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If you are an American or European citizen, chances are you've never heard about shengren, minzhu and wenming. If one day you promote them, you might even be accused of culture treason.



That's because these are Chinese concepts. They are often conveniently translated as "philosophers", "democracy" and "civilization". In fact, they are none of those. They are something else. Something the West lacks in turn.

But that is irritating for most Westerners, so in the past foreign concepts were quickly removed from the books and records and, if possible, from the history of the world, which is a world dominated by the West. As the philosopher Hegel once remarked, the East plays no part in the formation of the history of thought.



But let us step back a bit. Remember what school told us about the humanities? They are not the sciences! If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not overlap. Does that surprise you?



I estimate that there are over 35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into the English language. Words like yin and yang, kung-fu and fengshui. Add to this another 35,000 Sanskrit terminology, mainly from India and Buddhism. Words like buddha, bodhisattva and guru.



In a recent lecture at Peking University , the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun explained that wenming describes a high level of ethics and gentleness of a people, while the English word "civilization" derives from a city people's mastery over materials and technology.



The correct Chinese translation of civilization should be chengshijishu-zhuyi. Wenming is better, but untranslatable. It has been around for some thousand years, too, while Europe 's notion of "civilization" is a late 18th century "invention".



Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. Then they realize that the names are not correct.