Planning Chinese Characters: Reaction, Evolution or Revolution? (Language Policy)

PLANNING CHINESE CHARACTERS

Language Policy VOLUME 9 Series Editors:

Bernard Spolsky, Bar-llan University, Israel Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University, Israel Editorial Board:

Claire Kramsch, University of California at Berkeley, USA Georges Lüdi, University of Basel, Switzerland Normand Labrie, University of Toronto, Canada Anne Pakir, National University of Singapore, Singapore John Trim, Former Fellow, Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University, USA The last half century has witnessed an explosive shift in language diversity not unlike the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, but involving now a rapid spread of global languages and an associated threat to small languages. The diffusion of global languages, the stampede towards English, the counter-pressures in the form of ethnic efforts to reverse or slow process, the continued determination of nationstates to assert national identity through language, and, in an opposite direction, the greater tolerance shown to multilingualism and the increasing concern for language rights, all these are working to make the study of the nature and possibilities of language policy and planning a field of swift growth. The series will publish empirical studies of general language policy or of language education policy, or monographs dealing with the theory and general nature of the field. We welcome detailed accounts of language policy-making – who is involved, what is done, how it develops, why it is attempted. We will publish research dealing with the development of policy under different conditions and the effect of implementation. We will be interested in accounts of policy development by governments and governmental agencies, by large international companies, foundations, and organizations, as well as the efforts of groups attempting to resist or modify governmental policies. We will also consider empirical studies that are relevant to policy of a general nature, e.g. the local effects of the developing European policy of starting language teaching earlier, the numbers of hours of instruction needed to achieve competence, selection and training of language teachers, the language effects of the Internet. Other possible topics include the legal basis for language policy, the role of social identity in policy development, the influence of political ideology on language policy, the role of economic factors, policy as a reflection of social change. The series is intended for scholars in the field of language policy and others interested in the topic, including sociolinguists, educational and applied linguists, language planners, language educators, sociologists, political scientists, and comparative educationalists.

PLANNING CHINESE CHARACTERS Reaction, Evolution or Revolution?

by SHOUHUI ZHAO Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

RICHARD B. BALDAUF Jr. University of Queensland, Australia

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to our mentors and our colleagues who are working to understand the limits of language planning

Contents

Dedication.................................................................................................... v Authors ....................................................................................................... ix Abbreviations............................................................................................... xi Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii Foreword.................................................................................................... xv Prologue....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1

Making Hanzi Accessible.................................................... 23

Chapter 2

Reflections on New Perspectives......................................... 71

Chapter 3

New Challenges for a Digital Society ............................... 111

Chapter 4

Standardization as a Solution ............................................ 137

Chapter 5

Influencing Outcomes ....................................................... 191

Chapter 6

Envisioning the Future ....................................................... 249

Chapter 7

Some Critical Issues .......................................................... 287

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Contents

Acknowledgments ................................................................................... 329 Appendix.................................................................................................. 331 Notes ........................................................................................................ 361 References................................................................................................ 377 Content Index........................................................................................... 407 Author Index............................................................................................ 415

Authors

Zhao Shouhui (PhD, University of Sydney) is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP), NIE at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A professional language teacher by training, Zhao has been teaching and researching in Chinese applied linguistics for the past 19 years at 7 universities in 5 countries beginning in 1988, when he completed his MA in Chinese Applied Linguistics at Renmin University of China (Beijing). Zhao is a member of All-China Society of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and the Singapore Association of Applied Linguistics. He has published in the areas of linguistics and education. Zhao is the primary co-author of three dualauthored Chinese language textbooks and the co-complier of two dictionaries. He has also contributed a number of ephemeral pieces (e.g., prose, short stories, film reviews, etc.) to a range of literary publications, websites and broadcasts. Richard B. Baldauf Jr. (PhD, University of Hawai’i) is Associate Professor of TESOL in the School of Education at the University of Queensland and is on the Executive of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA). He has published numerous articles in refereed journals and books. He is co-editor of Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific (Multilingual Matters, 1990), principal researcher and editor for the Viability of Low Candidature LOTE Courses in Universities (DEET, 1995) and co-author with Robert B. Kaplan of Language Planning from Practice to Theory (Multilingual Matters, 1997) and Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the

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Authors

Pacific Basin (Kluwer, 2003). He is Executive Editor of the journal Current Issues in Language Planning and co-editor of six volumes in the Multilingual Matters Series, Language Planning and Policy.

Abbreviations

AI – Artificial Intelligence GB 2312-80 – Basic Set of Standard Chinese Characters for Information Interchange-GB 2312-80 CCCF – Chinese Character Cultural Faction CCP – Chinese Communist Party CCSR – Commission of Chinese Script Reform CIP – Chinese Information Processing CTSC – Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters CWCC – Corpus of Whole Chinese Characters FSS – First Simplification Scheme FTVVF – First Table of Verified Variant Forms GB – Guojia Biaozhan: National Standard GLPFCC – General List of Print Fonts of Chinese Characters GLSC – General List of Simplified Characters IR – Information Retrieval IT – Information Technology LPers – Language Planners LPP – Language Policy and Planning NCLW – National Conference on Language Work OCR – Optical Character Recognition PRC – People’s Republic of China RC – Rare Characters RIAL – Research Institute of Applied Linguistics SCLW – State Commission of Language Work SR – Speech Recognition SSS – Second Simplification Scheme TSC – Table of Simplified Characters xi

Preface

One of the remarkable things about Chinese language policy over the millennia has been the power of the writing system to unite what are disparate if related spoken varieties. We have already published one book on PRC language policy in this series, a collection edited by Minglang Zhou that covered the full range of topics including the development of Putonghua (common speech), the status of minority languages, and some interesting chapters on the reform of the writing system. This last subject is of such complexity and importance to justify adding to the series a book going into more detail on developments in efforts to manage and cultivate the writing system in the last 50 years, taking into account the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and the technological developments associated with computers and the web. It is important, we feel, to back up the common generalizations about language policy with detailed studies of specific topics, where one can observe at close hand the plans and activities of language managers, the problems they set out to solve, and their successes and failures. This is precisely what Zhao and Baldauf set out to do in this full account and analysis of the challenges met by recent efforts to adjust the Chinese writing system to new demands. We would like to express our thanks to the authors and to the others who contributed to the production of this volume. In particular, we want to

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thank the specialist reviewers who carefully read the manuscript, raising interesting points in a controversial field, and proposing some modifications that have made it a better book. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy Series Editors March 2007

Foreword

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a growing, developing, and dynamic society that is moving to take its place as a major world power. Having the world’s largest population – i.e., human resource base – it is estimated that sometime in the next 20 years, China will move from having the third to having the world’s largest economy. Everyone knows that the world’s most populous country has been experiencing radical change over the past two decades, yet few people are aware that at the same time the Chinese writing system has also undergone a less prominent, but no less significant silent revolution. This development has led a number of language experts to predict that as the power and influence of China grows, so too will the spread of the Chinese language. Some commentators have even suggested Chinese will surpass English as the world’s most common lingua franca. However, for the Chinese language to grow in power and influence, a number of hurdles first must be overcome, in particular the challenges of technology. The barriers to the growth and spread of the Chinese language are very different for spoken and written Chinese. This monograph focuses on the written variety as it traces the language policy and planning-related developments for Chinese characters, with particular emphasis on the post1950 period of the PRC and the more recent challenges that technology, and particularly the use of Chinese on the world wide web have posed for the language. This volume examines the linguistic, cultural, political, and economic debate, the outcome of which could determine whether Chinese reaches its international language potential, and explores some possible language policy and planning directions for the future.

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Foreword

Historically, while Chinese language policy and planning developments can generally be characterized as evolutionary, during the last century, and particularly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, there have been forces, both reactionary (i.e., elements of traditional language and cultural purism) and revolutionary (i.e., ‘alphabetic’ or radical simplification schemes) at work in language policy and planning (LPP). Over recent decades, this conflict of forces about the direction of character (hanzi) development has become intense, particularly since the milestone National Conference on Language Work held in 1986, where future possible simplification or radical treatment of the physical shape of hanzi and full-fledged Romanization were ruled out by the official working agenda of the conference. At the same time, to address the new challenges brought on by the advances that have occurred in communication technology, a more comprehensive and larger scale LPP program with the goal of ultimately overhauling the hanzi repertoire has been undertaken. The focus of this major operation has been the so called ‘Four Fixations’ or standardizations, aimed at settling the four most unstable attributes of hanzi, namely the number of hanzi, their ordering, shape and pronunciation. It is widely believed that once these four features are fixed or standardized and implemented through legally binding governmental measures like the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters (CTSC) and the Corpus of Whole Chinese Character (CWCC), some of China’s major language and communication problems will be on the way to being resolved. More importantly, and of more direct consequence, once they are required for new information technology (IT) products, it is argued there will be far-reaching effects and a significant impact on the linguistic life of the whole population. This may, eventually, in a silent and programmatic way, come to create a revolutionary impact on the visual communication life of hanzi users across the globe. Given the importance of China and the potential of the Chinese language, an understanding of these issues is critical for not only our understanding of China, but also for second-language policies and their implementation as they relate to the teaching of Chinese around the world. This book summarizes struggle to modernize the Chinese writing system, with a particular focus on the emerging conflict between the world’s oldest surviving writing system and the latest advances that have occurred in technology. The structure of the book has been developed around the problemsolution paradigm characteristic of much of classical language planning. The historical context and some discussion of basic features of hanzi are briefly reviewed in the Prologue for the benefit of readers not familiar with

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this background. In Chapter 1 we provide a relatively detailed presentation of modern simplification history, starting with a summary of dynastic simplifications, followed by the three simplification processes that occurred in the period spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. These were the most important clinical treatments that ever have been performed on the hanzi in their historical development. Chapter 2 briefly reviews past LPP experiences with a focus on the undesirable outcomes of the previous reforms from the perspective of the new historical context. The authors examine the chaotic situation that existed in the public’s use of hanzi in 1980s, and the prevailing confusion in academia about the evaluation of hanzi reform and hanzi’s future as it was affected by simplification and social transformation processes. The analysis of this transformation focuses on the impact of the cultural and socio-political dimensions of LPP activities. Chapter 3 sets out the problem. It concentrates on the conflicts between hanzi as a visual communication system and the needs of modern information technology in a digital society. A description of the enormous efforts Chinese scientists have undertaken to computerize hanzi is provided, illustrating for non-specialist readers the problems that Chinese IT experts and LPP professionals confront in tackling hanzi’s mechanical deficiencies. In particular, a substantial part of this section is devoted to the two key concepts: chongma and luanma. The former can be defined as accidental homophonic occurrence in hanzi computer input typically found when using phonetic input methods, the dominant scheme for entering hanzi into a computer. The latter refers to a string of unintelligible gibberish that occurs when hanzi are decoded by different encoding platforms or applications or during the transmission of Chinese encoded information over international computer networks. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the rationale for the argument that further LPP programs need to be carried out, thus forming the central focus for the subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 discusses hanzi’s standardization, or the so-called four fixations (hanzi siding), as the means to overcome hanzi’s inherent limitations in the technological applications described in Chapter 2. Since the mid-1980s, standardization has been pinpointed as the societal solution to address a situation where hanzi have become a retarding factor in upgrading Chinese communication technology. The standardization issue has come to take on greater significance as it is increasingly essential for the enhancement of communication in Chinese. It may not be an exaggeration to say that it has now come to the stage where no major advances in Chinese computerization can be expected until the hanzi infrastructure is improved. In other words, if this issue is not resolved actively and quickly,

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the question of hanzi’s survival as a mass writing form may be at stake. The major portion of this chapter provides a comprehensive examination of the contents of the four fixations and the various difficulties related to the standardization movement. Then, in the last section, an introduction is provided to the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters and the overhauling of the repertoire of all Chinese characters, the two major undertakings of official IT-oriented LPP agendas in the current context. In Chapter 5, we set out the external enabling factors that are bound to influence and determine hanzi standardization work and future trends in a more general fashion. Seven influential factors or sociolinguistic dimensions are identified and discussed. The discussions of these seven dimensions are presented according to a hierarchy of the influence or power that individual factors can exert on hanzi reform development, aiming to identify possible cause-and-effect patterns that would influence the direction of future reform. Each dimension is critically discussed through either: a) generalizations from historical experience and inquiry, b) an examination of the current trends and future directions using analytic approaches, or c) international comparisons. In Chapter 6, which summarizes the past and looks to the future, the external conditions for LPP are further examined from a sociolinguistic perspective. The first section focuses on the conflict between social development and technological advancement by analyzing the compatibility between standardization and societal conditions. To accommodate the new context, a pluricentric model of hanzi standardization is proposed. As standardization involves the choice between more than one alternative variant, the changes in linguistic behavior can only come about if there is a more open consensus building approach to LPP. Therefore, as part of an examination of the reform process, the last section of this chapter argues that it is also necessary to explore the possibility of establishing reliable and trustworthy LPP mechanisms that guarantee democracy and transparency for future hanzi reforms. The concluding chapter reflects critically on some key issues concerning hanzi planning that do not conveniently fit into the previous chapters. These issues are arranged under three rubrics: 1) the renewed interest in Romanization, 2) how to deal with two kinds of problems arising from the two simplification schemes implemented in the 1950s and 1970s, i.e., a) a strong survival of some simplified characters from the Second Scheme (1977) among the public, and b) the failure to develop an automatic conversion between simplified and traditional characters as the result of oversimplification in the Table of Simplified Characters (1956, 1964), and 3) a section on a common script that considers the possibility of a cross-

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national unifying standard among hanzi-using regions. This final issue is examined at two levels: the use of a set of real life standardized hanzi shared by all concerned hanzi-using polities and a unifying set of IT standards for encoding their use in cyberspace. By tracing the developments and challenges for China through an examination of the Chinese writing system, in this book we contemplate some possible futures for the country. Put another way, given China’s phenomenal economic growth, and the beginnings of the accompanying radical political and social development, the question may well be asked whether the evolutionary process that has occurred over the last half century with Chinese characters will lead to reaction or revolution. Because of the world’s dependence on the communication of information, these LPP developments may well help to determine the place of Chinese language in the world. Thus, while the discussion of these issues could be seen as just another scholarly debate, we believe the broader implications of these questions deserve a wider audience.

21 April 2007

Shouhui Zhao Richard B. Baldauf Jr.

PROLOGUE1

1.

THE ORIGINS OF HANZI

Due to the lack of authentic records, there is very little certainty about the earliest development of hanzi and only rough conclusions can be drawn. Archaeological findings have shown that the earliest embryonic forms of Chinese writing existed as far back as 4000 BCE on Neolithic pottery vessels. These earliest pictorial signs, referred to as Early ProtoCharacters (e.g., Hook and Twitchett 1991), are believed to be closely linked to signs inscribed on animal bones and tortoise shells ( jiaguwen) dating from the 13th century BCE. Although they were just the forerunners of Chinese ideograms, it shows that hanzi had developed for thousands of years before they were fully established as a writing system, adding more weight to the claim that hanzi are the world’s oldest continuing writing regimen. Jiaguwen are undisputedly regarded as the earliest relatively stabilized and systematically constructed form of Chinese writing. During the Shang dynasty (BCE 1600-1100), the major function of these inscriptions was to keep records of divination, rather than being a communication system for people’s everyday use. Some time after it was developed, the jiaguwen disappeared from history until they were accidentally rediscovered in 1899, and the complications surrounding this discovery have added an additional mysterious element to hanzi’s history2. Before that, they went unrecognized for what they were and were called dragon-bone, an expensive ingredient in traditional medicine. About 150,000 pieces of jiaguwen

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Prologue

from the Shang and Zhou dynasties have been found, with the best example bearing 128 recognizable inscriptions. Archaeological evidence of hanzi’s early development are so fragmentary that all theories about their origin are considered to be conjectural and speculative before jiaguwen’s time. However, even today there are at least four factors that keep Chinese characters shrouded in the mist of legend. First, there is hanzi’s long enduring history and imaginary explanations about its origin. Second, there is hanzi’s pictographic/ideographic structure. Third, the purposes of the early forms of Chinese characters are unclear (i.e., whether the oracle bone inscriptions were for divination purposes, or bronze inscriptions were for ancestor worship, the diviners were the only people who could give explanations of their meaning). Finally, there is the beauty of recondite Chinese calligraphy, which is essentially a very personal faculty that epitomizes spiritual expression and completely denies analysis. It is difficult to say who was the first person to concoct these stories, but traditionally, there are four theories about how hanzi were formed. Cooper (1989: 129), who finds a number of languages were imbued with legendary stories about the creation of their writing system, concludes that “supernatural assistance in the invention of writing systems is a common claim”. The most unique and best known legend ascribed the invention of hanzi to Cangjie, the official recorder of the mythical figure Huang Di (Yellow Emperor). It is said that Cangjie created hanzi wholesale out of the inspiration provided by a bird’s foot print. The other three theories are that hanzi: a) originated in incising notches on wood; b) were related to the invention of the notched stick which is dated at in the 27th century BCE, and c) evolved from tying knots in strings. The latter explanation is a universal visible communication method, found in many other cultures across the world, e.g., Quipus (Quechua for ‘knot’) used by tribes living in South America prior to the Spanish conquest, which consists of cords of different colors or shapes knotted in a very complicated way (Cobarrubias 1983). The Bagua (Eight Trigram) hypothesis provides another possible fascinating explanation. In the Yinyang Bagua system, which was said to have been invented by the legendary Emperor Fu Xi, all natural phenomena in the universe can be represented through a notational system using only two primary mystic signs ‘–’ and ‘– –’, or yang and yin3, in an oracular arrangement. This very sophisticated method can be practically understood using the analogy of the binary digit system (Zheng 1988: 316), although whether there is any relationship between Yinyang Bagua and the modern computer is debatable.

Prologue

2.

3

STRUCTURE EVOLUTION – FROM PICTURES TO SYMBOLS

It is generally agreed that there have been five major changes in the physical shape of hanzi: i.e., Oracle (including turtle shell and animal) bone inscription (jiaguwen, ), bronze inscription (jinwen, ), Seal Script (zhuanshu, ), Clerical Script (lishu, ) and Square Script (kaishu, ) (see Figure P-1). In the following sections, we briefly trace the five iconic stages that have marked the periodization of hanzi’s physical changes during its historical development, illustrating the general trend of how hanzi have evolved from their original prototype to what we see today, and examining the conditions under which these changes have occurred.

Figure P-1. The evolution of Chinese hanzi (Ager 2005)

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2.1

Prologue

Oracle Bone Inscription ( jiaguwen,

).

Hanzi’s traceable history began from pottery inscriptions, which were found to have existed 6,000-7,000 years ago, and have been archaeologically verified as the earliest signs for which the genetic link with jiaguwen can be established. Out of 4,672 character types found and identified on jiaguwen, only 1,723 can be deciphered without dispute among jiaguwen scholars. Because these characters are engraved by knife on turtle shells or big animal bones – written characters are pretty rare – jiaguwen are structured in thin and rugged lines and feature a long shape characterized by sharp shoulders, giving a strong impression of cutting. In comparison with its forerunners found on pottery, jiaguwen developed into a fuller linear form, but is still conspicuously pictorial and most are varied in a wide range of inconsistent shapes and unstable numbers of strokes. Constrained by the hard materials (knife and bone), only the outline of the object can be conveniently delineated. The elaborate drawing that often was found in pottery inscriptions was inevitably simplified and replaced by a few summary lines. Another striking feature of jiaguwen is that it is sometimes hard to tell if it is one or more than one character from the way it is written (see Figure P-2). The underlying principles for later hanzi formation also took shape at this time, as jiaguwen were sufficient in number for those needed for basic expression, and were a movement away from drawing actual objects. For these reasons, jiaguwen are considered to represent the coming to maturity of hanzi as a writing system.

Figure P-2. Inscribed Oracle Bone (Crystal 2005). (The concise and readable inscription is a record of deciphering the natural shell texture or crack patterns after being toasted over fire.)

Prologue

2.2

5

Bronze Inscription ( jinwen,

)

Bronze inscription can be said to have directly evolved from jiaguwen. The biggest difference from jiaguwen is its rounded shape with thicker lines, as these characters were cast or incised on bronze ware including ritual utensils and containers, and sometimes on stone monuments. Despite bearing some similarities to jiaguwen, and occasionally using picture-like signs in the text, a further step was taken in moving away from drawing pictures. Furthermore, not only was the size of each individual character standardized, but the rugged, uneven strokes that had characterized jiaguwen were also transformed into smooth, regular ones. The shape of these hanzi was more graceful and symmetrical (see Figure P-3). While jiaguwen were mainly used for divination purposes, bronze inscriptions were used in important ceremonies and the service of ancestor worship, so most contents (the longest extant text has 497 characters) functioned as a vehicle to perpetuated the patriarchal system, serving as a kind of materialization of social power and the status quo from a political perspective (Wang and Zou 1999). For the same reason, as Chiang Yee (1973: 43) observes, all characters are elaborately made to “be dignified and sublime, and designed to endure for many generations”, so bronze inscription has become the model for practicing calligraphy. A new academic subject – epigraphy (Jinshixue, the study of ancient inscriptions on cast bronze and carved in stone) – became a thriving academic study from the Song period (960-1279) lasting until the Qing period, when the scholars’ interest in hanzi switched to Jiaguxue as more oracle bone inscriptions were excavated.

Figure P-3. Bronze inscription (Galambos 2005)

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Prologue

During the later developmental phase of bronze inscription, a recorder at the court called Zhou ( ) synthesized the writing styles of bronze inscriptions, unifying to some extent the structure of these characters, making them easier to recognize and write. These redefined characters, typically represented by the so-called Stone Drum Inscription, depicting hunting expeditions, later came to be known as the Great Seal Script or Zhouwen. The great seal script Zhouwen was the major written communication means during the Zhou Dynasty (1100-221 BCE) and was used by all of the feudal states up to the Qin unification.

2.3

Small Seal Script4 (xiaozhuan,

)

Although it continued from the previous period, and was used into the late Zhou period, particularly during the time of the Warring States (475-221 BCE), the great seal script was no longer maintained as a universal standard in a disunified country. It was very common for the same character to have numerous variants in different competing states. Therefore, when the Qin Empire completed unification, a standardized form of great seal script was adopted as the standard character set to overcome the chaotic orthographic situation caused by half a millennium of feudal wars. It was called small seal because it was simpler and had a smaller number of strokes (although this is not true for all characters). Furthermore, each character was made to occupy a smaller imaginary square. Physically, the descriptive pictorial and representational ideographic rationality is still a dominant feature of small seal characters, albeit being further weakened, i.e., the pursuit of representing real things began to give way to the abstract symbols. Through this human intervention, all the irregularities of the earlier forms were dropped, and the writing style was marked by a preference for symmetry, balanced structure and a gently-curving stroke. Small seal script can be seen as a stepping-stone, connecting the earlier structure with the later evolution; it “break[s] away from pictographic forms, moving more towards linear and symbolic forms” (Yin and Rohsenow 1997: 35). But, by the small seal period, people were finding it increasingly impossible to express complex reality through near-real-life imitation, and a more productive method had to be found to represent oral expression. This development led to the combination of the existing ideographical signs and oral words, increasing semantic-phonetic characters to 80 percent of the total. This was a significant step towards creating a symbolic communication system. In this sense, although it gained official status by political coercion, the appearance and structure of small seal

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7

script has been generally regarded as being in accordance with the natural direction of script development.

2.4

Clerical Script (lishu,

)

Clerical script was a parallel style that prevailed at the same time as small seal script, and it came into being out of the need for a script with a higher speed of execution, so clerical script is the pragmatic shorthand form of seal script. As its name suggests, it was first used by clerks, military book-keepers and other civilian personnel serving in the huge administrative system of the highly centralized Qin Empire. As the state apparatuses grew more complex, the convenience and operational efficiency of communication became a major concern. Finding that small seal characters were still slow and laborious to write, Qin clerks simply ignored those unnecessarily strict formal pictorial elements needed to create an actual resemblance. Thus, for writing convenience, the circle was squared and rounded drawing lines were replaced by dots and straight lines, i.e., strokes. Through extensive use of strokes and square elements, the solid angles of jiaguwen were much softened and a great deal of movement and ease for writing was added. Hence the remarkable feature of this transformation is that the pictorial nature of hanzi was largely lost. This great change in developmental history has been referred to as ‘Li (cleric)-Change’ by Chinese philologists. Clerical script was not only popular among public servants in the shortlived Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE), but was also strongly promoted during the next dynasty – the Han (206 BCE-220 CE). One of the major factors for promoting clerical script might have been that the majority of the members of the ruling class during the initial period of the Han Dynasty were from a lower social stratum, therefore, they probably found themselves more comfortable with these pragmatic forms. The clerical script actually developed so quickly that it usurped the position of the small seal as the most popular style and achieved recognition among both ruling elites and plebeians, and by the Eastern Han (25-220 CE) period, the small seal script had lost favor even among the scholars蔽锯It was during this latter period that Xu Shen compiled the dictionary Shuowen jiezi ( ), in an attempt to resume the orthodox status of small seal script (Wang and Zou 1999). From this point of view, this dictionary can be seen as a result of the struggle between the pragmatists and the conservatives in the ruling elites.

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2.5

Prologue

Square Script (kaishu,

)

As a further simplification reform of the clerical script, the square script took root during the Eastern Han period and become the mainstream style during the Northern and Southern dynasties (420-581), but it only was finalized during the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-960) periods. While writing speed had been greatly increased by the change from small seal script to clerical script, it still was constrained by some structural conventions, such as the worm-head-like dot and swallow-tail-like ending stroke that posed obstacles to further efficiency. Square script reduced the remaining factors related to concrete objects to a few simple abstract lines. Its square structure and smooth level lines make it easier for common people to master, and partly due to the wide support lent by prestigious calligraphers, it quickly became the model style for learners to practice, hence its Chinese name, which literally means ‘Model Script’. Hanzi, at this stage, had deviated so much from its original forms that there would seem to be not much to associate it with the photographic image of its ancient origin. This last refinement created stability. For a thousand years after the introduction of square script, hanzi did not change significantly in its shape or style until the 1950s, when comprehensive simplification was first sanctioned by the government5. Today, these four types of archaic characters that came before square script are not a practical medium for daily use except as graphic art, i.e., Chinese calligraphy, or more rarely, personal communication among idiosyncratic eccentric individuals (e.g., Language Reform 1974). However, with nationalism on the rise in the PRC since the 1990s, there has been a lot of interest from both LP professionals and academics from other disciplines in preventing these culturally charged characters from disappearing, and for integrating them into modern communication medium. The graphical changes discussed in the previous sections are basically confined to the stroke and composition. However, hanzi’s shape also saw radical changes at the major developmental phases of the four typical styles, which in general can be illustrated by the shapes in Figure P-46.

Figure P-4. Historical changes in Hanzi shape

Prologue

2.6

9

Summary of Historical Development

In summary, the development of Chinese hanzi has followed a circle of standardization and simplification, and standardization characterized by evolution and reaction, i.e., the constant conflict between the desire to maintain the standard and the demand for operational efficiency which was facilitated by new writing instruments. For example, clerical script transformed the decorative elements of circular, curved and rounded lines of the small seal into the square, the polyangular and straight ones. This occurred to meet the requirement of writing quickly, as well as being the result of a change of the writing medium from hard and sharp implements to soft and pliable brushes. The clerical script transformation (Li-change) was a critical step in the process of developing from the imitation of primitive real things to an abstract and symbolic system. This development conformed to historical tendency, and the square script saw another sudden leap forward in construction and shape of hanzi that has remained basically unchanged up to the present. This extremely long period of total stabilization of the square script was no doubt due to the improvements made to the writing materials and means of writing, namely, the invention of the brush-pen, paper, and most critically, printing technology. This testifies to the proposition that technique innovation is the material foundation for any significant change in the Chinese writing system (see Table 7-2, Section 2.3, Chapter 7).

3.

CHARACTERISTICS OF CHINESE HANZI

Hanzi are a culturally rich script system and have many unique traits. The following discussion focuses on four major factors that are believed to be relevant to the discussion in the subsequent chapters of this book. These are: abstraction, structural complexity, open-ended number and artistic features.

3.1

Abstraction: From Pictogram and Ideogram to Phonogram

Hanzi are generally known as a prime example of an ideographic writing system, but as Tang Lan (1965: 81) points out, an important tendency found in its general evolution “is the transformation from the original elaborate picture characters into purely symbolic signs which were

10

Prologue

graphically composed of a narrow range of conventional strokes”. But the process, by which Chinese script evolved from primitive pictures to characters, has taken a long time. Even with the emergence of greater abstraction, the pictographic components have remained the basic building blocks that form hanzi. As hanzi have progressively become more abstract, the potential to create new characters has greatly increased. [A]s the script matured, it became simpler and progressively began to lose some of its pictographic qualities; devices other than pictures were eventually formulated in order to represent concepts and abstract terms which could not otherwise be represented graphically (Gao 2000: 75). Consequently, parallel to this process, phoneticization began to emerge. Developing from an ideographic structure to a phonetic compound is generally seen as another marked tendency. Hanzi’s phonetic tendency was so evident as to lead some researchers to believe that Chinese script “is phonetic, not an ideological system of writing” (DeFrancis 1984b: 133). However, instead of outright phoneticization (graphic representation of units of sounds in a language), phonetic factors in hanzi, as a writing system, were largely manifested in two ways. On the one hand, there was the development of a phonetic compound in a semantic-phonetic character. The semantic-phonetic method was so robust that it is believed that by the time the Shuowen jiezi dictionary was compiled, nearly 80 percent of hanzi were composed by semantic-phonetic characters. On the other hand, there was an increase in the occurrence of homophony, i.e., a number of very frequently used characters served as an inventory of possible syllables to represent characters with the same pronunciation but different semantic meanings. This method is in essence a homophonous substitution, or the extension of the traditional ‘Jiajie’ (phonetic loan) method. The Jiajie method allows people to employ a small number of the most used simple hanzi as basic syllables to represent other concepts or words with the same or similar sounds, disregarding these characters’ original meaning. These relatively small numbers of the commonest characters are used purely to vocally annotate the pronunciation for another unknown character and are called syllabic hanzi. The increased use of syllabic characters, only for their phonetic value in the text, is seen as a big step in the direction of a phonographic script (Li 1934). As a consequence, the number of homophonous characters or words have greatly increased, which in turn has become a driving force leading to word di-syllabication and poly-syllabication. Wang Fengyang (1989) points out, a developing trend in di-syllabization and poly-syllabication of Chinese vocabulary is the manifestation of a

Prologue

11

phonographic tendency, and it provides the material basis for hanzi developing from pictograms and ideograms to phonograms, because only disyllabic and polysyllabic words or compound words can tolerate homophonous substitution without causing semantic misunderstanding. A number of linguists insist on viewing the development of writing in terms of two stages, “language tends to undergo a linear process of evolution from the ideographical writing to the phonetic system as man becomes more sophisticated in his knowledge about the use of language as code for communication” (Jackson and T’sou 1979: 81). In the first stage, the pictographic symbols, which Gelb (1963: 59) called “the forerunners of writing”, are descriptive and representative. At the second stage, a kind of device like the phonetic elements was needed, as the previous pictographic and ideographic methods were insufficient to suitably and competently represent increasingly complex speech. Pictographic forms, most of which were carried over from the first stage, broke away from the real-life objects and began to orally represent the concept. Woon (1987: 270) observes, “[a]lthough many things happened in the structural evolution of Chinese characters, the most important development was that the writing system began to

Figure P-5. The structural complexity of Chinese characters (Ager 2005)

12

Prologue

tend towards phoneticization and that this led to the development of the phonetic compound.” The unique aspect of this change process is that it suddenly stopped, instead of developing into a full-fledged phonetic orthography, a phenomenon that still puzzles modern hanzi specialists and linguists.

3.2

Structural Complexity

Ostensibly, complex strokes make hanzi a time-consuming writing system (see Figure P-5). For 6,763 characters (39 are non-character graphic signs) in the Basic Set of Standard Chinese Characters for Information Interchange (henceforth, GB 2312-80; GB stands for Guojia Biaozhun: National Standard), the average number of strokes is 10.665; characters with more than nine strokes account for nearly 70 percent of the total (Su 2001b). More problematically, although strokes in a character are written according to fixed rules, the shapes of components are diverse and notorious for their inconsistency. As a consequence of these factors, and others, it is generally agreed that acquisition of writing skills requires a minimum of five years’ formal schooling, and as many as ten years to achieve durable literacy. Furthermore, there are many uncertainties when describing characters, such as the definition of the component, the number of radicals, what to call radicals and what the differences are between radicals and components, creating a high degree of complexity. (see Section 2.2, Chapter 4) Hanzi’s complexity in composition can be understood through three basic terms – strokes, radicals, components – discussed in the following sections. 3.2.1

Strokes (bihua,

)

Strokes are the smallest possible structural units used to form a character. When writing Chinese characters, each individual stroke can be seen as the continuous contact of one’s pen with the paper. Bihua is actually a term that came into being after lishu and kaishu, because, as previously mentioned, before Li-change, a character’s stroke was not clear-cut as most of time the writing tools were not the pen (bi). A character may consist of between 1 and 64 strokes. The stroke is the universal basis for any type of writing system. An alphabetic script is also comprised of letters that are composed of strokes, but hanzi are written using a much more diversified and recurrent array of strokes in which the

Prologue

13

shape varies for different types of strokes. Out of the approximately 30 strokes, only 8 are considered basic ones and all others are their variants. For example, a hook stroke can be a left hook or a right hook, a straight hook or a bent hook. Although the stroke’s thickness and length do not impinge on the meaning of a hanzi, a number of factors are taken into account in forming a character correctly: stroke shape, the relationship among the strokes, stroke ordering, and stroke number. 3.2.2

Radicals (bushou,

) and Compounds (pianpang,

)

It is the radical7, however, not the strokes, that is basic to the hanzi writing system. The radical, the head under which characters have been classified in dictionaries, is the minimum meaningful composing element. Characters may be classified into two categories in terms of structural complexity: simple characters and compound characters. Simple characters, accounting for about four percent of the total, are arranged as a compact integral and are not further divisible into distinct components. Many radicals are themselves simple single-unit characters, thus they can only be seen as a radical when used as a composing element in compound characters. The radicals that are used in the dictionary as a classifying index to group the characters are bushou, which are just graphic parts of characters used as headings in dictionaries without heuristic values. Characters containing the same radical are arranged under the same bushou in ascending order by number of residual strokes. Overall, radicals can range in number from 200 to 600, according to the approach taken in different dictionaries. One of the biggest problems with a radical is that there is no standardized way to verbally describe it, and this is increasingly becoming a daily problem as computers rapidly become more common (see Section 2.4, Chapter 4). Another term related to radical is compound (Pianpang), which is another structural element that makes up a character. There are two kinds of basic compounds in characters: a semantic compound (yipang – ), which more often than not overlaps with radicals, that specifies the meaning category of the whole character, and the phonetic compound (shengpang – ), which signals something about the pronunciation. However, not only semantic compound, but a number of phonetic compounds also have separate lexical status. Semantic-phonetic compounding is the most dominant method of character formation.

