Thorsten J. Pattberg

Western education remains a fetish of the colonial past.

A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories.

The British call junzi a "gentleman," no surprise. The Americans have no gentlemen, so they translate junzi as "the superior man." The Germans have no gentlemen either, and "superior man" is reserved, so they call junzi an "edler" meaning a person of noble blood. To sum up, all Europeans call junzi anything but junzi, which is quite a scandal.

The English word 'creativity' is derived from the Roman-Latin creo - to create. It is inextricably linked to the Western notion of a creator - a divine intervention and violent disrupter.

I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.

Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home.

The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all.