As these information technologies spread around the world, a process of globalization greatly facilitated by European colonialism and later American global dominance, they came to be viewed by many as language-agnostic, neutral, and “universal” systems—systems that worked for everyone and every tongue. In truth, however, such myths of “universality” held up only to the degree that Chinese script was effaced or erased from the story. Remington and Olivetti, as we will see, proudly declared universality on behalf of their typewriters, as did Mergenthaler Linotype and Monotype on behalf of their composing machines, all despite the fact that not one of these companies ever succeeded in breaking into the Chinese-language market—a rather substantial omission in an otherwise triumphal story. Every time Chinese script did show up, as in the 2008 opening ceremonies, it could only lead to awkward situations. Just as engineers in China and elsewhere reconciled Chinese script with one or another of these technologies, moreover, the invention and circulation of a new alphacentric technology rebooted the struggle, again placing Chinese script at risk of being denied entry to and participation in the “next big thing” as it further transformed the worlds of economics, politics, warfare, statecraft, science, and more. Threaded together, then, we are confronted with a 150-year history of “Chinese information crisis, redux.”
Throughout our exploration, we will pay close attention to engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, language reformers, and everyday practitioners who struggled to usher character-based Chinese writing into a modern age of global information, and who subscribed to a common belief that, as one of our historical actors will phrase it, “Chinese characters are innocent” (hanzi wu zui).13 For these individuals, the responsibility for China’s technolinguistic challenges during the modern period rested squarely, not with Chinese characters per se, but with people—engineers who had yet to discover the key to what, in their estimation, was an eminently solvable puzzle, and perhaps everyday users of the language who, if Chinese writing was to survive in the modern age, would need to be willing to engage with this language in unprecedented and perhaps radically new ways. This puzzle would have to be solved quickly, though, for it constituted nothing short of a civilizational trial by which to judge once and for all whether Chinese script was compatible with Modernity with a capital M.
What name shall we give to this long history of false universalisms? Linguistic imperialism leaps to mind, and at first seems to fit the bill. The history of these encounters is inseparable, after all, from the broader history of China’s engagement with Euro-American imperialism. Beginning in the nineteenth century, as we will see, Chinese script was enmeshed within a novel global information order whose infrastructure depended increasingly upon something China did not possess, and could not simply “adopt”: namely, an alphabet. Linguistic imperialism is a short-lived candidate, however, for one critical reason: the issue at hand here is not the dominance or hegemony of any one specific language—be it English, French, or otherwise. This was not a case of a dominant language being imposed upon a subject population, as witnessed in certain colonial language policies during the modern period.
The terms Western imperialism and Eurocentrism are also not quite right. In a counterfactual universe, after all, had the IOC chosen Cairo, Yerevan, Bangkok, or Yangon to host the 2008 games, the pseudo-universalism of IOC regulations would have been compatible, at least linguistically, with any such hypothetical situation. Arabic and Armenian are alphabetic scripts. Thai and Burmese are alphasyllabaries, or abugidas. The Parade of Nations could have unfolded according to existing regulations, and the universalist myth could have lived to mystify another day.
The hegemony at play, then, is not primarily a matter of Occident and Orient, West and East, Roman and Exotic, or even Europe and Asia. It is not reducible to any such crude binaries. Instead, the divide is one that pits all alphabets and syllabaries against the one major world script that is neither: character-based Chinese writing. It is a new hierarchy of script that tells us: while some alphabets and syllabaries are more compatible with modernity than others, all alphabets and syllabaries can take pride in their superiority over Chinese. There is a missing term in our discussion, it would seem: one that would enable us to pay keen attention to the historic origins of this hegemonic system in Euro-American imperialism, while at the same time recognizing how this hegemony enrolls a wide diversity of scripts, both Western and non-Western, into its configurations of power. The true fault line at play here is not the West and the rest, but pleremic and cenemic. So long as a script is cenemic—a writing system in which graphemes represent meaningless, phonetic elements, based on the Greek term kenos, meaning empty—then the IOC’s claim to universality stands, as will those made by the likes of Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, Mergenthaler, IBM, Adobe, and more. It is only in the case of pleremic script—writing systems like Chinese in which graphemes represent meaningful segments of language, based on the Greek plērēs, meaning full—that this universalism breaks down, as it did on August 8, 2008. Thus, while the origins of this hegemony are undoubtedly connected to the history of modern imperialism, nevertheless its expression takes the form of a different kind of binary altogether, one that divides the diverse multitude of cenemic scripts on one side from a singular pleremic script of immense scope and historical span on the other: Chinese.
To Be or Not to Be, That Is Not the Question
China has undergone profound changes over the past five hundred years. At the midpoint of the last millennium, Ming dynasty China was one of the engines of the world economy, one of its largest population centers, and a sphere of unparalleled cultural, literary, and artistic production. Over the ensuing centuries, China witnessed a transformative conquest by a non-Chinese dynasty from the northern steppe; a doubling of the empire’s size, as the consequence of immense Eurasian military campaigns into present-day Mongolia, Xinjiang, and beyond; a period of unprecedented economic and demographic growth during the eighteenth century; the emergence of ecological and demographic crises that spawned the largest and most destructive civil war in human history; colonial incursions by multiple Western nations that rewired the circuitry of global power; the demise of an imperial system over two millennia old; and a period of widespread political and social experimentation and uncertainty.
