But Chinese characters had other benefits. They provided a powerful element of unity to an empire that, from another perspective, was a mishmash of ethnic groups and languages. Writing created a remarkable sense of historical continuity: an unending narrative that smoothed over the chaos of the past. The characters were also beautiful. Calligraphy became a fundamental Chinese art, much more important than it was in the West. Words appeared everywhere: on vases, on paintings, on doorways. Early foreign visitors to China often remarked the way characters decorated everyday objects such as chopsticks or bowls. At Chinese temples, prayers were traditionally written rather than spoken; fortune-tellers often made their predictions by counting the strokes of a written name. In the nineteenth century, social organizations were devoted to collecting scraps of paper that had been dignified by writing; they couldn’t bear to see them tossed away like trash. Communities erected special furnaces to give these words a proper cremation.
Of course, writing was hard. To achieve literacy, a Chinese student had to memorize thousands of characters. Without alphabetic order, categorization was complicated. (Even today, file cabinets are an adventure, and few Chinese books have indexes.) The first Chinese dictionary organized words by shape. Over time, many characters had acquired secondary elements—now known as “radicals”—that helped distinguish and classify words. But even radicals were complicated: the first Chinese dictionary identified 540 radicals, and more than 9,000 characters.
But motivation was high in a culture that identified itself so strongly with the written word. By the seventeenth century, China already had a well-established commercial press, and literacy seems to have ranged more widely across class groups than it did in many parts of Europe. Foreign travelers noted that even in the countryside, it was common to find books—often manuals that showed peasants how to write simple contracts. Evelyn S. Rawski, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, has estimated basic literacy rates for Chinese males in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at between 30 and 45 percent—comparable to those for males in preindustrial Japan and England. Rawski concludes that, although China failed to industrialize as rapidly as those nations, the disparity shouldn’t be blamed on literacy problems.
TO OUTSIDERS, THOUGH, the Chinese writing system seemed badly in need of reform. One sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary described learning to write Chinese as “semi-martyrdom,” and it wasn’t surprising that the Jesuits were the first to develop systems that used Latin letters for Chinese. Over the centuries, as more foreigners arrived, they often believed that alphabetization would benefit the people. Of course, it would also benefit the foreigners and their churches. In the nineteenth century, as the Opium War treaties allowed more foreigners to proselytize in China, Christians published Bibles in the native dialects. Alphabetization became a key part of missionary work, and by the end of that century, foreigners and Chinese converts had developed alphabetic systems for all major dialects.
Meanwhile, Chinese intellectuals were undergoing their crisis of cultural faith. Having been defeated repeatedly by the foreigners, they began to question everything traditional, including the cherished script. At the same time that scholars were rediscovering the oracle bones, many Chinese were thinking about doing away with the characters entirely. In the 1910s, Qian Xuantong, a prominent philologist, proposed that China switch, in both spoken and written language, to Esperanto.
Most solutions were less radical. A number of intellectuals proposed using the same characters but shifting from classical Chinese to the vernacular. This proposal gained support in the late 1910s, eventually becoming incorporated into the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which called for the reform and modernization of many aspects of Chinese politics and education.
Eventually, reformers successfully did away with the tradition of writing in classical Chinese. Schools, government bureaus, and books and newspapers began using a writing system that followed Mandarin, the vernacular of the Beijing region. This was different from what had happened in Europe, where Latin was replaced by multiple vernaculars: French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. In China, largely because there was no alphabet, the shift to the vernacular was made without sacrificing literary unity. All educated Chinese still learned to write the same way.
Reformers believed that another step was still necessary. They pointed out that most southerners wrote in what was essentially a second language. For a native of Wenzhou to become literate, for example, he first had to learn Mandarin. It was the equivalent of an English-speaker being forced to use Dutch in order to read and write. In southern China, there was one major exception: Hong Kong writers had developed a system that allowed them to write their native Cantonese using Chinese characters. Even so, the traditional characters were so badly suited to Cantonese sounds that the Hong Kong system required more than a thousand additional symbols, many of them specially designed for the language. Such systems had not been developed for the other major Chinese languages, which remained unwritable, and it would have been an immense project to adapt characters to each spoken tongue.
With an alphabet, though, it would be far simpler—foreign missionaries had already proved this with their dialect Bibles. Across China, many intellectuals called for alphabetization, believing that the characters were an impediment both to literacy and to democracy. Lu Xun, who lived from 1881 to 1936, and was perhaps China’s greatest modern author, advocated a shift to the Latin alphabet. He wrote (in characters, as he did until his death): “If we are to go on living, Chinese characters cannot…. The characters are a precious legacy handed down by our ancestors, I know. But we can sacrifice our inheritance or ourselves: which is it to be?”
In 1930, Chinese Communists living in the Soviet Union developed a system that used the Latin alphabet for Chinese. Writing reform became a key Communist project; in 1936, as the revolutionaries were gaining power, Mao Zedong told the American journalist Edgar Snow that alphabetization was inevitable. “Sooner or later,” Mao said, “we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate.” The Communists described the characters as “a Great Wall” that “has been erected between the masses and the new culture.” They even blamed writing for the post-Opium War decline, claiming that the characters had “facilitated the imperialist invasion of the Chinese nation.”
