The “Chinese Century” and the dynamics of knowledge in a longue durée

Paradoxical situation

In 2012, the Australian government issued the White Paper of Australia in the Asian Century in order to adapt its economy depicted by contemporary discourses as “Asian Century,” “Pacific Century,” Indian Century,” or “Chinese Century.” The White Paper provides impressive data on Asia’s rise. It notes, for example, that

in the past 20 years, China and India have almost tripled their share of the global economy and increased their absolute economic size almost six times over. By 2025, the region as a whole will account for almost half the world’s output.

The “rise of China” or “Asia’s rise” has so far been the most read-about news story of the twenty-first century.

Under the background of this looming “Asian Century,” I moved to Hong Kong from Europe and worked in this “Asia’s World City” in 2010. A slogan of my university caught my eye right after my arrival and lingered in my mind even after my departure: “nearly 50% of our faculty come from overseas.” I could not stop thinking of the logic behind this slogan which obviously devaluates or even discriminates against local colleagues. I am also confused by its implication: if a Hong Kong researcher got a PhD from a foreign (certainly Western) institution, would she or he also be regarded as “from overseas”? However, the most surprising part in it is that such a slogan has passed unquestioned or even unnoticed for almost 3 years, and it is such an irony of the myth or the imagination of this “Asia’s World City,” where local educational apparatus still relies heavily on “imported” knowledge and personnel from the West.

Also, as a mainlander who first majored in anthropology in college and later went to France to continue to study, this kind of unbalanced academic scene is not uncommon. In fact, for many of us, the path of higher education is like a pilgrimage to the pinnacles of Western civilization. We encounter one and yet another term, and become more and more familiar with them, from “subject” to “episteme,” from structuralism to post-structuralism, from “metaphysics” to “phenomenology,” and the list goes on. We are products of and also produce this kind of “asymmetric ignorance,” to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) term.

Philosopher Anne Cheng, in her inaugural lecture “La Chine pense-t-elle?” (Can China Think?) in 2008 at the Collège de France, discussed another similar paradoxical situation. On one hand, European sinologists are overwhelmingly interested in ancient Chinese “thoughts” which are barely considered as “philosophy”; however, on the other hand, in China, we witness the surprising domination of modern Western philosophy.

To understand such a paradox, we realize the limitations of the postcolonial, which assumes the monolithic colonialism as a singular process. Obviously, China does not fit within the conventional postcolonial timeline due to its “semi-colonial” condition. Unlike India, China was never formally and fully colonized by a single country, and Chinese territory was never made into a foreign possession. One of the consequences of this different historical trajectory is that “semi-colonialism” has often been treated as noncolonialism. Tani Barlow analyzed how colonialism disappears in the works of some leading China Studies scholars such as Fairbank who treated China and the West as two “internally friable, externally discrete, boundaried, patterned concrete entities” (Barlow, 1993: 244), instead of organs and sites of a world system integrated by colonial relations.She further argues that colonialism and modernity are interwoven as essential features of the history of industrial capitalism, and she advocates the frame of colonial modernity as a way of thinking in extra-national or multinational ways about the multilevel remapping of East Asia.

Therefore, we need to step out of the textbook knowledge of postcolonial theory in order to better comprehend the complex picture. China confronts Western imperial legacies in its own way by appropriating the logic of coloniality. Chinese modernization is both prompted by the menace of Western imperialism and shaped and limited by it. Chinese scholar Wang Hui (2008) argued that changes in sovereignty and the legal basis of the modern state cannot be separated from the production of new knowledge and ideology. Chinese intellectuals, through educational and social efforts, transformed categories such as culture, morality, aesthetics, and feelings into specialized fields at modern educational and research institutions. Through this process of institutionalization, a new knowledge classification as well as educational system had been established based unavoidably on European universalism.

To better understand this process as well as to make possible changes from a broader perspective, we might need to devote some effort to two tasks: first, to write historical geographies of theories of colonialism that at once interrogate, critique, historicize, and provincialize Eurocentric framings of the world, but at the same time to take seriously the range of different and complex (theoretical) projects and practices that have emerged or are emerging in different locations and at different times. Departing from such a reflection and relating to my own research interests, I am keen to look at two moments in Chinese academia: one is related to educational movements in the beginning of the last century and the second is about some new developing trends in the current Chinese anthropological scene.

