Yan Fu and the language of liberty: beyond translation
This paper examines the late 19th and early 20th century work of the translator and writer Yan Fu (1854-1921), who was among the very first writers to introduce ideas of freedom and democracy in China. I survey his understandings of these terms, drawing particular attention to the methodologies he offers for importing these ideas. Specifically, Yan does not seek to “translate” these ideas, or use them to gain more sensitively calibrated self-understanding. Rather, he thinks quite carefully about how to mobilize them from one site to another in an adequate, efficacious, meaningful way. For Yan, democracy and freedom were the key to enabling China to produce the specific forms of knowledge that could offer strength in an increasingly threatening world. Unfortunately, their dependence on other Western cultural practices and characteristics frustrates their transportability. Yan thus argues for, and exemplifies, a new kind of cross-cultural engagement that does not translate or describe the ideas of a foreign community in his own terms, so much as it enables the formation of new utterances responsive to and coherent within differently-centered communities of argument. What results, I argue, is form of engagement that is ironically more democratically oriented than many current methods put forward in political theory to acknowledge otherness.