14

3.2.3

Prologue

Components or Unit (bujian/zigen/ziyuan/zisu, 贾 ) 贾 贾

‘Components’ are a new concept, born out of the need for designing schemes for computer typing, and hence is a flexible term. In addition to strokes and radicals, there is a need reconstruct characters into more maneuverable units, this being necessitated by the limited space on the ideographically arranged keyboard. In most character-based input schemes, characters are broken into components instead of radicals or strokes (e.g., the 6 components illustrated in Figure P-6). The component is purely a graphological composing unit, qualitatively between strokes and simple characters, with an emphasis on position in constructing the character regardless of its phonetic and semantic functions. Therefore, the component is essentially different from the radical in that the radical is either semantically or phonetically rational, but the component is not. It is based on the stroke, but normally smaller and simpler than a radical. Take the character (nàng, blocked nose) is the most in Figure P-6 as an example. complicated character in the Modern Chinese Dictionary (the most popular household dictionary in China since 1970s). In the scheme of the six traditional types of Chinese characters, i.e., liushu, it consists of a semantic (bí, nose) and a phonetic compound (náng, bag), but to compound reproduce and input it into the computer using a hanzi keyboard, it has to be decomposed or divided into smaller units – bujian. In this example, it is dismantled into six components. However, in actual practice, each particular type of software analyzes characters according to its own (tian3, field) principles. For instance, in this character, the components (the top component of the right radical) may not be treated as two and independent components in some input schemes, because they also can be = + ; = + . Consequently, on some expressed as: Chinese keyboards imprinted with radicals and components, the users , but just and . cannot find and Su (2001b: 79) defines components as “a combined stroke collection that appears in more than one hanzi structure and one that is universal to all characters”. The newly created units have sparked controversy because they are purely for the convenience of processing characters mechanically. They are unsystematic as a whole because each input scheme differs every other in disassembling the character. As a result confusion existed until December 1997, when the Information Processing Standard Components for GB 13000.1 Character Set (GF 3001-1997) was issued by the State Commission of Language Work (henceforth SCLW). In this official standard, 560 of the so-called basic components have been standardized

Prologue

15

based on an investigation of 20,902 characters, but the disagreement remains between historians of hanzi study and programmers about their validity.

Figure P-6. The difference between compounds and components

3.3

An Open-Ended Number of Characters

It is well known that there are an incredible number of hanzi in current use. Hanzi form an open system, the total number of which grows with time. Table P-1 shows the growth in the total number of hanzi included in various historical dictionaries8. These characters differ greatly in frequency of usage. Although it is commonly acknowledged that the most common 3,000 hanzi cover more than 99 percent of all characters used in modern writing, occasionally other characters may be used (see Section 2.1.1, Chapter 4). Table P-1 shows that historically the total number of Chinese characters has increased gradually with some deviations from this general tendency. There are various reasons to account for this. One obvious deviation is Yu Pian in 543. According to Li Jianguo (2000: 140), because of its farreaching influence, it was revised and enlarged from time to time before the total number of characters was finally fixed in 1013. This wider coverage explains why the number of characters included in the subsequent dictionaries declined rather than increased. Ji Yun in 1039 marks another steep increase followed by a decrease. It contains many variant characters and obsolete signs listed under each official standard entry. It also provides

16

Prologue

Table P-1. The historical growth of the number of hanzi (Reproduced from the Research Team of Computer Information Processing 1980: 70-71; Wu, 1995: 79-80) Date

Dynasty/Polity

?

Han

1-5

Han

60-70

Han

100

East Han

227-239

Wei

400

Jin

500

Northern Wei

543

Nan Liang

601

Sui

751

Tang

753

Tang

997

Liao

1008

Song

1039

Song

1066

Song

1615

Ming

1675

Ming

1716

Qing

1915

P.R. China

1990

P.R. China

1994

P.R. China

Dictionary (Cangjie Pian) (Xunzuan Pian) (Xuxun Pian) (Shuowen jiezi) (Sheng Lei) (Zi Lin) (Zi Tong) (Yu Pian) (Qie Yun) (Tang Yun) (Yunhai Jingyuan) (Longkan Shoujian) (Guang Yun) (Ji Yun) (Lei Pian) (Zi Hui) (Zhengzi Tong) (Kangxi Zidian)9 (Zhonghua Dazidian) (Hanyu Da Zidian) (Zhonghua Zihai)

Compiler

Number of Characters

?

3,300

Yang Xiong

5,340

Ban Gu

6,180

Xu Shen

9,353

Li Deng

11,520

Lü Chen

12,824

Yang Chengqing

13,734

Gu Yewang

22,726

Lu Fayan

12,150

Sun Mian

15,000

Yan Zhenqing

26,911

Xing Jun

26,430

Chen Pengnian etc.

26,194

Ding Du etc.

53,525

Wang Mu

31,319

Mei Yingzuo

33,170

Zhang Zilie

33,440

ZhangYushu etc.

47,043

Lu Feikui etc.

44,908

Xu Zhongshu

54,678

Leng Yulong etc.

85,000

Prologue

17

different style fonts for the same character listing them in both Kaishu and seal script. In addition, as Su (2000: 5-6) reminds us, the numbers listed here do not necessarily reflect the reality of the period in question, because on the one hand, it is impossible for any dictionary or author to represent or collect all characters in use, as many must have been missed. On the other hand, if we do not count the large number of variant forms, the actual number for each period would be a lot fewer. As the discussion in Section 2.1.1, Chapter 4 shows, variant forms, obsolete, and rare characters are three major reasons why the total number of hanzi is misleadingly large.

3.4

Artistic Features: Writing Stylization, Print Fonts

Hanzi are characterized by the fact that they are both a means of communication and a traditional art form. DeFrancis (1984b: 202) has argued that “the Chinese writing system, especially as expressed in calligraphy, is itself part cultural and therefore more than a mere conveyor”. Writing has been so highly valued that it was elevated to a place among other fine arts, and “the most fundamental artistic manifestation of the national mind” (Chiang 1973: 107). Hanzi’s dual role as both graphic art and visual communication has had a twofold impact on hanzi development. Opponents of reform use this argument as the grounds for rejecting simplification. They claim that calligraphy is inherently and intrinsically associated with traditional characters, and that simplification stifles the vigor of one of the important traditional treasures. However, historically, there has been a consistent drive to push the characters towards simplification, particularly through the grass style, and running style, two major styles of calligraphy which are actually the most important sources of simplified characters. The subject of calligraphy is somewhat outside the province of linguistic concerns, however, the calligrapher’s role in simplifying and standardizing hanzi is an important topic. While calligraphers are generally known as staunch guardians of traditional characters, a great number of simplified characters are derived from calligraphic forms10. There are no accurate and reliable statistics on how many simplified characters have resulted from the practice of calligraphy, because there were no clear-cut differences between handwriting, calligraphy and printing prior to modern times. Nevertheless, the artistic expression of Chinese writing system is

18

Prologue

undoubtedly an important contributing factor that cannot be emphasized too strongly in examining developments in hanzi simplification. Unfortunately, this artistic quality of hanzi has long been ignored when reforming characters and the resultant negative effect has made it more difficult for simplified characters to be accepted by older generations. For example, there is a cohort of hanzi users that gained their writing skills through the traditional method of copying the model book for various historical schools of calligraphy. They felt very frustrated in their attempt to switch to the restructured characters when they found that the stroke order differed from the one they had learned. For these people, some strokesimplified characters seem even more complex than their original forms. This kind of unexpected problem, which arises from the complete lack of study of the calligraphic features of the hanzi, is labeled the ‘chang-effect’ and is discussed in Section 1.2.2, Chapter 2. Font or typeface style, which refers to the printed style of a glyph or character set, is an important concept when talking about hanzi artistic style. According to Fu Yonghe (1993), there are four major distinct types of print fonts that mark hanzi’s course of development. Only one type of font (Song Style, or Songti) existed before the 1920s and 30s when another two styles, the Imitative Song Style (Fang Songti) and the Standard Style (kaiti) were devised, and a Bold Style (heiti) was introduced from Japan at about the same time. Kaiti is an industrial use of Square Script, and Songti is the Chinese equivalent of Times New Roman (together with kaiti) in terms of its primacy among shapes available for use. ‘Ti’ is the standard form used for printing purposes, so it is actually a strict technological term in the Chinese printing industry, referring to a kind of font for typesetting and editing purposes, based on a series of technical yardsticks about the stroke lines and structural proportions. Other standards, for example, include the national standards for the 32 x 32 Dot Matrix Font Set and Data Set of Chinese Ideogram for Information Interchange. Modern publications are printed in different font styles depending on the taste of their authors and target readers. For instance, kaiti is normally used in school textbooks at the lower grades, whereas the style is changed to songti when the students progress to higher grades. Most newspapers are also printed in songti. As for handwriting, there are broadly three forms that have developed, each with its own stylistic peculiarities: Model/Standard characters (kaishu), Running Characters (xingshu) and Grass/Cursive Characters (caoshu). Running characters are used mainly to save time when handwriting, while grass style is quicker but has the appearance of scrawling, like twisted grass, hence the Chinese name. For alphabetic-familiar readers it should be pointed out that what differentiates the hanzi fonts is the number of strokes and the

Prologue

19

way they are constructed – instead of the shape of the strokes, i.e., the width, length and thickness. For grassy characters and running characters, the aim is to economize the writing complexity without losing legibility. This can be done through a conscious combination of the separable elements of model characters, script characters being kept to a minimum: the number of strokes is lessened; double or triple curves are contracted to single curves or lines; certain minor elements are eliminated. The following three sections provide a brief introduction to these three styles. 3.4.1

Model Style Characters (kaishu,

)

The model style character, i.e., kaishu, is a genre of Chinese calligraphy. Briefly speaking, it is the artistic representation of square script and kaiti. Most books on Chinese characters do not bother to make distinctions among these three terms. It should be noted, model style characters are different from kaiti and square script mentioned previously. Kaiti, as just described, is an industrially defined standard referring to a font style printed by kaiti silver or copper mould before the introduction of computers. Square script is a broader concept, used in defining a structural style when discussing the developmental history of hanzi’s physical structures. Model style characters are based on the former two, but the term is used exclusively to refer to calligraphy. The focus is on its artistic features, and with the passage of centuries, it has developed an unimaginable number of varieties or sub-styles with different personal characteristics created over time by well-known masters of the brush-pen. However, they are intrinsically related to each other, and share common features, e.g., standardness and regularity. Sometimes a character may be called by any of these three names, square script, model style character or kaiti, but in most cases, they represent different things. Therefore, it is worth noting that the same term, kaishu, refers to different aspects of hanzi when it is used in different contexts. 3.4.2

Grass Style Characters (caoshu,

)

Grass style is the cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. It is derived from quick handwriting and evolved into a form of visual art, eventually gaining wide popularity among appreciative readers of literature. Grass style reached its peak during the time of Wang Xizhi (321-379), who worked during the East Jin period (317-420), and was the greatest calligrapher in history. He was also the first scholar to devote his whole life to developing writing into an independent art. Grass style’s practical

20

Prologue

value has virtually been lost, because it is just a rough sketch of the character, retaining only the basic outline of the character, thus legibility is often very poor for the layperson. It allows for freer handling and more vivid movement, and grew more and more carefree and grassy, as the uncurbed force and rapidity of the style causes every character in a complete piece to have both an inherent and visible link with the rest. Grass style’s graceful forms and undulating movement have not only been attractive to the minds of Chinese scholars, but it is also the most decorative style used for its beauty by common people. Mao Zedong is a widely acknowledged as a modern master of caoshu. 3.4.3

Running Style Characters (xingshu,

)

As a shorthand style writing form, running style writing is a compromise form to bridge the gap between the model style and grass style. Although the strokes have been simplified to some extent, it is still discernible enough to the general reader, and it allows writing at a fair speed with sufficient freedom of personal expression. Thus it has become the most popular style and is widely used in writing manuscripts, personal letters and other informal papers. Except for special visual effects such as headlines and titles in the press, or on advertisements and packages, running style is rarely used in normal text printing. Nonetheless, this is changing with the convenience brought about by computer technology. There is a new trend for more fonts or previously rarely used writing styles for printing purposes to be used in computer-typed materials, although songti and kaiti are still dominant. The impact of IT on the Chinese Hanzi writing style and its relationship to standardization deserves further elaboration. Traditionally, although numerous distinctive personalized writing styles have been developed, recorded and studied for at least 3,000 years, there have only been a couple of different fonts readily available to be selected for mechanical typesetting. Currently, with the convenience brought about by technological advances, although songti and kaiti hold an uncontested place both as practical medium for daily use and as a graphic art, it is simply a matter of time and money before a large number of writing styles will emerge. (For some examples, please see Figure P-7.) Unlike English, which has a set of welldeveloped and accepted fonts, Chinese has an almost limitless range of stylistic expression due to its complex structure and flexible composition, meaning there is always room for novelty. These would-be fonts, either ancient or modern, scattered in both calligraphy books and other written

Prologue

21

materials, need to be further defined before being programmed into software products and made available for public use. From a language management perspective, standardization is essential to make sure that new fonts will not cause too many difficulties for the IT industry, for instance, for optical character recognition (henceforth OCR, see Section 2.2.2.2, Chapter 3).

Figure P-7. Some samples of stylistic fonts of Chinese characters

4.

PROLOGUE SUMMARY

Chinese characters are characterized by their historical continuity. In this Prologue we have briefly discussed some key aspects of the ancient context that has shaped the basic features of today’s hanzi. In addition, we have examined some of their essential characteristics, providing a foundation for understanding the recent developments in hanzi standardization that are the focus of this monograph.

22

Prologue

In the first chapter, after describing the standardization work in dynastic China, we examine “The Three Simplifications”, the most important standardizations undertaken in more modern times.

Chapter 1 MAKING HANZI ACCESSIBLE Three Simplification Movements in Modern Times

1.

INTRODUCTION

As we have seen in the Prologue, the structural shape of Chinese hanzi was finalized in the Eastern Han period. Historically, numerous dictionaries, compiled either by individual etymologists or under royal patronage, were published, and because all dynastic governments’ script policies were characterized by a backward-looking conservative orientation, hanzi’s structure in formal publications remained extremely stable over this 1800year period of development. This situation lasted until the modern period1 when the issue of language and script increasingly became a common concern among the educated. In this chapter we look at the history of governmental intervention in hanzi’s development to provide the necessary background information to better understand the modern reform movements. The major focus of this chapter is the three rounds of character simplification that have been carried out by the Nationalist and Communist post-imperial Chinese governments: two aborted simplification attempts in 1935 and 1977 and a completed simplification in the 1950s. This brief historical account, while providing the necessary backdrop for the forthcoming discussion on hanzi planning history, attempts to illustrate the complex multi-dimensional context that accounts for the outcome of the script reform programs. Except for this general introduction, the emphasis in this discussion is placed on one or two focal points for each simplification, i.e., an exploration of the reasons for the failure of the first scheme

23

24

Making Hanzi Accessible

from a cultural purist perspective; an examination of the actor change in LP and a brief assessment of the resultant influence of the 1950s’ simplification; and the implementation and abandonment of the aborted scheme of 1977. In this volume, a new chronological system has been used to describe the modern historical period of hanzi simplification. Traditionally, historical studies dealing with Chinese LP were viewed through a political lens which labeled the 1956 simplification the First Reform and the failed one in 1977 the Second Reform. The reform movement in 1935 was called the Simplification Scheme before Liberation. That scheme emphasized the political boundaries before and after the Liberation of 1949, devaluing the historical position of the low profile 1935 scheme. In this book, more emphasis is given to LP and to the historical continuity of the hanzi simplification process. We argue there is an inseparable relationship between the schemes of 1935 and 1956, particularly in quantitative terms. Under this new classification system, the two simplification attempts in 1935 and 1977 are called the First Simplification Scheme (FSS, see Appendix A) and the Second Simplification Scheme (SSS, see Appendix B) respectively, while the 1956 reform is generally referred to as the Table of Simplified Characters (TSC). It includes the two minor revisions to the Table completed in 1964 and 1986. Under the system used in this book, the 1950s’ simplification is seen as a coming to fruition and an extension of the previous attempts carried out just twenty years earlier to reform hanzi. Thus, despite the changes brought about by the altered political circumstances of 1949, in technical terms, the TSC inherited a major legacy from the First Scheme of 1935, which was a collective accomplishment of the LP modernization pioneers. However, before looking at these three schemes, the next section provides a brief historical reflection on hanzi’s unification and standardization in dynastic China.

2.

HANZI UNIFICATION AND STANDARDIZATION IN DYNASTIC CHINA

Chinese hanzi have undergone numberless modifications and reform even before modern times, and its adaptability and flexibility is undoubtedly a major reason that has enabled hanzi to escape the fate of other ancient scripts. Given their continuity over such a long history, an examination of any aspect of character development would be incomplete without a look at

Chapter 1

25

the past. The following description provides a historical sketch of governmental participation in standardizing characters.

2.1

One State, One Script – Qin Empire

The Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE) was a defining period for the coherence and unity of hanzi. But the idea of standardizing writing was not new as discussions of the importance of language and script standardization can be found in the classical canons and analects of the scholars of the Hundreds Schools Contending, during the period when Chinese culture started to flourish, about 2,500 years ago. Ancient philosophers were highly interested in etymological matters because of their importance for logical arguments – as the Confucians said, “it is very essential to clarify the concept”. In his book Zheng Ming (Concept Clarification – ), Xun Zi (the originator of the Legalism School) said that deliberate misuse words or distortion of language conventions should be treated as serious criminal behavior. He argued that such offenders should be punished equally to those committing criminal offences such as forging documents and counterfeiting money. The Qin government unified the warring states with the help of a cohort of disciples of Xun Zi creating the first highly centralized dynasty in China. One staunch believer in the Legalism School and Xun Zi’s favorite student was Li Si, the perpetrator of the catastrophic ‘Burning of the Books’. As the empire’s Prime Minister, Li Si drew up an official list of 3,500 uniform characters to be adopted as the only officially mandated government standard, a standard form which later came to be known as the small seal script. Qin Shihuang, Qin’s first emperor and one of the most powerful despots in China’s dynastic history, is believed by historians to have had “a penchant for uniformity – standardizing among other things weights, measures, and the written language” (Wong 1990: 72). Unifying the script was an urgent policy and an essential part in a series of unification measures, and it was done in a bold and resolute manner by the Empire. Except for three books (volumes on Cangjie, Yuanli and Boxue) written by three of his top advisers as textbooks for primary education, the Qin government used standard characters mainly to produce official documents and to inscribe utensils and vessels. In 219 BCE, during an inspection tour of his far-flung empire, Emperor Qin declared his campaign of character standardization a success by having his handwritten characters ‘Tongshu Wenzi’ (Eternal Characters for Common Writing – ) engraved in stone. Interestingly, at about the same period,

26

Making Hanzi Accessible

Ashoka, the equally great emperor of India, also started to establish imperial communication to linguistically unify his empire by cutting inscriptions into steles in many parts of the country (Ferguson 1996). Although it was the shortest dynasty in Chinese history, Qin did everything to ensure it had a lasting impact. The script reform instituted by the Qin government had a far-reaching effect. As Moore (2000: 63) notes, “Measures undertaken by the Qin government also established a firm basis for the later development of several major forms of brush writing”. Seeing it as the major contribution to the country’s unity, power consolidation and social stability, subsequent governments, without exception, carried out language and script standardization immediately after completing national political unification, making it a common practice for the central government to standardize language and script use, employing state-based force (Geng 1996).

2.2

Subsequent Developments Prior to Modern China

In the course of Qin’s efforts to unify people’s way of thinking, almost all books (most in bamboo slips), except those on medicine and agriculture that existed prior to the Qin unification were destroyed in the Burning of All Books, creating a terrible loss for the development of Chinese civilization. To fight such human pillage and natural disaster, people turned to engraving characters on stone as an enduring means to help them survive the ravages of water, fire and time. Thus, stone engraving became a favorite medium for preserving permanent records of human intellectual achievement. After the Qin ideological dictatorship, the Han Dynasty witnessed a renewed emphasis on Confucian morality and scholarship. The resurgence of Confucianism led to unprecedented enthusiasm in engraving classical canons. Beginning in 175, following the proposal of Cai Yi, the eminent royal scholar, the Han Dynasty took eight years to complete engraving Six Canons on stone tablets (known as Xiping Shijing), and erected them before the gate of the Imperial University as model characters. Thus began a tradition to engrave the state-sanctioned standard characters onto stone tablets. In subsequent dynasties, at least three governments, Wei (368-550, Three Dimension Stone Canon), Tang (618-907, Kaicheng Stone Canon) and Qing (1644-1911, Thirteen Classic Stone Canon), followed the practice of setting up stone inscriptions before the gates of the imperial university or royal academy. The Sui (581-618) and Tang were two other dynasties that gave much importance to language work and a new academic subject, the

Chapter 1

27

‘Character Shape Study’, was also developed during this period. During the Tang Dynasty, Taizong, the second emperor of the dynasty and one of the best-known monarchs in Chinese history, issued an edict for the best etymologists to review and re-edit the Character Standardization books sanctioned by previous dynasties and work out their own standard. Of these books, the well-known Ganlu Character Book was the most influential. In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the official standard character book, Lei Pian (categories), which involved a number of high-ranking officials in the imperial court, was compiled over a period of 38 years. Pei Xie, a private collection of various forms of characters, also played an active role in standardizing characters and should, therefore, not be ignored. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) attached even more importance to character standardization. Zhu Yuanzhang, Ming’s first emperor, personally organized his ministers and distinguished scholars to set up the official standard. It combined standards for both pronunciation and characters into one book. He used the title of his regime to name the book Hongwu Zhengyun, which literally means ‘the authentic rhyming dictionary of the Hongwu regime’. The Qing Dynasty ushered in another peak in cultural prosperity. The Kangxi Dictionary is one of its remarkable achievements. This dictionary is still extensively used and plays a very important role in endorsing today’s standardization efforts.

2.3

Standardization Summary

From this brief historical overview of Chinese hanzi development, we can see the development of the basic modus operandi for structuring and writing hanzi, stressing the importance of standardization – a critical focus for this volume – during both ancient times and during the more recent dynastic period. Wang T.K. (2004: 192) has summarized the three principal measures used to standardize ancient scripts as follows: • To make standard character shapes and textbooks through rationalization. Volume on Cangjie , Volume on Yuanli and Volume on Boxue, were all the results of Qin’s effort to overhaul the script, following Qin Shihuang’s unification of the country in 221 BCE. • To make known the model characters through engraving the classics on stone tablets, e.g., the well-known Xiping Stone Inscriptions ( , 175 BCE) of seven canonical works were the earliest stone engraving set.

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• To unify character shapes through compiling dictionaries, rectifying variant forms and culling inauthentic characters, e.g., Collection of Characters (Zihui, ) by Mei Yingzuo in the Ming Dynasty (1279-1368). Geng (1996: 23) has summarized the four characteristics of the standardization that occurred in dynastic China: • From top to bottom, by royal mandate. In most cases the emperor himself became personally involved and a number of key national level officials were the major source of the initiative; • As an integral means of consolidating the foundation, at a time the country was on the rise; • Organizationally, it was a governmental initiative without rejection of individual commitment; • It was basically confined to the cultural circle that propagated the official standards and had, as such, little impact among the masses, a fact that may account for the huge divergence in characters and the flourishing of unorthodox forms among the rank and file. In the next section we examine the ‘Three Simplifications’ undertaken in more modern times. Table 1-1 provides a summary of the three respective modernization schemes. The circumstances of each simplification scheme then are examined in detail in the sections that follow.

3.

THE FIRST SIMPLIFICATION SCHEME IN 1935

By comparison with the other two subsequent simplifications, the first simplification scheme has been weakly documented and has long been ignored by LP researchers. Therefore, in this section, while focusing on the reasons that led to its failure, we look more closely at some of the substantive issues related to this scheme in order to fill the gap in evaluating this first important reform venture in the history of modern hanzi. The authors hold that the traditionalists’ struggle to keep the writing system intact is by its very nature a manifestation of linguistic purism. Through the application of this notion of purism and by using a multi-dimension analysis, this scheme can be more thoroughly explored and new light can be shed on the failure of the first government-sanctioned simplification scheme.

Chapter 1

Table 1-1. Three Chinese character simplification schemes

First Simplification Scheme (FSS, 8.1935)

Table of Simplification Scheme (TSC, 1.1956)

Second Simplification Scheme (SSS, 12.1977)

Content

324 characters

248 characters in List 1 (for immediate use) 605 characters in List 2 (For trial use and discussion)

Organizations

Ministry of Education (Republic of China)

Results

Withdrawn after 6 months

230 characters in List 1 (For immediate use) 285 characters in List 2 (For trial use and discussion) 54 components in List 3 Ministry of Education (People’s Republic of China) Commission for Chinese Script Reform of State Council (Cabinet) People’s Congress (Parliament) A general list of 2236 characters combining List 1 and List 2, as well as characters containing the 54 basic components in List 3 was republished in 1964 and 1986.

Reasons

Fierce opposition from the conservative camp and from a high-ranking senior official; War against Japan was imminent.

Background

Writing simplification as an integral part of language reform, originating in the May Fourth Movement of 1919; Leading linguist’s Qian Xuantong’s work was appreciated by the elites; Widespread and extensive actual use of simplified characters.

Enthusiasm by zealous population; Carefully organized by the government; Favorable environment created by de facto adoption of FFS.

Some appointed members in the Commission for Chinese Script Reform of State Council.

Stopped in the following year; Official repeal in 1986.

Alleged failure to win public support; Incomplete legal procedures; Oversimplification caused radical change; Economic losses (to re-typeset some major reference books and computer chips). Abnormal state of political life (end of the cultural revolution); People were sensitive to drastic change.

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3.1

Making Hanzi Accessible

Background Review

There is a tendency for language reform to go hand in hand with the socio-political upheaval. By the late 1800s after the first and second opium wars in China (1840, 1856), the military defeats inflicted by the Western Powers began to provoke demands for mass education within China, which inevitably led to a literacy campaign and script reform. However, although the debate on language reform was heard with increasing frequency as the Manchu Dynasty came to an end in 1912, the move towards character simplification was slower than reform on the other language issues such as vernacularization2 of archaic language use, national language promotion and writing system alphabetization or Romanization. The first round of character simplification did not occur until 1935 when a list of 324 simplified characters was officially accepted by the government of the Republic of China. As the discussion in this chapter has shown, hanzi simplification is a continuing historical phenomenon, and simplified variant forms of more complex characters have existed since Jiaguwen (Yin and Rohsenow 1997). Whereas the complex characters were promoted by consecutive governments, and were thus given official status, characters with fewer strokes and a simpler structure were stigmatized and called ‘vulgar characters’ (Suzi). Huang Zongxi (1610-1695), a Confucian philosopher in the Ming Dynasty, was the first scholar who consciously used these vulgar characters in his writing (Zhou 1979). Sociolinguists and LP theorists have long recognized and endorsed the important role that amateurs, dedicated individuals and academics play in engaging in preliminary research and in initiating LP programs (see Cooper 1989; Thomas 1991). This was the case in the first modern attempt to simplify Chinese characters. The first simplification movement, initiated and supported by a constellation of individual elitists in various disciplines, was purely an academic enterprise and can be seen as a typical bottom-up venture. Among these scholars, Qian Xuantong, a renowned linguist, played the most eminent role through his prolonged commitment to champion simplified characters. It was under his leadership and by using his simplification principles (see following discussion), that some of the staff working in the Association for Promoting a Unified National Language drafted a table of over 2,000 characters, which became the blueprint for the FSS, that was jointly approved by the Senate Session and the Central Political Conference on August 21, 1935. It was withdrawn in the following year.

Chapter 1

3.2

31

Exploring Reasons for Failure: Cultural Continuity

In this section we examine three issues, personal intervention, cultural explanations and politicization that underlie the failure of the first scheme. 3.2.1

Personal Intervention

There is disagreement among scholars why such a carefully deliberated and extensively discussed reform program should be withdrawn less than six months after its formal ratification. A widely held view – that a senior official’s opposition was the major reason for the withdrawal of the characters lacks credible supporting evidence. This explanation was first put forward in Zhou Youguang’s (1979: 325) book, Introduction to Chinese Script Reform and has been widely quoted ipso facto in the LP literature, but no primary historical sources can be found to support the claim, as Yao (2000), a Chinese LP observer from Hong Kong, has pointed out. It is worthwhile noting that, historical sources show that despite the rising voice of opposition, there had been no sign of a change in policy just two months before the abandonment was formally announced (Du 1935). According to Wang Xuewen (1997: 13), an eminent Taiwan script reform researcher: It was said that Mr. Dai Jitao was extremely angry at the decree publication. To promote simplified characters by using governmental force was equal to a self-imposed destruction of the national foundation – the result it caused would be even more harmful than national doom. Dai cited Dr. Sun Yatsen’s quotation, saying that the writing in education was the most important element for national life, and he argued that this was a hasty decision. Therefore, he wrote to Mr. Yuan Jiahua, the minister of Higher Education, and to Mr. Wang Shijie, the Minister of Education, and required Mr. Wang to withdraw the decree of the FSS. Consequently, the government of the Republic of China cancelled the order. Interestingly, both Zhou and Wang were very careful about the wording they used when speculating about the cancellation of the FSS, both using the phrase ‘it was said’. While some other rather insignificant events of the 1930s were discussed in relatively great detail in the Chronology of Chinese Modernization for One Century (Fei 1997), only a short paragraph is devoted to the promulgation of the FSS, and no discussion of opposition to the FSS can be found in this chronology. This perplexing situation

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suggests that there might have been regarding the public response to the publication of the FSS. As this issue is given only sporadic mention in relevant research articles, how much of the 1935 decision can be credited to personal opposition, as has been suggested, is uncertain and must await further historical investigation. Although it appears that Dai must have been one of the strongest opponents of reform among the higher-ranking officials of the Republic of China, it seems unlikely that he could have been solely responsible. Developments that occurred several years later suggest that this abrupt and unexpected turnabout can best be understood as the outcome of a complex set of interactions between the ideologies of the antagonistic parties, and their perceptions about cultural issues as well as their struggle for power. These issues are briefly examined in the following discussion. 3.2.2

Cultural Explanations – Attitudes and Beliefs in Language

After China’s failure to revitalize through the introduction of Western technological knowledge, military models and a democratic political system, the pioneers of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 saw cultural reform as essential to prevent the country’s demise. This was most strongly expressed in Lu Xun’s (the greatest writer in China’s modern history) proposition that ‘either Chinese characters die out, or China does’ ( , ). The anti-classical, anti-traditional and promodern movement sparked a wave of reaction to the constraints inherent in traditional Confucian society. This goal of saving the nation was given as the justification for the government’s decision to simplify Chinese characters. This nationalist modernist aspiration, however, was not adopted by every member of the elite stratum, as we will see later. On the contrary, the foremost point made by opponents, leading to the withdrawal of the FSS, was that there was a need to save the nation from a cultural demise that would result from script simplification – a cry that resonates with segments of the current Chinese society as well. The idea of simplification raised questions related to cultural continuity, the legitimacy of simplified characters, of script worship and psychological factors, all of which came to the fore when the FSS simplification was proposed. Traditional characters were seen as inextricably associated with ancestral roots, cultural heritage and nationhood. The notion of purism, which deals with attitudes and beliefs in linguistic culture, provides a useful sociolinguistic explanation for the failure of the FSS. Purism has been defined in a number of different ways with Jernudd and Shapiro (1989)

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emphasizing that purism is maintaining the linguistic consistency and the standard of a language. Schiffman (1996: 61) points out that it often involves a return to (or a search for) linguistic authenticity. It “takes the form of removing from the language elements that appear to be foreign, or corrupt, or lacking in true authenticity in the linguistic culture in question.” Viewed from this perspective, linguistic purism can be seen as the general population’s belief in Chinese hanzi as the focal point of Chinese culture. As the following paragraphs suggest, this notion is supported by an analysis of the literature on this topic. Since China’s ancestors have handed down the characters for thousands of years, the characters should maintain their purity and authenticity, and any change made to them is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. In ancient times, “scholar officials shrouded writings in mysticism, making it sacred and inviolable in the popular mind” (Seybolt and Chiang 1979: 17). Taylor and Taylor (1995: 74-76) also note that hanzi “are imbued with magical, mystical quality and power, and hence are objects of reverence”. It is a set of beliefs about the antiquity and purity of hanzi that unites a segment of the speech community in its resistance to any change in the status of the traditional system. According to the diehard opponents of simplification, such as Dai Jitao and He Jian, the founder of the All China Character Preservation Congress, character simplification is tantamount to national doom and racial extinction. The opinion that Chinese characters and the written word are to be worshipped and venerated originated partly in their use for linguistic divinity and myth. In antiquity, hanzi were engraved on bones and bronze vessels, only used either for divination or for important official rites, and monopolized by a tiny group of shamans and sorcerers, who were “never averse to using anything to imbue their calling with mystique, …to seize the opportunity to add a new touch of mystery to their craft by ostensibly reading omens and fortunes of good or evil” (Wong 1990: 58). Like mystification, sanctification also can be seen as another source of linguistic purism. Fishman (2002: 17) said that “there is no human culture without language and no human culture without the notion of the holy”, but the forms of language holiness may well differ from one culture to another. Chinese society is secular, but classical canons were treated as holy in every sense, in both their moral value and their importance in people’s spiritual life. So from their very origin, hanzi have been sanctified and have taken on an aura of fixed-once-and-for-all. As a Chinese proverb would have it, ‘every stroke has life and spirit’ [or more literally, ‘every

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stroke is mandated by God’, yi bi yi hua, jie tian jing di yi – , ]. In Chinese culture, there are many stories about the treatment of characters as sacred things in ancient times, and one did not dare to challenge their authenticity. It was a common practice in the Civil Service Examinations that examiners would fail a candidate on the grounds that a certain character was miswritten (see e.g., Peng 2001). In Historical Recordings (Shi Ji), the best-known Chinese history book, “a highly placed official of the Han Dynasty was in a great panic [for fear of being sentenced to death] when he found that one tail [stroke] was missing in writing ‘ma’ [ , horse]3” (Hu 1998: 29). The mythology and saintliness of hanzi were not given much attention in planning the Chinese script system. Li Zehou (1999), a renowned Chinese modern thinker, has called for further study that goes beyond hanzi as a visible communication system. Even in modern daily life, phenomena can very often be observed that attest to the Chinese reverence for hanzi (e.g., Lu 1992: 125, Zhang 1992: 37), for example: • Until recently, old people would say ‘pay respect to your characters and paper’ (jing xi zi zhi – ) when they saw children throwing away paper with hanzi on it; • Taoist priests always keep a hook handy to pick up any discarded paper with hanzi written on it; • One of the widely held beliefs about cezi masters ( ) was that the visual structure of people’s names in characters conveyed a mandate from heaven that could be used to foretell a person’s fate; • In some areas in the countryside, people still believe that Fu ( , a hanzi-derived magical figure drawn by Taoist Priests) can exorcise evil spirits and cure illnesses, or evoke ill fortune. (see Figure 1-1; the initial right vertical line is the user’s instructions: please burn this Fu, and drink the ash with water, which is the common way to use Fu.) Thus, it should come as no surprise that hanzi are the main component of a system of symbols, when arguing that languages have often come to be considered holy. Fishman (2002: 17) classified classical Chinese as a ‘holy language’, and pointed out that once languages are sanctified, “their very structure and corpus is assumed to have been transformed or shaped by their unique ‘holy vessel’ function. Like all holy phenomena, these languages are considered unalterable, just as are their texts”. The implication of language sanctification in LP is that it retards human efforts in language modernization. Fishman (2002: 21) argues:

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35

Figure 1-1. A Fu image from the notebook of an early 20th century shaman (Hook and Twitchett 1991: 122)

Sanctity being every bit as much socially constructed as other societal beliefs and convictions. …these very same convictions also tend to complicate or restrict language modernization efforts, constraining them to be more ‘authentic’, purist, ausbau, and indigenous in orientation rather than following along the lines of ‘internationalization’ which corpus planning for modernization normally pursues. To overcome the difficulty brought about by linguistic holiness and purism, there are cases where conscious efforts have been made to accommodate people’s beliefs, or to avoid the conflict between the planning programs and the holy nature people placed on their languages. Cooper (1989) argues that in general, language reforms that are consistent with the values and belief system of the target population are more likely to succeed than alternatives with respect to physical behavior. This is illustrated by a speech made by Mao Zedong at the Conference of Issues on Intellectual Elements, held in 1956. According to Ye Laishi (1981: 60), the former vice-director of the Commission of Chinese Script Reform (henceforth, CCSR), Chairman Mao said: About the reform on writing, there is no objection from the masses, it comes from the intellectuals. Some professors said to me that Chinese characters are the best script system in the world and cannot be changed. Supposing they are replaced by a kind of Chinese traditional form – that is OK. But the problem is that Latin letters were invented by foreigners and that China has to learn from others.

