Preface II

Placing Reg Little in the History of the Study of China

The study of China, whether defined as the w riting and spreading and discussion of scholarly and interdisciplinary know ledge about various economic, cultural, political and social aspects of China, “China Studies,” and “China Watching,” or as more narrow ly limited to a field of study now historically named as “classical sinology,”^[1] has consistently been framed by changing global political alliances and associations, forces and contexts and, of course, by the complicated histories of colonialism, post colonialism and neo colonialism.^[2] Post World War Ⅱ, modern Chinese Studies developed, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 as the colonial era “sinology” gave way to the arguably more enlightened “area studies.” “Area studies,” fraught with grow ing pains and its own controversies, including controversies within Chinese Studies, incorporates interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship. Continuing controversies in Area Studies include the association of its origins with the American government’s need to know more about the rest of the world, especially what would somewhat later come to be called the Third World (including China) — a key battleground of the Cold War. Hence one rationale for the emergence of Area Studies was to provide the U.S. state political and intelligence apparatuses with expertise and advice about parts of the world that few Americans had much know ledge about. During the early years of the Cold War, government officials and their colleagues at universities, foundations and research centers, hoped that the new Area Studies programs and scholars would produce know ledge and trained personnel to assist the American government in the making and implementation of American foreign policy.^[3] Ironically, while some scholars and researchers based in Area Studies (especially political scientists) actively desired to contribute to American policymaking and embraced political agendas, many had primarily scholarly and pedagogical interests and priorities and more idealistic motivations. And so, as the fields matured, by the late 1960s and early 1970s many of these fields w itnessed the emergence of radical and severe critiques of the role of the United States government in the areas of the world on which particular scholars focused, including some work by scholars focusing on China, undermining the notion that area specialists should prioritize in their work serving the American government or framing their work with the issues central to the government.^[4]

The term, “Area Studies,” itself exists primarily as a generalization for what consists of, in the practice of scholarship, many complimentary, but as often divergent, fields of research, in both the social sciences and the humanities.^[5]Academ ic, university centered, Area Study programs usually involve history, political science, sociology, cultural studies, language study, geography, literature, and other related disciplines. Area Studies approaches, as they developed, especially in North America with scholars such as John King Fairbank, challenged and superseded the dominance of classical, colonial era, Sinology.^[6]

Fairbank was a prominent historian of China and the founder of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University. He exerted a profound and continuing influence on the field of China Studies and on all who followed him. He created fellowships for graduate students, trained China historians and, because of his reputation and influence, he was able to place students, after they graduated, in universities and colleges and places of importance around the world. During his illustrious career, Fairbank welcomed and funded researchers from all over the world and hosted a series of conferences and seminars and workshops, which brought scholars together and produced publications. Fairbank and his colleagues at Harvard also w rote an influential textbook on China and Japan, A History of East Asian Civilization and he did establish links to figures in government and establish a voice in government both by training journalists, government officials, and foundation executives and by giving his thoughts to the government on policy on China. He also established the Harvard East Asian Series for publishing.

He was enlisted to work for the U.S. government from 1941 to 1946 and worked in China for two years. Fairbank was amongst those in the US who predicted the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and advocated establishing relations with the new, communist government. Fairbank had taught at Harvard until his retirement in 1977. Among his works are The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (1974), and Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings (1985, co-editor). Fairbank promoted the “study of China within a discipline,” an approach which downplayed the role of philological Sinology and focused on issues in history and the social sciences. As such, Fairbank establishes a remarkable and influential presence in the field of China Studies, combining an interdisciplinary approach with an attempt to avoid colonial era generalizations and to articulate contributions that Asia can make to the West. This is the tradition of scholarship, and, indeed the professional arc, that Reg Little and other contemporary China Watchers are follow ing. Reg Little brings, for example, his Australian diplomatic experience and his study of Confucianism to his w riting about China. It is Reg Little’s writing on China that is the focus of Shucang Li’s book.^[7]

The “culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations” within colonial discourse has been commented upon by Edward Said, the Palestinian-American critic. Said w rites in Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (1978),

Reality is divided into various collectives: languages, races, types, colors, mentalities, each category being not so much a neutral designation as an evaluative interpretation. (277)

Such tendencies have had a long tenure. European colonists and earlier generations of European w riters had regarded vast regions of the world merely as blank spaces, lands “without narrative” waiting to be mapped, mined, w ritten into existence. This domestication of the “orient” coupled with a discourse of the “inscrutable” nature of its peoples has been analyzed by Said in Orientalism (1978). The “orient” is a Western construct as much intended to define the East — a global cultural stereotype. The Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), for example, are imagined by Europeans initially as a locus for romance, but are subsequently translated, like India itself, into something repellant, maddening, destructive of identity under disoriented Western eyes. It has only been recently that these places, their societies and world views have begun to be inscribed. Particularly since the Second World War, as Said points out, there has been “[a] massive intellectual, moral and imaginative overhaul and deconstruction of Western representation of the non-Western world” (Culture and Imperialism, 1983).

