Many Chinese concepts are deceased in world history yet behave in
THE WEST 's disregard for foreign socio-cultural originality has become a
real problem for the rest of the world. Western media and academia for example
have the reputation for either omitting Chinese concepts or translating them
into Western biblical and philosophical terminologies. This creates a perfect
illusion: the West is all there is to know. Non-Westerners now have to study
the West to get to know themselves.
In the global discourse important Chinese names and concepts - like wenming, shengren, daxue and junzi - have become a somewhat useless cultural currency ; just as the German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had already envisioned it :
Take "Confucianism" for
example. Confucianism is a Western word
creation. The correct Chinese term is ruxue. But the Chinese name doesn't
follow the Western "logic" that "a religion" should be
named after its "messiah", like in Christianity. So the Western
missionaries created
"Confucianism", this word (same logic in "Buddhism", by the
way). Ruxue is not a religion but a school of thought, but it was quickly made
look like a religion thanks to misleading Western taxonomy. To this day, the
Western public believes that Confucius is a saint (and that there's just one buddha,
by the way).
This leads me to my favorite example
-that of "shengren". When the early European missionaries to
This all leads me to a very
provocative mid- conclusion:
Although many Chinese concepts are already deceased in world history yet they
behave in
So the next question would be, is
there a cure to this disease? Not that I know of. The "virus" that
already caused the undead of tens of thousands of East-Asian vocabularies has
now contaminated entire
To stop the spread of undead
vocabularies, one would have to stop translating foreign key terminologies into
familiar vocabularies of one's own lingua. Instead one would have to adopt
them. But this is like asking Christians to stop Christianity because its
unscientific or Westerners to stop military interventions because its wrong.
Translation of the most precious originality of our enemies into our own all-favorite
taxonomies is about power and dominance. Read more about Western Language
Imperialism and the prerogative of final explanation here.
Yes, Western domination may not be
able to annihilate the Chinese language. But Western media and academia will make
sure those Chinese key terminologies
will have no life outside