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CONTENTS
Introduction
What is Putonghua?
Language Wars
Linguistic Digression #1: Language and Dialect
The Dream of a Common Language
The May Fourth Movement: The Vernacular Wars
The Critique of Chinese Characters
Linguistic Digression #2: Chinese Characters and Representation of Sounds
The Alphabet Wars: The Romanisation of Chinese
The CPC Enters the Alphabet Wars
Putonghua after 1949
Reform of the Written Language under the CPC
Pinyin: The Victor in the Romanisation Wars
Implementation of Putonghua in Broadcast Media
Media Wars: Putonghua versus Profits
A Losing Battle: The Internet
Putonghua in the Classroom
Dialect Uprisings
The Future
Notes
Photographs
Bibliography
To Victor Mair
Introduction
When Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan ad-libbed a nonsense syllable for a shampoo commercial, he
probably never imagined his spontaneous creation would give rise to a lively linguistic controversy.
In an advertisement for Bawang hair products, Chan extolled the virtues of their shampoo,
improvising on camera, ‘It makes your hair so black, so shiny, and moisturised. It’s just . . . it’s just . .
. duang ! ’ He uttered the sound with a shake of his hair, as if qigong energy waves were emanating
from his shiny black locks.
The footage from the ad was remixed in a parody video that appeared on the video-sharing website
Youku in February 2014. For whatever mysterious reasons that cause something to go viral, the word
quickly became the newest example of an Internet meme, appearing more than eight million times on
China’s microblogging site Weibo, eliciting 312,000 discussion threads, and being the subject of more
than a million searches on the country’s most popular web portal, Baidu. Foreign Policy magazine
even characterised duang as ‘the word that broke the Chinese Internet’.1
Jackie Chan’s off-the-cuff neologism soon became the object of intense meta-linguistic analysis by
language mavens and the public at large. Could this be considered a new Chinese word? What did it
mean, exactly? What part of speech was it? Which of the four Chinese tones should be assigned to the
syllable: duāng, duáng, duǎng or duàng? Was there an English translation? (Some suggested ‘boing!’)
Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan’s native language is Cantonese, so there was even some controversy
about his pronunciation; was the word actually Cantonese?2 Certain persnickety linguist types
maintained that the syllable was technically not a part of standard Mandarin phonology, though it was
technically pronounceable.
Equally important, how should the new word be written? Since there was no existing Chinese
character for the syllable, websites could only represent the word in the official People’s Republic of
China (PRC) romanisation system, pinyin. (There is an alternative system using phonetic symbols, the
so-called bopomofo method used in Taiwan, though it seems no one seriously considered using that.)
But Chinese netizens were dissatisfied with the pinyin version alone. Surely a new word must have a
corresponding Chinese character to represent it? A common sentiment expressed was, ‘If a word
cannot be written in Chinese characters, how can it be considered a Chinese word?’ Almost
immediately the Internet community sprang into action and created just such a character. Using the two
characters in Jackie Chan’s name, Cheng Long, 成龙 a new Chinese character was born, stacking the
two characters cheng, 成, and long, 龙, one on top of the other – with the pinyin added above, as
icing on the cake:
All well and good, but there was yet another problem. There are actually two sets of Chinese
characters: the traditional, complex forms still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a set adopted in
the PRC in the 1950s that includes thousands of simplified versions. This newly created character
incorporated the simplified character for ‘dragon’, 龙, which is used in mainland China only. Since
Jackie Chan is a Hong Kong actor, naturally there had to be a version of this new character that
incorporated the traditional complex character for ‘dragon’, 龍. And sure enough, before you can say
‘duang !’ such a character materialised on the Internet:
In one fell swoop, this nonsense word managed to activate every thorny linguistic conundrum and
controversy that besets Chinese language use. In fact, this fleeting Internet craze, trivial as it may be,
actually serves as a linguistic microcosm for a series of complex issues that Chinese language
reformers and educators have grappled with for the last century. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty and
the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, an urgent priority for the new Chinese government
was the task of establishing a common language for a linguistically fractured China. When Mao took
power in 1949, language unification continued to be of vital importance to the nation building agenda.
Faced with the challenge of unifying a vast country populated with hundreds of ethnicities, languages
and dialects, these political leaders were confronted with some of the same linguistic problems and
conundrums raised above: Is there such a thing as ‘the Chinese language’? Should the Chinese people
share a common tongue? How should it be defined? How should pronunciation, vocabulary and
correct usage be determined? Should one standard language replace the numerous other regional
variations, or should all other forms of Chinese continue to flourish? Should written Chinese continue
to use the centuries-old character system, or should it be replaced with an alphabet, or some other
phonetic system? And who, after all, is the final arbiter for such decisions?
In the PRC, the twentieth century quest for a solution to these problems has resulted in a version of
Chinese called Putonghua. How did China arrive at this common language?
In what follows, I will present a brief historical overview of that process, and trace the trajectory
of Putonghua as it moved into the twenty-first century.
What is Putonghua?
Every year in China there are almost 100 million students attending primary school learning the
country’s official language, with about the same number of students throughout the world studying it as
a second language.3 This endeavour involves vast amounts of resources, from textbooks and tapes to
teachers and examiners, all for the purpose of teaching something we usually refer to as ‘Chinese’ or
‘Mandarin’. If we ask these students, ‘Where does this variety of Chinese you are learning come
from?’ presumably most of them would simply shrug and reply, ‘Isn’t it just the language that Chinese
people speak?’ Few of these students are aware that the Chinese they are learning is not the naturally
existing ‘language of the Chinese people’ – for there never was such a thing – but is actually an
artificially constructed hybrid form, a linguistic patchwork of compromises based upon expediency,
history and politics. This linguistic construct is called Putonghua, a 普通话, ‘common speech’, and it
is the official version of Chinese now promulgated in the People’s Republic of China.
Even if you are not a linguist, the designed-by-committee quality is evident in the official definition
given by the ‘Symposium on the Standardisation of Modern Chinese’ in 1955:
Putonghua is the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as the norm of pronunciation, and Northern
dialects as its base dialect, and looking to exemplary modern works in baihua [vernacular literary language] for its grammatical
norms.
Putonghua is a variety of Chinese that Mao Zedong did not speak, nor did later leaders Deng Xiaoping
or Jiang Zemin. In fact, it is a language that a great many Chinese still do not speak. China’s Ministry
of Education estimates that as many as one-third of China’s 1.3 billion population are unable to
communicate in Putonghua, stating on its official website in September 2014, ‘30 per cent of our
nation’s population does not speak Putonghua, and out of the 70 per cent of the population who
possess Putonghua skills, only one in ten can speak Putonghua articulately and fluently.’4 This suggests
that at least 400 million Chinese citizens remain unable to communicate in the PRC’s official
language.
Some might wonder why there would be such a sense of urgency to establish a unified Chinese
dialect. After all, don’t the speakers of English dialects, from London to New York to India, all
communicate reasonably well with one another? The difference, as anyone who has lived in China
knows, is that many of these so-called Chinese ‘dialects’ are in fact, different languages. This
linguistic reality has made the quest for a national language an arduous one.
Other countries have language standards, to be sure, but these are most often preferred existing
language systems: socially prestigious forms of speech, Received Pronunciation, general guidelines or
pronouncements from conservative watchdog organisations such as France’s Académie française .
Putonghua is more than a conventionally accepted norm; it is a national standard. It is a form of
language that was debated and fixed by committees of linguists over many decades, and is now a
constitutionally mandated form of speech.
Putonghua is enshrined in the PRC in Article 19 of the 1982 Constitution of the People’s Republic
of China as the officially promoted national language. The 2000 PRC ‘Law on Standard Spoken and
Written Chinese Language’ signed by then President Jiang Zemin, broadens the mandate: ‘The
standard spoken and written Chinese language [Putonghua] shall be used in such a way as to be
conducive to the upholding of state sovereignty and national dignity, to unification of the country and
unity of the nationalities, and to socialist material progress and ethical progress.’ These may seem
like lofty words, but they are not merely empty rhetoric. Language unification has implications for
commerce, education, science, culture and governance, all of which are subject to the impact of
China’s linguistic diversity.
Note that the policy makes no mention of the Chinese script. This might seem a puzzling omission,
since for most people the exotic Chinese characters are the first association that comes to mind when
the subject of Chinese comes up. But a word of caution: the Chinese characters are not to be conflated
with the spoken language itself. Speech is the primary aspect of language use, and the written script is
dependent upon the oral forms. Thus, unifying the spoken language was always the first priority for
Chinese language reformers. However, in China, the spoken language and the Chinese script are
historically entangled in complex ways, and for reasons that will become clearer, the reformers of the
spoken language were forced to grapple with script reform, as well.
The story of this massive language reform, spanning a century and involving one-fifth of humankind,
unfolds as a series of linguistic conflicts that parallel the tumultuous political struggles that wracked
China throughout the course of the century.
Language Wars
The early twentieth century brought a series of challenges to the very bedrock of Chinese cultural
identity. Still reeling from the aftermath of the Opium Wars, peasant rebellions and an unending series
of rapacious foreign land grabs, China, ‘the sick man of Asia’ seemed to be continually on life
support. The ruling elite, in the quest to restore China’s wealth and power, had been forced to call into
question virtually every aspect of Chinese traditional culture. Debates raged about the nation’s future
political direction, with factions advocating constitutional monarchy, western style democracy, or
other hybrid forms. The May Fourth intellectuals even called for the jettisoning of what had heretofore
been the very core of Chinese ethics and intellectual life, Confucianism. In the tumult after the fall of
the Qing Dynasty and the founding of the Republic in 1912, the sense of crisis was overwhelming.
China had to take drastic measures if it were to survive as a nation, and as a culture, in the twentieth
century. Against this backdrop, one can only imagine the vehemence and passion of the various
arguments as played out in everyday life. It is no wonder that in all the Chinese teahouses of the time
there hung a sign on the wall that read mo tan guo shi, 莫談國事 – ‘Don’t talk politics’.
These political debates spilled over into another domain, Chinese language reform. After the
establishment of the Republic of China, the task of establishing a national language as the medium for
mass literacy and education was seen as an urgent priority. As founding father Sun Yat-sen and the
republican government surveyed a landscape that included all the territories of the Qing, including
Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang, it was obvious that the long-term goal of national unity was dependent
upon implementation of a common language policy. And for this the Chinese leadership looked to the
model of European nation-states, for which ‘One country, one people and one language’ seemed the
natural and inevitable way of organising a modern country.
Many Qing scholars had studied in Japan, and were impressed by the way it had created a unified
vernacular amidst the many regional dialects. Such scholars were the first to see language unification
as essential to a unified and prosperous country, and began a movement to implement a ‘national
language’ for China, borrowing the term the Japanese used Guoyu 国语 (Kokugo in Japanese).
The language reform effort that arose at the turn of the century sparked a series of linguistic debates
that were as contentious as the political ones. A series of questions presented themselves. Should the
diverse ethnic and speech communities be allowed to co-exist independently, or should they all be
subsumed under one national language? Should one regional dialect become a hegemonic standard, or
should aspects of the various dialect forms be considered? And in the interest of universal literacy,
should some form of phonetic script be considered as a replacement for the notoriously difficult
Chinese characters?
These were not merely abstract academic quibbles; the future stability and cohesion of the republic
would depend on the answers. And given the magnitude of the problems, it is not surprising that the
various factions of the language debate, as with those of the political debate, were compelled to
consider solutions as drastic as discarding the Chinese characters – or abandoning the Chinese
language altogether.
Compelled by this sense of urgency, within just a few months after the founding of the Republic of
China, the Ministry of Education (under Provisional Minister Cai Yuanpei) organised a ‘Conference
on the Unification of Pronunciation’, the purpose of which was to establish the pronunciations for
6,500 basic Chinese characters, and to adopt a set of phonetic symbols to represent these sounds.
Though the emphasis was on pronunciation rather than aspects such as grammar and vocabulary, the
task before them was daunting enough. Modern linguistic science was new to China, and the country’s
language landscape was in many ways still vast and mysterious. It would take a dedicated effort on
the part of China’s scholars and political elites to understand and address the problem of establishing
a national language.
It was clear to the participants that a consistent phonetic standard would have to be chosen in order
to accomplish this goal. But on which regional language form should this standard be based? China
was a linguistic jigsaw puzzle of various dialects, each representing millions of speakers. How were
they to arrive at anything like a unified Chinese language, when in fact there was not, and never had
been, such a thing?
In order to fully understand the thorny complexity of the task that faced the attendees of the 1913
conference, we must take a small linguistic digression.
Linguistic Digression #1: Language and Dialect
The challenge of linguistic unification for the Chinese language reformers involved not only the nonHan languages – for example, Tibetan and Mongolian – but also the enormous number of regional
dialects, which were often mutually unintelligible and spoken by millions of native speakers. In
addition, the variations were not merely a matter of pronunciation; in terms of grammar and syntax, the
various dialects also differed significantly.
The Qing imperial bureaucracy had always managed to function under this situation of polyglot
diversity by adopting a special version of Chinese for usage among literati and officialdom that they
called guanhua, ‘the speech of officialdom’. This was a specialised common tongue based on the
speech of the educated elite in Beijing, and it allowed Qing officials from different regions to
communicate in speech and writing. This language was never promulgated throughout the country as a
vernacular for the common people. Indeed, the common folk continued to speak their local dialects,
oblivious to the linguistic sounds of the faraway capital, and even the officials who spoke guanhua
did so in their own regional accents, of which they were fiercely proud.
However, when the Jesuits first came to China in the sixteenth century, guanhua was the first
variety of Chinese they encountered, and they called it Mandarin, from the Portuguese mandarim ,
meaning ‘minister’ or ‘official’. The term ‘Mandarin’ expanded its meaning in the twentieth century,
and has now become a common (albeit rather imprecise) term for modern standard Chinese, in most
contexts basically interchangeable with the term ‘Putonghua’. The term also has a specialised
linguistic usage, referring to the group of Mandarin dialects spoken in regions throughout northern and
central China.
With the fall of the Qing, and the dissolution of court Mandarin, attention turned for the first time to
the problem of dialects. What exactly is meant by the term ‘dialect’? And what is the difference
between a language and a dialect ? The truth is, there is no universally accepted criterion for
distinguishing languages from dialects. A number of rough measures are commonly used, most
ultimately leading to certain contradictions and inconsistencies. The distinction is almost always
subjective, depending very much on the frame of reference, and often the judgment is based on
political rather than linguistic criteria. There is an old humorous definition: ‘A language is just a
dialect with a navy’. As we will see, in China the political considerations often trump linguistic
reality.
The most common, and most purely pragmatic, criterion for the language-dialect distinction is that
of mutual intelligibility. If two related kinds of speech are so similar that speakers of each one can
understand each other, they are usually regarded as dialects of a single language. If comprehension is
difficult or impossible, they are considered different languages. By this definition, varieties of
Chinese as remote as Beijing dialect and Cantonese – which are as mutually unintelligible as, say,
Italian and French – should be considered as distinct languages. Thus, as linguist John DeFrancis has
observed, asking the question ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ is akin to asking ‘Do you speak Romance?’5
These definitions are made more complicated by the fact that the language-dialect distinction is a
smooth continuum; there is no absolute boundary. Some dialects in close proximity to each other are
distinguished only by slight differences in accent, while more geographically isolated dialects diverge
into separate tongues. In language studies, there are almost no strict delineations between dialects,
only blurred statistical regions. Think of colours: The word ‘green’ can denote an enormous range of
hues, some quite distinct, others subtly blending into each other. So it is with dialects.
In a descriptive sense, the term ‘language’ may refer to a group of related speech communities, or a
single community, and a dialect can be considered one of those speech groups. Thus every dialect is a
language, but not every language is a dialect.
How many language groups are there in China? The exact classifications for local languages and
dialects are still debated, but seven major groups are conventionally recognised: Mandarin (guanhua
官话 or beifanghua 北方话,‘northern speech’), Wu 吴, Gan 赣, Xiang 湘, Min 闽, Cantonese (Yue
粤), and Hakka (Kejia 客家);6 each group is further divided into numerous sub-varieties, most with
unclear or shifting boundaries.7
By now it should be clear why the leaders of the new Republic of China saw language unification
as such an urgent priority. The national networks of businessmen, bureaucrats and military personnel
were quite often – quite literally – not speaking the same language, and the risk of disastrous
miscommunication was quite real.
Thus a common language was seen as a strategic necessity. But which language should be adopted?
The number of speakers of Mandarin was greater than that of all the other dialects combined, making
that dialect group a reasonable basis for a national language. But even within the category of
Mandarin there were hundreds of regional varieties, all differing in pronunciation, grammar and
lexicon to various extents. All this is just to say that, for the Chinese language reformers of the
twentieth century in search of a common tongue, the solution was far from obvious.
In the interest of precision, some scholars refer to these varieties of Chinese as ‘Sinitic languages’
rather than ‘Chinese dialects’. Some Chinese linguists have chosen to use a term translated directly
from the standard Chinese term fangyan, 方言, literally ‘regional speech’, also translated as
‘regionalect’ (John DeFrancis’ term), while sinologist Victor Mair and others have employed the term
‘topolect’.8 Since this is not a book for linguistic specialists, for convenience sake the term ‘dialect’
will be used in subsequent chapters, providing the reader keep in mind that the speech varieties
referred to may differ anywhere along the language-dialect continuum. Crucially, in China the
language-dialect distinction has been fraught with politically charged connotations, as the PRC
government has preferred the convenient fiction of classifying all the various forms of regional speech
varieties as ‘dialects’, as a way of obscuring the fact that many would be considered linguistically to
be separate languages.
Readers not familiar with these aspects of the Chinese language might be wondering: If the various
Chinese dialect regions were so diverse, how was it possible that literate people all throughout China
can read the same texts? The answer is that, just as in all dialect-rich countries, the literate population
becomes effectively bilingual, speaking their local dialects in daily life, while becoming at least
passively competent in a second dialect, the lingua franca Mandarin of books and newspapers. The
situation is a bit more complicated in China, since there was a transition from the centuries old textual
tradition of classical Chinese to books published in the vernacular, but the principle is the same.
The Dream of a Common Language
The task presented to the 1913 Conference on the Unification of Pronunciation was to assess the
various regional forms of speech and establish a set of standards for a national language, Guoyu ,
which had been a long term goal of late Qing language reformers. Now was the time to put decades of
theories and ideas into practice.
The conference preparations started off with the best of intentions. A number of experts were
invited from the fields of phonetics, education, foreign languages and dialect studies. The invitees
included two representatives from each of the provinces and one each for the Mongols, Tibetans and
overseas Chinese. The plan was to foster a scholarly and democratic atmosphere that could lessen the
inherent regional and professional tensions.
Given this goal, the committee could not have chosen a more polarising chairman than Wu Zhihui, a
linguist, anarchist and one of the founding fathers of the Kuomintang (KMT). Wu was a notorious
intellectual firebrand, and a harsh critic of Confucian values who famously called for China to ‘flush
all classical literature down the toilet’. He did not hide his contempt for the Qing government, either,
deriding the Manchus as a ‘dog-fucked race’, and the Empress Dowager as a ‘withered old hag’ and a
‘whore’.9 His appointment did not exactly bode well for the overall civility of the proceedings.
In addition, when the conference finally convened in Beijing in February, only forty-four of the
invited delegates were able to attend, and these represented an uneven hodgepodge of regions,
dialects and special interests. The political situation in China at the time was tense. The fragile
republic was only a year old, and the uneasy power-sharing alliance between Sun Yat-sen and the
power-hungry provisional president Yuan Shikai was unravelling. Politics hung like a black cloud
over the conference, making the atmosphere perilously contentious at the outset.
The delegation members knew they had a momentous task before them, one that would affect all
future generations of Chinese speakers. Yet it was this very dynamic that poisoned the proceedings,
since it was the desire of almost every delegate to go down in history as the originator of an epochmaking language reform. The injection of such petty personal factors into a discussion that was
already made complicated by disagreements over the linguistic and political aspects made it difficult
to reach consensus on any point whatsoever without heated debate.
The matters before the committee required a mastery of certain newly introduced Western linguistic
theories, and the complexity of the task soon revealed the academic shortcomings and bias of the
delegates. At one point Wu Zhihui, in a fit of astounding ignorance, argued that Germany was
politically strong because its language contained many ‘voiced sounds’, whereas China’s relative
weakness was due to a lack of such sounds in Mandarin.
The problems proved to be more insurmountable than anyone had imagined. Despite the
comparisons to the successful language unification projects of Japan and European countries, China’s
dialect issue was much more intractable. The number of speakers for many local dialects was in the
tens of millions, and the dialect chasm between metropolitan centres such as Beijing and Shanghai
was far more enormous than those of comparable cities within France or Italy. The task before the
committee was, in the words of S. Robert Ramsey, ‘like choosing one of the vernacular Romance
tongues to replace Latin in a Europe just emerging from the Middle Ages.’10
To make matters worse, there was a particular clash between two factions: those in favour of
northern Mandarin dialects as the standard, and those vying for the implementation of a hybrid
language incorporating elements of both northern and southern dialects. Since the late Qing, language
reformers advocating a common language had always chosen some form of Mandarin dialect as the
logical and inevitable candidate. In fact, this was a reasonable solution, given the large population of
northern Mandarin speakers. The northern faction thus had a clear majority, which sparked
defensiveness and resentment among the southern delegates. It did not help matters that the slogan of
the northern dialect faction was ‘Force the South to follow the North’!
The southern delegates, however, had cogent arguments of their own. For one thing, the historical
inertia for the adoption of the Northern dialect standard had been weakened by the recent fall of the
Qing. The end of the dynasty entailed the dissolution of the intricate Qing bureaucracy, for which
Mandarin had been the ‘glue’, resulting in an erosion of that language as the lingua franca for the elite.
The weakening of Mandarin’s importance lent greater plausibility to the demands of the southern
dialect representatives. For example, some delegates began to argue that if the importance of a dialect
for economics and trade was to be taken into account, considering their mutual trade histories,
shouldn’t the Shanghainese or Cantonese dialects be the standard?
The northern Mandarin faction was led by committee Vice Chairman Wang Zhao (who had already
developed a largely-ignored phonetic system for notating Mandarin), and Chairman Wu Zhihui was
the leader of the southern advocates. As tempers flared and teacups flew, the north-south linguistic
and political differences threatened the collapse of the conference itself. After just two months, Wu
Zhihui resigned the chairmanship, declaring ‘I can’t stand this!’ Vice Chairman Wang Zhao took over
for a time, but he and Wu continued to lock horns, and after just two weeks Wang resigned as well,
leaving one of his students in charge of the proceedings. As the conference wore on, attacks became
increasingly personal. Ironically, dialect differences themselves became fuel for the ire of delegates.
At one point a member of the southern faction, Wang Rongbao, happened to use a Shanghai expression
for rickshaw, huangbao che , which northerner Wang Zhao misheard as a standard Mandarin curse
wangba dan ‘son of a bitch’ (literally, ‘turtle’s egg’). Incensed, Wang Zhao proceeded to bare his
arms and physically attack Wang Rongbao, pummelling him with his fists and chasing him from the
assembly hall.
Wang Rongbao never returned to the proceedings, and as a result Wang Zhao and the northern
faction gained an upper hand in the debates. After many rounds of exhaustive wrangling, a messy
compromise was reached: The newly devised pronunciation standard, though based essentially on the
northern Beijing dialect, would also include certain southern dialect aspects. For example, the new
hybrid standard had five tones, rather than the four tones of the Beijing dialect, the fifth tone being the
rusheng 入声 or ‘entering tone’, which had been common in southern dialects but which northern
Mandarin had not preserved.11
After more than a month of debate, the committee had finally arrived at a pronunciation guide for
the basic 6,500 characters. As is the case with all solutions designed by committee, no one was
satisfied with the results. Though based on a living dialect, that of Beijing, the overall system was
nevertheless an artificial construct, a version of Chinese that nobody actually spoke. However, this
hybrid pronunciation standard was baptised as Guoyin , ‘national pronunciation’, the first step toward
the establishment of a Guoyu , ‘national language.’
The Conference on the Unification of Pronunciation also came up with a set of thirty-nine phonetic
symbols, called the Zhuyin zimu , ‘Phonetic Alphabet’, derived from the shapes of Chinese
characters, to represent the sounds of the Guoyin characters, and which later would become the
system adopted in Taiwan after 1949 (informally referred to as the bopomofo system).
The next step would have been full-scale adoption of the standard, but at this juncture politics
delayed progress on the policy. For the next few years, Yuan Shikai, engaged in a white-hot power
struggle with Sun Yat-Sen and the Kuomintang, became a bit less concerned with pronunciation tables
than with his own political survival. When Yuan died suddenly of uraemia in 1916, the loosening of
his conservative influence enabled the academic realm to settle into a state of normalcy. In a few
years the Ministry of Education was finally able to enact the recommendations of the Conference on
the Unification of Pronunciation.
In 1919 the National Language Dictionary based upon the committee’s compromise standard was
published, under the editorship of Wu Zhihui. But before the champagne bottles could be opened, the
dictionary immediately came under harsh criticism. Many scholars continued to argue for a system
based on the Beijing dialect. Wu, in his typical bombastic fashion, defended all attacks on the
dictionary, describing a competing phonetic system as ‘utterly worthless dog shit’.12 Nevertheless, the
standard had now been made official; the next step was to create textbooks and materials to implement
it within the Chinese educational system.
By this time phonograph technology was quite common, and it was decided that a series of
recordings would be indispensable to promulgating and teaching the new pronunciation standard. In
1919 the newly established Commission on the Unification of Language sought out a linguist named
Wang Pu, who had also developed a phonetic script for Chinese, and tasked him with the job of
recording phonograph records of the Guoyin pronunciations for the 6,500 standard characters. This
peculiar duty amounted to codifying the sounds for a hypothetical language, and Wang Pu, as a native
of Beijing, was ultimately unable to capture all the Southern phonetic distinctions of the official
language. In the end the recording project had to be scrapped.
Then, in 1921, the Commission on the Unification of Language decided to give it a second try, this
time entrusting the task to a 31-year-old scholar named Zhao Yuanren (Y.R. Chao). In order to ensure
the highest fidelity recordings, Zhao travelled to New York’s Columbia Records building – where in
the same year jazz singer Al Jolson crooned his hit songs ‘April Showers’ and ‘Yoo Hoo’ – to record
a definitive series of phonograph recordings of the newly fixed pronunciation for the official version
of Guoyu .
Zhao’s unique résumé made him the ideal choice for this historic project. A legendary linguist and
polymath, Zhao had been the translator for Bertrand Russell and John Dewey during their lecture tours
in China. His creative translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland later became
a landmark in Chinese literary history, being one of the first Chinese books published in the baihua
vernacular. (Lewis Carroll would no doubt have appreciated the irony.) Later, Zhao had to invent
several new Chinese characters to achieve his translation of ‘The Jabberwocky’ in Through the
Looking Glass.
With Zhao Yuanren’s successful completion of the sound recordings, the stage was now set for the
national pronunciation to be promulgated in schools. Yet there was a problem: How was this standard
to be taught and implemented when the total number of qualified teachers in all of China was exactly
one? Decades later, Zhao would jokingly remark, ‘For thirteen years I was the sole speaker of this
idiolect, meant to be the national language of 4, 5 or 600 million speakers.’13
Zhao’s ironic quip reveals the very serious impracticality of the entire project. Once the standard
pronunciation was completed and ready for dissemination, it became obvious to everyone involved
that the task of recruiting and training teachers alone would be insurmountable. The ‘experts’ who had
arrived at the system had not fully considered its implementation. The first attempt at a national
language standard was stillborn.
Language reform thus experienced a brief hiatus during the early 1920s as political upheavals
sapped energy from the cultural sphere. China was struggling with a power vacuum left by Yuan
Shikai’s death, and various regional warlords continued to vie for China’s vast territory. In 1921 the
Communist Party of China was founded with the active participation of Chen Duxiu and many of his
May Fourth language reformer comrades, and by 1923 the CPC and the KMT formed an uneasy
alliance to stem the growing tide of Japanese aggression. A new chapter began after Sun Yat-sen’s
death in 1925, opening the door for Chiang Kai-shek to consolidate power in all aspects of
governance, including education and language reform.
Throughout these turbulent years the debate on the standard pronunciation continued in academic
circles, but without the previous rancour and personality clashes. As cooler heads prevailed in the
discussions, in 1926 a consensus finally arose to base the national pronunciation standard on an
existing dialect, rather than an artificially constructed one. This time, with minimal debate, the battlescarred members of the National Committee on the Unification of Language settled upon what had
been the obvious choice for the pronunciation standard all along: the Beijing dialect. Zhao Yuanren, in
a 1976 interview, described the rather un-dramatic turning point:
We decided – that is, the National Committee on the Unification of the Language – decided that we’d better take the natural speech
of Peking city. ‘Beiping’ it was called then. And so, we just found out how people actually spoke. It’s still the standard now – the socalled general speech – Putonghua . Peking is now the standard dialect.14
In 1932, with no fanfare or hoopla, the commission published the Vocabulary of National
Pronunciation for Everyday Use , which normalised the pronunciations for all the characters
according to the Beijing dialect. The new standard was renamed Xin Guoyin , the ‘new national
pronunciation’. Amazingly, this was the first time in the history of the Chinese language that a real life
vernacular pronunciation gained prestige over the literary pronunciation. Past standards always took
into consideration artificial standards of ‘historical correctness’ or ‘literary elegance’ rather than
actual vernacular pronunciation.
This was a landmark juncture. The official definition of Guoyu – the phonology of the Beijing
dialect, plus the grammar and vocabulary of the northern Mandarin dialects – was very close to what
would later be the definition of Putonghua in the PRC constitution. China was on the way to
developing a true national language.
Yet these reforms mainly affected one area of language use, the spoken form. Outside the stuffy halls
of government organised language policy meetings, the language wars were being waged on a second
front, the written language. And these battles were being fought by some of the most brilliant Chinese
thinkers of the twentieth century: the May Fourth intellectuals.
The May Fourth Movement: The Vernacular Wars
Around 1915, in the face of foreign aggression and internal political instability, a group of young
Chinese intellectuals began agitating for cultural reforms and the resuscitation of Chinese society. This
group of reformers called themselves the ‘New Culture Movement’, and their agenda coalesced
around the influential magazine New Youth , which published articles attacking traditional Confucian
ideas and advocating progressive Western notions such as ‘science’ and ‘democracy’. Historically
their movement came to be known as the May Fourth Movement, commemorating the demonstration in
Beijing on 4th May, 1919, when 3,000 students held a mass demonstration to protest the transference
of the German concessions in Shandong province to Japan, as dictated by the Treaty of Versailles.
China may be one of the few countries on earth for which such a political revolution necessitated a
parallel full-blown language revolution. It is not an exaggeration to say that China’s once-great
literary and linguistic tradition had in modern times become an albatross around its neck, and it is to
their credit that the May Fourth Movement’s key figures recognised this problem and focused their
intellectual energies on it.
The first line of attack was on the millennia-old language of Classical Chinese, called wenyanwen ,
‘literary language texts’. Though originally a parsimonious, highly stylised version of a Zhou Dynasty
vernacular, Classical Chinese slowly ‘fossilised’ into a conventional textual language that became the
scholarly standard.
Generations of literati refined the idiom into an extremely terse and aphoristic written form that,
although an extremely expressive vehicle for poetry and literature, had become completely divorced
from any of the spoken vernaculars. This meant that subsequent generations of scholarly elites were
functioning in what was essentially a bilingual environment, required to master both the esoteric
wenyanwen textual language along with their own native spoken tongues.
Although there were disparate examples of vernacular literature, and a handful of classic novels
such as Dream of the Red Chamber were written in a hybrid vernacular idiom, almost all other
formal texts were written in the classical language (which was also the de rigueur language for the
imperial examination system). Thus for many centuries, there was an enormous chasm between the
written word and the spoken language.
Classical Chinese was almost perversely difficult to learn and master, and a tiny percentage of
privileged scholarly elites had the time and leisure to master it. As with all texts in pre-modern China,
it was written entirely without punctuation, and stylistically favoured an extreme economy of
expression, thus requiring a great deal of background knowledge and context to draw out the meaning
from the cryptic text. The classical textual tradition was fundamentally anti-democratic, elitist, and,
most importantly, a serious impediment to literacy.
The May Fourth intellectuals therefore sought to release the world of Chinese scholarship from the
stranglehold of Classical Chinese, and instigated a movement to publish all books in a vernacular
form called baihua , (literally ‘plain speech’), a written form grammatically patterned on the standard
northern Mandarin dialects, which were at least passively comprehensible by a majority of the
Chinese population.
For the May Fourth activists, the baihua movement was not a matter of literary aesthetics; it was a
matter of China’s cultural survival. The artificial classical language had remained the official written
language of China for more than 2,000 years. Whereas Europe had discarded Latin and was
publishing books in the vernacular by the sixteenth century, incredibly, Classical Chinese continued to
be the language of Chinese texts until well into the twentieth century. Imagine a London of the 1920s in
which all scholarly books were still published in Latin, enjoyed by only a small percentage of literate
scholars, while the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Darwin remained inaccessible to the masses.
This is essentially analogous to the case for Chinese literature of the time.
In fact, it was not until 1920 that the Chinese Ministry of Education, with intense prodding from the
May Fourth scholars and linguists, ordered that primary and middle school texts be changed from
Classical Chinese to the vernacular, and mandated that all textbooks be written in baihua . This
prompted what amounted to a commercial publishing war, as all the printing companies rushed to
publish new textbooks written in the vernacular.
The vernacular movement was only one part of an overall radical agenda to reform and reshape
Chinese language, literature and education. The leaders who spearheaded this movement, some of the
greatest thinkers of the last century, all shared the goal of forging a new common language, one that
would serve as a more democratic means of expression.
Lu Xun, perhaps the most iconic May Fourth intellectual and one of the most important Chinese
writers of the twentieth century, was a champion of the baihua movement. His groundbreaking short
story, ‘Diary of a Madman’, was one of the first pieces of fiction to be written in the new baihua
style. The narrative of the story is framed as the medical file of a delusional mental patient. The
doctor’s introductory diagnosis is written in Classical Chinese, followed by the madman’s diary
entries, written in baihua . The patient’s diary is a record of his increasingly paranoid descent into
madness. As he spends his nights obsessively studying the Confucian texts collectively known as the
‘Four Books and Five Classics’, he begins to detect faint words written almost imperceptibly
between the lines. Only after intense scrutiny does he decipher the message, ‘Eat people!’
The intentional juxtaposition of the classical and vernacular languages in the story constitutes a formcontent blend whose political implications – an attack on the socially destructive subtext of the
Confucian value system – were obvious to contemporary readers.
Throughout his writing career, Lu Xun undertook a comprehensive critique of the scholarly Chinese
language tradition, attacking the elite nature of the classical language and the dregs of Confucian
ideology embedded within it. More than any other writer, Lu Xun sensitised the Chinese intelligentsia
to the pernicious subconscious influence of language in reinforcing the outmoded ideologies that he
felt were crippling China’s development.
Chen Duxiu, was one of the founders of the Communist Party, and a leading figure in the May Fourth
language reform movement. Like Lu Xun and many of the May Fourth intellectuals, he had spent
several years studying in Japan, and, seeing first hand the influence of foreign ideas on that society,
became aware of the extent to which Confucian ideology was threatening China’s survival. Chen was
the founder and editor of the influential journal New Youth , which he used as a platform to advocate a
non-elitist, easily readable literary style. As with all the other social programs in China at the time,
progress seemed to come in tipping points. In 1917, when Chen published his historic essay in New
Youth calling for a ‘literary revolution’ to overthrow Classical Chinese and transition to baihua ,
ironically the article itself was written in Classical Chinese. Just a year later the entire journal was
being published in baihua . Qian Xuantong, a well-known philologist and professor of literature at
National Peking University, was one of the most radicalised of these young Chinese intellectuals, and
a close friend of Lu Xun. (In fact, legend has it that Qian Xuantong was the one who convinced Lu Xun
to begin writing fiction.) As opposed to thinkers who advocated preserving aspects of China’s
‘national essence’, guocui , Qian identified with the ‘total westernisation’ camp, and expressed utter
pessimism about the utility of Chinese tradition. At one point in his life he even considered changing
his name to Yigu , ‘doubting the ancient’. In 1918, Qian wrote an open letter in response to one of
Chen Duxiu’s anti-Confucius articles:
Dear Mr. Chen,
In an early essay of yours you strongly advocated the abolition of Confucianism. Concerning this proposal of yours I think that it is
now the only way to save China. But upon reading it I have thought of one more thing: if you want to abolish Confucianism, you
must first abolish the Chinese [written] language. If you want to get rid of the average person’s childish, uncivilised, obstinate way of
thinking, then it is all the more essential that you first abolish the Chinese language. To abolish Confucianism and eliminate Taoism is
a fundamental way to prevent the fall of China and to allow the Chinese to become a civilised nation in the twentieth century. But a
more fundamental way than this is to abolish the written Chinese language, in which Confucian thoughts and fallacious Taoist
sayings are recorded.15
The shock of this extreme position can be felt even today. Without a cultural context, one might suspect
Qian Xuantong of being facetious. Yet one must imagine the utterly disorienting atmosphere of the
times, when day by day the very foundations of Chinese culture seemed to be crumbling. If the ideas of
Confucius could be relegated to the dustbin of history, why not the language of Confucius, as well?
Qian felt that even if Confucianism was banished, remnants of its cancerous influence so permeated
the Chinese language that only surgical interventions could cure the sickness.
Furthermore, since no alternative literary language was available, Qian Xuantong and others
believed that Chinese should be replaced by another language altogether, the best candidate being the
culturally neutral Esperanto.16
In his response to Qian, Chen Duxiu argued that to abolish the Chinese written language would also
entail abolishing the spoken language. Since he felt this step would be utterly impractical, his solution
was to retain the spoken language, but to write it with a roman alphabet.17 Yet over time Chen, too,
came to openly consider the notion of completely jettisoning the Chinese language.
This radical notion of China transitioning to a world language like Esperanto had at least some
intellectual precedent. Late Qing reformer Kang Youwei, in The Book of Grand Unity , had described
a utopian vision of a universal language that would gradually supplant the national languages of the
world. ‘So long as individual states coexist,’ he wrote, ‘and the boundaries between states have not
been abolished, then in the education of the youth, every state will continue to use its own national
language so as to inculcate patriotism and the foundation of the national existence.’18 Echoing Kang
Youwei, May Fourth thinkers such as Qian Xuantong felt that only a new vehicle for thought could
enable them to avoid the useless cultural baggage of the old ways of thinking. Hu Shi, writer and
student of American philosopher and educator John Dewey, was one of the most influential Chinese
thinkers of the last century, and also at the vanguard of the baihua movement. He saw the promotion of
the vernacular literature as just part of a more general cultural project of democratisation of the
written text, expansion of literacy and development of a national common language. Hu Shi viewed
‘orality’ as the important feature that distinguishes vernacular literature from classical literature. As
Hu saw it, the problem with Classical Chinese was that it was not based on any existing form of
speech, and thus had become primarily a visual language rather than an aural one. What was needed,
he maintained, was a new written tradition that could enable the page to ‘speak’. His passion for this
goal can be seen in an excerpt from his diary from July 1916:
What we need today is a readable, audible, singable, speakable, dictatable language which we can read aloud without the need to
translate into the spoken language, with the help of which we can take notes without the need to translate into the literary language,
which we can [use] at the speaker’s desk as well as on the stage, and which even village grannies, women and children can
understand if we read it to them. Any language that does not meet these requirements is not a living language, and can under no
circumstances become the national language of our country.19
One can see from this and other accounts of the May Fourth writers that in China, problems of spoken
and written language, scripts, styles, registers, and culturally-embedded meanings were so
inextricably tangled, that only radical solutions could address the problems of reform. In retrospect,
the sheer breath-taking scope of the options that were being seriously considered is an indication of
the existential seriousness of the crisis. These were truly revolutionary times.
The Critique of Chinese Characters
Through exposure to the Western education system, Chinese intellectuals began to see the Chinese
characters as inefficient, unscientific and burdensome. Lu Xun was perhaps the first major thinker
who called for the eradication of Chinese characters entirely, advocating replacement with a phonetic
system. He wrote: ‘To continue to write with characters is a waste of mental energy and time, not to
mention an uneconomical use of paper and ink.’ Lu Xun saw abolition of the characters as the only
way to expand literacy, which was a vital goal toward strengthening the nation. On his deathbed, Lu
Xun is supposed to have said, ‘If the Chinese characters are not eradicated, China is doomed.’
Hu Shi also advocated replacing the characters with a phonetic writing system, but believed the
more crucial first step was to allow the new vernacular writing to take hold and develop into a new
literary tradition. For Hu, a new literary style based on the sounds of language and a natural spoken
expressiveness must be created before being codified in script:
I think China will have to have an alphabetic writing in the future. But there are too many monosyllables in the literary language and
it would be impossible to change over to an alphabetic script. So it is first necessary to replace the literary writing with baihua
writing, and after that to change from baihua writing to alphabetic writing.20
Such calls for discarding the Chinese characters met with great opposition among conservative
scholars, of course, later, the issue was very much a priority in Mao Zedong’s long-term language
policy plans.
Linguistic Digression #2: Chinese Characters and Representation of
Sounds
Consider for a moment why Chinese language reformers seriously entertained something as radical as
adopting a phonetic script. The Chinese characters had been a great source of cultural unity and the
linchpin of a shared literary tradition spanning millennia. Surely abandoning them would be
tantamount to cultural suicide? Yet the aspect of the characters that give them their unifying power
during the dynastic period also constituted their greatest weakness in the modern era.
To illustrate this it is necessary to delve into the nuts and bolts of Chinese characters themselves
and their function as a writing system. To those familiar with Chinese, the following explanations will
seem rudimentary. To those with no knowledge of Chinese, what follows may seem, well, rather
geeky. My apologies in advance to both groups of readers.
First, we must avoid the common pitfall of conflating the Chinese language with Chinese script . In
the early part of the last century there were many scholars who believed that the Chinese language had
evolved in such lockstep with the characters that it simply could not be written with an alphabet or
any other symbols. While such confusion is historically understandable, in fact there is no scientific
basis for it. There is nothing mystical about the Chinese language in this respect, and there is no
reason that Chinese could not be written with any number of different symbol systems.21
Perhaps the most salient aspect of Chinese script is the difficulty in learning to write it. Whether or
not you’ve studied Chinese, you will have noticed that the Chinese characters, in addition to being
exquisitely beautiful, are graphically quite complex. The sheer number of these intricate shapes
imposed an absurd burden on the learners of the language, most of whom did not have the leisure to
spend their entire formative years with a calligraphy brush in hand, copying characters onto a page.
Unlike phonetic or alphabetic scripts, which normally involve a couple dozen or more simple
symbols, Chinese script requires the rote memorisation of many thousands of characters, some of such
stupefying calligraphic complexity that the literati had to essentially devote their entire childhoods to
mastering the system.
In addition, there was the problem of how the characters represent sounds. A full explanation of
this complex issue is well beyond the scope of this book, but here we will focus on the extent to
which the characters are phonetic.22 It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that Chinese characters are
not phonetic at all. Chinese does have a way of representing the sounds of Chinese syllables, but it
does so in a way that is inconsistent and unsystematic to the point of being almost worthless as a tool
for learning and remembering them. It basically cannot be considered a phonetic system; a perfectly
intelligent beginner to the language could go for months without even discovering that there is any
correspondence between symbol and sound.
Chinese character classification is quite a complex issue, but for our purposes here, we’re going to
oversimplify and say that there are essentially two kinds of characters: (1) Those that do not represent
sounds and must be memorised by rote, and (2) Those that contain a phonetic component, which gives
some clue (seldom reliable) to the character’s pronunciation.
Non-phonetic Chinese characters are essentially analogous to the special symbols adjunct to
alphabetic writing systems, items like %, &, @, etc., in that the pronunciations of such symbols must
simply be memorised and retrieved through rote learning. The familiar symbols of arithmetic can be
used as a convenient example. When we learn arithmetic in primary school, we encounter strings of
symbols such as:
3+4=7
We soon learn to associate these symbols with the sounds of the English words ‘three’, ‘plus’, ‘four’,
‘equals’ and ‘seven’. Yet, there is nothing in the mute shapes of the mathematical symbols to indicate
the sounds of English, or any other language. The symbol-to-sound relation must be memorised
through repetitive exposure. In English, we also have the option of writing out this same arithmetical
statement using our phonetic alphabet, thus:
Three plus four equals seven
Here the process of sound retrieval is quite different. The script gives us a quite reliable symbol-tosound correspondence; the sounds can be decoded from the alphabetic symbols themselves. To learn
this system, there is some front-loaded learning that must take place, namely the spelling rules that
indicate the sequence of letter codes for each sound. But once these rules of orthography are mastered,
the user of the language can freely convert the sounds of the language through active writing or passive
reading, hopefully achieving something like full literacy.
For Chinese characters there is a large number of non-phonetic characters that do not contain any
clue as to their sounds. Let’s start with an example using a string of such characters:
三加四等于七
If you cannot read Chinese, this string of symbols will be totally mute to you. If you read Chinese, you
will know that this is a translation of the same arithmetical phrase, ‘3 + 4 = 7’. And, just like the
Arabic numerals in the first example, these particular Chinese characters do not contain any
information about the sounds of the corresponding Chinese words. Until the importation of phonetic
alphabets and romanisation schemes around the turn of the last century, Chinese simply had no
convenient phonetic option; there was no reliable system for representing the sounds for the
characters.23 With the development of modern romanisation methods, we are able to render the string
of characters above into a phonetic form using pinyin:
Sān jiā sì děngyú qī
‘Three plus four equals seven’. The advantage to literacy is obvious. With only the letters of the
Roman alphabet and the symbol-to-sound rules, Chinese speakers can now read anything that is
written down, and write down anything that is said.
Now what about the characters that do have a phonetic component? How do phonetic characters
represent the sounds of a Chinese syllable?
Historically, as the set of Chinese characters grew, the strain on finite human memory was stretched
to the limits. Chinese writers soon developed a method to make newly created characters easier to
remember. They did this by creating composite characters that contained one semantic element that
gave a clue to the meaning of the character, and another phonetic component whose sound was similar
to the word in question. They called this type of character a xingshengzi, ‘form-sound character’. The
technique was such a user-friendly advancement that this principle of character formation now
accounts for 90 per cent of the total number of Chinese characters.
Take, for example, the character gōng, 工, meaning ‘work’. This is one of those basic ‘mute’
characters that contain no phonetic clues. But when appearing in the composite character gōng, 攻
(meaning ‘assault, attack), the component 攵 (pū, ‘tap, rap’) acts like a semantic indicator, whereas
the component gōng, 工, plays only a phonetic role, reminding the reader that the pronunciation for the
character gōng, 攻, is the same as the character gōng, 工, in isolation.
So far, so good. If only all Chinese characters were so systematic, then we would have, in effect, a
syllabary, a set of symbols that reliably represent the syllables of a language, something like the
Japanese kana system. But of course, with the Chinese language nothing is ever quick and easy. The
Chinese character set evolved over the period of several thousand years, and this strategy of
‘semantic component + phonetic component’ soon became much less reliable, due to the fact that the
sounds of a language slowly change over time. So as the centuries went by, Chinese language users
were stuck with characters whose phonetic value had eroded to the point of being almost useless. For
example, here are some ‘form-sound’ characters that also contain the phonetic component gōng, 工:
空 kōng
红 hóng
杠 gàng
江 jiāng
As you can see, the pronunciations of these characters now bear only a mild resemblance to the sound
gōng. At some point in the distant past, some of these characters may have been near homonyms, but
the original usefulness of the phonetic hint has largely evaporated. In fact, studies have shown that out
of the 5,990 xingsheng characters, only 1,578 of them are pronounced the same as the phonetic
component in modern Chinese.24
It’s easy to use a comparison with the English language to demonstrate the divergence of script and
sound over time. For example, here is a couplet from Shakespeare’s sonnet number 32:
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.
Oops. Clearly ‘love’ is a pretty weak rhyme for ‘prove’. Did Shakespeare suddenly develop a tin ear
for rhyme? The reality is that in the Bard’s time (sixteenth century), the vowels in ‘prove’ and ‘love’
were identical, as were the vowels in ‘good’ and ‘blood’, and a host of others. The sounds of English
words have shifted and diverged over time, leaving the original spellings as ‘fossil evidence’ of their
original similarity. The same phenomenon can be found in Chinese, except the changes took place
over thousands rather than hundreds of years, and thus the divergence is much greater.
For languages that use alphabets, reading, writing and speaking form a ‘virtuous circle’,
constituting one composite skill. In Chinese, the circle is broken, and none reinforce the other. In
English, the spelling of the word ‘dragon’ conveys the sound of the word, and the sound of the word is
enough for the learner to quickly remember how to write it. In Chinese, the traditional character for
‘dragon’, 龍, sits silent and imposing on the page, and can only be remembered through countless
hours of repetitive practice.
In sum, the phonetic function of the characters was so weak or inconsistent as to be more of a
distraction than an aid to memory. Or, as one article about the difficulties of Chinese put it: ‘Chinese
is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic; technically true but in practice not the most salient thing
about it.’25
This explains one of the reasons that the Chinese characters could be used throughout all the
different language regions of China; since they essentially represented no sounds, they could represent
all sounds. Just as the non-phonetic symbol ‘7’ can be read as ‘seven’, ‘siete’ or ‘sieben’ depending
on the language of the reader, traditionally Chinese speakers simply read the characters with the
pronunciations of their own particular local dialect. This state of affairs created an illusory
impression among many scholars that China already had a ‘common language’, whereas all it had was
a common script.
The situation was clear: No matter what the aesthetic qualities or expressive subtleties of the
Chinese characters, in order to codify, teach, and promote the new national language, a transition to
some kind of phonetic system was essential. In addition, the long-term agenda of developing forms of
local dialect vernacular literature also required something like a phonetic alphabet, for only
alphabetic scripts are able to represent the sounds of local accents and dialects, so as to notate
realistic records of actual speech. For example, think of how Mark Twain was able to represent
southern American speech in Huckleberry Finn , or Charles Dickens vividly rendered the accents of
London in his novels. By now it should be clear that the system of Chinese characters is incapable of
this sort of fine-grained speech transcription, and thus incapable of representing China’s various
regional languages.26
For comparison, here is an example of how the alphabet can be used to represent the sounds of
local Chinese dialects. The following is arguably the most famous Chinese poem in history, ‘Night
Thoughts’ by Tang poet Li Bai, rendered in Putonghua pinyin pronunciation, alongside a version of the
poem as rendered in Cantonese pinyin pronunciation:
Putonghua pronunciation
Cantonese Pinyin pronunciation
《靜夜思》
Jìng Yè Sī
Zing6 Je6
床前明月光
Chuáng qián
Cong4 cin4
míng yuè guā ng
ming4 jyut6 gwong1
Yí shì
ji4 si6
dì shàng shuā ng
dei6 soeng6 soeng1
Jǔ tóu
geoi2 tau4
wàng míng yuè
mong6 ming4 jyut6
Dī tóu
dai1 tau4
sī gù xiā ng
si3 gu3 hoeng3
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉
Of course, the poem is written in the ancient classical language, the grammar and sounds of which
were very different from those of modern Chinese. These two versions merely provide phonetic
representations for the sounds of the characters in the modern Putonghua and Cantonese. But the
example illustrates the power of a phonetic alphabet, which can be flexibly adopted to transcribe the
sounds of any language or dialect.
All well and good; hopefully by now you are as convinced as the early Chinese language reformers
that a phonetic system was essential for China’s future in the modern era. For the next step, the
inevitable question arose: What kind of phonetic system should be adopted? As if China had not
suffered enough wars in the twentieth century, a new one loomed on the horizon: the ‘alphabet wars’.
The Alphabet Wars: The Romanisation of Chinese
To the newly established Republican government of 1912, it was obvious that the countries with the
greatest literacy were also the most advanced. In particular, it seemed significant that all such great
nations made use of some form of alphabetic writing. Government reformers were most keenly aware
of the example of Japan, which had incorporated the Chinese character set for their kanji script, but
had also developed the kana phonetic symbols, which had been instrumental in language pedagogy
and the development of their own national language. The leaders of the Republic realised a disturbing
fact: the Japanese soldiers were efficient and effective partly because they, unlike their Chinese
counterparts, were all able to read.
This realisation is clearly spelled out by Lu Zhuang-zhang, a language teacher and translator at the
time:
The wealth and strength of a country depend on science. The growth of science depends on everyone – men and women, young
and old – having a love of learning and a knowledge of theory. Their ability to have a love of learning and knowledge of theory
depends on using a phonetic system of writing; then, once the alphabet and spelling have been mastered, everything can be read by
oneself, without a teacher. It depends on speech and writing being the same; it also depends on a simple script that will be easy to
learn and write . . . If all this time is applied to the study of mathematics, the natural sciences, chemistry, and all sorts of practical
studies, how can there be any fear that our country will not be rich and strong?27
When Lu expresses the desire to make the Chinese ‘rich and strong’ his allusion is to the longstanding
goal – since the late Qing – of reviving China’s former state of fuqiang , ‘wealth and power’.
Increasing the literacy rate of the broad masses was essential to achieving this objective.
The attempt to phonetically represent Chinese was not new. Foreign and Chinese scholars had
already been attempting phonetic systems for quite some time. Western missionaries had designed
alphabetic scripts for south eastern coastal dialects to aid in spreading Christianity. In the late 1800s
Sir Thomas Wade developed a romanisation method that was modified by Herbert Allen Giles in
1912 to become the Wade-Giles system, a standard among foreign Sinologists for several decades, but
never popular among the Chinese. In fact, there had been literally dozens of attempts at various
phonetic systems around the turn of the century, but none had gained wide acceptance.
There were numerous slogans and catchphrases among the phonetic writing advocates, all centring
on the idea of closing the gap between the spoken and written language. The most popular of these
was, ‘My hand writes what I speak’.28 This core principle had already been in the air for quite a long
time. Now, at last, there was the political will to implement it.
Yet unanimity of purpose did not entail unanimity of method. The same sorts of conflicts that had
plagued the development of a common spoken language also inflamed the ‘alphabet wars’. What sort
of phonetic system should be adopted? Should China simply borrow the existing Western Roman
alphabet, or should special symbols be adopted that are specific to the sound system of the national
language? And should the phonetic system be taught as a stepping stone to full Chinese character
mastery, or should it replace the system of characters altogether?
When the Conference on the Unification of Pronunciation met in 1913, one of their tasks was to
come up with a set of phonetic symbols to represent the sounds of the characters. Advocates of one or
another of the myriad schemes under consideration often brought up misinformed or linguistically
absurd arguments, opposing the Roman alphabet on purely political or aesthetic grounds. Using the
Roman alphabet was considered by some to be blindly following the West, if not unpatriotic. Others
maintained that kana -like phonetic symbols were better suited to China because they looked more
like Chinese characters.
Unfortunately, such superficial arguments won out, and it soon became apparent that the sentiment
of the conferees was generally against the adoption of any system based on the Roman alphabet, and in
favour of a system of symbols resembling characters. After further extended debate, an agreement was
reached on the thirty-nine symbols of the Zhuyin zimu , or ‘Phonetic Alphabet’, which was the system
to be adopted in Taiwan after 1949 (often informally referred to as bopomofo ).
In 1930 the National Education Conference held in Nanjing passed a resolution in favour of the
national phonetic alphabet, and sent a delegation to discuss the matter with Chiang Kai-shek and other
top Kuomintang leaders. Chiang was enthusiastic about the phonetic signs as a means to attack
illiteracy, and shortly thereafter, the Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution proposed by
Chiang Kai-shek calling for the immediate implementation of the phonetic system in propaganda,
education and signage. Hopes ran high, but the vagaries of war, dislocation and factional infighting
stalled progress on the implementation.
The biggest stumbling block, however, was the usual clash of linguistic science versus political
realities. In this case, the result was confusion over the actual function of the phonetic symbols; should
they replace the Chinese characters, or simply be used to teach their correct pronunciation? The
conservative factions won out, and in the end, the effect of the phonetic alphabet was not to eliminate
the Chinese characters, but to merely reinforce their use. Predictably, most people found this to be
such an annoyance – learning a whole new set of symbols just to help learn the old symbols! – that
they threw up their hands in disgust and ignored the system altogether.
The failure of the phonetic alphabet to catch on ironically left an empty space for the character
abolitionists to re-enter the fray. At the forefront of this camp was Fu Sinian, another May Fourth
intellectual who had been one of the student leaders who led the demonstrations on the morning of 4th
May, 1919, and would later go on to become the president of Peking University. Fu was a supporter of
the total westernisation of the education system. He advocated sweeping away all of Chinese
literature as worthless, declaring that ‘the Six Classics and the Three Histories should be used as
cooking fuel’, and ridiculing calls for preserving the literary canon as ‘like saying that bound feet are
also artistic and should be preserved’.
Equally outrageous to preservationists at the time was Fu’s claim that the Chinese characters were
a totally dispensable aspect of the Chinese language. Fu Sinian and his comrades, steeped in the new
western science of linguistics, stood with the Saussurean principle of the primacy of speech over
writing. ‘Language is a means of expressing ideas,’ Fu said, ‘and writing is just a means of expressing
language.’ Since the purpose of written language is to represent speech, why not throw away the
outmoded characters into the garbage and just notate the sounds? For most of the academic
establishment, opinions such as these were viewed as heretical lunacy.
It is easy to forget that, for most Chinese then (and even now) there was an almost sacred reverence
for the Chinese characters. Chinese traditionalists tended to ascribe almost mystical semiotic power
to the characters, seeing them not just as symbols for semantic meaning, but as embodying the essence
of Chinese culture itself. To eliminate the characters would be tantamount to eradicating Chinese
civilisation. For such conservative traditionalists, Fu Sinian and his ilk were seen as race traitors, as
cultural terrorists who wanted to plunge a knife into the heart of China.
Some political leaders of the time also feared the consequences that might result from adopting a
form of writing that was readily accessible to the common people. Such a move had the taint of
democracy, after all. An example of this mind-set can be seen in Zhang Zuolin, military overlord of
Manchuria from 1916 to 1928. Apparently viewing the Phonetic Alphabet as an instrument of
revolution, and a subversive plot against his regime, in 1924 he banned the teaching of such systems,
and at the same time, for good measure, mandated the use of classical literary style in school
textbooks.29 To the authoritarian mind, intent on maintaining the established order, apparently no threat
is more salient than the thought of ordinary citizens freely acquiring and sharing information.
There was indeed something of a democratic impetus in pushing for an alphabetic script. Beyond
purely linguistic considerations, the promotion of alphabets was perceived as a move toward science,
toward a liberation of the human spirit, and the key to universal literacy. It is partly this aspect that
attracted the communist left to the system.
The CPC Enters the Alphabet Wars
In 1923, the newly-minted Communist Party of China had joined forces with the KMT in an uneasy
alliance, the so-called ‘First United Front’, in order to beat back the tide of regional warlord factions
that were attempting to carve up China. By 1927, this tenuous alliance had broken down, and by the
1930s the two sides had entered into a protracted civil war. While Mao and Chiang vied for political
control over China, they also began to lay the groundwork for their future administrations, each
drafting their own tentative language reform policies.
In 1940, Mao and his comrades joined in a nationwide movement to establish a ‘New Writing
Society’ in Yan’an, setting their sights on an outmoded feudal enemy, the Chinese characters. The
language reformers in the CPC were in complete accord with the May Fourth contention that China’s
backward condition, while mostly due to political and economic obstacles, was also partly due to the
regressive effect of the writing system on education. As Mao explained to journalist Edgar Snow in
1936:
Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters, or simplified teaching, does not
equip the people with a really efficient and rich vocabulary. Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters
altogether, if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate.30
The Yan’an group was aware that abolishing the characters entailed replacement with a phonetic
system. Being very much in the Soviet sphere of influence, the CPC advocated the adoption of a
phonetic system called Latinxua Sin Wenz (‘Latinised New Writing’), a plan developed by the
Chinese immigrants in the Soviet Union to reduce illiteracy rates. This method was unique in that from
the outset it was intended to supersede the Chinese characters. Championed by intellectuals such as Lu
Xun and Guo Moruo, the method enjoyed a very brief period of success in increasing literacy, with
over 300 publications using the system. When Edgar Snow visited China in 1936, he found that the
CPC had already published a pocket dictionary of Latinxua, and were experimenting with teaching it
to a class of young students.
In early 1949, the tide had turned in Mao’s favour. Beijing had fallen to the communists without a
fight, the KMT had been dislodged from their capital at Nanjing, and the CPC controlled most of
northern China. With his KMT army in retreat in Guangzhou, Chiang Kai-shek watched in despair
throughout the summer of 1949 as support for the Nationalists eroded, and city after city fell to the
communists. By autumn it became clear that Chiang had been checkmated; the few remaining moves on
the board were a mere formality. As the Red Army routed the last vestiges of the Nationalist army,
Mao wasted no time in beginning to set up his administration in Beijing.
Even as the civil war in China raged, the push for language reform never fell by the wayside. On
the eve of the communist takeover, just two months before the formal establishment of the PRC,
linguist Wu Yuzhang wrote a letter to Mao Zedong asking for guidance on how to carry out Chinese
language reform. The next day Mao passed on Wu’s letter to Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, as well as to
Ma Xulun, the future Minister of Education, asking for their advice. Mao Dun and Ma recommended
adopting the Guoyu strategy of taking the northern Mandarin dialects as the spoken standard, and
completely replacing the Chinese script with an alphabetic system.
With the Nationalist threat effectively out of the picture, language reformers saw hope on the
horizon. If Mao had actually fulfilled his promise of abolishing Chinese characters after 1949, he
might have brought about a linguistic revolution every bit as earthshaking as the political one. Alas, it
was not to be.
Putonghua after 1949
When Mao stood on the Tiananmen rostrum in October of 1949 and declared the official establishment
of the People’s Republic of China, he did not make this announcement in standard Putonghua. His
proclamations were spoken in a Hunan accent so strong that some members of the crowd came away
with different versions of what he had actually said. But although Mao stood in Tiananmen before a
politically united China, the populace itself was as linguistically fragmented as ever. Now, with the
Great Helmsman firmly at the wheel, what would his policy be? Would Mao be able to accomplish
what a generation of reformers had been unable to?
The new regime moved quickly on the linguistic front. The Chinese Script Reform Association is
said to have been established on the same day as Mao proclaimed the founding of the PRC.31
After a busy and tumultuous few years, filled with national growing pains and crises such as the
Korean War, language reform began in earnest. In 1955 two conferences were held by the Chinese
Academy of Science and Ministry of Education, the purposes of which were to create a new phonetic
scheme, simplify the Chinese characters, and adopt standards for the spoken and written language. The
National Conference on Script Reform reached a general consensus on these issues in October 1955,
and at long last the People’s Republic of China had an official common language, called ‘Putonghua’.
The CPC had been loath to simply adopt the KMT’s Guoyu standard. Whatever its strengths might
be, it was a language policy that bore the class taint of the Nationalist regime. Yet despite the new
name, Putonghua represented only slight additions to the Guoyu features. A symposium in 1956 set
down the definition as (1) the Beijing phonological system as the pronunciation standard, (2) the
northern dialects as the base dialect, and (3) modern vernacular literary works for its grammatical
norms.32 In terms of phonology, this definition differed little from the definition of Guoyu in 1926,
with the deletion of the class-sensitive word ‘educated’ from the original clause ‘the pronunciation of
educated natives of Beijing’.
A few linguistic points need to be made here. First of all, the three criteria listed show that
Putonghua was not the adoption of an existing form of speech, but was still an amalgam of linguistic
features. It was a prescriptive standard rather than descriptive norm. Secondly, the choice of the
Beijing phonological system does not imply that Putonghua is equivalent to the Beijing dialect; many
colloquialisms were excluded from standard Putonghua.
The decision to use modern literary works in the baihua vernacular as a basis for grammatical
norms has been the subject of much criticism. Given that definition is meant to establish a spoken
standard, why should its grammar be based on written traditions? There has been a tendency in
Chinese linguistics to prescriptively prefer written forms as more elegant or ‘correct’, rather than to
conduct linguistic surveys of vernacular speech to arrive at descriptive standards for how people
actually talk. Despite any flaws in the initial policy, the PRC language committees had at least
acquiesced to the enormous amount of expert opinion on the matter, and had sensibly adopted the
Beijing dialect as the basis for the standard. This policy decision was not particularly surprising.
What was surprising, however, was the CPC’s subsequent about-face concerning the continued coexistence of local dialects.
As the CPC discussed language policy issues at Yan’an, a series of practical questions began to
arise. Should the various regional dialects continue to exist and be used in parallel to the new national
language? Or should the new national standard gradually replace the various regional forms of
speech? The promulgation of the new language would not happen overnight. It would take time – even
optimistic estimates said 100 years – for the speakers in various regions to adopt the national
language. In the meantime what would be the fate of the tens of millions of speakers of the other
dialects? Would these people be consigned to a kind of linguistic second-class citizenship for
generations?
The Kuomintang had been clear about the answer to these questions, and were always opposed to
the notions of autonomy and equality for the local dialects. They banned dialect-based phonetic
writing and literature after 1928, charged advocates of such positions as ‘cultural traitors’,
confiscating their literature and arresting them, in parallel with other anti-CPC purges.
By contrast, prior to 1949 the CPC had always been in favour of allowing, and even encouraging,
the local dialects to develop their own language and literature in parallel with the development of a
national language. The dialects would not be abolished; speaking the national language would be
optional, not mandatory. But the case for this policy could be convoluted and hard to make. Language
reformer Li Jinxi, a mentor and lifelong friend of Mao Zedong, exhibited the awkward nature of this
rhetorical stance in this passage from 1934:
What we mean by National Language is a sort of universal language which all the people use to express their ideas. Everyone may
speak it, but everyone doesn’t have to speak it. Although everyone doesn’t have to speak it, we want all the people to be able to
speak it, for all are Chinese, and it should not be that they cannot speak Chinese when they see each other.33 [Emphasis author’s .]
The plea of the last statement has poignancy; to many people the imposition of a national language
seemed to entail that a huge proportion of the Chinese people would actually have to be taught how to
‘speak Chinese’. Opponents of the measures were not convinced; the requirement to learn the
language seemed a slippery slope to being forced to speak it in everyday life.
Language policy toward ethnic minorities, such as Tibetan, remained unchanged, with the local
languages still being taught in the schools alongside Putonghua. Article 53 in the original 1954
constitution stated that ‘Every minority group (minzu ) has the freedom to use and develop its
language and writing system(s) and to maintain or reform its religion.’ The issue was the concept
minzu , a notoriously slippery word to define, but basically having the sense of both
‘nation/nationality’ and ‘ethnic group’. Was the new People’s Republic to be considered as one
nationality, or as a collection of separate nationalities, including the Han?
The government decided to continue treating the speakers of non-Han languages, such as Tibetan, as
belonging to separate, minority nationalities, and thus entitled to linguistic autonomy. With regards to
local Han languages, however, the CPC’s original position of unity-in-diversity became a victim of
Realpolitik; the profusion of local dialects was now viewed as a long-term threat to national unity.
The Han speech forms were now considered as fangyan , ‘dialects’, and not separate languages. The
classification was based on politics, not linguistics; after all, surely all the ‘Chinese people’ must be
speakers of one ‘Chinese language’?
In linguistic circles, a criticism was launched on foreign use of the word ‘languages’ to refer to
what Chinese referred to as ‘dialects’. At a conference in Beijing in 1955, Wang Li, one of the most
important Chinese linguists of the era, denounced Leonard Bloomfield as ‘a reactionary American
linguist’ for stating that the term ‘Chinese language’ refers to a linguistic group made up of a great
many varieties of mutually unintelligible languages , which was tantamount to saying that China was
not one nation.34
When the 1950s policy statements began to be promulgated, it became clear that the expectation
was for Chinese dialects to be eventually replaced by Putonghua. Even before Putonghua was
officially adopted as the national language, on 26 October, 1955, the People’s Daily published an
editorial ‘Strive to promote the reform of the Chinese script, the spread of Putonghua and the
standardisation of Chinese’. The editorial proclaimed:
We should vigorously advocate the importance of the spread of Putonghua, so that people know correctly the relationship between
dialects and Putonghua. Putonghua serves the people of the whole country, and dialects serve the people of an area. To spread
Putonghua does not mean to wipe out dialects artificially, but to reduce the scope of dialect use progressively. This is in line with
the objective laws of social progress. [emphasis author’s ] Dialects are to exist side by side with Putonghua for quite a long
period, but the use of Putonghua must be expanded constantly.35
The tone of such pronouncements was clear, and no doubt chilling to the speakers of local dialects.
The dialects were to disappear; the only question was whether to eradicate them artificially (meaning
by strong administrative measures) or to allow them to die out naturally as Putonghua spread to every
domain of language use.
The tone of Zhou Enlai’s 1956 executive order on the nationwide official promotion of Putonghua
almost gave the impression that use of dialects constituted a threat to national security:
Many unintelligible dialects have hindered the communication between people from different dialect communities and caused many
inconveniences for China’s socialist construction . . . These phenomena must be effectively eliminated in order to protect the interest
of China’s political, economic, cultural and national defence development.36
Whatever misgivings the localities might have had, once established, the Putonghua language policy
was unassailable. Though the policy was difficult to explain clearly, and was misunderstood by
language planners and the public alike, there was no turning back. This was to be a work in progress.
Promulgation of the spoken language was only one leg of the post-1949 language reforms. In China,
reform of speech could not be fully implemented without addressing the problems of writing, and so
the Party turned its attention to the written language.
Reform of the Written Language under the CPC
Those experts who had been heartened by Mao’s apparent willingness to replace the Chinese
characters with a phonetic script were in for a disappointment. Whereas Mao himself had expressed
determination to transition to an alphabetic system, soon after 1949, he seemed to execute an aboutface. Instead of abandoning the characters, the CPC now seemed to be moving toward merely
simplifying them. On July 10, 1950, Wu Yuzhang convened the cadres in charge of language reform,
and relayed instructions he had received from Mao a month before. Mao’s directive, which ignored
the recommendations by Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, ordered that the reform of the writing system
should start with simplification of the characters, and that the reforms ‘should not be divorced from
reality or make a break with the past’. Furthermore, the directive stated the Roman alphabet should
not be used for any new phonetic system, but instead a set of symbols should be devised based on
Chinese characters; they should be ‘Chinese in form’.37
One can almost hear the ardent language reformers breathe a collective moan of despair at that
time. If there was one chance to push through such an utterly radical reform, it would only come now,
under the near-total authority of Mao and the momentum of the CPCs mandate. Mao’s reversal seemed
to represent a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Why the change of heart? What can be gleaned from off-the-record comments is that Mao was
experiencing vehement pushback from the old guard intellectuals and literati, who felt that the
proposed changes were too extreme and potentially disruptive.38 In addition, given the Party’s urgent
nation-building tasks, the language reforms were perceived as low priority. These pragmatic
considerations were more or less confirmed by Zhou Enlai in his remarks to a former French minister
of education:
In the 1950s, we tried to Romanise the writing. But all those who had received an education, and whose services we absolutely
needed to expand education, were firmly attached to the ideograms. They were already so numerous, and we had so many things to
upset, that we put off the reform until later.39
Another piece of the puzzle comes from author Peter Hessler’s interview with Zhou Youguang (known
as ‘The Father of Pinyin’), in which Zhou suggests that it was a remark made by Stalin to Mao during
a visit to the Soviet Union that caused the change of focus. Stalin had said to Mao, ‘You’re a great
country, and you should have your own form of Chinese writing. You shouldn’t simply use the Latin
alphabet.’40 This remark may have prodded Mao to consider the political perceptions of the proposed
changes, rather than their scientific validity. As a historical footnote, Hessler also mentions that the
greatest Western advocate of Chinese language reform, John DeFrancis, was so incensed by Mao’s
reversal on character abolition that he refused to return to China for forty-nine years afterward.41
In 1952, the communist government convened the Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written
Language. The goal of this committee was to simplify the Chinese ideograms to such an extent that
even workers and peasants would be able to write them without much difficulty. It was noted that the
common people had already been using informal simplified forms in daily life for hundreds of years,
so the Party need only follow the lead of the people to carry out the character simplification project.
In 1956, the State Council promulgated the first list of simplified symbols consisting of 515
simplified characters plus fifty-four simplified components. About 90 per cent were commonly used
shorthand forms that had been in use for some time, even centuries, and others were simplifications
replacing complex components with more phonetic ones. How much did these simplifications
streamline the Chinese writing system? For an intuitive sense of the savings in pen strokes, here is an
example:
Traditional:
他們幾個畢業生都在廣州藝術學院學習書法和國畫。
Simplified:
他们几个毕业生都在广州艺术学院学习书法和国画。
Pinyin:
Tāmen jǐge bìyèshēng dōu zài Guǎngzhōu yìshù xuéyuàn xuéxí shūfǎ hé guóhuà.
Translation:
‘Those graduates all studied calligraphy and Chinese painting at the Guangzhou Art Academy.’
This streamlining yields a reduction of 12.5 per cent in the average number of strokes for the 2,000
most common characters, but even this simplified system still requires years of practice to master.42
The PRC government attempted a second round of character simplifications in 1977 but these met
with strong resistance by the linguistic community as well as the general public.
Can the character simplification program be considered a success? The general consensus is that
the streamlined graphs represent marginal progress – in the way that flyswatters help to decrease the
fly population – but are woefully inadequate for ultimately addressing the real problem, which is
literacy. Some analysts have noted that the most salient effect of the character simplifications has been
to further exacerbate the cultural divide between the PRC and Taiwan and Hong Kong. When it comes
to language reform in China, sometimes simplifications just complicate things.
Pinyin: The Victor in the Romanisation Wars
The failure to adopt an alphabetic script to replace the characters did not mean that the quest for a
scientific romanisation scheme had lost its importance. On the contrary, a phonetic system remained
one of the essential legs of the language reform agenda, and many different scripts were tried,
including Cyrillic. To get a sense of how intense this project had become, according to John
DeFrancis, between 1950–58, over 1,700 phonetic scripts and methods were proposed!43
Eventually, however, common sense and inertia caused experts to revert back to the Roman
alphabet, rejecting the idea of a character-form system that Mao had originally called for. Mao
Zedong did not seem fazed by the refusal to comply with his directive; most likely he had never been
strongly committed to any of the competing solutions. But some off-the-record comments made in
January 1956 to the Communist Party Central Committee reveal that he still favoured replacing
characters with the alphabet, and blamed conservative intellectuals for opposing the move:
Do you approve or not adopting the Latin alphabet in the future? As I see it there is no great problem among the broad masses.
There are some problems among the intellectuals. [They say] How can China adopt a foreign alphabet? However, on examination it
is better after all to adopt such a foreign alphabet . . . Several professors have said to me that Chinese characters are ‘the best
writing system of all the countries in the world’ and cannot be reformed. (Laughter ) If the Latin alphabet had been invented by
Chinese, probably there would not be any problem.44
These unscripted remarks are a fascinating glimpse into Mao’s personality, revealing his impatience
with stale orthodoxy and an utter contempt for the narrow vision of the traditionalist scholars. Seeing
that eradication of the characters was a lost cause, he had evidently accepted defeat, but not without a
few parting shots.
To paraphrase Churchill’s quote about the Americans, it seems you can always count on the
Chinese to settle on the right language reform proposal – after they’ve tried everything else. And so,
after decades of considering different scripts, alphabets, and symbol systems, China finally arrived at
the Hanyu pinyin romanisation system – the method used throughout this book to render Chinese in
phonetic form.
The development of this method was due, in large part, to the efforts of Zhou Youguang. Zhou was a
rather unlikely candidate for the job of aiding the CPCs language reform efforts. He never joined the
Communist Party, and in fact, early in life he married into a rich family and went into banking. He
moved to New York in 1946, and continued his career as a banker, living the kind of life the
Communist Party would later excoriate: travelling the US in first-class luxury, taking the Queen
Elizabeth ocean liner to Europe, and hobnobbing with the likes of Albert Einstein.
Zhou returned to China in 1949 to help with the modernisation of the new China, and found a
position for a time teaching economics in Shanghai. His life in China was far from the bourgeois
lifestyle he had led in New York. While working for a state work unit, Zhou took his meals in one of
the humble work-unit canteens, eating there daily during the many food shortages at the time. At lunch
he often noticed a certain man sitting at the table near him, and eventually recognised him as Pu Yi, the
deposed ‘Last Emperor’ of the Qing Dynasty who became an ordinary citizen in the Mao era. ‘It was
Puyi,’ he recounts during a BBC interview years later. ‘Imagine, even the emperor had to eat there
because he didn’t have enough food.’45
In 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai requested Zhou Youguang’s presence in Beijing. The Party needed him
to join in the language standardisation program to devise a new phonetic alphabet. Linguistics had
always been a hobby of Zhou Youguang’s, but he never studied it formally. When Zhou protested that
he was only an amateur, he was told, ‘Everyone is an amateur.’46
Zhou at least had some predecessors for his work. The Wade-Giles method had existed for
decades, and Zhao Yuanren had also devised a tonal spelling system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh
(Guoyu luomazi ‘National Language Romanisation’). Early on Zhou had also been influenced by
China’s first romanisation method, developed by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci in collaboration with
Michele Ruggieri as part of their 1584–88 Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, the first European-Chinese
dictionary.
With these systems as references, Zhou Youguang and his team wrangled with the same kinds of
issues these early Jesuit pioneers dealt with: how to cope with the numerous homonyms in Chinese;
how to graphically represent the four tones of Mandarin; and whether to use the Roman alphabet, the
Cyrillic alphabet, or to invent a new Chinese set of phonetic symbols similar to the Zhuyin fuhao .
‘We spent three years developing pinyin. People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us a long time
to deal with just 26 letters,’ he later said.47
Finally, the scheme for pinyin was completed in February 1958, the same month that Mao’s ‘Great
Leap Forward’ campaign was approved by the National People’s Congress. Once implemented, the
method played a crucial role in increasing literacy rates, and making Chinese more accessible to
Western media and scholarship.
The movement for language reform came to a standstill during the Cultural Revolution and nothing
was published on language reform or linguistics from 1966 to 1972. Zhou was sent to the Ningxia
countryside to ‘learn from the masses’. In a reaction against all things foreign, the pinyin letters that
had been added below the Chinese characters on the masthead of the People’s Daily newspaper and
the Red Flag journal were removed from July 1966 to January 1977.
Zhou has always been modest about his achievement. ‘I’m not the father of pinyin,’ he has said,
‘I’m the son of pinyin. It’s [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down
to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect.’48 At the time of this
writing, Zhou was 110 and still active. Taking advantage of the privilege accorded him due to his age
and accomplishments, he remains a fearless critic of the government, producing books and articles
calling for democratic reforms. Zhou seems to thrive on controversy, admitting ‘I really like people
cursing me.’49
Zhou Youguang at 110, still going strong
Like many political reforms, comprehensive language reforms were begun with much fanfare and
promotion, only to fall victim to political struggle and lack of funding. Mao’s public support for the
promotion of Putonghua was praised during his final decade, though his occasional statements
amounted to no more than lip service, and language reform remained an unfulfilled agenda. As for
script reform, the US National Archives contain a fascinating transcript of a conversation between
Mao, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai in February of 1973 (following the historic Nixon visit the previous
year) in which language reform was briefly – if incoherently – discussed:
KISSINGER: Chinese culture is so particular that it is difficult to assimilate other cultures.
CHAIRMAN MAO: The Chinese spoken language is okay, but the Chinese characters are no good.
ZHOU ENLAI: They are very difficult to learn.
CHAIRMAN MAO: And there are many contradictions between the oral and written language because the oral language is
monosyllabic while the written language develops from symbols. We do not use the alphabet.
KISSINGER: There are some attempts to use an alphabet I am told.
ZHOU ENLAI: First we must standardize the oral language.50
So much for the Chairman’s linguistic expertise. Overall Mao and the CPCs record on language
reform is, at best, uneven – although in all fairness, they did have quite a few other matters on their
plate.
It was not until the expansion of broadcast media in the 1980s and 1990s that Putonghua began to be
truly popularised beyond large urban areas. In fact, some might say that the growth of television and
radio has done more to promulgate Putonghua than any of the official government-instigated promotion
programs.
Mao Zedong, language reformer
Implementation of Putonghua in Broadcast Media
Since the founding of the Communist Party of China, the role of media has been defined as the
‘mouthpiece’ of the Party. As soon as the language policy on Putonghua was ratified in 1955, the CPC
began efforts to ensure that this mouthpiece spoke with one voice. At that time radio was the only
game in town – Beijing TV did not begin broadcasts until 1 May 1958 – and dialect radio
programming was immediately withdrawn. Numerous directives were issued to enforce the new
monolingual media policy for all central and local broadcasts.
It’s fair to say the Putonghua policy, though starting with the best of intentions, got off to a shaky
start. There was a shortage of trained announcers and professionals to implement the policy, and many
experienced media personnel were themselves speakers of local dialects, not Northern Mandarin. In
addition, there was initially a certain amount of pushback from listeners in local regions, who
suddenly had trouble understanding the daily news and weather forecasts. A few local stations were
allowed to continue offering public service announcements in the regional dialects such as
Shanghainese and Cantonese.
The Putonghua reforms came to a virtual standstill during the onset of the Cultural Revolution in the
late 1960s. Politics trumped pronunciation, and radio announcers were more likely to be chosen on
the basis of their political connections than the purity of their Putonghua – a reflection of Mao’s
distinction between ‘red’ and ‘expert’.
When Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, the Putonghua agenda was revived as the education system
gradually returned to normalcy. Putonghua was promoted again in all media, schools and public
activities.
As Deng’s reform and opening up got underway, and China became more interconnected, the need
for language unification became more pressing. In 1982 Putonghua was given extra clout through its
inclusion in the revised PRC Constitution, Article 19 of which now read, ‘The state promotes the
nationwide use of Putonghua (common speech based on Beijing pronunciation).’ This single sentence
solidified Putonghua as a constitutionally mandated nationwide language. In the same year the State
Administration of Radio and Television was established as a media oversight agency (later expanding
its scope in 1986 to become the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, SARFT).
Meanwhile, the increasing number of ‘talking heads’ on TV necessitated a better training and
monitoring system that would ensure standard Putonghua was used. In 1994 the State Language
Commission under the Ministry of Education established a national Putonghua proficiency test, and
this evaluation tool would apply to primary and secondary school teachers, and teachers at language
colleges, as well as television and radio broadcasters. Outcome on the test would be used in issuing a
proficiency certificate for radio and TV announcers, as well as all movie, television, theatre and
soundtrack professionals.
The language requirements for Chinese TV and radio professionals are some of the most stringent
in the world. Whereas in, say, the United States media environment, it is common to hear TV hosts
with regional accents (think of Larry King’s trademark Brooklyn accent, or Bill Moyers’ folksy
southern drawl), in China, such regional linguistic flavours are strongly discouraged.
This means that for any official media professional with a microphone, the uttering of a nonstandard pronunciation or faulty tone is subject to a fine. The exact amounts of these fines vary
somewhat, depending on the media outlet and internal department rules, but they constitute an effective
check on non-standard language use. The knowledge that somewhere in the bowels of China Central
Television (CCTV) there exists a shadowy group of language monitors whose job it is to check for
Putonghua violations is an annoying reality for all those who make a living talking on TV.
Even the Chinese-character subtitles that appear on TV screens are subject to monitoring. As part
of the media’s Putonghua promotion agenda, many Chinese TV shows include subtitles, and when I
worked for CCTV-10 in the early 2000s, the subtitle technician would be fined 50 yuan for each
erroneous character, an amount that could quickly add up to a substantial part of the hapless editor’s
monthly salary.
Hosts and announcers from outside Beijing must hone their speech to expunge local dialect traces,
but professionals born and raised in Beijing have their own problems, due to the fact that Putonghua,
though based on the Beijing dialect, is not identical to it. Language habits are hard to break, and
sometimes the most common words are most difficult to change. For example, Beijing hosts have
complained to me about slips involving the word for ‘because’. In their native Beijing dialect the
word is pronounced as yīnweí, whereas in Putonghua the correct pronunciation is yīnweì, with a
falling fourth tone weì on the second syllable. It is virtually impossible for such professionals to
avoid occasionally lapsing into their mother-tongue pronunciation, and the resulting error brings a
slap on the wrist.
Media Wars: Putonghua versus Profits
Dialects are not just dry subjects for linguistics papers, they are fascinating and fun aspects of culture,
and the Chinese people have always had a great love of dialects and dialect humour. Not allowing
news anchors to speak in dialect is one thing; forbidding dialect usages on the part of actors and
performers in TV series and movies is another. Dialects are a fact of Chinese history and current
society, and completely expunging them from scripts, plots and jokes would be next to impossible.
(Just imagine the American audience’s reaction if some government agency required the makers of
The Simpsons to dub all the voices of the characters into a bland, vanilla newscaster variety of
American English.) Dialects are culture, and culture sells. Thus, almost from the outset of the policies,
there developed a tension between the agenda of the language policy enforcers and the increasingly
profit-driven media producers – a tug-of-war between Putonghua and profits.
Despite Deng Xiaoping’s renewed promotion of Putonghua, during the 1980s the sound of regional
speech began to be heard even more in the broadcast media. This was due in part to the sudden
growth of the television industry in China. Whereas in 1978 there was less than one television per 100
people, by 1987 there were more than 70 million TV sets in homes and work units. As the number of
television stations proliferated, there was a need to provide diverse programming to all regions of
China, and local dialect programming crept in to fill the space. China’s polyglot audiences
increasingly clamoured for programming that reflected the linguistic diversity and richness of their
local regions. Regional and provincial TV and radio stations found that soap operas, serial dramas
and variety shows with dialect segments were very popular. In 1983, viewers tuned in to the first
broadcast of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, an annual variety show featuring xiaopin , ‘comedy skits’,
a wildly popular form that often used regional accents and dialects for humour.
Adding fuel to the fire, in the 1990s State media stepped up its requirement that broadcasting
entities collect most of their revenues through advertising. The need for commercial sponsorship put
dramatic pressure on media outlets; increasingly, they had to produce shows that were – miracle of
miracles – actually entertaining. Such pressure gave rise to an increasingly common clash between
commercial interests and the official language policy.
The use of dialects continued to spread, despite increased regulation, and there arose a situation
where the Putonghua-only language policy was becoming at odds with the commercial interests of
film production, as well. As cinema strived for more relevance and verisimilitude, the use of dialects
became an artistic asset, if not a necessity. Film maker Zhang Yimou directed films such as The Story
of Qiu Ju , in which actress Gong Li performed her role entirely in Shaanxi dialect. Mainstream film
became an artistic arena where the tension between the State, commerce and art was intensified, as
the official position on the use of local dialect became more ambiguous and sporadically enforced.
The 1990s saw an even greater upsurge in dialect programming, as provincial and regional TV
stations became big players, particularly in the prestige dialect areas such as Guangdong, Shanghai
and Chongqing. In a move that was technically redundant, in 1997 CCTV even attempted to ban all
dialect usage from its airwaves.
In a country with such centralised media control, why was the language policy so inconsistently and
weakly applied? Part of the reason was that the language committees had never really resolved the
longstanding question of whether Putonghua was to ultimately replace all regional dialects, or to act
as a convenient standard, allowing dialects to continue unchecked. This left a grey area for dialects to
creep in.
The 2000 ‘Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language’ also reinforced restrictions
on dialect use, though Article 16 of the law included clauses allowing certain exceptions for
broadcasting, especially in traditional operas, films, TV programs and other forms of art. Such
exceptions were an attempt to draw reasonable boundary lines where commercial interests and
interests of artistic licence could co-exist, but also created legal loopholes that only brought more
dialect cacophony to the airwaves.
Dialect shows in Guangdong, Chongqing and other regions began to flood the TV channels. In 2004,
one of the top-rated shows in China was Hangzhou TV’s News by Ah-liu-tou , a show which, in
blatant violation of SARFT guidelines, was almost completely in Hangzhou dialect. There also came
a trend in 2004 of dubbing foreign movies and cartoons into local dialects, thus cashing in on the
insatiable market for dialect children’s programming. The most lucrative of these projects was the
dubbing of American cartoon favourite Tom and Jerry (in Chinese, Mao he laoshu ) into various
dialects, including those of Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei and Shanghai.51 All this activity sparked a
(metaphorical) cat-and-mouse game between SARFT and the local media outlets, as the watchdog
agency immediately responded by issuing a notice prohibiting TV stations from dubbing imported
films and dramas into dialect.
In October 2005, SARFT followed up with another regulation, ‘On Further Reiterating the Use of
the Standard Language in TV Series’, which, among other things, mandated that ‘National leaders
depicted in TV series should speak Putonghua’.52 This provision was quite historic, in that it finally
succeeded in coercing Mao and other historic Chinese leaders to learn standard Putonghua – at least
for the lines in the script. SARFT never explained the rationale for this particular ruling, but the
regulation violated media common sense. Chinese television churns out a tremendous number of
historical dramas depicting the key battles of the twentieth century’s wars, and there have been pools
of actors who make their living portraying Mao, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and the rest of the CPC pantheon
in these epics. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, historical films were allowed to depict the
revolutionary leaders speaking with their native accents and dialects: Mao Zedong with his Hunanese,
Zhou Enlai with his penchant for Tianjin dialect, Deng Xiaoping talking in Sichuan Mandarin, and
Chiang Kai-shek with a Ningbo accent. Of course, the actors usually did not attempt to replicate the
exact speech of these leaders, but rather imitated the distinctive dialect pronunciations in such a way
that the words would be intelligible to general audiences. The new SARFT ruling nixed this practice,
and as a result such films as The Founding of a Republic featured the Chairman, played by Mao
lookalike Tang Guoqiang, speaking with a standard Putonghua accent. Imagine a biopic of George W.
Bush, in which the actor was coached to replace W’s thick Texas drawl with that of a polished
National Public Radio news announcer. Audiences would no doubt react to the performance with
shock, but not awe.
However, the ruling is apparently applied inconsistently. In the 2014 series ‘Deng Xiaoping at
History’s Crossroads’ the actor playing Deng speaks in an unabashed Sichuan accent – with Chinese
subtitles, mercifully. The PRC language enforcers are evidently following Deng’s advice to ‘cross the
river by feeling the stones’, i.e. ‘to learn by trial and error’.
A Losing Battle: The Internet
Traditional broadcast media is a one-way street; the spigot of information is controlled by the
broadcaster. The Internet is an entirely different animal. The radical new interactive nature of the Web
enables users to create and share information, meaning that the traditional methods of monitoring and
control cannot easily be applied. Though technically subject to the language stipulations of the various
language laws (especially with regard to online video), the Internet represents a wild, unruly space
that is difficult to adequately police.
Internet media content is now monitored by the new incarnation of SARFT, the State Administration
of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (the new tongue-twisting acronym for which is
SAPPRFT), which is the result of a 2013 merger with GAPP, the General Administration of Press and
Publication, which was the agency formerly tasked with monitoring the Internet. The rise of the
Internet brought a host of new monitoring and control issues for the agency, and in the cyber domain,
pesky dialect intrusions are the least of their worries.
In fact, the Internet has given rise to a new kind of Chinese dialect: Internet slang. As Internet
censorship increased in the 2000s, netizens began to take subversive delight in creating puns, coinages
and wordplay that would confound the censorship apparatus. The Internet began to be populated with
a zoo of subversive animals with punning names, such as the alpaca, ‘grass mud horse’, whose name
in Chinese cǎonímǎ becomes ‘fuck your mother’ with a few tone tweaks, and ‘river crabs’ héxiè, a
close homonym for the Chinese word for ‘harmony’, which pokes punning fun at Hu Jintao’s
‘Harmonious Society’ slogan.53 Also fed into the mix was a constant stream of fabricated Chinese
characters, English jargon, coded acronyms, egao (‘spoof’ or ‘parody’ videos and images) and hybrid
mixtures of foreign and Chinese components. In such a world, the linguistic niceties of correct
Putonghua usage seem quaintly irrelevant.
