Twentieth-century China Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton Culture and education in the late Qing era and early Republic are the subjects of the four articles in this issue. Li-Lin Tseng brings an art historian’s sensitivity to her study of Zheng Zhengqiu, who got his start as a publisher of illustrated newspapers. He made use of images and approaches from that genre, including a commitment to social change, as a pioneer of new drama and film in the 1910s and 1920s. Jiacheng Liu focuses on Beijing actresses in the same period, exploring the professional and personal lives of the first generation of women allowed to perform on the stage. She argues that these actresses were well aware of the tendency of theater audiences and the press to look on their bodies as commodities; some responded to this by crafting a new type of flirtatious feminine persona, quite unlike the image of courtesans of the past or other female ideals emerging in the early twentieth century. Educational and communication initiatives launched by the two dominant political parties in the 1920s and 1930s round out this issue. Shaoqian Zhang documents and analyzes the Nationalist Party’s propaganda work and shows how it drew on both earlier Chinese political imagery and models from the Soviet Union. She argues that the successful use of propaganda posters by the Nationalists preceded the better-known propaganda work of the Communist Party. Di Luo examines the methods and goals of the Communist literacy campaigns during the period of the Jiangxi Soviet. Analyzing the literacy primers that were employed, she argues that literacy campaigns were seen as central to the process of creating revolutionaries from among the peasantry of Jiangxi. In addition to these four articles, this issue of Twentieth-Century China includes reviews of three new books on, respectively, urban-rural relations in the early PRC period, museums in contemporary China, and the fortunes of a family business that operated under five different political regimes in twentieth-century China. Readers may have noticed some recent additions to the journal’s staff. Professors Zhao Ma of Washington University in St. Louis and Margaret Greene of the University of Montana have joined the journal as associate editors, and Gregory Epp has taken on the role of coordinating editor. Our publisher, Maney, has been acquired by Taylor & Francis, which has led to some changes in the production staff. We thank our Maney colleagues for their excellent work on behalf of the journal and look forward to developing the same productive relationship with our new Taylor & Francis associates. [End Page 1] Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton The articles in this special issue work toward what guest editor Jing Tsu calls an “interconnected global history” of Chinese language politics. Professor Tsu’s introduction offers an overview of the subject and points out emerging perspectives and analytical approaches. The creation of a national language was seen by many political activists as a key step toward unifying the Chinese nation. Jin Liu’s article analyzes the place of local languages—or fangyan—in the thinking of twentieth-century language reformers. Mårten Söderblom Saarela explores the overlooked history of alphabetic schemes for Chinese that employed Chinese characters or Manchu script rather than Western letters. Flora Shao uses the genre of folk song to examine the tense intersection of dialect studies and linguistic nationalism in the 1920s. Gina Tam, who organized the 2015 Association for Asian Studies panel at which most of these essays were originally presented, concludes the special issue with a study of dialect history after 1949, analyzing how the relationship between a new standard spoken language (Putonghua) and dialects was understood by aspiring scientific Marxist linguists. Associate editor Zhao Ma worked with Professor Tsu to oversee the editorial process for this special issue. The issue also presents three book reviews: Yun Xia reviews Lisa Tran’s study of marriage and monogamy in twentieth-century China, Alvin K. Wong reviews Petrus Liu’s work on queer cultures in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic of China, and Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley reviews David Pietz’s history of the Yellow River. [End Page 209] Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China

Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China by Tran, Lisa

Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China by Tran, Lisa

Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, by Leta Hong Fincher. London: Zed Books, 2014. 214 pp. £70.00/US$134.95 (cloth), £14.99/US$24.95 (paper), £14.99 (eBook).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsLeftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, by Leta Hong Fincher. London: Zed Books, 2014. 214 pp. £70.00/US$134.95 (cloth), £14.99/US$24.95 (paper), £14.99 (eBook).Mei-Ling EllermanMei-Ling EllermanThe Australian National University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 75January 2016 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/683475 Views: 556Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Zhinan Ji, Meng Xiangchun A feminist translation approach in twentieth-century China: Bing Xin’s 《园丁集》translation of The Gardener by Tagore, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9, no.11 (Aug 2022).https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01295-1

