
elevated some to a climax of ecstasy, was learning to play the role of a jury in the court of public
conscience: to debate, to argue, to criticize, to defend, to attack, to curse, to make fun of, to humiliate,
to laugh at, or to tear others apart in words, regarding a case of plagiarism caught in the work of aneminent young scholar of social science, of Peking University, a most esteemed institution of higher
education which is well-known for its inspiration for freedom and intellectual democracy in the
country.
The case, however, was not too complicated.6 A scholar, who originally came from anotherpart of the country and got trained abroad, went back to Peking University to take up a position in
the mid 1990s, and soon built up a good reputation for himself as a leading figure in the newly
cultivated field of anthropology, which had been regarded as a bourgeois discipline anddismissed—together with a number of other social science disciplines—during the radical years of the
Maoist revolution (1950s-70s). This scholar, in the larger context of a national effort of re-building themetropolis of social sciences in a late socialist landscape, made a significant contribution to the imageof anthropology as a possible new site for a disciplinary (re)construction. Anthropology, as this foreign
and peculiar word might have suggested and inspired for the popular mind, had hardly been known
except within a small circle of professors and students in the 1980s. That the general public began toopen their eyes to the ideas of anthropology, according to some serious scholars in the field, waslargely due to the strenuous effort that this young and dynamic scholar has made in popularizing theanthropological knowledge. Prodigiously productive and intensively hard-working, he published alarge number of books and articles in a relative short period of time, that is, within the span of several
years. It is within an environment of reform where things were running fast in both a physical and ametaphysical sense that his energetic publications, though not without criticism and challenge, madea visible mark on the scene of social sciences and brought him to the forefront of both academic andpopular attention. The incident occurred when this promising young scholar was at a considerable
height of his achievement. A graduate student from another field wrote an open letter or, rather, a
6 I am treating this case as an ethnographic experience, that is, as ethnographic materials obtained by myparticipant observation, either in the form of conversing with people involved or in the form of reading the debate
on the internet. My purpose, as one will see in the following paragraphs, is to show how the internet constitutes
an emerging arena for a different kind of discursive practice, that is, to focus on its possibility and emergence,
rather than dealing with the plagiarism itself. The objective is to write about this animated feeling, innovated byand innovating as a special kind of everyday experience of internetwork, rather than to make a judgement about
the plagiarist case.
97

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

short article, to a major social science journal, charging then well-known young professor’s new workof plagiarizing his own translation of a text book, some years ago, written by an American
anthropologist.7 The young scholar in question made a public apology later for his misconduct,
though prior to the apology had there been a heated debate about what was academic honesty andintellectual value that must be defended, drawing ardent participants from all lanes and corners of afast-moving society.
In the turn of a new century, or on the threshold of the past and the future, such cases as thiswere called “academic corruption”, that is, xueshu fubai in mandarin, which produced a culturalconnotation specific to the recent memory of the People’s Republic, where the idea of corruption hadoriginally meant the wrong doings of government officials. Gradually, it seems that the word
“corruption” has obtained a greater connotation in its application, chiefly, via a redefinition of it by the

public in such a way as to include everything considered immoral or unethical, broadly speaking.

Academic corruption basically meant two things: 1) producing false degrees and identifications; and 2)
plagiarizing. The cultural history of this development in the meaning of a word, which could havebecome a good place for looking into the underlying trajectory of a new mode of sense associations inlanguage, is not our task here; instead, what is interesting is to note how this particular case wasdebated on the net, allowing a new platform for a different kind of discursive possibility. One would
have been struck, if involved in the debate, by the ephemeral power, penetrating and absorbing at

once, of the virtual space, perhaps unparalleled by any other forms of social struggles in the real sense.
When this case was just about to receive a greater attention from popular media, which is in aconstant search for all possible sensations to feed the hungry masses as consumers these days, somesincere scholars, out of their conscience, spoke out, with good intentions, issuing their warning about
making the case a public affair, which might be wrongly or improperly judged by the popularaudience. For this was a serious academic matter and it should be dealt with within the walls of theacademe. The consideration is that the public may not be able to judge the situation in an adequate
way, given the fact that they lack basic knowledge on the subject matter. There was a great deal of
sympathy for the young scholar under criticism, because, as some argued, this was probably the mostproductive advocate of this new field and; if he got burned by any unfair media fire, it could bedamaging the construction of a new building for the social sciences as whole. Indeed these were goodintentions and kind warnings, however, nothing stopped the case from becoming a national fever in
the already heated debates about academic corruption over all the possible means of popular media,
such as newspapers and television. Among all the means of debates and communications, the mostferocious was internet, that immediately created several public forums where the jury of public
conscience, self appointed, was formed. The idea that such serious matters as this must be discussed
among specialists in a more refined setting of intelligence was challenged by those who, ignoring thewarning, opened an internet page for discussion, arguing that this was a matter of basic morality or
ethics instead about academic knowledge. The internet did not make people change their attitudes,
but it provided a new platform for refuting the scholarly opinion in the hope of confining the debate
within the academic circle. The internet made it a public affair without the consent of academic
7 The charge was that one third of his book was directly copied from the English work, which he had translated

