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This essay engages with Jon Douglas Solomon's The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, moving in two parts. It first provides an overview of the Solomon's critique of Pax Americana: the way American economic, military, and diplomatic power is projected throughout the world to consolidate the interests of the neo-liberal capitalist system. Pax Americana operates through "colonial governmentality under erasure" (5), in which post-colonial nations becoming willing participants in a subordinate relationship to the United States. Taiwan is one such client-state, and Solomon seeks to challenge the "Taiwan consensus" (120), which presents Taiwan in the terms of a successfully transitioned liberal democracy rather than as a "laboratory of engineered self-determination" and "colonial governmentality under erasure" (29). For Solomon, the only way to move beyond Pax Americana is to critique the "modern regime of translation" (6), which imagines the world as divided by civilizational and national units grounded in notions of anthropological essence. Solomon calls for a decolonization of Area Studies through a repudiation of the regime of translation, a move born out of a desire to build a social critique grounded in "revolutionary demands for justice in the present" (217). The second section of this essay presents a series of questions I have regarding Solomon's project, concerns which predominately revolve around the relationship between Marxism and the Chinese humanist tradition. These are questions that a Sinologist brings to their work, a field which is concerned with not just questions of revolutionary rupture but cultural continuity as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current discourse on Matteo Ricci often focuses on his remarkable contributions to sinology and his role as a bridge between Chinese and Italian cultures. However, it is important to note that this perspective has not been constant throughout history. Over the years, Ricci's image has undergone significant changes, and only recently has he been recognized as someone who embodies values that go beyond the strictly Catholic dimension. This article examines a crucial moment in this transformation, which occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century within the academic circles of post-unification Italy. During that period, the discussion around Ricci expanded to encompass his identity as a sinologist, that overlapped or ran alongside his identity as a missionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nearly 75 years that the People's Republic of China has been in existence, the field of contemporary China studies in the United States has developed and evolved through six distinguishable 'generations' of scholarship. The evolving social science scholarly analyses of contemporary China have paralleled the changes in the PRC itself over time, but they have also reflected paradigmatic changes in scholarly disciplines in the United States. Other stimuli which have also impacted the field include domestic politics in America and shifts in US-China relations. This article traces the evolution of field (as observed and interpreted by the author); it concludes that while the field is generally very healthy, diverse, and enjoys great breadth and depth of knowledge, it faces significant new challenges for source material and research in Xi Jinping's China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The previous generation of Sinologists were of the overwhelming consensus that race consciousness did not exist in pre-modern China. However, in recent decades there has been a revision of this consensus. This paper frames this shift in terms of Sinology's complicity with white supremacy, imperialism and the military-industrial-academic complex. Contemporary Sinology sets itself up as exposing a colonial mentality in pre-modern China. The irony is that it is contemporary Sinology which is complicit with white supremacy and itself is in need of decolonisation. This paper will analyse the most prominent example of this sea-shift in the Sinological consensus on race in China: Frank Dikötter's The Discourse of Race in Modern China. That such scholarship, deficient in the most basic scholarly standards, was overwhelmingly feted upon its publication, continues to be cited as an authority and to receive inordinate recognition reveals Western academia's problematic attitudes towards China and the issue of racism. This paper will show how all of the above phenomena can be understood in terms of the "epistemology of ignorance." By misappropriating the discourse of the critical philosophy of race, Sinology's epistemology of ignorance universalises Western racism. Sinology has weaponised the discourse of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Chinese Studies in the West: The Chinese Record" is a book series consisting of works written by Westerners who went to China from the 18th to the early 20th century, each of which contains a Chinese introduction and translations of the book's core information followed by the reprint of the original text for scholars to study and research. From 2009 to 2021, 13 volumes have been published, with a total of 130 titles. This article will discuss the different types of Westerners in the Series, the activities they engaged in while they were in China or related to China, the books they wrote and their opinions towards China and its people. It will also explore the Series' social impact and its value to the study of Sino- Western culture exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews with 23 Japanese Sinologists as well as other oral materials, this article examines the origins of the pro-China trend among Japanese Sinologists during the Cold War, primarily from the perspective of 'situated knowledge'. This article first contextualises how China scholars had been 'situated' socially and culturally in the 'post-war' discourse, and depicts the role of these scholars, whose production of knowledge can be seen as an embodiment of 'post-war' thought in Japan. Subsequently, the article discusses how the pro-China trend was born, how it intensified, and finally how it faded, by considering three conditioning factors: the China experiences of the Sinologists in initiating the reinterpretation of Japan's locus in