UPLIFTING THE STUDY OF CHINA

UPLIFTING THE STUDY OF CHINA Hans Kuijper ‘There is nothing isolated’ (Zhu Xi) ‘Tout tient à tout ’ (όrench proverb) ABSTRACT In this paper the thesis is submitted that there is something fundamentally amiss in Western Sinology (Zhōngguóxué): ‘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’. First, after an introduction, an attempt will be made to give a definition of ‘science’, the definiendum not being restricted to the business of natural scientists. Secondly, the question will be raised as to whether Sinology can be considered a science. The criticism will be leveled at studies of China carried out in Europe and America. Thirdly, objections that could be voiced to the thesis will be countered. Fourthly, a constructive response to the challenge launched in the article will be suggested and the road ahead will be indicated, its fork being two-pronged. Fifthly, the importance of considering China to be a complex system of complex systems, and, consequently, of engaging in scientific collaboration, will be emphasised. Finally, a grand research project proposal, entirely in line with the argument against the conventional Western way of doing China research, will be made. Overall, the author (for personal details, see end of paper) firmly believes that, for better international relations and more intercultural understanding, the study of countries in general, and of China in particular, should be taken to a higher level. Key words: country/area studies, Sinology, complexity, interdisciplinarity, e-science, modernisation INTRODUCTION The study of China has a long history. In the West, its origin can be traced to the late 16th century, when Jesuit missionaries, notably Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, introduced Christianity into the country. Though they seriously attempted to understand the Chinese (read: Confucian) way of thought, a fact that sets them apart from their predecessors Giovanni da Montecorvino, Odorico da Pordenone and Marco Polo (whose journey to, and adventures in, Cathay are recorded in his 13thcentury travelogue Il Milione), it tends to be forgotten that evangelising (trying to persuade Chinese to become Christians) rather than studying the Middle Kingdom was the primary and principal objective of their exercise. The shock troops of the Counter-Reformation might have been ‘brilliantly successful in interpreting China to the West’ (Colin Mackerras), the interpretation betrays their missionary agenda. These early pioneers were followed by a train of scholars coming from different backgrounds and having different agendas. Notable names are Niccolò Longobardi, Nicolas Trigault, Giulio Aleni, Álvaro Semedo, Adam Schall, Michał Boym, Martino Martini, όerdinand Verbiest, Philippe Couplet, Antoine Thomas and Joachim Bouvet in the 17th century; Giuseppe Castiglione, Antoine Gaubil and Joseph-Marie Amiot in the 18th century; and Ilarion Rossokhin, Hyacinth Bichurin, Robert Morrison, William Milne, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Walter Medhurst, Stanislas Julien, Édouard Biot, Antoine Bazin, Karl Gützlaff, August Pfitzmaier, Samuel Wells Williams, James Legge, Pyotr Kafarov, Vasiliy Vasilyev, Joseph Edkins, William Martin, Emil Bretschneider, Georg von der Gabelentz, Gustaaf Schlegel, Jan de Groot and Wilhelm Grube in the 19th century. Whereas in the 17th and 18th century positive reports on China inspired the development of chinoiserie and the comparing of Chinese to European culture (unlike Montesquieu, who detested China’s despotism, Leibniz and Voltaire described the country as an example of the enlightened state), in the 19th century, particularly after the First Opium War, the image turned negative.1 1 See José Frèches, La Sinologie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1975, 9-61; Jacques Gernet, Chine et christianisme: action et réaction, Gallimard, 1982; Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Penguin, 1984; Claudia von Collani, P. Joachim Bouvet S.J., Steyler Verlag, 1984; René Étiemble, L’Europe chinoise, Gallimard, Vol. 1 (De l’Empire romain à Leibniz), 1988, Vol. 2 (De la sinophilie à la sinophobie), 1989; David Mungello, Curious Land, In the late 19th century, the study of China made a major shift, definitively taking the university as its base. Leading Western China-scholars born in the period 1860-1940 were/are Otto Franke, Édouard Chavannes, Berthold Laufer, Paul Pelliot, Vasiliy Alekseev, Henri Maspero, Marcel Granet, Arthur Hummel, Jean Escarra, Bernhard Karlgren, Jan Duyvendak, Luther Goodrich, Paul Demiéville, Karl Wittfogel, Joseph Needham, Max Loehr, Karl Bünger, Peter Boodberg, Étienne Balázs, Herrlee Creel, Jaroslav Průšek, John K. Fairbank, Derk Bodde, Wolfram Eberhard, Anthony Hulsewé, Arthur Wright, Edward Schafer, Herbert Franke, Benjamin Schwartz, Janusz Chmielewski, Mary Wright, Sergei Tikhvinsky, Angus Graham, Rhoads Murphey, Ted de Bary, Hans Bielenstein, Jacques Gernet, Lucian Pye, Fritz Mote, Michael Loewe, Edwin Pulleyblank, David Nivison, Stuart Schram, Denis Twitchett, Lionello Lanciòtti, Albert Feuerwerker, Erik Zürcher, Lloyd Eastman, Roderick MacFarquhar, Lucien Bianco, Merle Goldman, Maurice Meisner, Nathan Sivin, Jürgen Domes, David Keightley, Philip Kuhn, Thomas Metzger, Manfred Porkert, Mikhail Titarenko, Kristofer Schipper, Paul Cohen, Oskar Weggel, Roy Hofheinz, Rafe de Crespigny, Frederic Wakeman, Anna Seidel, Edward Rhoads, Michel Oksenberg, Glen Dudbridge, Richard Baum and Orville Schell. Their life was/is centred on learning about China, and their works are both extensive and impressive. Many of their numerous students are holding Professorial Chairs across the world.2 Since the end of the Second World War the literature on China has dramatically increased, and particularly since the 1980s Western bibliographers have difficulty in keeping up with the flood of China related publications. In 1956, under the editorship of Piet van der Loon, the Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie was founded as leading European source of information on current Sinological publications. Its announced fields of interest were ‘history, fine arts, archaeology, music, linguistics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of science’, and the coverage included books and articles in Chinese, Japanese and the major European languages. After a lapse of more than a decade, a new series was inaugurated in 1982, increasing the emphasis on Chinese publications. In 2006, after 50 years of scholarship, the official announcement was made that the review’s publication had ceased. The Bibliography of Asian Studies, compiled by The Association for Asian Studies (Ann Arbor), is now available online. As of November 2013, it contains ‘over 823,000 records on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast and South Asia published worldwide from 1λ71 to the present day’. The subject headings are ‘ύeneral and Miscellaneous; Anthropology and Sociology; Arts; Biography; Communication and Media; Economics; Education; Geography; History; Language; Library and Information Sciences; University of Hawaii Press, 1989; idem (ed.), The Chinese Rites Controversy, Steyler Verlag, 1994; Jerome Heyndrickx (ed.), Philippe Couplet S.J., Steyler Verlag, 1990; Alfons Väth, Johann Adam Schall von Bell S.J., Steyler Verlag, 1991; Thomas H.C. Lee (ed.), China and Europe, Chinese UP, 1991; Walter Demel, Als Fremde in China: Das Reich der Mitte im Spiegel frühneuzeitlicher europäischer Reiseberichte, Oldenbourg Verlag, 1992; John Witek (ed.), Ferdinand Verbiest S.J., Steyler Verlag, 1994; Tiziana Lippiello & Roman Malek (ed.), Scholar from the West: Giulio Aleni S.J., Steyler Verlag, 1997; J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, Routlege, 1997, 39-53; Wu Xiaoxin (ed.), Encounters and Dialogues: Changing Perspectives on Chinese-Western Exchanges from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Steyler Verlag, 2005; Yves Camus, 'Jesuits’ Journeys in Chinese Studies', 2007 (online); Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724, Belknap, 2007; Lin Xi, ‘China through Western Prisms’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3:4 (2010), 146-149; Luisa Paternicò (ed.), The Generation of Giants: Jesuit Missionaries and Scientists in China on the Footsteps of Matteo Ricci, Centro Studi Martino Martini (Trento), 2011; Beatriz Moncó, ’The China of the Jesuits’, 2012 (online); Claudia von Collani, Von Jesuiten, Kaisern und Kanonen, WBG, 2012; Filipe Barreto (ed.), Europe-China: Intercultural Encounters (16th -18th Centuries), Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2012; and Roger Hart, Imagined Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter, JHU Press, 2013. 2 See Harriet Zurndorfer, China Bibliography, Brill, 1995, 4-44; Ming Wilson & John Caley (eds.), Europe Studies China, Hanshan Tang Books, 1λλ5; Kjeld Brødsgaard, ‘China Studies in Europe’, in David Shambaugh a.o. (eds.), China-Europe Relations, Routledge, 2008, 35-64; Stuart Kirby, Russian Studies of China, Macmillan Press, 1975; and the book reviewers in China Review International, 1994 ff. Also visit www.washington.edu (search: history of sinology) and www.indiana.edu (search: C511). Literature; Philosophy and Religion; Politics and Government; Psychology and Psychiatry; and Science and Technology’.3 In this article, instead of investigating what has been written about China, we venture upon a critical assessment of how the country has been studied. For it is one thing to examine the content of the discourses or treatises of Sinologists on a special subject matter, but quite another to examine Sinology itself, its nature, scope, methodology and relationship to the human and social sciences. So we take a stance on a stance, a second-order position. The reader is requested to bear this constantly in mind. We are not the first to assess the study of China critically. In 1964, at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of The Association for Asian Studies, in Washington D.C., Joseph Levenson (Professor of History at the University of California), Mary Wright (Professor of History at Yale University), William Skinner (Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University), Maurice Freedman (Reader in Anthropology and Political Science at the London School of Economics) and Frederick Mote (Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University) crossed swords with each other on the issue ‘Chinese Studies and the Disciplines’. The extended papers from the gathering and some impromptu comments from the floor by Benjamin Schwartz (Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University) were published in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Aug. 1964), 505-538. The comments of Denis Twitchett (Head of the University of London’s Department of όar Eastern Languages and Literatures) and Hsiao Kung-chuan (Professor of the History of Chinese Thought at the University of Washington) were published in the same journal, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Nov. 1964), 109-114. The ideas exchanged on that historic occasion are still a testimony of perceptiveness and scholarship, but the dispute was not settled and, remarkably, the scientific status of China, or Chinese, studies has remained undecided ever since. The structure of the paper, being the result of long and independent but not solitary work, is as follows. όirst an attempt will be made to give a definition of ‘science’(sensu lato). We will deal with the principles scientists use to work on, and with the differences and similarities between natural and cultural sciences. The treatment of the issue is somewhat extensive because the rest of the article is based on it. Secondly, the question will be raised as to whether Sinology (Zhōngguóxué), which belongs to the controversial group of country/area studies, can be considered a science. Our criticism will be lodged against studies of China carried out in Europe and the United States.4 We leave it to Russian, Indian, Japanese, Australian and other China scholars to decide for themselves whether or not the cap fits. Thirdly, objections that could be raised to our critical remarks will be countered. Fourthly, a constructive response to the challenge launched will be suggested and the road ahead will 3 Visit www.asian-studies.org/bassub.htm. The online version of BAS is referred to in the Internet Guide for Chinese Studies (www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/igcs). Visit also www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaandthewest.html. Endymion Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual, comprising fourteen book-length parts subdivided into 76 chapters (Harvard UP, 2013), is the standard guide to China research. See also previous note. 4 In this paper, we heavily criticise the Western state of Zhōngguóxué, the study of a country called China (to be distinguished from Zhōngnánhǎixué, the study of China’s Kremlin). In fact, we argue that the study of China in and of itself is nonexistent; the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Hànxué (literally: Scholarship of the Han), the more narrow subject we are NOT dealing with, is the study of the (main) language of China, that is to say, the study/interpretation of Chinese texts, and, by extension, of Chinese culture and history; it is a kind of philology, this being a type of scholarship that has a long pedigree but is fast losing ground to, inter alia, linguistics, literary theory or criticism, art history, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. See David Honey, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology, American Oriental Series, Volume 86, 2001; and Jesse Russell & Ronald Cohn, Sinology, VSD, 2012. Hoù-Hànxué (Post-Hanxue) is an academic approach first propounded by ύeremie Barmé (AσU). It ‘builds on traditional Sinological strengths while emphasizing a robust engagement with the complex and shifting realities of contemporary China’. For Guóxué (National Learning/ Scholarship), a concept related to Hànxué, see Chen Lai, ‘The genesis and Transformation of the Concept of Guoxue in the Past Century’, 2011 (online). όor ‘Sinologism’, see Mingdong Gu, Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Postcolonialism, Routledge, 2013. See also Adrian Chan, Orientalism in Sinology, Academic Press, 2009; and visit http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/clinton.htm. Unfortunately, the Chinese terms for Sinology, (Hoù)Hànxué, Guóxué, Zhōngguóxué and Zhōngnánhǎixué), have been confusingly interchanged. be indicated, its fork being two-pronged. Fifthly, the importance of considering China to be a very complex ‘system of systems’(SoS), and, consequently, of engaging in truly interdisciplinary research will be stressed. Finally, a grand research project proposal, compatible with our argument against the conventional Western way of doing China research, will be made. The occasionally crossreferencing footnotes, taking nearly half of the article, give supplementary, mostly recent information. The essay is meant to be an exercise in what Joseph Schumpeter famously called ‘creative destruction’. While the first half is strongly critical of the current state of China studies (in Europe, the USA and elsewhere), the second half redresses the balance by being more ‘creative’. The negative is compensated by the positive, and the sweet is added to the sour, making the dish we serve more palatable. Our argument – the gist of which is that China, indeed every country, ought to be seen sub specie totius (under the aspect of its whole) – is founded on the widely supported claim that the identity of whatever entity is constituted by the totality of its relations to other entities. In other words, we side with those who – like the masters in ancient China – uphold the holistic, that is to say, the non-reductionist and non-essentialist principle, recognising that ‘there are relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations’(Richard Rorty). As the great, twelfth-century philosopher Zhu Xi (a contemporary of Averroes) succinctly put it: ‘There is nothing isolated’. We do not expect all readers to agree, but, quietly confident that the spark of truth will come from the clash of opinions, we hope the article will rekindle a long forgotten fundamental debate. May the gauntlet we throw down be taken up! Silentium videtur confessio. SCIENCE INVESTIGATED In its most general sense, ‘science’ could be defined as a kind of knowledge, but this definition is not very helpful, for the question then arises: what is knowledge? Leaving it to epistemologists, philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists to solve this long-standing problem, we wish to point out that ‘scientific knowledge’ is the antonym of ‘unscientific knowledge’. To give an example of the latter, two housewives chatting somewhere in Amsterdam about price changes in a nearby supermarket know to some degree what is happening in the shop, but the small talk of these ladies is a far cry from the coherent/systematic account of market movements, government budget and balance of international payments in/of Holland given by an economist. Similarly, viewers of an ‘intelligence quiz’ may be awed by the winner’s display of knowledge, but no man in his right mind would call such person a scientist. So we take ‘science’ to mean (the search for) ordered knowledge, that is to say, knowledge gained in conformity with rules and principles that are generally accepted but never dogmatised.5 5 The literature on philosophy of science, a subset of the literature on philosophy (www.philindex.org), is vast. Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science, www.thebsps.org, http://philpapers.org/browse/general-philosophyof-science, www.philsci.org, www.clmps2011.org, http://www2.lse.ac.uk/cpnss, http://humweb.ucsc.edu/roundtable, https://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/taxonomy/2218, www.iep.utm.edu/category/s-l-m/science, www.vub.ac.be/CLWF, www.hopos.org, www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/tilps, www.galilean-library.org (resources[philosophy of science]), www.epsa.ac.at and www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/loewe/FotFS. In addition, see Donald Gillies, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century: Four Central Themes, Blackwell, 1993; Michel Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought, Blackwell, 1995; Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of Science Today, OUP, 2003; Dov Gabbay a.o. (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Elsevier, 2006 ff.; Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, 2008; Richard DeWitt, Worldviews; An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010; the book series Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1956 ff.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1963 ff.), The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science (1973 ff), Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (1978 ff.), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Springer, 1982 ff.) and The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective (European Science Foundation, 2010 ff.); and the journals Philosophy of Science (1934 ff.), Synthese (1936 ff.), Journal for General Philosophy of Science (1970 ff.); Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Elsevier, 1970 ff.; Springer, 1982 ff.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1971 ff.), International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1986 ff.), The search for ordered/systematised knowledge (according to Arthur Fine, a ‘shaky game’) is an ongoing process. It starts when somebody a) cannot accept the first-instance reply to a question posed with reference to something striking, b) brings his mind to bear upon the problem, and c) decides to collect data. Next, following certain rules and using certain techniques, he will group or segregate the data in categories. If a number can be assigned or a classification can be made according to the frequency of occurrence or the intensity (the more or less) of a property, the door to the treasure troves of mathematics/statistics will be opened.6 Facts may have power of persuasion, but they do not speak for themselves; somehow they must be interpreted. The scientific researcher will form a plausible hypothesis and draw out propositions from it which may explain the data. May explain, for the induction and deduction are to be followed by confrontation (to see whether the reasoning stands in the light of new facts) and evaluation (to see whether the piece of knowledge acquired can be introduced into the scientific corpus already existing). Facts are the raw material of the theory explaining them. A theory (to be distinguished from a scientific law) is a set of statements held to be true. Axiomatisation, a hot topic in mathematical/symbolic logic, is a way of organising them; it is the act or process of reducing a number of statements to a system of axioms relating undefined terms and undefined relations. Axioms, or postulates, are propositions ‘regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true’; they serve as starting points for scientific reasoning and should not be confused with dogmas. A theory is an imaginative construction suggested by the outcome of critical and exhaustive investigations; it has been devised to guide the (lab- or field)research. Rather than being a dispensable luxury, or an unnecessary encumbrance to empirical research, a theory provides a sophisticated way of seeing, an important source of conjectures, a handy tool for investigation. There is nothing so practical as a good theory. As the Romans used to say: ‘Theoria sine praxis est rota sine axis sed praxis sine theoria est caecus in via’. A theory is an evolving scheme of thoughts, a disciplinary framework according to which the scientist expounds on a topic or covers a field. It is not a doctrine carved in stone, but a conceptual structure, which people may or may not concur with. When the facts that do not square with the theory accumulate, the pressure to revise, or replace, it will be mounting, a process that may result in a ‘paradigm shift’.7 Next to observing/experimenting and theorising (thought experiments, being devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things, should be distinguished from thinking about experiments), computational science, a young and quickly developing discipline, has established itself as the third pillar of modern science. It involves the mathematical modelling, simulation, and analysis of phenomena by means of a computer, or a network of computers.8 Perspectives on Science (1993 ff.), Foundations of Science (1995 ff.) and European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2011 ff.). The Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and its sister organisation, the Division of History of Science and Technology, form the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS), which is affiliated with the International Council for Science (formerly International Council of Scientific Unions). One should also read Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics of Science (OUP, 2013), and visit the website of The Society for the Metaphysics of Science. 6 Visit www.ams.org/mathscinet/msc/msc2010.html, http://mathworld.wolfram.com, www.encyclopediaofmath.org, http://mathforum.org, www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm and www.maa.org/euler-book-prize. In addition, see Kiyoshi Itō (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics, MIT Press, 1993; and Robert Doran a.o. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, Cambridge UP, 1989 ff. Timothy Gowers (ed.), The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (published in 2008) conveys the beauty and depth of modern mathematics. Erik Gregersen (ed.), The Britannica Guide to The History of Mathematics (published, in 2011, in the Britannica Guides Series) is probably the best book on this subject, but Donald Gillies (ed.), Revolutions in Mathematics (OUP, 1992) is not to be overlooked. If only one short book on mathematics could be read, it should be Gregory Chaitin, Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega, Atlantic Books, 2006 (‘a startling vision of the future of mathematics’). 7 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn. Theories and models are related (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science). See James Jaccard & Jacob Jacoby, Theory Construction and Model-Building Skills, Guilford Press, 2010. 