Topic:
The Dissemination and Interpretation of the First Chinese Translation of The Social Contract
Speaker:
Fan Guangxin, Professor of Philosophy, Nankai University
Time:
Saturday, October 11, 2025, 10:00 a.m.
Venue:
Room 106, Liuheyuan, Shenzhen University
Speaker Bio
Fan Guangxin, born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, received his doctoral degrees from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is Professor in the college of Philosophy at Nankai University. His research focuses on modern Chinese intellectual history, Chinese political philosophy, Western political philosophy, and comparative political philosophy. He has published articles such as From Minben to Democracy: Luo Zhenan, Nakae Chōmin, and Rousseau on Tyrannicide and An Alternative Interpretive Tradition of “Pacifying the Distant with Virtue”, and authored the monograph Using Classical Learning as Statecraft: The Practical Thought of Late Qing Hunan Neo-Confucians.
Lecture Abstract
Nakae Chōmin’s Min’yaku Yakkai (An Explanatory Translation of The Social Contract), the first Chinese translation of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social, is an exceptionally rich text of political thought. Its reception and interpretation in China were not a single event, but rather an ongoing process of rediscovery and reinterpretation. Over the two decades following 1898, the shifting political missions—from constitutional reform, to the anti-Qing revolutionary movement, to the reestablishment of the Republic after the fall of Yuan Shikai—repeatedly drove Chinese intellectual elites to draw sustenance from Nakae’s translation. Through reprints (often with modifications), commentaries, and citations, they shared their reading experiences with broader audiences. These reprints became the most important medium for transmitting Rousseau’s political philosophy—or Rousseau-inspired political philosophy—within China.
