zhongguoren

…a sort of reticence in meta-language, in the great metaphysical and/or philosophical systems… responsible, perhaps, for something in the way that ancient and modern Chinese have of explaining their problems, which often is disconcerting to us.

Rather than proceeding to an explanation which, for us, is the only logical one – which seeks the causes, makes the deductions, specifies the motivations, appearance and essences, and at the same time foresees the consequences of an event – an operation which derives from the principle of a logical, metaphysical causality – the Chinese give us a ‘structuralist’ or ‘warring’ (contradictory) portrait. Behind the event itself there appears a combination or an association that bears the seed of the overthrow of the previous order; a battle between good and evil, two-faced people, persecutions, conspiracies, sensational turns of event.

As if the causal, deterministic, metaphysical logic had crumbled before the traumatic occurrence whose advent we question, but without losing the symbolic level, the Chinese-speaking individual describes this event as if he were speaking of a game, a war, a combinatorium… an aesthetic mode of reasoning… By eliminating straight away the problem of an objective truth, it shifts people to a symbolic situation.

--Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women