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Orientalism, political economy and the ‘China question’
Presentation for ‘Lunch ‘n Learn,’ Athabasca University, October 26, 2011
Part of an ongoing research project, ‘Self-Emancipation: Reflections on Work, Organization
and Resistance in the Global Workplace’
Paul [email protected]
Deconstructing the ‘two drunks’ metaphor Dependent on whom?
Chart 1.1 – Growth of Trade with China, 1994-2009 (millions of U.S. dollars)
Chart 1.2 – Growth of Trade with China, 1994-2009 (millions of U.S. dollars)
Chart 1.3 – China: regional share of trade, 1994-2009
China is not Japan
Chart 2.1 – GDP per capita, China as a percent of Japan
Chart 2.2 – GDP per capita, China and Japan, 1970-2009 (U.S. dollars)
Chart 2.3 – Percent of population which is rural, China and Japan, 1990-2005
Chart 2.4 – Agriculture as a percent of economic activity, China and Japan
Chart 2.5 – Agriculture as a percent of economic activity, China relative to Japan
Global South and Global North
Orientalism and epistemologies of ignorance Having one category for all of Asia
Big facts which refuse to be seen
Chart 3.1 – Urban Population of China, 1990-2009
Chart 3.2 – Annual Increase in Urban Population, China, 1991-2009
Chart 3.3 – Total increase in urban population since 1990
Chart 3.4 – Rural Population of China, 1990-2009
Self-emancipation and the alternative to orientalism
The U.S. and China – two drunks?
August 7, 2011 – “The U.S. and China … resemble two drunks stumbling down a street with arms slung around each other’s shoulders. From one crisis to the next, it’s unclear if they’re holding each other up or on the verge of tripping.”
Mark Mackinnon. “China nervous about the $1.5-trillion of U.S. debt it holds.” Globe and Mail, August 7, 2011
May 10, 2011 – the headline for an article by Willem Thorbecke published in Firstpost Economy: “US and China: 2 drunks who need each other for support.”
November 26, 2009 – in the China Economics Blog, commenting on an Economist special report on China-US relations: “The most interesting article … touches on the ‘two drunks propping each other up’ argument relating US spending, exchange rates and China’s Treasury holdings.”
The U.S. and China – two drunks?
Summer 2004 – China specialist Charlie Hore. “Cheap imports are one of the main factors propping up the US economy's shallow recovery since the dot-com crash of 2000, while the dollar mountains in east Asia are partly invested in the US, helping to offset the lack of domestic investment. For some commentators this marks the US becoming parasitic on the rest of the world economy, using the dollar to suck in cheap imports and investment. In reality it's more like an unhealthy symbiosis--two drunks propping each other up.”
Dependent on whom?
Dependent on whom?
Dependent on whom?
Can China be a proxy for Japan?
Brian Reading, in 1992, first used the image. In the 1980s, he argued, “The Japanese saved and lent; the Americans borrowed and spent. The Japanese lent their surplus savings to the Americans, who used them to buy Japan’s surplus products.” This meant that “America and Japan resembled two drunks, leaning against each other in order to stand up.” Charlie Hore (cited above), argued that it was legitimate to keep the analogy and replace Japan with China, as did Richard Iley and Mervyn Lewis in 2007 who wrote: “Brian Reading described Japan and the United States in the 1980s as two drunks propping each other up, which is an image that may be invoked today of the United States and China.”Brian Reading. Japan: the coming collapse. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. p. 4.
Richard A. Iley, Mervyn K. Lewis. Untangling the US Deficit. Northampton Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing Inc. p. 91
China is not Japan
China is not Japan
China is not Japan
China is not Japan
China is not Japan
Orientalism and epistemologies of ignorance
“From the 1950s to the 1980s, China was studied at long distance. China was almost closed to the outside world, and foreign scholars could not work there. At the same time, China, as part of the then “evil empire” and thus a threat to the “free world” (on a scale that makes the current war on terror look like child’s play) had to be studied for strategic reasons, to understand the enemy and to work out how China had become Communist, how China had been ‘lost’.” “This form of orientalism was based on an implicit assumption that only Westerners had the intellectual abilities to make useful analyses, or to derive theory. It assumed that the repository of real knowledge was in the West, and that China could only be explained by Westerners.”
Diana Lary. “Edward Said: Orientalism and Occidentalism.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. New Series. Vol. 17, issue 2, 2006. p. 6.
Big facts which refuse to be seen
Footnote – ‘not adequately defined’
Big facts which refuse to be seen
Big facts which refuse to be seen
Big facts which refuse to be seen
Orientalism and epistemologies of ignorance
“The idea of an epistemology of ignorance attempts to explain and account for the fact that such substantive practices of ignorance – willful ignorance, for example, and socially acceptable but justificatory practices – are structural. This is to say that there are identities and social locations and modes of belief formation, all produced by structural social conditions of a variety of sorts, that are in some cases epistemically disadvantaged or defective.”
“ … oppressive systems produce ignorance as one of their effects.”
Linda Martin Alcoff. “Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types.” In Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds.. Race and epistemologies of Ignorance.
Albany: State University of New York, 2007. p. 40.
Orientalism, political economy and the ‘China question’
Presentation for ‘Lunch ‘n Learn,’ Athabasca University, October 26, 2011
Part of an ongoing research project, ‘Self-Emancipation: Reflections on Work, Organization
and Resistance in the Global Workplace’
Paul [email protected]
