Sinocentrism

A “sinocentric” world order that posits a central role for the “Middle Kingdom” has long been an integral part of international discourses on China, including those of an “Orientalist” cast. The most effective taxonomic and axiological expression of this discourse can be found in the works of the late John King Fairbank, which exerted enormous influence over American study of China for much of the Cold War era and also had a notable impact on the way some scholars in other parts of the world approached Chinese history. In his classic formulation, China is the natural center of East Asia, having been kept separate for most of its history from West and South Asia. “Sinocentrism,” which links up tightly with traditions of thought within China, including some that have gained renewed currency in recent years, expresses Chinese superiority and hubris. It has been couched historically through the millennial experiences of the great Chinese civilization in certain key terms: Tianxia (“all under Heaven”), presided over by Tianzi (the “Son of Heaven”) is presumed to envelope the entire world outside of Zhongguo (the “Middle Kingdom”). The taxonomy that Fairbank confers on China's “foreign relations” derives from these key terms; it is hierarchic and non-egalitarian, in contrast to the European international order, which came to embrace since the nineteenth century the notions of sovereignty and “equality” of nations (Fairbank Reference Fairbank1968, 1–19).

Fairbank classifies the “concentric hierarchy” of China's foreign relations in three main zones: the Sinic Zone comprising the culturally close neighbors, including Korea, Vietnam, and occasionally Japan; the Inner Asia Zone consisting of the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the steppes region outside the Great Wall frontier; and the Outer Zone inhabited by Wai-yi (“outer barbarians”) who are at a farther distance across land and sea—states of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Europe that would send “tribute” (gong) while trading (Fairbank Reference Fairbank1968, 2). We are introduced to two additional terms in the framework—barbarian and tribute. Together, these have given “Sinocentrism” an essentially ethnocentric, overwhelmingly arrogant cast in relation to the peoples and cultures China had historically encountered.

Fairbank first formulated the China-at-the-Center construct in his magisterial work Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Fairbank Reference Fairbank1953). In this book, regarded a classic, Fairbank attributes the complex concatenation of events that led up to the Opium War (1839–42) and the subsequent complications in China's diplomatic and political relations with the West to “China's conception of Western barbarians” and “Tribute and Trade” (Fairbank Reference Fairbank1953, 3–38). He elaborated upon this further in a dense monographic study, with copious references to Chinese-language sources, on the Qing (1644–1911) tributary system (Fairbank and Têng Reference Fairbank and Ssu-yü[1961] 1968). He undertook this study in collaboration with a Chinese colleague and former assistant Ssu-yü Têng; later, they published a textbook reader for students. The book attempted to document China's post-Opium War political and ideological difficulties in terms of vestiges of the traditional world order (Fairbank and Têng Reference Fairbank and Ssu-yü1961). The Harvard East Asia textbook that Fairbank authored with his colleagues Reischauer and Craig (Reference Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig1965) accorded the Sinocentric world order an axiological status resulting in China's inadequate, inappropriate, historically constrained responses to the West. Such responses often resulted, in this view, in anti-foreign explosions of murder, mayhem, and massacre. These erupted periodically at times of China's internal crises, such as the period following the Opium Wars and the failure of reform and revolution (Tianjin Massacre, Boxer Uprising, anti-Imperialist movements of the 1910s and 1920s, the period of Cultural Revolution, etc.). Fairbank's popular writings have also carried the same axiological messages in such works as The United States and China (Reference Fairbank1959) and People's Middle Kingdom (Reference Fairbank1967). Fairbank suggests that both the Nationalists and the Communists have inherited a set of institutionalized attitudes and historical precedents not easily conformable to the European tradition of international relations among equally sovereign nation-states.

