By Peiyu Yang
Reviewed by Mohammed Alsudairi
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2025)
Peiyu Yang, Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of the Postcolonial World Between China, Europe, and the Middle East 1880-1940 Cambridge, UK: Legenda, 2024. x + 130 pp. ISBN: 978-1-839540-31-8 (hardcover); 978-1-839540-32-5 (paperback, forthcoming); 978-1-839540-33-2 (ebook)
Peiyu Yang’s Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of the Postcolonial World Between China, Europe, and the Middle East, 1880-1940 is an important contribution to our understanding of how Arabic-speaking intellectuals—those of Egypt and to a lesser extent, al-Shām (the Levant)—“textually” imagined China during the Nahda. Literally the “awakening” or “renaissance,” the Nahda was an intellectual and cultural movement that began in the late nineteenth century among the Arab-speaking elites of the Ottoman and Khedivate (Egyptian) realms. Animated by a variety of new influences and trends, this movement sought to critique, dismantle, and then re-build Arab culture upon wholly new “modern” foundations. Yang shows us how imaginations of China played against this larger historical backdrop. In nearly all cases, this process was mediated triangularly (hence the apt title of the book) through European imaginaries and sources. Yet although Nahdawi intellectuals had to contend with vast cultural barriers as well as the epistemic and linguistic hegemony of Europe, their consumption of English and French works on China did not result in an Orientalism by proxy that was marked by an outright reproduction of European visions of al-Sharq (the Orient) à la Said. Rather, as Yang convincingly argues, Nahdawi intellectuals effectively co-authored, through a repertoire of translation practices, their Arabic renditions of European sources, harnessing and sometimes subverting these sources’ Orientalist claims to generate wholly autonomous, yet quite ambiguous, conceptions of China and the Chinese other.
Given that the Nahda itself was a highly self-conscious project grappling with the contradictions and challenges of modernity on Arabic-speaking intellectual landscapes, this translational authorship gave Nahdawi intellectuals, and the wider print cultures consuming their writings, the sufficient breadth to “work through the political and cultural controversies facing” their milieu by essentially using China as a referential object of comparison and contrast (p. 4, 120). In doing so, they also cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a degree of empathetic familiarity with the Chinese other that would feed into the nascent anti-colonial solidarities linking the Middle East with East Asia. In that sense, the book offers us a look into an important literary landscape that acted as a prescript and catalyst for the forging of the “non-West” (or “Third World” and “Global South” in later iterations) at the dawn of the Bandung age.[1]
The overall argument advanced by Triangular Translation and sketched out above is by no means novel in and of itself. Such dialogic co-constitutions, involving a distinct European component, were discernable across many intellectual-cultural contexts, especially from nineteenth century onwards, and have been masterfully explored by Rebecca Karl, Lydia Liu, and Nile Green.[2] Such co-constitutions arguably have faint precursors from earlier eras (and prior to the onset of European domination), including works from the thirteenth century by Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlullāh Hamadānī that introduced “China” to the Islamicate world via Mongol sources, or the writings of the sixteenth century Ming Muslim Confucian literati like Liu Zhi, who drew on European and Islamicate sources to address a Confucian-minded readership.[3] Of course, these earlier works did not lead to the kind of sustained triangular dialogues that Yang examines, but they nevertheless followed a similar logic and dynamic.
What makes Triangular Translation unique is its articulation of a theoretical framework that allows us to consider practices of translation as multi-scalar, ambivalent cultural dialogues involving the Arab self (or “selves”) with and against both European and Chinese others. In doing so, the book brings an orienting coherence to the findings of a growing multilingual corpus of scholarship that investigates Arab engagement with China (or vice versa)—what we can call Arab-Chinese cultural dialogue—at the turn of the twentieth century, and as epitomized by the writings of Shuang Wen, John Chen, Wen-chin Ouyang, Leor Halevi, Xue Qingguo, and Ahmad al-Sa’id.[4] Although many of the latter underscore both the centrality of the imperial frame and the ambivalence of the discourse being produced, they fall short of systematically explicating, in detail, how that happens. In this respect, Triangular Translation delivers, particularly through its in-depth examination of these practices.[5]
More broadly, the book brings nuance to how we should think about Arab knowledge production on China beyond the Nahda period, and which itself typically attracts a disproportionate focus in the scholarship described above. Even those who had a direct experience of China, such as the towering Cold War intellectual and Marxist-Daoist Hādī al-Alawī (1932-1998) of Iraq, who was best known for his work The Chinese Book of Novelties (al-Mustatrif al-Sīnī), ultimately “read” (and translated) China and Chinese culture through the writings of Joseph Needham and Israel Epstein.[6] Yang’s work offers a productive way of analyzing al-Alawī’s writings as well as those of others that have yet to garner the attention they deserve. I would be remiss in suggesting that Triangular Translation is relevant solely to those interested in the specificities of Arab-Chinese imaginaries, however. Its theoretical framing is capacious enough to be utilizable by anyone studying how the colonial “peripheries,” at a critical and transitional juncture in global history, crafted previously unimaginable post-colonial worlds that were increasingly informed by new understandings of the self, and the emergence of emotional ties with the transnational other.[7]
Beyond the useful theoretical framing it provides, Triangular Translation has two major strengths I would like to commend to prospective readers. First, it brings the theme of gender into sharp focus, demonstrating how Nahdawi intellectuals used the European “refractions” of China to push for various narratives concerning female empowerment and social reform. This gendered lens is significant in so far as it has been often occluded in the literature on Arab-Chinese cultural dialogue in favor of other topics of consequence such as state-building, anti-colonial resistance, and religious reform—though these themes, as Yang’s work amply illustrates, were themselves enmeshed in the debates surrounding the status and role of women. It also brings a fresh reading to the contours of the Nahda’s intellectual universe, and wherein the European and Turkish elements were often accorded (understandably) primary attention. The Chinese involvement, if ever considered, was conventionally reduced to how Nahdawi modernity influenced Chinese-speaking Muslim reformist movements and activities in the early twentieth century.[8]
Second, the book draws upon an eclectic grouping of sources that had not previously garnered much attention. The selected texts are organized into four genres that correspond to the four main chapters: The Young Woman From China [Ghadat al-Sīn, p.d. 1889], a novel translated and adapted from the French by Salih Jawdat; a series of biographic entries on the figure of the late Qing Empress Dowager Cixi; deftly altered translations of an essay on constitutional reform in China by Lord Cromer; and, finally, a jointly written Chinese-Egyptian theatrical play—The Roar of China (Za’īr al-Sīn, p.d. 1939)—set in a patriotic Chinese Muslim mosque-community during the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. This quartet underscores Yang’s basic argument of how Europe mediated the Arab imaginative construction of China, including The Roar of China—the only instance of a non-translated work—which was produced collaboratively through its authors’ shared proficiency in French. What is particularly praiseworthy is that while famous Nahdawi intellectuals are inescapably referenced and brought into the conversation, ranging from Shakīb Arslān (1869–1946) to Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914), we are exposed to new (or rather, unfamiliar) genealogies and clusters within the Nahdawi corpus. Even so, a vast number of Arabic travelogues, journal pieces, and books on China that had been published throughout the twentieth century remain, for the most part, untapped and unexamined in contemporary scholarship. In other words, there is much work to be done, and Yang offers us a glimpse of the dividends to be gained when taking an unknown path.
