How the Chinese Kept Their Characters—and Didn’t Adopt the Western Alphabet

“If Chinese writing is not abolished, China will surely perish!” That’s what the Chinese writer Lu Xun predicted in 1936. Not exactly a statement you would expect from the man now known as the father of modern Chinese literature. But Lu saw no other option: if China wanted to modernize, it had to say goodbye to that ramshackle character script that stood in the way of progress.

The Chinese cultural historian Jing Tsu wrote a book about how the Chinese managed to preserve their characters: kingdom of characters† She opens her book with this quote from Lu Xun, which expresses a sentiment that lived among the Chinese in his day. “Certainly at the end of the 19th century, there are many voices about giving up writing altogether,” Tsu says in a video call from the United States, where she is a professor at Yale University. “Yet you see very quickly that there are Chinese who say: it is not the fault of the characters.”

Tsu wanted to write down the story of those ‘problem solvers’: “This is not the history of the great revolutionary leaders, but of the people who tried to pick up the pieces after each revolution. The people who did the hard thinking it took to answer the question: what next?”

Why did the Chinese want to get rid of character writing after thousands of years?

“In a sense, that’s a story about the relationship between China and the West. Without the contact with foreigners, the Chinese would never have looked at their writing differently. The Chinese discovered that an alphabet made it much easier to learn to read and write. And literacy was a huge problem around the turn of the twentieth century. Less than 30 percent of the men were literate, and no more than 2 percent of the women. China was under great pressure to modernize. To do that, you didn’t just need peasants serving the emperor, but modern, well-educated citizens.

“So people said, ‘Why don’t we switch to a Latin alphabet or some other phonetic script? That would make it so much easier to learn to write. But of course there was also something else going on: in the shadow of the increasing dominance of the West, everything Chinese seemed backward.”

When you think of a typewriter, you think of a keyboard with 26 letters. What about characters, of which there are 80,000?

You write that the Chinese began to look at their writing differently due to the rise of Western technology such as telegraphy. What’s up with that?

“Look, it’s all about the globalization that started then. You can think of telegraphy as the Internet of the nineteenth century. So imagine: you are a country that still communicates with messages delivered by men on horseback, or by ship. That could take months, while a telegram delivered the message in a few minutes. That’s a really huge problem when you consider how everything in the modern age is driven by speed and efficiency.”

Tsu describes that the Chinese encountered great practical hurdles in using telegraphy. The 26 letters of the alphabet are easy to convert into Morse code. But for the thousands of Chinese characters, a solution was found that is laborious at best: each character was given a number. Whoever wanted to send a Chinese telegram had to look up that number for each character in a thick reference book, and then send that long string of numbers in Morse code. Conversely, the receiver had to look up the corresponding character for each digit.

A telegram that you sent in English in a minute or two therefore took more than half an hour in Chinese. Tsu: “Consider how much time and lives it took if a military order was not quickly passed on to a general on the battlefield. Or the profit that was lost if competitors were able to bid faster.”

And why was it so difficult to make a Chinese typewriter?

“When you think of a typewriter, you immediately think of a keyboard with the 26 letters of the alphabet on it. What about characters, of which there are about 80,000, and of which you need about 3,000 to 4,000 to properly express yourself as a literate person? Do you have to make a keyboard with thousands of keys? So that was exactly what the first inventor of a Chinese typewriter, the American missionary Sheffield, did. His idea was: one character per key. He put all those characters on a giant round plate, and if you wanted to type a character, you had to find it somewhere on that plate first. Not exactly efficient.” Finding the right character on the typewriter was especially complicated because there was no logical order in which those characters were arranged.

“The alphabet is not only a collection of 26 letters, but also a fixed series of letters. B always follows A, and that order plays an extremely important role in how we organize information. Think of a library catalog, computer files, or a simple list – everything, large and small.”

Tsu describes that developing character writing principles was essential to being able to type in Chinese. It was also important for typing on the computer. Typing in Chinese on a computer works differently than typing in a language like Dutch. It can best be compared to looking up words in a dictionary, explains Tsu.

These days when you type in Chinese, you look up characters stored in the computer one by one

Tsu: “Nowadays, when you type in Chinese, you look up characters stored in the computer one by one. Many people do that with the help of pinyin† You then type out the sound of a word in the western alphabet, such as my name Jing: JING. If you do that, you will not immediately see the correct character appear on the screen. Instead, the computer shows you a list of words, all of which are pronounced “jing.” Then you have to choose the right character from that.”

Pinyin is the standardized phonetic script for Chinese, in the Western alphabet, developed in the 1950s at the behest of Mao Zedong. Before that, there were countless ways to write out Chinese words in the Western alphabet: for example, you could write the name of the Chinese capital as Peking, Beijing or Pei-ching. Only since the introduction of pinyin is the standard spelling Beijing.

The introduction of pinyin has also played an important role in increasing literacy among the Chinese. For example, many Chinese first learn to read and write in pinyin, before attempting to learn character writing.

Why didn’t Mao simply replace the character script with the pinyin?

“The idea of ​​replacing the character script with an alphabet was still around until the 1930s. But in order to do that, a number of conditions had to be met. For example, an alternative phonetic script such as pinyin had to be developed – but that lasted until the 1950s. By that time, completely abolishing the characters, from a nationalist perspective, had become out of the question. Mao said he wanted a writing system with a “national shape.” It could be adapted a bit, but it had to remain a kind of ‘writing with Chinese characteristics’.

“Look, we tend to think that technology evolves naturally in a certain direction. But it is not a linear process. Every change was a bridge, a stoppage, to solve a certain problem. Pinyin thus partly solved the literacy problem. In this way, a more drastic change to the Chinese writing system is always postponed, and eventually cancelled.”

For the Chinese, sticking to the character script meant that practically everyone wrote by hand before the advent of the computer. Typewriters were expensive, rare and complicated devices that only specialists could work with. Tsu: “In fact, throughout the twentieth century, China has been at least 15 to 20 years behind the West in terms of technology. Although of course that also had to do with the completely different political situation in China.”

Modern technology no longer poses any obstacles to the Chinese writing system. But most Chinese do use the alphabet to type with pinyin. Isn’t that a shame?

“No, because that’s just one of the ways you can type. In addition, more and more options have been added in recent years. There are even people who write by hand again, with digital pens on a trackpad.

“And even if you use the Latin alphabet to type in Chinese, it’s much faster than in English. This way you don’t have to type out common phrases completely, but you can suffice with the first letter of each character. Take, for example, the seven characters that make up “People’s Republic of China” – zhong hua ren min gong he guo: all you have to do is type ZHR, and the computer will fill in the rest.”

The Chinese writing language revolution is far from complete

That reminds me a bit of what my smartphone does when I start typing a Dutch word. Then my phone often completes the rest of the word by itself.

“Oh! This is an important point! This is not in my book, but the so-called predictive textingtechnology is also based on principles developed for arranging Chinese characters based on how often a character is used. That idea was already developed at the end of the nineteenth century! People assume it’s western because it’s hard to imagine something so modern coming from China. But it absolutely is.”

What does the future look like for Chinese writing?

„Ha, it is a brave new world† The language revolution of the Chinese script is far from complete. Take emojis – they are Japanese, of course, but they also indicate a kind of global return to a writing system that contains ideographic, i.e. visual elements. We think again in images, about how we can capture emotions and reactions in pictures. Exactly the elements that also make up the Chinese writing!” Tsu laughs. “It’s actually unbelievable. You could say that the literate world is becoming more and more ‘Chinese’.”