Back in mid-1970s I started working for a bank when IT was in its nascent stage. The bank computerised its accounting functions with an NCR punch card computer system. I had learnt a bit about computerisation, seen the work environment of punch cards and readers, and thought it was not much of a field I would like to base a career on. Fast forward a few years when an IBM desktop cost something like S$15,000, my French boss showed me how he used Lotus 123 on his laptop. I also want. Technology advances at breakneck speed.
That was around the time Deng Xiaoping was opening up China. I have a restless mind that ponders over anything that pricks me. At the time I had thought China would be locked out of the new world of technology. The Chinese language, being iconographic or pictorial, is absolutely dis-advantaged because it has no place in the new technology which has binary structure at the heart of its hardware architecture. You cannot input Chinese characters, put them on the screen, store or print them. Technology will leave China behind unless it adopts a phonetic Roman alhabet language like English. It was an existential threat. Nobody talked about this, at least not in my peer circle or the volumes of printed material I covered.
It was many years later that I learnt China was already well aware of this existential threat at the turn of the 20th century. After WWI as China emerged into the modern world it found itself far behind. Coming out of the decadent Ming Dynasty, Chinese intellectuals and reformers believed two foundational pillars needed to be removed.
One, various schools of Confucian philosophy had to be smashed. The classical Chinese in practice was used only by a small coterie of very well educated elites who needed it as a pathway up the civil service and political power. Learning was by rot memorisation of volumes of Chinese classics and imperial examination was composing precise scholarly essays on Confucian philosophy, not an easy task. An analogy is Latin used in the Catholic Church.
Two, the classical Chinese written characters, which is very difficult to learn, need to be changed to enable mass literacy.
The famous Chinese writer Lu Xun, wrote in 1936: “If the Chinese script is not abolished, China will certainly perish!” It was an existential threat.
The classical Chinese language is based on association to objects in the real world. It is composed of thousands of root characters called radicals. Putting related radicals together forms another word. And it is to be written in strokes according to a sequence. Some characters have more than 10 strokes, try memorising that. Learning is thus graphic skill and memory dependent. In comparison to Roman alphabet languages which are phonetic i.e., based on the sound of spoken words. Many countries such as Russia had switched to use Roman alhabet. In a world dominated by Roman alhabet, China will be badly disadvantaged.
Unlike Romanised languages which are just sounds, Chinese characters have a soul through object associations and the meaning and history behind it.
Emperor Shi Huang Ti forcefully united China in 210 BC under a single language which gave the country a cultural and civilisational stability for 2,000 years. The Chinese were torn between the need to protect its culture and the need to modernise or perish.
After Shi Huang Ti, some sort of vernacular language surfaced. Non-Chinese do not realise whilst Chinese characters remained universal, for centuries people in different regions read it differently. Some read in Hokkien, some in Cantonese, others in Teochew, etc.
The march towards Romanised Chinese script was strong. Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887 by the Polish ophthalmologist Dr. L. L. Zamenhof. It is derived from Indo-European languages with 28 letter alphabet. It was meant to be an international language used by all countries. It had early success of acceptance by many countries but fizzled out without UN official adoption. Today there are still several hundred thousand practitioners all over the world. Esperanto first came to China in 1905. It grew in popularity and entered the education system but came under attack by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Today there are still several Chinese institutions offering courses in Esperanto. The Chinese government has used Esperanto since 2001 for daily news on china.org.cn. China also uses Esperanto in China Radio International, and for the internet magazine El Popola Ĉinio. It is however, not a solution for China.
From the turn of the 20th century, there has been many attempts to transliterate classical Chinese characters into Roman alphabet. Hanyu Pinyin is Romanised Chinese which is writing the characters in Roman alphabet according to sound. A problem with Chinese is almost all words have different meanings according to the tones. There are 4 tones, so in Pinyin, diacritical marks are used to differentiate the tonal sounds.
There are also attempts to reform the classical characters by economising the strokes. A new form of writing is now used called ‘Simplified Chinese’.
In 1952, the CCP created The Committee on Script Reform to drive the modernisation of the Chinese language. The Mao era introduced Hanyu Pinyin and Simplified Chinese. Pinyin is very much the standard today.
When China came into the modern world after the collapse of Ching Dynasty, it met its first technological challenge in the typewriter. Typewriter is far efficient over hand writing in terms of speed, legibility and making of copies. It made huge improvements in communication which has economic and political implications, for example in the mass printing of pamphlets and brochures, telegraph communication, etc. It seemed impossible to put the hundreds of thosands of Chinese characters into a typewriter. Mechanical engineer Hou-Kun Chow invented the first Chinese typewriter in 1916. As expected, it was very bulky, complex to manufacture and use. Chinese typewriters came very late into common use in mid 1900s through importation from Japan.
With the advent of the digital age, China faced its second technological Waterloo. The same problem of how to put thousands of iconographical characters onto the QWERTY keyboard. The task of solving the complex engineering, linguistic and conceptual problem fell on Professor Wang Yongmin. Wang was a top graduate of University of Science & Technology, (China’s MIT). He was sent to a secretive military research institute dedicated to building computers in 1970s.
