Representing Kowtow: Civility and Civilization in Early Sino-British Encounters

Tracing the debates over kowtow following the early British embassies to China, this essay argues that the British idea of bodily performance reshaped the making of the modern Chinese subject. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the British critique of kowtow began with a defense of courtly civility and developed itself into an Orientalist discourse on civilization, placing an assumed hierarchy between the standing Victorian gentleman and the prostrating Chinese slave. Paradoxically, such imperial pedagogy lent the Chinese republicans and revolutionaries a language of articulating individual autonomy and social equality in pursuit of a modern China. Following this dialectic of ideology and utopia, the essay further examines and reassesses the dual role of Orientalism in shaping China's semi-colonial modernity.