Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command Versus G ...

(or non-distribution), to financial grants, awards, and other means of limited support and control.

The term authoritarianism is largely reserved for discourse in political science as well as sociology and anthropology. It is doubtful if it can be applied to cultural activities such as translation, but it can refer to translation institutions, whether or not they happen to be an agency of an authoritarian state. It is generally agreed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been an authoritarian state since its foundation and can still be described as such. According to Teresa Wright, “perhaps a plurality of academics” still describes China since the early 1990s as being under some kind of authoritarian rule: “authoritarian resilience, nimble authoritarianism,” and so on.²² A distinction can be made between the “hard” authoritarianism of the Chinese regime from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s and the “soft” authoritarianism that has been in operation since the beginning of the 1990s, with a brief transitional period in the 1980s under Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.²³ More recently, Stefan Halper popularized the term market authoritarianism, which seems to be an apt description for the FLP in the twenty-first century.²⁴ The history of the FLP given in part 1 is an example of how this passage from hard to soft authoritarianism worked in practice.

Part 1 also shows how an authoritarian top-down command structure interacts with bottom-up compliance or contestation, whether it is formally or informally expressed. Because such regimes are typically secretive and exercise repressive forms of intimidation, the process of change or adaptation is rarely visible to outside observers or to participants. In the case of the FLP, changes in response to internal personal or collective resistance were limited and did not challenge the fundamental distribution of power within the organization. During its early period, the FLP’s executive powers recognized the strategic importance of supervision and control over the loyalty and reliability of translators who had access to information that was unavailable to their superiors.²⁵ Although the FLP’s reforms of the 1980s were characteristically put into operation by instructions emanating from the party-state center, a fundamental shift from hard to soft control took place during this transitional