into the Chinese language some years earlier.

98

What Is “China”?

authorities. The judges for this case required no special training in any discipline. The battle waseasily won by the public on the net, where the argument for the confinement of the case to the walls ofan academic circle was ridiculed in a number of ways on virtual space. It quickly became a scandalous
sensation, a public affair of seduction and betrayal, the very kind that ordinary people have always
enjoyed, just as some said, half jokingly, that this could well be the most exciting moment of public
entertainment after the President of the United States (Clinton) was caught in his oval officeengaging in some peculiar form of reproductive activity.
When a number of web-pages were opened up for such discussions, no longer did anyone
wonder whether this matter should be left alone to the university professors; and the hesitation aboutsaying something about it evaporated. It became a spectacle in the strict sense of the term, that is, tobe observed by millions of people who had little interest in the subject matter of anthropology. The
affair itself was lifted to the height of a new level, say, to become almost a contentious criminal case tobe publicized on the net. A crowd was gathered, in different hours of the day and in different locationsof the world, communicating across regional and national boundaries and chatting with each otherfrom several time zones; and they were united only by the capability of reading the logographic
writing, as if this were a show, a kind of show that was both played and watched by the samecommunity of people—being both its performers and audience at once. As Roland Barthes would have
said, spectacle is a physical thing that ties together both the performers and the audience. This isprecisely what we have seen in this affair: the performers are themselves also the audience, watching
the effects of their participation in the debates by switching on and off their computers, both there orhere and then or now.

The point is that there is a change in the way in which we are being with others. Even in asocial space still relentlessly censored and minutely controlled by the State authorities in many
respects, quite effective in some areas and less in others, there emerged a different dynamic forinteraction and exchange, largely due to the introduction of a cyber universe that has been operating
according to a certain rule contradicting our understanding of social formation in its conventional
sense. It was not about the contents of arguments or the opinions of differences, produced or
consumed by this or that particular social group; it is about the form of public life in change. This caseof so-called academic corruption, from the very beginning of its being exposed, was destined to becomea public affair—that is, no matter what measurements were taken to prevent such a case to be
exposed, by the official order or not, it would have been very unlikely to be otherwise than what it did
appear, that is, to be judged by a self-appointed jury of public justice. There was no alternative, nosuch a possibility of confining it to a small circle of concerned scholars despite of all the kind warnings
and benign considerations. A virtual community were like a rural community in the sense where
rumors and gossip would travel faster than anything else. Whenever there was a noise on the street
in a village, as some ethnographers could recall the experience, an excited crowd would have beengathered, leaving behind each window several anxious faces struggling to figure out what was goingon in their neighborhood. Whatever actually happened might not be very important to oneself, though
one must have his or her share in knowing it and/or having an opinion. The feeling of getting out of
one’s own door, jumping into the gathered crowd in a village square, would feel quite similar to what
was happening on the internet space of virtual debates. There is perhaps little difference in the actual
movements between the stern neighbors who jumped into their sleepers, grabbing their shirts in
99

