Who ‘let all this happen’? Shifts of responsibilities in representing the Cultural Revolution in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans

Abstract

A number of Chinese migrant writers have achieved success in writing in English, one of the most significant being Jung Chang, with her politically controversial Wild Swans. A key site for controversy is its attribution of historical responsibilities in describing China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). However, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to the Chinese translation of this book, an unusual situation where the source text author partially contributed to the translation decision-making. This article seeks to examine the shifts of responsibilities in this translation with a focus on the linguistic representation of three participants in the event: Mao, Red Guards and general students. It adopts a functional translational stylistics approach to explore the combinational foregrounding patterns in transitivity and clause status. Based on both quantitative and qualitative results, this study has found latent but considerable grammatical patterns in shifting responsibilities from Mao to the youth in the Chinese translation. This implies a weakened influence of an anti-Maoist ideology in translating the book into Chinese.