‘The China Question’ by Ho-fung Hung review

In a brief essay from 1976, written in the final year of the Cultural Revolution, the American scholar Frederic Wakeman Jr. pronounced that ‘once again, it would seem, China has become a kind of mirror for the West’. Wakeman’s observation – made two years before Edward Said’s Orientalism was published – recognised a striking resonance between contemporary Western portrayals, both positive and negative, of Mao’s revolution and 18th-century European writings about China. Just as Louis XV’s minister Henri Bertin had urged his monarch to ‘inoculate the French with the public spirit of the Chinese’ to face local challenges, so too did 20th-century Marxists such as Louis Althusser see Maoism as a model for European communists. By Wakeman’s account Westerners had, for at least two centuries, viewed China as a mirror reflecting their own fantasies and fears, rather than understanding it on its own terms. In The China Question Ho-fung Hung extends this genealogy back to the mid-13th century.

The China Question argues that the Mongols’ brutal westward expansion led European churchmen to characterise the invaders as inhuman monsters, embodying all that was evil in the world. Yet, as Mongol campaigns shifted attention to the Muslim world in the later 13th century, Europeans started fantasising about converting their former foes and forging a united Christian alliance spanning the Eurasian landmass. Since then, European attitudes to the Chinese and Mongols have swung like a pendulum from demonising fear to idealising fantasy. Whether Sinophilic or Sinophobic, at no point has the West seen China on its own terms.

The China Question tracks these pendulum swings into the present. While Hung suggests that the rise of China Studies as an academic discipline in the mid 20th century at last brought about more nuanced Western academic understandings of East Asia, orientalist perspectives continue to frame popular and political discourses on China. There is much to commend: the book is packed with fascinating case studies. We learn, for example, about Matthew Paris’ 13th-century association of the Mongols with the lost tribes of Israel. As Paris wrote, this lost tribe had been locked away in a mountain by Alexander the Great, leading them to follow ‘alien gods and unknown rites’ and adopt a life of ‘feral and senseless cruelty’. Elsewhere, Hung relates the Jesuit Martino Martini’s influential account of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, which painted the formerly barbarian Manchus as the saviours of an empire in moral decline. The book offers an interesting take on Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck’s projections of the American Dream onto an unchanging and harmonious Chinese countryside in The Good Earth (1931), which cast Chinese farmers as simple, honest folk who, by hard work, could climb the rungs of social hierarchies. Nor is the orientalist viewpoint unique to the West: as Hung argues, it emanates from within the People’s Republic, too, as seen in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when the CCP’s flagship newspaper, Global Times, reported that China’s success in handling the coronavirus outbreak stemmed from the fact that ‘Chinese culture is collectivist, and such unity strengthens the ability to collaborate and contribute to large-scale movements with greater efficiency’. Xi Jinping continues to characterise his own government as the apotheosis of an ‘unbroken history of more than 5,000 years of civilisation’.

Despite its historical focus, The China Question is not written for historians. It is very much a ‘Grand Theory’, supported by rich case studies drawn from a wide-ranging secondary literature. While its ambitiousness is laudable, it also opens up some pitfalls. An attempt to recount 800 years in 260 pages necessarily results in a loss of nuance. One of the more problematic aspects of Hung’s argument is its own replication of a binary view, much like the orientalism he critiques. His suggestion that for eight centuries almost all Western writings on China swung between two equally orientalist poles ends up overlooking the enormous ‘third space’ that has long existed in between. Martino Martini, for instance, wrote two extraordinarily erudite accounts of China’s chronology and geography in addition to his punchier account of the fall of the Ming, painting the empire and its history as connected to, but different from, Europe’s. Where Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault – earlier Jesuit missionaries in China – argued that the Chinese were peace-loving and thus ‘differ greatly from the nations of Europe’, Martini offered more nuance. In his lengthy Chinese history, Sinicae historiae decas prima (1659), he explained that, rather than being timeless and unchanging, Chinese wartime strategies depended on their particular contexts and often involved learning from their enemies. Many of Hung’s case studies contain complex perspectives which he overlooks. Indeed, his decision to see things as either Sinophilic or Sinophobic risks simplifying rather than critically probing the historical record. This is perhaps best captured by a table produced at the end of the book: ‘Eight hundred years of fantasy-fear cycles’, covering different ‘fields’ – from ‘Catholic scholarship’ in the 1240s to ‘Political discourses disguised as scholarship’ from the 1990s to the present – gives a binary overview of the evolution of attitudes towards China, tracking the pendulum swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia.

The China Question is, despite these reservations, timely and important, especially in the context of growing anti-Asian racism at the highest level of Western politics. Consider, for instance, Donald Trump’s characterisation of Covid-19 as ‘kung flu’, or the likening of China by his current counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, to a ‘voracious … Manufacturing Dragon’ that seeks to ‘strangle our babies’ and poison us with ‘Chinese junk’. Hung’s sweeping genealogy of Western fantasy and fear offers a valuable historical warning for our times.

• The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear
  Ho-fung Hung
  Cambridge University Press, 336pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is an Assistant Professor in Colonial Environmental History and Decolonial Futures at the University of Amsterdam.