Compared with its reception in western translation circle, skopos theory is more readily accepted than questioned in China。 The late 1980s has witnessed the spread of skopos theory in China。 Ever since then, it has been exerting an increasingly profound influence on China’s translation studies。 According to the statistics shown by China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, the number of academic papers relevant to skopos theory published from 1987 to present reaches 1180, including papers from academic journals and 492 excellent masters’ theses。 These papers outnumber those about many other Western translation theories。 Besides, so far dozens of academic works touching upon skopos theory are estimated to have also been published。 Viewing from the above-mentioned papers and academic works, one can easily find that the scope of research in this field ranges from the construction of translation studies as an independent discipline, the definition and standard of translation, translation strategy, translation criticism, literary and non-literary translation to translation teaching。

The spread of skopos theory in China should be credited to early Chinese scholars’ translation and introduction, which probably dated back to 1987 when the translation scholar, Qian Guiyuan, first introduced skopos theory into China in his paper On Three Translators of Federal Germany。 Although Professor Gui briefly introduced Vermeer’s skopos theory in this paper, he put greater emphasis on introducing three major representatives of German functionalism than on the functionalist translation theory itself。 At that time, skopos theory hardly received any attention from Chinese translation circle, partly because it could not match its predecessor—linguistic approaches to translation such as Nida’s formal  and dynamic equivalence, in terms of its compatibility with traditional Chinese translation theory which gives high priority to faithfulness to the ST。 Belated response did not come until eight years later when two translation scholars, Zhang Nanfeng and Chen Xiaowei, published   their papers Out of the Dead End and into Translation Studies and A Brief Comment on Skopos Theory to introduce and comment on German functionalist approaches to translation。