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Theorizing the Politics of

Translation in a Global EraGuo Yangshenga

aSouthwestern University of Finance and Economics,

P.R. China

Published online: 21 Feb 2014.

To cite this article:Guo Yangsheng (2009) Theorizing the Politics of Translation in aGlobal Era, The Translator, 15:2, 239-259, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2009.10799280

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ISSN 1355-6509 St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

The Translator. Volume 15, Number 2 (2009), 239-59 ISBN 978-1-905763-14-6

Theorizing the Politics of Translation in a

Global Era

A Chinese Perspective

GUO YANGSHENG

Southwestern University of Finance and Economics,

P.R. China

Abstract.In an age of globalization that is characterized by per-vasive use of various forms of translation within different political

contexts, theorizing the politics of translation assumes consider-

able importance. Such theorization has to move beyond linguistic,

textual, cultural and national boundaries by way of re-examining

lived and living experiences of the politics of translation and must

involve reconstructing and rewriting the history of translation. This

article seeks to explain, from a Chinese point of view, the political

impact of globalization on translation, and to identify the domestic

and international challenges that Chinese translation theorists facein theorizing the politics of Chinese translation within a postmodern,

postcolonial and globalized context. Finally, it explores whether this

Chinese effort to politicize translation can open up a new space for

a much-needed intercivilizational dialogue with the West.1

Keywords. Cultural values, Globalization, hh, Identity, Intercivilizational

dialogue, Politics of translation

The world has entered the age of globalization. In a sense, living in a globaliz-

ing world means living in translation not just the physical translation of

texts, but also the ideas, values, practices, ways of life and habits of mind that

have been carried from one culture to another, or ferried to and fro between

cultures. In this sense, translation can be considered an agent of globalization.

By the same logic, to live now is to translate. For non-Western peoples, in

particular, survival depends heavily on how well they can translate, literally

and metaphorically, the dominant language of the West. In this situation, the

1In this article, as in much scholarly and lay discourse, the West is used as a shorthand

reference to traditional centres of power, mostly located in Northern Europe and North

America.

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Theorizing the Politics of Translation in a Global Era240

politics of translation assumes more importance than ever before.

Before embarking on a discussion of the politics of translation, it is

necessary to address the question of what globalization actually means. While

descriptions and denitions of globalization abound and vary, David Smith,an advocate of intercivilizational dialogue in educational studies, offers an

exposition of the term that is particularly useful here. According to Smith

(2000:3-18), globalization can be understood in two phases or modalities as

facticity and as an imaginary. In terms offacticity, globalization refers to

the current global physical condition of interconnection, interrelatedness and

interdependence resulting from the great discoveries of Bartolomeu Dias

(1450-1500), Christopher Columbus (1436-1506), Vasco da Gama (1469-

1524) and Ferdinand Megellan (1480-1521) and the tension between Euro-

American globalizing agendas and projects and the global forces of resistanceto them. One example of such tension is the ongoing effort to institute global

economic integration through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and

the worldwide demonstrations against the WTO in recent years. In terms of

the imaginary, globalization refers mainly to predominant essentialist and

formulaic Euro-American economic theories derived from the Christian Fall

and Redemption mythology and the Enlightenment Reason, which claim to

be universally applicable. This new vision of globalization aimed at estab-

lishing a global market system based on Western values has been described

as fundamentally an extension of the old colonial dream (e.g. David Loy1997:15-28) in a new disguise.

As Smith goes on to suggest, the term global era, though used now to

describe the most recent stage of human development, does not imply that

the world has transcended its post (post-Fordist, post-Cold War, postmodern,

postcolonial) conditions of decentralization, plurality, relativism, uncertainty

and conicts which have long characterized the relationships between the East

and the West, and the North and the South.Instead, it suggests that humankind

is now living in such a state of interdependence and conict potential or real

that intercivilizational dialogues are becoming more urgently needed than

ever. In what follows, I will rst offer an analysis of whatglobalizationmeans

to a non-Western people, the Chinese, and then attempt to theorize how the

politics of translation is played out within the Chinese context a contextthat

is conditioned by globalization as facticity and as a Western imaginary.

1. A Chinese vision of globalization

It should be noted that the word Chinese does not actually stand for a uniform,homogeneous and undivided point of view (see Cheung 2006), any more than

the West does, especially given the fact that Greater China is now a loosely

constructed entity of political, ideological and even cultural differences. In

most cases, in the discussion that follows, Chinese is used to refer to the

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Guo Yangsheng 241

mainstream viewpoints and positions in and of the Chinese mainland.

