Kingdom of Characters
The Language Revolution that Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
2022
Kingdom of Characters tells the history of seven different innovations of the 20th century that Tsu narrates as a single century-long effort to 'modernize' the Chinese language, to allow China script to be reproduced mechanically, and later electronically.
Throughout, the challenge is that Chinese script consists of characters that represent whole words (or that pair or triple up to make compound words, like 'boardgame.') Because of this, there are thousands of characters in very regular use, and tens of thousands in an expanded vocabulary. And these characters are not phonetic - there's no relationship between how the character looks and how the word sounds when spoken. These features can make Chinese challenging to learn to read, and means that it's not easily retrofitted into technologies designed for alphabetic languages.
Tsu tells this story in seven chapters, each focusing on a key technology, and proceeding chronologically from 1900 to the 1990s. The events he describes parallels, and sometimes intersects with, China's political history. I knew a bit of this, but more familiarity would've helped me. She describes what's most necessary at each point, but doesn't say much more than that. At points I would've liked more of an overview or more context. Other times, it seemed strange to me that something like the Cultural Revolution or the Tienanmen Square Massacre gets mentioned only in passing, and solely to help timestamp another event. I'll readily acknowledge that my reactions say as much about me as they do about her.
Tsu doesn't glamorize - several language reformers are imprisoned or tortured, by leaders spanning from the Qing dowager Empress to Mao Zedong, and Tsu's sympathies are for the people, not the leaders. However, it also becomes increasingly clear that he is most concerned with Chinese as it's written in the mainland People's Republic of China. At several points he'll briefly note that something is different in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau, but it seemed to me he found those developments to be of lesser importance. And in the couple places where Taiwan and the PRC make different linguistic choices, or come into direct competition, he picks the side of the PRC.
One thing Tsu does well throughout is to explain the features of written Chinese to the unfamiliar reader, and to make analogies to the Latin alphabet. I'll make an analogy of my own that's based partially on what I learned from Kingdom of Characters and partly on my looking up various concepts on Wikipedia as I went. Written Chinese is a bit like written Latin, the official script used to communicate publicly, while Mandarin and Cantonese are only the best-known versions of whole families of dialects that are at least as different from each other as Spanish is from Italian. Chinese isn't vernacular, but does enable communication between members of an enormous population who would otherwise find each other mutually unintelligible.
Tsu's story starts around 1900. China is still suffering from the aftermath of the two Opium Wars and the ongoing Western occupation of close to a hundred of its port cities. Only about 10% of the population is literate, mostly scholars, civil servants, and members of the royal Qing court. It's clear that Western countries have technology that China doesn't, and civic-minded people wonder how their country can 'catch-up' and participate in international society as an equal. Some blame the complexity and difficulty of learning Chinese script, and suggest abandoning it in favor of alphabetical writing.
The first innovation is a set of phonetic symbols drawn from written Chinese rather than the Latin alphabet. The innovator here develops the symbols as part of a new system for teaching Chinese writing, which did sound much easier to me than the Reverse Cut system used up until that point. The same guy is also partially responsible for Mandarin beating out Cantonese as the official pronunciation of the characters. He was a staunch advocate during the convention where it was debated, but arguably won due to his procedural tricks to influence how the delegates' votes were counted. A later phonetic syllabary known as Bopomofo (like 'the ABCs,' it's named for its first few sounds) lingers in the background of Tsu's narrative at least into the 50s. Bopomofo also uses calligraphy-derived symbols, but each is also explicitly paired with a Latin letter.
The second innovation is a Chinese language typewriter. Tsu discusses several prototypes, but I don't know if any made it into mass production. Most tried to use whole characters. One, developed by Chinese students studying in the US and Chinese American professors, builds the characters out of strokes the way a calligrapher would. That one caught the eye of the CIA, and rather than allow it to help members of the public communicate more easily, they reserved it for translating intercepted documents.
Third is a code for sending Chinese-language telegrams. In addition to resisting transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the Chinese inventors have to figure out how to order the four-digit numerical codes in a way that's sensible and allows quick look-ups, and they have to argue about pricing, since Morse Code numbers are all longer than letters, making Chinese telegrams much more expensive to send.
Fourth, and related to the above, was figuring out a way to put the words in a meaningful order to allow them to be looked up easily. The Kangxi Dictionary had provided an order since the 1700s, but it still required checking the dictionary first. The system that seemed most interesting and intuitive to me was Lin Yutang's idea to create an indexing order based on the strokes used to draw the characters as calligraphy, with the first stroke serving the same function as the first letter in an alphabetical word. The Four Corner system that became most widely used didn't seem particularly intuitive to me, but it was developed by a bigshot in the publishing industry, so he could sell the books explaining his method cheaper than his competitors, and ensure that his method was used in the index of every book he published.
In the background of these chapters, China is in political turmoil. In 1911, the Qing empire collapsed and was replaced by a nascent democratic government. This progressively collapsed as regional governors and opportunistic warlords ruled over their own little fiefdoms. Japan invaded and claimed territory. The Nationalists and Communists cooperated to defeat the smaller local governments to reunify China, then went to war with each other.
In the 1950s, the CCP launches twin initiatives to create an official Latin alphabet transliteration of the language, and to simply written Chinese by reducing the number of strokes needed to write each character. The transliteration is called Pinyin, and it replaces the missionary-developed system Westerners had been using until then. This is when 'Peking' becomes 'Beijing' - not because the city was renamed, but because the way Westerners wrote and pronounced it changed. I think Pinyin also fully supplants Bopomofo, or maybe Tsu just stops mentioning it. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau all continue using the traditional, non-simplified version of the characters.
The sixth innovation is a computerized version of Chinese. Initially, instead of the four-number codes of the telegraph system, someone invents a four-letter code corresponding to each character, based on the first letter of the Pinyin name for the first four calligraphy strokes used to write it. He came up with the idea for this system while he was imprisoned for intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution.
The seventh innovation in a unified international coding scheme so that when you write a Chinese character on a computer, no matter which country you're in or who manufactured the computer, someone else can open the file and see the same character. Unicode accomplished this initially in 1992, and Taiwan moved first to ensure that the traditional versions of the characters were the official Unicode versions, with the simplified versions used in the PRC considered 'variants' (like how the yellow-skinned emojis are official and default, with all the human skin tones treated as variants.) Conferences to debate, add to, and amend Unicode continue to the present day, and Tsu has attended several to observe the process.
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