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In the debate about the FSS between the conservatives and script reformers, the former, while accusing their reform proponents of being ignorant of their own history and of forgetting their origins, praised themselves as being defenders of orthodoxy, and in accord with national sentiment having an enthusiastic affection toward the traditional heritage. Their typical accusation was that the simplifiers deliberately cut off the multi-millennial lifeline of nationhood, which is bound to lead to the undermining of the vitality of the cultural heritage, and as such, will bring calamity to the country and the people. There is no greater crime than this sin; whoever changes or gives up characters is committing the most heinous national crime and must be condemned by history. This interpretation finds resonance even today. To rebut current script reformers’ opinions, Peng (2001) has argued, “The defeat in war is temporary and recoverable, but once the culture is lost, it vanishes forever”. Specific fears about the eventual loss of the traditional cultural heritage include (also see Figure 7.2 in Section 3.3, Chapter 7): • Classical literature cannot be fully appreciated if it is recorded in simplified characters; • Aesthetic values, such as calligraphy and other art forms derived from characters, will be lost; • Language precision will be sacrificed because consistency within the hanzi system has been altered. In its very essence, purism is the manifestation of nationalism. Societal ideologies, including nationalism and traditionalism, are fundamental to the success of script reform, and nationalistic feeling was clearly an allpervasive factor in 1935. Being well aware of this, when the linguists proposed the simplification scheme to the Kuomintung government through the Preparatory Commission of National Language Unification, their very first stated reason and objective was “in order to save and preserve the characters”. Simplification advocates also tried to prove that simplified hanzi would be more convenient and effective than the traditional ones for reading classical texts. In 1955, when a new wave of simplification enthusiasm surged in Taiwan, the first justification, out of four reasons given by Luo Jialun, a renowned Taiwanese scholar who led the campaign, was, “to preserve Chinese characters” (Wang 1997: 26-27).

Chapter 1

3.2.3

37

Politicization

Purist arguments aside, it is believed that a more immediate reason for withdrawing the FSS table was the impending struggle against the Japanese who were to invade China two years later. The cultural controversy over the fate of China’s writing system gave way to the more burning issue of saving the nation from imminent destruction. But, Du Zijin (1935: 27) has argued that the national crisis was actually a contributing factor to the government’s initial decision to implement the FSS, because the war with Japan involved gaining the wider support of the population. The defense forces were constituted of illiterate ordinary people and the simplification movement could help to educate them about the significance of the upcoming war. Furthermore, there was also a possible political consideration for the Nationalist government – not to allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insurgent forces to gain the upper hand by taking advantage of the situation. There appears to be an inherent relationship between simplification reform and leftist political power internationally. For example, when a state LP body, the English Academy, modeled on French and Italian academies was proposed, it was opposed by Whigs because “Whig philosophy in the eighteenth century aimed at restricting the Royal power” (Ager 2003: 75). Another more recent example is the spelling simplification that was favored by working class parents in the 1990s in the German-speaking world (Clyne 1995). Similarly, simplification was regarded as akin to the ideological embodiment of the communist doctrine as there was seen to be an innate relationship between the ordinary people, simplification and the mass movement. In China the reality was that the CCP was more enthusiastic and liberal in reforming the language since it viewed cultural issues not as a peripheral activity but as an essential part of governance. As such, language and script must be controlled, directed, and regulated by the state for the benefit of the state. For instance, it was the Communist Party that did a great deal of work to promote Romanization in Party-controlled liberated areas. Thus, the ruling Nationalist Party was not willing to be instrumental in doing anything in concert with its archrival. This hypothesis can be partially verified by the subsequent debate on simplification in the 1950s and 60s in Taiwan. It is generally believed that the only explanation for Taiwan’s unwillingness to adopt simplified characters in a wholesale fashion was the authorities’ fear of being seen as following the Communist lead in Mainland China. Since the Kuomintung government fled to Taiwan, the issue of Chinese character simplification has been raised from time to time, by both influential politicians and academics. For instance, during the 1950s, Luo Jialun proposed character

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Making Hanzi Accessible

simplification and received significant and enthusiastic support from the population. He was, however, condemned by Chiang Kaishek as being “orchestrated by the Communists across the Strait” – and the reform was quashed.

3.3

Implications for the Forthcoming Reforms

Despite the failure of the first governmental attempt to change modern character development, the FSS has been regarded as a precursor of subsequent simplification efforts as it provided the background and basis for future reforms. It can be said to have met with reasonable success, if success is measured in terms of its far-reaching effect upon later development. As Su (1993: 42) has metaphorically said, “the bud of 1935 bloomed in 1956”. The first governmental attempt is also significant in that it planted the seeds of reform in a time-tested writing system and shook the shibboleths about hanzi. As a means of written communication, hanzi had taken shape over a long historical period. Wang Fengyang (1992) stresses that over such a long developmental period, negative lethargic habits have evolved in language use. The force of habit is pervasive and irrational, and once inertia sets in and develops, it is resistant to any alteration unless it is faced with massive coercive pressures. Without doubt, the nationwide discussion and the governmental action to promote simplified characters diminished the profound veneration attached to characters. That fact is attested to by the use of simplified characters by more and more people.

3.4

Government vs Individuals

Another aspect of the FSS that might be of interest to LP researchers is the role that individuals have played in instigating LP programs. From the very beginning, the government intentionally played a minor role, and all the initiatives came from non-governmental organizations that were often dominated by prestigious individuals. These individuals’ professional profiles varied considerably, but they were able to organize the propagation of a common point of view among those occupying key administrative positions. The government took little or no part in initiating the reform program, and basically accepted various individual proposals. Experience shows that more often than not the lack of strong central leadership is conducive to script reform. Thus, before the government had shown any interest in it, the simplification campaign already had drawn a

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39

lot of interest from the wider population. Numerous tables of characters and dictionaries promoting simplified characters had been published (see Table 1-2). Zhou (1979: 324-325) noted that from 1927 to 1934, over 30 journals, periodicals and newspapers began to publish research papers and articles discussing simplified characters. The printing industry and publishing houses were free to use their own type fonts and forms of characters, and between 1931 and 1993 four books on the topic were published, and in the spring of 1935 a joint petition by over 200 elite scholars from cultural circles supporting the simplification was signed. In addition, fifteen publishers and some magazines took it upon themselves to begin to publish in simplified characters. At the same time, the individuality in LP is a two-edged sword. The failure to retain the reforms embodied in the FSS also demonstrates that a mechanism to guarantee legal and democratic procedures is essential to successfully carry out script reform. A script is one of the fundamental institutions in human life and deeply rooted in people’s minds. Over time, once legitimized and enforced, the social effects the reform creates have important consequences that need to have a certain degree of immunity from the pressure of individuals or interest groups, without rejecting the important role individuals can play in campaigning and implementing LP reforms. Table 1-2. Individual efforts to simplify characters in the 1930s

Book

Compiler

Publisher

Year

Characters simplified

Table of Popular Characters Since the Song and Yuan Dynasties

Liu Fu, Li Jiarui

Historical Institution of the Central Academy

1930

6,240

Dictionary of Simplified Characters

Rong Geng

Harvard -Yanjing University Press

1936

4,445

Table of Common Simplified Characters

Chen Guangyao

Beixin Book Bureau

1936

3,150

Table of Simplified Characters

Character Shape Same as compiler Association of Beijing Academy

1937

1,700

40

3.5

Making Hanzi Accessible

Methodological Issues

From a methodological perspective, the implementation of the FSS can be described as a soft landing. First of all, even though they were small in number and there was little risk of opposition, the original counterparts of the simplified hanzi were not to be abolished when official status was granted to the latter. Furthermore, the Education Ministry required that students should be able to read the simplified and original forms at the same time. Wang Li (1938) contends that the legalization of simplified characters, instead of releasing students from the cumbersome memorizing burden, now forced them to spend twice the time and energy to learn two systems. This may, however, be regarded as one stabilizing tactic to minimize the disturbing shock that the FSS may have caused to society. Furthermore, the more characters a scheme intends to simplify, the greater the risk that it will run into conflict with traditional conservatism. The FSS was a very conservative reform in quantitative terms (only 324 characters), but it was a well-prepared and meticulously planned program. This was confirmed by the adoption of over eighty percent of its simplified forms in the TSC in the 1956 scheme. The principle of ‘recognizing without creating’ (shu er bu zuo – ), put forward by the Preparatory Commission of National Language Unification, had a far-reaching impact upon further simplification endeavors. Adhering to this principle, the government saw its own role in simplifying hanzi as just collecting and implementing already existing characters, either from historical texts or those in long-time circulation in public writings, rather than creating new forms. The 1920s also produced the first scholar, Qian Xuantong, to try to categorize the existing methods of simplification, and since then, his eight methods have remained the most comprehensive way to simplify hanzi. 4 There were two other reasons why the FSS did not have a strong influence on orthographic life. First, the 324 adopted characters were chosen from over 2,400 that were originally recommended, and this number accounted for only 10 percent of the characters in daily use, all of which had a long history. Second, although the decree was promulgated by the Education Ministry and the measures were clear and draconian, its impact was strictly confined to the schools. Public usage was mentioned in the Order promulgating the FSS, but in the Order it was just suggested that simplified characters be used “as possible”, with no specific measures being formulated to implement the Order, despite the fact that two months after its issue, the Order was re-promulgated in the name of the central government (Zhang et al 1997).

Chapter 1

4.

41

SIMPLIFICATION MOVEMENTS IN THE 1950s AND 1960s

While the TSC is the most unprecedented simplification movement in Chinese history since the hanzi were stabilized during the square script period, it is in some respects, as we have argued, a continuation and realization of the FSS reforms of 1935. As the whole process of formulation of the FSS reforms has been well-documented in both the Chinese and English literature (see e.g., Chen P. 1999, DeFrancis 1984b, Seybolt and Chiang 1979, and most recently, Zhao 2005), the following discussion concentrates on the characteristic role of state power, and briefly assesses the outcome of the 1950s simplification activities, which have been largely ignored in the previous studies.

4.1

Dynamic Intervention from the State – Organizational Change

As the preceding section indicates, prior to 1949 the Nationalist government adopted a non-interventionist policy toward language issues, but this situation was abruptly changed with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Language was seen as an important part of the nation’s resources and listed as a political task on the working agenda. The new government started to carry out language reform through increasingly vigorous intervention on a scale previously unheard of. The first distinct feature of LP in the new China was the extensive involvement of the state’s organizations and a top-down language administration policy. The national-level LP agencies changed four times during the brief period of the establishment of the PRC. Gradual release of historical data in academic literature and personal accounts since the 1990s, on what happened during the first period of the establishment of the PRC, enables us to take a closer look at what was occurring in a relatively detailed fashion. 4.1.1

Coalition of Chinese Script Reform and Association of Chinese Script Reform

The first step taken by the CCP was to merge the Guoluo School5 with the Beila School (Northern Latinization pro-communist organization). At the dawn of the country’s foundation, the LP activists within the Party began to think about how to integrate experienced human sources in language reform

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Making Hanzi Accessible

into a large-scale nationwide language modernization campaign. Obviously, the best way to achieve this end was to set up an organization to bring the key members of previous reform movements, with good linguistics training, together under one roof. At the time, the people who were enthusiastically designing phonetic orthography and trying to simplify hanzi were numerous, ranging from devoted individuals to organizations operating under different ideological patronage. It appeared that ‘Coalition’ was the best term to unite all the sides involved, including members of the Association of Unified National Language Promotion, which was related to the Nationalist government regime. A brief look at the list of the participants gathered at the founding conference (Wang 1995) reveals that its members were chiefly composed of academics from higher institutions in Beijing. However, there had been frequent correspondence between some Coalition members and Communist Party leaders, and what was a totally non-government organization, embracing a wide range of individuals with different backgrounds in terms of political ideology and academic specialties, existed only for a short time. After some months, the organization changed its name from Coalition to Research Commission. On August 28, 1949, at the third meeting of all proponents, Wu Yuzhang, who used to be a pioneer in the Latinization movement in the 1920s and 1930s, which was backed by the CCP to spread revolutionary knowledge among Chinese workers living in Russia, made the proposal to change the name from Coalition to Research Commission. It was later revealed that this modification occurred at the direction of Mao Zedong and some other high-ranking Communist Party leaders. Although it was a non-government organ in name, this first nationwide organization of language reform was virtually under the direct control of the newly formed state central administration. It came into being just ten days after the birth of the PRC and seventy-eight members were elected by the universities in Beijing, representing all sections of society. The major tasks, as stated in the conference documents, were to study and test the Latin alphabetic writing system. 4.1.2

Research Commission of Chinese Script Reform

Then after two months’ operation, a more significant change in the nature of leadership occurred. Under an order from the central government, the Association was again reorganized and merged with the Research Commission and the Education Minister, and Ma Xulun was appointed as the director. Chia (1992: 185) describes this arrangement as “[f]or the first time in sixty years, the non-official script reform movement gained a

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legitimate status. Now, the reform programs can be officially enforced by the government through the education ministry.” 4.1.3

Commission of Chinese Script Reform

With the rapid development of script reform, driven by the intensified activities of governmental LP workers, language planning issues increasingly had become a major agenda for the central administration, and it appeared that it was the right time for the government to act. Proposed by the Premier Zhou Enlai, the Standing Commission of the People’s Congress approved the establishment of a Commission of Script Reform on October 8, 1954. With this decision, the script reform plan went from being a theoretical study to a practical plan for action that was going to be enforced from the top through state power. Wu Yuzhang, its director, suggested in his Working Report, “Before, it was a research institution; from now on, we have to go among the masses and get into the society itself, to take tangible and feasible measures to promote various concrete programs of script reform” (Fei 1997: 193-194). In addition to the national-level script reform organizations just discussed, a number of provincial level and local organizations had been established across the country. The most influential one was the Association of Shanghai New Script Workers, which was founded on September 4, 1949. It was chaired by Chen Wangdao and Ni Haishu, two prime script reform activists for several decades, and it had 110 members. Its work focused on promoting Romanization that was left uncompleted by the Association of Unified National Language Promotion. Table 1-3 records the name changes and functions of the LP organs, indicating its gradual increase in official stature during this hectic transition period. The table indicates vigorous participation from the wider academic community, and powerful central leadership from the newly formed government. During the first three years of its establishment, the name changed from Coalition to Association to Research Commission, then from Research Commission to Commission, each indicating the increasing importance of government power in its functioning process 6. Chia (1992) sees the last reconstruction of the LP organization and its official governmental control as a positive change in language reform. But Duan Shengnong (1990: 207) and Lü Guanxiong (2003), two Chinese LP analysts, are critical of these changes, arguing that “the scholar’s role has eventually been reduced”. Duan (1990) blames top-down bureaucratic interference caused by these changes as the factor responsible for the

Founding Date

Affiliation

Leaders/Initiator

Purpose

Coalition of Chinese Script Reform ( )

7.8.1949

Non-official

Wu Yuzhang, Xu Teli (senior revolutionaries); Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei (linguists)

To exchange views on Chinese Romanization

Association of Chinese Script Reform ( )

10.10.1949

Semi official organization under the auspices of the new government; 78 members

Wu Yuzhang (director)

a. to unify Chinese script reform workers; b. to promote Chinese script reform; c. to study and carry out experiments with the reform methods.

Research Commission of Script Reform ( )

2.5.1952

Under the Education Commission of the State Council of the Central Government; 12 members

Ma Xulun (director, education minister); Wu Yuzhang (vicedirector)

a. to study and work out an alphabetic scheme (based on a character stroke) b. investigate character simplification and work out a simplification scheme.

Commission of Script Issues of the Chinese Communist Party Central Commission ( )

1.10.1953

Central Commission of the CCP; over 30 members

Hu Qiaomu (Mao Zedong’s secretary of political affairs);

a. to coordinate the different views on script reform within the Party; b. to discuss the major principles and steps to execute the script reform programs; c. to provide the Central Commission of the CCP with practical and feasible suggestions.

Commission of Chinese Script Reform ( )

23.12.1954

Fan Wenlan (vice-director; historian)

Under the direct leadership of the State Council (highest governmental apparatus); 23 members

Wu Yuzhang (director) Hu Yuzhi (vice-director communist ideologist theorist)

a. to increase governmental influence in enforcing script reform; b. to progress research work to a practical stage; c. to complement the national language policy across the country.

Making Hanzi Accessible

Organization’s Name

44

Table 1-3. The change in Chinese LP agencies in the 1950s (Chia 1992, Fei 1997, Wang 1995, Wu 1978)

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subsequent undesirable effects on Chinese characters. This shift in responsibility is consistent with the role of agency (i.e., actors in Cooper’s (1989) terms) found more general international experience. For example, Baldauf and Kaplan (2003: 33) observe that “applied linguists are not involved in language policy making to any significant extent. The actors are most likely to be (top-down) politicians, constrained by historical/ constitutional circumstances, or else bureaucrats.”

4.2

A Tentative Evaluation of the Table of Simplified Characters of 1956 – Periodic Success

In 1951, the Ministry of Education published the First Group of Simplified Characters, containing 555 characters. After seeking advice from experts in various fields, the government drafted a Scheme of Simplified Characters in 1954, which was formally published in the People’s Daily in January 1956. The Scheme consisted of three tables: a first track of 230 simplified characters already in use, a second track of 285 newly modified characters, and a third track of 54 streamlined radicals. It was a requirement that all school textbooks and educational publications should be in simplified characters starting from the first semester following the issuance of the Scheme. To put these changes in context, it is necessary to look at the simplification methods used. Methodologically, the Scheme had basically adopted Qian Xuantong’s principles (see Note 4), and, to conform with Mao’s directives, the simplified shapes made extensive use of the popular ‘running’ (xingshu) and ‘cursive’ (caoshu) writing styles, as well as substituting characters by others with the same pronunciation. DeFrancis (1979: 147) and Tsang (1996: 8-11) have listed these changes under three broad categories: •

Simplification by shape: a) using part of the original character to (ye, profession), (shu, skill); represent the whole: (qi, b) using just the silhouetted outline of the original one: (bian, change): c) using a simplified sign to complete), (zhao, surname), replace the complex part in the original one: (han, Chinese). • Simplification by pronunciation: a) using the existing simple or simplified identical or similar component to replace the more complex (jian, destroy), phonetic compound of the original one: (lin, neighbor); b) using the existing simple or simplified full or partial homonym of similar or even unrelated meaning, to replace the

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complex character with the same or similar pronunciation: (yu, gloomy). (dou, to fight), • Simplification by semantic implications: Creating a new simple character by combining two characters according to their semantic relations: (chen, dust), (mie, to perish). The simplification reform of 1956 that people talk about today generally refers to the General List of Simplified Characters (GLSC) of 1964, as this list is the final outcome of a series of tables that preceded it. The co-existence of a number of tables published in the 1950s confused users, with the biggest discrepancy being how to treat some characters when their simplified form is used as a component in other characters. In February 1964, the State Council decreed that it was acceptable to abbreviate most of the characters whenever they appeared as radicals or components in other characters. The following May, the CCSR published a General List of Simplified Characters containing 2,238 characters. However, simplification of traditional Chinese writing actually involves two additional processes, apart from the structural simplification for each individual character through stroke reduction; it also refers to the total number of strokes that are reduced and the shape standardization. The latter is evident in the two accompanying lists: the First Table of Verified Variant Forms (1955), and the General List of Print Fonts of Chinese Characters (GLPFCC) of 1965. Under the first measure 1,053 variant forms, referring to several characters having the same meaning and pronunciation but different forms, were eliminated through careful selection (some 26 of these subsequently have been resumed). Second, in the GLPFCC, shapes, stroke number and writing conventions of 6,196 characters were fixed, thus bringing to an end the chaotic situation that had plagued publications. Another important event that occurred during this period of the script modernization in the 1950s and 1960s was the promulgation of the Alphabetic Scheme of Chinese Romanization (more widely known as pinyin) in 1958. This reform is a major outcome of government policy to promote early literacy teaching in schools, but its introduction has not posed a threat to hanzi writing and use. Aspects of this reform are referred to subsequently (see Section 2, Chapter 7). The deficiencies in the simplified hanzi system came under fire from overseas Chinese residents from the very beginning. Because the discussion was heated and the criticism was sharp even before the TSC was commissioned, dissident voices in mainland China were silenced as part of the Anti-Rightists Campaign7 of 1958, and contentious academic

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views were indiscriminately labeled as politically-biased attacks. Thus, no negative comments were heard about the TSC until a symposium that was held in December 1986. The effect of this repression inside the country was that since its publication in 1956, no overarching assessment was attempted to examine any unexpected impacts on the writing system. This is abnormal in most LP situations, and as a consequence, since the mid-1980s there has been an increasing amount written about dysfunctionality in Chinese script reform. Overseas opposition forces have been joined by a growing number of Mainland scholars, who now admit that simplification was not entirely perfect. Understandably, Taiwan has produced more publications that critically analyze the failures of the Mainland language reform than any other place. Despite the fact that many authors are detractors rather than objective critics in this politically and culturally charged intellectual tussle8, there are analysts, such as Huang Peirong (1992) and Tsang Yuan-hou (1996), whose work is analytic with conclusions that are free of political bias. Chia (1992), a scholar from Singapore, is thought to be the first person to have comprehensively and objectively analyzed the problems in the TSC that have become evident over a relatively long period of time of use. Ferguson (1996: 283) points out that “the measurement of efficiency must always be in terms of particular goals; if these are left inexplicit; the whole definition of efficiency becomes problematic”. Critical comments that evaluate simplification gains and losses tend to take an ahistorical perspective. We would argue that the 1950s script reform is an embedded historical process that is more meaningfully understood if it is looked at systematically in three separate historical periods. 4.2.1

The Mao Era (1949-1977)

The achievements during the Mao period have manifested themselves in economic interests and political gains. From the very beginning, party leaders stressed that script reform must be treated as a political task. This was partly because the new government needed to consolidate its legitimacy to rule through the creation of visible achievements. The objectives of the hanzi simplifications were often presented through slogans and then specifically used to further particular governmental political purposes. For example, adult literacy was realized by teaching agriculture and production knowledge, or by making the more fundamental goal of educating the next revolutionary generation easier. It can be said that hanzi simplification is one of the few revolutionary actions, occurring during Mao’s era that has not been denounced and reversed after the Cultural Revolution.

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Considering the fact that only frequently used characters were simplified, the degree of convenience created varies, depending on the type of text. Table 1-4 provides a better idea of the quantitative impact of stroke reduction as viewed from a number of comparative perspectives. Table 1-4. Comparison of stroke reduction before and after simplification

Statistics

Before simplification

After simplification

Average number of strokes for 544 characters that underwent simplification (Wang 1995: 148)

16.08 strokes

8.17 strokes

Characters with less than ten strokes for 2,238 characters in the General List (Chia 1992: 236237)

141 characters

1,263 characters

Number of strokes for characters with less than ten strokes for 2,238 characters in the General List (Chia 1992: 236-237)

36,283 strokes

23,055 strokes

Average strokes in one million characters of running text (Zhou 1979: 341-342)

9.15 strokes

7.67 strokes

Average number of strokes for most used 2,000 characters (Zhou 1992: 168)

4.2.2

11.2

Simplified by 50 %

Increase from 6.3 % to 56.4 %

9.18

6 strokes on average

8.4%

12%

The Deng Era (1978 to the beginning of the 1990s)

Simplification caused a break between the writing system used in the mainland and that of the overseas community. The problems, stemming from the inconvenience of communicating with traditional character regions, only became evident in the Deng (Xiaoping) era after 1978 as political and economic policy moved to take on a more external focus. Given the socio-political setting in the 1950s, it was not surprising that little consideration was given to the external users. However, since the 1980s, there have been many reports that visiting and returning overseas Chinese have found themselves suddenly alienated from their own

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motherland and culture of origin. The cultural barrier the change has caused, both within China and in other character using regions, has led to international communication barriers in the East Asian region. As yet, no research has been done on the impact this may have had on external investment in China. While this kind of two-way interaction between regions using the simplified characters and traditional characters was of no concern during Mao’s leadership, when China was basically an inwardlyfocused country – it may even have been deliberately pursued to block the people from communicating with the outside world – it became an issue during Deng’s economic reform and ‘opening-up’. The change from inwardness to outwardness offers a good illustration of Ferguson’s (1996: 283) point: “if the goal is to facilitate linguistic understanding with a neighboring nation, one kind of orthography may be highly efficient, while if the goal is to have a nationally distinctive language or to inhibit communication with the other nation then a different kind of orthography would be more efficient”. 4.2.3

The IT Era in the 1990s

Today, while simplified characters have won significant approval among the majority of Chinese scholars, both inside and outside China, it has become clear to them that systematic rationalization is more vital than the quantitative reduction of stroke complexity. In keeping abreast of the information age, reducing the number of components has attracted a lot of attention from scholars. One of the earliest, Hung Hin-chung9 (1980: 34), recognized the shortcomings of pure simplification from his own experience in mechanizing hanzi: Chinese people are shortsighted people. Today, we write characters with a pen, so it is reasonable to simplify the strokes in order to save time, but this is not a future-oriented thought. If we still write characters by using strokes in the next century, then Chinese culture will become extinct even if Chinese characters survive the time. As this brief history of the FSS and TSC suggests, the TSC in the 1950s was adopted as an interim measure for contemporary convenience, prior to formally embarking on the road to Romanization. Feng Zhiwei (2001: personal communication10) argued vividly that the TSC was not the only thing that was in the government’s ‘pockets’: they only took out the items in one side-pocket to test the public’s response; the real objective – Romanization – was in the other pocket. The guiding ideology in this situation, ‘the simpler, the more efficient’, became the dominant premise

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of simplification. However, the problems that have emanated from the technological developments of the information age were unanticipated, and these will be left for relevant sections in forthcoming chapters. 4.2.4

Lessons Learned from the TSC

It is unquestionable that the 1956 simplification contributed to the great success achieved in diminishing the large number of illiterates and in spreading the knowledge about nation building. However, since China embarked upon a policy of economic reform and opening up in 1978, the anarchic situation that can be seen in actual language use indicates that simplified character use in Mainland China has not been the success it first seemed to be. This is indubitably so after the advent of the modern computer as will be seen in subsequent chapters in this volume. In the end, therefore, what has been achieved is limited and has only lasted for a relatively short period of time (see e.g., Zhou 1986a; 1992). The historical phenomenon of initial success, but with more and more problems arising because the social conditions in which the reform was made had changed, offers Chinese LP workers some lessons on which to reflect: • Script reform is a kind of large-scale social experiment; being a timerelated phenomenon, it is difficult to determine the degree to which goals are fulfilled and the far-reaching impact of the various outcomes that are subject to historical settings and technological conditions. As Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 5) observe, LP projects target human behavior, which “usually goes beyond the life of any political administration. At the termination of the project, there is no palpable outcome to see. There is no easy or agreed way to measure the benefits derived from the project.” • The historical nature of Chinese hanzi – which are used by one quarter of the world’s population and have survived an enormously long history almost intact – cannot be overlooked. Any reform of a welldeveloped and time-honored language cannot be achieved over a short time frame. • How one can consolidate the achievements, gained in a highly centrally controlled and pre-reform society, in a rapidly changing sociolinguistic environment, remains unresolved. • As this section suggests, the reform of 1956 can be regarded as linguistically successful. But this observation is made in the abstract, without sufficient emphasis on the wider social context. Therefore, the

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problem of the impact of the traditional system emanating from the communication problems with regions outside China, where, to varying degrees, traditional characters are still in use, has not been assessed.

5.

SECOND SIMPLIFICATION SCHEME (SSS) (1977)

The drafting work on the SSS started in the 1960s. After the GLSC was published in 1964, it was agreed that there were still a large number of commonly used characters that had more than ten strokes. Some simplified forms of these characters were shown to the public to elicit their opinions along with a series of simplification tables, published in the 1950s. There were a range of views on how to simplify some characters, but the government promised these characters would be simplified when further elaborations were available and further simplified characters had been collected. However, the beginning of the Cultural Revolution meant that the formulation process was not able to proceed in the same manner as in the 1950s. In particular, during the chaotic period of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, when the revolutionary spirit of the masses had reached its peak, the table in question was substantially expanded and gained the attention of the top national leaders. But for some reason, as yet not clearly explained, the proposal was shelved and was not passed by the central government until the end of 1977, immediately after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the celebration of the demise of the Gang of Four11. The Scheme came out as two lists, although the preface stated that the first list, which contained 248 characters, was to be put into immediate formal use, while the remaining 605 characters could be used in trials. However, in most cases, this distinction was not made in actual practice. Furthermore, due to the well-defined and effective Communist propaganda system, the Scheme very quickly penetrated deeply into public life. The Scheme encountered a mixed reaction following its official publication, and momentum opposing it grew so quickly and was so strong, that by July 1978, barely eight months after it took effect, the SSS was withdrawn from use in school textbooks and the major national newspapers, and was finally formally rescinded in 1986. In order to better understand these events better, we need to understand the ideological nature of the political system in China.

