台灣大學政治學系中國大陸暨兩岸關係教學研究中心 「中國學的知識社群」計畫 MEMORY OF BRAZILIAN SYNOLOGY Interview Schedule What follows now is the script of our interviews carried out in Brazil, seeking to gather experiences, impressions and opinions about Sinology in Brazil and its participation in this field. This structure was adapted from the oral interview script – a modality that unfortunately we could not perform at that time for health and logistical reasons, among other reasons. We seek an overview of the personal and educational trajectory; next, what led to the study of China, and from what aspect; finally, some of the academic and personal opinions about Sinology in Brazil and its future. It was not necessary to answer all the questions, but if possible, to form a scenario of the personal trajectory, academic performance and vision of Sinology. We allow for less formal language, telling personal stories and expressing opinions. There was no set size for each answer, you could use as much space as you want. André Bueno Prof. adj. Eastern History UERJ/Brazil Coord. Project Orientalism INTERVIEW Full name and birthday: Giorgio Erick Sinedino de Araújo (15/06/1976), in Chinese 沈友友 Family history details My boyhood and early teenage years were spent in Natal (Rio Grande do Norte, a state in Northeastern Brazil), that in the early 1980’s was a small city, and quite isolated from the outer world. My parents did not lead an active cultural life, but as my father was a university teacher (Economics), he used to buy books every once in a while. He also had a small collection of records, some of which I enjoyed. I had an Encyclopedia Britannica at home, the closest thing to the internet before the internet. The families of both my parents were/are large and their diversity naturally became a source of intellectual inputs. My maternal grandfather, by then deceased, had a small collection of books, yet interesting, general works on different subjects, mostly historical and geographical. My maternal uncles were quite young back then, loved music, 1 literature and politics. I had relatives pretty much all over in Brazil and, even though we were not close, it was a reminder that the world was larger than what I could see. I was very excited when people called from places I had only seen in photographs and it was a wonderful discovery when I, as a small child, realized that people had different accents and spoke with different language registers. My relatives were involved in many trades, some really fun to a child: there was a soccer player, a truck driver, a poet-wannabe, a seamstress, a small landholder/farmer, a policeman, a radio broadcaster, a sailor, a petty merchant dealing in handcrafts, an adventurous rogue, etc. I was in awe of an uncle-in-law who lived in the big city and had had a big job in government. It was not because he was successful, but because he talked about different things – as I would be able to express much later, he had exposure to foreign countries and “higher” standards of culture. Actually, he was, back then, my only relative that had been abroad. He not only descended from someone who immigrated to Brazil, the only such person I had got to know by then – and spoke about the outside world in a way that appealed deeply to something inside of me. He was the source of an irrational desire that was to haunt me for more than ten years. In 1988, he gave me a strange present, a printed booklet about the exams to the diplomatic career. He (and my mother) were especially active in making me believe that I had what it took to embrace that profession. This idea remained, conceptually, as an answer to all my troubles, to feeling bound to the environment I had been born in. My relatives on the paternal side were completely different, in the sense that they taught me more about what is inside the human being, the good and the bad. They remained anchored to the countryside (while most of those relatives on the maternal side had emigrated). Their town was lost in a semi-desertic region, beyond a mountain of granite and a few dammed up streams. It was a wonderful four-five hour trip that brought me from sandy beaches into fertile plains with luxuriant woods and then into ever drier land, with shepherds leading their goats and cacti and tumbleweed, until some semblance of green appeared from nothing: thorny bushes and shrub trees. I came to get to know those relatives under circumstances that had an air of wonder and even tragedy. Despite our rare contacts, they also bore a lasting influence over me, by being there as subjects of my father’s stories. The small town they lived was much alive to me as the stage of very many episodes I had heard through the years. Details of school experiences (from preschool to graduate) I remember a few glimpses of my pre-school period, but I cannot explain how meaningful they are regarding what was ahead of me back then. I only know that, from that period on, I found it hard to make friends and keep long-lasting relationships because of my efforts. With hindsight, I understand that I was not a likeable classmate; I grew up as a self-centered and pampered person. I went to a Catholic school, a good school by the local standards. I was interested in religion more than the average, but never went so far as to join the youth groups of those more active in the faith. Now I regret that I did not dedicate much more time to reading and studying Scripture and thinking harder about the issues raised by Jesus and Christianity as a whole. I also think that I would be a different person, had I gathered around with those classmates who now seem to have been good role-models and 2 influences. To be frank, school never interested me that much, but expectations always ran high in my family, my mother especially. I wanted other things, although I did not know (and could not know) what they were. Something that bored me in those times was how narrow-minded our learning was, text-book learning with little room for experiences