The centrality of the cultural construction of “all-under-Heaven” and the “Middle Kingdom” and the inferior status of outsiders as “barbarians” (Wai-yi) are now accepted as “givens” in most mainstream works on China, whether these are written by Chinese, Japanese, or Western scholars. Even those who consider the all-pervasive eternal quality of the Sinocentric world order as a myth still translate the Chinese term Yi as “barbarian.” In his Excursions in Sinology, Lien-sheng Yang (Reference Lien-sheng1969, 419–28) examines a posthumous letter from the Jin emperor Shi Jintang to the Northern emperor YeLu Deguang in 942 CE where, notes Yang, the Jin emperor clearly addresses his Northern neighbors as his equal, if not somewhat inferior (zexia). Yet Yang unhesitatingly translates the Jin emperor's ethnicity Xiyi as “Western barbarian.”

In this essay, I wish to argue that the translation of the term Yi as “barbarian” not only is problematic but also completely occludes the political context in which the word was authorized to receive its currently accepted coherent form of construction and representation. The political context was before and after the Opium War. While considering the commencement of hostilities, the British authorities found in Qing imperial attitudes to the outsiders, as explained and interpreted by its China hands or “specialists,” a respectable rhetoric for war. They invoked Vattel's treatise on the equality and sovereignty of nations and Chinese ignorance of it. This seemed politically more appropriate than appearing to give in to the conglomerate of free traders and their various associates led by Jardine and Matheson—the most powerful among the opium smugglers. Almost all the noted China “hands” with knowledge of Chinese and experience of living and trading on the China coast were consulted. They produced, following classical notions, what can perhaps be called a Chinese xenology (Halbfass Reference Halbfass1988, 172–96). Traditional terms such as Yi, Tianxia, and Zhongguo were translated with a certain finality and fixity, making their meanings static and unchanging rather than historically constructed, as Liu and Niranjana, authorities on the politics of translation, would put it (Liu Reference Liu2006, Niranjana Reference Niranjana1992).

Chinese Xenology

The “origins” of the Chinese “other” in the purview of official and imperial discourses were quite dispersed. One discerns a certain desire, attraction, fear, and on occasion repulsion in scholars' and officials' representations of the other; one also discerns elements of plenitude and fulfillment where the self assumed the incumbency of the other. For example, one can cite the Tang (618–907) fascination for horses of the “west or the north, and even of their nomadic enemies near at hand” (Creel Reference Creel1970, 169). Horse paintings became a major genre during the Tang. Li Xu, the nephew of the first Tang emperor and an avid horse painter himself, stated that scholars who painted horses took them as a metaphor, “for the range of a man's talents there will be those who are thoroughbreds, the slow and the swift, the reclusive and the illustrious . . . so they are an exact parallel to the scholar's wandering in pursuit of an official position” (Silbergeld Reference Silbergeld1984, 1). The horse metaphor had multiple uses—measuring the scholar's political talents, treatment of scholars in general by the rulers, and above all as a marker of Heaven's pleasure or wrath for such rulers to come to power. Goodrich tells us that the Chinese characters for “riding astride” (qi) and saddle (an) were relatively late in origination and were probably results of “barbarian” influences (Goodrich Reference Goodrich1984, 279–305). If there were pejorative elements in the terms, they were ignored or forgotten, for the horse symbol was given prodigious qualities. They were proclaimed the relative of the dragon, parented by divine beings. This representation was re-presented by Tang connoisseurs “who explained their bizarre appearance by pointing out that the holy sages of antiquity, even Confucius himself, did not look like natural men. Divine creatures, whether equine or human, must not be, but look weird and otherworldly” (Schafer Reference Schafer1963, 59). One must remember that the horse-image and its deification was a mnemonicon of Han China's historic encounters with the lands and peoples living on its continental regions—the “Steppe gradient” in Owen Lattimore's (Reference Lattimore1951) classic formulation.

