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

Chapter 2 begins with a brief history of the FLP in Beijing. I read its publications as a child, student, teacher, and researcher. I also worked for the company as a full-time salaried employee from 1981 to 1983, freelance worker for the rest of the 1980s, and occasional translator up to the present. The chapter includes consideration of the FLP’s mission and its impact on readers. The story finishes around 2000, at a time when the practices of the previous half-century were being radically transformed. Chapter 3 describes the workplace and the staff, including foreign staff who were employed as translators. Chapter 4 investigates the process of producing translations from Chinese into other languages, from text selection to drafting to print. Among the issues in these three chapters is the effect of authority and command on the translation process.

Authors, Authority, Authenticity, and Authoritarianism

The modern Chinese state established in 1949 has commonly been described as authoritarian and totalitarian in regard to politics, economics, and society. What might appear at first sight to be a dual structure of party and government was so much dominated by the CCP that for most purposes, it is more convenient to refer to a single entity—the party-state. From its inception up to the mid-1960s, the goal of this state seemed to be to control all aspects of Chinese life in the present and, to the extent that it was possible, in the past and the future as well. Its main objective appeared to be to support and sustain the CCP as the sole authority. In this respect, it seems fair to regard the state as totalitarian in its intention and largely totalitarian in its practice, especially in urban areas. The Cultural Revolution both pursued and defeated this objective, and the reform policies of the late 1970s and beyond were directed at reasserting the dominance of the party in a less restrictive form. Relaxations of the former totalitarian measures were popular and effective, and the Chinese state at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century was no longer regarded as totalitarian, at least in economics and culture. It was, nevertheless, still authoritarian.¹⁹