Barthes in China

[...] For Barthes, however, China is “not at all exotic, not at all disorienting,” and by that same token, he finds it utterly uninspiring. The country offers him nothing to work with, nothing like pachinko or haiku; it remains stubbornly opaque and devoid of nuance. “All these notes will probably attest to the failure, in this country, of my writing (in comparison with Japan),” he admits. “In fact, I can’t find anything to note down, to enumerate, to classify.” He makes a few half-hearted attempts at semiotic flight — calling the ubiquitous tea thermoses “fetish objects,” for instance — but these never really get off the ground.

“Chinois” in French can mean bizarre, complicated, or incomprehensible: “c’est du chinois” functions much the same way that “it’s all Greek to me” does in English. (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film La Chinoise, about a group of young French Maoists, plays on just this meaning.) But the surprising fact revealed by the notebooks is that China is not, for Barthes, particularly chinois at all. His disappointment at the country’s lack of foreignness is echoed by some of his companions, who feel they might as well be in East Berlin, or some Soviet country. For the Sinophiles among the French Left, China held the promise of revolution only insofar as it was essentially different from the West and from models of existing communism. By coming to the country, the Telquelians’ disappointment was the result of, as Michael Wood put it in his 2009 review of Carnets du voyage en Chine in the London Review of Books, “an over-exposure to an anti-aura.”

[...] 

After lunch with a group of Europeans who have lived in China for a long time, Barthes identifies two perspectives on the part of the foreigners. One attempts to speak “from the inside: clothes, rejection of the foreign restaurant, bus and not taxi, Chinese ‘comrades’, etc.” At the other end of the spectrum is the perspective that continues to see China from the point of view of the West. “These two gazes are, for me, wrong. The right gaze is a sideways gaze.”

-- Dora Zhang, "The Sideways Gaze: Roland Barthes' Travels in China"


Barthes' attitude was pretty Orientalist, but I somehow forgive him. Still, though.
White intellectual: *goes to China*
China: *isn't a foreign Oriental land of mystery and chrysanthemums that has turned into the ideal receptacle for fervent communist revolution thanks to its inherent Otherness compared to the west*
White intellectual: