Between knowledge and ‘plagiarism,’ or, how the Chinese language was studied in the West

This article looks at descriptions of the Chinese language in Western intellectual writings as indicative of a particular process of knowledge formation and reproduction. Beginning with the first systematic account produced by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), it charts views offered by John Wilkins (1614–1672), James Beattie (1735–1803), Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) among others. Drawing on the theoretical ideas of Edward Said and Michel Foucault, it shows how views about the Chinese language repeated and quoted one another, how they complimented and validated one another, how they collectively constituted themselves as a system of knowledge, and how this system of knowledge distorted, modified and redefined itself in a historical process until it acquired in the end a life of its own.