about “what was out there”. I have always had a penchant for the humanities, but also considered “mathematics and co.” enticing. I wish I had had more access to applied science, in the same way I would have welcomed more instruction in the arts (despite having no talent at all). I have always detested education that is too oriented towards exams or something utilitarian. A big change happened when I started taking language lessons – in Brazil, during my youth, it was easier to learn foreign languages in private language schools than at our own daytime schools. I started learning English first and, after a few years, I took up French. That was all I could get in Natal in my boyhood. I enjoyed learning languages more than going to school. Together with the languages came literature, music, films and new worlds of thought, new references about “what was out there”. It was a stark contrast, the freedom that I enjoyed learning languages and the curriculum I was force fed at school. Most of my classmates went on with the flow, leading meaningful and successful lives, following the wayposts one is supposed to follow in one’s way to adulthood. I do respect that now and I agree that it is the way most people are supposed to take. However, there was a natural and normal family and social expectation that I would do the same, but I was anguished that I would not feel fulfilled in the same way most of my classmates and friends did. Partly because of family inputs, I decided to leave Natal in my high school senior year. It was an important milestone in my life. Arriving in Brasilia, the place “prophesized” for my adult and professional life, I was bedazzled by first class teachers at my new school (also Catholic, but fully secularized). Although I only studied for one year there, it had a disproportionate influence in terms of revealing to me how wonderful it is to plunge into the sea of knowledge. Although every one of the teachers excelled at his own way, I still keep powerful memories of one of the literature teachers and one of the geography teachers. Coming from where I had come, I merely had intimations of what they were conveying to my classmates and me. Besides, there was more offer in terms of foreign languages I could learn in Brasilia. And I took them all, very avidly. In any case, at a personal level, that year was not a happy one. I was not ready for such a radical break with the only life I had known – and a sense of absolute freedom that led to a certain degree of added loneliness and aimlessness. While I had learnt much, in theory, about “what was out there”, I lacked the wherewithal to make it in real life. I could not focus into something consistent, methodic, long-term. There were only many new inklings of a larger intellectual realm – my maternal uncle had a small personal library, mostly classics of western literature, beautiful hardbound books. Like always, I just perused them, many at the same time. I remained some time in Brasilia after getting into college, but after a series of incidents, I decided to go back again to Natal, as an attempt to recover some sense of order and routine as I was used to understand it. I stayed in Natal until my graduation in Law and, luckily, I managed to continue learning languages during those years, although far from the standards I had found in Brasilia. One important breakthrough was that I began a Japanese course, realizing a long-had dream. I was lucky that my teacher had moved 3 back to Brazil from Japan, and, in addition to her job at the university, she taught language classes on the side. She had been to graduate school in Japan; chemistry, if I remember. Back then, I did not learn that much, since the materials were not oriented towards “real life” Japanese and lacked a clear focus on how to communicate in that language. In any case, Natal had become a larger city by then, and my old classmates had fared well too. With hindsight, law school was definitely not what I needed… and not what I wanted. I could get a comfortable life, like everybody wants, but I would be missing “what was out there” completely. I felt listless and consumed myself in selfseeking, sensual years. I made it through college coursework, the professional exams and did some extra professional training courses, not without ease, and that made me feel even more bitter inside. Then, out of personal considerations, I joined a graduate school in Brazil’s southernmost state. I was giving a second try at living alone, and it would not be less unsuccessful than the first one. The good thing about Porto Alegre was that I had a chance to study German at a good school again. There were excellent teachers at graduate school who had taken their doctoral degree in Germany. They seemed more intellectually disciplined than the others. I met folks with impressive backgrounds. It is interesting to notice that, since the small gift in 1988, I had never really gone and see how things worked in the diplomatic career. At graduate school, I actually got to know some classmates who took the exams and achieved a pass to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. That was the closest I had ever been to transforming that silly boyhood fixation into something workable. Only after some sudden developments in my personal life, I built up the courage to enroll myself in the exams, which were about to take place about two months later. Those two months were one of the most consequential moments in my life. The reason was that, I must confess, as much as I have always loved books, I rarely read more than a small section of them – until then. For the first time ever, I went to a library and stayed there practically for the entire day, reading and reading, book after book, from start to end. The exams had a reading list of, say, almost one hundred books, and I remember I read (and annotated) most of them. The point here is that I was 20something when I finally started to understand what it means to feel