It is beyond the reach of this article to describe comprehensively what a

Chinese vision of globalization looks like, since that would involve a complex

examination of historical, religious, cultural, social, political and intellectualdevelopments, most notably Confucianism and Communism, in China. For our

purposes here, however, a Chinese vision of globalization can be interpreted as

at once a response to, and a reaction against the two modalities of globalization

described by Smith. In the post-Mao era, towards the end of the 1970s, the para-

mount political leader Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) decided to promote greater

interaction between China and the rest of the world to foster modernization

of Chinas industry, agriculture, defence and science and technology. A heavy

political emphasis was placed on translation, which was expected to pave the

way for a major historical reorientation and transition in politics, diplomaticrelations, military affairs, science and technology, the social and economic

structure, education and culture. The massive programme of translation (mainly

of the West) from the early 1980s onwards2did help to generate a fast pace of

modernization in the PRC. At the same time, it led to one wave after another

of socioeconomic, intellectual, and political unrest, culminating in the tragic

Tiananmen Incident of 1989.3Signicantly, the day after the Incident, Deng

remarked that the riot was inevitable. It was determined, according to him,

by the larger international climate, and by the smaller, domestic climate cre-

ated by a small number of people who held Western bourgeois liberal values

and were determined to Westernize China (Deng 2001).

Deng did not elaborate on what he meant by the larger international

climate. From his use of phrases such as Western bourgeois liberal values

and Westernize China, however, it seems clear that he was referring to what

Smith (1999) would call the vision of globalization represented by the then

Reagan-Thatcher alliance. Under that alliance, Smith observed, a series of

neo-liberal initiatives were implemented on two interrelated fronts: (1) the

establishment of a global, universal and non-negotiable system of marketeconomy; and (2) the launching of ideological wars against non-Western politi-

cal systems represented by the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. The fall of

the latter at the beginning of the 1990s was interpreted as further proof of the

universal truth of economic fundamentalism (Smith 1999:25). The complicated

political relationships between the Reagan-Thatcher alliance and the Chinese

Communist Party are beyond the scope of this article. Sufce it to say that

according to the Chinese (Communist) perspective, the PRC wasthe target of

2

See, for example, Guo and Deng (2008) for more details on the pace and range oftranslations in this period.3 In the Chinese mainland, quite a number of words are ofcially used to name what

happened in late spring and early summer of that year, including (turmoil), (upheaval, riot) and(student unrest).Incident is chosen here as a relatively neutralword in this context.

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the alliances peaceful transformation and was contained by an international

politics that operated primarily through the workings of economic forces. From

the mid-1980s until the late 1990s the West, headed by the United States, was

applying great pressure on China to move towards a market economy. Forexample, Chinas thirteen-year effort to gain admission into the World Trade

Organization (WTO) was characterized by rounds of concessions involving a

nation-wide radical restructuring of state-owned and private businesses to meet

Western market standards. Thousands of factories were closed as a result and

millions of workers lost their jobs. In many other segments of its economy,

too, China has been preoccupied with translating into its own economic policy

what Loy (1997) calls the market theology of the West represented by the

World Bank, General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), International

Monetary Fund (IMF), and WTO (see Chen Jian et al.2006).The globalizing economic fundamentalism described above, along with its

associated strategies, means of domination and its goal of promoting peaceful

transformation, were posing a serious political challenge to China. What Deng

called the smaller domestic climate was fuelled by the massive inux, through

translation initiated in the 1980s by the Chinese intellectuals themselves, of

Western political philosophies, values, post scholarships (postmodernism,

deconstructionism, postcolonial and feminist theory, etc.) and pop culture. The

new ideas imported by this small number of people holding Western bourgeois

liberal values and determined to westernize China were found so threateningand subversive that Dengs Party launched a series of Anti-Spiritual Pollution

and Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization campaigns to strengthen the legitimacy

of its leadership (Guo and Deng 2008:35-47). Tension mounted as a result,

leading to the tragic Incident of 1989.

Even though the conservatives differed sharply from the progressives in

the resolute way they insisted on maintaining the single-party political system

in the PRC both groups embraced modernizationas the dream of national

rejuvenation. It is this dream to be accomplished via translation (in both the

narrow and broad senses) that constitutes Chinas vision of globalization.

This stands in sharp contrast to the new vision of globalization prevalent in

the Euro-American world in the last few decades, that is, the old colonial

dream disguised as economic theories that are universally true, universally

applicable, and hence readily translatable (Smith 1999:25).

Since the Chinese vision of globalization is aimed primarily at rejuvenation

of the self while the Euro-American vision is directed more towards the

peaceful (?) transformation of others, the politics of translation is also played

out differently. The next section will examine the gaps/differences betweenChinese and Western conceptualizations and understandings of the politics

of translation. These gaps/differences, having resulted from an asymmetry of

4And they still do.

