Gregory Blue, China and Western social thought in the modern period

Gregory Blue, “China and Western social thought in the modern period,” Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue (eds.), China and Historical Capitalism. Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57-109.

Blue starts by listing different political usages that invocation of China served in the European political philosophy since the 16^th century. In particular, he discusses how Chinese religious and moral norms were appealed as an example by Protestants and Catholic groups to reach their ends. By the turn of the 19^th century, the “orientalist” view on China would dominate, but before that, European knowledge of China had been more multi-faceted. Also, China played an important role in the development of the European tastes for material culture.

He then speaks of a drastic change in the European “balance of opinions” in respect to China from the mid-18^th to the mid-19^th century. Interestingly, this is exactly the same period which Koselleck labelled as “Sattelzeit,” i.e. the period when all basic political concepts in Europe were redefined. Blue’s explanation deals with the final establishment of European colonialism, capitalism and mercantilism. It is, however, strange that he treats the entire spectre of political opinion in Europe as something homogeneous. As Blue writes, in a quite essentialist way, in regard to knowledge:

And whether the general level of knowledge among Western social thinkers about "China" as a historical civilization was higher in the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth, as Tocqueville asserted, is not so easy to say. (77)

He then makes a statement that, in fact, there existed varying views on the Chinese in the 19^th century in regard to their mental and physical capabilities, and even the British government considered China favourable when it came to its anti-Russian role in the Big Game. Yet the “Yellow Peril” and scientific racism were dominating the intellectual landscape of Europe. Although, the main material is taken from British sources, as if the British had a monopoly on the knowledge about China at that time. I remember Bret Harte’s story Wan Lee, the Pagan, an 1876 story, which probably reflected rather universal views on anti-Chinese sentiment as something inappropriate.

After the WWI, the racist consensus in the West was gradually coming to an end.

He then moves to analyzing categories employed by European thinkers in their attempts to conceptualize the history and presence of China, starting with “historical stability.” In the 17^th century, the latter was looked at as a positive sign of its sound state order. This was reverted by Montesquieu, who argued that balance of powers was required for a successful state, something one could hardly find in the Chinese model. Here, he clashed with Voltaire who depicted China as a model of civilized government. Gradually, however, the perceived historical stability of China becomes linked with new ideas of “national and racial character” (91) – a favourite stick to beat China during the 19^th century. Marx and Engels invoked these racist prejudices of the Orient when they coined hardly coherent concept of the Asiatic mode of production.

In the beginning of the 20^th century, Max Weber carried out his analysis of the Chinese social evolution, which for him was, actually, a means to conceptualize the specific features of the Western capitalist social development. He emphasized the resistance of Chinese bureaucracy to social change and labelled China as a stagnant society. However, he was more attentive to subtle social complexities, such as different types of private property.

Finally, Blue explores the nature of early Soviet scholarly disputes about the Asiatic mode of production. Here, his argument seems quite weak, as he is unable to read Russian and is forced to interpret early Soviet sources interpreting Chine on the basis of later interpretations (he quotes mainly works: Degras 1956-59, Nikiforov 1970, Barber 1981). So: his interpretation – based on post-war interpretation – of early Soviet interpretation – of Marx’s, Engels’s and Weber’s interpretations – of China’s socio-economic model. Blue, consequently, concentrates on his attempt to narrate the complex web of arguments of Soviet Marxists, and he is lost, as he is unable to give the background of their ideas in terms of discourses they operated.

So, summarizing my concerns about his analysis: his is mostly the history of ideas in the form that Lovejoy introduced it in the 1920s and 1930s, as if “unit-ideas” flow from one intellectual environment to another in a pure form.

He concludes by asserting that the European scholarship aspired to explain the historical process in distinct countries by trying to find universal categories. But what if this desire was only a manifestation of a deeper one: to impose certain vision of the future upon one’s own society in order to find the most effective means for “appropriate” social construction – as in the case of Soviet Marxists, for whom this was not a scholarly debate based on empirical evidence, but rather a political debate related to struggle for power in the academic community and influence among the political leadership.