2023: PRC Aisixiang Academic Website Translated Via Chrome Extension

Posted on 10/06/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Further on translation tools.

Previously:

Chinese Academic Writing Gets Censored too Although Not as Often or as Much

I have been following the Aisixiang 愛思想 academic discussion website and  its predecessors for years.  Sometimes these sites gets suspended indefinitely and censored.  I suppose there is lots of pre-publication suppression by nervous editors. Generally academic stuff is more daring and informative than the general press and seems to get less attention from the censors who naturally focus on the most popular and influential stuff. When reporting from Beijing and Chengdu, I read lots of Chinese academic stuff  to give me leads and context and often quoted it where it helped fill out my reporting.  Often I’d find useful stuff on the CNKI database, other database, blogs etc. 

Scholar Censorship Countermeasures (as the saying goes for every measures descending from on high, a countermeasure emerges from below 上有政策，下有對策）

Academic writing on sensitive topics is often full of dark hints — sometimes an argument is made (??) by not making it yet including enough material so the reader can draw the unkosher conclusion or conclusions are made without adequate supporting evidence (I visited one AIDS researcher and asked about some omissions and logical inconsistencies in his article. He said, “You are right, I didn’t support my conclusion. The supporting evidence is classified.)

I often come across very interesting stuff on Aisixiang in scanning it for just a few minutes. They do have a list of the currently most popular articles which can be a good place to start. 

One censorship-fighting tool you can use is the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. You can ‘go back’ sometimes to find material that Party censors have taken down. Looking up Aisixiang there at https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/aisixiang.com

You can too just be entering a URL in the Wayback Machine.

I’ve translated quite a few articles on or censored from the Aisixiang website. As you can see this website regularly carries worthwhile reads. Here are some of them.

Read Extensively and Pay Attention to Detail: Absent Context, Censors Don’t Realize the Significance of a Detail. But they do erase old stuff once they realize…..

I tend to read extensively, keeping details I come across in mind. These details are some enlightening because they often escape censorship — the relevance of these details  is often unknown to censors. Brought together as pieces of the puzzle, they can often lead you to something different from the official story. That was a lot easier when I worked in China since I could ask views and bounce my speculations off well-informed Chinese people in mostly one-on-one conversations (since people speak more freely) and being indirect. Sometimes I just quote chapter and verse from the People’s Daily line and let them object — imitating what anthropologists do to elicit comment without injecting their own views and interpretations. Following Chinese affairs from afar is harder now. My reading of Chinese media, social media online and discussions with Chinese people now in the USA all help.

There are increasingly better tools to help with extensive reading on these good websites. I use the Chrome DeepL extension (need to subscribe for the full page extension to DeepL though —  you can try the free version    https://www.deepl.com/en/chrome-extension   ) and found it very useful.  I sometimes browse Russian websites using it. For Chinese, I just read it but use DeepL and especially ChatGPT to make a first draft of a translation and then correct it.  The Chrome DeepL extension is special in that it brings up entire Chinese language webpages in English fairly quickly and with impressive fidelity (though for translation accuracy not as good as ChatGPT — and ChatGPT too still needs to be checked).

Extensive China Contact Improved Scholar Language Competence: Downhill from Here?

In general, western writings on China don’t make enough use of Chinese language sources. The rising generation of China scholars is much better than way. I fear the next might not be as fluent in Chinese given the much reduced number of foreigners studying in the PRC these days.  I hope it is just a passing problem though it  doesn’t look like it. 

I wrote about Chinese language study tools on my translation blog

Chinese Language Study and Translation Tools

Chinese Language Study and Translation Tools

Below a copy of the DeepL machine translation extension’s translation of the Aisixiang international relations top page as it appeared on October 6, 2023.

http://www.aisixiang.com/academic/guojiguanxi.html

followed by the home page below:  

http://www.aisixiang.com/

Once you have located an interesting article, you can just click on the link in the translation — it comes up in Chinese but you can just click the DeepL extension translate link on your browser again to get it in English. Or you could change the default to always translate from Chinese into English. As you prefer. 

the translation is not bad and is a real step-up from Google Translation though GT has been improving over the past few years. In a few places the Chinese text further down wasn’t fully translated — my fault, I didn’t wait for the translation to load fully. It does load quickly, even so I am not patient enough sometimes it is nearly all translated by the time I finish reading down the translated page though.

