is rarely associated with its original meaning as simple “knowledge” and is instead tied to the European Enlightenment’s scientific method and a limited field of knowledge production. Likewise, the term “civilization” (wenming) was transplanted from Japanese, its meaning often conflated with notions of modernity and Westernization. This is demonstrated trenchantly in Lu Xun’s early essay “On Imbalanced Cultural Development” (“Wenhua pianzhi lun,” 1907), when he asks, “Shall we be instructed to abandon all our past institutions along with the accomplishments of the olden days, and speak only of Western culture as ‘civilization’?” (LXQJ, 1:47). Wang Hui has shown how understandings of science were further clouded by association with classical Chinese terms. This confusion of terminologies produced a specific and highly paradoxical form of knowledge, one that suggested familiarity through adoption of classical Chinese vocabulary but was often understood to be entirely non-Chinese.8
Like the hegemonic narrative of Said’s “universalizing historicism,” civilization was also a concept associated with the imagination of a single historical trajectory and a universal valuation of cultural worth. The West was understood to be at the leading edge of evolutionary time: the geographical home of civilization. Logically, if the vanguard of evolution and modernity was in the West, if science was the property of the West, and if civilization was the culmination of Western cultural and scientific achievement on a universal evolutionary scale, then science had to be an indispensable component of civilizational achievement. Theodore Huters and Marsten Anderson have argued that in the literary realm of the late Qing, “modernism” and “realism” were closely associated with one another (Anderson, 27–37; Huters 1993, 147–173). To modernize meant both to cast off the past and the static indigenous tradition that was modernity’s other, and to adopt realist modes of narrative representation in writing. Understood as the most viable alternative to a failing imperial system, material modernization and the adoption of realistic narrative modes to promote modernization were also more or less synonymous with Westernization. Science was thus also closely moored to notions of civilization, modernism, and realism.9
During the late Qing, definitions of science began to shift toward a sense of objective understanding of the material world. Although precise dating of the first usage of the term kexue is clouded by Kang Youwei’s penchant for forging memorials, it is clear that use of this term as a translation for “science” did not fully solidify until the early twentieth century, most likely in the year 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty (Wang Hui, 15).10 Not originally a Chinese term, kexue was a Japanese import: a product of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and another example of translingual practice. It was during this period that the term kexue, and its associations with categorizing knowledge, began to come into widespread usage. Kexue, though more closely associated with notions of “observation and factual experiment” (Wang Hui, 18), continued to be associated with positivism and an overarching cosmic order. While Yan Fu’s 1898 translation of Evolution and Ethics used the term gezhi, by 1902, in his translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he used kexue (Qiu Ruohong, 65).
Proponents of Western fields of knowledge like Yan Fu11 saw sociology as the “science of sciences,” offering the ability to unveil the inherent interrelation between natural and social order (Schwarz, 187). “Science was the expression and result of the spirit of positivism, as well as the manifestation of the universal principle and primary driving force known as tianyan. As the universal principle, tianyan not only revealed the pictures and vistas of the changing world but also determined the criterion of action and direction of value for people” (Wang Hui, 27–28).
As the understanding of science continued to develop, and as its importance continued to ascend in the intellectual hierarchy, science in the Chinese context gradually unmoored itself from its neo-Confucian framework. While the modern scientific lexicon was eventually disambiguated from its neo-Confucian counterpart, the ethical and moral implications of science continued to be foregrounded in intellectual debates and fictional treatment. Science, especially sociology, was seen as a tool for the understanding and reconfiguring of the social order in the interests of nation building. Yan Fu’s view of the importance of sociology continued to emphasize the consonance between the natural and the human order, a notion that has long been a central feature of Chinese philosophical thinking.
Despite an ongoing ambivalence about the relationship between Eastern and Western epistemologies, a key shift in attitudes toward science and technology did take place in the wake of the first Sino-Japanese War. Benjamin Schwarz has noted the fact that in translating Thomas Huxley’s work on social Darwinism, Yan Fu misapprehended the text’s critical stance and, perhaps not surprisingly given China’s semicolonial plight, reconfigured a critique of social Darwinism into a system of moral and social valuation (Schwarz, 45–48). The perception that the law of survival of the fittest applied to societies and nations hung over late Qing intellectual life like a sword of Damocles. Yan Fu’s translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics brought Darwinian thinking to China in a form that had already undergone profound reinterpretations. The translator’s unique understanding of Huxley’s criticism of the social implications of evolution was informed by the apparent reality of social Darwinism under the conditions of colonial rule. What was originally intended to be a criticism of the tenets of social Darwinism was easily understood in East Asia as a matter of historical and empirical fact. At the same time, this tangential offshoot of the main body of evolutionary thinking was identified as its most salient aspect. This is reflected in the writings of late Qing intellectuals like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei, to whom the concept of evolution is most often framed in terms of social Darwinism and racial extinction. Liang Qichao’s writing in Xinmin congbao reflected a pervasive sense that “naked aggression, once thought barbaric, was now presented as a law of civilization supported by European and American science” (Secord, 48). Many Chinese intellectuals shared H. G. Wells’s anxiety that while evolutionary time implied linear motion, the forward progression of time could be reversed, with human intervention playing a key role in the direction a given society was to travel (Pusey 1983, 57–64; Murthy, 79–80).12
Translating Jules Verne
Tracing the complicated trajectory that brought Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) to China presents the scholar of Chinese literature with an interesting case study in Lydia Liu’s “translingual practice,” as the text was creatively reinterpreted through the process of translation. At the same time, this act of translation demonstrates how a French SF text was incorporated into the Chinese literary field. The novel was translated from the French original into English, made its way to Japan (most likely) via an American translation, where it was then translated into Japanese by Inoue Tsutomu (1850–1928) as Getsukai ryokō, and was then rendered into Chinese by Lu Xun as Yuejie lüxing (1903).13 It is unclear which English version Inoue was working with, but it is likely that his translation came from a less-than-accurate version of the original. One glaring inaccuracy is the fact that Lu Xun mistook Jules Verne to be English, an error replicated from Inoue’s translation. It is difficult to say with certainty whether either translator was aware of the satirical nature of the novel. Verne himself harbored serious doubts about the efficacy of science and the promise of the future (Smyth, 118–119), but Meiji and Chinese authors writing in a similar vein often adopted such militaristic discourse with a sense of enjoyment, and adventure.
Reinterpretation, rather than translation, is a more appropriate term for Lu Xun’s efforts in bringing From the Earth to the Moon to a Chinese audience, and Lu Xun himself admitted as much. The specific choices made in reformatting Verne’s work illustrate the transformations that took place when foreign novels were rendered into Chinese, and what methods translators employed when they sought to make their work palatable to a local audience. In a letter to Yang Jiyun about his 1903 translation of Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), Di di lüxing, he wrote, “though I referred to it as a translation, it was actually a reinterpretation” (sui shuo yi, qishi nai gaizuo) (LXQJ,
