4 Takeaways on Chinese Writing Reforms
Updating the world's weirdest script for the modern era
How do you type something in Chinese? If you know, like most Westerners, that written Chinese depends on thousands of unique hanzi characters with their own unique sounds and meaning, the answer isn’t obvious. How do you input characters? How do you look up characters you don’t know how to pronounce, or how to write words that you can speak but don’t know the characters for? How do you organize libraries or indexes if there’s no alphabetical order among the tens of thousands of characters in existence? How do you come up with new characters, and how do you get people to agree on them? These questions are at the heart of two excellent books about how Chinese writing became modern: Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern, and David Moser’s A Billion Voices: China’s Search For a Common Language.
Summarizing China’s long, arduous quest to make the world’s oldest, weirdest living script fit into modernity’s alphabet world would be too long, but here are four takeaways, in no particular order, that struck me as I read.
Putonghua and the Language Police
If you’ve ever read anything on Chinese as a language, you probably know that the “dialects” of China are really more like languages in their own right, as different from each other as Romance languages are. Mandarin Chinese, the broad range of dialects spoken in the northern provinces and Beijing, is usually called the official language of China, which is true enough 99% of the time, though as Moser writes in A Billion Voices, the official language of The People’s Republic of China is actually a specific form of Mandarin called Putonghua, or common speech.
Putonghua and regular Beijing Mandarin are close, but not identical. Although 70% of all Chinese speak a Mandarin dialect as a first language, only 7% of Chinese citizens are completely fluent in Putonghua, while 30% don’t speak it at all. (The government is aiming for universal Putonghua proficiency by 2050.) As the official language of China, Putonghua is closely regulated, with state-issued dictionaries and usage guides to help the teachers, government workers, and media professionals who are legally bound to use the language.
A weird side effect of this law is that China has actual, literal language police, a kind of souped-up FCC that issues fines not only for profanity, but for simply using Putonghua incorrectly. Mess up a word in your TV broadcast, as reporters often do, and you’ll lose a hefty chunk of your paycheck. Moser identifies two exceptions to Putonghua’s iron grip: ethnic minorities and larger non-Mandarin media markets, but only if they remain politically loyal; and the speeches of Mao, a notoriously bad Putonghua speaker who preferred his own rustic Hunan dialect.
Not surprisingly, the language police are having a hard time adjusting to the Internet. Western media likes to portray Chinese internet censorship as a kind of Orwellian leviathan, though in practice they often look more like the Keystone Cops. Mandarin is rich with puns and double-meanings, and jokesters come up with workarounds faster than the censors can keep up: profanity is barred in most online spaces, but you can always type nonsense words like the hanzi for “grass-mud-horse,” which sounds almost exactly like “go fuck your mother.” As the state cracked down, writers protested that they were simply discussing their favorite animal, penning facetious, po-faced essays about the esteemed Grass Mud Horse. By the time the state banned the phrase, the internet had moved on to its next raunchy pun. In 2014, the government finally gave up, banning puns on the internet completely. This was mostly done to save face: the laws are not enforced, and no Chinese citizen has been arrested for a pun yet.
Simplified Characters May Not Be So Simple
One of the language reforms I was expecting to see more of in Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters was mainland China’s switch from traditional Chinese characters to simplified forms with fewer strokes. After all, the switch, undertaken by Mao’s government in the 1950s cost huge amounts of time and money in the form of new printing presses, re-writing old texts, creating new textbooks, educating tens of millions of students in the new style and re-educating millions of adults trained in the old style.
Simplified characters, the reasoning goes, are easier to learn and quicker to write. They use less ink, are more legible at a distance, and easier to distinguish from each other. Tsu is good on describing the origins of simplified characters, with the Communist reforms drawing on everything from cursive calligraphy to accounting shorthands to Daoist glyphs used in summoning rituals to Nushu, the secret “women’s script” of Hunan. She has less to say, though, about the actual success of simplification.
Moser does: simplification reduces the amount of strokes needed to write by about 12%, but it doesn’t reduce any of the fundamental problems of hanzi: the connection between sign and sound is arbitrary, writing new words requires creating an entirely new character from scratch, and you need to know thousands of characters just to skim a newspaper. The Communists only had enough political capital to change the script once, and they settled on a compromised reform that barely fixes anything. (A second round of greater, more rational simplification was proposed in 1977 and quickly struck down: Chinese people were not going to relearn all their hanzi a third time.)
More damning, literacy in mainland China still lags behind Hong Kong and Taiwan, which kept traditional characters. I don’t know nearly enough to weigh in on either side, though I was fascinated to learn that there’s a large, wide-ranging debate. You can see for yourself how extensive the arguments get by looking at simplification’s Wikipedia page.
Of course, there’s also the cynical argument, as Ian Buruma notes: switching to simplified characters also makes it hard for mainland Chinese to understand anything printed prior to, or outside of, Communist rule.
The Secret History of Soviet Pinyin
Pinyin is the official romanization of Putonghua. Unlike simplified characters, which were enshrined in law around the same time, Pinyin has been an unqualified success, and the single most effective tool in improving Chinese literacy in three thousand years. I’d heard about Pinyin’s creation by Zhou Youguang before–Zhou, a good candidate for Most Interesting Man in the World, was born a Chinese imperial subject in 1906 and died a national hero in 2017, having used his 110 years to be, variously, an expatriate banker in New York, an expert on Esperanto, a professor of economics, the creator of Pinyin, a labor-camp prisoner, and in his extreme old age, one of the only Chinese citizens untouchable enough to openly criticize the Communist Party. I had heard about Zhou before–he might be one of my favorite people, ever–but I’d never heard about the Soviet roots of Pinyin.
One of the finest chapters in Kingdom of Characters reveals that the precursor to Pinyin, known as Latinxua, was actually part of the Soviet Union’s push in the 1920s to provide modern, efficient scripts for all the languages of its subjects. Alongside all the Turkic and Siberian languages the Soviets worked to standardize and move away from Arabic script, tens of thousands of citizens in the Russian Far East were Han Chinese, almost all of them illiterate. According to the Soviet Constitution, they had a right to receive an education in their native language. The problem was, there wasn’t anybody around able to teach traditional hanzi to tens of thousands of peasants and laborers in Siberia. The Bolsheviks decided to alphabetize Chinese, with help from the Chinese Communist Party.
Alphabetization actually came up many times in modern Chinese history, with dozens of proposed systems throughout the 1800s and 1900s. The problem was, any scheme, no matter how good, would ultimately have to be ratified by China’s political elites–the same men who had already mastered hanzi writing, and were most likely to have a conservative, traditionalist attachment to the ancient writing system of their ancestors.
There were no such obstacles, though, with the illiterate Chinese immigrants of the Soviet Union. In fact, as working poor who had been kept illiterate by a repressive class system and a complex, aristocratic writing system, they were a perfect case for Communist modernization. And so in 1931, the Soviets officially rolled out Latinxua Sin Wenz, New Latin Script, and the first students–adults and children–were taught to write Chinese in roman letters. The system was a massive success, and within a few years there were Latinxua newspapers. Soviet Chinese wrote letters to each other in Latinxua. The plan was so successful, instituting Latinxua in mainland China was actually a major policy goal for the Chinese Communist Party during the Civil War. It was only as the war ended, when success was finally in reach, that the Communists backed down, worried that anti-hanzi rhetoric would damage their credibility as the rulers and representatives of the Chinese people. The old reverence for hanzi was hard to kill; Mao Zedong, after all, was proud of his calligraphy.
The Case Against Hanzi
While Kingdom of Characters ends on a triumphal note for Chinese logograms and their survival into the future, A Billion Voices is far more skeptical. Tsing cheers on the programmers and engineers who’ve made Chinese writing flourish in digital media, while Moser sides with the linguists and reformers–and there are more than I expected–who think that these fixes are only an ugly kludge, and that more serious script reform is needed.
Take the problem of “spelling” in Chinese. We think it’s bad in English, where there are entire competitions and lavish prizes for people who can spell obscure words. Most languages don’t have spelling bees, because they don’t need them. Chinese, though, is even worse than English: they have popular competitions just based around reading words, giving a definition and pronouncing them correctly. Although Chinese hanzi have a few advantages for cross-dialect communication and distinguishing between homophones (think of pairs like sleigh and slay in English), when it comes to the basic functions of written language, Chinese is extraordinarily slow and difficult.
The usual response is that hundreds of millions of Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, Singaporeans, and so on manage to learn hanzi just fine. But there is increasing evidence that they aren’t, and might even be getting worse: in every Sinophone country, there is a growing prevalence of “character amnesia,” or forgetting the particular character needed to write a word. The problem is especially acute among teenagers and young adults who have grown up under the language reforms celebrated by Tsing–in fact, those innovations are fueling the problem. When somebody has character amnesia, they aren’t forgetting how to say something, only how to write it. They can write the word perfectly well in Pinyin, which after all is how most Chinese type: write the Pinyin, and the software auto-suggests the right character from a list of possibilities. These amnesiacs could easily write in Pinyin alone and be understood, but for cultural reasons they are supposed to write it in hanzi.
Moser wonders: what’s wrong with switching completely to Pinyin?
This is entirely possible, at least in theory. Ditching hanzi would dramatically speed up literacy education and remove the extensive technical apparatus needed to write characters on screens. The heroes of Tsu’s book spent heroic amounts of time and labor in adapting Chinese writing for problems–designing a keyboard, encoding telegrams, writing computer code, transliterating foreign words–that would have taken trivial amounts of time to write in Latinxua or Pinyin. This is not to say that a switch would be simple, or that it would a good thing for the world’s last logographic writing system to lose its unique character. But something’s got to give, and there’s a good chance Chinese writing will change much more in the next hundred years than it has in the last three thousand.