The term “Occidentalism” refers to a body of usually simplified and often biased views about Western culture. These mental constructions, carrying either positive or negative connotations, may become ideological instruments in polemics and politics (Carrier 1995). A nineteenth-century coinage, the term was introduced into critical discourse about China by Chen Xiaomei (1992), who in her Occidentalism (1995) mainly focused on anti-official Occidentalism in post-Mao China, a kind of counterdiscourse that purveyed a positive image of a scientific and modern West contradicting Maoist orthodoxy. Not being aware of Chen’s pioneering work, Buruma and Margalit use the term Occidentalism in a more limited sense as “a dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” (2004: 5). Chen Xiaomei as well as Buruma and Margalit are indebted to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), an analysis of Western conceptions of the East. Crucial differences between Said and Chen are that the latter examines both positive and negative images of the Other, whereas Said does not investigate how the discourse of Orientalism relates to empirical knowledge of the East. He is concerned, “not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism” (1991: 5). Nevertheless, Said’s Orientalism often implies a negative judgment as he interprets Orientalist discourse as an attempt to deprecate the Orient and, ultimately, to justify colonial politics. The genuine interest of Voltaire, Goethe, Hesse, Hilton, and Huxley in Eastern literature and philosophy falls outside his perspective (Fokkema 1996; Weiss 2004; Figueira 2008).

From a cognitive point of view, the term Orientalism is a shorthand name for a body of simplified views about “the East” current among writers and critics living in “the West.” And, the other way round, Occidentalism refers to a reductionist image of “the West,” maintained by writers and critics in “the East.” We cannot communicate without such reductive concepts that often are partly distortions and sometimes completely wrong. Yet, and here I agree with Chen Xiaomei rather than later critics, it is not necessary that these reductive concepts should implicitly have a pejorative meaning. In principle, they are neutral linguistic labels. As Chen has shown, Occidentalism in China in the second half of the twentieth century served first to describe a repugnant West in an attempt to bolster Maoist orthodoxy, and later, after the death of Mao Zedong, functioned as a lever to undermine Maoist ideology.