If modern Chinese thought is to become accessible to a global audience of conventional political theorists and philosophers, and recognized more widely as a rich, nuanced, and diverse repository of compelling theoretical resources, scholars must recognize its terms as suitable for extended theoretical as much as historical analysis. In this vein, I offer below some explanations for my own translations of key terms in Zhang's work, hoping that these explanations can serve as glosses for an emerging cross-traditions vocabulary – which, in the Chinese/Euro-American case, Zhang himself helped to develop. Some of the translations have general application to all instances where the original Chinese term appears; others are keyed to Zhang's specific arguments, in which he invented or sought to influence the deployment of specific terms in early Republican political discourse. I have tried to indicate as accurately as possible the meaning of these terms, without narrowing their scope so radically that their more general theoretical applications are obscured. Indeed, the very theoretical ambition of Zhang's work requires that even those words with uncontroversial meanings in everyday talk, such as ren or tiaohe, be given special treatment as terms of art.

The reader should also keep in mind that Chinese has no plural constructions or verb conjugations, and that many Chinese words can function as different parts of speech (e.g. verb, noun, and adjective) depending on their placement within a sentence.