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton Zhao Erfeng and Sheng Xuanhuai were two larger-than-life political actors in the last decade of Qing rule. After their deaths in the 1910s, they continued to figure in Chinese politics and culture. In this issue of Twentieth-Century China, Joohee Suh analyzes biographies of Zhao published in the early years of the Republic, exploring various interpretations of his role as conqueror of the Western border regions and adversary of the Sichuan railway protection movement. The lack of a consensus on the significance of the 1911 Revolution is apparent, she argues, in the different assessments of Zhao’s place in history. Qiliang He examines the extravagant funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai in Shanghai in 1917, detailing the negotiations that resulted in the particular procession route and discussing the motivations of those who participated, including more than a million spectators. He argues that such public spectacles created a shared experience that bound diverse immigrant communities together as city people. One of Sheng Xuanhuai’s successors as a leader of industry, Liu Hongsheng, is a central figure in The Lius of Shanghai, 1 in which Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh mined family letters to trace interpersonal relationships and cultural change. In his article in this issue, Micah Muscolino takes a close look at neglected aspects of Liu Hongsheng’s business career. In particular, Muscolino shows how Liu managed different business ventures so that they supported one another, using by-products from his coal operations as fuel and raw material for factories in other sectors. Through his study of the Liu business empire, Muscolino uncovers the history of China’s transition to an economy based on fossil fuels. Conceptions of childhood in a China at war are the subject of Xu Lanjun’s contribution to this issue. She sheds light on children’s traveling troupes that formed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, examining the educational philosophy that inspired them, as well as their role in wartime propaganda. Vulnerable children, including refugees and orphans, gained symbolic importance during the national crisis, and Xu discusses how educators and activists encouraged children to think of themselves as part of the resistance struggle. Three recent books are reviewed in this issue: Parks Coble’s work on Chinese wartime journalism in the 1930s and 1940s, Joan Judge’s analysis of visual and written representations of women in Shanghai’s Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) during the first decade of the Republic, and Shellen Xiao Wu’s study of the evolution of mining engineering and the integration of China’s coal resources into the world economy. [End Page 109] Footnotes 1. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China

Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad

Reviewed by: Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad Franklin J. Woo (bio) Odd Arne Westad. Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750. New York: Basic Books, 2012. 515 pp. Hardcover $32.00, isbn 978-0-465-02936-5. Westad teaches international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He says he is not a China specialist, but credits Michael H. Hunt, his teacher, for creating in him an interest in Chinese history, sustained for more than twenty-five years. Dedicated to Michael and Paula Hunt, Restless Empire is about how Western ideas and institutions influenced and were incorporated into the Qing dynasty, beginning 250 years ago. As an empire, it was at its height in the year 1750. Designed largely by the Italian Jesuit missionary Giuseppe Castiglione, the Yuan Mingyuan gardens (five times bigger than the Forbidden City) were the concrete symbol of Qing power at its zenith. The magnificent gardens were totally [End Page 395] destroyed, burned to the ground by the allied forces of seven Western nations plus Japan, in squelching the Boxer uprising against foreigners and Christians in 1900. Westad’s position is that despite the forceful entry of the West and Japan into China, resulting in it being semi-colonial, quite a bit of Western ways and lifestyles were nevertheless absorbed by China and the Chinese, but were expressed in different forms of hybridity. The notion of hybridity is used by Westad in several places in the book to show “China’s capacity to form hybrid or at least eclectic forms of social identities, and its propensity for internalizing worldviews created elsewhere” (p. 14).1 Restless Empire is easy and interesting reading, enhanced by the fact that its many historical facets hang together coherently as one continuous story. The book is also entertaining. Westad is a careful historian, attested to by the detailed notes in the eleven chapters. He is a great storyteller, adorning his narrative with interesting tidbits of facts and information as well as actual names of significant players at different times and occasions. Many of his cited remarks or descriptions provide a touch of humor. In his acknowledgments, Westad states in bold letters, “I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED TO ALL THE SCHOLARS and writers whose work I draw on for this book of synthesis.” The book, he adds, “is primarily intended for a general reading public” (p. 477). Having read and reviewed several of the scholars from whom Westad has drawn, I find his use of secondary material skillful and imaginative in offering this informative volume to the reading public. As an artist in popularizing history, he by no means has compromised any of the scholarship of his sources.2 Westad’s use of one or two simple words (all with broad ramifications) to encapsulate each of his eleven chapters is ingenious. These are chapters: 1, “Metamorphosis” (China’s transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); 2, “Imperialism”; 3, “Japan”; 4, “Republic”; 5, “Foreigners”; 6, “Abroad”; 7, “War”; 8, “Communism”; 9, “China Alone”; 10, “China’s America”; and finally 11, “China’s Asia.” The chapters are sandwiched between his overview of the Qing by the two categories central to the book, “Empire” and “Modernities.” Having teased out the important antecedents of an outward-looking Qing (under Western and Japanese domination), Westad as historian makes no overt predictions, but leaves the task to his readers. His conviction, however, is that “[h]istory therefore influences Chinese ways of seeing the world in a more direct sense than in any other culture I know. . . . Although it is impossible to predict the future based on the past, it is necessary to understand it in order to have at least some means of navigation at hand” (p. 2). It is Westad’s view that by the first half of the twentieth century China had been internationalized, and that by the year 1940 it had become integrated into a capitalist world of expanding markets. His focus is not limited to state-to-state diplomatic relations; he also depicts the people-to-people relations and interaction that have helped to transform China and the Chinese. Despite much Chinese resistance, there were...