8 See Leon Horsten & Richard Pettigrew (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Philosophical Logic, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, 1-26; Daniela Calvetti & Erkki Somersalo, Computational Mathematical The decline of logical positivism in the 1960s resulted from growing awareness among philosophers of science that classification, even collection, of data does not unqualifiedly precede their explanation. They have been suspicious about ‘statements of facts’; for ‘data’ are not ‘things that are given’ but things made, fabricated, managed, massaged, manipulated, or falsified. Verum ipsum factum (the true is the made), Vico, opponent of Descartes and precursor of complexity thinking, aptly wrote. The senses per se grasp no facts. Percepts are bound up with concepts, which are vertiginously complex entities. The mind is not passive in receiving sense impressions. ‘The innocent eye is a myth’ (Ernst Gombrich). ‘We cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values’(Hilary Putnam). Perceiving, the intricate mechanism that guides our actions to navigate the world, is tainted by imagination and illusion. Perceptions can be erroneous. We are all somehow indoctrinated, if not deceived. ‘Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung’ (όranz Brentano). Observations are always ‘theory-laden’. Reality cannot be described as mind-independent; she is ‘veiled’. Telescopes, microscopes, sensors, detectors, camera’s, and a pair of (field) glasses do not observe. ‘Data mining’ and ‘information extraction’ are not natural events but human, culture-bound activities.9 Within the confines of science, there are many constituent sciences, the practitioners of which pay attention to specific facts and put forth specific theories. The expansion of these sciences is astonishing, and the manifold relations between them are even more amazing. Most perplexing, however, is the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between natural and cultural sciences, between physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology and biology on the one side, and the social and human sciences on the other side (since the 1930s, there is a fair amount of travel between physics, chemistry and biology). This ‘explanatory gap’ has given rise to a long controversy over the question as to how animus/mind/culture evolved out of, or emerged from, atoms/matter/nature.10 Modeling: An Integrated Approach Across Scales, SIAM, 2013; Louis Birta & Gilbert Arbez, Modelling and Simulation, Springer, 2013; and the Birkhaüser book series Modeling and Simulation in Science, Engineering and Technology, 1996 ff. For computational methods in the social sciences, see Scott de Marchi, Computational and Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences, CUP, 2005; and National Research Council, Behavioral Modeling and Simulation: From Individuals to Societies, National Academic Press, 2008. In addition, visit www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book232371, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/jasss.html, http://computationalsocialscience.org. 9 For facts, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts, and see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, Harvard UP, 2002. For concepts, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts, www.upriss.org.uk/fca, www.historyofconcepts.org, www.concepta-net.org and www.cogsci.indiana.edu. In addition, see Reinhart Kosseleck, Begriffsgeschichten, Suhrkamp, 2010; Denis Mareschal a.o. (eds.), The Making of Human Concepts, OUP, 2010; Julia Langkau & Christian Nimtz (eds.), New Perspectives on Concepts, Rodopi, 2010; and Christopher Gauker, Words and Images: An Essay on the Origin of Ideas, OUP, 2012. For perception, an ability no scientist can do without but few scientists reflect upon, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception_problem, http://consc.net/mindpapers (Part 3), www.philpapers.org (search: perception) and www.academia.edu (search: perception). For imagination, the ability to form ideas in the mind, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination. For hallucination (perception in the absence of external stimuli), see Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, Knopf, 2012. Illusion (māyā) has been a central issue in ‘Indian philosophy’. There is no agreement on the nature of information, ‘the blood, the fuel and the vital principle of our world’ (James Gleick). See Peter Janich, Was ist Information?, Suhrkamp, 2006; Thomas Cover & Joy Thomas, Elements of Information Theory, Wiley, 2006; Pieter Adriaans & Johan van Benthem (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Information, Elsevier, 2008; Søren Brier. Cybersemiotics: Why Information is not Enough, University of Toronto Press, 2008; Mathieu Triclot, Le moment cybernétique: La constitution de la notion d’information, Champ Vallon, 2008; Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Twenty Questions about a Unified Theory of Information, Emergent Publications, 2010; the special issue of Metaphilosophy on the subject (41:3 [April 2010], 247-442); Thomas Durt, ‘Competing Definitions of Information versus Entropy in Physics’, Foundations of Science, 16:4 (2011), 315-318; Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information, OUP, 2011; and Manfred Eigen, From Strange Simplicity to Complex Familiarity, OUP, 2013 (chapters 3-4). In addition, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information and www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/4/1/1. For the important difference between events and actions/activities, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/action, and see Jonathan Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics, OUP, 2002 (chapter 12). 10 See Richard Warner & Tadeusz Szubka (eds.), The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1995; Sergio Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind, CUP, 1995; Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, Doubleday, 2000; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Viking, 2002; John Dowling, The Great Brain Debate, Princeton UP, 2004; Tom Ziemke a.o. (eds.), Body, Language and Mind, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007; Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness, Routledge, 2009 (Part I); Mario The explanations of natural scientists are deterministic or probabilistic in character, and their approaches are ‘top-down’, starting from the unifying macrostructure, or ‘bottom-up’, beginning with the underlying microstructure. The facts they endeavour to explain are non-human. Natural scientists have obtained an impressive body of systematised knowledge of a) things that can be directly perceived, b) events that happened in the past (e.g. the extinction of dinosaurs), c) events that have not yet occurred (e.g. a future solar eclipse), and d) objects that are only perceivable through the use of instruments, or whose existence and properties can only be inferred (e.g. quarks). The explanations of cultural scientists are functionalist, structuralist, hermeneutic or humanistic. The facts they seek to explain, or understand, are human. Whereas social scientists are concerned with social structures and processes (collective behaviour), taking a keen interest in quantities, workers in the human sciences try to understand human attitudes, actions, representations and interpretations, knowing that conduct cannot be equated with behaviour. The former usually proceed positivistically, the latter phenomenologically.11 Cultural scientists have obtained an impressive body of ordered knowledge of a very special kind of objects. Human beings are neither billiard balls hitting each other nor animals only foraging and mating/reproducing. They are highly sentient, motile beings endowed with intellectual, emotional, volitional and spiritual faculties. Humans are not Bunge, Matter and Mind, Springer, 2010; Maurice Schouten & Huib de Jong (eds.), The Matter of the Mind, WileyBlackwell, 2012; Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, HMH Trade, 2012; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, OUP, 2012; Alexander Moreira-Almeida & Franklin Santana Santos (eds.), Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship, Springer, 2012; Liz Swan (ed.), Origins of Mind, Springer, 2013; Nikolas Rose & Joelle Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton UP, 2013; and Sally Satel, ‘Distinguishing Brain from Mind’, 2013 (online). In addition, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism, www.brain-mind-institute.org, www.princeton.edu/~pear, http://cbc.ucsd.edu, www.consciousness.arizona.edu, www.quantum-mind.co.uk, www.theassc.org, www.psych.indiana.edu, http://www.mindmatter.de, http://bcs.mit.edu, and the website of the European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN). Also see the journals Consciousness and Cognition (1992 ff.), Journal of Consciousness Studies (1994 ff.), Consciousness & Emotion (2000 ff.), Brain and Mind (2000 ff.), Social Neuroscience (2006 ff.) and Culture and Brain (2013 ff.); and the book series Advances in Consciousness Research (John Benjamins, 1995 ff.) and Studies in Brain and Mind (Springer, 2003 ff.). 11 The research methods of social and human scientists are converging. See Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods, OUP, 2008, 587-626; Charles Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond, University of Chicago Press, 2008, 1-12; James όearon & David Laitin, ‘Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods’, in Janet BoxSteffensmeier a.o. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, 2008 (Chapter 33); Manfred Bergman (ed.), Advances in Mixed Methods Research, Sage, 2008; Abbas Tashakkori & Charles Teddlie (eds.), Handbook of Mixed Methods, Sage, 2010, 1-42; Lawrence Neuman, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, Allyn & Bacon, 2010; Walter Hussy a.o., Forschungsmethoden in Psychologie und Sozialwissenschaften, Springer, 2010 (Part III); Uwe Flick, Introducing Research Methodology, Sage, 2011 (Part III); Henri Savall & Véronique Zardat (eds.), The Qualimetrics Approach, Information Age Publishing, 2011; David Plowright, Using Mixed Methods, Sage, 2011; Charles Stangor, Research Methods for the Behavioral Sciences, Wadsworth, 2011, 13-20!; Gary Goertz & James Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences, Princeton UP, 2012; John Gerring, Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework, CUP, 2012; Pierre Paillé & Alex Mucchielli, L’analyse qualitative en sciences humaines et sociales, Armand Colin, 2012; the journals Sociological Methods & Research (1972 ff.) and Journal of Mixed Methods Research (2007 ff.); and the Springer book series Methodological Prospects in the Social Sciences (2002 ff.). It should be added that the cultural sciences are becoming increasingly under the spell of the cognitive science (the interdisciplinary study of mind that encompasses philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, education & learning sciences, sociology and anthropology, and interrelates with biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology and computer engineering). Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science, http://cognet.mit.edu, http://consc.net/mindpapers (Part 7), www.ssrn.com/csn, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_cognitive_scientists, www.mindcogsci.net and www.gk-ev.de. In addition, see Robert Wilson & Frank Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, MIT Press, 2001 (particularly the overview essays); Lynn Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, John Wiley, 2005; Eric Margolis a.o. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, OUP, 2012; Keith Frankish & William Ramsey (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, CUP, 2012; Ron Sun (ed.), Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences, MIT Press, 2012; and the journals Cognitive Science (1976 ff.), Trends in Cognitive Sciences (1997 ff.), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2002 ff.) and Topics in Cognitive Science (2009 ff.). ‘Cooperative Mindsμ Social Interaction and ύroup Dynamics’ was the theme of the 35 th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, held in Berlin, in August 2013 (www.cognitivesciencesociety.org). See also the previous note. aggregates of (groups of) cells but wholes consisting of coherent systems or organisations of cells working together. Moreover, man is not only a system of (and among) systems, i.e. a physical/biological being, but also a meta-physical/biological being, because he is able to go beyond (transcend) himself. ‘Existing’(standing out), he is both a part of and apart from nature. He is an active being in a passive universe; a self shaped by, and shaping, its socially embedded brain. Man is a ‘zôon politikon’ (Aristotle), an ‘animal symbolicum’ (Ernst Cassirer), ‘the beast with red cheeks’ (σietzsche), a ‘cosmic orphan’, a ‘prison breaker’ (Loren Eiseley), a ‘Mangelwesen’ (Arnold Gehlen), a ‘liebendes Wesen’ (Max Scheler), ‘the only one who knows he is alone’ (Octavio Paz), a ‘non-trivial machine’ (Heinz von Foerster), a ‘strange loop’ (Douglas Hofstadter), an ambivalent and Janus-faced creature ‘fähig zum überlegen’ (Ernst Tugendhat), a ‘homo ludens’ (Johan Huizinga). Sometimes, he has a flash of inspiration. ‘He can conceive of self-perfection but cannot achieve it’ (Reinhold Niebuhr). Man is ‘un roseau pensant’ (Blaise Pascal), a thinking thing that, capable of introspection and self-reflection, has a ‘nisus towards the life divine’ (Sri Aurobindo), a ‘hunger for immortality’ (Miguel de Unamuno). Many if not most people may feel home in the crowd, follow the fashion, relish the opportunity to wear a uniform, and pursue ‘les 3 B du Bonheur’ (‘boire, bouffer et baiser’), yet we are all born to be different from paving stones, things that are only there but do not ‘exist’. Each of us has been given a full name, and we are all able to distance ourselves from the powerful engine of causality. Aping/imitating may be in the nature of man, yet he is an evolutionary sideslip. Living in the realm of norms and values, he creates the tight web of meanings called culture.12 In brief, man is a ‘denizen of two worlds’, a mysterious natural-cultural being. In spite of their differences, natural and cultural scientists have a thing of importance in common. They want their pieces of knowledge to fall into place. Their aim is to extract structure and invariance from the midst of disarray and turmoil, to see order where chaos seems to reign. In other words, their search is for systematised knowledge. This boils down to having a good command of the configuration of concepts basic to their discipline. Examples areμ ‘matter’, ‘energy’ and ‘space-time’ in physics; ‘molecule’, ‘bond’ and ‘reaction’ in chemistry; ‘sediment’, ‘erosion’ and ‘subduction’ in geology; ‘cell’, ‘evolution’ and ‘environment’ in biology; ‘location’, ‘region’ and ‘scale’ in geography; ‘fertility’, ‘mortality’ and ‘migration’ in demography; ‘state’, ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ in political science; ‘right’, ‘duty’ and ‘crime’ in law; ‘perception’, ‘motivation’ and ‘personality’ in psychology; ‘interaction’, ‘norm’ and ‘institution’ in sociology; ‘kinship’, ‘taboo’ and ‘culture’ in anthropology; ‘excavation’, ‘artifact’ and ‘dating’ in archaeology; ‘scarcity’, ‘investment’ and ‘competition’ in economics; ‘phoneme’, ‘sentence’ and ‘meaning’ in linguistics; ‘genre’, ‘theme’ and ‘style’ in literary studies; ‘creativity’, ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ in aesthetics/art history; and ‘holiness’, ‘soul’ and ‘ritual’ in religious studies. Each of these knowledge domains, or mental galaxies, has its own, ever refining network of concepts (ontology).13 Overcoming incommensurabilities and arriving at mutual understanding (information integration, interoperability) may be the big challenge; Einordnung (subsumption), trying to make things intelligible is unmistakably the common practice. The formal sciences (mathematics, logic, information theory, part of linguistics, theoretical computer science, decision theory, game theory, control theory, network theory and systems theory) are to be distinguished (but not separated!) from the natural and cultural sciences, which seek the soundness of theories with respect to observations or readings. The formal sciences are concerned We take ‘culture’ to mean ‘nature transformed by man’, i.e. everything in which the human mind is involved. Culture is a sign system (www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss), a mental universe embodied in the ‘world outside’ — in religion, in art, in philosophy, in science, and in our Lebenswelt (Husserl). See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1923-1929 (Meiner, 2010); Friedrich Jaeger & Burkhard Liebsch (eds.), Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, Vol. 1 (Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe), J.B. Metzler, 2004; and the special issue of Culture & Psychology, 18:3 (2012), on ‘Culture: An Ephemeral Notion of Universal Importance’. 13 όor ontology, which is ‘an explicit specification of a conceptualisation’ (Tom ύruber), visit www.iaoa.org, www.millennium-project.org/millennium/ontology.html, http://ontolog.cim3.net, www.jfsowa.com/talks/ontofound.pdf, www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk, www.newontology.org and www.isko.org > KO Literature (search: ontology). 12 with the nature of, and relationships between, structures in nature, society, and – probably most important – science(s); they are essentially interdisciplinary. In our view, Sinology (Zhongguoxue) is not, and urgently needs to be, scientifically based. The powers of the natural, cultural and formal sciences have to be harnessed and their concepts, tools and techniques have to be applied in order to grant Sinology the scientific status it should have. With China fast moving to the centre stage of world politics this desirability if not necessity is increasing. But we are running ahead of schedule. THE STUDY OF CHINA EVALUATED To mark its 50th anniversary, in April 2003, the Institute of International Relations, a think tank affiliated with the National Chengchi University, in Taipei, published a double issue of its flagship journal Issues & Studies on ‘The State of the China Studies όield’.14 The reasons given for this laudable initiative were: a) ‘the major jump in both data output within China and access to this data by scholars from outside the PRC’, and b) ‘the dramatic increase in the number and types of individuals analyzing China’. However, the reader who expects to find a critical assessment of how China has been studied will be disappointed. The (mainly Western) contributors to the special issue beat around the bush and ignore the elephant in the room. None of them is brave enough to ask the key question: of all the Western scholars having occupied themselves with the ‘curious land’(David Mungello), who has really been in the business of studying, ‘analyzing’ China qua China? We think the sad answer to this perfectly legitimate question is: nobody has! Let us explain. Sinologists – taken as such (students of China) and, we wish to stress, not taken as, e.g., literary students engaged in the study of Chinese literature, or economists specialising in the Chinese economy – share a common interest in China, just as Japanologists share a common interest in Japan (and Sovietologists shared a common interest in the erstwhile Soviet Union). However, Sinology – and the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for any other country study – is not defined by the perspective on, or the way of thinking and speaking about, the object of inquiry (China), but by the object itself. China students have no tidy description of their enterprise; they have no ‘research programme’(Imre Lakatos). Describing a scientific discourse is not a pointless academic ritual but a prerequisite for a meaningful exchange of ideas. This fact seems to have slipped from memory in the ongoing and confusing China debate. As a result, quite a bit of ambiguity has spread, which in turn has led to murky results. Sinologists are not in search of ordered/systematised knowledge of China qua China. Consequently, they do not see the structure, the character/make-up of the country, its tapestry, the intimate connections between its components, the features that determine its look and feel, the whole that differs from the sum of its parts. Nor do they see the pattern of changes (Wandlungsstruktur), the relations between the transformations, or metamorphoses, of the compound (the country). ‘China scholars’ do not really conceive of the enormous mass of things Chinese as belonging together, as constituting one thing. Having a ‘material object’, an explanandum (China), they do not have a ‘formal object’, an explanans (Sinological viewpoint), a fact they conveniently forget, try hard to gloss over, or do not like to be reminded of. Sinologists have not developed a domain ontology; they have no command of a body of theoretical concepts that would put them on the same footing as, but differentiate them from, linguists, literary students, demographers, geographers, archaeologists, law students, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists or political scientists, professionals who increasingly collaborate in international and – more important – interdisciplinary projects. The cosmos, the earth, the biosphere, man, language and society are the objects studied by cosmologists, geologists, biologists, anthropologists, linguists and sociologists respectively. Sinologists, however, are holding their own territory but do not have their own theory. There is no Sinological counterpart of Franz Boas, Kenneth Burke, Noam Chomsky, Robert Dahl, Ferdinand de Saussure, Herman Dooyeweerd, Émile Durkheim, Ronald Dworkin, Henri Fayol, 14 Vol. 38, No. 4/Vol. 39, No.1, December 2002/March 2003. Northrop Frye, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, Torsten Hägerstrand, Herbert Hart, Leonid Kantorovich, John Maynard Keynes, Philip Kotler, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Kurt Lewin, Yuri Lotman, Niklas Luhmann, Rudolf Otto, Erwin Panofsky, Jean Piaget, Adolphe Quételet, John Rawls, Carl Ritter, Herbert Simon, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Léon Walras, Max Weber or Wilhelm Wundt. The way of finding out whether Sinologists really are what they pretend to be (experts on China) is making inquiries about how comfortable they are with quantitative reasoning and information technology (IT), about their nomenclature (the key terms of their debate), about the property of the relations between their master concepts, about the underlying assumptions of their argument, about the kind and number of hypotheses they have framed, about the Grundstein and Gipfel of their conceptual Gebäude, about the core subject (problématique) of their discipline, about the landmarks/milestones in its history, or about the central point that assures its unity. Such a point would be a ‘black hole’ (René Thom), eine grundlegende Aporie, like the relationship between the continuous and the discrete in mathematics, between spacetime and matter in physics, between body and mind in psychology, between man and society (Mitwelt) in sociology, between positive and moral law in legal theory, between efficiency and justice in economics, or between organisms and their natural environment (Umwelt) in ecology. ‘China experts’ have a keen eye for details but do not let them speak as parts of a whole. They do not have an architecture for organising the elements, for presenting them into an intelligible system. Their writings excel in multitude rather than plenitude, in multa instead of multum (Pliny). We are provided with an aggregate but not with a whole, with a pile of stones (a few segments at most) but not with a well-founded and well-structured house, i.e. with a model representing China in and of itself, as a complexity of coupled human and natural systems.15 The mosaic, the score, the wiring of the country is not given. ‘The one is not shown in the many; the root is not connected with the twigs’ (一 不 显 于 多, 本 不 贯 于 末). To be sure, the plures are insignificant so long as the unum is elusive. όor ‘it is only against the background of the general that the particular acquires meaning’ (im Aufbau des Ganzen werden die Züge erst bedeutend). In order to comprehend something, it is crucial to be able to see the typical/ordinary in the individual/extraordinary (type-token distinction).16 Not having their own model, and mistaking the cramming of facts for discernment in selecting the important ones, Sinologists are, therefore, not entitled to wear the sacred mantle of science, the hallmark of which is theoretically founded systematisation of knowledge. Visit http://archive.csis.msu.edu/publications/CHANS_science.pdf and www.ecologyandsociety.org. The ‘classic Maya collapse’, which dramatically illustrates the complex interactions between man and environment, is not a historic event irrelevant to man today. See Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s comprehensive and lucid paper ‘Can a Collapse of ύlobal Civilization be Avoided?’ in Proceedings of The Royal Society B, March 7, 2013; 280 (1754). See also the Springer book series Environmental History, 2013 ff. όor model(ling), see Mary Hesse, ‘Models and Analogies’, in W.H. σewtonSmith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, 2000, 299-307; Adolf Žižek, Complex Systems, Vol. I, Samozaložba, 2006, 14-17; Daniela Bailer-Jones, Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Press, 200λ; Emily ύriffiths, ‘What is a model?’, 2010 (online); Jennifer Badham, ‘A Compendium of Modelling Techniques’, 2010 (online); Margarita Vázques, ‘Models as Points of Viewμ The Case of Systems Dynamics’, Foundations of Science, 16:4 (2011), 383-391; Mary Morgan, The World in the Model, CUP, 2012 and Rose & AbiRached, op.cit., 92-102. There are iconic, analog, animal, verbal, symbolic, data-based, theory-based, and computational models. Though models are always wrong (because the real world is always more complex), modelling, i.e. approximating, is the essence of scientific labour. See also note 7 and 8. Models can be integrated. See Wayne Gray (ed.), Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems, OUP, 2007 (Preface). Metamodels, which are closely related to ontologies, highlight the properties of models. See Guy Caplat, Modèles et Métamodèles, PPUR, 2008. Metamodelling is based on set – and category theory (the foundations of which are contested!). See Brian Henderson-Sellers, On the Mathematics of Modelling, Metamodelling, Ontologies and Modelling Languages, Springer, 2012. Also visit http://www.metametamodelling.com. 16 The type-token distinction differentiates between a concept (e.g. ‘car’) and the objects that are instances of it (e.g. ‘this car’). Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens, and see Wolfgang Künne, Abstrakte Gegenstände, Klostermann, 2007, ch.5; and Ernest Lepore, Meaning and Argument, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 26-30. 15 ‘China students/scholars/experts’, taken literally, are undisciplined academics, dabbling in Chinese language, culture and history, but unable to point out the endogenous and exogenous variables of their research, let alone the (form of the) relations prevailing among them. Their publications, displaying breadth of scholarship rather than depth of insight, contain copious footnotes but a rigorous, sustained and substantive argument is difficult to find. Nobody knows whether their investigations suggested, or were guided by, a Sinological theory. Labouring through their (sometimes aggressively marketed) books, one feels like looking at the stars in company of an amateur astronomer, who keeps on pointing at objects in the sky — without a powerful telescope, without any attempt to reduce the incomprehensible multiplicity of the universe to a comprehensible simplicity, to design a theory, that is. To be convinced of this, the reader should open a volume of T’oung Pao, ‘the foremost journal on Sinology, covering history, literature, art, history of science, in fact, almost anything that concerns China’. The study of China in the West has a long history, but a coherent scheme of basic concepts concerning China qua China has never been developed, the meaning of which can only be: the country, now rapidly moving to centre stage (economically, politically, and – the West fears – militarily), has never been truly analysed comprehensively. It has been variously (and wildly) speculated but never really theorised about. A host of distinguished scholars has amassed facts and figures about (pre)Imperial, Republican and Communist China, but none of them seems to have attempted to reduce the incomprehensible multiplicity of this universe to a comprehensible simplicity. Monumenta Serica, another important scholarly journal, founded in 1934 and devoted to China, runs into 61 volumes, with an average of more than 500 pages, but features no article on the foundations/underpinnings of sinology. Principia Sinologica is the title of a book yet to be written. The study of China belongs to the fuzzy category of ‘area studies’, the numerous practitioners of which seem to believe they can do without a textbook comparable to, say, Paul Samuelson & William σordhaus’s Economics (19th edition), or Rita & Richard Atkinson’s Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology (13th edition). Basically disoriented, they still have to get their act together by organising themselves, as the members of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences (IUAES) did.17 There is urgent need for an international journal devoted to the history, theory, methodology and philosophy/foundations of area, or country, studies, that stranger among the academic disciplines. COUNTERING LIKELY OBJECTIONS It may be objected that China is a country sui generis, and that notions having their origin in the West are not applicable to it, all the more so because the connotations and denotations of the words concerned have changed in the course of time.18 The central proposition of those who adopt this relativistic attitude is that China must be understood from within. Indigenous terms such as dao (道), de (德), di (谛), fa (法), gan (感), gang (纲), gong (公), gui (归), guo (国), hui (慧), ji (己), jia (价), jian (间), jue (觉), li (礼, 理), ling (灵), lun (伦), mei (美), ming (命), po (魄), pu (朴), qi (气), quan (权), rang (让), ren (仁), shan (善), shen (神), shi (时, 实, 识, 势), shu (恕, 术), tai (太), ti (体), tian (天), tong (通, 同), wen (文), xiao (孝), xin (心, 信), xi (习), xing (性, 形), xu (虚), xue (学), xuan 17 These unions, established in 1922 and 1948 respectively (www.igu-online.org, www.iuaes.org), belong to both the International Council for Science, established in 1931 (www.icsu.org), and the International Social Science Council, founded in 1952 (www.worldsocialscience.org). See end of note 5. 