The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  116 “Draft Charter of the Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturing Plant Joint Management Organization (Shanghai Zhongwen daziji zhizaochang lianyingsuo zuzhi zhangcheng cao’an) [上海中文打字機製造廠聯營所組織章程草案],” in “Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturing Joint Venture Marketing Plan (Shanghai Zhongwen daziji zhizaochang lianyingsuo chanxiao jihua) [上海中文打字機製造廠聯營所產銷計劃],” SMA S289-4-37 (December 1951); “A Large-Scale Public-Private Typewriter Store Newly Opened in Shanghai (Shanghai xin kai yi jia guimo juda de gongsi heying daziji dian) [上海新开一家規模巨大的公私打字机店],” Xinhuashe xinwen gao [新華社新聞稿] 2295 (1956).

  117 “Draft Charter of the Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturing Plant Joint Management Organization (Shanghai Zhongwen daziji zhizaochang lianyingsuo zuzhi zhangcheng cao’an) [上海中文打字機製造廠聯營所組織章程草案],” SMA S289-4-37 (December 1951).

  118 Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory (Shanghai jisuanji daziji chang) [上海計算機打字機廠], ed., “Evaluation Report on the Double Pigeon Brand DHY Model Chinese Typewriter (Shuangge pai DHY xing Zhongwen daziji jianding baogao) [双鸽牌DHY型中文打字机鉴定报告],” SMA B155-2-284 (April 24, 1964), 4; Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory (Shanghai jisuanji daziji chang) [上海計算機打字機廠], ed., “Double Pigeon Brand Chinese Typewriter Improvement and Trial Production Summary Report (Shuangge pai Zhongwen daziji gaijin shizhi jishu zongjie) [双鸽牌中文打字机改进试制技术总结],” SMA B155-2-282 (March 22, 1964), 11–14; Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory (Shanghai jisuanji daziji chang) [上海計算機打字機廠], ed., “Double Pigeon Brand Chinese Typewriter Internal Evaluation Report (Shuangge pai Zhongwen daziji chang nei jianding baogao) [双鸽牌中文打字机厂内鉴定报告],” SMA B155-2-282 (March 22, 1964), 9–10.

  119 Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory (Shanghai jisuanji daziji chang) [上海計算機打字機廠], ed., “Evaluation Report on the Double Pigeon Brand DHY Model Chinese Typewriter (Shuangge pai DHY xing Zhongwen daziji jianding baogao) [双鸽牌DHY型中文打字机鉴定报告],” SMA B155-2-284 (April 24, 1964), 4.

  120 Ibid.

  121 Ibid., 1.

  6

  QWERTY Is Dead! Long Live QWERTY!

  Lin Yutang Invents Chinese Typewriter: Will Do in an Hour What Now Takes a Day

  —New York Herald Tribune, August 22, 1947

  Even though it cost 120,000 US dollars, even though it has saddled us with a lifetime of debt, this creation of my father that he had worked his entire life on, this newborn baby birthed with such difficulty, it was worth it.

  —Lin Taiyi, daughter of Lin Yutang

  I think this is it.

  —Zhao Yuanren on the MingKwai Chinese typewriter, 1948

  The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is a temple to technophilia. Twenty exhibit halls and a world-class collection of artifacts chart the history of calculators, punched cards, programming, memory, graphics, and the web, among many other domains of computing. Prominently featured is the UNIVAC I, the Cray-2 supercomputer, and, perhaps most exquisite of all, Difference Engine No. 2—a faithful construction of the unrealized masterpiece by Charles Babbage.

  After moving through the first five centuries of the collection, one reaches the Input/Output exhibit hall. It is a cabinet of curiosities in the form of a wearable keyboard “glove,” early and now forgotten prototypes of the mouse, and dozens of other fantastical objects. One revealing bit of signage in the Input/Output hall is so modest that it almost escapes notice. It reads:

  Keyboards: With so many new elements to create, computer designers were happy not to re-invent text-based input and output. They used existing teletypes and automatic typewriters—including the established QWERTY keyboard.

