SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS

Number 264 December, 2016

Sinitic Language and Script in East Asia:

Past and Present

edited by
Victor H. Mair

Victor H. Mair, Editor

Sino-Platonic Papers
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA
vmair@[Link]
[Link]
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS
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Editor-in-Chief
VICTOR H. MAIR

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SINITIC LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT IN EAST ASIA
 CONTENTS

Preface v
Victor H. Mair

The Power of Ambiguity: Bada Shanren’s Personal Marks 3

Leqi Yu

Effect of Technology on Chinese Character Amnesia and Evolution 27

Conor Pyle

Character Amnesia: An Overview 51

Christina Hilburger

Language Reform and Nation Building in Twentieth-Century China 71

Yixue Yang

Explaining China to the World: Huang Youyi and the Role of the Translator
in Chinese Foreign Policy 89
Lauren Avery

Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo 109

Derick Olson

China English: A Developing, Functional, and Legitimate World English Variety 123
Kaitlyn Ugoretz

The Role and Prospects of Non-Sinitic Languages in China 141

Carolyn Lye

Sinographs in the Man'yōshū: Nature, Function, and Double Meaning 157

Ashley Liu

Power Shifts and Changing Scripts: The Development of the Sinographic Script
through Media and Authority 175
Zachary Hershey
 Preface

Victor H. Mair, Editor

The ten papers in this volume were originally written as part of the requirements for my
course on “Language, Script, and Society in China” during the fall semester of 2015. They range
from a detailed study of a seventeenth-century artist's peculiar, esoteric signature-logo to a
consideration of the history of the Chinese script through three-plus millennia and its
relationship to evolving media and different modes of production. In between are a variety of
other studies on diverse aspects of language development in China, from the inception of the
writing system to the startling transformations of information technologies at the present day.
Computers and cell phones heavily impact language usage in ways that would have
been difficult to foresee a generation ago. Perhaps no change has been more fundamental
than the phenomenon of “character amnesia” that results from reliance on phonetic inputting
of characters in electronic devices. Two of the papers in this collection examine this
conspicuous trend from diverse angles.
The intersection of politics and language is another area of concern for several authors.
The question of language reform has been a key element in the rise of nationalism during the
past century and more. Coming up to the current moment, one of the most pressing issues for
all writers who use the Internet in China is how to confront (and circumvent) the heavy hand
of Internet censorship.
Internationally, we have the very interesting problem of how China presents itself to
the world through translations of its documents and literary works into other languages. For
the Chinese authorities, this is not a simple matter of striving for utmost accuracy and felicity
in preparing translations for external consumption, but of providing renditions that are
acceptable and accessible to foreign readers. Part of this mission is to create a malleable
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

“China English” that can be used to communicate with citizens of other countries, yet will
remain true to the values and modes of thought of the Chinese people.
More specialized topics include the fate of the languages of non-Sinitic peoples in
China and, going back more than a thousand years, the role of Sinographs in the earliest
collection of Japanese poetry.
Finally, nothing could be more crucial for the continued health and indeed the very
existence of Chinese language and script than the way in which they are taught, both to
students at home and those abroad. New language pedagogy — especially regarding how to
deal with the demanding, complicated writing system — is making life easier for learners, but
it is also changing the very nature of the acquisition of proficiency.
All of these topics are covered in the thought-provoking papers gathered in this
special issue of Sino-Platonic Papers, which I am delighted to present to all those who are
interested in Chinese language and writing.

vi
SINITIC LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT IN EAST ASIA
 The Power of Ambiguity:
Bada Shanren’s Personal Marks

Leqi Yu

Bada Shanren 八大山人 (1626–1705), a prince of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and a literati
painter after the Manchu conquest, elevated Chinese art to a high mode of self-expression.1
While his flower and bird paintings may be thought of as abstract and simple images, his
accompanying language — including poems, signatures, personal marks and seals on
paintings — is full of obscure references and linguistic puzzles. Thus, Bada’s art is famous for
its uncertainty of meaning. Deciphering his difficult language has been a task of modern
scholarly inquiry for decades.

1 There are several different versions of Bada’s biographies, as follows. “八大山人有仙才，隱於書畫……山人

江西人。或曰，姓朱氏，名耷，字雪個。故石城府王孫也。” See Zhang Geng 張庚, Guochao huazheng
lu 國朝畫徵錄 (A Record of the Paintings This Dynasty), the version of the eighth year of the Tongzhi Reign, 1.
More details about Bada’s life could be found in Gu Wenbin 顧文彬, Guoyun lou shuhua ji 過雲樓書畫記
(Records of Paintings and Calligraphy Collected in the Flying Clouds House), volume 5, in Xuxiu siku quanshu 續
修四庫全書, ed. Xuxiu siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui《續修四庫全書》編纂委員會(Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995–1999), 21–22; Chen Ding 陳鼎, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada
Shanren’s Biography), in Yuchu xinzhi 虞初新志 (The New Records of Yu Chu), volume 11, ed. Zhang Chao 張潮
(Japan: 1823), 3–7; Shao Changheng 邵長蘅, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s Biography), in
Qingmen lügao 青門旅稾 (Green Gate Travelling Drafts), Volume 5 (Piling: Wang Yuanxuan deng ke, Kangxi gui
you yi you, 1693–1705), 27–28.
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

Figure 1. Bada Shanren, the frontispiece of Falling Flower, Buddha’s Hand

Citron, Hibiscus, and Lotus Pod, 1692. Four album leaves, ink on paper, 21.9 ×
28.8 cm. Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai Collection.

A reader’s interpretation of Bada’s language is influenced by his unique calligraphic

style and his life activities, as well as the literary meaning presented by texts and the
intersections between words and images. For example, in the frontispiece of the 1692 Falling
Flower album (Fig. 1), Bada writes two large characters she shi (涉事, involved in affairs) in an
archaizing cursive style, next to a painted blossom. The characters resonate with the image:
she seems to consist of floral petals, and shi is shaped like the round stalk of a flower. The
absolute simplicity of the image, the vague meaning of the two characters, and the subtle
connection between words and images contribute to the potential multiplicity of
interpretations. However, for a long time, most scholars agreed that the character shi means
“the affair of the Ming restoration movement.” This suggests that Bada’s identity as a member
of the deposed Ming imperial family strongly influenced these scholars’ interpretation of the
entire work.2 In the 1980s, Wen Fong was the first to propose that she shi should be understood
as “concerning oneself with the affairs of painting.”3 This interpretation is supported by Bada’s
inscription on his 1693 painting Bird and Fish (Fig. 2):

2 Lee Hui-shu, “Bada Shanren’s Bird-and-Fish Painting and the Art of Transformation,” Archives of Asian Art,
Vol.44 (1991): 8.

3 Wen C. Fong, “Stages in the Life and Art of Chu Ta (a.d. 1626–1705),” Archives of Asia Art, Vol. 40 (1987): 15–16.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

[One must] repeatedly climb [the mountains] to be free from fear, struggling
for competence. In writing, too, [one] must be free from fear in order to be
competent; the same holds true for painting. Therefore, when it comes to
painting. I respectfully call it she shi.

必頻登而後可以無懼，是鬥勝也。文字亦以無懼為勝，矧畫事！故予
畫亦曰“涉事”。4

Figure 2. Bada Shanren, Fish and Birds, 1693. Handscroll, ink on paper.
25.2 × 105.8 cm. Shanghai Museum.

Knowledge of this inscription completely changes the scholarly interpretation of the Fallen
Flower album, and it proves that the artist has the controlling presence in relation to his works
of art. However, there are further questions: If we do not have the artist’s answer, how could
we read his works of art? Could Bada’s calligraphic writing correctly convey his hidden ideas?
To what degree could the knowledge of an artist’s biography inform a viewer’s interpretation
of a work of art? In turn, how does the artwork act upon one’s reading?
In order to explore these questions, this essay focuses on Bada’s use of rare characters
in his works of art, personal marks in particular, and it shifts the concern from the artist’s
creative process to the scholars’ reading process. This essay examines the effectiveness of the

4 See Fig. 2; Trans., Joseph Chang, In Pursuit of Heavenly Harmony: Paintings and Calligraphy by Bada Shanren
from the Estate of Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2003), 6.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

underlying codes of those personal marks and discusses how scholars integrate and balance
the calligraphy, texts, and images, and the artist’s biography in their elucidation.

SAN YUE SHI JIU: THE STEREOTYPE OF REMNANT PEOPLE

As a royal descendant of the fallen Ming dynasty, Bada Shanren spent years, for his own
security, in a Buddhist monastery, and he abandoned the monastic life in his mid-fifties. After
that, he returned to his hometown, Nanchang in Jiangxi Province, and lived as a poet-painter.5
In his lifetime, he adopted around twenty pseudonyms, including the well-known
Bada Shanren.6 The literal meaning of these four individual characters is “Eight, Eminence,
Mountain, Man;” their combination does not make sense. Nevertheless, readers have no
problem in filling gaps between these unrelated characters to form a reasonable explanation
for the whole. Their readings are not based on a language’s own code of grammar, syntax, and
vocabulary, but rather, they associate the circumstances of the artist’s life with this elusive
name. For example, Chen Ding 陳鼎 writes: “Bada are the four chief and the four secondary
points of the compass. In all I am great, and none is greater than me.”7 Here, Chen emphasizes
Bada’s noble identity as a prince. Another explanation pays more attention to Bada’s
experience as a Buddhist priest. Both the Nanchang xianzhi 南昌縣志 (Annals of Nanchang)

5 See Bada Shanren’s biographies such as Zhang Geng 張庚, Guochao huazheng lu 國朝畫徵錄 (A Record of the
Paintings this Dynasty), 1; Gu Wenbin 顧文彬, Guoyun lou shuhua ji 過雲樓書畫記 (Records of Paintings and
Calligraphy Collected in the Flying Clouds House), volume 5, 21–22; Chen Ding 陳鼎, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八
大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s Biography), 3–7; Shao Changheng 邵長蘅, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳
(Bada Shanren’s Biography), 27–28.

6 A complete list of Bada’s signatures of pseudonyms could be found in Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞, ed, Bada
Shanren quanji 八大山人全集 (Complete Collections of Bada Shanren), Volume 4 (Nanchang: Jiangxi meishu
chubanshe, 2000), 917–929.

7 “號八大山人，其言曰：八大者，四方四隅，皆我為大，而無大於我也。” See Chen Ding 陳鼎, “Bada

Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s Biography), 3–4. Trans., Wang Fangyu, Master of the Lotus Garden:
The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705) (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press,
1990), 32.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

and Zhang Geng’s 張庚 biography of Bada mention that Bada read the Badarenjue jing 八大
人覺經 (Sutra of the Eight Great Human Realizations) and named himself after the sutra.8
The most popular interpretation, however, is strongly influenced by Bada’s writing style in the
signature (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Bada Shanren’s signature, from the frontispiece of Falling

Flower, Buddha’s Hand Citron, Hibiscus, and Lotus Pod, 1692. Four album
leaves, ink on paper, 21.9 × 28.8 cm. Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai Collection.

The biographer Zhang Geng points out that Bada Shanren preferred to write the individual
characters ba da (八大) as one, and shan ren (山人) as one, which makes the signature appear
like two characters: kuzhi (哭之, cry for it) or xiaozhi (笑之, laugh at it).9 This interpretation
has become a well-established understanding of Bada’s signature because it perfectly reflects
his possible attitudes toward his complex life experiences during the Ming–Qing cataclysm. It
is recorded that Bada was mad for a time — he would suddenly laugh or cry.10 This
interpretation also suggests that the average reader inclines towards Bada’s identity as a
model remnant of the past dynasty (yimin, 遺民).

8 “按山人隱進賢燈社，有故家子示以趙子昂所書《八大人圓覺經》，遂自號曰八大山人。” See Gu
Zhi 顧志, Nanchang Xianzhi 南昌縣志 (Annals of Nanchang); “或曰，山人固高僧，嘗持《八大人覺經》，
因以為號。” See Zhang Geng 張庚, Guochao huazheng lu 國朝畫徵錄 (A Record of the Paintings this Dynasty),
1.

9 “余每見山人書畫，款題八大二字，必聯綴其畫，山人二字亦然，類哭之笑之字，意蓋有在也。”
See Zhang Geng 張庚, Guochao huazheng lu 國朝畫徵錄 (A Record of the Paintings this Dynasty), 1.

10 “遂發狂疾，忽大笑，忽痛哭。” See Shao Changheng 邵長蘅, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada
Shanren’s Biography), 27.

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Both Bada’s contemporaries and subsequent scholars hold such an opinion of Bada.
For instance, Shao Changheng 邵長蘅 (1637–1704) writes in his Qingmen lügao 青門旅稿
(Qingmen Travelling Diary):

Many people know of Bada Shanren, but actually no one really knows him. In
his innermost being he is at once ebullient and melancholy, and because he is
unable to release these tensions, he is like a bubbling spring blocked by a large
rock, or a fire smothered by a wet blanket…. If Shanren could meet with such
men as Fang Feng (1240–1321), Xie Ao (1249–1295), and Wu Siqi (1238–1301),
they would throw their arms around him and weep together in anguish until
their voices were gone.

世人多知山人，然竟無知山人者。山人胸次汩渤鬱結，别有不能自解
之故，如巨石窒泉，如濕絮之遏火，無可如何…假令山人遇方鳳，謝
翱，吳思齊輩，又當相扶攜慟哭至失聲。11

Shao points out that Bada’s expressions are difficult and not directly accessible, just like “a
spring blocked by a rock” or a “fire smothered by a blanket.” Besides, Bada is juxtaposed with
Fang, Xie and Wu, all loyalists after the fall of the Song to the Yuan, and thus was regarded as a
similar model of a remnant of the lost dynasty.
It is because of this belief in Bada’s loyalty and his intentional creation of ambiguities
that one so often reads the stereotype of “remnant” into Bada’s language and art. Bada loved to
imitate rare variants of ancient characters and to create new forms of characters in his poems,
seals and personal marks. Bada’s personal marks are inscribed alone or together with
colophons and other inscriptions on works of art. These marks occupy less space on a painting
than an inscription, but they are no less important. Bada’s most frequently-used personal
mark appears in six different variants in his works of calligraphy and painting (Fig. 4). This

11 Ibid., 28. Trans., Wang Fangyu, Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 19.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

mark is difficult to read. It is a kind of pictorial writing, and it consists of obscure forms of Han
characters.

Figure 4. Bada Shanren’s personal mark.

Although contested today, the Qing scholar Gu Wenbin’s 顧文彬 (1811–1889)

explanation was widely accepted for a long time.12 In this interpretation, the mark is regarded
as Bada’s own creation, which is the combination of four individual characters San yue shi jiu
(三月十九), meaning the date “nineteenth day of the third month.” The knowledge of Bada’s
life and political context helps scholars’ understanding of the organization of the mark. After
all, Bada first inscribed this mark in 1694, exactly fifty years after the fall of the Ming dynasty in
1644, and the “nineteenth day of the third month” is precisely the date that the last Ming
emperor hanged himself. Thus, this mark was believed to conceal Bada’s lamentation and
loyalty for the former Ming.
This interpretation seems to be supported by Bada’s works of art. In one of his 1697
landscape album leaves, Bada draws this mark after his poem on painting (Fig. 5):

Master Guo’s modeling strokes are like small clouds,

Old Dong’s hemp-fiber is mostly on his trees.
Try to imagine how people nowadays should understand the meaning of
painting:
Like Yifeng, who still painted the mountains and rivers of the Song.

12 “諦視之, 上是‘三月(十)九日’，乃思陵殉國諱日。” See Gu Wenbin 顧文彬, Guoyun lou shuhua ji 過雲樓

書畫記 (Records of Paintings and Calligraphy Collected in the Flying Clouds House), volume 5, 21–22.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

郭家皴法雲頭小，董老麻皮樹上多。想見時人解圖畫，一峰還寫宋山
河。13

Figure 5. Bada Shanren, final leaf with inscription from landscpae, 1697.
Twelve album leaves, ink on paper, 23.5 × 34.1 cm. Chih-lo Lou Collection.

The Yifeng mentioned in the last line is the literary name of the Yuan painter Huang
Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), who lived under Mongol rule but still yearned for the former
Song dynasty. According to Bada’s poem, Huang’s landscape depicts the “mountains and
rivers of the Song” rather than that of the Yuan. Similarly, Bada’s landscape is a representation
of the former Ming dynasty. In this case, the presence of the personal mark San yue shi jiu
resonates with and extends this hidden expression.
Such a reading of this tiny personal mark takes a prominent part in the reception of
some mysterious art works by Bada. For example, Bada only paints an ink flower in a leaf of
the 1694 Anwan album (Fig. 6) and draws a branch of bamboo in a leaf of the 1705 album (Fig.
7). These flower and bird paintings have simple forms of images and masterful arrangements
of empty space, reflecting Bada’s unique style, but they lack any textual cues to his expressions.
Thus, the personal mark San yue shi jiu on those paintings plays a central role in evoking
viewers’ associations of the remnant theme.

13 See Fig. 5; Trans., Richard M. Barnhart, Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705),
141.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

Figure 6. Bada Shanren, a leaf of Flower from the Alwan album, 1694.
Twenty-two album leaves, ink on paper, 31.8 × 27.9 cm. The Sumitomo
Collection, Japan.

Figure 7. Bada Shanren, a leaf of New Bamboo from the Flower and Bird
album, 1705. Ten album leaves, ink on silk, [Link] high. Shanghai Museum.

Even when Bada left his expressive poem on a painting, the appearance of the mark
San yue shi jiu still has an effect on viewers’ understanding of the artist’s own words, and it can
even complete dominate interpretation of the work. In a 1694 hanging scroll (Fig. 8), Bada
paints two tiny and isolated birds against an empty background, and he inscribes a cryptic
poem together with the aforementioned mark. Richard M. Barnhart translates the first four
lines of the poem as follows:

Spring in Xizhou, slightly drunk,

At Nannei the flowers are already late.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

Somewhere near me is the sound of a lone zither.

I wonder who is composing an elegy.

西洲春薄醉, 南內花已晚。傍着獨琴聲，誰為挽歌版。14

Figure 8. Bada Shanren, Two Birds, 1694. Hanging scroll, ink on paper,
75.3 × 37.8 cm. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou.

Barnhart translates the phrase wan ge ban (挽歌版) as an elegy. It suggests that the
zither sound is mournful and the elegy is composed for the lost dynasty. In his essay, Barnhart
continues to discuss the mark san yue shi jiu immediately after his explanation of this poem.15
There is no doubt that the personal mark and poem are fused as a coherent process through
Barnhart’s reading, shaping Bada’s fixed image as a remnant of the Ming.
Zhu Liangzhi rebuts such an interpretation as Barnhart’s by stating that wan ge ban
cannot be treated as a term for an elegy; wan (挽) means “hold” and ge ban (歌版) is a kind of

14 The complete poem and inscription are as follows: “西洲春薄醉, 南內花已晚。傍着獨琴聲，誰為挽歌版。

橫施爾亦便，炎涼何可無。開館天台山，山鳥為門徒。甲戌之夏日畫並題。” See Fig. 8. First four lines
translated by Richard M. Barnhart, Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 153.

15 Ibid., 153.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

accompanying musical instrument.16 If so, the fourth line could be translated in this way: “who
could hold the supplementary instrument to accompany my zither?”17 According to this
reexamination, the poem focuses more on the feeling of solitude than on loyalty to the Ming
dynasty. Significantly, Barnhart actually neglects the next four lines of this poem, which
cannot effectively uphold the stereotypic reception of a remnant figure he proposes. In Zhu
Liangzhi’s opinion, terms like shi (施) in these four lines could find their roots in Buddhist
texts.18 This poem actually describes Bada’s understanding of Chan Buddhist teachings,
including its emphasis on solitude and on the freedom of the mind when one is disengaged
from the world.19 In contrast to Barnhart’s interpretation, Zhu’s moves away from the remnant
image and establishes the interrelations between Bada’s ideas and art in another way. It is
worth noting that Zhu’s reading of Buddhist disengagement in Bada’s poem is not perfectly
reconciled with the accompanying mark San yue shi jiu, whose canonical reception is
nostalgia for the lost dynasty.
Wang Fangyu has noticed that in fact the proportion of Bada’s poems clearly
expressing his lamentation for the Ming dynasty, such as the aforementioned poem about the
Yuan loyalist Huang Gongwang’s landscape, is very small.20 The other poems are either
difficult to decipher, or they convey different ideas. Hence, Bada’s actual image shaped by his
texts and paintings should be much richer. This does not mean that the canonical reception of
Bada’s Ming remnant identity is wrong; after all, Bada’s obscure expressions do encourage
readers to associate his works with his most famous role as a Ming prince. In order to fully

16 See Zhu Liangzhi 朱良志, Bada Shanren yanjiu 八大山人研究(Research on Bada Shanren) (Hefei: Anhui
jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010), 37–40.

17 I translate this line based on Zhu Liangzhi’s interpretation.

18 See Zhu Liangzhi 朱良志, Bada Shanren yanjiu 八大山人研究 (Research on Bada Shanren), 38.

19 Ibid., 37–40.

20 See Wang Fangyu 王方宇, “Bada Shanren de shengping”八大山人的生平 (Bada Shanren’s Life), in Bada
Shanren quanji 八大山人全集 (Complete Collections of Bada Shanren), volume 5, ed. Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞,
1031.

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understand Bada’s works, the following questions are important to consider: To what extent
could one read Bada’s life experience into his works? How closely are Bada’s visual and textual
clues associated with his remnant image?
Unfortunately, in many cases, Bada’s abstract artistic strategies and fixed image as a
remnant easily lead to oversimplified interpretations of his works. This section has analyzed
the widely accepted reading of his mark San yue shi jiu. The next part will discuss the
challenges this personal mark faced in the 1990s.

SHI YOU SAN YUE: PURSUIT OF ANTIQUITY AND LANGUAGE

GAMES

The aforementioned prevailing reading of the personal mark San yue shi jiu emphasizes its
correspondence to the date of the last Ming emperor’s death. This coincidence is so powerful
and persuasive, thus inevitably excluding other possible interpretations of links between the
mark and Bada’s works of art.
Wang Fangyu was the first to realize a concealed link: Bada did not draw this mark
randomly on his works. Wang argues that Bada’s artworks with this mark were “executed in
the four years 1694, 1697, 1699, and 1705” and “each of these years contains an intercalary
month.”21 Nevertheless, Wang could not figure out the relation between the mark showing the
date of the Ming dynasty’s collapse and the years having an intercalary month. In his 1994
paper, Bai Qianshen finally solved the problem put forth by Wang.22 Bai does not limit his
exploration to the restriction of the mark San yue shi jiu to those specific years mentioned

21 Wang Fangyu, “The Life and Art of Bada Shanren,” in Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada
Shanren (1626–1705), 34.

22 Bai Qianshen 白謙慎, “Bada Shanren huaya ‘Shiyou san yue’ kaoshi; fu Bada Shanren ‘Yunchuang’ yin xiaoji”
八大山人花押“十有三月”考釋：附八大山人“芸窗”印小記 (Studies on Bada Shanren’s Personal Mark “the
Thirteenth Month”; Together with a Record on Bada Shanren’s “Cloud Window” Seal), Gugong wenwu yuekan 故
宮文物月刊, Vol. 12, No. 1 (April 1994): 120–131.

14
 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

above. Rather, he steps back to question the validity of the dominant explanation of the mark
and to examine the visual dimensions of the mark instead of the artist’s expression.

Figure 9. Xue Shanggong, Lidai zhongding yiqi kuanzhi fatie, in Siku

quanshu, (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), volume 9,15; volume
16, 2.

Bai Qianshen believes that this obscure mark was not Bada’s original creation but
actually borrowed from existing ancient texts — in this case, the mark should have nothing to
do with the last Ming emperor’s death and could not convey Bada’s nostalgia for the lost
dynasty. Furthermore, Bai has been able to find the exact model of Bada’s personal mark from
ancient marks (Fig. 9) that were inscribed in Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 B.C.E.–256 B.C.E.) bronze
vessels and recorded in the Southern Song (1127–1279) scholar Xue Shanggong’s 薛尚功 book
Lidai zhongding yiqi kuanzhi fatie 歷代鐘鼎彝器款識法帖 (Inscriptions on Bronzes and
Master Calligraphy Works of Successive Dynasties). Xue’s book was re-published by the late
Ming scholar Zhu Mouyin 朱謀垔 (1581–1628) during the reign of the Ming Emperor
Chongzhen, and thus likely to be accessible to Bada.23 In Xue’s book, the inscribed mark is
understood as a combination of four characters Shi you san yue (十有三月). Here, this ancient
mark has three different forms (Fig. 9). Their lines are flexibly bent, and the locations of san
and yue are freely reversed.24 Based on the basic Zhou dynasty mark, Bada’s personal mark (Fig.

23 Ibid., 123.

24 Xue Shanggong 薛尚功, Lidai zhongding yiqi kuanzhi fatie 歷代鐘鼎彝器款識法帖 (Inscriptions on Bronzes

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

4) is developed into six variants, all keeping the underlying principle of its composition. Bai
Qianshen claims that Shi you san yue is a symbol of the intercalary month in Bada’s artworks.
After all, in the Shang and Zhou calendars, the intercalary month was arranged after the other
twelve months — it was exactly the thirteenth month, namely Shi you san yue. Although from
the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) on, the intercalary month was no longer put at the end
of a year, Bada still used Shi you san yue as a substitute name for the intercalary month.25 For
example, in his 1694 Anwan album, Bada inscribes this mark as well as the characters wu yue
(五月, the fifth month) — the fifth month was exactly the intercalary month of 1694. In his
1699 calligraphic work Linhe ji xu 臨河集序 (The Preface of the Linhe Collection) (Fig. 10.1),
Bada also includes this mark and the date qi yue (七月, the seventh month), which was the
intercalary month of 1699. Therefore, it is very likely that Bada’s personal mark should be read
as Shi you san yue, simply a straightforward and ancient form of dating characters. If so, the
adoption of this mark would contribute an archaic flavor, rather than an expression of loyalty,
to Bada’s work of art.

Figure 10.1, 10.2. Bada Shanren, leaves of Linhe ji xu from Painting and
Calligraphy album, 1699. Sixteen album leaves, ink on paper, 25 cm high.
Shanghai Museum.

and Master Calligraphy Works of Successive Dynasties), in Siku quanshu 四庫全書, (Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 1987), volume 9, 15; volume 16, 2.

25 Bai Qianshen 白謙慎, “Bada Shanren huaya ‘Shiyou san yue’ kaoshi; fu Bada Shanren ‘Yunchuang’ yin xiaoji”
八大山人花押“十有三月”考釋：附八大山人“芸窗”印小記 (Studies on Bada Shanren’s Personal Mark “the
Thirteenth Month”; Together with a Record on Bada Shanren’s “Cloud Window” Seal), Gugong wenwu yuekan 故
宮文物月刊, Vol. 12, No. 1 (April 1994): 124.

16
 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

Bada had a vast knowledge of classical literature and developed strong interests in
ancient epigraphy. In 1694 — exactly at the time Bada first used the mark Shi you san yue —
he created a group of calligraphic works (Fig. 11.1, 11.2), copying inscriptions on ancient stone
drums and steles from the Eastern Zhou Period (771–221 B.C.E.). This rare example of Bada’s
extant seal-script calligraphy keeps the pictorial features of that early script type and testifies
to Bada’s pursuit of antiquity. In this case, it is understandable that this artist chose the
ancient form of characters Shi you san yue as his personal dating mark in the same year.

Figure 11.1, 11.2. Bada Shanren, two leaves from Stone drum script and seal
script album, 1694. Fourteen album leaves, ink on paper, 17 × 8.3 cm.
Nanjing Museum, Jiangsu.

Bada not only incorporated rare characters from epigraphy into his works, he also
learned to play with scripts, such as re-arranging the compositions of characters. For instance,
in his several calligraphy works titled Linhe ji xu (such as Fig. 10.2), Bada reverses the upper
and lower parts of the character chong (崇); the method of this reversal is similar to that of the
flexible exchanges between san (三) and yue (月) in the aforementioned personal mark
traced to Zhou bronzes. In his cursive writing, Bada also skillfully used this strategy. Here is an
example (Fig. 12):

Ascending the tower in the bamboo forest, I cannot be seen.

The birds are the first to know that I am looking for the path among the
flowers.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

竹裡登樓人不見，花間覔路鳥先知。26

Figure 12. A rubbing of Bada’s copy of a poem by the eighth-century poet

Zhang Wei. See Wang Fangyu, “The Life and Art of Bada Shanren,” in
Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 36.

In these lines, Bada intentionally writes the two characters bu jian (不見) as if they are
one, namely mi (覔), and puts it next to the single character mi (覔), which appears the same
in the second line. Such juxtaposition shows Bada’s fascination with playing intellectual
games with his viewers.
Bada’s friends also loved to play language games. When Bada was forty-nine years old,
his friend Huang Anping 黃安平 painted a portrait of him, and another friend, Cai Shou 蔡受，
left an inscription near Bada’s image (Fig. 13). The first character of this inscription looks like
the seal script, but it is unrecognizable for viewers. It consists of five individual characters,
namely those for the five phases mu (木, wood), huo (火, fire), tu (土, earth), jin (金, metal),
and shui (水, water). Then, Cai wrote:

Alas! Ge [namely Geshan, another of Bada’s pseudonyms] has Ge,

But he stands among one, two, three, four, and five.
Ge doesn’t have Ge, but transcends beyond five, four, three, two and one….

26 This is a rubbing of Bada’s copy of the eighth-century poet Zhang Wei’s 張渭 poem “Chunyuan jiayan” 春園
家宴 (Family Gathering in the Spring Garden). Discussed and translated by Wang Fangyu, “The Life and Art of
Bada Shanren,” in Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 36.

18
 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

咦！个有个，而立于一二三四五之間也。个無个，而超于五四三二一
之外也…

Figure 13. Huang Anping (act. late seventeenth century), Portrait of

Geshan, 1674. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 97 × 60.5 cm. Bada Shanren
Memorial Museum, Nanchang.

This sentence is extremely difficult to understand. The modern scholar Xie Zhiliu claims that
the first name of a member from the Ming imperial family would typically include a word with
a radical from each of the five phases.27 Hence, Cai Shou implied Bada’s identity as a Ming
prince by putting the eccentric character of five phases in the beginning of his inscription.
The use of rare characters and the practice of language games were not unusual
among the seventeenth-century literati. The Ming calligrapher Dong Qichang 董其昌(1555–
1636), who was highly esteemed in the early Qing period, said: “When ancient masters
practiced calligraphy, they would not stick to the formal style, but emphasize the
bizarreness.”28 In addition, during the late Ming period, numerous publications on seal

27 See Xie Zhiliu 謝稚柳, “Bada Shanren quming de hanyi he ta de shixi” 八大山人取名的含義和他的世系
(The Meaning of Bada’s Names and His Lineage), in Bada Shanren quanji 八大山人全集 (Complete Collections
of Bada Shanren), volume 5, ed. Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞, 1038.

28 “古人作書，必不作正局，蓋以奇為正。” See Dong Qichang 董其昌，Huachanshi suibi 畫禪室隨筆

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

characters and cursive scripts emerged, amplifying literati interest in ancient epigraphy. In
this case, the pursuits of antiquity and bizarreness in works of art became a fashion and a
manifestation of the immense erudition of the literati. For example, around 1652, the
calligrapher Fu Shan 傅山 (1606–1684) produced a calligraphy handscroll that included a
great number of rare variants of ancient characters in different calligraphic styles. Fu selected
these characters from various ancient sources, such as Guang yun 廣韻 (Broad Rimes) and
Han Jian 汗簡 (Paleographic Compilation).29 For artists like Fu Shan, the use of rare ancient
characters had a performative feature, designed for a very select audience — namely the
learned literati.
Bada’s work also follows this trend of pursuing antiquity, and it invites commentary
within a specific audience. It is acknowledged that, in his later years, Bada sometimes painted
for money, in order to make a living.30 Huang Yanlü 黃研旅, a customer, wrote on Bada’s
landscape albums to point out the fact that Bada always painted in a merely perfunctory
manner to satisfy the requests of salt merchants in the Xijiang area.31 But it was completely

(Jottings Created in the Huachan Room), in Zhongguo shuhua quanji 中國書畫全集 (Complete Collection of
Chinese Calligraphy and Painting), volume 3, ed. Lu Fusheng 盧輔聖, Cui Erping 崔爾平 and Jiang Hong 江宏
(Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1992), 1000.

29 Bai Qianshen 白謙慎, “Xinxin wuyi yuchu yuqi—shi qi shiji shufajia shuxie yitizi fengqi de yanjiu” 新新無已
愈出愈奇─
十七世紀書法家書寫異體字風氣的研究 (Studies on the Seventeenth Century Calligraphers’
Writing of Character Variants), Gugong xueshu jikan 故宮學術季刊, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2004): 113.

30 Bada’s contemporary scholar Wang Yuan (1648–1701) wrote that Bada was “a true master. His art go far beyond
those of his peers. But he is poor and has to make a living by selling his calligraphy and painting.” See Hu Zhe 胡
哲 and Jin Ping 錦平, “Mei Geng nianpu” 梅庚年譜 (Mei Geng’s Biography Chart), Duoyun 朵雲, No. 53
(December 2000): 294–320. Trans., Joseph Chang, “The Life and Painting of Bada Shanren,” in In Pursuit of
Heavenly Harmony: Paintings and Calligraphy by Bada Shanren from the Estate of Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai, 8.

31 Huang Yanlü 黃研旅: “因念跋齋文人，書既誠懇，八公因不以草草之作付我，如應西江鹽賈者矣。”

See Cai Xingyi 蔡星仪, “ ‘Heshui yidan zhi sanwen’—tan tan Bada Shanren maihua de wenti” “河水一担直三
文”——谈谈八大山人卖画的问题 (Two Buckets of River Water Are Worth Three Coins—Talking about the
Issue of Bada Shanren Selling His Paintings), in Bada Shanren quanji 八大山人全集 (Complete Collections of
Bada Shanren), volume 5, ed. Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞, 1093.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

different when Bada’s paintings were produced for his friends. In a colophon on his
calligraphic work Linhe ji xu, Bada commented that “two buckets of river water are worth
three coins,” alluding to the cheapness of his works.32 Here, when Bada wrote to the recipient
Xingzhai 省齋, he used a very casual tone and even mocked himself — it could only happen
between close friends. Moreover, in the attached letter, Bada answered Xingzhai’s question
about whether he quoted some Chan literature in his aforementioned colophon, and then, he
asked Xingzhai “not to let Abbot Shi Tao see it (namely his comment on the colophon).”33 This
suggests that Bada’s works were always displayed and appreciated by their common friends,
such as the Buddhist painter Shi Tao 石濤 (1642–1707). All these painters and viewers formed
a like-minded community. As should be noted, in the letter mentioned above, Bada did not
explain the reading of his personal mark Shi you san yue, which also appears in the colophon
of that calligraphic work. This suggests that Xingzhai did not ask Bada about the mark, and
Bada did not think Xingzhai would have questions about it. Therefore, although Bada’s
language games created a bewildering sense of ambiguity and incomprehension in
subsequent readers, they were unlikely to puzzle Bada’s intended audience, who had similar
knowledge and interests.
Bada’s love of language games and ancient characters complicates his image as the
stereotypic if brilliant Ming remnant. For one thing, we see that he had richer and more
diverse life — for instance, he also played jokes and shared academic interests with his friends.
It is dangerous for viewers to establish an ossified pre-conceived idea of Bada, which can
mislead them as to the nature and meaning of Bada’s language and art.

32 “河水一担直三文” Trans., Wang Fangyu and Richard M. Barnhart, Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and
Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 283.

33 “禪家方語未載，切勿與石尊者見之。” Trans., Wang Fangyu and Richard M. Barnhart, Master of the Lotus
Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705), 283. Apparently Xingzhai had written to Bada to ask him
about the origin of that saying “two buckets of river water are worth three coins.”

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GE XIANG RU CHI: MUTENESS OR NOT?

