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Language Reform in Revolutionary China
Thor May
1974-2015
Preface: This historical essay contains nothing new for specialists, but might be
useful background for the many people who now have a more general interest in
China. The analysis has two important limitations: firstly it began as an
undergraduate essay, which suggests some naivety, and secondly it was originally
written in 1974 at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The topic set
then was : “Why and how was linguistic reform linked to the revolutionary struggle
in China?”. The New Zealand course seemed well taught at the time by a Chinese
mathematician, Jock Hoe, and a NZ sociologist, Allan Levett. Looking back though,
it is amazing that not a word was mentioned about China’s devastating Cultural
Revolution, which by 1974 had done the worst of its damage as CCP Chairman Mao
Zedong sank into irreversible mental and physical decline (he died in 1976). Many of us, my NZ
lecturers included, still had a somewhat incomplete view of the benefits and costs which blue boiler
suit communism with Chinese characteristics had brought to a very poor country. China’s real
modernization was still in the inconceivable future.
Since 1974 a number of factors have combined to boost the spread of standard Chinese (普通话
Pǔtōnghuà, 国语 Guóyǔ, 华语 Huáyǔ, Mandarin) within the country. Education and literacy levels
have improved for large numbers of people. Modern transport infrastructure and urban to rural
migrations have led to massive internal population movements, especially into regions hitherto not
Mandarin speaking such as the Pearl River Delta. Above all, electronic communications media such
as TV, mobile smart phones and the Internet have penetrated even the remotest areas with the
official lingua franca. Yet in spite of all these changes, a government official recently conceded the
limited success of language reform: “Fully a third of the Chinese population, or 400 million people,
can’t speak Mandarin, Ministry of Education representative Xu Mei told state media Xinhua in a
September 2013 article” (Wikenkamp 2014). Of the remaining two thirds of the Chinese people, at
the moment almost all of them speak the official standard as a second language or second dialect
to varying degrees of fluency. Nearly all who seek employment which requires a “broadcast
standard” of competency in Pǔtōnghuà need special language training. A few more contemporary
Internet links are included in the bibliography.
1. Introduction
The scope of this essay is primarily that period from the humiliating defeat of
Chinese forces by Japan in 1894 until the accession of the Chinese Communist
Party to hegemony over all of China in 1949. That is, it deals with a period of
nationalist awakening and revitalization.
The accelerating impact of Western commerce and gunboat diplomacy in the
nineteenth century had done much to shatter the already declining Manchu
administration and undermine the old economic system of the Celestial Empire.
Initial attempts to come to terms with Western technology tended to be crudely
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imitative, showing little grasp of or interest in the political and social
philosophies upon which the success of the Western powers was based. An early
anti-establishment and somewhat irrational response was the millenarian
movement known as the Taiping Rebellion which engulfed much of the country
from 1850 to 1864, eventually costing at least 20 million lives and thus
becoming one of the worst civil wars in history. Nevertheless, it took defeat by
the hitherto “inferior” Japanese to shake the faith of Chinese intellectuals and
administrators in the cherished values of Chinese high culture.
2. The beginnings of political reform
The search for a rationale to explain China’s catastrophic decline, and the slow
devolution of social and political solutions to the crisis was a turbulent process.
Successive waves of reformers tried to reconcile elements of the existing neo-
Confucian ethic with the new objectives of technological progress, effective
national sovereignty, and finally social revolution. By 1927 two clear and
competing sets of priorities had emerged, although their respective champions
were to enter into numerous tactical alliances in the coming years.
The first political grouping, centred around the Kuomingang (国民党) was publicly
committed to establishing a Western style capitalist industrial economy
(although its eventual leader, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), was unlikely to have
fully grasped what that implied). Cooperation with forces pressing for social
reform was the strategy of an aspiring ruling class, military officers, who sought
strong central government based on a coalition of influential landholders and
urban financiers from the coastal cities.