Traditional Chinese sources provide several terms that were used to designate strangers, outsiders, and guests: Dong Yi (Yi in the East), Xirong (Rong in the West), Nanman (Man in the South), Beidi (Di in the North). The association with the cardinal directions was dispersed to the extent that each term came to assume multiple meanings and identities. That the word Di is a combination of “dog” and “fire,” and the word Man includes a part that suggests “worms” could not necessarily be contumely, for dog, fire, and worms as signifiers have complex cultural uses in the Chinese language. Chinese ancients did not, argues Tan Chung, consider it undignified to associate with animal symbols. For example, the culture-hero Fuxi was described as one with human head on a snake's body; Sichuan, the province, was known as Shu, with a character that contains the sketch of a silkworm; and Yi, the character most commonly used to refer to outsiders or strangers, is a combination of a big man with a bow—a term also employed to convey the concept of conquest (Tan Reference Tan1973, 67–68). Two other terms—hu and fan—are also often cited as terms for foreigners. Hu is a combination of two symbols—a sketch of cow's head on the left, and an ideogram of flesh on the right. Later, it was adopted as a homophone to refer to the Huns, as well as a variety of objects in material culture, e.g., pepper (hujiao), fiddle (huqin), and easy chair (huchuang). Fan represents an animal footprint in the field: of the two homophones, one denotes “exuberant growth” and the other “hedge.” Fan has been used to mean both an outsider or guest as well as a vassal. For example, the enclave of outsiders in Canton was Fanfang. Many Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and Indian traders inhabited such enclaves; some were honored with official titles during the Tang through Song (907–1127) dynasties.

The Ming (1368–1644) in their official documents used the term Siyi—outsiders from all directions—to refer to foreigners. Yi became the basic term to refer to foreigners. The Jesuits, who were honored and respected at the late Ming and early Qing (1644–1722) courts, were designated as Yi. Lord Macartney's Mission in 1793 to China was also represented with the character Yi. During the early Qing (1684–1775), Gang Zhao's (Reference Zhao2013) recent study shows, the Chinese private traders were allowed to trade abroad; the Qing emperors considered China and the world outside interconnected and intertwined.

I have examined the extensive records of correspondence between the Chinese authorities and the East India Company's supercargoes in Canton during the 1760–1810 period. These are preserved at the Public Records Office in London and are written in Chinese. The term Yi is the standard technical expression when referring to the Europeans in all these records, whether used by the Chinese or the supercargoes. No one seemed to have minded the term, nor was it translated as “barbarians” in the English-language records.

The exercise in a bit of “Sinology” above is an attempt at teasing out the truth in translation. It is certainly a difficult if not an impossible task given the autonomy and immanent character of all language. Our project here is not the problem of truth but the “meaning effect of truth” in translation. The “veridictory mechanism” involved in such a project is directly related to politics of interpretation. To quote Donald Maddox on Greimas, “While veridiction presupposes a cognitive dimension which conditions it, it may also be contextualized by a narrative dimension, such that an event could suffice to trigger it, or else its occurrence as a significant modification within the structuration of knowledge could bring about a corresponding change in the evental domain” (Maddox Reference Maddox1989, 662). This Greimasian perspective must be modified to include the perspective of contesting opinions and representation.

The Context

The context was the year 1834. The year marked the end of the East India Company's China trade monopoly. It threw open trade to all comers, resulting in a phenomenal increase in opium sales with hordes of “Free Traders”—those outside the East India Company's domain, glutting the Canton market. The crisis within China was exacerbated by a worldwide silver shortage that caused foreigners to use specie less frequently when buying Chinese goods. In the 1820s, there was a drain of about two million taels of silver out of China each year; in 1834 it was more than ten million taels.Footnote ¹ The Daogueng emperor asked his officials for advice. Some were for legalization of the opium trade. Others argued that foreign traders were too greedy, that the prohibition on opium sales must be effectively enforced.

The end of the Company's monopoly was marked by the arrival of a new British official, representing the government rather than a trading company. He was Lord Napier. As a government official, he demanded to deal directly with the governor-general of the two provinces in the south, rather than conduct relations through the Hong merchants, as was the custom since 1760. The Qing officials refused to acknowledge Napier's status as a government representative. Searching for a term to translate his official title of superintendent of trade, a new one to the Chinese, they arrived at Yimu. This term appeared in Qing edicts and notices. It was translated as “Barbarian Eye,” a rather absurd expression that angered all and sundry among the East India Company's officials. Napier forced his fleet up the Bogue toward Canton. Serious fighting would have ensued had he not died from malignant malaria fever before his fleet could reach Canton.

A war of words followed this debacle. On the British side, the campaign was led by James Matheson of Jardine and Matheson Company—the foremost among opium traders—now an honorable member of the Parliament. Matheson's broadside presented, in a well-publicized pamphlet in 1836, three levels of argument. The first related to an outright attack on the character of the Chinese people, whom he represented as having “a marvelous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy. . . . It has been the policy to shroud themselves and all belonging to them in mystery impenetrable—to monopolize all the advantage of their situation. They consequently exhibit a spirit of exclusiveness on a grand scale” (Matheson Reference Matheson1836).

At the second level, Matheson addressed how the Chinese expressed this spirit of exclusiveness in relation to outsiders: “This truculent, vain-glorious people have been pleased to consider all other inhabitants of the earth as BARBARIANS—destitute of all pretension to civil, political or moral excellence. They will not permit themselves to be polluted by those ‘barbarian’ by intermingling with them.” He then noted that the only terms upon which the Chinese authorities would allow commercial relations with England sprang from an “amazing and unmerited condescension” of the Emperor of China toward “his reverently-submissive tributary,” the King of England and his “barbarian and profligate subjects.” Finally, quoting Vattel, the first recognized authority on the then international law in the West, he argued why such arrogant and exclusive people and their government must be made to follow the terms of free trade, which he defined as “all men ought to find on earth the things they stand in need of” by force of arms if necessary (Matheson Reference Matheson1836, 7–20).

Matheson was followed by Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, a long-time Company official who in 1832 had conducted a market survey of the China coast from the ship Lord Amherst. He was assisted by a number of men with stakes in the opium trade and by Dr. Charles Gutzlaff, the Chinese-speaking German missionary who too had a stake in the opium trade. Lindsay wrote to Palmerston, urging a “direct armed interference to demand redress for past injuries, and security for the future.” He then recommended, along with the opening of additional Chinese ports, “discontinuance of all those insulting expressions, implying national superiority.” He invoked scriptural authority, quoting passages from Confucius in which “the term E, which we translate ‘barbarian’ is found to denote those out of the pale of the Chinese empire, and always in a derogatory and contemptuous sense” (Lindsay Reference Lindsay1840).

The meaning effects of the translated terms within the “event” of 1834 were vigorously countered by at least two older China “hands”: Sir George Staunton, who had accompanied Lord Macartney to China in 1793, and was among the very first generation of Chinese-speaking officials of the East India Company; and P. P. Thoms, a close contemporary of Staunton. Thoms, along with W. C. Milne and J. R. Morrison, was one of “that glorious triad who had burst the barrier, and have obtained some knowledge of what was said to be the unattainable language of the Chinese” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853).

Staunton questioned the propriety of sending an armed expedition against China, providing a critique of the misguided policies adopted by Lord Napier. He quoted Robert Morrison, who had translated Yi as “a foreigner” and Yiren as a more respectable term for foreigners in his dictionary, the first Chinese-English lexicon, published in Macao in 1815 (Morrison Reference Morrison1815, 1–1:61). Staunton also quoted Morrison to demonstrate the absurdity of translating Yimu, addressed to Lord Napier, as “Barbarian Eye”: “Mu, the eye; that which directs; the head or principal person.” He concluded by saying that their epithet applied to Lord Napier, the third and not the first of these senses was intended, that in point of fact his title of Foreign Superintendent was fairly translated (Staunton Reference Staunton1836, 37).

