Dan Snow's History Hit - The Revolution of The Chinese Script

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology.Jing Tsu is a cultural historian, linguist and literary scholar. Joining Dan on the podcast, Jing tells the story of China's most daunting challenge as a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalised, digital world and transform China into a superpower in the process.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Everyone's talking about China. You've heard me talk about China a lot in this podcast. We're all fascinated by the rise of China. What's it mean? What's the future hold in terms of the relationship between China and its neighbours, China and the rest of the world? But today I'm talking to a guest about a very particular aspect of China's rise. In fact, an aspect without which it would have been impossible for China to embrace modern technology and grow into such a gigantic economic and technological powerhouse. Because what we're talking about today is the Chinese language, Chinese script. Now think about it. The Chinese

script is made up of something like 80,000 symbols and characters, of which 3,000 are needed for everyday communication. How, in the 19th century, 20th century, did you communicate using Morse code, telegraphy, typewriters? How do you communicate in that script? Do you have to either jettison an ancient language to which you're deeply attached and proud of, or do you work out clever ways to adapt these Western technologies and preserve something essential about the Chinese language itself? This is the subject of a wonderful new book written by Ching Tzu. She's a culture historian. She's a linguist, a literary scholar. She's the first tenured professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale University. She's a really, really remarkable scholar. And it's great to get

her on the podcast to talk about how the Chinese adapted their language to suit the needs of an economy that was transforming itself, that was dealing with the challenges and opportunities posed by the West. This is super interesting, folks. It's about the past, the present and the future of China. Thank you very much, Jing, for coming on the podcast. I hope you all enjoy. Jing, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Dan. This is such an amazing story you tell. And it strikes me that it's one that's kind of elemental to the building of China, not only as a superpower of the 21st century, but all the way back. It's the kind of slightly unglamorous, but super important ways

in which standardizing things, weights, measures, the way we talk about things, language, that is the foundation of empire, of greatness't it absolutely and for china i think the the person who had the foresight was well also one of the most draconian rulers with the emperor qing who built a great wall who standardized measures measurements who also unified the chinese language because before then china was broken up in different kingdoms they were rivaling or they had little to do with each other. But it was that one idea of unifying the language, which for us, you know, modern-day nationalists, we live in the world of the nation-state.

We didn't theorize the importance of language until 19th century. We realized, gosh, nationhood is about one language, one blood, one land, one people. Although we talk about the first emperor in 3rd century BCE, actually, even in the 19th century, that job wasn't complete, you might say. And talk to me about the situation in the 19th century as the West is galloping off with publishing and the media and everything. How were things different in China linguistically? In China, there were hundreds of dialects, and I never failed to see the importance, appreciate the importance of this, is how big China is,

which we all understand in some ways. But when you have this huge population spread across such a wide geographic area, it's a problem when they speak different dialects, right? And that's why the written Chinese script has been so important, because that was the one way in which at least the educated and the learned could communicate. But you will have problems nonetheless, like officials trying to distribute famine relief or take census. And they move outside the capital and they basically cannot really understand what's being said. So there are these centuries of frustration that have been reported. And the problem was, how do you unify the country? And usually they were able to paper over it by speaking Mandarin, which is kind of an official language that the official bureaucracy learned to communicate in.

But nonetheless, in the 20th century, we had to give the power of the word back to the people or to the people for the very first time. Then it became like a much bigger challenge. we just think of these things that were invented like telegraphs and telegrams and morse code and even the explosion in printing that comes from the 16th, 17th century onwards. And actually, as you point out, this kind of heterodox linguistic environment was not really well adapted to those new technologies that were coming in. No, and that's why this book is really a story about China and the West. Because if it weren't for telegraphy, if it weren't typewriting, if it weren't computing, Chinese probably didn't really have to deal with this huge challenge, didn't have to really rethink what is our language

