“Soulstealing”: A Chinese Scholar’s English “Soul-Summoning” in the Autonomization of Chinese

I. Statement of the Problem

A century of Chinese linguistics has been a path of autonomization, from “copying the West wholesale” to “breaking free of the fetters of Indo-European”: Ma Jianzhong copied Latin grammar in the Mashi Wentong,^[1] Lü Shuxiang awakened self-awareness through “destruction” and “construction,”^[2] Zhu Dexi stated plainly that we must “break free of the Indo-European eye,”^[3] and Shen Jiaxuan, with “nouns include verbs,” thoroughly overturned the basic presupposition of the Western separation of word classes.^[4][5] The direction is clear: to liberate Chinese from the grammatical framework of Indo-European, and to grow an autonomous theoretical system out of Chinese’s own linguistic facts and cognitive tradition.

Since the Eighteenth Party Congress, the Party Central Committee has raised the building of China’s autonomous knowledge system to the level of national strategy. In 2022, during his inspection of Renmin University of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that “accelerating the construction of philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics comes down in the end to constructing China’s autonomous knowledge system,” thereby establishing the fundamental goal of philosophical and social-scientific research in China.^[6] In 2024, the General Secretary gave important instructions on the project to study and develop Marxism in the new era, stressing “adherence to the ‘two combinations,’ taking root in the soil of China and carrying forward the Chinese cultural vein,” which established the methodology for philosophical and social-scientific research in China.^[7] In 2026, on promoting the high-quality development of philosophy and social sciences, the General Secretary emphasised once again: “accelerate the construction of an autonomous knowledge system for Chinese philosophy and social sciences, and better answer the questions of China, of the world, of the people and of our times.”^[8]

Yet at a time when the whole country is striving to build China’s autonomous knowledge system, there are scholars in the field of Chinese-language research who speak up for Western linguistic theory. This article takes as its object of study the scholarly output and practice of Wang Renqiang, member of the Party Standing Committee and Vice-President of Sichuan International Studies University. Wang is former director and honorary director of the Lexicography Research Institute of Sichuan International Studies University, a second-grade professor of foreign languages and literature and doctoral supervisor, an academic leader of Chongqing Municipality, vice-president of the Lexicographical Society of China, a former visiting scholar in the United States under Professor Joan Bybee, a past president of the Linguistic Society of America, and the leading developer of the “Quantum Dictionary” system. These titles and achievements compose a standard portrait of an “outstanding scholar.” But his scholarly output and practice present a fact that warrants vigilance: his entire academic practice is, in essence, the systematic reproduction of the cognitive authority of Western theory within China’s own academic system. With “quantum linguistics” as his banner, the “two-level word-class categorisation theory” as his framework, and such institutional powers as vice-president, director of the lexicography institute and provincial academic leader as his support, he seeks — at a moment when Chinese linguistics is breaking free of the fetters of Indo-European and the world is undergoing unprecedented changes on a scale unseen in a century — to place once again the theoretical framework of Anglo-American functional-cognitive linguistics in a dominant position in the study of Chinese, so as to maintain the discursive dominance of Western theory over the study of modern Chinese, prolong Western academia’s cognitive authority over Chinese-language research, and at the level of scholarly roots dissolve the efforts at autonomization of Chinese linguistics. This article holds that the core direction of this practice stands in structural dislocation with the century-long historical trend of autonomization in Chinese linguistics; by way of “soulstealing” it summons back Western theory that is already retreating, and prolongs the discursive dominance of Anglo-American theory over Chinese.

