China needs — no, it deserves — its own Harvard (and Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, and so on)

"Chairs in Chinese Studies — both in China and the West — have become extremely valuable assets, as political as the highest political offices, and have become monopolized by patriarchs and their acolytes."

Elite universities like Harvard in the United States are a growing lure for well-heeled Chinese students. The attraction to the Ivy League is enhanced by high-profile donations from mainland businesspeople and a two-way traffic in visiting lectures by professors. The downside of sending top young scholars to the West, writes Thorsten Pattberg, is that China’s own elite universities lose out on some of the best talent. [READ AT GLOBAL ASIA (Online-Registration required)]

裴德思:包子烤鸭不需要翻译

    裴德思，德国人，北京大学高等人文研究院研究人员，在大学时代就开始学习汉语以及中国文化，“中华思想文化术语传播工程”得以启动，和他穷究其里研究中华传统文化分不开。2013年他的相关研究文章《怎么翻译中华文明的核心词》引起中国有关方面的关注，并成为该工程得以启动的一个诱因。

    在接受本报记者专访时，裴德思回忆起写这篇文章的前前后后。“当我深入理解汉语之后，发现许多词汇的概念与我在德语或英语里所理解的有些出入和不同，比如‘圣人’这个概念的定义就十分不同。”他因此萌发更加深入研究的念头，他发现，像Yin-Yang（阴阳）和Kungfu(功夫)这样的词汇，已经被西方语言吸收并被他们的人民所接受。但这样的例子毕竟是少数，“我个人认为，任何一个中国名牌，像Baidu（百度），Weibo（微博）等都不用翻译。传统食品，类似Baozi（包子）、Jiaozi（饺子）、Kaoya（烤鸭）等也不需要翻译。”裴德思说，中国文化博大精深，应该以最贴近汉语意思的表述方式让世界理解，这样才能让中国文化在世界发扬光大。“现在时机到了，中国应当把‘文化财产权利’看得与领土、海洋权利一样重要，向全世界普及一些重要的中国文化词汇。

What is Language Imperialism? (Video)

Imperialism, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, is "the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence" over another nation. Consequently, linguistic imperialism is the extension or imposition of one’s own language over another’s. Martin Luther's Bible translation is a good example, Georg Hegel's German Die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1830) is another; the former made the Bible German, the latter made world history German. Language imperialism is more surgical than that: It is the translation of foreign key terminologies into familiar vocabulary of one’s own language tradition in order to claim deutungshoheit, to diminish another culture’s originality, or to pretend to have full comprehension of a foreign topic by simply switching into one’s own lingua. So even if a nation is not strong enough to impose its own language over another’s, like Germany could never conquer the Chinese people, it could always try to steal important cultural property by giving it German names. [WATCH VIDEO ON YOUTUBE]

I saw the Emperor - this world-soul - riding out of the city on reconnaissance (Hegel)

Breaking down systematic language imperialism in Western scholarship as well as Western key media such as The New York Times, The Economist, etc.

Read the recent New York Times article "A Confucian Constitution for China" by "Confucian philosopher" Daniel A Bell. It's about China but it doesn't include a single piece of Chinese terminology. As if the New York Times ordered Professor Bell to keep his China text clean of Chinese, so to speak.

The Germans wouldn't doubt for a moment the fact that the German language was essential to understanding their own culture. Yet, for foreign cultures it's exactly the opposite: as far as the German media and academia are concerned, foreign cultures precisely cannot be understood unless translated into familiar German. 

As a result, German scholars, submerged in clean German culture, are destined to misappropriate China's history, etymologies, experiences, ideas and originality and, most importantly, they will intuitively omit the "correct Chinese names" of decisively non-German concepts and hide them from the German public. 

Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. 

There are now "Chinese religions", "Chinese saints", "Chinese gods", and "Chinese universities", and so on. Yet, you will find that what these scholars "translated" from - presumably the words jiao, shengren, shen, and daxue - do not bear any historical or meaningful resemblances to those Western terminologies.

Germany is case in point, where the ruling class controls the general public to live in an artificial German world and demand all immigrants to express "knowledge" solely in the form of German language. Knowledge in Germany exists only if it's known in German. 

The Shengren - How it started at Peking University

"The Shengren is the single most important concept in the Chinese tradition..."

[GO TO VIDEO]

Dead in Translation: The Chinese Qingming Festival and its linguistic exodus

NEW VIDEO: Many Chinese ideas are deceased in world history yet behave in China as if alive： they are truly undead concepts.

The West’s disregard for foreign socio-cultural originality has become a real problem for the rest of the world. Western media and academia have the reputation for either omitting Chinese concepts or translating them into Western biblical and philosophical terminologies. This creates a perfect illusion: the West is all there is to know.

In the global discourse, true Chinese names and concepts gradually became useless currency. China has no longer any stake in the history of thought. Its unique concepts and ideas, after having been translated into convenient Western taxonomies, are no longer relevant.