Shouhua Qi's new book is one of the most historically comprehensive and approachable in a body of work that prioritizes the study of translation of foreign texts in Chinese modernity and nation-building. It surveys episodes of translation and translation culture in China from the late 1800s to the present day and offers a rich body of resources for scholarship on this emergent field (of late represented by the works of Ning Wang, Luo Xuanmin, and He Yuanjian). Qi's history of the cultural and sociopolitical work of translation in China also contains within it a history of the remarkable centralization of translation in China that took place from 1880 to 1970, and the process of decentralizing translation after the Cultural Revolution; thus, it represents a truly systematic treatment of modern Chinese history through its translation movements.
This book achieves a remarkable feat in accounting for and differentiating between different camps of translators, translation camps and periodicals, thought campaigns and institutional regimes of translation. Qi goes to great lengths to recreate the intense debates and deliberations over translation, attending carefully to the changes in print culture and the influences of political iconoclasm. Qi starts with early figures like Lin Shu and Kang Youwei, and tracks their ideological reincarnations at different flashpoints in twentieth-century China: the early Republican period; the eve of the Sino-Japanese wars; the inter-war period; the Guomindang's decadent phase; the early days of the rise of the CCP; before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution; in the digital age; etc.
The book does not use its wealth of materials and their historical linkages to mount a new interpretive paradigm for East-West studies. Instead, it is devoted to tracking down and contextualizing influence, wherever it may have occurred, and using influence to index historical change. Influence and its aftermath are traced in the familiar cases, such as Lin Shu's translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Yan Fu's translation of Evolution and Ethics, but also in less well-known but equally fascinating instances, such as Hong Qiuquan's biblically inspired self-legitimation as the leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1837) or Mu Dan's Auden- and Eliot-inspired modernist poetry (1940s). Deftly switching between chronology and genealogy, Qi places into the same viewing plane translation-inspired social networks that have never been mentioned in the same book together, such as the generations of producers of Ibsen's plays in China, and collaborations between Arthur Miller, Ying Ruocheng, and Cao Yu. Qi's method testifies to the need for greater coverage—and not necessarily greater nuance—in positioning translation in relation to China's political history.
Noticeably missing from this history of influence is the genre of “critique,” whether postcolonial, feminist, or Foucauldian, that theorists like Lawrence Venuti and Lydia Liu have applied to histories of China and the West's translingual modernity. While Qi makes use of deconstructive readings of translation, he does not adopt the hyper-suspicious approach to the intake of foreign text, or its terminologies and ideologies, that has become increasingly the norm. So, for example, although Qi discusses the controversies of the May Fourth movement, he does not mount a performative critique of what many view as its Western-influenced, self-betraying formulations of essential Chineseness. Both in its macro-structuring (chapter titles that start with “The Rude Awakening” and end with “The Tsunami”) and in its summary conclusions, Qi's book recapitulates a very familiar history of China's interaction with the West, one in which translation is seen as a site of self-strengthening and political mobilization, aesthetic experimentation and self-therapy. Ordinarily, this deferral to the tried-and-true would be seen as a conceptual shortcoming. In this case, I believe Qi is modeling a type of critical idealism. Cultivating empathy for historical acts in their time, Qi leaves intact traditional narratives of influence, as seen in such a statement as: “The massive currents for change have since been sweeping across the country.… Much of this change can be attributed to the potent agency of translation—translation of Western texts” (p. 137). Although his lapses into broad-stroke historiography leave much to be desired rhetorically, his method suggests quite bravely that some histories should only be thickened by new materials, not untold by revisionism.
Genuine excitement over foreign literature—and what people thought it might promise—has a prominent place in the book, appearing usually without commentary about Western hegemony or China's ideological self-reprogramming. For instance, Qi attributes the embracing of Western books after the crackdown of the Cultural Revolution to “a pent-up longing of millions of people for knowledge, for understanding, for revival, and for change” (p. 139). There is no cynicism here. Preserving this type of affect as worthy of historical documentation is not only admirable but also necessary. His efforts to rein in skepticism over transferences between China and the West, instead of sowing skepticism wherever possible, made for a critical style that this reviewer, who already benefited amply from the book's archival exhaustiveness, found very refreshing.
