THE PROBLEM OF SINOLOGY

BEFORE you: a collection of bold essays and commentaries. Your author should like to say a few words about its background and how the book’s underlying new philosophy works – for, it is rather practical. A philosophy that nevertheless has been wisely omitted – for treason against their universe – by Western scholarship and the media of matters, and has failed [so far] to cause the much needed ruckus – in East and West – in cultural studies and the humanities. No kings have been beheaded yet.

Even among our learned mandarins and seasoned Confucian raiders at Peking University, nobody seems quite yet prepared to yield an iota of battered authority, or conceit publishing territory to the new findings concerning your Chinese words and their proper place in world history… let alone Chinese loan words in your English language classrooms. Why?

Enter the cowshed of academia. The sacred discipline of “Sinology” (or “China Studies” as it has been dumbed down) is largely administered and supervised by Western professors and pro-Western Chinese associates who have climbed up the ranks from kowtow to dontknow in a long lineage of equally challenged predecessors and idol-worshipers. Few innovation and originality could come out of it. They had 350 years to explain the words of China to the West, and they blew it.

They profited as enablers of Westernization. THIS, they were very good at: Regurgitating outdated evangelist formula and disenfranchising cultural China and the East. And if anybody said anything back to them, or critiqued or debunked their cold waffles, our grey Western eminences shamelessly excommunicated the “heretics” and expelled them from the universities. Especially our so-called elite hanxuejia (sinologists) – and I mean all those canting Harvardians, Ivy leaguers, and spoiled Hong Kong lights – seem over-sensitive to the crime of change. They are selling a product – “a Chinese-free China”. They have the global monopoly, they are determined to discredit any dissension; and they won’t let any foreign voices – let alone a language reformation – challenge the Western status quo. What has happened?

Historians may share a sense of crisis which permeates, I am sure of it, the style and tone of his writings – a coming-to-terms with one’s sui generis in a resistance that’ll not just affect any branch of scholarship but all of it: The entire corporation of “China Studies” stands accused of counterfeiting, theft and language imperialism. Let me rephrase that: Western Asia Studies is a fraud.

Disobedience and the love for Truth had ultimately led your author to withdraw from high academia with all its thieves and fraudulent careerists, and to relocate to the edge of the world – Japan – where he, quite simply overwhelmed by poverty and depression, became something of a wandering glum, writing for an audience that he may never come to know. In all those years, he had not doubted the liberalization of Asian words one day, but he surely doubted himself here and now.

Then, word reached Tokyo that a growing number of Chinese leaders had read his “How to Translate Chinese Terminologies”, among them our distinguished Vice Premier Liu Yandong. Madame Liu initiated a project “Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture”, upon which 70 illustrious professors were to feature the philosopher… only for the philosopher to discover that some of the elevator sages who ousted him now sat in the splendid committee, while he was disinvited and delegated to the rank of a “scholarly adviser” among countless other list-muppets. Hanban (Office of Chinese Language Council International, also known as Confucius Institute Headquarters), which operates under the Ministry of Education, stalled the publication of Knowledge Is A Polyglot with the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) for almost three years so that everyone at the top could try and take credit. At least educators take matters serious now.

Such is life. It is competition for scarce resources. It’s also a competition for the most intellectual resource of them all – our words; whose words history is run by and written with: Yours… or theirs. Or everyone’s. The great discoveries of mankind are the simplest and most obvious ones: We are not special – we are very special. The earth is just one among billions of other planets – the earth is all we have. The words of humanity add up, they don’t overlap. The greatest artist is him who has the whole world against him before he passes the torch of burning passion to a more enlightened, progressive age. China must compete for its words. What are you waiting for?

Some pinheads from Bloomberg and The New York Times have called your author “dangerous” and “anti-Western”, knowing very well that if he got to walk their pages – that would be the end of their indefensible and outdated, racist language policies. A Swiss-German catholic theologian who boasted his affiliations with the United Nations called your author a traitor to the German cause. Religious toadeaters! And does this spiritual quack’s concern not demonstrate the problem with the Christian conspiracy: What is the German cause in China? Proselytization? Agency? Your Catholicism!

“Meaning”, in any philosophy, is the make-belief that everyone ought to have adopted if only they had listened to the philosopher: IT [meaning] is so cheap and gratuitous that everybody in the West is now an expert – alas, those meek Asian thinkers who don’t put their words to IT are not even participating in the global discourse: Where are the Chinese terms your ancestors fought for and passed on to you?

Most knowledge they teach us in Western schools today is limited to just one language – yours, which for the sake of this work we say is English. That language may appear sufficient to monolingual speakers. To everyone else however it lacks the hundreds of languages the rest of us are learning:

If there are 10 choices, but 9 are expelled

– are you free in choosing the last one?

If there are 360 directions, but 359 are blocked

– are you not forced to walk the line?

If there are 1,000 sets of vocabularies,

but only one, they say, is permissible

– are you not reduced?

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