The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  The military campaign drew to a close in 1927, and had by its conclusion dramatically reconfigured the political landscape of China. In April 1927, the Chinese Communists—erstwhile partners of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, as part of the United Front alliance—became subject to Chiang’s violent and enduring purge, known as the White Terror. The Nationalists established a new regime centered in Nanjing, seeking to transform its capital city into a gleaming beacon of rational, modern, scientific government and statehood, undertaking an immense urban development campaign. For his own part, Chen Lifu set about extending his retrieval system from military to broader state and civilian applications: to render searchable everything from schools to prisons, political parties to the country’s taxation and communications infrastructures. Chen was better positioned than most in the “character retrieval problem” debates, drawing upon his professional and political connections to pilot his retrieval program in the Command Headquarters Confidential Work Section official correspondence archives, the Nanjing Household Registration Survey, the Guomindang Central Executive Committee, and the Membership Unit of the Organization Department, among others.22 Five-Stroke retrieval enabled one to “search for one person out of 100,000” (shiwan ren zhong qiu yi ren), Chen boasted, whether in the context of household registration statistics, party member name lists, addresses and statistics regarding postal and telephone offices, name lists within schools and factories, the management of state archives, the organization of tax registers and receipts, land registration, prison inmate registers, or documents connected to the examination and evaluation of political and military personnel.

  Chen also saw his retrieval method as a way to manage a modern capitalist economy. The diversification of consumer preferences, coupled with industrialized production, had already flooded the Chinese market with more commodities than current systems of information retrieval could handle, Chen argued. In large department stores and wholesale operations, he noted, commodity varieties could extend into the tens of millions.23 The same was true of the accelerated tempo of consumer transactions in China’s growing banking sector, Chen noted, with each transaction producing a record that the bank or client might need to access and review at a later date. If Chinese characters were to remain the semiotic substrate of the modern Chinese state and economy, a new character retrieval and organization system would be absolutely necessary. Some offices experimented with hybrid Chinese character/Latin alphabet systems—such as organizing Chinese characters alphabetically according to their phonetic values—but Chen Lifu considered this disgraceful. “To use Chinese characters, but to seek help from Western writing,” he wrote, “is truly a great dishonor to the Chinese nation.”24 Using Wubi, one could maintain Chinese characters while at the same time operating a surveillance state capable of handling hundreds of thousands of party member dossiers, nationwide census statistics, and household registration files.

  Chen saw himself as much more than the designer of a new information architecture for the modern Chinese state, though. Although his treatises on retrieval seem at first glance to be fixated on decidedly banal problems, his ambitions for Wubi extended to nothing less than the metaphysics of Chinese writing. Chen self-identified as a participant in a historical conversation with some rather impressive interlocutors—most notably, the renowned Jin dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361), whose theory of the “eight fundamental strokes of the character yong” we have encountered more than once in our study (figure 6.3).

  6.3 Eight fundamental strokes of the character yong (eternity)

  Chen drew inspiration from Wang’s calligraphic theory, and sought to transplant it to the world of taxonomy. If all characters could be said to have a highly limited number of fundamental strokes, then it stood to reason that one could transcend the radical-stroke system of the Kangxi Dictionary and its 214 categorical divisions. One needed no longer traffic in radicals at all, but could transfer one’s energy to the much more economical world of strokes.

  Sage of calligraphy though Wang Xizhi may have been, this Jin dynasty “predecessor” had failed to realize something, Chen Lifu argued. There existed something prior to the “stroke” itself, out of which all strokes were formed: the point or dian. All strokes, no matter their curvature, thickness, or direction, began their existence at the very moment when instrument first made contact with medium—when brush first made contact with paper. Every stroke, as Chen phrased it, “must begin as a point before becoming a stroke” (bi shi yu dian er cheng hua). Wang Xizhi had fallen victim to a basic misconception, so subtle that it escaped not only his attention, Chen argued, but indeed that of countless others down through the generations. The stroke was not the fundamental element of Chinese characters. Chen Lifu saw himself not merely as facilitating the interception of coded telegraphic transmissions, then, or creating more efficient telephone books, but as having righted the wrongs of the ancients. It was as if Chen had returned to the time before Wang Xizhi—before Wang had begun to cut his errant pathway—to rediscover the lost way or dao of Chinese writing, and renew its long-deferred exploration. Wang Xizhi had quite literally missed the point.25

  Although seemingly a minor qualification—this focus on the point (dian) rather than the stroke (bihua)—this notion would have a profound impact on Chen Lifu’s understanding of Chinese. What we know as strokes—in all their varieties—achieved their quality depending upon what followed the moment of origination: the direction the brush moved, and the quality of this movement. Having failed to grasp this essential truth of Chinese writing, Wang Xizhi had missed the mark by three strokes. There were not eight, but five essential transformations of the original dian, Chen claimed, all others being mere variations or combinations of these five: the dian could remain a dian; it could venture out laterally to become a horizontal stroke; it could advance downward to become a vertical stroke; it could move at a diagonal, in which direction did not matter; or it could move and bend, the direction of this bend being for Chen Lifu an insignificant distinction (figure 6.4).

