Author ｜
Shen Guo-wei
Abstract ｜
Historically, Chinese used the terms man, yi, rong, and di to refer to other races around China’s borders. After Protestant missionaries introduced the evolutionary ideas of Western history to China in the 19th century, words like “uncivilized” (manye) and “savage” (yeman) acquired a new meaning as descriptors of a particular stage of human historical development. These terms and the missionary writings that employed them made their way to Japan, where Fukuzawa Yukichi absorbed them and solidified their Japanese translation as yaban (or yema in Chinese), a word that returned to China at the start of the 20th century and became part of the modern Chinese vocabulary. This article investigates the formation and solidification of the word yeman and the related dialogues between China and Japan, with the goal of shedding light on the historical process by which the East accepted the civilized-versus-savage worldview of the West to hasten the transition to a modern society.
keywords ｜
yi, savage, civilization, culture, evolution