Britannica Becoming a Chinese Best-Seller

On a raw December morning just over seven years ago, I stood shivering in a Peking auditorium, about to lecture editors of the Encyclopaedia of China on the problems of translating a sizable portion of the Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese. The whole situation seemed wildly improbable. My first trip to China. I had never been, to put it mildly, a friend of the People’s Republic and my background in Asian matters was that of a working scholar in Japanese. With a few exceptions, American friends were skeptical. The Britannica in Chinese? In a communist country? Even if you got it out, who’d buy it?

Late last year the 10-volume Concise Encyclopaedia Britannica in Chinese went on sale in Peking and Shanghai, with considerable fanfare. The first 50,000 sets are now about sold out, with more printings in the offing. It is notably uncensored. Barring editorial condensation and some allowances for current Chinese needs (science and geography articles run longer than those on Western philosophy), readers have a translated version of what Americans read. We have received personal congratulations from the party secretary and the prime minister as well as the steady support of Deng Xiaoping himself.

“This is a barometer of our countries’ relations,” my friend and opposite number Liu Zunqi, then deputy editor of the Encyclopaedia of China, once told me. “As long as this project is in business, they are OK.” Beyond political barometry, the workings of the project offer a microcosm of China today. The restlessness of students in the past weeks’ demonstrations is not surprising--we have contributed to it. Neither is shake-up of party leaders. Political turbulence inevitably accompanies sweeping economic and social progress; everything in our experience, however, argues for optimism about the long-term outcome.

Our partner in this project, the Encyclopaedia of China, is a new organization. It was founded in 1978 by the Academy of Social Sciences, at least partly instigated by Deng himself. On receiving a copy of a new encyclopedia published by the Italian city-state of San Marino, Deng was said to have observed the incongruity of a tiny place having its own reference work, while China had none. Most of the China Encyclopaedia’s handpicked scholars and editors were survivors of the disastrous 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. Some in fact had just been released from the jails where Jiang Qing, Mao Tse-tung’s wife, had sent them. (The managing editor, once Mao’s Russian interpreter, had been in solitary confinement for six years). Anxious to begin reeducating China, they were almost all Deng-style liberals. Their new publishing house was free from encrusted bureaucracy--and from other government situations where newly released prisoners were sent back to work side-by-side with the people who had denounced them.

The Encyclopaedia of China was planned as a vast 75-volume opus. The idea of translating the Britannica 10-volume ready-reference Micropaedia into Chinese as a supplement came almost by accident during my first visit to Peking. When the Chinese editors heard about a similar reference effort I had edited in Japan, part of a 29-volume Japanese-language Britannica, they were intrigued. After the systematic isolation of their people from the outside world under Maoism, Peking scholars felt that a handy international reference set was a real necessity.

In Japan, we had heavily abridged the Britannica to fit the taste of Japanese readers. The Chinese did not want that. “Just let’s translate Britannica as it is,” they argued, “We want our students and young people to see for themselves what the world outside is saying and thinking.” In retrospect this decision probably saved the project from much ideological attack. For if an effort had been made to alter the text for Chinese readers, editors and party bosses would have had to agree on what the modern Chinese reader needed--no easy task. But with a translation, the editors could truthfully say that they were bound by their agreement to respect the Britannica text.

The Chinese undertook the basic work of translation, editing and publishing. Encyclopaedia Britannica provided its latest revisions, plus all the editorial help that we could offer.

Dealing with undoctored factual articles was for many Chinese editors a new and unsettling experience. But they demonstrated mammoth competence as well as enthusiasm. Backed by the Academy of Social Sciences, they scoured the country for capable English translators. This was not easy. For many years Russian, not English, had been China’s second language. And in areas of religion--or Western art and music--even well-educated Chinese were no longer acquainted with many basic terms.

From the first we had anticipated some ideological problems, even though our Chinese partners had insisted that, in the words of Deng, they wanted only to “seek truth from facts.” Since we were translating only factual articles, difficulties of interpretation would, we hoped, be minimal. But to solve them, we set up a joint committee of scholars to meet once or twice a year. We also kept in close touch by correspondence. As articles were translated, they were sent from Peking to Chicago, where we spot-checked the translations and drew up lists of “sensitive articles”--for example Soviet history, Marxism, entries on Eastern Europe and prominent Cold War politicians.

Most problems, however, were not necessarily ideological. A great deal of circumlocution had to be used, especially to render modern technical terms; some condensation was inevitable. While scientific and technological entries were largely left as they were, articles on geography, history and politics were often ruthlessly condensed. Much of our job was to restore these cuts so the articles made sense. We had also to deal with entries on figures not notably friendly to Mao’s China--Harry S. Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur spring to mind. Nervous Chinese editors at first reduced those entries to almanac lengths.

Our criticisms were generally accepted. Even a sticky point like the Korean War, which the Chinese insisted had been started by the south, was finally resolved by noting that, after weeks of skirmishing on the border of the 38th Parallel, the North Koreans “pushed forward.” This gave many Chinese readers their first inkling that there may have been an invasion from the north. Only one article, on Stalinism, had to be deleted for lack of agreement. The Chinese argued that the Britannica was too rough on cruelties in his regime. Since articles on Stalin himself were faithfully translated, we let Stalinism go by. Other articles on Soviet communism and the Russian Revolution remained faithful to Britannica originals.

Most of our political differences finally centered around some of the 24 articles on China (out of the total of 71,000) which Chinese editors prepared themselves, subject to our review. True to standard Marxist hyperbole, communist armies were forever “smashing” their “traitorous” or “counterrevolutionary” enemies; Mao Tse-tung’s “correct line” was constantly triumphing over “right opportunist” or “left adventurist” wrongs within the party. After discussions, our colleagues agreed to a “no adjective” policy.

Only once was there any danger that the project might be stopped. In 1983, a short but intensive campaign by party hard-liners against “spiritual pollution” took aim at the influence of Western ideas among Chinese intellectuals. A showdown took place in Peking and the naysayers lost--but it was a close call. Beyond doubt, the venture owed its survival to the steady support of Deng and leaders who gave top priority to modernization.

Visiting Deng in late 1985, we were told flatly: “The encyclopedia is a key step in our Four Modernizations . . . .We need this and more books like it to educate our people. We will continue in this effort.”

When the books went on sale, the Xinhua bookstores throughout China were literally packed with purchasers. As a one-time boss of an encyclopedia sales force, I had never thought the day would come when we would have to fight off crowds of eager customers. Many buyers--up to 40% in some stores--were individuals, not just institutions. This is all the more remarkable when the cheapest domestic edition at 156 yuan, about $50, was more than the monthly salary of many Peking editors.

In deciding to co-publish the Britannica in China, we had--Chinese and Americans--taken a gamble on the growing pace of Deng’s liberalization. Articles that would have been considered dangerous in 1979 were normal topics of discussion in 1986. As communist orthodoxy in China is increasingly jolted by changing economic and social realities, we can expect more spells of repression, more attempts to turn back tides of reform. But Deng is no Li Hung-chang, single-handedly fighting the Manchu court a century ago. His modernization drive was not forced on the Chinese from the West. They began it themselves. They have already taken China far beyond its communist contemporaries in what amounts to a widening cultural, political and economic liberalization--whatever the People’s Daily chooses to call it. Historians in the next generation will record the publication of the Chinese Britannica as an important step in this progress.