"Ethnic minority philosophy and ethnic psychology in the People's Republic of China: a report from the desert of ideology"

The academic disciplines of “ethnic minority philosophy” (shaoshu minzu zhexue) and “minority psychology” (minzu xinlixue) are of a relatively recent provenance, only emerging in the wake of the economic reforms initiated by the Deng Xiaoping in 1979 and the gradual relaxation of ideological constraints on knowledge production in the post-Maoist period. My talk will provide an overview of the historical background and intellectual significance of the emergence of these contested and still relatively marginal disciplines and try to show how they reflect ongoing debates over ethnic, national, cultural, and philosophical identity in the present-day People’s Republic of China (PRC). I will proceed by discussing the following questions: 1) Who are the PRC’s “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu ), how and why did they come to be classified and recognized as distinct social groups? 2) What is “philosophy” (zhexue) and what were the historical circumstances in which this and other academic disciplines such as “psychology” (xinlixue) were introduced into modern China? 3) What are some of the major questions and problems in the fields of “ethnic minority philosophy” and “minority psychology”, what can they tell us about the precarious nature of ethnic identity in contemporary China and beyond?

Ady Van den Stock is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University's Department of Languages and Cultures and a guest lecturer at KU Leuven's Chinese Studies department. His research is focused on modern Chinese philosophy, religion, and intellectual history, specifically twentieth-century and contemporary Confucianism, Sino-Islamic traditions of thought, and “ethnic minority philosophy”.
He has written over 20 articles and book chapters and published a monograph on the “New Confucian” current in modern Chinese philosophy entitled The Horizon of Modernity:
Subjectivity and Social Structure in New Confucian Philosophy (Brill, 2016).