In the 20th century in China, the surging Chinese character revolution was an important historical event that has been forgotten almost all. Why did the Chinese character revolution happen? How did it emerge and develop, and how did it affect modern Chinese writing, literature, and culture? How did the Chinese character revolution stop? In the face of this series of problems, Zhong Yurou traces the different aspects given to the Chinese character revolution by the torrent of the times in the book "The Chinese Character Revolution".
Original author |Zhong Yurou.
The Chinese Character Revolution: The Origin of Chinese Language Modernity (1916-1958), by Zhong Yurou, Life, Reading, New Knowledge, March 2024 edition.
Starting from the inside of the Chinese character revolution, reform the Chinese writing system.
Chinese characters are the treasures of the Chinese nation. In 2017, the first episode of the first season of the hit TV show "National Treasure" grandly introduced the stone drum, which is known as "China's first antiquity". The stone drum is passed down from the pre-Qin period, a total of ten sides, engraved with a big seal, it is the living fossil of Chinese characters, and it is a well-deserved treasure of the town. Through the mouth of Sima Chi, a civil official of the Northern Song Dynasty who desperately guarded the stone drum, the program expounded a truth that seemed to be easy to accept: "Many people say that our Chinese nation has no faith, but in fact, our faith is our own writing and history. ”
As a belief, Chinese characters not only carry the history and culture of China, but also construct a mechanism with religious connotations, and sanctify a basic concept that the Chinese character has never been broken and that the Chinese civilization has a long history. We then have every reason to be proud of our words and to be loyal to our culture. The story of the stone drum and the seemingly self-evident truth about Chinese characters have completely captured the young audience of the 21st century, but what the audience in front of and behind the screen may not have imagined is that just a century ago, the Chinese people's faith in their own words and history almost collapsed, and the treasures of the Chinese nation were almost wiped out. An astonishing and mighty Chinese character revolution took place, covering almost half of the 20th century, constituting the largest language and writing revolution in human history.
5,000 Years of Chinese Characters (2009) poster (detail).
This earth-shaking revolution may have been forgotten, but it has left traces for archaeology in the process of withdrawing from the collective consciousness. The two most important "relics" are the distinction between traditional and simplified Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin, which assists in the learning of Chinese characters. The simplification of Chinese characters is a script reform policy of the People's Republic of China, which aims to reduce the difficulty of learning Chinese characters, and is theoretically the first step in the transition to pinyin characters. Pinyin is not only the basic criterion of the Chinese character revolution, but also the legal romanized pinyin system of the People's Republic of China, and even became a state ideology for a time. Literally, pinyin is "spelling and pronunciation", which is not only a phonetic system to assist in the learning of Chinese characters, but also a pinyin script that replaces Chinese characters.
Although the Chinese character revolution came to an abrupt halt in Prime Minister ***'s 1958 speech "The Tasks of the Current Character Reform", the imprint of its phoneticocentrism is still clearly visible today. The so-called phone-centrism is an ideology that systematically puts language above words. It should be noted that there are precedents for language to be above words, but the fermentation of modern phoneticocentrism in the world has been accompanied by the new development of writing technology, witnessing the growth of philology and linguistics disciplines, and at the same time being carried by the revolutionary torrent of the 20th century, which has played a decisive role in shaping the modernity of Chinese literature and culture.
Why did the Chinese character revolution happen? How did it emerge and develop, and how did it affect modern Chinese writing, literature, and culture? How did the Chinese character revolution stop? The starting point of the discussion can be traced back to the discursive transformation of Chinese characters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when its status as a national treasure plummeted and was regarded as a national burden. Chinese characters, once praised by China-loving Enlightenment thinkers (such as Bacon, John Wilkins, and Leibniz) for their cross-cultural nature and hyperphonetic legitimacy, seem to have become an obstacle to literacy and a stumbling block to the development of democratic science. Chinese and foreign intellectual elites attacked in unison, and the national treasure suddenly became a "silent", lifeless, and worthless writing system.
The word "From Meeting You" (2022) poster (detail).
In the discourse shift of the evaluation of Chinese characters, the Chinese character revolution seems to have taken place as a matter of course. Lu Xun explained: "Chinese characters are treasures left over from ancient times, but our ancestors are even more ancient than Chinese characters, so we are treasures handed down from ancient times." Sacrifice us for the sake of Chinese characters, or sacrifice Chinese characters for us? This is something that anyone who has not yet lost his mind will be able to answer immediately. The abolition of Chinese characters and the use of alphabets have become the basic conditions of modernity, and to paraphrase Lu Xun's words again: we really have only two ways from now on, either we will die holding on to Chinese characters, or we will abandon Chinese characters and survive. However, history tells us that there is a third way for the Chinese character revolution, that is, starting from the inside of the Chinese character revolution, reforming the Chinese writing system, joining hands with the literary revolution and injecting new energy into it, so as to awaken the "silent China".
