Chinese Students Educated in the United States and the Emergence of Chinese Orientalism in the Early Twentieth Century

Title

Chinese Students Educated in the United States and the Emergence of Chinese Orientalism in the Early Twentieth Century

Author

Yung-chen Chiang

Page

37-76

DOI

Abstract

Chinese students educated in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century were at once the most Americanized and the most culturally conserva- tive cohort of all the American educated Chinese during the twentieth century. Whether driven by a sense of mission or acting as native informants, this generation of American educated often made sweeping and glowing generalizations about the Chinese national character, status of women, family structure, and political culture. While glowing gener- alizations, they were nonetheless orientalistic in that they reified, essentialized, and a- historicized the Chinese tradition. This was done in a manner that, as Edward Said ar- gued against in his seminal work on Orientalism, suggested the Chinese could be “de- fined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space.” That orientalism has flourished in China, with or without imperialism and West- ern orientalists, can be seen in the continued invocations, inversions, and re-deployments of the orientalist discourse on China by Chinese conservatives as well as liberals, nation- alists, Marxists, the opposition, and the regimes in power. As the most Americanized of all American-educated Chinese in twentieth-century China, they were also the most scrutinized, perhaps because they were the first cohort to appear on the scene in significant numbers. For the Chinese critics, deracination on the part of the American educated made them foreigners in their own country. Western crit- ics also criticized the American-educated Chinese for what they perceived as their un- critical acceptance of Western models. These Western critics imputed a crisis that was moral in character and civilizational in magnitude in the excessive Americanization of the American-educated Chinese. The more strident critics looked askance at the Ameri- can-educated Chinese for their ludicrous excess in their doomed mimicry to resemble the whites. For the Chinese to attempt to step beyond the “authorized version of otherness” deemed appropriate for them was, in their view, to transgress. As Homi Bhabha has aptly characterized, to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English. Most of the American-educated Chinese reeled back from such attacks. Some flushed with pride through seemingly laudatory orientalist pronouncements about China, its tradition, and its people. The most perceptive among them were, however, able to expose the preten- sion on the part of the Western critics to speak for China and to challenge their oriental- ist premises.

Keyword

Chinese students in the U.S., Orientalism, self-Orientalization, mimicry, Hu Shi

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