The background: evolutionism in late nineteenth-century China

When On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, China was struggling for survival against Darwin's homeland, the United Kingdom (and her allies), during the Second Opium War (1856–1860), which was terminated by the signing of the Convention of Peking (1860). This obtained for China a period of peace during which the Qing government had the prospect of building military and economic strength in preparation for future confrontation with foreign powers.

A new strategy was required to strengthen the moribund Qing regime and to find a new place for China in a transformed international ecosystem. This new strategy was the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895), an official effort to graft Western technology onto a traditional Chinese cultural base.Footnote ¹³ The philosophy underlying this self-strengthening is concise. Feng Guifeng (1809–1874), regarded as a pioneer of this movement on account of coining the concept of ‘self-strengthening’ (ziqiang), specified that ‘what we have to learn from the barbarians is only the one thing, solid ships and effective guns’.Footnote ¹⁴ Hence self-strengthening could triumph by setting up arsenals, shipyards and schools for training students in Western technologies. Such innovations included the Kiangnan Arsenal (f. 1865), the Peking Tongwen guan (Interpreters’ College, f. 1862) and the Fuzhou Naval College (f. 1866), and the hire of foreign advisers to cultivate Chinese artisans for manufacturing military wares. Missionaries, after being banned for several centuries (dating back to the prohibition of Christianity by the Kangxi Emperor in 1717), were reorganized by such groups as the London Missionary Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and entered China again after the First Opium War (1839–1842), providing the Self-Strengthening Movement with abundant sources of foreign advice.

These missionaries, or ‘foreign advisers’, provided the Chinese with their earliest information on evolution. The first Chinese reference to Darwin, as far as can be documented, appeared in 1871 at the Kiangnan Arsenal, whose Translating Department had been set up in 1867 primarily for rendering technical (particularly military) works into Chinese. Of necessity, this led to the introduction of the non-technological disciplines.Footnote ¹⁵ As an example, Charles Lyell's Elements of Geology (1865), which became a standard geological textbook for newly established undertakings in the Self-Strengthening Movement, was translated in 1871 under the Chinese title Dixue qianshi (A Brief Introduction to Geology). The translators, American Baptist missionary Daniel MacGowan (1815–1893) and Chinese mathematician Hua Hengfang (1833–1902), conveyed to the unsuspecting Chinese audience the claim that neither Lamarckian doctrines nor Darwinian principles had been solidified in the West. The translators suggested, in Dixue qianshi, that the legitimacy of evolutionary theories was dubious:

Proselytizing foreign advisers had little interest in enlightening the Chinese on Darwin's central principles; instead, their main concerns were to critique transformism and to rebut secular theories of human origin. This partially explains why the Descent of Man, as an instantaneous target of rejection, was reported in the Chinese press much earlier than the Origin. In 1873, the publication of the Descent (1871) was introduced in Shanghai News, a newspaper established by a British businessman, Ernst Major (1841–1908). The short essay described how Darwin had argued that one of the pieces of evidence that humans and animals share common progenitors is their common forms of facial expression.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet this limited awareness of Darwin's work was still sinicized, for Darwinian scholarship was referred to as shixue (‘evidential research’), the literal meaning of which is the meticulous evaluation of data based upon rigorous standards of precision. Evidential-research scholars claimed to get away from speculation altogether, and to rest their studies upon ‘hard facts’. Unlike Western natural philosophers (including Darwin), Chinese evidential scholars, such as Dai Zhen (1724–1777), were not concerned to uncover the laws of nature, but instead took up scientific disciplines as a means of reconstructing China's splendid antiquity.Footnote ¹⁸

Discussion of man's ape ancestry was introduced by the Anglican missionary John Fryer (1839–1928), who supervised the Translating Department of the Kiangnan Arsenal. ‘In the beginning, there were only worms. Fishes, birds and beasts appeared later; the most intelligent one is the ape, which gradually evolved into man. The process is from the bad to the good, from the simple to the complex’.Footnote ¹⁹ Fryer went on: ‘the origin of man is unimportant to us … It is more economical to devote research to man's destiny than to waste time on his origin’.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, for William Martin (1826–1916), the American Presbyterian missionary who directed the Peking Tongwen guan, ‘Tracking man's origin through animals and plants is no more than studying the vestige of Creation’.Footnote ²¹

