PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper discusses debates on Chinese university discussion boards in order to ask why narratives on “modernization” and Chinese “deficiency” and “backwardness” constitute such powerful discourses on the grassroots level in China. This is noticeable, because these discourses adapt a hierarchy of modernity from colonial discourses and they refer to colonial experiences in order to prove that a backward China has to change urgently. The paper argues that discourses on modernization and Chinese deficiency can become immensely pervasive because they are reproduced by authors on the internet in their attempts to produce a counter-discourse against either western or Chinese institutional discourses. These counter-discourses are, however, caught within a dual power structure: on the one hand, the dominant position of Chinese state discourse within China itself, and, on the other hand, the global domination of western discourses, often set in opposition to the Chinese government. In order to articulate a critique on either one of these discourses, authors respectively appropriate concepts from the oppositional institutional discourse. Yet both of these seemingly “contradictory” institutional discourses reproduce a hierarchy of modernity where China is portrayed as backwards and therefore inferior. Thus, the counter-discourses are trapped between seemingly alternative positions, which nevertheless both reproduce the same discourse of modernity and backwardness.