Thinking China Through “Order” – III

The previous essays, which approached China as “without an alphabet” and “without a voice” in the context of its relation to writing, were written with a question in mind—a question we hear often and are frequently asked at a time when, by looking at developments around the world, we increasingly feel that we stand at a new historical threshold: “Can China establish a world order?” Although I had thought these essays would be shorter and would come to an end within at least three or four installments, this question remained in the background throughout. To tell the truth, I had no intention at first of writing on such a subject at all. Yet the insistence of Ahmet Özcan, the editor-in-chief of Kritik Bakış, who kept saying, “Why don’t we also take a look at China?”, eventually led me, at least from my own vantage point, to dwell to some extent on the question: “Can China establish a world order?”

But was it possible to answer the question, “Can China establish a world order?”, in any other way? Perhaps. Yet any answers to be given through international rivalries or geopolitical developments are destined to remain as ambiguous as those rivalries or developments themselves. Moreover, to think about how China (or any other non-Western country) is imagined by placing at the forefront such empty and abstract notions as human rights, democracy, or the rule of law; or to embark upon an analysis by calculating the global character of the capital flowing into China and the ways in which the capital accumulated in China is employed; or again to present a chronology of China by tracing the course of its political and historical developments—all this would amount to underestimating other elements inherent in the idea of order (nizam). In these essays on China, I have tried to undertake a brief excursion through some of those elements.

Still, by making these warnings, I do not mean to suggest that I answer positively the question of whether China can establish a worldwide, universal, or all-encompassing order. Frankly, I do not have an answer to the question of whether China can establish an order at all. Yet I can readily say that the prevailing way of thinking about China is imperial in orientation. This itself is another issue—one that reveals what is actually meant by the idea of order, while at the same time underestimating other elements that ought to be inherent within it.

Let us consider either the movement toward alphabetization in China itself, or the strategic thinking behind the fact that a China which abandoned its alphabetization efforts in 1958 returned to a form of writing that it claims has existed since ancient times and, moreover, in 2017 revalorized its characters—especially its ancient scripts—by redefining them, no longer as a “national burden” or, to recall the expression of Lu Xun, as a “terrifying legacy,” but rather as a “national heritage,” organizing various activities to this end. One thing is certain: to think of China as “without an alphabet” or “without a voice” is inadequate. If there exists a Western metaphysics stretching from Plato to NATO, and if that metaphysics is logocentric, then in China there are things that occupy its place—things that present to us their own modes of encompassing, much as the West presents its own “history of writing” as though it were grammatology. To think otherwise would already mean that we are confronted with a transformed China. It is sufficient only to know that, depending on where we stand and provided that calligraphy is set aside, we must possess the discernment to judge what is pictographic writing, what is ideographic writing, what is (as is always said) alphabetic writing, and what is writing worthy of being read.

Otherwise, just like a struggle over capital, it turns into a struggle over writing. And a struggle over writing consists in arbitrarily assigning meanings to signs whose foundations are conventional—including the “letters” or “characters” inscribed on paper. There are certain accounts suggesting that Samuel Morse, who designed the Morse alphabet in 1851 for the “rapid memorization of the code through short syllabic alphabets,” endowed the codes based on the alphabet he designed not only with investments of capital, but also with other kinds of “investments”—imperial investments. According to these accounts, Samuel Morse also prepared a “guide” for the codes he developed, and this guide stated that in the code, the letter A (. – – ) should be memorized as “Ag-ainst,” and the letter B ( – – . . . ) as “bar-ba-ri-an.” Thus, the first two letters of the English alphabet are expressed in the international Morse code as “against barbarians.” The Morse alphabet then finds itself confronted by the Olympics, which make it possible to use the alphabet or writing characters of the host country.

Moreover, the guide in question was also used by American soldiers during the First World War (for this information, see page 8 of Lydia H. Liu’s The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making). Yet this changes neither the code itself nor the intellectual framework within which it was developed. Indeed, what truly deserves reflection is to try to grasp what it means—not only for the present epoch but also for other epochs—that the Chinese, too, could easily make use of such a code.