Missionaries, with their exclusive focus on general transformism and human origin in their discussions of Darwinism, provided the Chinese with a dichotomous choice: divine action or secular causes (and it was crucial to rebuff the latter before the Chinese accepted it). These scattered references to evolutionary ideas in missionary presentations generated little reaction among Chinese literati, who had little interest in the biological distinction between man and animals. As Eske Møllgaard notes, the Confucian distinction between human and non-human is not biological but is always produced politically and philosophically.Footnote ²² Other provocative Darwinian concepts, such as natural selection and the struggle for existence, were omitted. For example, Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), the British Protestant missionary who translated Joseph Hooker's Botany textbook in 1886, promoted natural theology but failed to inform his Chinese audience that Hooker accepted the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest.Footnote ²³ Perhaps the most immediate reason why the earliest introductions of evolution provoked little reaction was that access to this new knowledge was limited. Independent presses and journalism dealing with new knowledge by the mid-1890s were weak in China. Chinese scholars had few local channels for acquiring new knowledge from the West and, more essentially, for framing their own expertise through creative discussion in print.Footnote ²⁴

The ‘evolutionary sensation’ in China was inaugurated by the Chinese Spencerian Yan Fu (1854–1921) after China's humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). Yan was educated in the Fuzhou Naval College, the second-largest site for shipbuilding and education in Western sciences and engineering during the Self-Strengthening Movement. In 1877, Prosper Giquel (1835–1886), the ‘foreign adviser’ in this college, dispatched twelve students to England, with five attending the Royal Naval College in Greenwich – Yan was one of these five.Footnote ²⁵ After studying navigation for two years in England, the twenty-five-year-old Yan came back to China in June 1879, and taught mathematics at the Fuzhou Naval College for a short period. In 1880, Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), one of the most powerful officials in the Self-Strengthening Movement, urged him to work in the Northern China Naval College in Tianjin, where Yan became the chancellor in 1890.

Yan's British education led him to cast doubts on the established social–political order in late Qing China. His doubtfulness was further enhanced by China's embarrassing failure in the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, which destroyed China's North China Fleet (until then ranked eighth in the world). Yan, then chancellor of Northern China Naval College, the preparatory school for the North China Fleet, personally witnessed China's loss and weakness. His sorrow was further deepened by knowing that several of his classmates in Fuzhou Naval College, including Commanders Liu Buchan (1852–1895) and Lin Taizeng (1851–1895), committed suicide in this war. The Treaty of Shimonoseki (made final on 17 April 1895) ruined the whole sinitic world order, destroyed the national confidence of the Chinese and tested the results of the Self-Strengthening Movement. The Chinese henceforth realized that Western civilization was grounded on more than technology, and that China needed to seek a new road leading to power and wealth. Sociopolitical transformation became as demanding as technological development.

In response to this need, Yan published four eloquent essays from February to June 1895 in the Tianjin Newspaper, founded by German aristocrat Constantin von Hanneken (1854–1925). In one of these articles, entitled ‘Yuan qiang’ (In search of strength), Yan maintained that evolutionary ideas, with which he had become acquainted while in England, were the remedy for saving China's chaos in the post-1894 Sino-Japanese War period. China's loss in this war was a natural outcome of evolution, because, he proposed, ‘the weak are conquered by the strong, the stupid are enslaved by the intelligent’.Footnote ²⁶ Yan described Spencer as an honest admirer of Darwin: ‘Spencer followed Darwin and applied his principles to human society’.Footnote ²⁷ Yan neglected the substantial theoretical innovations for which Spencer was responsible, for he and his Chinese colleagues lacked the knowledge to realize that Spencer was more in tune with Lamarckian and even von Baerian traditions than with Darwinian ones.Footnote ²⁸

As an international intellectual, widely read by an enormous global audience, Spencer had tremendous influence in Victorian England, particularly during the period in which Yan studied at the Royal Naval College. Spencerian sociology, as one aspect of Yan's extensive curriculum of study, proposed that physical and intellectual abilities of individual persons determine national power. Following Spencer, Yan affirmed that the fundamental way forward was to apply evolutionary ideas to the Chinese: physically, mentally and morally. Nevertheless, he felt anxious about China's future:

Yan, on 8 December 1897, initiated his own periodical, Guowen huibian (Collection of National News), which published a portion of his translation of Huxley's ‘Prolegomena’. The book Tianyan lun 天演論 (On Natural/Heavenly Evolution), including both the ‘Prolegomena’ and ‘Evolution and ethics’, was printed in Mianyang 沔阳, Hubei Province, in April 1898.Footnote ³⁰ Yan was not Huxley's admirer. Rather, he criticized Huxley from Spencer's perspectives in his own commentaries that constituted approximately half of the Tianyan lun text.

