7/30/2019 1990 Reviewed work(s) The Asiatic Mode of Production in China. by Timothy Brook

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Arif DirlikSource: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 625-627Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2057782 .Accessed: 10/08/2011 17:30

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7/30/2019 1990 Reviewed work(s) The Asiatic Mode of Production in China. by Timothy Brook

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BOOK REVIEWS-CHINA AND INNER ASIA 625

interesting for being based on familiarity" (p. 201). The other section ("AmericaRediscovered") deals with travellers from the People's Republic since the normal-

ization of diplomatic relations in the late 1970s. "The mainland writers marvel atexotic America and its technology, though their naive enthusiasm is tempered bya fear of the menacing aspects of big-city life" (p. 242), as is epitomized by ZhangJie's paranoid description of New York City in 1982.

In the introduction and afterword, Arkush and Lee compare and contrast theseChinese views of the United States with, on the one hand, European accounts ofthe U.S. and, on the other, American accounts of China. They find particularlystriking the differences between the Chinese and the European views: Europeanimages of American boorishness, egalitarianism, and religious morality are, theyclaim, "all but entirely absent from Chinese accounts" (p. 5). The Chinese instead

stress the technological accomplishments of the U.S., American dynamism and vigor,but also "[tihe isolation and loneliness of American life" (p. 11). Another recurrentChinese criticism is the unfilial behavior of young Americans toward their parents.Arkush and Lee also provide useful prefatory notes to each section and each selec-tion. However, they present the selections with a minimum of annotations andrarely take issue with an author's observations. They also fail to include an index.

Arkush and Lee state that "In choosing the selections, we looked to works thatwere either representative or of special interest" (p. 12). It would appear that inmany instances they may have put interest ahead of representativeness. RegardingYin Haiguang, for example, they note that "Much of what he found in Americahe liked, including a political liberalism that he contrasted with Guomindang au-thoritarianism at home. But more interesting is what he did not like" (p. 209).They then proceed to quote not Yin's praise for American political institutions buthis distaste for American informality. Similarly, Zou Taofen's sympathetic accountof the plight of the black people in Alabama in 1935 was probably not represen-tative of Chinese views of American blacks then or now. In short, the selections inthis anthology, while tremendously interesting, may be more suggestive than de-finitive.

EDWARD RHOADS

University of Texas at Austin

The Asiatic Mode of Production n China. Edited (with an Introduction) byTIMOTHY BROOK. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xi,204 pp.

Politics has been integral to Chinese Marxist historiography since its beginningsin the late 1920s. The product of efforts to resolve problems of revolution through

social analysis, Marxist historiography was to be embroiled in ensuing years in theimmediate political questions thrown up by its revolutionary environment. Not onlydid political allegiance more often than not determine the choice of interpretivestrategy within a Marxist framework, but political change also had immediate ef-fects in shifts in the domination of the historical field by competing interpretivestrategies. This was especially the case after 1949 when organizational regulationbecame an effective force shaping the practice of history.

The studies compiled in this collection chronicle one such shift within ChineseMarxist historiography: the surge of interest in the application to Chinese historyof Marx's concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) that accompanied the

7/30/2019 1990 Reviewed work(s) The Asiatic Mode of Production in China. by Timothy Brook

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626 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

radical political changes of the late 1970s. After a few initial (and rather feeble)attempts to apply it to China at the very origins of Marxist historiography, the

AMP was absent as a significant issue in Chinese historical writing until this mostrecent revival. Its revival in the late 1970s in China may be viewed as part of aworldwide resurgence of interest in the concept that had gotten under way in Europeand the Soviet Union in the 1960s (the Chinese discussion called upon Europeanworks on the subject, such as Umberto Melotti's Marx and the Third World); andthe revival was due not to official encouragement, but to relaxation of official controlof history and to a new openness to the world that made possible challenges toofficial historiography. But it was also intimately connected with the ideologicalchanges in China that accompanied the political shift of the late 1970s; in partic-ular, a change in perception from the social to the political sphere as the locus of

China's most fundamental problems. The reasons for the repudiation of the AMPin the thirties had been complex ones (including its banishment from historiographyby political fiat following the Leningard Conference of 1931); but one such reasondirectly pertinent to problems of revolution had been a tendency on the part ofthose who portrayed China as an Asiatic Society to concentrate on the centrality ofpolitical power in such societies, which implied that change in the configurationof political power should have precedence over social revolution in defining the tasksof revolutionary change. It is not surprising, therefore, that the issue should havecome forth once again when, in the late 1970s, emphasis in politics shifted fromcontradictions within society to a purportedly more fundamental contradiction be-tween state and society.

