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This work picks up the long standing debate on the meaning of sinology, and particularly one of the latest contributions by "The Epistemology of China Studies: Oral History Project" hosted by the Research and Educational Center for Mainland China and Cross-Strait Relation at the National Taiwan University (NTU). It takes as a springboard the theoretical assumption about the floating meaning of sinology, which can never be fixed due to the shifting nature of disciplinary boundaries in the manner in which all knowledge is relative. It looks at the example the sinology department at the University of Warsaw (UW) and asks what counts as a discipline-specific knowledge according to the Polish academia. In order to answer this question it analyses the rhetorical work involved in the defining sinologists and defending the discipline in the selected works and interviews with the Polish scholars working on China. It comments on the phenomenon of creating disciplinary labels, the role of the external pressure on the knowledge production and the ways in which this pressure is mediated and assimilated by the staff of the sinology department at the UW.

This study looks at how an understanding of sinology as a discipline evolved among Polish specialists on China against the background of the epistemological debates on the study of China in the Western world. Based on interviews and focusing on two periods in the history of postwar Polish sinology – the 1950s-1960s and then the 1990s and thereafter – it provides insights into the discourses among academics. The findings from an analysis of the interviews demonstrate that the epistemological divide on the study of China in Western intellectual spheres has been particularly marked in academic circles in Poland. This is evident in the debates among Polish scholars who struggle both to establish the meaning of sinology and, at the same time, to determine the future of their profession. Whereas this divide has greatly influenced the program of sinological training at the University of Warsaw, it has not had an influence in Poznań and Łódź, the two other centers of sinology in Poland.