Queering China in a Chinese World

Peter Drucker

The Specter of Materialism:
Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus
By Petrus Liu
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023, x + 239 pages,
$29.95 paperback.

EFFORTS TO PRODUCE a ”queer Marxism,” at least by that name, date back a mere 15 years, to the publication of Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire in 2009.(1) The great majority of queer Marxism publications in the intervening years have been by U.S. academics or academics in other English-speaking rich countries, focusing more often than not on U.S. examples.(2)

In keeping with the anti-imperialist tradition in Marxism and the “transnational turn” in queer studies, there have however been attempts by queer Marxists for years to challenge and correct this Eurocentrism in actually existing queer Marxism. Together with his previous book Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism makes a major and invaluable contribution to creating a truly global queer Marxism.

Unlike other queer Marxists who have attempted this from within Western imperialist countries,(3) Liu can draw in his work on wide-ranging knowledge, impressive research and personal familiarity with a large and key part of the non-Western world: the Chinese lands of the People’s Republic (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan (where he hails from himself).

The results of Liu’s labors should occupy a central place from now on in queer Marxist studies — and in studies of geopolitics generally.

Centrality of China

As Liu points out, there is no way to make sense of the world today without seeing China as a key player. Yet repeatedly, Westerners talk and write about the world in a way that occludes China’s centrality.

For example, for 35 years now and still today, they write about the “post-Cold War” world. Yet by contrast with a view of history hinging on the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a truly global view should reflect the reality that the People’s Republic never collapsed and that the power of the Chinese Communist Party has never been seriously shaken.

As Russia went through its precipitous decline in the 1990s, China continued its steady, rapid rise. And while Russia acquiesced in NATO’s expansion and its own retreat, China paralleled its incorporation into the neoliberal global order with constant resistance to Western attempts to hem it in.

So as Liu points out, the Cold War in Asia never definitively ended. He notes that relations between the People’s Republic and Taiwan for example have all along been “overdetermined by a Cold War structure of feeling” (107) — intensified today by “unprecedented hostility between China and the United States.” (161)

Similarly, Western studies of gender and sexuality ignore the Chinese-speaking one-sixth of humanity. As long as this remains the case, there can be no question of a global feminism or of global queer perspectives.

Queer studies need to move beyond a Eurocentric understanding of “homosexuality as we understand it today” — whose origin was the object of so much early queer theory — to a comprehensive vision of global queers in all their diversity. “While 1990s queer theorists cautioned us not to apply queer theory to non-Western cultures, for today’s queer theorists there is no more urgent task,” Liu writes. (33) “Geopolitics … is constitutive of this understanding of queer.” (27)

Queer Marxists have a lot to learn from Liu about China’s central place in the spheres of geopolitics, economics, gender and sexuality. At the same time, queer Marxists will enthusiastically welcome his insistence that queer studies need to be far more materialist. As he writes, “being queer is no longer queer enough.” (21)

Queer radicalism needs to engage with resistance to racism, oppressive reproductive technologies, security regimes, austerity, ableism and homonationalism. The “starting point of a materialist analysis is the agency of the oppressed.” (8)

In particular, making the oppressed the subjects of history requires that we “transform the material conditions that authorize certain individuals to speak, act, or write in socially legible ways.” (8) Building on his work in Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Liu focuses more in this book on labor and capital.

Chinese Genders, Chinese Sexualities

Liu insightfully analyzes the ways in which China’s transition to capitalism has created “new classes of gender and sexuality — such as dagongmei (female migrant laborers in China’s export-oriented sunbelt), money boys (rural-to-urban sex works), and high-suzhi (quality) transnational queers — … as part of the new politics of human value.” (14)

“The vulnerability of women as a group is amplified by China’s neoliberal transformations,” he notes. (44) This is the backdrop to a fascinating and illuminating presentation of debates on gender among Chinese feminists today. Ultimately, Liu concludes, despite the richness of the debates, pressure from the regime has reduced discussions of gender to a reaffirmation of the CP’s traditional claim to have granted women equality, “while more transformative and queer understandings of sex/gender remain occluded from view.” (160)

In the realm of sexuality, similarly, “[d]ispossessed, displaced, and having literally nothing to sell except their bodies … rural sex workers perform a new form of proletarianized labor.” (45) At the same time, “Chinese gay men and lesbians [increasingly] seek higher education abroad” — another option offered by the new Chinese capitalism — “in order to escape compulsory heterosexuality and procreative familialism.” (46)

Although neoliberalism in China enlarged spaces for LGBTQ communities, Liu notes that compared with Hong Kong and Taiwan, China “appears to be significantly behind in the advancement of queer rights.” (104)(4)

On a more positive note, one of the most inspiring parts of The Specter of Materialism for me is Liu’s account of the gender and sexual politics of the brilliant Chinese revolutionary writer Lu Xun.(5) While the Maoist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party celebrated Lu’s work, and particularly his depictions of cruelty and violence against women, Liu uncovers a sexually subversive side of it that came as a revelation to me.