18 See Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, Le Seuil, 2004; Joachim Ritter a.o. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Schwabe Verlag, 1971-2007; Reinhart Koselleck a.o. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Klett-Cotta, 1972-1997; and the journal Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (1955 ff.). In addition, visit www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/hpscg. See also note 9. (玄), yi (一, 义, 易, 艺, 意), ying (应), yuan (元, 缘), yue (约), zhe (哲), zhen (真), zhi (知, 智, 质, 志) and zhong (中, 忠) should be the analytical categories, and scholarly research should be presented within their framework. China can never be understood from without, a conviction upheld by the Chinese themselves, particularly by those having a strong sense of nationalism (waiguoren bu liaojie Zhongguo). This line of reasoning, perhaps reminiscent of the controversy that surrounded Edward Said’s book Orientalism (see end of note 4), cannot be taken without some qualifications: 1) Bringing out different translations of the same indigenous term, Sinologists come under the suspicion of simply not knowing what they are talking about. On this account, the reader should compare Fung Yu-lan, tr. Derk Bodde, A History of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, Vol. II, 1953) with Anne Cheng, Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Seuil, 1997), Cheng Chung-Ying & Nicholas Bunnin (eds.), Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (Blackwell, 2002), Antonio Cua (ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge, 2003), Karyn Lai, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Nicolas Zufferey, Introduction à la pensée chinoise (Marabout, 2008), Bo Mou (ed.), History of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge, 2009) and Chris Fraser, Chinese Philosophy: An Introduction (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Ti (体), for instance, is confusingly rendered into ‘substance’, ‘body’, ‘model’, ‘style’, ‘principle’, ‘method’, ‘genre’, ‘essence’, ‘form’, ‘trend’, ‘nature’, ‘unity’, ‘noumenon’, ‘vigour’, ‘reality’, ‘constitution’, ‘constitutivité’, and ‘bone-structure’. Rendering ti into, say, ‘substance’ is to overlook a fundamental difference between the Western and Chinese way of thinking. Whereas philosophy in the West, from the time of Aristotle (whose universe was geocentric!), has been biased in favour of ‘substance’ (what a thing really is, without its accidental properties),19 Chinese educated in the wisdom of the Yijing and the Daodejing conceive of everything as something ‘becoming or de-becoming, all the time on the way to be something else’ (Joseph Needham). Taking a generative perspective, they consider everything and everybody as fundamentally changing over time instead of existing at some time. Where Westerners would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, Chinese, tolerant of contradictions, are likely to answer ‘well, not exactly’. They are alien to the philosophical concept of ontology and never engaged in a discussion about the distinction between esse/existentialism and essence/essentialism.20 They see relations as being essential (reality). They emphasise mutuality and relationality (guanxi), because, in their view, being is belonging, esse est inter-esse (being in-between), spatially, temporally, socially or otherwise. For them, individuals are intersections/nodes of relationships (in 19 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance and http://www.ontology.co/biblio/substance-biblio.htm. In addition, see Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s Categories and their Context, Princeton UP, 2000. See also Gunther Schmidt, Relational Mathematics, CUP, 2010; Mark Young, ‘Relevance and Relationalism’, Metaphysica, 12:1 (2011), 19-30; and John Kineman, ‘Relational Scienceμ A Synthesis’, Axiomathes, 21:3 (2011), 393-437. Heraclitus (vs. Parmenides), Leibniz (vs. Newton), Hegel, C.S. Peirce, William James, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Nikolai Berdyaev were process philosophers. For them, being follows upon functioning rather than the other way around. Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy and https://sites.google.com/site/internationalprocessnetwork. 20 Visit www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/aquinas-esse.asp, and see Étienne Gilson, L’être et l’essence, Vrin, 1948; AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka, Essence et existence, Aubier, 1957; Brian Ellis, The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism, Acumen, 2002; and David Oderberg, Real Essentialism, Routledge, 2007. Modern art might be seen as seeking out essences, whereas postmodern art might be characterised as querying all notions of essence. See also note 19, and visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence and www.ontology.co. For the concept of ‘ontology’ in information science, see note 13. In σovember 2010, at a workshop organised by the University of Amsterdam on ‘The History of Logic in China’ (www.sciencehistory.asia/history-logic-china), it became abundantly clear that the Chinese terms for ontology, metaphysics, category, epistemology, logic and philosophy are problematic (see Studies in Logic, 4μ3 [2011]). The ‘Second International Conference on the History of Logic in China’, which took place in April 2013, in Tianjin, was not particularly enlightening on this dogging issue. It remains to be seen whether the fundamental problems involved are resolved in the forthcoming Springer Handbook of Logical Thought in China. computer science terms: parts of a network where messages can be sent or received). Chinese have difficulty in understanding Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, in which Socrates speaks, without fatuous redundancy, of the superlative reality of the forms as ‘really real reality’.21 The theological doctrines of ‘consubstantiality’ and ‘transubstantiation’, over which so much ink and blood were spilt in the West, are beyond them, because they fail to see the (importance of the) difference in meaning between homoousios (of same substance) and homoiousios (of similar substance). In contrast to Westerners, who have been deeply influenced by, and are only just beginning to distance themselves from, the Aristotelian-Cartesian-Newtonian preference for causal/serial/catenary thinking (events/actions are concatenated), Chinese have been emphasising the importance of reticular/matrical/weblike thinking (events/actions are interwoven). They are geared to the ‘whatness’ instead of the ‘thatness’ of a thing, or a person. They are not disposed to the Western logic of identity (logocentrism). In their (Deleuzian!) view, différence is prior to distinction.22 Concepts constitute the building blocks of man’s thinking and galvanise him into action; they form, subtly interconnected, the fabric of his life. Consequently, ‘[a]s long as some important notions and their cognates remain vague, others must share this defect, making human thought and behaviour elusive’(Bertrand Russell). The requirement not to be vague about ideas that have been most potent and persistent in Chinese history is thus paramount.23 Though the argument about ‘meaning’ continues,24 with the Siku Quanshu (Emperor Qianlong’s library, counting about 840,000,000 characters) now electronically accessible and various types of computer software available, a thorough investigation of the interconnected concepts basic to Chinese thinking through the ages has been greatly facilitated, a fact that ‘experts’ like Anne Cheng, Karyn Lai, σicolas Zufferey, and Chris Fraser do not seem to be aware of. 2) Epistemic relativism, the view that the truth of knowledge-claims is relative to the standards a society/culture uses in evaluating such claims, is an incoherent doctrine, unable to defend itself, because, if it is right, the very notion of rightness is undermined, in which case epistemic relativism itself cannot be right.25 However, if the relativistic stance is untenable, the non-relativist (universalist) also faces a tall problemμ how to develop ‘a view that includes an acceptable account of rationality and rational justification which is non-dogmatic, rejects any notion of a privileged framework in which knowledge-claims must be couched, and is self-referentially coherent’(Siegel). Universalists tend to be ethnocentric, arrogant and intolerant. We disagree with the relativist, who maintains that culture-bound disciplines are blocking our ability to understand another country, but we also have a different opinion from the universalist, who denies this. The ‘emic-etic debate’ among cultural anthropologists revolves around the question whether an account of actions should be given in terms that are meaningful to the actors belonging to the culture under study, or in terms applicable to actions in other cultures as well. Whereas the emic perspective 21 See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, CUP, 1991, 254-255. In 1987, the first complete translation of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) into Chinese (Cunzai yu Shijian), by Wang Qingjie and Chen Jiaying, was published in Beijing. 22 The best book on Chinese relationalism is Kwang-kuo Hwang, Foundations of Chinese Psychology, Springer, 2012. 23 See Britt Glatzeder a.o. (eds), Towards a Theory of Thinking: Building Blocks for a Conceptual Framework, Springer, 2010 (Part II). ‘Vagueness’ is not a clear concept itself. Experts on the subject such as Roy Sorensen, Crispin Wright, Stewart Shapiro and Timothy Williamson fail to state precisely what they mean by ‘vagueness’, and how it relates to ‘ambiguity’, ‘approximation’, ‘chance’, ‘contingency’, ‘fuzziness’, ‘greyness’, ‘indeterminacy’, ‘plausibility’, ‘possibility’, ‘probability’, ‘randomness’, ‘risk’, ‘roughness’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘unpredictability’. See Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: A Guide, Springer, 2011; Petr Cintula a.o. (eds.), Understanding Vagueness, College Publications, 2011; and note 9. Also visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness and www.davidagler.com/research/vaguenessbib. 24 Meaning (Sinn, Bedeutung) has long been a serious bone of contention in philosophy of language, linguistics (semantics), semiotics, literary studies, art history (iconography), psychology, sociology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, cultural anthropology, ‘cultural studies’ (Kulturwissenschaften), communication studies, and information science. 25 See Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted, Reidel, 1987, 3-31. There are various kinds of relativism. See Maria Baghramian, Relativism, Routledge, 2004; and Steven Hales (ed.), A Companion to Relativism, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. focuses on intrinsic distinctions, only meaningful to the members of a given society, the etic view relies upon the extrinsic concepts and categories of scientific observers. This contradiction seems to be mistaken, for the points of view can be reconciled. A sensible combination of the emic and the etic lens yields a binocular vision, making depth perception possible.26 The fact that the great bulk of the ordered knowledge of social and human scientists is only based on the investigation of Western data does not imply the impossibility of cross-cultural dialogue, being a process in which the parties gradually learn to understand each other. The Okanagan (syilx) people, living in British Columbia and Washington (State), call this en’owkin, understanding through a gentle process of clarification and integration. A dialogue is not a debate. The former is geared to reaching an agreement (consensus), the latter to scoring a victory (meaningμ somebody else’s defeat!); the one aims at inclusion, the other at exclusion. In an ‘authentic dialogue’ (Gadamer) the participants do not talk at cross-purposes (dialogue de sourds) but actively listen to each other; rather than being bent on proving themselves right, they are eager to gain insight.27 A genuine dialogue, or real conversation, will inevitably lead to comparing (not to be confused with equating), to the placing together and examining of two things in order to discover similarities and differences, an activity that plays a crucial role in every scientific discipline. And this comparing (which should never be the comparing of an ideal situation at this side with the messy reality at the other side) may result in a change of mind, a mental leap, a conceptual re-configuration.28 It may also be objected that after the Second World War Sinology split into specialisms, making the jacks-of-all-trades-but-masters-of-none with regard to China a dwindling species. We think this assertion is to be taken cum grano salis. The change from ‘China study’/‘Chinakunde’ to ‘Chinese studies’/’Chinawissenschaften’, or ‘Sinologie als eine willkürliche Ansammlung von Einzelfächern’ (Hans-Wilm Schütte), has not improved the situation. On close inspection, many so-called experts, focusing on one or another aspect of China, turn out to be amateurs only — sometimes gifted amateurs, able to express their ideas and opinions well, but non-professionals nonetheless. What is necessary here is to ‘rectify names’(zhengming). For Confucius saidμ ‘If names are incorrect, language is not in accordance with the truth of things, and if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success’ (Lunyu, Book XIII, Chapter 3). ‘Professor of Chinese’ doesn’t make sense (not any more than ‘professor of life’, ‘professor of man’, or ‘professor of society’ does), unless this appellation of distinction is shorthand for ‘professor of linguistics with principal research interest in the Chinese language, or linguistics in China’. In much the same vein, we doubt whether every ‘professor of Chinese literature’ can be safely assumed to hold an academic degree in literary studies. ‘Lecturer/reader in Chinese economics’ will not do 26 See Thomas Headland a.o. (eds.), Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, Sage, 1990; and Shinobu Kitayama & Doc Cohen (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology, Guilford Press, 2010, 65-66. 27 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-dialogical, www.infed.org/biblio/b-dialog.htm, www.iada-web.org and www.benjamins.com/catalog/ds. In addition, see Marcelo Dascal (ed.), Dialogue, John Benjamins, 1985; Tullio Maranhão, The Interpretation of Dialogue, University of Chicago Press, 1990; Daniel Yankelovich, The Magic of Dialogue, Simon & Schuster, 1999; Peter Kühnlein a.o. (eds.), Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium, John Benjamins, 2003; Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue, Lexington, 2006; Toyoaki Nishida (ed.), Conversational Informatics: An Engineering Approach, Wiley, 2007; and Hans Köchler, ‘The Philosophy and Politics of Dialogue’, 200λ (online). 28 Comparing cultures (see note 12) is the staple of cross-cultural psychologists. See Eric Shiraev & David Levy, CrossCultural Psychology, Allyn & Bacon, 2010, 1-26; David Matsumoto & Fons van de Vijver (eds.), Cross-Cultural Research Methods in Psychology, CUP, 2011, 75-100; John Berry a.o., Cross-Cultural Psychology, CUP, 2011, 33-220; and Kenneth Keith (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Wiley-Blackwell (forthcoming). Crosscultural psychology is a subset of cross-cultural research. Visit www.sccr.org. όor ‘comparatism’, see ύuy Jucquois & Christophe Vielle (eds.), Le Comparatisme dans les sciences de l’homme, De Boeck, 2000; Monika Schmitz-Emans a.o. (eds.), Komparatistik als Humanwissenschaft, Königshausen & Neumann, 2008; Hubert Roland & Stéphanie Vanasten (eds.), Les nouvelles voies du comparatisme, Academia Press, 2010 (online); Ali Behdad & Dominic Thomas (eds.), A Companion to Comparative Literature, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011; and Evi Zemanek & Alexander Nebrig (eds.), Komparatistik, Akademie Verlag, 2012. Also visit www.encls.net and www.ailc-icla.org. either, for Chinese economics is a nonexistent subject matter. To be sure, Chinese economists lecturing on the economy of, or the application of economic theory in, China (or another country) do exist. There are Chinese, Japanese, American, Indian, Arabic, Russian, European and Australian logicians, mathematicians, scientists and philosophers (some of them being towering figures), but there cannot in reality be such things as Chinese, Japanese, American, Indian, Arabic, Russian, European and Australian logic, mathematics, science or philosophy, a major point Cheng ChungYing, founder of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy and editor-in-chief of Journal of Chinese Philosophy, seems to overlook.29 ‘History’ is an ambiguous term. The same word is used for a) the series of events that (have) happened30 and b) the scientific account of, or story about, these happenings (the historian’s choice of perspective being dependent on his/her axiological assumptions and the position in time he/she prefers to take). ‘History(E)’ and ‘history(A)’ mark the distinction, with E and A referring to what may be regarded as first and second level of reality. The word ‘historiography’ refers to one, or more than one, of three aspects of history(A): a) descriptive historiography (accepts what historians normally do and describes the standard methods and procedures), b) historical historiography (traces the history of historical writing), and c) analytical or critical historiography (discusses the concepts used in, the different kinds of, and the philosophical problems arising from, history(A)). Accordingly, ‘professor of Chinese history’ doesn’t make sense, unless this honourable title stands for ‘professor of history(A) whose attention is mainly devoted to the Chinese history(E), or to history(A)/historiography in China’. Era – and area studies have surprisingly much in common, for ‘[t]he past is a foreign country’ (Leslie Hartley). So the thesis put forth in this paper should also concern some historians. The World History Association, dividing the world into regions (without telling how these parts interrelate and constitute a whole: the world), considers anthropology, archaeology, climatology, demography, economics, epigraphy, geography, iconography, linguistics, media studies, numismatics, philosophy, political science, sociology, technology, and textual criticism to be disciplines auxiliary to world history(A). If that is true, let the real professor of ‘Chinese history’ raise his hand!31 Many ‘China experts’, acknowledging the impossibility of being a scientific all-rounder in regard to the country, have the bad habit of putting on the hat of a scientist without filling his shoes, that is, the habit of delivering lectures on the Chinese language, communication style, literature, legal system, political system, military system, educational system, health care system, financial system, economy, agriculture, energy sector, business activities, society, art(s), religion(s), psyche, culture or environment without any degree in linguistics, communication studies, literary studies, law, political science, military science, educational science, medicine, (corporate or public) finance, economics, agronomy, energy science, business administration, sociology, art history/criticism, science(s) of religion, psychology, Kulturwissenschaft(en) or ecology respectively. Only a few experts have taken The question as to whether ‘Chinese philosophy’ really exists is treated in the journal Extrême Orient – Extrême Occident, Nr. 27, 2005. In our view, there is neither ‘Eastern/oriental philosophy’ nor ‘Western/occidental philosophy’; there is only (perennial) philosophy. See note 20. 30 Visit www.philosophie-en-ligne.com/page98.htm and see Alain Badiou, L’Être et l’Événement, Seuil, 1988; Gilles Deleuze, tr. Tom Conley, The Fold, Athlone, 1993 (chapter 6); Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes: L’Être et l’Événement 2, Seuil, 2006; and Hayden White, ‘The Historical Event’, Differences, 19:2 (2008), 9-34. See also end of note 9. 31 For the ‘professionalisation’ of history(A), see ύeorg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, Wesleyan University Press, 1997 (Part I and II); Lloyd Kramer & Sarah Maza (eds.), A Companion to Western Historical Thought, Blackwell, 2006, 225-389; Georg Iggers a.o., A Global History of Modern Historiography, Pearson, 2008 (Part III); Aviezer Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009 (Introduction); Alison Stone (ed.), The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press, 2011 (chapter 8); and Daniel Woolf a.o. (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, OUP, 2012. In addition, visit http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/research/hs.html. Culture & History Digital Journal (2012 ff.) ‘aim[s] to contribute to the methodological debate among historians and other scholars specialized in the fields of human and social sciences, at an international level’ (http://cultureandhistory.revistas.csic.es). 29 the trouble to obtain a degree before ascending the pulpit. However, lecturing on a subject that lies within their purview, they often stray into forbidden domains — without duly notifying their credulous audience. More, much more interesting things could be written on, for example, the concept and practice of law in China if, paradoxically, the authors were also well up in the writings of Plato, Cicero, Aquinas, Suárez, Althusius, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, Henry Maine, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Otto von Gierke, François Gény, Roscoe Pound, Benjamin Cardozo, Giorgio Del Vecchio, Gustav Radbruch, Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, Karl Llewellyn, Herman Dooyeweerd, Alf Ross, Lon Fuller, Patric Devlin, Herbert Hart, Julius Stone, Harold Berman, John Rawls, Joel Feinberg, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Richard Posner, John Finnis, Duncan Kennedy, Robert Alexy, Roberto Unger, Jeremy Waldron, Ernest Weinrib, Dennis Patterson, and Andrei Marmor. Similarly, books, or articles, about ‘Chinese art’ would tremendously gain in importance if, in a way that only seems to be contradictory, the writers thereof were acquainted with the aesthetic views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Brunelleschi, Alberti, Hume, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Kant, Burke, Lessing, Schiller, Hegel, Coleridge, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, John Ruskin, Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, Benedetto Croce, Clive Bell, Collingwood, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Benjamin, Susanne Langer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, Harold Osborne, Nelson Goodman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ernst Gombrich, Clement Greenberg, Mikel Dufrenne, Monroe Beardsley, Richard Wollheim, Frank Sibley, Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis, George Dickey, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Roger Scruton, and Noël Carroll. A mature science consists of several subdisciplines. The workers in these special vineyards occupy themselves with a part without losing sight of the whole. Biology, for example, deals with living things at different levels in the biosphere, as distinct from the litho-, hydro-, atmo- and noosphere. Its growth was triggered by a division of labour. Zoologists (and ethologists) are interested in animals, botanists in non-vascular or vascular plants (the latter category being divided into seedless and gymno- or angiosperm seed plants), mycologists in fungi, phycologists in algae, and microbiologists in bacteria and viruses. Here the ramification does not stop. Mammalogists are concerned with mammals, entomologists with insects, carcinologists with crustaceans, arachnologists with spiders and their relatives, ornithologists with birds, ichthyologists with fishes, malacologists with molluscs, and herpetologists with reptiles and amphibians. The point is that, despite their apparent differences, all the divisions and subdivisions are interrelated; mother, daughters and granddaughters are akin. The splitting of biology into specialisms has been guided by the same principles. There may be differences in dialect, the language spoken is the language of biologists, ‘cell’ being the key concept. After World War II, Sinology also started to diversify. By any stretch of the imagination, though, we cannot see how the subgroups thereof form a family; there is no intellectual kinship, no scientific lineage, no academic genealogy. The new style ‘China experts’ have nothing in common, in a distinctively scientific manner, that is. They still have no command of a characteristic ‘network of basic notions’ (Geflecht von Grundbegriffen) related to China. There is an endless stream of books and articles ‘about China’, but there is no real Sinological debate and there are no schools of Sinological thought (comparable to schools of thought in political science, law, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, literary theory, or economics), simply because there is no Sinological language, a remarkable fact that seems to have gone unnoticed. The claimed post-war ‘split of Sinology into specialisms’ is a case of deceptive appearances. Books giving a general picture of China keep on rolling from the press, books not written by reporters, whose unscientific modus operandi may be excusable, but by tenured professors. Whoever believes that the all-rounders in respect of China are dead and gone is grossly mistaken. The toucheà-tout sans profondeur is still around; the jacks-of-all-trades-but-masters-of-none (or only-one) are still alive and kicking. Some of these all-purpose China scholars (Gordon G. Chang [author of The Coming Collapse of China, 2001], Martin Jacques [author of When China Rules the World, 2009], Jeffrey Wasserstrom [author of China in the 21st Century, 2010], Troy Parfitt [author of Why China Will Never Rule the World, 2011], David Shambaugh [editor of Charting China’s Future, 2011], Hu Angang [author of China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower, 2011] and William Callahan [author of China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future, 2013] being only a few examples) do not even shrink from predicting the country’s future, clearly unaware of the quiet nonlinear-science revolution of the 1970s, that emphasised the certainty of uncertainty and led to a redefinition of causality.32 If pretending to be, or making no objection to be introduced as, an expert on some aspect of China, without a degree in the discipline concerned, is reprehensible, downright unforgivable is it to make no bones about changing bonnets and to masquerade as connoisseur of China tout court. Those who are guilty of doing so corroborate Alexander Pope’s statementμ ‘όools rush in where angels fear to tread’. THE WAY AHEAD What is to de done? Advising ‘China experts’ to go home and to look for another job is certainly not what we are thinking of. For one shall not throw the baby out with the bath water. Sinologists are (we hope) fluent in classical and modern Chinese. So, first and foremost, let them cultivate their talent! There are plenty of books eagerly awaiting translation. Over the last 150 years or so, numerous books belonging to any of the four categories into which Chinese bibliographers traditionally put their sources, viz ‘classics’(jing), ‘history’(shi), ‘philosophy’(zi), and ‘literature’(ji), have been translated into a European language. However, not every author who has participated in the great Chinese conversation about the basic principle of order (in nature and society) has found a translator of his work, the assiduity and diligence of Édouard Biot, Cyril Birch, Édouard Chavannes, Séraphin Couvreur, Robert des Rotours, Homer Dubs, Jan Duyvendak, Alfred Forke, Esson Gale, Olaf Graf, David Hawkes, James Hightower, Wilt Idema, Wallace Johnson, David Knechtges, John Knoblock, Franz Kuhn, James Legge, Victor Mair, Göran Malmqvist, Georges Margouliès, Richard Mather, William Nienhauser, Max Perleberg, 32 For nonlinearity, visit http://spkurdyumov.narod.ru/NelDin/NelDin.htm, and see Alwyn Scott, The Nonlinear Universe, Springer, 2007; Zensho Yoshida, Nonlinear Science: The Challenge of Complex Systems, Springer, 2010; Raoul Huys & Viktor Jirsa (eds.), Nonlinear Dynamics in Human Behavior, Springer, 2011; Stefano Zamballi & Donald George (eds.), Nonlinearity, Complexity and Randomness in Economics, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; and Yoshitsugu Oono, The Nonlinear World: Conceptual Analysis and Phenomenology, Springer (forthcoming). For uncertainty, see Morris Kline, The Loss of Certainty, OUP, 1982; Daniel Kahneman a.o. (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty, CUP, 1982; Tony Rothman & George Sudarshan, Doubt and Certainty, Basic Books, 1998; F. David Peat, From Certainty to Uncertainty, Joseph Henry Press, 2002; Marcus Giaquinto, The Search for Certainty, OUP, 2002; Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works, Ashgate, 2004; Reuben McDaniel & Dean Driebe (eds.), Uncertainty and Surprise in Complex Systems, Springer, 2005; Kurt Marti a.o. (eds.), Coping with Uncertainty, Springer, 2006; George Klir, Uncertainty and Information, Wiley, 2006; David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, Anchor, 2008; Gabriele Bammer & Mike Smithson, Uncertainty and Risk, Earthscan, 2008; Krzysztof Burdzy, The Search for Certainty: On the Clash of Science and Philosophy of Probability, World Scientific, 2009; David Hillson, Exploiting Future Uncertainty, Ashgate, 2010; William Byers, The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty, Princeton UP, 2011; Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, OUP, 2011 (Preface); and Liu Baoding, Uncertainty Theory, 2012 (online). See also note 23. For causality, see Wolfgang Spohn, Causation, Coherence and Concepts, Springer, 2009, ch. 2-5; Judea Pearl, Causality, CUP, 2009; Pierfrancesco Basile, Leibniz, Whitehead, and the Metaphysics of Causation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, ch. 4-5; Helen Beebee a.o. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, OUP, 2009; Steven Sloman, Causal Models, OUP, 2009; Stephen Turner (ed.), Causality, Sage, 2010; Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science, Dover, 2011; Phyllis McKay Illari a.o. (eds.), Causality in the Sciences, OUP, 2011; John Losee, Theories of Causality: From Antiquity to the Present, Transaction Publishers, 2011; Michael Strevens, ‘Causality Reunified’, 2012 (online); Lars Syll, ‘Capturing Causality in Economics and the Limits of Statistical Inference’, 2013 (online); C.ύ. Jung, Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge, Rascher Verlag, 1952; and David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind, Bantam, 1987. In addition, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality. Rainer Schwarz, Nancy Lee Swann, Erwin von Zach, Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, Stephen West, Richard Wilhelm, Martin Woesler and other translators notwithstanding. Remarkably, there is no translation of the Great Books of the Chinese (or Indian, or Islamic) World comparable to the Great Books of the Western World. The latter, published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a set of 60 volumes containing 517 works (by 130 authors) in mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, history, philosophy, and imaginative literature. Three criteria governed the selection (by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler) of these books, which made their appearance in a time span covering more than 25 centuries (from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology). They were chosen by virtue of their dealing with issues, problems or facets of human life that are of major concern today as well as at the time in which they were written. They are worth reading carefully many times or studying over and over again. And they have very broad and general significance; their authors have something of importance to say about a large number of great ideas making up the abstract and complex infrastructure of Western thought.33 τnly a fraction of the rich Chinese literature has found its way to ύallimard’s world-famous Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The integral, annotated translation of the Zhengshi [Dynastic Histories], the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated, is the dream of many historians. Sima ύuang’s Zizhi Tongjian [Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government]; the Shitong [Ten Encyclopedic Histories of Institutions]; the monumental Gujin Tushu Jicheng [Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times], which – in the 18th century – attempted to embody the whole of Chinese cultural history; the extant collections of Zhaoling Zouyi [Edicts and Memorials]; the treasure troves known as Daozang [Daoist Canon], Daozang Jiyao [Essentials of the Daoist Canon] (extra-canonical texts) and Dazangjing [Chinese Buddhist Canon]; the invaluable Dunhuang manuscripts; and thousands of Fangzhi [Local Gazetteers] are waiting to be (further) opened up by Sinologists for scientists unable to read Chinese. So are the works mentioned in the three-volume Zhongguo Fazhishi Shumu [Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Legal History], compiled by Zhang Weiren and published, in 1976, by the Academia Sinica. In addition, a new (philosophically as well as historically annotated) translation of the Zhuzi Jicheng [Complete Collection of the Works of Ancient Philosophers] would be welcomed; and high on the list of modern and contemporary books to be translated are: • Jin Yuelin, Luoji [Logic],1935; • Cai Yuanpei, Zhongguo Lunlixue Shi [A History of Chinese Ethics], 1937; • Tang Yongtong, Han Wei Liangjin Nanbei Chao Fojiao Shi [The History of Buddhism in the Han, Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties], 1938; • όeng Youlan, Zhen Yuan Liu Shu [Six Books on Purity and Primacy], 1939-1946; • Jin Yuelin, Lun Dao [On Dao], 1940; • Sun Benwen, Shehuixue Yuanli [Principles of Sociology], 1944; • Chen Yinke, Tangdai Zhengzhi Shi Shulun Gao [Essay on the Political History of the Tang Dynasty], 1946; • Zhang Dongsun, Zhishi yu Wenhua [Knowledge and Culture], 1946; • Liang Shuming, Zhongguo Wenhua Yaoyi [The Essence of Chinese Culture], 1949; • Hou Wailu, Zhongguo Sixiang Tongshi [Comprehensive History of Chinese Thinking], 1957-1963; • Xiong Shili, Tiyonglun [On Ti and Yong], 1958; • Xiong Shili, Mingxinpian [Illuminating the Mind], 1959; • Hu Jichuang, Zhongguo Jingji Sixiang Shi [A History of Economic Thought in China], 1962-1981; • Chen ύuofu, Daozang Yuanliu Kao [On the Origin and Development of the Daoist Canon], 1963; • Zhou Jinsheng, Zhongguo Jingji Sixiang Shi [A History of Economic Thought in China], 1965; See Philip Goetz (ed.), The Great Conversation: A Reader’s Guide to the Great Books of the Western World, Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1994, 25-26. The Zhonghua Dadian is a collection of 240 Great Books of China. 33 • Xu όuguan, Zhongguo Yishu Jingshen [The Aesthetic Spirit of China], 1966; • Yin Haiguang, Zhongguo Wenhua de Zhanwang [The Future of China’s Culture], 1966; • Tang Junyi, Zhongguo Zhexue Yuanlun Yuanxing Pian [Fundamental Discussions of Chinese Philosophy: Human Nature], 1968; • Mou Zongsan, Xinti yu Xingti [Mind and Nature], 1968; • Tang Junyi, Zhongguo Zhexue Yuanlun Yuandao Pian [Fundamental Discussions of Chinese Philosophy: Dao], 1973; • Qian Mu, Guoshi Dagang [Outline of (Our) National History], 1974; • Lao Sze-kwang, Zhongguo Zhexue Shi [A History of Chinese Philosophy], 1974-1981; • Tang Junyi, Shengming Cunzai yu Xinling Jingjie [Human Existence and Spiritual Horizon], 1977; • Li Zehou, Zhongguo Jindai Sixiang Shilun [Historical Treatise on Modern Chinese Thought], 1979; • Zhu ύuangqian, Tan Meishu Jian [Letters on Beauty], 1980; • Zhang Dainian, Zhongguo Zhexue Dagang [Outline of Chinese Philosophy],1982; • Jin Yuelin, Zhishilun [Theory of Knowledge], 1983; • Huang ύongwei, Fajia Zhexue Tixi Zhigui [Guide to the System of Legalist Philosophy], 1983; • Liang Shuming, Renxin yu Rensheng [Human Heart and Human Life], 1984; • Sa Mengwu, Zhongguo Zhengzhi Sixiang Shi [A History of Chinese Political Thought], 1984; • Wu Hui, Zhongguo Gudai Liu Da Jingji Gaigejia [Six Great Economic Reformers in Ancient China], 1984; • Mou Zongsan, Yuanshanlun [A Treatise on the Highest Good], 1985; • Shen Jiaben, Lidai Xingfa Kao [Investigations of the Penal Code in Successive Dynasties], 1985 (reprint); • Li Zehou, Zhongguo Gudai Sixiang Shilun [Historical Treatise on Ancient Chinese Thought], 1985; • Tao Jianguo, Liang Han Wei Jin zhi Daojia Sixiang [Daoist Thought in the Han, Wei and Jin Dynasty], 1986; • Li Zehou, Zhongguo Xiandai Sixiang Shilun [Historical Treatise on Contemporary Chinese Thought], 1987; • Jin Wulun, Wuzhi Kefenxing Xinlun [A New Theory on the Divisibility of Matter], 1988; • He Lin, Wenhua yu Rensheng [Culture and Human Life], 1988; • Zhu Bokun, Yixue Zhexue Shi [A History of the Philosophy of Yi(jing) Study], 1988;34 • Tang Liquan, Zhouyi yu Huaidehai zhi Jian [Between the Yijing and Whitehead], 1989; • Li Kuangwu, Zhongguo Luoji Shi [A History of Chinese Logic], 1989; • Huang Renyu, Zibenzhuyi yu Nianyi Shiji [Capitalism and the 21st Century], 1991; • Hu Weixi, Chuantong yu Renwen [Tradition and Culture], 1992; • ύu Xin, Zhongguo Qimeng de Lishi Tujing [History and Prospect of Chinese Enlightenment], 1992; • Zhang Dainian, Zhang Dainian Xueshu Lunzhu Zixuan Ji [Collection of the Academic Writings of 34 Although not a philosophical book per se, Zhongguo Yixue Dazidian [Great Dictionary of Chinese Yi(jing) Study], chief-edited by Cai Shangsi and published in 2008 by Shanghai Ancient Books, should be translated, particularly Vol. I, 1-82 (summary) and 507-717 (history). Along with Lin Zhongjun (ed.), Lidai Yixue Mingzhu Yanjiu [Research on Masterpieces of Yi(jing) Study in Successive Dynasties], published in the same year by QiLu Press (Shandong province), this massive dictionary reveals how modern the ancient Chinese thinkers, who went beyond the Aristotelian ‘square of opposition’ (visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square and http://www.square-of-opposition.org), actually were! σeutrosophy, a generalisation of Hegel’s dialectic, might be more akin to their way of thought. Visit www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/neutrosophy.htm and see note 19. Joseph Adler, Luis Andrade, Jack Balkin, Thomas Cleary, Russell Cottrell, Frank Fiedeler, Jesse Fleming, Edward Hacker, Bradford Hatcher, Peter Hershock, Stephen Karcher, Richard Kunst, Richard Lynn, Steve Marshall, Harm Mesker, Steve Moore, Bent Nielsen, Michael σylan, Rudolf Ritsema, Andreas Schöter, Edward Shaughnessy, Kidder Smith, and Richard Smith are ‘modern Yijing scholars’ failing to demonstrate that they are conversant with the philosophical/scientific literature on chance and change. Visit www.hermetica.info/YixueBib.htm, www.biroco.com/yijing, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/change and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chance-randomness. In addition, see Michael Strevens, Tychomancy, Harvard UP, 2013. Zhang Dainian Selected by Himself], 1993; • όeng Qi, Zhihui San Lun [Three Essays on Wisdom], 1994; • Zhang Liwen, Zhongguo Zhexue Fanchou Jingxuan Congshu [Compendium of Categories in Chinese Philosophy], 1994; • Mou Zongsan, Renwen Jiangxilu [Lectures on Culture], 1996; • Chen Shaofeng, Zhongguo Lunlixue Shi [A History of Chinese Ethics], 1997; • Li Qiang, Ziyou Zhuyi [Liberalism], 1998; • Bai Shouyi (ed.), Zhongguo Tongshi [Comprehensive History of China], 1999; • ύe Zhaoguang, Zhongguo Sixiang Shi [A History of Chinese Thinking], 1998-2000; • Chen Lai, YouWu zhi Jing [The Realms of Being and Nonbeing], 2000; • Chen Lai, Zhuzi Zhexue Yanjiu [A Study of Master Zhu’s Philosophy], 2000; • Lao Sze-kwang, Wenhua Zhexue Jiangyan Lu [Lectures on Cultural Philosophy], 2002; • Lao Sze-kwang, Xujing yu Xiwang [Illusion and Hope], 2003; • Yu Ying-shih, Zhu Xi de Lishi Shijie [The Historical World of Zhu Xi], 2003; • Zhang Jialong, Zhongguo Luoji Sixiang Shi [A History of Logical Thinking in China], 2004; • Li Zehou, Shiyong Lixing yu Legan Wenhua [Pragmatic Reason and the Culture of Contentment], 2005; • Sun Zhongyuan, Zhongguo Luoji Yanjiu [Studies on Chinese Logic], 2006; • Zhang Liwen, Hehexue [The Philosophy of Harmony], 2006; • Ji Xianlin, Sanshinian Hedong, Sanshinian Hexi [Thirty Years East of the River, Thirty Years West of the River], 2006; • Lao Sze-kwang, Weiji Shijie yu Xin Xiwang Shiji [A World of Crisis and the New Century of Hope], 2007; • Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo Sixiang de Xingqi [The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought], 2008; • Li Bozhong, Zhongguo de Zaoqi Jindai Jingji [China’s Early Modern Economy], 2010; • Yao Dali, Dushi de Zhihui [The Wisdom of Reading History], 2010; • Liu Yingsheng, Hailu yu Lulu [Maritime and Continental Routes], 2010; • Wang Liqi, Yantielun Jiaozhu [Discourses on Salt and Iron Collated and Annotated], 2011; • Jin ύuantao and Liu Qingfeng, Zhongguo Xiandai Sixiang de Qiyuan [The Origins of Modern Thought in China], 2011; • Yi Wu, Yijing de Chubian Xue [Yijing: Learning to Deal with Changes], 2012; • Huang Ying-kuei, Wenming zhi Lu [The Path towards Civilisation], 2012; • Tang Yijie & Li Zhonghua (eds.), Zhongguo Ruxue Shi [A History of Confucianism], 2012; • Jin Yaoji, Zhongguo de Xiandai Zhuanxiang [China’s Modern(ity) Turn), 2013; • Yang Kuo-shu, Zhongguoren de Jiazhiguan [Chinese Views of Values], 2013.35 Finally, over the last three decades, eminent Chinese economists have variously written about the unprecedented growth of their country’s economy. Their main theoretical work has, alas, seldom been translated into a Western language. Translating, that humble, yet ever so important activity, is the strength, doing scientific research the weakness of Sinologists not graduated in any of the social or human sciences.36 They should, 35 No doubt the leadership of the Academy for Chinese Culture (www.iafcc.org), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (www.cas.cn), the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (www.cssn.cn), the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning, the Kai Feng Foundation, the league of most prestigious Chinese universities (Jiuxiao Lianmeng), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (www.cuhk.edu.hk), and Academia Sinica in Taiwan (www.sinica.edu.tw) will be able to add many more book titles to this list. 36 Fluency in a foreign language, however impressive, is only a skill. It does not qualify the speaker/translator for making scientific statements on the language concerned; doing so is the prerogative of the linguist who has focused his/her mind on the language. For the art/skill of translating, visit www.benjamins.com/online/tsb, https://www.stjerome.co.uk and www.atanet.org. In addition, see Rainer Schulte & John Biguenet (eds.), Theories of Translation, The University of Chicago Press, 1992; John Sallis, On Translation, Indiana UP, 2007; Piotr Kuhiwczak & Karin Littau, A Companion to therefore, concentrate on the former and link up with scientists for the latter. If they desire to embark on the study of a subject related to China, we would counsel them not to run the risk of being shipwrecked because of shortage of seamanship. Instead, they should look around for China oriented scientists to set up a joint venture. In this way, the party lacking disciplinary grounding has the right analytical tools at his disposal, whereas the party unable to read Chinese has access to primary sources. For there is no more excuse for sinologists writing incompetently on technical subjects than for scientists working incompetently upon texts. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that partial views add up to a Totalbild, to a complete and coherent picture of the structured and articulated whole of China. What we have got when the various joint ventures finally come out with their product is a patchwork rather than a tapestry, a juxtaposition rather than a composition, a pile of bricks rather than a house, an ‘aggregate’ (Gesamtheit) rather than a ‘whole’ (Ganzheit). CHINA IS A COMPLEX SYSTEM OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS Each country is a territory-bound, history-moulded, multi-minded, at one time open, at another time closed system of inextricably intertwined physical, chemical, biological and social systems. It has a ‘face’(Gestalt), a style, a character, a distinctive ‘sound’ or ‘beat’, a particular ‘flavour’(rasa), a cultural heritage expressing its soul. Constantly changing, sometimes revolutionarily, it has properties none of its constituent subsystems has (much in the same way as the nature of water is irreducible to the attributes of hydrogen and oxygen; and a picture is more than the sum total of the pixels into which it can be decomposed). Not being an aggregate of (groups of) humans who live on an expanse of land, but a superorganism, a hierarchically ordered, non-fragmentable holon, an exceedingly complex system of complex systems, and an intricately evolving compound/composite, a country cannot be understood by studying its parts. It can only be understood across the disciplines, that is to say, inter- or transdisciplinarily. Like the ant that cannot see the pattern of the carpet, a country student can never grasp the whole picture, not only because it is hard enough to be expert in one scientific domain and enormously difficult to learn two (let alone more than two) disciplines, but also because the whole of the country is something else than the sum total of its parts. Composition goes beyond juxtaposition. So we urgently need genuine scientific collaboration. The body can only be dissected at the price of cutting connections. Breaking a country up into morsels for scientists from different departments to chew on (the multidisciplinary approach) amounts to destroying a ‘system’ ( η α, constitution) in order to comprehend it. The crux of the matter is that the parts and the whole are interconnected, intertwined and interinvolved; they are inseparable from, and nonsubordinatable to, each other. Quite simply: it takes two to tango.37 Translation Studies, Multilingual Matters, 2007; Mona Baker & Gabriela Saldanha (eds.), Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Routledge, 2008; and Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories, Routledge, 2010. 37 Here, one cannot but think of the undichotomisable taijitu (  ), the interaction, uncertainty, complementarity, entanglement, nonlinearity, infinity, feedback and recursion suggesting yin-yang diagram that archetypically symbolises the Chinese world-view and prominently featured in the coat-of-arms of Niels Bohr, albeit in colours that are not ‘complementa’ (www.nbi.dk/hehi/logo). See Wenran Zhang, ‘Beyond Spacetime ύeometry – The Death of Philosophy and Its Quantum Reincarnation’, 2012 (online). τne wonders whether the ‘twin primes’ (pairs of prime numbers), of which Yitang Zhang recently proved that there are infinitely many, have something to do with the dynamical symmetry between, and ‘pairing’(!) of, yin and yang. Mereology is the study of parthood relations. Combined with topology, the study of relations and connectivity taken purely, it forms mereotopology, which is a major tool for ‘ontological analysis’. Visit http://iaoa.org/isc2012 and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology, and see Hans Burkhardt a.o. (eds.), Handbook of Mereology, Philosophia Verlag, 2012. For uncertainty and nonlinearity, see note 32. For symmetry (‘Beauty is the making one of opposites’), visit http://www.acadeuro.org/index.php?id=168, http://symmetry.hu/definition.html and www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry. In addition, see David Mumford a.o., Indra’s Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein, CUP, 2002 (ch. 1); Mario Livio, The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved, Simon & Schuster, 2006; Mark Ronan, Symmetry and the Monster, OUP, 2006; Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry, Basic Books, 2007; Marcus Du Sautoy, Symmetry: A Journey Into the Patterns of Nature, HarperCollins, 2008; John Conway a.o., The Symmetries of Things, A K Peters, 2008; Joseph Rosen, Symmetry Rules, Springer, 2008; Avner Ash & Robert Gross, Fearless Symmetry: Exposing the Hidden Patterns of Numbers, Princeton UP, 2008; Magdolna & István Hargittai, Symmetry Through the Eyes of a Chemist, Springer, 2009; and Leon Lederman & Countries, big or small, have to be thrown into a fresh perspective. Concepts borrowed from the burgeoning science of complex systems must be applied to them. Studies have been done on the complexity of companies, cities, economies, polities, societies and histories, even on the global complexity (complexity being defined as ‘elements that react to the pattern they together create’).38 It is time to explore the possibility of studying the complexity of countries. At this critical juncture, we can no longer afford to think and behave as if the intricately patterned and dynamically evolving economic, financial, political, legal, military, social, cultural, educational, religious, ecological, and foreign-relations systems of a nation-state are not interconnected, are not corresponding to, interfacing with, or mapping onto each other. It is time to imagine China through the miraculous language of mathematics, ‘the cosmic eye of humanity’ (Eberhard Zeidler); time to look for links and loops, for homologies and isomorphies, for correspondences and correlations, for analogies and similarities, for kinds and grades of embeddedness, for dynamic interfaces, for relationships between structures (category theory), for the invariance/constant in the variety/change; time to elucidate the pathways underlying China’s functioning; time to map the network(s) of its variously connected and continually changing multilayered institutions; time to investigate how the whole of the country, being a huge complex ‘system of systems’(SoS), is held together and differs from another country, like a Rembrandt from a Picasso, or a piece of popular from a piece of (traditional) folk music.39 Christopher Hill, Quantum Physics for Poets, Prometheus, 2011, 249-251. For supersymmetry (SUSY), see Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality, BCA, 2004, 869-933, and visit http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/9709356.pdf. For the related ‘search for the Higgs boson’ (the agent of particle interactions!), explore www.cern.ch and watch – just for fun – http://vimeo.com/41038445. 38 Studies on the complexity of cities are particularly interesting, because a country is a set of cities and their surrounding areas. See Michael Batty, Cities and Complexity, MIT Press, 2005; Juval Portugali a.o. (eds.), Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age, Springer, 2012; Luís Bettencourt, ‘The Kind of Problem a City Is’, 2013 (online); and Michael Batty, The New Science of Cities, MIT Press (forthcoming). In addition, visit www.complexcity.info, http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk, www.bk.tudelft.nl/ccupd, http://senseable.mit.edu, http://www.urb.umontreal.ca (search: complexité), http://emergenturbanism.com and www.uva.nl (search: asca cities project). Also read Part I (Introduction) of Rachel Weber & Randall Crane (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, OUP, 2012. 39 Visit http://comdig.unam.mx, www.isi.it, http://emergentpublications.com, www.santafe.edu, http://ecco.vub.ac.be, http://sites.google.com/site/unifiedcomplexity/Andrei_Kirilyuk, www.necsi.edu, www.cssociety.eu, www.iscpif.fr, www.complexsystems.net.au, www.cas-group.net, www.complexity.ecs.soton.ac.uk, www.igi-global.com (search: complexity), www.implexus.org, www.academia.edu/People/Complex_Systems_Science, www.mcxapc.org, www.cenecc.ens.fr, www.complex-systems.com, www.mpipks-dresden.mpg.de, www.complexitynet.eu, www.nico.northwestern.edu, www.homeokinetics.org, www.complex-systems.meduniwien.ac.at, www.iccwp.org, www.lsa.umich.edu/cscs, http://complex.upf.edu, www.complexityexplorer.