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Guo Yangsheng 243

political experiences and intellectual paradigms, pose major challenges to the

Chinese translation community in theorizing the politics of Chinese translation

within Chinas political culture.

1.1 What politics (zhengzhi,) means to the Chinese

In order to identify the challenges to Chinese theorization of the politics of

translation, it is necessary to consider what politics means to the Chinese,

whose political history is different from that of the West. Semantically, like

the words identity, representationand citizenship, the English wordpolitics

does not have the same meaning as its Chinese equivalentzhengzhi, which is

etymologically a loan word from Japanese. In the words of a Chinese graduate

student reecting on his experience of living with the concept of politics:

When I rst came to North America from post-Mao China over a

decade ago, I was shocked when a professor told me We have bad

politicshere in our Faculty. What? Did I hear him wrong? .

To someone from a politically overcharged society,politicsis a scary

word, so scary that it is almost sacred. The three-syllable utterance the

professor made invoked in me lived and living memories and haunting

images obtained from numerous massive, violent, and chaotic move-

ments and campaigns: high school classmates committing suicide for

fear of the consequences of some politically incorrect remarks theyhad unintentionally made; the Rightists or Reactionaries howling

helplessly as they were beaten savagely in front of hundreds of people

at political gatherings; skinny or dropsy-stricken parents, grandparents,

and neighbours starving to death while the state-controlled media cel-

ebrated bumper harvests;academics, artists, writers, and scientists being

bundled into jails; hot-blooded young people being killed for their

revolutionary ideologies or activities; millions and millions of people

perishing during the Civil Wars, the Anti-Japanese War, and the wars

against Western colonial powers. (Xiao, a graduate student from Chinawho has been in correspondence with the author)

In my minds eye, the student continued, politics was a fully armed,

iron-faced and ever-invincible unknown force, whose sword was ready to

crush anyone daring to stand up against its rule or rulings. Consequently, the

meaning of politics proved a kind of blind spot in Xiaos fully grown political

consciousness, where politics remained simply a black hole of fear and terror.

What surprised him most was that the most authoritative Chinese dictionary

deneszhengzhi(politics) as:

Activities of governments, political parties, social groups and indi-

viduals in internal affairs and international relations. As the distilled

expression of economics, politics is derived from and serves the given

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economic base, and meanwhile greatly inuences economic develop-

ment. (Lu Shuxiang 1983:1069; my translation)

Whereas in English, according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary,politicsmeans:

1. a: the art or science of government; b: the art or science concerned

with guiding or inuencing governmental policy; c:the art or science

concerned with winning and holding control over a government;

2. political actions, practices, or policies;

3. a:political affairs or business; especially:competition between com-

peting interest groups or individuals for power and leadership (as in a

government); b:political life especially as a principal activity or profes-

sion; c:political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest

practices;

4. the political opinions or sympathies of a person;

5. a:the total complex of relations between people living in society;

b:relations or conduct in a particular area of experience especially as

seen or dealt with from a political point of view.

Thus, even at the terminological level there are differences between

politicsandzhengzhi, and the two terms are, connotatively and denotatively,

only partially equivalent to each other. The Chinese dictionary denition ofzhengzhiis derived from the more classical strands of Marxism-Leninism.

Hierarchically, from governments down to individuals,zhengzhiis sweep-

ingly and even ambiguously dened, focusing on class struggle stemming from

economic status, social and ideological differences and group interests. Since

only a very limited number of people are actually involved in the operative

process ofzhengzhi, this concept is mystifying to the masses of people, who

look uponzhengzhialmost as a forbidden zone.Politics, by contrast, is very

clearly, democratically and elaborately dened. This dening process has

demystied and secularized the concept, so thatpolitics seems to be able torefer to any human activity.

At the level of daily life,zhengzhimay sound quite different to a Chinese

ear from the waypoliticsmay sound to an English ear. To the average, politi-

cally conscious Chinese mind, the term zhengzhiis always alive, not only

with memories of the Cultural Revolution but also with images of Chinese

anti-colonial, anti-feudalistic, anti-reactionary and proletarian revolutionary

struggles for survival during the last few centuries. To such a mind, English

terms and phrases such as ofce politics, gesture politics and bad politics

in the Faculty are alien and strange Chinese has other, less political termsto express such trivial stuff. While in Englishpoliticscan beplayedlike a

toy or game with preset rules, for the Chinesezhengzhiis something for which

one lives or dies.

Because of these differences between China and the West in the con-

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Guo Yangsheng 245

ceptualization of politics, and in the range, depth and weight of those

experiences carried by the terms zhengzhi and politics, the Chinese in the

PRC generally react to the idea of zhengzhidifferently from Westerners.