Wang spent more than a decade at the research institute. Many years were spent first in figuring out how to squeeze 60,000 basic Chinese characters into the QWERTY keyboard. He devised a methodology to reduce more than 5,000 radicals down to 125 root characters distributed to 26 alphabet keys. Each key is used to enter a root character depending how the key is used. When all the root characters necessary has been entered, hitting the space bar brings up on the screen all possible words that can be formed. User selects the desired word. Wang called his methodology the Wubi System. It was a monumental task and when it was completed, Wang introduced Wubi to an astonished world at 1985 UN general assembly. Wang was revered in China. He had gotten Classical Chinese script onto the QWERTY keyboard and saved the Chinese culture. Wubi entered the national education system. The Committee on Script Reform was shut down in the same year.
In the world of computing, speed is essence. Chinese technologists continued independently to devise new and faster ways of using the QWERTY keyboard for Pinyin and Simplified Chinese. Today there are some 50 to 60 systems, such as Sucheng and Cangjie methods. If you see a group of Chinese banging away at their keyboards, chances are they are using different system of input on different Chinese scripts whether Classical, Pinyin or Simplified versions. These systems challenged for speed to gain dominance. There were organised speed contests all over the country, sometimes televised. Surprisingly. Wubi dominates in speed. To have an idea of speed, at one contest, a Wubi participant had a typing speed of 244 wpm. This compared to fastest recorded speed of a Roman based alphabet held by Brazilian Guilherme Sandrini with a speed of 241.82 wpm.
Conservatives love the poetic beauty of traditional Chinese written culture and the artistic brush strokes. If one was versed in calligraphy, the assumption was he was a learned person. Chairman Mao Tse Tung had frequently tried to show he was an accomplished calligrapher. Caught up against the rising tide of communism, the conservatives had no chance. Communist radicalism favoured the destruction of old thoughts and new language script, or a switch to the Roman alphabet. Although communists shared the same objectives as reformers, the motivations were different. Reformers were in it to ensure China’s place in the modern world. Communists were driven by ideologies. A new language script suits cultural revisionism of totalitarian regimes. Unwanted baggages of the past can be easily wiped out by simply not translating them into the new script. Mass literacy enables radicalisation and conversion of youth into communism. In my opinion, there could also be a desire to foster unity by Northern Hans in a China where Southerners, particularly Hokkien and Cantonese regions, are the mainstay of the country’s economy. A modernised Chinese language will be universal, forcing the retirement of the vernacular way of reading the classical script.
Today, the majority of Chinese uses Pinyin. How did this come to be? Simple. The government kicked Wubi out of the educational system. In the same year the CCP closed down the Script Reform Commission, it created The State Working Commission on Language on 26 December 1985, to carry on the same tasks, namely :
“It formulates and enforces language laws, regulations and policies; conducts research on the standardization of Chinese characters and Chinese language information processing; and promotes the use of the romanisation system (Hanyu pinyin), modern standard Chinese (Putonghua) and simplified characters.”
Why did the CCP flip? Why reject a winner? Politics got in the way. Ideology and reformers won. The Conservatives, Wubi, Chinese classical language, its culture which sustained two thousand years of its civilisation, lost.
As China rejected its classical language and traditions, what will replace it? Thinkers and intellectuals ponder over this. When the country adopts a foreign language script, what cultural norms will come out of it? The US Boxer Grant is something most people aren’t aware. After the Boxer Rebellion, the US set up the grant as a form of reparation. This grant was used to subsidise the cost of Chinese students sent to study in the US. Remember Zhou, the guy who invented the first Chinese typewriter? He was one of these sponsored students. There were many other top Chinese brains that got sponsored education in US. Much more Chinese studied and had technical training in Japan learning modern industrial technology and process of a modernised Asian country post the Meiji Restoration. So there was actually a precedent for Deng Xioping to send thousands of students overseas to import knowledge. How will all this shape the culture of China going forward?
This fear may be allayed somewhat by an unreported development. All word processors today have ‘predictive’ capabilities. This is a feature that the Chinese already had in 1980s long before the West. As a root character is typed, Prof Wang’s Wubi is able to predict what the next character is probably going be. With cloud computing, Chinese keyboard systems now have ‘suggestive’ capabilities. What this means is when a word is typed the system can suggest what the next word possibly is. This probability is based on AI algorithm seeking information what millions of other Chinese users are communicating in the cloud at the time. This is a giant step up in technology far in advance of predictiveness of Google search technology. China has leapfrogged the West in this respect. Once the fundamentals are mastered, the Chinese has proven they are capable of advancing their own way. This underlines why the Chinese has emerged as a technology powerhouse that it is today.
I end with this short 4 minute clip of a Donald Trump interview on his views on China. I bet you have never heard the orange mop speak like this. The western press will never allow you to see this. It is a businessman speaking, not a politician. Americans reject Trump at their own peril.
A parting shout out :
Plato said:
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
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