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.6317, http://www.cbpf.br/~compsyst, http://c3.unam.mx/simposio, www.scholarpedia.org/article/complexity, www.collegepublications.co.uk/systems and the homepage of Hermann Haken, founder of synergetics. Robert Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science (Springer, 200λ) provides a handy ‘overview’, counting 10,450(!) pages, but bypasses the six-volume opus magnum of the greatest French complexity-thinker, Edgar Morin: La Méthode, Le Seuil, 1977-2004. See also Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, OUP, 2009 (Part Five); J. Barkley Rosser Jr. (ed.), Handbook of Research on Complexity, Edward Elgar, 2010; Vinod Wadhawan, Complexity Science, Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010; Paul Cilliers & Rika Preiser (eds.), Complexity, Difference and Identity, Springer, 2010; Peter Belohlavek, Complexity Science, Blue Eagle Group, 2011; Patrick Beautement & Christine Broenner, Complexity Demystified, Triarchy Press, 2011; Gregory Chaitin, Mathematics, Complexity and Philosophy, Midas, 2011; Cliff Hooker (ed.), Philosophy of Complex Systems, Elsevier, 2011; Allen Downey, Think Complexity, τ’Reilly, 2012; Ronaldo Menezes a.o. (eds.), Complex Networks, Springer, 2012; Jean-Louis Le Moigne & Edgar Morin, Intelligence de la complexité, Hermann, 2013; Marian Walhout a.o., Handbook of Systems Biology: Concepts and Insights, Academic Press, 2013; Claudius Gros, Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems: A Primer, Springer, 2013; and the book series Understanding Complex Systems (Springer), Complex Adaptive Systems (MIT Press), Studies in Complexity (Princeton UP), Complexity in Ecological Systems (Columbia UP), Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity (OUP), Primers in Complex Systems (SFI and Princeton UP) and Managing the Complex (Information Age Publishing). Leading journals are: Journal of Complexity (1985 ff.), Complex Systems (1987 ff.), Journal of Systems Science and Complexity (1988 ff.), Complexity (1995 ff.), Advances in Complex Systems (1998 ff.), Emergence: Complexity & Organization (1999 ff.) and Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling (2013 ff.). Measuring complexity is still a subject of heated debate. Read Seth Lloyd, ‘Measures of Complexityμ A σon-exhaustive List’, 2001 (online). Also visit www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/complexity-measures.html and http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1842. Basically, complex systems scientists are exclusively interested in properties common to all complex systems, leaving it to non-formal scientists, in the fields of natural or cultural research, to study the differences between these systems (the dream of Ludwig von Bertalanffy). Practically, and much to the chagrin of general system theorists, however, they follow one of two approaches. The first method is the building and study of mathematical models that only contain the most important properties of a particular system. The tools used in such studies include, but are not limited to, dynamical systems –, game –, and information theory. The second approach is building a more comprehensive and realistic model, usually in the form of a computer simulation, representing the interacting parts/agents of a complex system, and then watching and studying the emergent behaviour that appears. The power of computer simulation, aka computational modelling, has far exceeded anything possible using traditional paper-and-pencil mathematical modelling.40 Mark Newman, who is associated with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, at the University of Michigan, concludes a recent survey as follows: ‘Complex systems [science] is a broad field, encompassing a wide range of methods and having an equally wide range of applications. The resources reviewed here cover only a fraction of this rich and active field of study. For the interested reader there is an abundance of further resources to be explored when those in this article are exhausted, and for the scientist intrigued by the questions raised there are ample opportunities to contribute. Science has only just begun to tackle the questions raised by the study of complex systems and the areas of our ignorance far outnumber the areas of our expertise. For the scientist looking for profound and important questions to work on, [the study of] complex systems offers a wealth of possibilities.’41 The science of complex systems is an early 1980s outgrowth of a) the science of systems (the study of the general properties of systems), b) cybernetics (the study of control and communication in systems), c) system dynamics (the study of the behaviour of systems over time), d) synergetics (the study of the fundamental principles of pattern formation in systems), e) nonequilibrium statistical mechanics (the study of the emergence of dissipative structures), f) catastrophe theory (the study of sudden shifts in the behaviour of a system arising from small changes in its environment) and g) mathematical biology (the mathematical study of the mechanisms involved in biological processes). In the late 1λλ0s, the ‘complexity turn’ took placeμ social scientists changed their attitude to, and became increasingly interested in, complexity science.42 40 See Neil Gershenfeld, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, CUP, 1999; Frank Giordano a.o., A First Course in Mathematical Modeling, Brooks/Cole, 2009; Giovanni Naldi a.o. (eds.), Mathematical Modeling of Collective Behavior in Socio-Economic and Life Sciences, Springer, 2010; Mark Meerschaert, Mathematical Modeling, Academic Press, 2013; Vijay Mago & Vahid Dabbaghian (eds.), Computational Models of Complex Systems, Springer (forthcoming); and the journal Applied Mathematical Modelling (Elsevier, 1976 ff.). In addition, visit www.scs.org and http://cmg.soton.ac.uk. See also note 15. 41 Visit http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.1440. 42 See the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on complexity edited by John Urry (22:5 [October 2005]); Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems, CUP, 2005; Vladimir Dimitrov, A New Kind of Social Science, Lulu Press, 2005; Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, Continuum, 2006; Graeme Chesters & Ian Welsh, Complexity and Social Movements, Routledge, 2006; John Miller & Scott Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life, Princeton UP, 2007; Dirk Helbing a.o., ‘Social Systems and Complexity’, Advances in Complex Systems, 11:4 (August 2008), 485-652; Brian Castellani & Frederic Hafferty, Sociology and Complexity Science, Springer, 2009; Duane Gehlsen, Social Complexity and the Origin of Agriculture, VDM, 2009; Gordon Burt, Conflict, Complexity and Mathematical Social Science, Emerald, 2010; Ton Jörg, New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities, Springer, 2011; Hugo Letiche a.o., Coherence in the Midst of Complexity: Advances in Social Complexity Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Philip Ball, Why Society is a Complex Matter, Springer, 2012; Phillip Bonacich & Philip Lu, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology, Princeton UP, 2012; Bruce Edmonds & Ruth Meyer (eds.), Simulating Social Complexity: A Handbook, Springer, 2013; and David The recently published and widely acclaimed Sage Handbook of Complexity and Management, edited by Peter Allen, Steve Maguire and Bill McKelvey, is ‘the first substantive scholarly work to provide a map of the state-of-the-art research in the growing field emerging at the intersection of complexity science and management studies’. ύiven that each company belongs to an industry, which is an organised sector of the economy, which in turn is one of the systems a bound-to-bemanaged/ruled/governed/controlled country consists of, we hope that this paper will convince the reader of the importance of redesigning Sinology, of the significance of forging a bridge between complexity science and China studies. China can be compared with a brilliant-cut diamond, that sparkles in the sun. There will be no sparkling/brilliance until variously educated scientists shed light on the country. Having many faces/facets, it should be approached integratively. The scientific ‘attack’ on China should be a concerted one; the operation should be a combined, joint effort. Like every country, it should be studied interdisciplinarily, described synecdochically (using both pars pro toto and totum pro parte), and depicted cubistically (with different viewpoints amalgamated into a multifaceted whole). China is a universe the centre of which is everywhere. The whole and the parts are mutually implicated.43 There are different ways of scientific collaboration,44 but they have a common denominator. The scientists involved understand that reality, being the nexus of interrelated phenomena irreducible to a single dimension, can never be grasped by separate disciplines, which have formed the layout of ‘universities’ since the 18th century. While specialisation has yielded sharper analytical acuity within particular knowledge domains, where the ceteris paribus clause has been the self-imposed, unrealistic rule of operation (unrealistic because other relevant things never remain unaltered!), the goal of reaching integrated understanding has receded. Depth of focus has been achieved at the expense of breadth of view. Some scientists begin to realise that difficult, real-life problems require the pooling of disciplinary knowledge and analytical skills.45 It may be very hard for one (wo)man to become an expert in two disciplines, but two (wo)men jointly well-versed and well-trained in two disciplines, e.g. physics and chemistry, chemistry and biology, biology and sociology, sociology and economics,46 economics and psychology, psychology and anthropology, anthropology and Byrne & Gillian Callaghan, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art, Routledge, 2013. In addition, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_complexity. See also note 39. 43 Fascination with the relation between the whole (the universal, the absolute, the general, sameness) and the parts (the particular, the relative, the specific, otherness) is the basso continuo in religion, art, philosophy, and science(s). Visit www.spaceandmotion.com/Metaphysics-One-Many-Infinite-Finite.htm, and see Johannes Brachtendorf & Stephan Herzberg (eds.), Einheit und Vielheit als metaphysisches Problem, Mohr Siebeck, 2011; Vincent Yu-Chung Shih (tr.), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chinese UP, 1983, 437-443; and Robert Allison a.o., Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, OUP, 1989, 236-264. Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) differentiated between part-whole and inter-aspect relationships (www.dooy.salford.ac.uk/asp.html). His ‘theory of aspects’ (law-spheres) bears a resemblance to σicolai Hartmann’s Stufentheorie (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nicolai-hartmann). We are tempted to consider last year’s discovery of the predicted ‘Higgs particle’, by which subatomic particles acquire mass, to be the confirmation of the ancient Chinese idea of Tàijí. See also end of note 37. This subject is connected with the issue of the ‘unity of science’, which is related to the subject of metamodelling. Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-unity and see the Springer book series edited by Shahid Rahman and John Symons, Logic, Epistemology, and Unity of Science (2004 ff). Manfred Eigen, op. cit. (see note 9), presents a vivid argument for the idea of a unity of all natural sciences. See also end of note 15. 45 Whereas the world has interconnected problems, separate universities, anxious to be ranked highly, have disconnected departments, whose members are often rivals a) estranged from each other, b) working sedulously and solitarily on a book/article about a micro-subject, c) having no interest in the big picture, and d) unconcerned about the confusion of tongues. Visit www.nautilus.org/gps/probs, www.globalissues.org, www.arlingtoninstitute.org/wbp/portal/home, www.grandchallenges.org and www.uia.org (click on ‘Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential’). 46 For economic sociology, see Mark Granovetter & Richard Swedberg (eds.), The Sociology of Economic Life, Westview Press, 2011, XIII-XLI. This vibrant field of research is to be distinguished from new institutional economics, an ‘interdisciplinary enterprise combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand the institutions of social, political and commercial life’ (www.isnie.org, www.esnie.org, 44 linguistics, linguistics and neuroscience, neuroscience and sociology, neuroscience and law,47 law and sociology, sociology and political science, law and political science, political science and economics, law and economics, or economics and physics (econophysics),48 can co-produce something of great value. Interdisciplinary research is not a simple case of summing (∑), of aggregating several disciplines into one, multidisciplinary research project. Extra effort is needed to achieve the promise of synergy, by forming a cohesive team that combines the expertise of different (groups of) people. Crossdisciplinary collaboration is difficult, because it requires a conceptual turnaround, lacks prestige in classical academia, seems to threaten the position of deeply entrenched colleagues, has to overcome institutional barriers, and places one outside the circle of standard job slices. However, it has considerable added value: not only personal, because it enriches the life of those involved, and social, because its results tend to be more robust, but also scientific, because the collaboration minimises duplication, lights up blind spots, fosters analogical reasoning, leads to cross-fertilisation and – most important – stimulates innovation and creativity (provided the members of the team actively listen to, and challengingly question, each other; attempt to argue on the same wavelength, so to speak). Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, the landmarks of the information age, are essentially predicated on interdisciplinarity. Their successes come as a result of collaborative efforts.49 The adversaries of interdisciplinary (as distinct from: international) collaboration do not have to worry: it means integration, not fusion, of disciplines. It is based on the principle 1 + 1 ≠ 2. Its participants are comparable to the members of a symphony orchestra who are professional players of different instruments put in tune.50 www.uv.es/ecoinst). A promising dialogue between the two has begun. See Rudolf Richter, ‘σew Economic Sociology and σew Institutional Economics’, 2001 (online). 47 See Brent Garland (ed.), Neuroscience and the Law, Dana Press, 2004; Michael Freeman & Oliver Goodenough, Law, Mind and Brain (eds.), Ashgate, 2009; Michael Pardo & Dennis Patterson, Minds, Brains, and Law, OUP, 2013; and the Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy (2012 ff.). In addition, visit www.santafe.edu/news/item/lectureeagleman-neuroscience-blameworthiness 48 Visit www.saha.ac.in/cmp/camcs/Sci_Cul_091010/index.html (editorial), http://web.sg.ethz.ch/Latsis_2012, http://www3.unifr.ch/econophysics and http://econophysicsii.teikav.edu.gr. Also see the journals Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems (Vol. 10, Issue 2, June 2012, iii-iv, 57-113 [online]) and Hyperion International Journal of Econophysics and New Economy (2008 ff.). Econophysics, comparable to bio-, psycho- and sociophysics, belongs to a growing group (called ‘heterodox economics’ [www.hetecon.net]) that also includes Marxian, Austrian, post-Keynesian, Sraffian, feminist, green, new institutional, radical and evolutionary economics. Linked to neuroeconomics, it has largely subsumed complexity economics. For this alternative to neoclassical (orthodox) economics, see Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, Random House, 2007 (Part II); Dirk Helbing & Alan Kirman, ‘Rethinking Economics Using Complexity Theory’, 2013 (online); and W. Brian Arthur, ‘Complexity Economics: A Different Framework for Economic Thought’, 2013 (online). Visit also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/real-world_economics_review. 49 Visit www.sobigdata.eu and www.epjdatascience.com. Also see Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Eamon Dolan, 2013; ύeoffrey West, ‘Big Data σeeds a Big Theory to ύo with It’, 2013 (online); the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, edited by Witold Pedrycz; and the Springer book series Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems (2009 ff.). Readers interested in metadata (data on data), the use of which has been the subject of a worldwide controversy since the secret surveillance programme of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was revealed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures), should subscribe to the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontology (Inderscience Publishers, 2005 ff.). See also note 9 and 13. 50 See Harald Mieg, ‘Interdisziplinarität braucht τrganisation!’, Umweltpsychologie, 7:2 (2003), 32-52; Christine von Blanckenburg a.o., Leitfaden für interdisziplinäre Forschergruppen: Projekte initiieren – Zusammenarbeit gestalten, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005; Rico Defila a.o., Forschungsverbundmanagement: Handbuch für die Gestaltung inter- und transdisziplinärer Projekte, ETH Zürich, 2006; Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Basic Books, 2007; Wesley Shrum a.o., Structures of Scientific Collaboration, MIT Press, 2007; Luca Iandoli a.o., ‘Can We Exploit Collective Intelligence for Collaborative Deliberation?’, 2007 (online); Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in the Organization of Scientific Knowledge, Proceedings of the VIII Congreso ISKO-España, April 2007; Daniel Stokols a.o., ‘The science of team scienceμ an overview of the field’, 2008 (online); Allen Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, Sage, 2008; J. Jacobs & S. όrickel, ‘Interdisciplinarityμ A Critical Assessment’, Annual Review of Sociology, 35 (August 2009), 43-65; David McDonald a.o., Research Integration Using The International Network for Interdisciplinarity & Transdisciplinarity (www.inidtd.org) is currently putting together a proposal, to be submitted to the Volkswagen Foundation, for a series of three symposia on ‘όostering and όacilitating Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production: Developing a Synthesis of Academic Approaches to Societal Needs’, to be held in 20142016. The venue will be Schloss Herrenhausen (Hannover), where the last homo universalis, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) developed many of his world-changing ideas. Abstraction has given mathematical structures their portability. They can be carried over from one discipline to another. Actually, workers in both the natural the and cultural sciences are increasingly using mathematical methods and techniques, mindful of what Eugene Wigner called their ‘unreasonable effectiveness’; and since the bridge between these sciences and mathematics (a study that grows wider, higher and deeper) is heavily traveled, the interdisciplinary dialogue is stimulated. Moreover, scientific collaboration is facilitated by e-research, which combines a) vast quantities of digitised data (digital libraries), b) supercomputers running sophisticated software, and c) high-tech connectivity between computers (cloud - and grid computing, semantic web).51 With modern computers, almost any form of knowledge can be precisely expressed, and multi-dimensional computations of complex multi-scale phenomena are not beyond reach anymore. Artificial Dialogue Methods, ANU E Press, 2009; Carolin Kreber (ed.), The University and its Disciplines, Routledge, 2009; Robert Frodeman a.o. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, OUP, 2010; Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, Routledge, 2010; Myra Strober, Interdisciplinary Conversations, Stanford UP, 2010; Brenda Freshman a.o., Collaboration Across the Disciplines in Health Care, Jones & Bartlett, 2010; Michael Jungert a.o. (eds.), Interdisziplinarität: Theorie, Praxis, Probleme, WBύ, 2010; Bernard Claverie, ‘Pluri-, inter-, transdisciplinarité: ou le réel decomposé en réseaux de savoir’, International Journal of Projectics, 4:1 (2010), 5-27; Katy Börner a.o., ‘A multilevel systems perspective for the science of team science’, 2010 (online); Matthias Bergmann a.o., Methoden transdisziplinärer Forschung, Campus, 2010; Catherine Lyall a.o., Interdisciplinary Research Journeys, Bloomsbury, 2011; Bharath Sriraman & Viktor Freiman (eds.), Interdisciplinarity for the Twenty-First Century, Information Age, 2011; Basarab Nicolescu (ed.), Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability, TheATLAS, 2012; Kara Hall a.o., ‘A four-phase model of transdisciplinary team-based research’, 2012 (online); Paul Hirsch, ‘A framework for integrative thinking about complex problems’, 2012 (online); Allen Repko a.o. (eds.), Case Studies in Interdisciplinary Research, Sage, 2012; Liu Xiaobao & Liu Zhonglin, ‘Academic Background and Theoretical όocus of Interdisciplinary Research’ (Chinese), Journal of Zhejiang University, 42:6 (2012), 16-26; Andrew Barry & Georgina Born (eds.), Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, Routledge, 2013; and Gabriele Bammer, Disciplining Interdisciplinarity, ANU Press, 2013. In addition, visit and explore www.csid.unt.edu, www.scienceofteamscience.org, www.teamscience.net, www.theatlas.org, www.units.muohio.edu/aisorg, www.interdisciplines.org, www.inter-disciplinary.net, www.inidtd.org, http://pin-net.gatech.edu, http://www.i2sconference.org, www.ciret-transdisciplinarity.org, www.interdisciplinarystudies.org, www.coopsys.org, www.anoitt.ru/cabdir/materials_eng.php, www.labyrinthe.revues.org/1593, http://savoir-du-monde.fr/interdisciplinarite, and www.parmenidesfoundation.org/research. For collaboration among mathematicians, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/polymath_project; and for ‘intermedia/Intermedialität’, visit www.theorie-der-medien.de/text_detail.php?nr=12. 51 Visit www.dariah.eu, www.digitalhumanities.org, www.h-net.org, www.cdh.ucla.edu, http://cci.mit.edu, www.w3.org, www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh, www.iccs-meeting.org/iccs2012, www.cscw2012.org, http://bigdata.csail.mit.edu, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23253949, www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/bigdata, http://litlab.stanford.edu, www.digitalscholarship.wordpress.com, http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN86/EN86-web.pdf, http://ercimnews.ercim.eu/en89/special, www.cultureplex.ca, www.culturomics.org, www.planet-data.eu, www.ctwatch.org, www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/NCSA2015, www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728, www.hastac.org, www.chartex.org, www.ucl.ac.uk/dh, www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities, https://www.escidoc.org, www.projectbamboo.org, , www.diggingintodata.org, http://cscw.acm.org, www.dadh.digital.ntu.edu.tw, www.sr.ithaka.org/researchpublications/sustaining-digital-humanities and http://rilads.wordpress.com. Also see Dutton & Paul Jeffreys (eds.), World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities, MIT Press, 2010; Xiaoyu Yang a.o. (eds.), Guide to e-Science, Springer, 2011; Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Princeton UP, 2012; Matthew Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2012; David Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, Palgrave, 2012; Suzanne Bell, Librarian’s Guide to Online Searching, Libraries Unlimited, 2012; and Scott Selisker, ‘The Digital Inhumanities?’, 2012 (online); the Springer book series Computer Supported Cooperative Work (1993 ff.) and the IGI Global book series Advances in E-Collaboration (2005 ff.); and the journals Future Generation Computer Systems (1985 ff.), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (1992 ff.), International Journal of e-Collaboration (2005 ff.) and Journal of Computational Science (2010 ff.). See also note 49 and 50. Intelligence (the study of making computers perform tasks that require human intelligence) is a field of research that develops at an astonishing pace.52 In addition to computing with numbers, ‘computing with words’(CWW), a technology invented and developed by Lotfi Zadeh (father of ‘fuzzy logic’ and ‘soft computing’), is now possible.53 Computer engineers made the decisive passage from deterministic to (poly)stochastic systems, i.e. to self-organising systems that, resulting from a myriad of ‘independent’, interacting agents, have irreducible, emergent properties.54 The old software engineering paradigm, based on linear thinking, reductionism and the superposition principle/property, is being replaced by a revolutionary new one, based on nonlinear thinking and the science of complex systems.55 Whit Blue Waters in place, researchers will be able to understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, to design new materials at the atomic level, and to predict the behaviour of complex biological systems, among other things. Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations every second).56 Some researchers even dream, and explore the feasibility, of a synthesis of computer science, information science, physics, nanoscience and mathematics. Forecasting that ‘sustained petascale computing will be dwarfed by quantum computing’, they believe that the computer age has not yet really began! The recent detection of ‘Majorana particles’, subatomic particles that are their own antiparticle, may be a major step in that direction.57 52 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ai, www.agi-society.org and www.idsia.ch. In addition, see Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence, Pearson, 2010, pp. 1044-1052, 1063; Juyang Weng, Natural and Artificial Intelligence, BMI Press, 2012; Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind, Viking, 2012; Keith Frankish & William Ramsey (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, CUP, 2012; and the book series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Springer), Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (IOS Press) and Atlantis Thinking Machines (Springer). 53 See Lotfi Zadeh, Computing with Words: Principal Concepts and Ideas, Springer, 2012. A special issue of International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies on CWW is forthcoming. ‘Computing with words’, not to be confused with ‘natural language processing’ (σLP), overlaps with computational semiotics. See Alexander Mehler & Reinhard Köhler (eds.), Aspects of Automatic Text Analysis, Springer, 2007; and Nitin Indurkhya & Fred Damerau (eds.), Handbook of Natural Language Processing, CRC Press, 2010. See also Kurzweil, op. cit. (Chapter 7). 54 Visit www.scholarpedia.org/article/agent_based_modeling, www.cabsss.titech.ac.jp, www.agent-based-models.com, http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/abmread.htm, www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/methods/abss and www.paaa.asia/aescs2012. In addition, see Steven Railsback & Volker Grimm, Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction, Princeton UP, 2012; Bruce Edmonds & Ruth Meyer, op. cit.; Joshua Epstein, Agent_Zero, Princeton UP (forthcoming); and the new, open access Springer journal Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling. For self-organising systems, see Steven Strogatz, SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Hyperion, 2003; Hermann Haken, Information and Self-Organization, Springer, 2006; Dirk Helbing, Social SelfOrganization, Springer, 2012; and Manfred Eigen, op. cit., chapter 5. Laozi (6th century BC), founder of philosophical Daoism, emphasised the importance of ‘spontaneous’ (ziran) order. He is probably the first laissez-faire thinker. For emergence/emergent properties, visit www.icam-i2cam.org, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent, http://isce.edu, http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/eprg, www.arxiv.org/abs/1106.0704, www.arxiv.org/abs/1106.0702, and http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGBHA. Also see Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, OUP, 2002; Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence, University of Toronto Press, 2003; Philip Clayton & Paul Davies (eds.), The Re-Emergence of Emergence, OUP, 2006; Gianfranco Minati a.o. (eds.), Processes of Emergence of Systems and Systemic Properties, World Scientific, 2008; Jens Greve & Annette Schnabel (eds.), Emergenz, Suhrkamp, 2011; Rémy Lestienne, Dialogues sur l’émergence, Le Pommier, 2012; Liz Swan a.o. (eds.), Origin(s) of Design in Nature, Springer, 2012; John Padgett & Walter Powell, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton UP, 2012; and the forthcoming Springer book series Emergence, Complexity and Computation (to be distinguished from the journal Emergence: Complexity & Organization). 