And yet, as Timothy Brook correctly reminds us, it would be reductionist toview the discussion of the AMP merely in political terms, and ignore its impli-cations as history. Marxist historiography has been political all along; and it wason account of its radical vision of politics that it was able to open up radically newways of thinking about the past (a clear distinction needs to be drawn here betweenpolitical sensitivity and vision, and the political or organizational regulation of his-tory). This discussion, too, the editor tells us, has brought a new critical awarenessinto historical thinking; this time within prevailing Marxist historiography nd againstit. The selections in the volume have been chosen with care and sensitivity in il-lustrating this point: not only do they convey a good sense of the broad range ofinterpretations that have emerged from efforts to resolve the contradiction betweentheory and history, but they also indicate that the discussion has brought Chinesehistorians to a more critical appreciation of Marxism as historical theory. This par-ticular debate may not have led to a radical rewriting of China's past; but in thecritical awareness it has engendered, it has brought some historians to a sophisti-cated appreciation of Marxism as an interpretive strategy, which certainly is animprovement over its representation in official orthodoxy as an iron-clad naturisticsocial "law."

I do not agree with the editor's cavalierly psychologistic observation that theunilinear scheme of history which has long dominated Chinese Marxist historiog-raphy was the product of some Chinese "anxiety" about being excluded from therest of the world, which ignores the significant part questions of revolution playedin the choice of interpretation. Neither is it to be ignored that while the AMPreintroduces multilinearity into the Marxist conception of history, it does so at aprice: both in ignoring complex problems of revolutionary change imbedded insociety, but also in introducing into Marxism a culturalist concept that is hegemonicin its denial of validity to histories other than the European-capitalist. The con-

7/30/2019 1990 Reviewed work(s) The Asiatic Mode of Production in China. by Timothy Brook

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BOOK REVIEWS-CHINA AND INNER ASIA 627

frontation between the two views is to be welcomed, however, because in the con-tradictions it presents it may release Marxist historiography in China from the cat-egorical (and no less hegemonic) unilinear view of history (of Stalinist origin) thathas constricted it for so long. As this most recent debate has begun to wane already,we may only hope that the issues it raised are not lost to Marxist historiographyin China as with past debates. The editor and the other translators of the studiesin this volume are to be congratulated for making these important issues availablefor a reading public outside of China specialists.

ARIF DIRLIKDuke University

China and Its National Minorities. Autonomy r Assimilation? By THOMASHEBERER. Translated by Michael Vale. New York: M. E. Sharpe,1989. xiii, 165 pp. $39.95.

China's Minority Nationalities. Edited by MA YIN. Beijing: Foreign Lan-guages Press, 1989. v, 450 pp.

Given the growing interest in China's minorities and the dearth of informationin English, these two books, translations of German and Chinese works, representthe first substantial attempts to address all of China's fifty-five minority nationalitiessince June Dreyer's China's Forty Millions (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1976). LikeDreyer, Heberer derives most of his information from an impressive combing ofChinese journal and newspaper reports; the book updates Dreyer but does not giveus much more firsthand information on the minorities themselves. This is unfor-tunate, since the author claims to be "an anthropologist, sinologist, and politicalscientist," who "lived and worked" in China from 1977 to 1981, with trips to"minority regions" from 1982 to 1988 (p. 165). Instead of personal observationsor extensive interviews with local informants and officials, however, we are intro-duced to most of the minority issues from the perspective of the substantial Chineseacademic press (referred o generally only by the journal reference itself, rather thanthe author, which is standard procedure for newspaper citations, but an unfortunateoversight when dealing with more substantive academic articles). Though a wealthof information is provided in statistical tables and diagrams based on the Chinesereferences, there is little questioning of the sources themselves; the data is presentedraw. As a translation, Heberer's book also suffers from rather stilted English (withsuch neologisms as "animatism" pp. 102, 111), and citations of secondary sourcesin German even when they are available in English, such as those by Mao Zedong,Sun Yatsen, Donald Maclnnis and Max Weber, with little reference to the Englishlanguage social science literature on China or its minorities.

Despite these limitations as a research tool, Heberer's book is an excellent in-troduction to such contemporary minority issues as the history of China's nationalitypolicy, the problematic identification of the minorities in the 1950s (and the on-going debate, with such peoples as the Chinese Jews, Sherpas, and Khmer stillseeking recognition), the impact of the Cultural Revolution, the economic devel-opment of Yunnan province (with 24 minority groups alone), population and birth-