system about? And is it really inefficient compared to the Western alphabet? You know, truth be told, if you look at it, the answer is yeah, kind of, because Western alphabet, 26 letters, I'm sure you, Dan, learned it by age three. With those 26 letters, you can generate any word that uses the alphabetic script. But Chinese language, you have to basically memorize. I mean, I remember when I was growing up practicing and learning characters just wrote by hand and committing to muscle memory by repeating a character 30, 40 times in these kind of square ruled notebooks. But in the early 20th century, where China was the last dynasty on its last legs,

and it's under tremendous pressure to reform and to figure out whether it's going to be able to survive in the 20th century, the big question was, what if our language is the one thing that got in the way? Before we work out what the solutions were to that, talk to me a little bit more, because I love your description of the language. It's a language that stretches way back into prehistoric times. You mentioned you had to write, learn all these ones by rote. How many characters we have to learn?

I mean, just tell me a little bit more. Assume that the listeners, brackets me, knows absolutely nothing about it. Well, the average literacy for reading newspapers probably can, 3,000 to 4,000 characters. That's quite a lot compared to 26 alphabet letters. You know, the existing Mexican, one could say that characters, there's about 80,000 plus characters in a given, and you can find in these sort of comprehensive, the OED version of Chinese. given in the, you can find in the sort of the comprehensive, the OED version of Chinese.

And it's a real problem because throughout the century, you see how the imperial bureaucracies, every emperor had to struggle with, okay, too many characters, let's call it down. So you see, if I were to try to graph a little bit like kind of hourglass shape, where there are periods where Chinese characters would explode. And it's also, remember, it's a sort of subject to heterodox use as well. So cults used it. The populace used it in ways that were not sanctioned. Like they have these funky scripts that they use to make it easier to write. And it's not the official what a scholar would accept. Throughout the ages, you can see how Chinese characters really kind of this very organic,

cumulative mass of symbols attached to sounds that really had to be periodically perched to keep it down. So this is not something that happens in Western alphabetic language. It's just, I think it's sort of physically contained. And I want to point out also, there's a very powerful characteristic of the Western alphabet. It is not often appreciated, which is that it comes in a self-organizing order, right? So you know that B comes after A, S before T, that's basically universal. And that is actually very powerful

when it comes to the technological age, right? When you want to order something, when you want to organize something, that language has its power within. And Chinese character, basically, the character system throughout 20th century, that was a holy grail for the Chinese reformers. Like, how do we do this? Is there some hidden alphabet-like potential power within the Chinese

group that we fail to see? And now if we're to compete with the Western world, can we somehow develop that power without going wholesale and completely dependent on the use of the Western alphabet? Well, it's exciting. What is the answer to that question what happens and what adjustments are made and are they indigenous responses are they borrowed like how does the the language accommodate itself with the west things like telegraphy yes the question is what was the answer what do they do well it took several translators and the first was basically telegraphy how How do you send Chinese characters, thousands of characters in a Morse code that's developed for alphabet letters?

This solution was actually developed by the Danes. So it's not even the Chinese who came up with the solution themselves because the Danes wanted to break into the Chinese market. And they basically assigned random four-digit numbers to each Chinese character. It's a problem because when you use alphabet letters, it's very easy. Just remember, okay, the letter E has one dot. You can memorize it. You basically don't need to consult a code book. But for Chinese characters, these four numbers are rather random because the Danes were really thinking about how do we think of a system that's very intuitive for the Chinese to use. They were just thinking about how do we just break into this market because the Danes were also the ones who actually forcibly laid the first telegraphic cables on Chinese soil.

So they hired this French guy, this French harbor master, very dashing as I understand it, who was considered kind of an arrogant, unlikable person by his peers. So he refined that system and this system basically stayed in use from 1873 well into the 20th century. Now, it's not that the Chinese just accepted it passively, because even as soon as it came out, they were trying to improve upon it, trying to bend the stick back, try to make it more intuitive for the Chinese and try to clean the universality of a telegraphic code. But this is a story of how important standardization is and the first mover advantage.

Because once people started using it, once it was kind of official and then commercial companies used it, it was almost impossible to reverse. That was a painful lesson, a very important one. Because after that, the Chinese realized, ah, we should never let Westerners dominate our market. That if they were to bring in the technology, that we have to be very careful to try to control it and make sure it serves our needs.

