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Making Sense of the Political in Twentieth-Century China
Translation, Adaptation, and Appropriation
in Contributions to the History of Concepts
Author:
Xin Fan
Xin Fan
Teaching Associate, University of Cambridge, UK xf247@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract
At the opening of the twentieth century, some believed that there was a lack of political consciousness among the Chinese people. They introduced foreign political theories, attempting to engage Chinese citizenry with the political. Yet what the political entails remains an unresolved issue even in China today. This article traces the history of Chinese translation of the political through a dynamic process of language adaptation and cultural appropriation. It argues that two competing legacies, one that promises the politicization as a way to liberate individual subjectivity in a modernizing society and another that calls for the order and organization that subject individual will to the collective power of the state, have exerted combined influences on shaping the modern Chinese conception of the political. As a result, to many Chinese today, politics is not just about the daily business of people's affairs but also an orderly society with a centralized authority.
Contributor Notes
Xin Fan is Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Fellow and Director of Studies at Lucy Cavendish College of the University of Cambridge. E-mail: xf247@cam.ac.uk