From the back of the bus sounded the harried clatter of somebody typing fast on a laptop.
“There have been several fights between Ashcroft and Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld and Powell.”
“People often say that O’Neill is going to go.”
“Last year I covered the APEC finance ministers meeting in Suzhou.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ninety miles from Shanghai. Beautiful place.”
At exactly 8:38 the bus pulled away from the Shangri-La.
“I think journalists underrate Mr. Bush because they value minds like their own.”
“I covered Gore for a year—you could diagram his sentences and teach English from them. But I could never understand what he was saying. Once they asked a question about domed stadiums. Gore said a paragraph: the Astrodome was the first dome, the Kingdome is the largest enclosed space—all this kind of stuff. Then Bush said, ‘I like to watch baseball outdoors.’ Who’s smarter?”
“Does Arlington have a dome?”
“No.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a motorcade like this one before.”
A row of black sedans led us north across the Second Ring Road. Dark-coated cops stood along the streets, clearing traffic. Pedestrians stared. The sky was perfectly clear.
“I’ve been to Yucca Mountain. I’ve been down inside Yucca Mountain.”
“Vegas is a real booming city.”
Signs along the road:
BEIJING WEST AUTO PARTS MART
BEIJING RURAL CREDIT COOPERATIVE
SINOPEC
“The French reprocess the waste into plutonium.”
“There’s a journalist here named Jasper Becker who found a thirty-million gap in the Chinese demographic. Thirty million! It makes you wonder what the other journalists are doing.”
The bus crossed the Fourth Ring Road. An enormous English sign read:
IMPLEMENT NEW TRADEMARK LAW TO FACE THE CHALLENGE
OF THE WTO ENTRY
“Look at all the bicycles! That’s what I’ve been wanting to see!”
“The Post guy, Tom Ricks, is terrific.”
BEIJING CHEMICAL INDUSTRY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
“He was the first guy to realize that satellite photographic technology could be a really useful journalistic tool.”
The bus entered the back gate of Tsinghua University.
“And for a network, a thousand dollars a picture is no big deal.”
Pines, lawns, old brick buildings. Statues and monuments.
“They built it with money from the Boxer Indemnity.”
“Was he the round peg when we needed a round peg?”
“I only covered him for a couple of months.”
“I was on a plane once and I was reading Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. Clinton came back and asked what I was reading. And he could talk about it. He’s very gifted but…”
WELCOME US PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
TO TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY
RELATIONS WERE ON the upswing, and so was China. In the past, the Chinese had always sought things from the outside world: recognition, trade relations, WTO membership, the Olympics. Often the United States held the cards that mattered, but now the situation had changed. The Americans needed things from China. The People’s Republic was the only country that had good relations with North Korea, and in the post-9/11 period, the Chinese presence in Central Asia mattered. If the U.S. intended to take the Iraq issue to the United Nations, China’s support would be critical.
And the Chinese economy had become too powerful to ignore. Sometimes, it was hard to believe that only two years had passed since Polat had spent long evenings out in Yabaolu, changing money at 9 percent above the official bank rate. In those days, people had speculated that the Chinese would devalue their currency; now people wondered if it would be revalued. Property markets were booming; the trade surplus grew every year. Soon the Americans would be asking the Chinese to add value to their currency, because trade had become so imbalanced.
During President Bush’s visit, all the old conflicts—the embassy bombing, the spy plane incident—seemed a century away. At the joint press conference, President Bush’s remarks were broadcast in their entirety on Chinese television. That was another good sign: in the past, words had always disappeared. In 1984, when President Reagan quoted Abraham Lincoln—“no man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent”—the phrase was excised from the tape-delayed broadcast. In October of 2001, when President Bush visited Shanghai for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, several key phrases disappeared from his televised press conference. Twelve of the lost words were: “the war on terrorism should not be used to persecute ethnic minorities.”
As a journalist, you tracked trivia. Occasionally, you looked up from the routine of patchwork news stories and realized that somehow, imperceptibly, the whole picture had changed. At those moments—wearing the suit and tie, boarding the press bus with other white guys in suits and ties—you wondered: Is this what it all comes down to? Does the world actually move forward through these meetings and speeches, the thirty-hour stopovers?
But that was the job, and so you collected the fragments—the issues, the background, the color—and you organized them into stories. The United States wanted China to stop exporting missile technology to Pakistan. China wanted the United States to stop planning a missile defense system in the Pacific. The United States wanted to export soybeans. The thirtieth anniversary was a nice detail. Since foreign journalists almost never had the opportunity to speak with President Jiang Zemin, and he appeared to be even blander than everybody else in the current Chinese leadership, it was useful to mention his habit of singing during state dinners. Other good details floated around. Beijing had eighteen PriceMarts. China was home to six hundred KFC franchises. More than forty Chinese Christian activists were reportedly placed under house arrest during President Bush’s visit. The New York Times reported that a recent survey had shown that nearly half of all Chinese children under the age of twelve believed that McDonald’s was a domestic brand.
