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Clément Fabre, À l’ombre de la race. Chine, XIXe siècle

Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2025, 373 p.
Pierre Fuller
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Clément Fabre, À l’ombre de la race. Chine, XIXe siècle, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2025, 373 p.

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  • 1 Pierre Fuller, Famine Relief in Warlord China, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Asia Center, 2019
  • 2 James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China, Durham, Duke (...)

1“The Chinese people are inured to hardship,” the head of the American Red Cross in China wrote back to Washington headquarters in February of 1921, “and such people are hard to kill, under any conditions.”1 John Earl Baker’s remark reflected his surprise that far fewer Chinese had died in the preceding months from famine than he and many others had feared, despite severe drought and the bitter cold. But the American was also echoing a common Western belief circulating within a veritable industry of English and French-language books on life and culture in China, what one historian has called a “sociology of the Chinese.”2

2It is this industry of writing on the Chinese body that is the focus of Clément Fabre’s À l’ombre de la race. Chine, XIXe siècle. Fabre’s work opens with this very same idea, voiced by a British doctor in the late 19th century, that regarding the Chinese patient, “il semble difficile de le tuer.” (p. 14). Fabre’s book charts the way in which a multitude of isolated and particular observations on the Chinese, like this one, made in the field by Western diplomats, missionaries and, especially, physicians over the course of the 19th century were, over time, incorporated into broader generalized racial frameworks that prevailed in anthropology and sinology by the early 20th century. In doing so, Fabre aims to intervene in critical race theory as it has been applied to history in recent decades. He does this by broadening –liberating, one might say– the history of knowledge on the human body from its reduction to a racialized pursuit.

3The argument of Fabre’s study revolves around a distinction between two types of knowledge production: the “réflexions pratiques” (p. 281) or “savoir-faire pratique” (p. 179) that stemmed from experience on the ground in particular places or situations versus more generalized and abstract approaches that writers favored on China from the 1890s onwards, a turn to what he calls “un savoir théorique, sinologique, purement descriptif et destiné seulement à asseoir leur crédibilité comme experts des choses chinoises” (p. 179). For this, Fabre draws from and synthesizes an impressive range of British and French diplomatic and missionary archival sources, medical journals, and monographs by Western residents of China, many of them American, most notably, Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics from 1890.

4The result is a remarkably rich study that fleshes out French and Anglo-American thinking on the physicality of Chinese life on the eve of the modern period. One of the book’s greatest strengths is how it captures an inherent contradiction in the development of the social sciences at the turn of the 20th century: how the increasingly scientific tenor and rigor of sociological and anthropological research coincided with a broader turn towards racial generalization and essentialization.

5The first chapter, “Une connaissance par corps,” introduces a range of observations about the Chinese body and its faculties that drew the attention of Western residents over the course of the 19th century. These observations were by and large negative, from the idea that “the Chinese” —understood as a uniform group— were less bothered by odors from chamber pots or the presence of exposed corpses in the streets to the idea that the Chinese had a high tolerance for discomfort due to the peculiar ways they slept or clothed themselves. Fabre puts the nature of these commentaries down to the difficult sensory and bodily experience of Westerners adjusting to an alien, in this case Chinese, environment. (p. 60)

6Chapter two, “Ouvrir la Chine,” introduces the book’s three main types of actors, diplomats, missionaries and doctors, and the obstacles they saw to “opening” the country and its people to pursue their various agendas, most notably the hostility and xenophobia that foreigners recorded experiencing. Fabre argues that, of all three types of actors, physicians served as agents of political influence par excellence thanks to the intimate nature of their work and the access it gave them to all types and classes of people, along with the gratitude at times expressed by Chinese patients.

7Chapter three, “La Chine intime,” considers the rise of the expert through the role of interpreters during the various treaties around the opium wars. It then turns to doctors and their own claim to expertise on China thanks to the insights they were uniquely placed to provide, such as the manner and frequency of suicide or on the use of torture by the Qing state. Unfortunately (to this reader), we hear no more of these areas, and the chapter is devoted instead to the well-trod topic of “le mystère des pieds bandés” before turning to the medical examination of the emperor Guangxu in the Forbidden City in 1898, seen as a “victory” of access by a foreign doctor and a chance to uncover the sexual life of the Chinese court itself.

8Chapter four, “L’étiquette chinoise,” the longest chapter, draws from periodicals like The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal and a series of books published in the West or in China’s treaty ports, like Shanghai, at the time, such as W. Gilbert Walshe’s ‘Ways That Are Dark’. Some Chapters on Chinese Etiquette and Social Procedure, Shanghai, Kelly, and Walsh, 1890 and Chester Holcombe, The Real Chinaman, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1895. The chapter notes how the idea of “Chinese etiquette” grew with the notion of oriental despotism around figures like Montesquieu in the late 18th century. It then charts how Chinese mannerisms, epitomized by the kowtow (ketou), were increasingly seen by Westerners as “pure façade” (p. 171), a performance whose control on people was “toute-puissante et tyrannique,” (p. 177) rendering “l’homme s’il était un automate.” (p. 178) Over time, Westerners saw their knowledge of all things related to “étiquette” in China as a way of decoding the order of the Chinese body —and by extension, the political and social systems as a whole. Interestingly, the chapter also touches on the insecurity or anxiousness that foreign residents expressed over mastering what one understood to be proper comportment (including walking correctly in public) or over how to handle the feeling of “insult” when Chinese suspended their practice of decorum around you.