55 See Jay Xiong, The New Software Engineering Paradigm, Springer, 2011. See also note 32 and 39. 56 Visit www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22936989 and www.top500.org. Also see The Journal of Supercomputing (1987 ff.). For the development of computers and computability theory, see Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, CRC Press, 2012. 57 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcom, www.quantuminteraction.org, http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca, www.qubit.org, www.dwavesys.com and www.csrc.ac.cn/conference/IWSSQC6. In addition, see Dan Marinescu & Gabriela Marinescu, Approaching Quantum Computing, Prentice Hall, 2004; Mike Nielsen & Ike Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, CUP, 2010 (Chapter 1); Colin Williams, Explorations in Quantum Computing, A RESEARCH PROJECT PROPOSAL A study of the modernisation of China is arguably the most important research project that Sinologists could embark on in close collaboration with China oriented scientists ready and willing to co-operate with each other. In his best-selling book The Search for Modern China (Norton, 1990), Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, heroically tried to tackle the vexed problem single-handedly.58 However, he does not touch upon (let alone: extensively discuss) the issue of modernity. The entries ‘enlightenment’, ‘counter-enlightenment’, ‘modernity’, ‘hypermodernity’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘state’, ‘nation-state’, ‘liberty’/‘liberalism’, ‘equality’, ‘solidarity’, ‘justice’, ‘rule of law’, ‘popular sovereignty’, ‘citizenship’, ‘civil society’, ‘privacy’, ‘human rights’, ‘private property/ownership’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘social contract’, ‘separation of powers’, ‘checks and balances’, ‘mass media’, ‘scientific revolution’, ‘industrial revolution’, ‘electrical age’, ‘electronic age’, ‘information age’, ‘digital age’, ‘capitalism’, ‘welfare’, ‘rationality’, ‘critique’, ‘commercialization’, ‘progress’, ’secularization’, ‘emancipation’, ‘European miracle’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘decadence’, ’estrangement’/’alienation’, ‘westernization’ and ‘globalization’ are conspicuous by their absence from the book’s index. τne wonders if the author, who received eight honorary degrees, was well-informed about the subject matter of his ‘magnum opus’. The Western debate about modernisation, the idea of which is tied up with the idea of progress, has become ferociously complex. We could easily mention the names of hundreds of philosophers, writers and scientists having been involved in it (since, n’en déplaise à Francis Fukuyama, the end of modernisation’s history is not in sight, a definitive judgement has to be postponed).59 The heart of the matter seems to be that modernity is understood as the attempt to find the secular, rational principle of order, i.e. to solve ‘the problem of order’.60 There is disagreement as to when this Springer, 2011 (Part I); Andrew Whitaker, The New Quantum Age, OUP, 2012 (Part III); Andrey Varlamov & Lev Aslamazov, The Wonders of Physics, World Scientific, 2012 (Part IV); Hector Zenil (ed.), A Computable Universe, World Scientific, 2013 (Chapters 28-33); and — Noson Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us, MIT Press, 2013. For the hunt for Majorana particles, visit www.arxiv.org/pdf/1112.1950v2 and www.arxiv.org/abs/1205.7073v1. See also end of note 37. 58 In the preface to the Chinese translation (dated March 31, 2001), Spence acknowledges that he learned a lot from John King Fairbank (co-author, with Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig, of East Asia: The Modern Transformation, Allen & Unwin, 1965) and Immanuel C.Y. Hsü (author of The Rise of Modern China, OUP, 1970), but he forgets to mention Knight Biggerstaff (author of ‘Modernization and Early Modern China’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 25:4 [August 1966], 607-619) and Gilbert Rozman (editor of The Modernization of China, The Free Press, 1981). 59 Prominent names are Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Vico, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Condorcet, Hegel, De Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Veblen, Durkheim, Simmel, Husserl, Max Weber, Johan Huizinga, Thomas Mann, Paul Hazard, Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset, Franz Kafka, Karl Polányi, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Herman Dooyeweerd, Lewis Mumford, Norbert Elias, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Barzun, David Riesman, Jacques Ellul, Reinhard Bendix, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Bell, Jack Goody, Douglass North, Stephen Toulmin, Shmuel Eisenstadt, David Landes, Zygmunt Bauman, Ernest Gellner, Michel Foucault, Robert Bellah, Jürgen Habermas, Ágnes Heller, Immanuel Wallerstein, Charles Taylor, Christopher Lasch, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, David Harvey, Anthony Giddens, Quentin Skinner, Alan MacFarlane, Krishan Kumar, Joel Mokyr, John Gray, Arjun Appadurai, Slavoj Zižek, Richard Tarnas, Ken Pomeranz, Robert Marks, Jonardon Ganeri, Ian Morris, Peer Vries, Michel Houellebeck and Ricardo Duchesne. 60 The idea of ‘order’ (Skr. rta), or the lack of it, is central to mathematics (set, structure, sequence, lattice, graph, category), astronomy (cosmos), physics (entropy, symmetry), biology (taxon, morphogenesis), systemics (holon, selforganisation), cybernetics (control, feedback), synergetics (pattern formation), informatics (entropy), sociology (structure, hierarchy, class, control, network), politics (government), jurisprudence (right) and organisation Studies (management). See Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Gallimard, 1966 (Préface); John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Clarendon Press, 1980, 136-139; and Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, 2002-2005 (www.natureoforder.com). The (ancient) Chinese considered ‘order’, or ‘pattern’ (理), the essence of Dao (道), and vice versa! For postmodernism, see Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, Blackwell, 2003 (Introduction); Steven Connor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, CUP, 2004 (Introduction); and Stuart Sim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, Routledge, 2011 (Preface). attempt began (with the Milesian cosmologists [Axial Age], the Papal Revolution [led by Pope Gregory VII], the Renaissance-Humanism, the Age of Discovery/Exploration, the Protestant Reformation, or the rise of the Nation-State?), but what no one disagrees with is, that the revolutions instigated by Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Newton and Darwin were crucial catalysts. Understanding the world as potentially comprehensible and subject to human will, these men, and those who refined their views, radically changed the intellectual discourse. Rather than leave the awesome power of directing the individual’s fate to ύod and His Representative on earth (the Pope in Rome), or to a monarch falsely claiming to rule ‘by the ύrace of ύod’, they posed the really revolutionary question: what if society (always considered to be a unitas ordinis, a unity constituted out of plurality under a leadership) is made up of individuals each of whom has the power to more or less shape his own destiny? Society’s future is then what its members decide to make of it.61 In the 17th century, which has been called the ‘century of genius’,62 the gap between revelation (Jerusalem) and reason (Athens) that was thought to have been bridged in the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas) opened wider, and the relationship between faith and reason became a problem.63 In his consummate, extensively researched book Shūkyō to wa nanika (What is Religion? [1961]), σishitani Keiji, notable member of the Kyoto School of philosophy, writesμ ‘The problem of religion 61 See Ellis Cashmore & Chris Rojek (eds.), Dictionary of Cultural Theorists, Arnold, 1999, 2-6. For the origin, genesis and significance of individualism, which has made the West so different from the Rest, see Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Penguin, 1990 (1860), Part II; Maurice de Wulf, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages, Princeton UP, 1922, Chapter X; Georges Gusdorf, La découverte de soi, PUF, 1948; Crawford Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, OUP, 1962; Alec Macfie, The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith, Edinburgh UP, 1967; Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 10501200, Harper & Row, 1λ72; John τ’σeill, Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, Heinemann, 1973; Steven Lukes, Individualism, Harper & Row, 1973 (2006); Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual, University of Chicago Press, 1978; Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire, Gallimard, 1981; Luis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme, Le Seuil, 1983; Pierre Birnbaum & Jean Leca (eds.), Sur l’individualisme: theories et méthodes, FNSP, 1986; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, CUP, 1989; Enno Rudolph, Odyssee des Individuums, Metzler, 1991; Brian Morris, Western Conceptions of the Individual, Berg, 1991; Daniel Shanahan, Toward a Genealogy of Individualism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992; Uichol Kim a.o. (eds.), Individualism and Collectivism, Sage, 1994; Aaron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, Blackwell, 1995; Harry Triandis, Individualism & Collectivism, Westview Press, 1995; Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, CUP, 1996; Harry Triandis, ‘Individualism and Collectivism: Past, Present, and Future’, in David Matsumoto (ed.), The Handbook of Culture and Psychology, OUP, 2001, 35-50; Daphna τyserman a.o., ‘Rethinking Individualism and Collectivismμ Evaluation of Theoretical Assumptions and Meta-Analyses’, Psychological Bulletin, 128:1 (2002), 3-72; Gerd Nollmann & Herman Strasse (eds.), Das individualisierte Ich in der modernen Gesellschaft, Campus, 2004; Hans-Ernst Schiller, Das Individuum im Widerspruch, Frank & Timme, 2006; Peter Callero, The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009; Anthony Elliott & Charles Lemert, The New Individualism, Routledge, 2009; Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization, Palgrave, 2010; Meinhard Miegel & Stefanie Wahl, Das Ende des Individualismus, Olzog, 2011; Peter Brooks, Enigmas of Identity, Princeton UP, 2011; James Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, Fordham UP, 2012; Erzsébet Rózsa, Modern Individuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, Brill, 2012; Alan MacFarlane, Individualism, Capitalism and the Modern World, CreateSpace, 2013; the headword ‘individualism’ in Maryanne Cline Horowitz (ed.), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Thomson Gale, 2005; and the best-selling novels of Ayn Rand (1905-1λ82), America’s most controversial individualistμ The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). For methodological individualism, the basic precept of mainstream economics, see Alain Laurent, L’individualisme méthodologique, PUF, 1994; Lars Udehn, ‘The Changing όace of Methodological Individualism’, 2002 (online); and Rajeev Bhargava, Individualism in Social Science: Forms and Limits of a Methodology, OUP, 2008. Also visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism. For the ongoing debate between liberals and communitarians, visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism and www.jacobroundtree.com/2012/01/24/sandel-on-two-versions-of-the-liberal-communitarian-debate. 62 Visit www.clas.ufl.edu/users/ufhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Home and the home page of Stephen Gaukroger. 63 See D.J. τ’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy, The Free Press, 1964, 99-104; William Craig & James Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009 (Introduction); and Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics, Baker Academic, 2013. Also visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/christiantheology-philosophy. We bypass the intra-religious conflicts and the problematic relationships between religions. and science is the most fundamental problem facing contemporary man’.64 In the Age of Reason, aka the Age of Enlightenment, the ideas of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume were popularised. Never had there been an age so skeptical about tradition, so suspicious of authority, so confident of the powers of reason, and so deeply imbued with a sense of progress.65 Modern society has its origins in the Industrial and French Revolution, which began in the late 18th century, but these great upheavals, giving fresh impetus to the development of liberal ideas66 and spawning the social sciences,67 were part of the pattern of change that, in the preceding centuries, had set the West on a different path of development from that of the rest of the world.68 In the words of Carlo Cipolla, author of the standard book Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700 (Methuen, 1976): ‘The world in which we live and the problems we face would be unintelligible without reference to that grandiose change we label the Industrial Revolution. In its turn, the Industrial Revolution was but the ultimate phase, the historically coherent outcome of a development which took place in Europe during the first seven centuries of our millennium.’(p. xiii); and in the words of Robert Palmer, author of the magisterial study The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton UP, 1959): ‘By 1300 the ‘rise of Europe’ was an accomplished fact. The third of the three segments into which the Graeco-Roman world had divided, the one which in 700 had been the most barbarous, now some six hundred years later had a civilization of its own. It was not in its material culture, in the technical crafts, in the arts of building, in the distances traveled by its 64 Visit www.iep.utm.edu/sci-rel, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science and www.project-reason.org. In addition, see Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, OUP, 2006; Charles Taylor, The Secular Age, Harvard UP, 2007; Bryan Turner (ed.), Secularization, Sage, 2010; Steve Bruce, Secularization, OUP, 2011; and Anne Runehov & Lluis Oviedo (eds.), Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, Springer, 2013. 65 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment, and see Knud Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, CUP, 2006. See also Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, HarperCollins, 2000 (Part III); and Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments, Routledge, 2006. Comparing ‘Enlightenment’ in the West with ‘Enlightenment’ in the East (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism) might be enlightening. 66 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism, www.wikiberal.org, www.libertyfund.org and www.montpelerin.org. Also see Gilles Kévorkian a.o., La pensée libérale: histoire et controverses, Ellipses, 2010; and Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, Princeton UP, 2012. See also end of note 61. 67 The 26-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2001) provides a stellar overview of this expanding universe (which differs from the equally expanding universa called natural [physical and biological], human, formal, and applied sciences). Visit www.proquest.co.uk/en-UK/catalogs/databases/detail/ibss-set-c.shtml. Part VIII of The New Cambridge Modern History (a monumental study described as ‘a comprehensive examination of the political, economic, social, and cultural development of the world from 14λ3 to 1λ45’) deals with the American and French Revolution. 68 See Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, Yale University Press, 1997. This book inaugurated a major new series that ‘seeks to provide a chronological account of the intellectual life and the development of ideas in Western Europe from the early medieval period to the present’. See also Short Oxford History of the Modern World (1991 ff.). Informative websites are: http://eurodocs.lib.byu.edu, www.ieg-ego.eu/en/ego, www.thewha.org/recommended_books.php, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.asp, www.euarchives.org and www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/other_subject/item1685/?site_locale=en_GB. UσESCτ’s History of Humanity (www.unesco.org/culture/humanity) is unsurpassed; Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (six volumes, 2011) is overwhelming; Immanuel Wallerstein’s most important work, The Modern World-System, is controversial but not to be ignored (www.jwsr.org); and www.besthistorysites.net is an almost inexhaustible website. Compare the information given at www.history-world.org and http://www.global-history.org. See also note 31. In our view, Western civilisation, embodied in the ‘ύreat Conversation’ (see note 33), has its roots in Ancient ύreece, Ancient Rome and Medieval Christianity (the latter being ‘in dialogue with’ Judaism and Islam); the dynamic, intricate and often overlooked relationship between reason, law and faith has made it unique. It is this ‘trinity’ that those embarking on a study of China’s modernisation have to come to grips with. Fuzziness about the former will lead to fuzziness about the latter. merchants, nor in the mere size or magnificence of its cities that Europe in 1300 surpassed the Arabic, Byzantine, Indian, or Chinese civilization of that time. If it surpassed them at all, if it had any secret that the others did not know, its uniqueness lay in the realm of intangibles. Europe had a political system that blended freedom with more general order; a labor system in which no one was totally enslaved; a spiritual outlook producing a restless activity, because nothing that actually existed was ever believed to be perfect; an intellectual outlook not averse to the new, yet incorporating the old; a diversity of many nations which yet somehow were all the same.’69 From its original European base, modernisation has extended over the whole world, a process called westernisation.70 It has led to fundamental instabilities and tensions, sometimes causing, as in the Earth’s crust, devastating eruptions and shocks. The ‘Middle East’ and ‘East Asia’ are the regions that spring to mind. To become modern has been to become something like a Western society, but the question as to whether economic modernisation and political modernisation, in order to be successful, should go hand-in-hand has not been conclusively answered yet. The important question has been raised: why did the Celestial Empire, whose ‘superior blessings induced outer barbarians to come and to be transformed’ (Fairbank), not realise the Great Transformation from tradition to modernity? Why did the Middle Kingdom, that pretended to embody civilisation itself, not make the quantum leap of the industrial revolution, and not establish a constitutional, democratic society? In other words, how come Chinese history(E) lacks a ‘Sattelzeit’ (Reinhart Kosseleck)? Over half a century ago, ‘scientist and Sinologist’ Joseph σeedham (1λ001995), determined to find an answer to this question, launched the long-term project Science and Civilisation in China. The collaborative, twenty-six-volume work resulting from this planned undertaking has been widely acclaimed as perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted, but it has also been criticised for ‘its strong inclination to exaggerate China’s technological achievements’. Unafraid of eyebrows being raised, we venture to add two critical remarks: a) the key concepts ‘science’ and ‘civilisation’ are neither defined nor analysed, causing the whole project to be suspended in midair without anything like a proper foundation; and b) the structure, or framework, of the work is questionable. If ‘philosophy of science without history of science is empty, but history of science without philosophy of science is blind’ (Lakatos); if sociology of science, focusing on its institutional infrastructure, must be der Dritte im Bunde; and, finally, if science, whose boundary with mathematics has become blurred beyond recognition, is as much dialectically related to technology as the latter is to production, or manufacturing, then it would not be unjustified to maintain that the Needham-project is even hanging out of balance.71 Therefore Sinologists and China oriented scientists should go back to the drawing board and start afresh. όrom the years 800 to 1200, Central Asia was probably the world’s most advanced civilisation. See όrederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from The Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, Princeton UP, 2013. Scholarly interest in Palmer’s perspective has been revived by, among others, the Italian historian όranco Venturi. In The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), David Mungello sets forth a view clearly divergent from Palmer’s. Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (Allen Lane, 2013) is also an interesting read. His perspective is the antithesis of Annales-style, ‘bottom-up’ history. ύerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) is a major contribution to the debate on the idea of Europe. See also note 61 and 68. 70 όor a different view, see Jerry Bentley, ‘Early Modern Europe and Early Modern World’, in Charles Parker & Jerry Bentley (eds.), Between the Middle Ages and Modernity, Rohman & Littlefield, 2007, 13-31. 71 Visit www.nri.org.uk, www.cast.org.cn, www.ihns.ac.cn, https://sites.google.com/a/dhstweb.org/www, www.hssonline.org, www.crhst.cnrs.fr, www.cirphles.ens.fr/?lang=fr, www.hps.cam.ac.uk/research/ssk.html, http://jssts.jp, http://sts.sagepub.com, www.stswiki.org, www.easst.net, www.techculture.org, www.ieit-web.org/apscj, www.4sonline.org, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de, www.rutherfordjournal.org and www.sydney.edu.au/science/hps. In addition, see James Holstein & Jaber Gubrium (eds.), Handbook of Constructionist Research, Guilford Press, 2008 (chapter 11); and Paul Thagard, The Cognitive Science of Science, MIT Press, 2012 (chapter 1). See also note 5. Part I of 69 The state-funded encyclopedia Dukhovnaya Kultura Kitaya [the spiritual culture of China], edited by Mikhail Titarenko, Anatoly Lukyanov and Artem Kobzev, and published by Oriental Literature (2006-2010), covers “all aspects of China’s spiritual culture”, spanning four millennia: philosophy; mythology and religion; literature, language and writing system; historical, political and legal thought; science, technology and military thinking; healthcare and education; and architecture, painting, music and crafts. Regrettably (or fortunately?), the ‘Russian summa sinologica’ does not attempt to find an answer to the ‘σeedham Question’ (it presents a ‘description of the uniqueness, integrity and variety of Chinese civilisation from ancient times to the present’), but the research behind this collaborative, six-volume work is also deeply flawed. The widely contested concept of culture is not thoroughly investigated; the area of spiritual (as distinct from material) culture is not clearly demarcated; and – worst of all – the scientific qualifications of some contributors to the project are not spelled out. σaitō Torajirō (Konan,1866-1934), renowned for his knowledge of Chinese history (E and A), challenged the widely accepted view that the modern era in China began with the arrival of the Westerners – either with the appearance of Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, in the 16th century, or with the opening of China as a result of the First Opium War, in the 19th century. He maintained that the ‘modern period’(kinsei) began during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) and argued – to the chagrin of his Chinese counterparts – that there had been no fundamental changes in Chinese society thereafter. Naitō’s periodisation is, according to Joshua όogel, ‘responsible for shaping the twentieth-century Western view of China’. His most famous disciple, Miyazaki Ichisada (1901-1995), added a fourth stage to the ancient, medieval and modern periodμ the ‘most modern period’ (saikinsei), beginning with the 1911 Revolution (Sun Yat-sen).72 Hu Jichuang (1903-1993), whom we had the privilege and pleasure of meeting personally in 1985 (four years after he had been finally able to finish his three-volume Zhongguo Jingji Sixiang Shi), blamed the Confucianists’ preoccupation with ethics for China’s failure to develop capitalism. In his view, because of their domination of the ideology, along with the Daoists’ negative attitude towards material progress and the deadweight of the scholar-official-landlord establishment, China had been unable to sprout an indigenous capitalism for centuries. The argument Hu advances in his acclaimed (but not yet translated and critically annotated) book coincides with the conclusion Max Weber came to in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905). The Weber thesis has been challenged by, among others, Joseph Schumpeter, Jacob Viner, Richard Tawney, Ernst Troeltsch, Herman Kahn, Henryk Grossman, Davide Cantoni, Hector Robertson, Sascha Becker, Ludger Wößmann, Luciano Pellicani, Andrey Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina. The dispute is complex and very much alive, but there can be no doubt that Hu has added weight to Weber’s stance, as his work has contributed to the comparative study of histories of economic thought.73 China was clearly more modernised in 2000 than in 1900, but how much more? How far must it still proceed before reaching the stage of a truly modern nation? After the Meiji Restoration (1868), the final volume of Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1998, deals with language and logic. It is written by Sinologist Christopher Harbsmeier, a ‘well-known expert’ who, like his colleague Chad Hansen (author of Language and Logic in Ancient China, University of Michigan Press, 1983), is neither linguist nor logician by profession. See end of note 20. 