The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  Commercial Press may have lost interest in Zhou Houkun, but not in the cause of Chinese typewriting. The company launched a Chinese typewriting class in 1918, further demonstrating its commitment to the new technology.11 After Zhou’s departure, more importantly, the company continued its pursuit under the guidance of another engineer: Shu Changyu, who would come to be known by his pen name, Shu Zhendong. Having studied steam-powered machines, and made forays at both the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg (MAN) factory in Germany and the Hanyang factory in China, Shu joined the company circa 1919, receiving his first Chinese typewriter patent in the same year.12

  One of the first steps Shu took was to abandon the Chinese character cylinder in Zhou’s original design. Shu replaced it with a flat, rectangular bed within which character slugs would sit loosely and interchangeably. With this change, the common usage machine would still be outfitted with the same number of characters as before, but now typists would be able to customize their machines to fit different terminological demands—as had been possible on Sheffield’s first prototype decades earlier. As free-floating metal slugs, characters could be removed and replaced using nothing more complicated than a pair of tweezers.

  Following this important change in design, Commercial Press’s hesitation evaporated. The company dedicated a substantial financial investment to its new Chinese typewriter division, which occupied a reported forty rooms. Employing more than three hundred workers, and entailing some two hundred pieces of equipment, the process of building the new machine was divided among a variety of roles: melting lead to be used for character slugs, casting the character slugs, error-checking the tray bed character table, fitting the machine chassis, setting character slugs in their designated locations on the tray bed, and more (figure 4.2).13 If Bi Sheng had invented movable type nearly one millennium earlier, Shu Zhendong and Commercial Press now set out to manufacture a movable typewriter (figure 4.3).14

  4.2 Roles and tasks in Commercial Press typewriter manufacturing plant

  4.3 Commercial Press typewriter manufacturing plant

  Marketing the Machine at Home: Commercial Press and the Formation of a New Industry

  China’s first-ever animated film was entitled “The Shu Zhendong Chinese Typewriter,” and it was an advertisement for the new Commercial Press machine—the first mass-produced Chinese typewriter in history.15 Released in the 1920s, the film was produced by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming, foundational figures in the early history of Chinese animation.16 The film is no longer extant, unfortunately, and yet a plethora of promotional materials from the era help us speculate as to its content. “It is said that the fastest speed is 2,000-plus characters per hour,” one article in 1927 read, “or three times faster than writing by hand.”17 Claims such as these focused on three merits of the machine in particular. First, it saved time as compared to composing a manuscript. Second, it produced more legible characters than did writing by hand. Finally, and most importantly, it could be used in concert with carbon-infused paper to produce multiple copies of a single document.

  Song Mingde, Commercial Press employee and one-time head of the company’s Chinese typewriter division, placed particular emphasis on the machine’s function within textual reproduction, situating the device within the longue durée narrative of Chinese writing. In the time of Cang Jie, Song explained, paying homage to the apocryphal inventor of Chinese characters, Chinese writing had been limited to strictly ideographic forms carved upon the surface of bamboo. With the invention of the brush and paper, Song continued, this rendered it possible to “copy and record by hand” (yong shou chaolu). “Compared to bamboo, this was already ten thousand times more convenient.” From here, Song leapt over a large expanse of history to praise the third central invention within his abbreviated history, the printing machine (yinshuaji). With the advent of printing technology, he explained, the reproduction of many tens of thousands of copies was now well within reach.18

  This leap from manuscript to mass reproduction had left behind a vast gap, however. Printing press equipment was expensive, Song emphasized, and required extensive preparation before usage, justifiable only in cases when large quantities of material were required. Still unresolved was the problem of smaller-scale, day-to-day textual reproduction of the sort required by modern businesses, whether in the form of short-run reports, office memos, or legal record-keeping. In cases when only 10 or even 100 copies were called for, the printing press was hardly an option. But neither were handwritten documents an attractive alternative, Song argued, since they “took time” (feishi) and were “irregular” (bu zhengqi).

