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Acknowledgments
I thank Geremie Barmé, Suvendrini Perera and Nick Knight for their comments on earlier versions of this piece.
Notes
1. Genghis Khan established the Yuan Dynasty in 1206 at which time Mongol power extended from Korea to Hungary and as far south as Vietnam. Kubilai Khan was born circa 1215; one of four brothers, he was the grandson of Genghis Khan. In the 1260s he replaced his brother as the head of the Mongol Empire.
2. While the original text has been lost this is suggested in the earliest surviving Prologue.
3. The Franciscan friar William Rubruck wrote of the Chinese when visiting the Mongol capital of Karakorum, north-west of the Chinese border, in 1253, but never visited China (see Spence, Citation1998, p. 1).
4. Excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan 1797–98 (in A. Allison et al., Citation1983, p. 565).
5. In claiming to have unlocked the treasures of the Orient, traders, travel agents, motel operators and importers of Chinoiserie have also appropriated the Venetian merchant's name.
6. Edward Said defines Orientalism as a “style of thought”, or a form of geographical and spatialised knowledge, which is structured by a relationship of power and based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident”. He also defines Orientalism as an academic/governmental knowledge and a “corporate institution” that has had the power to dominate and restructure the Orient. Said insists on the dynamic interchange that takes place between these three different forms, or indeed, between authors, scholars, administrators and the state (Said, Citation1978, pp. 2–4). While many scholars who work in the field of Asian Studies have been dismissive of the challenge that Said represents for area studies, I believe that critiques of Orientalism, like the one presented by Edward Said, can be productively extended to the representational techniques used by Australian writers to produce China.
7. Despite the fact that Morrison is celebrated as a national exemplar, Australia's greatest China-watcher – Australia's Marco Polo – it is worth remembering that Morrison considered himself first and foremost a member of the British Empire: he wrote for British newspapers, as a British subject, and his reports were used to help facilitate the British imperial project in China. Lo Hui-min suggests that Morrison was “intended as some kind of railway guard to keep watch on China to make sure that she did not get into such a position as to derail the express train of imperialism which was then heading for the heartland of China with gathering speed” (see Lo Hui-min, Citation1978, p. 5).
8. Five years after Morrison's appointment to the London Times another Australian, W. H. “China” Donald, joined the Hong Kong-based China Mail. Later Donald became the China correspondent for the New York Herald. Just as Morrison had reported for British papers, Donald reported for American newspapers. It was some time before Australian newspapers commissioned an Australian reporter to work abroad.
9. As it appears in the Editors' Introduction, ‘The George Ernest Morrison Lectures in Ethnology – An Introduction’, East Asian History 11, June 1994, p. 1.
10. The claim that Polo was a student of Chinese is contested by Igor de Rachewiltz who suggests that Polo “did not ‘mix’ with the Chinese, he never learned their language and was not interested in their ancient culture” (de Rachewiltz, Citation2000, p. 3).
11. The discursive power of the Marco Polo legend is reflected in the large number of texts that refer to him. While Polo's image is linked to the way in which some travellers imagine themselves, elsewhere authors confer historical authority upon his text (G. E. Morrison, Citation1985 [1895]; Maslyn Williams, Citation1967; Brian Johnston, Citation1996 and so on). Others cite Marco Polo because he is inextricably linked to the way that China is imagined throughout the West (Mackerras, Citation1989; Mosher, Citation1990).
12. In a lengthy and painstaking appraisal of Wood's text, Igor de Rachewiltz identifies the large number of contradictions and misinterpretations that vitiate Wood's thesis. Among de Rachewiltz's many criticisms is the fact that the Great Wall did not exist when Polo lived in China. de Rachewiltz claims that the Great Wall was first mentioned in a volume of the Ming cartographic work Kuang-yu t'u in 1579 (see de Rachewiltz, Citation2000, p. 4, or a review that appears in Zentralasiatische Studien 27, 1997).
13. While a range of genres privilege the personal above all else, the personal narrative maintains a different status in anthropological writing. In her contribution to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), Mary Louise Pratt draws attention to the contradiction that exists between personal narrative and objective description within anthropological discourse. Pratt questions anthropology's professed independence from other genres or narrative discourses that are predicated on being there – the “subordinate”, less objective genres of travel books, personal memoirs, journalism and the accounts of missionaries, etc. Pratt asks why anthropology (a formal discipline grounded in cross-cultural discovery) attempts to assert its independence from the neighbouring genres and disciplines that, like it, rely upon ethnography (a form of experiential authority) as the foundation for analysis. In asking this question, Pratt seeks to query the assumption that this independence is based upon anthropology's status as a scientific discourse.
14. While the politically sensitive nature of these trips may have prevented many from publishing a record of their experiences, the academic C. P. FitzGerald and the journalist W. G. Burchett published materials that critiqued the changes that were taking place within the People's Republic. Leslie Haylen, who led an Australian Labor Party delegation to China in July 1957, also wrote of his experience in Chinese Journey (1959).
15. The first Australian tourist party, a group of Australia–China Society (ACS) members, visited the People's Republic in late 1963.
16. Roper visited China as a guest of the Women's Federation of the PRC in 1958 and as a member of the first ACS tour group (1963). During her 1965 trip, Roper organised a film crew to shoot footage for one of the first foreign documentary films about contemporary China. Information about her fifteen trips to China can be found in the National Library of Australia (NLA), CitationManuscripts (MS): 7711.
17. The Austrian author Hugo Portisch uses the image of the umbilical cord in Eye-witness in China (1966); Blainey employs the image of the mussel; Roper refers to Hong Kong as a waiting room.
