*sad In case you’ve missed it. There has been a Google Translate controversy tonight. Apparently, if you used Google Translation and typed in you are sad that Hong Kong became a part of China, the […]
A white South-African Youtuber known by his moniker ‘Serpentza’ has claimed the crown of China vloggers. He has over half a million subscribers and 87 million video views. Yet, many are worrying about his anti-China […]
Ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, just confirmed that he was a pro-China man during his reign over Google from 2001 to 2011. Even after the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008, when Google finally pulled out […]
It’s getting comical. If ultra-right-wing and uber-populist Steve Bannon recommends a book on Chinese unrestricted warfare, you better listen up. Conveniently, the book is entitled ‘Unrestricted Warfare’, written by two Chinese army generals in 1999. […]
US drops its pants over China’s Huawei dispute. What do you want to prove here, America? The USA don’t like competitors very much, especially not in the 5G mobile communication technology sector. So it smears, […]
Quote: “It is foolish to believe that one’s race and civilization are superior to others!” Xi Jinping made the remarks during the opening speech at the ‘Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations,” a highly closed-off […]
Joe Biden confirms an old racist stereotype: The Chinese have no creativity, no imaginations, and are thus less competitive. Where have we heard this prejudice before from a US presidential candidate? That’s right: Carly Fiorina, […]
This is not your usual list. We all have heard what’s “cool” in Japan. There is even Shinzo Abe’s governmental initiative: “Cool Japan.” It’s sushi, sakura, sumo, anime, manga, shinkansen, cosplay and the other usual […]
This scared the kami out of Shinzo Abe’s good night sleep. US president Donald Trump threatened, in good jest, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over Japan’s declining population and low fertility rate: I can send […]
Thorsten Pattberg with French mathematician and philosopher Daniel Andler.
Thorsten Pattberg with DAAD president Margret Wintermantel during a conference on Artificial Intelligence in Tokyo. The DAAD is the world’s largest academic exchange service. It has its headquarters in Bonn, Germany.
Hello Mr. Dundas! Greetings and best wishes from China! As you know, after the exchange year at Fudan University in Shanghai, and after having barely survived it (it is always about money matters), the same […]
IT’S been a full zodiac circle. Twelve years ago in the Year of the Sheep 2003, I landed in China and I must confess that I knew nothing about the Chinese zodiac. In my country, […]
Hannah Arendt (1968) argued on the intrinsic connection between pastness and the concept of authority in the Roman world. The authority of the living was derivative, depending upon the authority of the founders who no […]
The phrase “The Yenan Way” has been used by Seldon (1971) to summarize the collectively military, political, social and economic experiments of revolutionary China during the “Yenan Period”. The “Yenan Period” refers to the revolutionary […]
Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580-1644) and Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1645) were both poets, play-writers and short-story writers during the Ming Dynasty. Their vernacular stories, for the most part, are moral tales that deal with the social […]
Yan Jidao (宴几道) [1084-1151] was an important poet of the Song dynasty (宋朝) [c. 960-1279]. A contemporary of Su Shi (苏轼) [991-1055], little is known about Yan’s life. However, as the youngest son of Yan […]
Hu Shi (胡适) [1891-1962] regarded the May Fourth Movement as a patriotic movement of the students and emphasized the significance of its cultural rather than its social and political activities. While Sun Yat-sen rated the […]
Zhu Xi (1130-1200), according to the records, spent several years on his interpretation and commentaries on the Da Xue. Although a neo-Confucianist, his philosophy was deeply influenced by Daoism and Buddhism. In his analysis of the first part […]
Near the end of the Manchu Dynasty (Late Qing, 1902-1909) a number of social novels were written, modeled more or less after the fashion of The Scholars (儒林外史, Ru Lin Wai Shi), a realistic or […]
As far as the East-West dichotomy is concerned, little is known to Western scholars about Ji Xianlin. I wonder why. He is brilliant. In his essay ‘Forward to The Selected Books of Oriental Cultures’, written […]
When Zhou Shuren, alias Lu Xun, delivered his manuscript ‘Diary of a Madman’ to the New Youth magazine in 1918 he explained it later as ‘an attempt to reform his people’s nature’. To understand Lu […]
by Chlodwig Wimpffen Who writes here is a scholar of Chinese religion, who has been following the development of the field over the years. I will advance a critique of the work of the American […]
CHINESE STUFF - ESSAYS 2003 - 2004 From the star-celebrated author of Shengren, Inside Peking University, and the East-West Dichotomy comes yet another controversial manuscript diary during his life and study at Fudan University in […]
Peppa Pig, the adorable cartoon series that originated in England, has grabbed the attention of Americans and Chinese alike. The preschool television show features a little she-piglet and her jolly family and friends. And, oh […]