  Commercial Press thus advanced its typewriter as part competitor, part complement to both the human hand and the printing press.19 Early signs of commercial interest were encouraging, moreover. In his diary entry from April 16, 1920, Zhang Yuanji made note of a potential order from the Chinese postal division for one hundred machines.20 By 1925, Chinese consulates as far away as Canada were reported to have purchased a typewriter for their affairs.21 In 1926, Huadong Machinery Factory listed the Chinese typewriter as one of its best-selling and most widely known products.22 Commercial Press sold upward of two thousand units between 1917 and 1934, for an average of roughly one hundred per year. Commercial Press, in turn, attempted to raise awareness of the machine, not only by creating its pioneering animated film, but also by providing extensive demonstrations. In November 1921, Tang Chongli of Commercial Press included the Shu Zhendong machine as part of a demonstration of new technology and machinery by the Department of Forestry and Agriculture.23 On May 3, 1924, Song Mingde was scheduled to depart on a six-month voyage to present-day Southeast Asia. During his travels, he would promote the Shu-style Chinese typewriter to overseas Chinese merchants in Luzon, Singapore, Java, Saigon, Sumatra, Siam, and Malacca.24

  The national or civilizational significance of the Chinese typewriter was also a common selling point, both for promoters of the machine and for the inventors themselves. In the journal Tongji, Shu Zhendong reflected upon his pathway to Commercial Press and his development of the Chinese typewriter, lamenting as well that fewer and fewer Chinese compatriots “place importance on writing” (zhongshi wenzi).25 “A country’s writing is a country’s pulse,” Shu protested. “If the pulse dies out, what once was a country is no longer a country.”26 As for those who urged the abolishment of Chinese characters on account of the technological challenges of typewriting, he likened this to “refusing food for fear of choking.”27 For Shu Zhendong himself, as for his predecessor Zhou, the Commercial Press Chinese typewriter served as a tangible refutation of the idea that Chinese writing was incompatible with the demands of the modern technological age.

  The Missing “Typewriter Boy”: The Ambivalent Gender of the Chinese Secretary

  When the first Chinese typewriter rolled off of the Commercial Press factory floor, a fully formed Chinese typewriting industry did not miraculously spring into existence. The formation of a new industry would depend in equal measure upon the development of an entirely new clerical labor force: a battery of trained “Chinese typists” (daziyuan) to take up posts and put the machine to use in government, education, finance, and the private sector. In short, the development of Chinese typewriting required students of the Chinese typewriter—individuals whose bodies and minds would need to be trained to meet the requirements of this new machine, and to exploit its capacities.

  Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, a constellation of privately owned, one- and two-room typing institutes were established to meet this requirement, and to make money in the process. In Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, and other metropolitan areas, students received training in the new technology, typically over the course of terms lasting between one and three months, at the cost of fifteen yuan or less. Eager to secure employment as the first wave of human capital in this new clerical profession, these students would also play an important promotional role for Commercial Press itself—and eventually, as new entrepreneurs entered t
he market to compete with Commercial Press, for its competitors as well (a subject we will turn to later). By opening schools that specialized in a particular make or model of Chinese typewriter, and then securing employment for graduates, a manufacturer could begin to make inroads for his machine in the private, educational, and government sectors.28

  When thinking about the history of typewriting from the context of the United States, where the profession was steadily and rapidly gendered as women’s work, one might be tempted to assume that Chinese typing steadily feminized as well. Perusing Chinese newspapers and magazines from the era, moreover, one would indeed have encountered a new figure in the Chinese periodical press that might reinforce this assumption: the “typewriter girl” (dazinü or nüdaziyuan). Typically in their teens and early twenties, these young women were featured alongside other “modern girls” of the era, encompassing painters, dancers, athletes, violinists, and scientists. They formed part of the still little-understood world of Republican-era professional women, entering not the blue-collar worlds of textile manufacturing, match factories, flour mills, and carpet weaving, but the white-collar worlds of administration and office work.29 Whether framed en plein air, as in a group photograph of Chinese typists in Beihai Park, or poised before their machines in traditional dress and finely parted hair, such representations in many ways accord with what one might expect at a moment in global history when clerical work was undergoing a process of feminization worldwide—the “typewriter girl” was, as has been argued, an “American export” (figure 4.4).30