A few months earlier, during President Bush’s visit to Shanghai, William Jefferson Foster’s VOA journal had included one of the longest sentences ever to appear in Special English:
During the press conference, China U.S.A. are two major influences in the world common responsibitities and interested two side’s move forward smoothly as long as the two sides stick to the common interest and handle the bilateral tie property perticu with regard to the Taiwan issue Taiwan issue has been the most sensitive issue in relation hope us to adhere to one-China principal and abibe by the three joint communiques
On anti-terrorism. China is always opposed to any form of terrorism and support effort fight it.
VICE-PRESIDENT HU JINTAO introduced President Bush. The Chinese official was a Tsinghua graduate, but there were other reasons that he made the introduction. President Jiang Zemin was scheduled to step down later that year, and many predicted that Vice-President Hu would become the nation’s leader. The foreign press had been watching him carefully since May of 1999, when he had been the first high-ranking Chinese leader to appear on television after the NATO bombing. It was a well known fact that Hu Jintao enjoyed ballroom dancing.
In his brief introduction, Vice-President Hu mentioned the anniversary. “Thirty years are just a moment in human history,” he said. “But the great changes that have occurred during this period in the two countries’ relations will go down in history.”
President Bush thanked Hu Jintao and said, “This university was founded, interestingly enough, with the support of my country, to further ties between our two nations.”
The small auditorium was poorly heated, and the audience consisted of three hundred students. The Communist Youth League had selected them carefully from every department at Tsinghua. I stood with the other journalists in the back, jotting down bits of President Bush’s address, to be checked later against the offic
ial State Department transcript:
“As America learns more about China, I am concerned that the Chinese people do not always see a clear picture of my country. This happens for many reasons, and some of them are of our own making. Our movies and television shows often do not portray the values of the real America I know.”
“If you travel across America—and I hope you do some day if you haven’t been there—you will find people of many different ethnic backgrounds and many different faiths. We’re a varied nation. We’re home to twenty-three million Americans of Chinese ancestry, who can be found working in the offices of our corporations, or in the cabinet of the president of the United States, or skating for the America Olympic team. Every immigrant, by taking an oath of allegiance to our country, becomes just as American as the president.”
“Change is coming. China is already having secret ballot and competitive elections at the local level. Nearly twenty years ago, a great Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, said this—I want you to hear his words. He said that China would eventually expand democratic elections all the way to the national level. I look forward to that day.”
AFTER THE SPEECH, the ritual shifted to the deconstructionist phase. Reportedly, all questions had been vetted in advance by the Party. The first student rose and said, in English: “Whenever you talk about the Taiwan issue, you always use a phrase just like, ‘peaceful settlement.’ You never use the phrase, ‘peaceful reunification.’ What’s the difference and why?”
President Bush’s response repeated some form of the p word—peace, peaceful, peacefully—ten times. But he did not say “peaceful reunification.” Another student popped up:
Q: It’s a pity you still haven’t given us—sorry—give us a clear question about whether you always use the “peaceful settlement.” You have never said “peaceful reunification.” It’s a pity.
PRESIDENT BUSH: We’re back on Taiwan again—[laughter]—go ahead.
Q: This is a question our Chinese people are extremely concerned about.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, I know.
Q: Three days ago, during your speech in the Japanese Parliament, you said the United States will still remember its commitment to Taiwan.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Right.
Q: But my question is, does the U.S. still remember its commitment to 1.3 billion Chinese people? [Applause] Abiding by the three joint communiqués and three notes. Thank you.
President Bush used p three more times: “peaceful resolution,” “peaceful dialogue,” “peaceful dialogue.” Still no peaceful reunification. He said, “And, secondly, when my country makes an agreement, we stick with it.” The questions lurched ahead. After a while, somebody asked if President Bush had noticed any changes since his first trip to Beijing in 1975, when his father was the U.S. ambassador to China.
“In 1975, everybody wore the same clothes,” President Bush said. “Now people pick their own clothes. Just look here on the front row, everybody’s dressed differently. Because you thought, this is what you wanted. You made the decision to wear a beautiful red sweater. And when you made that decision, somebody made it.
“And, in other words, the person, the individual, the demand for a product influences the production, as opposed to the other way around. Recognizing the desires of the individual in the marketplace is part of a free society. It is a part of the definition of freedom.”
HIS LAST WORDS were, “God bless you all.” I skipped the journalist bus and had lunch at one of the small cafés just outside the Tsinghua gates. The restaurant was packed and I didn’t hear a single student talking about the state visit.
ARTIFACT K
The Lost Alphabets
ONE PARTICULAR DETAIL REAPPEARS IN MANY OF THE MEMORIES. Each old man has his own perspective on the suicide, and often he emphasizes something that the others neglect—the reputed affair, the criticism, the years in America. But the majority of them mention Chen Mengjia’s involvement in writing reform. Follow this strand, and it leads farther and farther back in time, past the old men and past the poet-scholar and past the Anyang excavations, past the dynasties and even past the oracle bones. And that’s where it ends: at the absolute beginning.
