SUNY series in Global Modernity.Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017. xii, 284 pp. (Table.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6471-8.
Forget Chineseness is a collection of essays about political identity-making processes in Chinese contexts. Chun presents Chineseness as a political discourse that shapes subjectivities domestically and articulates positionality in a global project of modernity. The book contains 12 chapters, preface, introduction, afterword, and short two-page introductory essays to sections on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and a fourth that includes Singapore, populations typically called “overseas Chinese,” and postcolonial scholarship. Eleven chapters were published between 1995 and 2013 but revised for this book. In most, Chun conceptualizes an area of inquiry and positions it as part of a broader theoretical problematic, using textual analysis of secondary scholarship as his method. The exceptions are chapter 2, where Chun draws on field research at a Hsin-chu middle school; chapter 5, where Chun analyzes the contents of Hong Kong City Magazine (Haowai); and chapter 12, where Chun investigates Chinese Ph.Ds in American universities.
In the Preface and Introduction, Chun clarifies his interest in “culturality” or “culturalism” as a politically charged identity-making process rooted in specific places and occurring at the level of the nation-state. He sees Chineseness as a political tool or claim that takes place within a geopolitical realm and is required in the world of nation-states. Colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism inform the political projects of Chineseness Chun investigates. He briefly characterizes his key arguments about Chineseness: Taiwanese Chineseness is grounded in a cultural nationalism articulated in opposition to Japanese colonial history and Chinese socialism. In Hong Kong, British indirect rule plus Hong Kong’s integration with China have formed Chineseness. The transition to capitalism and rise of guanxi as an institutional practice, through which actors gain access to resources in the context of single-party authoritarian rule, shape PRC Chineseness. A strong state, free market, and self-consciously multi-ethnic policies inform Singapore’s articulation of Chineseness.
In his prologue to part one, Chun states that most scholars have misunderstood Taiwanese ethnicity, but does not develop this position. In chapter 1, he argues that the Kuomintang (KMT) regime created an “oriental Orientalism” as it worked to cultivate a new national identity on Taiwan. In various eras, the KMT created a cultural identity for Taiwanese citizens by drawing on a mythologized relationship to ancient Chinese civilization, a redux of Sun Yat-sen’s Three People Principles, and so on. Chun sees the KMT’s re-elections in 1989 and 1992 as evidence of the project’s success. In chapter 2, Chun argues that the Taiwanese school is a disciplinary institution that creates culturally specific moral citizens through the relationships it fosters, its organization of space and time, and its integration with various levels of government. Chun bases this chapter on ethnography from 1991–1992, but writes in the present tense; how much of what he describes is accurate for Taiwanese schools in the twenty-first century is unclear. In chapter 3, Chun contrasts the indigenization of Taiwan (his term for the multi-ethnic policies that began toward the end of Chiang Ching-guo’s reign) with Taiwan’s economic role in transnational capitalism. He argues against the idea that economic openness to transnational capitalism causes political or ethnocultural openness; a point corroborated by the contemporary rise of far-right nativist movements in Europe and the US.
In part two, Chun notes that despite predictions, Hong Kong did not “disappear” in 1997, and suggests that the British colonial government practiced a politics of “disappearing” its colonial domination to facilitate its rule. In chapter 4, he explores British colonial governance as an example of a global political project of modernity, focusing on land rights in the New Territories to make his point that “indirect rule” changed existing sociocultural institutions and practices through the effort to systematize, manage, and render efficient local “tradition.” Chun looks at the Hong Kong City Magazine in chapter 5, exploring the rise of a place-based “cosmopolitan hybrid” identity that he sees as tightly attached to Hong Kong’s mass media and popular culture industry, themselves facilitated by the “free market.” In chapter 6, Chun discusses how identities are political projects related to macro-level geopolitics by looking at relations between Hong Kong and the PRC. While Hong Kong’s economic “embrace” of the PRC continues unabated, Chun’s ideas about Hong Kong’s political or cultural “embrace” seem dated, given recent mass protests about Hong Kong’s relationship to China.
In part three, Chun suggests that the PRC’s government and large-scale entrepreneurs have colluded to create a dominant party-state. In chapter 7, he takes up the “cultural complex” of guanxi (social networks, gift giving, reciprocity), renqing (human feeling, moral reciprocity), and mianzi (face), pointing out that whether a particular practice is understood as renqing or guanxi is a moral judgment. Comparing PRC guanxi with guanxi in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chen argues that shifting institutional contexts in Hong Kong and Taiwan have caused guanxi to lose importance, whereas the post-Mao institutional context has magnified guanxi’s role as a political and economic tool. In chapter 8, Chun explores the notion of “Greater China” as it emerged in scholarship (primarily from the social sciences). He argues that the emergence of Greater China was not just about phenomena in Asia, but the end of the Cold War and transnational transformations of capitalism. Chapter 9 is a meditation on the underlying drivers of the PRC’s politics, culture, and economy. Chun sees the party-state as putting its continued existence as China’s number one priority. Domestically, the government has created a national consciousness based on a narrative of national humiliation and crony capitalism to retain its legitimacy. Internationally, the Confucius Institutes are part of this project.
In part four, Chun contributes essays on diaspora, Singapore, and postcolonialism. In chapter 10, he argues against the idea of a “yellow Pacific” (à la Black Atlantic), finding that many Chinese who have been politically labeled as a diaspora (huaqiao) in fact identify with the nation-state in which they live. In chapter 11, Chun examines Singapore as an example of Foucault’s ideas of disciplinary modernity, identifying three phases of national identity construction. Chapter 12 is an argument against essentializing discourses within postcolonial studies. Rather than presuming that one’s ethnic identity or citizenship necessarily provides one with a “counter” position, Chun argues that institutional regimes give us particular identities, part of the workings of power that constitute a broader project of modernity.
In his afterword, Chun clarifies that he understands culture as governmentality and presents his work as a critical intervention against Asian studies and its ideas about shared culture or civilizational unity, and against anthropology with its goal of seeing “native society from the native’s point of view” (as Malinowski put it in 1922). These polemics are unnecessary in 2018. Contemporary Asian studies is defined by the macroprocesses that Chun highlights as essential to the geopolitics of Chineseness, and most sociocultural anthropologists see culture as suffused with power. Chun’s exploration of cultural identities operates at the level of the nation-state, contextualized within the modern world-system. However, cultural identities are not exhaustively defined by nation-states. They can be experience-near, local, and unconscious, and they can be political projects of formal and informal institutions of global governance, place-based movements, ethnic and religious solidarities, and so on.
Forget Chineseness demonstrates that governmentality is a productive frame for analyzing “culture” in nation-building projects, themselves located in wider geopolitical processes and relationships. Readers who have not previously encountered Chun’s work will find important insights on the political projects of Chineseness over three decades. Readers who are familiar with Chun’s scholarship will benefit from having these texts in a single volume. Forget Chineseness would work well for teaching at the graduate level, and is a useful contribution for scholars of China, cultural studies, critical theory, modernity, and global studies.
Maris Boyd Gillette
University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden