Throughline - The Characters That Built China (2022)

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Today, China is a global superpower. But less than two hundred years ago, the nation was in a state of decline. After what became known as the 'century of humiliation' at the hands of Western imperialist powers, its very survival was in question. A movement arose to fight off foreign interference and preserve Chinese culture in the face of intense pressure from a rapidly-changing world. And the key to that movement was language.In this episode, we follow three key reformers who worked to modernize written and spoken Chinese, sometimes risking their lives to do so. Their work simplified Chinese, standardized it, and took it from an inaccessible language built for the elite to a modern language for the masses. It was a struggle that spanned generations, changed the fate of millions of people, and helped create the powerful modern nation-state of China.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. The U.S. tends to think of itself as the center of the world. And to some degree, that's true. Our country's economic, military, and cultural power have dominated the globe for decades. But that's changing. Over the past few years, we've watched Russia invade Ukraine, North Korea test nuclear weapons, and China threaten Taiwan. When we need a break from the news, we might binge the dystopian world of Squid Game, dance it out to some K-pop, or distract ourselves with videos on the Chinese-owned platform TikTok. And we do it all on devices powered by Taiwanese semiconductors.

We're going to devote our next few episodes to telling some of the stories of how China, South Korea, and Taiwan came to shape so many aspects of life around the world. We're calling this series Superpower. We start with the characters that built China, a sweeping story filled with spies, book smugglers, and visionary librarians who stake their lives on the effort to create and share a common written language. The oldest theory we have of how Chinese characters came into being is actually this myth of this four-eyed sage

who spent his days looking up at the clouds and noticing the formation and pattern. And then he looked down on the ground and looked at how the birds were leading tracks on the sand.

He noticed that there are these recurrent patterns in the universe that kind of tie the world together. And then the lore has it that from that, that's how he developed characters. China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world. And the language is the oldest living language we have that is still used. And the earliest records we have is really from the third millennium BCE. Those records are pictographs

carved on turtle shells from thousands of years ago. Writing was and continues to be a fundamental part of Chinese identity. Today, China is a global superpower. But that disguises the fact that less than 200 years ago, the nation was in a state of decline and its survival was in question. And a movement arose to fight off foreign interference, to bring China back from the dead. The key to that movement was what the four-eyed sage saw in the clouds. Language. It's the desire to see China survive the modern age. This is Jing Su. I teach at Yale University.

I work on modern China from 19th century to the present. She wrote a book called Kingdom of Characters. The language revolution that made China modern. Jing says that the fight to modernize Chinese as a language represents the beginning of China's climb to being a superpower. Because if you ask linguists, they will all tell you that if you look at Chinese system, by all counts, it should not have survived. It's complicated, hard to learn. It defies everything we deem important in a modern age, which is quickness and speed and efficiency and precision.

So when you think about it, the Western alphabet has 26 letters. And once you've learned these 26 letters, you can compose any word you want from basically all Indo-European languages. Chinese doesn't work this way. It's not made of letters, but it's made of strokes, which are really just any kind of line you can draw on paper without lifting your pen. How something is written is incredibly important, and the order in which you actually write those strokes. Chinese characters can be complex and difficult to write. They also aren't phonetic. You're probably thinking to yourself, well, the alphabet is so much easier, which it is.

You only have 26, whereas you have up to 80,000 Chinese characters. 80,000 characters. To learn any character, you have to memorize it. And in order to do that, you have to practice writing them. And Jing knows firsthand how hard it is to do that. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, the way I learned Chinese writing was, I literally had, you know, we would get assigned anywhere between 12 to 40 Chinese characters. And I would spend two, three hours every night writing each out like 20 to 40 times,

depending on how complicated it is, just so I can commit it to both mental and muscle memory. So this is how literacy was acquired. A lot of time, cumulatively. So, you know, it just takes a lot longer, a lot more effort. These characters that Jing was learning to write were first standardized more than 2,200 years ago. And just like some of you might be wondering, outsiders who first came across written Chinese had a question. How did the Chinese writing happen?

I think centuries of Western observers really puzzled over this question because it is quite more or less an insular civilization. So you can imagine when the Western explorers first encountered China and the Chinese language and the customs, Confucianism, they could scarcely believe their eyes because here's this venerable civilization that's very highly refined, highly developed literacy and cultural system. You know, in the 17th, 18th century, Chinese was very much revered. But over time, Western feelings changed.

As European colonizers became the dominant force on the world stage, China was sidelined, and its culture and language were now looked down upon. It's easy to feel good about ourselves and think that we're the center of the universe until someone else comes along that's different from us and tells us otherwise, which is exactly what happened to China. This adoration and admiration for Chinese language in the 18th century flipped. So the fight to save the language was also a fight to save China and its culture, to carry its past into the future, and to create a unified identity. And so it was really a sheer force of will.

In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to learn how three figures within a movement spanning generations imposed order over the Chinese language. Chinese was simplified, standardized, and taken from an inaccessible language built for the elite to a language for the masses. It was a huge struggle that spanned generations and changed the fate of millions and millions of people. And helped create the modern, powerful nation-state of China. Hi, this is Bob, and I'm the third shift custodian at a university that I at one point attended. You're listening to Thru Superline on NPR. the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. The Century of Humiliation In the first spring of the 20th century, a man arrived on a boat in the port of Yantai in northeast China. He disguised himself as a Buddhist monk so as not to rouse any attention.

He'd been away from China for two years, exiled in Japan. He was completely disguised because anyone knew he came back, he would have executed. He didn't have weapons. He didn't have the keys to some secret treasure chest. Instead, he came back to China with an idea. He basically snuck through across the border with this pamphlet that he had hidden in his robe. Tucked in his sleeve was a fragile document made of rice paper that would change the country of China forever. But let's go back. In the middle of the 19th century, the rulers of China, the Qing Dynasty,

were warring with European powers. Conflicts which became known as the Opium Wars. Basically, the British wanted to sell opium in China, and China resisted. The Qing Dynasty had outlawed opium selling and consumption. But British companies were making a fortune selling opium in China. So Britain, with France joining in later, waged a war to force China to allow opium back into the country. They forced China to open up five treaty ports. And they got what they wanted.

The Opium War was really the beginning of what came to be known as the Century of National Humiliation. The Century of Humiliation. For decades after the Opium War, various European powers would pick apart China's economy and sovereignty. After the Brits, there were the Americans, there were the French, and even the Germans. So everybody just kind of came piling on and tried to breach China's gates. And, you know, China fought very hard to not become colonized like it saw India, right, under the British Empire.

It also recognized that old empires like Egypt, Persia, that they all basically were destroyed by Westernization. They had to go through this long period of figuring out, how do we even begin to fight this? Does it have to do with ourselves? Like, look at our own institutions, something wrong with the way we have held ourselves. China's worldview was basically falling apart around them. China's elites did some soul searching to figure out how things

ended up like this. How did a once proud, strong civilization fall before the West? And they realized, wow, to be a modern nation, you actually need modern citizens. And how do you have citizens when they're not educated? And how can citizens be educated if they can't read or write? During this time, China had a literacy rate of less than 30% among men and as low as 2% among women. Many of the language reformers in the late 19th century, they saw how Western power had guns and boats. They had wealth and power.

And to them, when the Chinese thought about what is their secret, they can't help but think about, well, part of it is their language. So the whole issue of language became tangled up with the issue of literacy and giving power of the word to the people. So a plan was needed that could be used to create millions of educated citizens. A plan that was written on a piece of rice paper tucked inside the robe of a man in disguise sneaking back into China. The man's name? Wang Zhao. Born in 1859, the last year of the Opium Wars, Wang Zhao lived through the events of the Century of Humiliation. He himself was known to be very swarthy, very strong. He has great integrity, but gosh, was he difficult.

He was an extremely hard-nosed personality to deal with. Coming from a military family background, he became a bureaucrat in the Qing dynasty. And he was a loyalist. He never missed a day's roll call at the court. And he really had deep loyalties to the empire. But still, he was very wary of where the empire was going. He felt that what was really important for China's future destiny was the language.

Because to become a modern nation, he felt that China needed a single language that they can communicate in mutually, right? That's mutually understandable. Now remember, China has hundreds, if not thousands of dialects, right? But for Wang Zhao, he foresaw that to standardize, you actually need to make sure that the Chinese can communicate with each other. He knew that language had to be the key to the kind of unity that would be required of modern nationalism. So Wang Zhao and a group of reformers came up with plans to reform China and its language. Initially, the Qing emperor was open to it. But the powerful Empress Dowager was not.

They started a movement that lasted all but 100 days of reform. And the Empress Dowager shut it down. They went into exile, fled to Japan, because there was then a bounty on their heads. But Wang Zhao didn't give up on his dream in exile. He kept developing his ideas for simplifying and standardizing Chinese. So after two years in Japan, he smuggled himself back into China disguised as a monk in order to try and apply his new ideas to teach this new version of the language. And so he came back at great risk to his life, to China. He was traveling, you know, trying to stay off the big roads and open roads

and trying to find his way back to his allies and his home. He headed north, crossing through the countryside and sleeping in open fields. And so in that process, he came across the peasants, most of whom were illiterate and uneducated. And it kind of confirms his belief like, gosh, the Chinese really need to be more educated. But what's preventing them, right? What's preventing them from seeking and acquiring, you know, better enlightenment is really language. That you really need to give the power of literacy for people so that they can open the door themselves and walk through it. Wang Zhao wanted to do two things.

One was to make his dialect, Mandarin, the standard language across China. The second was to come up with a writing system that would let people of other dialects sound out words in Mandarin. And what made it especially difficult was that there was no purely phonetic representation to tell you how to sound out a character. For example, if you were given the letters D-O-G, you already know how to pronounce each of those individual letters, which allows you to sound out the word dog. But because each character is made up of strokes, and the strokes don't tell you how to sound it out, you would have no idea how to pronounce a character you've never seen before. And this is where Wang Zhao comes in. Remember that plan he had tucked in his robe? Wang Zhao wanted to come up with a phonetic representation of characters, so that you can learn characters faster, better, more efficiently. It would be easier for, you know for different speakers, different dialects to learn the writing system

if they could somehow bridge it, if they could hear how it's pronounced in their own dialect as well as a standard dialect. So he came up with his own phonetic system based on strokes. Each stroke represents a different sound. The system that offered a finite set of phonetic symbols, around 50, that could teach all Chinese how to pronounce Chinese in the same way. After crossing through the countryside, Wang Zhao eventually ended up back in his hometown,

where he would test out his plan to see if it would really be faster and easier to learn Mandarin through his writing system. He had to test it out. He had to see if the conditions were ready. Because after all, remember, he had been away for two years. And China had just gone through this tumult and things were still very unstable. And so he was kind of, he had to be very cautious and alert to see, is this the time to bring this back? While he stayed low and behind the scenes,

he had a friend at the Ministry of Education promote his Mandarin writing system. And it was a hit. By 1906, people were teaching it at schools throughout the region. Soon, lots of people were taking credit for it, saying they came up with the idea. And that he just couldn't stand any longer because he will not be upstaged by copycats.

So he had to let everyone know, this is my system, my plan. He just walked right into the police headquarters and turned himself in. And none of his friends and family knew what was happening to him. They thought maybe he was being tortured. Wang Zhao's sentence was promptly handed down. Life imprisonment. But with a little pleading and a friend helping to pull some strings, Wang Zhao was released and even exonerated.

With this second chance, Wang Zhao would push for his language reform with an even stronger conviction as the ruling powers in China were changing. By 1911, the Qing dynasty had fallen, bringing an end to the long lineage of dynastic rule in China. But with the end of a tradition spanning thousands of years, it also meant a new beginning for the country, and its future as a republic was declared. With a new nationalist government looking for ways the country could pick itself back up, they quickly saw that something had to be done about the Chinese language. Now, what's important to note is that

Wang Zhao was not the only person thinking about reforming the Chinese language. There were others, which is why there's a big congress about what should be the standard for the national pronunciation of Chinese. It was held in 1913 at the capital in Beijing. And of course, Wang Zhao was going to be there to represent his idea. So there were people from the south, and Wang Zhao from the north. There were people from Sichuan. So there were people from the south and Wang Zhao from the north. There were people from Sichuan and there were people from all kinds of other places. And they all had one goal in mind.

They want their own dialect to become the standard, right? To be put forward as the basis for the national tone. So Wang Zhao was thinking, well, there's no way that they're going to become the standard because I want Mandarin to be the one. He understood that language creates the foundation for culture and identity. So if there was going to be one dialect chosen, Wang Zhao wanted his language, his culture, his identity to be the one. And he wasn't going to back down. Oh, you cannot mess with him. Oh, you can't mess with him.

And so, you know, it's after these long sessions that, you know, this is actually extraordinary because it was so acrimonious and so combative. You know, people reportedly fainted and had to be carried home.

You know, they felt sick and basically backed out of this conference, couldn't, like, bear to come back. And Wang Zhao held on. And Wang Zhao wasn't just willing to fight for his ideas figuratively. He was willing to square up. And his most famous episode in all this was,

it was during a break. He thought someone in another dialect called him... Son of a bitch. He flew across the aisle. He basically grabbed the guy and chased him out of the hall. I think physical brawls are actually not unusual at this conference. People are very impassioned. They felt very strongly about their language. People were very impassioned. They felt very strongly

about their language. A bunch of language nerds fighting at a conference. Eventually, Wang Zhao won out. So for a time, Wang Zhao did win. He managed to put Mandarin forward as the model. And even though it went through a couple of other transformations, essentially, it was Mandarin that became the basis for the modern Chinese that we speak and know today. Despite all of the hardship and years in exile, Zhao's idea for language unification was implemented throughout China. I'm thinking, you know, this man, he really kept that fire in his belly, so to speak. His entire life, didn't matter when he was in exile, when he was, you know, sleeping, you know, out in open fields. Didn't matter when he was starving to death or he was jailed and, you know, locked up in these urine, vermin-infested cells. None of that bothered him because he just had this one thought, this one commitment. A commitment to the idea of a strong, unified China, a modern nationalist Chinese state that could take its

rightful place as a world power. So his contribution was immense. It could have been any other dialect, you know, that could just as well have become the national language. Because as this very famous Yiddish language said, the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Wang Xiao got the wheel spinning, but to keep it going,

others would need to add to his contribution. When we come back, the book savior. Hi there, this is Gerald Lamb from Sunnyside, Queens, New York. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else.

Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 2. Books Don't Have Legs One day in October 1938, the people of Guangdong province in China near the southern coast noticed a low droning sound in the air. It took minutes to realize the sound was not coming from ships passing in the harbor. It was coming from the enemy planes of the Japanese. the people hurried home to pack their belongings and prepare to flee a 40 year old librarian named du ding yo didn't rush home while he listened to the sirens go off all around him his first thought was not fear for his life.

Instead, he poured over documents at a disorganized desk at the Sun Zhuangshan University Library. The buildings at the university were empty. The professors and students had already fled. The smell of burnt concrete and wood hung in the air. He was told, you better evacuate like everybody else.

And you would think that's what he would do, go home to his wife and children, pack things up, get on a boat and get out of there. But Du Digno wanted to save something that he felt was bigger than his life. His first thought was, well, what am I going to do with all these books? I'm still responsible for them. So he actually ordered his subordinates to stay behind and pack up about 300,000 books. 300,000 books. Philosophy, poetry, paper records of past dynasties. These books were threadbound and sewn together. All were original manuscripts.

Du Deng You ordered his subordinates to save them all. And they pulled like blackboards off the walls and broke off legs off of chairs to recobble them into boxes. The books that fit into their boxes, they took with them. And he said, whatever we can't take us, seal them in the basement with concrete. Some of the people working for him questioned him. Shouldn't we save the basement for the refugees who will soon be flooding the city? His response? Humans will always be clever enough to escape, but books don't have legs. They can't very well grow legs and take themselves away now, can they? In the 1930s, Japan was an expanding imperialist power.

They began slowly taking over parts of China in search of raw materials to grow their industries. Though China had more people, Japan had a more powerful military. Eventually, they launched a full-on invasion and occupation. With the fall of the Qing Dynasty, a period of civil war, and now a brutal invasion from Japan, the century of humiliation only continued for China. So in all this chaos, why would this librarian be willing to sacrifice so many human lives, even his own, for some dusty old books? Because his notion was also that the Japanese will invade China, they may burn, pillage, rape and kill its women and children. But he said he cannot let the thought that the Chinese cultural heritage will also be extinguished by the

Japanese imperialists. So he said these written heritage, these rare books, he had to take with him. He believed that in these books lived the key to survival for Chinese people. Without access to their history, their knowledge systems, the Chinese people stood no chance of surviving into the future as a people. He was essentially saving heritage. And like Wang Zhao before him, Du Dingyou believed for China to be a modern state capable of competing with the West,

it needed a unified language. But Du Dingyou was coming at the issue from a different angle. See, Wang Zhao had created a phonic alphabet based on a single dialect, Mandarin, and he pared down the number of characters. Du took it further. He focused on the technological applications of language. He wanted to find a way to organize it. How would Chinese apply in a world with rapidly advancing technology? How would you use it to organize massive amounts of data? Or, let's say, books?

