TIME: Shengren? Only Western terminologies, please!

TIME: Shengren? Only Western terminologies, please!

- Time, NYT, WSJ, Nature, and Science Magazine decline to mention the shengren.

    “If Western science doesn’t know it, than it’s effectively unknown.” – K. David Harrison

It’s worrying to see how major Asian (English language) newspapers are willing to write about Asian concepts but not a single Western newspaper is. Westerners effectively tell me to go back to China every time. Lots of activism by young scholars will be necessary to inform the Western public about things that are effectively unknown to them simply because Western media would never report about Chinese classifications like wenming, junzi, or shengren.

I recently approached Science magazine in China (!) about the shengren, even met the AAS China correspondent in Beijing, but was declined once more because the shengren is unknown to the (Western educated) editors, even those so-called ‘China experts’ living now in China, and thus not considered to be science. But if shengren isn’t science, what in China is? If today’s science is so closely tied to only Western taxonomies, then it simply isn’t credible.

Anyway, here’s a punchy version of the infamous ‘Language Imperialism’ article on my Indian blog on Sulekha. Namaste!