译者 Chiuvon
The Opium Wars
鸦片战争
Be careful what you wish for
勿要叶公好龙
A time when the West clamoured for free trade with China
曾几何时，西方要求中国实行自由贸易
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of China. By Julia Lovell. Picador; 480 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
《鸦片战争：毒品，梦想及中国的形成》，作者茱莉亚•洛弗尔（Julia Lovell），斗牛士出版社，480页，25英镑。从Amazon.co.uk购买。
HISTORY, it turns out, is not just written by the winners. In documenting the historical crapshoot of the last 200 years, there have been few losers more assiduous than the Chinese. So, apart from adapting first Karl Marx and now Adam Smith, what have they been writing? Rather a lot, it seems. A topic of choice is the Opium Wars, those 19th-century skirmishes on the far-eastern fringe of the British empire. They are largely unknown by British schoolchildren, but successive Chinese governments have made sure the same cannot be said for their overachieving students in the Middle Kingdom.
原来历史不仅仅是由胜利者书写的。在记叙近二百年的历史博弈这方面，没有哪一个失败者比中国人更为勤勉。那么，除了改编卡尔•马克思和亚当•斯密，他们还写了什么？看来还有很多。候选主题之一是鸦片战争——那些十九世纪英帝国远东边缘地区的战争。这两场战争在很大程度上不为英国学生所知晓，但是历届中国政府都确保“中央王国”的学生不会对此一无所知。
Julia Lovell’s excellent new book explores why this period of history is so emotionally important for the Chinese. Drawing on original sources in Chinese and English, she recounts the events of the period in fascinating detail. More importantly, she explains how China has turned the Opium Wars into a founding myth of its struggle for modernity.
茱莉亚•洛弗尔的新书研究了为何这段历史对中国人在感情上来说这么重要。她依据中英文原始资料翔实地叙述了那段时期的事件。更重要的是，她解释了中国如何将鸦片战争转化为一个神话，而这个神话又构成了中国为现代化奋斗的基础。
Ms Lovell weaves this story into the historical brocade of the early 19th century, when European demand for Chinese silk, tea and porcelain was insatiable. To save their silver, the British began to pay for these luxuries with opium from India, and many Chinese were soon addicted. The Chinese emperor tried to stop the trade, and hoped to slam the door completely on the outside world. Between 1839 and 1842, the British manufactured a nasty little war in which they smashed the Chinese military, and justified it all in the name of free trade. The Western powers, hungry for more markets, then prised China open.
洛弗尔将这个故事置入十九世纪早期的背景中。彼时，欧洲对中国丝绸、茶叶和瓷器的需求难以得到满足。为了节省白银，英国开始用来自印度的鸦片换取这些奢侈品。许多中国人很快形成了烟瘾。中国皇帝试图制止鸦片贸易，希望能够闭关锁国，与外部世界完全隔离。1839年至1842年之间，英国对中国发动了一场肮脏的小型战争，击垮了中国军队，并以自由贸易的名义将战争完全合法化。渴望更多市场的西方列强珍视中国的开放。
Westerners have good reason to be ashamed of their treatment of China in the 19th century. Yet Ms Lovell contends that they administered only the final blows to an empire that was already on the brink. That is hardly how it has been portrayed in China, however, where manipulating memory is an important tool of government propaganda. In the 1920s Chinese nationalists began spinning the arrival of Western gunboats as the cause of all the country’s problems—the start of China’s “century of humiliation”. Chairman Mao also blamed Western aggression at the time of the Opium Wars for China’s decline. And so emerged the narrative of China as victim that can still be heard today, even as the country casts off its loser status.
西方人有充分的理由为他们十九世纪时在中国的所作所为而感到羞愧。但是，洛弗尔主张，他们只是给一个早已站在悬崖上的帝国致命一击。然而，将操纵记忆视为政府宣传重要工具的中国却不是这样描述这件事的。在二十世纪二十年代，中国民族主义者开始将西方战舰的到来说成国家问题的起因，将鸦片战争作为中国“百年国耻”的开端。毛主席也将中国的衰落归罪于鸦片战争时西方对中国的侵略。由此演化出来中国是受害者的说法今天仍能听到——即便中国已经摆脱了失败者的地位。
Despite China’s growing strength, Ms Lovell sees worrying similarities between China’s weaknesses today and those of the Chinese empire of 1838, describing both as “an impressive but improbable high-wire act, unified by ambition, bluff, pomp and pragmatism”. She finds parallels too in how the West sees China. Foreign policy hawks in 1840 repeated loudly that violence against China “was honourable and inevitable until, in the popular imagination, it became so.” Demonisation of China today, especially in America, can sometimes seem almost as shrill.
除去中国日益增长的力量，洛弗尔也看到了当今中国和1838年的中华帝国有着相同弱点，这些相似之处令人担忧——二者都有“印象深刻但未必确实的危险举动，以及野心、威慑、浮华和独断”。她也发现了西方看待中国的相似之处。1840年的外交鹰派们叫嚣对华动武“是高尚而不可避免的，直到公众也这样想”。今天对中国的妖魔化有时就显得刺耳了，尤其是在美国。
Westerners interested in why China behaves the way it does should read “The Opium War”. So should Chinese readers, who could gain a more balanced view of their own history than they receive in school. In 2006, for example, China’s government shut down a leading liberal weekly over an article that challenged national orthodoxy on the Opium Wars. The Communist Party’s propaganda bureau accused the author of attempting “to vindicate criminal acts by the imperialist powers in invading China”. An internet post by a nationalist suggested the author should be “drowned in rotten eggs and spit”.
对中国行为方式感兴趣的外国人应该读一下《鸦片战争》。中国读者也应该读读，以此获得比在学校中所学的更为平衡的历史观。比如，2006年，中国政府关闭了一份具有领导地位的自由主义周刊，因为该刊物刊登了一篇挑战国家正统史观的关于鸦片战争的文章。中宣部指责作者试图“为帝国主义侵略中国的罪恶行径翻案”。一个民族主义者在网上发帖，认为应该“用臭鸡蛋和口水淹没”作者。（译者注：“《冰点》停刊事件”）
Ms Lovell reassures her readers that not all Chinese buy into tired government propaganda. But the Opium Wars are always there, lurking in the Chinese subconscious, perpetuating the tension between pride and victimhood. Tellingly, Ms Lovell quotes George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
洛弗尔使打消了读者的疑虑，并不是所有中国人都买政府宣传的帐。但鸦片战争总是潜伏在中国人的潜意识里，在自尊心和受害者心态之间保持张力。诚然，洛弗尔引用乔治•奥威尔的话：“谁控制了过去，谁就控制了未来。谁控制了现在，谁就控制了过去。”
from 译言-每日精品译文推荐 http://article.yeeyan.org/view/Chiuvon/228788