(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
following a European model of institutional governance spreading from the centre to the
periphery, in East Asia institutions spread from the periphery to the centre” (2007, 245). If we
are using the word “centre” to politically theorize the identity make-up of the West and the East,
it is crucial to note that, in the above etymologies, the point of reference in the pair of compasses
is fixed in the Greek and Latin roots but not in the Chinese root. The Chinese etymology of
“centre” aids in this argument that the word “centripetal” is an inaccurate use in the description
of Pan-Asian film productions because it gestures to a “centre-seeking” quality. What we have,
instead, are the co-figurative of twin foci, the impact of which can also be felt contrariwise, thus
engendering contingent geopolitical identities. The term “Pan-Asian Cinema” itself denotes
global filmmaking, reminiscent of Chen Shaochun’s “transnational allegory”, suggesting the
simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal forces as consequences of disjuncture and difference.
Callahan’s thesis which has East Asia constituted centripetally and predicated upon social and
economic networks, is derived from Tu Weiming’s Cultural China, figured in the latter’s essay
as a living tree: “Tu Weiming’s ‘Cultural China: The Periphery as the Centre’ deserves detailed
consideration because it propose a mode of cultural governance for a transnational community.
Using the centre/periphery logic of power, Tu posits a non-ethnic, non-territorial notion of
community that problematizes both narrow and universal prescriptions for identity: ‘An
underlying theme … is the emergence of a cultural space (a symbolic universe) that both
encompasses and transcends the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that
normally define Chineseness’” (2007, 249). This reading ushers in Ferdinand de Saussure’s
example of the tree, which is arguably of import because of the discussion of “natural” imagery
used in literary discourses but it is exploited here to signal the naturalizing process that underpins
any ideological extrapolation, a non-natural semantic verticality because it is enforced. Tu’s
Cultural China may be considered by Chen and Callahan as a more apposite image of Greater
China with the three universes of Greater China (Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore included),
Diaspora China and the third China comprising scholars and writers of Chineseness, an inclusive
socio-economic network widening at the top. But the stake that is unaddressed here is this: if one
reconsiders the Marxian concept of the superstructure which is given rise by the economic base,
where politics is concealed by the economic and cultural focus, a critique further enhanced by
Louis Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses, then Callahan’s argument may be flawed in
attributing East Asian’s modes of governance as non-institutional. It must be said that I agree
that Asian regional integration is predicated upon informal ethnic and social ties but this does not
mean that politics is not involved. East Asia’s emphasis on the cultural and the economic
constituting facets masks the political underpinnings of the very economic and social networks
that provide regional integration and community in diversity.
Cheng refers to Tu’s “Cultural China” in his description of what he means by transnational
dimension of the national allegory in an era of globalization: “Contrary to the ‘political China,’
the transnational sense of Chinese identity implies a ‘cultural China.’ ‘Cultural China’ is
employed by Tu Weiming to elaborate on the contours of a symbolic universe that both
encompasses and transcends the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that
normally define China (1994, v). In his testimony to the cultural identity of China rather than its
political identity, one which would have its focus on Greater China, he continues: “In the project
of ‘cultural China,’ Tu tries to deconstruct the cultural authority of geopolitical China. He wants,
instead, to ‘explore the fluidity of Chineseness as a layered and contested discourse to open new
possibilities and avenues of inquiry, and to challenge the claims of political leadership (in
Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore be the ultimate authority in a matter as significant as
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