18. Each author produces a strikingly similar account. There are only minor differences in itinerary, the size of groups they travelled with and the range of places they visited. While Roper, Blainey and Jackson's narratives all deal with events chronologically, Williams' narrative is discontinuous. While omitting much of the day-to-day detail of the tour – the way he is transported, fed and accommodated – Williams' text offers detailed representation of the personalities on the tour: the professor, the capitalist, the physician, the teacher, the interpreter Miss Peng and so on. By contrast, Jackson represents the day-to-day proceedings in painstaking detail.
19. In Suzanne Butler Citation(1974) this form of categorisation is clearly reflected in the text's chapter titles: ‘Introduction’, ‘Daily Life’, ‘Housing, Transport, Food and Shops’, ‘Recreation’, ‘Women and Family Life’, ‘Education’, ‘Medicine’, ‘Language’, ‘Tourism’, and ‘Future’.
20. In Writing Culture, James Clifford suggests that it is important to move beyond the visual as a category for cultural analysis: “Once cultures are no longer prefigured visually – as objects, theatres, texts – it becomes possible to think of cultural poetics that is the interplay of voices, of positioned utterances. In a discursive rather than visual paradigm, the dominant metaphors of ethnography shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech” (Clifford and Marcus, Citation1986, p. 12). Here, I identify the unconscious and uncritical use of visual metaphors in the work of these writers rather than their explicit invocation of ethnographic authority.
21. Blainey does not seem to need to present a political profile and his trip to China is represented as a rather different project, an historian's study of the various manifestations of Communism.
22. Like Jackson, Roper speaks of producing “a fair and objective record of what life in the new China is like” (Roper, Citation1966, p. 6).
23. In claiming that there are both Occidental and Oriental veils of propaganda, Blainey breaks with the tendency exhibited by Roper, Williams and Jackson to assume that propaganda is something that only Communists engage in.
24. In An Australian in China, Morrison undergoes a transformation similar to that experienced by Jackson. He claims: “I went to China with the strong racial antipathy to the Chinese common to my countrymen, but that feeling has long since given way to one of lively sympathy and gratitude, and I shall always look back with pleasure to this journey, during which I experienced, while traversing provinces as wide as European kingdoms, uniform kindness and hospitality, and the most charming courtesy” (Morrison, Citation1895 [1985], p. 2).
25. In Orientalism Said claims: “In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these” (Said, Citation1978, p. 177).
26. There were pockets of the Australian community that also looked at such texts with a good deal more scepticism, even cynicism. A review of Douglas and Meriel Wright's China: Our New Neighbour in the Adelaide Advertiser offers a critical response to new travelogues about China. It reads: “The new wave of visitors can't stop boggling at the overt politicised indoctrination in the preschools. I don't blame them it must be pretty riveting to hear political slogans from babies' lips … I didn't find much new or unusual about the Wrights' tour but, for those who haven't been reading the mass of descriptive material about our new buddy-buddies this quickie will bring them up to date with what we are permitted to know from a brief neighbourly peak over the fence” (Shirley Despoja, Adelaide Advertiser, 27 April 1974).
27. In 800,000,000: The Real China, Australian journalist–academic Ross Terrill explains that when he visited China in 1971 he observed banners that declared: “Make the Foreign Serve China”. Perhaps the best-known example of a foreigner who produced propaganda for China was Edgar Snow. Wilfred Burchett may be considered something of an Australian equivalent. Burchett's China's Feet Unbound Citation(1952) was one of the first texts written by an Australian to celebrate the successes of the Chinese revolution.
28. Myra Roper explains that her visit to the People's Republic in 1958 was designed to illustrate to foreigners what Mao's Communism had done to liberate women in China (Roper, Citation1966, p. 2). Jackson's exaggerated sense of self-importance (which, in one instance, causes him to write to Mao and request an audience with him) contributed to his desire to speak out and tell Australians what China was really like. While he did not meet Mao, he explains he “settle(d) for the Premier”, Zhou Enlai (Jackson, Citation1971, p. 56).
29. In The East is Red, the professor, a member of the tour group who reads Chinese, introduces Maslyn Williams to a copy of a CCP handbook for guides and interpreters (Williams, Citation1967, p. 31). For a more detailed discussion of these handbooks see Brady.
30. It should be noted that Leys/Ryckmans seeks to defend Sinology from the charge of Orientalism. Leys describes Said as “a Palestinian scholar with a huge chip on his shoulder and a very dim understanding of the European academic tradition” (Leys, Citation1984, p. 18). Those who defend Leys' (racist) rejection of Orientalism claim that Leys merely employs the same type of analysis to Said that Said has applied to others; that is, he positioned him according to his racial and cultural background. Said would claim that Leys' response to Orientalism is that of the “nativist” (Said, Citation1986, p. 216). Leys seeks to identify China's own specificity and objects to Said making China indistinguishable from the rest of the “Orient”. This claim is not without merit, for Said does appear to develop Orientalism as a single, consistent discourse that spans a range of different social, political and intellectual trajectories. Despite his rejection of Said, when Leys refers to the way in which one set of binaries about China is replaced by another (Leys, Citation1978, p. 2), or the “foreign devotees'” “unconscious contempt” for China (Leys, Citation1978, p. 7), he could be considered to be constructing a very similar argument to Said.
31. The effort to recruit Experts rather than Reds was a result of China's falling out with the Soviets, at which point Russian experts were withdrawn from China.
32. Here we have more examples of what James Clifford calls the “visual prostheses” used in cross-cultural description.
33. While in Hong Kong, and before he began his journey to the Mainland, Maslyn Williams wrote in his diary: “Observation on Asian women: Western women take to sex as they take to booze – compulsively, hungrily; Asian women take (and give) it naturally like refreshment” (NLA, CitationMS: 3936, Folder 26, Notebook 1, p. 4). Williams omitted this remark from The East is Red.