Evolution, in Tianyan lun, is progressive, as Yan expressed in his own annotation: ‘we can judge from worms, plants and animals that evolution makes progress every day. There are vestiges from infusoria to man, which is a viewpoint of multiple naturalists’.Footnote ³¹ What Yan did not translate is also important. For example, he omitted to translate Huxley's non-progressivist interpretation of evolution: ‘that every theory of evolution must be consistent not merely with progressive development, but with indefinite persistence in the same condition and with retrogressive modification, is a point which I have insisted upon repeatedly from the year 1862 till now’.Footnote ³²

Yan was convinced by Spencer's Lamarckian transformism and coined a Lamarckian-flavoured term – tihe – in his own commentary: ‘An organism modifies its appearance and function for the sake of fitting the changing environment; such a process is named as tihe, which is the secret of evolution’.Footnote ³³ The struggle for existence, according to Yan, is the cause of progressive tihe: ‘If we stop men from struggling for existence, they will not use their minds and strength; hence tihe will not happen, and man will not make progress’.Footnote ³⁴ Yan proposed that the principle of evolution is useful in both the organic world and human society, and treated tihe as equivalent to central Darwinian principles: ‘All these three principles, the struggle for existence, natural selection and tihe, play an identical role in the evolution of living organisms and society’.Footnote ³⁵ Progressiveness dominates both natural and social evolution: ‘Organic beings make progress in natural evolution; hence social evolution is also doubtlessly progressive’.Footnote ³⁶ He was skilful in merging theoretical factors from Darwin, Spencer and Lamarck to justify his own purpose: ‘the growth of population surpasses the food increase, which is why people need to use their intelligence and the capability of self-governing. Disuse causes non-progressiveness; use leads to development’.Footnote ³⁷

Nonetheless, the initial preoccupation of Yan's work was not to make a distinction between Darwin, Lamarck and Spencer, but to search for a therapy to secure the racial survival of the Chinese, which had been threatened in the aftermath of a series of military and political catastrophes in the late nineteenth century. Yan warned that progressive development is perhaps the best solution for avoiding natural elimination, because ‘the ones making progress survive and reproduce, the non-progressive ones suffered from diseases and became extinct. That is why there are multiple fossils underground’.Footnote ³⁸ The Chinese must accept Spencer's claim that ‘the nature of social evolution is progressive’.Footnote ³⁹

Tianyan lun became widespread, with some thirty editions appearing in subsequent years after its publication.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Chinese scholar Cao Juren (1900–1972) estimated that over five hundred autobiographical memoirs from prominent Chinese intellectuals and politicians in the early twentieth century recalled the influence of Tianyan lun.Footnote ⁴¹ If ‘the survival of the fittest’ was the most powerful social Darwinist slogan in the West, then Yan's mighty wujing tianze, shize shengcun 物競天擇，適者生存 (‘Things struggle, the fittest survive’), a catchphrase for sociopolitical change, had an equivalent dominance in China. The explosion of popular journals and the great sociopolitical transformation at the turn of the twentieth century helped popularize Yan's work amongst a wide Chinese audience. The pragmatist Hu Shi (1891–1962), a disciple of John Dewey (1859–1952) at Columbia University, recalled how Yan Fu's Tianyan lun rapidly became popular with young students – the twenty-two-year-old translator of the Origin, Ma Junwu, amongst them.Footnote ⁴²