  One can hear a sigh of relief in this explanation, a rare moment of repose in a narrative of computing history that otherwise prides itself on “disruption” and unbroken unrest—an industry that has profited precisely because it does not leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, within this wider, agitated history, at least the QWERTY keyboard did not need to be revisited—thank heaven.

  For the historian of China, this sign captures a fundamental divergence between the history of IT as it is presented in Silicon Valley and the history of IT examined in this book. In the Valley, the question of text input and output is treated as relatively straightforward—perhaps even uninteresting—particularly when juxtaposed against “hard” questions like stored-program computing, magnetic core memory, network protocols, and more. Imagine for a moment, however, what a museum of Chinese information technology might look like. Much of it would be identical, of course, paying necessary homage to the shared genealogy and common heritage of early calculation, magnetic tape, Ethernet cables, and the like. And, as in Mountain View, there would certainly be an abacus. The Input/Output exhibit, however, would need to change drastically. Unlike the designers of computer systems in the West, who may have been “happy not to re-invent text-based input and output,” those working in the allied fields of Chinese information technology have had no choice but to regard input and output as among their most sophisticated challenges. No history of Chinese information technology would be possible without dedicating ample space and attention to a question for which no sigh of relief or well-earned complacency is available. In China, the question of text input and output would need to take center stage.

  For many readers it will be surprising to learn that computers in China look exactly the same as those in the United States, right down to the QWERTY keyboard. Were you to seat yourself at a café in Beijing, Shanghai, or Chengdu, the entrepreneurial millennials you would undoubtedly encounter would be hard at work on QWERTY devices. The QWERTY keyboard in China is not what it seems, however.

  In the alphabetic world, QWERTY keyboards are used within a what-you-type-is-what-you-get framework. When striking the keys marked T-Y-P-E-W-R-I-T-E-R, one expects these same symbols to appear on the screen. In most other language contexts, the same holds true: to depress a key marked “щ” or “א,” and to have this same symbol then appear on the screen, is the unspoken assumption of computing in most of the world. By virtue of China’s position within the global history of modern information technology, however—the position we have been charting out in this study—QWERTY is not and cannot be used in this what-you-type-is-what-you-get way. Instead, the QWERTY keyboard is used in China in the context of “input,” or shuru, a form of human-machine interaction that has been fundamental to both Chinese computing and word processing from the 1950s onward. In contrast to “typing” in the rest of the world, where users assume this one-to-one correspondence between the symbols-upon-the-keys and the symbols-upon-the-screen, Chinese “input” assumes no such identity. If this sounds surprising, we would do well to remember that the keys upon which the symbols “Q,” “W,” “E,” “R,” “T,” and “Y” appear are simply actuators—they are switches not unlike those we use to ring doorbells or turn on light fixtures. That the closing of these particular switches should, in most of the world, result in the near-instantaneous appearance of these same symbols on one’s screen is the result of a complex cascade of mediations that none but a very few could readily explain. Indeed, batteries of highly trained and well-paid engineers and designers have done their best to hide this process, to cloak this mediation so that it takes place “behind the blip,” to invoke Matthew Fuller’s concept.1

  In Chinese computing, to close the switch marked “Q” might invoke the corresponding Latin letter under certain conditions, but more likely it will be used to provide an instruction or criterion to a piece of software known as an “input method editor” (IME). IMEs operate in the background on every computer in China, intercepting the user’s QWERTY keystrokes and, on the basis of these instructions, presenting a menu of Chinese character candidates on the computer screen from which the user can choose. No matter if one is composi
ng a document in Microsoft Word, surfing the web, or otherwise, he or she is constantly engaged in this iterative process of criteria, candidacy, and confirmation. The fundamentally mediated nature of text input is thus never concealed in Chinese computing. At all times, mediation remains explicit, visible, and available to the conscious mind—before the blip. The “code consciousness” we first encountered in the context of Chinese telegraphy is alive and well.