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5.1

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Political Presence in Chinese Characters and Character Planning

The Chinese Communist Party identifies itself with Marxist tenets. The main elements in Marx’s theory of society can be summarized as follows: the mode of production and relations of production, the economic base and superstructure, contradictions and class struggle, social formation (such as capitalist and communist society) and revolutionary change. Thus, the mode of production determines the general social, political, and intellectual life process, i.e., the superstructure. According to the Marxist school of thought, in 1949, when the people (i.e., the Communist Party) took power and replaced capitalism with socialism, there still remained an important economic base to give rise to a new bourgeois element. A potential conflict in the superstructure could not be ruled out as long as the struggle between the two antagonistic economic classes continued. The decisive factor in creating the nature and function of language is the political need of the dominant class. Thus, in a class-based society characters inevitably become an instrument of proletarian indoctrination. For example, in discussing how language is related to politics, Kim (1992: 242) says that in the 1960s, North Korea’s socialist movement for language reform was “a logical product of the communist doctrine, in which language is not just a medium of interpersonal communication but is viewed as ‘a weapon of revolution’, or instrument for implementing communist ideals such as social equality and justice, egalitarianism, etc.” This helps us to understand the political impact on script reform, which was seen as a part of an ideological structure, containing a matrix of supportive versus contradictory relationships between the economic structure and character simplification. According to CCP doctrine, China prior to liberation in 1949 was a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society, where the dominant classes were the landlords and capitalists (see Figure 1-2), and where the superstructure was aligned with the economic base. For the ruling classes, reading and writing skills were a source of their power and influence, so a supportive relationship existed between social class and traditional characters. After liberation, when China had become a socialist country, the means of writing was no longer compatible with ruling class as the superstructure should satisfy the economic substructure. Therefore, the proletarian masses now had both the need and the power to reform the writing system in order to make it serve the new society more effectively. Nevertheless, from an analysis of the relationships of production, potential capitalist factors continued to exist in socialist China after the simplification

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scheme of 1956. The various reactionary elements (persons with power, capital, education) representing the capitalists’ interests, invariably opposed character simplification. According to N.Y. Marr, a dominant linguist in developing a ‘socialist linguistics theory’ in the former Soviet Union, language, including writing, has a class nature in that it is part of the superstructure. Language changes when the economic base undergoes change as a new class comes to power, as in the transition from feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Marr’s idea found fertile soil in China because of hanzi’s apparent class nature. It was seized upon by Chinese Romanization advocates to buttress their arguments for a more fundamental reform, i.e., replacing Chinese characters with an alphabetic system. The Declaration of the New Latinized Script, passed by the First Congress of Chinese New Script, which was organized by exiled members of the CCP in the Soviet Union on September 26, 1931 announced:

Figure 1-2. Class analysis of script reform (Adapted from Kwong 1979: 12)

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[T]his congress holds that Chinese characters are an attachment of the past and feudalism, and that they have become a tool for the ruling class to oppress the poor class. For the vast working people they are a real obstacle to gaining literacy, thus hanzi are not in conformity with the new era (Li M.S. 2000: 299). Luckily for Chinese hanzi, this class-based theory was not sufficiently long-lived to create a more pernicious effect on Chinese language reform. Because the Marr School was quickly losing approval when Joseph Stalin’s Marxism on Linguistic Issues was published in mid-1950s, his followers in China were also forced to self-criticize (see Wu 1978). In fact, during the founding years of the PRC, the relatively democratic climate provided a favorable environment for any cultural undertaking. In this atmosphere, script reform work might have proceeded along a smoother road had not a turn to the left in the political arena produced the AntiRightists Movement and the Cultural Revolution.

5.2

Formalization and Implementation

After noting how political ideological was incorporated into the notion of Chinese character reform, in the following sections, we look at how the radical SSS, which was boldly expanded from about 100 characters to a seemingly impossible 850 characters over a short period, got published. 5.2.1

The Dying Cinders Glowing Again

In 1965, GLPFCC was officially published, and 6196 characters had their standard fonts for the publishing industry defined. After this, due to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, publications related to LP were virtually discontinued until 1972, when Guo Moruo, the authoritative scholar in the study of jiaguwen and the president of the China Academy of Sciences, published an article in Hongqi (Red Flag) Magazine, praising the masses’ enthusiasm for creating new simple characters (Guo 1972: 8485). Given the fact that this was the first significant article to be published on language reform issues in seven years, and that it appeared not in a linguistics journal, but in the mouthpiece and the theoretical journal of the CCP (Guo was China’s then Vice-Premier), its political significance was self-evident. Milsky (1973: 98-133), a Paris-based Sinologist, was so excited by the latest development of the official policy in Chinese language reform heralded by this article, that he made an unusually detailed analysis of its significance, section by section.

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Similarly, some other articles that had appeared at the beginning of the 1970s are of special significance when discussing the historical events leading up to the resumption of simplification and the publication of the Second Scheme. In 1973, two articles with heavy political overtones appeared in the People’s Daily, by the same author (Wen Hua, an obvious pseudonym), entitled The Written Language Must be Reformed and On Reforming Written Chinese. Despite the fact that the class basis of characters had been rebutted in Stalin’s comments in the 1950s, the debate over script reform in China began to be raised as a political issue again. In order to justify why so much importance should be placed on script reform, its political significance was raised in another form, with the emphasis on the class nature of writing reform instead of on writing per se. As Wen Hua (cited in DeFrancis 1984b: 267) points out, “Written language is a system of symbols for recording spoken language. It has no class nature in and of itself; the work of reforming it has a clear-cut class nature.” In another article, Wen Hua (Seybolt and Chiang 1979: 351) provided a further explanation about the class orientation of writing reform work: The fierce struggle between the two classes and the two lines within our country is reflected in the work of language reform. In 1957, the right wing of the bourgeoisie attacked language reform. Swindlers like Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao are the deadly enemies of socialism. Within our Party, they represent the landlords and bourgeoisie. “They do not want workers and peasants to lift their heads politically and culturally” [Mao Zedong]. While this reasoning sounds somewhat convoluted, the political fervor it expressed was very much the standard of the times; therefore no one appears to have come forward to challenge it. To serve political ends, the Special Language Reform Unit of Nanjing University (in collaboration with its counterpart, the Beijing University), led a campaign to criticize the Confucian ‘great man’ historical theory claimed to be promoted by Lin Biao12. In January of 1974, a paper, written by this Unit, entitled ‘Cangjie means the Masses and the Masses Means Cangjie’, was published in the Guangming Daily. The article emphasized that the ‘mass line’ in script reform is the underlying principle of language reform, “the great masses have contributed to language reform by using their wisdom to create new simplified characters.” This is the so-called for the masses, by the masses doctrine, because the masses not only have created the hanzi, but also were the force to push forward its development forward. Considering that the nature of the Cultural Revolution was a political game or exercise, to use

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mass movements to achieve personal ends (see e.g., Liu 1986), this slogan of ‘come from the people, back to the people’ is a reflection of the Cultural Revolution at work in language work. In addition, the theme of alignment was furthered by a series of other activities. A biweekly column on language reform in the Guangming Daily was resumed, and articles encouraging further simplification by the masses were published in this column. A small dictionary of newly simplified characters was given official support and published in 1973, and a book, entitled The Overhauling and Simplification of Chinese Characters, was edited by the Language Reform Press (Beijing) in 1974. The book, which is a collection of articles dealing with simplified characters, was authored by peasants, soldiers, and workers, which were then propagated as the ‘basic elements of revolutionary masses’. More significantly, most of the trained LP staff were expelled from the CCSR, and it was restructured and staffed with non-expert personnel representing the masses. 5.2.2

A Critical Review of Promulgation

The SSS took shape in 1974, and it was originally scheduled to be given national publicity in 1975. But after the Scheme was submitted to the State Council for further review, in the name of the CCSR, the request was not acted upon immediately. In some areas in late 1975, however, the draft proposal was distributed for discussion, to people down to the brigade level of the rural communes. Many questions around the formalization of the SSS and its final public release still remain to be answered. It was assumed that while much valuable information remains political and personally sensitive, key figures involved in Chinese LP would know a great deal about these decisions. The first author has tried to obtain more information about some of these questions through personal contact with the key figures, but failed to get unambiguous and satisfactory answers, leaving the issue vague for the foreseeable future. No open discussion of the formalization process is available, not even to the extent of there being some sketchy paragraphs on this issue. As most personnel who participated in the process are still active in LP or in other academic circles, it remains a very sensitive topic. In the Chinese cultural context, it is always best to avoid specifying the person responsible for an event when that person would be linked negatively to a situation. This cultural behavior makes it very hard to piece together a complete picture of what happened in order to draw reliable conclusions. The literature concerning the process is quite confusing, with contradictory articles.

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In addition to cultural and social reluctance, much valuable information, especially that from the 1960s and 70s, is still classified and withheld for various political and strategic reasons – it is common policy for many governments around the world to withhold documents in their archives for 25 or 30 years. As Blachford (2004: 183) laments, “the greatest difficulty in analyzing the policy process in China derives from the practice of closed-door meetings and the confidentiality of almost all internal documents”. In discussing Mao’s role in LP programs in the 1950s, DeFrancis (1984b: 257) uses phrases like “[T]his remains buried in archives that it is hoped will one day be opened for study”, or “the tantalizing uncertainties whose resolution awaits further information” (p. 258). Official data for events or actions, reported in the highly partycontrolled media, are more likely to be based on political considerations than on being related to the existing reality. In 1974, an eight-member delegation of American linguists visited China and held wide-ranging discussions with LP practitioners, including some key members in the CCSR. The CCSR’s officials claimed, according to the accounts subsequently published by the delegation (Lehmann 1975: 46-47), that since 1964, the Committee had collected simplified characters coined by the masses. After a systematic study of these characters, it submitted the draft list of about 100 simplified characters to the State Council for approval. It was expected that these would be promulgated in 1975, and then the list of approved characters would again be distributed to the masses for discussion and comment before its official publication. If this was the expectation, two questions arise: • Why was its promulgation delayed for two years until 1977? • How did a moderate list of 100 characters become a list of 853 characters when it was finally presented to the public? At first glance, the following standard official explanation seems to provide an answer to the first question (Seybolt and Chiang 1979: 379): As early as May 1975, the Committee for Chinese Writing Reform submitted the ‘Second Plan for Simplifying Chinese Characters (Draft),’ but it was suppressed unreasonably by Zhang Chunqiao, using authority that he has stolen. Now that the Gang of Four has been struck down, there is hope for writing reform. Under the leadership of the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Hua, the ‘Second Plan for Simplifying Chinese Characters (Draft)’, which the masses have long awaited, has finally been introduced to them.

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Except for this kind of slogan-like denouncement beset with political cliché, no substantial evidence has been given to suggest Zhang (VicePremier of the State Council during the Cultural Revolution) or his collaborators in the Gang of Four had been obstructing the simplification process. The following, more detailed account, appeared in People’s Daily on February 22, 1977. It is the only description that can be found in official publications regarding their crime against Party language reform policy. In May 1975, the CCSR submitted the SSS to the State Council. Just at this time … Zhang Chunqiao had usurped the Party and seized the leadership. He did not even look at the SSS, but held it unreasonably for two months, excusing himself that “I don’t know the historical development of character reform well”. Then he deliberately passed it to Premier Zhou Enlai … Even if it is true that he [Zhang] did not know it very well, he could order an investigation into it through relevant organizations. In fact, Zhang Chunqiao was an opponent of the Vernacularization Movement during the 1930s … Jiang Qing also once complained and shouted “simplified characters make people like us become almost illiterate …” Historical sources indicate, however, that Zhang himself used to be one of the pioneers advocating the simplification and Vernacular Movement in the 1930s (Li 1934; Fei 1997: 66). Zhang’s indecision is more of a technical concern rather than being politically inspired. “Their reservations concerning some of the shortcomings of the draft, shared by many who saw it later, was quoted as evidence of ‘suppression’ immediately after their fall from power”, as Rohsenow (1986: 84) has rightly pointed out. Furthermore, as previously noted, the formation of the SSS was an outcome of the Cultural Revolution, which the Gang of Four enthusiastically supported and directly benefited from. The enlarged list generously included ‘creations by the masses’, and as such manifested their ‘revolutionary spirit’. It appears, therefore, that some other explanations ought to be sought to account for the two-year delay in the release of the SSS. It is reasonable to infer that the simplified character list, submitted to the State Council, was the shorter version of the aforementioned approximately 100 characters that had been properly selected from the masses since 1964 and tabulated by senior experts for fuller, careful examination. The risk of being branded anti-revolutionary Rightists by the Leftist faction in the CCSR left them no choice but to put it forward to the central government. However, Left radicals, both in the political domain and within the linguistic institutions including the CCSR, considered the proposal not to be revolutionary enough – not embracing all the creations

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by the masses that they would have liked to have seen. For instance, Chi Qun, one of the followers of the Gang of Four and the ‘responsible person’ for science, education, and cultural affairs, was a strong supporter of increasing the Scheme’s scope (Rohsenow 1986: 76). Invisible political power games at the highest level were being played out most visibly in the superstructure (ideological) areas, such as the cultural and educational sphere, and these became increasingly fierce towards the end of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. The Leftist forces of the politically ambitious Gang of Four penetrated into virtually every institution. The CCSR, which was subordinate to the State Council and functioned at the ministerial level, was an important battlefield in this political struggle. One of the original sections in the CCSR was responsible for the collection and standardization of simplified characters in use by the masses or suggested by them, as well as for the preparation of draft lists for consideration by the committee. During the Cultural Revolution, this section was reorganized as the ‘748 Project’ Special Research Group of Standard Characters13, with an emphasis on non-scholar members and independence from the CCSR. The composition of this group can only be surmised, due to the lack of reliable data about its formation and members. What we can be certain of is that this was an ad hoc body of members, drawn from the non-academic staff of all organizations concerned with the Chinese language, such as news agencies and publishing houses, as well as the CCSR office. This special group was believed to have played a very instrumental role in broadening the basic list of about 100 characters to 853. In order to have a specific source to justify what they had done and to drum-up support in the publicity campaign for the final publication, Zhou’s instruction was deliberately quoted in an article published in the People’s Daily (February 22, 1977), in the name of the CCSR: Our beloved Premier Zhou, being possessed by the demon of disease, went through the whole draft and report on his sickbed. Premier Zhou instructed us: “It has been such a long time since Chairman Mao talked about the simplification of characters, why has so little been done? To get the opinions from the masses is correct; allow them to revise it …” DeFrancis (1984b: 261) also noted that this list was the work of some working staff in the CCSR “without consultation with and, of course, without the approval of official members of the committee. The draft was sent directly to the State Council for approval.” But, how could this Leftist work be published over one year after the fall of the Gang of Four? One plausible explanation is the ascendance of another well-known official

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named Ni Zhifu14, who had taken over Zhang’s responsibility for the areas of education, culture and propaganda after the Gang of Four was arrested in October 1976. Rohsenow (1986: 78) believes Ni had played a key role in making it happen: Finding that Zhang Chunqiao has taken no action on the draft since it has been submitted to the State Council in May 1975, in order to protect himself, Ni had no choice but to submit it as he found it, probably in late 1977. As the draft had been properly submitted by the CCSR two years earlier, shelved by Zhang Chunqiao, and purportedly supported by the ever-popular Zhou, the State Council, having far more pressing matters to deal with, simply approved it and sanctioned its release for trial use and public comment. Given the intensity of the political situation during the Cultural Revolution, especially at the time around 1976, it is not surprising that the SSS was formed and promulgated in such an unusual way. Another source, provided by a participant, despite its equivocal paraphrasing, tells us more about the behind-the-scene facts surrounding its mysterious publication, and about how confusing the situation was at that time. When Hu Yuzhi, who was the former vice-director of the CCSR and the former vicechairman of the Standing Committee of the Great People’s Congress and had played a big role in overturning the SSS, wanted to know who had authorized this scheme for publication in the national newspaper, he had to turn to staff in the People’s Daily. “Some years after the Second Scheme was officially published, one day, comrade Hu Yuzhi asked me how the Second Scheme could get published and ordered me to write a selfcriticism,” said Zhang Xuetao (2000: 6), who served as a journalist with the China national Xinhua News Agency before his retirement. In his own words: When the Great Cultural Revolution began, all members of the CCSR went to ‘5.7’ Cadre’s Rehabilitation School and they did not return to the city until the middle of the 1970s, when the revolution came to an end. … at that time, our ‘748 Project’ Research Group of Standard Chinese Characters got a room from the CCSR and went to work there every day. One comrade in our group was from People’s Daily, and he was very enthusiastic about the script reform. So our group was able to have the typesetting of the SSS arranged in advance through this comrade. After it was studied many times by the rank and file within the CCSR, without the approval from the National People’s Congress,

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the SSS was published in a very hurried fashion under the mood of ‘revolution is right’. The following narrative affords us additional information to get a clearer understanding of the situation. During a face-to-face argument with SSS opponents in an officially sponsored meeting on hanzi issues, Zheng Linxi (1988b: 348), a widely respected script reform pioneer, said: The SSS has nothing to do with the ‘Gang of Four’, neither is it a concomitant of the ‘Leftist Line’. Factually, the first person who insisted on submitting the draft of the SSS to the ‘above’ [top authority] was Zhou Rongxin, the then Education Minister. He was persecuted to death by [nobody but] the ‘Gang of Four’. Therefore, it is contrary to the historical facts to put a Leftist cap on the SSS. This is a groundless accusation. Based on Zhang and Zheng’s statement, we can assume that it is more likely that the internal conflict between competing forces within the CCSR, rather than the more superficial political struggles, played a substantial role in the process. It used to be customary to disgrace ousted politicians by holding them responsible for all faults committed during their time in office, which partially explains why the media was so keen to pick on the ‘Gang of Four’ and blacken other individuals’ names. But this approach, which oversimplifies the actual situation, is not salutary to any scientific research and not only blurs historical facts, but also puts up barriers to a rational analysis, taking attention away from the underlying reasons which have to be evaluated and submitted to critical analysis in the future. Jackson and T’sou (1979: 78) point out that language reform can be used as a means to gain political balance among various interest groups. [A]ny language reform must be taken at such a pace that it may not exacerbate the differences and mutual distrust, [because] the leadership in the government maintains its position in power by means of a variety of social, economic and political strategies. … Such a situation may be acted upon by subversive and anti-communist groups or by factions within the Party itself who wish to oust the group currently in power. In case of the SSS, it is interesting to see that the same faction within the Party that was at one time criticized as a ‘road-blocking tiger’ (obstacle) on the way to the release of the Scheme, was at another time accused of being its mastermind. The picture of the whole process may become more ambiguous if we uncritically accept the information offered by

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official documents. Revealing the complex socio-political fabric in which LP is embedded can shed some light on our understanding of the origin and development of the entire process. However, politically biased reviews invariably downplay and distort certain factors and tend to overlook the complexity of LP. So particular questions are avoided: If the Gang of Four were the guilty party in the Scheme’s postponement, what were the likely underlying factors leading to that failure? What is the implication of accusing a clique of ousted politicians? Can other attempts be similarly generalized, say, the previous failed reforms of 1935? Furthermore, a tentative exploration of the official version of the SSS’s publication process shows that any LP evaluation should not concern itself purely with examining the political context or finding the individual who bears real responsibility. To ensure that attention is not distracted from examining LP as a whole, politically charged explanations require some degree of conscientious examination. 5.2.3

The Abandonment of the Second Scheme

The Scheme was published in full in China’s two most important newspapers (People’s Daily and Guangming Daily) on December 20, 1977, along with editorials, entitled Speeding up the Pace of Character Simplification and A Jolly Event Welcomed by the Masses, respectively. The next day, these two major papers started to use the characters from the first list. In the first few days after the announcement, many signed articles were arranged to hail the publication, and the response from the general public was to a greater or lesser extent positive. In particular, the Language Reform column of the Guangming Daily poured out a great number of articles which recorded enthusiastic support from the masses, but vigorously criticized the Gang of Four for their role in retarding the reform process, and for the “heavy losses they caused in education and language planning” (December 20, 1977, People’s Daily and Guangming Daily). Blame even extended to Liu Shaoqi15 and Lin Biao, regardless of the evidence to the contrary which supported Liu’s actual role in reforming hanzi, and to Lin Biao who was at no stage known to oppose the simplification. Perhaps because of this fervent initial official reception, withdrawal of the Scheme was not straightforward and three distinct phases can be seen. 1. The cooling-down period. This was marked by three observable facts that contributed to a subsiding fervor in the political tone of the SSS:

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• It got a chilly response from professional circles. Chinese Linguistics (Zhongguo Yuwen), the country’s foremost linguistics journal, neither used SSS characters nor published articles to endorse the SSS, which is in stark contrast to its enthusiastic role in the 1950s simplifications; • More unusually, at the annual Conference of the National People’s Congress and the political consultancy held in March of 1978, the conference organizing secretariat was strongly cautioned before the meeting not to use SSS characters in any official documents of the conference by some prominent linguists, who were themselves representatives at the conference (Fei 1997: 352); • Then, on January 7, 1980, when answering readers’ letters, the People’s Daily declared: “the large-scale experiment [of the SSS] has been accomplished and will enter a revision phase”. To clear up any confusion, this official position was reiterated by a news report in People’s Daily (12.5.1980), announcing that: The trial use needed further revision before it could be submitted to the State Council for approval. 2. The re-evaluation period. This started in the spring of 1980, when the functions of the CCSR were resumed and a special SSS Revision Committee was set up, headed by Wang Li, who had suffered political persecution for expressing his views on language issues. The re-evaluation process involved consecutive closed-door meetings for which no references are available, so it is not known how consensus was reached to settle differences among the members. But there are detectable indications of disagreement that suggest that the process eventually came down essentially to one issue: “What should be the guiding principles for the revision outcomes and for further simplification generally”. For example, should simplification be based on a careful and systematic overhaul of the whole system of characters, or a greater use of the forms already in use by and coming from the masses, but giving little consideration to the scientific view of treating the hanzi system as a whole? There was even more widespread opposition to any further changes to the shape of hanzi. The dispute on these matters was inevitably complicated by the need for fundamental and theoretical political correctness, with which none of the academics would have liked to have become embroiled, given the nature of the unfathomable situation and capricious policy during that period. Seen from this perspective, it is not hard to understand why it took so many years for the Revision Committee and the CCSR to contemplate the issue, while

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still being unable to come up with a definite decision as expected. The competing views within the CCSR were not clearly recognized by outsiders, and one hardly finds any news items or articles about the Scheme. This murky situation lasted until 1984, and there was even some unofficial information that “in fact, the revised version of the SSS had been shelved temporarily and perhaps indefinitely” (Rohsenow 1986: 83). It appeared that the decision had to wait for a clearer political climate or message from higher authorities. 3. The formal abandonment. As the previous section shows, in theory, the SSS operated in a state of “eliciting opinions” for seven years (Fei 1997: 425), until the formal decision was made at a seven day meeting of the National Conference on Language Work which was held in Beijing in January, 1986. The decision-making process was kept from outsiders, but from the official documents released from the Conference and sporadic scholarly discussions that followed, it was obvious that the SSS was one of the hardest issues that the conference had to deal with, partly owing to the fact that during this period, the Party did not adopt a clear position relative to the further reform of hanzi. An analysis of the conference documents suggests that the mood was characterized by the views of relatively conservative scholars, and was unrepresentative of the radicals who had contributed to the SSS, and who turned out to have few real friends at the meeting. It appears that there was little dispute on the repudiation of the second batch of characters proposed under the SSS (605 characters), but the representatives could not agree on the treatment of the first batch (248 characters), particularly on those well-established 110 characters recommended by the Revision Committee. Finally, after much wrangling, the conference participants decided to wash their hands of this sticky issue and pass it on to “those more senior”. So the final decision to reject probably was made at the end of the conference, not as a result of conference discussion, based on top-level decisive authority. Instead of a clear explanation, the overthrow of the SSS was accompanied by a general policy statement indicating that in the future the government would take an extremely prudent approach to hanzi reform.

5.3

Factors That Led to the Abandonment

The four factors that are implicated in the abandonment of the SSS, institutional forces, timing factors, technical rationals and economic rationals are discussed in the following sections.

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Institutional Forces

Because the SSS was put into effect under an unusual set of circumstances, although it was in fact enacted by the appropriate state organ, the official LPers were not involved in the full decision-making process, and its legality has been often cited as a reason that led to its final rejection (e.g., Zhou 1992). But, this did not seem to be the central concern when the authorities decided to nullify the Scheme in 1986, because the legality issue was never mentioned. It is believed that some influential members in the CCSR, and other high-ranking authoritative figures in charge of ideological affairs, played a decisive part in the wholesale rejection. The strongest attack came from a rather unified group centered in the CCSR. As time went by, their stand created a climate in which an ever-increasing number of people articulated their dissenting views. As indicated previously, most members of the pre-Cultural Revolution CCSR, who were the protagonists in drawing up the TSC, suffered from being prosecuted as Rightists during the Cultural Revolution political struggle. When it ended, these scholars came back to the city from the countryside, eventually taking up their original posts in the reorganized CCSR16. In 1986, the two conflicting factions invariably despised each other. Owing to a lack of common ‘language’, ideological divergences arose that added more fuel than necessary to the ‘language struggle’. These members felt uncomfortable with the appearance of the SSS, not because they tended to be naturally conservative, but because they were reacting strongly against the unqualified non-specialist members in the agency, who should have been made accountable for broadening the originally moderate draft Scheme to the more radical one accepted in 1977. Many did not even try to conceal their personal aversion and their attempts to overturn the SSS through unofficial channels. Liu Yongquan (1991: 397) once said, “I totally opposed the SSS and lodged my complaints with the higher leaders whenever an opportunity was available”. This kind of sentiment was pointed out by some scholars (e.g., Chen Y.S. 2004; Yu 1996) in latter reflections on the abandonment of the SSS. It may be difficult for outsiders to believe that a decision on national language policy could be decided on the basis of the support or antipathy of an influential lobby group. Unfortunately, cases in which language reform was sabotaged by a personal affront have been attested to in other polities. The well-known ‘Japanese Language Council Incident’ of 1961 (He 2001), and the feuding over which of the highly-disputed character sets (CCCII vs CNS 11643) to use as the hanzi encoding standard in Taiwan (Hsieh and Huang 1989; Hsieh 2001), can be cited as other examples.

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In discussing the influence of social concerns on the script reform controversy, Geerts et al (1977: 233) cites Couvreur as saying, “For some combatants it seems to be just an occasion to settle personal grudges”. Gonzalez (2002: 10) attributed the slow development of Pilipino, the national language of the Philippines intellectualization to “jejune debate of personal opinions of members” of the national commission on Filipino language. 5.3.2

Timing Factors

Matters of timing are key factors in ensuring the success of a LP program (e.g., Ball 1999). The SSS was promulgated at a time when the whole population was eager to settle down to a normal life after more than a decade of social upheaval during the Cultural Revolution; they were fed up with constant drastic changes (Zhou 1992). On the other hand, there was a strong tendency to undo things that had been done under the ‘wrong political line’ adopted by the gang of four. “This sentiment had become stronger after 1979, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s successor, who vigorously resisted any reassessment and correction of previous policies, was removed by the political clout of reformers led by Deng Xiaoping.” (Zhao 2005: 339) Eastman (1983: 24) argued that script reform “affects all at once the web of communication, it cannot be introduced gradually but requires an immediate willingness to change habits”. In this sense, we can venture to hypothesize that, if the second simplification had been carried out a few years earlier, or as the result of a more normal decision-making process in the 1980s, the likelihood of success would have been greatly increased. At least the initially proposed 100 characters were quite soundly based from a technical point of view. Therefore, the assumption that external interference probably overruled linguistic considerations in the final rejection of the Second Scheme is probably valid. 5.3.3

Technical Rationales

Cheng (1983: 5-6) points to three factors that should be considered in measuring the success of Chinese script reform: • Popularity: acceptability of affected characters among the common user; • Stability: the number of (school) years between the two simplifications; • Scale of Change: reduction made to the total number of common characters and number of strokes for individual characters.

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Except for popularity, which is a very controversial subject and difficult to measure exactly, the numerical results for the other two factors are readily known. For stability, the time span between the TSC and SSS is 22 years, which is not considered long enough on a normal scale of linguistic evolution to bring about any substantial changes. The change scale can be partly seen from the two tables in this scheme: the first contains 248 characters and the second 605. The second scheme, however, was projected to encompass 4,500 commonly used characters and over 270 re-simplified or abolished characters17. Furthermore, the recipients of the SSS were not as homogenous a group as either the FSS or the TSC. By the time the SSS was publicized, the TSC had been in use for 22 years, and a generation had been educated in the simplified system of writing. While it might have been welcomed by the preschooler and the illiterate, it also may have been seen as a burden by significant segments of the population, including not only the older generation, who had switched from traditional to simplified characters 22 years ago, but also to the people who had received their education under the TSC. More significantly, by this time the illiterates that the FSS aimed to serve had been overtaken in number by the literate population who were familiar with the TSC characters and felt uncomfortable with SSS characters. Lastly, from a methodological point of view, the arbitrary nature of oversimplification was a technical failure. The success of the TSC lay quite significantly in the fact that most simplified characters included in the TSC had been circulated among ordinary people for daily use for centuries before the TSC scheme was drawn up. For example, a significant number of simplified forms in the first table of the TSC are from the FSS. Su (2001c: 199) counted 288 same or similar FSS forms that were adopted in the TSC, which accounts for 88 percent of the total in FSS. ‘Established usage’ is widely considered the basic principle underlying both the FSS in 1935 and the TSC in 1956. It is acknowledged that simplified forms, already prevalent among the masses, are easy to promote although they are not necessarily rational or systematic. Zhou (1986b) contends that the failure of the Second Scheme is chiefly due to its deviation from this principle; it suddenly created a large number of ‘new-faced’ characters that had never been seen previously. As Zhao (2005: 337) points out, “Just as the Great Leap Forward happened on the economic scene in 1958, the immature SSS was issued under a similar Leftist atmosphere of utopian

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idealism, hoping for a quick result through a mass campaign”. More importantly, it should not have included additional industry specific characters and regional variants (Zhou 1986c). 5.3.4

Economic Rationales

Another aspect of the technical considerations was the rapid development of the IT industry, which was not allowed enough time to make the comprehensive changes that were required. The national standard, BSSC CII-GB 2312-80, had just come into force in 1980, and to reprogram the large number of imported hard disks would have been an unaffordable financial burden (Fu 2002: personal communication). After a long break in the cultural infrastructure work because of the Cultural Revolution, some state-sponsored reference books, encyclopedias and dictionaries of national importance were under way or being completed, and any change made to the characters meant an enormous repetition of work and economic losses for the participating academics and the publishing industry. For example, Chen Yuan, a renowned sociolinguist and the director of the Commercial Press (the most prestigious press in the Chinese world), was a fierce opponent (Chen 2001: personal communication).

5.4

Summarizing the Second Simplification Scheme

To sum up, the authors hold that although the revision process involved much deliberation and discussion, in hindsight, it was completed without comprehensive study and internal consensus. Therefore, the 1986 decision, which at first was put forward as a compromise solution intended to please the contenders in both camps (advocates and opponents), left problems that needed to be dealt with unresolved. But, like many other deviations in LP development in China, where opaqueness and behind-the-scene manipulations have been common place, many questions about the formalization of the SSS and its final public release still remain a matter of conjecture until there is access to further relevant evidence. Political taboos in present-day China are still very considerable, and some areas of LP – like the SSS in 1977 – that require further investigation are currently unlikely to be discussed because of their sensitive political nature. The little information that is available in the relevant publications is confused and full of contradictions. In private talks and public discussions with the first author, many official scholars, when faced with challenging questions, keep within safe boundaries by either engaging in

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an abstract discussion, or by denouncing the Gang of Four, rarely venturing to make critical comments on these issues. Regrettably, it has always been easier to condemn the Cultural Revolution as a harbinger of all present ills rather than trying to understand in detail the underlying reality. In CCP history, official views on many historical events have shifted, e.g., as noted previously, when the SSS was first published, Zhang, a key member of the Gang of Four, was blamed for not being revolutionary enough to give the go-ahead for the Scheme. This contradicts the post-Mao official version of history that Zhang was an extreme leftist who wanted to revolutionize all traditional things. The ultimate importance of the SSS for Chinese LP is the ambiguous position in which hanzi planning was left as the result of the decisions of 1986. By failing to resolve a number of crucial issues, LP efforts were weakened. The results of these decisions are discussed in the following chapter.

Chapter 2 REFLECTIONS ON NEW PERSPECTIVES The Opening Up of Chinese Society

1.

SCRIPT REFORM TRANSFORMED: REFLECTION AND RE-ORIENTATION

This chapter provides a relatively comprehensive review of the impact of the three previously discussed reform programs. To cope with the new challenge from advances in technology, and to summarize past experience as well as to formulate an agenda for the future, an all important National Conference on Language Work (NCLW) was held in Beijing in January 1986. The first part of this section is devoted to a relatively detailed description of how the language planning focus was shifted and the new tasks that faced LPers in their newly reorganized context, i.e., there was a reorientation of priorities and a redefinition of roles created by governmental approaches to language planning that occurred in the mid-1980s. Then we proceed to another theme of the conference – reflection on the past experience with hanzi simplification. After a brief description of impact of that conference on language planning, this section discusses the details of the three major historical experiences that emerged from the clinical treatment of hanzi prior to the conference. We hold that three types of undesired outcomes found in 1950s’ simplification deserve more attention than others if the further reform of the hanzi system is to be considered. To summarize these historical lessons at a theoretical level, two important constructs, the ‘Chang-effect’ and the ‘Guo-phenomenon’, are conceptualized and substantiated based on the data from that period.

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The problems encountered during the three decades of practical use of the simplified characters make abundantly clear the multifaceted nature of hanzi planning. With this in mind, a further and even more complex layer is added in the final section, i.e., that hanzi is almost totally enmeshed in the social environment, and thus one must deal with the socio-political aspects of script reform if progress in language planning is ever to be achieved. Thus, the third focus in the chapter is the developments in China’s language planning in relation to the change in the political arena and the impact of technological advances that happened after mid-1980s. At the NCLW in 1986, further simplification of Chinese characters was dropped from the agenda of the revised policy and the possibility of phoneticization was also implicitly ruled out. But shortly after these decisions were taken, a debate on the future of hanzi took place between conservatives and reformers. Drawing on the implications of this long lasted debate, this section highlights the complicated nature of Chinese script planning and thus gives rise to the necessity of examining the issue from multiple perspectives in subsequent chapters.