The term “geopolitics,” which has proved useful in the study of international relations, identifies a framework that considers power relations as embedded in the spatial structure (size, distance, adjacency, etc.) of geographical states and territories.^[8] The colonial roots of Oriental or Asiatic scholarship, the war-driven migration of Asian scholars and the dispersion of their expertise and Cold War investment and competition are examples. The rising scholarly interest in China follow ing its grow ing political-economic significance in recent decades, as well as the emergence of various “alternative discourses” and other attempts at intellectual decolonization, provide further examples.^[9]

There are many institutions and agencies involved in the social and political processes of know ledge production about China — such as foundations, professional associations, publishers, journals, research institutes, cultural societies, governments and multinational entities, for example. These institutions and agencies operate in ways that reflect their roles, agendas and power relations within a geopolitical context, and leave their imprints, through funding and agenda setting and framing, on their associated scholarly networks and subsequently the intellectual landscape of human know ledge, especially in the West, about China. While institutions and agencies can often be seen as mechanisms by which geopolitical priorities help to frame China Studies, it is important to recognize that institutions and agencies and their associated networks can also be centers of opposition to the prevailing foreign policies and their geopolitical underpinnings.

Investigating these themes further invites critical examination of the power structure underlying this know ledge: Who has w ritten about China — why, for what purpose(s) and for whom? Where is this know ledge disseminated and consumed? Which (institutional, societal-structural, national) interests and biases have been brought into this know ledge production and dissemination? Which topics have been emphasized or excluded? Or modified? Been framed and reframed? What is the nature of China, in other words, as “subject”? To be a subject, Foucault has shown, is at the same time to undergo subjection. If one discards any essentialist notion of culture, then one must turn to the constitution of the subject, to the “games of truth” and practices of power that makes possible certain determined forms of subjectification in order to revaluate our understanding of them. Such an analysis of the “relationships. . . between constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power and so forth” involves, according to Foucault, the rejection of any “a priori theory of the subject” (121). ^[10]

Follow ing in the professional and critical tradition established by John K Fairbank’s, Reg Little is a contemporary, important, interesting and controversial w riter and speaker who has focused on the official return of Confucianism to China.^[11] Formerly of the Australian Foreign Service, Little draws upon his extensive diplomatic experience in Asia in his w ritings and speeches. He often attempts to make prescient pronouncements regarding Asia’s, and especially, China’s, place in the world vis-a-vis the West. He is sympathetic, perhaps overly so, to many of the values and achievements of Asia, and especially China, and his w ritings and talks about China usually strive to communicate some of the essence of what he sees as their positive and useful values. Simply put, his underlying point is that China is still profoundly and essentially influenced by the cultural inheritance of the Confucian ethical tradition and that the West has much to learn and unlearn about China. This tradition, in Little’s opinion, is based on notions of human obligations, the community and the rule of virtue or, in practice, of extremely powerful men. For example, In The Analects, Confucius w rote:

Lead the people by laws and regulate them by penalties and the people will try to keep out of jail but will have no sense of shame. Lead the people by virtue and restrain them by rules of decorum, and the people will have a sense of shame and moreover, will become good.^[12]

In an age of the Internet, fast international air travel, and ever grow ing international contacts, the differing perceptions and interpretations of the role of ethics in China have become much more compelling and relevant and important to policymakers and social scientists alike. Reg Little urges the importance of achieving an understanding in Western countries of the modern form of Chinese Confucianism that he believes is the frame, and indeed the energy as well, for the remarkable and unexpected (by most Western observers at least) economic advance of China in the 21st century. Amongst other things, according to Little’s analysis, the emphasis in 21st century China on rigorous and even ruthless, by Western moral and ethical standards, competitive education and the awarding of lifetime positions in government and private business bureaucracies can be traced directly to the return in China of the importance of Confucianism. The authority and responsibility carried by officials, which is part of the basis of both ancient and modern Chinese Confucianism, and the conclusion that it is these officials who should hold and w ield power, is, in Little’s view, an accepted and advantageous practice in China. And the Chinese stress on rituals and rites and ceremonies, in this view, ensures that individual activity is pursued within a framework of established social behavior and courtesies which help to preserve the social fabric and ruling consensus. In academia there is a movement to reclaim Confucianist social and cultural norms that were discarded by the May Fourth Movement and the “Cultural Revolution.”^[13]Know ledge and understanding of these important and essential aspects of China is, for Little, critical for geopolitics in the 21st century, and, in his opinion, sadly lacking in officials and scholars in the West.