Sino-French Institute of Lyon and the Boxer Indemnity scholarship: From military mission to “civilizing” mission

After completing my PhD, I worked for an exhibition of the Sino-French Institute of Lyon (1921–1946) commissioned by the City of Lyon for the Shanghai Universal Exhibition in July 2010. It functioned from 1921 to 1946, hosting 473 male and female Chinese students. These Chinese students, chosen in China on the basis of a selective examination and already holding a certificate of secondary education from China, were taught French, history, and science in China and further prepared at Lyon to enter French universities or specialized schools. Once trained, they would then go back to their country and make up the cadres China lacked.

The objective of the institute was clear: it was not to acquire specific skills (as in the self-strengthening movement of Qing that gave favor to the naval and military areas) but rather to create an intellectual elite who would be the foundation for the modernization of Chinese society after their acquisition of Western theories, ideas, and values. Of the 473 students who were officially enrolled in the Franco-Chinese Institute, a quarter of them obtained a PhD from French universities and returned to China.

Therefore, this institute is regarded as an excellent example of “Sino-French educational cooperation.” “Cooperation” and “collaboration” are the keywords in describing this educational enterprise both in France and in China, and the emphasis always goes to the significant roles played by students from this institute on China’s modernization process. France is not only proud of this French imprint on China’s modernization but also views this historic connection as a proof of Sino-French “friendship” to promote and to build up business collaborations with China and as a selling point to attract Chinese tourists. For many Chinese intellectuals, France and the French Revolution associated with its motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” have always been inspirational models for China’s modern future, and it is often nostalgic to read the history of the institute.

The criticism that Barlow leveled against Fairbank can also apply to this “cooperation” discourse, which has the same effect of making colonialism disappear by pretending that two sides lead “collaboratively” and on equal terms. However, on the institutional level, the financial contribution of the French government was actually from the pocket of the previous Qing government. In 1901, after the “carnival of loot” during the siege of Beijing by the international expeditionary force and China’s defeat in the intervention to put down the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing court was forced to sign the Boxer Protocol with the Eight-Nation Alliance that had provided military forces (Austria–Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) plus Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands. According to the protocol, 450 million taels of silver were to be paid as indemnity over a course of 39 years. The indemnity stands out for its enormous size: under the exchange rates at the time, 450 million taels was equal to US$335m gold dollars or to GBP £67m.The total amount represents more than four times the annual revenue of the Beijing government with the annual payments representing about one-fifth of the national budget (Esherick, 1987: 311).

Of all the foreign nations who received the indemnity, America was the first to decide to renounce its share in order to invest in China’s educational projects, although Chinese officials hoped that the funds could be devoted to items high on the agenda of the government, such as mining and railways. The following lines can best illustrate the agenda of the America’s remission of the indemnity:

They will be studying American institutions, making American friends, and coming back here to favor America for China in its forge in relations. Talk about a Chinese alliance! The return of this indemnity was the most profitable work Uncle Sam ever did … They will form a force in our favor so strong that no other government or trade element of Europe can compete with it. (Hunt, 1972)

The reimbursement led to the establishment of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program in 1908, which funded the selection, preparatory training, and transportation to the United States for the beneficiaries. In 1911, a portion of the money was used to establish a preparatory school: Tsinghua College (known at first as the American Indemnity College). In 1924, the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture was created, whose function was to administer the second remission of the Boxer Indemnity. At the beginning, the focus of the foundation was placed on the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge in China. Gradually, it also expanded its activities to the promotion of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The scholarship has been regarded as “the most important scheme for educating Chinese students in America and arguably the most consequential and successful in the entire foreign-study movement of twentieth century China” (Ye, 2001: 10).

Following the action of the United States, other foreign powers also started to invest the indemnity on educational projects. The financial commitment from the French government for the Sino-French Institute of Lyon was also drawn from the indemnity paid by the Chinese. Ironic indeed, the price for imperialist powers being philanthropic to China was, in fact, paid with money stripped from China.

These educational projects formed the Chinese elite whose names are directly associated with China’s modernization process. It is no exaggeration to state that from the social sciences to the natural sciences, from medicine to engineering, almost every facet of China’s “modernization” in the twentieth century was influenced, if not led, by people who had been educated abroad, both in the United States and Europe, and most of them were beneficiaries of the program.

