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http://tinyurl.com/je9z4cr

EIGHT is a lucky number in China. How fortunate it was, then, that a team of
more than 100 scientists was able, after three years of research, to declare
that ancient Chinese had achieved no fewer than 88 scientific breakthroughs
and engineering feats of global significance. Their catalogue of more than
200 pages, released in June, was hailed as a major publishing achievement.

一群中國學家在三年的研究後 於日前宣布了至少88樣的中國古代發明

All Chinese schoolchildren can name their country’s “four great inventions”
: paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder. Now it appears they have a lot
more homework to do. The study purports to prove that China was first with
many other marvels, including the decimal system, rockets, pinhole imaging,
rice and wheat cultivation, the crossbow and the stirrup.

四大發明已經不夠看了 中國學生要知道的發明看來要再增加了

It is no coincidence that the project, led by the prestigious Chinese Academy
of Sciences, got under way a few months after Xi Jinping took over as China’
s leader in 2012. Mr Xi has been trying to focus public attention on the
glories of China’s past as a way to instil patriotism and provide a suitable
historical backdrop for his campaign to fulfil “the Chinese dream of the
great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

自從習大大掌權以來  就致力提升公眾對於中國光輝歷史的認識

Mr Xi is building on a long tradition among the Communist Party’s
propagandists of claiming world firsts. “China invented Lassie,” ran a
headline in Global Times, a party-controlled newspaper, about dogs being
domesticated in China 16,000 years ago (another group of scientists reckon
China first did this 33,000 years ago). In 2006 official media shocked the
Scots with an assertion that China invented golf a millennium ago, hundreds of
years before the game took off in Scotland.

根據習大大和共產黨 中國有許多世界第一

例如在16000年前馴化狗 以及在千年以前發明高爾夫球

As a lover of football, Mr Xi likes drawing attention to China’s pioneering
of that sport, too. On a visit to Britain in 2015 he stopped at one of the
country’s most famous football clubs, Manchester City. There he was
presented with a copy of the first rules for the modern game (drawn up by an
Englishman in 1863). In return, he handed over a copper representation of a
figure playing cuju, a sport similar to football invented by China 2,000
years ago (see picture, from a football museum in Shandong province). It was
apparently popular both among urban youths and as a form of military fitness
training. Mr Xi would like a great rejuvenation of this, too. In 2014 he
announced plans to put football on the national curriculum. The aim is to
make China a “first-class power” in football by 2050 (it has a long way to
go).

身為足球愛好者 習大大也想讓大家了解中國在這項運動的領先地位

The growing attention that China pays to its ancient achievements, real and
exaggerated, contrasts with the almost total rejection of them by Mao Zedong
after he seized power in 1949. In Mao’s China history was not something to
celebrate. A central aim of his Cultural Revolution was to attack the “four
olds”: customs, culture, habits and ideas. Many Chinese dynasties destroyed
some glories of the previous one, but the Communists took this to new
extremes. Across the country state-sponsored vandals destroyed temples,
mansions, city walls, scenic sites, paintings, calligraphy and other
artefacts.

宣揚中國古代成就的行為和毛澤東路線互相衝突

That began to change after Mao died in 1976. Now Mr Xi claims that Chinese
civilisation “has developed in an unbroken line from ancient to modern times
”. He glosses over not just the chaos and destruction of the Mao era but the
long centuries when the geographical area now called China was divided into
many parts, and even run by foreign powers (Manchu and Mongol).

毛死後路線開始改變

The party also wants to use ancient prowess to boost China’s image abroad
and to counter widespread (and often unfair) impressions in the West that the
country is better at copying others’ ideas than coming up with its own. The
four great inventions were one of the main themes at the opening ceremony of
the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, an event that China saw as its global
coming-out party after decades of being treated with suspicion and contempt
by foreign powers.

黨想讓世界知道中國不是只有山寨而已

Envy of the West’s rapid gains in technology since the 19th century has been
a catalyst of Chinese nationalism for over 100 years. It fuels a cultural
competitiveness in China that turns ancient history into a battleground. This
was evident in China’s prickly response to a recent documentary made by the
BBC and National Geographic, which suggested that China’s famous terracotta
warriors in Xi’an showed Greek influence. Some people interpreted this as a
slight. One Chinese archaeologist dismissed the theory as “dishonest” and
having “no basis”; another said that foreign hands could not have sculpted
the figures because “no Greek names” were inscribed on their backs.
Likewise in 2008 Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, was derided for saying
that table tennis originated not in China but on Victorian dining tables and
was known as whiff-whaff.

之前BBC和國家地理說兵馬俑有受到希臘影響激怒了中國

Just a slight inconsistency

The publication of the 88 achievements, however, has drawn attention again to
an enduring mystery: why, after a long record of remarkable attainment in
technology, did Chinese innovations largely cease for the 500 years or so
leading up to the collapse of the last imperial dynasty in 1911? As state
media observed, few of the inventions on the new list belong to this period.
This puzzle is often referred to as the “Needham question”, after a British
scientist and Sinologist, Joseph Needham. (It was he, in his study of China’
s ancient science in the 1950s, who first identified the four great inventions
—before then most people thought they had emerged in the West.) A member of
the team that produced the list said the question deserved “deep reflection”
 and would be a topic of future research.

這次公布的88項成就又讓人不禁疑惑 為什麼近代中國突然停止發明了?

Mr Xi skates over this. He lauds Zheng He, a eunuch who launched maritime
voyages from China across the Indian Ocean from 1405, as one of China’s
great innovators—an early proponent of a vision of China that Mr Xi would
like to recreate: prosperous, outward-looking and technologically advanced
(the admiral’s massive boat is number 88 on the list). Yet he fails to point
out that soon after Zheng He’s explorations China turned inward, beginning
its half-millennium of stagnation.

習大大讚揚鄭和 但他忘了指出在鄭和出航後 中國開始閉關自守

In this 15th-century turning point, reformists in China see an obvious answer
to Needham’s question: isolation from the rest of the world is bad for
innovation. They take heart in China’s efforts since the 1970s to re-engage
with the West, but lament the barriers that remain. With luck, it will not
take 100 state-sponsored Chinese scientists another three years to reach the
same conclusion.

運氣好的話 應該不用百位國家贊助的科學家花三年時間來達成這個結論吧

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