Book review Article Swipe

Walk into most bookshops in Australia today and one will be treated to an array of books, prominently placed, that claim to offer up some sort of insight about China.This is perhaps unsurprising given Australia's recent and (at the time of writing) rapidly deteriorating relationship with its largest trading partner.Nightly news carry reports of yet another embargo on some iconic Australian productbarley, wine, wool, beef, coalas if the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) were working up the list of Australia's exports.Those in management positions in the education industryand in higher education especiallywho have presumed upon the steady (cash) flow of international students from the PRC must be hoping that Beijing does not run the red pen across it.In this geopolitical climate, many "China experts" have emerged to help the anxious onlooker decode the puzzle of "what the Chinese are really thinking"partaking in a genre with a long history of scrutinising the "inscrutable oriental" for the occidentally positioned reader.Fortunately, despite its paperback title being a clear publisher's ploy to tap into that market, Roel Sterckx's Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding does not sit in that ignoble lineage (its first edition was published with the far less sexy title Ways of Heaven: An Introduction to Chinese Thought [Sterckx, 2019]).What the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University has delivered is instead a carefully arranged and argued book that situates the emergence of classical strands of Chinese thought in their socio-political context: namely, the breakdown of the Zhou dynasty (c.1045-256 BCE) and the slide into what is known as the Warring States period ."China's masters of philosophy were a product of this age", Sterckx points out, and the "chaos around them must have felt like the end of the world" (p.16).It is amidst this tumult that the key problematic of Chinese thought emerges: "how does one cultivate and educate people and organise a state to gain advantage over its rivals?"(p.19).In this context, as Sterckx points out early on and reminds readers throughout, the questions posed by Chinese thinkers differ significantly from those posed by Western European philosophers (with the exception of pragmatists, perhaps)the former concerned with "how" questions that are "predominantly human-centred and practice-oriented" (p.xi), by contrast to the more speculative "what" questions that bedevil the latter.Hence the difficulty of speaking of Chinese "philosophy" (哲學; zh e xu e) with recourse to Western European categories like metaphysics, ontology, etc.notwithstanding the courageous work of Wen Haiming (2012) and others since the term was borrowed from the Japanese in the 20th century in the shadow of imperial pressure.In any case, as Foucault (1989) points out, "thought" is a much more capacious analytical category than "philosophy" because, unlike the latter, the former foregrounds "the element of problems, or more precisely, problematizations" (p.421).That is, thought arises historically in relation to certain problems agreed upon by people as needing to be addressed, which of course differ