  To help pin down how input works, let us consider how one would use the QWERTY keyboard to produce a simple three-character sequence using one of China’s leading IMEs, the Sougou pinyin input method: 打字机 (daziji/“typewriter”) (figure 6.1).

  6.1 Entering “typewriter” (daziji 打字机) using Sougou Chinese input

  Since the Sougou system relies upon phonetic pinyin input, the first key we would strike is “D”: the first letter in the phonetic value of the first character, da. As soon as the input system intercepts this very first letter, a pop-up window appears on the screen, and the system sets into motion. Searching through its database of characters, it offers up Chinese characters whose phonetic value begins with “D,” ranked in order of frequency. First in line is the possessive particle de (的), one of the most common characters in the entire Chinese language. The second option in the pop-up menu is dou (都), meaning “all” or “every”—another highly common term. In the third position is the character we want: da (打), meaning “to strike” or “to hit.” At this point, if we wish, we do not need to enter the second letter “A,” and instead can select our first desired character by depressing the number key “3” (indicating that we want the third candidate in the pop-up menu of suggestions). With the depression of just two keys, then, we have the first of our three characters.

  This is not always the case, of course. Were we searching for a less common term than da (打), perhaps the homophonic character da (沓), meaning “repeatedly,” it might be necessary to complete the phonetic spelling of our desired term, in this case by entering the second letter “A.” As soon as the IME intercepts this second letter, the menu of candidates begins to fluctuate again, the IME reshuffling its suggestions and limiting them now to those characters whose pronunciation begins with “da,” again ranked in terms of frequency, and from which we would then locate and select our intended graph. This is the nature of input: a recursive and dynamically changing process in which the IME offers up a fluctuating and ever more refined list of potential Chinese characters until the user finds the ones he or she wants.

  Upon entering the third letter in our sequence—the letter “Z,” which forms the initial phonetic value of our second character zi (字), meaning “character”—the input process becomes even more sophisticated. No longer seeking out standalone characters in isolation, now the IME begins to search for multiple-character sequences and compound words. Upon depressing “Z,” the input system reloads its pop-up menu with a set of the highest frequency two-character compounds whose first character has the phonetic value of da, and whose second character begins with the phonetic value of “Z.” Atop this list are the first two characters we want: dazi (打字), meaning “to type.” (Other options in the menu include dazhong (大众), meaning “the masses,” and dazhe (打折), meaning “discount.”) To complete the input process, one need only continue these steps with our third and final character ji (机), meaning “machine.”

  As indicated above, the complete phonetic spelling of one’s desired Chinese characters is only one of the many possible ways to input—and the longest and slowest way at that. Alongside d-a-z-i-j-i-1, there are at least a half dozen other ways to enter this three-character sequence within Sougou input, each one employing different input techniques, and yet all resulting in the same screen output.

  d a z i # j #

  d a z i j #

  d a z # j #

  d a z j #

  d z j i #

  d z i j #

  d z j #

  For the shortest of these—d z j #—this means that a four-stroke QWERTY keyboard sequence is capable of producing a Chinese term that, when translated into English, requires a total of ten: t-y-p-e-w-r-i-t-e-r. Something has clearly changed.

  Sougou pinyin is only one of many Chinese IMEs on the market, moreover. Google offers its own IME, as do Apple and QQ. There are also IMEs that are not based on pinyin or phonetic input at all, but instead let operators use the letters of the QWERTY keyboard to represent structural properties of the desired character, such as the radicals or stroke forms out of which a given character is composed.2 Thus, while the “H” key on one’s QWERTY keyboard signifies the eponymous consonantal value, it can also be used to refer to the “tree-radical” (木) when used with structure-based IMEs. Instead of producing a menu of characters that begin with the value “H,” then, such a technique would instead result in a menu of characters containing this particular radical. Such input systems are particularly popular among older Chinese dialect speakers who, while fluent in Cantonese or Fujianese, might not be proficient in the standard Chinese pronunciations upon which pinyin input is premised. To enter this same three-character passage for “typewriter” using Cangjie input, for example, the input keylog would read qmnjnddhn, each of these letters describing a specific graphic feature of the three desired characters—not their pronunciations.

