Inventing the Grammar of Liberty: Yan Fu and the Translation of Ziyou

In this paper, I explore how Yan Fu translated and articulated the classical liberal concept of liberty into Chinese and initiated the conceptual life of liberty that followed. Existing scholarship on Yan Fu has centered on the inaccuracy in his translations, often recasting it as evidence of Chinese traditions’ inherent incapability of accommodating liberalism or reaffirming the universality of key concepts in the classical liberal tradition. These views are closely tied to ongoing debates in Chinese intellectual history over whether concepts equivalent to those comprising the liberal tradition existed within Chinese traditions, whether the absence of such concepts indicates their fundamental incompatibility with liberalism, and whether Chinese traditions can be reconstructed to accommodate contemporary liberal and democratic values. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. V. O. Quine’s philosophy of language, I suggest that the historical absence of certain concepts within Chinese traditions should not be measured against the assumed universality of liberalism or taken as evidence of their incompatibility with it, distinguishing the historical inequivalence between traditions from the changes possible within traditions. By examining Yan Fu’s “free” translation as an intentional maneuver of words and grammar, both old and new, I suggest that Yan Fu initiated the emergence of the concept of liberty in the Chinese language. By doing so, I call attention to another possibility: it is always possible for a community to adopt and develop new values, even if those values are not historically rooted in its traditions.