Content area
Full Text
THE POLITICS OF IMAGINING ASIA. By Wang Hui; edited by Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 360 pp. US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-05519-3.
Wang Hui is now established as one of the foremost thinkers in the humanities from China following upon the publication of his four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought and other translations. In this latest collection of his translated essays, there is a certain poignancy that a casual reader might miss. These writings embed a pervasive struggle between a commitment to the modern nation-state that is a rising China and the idealism of socialist anti-imperialism with a wider commitment to regional and global justice.
The first essay, "The Politics of Imagining Asia," lays out the framework to think of the relationship between these two commitments, which, to be sure, Wang himself does not perceive as one of struggle or tension. The modes by which imperial China was linked and managed relationships with its neighbours to the south, east, north and west through the tribute system, networks, trade, etc., is contrasted here and in a later chapter with the nation-state system which Asian societies had to willy-nilly participate in to survive in the modern world. Thus the imagination of Asia will have to draw upon these historical resources to form a non-imperialist relationship that in turn must transform the global order established over the last few centuries. At the same time, however, Wang Hui is clear that...