Among the Chinese,zhengzhiis either treated with skepticism or wariness,or dismissed altogether as an endless power struggle within the echelons of

ofcialdom. The people understand all too well, however, that their political

responsibility is to follow, with total loyalty, those who hold power. In such

a political culture, it is not surprising that even intellectuals would distance

themselves from political engagement. Research on politically sensitive

issues or just political issues is avoided; ofcial sponsorship of research

projects is limited to mainstream topics prescribed by the government or its

representatives in the academic world. Research results of studies not ofcially

endorsed do not stand much chance of getting published, let alone winningacademic awards. As for the older generation of scholars, the fresh memory

of the political movements they experienced under Mao, in which intellectu-

als were purged for making their voices heard,5tends to make them shy away

from political theorization. Even the younger generation is not likely to be

more outspoken. Theorizing the politics of translation, which could be viewed

as patternizing political tensions from textual, inter-textual and extra-textual

perspectives, involves engagement with a whole set of political principles,

standards, positions and associated methodologies; scholars undertaking such

a venture would run many political risks.

Where translation studies is concerned,zhengzhi has, somewhat paradoxi-

cally, led to both a political over-sensitivity and a political insensitivity.

Translation studies scholars on the Chinese mainland have developed an alert

political consciousness, borne of political experience, which asserts itself in

some form of self-censorship. Thus they are generally allergic to the idea

of politics, which they have derived exclusively from the Marxist-Leninist-

Maoist discourse on politics. Within this discursive tradition, translation, like

literature and art, is regarded as part of the superstructure, and as a weapon

against foreign colonial powers and domestic reactionary forces. Chinese

translators have been judged by their political loyalties and divided into two

opposing camps: Leftist vs. Rightist, Proletarian vs. Bourgeois, Progressive vs.

Reactionary. Consequently, Chinese translation scholars are often unaware that

politics could operate in other ways (as dened in an English dictionary, for

example). What the West, through theorization, has produced on the politics

of translation (say, the Theory of Manipulation) may not be considered by a

Chinese scholar to be politically signicant, and what a Chinese scholar regards

as politically important may, realistically, be beyond theorization because it

is outside the limits of permissible discourse in the PRC.

5There is a long list of ideological and political campaigns carried out under Maos lead-

ership, including criticism of the movie The Story of Wu Shun(1951); suppressing the

Anti-revolutionary Group Headed by Hu Feng (1952-1955); Anti-Rightist Movement

(1957-1958); and the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-76) (see Zhu et al.1992).

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2. The teeth of translation

An anecdote from an earlier phase of Chinese translation of the West offers

a powerful illustration of the politics of translation in China. In the 1860s(the later Qing Dynasty), when Western colonial powers were trying to break

Chinas closed door policy and force their way into the Middle Kingdom, an

open-minded imperial court ofcial named Xu Jishe (,1795-1873)sponsored a translation of a brief survey of Western European countries. Be-

fore then, even the better-educated Chinese were content categorically to call

Western Europeans red-haired barbarians, orfolangji() (Shen Fuwei1987:263), perhaps a transliteration of the Persian termfolangi(foreigners).

With more folangjipersistently harassing the coastal areas of the Celestial

Empire, the Chinese began to sense some differences among the foreigners.The translation, which the patron/ofcial presented to the emperor, tried to

differentiate Western European countries through transliteration. It gave the

Chinese namesputaoya()for the country Portugal and xibanya() for Spain. As transliterations, these two Chinese names did not meananything. Literally,xi-ban-yaand pu-tao-yaare respectively three separate

Chinese characters:xi West, ban team or class,ya tooth;puand taoboth

stand for grape independently, but they can also be used together.

The translation, however, led another imperial ofcial Xu Tong(,1819-1900), a staunch supporter of the closed door policy to petition thethrone. In the statement, Xu said:

It might make a little sense to say thatputao(, grapes) have teeth.But what isxiban()? How could it grow teeth? Apparently theMinister was making a false statement to the throne, and I hereby

earnestly demand that the Minister be accused of deceiving the throne.

(Zhu Haijun 2000:8; my translation)

If so charged and convicted, the minister, perhaps along with his whole, ex-

tended family, would be beheaded, given the practice of wenziyu()6that was prevalent in the Qing dynasty.

No one knows whether the other court ofcial accused the patron out of

ignorance or political intention. But this historical case deserves examination,

from both a linguistic and a political point of view. Linguistically, it shows

how difcult it was, still is, to translate European alphabetic and word-based

languages into pictographic, ideographic and character-based Chinese. The

fact that each Chinese character can at once stand alone as an independent

word and serve as a morpheme to form a word with (an)other character(s)6Literally, the imprisonment or execution of an author for writing something considered

offensive by the imperial court; this practice was mainly directed against intellectuals of

the Han nationality, the demographic majority in the country, who were feared by the ruling

(but outnumbered) Manchus of the Qing Dynasty.

