From West To East: A Study On Yen Fu And His World Of Thought In Chinese Traditional Culture

Yen Fu, a pioneer Chinese translator who adopted new beliefs from the West in modern China, developed his synthetic view of contemporary Anglo-European civilization in a series of remarkable translations of major works of Herbert Spencer, T.H. Huxley, J.S.Mill, Adam. Smith, Montessquieu, and others. His most popular translation of the work of T.H. Huxley named "Evolution and Ethics" has made tremendous impact on several generations after him. He is not only familiar with "new knowledge", but also old morality and scholarship. He stands "on the speed of world change", which is a fundamental turning-point; the end of the era of separation between Chinese and barbarian and the coming of an age of association among states. Yen Fu is broadly researched, but not at all fully. Just as Benjamin I. Schwartz had said, the relations between Yen Fu and Chinese traditional thoughts have hardly been set down.The first part of this paper would discuss the logic structure of Yen Fu's view in "Wealth and Power" as his modernization project as well as the Confucianism and legalism factor in it. In the second part we will tell you that, as one of the new group of educated elites who created a new self-image of their own importance precisely at the time when the traditional channels of political advancement were no longer available, Yen Fu, this new "intelligentsia", in contrast to traditional literati, sought to enhance what they considered to be "new knowledge" and values as opposed to old morality and scholarship. The role Yen Fu has played in the central stage of modern Chinese history can be described as vacillating between two ideological polarities: tradition and Modernity. In the third part, we will try to discuss the relations between Yen Fu and ancient Chinese thought especially Confucian thoughts. We take this for example, such as "see East in comparison with West", his comments on Song and Ming Dynasties' philosophy, what he has expressed in his key Translating Words and so on, in order to have a restricted view on the relations between Yen Fu and traditional culture. The last part will not only tell you what Yen Fu had thought in similarities and differences between Chinese and western civilization, but also the proper way to have a good communication between these two civilizations. From all of the above, we can have a conclusion that, Yen Fu never thought that Chinese tradition was a whole and self-sufficient cultural system, and in Yen Fu's modernization project, with the exception of democratic factor, how the traditional factors affected his whole design and how these factors themselves interacted.