Reading Isaiah Berlin in China1

A year before his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin was invited by a Chinese scholar named Ouyang Kang to write a summary of his thought for the Chinese reading public. Berlin, as Dr Henry Hardy recalls, much valued this new readership, and therefore wrote his last essay, ‘My Intellectual Path’. It was first published in English in the New York Review of Books, and then included in The Power of Ideas, an anthologies edited by Hardy.2 Eight years later, this piece finally received its Chinese translation. According to Ouyang Kang, his incentive is to edit a book composed of intellectual self-portraits by several distinguished Anglophone philosophers as a way to introduce contemporary Anglophone philosophy to common readers in China. Ironically, when Ouyang’s volume was published, many of Berlin’s writings had already been translated and his thought been made accessible to the general public.3 Unlike his Oxford colleague, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Isaiah Berlin never went to China; nor did he write anything directly related to it. Although he sometimes mentioned China in passing, he seemed not to have known much about either its history or its status quo, and he probably viewed it, along with India and Japan, as an old, mysterious and exotic civilisation. Among his interlocutors, Joseph Alsop had served in the ‘Flying Tigers’ commanded by C.L. Chennault in fighting the Japanese. After the Communist Party took power by defeating Chiang Kai-shek’s army in 1949, thus ending a civil war lasted for three years, China became a Communist regime, which borrowed its totalitarian system entirely from the Soviet Union. However, what happened in China during Mao’s age did not draw Berlin’s attention particularly, if compared to other Communist states. The Great Famine was not widely reported in the West then, whereas the Cultural Revolution, which inspired many demagogic leftwing French intellectuals in the 1960s, did not have the same effect on him. He saw virtually no differences between Mao and Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, all of whom seemed to him, at best, believers in fanatic credos, and at worst, tyrants who were responsible for ‘oppression, torture, [and] murder’.4 Only in the 1980s, after thirty years of China’s self-imposed cultural insulation, did Berlin’s name gradually came to be known among Chinese intellectuals. The first piece translated into Chinese was ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’ in 1985;5 and Berlin’s more influential Four Essays on Liberty was then published in Taiwan in 1986.6 In 1987, Bryan Magee’s Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy, based on his dialogues with Berlin and other well-established philosophers on BBC,