There were four pinyin revolutionizations before the Chinese character revolution.
Before the modern Chinese character revolution took place, it is believed that there were precedents for four pinyinizations. First, the traditional reverse cut of Chinese primary schools; second, the phonetic alphabet inspired by Sanskrit; third, the Pinyin scheme created by the Jesuits and Protestant missionaries after the Ming and Qing dynasties, using the Lalo alphabet; Fourth, a series of syncopation, shorthand, simplified characters, and phonetic alphabet movements appeared in the late Qing Dynasty. It is necessary to add that over the past thousand years, countless scholars, monks, and missionaries have made various efforts on the issue of pinyin of Chinese characters, but few of them have made such a decisive call for the abolition of Chinese characters. Many of the pinyin schemes they created appeared without exception as an aid to learning Chinese characters. However, this did not prevent the standard-bearers of the Chinese character revolution, such as Zhao Yuanren, Li Jinxi, and Ni Haishu, from taking the above four pinyin precedents as the precursors of the Chinese character revolution in the 20th century.
First of all, the reverse cutting method uses two Chinese characters, taking the initials of the first word (upper character), taking the finals and tones of the second character (lower character), and including the rhyme ending when there is a rhyme ending, and putting the two parts together to obtain the pronunciation of the third Chinese character, so it is considered to be the first systematic pinyin method. The use of Chinese characters is flexible, and the same initials and finals can be represented by any Chinese character, as long as the upper and lower characters can form the required syllables. The reverse cut method originated in the Eastern Han Dynasty, when Buddhism was introduced to China, so some scholars believe that the reverse cut was invented for the translation of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. Since the Sui and Tang dynasties, rhyme books began to make extensive use of reverse cutting to phonetize Chinese characters, such as Lu Fayan's "Cut Rhyme" (601).
A still from the documentary "Chinese Characters" (2017).
Secondly, the alphabet pinyin scheme that began to appear in the Tang Dynasty was further developed in the Song Dynasty. At the end of the Tang Dynasty, the monk Shouwen created 30 letters, although these letters still appear in the form of Chinese characters, and the initials are taken according to the reverse cut method, but Shouwen established a one-to-one relationship between Chinese characters and initials, that is, "Chinese character letters". The equivalence of Chinese characters and initials in the temperature keeping system is a big step forward on the road of pinyinization of Chinese characters compared with the reverse tangent method.
Again, the Pinyin scheme created by the missionaries one after another. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Jesuit missionaries Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault were the first to experiment with spelling Chinese characters in the Lalo alphabet. Matteo Ricci's project, which was completed with the help of two other Jesuit priests, Michele Ruggieri and Lazzaro Cattaneo, contains 26 consonants and 44 vowels, and the final result is recorded in The Miracle of Western Characters. After Matteo Ricci's death, Kinney reduced his scheme to 20 consonants and 5 vowels. Although the pinyin schemes of the late Ming Dynasty were instructive to contemporary people, such as Fang Yizhi and Liu Xianting, who began to think about the benefits of using the alphabet, they were ultimately only tools for foreigners to learn Chinese characters.
Following the Jesuits, Protestant missionaries began to create and export a large number of translations of the Bible in the Lalo alphabet in various Chinese dialects, which I call the "Alphabet Dialect Bible." After the publication of the first alphabetical Hokkien Bible in 1852, Protestant missionaries played the horse character J v. n.Talmage), Ding Yunliang (W.). a. p.Martin), John CGibson), Joshua Marshman, Robert Morrison, Walter Henry Medhurst, Karl Friedrich August Gitzlaff, and Thomas Barclay produced numerous translations of the Bible, both in official and dialectal languages. The script used is both Chinese and Lalo. According to incomplete statistics, between 1891 and 1904 alone, at least 137,870 copies of the Bible were published in Chinese translations of various kinds, and the readers were very large. Among them, the alphabetic dialect Bible is particularly noteworthy, not only because it is the first attempt to use the Lalo alphabet for literacy, but also because it has injected new, alphabetical, dialectal imagination into modern Chinese writing, giving birth to new works. What is even more interesting is that the practice of dialect pinyin alphabetic dialect Bible unexpectedly reveals the inherent limitations of the phonetic-centric turn of modern Chinese Chinese, that is, the irreconcilable contradiction between dialect-based alphabet writing and the national literature that has yet to be built.