After clarifying the meaning of the personal mark Shi you san yue, this section re-examines
one of Bada’s paintings that displays it. I hope thereby to avoid the common bias of seeing
only the artist’s loyalty to the Ming and, instead, react appropriately to the nuances of Bada’s
expression.
In the 1694 hanging scroll (Fig. 8), Bada depicts two isolated birds without settings,
and writes a poem above them. As mentioned, Zhu Liangzhi has persuasively argued that this
poem reflects Bada’s Chan Buddhist thoughts, emphasizing the notion of Kong (空, Emptiness)
and solitude in the world.34 The comparison between the small birds and the large empty
space extends this expression. Along with the dating mark Shi you san yue, Bada inscribes
another personal mark formed by four cursive characters Ge Xiangru chi (个相如吃) — some
strokes are linked to ones nearby, and thus these combined as a single, unified form. This
mark means “Ge (namely Geshan 个山, another pseudonym of Bada) and Xiangru stutter.”
Xiangru might be a reference to the famous Han writer Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (c. 179–117
B.C.E.) who is said to have stuttered. According to his biographer Chen Ding, Bada and his
father also suffered from stuttering or muteness; but Chen also suggests that Bada actually
feigned muteness in order to avoid unwanted social interactions — “Bada writes a large
character Ya (啞, mute) on a fan, and when he does not want to speak to someone, he will
hold this fan up.”35 Thus, the mark Ge Xiangru chi on this hanging scroll might convey Bada’s
unwillingness to speak, which perfectly echoes the expressions of the solitary existence and
the Buddhist disengagement in the accompanying poem.
However, Bada’s creation of this hanging scroll is itself proof of his efforts to express

34 See Zhu Liangzhi 朱良志, Bada Shanren yanjiu 八大山人研究 (Research on Bada Shanren), 36–40.

35 “父某，亦工書畫，名噪江右，然喑啞不能言。甲申國亡，父隨卒。人屋承父志，亦喑啞。” “又聞
其于便面上，大書一‘啞’字。或其人不可與語，則舉‘啞’字示之。” See Chen Ding 陳鼎, “Bada Shanren
Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s Biography), in Yuchu xinzhi 虞初新志 (New Records of Yu Chu), volume 11,
ed. Zhang Chao 張潮 (Japan: 1823), 3, 5. Another version of this anecdote: “一日，忽大書‘啞’字，署其門，自
是對人不交一言。” See Shao Changheng 邵長蘅, “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s
Biography), 27.

22
 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

himself and also a call for sympathetic viewers to respond. In other words, there exists a
tension between Bada’s intention to keep silent and his actual action to express himself.
Bada’s ambivalence toward his art practice might explain the puzzlement and uncertainty of
his meaning — just like raising the fan with the word “muteness,” Bada set obstacles into his
language and art. He created his art to be understood only by a very select group of elite
literati.
Paradoxically, this does not mean that the average reader and viewer could not
appreciate Bada’s art. Actually, the ambiguities of Bada’s language and art make them more
intriguing to a larger audience. For example, in a leaf (Fig. 6) from Bada’s 1694 Anwan album,
the artist leaves the center of this painting void, enfolded by a branch of ink flower; on the
right, Bada puts together the personal mark Shi you san yue, the signature Bada Shanren, and
the seal form of the mark Ge Xiangru chi. The arrangement of the abstract image and the
mysterious characters gives viewers enough space for imagination to establish the
interrelations between the artist’s past and the present of the work. It relies on the power of
ambiguity, which greatly enlarges the potential for expression in Bada’s works.

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REFERENCES

Bada Shanren Jinianguan 八大山人紀念館, ed. Bada Shanren Yanjiu 八大山人研究

(Studies on Bada Shanren). Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1986.
Bai Qianshen 白謙慎. “Bada Shanren huaya ‘Shiyou san yue’ kaoshi; fu Bada Shanren
‘Yunchuang’ yin xiaoji” 八大山人花押“十有三月”考釋：附八大山人“芸窗”印小
記. (Studies on Bada Shanren’s Personal Mark “the Thirteenth Month”; Together with
a Note on Bada Shanren’s “Yun chuang” Seal) Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊,
Vol. 12, No. 1 (April 1994): 120–131. Reprinted in Bada Shanren quanji 八大山人全集,
ed. Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞. Vol. 5. Nanchang: Jiangxi meishu chubanshe, 2000.
———. “Qingchu jinshixue de fuxing dui Bada Shanren wannian shufeng de yingxiang” 清初
金石學的復興對八大山人晚年書風的影響 (The Influence of the Flourishing of
the Early Qing Epigraphy Studies on Bada Shanren’s Calligraphic Style in His Later
Years). Gugong xueshu jikan 故宮學術季刊 Vol. 12, No. 3 (April 1995): 89–124.
———. “Xinxin wuyi yuchu yuqi—shi qi shiji shufajia shuxie yitizi fengqi de yanjiu” 新新無
已 愈出愈奇─
十 七 世 紀 書 法 家 書 寫 異 體 字 風 氣 的 研 究 (Studies on the
Seventeenth Century Calligraphers’ Writing of Character Variants). Gugong xueshu
jikan 故宮學術季刊, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2004): 101–129.
Berkowitz, Alan J. Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early
Medieval China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Chang, Joseph, et al. In Pursuit of Heavenly Harmony: Paintings and Calligraphy by Bada
Shanren from the Estate of Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery
of Art, 2003.
Chen Ding 陳鼎. “Bada Shanren Zhuan” 八大山人傳 (Bada Shanren’s Biography). In Yuchu
xinzhi 虞初新志, Volume 11, ed. Zhangchao 漲潮, 3–7. Japan: 1823.
Fong, Wen C. “Stages in the Life and Art of Chu Ta (a.d. 1626–1705).” Archives of Asia Art, Vol.
40 (1987): 6–23.

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 YU, “BADA SHANREN’S PERSONAL MARKS”

Gu, Bing. “Spontaneous Interpretation: An Album of Bada Shanren’s Seal Script Calligraphy,”
Orientations, Vol. 20, No. 5 (May 1989): 65–70.
Gu Wenbin 顧文彬. Guoyun lou shuhua ji 過雲樓書畫記 (Records of Paintings and
Calligraphy Collected in the Flying Clouds House). In Xuxiu siku quanshu 續修四庫
全書, ed. Xuxiu siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui 《續修四庫全書》編纂委員會.
Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995–1999.
Lee, Hui-shu. “Bada Shanren’s Bird-and-Fish Painting and the Art of Transformation,” Archives
of Asian Art, Vol. 44 (1991): 6–26.
Murck, Alfreda, and Wen Fong, ed. Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and
Painting. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.
Shao Changheng 邵長蘅. Qingmen lügao 青門旅稾 (Green Gate Travelling Drafts). Piling:
Wang Yuanxuan deng ke, Kangxi gui you yi you, 1693–1705.
Sturman, Peter C. and Susan S. Tai, ed. The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in
Seventeenth-Century China. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2012.
Wang Fangyu 王方宇, ed. Bada Shanren lunji 八大山人論集 (Collected Essays on Bada
Shanren). 2 vols. Taibei: Guoli bianyiguan Zhonghua congshu bianshen weiyuanhui,
1984.
———. “Bada Shanren de huaya” 八大山人的畫押 (Bada Shanren’s Personal Marks),
Wenwu 文物, No. 6 (1981): 78–81.
———. “Ji Bada Shanren shufa taben” 記八大山人書法拓本 (Rubbings of Bada Shanren’s
Calligraphy), Wenwu 文物, No. 5 (1985): 73–76.
Wang, Fangyu, and Richard M. Barnhart. Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada
Shanren (1626–1705). New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press,
1990.
Wang Zhaowen 王朝聞, ed. Bada Shanren quanji 八大山人全集 (Complete Collections of
Bada Shanren). Nanchang: Jiangxi meishu chubanshe, 2000.
Xiao Hongming 蕭鴻鳴. Bada Shanren yinkuan shuo 八大山人印款說 (Discussions about
the Seals and Signatures of Bada Shanren). Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1998.

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Xue Shanggong 薛尚功. Lidai zhongding yiqi kuanzhi fatie 歷代鐘鼎彝器款識法帖

(Inscriptions on Bronzes and Master Calligraphy Works of Successive Dynasties). In
Siku quanshu 四庫全書. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987.
Zhang Geng 張庚. Guochao huazheng lu 國朝畫徵錄 (A Record of the Paintings of this
Dynasty). The version of the eighth year of the Tongzhi Reign.
Zhu Liangzhi 朱良志. Bada Shanren yanjiu 八大山人研究 (Research on Bada Shanren).
Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010.

26
 The Effect of Technology
on Chinese Character Amnesia and Evolution

Conor Pyle

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the nature and learning of Chinese characters and whether
and how they might be affected by technology, in particular Short Message
Service (SMS) or texting. The character-based system has clear differences
with alphabetic writing systems. Because it is an open-ended system, the
characters number in the thousands; rote learning and practice are needed to
learn the most common. The written language has changed over the years
with the coining of new characters and simplification as well as the
introduction of Pinyin. With technology there are now new forms of
communication and means of inputting characters, and this is seen to be both
a source of neologisms and of concern to some that certain characters may be
forgotten.

INTRODUCTION

The introductory sections will set the scene for the discussion, with a look at the development
of Chinese characters and how they are composed. If they are ideographs, as some hold, then
in principle they should be readily readable, if not writable. Alternatively, an understanding of
their construction will allow us to see how they might be learnt and recalled. Looking at the
history and influence of characters allows us an appreciation of their significance and an
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

understanding of the widespread concern if they were to lose currency. As the oldest writing
system still in use, with a large literature, characters have been described as being core to
Chinese culture.1 The fact that characters have continuously changed over their history may
allow us to see modern developments as part of the same process.
Chinese characters have a long history and are considered to be strongly bound with
culture; they can act generally as a universal means of communication. While the characters
have changed, they represent a continuity not found elsewhere. The writing system has also
excited the imaginations of western thinkers, with characters having been thought to directly
represent ideas in the mind, bypassing language. They have inspired psychoanalysts, poets,
and cinematographers.
In the later sections we will look at technology, in particular SMS, and the
development of “text speak.” This will allow us to consider in what directions the written
language may travel. The phenomenon of character amnesia will then be looked at to see if it
is a real issue.

HISTORY OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

McKenzie2 relates the legend of Cangjie, who lived under the Yellow Emperor five thousand
years ago and who got the idea of characters from seeing the traces of a bird’s feet in the sand.
Historically, the system originated in the Shang dynasty, 1300 BCE. It is one of the three
earliest writing systems, the other two being Mesopotamian writing from 3200 BCE and that
of Meso-America from 650 BCE.3 It is thought the characters started as pictographs, from there
developed into symbols in the Zhou dynasty, and were standardised after that.4 In the three

1 Tenner, 2011.

2 McKenzie, 1970: 9.

3 Schmandt-Besserat and Erard, 2008.

4 DeFrancis, 1984: 240.

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millennia up to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 there were changes in the characters, but
not in the system itself.
Lindqvist5 shows how a lot of our knowledge of the earliest characters started in 1899,
when old characters were found on bone. Bone or tortoise shell had writing carved on it with
a knife by an oracle for divination purposes, and was then heated till it cracked. This magico-
religious origin differs from the mercantile origin of Sumerian script.6
As well as being ancient, the Chinese script is widely used. The same text can be read
by speakers of Chinese “dialects” that differ as much as English does from German.7
Intelligibility extends beyond its borders to countries that imported the characters: Liu8 uses
the term “brush talk,” in the context of the portability of the material sign; Chinese people
communicating with Japanese and Koreans. However DeFrancis9 cautions against too literal a
notion of universality.

DEBATE OVER THE IDEOGRAPHIC NATURE OF CHARACTERS

A recurrent debate on Chinese characters has been about whether they represent ideographs.
In the strongly pro-ideograph version of this argument, they are seen to bypass language and
transmit meaning straight to the mind. This idea is dated by DeFrancis10 to Catholic
missionaries in the sixteenth century and later. There is a tradition of Western interest in
Chinese characters amongst other facets of Chinese culture; what MacDonald11 terms the
appropriation of China in the West. He mentions Ezra Pound viewing Chinese as both

5 Lindqvist, 1989: 16–17.

6 McGilchrist, 2009: 279.

7 McNaughton and Li, 1999: 21–22.

8 Liu, 2004: 205.

9 DeFrancis, 1984: 151–153.

10 DeFrancis, 1984: 133–134.

11 MacDonald, 2007.

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modern and ancient; with aspects of facticity and universal signifiers. He claims Pound is
looking at the xiangxing, or pictographic category, with the idea of throwing the visual image
onto the mind, or “phanopoiea.” Russell12 also avers that characters represent ideas.
Fenollosa13 states that the Chinese written language in comparison to alphabetic
scripts has “absorbed the poetic substance of nature … the phonetic word does not bear its
metaphor on its face.” Ezra Pound’s foreword to the same volume14 describes how “the running
legs and the gripping hand of the Chinese pictures will give considerable vividness to the
meanings and their relation.” Fenollosa15 concedes that the pictorial clue of many Chinese
ideographs cannot now be traced. Nevertheless a pictorial method, whether exemplified by
Chinese or not, would be the ideal world language.
The Soviet cinematographer Eisenstein16 drew inspiration from Chinese characters,
claiming that they originated as portraits. Then with two characters undergoing a copulative
(huei-i) or combinative process, the result is not the sum but the product; two depictables
represent the undepictable. Eisenstein related this to montage, which he regarded as primary
to cinematography: shots that are depictive are placed into intellectual contexts and series. In
other words, Eisenstein17 shows how a material form, the character or ideogram, can produce
an abstract conceptual result transcending the form. However, MacDonald18 makes the point
that Eisenstein made similar claims for Western portmanteau words.
Tom Sun19 takes a psychoanalytic approach to characters, suggesting that characters
moved from pictograms to ideograms to phonograms. The study of ideograms in his view

12 Russell, 1922: 34–35.

13 Fenollosa, 1936: 28–29.

14 Ibid : 6.

15 Ibid.: 34–35.

16 Eisenstein, 1957a.

17 Eisenstein, 1957b.

18 MacDonald, 2007.

19 Tom Sun, 1923.

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gives a wealth of psychological information, and gives an insight into unconscious thought
over five thousand years ago. Jung,20 though, says that the Rorschach inkblot or Cyrillic script
(in someone who did not know Russian) can trigger free associations. Knowledge of character
construction may therefore be needed in order to understand them, rather than relying on
them as universal signs.
Associations are varied and can depend on the perceiver. It has been argued that
divine knowledge appears in the etymology of characters: for example, lái 来 to come, or wŭ
午 noon, include the Christian cross.21 Gu22 compares Western and Eastern traditions, quoting
De Saussure as saying Chinese writing is ideographic.
In opposition to this view, Liu23 states that Chinese characters are not ideographical
and that this is a European idea of a universal language, transcribing abstract thought without
speech or sounds. Kennedy24 also refutes the ideograph as does DeFrancis,25 who debunks
what he calls the ideographic myth. On a numerical basis, ideographs are only a minority of
the characters, while the majority of characters include a phonetic part. Characters
themselves are words, not ideas. DeFrancis adds that, not only are characters phonetic rather
than ideographic, but there cannot be an ideographic system.
Both points of view have been looked at elsewhere. Hiraga26 adds some support to the
logographic view in the context of Japanese kanji. Japan has kept kanji characters, having
borrowed them from China,27 but also has developed kana syllabaries. 28 Hansen 29 gives
support to the notion of ideographs.

20 Jung, 1964: 10–11.

21 Porter, 2001: 67.

22 Gu, 2000.

23 Liu, 2011: 70.

24 Kennedy, 1958.

25 DeFrancis, 1984: 133ff.

26 Hiraga, 2006.

27 DeFrancis, 1984: 65–66.

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There may be some small mental link; Xiao & Treiman30 look at the iconicity of
characters. U.S. adults with no knowledge of Chinese were given an English word or phrase
and two Chinese characters to choose from. The accuracy rate was 53.6 percent, slightly but
significantly higher than expected by chance.

COMPOSITION OF CHARACTERS

There are 214 basic components or radicals: these are used to organise characters in
dictionaries. McNaughton and Li31 write that characters are of six types, and thus form a
logical system; these are as follows, with examples:
1. pictures: 月 yuè ‘moon’.
2. symbols: 下 xià ‘below’.
3. sound-loans: 萬 wàn; originally ‘scorpion’, came to mean ‘ten thousand,’ as it sounded
similar.
4. sound-meaning compounds: 包 bāo ‘to wrap’ + 魚 yú ‘fish’ = 鮑 bào ‘salted fish’. The
sound may have changed in the intervening time so it is not always a reliable guide.
5. meaning-meaning compounds: 女 nǚ ‘woman’ + 子 zĭ ‘child’ = 好 hăo ‘good’.
6. reclarified compounds: 廷 tíng ‘courtyard’ added the 广 yăn ‘lean-to’ radical to give 庭
tíng ‘king’s courtyard’.

The first, second, and fifth types seem ideographic in nature. Over 80 percent of
characters, however, correspond to type 4, sound-meaning.32 In principle, these could act as
useful mnemonics for someone who speaks the language.

28 Ibid.: 158.

29 Hansen: 1993.

30 Xiao and Treiman, 2012.

31 McNaughton & Li (1999: 12–14)

32 Marta (2012)

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READING AND WRITING CHARACTERS

As the characters are not purely ideographic in nature, whatever their origin, they need to be
learned by rote. This takes constant practice and years of learning, making it especially hard
for foreign learners.33 Some characters may be used daily but rare ones almost never, so there
will always be a need for recourse to a dictionary. Demick34 cites a figure of 4–5 hours a day for
9 years in school needed to learn 3000 characters. The upshot is that Chinese children take
two years longer to learn the writing system than learners of alphabetic scripts. Writing
systems are always under selective pressure to have symbols that are easy to recognize and to
write.35
Studies using fMRI show brain activity differs when reading Chinese characters
compared to alphabetic scripts.36 Chinese readers use both brain hemispheres, whereas
alphabetic readers use the left one.37 There may be benefits to learning Chinese characters: a
study of Chinese logographs showed that practice in visuo-spatial processing and memory
caused greater cognitive fluidity.38 Wang and Thomas39 state that there is no evidence that
imagery-based mnemonics confer an advantage beyond the immediate test of recall. In fact,
greater forgetting was found under conditions of mnemonic learning compared to rote
learning. Comparing Japanese and U.S. subjects, a study found that the Japanese subjects of all
ages performed significantly better on visual recall.40 This is in the context of Japanese

33 Moser (1991)

34 Demick (2010)

35 Changizi and Shimojo, 2005.d

36 Deng et al., 2008.

37 Marta, 2012.

38 Kazi et al., 2012.

39 Wang and Thomas, 1992.

40 Sugishita & Omura (2001)

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students needing to learn around 2000 Chinese characters. Chung41 recommends presenting
characters before Pinyin in teaching second-language learners of Chinese; he posits this is due
to limitations of the working memory.

SCRIPT REFORM

Script reform was mentioned by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth
century in China proposals for script reform were made.42 Lu Xun, in the twentieth century, is
quoted as advocating reform as well: 漢字不滅,中國必亡 Hànzì bù miè, Zhōngguó bì wáng!
(“If the sinographs are not destroyed, China will certainly perish!”). Two types of reform have
been debated, simplification of characters and Romanisation. Mao is described as accepting
that characters would have to be replaced, but they were simplified instead.43
The simplification removed variant characters, reduced the number of strokes, and
incorporated some cursive informal forms that were already in use.44 This process started in
the 1950s.45 Principles of sound loans were followed, using simpler phonetic elements.
Simplification took place only in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Traditional characters
are still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan46. People’s Daily Online47 suggests that simplified
characters may have been used much earlier than has been thought: for example, the
simplified 万 wàn for 萬 has been dated from around 1600. The Chinese word líng ‘zero’ has
the original character 零, but there is an established alternative 〇48.

41 Chung, 2007.

42 Mair, 2002.

43 DeFrancis, 1984: 247–248, 257.

44 Ibid.: 260–261.

45 Ibid.: 75.

46 McNaughton and Li, 1999: 18–19.

47 People’s Daily Online, 2004.

48 McNaughton and Li, 1999: 88, 301.

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Different types of Romanization were developed over the years 49 before the
acceptance of Pinyin.50 Pinyin is now the official Romanization in the PRC.51 One motivation
to switch was to increase literacy. For example, Vietnam shifted from characters to the
alphabetic system, allowing more people to read classical literature52.

TECHNOLOGY FOR CHINESE CHARACTER INPUT

Despite mid-twentieth century discussion on character abolition and full Romanization,

technology for character input developed apace. Lin Yutang invented the electric Chinese
typewriter in the 1940s.53 Predictive text was developed as early as 1956 on typewriters54:
characters were reorganized into natural language clusters, rather than dictionary order. This
dramatically speeded up input. There was a demand for an increase in output with the rise of
political campaigns: a two-to-four-fold increase was achieved to produce over four thousand
characters an hour. With the development of PCs, new methods of input using a keyboard
were developed. Bruggeman55 gives a summary of the pronunciation, structure, combination,
and direct code input methods. Research is underway to develop faster methods than the
currently popular Pinyin-based inputs.56

49 DeFrancis, 1984: 242–247.

50 Ibid.: 263.

51 McNaughton and Li, 1999: 7.

52 DeFrancis, 1984: 201–202.

53 Williams, 2010.

54 Mullaney, 2012.

55 Bruggeman, 2013.

56 Sun et al., 2013.

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SMS IN CHINESE

There are various methods of entering text in Chinese on a mobile phone. Text can be input as
Pinyin: a list of characters comes up matching the Pinyin, ignoring tones, and the inputter
chooses the correct character and enters it. Another method is a pad on which the character is
drawn with the finger or a stylus. With the pressure to increase speed and to accommodate
space constraints, new idioms may appear.
Some examples of text-speak in Chinese will allow us to see how the language might
be changed, or might lead to some characters dropping in frequency of use or being replaced.
These points are based on information provided by two Chinese consultants, one from Beijing,
the other from Nanjing. Both are native Mandarin speakers. Table 1 shows characters being
substituted for similar sounding words. A contraction is exemplified by 不要 bú yào ‘no need’
becoming 表 biǎo literally ‘to show.’

Table 1: Puns and contractions in common use.

Text Speak Mainstream English Translation
偶 ǒu 我 wǒ I or me
美眉 měi méi 妹妹 mèi mei younger sister
妹纸 mèi zhǐ 妹子 mèi zi younger sister
稀饭 xī fàn 喜欢 xǐhuān like
这是肿么回事? 这是怎么回事? what’s up?
zhè shì zhǒng me huí shì zhè shì zěn me huí shì
我木有 wǒ mù yŏu 我没有 wǒ méi yŏu I don’t have
酱紫 jiàng zǐ 这样子 zhè yàng zǐ like that
表 biǎo 别 bié, 不要 bú yào don’t; no need
表跟着我 不要跟着我 don't follow me
biǎo gēn zhe wǒ bú yào gēn zhe wǒ

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Table 2: Roman letters used in place of characters, from the initials of the Pinyin.
Text Speak Characters Pinyin English translation
DD 弟弟 dìdi younger brother
GG 哥哥 gēge older brother/boyfriend
JMS1 姐妹 jiěmèi sisters
MM 妹妹 mèimei younger sister
XDJM 兄弟姐妹 xiōngdì jiěmèi brothers and sisters
1
JM from Pinyin, and ‘S’ as in the English plural

Table 3: Numbers used as abbreviations.

Text Speak Characters Pinyin Number Pinyin English translation
520 我爱你 wǒ ài nǐ wŭ èr líng I love you
1314 一生一世 yī shēng yī shì yī sān yī sì all the life, forever
55 呜呜 wū wū wŭ wŭ boo hoo
886 拜拜了 bài bài le bā bā liu bye

One master’s degree student in Beijing, in her early twenties, who is studying Chinese
political science, said that text has an impact on the manner of communication, making
people feel more familiar to each other, and that it can be easier to say things via text. Text
communication uses emoticons extensively, such as O(^-^)O, meaning “very happy.” Emoticons
can also be used to express complex meanings, and often other intentions.
There are interjections such as the following, known as 语 气 字 yŭ qì zì
‘tone/mood/manner of speaking.’
 Humor: 呵呵 hēhē; 嘻嘻 xīxī; 嘿嘿 hēi hēi
 Surprize: 哇 wā
 Song: 唱 chàng

Texts are a rich source of riddles and metaphor, partly as a result of a seventy-
character limit. Metaphors may be used in everyday life in text to express or describe topics,

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for example, from telecoms, 欠费 qiàn fèi ‘short of money, out of credit’ is used in
relationships, along with metaphorical extensions borrowed from IT such as viruses,
formatting, trash, and recharging57. Phonetically 挨劈 āi pī is used for ‘IP phone card.’58
Similarly, Xing59states that new words get different meanings through homonym transfer,
making the language more vivid. This is widely used and popular. SMS enriches everyday
language, and that is of interest to scholars and lay people alike.60 Mu61 discusses the idea that
SMS and its seventy-character limit are leading to concision and punctuation omission. SMS is
considered here as a hybrid of written and spoken language. A semiotic perspective can
analyse how words are built up by letters, numbers, and punctuation.

WESTERN ALPHANUMERIC CHARACTERS

It should be pointed out that alphanumeric characters are also used outside of SMS. Where
there are alphabetic initials that cannot be converted to Chinese characters, they are freely
mixed in. Kuo62 has an example of a mix of characters, Arabic numerals, and Latin script:

我 2000 年毕业，在 ADC 公司工作了五年

‘I graduated from university in 2000, and worked at ADC for five years before I
came to this company.’

57 Zeng, 2009.

58 Pan, 2012.

59 Xing, 2012.

60 Xia, 2009.

61 Mu, 2006.

62 Kuo, 2009: 42.

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Wu,63 discussing Chinese as it is used today, has these borrowings from English:
 Combination of acronym and character64:
Soho 族 (soho zú) ‘worker from home’ from Small Office Home Office
 Rare example of word borrowed in its entirety65:
PARTY ‘party’
 Acronym66:
DIY – used for music, art etc.
 Borrowing sound, but using a character67:
酷 kù originally ‘ruthless’ or ‘strong (of wine)’ now by sound analogy, ‘cool’
Other Roman initials include CU ‘see you’; and OIC ‘oh I see’ as well as blends like 3ks from
‘sān (+ks)’ = ‘thanks.’68

CHARACTER AMNESIA

Character amnesia has been widely reported online in blogs and news articles. Lee69 reported
that it was already an issue for people who had gone online five years before. Mair70 refers to
this paper in the context of its being a long-time issue with people forgetting characters and
having to check their mobile phones constantly to look up characters. However, even before
computers, some characters were forgotten, such as 噴嚏 pēntì ‘sneeze’; few people could

63 H. Wu, 2003.

64 Ibid.: 65.

65 Ibid.: 79.

66 Ibid.: 42.

67 Ibid.: 114.

68 Pan, 2012.

69 Lee, 2001.

70 Mair, 2010.

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remember both characters. Rarer characters take time to look up, but learning them by rote in
the first place takes time too.71
Xu72 cites a survey of 2072 people, 83 percent of whom say they occasionally forget
characters. In 2008 the Education Ministry found teachers complaining about declining
writing ability and is now implementing programs to get students writing more. The
phenomenon of amnesia has a phrase: 提笔忘字 tí bĭ wàng zì ‘take up pen, forget character.’73
Mair74 refers to the government program dújīng yùndòng 读经 运动 ‘Movement for
reading Classics’ where pupils spend time reading and writing old texts in the traditional way.
The success of this solution is as yet unknown as the old texts are difficult. The likely options
are to accept the new technology, or have a mix of characters and Pinyin; the example of
Japan as a country using a mixed script (with kana) is cited.
BBC News75 reported on calligraphy classes being organized for students to get them
in the practice of writing again. This is known as the “Get Close to the Mother Tongue”
campaign.76 Calligraphy is historically prized and is the foundation of Chinese art.77 Tenner78
cites an interview with calligrapher Ma Tiankuo, who traces the change to the 1980s, when
calligraphy was still practiced at school. With the advent of computer classes then, less time
was spent on practicing calligraphy, so amnesia became more of a problem. He holds that
Chinese characters embody the spirit and essence of the Chinese people, and that their
forgetting is part of a global issue with declining handwriting.
The links between technology and character learning also have been studied. Tan et

71 Custer, 2010.

72 Xu, 2010.

73 Moxley, 2010.

74 Mair, 2012.

75 BBC News, 2011.

76 J. Wu and Liao, 2012.

77 Zhu, 2011.

78 Tenner, 2011

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al.79 suggests that Pinyin on e-devices hinders reading, while Lee et al.,80 discussing multimedia,
state that passive learning is not as good as actively writing. Marta81 finds that the brain is
being rewired towards alphabetic or syllabary processing.
The consultant from Beijing said, apropos character amnesia, that she has not seen
evidence that amnesia is causing simpler characters to be used instead of rarer or more
complex ones, and that amnesia was a problem before the electronic era. Street signs, for
example, are seen occasionally with wrong characters.

DISCUSSION

Chinese characters have developed and changed throughout the centuries from pictures to
words. These characters can convey both phonetic and semantic information, though in both
cases this may now be obscure. It could be argued that recent developments with phonetic
shortcuts are following this tradition of having a sound mnemonic. New characters enter the
written language as required: 他 tā, the generic third person singular pronoun, had a new
character 她 tā ‘she’ invented in the late 1910s in response to movements of gender equality
and women’s liberation; by the 1920s 它 tā ‘it’ had been added.82
Literacy has been a concern, leading to simplification and Romanisation. The system
of using both characters and Pinyin became known as ‘walking on two legs.’83 There was some
resistance to Pinyin,84 but pupils learning Pinyin in 1962 are described as increasing the
number of characters in their texts. 85 This suggests that an end result could be the

79 Tan et al., 2013.

80 C. Lee et al., 2008.

81 Marta, 2012.

82 Gang, 2012.

83 DeFrancis, 1984: 268.

84 Ibid.: 273.

85 Ibid.: 283.

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co-existence of the two systems. If, as Demick86 says, characters are the “soul of every Chinese
person,” this may be the best solution. Calligraphers are still studying and practicing them.87
An alternative is that they may change via attrition, with simplified characters and
Pinyin encroaching. The examples of text-speak above suggest some ways this might occur,
with informality leading to new constructions. Neologisms under influence from the west are
not new to China. Liu88 describes modern Chinese as having undergone major changes over
the past century through the translations of European texts.
Text-speak shows the primacy of the spoken language, using puns and homonyms.
With Pinyin initials and borrowed English expressions there is a possibility of expressing more
within the constraints of the medium. DeFrancis’s assertion89 that characters themselves are
phonetic rather than ideographic seems to agree with this. There are established homophones
in the language such as 巴士 bā shì ‘bus’ as opposed to the traditional 公共汽车 gōng gòng qì
chē ‘bus.’
Up to fifty thousand characters are quoted by some as an upper limit in Chinese
dictionaries, 90 although only around two thousand have been published by the PRC
government for purposes of adult education.91 So many of the rarer ones may not have been
widely learnt and need to be looked up in a dictionary. As they are not purely ideographic,
they cannot be understood without special instruction and practice.
Mass literacy was one of the original aims of script reform. DeFrancis92 mentions the
view that only the privileged mastered characters enough to be able to read old literature. In

86 Demick, 2010.

87 Mair, 2002.

88 Liu, 2004: 125.

89 DeFrancis, 1984: 133.

90 Lindqvist, 1989: 8.

91 McNaughton and Li, 1999.

92 DeFrancis, 1984: 201–203.

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attacking the idea of characters as indispensable, he suggests that characters can exist
alongside Pinyin so that people could study the translated classics and have broader literacy.
Despite ideographic theories, characters do not appear to be direct transmissions of
meaning bypassing the language. This is where the scope for amnesia creeps in: practice and
muscle memory are needed to be able to perform. The system itself has logic, and a thorough
understanding of the radical, phonetic, and semantic elements reinforce their ability to act as
mnemonics. Lee et al.93 state that hands-on practice of writing characters is needed, rather
than passive learning.
There are parallel concerns in English concerning text-speak, but Crystal94 alleviates
the worries and calls it a natural change. Crystal95 says texting is unlikely to change the
language; it is just an adaptation to the constraints in the form. Abbreviations and omitting
vowels are peculiar to this need. It is worth remembering that this is a relatively recent
phenomenon: Faulkner & Culwin,96 in a text messaging study, say that by 2005 texting was
used by many people as a preferred means of communication. Bennett et al.,97 describing the
debate on digital natives who have grown up with this new technology, caution against “moral
panic.”
The subjects of character amnesia and text speak can be regarded as separate though
related issues. Rare characters may drop out of use, and a person may no longer be able to
write a character if he or she does not have an electronic device to hand. The new text-speak
lexicon is optimized for speed of input and reflects current fashions. Any of these could have
implications for the survival of rare or difficult characters. It might also be the case that it is
the most common characters anyway that become initialized and converted to numbers, and
these are the ones least likely to be forgotten. At the same time, the rare characters are

93 C. Lee et al., 2008.

94 Crystal, 2008a.

95 Crystal, 2008b.

96 Faulkner and Culwin, 2005.

97 Bennett et al., 2008.

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available in the electronic databases as required, so in that sense would be less likely to
disappear.
Character amnesia is not new, but may be more prevalent now if people are not
writing the characters in the traditional way. The return of writing classes in school may
address this. The coexistence and comingling of characters and Pinyin seems likely. It could
be thought that this represents the best of possible worlds, with script reform for daily use
happening of its own accord. At the same time, characters will remain in place for more
formal situations. Text messaging can draw on this fund of characters for neologisms, word
play, and concise communication.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Jiang Renfeng, Chung Kam Kwok, Zhang Liqing, Lisa Ning, and Ma Yicao
for useful discussions on SMS.

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 Character Amnesia:
An Overview

Christina Hilburger

INTRODUCTION

The number of smartphone users will reach a staggering 2.29 billion worldwide by 2017.1 While
these and other technologies help us accomplish innumerable tasks, they also generate
unintended consequences. For example, when it was suggested that students use spell-check
to aid in writing, people started asking whether or not this tool hindered their learning how to
spell.2 Issues are even more complex when talking about East Asian scripts. China, for
example, has the oldest continuously used writing system in the world.3 The inherent features
of the Chinese script have made the integration of modern technology especially tricky.
However, languages and scripts, including Chinese, are not fixed but constantly evolving over
time.4
It is estimated that the number of smartphone users in China will reach 599.3 million
by 2017 and will increase to 687.7 million by the year 2019.5 One relatively new unintended

1 Statista (2015). Smartphone users worldwide 2014–2019, accessed Dec. 12, 2015, [Link]
330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/

2 Nancy Patterson, “Spelling: Blame It on Technology” Voices From the Middle Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), p. 40.

3 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986), p. 40.

4 Zhou Youguang, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Script (Ohio: The Ohio State University,
Foreign Language Publications and Services, 2003).

5 Statista (2015). Smartphone users in China 2013–2019, accessed Dec. 15, 2015, [Link]
330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

consequence of using technology in East Asia is the apparent increase in the difficulty
individuals experience in writing characters by hand. This phenomenon has been dubbed
“character amnesia.” This overview seeks to provide helpful context for understanding the
problem, examining the factors that led up to the increase of character amnesia, the
phenomenon itself, and its implications.

PHONETICIZATION

By the time of the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 a number of indigenous phoneticization
systems had been developed.6 These systems were necessary for representing the sounds of
spoken Chinese. An early system created in 1913, called the National Phonetic Alphabet, aimed
to promote literacy.7 Rather than utilizing the letters of a Western alphabet, this system
employed simple phonetic characters to represent sounds. The shapes of these symbols were
derived from Chinese characters.8 This system, also known as Bopomofo or Zhùyīn Zǐmǔ (注
音字母), is still used in Taiwan today. Phonetic systems have helped to solve a variety of
problems that cannot easily be addressed with traditional Chinese writing, including the
ordering of indexes and dictionaries. With regard to literacy, phonetic systems do not require
the memorization of individual characters for writing. That is, by learning the sounds of such
symbols, people are able to become literate more quickly.
A second form of the National Phonetic Alphabet eventually was developed, and this
did use Roman letters.9 The Wade-Giles system was another form of Romanization, developed
by Herbert Giles in the mid-nineteenth century. Wade-Giles continued to be the system of
choice for transcription in the English-speaking world for most of the twentieth century.
However, in 1958, this system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音). Pinyin helped to

6 Wm. C. Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), p. 24.

7 Ibid., p. 25.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

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reduce some of the ambiguity that results from homophony in the Chinese language.10 That is,
Chinese has many characters that are distinguishable from each other when written, but that
have identical pronunciations.11 The Wade-Giles system separates individual syllables, usually
represented by one Chinese character, with a space. Pinyin, on the other hand, uses a space to
separate words rather than syllables from each other, the majority of Chinese words being
composed of two or more characters. Some issues still arise with regard to word segmentation
and Pinyin, but it is nevertheless very useful. Today, in regions where Chinese is spoken, the
learning of Pinyin starts in primary school.

DIGRAPHIA

Chinese characters and Romanized Pinyin each serve a distinct purpose. To understand why
this is so, it is important to note the difference between language and script. Language is the
stream of sounds we use to convey meaning; fundamentally this is a “mental phenomenon.”12
Scripts are used to record language, and it is possible for a single language to be represented
by more than one script. Two distinct scripts for one given language is a phenomenon known
as “digraphia.” The increasing use of Pinyin alongside characters has been seen as evidence for
an emerging digraphia in the “Sinosphere.”13 For example, on a Language Log post written by
Prof. Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, a photograph of a child’s essay that was

10 Jie Huang, “Retrieval of Chinese Language Titles in Pinyin: A Comparative Study,” Information Technology and
Libraries Vol. 23, No. 3. (2004), p. 95.

11 For more on information retrieval in China in the early 1980s, see Yu Jinfeng and Xiao Zhongyi, “Chinese in the
Computer: Efficiency in Input and the Role of Nested Element Analysis,” Information Processing & Management
Vol. 19, No. 5 (1983).

