Introduction: Sounds, Scripts, and Linking Language to Power

On his 109th birthday, linguist Zhou Youguang (周有光 1906–) gave the same remark he had been giving every year since he passed the centennial mark in 2006: “God is too busy—he has forgotten about me.”¹ A veteran of China's modern language reforms and the main engineer behind the national romanization system, Hanyu pinyin, Zhou is the oldest surviving witness to the longest revolution in twentieth-century China: a quest for linguistic modernity that has taken more than 400 years to unfold. Since the first Jesuits arrived in China in the sixteenth century, the Chinese language has been transcribed, romanized, phoneticized, shortened, relengthened, and—most recently—digitized in its long road to modernization into a global language.

Yet, as with Zhou, a large part of this history has been forgotten. Partly due to the political and social tumult of the twentieth century, the story of the Chinese script revolution has been cut up and relegated to different domains of study. Language reform is mostly treated as a subsidiary or supporting event, pulled along by the larger currents of history. Whether it is state building or nationalism, the most familiar lens is the Communist takeover or the Nationalists’ Mandarin language campaign in Taiwan. Our awareness of this history has been deeply colored by the post-1949 divide, even though the Chinese language revolution predates that and is still ongoing in modern times.

This disjointed view is even more striking in the larger landscape of how and when the Chinese language has been studied. There are pieces of this modernization story in the increasingly ignored field of what we think of as sinology proper, where the historical changes in rhyme tables and phonological schemes are discussed in the utmost technical detail but in terms that few any longer have the training to appreciate.² Other parts can be found in the studies of missionary linguistics or regional sinicization, in which the Westerners’ fascination with the Chinese language, or the Chinese script's former role as a lingua franca of East Asia and Vietnam, is treated as a separate phenomenon, although the two are complementary in their patterns of diffusion.³ In more recent times, the language policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) have been a topic of interest for evaluating the efficacy of ethnic management and national literacy campaigns.⁴ Chinese language teaching has also become a controversial topic, with now nearly 500 Confucius Institutes on six continents.⁵ Elsewhere, scattered in the history of science and technology, are narrower topics like telegraphy and communications. There, language is treated as a modern infrastructure, imported much like anything else that is Western—under unequal terms—but analysis has gone little past the familiar Orientalist critique.⁶

While the Chinese language's modern transformation has come in and out of focus in different pockets of study, it has also emerged in new debates. The blanket term of “Chinese” has raised new questions in studies of global Chinese diaspora, reviving for some scholars former strains of postcolonial critique in the new field of Sinophone studies.⁷ There, the diversity of the spoken Chinese language has been called upon to rise against the hegemonic establishment of Mandarin, a call that has, however, raised more questions than it could resolve. Some of the best and most informative studies have come out of intellectual and cultural history.⁸ There, a growing inventory of detailed and fascinating studies of the semantic and semiotic changes of linguistic interchange between China and its foreign, or ethnic, others illuminates standing questions of how concepts travel and gain influence. For the time being, though, one still has to bridge the gaps between the different inquiries under this rubric, as the case studies can be, for instance, as disparate as translated mathematical symbols and modern education reform.

Outside these known academic niches, and unknown to most, the current digital age has made the topic of the Chinese writing system a more global concern than ever before. The advent of the computer age in China in the 1970s was a bottleneck for Chinese language engineers, who had barely figured out pinyin before they had to tackle the hard question of how to encode characters into machine language. Currently, written Chinese is also being tested as a new universal, as the ideographic script is employed as a litmus test for cognitive experiments with alphabetic languages in the field of cutting-edge neuroscience.⁹ This unexpected participation is about as far as one can get from the traditional scope of China studies.

