English literature might be regarded as one of the first Western "colonizing" and globalizing forces to enter and subsequently "decentralize" the homogenous nature of the Chinese classical literary mind. This process began with the early English version of the Bible and biblical literature. Although Christianity fought its way to China as early as the Tang Dynasty (618 ~ 907) (see Shen, 1987), the Bible was not accessible to ordinary Chinese until the British missionary Robert Morrison completed his translation of the Bible into modern Chinese in 1823. According to a comprehensive study (Gu, 1994), from 1823 to the present, over three hundred million copies of the Bible have been distributed, circulated and sold in China. While biblical literature in the Chinese vernacular has exercised manifold cultural, philosophical, ideological and political influences upon the Chinese, in particular it helped the vernacular (baihua) to establish itself over the classical Chinese (guwen) and promoted general literacy in a society in which public education in the modern Western sense had never been heard of. Many biblical terms, sayings, proverbs, anecdotes and references have become part of the modern Chinese vocabulary. The missionaries' scope of interest and attention went far beyond religious affairs in China. An account by the well-known American missionary Arthur Smith in his China and America Today (1907) aptly describes the "mental" state of the then rapidly changing China: Fiction was represented in one year by but twenty-one volumes, and in the next by fifty-seven, showing which way the Oriental mental tides run. Among well-known books translated and for sale, were Uncle Tom's Cabin; Treasure Island; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; Tales from Shakespeare; Joan of Arc, and even the Arabian Nights is said to be in preparation. In a paper on this fertile subject read in 1905 at a meeting of the Educational Association, Mr. Darroch judiciously remarked: "If the Chinese are being interested in Western storybooks they are learning to appreciate our way of looking at things. It will not much longer be true that the mind of the Orient is so dissimilar to the thoughts of the Occident that these two must always remain incomprehensible to one another. This is the one touch of nature which will make the whole world kin, and we shall find this mighty nation of 400 millions as susceptible to the thrills of emotion which sweep over our national life, as are our nearer and more intimate neighbours. That this change of sentiment on the part of the Chinese will have prodigious effects on our work as missionaries and educationalists will not, I think, be gainsaid." (P140) This "Orientalist" observation showed how the Chinese seemed to be actively moving in a direction that was particularly pleasing to the Western mind. Previously, various Euro-American colonizing powers had tried every possible means (e.g. religion, trade, diplomatic channels, military operations) to bring China onto the "right" track of history as understood in Wester...
