Daniel Hsu: In Memoriam

Mr. Xu Zhiyue or Daniel Hsu, an independent scholar and translator in Shanghai, died on November 2nd, 2014. He was 53. Mr. Hsu passed away just two weeks after undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer.

For more than a decade, Mr. Hsu has helped to introduce a great variety of European and American minds into the Chinese-speaking world. He called himself an “exile” and a “non-violent guerrilla” in his spiritual and intellectual life.

Mr. Hsu was a principal Chinese translator of Eric Voegelin, a German-born American political philosopher. In 2009, Mr. Hsu published the Chinese edition of Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections. In 2012, he published the Chinese translation of The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Second Edition) written by Ellis Sandoz, the Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University. Unexpectedly, China’s official news agency, Xinhua China News, and Southern Weekend, a prominent Chinese weekly newspaper, endorsed Mr. Hsu’s translation of The Voegelinian Revolution in 2012.

Mr. Hsu also translated In Search of Order, the last of Voegelin’s five-volume Order and History. It is expected to come out in the coming months. Apart from the translation, he wrote articles to help Chinese readers make sense of Voegelin’s life and mind.

In 2008, he attended the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, presenting a paper to Eric Voegelin Society entitled “Eric Voegelin’s Thought on Civil Theology and Its Potential in Reinterpreting Some Aspects of Confucius’ Political Thought.” As a book consultant, Mr. Hsu helped to introduce Voegelin’s other works such as Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, The Nature of the Law, and Hitler and Germans. For the moment, they remain unpublished in China.

Besides Voegelin and Sandoz, Western minds such as C. S. Lewis, John Howard Yoder, Thomas Merton, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alister McGrath, Rick Warren, Peter Drucker, Russell Lincoln Ackoff, Timothy Keller, Charles Taylor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Joan Chittister, and Daniel A. Bell were all on Mr. Hsu’s unusually-wide intellectual radar. Thanks to Mr. Hsu’s efforts, the books by or about most of them have been brought to the Chinese mainland.

Mr. Hsu started his translation and publication career in the late 1990s. In 2003, he published his first translated book, Religious Transformation in Western Society: The End of Happiness by Harvie Ferguson, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow. Later published translations include Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology by John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago. He also co-translated Happiness: A History by Darrin M. McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, and 50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom From 50 Great Books on Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose by the Oxford-based author Tom Butler-Bowdon.

All of this came late in Mr. Hsu’s life, despite his interest in political ideas from quite early on. He was born on May 19th, 1961 in Shanghai. In 1972, as a primary school student, he was demoted to deputy class monitor after one of his classmates reported that he “uttered reactionary words” when watching a recording of then-Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk. That was during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. From 1979 through 1984, he studied naval engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University, one of the oldest and best-known universities in China. As a student, Mr. Hsu became the first volunteer distributor of World Economic Herald, an influential Shanghai-based weekly newspaper renowned for pushing economic and political reform in the 1980s.

At a local used-book store in 1985, Mr. Hsu bought a copy of John J. Tarrant’s Drucker: the Man Who Invented the Corporate Society. He later borrowed the original English version from a Shanghai library, comparing it with the Chinese translation to hone his craft. Mr. Hsu later recalled that the book had made a lasting impact on his life as a scholar and translator. Then for more than ten years, he worked at Qiuxin Shipyard, a leading ship building company in Shanghai, where he translated business and technological documents.

The turning point was in 1999 when Mr. Hsu became an editor at the Journal of Shantou University and Shantou University Press in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He went back to Shanghai in 2004, working as a book editor and consultant at Liudian Culture Communication Company and Shanghai Joint Publishing House. From 2006-2011, Mr. Hsu was a librarian at the foreign language library of Fudan University’s School of Philosophy. After that, he spent his remaining years as an independent scholar, translator, and publishing consultant. Since 2013, he has helped Oak Tree, a Beijing-based company, to publish modern Christian classics.

One of his major unpublished translations is of A Secular Age by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Mr. Hsu’s wife, Ms. Qiu Hong, will finalize and edit the manuscript along with some of their friends. For the past ten years, Ms. Qiu, an editor at Shanghai Joint Publishing House, has worked closely with Mr. Hsu on numerous projects, including the translation of The Voegelinian Revolution by Ellis Sandoz.

In his Preface to the Chinese edition of The Voegelinian Revolution, Professor Sandoz thanks Mr. Hsu, a “distinguished scholar,” “for his diligence, skill and devotion in bringing the book into being.” Professor Sandoz has sent his condolences to Ms. Qiu. In his letter, he said that he was “very sorry to learn this” and called Mr. Hsu a “fine and brave man.” In the memorial service held on November 7th, Mr. Hsu’s daughter quoted Professor Sandoz’s letter, saying that she was proud of what her father has done in his extraordinary life.

In the opinion of Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian political philosopher teaching at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Shanghai Jiaotong University, Mr. Hsu was “a true intellectual. He cared mainly about the ideas; the rest was all details for him.” He also called him “a true liberal: always willing to discuss, argue, and live with differences while still respecting the integrity and good-will of his interlocutor.” Professor Bell added, Mr. Hsu “will be deeply missed, the world needs more people like Zhiyue.”

A few months before his death, Mr. Hsu shared the following thoughts with his friends through Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like Chinese micro-blogging service: “This is the end — for me the beginning of life.” These were the last recorded words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident. And that was on April 9th, the 69th anniversary of his death. Mr. Hsu planned to introduce more of Bonhoeffer’s works to Chinese readers. For Mr. Hsu, all this is not just a matter of politics and theology, but of life and death, and not just for this temporal world, but for eternity.

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