Under these diffuse conditions, the new starting point is to recognize that any simple claim of native ownership over the Chinese language and its fate is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Along with that, wagging an accusing finger yet again at Western prejudice—invoking a bygone era when Chinese was seen as inadequate in relation to the Western alphabet—would be a feeble approach to what the future holds. Some observers prophesy a merged lingua franca in the not so distant future; others assert the opposite.¹⁰ While opinions remain divided, texting and other new interfaces are changing the very medium and definition of writing and, with that, the traditional distinctions among human language scripts.¹¹ In explicating this phenomenon, scholarly debates are lagging behind the times. Contemporary artists, not just Xu Bing (徐冰 1955–), are exploring the limits and surface of Chinese character writing as universal signage.¹² This is not unlike the precedents in seventeenth-century England or eighteenth-century France and Germany, where Chinese was at once perceived as God's mother tongue or a secret mathematical language.¹³

What one can say for certain is that the idea of assuming one's mother tongue or national language as an exclusive claim to identity is becoming untenable in our time. Witness how “linguistic nativity”—or the claim of being exclusive to one language, one place—has been constructed or reinvented, whether it is the kokugo (国語 national language) in Taiwan under Japanese rule, guoyu (國語 national language) under the Nationalists’ stewardship, or the reconstruction of minority languages like Hakka or Baba Malay, for which there are no longer native speakers per se. Similarly, that all scripts may survive in the current digital age insofar as they can all be encoded in a machine language points to a hard threshold of representation that raises the stakes of linguistic survival in unprecedented ways. One might think of Devanagari or Khmer scripts as recent examples.

Historically, skirmishes over the modern Chinese language have been conducted with a passion that may be hard for the contemporary observer to grasp. Sometimes waged as wars, at other times mobilized through linguistic means or what I have called “literary governance”—the voluntary and involuntary coordination between users, institutions, and circumstance to generate language power at a given time and place—the Chinese language question embodies many of the contradictions in modern China's ambivalent desire to be part of the world, at once genuinely motivated and vengeful. The chosen cover graphic for the special issue of National Language Monthly in 1923, quite a striking visual for its time, remains a vivid reminder that people were willing to shed blood over such matters less than a century ago. On that cover, soldiers, intellectuals, and the masses each brandished a particular script (Western alphabet, seal script, or phonetic alphabet) as their weapon as one group slaughtered its way through the other.¹⁴ The intensity of the conflicts between speakers and institutions, nationalization and localization, technology and modernity in the twentieth century has been as great as those concerning race and gender in our time. The difference is that the essentialization of language is still commonly accepted and fiercely defended, while sexuality and racial categories have become more fluid.

It is no exaggeration to say that the true history of how the Chinese language adapted itself to the modern age has been grossly understudied. The scarcity of new references confirms this neglect. The most often quoted sources on the modern Chinese language reforms remain the studies of John DeFrancis (1911–2009) from the 1950s and 1980s.¹⁵ Pioneering as these studies were, DeFrancis relied heavily on the eyewitness account of Li Jinxi (黎锦熙 1890–1978), itself an unwieldy memoir to sort through, as it underwent several rewritings.¹⁶ Despite DeFrancis’ remarkable contribution, he also never won proper recognition for his pioneering efforts during his lifetime. His career suffered during the McCarthy era, when he was suspected of having Communist sympathies. The Chinese script revolution, much like the many participants in it who failed, fell into oblivion, or died in the process, has itself not come fully into the light.

All this is beginning to change. Our purview is giving way to an interconnected global history, like any other monolingual field.¹⁷ Many have gone outside of China to recover the longer and transregional links, and there are valuable sources still waiting to be further mined. To study telegraphy, for instance, there are, surprisingly, more clues in the company records of the Danish telegraphic company that made the first foray into Asia than in the municipal archives of China. To understand why the Chinese library system became a critical battlefield, one would find useful cues in the drafts of missionary romanization schemes tucked away in the British Library and the Vatican archives. Dissertations or theses written in France, America, and Germany by early twentieth-century Chinese students abroad who later became the movers and shakers of modern language movements like Gwoyeu romatzyh (國語羅馬字 Guoyu luomazi), still rest on the bookshelves in off-site locations, awaiting discovery—perhaps by other aspiring young dissertation writers.