1.1

Adjustment to Meet the Needs of a New Society – NCLW (1986)

The convening of the NCLW in 1986 was a watershed for Chinese language reform movements. The first milestone had been the national language conference of 1955, and this was the second time in the history of the PRC that the central government had organized a conference on language affairs on this scale. The conference, which was under the aegis of Central Committee of CCP and State Council, was held from 6th to 13th January 1986 in Beijing and was attended by over 280 LP workers, linguists, and cultural and educational officials from across the country. The conference was convened at a key moment in history when Chinese language work was at a crossroads, and when, as will be seen in the following discussion, a number of key LP issues urgently needed to be addressed. Therefore, the decisions made in the conference were very significant for national linguistic life and the future LP policy basis of language work for decades to come. The outcomes of most direct concern for the whole population were the wholesale formal rejection of the second simplification scheme and the withdrawal of official support for Romanization of the orthography. The repeated stress at the conference on linguistic stability and the failure in official documents to mention simplification conveyed a very strong message against constant change and was

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a clear signal of a more conservative atmosphere. This marked a significant shift in LP priorities, as since 1950s simplification and Romanization had been listed as two of the three major tasks of language reform. This is the first time that these two tasks were officially rescinded, although this occurred in an implicit manner in order to avoid provoking opposition from the group of strong advocates of simplification and Romanization, whose views were dominant just before the meeting. The decision that drew the most attention in the conference is the establishment of a standardization focus. Standardization was also the major theme of the national language conference in 1955. But, in the 1950s standardization was carried out in support of national language promotion, so the focus was on pronunciation and grammar with the aim of using putonghua as the basis to unify the widely diverse regionalects. At this conference, although putonghua promotion was reiterated, the real emphasis was on Chinese characters. When the meeting was held, Chinese linguists and computer scientist were engaged in devising the first generation of computer input schemes. Input program design is such a robust venture that, almost without exception, all the major Chinese IT companies have developed out of their work on character input software, and at the beginning of this period, ideographically based schemes provided the main focus for development. The first difficulty to overcome was how to set a series of standards for the characters so that there was a binding set of conventions for both the software vendors and the consumers to ensure operational efficiency. These standards for hanzi, which have been labeled the ‘Four Fixations’ in modern hanzi studies, include: having a fixed total number of characters, creating physical uniformity, unifying pronunciation, and standardizing the order of hanzi’s composition. These are essential to dismantle and reproduce hanzi on computers, and thereby fundamental to computerizing information in Chinese. Given the fact that information technology was seen as the pillar for industry in the country’s aspiration to embark on the road to modernization, and Chinese information processing was the precondition for developing an IT industry, it was natural, that hanzi standardization, or the so-called Four Fixations, come to the fore in the discussions held at the conference and was pinpointed as one of the central focuses in the concluding statement which set a new tone for the future agenda of language work. Facing the new challenge brought about by the emerging IT industry, and in order to effectively address an IT oriented LP task that is largely different from that of the pre-conference period, the restructuring of the national LP agency was another important initiative of the conference. At the conference, the Commission of Chinese Script Reform, which had

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been in operation since 1956, was replaced by the State Commission of Language Work. The reorganized body was given a new functional role in dealing with the complex diversification of LP issues, particularly technological compacts in the new historical context. Then after a decade of development, when language issues become more important in national life, the SCWL went through another major reform in 1998. Traditionally, since the mid-1950s, the top LP organ had operated under the leadership of State Council, which meant that its function was prestigious and executive. In this reform, it was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Education Ministry and enlarged to include two specialist offices: the Department of Language and Information Administration and the Department of Social Use of Language and Script. This gave the SCWL more administrative power, allowing it to act more independently, specifically in carrying out LP activities. At the same time, a well staffed research establishment – The Research Institute of Applied Linguistics (henceforth RIAL), which was set up within China Academy of Social Science in 1984, was also relocated under the dual administration of the SCLW and the Education Ministry. As a research arm of the SCLW, the RIAL’s daily research activities cover all aspects of LP goals, including studies on theoretical and practical issues concerning the sociolinguistic application of language and script, currently with an emphasis on hanzi standardization, lexical codification as well as national speech promotion. In addition to providing research-based advisory assistance for LP decision-making, the RIAL was also designated to be responsible for a number of institutional functions, namely, to edit and publish LP journals, to carry out training and testing activities and to organize consultative services on language affairs. The assessment of past LP experience has been cited as the main achievement accomplished at the conference, but it was clearly impossible to comprehensively examine any specific LP issue in a conference of this scale. As for hanzi reform, the relatively free discussions and comments on simplification, along with some other issues concerning language reform, reflected the views that were being discussed prior to the conference and were undoubtedly one of factors that led to its organization. On the other hand, the conclusions drawn about script reform encouraged further discussion on this sensitive topic. Therefore, a specific focus symposium on the hanzi issue was organized by the RIAL in December of the same year. One needs to remember that the mid-1980s was a special period in the PRC’s history when democracy and transparency were probably the least controlled. Thus, this nation-wide five day conference, which was attended by academic peers from across the country with a wide diversity

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of backgrounds and views should be seen as the first time that the script reform issues were discussed largely free of political constraints, and the first time that individuals belonging to conflicting camps could sit together and engage in face to face debates over issues. The papers presented at the Symposium published in the Collected Papers of Symposium on Issues of Chinese Characters are the only comprehensive assessment that has been made of hanzi simplification since 1950s. Therefore, the volume has been invaluable in helping to objectively review the gains and losses of the script reform movement launched three decades previously. While we basically draw on the views expressed in this Symposium, the following evaluative description goes well beyond a summary of Symposium’s views, even though, the major points summarized here should not be construed as an attempt at an overall evaluation of the whole hanzi simplification issue. The issues raised are too complex for that, and despite a great deal more openness in what information is available, in the PRC, as, for example, with cabinet papers in the UK and Russia which are only made available after 50 years, there are still issues which are too sensitive to discuss.

1.2

Reflection on Past Experience

A number of simplified hanzi, in both the TSC and the SSS, were found to be unsatisfactory in practical use, i.e., an over-emphasis on the effectiveness of stroke reduction may counteract the benefits brought about by simplification. Thus, for some characters, although the number of strokes was reduced, the resultant simplified forms may have been more difficult to write because they were hard to differentiate from some similar ones, or the new stroke ordering was not familiar, or the way they were composed differed from established writing habits. Some characters were not welcomed by the public, because their physical structures were culturally or psychologically unacceptable, or lacked aesthetic appeal. Hu Qiaomu (Guangming Daily 1999) has argued that a systematic view is needed to amend simplified characters. Not only should the SSS characters be corrected, but also “those ill-simplified characters in the First Table of 1956” should be reexamined and fixed. The three ill-simplified types of characters – those lacking systematicity, the Chang-effect and Guo-phenomenon – which this chapter suggests the authorities should reconsider1, are discussed in the following sections.

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Reflections on New Perspectives

Oversimplification and the Lack of a Systems View

To understand what has been lost and gained, one must examine the interrelatedness of various aspects of the subject matter. Insufficient consideration in a systematic way has been found to be the foremost issue that draws most criticism in appraising methodological principles of simplification, which is also the cause of oversimplification. An examination of the Chinese script reform experience that has targeted Chinese character shape shows a lack of a systematic plan. Hannas (1997: 207) rightly points out that to reduce complexity in one sphere merely transfers complexity to another. This may give the appearance of progress but, in fact, only shifts the problem between aspects of the system2. The excessive pursuit of stroke reduction created complexity rather than simplification in the writing system as a whole, although this only came to be realized only at a later stage. In addition, some of these mistakes were made due to the politically motivated and short sighted approaches taken to reform – a good lesson that is worth further exploration. More recently, as technological considerations have become more significant, unsatisfactory results brought about by this lack of foresight have become more evident, making re-examination more urgent. The problems that stem from the excessive pursuit of stroke reduction to achieve simplification can be categorized under the following five rubrics: inconsistent principles, ill-simplified characters, technically unfriendly characters, incompatible in classification, and misunderstandings. 1.2.1.1 Inconsistent principles Popular mass characters and simplification by analogy are the two basic principles for the 1956 simplification. The latter refers to the method of reasoning by analogy, the former were also called ‘characters of the people’. They had been simplified by the public and were well established through historical tradition. In spite of their popularity and acceptance, because these characters were randomly created by individuals, most of (gou, to purthem are either illogical or unsystematic. For example, . As an isolated instance, the simplification chase) was simplified as not only is much easier to write, looks apt as the new sound compound but also precisely provides the pronunciation of the whole character. But, it is unlikely that the individual ‘masses’ would be aware that the original is widely used in many other characters, such as in component . It is obviously very convenient for users if one change can be and universally generalized to all cases. Therefore, it is preferable that all should be replaced by same simplified characters with components

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efficiency of automation. However, in order to fulfill the goal of simplification, not only were about ten newly created composing signs added to the hanzi system, but in many cases, when a complex component was simplified, the same original component remained part of the hanzi system, i.e., some components that should have been simplified by analogy remain unchanged. For instance, suppose a complex component X appears in more than one character, when X is simplified as Y, a Rule A can be described as: all components X in all characters should be replaced by the new components Y, if all other conditions are the same or similar. It would be ideal for character processing schemes if Rule A is applicable to all characters in hanzi system. However, as shown in the left column of Figure 2-1, in , was replaced by a newly reality, X ( ) in some characters, such as in , , created component Y ( ); in some other characters, such as in etc…, X is still used. So in order for the system not to break down when hanzi is being automatically processed, a Rule B has to be designed stipulating that under what conditions, component X should not be replaced. Unfortunately, often no reason was given nor can one be derived by analogy.

Figure 2-1. Illustration of ‘the components get simplified, the composing structure becomes complicated’

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In the case of the right column, ostensibly, the complex character is also used as component in was simplified to a simpler one ( ). But a number of other characters that were not simplified. Furthermore, although the simplified form consists of fewer strokes, devisors of the input schemes prefer the original complex one to the simplified one because, despite of its complexity of structure, it can be resembled by two = . On other hand, although is a smaller extant units: , is never used as an independent unit, so smaller composite unit of it becomes a newly created extra component that is used only once in the whole hanzi system. This one unit uses as much space as any recurring unit does; and if it is used in an ideographic input scheme, it also takes up equal physical space on the keyboard. These two problems are illustrated in Figure 2-1. 1.2.1.4 Incompatible in classification Some of the newly created symbols are irregular and unpredictable elements standing outside the wholeness of the hanzi system, thus resulting in the so-called hanzi that are ‘simplified individually, complicated systematically’. Because these units are inconsistent with the whole system, although simple in form with fewer strokes, they are not necessarily easier to write, recognize and memorize. And what is more, etymologists and IT experts find it hard to classify an atypical component into the existing classification and retrieval systems that are used to index dictionaries and standard sets of encoding characters. This is further evidence that demonstrates that a perfect correlation does not exist between simplification and ease of operation. Some characters may be very complex in physical shape, but as long as their structures are logical and consistent, they may be are easier to mentally and physically process than their simplified counterparts. 1.2.1.5 Misunderstanding Some seemly unnecessary elements in characters have their own semantic value and serve as category indices. There is a good possibility that stroke reduction and/or homophonous substitution cause semantic misunderstanding. This is indubitably true for characters which are created by the ‘huiyi’ (associative compounds) and ‘xingsheng’ (semantic-pho(to travel) was netic) methods. Chen Y. C. (1994) gives this example, (to swim); when is used before places ending with merged into ‘he/jiang’ (river), ‘hai’ (ocean) or related words such as ‘you Zhuhai’ ( ) (a city name and the name of the ocean along which it is located), or ) (a northern province, named after the big ‘you Heilong Jiang’ (

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river Heilong Jiang bordering Russia). Such coincident combinations can be easily confused, particularly for overseas Chinese and foreign visitors. Beyond the semantic problems that homophones cause by making use of one character to substitute for characters with the same or similar pronunciation but with different meanings, homophonous substitution can, to some extent, compromise sound accuracy in semantic-phonetic characters. Shi Youwei’s statistics (1991: 177-178) show that representation efficiency of sound signifiers for the first 508 traditional characters in the GLSC is 0.5983. It was reduced to 0.324 after these characters were simplified. 1.2.2

Characters at Variance with Writing Habits: The Chang-effect

When the political environment became more open to criticism in the 1980s, it did not take long for more and more people to realize that neglecting ingrained writing habits can create more problems than it solves. While characters with fewer strokes are definitely easier for new learners, for literate users these adulterated characters may cause problems because fewer strokes do not necessarily make them easier to write if the way they are required to be written does not conform to common writing habits or customary writing practices. Modern characters have not yet developed far enough from their origin to stand on their own. Some features of writing characters are the legacy of brush writing and calligraphic art, although that has been long abandoned, influences from the old writing style on modern characters inherently persist and are sometimes very strong. (chang, long; Traditional form: ) and (yao, proper name; ) are two good examples that are extensively quoted Traditional form: as illustrating the flaws of ill-simplified characters (e.g., Gao 2002, Su 2003, Zhou 1992). The simplified composition of is not in accord with , the upper part is ordinary people’s deeply seated writing habits and in a newly created component. Ouyang Zhongshi (1988), one of the bestwas stipulated as a fourknown modern calligraphers, noted that stroke character, but it is actually very hard to write in four strokes. This problematic simplification is frequently noted by some other scholars. Zeng Xingchu (1988: 319), a noted psychologist, said “chang is really very hard to write with one stroke less”. As further evidence, the personal experience of the first author in teaching Chinese as a foreign language may help to make the point. In his 16 years of experience, the author has found that hardly any traditional character user correctly writes the

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Characters Conflicting with Cultural Values: Guo-phenomenon

Each culture has its own symbolic system of visual communication. Some anthropologists argue that to perceive the world visually is an important feature of Chinese culture. As an ideographic-based script, most hanzi are analytic from their graphic makeup, the so-called telling the meaning by its look ( jian xing zhi yi – ), as one would say in Chinese. Because Chinese hanzi are composed of differing components each with a meaning of its own, the important role of the phonetic compounds, apart from being a phonetic indicator, is to convey information about the meaning of the character. Effective adult readers of logographic scripts break complex characters down into their phonetic and semantic compounds, and then process each in an extremely efficient manner. Educated people, in particular, have a strong awareness of a character’s structure. Therefore, when one encounters an ideographical character, people habitually identify its visual elements in order to guess its literal meaning, and from this further implications of the image can be inferred, that concurrently creates their stereotyped concept about the character’s structure. Such analysis originates in the way that characters are created. All characters are perceived to consist of an analyzable structure according to the principles of Xu Shen’s liushu. It is worth noting that characters simplified according to these principles are the most successful ones. Hanzi riddles, which are concocted by using hanzi’s physical composition features, are a favorite game played by many Chinese and have been used by opponents of simplification to justify the argument that hanzi should not be changed or abandoned. Some popular folk adages, which are very powerful expressions, are also formed by making use of these hanzi characteristics. Furthermore, the analysis of characters in semantic terms has been used as a very valuable mnemonic technique, and characters have long been clustered and taught in such terms. It is unquestionably an indispensable aid to make the learning of characters easier and longer lasting. Trying to use graphic images to imbue hanzi with an auspicious message through a visual link, is a conspicuous feature of Chinese hanzi culture. The most typical example, showing the hanzi creator’s or reformer’s conscious effort to embody specific values in ideographic compositions, is of ‘Guo’ (country/state), is the ‘Guo-phenomenon’. The current form = borders + = jade, wealth. Its traditional physically composed by ( = population, = weapon, = four borders) was form stabilized through the writing unification in the Qin Dynasty prior to the

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the state is the oppressing apparatus of ruling class as well as an outcome of uncompromising class struggles, which is a tenet of Marxism. The evolution of the graphic make-up of ‘Guo’ implies that, from a broader perspective, characters themselves are an element of the Chinese cultural system. Hanzi are characterized by integrating cultural specifics in their structure and in the way they are composed. As Coulmas (1991: 228) points out, “few other cultures are based on writing in a more profound sense than the Chinese”. The influence from the cultural heritage is pervasive in hanzi; in addition to linguistic considerations, script reform should be socially and culturally treated. The numbers of this kind of character may not be large, but they are among the most frequently used characters and have the potential to create endless trouble. A few of them are not acceptable to particular groups of people, especially when personal names are involved, or the time or occasion makes their use ridiculous. Leng Yulong (2004: 339) notes that in the hanzi repertoire, there is a group of characters that can be called as “Sensitive Characters”. These are the characters that “the whole population is very familiar with; they are frequently used and of high concern. Any change made to these characters is bound to trigger vibrating reaction”. Leng warns that we should be extremely careful in dealing these “Sensitive Characters”, even a small alteration may touch the most sensitive part of hanzi’s societal use and people’s sentiment. In order to make a character socially and culturally acceptable, many factors are inevitably involved. Competent logographic readers find it particularly hard to resist the temptation to extract semantic clues from characters, which is plainly evidenced in frequent criticisms of some simplified forms. Therefore, as Zhang Jinqiu (1999: 23) aptly warns, if the cultural factors are not given proper consideration, any reform made to characters will end up ‘carrying water with a basket’ [i.e., ‘ending up with nothing despite great efforts’ because bamboo baskets contain holes that leak water]. The construction of the ‘Guo-phenomenon’ brings the disorderly conglomeration of previously found problematic simplifications under one concept and provides guidelines to conveniently deal with similar types of characters. The ‘Guo-phenomenon’ manifests itself in four specific categories. 1.2.3.1 Guo-phenomenon type one: Value-laden components (ai, to love) includes both the (heart) The complex form of (friendship, comradeship) compound. The ‘heart’ was omitted in and . Although “the heart has the simplified character, so it turned into traditionally been regarded as the seat of the intellect, not the organ of passion” (Unger 2004: 15), for instance, Mencius’s famous saying “Xi zhi

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guan ze si – (the function of heart is to think)”, quite a few people, overseas Chinese in particular, were furious about this simplification. They ask: “How can we love someone without heart, is this the Communist feeling of ‘love’?” (Lu 1992: 218) Further politically charged accusations include: ‘Love’ is not a much-used word in the Communist Party’s dictionary; Using ‘comradeship’ to replace the original semantic compound indicates, that for the Communist Party there is no ‘love’, but only ‘comradeship’. For example, Chen Mengjia (1957), who was condemned to death partly because of his opposition to simplification during the Anti-rightist Campaign in the 1950s, insisted that the ‘heart’ component in this character was essential. On the other hand, Zhao Wenzhu (2004: 5), a modern hermit but a very prolific writer of books mocking weird phenomena in modern China, poked fun at it by saying this was a very appropriate simplified form and an insightful invention for love, because there is no real love (from heart) in today’s society. A similar (er, son/kid). The traditional form had been written as case is since jiaguwen. “The upper part signifies a head with an open mouth and the lower part two legs. After simplification, the head was cut off and only the legs were left; So what kind of baby is that? ” (Ni 2003: 3) is very representative of this group of simplified forms, as it is vulnerable to criticism that is hard to avoid. This kind of culturally unacceptable simplified character has caused extensive concern even to some staunch simplification advocates. Xu Jialu (1990: 39), the top national leader directly involved in LP, once said in an interview with scholars from Taiwan, “some simplified characters just do not make sense. = more, = earth/soil) can be ‘sheng’ How come, very earthly ( , (upper part) = one , = heart) (sage); and why does one heart ( , in simplified form in the SSS mean ‘de’ (virtue)?” 1.2.3.2 Guo-phenomenon type two: Psychological aesthetics Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) note that one of the big problems that language planning has as an academic discipline is that language is a public communication tool and every one sees themselves as the expert and has a strong view on it from some perspectives. Ferguson (1996: 280) calls such perceptions of members of the speech community on language as ‘users’ evaluation’. If users agree on some language evaluation for particularly reasons, then Ferguson calls this “rationalized evaluation”. Ferguson notes that in many cases this kind of users’ evaluation may reflect “such different realities as idealization, stereotypes, completely unconscious, shared values, or individual attitudes”. Even if the rationalizations on particular features of language structure or use may just be their

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unconscious feelings, the language users accept some forms just because these forms “sound better”. Ferguson appears to agree that users’ judgments, be they rational or irrational, are often seen as signals of group identity; they may have “special importance as indicators of trends and values, and they constitute the primitive source from which institutional language planning activities ultimately are derived” (p. 281). Therefore, Ferguson emphasizes “[T]he whole area of user’s evaluations of language is of great importance for identifying language change but it has only been treated in general terms”. Psychological factors, or in Ferguson’s term, users’ evaluation, are something that had been largely ignored in reforming characters. DeFrancis (1984b: 78) observes, “aesthetics plays an exceedingly important role in Chinese writing, more so than any other system of writing”. Culturally acceptable and eye pleasing forms deserve more attention, as was unexpectedly found by Liu Mingchen (1997: 144) in his survey about the reasons for the resurgence of traditional characters in the 1980s. He found that “among various reasons accounting for people’s preference in writing traditional characters, aesthetic perception and artistic sense is the first : (chang, plant/mill), : consideration”. For some others, like : (chan, to produce/grow), are not (guang, wide/extensive), and welcomed by some people and are criticized just because they are not ‘good-looking’, due to the symmetrical structure in the authentic form becoming unbalanced after simplification (Li 2001: 16; see also Yan et al 2004; Su 2003). Li further points out that sometimes, the people’s feelings are hard to explain, or even irrational, but they are worth paying attention for beautiful/pretty is not beautiful, and to. Some think the character , even though it has twelve strokes they prefer to write the original more than the simplified one. Hu Qiaomu (Editing Team 1999: 80) gives another example: the ‘Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic of China’ ( ) written in simplified characters looks less solemn ). Some people feel than their traditional forms ( (zhuangyan, that after simplification even the characters for ). Ferguson (1996: solemn), are less solemn than their original forms ( 283) offers a good example that is illustrative of the similar point. He says that if Swedes consider that some archaic forms of language used for church’s worship is more “solemn and spiritually satisfying”, “these judgments reflect not direct natural response to linguistic features but feelings of appropriateness due to customary use of these varieties for their respective purposes”. This also reminds people of the debate about the (zhen in Chinese, or chin in Japanese, used exclusively by exclusion of the Emperor meaning, I, the sovereign) from the Table of Contemporary

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Characters (Japanese). It was reintroduced into that table in 1981, because “it provokes some funny imaginations if the character is written in Japanese kana” (He 2001: 133). More ironically, some people even found a relationship between the form of the simplified character for “commerce” in the SSS and the reason for commodity scarcity in the market that occurred at the end of Culture Revolution (Chen Y.S. 2004: 355). 1.2.3.3 Guo-phenomenon type three: Name taboos Another specific example worth mentioning that demonstrates the impact of cultural heritage on script reform is the ‘names taboo’. Certain characters are often used for proper names and deserve special attention. Although a note under the First Table of Verified Variant Forms (1955, henceforth FTVVF) says that “the original forms of abandoned variants can continue to be used as surnames in publications, this applies only to the characters exclusively used for the surname.” One of the difficulties of structurally changing the character Yin (see Section 2.2.1, Chapter 4) is the fear that “the people whose surname is Yin must be very furious about this” (Fu 2002: personal communication). This is because to change one’s name is one of the most offensive and intolerable things a Chinese person can do. As a popular Chinese saying goes: I’ll not conceal my first name, in spite of wrongdoing; I’ll never change my surname because of my indecent behavior (xing bu geng ming, zuo bu , gai xing – ). In analyzing the cultural and psychological implications, Wu Chang’an (1995: 76-77) argues that: [t]here are over two thousand surname-only characters. No matter which one is to be reformed, it is hardly possible to obtain the consent (liu), of the person who has this surname. Even if his surname is which has the ominous meaning ‘to kill’ or ‘to slaughter’, he is unwilling to change to another character as suggested by Yuen Ren Chao. Traditionally, Chinese have had a strong feeling that their names ought to be written in their original form. In a study conducted by Zhao (1999), it was found that the simplified characters were generally well accepted by adult Thai Chinese students who are culturally traditional character users, but not for their handwritten names which appeared on the cover of their course assignments. When people see anything that appears somewhat formal, important or solemn, things like shop plates or signboards, commercial marks and documents such as marriage certificates, they are particularly reluctant to have them changed just because of their sense of

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permanence and eternity (Huang 1992: 61). The government was well aware of this issue and succeeded in a nationwide campaign, launched in the 1960s, to simplify the geographical names under the principle ‘consensus must be gained from the local population first’5. However, it must be acknowledged that it was much less successful in simplifying characters for naming. The principle that was stated in the 1950s simplification and reduction campaigns, was that the only exceptional situation in which obsolete characters are allowed to be used is for surnames. But this principle has been much compromised in reality. Some variant forms (yiti zi) still exist when it comes to their use with public celebrities; the much publicized case of how to deal with Rong ( , to cast), which was discarded as a variant form of Rong ( , to melt), will suffice as an , to consolidate the foundation), the given example. When Rongji ( , it takes on the name of the former Chinese Premier, is rewritten as meaning ‘to undermine the foundation’. It is understandable, therefore, particularly if the taboo effect enshrined in Chinese names is taken into account, that the Premier himself absolutely was opposed to his name being printed with its opposite meaning in the media. Furthermore, Chinese people, especially the older generations, who have a strong faith in Fengshui (fortune telling), would consider it unlucky to have a premier with a first name implying ‘to undermine the foundation’6. (zhao, the No. 1 One of the most common Chinese family names surname in a traditional character book for children, first compiled in Song ; a complex phonetic compound Dynasty, 960-1279), was simplified as was substituted by the fewer-strokes sign . But is the sign for the death sentence in traditional performing arts, such as Peking Opera. Probably for this reason, it was simplified as in the First Scheme in 1935 (see Appendix A); and Hu Qiaomu (Editing Team 1999: 292) suggested simplifying it as ( -xiao which is one stroke more than and , but is phonetically more appropriate). Zhao Ziyang, the former chairman of the CCP, was said to have complained about his surname being crossed (Wang 2002: personal communication). It has not been uncommon to hear that some well-known people complain or just refuse to use simplified characters for their names themselves or, let them be used by others, particularly characters for - - , - , this kind of simplification surnames. For instance, has attracted wide criticism. Thus, not just surname-only characters should be resumed, but also those commonly discarded variant forms of characters, when used as surname, should be allowed to be used7. Similar problems occur very often with geographical names that use particular characters. A number of characters with historical significance require a

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Hall. Older Chinese feel especially disgusted by it, not just those Chinese whose surnames are ‘zhan’. Some characters are problematic just because of their politically (tai) was for Taiwan, and unacceptability. Before simplification, exclusively for taifeng (typhoon). But as the latter was discarded as the (kangtai) can be ambiguously variant form of the former, the word interpreted as ‘against typhoon’ or ‘against Taiwan’. So the sentence, “The government mobilizes the people in coastal areas in Fujian Province10 to act and fight the typhoon,” can be easily interpreted as, “The government mobilizes the people in coastal areas in Fujian Province to act and fight Taiwan” (Shen and Shen 2001: 226).

2.

SOCIO-POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE TRANSFORMATION

Social transition and policy reorientation in 1980s have produced two outcomes in the area of character planning. The 1980s saw the most chaotic period in character use. There were two factors contributing to the chaos: 1) the impinging effect of Second Simplification Scheme and 2) the intrusion of the banned traditional characters. These factors increased the arbitrary use of non-standard characters. In addition, the shift in Party’s propaganda strategy, while rarely loosing political control, created a favorable environment in which dissenting views were more generally tolerated. The renewed interest in traditional heritage triggered a debate on a number of issues related to Chinese characters that are still going on. This section focuses on a discussion of the socio-political implications of the practical use of hanzi and of hanzi’s future.

2.1

Chaotic Situation During Social Transition

China in the 1980s was socio-politically a very homogenous country in every respect, yet in contrast to the highly centrally-controlled nature of Chinese society, character use was in a chaotic state. Before the SSS characters were sanctioned in 1977, China had attained a remarkable degree of script coherence and a very stable standard that was virtually consistent with that prescribed by the government. Thus, in comparison with the character use prior to the 1980s, China witnessed more deviation from the official standard in its script use when the once-favored ideals of uniformity began to loose strength. As Chen Ping (1999: 192) noted, the

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“regulations on language issues are beginning to lose the authority or binding force they used to enjoy in the 1960s and 1970s”. It needs to be remembered that official standards for script usage apply primarily to print materials and public usage, but that in informal settings for private correspondence, to save time many people invent their own simplified shorthand-style characters. That is, a very large number of variant forms have been coined, using the analogy of the methods of previous simplification schemes, and a good many of these have taken root more widely. In addition, by the 1980s the return of traditional characters to Mainland had been progressing rapidly, and some bureaucrats were alarmed by their appearance in a wide range of official or semi-official publications11. The introduction of unofficial hanzi was not revolutionary in scope, but they were happening in parallel with the changes under way in the political, economic and social fields, and they had even caught the attention of the highest political authorities. For example, in his speech delivered at the 1986 Conference, Wan Li, the then Chinese vice-premier, lamented that “the laissez-fire state of Chinese characters has caused harm to our two-civilization – referring to material and spiritual civilizations – development and it hence invites widespread criticism from influential personnel both within our own country and abroad”. The “severe situation of the disorder in character use” was emphatically documented in SCLW’s application to the State Council for the official withdrawal of the SSS (The Office of Standard Work 1997: 20). The term ‘unofficial characters’ is ambiguous and inconsistent. At present in Mainland China, unofficial characters include mainly yiti zi and fanti zi each of which are discussed in the following sections. 2.1.1

Variant Forms of Characters: yiti zi

Several characters, having the same meaning and pronunciation but different forms, are called yiti zi. Here, yiti zi is used in a broad sense; it refers to all forms of characters that are neither listed in the TSC of 1956 nor are traditional forms, including newly created handwritten characters, and characters that can be seen only in regional dialects, or in other languages such as Japanese (more discussion about yiti zi can be found in Section 2.1.3, Chapter 4). The sources of yiti zi have been both geographical and chronological. Specifically, apart from characters in the SSS, the other main sources of yiti zi include informal writing such as manuscripts, local newspapers and literature, propaganda bulletins and posters, advertising signs, and personal correspondence. The SSS’s persistent

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survival in society has resulted in a new breed of yiti zi; these are also known as New Yiti zi. In contrast to a closed alphabetic letter system, the Chinese character system is open to public creativity and productivity. In one sense, every Chinese person can be a hanzi creator, which consequently makes the number of the character shapes literally too large to describe. Probably, because writing characters is apt to be a very idiosyncratic thing, parallel forms have learned to co-exist, and people have always been accustomed to using a wide range of diverse forms of characters. For the same reason, not only readers, but the government as well has developed a greater tolerance towards individual writing peculiarities and even mistakes. Although constantly monitored and managed by consecutive governments, it is doubtful whether there has ever been a single, unified form of conformity of writing throughout history. With a mushrooming emergence of new types of simplified characters, the 1980s saw one of the most creative periods in simplification. ‘Mass Line’ and ‘Mass Movement’ doctrines that dominated the Cultural Revolution in other areas influenced language issues and created an atmosphere that made character creation a fashionable thing. There are two types of policy towards these non-official or people’s characters: To control, and to guide according to the circumstances. The latter adopts a liberal attitude toward non-standard characters: to recognize and recommend a reasonable one and then leave the final decision to ‘usage’. But LP authorities worried that, with more than one system in use, it was going to be too incongruent with official standards and would thus lead to chaos in character use. 2.1.2

Traditional Characters ( fanti zi)

Fanti zi literally means physically complex character, but is called zhengti zi (orthodox character) in Taiwan and Hong Kong because there it is still the official standard. Their intrusion into the Mainland is related more to socio-politics and economics than to geographical contiguity. There are five generally agreed upon factors that have played a major role in the pervasive intrusion of traditional characters in the PRC in the 1980s and 1990s: cultural factors, geographical factors, psychological factors, traditional obsession, and decision-making (Shi 1993). The last two factors need some further explanation. Traditional characters have long been viewed as superior to the simplified characters as symbol of a good education. This erroneous belief is borne out by an undeniable phenomenon that indicates the original forms enjoy high prestige and authentic status as they are associated with a

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time-honored literary heritage. The traditional heritage was seen as an object that needed to be revolutionized prior to and during the Cultural Revolution. But, beginning in the 1980s, the Party’s attitudinal pendulum began to swing from the left to the right in social, educational and political matters. With the rise of a more positive attitude towards the traditional heritage at the end of the Cultural Revolution, there was a return to traditional things and this trend was fuelled by political manipulations that created blind admiration for everything that had existed in the past. The relationship between the hanzi’s use and political movements will be becoming clearer in the following discussion and is raised again in Section 7.1, Chapter 5. Therefore, fanti zi was unintentionally and obliquely encouraged due to the central authority’s renewed interest in traditional culture. Furthermore, being nervous about a growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of freedom in cultural life, the central authority tried to avoid being seen as unnecessarily heavy-handed in such matters. Thus, loose control at the ideological level created an environment in which the general population had more choice in character use and an opportunity to make their mark on the official standard. In addition to this, the long adhered to policy of phoneticization and simplification was openly rescinded in an official document passed at the 1986 conference. Although there was hardly any outright opposition to this most authoritative decision, there were obviously widespread differences of opinion about it both within and outside linguistic circles. For all of these reasons it seemed to predictable that a direct conflict between the traditionalists and reformers was unavoidable.

2.2

A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Character Use

The analysis in the preceding sections shows that there is a lack of conformity of handwritten characters with official standards. Thus, in today’s society, there are many cases where hanzi are written using different forms in handwritten manuscripts for general communication purposes by adults. The situation can be illustrated by the simple graphic representation provided in Figure 2-3. Under this model of character use in 1980s, we assume that, theoretically, there were at present seven types of character users: S, V, T, ST, SV, VT, and STV. While the S type of user is supposed to represent character users in Mainland China, most Chinese are actually multi-variant character users. The majority of users undoubtedly fall into the STV (central circle) type, only the types V, T, and VT, can be safely excluded

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in Mainland China. Confronted with such extensive variation in people’s preference for writing hanzi, naturally, questions arise as to the reasons for this phenomenon.

