China as method

This is one of Mizoguchi Yūzō’s famous polemical essays in which he rethinks the problems of Japanese sinology. He contends that China has been essential to constructing Japanese identity and consequently Japanese sinologists developed what he calls a “sinology without China.” That is Japanese sinologists projected a subjective image of China and such visions of China said more about Japan than they did about China. In contrast to this, Mizoguchi attempts to outline a sinology that takes China as method and uncovers the internal dynamics of Chinese history. Towards the end of the essay, he also discusses the ideological implications of such a shift in focus. In short, previous sinologists often took something like Western modernity as a method and forced China into this framework. Against this, Mizoguchi underscores the specific logics of Chinese history and hopes then to construct a new universality grounded in specific spatio-temporal logics around the world.