A founding claim of China’s government is that the nation is an eternal entity. From the outside, China can look like a nation state. But the country encompasses a huge population who eat different foods, practise different religions and hold different regional loyalties. They also, as Yale academic Jing Tsu describes in this highly readable history of two millennia of Chinese language reform, speak multiple languages and dialects. Under an empire, this mattered less—loyalty to an emperor transcends other differences. But creating a uniform nation state required the creation of a single Chinese language at its heart.
For the tyrant Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the 3rd-century Qin Dynasty, standardising the script was a way to impose cultural unity. Over the centuries, it had the advantage of allowing people speaking different dialects to make themselves understood in writing, but the non-alphabetic script made it hard to master, difficult to catalogue and unsuited to the needs of technological progress. There were centuries-long debates over rival methods of categorising written characters in a dictionary. Great minds wrestled for decades with building a typewriter that could cope with the 4,000 most basic Chinese characters, let alone the 40,000 in the 1716 Kang Xi dictionary.
Language reform became a cause both for centralising tyrants and 19th- and 20th-century political reformers, who saw the writing system as a barrier first to literacy, then to China’s participation in telegraphy and later digitisation. This is the story of the gifted individuals for whom this subject became a lifelong obsession.