In the Communist-controlled regions of the north, the new alphabetic script was granted legal status in 1941. Contracts and government documents could be written in the Latin alphabet as well as in characters. By the time the Communists gained control of the country, writing reform seemed imminent. In 1950, an American linguist named John DeFrancis published a book in which he predicted that the end was near for Chinese characters.
JOHN DEFRANCIS IS still bitter about that prediction. When I interview the scholar at his home, he becomes visibly agitated every time we touch on the subject. He was wrong, but he wasn’t—in his heart, he knows that the Chinese should have gotten rid of the characters, and they should have done it immediately after the Communists came to power. Unexpected events are always frustrating, and sometimes the memory burns for more than half a century.
The professor is ninety-one years old and in good health. He still researches his Chinese dictionary projects, although he is formally retired from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He lives and works in a beautiful Japanese-style house set into a hillside of the Manoa Valley. There’s a rock garden in the back, centered around a tiny pagoda, and the sweet smell of bougainvillea drifts into the open house. To the south, the brown-green peak of Diamondhead is visible. For a scholar who wants to spend his final years halfway between the two mainlands, this is the ideal place to do it.
DeFrancis first went to China in 1933, after graduating from Yale. His original plan was to pursue business opportunities, but everything changed after he arrived in Beijing. “I lost all interest in the American business community starting from my first day,” he te
lls me. “We were at a restaurant, and at the end of the dinner, an American businessman tipped the Chinese waiter by taking a banknote, tearing it in half, and throwing it at his feet. I didn’t want to become part of that.”
The poverty in China disturbed the young man, who believed that the country badly needed reform. Like many foreigners at that time, he thought that the Kuomintang were hopelessly corrupt. He studied Chinese, and in Beijing he became friends with another idealistic young scholar named George A. Kennedy. The Rockefeller Foundation gave Kennedy a grant to establish a Chinese language program at Yale, and his prize purchase in Shanghai was a Chinese printer’s font. Kennedy planned to ship the pieces to New Haven, reassemble them, and publish textbooks for American students. He asked John DeFrancis to help.
“I became in effect his right-hand man and his assistant,” DeFrancis remembers. “We set it up in the basement of Harkness Hall at Yale. Imagine a room of this size, if not larger, filled with V-shaped wooden trestles. If I’m standing up, they come to my chin. The trestles are divided to hold trays that are ten inches by twelve inches, which are further divided into little squares of two inches by two inches. Each square contains individual characters, arranged by radical. It was my job to set up the printer. I would take a composing stick, go pick up a character under the ‘person’ radical, , and then go get another character under the ‘field’ radical, . I’d walk back and forth, back and forth. I’d put a few sentences together and take them to the printer, who made a metal cast. Our characters were so limited that I had to continually compose and then break it down, compose and break it down. We were taking stories from classical Chinese and putting them into modern colloquial Chinese.”
Every foreigner who studies Chinese has a formative experience involving characters—the “semi-martyrdom”—and John DeFrancis’s was particularly scarring. After years of searching wooden trestles for tiny pieces of metal organized by shapes such as and , he became a passionate advocate of Chinese writing reform. (His colleague, George A. Kennedy, became the main designer of the Yale romanization system for Chinese.) In 1950, after predicting the characters’ demise, DeFrancis waited in America, eager to hear news of change. That summer, Mao finally issued a command:
The writing system must be reformed; it should take the phonetic direction common to the languages of the world; it should be national in form; the alphabet and system should be elaborated on the basis of the existing Chinese characters.
The directive took everybody by surprise. DeFrancis and other scholars had expected that the Communists would simply adopt the Latin script, but the 1950 command sent the movement in a completely new direction. Mao Zedong wanted a Chinese alphabet.
THE CHAIRMAN’S COMMAND represented a critical turning point. Afterward, Chinese linguists spent years trying to create a distinctly Chinese alphabet, and in the meantime, they lost the momentum for change. In John DeFrancis’s opinion, it was a missed opportunity, and that’s what makes him so angry. Several times, he tells me that he didn’t return to China for forty-nine years because of his bitterness over the failure of writing reform.
The motivation for Mao’s command, like so many of the Chairman’s decisions, remains a mystery. Once, when I telephone DeFrancis to talk about this period, he theorizes that perhaps the Korean War or some other aspect of U.S.-China relations had influenced Mao, turning him against the Latin script. DeFrancis urges me to visit with the surviving Chinese linguists who were involved in the project; in particular, I should meet with Zhou Youguang, who is in his late nineties. Back in 1982, when DeFrancis finally made his grudging return visit to China, he had asked Zhou Youguang about that key moment in 1950.
“He said that he knew why Mao made that decision, but he wasn’t free to talk about it,” DeFrancis tells me on the phone. He suggests that China’s increased openness, combined with Zhou’s advanced age, might make the man more disposed to speak freely about the past.
