Abstract
This is a study of four translated biographies of George Washington, published in 1886, 1903 and 1914, respectively. It focuses on the Chinese translators’ perception of concepts relating to the state and political authority as an avenue to explore the imagination and construction of a modern nation-state in late Qing and early Republican China. I have chosen George Washington (1732-1799) as the subject, partly because of his central significance during this era in China. But more importantly, none of the Chinese translators of the biographies of Washington played a leading role in the intellectual transition during this period, their perceptions and “translingual practices” representing the conditions of a larger Chinese audience. Moreover, the refashioning of the relationship between history and biographies during this period, from promoting a “cult of the hero” veneration for emperors and prominent individuals to equipping a wider readership with patriotic sentiments, highlights the significance of the biographical translations about Washington.
The four translated biographies provide tangible linguistic evidence to explore how the Chinese intelligentsia thought about and reacted to the social and political problems facing them when increasingly exposed to the West. In China’s engagement with the West, there was no equivalent self-evident semantic transparency between the different cultural systems. We need more case studies based on textual evidence and historical context to address the contingencies and differences in the meaning of a concept between the Western and Chinese contexts. The case study of the concept of sovereignty as conceived in the 1886 translation enables us to assess the Chinese imagination of the state before the heyday of Japanese influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing on the concepts of ziyou and guomin, as expressed in the two 1903 translations, I investigate how the influence brought by the Japanese transmission of Western knowledge played a role in the construction of liberty and new citizens in early twentieth-century China. By analysing how the translators of the 1914 biography interpreted concepts such as gonghe, xianfa and dang, I uncover the Chinese hopes for the new republic and the possible principles of the state learned from the American experience. Finally, the diachronic examination of the four translated texts, with particular attention to the concepts of zhimindi, geming, qun, yiwu and xuanju, reveals the evolving historical process of the Chinese reconstruction of conceptions of the world order, the form of the Chinese state and its government.