Figure 2-3. Model of types of character users

Every individual has their own script-using orientation, gained from their own experiences and sociolinguistic environment. The types of character users represented by the circles are largely determined by factors that include age, educational background, profession and personal psychological traits. If a user was educated before 1956, s/he may write traditional characters, in addition to using the ones that appeared in the TSC and Second Scheme. This is partly because writing habits, which were acquired in early life, are not easily changed, and, when people write, they concentrate their attention on the content rather than the external form of language, without taking into consideration the deliberate changes to the traditional writing system or the conscious adherence to official standards. A nationwide survey on language use (see Section 3.3.3, Chapter 6) among 470,000 people from 160,000 families across the country revealed that over 95 percent of the population “use standard hanzi in their daily life”. If this reflects actual use, then in our model, this 95 percent of the population should be categorized as STV users instead of S users. For the younger users, like teenagers immediately preceding and following their graduation from school, non-standard forms (type V and T) are unfamiliar to them. They are S-type users at this stage, but as they grow older, they are subject to being ‘polluted’ by the new hanzi environment. The ‘S’ circle would gradually descend, and they might be categorized as type ST, SV or STV users, depending on the extent to which they are exposed to a

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certain kinds of character-use settings. Supposing a person becomes a type ST user. This indicates they are extensively involved in using traditional characters, most probably because their duties require them to keep in frequent contact with overseas Chinese in commercial and industrial areas. In a survey12 conducted by the authors to investigate into the handwriting habits of people from different social strata, we found that the number of traditional characters use by the old readers of a newspaper closely associated with Taiwan is significantly higher than that for three other groups of people, namely primary teachers, farmers and university students. In contrast, if the circle moves closer to S, although the user is still an ST-type user in this case, traditional characters may only be used very occasionally in writing. Official orthography policy is binding only on school pupils and civil servants; outside schools and government offices, many use the official standard, but many others do not. In real situations where most writing occurs, people are inclined to use the easiest form rather than trying to write in line with print-oriented standards. The actual existence of multitype character users means there is a need for some regulation. However, it is considered inevitable that the regulating activities always lag behind hanzi creation. Therefore, all efforts being made in this field will be inadequate; by the time the regulators get around to looking at the characters, the damage may be irreparable. On the other hand, being a social behavior, writing habits are largely acquired from exposure to a society where ubiquitous non-government controlled sources of writing production are always available in geographically and professionally wide-ranging areas. At least in the near future, while the status of the TSC remains the same, characters from the other two sources will comfortably coexist with the official standard. The situation where non-official hanzi continue to persist parallels that of Schiffman’s (2002: 98) application of Bourdieu’s “linguistic black market” in analyzing the ineffectiveness of centralist LP policy for French. Perhaps we also need to think of these non-official hanzi as a kind of commodity in Bourdieu’s “black market” model, particularly the traditional characters, as they are purported to be “illegally imported [from Taiwan and Hong Kong] and ‘consumed’ because it has covert prestige, and consumers in the linguistic market place want them, irrespective of its legality” (Schiffman 2002: 98). We find that the “covert prestige”, or “signitive power”, which refers to “the association of language attributes which have a value, positive or negative, in the mind of the perceiver” (Rahman 2002: 40) has apt explanatory power for the strong comeback of traditional characters in 1980s. As described previously, the prestige of

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traditional characters comes from two main sources. First, it is the medium of time-honored classical Chinese, thus it is imbued with knowledge and education. Second, it is the official standard of economically advanced Taiwan and Hong Kong and used by most of influential overseas Chinese, so that it is associated with modernity and internationality. Despite their illegitimate status in the government controlled language market, and government’s relentless push to remove them from Mainland for last three decades, fanti zi are considered a badge of refinement and esteem by large segments of users who desire to procure symbolic power. Today, fanti zi are not only extensively seen on business cards, in restaurants and hotels, in commercial advertisements, on shop signs and in product manuals, but in many public domains people are also tempted to use them, thereby flouting government regulations. The use of Bourdieu’s economic terms, such as capital, market and exchange, to analyze language management appears to provide us with a way to understand why the government’s strenuous efforts have failed to keep fanti zi at bay.

2.3

The Polemic (Debate) on hanzi’s Future

Some controversies about a number of issues related to hanzi had been going on for quite some time before the NCLW in 1986. Some views on how to assess the achievements of the past reform programs and the linguistic nature of the hanzi system, which are directly related to some of the more critical questions regarding hanzi’s future, were so confronting that the participants were polarized, and a fierce debate broke out between two camps in the late 1980s. A line can be roughly drawn between the conservatives, grouped around the Chinese Character Cultural Faction (CCCF) and the reformers. The conservatives were called the CCCF partly because they established an organization called the International Institute of Hanzi Culture Studies with Hanzi Culture13 as their leading journal, but more importantly because they brought to the fore the debate on hanzi issues at a time when cultural issues had became a very hot and intriguing topic. This new context was different from societal environment in which the 1950s conservatives or the 1930s traditionalists had been living. Before examining the implications of the debate, we need to look at the CCCF’s position to understand the advantages or superiorities they claim for hanzi.

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Hanzi’s Six Superiorities

The CCCF have claimed many things about hanzi, often exaggerating what they see as the merits of ideographic system14. Most of what has been touted as “new discoveries” go back to long held controversial arguments in the history of Chinese hanzi and language study. For example, the use of monosyllables in Chinese is a strength rather than a weakness, because it makes Chinese very economic in expression; association is the mother of all inventions and, as Chinese hanzi encourages association, it stands Chinese in good stead; Chinese grammar is the closest to the rules of mathematics, musical notation, chemical symbols, and so Chinese has the potential to become the most used international language (Guo 2004: 9697). The most radical claim is that hanzi are China’s fifth great gift to world civilization, and that eventually they will replace all other scripts to become the world’s writing system. Most of these theories on the advantages of the Chinese writing system, that have been labeled “new wine in old bottles” (Zhao 2005: 348), have been enumerated by DeFrancis under six headings in his classic book Chinese Language (1984b). Unger (2004: 1-12) provides an insightful analysis of these “myths” about Chinese hanzi. While it may seem excessive to go through the details of the debate surrounding this issue, it is necessary to provide the main points as a backdrop to understanding LP issues. 2.3.1.1 Information oriented In rebutting the notion that hanzi-based writing systems create difficulties for the countries using them in tapping into the emerging information age, champions of hanzi superiority claim that from the perspective of computational linguistics, characters are an informationoriented writing system which becomes more powerful when it is computerized. Chinese characters contain more information than their phonetic counterparts (bigger entropy), and not only is Chinese the clearest and the most concise language in the world, but Chinese hanzi is economic in expression, because the ideographs themselves are expressive of meanings and store more information than linear alphabetic writings. A recurring example, given by the CCCF to prove these claims, is the fact that, compared with the versions recorded in the other five United Nations working languages, the Chinese version of a document is always the shortest.

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But in many cases, as hanzi critics have pointed out convincingly, when discussing how the Chinese writing system works, most articles produced by the CCCF lack the necessary linguistic discernment between character and lexical units, such as word and morpheme. In addition, many of the advantages they have claimed are a feature of the Chinese language itself rather than its writing system. Opposing scholars use this claim as evidence that these ‘hanzi preservers’ cannot even tell the difference between the language and the system-script that represents it. 2.3.1.2 Intelligent script Square Chinese characters are good for the development of the nervous system of the human brain and make the learner more intelligent. The characters are composed of symbols and images and, as such, are unique in evoking mental images that contribute to the development of intelligence. The evidence often quoted is the academic intelligence of the Chinese character-hemisphere countries, which excel in mathematics and have produced encouraging results from experiments with aphasia therapy. Additional evidence of cognitive improvement is based on some smallscale experiments done by American psychologists showing that thirty American children with reading problems could learn to understand limited English if the words are written in Chinese characters (Zhang 1994). That hanzi has a positive effect on human intelligence is nothing more than a hypothesis, due to a lack of factual evidence. Reformers argue that it is deceptive to claim that learning characters is a kind of memory training. Yet such conjectures are hard to test and inconclusive results lead one into the realm of speculation. 2.3.1.3 Transferability and internationality The thought that hanzi is virtually language independent and thus applicable to any language has been one of most contentious arguments, and has led to a great deal of confusion. Hanzi’s transferability, or the universality myth, is a long, controversial, but appealing topic. Coulmas (1991: 233) defined transferability as “the property of a written system to be applicable to languages other than one for which it was designed”. Krzak (1987: 61) declared that the Chinese script “is nowadays the most universal script for it does not essentially depend on the properties of Chinese language and theoretically it could be used for any other language”. Hanzi automatically expresses its meaning by its shape, and without the knowledge of its pronunciation, it is automatically readable by all Chinese as well as by East Asians whose languages are generally considered

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to be genetically and typologically unrelated to Chinese. The logical extension of this belief is that the ideographic symbols convey their message directly to our minds. The new traditionalists have tried to apply this to all languages, therefore, hanzi, as a self-evident script is intelligible to speakers of all languages. The CCCF have frequently advanced and cited this new discovery in their treatises. The best rebuke to this claim is that the jiaguwen and jinwen are the ideographic characters that are most closely related to drawings and pictures of actual objects, but two-thirds of the former have not been deciphered and about eight hundred characters of the latter remain unknown to the best hanzi specialists, who have devoted their whole lives to studying these so-called self-evident signs. 2.3.1.4 Permanent perspicuity – Unifying force Hanzi transcends chronological and geographical limitations and enables speakers from different dialectal areas, to communicate in writing even though they do not know each other’s speech. DeFrancis (1984b: 149) has noted that “[t]his view has been expressed countless times in the past four centuries”. It is also a topic that traditional conservatives, and now the CCCF members, love to talk about. Because of great variation in other aspects of Chinese language, the characters have created a common bond of unity for peoples, which are otherwise divided by diversified oral speech. More than that, the historically derived forms of hanzi [nonChinese scripts, but where the forms were derived from hanzi] make hanzi a focal point for ethnic unity and cultural cohesion and affinity – the role that Latin has played for the Romance languages. The view that hanzi functions as a national means of written communication, readily recognizable across different regions where people speak virtually unintelligible dialects, is particularly attractive to politicians because unification and the leveling of differences in the vast country areas is vigorously encouraged by the government which sees the multiplicity of linguistics groups as a factor that may threaten national unity. 2.3.1.5 Learnability The CCCF holds that the structure of Chinese characters is the most logical and scientific among human languages, and is therefore easy to learn. Ann’s (1982) five-volume work, Cracking the Chinese Puzzles, reveals, in contrast to the common perception that characters are a system that is extremely cumbersome to write and hard to memorize, learning hanzi can be a very enjoyable activity. There is an internal economy in the Chinese writing system, and once one gets initial command of the basic

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knowledge, hanzi are virtually the same as all other scripts – it is the world’s easiest writing system to learn. Furthermore, hanzi is remarkable for generating more with less. Learning characters is very much like building up a vocabulary, using the fewest building blocks to produce a great quantity of different signs for communication. Compared with hanzi’s other strong points discovered by Hanzi Culture advocates, this quality, although not necessarily an advantage over other orthographic systems, is at least much more acceptable to some, and it has to be acknowledged that the difficulty of character learning might be exaggerated or overemphasized by others. 2.3.1.6 Cultural heritage and historicity Risk of losing China’s extraordinary, rich cultural heritage of tens of thousands of ancient works written in the old form of characters, is the traditional fear of hanzi reforming opponents. As the sole functioning writing system with an unbroken history, hanzi is not only a Chinese national treasure; it also contributes much to the dominance of Chinese influence in South-East Asian culture. Aesthetics is another concern, since calligraphy is a unique art form stemming from hanzi which can be found nowhere else in other cultures. As for hanzi’s historicity, Eileen Chen (1982: 138) has argued, that “[t]he study of Chinese characters will throw light on ancient cultural developments, such as the social system revealed in the ideographic system, and ancient inventions manifested in pictography”. Hanzi makes it possible to read classic works, written over a period of millennia, in complete disregard of the tremendously changed appearance of the characters over time. 2.3.2

The Socio-Political Background

It is not hard to see that most of CCCF’s arguments are not essentially different from those produced by simplification’s opponents in the 1930’s and 50s. But in the new historical context they stirred up the public’s interest, and sparked wide involvement and protracted debate in academic circles. It has been generally agreed that the most important reason, as revealed in the later developments, was the tactic of aligning themselves with the changing political environment. Culture had become a fashionable word in party politics, particularly the indigenous culture at the end of 1980s, which was seen by the Party as a weapon to counteract the undesired impact of Western influence. As Bakken (1999: 6) notes, “[t]he

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Party has in fact returned to the memories of the Chinese past, old forms of control have been subsequently modernized, redeployed, augmented and refined in order to ‘bind’ or ‘stabilize’ a potentially disorderly population”. Barme (1999: 256) observes the same trend: The rapid decay of Maoist ideological beliefs and the need for continued stability in the Chinese Communist Party led to an increased reliance on nationalism as a unifying ideology. During the 1980s, the Party emphasized its role as the paramount patriotic force in the nation and it mobilized nationalist symbols and mythology to shore up its position. Therefore, the primary thrust behind the renewed interest in traditional characters was the official favor attached to emerging nationalist sentiment. Cultural issues have always played a unique role in shaping the country’s political landscape. The nationalistic sentiment in the new historical era was marked by pervasive Neo-traditionalism, which in many cases featured a blind worship for anything indigenous. At the time, an emerging phenomenon in the cultural field was that the Party propagandists have tried to tighten the reins on society through the glorification of indigenous cultural achievements. Revitalizing the traditional culture is the theme of the CCP’s Patriotism Education propaganda15 and of the ‘the Country’s Reality Education’ (Guoqing Jiaoyu – ) campaign, launched in the aftermath of 1989 Democracy Movement. In this context, it should be evident that the natural tendency of hanzi culture promotion would be to lead to the total undermining of past commitments to hanzi simplification. In addition, because language officials were conditioned to work either by following the Party’s line, or working practically inside the administration, they became extremely cautious about being seen as being against the Party line. Furthermore, the horrible memory, left by the anti-rightists movement in the 1950s, still lingered on in many indigenous scholars’ minds. In these circumstances, faced by this attack from the CCCF, the language officials took an unusual weak position. Even so, we must ask how it was possible that in a disciplined society like China’s, an unofficial organization could challenge the country’s long supported LP policy. The answer may lie in the fact that personal influence is a unique aspect of Chinese LP. Some key members in the CCCF played a very special and practical role in boosting its social profile. Yuan Xiaoyuan, the guru of the CCCF, is a returned overseas Chinese. Her personal influence among the Party’s elites stemmed from her special background16. The Party was eager to set her up as a model, showcasing

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the benefits of wooing patriotic overseas Chinese to resettle in the motherland. Her close relationship with the country’s top leaders and unstinting commitments enabled her to break even sensitive political taboos in Mainland China. For instance, although it was an open secret that no Romanization schemes submitted by individuals had ever been considered by the government since 1958, the green light was given to her phonetic scheme at the highest level. The SCLW not only had to organize a special forum to look into it, but also launched a spelling and reading experiment in a state-run school, which is said to be the only such instance to have ever occurred in the PRC (Wu 2001: personal communication; Li M.S. 2000). Another two key members of the CCCF, An Zijie (or Ann T.K., a HK based textile tycoon and the then Vice-chairman of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) and Xu Dejiang also had an overseas backgrounds as well. In launching the hanzi cultural movement, their successful strategy of getting directives issued from the top created a substantial and lasting impact. Apart from the attempts to promote individual schemes through experiments in the state-run schools, there was a massive publicity drive in the daily press and research journals. The so-called academic corruption, stemming from academics’ economic involvement in society, is another factor worth noting. When the whole intellectual class is stripped of its independent judgment and critical insight, it provides one of the most vexing obstacles to social progress. Intellectuals were increasingly becoming a profit-oriented social stratum, i.e., their principles, reputations and credibility could be traded on the marketplace (Collective Editors 2004). In these circumstances it might not be surprising that so many authoritative figures in academic circles, society luminaries and prestigious personages graced conferences, seminars, demonstrations and other events the CCCF had organized to promote hanzi culture. Ironically, some, such as Hu Qiaomu, Zhang Youyu, Liu Daosheng and Xu Jialu, used to be (vice) directors of the SCLW or its precursor organization, the CCSR. The propaganda campaign by the CCCF included: producing TV serials and inviting overseas Chinese children to visit China to promote traditional writing; sponsoring a contest to prove that Chinese typing is faster than English; and convening international symposia on hanzi culture in the Great Hall of the People’s Congress (Chinese Parliament House). They went even further by writing special newspaper sections, thereby selling their ideas in national newspapers despite the government’s ban on the private sector becoming involved in the government press. For instance, Renmin Ribao, which is the mouthpiece of the CCP, remains

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under the tight control of the censorship system. Any subject that appears in it must be considered as having great political importance. Therefore, there were reasons to think that these articles and programs, appearing in the nationwide public media, were representative of the government’s stance. Thus, upon closer examination, it can be assumed that the essential prerequisite for Hanzi Culture’s increasing momentum is the tacit consent of the authorities concerned at the central government level. After enumerating some of their most publicized events, held in politically symbolic venues, Guo Yingjie (2004: 108) said, “It is hard to know what went on behind the scenes, but it is safe to assume that these events would not have taken place at these key state venues without consent from the top”. This, perhaps, is the reason that despite its negative effect on LP policy and the confusion it created, even today no one dares to ask who bears the responsibility for letting the situation develop to the point of influencing the Party’s strategic position on language, instead of keeping it in check from the very beginning. The debate between the hanzi culture advocates and their opponents came to a head in 1994 (Chen W.Z. 1999), the year in which three important events took place: 1) The publication of Rehabilitating One Century of a Wrong Case: An Zijie’s Scientific System of Characters; 2) the founding of the Association of Chinese Language Modernization; and 3) the beginning of its institutional publication, Forum on Language Modernization, which came into being after its first conference. The Association was established by the language reformers as a formal response to the hanzi culture camp. The debate eventually developed beyond academic borders and the political color of the articles produced reminded the people of the period of the Cultural Revolution. Politicization became inevitable when there appeared to be a clear connection between the political tenor of the newspapers and their favored attitudes in weighing the pros and cons in the debate. Liu Bin, the then education minister, was the highest official to participate in the polemic debate that openly linked the Hanzi Culture advocates with political conspiracy. In a speech, delivered in 1992 at the National Education Work Conference, he dubbed the movement as being “under the influence of Hong Kong and Taiwan ideology” (Li 1992: 22). It has been a tradition that discussion of culture related topics has always been fundamentally a politically dominated issue in China, and opponents of script reform were naturally perceived as political opponents. Considering the point of the CCCF’s arguments of hanzi’s superiority, under the banner of patriotism, was to resume traditional characters, it was said that the real objective behind the hanzi cultural claims was to echo the

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arguments from across the Strait, and to follow Taiwan’s strategy to culturally reclaim the Mainland. Therefore, when the polemic threatened to undo several decades of solid progress made in LP, it was brought to a close by political intervention (Jiang Zeming’s speech in 1996. see Zhang and Xia 2001: 264). But, it needs to be noted that many underlying and unsettled disputed issues that were brought up during the debate had existed for some time, and were just waiting for their chance to emerge. 2.3.3

The Implications of the Debate

In this section a comparative description is used to provide a more complete picture of the complications created by the debate which becomes clearer by looking at the differences between this debate on the future of hanzi characters and previous ones. 2.3.3.1 Political factors In the 1950s, the conservatives’ argument was seen as a malicious attack on the Party’s ideological line. In Hanzi Culture debate, although the discussion is characterized by sentimental ideological arguments, a relatively liberal political environment meant that there was no ideological persecution. Although the CCCF was touted as ‘neoconservative’ and ‘regressive force’ by some radical reformers, no direct intervention from politicians occurred until 1996. The unusual silence on the matter during the whole process by those in authority was one of the reasons given for the cloudy policy on the direction of script reform during this period. Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the leaders’ roles were much more active and directive. Conservatives in the 1950s were passive in adapting to the political environment and fell victim to it. In the 1990s, the CCCF learned to tactically make use of the political situation. As the preceding paragraphs have indicated, the Mainland experienced many facets of traditional nostalgia during the 1990s – the past was imbued with national youthfulness and vitality. Hanzi culture advocates tactically repositioned themselves as the salvation of the traditional heritage and changed their roles in conformity with the growth of populist commercial nationalism, fed by the Party propaganda. The following example offers further evidence for the case that academic intensity alone is not enough to take advantage of the political climate. The precursor of the hanzi superiority advocates was, in fact, an indigenous scholar, Zeng Xingchu, a psychology professor. He was the first Mainlander who challenged the official language policy. His lengthy

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treatise, Evidence about Hanzi – Easy to Study, Easy to Use, was published in the early 1980s (Zeng 1983). Zeng’s argument drew an immediate fiery attack from the simplification defenders and the only voice of discontent was muffled before it could cause an earthquake. In the wake of the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution, normal academic discussion was not yet back on track. Another issue worth citing that indicates the intricacy and complexity of the situation is that in previous debates, participants on both sides were confined to a small group, basically linguists, LP practitioners and scholars in the relevant areas. The debate in 1950s was a brief fight within the framework of traditional philology, and was brought to a sudden halt by the ensuing anti-rightists campaign. In contrast, the more recent large-scale discussions have lasted over a decade and are still continuing to some extent, involving interests from a wide range of academic sectors. It is unusual that this debate has not been fully described so far in linguistic work published in the last few years. For example, there is hardly any relevant information in Fei’s (1997) Chronology of Chinese Modernization for One Century, a semi-official history of Chinese LP, collectively compiled by the staff of the RIAL. It was given little attention in Outline of Research on Modern Hanzi (Su 1994), which is a comprehensive introduction to modern hanzi, developed as a university textbook. There is no mention of it at all in the Applying Studies of Linguistics in the Twentieth Century (Yu 1996), which uses many official historical accounts, written by a member of the language planning authority. Presumably, it should be understood that the fact that no summary has been written about this debate in the academic community, does not imply an ostrichlike policy in the official attitude towards the struggle of competing interests in script reform. On the contrary, it only indicates that language issues are still sensitive and under the full control of the Party. 2.3.3.2 Technology oriented There was little debate in previous discussions about the desirability of having a machine-efficient writing system. The only issues that were talked about were those related to typewriting and the mechanical aspects of the printing process. In this debate, hanzi’s capacity for mechanical reproduction was the central topic, although, as we have seen, cultural concern was another. One of the most often used concepts is entropy, an important concept in information studies to measure the efficiency of written communication systems in a particular language. According to Feng Zhiwei’s (1989) calculation, Chinese entropy is nearly ten bits; it is

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only about half of this in other languages. However, the two sides of the debate see the high entropy in different ways. While the reformers see it as the obstacle in the way of modernizing Chinese, the CCCF argued it was one of the superiorities, proving that hanzi is an information rich writing system. Similarly, there are competing views about the fact that characters have been, to some extent, successfully computerized. The CCCF has argued that the laborious process to master the characters has been greatly reduced. Therefore, not only is the effort to further reform hanzi deemed to be unnecessary, the completed reform programs, given their harmful effect on China’s cultural heritage, should be reviewed and revised. The reformers, on the other hand, argue that the current resolutions to character input are far from satisfactory. Thus, in spite of the exponential need for human resources and the tragic waste of creativity in inventing the thousands upon thousands of input schemes over the past couple of decades, machine processing of written Chinese requires such sophistication that it has remained the domain of the privileged few. Moreover, character input and word processing do not encompass the whole of Chinese computerization. Insofar as the Internet is concerned, it appears that there is a long way to go to insure effective and efficient transmission. Then, as we will see in the next chapter, there are the higher level applications for artificial intelligence and Chinese information processing, which are seen as very critical for China’s competitiveness in the areas of science and technology. 2.3.3.3 Linguistic implications Most of the linguistic concerns rearticulated in this debate, in one form or another, had exercised the minds of Chinese thinkers for more than a century without being resolved, and this debate provided an opportunity for both sides to review the issues against the new historical context. The discussion has generated a vast increase in publications on various linguistic issues, which has enhanced our understanding of the merits and shortcomings of hanzi, as well as providing scientific evaluation of hanzi’s role in preserving traditional heritage and furthering the country’s modernization. It has also aroused considerable interest and stimulated the population’s awareness of LP problems. This, as it has turned out, has grown into a permanent academic interest, which in turn has produced new, gradually burgeoning publications on up-to-date information on various aspects about hanzi itself and its study as a subject.

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The renewed interest in hanzi studies, in the context of the emerging telecommunications era, has encouraged more linguistic experts to rethink the reasons for taking up and reforming the traditional methodology of hanzi study. Traditionally, Chinese philology has been an independent subject with a tradition dating back more than a thousand years. Since Indo-European language-based modern linguistics was introduced, indigenous philology has been integrated into general linguistics and treated as an insignificant part of the introductory material. In the 1990s, provoked by the push from advancing technology, and by inspiration sparked by the debate, a new academic subject, Modern Hanzi Study, has been taking shape (Su 1994). 2.3.3.4 Nationalism and script reform from a historical perspective From the New Culture movement in the 1910s to the most recent trends of modernism, the Chinese language reform wars waged between conservative purists and social reformers have seen three major disputes about the script reform. These movements first tended towards Westernization, then experienced a shift back to traditionalism that was followed by the propaganda of patriotism. It might be more useful to examine the differences between the two debates in the 1950s and 1980-1990s from a continuum perspective. As Guo (2004: 97) has put it, “There is good reason to believe that cultural nationalists’ re-examination of the language reforms today is but a continuation of the century-old resistance to language reform and part of their subversion of the whole May Fourth iconoclastic tradition”. Every revolution or social transformation brings about change in social and productive relations. This kind of robust change sends a tremor through culture, creating the social conditions for script reform. The path of modern script reform runs parallel with modern history and is closely intermingled with the political circumstances; thus the debate in the 1980s90s, after a period when China had experienced an abrupt shift, is not accidental. Systematic modern language reform in China dates back to the May Fourth Movement, which occurred in the first decades of the last century. A brief review of the Chinese script reform development reveals that politicization of the Chinese script reform is characterized by a manifest relationship between script reform and the nationalism movement. If we relate script reform programs, implemented after WWII, to DeFrancis’ (1950: 220) observation that “All five of these periods of intense nationalism coincide roughly with periods of the most active interest in reforming the script,” we get the relationship suggested by Table 2-1.

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Table 2-1. Script reform punctuated by social change Self-Strengthening and Reform Movement in 1898 Learning from the West

Xinhai Revolution Ending of Monarchic Rule in 1911

May 4th Movement in 1919 Promoting Democracy and Science

Founding of P.R. China in 1949 Construction of Socialism

Cultural Revolution during 1966-76 Ideological Struggle

Economic Reform and Opening up Market Economy

Renewed controversy over the future of hanzi and Romanization

2000

1986: Postponement of Romanization; Abandonment of the 2nd Scheme; four fixations

1980

1977: 2nd Scheme of Simplification

1970 Table of Simplified Characters in 1956 and pinyin in 1958

1950

Conference on Unification of Pronunciation in 1913; first Official Pronunciation Alphabet in 1918

1920

New script proposed by Lu Zhuangzhang and other pioneers

Reflections on New Perspectives

1928: Creation of the National Language Romanization Scheme; 1935: 1st Scheme of Simplification

1930

1898

Technology Revolution Information Age and Digital Society

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Recognizing the importance of the role of the nationalist movement, DeFrancis (1950: 129) emphasized the intrinsic relationship between nationalism and script reform by saying that script reform in China, Romanization in particular, is purely a political issue rather than a linguistic one. Although this proposition was formulated on the basis of Chinese history before the PRC, his anticipatory arguments are supported by the developments that have occurred in the subsequent Chinese language reform. Nationalism tends to come to the fore, and arouse the whole population to undertake radical action when the nation is either being strengthened or under threat by foreign forces. When a population is consciously patriotic, as it is in Chinese society today, issues of nationalism will continue to have a dynamic effect on any reform attempt. The Hanzi Culture advocates were able to succeed in exploiting the shift in language policy and the Party’s propaganda strategy. It reminds us that Chinese script modernization is a long and arduous process that can be reversed at any time. The present situation seems to satisfy no one. It can be cautiously predicted that as long as issues related to the writing system are unresolved and the socio-political circumstances in China remain as they are, political factors, notably nationalism, could reignite this dispute.

Chapter 3 NEW CHALLENGES FOR A DIGITAL SOCIETY Hanzi in the Computer Age

1.

INTRODUCTION

By concentrating on the planning process for hanzi simplification, the previous chapters have provided an overview of the developing trajectory of script reform. This reflection on history provides the background and context for an investigation of the relationships between external influential factors and hanzi’s future development. This contextual material should not only provide the basis for understanding the current problems in hanzi development, but sets in place the basis for the future directions that further language planning might take. In this chapter, we first look at the how hanzi are processed by computer, showing how hanzi clash with modern-day computer technology. This chapter deals with two major issues and focuses on two key notions – chongma and luanma. Tackling these two annoying phenomenon is an every day problem for every Chinese language computer user and has been a continuing challenge for Chinese information processing experts. While chongma is related to inputting hanzi, luanma happens when hanzi is displayed on a different platform or hanzi wrapped information is transmitted and viewed over international communication networks. These two issues mark the two kinds of problems that plague Chinese character computerization: how to get hanzi into the computer effectively and how to display these computerized hanzi in digital environments reliably and legibly; or how to reliably encode and latter decode hanzi. The first part of

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this chapter is devoted to providing the basic background knowledge of how the first problem is tackled while the second part covers the second problem, including the basic principles of information digitalization and some practical issues when dealing with Chinese online information. As computer-mediated language knows no borders, the issues concerning international standards of hanzi encoding sets among East Asian hanziusing polities is also briefly discussed.

2.

DEALING WITH THE PROBLEMS OF A DIGITAL SOCIETY

Modern word processors, originally invented in the West to process written alphabetic letters, bring efficiency to language processing, whereas Chinese hanzi have long been noted for their inefficiency in non-human mechanical contexts. In the digital era, with the widespread use of computers and communication networks, the deficiencies of the Chinese script have become even more apparent. This section explores the kinds of difficulties that Chinese language users have confronted in adapting their writing system to technology, and how various methods have been tried to overcome hanzi’s mechanical deficiencies. It is essential to comprehend two basic concepts in order to understand the quandary faced by those working on hanzi computerization: chongma (see Section 2.2.1, Chapter 3) and luanma (see Section 3.1, Chapter 3). Briefly, the former (literally meaning duplicated codes) refers to the homophonic occurrence of Chinese character when hanzi is input into computer, whether phonologically or ideographically; the latter (literally meaning disordered or messy codes) refers to the unintelligible gibberish Chinese internet users frequently encounter when trying to view and display Chinese information transmitted via international communication.

2.1

Chinese Character’s Machine Applications

Hanzi’s progress towards modernization can be divided into two historical periods – mechanization and computerization – but the difficulties confronted during both of these periods were basically the same in nature. The problems that Chinese people are currently trying to tackle in processing hanzi on the computer are similar to those left unresolved by hanzi typewriter designers. Therefore, any examination of computerization

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needs to start with a look at what was done when designing Chinese typewriters. 2.1.1

Mechanical Processing

The introduction of European typing machines in the nineteenth century inspired Chinese intellectuals to make hanzi suitable for mechanical reproduction, and these efforts to devise Chinese typewriters, most of them by individuals, lasted until the advent of computer technology. The persistent attempts to make characters mechanically processable left no possibilities unexplored, but produced only meager results. Some widely used approaches to typing characters include: • Whole character typing: This is a very primitive and straightforward method, derived from traditional printing technology, and only highly trained operators can pick up the needed character at a reasonable speed from the many thousands of characters arranged on a big and awkward tray. Obviously, the physical dimensions of the device create visual and motor hindrances for the operator, thus greatly reducing the typing speed. • Telegraphy method: It is based on the principle of sending and receiving Chinese telegrams, which was a clever invention by the American Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and was adopted in 1881 in China. Every Chinese character was assigned a ‘four digit number’ as used for encoding telegrams, and mapped on a reference numeral from 0001 to 9999 thereby accommodating up to 10,000 characters, about the number needed for general purposes. When the operator wanted to type a particular character, s/he picked the character by looking it up in a code conversion book in which the characters are represented arbitrarily by a four digit Arabic number. To accelerate selection, operators have to memorize as many of the numbers related to specific hanzi as possible. This is the main reason that prevents its wider use. • Four corners system: This method was invented by Wang Yunwu, a modern lexicographer. The hanzi is square in shape, and the information represented by the stroke order or shape of the four corners of the character is distinctive enough to differentiate characters. To represent characters, it divides the stroke configuration into ten types represented by the digits from 0 to 9 and identifies characters by four digit numerals allocated by the four corners of the character. The drawback of this system is that there are too many overlapping numerals and “many rules with too many exceptions” (Yin and Rohsenow 1997: 249). The need

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for selection thwarts the ideal of one keystroke per character, preventing rapid typing. These problems of mechanical selection are only partially alleviated by computerization, and new conflicts also arise. 2.1.2

Conflicts Between Character and Computers at Various Levels

In broad terms, there are two levels at which Chinese characters conflict with communication technology in the information age. There is direct conflict, which refers to the ‘mechanical’ difficulties of character input on the computer, but there is also indirect but more fundamental conflict which involves Chinese artificial intelligence and Chinese information processing. • Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI, also generally known as Automatic Machine Translation, refers to the understanding of natural language based on the syntactic analysis of the sentence structure, i.e., AI is about developing automatic or-semi-automatic systems of analyzing, understanding and producing the language in its natural state. Information about the function of words in context is vital for language processing whether in our normal everyday use or in any attempt to simulate it. As linguists would know, Chinese is typologically an analytical language, so there is usually no systematic marker to distinguish the functional differences among the words in Chinese as there are in inflexional languages. What makes this more complex is that characters, written in running text, leave no space for word boundaries. The units of meaning are only rarely a single character in modern Chinese; much more often they are longer chunks, compound multi-character units, set phrases and even full sentences. This poses a major problem for natural text analysis, because to identify words, or word segmentation, is the first and critical step for a machine to read and understand natural language. • Chinese Information Processing (CIP): As a part of, but at a lower level than AI in a strict sense, CIP which is sometimes used exchangeably with Chinese Computational Linguistics, principally refers to IR (Information Retrieval). IR is an automated information storage system that includes word processing and various computer-assisted expert systems, such as keyword searching, content substantiation and analysis, subject threading and categorization which is also known as automatic abstracting and indexing. Because the modern information

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processing systems have originated in the West, they are all based on alphabetical order, while the Chinese traditional radical system appears to be a more complex and time consuming way for both human beings and machines to extract information. The current situation is that some basic issues such as whether data ordering should be indexed by structural elements or pinyin remains a question yet to be adequately addressed. Usually, one would find a number of different classification systems are employed in libraries and other information intensive industries, an issue that is dealt with in Section 2.4, Chapter 4. The purpose of briefly describing these two computer applications is to emphatically indicate that although data entry is the first step in computerizing the Chinese language, the whole issue of Chinese machine automation goes far beyond designing highly efficient encoding system to input hanzi onto computers. While AI and CIP have been major technical ventures in the Chinese IT industry for decades, they have yet to produce any universally acceptable solutions. 2.1.3

Character Input on Computers

A phonographic writing system makes use of relatively small numbers of basic units to encode the language. Chinese does not have a clearly defined set of units (or letters) to use as a basis for text input via the keyboard, making it impossible to directly generate text on an electronic screen. Thus, an encoding/decoding process must be completed to transcribe hanzi and render them computer accessible. If the process of Chinese character input and output on computers is presented in a diagraph as shown in Figure 3-1, the difficulty and complexity of Chinese character processing are manifested in boxes 2 and 4. Process 5, which involves internal coding transformation, must also be much more sophisticated than with an alphabetic script. The quality of a particular schematic system is determined by how fully it is able to exploit information that can be extracted and generalized from the respective features in boxes 2 and 4, thus minimizing the time spent in process 5. The key technological problem in box 4 is how to deal with Chongma (homophones). If the encoding rules are complex, Chongma can be reduced to some extent, but the cost is that users have to invest more energy and time on learning the typing requirements specified by the scheme. In the words of Hannas (1997: 267-268), “each involves some trade-off between training time and accuracy or speed”. Therefore, it is a matter of achieving a balance between ‘Easy to Learn, Difficult to Use’; and ‘Difficult to

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Learn, Easy to Use’ which is the dilemma faced by all phonographic input scheme designers.

