Contemporary discourses on translation on the Chinese mainland have often broken into fierce argument about the need to develop a Translation Studies with distinct Chinese characteristics. Such a discussion might strike scholars outside China as bizarre. Shouldn't scholarly pursuit be objective, disinterested and free from the trappings of ethnicity, nationality, language and so on? Why should the world pay any attention to a local debate? This article argues for the need to treat this debate seriously by showing that it has erupted in many other cultural domains and hence is not an isolated phenomenon that can be ignored. Situating the debate about Chineseness, which is in fact a debate about identity and representation, in the larger context of cultural politics, the article explores the significance of the debate not only for Translation Studies, but also for the promotion of intercultural dialogue in the new geopolitical settings of the twenty-first century.