The Transcultural Turn in Chinese Hermeneutic Thinking:
On Yan Fu’s Translation of Classical Text of European Liberalism

Xudong Zhang
New York University

My paper addresses one of the less attended topics in the study of Chinese hermeneutic tradition, namely the Chinese hermeneutic traditions beyond the classics. Furthermore, it seeks to carry this inquiry beyond the textual-interpretative traditions of Chinese culture, and places it in a more global cultural interaction.

Yan Fu’s translation of John Stuart Mill, Charles Louis Montesquieu, Thomas Huxley, etc. had historically an enormous impact on the hearts and minds of modern Chinese intellectuals around the turn of the nineteenth century. His definitive and now canonical role in the discourse of Chinese modernity, however, should not overshadow the fact that at that time, Yan’s popular translation of the European texts was resented by the cultural conservatists as deviating from the orthodoxy of Confucianism and attacked by the cultural radicals as pertaining to a classical literary style (guwen) which runs against the grain of the very idea of the Vernacular Revolution. My study of Yan Fu takes as its point of departure his effort to make the “Western” ideas of liberalism, individualism, and evolution compatible with the discursive and literary style of Chinese classics. Rather than seeing it as a contradiction between the ends and means, I argue that such interpretative and stylistic interventions might obtain its posthumous significance in shedding light on the post-modernist drive against universality, center, origin, and essence. Therefore, it makes itself available to a democratic rethinking of the discourses of the universal (the rhetoric of laws of History, or the historical inevitability, etc.) with reference to conflicting forms of life, which, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, underscores an agreement in meaning, rather than subjecting cultural interpretations and historical-moral judgment to any superimposed Form, be it the liberal-democratic system of political-philosophical codification, or the cultural hegemony of a Eurocentric concept of Modernism.

My effort, however, is not to revive Yan Fu’s particular cultural loyalties and stylistic preferences in our own time, but rather try to tease out the subtle hermeneutic operations involved in his translations to negotiate and mediate between two cultural systems or forms of life without privileging one over another. Compared to Yan Fu’s translation, the latter day integration of Chinese intellectual discourse into the Western norm at every level deprives the Chinese cultural conscious its own hermeneutic space. Instead of advocating cultural relativism, I stress the importance to maintain a value-pluralism by defending and engaging a hermeneutic space to be carved out on the contact zone between cultures as well as on the horizon of a world-historical dynamism.