Thoms was outraged by attempts to invoke translations of Chinese terms as “barbarians” and “Barbarian Eye” in the wake of the failure of the Napier Mission. He published two essays in the Monthly Magazine protesting the arguments advanced by Matheson and Lindsay. He pointed out that during his period in Canton in the early 1800s, the word Yi was regularly used in the Qing communication system as a general term for Europeans as well as “Yin-ke-le” for the English. Referring to Matheson's staunch objection to the employment of Yi in Chinese official documents, Thoms approvingly quoted the Hoppo:Footnote ² “It has been stuck up for more than thirty years. It did not commence today. As the language of the proclamation is considered ignominious, why did not the former Barbarian [the irony and italics intended by Thoms] merchants early indulge their anger, and with hearts dead to the subject, cease to come again to knock heads at the service for an open market?” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853, 4).

Thoms also questioned Matheson's reference to the word “tributary,” applied to the King of England. The meaning of the English word “tribute,” he contended, was a “tax or impost which one prince or state is obliged to pay to another as a token of dependence, or in virtue of a treaty, and as a purchase of peace.” To translate the Chinese term “gong” as “tribute,” he believed, was a violation of its meaning. He quoted from the Kangxi Imperial Dictionary to say a better translation would be “to offer up to”; he again quoted Morrison to the effect that when applied to the Emperor of China it simply meant homage in the name of the King. He sarcastically asked Matheson whether he knew about the list of some eighty countries that traded with China. “Probably you don't know where to look for that list; or if you do, do you find in it an expression of insult? All that is said, is simply that in such a year such a nation came to trade with China, and if it brought presents, it is mentioned” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853, 6–7). Thoms's final salvo at Matheson was to say the latter was no Chinese scholar, that he probably never learned a single character, yet he pretended to advise the British Government on China policy!

Thoms's dispute with Lindsay was at the scriptural level. He referred to Lindsay's allusion to Confucius where the Master was purported to have said the Yi and Di could not be governed by the same laws as China, for they had neither a sovereign nor nobles, “they were all equals, like the brutes. When good government was conferred on them it led to confusion. The ancient sovereigns of China knew this and therefore ruled them with fixed laws. This mode of governing proved beneficial” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853). Thoms argued that Confucius was not speaking of people in his own day; he was giving his opinion of two distinct tribes or clans that had existed a thousand years before his time. He had no occasion to speak in contempt of them, or even to call them foreigners, because in his day, they had become subject to China.

Thoms's contestation was of no consequence. He noted that up to the time of Napier, no one complained about the term Yi in Qing communications. He knew why. The communications mostly addressed commercial matters; they were respectful and elegant. Yet in 1836 no less an authority than Morrison or Gutzlaff was translating the concept as offensive. He suspected that Morrison must have been acting “under authority and not in compliance with his usual judgment” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853, 21; italics in original) He further noted that in the Correspondence Relating to China presented to both Houses of Parliament in 1840, the offensive terms, occurred, in not a very long document, no less than twenty-one times.

It seems Thoms had vastly underestimated the number of times that the offensive terms appeared in the Napier episode-related documents. In the Additional Correspondence Relating to China published in Reference Staunton1840 as part of the Parliamentary papers and in the Public Record Office FO677/9 series there are some twenty enclosures. All of these pertain to Qing communications at the local level in Canton between the Governor General, the Governor, and the Hong merchants. These documents deal with the Napier episode and were translated by the staff at the Superintendent's office in Canton. The offensive epithets “Barbarian Eye” and “Barbarian Merchants” appear altogether eighty-seven times.

Thoms published in December 1851 in London a pamphlet entitled Remarks on Reading the Chinese Word Man “Barbarian, ” showing that the Chinese did not call Europeans barbarians. Copies of this were forwarded to China by the Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs. In 1852, he received responses from W. H. Medhurst, Dr. Bowring (whose opinion was ghostwritten by Thomas T. Meadows), John T. Meadows, D. B. Robertson, Charles A. Sinclair, Henry Parkes, and W. H. Pedders. They were the China “experts” employed in the various treaty ports establishments. Their responses to Thoms's pamphlets were forwarded to him by Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary. The debate and argumentation followed the scriptural lines. More classical authorities were cited, especially by Medhurst and T. T. Meadows, to vindicate the translation of the word Yi as barbarian.