Historian Joseph Esherick (1987) has pointed out the correlation of “imperialism” and “modernization”: the term “imperialism” should be understood to refer to the total historical process wherein foreign countries intervene to restructure the economy, society, polity, and culture of Third World nations in ways which serve the economic and political interests of the metropolitan powers. Such restructuring should not be simply regarded as part of the process of “modernization”; moreover, discourses highlight the “contributions” of the Western countries to the modernization of China eclipses the imperialist and colonialist nature of the process.

However, for France, the beginning of the twentieth century was also the moment when a professionalizing domain of French humanist knowledge known as “the colonial sciences” was established. Within France, a regional division of imperial work was allotted, and Lyon was the city that specialized in instruction relative to Asia (Singaravélou, 2011). If we look closely at the history of the Sino-French Institute, it is not difficult to find its connection with the ideology of the French “civilizing mission” which has been the footprint of the French empire’s expansion.

My colleague Florent Villard (2011), in his study of the PhD dissertations produced by the institute, reveals the dual status of the students as “knower” and “object of knowledge” at the same time. On one hand, the students provided their French Maîtres fresh material from the East, raw material to undergo the “scrutinization” of European categories because China is not part of the “civilizations considered to have the academic culture and way of thinking appropriate to study other civilizations.” On the other hand, they formed a new historical consciousness specific to “modernity” as producer of “neutral” knowledge subjects to disciplinary standards of “modern science” in the imagined rational and autonomous space of French “academic culture.” This coincidence between a form of exclusion of “China” as “knower” and its integration into modern academic culture as “object of knowledge” confirms coloniality’s distribution of scientific work taking place in the modern world.

Thus, the Sino-French Institute served as a “civilizing school” of the French empire (or The Third Republic given the time of the institute) that allows the spread of its science and values in China. The nature of this kind of “collaboration” has been summarized by Aimé Césaire (1956) as “fraternalisme”:

for it is actually a brother, an elder brother, who, steeped in his superiority, and certain of his experience, takes your hand (a sometimes stiff hand, alas!) to guide you on the road where he knows you shall meet Reason and Progress.

In reading the archives of the institute, I became interested in the following questions: did the process of reorganizing knowledges in China to fit into Western epistemology go smoothly? What kind of negotiations or incongruities can we identify in this process? For example, students in pharmacy encountered similar problems in their study. They realized the immensity of this “reorganization” work or process, which was almost impossible to accomplish. Western pharmacopeia was studied by Chinese students because it was presumed to be superior to the “traditional” Chinese pharmacy.

Their ambition was to introduce modern, Western (medical) knowledge to replace Chinese medicine, to replace the old, obsolete medicine with modern and scientific medicine. However, such an ambition and ideal only led to the exportation of Chinese pharmacopeia knowledge. This anxiety revealed in the works of the Chinese students shows that this process toward an “ideal” is always incomplete. Although European local knowledges and histories were projected into global designs through a process of neutralization as well as a transition to “universal knowledge,” this process is not totalizing. As Wang Hui (2008) argued, the traditional worldview and its epistemology continued to exist, however, only as elements of the new knowledge education and lost their status as a worldview.

In other words, the reinterpretation and reorganization according to Western categories may have led to a partial “decoding” or “translation” of the indigenous knowledge. But it did not directly replace indigenous knowledge by the claimed “universal” European (local) knowledges. In parallel, the West has entered our history and become part of it, but also not in a totalizing manner, and this laid the foundations for decolonial possibilities.

“Overseas ethnography”: A decolonial approach?

Once we understand how European knowledges have been imposed as a global design in the context of China, we might need to move our reflection forward by looking toward decolonial critical responses to delink from the long-lasting effects of epistemic domination.

Echoing a new research trend developing in China to promote haiwai minzuzhi (overseas ethnography), my PhD looked at how French society has confronted medical knowledge and practices from China. In a way, it focuses on French society as the study object. I am very keen to observe and follow the development of the “overseas ethnography.” The term itself already implies the dilemma within the field of anthropology. Anthropology is generally defined as being the study of the other culture; therefore, overseas first implies the notion of “going out.” While looking at the history of anthropology in China, some earlier endeavors on “overseas ethnography” can actually be found in Zelin Wu’s (1992 [1927]) dissertation on examination of racial “attitudes” in America; Anzhai Li’s (1931) study of the Zuni; Francis Hsu’s (1963) comparative study of Indian, American, and Chinese cultures; as well as Xiaotong Fei’s (1985 [1948]) travelogues of America; however, predominantly, ethnographies in China have always been conducted “at home.”

