ABSTRACT
This paper traces the evolution of Chinese interpretations of WN. Translations from three eras are compared, to investigate what was important and what was unimportant at various stages in China’s development. The translators’ emphasis changes from a preoccupation with national power to issues in theoretical political economy to how to facilitate China’s emergence as a modern market economy. This change over time to a great extent reflects changes in China itself. Section 2 looks at the original translation by one of the most important early translators of Western works in China; Section 3 discusses the 1930s translation by two Marxist analysts that was reissued at the height of Maoism; Section 4 explores two modern translations from the much more liberal publishing environment that has existed in China since 1979; and Section 5 reviews the particular changes over time in the Chinese translation of Smith’s notion of “arbitrary” governance, which was a natural concept to Enlightenment British readers but whose meaning there and then did not always translate well into twentieth-century China.
