The Kingdom of Characters or the Empire of Mandarin?

The book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern has received widespread attention on the eve of its publication in Taiwan. The book, written by Jing Tsu, a Taiwan-born American and a professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It features a unique perspective on the effort by Chinese innovators to adapt Mandarin to the digital age. However, flaws and inaccuracies in the book have sparked significant criticism.

“Meet another Mandarin-centric and China-boasting book, which does not correctly understand the linguistic and cultural facts of the Sinosphere,” Lau Sing-Hian, a linguist from National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), commented.

Cover of the book《Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution》. Image sourced from eslit.com.

The Confusion Between Script and Language

The author shows great ambition in this book. It begins in the Qing Dynasty and reveals how Chinese characters were adapted to typewriters, telegraphy, and computers. Tsu tells the story in an attractive narrative style, focusing on one character in each chapter, echoing the title “Kingdom of Characters.”

However, the author confuses the characters and languages themselves, leading to erroneous inferences. For example, the book suggests that the evolution of Chinese characters played a crucial role in the “unification” of languages in China. But Chinese characters had been a script system for various languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese—not just Mandarin. The same character can have different pronunciations in different languages. This is why “Han characters (漢字)” have different names in English: “hanzi” derived from Mandarin and “kanji” derived from Japanese.

There had been no phonogram system to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters for Mandarin. This is why the “Mandarin Combined Tone Alphabet” is so important. However, when Wang Zhao completed the “Mandarin Combined Tone Alphabet,” it is described as “he intended to help China’s masses of poor peasantry rise, building a common bridge of understanding…” in this book. The book’s storytelling style sometimes covers up where the scholarship is not as rigorous as it should be.

The obstacles the Qing Empire encountered, in terms of languages, were complex. Extremely low literacy rates and language differences across the country made it difficult for the Qing Empire to establish effective communication, which is essential to its political power. Only the elite across the country were able to communicate with each other with written Classical Chinese, which is not a spoken language in daily life. It was even challenging to issue military orders on the battlefield.

In the book, the modernization of Chinese characters is described as “deconstructing the Tower of Babel.” It seems as if once the phonetic system for Mandarin was completed, all obstacles would be lifted.

However, it was the state machinery that supported modernizing Mandarin exclusively, which, along with the suppression of all other languages, allowed the “broad masses to communicate with each other.” The suppression of other languages is often covered up with political rhetoric. The PRC government enforces the “promotion of Standard Chinese,” where only Mandarin is used in the education system while other languages are only allowed very limited appearances in the media. This policy poses a threat to minority ethnic groups and their cultures, including the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. After Hong Kong was taken over, the policy was also carried out in the Cantonese-speaking city. These aspects of Mandarin Cultural Imperialism are never mentioned in the book.

Misstatement of the Languages

Furthermore, the author refers to various mutually unintelligible languages as “dialects”, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Taiwanese. The mistake lies not only in the terminology, but also in the author’s understanding of the differences between these languages.

In the introduction, the author wrote, “depending on a region’s dialect, tones also change,” implying that the same Chinese character has different tones in different dialects. This could misguide people into thinking that the differences are only tonal. In fact, the pronunciation of the same Chinese character in Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Taiwanese differs significantly. Furthermore, the vocabularies and grammars of these languages have considerable differences.

In Chapter Five, the author discusses the debate between Chinese characters and Romanization. She points out the drawback of Romanization as being the difficulty in marking tones, stating, “Tones have always been notoriously difficult to capture and annotate on paper.” However, the Church Romanization for Shanghainese brought by missionaries had long overcome this problem. Yet, the author considers it a difficult task to notate Mandarin tones using Latin scripts.

The author holds the stance that these are merely “dialects with different tones.” She even draws an analogy with English, writing, “Imagine how difficult it would be to notate the tones of Australian English, Singaporean English, and Indian English.” The book repeatedly simplifies the differences between these languages to be like those between accents of English, when the differences between these “dialects” are more akin to the differences between Romance languages such as French, Italian and Spanish. The author also mistakenly describes Taiwanese as having five to six tones, while Taiwanese actually has seven to eight tones. It is a minor error, but it shows the lack of necessary knowledge the author needs to address these issues.