12 Wm. C. Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 238.

13 Victor H. Mair, September 25, 2013, “Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia,” Language Log,
accessed Dec. 13, 2015, [Link]

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being shared on social media is discussed.14 In this essay the child uses Pinyin when he/she is
unable to produce the needed character (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1

While some doubted the authenticity of this example, it is not an isolated incident.
Prof. Mair wrote another Language Log post, which includes a photograph of an elementary
school student’s diary entry that was being shared in the Chinese media.15 This essay shows
that when the child did not know how to write the character she used Pinyin (see Fig. 2). In
this example the identity of the student is included, which Prof. Mair suggests makes it less
likely that the entry was fabricated.16

14 Ibid.

15 Victor H. Mair, November 9, 2014, “A child’s substitution of Pinyin (Romanization) for characters,” Language
Log, accessed Dec. 14, 2015, [Link]

16 Ibid.

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HILBURGER, “CHARACTER AMNESIA”

Figure 2

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Not only is Pinyin used in the place of forgotten characters, it also serves as an
additional prompt when one cannot remember the pronunciation of a given character in texts.
This can be especially helpful for learners of Chinese as a second language. For example, in Li
Kunwu’s graphic-novel autobiography, A Chinese Life,17 characters that appear in a panel are
translated into English, but the Pinyin is there to remind one how to pronounce the
characters. This is useful whether a person is completely unable to read characters, or whether
they merely have trouble recognizing one or two of them. That is, it is a useful tool for new
learners, and also for native Chinese speakers who have forgotten characters.

17 At one time Li Kunwu specialized in propaganda comics. A Chinese Life is supposed to give Western readers
insight into China’s evolution through his illustrations. Many of the pages include the translations, Pinyin, and
characters. Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life (London: SelfMadeHero, 2012).

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Figure 3. 坚决粉碎我校的资反路线
Jianjue fensui wo xiao de zifan luxian:
“Cut our school’s capitalist rebels to pieces!”

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COMPUTERIZATION OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

The coding of Chinese characters has been going on for well over a century now, starting with
the telegraphic numeral code in 1880.18 This code used four digits to represent one character,
and employed ten thousand different coded characters (0000–9999) for use in telegrams.19
Hanyu Pinyin became the international standard in 1982. The People’s Republic of China
based this phonetic system on Mandarin, the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect.20 It has
been essential in establishing what has been called a “cyber highway,” which brings Chinese
culture, including language and script, to the international arena.21 In the early nineties,
however, East Asian information processing continued to lag behind other areas of the world.
This was the case even after decades of research and debate on the topic. The lag was largely
due to the complexity of dealing with characters in computers. The four-digit codes that had
been used for serial ordering in dictionaries were too difficult to memorize for inputting
characters into computers. To address this lag, many inputting methods were developed.
Some of these inputting methods were based on the coding of individual radicals, though,
because of the intrinsic features of the Chinese language,22 the efficiency of these systems was
questioned.23
This was a pivotal moment for East Asian information processing. Some were even

18 Zhou Youguang, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Script (Ohio: The Ohio State University,
Foreign Language Publications and Services, 2003), p. 91

19 Ibid.

20 Harry Tong and Linda Jin, “Recombinant Chinese Pinyin system for efficient processing of information in
Chinese” Computer Standards & Interfaces Vol. 20 (1998), p. 25.

21 Zhou Youguang, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Script (Ohio: The Ohio State University,
Foreign Language Publications and Services, 2003), p. 11.

22 Zhou Youguang, “Intrinsic Features of Chinese Language as Applied in Word Processing on Computers,” in
Characters and Computers, ed. Victor Mair and Yongquan Liu (Burke, VA: IOS Press, 1991).

23 Ibid.

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calling this period the “Warring States Period” (Zhànguó shíqí 战国时期) of codification.24
While some of these systems were relatively efficient for inputting characters, they were still
difficult to learn and use, especially for the nonspecialist.25 Experts suggested that many of the
issues that existed with inputting characters could be solved through the use of Pinyin.26
Yongquan Liu believed that, because of this, digraphia would first be achieved in the field of
Chinese Information Processing.27 This was, ultimately, an accurate prediction. While some
methods use root shapes for inputting, people often choose to use Pinyin-to-character
conversion methods for typing.

NETIZENS

After the Internet officially was launched in the United States and its services became more
widely available, the world became increasingly globalized, thanks in part to the widespread
use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies. In mainland China, Internet
services have been continuously developing since 1994. By the end of 2014 China had 649
million Internet users, with an increase of 31.17 million in that year alone.28 Mobile Internet
users in China reached 557 million by the end of 2014, for an annual increase of 56.72 million.29

24 Ibid., p. 22.

25 Harry Tong and Linda Jin, “Recombinant Chinese Pinyin System for Efficient Processing of Information in
Chinese” Computer Standards & Interfaces Vol. 20 (1998).

26 For more on the early history of characters in computers, see Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu, eds.,
Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo: IOS Press, 1991), a volume based on the
International Symposium on East Asian Information Processing conference held at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1990.

27 Yongquan Liu, “Difficulties in Chinese Information Processing and Ways to Their Solution,” in Characters and
Computers, ed. Victor Mair and Yongquan Liu (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo: IOS Press, 1991), 9.

28 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (2015). Statistical Report on Internet Development in
China, accessed Dec. 15, 2015, [Link]

29 Ibid.

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These mobile Internet users accounted for 85.8 percent of the netizen population, an increase
of 4.8 percent from 2013.30 With the increase of mobile Internet users, the number of instant
messaging users has grown, with 588 million instant messaging users in China, growing by
55.61 million in a single year.31 The impact of the Internet, for China in particular, has been
significant. Not only has it had a major impact on language usage,32 but the emergence of
netizens in China has also given rise to questions about their political influence.33
In December 2014, an overwhelming majority of the netizens in mainland China
(78.2%) were between the ages of 10 and 39, with a good portion of them between in the age
range 20–29 (31.5%).34 This netizenship is, for the most part, made up of young people, though
this has changed slightly as the population ages and devices become more user-friendly.35
These users shop, chat, play games, send emails, read, listen to and download music, watch
and download movies, etc., all online. The duration of time spent online has also been steadily
increasing.36 The online duration of China’s Internet users per capita per week was 26.1 hours
in 2014, which was an increase of 1.1 hours over the previous year.37

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., p. 56.

32 See Liwei Gao, “Synchoronic Variation of Diachronic Change,” in Chinese Under Globalization Emerging Trends
in Language use in China, ed. Jin Liu and Hongyin Tao (Singapore, Hackensack, NJ, London: World Scientific
Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2012), p. 9.

33 This study examines a nationwide representative survey data set, finding that Chinese netizens, as opposed to
other types of media and non-media users, are more politically opinionated and more likely to be supportive of
the norms of democracy and critical about the party-state and political conditions in China. See Ya-Wen Lei,
“The Political Consequences of the Rise of the Internet: Political Beliefs and Practices of Chinese Netizens,”
Political Communication Vol. 28 (2011).

34 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (2015). Statistical Report on Internet Development in
China, accessed Dec. 15, 2013, [Link]

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 37.

37 Ibid., p. 37.

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 HILBURGER, “CHARACTER AMNESIA”

CHARACTER AMNESIA

Character amnesia, known as “Tíbǐwàngzì” (提笔忘字), which can be translated as “forgetting

characters upon lifting the pen,” was first brought to the attention of a wider audience in 2001
by Jenifer 8. Lee in her New York Times article, “Where the PC is mightier than the pen.”38 She
interviewed a twenty-three-year-old named Li You, who said that there were some characters
he could no longer write with a pen, but would have no problem typing out on a computer.39
According to Lee, more than 97 percent of the computer users in China input characters using
Pinyin. Lee believes that this and other mounting anecdotal evidence suggest that the use of
computers for word processing is contributing to the increasing difficulty of writing characters
by hand for Chinese speakers.40
Today Chinese inputting methods utilize a standard ASCII41 keyboard. It does not
require special training to use Pinyin, but typing speed is affected because the user has to
choose the correct character from a list of characters that are phonetically similar. For
example, if one were to type “shi” or “ma” on a keyboard, the top six most commonly used
characters that correspond with “shi” or “ma” would show up, (see Fig. 4). The user only has to
select the appropriate number for the desired character to be input for the context. This
aspect of inputting is important because it requires users to recognize characters rather than
produce their individual parts, which is likely the reason more people are experiencing
character amnesia.

38 Jennifer Lee, February 1, 2001, “Where the PC Is Mightier Than the Pen,” New York Times, accessed Dec. 16, 2015,
[Link]

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Asciitable, accessed Dec. 11, 2015, [Link]

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Figure 4

Learning to write Chinese characters is notoriously difficult.42 It requires practice, and

lots of it. The processes taking place in the brain while writing Chinese characters are complex.
Recognition is one aspect of remembering characters, but muscle memory is an important
part of it, too. When a majority of writing is done using computers or mobile devices, the brain
is essentially re-wired. Writing on the computer using Pinyin inputting methods, especially for
individuals learning Chinese as a second language, becomes an endless series of multiple
choice questions and educated guesses based on component recognition. The two different
methods — learning to write Chinese characters and writing using Pinyin — activate two

42 David Moser, “Why Chinese Is So Damn’ Hard,” [Link], accessed Dec. 13, 2015, [Link]
texts/[Link]

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different parts of the brain. One study has even found that learning to write Chinese
characters influences the brain’s network for reading. 43
Whether typing on a computer or texting on a mobile device, oftentimes users do not
even have to type out the entire word before being given the likely character combination (see
Fig. 5). For example, when typing “老师” (laoshi), one only needs to type in “lao s” or when
typing “图书馆” (tushuguan), one only needs to type in “tu shu g” before the appropriate
characters appear. The implications of this should be evident. The ability to recognize rather
than remember and reproduce characters could fundamentally change one’s relationship to
the written language.

43 This study had students from a college Chinese class learn 30 characters in a character-writing condition and
30 characters in a Pinyin-writing condition. After the students learned the characters, images of the brain were
collected that showed different networks being used during the reading situation. They also found specific effects
of character writing in greater activation (relative to writing with Pinyin), suggesting that character writing
establishes a higher quality representation of visual-spatial structure of the character and its orthography. They
also found evidence that suggested that learning by doing (character-writing) invokes greater interaction with
sensorimotor information during character recognition. See Fan Cao, Marianne Vu, Derek Ho Lung Chan, Jason
M. Lawrence, Lindsay N. Harris, Qun Guan, Yi Xu, and Charles A. Perfetti, “Writing Affects the Brain Network of
Reading in Chinese: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” in Human Brain Mapping, vol. 34 (2013).

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Figure 5

The term “Character Amnesia” was first mentioned in another blog post written by
Prof. Victor Mair in 2010.44 A decade earlier, technology had already affected people’s ability to
write Chinese characters. Professor Mair wondered if this was further affected by the
popularization of texting.45 Some suggested that the stroke-based Wubi Input Method (Wubi
zixing shuru fa 五笔字型输入法) might be a cure for character amnesia, but the
shortcomings of this method have already been pointed out.46

44 Victor H. Mair, July 22, 2010, “Character Amnesia,” Language Log, accessed Dec. 14, 2015, http://
[Link]/nll/?p=2473.

45 Ibid.

46 See Rebecca Shuang Fu, “Character Amnesia: The Unavoidable Trend toward the Romanization of Traditional
Chinese Handwriting,” Sino-Platonic Papers Vol. 224 (2012).

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Soon thereafter, an article discussing contestants’ difficulties in writing the word

“Toad” at the Chinese Character Dictation Conference was published.47 However, as Prof. Mair
points out in another Language Log post, the author does not mention the influence of
technology at all. Rather, he attributes the problem to the simplification of characters.48 An
image of a shopping list for dumpling (jiaozi 饺子) ingredients, originally from an article
written by John DeFrancis,49 discussed on Language Log,50 is even more suggestive. What was
worth noting about this example is that this was not a young child using Pinyin, but a Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences researcher. When they were unable to remember how to write the
character they scribbled out the failed attempt and replaced it with Pinyin (see Fig. 6).

47 Dan Kedmey, August 15, 2013, “What the Word ‘Toad’ Can Tell You About China’s Modernization,” Time
Magazine, accessed Dec. 12, 2015, [Link]
chinas-modernization/

48 Victor H. Mair, August 16, 2013, “Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters,” Language Log, accessed
Dec. 10, 2015, [Link]

49 John DeFrancis, “The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform,” [Link], accessed Dec. 11, 2015, http://
[Link]/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html

50 Victor H. Mair, October 18, 2014, “Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia,” Language Log, accessed Dec.
10, 2015, [Link]

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Figure 6

葱 cōng ‘scallion’ 猪肉 zhūròu ‘pork’

姜 jiāng ‘ginger’ 虾仁 xiārén ‘shrimp meat’

香油 xiāngyóu ‘sesame oil’ 白菜 báicài ‘Chinese cabbage’

鸡蛋 jīdàn ‘egg’ 韭菜 jiǔcài ‘chives’

This is not an example of a child using Pinyin to substitute for tricky or unknown
characters, but an educated adult who has forgotten how to write standard ingredients for a
basic recipe.

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CONCLUSION

Forgetting how to write characters is not a new phenomenon. While empirical research on
character amnesia is limited, it is reasonable to think that as people spend more of their time
online, and depend more heavily on romanization for inputting, the difficulty of writing
characters by hand would be exacerbated. Because of the strong cultural identity ties to the
Chinese script, Pinyin is sometimes seen as a threat to Chinese culture as a whole. As against
this sentiment, computer-mediated communication technology is not going away any time
soon. Pinyin provides a user-friendly way to input Chinese characters. While it may be
contributing to character amnesia, it provides people with a way to successfully communicate.
If the goal is to give people the power to convey meaning through script, both Pinyin and
characters are effective.

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REFERENCES

Asciitable, accessed Dec. 11, 2015, [Link]

Cao Fan, Vu Marianne, Chan Lung Ho Derek, Lawrence M. Jason, Harris Lindsey H., Guan Qun,
Xu Yi, and A. Charles Perfetti. “Writing Affects the Brain Network of Reading in
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 Language Reform and Nation Building
in Twentieth-Century China

Yixue Yang

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the relationship between language reform and nation
building in twentieth-century China. In addition to treating language reform
as one of the movements answering the demands for socio-political progress,
this paper argues that language reform has always been in the forefront of the
political contentions. By surveying and comparing major influential schemes
alongside the historical process of Chinese language reform, it also tries to
explore the political implications entangled with urges toward linguistic
reform. This research offers new thinking about Chinese language reform in
the twentieth century as an indispensable part of the nation-building project,
and finds that these individual schemes shared a common ideological
motivation — the desire to construct a modern nation on the Chinese
territory, even though they took on different appearances and even appeared
mutually exclusive.

Keywords: language reform, nation building, Chinese language, Latinization.

 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

1. THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

For most of its long history, the Chinese language enjoyed an unshakable orthodoxy not only
in China, but also in the CJKV language circle. Deeply embedded in the heritage of historical
evolution, Chinese characters symbolized knowledge and advanced civilization, spreading
outward from China and taking new forms as Hanja in the Korean peninsula, Kanji in Japan,
and Chữ nôm in Vietnam. The Chinese character became the equivalent of Latin script in East
Asia when China was at its peak of state power and cultural influence. However, ebbing with
Chinese pan-Asian impact, it was gradually localized (in the kana system in Japan), replaced
outside China with the awareness of national consciousness (King Sejong the Great created
the Korean Hangul), and the entry of Western colonizers (French colonizers promoted the
Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet). The Chinese character nevertheless still retained its
legitimate and absolute authority in the Chinese education system and imperial examination.
Though there were a few mild proposals for language improvement in the imperial
past, the Chinese language experienced a sudden descent from being the once-glorious
product of civilization to being the scapegoat for underdevelopment in the late Qing dynasty.
The Opium War (1839–1842) opened the treaty ports, triggering the century-long sense of
crisis of “the Sleeping Giant.” Viewing their country as utterly humiliated by Western
gunpowder and warships, a group of Chinese intellectuals started to trace the poverty and
feebleness of the Celestial Empire to the inaccessibility of education. And they found that the
Chinese language stood in the way of spreading knowledge.
Their attacks were mainly concentrated on two aspects of the logographic writing
system: its inability to correspond to sound, and its extreme complexity. In the book Shuowen
Jiezi 《說文解字》, the Eastern Han scholar Xu Shen 許慎 characterizes the formation of
Chinese writing under six principles 六書: the pictographic principle 象形, the simple
indicative principle 指事, the compound indicative principle 會意, the phone-semantic
principle 形聲, the phonetic loan principle 假借, the derivative principle 轉注. These six
principles concern either the composition of the characters or their use.1 But when it comes to

1 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 79.

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 YANG, “LANGUAGE REFORM AND NATIONAL BUILDING”

pronunciation, one is dumbfounded, because these principles fail to suggest a direct link
between speech and writing. Compared to foreign languages equipped with sophisticated
alphabetic systems, the only way to bridge the gap between Chinese character and speech is
through years of rote learning, which easily falls into oblivion. The same memorizing difficulty
lies in writing the Chinese characters: the complex orthography and numerous strokes tend to
frustrate beginners easily, and they unavoidably require considerable devotion of time and
energy.
Therefore, the Chinese character, since its birth, remained a privilege of the elites, and
illiteracy was commonplace. It served as the tool of political manipulation through the
imperial examination system and a way of exerting power for those who could interpret
political discourse. However, notably, it was exactly this small circle of scholar-officials who
first gave the alarm in a moment of unprecedented national crisis, reminding later
generations of Chinese people that language reform was a means to remedy, if not reconstruct,
their nation.

2. FIXING THE CRUMBLING EMPIRE: EARLY ENCOUNTERS

WITH ROMANIZATION

As mentioned above, the Chinese language underwent serious examination in the shadow of
its foreign counterparts. The liberal intellectuals of the late Qing naturally looked at the
foreign language systems that appeared to be successful for possible solutions. While a small
number of pioneers were offering all sorts of plans for language reform, they were stalled
between a hesitant ruling class and the faceless masses. Owing to this lack of support, their
desire to achieve the return of the majestic Chinese empire by reforming its difficult language
writing system was doomed to fail.
Two schemes are most representative of these efforts, centered in the 1890s: the qieyin
letters 切音字 proposed by Lu Zhuangzhang 盧戆章, and the Mandarin letters 官話合聲字
母 offered by Wang Zhao 王照. Both reformers were inspired by their experiences in foreign
countries, where the advantages of an alphabet in linking writing with speech were obvious.

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So when they returned to China with their reform schemes, they pleaded with the emperor to
kindly approve their plans — like thousands of their Confucian predecessors throughout the
imperial history of China, risking their lives in admonishing the rulers to do the right thing.
Lu Zhuangzhang was born in Tongan, Fujian Province, in the reign of the Xianfeng
Emperor (1852). He received a systematic education in the Confucian classics beginning at the
age of nine, but failed the imperial examination when he was eighteen. Following the
emigration wave to Southeast Asia, he traveled to Singapore, where he was exposed to
Western civilization and acquired the English language. He returned to Xiamen three years
later, working for an English priest to create a Chinese-English dictionary. He also served as
the intermediary between the Chinese and English merchants on the prosperous Southern
coast. Lu’s bilingual experience prompted him to recognize the innate “problems” of his
mother tongue. He notes that, “the Chinese writing is perhaps the most difficult among all in
the world today…. The erudite old scholars would find it hard to memorize, not to mention
farmers, craftsmen, merchants, women, and children!” 中國字或者是當今普天之下之字之
至難者…雖博學老先生尚且難盡記，況農工商賈夫人小子也哉！ 2 The wide and
successful application of Latin alphabets abroad led him to think about the possibility of
applying the qieyin alphabet to reform the Chinese language. He reasoned that,

Even men and women above the age of ten in the most remote rural areas of
civilized countries like Britain and the United States are all literate. Why so? It
is because they use alphabetic letters, which not only link writing with speech,
but are also simple to write.

2 Ni Haishu 倪海曙, Qingmo Hanyu Pinyin Yundong Biannianshi 《清末漢語拼音運動編年史》(The

Chronicle of the Chinese Romanization Movements in Late Qing) (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Press 上海人民出
版社, 1959), 28.

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 YANG, “LANGUAGE REFORM AND NATIONAL BUILDING”

故英美文明之國，雖窮鄉僻壤之男女，十歲以上，無不讀書…何為其
然也？以其切音為字，字話一律，字畫簡易故也。3

As a result, he concluded that China should not differentiate itself from other countries, and
that only by promoting the qieyin letters could China be rich and powerful again.
In 1892, Lu Gangzhang published the Yimu Liaoran Chujie (一目了然初階（中國切
音新字廈腔），Zhongguo Qieyin Alphabets Based on the Xiamen Dialect), where he
systematized the qieyin alphabetic system. Combining the Chinese traditional fanqie fa 反切
法 and the Church Romanization developed by early Christian priests in the Southern Min
region, he selected a total of fifty-five Latin scripts, including capitalized, lowercase, invented,
and Greek letters. to represent the dialects of Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou, using the
shuangpin fa 雙拼法4. He also advocated making the Nanjing dialect into the standard
national language to re-unite the divided empire, both linguistically and territorially.
In 1898, Lu’s qieyin system was brought to the imperial court as a response to the
young Emperor Guangxu’s call for reform. However, Lu’s scheme was delayed and shuffled
between several central bureaucracies because the nascent political reform was facing strong
opposition. At the demise of the Hundred Days’ Reform, the qieyin system was rejected a year
later by the Ministry of Education, which criticized its creator as a person “confined to the
present, and forgetting about the past and losing sight of the future” 然以泥今忘古，狃進
昧遠，遂生種種之缺點5. Politics aside, the Ministry of Education did provide some
technical insights into Lu’s scheme: “the weaknesses can be summarized as follows, 1. The
initials are incomplete, 2. the finals lack the checked tone, 3. the writing is bizarre” (要其疏漏，

3 Ibid., 21.

4 雙拼法 might be translated as “the double-spelling method,” since it combines the initials 聲母 and finals 韻
母 in the Chinese language.

5 Fang Shiduo 方師鐸, Wushinianlai Zhongguo Guoyu Yundongshi《五十年來中國國語運動史》(The History

of the Chinese National Language Movement over Fifty Years) (Taipei: Mandarin Paper News Press 國語日報出版
社, 1969), 9.

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約有 1.聲母不完全，2.韻母無入聲，3.寫法乖謬…三端).6 Lu was deeply disappointed

about the failure of the Hundred Day’s Reform, and his zeal for a restored Great Qing Empire
was also shattered with the official denial of his qieyin letters. He later returned to Xiamen,
and there he tried to popularize his scheme among common people.
Also frustrated was Wang Zhao, a member of the reformers who took refuge in Japan
after the Hundred Days’ Reform. In Japan, Wang was impressed by the profound ability of the
Japanese kana alphabet to promote literacy. He contemplated this and attributed the failure
of the Hundred Days’ Reform to “the ignorance of the common people” 心中不見細民7. He
further argued that “the richness and power of a nation lies in the expansion of and
proficiency in each occupation … not in a minority of elites” 余今奉告當道者，富強治理，
在各精其業、各擴其職…不在少數之英俊8. Thus he envisioned the future of China, on
the basis of the Japanese pattern by which language reform had led to the “civilizing” process
of the whole population. To him, the salvation of the Chinese nation rested no longer in the
hands of a few persuing a radical evolution, but in a long-term reform of the language across
the whole of society, from the bottom up.
Wang secretly returned to China in 1900 and published the book Guanhua Hesheng
Zimu 官話合聲字母 in Tianjin. He raised objections to Lu Zhuangzhang’s qieyin letters,
considering the Latinized letters to be too simplistic and prone to blunders of pen. By contrast,
Wang thought highly of the Japanese kana, pointing out that “the system is not only easy to
remember, but also can prevent problems of confusion when written in a cursive form” 茲間
用二筆三筆以至四筆，務求易記，且熟時化為行草亦不至渾殽 9 . Wang Zhao’s
“Mandarin” letters were conceived directly under the influence of the Japanese kana, taking

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Ni Haishu 倪海曙, Qingmo Hanyu Pinyin Yundong Biannianshi 《清末漢語拼音運動編年史》(The

Chronicle of the Chinese Romanization Movements in late Qing) (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Press 上海人民出
版社, 1959), 77.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 81.

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 YANG, “LANGUAGE REFORM AND NATIONAL BUILDING”

some parts from Chinese characters as the syllables to indicate the initials and finals. In terms
of spelling, Wang accepted Lu’s application of shuangpin fa. But unlike the southern-based
Lu’s favoring of the Nanjing dialect, Wang regarded the Beijing dialect as the standard, and
urged the unification of the national language as integral to the unification of the China.
Unlike Lu Zhuangzhang, whose appeal was limited to a small circle, Wang’s Mandarin
letters enjoyed comparatively wider reception and even later comparable regional impact, in
large part due to his strategy of bottom-up popularization. As a political criminal, Wang had
to stay incognito, and he was granted shelter in the house of Yan Xiu 嚴修, an official at the
Hanlin Academy. In 1903, Wang Zhao risked establishing “the School for Mandarin alphabet”
官話字母義塾 in Beijing and reprinted his Guanhua Hesheng Zimu as its textbook. He also
published The Newspaper for the Mandarin Alphabet 《拼音官話報》. Both the school and
the newspaper achieved a certain level of popularity, and this helped promoted his Mandarin
alphabet at the common level.
Not only did Lu’s Mandarin letter system prove popular among the common people,
but it also was recognized later at a higher level. When Wu Rulun 吳汝綸, the Chief
Commander of Imperial University of Peking 京師大學堂總教習, was commissioned to
investigate the Japanese education system in 1902, he came to notice the relationship between
“national language education” and “national unity” when he was in correspondence with his
Japanese colleagues. The Japanese educator Isawa Shūji stated to Wu that “the unification of
language is the key to fostering the sense of patriotism of the people … and the most urgent
project of China today is the unification of language” 欲養成國民愛國心，必須有以統一
之。統一維何？語言是也…察貴國今日之時勢，統一語言尤為急急者10. As soon as
Wu Rulun returned to China, he was determined to adopt Wang Zhao’s Mandarin letters. But
he advocated this reform more on the basis of uniting the national language than because of
the linguistic dimension of bringing speech into correspondence with writing. Aided by the
joint efforts of bottom-level popularization and top-level support, Mandarin letters were put

10 Ibid., 91.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

on the agenda of Ministry of Education. It was the first time the need for language reform had
been officially recognized and incorporated into the national project.
Looking back on language reform efforts in the late Qing, we can see that it remained
a concern for a small circle of liberal intellectuals in their early encounters with the foreign
world. However, their role within the imperial framework was as the traditional scholar
officials who unilaterally waited for the appreciation of the emperor. As the crisis of the Qing
Empire exacerbated, the subject of the Chinese language reform underwent a transition from
pure linguistic debate to a political battlefield with increasing significance in relation to the
project of nation building. In the empire, the ability to act lay in the hands of a few members
of the ruling elite, who long neglected or refuted the abjurations of the reform-minded
intellectuals. Consciousness of the need for reform came far too late to the Qing rulers. The
feeble empire crumbled completely a few years later in 1911 when a republic was declared to
be founded on the same territory. Language reform as a fundamental pillar of national
reconstruction continued, nonetheless.

3. IMAGINING A REPUBLIC: CONTENTIONS OVER A NATIONAL

LANGUAGE

The 1911 Revolution took place overnight. The flags changed, and the territory once called an
Empire was now a Republic. The humiliations and scars were all to be left behind, intertwined
with the Imperial past, abominated, and ripe for radical reformation. The question now was
how to modernize China as a “nation.” The food, the clothing, the housing, and the
transportation styles were all under close scrutiny. Among many important concerns, Chinese
language reform came back into the limelight, intended to represent the progressiveness of
the new leaders. Newness was the fashion of time, but the problem was the ambiguity of
“newness.” There were various reformation schemes sprouting up in different stages, all
envisioning the creation of a national language unifying a new China.
Unlike the hesitant Qing government, the new administration wasted no time in
making every effort to promote language reform. The Chinese language was no longer on the

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wait list of reform, but was pushed to the forefront immediately, because the Chinese
language as it was had been labeled “the past.” In the founding year of the Republic, the
Ministry of Education convened a meeting in Peking and approved the implementation of the
Mandarin letters system nationwide. The Committee of Unifying the Pronunciation 讀音統
一會 was established the same year. In 1928, after Chiang Kai-shek nominally united the
North and South and established the Nanking government, the new Ministry of Education
adopted G.R., 國語羅馬字, short for Guoyeu Romatzyh (“National Language Romanization”),
as the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabets II (國音字母第二式)11. In 1930, the Executive Yuan 行政
院 changed the name “Mandarin Phonetic Alphabets” into “Mandarin Phonetic Symbols,” to
stress its adjunct function in annotating the Chinese characters, the irreplaceable cornerstone
of the Chinese civilization.
Successive stormy activities released strong political signals and revealed the
ideological orientation of Chiang’s administration toward constructing a Republic based on
the Chinese cultural heritage. He manipulated the language reform movement to consolidate
his newly established authority, which was still under potential threat within the
Kuomingtang and across the Chinese territory. However, the political regime of Chiang was
not established as smoothly as he wished, and language reform in the Republic became a
target for ideological criticism. In fact, the linguistic contests of Chinese language reform were
always entangled with political intentions.
The first struggle concerned central versus regional: whether the national
pronunciation should follow the Beijing dialect or “the National Pronunciation” approved by
the Committee of Unifying the Pronunciation in 1912. Initially, at the founding of the Republic,
representatives from various provinces throughout China gathered at the Committee and
devised a new pronunciation based on various topolects (spoken in the regions) to show the
government’s respect for diversity and the equality of the various provinces. However,
incorporating the checked tone in the South, the retroflex consonant in the North, and some

11 The previously endorsed Mandarin alphabet was regarded as the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabets I 國音字母第
一式.

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 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

rare sounds from the languages of minority groups, the new pronunciation system was such a
hodgepodge that it defied articulation for anyone and for application in language classes. Thus
the “National Pronunciation” turned out to be a political ideal but a linguistic impossibility.
On the other hand, some advocated the Beijing dialect as a substitute for “the National
Pronunciation” in light of its linguistic clarity and simplicity. But this ran counter to the
“national” agenda of the Republic because the Beijing dialect was often associated with the
Manchu aristocracy and could hardly meet the political goal of appealing to all regions,
especially the South.
The second dimension of the struggle was related to the issue of bourgeois elitism
versus proletariat commonality, which characterized the competition between G.R. and
Latinxua. The early twentieth century also witnessed the burgeoning of Communism in China,
with the opposition of the Communists against the Nationalists extending beyond politics to
the field of language. In 1926, G.R. was invented by a group of linguists led by Y. R. Chao as an
alphabetic system to represent the national language based on the refined Beijing dialect. In
an improvement over the previous qieyin and Mandarin systems, G.R. was able to indicate the
four tones of the Chinese language via variations of spelling.12 Although it was officially
regarded as “Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II” in 1928, it did not enjoy wide usage and
popularity, owing exactly to this complex “tonal spelling.” It was attacked by the Communist
side as “the toys of the educated” 知識份子玩玩的玩藝兒13, and “the Western style
concubine of the block-like Chinese characters” 方塊字底洋式派姨太太14, while the
Mandarin Letters were seen as “the traditional-style wife” 國粹派大夫人15. The Communists

12 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 245.

13 Junshi Zheng 鄭君實, “Guoyu Luomazi de Quedian 國語羅馬字的缺點 (The Weaknesses of Gwoyeu
Romatzyh),” in Zhongguo Yuwen de Xinsheng 《中國語文的新生》(The Rebirth of the Chinese Language)
(Shanghai: Shidai Press 時代出版社, 1949), 180.

14 Yupu Gao, 高毓溥, “Guoyu Luomazi he Ladinghua zhi Heliu 國語羅馬字和拉丁化之合流 (The
Convergence of Gwoyeu Romatzyh with Latinxua),” in Zhongguo Yuwen de Xinsheng 《中國語文的新生》(The
Rebirth of the Chinese Language) (Shanghai: Shidai Press 時代出版社, 1949), 187.

15 Ibid.

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 YANG, “LANGUAGE REFORM AND NATIONAL BUILDING”

took the tactic of labeling G.R. as the residue of the past, standing opposed to the looked-for
reimagining of a modern nation.
In contrast to the “oppressive” G.R., the early Chinese Communists created a new
alphabetic system based on the Romanization movement in Soviet Union. (To eliminate
illiteracy among Chinese emigrant workers in the Far East, the Soviet government devised a
Romanization script for them.) The new system, Latinxua, or Latinized New Writing, was first
proposed in 1931 at the Meeting for Chinese New Writing held in Haishenwei. Its newness
rested in its negation of the KMT’s language reform and of Chinese writing itself. In the first
place, the Communists regarded the KMT’s language reform as mere bourgeois tricks,
unrepresentative of the massive proletariat class. Secondly, they also found the Chinese
writing system problematic: “it is a product of the feudal past, a tool of the ruling class to
oppress the miserable people, and a barrier to widespread literacy, not suitable for the present
society” 中國漢字事古代與封建社會的產物，已變成了統治階級壓迫勞苦大眾的工
具之一，實為廣大人民識字的障礙，已不適合於現在的時代16. Their purpose was to
replace the Chinese character with the Soviet-style Latin script, “only through which could
China develop a international, and Communist culture for the workers and laborers, in a
national manner” 也只有這樣才能發展形式是民族的，而內容是國際的，社會主義的，
中國工人及勞動者的文化17. Linguistically different in design from G.R., Latinxua appeared
much simpler because it does not represent the four tones, and it was flexible enough to apply
to regional dialects (though it was originally based on the Shandong dialect). Under the strong
support of top-level Communist leaders, Latinxua had a considerably greater impact in the
CCP-controlled north. Latinxua carried the imagination of a Communist China, standing
completely opposite to the imperial past and the capitalist Republic.
The twentieth century was an era both of negation and imagination. In the first half of
the century, as soon as China got rid of the old Qing Empire, it was plunged into an extensive

16 See “Zhongguo Xinwenzi de Shisan Yuanze 中國新文字的十三原則 (The Thirteen Principles of the New
Chinese Written Language),” in Zhongguo Yuwen de Xinsheng 《中國語文的新生》(The Rebirth of the Chinese
Language) ed. Ni Haishu 倪海曙, 177–180. (Shanghai: Shidai Press 時代出版社, 1949), 54.

17 Ibid.

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and multi-layered debate over what a modern Republic should be like. Notably, the topic of
Chinese language reform departed from being a pure linguistic issue and grew increasingly
mingled with political ideologies, involving contentions between the past and the present, the
regional and the central, as well as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In times of constant
internal and external turmoil, different groups of Chinese were all devoted to mapping an
ideal nation. However, just as the China national language went through repetitive
alternations and internal struggles, the root of the Republic seemed hardly to have taken hold
in the Chinese soil.

4. CONSTRUCTING SOCIALISM IN CHINA: LANGUAGE AND

POWER

The Communist People’s Republic was established with the victory of the CCP in the Civil
War (1946–1949). Like its predecessor, the new regime was conscious of making changes to
the language in a way that would be to its advantage, but it appeared to prefer a “revolution”
rather than a “reform” on this matter. Following their promotion of Latinxua in the 1930s, the
Communist leaders raised the Chinese language reform to an unprecedented level of
attention. Soon after the founding of the “New China,” every trace of the old society was seen
as a fallen object to be cleared away to meet the needs of modernization and the construction
of Socialism.
In the case of the Chinese language, social and administrative forces were mobilized
with great vigor to facilitate the process of reform. In October 1949, the Committee for
Chinese Writing Reform was founded in Beijing. In 1951, Mao Zedong gave a famous talk,
throwing his great personal charisma behind the movement: “the written language must be
reformed, following the universal direction of spelling as do all the other written languages”
文字必須改革，要走世界文字共同的拼音方向 18 . Answering his call, a large-scale
investigation into Chinese written language reform was carried out with the support of the

18 This was Mao Zedong’s opening remark when he was addressing at the inaugural conference of the Research
Committee of Chinese Written Language Reform.

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Communist Party. In 1954, the Committee for the Chinese Written Language Reform officially
came into being, directly affiliated with the State Council and headed by Wu Yuzhang 吳玉章.
Two years later, the State Council issued “the Plan for Simplifying Characters” and elicited
public suggestions. In 1958, “the Plan” was revised and approved at the Fifth Session of the
First National People’s Congress as the Hanyu Pinyin Plan. Pinyin was announced as the
official alphabetic system to annotate the Chinese language.
Implementation extending from central to regional government followed
immediately after the birth of the theoretical framework, representing the determination and
highly centralized power of the Communist government. Addressing the Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference in 1958, Premier Zhou Enlai explicated the gradual but
continuous plan for Chinese language reform in New China,

The current task of language reform is the simplification of characters,

popularization of Putonghua (the common speech), and devising and
applying the Scheme for a Chinese Phonetic Alphabet.

