Television and Orientalism

Television and Orientalism

Orientalism, proposed by Edward Said (1995), refers to the network of interlocking
discourses about the “orient” constructed in western civilization. The orients, in
western conceptions, are stereotypically inflated others drastically different from the
collective imagination of the civilized West. Said’s argument was initially focused
more on Europe and Islamic Culture, but has been applied to the general cultural
dynamics between developed countries and the rest of the world (Hall, 1992). For Said,
the sites of discursive production of Orientalism include academic and creative institutes
that generate a web of historical and intertextual archive of academic knowledge,
popular culture, and common sense.

The thesis of Orientalism assumes that the orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not
merely there for the West to examine. The orient, within the discursive system of the
West, is a construction and an imagination. However, this anti-essentialist claim has a
material base. “The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and
culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically
as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,
doctrines….” (Said 1995: 2) It is supported by the political economy of institutions and
the power differential between the West and the rest. Said’s thesis has been
appropriated by nationalists as ammunition for essentializing and demonizing the West
in the reverse. It has also been criticized for being too totalistic, as if any rupture within
Orientalism is impossible (Sardar, 1999). However, his thesis provides us with a sharp
theoretical len to examine the discursive divide in the representation of otherness in
global cultural oppositions.
In this section, I will analyze a few selected American popular TV dramas featuring
Chinese characters. For many years, the flow of cultural products is mostly from the
America to the East, but there are signs of some “reverse flow” in recent years (Baker,
1999). There have been more exchanges between Chinese and American movie directors
and talents. Entertainment films, when compared to television, tend to travel across
cultural boundaries more easily, while television, because of its domesticity, tends to be
more localized and closer to the discursive perspective of the local. Can the thesis of
Orientalism be applied to television? Is the domestic medium of television a discursive
site of Orientalist discourse? Can the stereotypes of the orient be rehabilitated in this age
of intensive global exchange? These questions touch on the theoretical perspectives of

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media imperialism, globalization, postmodern hybridization and the role of television in
these processes.
X-Files, started off more or less as cult television in 1993, have entered the mainstream
as a complex, trend setting and stylistically hybridized television drama. It has also
attracted followers among the Chinese communities in Hong Kong and other Asian
countries (X-Files has not been released in Mainland China). Imploding the relatively
stable them/us boundary of the cold war binary, X-Files has reworked the discourse of
otherness as the enemies from within the United States Government and from the world
of aliens in outerspace and in the rest of the world. Drawing on adduction narratives and
earlier conspiracy genres (Graham, 1996), X-Files suggests the incredible charge that the
US government is involved in a vast conspiracy with former Nazi and Japanese scientists
to assist alien beings in performing experiments and genetic hybridization on American
citizens. It has mobilized the public sentiments of mistrust of authority and what Morley
& Robins (1995) called “Japan panic.” Japan is geographically located in the East.
But its high speed modernization has destabilized its discursive position as an inferior
orient. In term of technological advances, it seems to be catching up or even competing
with west. This cultural instability and anxiety may be one of the undercurrents that fuel
the depiction of lethal Japanese technocrats in western popular culture. Besides, in the
X-Files, immigrants from outside America are often depicted as genetic mutants, agents
of conspiracies, or carriers of infectious disease.
In the post-cold war period, the them/us binary is more fluid, multiple and unstable. In
the X-Files, the American West, embodied in the characters of FBI agent Mulder and
Scully, is somewhat incorporating alternative paradigms such as the paranormal and the
meta-scientific. But in this body of hybridized and ambiguous televisual text, the
discursive space available for Chinese characters is still very limited. In episode XXX,
the narrative hinges on the underground connection between Hong Kong, China and the
Chinese immigrant society in the States. The episode struck Hong Kong audience by its
depiction of Chinese as traditional, superstitious, malicious, and bloodthirsty. In the story,
a Chinese immigrant family in the States has fallen into the trap of a Chinese secret
society which organizes underground gambling and trades fresh human organs. The
Chinese are living in a world of murder, torture and exploitation. Built around this
textual Chinese underworld are incomprehensible Chinese characters, repulsive Chinese
medicine, secretive rituals, and mysterious philosophies of filial piety, death and afterlife.
These signs and icons serve good narrative functions for X-Files as a
horror/action/police/science fiction. This hybridized SFgenre predisposes the
representations of most X-files characters other than the heroes and the heroines to the
mysterious world of the unknown and horror. X-Files is not a straightforward

