Sun Ge, "The Signficance of Borders"

Sun Ge, “The Significance of Borders” 

孙歌，“临界的意义“《天涯》[Frontiers] (January 2017), pp. 25-30.

N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019). 
 
Translated by Joshua A. Fogel
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Translator’s introduction
 
Sun Ge 孙歌 (b. 1955) is one of the few female intellectuals included on this site to date, a reflection less of our choices than of the Chinese intellectual world in general, which remains dominated by men, despite some changes in recent years.. Sun also stands in the minority as a dedicated postmodernist in the style of the postcolonial cultural theories of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the English-language journal of the pan-Asian academic group based in Taiwan of which Sun is an active member. Dr. Sun Ge is a member of the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  She received her doctoral degree in political science in the Faculty of Law at Tokyo Metropolitan University in Tokyo. 
 
Sun’s essay appeared in Tianya in 2017 and draws from her introduction to her book, Okinawa: Life on the Border. She makes a case for the self-critical value of “borders” through a disjunctive presentation of her own experience in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the bitter history of Okinawa, and the artistic expression of avant-garde artists. While the language is difficult to follow at times, her point is clear in the end. This is ultimately a pacifist appeal of a leftist activist who finds the postmodern deconstruction of language a valuable antidote to the fatal arrogance of nationalism. She makes her argument about the value of a “border sensibility” as such an antidote through concrete, embodied experiences. This employs, rather than claims, a notable form of feminist analysis.
 
While Sun Ge does not directly engage the other voices in China’s intellectual public sphere—Liberal, Left or New Confucian arguments—she is a frequent speaker at major Chinese universities. She also reflects some of the preoccupation of Left intellectuals, such as Qian Liqun 钱理群. Like Qian, Sun repeatedly invokes China’s great cultural critic, Lu Xun and takes pains to declare that she is just a normal person, suggesting a certain discomfort with her elite status as an intellectual. In a fashion similar to Qian’s focus on non-elites or grassroots (民間), Sun focuses on the dispossessed of Okinawa and Korea. She is clearly speaking in the tradition of subaltern studies. 
  
Translation 
 
I have been going to Japan and Korea for my research just about every year.  After the Japanese earthquake of March 11, 2011 and consequent leakage from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, I was able while spending some time in Japan to get a sense at close range of the initial reactions to the disaster within Japanese society.
 
These disasters are an incomparably fearful event for mankind.  While they consume an enormous human cost, at the same time mankind has gained a harsh opportunity to reflect on the environment in which we live.  The real circumstances which have intentionally or unintentionally been hidden to us in peaceful times suddenly, when disaster falls, only then reveal their reality.  No one wishes for disaster, and those of us who study the history of thought are the same.  However, when disaster strikes, students of the history of thought have a responsibility to observe and analyze the real mechanisms with which “normal society” must rid itself of its covering when disaster suddenly strikes.
 
I unexpectedly encountered this lesson in 2011.  Drawing on the aftereffects of the Fukushima atomic power plant leak, I observed various aspects at work in Japanese social life and also the actual operating mechanisms of Japan’s state structures.  Of course, the most direct result draws on the specialized shelves of publications on the nuclear issue which grow like mushrooms after a spring rain in bookstores, large and small.  I found several convincing specialized works, gained a rudimentary understanding of the impact of nuclear power plants and nuclear accidents on daily human life.  I also came to understand one basic fact: the serious imbalance between investment in developing nuclear power and investment in handling nuclear waste means that nuclear power plants in times of ordinary operations are high-level apartment houses without toilets.  Therefore, handling nuclear waste always uses a method of “dilution” to stealthily recycle radioactive matter back into the living environment upon which we rely.  However, after the nuclear accident erupted, the electrical power company could not afford the enormous expense of the clean-up.  What’s more, because the follow-up investigation of nuclear contamination and the fact that such a study might harm the company’s interests, data on the most serious contamination in 2011, how much contamination of food and water the Japanese may receive, scarcely registers on the radiometer at all.
 
Given such a grave imbalance in the news, I concentrated my attention those days on the psychological aspect of human society.  How much do people long for a return to normal life, even if that means avoiding the big issue and focusing on the trivial, even to the point of self-delusion, supporting the impetus to survival.  Like the Japanese, I checked online for the contamination news issued daily by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and went out to buy certain foods one especially likes for safety sake.  I have come to truly understand during those days the genuinely helpless, as Lu Xun depicted it in his “I Want to Deceive People” (我要骗人)—this aside, are there any other options?
 
Times change, five years have passed before one knows it.  Five years in light of radiated material with a half-life of several hundred to 1,000 years is effectively meaningless, although Japanese society had in fact already survived a crisis period and returned to tranquility.  I visited Tokyo in the summer of 2016. And when I was returning home, I lined up at the airport to go through the boarding process, and I very carefully inquired of the Chinese person behind me who had lived in Japan for several decades: What’s the current status of the contamination?  She angrily glared at me and said: What contamination is there in Tokyo?  Tokyo’s very safe!