Bibliography of Defoe Studies in the Far East: China and Taiwan, Japan, and Korea

Bibliography of Defoe Studies in the Far East: China and Taiwan, Japan, and Korea Spiro Peterson, Sungkyu Cho, Hope Cotton, Minoru Oda, Huang Xian-fang, and Sung-Kyoon Kim China and Taiwan The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is the first extensive Western fiction about China; Crusoe sees me Great Wall and travels across the country; the Farther Adventures is the first of Defoe's novels in which characters cross vast continents. Actual contact between China and Western nations is a fraught and not especially pretty story. Beginning around 2000 B.C., a uniform, identifiable "Chinese" culture was established and, through a succession of dynasties, preserved and developed. Although European trade began in the middle of the sixteenth century, China maintained a largely anti-foreign and isolationist policy until 1834, when China opened Canton to Western trade. This isolation makes the Chinese episode in Farther Adventures especially notable. Characteristic of the nineteenth century was relentless external pressure, including the Opium War (1839-42) perpetrated by Great Britain to gain wider trade concessions, and some internal discontent and unrest stemming from dissatisfaction with me policies of me ruling Ch'ing dynasty. China was compelled to cede Hong Kong at the end of the Opium War, and soon France, Germany, and Russia forced trade advantages. Upheaval within China continued, and a brief republican rule (1912-16) ended in decades of civil wars and unrest. Ultimately , in October 1949, Chinese communists defeated the nationalists. While EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 96 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the communists rose to power under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and created the People's Republic of China on the mainland, the nationalists fled to Taiwan. Read in light of the domination of the communist government, the Chinese entries of this bibliography become additional cultural indicators of the nation's socio-political landscape. Out of the early twentieth-century events came the birth of the country's interest in Western literature. The first translation of Robinson Crusoe into Chinese appeared in 1905. Significantly, though, this translation reflects Chinese epistemologies as much as it does Western ones. This flirtation with, yet hesitancy to embrace, Western culture and its values seems indicative of China's twentiethcentury political history and its struggle to re-create itself as a nation independent of dynastic rule. The political climate of this ancient land has made a great impact on literature and art in the past half century. Defoe studies in China have gone through three historical periods since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. During the ten years between 1949 and 1959, the policy "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend"—a policy set forth by chairman Mao Tse-tung for promoting the progress of literature, the arts, and the sciences—brought about for the first time a flourishing of foreign, especially English, literary studies. Many major authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Shaw, among others—and introductions to, comments on, and criticism of their works were published. This stream of translations included Defoe's The Wanderings ofRobinson and Moll Flanders. The glamour of Robinson Crusoe not only made Defoe one of me English writers most familiar to Chinese readers, but also made Robinson a hero in me hearts of children who were greatly impressed by his adventurous and diligent spirit. The impact of Robinson's spirit upon youth was encouraged and advocated, for the diligence, perseverance, courage, and patience of his spirit have much in common with Confucian philosophy and embody the highest virtues in Chinese culture. During the 1960s "left-deviationist thinking" began to dominate ideological and political fronts in China. Accordingly, foreign literary works were divided into three categories: revolutionary ones represented mainly by Shelley and Byron; classical bourgeois literary works represented mainly by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway; and counter-revolutionary ones represented mainly by Pearl S. Buck and T.S. Eliot. Defoe's work fell into the second category. The left-deviationists required that works in this category be passed down and assimilated with discrimination. They were criticized and regarded as "savage beasts and fierce floods." The study of Defoe and foreign literature was...