One, in fact, does not have to look far and wide for these links. The Chinese language was never just a Chinese affair. The traditional phonetic representation of the Chinese language, reverse-cut (反切 fanqie), was not honed and systematized until the translation of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit in the seventh century. It had been in use for so long (from the third century onward) that by the late nineteenth century few people still fussed over its foreign origin; instead it was defended against the Western alphabet as the pure, native Chinese sound system. The next wave of foreign impact came from the Jesuit missionaries, not only Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) but also others. They transcribed Chinese with alphabet letters not to topple it but to teach the daunting language to themselves. While this early encounter had limited influence and reach, it planted the seeds of bigger ventures down the line, with stakeholders inside and outside of China. After the First Opium War, Protestant missionaries vastly expanded the network laid down by their Jesuit predecessors, this time with less accommodating strategies and more assertive forays into phoneticization schemes, bilingual dictionaries, and education overhaul.

The greatest transformation, though, came in the twentieth century, during which the Chinese script underwent more change than in the previous three millennia combined—with the greatest possible consequences for the foreseeable future. From typewriting to Chinese character encoding, arranging library catalogs to finding a place in Unicode, raising the status of national language above dialects, or pegging a Chinese sound to a foreign spelling system, the trials and tribulations of the Chinese script extend far beyond any single individual or policy, movement, or historical moment. To approach the vast network of its interdisciplinary linkages, one has to raise the methodological imagination accordingly. It requires new ways of linking language to power.

To this end, the following four essays in this special issue are fresh and thought-provoking takes on the matter. They focus on the different elisions between sound and script that have propelled, and plagued, much of China's effort to disseminate a national language. Taking up the cause of topolects, or fangyan (方言), Jin Liu provides an overview of some of the central debates on the national language and local tongues in the first half of the twentieth century. From late nineteenth-century romanization schemes to the controversy over “national forms,” Liu shows the fallout of the wide-scale campaign to nationalize, when local languages were largely left to occupy an awkward place between standardization and individualized preservation. These issues returned throughout the twentieth century to haunt the monolithic practice of the Chinese national language.

In an original take and with linguistic sources mined from the deep archives, Mårten Söderblom Saarela excavates an important history of how Manchu phonology changed the way Mandarin was recorded and preserved. Making a contribution to New Qing studies, among other areas, Söderblom Saarela shows that, in the process of sinicization, Manchu emperors and imperial scholars ended up reshaping the phonetic understanding of spoken Chinese through lexicographical projects they had originally undertaken to teach, rather than to supersede, Mandarin. The multilingual nature of the Qing empire did not just fall away at the dawn of nationhood but was, instead, the condition of possibility for how the northern vernacular, Mandarin, could be accurately captured as a spoken language.

Focusing further on the question of local tongues in the unification of the national language, Flora Shao unravels a fascinating story about the rise of folk song studies in the 1920s, just as the nationalization campaign reached a new height. She juxtaposes the two developments in order to show the deep ambiguities—and near impossibility—of capturing sound in a written mark. The championing of dialects, she shows, was carried out not as an opposition to, but in corroboration of, the goal of national unification. Yet this anticipated merger never happened. Through a careful analysis of some of the folk song ballads in question, she demonstrates why and how the basis for unification hinged on inherently irreconcilable issues that were played out in raising the profile of dialect studies.

Finally, in a complementary piece that traces the fate of fangyan into the 1950s, Gina Tam gives a compelling account of how the dependency of dialects on Putonghua, the common speech promulgated in 1956, came to be established at key moments. The subsidiary role of dialects, which Tam challenges, came about in coordinating dialectology—led by Zhao Yuanren (趙元任 1892–1982), also known as Yuen Ren Chao—with Stalinist–Marxist interpretations of language, as they were embodied in dialect surveys and the promotion of Latinized New Writing (拉丁化新文字 Ladinghua xin wenzi; Latinxua sin wenz). Reevaluating the place of dialects in relation to standard common speech, Tam shows how their lack of autonomy resulted in their appropriation by the language policies from the decades before and after the founding of the PRC.