Thoms, away from China for over thirty years, was dismissed as out of tune with the times, ignorant of the changing context of evolving Sino-Western relations. Even his knowledge of Chinese was questioned: he was a mere apprentice in Morrison's workshop printing the first Chinese-English dictionary. Coming from Medhurst, this was indeed an unkind remark. Thoms had translated Chinese poetry, fiction, and history, as well as a great number of official documents, some of which were exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Thoms countered the personal attacks on him by declaring that the new generation of Western experts on China was influenced and governed by the events of the Napier fiasco and the miasma of the Opium War that followed. He characterized the new generation by quoting one of them. The unnamed person told Thoms that the “Chinese have nothing worthy of being rendered into English. Their works are all alike, and their miscellaneous publications are not worth translating. They have no poetry” (Thoms Reference Thoms1853, 64).

Structure of Knowledge

By 1852, the case was closed; the debate on Chinese xenology was over. Thoms's contestation had collapsed. W. H. Medhurst and T. T. Meadows, two of the most prominent and powerful among the Sinologues, furnished the basic elements that would constitute the Chinese world order. They explained away the contextual complexities and meaning effects of translation; if there was any lack in the structure of this knowledge, it was neatly supplemented by references to scriptural authority.

Medhurst, quoting Beishi (Northern Annals of the Six Dynasties) and Tangshu (Tang history), demonstrated how, in the traditional Chinese perception, Heaven had separated the Middle Kingdom from outer regions inhabited by Yi peoples; Heaven had given this privileged land good government and social order, girding its territory by a frontier of natural barriers. Beyond these lived the savage tribes devoid of morality and intellectual light; they could be only lifted from their degraded condition by the enlightened government of the Middle Kingdom. Providence had placed these tribes as tribute-bearing vassals to the Kingdom. Medhurst remarked that there was not a perfect analogy between “oi barbaroi” of the Greeks and the Yiren of the Chinese. In one case, the distinction was one of territory, in the other that of language; but both terms indicated inferiority of civilization. He conceded that Yi was not necessarily opprobrious but in the context of Sino-foreign relations had acquired a contemptuous import, as had the English words “pagan,” “savage,” “knave,” and the like. He pointed out that since 1842 many of the treaty rights had been contested. The term Yi continued to be employed in official documents. He urged the British authorities to impress on the Chinese government that the term be permanently discontinued from official use. Such a measure, he hoped, would help remove “the unhappy impression of our inferiority and obnoxious character, now so deeply rooted in the Chinese mind” (Medhurst and Thoms Reference Medhurst and Thoms.1852, 14–15; italics in original).

Medhurst's plea was taken seriously by Dr. Bowring, Her Majesty's Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade in Hong Kong. He addressed a letter to the authority in Canton on July 22, Reference Medhurst and Thoms.1852, on the subject of Yi. On July 27, he received a reply from Xu Guangqing, the Governor-general, and Bei Guei, the Governor. Medhurst translated it himself:

Thomas T. Meadows studied Chinese in Munich in preparation for a career in post-Opium War treaty-port service. He was hired by Henry Pottinger to work as an interpreter in the Canton Consulate in 1843. There was something “professional” about him. By 1846, he was writing books on China: in 1847 his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China had appeared, and in Reference Meadows1856 his classic The Chinese and Their Rebellions. His knowledge of the Chinese language and his important experiences of working for the British government in China particularly qualified him, he believed, to write for the British public on matters relating to China. He thought he had a special mission of correcting “false notions extant in England regarding China and the Chinese” (Meadows Reference Meadows1847, 1). This included descriptions of the Chinese language, government, people, manners, customs, ignorance of foreign countries, and feeling of superiority over foreigners—issues he addressed with remarkable clarity in the structured narratives of the Desultory Notes. He was also invited to give his opinion on the meaning of the word Yi. He took up the points made by Thoms one by one, showing how the term from the Zhou dynasty to the Qing systematically carried an opprobrious meaning. In the context of the Canton commercial system preceding the Opium War, he argued, British quarters and residences as well as the costly Western fabrics were “barbaric,” denoting “rudeness,” “savagism,” and “absence of civilization”—terms derived from China's historic encounters with peoples on its frontiers (Meadows Reference Meadows1853).

Meadows's career and writings began what can perhaps be called a “China-Coast genre.” Robert Hart epitomized the career aspects of the Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Customs, who was arguably the most powerful foreigner in China for over fifty years. Strengthening and maintaining British dominance in China was Hart's moral duty, as is abundantly shown in his letters meticulously edited by Fairbank. Fairbank marveled at how Hart could work for the general foreign interest in the “orderly growth of trade” while also maximizing the revenues of the Qing government. Fairbank saw in Hart's career and work a constructive effort of fostering Sino-Western cooperative policy that helped the Qing adjust to the new international order presided over by British hegemony (Hart Reference Hart1975).

Fairbank expresses his admiration for Meadows and Hart in his personal memoirs. The most formative influence on Fairbank was that of H. B. Morse, “a Harvard alumnus,” who had served under Hart in the Chinese Maritime Customs, chronicler of the East India Company records, and the author of The International Relations of the Chinese Empire: The Period of Conflict, 1834–1860 (Reference Morse1910). Fairbank, who met Morse in London, not only modeled his Trade and Diplomacy after Morse's International Relations, he dedicated the book to him. Morse had dedicated his to Robert Hart. Both Morse and Fairbank emphasize the difficulties of the Qing in overcoming their “historical legacy” of dealing with foreigners. Morse quoted “the fundamental Chinese maxim in dealing with foreigners”—a quotation from a Confucian commentator rendered into Latin by Father Premare in Macao, and retranslated by John F. Davis, an “old China hand” from the 1830s in Canton (as quoted in Alcock Reference Alcock1882, 208):

In the early twentieth century, at China's “modern” universities, Chinese scholars attempted to appropriate the China Coast genre in their own writings. Most notable among them was Dr. T. F. Tsiang (Jiang Tingfu) of Qinghua University, who was Fairbank's Chinese history instructor in Beijing in 1931. In his various writings, Dr. Tsiang outlined the thrusts of age-old Chinese foreign policy as a “dogma that asserted that national security could only be found in isolation. . . . Whoever wished to enter relations with China must do so as China's vassal, acknowledging the supremacy of the Chinese emperor” (Jiang Reference Tingfu[1939] 1996, 3–4). Others included Zhang Zhongfu (Reference Zhongfu1933) and Guo Tingyi (Reference Tingyi1947).

How can one restate the above in theoretical terms? In structuring forms of knowledge, the manipulation of the meaning effects of translation in the representation of Chinese xenology leads one from veridiction to verification. In the rhetorical strategy deployed, the self is posited as the other. By thus fictionalizing the Other and situating it in the position of the self, the move was/is to control the Other.

Put another way, the relationship between “Self” and “Other” as conceived in Orientalist discourse, I argue, underwent a critical change in this particular case. Translated as “Barbarian,” Yi yielded an entire cultural ensemble: it celebrated and deplored China's so-called centrality as a civilization and all that it entailed in its relations with the outside world and non-Han minorities. China had, as it were, a “self” while it remained simultaneously as “Other” in discourse. The translation of Yi as “Barbarian” would include and not occlude the West or “Self” in the same discourse, especially as it was presented in the post-Napier period leading to the Opium War. As a result, we thus have a rather heterogeneous and hybrid pair of binaries—“Other-self” (O-s) for China, and “Self-other” (S-o) for the imperialist West. The lower-case s and o are used to indicate elements of uncertainty and tension, obscurity and obfuscation in the rather fragile spaces they are invited to inhabit.

