Barbarians and Lao Wai: Trans-lingual negotiation and the clash of empires

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 that we’re discussing the situation in two (or three) languages and risk a misunderstanding. The problem is that I was an ass and should have come home at a normal time.

Perhaps my initial reaction to the heavy use of literary theory in a historical work and my quaint attachment to sources and evidence are more matters of taste. Putting those aside for the moment, Liu’s book is chock full of fun things to ponder. For example, what of this character 夷 (yi)? One of the more fascinating discussions in the book is Liu’s description of 夷 as a “super sign” existing beyond the signifier and the signified: “a linguistic monstrosity that thrives on the excess of its presumed meanings by virtue of being exposed to, or thrown together with, foreign etymologies and foreign languages.” [1]

Liu argues that the British (deliberately in some cases) misunderstood the term`夷 as “barbarian,” a translation that perplexed the Chinese, who insisted on the neutrality of the term. Liu quotes Admiral Wu Qitai who used the term in an 1832 decree telling the Brits to get the hell away from Shanghai and stay down in Guangzhou. The British protested being referred to as 夷. Wu responded, “We have always said southern man, northern di, eastern yi, and western rong. Take our own noble sages King Shun and King Wen. Mencius himself said, ‘King Shun was an eastern yi and King Wen was a western yi.’ How can the word be offensive, you must be overreacting.” [2] Translation: “Quit whinging and get back on your boats.”

The Chinese would continue throughout the 19th century to maintain that the word simply meant “foreigner,” but the British might have actually had a point. Generally, yi referred to those people known to the Chinese but who remained outside the Qing Empire. (That the term’s relationship to ethnicity was ambiguous at this stage was due in large part to the Manchus, who had their own delicate relationship with the word for obvious reasons.) But all of the yi states had some kind of theoretical subordinate status–at least in the minds of the emperors–to the Qing throne. Maybe these other states, for example Japan, didn’t always play the game right, but it was understood that in an ideal world they would.

The British, of course, were approaching the problem from the position of an expanding empire; one that would brook no challenges to British superiority—never mind consideration of the British as anything less than fully civilized. Herein is the crux of the debate: Both the Qing and the British were expansive empires. Both participated in a project of ‘civilizing’ those peoples recently incorporated into their imperial polities. Liu argues that the fight between the British and the Qing was a clash of empires not civilizations and to an extent she’s right—but inherent in the quest for empire were competing civilizing projects and two universalistic worldviews that struggled to coexist.

Eventually, the British insisted on including a ban on the term 夷 as part of the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858 (the negotiations for which involved other translator shenanigans, but that’s a story for another time). The British even tried to force a ban on using the terms 番鬼 or 鬼子 (fangui/guizi ‘foreign devil’) in people’s speech…you can guess how well that worked out. [3]

I thought about this in the context of today’s China and the seemingly innocuous term “lao wai.” All of the Chinese that I ask insist that the word is a neutral, even respectful, word for a foreigner. If that’s so, then why does the word cause so many foreigners in China to grit their teeth? I think, like the word 夷, there are contexts in which the word denies foreigners a sense of humanity: we are not referred to as people (ren 人), we are referred to as lao wai. Never mind the inevitable, high pitched “lao wai!” with accompanying finger points and wide eyes in the countryside, how many times has a foreigner gone to an appointment in China’s major cities and heard the receptionist call her boss and whisper into the phone: “有一个老外…./you yige lao wai…” Perhaps we are the heirs of the British, constructing our own ‘super-sign.’ It probably doesn’t make us want to blockade the Chinese coast and bombard the city of Canton…but it does offer insight into how a simple word can say so much about communicating down that trans-lingual highway.

And on that note, I’m going to go get some lunch. something to celebrate and embrace my “laowai-hood”:
“Fuwuyuan’r, lai yi fen’r gongbao jiding…”