On June 17, 2026, the seventh Tang Prize Sinology Award was announced, and Ge Zhaoguang, professor at the Institute of Historical and Literary Studies at Fudan University, was named the laureate. It was the first time since the prize's founding in 2014 that it had been awarded to a scholar whose academic career was built primarily on the Chinese mainland. An international prize bearing the name "Sinology" ran six cycles — twelve years — before it finally placed the trophy in the hands of a scholar rooted in the very culture that is its subject. That in itself is a structural phenomenon worth interrogating.
The Sinology Prize's "Detour" Path
The Tang Prize selection process is modeled on the Nobel Prize: thousands of scholars and institutions worldwide make nominations, and an international committee deliberates. Looking back over the roster of laureates, a clear path emerges:
2014 Yu Ying-shih (US / China / HK), 2016 Wm. Theodore de Bary (US), 2018 Stephen Owen and Shiba Yoshinobu (US / Japan), 2020 Wang Gungwu (Southeast Asia / Australia), 2022 Jessica Rawson (UK), 2024 Cho-yun Hsu (Taiwan / US)
A Sinology prize that alone skirted the Chinese mainland. Critics have observed that the Tang Prize "can only hold supreme the narrow Western values — that is, the Anglo-Saxon culture of the Anglo-American world," and that even the winners of its Sinology prize "must first be fluent in English and, only after winning Western affirmation, be able to loop back around to the East to receive the award."
This "detour" path is, in essence, a gatekeeping system for academic discourse: whether a scholar's achievement is deemed worthy of recognition by "Sinology" does not depend entirely on the depth of the scholarship itself. It depends on whether the work has been published in the internationally circulating academic language, whether it has entered the Western-dominated system of academic evaluation, and whether it has gained sufficient visibility within Western academic circles.
Institutional Bias, or a Debate over Academic Standards?
Huang Chin-shing, the convener of the Tang Prize Sinology Award, has candidly admitted that during deliberations he had "always hoped mainland scholars would appear among the Tang Prize laureates, because it felt strange to him that the birthplace of Chinese culture never won." When even the convener of the deliberations "feels it is strange," it is clear this is not purely a question of academic standards.
A prize system named after "Sinology" spent more than a decade excluding scholars from the mother country of Chinese culture when deciding "who is qualified to study China." This is not the bias of individual judges — it is the Western academic establishment's systemic distrust of knowledge produced indigenously in China. The gate is not set at the checkpoint of scholarly competence; it is set at the checkpoint of "being visible to Western academia."
The way some Taiwanese media covered Ge Zhaoguang's award is also worth noting: several reports went out of their way to foreground his "experience of labor reform during the Cultural Revolution." This narrative frame betrays an ideological filter — using the politicized label of personal experience to erode the primacy of his scholarly achievement.
The Significance and the Limits of Ge Zhaoguang's Award
Ge Zhaoguang's award is a long-overdue breakthrough, but it is not necessarily the end of the bias. At the very least, it proves that research conducted in Chinese as its academic language and completed inside the academic institutions of the Chinese mainland does possess world-class scholarly quality. But a gate does not dismantle itself because of one breakthrough.
Who is entitled to define "Sinology"? Who gets to judge its value? Between scholars of Chinese studies working inside the English-language academic hegemony and scholars writing in Chinese on their own ground, there exists an unequal "translation relationship" — the latter must first be "certified" by the former before they can be "discovered." Ge Zhaoguang's award has broken through one corner of that screen, but the underlying character of the institution has not changed.
From a broader vantage point, this event is structurally homologous with the shift in China's position in the global landscape of knowledge production. China already stands at the top of the world in the sheer volume of scientific and technical papers, but in the discourse power of the humanities and social sciences it still faces a long ascent. The "detour" path of the Tang Prize Sinology Award is this overall pattern refracted through one particular discipline.