When the Associate Press, the New York Times and Bloomberg all publish the same anti-China propaganda piece on the same hour of the day, we smell the pari passu. China apparently has detained two Canadians, […]
Flying to the Far side of the Moon with an unmanned aircraft carrying animals and plants will be considered the beginning of space exploration. We know it because all liberal media in the West issued […]
The SPIEGEL, Germany’s crap news, starts off 2019 with a hateful cover story: “Knife to the throat,” “America’s nightmare” and “menacing.” The propaganda war is almost unbearable. No, China is not a nightmare. No, there […]
Islam’s getting strong in Germany, too strong? Horst Seehofer, German Minister of Interior, called on Muslims to cut ties with their home countries and exclusively collaborate with the German state: “Muslims in Germany should decouple […]
DOLCE AND GABBANA ROASTED OVER RACIST TV AD Unbelievable Western racist and disrespecting ad-campaigns are useful to grab attention in Asia. Therefore, large business like Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian fashion label, thought it wonderful […]
He voyaged into life from Urumqi and into the hearts of the Chinese civilization. He enchanted billions with his looks and voice and charisma, but now Li Yong is no more. He left us for […]
NEW BOOK: The Problem of Sinology - Hanxue Wenti Abstract: Chinese culture in the past had little soft power. That’s because powerful Western interest groups –colonialists– translated China into the West. When Dr. Pattberg hellshelled […]
Insecure China censors aimlessly Record block in China: After only 24 hrs on LinkedIn, the US business network, this author’s account has been blocked in China. No specific reasons were given, but LinkedIn kindly sends […]
PKU is the mother lode of Chinese education, and Confucianism (rujia) wants to cultivate the ‘junzi’ - the ideal scholar. At the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Pattberg explains how an old tradition is on […]
This really is the tragedy of all defeated people. Lu Xun, China’s greatest novelist, exposed the delusions of his countrymen in his essays ‘Ah Q’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’. These stories are a lesson […]
Science is inherently non-ethical –there is neither good nor bad, or so they say. Nature certainly has no morality. Laws are human fabrications; let’s not pretend they are God-given. All ethical prescriptions are but pretensions, […]
To be safe, if any group, cooperation, or self-proclaimed humanist approaches us with ‘universal laws’, bad things are about to happen to people and you may want to run for your life. There has yet […]
In fact, ‘human rights’ were invented by accident in Europe (and nowhere else in the world); they are man-made and culture-based: That’s why it’s so hard to force other civilizations to comply. Any dominant civilization […]
Hedonism, promiscuity, obscenity, egoism, and all money crimes are no longer immoral in America; on the contrary, the excesses of humanity are celebrated and hero-worshiped. Stars are expected to live in a style 99% of […]
In world history, the most ruthless, rapacious, fearless and corrupt personalities were also the most successful –conquerors, emperors, dictators, and spiritual leaders, and, recently, the CEOs and bankers. Weak people suck the tittynope. The greatest […]
The ‘law’, although based on some archaic religious notions, clearly tries to distance itself from ethics in this century, as most lawyers would confirm. The accused, too, have relinquished the idea of fixed ethics; instead […]
Certain forms of moral corruption that were once considered despicably evil are now acceptable behavior already; we don’t even think about them as moral failings at all. Homosexuality was long thought of as the breakdown […]
Corruption should be liberalized in all its forms, and never be morally condemned. Let’s punish people for breaking the law, not for being bad people. If we had total transparency of society, most would be […]
As to more complex human interactions, no matter what the hapless man on the street considers ‘morally good’, it is impossible to him to even fathom the greater universe of relations in which even his […]
Every religion on this planet dichotomizes human beings into two (spiritual) classes –the nobles and the rest- with clearly different ethical outlooks. In a nutshell, the nobles see good and evil as the two sides […]
Since most human beings are in no position to ever reach their highest potential and feel what it is like to have a blast at life, to enjoy patriarchy, nepotism, and the benefits of the […]
Ethics do come in hierarchies. In other words, the starving will steal, the insecure will cheat, and the rich will bribe, and if they don’t, they risk penalties such as existential demise, few or no […]
As to politicians: they must bend the ‘truth’; this is not a secret but the mendacity of their profession, which is not as irresponsible as it may sound because it reveals the complexity of political life that […]
As to the much celebrated formula ‘trust’, well, if a businessman overtly comes on with ‘trust’ he is about to bribe you, because that’s the only way to establish “trust” in business. In fact, it […]
So why does the public believe that there is one ‘universal ethics’ for everyone? Clearly, all attempts in history failed utterly: The ‘Ten Commandments’ of the Bible is one of the most devious listicles ever conceived; it’s bordering on […]