whole, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, when you find the “things” you had always been looking for, even if you had not realized it and still did not. Without these things, languages are merely empty vessels. The beginning of the professional career Since I had achieved a pass in the exams, I had to quit the master course in Law in Southern Brazil and move, a second time, to Brasilia. There were no regrets concerning the master, except that, originally for the exam’s sake, I tried out some courses in Brazilian economic history, literature, sociology at other departments, which made me accept, deep inside, that my heart had never been into law, except as a something respectable to the eyes of others and my own. That urge of respectability rooted in pride, surely, did not bode well for what I had ahead of myself in the diplomatic career. In the first three years, we must go through a professional course that, at that time, took the form of (another) master course. Coursework was, doubtless, very attractive: there was a strong focus in comprehensive subjects, including history, sociology, economics, foreign affairs – and a little of law, by all means bearable. Four languages were carefully 4 cultivated: Portuguese, English, French and Spanish. I discovered a different Brasilia from about ten years before. Now I could learn Japanese there too, and the Ministry of Foreign Relations was generous, in that I could make some experiments in learning a bit of Russian and Arabic. Unfortunately, except for my personal linguistic interests, I did not commit myself to learning in general, and the main subjects of my master course in particular. One reason was that the new reality of having a professional life made it possible for me to formally enter adulthood, with everything that it entails. However, I was not mature enough to deal with the responsibilities. That was my first job, I had always had a problem with hierarchy and, worse, found it hard to respect other people for no other reason than they are people. As always, I missed the chance of befriending talented, really brilliant people; at least missed the chance of trying to make a positive impression and engaging in meaningful relationships with them. The beginning of the study from China I started to learn Chinese very late; I was almost thirty years old. It was another “accident” in my life. In the last year of my professional training at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I heard that a young teacher had arrived recently from Mainland China, Hu Xudong. He was eccentric and likeable. I took private classes with him and we became friends (in my strange way of making friends). I worked very hard, as usual when it came to learning languages, but this teacher did make some emotional investment in me – something I was not very accustomed to. The fact is that Chinese got under my skin, although I still loved Japanese more. I was in another challenging moment, where I should be posted away to an internship somewhere in South America. That was the policy that year, and I did not like it, not a little. Frankly, I felt absolutely no curiosity about South America, even granted that it was very “in” and was politically important in the career. I took another unconstructive decision, delaying my departure in a way that menaced my internship, not without creating inconvenience for others. For me, I did not care then, I preferred to stay in Brasilia, learning Chinese and “hanging out with my new friends” – a group of very young Chinese expats. An opportunity magically appeared for me to do my internship in Japan. I was thrilled and requested my superiors who, reasonably, denied. I had ignored the rules, that are made for everybody. It only matters that, after some time passed by and there were other developments in my workplace, I was allowed to take part in a two-week course in China, hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for diplomats from Latin America and the Caribbean. I was more than satisfied. After some lectures at the Diplomatic Academy, we then when around for study tours in Gansu, Fujian, Shanghai and Beijing. A momentous thing happened in the graduation ceremony, when I met my ambassador in Beijing, and he, to my utmost surprise, extended an invitation for me to remain at the Embassy. He convinced the Ministry that I should remain for some time there, as my colleagues were still in their internships. Time dragged on and, to make things short, my ambassador got me posted to Beijing. I would stay there for more than seven years. Ambassador Luis Augusto de Castro Neves became the sponsor I had never had. He encouraged me to learn the language, allowing me to put half of the office hours into it, to which I gladly added all the spare time I had, my vacations, and any more I could scratch out. It was like I was preparing for the Ministry of Foreign Relations’ exam once again, only that 5 now I was doing it without a timeframe, without a specific goal. I did not want to let my ambassador down, I wanted to make good of that opportunity, and I wanted to change a pattern in my previous life, that I started things full speed, just to quit after some time with nothing to show for it. Like the Chinese say, “head of a tiger, tail of a snake”. Hence, after some six months I acquired enough proficiency to join a master course in Ancient Chinese Philosophy at Peking University. I did it through many hours of private classes and very many of self-study. As soon as my listening comprehension was good enough, I moved up in the ladder of learning, trying to find people interested in helping me to get closer to “Chinese traditional culture”. With the exception of the Daoist and Buddhist monks, none of my tutors were specialists, in the sense that they went through a formal course at a university. On the contrary, they had learned it “the proper way”, by themselves or by following “masters”, wandering teachers not linked to any institution. That