  With five commonly used Chinese input method editors, and literally hundreds if not thousands of experimental IMEs developed by independent designers, there exist dozens if not hundreds of different ways for Chinese computer users to input just this one simple three-character sequence. Were we to imagine longer Chinese-language passages, extending into the hundreds and thousands of characters, the number of potential input sequences would quickly become staggeringly large.

  By this point, readers will no doubt have noticed a conspicuous absence in the foregoing narrative: Where has the Chinese typewriter gone? Is this perhaps the moment in our history when we at last abandon this hopeless device and turn our attention to the true mechanical savior of the Chinese script in the modern period—the deus ex machina that is the personal computer, which, as many have assumed, rescued Chinese characters from the “abyss” separating alphabetic and nonalphabetic script? In fact, the story of this chapter is precisely the opposite: The birth of input—this revolutionary new mode of human-computer interaction upon which modern-day China has laid the foundations of the world’s largest IT market and a vibrant social media environment—had nothing to do with computing at all. The first input system in history was, in fact, an experimental Chinese typewriter debuted to the world in the 1940s—the first Chinese typewriter in history to boast a keyboard.

  The Uncanny Keyboard

  “We learn with mingled emotions—transcending dismay and yet appreciably milder than despair—that Dr. Lin Yutang, our favorite oriental author … has invented a Chinese typewriter.”3 So began a 1945 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune that revealed to an American reading public the quixotic new pursuit of a celebrated cultural commentator, and beloved author of the bestselling titles My Country and My People (1935) and The Importance of Living (1937). So allergic were they to this startling news, the authors explained, that at first they simply did not believe it. The news would have been “incredible,” they stressed, if it had not come directly from Lin’s publisher. “Seeking additional enlightenment,” the reporters continued, “we consulted our laundryman, Ho Sin Liu.”

  “Tell us, Ho, about how big would a Chinese typewriter need to be to cover the whole range of your delightful tongue?”

  “Ho, ho!” Ho replied, wittily punning his name into an English exclamation point. … How indeed shall I answer such an interrogation unless with another? Have you seen the Boulder dam?”4

  Lin Yutang was born in 1895 in Fujian province, the same year that Taiwan was lost to Japan following the humiliation of the first Sino-Japanese War. Raised in a Christian household, Lin entered St. John’s University in Shanghai in 1911, the year a republican revolution del
ivered the death blow to an already weakened Qing dynasty. His educational career was marked by distinction, continuing at Tsinghua University from 1916 to 1919, and then Harvard in 1919 and 1920. By forty years of age, Lin was a celebrated author in the United States and beyond, becoming one of the most influential cultural commentators on China of his generation.

  Years before his breakout English-language debut, Lin Yutang began to contemplate a question that, as we have seen now on more than one occasion, exerted a magnetic pull on the minds of many: the question of how to develop a typewriter for the Chinese language that could achieve the scope and reputation of its Western counterpart. With these inspirations, Lin set off down a path that many years later would lead to perhaps the most well-known, but also most poorly understood, Chinese typewriter in history: the “MingKwai” or “Clear and Fast” Chinese typewriter, announced to the world starting in the mid-1940s.

  When MingKwai made its first appearance, the writer at the Chicago Daily Tribune and his “laundryman” would be proven wrong: MingKwai was considerably smaller than the Boulder Dam. In fact, it looked uncannily like a “real typewriter.” Measuring fourteen inches wide, eighteen inches deep, and nine inches high, the machine was only slightly larger than common Western typewriter models of the day.5 More notably, MingKwai was the first Chinese typewriter to possess the sine qua non of typewriting, a keyboard. Finally, it would seem, the Chinese language had joined the rest of the world by creating a typewriter just like ours.