Every day a billion or more Chinese speakers will send a message using Chinese characters on their phone. For an English speaker using the Roman alphabet it seems like quite a feat; English has 26 characters, Chinese has tens of thousands, and phones have small screens. Yet Chinese is flourishing on the Internet.
It wasn’t always obvious it would, says cultural historian Jing Tsu in Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China. For decades, modernisers thought Chinese script was too inefficient, too hard to learn and too complex with so many strokes to survive in the modern world. The novelist Lu Xun argued, “if the Chinese script is not abolished, China will certainly perish”.
Chinese characters and language Photo: 123RF
The problem, as many modernisers thought, was that the alphabet of the West was more supple. An English writer only has to learn 26 lower case characters and 26 upper; once you know the sounds associated with them, you can take a stab at saying most words. Chinese characters often represent a syllable or a word. In 5000 years of Chinese culture there are possibly more than 200,000 characters; a modern dictionary may have around 20,000. Some characters take 20 or more strokes; each has to be learned by heart. And characters can be made up of several parts.
The gang of modernisers who Jing Tsu assembles in her entertaining book didn’t want to abandon Chinese script. They wanted to take it apart and reform it.
Jing Tsu, author of Kingdom of Characters Photo: Supplied
They are, literally, great characters. There was the radical Wang Zhao, once wanted by the police for his opposition to the Qing dynasty, who tried to invent an easy alphabet-like system for the sound of Chinese and then to unite China’s languages and dialects under one standard system. He rather proved the point by attending a conference on unifying China’s pronunciations, and punching a man with a thick southern accent who he thought had called him a son of a bitch. In fact, he was discussing his rickshaw ride.
At the same time, others struggled to try to get the Chinese script to fit the telegraph, the internet of the nineteenth century. Morse code was designed for English’s few characters, not a script of thousands.
The same problem occurred with the growth of typewriters. The QWERTY keyboard is simple but how to create a machine to sift through thousands of characters.
Thousands of characters
Jing Tsu, a Yale professor who also happened to be NBC’s commentator explaining China at the opening of the Beijing Winter Games, broadly breaks down the reforms into three themes. The first is how to classify the Chinese script. If there was a fool-proof system to differentiate one character from another, then a machine could write it. This touched off a race among librarians and dictionary writers from the 1920s to the 1940s to come up with the best. Traditionally, many dictionaries sorted characters by a component called a radical. One idea was to study the corners of characters, another to index by the first stroke. It would be the equivalent of trying to work out how to order the Roman alphabet; rather than ABCD, by number of strokes (in descending order), say, it would be EFBH.
Then there was the idea to simplify Chinese, an idea promoted by General Chiang Kai-shek to the horror of his classically educated advisors, and pushed through later by Mao.
And lastly, could an alphabet be applied to Chinese characters to make sounding them out easier. Today it is known as Pin-yin. But, as Jing Tsu points out, it may have ended up using the Roman alphabet but that was not always a given. With Sino-Soviet friendship at its height in the 1950s, it could have been Cyrillic.
Geniuses and rogues
Kingdom of Characters: A new book on the Chinese script Photo: Supplied
Jing Tsu manages to tell what could be an arcane story through the odd assortment of geniuses and occasional rogues who deconstructed and then reconstructed the Chinese script. Some stories are vividly told. There is Zhi Bingyi, an early computer expert, who was thrown into prison during the Cultural Revolution and spent months staring at the same eight characters on a poster in his cell. Slowly it dawned on him how to translate them into the dot-dashes of early computing languages. He writes his findings on the bottom of his tea cup. Or Du Dingyou, a university librarian who had been breaking characters into shapes (later useful for computing) whose work is interrupted by the invasion of the Japanese. He manages to evacuate books from the Sun Zhongshan University library in Guangzhou in a flotilla of boats to an upstream village, gets students to safety and manages to invent a crate for the refugees which unfolded into a bed, bench and table. He sent his design to the Bulletin of the American Library Association.
Such tales make Kingdom of Characters a surprisingly wild ride. Every now and then, though, we follow an entertaining personality to an abrupt dead-end. In one chapter, we root for a fascinating student consumed with creating a Chinese typewriter, only to discover his version was not as good as that of a less colourful rival.
Jing Tsu does a good job of explaining difficult concepts. She has given herself the task of explaining how Chinese characters work, how reformers worked on it, how those changes worked in machines and all set against the history of modern China. Only very occasionally is it hard to follow; the chapter on computing is hard work in places but, perhaps all chapters on how computers work are baffling to non-experts.
Kingdom of Characters deserves to find a wide audience beyond at first glance an arcane subject.
A Chinese mobile phone user with Alibaba's online payment service Alipay app. Photo: AFP
And so how does Chinese script work on a smartphone? Several ways; a writer could use Pin-yin to write the sound of the character on their Roman alphabet keyboard; the corresponding Chinese characters then come up as suggestions. Or you could write the first few strokes and the phone will offer suggestions. Whatever way, the script that was thought to be too hard for a typewriter, telegraph and early computer is now in use every day.
Kingdom of Characters
A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China
Jing Tsu
Allen Lane