The second major political grouping of the time, the Communist Party of China,
was committed to social revolution. This ideology publicly sought the abolition of
elitism and the elevation of the whole population to political awareness and
activism. Industrial and political power in the hands of a capitalistic elite would,
it was said, inevitably lead to greater oppression of the masses. The CCP
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interpretation of events and goals came to be concentrated through prism of
Chairman Mao Zedong’s (毛泽东) political needs.
3. The role of language reform
Language reform movements in China over the last hundred years have found
both their motivations and limitations in the divergent socio-political objectives
already referred to . Language has been seen as a vehicle of social change,
actual or potential, by reformers and conservatives alike. The apparent success
of language reform programs has been closely tied to the fluctuating political
fortunes of their protagonists. Pragmatic outcomes however have also been
constrained by the fragmented nature of Chinese languages (plural) and
dialects. To this day, an inconvenient reality is that a significant proportion of
Chinese citizens cannot use standard Chinese (普通話), especially as spoken,
while many others struggle with the standard form as a second language.
4. The linguistic and literary context of language reform
What was susceptible to reform in the languages of China and their usage? For a
professional linguist language implies above all else spoken language: the
speech of common people is his main source and court of final appeal on
“correctness”. By contrast, when educated Chinese thought of language
explicitly, it tended to be in terms of orthography and literacy (and this is still
the case in modern China). The classical ideographic writing system of Chinese
was largely diglossic. That is, its connection with any commonly spoken
language is tenuous, and has been for two thousand years. It was a system
which underpinned a unique form of civil service recruitment, and had been
perpetuated among the small elite of Confucian educated graduates, comprising
perhaps 2% of the population.
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The cultural monopoly of classical traditions absorbed and codified educated
literary talent for long periods of Chinese history. Most popular art forms tended
to be either stifled or went unrecorded for posterity. Various barbarian invasions
did break this stranglehold from time to time. From the 4th to the 6th Centuries
AD for example, popular songs and poems proliferated. Under the Mongol
dynasty, dramatic talent flowered, and with the suspension of literary
examinations from 1237 to 1313 educated men condescended to write popular
drama. During the final four hundred dynastic years to the end the of the 19th
Century, the medium of popular literature was the romantic novel, officially
despised but written by the hundred1.
5. Educational reform and the elevation of bái huà (白话)
In the late 19th Century when the neo-Confucian administrative elite proved
incapable of buttressing the old system, or of introducing a technological
revolution along Western lines, one of the core things to be called into question
was traditional education, which had been almost exclusively in classical
literature and the system of ideographic writing which went with it. The dead
classical literary language was simply not equipped to cope with the concepts of
modern technologies or their social consequences.
The short term training of technocrats could be accessed through foreign
language programs in English, German, Russian or French, and the development
of bái huà (白话 written vernacular). However, this was bound to create an
unwelcome class of potentially powerful men, not only insensitive to the weight
of classical tradition, but also likely to evaluate the old ideographic system of
writing against much more flexible alphabetic systems used worldwide for other
languages, with their (usually) closer approximation to spoken forms.
The abolition of competitive civil service examinations2 in 1905 immediately
directed the attention of large numbers of scholars away from the classical
language and towards the vernacular (just as a similar move had in the
thirteenth century AD). The “vernacular” referred to was not really the language
of the common people, but a kind of lingua franca used among the Confucian
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educated elite, based on the northern Mandarin dialect, but heavily embellished
with classical allusions and a vocabulary not familiar to the working classes. A
literary renaissance developed , especially in Beijing, which was devoted to
modern prose expression in the written medium of bái huà (白话). It was
consciously conceived as a direct challenge to the classical tradition. The
promoters of this renaissance were not necessarily enthused with the idea of
introducing a romanized script, although they were interested in the problem.
Their actual literary output constituted an uneven (and according to much
contemporary opinion, unholy) mixture, ranging from the semi-classical to the
frankly populist.
