Twentieth century China saw unprecedented attempts at cultural change and rejuvenation through the transfer of foreign knowledge, and translation played a role in almost all aspects of this development. Except for a short period under the PRC, English was the dominant source language for this transfer. This paper gives a brief historical background to the causes for the emergence of translation as a key to national survival and cultural change. It then focuses on three of the most significant translation-related phenomena in twentieth-century China: (1) the role of fiction translation (and later literary translation) as a vehicle for cultural change and construction; (2) the phenomenon of translating out of the mother tongue, i.e. Chinese, into English; and (3) the relationship between translation and learning English.