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demonization of the “non-west”. In fact, bits and pieces of floating signs in this
textual world are intertextually connected to other fictional and non-fictional media
representations. Far from being merely fabrications, these representations have strong
links with previous creative depictions of the Chinatown and news stories about illegal
immigration and the trading of human organs in China. However, taken all these generic
and intertextual pre-depositions into account, the thesis of Orientalism still provides an
insightful perspective for seeing through the binary of the West and the oriental. Chinese
culture is projected as traditional, with a timeless history, yet uncivilized, barbaric and
mysterious.
X-Files producer Chris Carter has also produced another SF/police drama series the
Millenium. In this series, the FBI veteran has the specialty in apprehending homicidal
psychopaths. This in fact can be seen as the loosening up of the rational/scientific ideal
of modernity. One interesting episode ### features a Japanese scientist experimenting
with genetic engineering but contracting fatal infection himself. His hand and face are
deformed gradually under the close and prolonged examination of the television camera.
Three points can be said about the configuration of Orientalism in this small piece of text.
First, as discussed above, the textual world of the orient in this episode is saturated with
traditional, religious and cultic motifs. Second, within this mysterious pre-modern
oriental world there is a modern oriental scientist with a PhD. This echoes with the
techno advances in Asia and the migration of intellectuals from the East to the West. But
this smart orient invents fatal diseases and he dies a horrible death. The narrative is
another textual expression of Japan panic and techno-phobia on the part of the orientalist.
Third, the difference between the West and the East is marked and inflated, while the
differences within the East are collapsed and obscured. In this episode, Japanese and
Chinese icons and characters are hybridized to such as extent that the Japanese are
replaceable by the Chinese. Through western eyes, different orients are often hybridized,
decontextualized and over-generalized.
The above two cases seem to fit nicely into the discourse of Orientalism. However, in
today’s world of global exchanges, the representation of the orient is complicated by
diverse and reverse cultural flows between the East and the West. Another recent
American TV action drama series, Martial Law, features Hong Kong Chinese actor
Sammo Hung as a kung fu master and veteran police who is sent to America as an
exchange from the Shanghai police force. Sammo is a positive character who can hardly
be seen as a derogatory stigmatization of the orient. He outsmarts bad guys and some of
his American partners by his charming and surprisingly athletic martial arts. Producer
Lee Goldbery explicitly indicated that Marital Law is doing what TV does best –
escapism. The joke of the show is mostly about the 5-foot-7, 230-pound, 44-year-old

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Sammo kicking and flipping like Jackie Chan. The story moves along the political
correct line of Sino-American co-operation, while the Chinese characters are built on the
long tradition of western imagination of Chinese kung fu and philosophies. Bruce Lee on
the big screen has been a key model of this. On the TV screen there was David
Carradine who played the lead role in the long running series Kung Fu in the early 1970s.
Carradine as a Caucasian recycled Orientalist imagery in the positive mode, highlighting
the wisdom and physical strength of Shaolin philosophy and Martial arts. Now Sammo,
a Hong Kong stunt man rather than a Caucasian, plays a lead role in domestic American
television. However, there are still traces of orientalist discourse. Sammo burns incense,
performs impossible kung fu kicks and teaches his partners Chinese wisdom and Tai Chi
philosophy. These are marked differences which distinguish the pre-modern from the
modern, the intuitive from the rational, and the power of the fist from the power of the
mechanics. Sammo drinks diet coke, speaks English and tells his partner that he learns
from the Discovery Channel. Of course there are occasions for mutual learning: the
Americans learn from the legendary oriental and the Chinese learn from the scientific
West. The orients in the X-Files appear in the esoteric/negative mode, while in Martial
Law, they are depicted in the exotic/positive mode. But both are discursive forms of
stereotypical dualism of the modern West and the traditional rest.
There are reasons for this mixing of the esoteric/negative and the exotic/positive. First,
the world is now having shifting ethnoscapes where diverse cultural narratives have been
absorbed into the dynamic of global/local hybridization. Intensive global migrations and
tourism characterize these shifting ethnoscapes. Because of the implosion of boundaries
between the eastern and western ethnoscapes, previous inflated international stereotyping
may sometimes be rehabilitated. In the case of Martial Law, the influx of Hong Kong
and Chinese artists into the United States helps to bring about changes. John Woo,
Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Wu Ping (the martial arts director of the movie
The Matrix) were all closely connected peers in Hong Kong. Together they bring the
practices of Hong Kong action movies and TV dramas into the States. Second, the
market logic of mass production leads to standardization and disenchantment. In order to
“re-enchant” cultural products and stimulate consumption, there is a strong tendency
for American popular culture to absorb exotic cultures from all over the world to
re-energize itself. Third, the increasing number of Chinese immigrants and the
strengthening of their political power within America may add pressure for political
correct media representation.
Orientalism can be exported to and reproduce itself in the rest of the world. It is argued
that Orientalism is so powerful and encompassing that some people from the East may
see themselves through the discursive web of Orientalism. In other words, the orients