A prime mover behind the bái huà (白话) movement was Cài Yuánpéi (蔡元, Ts'ai
Yüan-p'ei) who, as Minister of Education, abolished the Chinese classics from the
curriculum of all elementary schools. Upon becoming President of Peking
National University in 1913 Cài Yuánpéi proceeded to radically reorient that
institution:
“The university is not merely intended to offer ready-made courses for
students to attend at fixed hours, but primarily to be an institution for
corporate work in scientific research. And by research I mean not merely
the introduction of European culture, but original contributions on the
basis of what is already done in the West; not merely the preservation of
our national heritage but the seeking by means of scientific research to
show what that heritage has actually been.” 3
There was a sense in which a good deal of the “original research”, or at least the
literary research, anticipated by Cài Yuánpéi turned out to be at best marginal in
its impact on the language and culture of greater China. Hú Shì (胡適, Hu Shih),
perhaps the greatest liberal intellectual of the period, spent much time and effort
establishing the literary credentials of the long, but hitherto despised tradition of
Chinese popular novels. He devoted himself to the history and philosophy of
literature because in these areas he could fashion a credible case for
transformation on the basis of Chinese experience. He could argue persuasively
that bái huà literature would flourish because it came as an outgrowth of the
long evolution of vernacular forms. He could assert that the precedents derived
from Chinese experience made it possible for the Chinese to appropriate the
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modern scientific method4. However, the liberal tradition, with its capacity for
benign self-deception, abhorring violence, and in the final analysis unprepared to
cope with the aspirations of the mass of the people was, when battle lines had to
be drawn, vilified by the more radical extremes of both the left and the right.
During the period of Cài Yuánpéi’s presidency of Peking National University it
became a centre of political and intellectual ferment that attracted protagonists
committed to every kind of reformist opinion. The journalist and politician Tāng
Liánglǐ (汤良礼, T'ang Leang-Li), whose own later career exemplified the
ambiguous loyalties of the period, explained the catalytic role of this university
very well:
“The influence which Peking National University wields in the national life
of the Chinese people is tremendous and unprecedentedly far-reaching. It
is at the head of all the new intellectual and social movements which have
arisen in China during the last decade, a living power in immediate and
intimate contact with the life of the people …
“The most important achievement of the University in the cultural
reconstruction of China was the creation of a new national literary medium
by the elevation of the spoken language to the position of a written
language”5.
He goes on to draw parallels with the European Renaissance, the revolt against
Latin by Dante, the proclamation in 1531 by Francis I of France that all official
documents should henceforth be issued in the Parisian dialect, and the ascent of
the south-eastern English dialect to national prominence through the influence of
Chaucer and Wycliffe in the fifteenth century.
These European analogies may be rather naïve avocations of the factors
determining the growth of a national language, but the fact that they were
consciously drawn upon by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century is
a clear sign of Chinese aspirations.
In an article entitled “Some suggestions for the reforming of Chinese literature”,
Hú Shì launched a direct attack on the classical language which was
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“… openly declared to have outlived its usefulness and to have been the
fundamental cause of the utter poverty of literary masterpieces during the
past twenty centuries” 6.
Cài Yuánpéi, who had published Hú Shì’s article in a Peking National University
monthly journal, Xīn Qīngnián (新青年, New Youth), followed up with one of his
own, “A revolution in literature”. These essays virtually initiated the bái huà
movement as an organized force for reform.
6. Radical politics makes its mark on the bái huà (白话) movement
In December 1918, Chén Dúxiù (陈独秀), later to be co-founder of the Chinese
Communist Party but at this time Dean of the Faculty of Literature at Peking
National University, started Měi Zhōu Píng Lùn (the Weekly Review, 每周评论)
which was an organ of revolutionary opinion. Chén Dúxiù was already well
known as a champion of bái huà through other widely circulated magazines.
However with Měi Zhōu Píng Lùn it was absolutely clear that the bái huà
movement was no longer merely literary, but also avowedly political. The forces
of academic conservatism reacted strongly. Chén Dúxiù had obtained his
position of dean at the invitation of Cài Yuánpéi, but now he was forced to
resign, and great pressure was brought to bear on the President, Cài Yuánpéi
himself.