Let's go back to the English alphabet. There are 26 letters, and there's an unbreakable order to those letters. A, B, C, D, all the way to Z. So that's why, you know, when we go to the Library of Congress or in the library, it's all arranged alphabetically. So it's easy to search for something. So Chinese didn't really have that power. It's made up of thousands of characters that don't fit neatly onto something like a typewriter.

So organization was essential to the survival of the Chinese language. It was essential to fuse it with modern technology. And without it, the future of China would fall farther and farther behind the world order. Some propose dropping Chinese characters altogether and just adopting Roman letters like in English. But many people oppose this idea. They thought abandoning Chinese writing would be like abandoning Chinese history and tradition. So instead of looking outward to other languages for a solution, people started looking in Chinese characters to find a way to organize the written language.

Because they were like, God, this quest of the modern era, really to figure out how to crack the Chinese code to make Chinese as efficient, as powerful, as modern as the Western alphabet. That quest was called the character index race. The character index race. Everyone started to go after the holy grail. Over the next three decades, China saw dozens of proposals to reform the written language. An ocean of fierce, fierce competition and rivalry. And Du Dingyou was right there in the mix. So he's thinking, well, how do we break down Chinese characters? Remember, Chinese characters didn't have a distinct order like the ABCs. All these people were looking inside the characters to find a way to organize them.

So Du Dingyou... It's called Bismarck. He had a nickname for himself, Bismarck, after Otto von Bismarck, ruler of Germany in the late 1800s. Because he wanted to rule the field of library science with an iron fist. And Bismarck was essentially playing with the geometry of character shapes. He was really using the advantage that characters have, which is very visually oriented.

Bismarck, du Ding You, split characters up. He broke them down into patterns of strokes, so a set of strokes could be easily called up and combined to create a character. It was basically a kind of syntax, an order that wasn't there before. A way to organize Chinese that mirrored the way people arranged letters in English. Alligator. You go to the section A first, then you find L, then you find the L after that. So you sort of move over, you know, one letter at a time.

But instead of letters, you have specific kinds of strokes. A horizontal stroke, a slanted stroke, a curved stroke, and others. Each stroke building on the other to form a complete character

or a word. And Du Ding You's system was the best of its kind. It made it easier to organize Chinese and ultimately easier to learn. But most importantly, it made Chinese easier to use in modern technology. His obsession with efficiency and organization began when he was in the Boy Scouts. He would feel that the rules in Boy Scout, you know, was actually, they were not stringent enough. They were contradictory.

So he actually reorganized them and came up with new rules and submitted it for Boy Scout in the organization to review. So he's a stickler for the rules. And Du Ding Yeo was obsessed with something else, books. So much so that he even wrote love letters to his imaginary beloved, the library, right? He would describe it as though they were fights, reconciliations, you know, winks and nods, you know, falling outs, but eventually a passionate partnership that was powered by

mutual understanding. This is part of why he fought so hard to save the books from the Japanese invasion. He believed in his system. He thought it was the key to China's future. So for three days, Du Dingyo encouraged his colleagues as they worked around the clock, with no rest, to pack up the library's books. Eventually, when their work was done, the group boarded six boats and set sail on the Pearl River. To make room for the books, each person crammed their body and belongings into a foot and a half of space. They looked back at a city and a nation that teetered on the brink of total annihilation. But like Bismarck's books, China would survive.

And the ideas in those books, along with his index system, would lay the groundwork for China's technological future. It was the next step in the battle to modernize China's language and bring the country out of a century of humiliation. The Chinese writing system not only survived, but figured out how to adapt to the alphabetic environment successfully. When we return, another library worker takes the ideas of China's language innovators and puts them into practice. Hi, my name is Grace Brown, and I'm from Upland, Indiana, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. A Language Revolution It's 1918.