Figure 3-1. Functional processes in phonic-based hanzi computerization schemes

Hanzi is characterized by unlimited potential in its structure that can be employed to represent its shape; this is thought to be the main reason why countless input schemes have been devised over last two decades. Broadly speaking, the information manifested in the structural makeup of hanzi is much richer than it is in phonetic strings, so there are more character-based schemes than the phonetics-based ones. As Mair (1991) noted, some schemes decompose the hanzi according to components, others may identify it by types of strokes at its corners. Others may even enter onto the computer sequentially some or all of the strokes of a character. As a result, since the mid-1970s Chinese people, from every walk of life have shown great enthusiasm in devising character encoding schemes. Zhi Binglin’s scheme of hanzi computerization, reported on the front page of Wenhui Bao Daily (Shanghai) on July 19, 1978, was the first hanzi input scheme developed within China. (Those designed both by Chinese and foreigners outside of China were created much earlier.) Only 30 odd schemes were reported in the First Nationwide Symposium of Hanzi Input Schemes, held in Qingdao in 1978, just one year after the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Since then, thousands of schemes have been invented and publicized on the Mainland alone, and over 100 of these schemes can be found in software products. Most Chinese computers have a wide range of preinstalled hanzi input programs provided by computer producers or vendors. No accurate statistics are available about how many input schemes have been devised to date, but there is a widely acknowledged belief that almost every fortnight a new scheme comes into being

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(Mair 1991; Zhou 2001b). At times, during the 1980s into the 1990s, there were more than 500,000 people engaged in devising input schemes1, and watching press briefings on the TV news about the latest schemes to encode and decode hanzi used to be a way of life in Chinese society. This testifies to the tremendous amount of effort that has gone into solving this problem. However, despite the time, money and effort devoted to solving this problem, China has yet to see a scheme that is truly satisfactory or widely adopted. By the mid-1990s, competition in Chinese input software was growing more intense, and the term Wanma (numberless encoding schemes/horses) Benteng (galloping) [ten thousand horses competing] was used to literally describe the efforts of individuals to secure themselves a position in the national marketplace. According to Zhang Pu (1997: 6-8), by 1997 the Patent Bureau had accepted 336 applications and 159 cases were granted intellectual copyrights. Apart from this, the Administration Centre of Software Registration also accepts registration applications. Today, there are around twenty systems which have the capacity to successfully compete in the software market from which consumers have to choose if they want to enter characters on their computers.

2.2

Three Streams of Input Schemes

In general terms, the method of hanzi input can be categorized as either keyboard or non-keyboard input (see Figure 3-2), and there are two streams of keyboard entry (phonetic and ideographic) as illustrated in Figure 3-3. Most phonetic input schemes use pinyin to transliterate Chinese characters. However, there are some individually devised alphabetic systems, as well as the zhuyin (or, Bopomofo) scheme, a stroke-based alphabetic transliteration system introduced by Chinese government in 1905. Non-pinyin schemes normally come with a specific keyboard or modified international keyboard as part of the hardware. The use of an international standard (i.e., QWERTY) keyboard is the most attractive aspect of the pinyin-based system. Growing interest and market performance show that the most convenient and natural way to get Chinese characters on the screen is to type by pronunciation. For ideographic or hanzi-based systems, one of the inconvenient aspects is the need to use a Chinese-specific keyboard. Another disadvantage is that there is no unifying standard for traditional stroke and radical/component systems, so keyboards designed to represent these units vary considerably from one to the other. Although one can use an international standard keyboard for alphabetic hanzi-based schemes, there is still no consensus on how

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the strokes or comp onents should be represented by the letters. For instance, some schemes use D or O to represent , because of their physical resemblance, but some other systems may use phonetic relationships by , which is pronounced as Kou in Mandarin employing K to stand for Chinese. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) SR (Speech Recognition)

Non-keyboard

Mouse Computing with Chinese Characters

Pinyin Phonetics Non-Pinyin Combined

Keyboard

Stroke/component Ideographic

Components

Alphabetic Figure 3-2. Computing with Chinese characters by character/words (70s) – stats-based (frequency use) (standard key board only) pinyin

Phonetically

by phrases (80s) – corpus-based

by sentences (90s) – linguist/AI-based (semantics + pragmatic) Non-pinyin/zhuyin (Chinese/standard keyboard)

Keyboard Inputting

Combined Method by stroke/component (traditional) Ideographically

by component (traditional or self-defined) by alphabetic (Chinese/standard keyboard)

Figure 3-3. Taxonomy of keyboard input schemes

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Mainstream Schemes: Alphabetic/Phonetics-Based Method

There are a number of alphabetic, keyboard-based software packages in which hanzi are phonetically encoded using official pinyin, including modified pinyin, or some other individually devised phonetic system. The best feature about the phonetics-based input method is its closeness to human language; any putonghua speaker who has some knowledge of pinyin can readily use it without special training. But, homophones or chongma, putonghua requirements, and rare characters are three fatal weaknesses of alphabet-based schemes. 2.2.1.1 Homophones An almost irresolvable obstacle with a phonetic-based system is the so-called chongma crisis. As previously noted, chongma or homophonous hanzi, are superfluous characters frequently appearing on the screen along with the correct one when phonetic syllables are input. This is a result of the paucity of syllables available in the phonetic system compared to the very large number of morphemic units (hanzi) in Chinese. An apt example for an English speaker might be the distinguishing between “right, rite, write and Wright”. When a word processor for an alphabetic language is designed to receive spoken input rather than input from a keyboard, it has to correctly identify the words it hears from the phonetic context. For instance, when (zhao) is input by Microsoft pinyin 2.0, a phonetic-based input scheme developed by Microsoft for Chinese users, 53 monosyllabic

Figure. 3-4. Illustrated sample of computer typed Chinese text

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homophonic chongma are displayed (see the panel bar in Figure 3-4), not including the polysyllabic words/phrases. The users’ enthusiasm for the alphabet-based schemes has been dampened by their low accuracy rate due to the frequent interruption by chongma. Similarly structured characters also cause homographic chongma for ideographic input schemes, but the problem does not appear to be as serious as it is for phonetic schemes. Linguistically, the Chinese speech sound system uses over 400 non-tonal sounds to represent a huge hanzi system of as many as 3,000 characters in modern Chinese. Theoretically, one syllable has to represent at least 7.5 homophonous characters, if the four tones are not taken into consideration (the majority input schemes are non-tonal). Some spellings, such as shi, yi, ji, will produce hundreds of alternatives in some schemes. As the screen normally can only display about ten characters at a time, in order to select the correct one, users will have to scroll through a number of display pages (typically a bar that pops up on the screen to display homophgraphic characters when a valid syllable is input) to search for the intended character. For some rarely used characters, one may have to search through about ten pages (Gu 2000: 30), severely decreasing typing speed. When a Chinese translation of the underlined text from the previous paragraph was typed using the popular ‘Microsoft pinyin’ input method, which comes preinstalled on most computer systems with Windows 98 or above, the first author, an experienced user of the system, took nine minutes to type the text. Most of the time was spent correcting the homophonous characters, which related to 17 words. The input speed was 9.2 characters per minute; this is much slower than the average typist’s 50 words per minute (Wu and Ding 1992: 3). Zhang Zirong and Chu Min’s (2002: 17-18) research has highlighted the chongma problem in the natural language use. According to their statistics, there are 1,036 homophonous characters in the latest version of the Modern Chinese Dictionary. Only 688 characters, that form 1,036 homophonies, are used more than once as monosyllabic words in the 2.5 million characters corpus from People’s Daily, but the characters in high use among these 1,036 homophonies are quite limited. For example, there are nearly 100 characters that may be presented if one says ‘shi’, but the most used one ‘ ’ (shì, to be: is/are) is far more likely to be required than any of the others. The most used 180 characters cover more than 95 percent of occurrences; only 42 characters are used less. These are characters that are most likely to make trouble in actual graphemephoneme conversion in the natural language. If these 42 characters were able to be satisfactorily processed, theoretically and practically, the homonym errors would be reduced to 75 percent, so chongma caused by

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homophonous words would be significantly diminished. At a more general level, 580 words were found to be homophonous in this dictionary, but only 170 words were found in a 2.5 million People’s Daily character corpus, and just 48 highly frequented (above 95%) occurrences were required to be distinguished. Using Zhang’s and Chu’s scheme, the error rate for grapheme-phoneme conversion decreased from 8.8 per 1,000 to 4.4 per 1,000. They conclusively contend that this should set the maximum possible rate of occurrence for homophone errors in conversion between phonetic input and character output that can expected as the average capacity for most systems. Another cumbersome burden for phonetic users is that individuals have developed their own personal alphabetic schemes. Although government agencies have repeatedly urged everyone to adhere to the officially sanctioned pinyin system, numerous new computer-oriented Romanized schemes have been created, mostly by educated dilettantes and amateurs. Some have claimed that their systems have reduced the homophonous coding to a minimum level, but users’ unfamiliarity with the spelling rules of the newly designed schemes means that they have to spend time and energy on training, which compromises the systems quantitatively and qualitatively. 2.2.1.2 Additional knowledge about pinyin and putonghua The basic requirement for the phonetic method is that one must be able to read and spell the hanzi correctly and precisely. Thirty percent of China’s 1.4 billion people are speakers of various dialectal variations (Hannas 1997: 373-4), and usually dialect speakers have problems providing the correct phonetic input. For those who do speak Mandarin, not everyone can use pinyin as a method of input if they lack 1) enough functional knowledge of pinyin and/or 2) do not know the correct orthographic rules for word division. In a national large scale sociolinguistics survey (see Section 3.3.3, Chapter 6), it was found that 68 percent of the total population “can use pinyin”. Rohsenow (2001: 136) gives a straightforward description of this situation: until the population at large is educated enough in the national language, and familiar enough with the standard pronunciation and/or with the standard Hanyu Pinyin spellings of words, it is unlikely that there will be a popular acceptance of the Hanyu Pinyin input systems. However, Mair (1991: 7) argues that computer input has helped to spread alphabetic literacy. “After a couple of years of reliance upon

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phonetic input schemes, users gradually become comfortable with the notion that Romanization really does faithfully represent their language”. The argument, that pinyin has a role in popularizing input systems, is strongly supported by the findings of an online survey2. In response to the question “If you use pinyin-based input systems, how did you get your knowledge of pinyin?” Of 104 respondents, only six said they had to spend time on learning pinyin for typing purposes, whereas most people (77/104) used their knowledge of pinyin obtained through schooling. Interestingly, 17 respondents indicated that pinyin skills can be gained automatically through typing practice. 2.2.1.3 Inability to spell rarely used characters The most attractive point of the ideographic input schemes is that they can deal with all signs that are stored in the programmed data bank as long as they are systematically classified. Wang Shiyao (2000: 217-218) argues that “the character is a visual code and the ideal way to input a character should be by visual means. This can be seen by the fact that no script in the world is being input on the computer by phonetic means”. The ideographic method designers and proponents criticize phonetic schemes for their inability to process rarely used characters, and these schemes will never be considered ideal if they cannot produce all the characters available in Chinese. 2.2.2

Non-Mainstream Schemes

Non-mainstream schemes include the ideographic input approach and non-key board approach. The former, which refers to ideographically reproducing characters by encoding hanzi’s structural elements (normally strokes and components), which was the dominant approach in the initial stage of developing character input programs. Up until the mid-1990s, Wang Ma system, a typical ideographic input method, famous for high input speed by professional typists, accounted for 70 percent of the total input software market (Zhang 1993: 37). But currently, professional typing is a sunset industry with computers being used more by urban professionals, and in this climate hanzi-based approaches have gradually lost their dominant position among general computer users. Notwithstanding the possibility of a significant boost in acceptance at some point in time, the non-keyboard approach, as the following sections indicate, is not a practical option in the near future.

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2.2.2.1 Ideograph-based method Generally, hanzi input scheme designers use components as the units for analysis for technical convenience instead of using components to input characters (component-based schemes were only seen in the very early stages of program development). Cognitive dissonance occurs because the IT industry designs character input based on technical convenience which goes against educational practices related to character structure and stroke order. While the state imposes a national standard on how to analyze and dismantle hanzi, and these standards are strictly observed in schools across the country, they are often ignored by software designers. Another even more critical drawback that prevents hanzi-based schemes from gaining wider use is that they require more effort as the user must continuously analyze the structure while typing. When the mental creation process is interrupted, the thought flow is broken, and concentration and typing speed are lost, confining hanzi schemes mainly to professional typists. Table 3-1. Advantages and disadvantages of two input streams Features Speed Innateness

Character-based Schemes Depends on typing skill More familiar to Chinese eyes. It is indigenous to Chinese, acceptable especially to older generation. Writer friendly Interfering with thought processes, resulting in loss of concentration. For most schemes, a several weeks Special training course is a must; easy to training be forgotten. required Conforming to Most run against the standard official policy specified by language and education authorities. Re-selection Click once and get the character involved right away. Dialect free Welcomed most strongly by people from dialect areas in southern China. Skill persistent Skill erodes very fast, hard to recall after a period of interruption. Keyboard Most use a specific or self-defined keyboard.

Alphabet-based Schemes Typing skill has little relevance Culturally alien to Chinese.

More natural and innately related to the language. Basically, no training needed. Once the skill is acquired, it is retained for a longer time. Most use pinyin, the official standard; some devise their own alphabetic system. Have to select from a panel of candidate homophonous characters. Dialect speakers find it difficult, failing to get characters if misspelling occurs due to wrong pronunciation. The skill is easy to retain, once mastered, long lasting. Most use the international standard keyboard.

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Combined schemes make use of both phonetic and ideographic information to define hanzi. They try to distinguish homonyms by applying strokes to indicate semantic information. This method is less distracting and can save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on homonym discrimination when typing. Table 3-1 compares the strengths and weaknesses of the two dominant encoding schemes. 2.2.2.2 Non-keyboard input streams The frustrating experience of depending only on a keyboard input method has made people turn to other alternatives. Out of three non-keyboard input methods (i.e., reading, handwriting and scanning), automatic speech recognition is the long-term focus for the IT industry since mouse-based input has been proven to be awkward and inept. OCR is the only one that has found its way into the retail market, although it is still in the development stage (see Figure 3-5).

Figure 3-5. Taxonomy of non-keyboard input schemes

There are two varieties of OCR: scanning and simultaneous writing. The scanning method for OCR involves input of existing text, which is analogous to using a scanner. Simultaneous writing OCR requires the computer to make on-going pattern-recognition matches by simultaneously comparing the characters input by hand with the mapped characters preprogrammed in the computer, until one that has maximal structural similarity is found. As the speech recognition technology is not a realistic expectation in the foreseeable future, OCR has captured people’s imagination as a potential breakthrough in overcoming the difficulties of inputting hanzi on a computer. The first printed hanzi OCR scheme was a 1000-character scheme developed by IBM in 1966. In China, scholars did not start any research on OCR until the end of the 1970s, but since then

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there has been rapid research development with marketing beginning in the 1990s. OCR has special implications for hanzi processing in China, because: • Dialect speakers have welcomed it; • The older generations are for various reasons not familiar with a keyboard (Tompson 1991), and it is too late for them to gain the needed physical skills late in life; • Computer illiterates and pinyin illiterates can not use phonetics-based input systems. • The time and energy need to effectively use complex hanzi-based input systems may be too much for many users. • Unlike western alphabetic manuscripts, where most text is normally typed because of the long-term use of typewriters, a large proportion of intellectual products in Chinese are initially handwritten. For a number of practical reasons, it is unusual to find any combined input systems in the marketplace, which undisputedly is dominated by pinyin-based schemes. 2.2.3

Optimizing the Input Schemes

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was increasing discussion about the appropriate role for the government in the management of the input software market. Zhou (1986c: 52) argued there was in fact no possibility to single out a universal scheme for all purposes, because “different services require different types of input methods”. Hu Shuangbao (1996: 404-405) proposed that the accepted set of alternatives for common and professional users in Mainland China should be reduced to four schemes. However, this is unlikely to happen and the public is unlikely to be satisfied with the alternatives as long as the following phenomena exist: • The debate about evaluation criteria for scheme selection is ongoing; • Speed competitions for academic and individual input projects continue to get sponsored by interest groups; and • The devising of input schemes is still a flourishing and dynamic business. While there is no agreement on a set of evaluation criteria for input schemes, it is generally agreed that the principles and factors to be considered should be:

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• Scientific: Input should be in accordance with the official standards, based on a sound linguistic theory and be compatible with the national education policy. It also should be devised on the basis of the latest developments in the relevant academic areas, such as human body engineering science and ergonomics study. • User friendly: No special training should be needed or if it is, it should be available within an affordable timeframe. Operational principles should be concise, consistent, and clear, and more importantly, to enable the user to type by natural association rather than commitment to memory. The system makes use of the characteristic features of hanzi and the Chinese language. Traditional and modern characters should be treated equally by adhering to consistent rules, conveniently and indiscriminately applicable to the whole population regardless of their age, location and educational background. • Application in a wide range of uses: Equally effective for users with various purposes. The general population has quite different requirements for speed than professionals; most schemes are designed to be effective within the common hanzi, i.e., 6763 (to be exact, 6724 character + 39 components) characters contained in the national standard code set SCCSII GB2312-80. The ideal scheme should accommodate a large enough number of characters to include not only modern Chinese, but also archaic and non-Chinese characters. • High efficiency: Using as few key strokes as possible, i.e., coding length is short enough to speed up the typing. In 1990, Qian Yuzhi advanced a formula to assess the efficiency of an input scheme (Feng 1995: 74). The efficiency (represented by ) is the optimization of the following three factors. If ‘n’ is the total number of caps required on the keyboard (most use all 26 letters on the international keyboard), ‘l’ (letter) is the number of key strokes required (most are 4) and ‘c’ is the coincident occurrence (chongma) in static conditions, then the efficiency = n x l x c. A minimum value means maximum efficiency. Another two influential factors are keyboard design, and the vocabulary database. • National and international: It should be equally effective nationwide, regardless of the population’s place of birth and dialect use. At present, all alphabet-based schemes are based on the official standard pronunciation, or putonghua, and thus are national from the perspective of alphabetbased advocates, but criticized as locally biased by character-based proponents. It should also be compatible with the international standard keyboard and characters used in other character using countries and overseas Chinese communities.

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• Consistency: It should be in conformity with school language teaching methods, existing dictionary classification methods and database retrieval systems. There is no doubt, that in the long run the biggest group of beneficiaries of a good input system will be school students. About 200-300 million students will be involved, all of whom will have to learn computer typing, the basic requirement to acquire further IT skills. Prior to mid-1990s, especially in 1980s, computers were expensive hi-tech office equipment, and the targeted users of input scheme were confined to professional typists and secretarial and clerical staff, and therefore high typing speed (normally meaning a lengthy period of training and familiarity) and powerfulness (a big character database to process a wide range of texts) were the primary pursuit of any input scheme vendor. Over last decade or so, big strides in computer technology coupled with radical economic development has made computers a commodity and one of the domestic necessities for the urban household. This has significantly changed the focus of input software developing strategies as the new users place greater emphasis on practical factors in choosing word-processing products, in particular, no special training requirement and good compatibility. Finally, after two decades of overheated enthusiasm for input scheme development, people finally have realized that given the complexity of the problem, there can be no progress made beyond the level currently achieved without more input from linguistic science. Indeed, input and encoding issues are becoming less of a concern, as attention is turning to how to transmit characters validly through international telecommunications systems in ways that are intelligible to different application platforms. This is now deemed to be a more urgent issue as email and the internet have rapidly become part of Chinese language user’s lives.

3.

INTERNET USE OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

Currently, more computers are beginning equipped with the special software and/or hardware needed to work with Chinese characters. Most handle Chinese in one of three ways. In the Chinese-speaking world, most operating systems are localized for Chinese with all text settings set to Chinese. The users can freely and conveniently input and display Chinese with built-in Chinese fonts. For example, Microsoft has made available traditional and simplified Chinese Windows for every new version. These

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systems are best for the people who deal only with Chinese on a daily basis. Another two practical ways for overseas Chinese computer users to access characters have emerged over time. One approach is to add a Chinese helper program, which typically comes with Chinese fonts to enable Chinese to be used, in conjunction with another language operating system, and programs such as word processors and Internet browsers. A second approach, which is increasing in popularity as more programs are equipped with Unicode, is using Unicode to handle Chinese directly through the systems themselves. The growing popularity of Unicode enables more computers to work in a multi-script friendly environment, offering a potential solution for non-Chinese computer users to input and display Chinese hanzi. However, none of these systems has proven to be totally reliable and frequent interference with the local system is common. In the early 1990s, when most technical standards concerning Chinese characters were still ‘under construction’, only a small number of Chinese citizens had computer facilities, and it was not normally possible to process online information in Chinese characters without Chinese Windows or installing special Chinese support software. Although there is still a long way to go in developing the ability to view and create Chinese information in a ‘problem free’ manner for Chinese-language internet users, currently most Chinese computer users, despite occasionally relying on various support software and their own skills, can largely work with Chinese online. The following is a succinct discussion of some of the technical matters related to the display and decoding of websites and email in Chinese, with the aim of offering an insight into the problem of encoding (input) and decoding (output) of Chinese characters.

3.1

Some Technical Issues in Encoding and Decoding Chinese Characters

Before proceeding to discuss dealing with hanzi on the internet and problems concerning hanzi encoding and decoding in multilingual text, it might be beneficial to provide some basic understanding of Chinese computerization. The computer works by taking only two simple orders: yes or no; or in mathematical terms, a series of binary numbers. All programmed computer data is represented by the two figures 0 and 1, called the binary digit system. 28 = 256 non-identical codes can represent all Western alphabetic 52 letters (including upper and lower cases), the 10 Arabic numerals, plus the punctuation marks in Latin script and some

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control codes on the keyboard. The process of assigning numbers to characters is known as encoding. Decoding is the process of looking up the encoded character through its internalized mapping table and displaying it on the screen. Alphabetic scripts can use a universal system for internal coding and external exchange as an interface with other software. For other languages, hundreds of code systems were used to encode all the orthographies used around the world. No serious problem occurs if each language operates within the confines of its own group of users, but when these scripts, encoded by different systems, come into close contact in the same application environment, they produce unintelligible masses of text (luanma) on the screen. Chinese users, although sharing the same language, are not able to communicate because of a lack of versatility among internalized code labeling systems. Versatility requires that the code used in the shared document must always be identified, so the machine can recognize and process these identical codes. In other words, agreement on a universal standard within the country facilitates communication. The release of GB 2312-80, which uses double-byte (2 16 = 65,535) to encode 6,763 characters, has ended the laissez faire state of various individual code systems used by different software manufacturers and editors in China. However, numberless character codes have been devised and published by respective governments or big IT industries in hanzi-using regions. Some other influential systems are listed in Section 2.1.1.3 of Chapter 4. The coexistence of standards, adopted in isolation, detrimentally affects all and prevents information from stably and smoothly being communicated and interchanged. In Section 4, Chapter 7 and Appendix F, we see how Chinese technological standard and language management authorities undertook to unify the various internal standard character sets and made them compatible with international standards. At present, to input Chinese characters, or create an e-mail message on a non-Chinese Windows computer, usually involves activating the existing Chinese software that comes preinstalled with the major encoding systems. Now most Windows (after 2000 and XP) have excellent built-in Chinese support with availability of various hanzi standard sets such as GB 231280, GB 13000.1 and Big5, and at least theoretically, users have access to Chinese fonts and input methods internationally. Over the past few years the reliability of the system has been significantly enhanced as more national and international technical standards for character sets are put in place. The frustrating thing is that, for a number of reasons, programs do not always recognize and respond as expected, and interference is commonplace when communicating with the outside world, making internet use in

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the Chinese language not as pleasant an experience as occurs when using alphabetic languages. We examine this issue in the subsequent section.

3.2

Decoding Chinese Information on Web Pages

In the past, Windows web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator could support Chinese characters on their own without the installation of special programs, but users needed to select the right font. This often involved a trial and error process if one was not sure about the font used to encode the information, and could be a very frustrating experience. There are many good free software fonts for downloading, including free language packs from Microsoft that contain methods for inputting Chinese characters. However, installing these language packs will also automatically set up browsers for Chinese, which sometimes can interfere with the local system. Apart from Microsoft fonts, Chinese users have now a number of other fonts to use in Windows. Some of these fonts will allow the user to write e-mails in Chinese in Microsoft Outlook. However, the predominant problem is the instability in viewing results, commonly known as luanma, in which characters are displayed as undeciphered or ill-formed codes. Two primary reasons account for this kind of garbled code: 1) different Chinese character internal codes are used for different software or on internet servers; and 2) characters are programmed using a single byte while alphabetic scripts use a double byte. Either of these produces distorted characters, making the content unintelligible. Figure 3-6 provides some examples of these luanma or corrupted text strings. The first two lines are also called ‘kongma’ (empty code). While for luanma there is still the possibility to restore the text using specially designed (online) programs, kongma are irreparable and irretrievable as the coded information has been totally lost in the course of transmission. **********************; ฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀฀; µÚ Ò¼ ½²Ð÷ ÂÛ£-£-£-£-£-£-£-£-£-£-£-£; üÖØÁË¡£ 1_9_9__(_(_ _(_; ¡£, or Öйú¸è£º·ÅÂíɽ¸è£¬ÌðÃÔÃÔ£¬¹ú¸è¡¢Â·±ßµÄÒ¹»°²»Òª²É. Figure 3-6. Illustrated samples of corrupted text strings

As long as Windows has Chinese fonts installed, both of the major browsers are able to display Chinese characters, and Chinese web surfers can view different Chinese websites. But this only occurs if web pages tag

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the information to let the browser know that the script is in Chinese. Otherwise browsers will display luanma if they mistake the information created by coding schemes such as Big 5 as GB or vice-versa. In this case, the user has to go to ‘View’ on the main menu and manually choose a decoding font by clicking ‘Character Set’ (on Netscape), ‘Character Encoding’ (on Mozilla Firefox) or ‘Fonts/Encoding’ (on Internet Explorer, see Figure 3-7).

Figure. 3-7. Illustrated sample of hanzi character sets available on IE

The problem is complicated because the code standards used to encode the information have to be specified from an increasingly large number of choices. At present, simplified Chinese (GB) or traditional Chinese (Big5) are still the most frequently used codes. The latter encodes traditional characters and is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and some other Chinesespeaking communities, while GB encodes simplified characters and is used mainly in Mainland China and Singapore; the encoding used depends on the target audience. Unicode is growing in popularity and can be used for both simplified and traditional hanzi, and many web sites are dual-coded, i.e., offer the same information in both codes. Before the Unicode era, it was standard practice for web editors to use a single encoding system to code information, and this information is still available on the web, so it is not uncommon that the Mainlanders cannot view the information coded in traditional characters on a website, and vice-versa. This brief introduction only describes how Windows browsers work. For other operating systems such as Macintosh and Unix, the users may have trouble even after the appropriate Chinese fonts are installed.

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New Challenges for a Digital Society

E-mail Use on Non-Chinese Language Computers

Essentially, the difficulties and possible common solutions to viewing emails in Chinese are the same as those for internet information. Prior to the mid-1990s, Chinese computers used an encoding mechanism outside the normal ASCII range used by English, making it almost impossible to use Chinese for international e-mail. Computer users would be aware that alphabetic languages use only seven bits of an 8-bit byte unit and anything included in the 8th bit can be either ignored or changed. When eight bits double-byte encoded hanzi information is sent out over the international media network, it is transmitted and read around the world on Western script platforms (typically, in single-byte English Windows environments). In order to make Chinese encoding different from alphabetic codes, Chinese character encoding editors have had to use the eighth bit as a distinct marker to represent hanzi. However, these 8th-bit bytes used for Chinese can be mistaken as other bytes used to create special characters, like ampersand signs. Since the mid-1990s, computers have made major advances in being able to handle Chinese, and the need to deal with online Chinese information has increasingly become an international matter in the cyber world (see Section 4, Chapter 7). This trend has caught the attention of software developers, and as a result various decoding helpers and special font software have been developed. Although an experienced Chinese net surfer, aided by these supporting tools, can successfully view or fix some damaged Chinese texts using major international browsers, it is still the biggest obstacle preventing people from getting access to Chinese online information. So far, there is no universally acceptable solution to this problem, even for those who are very experienced. As Jack Dai (1996: 24), a specialist in cross-language computing and software localization, said, “even the most savvy and experienced [software] manager can run from time to time into some unexpected quirks that are unique to Asian languages”. After citing a case study on how to deal with Asian computing challenges in a corporate business communication, and “the granddaddy of all the headaches” in cracking the “quirky and bizarre”, “intricate and troublesome” problems in this case, he (p. 25) warns, “Even now I still sweat over the possibility of getting myself grounded over the precarious business of Asian language computing, no matter how high-flying my confidence and experience”. A site that has tried to overcome this impasse was Bluesea (2003). In a lengthy article (telnet//bbs.tsinghua.edu.cn, or, hppt://bbs.tsinghua.edu.cn), entitled Complete Collection of Luanma, there is a list of twenty-four reasons (22 pages) that may cause luanma. The authors suspect that such

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good intentions to help Chinese language internet users will be of no avail, as the problem of luanma is so incredibly complex that even computer experts lose their enthusiasm after getting halfway through a text. One of our online survey’s correspondent’s experiences corroborates this observation: Reading emails, for example, on the same machine, under the same mechanical conditions, some characters are intelligible, some are not. If I can read them this time, I’m not sure about next time, with the same message. Sometimes the message in characters can be printed as it is seen on the screen, other times it is just luanma; more puzzling, one part is luanma, another part is intelligible text. The outcomes of the aforementioned online survey (carried out in 2002) also shows that out of 164 respondents, only 32 people said they rely only on hanzi in their cyber life. In answering, “Overall, how would you describe your digital surfing experience involving Chinese characters on the computer?” among 114 respondents, 49 people chose ‘not satisfied’ and 12 ticked ‘very frustrating, a lot of problems’. One respondent wrote, In order to avoid the troubling delay caused by encoding and decoding characters, my personal experience is that when I contact someone for something urgent over the Internet, even when I surely know the machine at the other end is installed with a Chinese character processing software package, whether it is the same that I am using or not, the most secure method is to use English or pinyin, depending on the receiver’s proficiency in English. Fortunately, at present most Chinese Internet users know either English or pinyin, but with the rapid popularization of computers and the steady lowering of the age of the computer using population, this situation will change in the future. As e-mail has become a worldwide phenomenon, some e-mail programs, such as Outlook and Netscape Messenger, give the user the option of specifying the appropriate language that is being used in the body of the text at the stage when the e-mails are being written. If this is done, the messages can be opened and read in Chinese when they reach the end recipients. But if the e-mail program used by end recipients is not identical to the senders’, it will normally fail to recognize the language tag, and the e-mail text will not be automatically displayed in characters, so the end users will have to look for decoding helpers on the main menu of their browsers. Again, different browsers and e-mail programs internalize this

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function in different ways, so only experienced and frequent users can quickly and successfully read Chinese messages.

