The study of China and the study of its languages throughout the wider world, once thought of in many countries as exotic and marginal elements in academic life, are now at last seen as a perfectly sensible pursuit. But hitherto little reflection took place upon the presuppositions that lie at the roots of these activities as now carried out, for in the past the enormity of attempting to educate undergraduates in difficult languages and an extremely rich yet largely unfamiliar culture, within the generally somewhat grudgingly bestowed resources allocated by institutions convinced that other matters were far more important, left little time for that. Now, however, monographs of a more searching nature are beginning to appear, and are to be welcomed. The field known as Sinology is touched upon in both the volumes under review, though in fact both are concerned more centrally with other issues. Thus Ming Dong Gu, as his title indicates, explicates the significance and value of a more recent coinage, Sinologism, a term he employs to point to the “totality of multifaceted blindness in epistemology and methodology in observing China and processing Chinese materials” (p. 18).

It should be pointed out, however, that this formulation is not offered as a definition of Sinologism; rather, the ways in which the new term may be deployed in place of the other terms used in his title are laid out with great care and clarity over the opening chapters of the book. The good work achieved here is, however, somewhat undermined for this reader by the later discussion of aspects of Sinologism, wherein the vehemence of the criticism tends to distract significantly from the argument. One can just about appreciate, for example, that calling for the death of Salman Rushdie can be said to “speak eloquently of how self-orientalization has been resisted in the Islamic world,” in contradistinction to the “severe criticism, vicious condemnation, and profane attacks” on Confucius which “coincided with the large-scale importation of Western ideas and culture,” given that the Marxist vilification of Confucius of the “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” campaign of 1974 initiated by Mao Zedong, did indeed pass without challenge. But, cumulatively, expressions characterizing an array of scholars that move from “contradictory stance” (p. 148), through “self-glorification” (p. 172) to “childish questions” (p. 183), become discouraging more than helpful, whatever their justification. I am not sure in any case that all the shots fired land squarely on the selected targets: to insist for example on using the Eurocentric terms “religion” and “philosophy” to distinguish different strands in the Daoist tradition surely calls for more explanation than is offered – not that an alien terminology or perspective need necessarily be unhelpful, as a pioneering work like H. C. Chang's Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburgh University Press, 1955) long ago first demonstrated for Chinese perspectives on English literature.

Among the topics treated here is the thorny question of the relationship between the Chinese script and the languages for which it is used. On p. 200 we are told: “When a Japanese first starts to learn a character as a child, most likely, he is not relying on the Japanese language, but on his cognitive understanding of what the character means”. Though there is no indication that any Japanese child was consulted on this point, we are assured that “After he understands what the character “learn” means, what he remembers in his mind is not the phoneme of “learn” in Japanese but the cognitively mental representation of what “learn” means.” Indeed one supposes that alert Japanese children, male or female, might well if brought up in the vicinity of a school infer that a certain character had some relation to education, just as they might infer that golden arches had some association with fast food, but I am not sure this means that the signs would be entirely uncoupled from language.

Certainly a Japanese child may treat Chinese characters in a way not allowed to a Chinese child – even if the normal character for the Japanese inu (dog) is that read in Chinese as quan, the Japanese may also read the Chinese character gou for dog as inu too, whereas a Chinese child would presumably be corrected for reading both characters the same way. Whatever the original relationship of script and language in China, centuries of education have enforced linkages between the two. What is now happening in a digital age in which the Chinese script jostles freely on screen not simply with the rather thin fare provided by alphabetic scripts, but also with any number of icons, emoticons and the like, is another entire topic not conventionally included in Sinology yet equally importantly linked to it.

And this is the topic of Andrea Bachner's monograph, a study that skilfully puts the reader on the alert from the title page, or even the jacket, in that the English title given above is not exactly the same as the Chinese. What better way to start “a case study of the ways in which the confluence of the digital media revolution and the reshaping of global power structures impacts our understanding of the Chinese script in particular and of writing in general”? The material she provides is assuredly rich, ranging from chapters devoted to writing and the body through writing and image in recent concrete poetry using Chinese, and on to “glossolalic” literature in which sound plays an important role, such as Han Shaogong's Dictionary of Maqiao – I had not realized that Han in fact ventriloquizes some of his remarks on the writing system (p. 125) through an individual named after a Sanskrit poet. Two further chapters follow, the first on literature pushing new boundaries by using distorted characters and intrusive punctuation, and the second taking us on a final tour of the influence of new technology, from Xu Bing's Book from the Sky on to the “Martian Scripts” used by Chinese young persons in texting.

Sinology itself finally appears in the conclusion, where it turns out what this has all been about. “How can we analyse these complex constellations around Chinese culture and its scripts? With the help of a new method of reading, a new sinology that this book has tried to model. By scrutinizing examples of sinography, understood not merely as Chinese writing, nor merely as the textual production of China, but as texts that reflect on and experiment with the sinograph as a medium, Beyond Sinology pushes for a more situated as well as medially responsible approach to cultural difference” (p. 215). Is this project Orientalist, “albeit on a meta-metalevel”? It may be, but “both Orientalism and Sinocentrism need some similar ingredients – in this respect both are actually quite similar – that Beyond Sinology constantly critiques and contests” (p. 217).

Any chart that offers to steer us between Scylla and Charybdis demands careful attention. To have two charts is no doubt even better. Perhaps one day it will be possible to download the substance of these studies in cheerful graphics along with the apps that offer to teach Mandarin to young children. For the moment this is what we have.