This article takes the 57 papers by Wang Renqiang indexed in CNKI as the basis for a bibliometric analysis and, drawing also on his public academic lectures, reports and news coverage, systematically examines his academic practice across five levels: sources of knowledge, mechanisms of operation, theoretical substance, institutional foundation and historical positioning. The analytical framework unfolds as “source–operation–packaging–mechanism–positioning”: Section II, “Whence Comes the Soul,” defines through bibliometric analysis the structure of the knowledge sources of his academic practice and examines the distribution of the sources of his theoretical tools and intellectual resources; Section III, “Whither Goes the Soul,” demonstrates his threefold operating mechanism — terminology substitution in the name of “quantum,” “correcting” Chinese by English standards, and the accumulation of symbolic capital in the form of academic criticism; Section IV, “The Soul’s Disguise,” exposes the terminology-substitution character of his “quantum linguistics” and analyses the structural dislocation between his academic presentation and the actual character of his academic output; Section V, “The Soul’s Mechanism,” analyses the institutional coupling of his academic identity and academic power, and examines how the academic power structure operates and its intergenerational transmission effects; Section VI, “The Soul’s Paradox,” discusses the structural dislocation between his academic direction and the trend of autonomization of Chinese, and the limits this places on the influence of his theory.

The core question this article seeks to answer is:

How does a Chinese scholar situated in a Chinese university, whose main source of knowledge is Western theory and who concurrently holds administrative office, acquire cognitive authority within China’s academic system — and through what operating mechanisms and institutional conditions does he systematically reproduce the discursive dominance of Western theory in the study of Chinese?

II. Whence Comes the Soul: Wang Renqiang’s Academic Pedigree

To understand the substance of “soulstealing,” one must first trace the intellectual genealogy and theoretical sources of Wang Renqiang’s academic pedigree. To analyse a scholar’s academic affiliation, an effective path is to examine the sources of his theoretical tools and intellectual resources. Statistics on the 57 papers by Wang Renqiang indexed in CNKI show: 35 empirical studies on word-class/conversion labelling, 6 on linguistic theory (of which 1 on the “two-level word-class categorisation theory,” 3 on “quantum linguistics,” and 1 on area studies), with the remainder being short pieces, teaching-reform articles and the like. Tracing the 15 core concepts used in his papers yields: Saussure cited in 26 papers, Croft in 21, Bybee in 16, Nicolescu in 4.^[1] In one fairly representative paper, “A Study of the Correlation between Conversion and Word Frequency in Modern Chinese — with a Review of the Validity of the ‘Principle of Economy’,” Croft is cited 10 times.^[2]

The above data show that Wang Renqiang’s theoretical resources come almost entirely from the Western linguistic tradition, and that his academic pedigree is deeply rooted in Western functional-cognitive linguistics. This means that the basic framework, core categories and criteria of evaluation of his research all derive from the Western theoretical tradition rather than from Chinese’s own linguistic facts and cognitive tradition. This structure of knowledge sources constitutes the theoretical undertone of his subsequent academic practice, and also provides the basis for his research path of examining Chinese by Western standards and “correcting” Chinese by the norms of English dictionaries.

Further analysis of Wang Renqiang’s writings shows that the core components of his theoretical framework — Saussure’s dichotomy, Croft’s expressive function and propositional speech-act function, Bybee’s usage-based theory, and Nicolescu’s transdisciplinary methodology — all derive from the Western academic tradition, none from China.^[1] His “two-level word-class categorisation theory” is in essence a systematic combination of the existing concepts of the above Western scholars, forming an analytical framework addressed to the problem of word classes.^[2][3] As a theoretical contribution, this amounts to conceptual synthesis rather than theoretical innovation.

Wang Renqiang’s academic pedigree can be traced to Joan Bybee, a central figure of the American functionalist school. In 2011, Wang Renqiang published in Zhongguo Waiyu an email interview with Bybee entitled “Usage-based Theory (UBT): A Milestone in American Functionalism — An Interview with Professor Joan L. Bybee.”^[4] In that article, Wang Renqiang characterises Bybee’s theory as a “milestone” and uses this as an important source of his own academic legitimacy.

From the standpoint of academic evaluation, this act has two layers of meaning. First, it establishes the theoretical foundation of Wang Renqiang’s academic practice — the core components of his “two-level word-class categorisation theory” (Bybee’s usage-based theory, Croft’s propositional speech-act function, Saussure’s langue/parole dichotomy) all come from this Western functional-cognitive tradition. Second, it reveals how Wang Renqiang obtains academic legitimacy: by offering highly affirmative evaluations of Western scholars’ theories in a Chinese core journal, he binds his own academic authority to that of Western theory, and thereby obtains an endorsement of cognitive authority within China’s academic system. This pattern is precisely the typical manifestation of his academic practice’s epistemological dependence on the Western theoretical framework.

