The Guolinfeng List of 106 Important Publications of the Twentieth Century by Thomas Kampen

In Spring 2002, the Guolinfeng bookshop in Beijing (Haidian) organised an exhibition of important publications of the Twentieth Century. At the same time, a short catalogue of 36 pages with the title YINGXIANG ZHONGGUO ERSHI SHIJI LISHI JINCHENG DE ZHONGYAO WENXIAN was printed, but not formally published; there is no editor, no publication date and no book number.

Contents The catalogue presents a useful selection of 106 important titles published in China between 1892 and 1994 (in chronological order). 20 of these were published before 1911, 57 between 1912 and 1948 and 29 after 1949; there is a twelve year gap between 1966 and 1978. More than half of the entries are Chinese works, nearly fifty are translations of foreign publications.

Chinese publications

The Chinese titles include

- academic works by Cai Yuanpei, Feng Youlan, Gu Jiegang, Guo Moruo, Li Zehou and Ma Yinchu, - literary works by Ba Jin, Cao Yu, Lao She, Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Yang Mo, and - political works by Chen Duxiu, Chiang Kaishek, Deng Xiaoping, Kang Youwei, Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Sun Yatsen and Zou Rong.

Translations of foreign publications

Nearly all of the translated works are from European and North American authors, most of them from

- Britain (Bacon, Mill, Smith, etc.),

- France (Hugo, Rolland, Sartre, etc.), - Germany (Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, etc.),

- Russia (Gogol, Kropotkin, Lenin, etc.)

- and the United States (Snow, etc.).

The translations include

- academic works by Darwin, Dewey, Freud and Smith,

- literary works by Defoe, Goethe, Gogol, Hugo, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and

- political works by Hayek, Kropotkin, Lenin and Marx.

Comparisons and other sources

About thirty of those translations which were published before 1949 also appeared in Zou Zhenhuan's introduction to 100 important translations (http://www.zo.uni- heidelberg.de/md/zo/sino/institute/staff/kampen/kampen_100_translations.pdf), which covered the years between 1840 and 1949. These include Goethe's Werther, Ibsen's Nora, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Marx's Kapital, Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Snow's Red Star over China.

As Zou's book does not cover the post-49 period, the Guolinfeng list is very useful for readers interested in PRC translations.

Unfortunately, the Guolinfeng catalogue avoids the years of the Cultural Revolution, but important translations of the 1960s and early 1970s can be found in a list of 37 titles published in the book CHENLUN DE SHENGDIAN, edited by Liao Yiwu (1999), pp. 7-10. (see: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind03&L=chinaresource-l&F=&S=&P=5771)