is how I got to know a bit more about Traditional Chinese Medicine, Daoist ritual, gymnastics, meditation, dietetics, Buddhist philosophy, logic, discipline, Book of Changes, horoscope, poetry and poetics, calligraphy and more. I am forever grateful to professor Cui Libin from Beijing Normal University who kindly accepted to train me in Ancient Chinese every Saturday for three long years. We went through, literally, a few thousand pages of text. Parallelly, my oral communication skills were sharpened to a point where my ambassador put me through taxing ordeals – doing interpretation in formal meeting between Brazilian and Chinese high officials. He could be a demanding boss, yes, he could. Some of those meetings were related to negotiations and touched upon complex subjects. I failed in some, bringing shame to my ambassador, guilt and insecurity to myself, heartfelt compassion from some coworkers. Long history short, my baptism of fire came in the Beijing Olympics, when I was entrusted with interpreting for the Brazilian president in his official visit just before the opening ceremony. As usual, I did not want to do it, I was too insecure, too afraid. I did not know what my authority was going to say, not even what the topics of the meeting were. Obviously, no one could pass information to me, not only on grounds of confidentiality, but given the fact that all kept changing until the very last moment – a key topic appeared at the departure from the hotel hall. Before the “great day”, I had to learn and memorize anything that I found could be relevant. I had to endure a few months of enormous pressure. I remember that, shortly before the meeting, the ambassador was taking heavy flak from our president’s protocol chief and from other higher-ups, for standing by me. I was nearby, I could hear everything and my ambassador looked nervous and maybe scared. Indeed, I remember that he had already been veiledly threatened by the Chinese side, understandably concerned that, with I as the interpreter, the meetings would be “less than perfect” – that is what they said. That morning was worse; it was his own bosses and many other powerful people noticing that he personally put himself on the line. After so many years having my back for nothing, because I did not know how to be grateful, I had grown up to understand that sometimes you must sacrifice yourself for others, even if it brings suffering and harm to yourself. Nobody could know, but I had taken that job with all my heart and soul. One of the best memories I have is that, shortly after the beginning of the first meeting, with things flowing well, I looked at my ambassador and he was sitting 6 straight, smiling, holding his head high. Ambassador Castro Neves was posted away a couple of months later and, to this day, I have never met him again. I think that that experience marked the end of the beginning of my Chinese studies. The curricula, faculty, institution and advisor during graduate training It took six years to finish my master course at Peking University. Before the formal coursework, we had one (or two) years of compulsory language practice. I managed to become exempted from language classes and went head-on into university life. I took as many general courses as I could in a number of departments, especially literature, history, archaeology and anthropology. That first year was the best, as I was not bound to any “specialty”, but was free to look at what matters most to me: the whole thing. Even back home, in my own cultural environment, it was frustrating when people started carving out parts of reality as one’s own “specialty” – pretending that learning as much as you can from a small problem is worthwhile beyond finding a job and getting a career. In China (I imagine, in any different cultural setting), that kind situation naturally is more frustrating, for two reasons. First, you are outside of your own element, you grew up unaware of so many things that had been understood by default, you lack the common knowledge and the common sense that everyone else has. The second is that, for various reasons, Chinese scholars seem to be even less mindful of the “big picture” and even more willing to specialize themselves into infinitely small fields, regardless of the meaning and even worth of what they do outside academia. Not a few teachers, even quite famous ones at PKU, did not show any hint that what they had been learning for decades had transformed them in any way – especially those who had learned about foreign languages and cultures. Some teachers were too much focused on their own things, so you had courses dedicated entirely to reading and reviewing book lists, with no or little time dedicated to what was in them. The course names and syllabi seemed interesting at a first look, but many, maybe most of the teachers treated teaching as something you have to do because “it is in the package”. My Chinese classmates did not seem to care very much either, as they had their own goals, like moving on to a PhD course abroad, finding a job or getting connections. I do not mean to criticize anyone. I was an exceptional case: I already had a job; (to the Chinese standards) I was beyond my school years; by all means, I was just passing by. I took a master in Ancient Chinese Philosophy. The course was well structured, with subjects divided into methodology and theory. Theoretical courses gave enough attention to four lines of research, Confucianism (with an emphasis on Song-Ming Lixue), Daoism (we studied Guo Xiang), Buddhism (early Chan) and Modern Philosophy (some less-known thinkers who focused on epistemology and philosophy of science in the Republican period). We also had a course on Chinese Modernization, that touched upon “XX Century Neo Confucianism” in Mainland China, Taiwan and the West – but, not insensibly, centered on the Chinese perspective and, unfortunately, with heavy overtones of ideology. To my eyes, classes were not carefully prepared or, when they