Before the full-scale outbreak of the Chinese character revolution in the 20th century, the last attempt at pinyin of Chinese characters was the phonetic cutting movement in the late Qing Dynasty, which evolved into the phonetic alphabet movement in the early years of the first century. The two movements were influenced to varying degrees by the Western missionaries and the Dongying Dialect Unity Movement, respectively, but neither explicitly called for the abolition of Chinese characters. The first Chinese scholar to propose the use of the Lalo alphabet for the pinyin of Chinese characters was Lu Jianzhang. As a native of Xiamen, Lu Jianzhang had access to some alphabettic Chinese Bibles, including the aforementioned alphabet Hokkien translation. Lu Jianzhang simplified the orthography adopted by the missionaries and compiled a series of textbooks on phonetic syncopation, such as The Beginning of the New Characters (1892), The Beginning of the New Characters (1893), and The New Characters of All Sounds in the World (1895). These textbooks stimulated the productivity of the phonetic cutting movement, and a large number of pinyinization schemes emerged, including Wu Zhihui's "Bean Sprout Letters", Cai Xiyong's "Chuanyin Kuaizi" (1896), Li Jiesan's "Min Dialect Kuaizi" (1896), Wang Bingyao's "Pinyin Character Spectrum" (1897), and Shen Xue's "Shengshi Vowels" (1896). However, none of these early textbooks were disseminated on a large scale, and their impact was limited until Wang Zhao's Mandarin Syndicate Alphabet (1900) and Lao Naixuan's Syndicate Simplified Characters (1905).
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were many pinyin schemes, some using shorthand, some using Japanese kana, and of course, the Laro alphabet, but it must be reiterated that while all of them expressed dissatisfaction with the inconsistency of Chinese characters, there were few direct challenges to the domination of Chinese characters. Lu Jianzhang's expression in "The Beginning of Clarity at a Glance" is quite close to the later idea of replacing Chinese characters with Lalo letters, but he does not put forward the slogan of abolishing Chinese characters. Even in 1910, Yan Fu's report on behalf of the Senior Administration Yuan proposed to "correct the name" of the phonetic character cutting movement and demanded that the phonetic characters be changed to "phonetic transcription", did not advocate the abolition of Chinese characters. The closest thing to the demands of the later Chinese character revolution was that of the New Century colleagues in Paris, who advocated the simultaneous abolition of the Chinese character and its replacement with the new language of all nations (i.e., Esperanto). But the radical claims of the Qing Dynasty did not really shake the legitimacy of Chinese characters until the early Republic of China, and the ideas of the Wanguo Xinyu faction were not so much a deterrent to modern phonenocentrism as a double anxiety about the lack of universality in Chinese writing and language.
Zhang Taiyan was the one who raised the most stern opposition to the radical propositions of the "New Century". It is interesting to note that Zhang Taiyan defended Chinese characters while pursuing ancient sounds, and introduced his own phonetic cutting scheme based on "ancient Chinese seals" in "Refuting China's New Sayings of All Nations", which eventually became the basis for the phonetic alphabet scheme (phonetic symbols) approved by the Unified Reading Committee of the Republic of China, which was officially adopted in 1913. The so-called phonetic symbols, as the name suggests, are to phonetize Chinese characters, and the Chinese characters that have entered the new era seem to be safe and sound, and the phonetic syncopation movement has come to an end. However, syncopation is not the finale of pinyinization, and the Chinese character revolution is about to begin.
"Chinese literature" written in "Chinese Roman characters"?
The book is set to begin after the Qing Dynasty script reform, and is intended to highlight the central difference between the phonetic-centric turn in modern China and the pre-20th-century Chinese pinyinization movement. The crux of the problem is not only the preservation and discarding of Chinese characters as tools, but more importantly, how to evaluate the texts, cultures, and theories of knowledge that grow based on Chinese characters. In the 20th century, hostility towards Chinese characters grew, and all knowledge and traditions related to Chinese characters, from rhyme to forensics, from Confucian classics to Gezhi studies, were devalued.
Stills from the word "From Meeting You" (2022).
Lu Xun had a concise and concise concluding opinion: "I thought that I should read less – or not – Chinese books and more foreign books." Of course, Lu Xun wrote many articles about the Latinization movement, but any reader who is willing to read it carefully will find a position that is much richer than a total rejection of Chinese characters and Chinese culture. However, it is undeniable that the literary crisis in modern China does threaten the Chinese intellectual tradition, and it seems that both Chinese characters and Chinese culture will be abandoned by history. Using the benchmark of phonenocentrism to measure the length of Chinese characters seems to lead to one conclusion: Chinese characters, as a writing technique, are substandard or even worthless in terms of recording language, reproducing sounds, and transmitting information. Modern technology has amplified the demand for pinyinization, and the mission of the text revolution is to give sound to the originally "silent" Chinese characters and upgrade them in pinyin. As a result, the Chinese intellectual elite, who took the Chinese character revolution as their own responsibility, incorporated the historical precedent of the pinyin of Chinese characters into the revolutionary journey of the alphabetization of Chinese characters, and constructed a new discourse—the history of Chinese characters seems to have shown a trend of technical and pinyin alphabetization, and has prepared the way for a comprehensive turn of phonetic-centrism.
