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Thorsten J. Pattberg
Research Fellow, Peking University
Dr. Thorsten J. Pattberg (裴德思 Pei Desi) is a German writer, linguist, and cultural critic.
rnHe attended Edinburgh University, Fudan University, Tokyo University, and Harvard University, and earned his doctorate degree from The Institute of World Literature at Peking University. He studied under the guiding stars of Ji Xianlin, Gu Zhengkun, and Tu Weiming, whom he considers his spiritual masters.
Dr. Pattberg is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo; and a former Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University. He is the author of four monographs 'The East-West dichotomy,' 'Shengren,' 'Holy Confucius,' and 'Inside Peking University,' and some of his representative articles are 'Language hegemony – It’s shengren, stupid!,' 'Long into the West’s dragon business,' 'China: Lost in Translation,' and 'The end of translation.'
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In the Chinese Zodiac, the horse symbolized high expectations, performance, and stubbornness. What better occasion than this to talk about the heavy work load that’s awaiting China’s leaders, economists, and […]
The Cyclops Polyphemus as a Metaphor for Western Civilization and its Linear Way of Reasoning “The Greeks only understand theories, but the Chinese are the people who own the technologies.” […]
Red-hot news Jan 26 – Beijing has sent another activist, Xu Zhiyong, to prison. He fought against corruption and social injustice. Washington and Brussels protested vehemently on Sunday, and on […]
A German top official with the Goethe-Institute in Shanghai once remarked that “marrying a Chinese woman will make you rich.” This statement was soon retracted, and the man repatriated, but […]
“Underdeveloped,” “immature,” “effeminate” – such adjectives from the life-sciences were often used to describe East-Asian cultures in the 20th century. By erroneously seeing ‘culture’ as an organic, living entity -a common metaphor […]
“Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed.” –Sam Polk BREAK it down: Obscenely rich people from 2013 meet in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss […]
During the age of colonialism, Western powers conquered the people of Asia and objectified their women. This is well documented in literature, film, and scholarship: Here the dominant, masculine West; […]
This topic deserves more attention. Below you will find an [abridged] transcript of a fascinating talk given on Chinese identity by Frank Ching, an American writer and journalist. It touches […]
THAT is a common joke among mainland Chinese who outnumber the Japanese roughly ten to one. It also mocks Japan’s geographical tininess. (It’s not a small country, bigger than Germany […]
When the Western powers colonized Asia, naturally they enforced their own views on sex, gender, and relationships onto the subjugated civilizations. This is from a chapter on ‘Gender’ taken from […]
Horrible, horrible social injustices “I feel like a walking corpse.” BEIJING – Left picture: Gong Qifeng is traumatized and suffers from schizophrenia ever since the forced abortion of her second boy […]
“Hence the competition […] was sharp between book and book, brain and brain, constituting […] almost a gladiatorial spectacle for the entertainment of the sophisticated.” –A. R. Hall, Philosophers at […]
“We practically know the West like the palm of our hand, but the West’s vision of the East is still a murky confusion. It is thus self-evident who would hold […]
USScience Magazine excludes Chinese terminologies from its publications If the shengren isn’t science, what in China is? The shengren is the single most important concept in the Chinese tradition. Yet, […]
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” –Thomas Carlyle, 1840 1. Be that […]
BEIJING – Chinese universities are plagued with corruption. Last November, the clique around Cai Rongsheng at Renmin University got busted. The 48-years old ‘Chief of the Student Admissions Office’ tried […]
‘Tiger Mom’ spurns out another bestseller – a bit racist but true? NEW HAVEN – Social media is currently hyping a soon-to-be published book by America’s notorious ‘Tiger Mom’, Amy […]
“Education isn’t about knowledge, it’s about privilege.Would we know about Hannah Arendt had she not studied under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers? Let me be more specific, education is about the privilege […]