Abstract

At the end of the book, Gu defines Sinologism as an undeclared but tacitly administered institutionalization of the ways of observing China from the perspective of Western epistemology that refuses, or is reluctant, to view China on its own terms, and of doing scholarship on Chinese materials and producing knowledge on Chinese civilization in terms of Western methodology that tends to disregard the real conditions of China and reduce the complexity of Chinese civilization into simplistic patterns of development modelled on those of the West. While comparative philosophers can sympathize with the idea that in the humanities and to a large extent in the social sciences such bias is indeed prevalent, in my opinion it is hard to argue that scientific standards as such are biased just because they originated in the West.