COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
or guizi M^F - it was the Euro-Americans who were to blâme: "It was
thèse acts of violence [committed by Westerners against the local populace],
rather than the exotic appearance of Westerners, that had contributed
to the rise of the epithets/an gui and gui zi among the Cantonese and their
spread to the rest of the country after the first Opium War." (p. 99). The
évidence presented hère is extremely thin and begs for solid linguistic
analysis, not vitriol inspired by the ire of a Franz Fanon.
Chapter 4, "Translating International Law," is little changed from its
earlier incarnation in Liu's edited volume, Tokens of Exchange (Duke
University Press, 1999), and I hâve commented (largely favorably) on that
chapter elsewhere 4 . Her next chapter contains some interesting material on
the unique figure of Gu Hongming l|ï#i§$& (1857-1928) with his extraordinary
éducation in both Chinese and Western languages and his undying
affection for the Qing dynasty. This chapter also contains a number of
passing mentions of the "Boxer Uprising" of 1900, which Liu prefers to
represent by its Chinese-language désignation "Yihe Tuan" (or "Yihe
Quan"). The Westerners at the turn of the last century dubbed this group
Boxers because of the martial arts in which they engaged, practices they
believed would make them impervious to Western bullets and which appeared
to Westerners as if they were boxing. At one point she notes that
Gu, too, disliked the term "Boxers" and wrote: "The name of the original
legitimate first so-called 1900 society 'Yi-ho-t'uan' may be translated as
'friendly society of good men and true' or 'society of honest men for
mutual defence'" (p. 174). To leave this statement uncommented on, as
Liu does, borders on the irresponsible. Gu Hongming was certainly playing
with his Anglophone readers, but Liu knows full well (as Gu certainly
did) that his translation is completely dishonest. "Yihe Tuan" might be
rendered "righteous and harmonious group (or band)"; "Yihe Quan"
would then be "righteous and harmonious fists," much as if it were the title
of a kung-fu movie in which martial arts figured prominently. And, to
suggest that they were a "popular nationalist movement" (p. 168) represents
quite a leap over and beyond most non-PRC scholarship. However,
what the Boxers shared with Gu Hongming was a nascent anti-imperialism,
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