The historic May Fourth Movement (五四运动, Wǔsì Yùndòng) arose as a protest
movement in 1919 at first led by students, and ultimately this movement forced
the Beiyang government to reverse policies (北京政府, běiyáng zhèngfǔ, 1912 to
1928 : really a bunch of competing warlords). The Movement’s genesis was in
demonstrations against the betrayal of Chinese interests by the Western liberal
democracies during the Treaty of Versailles negotiations after World War I, in
violation of earlier promises. The consequence was deep and lasting disillusion
among Chinese intellectuals with the supposed values of those liberal
democracies, values which had previously been seen as quite attractive to many.
There was a sharp turn to more radical politics amongst many of these
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intellectuals. Thus the relative political success of the May Fourth Movement
demonstrations also vindicated the editorial position of Chén Dúxiù and his Měi
Zhōu Píng Lùn (Weekly Review) publication. Soon hundreds of periodicals
modelled on it were being published in provincial centres throughout China.
From a language use perspective, within a short time after the inception of the
May Fourth Movement all major political parties had adopted the new writing
style in their publications. Writing in 1928, Tāng Liánglǐ observed that:
“Most of the recent publications, both popular and scientific, have been in
bái huà, and newspapers have in the majority of cases ceased to publish
poems in the classical language”7.
He adds, naïvely as we can see with hindsight, that:
“The obstacles to the creation of an educated popular democracy, one of
the chief causes of the retardation of China’s political and economic
progress in the twentieth century, and of China’s inability to cope with
Western aggression, is thus removed.”
In 1950 the sinologist John de Francis could still comment that:
“The ability to read and write is still limited to fifteen or twenty percent of
the people, and perhaps even less if effective literacy is made the
criterion. In 1940 Hú Shì himself expressed the judgment that the bái
huà movement has merely been of help to a few intellectuals.” 8
7. The problem of literacy:
The generic term “language reform” turned out to have a variety of
interpretations, but underlying many of the issues was the problem of literacy.
The actions of various political players could usually be traced to the
consequences of overcoming general illiteracy and hence giving a voice to much
wider constituencies.
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a) General literacy was seen by conservatives as a threat to their elite status,
but also as a necessary correlate (to some extent) of industrialization. This
contradiction was reflected in the ambivalent and generally ineffective reform
programs of the Kuomintang period of government in mainland China (中国国民党
1928-1949).
Literacy was seen by the Communists, and by some reformers of less radical
persuasion, as a key tool in the struggle to politicize the masses. Broad
population access to a written standard was especially important in a country
like China with its many divergent spoken dialects and in some regions mutually
incomprehensible (though related) languages. Given this political realization, the
problem was to devise ways of raising the literacy of the largest number of
people in the shortest possible time.
8. The problem of promoting a national language
China has been understood in some sense as a single political entity by its small
ruling elites for many centuries. However, the reality of daily life for the myriad
communities within the geographic boundaries of the state in each historical
epoch has had little to do with a popular concept of being a Chinese national
citizen. China has always been a collection of diverse cultures and languages,
sharing certain commonalities (as for example, Europeans do) but centering on
very local interests. The idea of a modern nation state required something more
homogeneous than this, and language was an obvious potential binding agent.
Mandarin, supposedly spoken in various dialects by about 75% of the
population, seemed the natural choice for a standard national language. Most
political groups accepted in principle the overriding need for a common
language, but in China (as is the case worldwide) linguistic communities were
and are tenaciously reluctant to yield up the prominence of their own mother
tongue. That is, one’s home language is intimately bound up with personal
identity.
However, for the promoters of change, the National Language Program struck its
major problems, both logistic and political, in attempts to reconcile its idealized
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goals with some of the other objectives of language reform. There may also
have been some conflict between expressed intentions and the personal
examples of various political leaders. For example, Mao Zedong, although
sometimes eloquent about the goals of a national language, was a poor
language learner and retained a thick Hunanese accent which others often found
difficulty in comprehending.