Geopolitics began in the nineteenth century as a way to try and establish an objective geographic “science” of statecraft. Ironically, the “science” of geopolitics was itself shaped by the same imperial and colonial forces and motivations that gave rise to orientalism. Sir Halford M ackinder’s famous “heartland” doctrine — that whichever power controlled the Eurasian “heartland”would control the world — reflected decades of British imperial competition with Russia in Central Asia.^[14] The American Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan expressed a geopolitical theory of sea power that was used to help justify President Theodore Roosevelt’s expansion and use of U.S. naval forces.^[15] The German Karl Haushofer adapted Mackinder to create a Geopolitik in support of Hitler’s Third Reich.^[16] And the American Nicholas Spykman countered Mackinder’s Heartland theory with a “Rim land” theory that later became a significant basis for the application to Asia of the United States’ Cold War doctrine of containment.^[17]

The recognition that geopolitics might differ from country to country has led to the contemporary study of critical geopolitics. Like Asian Studies, Geopolitics (as a set of theories or field of study) is itself framed by real and/or perceived political conditions. We tend to speak of geopolitical eras. Orientalism developed in the era of European colonialism. Area Studies developed in the Cold War era, faced major challenges in the brief period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, and continues to evolve in the post-9/11 era. These broad generalizations, of course, overly simplify temporal and geographic complexity.

Chinese Studies has roots that can be traced back to the European colonial interest in Asia, or the Orient, and the indigenous intellectual attempts to resist colonial dom inance through promoting form s of pan-Asianism. But as an institutionalized field of inquiry it was largely developed in the special geopolitical circumstances follow ing World War Ⅱ — the rapid dismantling of colonial empires; the proliferation of “new nations” in Asia, A frica, and elsewhere; and Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Reg Little was an Australian diplomat for 25 years, during which time he received language training in Japanese and Chinese and served as Deputy or Head of five Australian overseas diplomatic missions.^[18] In Canberra he headed Divisions concerned with North Asia, International Econom ic Organizations and Policy Planning, and directed the Australia China Council. In 1976 in Beijing, he predicted China’s future double digit grow th. For the past three decades he has been active in China and other parts of Asia in conferences addressing the renaissance of Confucian traditional values, about which he has been involved in w riting a number of books and conference presentations. Little’s time in Japan from 1964 to 1969 led to his judgment in 1976 that China would emulate Japanese grow th. It also led to The Confucian Renaissance in 1989 and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny in 1997, and A Confucian Daoist Millennium? in 2007. His most recent work is A 21st Century Dream of Red Chambers (forthcoming). Since 2009 he has been a vice president of the Beijing-based International Confucian Association.

The International Confucian Association (ICA) held its inaugural meeting in Beijing between the 5th and 8th of October, 1994, to celebrate the two thousand, five hundred and forty fifth anniversary of the birth of Confucius. It represented a commitment by all the member communities of East Asia to a serious exploration of the qualities of the Confucian tradition which are producing a range of unique, non-Western approaches to cultural, social and econom ic organisation amongst the grow th econom ies of East Asia...

It is not difficult to recognise some qualities which are common throughout East Asia. In fact, participants in conferences focusing on the Confucian tradition are beginning to identify a number of organisational qualities which are of importance to anyone wanting to do business in Asia and, indeed, to anyone interested in the future of the global economy...

...a knowledge of Confucian and associated Daoist values suggests that contemporary Western thinking may need to look again and critically at some of the legacies of the Enlightenment which still tend to predetermine Western behavior and notions of progress. It may even be that, viewed against the panorama of history and civilisation, the mechanical principles of Isaac New ton, the liberal political instincts of John Locke and the commercial ethos of Adam Smith come to look a little like the horsemanship of Genghis Khan-genius, releasing raw energy capable of conquering the world, but in another time.^[19]

Little has previously w ritten on the early and later acquaintance between Asian communities and the Christian West. In The Confucian Renaissance (1989), Little and Warren Reed, his co-author, sketch the importance of the 19th century leadership of Japan and the Chinese Revolution. They analyze the pervasive influence of the West and especially the US in the global bodies which were established after the Second World War and conclude that the West is content to watch these global systems “decay, until pressure mount: to oblige them to accept leadership without becoming involved in over contests and conflict.” It is in this context that the authors urge the importance of achieving an understanding in Western countries of the “modern form of renaissance of Confucianism.”

