Abstract:
In the past the organization of the Chinese society was equal and democratic through the decentralization of the power and the “collective” idea of the people itself pursuing the well-being of the State. The Western concept of democracy was brought into China by Western missionaries in the early 19th century. Their shallow understanding of such concept made the Chinese people confused and unable to grasp its basic essence. These omissions resulted in the “democracy” to fail its primary purpose, to the point that it was difficult – in the past as well as in the present – to introduce the Western concept of democracy into the Chinese society. The peculiar growth of the Chinese society needs to follow its own personal democratic path.
This thesis focuses on the translation from Chinese into Italian of two different articles. The first one is an article of social sciences that appeared in the Journal of Henan Polytechnic University, while the second is an article of political sciences that appeared in the Journal of Renmin University of China. Their contents are very different, but their essence is the same, because they display, from different points of view, the difficulties faced by China in its quest for a path to democracy, and the fact that this path cannot be the same as the one followed by Western countries, due to the peculiar situation that China faced in the past and still exists in the present times.
This thesis comprises four main sections. The first one is a discussion about the Western term of “democracy” and its shallow and inadequate translation into Chinese carried out by Western missionaries. The second part deals with the key problem of democracy in China through a brief analysis of the society and the centralization of state power. The third part is an analysis of different kind of democracies, as it mentions some examples of democracy in Western countries and the causes for their failure. The fourth part is the key part of this thesis because, through the analysis of the previous sections, it attempts to find a path for Chinese democracy, which seems to be the decentralization of state power that originates from the past tradition.