were, they looked like they had been reprocessed from something the teachers had read, written or taught about before. To be sincere, most of the courses had no clear beginning nor end as far as the contents were concerned, and they were there just to fit the school year. That is not to say that the teachers did not know what to do. They were 7 knowledgeable, capable and, in some cases, extremely intelligent people. It is only that they did not truly care about teaching, probably because it was not an institutional priority or either it was not challenging enough to them. There were honorable exceptions, professors who taught new courses every semester (I could tell), who had a clear vision of what they should do during the semester, who kept bringing new insights to old subjects and who took a personal interest in their students. It is undeniable that I had lost interest in my master during (and partly because) of the formal coursework. That does not mean that I stopped studying. The course on Chinese modernization changed my interests, making it dawn on me that I was almost completely ignorant of what it meant to be a Brazilian, a Westerner. I was not willing to go with the flow, to pick up a topic, any topic, write a dissertation, any dissertation, and get the diploma. Given that a new ambassador had arrived, I interrupted my course to respond to the challenge of working under someone who, truth be said, had no reason to give me any special treatment. Ambassador Clodoaldo Hugueney was very different from ambassador Castro Neves; ambassador Hugueney was active in multilateral diplomacy and ambassador Castro Neves had made his career in bilateral relations. Pragmatic and demanding, ambassador Hugueney shook things up, cancelling a small Portuguese course open to the community – a course I had involved myself more and more during the previous three years. I was upset, but now I understand that he was in charge and had a coherent vision of what he wanted to do. It was his job. And he was magnanimous to me: as far as I am concerned, although he did not become a sponsor in the same way as ambassador Castro Neves had been, he was exceedingly gracious in letting me pursue my interests with much freedom. He even showed me the way, that is, he made me believe that what I was doing was meaningful and not without use. Being a hands-on man such as he was, at some point, he invited me to share what I was learning with the entire team. I gasped: everything that I have been learning over these years is just empty babble to a man like him! I could not be more wrong. We had on and off meetings to speak about ancient thought and modern politics in China, during which ambassador Hugueney proved himself a man of wide learning and shrewd understanding of China. Being such a down-to-earth man, he came to realize that, when we are dealing with China, things that look antiquarian to ordinary Westerners are indispensable and always up-to-date. He made me write an essay about Chinese history of ideas and politics from a Realist standpoint. Those pages have remained as a workin-progress in the back of my mind. During those years, my after hours at the Embassy were more relevant to my graduate studies than anything I could get at PKU. I put all my forces into learning what I should have during my teenage and early adulthood years, like the entire Platonic corpus, most of the Aristotelian, general readings about the classical Western world – gravitating towards a wider understanding of the history of ideas. I was still laser-focused on philosophy, but philosophy had been losing its luster to me. Especially Chinese Philosophy. I almost did not finish my master, not only because of my shifting intellectual interests, but mostly because of personal feelings about my condition at the Embassy/in China and their consequences. My energies were channeled to my first book, a heavily commented translation of the Analects, and the dissertation was written slovenly and haphazardly, to meet the approaching deadline of my course. PKU professors were warm and supportive during the defense, and I wish my heart would be 8 there on that day. I am thankful for PKU’s department of (Chinese) philosophy, they do what they do for cogent reasons. My PhD would also last six years, but I only started it two years after graduating. In that meantime, my posting could not be extended anymore – I had already exceeded the regular limit by a couple of years – so I had another life-changing decision in front of me. The Ministry was very good to me: I was offered the post of my dreams – the Brazilian embassy in Tokyo, but I knew that if I took it, everything I had learned in China would be lost. In other terms, I had to choose between beginning to become a career diplomat or continue being… there is not a noun that defines it… what I was until then. I was also offered a chance to go back to the Ministry in Brasilia and I was even invited to teach about China in the Brazilian diplomatic academy. It would have been wonderful, if it just were to be. What happened in the end was that I had a middle-of-the-road plan: I would apply to a PhD in the United States, finish up what I had begun in Beijing and then see what was up ahead. Not with much emotional distress, I gave up Japan, a solid chance to learn Japanese, for real, and took a license from the Ministry, which meant basically a death sentence for any career diplomat. Moreover, I could not stay at PKU anymore, I felt that everything had been said and done already, so I decided to move to Renmin University. I was more interested in Buddhism now, as I had learned enough about PreQin, Xuanxue and the Tang-Song transition. Buddhism represented the foreign element in Chinese mainstream culture and it was an interesting counterpoint to the Chinese Late Imperial orthodoxy. Still at PKU, I attended an Aesthetics course under a teacher I had a personal liking; his classes stood in a welcome contrast to the “Pan-ethicism” that