So that's the story number one. And of course, there's the typewriting. How do you fit all these characters onto a Western alphabetic keyboard? very short, I could tell you what the punchline is, which is basically the Chinese figured out how to dismantle each character into parts so that these parts are kind of like alphabet letters that you can then spell any character. So the beautiful part of this, and it's really kind of ingenious, is that when you break down the character that way, it adds just about two to four parts that you can kind of break it down into which means when you type a Chinese character on a keyboard you only take two to four strokes then if you type

an English word I think the average length of English word is 4.7 to 5 in that range so it means you can actually type Chinese faster on alphabetic QWERTY keyboard than you can an English word now let alone the Romanized version of Chinese, you know, the pinging, like my name, J-I-N-G. Actually, that's not a good example because my name is so short. Let's use my whole name. This is Jing Su, J-I-N-G-T-S-U. So typing that on a keyboard is really inefficient. But if I use a Chinese way, it is much easier. So this is the interesting that happened. They basically piggybacked on Western government technology. That's so interesting. And yet the shapes they came up with to break down the characters, they're not shapes that are described in Chinese history.

There's useful ways of breaking down these characters, are they? That's right. Because Chinese characters, you know, we talk about Chinese characters, are they? That's right. Because Chinese characters, you know, we talk about Chinese characters, ideographic, like pictures, pictographic. But in truth, no more than 3% of Chinese characters are actually ideographic or pictographic. Even that's very questionable. But what the Chinese language former figured out is that, you know what, shape, the way something looks, the way the script looks actually very important to the Chinese language. Not like the alphabet. We don't think of the alphabet as being ideographic or pictographic, even though capital A was originally a house according to the Phoenician alphabet. So for Chinese, they figure, okay, shape is actually very important to us. So let's think

about the character geometrically in spatial patterns. So this shape analysis was proposed by this librarian in the book who named himself Bismarck Du because he was going to rule the field of library science with an iron fist. So he came up with this H-shape analysis and he said, oh, look, you can sort of split up a character

vertically, side by side, or horizontally, or kind of nestled, kind of layered like a Christmasmas tree so he thought it was a very very clever way of basically making the chinese act and think and talk and look like an alphabet but relying on the shape patterns rather than actual letters you listen to dan snow's history hit I'm talking about the Chinese language. More coming up.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You write about the reaction this causes, and particularly because you've got the example of Japan just off the east coast of China.

There are vigorous debates within China about having to accommodate themselves to these Western ideas and motifs. Yes, absolutely. And one would think that Chinese would say, no, no, no, we're going to reject romanization at all costs, right? Because it's Western. But it's actually not true.

So throughout the 20th century within China, there was a lot of debates, heated controversies and fights over what is going to be the fate of the Chinese script. But it was decided rather early on, even in 1912, 1913 at this particular Congress,

they decided that characters are not going to be abolished, that they would adapt. They will even develop auxiliary systems like a phonetic alphabet or even Roman letters, but characters will stay no matter what. And they were prepared

to bear the cost of that. And so we think of the 20th century innovation under Mao as, oh, he simplified characters. He also Romanized the Chinese script right into what we call pinging system. So things just like my name, like my name is spelled J-I-N-G and so on and so forth. But those two measures were always meant as bridge solutions to ultimately preserving and allowing the Chinese writing system to thrive.

ultimately preserving and allowing the Chinese writing system to thrive. So, you know, to do that, they were willing to alter and to adapt to a sort of Western alphabetic system. It was always clear that was going to be the outward facing part, that Chinese character always maintained his own identity. And with the development of dictation apps and with all sorts of new technology, it looks like it was exactly the right call. You had to find a bridging way of getting to a point at which technology could accommodate this different type of alphabet, right? You're exactly right. And that's kind of the story, like our history of science technology

is that a lot of times the ideas was there, but we didn't have the technology to actually exploit it. I mean, think about how useless a keyboard actually is going to be pretty soon. We have dictation. I don't know, it's going to be pretty soon Google will come up with something where you think a word and it's going to pop up on the screen. But, you know, we came up with a keyboard because we had no other way of interacting with machines directly. We needed a mediator, right? We need to translate our human language into a keyboard, into a language that computers can understand, which is sort of zeros and ones. That's how we communicate. So these layers of mediation

is because we didn't have a technology that could be direct. But now, hard to say. One could say that all language systems, written language systems, in some ways have a questionable future. Do we need writing? We know the deterioration of handwriting.