Intermittent government attempts to squelch such cyberspace nose-thumbing are usually ineffective
and risible. For example, in 2014 SAPPRFT issued a directive banning the use of puns in advertising
and other broadcast forms.54 The agency barred what it called ‘the irregular and inaccurate use of the
Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms’, and stipulated that programs and ads should
‘avoid changing the characters, phrasing and meanings’. Since puns and character play have
permeated Chinese culture for thousands of years, it was evident that the real target of the directive
was precisely the sort of coded Internet slang that infuriates the censors but delights the netizens. The
SAPPRFT order gave rise to much mocking and derision in China and the foreign media, and no
further notices or enforcement attempts ensued.
With over 720 million Internet users online in China, cyberspace is an unimaginably large
battleground, with many valleys where local dialect culture can flourish to some extent. 55 Given this
strategic reality, the language policy police may be taking a page from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War ,
wherein it is written ‘One who knows when fighting is possible, and when it is not, will be
victorious.’56 The sheer number of dialect audio and video files means that such materials can be
posted with little fear of pressure from the SAPPRFT’s Putonghua monitors. For example, China’s
rising local hip-hop cultures have produced a burgeoning amount of Internet rap video sung in dialects
such as those of Chongqing, Shanghai and Changsha.57 (The latter, of course, being Mao Zedong’s
home dialect; would the Chairman have been a fan?). When the Ministry of Culture occasionally
expunges such videos from the Internet, the reason is always a matter of political incorrectness, not
pronunciation.58
All this suggests that, while the Internet may be one of the most powerful social forces to encourage
the spread Putonghua, paradoxically it is at the same time creating pockets of shared cultural space to
preserve the dialects. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the crucial next generation
of speakers: the students currently learning Putonghua in Chinese schools.
Putonghua in the Classroom
If you want to get a nation all speaking the same language you’ve got to start by indoctrinating the kids.
Thus, the promulgation of Putonghua in primary and secondary education has been the most systematic
and least controversial aspect of the language unification agenda. With the exception of certain ethnic
minority areas, starting from 1956, most primary and middle schools throughout China began a push to
either make Putonghua the language of classroom instruction, or to teach it as a second language.
Success in these measures varied considerably, based on the linguistic disparity between the
Putonghua standard and the local dialect, as well as access to texts and educational materials. Due to
the lack of qualified teachers, and an imperfect understanding of the problems of bilingual education
in dialect areas, Putonghua instruction in the early years was somewhat unsystematic and poorly
monitored. The results in the decades since the policies were implemented have been a qualified
success, though the reforms remain a work in progress.
Article 10 of the 2001 ‘Language Law of the People’s Republic of China’ makes Putonghua the
default language of instruction, stipulating: ‘Putonghua and the standardised Chinese characters shall
be used as the basic language in education and teaching in schools and other institutions of education,
except where otherwise provided for in laws.’ The official policy continues to make the distinction
between ethnic languages (e.g. Tibetan or Uyghur) and Sinitic dialects (fangyan e.g. Cantonese or
Shanghainese). The language of instruction in dialect areas is Putonghua, whereas school systems in
ethnic minority areas are only required to train students who are proficient in both Putonghua and the
local language; the right to some degree of bilingualism is constitutionally guaranteed. However, the
continued survival of minority languages is very much an active concern, and represents a growing
crisis for the language policy.
Obviously, implementation of the Putonghua policy has been most successful in northern Mandarin
areas, where the local speech is closest to the Putonghua phonology and grammar. In regions where
the language is quite different, some degree of bilingualism still remains the norm. Other factors play
a role, as well. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘The mountain is high and the emperor is far away’ and it
is still difficult to get remote regions of the country on board with the Department of Education
guidelines. The success in student achievement of Putonghua fluency in general depends upon factors
such as whether the regional form of speech is a ‘high prestige’ dialect such as Cantonese or
Shanghainese, and whether the region is economically advanced, with high mobility and contact with
the outside world.59
Teacher training is important, as well. In principle, all language teachers should be tested for
appropriate standards using the 1994 national Putonghua proficiency test. In practice, a great many
teachers in remote regions remain woefully undertrained, and it is fair to say that most do not speak
Putonghua as their native language, and thus have not mastered the Beijing-based pronunciation.
Pinyin to the rescue. The romanisation system developed by Zhou Youguang is still the cornerstone
of teaching the phonology of Putonghua, and this function is facilitated by the use of pinyin printed on
top of the characters in primary school textbooks for Chinese in the first several years of primary
school. Students are gradually weaned off of pinyin-annotated texts in the course of the next few years,
though pinyin is always used as a pronunciation aid in the introduction of new characters. You have to
feel sorry for Chinese school kids. In the first years of their basic education they must study and
master two script systems, one foreign, the other familiar but devilishly hard to write and
unreasonably time-consuming to memorise.
Schools in dialect regions are instructed to encourage Putonghua use both inside and outside of the
classroom, and schools typically put up signs and posters in halls and classrooms exhorting students
to speak Putonghua. Since 1998 PRC language planners have mandated an annual ‘Putonghua
Promotion Week’, and a series of slogans are circulated to encourage children to proactively speak
the language. Such slogans usually strongly associate speaking Putonghua with patriotism, good
citizenship, social values, and even a sense of national identity. Chinese kids can be forgiven for
having the impression that failure to speak Putonghua is virtually tantamount to treason. Here are some
examples:
‘Love the national flag, sing the national anthem, speak Putonghua.’
(Ài guóqí, chàng guógē, shuō Pǔtōnghuà 爱国旗，唱国歌，说普通话)
‘I am a China kid, I love to speak Putonghua.’
(Wǒ shì Zhōngguó wá, ài shuō Pǔtōnghuà. 我是中国娃，爱说普通话)
‘Vigorously promote Putonghua, strengthen the cohesiveness of the Chinese nation.’
(Dàlì tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà, zēngqiáng Zhōnghuá mínzú níngjùlì. 大力推广普通话，增强中华民族凝聚力)
The subtext of these slogans is clear enough. Since its inception, the national language policy was
never only about the pragmatic goal of facilitating communication; politics was always part of the
agenda. During the reform movements of the twentieth century, there was always a tension between
accommodation and assimilation, between a pluralistic tolerance for ethnic and linguistic coexistence, and a more conservative impulse toward uniformity. With regards to its Putonghua policy,
China has never quite reconciled these two oppositional forces.
In recent decades there has been a rhetorical shift from the use of Zhonghua renmin, 中华人民,
‘The Chinese people’, to Zhonghua minzu, 中华民族, ‘the Chinese nation’ in referring to the people
of China. (Note president Xi Jinping’s call for ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’,
Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing, 中华民族伟大复兴.) This change signals a shift of focus from the
original notion of China as a communist state encompassing several different ethnic groups to a
national state with one unified minzu. But as mentioned earlier, the problem lies precisely with this
problematic word minzu. Should it be interpreted as simply ‘the nation’, or does it also encompass
meanings such as ‘a people’, ‘an ethnic group’? Whatever the case, the Putonghua promotion slogans
are clear; the central purpose of teaching the common language to children is to instil a sense of
cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders.
Arguably, the most effective cultural force for the spread of Putonghua among children is television.
Just as generational differences in regional accents throughout the world have been diluted or erased
due to the influence of broadcast media, in China as well, regional forms of speech are losing out to
the common language. The Party is well aware of this fact, of course, and it partly explains the
obsession with creating and maintaining a monolingual media environment. By this time, several
generations of kids have essentially learned how to speak from watching TV, and the trajectory for
many of the less prominent local dialects is clear. However, it is equally clear that the utopian goal of
‘one people, one language’ pursued by many of the early language reformers is not a likely outcome,
either. Some of the dialects are pushing back.
Dialect Uprisings
As the officially mandated scope of Putonghua continues to widen, there is beginning to be some
resistance. Under the government’s policy of a monolingual media and educational system, some
regions of the country are beginning to realise that, as the local dialect fades, so does the local culture.
Since the beginning of the Putonghua drive, the push-back has been greatest in Guangdong province,
home to 60 million speakers of Cantonese, which is roughly the number of the world’s Italian
speakers. The Cantonese dialect has been the linguistic vehicle for a great deal of regional culture,
such as Cantonese opera, and has been bolstered by the shared soft power of neighbouring Hong
Kong, being the language of kung-fu movies and Cantopop. If there is any dialect tradition that can
challenge the cultural hegemony of northern Mandarin, it is Cantonese. Cantonese is also one of the
few dialects to be written with special Chinese characters, using over a thousand extra symbols
invented specifically for Cantonese (though books and magazines using this character system are
published only in Hong Kong).
In 2010, mass protests broke out in Guangdong province when the Guangzhou Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference Committee put forward a proposal to completely eliminate
Cantonese from radio and TV. Since the 1980s, Guangzhou TV had been given special approval to
broadcast in Cantonese to attract viewers from neighbouring Hong Kong and Macau, which were still
under British and Portuguese rule at the time. The residents had thus become accustomed to – and
addicted to – a certain amount of Cantonese programming on TV, and so the new ruling came as an
unpleasant shock. The decision sparked what amounted to a culture war as tens of thousands of local
residents took to the streets to protest the proposed change.
The protests spread to Hong Kong, where crowds of protestors shouted slogans in support of the
protests in Guangzhou. For years there had been growing controversy and opposition in Hong Kong to
the increasing use of Putonghua in schools, and now many felt that their language was under increasing
attack from Beijing. The Guangzhou government, in an attempt to quell the unrest, issued a notice
denying that the ruling amounted to an attempt to eradicate Cantonese.
Speakers of Shanghainese, another ‘prestige’ dialect, have begun to express reluctance to comply
with the government’s Putonghua-only media policy. Shanghai dialect radio programs were steadily
popular with audiences in the 1990s, and in 1995, a well-received TV series called Evil Debt was
broadcast entirely in Shanghai dialect. Since then, however, Shanghainese has been fast disappearing
from the broadcast media.
Indeed, the dialect is disappearing from the Shanghai streets. Beginning in the early 1990s, in
compliance with the Department of Education’s Putonghua drive, and in an effort to make Shanghai a
more cosmopolitan city for the twenty-first century, Shanghainese was actively discouraged in
schools. Now an entire generation of Shanghai residents is forgetting how to speak the local dialect.
Since 2005, there has been a large-scale movement to revive and protect Shanghainese. Some local
kindergartens have set up Shanghai dialect programs, and linguists and Shanghai media figures have
initiated public activities to encourage the use of Shanghainese in daily life.60
All this puts Shanghai in an uncomfortable linguistic limbo: The local dialect may be fading, but the
Putonghua level of the residents is still low. In the lead up to the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010, the
Shanghai municipal government established measures to require standard Putonghua among local
travel and tourism personnel. The municipal authorities also required people who speak substandard
Mandarin to attend remedial classes in the run up to the exposition. All service industry workers also
were required to pass a Mandarin test, and to practise greeting shop customers in Putonghua – though
they were allowed to continue to chat with them in Shanghainese.61
Just as dialect erosion can lead to loss of local culture, the rise in popularity of local culture can
help to preserve the dialect. Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo has probably done more to revive
Shanghai dialect than any public policy campaign. Zhou Libo has singlehandedly popularised an
indigenous style of Shanghai humour called ‘Shanghai-style small talk’, a form that blends Shanghai
traditional humorous monologues with Western stand-up comedy format. His routines, peppered
liberally with jokes and bits in Shanghainese, have been a hit with Shanghai urban elite audiences,
and have increased the popularity and ‘cool factor’ of Shanghai dialect.
Zhou is keenly aware of the corrosive effect that the Putonghua policy has had on the survival of the
Shanghai dialect, but has expressed faith in the power of humour and culture to keep it alive. ‘A
language’s development and extinction can’t be controlled by the government’, he has said.62
Some may beg to differ with Zhou Libo’s noble sentiment. In ethnic minority regions such as
Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Ningxia and Guangxi, the Putonghua policy has long been suspected of
being a governmental attempt to erode the influence of the local culture so as to diffuse ethnic
tensions. For some regions, such suspicions are no longer speculation. In November of 2015 the Party
boss of Xinjiang province announced that Xinjiang would expand the learning of Putonghua and the
‘blending of different races’ to push for greater stability in the region.63 Originally schools in Xinjiang
were allowed to use Uyghur, a Turkic language, as the language of instruction, but since 2011, schools
have switched to ‘bilingual education’, requiring an increased use of Putonghua for basic classes. The
result has been a gradual dilution of Uyghur cultural identity.
In Tibet, protests against the State’s language policy have broken out several times in recent years.
In 2010, prompted partly by the media coverage of the Cantonese riots in Guangdong province, more
than 1,000 Tibetan students in the town of Tongren took to the streets in protest against a proposed
ruling that would make Putonghua the language of instruction in the school system. Ironically, the
slogan of the protesters used was a phrase taken directly from the Chinese constitution ratified after
the CPC took power: ‘Equality of ethnicities, freedom of language.’64 The government backed down
temporarily, but the demonstrations only succeeded in delaying the inevitable. In 2012, language
officials in Qinghai and Gansu provinces essentially eliminated Tibetan as the classroom language in
schools, and new Chinese textbooks were adopted that downplayed aspects of Tibetan history. One
student in Gansu set herself on fire in protest of the new language policy in her school.65
Such protests are extreme reactions, of course. Most ethnic minorities acknowledge the advantages
of the language policy, even at the expense of some cultural diversity. Many Tibetan and Uyghur
parents have maintained that the problem is not that Putonghua is stressed too much, but rather too
little. Faced with the practical reality of trying to succeed in a predominantly Chinese speaking
country, both parents and children tend to emphasise Chinese language studies, in part because the
gaokao, the national college entrance examination, is administered only in Chinese.
There are an estimated 130 non-Han languages spoken among China’s fifty-five designated ethnic
nationalities, and these tongues are disappearing rapidly. Half of these languages have speech
communities that number under 10,000 people, and some number as few as 1,000. Whatever the fate
of China’s many non-Han ethnic groups and the endangered minority languages, one thing is certain:
Putonghua is here to stay.
The Future
Although Putonghua began as an artificial creation, it has now become a living language. As such, it
now must evolve and adapt naturally as do all human languages. What was designed as a fixed,
invariant standard must now be given the freedom to breathe, to incorporate regional variations. And,
in fact, we are seeing this transformation occur right now. Even when Putonghua becomes the
dominant language in a region, it is seldom heard in its pure form; the evolving norm is Putonghua
spoken with local accents and features. Linguist Jerry Norman describes this living Putonghua as ‘a
kind of Umgangssprache, a variety of speech that lies somewhere between a local dialect and a
standard proper’.66
Is the Putonghua project succeeding? In China, every statistic is an astronomical number. This
means that, by any objective measure, the success rate for the spread of Putonghua has been
spectacular, with hundreds of millions of people over the last several generations being educated in
the language, and speaking it routinely in daily life. But by the same logic, the failure rate is also
enormous. As mentioned earlier, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education, as many as
400 million people still cannot adequately speak a common language. The Ministry of Education has
on several occasions mentioned 2050 as the year when Putonghua is to be spoken by all Chinese. This
is probably an ambitious target.
Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that, by any reasonable criteria, Putonghua has
already succeeded. Anyone who has spent time in China’s dialect areas can attest to the fact that the
local citizens may not be able to express themselves fluently in Putonghua, but they can almost always
understand it to a high degree. Ideally communication is supposed to be a two-way street, but even
one-way streets can be very useful in daily life.
