I’ve been working on translating a standard issued by the People’s Bank of China on credit ratings, and have been perplexed by their use of the word 主体. Their standard includes some English definitions that kind of give me a clue as to what they’re talking about. The first is 信用评级主体, which they translate as “subject of credit rating”. This made me think of “subject” as in “subject of an investigation”, but that’s not what they mean. Later it becomes clear that they are using a more philosophical idea of the word subject, as in the subject is the one who acts upon an object: 信用评级机构（行为主体）进行信用评级业务的操作对象（行为客体）”the object (object of the action) of credit rating operations undertaken by a credit rating agency (subject of the action).”

Another translation they give is “corporate credit rating” for 主体信用评级, and here 主体 is clearly the target of the action, the thing being rated. They clarify a little by saying this refers to 经济主体, an “economic agent” or “economic entity”.

Could they be any more confusing?

I haven’t really come across many uses of subject-object 主体-客体 like this in Chinese, but I am wondering if this is a result of the study of Marxism, Maoist thought, and dialectics that virtually every Chinese college student has to undergo?

Then the second use of the term as a corporation seems to be more of a legal concept, as in a legal entity, and when both senses of the word are used together, it gets very confusing trying to figure out what they are talking about.

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