I had no idea, for instance, that Lu’s radical commitment to gender equality led him to consistently use the honorific “elder brother” (xiong) in his letters in addressing his female partner. (93) It is no wonder that contemporary Chinese queer scholars have been reclaiming Lu from Maoist orthodoxy.

What Is China?

Understanding a capitalist world in which China is central requires understanding what China is. In this respect Liu provides many formulations with which I wholeheartedly concur — and others that I find dubious.

I believe that he is absolutely right to state that “capital meets, subsumes, and reconfigures preexisting temporalities — relations of production and property, gendered hierarchies, and kinship — without creating a homogeneous world.” (11) This describes what has happened in China over the past several decades, notably beginning under Deng Xiaoping.

This is in the last analysis the explanation of the “mounting social inequality … reckless developmentalism justifying human rights abuses, onslaughts against the environment, suppression of freedoms of speech and assembly, and belligerence toward Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang” that Liu describes. (42)

I am less convinced by Liu’s statement that China has “displace[d] the United States as the center of global capitalism,” (1) given that the U.S. with about one-quarter of China’s population still by any measure has the world’s largest capitalist economy (even though indeed dependent on Chinese investment and imports).

At one point Liu declines “to adjudicate on these claims whether China is socialist or capitalist, neocolonial or liberationist,” even after saying that this is “a question of utmost importance that is haunting the international Left.” (7) In a more recent Historical Materialism podcast on his book, Liu has clarified his analysis, making clear that he sees capitalism as a totality, “global in scale,” including countries like China that “claim to be socialist.”(6)

For my part, I think that the global spread of Chinese investments on every continent, and the rapid rise of Chinese military power particularly in its own region, justify defining it as one of the world’s main capitalist and imperialist powers. In the realm of sexual politics, I believe that we should oppose the increasingly heteronationalist policies of the Chinese state as well as Western homo­nationalism, in defense of a vision of global queer liberation that transcends them both.

Toward a Global Queer Vision

“This book was written in dialogue with the exciting and rapidly growing body of literature on queer anticapitalism, which includes the works of Kevin Floyd, Alan Sears, Jules Gleeson, Holly Lewis, and Peter Drucker,” Liu writes. (16)

At the same time he seeks to move beyond us, by analyzing “capital as a dispossessive logic on a global scale.” (17) He has my heartfelt support in this badly needed endeavor.(7) It is striking, however, that Liu’s book barely refers to non-Chinese-speaking Asia — South Asia, Central Asia or the Middle East, for example — not to mention Africa or Latin America.

A truly global queer vision needs to go beyond the dominant Eurocentrism of queer studies and beyond Liu’s China-centered account — indispensable as it is — to embrace in-depth analyses of the social and sexual formations of the incredible wealth and diversity of the world’s regions.

This will necessarily be a long-term, collective effort drawing on many contributions, especially from Latin America, Africa and Asia, on the road to “new ways of imagining queer futures and transformative politics.” (163).

Notes

1. Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
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2. For a recent survey see Peter Drucker, ‘Queer Studies’, Beverley Skaggs et al. eds., The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, London: Sage, 2021.
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3. Like my own attempt in Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, Leiden/Chicago: Brill/Haymarket, 2015.
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4. In recent years I have analyzed this sexual divergence between Taiwan and the People’s Republic as one example of a global clash between ‘homonationalism’ (as defined by Jasbir Puar) and ‘heteronationalism’ (see e.g. Drucker ‘Revisiting Queer Anticapitalism’, Spectre 7 (spring 2023), 76-79, esp. 78).
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5. My enthusiasm for Lu Xun’s work goes back to a Chinese history course I took from Jonathan Spence in the 1970s — though I don’t remember Spence’s mentioning Lu’s gender and sexual radicalism.
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6. ‘The Specter of Materialism (with Petrus Liu)’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwXbpuKho2I.
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7. In all due modesty, despite the minor place that my work has in his book, I would suggest that Liu could have read it more attentively. After a quick but accurate summary of the account in my book Warped of the role of capitalism in shaping European and North American sexualities, he writes, “By contrast, as capitalism failed to develop in the feudal societies of Asia — which Drucker defines as those ‘in whose sexual regimes class and status trumped gender and kinship’ — the basic historical conditions for lesbian/gay communities remained absent.” (70) This is a misreading. There is only one Asian society I describe (following Perry Anderson) as “feudal” (and therefore particularly propitious for the rise of capitalism): Japan. Among other Asian societies, I analyze precolonial India as one where gender and kinship were central to its indigenous sexual regimes, and China — together with ancient Rome, the classical Arab caliphates, and feudal societies — as ones “in whose sexual regimes class and status trumped gender and kinship.” See Drucker, Warped, 78 (on precolonial India), 85-86 (on feudal Japan), 84.
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November-December 2024, ATC 233