Chinese Philosophy becomes if considered abstractly, that is, without reference to its social and political background. That teacher introduced me indirectly to professor Zhang Fenglei at Renmin University, who would become my PhD supervisor. Before joining the PhD course, though, I took a year as a “senior scholar” under Zhang. That was another year of excitement and discovery, like the one I had had before my master. Renmin was a smaller college then, and religion, being a marginal field, gave me enough room to reorient my way of thinking. Some courses left a deep-lasting impression, especially a close-reading of the Vimalakirti sutra, a course on Nagarjuna and a history of Indian Buddhism. Of course, professor Zhang’s lectures on Tiantai Buddhism were helpful to keep aware of the Chinese background. It is important to point out that, during my later years at PKU and those at Renmin University, I had not given up my plans to learn Japanese seriously either. I had found a number of private tutors to help me achieve a certain oral proficiency, good reading skills and the basics of ancient Japanese. Japan is traditionally strong in Buddhist studies, and I found much profit in the Japanese academic production. Despite I had found some new life, intellectually, things were getting worse in the personal front, so I decided to spend some months in Kyoto – I had been a couple of times in Japan before that, and Japan had always been like a dream-land to me. There is something unspeakable in the Japanese countryside landscapes that haunt my memories – sad, wistful memories of loneliness painted with sounds. In those months in Japan, I applied and was accepted by the University of Chicago, to study Buddhism, tentatively about the concepts of Buddha Nature and Heart-Nature in Song-Ming Confucianism. However, it did not 9 matter as far as I was living those moments, travelling as much as I could within Japan, and enjoying and suffering every new sunrise and every new sunset. I could never live there... Something wonderful happened in Kyoto when I was about to go back to China and my outlook on life changed completely. When time came, I was back in China, but with a completely different path ahead. I was giving up the PhD in the US and I would be moving, for family reasons, to Macau, a small place in Southern China that did not mean much to me. I asked professor Zhang if he would be willing to become my supervisor, and, after he accepted, I applied to a PhD program in history of Chinese religion at Renmin University. The PhD had begun. The choice of research subjects, especially those related to China: All the time I spent at PKU was directly or indirectly devoted to the so-called “Gainian Fenxi” that is the central feature of “Chinese Philosophy”. “Chinese Philosophy” is, essentially, an effort to discover, describe and establish connections between “concepts” and “categories”, reverently related to the teaching of some great master(s) or corpora of texts. It is true that “Gainian Fenxi” inherits and develops an old method that was brought to perfection by the Song-Ming philosophers. Since in the beginning I had been so intent on reading the ancient works, that seemed to be a good way to start. However, as time passed and I realized the chasm between social reality and the carefully ordered realm of “Chinese Philosophy”, I could not help looking to new approaches, that made me feel as fulfilled as when I read about Western culture in general and history of ideas in particular. I had found a new viewpoint in the work of Max Weber, enriched by the great masters of cultural history in its different dimensions: Burckhardt, Huizinga, Snell, Curtius, Auerbach, Panofsky, Hazard, just to mention a few giants among very many. While many sinologists involved in the study of Chinese Philosophy use comparative methods, they tend to focus on what is common between China and their referents. But the greatest breakthroughs are to be obtained from the contrastive method, given that China is so different from pretty much everything else – with Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc. as partial exceptions. Philosophical ideas are decisive to the extent that they explain the existence and activities of certain institutions. These ideas must explain in some form the way of life, values and patterns of thought – the bigger picture. Every ideal must refer back to the reality it struggles against. This is my favorite method and the place to where all my thoughts ultimately converge. To give an example, my PhD topic was an attempt to think over the relationship between Buddhism and Chinese institutions. Undeniably, Buddhism is an “otherworldly” doctrine, but it cannot but exist under a group of institutions and its discourse must bear influence on how society organizes itself, how political power is wielded, how the economy operates and so on. That is why China reacted to it like a body that is being fed something it is not used to. Although the body rejects that kind of food, it is still able to digest something from it, being nourished and growing from it. It is easier to find a context to what happened to the Buddhist thought and community as soon as China became reunified by Sui dynasty and to the progressive hollowing of the Buddhist 10 doctrine and community in the centuries that followed. Neo-Confucianism and the bulk of Chinese culture should also be reappraised from that process – the “top-down” harmony of the Three Doctrines makes us blind to the dynamics between politics and culture. Instead of “taking sides” like Chinese intellectuals normally do, maybe we should try to understand the real interests, the role of authority and political patronage that defines intellectual life in China. I think that is a satisfying way of rethinking the relation between ideas and reality, because, in China, philosophical ideas tend to be implemented as policies in a much more material way than in the Western experience. Indeed, I can think