A young man walks up and down the stacks of the Peking University Library. Carrying a ledger, he hurriedly restocks the shelves with books. Medicine, history, astronomy. The young man was the son of a farmer who grew up like most people in China, in a rural agrarian province. But he was able to pursue an education, and eventually he got a job at a library. His name was Mao Zedong.

He was a library assistant at Peking University. Wow, a library assistant? Library assistant who was like bunking with, you know, a few other guys in a small apartment. Wow. Mao would eventually become the leader of China's Communist Party and dictator from 1949 to his death in 1976. But during those revolutionary years of the early 20th century, when a Chinese nationalist fever had taken over the country, he was a humble, quiet library worker. Mao was actually not at the center of this revolutionary ferment.

And at the time, he saw this incredible, these revolutionary leaders who were these thought leaders who were at the front lines of these incredibly progressive ideas. He would write these passionate letters to them supporting their cause. Dear Mr. Hikuro Toten, we have long admired your integrity, but regret not having the privilege of your acquaintance. Even at this great distance, your reputation is enough to inspire us. He wasn't able to participate at the core, but only cheer from the sidelines. Your lofty friendship reaches as high as the sun and moon.

Your sincerity moves gods and spirits. Both are rare in this world. In the past, as well today, we long to have an opportunity to meet you, to learn deportments, and receive instruction from you. Mao Zedong. Mao wouldn't stay on the sidelines forever. By the late 1920s, he'd returned to his home province in south-central China and develop his career as an armed revolutionary. But that experience as a

library assistant in the city got him thinking about the challenge of modernizing Chinese as a language. You know that in Yang Mao's mind, that was planted, right? To truly modernize China, to lead China into its modern destiny, it had to do something about its language. and the relationship between the two sides. I want everyone to know. The tumult in China came to a head in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when most people in the country experienced incredible amounts of hardship. First, a civil war between nationalists and communists. Then, the Japanese invasion and occupation, during which millions of people were killed, displaced, or tortured.

Then, after the Japanese were defeated, another bloody civil war. Out of the ashes of these two decades of tragedy emerged a winner, the Chinese Communist Party. So in 1949, China, for the first time in the 20th century, was united under one government. Under the People's Republic of China, the country's power structures were centralized. Land was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. And a massive education

program was established. For the communists, you know, this was really important because literacy proved to be the key to winning the hearts and minds of the Chinese. By this time, that library assistant, Mao Zedong, had become the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, basically China's de facto leader. He believed that organizing and empowering the country's peasant class was key to creating a strong Chinese state. He knew how to mobilize the masses. He knew how to mobilize China's vast peasantry. China was basically an agrarian society. Mao's power base were the peasants. So how did he mobilize them?

Well, the communist comrades would go down to the countryside. They worked along the peasants. They taught them folk songs. You know, they taught them basic literacy. So they were through this working with them day in, day out. They really won the hearts and minds of these average Chinese farmers. It was a very, very powerful tool. So in order to deliver that promise to the Chinese people,

basically the communists had to deliver that promise of literacy to its people. Language was going to be key.已经躺在整个人民自己的手里 那么整个就会要讲一个什么东西呢 This is the voice of Mao Zedong. When he came to power, he made simplifying Chinese his priority. He was on top of his agenda. He convened this task force. Mao created a committee in the government that would be responsible for figuring out how to get it done. The committee set out to do two things.

One was they basically thinned out characters of strokes so that characters were simply easier to learn, easier to write. Similar to what innovators like Du Dingyou and Wang Zhao had tried to do earlier, find a way to make writing Chinese more accessible for non-elites. The other was to come up with a standard Romanization system for Chinese. That is to say, one single unifying way of representing Chinese characters in Roman letters. Roman characters, or in other words, the letters used in languages like English, Spanish, French, and German. And why?

Well, because all the major global communications technology were built for the alphabet. If you think about telegraphy, typewriting, computing, these were all built in the image of the alphabet. So the government committee on language had to ask themselves, Do we build a modern technological environment for the Chinese alone? Or do we find a way to coexist with the existing alphabet infrastructure? They chose the latter. But then came the task of creating this new Romanized form of Chinese. There can only be one.

