Political Narratology and Consensual Development in Post-Mao China

Political Narratology and Consensual Development in Post-Mao China Gabriel F. Y. Tsang (bio) Reading dominant political narratives in China can allow us to understand the Chinese government’s ideological positions surrounding the economic-centered policy that has been advocated since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China from 1978 to 1992.1 A full understanding of the competing discourses and rhetorical techniques adopted by various stakeholders, and the dynamic process of communication between the government/dissidents and the public, is essential to address the structure of current political phenomena. Such a critical perspective prevents oversimplified conclusions about the modernizing process of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which make China appear to be either imitating the West or undermining the purity of “Chineseness.” Taking the documentary series He Shang [River Elegy] as an example, the first section of this paper will explain how such reductive conclusions can be reached and how they may appear as reasonable to the Chinese public. The second and third sections will focus on the narrative strategies adopted by Chinese democrats and political leaders, respectively. By investigating the political intentions of both sides, we can reassess the Eurocentric paradigm, in which the values categorized as belonging to the West, such as democracy, are regarded as universally superior, beneficial, and pragmatic. Instead of illustrating how democrats and political leaders comply with the international [End Page 467] discipline that Western countries impose, this paper argues that the self-interest of individuals on both sides (exemplified by Chai Ling and Hu Jintao) motivates compliance with that discipline regardless of their intentions. While democrats employ Western political concepts to increase their discursive power, political leaders express agreement with the West to increase their economic bargaining power. In China, the process of building popular consensus around Western values is not straightforward, but instead full of internal contradictions, inconsistency, and incoherence. The Logic of Westernization and Self-Orientalization The charismatic discursive power of Western ideas in post-socialist countries after the end of the Cultural Revolution2—fifteen years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—is similar to that of Marxism in capitalist countries during the late nineteenth century. This power consists more in the possible outcome of these ideas, their interpretability for political use, and their idealized contrast to the current situation, and less in their adaptability. In the case of China after the death of Mao Zedong—the leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, who diplomatically enclosed China and practiced socialism—Deng Xiaoping’s policy favored the “translation and dissemination of foreign literature” (McDougall and Louie 334), and created the desire in the general populace for Westernization, that is, imitation of Western policies, culture, and philosophy. Simultaneously, because of Deng’s neglect of the economic and legal system, a prerequisite of reconstructing, Chinese intellectuals, who were adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, attempted to construct an image of China as inferior to the West in order to speed up the Westernizing progress. Their attempts to evaluate China through a Western gaze, which can be described as self-Orientalization,3 came about for two reasons. First, their past experience under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship gave them a sense that the still-dominant Marxist/socialist ideology was retrogressive. Second, the term “modernization” that Deng Xiaoping used to sum up his capitalistic reform gave them an impression that the successfully modernized Western countries were superior to China. According to Chinese Contemporary Literature Studies, between 1978 and 1982, over four hundred essays analyzing Western modernism were published in China (Yang and Jiang 182). While [End Page 468] establishing the West as an object to study, scholars began to compare and contrast China and the West. During this time, the indefinite difference between self and other that Chinese intellectuals gleaned from personal experience and official statements became expressed through fixed binary oppositions: East-West, socialist-capitalist, developing-developed, modernizing-modernized, uncivilized-civilized, peripheral-central, dictatorial-democratic, suppressed-free, poor-rich, violent-peaceful, foolish-intellectual, dirty-clean, etc. In each binary pair, the first terms were used to describe the inferiority of China, and the second ones to evoke the qualities of the West regarded as aspirational...