COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
devout Neo-Confucians were deemed "uncivilized," what about the Westerners
of the nineteenth century who accepted none of the moral or ethical
principles of the Confucian tradition?
The next chapter, entitled "Figuring Sovereignty," picks up the pace
of this same thème and attempts to problematize "China" itself. This is a
worthy objective, the kind of project that should be undertaken by
someone trained in historical linguistics. Liu is, unfortunately, not that
person, as her analyses are continually lessened by wide-ranging, political
charges of racism and the like. Thus, the scholar Frank Dikotter is attacked
(p. 72-73) for inserting "race" into a discussion of Chinese views of the
outside world, and several pages later the Japanese (ail of them?) are
attacked for using the term Shina for China, which she claims was "a
racial marker in Meiji Japan" (p. 79). If this assertion isn't sufficiently
extrême, several lines later we learn that Shina was adopted by the
Japanese "to name a China for the purpose of Japanese colonial conquest."
Again, I think words are given crédit for forces beyond their control.
Nonetheless, the "renaming literally inscribed the désire of impérial Japan
to mimic Western civilization by mimicking Western imperialism. The
mirror of colonial mimicry captured the object of its imitation with a
faithfulness that cast a sinister light back on the exemplarity of the
Western powers that pursued imperialism in the name of civilization"
(ibid.JThere is much spéculation in this chapter about the origin of the term
"China" and its relationship to Sanskrit cïna, believed by many to be its
ancestor and the antécédent of Japanese Shina. This discussion ail but
pleads for a linguist's hand, but alas it never materializes. Instead, we are
taken down a number of roads that become dead ends quickly, often involving
languages that Liu should probably hâve refrained from mentioning
to spare herself certain embarrassment. For example, in rehearsing a
Chinese scholar's argument, she mentions "the Hebrew term Ciyniym from
the Old Testament Book of Isaiah" (p. 264). This is an utterly bizarre
transcription of Biblical Hebrew "Sinim" (the romanization she soon cites
from the King James translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is, incidentally,
préférable to "Old Testament"). Although Isaiah probably knew
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