Each of the contributors in this special issue speaks to the wealth of materials and the new perspectives that await our interpretation in the rich, interdisciplinary, and global history of the Chinese language in modern times. This exciting prospect is just beginning to be materialized, with the publication of these four exemplary essays on the subject as a new conversation. As China continues to garner the world's attention in our time, its language is a key lens through which to understand its modern history. From Kazakhstan to Kenya, Singapore to South Africa, China's linguistic reach speaks to internal contradictions as much as it does to global ambitions. In the same way, it is no longer merely a subject for the fastidious scholar or professional linguist. It is already opening up the field of modern China studies to a global history that is greater than itself.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jing Tsu

Jing Tsu, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has published widely on sinophone literature, the science and technology of scripts, and Chinese diaspora and nationalism. Her forthcoming book, The Kingdom of Characters: Language Wars and China's Rise to Global Power (Penguin Random House), is a new account of what happened to the Chinese script in the age of the alphabet.

Notes

1 “Yuyanxue jia Zhou Youguang ying 110 sui dashou, zhudao jianli Hanyu pinyin xitong” (Linguist Zhou Youguang greets his 110th birthday, having led the establishment of the Chinese romanization system), China News, January 13, 2015.

2 David Prager Branner, The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006); David Prager Branner, Problems in Chinese Dialectology: The Classification of Miin and Hakka (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000); W. South Coblin, A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003); A Compendium of Phonetics in Northwest China (Berkeley, CA: Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1994); Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984); Bernhard Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (London: Oxford University Press, 1946); Grammata Serica Recensa (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1972). For an account of the difficulties in parsing and categorizing sounds in Chinese phonology in a comparative context, see Charles W. Kreidler, Phonology: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (London: Routledge, 2000–2001).

3 Henning Klöter, The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Francis Varo, Francis Varo's Grammar of the Mandarin Language (1703): An English Translation of “Arte de la Lengua Mandarina,” ed. W. South Coblin and Joseph A. Levi (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000); Bruce Rusk, “Old Scripts, New Actors: European Encounters with Chinese Writing,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 26 (2007): 68–116; Wang Feng, Cong hanzi dao hanzi xi wenzi: hanzi wenhua quan wenzi yanjiu (From the Chinese script to sinoscript: a study of the sinoscript cultural world) (Beijing: Minzu, 2003); Li Shiren, “Dongya Hanzi wenhua quan” geguo gudai xiaoshuo de yuanyuan fanzhan (Source and development of classical fiction among countries of the “East Asia sinoscript cultural world”) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University, 2009); He Jiuying, Hanzi wenhua quan (Cultural world of the sinoscript); Li Yunbo, Hanzi wenhuaquan jindai yuyan wenhua jiaoliu yanjiu (Study of modern linguistic and cultural exchange within the sinoscript world) (Tianjin: Nankai daxue, 2010); Zhou Youguang, Xiandai wenhua de chongji bo (Clashing waves in modern culture) (Beijing: Sanlian, 2000); Chen Yulong, Han wenhua lungang: jianshu Zhong-Chao Zhong-Ru Zhong-Yue wenhua jiaoliu (An outline of Chinese culture: cultural exchanges between China and Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) (Beijing: Beijing daxue, 1993).

4 Minglang Zhou and Hongkai Sun, eds., Language Policy in the People's Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949 (Boston: Kluwer, 2004); Chen Ping and Nanette Gottlieb, eds., Language Planning and Language Policy: East Asian Perspectives (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001); Gulbahar H. Beckett and Gerard A. Postiglione, eds., China's Assimilationist Language Policy: The Impact on Indigenous/Minority Literacy and Social Harmony (London: Routledge, 2012); Li Yuming, Language Planning in China (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015).

5 For a sample of views, see: Peter Schmidt, “At U.S. Colleges, Chinese-Financed Centers Prompt Worries about Academic Freedom,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 22, 2010; Marshall Sahlins, “China U,” Nation, October 29, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/china-u/; Tao Xie and Benjamin I. Page, “What Affects China's National Image? A Cross-National Study of Public Opinion,” Journal of Contemporary China 83 (2013): 850–67; Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China's Influence on U.S. Universities?, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 113th Cong. (2014), http://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20141204/102778/HHRG-113-FA16-Transcript-20141204.pdf. For Hanban's website, see http://english.hanban.org/node_10971.htm.