9. The problem of code (classical Vs vernacular language)
Which code to officially favour, and the closely related issues of medium and
audience became hotly contested issues (esoteric journals, bureaucratic
material, technical information, popular journalism, political pamphlets …
intelligentsia, a Confucian elite, technocrats, literate bourgeoisie, the masses …).
These questions tended to be resolved in the end by external and largely
uncontrollable forces, but conscious ideological decisions did have an effect.
Some of those controlling influences have been referenced in the first part of this
essay.
10. The problem of script
Although mass literacy was the basic issue of contention in the Chinese language
reform movement, it was the means to literacy which attracted most debate.
China’s unique ideographic system had created a unique, and hitherto deliberate
barrier to mass literacy. The diglossic nature of classical Chinese writing had also
created an artificial (and politically useful) appearance of linguistic unity,
concealing the mass of spoken languages and dialects which really constituted
the Chinese state. That is, classical Chinese writing was essentially unrelated to
any common spoken language.
Common wisdom had it that a respectable competence in Hàn zì (汉字, Chinese
ideographic script) took about ten years of intensive study to acquire. The PRC
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administration has since challenged this, although even today the evidence of a
schooling handicap remains (through the opportunity costs to Chinese students
of having to forgo a wider curriculum). The difficulty was not primarily one of
intellectual complexity, but simply the time required to memorize thousands of
characters.
The second serious problem with ideographic writing seemed to be that it played
havoc with new communications systems. Chinese telegraphic messages had to
be sent in numbered codes, and nobody was able to devise anything
approaching a satisfactory Chinese typewriter. [Post 1974 when this was
originally written, computer technology and the Internet have largely resolved
this bottleneck, and perhaps given a new lease of life to Hàn zì].
Romanized scripts for Chinese were first devised by Christian missionaries,
beginning with the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, as an aid for learning and
teaching the language to foreigners. The missionaries had a direct concern with
transcribing the spoken languages – more often Southern Sinitic languages than
Mandarin – and this activity sometimes led them to linguistic insights which were
obscured from Chinese scholars who had a propensity to trust the classical
written tradition as antecedent to spoken forms.
The opinion was widely held by Chinese scholars(and taken over by many
Western sinologists) that the Chinese language could not be written in Latin
(Roman) script because it was monosyllabic. Yet already in 1846, the Rev.
Walter Ningpo was commenting that
“… in all parts of China the written and colloquial dialects differ so widely
as to be really two languages … the SPOKEN language of China (my
remarks are about Mandarin but are substantially true of all the dialects)
is like all other languages of the world, polysyllabic … In consequence of
this fact … it would be perfectly easy to write it with Roman characters.” 9
The missionaries were, of course, interested in promoting literacy for evangelical
purposes, but at least some of them also saw the social consequences of an
esoteric script written in a foreign language (as classical Chinese was to most
Chinese people) and permanently inaccessible to the main population. The Rev.
William Brewster wrote in 1901 that:
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“The illiterate classes have opinions. They know they are oppressed. They
resent it. But they cannot be heard because they cannot speak through
the Press. They cannot organize a reform without educated leaders. As
long as the masses endure in sullen silence, or break out only in an
occasional abortive uprising that is easily crushed, these privileged men
will go on as near as possible in the ways of their forefathers, oppressing
the people whom they despise because they can neither read nor write.”10
The Chinese themselves had taken little interest before the 1850s in the
attempts by European missionaries at Romanizing the language. It was the
social issues, recognized by William Brewster, which finally led them to ask
whether the ideographic script had outlived its usefulness.
Indigenous work in phonetic writing was pioneered by Lù Kan-chang (1854-
1928) who perceived its political and social significance even prior to the Sino-
Japanese War of 1894-9511. His alphabets were derived for Amoy (廈門話, Ē-
mn g-ōe, Xiamenese) and other dialects in the belief that literacy in the mother
tongue should precede competence in a standard national language (for which
purpose he advocated the Běijīng dialect). This choice of priorities between local
languages and the national standard was to be hotly debated in every
subsequent attempt at reform.