The discourse on the prehistory of pinyinization of Chinese characters was officially completed in 1926 and entered the international arena. That year, Philadelphia hosted the World's Fair to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the United States. A work from China entitled "The Changing Trend of the Chinese Language in the Past 4,000 Years" (hereinafter referred to as "Evolution Map") was presented to the exhibition on 31 May. Painted by the renowned philologist and chief historian of the Romanization movement, Li Jinxi, this map depicts the history of Chinese writing and language from 1800 BC onwards and looks forward to the development of the Chinese Chinese language in the 20th century, spanning nearly 4,000 years. The Datu Calendar counts the evolving fonts from "pictorial scripts" and large and small seals to cursive scripts, explains how foreign trends influenced the development of Chinese and Chinese scripts, emphasizes the role of Sanskrit, Buddhist scriptures, and Western literature, and focuses on the phonetic scheme of Chinese characters, including all four precedents mentioned above, with special mention of the Roman character scheme of Ming and Qing missionaries. The big picture concludes that the 4,000-year-old "changes" of the Chinese Chinese script will eventually evolve into the "Chinese" written in "Chinese Roman characters". In this way, the 4,000-year-old Chinese Chinese language has been reshaped and grandly debuted on the international stage, celebrating the birth of a country (the United States) and a Chinese language (China's Chinese language).
The word "From Meeting You" (2022) poster (detail).
Lai's interlingual practice is obvious. The content corresponding to the "Chinese" in the English title includes Chinese historical characters, pinyin schemes, and literary styles, all of which are eventually classified as "Chinese". This "Evolution Map" uses the production of Chinese language and Chinese literature as an example to vividly and clearly show how language overrides the construction of discourse over writing. What is interesting is not only that this ambitious picture allows us to see with our own eyes how each of the constructing of the nation-state's language is sketched, but more importantly, it situates the language of a nation-state in the larger picture of the world, what Heidegger calls the "weltbild" (world image). If the images from all over the world gathered at the World's Fair allow the world to be reproduced in a certain order, then it is precisely this reproduced world order that activates images from all corners of the world and gives legitimacy to the nation-states they represent. The Chinese Chinese language is one and only one example.
Therefore, Li Jinxi's "Evolution Map" is displayed on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also used as a blueprint for the Chinese language and Chinese literature. In the process of effectively organizing the 4,000-year-old literary tradition into a "world image", phonet-centrism is vividly and clearly presented as the dominant force in the evolution of language. Lai Jinxi gives color and shape to the linear development of the Chinese language and its literature, and the whole picture is a turquoise-colored river, and countless small rivers converge to it until the early 20th century to form a large river of "consistent words", which is reminiscent of the eponymous movement of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. In the end, the river flowed all the way, leaving behind the "various Chinese characters" (history of writing) and "various ancient characters" (literary history) that could not catch up with the trend of evolution, and the outlet of the river, that is, the end point of the evolution of the trend, was the "Chinese literature" written in "Chinese Roman characters". The end of history is at hand.
The allure of phonocentrism lies not only in the abstract, artificial image of the world that vows to alphabetize all the writing in the world. The dichotomy of phonocentrism dictates that abstract, orderly, and even elegant images of the world must coexist with concrete, noisy, and anti-identity expressions. So the promise of phonocentrism is accompanied by its violence, promising everyone that their voices can be heard and heard. This book is about how the aspirants of the Chinese character revolution were attracted to phonetic-centrism and its duality. They enthusiastically plunged into the revolutionary trend, gradually discovered the inherent limitations of phonenocentrism, and then recognized, accepted and explored the variation of phonecentrism under the influence of the contradiction between the two laws, in order to accomplish the great cause of the revolution. It is precisely the loyalty to the Chinese character revolution and the persistence of phonetic-centrism and its dual-law rebellion that make it possible to rebel against phonetic-centrism. The epilogue of the Chinese character revolution reveals a surprising but justified truth: a theoretical critique of phonocentrism must grow from within, and a rebellion against it must begin with obedience to it.
This article is excerpted from "The Chinese Character Revolution: The Origins of Chinese Language Modernity (1916-1958)", which has been abridged and modified from the original text. The subheadings have been added by the editors. It has been authorized by the publisher. Author: Zhong Yurou; Excerpts: He Ye; Editor: Zhang Jin; Introductory proofreading: Jia Ning. Without the written authorization of the Beijing News, you are not allowed, welcome to the circle of friends. This article contains an advertisement for "The Scale of Time: 20 Years of the Beijing News's Best Books of the Year".