ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that in French social science globalisation was negatively understood, namely the anti-American context of the early 1990s, because the crystallisation on the issue of republican universalism, the risk of homogenisation and the risk of cultural relativism in globalisation. It considers "Post-Western Sociology" as neither a weapon to deconstruct the hegemony of Western discourse in the post-colonialist discourse nor the further "ideologicalisation" in the concept of "East", but attempts to jointly construct a kind of sociological knowledge system which is beyond the binary opposition of the West and the non-West. The book also demonstrates the Chinese are both collectivists and individualists as reflected by their circles with different types of trust related to the different modes of association in terms of family, familiar and acquaintance ties.
