China and the Translation of the Other

Abstract

A one unified China exists in theory alone. In reality, as the country projects itself on theinternational stage as a modern global power, on the domestic front it continues to grapple withthe perceived secessionist and “splittist” threats from Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang to its carefullyconstructed image of “Chinese” national unity.This study looks at the role of translation in such a politically-charged context, andspecifically its significance in the case of China-Xinjiang/Han-Uyghur relations. By examiningthe documented trends in violent unrest in Xinjiang against the trends in translated statepropaganda from 1949-2009, the formulated research question is that translation in this contextdoes not function to facilitate intercultural communication, but serves as an expression of ethno-dominance and a means to strengthen one’s own cultural subjectivity and superiority against theOther.Furthermore, by examining China’s historical relations with non-Han identities before1949, this study would like to suggest that what is deemed, in modern Chinese terms, the“Xinjiang Problem,” should be turned around and re-assessed as the “Chinese Problem”—of toomuch power concentrated in the hands of the majority who identify as “Han” and that powerbeing normalized and constructed as “Chinese” throughout history, so much so that it becomesan undetected privilege akin to what is known in Western cultural studies as “white privilege.”By exercising this privilege without critical examination, the Han majority creates, incites, andexacerbates the very “splittist” tendencies it wishes to diffuse—because if what is “Chinese”derives from a Han prerogative, then a non-Han perspective would, almost by default, become“anti-Chinese/China.”Translation, reframed under this specific sociopolitical and power-relations framework,becomes what enables “China”—an ideological entity focused on securing and normalizing thelegitimacy of “Chinese” rule—to translate seemingly oppositional ideological regimes, fromConfucianism to Communism, Marxism to a market-based economy, into coherent tenets thatsupport that goal