Le syndrome chinois des idéologues ou les débuts de la sociolinguistique (J. Jamin) The Ideologists' political imagination sees the Chinese social hierarchy, cominated by the Mandarins, as a fascinating pattern, -is it a model or not? -for the status of French inteUectuals (then called: la classe savante) in the state that is being founded. The visit of the Chinaman Tchong-A-Sam to Paris in 1799, initiates a debate on another type of hierarchy: that of the world's languages, and leads fmally to significant choices about the shaping of concepts and inquiry procedures of the then emerging sciences: ethnography and sociolinguistics.