Well, since you have a young son, you might be a very strict parent in making him practice his penitentiary. But you know, I find my penmanship in Chinese, I find a deteriorating. The lines are not always straight. And so there's a sense in which I'm not sure where we're at this cusp

of technological change. Is it going to change our habits? Is it going to change our habits of communicating with ourselves? Because we know that being able to write is actually that first technology, that first technological innovations that humans came up with to externalize our thoughts. So that you're not just like free associates on your own head,

living in a string of consciousness, but to actually be able to put your thoughts out there, to further refine it, to deepen it, to communicate with it. So it's unclear whether the writing system could alone bear that responsibility. Or do we have, as you said, dictation? I mean, I don't talk to Siri much, but all my friends do. And I still prefer cramping my thumbs. At least I can remember how to spell.

But it is interesting. What is the fate of the written human script? Also, what is the nature of China's relationship with technology in the West? And at a time now when you would no longer be able to describe that as Western technology, I presume. I mean, because it's just as likely the next wave is just as likely to emerge from China. It's very true. And, you know, just a couple of years ago, the Chinese company Baidu actually came up with a better machine translation algorithm than Google. And one of

the reasons is because China has been a very diligent understudy of Western civilization much longer. And I think they studied the West with much more seriousness and in greater depth than we have in reverse. And so one of the things that happened with Chinese script revolution is that because they spent so many decades trying to figure out the alphabetic structure, the alphabetic environment, as well as their own, that they actually ended up learning a lot more than what the technological wave is going to be next. So they figure out, for instance, for Chinese character writing, Chinese language, that sentence segmentation is very important. That's to say, you know how to group words together to guess at their meaning. And Chinese, you absolutely have to know that

because the characters, they can mean different things, but it's really what characters they end up with that actually produces sense. But that is something that was like a great handicap for the Chinese because the alphabet technology from telegraphic typewriter doesn't really care about that because we have space that separates each word. But Chinese doesn't have that. So what they end up doing was they place a lot of emphasis on trying to figure out how do you make word

segmentation work with these technologies. That is actually a very useful thing now for machine learning and to an automatic translation. When you talk to your Siri, you actually have to figure out the context of what you're saying. And Chinese has been much longer honing this particular niche technology. Just remember that Western alphabet is not really a Western technology anymore. And Lyndon, way back when, has said, alphabetization is going to be the greatest revolution of the East. He saw no problem in adapting Western technology because he knew that they would take it over. the greatest revolution of the East. He saw no problem in adapting Western technology

because he knew that they would take it over. But it's also so interesting that the tech at any one time might slightly privilege one group with particular historical and cultural traits over another, but there's no guarantee it will continue to do that. And as you point out, it's now quicker to type Chinese characters on a keyboard and the sentence structure has given the Chinese an advantage. So in fact, it's so interesting

always with the book, seeing how brief this period of technology and hegemony was in the West. It's true. And one could also say that China's hegemony may also not be forever. We're so used to just taking headlines about what's happening between China and the US and whatnot in Europe that we sort of forget that this is a long game that we're looking at now. The dust, I think, has settled a bit. I think US-China relations are basically a moment

where I feel like we're now entering the real era of competition and science, technology, so on and so forth. Amazing stuff. And your book is the perfect history for that new phase of the relationship because it's the story of that technology and that relationship as it evolves.

So thank you very much indeed. Everyone make sure you go out and buy it. Tell us what it's called, Jing. Kingdom of Characters, the Language Revolution that Made China Modern. It's such a remarkable book. So thank you very much for coming on and talking about it. Thank you, Dan.

Always a pleasure. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. remarkable book. So thank you very much for coming on and talking about it. Thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure. you