Readings in New Sinology

Celebrating New Sinology in 2025

I first proposed the idea of a New Sinology in May 2005. In the series below, published as China Heritage Annual 2025, we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that idea and of the publication of China Heritage Quarterly, the precursor to China Heritage.

We are also marking three decades since The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a website that I designed with Richard Gordon and colleagues at the Long Bow Group in 1995. That site — my first foray into digital publication — accompanied the screening of our documentary film The Gate of Heavenly Peace, for which I was the main writer and senior academic adviser, at the New York Film Festival in October 1995. Other anniversaries include:

  • The invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in December 1975 — one encouraged by the avowedly anti-colonial ‘leftist’ Australian government of Gough Whitlam — which had a profound impact on my view of Australian politics;
  • The 1965 Indonesian coup and the mass killings that resulted from it — both events that were abetted by Canberra and Washington, something of which I only became more aware of following East Time;
  • Editorial and translation work from late 1985 which resulted in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, a book that was published in 1986;
  • This year, 2025, also marks a decade since I quit institutional academia.

Thus, in Celebrating New Sinology we also mark half a century of anniversaries.

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New Sinology encourages a holistic approach to the study of China. We emphasise the tradition of 文史哲 wěn shǐ zhé, one that embraces the ‘literary, historical and intellectual’. To accommodate this old formula to the realities of China’s post-1949 party-state, we could translate 文史哲 as ‘propaganda/ PR, mytho-poetic historiography and Stalino-Maoist based ideology’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
29 January 2025

First Day of the First Month of
The Yisi Year of the Snake
乙巳蛇年正月初一

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New Sinology is a Sinology that combines fluency in the practices of the ‘China Studies’ that developed during the Cold War and the academic disciplines that have flourished in academic institutions world wide. New Sinology engages equally with Official China via its bureaucracy, ideology, propaganda and culture, as well as with Other Chinas — those vibrant and often disheveled worlds of alterity, be they in the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or around the globe.

My advocacy of the study and reading of literary Chinese and attention to modern Chinese culture is not merely a way of justifying support for underfunded academic programs. As I have repeatedly argued, when things with China ‘went south’ — that is as the systemic inertia of party-state autocracy continued to cast a pall over contemporary Chinese life, as I had no doubt that it would following the events of 1989 — students and scholars would always have recourse to the vast world of literature, history and thought that made a study of China also a study of human greatness, genius and potential.

New Sinology is nothing less than a laissez-passer into the Invisible Republic of the Spirit.

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Celebrating New Sinology

China Heritage Annual 2025

 

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Yuan Ming Yuan, 1999. Photograph by Lois Conner