16 S UNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2022QWERTY keyboards, were designed for
alphabetic languages like English; with
just 26 letters, you could type anything
from a shopping list to Shakespeare. The
Chinese script is character-based, each
character roughly equivalent to what we
mean by an English word. Designing a rel-
atively portable machine that could type
4,000 individual characters had been a
monumental task, and people gathered in
the July heat to hear Zhou speak.
But Zhou’s first message to his audience
seemingly had nothing to do with typewrit-
ers. Instead, he pulled an American fac-
tory worker’s outfit over his suit. “I have
one phrase to impart you with today,” he
told the crowd. “Don’t be afraid to get your
hands dirty.” The Chinese, he said, “shun
all activities concerning industry and arti-
sanship, which has made the learned inept
at anything practical, and the peasants ig-
norant of real knowledge.” Instead, they
celebrated the literati over honest labor-
ers. And yet, in America, even President
Roosevelt’s relatives were woodworkers.
Zhou wore a uniform from his stint intern-
ing at an American factory, to emphasize
that however “shabby and filthy these
clothes may be, I don’t abandon them, be-
cause they bear the marks of a worker.”
Zhou’s speech occurs about a quarter of
the way through Jing Tsu’s rigorous and
engaging new book, “Kingdom of Charac-
ters: The Language Revolution That Made
China Modern.” His opening lines may sur-
prise. First, that startling reminder: China
once admired America’s manufacturing
prowess? And then why such a political cri
de coeurfrom the inventor of a typewriter?
But this is the key message of Tsu’s book:
The story of how linguists, activists, librar-
ians, scholars and ordinary citizens
adapted Chinese writing to the modern
world is the story of how China itself be-
came modern. Following the history of the
script helps explain China’s past, present
— and future. “More than a century’s effort
at learning how to standardize and trans-
form its language into a modern technol-
ogy has landed China here,” writes Tsu, a
professor of East Asian languages and lit-
erature at Yale, “at the beginning — not the
end — of becoming a standard setter, from
artificial intelligence to quantum natural
language processing, automation to ma-
chine translation.”
Tsu’s book begins around the turn of the
20th century, when reformers challenged
traditions like foot binding and the Chinese
script. Western kings, missionaries and
scholars had long sought to “unlock” the
secrets of Chinese — or to fetishize it. Oth-
ers saw China’s character-based script as
“incompatible with logic and inhospitable
to abstract thinking.” “The nature of the
written language in itself is a great hin-
drance to the development of the sci-
ences,” the philosopher Hegel wrote. With
their “ad hoc efforts to retrofit Chinese
characters” to typewriters and telegraphs,
Chinese inventors sought to resolve the
difficulties “that accompanied being late
entrants in systems intended for a differ-
ent kind of written language. But many
wondered if the Chinese script itself was
the problem.”
This book tells the stories of those who
decided otherwise. Tsu’s title, “Kingdom of
Characters,” refers both to the literal char-
acters that make script and the people who
sought to save them. She does not sugar-
coat their difficulties, introducing us to, for
example, Wang Zhao, an exiled reformer
who crossed China disguised as a monk,
risking his life to introduce a new Chinese
alphabet that he believed would unite the
country under one common language. She
tells the story of Count Pierre Henri Stani-
slas d’Escayrac de Lauture, a French ad-
venturer, who, even after being mutilated
in a Chinese jail, helped pioneer the devel-
opment of Chinese telegraphy. And she
writes of how, over 100 years later, Zhi
Bingyi, branded a “reactionary academic
authority” in the Cultural Revolution,
helped discover how to “render Chinese
into a language that computers can read —
in the zeros and ones of binary code” —
from a makeshift prison cell. (Lacking pa-
per, he tested his hypotheses by writing on
a teacup with a stolen pen.)Each step of the way, these innovators
had to ask questions like: How can the Chi-
nese script be organized in a rational way?
Could the language be written with an al-
phabet? And if so, which one? (Latin? Ara-
bic? Cyrillic? Another symbolic script?)
Could any alphabet account for the tones
needed to differentiate among characters?
Zhao Yuanren, a celebrated Chinese lin-
guist, illustrated this difficulty. “Stone
house poet Sir Shi was fond of lions and
vowed to eat 10 lions,” the first line of a
story reads in English. But merely Roman-
ized, “without tone marks or indicators,
however, it becomes a long string of monot-
onous gibberish: Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi
shi, shi shi shi shi.”BY EXAMINING THESE QUESTIONSclosely,
Tsu helps the novice to Chinese under-
stand both the underlying challenges and
how they were conquered. (I sense Tsu is
an excellent teacher.) This material could,
in the wrong hands, become dry. But Tsu
weaves linguistic analysis together with
biographical and historical context — the
ravages of imperialism, civil war, foreign
invasions, diplomatic successes and disap-
pointments. This approach not only adds
background and meaning to the script de-
bate, but also terrific color to what might
have otherwise read like a textbook.
In particular, Mao Zedong’s role in reshap-
ing Chinese script shows how politics and
language are often fused. Mao, Tsu notes,
“went down in history as, among other
things, the political figure who guided theChinese language through its two greatest
transformations in modern history.” With
more than 90 percent of the population illit-
erate, Mao embraced the movement to re-
duce the number of strokes in more than
2,200 characters to render them easier to
learn and write. (Taiwan, rejecting simplifi-
cation, still sees itself as the guardian of tra-
ditional Chinese culture.) Mao also spurred
the creation of Pinyin, a phonetic, Roman-
ized Chinese alphabet designed as an auxil-
iary aid to learning Chinese script, rather
than a replacement. Approved in 1958,
Pinyin was reportedly learned by 50 million
people in its first year alone, during a time of
“idealism and hope.” And yet 1958 was also
the first year of the Great Leap Forward, the
experiment that saw millions die from fam-
ine — and Pinyin’s detractors persecuted.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that in the end,
the Chinese script did not die; instead, it
flourished. As Tsu writes, “Every technol-
ogy that has ever confronted the Chinese
script, or challenged it, also had to bow be-
fore it.” Tsu herself is rarely present in the
book, though in the introduction she ex-
plains how, after emigrating from Taiwan
to America as a child, she found it difficult
to give up Chinese. “It was not enough,”
she adds, “to just master writing, reading
comprehension and vocabulary. To think in
English, I had to breathe and live a world-
view that was expressed and constructed
in that language.” Languages, as this book
makes clear, convey worlds. The world of
Chinese script, painted so vividly by Tsu, is
one I’m now grateful to have glimpsed. 0‘Kingdom of Characters’
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
IMAGE FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICANDevello Zelotes Sheffield’s Chinese typewriter. From “A Chinese Typewriter,” Scientific American, June 3, 1899.DEIRDRE MASKis the author of “The Address
Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About
Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.”