Chinese Image in the
Western Academia:
Chinaphobia and
Neo-orientalism in Chinese Studies in the US After the Cold War Era
Tugrul Keskin
Professor and Director of Center for Global Governance
Shanghai University
ABSTRACT: Edward Said’s theory of
Orientalism sparked the rise of a more critical understanding and discussion
within the social sciences and humanities on how Orientalist scholarship has
produced a false image rather than providing any academic objectivity in the fields
of history, anthropology and political science. However, the old colonial
mapping and containment of culture embedded within Middle East Studies has not
been critically evaluated and updated to address modern realities in the years after
Said’s work on Orientalism, not just in Middle East Studies, but also as it
applies to African, Asian and Latin America Studies. This is due to the large
scholarly industry of area studies, which has grown and benefitted from the plethora
of state institutions that support and provide grants for academic careerism. According
to Wallerstein, post-war
language training was “the major justification for post-war U.S. government
financing of area studies” Probably
one of the best examples of this trend has been demonstrated within and through
Turkish and Ottoman Studies in the US. On the other hand, area studies itself
has an embedded colonial structure. However, over the last fifty years the
colonial approach has started to change, influenced by facets of neoliberal
globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of modern
China in the late 1980s. Instead of disappearing however, the old colonial
model has been replaced with a new approach based on the neoliberal model of
neo-orientalism and public scholarship. As a result, in the 1990s we started to
see a more aggressive and hegemonic form of scholarship that uses a neoliberal
understanding of human rights, academic freedom, religious freedom, democracy,
and press freedom as tools in service to the neo-orientalist perspective. In
the 1990s, modern China was emerging, while basic political concepts were
reconfigured in Washington DC. These new economic and political realities have led
to many important implications on academia, specifically for Chinese Studies in
the US. In this article, I argue that the Neo-Orientalism perspective embedded
in Western academia and also within the media and think-tanks, is a
continuation of the cold war policy model.
