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 every 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 criticism 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 Chinese academic field from the economic, social, and political fields according to its operational logic can be considered the domestic dimension of academic autonomy. Thus, it is also 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 exists a very common phenomenon: researchers often uncritically apply some Western concepts or theoretical frameworks to the analysis of Chinese society without critical examination. Based on this, I argue that we must provide our own response to the question of how the Chinese academic field can be autonomous from the cultural hegemony of the Western social field in the current world structure in our knowledge practices. Perhaps our response may not be very effective, but as long as we begin to respond to this question, our efforts can signify that our awareness of Chinese academic autonomy has already been established.