Abstract

In 1997, Louisa Schein published her famous article "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," in which she modified Edward Said's theory of orientalism and transplanted it into the study of ethnicity in contemporary China. According to Schein, Chinese society develops an orientalist view of non-Han people and consumes their ethnic cultures as cultural commodities, which clearly denotes the power of the center over the periphery. While fully acknowledging internal orientalism as a problem, I realize that Schein's theoretical framework, without paying much attention to the specific cultural and economic condition of urban China, cannot satisfactorily explain why...