ABSTRACT
Besides the developmental comparative paradigm, Westernization of the Chinese language since the early twentieth century also contributes to the material happening of epistemicide in structuring the knowledge system and educational reform in modern China. This chapter moves a step further to scrutinize the principles and rationales of signification and representation that reduce modern languages, both English and Chinese, into an enclosed linguistic system. With such representational system, meaning is generated mainly through analyzing the synchronic grammatical arrangements within statements. To constrain such a representation rationale, this chapter brings in an ontological language–discourse perspective for educational studies in China and beyond. This perspective calls for a reconceptualization as well as demystification of the Chinese language, no longer with some Western notions and frameworks, but by historicizing it back to its own historical strata. In so doing, it constructs a diachronic hermeneutics to understand the tones and contextures that subsist in the Chinese individual characters and words. This chapter prepares a way for further mapping out the conditions of possibility of China’s entire knowledge system and educational thinking as expressed in Yijing in the next chapter.