So which one are we going to go with? Researchers in the committee searched through records. They analyzed different styles of romanizing Chinese. They borrowed and blended from past ideas. And they finally decided to come up with pinyin. Pinyin. What is pinyin? Basically, the first standardizable proposal and scheme for how you represent Chinese in letters. When you look up a word in a Chinese dictionary, there's always pinyin assigned to each Chinese character. Basically, here's how it works. That pronunciation is in many Chinese words. When Romanized, the letters that represent that sound are a Z and an H.

Like Wang Zhao. You teach Chinese to the Chinese in Roman letters first as a phonetic, as a sound, because they spoke, right? They just didn't know how to write it. So if you give them a system in which to notate their spoken language, they can

use that to read. So that's why pinyin was also very important, not just for international usage, but also a way of simply getting the Chinese to learn. Wow. Why would that make it easier to learn? Yeah. You see the Romanized form first to learn how to pronounce it. And then once you know that pronunciation, you can then establish a link between how you pronounce it and how it's actually visually seen as a character. Sometimes people wonder if they can only learn pinyin and ignore the actual Chinese characters. The short answer is no. Fascinating. So like the Z-H makes a certain sound, right? So that sound, you would learn it

and then you start to be taught in the simplified script to translate. So you've essentially done a two-level simplification, like one in sound and then also in writing. Correct. Pinyin was finally adopted as a way to teach the national language of China in 1958. The Chinese communists used the government's resources to compel millions of people to learn Chinese in this way.

This applied to everyone from adults to students. So if you were an illiterate farmer, you would attend a local school where they would first teach you Chinese using Romanized letters, then build to reading and writing using Chinese characters. And it worked. People were excited about it. Every year, more and more people learn to read and write. What the Chinese Communist Party did was basically to fulfill a century-long vision of making China strong again, of modernizing China, of seeing this civilization thrive again.

Right? So the communists really became the ones that saw themselves as the ones who are capable of fulfilling that quest. The thing that allowed them to fulfill that quest, at least when it comes to the Chinese language, is that the Communist Party is an authoritarian government. It controls almost every part of Chinese life. So unlike other innovators like Wang Zhao or Du Dingyou, Mao Zedong had the power of the state behind him.

The only thing that could have really made that happen is the power of the nation. And that was in the hands of the state. Under Mao Zedong's rule, millions of Chinese people died. Some of his disastrous economic and social policies resulted in mass starvation and repression. But there's no doubt that his intense effort to standardize the Chinese language was effective. It helped take China from a largely agrarian, illiterate country to a vastly more literate and increasingly urbanized one. It set the stage for the economic reforms of the 1970s and China's emergence as a global superpower. Yet, there's another important question that haunts this story.

If the original intentions of Zhao and Ding You and many other, they are part of movements of people, right? Their intentions was a survival of the language. By romanizing it and simplifying it in this way, are you almost in a way setting it up for its end? Like, are you taking too much? Is it worth the way, are you almost in a way setting it up for its end? Like, are you taking too much? Like, is it worth the cost of what you lose in trying to educate so much of the public? Because we know that Mao also had a very practical interest for wanting to bring the country into the 20th century, et cetera, modernizing it. But like philosophically,

culturally, is Chinese losing something in this process? I think from the perspective of how well it helped China to modernize and what it did practically, there's really no loss in that sense, right? Because Chinese could not have survived without tapping into these global technologies. And it had to do something about getting through these bottlenecks. From a sentimentalist perspective, I've now come to realize, having written this book, that even languages, they die all the time. There are lots of species in the natural world that go in and out constantly. And so there is this sort of natural process of renewal that happens. And what's more remarkable is how something could have been kept or preserved despite all the outside pressure for it not to survive. Every one of these innovators, even when they

failed, you know, they had a love and passion and belief in that the Chinese language must survive as the very core of Chinese culture. Now, whether the path of modernization led to nationalism, capitalism, socialism, or whatever system you might think of, that was less important than to simply see the Chinese civilization go on. And they were able to see themselves as foot soldiers in this longest revolution of the 20th century. And that really is the story of the Chinese script revolution. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me.

And me, and... Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibeez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner. Kumari Devarajan. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Deb George, Alex Chong, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman.

This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. Thank you.