The picture shows Lord Macartney, Embassy to China (1793), a folio taken from “A study of History” by  Arnold Toynbee and available from the Wikimedia Commons.

如果马嘎尔尼的火器操练没被视为奇巧淫技，而是激起清廷官员的忧患与危机

— People's Daily (domestic), 20 December 2010, p.1

This line, taken from a People’s Daily article with the headline “Let reform pull off historic opportunities for us – at the turn of two five-year plans“, translates as follows.

Which is the right translation? This question in trickier than you may think. It is not as simple as failing to pick up on a negation or two.

Sure enough 而且 (moreover, and) warrants the first translation of “and had aroused worries and a sense of crisis” but it also misses the nuance that indicates worries and a sense of crisis are desirablein this context.

Worries and a sense of crisis, in this context, would have encouraged the Chinese to seize and act upon the opportunities available to Qing dynasty officials at the time.

This nuance is carried especially strongly by the word 危机 (crisis), which is a contraction of the characters for danger (危) and opportunity (机).

A syntactically correct translation in English implies that the development of China would have come to a halt if worries and a sense of crisis had been aroused.

But the context assumes that the development of China did come to a halt and that this wouldn’t have been the case if worries and a sense of crisis had been aroused. The latter message is carried more closely, in my opinion, by the syntactically incorrect translation of 而且 (moreover, and).

I welcome your opinions and suggestions, off course.

As I was weeding through my administration of the last 7 years – I’m moving about, so I wanted to chuck a lot of old paperwork out – it struck me that life in one country doesn’t leave nearly as big a paper trail as life in another country does.

In the last 7 years my life was spread out across two continents, three countries. Which life was the greatest bureaucratic burden, nanny-state Netherlands, buttoned-down Britain, or communist China?

There’s something to say for all our candidates. In a nanny-state, such as the Netherlands has turned into, a wealth of social services has left a wealth of bureaucracy, of rules and regulations, all accompanied with a host of checks and balances that require endless cross-referencing and paperwork. I keep forwarding documents from one organisation to the next. Admin-work often piles up as forms and documents sit on my desk waiting for the appropriate attachments to arrive.

Britain’s recent track record of CCTV surveillance, and legislation that infringes on people’s privacy more with every change in policy, doesn’t spell good. A lot of organisations and a lot of companies keep a lot of information on each and every one of their clients. In my experience it’s all rather compartmentalised though, which reduces the paperwork dramatically. Government bodies check with each other, you’re not required to play the traffic warden and forward stream or paperwork-traffic this way and that.

Communist China has the name of knowing where every one of its billion citizens is at any time. It may well be so that it keeps a file on every one of them, but I doubt it very much. If they do, then the Chinese have the most streamlined, well-integrated social security system in the world; how likely is that? Theirs involves very little paperwork. In fact I could only find three or four A4 sheets of paper when I weeded though my admin-stuff earlier today. It’s true that striking down in a Chinese city can be a major hassle – the language barrier undoubtedly sticks its ugly head around the corner here – but in my experience, when it’s done it’s done, and the paperwork just ceases after a while.

In conclusion, let’s throw in a sports metaphor. Paperwork in the Netherlands, it’s like the marathon, or the 4 x 400 meter relay. England’s compartmentalisation is a 110 meter horde, a triple-jump at worst. The 100 meter dash strechtes it for China, it’s more like a high jump: one big, high leap and you’re there.