How Can We Talk about China and against Sinophobia without Feeling Guilty, Apologetic or Defensive? (original) (raw)
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The othering of China and taboo in Euro-American academia
The ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’ discourse targeted at China that Biden introduced since taking office in 2021 constitutes the othering of China as a distinct civilization and society, which embodies a profound intolerance of civilizational diversity. Under the dominance of the above discourse, to make such an argument is impermissible in Euro-American academia.
This thesis inquires into the structure of contemporary knowledge production on China through a particular emphasis on the organization of academic expertise across the range of Area Studies and traditional disciplines, the functioning of and incentive structure within the academic field and consequences for the usefulness and consumption of knowledge. Conclusions include: that the compartmentalization into multiple communities of academic knowledge production on one subject area may harm the validity and quality of of conclusions about wider issues of importance when this makes falsification difficult; that the products of ‘Area’ and ‘disciplinary’ scholarship tend to feed into different theoretical discourses (if at all) and reach different audiences; that ‘Area’ and ‘disciplinary’ style scholarship thus have different implications for the public legitimacy and the academic legitimacy of the China field.
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.
2013
In this heavily annotated article the provocative thesis is submitted that there is something fundamentally wrong with Western Sinology, or 'Chinakunde', or 'Zhongguoxue' (as distinct from 'Hanxue', which is a kind of old-fashioned philology). 'China experts' either pretend to be knowledgeable about everything related to China, in which case they cannot be taken seriously, or - eventually - admit not to be scientific all-rounders with respect to the country, in which case they cannot be called 'China experts'. The author, who graduated in Sinology from Leyden University and in economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, not only believes that the study of China has to be taken to a higher level (a belief he expects few tenured professors of Chinese Studies/History will share); he also explains how this long overdue task can be accomplished. Sinologists should take the complexity turn. They should treat China as a 'Ganzheit' (not: 'Gesamtheit'), as a territory-bound, history-moulded and culture-soaked totality of identifiable yet interdependent (f)actors, as a whole intimately interconnected with its numerous parts, as a hypercomplex system of complex, adaptive and non-linear systems of political, military, legal, economic, financial, social, medical, educational, artistic or other nature. Firmly distancing itself from multidisciplinary research (which in practice is a matter of juxta- rather than composition), the new study of China requires a well-thought-out, balanced division of labour. Close collaboration with ICT-driven, China-oriented experts in the natural, social and human sciences willing to co-operate with each other is a sine qua non for comprehending the country that seems to be moving to the centre stage of world politics. The study of China should be mile-wide and mile-deep. The heyday of Sinology is yet to come! An earlier version of this highly critical but undeniably constructive paper was rejected out of hand by the editors of leading 'Chinese/Asian Studies' journals. The author claims to have reason to suspect them (and other so-called China experts) of being 'bought by China'!
Asien -- The German Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2022
For some time now, German China research has been engaged in a controversial and sometimes polemical debate revolving around a number of questions central to academic and higher education policy on contemporary authoritarian China. The authors of this article have participated in this debate (and continue to do so), with, among other things, an article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in March 9, 2022, in which we took a stand against what we perceived as "moral crusaderism" among critics of university-based German sinology (Alpermann and Schubert 2022).1 We were not surprised by the fierce reactions this triggered in the traditional print media and especially on various social media platforms. However, it has become apparent that our arguments, which were sometimes deliberately truncated and thus distorted by some critical voices, require more detailed elaboration, for which a newspaper article does not provide the necessary space. We would therefore like to return to these arguments in this article, which we also see as a preliminary accounting of the ongoing debate. These will be developed in more detail in light of the criticisms that have been made so far. In the aritcle, we to focus on three aspects that are at the heart of the question of how to “properly deal” with contemporary China: • Positionality, specifically the tension between individual normative value orientations on the one hand, and the public (educational) mission of Sinology in Germany on the other. • Field access and the associated challenges in terms of scientific ethics and practice, with special consideration of the complex problem of “self-censorship” • University cooperation with China
What’s Wrong with the Study of China/Countries
Asian Studies, 2014
In this paper the thesis is submitted that there is something fundamentally amiss in Western Sinology (Zhōngguóxué, as distinct from Hànxué, which is a kind of old-fashioned philology): ‘China experts’ either pretend to be knowledgeable about everything related to China, in which case they cannot be taken seriously, or–– eventually––admit not to be scientific all-rounders with respect to the country, in which case they cannot be called ‘China experts’. The author expects no tenured professor of Chinese Studies/History to share this view. Having exposed the weakness, indeed the scandal of old-style Sinology, he also points out the way junior Sinologists should go. The fork in that road is two-pronged: translating or collaborating.