English Encyclopedia a definitive China reference

Foreign insights

“It is a worthy cause. The world does need to know more about China. The Chinese are not all that good about telling foreigners about themselves so a good outside publisher is the best thing for them,” Wang Gungwu, a professor at the National University of Singapore, said.

With a foreign team and Chinese scholars in the US, the Encyclopedia of China is expected to have distinctive foreign insights on the country and its history.

“We often see ourselves more clearly through the eyes of others,” Christensen sai “If a book or an article is written by an insider, it will not menion the details and history that provide context for readers unfamiliar with the subject.”

As an outsider, they have to explain many terms, concepts and events in their publications that would be obvious to Chinese readers but that are completely unfamiliar to those in the US.

“We also make difficult ideas understandable by comparing them to something familiar, such as the land area of a Chinese province to a US state,” she said.

One Western ignorance for which they tried to compensate was famous Chinese historic figures.
 
In the West, everyone knows Christopher Columbus and Julius Caesar, but they do not know that the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty ruled an empire just as big as Caesar’s, and began a series of explorations that reached from Russia to Africa, the publisher said.

They are specially developing a three-volume Dictionary of Chinese Biography, collecting the life stories of 150 key figures, selected from the earliest dynasties to the present day.

Chinese culture and Chinese inventions are also fully explained. “I suppose this might be the other great difference [from the Cina’s Encyclopedia]: how we try to place China within global history as an imperial power and source of innovation,” she said.

The China project has also lent more information to Berskshire’s other books, the Encyclopedia of Sustainability and Encyclopedia of World History.

Christensen compared the producing of Encyclopedia of China to “fusion food,” which combines the best elements of China andhe West. “We want to learn from the Chinese, an we also need to help them understand us, and what Western readers desire from them,” she said.