Since the end of the 1990s, anthropologists in China have thought seriously about the politics of ignorance, which create structural asymmetries in transnational anthropology. This asymmetry has been clearly illustrated through the distinction of “provincial cosmopolitanism” and the “metropolitan provincialism” of anthropology proposed by (Ribeiro and Escobar, 2006). The existing inequality of knowledge production within anthropology has also been discussed under other labels, namely, hegemonic and nonhegemonic anthropologies (Ribeiro, 2006), anthropologies of the South (Krotz, 1997), and central versus peripheral anthropologies (De Oliveira, 1999).

Therefore, overseas ethnography is regarded as being a dimension that Chinese anthropologists have never before reached and is an individual element that has always been missing from Chinese anthropology. If ethnography can be regarded as the collective narration and discourse on certain groups and communities, it also implies a certain power over the object of investigation, such as the power of analysis, of definition, and of categorization. These hierarchies of knowledge are determined by and predicted in relation to the hierarchies of social and political power. The central idea of overseas ethnology lies in the concept of altering the balance of power relations by adopting Western societies as the object of study. By engaging in this new form of anthropology, China will no longer passively undergo the Western gaze, and the zhongguo huayu (Chinese discourse or discourse of China) (Xu, 2009; Xu et al., 2008) should and will find its voice.

In November 2009, a forum on “Overseas Ethnography” was organized in Guangzhou. At this forum, scholars expressed a strong interest in finding diverse opportunities to take part in the process of developing and promoting overseas ethnography. Overseas ethnology is defined as “a research and narrative method, which is situated in the Chinese context and utilizes Chinese as its academic language” (Wang, 2011). Its ethnographic description of people, things, and objects primarily exist outside of China. Anthropologists view the promotion of overseas anthropology as a way to fight for knowledge control. It is regarded as a way to construct one’s own narration of the world, and by doing so, one’s role is shifted from the “object of study” to the “studying subject” (Gao, 2010). In this way, by developing overseas ethnology, Chinese anthropologists hope to shake off the passive roles they have been used to playing as “native informants” in the academic world that is dominated by the West. Furthermore, Professor Wang Mingming came up with a China-centered worldview alternative to the Euroamerican version of anthropology. Clearly opposing ethnocentrism, Professor Wang firmly believes that the academics of any country should be based on its own historical experience and should possess its own ideological starting point. To summarize and to forecast anthropological studies in China, he developed the concept of the “three rings” (Wang, 2006). The inner ring concerns local studies of the Han Chinese society, or what Xiaotong Fei has called the soil of rural China; the second focuses on non-Han peoples in China; and the third refers to studies done by Chinese outside of China.

Along with academic discussions, progress has been made in terms of institutionally based initiatives and publication projects. In 2012, the “World Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology,” which has a specific focus on overseas ethnographic studies, was inaugurated at Minzu University in China in 2012. Some universities such as Peking University, Minzu University, Xiamen University, and Zhongshan University started PhD or postdoctoral programs in overseas ethnography, sending students and researchers to conduct fieldwork overseas. As a result of such practices, a book series including six ethnographic works conducted in the United States, Australia, Thailand, France, India, and Malaysia has been published since 2009.

The monographs were written on the basis of observations and divided by genre. They are classic descriptive ethnographies that cover various aspects, such as social organizations, daily life, politics, and the religions of the societies in which the authors lived and studied. Among the new geographical locales of Chinese anthropology, African societies have started to receive increased attention. In November 2011, the Africa Research Week workshop was held at Minzu University, co-organized by Minzu University and the Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University. Another point of view regarding overseas anthropology explores the historical potentials of Chinese knowledge. It is argued that there has been a long history and tradition of writing descriptive narratives of other cultures and people in China and a sort of prototype minzuzhi (ethnography) already existed before the “Enlightenment” brought by Western scholars. Therefore, apart from extending new geographical sites, rediscovering, rereading, and reexamining ancient minzuzhi done by early Chinese travelers and diplomats to other Asian even European regions could become another line of direction (Wang, 2011).