Or rather, should we be surprised when we learn that the communication system based on signaling with flags or lights—designed by Colonel Albert J. Myer, who served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army, and known as the “air telegraph”—was in fact a system Myer devised by observing how Native Americans communicated during military campaigns conducted against them? If, whether written or visual, the foundations of signs turn out, quite unexpectedly, to lie with the so-called savage American natives, then the meanings of “barbarian” and “savage” themselves must undergo a transformation. In other words, in a war where perhaps Samuel Morse’s (. – – ) confronted his ( – – . . . ), and where the latter were massacred—or even subjected to genocide—by the former in order to make room for themselves as a “homeland,” accompanied moreover by allegedly Biblical and allegedly spiritual slogans such as “errand in the wilderness” and “Manifest Destiny,” with the surviving handful confined to reservations, the irony of employing, for a technological purpose, a sign language learned from those very so-called “barbarians” is hardly something that can go unnoticed.

Lydia H. Liu discusses how the word yi or the character 夷, which in Chinese means “foreigner,” “alien,” or “non-Chinese,” came to acquire the meaning of “barbarian.” In other words, the character yi (夷), which possessed a usage similar to that by which Arabs called others Ajam and Greeks called others “barbarians,” was transformed into “barbarian” in its modern sense. Certainly, when one considers that the Greek word “barbarian” may not originally have embodied such categorical meanings as “savage,” “uncivilized,” or “coarse” in the sense we understand today, and that—even if used pejoratively—it may simply have referred to those who did not speak Greek, that is, may have operated at the level of language alone, then the reasons behind such a transformation in the Chinese character yi (夷) become particularly intriguing.

[Two notes for those interested. The first concerns the character yi (夷): At the very beginning of The Legacy Left to the Göktürks, *Gürhan Kırılen of the Department of Sinology at Ankara University’s Faculty of Language, History and Geography makes a noteworthy observation concerning how the Chinese defined themselves and others. He states that characters including Yi (夷), as well as Di (狄), Rong (戎), Man (蠻), and Hu (胡), although generally translated as “barbarian” by Western sinologists ranging from nineteenth-century scholars such as Julien, Chavannes, and Eberhard to contemporary sinologists such as Di Cosmo, in fact both indicate directions and serve to designate certain peoples or tribes outside the Chinese world. Therefore, he argues that neither Yi (夷) nor the others can properly be translated as “barbarian”; that such a rendering is an abstraction arising from Eurocentric thought; and that the Chinese expressions are instead more closely “connected with geographical directions and with political and cultural affiliations.” In this context, Kırılen suggests that equating Yi (夷) with “barbarian” is, in reality, “a translation” reinforced by “the legacy that Western sinologists inherited from early missionaries.”

The second note concerns Ajam and related attributes, and perhaps also points toward the broader framework of all our writings on “writing.” The designation Rumi, once used in Anatolia, though no longer capable of conveying today that former inclusiveness if employed now, should be thought together with Arab, Ajam, and Rum. Those who described themselves as Rumi did not render themselves an “other” by distinguishing themselves from the Arab, the Ajam, or the Rum. Rather, perhaps they signaled that they possessed a quality transcending the relationship among them. Thus, for instance, Mevlana’s being Rumi signifies that, although written in Persian, his Masnavi cannot be read as one would read a Shahnameh in Ajam or an Odyssey in Romania [which, for some reason, modern historiography calls Byzantium, and for which “Byzantine Research Centers” are even established despite the nonexistence of such an imperium]. Ruminess indicates that the Masnavi is not to be read merely as a poetic text. Yet this distinction does not signify making oneself an “other”; rather, it signifies encompassing the Arab, the Ajam, and the Rum and passing beyond them. For this reason, although the Masnavi was written in Persian, it has never been read in Anatolia in the way it is still read in Iran, namely as Firdausi’s Shahnameh. As another Rumi, Eşrefoğlu Rumi, frequently reminds us in Müzekki’n-Nüfûs, it has been read by being clothed in a “Turki garment” or by being “turned toward Turki,” and it is still read in this way today.]*

