Introduction: National Traditions of Sinology (2025)

The End of Western Sinology

During the last century, researchers started to pay increasing attention to the ways in which Westerners study China in contrast to the ways in which the Chinese study China. The terms for distinguishing between these two fields are somewhat ambiguous in English, for they all fall under the broad category of “sinology”. They are much clearer in Chinese: guo xue 国学 “national studies,” is the term used by the Chinese to refer to the study of their own ancient culture; han xue 汉学, or xifang han xue 西方汉学, “Western sinology,” is the term used for the study of China’s culture by Western outsiders. Although the object of these two “ologies” is the same, they are often seen as distinct and even competing fields. The Chinese engage in national studies from a uniquely Chinese point of view, using their Chinese way of thinking; Westerners approach it from a Western point of view, using a distinctly Western way of thinking. The aim of this paper is to discuss the origins of this dichotomy, and to evaluate the extent to which it represents historical and contemporary reality. The thesis of this paper is that, although the clear division between the Western and Chinese approaches to the study of China is based on historical fact, the line that once served to distinguish between the two has diminished and blurred to such an extent that it is no longer relevant.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SINOLOGY SPECIAL ISSUES 1

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie 14 (review)

China Review International, 1998

THE SCANDAL OF SINOLOGY

The reader of this debunking article will notice that the author does not write about what is basically wrong with China (a subject certainly worth dealing with), but about what is fundamentally amiss with THE STUDY of China, this being a subject of utmost, not only academic importance. In the author's view, it is time to take the study of China to a higher level, to go to the root of the matter, to consider China, indeed each and every country, to be a 'holon' (not: a 'pan'), a - what modern brain scientists call - 'dynamic functional connectivity'. Big, small or medium-sized, a country should be studied by professionals (political scientists, jurists, economists, linguists, sociologists, educationists, ecologists etc) prepared to work together (in a country-project) and well-informed about the latest developments of the behavioural and social sciences and the humanities. The logic behind this view must appeal to all those in favour of cross-disciplinary (as distinct from international) collaboration. The author hopes that readers having closely looked at the whole paper will ask themselves one question: how would this deeply troubled world look like if Western statesmen, politicians, and captains of industry were effectively advised on the policy to pursue towards China, Russia, or - lumping essentially different countries such as Egypt, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey together - the Middle East by COLLABORATING SCIENTISTS of the kind profiled in the paper?! Tenured professors of China/country studies, used to carve their material object (explanandum) up into parts the dilettante explanations of which they cannot but leave to their students/listeners to make chocolate out of them, seem to be opposing the dangerous, life-changing idea here advanced. They do not want their comfortable boat being rocked, seeing the argument for truly interdisciplinary China/country-research as threatening to their privileged position rather than as providing a great opportunity for them to do some soul-searching and to rethink thoroughly the way they have been working. Perhaps the author should resign himself to this situation and accept that man wants novelty but cannnot take, and gets disturbed by, too much of it.

Library of Sinology

Preface, by Edward L. Shaughnessy (University of Chicago) IX The He zun Inscription and the Beginning of Zhou 1 Supplement to the "The 'Question' Question"-British Museum Scapula and British Museum Library Deer Horn 17 The King and the Bird: a Possible Genuine Shang Literary Text and Its Echoes in Later Philosophy and Religion 22 The Hampers of Zeng: Some Problems in Archaeoastronomy 29 New Study of Xiaotun Yinxu Wenzi Jiabian 2416 42 Research Notes On Yin Li Chronology per Zheng Xuan 55 A Telltale Mistake in the Lü shi Chunqiu: The Earthquake Supposedly in the Eighth Year of Wen Wang of Zhou 62 The Origin of the Chaochen Rule 69

Cultural Anthropology and Sinology in the United States: An Informal Assessment

Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales 25, 76:117-125, 1987

A Critical Introduction to Sinology and Chinese Studies 汉学批评, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2023 version)

Core Course for MA in Modern Chinese Studies (English)

Cross-cultural Interpretation and Chinese Literature: A Book Review Article on Owen's Work in Sinology

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2013

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies.

Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Postcolonialism by Ming Dong Gu

Philosophy East and West, 2015

depth and originality of the text, many chapters and individual passages of the Laozi refer to the syncretic environment of governance theoreticians, and elements traditionally considered typically Daoist can be found in texts marked as proto-Legalist, Legalist, or Realist" (vol. 1, p. 43). There seems to be a remarkable tendency in contemporary Czech sinology to stress the "pragmatic" aspects of the Laozi. 3-Správná cesta in Czech. Sehnal's Czech translations are translated into English by the author of this review.

"The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere: The Early Modern East Asian Information Order", in Proceedings of the British Academy, 212, pp. 285-310.

This chapter traces the contours of the Sinosphere as an information order. East Asian history has recently begun to offer up examples of early modern networks which both transcended cultural spheres in their own early modern times, and laid the ground for East Asian societies’ engagement with and later reworking of the modern global order. The main model in East Asia has been the intellectual networks facilitated by the Classical Chinese language and Confucian intellectual culture referred to by Joshua Fogel as the ‘Sinosphere’. In this chapter I will argue that just as Islam provided an important scheme of scientific and ethical conceptual orthodoxy for the establishment of an early modern (and pre-Western dominance) cosmopolis in Southwest Asia, so too Confucianism played a similar role in the Far East, with Chinese acting as a transnational lingua franca much like Persian, Arabic, and other languages across the Near East and South Asia.