The End of Translation is just this: Stop omitting, replacing, erasing foreign key terminologies. Instead, adopt those terminologies as loanwords into your own syllabus. Brands, trademarks, and names like Google, Microsoft, or McDonald’s enjoy greater […]
A genius is not the person but a homunculus, a companion, an angel that accompanies that person, sitting on our shoulders. It loves youth. It may come and go, and some it never visits. A genius […]
What is Language Imperialism? That is easy. Imperialism, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is when a strong nation extends its power or influence over a weaker nation. Linguistic Imperialism, therefore, is extending one’s language over […]
About the future of Global Language: It is very simple. You add all the world’s vocabularies together to form One -the Future Global Language. You may take English, the international language, as the base onto […]
Press soldiers are a dirty archetype of “journalists” like paparazzi or propagandists. As their name suggests, however, press soldiers are militant and dangerous. Their task is to subvert and destabilize the target person, group, or […]
If focused enough, the study of ethics soon reveals itself as the futile attempt to rationalize things we didn’t do (or couldn’t do). So we think others shouldn’t do them either. For a complete list […]
Only the weak, the ones that do little to nothing with their lives, have tinsel ethics that they put on others. That’s why corruption is mostly exposed by resentful, hurt, and ultimately less successful people […]
You MUST give back, they say. But most people don’t have anything, so they can’t give back. As a rich spiritual leader, however, you always have a lot to give, and I don’t mean necessarily […]
There is no planning for followers. Followers will follow. It’s the followers that care about the spiritual leader, and that is that. In fact, since the leader and his movement are constantly creating new connections […]
People have various talents, strengths and weaknesses; they also come from different countries, live in different times under different circumstances. Still, successful spiritual leaders have much in common: they have powerful personalities who experience similar […]
Don’t take your money into the grave. That is stupid. Think about Alfred Nobel and donate your wealth to a public trust or foundation. In the end, it all boils down to this: People must […]
You must carefully plan your legacy. If you have done everything right so far, your accomplishments may have bought you, say, hundred years, maybe two hundred years of fame. But to become truly immortal, you must […]
You must engage in diplomacy. Like head of states do. Search dialogue. I assure you, it’s been road tested. You are now in a different ball game than most of humankind. Meeting with ordinary people gives […]
You must become an exemplar person. If you can, become a hero. Save little children from starving in Africa, help the victims of natural catastrophes in Japan or Indonesia. And let the public know that you […]
Have your employees regularly conduct brain-storming sessions. Their ideas are obviously yours. You have the resources to publish them, they don’t. Next you build a library with all your favorite collections, you publish your memories, […]
You must become a founder. Few leaders reach this step, but if they do, they all did it the same way. You now establish an institute, a method, a research center, a foundation, a non-government organization, […]
Now, let me explain what I mean by “self-publishing” to avoid a common misconception. Self-publishing is more common than you think, although it is not always labeled as such. Self-publishing means that you are in […]
You need your own channels. This is about constant public relation management. At first, you publish your ideas in magazines, journals, newspapers. In modern times, social networks, blogs, websites, videos, or mini-productions firms all help to […]
A billion reasons. Here’s the best one: Challenge yourself with the new and difficult language, with Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism… a non-Western worldview… that will one day enrich you, personally, more than if you stayed home […]
How to get into a PhD program at an elite university? The answer: Relationships! You court your prospective supervisor, you touch first base… Always be proactive! This way, they will remember you, and when the […]
How to get into a PhD program? That’s easy! You just apply. But listen, there are TWO kinds of PhD applicants: One wants a PhD degree. This kind has no idea what to research and […]
Suckers, doormats, and yes-sayers live side by side fat money cats, pedophiles and other predators on Hollywood sets producing crap movie franchises that everybody is going to watch eventually because… you cannot leave this planet, […]
Connecting with the people. That’s precisely why Donald Trump won the election against crooked Hillary Clinton and the Washington swamp, why he deserves the presidency in these times like no other, and why the establishment […]
America’s all-favorite Youtubers profit off and poke fun at dead Japanese dangling from trees-nothing is sacred What better thing to do on the turn of the New Year than travelling to Japan’s infamous Aokigahara (青木ヶ原) […]
Censorship is a brutal form of psychological terror… torture.. It leaves mental scars. “The Devil don’t want you to criticize him, to drag him into the light. Darkness hates the light. He does not want […]
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