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Li Huaiyin, and: Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China by Qin Yanchun

Reviewed by: Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Li Huaiyin, and: Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China by Qin Yanchun Guo Chao (bio) Li Huaiyin. Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xii, 338 pp. Hardcover $52.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3608-5. Qin Yanchun 秦燕春. Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China (清末民初的晚明想象). Beijing: Peking University Press 北京­大学出版社, 2008. ix, 408 pp. Paperback RMB42.00, isbn 978-7-301-14863-1. Li Huaiyin’s book, by showing the shift of two paradigms—modernization and revolution—in Chinese historiography since the 1930s, emphasizes the significance [End Page 58] of motivations of teleology, specifically ideology, in all history writing. In Li’s point of view, history writing is the historian’s subjective construction, which is not “found” or “discovered,” but “invented” (pp. 4, 18). Via the “reinventing” in the title of his book, Li definitively differentiates history writing from history, therefore indicating that the ultimate aim of Chinese historians in the twentieth century was not (primarily) to seek the truth (history) but to legitimate the solutions for the given sociopolitical situations (reality). Specifically, Li discusses the two paradigms of historiography with emphases on four sequentially historical Chinese contexts. I will not retell the details of the book at length; Paul A. Cohen1 and Qian Zhu Pullen2 have both excellently summarized these in their book reviews. As an early attempt in English, which “systematically studies Chinese historiography over the period 1930s–2000s” (Qian, p. 229), Li outlines the confrontation between and transformation within the two paradigms, as well as indicates an alternative explanatory framework to the historiography of twentieth-century China. But he still leaves some questions unanswered (or even concealed), which will be examined hereinafter. First, Li’s book is indeed, as he himself writes, “a study of Chinese historiography” (p. vii); however, we must acknowledge it as an examination of Chinese history as well, which is welded together with ideological biases. If checked within a long-lasting and far-ranging perspective of the history of China, his way of framing his narrative model seems questionable in two points: origin defining and material choosing. One of the contentious points is Li’s beginning his narrative in the 1930s. By distinguishing “modernization” in the 1930s from “Westernization” in the May Fourth Movement, which focused on “intellectual enlightenment” and “liberal values” (p. 38), Li switches his “before 1949” in the title with “after 1930” in the body, beginning with Jiang Tingfu (蒋廷黻), an intellectual as well as KMT (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party of China) official in the 1930s, as an exemplar. Thus, when viewing Li’s relocation of the 1980s “New Enlightenment” as a return of liberal tradition, we may notice the absence of the origin of the “liberal tradition” (p. 198) it came back to. Li therefore reveals an ambiguous attitude to the May Fourth Movement, since his efforts at downplaying it might precisely reflect his anxiety of unconsciously admitting it as orthodoxy. Li’s studiously downplaying May Fourth’s influence might be an outcome of CPC’s (Communist Party of China) ratifying this movement as the origin of its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the nationalism of the 1930s cannot outweigh the liberalism of May Fourth—for the 1930s “nationalism” exemplified by Jiang is dubious itself. In a battle with the “Left-Wing League” of CPC, KMT initiated the “Nationalist Literature Movement” in the 1930s. History writing, especially the narrative of KMT official Jiang himself, was unlikely to avoid such influences—despite Li’s justifications (p. 70) for Jiang’s identity as an individual intellectual. After all, when a “liberal intellectual” [End Page 59] becomes complicit with “a dictatorial state,” it seems contradictory to consider him a “liberal intellectual” as before, with absolute individuality. As for his choice of material, “The foremost characteristic of the modernization discourse in the 1930s,” according to Li, is a shifting from liberalism to nationalism (p. 37). Li neglects the heterogeneity of such categories as “liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism,” as well as “Maoism” (p. 2) by integrating them into his two main narratives. Generally, nationalism is a claim calling for a...