72 Visit www.icis.kansai-u.ac.jp/en/syukai02.html and http://earlymodernworld.uchicago.edu/kishimoto.pdf. Also read Li Qing, ‘τn σaitō Konan’s Theory of Tang-Song Transition’, Academic Monthly, 2006, Issue 10, 116-125. In Xiandai Zhongguo Sixiang de Xingqi [The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought], Sanlian Shudian, 2008, Wang Hui, the voice of China’s σew Left, also traces modernity back to the Song dynasty. Visit http://alexanderday.net/wang-hui-review. For a biography of σaitō, ‘pointing up the intricate connections between his Sinological and political interests’, see Joshua Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan, Harvard University Asia Center, 1984. 73 The website of the China Society for the History of Economic Thought (CSHET), which held its 15 th Annual Congress in October 2012, is http://se.shufe.edu.cn/structure/zgjjsxsxh. Two months ago, a conference on ‘Max Weber and China: Culture, Law and Capitalism’ was organised at the School of τriental and African Studies, in London (www.soas.ac.uk/max-weber-and-china). The journal Max Weber Studies (2000 ff.) is ‘committed to the application and dissemination of the ideas of Max Weber’. Japan, adopting (and adapting) the Western model, rose to become a rich and powerful country.74 About a century later, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, following in the footsteps of Japan, rose to prominence as the Four Asian Tigers, or the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs). They have since graduated to advanced economies.75 After the death of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) and the downfall of the ‘ύang of όour’(siren bang), China, drawing heavily (but without acknowledgement) on the experience of the NICs (Taiwan!) and Japan, has – the bombastic proclamations about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Zhongguo tesede shehuizhuyi) notwithstanding – been taking the capitalist road, so much so that CCP is now ironically said to be an acronym referring to the Chinese Capitalist Party.76 The ‘four modernisations’(sige xiandaihua), of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science & technology, are the main targets the leadership in Beijing attempts to achieve. However – China’s looming demographic and environmental catastrophes set aside, and granted that ‘Mr Democracy’ (Hu Shih) has a rather checkered history in the West77 – the big question is: Can these modernisations be realised without radical political changes, without a ‘fifth modernisation’ (Wei Jingsheng)? Can China be a ‘prosperous and powerful’(fuqiang) country the inhabitants of which are essentially ‘subjects’ (from subiecti: those lying beneath, underlings) instead of citizens?78 Can there be a ‘rejuvenated’(fuxing), ‘wellWe recommend comparing the second, enlarged edition of Spence’s book (and όrederic Wakeman & Wang Xi [eds.], China’s Quest for Modernization, University of California Press, 1997) with Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard UP, 2000) and James McClain, Japan: A Modern History (Norton, 2002). See also Liao Chih-yu, A Comparative Analysis of the Difference between Chinese and Japanese Modernization in the Mid-Late Nineteenth Century, with Particular Regard to the Idea of ‘Rich Nation and Strong Army’, 2006 (online); Masahiko Aoki, ‘The όive Phases of Economic Development and Institutional Evolution in China, Japan and Korea’, 2011 (online); and Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, Allen Lane, 2013 (Prologue). 75 See Gerald Tan, The Newly Industrialising Countries of Asia, Marshall Cavendish, 2004. 76 See Doug Guthrie, Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China, Princeton U.P., 2001; W. Arthur Thomas, Western Capitalism in China: A History of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Ashgate, 2001; Satyananda Gabriel, Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision, Routledge, 2006; Kellee S. Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy, Cornell U.P., 2007; Mary Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China , Princeton U.P., 2007; Gordon Redding & Michael Witt, The Future of Chinese Capitalism, OUP, 2007; Christopher McNally (ed.), China’s Emergent Political Economy: Capitalism in the Dragon’s Lair, Routledge, 2008; Huang Yasheng, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, CUP, 2008; Yin-Wah Chu (ed.), Chinese Capitalisms: Historical Emergence and Political Implications, Palgrave, 2010; Carl Walter & Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise, Wiley, 2011; Loretta Napoleoni, Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do, Seven Stories Press, 2011; Scott Kennedy (ed.), Beyond the Middle Kingdom: Comparative Perspectives on China’s Capitalist Transformation, Stanford U.P., 2011; Michael Webber, Capitalism in Rural China, Edward Elgar, 2012; Michel Aglietta & Guo Bai, La Voie Chinoise: Capitalisme et Empire, Odile Jacob, 2012; Victor Nee & Sonja Opper, Capitalism from Below: Market and Institutional Change in China, Harvard U.P., 2012; and Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 77 Visit http://www.iefd.org; www.beyonddemocracy.net, and see Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics, Yale UP, 1989; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, Transaction Publishers, 2001; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Norton, 2003; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy, University of California Press, 2004; Pierre Rosanvallon, La Contre-démocratie, Seuil, 2006; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Princeton UP, 2007; John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster, 2009; Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Encounter Books, 2010; Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton UP, 2010; Kay Lehman Schlozman a.o., The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, Princeton UP, 2013; Philip Coggan, The Last Vote: The Threats to Western Democracy, Allen Lane, 2013; David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present, Princeton UP, 2013; and above all Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere, τUP, 2006 (the author of this ‘subtle and hugely informative work’ concludes programmaticallyμ ‘Civil society is a project. It inspires hope for a democratic life.’). The Journal of Democracy (1990 ff.) is the world’s leading publication on the theory and practice of democracy. 78 Visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship, and see Joshua Fogel (ed.), The Teleology of the Modern NationState: Japan and China, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. We would like to see Orville Schell and John Delury, authors of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (Random House, 2013), being engaged upon a well-moderated discussion with Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, who, in their widely acclaimed book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Crown, 2012), ‘[make] the persuasive case that inclusive 74 off’(xiaokang) society where unprivileged people live without respect for their dignity and rights? Or to say the same differently and more dramatically: are standing on one’s own feet (Mao Zedong) and having a full stomach (Deng Xiaoping) sufficient conditions for being able to raise one’s head proudly and to keep it high? In brief: Can China be a modern nation without liberty?79 There are surely many things wrong with Western civilisation, as hundreds of Western(!) philosophers, writers and (cultural) scientists have been telling us. Howeverμ ‘The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began at the dawn of history and continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The Great Conversation symbolizes that Civilization of the Dialogue, which is the only civilization in which a free man would care to live’ (Robert Hutchins).80 Lest anyone mistake our concern about China, we hasten to add the rhetorical question raised by Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatismμ ‘Can men live in a free society if they have no reason to believe it is also a just society?’. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION In this paper we presented the thesis that there is something fundamentally amiss in Western Sinology (Zhōngguóxué, as distinct from Hànxué, which – as we pointed out in note 4 – is ‘only’ a kind of old-fashioned philology). The field is not circumscribed. Unable to define their disciplinary political institutions in support of inclusive economic institutions is key to sustained prosperity’ (Peter Diamond). In chapter 5, Acemoğly and Robinson explain ‘why China’s current economic growth cannot last’. 79 όor ‘modern China’, see Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.), Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, University of California Press, 2000; Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Verso, 2010; and Edmund Fung, Foundations of Chinese Modernity, CUP, 2010. See also Jin Guantao & Liu Qingfeng, op. cit.; and Jin Yaoji, op. cit. There is a vast, expanding literature on liberty (the essence of Ludwig van Beethoven’s message) and liberalism (one of the main political ideologies), but Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (1576), όriedrich Schelling’s Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (185λ) and Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), all online, are mandatory readings. The Magna Carta (aka The Great Charter of the Liberties of England) deserves special mention (www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta). See also note 66. In the light of the ongoing, worldwide struggle for freedom and ‘emancipation’ (from emancipareμ to release, let go), of which the ‘Arab Spring’ is just one example, it might be interesting to compare ‘The ύreat Chinese Revolution’ (όairbank) with the Papal, the ύerman, the English, the American, the French, and the Russian Revolution, each of them being a fundamental, lasting ‘system-of-systems’ (SoS) change. See Harold Berman, Law and Revolution, Harvard University Press, Volume I (1983) and II (2003); and Shmuel Eisenstadt, Die großen Revolutionen und die Kulturen der Moderne, VS-Verlag, 2006. 80 Philip Goetz, op. cit., page 31 (see note 33). To realise how, and to what extent, 'modern China’ differs from the West, one should read Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics, Cambridge UP, 1993; Thomas Metzger, A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today, Chinese UP, 2005; Leigh Jenco, Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao, CUP, 2010; Hu Ping, tr. Philip Williams & Yenna Wu, The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State, Amsterdam UP, 2012; He Weifang, In the Name of Justice: Striving for the Rule of Law in China, The Brookings Institute, 2012; and Yan Xuetong, tr. Edmund Ryden, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, Princeton University Press, 2013. See also note 58, 68, 74 and 79. Meanwhile, readers inclined to trumpet the scientific and technological achievements of 'modern China’ in such fields as space flight, computing, neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology and aircraft carriers, should ask themselves (or somebody else) whether the Chinese can really claim credit for these impressive accomplishments, whether there is absolutely no reason to suspect them of foul play or stealthy behaviour [see Dennis Poindexter, The Chinese Information War (McFarland, 2013) and William Hannas a.o., Chinese Industrial Espionage (Routledge, 2013)]. Sinologists will probably think twice before answering this or suchlike question, bearing their next application for a visa to visit the PRC in mind. See Carsten Holz, ‘Have China scholars all been bought?’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 170:3 (April 2007), 36-40 (online); and visit www.initiativesforchina.org/?p=1206! matrix, lacking a research agenda, not having built a domain ontology (a precise explanation of the basic terms of their discourse), not commanding a theory of their own, and not searching for ordered knowledge with regard to China in and of itself, the so-called China experts in Europe and America are not scientists, even if science is broadly defined. Ignoring the elephant in their room (there is no book on the philosophy, or principles, of Sinology) and refusing a Reflexion auf eigenes Tun, these scholars boldly claim to synthesise the results of all kinds of professional study regarding the country of their choice and predilection but, without a conceptual framework, i.e. without a model representing China as such, they are not able to present a comprehensive and coherent picture of the country,81 not to mention a lucid exposition of its dynamics, its phase transitions, its transformation logic (i.e. an exposition that could serve as an example of history[A] writ large). Browsing and trespassing rather than really ‘putting together’ is what these heroic polymaths are good at. Having no degree in any of the disciplines concerned, they do not shrink from rushing in where angels fear to tread. Pretending, or implicitly claiming, to be scientific all-rounders in respect of China, these jacks-of-all-trades keep the reader/listener in the dark as to how the parts fit into the whole and, conversely, how the whole stands interconnected with the parts. Their China approach is mile-widebut-inch-deep. Though their population is dwindling, they are by no means extinct. The claimed post-war ‘split of sinology into specialisms’ has worsened the situation, because there is confusion and obfuscation as to who has a thorough grounding in a scientific discipline and who has not. Some, and we believe many, ‘experts’ are actually amateurs who have the bad habit of putting on the hat of a scientist without filling his shoes. Others have no qualms about introducing themselves simply as ‘Professor at the University of … (name of city)’. A courteous request to present academic credentials is considered a token of disrespect, and deeply ingrained customs (old boys network) preclude fundamental internal criticism, causing intellectual inbreeding. Occasionally – we confine ourselves to one example – someone, knowing very well that studying a language is not the same as studying the literature written in that language, decided to enrol for literary studies82 before hurling him/herself at the Chinese literature. His/her monodisciplinary approach to the country is then mile-deep-but-inch-wide (the truth would be intolerably stretched, if such a person permitted people to call him/her ‘China expert’). However, the problem with these one-dimensional scientists, who Max Weber would have derogatorily called Fachmenschen (department people), is that they are accusable of silo/stovepipe thinking, of not seeing the big country-picture, of being unable to think systemically (to discern the parts as well as the whole).83 To remove this odium, they have a tendency to cross boundary lines, blissfully ignorant about the dangers of skating on thin ice. The reader who takes pains to check the list of contributors to the journals T’oung Pao, Monumenta Serica, Late Imperial China, Modern China, Modern China Studies, Das neue China, China heute, ChinaContact, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, China Currents, 81 That is to say, a picture different from the national characterisations and ethnic stereotypes studied by imagologists. See Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited, Rodopi, 2010; and visit www.imagologica.eu. For images of China, see Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China, OUP, 1989; Steven Mosher, China Misperceived, Basic Books, 1990; Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, W.W. Norton, 1999; David Martin Jones, The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought, Palgrave, 2001; Alexander Lukin, The Bear Watches The Dragon, M.E. Sharpe, 2003; Zhijian Tao, Drawing the Dragon, Peter Lang, 2009; and Chengxin Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise, Edward Elgar, 2012. See also note 1 and 4. 82 Over the course of the past three or four decades, literary studies have come to play a central role in the social and human sciences. See Michael Groden a.o. (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, The Johns Hopkins UP, 2005 (list of entries); Raman Selden a.o., A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Pearson, 2005; Gregory Castle, The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007; Vincent Leitch a.o. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W.W. Norton, 2010; Barry Nisbet & Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (nine volumes), CUP, 1990-2013; and José Ángel ύarcía Landa, ‘A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology’, 2013 (online). René Wellek’s eight-volume History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, Harcourt, 1955-1992, is a monumental scholarly study. Explore www.litencyc.com, www.fabula.org, www.ipl.org/div/litcrit and the home page of Rafey Habib. 83 Zhuangzi (369-286 BC) famously saidμ ‘A frog at the bottom of a well cannot conceive of the sea’. Chinese Cross Currents, China in Focus, Twentieth-Century China, China Information, China Perspectives, Études chinoises, Monde chinois, China Report, China Review, The China Review, Harvard China Review, China Review International, The China Journal, The China Monitor, The China Quarterly, China Studies Quarterly, World Sinology, Sinologie française, China Heritage Quarterly, Newsletter for Research in Chinese Studies, Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies, China Studies Review International, China: An International Journal, Journal of Chinese Studies, Journal of Modern Chinese Studies, International Journal of China Studies, International Journal of Current Chinese Studies, Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies, Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies, American Journal of Chinese Studies, European Association for Chinese Studies Newsletter, Berliner China-Hefte, Sino-Platonic Papers, Columbia East Asia Review, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, European Journal of East Asian Studies, Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung, Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, Asia-Pacific Journal, Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, Princeton Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, East Asia Forum Quarterly, Journal of Oriental Studies, Oriens Extremus, Acta Orientalia, Acta Orientalia Belgica, Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, Archiv orientální, Orientaliska Studier, Orientalia Suecana, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, Bulletin of the School of Oriental & African Studies, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, Far Eastern Affairs, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Asien, Asian Survey, Asian Perspective, Asian Studies Review, Asian Culture, Journal Asiatique, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, Virginia Review of Asian Studies, International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, The Journal of Asian Studies, The International Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Asiatische Studien, Studies on Asia, Studia Asiatica, Acta Asiatica, Asia Major, Asia Papers and Critical(sic) Asian Studies84 will discover that the editorial boards of these competing periodicals have not been consistent in their declared policies on the professionalism of authors. All too often, published articles are not ‘of the highest academic standard’. In our view, the wheat has not always been separated from the chaff, and experts in their own field of study are still allowed by editors who may not be kosher themselves to veer off course, that is, to leave their academic home turf and to enter unlawfully upon somebody else’s professional domain.85 Goodbye, intellectual integrity! The fork in the road ahead for Western Sinologists is two-pronged: translating or collaborating. They are supposed to be fluent in classical and modern Chinese. So our advice would be: cobbler, stick to your last. There are numerous important Chinese books eagerly awaiting translation. If their desire is to embark on the study of a China related subject, we would counsel them not to venture forth on too vast a sea, but to look around for China oriented experts (i.e. scientists [in the first place] who have a special interest in China) to set up a joint venture, with the caveat that partial views do not add up to a picture of the whole of China. For making good use of organised and structured databases, they need to be interconnected.86 Partial studies that are not nicely dovetailed or firmly interlocked with each other present the reader with a spectacle coupé, with a Humpty-Dumpty broken into bits. Such studies (one may think of those collected in the much touted Cambridge History of China) do not constitute a system, a coherent whole. They lack the overarching, unifying framework that could be provided by the science of systems and the related science of networks (the The word ‘Chinese’, or ‘(East) Asian’, in the title of some journals is ambiguous; ‘Asia’ is a vague, ill-defined concept; and the terms ‘oriental’ and ‘far eastern’/’Extrême-τrient’ smack of bygone colonialism. 85 The reader who checks a) the online bibliography compiled by Lubna Malik and Lynn White (www.princeton.edu/~lynn/chinabib.pdf) and b) the list of contributors to Das große China-Lexikon (WBG, 2008), and to the eight-volume set Contemporary China Studies (Sage, 2011), must come to the same conclusion. See note 3. 86 The online Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (www.eolss.net) is a striking example. Being an ‘integrated compendium of twenty encyclopedias’, EτLSS ‘attempts to forge pathways between disciplines in order to show their interdependence’. It ‘deals in detail with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary subjects, but it is also disciplinary, as each major core subject is covered in great depth by world experts.’ Visit also www.springerreference.com. 84 theoretical part of which must appeal to researchers really willing to work together and fully aware of the awesome power of making abstractions). Parceling up neglects relations that matter. Com– or departmentalisation, the breaking down (mentally) of a complex system into ‘more manageable’ subsystems, easily results in losing sight of the context, of the ‘environment’, of the surroundings, of the conditions under which these subsystems operate within their (usually open) suprasystem. A good physician and a commander-inchief know this. We need a cubistic, multi-professional perspective, ‘multimodal integration’.87 If and only if they are orderly and specifically put together (assembled), single parts/modules/entities/agents make up a whole, as every architect, astronaut, chef de cuisine, choreographer, composer, flower arranger (ikebana), novelist, even a football coach can tell. The interactions and interfaces between the components of a country (its political, legal, military, economic, financial, social, educational, and cultural system) need to be investigated, much in the same way as the fundamental structure of the human language faculty is examined in current linguistics.88 For, as the ancients intuitively knew already, the perpetual interplay of components (a process involving exclusiveness-dissimilarity-uniqueness-discreteness as well as inclusivenesssimilarity-commonness-continuity) is the basic principle of life and the core of all matter; it is the very essence of intelligence, creativity and harmony. 89 In the words of Chinese-American theoretical physicist Kerson Huangμ ‘Interaction makes the world tick’. Studying China multidisciplinarily will miss its mark (illuminating the whole country), because it is bound to result in a building not held together by cement, in the sterile juxtaposition of accounts forming a picture of incompatible colours. Partition walls must be lowered (but certainly not removed). What we need is detribalisation, collaborative scholarship, a well-coordinated joint effort, a disciplinarily integrated approach, that facilitates consilience, the joyful jumping together of scientific knowledge. The main thrust of our argument is that China ought to be seen under the aspect of its whole. The country must be depicted not in a ‘flat’, or ‘curved’, but in a ‘fully rounded’ way.90 For knowledge of the whole is knowledge of each and every part of it, and conversely. It cannot be overstressed: in order to be scientific, the approach to China should be integrative, orchestral. Professional players should put their various instruments in tune and perform a symphony. Different perspectives must be brought together into the same ‘espacio interdisciplinario’(dialogue space). Being a large, intricate and culture-soaked society cum polity cum economy cum geography cum history, China has to be studied truly interdisciplinarily. Concordia res parvae crescunt. L’unité fait la force. Besides collaboration between Sinologists and China oriented scientists, we need ICT-driven collaboration between these scientists. In other words, we are in need of Sinologists who are prepared to work together with scientists having a) profound knowledge in a particular discipline, b) a special interest in China, c) proficiency in communicating with other T-shaped experts, and d) skill in using the tools 87 We borrow this expression from perception scientists. See Lawrence Marks, The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations among the Modalities, Academic Press, 1978; John Harrison, Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, OUP, 2001; Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, MIT Press, 2002; Gemma Calvert a.o. (eds.), The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, MIT Press, 2004; Jamie Ward, The Frog Who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses, Routledge, 2008; Lawrence Rosenblum, See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses, Norton, 2010, 239-293; Julia Simmer & Edward Hubbard (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, 2013; and David Bennett & Chris Hill (eds.), Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness, MIT Press (forthcoming). Also visit http://thecenses.org and www.eaglemanlab.net. See note 9. 88 See Gillian Ramchand & Charles Reiss (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, OUP, 2007, 1-13; and William O.Grady a.o., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, Bedford/St.Martin’s, 200λ, chapters 2-6 and 12-14. 89 Tibetan mandalas, symbolising the universe, model the movement from the one/the whole to the many/the parts (omnia ab uno) and from the many to the one (omnia ad unum). See Giuseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, Rider, 1961; and visit http://www.kalachakranet.org (click on ‘mandala’). Mathematicians will associate mandalas with the inverse operations of differentiation and integration (fundamental theorem of calculus). See note 37 and 43. For the unity of discreteness and continuity, see Alain Laibelman, Discreteness, Continuity, and Consciousness, Peter Lang, 2007 (chapter 3); and Jean-François Dars & Anne Papillault (eds.), Le plus grand des hasards, Belin, 2010. 