Mitja Saje (born 16 August 1947) is a Slovenian sinologist.[1]
Mitja Saje was born in Ljubljana. He studied at both Faculty of Economics and Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. As a student in the time of former nonaligned Yugoslavia he visited most of European countries, the United States, and North Africa. Then together with Andrej Bekeš in winter 1969–1970, with a basic knowledge of Japanese, he travelled to Japan via the Middle East and India and back to Europe through the USSR. In 1971 the two of them travelled to East Africa and started to learn Chinese. In 1972, he graduated at the Faculty of Economics. After graduation, he was employed as consultant for economic development at the Executive council of the Socialist Republic Slovenia. In 1976 he got a postgraduate scholarship to study in China, where he obtained a Master's degree in History of China at Nanjing University. After the return from China he started to conduct a Chinese language course at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. There he received his PhD in 1994 for a thesis discussing the Chinese economy during the Ming dynasty.
He lives and works in Ljubljana. He is married to the painter Wang Huiqin.
In his research he mostly examines subjects related to Chinese economy, Chinese politics, Chinese history and Chinese language. Since 1995, he has been a professor at the Chair of Sinology, Department of Asian and African Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. He was one of the co-founders of this department and chaired it for four years (1995–1998). He retired in 2015 though he still lectures the subjects of Chinese history and Chinese economics. In 2016 got the title Professor Emeritus for his contribution to the development of sinology and Asian studies in Slovenia. Since 2006 he is also teaching Chinese history at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in Croatia.
He is a member of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS). He was one of the hosts of the 'XVI. Biennial Conference of the EACS', which was held in Ljubljana in 2006.
Between 2008 and 2009 he collaborated in the EU-China cultural project on Hallerstein. During this project he hold presentations on Hallerstein's work and his importance for early cultural relations between Europe and China on symposiums in Slovenia, Austria, Czech Republic, Portugal, and China. At the conclusion of this project he edited a monograph on Hallerstein titled Hallerstein –Liu Songling: The Multicultural Legacy of Jesuit Wisdom and Piety at the Qing dynasty Court, which was published in China in Chinese translation in 2014.
After the World Financial Crises in 2009 he is analysing Chinese integration into the global economy and the economic problems of the globalised world order.