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Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. By THEODORE HUTERS. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. 384 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
When young men abandon their medical studies and become fiction writers, in order to do something useful for society, we know that "writer" has for them a privileged status. The famous Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) did just that in the first years of the twentieth century. But he was not the only Chinese writer to perceive literature as a route to modernization and as a weapon against imperialism. Indeed, in fin-de-siècle China, translators, novelists, and essayists entered directly into the political fray. New ideas had to be conveyed to the general public-but using what vocabulary, and in what style? Theodore Huters's Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China offers a masterful exploration of this topic, from the late nineteenth-century translations of Hubert Spencer into Chinese by Yan Fu (1854-1921) to Lu Xun's sardonic stories, such as "The True Story of Ah Q" with its beggar-man antihero. Indeed, as Huters makes eloquently clear, China's literary revolution was not a dinner party. Rather, it was a complex, multigenerational argument concerning the necessity of forgoing Chinese cultural traditions in exchange for an often bitterly criticized Western (or Japanese) standard.
To be sure, Chinese modernization (or the modernization of any non-Western, colonized, or semicolonized nation) is not a new topic. Nor are well-known historical figures such as Yan Fu and Lu Xun underrepresented by scholarly research. Indeed, Huters engages with a long genealogy of China scholars who have examined the demise of traditional cultural practices and the painful adoption of foreign ideas, often at the barrel of a gun. Relatively new, however, is Huters's exploration of a modernization that is both localized and contested. Drawing upon the work of Lydia Liu (translation of the foreign as an active process of selection and judgment), Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha, Huters shows how both...