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Guo Yangsheng 249

a systematic, objective account of phenomena that is high in explanatory and

predictive power) has yet to be proposed and presented to the international

translation community. This is not just because the conservatives have not

produced anything more substantial than arguing for the merits of traditionalChinese translation theory. It is also related to the complex issue of the poli-

tics of identity in a globalizing world, and to the intellectual entrapment of

post scholarship. Western post scholarship initially a political voice of

intellectuals coming from the peripheries and now living in the heart of the

West (Smith 1999) has helped to weaken the Western empire of discursive

hegemony considerably, thus providing an opportunity for minority dis-

courses, such as Chinese theorizing of translation, to emerge. Yet the very

political quality of post scholarship at times could be counterproductive.

A case in point is the experience of H. L. Gates. Gates complained to hiscolleagues (in Zhang Xudong 2000) that when the moment came at last for

the African-American people to construct their own subjectivity and cultural

history, they were told that everyone else had already discarded subjectivity

and history as theoretically meaningless. A similar realization could well be

awaiting Chinese translation scholars.

The differences between China and the West in their conceptualizations

of and sensitivity towardspolitics, the complexity of the politics of identity

in a postcolonial world and the intellectual predicament posed by Western

post scholarships are all factors that would discourage Chinese translationscholars from embarking on projects that might be construed as political.

In spite of this, I believe it is an intellectual, moral and certainly political

imperative to understand Chinese translation from a political point of view.

It is through investigating the political patterns of interfacing and interaction

through translation between China, as one of the major civilizations of the

world, and the West the realistically unavoidable Other against which China

has been trying to dene itself, especially over the last two centuries that

Chinese translation scholars can hold effective dialogues with the West.In a

way, only through a political perspective could one make logical sense of whathas happened and what is happening to Chinese translation of the West as a

whole as a dynamic and ever-unfolding text merging itself with the political

intertextuality of global translation.

Since the Chinese experience of translating the West has been extensive,

profound and complex, the following section will attempt to go back in

history and to understand Chinese translation of the West from a political

point of view.8The analysis will cover the missionary-convert translations that

marked the beginning of Chinas engagement with modernizing Europe, and

translations in the late Qing and early Republican era (the late 19th and early

8In recent years, quite a number of scholars have published papers using Western theories

of the politics of translation to reect on Chinas translation practice especially from the

late Qing Dynasty to 1960s. These include Cui Bo (2007) and Zha Mingjian (2004).

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20th century). An explication of the kind of political perspective adopted by

the author precedes the analysis.

4. Theorizing the politics of Chinese translation

In China,(lilun, theory) is dened literally as a systematic conclusion ofthe knowledge of Nature and society drawn from practice (Lu 1983:686; my

translation). If this denition is not too different from that found in an English

dictionary, the actof theorizing (that is, forming a theory about something),

which does not actually have a Chinese equivalent, is conducted differently

within Chinas political context. For this discussion, it is useful to borrow from

education studies the concept of hidden curriculum that is, the norms, values

and social expectations indirectly conveyed to students by the styles of teach-ing, unarticulated assumptions in teaching materials and the organizational

characteristics of educational institutions. It follows in the Chinese context

that any theorization in sociology and the humanities is subject to the control

of the hidden theory(of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng

Xiaoping Theory), understood as an all-inclusive system that is constantly

expanding and developing. Consequently, all theorization has to begin from

and end in that master framework of the hidden theory.

In the discipline of translation studies, the operation of this hidden theory

can be clearly seen in the practice of placing the Chinese Communist Partyright at the centre of the ofcial history of translation, and in the treatment of

actual translation activities as a tool serving the political will and agendas of

the Party. It is also evident in the practice of employing a Marxist hermeneutics

to interpret/write the history of translation in the pre-Communist eras (e.g.

Ma Zuyi 1999).

This hidden theory, being hidden and hence sinister because it is potentially

tyrannical, must be contested. This can be done by offering an alternative

reading of Chinas translation of the West during the pre-modern period

from the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to the end of the Qing Dynasty

(1644-1911) and modern period (from the May 4th Movement of 1919 to

1949, when the PRC was founded). In a sense, the history of translation of the

West in these periods can be interpreted as one of political translation of the

Euro-American world. It is political because translation was almost always

politically motivated and the teeth of translation have always been there,

ready to bite, leading to political consequences. It is also political because

the meaning and signicance of translation cannot be understood fully without

an understanding of the political climate (Sinocentrism, national survival andxenophobia at different historical periods), and/or the circumstances in which

translation took place. The circumstances may have taken the form of court

intrigues, domestic struggles for power, national needs to import Western ideas,

science and technology, or conicts between China and the West.