These efforts could be regarded as a first step to decentering the monopoly of hegemonic anthropology. Certainly, there are major concerns regarding overseas ethnology: anthropology students from the Third World, who are studying in Western universities, are rarely encouraged to carry out their studies on the West. As Ben-Ari (1999) argues that anthropological knowledge, together with the census, the map, and the museum, was part of what Anderson called the grammar of the colonial state style of thinking about its domain. Asad (1973) also reveals that this asymmetry between most Western anthropologists, who study “other cultures,” and most Third World anthropologists, who study their own cultures, comes with the inherent problem of cultural imperialism, in the sense that cultural products of all kinds, which are created in Western societies, gradually replace or radically transform those created in non-Western societies. This might explain why, beginning with the first generation, some Chinese anthropologists who studied in the West, such as Xiaotong Fei and Lin Yaohua, made Han Chinese society instead of minorities play the role of a native informant of the “Third World.”

Critical discussions about the various initiatives and discussions of overseas anthropology are also often closely associated with China’s current economic reforms and opening up, especially in regard to the updated role that China expects to play in the political, economic, and cultural arena. The initiative of overseas anthropology implies not only “a shift of studying object” but can also “redefine[s] the mental state of the research subject” and reflects the academic ambition of Chinese scholars in what has been called “China’s century” (Gao, 2010).

As Anne Cheng pointed out in her inaugural speech (Can China Think?), China rejects being regarded as an ahistorical picture and as an object of study because of its increasing influence in world politics and economy: China is becoming an “interlocutor” and an “active intervening.” Changes in the domain of political economy and politics bring about changes in the domain of knowledge and culture. Chinese scholars are also engaged in the process of self-discovery.

It might be too early to predict or to evaluate the impact of these new initiatives. However, they are meaningful in the sense that they have altered the “where” of the discipline and its knowledge production. Chinese anthropologists are not merely passive “native informants,” confined to study their own culture and providers of information for theoretical analysis. They hope to overcome Eurocentrism or Western academic hegemony by blurring the boundary between colonizer or see-er or describer and the colonized or seen or described. The objective and message is clear: to modify the colonial side of anthropology and to create a dialogue and interaction with smaller or subaltern communities. But the question of “how” remains ambiguous. George Marcus (1999) once argued that the repatriation and refocus of anthropological interests should be not just upon new (and homebound) geographical locales but also on new objects of anthropological analysis. In this sense, the greatest challenge lies in developing paradigms and interpretative frameworks, rather than simply reproducing ethnological works defined by hegemonic anthropology. If Chinese anthropologists continue to operate without dismantling the old theoretical and epistemological, essentially Eurocentric, framework, this anthropology, although it uses Chinese as the academic language, will continue to be confined within the discourses of hegemonic anthropology. Besides, the turn to China’s traditions may have the potential to correct the Eurocentrism; however, it may encounter another trap of Sinocentrism, especially as China itself becomes part of a global structure of power.

To overcome Eurocentric universality, the best solution is not to invent another “centric” worldview. Nationalist initiatives against colonialism in reality can work as much to reinforce Eurocentrism as to help bring about a more thoroughgoing liberation from the West. Heretofore, the creation of alternative centers of knowledge should not be separated from the creation of alternative knowledges and methodologies. Only with the construction of polycentric theoretical frameworks can a plurality of anthropologies be made possible and meaningful.

China represents an interesting variant on the anthropology of the South, in as much as China’s economic ascendency places it in a unique position, vis-a-vis a globalization that seemingly closes a chapter on the West. Ideally, decolonial initiatives of Chinese anthropology transform existing visions of anthropology in which hegemonic discourses about difference prevail and also build arguments and knowledge that will supersede the current hegemony of Western knowledge. However, this objective demands collective endeavors, as the freeing of Chinese anthropology from its intellectual colonization by the West is a process that has been paralleled in a range of other anthropologies around the world. Chinese scholars may also participate actively in the discussion of anthropology of the global South.

Moreover, it requires not only efforts from anthropologists of the peripheries but also anthropologists from the center, since “scientific monolingualism might not only deepen the existing inequalities in the access and diffusion of scientific findings, but also threaten scientific creativity and conceptual diversity itself as a basis for scientific development as such” (Hamel, 2003: 24).

