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.'
BEIJING – About 2,565 years ago a wise and aristocratic Kong Qiu came to the world, 551 years before a certain Jesus of Nazareth, nutcase and son of a penniless […]
THE Gretchenfrage is this: Should honest, intelligent parents from a not so-privileged background send their children to the Ivy League when they know (and have been warned by the likes […]
…that said, what’s the big deal of having no soul when it got you into Harvard or Yale? You can’t have petty moral issues in high society; elites simply see […]
BEIJING – Rhodes Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, Humboldt Scholars… those are the BIG brand names on the scholarship firmament. Soon, the academic world will –hopefully- be talking about a new superlative: […]
“If something is omitted, you have no way of knowing it has been omitted.” –Howard Zinn More search engines for the world, please BEIJING – Baidu (百度), the Chinese search […]
Chen Guangbiao – The Mysterious Entrepreneur Who Vowed to Buy The New York Times and to Dine America’s Homeless BEIJING/NEW YORK – The Chinese millionaire in green has struck again […]
Xue Yifan And Her Cool Graduation ‘Group-Photo’ Inspire A Nation BEIJING – In China’s over-populated and ultra-competitive education system –the largest in the world with 200 million students in elementary […]
“All cultures have their legitimacy and should be respected. But just because they are all legitimate, this does not mean they all achieve the same degree of excellence.” –GU Zhengkun […]
Following up on the post Zero Translation – If you will allow; my thoughts on the recent over-the-top Bloomberg’s China’s War on English – by Dexter Roberts: “Chinese authorities are waging a war […]
Beida vs Tsinghua – China’s world class universities and global players BEIJING– Beida and Tsinghua are the two most prominent universities in China, a country of 1.35 billion people. (There […]
Young trailblazers all over China mix English words and Chinese characters to modernize China’s 3300 years old writing system. Conservatives want to stop this movement. No need, says Dragons and […]
LOVERS of the Big Think will rejoice at hearing about the world’s largest migration of brain: BEIJING – Thousands of philosophers are expected to descend upon China’s capital in 2018 in […]
TAIPEI/TOKYO – What is this East-Asian obsession with blades and stabbings that has perverted these otherwise harmonious quarters of Confucian legacy? The knife seems to be the preferred device of […]
Into the Bestiary Business Should Chinese creatures be incorporated into Anglo-Saxon parlance, and if so, where to draw the line in number and color? This goes beyond linguistic pedantry and […]
YOU wish they’d teach you this at school -they won’t necessarily. The United States, according to many foreign policy analysts, including critical voices such as famed Noam Chomsky (aka: “The […]
Interesting piece in The Economist today about Academic prestige – Why climb the greasy pole? I can only speak about the humanities, not the sciences. So, to start with: “better research” has nothing […]
TOKYO – One of the most controversial of all world rankings is the annual ‘World University Rankings of the Times Higher Education’ –some say a rather biased and telling indictment of […]
Review of Leta Hong Fincher’s Leftover Women – The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, Zed Books, April 10, 2014 – 5/5 stars BEIJING – I remember I read a The […]
Selection and adaptation of invalid methods to prove Chinese theorems BEIJING – Many Western readers will find China’s hard-core communist propaganda alien and mind-bogging. The tasty way someone (from former […]
China’s unhealthy obsession with foreign education and degrees is a turn-off for many foreigners BEIJING – The marketable and exploitable obsession of the Chinese for everything “Western” is legendary and […]
A LOT of people ask me about RUXUE –Confucianism: “Is it an organized religion?” “Does it exist in Europe/the US?” “Are there Western Confucianists?” “How do I become a disciple?” [and […]
“We, The US And Our Allies…” –Wait A Minute, What Allies? NEWS just spread through the international media that China may be overtaking the United States on GDP terms by […]
TOKYO – Francis Fukuyama’s ambitious The End of History wasn’t the only historical blunder of epic proportions when it came to foretelling the future. Here’s a 1910 report drafted by Theodor von […]
Wikipedia has lost thousands of editors due to a culture of deletionism, anti-expertism, bloated bureaucracy, horrible abuses of power, and its slightly condescending founder (They all work for free because […]
“Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one’s […]
IN contemporary Western ‘China studies’ 99% of its scholars are what I call language imperialists. They purposely replace important Chinese key terminologies with European words. It is plainly their only […]
THERE have been a lot of rumors lately about the possibility of a revival of Confucianism. Powerful scholars, not without personal agendas, call for a Confucian constitution. Some people have […]
THE European missions to Asia consisted of very few highly specialized individuals trained in theology and the sciences. Their destination countries – India, Japan, China, and Indochina – were the […]
“And so is the type of great men that shaped European history a very particular figure: half warrior, half statesman…” –Richard Wilhelm, 1922. MOST scholars believe themselves to be a […]
CHINA has always been a ‘living sage culture’. A ‘culture without sages’, on the other hand, was a culture that lacked a profound respect for relationships – the relationships among […]