6 Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997); Wook Yoon, “Dashed Expectations: Limitations of the Telegraphic Service in the Late Qing,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 832–57; Thomas Mullaney, “Semiotic Sovereignty: The 1871 Chinese Telegraph Code in Historical Perspective,” in Jing Tsu and Benjamin A. Elman, eds., Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Xia Weiqi, Wan Qing dianbao yu shehui bianqian yanjiu: yi youxian dianbao wei kaocha zhongxin (A study of telegraphy and social change in the late Qing: with a focus on wired telegraphs) (Beijing: Renmin, 2012); Sun Li, Wan Qing dianbao jiqi chuanbo guannian (1860–1911) (Telegraphy and the ideas it disseminated) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2007); Li Xue, Wan Qing xifang dianbao jishu xiang Zhongguo de zhuanyi (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu, 2013).

7 At its inception, Sinophone studies was met with both criticism and support. For representative views, see Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2010). See also Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

8 See Michael Lachner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Elizabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education. 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Lydia H. Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

9 Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision (Dallas: Benbella, 2009); Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Viking, 2009); Daisy L. Hung and Ovid J. Tzeng, “Orthographic Variations and Visual Information Processing,” Psychological Bulletin 90, no. 3 (November 1981): 317–44.

10 For recent opinions on the likely contender for the next lingua franca, see “English as a Growing Lingua Franca, and Why Mandarin Is Unlikely to Replace It,” Washington Post, January 22, 2016; Geoffrey Pullum, “The Unsuitability of English,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2015; “The Language Barrier Is About to Fall,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2016.

11 Compare David Crystal, Txtng: The gr8 db8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995); “Emoji: The First True Universal Language?” Guardian, August 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/31/emoji-became-first-global-language; “Are Emojis Becoming the New ‘Universal Language'?” Newsweek (Europe), September 18, 2015, http://europe.newsweek.com/are-emojis-becoming-new-universal-language-333213.

12 Contemporary artists such as Gu Wenda (1955–), Zhang Huan (1965–), and Qiu Zhijie (1969–) have attempted new expressions with the mediality of Chinese writing. See Maxwell K. Hearn, Ink Art: Past as Present (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013). Within the former Sinosphere of a shared script, a group of young Vietnamese avant-garde calligraphers, known as the Zenei Gang of Five (Tran Trong Duong, Pham Van Tuan, Nguyen Duc Cung, Ngyuen Quang Thang, Le Quoc Viet) have also been experimenting with the writing of the Vietnamese sinoscript, Nôm, in order to reclaim this dead script for the present. I thank Pamela N. Corey, who is working on this fascinating topic, for this reference.

13 John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: Printed for Sa. Gellibrand and for John Martyn, 1668); Donald F. Lach, The Preface to Leibniz' Novissima Sinica: Commentary, Translation, Text (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1957).

14 “Hanzi gaige” (Han script reform), special issue, Guoyu yuekan (National language monthly) 1, no. 7 (1923).

15 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984); Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).

16 Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang (History of the national language movement) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1990). Ni Haishu (1918–1988) is the other leading authority, though even some of his data and samples are also incomplete. See his most influential works: Qingmo Hanyu pinyin yundong biannian shi (A chronology of the phoneticization movement of the late Qing period) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1959); Zhongguo pinyin wenzi yundong shi jianbian (Simple history of China's phonetic script movement) (Shanghai: Shidai shubao, 1948). See also Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (Berkeley, CA: Society for the Study of Early China, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2000).

17 For a recent example, see the three-volume publication Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Asia Inside Out (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), consisting of Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (2015), Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (2015), and Asia Inside Out: Mobile Peoples (forthcoming). See also Kenneth Pomeranz's introduction, “Moving the Historiography West,” in “West China,” ed. Kenneth Pomeranz and Kristin Stapleton, special issue, Twentieth-Century China 40, no. 3 (October 2015): 168–80.