當前文字改革的任務就是：簡化漢字，推廣普通話，製定和推行漢語
拼音方案。19

Although Mao indicated a plan for a radical elimination of Chinese characters in his
1951 speech, and at earlier activities in the 1930s, Zhou took an ambivalent attitude towards
the future, by directing that the focus of the present work should be considered the first step
of the overall gradual process. Top-level demands were put into practice in no time. All kinds
of pamphlets and government documents were printed and released to local governments. In
1956, the Ministry of Education initiated research classes for Putonghua to train teachers and

19 Enlai Zhou, 周恩來, “Dangqian Wenzi Gaige de Renwu 當前文字改革的任務 (Tasks for the Current Written
Language Reform),” in Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an de Zhiding he Yingyong 《漢語拼音方案的製定和應用》 (The
Planning and Application of the Hanyu Pinyin Scheme) (Beijing: Wenzi Gaige Press 文字改革出版社, 1983), 6.

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experts, who were assigned to a local region upon graduation. Also, the CCP stressed the
function of media: exhibitions, newspapers, journals, and treatises concerning language
reform in the New China sprang up and developed at a high speed. It is estimated that there
were more than five hundred books about the language reform published during the ten years
from 1956 to 1966.20 The rapid and efficient popularization of the language reform scheme was
both a test and a manifestation of CCP’s power construct all across China.
Though the “Socialist” language reform was carried out in a sweeping manner, it was
confronted with linguistic objections. Concerns were mainly directed to the Scheme for
Simplifying the Characters. By 1964, more than two thousand characters had been simplified,
over one thousand variant Chinese characters had been abolished, and over thirty rare
geographic names had been replaced.21 Many linguists raised questions over the legibility of
the new terms, but these questions were either ignored, or politicized as “a pretext to attack
the Party and government.”22 Proficient at exerting the modern state apparatus, and at
political discourse, the CCP used the process of language reform to consolidate its authority
and create the look of a strong “Socialist China.”
However, Socialist language reform experienced ups and downs when the political
climate of the People’s Republic changed radically after the 1960s. During the Cultural
Revolution, language reform fell into chaos when the Red Guards presented extremely
simplified scripts of all sorts, and reform was later officially banned when the ten-year
turbulence ended. In recent decades, there have been waves of appeal for a further reform,
and also longing for a restoration of traditional characters. The relationship between language
and politics has become increasingly inseparable in the People’s Republic, such that the CCP

20 Fu’ang Cao, 曹夫昂, Wenzi Gaige Gongzuo Wenda 《文字改革工作問答》(Q&As for the Written Language
Reform Work) (Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press 上海教育出版社, 1980), 18.

21 Ibid., 25.

22 John DeFrancis, “Language and Script Reform,” in Advances in the Sociology of Language (The Hague:
Mouton& Co, 1972), 459.

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has regarded language as an integral part of nation construction and as an ideological

battlefield that cannot be lost.

5. CONCLUSION

The history of the Chinese language is long, but the proposition of a national language is a
modern one with a history of only a hundred years or so. It entered the sight of the Chinese
people against the backdrop of internal crisis and external tension. Before the Opium War, the
idea of “nation” was absent in the Chinese imagination. Instead, the Son of Heaven ruling the
Tianxia 天下 comprised the Chinese worldview, and the Chinese language was undoubtedly
the carrier of high civility and cultural superiority. But then, starting in the late 1890s, the
undoubted was doubted, and the unchangeable was changed.
Examining the historical process of the language reform, we note two features of
development. First, the Chinese language has been constantly examined and reexamined for
self-improvement in comparison to its foreign counterparts (the Western alphabets and the
Japanese kana). From the late Qing, the Republic, and the current Communist regime,
Chinese linguists have been learning from the successful cases of foreign alphabetic systems
to bridge the gap between the pictographic characters and pronunciation. Romanization of
the written language greatly helped the popularization of education, by enabling ordinary
people to much more quickly and easily memorize a writing system.
Second, the Chinese language has been increasingly interwoven with the political
whirlpool of the twentieth century, so that the boundary between language and politics has
grown blurry. The Qing emperors turned a blind eye to the potential power in language, until
it was too late to save the dying empire by reforming its language. The need for a language
reform was well understood by the Nationalist Government. Although it endeavored to
construct a modern Republican nation, different from the imperial past, its efforts seemed
powerless and were diluted during the intervals of wars and alternative schemes. Unlike their
predecessors, the Communists took a strong position in the matter of language reform. The

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radical revolution imposed on the Chinese language exhibited their political power in the
form of coercion.
After all, “empire”, “republic”, and “the people’s republic” are only terms to describe a
certain territory. What seems more important are how, and with what vision, change is
introduced in the language reform project. In modern China, politics has become a topic
sensitive to talk about, but, interestingly, each time we speak the language, everything we
utter is a manifestation of political power, because language and power are doppelgängers,
whether people are aware of it or not.

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REFERENCES

Cao Fu’ang 曹夫昂. Wenzi Gaige Gongzuo Wenda 《文字改革工作問答》(Q&As for the
Written Language Reform Work). Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press 上海教育出版
社, 1980.
DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1984.
———. “Language and Script Reform.” In Advances in the Sociology of Language, 450–475.
Edited by Joshua A. Fishman. The Hague: Mouton& Co, 1972.
Fang Shiduo 方師鐸. Wushinianlai Zhongguo Guoyu Yundongshi《五十年來中國國語運動
史》(The History of the Chinese National Language Movement in Fifty Years). Taipei:
Mandarin Paper News Press 國語日報出版社, 1969.
Gao Yupu 高毓溥, “Guoyu Luomazi he Ladinghua zhi Heliu 國語羅馬字和拉丁化之合流
(The Convergence of Gwoyeu Romatzyh with Latinxua),” in Zhongguo Yuwen de
Xinsheng 《中國語文的新生》(The Rebirth of Chinese Language), ed. Ni Haishu 倪
海曙, 185–190. Shanghai: Shidai Press 時代出版社, 1949.
Ni Haishu 倪海曙. Qingmo Hanyu Pinyin Yundong Biannianshi 《清末漢語拼音運動編年
史》(The Chronicle of the Chinese Romanization Movements in Late Qing). Shanghai:
Shanghai Renmin Press 上海人民出版社, 1959.
Zheng Junshi 鄭君實. “Guoyu Luomazi de Quedian 國語羅馬字的缺點 (The Weaknesses of
Gwoyeu Romatzyh).” In Zhongguo Yuwen de Xinsheng 《中國語文的新生》(The
Rebirth of Chinese Language), ed. Ni Haishu 倪海曙, 177–180. Shanghai: Shidai Press
時代出版社, 1949.
———. “Zhongguo Xinwenzi de Shisan Yuanze 中國新文字的十三原則 (The Thirteen
Principles of the New Chinese Written Language).” In Zhongguo Yuwen de Xinsheng
《中國語文的新生》(The Rebirth of Chinese Language), ed. Ni Haishu 倪海曙, 54–
55. Shanghai: Shidai Press 時代出版社, 1949.
Zhou, Enlai 周恩來. “Dangqian Wenzi Gaige de Renwu 當前文字改革的任務 (Tasks for the
Current Written Language Reform).” In Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an de Zhiding he Yingyong

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《漢語拼音方案的製定和應用》 (The Planning and Application of the Hanyu

Pinyin Scheme), ed. by the Committee for Written Language Reform, 6–10. Beijing:
Wenzi Gaige Press 文字改革出版社, 1983.

88
 Explaining China to the World:
Huang Youyi and the Role of the Translator in Chinese Foreign Policy

Lauren Avery

1. INTRODUCTION

In foreign policy, the role of language as a whole is often underestimated or ignored altogether;
for the most part, the glory goes to those who speak — the leaders, diplomats, and
policymakers. Yet, interpreters have played a critical role in diplomacy for millennia, and their
role in the underlying processes of foreign relations should not be discounted. Writing about
interpreters who facilitated contact between dignitaries from Chŏson Korea and Ming China
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where the written word was still valued over speech,
Sixiang Wang writes that “while the social obscurity of interpreters belied their political
indispensability … interpretation was both the mechanism of overcoming linguistic difference
and the very marker that exposed it.”1 Even now, interpreters hold an immense amount of
power in foreign relations, as they can either bridge a linguistic gap between two peoples or
underscore their differences. An interpreter has the ability to manipulate tone, language, and
nuance to either reflect or distort a leader’s words, yet his or her role is often overlooked.
In this paper, I examine the role of the interpreter in affecting and altering Chinese-
American relations. Few national relationships are as important as the Sino-American
relationship, yet few languages are more distant from one another than Mandarin Chinese
and English. Phrases and idioms that may carry a great deal of weight in China may sound

1 Sixiang Wang, “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in
Early Choson Korea,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, ed. Benjamin A.
Elman (Boston: Brill, 2014), 58.
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

trivial in the United States, and connotations that are easily understood by any American may
be missed by a Chinese speaker. These two countries share a long history of cooperation and
confrontation, and the status of their relationship is ever-changing. Their mutual
understanding of policy statements could not be more important. The interpreters tasked
with bridging the gap in language between the United States and China receive little, if any,
attention, yet they are constantly working behind the scenes of every major development in
foreign policy.
This paper will address several questions about the importance of interpreters. What,
precisely, is their role? How are they chosen and trained? How do they carry out their
translations, and how are the translated documents distributed? How do their translations
impact the Sino–American relationship? Do their translations have a different effect on the
audience than the original text? Do they alter their translations to produce a different effect,
and why? Do the leaders have particular messages they want to send to a foreign audience,
and how does the translator help them to achieve this goal?
To answer these questions, I will take Huang Youyi (Huáng Yŏuyì, 黄友义) as a case
study. He is the official translator for Chinese President Xi Jinping, and he has also translated
for previous leaders. I will examine his role in the Sino-American relationship and look at how
his translations have impacted the way foreign audiences perceive President Xi’s statements.
I will begin by outlining Huang’s background and experience as a translator, including
his education and training. I will then closely analyze his methods of translation, and discuss
the specific words and phrases he changes in Xi Jinping’s speeches when translating them into
English. Most of my sources are news interviews with Huang himself, in addition to somes of
his written work. I also use excerpts from the original Chinese text of Xi Jinping, cross-
referencing them with Huang’s translations. In this section, I also examine the way in which
Huang’s changes could affect Xi’s image and message abroad, and I discuss the problems that
Huang has in translating Xi’s Chinese.
Finally, I apply the results of my case study to the larger discussion by assessing the
importance of translators in the conduct of foreign affairs generally. I will also discuss the
implications for this research and its role in the larger political discourse. Overall, as

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exemplified by Huang Youyi, interpreters play a crucial role in foreign policy due to their
unique ability to construct a leader’s image in a foreign environment.
The role of the translator in foreign affairs is worth studying because of its
implications for the conduct of foreign policy. Interpreters have been used for thousands of
years to connect societies that spoke different languages, and most of modern diplomacy
would be impossible without interpretation and translation. Even as technology evolves to
make communication faster, allowing people who speak two different languages to
communicate continues to be crucial. Nearly all countries utilize interpreters, yet their
presence is understudied within the fields of political science, international relations,
linguistics, and history. With this paper, I hope to help fill this gap in the scholarship by
looking at the Sino-American relationship as an example, and in particular examining the
ways in which Huang Youyi has influenced Xi Jinping’s image in the United States.

2. HUANG YOUYI AS A TRANSLATOR

Huang Youyi is one of very few “high-profile” translators in China: he has been called upon to
interpret and translate documents for current President Xi Jinping, as well as previous
presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.2 Outside of his official duties, he remains a prominent
figure in the field of translation, serving as Standing Vice President and Secretary-General of
the Translators Association of China and Vice Chairman of the International Federation of
Translators.3 Yet, his exact role with respect to the Chinese government is frequently
presented with a degree of uncertainty; reporters have variously have called him a
“government translator,”4 a “political advisor,”5 and “a senior editor in a state-run publishing
house.”6

2“‘The Translator’s Role in the Rise of China: With Special Reference to Translations of President Xi’s Addresses’ –
by Mr. Huang Youyi,” The University of Macau Department of English, (24 September 2015).

3 “Mr. Huang Youyi,” Beijing Chinese–Foreign Translation and Information Service, <[Link]
[Link]/[Link]?content_id=8>.

4 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal China RealTime Blog (16 April

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However, despite his extraordinary number of titles and responsibilities, his

upbringing was not unlike the lives of many Chinese children growing up in the shadow of the
Cultural Revolution. He was born on June 1, 1953, before the Cultural Revolution transformed
the social and academic landscape of China.7 When the government began closing universities
in the mid-1960s, Huang was a middle school student.8 Several years later, in 1968, Mao
Zedong established the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement”
(Shàng shān xià xiāng yùndòng, 上山下乡运动), which sent 17 million young Chinese from
their homes in the bustling cities to the countryside. These relocated Chinese teenagers
became known as the “rusticated urban youths” (Zhīshì qīngnián, 知识青年, also frequently
translated as “sent-down youth” and “educated youth”), and as Jonathan Unger has shown,
they frequently had great difficulty reentering urban society upon their return to the cities.9
Huang was sent to Heilongjiang Province near the Russian border to work on a farm
months after a border conflict between Russian and Chinese soldiers.10 This reality was not
lost on Huang, who said that he was “prepared to die on the battlefield.”11 Yet, despite the
struggles faced by the “educated youth” of his time, Huang later noted the similarities between
his experience and the experience of President Xi Jinping, who was sent to work in Yanchuan
County in Shaanxi Province as a “sent-down youth.”12 In discussing his attitude towards Xi, this

2015).

5 Zhang Rui, “Huang Youyi: Timely Translations Can Reveal China,” Beijing Review (4 March 2014).

6 Jaime A. FlorCruz, “Xi Jinping: China’s New Boss a Man with a Dream,” CNN (16 March 2013).

7 “Mr. Huang Youyi,” Beijing Chinese-Foreign Translation and Information Service.

8 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

9 Jonathan Unger, “China’s Troubled Down-to-the-Countryside Campaign,” Contemporary China, Vol. 3, No. 2
(Summer 1979), pp. 79–92.

10 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

11 Ibid.

12 “Xi Jinping 习 近 平 : One of China’s Top Future Leaders to Watch,” Brookings Institution,
<[Link]

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remained a major point of connection between himself and the President during his time as
translator, and it served to humanize Xi in Huang’s eyes. “Xi is of my age, he also spent years in
the countryside as an educated youth, just like me,” Huang said to a reporter in 2013. “At least
he knows the real situation then and now.”13
Two years after Huang’s relocation, many universities around China reopened, and
with the encouragement of his team leader, he enrolled in the Beijing Foreign Languages
Institute (Běijīng wàiguóyŭ xuéyuàn, 北京外国语学院), which is now the Beijing Foreign
Studies University (Běijīng wàiguóyŭ dàxué, 北京外国语大学).14 Students were not allowed
to choose their course of study, and, upon arrival, Huang was “assigned” to the English
department, where he remained until graduating in 1975. Much of his training consisted of
translating outdated documents from the United Nations that had not yet been translated
into Mandarin. In his last year, he discovered that his talent for translation had been
recognized as exceptional when his teacher chose his paper as the exemplar for the class.15
After graduation, he began his career as a translator.
As he refined his craft, Huang specialized in publishing, especially “foreign
communications” and publishing internationally.16 In his career, he has translated many
classic American novels into Chinese, and several informative Chinese books about China’s
economy, culture, and society into English. He held a number of leadership positions at
several major publishing firms in China, and he focused primarily on translating Chinese
documents into English in order to educate a Western audience about Chinese culture and
civilization.17 Currently, in addition to the titles listed previously, Huang serves as a member of
the eleventh and twelfth National Committees of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative
Conference (CPPCC), the Director of the English Expert Committee of the China

13 FlorCruz, “Xi Jinping: China’s New Boss a Man with a Dream.”

14 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

15 Ibid.

16 Mr. Huang Youyi, Beijing Chinese–Foreign Translation and Information Service.

17 Ibid.

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Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters (CATTI).18 In 2015, he served as the senior
English translator for a new English-language compilation of Xi Jinping’s key speeches and
interviews, entitled Xi Jinping: The Governance of China.19
During the course of Huang’s career, the nature of his translation work has changed
dramatically. When he began working as a translator, he and his contemporaries were
responsible for translating “everything” from economic documents to technology records from
foreign languages into Mandarin. However, later in his career, Huang claims that at least 54
percent of the translation occurring in China was from Chinese to English, and his associates
claim that this percentage was even higher.20 Which raises the question: why did English
become the primary language that interpreters encountered? According to Huang, the rise of
China’s economy in the last ten to fifteen years has caused Chinese companies to devote more
of their business to exports, specifically exports to the United States.21 However, this
phenomenon should not be viewed simply as a matter of economic growth. The increased
political, cultural, and military interaction between China and the United States is also
responsible for the growing importance of English for Chinese translators. When asked if
foreigners should study Chinese, Huang Youyi replied, “If you really want to understand
Chinese philosophy, the way Chinese people think, the best way is still to learn the language.
Having said that, if there’s only one language in the world left it’s not Chinese. It’s English.”22
This is a critically important change in the field of translation. There is a distinctive
trend in official translation and at publishing firms: foreign language documents used to be
translated into Mandarin, but now most of the work is translating Chinese documents into
English. This is indicative of a larger trend within Chinese politics. As Huang’s figures show,
English is quickly growing in importance, and Chinese business and politicians are no doubt

18 Ibid.

19 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

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taking notice. Leaders such as President Xi Jinping are likely to be especially concerned about
their official English translators because of the growing importance of English in China. The
impact of this trend is twofold: for translators like Huang, it means that they must become
extremely familiar with the mentalities and cultures of English-speaking audiences, so that
they can tailor their translations to address the reading habits of these cohorts and to take
into consideration their preexisting impressions of China. From a diplomatic standpoint, this
means that translators have experienced a dramatic gainin power in the political sphere due
to their mastery of English.
With Huang’s background given as context, it is now possible to examine what his job
as translator for Xi Jinping has entailed. Clearly, Huang was not only a naturally talented
translator, but he also had to undergo rigorous training before serving as an official interpreter.
From this, we can conclude that Xi Jinping chose him due to his expertise. Thus, he is
representative of official translators in other countries besides China. Also, his experience
with the rise of English translation in the Chinese publishing community is not only a result of
economic interaction between China and English-speaking nations, but it reflects a larger
trend in official correspondence. Xi Jinping, like other global leaders, seems to be increasingly
concerned about his image and his administration’s reception overseas. Translating his
speeches into English has become a priority, and, as a result, the translator has gained
remarkable power to influence Xi’s image abroad, and, accordingly, increased responsbility.
As American relations with China and other nations develop still further, translation into
English will grow in importance, in tandem the importance of American public opinion of
foreign nations. I will next assess Huang’s translations of Xi Jinping’s speeches and statements
and determine the effect his translations have had on an English-speaking audience.

3. HUANG’S TRANSLATIONS OF XI JINPING’S STATEMENTS

Huang’s background and his mastery of English enabled him to secure a top position as
translator for presidents Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, but it is his work for Xi Jinping
that will be given special attention here. Huang’s methodology for translating Xi’s official

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documents into English will be examined. In particular, I will look at how Huang addresses a
very specific problem: assessing the tone, nuances, and references to history and culture that
are ubiquitous in a state leader’s speech, and conveying them to a foreign audience. Certainly,
the stakes are high, when there is a constant risk of mistranslation that could result in
misunderstandings in areas of intense international sensitivity.
Yet Huang employs a very particular methodology when translating Xi’s documents,
which consists of three “steps.” Each of these steps is intended to solve a major problem that
Huang believes can prevent Xi’s Chinese from being translated accurately into English. Since
the goal is to make Xi’s speeches understandable to an English-speaking audience, these three
problems are the biggest hindrances that Huang faces during translation.
Much of the information used to describe each step comes from a Wall Street Journal
interview of Huang published in April 2015, in which Huang divulged the most common
changes he has to make when translating Xi Jinping’s texts. We will look at this issue in three
parts: one for each “step” or “problem” addressed by Huang’s method. Many of Huang’s
solutions to these problems involve simplification of the word or phrase until it is
understandable to English speakers. After introducing each step, I will cross-reference
Huang’s translation with Xi’s original Chinese text. Then, I will analyze the different effects
that the original and the translated texts would have on a reader. It is worth noting that the
translation that Huang does is done very closely, and often does not differ noticeably from the
Chinese. I will instead be looking at the instances in which Huang believes that literal
translation is impossible or disadvantageous. These are examples in which he deliberately
changes something in Xi’s speech in order to have a specific effect on a Western audience, or
to communicate a certain nuance that would have otherwise been lost.

A. PROBLEM 1: XI’S USAGE OF TRADITIONAL IDIOMS

The first problem that Huang faces in translating Xi Jinping’s Chinese into English and making
it understandable to an English-speaking audience is his frequent use of traditional idioms. In
his public addresses, Xi will often make use of Chinese idioms, and he usually uses chengyu
(chéngyŭ 成语), which are idiomatic expressions that are frequently four characters long,

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although he occasionally selects longer idioms and metaphors. For Xi, the literary nature of
the idioms and their traditional place in Chinese speech can enhance his addresses by making
him appear intelligent and sophisticated to a Chinese-speaking audience. To a Chinese
audience, the hidden meanings and stories within these idioms and metaphors are usually
very clear, but they lack the same effect when translated into English because most foreign
English-speakers do not have the cultural and historical background to comprehend them.
Indeed, according to “A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English and Chinese”
by Lanchun Wang and Shuo Wang, idioms are “not only the gems of languages, but also the
crystallization of human wit and wisdom,” and “they best mirror the national characteristic
embodied in a language” so they are “always rich in culture connotation and national flavor.”23
However, this “culture connotation and national flavor” can be exceedingly difficult to
translate into another language, and by extension another culture.
As a result, the idiomatic expressions that are frequently present in Xi’s speeches pose
a major problem for translators. This problem becomes especially serious when the
metaphors’ meanings have a different connotation in English and can be therefore be easily
misconstrued. As an incident in November 2014 showed, failure to properly convey the
nuances of Chinese idioms can often have unintended consequences.
During President Xi’s visit to Washington last fall, he attended a press conference with
US President Barack Obama, where a reporter from The New York Times asked him if he would
resume issuing visas to foreign journalists. Xi responded brusquely with a Chinese phrase, “解
铃还须系铃人” (jiĕ líng hái xū xì líng rén).24 According to Victor Mair, this is a “fixed saying”
in Chinese that can be traced back to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).25 The New York Times
translated it roughly as “Let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off.”26 Mair translates it

23Lanchun Wang and Shuo Wang, “A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English and Chinese,” in
Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3.9 (Sept. 2013): 1692.

24“解鈴還須繫鈴人” (“Let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off”), Wiktionary, accessed 10 Dec. 2015.

25 Victor Mair, “Xi Jinping: ‘when a car breaks down…’” Language Log (13 Nov. 2014).

26 Patrick J. Lyons, “In the Words of Xi Jinping: Unraveling an Ancient Saying,” The New York Times (12 Nov. 2014).

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literally to mean “the person who removes the bell (from the tiger’s) neck must be the person
who fastened the bell (around the tiger’s neck).”27 Yet, as The New York Times reported, many
English-speaking listeners confused Xi’s metaphor with one of Aesop’s fables, which also
involved a bell around the neck of a cat. “Belling the cat” is an English phrase which derives
from a fable about some mice who tie a bell around a cat’s neck so that they know when he is
approaching, but they cannot decide who will tie the bell on the cat in the first place. Thus,
the phrase has come to mean something that is appealing, but ultimately unachievable.28
However, the Chinese phrase has come to mean that the creator of the problem should be
responsible for its solution.29 In Xi’s case, this seems to suggest that foreign correspondents are
responsible for fulfilling Beijing’s demands, and not the other way around.30 However, when
confused with Aesop’s fable, the powerful, staunch message that Xi is sending is entirely lost.
This is a risk with translating any of Xi’s idioms and metaphors into English.
Xi’s frequent usage of idioms and chengyu means that translating them into English,
without losing their meaning or literary aspect, is a top priority. How does Huang Youyi tackle
this problem? His solution is to make the idiom as simple and easy to remember in English as
it is in Chinese, and to simultaneously preserve its meaning. His method was put to the test in
2012 when Xi Jinping gave his first speech after ascending to the presidency. Before he stepped
onstage, he explicitly asked Huang to pay particular attention to one line and ensure that
English speakers would understand it clearly. The line in question was a metaphor: “打铁还
需自身硬,” which can be literally translated as “to be forged with iron, the metal itself must
be strong,” and it was part of Xi’s call for the Party to work together and maintain a strong core
of leadership.31

27 Mair, “Xi Jinping: ‘when a car breaks down…’”

28 Lyons, “In the Words of Xi Jinping: Unraveling an Ancient Saying.”

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 “习近平在与中外记者见面会上讲话” (Xi Jinping meets with Chinese and foreign reporters), Sina Blogs (16
Nov. 2012).

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The translation of this phrase, incidentally, caused an uproar in the Chinese media, as
many felt that the literal translation of this phrase into English conveys the correct meaning
only if it is taken in context, and otherwise is too ambiguous to have a clear meaning.32 Huang,
also dissatisfied with the literal translation for being too clunky and lacking the original
nuance, translated it as “if you want to work with iron, you must be tough yourself.”33 Huang’s
translation has a different effect from that of a literal translation of Xi’s original phrase, by
driving home the toughness of the subject. In Huang’s translation, changing “the metal” into
“you” makes the entire idiom much more self-confident. Instead of “the metal” being tough,
which could mean Xi, the Party, or the entire People’s Republic of China, Huang’s singular
subject clearly suggests that Xi is tough. Huang’s translation made Xi’s confidence and
presence felt to English-language readers, and this would have been impossible if the idiom
were translated literally. Thus, Huang Youyi was able to simplify the metaphor, make it
memorable, and preserve its impact in English, all the while making Xi appear confident and
resolute.

B . P R O B L E M 2: X I ’ S M A N N E R OF ADDRESSING HIS AUDIENCE

The second problem that Huang faces when translating Xi Jinping’s documents into English is
his manner of addressing his audience. When a leader is delivering a speech, a great deal of
information can be gleaned from how he/she refers to the audience. The address that the
leader uses can indicate their perceived standings in the status hierarchy, as well as the
general quality of the relationship between speaker and audience. According to Huang, Xi
Jinping has a tendency to refer to his audience as “comrades” (tóngzhì, 同志). Among
contemporary Chinese translators, he says, it is a convention to keep this word in the
translation, although he hopes to use the power of translation to alter the way Chinese people
address each other.34 In fact, the word “comrade” has come to possess a certain stigma in some

32 “中国领导人的白话魅力” (The beautiful vernacular of Chinese leaders), 半月谈 (Bàn Yuè Tán) (3 Nov. 2014).

33 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

34 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

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parts of the world. In the United States, it is now associated with socialism and communism,
and it is especially associated with the Soviet Union. In China, too, the word has changed its
connotation; recently, and despite the vehement protests of the older generation, the word
“同志” has become a slang term among modern Chinese youth, and it has taken on a
surprising new meaning: homosexual.35 Still, the word is very popular among Chinese leaders
because of its historical importance and its emphasis on camaraderie — in his speech after
being appointed president, Xi Jinping uses the phrase no fewer than eleven times.36
To Huang, this is a word that must be changed in his translations from Chinese into
English. Although he admits that the use of “同志” is on the decline, it still carries a great deal
of historical weight and societal connotation in China. As senior translator of Xi Jinping: The
Governance of China, Huang changed the word “comrade” to the word “friends.”37 In other
documents, he goes even further with his transformations of the word “comrade.” He is
currently trying to overturn the convention of keeping the word “comrade,” and instead he
hopes that more translators will follow his lead and change it to reflect better the relationship
between Xi and his audience. For example, if Xi is addressing Party members of government
officials, Huang believes that he should call them “dear colleagues.” Interestingly, if he is
talking to rural countrymen and farmers, Huang argues that “comrade” should be translated as
“fellow countrymen,” to reflect the status disparity between him and his audience.38 Still,
Huang says that these translations have not yet caught on in the field.
In this case, the differences between “comrade” and “friend,” “dear colleague,” and
“fellow countrymen” carry is clear, and the variants would have a noticeable effect on an
English-speaking audience. As stated previously, the word “comrade” carries a stigma within
the United States, and few Americans respond favorably to it. Furthermore, “comrade” is an
unfamiliar word in the United States political milieu, and American leaders would never refer

35 Molly Gray, “Chinese dictionary refuses to turn ‘comrades’ gay,” CNN (24 July 2012).

36 “习近平在与中外记者见面会上讲话” (Xi Jinping meets Chinese and foreign reporters), Sina Blogs.

37 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

38 Ibid.

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to their audience as their “comrades.” Accordingly, the word “comrade” underscores the
historical differences and the cultural distance between China and the United States. To many
English speakers, the use of this word, strongly associated with communism, and therefore
foreign in its nature, is jarring, and the gap between the reader and the Xi administration
would grow. But by using such words as “dear colleague,” “friend,” and “fellow countrymen,”
Huang is able to familiarize and humanize Xi to English-speakers. These words are not
politically charged like “comrade,” and, in English, they emphasize brotherhood and close
cooperation. By presenting Xi as addressing his “friends” or “colleagues,” Xi appears to be
much more similar to an American political leader, and to many Americans, seems to close
the cultural gap between China and the United States. In the United States, where only 38
percent of the population views China favorably, humanizing Xi and emphasizing the
similarities between China and the United States is a very useful tool in maintaining stable
foreign relations.39

C. P R O B L E M 3 : X I ’ S H E A V Y U S E OF ADVERBS

The final challenge that Huang must meet to make Xi Jinping’s statements understandable to
an English-speaking audience is Xi’s heavy used of adverbs and adverbial phrases. According
to Huang, it is common for Chinese speakers to string along many adverbs in a sentence, while
a similar sentence in English would not make sense or would be very difficult to read.40 In
their interview with Huang, The Wall Street Journal provided links to three of their own
articles in which they faced this problem. For example, their reporter faced difficulty with the
word “comprehensively” (quánmiàn, 全面) which was used by Xi to establish his “Four
Comprehensives” campaign (sì ge quánmiàn zhànlüè bùjú, 四个全面战略布局) in February
2015.41 The “four comprehensives” are the needs to:

39 Global Indicators Database, “Opinion of China,” Pew Research Center, Spring 2015.

40 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

41 “Xi Jinping Hopes to Count in Chinese Political History with ‘Four Comprehensives,’” The Wall Street Journal,
25 Feb. 2015.

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1. “Comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society” (quánmiàn jiànchéng

xiăokāng shèhuì, 全面建成小康社会)
2. “Comprehensively deepen reform” (quánmiàn shēnhuà găigé, 全面深化改革)
3. “Comprehensively govern the nation according to law” (quánmiàn yīfă zhìguó, 全面
依法治国)
4. “Comprehensively be strict in governing the party”42 (quánmiàn cóng yán zhì dăng, 全
面从严治党)43

While these “comprehensives” are understandable by an English speaker, the repeated

use of the adverb “comprehensively” makes the sentences awkward to read. The Wall Street
Journal article includes links to other articles that faced similar problems, using repetitiously
the words “unswervingly” and the “three represents.”44
According to Huang, this is a frequent problem he faces when translating Xi’s
speeches. When translating, he notes that “in English it sounds better if you take out all the
adverbs,” yet if the adverbs were removed in the original Chinese text, “the Chinese is not
Chinese anymore.”45 He says this is merely a cultural difference between China and English-
speaking countries, but it still proves to be an obstacle when translating official documents. In
cases where the repeated use of multiple adverbs makes the sentence difficult to read in
English, and where the adverbs are not essential to the meaning or necessary to show a theme
(as in the “four comprehensives” example above), Huang solves the problem by simply
removing the adverbs. This succinctly clarifies the sentence, and when the adverbs are not
essential to the intelligibility of the sentence in English, it does not alter the meaning
whatsoever. Unlike Huang’s solutions to translating Chinese idioms and use of the word

42 Ibid.

43“学习习近平’四个全面’战略思想” (Studying Xi Jinping’s “Four Comprehensives”), 人民网 [Link].

<[Link]

44 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

45 Ibid.

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“comrade,” which do have a noticeable effect on the reader’s perception of Xi, the elimination
of adverbs does not seem to have a dramatic effect on the reader, as long as the adverbs are
not necessary for understanding the meaning.
As Xi Jinping’s translator, Huang faced a difficult task: make his words not only
palatable, but also powerful to an English-speaking audience. The three primary problems he
faced in translating Xi’s Chinese into English were his frequent use of traditional idioms, his
manner of addressing his audience, and his heavy use of adverbs. All of these made Xi’s
speeches in Chinese sound intelligent and confident, but when they were translated literally
into English, they either lacked their intended nuance or would have sounded extremely
foreign to English speakers. As a solution, Huang mostly simplified the translations of Xi’s
Chinese statements so that they were still pithy yet meaningful. Table A summarizes the
problems and solutions analyzed in this chapter. However, as shown previously, it seems that
Huang’s deliberate translations do have a slightly different effect on the English-speaking
audience when compared with the original Chinese texts. Although the overall effects of his
changes seem small, when all of Huang’s solutions are used concurrently in Xi’s speeches,
these translations may alter English-speakers’ perception of the President. By and large,
though, Huang remains very true to Xi’s original words, and effectively communicates his
meaning to a foreign audience. Still, these deliberate changes in the translation of Xi’s
language from Chinese to English are testament to the power that translators hold in foreign
affairs.

TABLE A. Goal: To make Xi Jinping’s speeches more understandable to an English-speaking

audience.
Problems with Xi Jinping’s Chinese for Huang Youyi’s Solution
English Speakers
Xi’s usage of many traditional idioms Keep it equally simple and easy to remember
in English
Xi’s manner of addressing his audience Make it more familiar to English speakers

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Problems with Xi Jinping’s Chinese for Huang Youyi’s Solution

English Speakers
Xi’s heavy use of adverbs Eliminate the adverbs (when it doesn’t affect
the meaning)

4. CONCLUSION: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM HUANG YOUYI,

AND THE IMPORTANCE OF TRANSLATORS IN FOREIGN
AFFAIRS

When Huang Youyi, translator for President Xi Jinping, is taken as a case study, it becomes
clear that translators play a critical role in foreign policy, due to their unique ability to
influence a foreign audience’s perception of a leader and his/her policies. Examination of
Huang’s background makes evident the level of training and skill that is required of these
translators. In addition, translation into English reflects a growing trend in foreign relations
— world leaders and policymakers are increasingly interested in targeting their rhetoric to a
foreign audience. Thus, the translator’s role is of great importance. Huang’s three problems
with translating Xi’s Chinese into English — and his solutions — illustrate the effect that the
translator can have on the text’s overall impact on the reader. When Huang translated the
idioms to be clearer to an English-speaking audience, and when he transformed the word
“comrade” into “friends” or “colleagues,” he made a definitive impact on the English-speaking
audience’s perception of China. However, the removal of the adverbs when translating from
Chinese to English did not seem to have as great an effect on the audience. Overall, however,
Huang Youyi illustrates the importance of the translator in foreign relations.
This result has wide implications in many fields. Leaders and policymakers around the
world, even outside of China and the United States, should be aware that their official
translators have the power to enhance or detract from their overall messages. The
implications are even greater for scholars and government officials involved in the Sino–
American relationship. By sensitively translating Xi’s messages and nuances, Huang directly
affects how Western political leaders, policymakers, scholars, and the general public view Xi

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and his administration, yet he gets very little international attention. Even when they are not
in the spotlight, though, the impact of professional translators is felt. It is important to
understand where one’s information comes from, and the transformation it undergoes,
particularly in foreign languages. Leaders and scholars who study languages, foreign relations,
government, political science, and history must be constantly aware of the behind-the-scenes
role that translators play.
From Huang’s case study, we can glean a great deal of information about the role of
interpreters and translators in global affairs, not just Sino–American relations. Huang and
other official government translators directly affect foreign perception of their leaders and
their country. By communicating in the audience’s native language, they have the power to
help or hurt public opinion of an administration or of an entire nation. They can make leaders
seem more relatable, less foreign, and more human by using language to emphasize the
cultural similarities between the two nations. Conversely, they can also use linguistic
differences and mistranslation to emphasize the cultural and historical gap between two
countries, and make the leaders feel very distant. Translation truly goes beyond the literal
meaning of the leader’s words. Words, phrases, and idioms carry different weight in different
languages, and many have historical, literary, or societal connotations attached to them. By
manipulating and transforming language, translators can convey culture, nuance, deep-set
beliefs, intentions, as well as a country’s own self-perception and its perception of other
countries. The relative status of the two nations, or their perceived positions in the world
order, can all be communicated and decoded through translation. The power to clarify
misconceptions and diffuse conflict, or spread hostility and divide two nations, is immensely
important, and its impact should not be underestimated when studying foreign relations.
To Huang Youyi, though, China is not merely an exporter or an economic powerhouse.
It is also a monumentally important player in global affairs, and its official statements —
through translation — need to reflect that status in every language. He has long argued for the
importance of conveying Chinese intentions and culture, and believes that language can serve
to educate English-speaking nations about Chinese politics. He also believes that translation is
important because it can communicate the role of history in a way that is digestible to a

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foreign audience that has not directly experienced that history or that culture. By translating,
he can provide foreign nations with a Chinese perspective for acting a certain way or
remembering a particular moment in history. Indeed, words are powerful, and translators play
a key role in using that power to influence the course of global affairs. Huang encapsulated the
importance of translators in influencing Chinese image abroad and building foreign policy
with a useful sentence: “In the 1970s, there was practically nothing about China in foreign
newspapers. But now, you see several articles on the front page of The New York Times every
day. Our task is to explain China to the world.”46

46 “Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal.

