Problematizing the Onto-Epistemic Re-Turn in China’s Educational Theorizations as a Decolonial Involution

• In Event: Colonial Discourses, Racial Capitalism, and Decolonial Possibilities

Abstract

Decolonial studies scrutinize the coloniality of power/knowledge/being as a constitutive condition of the Western modernity, and explicate otherwise suppressed non-Western onto-epistemes for a cognitive justice. Situated in such context, this paper examines Chinese academia’s theorizations on “building Chinese education”, i.e., grounding China’s educational theorizations-praxis on Chinese cultural wisdom, as a de-colonial “self-awakening” effort to counter the Euro-centric global structure of knowledge (re)production. Reading into 313 educational journal articles housed in the CNKI database, we untangle Chinese academia’s onto-epistemic re-turn along three interpellations: a) East-indigenization and West-globalization, b) tradition-past and modernity-present, and c) theory and practice, and problematize possible onto-epistemic flashpoints therewithin. Zooming in on China, this study complicates the negotiation among cultural relativistic indigenization and globalization toward a de/anti/re-colonial involution.

Authors

• Weili Zhao, Hangzhou Normal University

• Moqiu Cheng, Cornell University