SPEAKING FREELY China: Lost in
translation By Thorsten
Pattberg
Speaking Freely is an Asia
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have their say. Please
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"The true victory
(the 'negation of the negation') occurs when the
enemy talks your language" - Slavoj
Zizek
BEIJING - The "Frontiers of
Philosophy in China" - a "distinguished" academic
journal with an impressive editorial board
composed of many prominent "China experts"-
involuntarily supports Western sovereignty over
the interpretation of Chinese thought. And it's
not alone.
The Journal's open propaganda
is striking: the word "philosophy" is a Western
term and concept that is nowhere to be found in
pre-colonial East-Asia. I would guess that 90% of
China's population have never heard of
"philosophy". The Journal's title deliberately
conceals from the public what China has instead.
The correct Chinese term for philosophy,
zhexue, is a late 19th-century import from
Japan, where it is pronounced tetsugaku.
It therefore cannot exist in any of the Chinese
classics. Have a close look at the Journal's
'Aims':
"Frontiers of Philosophy in China
aims to disseminate new scholarly achievements in
the field of broadly defined philosophy, and
promote philosophical researches of the highest
level by publishing peer-reviewed academic
articles that facilitate intensive or extensive
communication and cooperation between philosophers
in China and abroad. It covers nearly all main
branches of philosophy, with priorities given to
original works on Chinese philosophy or in
comparative studies in Chinese philosophy and
other kinds of philosophy in the world."
Apart from the self-praise for being elite
and exclusive (it tacitly offers the title
"philosopher" to its authors) - and essentially an
old-boy network - , the 'Aims" propagates the
Western term 'philosophy' no less than eight
times. If this looks like ideological
indoctrination, that's because it is ideological
indoctrination.
We can only guess at how
this propaganda pamphlet came into being;
something along the lines of:
Editor: Hmm,
that's awkward. We've put "Philosophy" in our
'Title', but we couldn't find the term
"philosophy" nowhere in Chinese tradition.
Editor-in-Chief: That's why we have to repeat it
another eight times in our 'Aims', Goebbels Law!
The Journal's mission is self-evident: to
hammer home "Philosophy in China" in China and
abroad. It is precisely this easy-peasy formula of
parading Chinese thought under European
prescription that should set serious scholarship
on its ears. In its form it resembles fascist and
ideological writings intended to forcefully pull a
world-view, in this case the (Western) History of
philosophy, over China's own contributions to
history like rujiao, daojiao, fojiao and thousands
of other xue, jia and jiao.
Many Western
Sinologists spent the formative years of their
lives learning and mastering European culture and
language, an education that is guided by a
colonial and imperial sense of mission. They
inevitably continue old habits and cultivate a
"China image" that is going to confirm their own
world-view and advance the complete Westernization
of China. They prefer to do it by translating
China's socio-cultural originality into Western
biblical or philosophical taxonomy. If nothing
else, it's grand intellectual property theft.
Western publishers understandably embrace
such ideology. How else can we explain - given
that no "philosophy" existed in China - thousands
of recent titles like Readings in Classical
Chinese Philosophy (2006), Introduction to
Classical Chinese Philosophy (2011), A
Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1997),
Oriental Philosophy (1979), and so on?
There are exceptions to this propaganda,
of course, as seen in neutral titles like
Chinese thought (1960). Yet, even that
author had to work in the word "philosophy" on the
book cover for promotional purposes.
One
can often guess from the book titles what ideology
the publishers (and/or the authors) are trying to
instigate. For example, Cambridge University Press
- maybe because it served British imperialism for
so long - is the usual offender; its title range
includes propaganda like Chinese Philosophy
and Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early
Chinese Philosophy, and so forth. On the other
hand, Harvard University Press is explicitly more
tactful in its title choices, for example in
The World of Thought in Ancient China
(1985) by Benjamin Schwartz.
Most Western
universities and those that harbor
Western-educated Chinese require their students to
write essays, class assignments, and to attend
seminars on "Chinese philosophy" as if it was a
fact of life that the Hellenic and the
Judeo-Christian tradition also applies to the
Chinese one.
Many China historians, such
as Ji Xianlin, Tu Weiming, Gu Zhengkun and Roger T
Ames, persistently warn against misleading
biblical and philosophical Western translations of
non-Western concepts, but few people outside the
profession have heard about their critique.
Meanwhile, Western language imperialists pick
"Cultural China" into pieces word by word.
In these days only those students who are
receptive to Western indoctrination may reach a
doctoral level, post-doctoral level, lectureship
and then, finally, a professorship, by which time
they will have become so indoctrinated and
subservient, and will have "manufactured" so much
propaganda material on "Chinese philosophy" that
they cannot possibly blame an omnipotent Big West
for having deceived them or forced them to do it.
Such a confession would jeopardize their academic
careers and vindicate their "good reputations" (as
"peer-reviewers" and "cross-quotation
careerists").
There are thousands of
Chinese scholars who still fight for Chinese
terminologies, but who will not be given a voice
in Western mainstream media. Such Chinese are
virtually unemployable globally, as they do not
conform to Western standard.
Often Chinese
scholars involuntarily support the Western
onslaught on Chinese terminology and, without
giving too much thought to it, enabling the
Western hold for power over the history of
thought. Peking University's Department of
Philosophy, The Council of Research in Values and
Philosophy, in 2007 published its pamphlet
"Chinese Philosophical Studies" entitled
"Dialogues of Philosophies, Religions and
Civilizations in the Era of Globalization". All
those key words in here: philosophy, religion,
civilization, globalization are Western concepts
and inventions. Chinese concepts are left out of
world history.
Thorsten Pattberg
is a German linguist and cultural critic from
Peking University. He is the author of The
East-West dichotomy (2009) and Shengren
(2011), and he publishes widely on language
imperialism.
(Copyright 2012 Thorsten
Pattberg)
Speaking Freely is an Asia
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have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
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