  4.4 Photograph of female Chinese typist, 1928; Eastern Times photo supplement (Tuhua shibao) [圖畫時報] 517 (December 2, 1928): cover

  When we look beyond representations of Chinese typists in the periodical press, however, the archival records of these same Chinese typing institutes from the period reveal a strikingly different history. In data compiled on just over one thousand typing students enrolled in a variety of institutes between 1932 and 1948, more than 300 (or 30 percent) were, in fact, young men—far greater than found elsewhere in the world at this time.31 In other words, whereas mass media representations of Chinese typewriting suggested a profession that mimicked the prevailing gender norms of typewriting globally, the actual practice of Chinese typewriting did not. Typing in China remained a mixed labor pool throughout the period, with women constituting a larger, but by no means exclusive, share of the labor force. Young men, predominantly teenage and lower- or middle-school-educated like their female counterparts, entered these schools as well and sought training in the new technology. They graduated from typing institutes in sizable numbers. They served as typists. In certain cases, they went on to found typing schools of their own.32 One such example is Li Zuhui, a young man hailing from Wujin in Jiangsu province who himself was a graduate of the Chinese-American Typing Institute (Hua Mei dazi zhuanxiao). Li later went on to direct the Mr. Hui’s Chinese-English Typing Institute (Hui shi Hua-Ying wen dazi zhuanxiao)—a program founded circa 1930 in the Shanghai International Settlement with the stated aim of supplying “typing talent” (dazi rencai) to the Shanghai business community. In between, he served as a typist at the Zhili Province Bureau of Negotiations and the Tianjin Customs House.

  To gain a better sense of the typing profession in its early formation, we must begin by looking at the schools where young people received training on this new device and from where they entered this new profession. At one end of the spectrum were small-scale training operations, such as the “Victory and Success Typing Academy” in Shanghai.33 Founded in May 1915 and originally focused on English typewriting, the two-room tutoring company eventually expanded into Chinese typewriting with the purchase of two machines. Circa 1933, the school enrolled six students in its English-language typing class and eight students in its Chinese typing class. At the other end of the spectrum, larger typing institutions were also in operation, such as the Shanghai-based Huanqiu Typing Academy with its hundreds of students. Founded in the fall of 1923, and originally focused exclusively on English-language typewriting as well, the institute expanded into Chinese typewriting during the fall of 1936, offering training on the Shu-style machine manufactured by Commercial Press.34 Founder Xia Liang, once an employee of the Standard Oil Company in Shanghai, developed his institute around a team of experienced professionals. The principal of the school, Chen Songling, was a graduate of the Shanghai-based Nanyang University, as well as a former employee of the Shanghai Customs House in legal translation. Working under Chen Songling were four tutors: Chen Jie, a graduate of Shengfangji Middle School in Shanghai, and a former employee of Standard Oil as well; Xia Guochang, a graduate of the Shanghai Business English Academy and a former employee of the Shanghai Telephone Company; Xia Guoxiang, formerly an employee of Robert Dollar and Company (Dalai yanghang); and Wang Rongfu, a graduate of the Shengfangji Middle School.