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REFERENCES

“解鈴還須繫鈴人” (“Let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off”), Wiktionary.
<[Link]
“中国领导人的白话魅力” (The beautiful vernacular of Chinese leaders), 半月谈 (Bàn Yuè
Tán), 3 Nov. 2014. <[Link]
/[Link]>.
“习近平在与中外记者见面会上讲话” (Xi Jinping meets Chinese and foreign reporters),
Sina Blog, 16 Nov. 2012. <[Link]
“学习习近平”四个全面”战略思想” (Studying Xi Jinping’s “Four Comprehensives”), 人民网
[Link]. <[Link]
“CPPCC member Huang Youyi on China’s leadership change,” GB Times, 13 Nov. 2012. <https:
//[Link]/watch?v=MoxnKHzZcXE>.
FlorCruz, Jaime A. “Xi Jinping: China’s New Boss a Man with a Dream,” CNN 16 March 2013.
Global Indicators Database. Opinion of China. Spring 2015. <[Link]
/database/indicator/24/survey/17/map/>.
Gray, Molly. “Chinese dictionary refuses to turn ‘comrades’ gay,” CNN 24 July 2012.
Lyons, Patrick J. “In the Words of Xi Jinping: Unraveling an Ancient Saying,” The New York
Times 12 November 2014.
Mair, Victor. “Xi Jinping: ‘when a car breaks down…’” 13 November 2014. <[Link]
.[Link]/nll/?p=15732>.
“Mr. Huang Youyi,” Beijing Chinese-Foreign Translation and Information Service.
<[Link]
Rui, Zhang. “Huang Youyi: Timely Translations Can Reveal China,” Beijing Review 4 March 2014.
Unger, Jonathan. “China’s Troubled Down-to-the-Countryside Campaign.” Contemporary
China 3.2 (1979): 79–92.
University of Macau. “‘The Translator’s Role in the Rise of China: with Special Reference to
Translations of President Xi’s Addresses’ – by Mr. Huang Youyi.” 24 September 2015.
<[Link]

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series-the-translators-role-in-the-rise-of-china-with-special-reference-to-translations-
of-president-xis-addresses/>.
Wang, Lanchun, and Shuo Wang. “A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English
and Chinese,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3.9 (2013): 1691–1697.
Wang, Sixiang. “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the
Politics of Language in Early Choson Korea,” Rethinking East Asian Languages,
Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919. Ed. Benjamin A. Elman. Boston: Brill, 2014. 58–
95.
Wei, Wang. “Huang Youyi: China Needs a Strong Team of Translators.” 2 March 2013. <http:
//[Link]/china/NPC_CPPCC_2013/2013-03/02/content_28107356.htm>.
“Working with Iron: Meet Xi Jinping’s English Translator,” The Wall Street Journal 16 April 2015.
“Xi Jinping 习近平: One of China’s Top Future Leaders to Watch,” Brookings Institution. <http:
//[Link]/about/centers/china/top-future-leaders/xi_jinping>.
“Xi Jinping Hopes to Count in Chinese Political History with ‘Four Comprehensives,’” The Wall
Street Journal 25 February 2015.
Xi, Jinping. The Governance of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014.

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 Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo

Derick Olson

This paper is a study on the censorship of “Grass Mud Horse Lexicon” terms on China’s largest
microblog, Sina Weibo. The paper surveys methods used by studies of Chinese internet censorship
and frames its question in terms of “morphs,” or alternate representations of controversial terms and
ideas.

BACKGROUND

Sina Weibo is the primary microblogging service in China, with 500 million registered users and over
46 million daily active users.1 In the last decade, microblogging services such as Twitter have risen in
prominence in the realm of social media, as well as in those of politics, news, and finance. In the
United States, companies such as Dataminr and Datasift “mine” Twitter for live-streaming data about
events around the world.2 Short messages and additional contextual information associated with a
post, or “tweet,” have made microblogs like Twitter into an important corpus of structured text in
academic research.3 As a similar service, Sina Weibo is another useful resource for such applications.
However, unlike these, Sina’s cooperation with China’s government censorship policies also makes
the Weibo corpus a uniquely positioned proxy for understanding the censorship policies of China.
As with all websites and public platforms in China, social media platforms are subject to

1 How many people really use Sina Weibo? [Link]

sina-weibo/

2 Twitter Is Selling Access to Your Tweets for Millions [Link]

your-tweets-for-millions/

3 Twitter Data Analytics. [Link]

 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

government censorship. The Chinese government sometimes involves itself in pursuing particular
posters, such as in the recent case of the trial of Pu Zhiqiang for his posts on Weibo,4 and the
controversial imprisonment of Ai Wei Wei in 2011.5 In the case of Weibo, censorship consists of entire
posts being removed from the timeline of searchable posts. Post and account blocking are handled by
Sina, prior to government intervention. Estimates of censored Weibo posts range from under one
percent to sixteen percent of all posts.
The motivations for censorship can be grouped into two primary categories: (1) to suppress
criticism of the state, and (2) to reduce the probability of collective action. According to an empirical
study by King et al.,6 China’s censorship policies are almost entirely focussed on suppressing the latter
case of collective action potential, rather than of criticism of the state.
There are multiple methods of internet censorship in China. These can be grouped into three
categories: site-wide censorship (the Great Firewall), automatic blocking (based on topics and
keywords), and manual blocking (human censors). Examples of the first case are the ban on sites like
Google, Facebook, and Twitter from the Chinese internet due to the refusal of these companies to
comply with China’s censorship policies. The latter two cases, on the other hand, exist in most
companies that do comply with China’s censorship policies. For example, Sina has blacklisted terms,
which are blocked automatically. The advantages of such an approach is speed and scalability,
because this form of censorship can be performed by computers. Manual blocking, on the other hand,
requires a human to read and respond to a particular post, or to add a term to an automatically-
blocked blacklist. Jason Ng’s post on [Link] goes into further detail on the actual flow of

4 Chinese rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang stands trial for Weibo posts criticizing government.
[Link]
Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial#F7CZK27wyEqV

5 [Link]

6 King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences
Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review. 2013. Source: [Link]
[Link]?m=1448321711.

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 OLSON, “BYPASSING CENSORSHIP ON SINA WEIBO”

human-computer post filtering.7 Keyword-based censorship has led to the introduction of alternative
words and phrases known as morphs, which have entered the Chinese internet language.8
A morph, defined as an alternative form of a preexisting, original word or phrase, can be
categorized as one of the following: homophone, homograph, acronym, pun, and Pinyin. Homophonic
morphs include 河蟹 (he xie) “river crab,” a morph for the sarcastic use of 和谐, the word “harmony,”
in reference to the campaign for China as a “harmonious society.” A homographic morph is 目田 (mu
tian), which looks like 自由 (zi you), meaning “freedom.” Acronyms generally use the Pinyin
Romanization to represent a Chinese phrase, such as TMD for “ta ma de,” meaning “fuck your mother.”
A example of pun or metaphor is 西朝鲜 (xi chao xian), which means “West Korea,” an alternative
way of saying China.9 Finally, the Pinyin representation of a Chinese word acts as an easily-accessible
morph, as the use or absence of accent tones change the underlying representation, allowing such
terms to bypass automated censorship methods.10

METHODOLOGY

This study addresses Pinyin as a morph that can be used to bypass censorship. It uses the China Digital
Times’ “Grass Mud Horse Lexicon”11 as a source of potentially sensitive terms and phrases, and
predicts the term’s censorship status.
There have been several approaches to researching censorship on the Chinese internet.
Chen’s research on Pinyin acronyms used a questionnaire-based approach to determine which

7Tracing the Path of a Censored Weibo Post [Link]

keywords-trigger-automatic-review/

8 Chen, Le, Chi Zhang, and Christo Wilson. “Tweeting under Pressure: Analyzing Trending Topics and Evolving Word

Choice on Sina Weibo,” Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Online Social Networks. 2013. Source:

[Link]

9 Victor Mair, “Ways to Say ‘China’ That Can Circumvent the Censors.” Language Log. 2015. Source: http://

[Link]/nll/?p=22520.

10 Victor Mair, “Pinyin Spam Text Message.” Language Log. 2015. Source: [Link]

11 [Link]

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acronyms were most popular among a sample population of mainland China Mandarin speakers. This
approach yields high quality data in small amounts, and it is particularly useful for seeding terms that
are as yet unknown. Since I am using an existing corpus of terms for my study, I do not take this
approach.
A second approach to Chinese internet censorship studies is long-term monitoring of websites
to detect when certain terms are censored. For example, in the King et al. study on the effects of
censorship on collective expression, researchers crawled the Chinese internet to find a myriad of
blogs and websites, sampling for terms at varying levels of controversy over time. In the Chen et al.
study on censorship on Weibo, researchers determined a set of the most influential posters on Weibo,
and followed the lifecycle of their posts and comments over time. Both of these approaches are very
effective for determining when terms are censored, and they have shown the dynamic nature of
Chinese keyword-based censorship. Due to time constraints, I elected not to take this approach, as
these studies were conducted over many months.
Lastly, we come to Jason Ng’s query-based approach, used to select terms for his book Blocked
on Weibo. His particular approach was to crawl Wikipedia for Chinese article titles, and test whether
or not they were blocked on Weibo. This approach is targeted in that it pre-selects queries, rather than
tries to ingest the live fire hose of data that is Weibo. Its primary advantage is that it does not require
many months of monitoring in order to return interesting results. Its primary disadvantage is that
queries can become “stale,” or no longer relevant, and this approach does not account for changes due
to current events.
I chose a similar query-based approach, as it balances the advantage of computer-aided
research to ingest large amounts of data, but stays within the resources and timeline available to my
study. One disadvantage of this approach is that it is limited to pre-selected terms. However, my
particular study focuses on known morphs, and the extent to which their Pinyin representations are
censored.
There were three main stages to my implementation: (1) collection, (2) querying, (3) response-
handling.
In the collection stage, I parsed the entire “Grass Mud Horse Lexicon” (found at
[Link] For each entry, I

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stored the script-based term and Pinyin representation (along with the English meaning for reference).
After filtering for certain duplicates of undocumented terms, I was left with 336 (script, Pinyin) pairs.
Each entry is tagged with its morph-type:
 Chinese script: ‘og’
 Pinyin script: ‘py’

Now that we have a pairing, I can state my hypothesis:

Given a blocked Chinese character/word, the Pinyin representation will sometimes be

used as a morph in order to bypass keyword-based censorship methods.

The reasoning behind this hypothesis is that in the case that the automated censors have
discovered a new morph (the script term) for some controversial idea, the netizen will have continued
using the same conceptual morph, but represented in an alternative way such as Pinyin.
In the querying stage, I used a Selenium12 browser driver, along with my own scripts to query
Sina Weibo’s search engine (found at [Link] for each term of each pair.
In the response-handling stage, I parsed the html responses to my queries to determine which
response type was assigned to each morph. This study designates four response types:
 BLOCKED: message stating query was censored
 NO_RESULTS: message stating query returned no results
 FEW_RESULTS: less than 5 results
 MANY_RESULTS: more than 5 results

In addition, there is a fifth ERROR state in which timeouts and other web-crawling-related
issues prevented the script from determining the appropriate response. After response-handling, I
saved the results to a .CSV file (see appendix).

12 [Link]

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Figure 1. Screen shot of graphical interfaces for automated browser querying

ANALYSIS

My hypothesis that certain blocked terms would be presented with Pinyin was not supported by the
data. In fact, only one term containing Pinyin was blocked across the entire dataset: GFW zh fù, which
refers to the “Father of the Great Fire Wall,” or China’s nationwide internet censorship policy. It is
possible that some of the errors could have resolved in terms that were either blocked or unblocked in
such a way that Pinyin morph was used in place of a blocked character term, but this is not
particularly likely.13 Below is a sample of the overall results (see the link in appendix for full results).

13 There were about 100 errors in total, but 0 pairings of blocked-unblocked morphs in the remaining 550+ entries

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Base Term Meaning Morph Type Result

不差钱 no shortage of money 不差钱 og MANY_RESULTS

不差钱 no shortage of money bù chā qián py NO_RESULTS

不折腾 free from turmoil 不折腾 og MANY_RESULTS

不折腾 free from turmoil bù zhēténg py NO_RESULTS

不明真相 don’t understand the 不明真相 og MANY_RESULTS

actual situation

不明真相 don’t understand the bù míng zhēnxiàng py NO_RESULTS

actual situation

不要乱说话 do not make irresponsible bú yào luàn shuōhuà py ERROR

remarks

不要乱说话 do not make irresponsible 不要乱说话 og MANY_RESULTS

remarks

专业孙子 professional grandchild 专业孙子 og ERROR

专业孙子 professional grandchild zhuānyè sūnzi py NO_RESULTS

中国人是需要 Chinese people need to be 中国人是需要管的 og MANY_RESULTS

管的 controlled

中国人是需要 Chinese people need to be Zhōngguórén shì xūyào py NO_RESULTS

管的 controlled guǎn de

中国人民的老 old friends of the Chinese 中国人民的老朋友 og MANY_RESULTS

朋友 people

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Base Term Meaning Morph Type Result

中国人民的老 old friends of the Chinese Zhōngguó rénmín de py NO_RESULTS

朋友 people lǎo péngyǒu

中国感恩节 Chinese Thanksgiving 中国感恩节 og MANY_RESULTS

中国感恩节 Chinese Thanksgiving Zhōngguó Gǎn’ēnjié py NO_RESULTS

中国的互联网 China’s Internet is open 中国的互联网是开放 og MANY_RESULTS

是开放的 的

中国的互联网 China’s Internet is open Zhōngguó de py NO_RESULTS

是开放的 hùliánwǎng shì kāifàng
de

Figure 2. Typical Sample of Dataset. Observe that Pinyin generally does not return
any results, and Chinese script generally passes through censors.

An interesting result is that the Pinyin terms with accents were very rarely used on Weibo.
The vast majority of Pinyin morphs yielded no results, even when the base term morph yielded many.
There are likely two reasons for this. The first is that computer-based entry systems are generally
geared toward displaying characters, even though the user may be typing in Pinyin. In the case of
stroke-based entry, the Pinyin is completely bypassed. The second reason for the lack of Pinyin results
is that the computer-based entry for Pinyin with tones is particularly cumbersome, often requiring the
user to hold down a key in order to select the accented version. Particularly with idiomatic terms such
as these, it is likely that any Pinyin input would have been entered without tone marks. I discuss the
addition of toneless Pinyin as an additional morph, along with other further steps, in the conclusion
section.
Below we find all of the blocked-status morphs from the dataset. It is of interest that only
fifteen of over three hundred terms (over six hundred morph-pairs) are currently blocked by censors.

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On the one hand, this could indicate that the internet slang found in the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon is
new enough to pass undetected by censors.

Table. All blocked entries from Grass Mud Horse lexicon

Base Term Meaning Morph Type Status Topic Connotation

GFW Great Firewall GFW og BLOCKED censorship pejorative

GFW 之父 father of the GFW 之父 og BLOCKED censorship pejorative

Great Firewall

GFW 之父 father of the GFW zhī fù py BLOCKED censorship pejorative

Great Firewall

习包子 Steamed Bun 习包子 og BLOCKED political endearing

Xi

五月三十五 Thirty-Fifth of 五月三十五 og BLOCKED collective neutral

日 May (June 4, 日 action
1989 -
Tiananmen)

土共 TG 土共 og BLOCKED political neutral

带鱼包子 cutlassfish 带鱼包子 og BLOCKED political pejorative

bun

当今皇上 reigning 当今皇上 og BLOCKED political pejorative

emperor

捅鸡局 Bureau of 捅鸡局 og BLOCKED political pejorative

Dicking
Around

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Base Term Meaning Morph Type Status Topic Connotation

日人民报 Screwing 日人民报 og BLOCKED political pejorative

People Post

正腐 govern-rot 正腐 og BLOCKED political pejorative

淋巴县长 Mayor Lymph 淋巴县长 og BLOCKED collective neutral

action

电婊 power whore 电婊 og BLOCKED political pejorative

糊煮席 muddled 糊煮席 og BLOCKED political pejorative

boiled
banquet

翻墙 scale the wall 翻墙 og BLOCKED collective neutral

action

Yet, if these sorts of terms are widely available on the internet, it would seem that it would be
very simple for censors to simply add the list to their own blacklist of terms. Rather, it seems that the
majority of the lexicon’s terms are not intended to be blocked. This is in line with the King et al.
hypothesis that criticism is not necessarily something that the government aims to suppress, as long
as it is not backed by collective action.
Of the blocked terms below, I have classified three as refering to collective-action events: 35th
May, Mayor Lymph, Scale the wall. The 35th of May refers to June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen
Square crackdown.14 Given the controversy surrounding the topic, it is not surprising to see a
reference to Tiananmen censored. Of particular note is “Mayor Lymph,” which refers to a manifesto
for reform and democratization in China signed by 350 scholars and activists in 2008.15 “Scale the wall”

14 [Link]

15 [Link]

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refers to methods of bypassing China’s firewall via VPN, 16 which also has collective action
connotations.
The remaining terms have to do with censorship or political criticism. It is interesting that
only these particular terms were blocked, as they do not seem particularly distinguishable from the
majority of unblocked terms. One of particular note is “习包子”, or “Steamed Bun Xi,” which is an
endearing reference to Xi Jinping’s dining at a common peoples’ steamed bun restaurant. This act was
generally popular among netizens for its representation of the average citizen, although some
criticized it as a “political show.”17 Regardless, it appears that it is the potential for viral conversation
around politics, neither decisively positive or negative, that has landed this term on the blocked list.

CONCLUSION

It would be worth revisiting the crawling stage in order to re-evaluate the ERROR-results. The primary
limitations in this regard were not having access to the Weibo API for search queries (which would
essentially give a clean backdoor to search, where no web crawling would be necessary), and having to
monitor queries due to CAPTCHAs. The API issues would require getting Weibo developer
application approval, which might turn out to be unfeasible for academic purposes. The CAPTCHA
issue may be solvable by using proxies.
One interesting direction to take with this study is comparing the result types with term
classification. For example, tagging sensitive topics such as: government policies, criticism,
pornography, profanity, news, would be useful for supporting or refuting the collective action
potential hypothesis (set forth by King et al.) in the microblogging space.
The code for this project was designed to allow for more morphs. To begin with, two
additional morphs can be derived programmatically from each entry: no tones (Pinyin Pinyin), and
acronym (Pinyin PY). There are many more Romanizations (Wade-Giles, dialect-based), syllabary-
based such as bopomofo, homophones-lookup up via rhyming dictionary, and potentially even
homographs from a graphically organized Chinese dictionary. All of these methods are certainly

16 [Link]

17 [Link]

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doable by hand, but it would be interesting to explore programmatic techniques to accurately predict
the possible “up and coming” morphs by finding all potential morphs, and checking to see if any are
being used to represent the initial term.
With this in mind, a programmatic approach to exploring potential word morphs applies to
more than patterns of internet censorship. The homophonic and multi-topolectical nature of Sinitic
languages in China may be particularly suitable to a programmatic approach to the problem of morph
generation, because of the ease of generating novel ways of presenting ideas based on similar sounds.
An exploration of morph usage and proliferation could offer insight into the development of internet
language in China and lend itself to similar studies in other languages.

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REFERENCES

Chen, Le, Chi Zhang, and Christo Wilson. “Tweeting under Pressure: Analyzing Trending Topics and
Evolving Word Choice on Sina Weibo,” Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Online
Social Networks. 2013. Source: [Link]
Chen, Sherry. “From OMG to TMD — Internet and Pinyin Acronyms in Mandarin Chinese.”
Language@Internet Volume 11. 2014. Source: [Link]
chen.
Fu, K., C. Chan, and M. Chao. “Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword
Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the ‘Real Name Registration’ Policy.” IEEE Internet
Computing, 2013.
King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts. “How Censorship in China Allows Government
Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review. 2013. Source:
[Link]
Liberman, Mark. “Franco-Croation Squid in Pepper Sauce.” Language Log. 2009. Source: http://
[Link]/nll/?p=1225.
Mair, Victor. “Pinyin Spam Text Message.” Language Log. 2015. Source:
[Link]
———. “Ways to Say ‘China’ That Can Circumvent the Censors.” Language Log. 2015. Source: http://
[Link]/nll/?p=22520.
Ng, Jason. Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (and Why). New York
and London: The New Press, 2013.
———. “Tracing the Path of a Censored Weibo Post.” Citizenlab. 2014. Source: [Link]
2014/11/tracing-path-censored-weibo-post-compiling-keywords-trigger-automatic-review/
Sun, Shengyun, Hongyan Liu, Jun He, Xiaoyong Du. “Detecting Event Rumors on Sina Weibo
Automatically,” Computer Science, pp. 120–131.
Zimmer, Ben. “Censoring ‘Occupy’ in China.” Language Log. 2011. Source: [Link]
.[Link]/nll/?p=3523.

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APPENDIX

Complete project code can be found here: [Link]

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 China English:
A Developing, Functional, and Legitimate World English Variety

Kaitlyn Ugoretz

INTRODUCTION

As globalization continues to reach past the upper echelons of international relations to transform
our everyday lives and encourage communication between even the most distant of places, the
phenomenon is affecting English in exciting and unprecedented ways. English has grown from being
just one of the many languages of Europe to sharing the position of international language of choice
with French and to what many sociolinguists now consider a “family” of “World Englishes” (Kachru
1965).1 As Bhatt notes in his comprehensive review of the study of World English (WE), English has
grown to encompass many “different English languages, studied within the conceptual framework of
world Englishes, [which] represent diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideological voices” (Kachru 1965,
527). And although there is the prescriptive faction within the linguistic community that still rallies
around preserving the integrity and ubiquity of Standard English (SE)2, the legitimacy of certain WE
varieties — such as Indian English, Pakistani English, and Ghanian English — is widely accepted.
These varieties have been studied for more than forty years; their distinctive features have been
negotiated and catalogued, and they are now received as “developed,” “established” WE varieties. Yet

1 The linguistic community owes much to Kachru’s groundbreaking research on WEs and his founding of the World
Englishes journal, which has been instrumental in the legitimization of WEs and discourse on the subject.

2 Although I use the term “Standard English” to describe the core English variety and features that have historically been
afforded dominant status, it should be understood that there is a plurality of Standard Englishes, just as there is a plurality
of WE varieties. The two English varieties most commonly characterized as “Standard” are British English and American
English.
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despite the general recognition accorded to the existence and continued development of WEs, the
linguistic and English Language Teaching (ELT) communities continue to act as gatekeepers for
which new English varieties “qualify” as WEs, intensely skeptical as if worried that allowing
“unsophisticated,” unvetted varieties into the fold would tarnish the good name of English. Such is the
case with China English (CE).
There has been immense pushback to the acceptance of China English as a WE on several
fronts, but the scholarship to date overwhelmingly agrees that CE is a “developing” but valid native
variety of English. In light of all this, why has there been so much resistance to recognizing CE and
encouraging its use? The opposition, sometimes surprisingly aggressive, stems from the lack of general
understanding about how CE has developed, what it is and is not, and why its acceptance and
adoption is beneficial — if not necessary — for the growing Chinese English-speaking population.
The goal of this paper is to increase awareness of CE and support its ongoing study, legitimization,
and implementation. I will first provide background on the development of WEs in general and CE in
particular, then distinguish CE from other obfuscatory English “varieties” in China, compile and
examine CE’s distinct linguistic features, and finally consider commentary both advocating and
discouraging the validation and adoption of CE as China’s own standard English variety. Although it is
not yet a fully mature WE variety, the consensus of decades of research promotes China English as a
legitimate and functional World English variety that has the potential to improve communications
with and in China.

1. BACKGROUND

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORLD ENGLISHES

Globalization and its implications for international relations and communications are a hot topic for
many humanities discourses in the twenty-first century; however, one must look back to much earlier
instances of prolonged language contact to understand the origins of World Englishes. As one might
expect, here we see again the impact of the far-reaching influence of Western European colonialism.
Braj Kachru, the father of the study of World Englishes, created a model of three concentric circles
(1997) to illustrate the historical spread of English around the globe (Fig. 1). The Inner Circle — the

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smallest, oldest, and innermost ring — represents the First Wave of the spread of English: the
transplanting of English as a native language by the massive British3 migrations to North America,
Australia, and New Zealand beginning in the seventeenth century (Bhatt 2015; Schneider 2014). This
first diaspora led to English “becoming one of the major languages of the world … though it was still
not, as it is now, a global language, numerically or functionally” (Bhatt 2015, 529). At this point in the
English diaspora, people who spoke English as a native language (ENL) largely lived in community
with each other or otherwise imposed their own language on the indigenous population in such a way
that the coexistence and intermingling of languages did not occur as is necessary to create a nativized
English variety. Those currently within the Inner Circle are estimated to be 320 million – 380 million
native speakers.

Figure 1. Kachru’s Three-Circle model

(Bhatt 530 [Adapted from Kachru (1997)])

3 Here I use “British” instead of “English” to denote the colonial nature of the first English diaspora.

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The second tier of Kachru’s model, the Expanding Circle, encompasses the countries where
English has been institutionalized alongside native languages as an official language. This includes
countless countries impacted by Western European colonialism (e.g. India and South Africa), but also
goes beyond to include regions that were induced to adopt English in order to participate in trade.
Bhatt points out that perspectives explaining the Second Wave of the English diaspora are divided
between the theories of English linguistic imperialism and linguistic pragmatism (Bhatt 2015, 532).
The former theory argues that English has been imposed by linguistically coercive bodies like
the British Council and TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) to create a power
dynamic in which SE is viewed as superior to native languages; thus, Bhatt critiques, “linguistic
imperialism results in the emergence, on the one hand, of an asymmetric relationship between
producers and consumers that is internalized as natural, normative, and essential and, on the other
hand, of a heteroglossic (hierarchical) arrangement of languages, pervaded by hegemonic value
judgments, material and symbolic investments, and ideologies that represent interests only of those in
power” (Bhatt 2015, 532). This theory applies most strongly to the spread of English to British colonies.
Colonists were indoctrinated into a market in which the “quality” of one’s English was a type of capital;
but no matter how much time and effort one spent learning SE, they would always be denied total
fluency and thus continue to occupy a position beneath native speakers (i.e. colonizers) in terms of
linguistic status. When the colonizers withdrew, the influence of the market they had created
remained; however, their “departure did create a new ecology for the teaching of English in terms of
(nonnative) linguistic input, local (Indian, Nigerian, etc.) norms, multiple identities, communicative
competencies and methodologies that respect language variation” (Bhatt 2015, 533). This new ecology
created a space for the former colonists to make English their own and develop WE varieties.
On the other hand, the theory of linguistic pragmatism — or the “econocultural model” —
explains the spread of English as a second language (ESL) as being due to the economic and cultural
capital of English as a lingua franca, first in terms of commerce and later as the language of
international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank that sprang up after World
War II. Thus it was possible for countries like Ghana, which had no colonial ties to Europe, to take
English as an official language alongside native languages in order to participate in both the linguistic
and commercial markets that British imperialism had created. I see no reason why the two should be

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mutually exclusive; rather, it more likely the case that the phenomena of linguistic imperialism and
linguistic pragmatism reinforced one another. In any case, it became apparent to the countries within
the Anglosphere’s scope of influence that adopting English was in their best interest and caused
English to come in contact with genetically and culturally unrelated languages. It is the creation of
this Outer Circle of English speakers that granted English its status as a global language and would
eventually catalyze the spread of English to the third and newest tier in Kachru’s model, the
Expanding Circle.
The Expanding Circle refers to the communities in which English is taught and spoken as a
foreign language (EFL). In 1997, David Crystal estimated that the Expanding Circle included 100–1000
million EFL speakers. However, keeping in mind the fact that estimations of the number of Chinese
English-speakers alone vary from 200 million to upwards of 400 million (Gil 2011), more recent
calculations of the Expanding Circle containing 750–1000 million speakers seem more likely
(McArthur 2001). Nations within the Expanding Circle often stress the teaching of English as a foreign
language in order to participate in the English-dominated markets discussed above, despite the fact
that English holds no official status there. The desire to educate as many people as possible to be as
fluent in English as possible has led to the growth of the burgeoning ELT industry over the past thirty
years (Crystal 1999). Hundreds of thousands of native speakers — many with little to no training in
language instruction — are sent all over the world to meet demand. The number of ELT programs and
products available, let alone the revenue they generate, is simply staggering. And this whole business
is built upon the status and exclusivity of SE and nations’ conclusions that investing in EFL teaching
and gaining competency in a global language is profitable in the long run. But while the influence of
the English market on linguistic norms cannot be overstated, it is important to remember that
speakers of English in the Expanding Circle now outnumber those in the Inner and Outer Circles
combined, and they too now have the power to change what “English” really means.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHINA ENGLISH

Now that we have an understanding of how China and other members of the Expanding Circle fit into
the context of the rise of English as a global language, we may turn our attention completely to the
development of a native variety of English in China — China English. Compared to the extensive

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history of Outer Circle World English varieties like Indian English, China English is still in its infancy.
China did not truly open itself up to prolonged contact with the English-speaking community — as
was true with many things — until Deng Xiaoping’s famous economic reforms beginning in 1978. But
what English’s place in China may lack in history, it makes up for in fervor. Many scholars point to
China’s increased engagement in the international sphere — specifically its joining the World Trade
Organization in 2001 and hosting the Olympics in 2008 (Hu 2004; Yang and Dai 2011; Schneider 2014)
— as the beginning of the so-called “English Boom” (Eaves 2011). Although English is not an official
language of China, it is obvious from the number of state English programs and English media outlets,
and the growth in Chinese English learners that English is afforded eminent status. Megan Eaves
remarks that “roughly 90,000 taxi drivers in Beijing learned English in preparation for the Summer
Olympic Games … of some 600,000 total residents … that have jumped on the English bandwagon”
(Eaves 2011, 64). Furthermore, as Edgar Schneider notes, “since 2001, English is a compulsory subject
from grade 3 in primary school … [and a] national College English Test, administered at various levels,
is compulsory for graduation at most colleges” (Schneider 2014, 18). Thus, achieving English
competency has now become a requirement for Chinese students’ academic — and increasingly,
professional — success.4
With the number of Chinese learning English now outnumbering native English-speakers
learning Chinese (Gil 2011), many have questioned why the Chinese must learn a SE that
communicates ideas that do not correspond with their own unique historical and cultural background.
This is exactly the sort of question that has led to the development of World Englishes — varieties
that more aptly convey the national identity of the speaker than SE. Chinua Achebe, a staunch
advocator for native varieties of English, communicates the desire for an English in tune with one’s
own culture well: “I feel the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience.
But it will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its

4 I myself have been caught in the sights of Chinese ELT programs and college application paper mills that promise their
clients a competitive edge in the business and education sectors. The market for SE fluency that prescriptivists have
created is so lucrative that American and English college students are shipped to China during the summer in droves.
Native fluency in English is the only real requirement to teach for these ELT programs, though some programs pride
themselves on only hiring the “best” (e.g. Ivy League students).

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new African surroundings” (qtd. in Bhatt 2015, 537). It is this same desire for a culturally-specific
English that sparked the genesis of China English (Li 2012). Ge Chuangui, the first linguist to refer to
the existence of China English, in 1980, echoes a sentiment similar to that of Achebe: “When we want
to express ourselves in both spoken or written English, we all have something … unique about China
to express. These expressions do not belong to those native [English] speakers and they should be
called China English” (qtd. in Hui 2013, 119). The various unique features of China English will be
examined below, but first it is important to disambiguate what linguists take the term “China English”
to mean.

CHINGLISH, CHINESE ENGLISH, OR CHINA ENGLISH?

Although the development of China English has been studied by linguists for almost thirty-
five years, there is little understanding of this WE variety outside of academia. This is due in part to
the prominence and popularity of the linguistic phenomenon known commonly known as “Chinglish”
which exploded in the public consciousness after the Beijing Olympics. Countless books and blogs are
dedicated to documenting the comical butchering of English on Chinese signage that so amuses
tourists. Moreover, the term “Chinglish” lacks a clear definition commonly accepted by the public and
is also often used to describe the code-switching that bilingual speakers of Chinese and English and
foreign language students often employ. “Chinese English” is also a phrase thrown about when
describing the English spoken by native Chinese speakers that seems to “miss the mark” according to
SE sensibilities. It is therefore necessary to define and distinguish “Chinglish,” “Chinese English,” and
“China English” before we can begin to analyze China English in depth.
Some scholars argue that Chinglish, Chinese English, and China English stand on a continuum
of authenticity and legitimacy that the Chinese English-speaking demographic is progressing along
(Fang 2011; Hu 2004).5 According to this mindset, the terrible English that has become characteristic of
Chinglish has been a stepping stone to an accepted variety of WE that can be recognized as uniquely
Chinese, a variety now officially titled “China English.” However, in this paper I reject the ideas that

5 Many scholars who argue that there is a line on which Chinglish and China English are situated at opposite ends describe
Chinglish as what I would call “Chinese English.” I do agree that Chinese English and China English are related; thus, this
disagreement is mostly over semantics. This further proves the need for scholars to reach a consensus on terminology.

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Chinglish and China English are linguistically related and that the latter has developed out of the
former. Additionally, I reject the idea that Chinglish is an interlanguage or form of Pidgin English (Gao
2010; Li 2012; Wei and Fei 2003); I reserve this definition for “Chinese English,” which I will expand
upon in a moment. Rather, I subscribe to Eaves’ definition of Chinglish as “a nonsensical form of
language, identifiable as an attempt at English, but usually produced by deficient translation devices
or speakers/writers with a low skill level” (Eaves 2011, 65). Examples of Chinglish can most easily be
identified by the obvious and indiscriminate “plugging in” of English lexical items — often outdated
or simply incorrectly translated items — into Chinese syntactic structures. Eaves argues that such
examples are less indicative of the partially-informed interference between speakers’ native language
(L1) and second language (L2), and more likely due to poor machine translations. As such, Chinglish
cannot be considered a Pidgin English or a true stage in the development of a national variety of WE.
Further adding to the confusion over the qualifications of China English as a WE variety is the
historical conflation of CE with “Chinese English.” Wei and Fei and Hu both note that the term
“Chinese English” is simply a title for China English that is associated with contempt rather than the
relative acceptance or prestige held by the latter. In light of her understanding of Chinglish, however,
Eaves distinguishes Chinese English from CE as an interlanguage spoken by Chinese learners of
English (Yang and Zhang 2015). Thus, it is Chinese English and not Chinglish which is “the product of
errors made by learners as they advance in fluency level,” errors including “borrowing patterns from
the mother tongue, extending patterns from the target language, [and] expressing meanings using the
words and grammar which are already known” (Richards qtd. in Eaves 2011, 66). Such errors set
Chinese English apart from Chinglish, as instances of Chinese English still follow many of the rules of
SE syntax and use lexical items that are close enough to be intelligible to native speakers of English.
Still, Chinese English cannot be accepted as a legitimate national variety of WE in the ways used to
define China English as such below.
Having defined Chinglish and Chinese English and thus also defined China English by what it
is not, we can safely proceed to define China English by what it is. As Wang Rongpei astutely noted,
“China English (Zhōngguó Yīngyŭ 中国英语) is defined as that which the Chinese use on the
mainland, which takes SE as its core but is an English with Chinese characteristics” (qtd. in Gao 2010,
54). However, we cannot simply accept China English as an established WE variety because it has

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been the subject of substantial study since 1980. According to Butler’s framework for determining the
“nativization” of an English variety, China English is still a developing language variety because,
though it exhibits various unique linguistic features, CE is still too young to have a written literature
and a body of reference works. Due to this lack of reference materials, those outside of the linguistic
community tend not to take China English seriously when compared to a long-studied, well-
established, and popularly accepted variety such as Indian English. However, by drawing together the
findings of various studies of CE and examining the variety’s unique linguistic characteristics in detail,
I hope to lend credibility to the argument that China English is a developing but nonetheless
legitimate variety of WE that conforms to the underlying principles of English while transmitting the
unique aspects of Chinese identity.

