Context is Key / 注意场合

Today was my first day of Chinese class in over 5 years. Interestingly, for our first text, Yu Laoshi chose the December 16th, 1978 announcement of the normalization of Sino-American relations.

As she walked us through the text, we were getting to some of the thornier sentences and I noticed a couple of my classmates struggling with translating certain sections into English. Honestly, I think part of the problem was that the intent of those sections was totally opaque to people who weren’t necessarily thinking about the context.

The most confusing passage was probably:

任何一方都不准备代表任何第三方进行谈判，也不准备同对方达成针对其他国家的协议或谅解。
Neither side is prepared to negotiate on behalf of any third party, or prepared to reach an agreement or understanding directed against another nation.

What does that mean?

Well, the first phrase seems pretty clearly about Taiwan. The US wanted to make it very clear that their recognition of China did not equal a Taiwanese surrender and that the US did not speak for Taiwan and was not prepared to negotiate on Taiwan’s behalf. Indeed, the US would use the excuse of “preserving economic relations” with Taiwan to continue to sell the ROC arms up to the present day.

The second phrase seems to be about the Soviet Union, primarily. The Cold War was still brewing, despite America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and, to avoid unnecessary provocation of the USSR, both China and the US wanted to emphasize that they were not publicly declaring an anti-Soviet alliance. Sure, both parties wanted Moscow to be worried about the warming of Sino-American ties — this was after the Sino-Soviet split and the border skirmishes of 1969 — but not worried enough to totally freak out and make the Cold War into a hot one.