Conclusion

One thing worth noticing about the Australian government’s “Asian Pacific Century” White Paper (Gillard, 2012: 273–274) is until the nineteenth century, nations in Asia made up more than half of the world economy, and the economies of Asia were larger than those of Western Europe and North America combined. The past 200 years of Western economic domination was a major historical occurrence. This historical occurrence was made possible not only by military conquest, territorial colonization, and material gains of the Western nations but also, or even more importantly, through epistemological colonization and the control of knowledge. There is the close complicity between modern knowledge and modern regimes of power. Colonial expansion was accompanied with the colonial expansion of forms of knowledge, which were founded on European epistemic and aesthetic principles and which were the constitution of the European paradigm of modernity or rationality.

The appropriation of European modernity (if not colonization) leads to the subalternation of “traditional” or “indigenous” knowledge and aesthetic standards and a hierarchization of the ways knowledge is accepted and diffused. That is why scholars (Mignolo, 2000, 2011; Quijano, 2007) argue that modernity goes hand in hand with coloniality, which is the hidden side of the former.

This “Asian Century” should not be regarded as Asian replacing twentieth-century Western forms of hegemony in a race for control. It should be understood as “the return” of Asia—“return” in the sense that we are moving toward a more balanced world which is no longer based on unilateral decisions. States such as Australia are discerning the role-playing and that to be played by Asian nations in the domain of political economy and of culture. Politicians such as the author of a provocative book Can Asians Think? (Mahbubani, 1998) have also been concerned about the flexibility and capabilities of “the Asian mind” following Asian economic success.

Indeed, economic growth in and the participation of Asian nations and other “underdeveloped” countries in world politics are changing today’s world. However, to what extent if today’s world and our common future is still conceptualized and imagined according to the foundation of knowledge that was and is still offered by the history of Western civilization, and if we still remain as consumers of universal modernity within the language frame of development and modernization, and our universities, scholars, intellectuals, and artists still believe in the superiority of the West? As Mignolo (2011) clearly illustrated in his latest book, de-Westernization (delinking from the domain of economics and politics) is only one way or one layer of delinking, a superficial one since it does question the idea of development and the economy of growth.

One of the urgent tasks is, therefore, the decolonization of knowledge, which would be a common issue globally not only in Asia and beyond the politics of the State in international relations. Decolonization of knowledge means that we should constantly examine the past with a critical angle, being aware of the subalternization of knowledge and alert to the limitations of universal claims to truth based on European or Western experience and history. We need theoretical reflections on the geopolitics of knowledge, which question and refuse the rhetoric of modernity (progress and development) and the logic of coloniality. This is the role to be played by the academy in the decolonization of knowledge: to ask how knowledge is being produced, why, when, and what for, rather than believing in the superiority of the West and in the hegemonic Western practice of scholarship. That role is also to think from the problems and the history of the problems rather than thinking from theories that have been put forward to solve problems of other local histories, situations, and subjectivities.

Moreover, new forms of knowledge are needed. Knowledge that is not dependent on the epistemology of European modernity. They will be indispensable to create new geographies, new forms of social organization, and new narratives of cultural and anthropological difference diverting from the imperial–colonial legacy. Where will these “new” forms of knowledge come from? Some scholars explore the possibility of a living and lived experience (“Sumak Kawsay” or “vivir bien” in Mignolo, 2011) as a type of resistance embodying the potential to unearth valuable knowledges outside the engine of colonial thought. This knowledge is no longer or necessarily produced in the academy but in the political society that is confronting and addressing similar issues in distinct spheres of society. Some scholars (Lee, 2013), reflecting on the future of Humanities, suggest two directions: (a) transdisciplinary, going beyond the existing disciplines and aiming at un-disciplining knowledge, and (b) revaluating “the contribution of non-Western ideas and recuperable historical practices” and pondering texts from the past which is ruptured by colonial rule and by the domination of European modernity rhetoric. Certainly, these texts and knowledge should not be treated as “bloodless abstractions” or “disembodied” (Cheng, 2009); instead, they should be captured “alive and wriggling” like the fishes of Zhuangzi in the water of Dao—a beautiful metaphor put forward by Anne Cheng.