of no Chinese idea that is not ultimately a policy tool. Intellectual growth after graduate school I was about to turn 44 years old when I obtained my PhD degree in 2020, very late indeed. Just like in my master course, I have always been studying while working, and involved in all kinds of pursuits while my younger classmates were aiming at an academic career. I have always been an outsider, everywhere. On the flipside, it means that I have had a peculiar intellectual development, that has outgrown the narrow concerns of a professional scholar. Given my strong background in foreign languages, I have been amassing a sizeable quantity of first-hand knowledge from different aspects in Western and Non-western civilizations. I think that the mutual fecundation between my formal Chinese studies and my informal study of Western cultural history is precious both to my intellectual growth and to my outlook on life. Just to give a noteworthy example. Over the last seven years, I have put a lot of effort into mastering Latin and getting acquainted with the awesome treasures of Western Classical Civilization. I have achieved a certain knowledge of literature, philosophy and history from the first-hand sources, which has influenced some courses I taught about literary translation, culture and translation, literary theory, etc. Although these courses were mostly practical and still in an embryonic state, I do want to think deeper and systematically in terms of how Chinese (and Western) civilization are built around the concept of a Canon, how this Canon grows and transforms, how political power and economic behavior is reflected by the Canon, etc. I have many ideas about what can be done through the contrastive approach, which may produce some innovative and useful insights about the big picture, the transformations that Western culture has suffered over the last one hundred years and how China may be molding a new cultural synthesis in its State-enforced culture. The development and evolution of china's own research agenda: I have already spoken about this question, albeit if at a more abstract level. Until now, I have mostly worked as a translator of Chinese classics to the Portuguese language. I think that this is expedient and indispensable, considering that I have mostly been working in Portuguese. Expedient, because it helps me to present my work the Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking public, it hones my linguistic and critical skills, it allows me to experiment with hermeneutical strategies – and it is fun. It is indispensable, too, because we still lack translations of basic Chinese texts. As a matter of fact, I do not 11 consider my texts as mere translations. While it is true that the reader is more interested in what the Chinese original author has to say, considering the peculiar way books are composed in Ancient Chinese, I have leeway to orient the reading according to my studies of the critical tradition that grows around the main texts. Consequently, my texts are different from the standard translations one can find in the market, including mainstream sinological languages like English or French. I normally add a commentary that is many times longer than the main text. Since there is no standard recipe for the commentary, I use that freedom to experiment with different tools and approaches, that I take pains to adapt to the characteristics of every work in particular. In my articles and essays, normally oriented towards reading specific texts, I have tried to deal with different aspects of the Chinese social/intellectual background, to the extent that they become relevant to explaining those texts. I also cherish the contrastive approach to how Western and Chinese cultures relate to each other, attempting to understand how thought relates to reality in the respective social setting and how institutions give concrete existence to abstract ideas. Reflections on the methodology of china studies: I do not have much to say about this point. Maybe only that a standard academic career, even in more developed sinological traditions, does not provide the life experience necessary to understand the Chinese reality, the big picture in China. In other terms, I sincerely doubt that one can learn about China without living and working here for many, many years after mastering the language and studying traditional culture hard. To us, studying China should not be like studying Latin America, the United States or Western Europe. We do not have the same representations, the values are different, our societies work in peculiar ways. I grant that such a educational program is not economically feasible, either to the individual or to the academic institutions – but I insist that, unless it is the case of a powerfully perceptive individual or that we are only working superficially and descriptively, the maximum one can do with a total of a couple of years studying or visiting a campus in China is some approximative interpretive research. Chinese texts, ancient or modern, are not true to reality and must be mediated by a real-life experience of what China is. We need Chinese experience to do Chinese studies. The source of research funding over time: I have been doing governmental work since I arrived in China and have also worked as a part-time lecturer in a small university in Macau – this is how I have been mostly funding my studies and scholarly work. That being said, I have obtained complementary grants from Hanban/CLEC for my commented translations and from the University of Macau for my podcast series. I have also received support for specific projects, including grants and expenses, from a few institutions in Mainland China. 