During the anxiety-ridden nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, Chinese reformers of multiple political persuasions engaged in thoroughgoing critical reevaluations of Chinese civilization in an attempt to diagnose the cause of China’s woes, and to identify which aspects of Chinese culture would need to be transformed to ensure their country’s transition into a new global order intact. Targets of criticism included Confucianism, government institutions, and the patriarchal family unit, among many others.
For a small but vocal group of Chinese modernizers, some of the most impassioned criticism was trained on the Chinese language. Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, famously called for a “literary revolution” to overthrow the “ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy,” and to promote the “plain, expressive literature of the people!”14 “In order to abolish Confucian thought,” the linguist Qian Xuantong (1887–1939) wrote, “first we must abolish Chinese characters. And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking, the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.”15 The celebrated writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) was yet another member of this anti-character chorus. “Chinese characters,” he argued, “constitute a tubercle on the body of China’s poor and laboring masses, inside of which the bacteria collect. If one does not clear them out, then one will die. If Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish.”16 For these reformers, abolishing characters would constitute a foundational act of Chinese modernity, unmooring China from its immense and anchoring past.
To abolish character-based writing invited serious peril, however. What would become of China’s vast
corpus of philosophy, literature, poetry, and history, all written in Chinese characters? Might not this inestimable heritage be lost to all but the epigraphers and specialists of tomorrow? Were China to abandon characters, moreover, what would become of the country’s pronounced linguistic diversity? Cantonese, Hokkienese, and other so-called “dialects” of Chinese are as mutually distinct as Portuguese and French. Indeed, many have argued that the coherence and persistence of the Chinese polity, civilization, and culture have in no small part been predicated upon the unifying influence of a common character-based script. Were China to go the route of phonetic writing, would not these linguistic differences in the oral realm be made more insurmountable, and politically charged, once formalized in writing? Might the elimination of character-based writing precipitate the breakup of the country along fault lines of language? Might China cease to be one country, and instead become a continent of countries, like Europe?
The puzzle of Chinese linguistic modernity would appear, then, to be a perfectly irresolvable one. Characters held China together, but they also held China back. Characters maintained China’s connection with its past, but so too did they isolate China from the Hegelian sense of historical progress. How then was China to make this seemingly impossible transition?
Returning to the twenty-first century, where the passages of Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu continue to bejewel the syllabi of countless undergraduate lecture courses on modern Chinese history (and scholarly writings alike), a world presents itself that hardly anyone could have anticipated at the dawn of the twentieth. Chinese characters were not exterminated, and yet China did not perish. Not only are Chinese characters still with us, clearly, but they form the linguistic substrate of a more vibrant world of Chinese information technology than even its most avid defenders could have dreamt of: a spectacularly large and growing presence in electronic media, widespread literacy, an ever-increasing network of Confucius Institutes and early education immersion programs propelled by foreign interest in the acquisition of Chinese as a second language, and continued popular fascination with Chinese characters that has manifested itself in not a few regrettable tattoos. More than ever before, Chinese is a world script. Throughout most of the past century, most assumed that such an outcome was conceivable only if China abandoned character-based writing, and underwent thoroughgoing alphabetization—which it did not. This outcome was not supposed to have been possible, and yet here we are. What happened? What did we miss?
The answer to this question is complex. At the outset, however, one key element can be outlined plainly: In sharp contrast to the popular trope that winners write history, in the case of modern Chinese language reform it is the losers of history who have managed to command the greatest attention of scholars—the Chen Duxius, Lu Xuns, and Qian Xuantongs. Collectively, we have been enamored of this vocal minority’s brand of easy iconoclasm: incandescent, seductively quotable, yet ultimately naive calls to abolish characters, or to replace Chinese writing wholesale with English, French, Esperanto, or one of a variety of competing Romanization schemes. Meanwhile, we know virtually nothing about those who made possible China’s contemporary information environment: iconoclasts who were no less passionate, and yet whose work was grindingly technical, dogged by intractable challenges, but ultimately of unparalleled success and significance. Unlike their celebrated and well-known abolitionist counterparts, the builders and users of the modern-day Chinese information infrastructure never appear on course syllabi, nor are their writings canonized within source compendia on the history of modern China. Indeed, they were often anonymous even in their own times, leaving behind fragmentary sources about their work, and in all but a very few cases never achieving any celebrity.
For these language reformers, the question of Chinese linguistic modernity was never the stark binary advocated by Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu: In the modern age, are Chinese characters to be, or not to be? Theirs was a far vaster, more open-ended, and thus more complex question: In the modern era, and particularly in the modern information age, what will Chinese characters be, and how will the “information age” itself be transformed in the process? Seductive though it may be, To be or not to be? was never the primary question of Chinese linguistic modernity. The question was: To be, but how?
