Volume 14, Issue 1

Today we live in a global network of knowledge–as shown recently by the worldwide interactive research on Covid-19. Nevertheless, knowledge is distributed differently around the world and is perceived and valued differently in different cultures. This also applies to different strata within societies. The fact of a global world of knowledge and its horizontally and vertically different perception, interpretation and usage raises several problems. These can be explained above all by the sociogenesis of the global knowledge world and its fundamental lines and moments of development. Even a brief look at history shows that knowledge has been and is exchanged from earliest times till nowadays. This fact in turn raises questions and problems that we want to address systematically. What is “knowledge”? Sciences? Arts and crafts? When, by whom, in what form was knowledge disseminated? What is knowledge transfer? Exchange? Is it a mere transport, a deliberate exchange, or a kind of silent appropriation of foreign knowledge? In the following, some of these questions will be dealt with systematically. The historical material as well overarching question is the exchange of knowledge in Eurasia and here specifically the transfer and exchange of knowledge between Europe and China. After a preliminary clarification of terms and questions, the transfer of knowledge between Europe and China from the earliest times up to the Yuan Dynasty will be surveyed. Subsequently, the basic concepts and questions can be discussed and sharpened for further research. An outlook on the historical phase of a deliberate transfer and finally exchange of knowledge between China and Europe since the early modern period concludes the study. The aim of this work is not primarily to describe the historical course of individual exchange processes, but to clarify questions and problems for future empirical studies regarding the research landscape.

Paradigm shift in the understanding of China is an inevitable result of intellectual and social changes. A history of the Western conception of China is a history of paradigm shift. As the driving force behind the European mainstream thought, Leibniz, Hegel and Jaspers, representatives of German philosophy, approached China with the spirit of the times, which one can still feel today. None of the three philosophers is a sinologist, but all of them brought China into their philosophical framework. The study of the paradigm shift in their understanding of China is valuable for our comprehension of the transformation of China image in the West. Obviously, these German thinkers studied China not out of the purely sinological interest, but the questions they raised when comparing Chinese thought and Western thought and their problem awareness in the face of Chinese thought still worth our attention today.

The relationship between Heidegger and Chinese Taoism has long been ambigious, and the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (GA97-102) will help us to find the answer. From the co-translations of the Tao Te Ching by Heidegger and Paul Shih-yi Hsiao in the Black Notebooks , it is clear that Heidegger’s expressions and ideas were transformed by Tao Te Ching . This paper attempts to point out the documentary evidence of the relevant influence and to indicate how the language of Heidegger’s thought was completely transformed by the Daoist dialectic in a purely philosophical syntactic logic. It will further show the future intellectual value of this transformation.

This paper focuses on the visual depiction of children venturing into space in China during the late 20th century. I investigate how children are portrayed in Chinese posters and their space exploration themes by comparing them with similar art forms in the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s–1980s. Moreover, the study examines how these posters both shaped and reflected the political, social, and gender discourses of the period and served as means of reinforcing the reproductive future while interacting with Chinese historical myths. The study also considers the motivations for including chubby babies in Chinese posters, noting that this primarily resulted from Chinese moral beliefs. By historicizing the meaning-making process behind the “space babies” in Chinese posters, I argue that the depiction of children venturing into space helped in two distinct ways. First, it helped shift traditional immortality ideology into new forms of living and delimit the Chinese’s vision of the reproductive future: a desire to create better futures for our children/humanity by participating in politics. Furthermore, these visualizations apply the form of children as citizens to represent the mother country’s wishes while reflecting the corresponding Chinese national policy and fear of anthropic population expansion.