The entire book is based on these flawed viewpoints to highlight the limitations of Romanization and later boast about the achievement of Pinyin. This is not the only exaggeration of the contributions made by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in this book.

Catering to the propaganda of the CCP

Technologies such as typewriters and telegraphs were invented by the alphabet-using Western world. Countries that predominantly use Chinese characters or other character-based scripts had to redesign or adapt these technologies. These challenges were faced by all these regions and countries. However the author focuses on China in her discussion of the evolution of typewriters and telegraphs. The narrative portrays how Western technology was unfriendly to China and how China overcame numerous barriers to make Chinese characters thrive in the digital age.

This narrative overlooks the contributions of other countries. “The Chinese Typewriter” by Thomas S. Mullaney revealed that Japan made significant breakthroughs in Chinese character typewriters to establish its colonial rule in East Asia. As to digitization, the author dedicates significant paragraphs to the Chinese Communist Party’s “748 Project,” a state led program to build a computer for printing Chinese characters. Yet, there is no mention of other input methods like Cangjie (1978), which were developed earlier in Taiwan. The Cangjie input method uses the “shape” of characters as the basic input element and has been widely used in Taiwan. Cangjie is also used in Hong Kong and Macau, regions that also use traditional characters but speak Cantonese.

What is more concerning is the book’s fawning praise of China. This kind of praise begins in the introduction: “Chinese heads of state are probably the only political leaders in the world who can still be seen demonstrating their cultural prowess at occasions, in their case by dashing off a few characters.” Setting aside Taiwan, it is a tradition for Japanese prime ministers to inscribe their mottos in Kanji (Chinese characters). Yet, the author ignores this fact and reinforces the connection between “Chinese characters” and “China.”

In the latter half of Chapter Five, the book unveils the decision-making process behind the CCP’s establishment of Pinyin. The author links the creation of Pinyin to its historical context, a time when Mao Zedong advocated for the “Hundred Flowers Campaign.”

Through the words of Pinyin creator Zhou Youguang, the book states, “Mao promised us the rule of the people,” describing Pinyin’s political purpose. The author further adds, “And Pinyin gave the people their voice.” However, Pinyin and democratization are separate issues. Soon after Pinyin was established, many dissidents were persecuted or sent to labor camps.

In the final chapter, “The Digital Sinosphere,” the author emphasizes the abundance of Chinese data on the internet and praises China’s AI language model, asserting that “China has more data and three times the users than the United States… Powered by the Chinese script, a new digital Great Wall is being erected in place of the old one.” However, the digital Great Wall is a consequence of censorship and digital authoritarianism, not the Chinese script.

Rethinking sinology and sinophone studies

“Sinophone literature” has been proposed as a framework to study the literature created by Sinitic-language communities outside China. However, the discord between language and script remains an issue within this framework. Immigrants from China use different languages and possess distinct cultures of their own.

For instance, Malaysians with Chinese backgrounds mostly originated from Hokkien and Cantonese-speaking regions. It is common to see code-switching between Mandarin, Hokkien, and Malaysian in their literary works. In Taiwan, fragments of Taiwanese, Japanese, or indigenous Austronesian languages can be found in articles written in Mandarin, depending on the author’s background. This phenomenon of code-switching and the complexity of multiple languages make the idea of Sinophone studies effectively meaningless as a catch-all category .

Meanwhile, some works in Taiwan are written entirely in Taiwanese, Hakka, or indigenous languages. Those who only speak Mandarin can hardly read these works. This is a basic but often neglected fact:works written in Chinese characters are not always written in Mandarin.

The book “Kingdom of Characters’ ‘ reflects a common misunderstanding of the fact that Chinese characters is simply a script used  by a multitude of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, similar to Latin, Cyrilic, or Arab scripts. The modernization of Chinese characters was contributed by countries within this cultural sphere, including Japan and Taiwan. It is time to adopt a broader viewpoint in studies on East Asia beyond a China-centered perspective.

(Featured photo by Henry & Co. on Pixels)