Lydia H. Liu notes that the character yi (夷) gave rise to an international crisis in 1858. Recalling once again the claim that this character, although generally not used in a racial sense, designated peoples lying outside the cultural and political sphere of influence of China, which regarded itself as the “Central Country,” the crisis in question emerged during the Anglo-Chinese Treaty signed in Tianjin after the Opium War. Article 51 of the treaty prohibited the use of the character yi. To ensure this, Article 50 stipulated that all official correspondence sent by the representatives of “Her Majesty the Queen” to Chinese authorities would henceforth be in English; although a Chinese version would continue to accompany such correspondence for some time, in the event of any divergence of meaning between the English and Chinese texts, the representatives of Her Majesty the Queen would accept the meaning expressed in the English text as the “correct meaning.”

Thus, through the character yi (夷), a principle effectively came into being according to which the “correct meaning” could be expressed in English. What is remarkable is the transformation undergone by the character 夷, which at least did not directly contain the meaning of “barbarian”: first into the Latinized form yi, and then into the English meaning “barbarian.” Henceforth,

夷 = yi = barbar.

This equivalence becomes dominant, superseding the other meanings inherent in the character 夷. From that point onward, it is the English meaning “barbarian” that determines the character 夷. In Lydia H. Liu’s concise formulation, any attempt thereafter to violate the equivalence 夷 = yi = barbar, guaranteed and secured by treaty, “runs the risk of violating international law itself.”

In fact, after this particular point of passage, imagining a Chinese typewriter ought to have been like embarking upon a fantastic archaeological journey. Indeed, another aspect of such a fantastic archaeological journey ought to have been Byung-Chul Han’s account—which appeals both to Western eyes and seemingly accords with Chinese thought as well—in which he attempts to explain China through the notion of the “counterfeit”: a Chinese mentality constituted by a “process” devoid of any essence, substance, core, being, or logos, and therefore inherently deconstructive. Likewise, Derrida’s grammatology—conceived, on the one hand, as a “history of writing” based on the Chinese ideograph, which Leibniz, among others, who imagined he understood China through missionaries’ letters and travel accounts, took as a model for constructing a universal language; and, on the other hand, as the “trace” of grammatology understood as psychic “processes,” which Derrida sought to oppose to ethnocentrism and logocentrism through Freud’s writings on “writing”—ought to have remained a discovery inaccessible no matter how deeply one excavated in such an archaeological expedition.

Yet the matter is not entirely so. For this very “juncture” already brings China and “order” together. But, strangely enough, the same point of passage also reveals all the implications—and therefore all the deficiencies—of the representation of China as though it were something ideographic.

Still, one more point should be added: the fact that violating the equivalence

夷 = yi = barbar

came to be regarded as a violation of “law” and “international law,” and therefore as something warranting war, itself demonstrates the (new) encompassing power of the character yi. If the Chinese can no longer refer to the English as 夷 = yi in the sense of “foreigner” or “alien,” and if the word 夷 = yi has acquired the meaning of “barbarian” through English intervention, then the equivalence

夷 = yi = barbar

also establishes the equivalence

Chinese = English.

The Chinese, who emerged defeated from the Opium Wars, in which calling the British 夷 = yi had been prohibited, will themselves no longer be called “barbarians.” It is precisely international law that produces this belief, and international “order” is the “order” that serves to sustain it.

Can the Chinese establish an international “order”? This question resembles imagining a Chinese typewriter; and answering it is equivalent to undertaking the archaeology of such a typewriter. This brings us back to the point from which we began: the Beijing Olympics did not alter the Olympic stage; they merely contented themselves with arranging the order of the Olympic parade in a manner befitting their own “tradition.” And this is, before one even begins to think of a Chinese grammatology, as if a Chinese dragon entered a stage that had already been Greek from the outset. If there are other meanings to it, I do not know them.