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Guo Yangsheng 251

This history can be traced back to the missionary-convert translation of

the late Ming and early Qing (1644-1911) dynasties during which China,

in spite of its closed door policy, experienced its rst large-scale engagement

with Western modernity. It was an encounter between two widely differentcultures, one secular, agriculture-based and Sinocentric, and the other

market-as-theology-minded, industry-based, trade-oriented and logocentric

(i.e., adhering to the word of God). Initially, China rejected the West as just

another vassal somewhere in the distant margins of Terra Incognita on its

China-centred map. The West, by contrast, inspired by Marco Polo, was eye-

ing China for market, wealth and prosperity. As mentioned in the Library of

Congress Vatican Exhibit (n.d.), the horizons of Romes intellectuals had

widened enormously. They now included not only Rome, Greece and Egypt

but a Far Eastern culture that westerners had hardly known since the days ofMarco Polo China.

Romes journey into the heartland of China, however, was difcult. The

determination of the Roman Catholic Church to convert the Chinese was

fully matched by the resolution of the late Ming Dynasty to reject the outside

world. It took some fty years for members of the China mission, including

Francis Xavier (1506-52) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), to nd their way

to Beijing. Even then, the missionaries were fully aware that their activities

had to be carefully camouaged, and the translation of science and philoso-

phy they initiated was intended primarily as a way of attracting the Chineseto the Church. The heavy involvement of the Chinese converts in the work

of translation mostly as collaborators would seem to suggest that the

missionary strategy worked. However, it has been pointed out that the convert

translators particularly the Three Pillars of the Catholic Church in China

Xu Guangqi (Paul Hsu, 1562-1633), Li Zhizao (Leo Lee, 1565-1630) and

Yang Tingyun (Michael Yang, 1557-1627) turned to Catholicism more as a

way out of the intellectual, moral and philosophical predicament of the day

than out of genuine religious faith (see Chen 1992).In any case, translation

issues, such as the manipulative treatment of the word God and the decision

to include the translation of Aristotles works in the Siku quanshu,10represented

a compromise between the missionaries and their convert co-translators, one

that allowed both parties to achieve their respective ends. All these, in turn,

were subject to politics on a larger scale: the conict between the authority

of the Pope in Rome and the emperor in China, both of whom regarded their

authority as supreme. Lost in the gaps between logocentrism and Sinocentrism,

this rst China-West engagement through translation ended prematurely, when

9The lines taken by Catholic and missionary scholars were, and still are, quite different,

and these Chinese converts are thought to have had a genuine belief in Christianity.10Siku quanshu (Imperial Catalogue or Four Partite Library, completed in 1782) is the

worlds longest series of books, containing 3,503 titles bound into more than 36,000 books

and totalling 853,456 pages.

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Guo Yangsheng 253

throwing the country into a civil war, and extending Chinas political reality as

a semi-colonized country. All these were reected in Chiangs book,Chinas

Destiny and Chinese Economic Theory(1947). Chiangs fate and his Partys

defeat in the Civil War suggest that the teeth of translation once again werebiting, and biting hard, and the effect was painfully felt by the entire nation.

The discussion above offers a glimpse of a few episodes in the grand

political narrative of modern Chinese translation. The narrative was informed

by a sense of political mission, initially to open up China to the outside world

and later on to secure the survival of the Chinese nation in the face of Western

colonization and neocolonial practices. It is hardly surprising, then, that transla-

tion was conducted in a utilitarian manner. This was occasionally accompanied

by a Sinocentric view of China (particularly during the late Ming Dynasty in

the rst half of the 17th century, and much of the Qing Dynasty) as culturally,and especially morally superior to the West.

This note of Sinocentrism must be stressed in attempts to theorize the poli-

tics of translation in China. There have been signs (since the late 1980s) that

Sinocentrism is on the rise in the PRC again as the Chinese people become

further engaged in an all-out effort to translate the Western neo-theology of

the market with a view to winning the game of global economic competition.

