Page 53 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

was drawing to a close. There are two interrelated sides to this challenge. On the
one hand the question is how to modernize Chineseness itself in a way that would
correct and overcome the arguably abject course taken by the existing political
regime in the PRC – a course almost universally perceived as morally wrong and,
provocatively, as somehow having a debilitating effect on the fate of Chineseness. 4
According to Tu, the Chinese diaspora will have to take the lead in the modern-
ization of Chineseness. He writes in an implicit attack on the ‘center’: ‘While the
overseas Chinese may seem forever peripheral to the meaning of being Chinese’,

they [can] assume an effective role in creatively constructing a new
vision of Chineseness that is more in tune with Chinese history and in
sympathetic resonance with Chinese culture.
(ibid.: 34)

On the other hand, there is also the reverse question of how to sinicize modernity;
how, that is, to create a modern world that is truly Chinese and not simply an
imitation of the West. The radical iconoclasm of the 1919 May Fourth Movement,
which was based on the assumption that China’s modernization could only
be realized through a wholesale process of Westernization and a simultaneous
renunciation of Chinese culture, is now regarded as completely outdated. Instead,
inspiration is drawn from the economic rise of East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s
to look for models of modernity – Chinese modernity – which pose challenging
cultural alternatives to the Western model (Ong 1999). Tu refers specifically
to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Chinese communities in South-East
Asia. The experiences of these countries suggest for Tu that ‘active participation
in the economic, political, social, and cultural life of a throroughly modernized
community does not necessarily conflict with being authentically Chinese’,
signalling the possibility that ‘modernization may enhance rather than weaken
Chineseness’ (1994c: 8).
The privileging of the periphery – the diaspora – as the new cultural centre of
Chineseness in Tu’s discourse is an important challenge to traditional, centrist and
essentialist conceptions of Chinese culture and identity. Yet I want to suggest that
the very postulation of a ‘cultural China’ as the name for a transnational intellectual
community held together not just by a ‘common awareness’ but also by ‘a common
ancestry and a shared cultural background’, ‘a transnational network to explore
the meaning of being Chinese in a global context’ (Tu 1994c: 25), is a move that
is driven by a desire for, and motivated by, another kind of centrism, this time
along notionally cultural lines.
An important element here is the continued orientation of, if not obsession
with, the self-declared periphery as centre in the discourse of cultural China in
relation to the old centre, even if this centre is so passionately denied its traditional
authority and legitimacy. ‘What mainland China eventually will become remains
an overriding concern for all intellectuals in cultural China,’ writes Tu (1994c: 33),
and in this ongoing preoccupation with the centre the periphery not only

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