SCIENCE science.org 14 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6577 151PHOTO:
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LINGUISTICSAn antiquated language,
reimagined
BOOKS et al.
also intensified nationalism, ultimately in-
spiring Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan, two Chi-
nese students studying in the US, to invent
Chinese typewriters with rival designs in the
mid-1910s. The enormous quantity of Chinese
characters and the difficulty of constructing
them satisfactorily from their componentparts proved challenging, but an improved
model based on Zhou’s design did come into
wide use beginning in the 1920s ( 1 ).
The Chinese script’s incompatibility with
the Western alphabet not only posed cultural
and technical barriers but also resulted in
higher prices for Chinese users of telegraphy,
who were forced to use the more expensive
numerals to render Chinese characters. The
battle to invent a suitable symbolic system toreplace or accompany Chinese script raged
on during the 1930s and 1940s.
When the Chinese Communist Party drove
the nationalist government to Taiwan and es-
tablished the People’s Republic in 1949, the
reform entered a decisive new phase with
two changes that have reshaped it to this day:
simplified characters and the development of
pinyin as the official alphabet designed to ac-
company the script. In an original discussion
of the roots of pinyin, Tsu uncovers both its
connections with Soviet linguistics and the
overlooked roles played by a group of Chi-
nese Muslims who were involved in language
reforms in both China and Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
As the account moves closer to the
present, Tsu describes how the Chinese
language was brought into the digital
world against the background of the cha-
otic Cultural Revolution, the moderniza-
tion drive in the ensuing reform era, and
the reopening of relations between China
and the US. Here, she profiles Zhi Bingyi,
an electrical engineer who was placed in
solitary confinement in 1968 when he
figured out a way to enter Chinese char-
acters into a computer, and Wang Xuan,
a computer researcher who led efforts to
solve the critical problem of character
compression in the mid-1970s.
A critical step in Wang’s achievement,
we learn, pivoted on design information
about an advanced new microchip pro-
vided in 1979 by Francis F. Lee, a Chinese
American engineer. Tsu reconstructs
Lee’s deep, but little-known, involvement
in digitizing Chinese characters in associ-
ation with an American nonprofit known
as the Graphic Arts Research Foundation.
Tsu devotes the last chapter of King-
dom of Characters to the globalization of
the Chinese language. In the book’s con-
clusion, she recounts a contentious 2018
conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, where a
Unicode group adjudicated new Chinese
characters proposed for international
acceptance. This episode illustrates a larger
point: that even as the Chinese language goes
global, it still stirs cultural and geopolitical
tensions, especially in an era when China
seeks to expand its influence in the world. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- For more on the history of the Chinese typewriter,
see T. S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History
(MIT Press, 2017).
10.1126/science.abn0932
A
s China’s scientific, technological, and
economic developments continue to
propel its rapid rise and geopolitical
tensions, there is a hunger for infor-
mation on the country’s past and pres-
ent. Among the new crop of books
being published to meet this demand,
Kingdom of Characters by Yale professor
of East Asian languages and literatures
Jing Tsu stands out as a lively and insight-
ful history of the intersection of China’s
information technology systems and its
language revolution. The book is a richly
documented, riveting, and scholarly rig-
orous transnational account of how Chi-
nese evolved from a hard-to-learn script
entrenched in the beleaguered Middle
Kingdom in the 19th century to a global
language in the 21st century.
Tsu profiles a number of historical and
contemporary figures who represent suc-
cessive campaigns, begun around the turn
of the 20th century, to unify, reform, and
modernize the Chinese script. In doing
so, she provides not only vivid portraits of
these individuals and their struggles but
also broad coverage of social and political
changes in modern Chinese history.
The narrative begins with Wang Zhao,
a persecuted political reformer who, dis-
guised as a monk, snuck back into China
from his exile in Japan in 1900 to pursue
another radical agenda: the unification
of numerous Chinese dialects into what
became known as Mandarin and the in-
vention of a new phonetic alphabet for
Chinese characters. Both efforts were aimed
at improving literacy among the Chinese peo-
ple, a goal shared by other reformers.
The 1911 republican revolution that ended
the Qing imperial rule of China not only lent
support to Wang’s Mandarinization drive butA new tome traces efforts to unify, reform,
and modernize the Chinese language
By Zuoyue WangKingdom of Characters:
The Language Revolution
That Made China Modern
Jing Tsu
Riverhead Books,- 336 pp.
Lee Mau Yong operates a Chinese typewriter used to set type
for printing in 1986.The reviewer is at the Department of History, California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA 91768, USA.
Email: [email protected]