China Book Review. Issue 3

Author: Zheng Zhenglai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: China Review is a major comprehensive academic book review publication that focuses on academia. It is published once a quarter, serving as a free platform for intellectuals at home and abroad to review, discuss, and critique academic works and intellectual trends. The purpose of China Review is to promote academic critique and elevate Chinese scholarship. For Chinese scholarship to develop, it must establish its own autonomy. Regarding the issue of Chinese academic autonomy, I believe that emphasizing the need to clearly distinguish the field of Chinese academic research from the economic, social, and political fields according to its operational logic can be considered the domestic dimension of academic autonomy, and thus a challenge that every nation's scholarship faces in its development process. It is well known that in the current development of Chinese scholarship, there is a very common phenomenon: scholars often uncritically apply some Western concepts or theoretical frameworks to the analysis of Chinese society in their research. Based on this, I argue that we must provide our own responses to the question of how the field of Chinese scholarship can be autonomous from the "cultural hegemony" of the Western social field in the current world structure in our knowledge practices. Perhaps our responses may not be very effective, but as long as we begin to address this issue, our efforts will signify that our awareness of Chinese academic autonomy has already been established.