2. FEATURES OF CHINA ENGLISH

PHONOLOGY

Butler’s first qualification for a nativized language variety is a standard and unique pronunciation, and
so I will begin my examination of China English’s linguistic characteristics with the variety’s
phonological features. Keep in mind that while these features are not standardized so that the speech
of every CE speaker does not exhibit all of the following features, the majority does exhibit a plurality
of these distinct phonological characteristics:
 /θ/→/s/ and /ð/ → /z/ or /d/. Because the phonology of Modern Standard Mandarin lacks the
voiced dental fricative /θ/ (as in theory) and unvoiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in then), these
consonants are often replaced in CE by the close but more familiar phonemes /s/ and /z/ or
/d/ respectively.
 Anaptyxis of final /ə/. Because the phonology of MSM syllables only contains two final
consonants (/n/ and /ŋ/), Chinese speakers tend to add a schwa (/ə/) to the ends of English
words in CE to make it more readily pronounceable.

These are a few of the main phonological features of CE that linguists agree upon (Eaves 2011;
He and Li 2009; Schneider 2014). According to He and Li, it is still too early in the study of CE, as well

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as the development of CE itself, to give an exhaustive list of the variety’s phonological features.
However, several linguists have reported seeing many other characteristics “on the horizon,” namely
“general lack of voiced fricatives, certain types of diphthong simplification, avoidance of weak forms
for function words, and a tendency to pronounce multisyllabic words or word groups with syllable-
timing” among others (He and Li 2009, 72). Zhang points out that most current research on the
phonology of CE is focused on the segmental level (i.e. the phonemic level), with little scholarship
dedicated to the more salient suprasegmental level which deals with units larger than the phoneme.
As CE develops and gains greater acceptance and attention, we may be able to satisfactorily codify all
of CE’s features; for the time being, I believe the features listed above sufficient to fulfill the first
requirement of Butler’s standards for a legitimate nativized language variety.
Many who oppose the acceptance of WEs cite a fear of such varieties becoming mutually
unintelligible. But the fact of the matter is that linguists agree that each English variety has small
differences in pronunciation (Hu 2004; Yang and Dai 2011). As Yang and Dai argue, “As long as they do
not bear such differences in speech that would cause a change in meaning and by using them people
from different nations can communicate with one another without restraint, they are acceptable and
reasonable at least on the level of phonology, which is the case of China English” (Yang and Dai 2011,
9). There are differences in phonology between the two English varieties taken as standards, British
English and American English, but they are still mutually intelligible. And although there is
technically a codified “Received Pronunciation” from Standard British English that English-learners
could refer to, only 3–5 percent of the population in England use this pronunciation (Yang and Dai
2011, 9). It is in light of this Received Pronunciation being so far from the norms of spoken English that
Peter Roach referred to it as a “convenient fiction, not a scientific fact.” Moreover, in a study published
by Wang Weihong in 2015, it was found that 97.8 percent of the 1,782 Chinese university English
teachers and students had no problem understanding the phonology of CE. While prescriptive biases
may still afford a more “standard” accent certain currency in the linguistic market, CE’s phonology still
exhibits the core of English pronunciation and its unique features are also mutually intelligible. It is
clear that there should be no objection to accepting China English as a legitimate WE variety on the
grounds of phonological differences.

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LEXIS

Following Butler’s framework, it is next necessary to explore the ways in which the China English
lexicon expresses the local culture better than SE could. As a matter of fact, many words that speak to
Chinese history and culture have made their way into popular use in SE due to borrowing. Yang and
Dai posit that at least sixty-five words in English are derived from the word “silk,” “reflect[ing] the high
level of silk culture of ancient China,” and many more words have been adopted to refer to Chinese
cuisine and other cultural aspects (Yang and Dai 2011, 10). And as the growing phenomenon of
globalization has enabled the spread of culture around the world, we require new words to describe
things and ideas for which SE lacks proper equivalents. Since the primary purpose for the
development of China English is to create a variety of English that more aptly expresses the Chinese
“experience” better than any other variety, it stands to reason that new words must be added to the
lexis of CE to do just that. Words are added to the CE lexis through several mechanisms (Eaves 2011;
Han 2007; He and Li 2009; Yang and Dai 2011; Wang 2015):
 Loanshift. As Eaves defines it, loanshift (or semantic shift) takes words from the base
language (SE in this case) and extends the meaning beyond its original usage (Eaves 2011, 69).
The most prominent example of a loanshift is the word face. In Chinese, the concept of face
(面子) — as explained by Hu — “means honour, dignity, pride, or even identity …
expressions like give face, save face, no face, lose face are very often used” (Hu 2004, 28).
Although the expression to lose/save face may be used by speakers of other SE and WE
varieties, it does not cover the full range of meaning that face has in Chinese. Thus, CE extends
the meaning of face through loanshift by using it in other expressions, thereby slowly
changing the meaning of face in general over time.
 Loanblend. Loanblend may be the least used mechanism for creating new CE lexical items,
but one word created through loanblend stands out: taikonaut (Han 2007; Fang 2011; Yang and
Dai 2011). This term came into use at the turn of the millennium and follows the practice of
adding an affix to the –naut suffix to refer to space workers according to their country of
origin (e.g. astronaut, cosmonaut). The affix taiko- is derived from Mandarin tàikōng (太空),

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meaning space. This instance of loanblend suggests that certain CE lexical items are created to
participate in international discourses and demonstrate power or gain prestige.
 Loan translation or calque. The mechanism of loan translation literally translates Chinese
concepts or idioms for which there is no existent equivalent into English. What distinguishes
these loan translations from the terrible translated phrases of Chinglish is that loan
translations still follow general word meanings and English grammar so that the words or
phrases, though they may seem a bit strange at first, are readily understandable. Loan
translation is often used for China-specific historical and political terms like the May Four
Movement and the One Belt, One Road initiative, but it is also responsible for culture-specific
terms like color wolf, paper tiger, and Mid-Autumn festival.6
 Transliteration. Words that are not so easily or concisely translated directly into English can
be added to the CE lexis through transliteration from Pinyin. A few transliterated Chinese
words have already become part of the SE lexis, such as fengshui, ping p[o/a]ng, and Renminbi
(RMB).7

I have already mentioned that, as one would expect from a variety of any language, the core of
the CE lexis is derived from SE. Clearly, rather than degrading the core SE lexis in any way, as some
might fear, CE simply adds to the richness of WE as a whole with new vocabulary while allowing
Chinese to express their unique experiences (Hui 2013).

SYNTAX

Yang and Dai note that manipulation of syntax allows for linguistic creativity and the expression of
one’s own aesthetic. By incorporating certain syntactical structures from their native language,
speakers of CE may easily pursue aspects of beauty that they appreciate in Chinese but which may not

6 See Wang and Wang 2013 for an analysis of the considerations involved in translating idioms into English.

7 As Hui points out, a majority of transliterations of Chinese words in the SE lexis come from names for China-specific
ingredients and dishes, since terms for native cuisine in one language may not have proper equivalents in another (tofu,
jiaozi) or may be interchangeable with loan translations (e.g. jiaozi vs. dumpling). Notice that Pinyin diacritics are not used
once a Chinese word has been loaned into a WE variety.

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be normal in SE. The most commonly distinguished syntactic features of CE are as follows (He and Li
2009; Eaves 2011; Yang and Dai 2011; Hui 2013; Yang and Zhang 2015):
 Parallel structure. Parallelism, often coupled with parataxis and repetition, “characterized
by conciseness, rhythm and symmetric beauty … wins the affection of Chinese people and
makes itself at home in China English,” according to Yang and Dai (2011, 11). They stress that
the goal of using such structures to reinforce ideas is the achievement of “language
eloquence.”8 While these features are similarly used for their aesthetic in SE poetic genres,
they are not used as often in spoken SE as in CE.
 Topicalization of adjuncts. While modifiers such as adverbial clauses are typically added at
the ends of SE sentences, it has been observed that CE speakers prefer to place them at the
front.
 The Null Subject parameter. Because subjects are optional in Chinese and are often dropped
when the subject is considered obvious from context, CE speakers also tend to omit subjects
in certain cases. Subjects are required according to standard SE syntax, but upon considering
examples of CE such as “Very glad to see you” and “Miss you a lot,” one may recognize phrases
like these coming more into casual SE speech and text (e.g. emails). While speakers of other
WEs may have to refer to the context of the conversation to intuit the subject in CE sentences,
I still believe that the Null Subject parameter will not affect mutual intelligibility too greatly.
 Open head vs. open end. The open head structure is preferred in CE, where sentences are
“top heavy”; that is, subordinate clauses are often put in front of main clauses.

Wei and Fei go on to list several other features that have gone unaddressed or glossed over,
including tendencies to arrange sentences in chronological order; prefer simple and compound
sentences over complex sentences; replace the formal subject it with special subjects; disprefer using
the passive voice; and respond to negative or tag questions based on agreement with the question,
rather than the fact. Most of the linguists referenced in this paper also offer a few unique features to

8 I find Yang and Dai’s definition much more realistic than He and Li’s argument that parallelism is chiefly reserved for
“words of wisdom” (273).

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consider. But all linguists agree on the need for more research to establish an exhaustive consensus on
CE’s syntactic features.
Members of the ELT community often advocate clinging to SE norms for fear of every
prescriptivist’s nightmare: poor grammar (Wang 2015). In the case of CE, however, its syntactic
features are still generally permissible within the grammar of SE. Although an American would prefer
to say “There is a cat on the chair,” “On the chair there is a cat” is still an acceptable and intelligible
sentence. It is just that CE syntax uses particular structures more than is the norm in written or
spoken SE. Therefore, accepting CE — once the variety has been codified — should bear no negative
effect on the integrity of English grammar. Actually, if it were to be taught in schools, CE may even
improve the overall grammar of Chinese English-speakers by making the syntactic structures of
English more relatable to their native language.

DISCOURSE PRAGMATICS

The discourse features of CE have been the least studied and agreed-upon characteristics to date (He
and Li 2009). It is difficult to distinguish unique discourse features for CE because, as mentioned
above, it is still too young a variety to have a written literature and a body of reference works to
analyze. However, discourse pragmatics in WE varieties are typically informed by the “world outlook,
philosophical view, value system and thinking patterns” of the host country, and so a few features
have been pointed out along these lines (Yang and Dai 2011, 11; Schneider 2014). Eaves notes that
emails written in CE often begin with “facework,” “whereby [the sender] creates ‘good face’ by
complimenting the recipient and noting his connection to her via a third party” and then moving on
to the purpose of the message (Eaves 2011, 70). Many linguists argue that CE texts have a tendency to
be organized according to inductive reason, a Chinese discourse feature, rather than deductive
reasoning, the favored Western approach (He and Li 2009; He and Zhang 2010; Wang 2015) —
although You states that inductive and deductive patterns are both used according to the genre9 of the
literature (You 2008, 238). Yang and Dai comment that there is a “roundabout” quality to Chinese and

9 See You 2008 for an in-depth analysis of CE discourse pragmatics in digital media genres.

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CE, citing the aesthetic beauty of implications and room for interpretation (Yang and Dai 2011, 12).10
Each linguist in the conversation seems to have their own ideas about CE discourse pragmatics.
Perhaps in the interests of helping to develop CE into a rich, well-supported, and recognized WE
variety, more attention should first be given to identifying reference works exemplary of CE from
which we can later draw conclusions about discourse pragmatics.

3. BENEFITS OF CODIFYING AND OFFICIALLY ACCEPTING CE

Linguists studying CE have identified several ways in which accepting and further developing CE is
beneficial to speakers of CE and English as a whole. As was discussed earlier in evaluating CE’s lexical
features, the new vocabulary being created to express Chinese ideas enrich the English lexis at large
and make communications more exact. Hui points out that adding China-specific words to the lexis of
non-Chinese English-speakers can also reflect current Chinese society and encourage a greater
understanding of modern Chinese politics, economics, etc. (Hui 2013, 120). Furthermore, CE is
certainly more capable of expressing the Chinese experience than any other variety of English. Fang
argues that adopting CE will empower China in the English-dominated world:

With Chinese culture and traditions growing more and more popular in the world,
Chinese English speakers will too be gaining the power of discourse in intercultural
communication, because they are no longer passive culture receivers but culture
disseminators. This, in return, may reinforce their sense of pride in their native
cultural identity and serve as a strong incentive for them to further explore and
protect Chinese cultural legacies. (Fang 2011, 379)

Many proponents of institutionalizing CE remark that due to China’s growing military, economic, and
cultural influence, it is high time that China was able to hold its own in terms of communications in
English.

10 Fang cautions against using this “indirect manner,” arguing that in CE this would likely cause confusion and thereby
compromise mutual intelligibility.

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CONCLUSION

If accepting CE as a valid WE variety and putting in the effort to develop it more formally could do so
much for international communication, why not pursue such a course? The problem is that CE is still
victim to prescriptive biases both within China and outside. In Wang’s study, although over 96
percent of teachers and students agreed that all features of CE were understandable, only 30.8 percent
viewed them as acceptable (Wang 2015, 64). In order to improve language attitudes in China towards
CE, two things must happen in tandem: (1) a sound pedagogy must be devised and widely
implemented to create a powerful community of fluent, confident speakers of CE; and (2) linguists
must reach a consensus on the core features of CE and thereafter inform the general public so that CE
can gain legitimacy around the world. This may sound like a tall order, but if a larger group of CE
speakers is not encouraged, then linguists will not be able to amass the necessary body of reference
works for CE to qualify as a developed WE variety; similarly, if linguists do not continue to develop our
understanding of CE, the variety will not gain enough traction within China to allow for the CE
community to grow. The first step in the long journey to legitimizing CE in the eyes of the general
population is for linguists to come together in a highly visible way. We need to get the word out about
CE through collaborations, conferences, seminars, interviews — whatever channels are open to us.
It’s time for the reality of CE to be brought to light.

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Eaves, Megan. “English, Chinglish or China English?” English Today 27.4 (2011): 64–70.
Fang, Xing. “Glocalizing ELT: From Chinglish to China English,” Journal of Language Teaching and
Research 2.2 (2011): 377–381.
Gao Lijuan (高丽娟). “Lùn Zhōngguó Yīngyǔ yǔ Zhōngguó shì Yīngyǔ, 论中国英语与中国式英语
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Gil, Jeffrey. “A Comparison of the Global Status of English and Chinese: Towards a New Global
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Han Ling 韩玲. “Zhōngguó Yīngyǔ” yánjiū xiànzhuàng fēnxī, “中国英语”研究现状分析 (“Study and
Analysis of the Current State of ‘China English’”), Wàiyǔ yǔ wàiyǔ jiàoxué, 外 语 与 外 语 教
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Debate,” World Englishes 28.1 (2009): 70–89.
He, Deyuan, and Qunying Zhang. “Native Speaker Norms and China English: From the Perspective of
Learners and Teachers in China,” TESOL Quarterly 44.4 (2010): 769–789.
Hu, Xiaoqiong. “Why China English Should Stand alongside British, American, and the Other ‘World
Englishes,’” English Today 20.2 (2004): 26–33.
Hui, Yun. “China English, a Developing Variety of English,” English Language and Literature Studies 3.1
(2013): 117–121.
Kachru, Braj. “The Indianness in Indian English,” Word 21 (1965): 391–410.
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Li, Wenzhong 李文中. “Zhōngguó Yīngyǔ yǔ Zhōngguó shì Yīngyǔ, 中国英语与中国式英语 (“China
English and Chinglish”), Wàiyǔ jiàoxué yǔ yánjiū, 外语教学与研究 (Foreign Language
Teaching and Study) 4 (2012): 18–24.
McArthur, T. “World English and World Englishes: Trends, Tensions, Varieties, and Standards,”
Language Teaching 34.1 (2001).
Schneider, Edgar. “New Reflections on the Evolutionary Dynamics of World Englishes,” World
Englishes 33.1 (2014): 9–32.
Wang, Lanchun, and Shuo Wang. "A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English and
Chinese," Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3.9 (2013): 1691–1697.
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Wei, Yun, and Jia Fei. “Using English in China,” English Today 4 (2003): 42–47.
Yang, Chengsong, and Lawrence Zhang. “China English in Trouble: Evidence from Teacher Dyadic
Talk,” Systems 51 (2015): 39–50.
Yang, Weidong, and Weiping Dai. “China English: Its Distinctive Features,” Higher Education Studies
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You, Xiaoye. “Rhetorical Strategies, Electronic Media, and China English,” World Englishes 27.2 (2008):
233–249.
Zhang, Fachun. “China English: Adaptation of English to Chinese Culture,” Asian Social Science 5.4
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 The Role and Prospects of Non-Sinitic Languages in China

Carolyn Lye

INTRODUCTION

China is an ethnically diverse country made up of fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups.
Approximately 1.2 billion of its people are in the Han majority, and 112 million compose the
population of the remaining fifty-five ethnic minorities.1 Among these fifty-six ethnic groups, there are
292 attested living languages in China that are part of at least nine language families, including Sino-
Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mon-Khmer. 2 Each language family is composed of
languages that are historically related, and together they share similarities in word forms, grammar,
and syntactic structure.3
While Standard Chinese, or Putonghua, is considered the official national spoken language of
the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and also serves as a lingua franca for regions of the PRC, the
remaining languages of China serve an important purpose for the maintenance of ethnic identity
among the ethnic minorities of China. The focus of this discussion is the past treatment, current role,
and future prospects of the non-Sinitic languages of China.
The treatment of the non-Sinitic languages of China has changed over time, but it has always
been an important topic of discussion within the political arena of China in terms of ethnic minority
and language policy and within the ethnic minorities themselves.

1 Minglang Zhou, “The Politics of Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China Since 1949,” Bilingual Research
Journal 25.1–2 (2001): 147–171.

2 M. Paul Lewis, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds.. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th ed. (Dallas, Tex.: SIL
International, 2015. Online version: [Link]

3 Fang-Kuei Li, “Languages and Dialects of China,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1.1 (1973): 1–13.
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

This study first outlines the role of language in shaping ethnic identity, both in a broad sense
and as it applies to non-Sinitic languages in ethnic minority communities in China, to demonstrate
the perspectives of ethnic minorities when China’s language policies have been repressive. An
overview of language policy in the PRC since 1949 will subsequently be presented in three stages, each
stage characterized by either accommodationist or integrationist views of minority languages. Finally,
case studies of four non-Sinitic languages used by ethnic minorities in China will then be explored:
Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Korean. These four languages were chosen because (a) they all have
the status of languages with writing systems that have had broad usage for an extended period of time,
and (b) the four languages are associated with ethnic minorities in China that have been treated in
vastly different ways. These analyses show that the preservation of non-Sinitic languages for ethnic
groups in China is crucial for the preservation of ethnic identity, and language policies in China have
affected language use differently, depending on the culture and outlook of the ethnic minority called
into consideration.

ROLE OF NON-SINITIC LANGUAGES IN ETHNIC MINORITY

COMMUNITIES

Language and ethnic identity are concepts that are very closely tied together. In terms of
communication, language is the medium with which cultural information is transferred from one
generation to the next, and therefore it is the primary way that an ethnic group is enabled to learn
about itself and understand its place in the wider community. Furthermore, most people tend to
identify with a certain ethnic group through socialization within their immediate community — their
family and friends. What underlies this socialization is the language used at home and in the
surrounding community, and thus language becomes an important factor in identifying with a social
group.4
Besides its use in communication, language also has other characteristics that help to forge
communities and social groups. First, language can be used as a means to create boundaries between

4 Joshua A. Fishman, Ofelia García, and the Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund, Handbook of Language &
Ethnic Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.)

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the “in-group” and the “out-group.” Ethnic boundaries such as these serve to preserve the culture,
traditions, and customs of an ethnic group from outside influence.
In addition, people often make positive or negative attributions to speakers of a language or
dialect different from their own. In some cases, this escalates into the repression or threatening of
certain languages by another social group. Ethnic groups whose languages are repressed view this
repression as an attack on their ethnic group or culture as a whole, and they often find ways to resist
subjugation by the dominant group.4
In China, the non-Sinitic languages that ethnic minorities speak are therefore regarded as
defining features of the ethnic minorities, particularly as the Han majority form almost 92 percent of
the population and, through time, have “diluted” ethnic minority communities through their
migration within China.1 In response, these ethnic minorities have attempted to maintain their
identity through the promotion of minority language use. Koreans in China have, for instance,
advocated for Korean schooling and minimal teaching in Chinese and have imposed restrictions on
the number of Koreans who can attend Han Chinese schools in the area.5 Mongolian communities
have similarly advocated for early education in Mongolian to instill in Mongolian students the culture
and traditions of their ancestors.6 Before delving into the ways in which different ethnic minorities
have responded to the language policies imposed on them, this study will first survey the way in
which language policy in the PRC has developed and changed since 1949.

LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA SINCE

1949

Language policy in the PRC since 1949 can be divided into three periods: (a) the period 1949–1957 that
generally promoted accommodationist views of minority rights and language use, (b) the period 1958–
1977 in which integrationist views to assimilate minorities into the Han majority were dominant, and
(c) the period from 1978 onwards in which accommodationist views were revived. Each period is
characterized by the enactment of policies that have affected the language rights of ethnic minorities

5 Woo-Gil Choi, “The Korean Minority in China: The Change of Its Identity,” Development and Society 30.1 (2001): 119–141.

6 Uradyn E. Bulag, “Mongolian Ethnicity and Linguistic Anxiety in China,” American Anthropologist 105.4 (2003): 753–763.

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in China. This study will look at each period in detail to highlight the important policies and
legislation that have influenced non-Sinitic language use in ethnic minority communities.1

ACCOMMODATIONIST PERIOD, 1949–1957

Overall, this time was crucial in developing the infrastructure for minority language education and
developing legislation that provided ethnic minorities the right to their own languages. In September
1949, even prior to the establishment of the PRC, a provisional constitution — the Commons Program
— outlined provisions in Article 53 that gave minorities the right to speak and develop their own
languages, and that obligated the government to help minorities with this effort. This, along with
other provisions that supported more recognition of minorities in China, helped the Chinese
Community Party (CCP) win support from ethnic minorities in China in the first place. These
minority language rights were officially recognized in the first constitution of the PRC at the First
Chinese People’s Congress, with institutions later created to promote minority language education
and language development.1
In 1951, the Ministry of Education in the PRC made preliminary decisions on bilingual
education. Their decisions addressed the diverse range of minority languages that exist in China. First,
for minority communities in which languages with widely developed writing systems are used, all
courses should be taught in the minority language in primary and secondary education systems.
Second, for communities without a language with a writing, students should either be taught in
Chinese or another minority language of their choice. Finally, Chinese should be taught to some
degree in school; however, the degree to which it is taught should be determined by the minority
community and their need for Chinese education. Outside of education, the government further
required local governments to use minority languages in official business and cultural activities in
1952 through the Implementation Program of Autonomous Governing in Minority Regions. Quite
interestingly, research and advisory committees were established within the Ministry of Education to
develop writing systems for oral languages for which writing systems did not yet exist.1
All of these efforts were made to improve minority education and reduce illiteracy in minority
communities, and although progress was made, the government grew increasingly impatient with the
slow development of minority language affairs. Soon, the CCP would remove the right of engaging in

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minority language affairs from regional minority autonomous governments, and instead, all matters
would be in the hands of the Han Chinese.1

INTEGRATIONIST PERIOD FROM 1958–1977

During this period, language policies for minority languages were no longer considered separately
from language policies for Chinese. This created a huge shift towards promoting Chinese as the
primary language used throughout China, instead of advocating for minority language use within
ethnic minority communities. Bilingual education, therefore, was severely reduced, and efforts were
made to integrate minorities into Han communities.1
In 1958, the Minority Culture and Education Department of the State Commission on
Nationalities Affairs suggested that minority languages that already had a well-developed writing
system should still play some role in education, while developing writing systems for oral languages
should be strictly limited. In addition, substantial use of Chinese was recommended in communities
without a writing system. In practice, however, even communities that used languages with
established writing systems were affected by these language policies. In Uyghur communities, for
example, Chinese classes were no longer limited to secondary schools. Primary schools, particularly in
more urban cities, began to introduce Chinese to students much earlier on in their education.1

SECOND ACCOMMODATIONIST PERIOD, FROM 1 9 78 TO PRESENT

In 1978, the CCP reverted to its initial accommodationist views. In December 1978, academic forums
were held on minority issues in China, and a consensus was reached among academic and
government officials that minority language issues should be deliberated on their own, without being
grouped into Chinese language issues. This was a favored view at the time and it resulted in positive
backing from the congress of the CCP, leading to further legislation in support of bilingual education
and minority autonomy in terms of language use.1
In 1982, the constitution of the PRC was revised such that every ethnic group was re-granted
the right to utilize and develop its language, and regional local autonomous government were given
the freedom to make decisions on the use of the minority language in business and education.
Specifically, in 1984, the Law of Autonomous Governing of Minority Regions stated that the local

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governments should choose for themselves the primary language in which education is conducted.
Since the 1980s, there have additionally been several pieces of legislation passed to continue to
promote minority language use. Overall, efforts to improve the minority language situation have been
made to increase minority regions’ economic independence, develop education and literacy, and
improve ethnic unity across China.1

CASE STUDIES

Through these three periods of changing views on language policy for ethnic minority communities in
the PRC, all minority languages were affected. However, the degree to which a language was affected
rested on the community itself. Different languages have experienced different levels of repression
and development depending on the cultural values of the community and the government’s outlook
on the importance of the minority language in society.
Here, case studies for four non-Sinitic languages, Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Korean,
will be presented. These four languages have writing systems that have broad usage, and were
collectively used in education to a greater extent during the accommodationist periods. As will be
discussed, the repression imposed on these languages manifested in different ways depending on the
ethnic minority involved.

CASE STUDY: UYGHUR LANGUAGE

On the surface, the cycling of accommodationist and integrationist views in the PRC seem to have
affected the Uyghur language to the same extent as other languages. In 1949, cultural policies
promoted diversity and provided minority communities with the autonomy to use their minority
language. During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Uyghur was suppressed, as
were all other minority languages, and from 1978 onwards, rights promoting minority languages were
reinstated. However, although the overt policies allowed for Uyghur language use during the
accommodationist periods after 1949, in practice, Uyghur was severely repressed to the extent that
some consider it cultural genocide.7

7 Aurora E. Bewicke, “Silencing the Silk Road: China’s Language Policy in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” San

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In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Uyghur has been recognized as the
official language of the XUAR government since 1955. While the local government was given the right
to use Uyghur under new legislation, relevant departments in the government were required to
promote Chinese language use in the region. This resulted in a domination of the Chinese language in
the XUAR, permeating media, education, and business.7 For instance, Chinese was used as the
primary broadcasting language for television and movies. Movies produced in the XUAR, in fact, were
required to be first made in Chinese and then translated or re-adapted into Uyghur. Signs and
advertisements used in the XUAR must also be written or spoken in Chinese. In terms of business,
everything in the service trade, such as packaging for boxes, must be written in standardized Chinese.
In terms of education, while minority languages could supposedly be taught in ethnic schools, efforts
were made to encourage Chinese language instruction rather than Uyghur language instruction.
Schools in which Uyghur is the primary language of instruction would receive fewer educational
supplies than equivalent Chinese schools. Even in schools that do teach Uyghur, education in Uyghur
is limited only to primary education and serves the purpose of transitioning the students from Uyghur
to Chinese in later schooling.8 Presently, teaching in Chinese begins in the first grade in the XUAR.
While Uyghur already has a well-developed Arabic script, the language was not treated the
same as other languages with well-developed scripts. Depending on China’s relations with the Soviet
Union, for example, China has either imposed or restricted a Cyrillic script for Uyghur. Additionally,
as neighboring countries like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have moved towards a Latin script, China
has similarly promoted the use of a Latin script for Uyghur. From the Uyghur perspective, however,
the Arabic script is the most preferred, and at times the Uyghurs were restricted from using the script
of their choice.7
In 2002, two significant events occurred in the XUAR that further restricted Uyghur language
use. First, in Xinjiang University, while Uyghur and Chinese were both used in teaching, a government
mandate required that the majority of classes would only be taught in Chinese. While the government
reasoned that it is crucial for Uyghurs to be proficient in Chinese, and that textbooks in Uyghur were

Diego International Law Journal 11.135 (2009): 136–70. HeinOnline.

8 Arienne M. Dwyer, The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse (Washington, DC:
East–West Center Washington, 2005).

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not as readily available as Chinese textbooks, Uyghurs saw this action as a direct attack on their
language and culture, even suggesting that the Uyghur language is a “lesser” language than Chinese.
Second, in June 2002, it was reported that copies of A Brief History of the Huns and Ancient Uyghur
Literature, written by prominent Uyghur historian and poet Turghun Almas, were burned.7 Both book
burning and book banning have been common occurrences in the XUAR, and have reduced the
ability for Uyghurs to learn about their culture and native language. These acts of burning and
banning have largely been spurred by the separatist ideas of the writers of the books, like Turghun
Almas, but also as a broad ideological campaign against the separatist ideas that exist within the
larger community in the XUAR.9
Early in the 1940s, China mostly targeted underground Islmaic organizations and political
groups in the XUAR that threatened its control over the XUAR. However, with the growing separatist
movements and discontent with the government, China has actively attempted to integrate Uyghurs
into the Han society (who, presently, constitute a minority in the XUAR) by directing their attention
to the spoken and written language of the Uyghurs. The totality of China’s language policy in the
XUAR discourages and even punishes the use of Uyghur on many levels, promoting and perpetuating
the notion that Chinese is the superior language to Uyghur.7

CASE STUDY: MONGOLIAN LANGUAGE

In the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), the sentiments toward minority language policies
have been quite different. In 1985, approximately 96 percent of Mongolian heads of household could
speak fluent Chinese, and surprisingly, 34 percent of Mongolians could no longer speak Mongolian at
a proficient level.10 In 1998, almost a quarter of the Mongolian population in the IMAR solely used
Chinese. One of the main reasons that this shift towards speaking Chinese over Mongolian has
occurred is that, despite having autonomy in the IMAR, the Mongols constitute only approximately 17
percent of the population, while the Han Chinese constitute almost 80 percent.10 This social
environment has made it difficult for Mongols who solely speak Mongolian to survive and live

9 Michael Dillon, “Uyghur Language and Culture Under Threat In Xinjiang,” Analytical Articles (2002): n. pag. CACI Analyst.

10 Ma Rong, “Bilingual Education for China’s Ethnic Minorities.,” Chinese Education & Society 40.2 (2007): 9–25.

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successfully in a community largely inhabited by Han Chinese. Even though pastoralism and herding
are known to represent Mongolian culture, being able to communicate with other agricultural
communities in the IMAR that are now mostly composed of Han Chinese has made it necessary to
know how to speak Chinese.
Therefore, although there exists the linguistic. anxiety that Mongolian as a language is
decreasing in use, the practical value of learning and primarily using Chinese has become more
important. Students who studied in Mongolian schools were not able to assimilate into society after
graduation because the IMAR is a Chinese-dominated society. The only communities in which
knowledge of Mongolian would be valuable is in Mongolian peasant villages, and thus Mongols who
are educated in Mongolian schools generally can only become “elite” members of society in these
peasant villages.6 However, Mongols who were educated in Chinese schools could better adjust to the
larger community, and therefore could become more successful in fields such as production, business
and trade, and science.10 In terms of the jobs actually available in the IMAR, there are hardly any jobs
in which proficiency in Mongolian is useful. On the other hand, knowledge of Chinese is very useful,
even necessary in many cases as almost all jobs are controlled by the Han Chinese in the IMAR.
While the general consensus is that the Chinese language is more useful than Mongolian for
Mongols in the IMAR, some Mongol intellectuals do support movements to include Mongolian
education through childhood as a means to maintain the cultural identity of the Mongols.6 However,
during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as with schools for other minority
languages, Mongolian schools were mostly closed down. After this period, Mongolian schools were in
an unstable situation and constantly opened and closed. Even with some Mongolian schools available,
Mongolian schools lose more students every year to Chinese schools.11 The government has also
reduced funding for Mongolian schools, and therefore surviving without many students proves to be
difficult.
While the language policies in China have limited Mongolian language use, the Mongols
themselves have moved away from promoting Mongolian education because they believe that

11 Naran Bilik, “Language Education, Intellectuals and Symbolic Representation: Being an Urban Mongolian in a New
Configuration of Social Evolution,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 4.1–2 (1998): 47–67.

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Chinese is needed for upward social mobility even in the IMAR. Thus, the Mongolian language seems
to be heading for vernacular use in the community as Chinese becomes more and more dominant in
Mongolian communities.11

CASE STUDY: TIBETAN LANGUAGE

Tibetan has faced high levels of repression since the latter half of the twentieth century, largely
because of unrest in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). When the PRC spread its control over
Tibet in 1951, language policies in general promoted cultural diversity and the use of minority
languages. However, after the 1959 rebellion in Lhasa, Tibet, wherein Tibetan rebels had an armed
conflict with the Chinese officials, the PRC imposed stricter language policies over the Tibetan
communities, more so than other minority communities at the time. At this time, Chinese was
enforced as the primary language of instruction in schools in the TAR.12 However, because of
discontent with the Chinese government, the Tibetans saw these language policies as a form of
imposing Han Chinese ideologies upon Tibetan communities. Over time, this resulted in increases in
illiteracy rates within Tibetan communities, with almost 70 percent of Tibetans over fifteen years of
age being illiterate, compared to the 22 percent of Han Chinese over fifteen years of age who are
illiterate.13
In 1984, to combat illiteracy rates and incorporate Tibetan language use in schooling, the TAR
formed their own policies that recommended Tibetan language as the the primary language of
instruction, with Chinese as the second language of instruction. The objective of this was to
encourage students to become proficient in both languages after graduation, so as to preserve Tibetan
culture but also provide students with the language background to work successfully in the larger
society. In 1987, regulations became even more progressive in that Congress developed plans to
enforce the sole use of Tibetan in school textbooks and in the classroom. However, within a couple

12 Minglang Zhou, “Language Policy and Illiteracy in Ethnic Minority Communities in China,” Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development 21.2 (2000): 129–48.

13 Yuxiang Wang and Joanne Phillon, “Minority Language Policy and Practice in China: The Need for Multicultural
Education,” International Journal of Multicultural Education 11.1 (2009): 1–14.

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years, these plans were quickly abandoned because of separatist movements in Tibet, mostly by the
Drepung and Sera monasteries, for independence from China.13
Thus, through the mid-1990s, the proportion of Chinese to Mongolian language instruction
favored Chinese enormously. Chinese language instruction began as early as the first grade in primary
school in the larger cities of the TAR. In society, Chinese use was enforced in the local governments
and in business, and this further decreased Tibetan use and the motivation to pursue Tibetan
language learning. Like the Mongolians, the Tibetans saw that learning Chinese was a pathway for
upward social mobility in order to improve their lives, and thus the Tibetan language experienced
even further decreased language use.
In response to this substantial decline in Tibetan use, the Chinese government implemented a
set of regulations, the Decree on the Study, Use and Development of Tibetan Language, to protect
Tibetan language and culture. Within this decree, Article 8 states that those living in the TAR must
learn Tibetan, and Article 10 states that those in the TAR who are bilingual in Chinese and Tibetan will
receive priority in terms of recruitment for governmental positions14 While the implementation of
such large goals will be difficult, and perhaps unfeasible, this positive mindset of preserving Tibetan
may rescue the Tibetan language from complete extinction in the future.

CASE STUDY: KOREAN LANGUAGE

The Korean minority in China has had a relatively short history because, although Koreans migrated
to China as early as the seventeenth century, the largest influx of Koreans into northeast China began
in the late nineteenth century. The Korean population in China has often been labeled the “model
minority” in China because of its high level of education in comparison to other ethnic minorities in
China.5 Even so, during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Korean language use was
repressed. However, after accommodationist views of ethnic minorities returned, the Koreans were
able to revive Korean language education and maintain their ethnic identity.
The Korean Chinese have been able to maintain their culture in China largely because they

14 Nicolas Tournadre and Peter Brown, “The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism: The Current Situation and Future
Prospects,” China Perspectives 45 (2003): 30–6.

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have formed ethnic boundaries that have separated them from other ethnic communities in northeast
China. It is said that the Koreans have lived on a “cultural island” in northeast China, away from the
Han Chinese society, and have therefore been able to practice and maintain their own customs and
values.5 Additionally, geography has protected their culture: the Chinese Communists have not been
as active in areas where Koreans settled, and so received little pressure to conform to the Han
majority.15 Thus, ever since the Koreans have lived in northeast China, they have maintained their
ethnic identity and have not experienced any organized assimilation into the larger society.
While many schools in Korean-inhabited regions, such as the Yanbian Korean Autonomous
Prefecture, were closed during the integrationist period, after the Cultural Revolution, Korean
education in these areas was restored. The minority language policies post-Cultural Revolution
allowed the Koreans to manage their own educational system, and thus local governments, such as
the Yanbian government, enforced regulations that required Korean children to attend Korean
schools through secondary education and limited enrollment in Chinese schools. The entire
educational system for the Korean Chinese has been successful for a variety of reasons that did not
apply to the ethnic minorities discussed earlier. First, before coming to China relatively late in the
twentieth century, the Koreans had already established a culture in which education was a top
priority. Second, the Koreans have very adamantly protected their ethnic identity by practicing their
customs, promoting Korean language education, and discouraging intermarriage with other ethnic
groups in China. The ethnic boundaries that they created helped maintain the integrity of the Korean
communities in China. Third, because the Koreans share a Confucian-influenced background with the
Han Chinese, there is common ground between the Koreans and Chinese that has made Korean
cultural values acceptable by the Chinese. Finally, when the Koreans inhabited northeast China, they
made use of the infrastructure that the Japanese colonial system had built, and thus the Koreans were
able to quickly develop their own society from a base that had previously been made available to
them.16

15 Jean-Young Lee, “The Korean Minority in China: The Policy of the Chinese Communist Party and the Question of
Korean Identity,” The Review of Korean Studies 4.2 (2001): 87–131.

