After over five decades of de-Orientalization, academic China studies in the US and Europe have largely moved beyond the essentialist and reductionist epistemology of old Sinology. Scholars in the field now actively collaborate with counterparts from China, Japan, and beyond to develop nuanced, multifaceted understandings of China’s economy, politics, society, and culture, engaging in open and dynamic debates. Nevertheless, simplistic fantasies and fears about China – rooted in monolithic and ahistorical stereotypes from old Sinology – continue to shape popular and political perceptions of China in the West. The authoritarian regime in China also selectively leverages these stereotypes to promote Chinese exceptionalism and justify its resistance to liberal democracy. While striving to foster a more sophisticated public understanding and representation of China, contemporary China Studies scholars are also confronted with the risk of re-Orientalization under the growing influence of Western political elites, popular writers, and the Chinese Communist Party-state within the field.

Confucianism has continuously evolved in Chinese history. A liberal form of Confucianism emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century, flourishing in private academies in southern China. These academies, funded by the region’s growing commercial wealth, were tied to southern intellectuals’ resistance to the Ming monarchy. When the Manchu rulers established the Qing Dynasty in 1644, they suppressed this liberal Confucianism, promoting instead a conservative version that reinstated familial communalism and hierarchy. The liberal variant of Confucianism revived in the nineteenth century as the Qing Empire began to falter, and it continued in the efforts of twentieth-century diasporic New Confucianist scholars who sought to merge Confucianism with Western ideas as the intellectual foundation for a Chinese democracy. Meanwhile, late twentieth-century authoritarian states in Asia promoted the conservative form of Confucianism to justify autocratic rule. The Chinese state’s self-Orientalizing views contributed to the persistence of Orientalist views of China in Western popular and political discourses, despite advancements in de-Orientalization within China Studies.

During the economic crisis and geopolitical turmoil in seventeenth-century Europe, Catholic missionaries observed similar chaos in China and its rapid recovery under the Qing dynasty in the mid seventeenth century. The Jesuits gained exclusive access to the Qing court. They translated classic Confucian texts into European languages and began publishing books on the history, economy, technology, politics, and other aspects of the Chinese Empire. To secure support from the Church and European rulers for their missionary efforts, the Jesuits presented an idealized image of China, claiming that classical Confucian texts reflected a belief in a monotheistic God. They argued that China’s continuous adherence to ancient teachings, in contrast to Europe’s degeneration from antiquity, brought Chinese civilization closer to the pure morality of God. Jesuit writings on China provoked attacks from other Catholic orders, who persuaded the Church that the Chinese were godless and idolatrous. Although the Jesuits were cornered in the Church, their writings became popular and intensified Sinophilia outside the Church.

Alongside the rise of Romanticism, which emerged as a reaction to the perceived excesses of modernism and industrialization that threatened humanity’s integrity, came the rise of Romantic Orientalism as an academic field, institutionalized in universities and scholarly associations in the nineteenth century. Romantic Orientalists sought to rediscover in the East the lost innocence of human minds, or the pure knowledge of God, obscured by industrial civilization. Romantic Sinologists revived many of the Jesuits’ idealized views of China, immersing themselves in Confucian texts and Chinese folk religious practices to seek the untainted, original human soul and God-inspired morality. Notable Sinologists such as James Legge and J. J. M. de Groot exemplified this tradition in the study of classic texts and ethnography, respectively. They argued that Chinese civilization had remained continuous and unchanged for thousands of years, and its divinely inspired morality was equal to or superior to that of Europe.

Social theorists like Weber sought to explain why modernity emerged in the West but not in the supposedly “unchanging” non-Western societies. These theorists based their understanding of non-European civilizations on the biased works of prominent Orientalists of their time. Weber’s primary sources on China were the later works of Legge and de Groot. Though the distorted views in such Sinological works were later rejected in the field, the prejudices of nineteenth-century Orientalism persisted through dominant, universal social theories – like Weber-inspired modernization theory. Meanwhile, Sinology, as it evolved into postwar China Studies, became one of the first Area Studies fields to “de-Orientalize” by shedding centuries of reductionist and essentialist epistemology. This de-Orientalizing process began on the fringes of Sinology in the mid twentieth century, benefitting from new social science methods and the growing participation of Chinese scholars. It culminated in the transformative 1960s, a time when many Eurocentric ideologies were challenged and China’s geopolitical relations with the West shifted drastically after the Sino–Soviet split.

Many early Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were educated in Jesuit schools and served absolutist monarchs pursuing political centralization in the early eighteenth century. They embraced the Jesuits’ idealized image of China and Confucianism, viewing China as a model of rational Deism and enlightened despotism for Europeans to emulate. The Physiocrats drew inspiration from China’s vast internal market, perceived as free from bureaucratic interference, to shape their ideas on laissez-faire economics. Some linguists even promoted Chinese as a universal language, claiming it was the language of God, while Leibniz suggested that ancient Chinese texts held keys to important mathematical principles. These early Enlightenment thinkers had not yet discarded their reverence for antiquity, believing that older ideas were inherently superior, and thus hailed China as the world’s oldest and hence greatest civilization.

Political discourses on China have swung between naïve idealization and racist contempt over the past decade. This pendulum swing has roots in the oscillating extremes of positive and negative interpretations of China in Western scholarship over the last eight centuries. From the medieval church’s depiction of the Tartars, through early modern priests’ debates about Chinese religions, Enlightenment thinkers’ disputes over the nature of China’s political economy and moral systems, to the Romantic and scientific-racist Sinology of the nineteenth century, perceptions of China have alternated between seeing it as a civilization sharing Christian morality with Europe and as a satanic or idolatrous civilization threatening Christian values and freedom. These shifts have stemmed from both the internal dynamics of the academic field and evolving political and economic relations between Europe and China.

Marx’s concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production, characterized by Oriental despotism and isolated Asiatic peasant communes, appears throughout his sporadic writings on Asia. While Marx initially regarded these Asiatic features as barriers to modernity and revolution, in his final decade, he began to see them as possible shortcuts to socialism. His depiction of Asiatic society was informed by British colonial reports on India, as well as German and Russian Romantics’ portrayals of the countryside as communal societies untouched by capitalist industry. These Romanticist views later influenced a variant of twentieth-century dependency theory that idealized premodern Asian rural society and sought to recreate a hyper-modern version of Oriental despotism through rural collective farms. Such theories contributed to large-scale catastrophes and atrocities in Asian communism. Although recent research has largely debunked this romanticized view of the Asian countryside, it persists within some dominant academic theories on Asian peasants.

China entered Europe’s consciousness through the rise of the Mongol Empire. Marco Polo’s portrayal of well-governed and prosperous Mongol’s China and a benevolent Mongol ruler willing to convert to Christianity marked the beginning of Western idealization of China. Polo’s belief in the Mongol ruler’s readiness for Christianity stemmed from earlier monastic writings that claimed the Mongols were descendants of the Three Magi. Prior to Marco Polo, some Catholic scholars depicted the Mongols as cannibalistic barbarians and the gravest threat Christianity had ever faced. These writings made no distinction between Mongols and the Chinese. This simplification persisted into the nineteenth century, when scientific texts often referred to people from China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan collectively as “Mongoloid.” The medieval fears and fantasies surrounding the Mongols and the Chinese constituted the archetypes for the two opposing poles of Western representation of China. These polarizing views were deeply ingrained in Europe by the time direct and regular contact with China was established during the Spanish and Portuguese globalization in the long sixteenth century.