The history of the production of India‐related knowledge in post‐1950 China

Abstract

This essay surveys the ways in which India‐related knowledge has been produced and disseminated in China since 1950 when diplomatic ties were established between the two nascent nation‐states. The examination proceeds along two differing yet intertwined dimensions: academic knowledge and popular knowledge. At the academic level, both traditional and modern Indology in China have undergone remarkable development, which is mainly charasterised by institutional extension, growing multidisciplinarity, and diversification of languages taught and research subjects. However, confined mostly within the intelligentsia, scholarly knowledge has limited impact on shaping China's public views on India. This task, instead, has been well fulfilled by popular modes of knowledge production that target a wider audience, such as translated literary works, subtitled films, and travel writings. Thanks largely to the rise of Internet and social media in China, recent years have seen gradual convergence of the two modes of production of India‐related knowledge, with junior academics embracing digital mediums to popularise rational thinking about Indian issues, while non‐academics starting to generate well‐studied contents in their creative engagement with Indian culture and society. In light of India's economic growth and China's increasing emphasis on neighbouring countries and those located along the Belt and Road, China's demand and supply for unbiased and specialised knowledge about India are anticipated to grow in the future.

Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: Global and Local Historical Reflections

“…But despite these commonalities and historical ties, the humanities and social sciences in the two countries have had very few connections (Phalkey and Lam, 2016). For many years, Chinese historiography as an academic field hardly covered modern India outside of Buddhist studies, and the situation is similar in Indian history departments, as well as the entire history education system, where China tends to be treated as a distant land (Jiang and Yan, 2018). In both countries, in contrast, throughout various stages of the twentieth century, shifting academic connections with the Western world were highly significant for academic historiography, but reception between Chinese and Indian history departments remained extremely limited.…”