Introduction

Abstract

The present issue of our academic journal, Asian and African Studies, represents one of the many results of such cooperation. The authors are internationally established and well-known Taiwanese scholars with whom the Department of Asian and African Studies has been collaborating in the areas of social studies and humanities for several years. The articles in this volume are published in Chinese, because it is our firm belief that sinological research cannot remain limited to sources in Western languages. The volume not only represents a bridge which links Slovenian and international sinologists to Taiwanese scholarship; it also provides an opportunity for direct insight into the original sources, defining this discourse. Such a decision of the editorial board is based on the conviction that the incorporation of material in native language into any intercultural research framework provides a more objective, and at the same time, hermeneutically more proper understanding of the complex problems under investigation.