Asia; the memorial site of war where these scholars shouldered a spiritual burden in relation to China; and the localised power structure of the global Cold War in which China scholars took the People's Republic as a robust ideological symbol as they challenged Japan's conservative state under US patronage. In so doing, the article argues that the meandering journey of these Sinologists to constitute the meaning of 'post-war' through these three factors prompted the emergence of the pro-China trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jue Hou's study of interactions between computer engineers and Chinese script reformers in the 1970s enriches growing STS and China studies interest in Chinese engineering. It can also make a distinctive sinological contribution to contemporary efforts to develop the field of comparative philology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as "Confucian Heritage" learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West and civilised and yet authoritarian East. In mapping the deployment of such heuristic in the management of international affairs during and after historical colonialism, we moreover demonstrate how the derivative characterisation of international students as "rote", "dependent", and inherently "prone to plagiarism" learners has been used to explain racism without race - that is, the epistemic exclusion of international students as a matter caused by factors other than race: lack of socially relevant cultural skills and communication barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ming dynasty Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529) has been the subject of a European and North American literature since at least the 18th century. But the rich history of writing about him in the West has been largely obscured by an English-language scholarship published in the 1960s and 1970s. This earlier literature nevertheless provides one window into the broader history of intellectual encounter between China and the West, shedding light on it from the angle of the discovery of one of late imperial China's most influential scholar-officials. This article's goal is to provide a history of writing about Wang Yangming in Europe and North America from the 17th century to 1950, demonstrating both how historical circumstances shaped his reception and interpretation, and that these earlier accounts shared valuable insights yet worthy of our attention today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article deals with a monograph by the German Divine Word Missionary Franz Xaver Biallas (1878-1936) on the Temple of Confucius in Qufu and the rites performed there in veneration of the Chinese sage. Biallas was the first academically trained Sinologist of his congregation and founder of the Sinological journal Monumenta Serica. His book Confucius and His Cult: A Contribution to the Cultural History of China and a Guide to the Native Place of Confucius was published in German in 1928. It includes an introduction to Chinese culture, a presentation of Confucius and the historical development of Confucianism, as well as a detailed description of the temple and the grave of Confucius in Qufu. Richly illustrated, the work features photographs taken by Biallas himself and maps drawn according to his and his confrere Andreas Mohrbacher’s measurements made during their extended stays in Qufu. Following a biographical sketch of Biallas and a description of the genesis and contents of his book on Confucius, the Sinological value of the work is explored in the context of contemporary reviews. Finally, the present article assesses the academic relevance of Biallas’s book today as a thorough study of the Temple of Confucius and an eyewitness account to the performance of the Confucian rites in Republican times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of post-Chineseness is enlisted to analyze Vietnamese Sinology as a comparative agenda. Post-Chineseness refers to the cultural preparation and the political process of mutual acknowledgement among those who consider one another sharing (some kind of) Chineseness, practically defined according to the context and its trajectories, at each time and each site. Chineseness can thus have various, if not entirely irrelevant, meanings. Vietnamese Sinologists have relied on different kinds of post-Chineseness to make sense of their relationship with the encountered Chinese to select and determine the mode of self-understanding, the purpose and a strategy to reconnect, and the normative criterion to assess and manage the relationship. Chinese Vietnamese are significantly less numerous than Chinese Malaysian, Thai, and Indonesians. However, the history of Vietnam is considerably closer to China than are those of Korea and Japan, in terms of length of merger. The post-Chineseness of Vietnamese scholarship therefore complicates its role-identity vis-à-vis China, intellectually as well as practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special nature of Sino-Japanese translation, with a history as long as that of vernacular translations of Greek and Latin, is worth exploring because it can throw new light on Eurocentric and universalist approaches to translation theorizing. The tradition of translating between China and Japan, disrupted and then reinvigorated by the “invasion of Europe” in the nineteenth century, is the subject of ruminations by Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–77), a prominent twentieth-century Sinologist. Takeuchi triangulates the relationship between Japan, China and the West in a way that forces a deeper reconsideration of the notion of the “translational”. The West (the Other) is a means through which identity can be constructed by Japan (the Self), but given Japan's long history of being shaped by/shaping the China imaginary, China is also Japan's Other. Takeuchi's prime interest is in Japan projecting its own identity onto China (via Lu Xun). In the present article, Takeuchi's two translations of Lu Xun's “The Diary of a Madman” in 1956 and 1976 are compared with those by Inoue (1932), Oda and Tanaka (1953) and Komada (1974) to understand how Takeuchi's advocacy of a realignment with China (and Asia) constitutes an attempt to reconstrue a Japanese identity that would refute the West's monistic view of civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]