Discourses of Weakness in Modern China: Historical Diagnoses of the "Sick Man of East Asia." ed. by Iwo Amelung (review)

From the late nineteenth century, when Qing China suffered a series of military defeats and "national humiliation" at the hands of Japanese and European powers, to the early 1940s, Chinese officials and scholars created a cache of references to the weakness of China in the face of imperialism and foreign aggression. They established and explained China's links with other nations in the world and sought both inspiration and lessons from them for elevating China in the global hierarchy of national power. Taking its cue from Rebecca E. Karl's conceptualization of nationalism as a "global historical problematic," this book examines how the metaphor of the "Sick Man" in Chinese discourses of weakness has produced a distinct form of Chinese nationalism that "can be consumed and maybe even enjoyed" (p. 14). A collection of papers presented at an international conference held at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, in December 2015, within the framework of the Collaborative Research Cluster "Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes," funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the book argues for a more historically grounded understanding of contemporary China's national identity, self-image, and self-representation. Featuring mostly German and mainland Chinese scholars, the book ultimately traces the current Chinese government's obsession with sovereignty and fear of foreign intervention in its internal affairs. It also suggests how China, with its innovativeness and economic might, has turned the tables on Europe in recent years, forcing Europe to generate its own discourses of weakness with which Europe's China historians have had to grapple through a comparative lens.

Running to almost 600 pages, this massive book is divided into four parts. The first part, "Examining the Sick Man—Describing Symptoms of Weakness," explores the development of the Sick Man metaphor in China. As the four essays in the first part suggest, Chinese elites created and deployed discourses of weakness to define China as a modern polity that was enmeshed in global structures. In doing so, they clarified what modernity meant for China and what China had to do—or not do—to be modern and respectable in the global family of nations. The second part, "Diagnosing the Sick Man—Divided, Imperiled, Humiliated," discusses the concepts of extraterritoriality, national ruin, and social Darwinism in relation to the decline and disintegration of the Chinese nation. The five essays in the second part reveal that Chinese intellectuals held a Darwinian, realpolitik worldview, in which war, interstate rivalry, and global competition took center stage, and China must learn to adapt and survive in the harsh world of diplomatic realism and military conflicts. The third part, "Prognosis for the Sick Man—Ruin, Resistance, and Restoration," is composed of three essays that delve into the Chinese appropriation of foreign knowledge and contextualize the Chinese discourses of weakness in the world. In the discourses, the partition of Poland was a particularly popular and striking trope, which soon developed into a nationalist symbol, a specter of national ruin that China must avoid at all costs. For Chinese intellectuals, India, a supposedly civilizational nation like China, was another prime example of what could happen to their nation if they did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The fourth part, "Treating the Sick Man—Coexistence, Science, and Profit," highlights the rallying power of Chinese discourses of weakness in "awakening" and mobilizing much of the Chinese nation for the cause of overcoming the peril of total annihilation. The three essays in the fourth part show how ideas such as pan-Asianism and scientific progress gained credence in print media among increasingly educated and literate Chinese. The ideas were widely debated as possible solutions to China's weakness, and the public debates reflected a Chinese nation that had come to terms with its weakness. In the present day, however, this has been "overcompensated" for with hyper-defensive diplomatic...