Two one-way roads: Some observations of China-West cultural exchange

Abstract

In the last century there has been a huge number of Western intellectuals visiting China and their Chinese counterparts visiting the West, the Westerners coming here to teach whereas the Chinese going there to learn. The asymmetry in cultural exchange has been caused by their conception of each other’s scholarship: the Western learning has been regarded as universal whereas the Chinese specific. This imbalance has resulted in a strange situation: the Chinese specialists of the West are the cream of the Chinese intelligentsia while the Western sinologists on the margin of the Western academia, and, therefore, the Chinese understanding of the West has to be as accurate as possible while the few cases of Western receptions Chinese influence have all been based on gross misinterpretations.