The work of Lù Kan-chang and several other reformers was brought to the
attention of the young Guangxu Emperor in 1898, who subsequently requested
an official examination of the issues. These actions were part of the so-called
Hundred Days Reform, a rather poorly planned palace reform which took its
inspiration from Japan’s successful modernizing Meiji Restoration. Resistance
within the bureaucracy was strong, and the coup d'état by the Empress Dowager
Cixi put an effective end to this enterprise.
The 19th Century Qing Dynasty (清朝 Qīng Cháo) administration did not have a
Ministry of Education, let alone the kind of education policy which was a
prerequisite of any effective language reform program. In 1898 Wáng Chao, a
secretary on the Board of Rites, urged the Emperor to establish such a ministry,
but court intrigues forced him to flee for his life13. Living in exile in Japan, Wáng
Chao devised a syllabic script of sixty-two syllables, derived from parts of
Chinese characters and strongly influenced by the Japanese Kana symbols. A
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syllable could be expressed by two symbols, with a further mark to indicate
tone.
Wáng Chao’s syllabic Mandarin Alphabet was widely promoted, although covertly
at first since the issue was politically sensitive. Schools were established to teach
the system and eventually it spread the thirteen provinces. The militarist Yuán
Shì kǎi (袁世凯;later president, then briefly self-proclaimed Emperor) and others
like him were impressed with the efficiency of the system. They had learned
from the Japanese example the overwhelming advantage of a literate army.
When Yuán Shì kǎi fell from power in 1908, the use of the Mandarin Alphabet
was proscribed, but the cause was taken up again by Láo Nǎi Xuān (劳乃宣, Lao
Nai-hsueh) an influential bureaucrat and scholar.
Láo Nǎi Xuān took over the Mandarin Alphabet and added various symbols that
would make it possible to be used with other dialects14. Between 1905 and 1921
he repeatedly petitioned successive governments to accept the Mandarin
Alphabet and promote a program of mass education, but his recommendations
were always pigeonholed by officialdom. Láo’s proposal to adapt the Mandarin
Alphabet to other dialects was strongly opposed by many reformers who felt that
such a move would split China into a cacophony of small “Balkan” states.
However, the principle of phonetic symbols written alongside ideographs as a
guide to pronunciation was widely accepted (Japanese furigana do something
similar).
Cài Yuánpéi (蔡元培, Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei), first Education Minister in the Republican
Government, convened a conference in 1912 on “The Proposal for the Adoption
of a Phonetic Alphabet”. Reformers of all persuasions were represented, and
personal ambitions impacted a good deal on the discussion. A key issue was the
status of regional dialects, and after the debate had descended into fisticuffs, the
regionalists were defeated. The conference then proceeded to adopt a system of
non-Romanized symbols, largely based on the work of Chang Ping-lin. This later
became known as the National Phonetic Alphabet15 (which today forms the basis
for Taiwan’s Bopomofo system of phonetic transcription). The government
proved indifferent to the conference’s recommendations, distrusting the political
implications of the movement. Only nominal steps were taken to promote the
National Phonetic Alphabet. The script achieved its greatest success in the anti-
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illiteracy campaigns of James Yàn’s (晏阳初 Yàn Yángchū) National Association of
Mass Education Movements which was intended to bring literacy to the masses
in the 1920s and attracted more than five million students, but even here it was
never used as more than an adjunct to the traditional ideographs.
Hú Shì opposed the National Phonetic Alpabet on the grounds that it did not go
far enough. He felt that reform of the script should concern itself with the
tendency of popular usage to evolve simpler ideographs by reducing the number
of strokes16. Note that the People’s Republic adopted precisely this procedure
thirty years later. Others sought the more radical alternative of abolishing
ideographs altogether and developing a Romanized script.
