INDIA AS METHOD: TIMOTHY RICHARD, MIN BEN, AND THE RECEPTION OF COLONIAL DISCOURSES IN FIN DE SIÈCLE CHINA

Résumé

This article explores the traveling of two colonial discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China: the evolutionary and statist colonial discourse and the developmental and commercial colonial discourse. Specifically, it looks at how Timothy Richard played with these discourses in connection with min ben, one of the fundamental ideas in Chinese political thoughts, first in his miscellaneous writings about India from the 1880s on to later his Chinese translation of the India chapter in Robert Mackenzie’s The Nineteenth Century: A History in 1895. Drawing from a substantial body of Richard’s
translations, commentaries, unpublished personal diaries, and a wide array of bilingual writings, this article argues that Richard’s translingual practice not only created a platform for colonial discourses to travel between different knowledge and cultural systems but also effectively provided Chinese intellectuals with vocabularies to construct a localized hybrid understanding of the colonial discourses. The rise and fall of these discourses illuminate the dynamics of knowledge qiaoyi, especially in terms of how intellectuals under disadvantaged political condition manifested a great level of agency and flexibility in receiving and reinterpreting the clusters of knowledge catered through the cultural network empowered by empire and global colonial expansion.