9In chapter five, “Médecins occidentaux et patients chinois,” Fabre argues that the “savoir-soigner” that came with hands-on medical care allowed doctors to test and undermine generalizations about the body and customs across the whole of Qing China. It covers the range of challenges faced by the China Medical Missionary Association over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including performing surgery in the face of taboos on mutilating the body, fear of a litigious culture over malpractice, and the absence of institutional checks on charlatanism by Chinese practitioners, resulting in overly-guarded patients and their families. The chapter ends on a point with which the book started: the idea of Chinese resistance to infection. With this Fabre notes a crucial “changement de registre” (p. 281) that played out in late 19th century medical surveys on the Chinese constitution. This saw a shift from “réflexions pratiques” (which were particular to time, place and instance) in favor of racial generalization over the whole of “the Chinese.”

10The sixth and final chapter, “La clef profonde de la Chine,” explores a common stereotype over the 19th century: the idea of extreme Chinese self-control over the body to the point of resistance and even indifference to pain, what writers dubbed an “absence of nerves.” Fabre ends on this over-arching claim on the Chinese bodily experience in order to chart how medical observations over time lost their particularity and grounding and were instead caught up in a chase for coherence in Western understanding of China and the Chinese and connected to broader stereotypes about the brutality of Chinese culture. The chapter ends on the Boxer Rebellion against the foreign presence in 1899-1901 and how this seismic event stood as “proof” of all sorts of racialized claims about the Chinese body and attitude to foreigners popularized over the preceding decade.

11One comes away from these chapters with a rich picture of the difficulties Westerners saw themselves encountering in Qing China, and the differences they saw between their physical world and that of the Chinese. Through it all, Fabre sheds light on the striking tendency of French and Anglo-American writers across the 19th century to see all things Chinese as constituting the very polar opposite of the Western experience. What is equally striking is that the observations and claims recounted by Fabre about the Chinese are, nearly without exception, negative in nature and tone.

12It is hard, though, not to come away from this study with the impression of an inscrutable and baffling people whose codes were impossible for frustrated and often well-meaning French, British and Americans to crack. It is hard, in other words, for the reader to see the Chinese themselves –beyond the prism of outsiders observing things in an alien place. At times, Fabre notes how the ethnographic writing recounted in his book was seen by its creators as a “dévoilement du monde chinois” and its “mystères” (p. 116), a “prétention… à pouvoir, mieux qu’un autre, parler de la Chine et des Chinois…” (p. 134), an effort to “se créditer d’une connaissance intime de la Chine.” (p. 116) Rarely, however, is the reader given anything to test the validity of these claims to expertise. Fabre explains how the focus of the book was knowledge creation on the Chinese : “l’optique qui est ici la nôtre de reconstituer la genèse pratique des savoirs et des stéréotypes qui entourent au XIXe siècle les corps chinois.” But how is the reader supposed to distinguish between knowledge and stereotype, or as he puts it elsewhere, “des imaginaires, des représentations et des caricatures”? (p. 225)

13Part of the problem comes down to sources. The book relies on an impressive range of secondary literature on Chinese history to fill in the gaps presented by its lack of Chinese-language sources. But this does not overcome the fact that the study focuses on claims about one particular segment of humanity while using, exclusively, the languages and voices of another.

14But on a more fundamental level, questions might be raised about the crucial distinction underlying Fabre’s study between practical and theoretical knowledge. I appreciate the point that limited, particular observations or claims on other peoples are preferable to generalized blanket statements about “races” in the early 20th century. But the question remains: could these more circumscribed claims themselves be no less problematic?

  • 3 See again Pierre Fuller, Famine Relief in Warlord China. An example of a Chinese study of indigenou (...)

15Here we might return to the idea that the Chinese are “hard to kill,” expressed by the head of the American famine relief effort in China in 1921. Baker echoed the belief that tens of millions of destitute Chinese had somehow survived on their own through famine conditions. Anyone able to read the Chinese-language press that year or acquainted with the numerous local social channels funneling aid to stricken communities and receiving refugees would have realized that the saving of lives was less about resilient bodies than it was about a formidable –and to most foreign observers, oddly invisible– native relief culture in operation that year.3

16Baker’s observations stemmed from hands-on knowledge gained from being on the ground in a most practical way: feeding, housing and putting refugees to work. Yet his conclusions about what lay around him were as problematic as any theoretical writing on the Chinese in his time. Firsthand observation and practical knowhow might be more concrete than the theoretical but they are nonetheless limited to one’s social exposure, worldview and linguistic tools just the same.

17À l’ombre de la race is about the long shadow cast by 20th century racial thinking and how historians have to do a better job at not applying it anachronistically to other contexts. It historizes racial theory in helpful ways while adding nuance to our understanding of 19th century ethnographic writing. But in the process, the book casts its own shadow onto the Chinese themselves while keeping Western actors and their viewpoints in the spotlight. No matter how well the study of Western discourse on “the other” is done –and this is in many ways an excellent study– it remains limited to perception studies. This exercise might challenge our understanding of Western intellectual practice in the Victorian era. But it also runs the risk of reviving colonial-era perspectives.

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Notes

1 Pierre Fuller, Famine Relief in Warlord China, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.

2 James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

3 See again Pierre Fuller, Famine Relief in Warlord China. An example of a Chinese study of indigenous relief cultures leading into this period is Zhu Hu, Minbao wuyu: Zhongguo jindai yizhen (1876–1912) [Compatriots above all: modern charity relief in China (1876–1912)], Beijing, Renmin chubanshe, 2012.

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Pierre Fuller, « Clément Fabre, À l’ombre de la race. Chine, XIXe siècle »Histoire Politique [En ligne], Comptes rendus, mis en ligne le 31 mars 2026, consulté le 14 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/histoirepolitique/23269 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15zd7

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