'Father Mao' and the Country-Family

What does it mean when Mao Zedong is called 'Father Mao' and when ordinary people in central China put a poster of Mao in the place of their ancestors and the emperor? This article analyzes ordinary affection for the Chinese state and explores changing ideas of the leader as a father and the country as a family. The first part deals with the historical transformation of these metaphors from the late Qing dynasty to the Communist Revolution and Maoism, describing the vernacularization and sentimentalization of the 'Confucian order of the father/son' in twentieth-century China. Against this historical background and based on fieldwork material from central China, the second part deals with the 'mixed feelings' that people in the present day now have for fathers at home, for local officials, and for national leaders.

Paul A. Cohen.History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis.

During his career as a scholar of China, Paul A. Cohen has written insightful books on the way the past is analyzed and remembered by historians and laypersons: Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (2008) and the brilliant History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997). His new study elaborates further on these themes, bringing to bear Cohen’s sensitivity as a historian. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis is a book about storytelling, about the stories people tell themselves about their past in order to give meaning to their life. “The power of story,” writes Cohen, “so common and yet so poorly understood, merits far more scrutiny than it has generally received from historians” (xiii). Following the zeitgeist of memory studies, he is interested not in what happened, but in what people believed took place in the past: because we remember the past not in order to get it right but in order to get it wrong, and to make sense of our life in the present. These are stories full of repressions, mistakes, embellishments, and lies, a lot of lies.

Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren, Luke Him Sau Architect: China’s Missing Modern

This book by Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren is one of the first of its kind, focusing on the biography of a first-generation architect from twentieth-century China. Like his fellow architects of that period, Luke Him Sau (Lu Qianshou, 陸謙受, 1904-1991) belonged to a group of architects educated at a Western school with a formal academic tradition. In late 1930s this generation designed the curricula for the architectural education system in China according to their experience in the West. The ...

Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-century China

In her article Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to the perception that early twentieth-century Chinese women's military activism was facilitated through assimilation into male identities, Xie's, Hu's, and Bai's texts show that women celebrated their womanhood through mass mobilization and dedicated services at the front as soldiers, activists, and reporters.

Making National History with Literary History: Hegel’s Influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and the Late Qing and Early Republican China

Through analyzing Hegel’s influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and later, on the late Qing and early Republican China, this paper will shed lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.

Medical transitions in twentieth-century China

Medical transitions in twentieth-century China

Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong. By Angelina Chin. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. xx, 278 pp. $85.00 (cloth).

Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong. By Angelina Chin. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. xx, 278 pp. $85.00 (cloth). - Volume 74 Issue 2

Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China

The ink brushes of the painters Chen Shizeng (1876–1923), Liu Kuiling (1885–1967), and Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) were employed as tools of the nation in early twentieth-century China. Yet the expression of a radical idealism about the new republic in their ink paintings was tempered early on by a tentative and self-conscious exploration of new ways of seeing. By synthesizing a “universal” scientific gaze with their idiosyncratically trained vision as artists, they created pictures that encouraged their viewers to cross the boundaries and binaries that would come to define the discourse about guohua , or “national painting”: East versus West, oil versus ink, modernity versus tradition, painting versus graphic arts, and elite versus folk. This article explores that extended moment of synthesis and experimentation. It argues that it was through the scientific gaze of these brush-and-ink artists that idealism and learning came to cooperate, and through their paintings that possibilities for news ways of seeing the nation emerged.

The Dragon King and the 1931 Wuhan Flood: Religious Rumors and Environmental Disasters in Republican China

This article explores popular religious conceptualizations of the environment and disasters in early twentieth-century China. In 1931, the city of Wuhan experienced a catastrophic flood. Soon a rumor began to circulate suggesting that the disaster had been caused by the recent demolition of a local Dragon King Temple. This article examines this rumor as a mode of popular discourse, using it to illustrate debates among members of the local population regarding the link between the environment, religion, and disasters. It describes the place of Dragon Kings in late imperial religious environmental management, before discussing how the status of these deities was devalued during the early twentieth century. It argues that, in spite of vigorous attempts at secular reform, for a large section of the population the experience of disasters continued to be dominated by popular religious conceptualizations of the environment. While modern critics disparaged what they saw as lamentable superstitions, for many people rainmaking Dragon Kings continued to exist.