The arrival of the Origin

Born in Guilin, Guangxi Province, on 17 July 1881, Ma Junwu 馬君武 (or Mc Quinwoll) was educated in preparation for the imperial examination in his early life. He was talented in classical (Chinese) studies and was able to write formal ‘eight-legged essays’ by the age of fourteen.Footnote ⁴³ However, he never took this exam because his scholarly concentration was redirected during 1896, in which year Ma became interested in studying science. Making such a decision was difficult for a young man in Ma's time; the pursuit of ‘Western studies’, even at the end of the nineteenth century, was the first choice of few scholars. Rather it was a disappointing alternative for those whose path to an official career, via the imperial examination, had been blocked.Footnote ⁴⁴

Ma's intellectual world and his personal life were intertwined, as they are for most of us. Ma's interest in evolution had been initiated through his personal connections with several important Chinese evolutionists, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925).Footnote ⁴⁵ Kang, who read the manuscript of the Tianyan lun sent by Yan Fu in 1896, promptly assimilated evolutionary ideas into his Datong shu (On the Great Unity), a Confucian–teleological evolutionary map for world unity.Footnote ⁴⁶ Confucius and other great sages were, in Kang's work, converted into ‘innovators’ who had championed institutional reform and social evolution. Kang became best known for his role in the Hundred Days Reform (1898).Footnote ⁴⁷ Along with his brilliant protégé Liang Qichao, Kang advocated dramatic institutional revolutions, following the models set by the Meiji Emperor of Japan. Kang appears to have been one of the Confucian tradition's truly creative thinkers, and one of its most radical as well, for he endeavoured to modify that legacy into a system that was not only not inherently conservative, but progressive.Footnote ⁴⁸

Ma Junwu attended Kang's lecture of 1897 in Guilin, in which Kang advocated evolution and Western learning. This fortified Ma's determination to pursue a scientific education. Two years later, Ma was recruited to study English and mathematics at the Guangxi Science and Technology Academy, the first scientific institution in Ma's province. Yet Ma was expelled from the school in 1900, due to his radical stance on political reform. He then fled to Singapore, where he became Kang's formal disciple (Kang had been exiled to Singapore owing to the failure of the Hundred Days Reform). The content of the conversation between Kang and Ma is not known, yet Ma, after this meeting, incorporated evolution-flavoured slogans into his poem: ‘Tianyan [natural evolution] has been dominant from the ancient to the present, ferocious struggles for existence occur all over the earth’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ma acquired a minor sponsorship to study in Japan from the magistrate of Dongguan County in Canton Province and left for Yokohama in 1901. He took up residence in Kang Youwei's Yokohama Great Unity School, where he met Kang's disciple Liang Qichao, who was ‘Darwin's loudest champion’ in China.Footnote ⁵⁰ As China's most prolific intellectual, with more than ten million published words, Liang relied even more on Tianyan lun in his calls for political reform and cultural progress. For Liang, the struggle between Chinese and Western culture, originally seen as in parallel, changed, in the aftermath of Tianyan lun, into a consideration of two unequal developments, in which Chinese culture was regarded as backward and Western culture as progressive.Footnote ⁵¹

Ma had been a lifelong political ally of Sun Yat-sen since 1903, and Sun, in return, ordered his political partner to sponsor Ma's education in chemistry at Kyoto Imperial University, beginning in autumn 1903. As a revolutionary Darwinist, Sun Yat-sen, the future founding ‘provincial president’ of the Republic of China, proposed that the motivating force of history lay in man's ever-renewing efforts to ensure his subsistence. ‘The problem of livelihood is the problem of subsistence … Livelihood is the central force in social progress … and social progress is the central force in history.’Footnote ⁵²

The Chinese translation of the Origin was initiated in early 1902, when Ma acted as a temporary editor of Liang Qichao's influential Sein min choong bou (New People's Journal). Almost all Ma's articles during 1902 and 1903 were published in Sein min choong bou, including his earliest translation of the ‘Historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species’. Thenceforth Ma continued to publish the Chinese Origin as separate instalments:

• 15 April 1902, ‘Historical sketch’ (‘Xinpai shengwuxue (ji tianyan xue) jia xiaoshi’ 新派生物學（即天演学）家小史Footnote ⁵³

• October 1902, Wujing pian 物竞篇, Chapter 3, ‘Struggle for existence’ (Figure 1)

• October 1902, Tianze pian 天择篇, Chapter 4, ‘Natural selection’Footnote ⁵⁴ (Figure 2)

• December 1903, Daerwen wuzhong youlai, yijuan 達爾文物種由來，一卷, ‘Historical sketch’ and Chapters 1–5Footnote ⁵⁵ (Figure 3)

• September 1920, Daerwen wuzhong yuanshi 達爾文物種原始, Origin in its entiretyFootnote ⁵⁶

Figure 1.