  6.4 Chen Lifu’s outline of the relationship between the point and strokes

  If we look laterally, at Chen Lifu’s contemporaries, a wide field of practitioners is found engaging in comparable pursuits. Indeed, one of the prerequisites of being the kind of person who would dedicate years of effort to the invention of an experimental Chinese character retrieval system was, it appeared, to be the kind of person who regarded himself as possessing astonishing, unprecedented insight into the essence of Chinese writing. Participants in the “character retrieval problem” saw themselves as linguistic argonauts, venturing out into a vast and unknown terrain to uncover still elusive fundamental truths that even the greatest minds of Chinese antiquity had failed to grasp. Beneath the banality and humility of such goals as improved filing cabinets, library shelves, and phone books resided a much deeper sense of historical purpose and self-importance. I am not merely inventing a new card catalog case—I am righting the wrongs of the ancients. I am not merely creating a new phone book—I am discovering the truth of the order of Chinese and thereby bringing Chinese writing into a state of parity with other world scripts, in which the question of fundamental order had long ago been settled.

  Looking for “Love” in All the Wrong Places: Du Dingyou and the Psychology of Search

  Distilling the orthographic essence of Chinese characters was not the only concern that motivated reformers in their attempts to create an ideal character retrieval system. The 1920s and 1930s were also the era of “the masses” and the “citizen,” a time when these concepts were swiftly becoming a central focus of political, economic, and social thought in China. Whether in the domains of popular education or literacy campaigns, the mobilization of the Chinese citizenry was deemed essential for the survival of the nation; it was the masses that formed the new locus of Chinese sovereignty. In this context, multiple reformers came to the conclusion that the key to solving China’s character retrieval problem required a
n ethnographic focus, not an orthographic one. While their systems and approaches varied greatly, a shared goal was the idea of developing a “transparent” system of organizing the Chinese language—that is, one that annihilated any and all ambiguity about how to find any given Chinese character, and thus could be readily used by “everyone,” with as little training as possible. For the historian of technology, then, one finds in such debates over the “Chinese everyman” one of the earliest discussions within the Chinese context of design, human-machine interactionism (HCI), user experience (UX) analysis, and related subjects.

  For a vivid example of the ethnographic claims that were central to the character retrieval crisis, we turn to another contemporary of Lin Yutang. Du Dingyou (1898–1967) was a pioneering figure in the history of modern Chinese library science. Born in Shanghai in 1898, Du undertook his undergraduate training at the University of the Philippines. Following the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, during which the collections of the Oriental Library (Dongfang tushuguan) suffered severe losses, Du was instrumental in the foundation of the Shanghai Municipal Library, of which he became vice director. He would later serve as director of the Zhongshan University library, among other posts.

  As part of his lifetime of service to library science, Du Dingyou was the developer of still another experimental Chinese retrieval system: the Shape-Position retrieval system (Hanzi xingwei jianzifa). In 1925, he published an article entitled “On the Psychology of How the Masses Search for Characters,” a lively and even humorous piece in which Du took aim at his competitors within the field of character retrieval. Du Dingyou regarded competing systems of character retrieval as failures on ethnographic grounds: a failure to “grasp the psychology of retrieval among the masses” (zhuaju minzhong jianzi de xinli).26 Divorced from the objectivity of mass psychology, Du’s competitors had yet to solve the problem of the Chinese script because they had yet to solve the problem of the Chinese masses.

  Du Dingyou wove his own modern-day parable starring an overworked mother and a young daughter looking for “love.” “One day,” the parable began, “a twelve-year-old girl suddenly asked her mother: ‘What is love?’” “How frightening,” Du inserted his editorial voice: “only twelve and already talking about love!” Thankfully for her mother, the “love” for which this young girl searched was neither the emotion nor the experience, but quite literally the word: the Chinese character lian (戀). “At that moment,” Du Dingyou continued, “her mother was in the middle of doing housework, and couldn’t leave her seat. So she explained that the character lian has the character for ‘language’ (言 yan) in the middle, flanked on each side by ‘silk’ (糹 si), with one ‘heart’ (心 xin) on the bottom.” Du was referring to a practice with which all of his readers would no doubt have been familiar: what Joseph Allen refers to as the Chinese “graphology” or “metalanguage.” In everyday practice, one can describe the structure of a character verbally by describing the components out of which it is formed. The Chinese surname Li (李), for example, might be referred to as “tree-child li” (mu zi li 木子李), so as to distinguish it from other characters with the same pronunciation.