When we move away from the simplistic iconoclasm of character abolitionists, an entirely new history of the Chinese language comes into focus. No longer in the realm of Confucian ethics or Daoist metaphysics, where Chinese characters were criticized by some as the very repositories of antimodern thought—as the “the very nests and lairs in which poisonous and corrupt thoughts reside,” to pull another gem from Chen Duxiu’s abolitionist jewel box17—we find ourselves in the admittedly less sensational yet decidedly more vital realm of Chinese library card catalogs, phone books, dictionaries, telegraph code books, stenograph machines, font cases, typewriters, and more—the infrastructural subbasement of Chinese script whose systems of inscription, retrieval, duplication, categorization, encoding, and transmission make it possible for the above-ground “Chinese canon” to function. We find ourselves in the plumbing and the electrical grid of Chinese.
Throughout the early twentieth century, just as some language reformers were critiquing the Confucian classics, many publishers and educators decried the average time required to find Chinese characters in the leading dictionaries of the era; library scientists lamented how long it took to navigate a Chinese card catalog; and state authorities bemoaned the inefficiency of retrieving names or demographic information within China’s immense and growing population. “Everyone knows that characters are hard to recognize, hard to remember, and hard to write,” one critic wrote in 1925. “But there is a fourth difficulty in addition to these three: they are hard to find.”18 These were problems, moreover, that could not be solved through mass literacy, the simplification of characters, vernacularization, or any of the other lines of action so often treated as synonymous with “language reform.” And if these problems proved insoluble—if it proved impossible to build a telegraphic infrastructure for Chinese, or a Chinese typewriter, or a Chinese computer—then arguably even the most well-meaning efforts at mass literacy and vernacularization would not be enough to realize the ultimate goal: to usher China into the modern era.
Continuity Is Strange
One of the few celebrated explorations of Chinese characters that dwells completely within the space of To be, but how? comes not from the world of scholarship, but from conceptual art. In 1988, the artist Xu Bing unveiled Book from the Sky (Tianshu), a work composed of four thousand fake Chinese characters. Despite their uncanny resemblance to actual Chinese, the graphs that formed the Book from the Sky resist all attempts to be read, offering the viewer no knowable sound (yin), meaning (yi), or shape (xing).19
This triad—yin-yi-xing—is of very old provenance in China, and many would say constitutes the three fundamental dimensions through which to define and understand Chinese writing in all its structural, stylistic, phonemic, and heuristic qualities. For the paleographer and the calligrapher, the most significant part of this triad is the xing or shape, the axis along which it becomes possible to engage with different historical forms of the Chinese character—such as seal script of the first millennium BCE, or clerical script of the Qin and Han dynasties—or with different calligraphic styles, such as “running script” or “grass script.” For the poet and the philologist, by contrast, it is perhaps the yin or sound that stands paramount, being the ontological axis along which one can think about and engage with archaic pronunciations of Chinese words, or craft passages of great lyrical elegance. For the journalist and essayist, meanwhile, yi or meaning is at the core of one’s concern, being the axis along which it becomes possible to find le mot juste or perhaps invent “new terms for new ideas.”20 These axes coexist and cooperate, no doubt: the poet cares for the yi and xing as well; and the essayist concerns herself arguably as much with yin as with yi. Important for us is not to distinguish these three axes, but
to note that—in popular conceptions—they seem to exhaust all of the myriad possible understandings of what Chinese writing is, and thus can be.
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky explodes this idea. Exiting the three-dimensional, yin-yi-xing universe altogether, Xu carves a moat of infinite depth between his faux Chinese graphs and anyone—be they poet, essayist, calligrapher, philologist, or mere reader—who would seek to commune with them by means of sound, meaning, or shape. Fundamentally, they should not be “Chinese” at all. Something is wrong, however. If Book from the Sky constitutes a total rupture of the yin-yi-xing triad, and if this triad constitutes the entirety of what makes Chinese Chinese, how then are we still able to recognize Book from the Sky as somehow unmistakably Chinese?
The answer is that the yin-yi-xing/sound-meaning-shape triad does not, in fact, exhaust the entirety of what makes the Chinese character. This three-dimensional space, while accounting for many of the aspects of Chinese script that have occupied our attention for the greater part of history, is nested within further dimensions of writing that are largely invisible, inaudible, and unconcerned with meaning. In this book, I will refer to these dimensions collectively as the technolinguistic.
To inaugurate our discussion of the technolinguistic realm, I draw inspiration from typographer and type historian Harry Carter, who once reminded a somnolent world of a basic fact:
Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand. Bibliographers mostly belong to a class of people for whom it is an abstraction: an unseen thing that leaves its mark on paper. For their convenience it has long been the practice to talk about a typeface, meaning, not the top surface of a piece of type, nor even of many pieces of assembled type, but the mark made by that surface inked and pressed into paper.21
The Chinese Typewriter Page 3
