Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters (review)

Bernard Shaw and China traces a series of moments of contact between Shaw and his works, on the one hand, and the broad spectrum of Chinese culture and society, mainly twentieth-century, on the other. Termed ‘cross-cultural encounters’ by author Kay Li, these moments include portrayals of (supposedly) Chinese characters in Shaw’s plays, various Chinese adaptations and spinoffs of Shaw’s dramatic works, the use of Shaw the man of letters as an anti-imperialist icon by Chinese intellectuals, and the playwright’s brief trip to China in 1933. Inspiring, baffling, surprising, ironic, comical, or outright uncomfortable as many of these moments may be, they all provide insight into how truly complex and multidirectional the forces at work are in these forays across cultural boundaries.

Through her examination of how Chinese translators, theatre practitioners, and critics reshape, manipulate, and adapt Shaw’s writings to make them relevant in a Chinese context, Li demonstrates that China is by no means a passive receiver of imported culture. Culling contemporary newspapers, magazines, and other sources heretofore available only in Chinese, Li provides us with a composite picture of the energetic, purposeful, and in some cases even violent appropriation of Shaw – both the man and his works – by his Chinese audience. The following lines, quoted by Li from an article in the Chinese newspaper Shenbao, serve as an example: “[Bernard Shaw] is a satirist with a strong Chinese flavor. Apart from accent, costume, and eating habits, his speech and actions do not look like a mechanical European, but like a comical Easterner.” (A different translation of this passage is quoted elsewhere in the book. It is unclear why Li chooses to use variously translated versions of the same passage.) Of the many astonishing aspects of this statement, what stands out is the author’s determination to lay claim upon Shaw by making him ‘Chinese’ against all evidence to the contrary. Clearly, imperial superiority is by no means the only force that drives peoples and cultures wilfully to appropriate – or, more pertinently, to misappropriate – elements of other cultures for their own purposes.

The strength of Li’s study is its wealth of contextual material. The organization of this material, however, leaves something to be desired, for at times the context threatens to overpower the main focus of the project. As an extreme example, chapter 3, titled ‘Shaw’s Works in Chinese,’ meanders through a lengthy discussion of the political, social, and literary climate in China that fermented the translation of Shaw’s plays, as well as theoretical reflections on the relative merits of ‘cultural’ as opposed to ‘literal’ translation. Even though the title unequivocally marks the Chinese versions of Shaw’s plays as the raison d’être of the chapter, Li spends more time on the interpretation of Shaw’s Chinese name than she does on the plays themselves, about which we learn little except when and where they were published, and why they were chosen for translation.

Ultimately, Li’s book leaves the reader puzzling over several things. If the first Chinese production of a Shaw play was unsuccessful because of its ‘failure to produce Shaw’s play as it was written,’ why is the antidote further movement away from Shaw towards a drama Sinocized to ‘suit China’s society’? If the first Chinese audience of Mrs Warren’s Profession proved uninterested in the play because the audience members did not connect ideologically with it on the two main topics of anti-capitalism and ‘the woman issue,’ what does Li mean when she concludes with the contradictory claim that ‘cultural exchanges are easier on the ideological level rather than on the level of everyday life’? Why does Li persistently underscore ‘relevance to everyday life in China’ as a core requirement for the success of a play, when much of the traditional Chinese drama popular among 1920s and 1930s audiences is based on ancient myths and historical events that have little to do with ‘everyday life’ in the twentieth...