It is worth noting that a close reading of the interview shows that when Wang Renqiang put the loaded question “We can consider it as a milestone in American functionalism?” to Bybee, Bybee’s own response was rather cautious: she did not give positive confirmation to this highly affirmative characterisation, but offered a more restrained and neutral formulation.^[5] This detail indicates that Wang Renqiang’s “milestone” characterisation of Bybee’s theory is largely a one-sided act of academic evaluation on his part rather than a shared consensus. Even so, the act of evaluation itself suffices to show that Wang Renqiang’s construction of academic legitimacy depends heavily on introducing and affirming the authority of Western theory, and that the direction of his academic practice was therefore at odds with the theoretical pursuit of the autonomization of Chinese from the very beginning.

III. Whither Goes the Soul: Three Operations in Summoning Souls for Anglo-America

(1) In the Name of “Quantum,” the Substance of Exporting Western Learning Eastward

Since 2022, Wang Renqiang has, under the banner of “quantum linguistics,” repeatedly propagated a “polemic” in Chinese academic journals and university lectures — “Newtonian thinking versus quantum thinking.” On the surface, this is a Chinese scholar’s critique of the mainstream Western linguistic paradigm (“Newtonian scientism”). In substance, it is an American functional-cognitive linguist’s disciple in China taking sides, within an internal branch of the Western intellectual tradition, for his teacher’s school.^[1]

“Newtonian thinking” comes from the West, and “quantum thinking” also comes from the West. The definition of “scientism” that Wang Renqiang criticises comes from Hayek (Austrian-British).^[2] This polemic is in essence a dispute among branches within the Western intellectual tradition; Wang Renqiang’s related arguments are an introduction and restatement of that internal dispute in the Chinese academic context.

But he packages this dispute among schools within Anglo-American linguistics as “Chinese autonomous innovation.” When SISU signed an agreement with iFLYTEK on the “Quantum Dictionary,” the press release called Wang Renqiang’s theory a “Chinese original linguistic theory.”^[3] Yet all the core concepts of that theory come from the Western intellectual tradition. When a conceptual system entirely of Western origin is labelled “Chinese original” and circulated in China, its objective effect is to reproduce the cognitive authority of Western theory within China’s academic system rather than to advance autonomous innovation in Chinese linguistics. This is not “Chinese learning as substance, Western learning as function,” but “Western learning as substance, Chinese packaging as surface.”

(2) In the Name of “Proofreading,” the Substance of “English Standards”

Looking across the core work of Wang Renqiang’s more than twenty years of academic practice, it can be summed up in one sentence: using the conversion-labelling norms of English dictionaries as a “normal standard” by which to measure and “correct” Chinese dictionaries.

His core “discovery” is that the conversion-labelling ratio of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (5th edition) is only 5.29%, whereas that of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is 10.48% — on this basis he judges that Chinese dictionaries “under-label,” and that in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary word-class labels and illustrative examples are “at sixes and sevens.” His chain of logic is: English dictionaries are “scientific,” the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary is “unscientific”; the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary is “unscientific” because it does not fully label according to English theory; therefore more conversion words should be labelled, and only when Chinese dictionaries are “more like English dictionaries” will they be scientific and correct.^[1][2]

This judgement that the dictionary “under-labels” presupposes that the English standard is “normal.” But if Chinese is not in fact suited to having every word forcibly tagged with the Aristotelian set of “noun/verb/adjective,” then “a low conversion ratio” is not a problem but a feature — to evaluate chopsticks by the standards of knife and fork is to use the wrong tool and the wrong standard, and the “problem” so derived was never a real problem.

Whether something is scientific does not depend on whether it applies the English categorical framework, but on whether the argument suits its object. Chinese dictionaries take definition as their centre, with word-class labelling serving definition, and have their own scholarly logic; to judge them “unscientific” is in substance to place the categorial standards of Western grammar above the definition-centred tradition of Chinese lexicography. To measure Chinese with an English ruler and then declare Chinese “out of specification” — this is not scholarship but the substance of “English standards” under the name of “proofreading.”

