科研成果详情

This paper discusses the idea of the French sinologist, Francois Jullien, who perceives the radical difference of China to be of great importance to European philosophy. Jullien sees China as the instrumental heterotopia of Indo-European languages, Roman-Christian historical influences, and a long-standing original textual tradition that makes it a viable historical subject for alternative conception. The intellectual detour to China provides a unique access to European philosophy. Jullien’s insight on the alterity of China should be carefully considered in the sociological context as well, which sociologists are struggling hard to reinvent the discipline with various decolonising, dehegemonising, and provincialising attempts. These efforts aim at shaking off previous epistemic and ethnocentric problems, pertaining to the sociology discipline. The positive endeavour, this paper argues, for sociologists working on China, should be to recognise and work towards an alternative social ontology and epistemology of China. Sociologists should refrain from forcing Chinese formation of reality arbitrarily into Western categories and concepts, like many trivial or even pseudo attempts to extend or modify Western theories with a misplaced sociohistorical context of China. If China difference is fully recognised, undistorted sociological understanding of Western societies and China would be possible.