A book on the de-Westernization of sociology that looks at Europe from a Chinese perspective cannot be but big news. At least since Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, many Western scholars have been aware that the treatment of non-Western knowledges as local, particular, and as such ungeneralizable has gone into the making of Western academic knowledge as universal, generally valid, and unsituated. While subsequent poststructuralist, postcolonial and decolonial critiques have systematically denounced and painstakingly uncovered the historical contexts, the economic structures and/or the ideological mechanisms underlying the global asymmetries of knowledge production, works attempting to reverse-engineer the process by looking at Europe through one of its paradigmatic Others are still scarce.
At a time when, as Roulleau-Berger tells us, it has become impossible for Europe ‘to ignore China’ (p. 8), starting from Chinese sociology in order to reinterpret European sociology would seem to be the perfect choice. However, this is not what the book does. In spite of its ambitious title, the author's claim to participate in ‘a process of decolonial reformulation’ of universality (p. 13) that addresses ethnoscapes of knowledges emerged among Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean sociologists and defined according to shared academic norms ‘against forms of colonial domination of knowledges’ (p. 13) never goes beyond the introduction. The remainder of the book is essentially a comparison of French and Chinese sociologies of the past three decades. As such, it looks for similarities and differences between approaches to mainstream Western sociological topics, such as modernity, social mobility, and individualization, thus providing a conventional comparative analysis of two national cultures of scholarship, rather than the ‘intermediate transnational space’ (p. 11) proposed at the outset as an alternative to provincialized knowledges. While it often points to the influence of Western theoretical production and key empirical issues on Chinese sociology, it never again goes back to the issues of Orientalism, colonial domination, and imperial thought made central in the beginning.
This being said, the comparative approach alone does not reduce the author's claim of contributing to the de-Westernization of sociology to a mere declaration of intent. Roulleau-Berger is serious about taking Chinese sociology seriously, and consistent in doing so. Hers is an impressive overview of a large body of Chinese theoretical work and empirical data. But, while it is not an Orientalist undertaking, it is not a postcolonial or decolonial one, either. The main reason is that, throughout the book, Chinese sociology is almost never treated in its own terms, but through the (however benevolent) filter of mainly French and at times German sociology. The book is divided into seven chapters, structured around the topics of sociology and transnationalism, employment and work, social frontiers and urban segregations, modernities, the subject and the other, state, social conflict, and collective action, inequality and the life-course, and, finally, international and internal migrations. While the first chapter still addresses the silencing of Chinese social scientific knowledge as an instance of academic colonialism, it does so mainly with reference to Bourdieu's sociology of practice and Gaston Bachelard's notion of ‘regional rationalisms’. The circulation of knowledge that Roulleau-Berger invokes as an alternative view on the trajectory of Chinese sociology since 1979 (when it was officially reinstated) and that produced ‘own/personal spaces’ (espaces propres) alongside ‘shared spaces’ (espaces partagés) (p. 31) of knowledge in its interaction with North-American and European sociologies, is, according to the author, best illustrated by showing similarities in the use of sociological methods in Chinese and French sociology. This is subsequently undertaken throughout the rest of the book in relation to the treatment of the above-mentioned issues, with French examples substituting for Western, European, and sometimes Western European sociology and social reality. This undifferentiated use of geographical references, very frequently and off-handedly explained (away) through the qualification ‘European, especially French’ (sociology, example, case) makes the ‘Europe’ in the book's title a mere synecdoche and unwarranted generalizations the rule in a text explicitly directed against them. The attempted comparison between Chinese and ‘European’ sociology is accordingly flawed: While we learn that the idea of a plural modernity is one of the spaces shared by Chinese and European theorists, Roulleau-Berger's main reference is Alain Touraine, who only uses the term in the singular to refer to the unity of Western modernity. There is no engagement with the abundant European literature on multiple, fragmented, or entangled modernities. Likewise, it is unclear what the author means when she states that ‘in European sociology, the term violence has only relatively recently entered academic use’ (p. 126, my emphasis) – unless she restricts it to the French context. Given Hobbes’ notion of the natural inclination of men to violence or Max Weber's theory of the state's monopoly of violence, one would rather be tempted to state that the sociological use of the term ‘violence’ is older than the term ‘sociology’ itself. Where would this then leave Chinese sociology's ‘timid engagement’ (p. 126) with the phenomenon?
While the ‘shared spaces’ are thus incompletely explored with reference to European sociology, the ‘own/personal spaces’ of Chinese sociology are artificially restricted. Although different organizational logics (such as the work unit danwei) and different mechanisms of regulating social mobility (such as the hakou system) characterizing Chinese social reality are reflected in the Chinese sociological apparatus, Roulleau-Berger subsumes China's inequality patterns and transformation processes under the mainstream Western model. An opening statement like ‘Processes of social differentiation are inherent to any type of modernity’ (p. 129) thus not only results in the search for convergences in the trajectory of social differentiation in France and China, but also forgoes the critical potential motivating the author's undertaking: Indiscriminately applying European theories to the Chinese context does not amount to the de-Westernization of sociology, but to the (further) intellectual Westernization of China.
Manuela Boatcă, Freie Universität, Berlin