(3) Boundary-Crossing Conduct in the Name of Academic Criticism and Its Institutional Effects

The targets criticised in Wang Renqiang’s series of papers — Lü Shuxiang,^[3] Zhu Dexi,^[4][5][6][7] Shen Jiaxuan,^[8][9] Guo Rui^{[10][11][12][13][14]} and others — are all representative scholars in the field of Chinese linguistics. Lü Shuxiang was a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the first president of the Linguistic Society of China; Zhu Dexi was vice-president of Peking University and president of the Linguistic Society of China; Shen Jiaxuan is a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and president of the Linguistic Society of China; Guo Rui is a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University, deputy head of that department, and deputy director of Peking University’s Centre for Chinese Linguistics. These scholars have long been committed to “breaking free of the Indo-European eye” and to building a grammatical system proper to Chinese. Wang Renqiang, who criticises them, was trained in English lexicography, and all his scholarly tools come from Anglo-American functional-cognitive linguistics — an objective disciplinary distance from theoretical research on Chinese.

This set of operations objectively constitutes boundary-crossing conduct and institutional effects in the form of academic criticism. In terms of actual effect, he targets the most advanced and most discussed themes of autonomous theory in Chinese linguistics, and by seemingly “dialoguing” and “crossing swords” with them objectively creates the appearance of his being part of the mainstream of Chinese-language scholarship. Yet such “critical” articles rarely receive responses or citations in public discussion in the Chinese-language scholarly world. This is no accident: Wang Renqiang was trained in English lexicography, and all his scholarly tools come from Anglo-American functional-cognitive linguistics, so an objective disciplinary distance from theoretical research on Chinese exists. His use of Western tools to “criticise” Chinese indigenous scholars means he is not within the same academic discourse system to begin with. Its nature is not academic dialogue but a practice of self-legitimation in the form of academic criticism — in terms of actual effect, its function is to complete the construction of academic legitimacy and the accumulation of symbolic capital within the academic evaluation system, rather than to advance substantive dialogue in Chinese linguistic theory.

IV. The Soul’s Disguise: Academic Hollowing beneath the “Quantum” Cloak

Wang Renqiang’s academic training is concentrated in dictionary database construction and empirical research, yet his academic presentation seeks to position himself as a theoretical innovator. There is a structural dislocation between this self-positioning and the actual character of his academic output.

The genuine quantum-linguistics research in the international scholarly world — represented by Bob Coecke’s team at Oxford — employs category theory, linear algebra, Lambek pregroup grammar and other mathematical tools to perform compositional operations on semantic vectors within a quantum-computing framework, and its papers are grounded in rigorous mathematical derivation. Yet in Wang Renqiang’s 57 papers to date, no substantive mathematical argument is to be found. His article with a student, “From Large Language Models to the Quantum View of Language,” published in Waiyu Jiaoxue yu Yanjiu in May 2026,^[1] contains a line resembling a formula, but with neither derivation nor computational verification; at the level of academic argument it lacks testability and has only a formal decorative effect as notation.

At the conceptual level, Wang Renqiang renames “conversion” as “wave-particle duality,” “polysemy” as “superposition state,” and “contextual disambiguation” as “quantum collapse” — an operation that is terminology substitution rather than theoretical innovation, and brings no gain in explanatory power. Its nature is not “quantum linguistics” but a “metaphorical borrowing” that uses physics concepts as rhetorical resources to repackage common linguistic-scientific knowledge.

In terms of positioning in the history of the discipline, this “metaphorical borrowing” came about twelve years later than Coecke’s team internationally, and in China later than scholars such as Xu Shenghuan and Peng Xuanwei. Wang Renqiang is neither the founder of this field nor its earliest introducer — his actual role is that of the most active and most public promoter of the “quantum” label within Sichuan International Studies University, in the wake of the later influence of Western quantum linguistics.

As to the actual character of his scholarly operation, what Wang Renqiang does is not the theoretical construction of “quantum linguistics” but the renaming of empirical material from dictionary databases with quantum-physics terminology, the packaging of the ordinary linguistic concept of “conversion” with terms such as “wave-particle duality,” “superposition state” and “collapse,” and its presentation in academic communication as the invention of a new theory. His empirical data are genuine, his theoretical framework comes from existing Western concepts, and his terminology packaging has a rhetorical effect — after the conceptual substitution, the theoretical core has undergone no substantive change.