Cosmopolitanism and the translation of children’s literature: Zheng Zhenduo as a case study

Cosmopolitanism in early twentieth-century China was chiefly associated with political ideals. The author contends that as an intellectual discourse, cosmopolitanism also made a visible impact on the literary landscape. Literary translation was a field where the cosmopolitan spirit was most clearly discerned, and children’s literature is especially relevant to cosmopolitan thinking due to its association with humanist ideals in the Chinese enlightenment endeavor. After an attempt at defining cosmopolitanism in its specific historical and contextual background, this article moves on to a detailed look at Zheng Zhenduo’s (1898–1958) cosmopolitan consciousness and its link with his advocacy for translating children’s literature. The selection of genres and authors, and the strategies of translation are examined in detail. The case helps to reveal that the translation of children’s literature in early twentieth-century China, which first grew out of the Chinese nationalist movement, came to be increasingly tinged with deep cosmopolitan ramifications that sought continuously to disrupt mainstream nationalist discourse. The article also shows that the translator, caught in the vicissitudes of the early twentieth century, disrupted the frequently-assumed dichotomies between the cosmopolitan and the local, and between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, not through theory or discourse, but through the very act of translating. As such, the historical case of China might also provide some interesting insights into the role of children’s literature translation in constructing the world we inhabit.

Nationalism and Beyond: Writings on Nüjie and the Emergence of a New Gendered Collective Identity in Modern China

This study focuses on nüjie, as a new conceptualization of women’s public identity, and the transformations in its meaning in early twentieth-century China. Rather than merely perceiving nüjie as a term for collective womanhood in the context of Chinese nationalism and feminism, this essay reinterprets it as a conceptual totality as well as a powerful category to redraw Chinese women’s links to those connections between the Chinese nation and women, gendered social relations, and more broadly, the relationship of women to the modernizing world. By examining writings – in particular women’s writings on nüjie in late Qing women’s feminist journals, this essay argues it was through the empowering category of nüjie that women writers constructed feminist critiques within – and against – the nationalist discourse, and ultimately, envisioned a new collective identity for Chinese women.

Sinology, Feminist History, and Everydayness in the Early Republican Periodical Press

This article merges two approaches in what I am calling a horizontal reading of the women’s periodical press in early twentieth-century China. Feminism’s skepticism of all-encompassing narratives and attentiveness to the circuitous routes through which knowledge is produced make these multigenre, multivocal, and multiregistered materials legitimate objects of historical study. At the same time the methods of sinology, which combine competence in the mutating forms of Republican-era written Chinese with openness to new theoretically inflected approaches, help to unlock their aporetic richness. Aimed at capturing rather than disciplining the chaotic richness of these publications, this horizontal method reads the range of materials within women’s magazines against one another: discursive essays against photographic portraits, and advertisements against readers’ columns, for example. Rather than seeking the discursive logic articulated in selected essays—the prevailing scholarly approach to the periodical press—the horizontal method aims to capture the naturally occurring oddities of quotidian print matter. These oddities, in turn, highlight productive disjunctions inherent in Republican culture. Such a reading deepens our knowledge of the dramatic early twentieth-century changes that altered the course of modern Chinese history and enriches our understanding of the demographic that was arguably most affected by those changes—urban women. It also offers an alternate vision of how those dramatic changes were lived and understood, not in terms of a series of stark binaries that pitted “Western modernity” against “Chinese tradition” but through blended accommodations grounded in the intimate details of daily life.

Translation and the relocation of global cultures: mainly a Chinese perspective

Starting from Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural translation, the author holds that one of the important functions of translation lies in that it could relocate different cultures in the age of globalization. To the author, culture in such a global era is characterized more by diversity than homogeneity，which is a direct consequence of the location and relocation of global cultures. Thus, in this aspect, translation has been playing a dominant role: mediating and translating among different cultures. But its traditional definition has long transcended changing from one language into another. If the large-scale literary and cultural translation in the first half of the twentieth century in China brought Chinese literature and culture closer to the mainstream of world literature and culture, then the Chinese literary and translation practice in the past decades has enabled Chinese literature and culture to carry on dialogue on an equal footing with their western counterparts as well as international scholarship. But the difference lies in that the former was realized at the sacrifice of an “overall Westernization” of Chinese language and culture, while the latter is to enable Chinese literature and culture to contribute more to global cultures and world literature(s). In view of this, the author calls for putting more emphasis on translating from Chinese into the major world languages so that translation could “relocate” global cultures and contribute more to the remapping of world literature(s).