第１部

方法論のパラダイム転換

hands, and hurried out of their homes to watch how a village fight broke out; and those who, with thesame impatience and eagerness, just after returning from work or having a coffee break in the office,trembled on the key board of a Dell or a Sony or a Mac computer, searching for the pages that
displayed all the comments, short or long, insulting or defending, proving or disagreeing, on the
intriguing case of academic corruption. In terms of how individuals were attracted by the noise, andhow he or she was allured by the temptation of knowing everything that was happening, there wasindeed no difference between peasants and internet surfers; nevertheless, the difference, a decisive
one, is that the village crowd consists of a group that shares a common cultural identity, a familiarsocial context, and a known collective history of sentiment and passion; whereas, the crowd in thevirtual space is made up by a group whose relationship to each other is simply generated by theshared interest of a commonality, apart from which there is almost no other common bounds among
the people of this virtual community. This is why I have invoked the images of a jury and a court,
where a loosely related bunch of individuals came in to judge, according to their rationality andcommon sense, on the criminal case of academic affairs. There is a connectivity rather thancollectivity of the Durkheimian sense among them; and the court room is the home of theircommonality.
The internet acted as an arena for a particular form of connectivity; the jury, volunteered,
was constituted as a plural subject, whose face was never clearly shown, because one could simply
write to the web pages without leaving his or her full name or any other social trace; the space within
which such a social force was operating was also plural—in the sense that it was not a place thatbarred access from certain directions or from certain layers of the social hierarchy. Of course, noteverything written was worthwhile reading; in fact, a large number of comments on the case werelight-hearted jokes; however, the point is that the creation of such a public space, via the newtechnology of information, allowed a different discursive formation, in which the argument for a rigid
conceptual division of labor between public/media/popular interests and private/textual/academic
discourses has become difficult—if not entirely impossible.
Is it not the case that this spectacle, of internetwork in virtual space, poses some serious
questions about our relationships with ourselves and others, questions about our mode of self andbelonging, questions about our very being in the world? What needs to be explained is not the generalmechanism of electronic (re)production of information and image, about which books and manuscripts
have been piling up on the shelves of our libraries; instead, what must be understood is this reifying

process of internetworking, historically specific and specifically historical, in transforming our
relationship to the world, within which we are struggling. We need to take a step into a particular
history of the present and examine this unique technological development in the vast ruins of asocialist revolution, in order to draw a possible sketch of ourselves/Ourselves on the canvas of thecontemporary world.

Concluding Remarks

I wish to make three points as concluding remarks. First, the (neo)positivist reincarnation,

which was given birth by a vast expansion of the global system of production and consumption, needs
to be critiqued. What is called “China”, as I have shown in the reemergence of sociological studies, is agood entry for such a needed reflection, not only due to its enormous importance for us today but also100

What Is “China”?

due to the uniqueness of its coming of age in modern development. Second, the identity of self, either“Chinese” or “Japanese”, may need to be re-thought so as to reflect, adequately and sensitively, on therevolutionary struggles of our time. Nationalism has been on sale from the 19th century; and thequestion is how one could engage with an old language embedded with new meanings. As I havesuggested, how we could announce ourselves as a collective “We” has become a serious problem forthose in or outside the People’s Republic, due to both historical and global reasons. Our intellectual

task is, or should be, part of this effort in redefining who we are, rather than simply producing

mimicries of an older kind. Third, the problem of corruption is a global one; it is one about the age ofthe copy or, if one wishes to put it in the words of Jean Baudrillard, the age of simulacra. It is not a

problem specific to the People’s Republic; it is a problem concerning the nature of global
transformation, in both its material and moral senses, in which “China” has become its symptomatic

symptom today.

Works Cited:
Althusser, L. 1972. For Marx. London: New Left Books.
Althusser, L. and E. Balibar. 1968. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.
Baudrllard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Castells, M. 1976a. Is There an Urban Sociology. In Urban Sociology: Critical Essays, ed., C. G. Pickvance, 33-59.
London: Tavistock.
Castells, M. 1976b. Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology. In Urban Sociology: Critical Essays, ed., C. G.
Pickvance, 60-84. London: Tavistock.
Castells, M. 1977. The Urban Question: a Marxist Approach. Trans. A. Sheridan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Davis, D. S., R. Kraus, B. Naughton, and E. J. Perry, eds. 1995. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: thePotential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Eagleton, T. 1994. Ideology and Its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism. In Mapping Ideology, ed. S. Zizek, 179-226.
London and New York: Verso.
Fairbank, J. K. 1993. China: A New History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Fei, X-T. From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society. Trans. G. G. Hamilton and Z. Wang. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Social Sciences. London: Tavistock.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gernet, J. 1962. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276. London: Allen & Unwin.
Liu, X. 2002. Urban Anthropology and the ‘Uban Question’ in China. Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 22(2): 109-132.
Marx, K. 1967. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols. New York: International Publisher (Originallypublished in German in 1867885, 1894).
Odgen, C. K. and I. A. Richards. 1969. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language uponThought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1957. A Natural Science of Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Saunders, P. 1986. Social Theory and The Urban Question, 2nd ed. New York: Holmes & Meier.

101