What are the perils of trans-lingual negotiation? Lydia Liu’s The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making explores the myriad roles language, and the process of translation, played in shaping the relationship between the Qing and the foreign powers (especially Britain) during China’s long nineteenth-century.
The book itself is a little too laden with the vocabulary of linguistic theory for my tastes, reading the first chapter (“The Semiotic Turn of International Politics”) is its own exercise in trans-lingual negotiation. The emphasis on linguistics also in some ways obscures other historical exigencies. The ‘insults to the crown’ perpetrated by the Qing officials, who insisted on using the term 夷 when referring to the British, may have exacerbated issues in Canton circa 1840, but the crux of the dispute remained the demands of the British to ‘liberalize’ trade with the Qing empire, the Qing resistance to British overtures and the continued hostility of the Qing court and (some) Qing officials to the trade in opium. It’s a bit like if I’m hanging with my buddies, come home at 3:00 in the morning, and YJ and I have a fight, the critical problem is not