The Question of Technology in China

A study of the historico-metaphysical question of technology, shedding new light on the question of technology in China.

Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its connection to metaphysics found a receptive audience in the East. However, the concept that there exists... only one – originally Greek – type of technology has become an obstacle to any original critical understanding of technology in contemporary Chinese thought. Yuk Hui asserts the urgent need to imagine a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology that can respond to Heidegger's challenge while at the same time problematizing the assertion of technology and technologies as anthropologically universal.

This study of the historico-metaphysical question of technology, relying on the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler, and presenting the history of modern Eastern philosophical thought (including figures such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani), largely unknown to Russian readers, sheds new light on the question of technology in China. Why has technology never been thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How has the traditional concept of Qi transformed in relation to Dao as China embraced technological modernity and Westernization?

In the "Question of Technology in China," a systematic historical overview of the main concepts of traditional Chinese thought is accompanied by an original investigation of these issues and leads to the question: how can Chinese thought today contribute
to a critical reassessment of globalized technology from cosmo-technical perspectives?