90 The words ‘flat’, ‘curved’ and ‘fully rounded’ were coined by the novelist E.M. όorster. provided by rapidly developing e-research; with scientists being, additionally, conscious of the fact that geography (the study of who, what, how, why and where) is nothing but history in space, and that history (the study of who, what, how, why and when) is only geography in time. The method of ‘structured dialogic design’(Alexander Christakis) could be used to engage the stakeholders in a productive conversation;91 the techniques of concept mapping, data mining, and information retrieval and visualisation could be applied to capture their attention or stimulate their imagination;92 and much could be learned from those having first-hand experience in operations – and project management.93 First and foremost, however, Sinologists (presumed to be highly competent to translate) and China oriented scientists willing to team up with each other should consult people well versed in network – and (complex) systems science. For these are the fast evolving fields of research that may provide a conceptual framework within which the closely intertwined patterns of China can be described and analysed in a meaningful way. What is more, these are the formal disciplines that can play a crucial role in understanding any country/nation94, and ultimately the whole world, which is – we hope students of international relations will realise it – a hypercomplex system of complex systems of complex systems in the cosmos (the grand total).95 91 See Thomas Flanagan & Alexander Christakis, The Talking Point: Creating an Environment for Exploring Complex Meaning, IAP, 2010. See also note 27 and 50. 92 See Brian Moon a.o. (eds.), Applied Concept Mapping, CRC Press, 2011; Jiawei Han a.o., Data Mining, Elsevier, 2012; Ayşe ύöker & John Davies (eds.), Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century, Wiley, 2009; Robert Spence, Information Visualization: Design for Interaction, Pearson, 2007; Stephen Few, Now You See It, Analytics Press, 2009; Torsten Stapelkamp, Informationsvisualisierung, Springer, 2012; Hunter Whitney, Data Insights: New Ways to Visualize and Make Sense of Data, Elsevier, 2013; and Colin Ware, Information Visualization, Morgan Kaufmann, 2013. In addition, visit www.indiana.edu (search: Katy Börner), www.nsf.gov (search: visual analytics), www.onezoom.org, www.cg.tuwien.ac.at, http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu, www.vismaster.eu, www.visweek.org and http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/lessons.html. See also note 9, 49 and 51. 93 Read Robert Wysocki, Effective Project Management, Wiley, 2011; and visit www.maxwideman.com, http://ipma.ch, www.projectmanagement-training.net/book, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/comparison_of_project_management_software and http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/Nagurney-Nordlog-PhD-Workshop-2013-Gothenburg-University.pdf. 94 In contrast to globalists, who seem to carry the day (see Gerard Delanty [ed.], The Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 2012 [Introduction]; and William Coleman & Alina Sajed, Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization, Routledge, 2012), we believe that national borders will not disappear. See Pierre Manent, La raison des nations, Gallimard, 2006; Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter, Routledge, 2007; Robert Holton, Globalization and the Nation-State, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; and Ireneusz Karolewski & Andrzej Suszycki, The Nation and Nationalism in Europe: An Introduction, Edinburgh UP, 2011. Also visit www.nationalismproject.org. 95 For network science, a thriving interdisciplinary field of research based on graph theory, visit www.inns.org, www.networkinstitute.nl, www.networkologies.wordpress.com, http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6822, www.casos.cs.cmu.edu, http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1331, www.insna.org, www.cnn.group.cam.ac.uk, www.scholarpedia.org/article/smallworld_network, http://netfrontier2013.northwestern.edu, www.relationalanalysis.org, www.barabasilab.com, http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0302, http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.7233, www.maths.ox.ac.uk/groups/ociam/research/networks. In addition, see Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Norton, 2003; Peter Carrington a.o. (eds.), Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis, CUP, 2005; Ulrik Brandes & Thomas Erlebach, Network Analysis: Methodological Foundations, Springer, 2005; Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale UP, 2006; Bertrand Roehner, Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena: A Network Science Investigation of Social Bonds and Interactions, CUP, 2007; Harrison White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Princeton UP, 2008; David Knoke & Song Yang (eds.), Social Network Analysis, Sage, 2008; Matthew Jackson, Social and Economic Networks, Princeton UP, 2008; Alain Barrat a.o., Dynamical Processes on Complex Networks, CUP, 2008; Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler, Connected, Little Brown, 2009; Paul Kleindorfer a.o., The Network Challenge, Pearson, 2009; Ted Lewis, Network Science: Theory and Applications, Wiley, 2009; Mark Newman, Networks: An Introduction, OUP, 2010; Reuven Cohen & Shlomo Havlin, Complex Networks, CUP, 2010; David Easley & Jon Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets, CUP, 2010; Christian Stegbauer & Roger Häußling (Hrsg.), Handbuch Netzwerkforschung, VS Verlag, 2010; Mark Rivera a.o., ‘Dynamics of dyads in social networks’, 2010 (online); Olaf Sporns, Networks of the Brain, MIT Press, 2011; John Scott & Peter Carrington (eds.), Handbook of Social Network Analysis, Sage, 2011; George Barnett (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Networks, Sage, 2011; Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks, OUP, 2012; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, Polity Press, 2012; Christina Prell, Social Network Analysis: History, Theory, and Methodology, Sage, 2012; Evangelos Kranakis (ed.), Advances in Network Analysis and its Applications, Springer, 2013; Matthias Dehmer a.o. (eds.), Advances in Network Multidisciplinarity is certainly not the solution to the problem of Western Sinology. Changing from the mile-wide-but-inch-deep approach of the generalist (‘China study’) to the mile-deep-but-inchwide approach of juxtaposed partial studies (‘Chinese studies’), one gets out of the frying pan into the fire. Western Sinologists should decisively act, attempt to engage the interest of scientists from various quarters, and treat China as a ‘Ganzheit’, as a territory-bound, history-moulded and goaldirected totality of identifiable and yet interdependent actors and factors. The study of China, in particular the long overdue interdisciplinary study of its ‘modernisation’, should be mile-wide-andmile-deep, and the key words should be ‘coordination’ and ‘integration’. The dilemma as to whether to take the road to ‘knowing nothing about everything’ or to ‘knowing everything about nothing’ in respect of the country will then be broken, and both the wood and the trees will be seen. Firmly distancing itself from multidisciplinary research (which, we repeat, is a matter of juxta- rather than composition), the study of China we have in mind includes – nay, requires a well-thought-out, perfectly balanced division of labour, the specialisation of cooperating individuals valued by Adam Smith and Émile Durkheim. Parts and whole, the reader will remember, are mutually implicated and inseparable from each other. It takes two to tango, or to perform a pas de deux. Entangled, Yin and Yang form Taiji, a fundamental concept that was created in ancient China but that the West seems to have difficulty in grasping.96 Working together as a scientific team, informed about the latest developments in complexity and network science, is the key to understanding China in and of itself. The change from multi- to interdisciplinary research in the study of China will be a paradigm shift. Reading, for example, John King όairbank’s China: A New History (a book published by Belknap, in 1992), one might be impressed by the ease with which the great American China-scholar wrote about all kinds of subjects related to the country he had fallen in love with. However, it should not be overlooked that Professor Fairbank was/is to blame for entering without announcement the domains of professionals. Now, let John King Fairbank & Co. be a legal person with many crosscommunicating heads, each graduated in, and familiar with the history of, e.g. geography, demography, archaeology, linguistics, literary studies, economics, public finance, business administration, political science, law, military studies, medicine, psychology, sociology, educational studies, anthropology, Kunstwissenschaft, philosophy, or ecology. We dare say this scientific community, epitomising the ‘university’ spirit, would be able to produce a book on the history of China entirely different from, and more thoroughly researched than, the one written by JKF, provided the project is well managed, provided the scientific orchestra/choir is well conducted. Were such a book published, the giant step from multi- to interdisciplinary research and production would have been taken, a decisive move those subscribing to the fundamental idea of the Bauhaus School would warmly applaud and nobody at, say, GM, Volkswagen or Toyota would be surprised at. Complexity, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, Crown, 2013; and Michael Nielsen, Neural Networks and Deep Learning (forthcoming); the Springer book series Lecture Notes in Social Networks (2011 ff.) and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 6675, 6676 and 6677); and the journals Networks (Wiley, 1971 ff.), Social Networks (Elsevier, 1978 ff.), Neural Networks (Elsevier 1988 ff.), Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory (Springer, 1995 ff.), Foundations and Trends® in Networking (Now Publishers, 2006 ff.) and Network Science (CUP, forthcoming). Recently, Yale University established an interdisciplinary institute of network science (YINS). For the related science of (complex) systems, see note 39, 42 and 54. Researchers focusing on social ties (‘edges’, or ‘lines’) should not forget the importance of the actions/conduct of the living beings involved (‘vertices’, or ‘nodes’). Communities are cohesive groups of nodes. ύeorg Simmel, σorbert Elias, Talcott Parsons, James Coleman, Peter Berger, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Nicos Mouzelis, Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Mark Granovetter, Roberto Unger, Charalambos Tsekeris, Daniel Little, Dave Elder-Vass, Peter Hedström and Poe Yu-Ze Wan are theorists having addressed the agency-structure problem, arguably one of the major issues in all the social sciences (another one being the structure-change relationship). 96 Compare Aristotle’s dictum ‘If any of the parts of a work of art is either transposed or taken away, the whole will be destroyed or changed’ with Pablo Picasso’s statement of opinion ’A head is a matter of eyes, nose, and mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like; the head remains a head’; and compare the taijitu (  ) with the Black Circle of Kazimir Malevich, founder of the abstract art movement suprematism. See also note 37. With philosophy, mathematics, science and technology changing their character, the study of China should be lifted onto a higher plane.97 If its objective is to make a fine weave, the study should be diachronic and synchronic at the same time; it should be historical/longitudinal as well as crosssectional/transversal. That is to say, those embarking on the study of China should from the very outset bear in mind that paths and patterns are intimately interrelated, together constituting multirather than dialectic processes, on macro-, meso- and microscale.98 With each and every one of the cultural (i.e. behavioural, cognitive, human, and social) sciences beginning to realise that without the help of the other neither will be able to proceed very far, the heyday of Sinology, or Chinakunde, or Chūgokugaku, or Zhōngguóxué, is yet to come.99 However, this crucial point (Wende!) in the history and evolution of that odd field of research called ‘China study’, or ‘Chinese Studies’, cannot be reached until one thing has been accomplished: the creation of a truly scientific, genuinely interdisciplinary, and professionally managed China research centre (中 国 研 究 中 心) affiliated with a yet to be established (ICSU and ISSC connected) International Union of Area/Country Studies, and linked up with the global e-infrastructure.100 Meanwhile, the organisation of an international conference on the complexity of China, i.e. a world forum really committed to improving the state of China studies, might be worth considering. ‘Really’, because the current ‘World όorum on China Studies’, co-sponsored by the State Council Information τffice of the People’s Republic of China and co-organised by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, is a complete farce, a shameless show of partisanship.101 The active participants in the onsite and/or online conference we are thinking of, especially the younger generation among 97 Higher than what Bernhard Fuehrer, Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, teaches in his course on ‘Sinological methodology’ (www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff30963.php); higher than what Geremie Barmé, Professor at the Australian National University, seems to have in mind (http://ciw.anu.edu.au/new_sinology), see note 4; and higher than what Goro Takahashi, Director of the International Center for Chinese Studies at Aichi University (http://iccs.aichiu.ac.jp), Yukio Hayashi, Director of the Center for Integrated Area Studies at Kyoto University (http://www.cias.kyotou.ac.jp), and Nobuo Takahashi, Chair of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University (http://www.kieas.keio.ac.jp), seem to aim at. 98 We are not asking the impossible. For the way in which synchrony and diachrony affect each other, see Anna Giacalone-Ramat a.o. (eds.), Synchrony and Diachrony: A Dynamic Interface, John Benjamins, 2013. Claude LéviStrauss and Marshal Sahlins consider(ed) history and structure conjoined dimensions. The central concerns of ‘(con)figuration sociology’ or ‘process sociology’ are the connections between knowledge, emotions, behaviour and power in long-term perspective. Modern biologists are interested in the genesis, development and evolution of, and feedback mechanisms in, living systems, self-organising things that interact with their environment. Ecologists increasingly recognise the interrelationships between evolution and ecology. Neuroscientists discovered that the structure of the human brain changes, i.e. is located in the dimension of time. Water waves, the fascination of Chinese poets, are an example of waves involving a combination of longitudinal and transverse motions. Light is an electromagnetic wave; it has an oscillating electric field and, perpendicular to it, an oscillating magnetic field. The Earth sciences, which consist of the geologic, hydrologic and atmospheric sciences, and – on a broader scale – intergrade with physics, chemistry and biology, orbit elliptically around earthly structures/compositions/patterns and processes. Last but not least, ‘dynamical system’ and ‘rate of change’ are key phrases in mathematical analysis and its numerous applications. Explore www.scholarpedia.org/article/encyclopedia_of_dynamical_systems; see Santiago Ibáñez a.o. (eds.), Progress and Challenges in Dynamical Systems, Springer, 2013; and look through the pages of Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems (1λλ5 ff.). όor ‘system dynamics’, a computer-aided methodology (initiated by Jay Forrester) for dealing with the dynamics of systems characterised by interdependence, mutual interaction, information feedback and circular causality, visit www.systemdynamics.org. See also end of note 95. 99 Compare this prophesy with the vision Paul Demiéville expounded in T’oung Pao, Volume 38, Issue 1-2, 1947, 1-15. 100 Reading Khoi Tu’s latest book, Superteams (Penguin, 2012), exploring http://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures and visiting www.arxiv.org/abs/1211.2313 might be inspirational. In The New Digital Age (Knopf, 2013), Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google Inc, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, outline their vision of the futureμ ‘We have barely left the starting blocks’. 101 By hook or by crook, the Chinese Communist Party, having changed from traditional ‘footbinding’ (chanzu) to modern ‘mindbinding’ (chanxin), and being used to falsify history, attempts to prevent social and human scientists from pursuing serious research in or on China. See end of note 80, and Zhu Zhenghui, ‘China pays attention to world’s China studies’, 2013 (online). them, will undoubtedly benefit from a fundamental, critical, open, and professionally moderated discussion. Phrases like ‘systems thinking’, ‘complexity thinking’, ‘relational logic’, ‘nonlinear behavior’, ‘circular causality’, ‘adaptive system’, ‘agent-based model’, ‘emergent properties’, ‘pattern formation’, ‘data compression’, ‘level of analysis’ (as distinct from ‘unit of observation’), ‘concept map’, ‘knowledge organisation’, ‘knowledge management’, ‘network evolution’, ‘system dynamics’, ‘scientific collaboration’, ‘knowledge integration’, ‘research integration’, ‘science of team science’, ‘research network(ing)’, and ‘e-research’ are increasingly used, not only in the natural but also in the cultural sciences, the main reason being that the ‘yawning gap’ between the two is being closed.102 This deliberately provocative article is nothing but a wake-up call for ‘China experts’ in Europe, the USA and elsewhere (Japan?) to be aware of this and to act accordingly, that is, to make – without waiting or wavering – the complexity turn.103 It has been our intention throughout the paper to convince the reader that there is an elevated place (a meta position) where the huge body, and bewildering variety, of data on a country can be compressed into a falsifiable or refutable theory, where multiplicity (multa) can be turned into simplicity (multum), where – in the case at issue – a breathtaking view of the whole of China can be gained. At that high altitude, long-held convictions will be disestablished, and the Eureka effect, the Aha-Erlebnis will be, that – by seeing both the many in the one and the one in the many – one finally ‘com-prehends’ (fasst zusammen). Beautiful and profound is, therefore, the old Chinese proverb: ‘the pattern is one, the parts are different’ (理 一 分 殊). Summa summarum: China, being a universe the centre of which is everywhere (like an organism the hereditary material of which is encountered in each and every one of its cells), should be studied 1) professionally (i.e. by China oriented people not only running the gamut of the natural and – probably more important – the cultural sciences, but also taking full advantage of the latest in information and communications technology), 2) on the basis of reliable/primary sources, and 3) with the translation skill of sinologists being put to good use. The country (indeed, each country) should be approached respectfully (account also being taken of its history, which will give the appearance of a seamless web), looked at with an open, unbiased mind, and presented in a critical but fair and honest way. China is a Gestalt, an entirety, irreducible to any of its complex adaptive systems; it is a dense and intricate network of ties developed over a long period of time; it is an organization/construction of numerous parts/agents/individuals having different, often convoluted and sometimes strained relations with each other; it is a cluster of institutions (commonly cognized patterns by which societal games are recurrently played and expected to be played);104 it is a complex 102 See C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, CUP, [1959] 2012 (Introduction); Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities, Harmony Press, 2003; Helga σowotny, ‘The Increase of Complexity and its Reduction: Emergent Interfaces Between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences’, Theory, Culture & Society, 22:5 (2005), 15-31; Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, CUP, 2008; Maria Burguete & Lui Lam (eds.), Science Matters: Humanities as Complex Systems, World Scientific, 2008; Katarina Prpić (ed.), Beyond the Myths About the Natural and Social Sciences, Zagreb Institute for Social Research, 2009; Jerome Kagan, The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21 st Century, CUP, 2009; and Edward Slingerland & Mark Collard (eds.), Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, OUP, 2012. See also note 10, 11, 15 (end), 44, 50 and 51. 103 Over the years, we have learned that application of the concepts, tools and techniques developed in the science of complex systems is the one and only way to study China in a scientifically satisfactory manner; all the more so as the teachings of the masters in ancient China and the insights of modern complexity thinkers in the West have surprisingly much in common, in our view a point worthy of being further explored. See note 39 and 42. For a short cut through the vast literature, visit www.springer.com/physics/complexity?SGWID=0-40619-6-127747-0. 104 Institutions are important objects of study in the social sciences, particularly in sociology. See Jeffrey Alexander, op. cit. (chapter 5-7); and Robert Seyfert, Das Leben der Institutionen: Zu einer Allgemeinen Theorie der Institutionalisierung, Velbrück, 2011. Also visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social_institutions. system of evolving/developing hierarchical systems;105 in short, it is a non-linear universe, to be studied as such by China oriented, truly collaborating experts from various disciplines, linguistics, or literary theory/criticism, being only one of them. China is a holon, to be described holographically. China, ‘l'autre du monde indo-européen’,106 somehow behaves; it has a personality, because its people have a sense of belonging (sustained by the Chinese script) and constitute a community of destiny/values.107 The country is an individuum, something that cannot be ‘divided up’ without losing its essence, its identity.108 The argument advanced in this bold article boils down to a single, deceptively simple statement. Without scientific collaboration, there will be no (theoretically and empirically founded) knowledge of countries such as China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Italy, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Albania, Israel, Norway, Brazil, South Africa, or the USA, the consequences of which can be far-reaching. To know a man, it has been said, you have to walk a mile in his shoes; and to know a city, you have to walk a thousand miles. To know a country, we like to add, you need nothing less than a scientific team. Our inspiration came from the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the creator of General Systems Theory who has been described as ‘the least known intellectual titan of the twentieth century’ and whose leitmotiv was ‘unity-through-diversity’ (providing space for different perspectives while sharing a common goal).109 Our hope is that ‘the brick we have thrown will attract a jadestone from others’ (抛 砖 引 玉) — for the improvement of intercultural and international understanding, for more peace in this ‘hyperconnected’110 but deeply troubled world. CHINA ORIENTED EXPERTS FROM ALL DISCIPLINES, UNITE!111 Rotterdam November 2013 Visit http://www.isss.org/hierarchy.htm and http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2503. Also see Mihajlo Mesarović a.o., Theory of Hierarchical, Multilevel Systems, Academic Press, 1970; John Nicolis, Dynamics of Hierarchical System, Springer, 1986; and Denise Pumain (ed.), Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences, Springer, 2006. 106 For the controversy between François Jullien and Jean François Billeter over the question as to whether China is fundamentally different, see Pablo Blitstein, ‘A new debate about alterity’, December 2008 (online). See also Chan-Fai Cheung a.o. (eds.), Identity and Alterity, Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 107 The fundamental problem with Europe today is that its people have no sense of belonging and do not constitute a community of destiny/values. None of its leaders is able to instil that sense into them and to cement them into a family, into a ‘United States of Europe’ that knows where it’s heading. The ‘European Union’ is not a discordant concord. Visit www.atlasofeuropeanvalues.eu, www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu and www.worldvaluessurvey.org. Also see note 69. 108 A nation state is comparable in make-up to an individual. A human being is composed of, but irreducible to, a number of cells (studied by biochemists, geneticists and molecular biologists). Similarly, a nation state, or country, consists of, but cannot be reduced to, a number of human beings (studied in the human and social sciences). For individual personality, see Randy Larsen a.o., Personal Psychology: Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature, McGraw-Hill, 2013 (Chapter 1); and visit www.personality-project.org. ‘Individuum’ is the translation, by Boethius (480-524), of ‘atomon’. He opposed the atomon (the part/particular) to the kosmos (the whole/universal). See Jorge Gracia, Individuality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics, SUσY, 1λ88. We take the ‘essence’ and ‘identity’ of something (or somebody) to mean its (or his/her) ‘character’/’nature’ and ‘whatness’ (as distinct from ‘thatness’) respectively. See Chan-Fai Cheung, op. cit.; Peter Brooks, op. cit.; and Seth Schwartz a.o. (eds.), Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, Springer, 2011. In our view, a thing, or ‘object’ (from obiectum: what is thrown hither), is an embedded set of emergent properties. See note 20 and 54. The nature of, and relationships between, individual/personal, group/social and π ις/national identity will be the focus of our attention in another article. D.V. 109 Visit www.isss.org/lumLVB.htm and www.bcsss.org. 110 In The Net Delusion (Public Affairs, 2011), Evgeny Morozov argues that digital connectivity on its own is a ‘poor predictor of political pluralism’. See also ύillian Youngs (ed.), Digital World: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights, Routledge, 2013; Raphael Sassower, Digital Exposure: Postmodern Postcapitalism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and note 49 (NSA) and 100. 111 To get the gist of the argument put forth in this essay (in case necessary), the reader should visit http://WLCG.web.cern.ch, click on ‘Docs & Ref’, and watch the animation ‘Exploration on the Big Data όrontier’. 105 The author, who graduated in Sinology from Leyden University and in economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, is a retired civil servant (Ministry of Economic Affairs, The Hague), currently working on a book about the necessity and possibility of scientific collaboration with regard to the study of countries. He can be contacted at j[underscore]kuijper[at]online[dot]nl.