  “As soon as she heard it,” Du’s parable continued, “she wrote it straightaway, without the slightest error. This is the essence of the structure of our writing, and a point which character retrieval researchers should pay close attention to.”27 Du took his allegorical critique one step closer to the cradle, suggesting that mass understandings of Chinese characters were “akin to when a baby recognizes his mother for the first time, that she is generally tall or short, fat or skinny.” He continued:

  That which he recognizes is his entire mother. Before he has become aware, when his faculties of discrimination are still immature, he still cannot recognize if this pair of eyes is his mother’s, or any other part of the body. But as for the overall concept of his mother, this he possesses. A character retrieval method … should pay close attention to the importance of the law of synaesthesia.28

  For Du, the average Chinese informational subject was a Gestalt pattern-finder: a mind for whom script was primordially meaningless and spatial. Highbrow questions of etymology had no place in a modern and mass-oriented character retrieval system, he felt, an ethnographic presupposition that manifested itself in the retrieval system he designed. Dispensing entirely with all etymological concerns, his system was premised on the contention that the best way to organize a writing system was, counterintuitively, to stop thinking of it as a writing system—that is, as a special class of object bound up with meaning. Instead, graphemes would be approached no differently than any other entity that occupied space (figure 6.5).

  6.5 “Shape-Position” retrieval system by Du Dingyou

  Moving through the corpus of Chinese characters, Du Dingyou isolated eight spatial archetypes: north–south/vertical (縱 zong); horizontal (橫 heng); oblique/diagonal (斜 xie); “carrying” (載 zai); “covering” (覆 fu); cornering/cornered (角 jiao); enclosed (方 fang); and whole/complete (整 zheng). To help potential users discern between these eight classes, he provided a handy eight-character phrase which, in deft entrepreneurial style, entailed his own name: Du Dingyou shu gongkai tushuguan shi (“The History of Public Libraries as Described by Du Dingyou”).29

  The groupings and classes of equivalence Du proposed in his system were unprecedented in Chinese history. Suddenly, the character 林 (lin, “forest”) shared something in common, taxonomically speaking, with a host of characters with which it had never before been associated—characters such as 動 (dong, “movement”) and 排 (pai, “to arrange”). These characters shared no radicals in common. They were neither composed of the same number of strokes nor did they share similar pronunciations. For Du, however, the salient property of lin was the side-by-sideness of its two component parts (木 mu)—that these components mu happened to signify “tree,” from which the character lin derived its meaning “forest,” concerned Du not in the slightest.

  Du Dingyou’s twelve-year-old girl and her harried mother would be difficult if not impossible to track down in the real world, however. They were not empirical subjects, decided upon through comparison and observation. They were the projections of Du’s imagination: the invented Chinese masses that were constantly invoked by the linguistic elite of twentieth-century language reform efforts. Were we to extend our analysis to the dozens of other experimental retrieval systems, and to the world of twentieth-century Chinese language reform more broadly, we would gain many more illustrations of this field of ethnographic contestation. Each character retrieval system had embedded within it a presupposed, informational subject—a holographic Chinese user on whose behalf each system would function, and more precisely, a set of assumptions upon which the system depended if its claims to transparency and effortlessness were to bear truth.

  Depending upon the system and inventor in question, this holographic homme moyen exhibited a distinct set of capacities, predilections, plasticities, and limitations. Du Dingyou’s holographic Chinese was unsystematic and messy, and could not be relied upon to follow instructions of any complexity. Other designers put forth a holographic Chinese everyman of more optimistic design: possessing a high capacity for abstraction, pliable, attentive to detail, and able to reconceptualize Chinese script in ways no one ever had before. Who the Chinese everyman actually was was a different matter entirely.

  From Search to Search-Writing

  In the autumn of 1931, just as northeast China was falling to invading Japanese forces, Lin Yutang authored a letter in which he shared privately the work he was doing in his latest and boldest venture: a Chinese typewriter of his own novel design.30 His continuing correspondence, extending into the late 1930s, would reveal his earliest thoughts on the subject. In the first of his letters, Lin Yutang made three assertions about the history and prospect of typewriting for the Chinese language:

  “No Chinese typewriter using a phonetic alphabet will ever have a real market.”

/>   “No Chinese typewriter can operate by a process of combination of strokes and dots.”

  “No Chinese typewriter can provide over 10,000 characters required in Chinese printing and correspondence.”31

  In three swift negations, Lin Yutang dismissed the entire history of Chinese typewriting that we have come to know, ruling out each of the three approaches that inventors had concentrated upon over the preceding half-century. With his first statement, Lin had refuted in one breath the entire model upon which Remington and others staked their hopes. With the second, he jettisoned divisible type, or combinatorial, approaches advanced by Qi Xuan and others. In his third pronouncement, his dissatisfaction with the limits of the common usage approach were made clear. Indeed, so damning were these statements by Lin that, at first glance, they seem indistinguishable from those of character abolitionists—a Qian Xuantong, perhaps, but not the would-be inventor of a Chinese typewriter. Nothing was left, it would seem, short of giving up or perhaps starting all over.32

  As we delve more deeply into Lin’s early thoughts on Chinese typewriting, however, we soon find that his goal was to integrate these three existing approaches, not to abandon them.33 More accurately still, Lin wished to merge these three approaches and, in the process, create an entirely new type of typewriter—and, indeed, an entirely new mode of inscription. “First, the solution lies in reducing the number of characters to be provided for,” he argued, in a clear invocation of the common usage approach to Chinese technolinguistic modernity. The machine he would set out to build would include a set of high-frequency Chinese characters, just like those machines we have examined thus far.