Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s <em>China Mountain Zhang</em>

• Main Author: Christopher T. Fan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship Publishing, University of California 2015-03-01
• Series: Journal of Transnational American Studies
• Subjects: orientalism; maureen mchugh; china mountain zhang; racial form; racial formation; neoliberalism; critical realism; georg lukacs
• Online Access: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n70b1b6

<p>Christopher T. Fan argues that McHugh’s award-winning 1992 science fiction novel perceives the twilight of the American Century by offering a “critical realism,” to use Georg Lukács’s phrase, of postsocialist US–China interdependency. In other words, it offers a form in which we perceive ourselves as subjects and objects of the twenty-first century world-system’s most important bilateral relationship. Moreover, as a novel about US–China <em>interdependency</em>, it implicitly critiques the binary Orientalism that structures the rapidly growing body of work on “techno-Orientalist” formations. Fan's analysis thus extends arguments about American Orientalism’s non-Manichean formations (Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Colleen Lye) into the postsocialist era.</p><p>The novel’s near-future, China-centric world analogizes McHugh’s personal crises of professional desire as a precarious laborer in New York City, with the massive reorientation of desires from Maoist politics to market-directed individuality that she witnessed among her students when she taught in China from 1987–1988. Chinese racial form plays a crucial mediating role in the novel because it reflects the revival of Confucian humanist discourse in reform-era China as a way to focus a national project of rapidly generating capitalist desire. Finally, by describing US–China interdependency, this article also generates a theory of US–China neoliberalism that corrects for universalist, Euro-American accounts of neoliberal subject formation (Lauren Berlant), as well as insufficiently subject-sensitive accounts (Aihwa Ong).</p>