In A Confucian-Daoist M illennium? (2006), Little addresses such questions as: Can the leadership of a emerging Confucian-Daoist civilization successfully compete with and eventually replace that of a declining West — in global governing, education, spirituality, science, and more? Has the Anglo-American colonizing mission left the West incapable of understanding a Chinese civilization that overshadowed global order for centuries before the early 19th century, despite the fact that this colonial project was abandoned? He argues in this text that the Confucian-Daoist renaissance of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has catapulted China and other East Asian countries to leadership in most areas of global competition and that this success has deep Chinese and East Asian cultural roots but that this success has been misunderstood and misrepresented by Western commentators, theorists and politicians.

Little predicted the future success and “spiritual rise” of China and the Far East in 1976, during his time as a diplomat with the Australian Embassy.^[20] China’s econom ic rise since the Reform and Opening-up is now a historical fact, but few people had faith in China’s cultural rise like Reg Little did in the late 1970s. In particular, Little has been interested in the question of the West embracing certain key Asian values, including filial piety, the striving for oneness and greater harmony. Buddhism, Daoism, and above all, Confucianism, all of which are absent in the West. Little argues that all of these Asian values can be exported to the world. From the author’s “Introduction” to A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? (2007), Little w rites:

Erosion of Anglo-American global order, which has shaped the past two hundred years of world history, has been apparent for several decades. Essentially, the United States has allowed itself to become dependent on East Asian manufacturing, technology and finance.

Recent activities in Afghanistan and Iraq have accelerated this process, alienating America from newly enriched energy suppliers in Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The accompanying alliance of Russian and Chinese strategic interests has offered new options to Latin American, African, Central Asian and the M iddle Eastern communities.

Business m ust pay serious atten tion to the thesis o f A Confucian-Daoist M illennium? We are returning to a global order that existed for several m illennia prior to the rise of Anglo-American power in the early 19th century. During that tim e China occupied the central and leading position in the global trading and technology system.^[21]

The end of the Post World War Ⅱ era and the Cold War, whether measured by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, challenged the necessity of Asian Studies and Area Studies in general. In particular, the decline of United States’ federal funding became a major concern of Area Studies centers and scholars. But there were also issues of globalization, questions of academ ic priorities, and new theoretical directions. Globalization, some argued, was creating a much more homogenous world in which area-specific know ledge would become increasingly unnecessary and irrelevant. Traditional academ ic disciplines and departments and adm inistrators questioned the allocation of scarce resources to interdisciplinary Area Studies programs. New funding initiatives and approaches brought additional challenges to what had become familiar Area Studies fram eworks. Little’s contributions to the debate on the necessity, definition, and value of Area Studies have been controversial and provocative:

China’s peaceful rise over less than forty years has been little anticipated and profound ly m isunderstood by the West. It has been crafted by Chinese leaders deeply educated in a uniquely rich thought culture. This remains largely unexplored in a West shaped by a form of intellectual apartheid.

Chinese leaders are shaped by classics and historical experience that unites them with ancestors over several m illennia. Each generation is part of a community that is both the largest in today’s global order and the most conscious of past and future continuity.

The labeling of East Asian leaders as Comm un ist or Capitalist is misguided. These are lazy and m isleading Western abstractions that are easily manipulated by highly educated, bicultural and experienced Asian adm inistrators, whose thought is holistic, fluid, intuitive and practical. (Chinese Mindwork: A Primer on Why China is Number 1, 2015)^[22]

Chinese Studies is alive and well and has become polycentric and diverse.

