China Humanities Seminar: Librarians, Card Catalogs, and the Chinese Script Revolution

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies will host Jing Tsu to discuss the Chinese script revolution.

In recent years, the Chinese language has made headlines.  From soft power to software, its future has been discussed in public and academic media.  Motivated by China’s much touted and feared rise, the bulk of the conversation, however, has not departed from the usual and expected themes.  There are those who argue for the excessive difficulty of the language and give reasons to expect its continual lagging behind the times, countered by those who emphasize the unfair denigration and misunderstanding by westerners and the Chinese language’s current comeback in the digital era.  Little heeded amidst this flurry of pens is the fact that, for more than 430 years, the Chinese script has been breaking into the alphabetic media, involving the earnest efforts of westerners and Chinese alike to solve one of the most extraordinary linguistic puzzles of the modern age.  If evolution—in the way it was understood in the early twentieth century—had its way, the Chinese script would not have survived this great technological transformation.  Yet it did against significant odds in the development of global communications, which preponderantly favored the western alphabet.  The critical pivot was made by a decisive change resulting from a series of efforts to re-index the Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s.  This talk focuses on this event and discusses its impact and lessons for our own ways of thinking about the materiality of language, script contacts, and modern China in the world.