Wang Renqiang’s “quantum linguistics” exhibits an evident hollowing at the scholarly level: his “theory” lacks mathematical argument, his “innovation” is terminology substitution, his “framework” is conceptual synthesis. The character of his academic practice should be defined as terminology substitution and conceptual borrowing under the name of “quantum linguistics,” rather than theoretical innovation in any genuine sense.

V. The Soul’s Mechanism: The Institutional Coupling of Academic Identity, Power and Legitimacy

(1) The Institutional Coupling of Academic Identity and Academic Power

The reason Wang Renqiang’s academic practice can produce substantive influence lies not in the explanatory power of the theory itself but in the institutional power he holds. Vice-President of Sichuan International Studies University, doctoral supervisor, academic leader in foreign languages and literature for Chongqing Municipality, second-grade professor — these identities, stacked together, form an academic power structure combining the power of resource allocation, the power of academic evaluation and the power of talent cultivation.

The operating characteristics of this power structure are reflected in the student theses he supervised. From the literature examined, the student theses supervised by Wang Renqiang all take the “two-level word-class categorisation theory” as their sole theoretical framework, with no discussion of the theoretical premises themselves; their research designs consist mainly of verifying existing conclusions. His students cite their supervisor’s work at a high rate; in some theses, Wang Renqiang’s published papers occupy a prominent share of the references, and in one case 7 of the 9 references are works published by Wang Renqiang.^[1]

Judging by the features the theses display, the students’ research is concentrated on: selecting a lexical entry, completing a corpus survey according to a set procedure, and reaching conclusions consistent with the supervisor’s theory. In this training model, students’ exposure to indigenous Chinese linguistic resources is relatively limited, and the space for reflecting on and questioning the theoretical premises governing their research is also rather narrow.

The objective effect of this training model is to produce verifiers of the Western linguistic paradigm rather than creators of Chinese scholarship. A scholar who holds institutional power in a foreign-languages university studies Chinese linguistic phenomena with Western logic, methods and concepts, reaches conclusions verifying the correctness of Western theory, and then propagates them in Chinese to Chinese students in Chinese journals — the objective effect of this model of practice is: within China’s academic system, to reproduce the cognitive authority of Western theory systematically, institutionally and across generations.

The emergence of this phenomenon has institutional roots. Wang Renqiang’s academic position is the result of sustained investment of resources inside and outside Sichuan International Studies University — from ordinary teacher to vice-president, from lecturer to second-grade professor, from a student of SISU to doctoral supervisor. When a scholar’s academic standing depends mainly on the accumulation of institutional resources rather than on recognition by the scholarly community, and when his academic power suffices to affect students’ academic prospects, the allocation of resources to teams, the routes by which projects are applied for, and even others’ space for academic development, the academic power structure may form an informal set of operating rules. There thus arises an academic power network bound by “academic” ties, self-reinforcing and relatively closed within SISU, displaying the operating features of academic stratification.

(2) The Construction of Academic Legitimacy in the Perspective of English-Centrism

Wang Renqiang’s criticism of Shen Jiaxuan’s theory that “nouns include verbs” is a typical sample for observing the logic of his academic practice. Using empirical studies of English, Russian, French and Italian as evidence, he repeats the same verdict word for word across four papers — “Mr Shen Jiaxuan mistakes epistemology for ontology, confuses the theoretical model with the real world, and commits what Whitehead called the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.”^[1][2][3][4]

This criticism uses English theory as its framework, English tools as its method and other foreign languages as its evidence, in order to systematically question a Chinese scholar’s theoretical construction regarding Chinese. Although “nouns include verbs” is contested within the Chinese linguistic community, all the theoretical tools Wang Renqiang uses to support this criticism — Croft’s markedness model, Bybee’s usage-based theory, Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” — come from the Western academic tradition. Yet Wang Renqiang himself never questions the existence of the noun-verb separation and the phenomenon of conversion, but instead treats those who deny conversion as an “anomaly” requiring explanation, saying that they “cut the feet to fit the classical-logic shoes” and “wave Occam’s razor.”^[5][6]