Little may be critiqued on a number of points in his arguments and conclusions. He is usually a bit repetitious and he does not provide a thoughtful, and possibly essential, critical analysis of the sometimes problematic rule of “Men of virtue”that he offers up as examples for the West to emulate. There is no interrogation by Little of, for example, the status of women in Chinese culture and the fact that Confucius literally meant what he said when Confucius w rote of a rule of “men of virtue.” And, a lot of Confucian thought centered upon political governance and often challenged corruption and abuse of authoritarian power. Little’s position seems to be that Confucianism is the leading force of China, guiding decisions from the top leaders down to the average Chinese worker, which obviously it isn’t (what, for example about the grow ing influence of Christianity, and the possibility that promoting Confucianism is an official attempt to try and counter the effects of Western religions with a kind of Confucian humanism?).^[23] And finally, what about the appearance and “relocation” (a few months later) of a statue of Confucius in Tian’anmen Square in 2011? But weighed against the value of the basic ideas which Little describes insightfully and advocates, these criticisms do not argue for a dismissal of Little’s work. If Chinese Studies of half a century ago was framed primarily by Cold War geopolitics, present-day Asian Studies may be seen to be shaped by much more diverse, decentralized and complex geopolitics, as Shucang Li’s book on Reg Little demonstrates.^[24]

David Erben

Professor of World Cinemas and Cultures

University of Toledo

Toledo, Ohio, USA

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注释

[1]See Louise Yelen, Review: “Post Colonial Criticism in the Era of Globalization,” Studies in the Novel, Vol.34,No.1(spring 2002),pp.90-101.

[2]See Norma Field, The Cold War and Beyond in East Asian Studies, PMLA Vol. 117, No. 5 (Oct., 2002), pp. 1261-1266 and Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,”The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Andre Schiffrin (New York, 1997), pp. 195-232.

[3]Bates, Robert H. Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy? PS: Political Science and Politics 30, No. 2(1997), pp. 166-169.

[4]See Christopher Shea, “Political Scientists Clash over Value of Area Studies,” Chronicle of Higher Education, (January 10, 1997): A13.

[5]See, e.g., Mungello, David E., Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology, Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag W iesbaden, 1985; rpr. Honolulu: University of Haw aii Press, 1989 and Zurndorfer, Harriet, “A Brief History of Chinese Studies and Sinology,” in Zurndorfer, Harriet (1999). China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works About China Past and Present. Honolulu: Brill; reprinted, University of Hawaii Press.

[6]See Jonathan Spence’s review of China: A New History for the NY Times, “From the Stone Age to Tian’anmen Square,” https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/24/books/from-the-stone-age-to-tian’anmensquare.htm l.

[7]Clarence J Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, reprinted 1990).

[8]Albrert Tzeng, William L. Richter, Ekaterina Koldunova, Introduction: Framing Asian Studies, Framing Asian Studies: Geopolitics and Institutions, Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018.

[9]Foucault, M. Truth and power. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp.51-75). New York: Panthenon Books, 1984.

[10]A New York Times article from February 13, 2014 on the official attitude: “Mr. Xi said the party leadership was preparing a policy document ‘to promote traditional values, implant new social mores and a cohesive national spirit, and enhance cultural soft power.’” http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/xitouts-communist-party-as-defender-of-confuciuss-virtues/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_ type=blogs&_r=1.

[11]Reg Little, 2018 July 17,https://confucianweeklybulletin.wordpress.com/diplomatic-insight-from-dr-reglittle/.

[12]Confucius (translated by D C Lau), The Analects (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd,1979).

[13]For a more detailed examination, see Wang Gungwu, May Fourth and the GPCU: The“Cultural Revolution” Remedy, Pacific Affairs Vol.52,No.4 (Winter,1979-1980),pp.674-690.

[14]Sloan, G.R.“Sir Halford Mackinder:The Heartland Theory Then and Now”,in Gray C.S.and Sloan G.R., Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy. London: Frank Cass,1999.

[15]Jon Tetsuro Sumida,Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Al fred Thayer Mahan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1997).

[16]Saul Bernard Cohen.“Geopolitics of the World System.”Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc,2003.

[17]Nicholas Spykman with A.A.Rollins, Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy, I, The American Political Science Review 1939,issue 3.

[18]See Paul M. Evans. Biography of Fairbank, John Fairbank and the American Understanding of China, Blackwell Pub,1988.

[19]Little, Reg. Conference Report.Confucius in Beijing: The Conference of the International Confucian Foundation. September 1955.

[20]Reg Little, A Confucian–Daoist Millennium? https://www.east-west-dichotomy.com/reg-little/.

[21]See also an interview with Reg Little, https://confucianweeklybulletin.wordpress.com/diplomatic-insightfrom-dr-reg-little/.

[22]https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/526759/1/chinese-mindwork-a-primer-on-why-china-isnumber-1.

[23]Yao Xinzhong, Confucianism and Christianity: A Comparative Study of Jen and Agape. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1996.

[24]See the Honorable Justice Michael Kirby’s “Review of Reg Little and Warren Reed, The Confucian Renaissance,” http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UWALawRw/1991/19.pdf.