16 Chae-Jin Lee, “The Korean Minority in China: A Model for Ethnic Education,” Korean Studies 11.1 (1987): 1–12.

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While Koreans have been very successful in maintaining their own cultural identity, they have
created a new challenge for themselves in adapting to the larger society of China. With population
movements in China, the “cultural islands” are slowly starting to sense the influx of the Han Chinese,
and thus it is increasingly useful for Koreans to learn Chinese as well. Korean students are now
required to study Chinese for a number of hours per week, but it is likely necessary for a larger portion
of the curriculum to be focused on Chinese language education in order for the Koreans to reach a
level of proficiency that will allow them to participate in mainstream Chinese society.

CONCLUSION

Currently, minority languages in China, such as the non-Sinitic languages cited earlier in this study,
are facing a period of accommodationist views in which minority language use is generally supported
by the government. Looking back through history, we note that instances in which minority language
rights are revoked tend to occur when separatist movements arise. As long as the political, social, and
economic situations in ethnic minority communities are stable, the Chinese government has no
reason to infringe on minority language use.
However, since the mainstream society does use Chinese as the main mode of
communication, ethnic minorities have increasingly become aware of the importance of learning
Chinese in interacting with the larger society. Thus, a balance must be found between teaching
Chinese and the minority language of a given community in these bilingual educational systems.
Communities such as the IMAR and TAR have recognized the importance of learning Chinese, but in
turn, Mongolian and Tibetan language and culture have suffered. It should be the responsibility of
governments and the people to preserve the rich culture and language of its ethnic minorities.
From this brief look into how four non-Sinitic languages have been affected by language
policies in China, it is clear that no two languages have experienced the same levels of promotion and
repression. Depending on the circumstances of the ethnic minority group, languages have either faced
severe domination or have received little oppression at all. However, since integration into
mainstream Chinese society is increasingly being viewed as a path to leading successful lives, even
languages that have been mostly untouched will soon feel threatened by the presence of Chinese.

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REFERENCES

Bewicke, Aurora E. “Silencing the Silk Road: China’s Language Policy in the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region,” San Diego International Law Journal 11.135 (2009): 136–170. HeinOnline.
Bilik, Naran. “Language Education, Intellectuals and Symbolic Representation: Being an Urban
Mongolian in a New Configuration of Social Evolution,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 4.1–2
(1998): 47–67.
Bulag, Uradyn E. “Mongolian Ethnicity and Linguistic Anxiety in China,” American Anthropologist
105.4 (2003): 753–763.
Choi, Woo-Gil. “The Korean Minority in China: The Change of Its Identity,” Development and Society
30.1 (2001): 119–141.
Dillon, Michael. “Uyghur Language and Culture under Threat In Xinjiang,” Analytical Articles (2002): n.
pag. CACI Analyst.
Dwyer, Arienne M. The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse.
Washington, DC: East–West Center Washington, 2005.
Fishman, Joshua A., Ofelia García, and Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund. Handbook
of Language & Ethnic Identity. 2nd ed. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Lee, Chae-Jin. “The Korean Minority in China: A Model for Ethnic Education,” Korean Studies 11.1
(1987): 1–12.
Lee, Jean-Young. “The Korean Minority in China: The Policy of the Chinese Communist Party and the
Question of Korean Identity,” The Review of Korean Studies 4.2 (2001): 87–131.
Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2015. Ethnologue: Languages of the World,
18th ed. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: [Link]
Li, Fang-Kuei. “Languages and Dialects of China,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1.1 (1973): 1–13.
Rong, Ma. “Bilingual Education for China’s Ethnic Minorities,” Chinese Education & Society 40.2 (2007):
9–25.
Tournadre, Nicolas, and Peter Brown. “The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism: The Current
Situation and Future Prospects,” China Perspectives 45 (2003): 30–36.

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Wang, Yuxiang, and Joanne Phillon. “Minority Language Policy and Practice in China: The Need for
Multicultural Education,” International Journal of Multicultural Education 11.1 (2009): 1–14.
Zhou, Minglang. “Language Policy and Illiteracy in Ethnic Minority Communities in China,” Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21.2 (2000): 129–148.
———. “The Politics of Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China Since 1949,” Bilingual
Research Journal 25.1–2 (2001): 147–171.

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 Sinographs in the Man'yōshū:
Nature, Function, and Double Meaning

Ashley Liu

The sinographs in the Man'yōshū 万葉集 ("Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves") are a complex
system of recording syllables. In the Chinese writing script, sinographs are capable of reflecting
pronunciations to considerable extents as characters often carry phonetic components, or
“phonophores”, that suggest their pronunciations. Given that phonophores are central to sinographs’
capacity of representing sounds in the Chinese script, it is meaningful to consider how sinographs can
represent syllables in the Man'yōshū without reliance on phonophores. On the other hand, although
the semantic usage of sinographs is central to sinographic representation in the Man'yōshū, it is
possible to convey meanings without regard to the graphs’ semantic components, or “semantophores,”
via phonetic transliteration. Unlike in the Chinese script, the relationships among sinographs,
syllables, and words are manifold and highly varied and flexible in the Man'yōshū: the sinographic
representation of syllables and words is not determined but only loosely guided by the semantic or
phonetic functions of the graphs. In the Man'yōshū, the sinographic representation of a syllable or
word can be chosen from a wide range of possible representations and subject to purposeful
manipulations by the poets to achieve certain artistic effects such as double meaning. In some cases,
poets even fabricate ways to represent syllables and words with sinographs by pushing the limits of
and expanding the graphs’ semantic and phonetic functions and representations. This essay examines
the nature and usage of sinographs in the Man'yōshū and explores the ways in which poets
manipulate the links among syllables, words, and sinographs to convey double meaning. I argue that
such manipulations can produce a sinographic layer of meaning that is separate from the syllabic
layer of meaning. The staggering range of representative possibilities of sinographs and their
manipulations found in the Man'yōshū can significantly broaden our understanding of not only the
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

representative capacity of sinographs but also the possible interactions among writing scripts,
meanings, and sounds in human history.
The Man'yōshū is the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry. It was compiled before the
proliferation of kana and is written with sinographs. Whereas sinographic writing in Japan do not
always need to be associated with syllables, the sinographs in the Man'yōshū are necessarily tied to
syllables because the poetic metrical structure that regulates the number of syllables per line is one of
the essential, defining characteristics of the waka poetry genre. In other words, sinographs in the
Man‘yōshū must be seen as representations of syllables as syllables are fundamental to waka. In the
Man'yōshū, one sinograph represents from less than one to four syllables; the pattern is highly
irregular. On one end of the spectrum, two graphs like 五十 can represent just one syllable: i. On the
other end, one graph like 古 can represent as many as four syllables: inishie. Some syllables are not
directly represented by the graphs but implied by the metrical structure of the poem and/or
grammatical needs. For example, see the following poem:

tachibanano shimanomiyaniwa akanekamo sadanookaeni tonoishiniyuku

橘之 嶋宮尓者 不飽鴨 佐田乃岡辺尓 侍宿為尓往 (MYS 2:179)

The island palace

of Tachibana—
We cannot fall out of love with it.
Perhaps this is why we go to the hill of Sada
To perform guard-duty.

In this poem, the numbers of represented syllables per graph are irregular as mentioned above.
Graphs that represent just one syllable are 之 (no), 尓 (ni), 者 (wa), 不 (ne), 佐 (sa), 田 (da), 乃 (no),
辺 (e), 宿 (i), and 為 (shi). Graphs that represent two syllables are 宮 (miya), 飽 (aka), 鴨 (kamo), 岡
(oka), 侍 (tono), and 往 (yuku). There is no graph that represents three syllables in this poem, albeit it
is fairly common. A graph that represents four syllables is 橘 (tachibana). Not all syllables are

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explicitly represented. The no in shimanomiya (“island palace”) is not explicitly represented but
implied by the metrical and grammatical structures. This poem follows the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic metrical
structure, which determines that the line in which shimanomiya appears must have seven syllables.
The four graphs in this line, 嶋宮尓者, when read in their conventional pronunciations, only produce
six syllables: shimamiyaniwa. In order to find seven syllables in these graphs, one must either apply
less conventional pronunciations to the graphs or add an implied syllable based on the grammar. In
this case, it is apparent that the latter option is more reasonable because adding the attributive
marker no between shima (“island”) and miya (“palace”) is a much more obvious solution than
somehow finding unconventional pronunciations of these graphs that add up to exactly seven
syllables. Whereas two nouns do not need to be connected with an attributive marker to have an
attributive relationship and the no is not grammatically necessary, adding it here fills the seventh
syllable and thus is metrically necessary. The attributive marker no is explicitly represented in other
lines by 之 and 乃. From this, we can tell that the poet has considerable freedom in deciding whether
and how to represent no.
There are four major ways in which sinographs in the Man'yōshū represent syllables. The first
is ongana 音仮名. Ongana is the phonetic transliteration of syllables with sinographs based on
Chinese pronunciations of the graphs. For example, in the phrase shiranamino 志良奈美能 (MYS
12:3023) (“of the white waves”), the sinographs that represent these five syllables were chosen based
on their Chinese pronunciations. The graph 志 can represent the syllable shi because of its similar
Chinese pronunciation (zhi in modern Mandarin); the other graphs function in the same way. In
ongana’s representation of sounds, like in the Chinese script, phonophores play a significant role as
ongana borrows from Chinese pronunciations. Another way in which phonophores function in
Japanese pronunciation of sinographs is ondoku 音読. Whereas ongana is the phonetic transliteration
of Japanese syllables, ondoku is the pronunciation of sinographs in ways that resemble their Chinese
pronunciations while comprehending (or trying to comprehend) their original meanings in Chinese.
Ondoku is usually applied when a Japanese person reads a Chinese text. Despite its widespread usage
and significance outside the Man'yōshū, onduku is virtually absent in the Man'yōshū as waka rarely
employs onduku. Besides ongana, the other three ways in which sinographs represent syllables in the

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Man'yōshū rely on kundoku 訓読 rather than phonophores. To examine how they represent syllables
with sinographs but without reliance on phonophores, one must first learn about kundoku.
David Lurie defines kundoku as “a complex of practices that: 1) associate [sinographs] with
Japanese words and 2) transpose the resulting words into Japanese order while 3) adding necessary
grammatical elements.”1 For example, in kundoku, the sinograph 船 (“boat”) is pronounced as fune,
which is unrelated to its Chinese pronunciation (chuan in modern Mandarin) because the
pronunciation stems from the Japanese word for boat, fune. In other words, the Japanese word fune is
used as the pronunciation of the sinograph 船. In such cases, the pronunciations of sinographs are
unrelated to their phonophores. The usage of Japanese words as pronunciations of sinographs is 1) in
Lurie’s definition. 2) and 3) must be illustrated with a phrase: nagakiyowo hitoriyanemuto 長夜乎独
哉将宿跡 (MYS 3:463) (“Will I sleep alone through the long night?”). The syntax of this phrase is
adjective (nagaki “long”)-noun (yo “night”)-adverb (hitori “alone”)-verb (ne “sleep”). The noun, adverb,
and verb are connected with particle wo, ya, to, and auxiliary verb mu. Whereas the verb precedes the
noun in the Chinese script, this phrase, as Lurie describes in 2), transposes words into Japanese syntax
and adopts the Japanese noun–verb structure. In addition, Japanese grammatical elements like
particles and auxiliary verbs were added as Lurie describes in 3). For another example, recall the
island palace poem quoted above. Although the graph 不 precedes 飽, its represented syllable ne is
actually read after 飽’s represented syllables, aka. In kundoku, the reading order of the syllables can
differ from the order of their representing graphs because of grammatical needs. In this case, the
negating auxiliary verb ne grammatically follows the verb aka (“to be tired of something after having
too much”).2 However, ne is represented with the graph 不, which should grammatically precede a
verb in Chinese writing. In this case, the order of the sinographs follows Chinese syntax, but the
reading of the syllables follows Japanese syntax. According to Kim Bunkyo 金文京, kundoku

1 David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 175.

2 The literal translation of akane is something like “we do not get tired of it.” However, in the context of the poem, it
describes that the “we” in the poem cannot fall out of love and become emotionally detached from the island palace; thus,
I translated the line as “we cannot fall out of love with it.”

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originated in annotations of Chinese Confucian classics.3 When the Confucian classics were imported
to Japan, the Japanese borrowed from the Chinese tradition of annotating the classics and annotated
them with Japanese words, which was the origin of the association of sinographs with Japanese words,
which is a central aspect of kundoku. The kun in kundoku refers to the process of annotating and
explaining difficult texts as its usage derived from the Chinese word xungu 訓詁, which is the Chinese
art of glossing and annotating texts.
Other than ongana, the major ways in which sinographs represent syllables in the Man'yōshū
are kungana 訓仮名, seikun 正訓, and gikun 義訓; their representations of syllables are all related to
kundoku. Kungana, like ongana, is the phonetic transliteration of Japanese syllables with sinographs.
But unlike ongana, whose representation of syllables is based on Chinese pronunciations, kungana’s
representation of syllables is based on the kundoku pronunciations of the graphs. For instance, in the
phrase wasuretamauna 忘賜名 (MYS 4: 521) (“Do not forget it.”), the graph 名 is a kungana: its
representation of the syllable na is derived from the kundoku association of the Japanese word na
(“name”) with this sinograph, which also means “name” in Chinese. Here, 名 is used merely as a
phonetic transliteration for the negating particle na and does not reflect its meaning in Chinese.
Whereas ongana and kungana are phonetic transliteration, seikun and gikun are semantic
usage of sinographs and the principal ways in which sinographs are used in the Man'yōshū. As Lurie
points out, phonetic transliteration and phonetic usage of sinographs are of relatively minor
importance in the Man'yōshū compared to the semantic usage of sinographs, which dominates the
nature and function of sinographs in the Man'yōshū: “Only about a quarter of its [the Man'yōshū’s]
poems are written in a predominantly phonographic mode, these are concentrated in four books [. . .]
The remaining three-quarters of the anthology [. . .] are written in a primarily logographic register,
with varying amounts of phonographic adjuncts.”4 “Logographic register” here refers to the semantic
usage of sinographs. In seikun, sinographs are “linked with Japanese words of equivalent meaning to
the original Chinese words with which those characters are associated.”5 The association of the

3 Kin Bunkyo, Kanbun to Tōajia: kundoku no bunkaken (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010), 19–21.

4 Lurie, 271.

5 Lurie, 273.

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sinograph 名 with the Japanese word na above is an example of seikun. The association of the
Japanese word yama (“mountain”) with the graph 山, which means “mountain” in Chinese, is another
example. Note that in seikun, the Japanese word is more or less equivalent to its associated
sinograph’s meaning in Chinese. This equivalence differs it from gikun. In gikun, the relationship
between the Japanese word and its associated sinograph is not that of exact equivalence but
approximate description or relevance. For instance, in kinoyamamichiwa sabushikemu 城山道者 不
楽牟 (MYS 2:576) (“The mountain alley of the castle is probably lonely.”), the association of the
sinographs 不楽 with the word sabushi (“lonely” or “lacking”) is not a relationship of exact
equivalence but that of approximate description or relevance and therefore a gikun association. The
meaning of 不楽 in Chinese is “unhappy”, which is broader and vaguer in meaning than “lonely.” In
this case, the author likely consciously chose graphs related to but not equivalent to the associated
Japanese word to expand the semantic denotation of sabushi in this poem. By using 不楽 to represent
sabushi, the author is able to invoke the meanings associated with sabushi and the graphs 不楽. In the
Man'yōshū and Japanese writing in general, gikun is an important way in which double meanings are
conveyed as one can freely associate relevant graphs and words. Given such a wide range of
possibilities in sinographs’ representation of Japanese words and syllables, the poets of the Man'yōshū
enjoyed tremendous freedom in manipulating the links between words and graphs, which result in
unique channels of artistic expressions that will be discussed below.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of waka poetry is its ability to convey double
meaning in an astonishingly concise manner. Consider the following poem in the Man'yōshū:

ashigarano hakonenoyamani awamakite mitowanareruwo awanakumoayashi

安思我良能 波祜祢乃夜麻尓 安波麻吉弖 実登波奈礼留乎 阿波奈久毛安夜思

(MYS 14: 3364)

On Mt. Hakone
of Ashigara,
I sowed the seeds of foxtail millet.

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Although they have ripened,

It is strange that we do not meet.

This poem is almost entirely written in phonetic transliteration with the exception of the
graph 実, which represents and is a seikun graph of mi (“fruit”). The first four lines are about millet
farming, but the subject seems to suddenly change in the last line, which is puzzling. The word
“although” in the fourth line connects the line with the last line and suggests that there is a concessive
relationship between them,6 which is also puzzling as it is not obvious what logically connects the
ripening of the millet with meeting someone. These puzzles suggest that there is a hidden layer of
meaning in this poem and the first four lines are not solely about millet farming. The word awa
(“foxtail millet”) in this poem functions as a “pivot word” (kakekotoba 掛詞). A pivot word is a
prominent poetic device in waka that "merge[s] two syntactically and semantically distinct phrases
within a single poem by providing two meanings for a single set of [syllables]".7 In this poem, awa
semantically pivots between and signifies both “foxtail millet” and the verb au, “to meet”; the syllables
awa is the mizenkei 未然形 inflected form8 of au. Other than what its pronunciation suggests, the
word awa’s semantic merge with au is reinforce by this verb’s appearance in the last line, again in its
mizenkei form awa, in the context of “we do not meet.” It noteworthy that the syllables awa appear
twice in this poem and are represented with different sets of sinographs: 安波 and 阿波. This
illustrates the freedom and flexibility in using sinographs to represent syllables: both 安 and 阿 can be
ongana that represent the syllable a. There does not seem to be any semantic significance in the
difference between these two sets of sinographs other than that these two awa are being used
differently: one is a pivot word and the other is plainly a verb. In addition to the surficial meaning of
millet farming, the semantic pivot of the first awa suggests that the narrator of the poem/character

6 The concessive relationship is signified by towa. The translation of this line in modern Japanese in the Shogakukan 小学
館 edition of the Man'yōshū is もう実となったのに.

7 Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University East
Asia Program, 2008), 21.

8 The mizenkei is one of the six forms of inflection in Classical Japanese verbs. The form of inflection here is irrelevant to
the meaning of the poem; what matters is that awa is a possible form of and should remind the reader of au.

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depicted in the poem is thinking about meeting someone while farming. This illustrates how double
meaning can be achieved concisely in waka and via pivot words.
As discussed above, pivot word is an important poetic device in waka that concisely conveys
double meaning. In fact, the Man'yōshū’s title is a pivot word in itself. The syllable yō is represented
with the sinograph 葉, which means “leaf” in Chinese; this meaning of yō gave birth to the
conventional English translation of the anthology as "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves." Besides this,
the term man'yōshū can be interpreted as and pivot among a number of different meanings. Yō is the
onduku pronunciation of 葉, which resembles its Chinese pronunciation (ye in modern Mandarin).
This pronunciation of 葉 is also found in the word shiyō 紙葉, which means “paper” or “page.” Thus,
the term man'yōshū can also be interpreted as “collection of ten thousand pages.” Moreover, the
seikun reading of 葉 is ha, which can be associated with the ha in the word kotonoha (“speech” or
“language”) since 葉 can be used to represent the syllable ha in kotonoha. In this light, man'yōshū can
be taken as “collection of ten thousand speeches.” Finally, the syllable yō can denote the Japanese
word “generation,” also pronounced yō, which gives yet another meaning to man'yōshū: “collection of
ten thousand generations.”9 Despite its prominence in the development of later waka and presence in
the very title of the anthology, pivot words in the Man'yōshū are of relatively minor presence
compared to its proliferation in waka from the Heian period onward in terms of quantity and variety.
Scholars have suggested that the proliferation of pivot words in waka since the Heian period was
intimately tied to and enabled by the usage of kana rather than sinographs to write waka, which
inevitably implies that the usage of pivot words in the Man'yōshū is limited by the fact that the
Man'yōshū is written with sinographs rather than kana.10 From personal experience, Professor Linda
Chance has confirmed that sinographs usually hinder native Japanese readers’ ability to detect pivot
words in a text. Regardless of whether an all-sinographic writing system inherently limits the

9 Matsuura Tomohisa, Man'yōshū to iu na no kakekotoba (Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Co., Ltd., 1995), 1. It is controversial
among scholars which interpretations are more historically plausible. However, there is a general consensus that the term
man'yōshū is a pivot word with more than one meanings. See Matsuura, 2–40.

10 This is argued in Akiyama Ken, Ōchō no bungaku kūkan (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1984), 57–59. Also in Heldt,
22.

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development of pivot words, which is controversial,11 it is undeniable that pivot words play a
relatively minor role in the Man'yōshū compared to later waka. In his studies of the Man'yōshū,
Uchida Kentoku 内田賢徳 offers insightful observations regarding the interpretation of the
sinographic nature of the Man'yōshū. He points out that the perception of sinographs as a limiting
medium of waka composition is ahistorical and only reflects the view of later readers who are
uncomfortable with the writing system in the Man'yōshū. He argues that rather than solely focusing
on what an all-sinographic writing system is incapable of, we should consider what it can achieve and
has achieved.12 Without the central role of pivot words, we may ask, how does the writing system in
the Man'yōshū convey double meaning?
Lurie claims that there are two levels of aesthetics to poems in the Man'yōshū: the external
and the internal. The external level refers to the aesthetics associated with the calligraphy of the
sinographs. The internal level refers to the “interplay between words and the graphs that inscribe
them.”13 As discussed above, poets of the Man'yōshū enjoyed tremendous freedom in matching
sinographs with syllables and words due to the wide range of representative possibilities; the complex
interplay among syllables, words, and sinographs in the writing system produces unique poetic
expressions and aesthetics. Although the sinographs in the Man'yōshū are representations of syllables,
the sinographs and syllables are not necessarily unified in meaning since sinographs, unlike scripts
that are purely phonetic, can represent sound and meaning. A considerable portion of poems in the
Man'yōshū has two layers of meanings: the syllabic layer and the sinographic layer. The syllabic layer
of meaning refers to the meaning conveyed by the syllables in a poem; the sinographic layer of
meaning refers to the meaning conveyed by the sinographs. In the remaining body of this essay, the
English translations of the poems only translate the syllabic layer of meaning; the sinographic layer is
explained in the analysis.

11 Thomas LaMarre is cynical about this position. See Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of
Sensation and Inscription (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 63.

12 Uchida Kentoku, “Uta no naka no kanji hyōgen: kunji to kana wo megutte” Manyō 161 (1997), 17.

13 Lurie, 7.

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In the Man'yōshū, sinographs can acquire a separate layer of meaning from syllables via gikun
representation. See the following poem:

yoshinogawa yukusenohayami shimashikumo yodomukotonaku arikosenukamo

芳野河 逝瀨之早見 須臾毛 不通事無 有巨勢濃香問(MYS 2:119)

The Yoshino River:

Its flowing stream’s swiftness—
Not even
A bit of stagnation.
Hopefully it is like this.

This is a poem composed by Prince Yuke 弓削皇子 (d. 699) for Princess Ki 紀皇女. Like the poem
about millet farming above, this poem has an additional layer of meaning beyond the surficial context
of water flow. This additional layer is signaled by the gikun graphs for the word yodomu: 不通.
Yodomu is a verb that means “to stagnate” and primarily applies to water. The equivalent graph in
Chinese is zhi 滯, which is also a verb that means “to stagnate” for water. However, an electronic
search in the Man'yōshū on JapanKnowledge yields no result of a seikun graph for yodomu despite the
existence of an exact Chinese equivalence. In almost all cases, yodomu is represented with phonetic
transliteration. This poem is one of the very few cases in which yodomu is given gikun graphs, which
highlights the verb’s importance in this poem as it is apparent that the poet intended to manipulate
the sinographic representation and express meaning beyond the word yodomu. The graphs 不通,
unlike yodomu, is very vague and have a wide scope of meanings that include “do not flow,” “do not
connect,” “do not make sense,” “do not exchange,” “do not communicate,” “do not understand,” and so
on. The association of yodomu with 不通 is made possible by one of the graphs’ meanings as “do not
flow,” which is related to “to stagnate.” The association of “do not flow” and “to stagnate” opens up
yodomu’s possible associations with other meanings of 不通 like “do not communicate” and “do not
connect.” By associating graphs with such broad applications to a word of such specific usage, the

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poet drastically expands the meaning of the poem. In the last line, the poet expresses his wish for the
lack of “stagnation.” In the syllabic layer of meaning, he wishes for the absence of stagnation in the
flow of the Yoshino River. In the sinographic layer, the graphs 不通 suggest that he also wishes for the
absence of breaks in his communication, connection, and mutual understanding with Princess Ki and
perhaps in other aspects of life as well.
Another example of double meaning conveyed through gikun association can be found in the
following poem:

sasanohawa miyamamosayani sayagedomo warewaimoomou wakarekinureba

小竹之葉者 三山毛清尔 乱友 吾者妹思 别来礼婆 (MYS 2:133)

Sasa leaves:
The whole mountain is rustling,
Rustling with the soft wind.
I think of my wife,
As we have separated.

In this poem, sayage, which is the izenkei 已然形 inflected form of the verb sayagu, is given
the gikun graph 乱. Sayagu means “to rustle” and applies to the action of sound-making when leaves
and other thin things move about. Again, a search on JapanKnowledge yields no result of a seikun
graph for it in the Man'yōshū. A potential equivalent graph in Chinese is su 簌. Like yodomu, it is
almost always represented with phonetic transliteration. In this case, its gikun representation is
unusual and signals the poet’s intention to convey meaning beyond sayagu. The graph 乱 means “to
be disturbed,” “to be volatile,” or “to be disarranged.” Sayagu’s association with 乱 is enabled by the
similarity between leaves rustling and leaves being disturbed and disarranged. Whereas sayagu
conveys the action of sound-making, 乱 provides a visual image of the leaves being disturbed and
disarranged. Through this gikun association, the poet is able to merge the aural and visual aspects of
the leaves’ motion, which eliminates the need for a separate word to describe the visual aspect and

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enables extraordinary conciseness. Moreover, 乱 is often used to describe the volatility and
disturbance of the human mind. Besides the disarrangement of the leaves, 乱 here likely also refers to
the poet’s volatile and disturbed mind when he longs for his wife, which cannot be expressed by
sayagu alone as it does not carry this dimension of meaning. All the meanings added by the gikun
graph 乱 are untold in the syllabic layer of meaning and belong to the sinographic layer of meaning.
Another major way via which double meaning is conveyed through the interplay among
syllables, words, and sinographs in the Man'yōshū is the semantic usage of ongana and kungana,
which seems to be considerably more frequently used to convey double meaning than gikun
representation. Due to the semantic nature of sinographs, it is possible for phonetic transliteration
with sinographs in China and Japan to have semantic significance. For example, when the Chinese
phonetically transliterate foreign names, they can choose to use flattering, degrading, or neutral
graphs to represent the names. The name of the Japanese shaman queen Himiko (r. 189–248) is
transliterated in premodern Chinese historical sources with the graphs beimihu 卑彌呼, which is an
intentionally degrading choice as bei 卑 means “low” or “humble.” As methods of phonetic
transliteration, ongana and kungana in the Man'yōshū can carry semantic functions alongside their
phonetic functions and add additional sinographic layers of meaning to the poems. See the following:

harusugite natsukitarurashi shirotaeno koromohoshitari amenokaguyama

春過而 夏來良之 白妙能 衣乾有 天之香來山 (MYS 1:28)

It seems that spring has past,

And summer has arrived.
The purely white clothes
Have dried,
On the heavenly Mt. Kagu.

This poem is composed by Empress Jitō 持統天皇 (645–703). In this poem, the syllables kagu,
which is the name of the mountain, is represented with 香來. The graph 香 means “fragrance”; here, it

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is a kungana whose representation of the syllable ka derives from the Japanese word for “fragrance”:
ka or kaori. The graph 來 means “to come”; as a kungana, its representation of the syllable gu derives
from the Japanese word “to come”: ku. The syllables ku and gu can be interchangeable because voiced
and unvoiced syllables were not necessarily distinguished before the Nara period (710–794).14 In the
syllabic layer of meaning, kagu is plainly the name of the mountain. However, the two kungana
graphs, when interpreted semantically, means “fragrance comes,” which adds an additional
sinographic layer of meaning. “Fragrance comes” is likely related to the arrival of summer described
earlier in the poem and invokes the image of seasonal transition accompanied by the approaching
fragrance of summer.
The following is another example of phonetic transliteration’s semantic significance in
achieving double meaning:

wagasekowa idukuyukuramu okitsumono nabarinoyamawo kyoukakoyuramu

吾勢枯波 何所行良武 已津物 隱乃山乎 今日香越等六 (MYS 1:43)

My husband—
Where has he gone?
Today,
Is he crossing over
Mt. Nabari of seaweed?

The syllabic layer of meaning as translated here is about a wife wondering where her husband
has gone. However, the unusual graphs of phonetic transliteration for okitsumo (“seaweed”) and
Nabari (name of the mountain) signal the author’s intention to convey something beyond the
meaning of the syllables. The graph 已’s representation of the syllables oki in okitsumo is unusual and
involves a complex process of inference. In Japanese, 已 carries the meaning “to give up”; it can be

14 Haruo Shirane, Classical Japanese: A Grammar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 19.

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found in the representation of the word yamu, “to give up.” Another word for “to give up” is oku, which
apparently is the origin of 已’s representation of oki here as oki is the renyōkei 連用形 inflected form
of oku. However, an electronic search on JapanKnowledge and the annotation of this poem in the
Shogakukan 小学館 edition of the Man'yōshū suggests that there is no conventional association
between the word oku and the graph 已.15 In this case, the association between 已 and oku/oki is likely
fabricated and stretched from the semantic similarity between oku and words 已 can represent (like
yamu). The matching of relevant graphs and words is characteristic of gikun representation. However,
已 is not a gikun graph here because it is being used to phonetically transliterate part of a word: oki in
okitsumo. Gikun is the representation of Japanese words with semantically relevant sinographs; 已 is
not semantically related to “seaweed.” To me, 已 here can be seen as a kungana whose pronunciation
derived from a very obscure or even fabricated kundoku reading of it. The Shogakukan annotation
suggests that 已 here is a so-called kariji 借字, which refers to graphs used as phonetic transliteration
like ongana and kungana; this is in accordance with my interpretation. Why did the poet go through
such a complex process of inference to insert the meaning “to give up” into this poem? Let us consider
another graph whose representation of syllables deserves attention in this poem: 隱. 隱 here
represents the syllables nabari, which is the name of a mountain but also the renyōkei inflected form
of the verb nabaru, “to hide.” Unlike in the case of 已 and oki, nabari is a conventional kundoku
pronunciation of 隱; thus, 隱 is a normal kungana for the syllables nabari. The semantic functions of
these two graphs interpreted in the context of the poem invoke the idea of a husband who has given
up his marriage and left to hide from his wife, which is a sinographic layer of meaning not found in
the syllabic layer.
The manipulation of the semantic functions of graphs used in phonetic transliteration can
also be found in this poem:

wagimokowo izaminoyamawo takamikamo yamatonomienu kunitoomikamo

吾妹子乎 去來見乃山乎 高三香裳 日本能不所見 国遠見可聞 (MYS 1:44)

15 Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Akihiro, ed., Man'yōshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1971), 86–87.

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My lover:
Is it because of
The height of Mt. Izami
That I cannot see the land of Yamato?
Or is it because of the distance?

There are two sets of sinographs that call for attention in this poem. The first set is 去來見,
which represents Izami in Mt. Izami. All three graphs are kungana graphs. The graph 去’s
representation of the syllable i is derived from its representation of the verb inu, “to leave.” The graph
見’s representation of the syllable mi is derived from its representation of the verb miru, “to see” or “to
look.” I have not been able to identify the origin of 來’s representation of za. It is possible that it also
derives from a fabricated kundoku reading of the graph like in the case of 已 above. On a second
thought, it might be related to the word saru, also “to leave,” but saru is usually represented with the
graph 去 (“to leave” in Chinese”), not 來 (“to come” in Chinese). If this was the case, this
representation reflects a technique called gikun 戯訓 (not to be confused with gikun 義訓), which
refers to seemingly bizarre associations of words and graphs for playful purposes. Although both i and
za can be represented with the kungana graph 去, 去去見 is redundant and looks awkward so the
author might have playfully substituted the second 去 with its semantic opposite, 來. Regardless of
the origin of 來’s representation of za, the fact that there is no obvious explanation for why it is
represented this way and its unusualness suggest that this graph might not merely be a phonetic
transliteration. When interpreted semantically, 去來見 means “go, come, and see”; in the context of
this poem, it is likely related to the travelling implied in the narrator’s longing for the land of Yamato.
Moreover, the particle kamo is represented with 香裳, which semantically means “scented clothes.”
On the syllabic level, it is merely a particle that renders the sentence a question. However, its
sinographic level of meaning likely corresponds to the mentioning of a lover at the beginning and
invokes the image of a lover with scented clothes.
For those who are used to how sinographs function in the Chinese script, the range of
representative possibilities and freedom in the writing system of the Man'yōshū is astonishing. As
demonstrated, the poets of the Man'yōshū do not shy away from exploring such possibilities and test

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the boundaries of the representative capacity of sinographs. Today, we are able to avoid being
absolutely bewildered and dumbfounded by how the sinographs function in the Man'yōshū because
we benefit from centuries of scholarship on annotating the Man'yōshū that are readily available. The
availability of comprehensive annotations sometimes overshadows the near-incomprehensibility of
many poems in which poets use unconventional, radical, and even fabricated sinographic
representations. The ingenuity of these poets expands and challenges our conception of sinographs’
representative capacity and makes us wonder at what point such capacity becomes
incomprehensibility. If meant to be virtually incomprehensible to most, how do such writings affect
our understanding of the function and meaning of poetry and writing in human history? We may
consider Lurie’s proposition that writings do not need to be either legible or illegible and can be
“alegible,” which means that legibility is irrelevant to its function and significance.16 If we consider
poetry as a genre of writing that often intentionally employs inaccessible language to unfamiliarize
and mystify what is being represented, perhaps alegibility is a meaningful lens through which we may
interpret the sinographic representations in the Man'yōshū.

16 Lurie, 15–56.

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REFERENCES

Akiyama, Ken 秋山虔. 1984. Ōchō no bungaku kūkan 王朝の文学空間 (“the literary space of a
dynasty”). Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai.
Heldt, Gustav. 2008. The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan. Ithaca (New York):
Cornell University East Asia Program.
Kin, Bunkyo 金文京. 2010. Kanbun to Tōajia: Kundoku no bunkaken 漢文と東アジア―訓読の文化
圏 (“sinographs and East Asia: the kundoku cultural sphere”). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
LaMarre, Thomas. 2000. Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge
(Massachusetts): Harvard University Press.
Man'yōshū 万葉集. 1971., eds. Kojima Noriyuki 小島憲之, Kinoshita Masatoshi 木下正俊 and Satake
Akihiro 佐竹昭宏. Vol. 1–4. Tokyo: Shogakukan.
Matsuura, Tomohisa 松浦友久. 1995. Man'yōshū to iu na no kakekotoba 万葉集という名の雙關語
(“the title Man'yōshū as a pivot word”). Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Co., Ltd.
Shirane, Haruo. 2005. Classical Japanese: A Grammar. New York: Columbia University Press.
Uchida, Kendoku 内田賢徳. 1997. “Uta no naka no kanji hyōgen: kunji to kana wo megutte” 歌のなか
の漢字表現―訓字と仮名をめぐって (“sinographic representation in uta: on kunji and
kana). Manyō 161 : 17.