Yet the logic on which he criticises Shen Jiaxuan for “mistaking epistemology for ontology” is precisely the logic he himself criticises — the same criticism can turn back on himself. For Wang Renqiang measures Chinese by an English framework and commits the same error, indeed a graver one: he takes an epistemological framework of Western origin as an ontological standard by which to measure all languages. This logical paradox constitutes the fundamental methodological problem of his academic practice: to evaluate negatively the autonomous theoretical construction of Chinese linguistics on the premise of a Western theoretical framework, when the validity of the argument itself depends on an untested presupposition — that the categorial framework of Western grammar has cross-linguistic universal applicability.

The more fundamental paradox is this: a scholar trained in English lexicography uses a set of Western tools with little connection to the Chinese theoretical tradition to make negative evaluations of theoretical constructions in the Chinese-language scholarly world — its nature is not academic dialogue but an institutional boundary-crossing in the form of academic criticism. Its effect is to accumulate symbolic capital within the academic evaluation system, not to advance substantive dialogue in Chinese linguistic theory.

(3) The Dependent Sources of Academic Legitimacy

Vice-president of a foreign-languages university, second-grade professor, academic leader, vice-president of the Lexicographical Society of China — these positions within the academic establishment constitute the institutional basis of his academic authority. Yet the core source of his academic legitimacy is not these institutional identities themselves, but the introduction and dissemination of the authority of Western theory. The confidence behind his “authority” derives to a large extent from this; and this is precisely the source of his entire academic legitimacy. It is for this reason that he has the scholarly confidence to mount “criticism” against the Chinese-language scholarly world — a mode of constructing cognitive authority that relies on the authority of Western theory.

In this mode of constructing cognitive authority, Wang Renqiang styles himself as an authority on “English theory”; his academic writing shows a relatively high rate of self-citation, while his academic judgements of Chinese-language scholars consist mainly of negative evaluations.^[7] This mode of writing objectively constitutes a practice of constructing academic legitimacy that takes Western theory as its resource, China’s academic establishment as its platform and the Chinese-language scholarly world as its object; its core feature is cognitive dependence on the authority of Western theory, rather than autonomous theoretical construction grounded in Chinese’s own linguistic facts.

(4) The Operating Logic of His Academic Practice and the Alienation of Its Institutional Function

At the institutional level, Wang Renqiang’s academic practice displays an operating logic worth analysing: his academic output depends heavily on Western theoretical resources, yet he obtains academic legitimacy within the academic evaluation system by adopting the posture of “criticising Chinese indigenous scholars.” The core of this logic is not substantive exchange of academic views but the strategic accumulation of academic symbolic capital.

The reason this mode of operation works is closely related to the institutional features of the academic evaluation system at Sichuan International Studies University. The university’s current documents on research and professional-title assessment (SISU Doc. [2022] No. 118 and No. 119, SISU Doc. [2024] No. 21, etc.) take the level of the journal in which a paper appears and the level of the outlet of the output as the main quantitative basis; yet although the assessment-reform opinion issued by the university in 2022 already expressly proposed breaking with “paper-only” evaluation, the above method of scoring by outlet level has not been revised in step. If such a gap exists among policy documents themselves, the gap at the level of implementation can readily be imagined.^[1]

Under this institutional arrangement, what assessment asks is in what level of journal something was published, not whether the research addresses a real question — whether research addresses a real question does not easily enter the field of vision of assessment.^[2]

Wang Renqiang’s academic practice is precisely the exploitation of this institutional gap — with English lexicography as the disciplinary outer garment and “interdisciplinarity” as the methodological banner, he completes the accumulation of academic symbolic capital in the marginal zone of the Chinese-language scholarly world.

At the methodological level, this practice displays an evident logical paradox: he measures Chinese by a Western grammatical framework, yet accuses the Chinese-language scholarly world of “cutting the feet to fit the shoes”; he uses borrowed Western theory as his tool of criticism, yet declares that he “represents China” in academic stance. The core of this paradox is that the validity of his argument depends on an untested presupposition — that the categorial framework of Western grammar has cross-linguistic universal applicability. Yet this presupposition is itself precisely what his targets question.