  This overlapping network of pedagogical, entrepreneurial, and technological centers and practices combined to expand the network of the Chinese typewriter and Chinese typists into companies, schools, and government offices across the country. Schools placed their graduates in metropolitan and provincial governments throughout China, including the Nanjing Inspectorate, the Fujian Provincial Government, and the Sichuan Provincial Government; and major Chinese corporations such as the Chinese Soap Company, Macao China Bank, and the Zhejiang Xingye Bank.35 Graduates of the program also went on to teach Chinese typing in elementary schools. The Henan Provincial Government directed every department to dispatch secretaries to enroll in two-month courses in Chinese typewriting, for example, after which they would return to their original positions.36 Such training would make people better at their jobs, authorities argued, and would “contribute to emerging enterprise in China” (xinxing gongye).37

  If the gender makeup of Chinese typewriting was a complex affair, and one that diverged sharply from its highly feminized counterparts in the United States and Europe, nothing within the contemporary Chinese periodical press would have suggested it. Whether in photographic spreads or news reports, male Chinese typists were conspicuously absent, with the new industry of Chinese typewriting presented as one dominated by young, often attractive female students and clerks.38 In 1931, the journal Shibao featured a photograph of the young female student Ye Shuyi as she practiced diligently at her Chinese machine.39 In a 1936 spread in Liangyou, a young female typist—in this case using an English-language typewriter—was featured alongside photographs of other “new women” (xin nüxing): women aviators, radio announcers, telephone operators, and beauty parlor owners.40 In a 1940 spread in Zhanwang, young women were shown at work on Chinese typewriters, accompanied by the caption “Type-writing is a congenial occupation for women.”41 Placing the Chinese typewriter girl in her broader context, the same spread included other “congenial” occupations such as nurse and flower seller. To emphasize the modern condition of Chinese women, though, the professions of lawyer and police officer were included in the mix as well. At all times, though, femininity and motherhood were honored, as stressed by another photograph and caption: “Mother teaching her child how to be a good girl.”

  Male typing students sometimes did show up in photographic representations of Chinese typing, but in such cases their presence was subtly written out of the story by means of the contexts in which such photographs appeared, and the captions that accompanied such visuals. In 1930, for example, Shibao featured a portrait of eight young typing school graduates—six women and two men—with the caption “Graduates of Hwa-yin Type-writing School, Peiping.” While appearing gender-neutral at first, with the photograph including both men and women, and making no mention of the “typewriter girl,” nevertheless the surrounding photographs on the same page reveal the editor’s understanding of the typing profession as one with a distinctly feminized valence: “Modern Drill by Girl Students at Tsinghua University,” “Morning Drill by Girl Students at Nan-Kai University,” as well as photographs of three young female athletes.42 Still o
ther images were starker in their erasure of male typing students, as in a photographic spread from Great Asia Pictorial, also in 1930. In this photograph, twenty-two Chinese typing students were shown—fifteen women and seven men—and yet the caption read: “Photograph of First Entering Class of Female Students at the Liaoning Chinese Typing Institute.”43

  An important tension emerged, then, between the lived experience of Chinese typewriting and the images that these schools and Chinese media outlets chose to represent it. What accounts for this discrepancy? Here we must once again return to the global context within which Chinese typewriting was taking shape and was at all times nested. At the very moment China began to form its own typing industry, there already existed such a thing as a “typewriter girl,” a robust trope that had found expression globally in a wide variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts. By contrast, nowhere on earth did there exist the trope of the “typewriter boy,” in the sense of a comparably powerful discursive or representational formulation that captured this reality in the form of stereotype. In the United States, the displacement of male typists and stenographers was part of the history of industrial mechanization, a history in which routinized forms of work were increasingly delegated to young women starting at the end of the nineteenth century.44 Similarly, typewriter manufacturers worldwide had by this point long encouraged this trend toward feminization, targeting women both as potential consumers and as vehicles for the popularization of their new machines. The Remington Company went so far as to encourage consumers to purchase machines and donate them to women as a kind of charity. “No invention,” the company’s advertisement boldly proclaimed in 1875, “has opened for women so broad and easy an avenue to profitable and suitable employment.”45 Companies also employed young female typists during sales calls. In 1875, for example, Mark Twain purchased his first typewriter from a salesman who employed a “type girl” to demonstrate the apparatus.46