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.

“I recount my thoughts after leaving the desert. ‘Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fear, but this is not real freedom. You need money to be free’.”

— Ma Jian, Red Dust

The years I spent in Xinjiang,
my desert;

the situation I find myself in,
my freedom?

But your spine has been smacked,
My beautiful, pitiful era,
And with an inane smile
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like an animal past its prime,
At the prints of your own paws.

— Osip Mandelstam