In a somewhat different context, Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1995) refers to such heterogeneity as “splitting.” Following Bhabha, one can show that “splitting” pretty much disarticulated the voice(s) of existing authority in So (Staunton and Thoms in particular) in the debate over Yi. At the same time, it helped orchestrate a chorus of dominant new voice(s) (Matheson, Lindsay, Medhurst, Gutzlaff, Meadows, et al.). These voices also come from So. However, the lower-case o in So represents a kind of, in Bhabha's words, “enunciative disturbance” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1995) throwing the process of interpretation into flux.

Splitting empowers the disempowered. It gave China, after the humiliations of the Opium War, a sense of social agency where the centrality and cultural hubris assigned to it in xenology and Sinocentrism were the key elements. This also gave China a sense of “self”-hood in relation to peoples on its peripheries. The “s” in Os was, one must add, problematic at best: it was derivative in relation to the West, dominant and hegemonic in relation to China's minorities.

Postscript

A bit of personal narrative: I have lived with Yi and the history of its translation since the mid-sixties when I began studying Chinese history. I first encountered the term “Barbarian” in the Sino-foreign context in a reading class on Qing history with Professor Fairbank. I read the extant works in English on the Opium War period along with a volume of documents on Sino-American relations: Earl Swisher's China's Management of the American Barbarians (Reference Swisher1953). At first I thought the title was a sarcastic remark on the “Ugly American.” I soon learned that it was an actual translation of the Qing term that was employed in official edicts and memorials. I was aware of several well-known Sanskrit words that were traditionally used to refer to outsiders from different lands, cultures, and religions. One of them—Yavana—was translated as “Barbarian,” and an interesting controversy followed it. I learned that Yavana was a transliteration of “Ionia,” referring to the Ionian Greeks who had come to India two centuries before the Christian era. How can a Greek word used to refer to ancient Greek people who had settled in Eastern Greece and Ionia be called “Barbarian,” a rather bewildered participant in the controversy had asked. The question posed was about the appropriateness of the translation, not about the meanings of Yavana, which, most controversialists agreed, carried prejudicial elements from a Hindu conservative standpoint in a later period.

Knowledge of this little controversy prompted me to naturally question the appropriateness of translating Yi as “Barbarian.” One evening after class in his study at the Widener Library, I pulled up enough courage and asked Professor Fairbank the question: how can a Chinese term with a long history and political and cultural association within China be so unequivocally rendered into “Barbarian”? Professor Fairbank listened to me attentively and then, without a wink—he usually winked while greeting students—told me firmly, “No, it is ‘Barbarian.’ It is a proper translation.”

In 1974, I traveled to China for the first time. It was a guided tour. We expressed an interest in visiting “minority” regions and “minority” people. We were in Guilin. I knew of the local minority—the Zhuang. We wanted to meet them. We were told that indeed we would meet representatives of all of China's national minorities in Beijing at the Institute of Minorities. A couple of weeks later, we were in Beijing and were taken to the Institute. Different minority representatives donning their ethnic costumes and jewelry greeted us in rooms especially marked “The Mongol Room,” “The Tibet Room,” “The Xinjiang Room,” and so forth.

In the Xinjiang Room, a woman with braided hair and wearing a multicolored outfit greeted me warmly. Soon she, much to my surprise, broke into humming a well-known Bombay film song from the 1950s. She spoke in Chinese, talking about how the feudal Yi culture of Xinjiang had been transformed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Our guide was stuck with the term Yi. He did not seem to find an English equivalent. As I wondered what he would say, he pulled out his pocket Chinese-English dictionary published by the Beijing Foreign Language Press. He looked it up and proclaimed, “Barbarian.”