I am pleased to host the work of two guest translators this fortnight.  Matthew Dean has translated an important 2006 interview with Gan Yang on “The Modernity Critique of the 1980s and the Transformation of the 1990s,” in which Gan offers his reflections on how he and China’s thought world have evolved over time. 

In addition, Freya Ge has translated a round table discussion of “China’s Generation Z?  What are houlang and houlang Culture?” which addresses youth issues in contemporary China.  Freya is an exceptional high school student in Shanghai who wrote me a few weeks ago wanting to contribute her translations to the site, and we are very pleased with the results of our inaugural effort.
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Finally, I translated an interview with the well-known liberal Liu Qing in a Chinese equivalent of People magazine, which I found interesting both in terms of form and content.

New on the site this fortnight, Qin Hui, “Globalization after the Pandemic:  Thoughts on the Coronavirus,” a long and fascinating text by one of China’s most famous liberals which, to my knowledge, has not yet been published in Chinese.  Qin sent me the text in mid-October, asking me to translate it.  The essay pursues Qin’s decades-long reflections on the relationship between human rights and globalization in ways that readers are likely to find sobering, if not disturbing.
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Given the importance of Qin’s text, I decided to translate it (my English translation) into Spanish and French as well, an idea I have been toying with for some time.  DeepL, a translation program, does a remarkable job when translating between related European languages, and colleagues who are native-speakers of the languages helped me to prepare the final version.  Cristina Reigadas of the University of Buenos Aires—who has recently launched her own China Dream blog​—handled the Spanish, and Laurence Monnais, my colleague at the Université de Montréal did the French.

If followers of Reading the China Dream are interested in participating in such translation efforts, send me an email and we’ll explore possibilities.