12 Relations with academics, professionals, government and other connections from China: I have obtained my PhD recently, so that my relationship with Chinese academia has just barely begun, if so, as I do not have any academic title yet. As I said, I have a solid relationship with Hanban/CLEC and the University of Macau, as well as frequent contacts with some Confucius Institutes in Brazil and Macau. I have currently made applications for translation/research programs in Mainland China, but there are no concrete results to report this far. Frequency of trips to China and remembrance of trips to China: I have lived in China since 2005. Other experiences abroad such as visits, lectures, conferences, etc.: Over the last two, three years, I have taken part in a growing number of events, in Mainland China and Brazil. It is also something very incipient, without any true breakthoughs. The relationship with the government: Over the years, I have received different kinds of support from Mainland Chinese educational, cultural and diplomatic agencies to realize, and, more recently, to promote my work in Brazil and China. I am thankful for all the help, as we keep politics out of the equation. Publishing experiences: To this day, I have published three commented translations through Editora da Universidade Estadual Paulista: the Analects, the Dao De Jing and the Immortal from Southern China (Zhuangzi). These books are, as far as I know, the first to be translated into Portuguese from first hand sources and to take into account the original hermeneutical traditions. They are also quite unique even if compared to similar books in other Western languages, in that the commentaries are much more comprehensive and carefully designed to respond to the specific features of each work. I am working in Portuguese as ancient Chinese commentators worked. The Analects have been released as mass market hardbacks in Brazil and Portugal through mainstream newspaper media groups, respectively, Folha de São Paulo and O Publico. The Dao De Jing has received a positive response and has sold well, despite the fact that there are many other translations available in Portuguese and that there are classical translations into English etc. available for free in the Internet. The Immortal has had as surprisingly strong first month and I am hopeful that it will continue to be warmly welcomed by the Brazilian readership. Over the years, I have also published a few dozen articles, papers and essays. Most are preparatory work, that is, studies about shorter texts and specific issues. These 13 publications deal mostly with the long Period of Disunion between Han and Sui, and focus on the problem of the Chinese cultural canon. I have tried to argue indirectly that poetry/literary theory, painting/calligraphy and music adopt, in their fields, the same set of ideas and conceptions that one may find in social, ethical and political life. There is an overarching sense of coherence between fields that in the Western tradition are comparatively independent. That is, more or less, my entry point into the Chinese Canon. Evaluation of china's academic establishment and scholarship: I was granted a scholarship by the Chinese government for my master program and my one-year senior scholar visit at Renmin University. I remember that the conditions compared well to those offered to Chinese (local) students. Regarding my experiences as a foreign student in different universities, I think that, in general, foreign students are not taken very seriously by the faculty and classmates. Linguistic and cultural differences are to blame, of course, but my opinion is that Chinese go through graduate school at breakneck speed and, consequently, the intellectual environment is not stimulating, or stimulating enough, even to the Chinese students, had they cared very much. They come in too young, with limited or no social and work experiences, and accumulate insufficient general culture and knowledge outside their narrow fields of interest. The result is that there is little you can talk about or work together – that includes Chinese amongst themselves. The result is that one is working by oneself most of the time and it is difficult to make friendships. I noticed that almost all foreign students remain together with people from the same or similar linguistic/cultural backgrounds. Visions on China's future: This is a complex question. I really do not know for sure. It is undeniable that, in the period of Reform and Opening, China has behaved very differently from its historical pattern. It has developed (in qualitative terms) quickly for thirty plus years. Chinese have gone abroad to look for better lives and those who have remained have seen their livelihoods improve – but not to a point in which they have truly become stakeholders in their societies. This development has not been exclusively endogenous, but has relied on a huge number of foreign firms and foreign specialists who had come to Mainland China to make money. Because of this global manufacturing migration to China since the later 1990s, there has been unprecedented transfer of technologies and know-how, which has helped the Chinese-government controlled economy to close the gap with the “Advanced Economies”. However, the same historical conditions probably do not exist anymore, in a way that the “Chinese model” may keep chugging along. After the Global Financial Crisis, the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Covid Pandemic, the international situation has changed deeply, for the worse, so that there are increasingly fewer common interests between China and US/Western Europe. China’s domestic political situation has also changed, in that Reform and Opening caused or aggravated problems that sooner or later have to be dealt with, like serious regional differences, the growing gap between rich and poor, fast population ageing, a real estate bubble, etc. Apparently, Chinese institutions have moved away from Reform and Opening, the 14 statecraft has looked back to its heyday years for ideas and ideology has become an important tool to raise political capital and try to solve all those challenging issues. Inevitably, there will be a price to pay, and I am afraid it will be steep. 15