On the evening of November 26, 2020, at the invitation of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance & Area Studies (SAGGAS), Dr. Yun Wenjie, Associate Researcher of the China Center for Special Economic Zone Research (CCSEZR), Shenzhen University (SZU), and Executive Chief Editor of the Journal of the Belt & Road Studies, delivered an online lecture on the topic of “The Orientalistic Origin of the Dualistic View of China in American Studies of Inner Asia”. This lecture is the sixth in a series on "Inner Asia / Central Asia Theme Studies" sponsored by SAGGAS. The lecture was anchored by Yang Zitong, a graduate student of the Eurasian Civilization Feature Graduate Program (ECFGP). The lecture attracted more than 90 teachers and students from inside and outside SZU (including the ECFGP students), who are dedicated to Inner Asia / Central Asia studies.
To start with, Dr. Yun cited the incident that took place at the Brandeis University in the U.S. on November 13, 2020, as an introduction to his inquiry on the Orientalistic origin of the dualistic view of China in American studies of Inner Asia. Dr. Yun pointed out that the Americans’ “Inner Asia Theory” has its origin in the European Orientalism’s traditional conception of Asia.
Firstly, Dr. Yun gave an in-depth analysis of the origin of the dualistic view of China, i.e. the “Scythia-Serica-Sinæ-India” view of Asia in the Greco-Roman period. The famous geographer Claudius Ptolemy divided the Asian region east of Mare Caspium (the Caspian Sea) and Persia into “Scythia”, “Serica”, “Sinæ” and “India” from north to south. Based on an analysis of evidence such as the maps drawn by Ptolemy, Dr. Yun concluded that the Greco-Roman view of Asia constructed by the Europeans was nothing more their imagination of Asia based on legends.
Dr. Yun then expounded on the “Tartaria-China (Cathay)” dual conception of China in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, impacted by the Mongol Empire’s westward campaigns, Europe began to construct a new knowledge base of China and imaginations of the Orient. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the “Tartaria-China” dualism was developed under the influences of Catholic missionaries to China; Matteo Ricci and other westerners discussed the antagonistic relationship between the “Tartars” and “China” from various perspectives such as geography, lifestyle, ethnicity, culture and political relations in their discourses on the history and existing conditions of China, and constructed a macro-narrative system of the “Tartars” conquering “China” based on the history of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.
From the early nineteenth century onwards, European Orientalists began to construct a body of knowledge symbolized by term “Central Asia-China”, which replaced the “Tartaria-China” dualistic view of China, which they considered wanting in “rationality” and “scientific integrity”. The main reason was that they believed the term “Tartaria” originated from European hearsay about the Mongolian Empire in the late Middle Ages and that its meaning had become very ambiguous over the centuries; moreover, as a term with mixed connotations in ethnicity, geography, culture and social psychology, it did not find favor with modern geography which strove to be "scientific" and "precise"; in addition, it was difficult to reconcile “Tartaria” with the group of terms represented by “Asia” in modern European geography, and such difficulties were apt to create conceptual confusion. Then, thanks to the efforts of such scholars as Pinkerton, Klaproth and Humboldt, European academia established the concept of “Greater Central Asia”. And after the Russian conquest of the Central Asian khanates, the narrower definition of “Central Asia”, which mainly referred to the Russian Turkestan and Chinese Xinjiang, were established.
Meanwhile, driven by colonialism and imperialism, societies of Oriental studies and geography across European countries intensified their exploration and study of China and Asia. They further clarified and strengthened the geographic and cultural scope of “China” tailored to their colonial policies. (Pinkerton began using the term “China Proper” in 1806, as an equivalent to the Chinese term “China (Tchon-Koue)”, to refer to the region south of the Great Wall and east of Tibet. The intention of these European orientalists was twofold: firstly, to escalate the institutional differences in the Qing dynasty’s governance into political, economic and even sovereignty differences, only regarding the eighteen provinces as China's homeland and treating China’s vassal states and dependencies as the so-called “Colonial Possessions” of the European powers, in order to apply European international law and state theories to the argument for the legitimacy of advocating the independence of the vassal states of the Qing dynasty, and to implement such advocacy in their diplomatic transactions with China; secondly, to break up China's ethnic and religious solidarity by peddling modern European nationalism and treating the Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui as the ethnic bases on which modern European-style nation-states could be founded separately, so as to “divide and conquer” China. These basic ideas are predominant in the works of European and American Orientalists on Northeast China, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. Some Japanese and Chinese scholars imitated their European and American counterparts by translating “China” as "Shina" or “China Homeland” when drawing maps of China, and thereby imported the Western view of China into China herself. Further, some Japanese scholars and militarists abandoned the use of the Chinese word “Tchon-Koue” and referred to China with the Japanese Han Buddhism term “Shina” with a geographic reference to the European term “China”, thus making “Shina”, along with such geographic concepts as “Manchuria” and “Mongolia”, part of the Japan’s discourse system at the service of its invasion of China.
Next, Dr. Yun explicated the American scholars’ construct of “Inner Asia”. In 1996, the so-called “New Qing History” research circle emerged in the United States, who adopted the research perspective and methodology of the “Inner Asian Studies”, which had a focus on “nomadic culture and society”, and incorporated such post-modern American political theories on ethnicity and identity, in an attempt to discover, within the Westerners’ world history context, the so-called “non-sinocentric” characteristics of the “Steppe Empires” such as the Yuan and Qing dynasties, in order to deconstruct the “theory of “sinicization” in European and American Sinology and the “sinocentric view” occasionally expressed in the Cambridge History of China.
Finally, Dr. Yun concluded that the “Inner Asia Theory” is a derivative of the Eurasian perspective of the New World and Western geostrategic theories, it emphasizes the “civilizational divide” and the independence of “nomadic civilization regions”, reflecting the American academia's precautionary attitude towards the possibility of political and cultural alliance within the continent of Asia. Based on above analysis, Dr. Yun further pointed out that the “copinism” of Chinese scholarship since the late Qing dynasty has led some scholars to overly rely on the “second-hand knowledge” imported from Western academia. Dr. Yun made the critical remark that the Chinese constructs of frontier studies and world history should be more discriminating of foreign terms and theories, and evolve within the context of international cooperation promoted by the “Belt and Road Initiative”.
During the Q&A session, Dr. Yun earnestly answered questions from the audience, who “took away” instruction as well as inspiration from this successful lecture.
