When the Tang Prize Is Awarded to the Intellectually Blind: A Critique of Ge Zhaoguang's Paradigm in Chinese Intellectual History

On April 29, 2025, at Stanford University, Professor Ge Zhaoguang asserted in a private exchange that Laozi's thought was no more than "fabricated by later generations." One year later, on June 17, 2026, the Seventh Tang Prize in Sinology was awarded exclusively to Ge Zhaoguang, making him the first scholar whose entire academic career was rooted in mainland China to receive this highest honor in Sinology. The juxtaposition of these two events constitutes the most striking cognitive paradox in contemporary Sinology — and the direct impetus for this paper. This paper targets two levels of critique: first, Professor Ge Zhaoguang as an individual scholar, whose methodology in intellectual history contains a systematic blind spot in the cosmological dimension; second, the Tang Prize Committee as an institution, which has granted this cosmological blind spot the highest level of global academic endorsement. Proceeding from the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) framework, this paper takes up the three publicly stated award rationales — peripheral historiography, popular intellectual history, and global dialogue capacity — and mounts a systematic cosmological refutation of each, demonstrating that the Committee's three commendations are precisely the three levels of cosmological blindness. The core arguments are as follows. First, Ge Zhaoguang's "viewing China from the periphery" merely diversifies the sources of historical noise; the cosmological axis does not lie in the periphery but in the Great Transformation (Dao follows Nature). Second, "popular intellectual history" substitutes hierarchical confusion for qualitative discrimination, placing sageic cosmology alongside folk techniques and thereby destroying the meta-judgment capacity upon which intellectual history depends. Third, "global dialogue" with postmodern constructivism is the mutual institutional confirmation of two paradigms sharing the same cosmological blind spot — producing no light, only amplifying blindness. The deeper critique targets the fourfold self-implosion of Ge's methodology: the self-paradox of "de-contextualization," constructivism's erasure of the legitimacy of sageic intuition, the cognitive downgrade of the "intellectual mean," and the confusion of instrumental completeness with epistemic ultimacy. Diagnosed through the Sage Entropy formula (dS/dt = ρr · DAF / ΔCCF): Ge Zhaoguang's paradigm operates in a high-entropy accelerating state — high DAF (deconstructive drive), ΔCCF approaching zero (cosmological reverence extinguished) — abundant in knowledge output yet in reality accelerating the dissipation of civilizational thought-energy. The Tang Prize's institutional endorsement crowns this dissipation process as the supreme paradigm: a collective misdiagnosis at the civilizational level. The paper concludes with a call: genuine Sinological renewal lies not in collecting peripheral documents ever further, sampling popular noise ever more broadly, or enlisting more global dialogue partners — but in rekindling reverence for the cosmic source and rebuilding intellectual history's anchor through a correct cosmology.