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can be orientalized by Orientalism. This leads to the question of transnational discursive
effects which are often assumed in various theoretical forms of media imperialism.
However, transnational discursive effects are problematized in recent globalization
theories (Baker, 1999). On the textual level, as indicated in the above, Orientalism may
oscillate between the esoteric/negative and the exotic/positive modes. On the reception
level, it is relatively easier for transnational viewers to discern the discrepancies between
Orientalist discourse and everyday practices. Contextual interpretations can also be
injected when Orientalist texts travel across nations (Liebes & Kayz, 1992). I tend to
agree with Lodziak (1986) who argues that the ideological effect of television works
better for the dominant groups rather than the subordinate. Extending this argument to
the transnational context, Orientalism works better in reinforcing Chinese stereotypes
among domestic American audience, but is less powerful in “orientalizing” Chinese
audiences in their own contexts. However, one obvious transnational effect of
Orientalism may be the construction of an essentialized West in the reverse, or what is
called “Occidentalism”. Through subtle stereotypical dualism, Orientalism triggers
the imagination of the West as a unified and modernized whole, no matter whether the
orient is depicted in the esoteric/negative mode as in the X-Files or the exotic/positive
mode as in Martial Law. It is found that the discourse of Occidentalism (Carrier, 1995)
can be and has been mobilized to intervene local and global cultural politics in the East;
but this is a subject far beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Grey Box
Kung Fu (1972- 1975)
Kung Fu, a TV series produced by Ed Spielman in the 1970s, is a sort of an Eastern
Western in which a Shaolin priest, played by David Carradine, is wandering in the
middle of the decidedly unenlightened Old West. Martial arts star Bruce Lee was, for a
time, considered to play the lead role grasshopper Kwai Chang Caine. The show was
never a tremendous rating success in the States, but it attracted a loyal legion of fans
who were interested in eastern culture. In the show, Chinese culture is represented in a
restricted range of kung fu tricks and quasi-Chinese philosophy. Caucasian actor David
Carradine playing the role of a Chinese can be appropriately seen as a representation of a
representation. Kung Fu was enthusiastically received in Hong Kong in the 1970s.
Arguably, it can be said that this American TV show was having some orientalistic
effects by telling highly urbanized Hong Kong Chinese what Chinese culture was
through Orientalist eyes. However, imported American TV programs were quickly
removed from the prime-time hours. Hong Kong prime-time television has been filled up

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with local programming since the mid-1970s. The argument of media imperialism and
orientalization seems problematic in the case of Hong Kong (Ma, 1999).
Suggested Video Clip
X-Files
The ending scene in which agent Mulder and Scully break into the Chinese underground
society is a typical case for illustrating a wide range of Orientalist imageries. In this
video clip, the “orient is passionless and fanatic; disciplined in the arts of cruelty and
licentious and effete; built on family and filial duty and lacking emotional warmth in
intimate human relations.” (Sardar 1999: 114)

Recommended Reading
Barker, Chris (1999), Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Hall, Stuart (1992), ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’ in Hall, Stuart &
Bram Gieben (eds.), Formation of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sardar, Ziauddin (1999), Orientalism, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Further Reading
Carrier, James (ed.) (1995), Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Graham, Allison (1996) ‘ “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?”: Conspiracy
Theory and the X-Files’ in Lavery, David et al. (eds.), “Deny All Knowledge”:
Reading the X Files, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Liebes, Tamar & .Elihu Katz (1990), The Export of meaning : cross-cultural readings of
Dallas, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lodziak, Conrad (1986), The Power of Television, London: Frances Printer.
Ma, K.W. Eric (1999), Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong, London:
Routledge.
Morley, David & Kevin Robins (1995), ‘Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic’ in Spaces
of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, London:
Routledge.
Said, Edward (1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin.

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