Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory

• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591714537079
• Author: Leigh K. Jenco
• Subject Matter: Articles

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Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(6) 658 –681
Histories of Thought and
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714537079
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Theory: The Curious
Thesis of “Chinese
Origins for Western
Knowledge,” 1860–1895
Leigh K. Jenco1
Abstract
How is cultural otherness any different from the historical otherness already
found in our existing canons of thought? This essay examines an influential
Chinese conversation that raised a similar question in struggling with its own
parochialism. Claiming that all “Western” knowledge originated in China,
these Chinese reformers see the differences presented by foreign knowledge
as identical to those already authorizing innovation within their existing
activity of knowledge-production. Noting that current academic theory-
production treats the otherness of past authors in a similar way, I argue
that we must broach something like a China-origins claim if we are to see
typically marginalized (“non-Western”) thought as part of what disciplines
our thought, rather than serves simply as its target of inclusion. Doing so, we
blur self/foreign binaries and enable future innovation of thought on radically
new terms.
Keywords
Chinese thought, comparative political theory, history of political thought,
political theory discipline, Yangwu movement
1London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Leigh K. Jenco, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United
Kingdom.
Email: leigh.jenco@gmail.com

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Jenco
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Around 1860, a loosely associated group of Chinese reformers began agitat-
ing for changes to the Confucian civil service curriculum. Wanting to educate
younger elites in mathematics, engineering, and natural science, knowledge
only recently introduced into China by Protestant missionaries, these reform-
ers claimed that such novel Western practices actually developed from
ancient Chinese precedents. The claim was intended not to entrench alle-
giance to existing Chinese thought, but to enable China to contribute to an
established stream of “Western” scientific and technical knowledge.1 Most
interpretations of this wildly popular “China-origins thesis” attribute it to
nativism or a rhetorical strategy. Yet as one of the first attempts by Chinese to
grapple with their own cultural and historical specificity, the thesis sheds
light on more general questions about how to engage putatively foreign
knowledge.
I argue that these Chinese reformers pose Chinese origins for Western
knowledge not because they assume that historically situated difference is
more easily or naturally negotiated than culturally situated difference. Rather,
they intuit how situating difference within a received genealogy inscribes it
as disciplinary (i.e., capable of facilitating meaningful innovation), rather
than an object of assimilation (in which it is represented within and in the
terms of some existing discourse). The China-origins thesis can thus be read
not as a historical claim about actual origins, but a political claim intended to
endow foreign knowledge with recognized “membership” in some existing
practice—in their case, the ru xue (scholarly learning) that constituted legiti-
mate knowledge in late Imperial China. Its advocates ultimately interrogate
rigid binaries between indigenous and foreign knowledge, however, by
exploring how the inscription of difference as one kind of “otherness” (say,
historical) rather than another (say, cultural or foreign) enables certain kinds
of intellectual self-transformations to take place. By identifying Western sci-
ence as a constitutive rather than supplementary part of ru learning, the
China-origins thesis enshrined it as part of those parameters of intelligibility
and analysis that identify future developments as innovations of, rather than
departures from, such learning. The ironic outcome, however, is that in inte-
grating Western science into an existing frame of discourse, these reformers
end up displacing the repositories of (largely Confucian) past thought that
once lent definition to ru learning, and contribute instead to the evolving
criteria of a very different kind of knowledge.
The China-origins thesis may seem outlandish, and its implications unex-
pected, but it throws into sharp relief the consequences of a variety of contem-
porary attempts to engage marginalized bodies of thought. Many current efforts
explore how a comparative theoretical framework can be built on the basis of
shared questions or themes that prevail throughout global conversations on
political life.2 These efforts tend to focus on how typically marginalized (usually

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Political Theory 42(6)
coded as “non-Western”) thinkers can be meaningfully interpreted by differ-
ently-situated Anglophone political theorists, who come to represent these
thinkers within political theory as a means of disturbing its universalist assump-
tions, enhancing the self-reflexivity of its practitioners, or signaling its respect
for global cultures.3 However, even as political theorists acknowledge possible
contributions of such marginalized thought to substantive issues in political
theory, their practices often fail to recognize in such thought the same capacity
to discipline intellectual production as is typically enjoyed by work in North
Atlantic languages4—in the process further encoding such thought as “non-
Western.” Theorists tend to either represent otherness in a way that merely
acknowledges its difference, or draw theoretical inspiration from it in a piece-
meal way without attending to the historically situated discourse that originally
produced it. This is an odd double standard, because political theorists tend to
inscribe the otherness of authors from their own past very much as the China-
origins advocates do: not as targets of representative inclusion but as think-part-
ners who help us to develop a practice we see ourselves as sharing with them.
We confront here an ironic and destabilizing paradox: we must accept
something like the argument of the China-origins reformers if, with respect to
the differently situated knowledge that comparative political theorists and
others are urging us to include in our disciplinary conversations, we are to act
as theorists, rather than ethnographers. The irony consists in the fact that
although this theoretical engagement is originally registered in terms of exist-
ing practices and values, it may ultimately displace them. My essay is
intended to serve as one example of such “theoretical” engagement with non-
Western thought, which models a specific interpretive posture toward source
material. Following the Chinese reformers who organized cultural and his-
torical otherness in more internally self-consistent ways, I seek to demon-
strate not only that, but also how, political theorists might come to be
disciplined by the standards of a differently sited conversation. Although this
approach may not involve manufacturing “Western” origins for that disci-
plinary continuity, it would require us to act as if such knowledge is part of
our own heritage, if we are to avoid assimilating rather than becoming truly
disciplined by it. The point is not that any learning from cultural others will
be beneficial. But the Chinese reform thesis and its aftermath show that tak-
ing such thought seriously does entail coming to terms with a radical possi-
bility: that its terms may eventually come to displace existing criteria for
understanding and evaluating what it is we think we are doing.
The Radical Implications of “China as Origin”
The deeply self-transformative possibilities intimated by the China-origins
thesis emerged from ongoing struggles by Chinese educated elites to

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Jenco
661
establish grounds for what they called “Western Learning” (Xi xue). Beginning
in the 1840s, British gunships increased their military and economic presence
in China, precipitating not only a shift in Chinese political strategy but also
ongoing reflection by educated elites upon the conditions of cultural sustain-
ability. Awed by the technological capabilities of European and American
military forces, concerned scholar-officials, or literati, began urging the Qing
court to include engineering, mathematics, and other such technical knowl-
edge in the basic training of civil servants, which at the time focused exclu-
sively on literary and philosophical familiarity with a series of ancient classics
and their more recent neo-Confucian commentaries. These literati justified
the inclusion of Western knowledge in Chinese discourse either by reading
Western ideas as better-developed complements of Chinese ones, or by iden-
tifying their origins in Chinese inventions subsequently developed by
Europeans.
This thesis of “China as origin” (Xi xue Zhong yuan) “was shared by virtu-
ally all those who advocated technological borrowing [from the Western
nations] in the period between 1860 and 1895” and motivated the reformist
policies of the Yangwu (“foreign affairs”) movement.5 Many early formula-
tors of the thesis, such as Ruan Yuan and Zou Boqi, found what they believed
to be prototypes of algebra, logic, astronomy, and architecture in ancient non-
canonical texts such as the Mozi and Zengzi.6 Over a thirty-year period,
reformers advanced claims about the Chinese origins of everything from...