Yuen Ren Chao (赵元任 Zhào Yuán rèn), an American based Chinese linguist,
developed and promoted one of the most widely accepted Romanization
solutions: Gwoyeu romatzyh or ‘GR’ (国语罗马字, Guoyu romazi). GR featured no
diacritical marks, the writing together of syllables which formed words, and the
adoption of a fixed system of indicating tones by a fundamental change in the
spelling in syllables. GR was based on sound scholarship and attracted a certain
amount of official support, but its method of tone spelling was found over-
complicated by those trying to promote mass literacy.
The Soviet Union had early adopted a policy of encouraging literacy among its
many national minorities, including a Chinese element. As a part of this program
very professional efforts were made to devise satisfactory scripts for the
minority languages. In 1929, Qū Qiū bái (瞿秋白, Ch’u Ch’iu Pai), a leading
Chinese communist and Russian translator, in cooperation with the Russian
linguist V.S. Kolakolev, began to devise a system of Romanization for Chinese.
Initial attempts were heavily criticized, but in 1931 a commission under the
chairmanship of B.M. Alexiev tackled the problem professionally and the
resulting system, Latinxue (later called SinWenz or New Writing; 拉丁化新文字;
Lādīnghuà Xīn Wénzì) was taught with wide success amongst the Soviet Chinese
minority18. It played an important part in promoting literacy in northern China,
and was used in three hundred distinct publications as well as by the north-
eastern railway system for all communications. However, communist-controlled
regions ceased to support it in 1944 for political reasons.
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An understanding of the principles of Latinxue or New Writing did not become
current among scholars in China itself until 1934, when Y.H. Chao managed to
obtain a copy of one of the textbooks being used. The proponents of GR soon
made their opposition to Latinxue plain on the basis that it ignored tonal
representation and would therefore lead to massive ambiguity in expression. It
was also attacked because of its ready adaptability to the other dialects of China
(i.e. it undermined the goal of one nation, one language).
The New Writing or Latinxue Movement was taken up in the 1930s by many
urban student groups. Efforts were made to establish special classes and to
publish material suitable for consumption by the semi-literate. The highly
political overtones acquired by the New Writing Movement also meant that its
success was closely dependent upon the political strength of its protagonists.
The Japanese occupation in 1937 had the effect of dispersing teachers of the
New Writing throughout the country, but also on developing forums for its study
in various refugee settlements (e.g. the International Settlement in Beijing).
In 1938 the Propaganda Ministry of the National Government published a
statement which stated that:
“… There is no objection if the Chinese Latinization Movement is made the
subject of research in the field of pure scholarship or is viewed as an
instrument of the social movement”20.
This statement was interpreted literally by supporters of the New Writing
Movement, but they soon encountered strong official opposition.
The Communists never became wholly committed to pushing one kind of script
at the expense of others, but they quickly realized the potential of New Writing
for promoting literacy, especially in the army. Hsu T’e-li, Communist
Commissioner of Education in 1935, estimated that in the Party and among the
Red Army officers, at least twenty thousand were able to read and write New
Writing21. However the figures were still pitiful considering the magnitude of the
problem.
In 1940 a vigorous literacy program in New Writing was mounted in the
communist controlled areas, yet four years later it had made little progress. The
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problem was not the motivation of teachers (who were scarce) or of learners,
but the constant struggle for physical survival with limited resources.
Peasant associations in areas where the Communists had taken control were
invariably eager to establish village schools. It is true however that the peasants’
conception of education was quite conservative. They valued the ‘traditional’
styles and were heartily suspicious of modern primary schools staffed by people
from the cities22. We might guess that that conservatism would have favoured
the choice of ideographs against ‘foreign’ Romanized script.