I BEGIN ON the first floor. Zhou Youguang, along with two other aging linguists, lives in the dormitory at the State Language Commission in downtown Beijing. All three men share the same entryway. It’s a traditional Communist work unit arrangement, a throwback to the days of the planned economy. For reporting, it couldn’t be better. All I have to do is go up and down the stairs, and I’ll meet the most important writing reformers still living in China. The entryway becomes a tower of time and language: the afternoon passes; the reformers get steadily older; their memories shift restlessly through the years of the failed campaign.
At seventy-two, Yin Binyong is the youngest, and he lives on the first floor. For months, he has battled liver cancer, and his body is wasted: tiny chest, brittle limbs. His face is heavily lined, and he has the eyebrows of a Taoist god, great clumps of white that shadow his yellowed eyes. But if the man is in pain, he never shows it. He greets me warmly, pulling out the letter of introduction I have sent. Another scholar had suggested that I contact the reformers by writing a note in Pinyin, the script that uses the Latin alphabet for Chinese. Yin is thrilled that I got in touch without writing a single character.
Half a century ago, he graduated from Sichuan University with a degree in mathematics, and for a spell he was a middle-school math teacher. But he researched linguistics on the side, publishing articles, and eventually he was invited to work on the Beijing writing reform committees. His background is not uncommon—many linguists have skills in math or logic.
“There’s definitely a link,” he says. “You can often use mathematical methods and apply them directly to the study of language. I’ll give you one simple example. Consider animals—which animal has the closest relationship to human beings? You can probably narrow it down just by thinking: cow, horse, dog, pig. But which one is the most important to the way that people live? What do you think?”
“Dog,” I say.
Yin smiles; the eyebrows dance. “That’s your guess,” he says. “But how can you tell for certain? One method is to analyze writing through statistics and frequency studies. This is something that we did during the 1950s. We examined texts, both modern and ancient, to see which animal name appears the most frequently. For all periods, it was the same: the horse. So we concluded that the horse had the most important relationship to human society in China.”
Visions flash before my eyes: a bronze artifact, a buried chariot, a man on horseback riding straight at a wooden gate. Yin continues, “I wrote a paper about this in the 1950s. I also did a study with English and Japanese texts, and they were both the same. But the second-closest animal was different. In English, it’s dog. For us Chinese, it’s cow.”
After the horse diversion, he discusses the challenges of Chinese writing reform. Some people claim that Chinese has too many homonyms to be written with an alphabet; the characters are necessary to distinguish like-sounding words. Yin acknowledges that this is true for classical Chinese, but not for the modern languages. It’s no different from listening to a radio broadcast—Chinese can understand their languages on the radio, without seeing the characters, and that means they could also understand an alphabetized script.
“Of course, that’s theory, and practice is different,” he says. “It’s hard to get people to change when they’ve been using characters for so long. And it’s true that if you shift to an alphabet, you have problems with the old texts. Look at The Dream of the Red Mansion, where all of the people of the same generation have names that use the same radical. You lose details like that if you change the writing system. Mostly, though, it’s hard to change old habits. Look at your language—English writing also needs reform. George Bernard Shaw thought it should be changed.”
Spoken English has about forty sounds, which are too many to be handled efficiently by the Latin alphabet—thus the often illogical spelling. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote everything in shorthand, specified in his will that future royalties from his works be used to fund the creation of a new alphabet. In 1958 and 1959, a public contest drew 467 proposed English alphabet
s, of which four were selected as winners. One of these systems, which had been designed by an architect, became the basis for the “Shavian” alphabet of forty-eight letters. A print run of a single book was published using the new system, a special edition of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. The four English words of that title appeared as:
By coincidence, the Chinese were also constructing alphabets in the 1950s. But their project was much more serious; it had been commanded by the Chairman, and linguists across the country created more than two thousand proposed Chinese alphabets. Some used Latin letters; others used Cyrillic; a number of proposals incorporated the Japanese syllabaries. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic. Yin remembers one system that used numbers. Another method combined Latin letters with the Chinese radicals. Under this system, the Chinese character which is pronounced fa, would be written:
Linguists tinkered with the Latin alphabet itself. One system proposed four new letters that would represent specific Chinese sounds: zh, ch, sh, and ng. Under the proposal, ng would be written like the symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet:
“The East Germans heard about this,” Yin says. “They quickly designed a typewriter that included those letters, and they sent it to our bureau. They said that if we adopted that system, their factories could produce typewriters. I think that was around 1952, although I can’t remember for certain. I do remember that the typewriter was still sitting around the bureau in the late 1950s. It was a beautiful machine; I have no idea what happened to it.”
In 1955, the reform committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists. One system used Cyrillic letters, and another used the Latin alphabet. The other four finalists were completely new “Chinese” alphabets that were based on the shapes of characters. But a year later, Mao and other leaders decided that the Chinese alphabets weren’t yet usable. They sanctioned the Latin system—the one known as Pinyin—for use in early education and other special purposes, but it wasn’t granted legal status. Meanwhile, they decided to simplify a number of Chinese characters, reducing the stroke counts. For example, guo, which traditionally is written , was changed to became became became A total of 515 characters were simplified, as well as a number of radicals. At the level of individual characters, it was a significant change, but the basic writing system remained intact. Chinese was still logographic, and most dialects were still unwritable.
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