All in all, Triangular Translation is a thoughtful, impressive, and often surprising work, albeit somewhat on the shorter side (out of want for more). There are a few issues I feel the book could have addressed more forcefully. For instance, where is the place of Meiji Japan in these triangular flows and cultural dialogues? Especially following its triumph over Tsarist Russia in 1904-05, Japan loomed large in Nahdawi discourse and exercised a clear, distinct influence in shaping wider assumptions and perceptions about the states and societies of East Asia, most particularly China. This influence lasted well beyond the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, which is the focus of the fourth chapter. In this framework, China, whether as a model of success or failure, is typically read in relation to Japan. Perhaps Yang wanted to move us away from the Japan-centrism that pervades existing works looking at the Middle East and East Asia in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, but it would have been fruitful to put these strands in closer conversation with one another.[9] I also wondered how Yang might link her perceptive observations about Nahdawi visions of China with later Arab knowledge production about China: what were the legacies of these triangular translations? And how did the triangular flows change or persist in the Cold War and beyond? What is the role of the modern Chinese state (and its regional equivalents) in re-adjusting these flows? A sense of the long-durée would be welcome and would allow us to better contextualize the meaning of this important moment.
Mohammed Alsudairi
Australian National University
NOTES:
[1] That is to say, the book looks at one scale of worldmaking and knowledge production that had facilitated the emergence of transnational solidarity. The advocacy and work of anti-colonial intellectuals and activists during this same period is yet another inter-linked scale that helped bring about this outcome. See Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
[2] Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2002); Lydia He Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford University Press, 1995); Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press, 2022).
[3] Francesco Calzolaio, “The Muslim Vizier Rashīd al-Dīn and His Studies of China: The Birth of Sinology as an Islamic Science.” Dirasat 73 (Riyadh: King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, 2025); James D. Frankel, “Liu Zhi: The Great Integrator of Chinese Islamic Thought.” In Jonathan Lipman, ed., Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution from the 17th to the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 34-54.
[4] Shuang Wen, Mediated Imaginations: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. PhD diss. Georgetown University, 2015; John Chen, “Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow–Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism.” ReOrient 3, 2 (2018): 120-139; Wen-chin Ouyang, “The Silk Roads of World Literature.” In Debjani Ganguly, ed., The Cambridge History of World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 63-79; Leor Halevi, “Is China a House of Islam? Chinese Questions, Arabic Answers, and the Translation of Salafism from Cairo to Canton, 1930-1932.” Die Welt des Islams 59, 1 (2019): 33-69; Xue Qingguo 薛庆国, Alabo wenhuazhong de Zhongguo xingxiang: xian dangdai juan 阿拉伯文化中的中国形象: 现当代卷 (Changsha: Hunan wenyi, 2022); Ahmad Sa’id, al-Sin fi al-mukhayila al-‘arabiya: al-bahth ‘an al-mushtarak al-tarikhi (Bayt al-Hikmah, 2022).
[5] I have found this theoretical framework to be immensely useful in my own work concerning how the fantasy of Chinese Islamization appeared across the interconnected print cultures of Europe and the Ottoman domains during a proximate timeframe. See Mohammed Alsudairi and Ulrich Brandenburg, “Yellow Peril with a Dash of Green: The Global Imagining of an Islamized China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming 2026.
[6] Mohammed Turki Alsudairi, “Arab Encounters with Maoist China: Transnational Journeys, Diasporic Lives and Intellectual Discourses.” Third World Quarterly 42, 3 (2020): 1-21.
[7] There is resonance with other strands in the scholarship. See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019).
[8] Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’: Al-Azhar University and the Arabization of Chinese Islam.” Hagar 8, 1 (2008); John T. Chen, “Re-orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938-55.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 1 (2014): 24-51.
[9] Michael Laffan, “Mustafa and the Mikado: A Francophile Egyptian’s Turn to Meiji Japan.” Japanese Studies 19, 3 (1999): 269-286; Renée Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Springer, 2014); Ulrich Brandenburg, “Imagining an Islamic Japan: Pan-Asianism’s Encounter with Muslim Mission.” Meiji Japan in Global History (Routledge, 2021), 126-149.