This ditty by Professor Pattberg is thought-provoking but a bit obscure, due to the authors failure to elaborate with further examples. Moreover, instead of being positive (i.e. taking the bull by the horns) and showing where the West would benefit from acquiring Chinese vocabulary, he simply derides Western Imperialism. As Imperialism is a straw-horse rather than the key point of his argument, Pattberg would do well to revise the writing below a bit.
Nonetheless, it is always useful to absorb criticism. The hope for me is that a more educational piece can be derived from Pattberg’s intended theme.–KAS
Language Imperialism — “democracy” in China?
By Thorsten Pattberg
How Western translations of Chinese key concepts misrepresent history and culture.
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If you are an American or European citizen, chances are you’ve never heard about shengren, minzhu and wenming. If one day you promote them, you might even be accused of culture treason.
That’s because these are Chinese concepts. They are often conveniently translated as “philosophers”, “democracy” and “civilization”. In fact, they are none of those. They are something else. Something the West lacks in turn.
But that is irritating for most Westerners, so in the past foreign concepts were quickly removed from the books and records and, if possible, from the history of the world, which is a world dominated by the West. As the philosopher Hegel once remarked, the East plays no part in the formation of the history of thought.
But let us step back a bit. Remember what school told us about the humanities? They are not the sciences! If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world’s languages would add up, not overlap. Does that surprise you?
I estimate that there are over 35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into the English language. Words like yin andyang, kung-fu and fengshui. Add to this another 35,000 Sanskrit terminology, mainly from India and Buddhism. Words like buddha, bodhisattva andguru.
In a recent lecture at Peking University, the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun explained that wenming describes a high level of ethics and gentleness of a people, while the English word “civilization” derives from a city people’s mastery over materials and technology.
The correct Chinese translation of civilization should be chengshijishu-zhuyi. Wenming is better, but untranslatable. It has been around for some thousand years, too, while Europe’s notion of “civilization” is a late 18th century “invention”.
Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. Then they realize that the names are not correct.
In many countries, adopting Chinese terminology is a taboo. Even the most noble-minded thinkers, such as the Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, warned the Germans that “we must not become Chinese […], otherwise we’d adhere to a fetish.”
Next is “democracy”, a concept of Greek origin. The Hellenic “civilization” failed a long time ago, of course. It’s gone, while China’s wenming is still here, uninterruptedly so, after 5,000 years. “Democracy” originally had little to do with letting the mob vote, lesser even so for the mob to rule the country; on the contrary, it meant that various, powerful interest groups should fight over the resources, each by mobilizing their supporters of influential city dwellers.
While in China we still see a family-value based social order, in the West we find an interest-group based social order. When in your family you do not apply strict laws or make contracts; instead you induce a moral code. When among strangers who fight against other interest groups, you simply cannot trust them like your own family, so you need laws.
Up to the 20th century, the Europeans believed China was not a proper “civilization”, because it had no police force, while China accused Europe of being without “wenming” because it lacked filial piety, tolerance, human gentleness, and so on.
Finally, the shengren is the ideal personality and highest member in that family-based Chinese value tradition, a sage that has the highest moral standards, called de, who applies the principles of ren, li, yi, zhi and xin (and 10 more), and connects between all the people as if they were, metaphorically speaking, his family.
The modern Chinese word for philosopher, zhexuejia, is nowhere to be found in any of the Chinese classics. In fact, zhexuejia came to China viaJapan, where it is pronounced tetsugaku, after Nishi Amane first coined the word in 1874. Yet, the Western public is constantly told, through our highly subsidized China scholarship, that Confucius is a “philosopher” and that Confucian thought is “philosophy”.
As Slavoj Zizek once said: “The true victory (the true ‘negation of the negation’) occurs when the enemy talks your language.” The West would be irrational to adopt Asian concepts. That would be like holding the candle to China. Moreover, the Middle Kingdom is notorious for assimilating all invading cultures in the past. Why queuing?
The “barbarians” always had superior weapons and technology, but, as Gu Hongming in 1920 noted, lacked true human intelligence. How’s that? Well, it’s a bit like Star Trek wisdom: if prehistoric humanity evolved from the beasts, then the most advanced human societies would be the least physically aggressive ones, no?
In 1697, the German philosopher Leibniz famously argued that the Chinese were far more advanced in the humanities than “we are”. He never specified, but, I think, it is all revealed when he urged all Germans that they must not use foreign words, but use their own language instead (German is a compound language, so it’s an infinite source), in order to build and enlarge the German-speaking world.
And so they did. And so the Germans rose to the top. As expected, the Germans, the descendants of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, called Confucius a “Heiliger” (a saint or holy man). Now, that’s convenient. But is it correct scholarship?
Since the European languages have their own histories and traditions, they cannot sufficiently render Chinese concepts. The solution, I think, would be to not translate the most important foreign concepts at all, but adopt them.
So that next time in international relations we could discuss how we’re going to improve minzhu in Europe, and how to help America’s transition into a descent wenming. Maybe the West just lacks shengren after all.
Submitters Bio:
Dr. Thorsten Pattberg, East-West, is a linguist (PhD, Peking University) and the author of ‘The East-West dichotomy’, ‘Shengren’, and ‘Inside Peking University’. He is also an alumnus of Harvard University, The University of Edinburgh, and The University of Tokyo.
Eslkevin's Blog 
Gaisatsu and Japanese words that would be helpful
For example, Gaiatsu are Shoganai are Japanese words that would be helpful to understand whether you are from the West or the East.
What Dr. Pattberg should do here is to take time and explain why thinkers and societies need to grasp certain terms. Circularity of untranslatable pieces are not useful in many cases. I have written adnauseum about Shoganai and some other concepts that Japanese claim are untranslatable but existed in Taiwan and other cultures in Asia and Europe. It would be helpful if the Taiwanese and Chinese would recognize the overlapping similar concepts and identify them with common language in modern vernacular and social science research (or in the humanities).
Now, I will tell you a bit about how “gaiatsu” is sometimes a better word to use than Western Imperialism. ” It is pressure exerted on one country by another. Specifically in reference to Japan, it is the reason for the rise of Japanese militarism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Japanese wanted to avoid pressure from the west, and so became militaristic.” claims one translator.
According to large dictionaries, gaiatsu is now used in English–and has certainly been used by historians, social scientists, and those in the humanities to describe a Japanese concept in English by borrowing the terms.
i.e. Noun
gaiatsu (uncountable)
Foreign pressure; pressure applied by one country onto another.
Why is the term borrowed from Japanese?
Well, unlike imperialism, which still harbors mainly negative connotations in the West, “gaiatsu” in Japanese is able to conjure up positive manipulation of foreign pressure to gain politically, socially, economically in one’s home community by “pointing the finger at western pressures or globalization and “taking the bull by the horns” and steering change at home before the full international pressure changes the system in a way that cannot be controlled by those who normally maintain local power.
For example, Korean and Japanese politicians and economic leaders and planners have allowed foreign pressure to change the countries rice and farming laws, supposedly for the greater good of benefiting the local industrial economies, etc. They could have fought the gaiatsu but chose instead to use it to force other changes in the status quo.
In short, gaiatsu can be used to threaten, cajole or change a status quo by those who know how to do it. It is a similar move as used in martial arts, where the pressure of the attacker is used against him or used to change or rearrange the position of the one being attacked.
by Kevin Anthony Stoda