The note of Sinocentrism rang loudest in the late 1990s, with the publication

of the book China Can Say No(Song Qianget al. 1996). The book appeared

on the eve of the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 anevent regarded by all Chinese in the PRC as marking the end of a long chapter

in the Euro-American history of global colonization. Inspired by The Japan

That Can Say No(A. Morita and S. Ishihara, trans. by Junkeyuan in 1990),

China Can Say No, written by ve young men in their twenties and thirties

who had never been to the West, swept the country. Within three weeks, over

two hundred thousand copies were sold. In October of the same year, the ve

authors published their next bestseller, China Can Still Say No. In December,

another book in this vein, Behind Demonization of China(Li et al.1996),

written by eight Chinese scholars and students in the United States, became

the No. 1 bestseller. The books listed the negative things done to the Chinese

by the West, including Western manipulations and interferences in the Taiwan

Issue, Tibetan separatist efforts, Chinas seemingly ever-delayed admission to

the WTO, and Chinas failure in bidding for the 2000 Olympic Games.14They

called on China to stand up to the West. It is noteworthy that the books part

of the Chinese reaction to what can be called the Western mission of global-

ization came out just at the point when China was perhaps nally ready to

rise as a global power, and was to have a voice in international politics. Anytheorization of the politics of translation should take into consideration this

14The books are structured such that all these topics are mentioned and discussed randomly,

without sustained or systematic analysis.

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intensication of almost feverish nationalist sentiments.

Determined utilitarianism in translation might have empowered China to

become materially strong enough to sit as an equal to the West at the same

table of competition. Yet it also seems to have undermined the Chinese iden-tity, which since ancient times has been built on the traditional Confucian

values of (hh). The term hh, having no standard English equivalent,is comprised of two Chinese characters, (peace, harmony, harmonize,gentleness) and(combine, join, mix). According to Zhang (2001:26-27),hhrefers to the sum total of the conicts between, and the amalgamation

of, the heart and mind; the tangible and the intangible in nature, in society,

in interpersonal relationships, and in culture; and the new structures, new

things and new lives emerging from this dynamic process. As Zhang (2001)

observes, hh, a national spirit shared by Confucianism, Taoism and othermajor schools of Chinese thought, supported and held the Chinese nation to-

gether for thousands of years. This spirit characterized the inner structure of

Chinese society and of Chinese social relations, allowing for peace among dif-

ferences and harmony among diversity, most notably, the peaceful co-existence

of Confucianism, Taoism, Islam and Buddhism. Even in times of conquest by

non-Han minorities, this spirit survived, resulting in the Sinicization of the

minorities/non-Han groups, as in the cases of the Yuan (Mongol, 1206-1368)

and Qing (Manchu, 1644-1912) dynasties.

This core of traditional Chinese values, however, could hardly translate, orbe translated into the colonizing West. From the time of the missionary-convert

translation onward, it became increasingly difcult to reconcile or harmonize

the indigenous Chinese concept of hhwith the Western colonial dream. The

hold that this concept had on Chinese thought was eventually undermined by

Western invasion around the time of the late Qing Dynasty. The subsequent

massive introduction, mostly through translation, of Western political and

sociological theories, science and technology began to reshape the Chinese

mind, replacing hhwith the Western spirit of evolution15and revolution. The

utilitarian approach to translation, that is, translating in order to survive by

any means in the international jungle of nation-states, pushed China onto the

road of radical and violent revolution in the domains of politics, society and

culture over the next century. Now that China has gained sufcient material

strength to survive in the global jungle, the Chinese have also realized that

they are lost, in spiritual and cultural terms. The nationalistic expressions the

call to establish a Chinese theory of translation in the 1980s; the China-can-

say-no voice in the 1990s; and the revival, at the turn of the century, of what

can be termed neo-Confucianism, from which the Communist Party drew theinspiration to build a harmonious society all point to a sense of loss and a

15Through Yan Fus inuential translation in 1898 of T. HuxleysEvolution and Ethics and

Other Essays(1894), evolution was understood mainly as the law of the jungle.

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Guo Yangsheng 255

political desire to redene who the Chinese are in a globalizing world.

It should be noted, however, that though superseded at times over the

years by other values and contingencies, the spirit of hh has not died

out. Even during the anti-colonial and Cold War eras from the 1920s to the1980s, the spirit of hhfound its expression in Maoist internationalism

and communism. In more recent decades, Chinese philosophers such as

Liang Shuming (in Wang 1988) have also expressed the view that hh, in

its logical extension of global harmony, will be a guiding philosophy of the

21st century.

