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English to Chinese: Iran comes face-to-face with its own contradictions General field: Social Sciences Detailed field: Journalism
Source text - English Iran comes face-to-face with its own contradictions
Six nights of protests against economic hardship and the perceived unfairness of the Islamic Republic have rocked Iran.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his allies are facing deep social discontent that represents a tremendous challenge to state security forces and their efforts to restore the Islamist order. In the longer term, they will also have to overcome this popular discontent in order to guarantee the survival of the Islamic revolution of 1979.
These protests have been sparked by both immediate and structural causes.
Amongst the short-term factors, one has to consider the 40 percent increase of the price of eggs, rises in the prices of many other staples, government efforts to cut subsidies to the poorest citizens, and the closure of credit agencies that has dispossessed several groups of Iranian investors.
More broadly, expectations that the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers would deliver significant economic improvements were exaggerated. The international agreement did not lead to an improvement in the daily lives of the majority of the Iranian population.
Slogans against the regional policy of the Islamic Republic also once again show the revolutionary fatigue of a vast portion of the Iranian population, especially in relation to its economic cost.
Indeed, protesters’ slogans have focused blame on the leaders of the Islamic Republic for spending Iran’s oil money on proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian government and other groups in regional countries.
They would prefer to see the cash spent inside Iran and not being used to serve foreign policy goals such as influencing the destiny of the region.
One other question is also asked of the government: How can President Hassan Rouhani talk ending U.S. non-nuclear related sanctions against the Islamic Republic when he does not have the ability to change the policies that are the reason for these very same sanctions?
Beyond the discontent engineered by the double discourse of the elected institutions of the Islamic Republic, there are structural reasons explaining the rise of social discontent in Iran such as widespread corruption in the system and the mismanagement of the economy, especially the distribution of oil revenues.
The authorities were unable to propose solutions for these shortcomings. Therefore, the religious-political elite now appears from the perspective of the protesters as a privileged cast of insiders (khodi) benefiting from the oil rent, while excluding the outsiders (gheyr-e-khodi) from benefiting from their economic favours.
This is the main explanation behind the sense of injustice of the outsiders towards the Islamic Republic. Rouhani’s policy did not work because there is a contradiction between his neoliberal economic policy and the clientelism of the system. Can an oil-theocracy with parliamentarian and militia dimensions overcome this contradiction?
To manage discontent, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini created an innovative and original political system that can be categorised as an elective autocracy.
The elective dimension is linked to a limited pluralism inside the system. On the one hand, there are the so-called reformist or moderate factions that intend to focus on the civil rights of the population using popular demands for freedom as a tool to win elections.
Nevertheless, once these factions are elected they pursue a policy based on the Chinese model. This has been the case from former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, to Rouhani. This strategy failed in Iran not only because the government is unable to produce and maintain a high rhythm of economic growth but also because of the refusal of civil society and now the popular classes to find a modus vivendi with the authoritarian political system.
This democratic aspiration can be traced from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to the Green Movement of 2009. Moreover, once in control of the government, the reformist faction has chosen a neoliberal economic path following the guidelines of International Monetary Fund (IMF).
This is in contradiction to the revolutionary promise of giving priority to the oppressed (mostazafin). The revolutionary ideal of Islamic social justice has therefore to be abandoned for the sake of the structural adjustment of the economy.
On the other hand, conservative factions (osulgarayan), offer as an alternative a reckless policy of redistribution of the oil rent to the poorest segment of the population. This time the revolutionary promise is fulfilled, but at the expense of the economy.
The deadlock provoked by both conservative and reformist factions is one of the main reasons explaining the current expression of popular discontent. Because putting a vote in the ballot box is not anymore a solution, the citizen, the victim of the economic inefficiency of the Islamic Republic, transforms into a protester.
In the absence of solutions from inside the Islamic Republic establishment, what can a centrist president like Rouhani do? In the context of social polarisation inside the country, he has no other option than blaming the U.S. administration for the shortcomings of a system that always despises economic questions.
Khomeini once said, “economics is for donkeys”. At the time, the objective was to justify the priority given to spiritual matters.
Today, questions related to political economy are bringing the Islamic Republic face-to-face with its contradictions. These irreconcilable goals can be best seen through the opposition between the character of the mullah businessman and capitalist and the ambition of the Islamic revolution to give priority to the protection of the oppressed.
Today, a large proportion of the protesters belong to the popular class. They have denounced the hoarding of resources by the new religious-political elite. This is already a strong repudiation for a religious government that once thought that Shi’ite Islam should always be at the centre of any legitimate government in Iran.
Translation - Chinese 伊朗直面自身重重矛盾
过去七天，反对经济低迷和不平等问题的抗议示威活动震动了伊朗。最高领袖哈梅内伊(Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)及其同盟面临着深刻的社会不满情绪，给国家安防部队及其恢复伊斯兰秩序的努力带来了巨大挑战。长远来看，他们仍将不得不在克服这一广泛的不满情绪的前提下维系1979年伊朗伊斯兰革命的成果。
Chinese to English: 作品意图阐释（节选） General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting
Source text - Chinese 这一年来我想努力发掘我做作品的背后逻辑。在我看来，不断生产作品是一个方面，与此同时，我同样也需要将这些线索和骨架挖出看，并试图组成更强壮的内在。
我想谈谈我到目前为止的发现，我一直倾向于去做一些貌似稳定平衡的大环境，或者说物体，内里藏着的无数的细微矛盾的作品。每当我想要去呈现在生活里的细微矛盾，我乐意把这种矛盾置于一个大的稳定当中去说明。这就像一个运作着的巨大的机器，但内部构造随时可能爆发某种破坏。就像当时的那张maze。
我使用水墨以及其他多种媒介解构当代叙事，常打破固有的结构，从而制造一个多重投射、循环往复的套层空间，其中隐含着大量或双关或相悖的细节，借以反应当今社会。
在我看来水墨更像是一个入口和一种剖析工具，让我对自己本身所携带的东方的思维方式逐渐了解。了解之后我再把内在的思维方式带进作品里。在这里我把水墨作为关键词画出是因为我认为这是一个复杂的命题。东方禅的思考，是把阴阳作为一个整体去理解，黑和白相互依存。
Translation - English Over the past year, I’ve been trying to figure out the logic links hidden behind my works. In my view, to keep producing works is just one part of the story. I need to dig out the evidence, the bone structure of them at the same time, trying to consolidate them into a stronger core.
I’d like to talk about my discoveries so far. I always tend to make some seemingly stable and balanced environments, or objects, with numerous subtle contradictions hidden inside. Whenever I feel like demonstrating these subtle contradictions in our life, I like to put them inside a greater stability. It is like a vast machine, operating, while some kind of destruction is apt to break out in its internal construction at any time. Just like the maze back then. I used Chinese ink painting and a few other media to deconstruct contemporary narratives, often breaking existing structures. Thus a prismatic and cyclical space nested in layers upon layers was created. Numerous details, parallel or contradicting, were implied to reflect the society we live in.
To me, Chinese ink painting is more like an entrance and an analysis tool, helping me get to know about my inherent, oriental way of thinking. After that I get to put this way of thinking into my works. I underline Chinese ink painting as a key word here because I believe it is a complicated subject. There is Zen in it, an oriental concept that understands yin and yang as a whole, and that the blacks and whites are interdependent.
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Years of experience: 6. Registered at ProZ.com: Jun 2018.
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