In terms of academic training, Wang Renqiang completed his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral studies in English language and literature at Sichuan International Studies University and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, with training concentrated in English lexicography. He uses the English theoretical system as his analytical tool to make negative evaluations of the academic judgements of Chinese-language scholars — this act is not theoretical dialogue within a single academic discourse system but a systematic questioning of the autonomous theoretical construction of Chinese linguistics on the premise of a Western theoretical framework. Its objective effect is to reproduce the cognitive authority of Western theory within China’s academic system, rather than to advance substantive dialogue in Chinese linguistic theory.

To take Western theory as resource, China’s academic establishment as platform and the Chinese-language scholarly world as object — the nature of this academic practice is not academic dialogue but conduct that, in the form of academic criticism, objectively serves the construction of academic legitimacy. Its objective effect is: to complete within the Chinese academic field a construction of academic legitimacy coloured by Western-centrism and to bring about the accumulation of symbolic capital within the academic evaluation system, rather than to advance substantive dialogue in Chinese linguistic theory.

VI. The Soul’s Paradox: A “Soulstealing” Doomed to Fail

Wang Renqiang’s “soulstealing” is doomed to be futile — there is a structural dislocation between the core direction of his academic practice and the century-long historical trend of autonomization in Chinese linguistics.

The century-long thread of research on Chinese word classes is a path of autonomization from “copying the West wholesale” to “breaking free of the fetters of Indo-European,” Chinese linguistics always taking as its direction the growth of an autonomous theoretical system out of Chinese’s own linguistic facts and cognitive tradition. Wang Renqiang’s academic path is the opposite: Western theory as his analytical tool, English dictionaries as his normative standard, “making Chinese more like English” as his goal of correction. This path stands in structural dislocation with the century-long trend of Chinese linguistics from dependence to autonomy — criticising indigenous scholarship with Western tools, “correcting” Chinese-language research by English standards, and packaging theoretical hollowness with “quantum” terminology.

His academic stance stands in structural dislocation with the historical trend of the autonomization of Chinese linguistics — the theoretical paradigm he defends is retreating. Yet Chinese linguistics no longer needs to establish its own legitimacy by means of Western theory. Chinese has its own logic, its own tradition, its own future.

Conclusion: The Wrong Shrine, the Wrong Soul, the Wrong Post

This article’s analysis shows that Wang Renqiang’s academic practice may be summarised along three dimensions:

“Worshipping at the wrong shrine” — the dependence of theoretical sources. His theoretical tools and theoretical allegiances all come from the Western linguistic tradition, and not one of his core components originates in the Chinese academic tradition. The source of his academic legitimacy is not autonomous theoretical construction grounded in Chinese’s own linguistic facts, but the introduction of and dependence on the authority of Western theory.

“Summoning the wrong soul” — the historical dislocation of academic direction. With Western theory as his analytical tool, English dictionaries as his normative standard and “making Chinese more like English” as his goal of correction, he stands in structural dislocation with the century-long historical trend of autonomization in Chinese linguistics. In substance, he defends a theoretical paradigm that is retreating.

“Guarding the wrong post” — the institutional construction of academic legitimacy. The actual character of his academic output is to take Western theory as resource, China’s academic establishment as platform and the Chinese-language scholarly world as object, and within the academic evaluation system to complete the accumulation of symbolic capital and the consolidation of cognitive authority. Its function lies in constructing academic legitimacy coloured by Western-centrism, not in advancing academic dialogue.

The three form a complete causal chain: the dependence of theoretical sources (worshipping at the wrong shrine) determines the historical dislocation of academic direction (summoning the wrong soul), and the historical dislocation of academic direction is in turn solidified through institutional construction (guarding the wrong post).

Those academic practices that “summon souls” for Western theory in the course of the autonomization of Chinese will in the end find that the talisman has long since lost its power. And Chinese, emerging from the shadow of Indo-European, is returning to its own track, telling its own story in its own voice.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent the position of the Homing Strategic Institute; responsibility for the content rests with the author.
Finalised 20 September 2026