| Volume 5, Number 4, October 2008 |
The Persecution by the Others
Lu Xun and Emmanuel Lévinas
by 伍晓明 Wu Xiaoming |
The (Re-)Shaping of Academic Disciplines
in China
by Thierry Meynard 梅谦立
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IN a certain sense, the origin of spiritual “modernity” in China can be traced to a hope and call for “an ego for each individual”. One of the major denunciations of the traditional Chinese culture by the May Fourth New Cultural Movement was that the traditional culture strangles the individual character or ego of man. Before China can really enter into modernity, the establishment of “individuality” or “self” must be treated, first and foremost, as an important task: “Ego must be made absolutely free”, and “self must be made into the centre as well as the ultimate.” This is the wish and demand of the modern Chinese culture made by Lu Xun, a representative figure in the May Fourth era, in his early essay entitled “On Cultural Paranoia” (文化偏至论 wenhua pianzhi lun), written in the classic Chinese language, when he was reporting some philosophical thoughts from the West. In the eyes of Lu Xun, as long as the “individual character” gets promoted, and as long as each individual has his/her own “ego”, China, a “country built currently on loose sand”...
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AS Michel Foucault has stressed in his writings, human knowledge is very much informed by its classification into different disciplines and branches. Before the impact of Western knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectual life had basically followed its own track for centuries. However, with the elimination of the examination system in 1905, everything changed. New academic institutions, functioning mostly according to the Western episteme, were established. After 1949, reforms were implemented following the model of the Soviet Union. Since 1978, the layout of academic disciplines has once again been re-adjusted to the dominant patterns of American and European academic institutions. Now, with the emergence of a trans-national market of education, China, as many other Asian and African countries, is compelled to follow Western norms and practices, unless it wishes to become marginalized.
From such a historical perspective, it seems that the shaping of the academia in modern China results from a continuous process of colonization by the West...
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| Issue 5.4 |
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A Voice to
Be Remembered
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