PEOPLE DREW. IN ancient times, they simplified and standardized; the sketches became pictographs. It worked until they reached the undrawable—abstract concepts—and that’s when they turned to sound.
Imagine that three simple pictures represent the English words “leaf,” “bee,” and “eye”:
Now, reorganize the three pictographs:
Speak the words quickly: “Eye-bee-leaf; I believe.” That takes care of two abstractions: the first-person noun and the verb of faith. If you want, you can add simple markers that will allow a reader to distinguish “eye” from “I” and “believe” from “bee-leaf”:
In such a system, the writer listens for connections between words—homonyms, near-homonyms, rhymes—and then expands the vocabulary of the original pictographs. The key element is sound: a symbol represents a spoken sound rather than a picture. And that’s when you have writing, strictly defined: the graphic depiction of speech.
Nobody has found direct evidence of these early stages—it’s not the kind of thing that would have been recorded—but experts believe that’s roughly how it happened. The earliest known writing in East Asia is already a fully functioning system by the time it appears on the oracle bones. The Shang characters are not pictographs, although many of them contain links to that earlier stage. The Shang word for “eye” is written:
This kind of writing system is called logographic. Each character represents one spoken syllable, and syllables having the same sound but different meanings—homonyms—are represented by different characters. For example, the modern Chinese (“great”) is written differently from (“wilt”) and (“false”), despite the fact that all three are pronounced exactly the same: wei. The other known ancient scripts, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, also first appear on the archaeological record at the logographic stage. (Sumerian is the earliest known script, appearing roughly 1,700 years before the oracle bone inscriptions.) Most scholars believe that Chinese developed independently, although Victor H. Mair and a few others theorize that the Shang had contact with the writing of the Near East.
None of these early scripts is easy. In a logographic system, thousands of symbols must be memorized, and a reader often can’t pronounce an unfamiliar word without looking at a dictionary. During the second millennium B.C., Semitic tribes in the Near East converted Egyptian hieroglyphics into the first alphabet. An alphabet allows a single syllable to be broken into even smaller parts, which gives far greater flexibility than a logographic system. With an alphabet, it’s possible to distinguish homonyms in subtle ways (“see” and “sea”) instead of writing completely different characters. Unfamiliar words can be sounded out, and an alphabet shifts more easily between different languages and even dialects. For example, one can listen to somebody from the American south say “I believe,” and then, using the Latin alphabet, describe his pronunciation of each syllable: “Ah bleeve.”
A logographic system can’t capture that level of nuance. And an alphabet requires the memorization of only two or three dozen symbols, instead of thousands of characters. That’s why, in the Near East and the Mediterranean, the old systems didn’t survive. There are no direct descendants of Sumerian cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphics remain with us only indirectly, as the inspiration for the first alphabet.
But the Chinese still write in characters. In the history of human civilization, written Chinese is unique: a logographic script whose fundamental structural principles haven’t changed in more than three thousand years. Even the characters themselves are remarkably timeless. Today, when a Chinese writes mu, or “eye,” yu, or “rain,” niu, or “ox,” the modern words stand beside the Shang characters like close relatives:
NOBODY KNOWS WHY the writing system remained so stable. The spoken language of ancient China was chiefly monosyllabi
c (most words consisted of only one syllable), and it was uninflected (no changing endings for plurals or verb tenses). Some linguists note that these qualities made Chinese naturally suited to a logographic system. The Japanese, whose spoken tongue is highly inflected, originally used only Chinese characters but then converted them into a syllabary, a simpler writing system that makes it easier to handle changing word endings.
Other scholars point to cultural reasons. Ancient Chinese thought was deeply conservative—the ancestor worship, the instinct for regularity, the resistance to change, the way that Confucianism idealizes the past—and such values naturally would make people less likely to modify their writing system. But that’s a chicken-and-egg theory, and the fundamental issue isn’t why the writing system remained stable. The key is how this written stability shaped the Chinese world.
For most of China’s history, official writing used classical Chinese. By the time this language was standardized during the Han dynasty, more than two thousand years ago, it existed only in written form. People wrote in classical Chinese, but their day-to-day speech was different. Over time, as the spoken languages evolved, and the empire expanded, encompassing new regions and new tongues, classical Chinese remained the same. A citizen of the Ming dynasty spoke differently from a citizen of the Han—they were divided by more than ten centuries—but they both wrote in classical Chinese. The native language of a Fujianese was different from that of a Beijing resident, but if they both became literate, they could understand each other’s writing. Classical Chinese connected people across space and time.
It would have been harder to maintain such literary stability with an alphabet. In Europe, Latin was the written language of educated people for centuries, but they always had the necessary tool to shift to the vernacular: the alphabet made it linguistically easy. (Of course, cultural and social reasons delayed the transition.) In China, there was also some vernacular writing, but it was limited. Vernacular writing is less likely to develop in a logographic system, which simply can’t shift as easily as an alphabet among different languages and dialects.
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