The translation of Chapter 3 of the Origin, Wujing pian, was bound together with Chapter 16 of Spencer's Social Statics (1851), which confirmed Ma's determination not to separate Darwin and Spencer, similar to the practice of his predecessor, Yan Fu. The full monograph above, entitled Daerwen wujingpian sibinsai nvquan pian heke (The Co-publication of Darwin's On the Struggle for Existence and Spencer's The Rights of Women), was announced by three companies in Shanghai, Kaiming Book Company, Wenming Book Company and Guangzhi Book Company, in October 1902. © 2018 Trustees of the National Library of China (Beijing).

Figure 2.

Tianze pian was distributed in October 1902 by the three companies that published Wujing pian. © 2018 Trustees of Shanghai Library.

Figure 3.

The first edition of Daerwen wuzhong youlai, yijuan (Darwin's Origin of Species, vol. 1) was circulated on 1 December 1903 by Wenming Book Company and Guangyi Book Company in Shanghai. This volume was then reprinted in 1906. The first edition of this book is now lost. The above is the second edition published in November 1906. © 2018 Trustees of Australian National University Library.

A gap of fourteen years is noticeable between two distinct periods of translation. The first period of translation (before 1906) consisted of Chapters 1–5 of the Origin and the ‘Historical sketch’ – Ma labelled these chapters the ‘first volume’ of Darwin's Origin. The translation of the Origin in its entirety, however, was accomplished in 1920. Historically, the first period of translation occurred during the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), while the second period was in the era of the Republic of China (1912–1949). The difference in the context between the first and second periods of Ma's translation was substantial, and was interwoven with the translator's personal background, the history of evolutionary thinking, the development of biological sciences, and political history in China. In the following section, I will investigate the first period of Ma's translation, showing how intellectual and social context shaped the reading of Darwin's work in China before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty.

The transformation of the Origin

Darwin published six editions of the Origin between 1859 and 1872, all of which have textual modifications, particularly the third, fifth and sixth editions.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ma translated the sixth edition.Footnote ⁵⁸ His translation style mimicked that of Yan Fu in his edition of Huxley's work; Darwin's Origin was rendered into concise and poetic classical Chinese. It is unnecessary to question why Ma did not adopt ‘vernacular Chinese’, which later became the standard scientific language in China, for the whole vernacular-language movement still lay in the future; that is, in the mid-1910s. In the first period of Ma's translation, classical Chinese was still the orthodox scholarly medium of communication.

The rigid semantic form of classical Chinese, indeed, provided Ma with a convenient linguistic tool for transforming the original text in the Origin. In the following discussion, I will demonstrate how Ma utilized his linguistic strategy for reconciling China's previous progressive code of evolution with the ideas in Darwin's Origin, and how Darwin's branching model of ‘descent with modification’ was converted into a linear progressive one through in-depth analyses of the central Darwinian concepts: variation, adaptation, the struggle for existence and natural selection. The transformation of Darwin's most provocative doctrines not only reflects Ma's reconceptualization of evolution through the progressive lens of Chinese eyes, but also makes clear that Ma had little intention of contesting Yan Fu's progressive ‘paradigm’ of evolution.

‘Variation’ is, undeniably, a notion prioritized in Darwin's Origin, introduced in the text through a discussion of ‘Variation under domestication’ and ‘Variation under nature’. After expounding on the ‘Struggle for existence’ and ‘Natural selection’, Darwin revisited variation under ‘Laws of variation’ in Chapter 5. In the Chinese translation, the concept of variation was transformed into the description of a progressive process:

Ma has evidently transformed Darwin's original text.Footnote ⁶⁰ Variation, for Darwin, refers to individual differences, or, more accurately, ‘modifications’ in organisms in the process of the ‘descent with modification’; that is, from certain causes, the parental character becomes slightly modified in the progeny. Darwin's variation was based upon his observation of slight differences in offspring, as he had observed in his barnacle taxonomy carried out between 1846 and 1854.Footnote ⁶¹ Ma conflated ‘variation’ with ‘variety’, and defined bianyi (variation) as meaning that ‘incipient species become ultimately converted into good and distinct species’. He thereby incorporated progressiveness into Darwin's concept of variation. Indeed, progressiveness and consciousness-flavoured arguments appear in the Chinese Origin on multiple occasions: ‘if the climate changes, the residents strive to modify their body to adapt to the changing environment instantly’. Ma's translation reiterated, ‘the transformation of species is continuous. In order to adapt to the environment, progress is ceaseless’.Footnote ⁶² By highlighting the ‘power of will’ and progressiveness, Ma assimilated Lamarckian or Spencerian developmental processes into the Origin. What Ma chose not to translate is also important. For instance, Darwin's non-progressivist statement in the sixth edition – ‘natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not include progressive development’ – was omitted from the Chinese Origin.Footnote ⁶³

During the period of Ma's translation, appeals to Darwin and Spencer frequently appeared together in Chinese mass publications. Spencer had published his philosophy of progressive social evolution prior to the publication of the Origin, and his writings were far more effective than Darwin's in spreading the general gospel of evolutionism.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Spencerian synthetic philosophy encompassed the formation of the cosmos from matter and force to the evolution of humanity, with all moral customs, social institutions and political systems seemingly accounted for. Such a perspective made Spencer attractive to international readers,Footnote ⁶⁵ including Ma Junwu, who translated Spencer's ‘The introduction of sociology’, Part II of the Principle of Sociology, in 1903. It is evident that Ma had read, at least partially, Spencer's Social Statics, since his translation of Chapter 3 of the Origin was bound together with Chapter 16 of Spencer's Social Statics. Spencer, who was not timid in speaking about progress, provided Ma with an abundant source of upward transformation. As Spencer argued in Social Statics,

It is hard to say that Darwin was a ‘non-progressivist’, and scholarly debates over Darwin's ‘progressivism’ have been long-standing.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, Darwinian ‘progressivism’ is dissimilar to Lamarckian–Spencerian versions. Lamarck asserted, in his Zoological Philosophy, that ‘[p]rogress in complexity of organization exhibits anomalies here and there in the general series of animals, due to the influence of environment and of acquired habits’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Lamarckian evolution is a linear progressive process, moving from the simplest to the most complicated organic forms; meanwhile, this process is affected by use and disuse, environment and consciousness. Lamarck held also to the teleological view that the human being is the telos of speciation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Conversely, Darwin believed that monkeys and man might both give rise to other species, and no species, including man, could be produced twice.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Darwinian criterion for judging ‘progressiveness’ might have been derived from French zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards (1800–1885), who had applied Adam Smith's (1723–1790) concept of the division of labour to zoology and believed that division of physiological labour achieves perfection within each type. Specialization or division of labour became the generally accepted definition of organic progress among zoologists in the 1850s.Footnote ⁷¹ From about 1854, Darwin considered Milne-Edwards's notion of the division of physiological labour as a mark of higher development.Footnote ⁷² Darwin may also have drawn such an idea from the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and argued in his A Monograph of the Sub-class Cirripedia, ‘Von Baer considers that the perfection of the type of any animal is in relation to the amount of morphological differentiation’.Footnote ⁷³

Darwin decided to avoid the expressions ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in his later editions of the Origin. Darwinian development is sometimes retrograde; that is, progressiveness is not always obligatory for the working of natural selection.Footnote ⁷⁴ To mark his distinction from the popular evolutionism of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) that had assimilated Lamarckian progressivism, Darwin added this paragraph to the sixth edition of his Origin:

However, Ma rendered this paragraph as follows:

In the Chinese translation, Ma, who removed Darwin's rejection of Lamarckian doctrines, took great pains to demonstrate Darwin's progressiveness in order to legitimize the progressive evolutionary interpretation held by Yan Fu and Spencer. For Ma, progressiveness or ‘occupying the highest position’ is indispensable for survival, since ‘species making progress survive, those not evolving become extinct’.Footnote ⁷⁷ To help Chinese readers better understand the significance of seizing an advantageous ecological position, Ma added a vivid example of human warfare to the Chinese Origin: the struggle for survival is ‘like two armies that stand off on a mountain; success and failure are decided in one second. Any species that fail to transform and let their enemies occupy a higher position become extinct instantaneously’.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the ‘Historical sketch’, Darwin criticized, at least mildly, the Lamarckian concepts of use and disuse, environmental effects, progressiveness and spontaneous generation:

Ma abridged and restructured this paragraph in the Chinese translation:

Apparently, Ma removed Darwin's criticisms of key Lamarckian doctrines in the Chinese Origin. In a way similar to Yan Fu, Ma made an effort to diminish the differences between Darwinian ideas and Lamarckian or Spencerian notions, because they all ‘belonged’ to the same camp. Ma annotated, in his translation of the ‘Historical sketch’, the claim that thirty-four naturalists (including Lamarck) shared an identical view with that of Darwin.Footnote ⁸¹

Ma argued that the struggle for existence is the engine for progressive speciation: ‘whenever there are organic beings, there are struggles for life, which cause variation’.Footnote ⁸² Darwin himself never worked out the causes of variation, speaking only of ‘unknown laws’ governing variation: ‘Variability is governed by many unknown laws, of which correlated growth is probably the most important’.Footnote ⁸³ Darwin's struggle for life could not be straightforwardly treated as the direct cause of variation. It only elucidates why some individuals – that happen to have a combination of advantageous or fittest traits – succeed. Heredity, rather than consciousness or effort, is conducive to survival.

It was clear to Ma that Spencer's teleologically directed competition, rather than Darwin's less directional struggle for existence, would better propel Ma's ‘obsolete’ homeland, China, forwards. Moreover, the struggle for existence, for both Spencer and Ma, is ‘selfish’, as Spencer explained in the Social Statics:

Spencerian selfishness struck a sympathetic chord in Ma's mind: ‘Being selfish is man's nature and the spur for development’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ma stressed, ‘the struggle for existence is also the best school for modifying human races’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He disallowed artificial checks on the Spencerian social struggle: ‘[some] philosophers, being of high morality, assail selfishness, and promote their holy dogmas on civil rights in their ideal society. Rather, those ideas are the obstructions to social advance’.Footnote ⁸⁷

In the Notebook period and in the ‘Sketch of 1842’ and the longer ‘Essay of 1844’, Darwin considered ‘perfect adaptation’ to be the norm of nature, and the purpose of natural selection was to preserve harmonious and flawless adaptation.Footnote ⁸⁸ But he gradually abandoned the idea of perfect adaptation in later life, particularly in the 1870s, when he published his sixth edition of the Origin. Darwin's concept of ‘adaptation’ was translated as yinyun 氤氲, a classical term from the ancient divination text I Ching.Footnote ⁸⁹ Yinyun, a mysterious phrase meaning the harmonious interactions between yin and yang, might partially reflect the meaning of Darwin's ‘adaptation’. However, this phrase was never adopted by Chinese scientists who later designated shiying 適應 as the standard Chinese term for ‘adaptation’. One reason is that yinyun 氤氲 was a classical Chinese term, which was made obsolete in the vernacular-Chinese movement of the mid-1910s. Most of Ma's classical-Chinese-derived terms, including leize 類擇 (sexual selection), and most of the terms inherited from Yan Fu's Tianyan lun, such as wujing 物競 (struggle for existence) and tianze 天擇 (natural selection), were abandoned by Chinese biologists in the 1910s. With the flocking of Chinese students to Japan for university study, and a flood of Chinese translations of Japanese texts (including Japanese translations of foreign literature), the line of least resistance was towards the wholesale adoption of the new Japanese vocabulary.Footnote ⁹⁰

Natural selection had been personified by Darwin in the first and second editions of the Origin, but then altered with the revisions of the third and subsequent editions. Ma's attitude towards natural selection is ambiguous. As an atheist, Ma had no difficulty in conveying Darwin's clarification of the secular idea of ‘nature’ in the insert of the third edition and in all subsequent editions of the Origin. He conveyed precisely Darwin's claim in his translation with this rendering: ‘natural selection is not an omnipotent God who governs human society. Attacking my theory is equal to rejecting an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movement of planets’.Footnote ⁹¹ On the other hand, Ma personified natural selection, in his poetic language, as a ‘ruler’:

In this translation, Ma greatly changed the meaning of the corresponding text in the Origin.Footnote ⁹³ Natural selection, interpreted here as a judge, becomes a forceful impulse in Ma's teleological speciation: ‘natural selection forces species to make progress. All that wish to survive have to be firmly aware of the warning of natural selection’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ma wrote in the Chinese Origin, ‘natural selection navigates around the world, permanently eliminating the inferior, and preserving the superior. Albeit its effect is hard to detect, it works permanently. Hence species have to progress all the time’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nonetheless, Ma assured his fellow Chinese that natural selection is an ‘amiable’ arbitrator, and that ‘the ones that are willing to progress should not feel afraid of natural selection’. He went on, ‘Although natural selection is relentless, it could not hurt the ones that make variation’, and ‘if an individual is born with an innate capability of seeking progress, its viability must be more consolidated’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Like Yan Fu, Ma urged that the Chinese should unite and propel the nation's social development, or else face racial extinction. In ‘On the deterioration of Chinese morality and its solutions’, published four months after Tianze pian, Ma blamed the Chinese for not being united.Footnote ⁹⁷ Natural selection, under Ma's pen, became a sacred cause of racial unification, in order to succeed in the international struggle.

Darwin's diagram in Chapter 4 comprehensively demonstrates his concept of descent from a common progenitor, the role of variation, the struggle for existence, the principle of divergence, the Darwinian interpretation of taxonomy, and the working of natural selection. The diagram itself is precisely reproduced in the Chinese Origin (Figure 4). Nonetheless, the explanation of this diagram ‘evolved’:

Figure 4.

The diagram in the Daerwen wuzhong youlai, vol. 1 (1906). © 2018 Trustees of the Australian National University Library.

This is, indeed, an astonishing reinterpretation of Darwin's diagram, and it alters Darwin's own explanation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Ma had also reduced the text of Darwin's original description in Chapter 4 – ‘The probable effects of the action of natural selection through divergence of character and extinction’ – by nearly four-fifths. He simply divides species into two categories: the winners, like A and I, each of which has multiple branches of offspring; and the rest as losers, which perish sooner or later. Ma never conveyed Darwin's intended claim that all species derived from a common progenitor. Nor did he explicate how a fairly well-marked variety came into being under the action of the principle of divergence and isolation speciation, or how the struggle for existence and natural selection carry on their work. Nor, lastly, did he explain why some species, such as F in Darwin's diagram, either persist unaltered or are altered only to a slight degree.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Meanwhile, F, for Darwin, is not a ‘loser’ (as Ma stated), but a ‘living fossil’. Seeing so many extinct species in Darwin's diagram, Ma expressed himself sentimentally: ‘the past ones ceased to survive; memorializing their ancient living times; we cannot stop crying’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Perhaps we see here a hint of Ma the classical Chinese poet, who later (in 1909) became a member of the conservative Chinese literature association, the Southern Society (Nan she 南社).

The most substantial concern for Ma, like that for Yan Fu, was the social development and power of his nation. Although Darwin indicated in the Origin that ‘much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’, he famously did not discuss in that book humans or their society.Footnote ¹⁰² Nevertheless, Ma took great pains to apply the evolutionary principles to human society in his translation, altering Darwin's text to read as follows:

Darwin did not say anything about human society in the original text.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet Ma strove to convey that China, ‘the secluded country surrounded by barriers’, had been invaded by new and better species, and that the Chinese must evolve in order to escape natural elimination. Like Yan Fu and Spencer, Ma was concerned to apply the principle of evolution to the social realm, and as a consequence turned the Origin into a treatise for saving China's chaotic social and political environment at the beginning of the twentieth century.

By transforming the central Darwinian notions of variation, adaptation, the struggle for existence, and natural selection, Ma effectively presented to unsuspecting Chinese audiences an amended Darwinian system through his progressive mindset. This legitimized China's pre-existing paradigm of evolutionary progressivism encoded in Tianyan lun, and justified Ma's own conception of social evolution, with Spencerian (or Lamarckian) consciousness and progressiveness coexisting in the Chinese Origin. Darwin, through the effort of Ma, was converted into underwriter rationale for revolutionizing the ‘obsolete’ political forms of the late Qing Dynasty, a rescuer of racial survival and a prophet denoting the secret of national power.