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[Joining hands to build a community of human destiny: China’s initiatives and actions ] Whether it is to cope with the current crisis or to create a better future, all countries need to be in the same boat, united and cooperative. In the face of the profound and ambitious changes of the past century, China has proposed the building of a community of human destiny, calling on all countries to uphold the concept of shared destiny, fully communicate and consult with each other, share the responsibility of governance, and form a broad consensus and concerted action to address global issues, so as to instill confidence and motivation for mankind to move forward to a brighter future.

[China’s proposal on the transformation and construction of global governance ] Mankind is in an era full of challenges, but also full of hope. In the face of increasingly severe and complex global challenges, promoting the strengthening and improvement of the global governance system is a common task that all countries in the world must undertake. China will move forward hand in hand with the international community, adhere to genuine multilateralism, promote the implementation of global development initiatives, global security initiatives and global civilization initiatives, and jointly create a better future for humankind!Site Search:           作者           标题           关键词         

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[Sheng Laiyun: China’s high-quality economic development trend has not changed ] Currently China is in the key period of economic recovery and industrial upgrading, the problems encountered in the recovery of the economy are problems in progress, problems in the development of the economy is fully able to promote the sustained and stable recovery of the economy to gradually overcome and solve the problem. China’s economic development has never been smooth sailing, and the international community has been full of theories about China’s downfall, but China’s economy has not collapsed, but has created two miracles of rapid economic development and long-term social stability.

[Liu Qi: the meta-issue of rural revitalization: what kind of village to build? ] Rural revitalization first need to figure out a problem, that is, to build a what kind of village, this is the meta-issue of rural revitalization. If you don’t know what kind of village to build, how can you build it? Because village construction is not a child’s building blocks that can be knocked down and started over again, and after it is built, it has to be managed for several generations, so the positioning of the village is very important. So what is the basis for determining the positioning of the village?

[Ji Weidong: Chinese-Style Modernization and the Reconstruction of Legal Order ] Taking Weber’s and Unger’s questioning as a clue, retracing the target mode of the modernization movement of the rule of law can help to summarize and reflect on the practical experience of China’s social and institutional changes. Following this clue, the rule of law connotation of Chinese-style modernization can be divided into four stages or types for comparative analysis. In the new stage of AI-driven modernization, the search for the best combination of legally just procedures and technologically just procedures will become the main connotation of the digital rule of law.

[Han Dayuan: The Constitutional Logic of Chinese Modernization ] The full implementation of the Constitution is not only the proper meaning of Chinese modernization, but also the effective guarantee of Chinese modernization. In order to give better play to the role of the constitution in regulating and safeguarding Chinese-style modernization, the constitutional text should be treated seriously, the method of constitutional hermeneutics should be applied systematically, the basic categories and concepts of the constitution should be deeply excavated, and the theoretical system of the constitution should be constructed with a sense of history and oriented to the practice of modernization.

[Zhang Haipeng: The Continuity and Innovation of Chinese Civilization — and Refutation of Foreign Comments on the Interruption of Chinese History and Culture ] From the viewpoint of thousands of years of history, the Chinese nation is indeed characterized by the enterprising spirit of observing the right rather than the old, and respecting the ancient rather than reverting to the past, which determines the Chinese nation’s intrepid character that is unafraid of new challenges and courageous in accepting new things. By incorporating this character into the spiritual lineage of the CPC, into the “two unions”, and into the blood of the people, a new history, a new culture, and a new form of human civilization can be created.Site Search:           作者           标题           关键词         

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About 高大伟 David Cowhig

After retirement translated, with wife Jessie, Liao Yiwu's 2019 "Bullets and Opium", and have been studying things 格物致知. Worked 25 years as a US State Department Foreign Service Officer including ten years at US Embassy Beijing and US Consulate General Chengdu and four years as a China Analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Before State I translated Japanese and Chinese scientific and technical books and articles into English freelance for six years. Before that I taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan for three years. And before that I worked two summers on Norwegian farms, milking cows and feeding chickens.
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