The decades of regulation, educational policy and media promotion have had noticeable results.
Business meetings and academic conferences are now held throughout China with virtually no
language obstacles. In the political sphere alone, one need only recall the heavy dialects spoken by the
top Communist Party leaders in the 1980s, as compared to more neutral Mandarin spoken by those in
the Politburo today. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced, ‘At
last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!’
The fact is, whatever we call it, there truly has developed something like a common language for
most of the Chinese speaking world. The rather imprecise term ‘Mandarin Chinese’ is now used to
refer to a range of mutually intelligible varieties of Chinese that have been accepted as the standard
official language throughout all the countries and regions of the Chinese diaspora. Guoyu is the
version of the language that Chiang Kai-shek took with him (along with some of the best loot from the
Forbidden City) when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949. Huayu , literally ‘Chinese language’,
is the term used in Singapore and Malaysia, a politically neutral choice that carefully avoids
affiliation with either Taiwan Guoyu or PRC Putonghua. In Hong Kong, standard Mandarin, long an
accepted third major language after Cantonese and English, is gradually gaining ground. Despite
myriad minor differences and distinctions, all of these versions of Chinese are very close to the
phonological and grammatical features of Putonghua.
We can now see the future of the globalised Chinese language, and its evolutionary path is
beginning to look very similar to that of the variegated, mongrel language we call ‘English’. Just as all
the colourful varieties of English – whether Texan, Cockney, Australian, Indian English or the Queen’s
English – are all (more or less) mutually intelligible yet imbued with their own distinctive flavours,
so the varieties of Chinese, under the influence of Putonghua, are converging to a shared norm. As
Putonghua takes its place as the official language of the PRC, its importance in the world will spread
as a function of China’s influence and economic clout.
As for the dialects, the minor ones will continue to atrophy and die out, while the larger prestige
dialects may flourish for many generations to come. One thing is certain: the Chinese people, as all
human groups on the planet, will continue to evolve their language in ways we cannot now imagine.
One final observation: While a language may be unified, the thought of the people who speak it
cannot be. A shared language does not imply a shared vision for society. With the establishment of
Putonghua, China may well achieve its ultimate goal of language unity – a billion voices speaking as
one – only to find social and political unity as elusive as ever.
NOTES
All websites last accessed 4 February 2016.
1
Allen-Ebrahimian, Bethany (2015)
2
See Mair (2015a) and (2015b).
3
See China Statistical Yearbook (2014); Chen (2010).
4
Luo (2014); According to the Confucius Institute (Hanban) See Chinese Ministry of Education website. www.mo
e.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s8316/201409/174957.html
5
DeFrancis (1955).
6
For a good representative language map of Chinese, see Wikimedia ‘Map of Sinitic Languages’. https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_sinitic_languages-en.svg#/media/File:Map_of_sinitic_languages_full-en.svg
7
A pair of heroic American linguists, Kellen Parker and Steve Hansen, have set up a website called Phonemica
(phonemica.net), which documents an ongoing project to record examples of the dozens of local dialects
throughout China that are now at risk of dying out. In 2013, the site was abruptly blocked by the Chinese
government.
8
Mair (1991).
9
Jon Eugene von Kowallis, The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical-Style Verse quoted in Rea (2015).
10
Ramsey (1987) p. 7.
11
Also translated as ‘checked tone’, rusheng is not considered a tone in the phonetic sense, but a classification of
Chinese syllable that ends with a consonant such as p, t, or k.
12
Quoted in Rea (2015), p. 99.
13
Zhao (1976) p. 79.
14
Levenson (1976).
15
Quoted in Ramsey (1987), p. 3.
16
Esperanto is still very much alive in China, and perhaps is home to the most speakers of the language. Many of
the Chinese classics, such as Dream of the Red Chamber , have actually been translated into Esperanto, and
CRI still offers broadcasts in Esperanto. See the website for the China National Esperato Association, (Cina
Esperanto-Ligo) http://www.espero.com.cn/old/epch/Cel/index.htm
17
DeFrancis (1950), footnote 35.
18
Kang Youwei (1958).
19
Hu Shi (1916), quoted in Kaske (2008).
20
Qian Xuantong (1935), quoted in DeFrancis (1950).
21
The definitive treatment of these issues can be found in Hannas (1997) and DeFrancis (1984).
22
For this topic, there is no better source than John DeFrancis’ book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
. (DeFrancis, 1984).
23
Except for, arguably, the fanqie 反切 method, which involved specifying the sound of a syllable by combining
the initial sound of one character with the final of another.
24
Chen (1999) p. 142.
25
Moser (1991).
26
For more on this, see Moser (2001).
27
Cited in De Francis (1955), p. 107.
28
For more on this, see Liu (2013) p. 22.
29
In DeFrancis (1955).
30
Peterson (2000), also cited in De Francis (1984) p. 247.
31
Rohsenow (2004).
32
Quoted in Chen (1999) p. 24.
33
Quoted in DeFrancis (1955) p. 229–30.
34
DeFrancis (1955) p. 227.
35
Renmin Ribao , quoted in Guo (2004).
36
Quoted in Guo (2004).
37
DeFrancis (1984) p. 257.
38
There were, and are, Chinese scholars who are sceptical that pinyin could ever serve as a replacement for the
Chinese characters, citing the historical parallel development of the written language and script. This issue is
beyond the scope of this book, but numerous works by scholars such as John DeFrancis, Victor Mair, William
Hannas and others have made a convincing case for the viability of writing Chinese in pinyin.
39
Peyrefitte (1973) quoted in DeFrancis (1984) p. 258.
40
Hessler (2009) p. 417.
41
Hessler (2009).
42
DeFrancis (1984) p. 260.
43
DeFrancis (1984) p. 262.
44
Ye Laishi (1981) quoted in DeFrancis (1984) p. 263.
45
Bristow (2012).
46
LaFraniere (2012).
47
Bristow (2012).
48
Branigan (2008).
49
Louisa Lim (2011).
50
US Department of State (1973).
51
See accounts in Liu (2013), and Glasgow (2012).
52
State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.
53
Link and Xiao (2013).
54
Branigan (2014) and Mair (2014).
55
As of the final draft of this book. For the exact current statistic, you can check the real-time online update at: w
ww.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/china/
56
知可战与不可战者胜。Zhi ke zhan yu bu ke zhan zhe sheng. 孙子《兵法》.
57
There is an excellent treatment of dialect rap on the Chinese Internet in Liu and Tao (2012).
58
Sheehan (2015).
59
Chen (1999) pp. 28–29.
60
Glasgow (2012).
61
People’s Daily online ‘Shanghai promotes Mandarin for 2010 expo’ Sept. 14, 2005. http://en.people.cn/200509/1
4/eng20050914_208458.html
62
Hilgers (2009).
63
South China Morning Post (2015).
64
Edward Wong (2010).
65
Wong (2015).
66
Norman (1988) p. 247.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Mark Swofford
Oliver F. Atkins photograph collection. Collection #C0036, Special Collections
Research Center, George Mason University Libraries
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Disclaimer:
Chinese Don't Drink Coffee
When I came to China in 1975, I was told that the Chinese drank tea but not coffee. In
fact, most people took boiled water as their daily drink; coffee was a luxury item, and
even tea was too expensive to drink every day. However, there were exceptions. The
Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee at the Beijing Language Institute drank
coffee, and he told me that many intellectuals of the older generation did, too.
Forty years later, in 2016, Starbucks plans to open 500 new coffee shops in China.1
It’s important to remember that generalisations are useful but they can also be
misleading. What’s more, societies are subject to change. While my experience in the
Year of the Fire Dragon 1976 does not exclude other interpretations of what happened
that year, I do believe there is a consensus on the overall importance of the year’s
events. In the span of just three months, China was devastated by a huge earthquake,
Chairman Mao passed away and the Cultural Revolution came to an end.
A snapshot of China in any given year or decade does not capture the entire
landscape; all we can do is try to describe the colours and the angle of the picture,
knowing that it is not complete. That is what I will attempt to do in the following pages.
Prologue
Twenty-first of October, 1976: Looking over the crowd gathered in Tiananmen Square, I
realised that I had never seen so many people assembled in one place before.
Every labour unit, school, factory, institute and commune marched proudly under its
own banner, with slogans like ‘Down with the Gang of Four’, ‘Long Live the Great and
Correct Communist Party of China’, and ‘Long Live the Thought of Mao Zedong’.
Firecrackers exploded in every direction – so loudly and forcefully that medical
workers were stationed at regular intervals to provide emergency aid to those who
were injured by them. But that just amplified the excitement and euphoria in the air.
The crowd surged when Chairman Hua arrived at the podium above the Heavenly
Gate. I could see him wave, his every move greeted with thundering applause. Flags
and banners rose high into the air and I felt jubilant loyalty swelling forth from over a
million people. The crowd chanted slogans in one unified voice.
When the speeches began, Mayor Wu De applauded the Great, Glorious and Correct
Communist Party of China and the Invincibility of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong
Thought for ten thousand years. He welcomed Comrade Hua Guofeng as leader of the
Party and declared the end of the Great Cultural Revolution of the Proletariat.
It was a momentous occasion – one I did not expect to witness when I arrived in
China one year earlier, a few months before the beginning of the Fire Dragon Year in
1976. It felt surreal. Who was this Hua Guofeng? He was being glorified as Mao’s
successor, yet I had expected Deng Xiaoping to be rehabilitated after Mao’s death.
Standing in the midst of the crowd that day, I had a revelation: I was witnessing a
crucial moment in China’s history – a dynastical shift. A new emperor was being
enthroned. The jargon surrounding this shift was Marxist, but the scenario didn’t fit the
Marxism-Leninism that I had studied back in Iceland.
Then again, nothing about my experience in China exactly fit my expectations.
Studying Revolution
Recently, I came across a copy of an old newspaper containing an interview I gave in
1977. I was on a summer break in Iceland after two years in China, and the newspaper
wanted me to tell its readers about my experiences.
I look somewhat like a young revolutionary with a Mao button on my Mao jacket, but
my statements are diplomatic. I focus on everyday issues like chopsticks, the study of
Chinese characters and Chinese beer. I emphasise stability and security without
mentioning the violence of the Cultural Revolution or the tension around the time of
Mao’s death, when China was on the verge of a civil war.
I remember being conscious that my parents would be reading the interview and I
didn’t want them to worry about their son, which may partially explain the banality of
my descriptions. Truthfully though, when I met with the Icelandic journalist in 1977, I
wasn’t prepared to express myself clearly about what was happening in China. I really
didn’t understand it and hardly anybody else did either. Now, after forty years of
reflection, I want to make another attempt to share my experiences in 1976, the Year of
the Fire Dragon.
*
My motivation for applying for a scholarship to China can be traced back to my
political involvement with the Marxist-Leninist movement during my high school years.
In the early seventies, students returning from universities in Europe brought back to
Iceland the radicalism of the so-called ‘68 Revolution. They were split into many
factions, some of which sought inspiration from the Cultural Revolution in China. By
1974, one Trotskyist and three Maoist factions had undertaken the hopeless task of
persuading the peaceful Icelandic people to revolt against capitalists, who were –
according to Marxist-Leninist dogma – exploiting the working classes. In reality, thanks
to rich fishing grounds, abundant hydropower and geothermal resources, the Icelandic
‘proletariat’ lived in their own houses and drove around in private cars. But Marxist-
Leninist banners and huge portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao added colour to the
fringes of Labour Union Parades on the First of May Workers’ Day.
There was an American military base in Iceland that provided a target for these
movements. My generation grew up watching demonstrations against the Vietnam War
on TV news and admiring the eloquent radicals. Radicalism dominated social life in
Icelandic high schools and the University of Iceland.
We never discussed politics at home, but my father attended demonstrations against
the US military base. As a kid, I was quite offended when he didn’t allow me to join.
My mother taught me that everyone was equal in the eyes of God, who expressed
himself through all-embracing love and compassion. But I had reservations about this
God, who didn’t seem to be doing much about all the injustice in the world. I thought
people needed to take matters into their own hands.
Entering secondary grammar school in 1971, I decided to join the radicals. I was a
shy teenager; I was no good at sports, I didn’t smoke or drink, and I spent most of my
spare time reading. Becoming political seemed like a good way to both enter the social
scene at my school and also do something about the social injustices I perceived. I
started hanging out with radicals in the Vietnamese Movement in Iceland, which had
been taken over by Maoists. I also entered a Marxist-Leninist study cell, which is how I
came to participate in the founding congress of the Communist Organisation MarxistLeninist (KSML) in 1972, and became its youngest member.2
In spite of aggressive rhetoric, ideology-fuelled violence was mainly limited to the
verbal sort. I remember once when I was selling Maoist publications outside a liquor
shop, there was a student from another high school selling the Trotskyist paper. We
started quarrelling, rather loudly I suppose, because a shop assistant came out and asked
us to lower our voices. Shortly thereafter, I went to China to study revolution and my
antagonist entered the University of Iceland as a student of economics. When we met
again almost four decades later, I had become a diplomat and he went to Sweden and
England to study economics. It was not only China that changed course during those
decades; the lives of Western leftists who had been influenced by China’s radicalism
underwent parallel transformations.
Given that I spent almost as much time reading Marxist-Leninist literature and Maoist
propaganda in high school as I did my schoolbooks, going to China for further study
seemed logical. Iceland had only recently established diplomatic relations with China
in 1971. The Chinese government had sent two students to study at an Icelandic high
school. In exchange, scholarships for two Icelandic students to study in China were
being offered through the Ministry of Education. I didn’t think twice before applying.
When I told my parents that their nineteen-year-old son would be going to China, they
took it rather well. My mother just asked me if I was absolutely sure I wanted to go. It
was a long way from Iceland to China, she said. Outside of my family though, the news
evoked some broader interest. We were in a nationally broadcast interview on the
evening news. I came across as a confident young guy who knew exactly what he was
getting into.
I thought I did, too – I had learned a lot about Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong
Thought. But I knew next to nothing about Chinese history or culture. I honestly thought
it was only a matter of time before the Chinese would start using the Roman alphabet
instead of complicated ideograms, and I had no idea that the traditional lunar calendar
was still so important that most Chinese festivals were celebrated with reference to it.
However, one thing I knew was that dragons were important symbols in China, just
like in Nordic culture. I had seen pictures of Chinese dragon dances and I knew that
sometimes people would refer to China as ‘the Chinese dragon’. Approaching the
Chinese border by train from Hong Kong on 23 October, 1975, I remember thinking
about the similarities between the mythical Chinese dragon and the Viking one.
According to Viking lore, Midgardsorm, a gigantic dragon-like serpent, encircled the
reign of the ancient gods. I wondered if it was possible that the Viking stories about
mythical Midgardsorm were connected to the Chinese dragon.
NOTES
This book is based on personal experience and memories refreshed by letters to my
parents. Rumours I refer to may not be factually correct in all instances, but they did
exist as rumours. In addition, I refer to the following sources:
1
Burkett, Laurie, ‘Starbucks to Add Thousands of Stores in China’, 12 January 2016, http://www.wsj.com/article
s/starbucks-plans-thousands-of-new-stores-in-china-1452580905 , (last accessed 14 January 2016).
2
Changed to the Communist Party of Iceland Marxist-Leninist in 1975 (KFIML), which merged with another
Maoist group in 1979 to become the Communist Organisation of Iceland (KS). The KS was then dissolved in
1985 by a majority vote citing flawed ideology and political irrelevance.