Yan Fu

Works

• 1895On Strength

  Written in Tianjin after the defeat by Japan: the strength of the West lies not in its guns but in the physical, intellectual and moral energies of its people, which China has to cultivate.

• 1898On Evolution (Tianyanlun)

  A free rendering of Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” with Yan Fu’s commentaries, which side with Spencer against Huxley: nations, too, are subject to natural selection, and only a people that develops its energies survives.

Position

Yan Fu read the liberal classics as an answer to one question: what is the source of the West’s wealth and power? His answer, set out in “On Strength” (1895), was that a nation’s strength rests on the physical vigour, knowledge and public virtue of its people, and that freedom matters because it releases these energies. In the “Tianyanlun” he translated Huxley but argued against him in his commentaries: Huxley had separated human ethics from the cosmic process of evolution, while Yan Fu followed Spencer in seeing evolution as progress and applied the struggle for survival to nations. Phrases he created, such as “natural selection” (tianze) and “survival of the fittest”, became slogans of a generation that included Liang Qichao, Lu Xun and Hu Shih. He translated into an elegant classical prose to win over the scholar-officials, and formulated the triad of faithfulness, comprehensibility and elegance (xin, da, ya) that is still quoted in Chinese translation studies. Benjamin Schwartz’s study “In Search of Wealth and Power” (1964) argued that Yan Fu subordinated individual liberty to state power; later scholars, among them Huang Ko-wu, have questioned this reading and stressed how carefully he rendered Mill’s idea of liberty.

Life & context

Yan Fu was born on 8 January 1854 in Fuzhou, Fujian, the son of a doctor. After his father’s early death he entered the school of the Fuzhou Navy Yard in 1867, one of the first Chinese institutions to teach Western science, and served on naval ships. From 1877 to 1879 he studied at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where he read widely in British political economy and philosophy and impressed the Chinese envoy Guo Songtao. Back in China he taught at the Beiyang Naval Academy in Tianjin from 1880 and later headed it, but he repeatedly failed the imperial examinations and remained outside the inner circle of officials. China’s defeat by Japan in 1895 turned him into a public writer: in a series of essays in a Tianjin newspaper he asked why the West had become wealthy and powerful. His translation of Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics”, the “Tianyanlun” (1898), was followed by versions of Adam Smith, Mill, Spencer, Montesquieu and Jevons. In 1912 he briefly served as the first president of the renamed Peking University. In 1915 he joined a society that supported Yuan Shikai’s attempt to restore the monarchy. Disillusioned by the First World War, he turned back to Confucian values. He died in Fuzhou on 27 October 1921.

Further main works

• On the Speed of World Change (Lun shibian zhi ji, 1895)
• Refutation of Han Yu (Pi Han, 1895)
• The Origin of Wealth (Yuanfu, translation of Adam Smith, 1901–02)
• On the Boundaries between Society and the Individual (Qunji quanjie lun, translation of Mill’s On Liberty, 1903)
• The Study of Sociology (Qunxue yiyan, translation of Spencer, 1903)
• The Spirit of the Laws (Fayi, translation of Montesquieu, 1904–09)