Before this could happen, however, at least two issues would have to be

addressed. First, the Chinese vision of globalization as national rejuvenation

based on the core values of hhwould need to be mediated and translated

into a politically acceptable language of the globalizing world. The conceptof collective harmony over individual and gender freedom and equality has

grown within the Confucian discursive context of familial, social and political

order based on patriarchalism and hierarchism, namely the Three Cardinal

Guides (ruler guides subject, father guides son and husband guides wife) and

the Five Constant Virtues (benevolence, righteousness, propriety, knowledge

and sincerity). Its meaning for the rest of the world would need to be more

broadly interpreted. The second issue is whether the dominant global culture

has a genuine interest in embracing, and the capacity for translating hhinto

its vision of humanity.Thus far, there is little suggestion that these two issues will be resolved

quickly. Few, if any of the Chinese cultural or intellectual voices have been

heard in the global forum of ideas, including, for example, in studies of the

political dimensions of translation. The West, for its part, seems to be caught

within a market mentality and seeks merely to translate China as a poten-

tially huge market to be developed. Any other role that China plays is easily

interpreted as a threat to the West. Alarmist messages, such as that conveyed

by the phrase the China threat, for example, have been circulating for years.

Recently, the rise of China to global prominence publicly symbolized in

recent years by such events as the opening and closing ceremonies and the

successful performance of Chinese athletes at the Olympics in Beijing, and

by Chinas ability to withstand the ongoing nancial tsunami thus far, for

example will almost certainly be translated into a cause for alarm, or even

revive old fears of the yellow peril.

Therefore, it is perhaps even more necessary for Chinese translators and

translation theorists alike to be alert to and theorize the politics of translation.

This could be one way to reshape Chinese identity and make it more identi-able to the West; it could also help the West see more clearly the structure

of politics that has been at work in Chinese translation practices. Theorizing

the politics of translation could thus become an effective form of intercultural

and intercivilizational dialogue, mediating and amalgamating, for instance,

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the Western imaginary of globalization and the Chinese vision of global har-

mony. To this end, a form of theorizing the politics of translation(such as that

advocated in this article) is needed.It could be called intercultural studies

on the politics of translation. The point to stress is that such an interculturalapproach not only can lead to a deeper understanding of how the politics of

translation has functioned in the Chinese mainland but can also be applied

to other political cultures and stimulate a more focused investigation of the

political implications of translation in a global era.

5. Conclusion: toward a global, intercivilizational dialogue

As this discussion from a Chinese perspective indicates, theorizing the politics

of translation is a political act in itself. To undertake this task in an age ofglobalization is to understand politically the existential conditions of humanity,

which includes not only the West but also the Rest. This means that the active

political participation of the non-West is required for any valid theorization.

The non-West peoples have been silenced for so long, however, that they

may have lost their voice and their self. Consequently, they are caught in a

dilemma. Either they participate in debates on theoretical issues by borrowing,

learning or adopting the dominant language of the West, and thus risk becoming

mere parrots, or they lapse further into silence. But there is perhaps no need to

despair. The politics of identity in a globalizing world is even more complexthan that envisaged in the dilemma. As postmodern and postcolonial studies

caution (e.g. in Johnston 2003:5), identity itself, or Chinese-ness in this case,

is uid, ambivalent and hybrid. As a historical, cultural, social, political and

linguistic construct, identity is perhaps always in the making. This points to the

necessity of moving from an understanding of Chinese identity in translation

studies as something xed, something lost but recoverable, to a more open and

hermeneutic space of intercultural dialogue, where a newer, more dialogical

language of identity in translation studies could be developed.

My attempt here to revisit, however briey, the Chinese experience of

translating the West suggests that theorizing the politics of translation ac-

tually involves re-examining, reconstructing and rewriting the history of

translation. This must be done and not only in relation to what has been

translated, which is the standard practice of translation historians. It must

also and more importantly be seen in relation to the political forces asserting

themselves at different levels including textual, intertextual and extratextual

and/or individual, collective, national and international levels. Such an effort

holds the promise of moving beyond an (anti-)colonial mentality to a spaceof dialogue with the West.16The interfacing and amalgamation of different

16One of the projects of this level of political importance is the appearance ofAn Anthol-

ogy of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume I: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist

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Guo Yangsheng 257

horizons may be one of the most urgent political tasks facing globalization.

Humanitys future does not necessarily have to be what Francis Fukuyama,

who famously articulated the Western vision of globalization, predicted: What

we may be witnessing is not just the end of post-war history, but the end ofhistory as such. That is, the end point of mankinds ideological evolution

and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the nal form of

human government (1992:271). Neither should this future be supportive of

aggressive Chinese nationalism or Sinocentrism. As agents and interpreters

of globalization, translators and translation theorists have the responsibility to

mediate between the vision of globalization as a Western imaginary and that

of globalization as national rejuvenation based on the Chinese idea of hh.

This, hopefully, could be the beginning of a more deeply shared and more

balanced history of humanity that transcends Fukuyamas end.

GUO YANGSHENG

Centre for the Study of Translation and Globalization, Faculty of Foreign

Languages for Economics and Trade, Southwestern University of Finance and

Economics, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610074 P. R. China. [email protected].

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the politics of translation in a global era (2009)

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