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 Power Shifts and Changing Scripts:
The Development of the Sinographic Script through Media and Authority

Zachary S. Hershey

INTRODUCTION

The development of the Sinographic script1 prior to its standardization at the beginning of the early
imperial period of China is quite complicated, but it can be broken down into a series of manageable
stages or categories progressing from the earliest graphs seen on bones and shells, through the
adaptation of the script for use in the bronze inscriptions and the seal script, to the emergence and
refinement of the clerical script in the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–221 CE) dynasties as a
standardization of the confusingly variant set of scripts which existed during the Warring States
period (475–221 BCE). Each of these large developments in the script can be analyzed as stemming
from the specific needs of a power group within the culture, the literate elite.
Considering the development of the script in a chronological fashion provides one perspective
but is not successful in all cases due to the fluid nature of the subject — people did not confine
themselves to one calligraphic style, just as contemporary writers are not confined to one font. In later
chronological divisions, it is common to see scholars reaching back into the textual tradition to mimic,
modify, and make use of classical style for reasons distinct to the individual’s preference. Observing
the development from a new angle allows for further understanding of the script that may not have
been possible in previous narratives. Rather than dividing the stages of the script in time, divisions in

1 I adopt the term “Sinographic script” rather than “Chinese script” mainly to draw attention to two points. The script
dating back to the Shell and Bone Script (jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文) is not “Chinese” in the modern sense for numerous reasons
with the most obvious being that the language was different. Additionally, this recognizes the fact that cultures other than
those who identified as Chinese used the system that developed from this for a diverse collection of languages.
 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS 264

media are an enlightening way to organize the changes seen in the Sinographic script. This study
takes this approach while limiting the scope of the study to the time period up to the standardization
of the script during the Qin dynasty.
The direct effects of media in studies of the development of the Sinographic script, are not
usually considered in scholarly study; rather, they are often mentioned as a side note in a larger
chronological narrative.2 In drawing attention away from the media used, possible explanations of
why the script changed at different points in East Asian history are lost, because the acquisition of and
role that these media played in society are intimately connected to the functioning of power on the
central plain.3 In order to understand the influences behind the changing script, developing models
for the infrastructure and skills needed to acquire the media and marry them to the script is necessary.
Viewing the script through the lens of the media on which it was inscribed or brushed, not only offers
a reflection of the changing needs of the government as seen in script modifications, but allows us to
see clearly how media impacted those needs.

DIVINATION AND THE POWER OF BONE

The exact nature of the origin of the Sinographic script is still unclear and may never be clarified,4 but
the earliest extant graphs that have been reliably demonstrated to be related to language are those
incised onto the scapulae of bovines and the plastrons of tortoises dating as far back as about 1200
BCE. A scholar by the name of Wang Yirong 王懿榮 (1845–1900) is said to have been the first to

2 For an in-depth chronological approach to the development of the Chinese writing system, see, for example, Qiu 2000,
59–149.

3 The “central plain” or zhōngyuán 中原 here refers to the portion of the North China Plain at the lower reaches of the
Yellow River, which covers parts of modern day Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Shandong provinces. The term is commonly
used to refer to the location of the “origin of Chinese civilization.” For an introduction to the early cultures associated with
the central plain, see for example Li 2000.

4 Some scholars argue that the earliest forms of the script are found on pieces of pottery from sites such as Banpo in
Shanxi, which is attributed to the “Yangshao culture” (an etic term to identify a group of archaeological excavations; see Li,
2015, 25–30, for a brief discussion), which date back to a much earlier period than the Shell and Bone Script, but these
graphs have not been reliably connected to any form of language. See Qiu 2000, 29–44.

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recognize that these inscriptions were actually ancient forms of the Sinographic script, but this
discovery has since developed into a myth involving the use of these bones in Chinese medicine
where they were identified as “dragon bones.”5 The initial source of these, near modern day Anyang 安
陽, was discovered by another Chinese scholar, Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940) in 1908, but official
archaeological excavations of the site, supervised by Li Ji 李濟 (1896–1979) did not begin until 1928,
after the founding of Academia Sinica.6
The term most often used to identify this script is “oracle bone script,” because a majority of
the inscriptions unearthed have dealt with divinatory practices that will be discussed further below. A
more appropriate gloss is adopted here from Gilbert Matteos and Jerry Norman’s 2000 translation of
Qiu Xigui’s 裘錫圭 Chinese Writing, “Shell and Bone Script,” which both recognizes that the content
of the inscriptions is not restricted to divinatory practice7 and stays truer to the Chinese term,
jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文. The Chinese name directly reflects the media which was used for the inscriptions,
plastrons and scapulae.
In order to understand the earliest extent developments of the script, the nature and usage of
the media on which it was inscribed, turtle plastrons and ox scapulae, must be explored. An
“economic” interpretation of the choice of material is illuminating. Both turtle plastrons and ox
scapulae would have been rather rare commodities during the Shang. While oxen were available in
sufficient number on the central plain, the acquisition of these scapulae would require the
slaughtering of a great many of these oxen, which a majority of members of this early society would
not have been able to manage frequently enough to account for the numbers seen in the excavations.
As for turtles, the situation is similar, but made more difficult by the fact that the species of turtles
used are found in regions to the south of the central plain.8 This means that the turtles needed to be
brought from other regions beyond the immediate vicinity of the site where the divinations took place.
To account for the vast number of plastrons that have been recovered would require a sophisticated

5 Shaughnessy 1991, 13–15.

6 Li 2015, 66–75.

7 Bagley in Houston 2007, 213–214.

8 For a discussion of the origins of the shells used in divinations, see Keightley 1978, 8–12.

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system of transporting goods between regions — whether that involved trade, tribute, and/or
enterprise is unclear. Both of these observations draw attention to the fact that these practices would
be the prerogative of the elite of the society, and the existence of these elites is supported by
excavations which demonstrate material wealth disparity in Shang graves.9
The Shang elite used these bones and shells in the practice of pyro-osteomancy. Pyro-
osteomancy is the practice of divination, “mancy,” through the use of fire, “pyro,” on bones, “osteo.”
Before the divination was conducted, the scapula or shell needed to go through a process of
preparation. The bone was cleaned and any protruding pieces were cut away to provide a flat surface
with which to work, which was then polished.10 Holes were then bored into the surface into which a
hot metal rod would be inserted later during the divination ceremony; these facilitated proper
cracking of the material. The divination ceremony was done by first posing questions to be answered,
a prognostication, after which a hot piece of metal was applied to the interior of the prepared holes,
causing cracks to form in a similar shape to the graph bu 卜, which came to denote the action “to
divine.” These cracks were then interpreted as answers to the prognostications, recognizing them as
“auspicious” or “inauspicious.”
The inscriptions that have been unearthed often record various elements of these divinatory
ceremonies, with the most common being the prognostications and interpreted answers. In rarer
cases, the outcome of the actual events that transpired that were related to the divinations can be
found inscribed as well, which may be a kind of affirmation of the divinatory interpretation and are
commonly referred to as “verifications.” Important to note is the fact that these inscriptions often
appear to have been completed in one act rather than in stages, suggesting that the record was made
after the fact, and in the case of those with verifications, the period of time between divination and
inscription may have been substantial. Bagley notes an inscription where the dates of the divination
and the verification are separated by thirty-one days, yet the inscription seems to have been
completed in one sitting.11

9 Li 2015, 75–78.

10 This description closely follows Keightley 1978, 12–15.

11 Bagley in Houston 2007, 193–200.

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Suggesting that the inscriptions were done at a later date is not unreasonable after identifying
the people involved in each step of the process. The names of individuals involved in the process are
commonly inscribed, which reveals that while the king is often the persona announcing the
prognostication, he is not the diviner or the scribe.12 Beyond that, the diviner and scribe are also
distinct individuals. It seems that the bones and shells might have been sent to a scribe who
specialized in inscriptions on bone long after the ceremony with a transcript of the content of the
ceremony which was to be inscribed.13 This would suggest that there could even have been two scribes
in some cases — one taking notes on perishables and one who inscribed the bones following these
notes. Evidence of perishable media that could have been used for such notes is suggested by the
appearance of painted graphs on some extent bones as well as through the content of the inscriptions,
which will be discussed in the final section of this paper. This reveals the complexity of the practice of
divination as seen through the lens of these bones and shells.
The actual reason that these shells were inscribed, however, is still a matter of much debate.
Some suggest that it may have been some kind of system of record keeping, but others point to
apparent mass-discarding of the bones and inconsistent recording standards across the corpus as
evidence against this proposal.14 While a subset of the inscriptions seems to fit the idea of a system of
records, such as those recording punitive expeditions carried out by the king, examples such as these
are just as easily explained by other models.15 In this specific case, Keightley explains that this detailed
record of the divinations recorded on the punitive expedition may have served as proof of completion
of these rituals that could be presented upon the king’s return. Seeing the inscriptions as a limited
form of demonstration, rather than as records to be stored, seems much more reasonable.
The practice of pyro-osteomancy on the central plain predates the appearance of these
inscriptions,16 so the appearance of the script must coincide with the emergence of new needs

12 For a discussion of diviners and diviner groups, see Keightley 1978, 31–32.

13 Bagley in Houston 2007, 197.

14 Bagley in Houston 2007, 198–200.

15 For a detailed discussion of these inscriptions, see Keightley 2000, 45–47.

16 Keightley 1978, 3–6.

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associated with the elite practicing these divinations. It may have been a kind of a display, similar to
the inscriptions found on bronzes, which will be discussed in the next section. Bagley admits that this
is possible with the caveat that the audience which these inscriptions were meant for must have been
rather restricted in scope.17 It is unlikely that these early kings needed to demonstrate their ability to
communicate with the spirits to the society as a whole through display of such inscriptions, but that it
is likely that these inscriptions were of importance for demonstrative purposes to the literate elite of
the time. Bagley even suggests that the inscriptions were a bridge for communication with the
ancestral spirits, with the ancestors as another possible literate audience as perceived by the elite. A
reasonable model for understanding the purpose of this practice as a whole would be as a two-stage
display demonstrating proof of ritual performance to, first, the literate elite, likely branches of the
king’s family,18 and then to the ancestral spirits themselves in the burial of the inscriptions.
Osteomancy, or divination through the use of bones, is not unheard of in world history; there
are even other notable examples of pyro-osteomancy discovered in North America.19 What is
interesting to note here is the development and use of a script to record the events or results of the
practice. Understanding the plastrons and scapulae as commodity goods restricted to the elite
through both acknowledging the difficulty of their acquisition and observing the actors involved in
the divination rituals recorded in the inscriptions, it is reasonable to suggest that the practice was
developed to fill the needs of the literate elite. Since the practice of pyro-osteomancy in the central
plain predates the emergence of the earliest of these inscriptions, the need for simple divinations
seems to have escalated to the need to demonstrate completion of the practice, whether that may be
to fellow members of the elite or to the ancestral spirits, and thus the Shell and Bone Script emerged
to fill this need.

17 Bagley in Houston 2007, 199–200.

18 Keightley 2000, 98–103.

19 Keightley 1978, 3.

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VESSELS, METALLURGY, AND CONSIGNMENT

The emergence of inscriptions on metal works was roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of
the Bone and Shell Script, but the earliest examples of metal inscriptions are of a much simpler nature
than those found on the bones. These early inscriptions are often found on vessels of various shapes
and sizes cast in bronze for use in rituals, often related to ancestral worship and sacrifice.20 Similar to
the bone inscriptions, estimates for the dates of early bronze ritual vessels suggest that the earliest
extent uninscribed vessels predate the appearance of their inscribed counterparts by about four or
five centuries, so this suggests that the technology required to cast these vessels was developed long
before anyone thought it necessary to inscribe them. Before investigating the possible reasons for the
emergence of the script, a model for the process by which these objects were produced and inscribed
is helpful for understanding their use.
Similarly to the scapulae and plastrons discussed in the previous section, the acquisition of
the resources necessary to produce bronze and cast the bronze into vessels requires a sophisticated
system consisting of multiple phases. Satisfying all of the necessary requirements of bronze
production required discovering the location of the requisite ore, acquiring it through mining
operations, transporting the ore to the metallurgists, proper understanding of the process of smelting
and refining, transporting the refined material to the casters, the production of molds for casting, and
proper understanding of casting techniques. The two main phases in this process are acquisition of
the refined bronze and the casting of the vessel, and the media in question in these two phases are
bronze and clay respectively.

20 For an in-depth discussion of the development of methods for classifying and dating bronze vessels, see Robert Bagley’s
Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes. In the course of this book, Bagley surveys early developments in the
classification of bronzes mainly through examining the work of Bernhard Karlgren and Max Loehr.

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Figure 1. Fāngyí 方彞, ca. twelfth century BCE. Winthrop Collection, Harvard
University Art Museum (1943.52.109). Source: Bagley 1990, 7 (Fig. 1B).

Bronze is an alloy produced using copper, tin, and often other metals such as aluminum or
lead in trace amounts.21 These metals are smelted and refined through an arduous process of repeated
melting and the addition of such materials as carbon from charcoal to remove impurities. The
addition of tin to copper resulted in a much stronger and durable material that could be used to

21 Tan and Lian 2011, 131–132.

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created large, sturdy objects such as these vessels. Before these metals could be produced, the ores
from which they are extracted needed to be mined and brought to the location of refining. Mining
operations have been discovered that were in use during the Shang, and evidence of smelting
workshops and bronze ingots suggests that the refining process probably took place in the immediate
vicinity of the mines.22 Producing the refined metal on-site simplifies the first stage of transportation
mentioned above, but by processing the metals at the mine, further shipments become more
attractive to bandits.
Archaeological excavations that yielded bronzes suggest that the casting of bronzes in the
earliest stages was restricted to the central power on the central plain, the Shang capital, the last of
which was Anyang.23 Workshops yielding mold fragments for the casting of bronze vessels have been
found at Anyang, suggesting that production of the vessels was done here rather than at the mines
after refinement of the materials.24 The mines mentioned above were discovered far away from
Anyang, so the ore, or more likely the refined metal, needed to be transported quite a distance to
reach the workshops where the bronzes were produced. Banditry is a problem that arises whenever
valuable goods are being transported, and so the shipments of metals would need to be accompanied
by armed escort if the safety of the shipment was to be assured. While the refining of the ore at the
mine would reduce the volume of material needing to be shipped, refined metal has added value due
to the complex nature of the process by which it was produced, so those who were not privy to this
process or lacked the resources to implement the infrastructure would place a high price on these
goods. The condensed nature of the refined material is such that it is easier to transport and guard,
but this must be weighed against the fact that the cargo would be quite precious. The people who
developed the mining and refining operation needed also to maintain a system that allowed for
regular armed shipments between the mines and the capital to provide a secure flow of metal, so
possession of bronze itself was a symbol of the power of implementation, demonstrating that this

22 For a discussion of the Tonglushan mine site, see Li 2015, 63–64.

23 Notable examples of intricate bronze objects produced separately from those connected with Anyang have been
unearthed at Sanxingdui 三星堆. See Li 2015, 86–89.

24 Shaughnessy 1991, 37–38.

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would be an endeavor restricted to the elite.

As for the actual methods employed in casting the bronzes, early scholars assumed without
much thought that the lost-wax method of casting which is commonly seen in early Western bronze
working and later adopted on the central plain was also used in the earliest castings.25 It was not until
the 1960s that the piece-mold casting theory, which found its roots in Orvar Karlbeck’s 1935 study of
mold fragments, became the favored model.26 Instead of creating a wax model that would be melted
away, the model could be made of any material desired by the caster.27 Clay would then be packed
around this, divided into sections that could be removed from the model after baking. These could
then be reassembled around an inverted core designed to produce the inner cavity of the vessel with
proper spacing maintained by small pieces of metal shaped for the job. After fitting the various pieces
of the mold, the bronze could be poured into the cavity, and the mold could be broken away from the
finished vessel after cooling. Bagley provides excellent illustrations for this process as it would have
been done to produce the fāngyí 方彞 seen in Figure 1. A schematic for the piece-mold sections can
be seen in Figure 3, and fragments of an actual piece used to create a fāngyí can be seen in Figure 2.
This second major stage of the process requires advanced understanding of mold production and
casting techniques, which, similar to smelting and refining, would not have been widely understood,
as evidenced again by the restriction of bronze production to few select areas in the earliest stages.28
This is further evidence for the restriction of vessel to elite usage.

25 Archaeological evidence suggests that the lost-wax technique was not used until about the sixth century BCE. The lost-
wax technique consists of first creating a model of the object to be cast in wax, with all of the details cut into it. This was
then encased in clay, leaving holes to drain the wax and add the molten metal, and baked, causing a hardened mold to be
formed and the wax to melt and drain away. See Shaughnessy 1991, 36–37; and Bagley 1990, 9.

26 Bagley returns to the question of molds used in the making of bronze vessels in Bagley 2008.

27 The description of the piece-mold process given here follows that provided by Bagley 1990, 9–10.

28 Li 2015, 59–65.

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Figure 2. Part of the mold for a fāngyí, ca. eleventh century BCE, from Anyang
Yinxu, Miaopu Beidi. Source: Bagley 1990, 10 (Fig. 6).

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Figure 3. Mold diagram for the fāngyí of Figure 1. Drawing by Whitney Powell.
Source: Bagley 1990, 9 (Fig. 5).

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Figure 4. Name inscriptions of bronze vessels from Xiaotun M18 tomb, Anyang,
c. 1200 BCE. (a)/(b): Yu 漁; (c): Zheng 征; (d): Zheng Hou 征侯? Source: Bagley,
“Anyang Writing and the Origin of Chinese Writing,” 203.

With a model for the production of bronzes, the purpose of the inscriptions can be addressed.
The number stated above for the dating of the relative appearance of uninscribed and inscribed
vessels is not static and could fluctuate pending the discovery of earlier examples of bronzes of either
type, but the number of bronzes already unearthed or passed down by collectors is substantial, so it
seems unlikely that the effect of this would be great. A factor of greater importance to this study is
what is taken to be a meaningful inscription when looking at inscribed vessels. The earliest graphs
seen on extent bronze vessels consist of only a few graphs, which often identify the person for whom
the bronze was cast or possibly are a lineage symbol.29 These short inscriptions tend to be highly

29 Qiu 2000, 62.

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stylized and much more pictographic than the graphs seen on the bones and shells, which Bagley
suggests is due to the ease of inscription on the soft clay which formed the molds.30 The inscriptions
found on the bronze vessels are rather different from those of the Bone and Shell Script, because
rather than being incised onto the media directly, the graphs were formed in the mold and thereby
cast as part of the vessels.31 Bagley provides examples of stylized inscriptions with names like “Prince
Yu,” or Zǐ Yù 子漁, or “Marquis of Zheng,” or Zhēng Hóu 征侯, which point to royal lineages. These
inscriptions have been reproduced in Figure 4.

Figure 5. Examples of early differences in the Sinographic script from around 1200
BCE to 800 BCE. Source: Qiu 2000, 65.

Understanding the reasoning behind the appearance of the name and possible clan signs is a
complete guessing game if taken alone, but using the longer, content-laden inscriptions of later

30 Bagley 2004, 200–202.

31 Shaughnessy 1991, 40–42.

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periods to reflect back on the early inscriptions provides clues.32 Bronzes were commissioned for
numerous reasons ranging from the appointment of an official to the commemoration of a military
victory. There are numerous examples during the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) of inscriptions which
record appointment ceremonies, where an individual deemed worthy by the king is given an official
position and the accoutrements to go along with it.33 In general, four distinct sections are commonly
found in the longer inscriptions — date and place notation, event notation, a gift list, and a
dedication.34 The date and place of the event are noted, followed by an account of the event, often
including the reason for the event. Gifts were usually offered by the king to the person commissioning
the vessel, and then the donor, or commissioner of the vessel, dedicates it to certain ancestors so that
it may be used to worship their spirits.
This was a ceremonial appointment of both ritual and legal import in which the king
conferred status onto the appointee and his family. Reflecting back on the early vessels whose
inscriptions were short, usually containing only possibly a name or lineage symbol, it becomes clear
that these inscriptions might be early forms of the later inscriptions commemorating appointments.
However, the names seen in these early inscriptions suggest that the people involved in the
production of the vessels were the royal family rather than officials. For both situations, the
inscriptions have a demonstrative purpose, displaying status to those who are literate among the elite,
but as time progressed, that status and literacy spread. Li Feng points to the dissemination of vessels
to ritual centers beyond the capital as a way of pushing the influence of the Zhou state outward.35 By
providing appointed officials with inscribed bronzes and establishing them in regions on the
periphery, the officials became tied to the Zhou central power through common ancestral worship,
and the bronzes themselves and the inscriptions on them could serve as demonstrative proof of that

32 See Figure 5 for a reproduction of a chart demonstrating the differences in the Shang and Zhou script by media from
Qiu 2000, 65.

33 For multiple rubbings and translations of inscriptions recording appointment ceremonies, see Kern, “The Performance
of Writing in Western Zhou China” in Houston 2007, 140–151.

34 Here the terminology of Shaughnessy is adopted. See Shaughnessy 1991, 76–85.

35 Li 2015, 146–155.

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connection. However, this is a diffusive spiral, because the power represented by an inscribed bronze
from the king lessens as they grow in number — not to mention that the power that they represented
led other groups to begin to attempt to emulate the process.36
The acquisition of the materials required to produce bronze vessels alone mean that the
vessels would be a symbol of power due to the system that needed to be maintained for a steady
supply. This suggests a possible explanation for the lack or simplicity of inscriptions on the earliest
bronzes — the vessels were largely restricted to the royal family at the capital. The earliest
inscriptions that appeared served as stylized marks of ownership, erring on the pictographic side, but
the scope of participating individuals in this show of possessions was narrow. As vessels began to be
consigned to a wider range, both genetically and spatially, of people through appointment ceremonies,
the inscriptions became longer, providing greater detail of the reasons why this appointee received his
honors and to which ancestors the vessel was dedicated. These served as reminders to its descendants
of the reason the family earned the vessel, and made other members of the literate elite aware of the
status of the family in question.
The quality of the script varies greatly, especially when the less skilled craftsmen of the later
period are taken into consideration, but during the Shang and Zhou, the graphs are recognizably
similar to the Shell and Bone Graphs discussed earlier, but more refined and smoother. The elegant
character of the script is connected to factors associated with both of the media involved in the
production process — clay molds and bronze vessels. The clay of the molds is easier to manipulate
than the bones and shells, so the forms of the graphs can be made smoother with less effort. As
symbols of power through either proof of ability to produce or proof of consignment from the central
power, the demonstrative nature of the script would push the elite to desire elegant, aesthetically
pleasing inscriptions to be displayed on their bronzes.

SEALS AND TEXTUAL IDENTITY

The problems involved with identifying the self are not easily solved, especially in pre-

36 Shaughnessy discusses the appearance of bronzes cast by less skilled workers that could roughly pass as those created
by the royal casters appearing as early as the Western Zhou. See Shaughnessy 1991, 78.

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imperial China, but one method for proof of person that has remained popular throughout Chinese
history up to the present day is that of the seal. Even now, the signature has yet to replace the
personal seal in many aspects of formal interaction in East Asian countries such as China and Japan,
but that is not to say that the nature of the seal in pre-imperial China was the same as the personal
seals seen today. The methods by which seals are used underwent great change between their earliest
use and the invention of paper.
The basic structure of a seal has not changed much over the millennia, and a few examples
can be seen in Figure 6. Seals are made in a variety of different shapes and from many different
materials, and so there are multiple possible processes for their production. The earliest extent seals
were cast in bronze, and bronze has been the most prevalent material used in their production, but
other materials, such as gold, silver, and jade, were also used.37 The inscriptions tend to be found on
one face of the seal, with the other faces being either unadorned or embellished with designs;
however, there have been cases were multiple faces were engraved with different inscriptions.38 The
graphs of these inscriptions can either be in relief or intaglio, depending more on the style desired by
the producer of the seal rather than the specific material, with different impressions being produced
based on these design choices.

37 See Lai 1976, xii.

38 Ibid., xiii.

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Figure 6. Top left: “Great Wealth Seal.” Warring States. Top right: Inscription of
previous seal: Yi You Bai Jin 宜有百金. Bottom left: “Chang T’san Name Seal.”
Bottom right: Inscription of previous seal: Zhang Can Yin Xin 張參印信. Source:
National Palace Museum Guoli Gugong Bowuguan 國立故宮博物館.

Early in the use of seals, their role as markers of identity was tied to the physical seal; it was
carried with the individual, perhaps attached to his belt, and, when necessary, the inscription on the
seal would be presented as identification.39 Early seal inscriptions recorded rank rather than specific
identity, but as they came to be more widely used, both rank and personal names became common in
the seal inscriptions.40 Seals conjure up images of letters sealed with wax and marked with the seal of
the sender as proof of authenticity, and a similar practice is evidenced in the sealing of bamboo slip

39 See Lai 1976, 20.

40 Ibid., x.

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documents. Not wax but clay was often employed to encase the knot tied to secure the documents,
and remnants of these pieces of clay have been discovered that retain the impression of seal
inscriptions dating back to the Warring States period.41 Before the invention and widespread use of
paper, seals were used to make imprints in clay rather than leave the ink markings so commonly seen
in the later period.
The need to identify oneself inspired the production of seals with elaborately stylized script,
which is reminiscent of the modern practice of stylizing money. The earliest inscriptions were very
reminiscent of the script seen in the bronze inscriptions mentioned above, but during the Warring
States period and into the imperial period, inscription styles evolved to fill the surface of the seals. The
production of a seal inscription became heavily reliant on mastery of specialized seal scripts which
differed in execution through their fluidity. The selection of each graph relied on the surrounding
graphs in the inscription, and so each graph would be rendered differently on different seals
depending on the content of the inscription. In this way, seal inscriptions began to fill the role that
signatures fill in Western culture today. As the seals spread in use from simply identifying the rank of
officials or royalty to presenting names of individuals, the script used evolved to fill the need to
produce unique representations for proof of person. This script adapted to the media, the small
surface of a seal, by filling the surface and allowing the graphs to conform to the scriptural
environment in which they were written.

PORTABILITY AT THE COST OF PERMANENCE

The final section of this study of Sinographic script up to the Han dynasty addresses the problems
involved with the many perishable media employed, specifically bamboo slips, wood, and silk.42 The
earliest texts written on these perishable media that have been unearthed were written on bamboo
slips which date to the late Warring States period, so little can be said about the nature of the script on

41 See Qiu 2000, 93–94.

42 This section will take a close look at the Chu bamboo slips found at Guodian 郭店, but there have been other important
discoveries of texts written on perishable materials dating to the pre-imperial period, such as the Chu silk manuscripts
discovered near Changsha 長沙.

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these media prior to this point. Evidence of the use of these materials, likely bamboo or wood slips,
can be seen in inscriptions on bone and bronze where the graph cè 冊, with some variation, is used,
referring to other texts not preserved in the archaeological record as it is seen today.43 The exact
meaning of the graph in the various situations is a topic of debate, but scholars agree that at the basic
level it refers to collections of slips lashed together with rope or string.
These bound collections of strips are distinct from the bones, bronzes, and seals by the
convenience of the media. Texts written on bamboo, for example, are much more easily transported
than inscriptions on bronze and bone, and bamboo allows for much longer texts than the surface of a
seal. Not only is bamboo relatively light, if prepared correctly, the slips could be stacked and rolled in
a neat fashion, allowing for the creation of cè documents. Texts written on these media range in
content from short notes to longer texts such as the sections of the Dàodé Jīng 道德經 discovered
among the Chu bamboo slips found at Guodian.44 The possibility that bones and shells may have been
used to keep a system of records was mentioned in the first section of this paper, but records kept on
bamboo or wood slips are much more likely, and the bone and bronze inscriptions even suggest this
with their mention of cè as noted above. The convenience of the media is key to understanding the
influence which it had on the development of the script, especially in the late Warring States and into
the early imperial period, the effects of which posed problems to a new power player on the central
plain — the Qin Empire.
The situation prior to the standardization of the script under the Qin at the hand of the official
Li Si 李斯 (280–208 BCE) is easiest to understand from the perspective of the emergence of new
powers paired with the convenience of the media. The shift in power away from the Zhou into the
hands of the smaller states that constituted the “Warring States”45 saw the development of variants of

43 For a discussion of the appearance of ce 冊 in early texts, see Kern, 152–7. For references to ce in early texts, see Qiu
2000, 62–63.

44 The discovery of these texts has led scholars such as Paul Goldin to entertain the possibility that texts in the Warring
States period circulated to a much higher degree than was previously understood, with literate elite collecting texts or
various types or schools of thought (Goldin 2005, 4–5).

45 The main states that survived into the Warring States period were Qin, Han, Wei, Zhao, Qi, Chu, and Yan. For a
discussion of interactions between these states, especially related to warfare and sacrifice, see Lewis, Sanctioned Violence

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the script unique to each state, which was mentioned in the discussion of late bronzes. The script seen
on bronzes is designed for some level of demonstrative purpose, and so it is elegant and aesthetically
pleasing, yet clear. When investing the resources necessary to cast vessels, wanting a clear and
impressive inscription is understandable, but in the case of perishable, or even disposable materials,
the need for standard presentation is not as intense. Because of this, the various script types seen
throughout the states of the Warring States period probably emerged through relatively inexpensive,
perishable media before being used to inscribe the bronze vessels. This explanation fits with early
narratives of script development where it has been suggested that the inscriptions seen on bone, shell,
and bronze from the Shang and Zhou may have been modelled on script that appeared on perishable
media no longer extent.46 Bagley points to a small collection of bones that have graphs printed on
them.

Figure 7. Graphs of the characters zhe 者 and shi 市 as they appeared in the
regional scripts in the late Warring States period. Source: Qiu 2000, 87.

An examination of the style of the script as it appears on the bamboo slips reveals that it was
most likely written in a haphazard and hasty manner, which is not unreasonable if modern
handwriting is kept in mind. The graphs often vary in size, shape, structure, and execution, both
across regions and internally. In studies of the script in the late Warring States period, scholars often
mention the varying nature of the script, but it is difficult to conceptualize what this means without

in Early China.

46 Bagley in Houston 2007, 200–201.

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visuals. Figure 8 presents varying forms of graphs that have been interpreted to be forms of wén 聞,
meaning “to hear,” and wèn 問, meaning “to inquire,” as seen in the slips unearthed at Guodian. The
following short discussion involves the graphs found on various documents at Guodian, which are of
the Chu script variety, but this is only one of the states mentioned above, so inconsistencies seen here
are only a subset of the problems that Li Si and the Qin would face following the Qin unification. Qiu
Xigui provides a simple but illuminating graphic demonstrating regional variance which has been
reproduced in Figure 7.

Figure 8. Examples of script variation within the Chu Warring States period script.
Source: Ma 2001: (1) p. 242; (2) p. 187; (3) p. 218; (4) p. 214; (5) p. 303.

While character borrowing is not uncommon in Sinographic writing, the inconsistent

interchangeability of graphs in texts such as these could easily cause confusion to a reader, especially
if the reader is not versed in all possible variants. The standard script, or kǎishū 楷書, glosses are
interpretations as seen in the 2001 publication of the Chu bamboo slips in the Shanghai Museum
collection by Ma Chengyuan 馬承源. The first two examples demonstrate the graph, which is glossed
in standard script as hūn 昏, being used semantically as both “to hear” and “to inquire” in different

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sections of the text. The last three demonstrate not only that the same semantic idea can be glossed
with multiple graphs with the addition of the graph represented in standard script as wén 䎽 being
used semantically as “to hear,” but also that calligraphic differences could also vary greatly. The last
two graphs are even found within the same text, but looking at their structure, it is not obvious that
they are the same graphs. This example demonstrates the internal inconsistencies of the Warring
States scripts, where graphs glossed multiple semantic ideas, multiple graphs were used for the same
semantics, and the same graph was rendered in inconsistent structure.
Such variations or inconsistencies in the script, whether they are found within a single
regional script or across regions, would pose a significant problem to an empire that wished to unite
the peoples of these various regions. If regional scripts differ, then messages or edicts sent between
different regions would not be intelligible, even under the assumption that the language used in each
region was the same.47 People in each region would need to be trained in all of the script varieties in
order to function efficiently with individuals from other regions. Implementation of such training
would be time consuming and would likely impair the functioning of governance through
communication difficulties. Developing a clearer picture of the state of the Sinographic script at the
time of the unification of the states under Qin in 221 BCE highlights the reasons underlying the need
to standardize the script, but what this undertaking entailed is not clearly understood, so a brief
overview is warranted.
Two major script styles were formalized throughout the Qin and into the early Han — the Qin
seal script and the clerical script. The standardization of the script by Li Si refers to the formalization
of the Qin seal script, which is directly related to the discussion of the Warring States scripts
presented earlier. The formulation of the Qin seal script was not entirely the work of Li Si and those
who worked with him. This style of the Sinographic script developed over time in ways similar to the
scripts found in the other states during the Warring States.48 The role which Li Si played in this process
was likely two-fold, involving the elimination of variant graphs and imposing the script on the various

47 This assumption is made for instructional purposes here, but it must be noted that different regions during the Warring
States must have had diverse modes of speech.

48 Qiu 2000, 97–103.

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regions. As was demonstrated using the script of Chu, the script used within each of the individual
states was not internally consistent, and so the first stage of Li Si’s job would be to establish a set of
standard graphs in order to “define” the Qin seal script. This can be likened to the methodology used
in modern simplifications of the script, where certain graphs are abolished while others are
preserved.49 The work of Li Si is said to have been compiled as a collection of around 3300 graphs
serving as these standard graphs in a work known as the Cāngjié piān 倉頡篇. Its existence has been
called into question due to the fact that he was not associated with this work until around three
hundred years after his death by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92 CE) in the Book of Han 漢書, in spite of having a
long biography in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 Shǐjì 史記 in the early Han.50 The second stage of the process
would require imposing this script across the empire to the regional governments in all of the regions,
which was no simple feat. The Qin are notorious for the alleged “burning of books” at the behest of the
First Emperor, but this is easily understood if taken as a part of the script standardization.51 If one is
implementing a standardized script across the regions, destroying texts written in the variant regional
scripts would be an effective way to discourage their use in favor of the standard script, but whether
or not this was actually the case is an open question.
While the earliest usages of perishable media for writing on the central plain are unlikely
never to be understood precisely, the later effects of the use of these media can be seen clearly from
the Warring States period onward. Developments in the Sinographic script seen on such media as the
bronze vessels seem to have had their roots in the perishable media as early as the Shang, which is
reasonable due to the disposable nature of the perishable media. Writing on perishable media is
efficient in both effort and portability, and so writings on these media are more likely to propagate
mistakes or stylistic modifications. In the late Warring States period, the diverse regional scripts likely
developed through the versatility of the perishable media, and this was accelerated by diffusion of
power to the regional kings who no longer needed to model themselves after Zhou. This presented

49 For an overview of the methodology employed in the 1955 simplification of the Chinese script, see Hsia, China’s
Language Reforms. For a more detailed discussion, see Zhou 2013, 57–92.

50 For an English translation of the biography of Li Si in the Shiji, see Bodde 1967, 12–55.

51 Ibid., 150–151.

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problems for the Qin unification in the form of inefficiency of governance, which led to forced
modification and standardization of the script in the early imperial period.

CONCLUSION

Throughout the pre-imperial period, the interplay between media and government was at the
forefront of the evolution of the Sinographic script. The inscriptions on bone and shell, which were
clearly the prerogative of the king and his immediate relations only, sat alongside a fluid evolution of
bronze inscriptions. With the practice of pyro-osteomancy predating the use of the Shell and Bone
Script, the circumstances surrounding the script’s emergence must have been incited by the elite’s
changing needs. The Shell and Bone Script seems to have been employed for either restricted
demonstrative purposes between the royal elite of the Shang or possibly as a communicatory bridge
with the ancestral spirits of the royal family.
A similar but complicated trend is seen in the evolution of bronze inscriptions. The restriction
of bronze vessels to those who could muster the resources to maintain the infrastructure required to
produce them is reflected in the earliest short but highly stylized name inscriptions as identification
of property. Those restrictions slowly decayed as the vessels were consigned to appointed officials
furthur down the royal family tree, and what was once a sign of royal power became a sign of royal
approval of an individual and his lineage. In both situations, the role played by the script is
demonstrative, so while similar in structure to the Shell and Bone Script, the graphs are refined for
presentation. This was aided by the ease of manipulation of the clay of the mold, which allowed for
elegant graphs to be produced with less effort. With the decentralization of power during the Western
Zhou, the power to produce these spread to the many states of the Warring States period and became
a way each could distinguish itself from other states, and underline its sovereignty. This was
accompanied by fragmentation of the Sinographic script into multiple state-specific scripts, likely
emerging from the script as it was written on perishable media.
Elegence of presentation was taken a step further in the refinement of the graphs seen on
seals, whose production became intimitely tied to the individual identified by the inscription. The
earliest seals, as we have seen, were symbols of official positions held rather than an individual’s name.

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But as their use spread and they became tied to individual identity, stylistic calligraphic
representation was key both for aesthetic demonstration and personal identification. Stylized
inscriptions were a sign of refinement, and calligraphic style was associated with the individual
identified.
Script on perishable media in the pre-imperial period, evidenced mainly by bamboo slips that
have been unearthed in recent times, had a profound effect on the emergence of the diverse regional
scripts seen in the Warring States period. The convenience and disposability of the media allowed for
liberated development of the script that operated outside of the restricted framework of display on
bronze, bone, and jade. While these other media are associated here with elegance and
demonstration, the perishable media are for quick and efficient writing for the production of bamboo
slip texts, messages, and letters. The need for efficient communication and solidarity led the Qin and
their official Li Si to standardize the script in the formalization of the Qin seal script, but this spread to
media beyond the perishables, being used in inscriptions as well. This observation aligns with the idea
that scripts used on the perishable media ultimately influenced those employed in formal inscriptions.
With this, the need to control the script following the wild Warring States period was finally given
closure.

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