The attitude of the peasant associations to education is perhaps the most telling
comment on the Language Reform Movement in all its aspects. Broadly speaking,
language reform was aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate, that is, the less
privileged sectors of the population. However, in the nature of the case its
promoters (even its communist promoters) came from the literate and more
privileged sector of the population. Attempts at language reform helped to give
the intelligentsia a living appreciation of the virility of China’s spoken languages
– the languages of the mass of the people – and to this extent prepared them
for the difficult task of aligning their own aspirations with those who lacked a
voice or a pen.
~~~~~~
Bibliography (* Chinese spellings used for authors here are as in the original
publications. In the essay I have used modern Chinese spellings where known)
deFrancis, John (1950) Nationalism and Language Reform in China. Princeton
University Press.
Fisher, Beverly (April,1972) “Impressions of Language in China”. The China
Quarterly, vol. 50
Grieder, J.B. (1970) Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance. Harvard University
Press
Hsiao Hsia (ed. 1960) China. New Haven: HRAF Press
Mao Tse-Tung (1954) Selected Works, volume I. London: Lawrence & Wishart
T’ang, Leang-li(1928) The Foundations of Modern China. London: Noel Douglas
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References
1 T’ang 105 / 2 T’ang 105 / 3 T’ang 99 / 4 Grieder / 5 T’ang 100 / 6 T’ang 105 / 7 T’ang 107 / 8 deFrancis 12 / 9 deFrancis 21 / 10 deFrancis 27 / 11 / deFrancis 34 / 12 deFrancis 40 / 13 deFrancis 44 / 14 deFrancis 48 / 15 deFrancis 63 / 16
deFrancis 72 / 17 deFrancis 73 / 18 deFrancis 97 / 19 deFrancis 117 / 20 deFrancis 126 / 21 deFrancis 128 / 22 Mao 56
Contemporary links
Anderson, T (April 26, 2011) “Language Nation and Literacy: Visions of Chinese
Language Reform from 1895-1919”. In Other Words blog, online @
https://tomalden.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/language-nation-and-
literacy-visions-of-chinese-language-reform-from-1895-1919/
DeFrancis, John (1950) Nationalism and Language Reform in China. Princeton
University Press. Chapter 4, “One State, One People, One Language”
online @ http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/DeFr1950.html
Morris, Ruth (December 03, 2013) “Hundreds of millions of Chinese stubbornly
resist speaking the 'common tongue'”. Public Radio International, online @ http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-12-03/hundreds-millions-chinese-stubbornly-resist-speaking-common-tongue
Sun Ye (8 December 2013) “Digital dialects”. China Daily online @
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-12/08/content_17159799.htm Wickenkamp, Carol (January 12, 2014) “Beijing Pushes Mandarin, Punishing
Ethnic Tongues “ Epoch Times online @ http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/445674-beijing-pushes-mandarin-
punishing-ethnic-tongues/ Wikipedia (2015) “Standard Chinese”. Wikpedia online @
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese
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Professional bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive linguistics, at which he has
rarely succeeded in making a living. He has also, perhaps fatally in a career sense, cultivated an
interest in how things work – people, brains, systems, countries, machines, whatever… In the
world of daily employment he has mostly taught English as a foreign language, a stimulating
activity though rarely regarded as a profession by the world at large.
Thor’s eventually awarded PhD dissertation, Language Tangle, dealt with language teaching
productivity. Language Tangle (2010) is aimed at professional educators and their institutional
keepers, and accordingly adopts a generally more discursive style than his earlier, more formal
work in linguistic analysis.
Thor has been teaching English to non-native speakers, training teachers and lecturing linguistics,
since 1976. This work has taken him to seven countries in Oceania and East Asia, mostly with
tertiary students, but with a couple of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He
has trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. Thor taught in Chinese tertiary institutions
for five years altogether (1998-2000 and 2007-2010).
In an earlier life, prior to becoming a teacher, he had a decade of finding his way out of working
class origins, through unskilled jobs in Australia, New Zealand and finally England (after
backpacking across Asia in 1972).
contact: http://thormay.net [email protected]
academic repository: Academia.edu at http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay
Language Reform in Revolutionary China © Thor May 1974-2015