Surprising only the naïve, the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in mainland China was dismissed in the United States as further proof of the country’s supposed barbarism and inferiority. Though many were quickly humbled as COVID revealed the glaring defects in America’s own political system, others doubled down on their critiques of China, with some going as far to label all of COVID a Chinese bioweapon designed by the dastardly Communist Party, seething in the shadows at the principles of democratic governance.
Amidst all of this, there have been many attempts to correct misinformation and disarm the growing fits of militarism and xenophobia that have exuded from every aspect of American political discourse. Many of these attempts have, in the spirit of real internationalism, challenged us to go beyond simple divisions of ‘us/them’ to focus on the shared struggles that people in both countries go through, as well as the very real failures in the American political and economic system that have been brought to the fore. Crisis can be an opportunity to find novel paths for political solidarity…or stupidity.
Unfortunately, the latter is more common, and COVID has been no exception to that rule. Alongside the people calling for introspection in the United States and international solidarity, there is a rather loud, if small, contingent of people that have in many ways flipped the crudeness of American attacks on China on their head. Given monikers ranging from ‘Dengists’ to ‘tankies’, this group of people often spend many hours on Twitter and Reddit arguing that not only is the US suffering from severe deficiencies at every level, but that in contrast to these deficiencies, China should be seen as a symbol of a better world.
At the heart of this view is ‘radical orientalism’. Professor of Asian American Studies Judy Tzu-Chun Wu uses this term in her work on American political movements during the Vietnam War, Radicals on the Road, to refer to the way that many activists would look to examples of revolution and resistance in East and Southeast Asia to address the problems they diagnosed at home. Mirroring Edward Said’s withering critique of the flatness with which scholars portrayed the Middle East in his landmark book Orientalism, Wu similarly argues that though her actors were motivated by an admirable desire to redefine politics in the US, they similarly erased all complexity in the societies they visited and studied. In other words, all of Asia became a ‘radical Orient’ that they could look to for hope without necessarily understanding.
Today this radical orientalism remains a force, at least in certain weird, make-believe corners of Too-Online™ American leftism, from prominent subreddits like r/Sino and r/communism, to popular Twitter commentators like Carl Zha and The War Nerd. And no country has captured the imagination of this small contingent of outspoken politicos than China.
The way that China is invoked under the radical orientalism playbook is simple. Any critique of the country that emerges from ‘Western’ media is immediately one to be taken with a grain of salt; any words of praise offered from within the country towards policies or government is wholly and uncritically accepted. This goes for everything from discussions of Chinese policy towards Xinjiang to the growing inequality in the country. Critique from within is of course discounted as misguided at best and CIA chicanery at worst. And, of course, failing to defend the country against any sort of criticism means that you are little more than a tool of the imperialists circling the world’s principal revolutionary power.
There is of course much about this attitude that is not objectionable. There is a blatant hypocrisy to powerful American officials condemning a country for actions that they would and have taken. We are seeing unfair lines in the sand being drawn to punish China for not simply accepting American hegemony in the Pacific. And it would be hard to deny that the critiques of the Chinese government have often dipped into the ugly racism and xenophobia that have often colored American attitudes against supposed ‘competitors’.
But lost in the very deserving critique aimed at American commentators are the ways in which radical orientalists fail to really understand the country they are championing. There is no effort made to engage with the many different theorists and thinkers that have examined the ins-and-outs of Chinese political economy today, or interpretations of the historic disjuncture marked by the country’s ‘opening up’ in the late 70s and the decades of liberalization that have followed since. Any academic literature is merely branded ‘revisionist’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Western’ and tossed to the wind.
What is simply accepted, without that same critical eye, is the official narrative propagated by the Party and various outlets under its influence. Where The New York Times is rightfully critiqued as a mouthpiece of one strand of American political power, the radical orientalists proclaim that The Global Times is an objective source. To disagree with this narrative is to be acting in bad faith, they say — if a people’s government has declared something to be true, it must simply be true.
This comes to the crux of the issue: the radical orientalists accept, without question, the status of today’s CCP as a revolutionary party. Any differences between Mao, Deng, and Xi are tossed aside in favor of the belief that a communist party remains communist so long as they maintain even the bare minimum commitment to it. The CCP critiquing neoliberalism in a white paper means, of course, that the country is entirely opposed to neoliberalism, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. The CCP declaring that the transition to socialism is on the horizon means, without a doubt, that such a transition is on its way. The CCP insisting that it is not, in fact, engaged in a project to curb and police its ethnic minority communities, means that yes, all that is happening in Xinjiang is little more than ‘counterterrorism’.
Just like Judy Tzu-Chun Wu ‘s protagonists, the radical orientalists flatten what they see in order to make it somewhat more digestible for their audience. With this sort of analysis, far removed from any ideal of historical materialism, the world takes on a Manichean tone. You have the American imperialists as the progenitors of all suffering, and those that oppose them as the avatars of some noble political alternative. Any sort of evidence that could muddle this worldview is simply cast aside or perverted to fit this dichotomy. Anti-black racism in China becomes a question of ‘outdated culture’ that the Party is working to defeat. Wealth inequality is a minor problem soon to be extinguished, and billionaires in the Party are policed and kept under a short leash. Harsh rhetoric towards minorities is a necessary evil to squash CIA-promoted separatism. The list goes on and on.
This simplified image of a China governed by a party that remains committed to revolution has empowered radical orientalists to argue the PRC seeks to transform the world. In a sense, they agree with the neoconservatives and their fearmongering of a ‘resurgent’ China seeking to destroy American hegemony. The Qiao Collective is perhaps the biggest proponent of this view, adamant that China’s resistance against American imperialism is creating a space for other so-called ‘rogue’ nations to operate without fear of American domination. Discomfort by governments in Southeast Asia — even Vietnam! — is dismissed as American propaganda. Growing unease towards Chinese financial diplomacy, likewise, is meaningless — so long as Chinese financiers remain better than the IMF, they are worth defending.
Ultimately at the heart of this is the simple notion that China was once home to a revolution of world-historic significance, and that since the Party that purportedly led such a revolution remains in power, China itself is unchanged. The country may be richer, more unequal, is home to very different politics, and takes on a very different role in international affairs — but none of these things matter. If China was revolutionary, then it still must be, with its purported hostility to the United States and the American world order being clear evidence of the country’s radical bonafides. Any evidence that Chinese capitalism is not a wholly beneficial force, or that the mere replacement of China for the US at the top of the world’s pecking order may not be as transformational as one might hope, is meaningless in the face of this intransigent belief.
Anti-imperialism does not mean longing for another empire or great power to defeat the dreaded hegemon. It means thinking of something new, beyond the logic of the dominant systems of political and economic organization. Radical orientalists may have good intentions — but their flattening of China ultimately means they refuse to understand it on its own terms, to take the good with the bad. That will never be the foundation of a real political program, simply a pantomime lost in the language of a revolution long since snuffed out.