3.4

Summarizing the On-line Dilemma

This discussion briefly sets out some basic principles and common approaches used to deal with Chinese online information. However, as the operating systems of computers are becoming more sophisticated each day, especially when connected to the international electronic communication systems, numerous instability factors arise when trying to get them to communicate. Thus, despite more capable systems, there are just too many unpredictable circumstances and curious incidents that occur every day to harass the experts and big company users. Put simply, unless 100 percent compatibility of all possible factors is achieved between hardware, software and platform, as well as exact the duplication of the original environment, any small fault in the interchange processes may cause a failure in displaying information, often resulting in luanma or a total loss on non-Chinese Windows. For individual users, very often the problem of getting Chinese characters to work is almost impossible, leaving them with the impression that being able to view Chinese online information is a matter of chance. In the digitally designed linguistic environment, quality assurance and system stability in viewing online information wrapped in hanzi has become the bottleneck for easy web browsing. There is no available statistical data that shows the failure rate of obtaining intelligible text. In a succinct online survey of how Chinese language prevents overseas hanzibased web citizens from efficiently accessing online information (see Note 2 in this chapter), in answer to ‘How often are you able to view Internet information or receive a message in Chinese hanzi’, more than a third of the respondents chose ‘seldom’ (32/114) or ‘very infrequently’ (8/114), and ten selected ‘I’ve never tried to read in Chinese’. The development of Unicode marked a historical watershed in the history of computer development and it provides a potential platform for the long-standing inspiration of a common script in hanzi-using communities. Unicode was created for a particular task: to employ a single set of numerical codes to digitally accommodate the entire world’s scripts, allowing them to be identified, processed and displayed on all future computers regardless of the script’s physical complexity. But as we are going to see in Section 4, Chapter 7 and Appendix F, despite the initial accomplishments in unifying the hanzi inventory across hanzi-using

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polities, the outcome is still far from satisfactory. First, Unicode has its own technical limitations; second, the socio-political factors involved in the development process make agreement on obtaining a unified electronic environment capable of processing most of East Asia’s sinographs3 more difficult and complex (see Section 4.2, Chapter 7). Standardization is the prerequisite for any script to be Unicoded. How to achieve the internal standardization of Chinese hanzi is the topic of next chapter.

Chapter 4 STANDARDIZATION AS A SOLUTION Multiple Standards for Specific Purposes

1.

INTRODUCTION

Having examined the basic principles of hanzi computerization, the progress made thus far, and particularly how a time-tested writing system has come into conflict with modern communication systems, it is now appropriate to look at what LPers have done to bring the two systems together. “Language planning is called for wherever there are language problems. If a linguistic situation for any reason is felt to be unsatisfactory, there is room for a program of language planning” (Haugen 1966b: 52). The program that has been pinpointed by Chinese LPers to tackle the problems of the writing system was standardization. As indicated in Chapter 2 the four fixations were formally listed as the major tasks in the working agenda of the hallmark 1986 Conference, and to formulate computer oriented language standards and to supervise the implementation of the language standards stood out as new responsibility for Chinese language planning authorities. However, as the evidence shows in 1986 standardization was a vague notion that was primarily of theoretical concern. Hardly any standards, guidelines or regulations regarding language use, decreed before the Conference, gave any thought to technological standards or needs. But, subsequently it did not take long before LPers and software developers realized the urgency of achieving a high standard level of use when using hanzi. There also has been an increased awareness of the applied value that corpus methods offer for tackling a number of problems in the field of character input and CIP, that is, a systematic

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optimization of the hanzi system, in some cases, would not only add considerable functionally and be idealistically desirable, but would be practical to implement. If hanzi are to be adapted to the demands of the new technological, typographical and pedagogical adequacy, there must be a clear understanding about the areas to which the script can be adapted. Standardization, or correctness, has been the core theme of governmentally initiated corpus planning since 1950s. The general propose has been to maintain language within specified norms and to protect it from fluctuation and change which are seen equated with confusion and anarchy. But standardization movements, launched in the series of standardization conferences in 1950’s, focused on grammar and putonghua. What grammarians and rationalists have been trying to achieve through this standardization has been to create a basis for effective communication across wide range of diversified regionalects. The aims of the new round standardization focus on developing a computer friendly writing system, so standardization is more about technological convenience than interpersonal communication. Correctness plays an essential role for both human communication and machine automation. It must be acknowledged, as Cheng Rong (1999: 144) has argued, that “[i]n general, since 1955, excepting 1977, the standardization process has gradually improved and for the first time in history, in the last 30 years, at least in official publications, standardization has been achieved.” However, while human communication can occur with limited correctness, machines require a standard operating environment, as the communication between human and computer and machine to machine information exchange is very intolerant of error. The rapid advances that have occurred in computer science have led to concerns in both linguistic and IT circles that unless there is systematic improvement in hanzi, a bottle-neck is likely to develop which will hamper the country’s embarkation on the road to technological modernization. History shows, a society-targeted technology can only be rapidly developed and popularized once it has been standardized (i.e., Fordism). Without a set of well-defined official standards, the extensive economic benefits of a new technology are likely to be inaccessible to a substantial segment of the population. In Cheng Rong’s (1999: 144) provocative words, “whether language and script comply with standardization and the norm is an indicator of the degree of civilization of a nation and nationality”. The four standardizations, or Four Fixations (Si Ding – ) as it was called before the computer age (i.e., fixing the total number, physical shape, pronunciation and stroke ordering of hanzi), have provided a major argument for advocating an instrumental role for language planning. In the

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following sections, we look at the difficulties and technological implications of each of these standards in some detail, with greater emphasis on standardizing the total number as the first major step in resolving the ‘Four Fixations’ issue. The ‘Four Fixations’ notion was first raised in the 1950s, but previous research was largely conducted by individual scholars or institutions on a piecemeal basis without much consideration being given to technological requirements. Each of these four fixations has encountered their respective problems, and thus hanzi continue to remain the bottleneck in Chinese language computerization. To show the government’s determination in further enhancing the computability of the Chinese writing system through optimizing the range of hanzi’s features, a national research project titled the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Character was launched by Chinese language authorities in 2002. The description of this ambitious statemandated LP program, along with an even more wide-ranging proposal that suggests the overhaul of the entirety of the hanzi repertoire, is provided and discussed in the last section of this chapter.

2.

2.1

A NEW ROUND OF STANDARDIZATION: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC SOLUTION TO TECHNOLOGICAL IMPACT Tackling the Total Number of Chinese Characters

The extensive nature of the Chinese character repertoire is well known and was partly described from an historical perspective in the Prologue and first chapter of this volume. One of the most uncertain aspects of Hanzi is the total number of characters involved. However, before trying to fix the total number of hanzi, one must have an overall picture of the stock of characters, a job that has never been undertaken. This section provides a sociolinguistic examination of complex factors involved in the process of streamlining the total number of characters and critically analyzes the new theoretical framework advocated by LP practitioners over recent years for addressing the dilemma of dealing with this issue.

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Standardization as a Solution

Extensiveness in Three Domains

Given that hanzi are an open system, over the centuries and across geographical space, the total number has grown larger and larger, making it almost impossible to tell precisely how many there are. Thus, when the system underlying this issue is considered, one can not consider just ‘Mandarin’ characters with all their variants. An inclusive system that includes all characters must cover: • Non-Chinese hanzi: Mainly referring to what Lunde (1993) has called JKV (Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) characters and to the hanzi derived characters (over 20 systems throughout history) created by Chinese ethnic minorities within China proper; • Chinese regional or dialectal characters: Although only Cantonese characters are used in modern publications (Zhou 1999: 175-176), characters specific to other spoken varieties did exist historically or are still being circulated locally with some having possibility for them to play a more active role in written communication. They have stimulated a great deal of interest in recent years (see Chen 1996; Jordan 2002); and • Obsolete characters: Those found in ancient scripts such as jianguwen and jinwen. Currently, when people talk about the total number of hanzi, they normally have one or more of three possible reference points in mind: 2.1.1.1 Influential dictionaries In Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi, 9353 characters were etymologically explained in a systematic manner based on structural analysis. The next very dictionary, which is used extensively even today, is Kangxi Zidian, which was made under the royal patronage during the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty (1664-1911), and it marshaled 47,035 characters. More recently, in the Zhonghua Zihai (Ocean of Chinese Characters – , 1994), the most inclusive dictionary that amasses as many characters as possible, 85,568 characters were included. In a broader sense, a widespread estimate is that the ultimate number of hanzi may be well beyond 100,000, if all Chinese characters and the derived forms that have ever existed were counted, including variant forms, non-Chinese hanzi and dialect hanzi. (Also see the dictionary list in Table P-2)

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2.1.1.2 Character lists Some well established pedagogic character tables and the high profile character lists, both official and those developed by individual scholars, show the total number required for different purposes. Two of the most frequently quoted tables are the Table of the Most Used Characters (3500 characters, see Appendix C) and the Table of General Characters (7000 characters) published by Chinese language administration authorities in 1988. The later was intended to replace the Table of Print Forms of Chinese Characters for Publication (6196 characters), which was issued in 1965 to meet the demand from publication industry. Three education oriented tables of Chinese characters are worthy mention. The Table of Characters For Illiteracy Elimination (1993) contains 2000 characters; this number is believed to cover 93.9936 percent of the characters in publications and targets general readers; The Table of Characters for Primary Students has 3071 characters; the third pedagogical character table is Grading Outline of Chinese Vocabulary and Character Proficiency Criterion. It was a collaborative product made by the National Office of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and the Testing Centre of Chinese Language as a Second Language in 1991. It includes 2905 characters arranged at four levels (A=800, B=804, C=601, D=700) for non-Chinese speaking students. 2.1.1.3 Standard character encoding set for information interchange To process characters, computer software developers need a list that gives the all forms they have to deal with. Since 1980 when the first character set, Chinese Character Code for Information Interchange (CCCII, 53,940 characters) was published in Taiwan, numberless character codes have been devised and published by respective governments or big IT companies in hanzi-using regions. The two most familiar to computer users are GB-2312 and Big5. The former has 6,763 characters and was authorized for use by China’s National Bureau of Standards in 1981 while the latter – Big 5, is GB-2312’s equivalent in Taiwan. It includes 13,053 characters and was jointly endorsed by five big computer companies in Taiwan in 1984, hence the name. These standard sets have established themselves as important parameters for examining the number of hanzi. Some other influential national-based systems include: the Government Chinese Character Set in Hong Kong (GCCS, 3,049 characters, 1994); Chinese National Standard Interchange Code (CNS11643, 48,027 characters, 1980) in Taiwan; the Japanese Industry Standard (JIS Code 6226, 6,349 characters); and the Korean Information Processing Standard (KIPS, 2,192 characters). In 1993 ISO10646.1/GB 13000.1 was devised by ISO

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and the Unicode Consortium and 20,902 CJK sinography were included as a result of merging or unifying over 20 character sets and telegraphy codes (totaling 121,403 characters) that had been introduced by USA, Taiwan, Mainland China and Korea (Lunde 1993: 49-53). The number of hanzi encoded in these national and international standard sets have grown year by year. On March 17, 2000, the Ministry of Information Industry and the former State Bureau of Technological Quality Supervision in the PRC jointly issued GB 18030-2000, another national encoding standard for 27,484 hanzi. Because it is the most fundamental encoding standard after CB 2312-80, it is likely that it will define the country’s computer system for the infinite future (Lin 2004). 2.1.2

A Technological Perspective

This brief introduction to the number of Chinese characters shows the massive total number, but also demonstrates that there are great disparities in the total number used for different domains. Traditionally, educational considerations have been the main thrust of arguments underlying the need to have tables that prescribe the character numbers and usages. For example, in programs to eliminate illiteracy, it is very important to know the number of hanzi required for an illiterate to successfully operate in a particular written context, and for school reading and writing education, it is equally desirable to have some kind of restrictions on the number of characters used. Because, as it is said, no one knows all the characters, mastery of the most frequent hanzi is more critical as that provides relatively high comprehension in written discourse. With the coming of the computer era, the continued uncertainty and increase in the number of hanzi have been a growing problem for both LPers and computer scientists. The need to regulate character use has appeared to be almost irresolvable. This is because: 1. In order to create input schemes for hanzi stroke or component-based software, one needs to know what the entire range of types of strokes and/or components are to form the basic units that represent hanzi on the computer screen. Obtaining an optimized classification system of stroke and/or components that can best reconstruct all Chinese characters has been attempted many times, but yielded no conclusive result due to the lack of accurate knowledge about the total number of characters. 2. The computer industry across the world at present employs a number of different encoding character sets for information exchange, and the

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coexistence of these standards, adopted in isolation, detrimentally affects and prevents the smooth and stable exchange of information and communication. Despite the rapid rise of Unicode, there seems to be little hope of unifying all hanzi code standards as long as there are a large and unstable number of overall characters from which to choose. 3. The third reason is perhaps more evident. While computers are assumed to have the capacity to process all characters, the three unique features of hanzi, i.e., big and unstable number, complex structure, and incapability to indicate the pronunciation, make it in fact impractical for users to be able to deal with the characters outside their daily purview, even with computers that are equipped with databases capable of recognizing all characters. More broadly speaking, the conflicts between the hanzi and the computer in terms of the total number of characters manifest themselves in two ways. First, the total number of characters currently encoded in standard character sets is too small to process some big corpus texts in specialist areas. At present, the total number encoded in the largest IT-oriented Character Sets, issued by the government, are 20,902 in ISO 10646/ GB13000.1(1993), and 27,484 characters in GB18030-2000. This number of forms is obviously far from being sufficient to process all the orthographic forms that have ever existed. For example, the paucity of ways to represent the Chinese classical written heritage has been talked for quite some time. As Li Yuming (2004b) points out, the internet can be seen as an expressway and the website as a vehicle, but even with the road, and effective transportation, the goods for transportation are not available (also see Xu J.L. 1999: 208). Li recommends building a digital bank of the Chinese cultural heritage to make Chinese ancient texts available in their original form (see discussion in Section 3.2, this chapter). The first step in this process would be to demarcate and settle on hanzi’s total number in modern use. To computerize the ancient texts it is necessary to analyze, categorize and encode every character used in the colossal body of ancient works, which inevitably would involve an overhaul of the whole repertoire of hanzi – an inexorably difficult process. Second, even the total number used in general texts in routine life has proved to be too big and unstable for common readers to deal with electronically. Therefore, to overcome this difficulty, it is also necessary to control character use through restricting the total number used for general purposes. For non-specialist computer users, the biggest problem is the socalled Rarely Used Characters (henceforth RC). Studies have shown that, in spite of the fact that the total number of characters may be incredibly

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large, the number required for the common person to read modern written material at a good level of comprehension is relatively small. Various domains and corpuses may favor a certain type of characters, but statistical studies on the percentage of coverage suggest that knowledge of 2500 at lower end to 3500 at higher end is an appropriate goal for a mainland reader to gain an over 99 percent understanding of modern printed texts. (It might be a bit higher than this for readers in traditional character using polities). For most people, mastery of about 3000 can be considered to be the watershed; a knowledge of characters beyond this baseline does not give the reader much net gain. RCs are the real trouble-makers in information processing. As articulated by Ao Xiaoping (2000: 74), although 3,000 characters cover more than 99 percent of text, no one can guarantee that the 3001st character won’t appear. “Out of seven or eight thousand characters in current circulation, more than half are non-common characters.” This is a wellattested phenomenon in what Zhou (1992: 156) has called the Rule of Decreasing Percentage Coverage (Hanzi Xiaoyong Dijian Lü – ), i.e., a relatively small number of hanzi with high-frequency typically makes up a very high percentage of modern texts, with a large number of lower-frequency characters occurring a few times in running texts. One ramification of this frequency distribution is that the last few percentage points of coverage are made up of a great number of RC. As might be expected, most low frequency RCs are special nouns. But these nouns have three characteristics; they are: large in number, problematic in internal consistency and ubiquitous in daily human life (Zhang 1988). The instability of the total number of characters has been causing great confusion in the IT industry. It is often reported that customers are refused banking services just because some characters used in their names cannot be found in the national standard code sets for information exchange – under the terms and conditions of the Chinese banking system, Chinese names must be precisely identified in Chinese characters (Wang 2002). This kind of policy is now widely known as ‘Identification Policy’ (Shi Ming Zhi – ). It has been rapidly extended into more and more service sectors over recent years, such as ticket/hotel booking or Internet/ mobile phone registration. The policy has been criticized as another form of tightening control on people’s activities in name of public security (to avoid cheating) under new context. To implement such a policy, it is required that all names must be computable, thus highlighting the importance of LPP. Examples that often catch the nation’s attention include many students’ results on national university entrance examinations being delayed due to the lack of some characters in computer system. For

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instance, the University of International Trade enrolled about 200 students in Beijing, but 11 students’ given names on the admission lists printed as black boxes just because their parents named them using rare characters. In another recent incident reported by the newspaper Xin Bao (2006), during the ID card updating process for the 9.8 million people living in Beijing, 231 cards could not be renewed because of characters on their ID cards are not available in the updated character database. Even if these characters could be created locally, the uncoded characters would not be displayable and transmittable on other computers or Internet, which would mean endless trouble for these people when they try to use such public services as banking, the mail or travel in the future. The examples given here are just the tip of the iceberg. Thus, it is not too hard to image the serious consequences that may be caused in other areas as more social services go online. Most languages have dictionaries of different complexity to deal with rarely used words in different specialties, but alphabetic scripts are not faced with as many problems as those confronted by those using hanzi script. In discussing the difficulties that seriously constrain computers from playing a larger role in automatic information processing, Xu (1993: 86-87) has noted, “the administrative institutions that deal with the management of ID cards, geographical names, machines and chemical industries, are constantly bothered by the characters’ unavailability within the GB 2312-80.” In addition, the overly large character set is the first obstacle that the researchers encountered in developing programs for the automatic recognition of printed text (Wu and Ding 1992: 96). The issues related to efforts to restrict RC will be further discussed in a subsequent section. There has been a lot of talk over a long period of time about creating a fixed number of characters. But, for those concerned with hanzi’s future and the welfare of the whole population, this has seemed to be a forlorn hope. However, the time has come for change as any further delay is not affordable if the hanzi are to survive in the increasingly digital world. Some believe that keeping characters within the prescribed range could be accomplished by restricting the number of characters to a reasonable number, say 20,000. As early as 1950s, Zhou Youguang (1979: 331), the most prolific Chinese LP researcher, had conceived of the notion of verifying and overhauling the hanzi to develop a complete table as a first step in an embryonic notion of a fixed number of modern characters. When questioned about the possibility of whether such a complete list could be created, he said, that if no new character is allowed to be created in the future, “it is estimated that the total number would be somewhere between

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6,000 and 8,000 in the table, including the most used and less frequently used characters. But this number is too large for the whole society” (Zhou 1980a: 112). Yang (2000: 198), while acknowledging that a complete table will be “almost impossible” to make 100 percent accurate, suggested the following mathematical equation: the Complete Table = (special characters + most used characters) – shared characters. As for the exact number, the two high profile tables, Table of the Most Used Modern Characters and the Table of the Common Modern Characters (see proceeding discussion), provide parameters for developing such a list. Turning to past experience, the Draft Scheme of Common Modern Characters, published by the CCSR in 1956, included 5,390 characters. A more widely accepted statistic is the General List of Print Font of Chinese Character of 1965, which has 6,196 characters; 40 years of experience has shown that this number basically meets the demand from entire printing industry. Therefore, Su Peicheng (2001c: 50), the president of the Association of Chinese Language Modernization, says that total number for modern Chinese should be around 7,000. Zhang and Xia (2001) emphasize that number standardization is not about deciding the total number of characters, but the characters for current and future use. 2.1.3

Beyond the Language – Sociolinguistics Dimensions

From the previous discussion, a natural question that arises is, as the characters used in modern written text are quite limited, what prevents putting an upper limit on the number growing? The system of Chinese characters is a heavily culturally charged writing system, where the individualism is manifest in the use of written forms, and where deviation from the norm has been extensively tolerated both historically and in modern times. Putting a limit on people’s use of characters, in most circumstances, has long been seen as constituting a form of behavioral control. The early research about hanzi’s number was confined to internal factors, but currently LPers have come to realize that the solution to hanzi’s misleadingly large number should be looked from a broader perspective. Roughly, there are two forces at work in preventing putting a straitjacket on the expansion of total number of characters: people’s inclination for the language novelty and cultural obsession. It is generally agreed that, in addition to the aforementioned RC, obsolete characters and variant forms (yiti zi) are another two major reasons which make the total number of hanzi uncontrollable. Obsolete characters refer to all those that ever existed in history and for recording of

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historical events. Zhou (1992: 208) remarks, “The register of Chinese hanzi records only births, never deaths”. Yiti zi have accumulated and been deposited in the dictionaries. These characters are one of the important factors that account for the explosion of the quantity of hanzi found in some dictionaries, but except for a small number of historical characters categorized and discussed in the following section, most have died out forever and thus do not pose a threat to modern usage. The following analysis focuses on yiti zi and RC. 2.1.3.1 Variant forms As we saw in Section 2.1.1, Chapter 2, yiti zi refer to several characters having the same meaning and pronunciation but different forms. Yiti zi contribute to two kinds of increase in hanzi’s total number; positive increase stems from a requirement to meet accuracy of expression, while negative increase relates to unneeded variant forms. Linguistically hanzi are categorized as a morphemic script. It closely traces and copies in a straightforward manner the way humans understand the world, so every change that occurs in the world and human’s comprehension of it are discernibly mirrored in hanzi, which results in an increase in the number of forms. This kind of increase is necessary to make the script function as an accurate reflection of social development. Negative increase is mainly caused by the accumulated variant forms of the same character. There is general agreement that in current terms these absolute yiti zi, resulting from a long tradition of historical development, are the sediment in hanzi, producing purely meaningless and superficial redundancy that adds nothing except an unnecessary burden for users’ memories. But once created, they generate the possibility of finding a niche for themselves1. Wang (1989: 573) observes there is a ‘backward principle’ that has existed historically concerning standardizing the shape and limiting the numbers of characters: The authorities in all dynasties were found to be tolerant of the existing yiti zi in ancient texts and have imposed stringent restrictions on newly created yiti zi that were in current circulation, thereby a large number of yiti zi were shielded under this policy of ‘stress the past and suppress the present’, which inevitably led to a sharp increase of hanzi numbers. The reasons for and types of these character complications are an interesting topic worthy of further exploration (see Kan 2000). Since ancient times, writing hanzi has been a means of self-expression, showing personal inclination. Some inventors are primarily interested in the occult nature of hanzi, while others simply want to show off their scholarliness or

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provides pedantic temperament by choosing or coining characters. a typical example of yiti zi. When criticizing some educated dilettante (Gongren, officials who indulged their fancy and deliberately wrote worker) as when painting slogans on walls, Mao Zedong (1968: 793) said in his Oppose Stereotype Party Writing, “These comrades seem to take great delight in turning simple things into mysteries and deliberately make a play upon tricks to befool the masses”. Thus, the artistic and recreational nature of hanzi is one of the important reasons that nurtures new character creators. Because ordinary people find it enjoyable to amuse themselves by dismantling and assembling unlimited units to coin their own characters at will, a large number of phonetic-semantic characters have been created. Creating new unique characters is not only a hobby and pastime for the whole Chinese population, but people are mesmerized by the opportunity to imprint history with their own inventions. Variation from accepted norms can be observed with virtually all languages, particularly idiosyncratic writing, spelling and pronunciation. It is the same psychological quirk that creates numberless new English words, like the shorthand ‘sox’ for socks or ‘nite’ for night. The difference is that in Chinese, when a new character is created, it adds to system complexity if it is retained and has the possibility of causing systemic change in the whole writing system, rather than just being a new combination of letters making up a lexical item. In order to predict the future development and to propose reform programs for hanzi, one must look at the internal and external interplay of forces, or in other words, at the sociolinguistic dimensions or extra-linguistic factors and linguistic possibilities. Most of the time, these two factors are intertwined in determining the developmental direction of hanzi. When drawing up a workable configuration for hanzi, LP success tends to happen when the government acts to balance two factors – external pressures and the linguistic rationale. While this chapter chiefly dwells on the latter, i.e., how hanzi need to be physically optimized on a micro level, external factors are dealt with in the next chapter on macro dimensions. 2.1.3.2 Rarely used characters Rarely used characters or infrequently used characters include ones that have existed or have been created for special purposes such as newly found chemical elements. The number of RC is some twenty times the number of common characters and are the most important contributing factor in preventing character reduction. These characters, differing greatly in frequency of usage, with most appearing only occasionally, but they can appear at anytime, acting like submerged rocks in an ocean of reading and

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writing. It is worth noting that a RC is a subjective condition, i.e., some RCs, or the so-called dead characters, can be revived and even become popular under certain conditions, such as when people take a renewed interest in ancient culture. Another example occurs when a character is used in somebody’s name – it is not rare to find ordinary parents who are keen to make their children’s names sound or look unique – and then if this person becomes well known, the usage of this character may become highly used. The same thing can happen to characters related to geographic names. Some geographic name-specific characters are commonly used locally, but under certain circumstances, they can become common characters over night. Broadly speaking, RCs can be discussed under two rubrics: specialty characters ( / and literary characters ( ). Specialty characters are necessary for specific topics and purposes. It is generally agreed that there are six to nine areas that are the source of these characters, but these can be considered under two broader headings: • Characters for proper names, including characters for foreign proper name translations, ethnic minorities and religious purposes; and • Characters for science, technology, animals and plants. Apart from personal names and geographical names, proper names also include the characters employed to record well-known historical events or phenomena that have existed previously. Most of the historical characters are seldom seen in modern life, but some, names for traditional medicines, for example, are still in frequent use. Characters for geographical names form an important part of this category. One successful attempt to delimit specialty hanzi has been the replacement of geographical names that occurred from March 30, 1955 to August 29, 1964. During this period the Chinese government issued nine orders to replace the 36 RC in 35 geographical names with reference to features higher than the county administrative level. Changing these characters, be it their physical shape or their pronunciation, was an extremely emotional and controversial issue, particularly for names with historical implications or those used by ethnic minority groups. But the government achieved a satisfactory outcome by adhering to eight principles, set by the State Council (Fei 2000a, Fu 1991). There is still room to carry out further reduction as there are more than 3,000 geographical names above county level. Characters for personal names are another area that curtails any great reduction in the total number.

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The proposed list for naming that is being developed intends to include 12,000 characters (including their traditional and variant forms), although research on names shows that 2,500 hanzi can cover 98 percent of modern names (Su 2004). Currently, before the List of Characters for Naming formally goes into effect, to accommodate the minute number of rare naming characters, the Character Database for the Second Round Citizen ID Card, developed by the Ministry of Information Industry in collaboration with other government departments, has to include 72,000 characters (Yang 2003), which is about ten times bigger than the normal character database. A very heated nationwide debate revolving around ‘Shall we have restrictions on name giving rights?’ was triggered off when the Table of Standardized Characters for Naming was included in the list of national language research programs (see Section 3.3.3, Chapter 6). Science and technology are developing rapidly and the additional characters being added in these domains are predominantly characters for newly discovered chemical elements. Scientists estimate that, when all substances on the earth have been discovered and synthesized, their number could be in the multimillions (Zhang 1988: 56). Attempts have been made to end the creation of new characters for new scientific discoveries (Wu 1995: 77), but it has proved to be impracticable as they cannot all be effectively and accurately expressed by creating multiple syllabic words with existing characters. The State Commission of Technological Terms was set up to take charge of this matter, and the new coinage of terms continues2. Characters for translation refer mainly to those characters used to translate foreign and Chinese ethnic names, particularly, when the sound is not common in the Mandarin phonology system, requiring the creation of RC or new characters. The issue has been discussed for some time3 and now, thanks to the pressing need from the IT sector, the official Table of Standard Characters for Transliterating Foreign Proper Names has been listed as a key linguistic research topic in the national research and development plan. The purpose of literary characters, as its name suggests, is to make literary writing stylized and attractive to readers. The archaic hanzi and dialectal hanzi make up a big part of this constituent body. Archaic characters are the characters carried over into modern texts from classical Chinese in the form of archaic words and expressions, found predominantly in proverbs and idiomatic phrases. Well-known for the richness of its vocabulary, Chinese has created myriads of works in its dynastic history since jiaguwen. It is believed that at least 8,000 ancient classical Chinese texts have survived into the modern times. This influence of

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the ancient heritage on standardization should be looked at from two perspectives: On the one hand, as these texts were recorded in traditional characters, they act as a force in opposition to simplification. On the other hand, they are a source of RC in general texts. Like classical literature and traditional characters, a lot of characters that are inherently associated with classical works but not semantically needed in modern texts enjoy high prestige and authentic status as they pay homage to a time-honored heritage. From this discussion it is clear that literary characters are in essence an exemplification of manifest archaism and cultural obsession, rather than linguistic necessity. Spoken Chinese and its written language are markedly dissimilar. The degree of disparity in lexicon and syntax range is so wide that they might be almost unintelligible to each other. Even a century after the ‘Vernacularization Movement’ had been completed (see Note 2, Chapter 1), a large number of characters from classical texts still have survived, posing a major destructive factor in efforts to bring a uniform standard to the written language using only a fixed number of prescribed characters. Despite their generally low frequency, under certain conditions these characters have the potential to become highly used characters. To complicate matters still further, there is a deep-seated feeling of literary superiority in employing millennia-old expressions to add an aura of elitism to contemporary texts. Whenever an attempt has been made to limit their use, the long-standing prestige of classical Chinese literature comes into play. As DeFrancis (1984b: 286) notes, “attachment to characters which boast a vast body of literature, a system so deeply embedded in Chinese society, is naturally far more resistant to change”. Since the 1990s, there has been a healthier attitude towards the traditional heritage which had been seriously undermined during the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This has given rise to a ‘Back to the Ancients’ sentiment in popular culture with a large number of classical works being reintroduced into school education, increasing the reemergence of archaic usage in written communication. This indicates that rather than treating the character as a means of written communication, people, particularly some scholars, use it as a faculty to display their scholarship and intellectual superiority. Although literary characters are an alternate, and not absolutely necessary for writing, the urge to use them is almost irrepressible and undermines restraints on character number. Japan has confronted a similar problem. Japanese scholars are also obsessed with classical texts and their writings are replete with archaic characters used as an intellectual exercise. Twine (1991: 215) notes that “It was a favorite ploy of scholars wishing to

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display their erudition to pad out the text of their discourse with unnecessarily complex characters …” However, Japan was quite successful in regulating the legitimate number of characters for modern use to an upper limit of 1,8504 (Table of Contemporary Characters) in 1946, plus an official list containing 92 extra characters for giving names to children born after May 25, 1951 (He 2001). From the point of controllability, these RC differ a great deal in terms of the activity and visibility. As the proceeding discussion has shown, except for yiti zi and literary characters, the possibility exists for all others to be fixed in number, and LP authorities have never actually stopped trying to manage RC to bring the total number of hanzi under control. Wang Tiekun (2003: 2), the Vice-Director of Language and Information Management Department of Education Ministry, argues that “the work to standardize characters for personal names, geographical names and technological terms has never been so important and urgent”. These three types of specialty characters are the easiest component parts to start with as an overhaul of all kinds of RC. RCs in other domains, although also large in number, have specific uses and are subject to being included in a future plan. The research projects to standardize them are a substantial part of the Applied Linguistics Research Scheme and Project Guidelines for the Tenth Five-Year National Social Development. Unfortunately, very few empirical research studies5 have been done on the differences among the various types of RC. In Table 4-1 the specific features of seven types of RC are listed and a subjective estimate of the strength of each characteristic is provided. The table captures the specificity of each type of RC and provides an indication of why each category should be treated individually. In summary, at most, 3,500 characters are sufficient for the lexical representation of the language for general purposes. It is obvious therefore that the real impediment to the restriction of the total number of characters rests in users’ attitudes rather than being a linguistic problem. As long as characters were hand written, these attitudes made very little difference as writing characters was understood to be a personal thing where parallel forms co-existed, and people were accustomed to using a wide range of diverse forms of characters. However, technology, with its requirements for specificity, has changed what is required from a written communication system.

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Table 4-1. Intensity levels for different types of rarely used characters Purposes of rarely used characters

Number in modern publication

Stability in number

Activity and Potential visibility in productivity common use in the future

Necessity for modern life

•••

••••

•••

••••

•

Literary style

•••••

•

•••••

••

••••

History and geography

••••

•••

••••

••

••••

Proper names

••••

•••

••••

••

•••••

Religion and minority

•••

•••

•••

••

••••

Science and technology

•••

••

••••

•••

••••

Translation

•••

•••••

•••

•••

•••

Yiti zi

2.1.4

What Is the Solution – Previous Attempts and Past Experience

Reducing the total number of characters and checking the constant urge to create new ones have been vital parts of a century of script reform. Japan was generally regarded as the forerunner in hanzi number reduction. But, prior to Japan’s reform, there had been one or two earlier occasions when archaic-style characters in literature were examined. Lu Feikui in his 1921 paper – “My suggestions on collecting and collating hanzi” – was perhaps the first scholar to see the importance of delimiting the commonly used characters before simplification. He suggested 2,000 characters for general purposes, a number considered sufficient to satisfy the basic needs of actual use for ordinary people at that time. Hong Shen, a famous playwright, was another person who actively advocated reducing the number of modern hanzi, but to an even smaller number. His method employed the coinage of multiple-syllable words by using prescribed characters to replace the ones that are structurally complex and rarely used. In his book, Teaching Methodology of 1,100 Basic Characters (1935), Hong attempted to delimit 1,000 characters for general purpose use, with 250 characters for special use, for instance, using ‘ ’ (wet earth) to replace ‘ ’ (mud).

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An even more radical reduction advocate, Zhai Jianxiong, in 1939 wanted to employ only 454 characters as syllables to transliterate Chinese writing. However, all these proposals strayed too away far from script reform as they invariably affected the lexical system and resulted in limiting the expressive power of language, leading to a wordy and artificial dumbeddown style for the less educated readers. As Su (1994: 50) has said, the writing system is the instrument to serve the language. When a large, new vocabulary is created to accommodate delimited characters, it reverses the functions of language and script. It was not surprising that these efforts were futile and failed to gain support from the population they were designated to serve. Nevertheless, the previous failures did not prevent other scholars from continuing the ambitious course to put a limit on character use after Liberation in 1949. Because the radical change of the political climate ruled out an environment that was conducive to experimenting with individual schemes, scholars’ efforts focused on exploring theoretical possibilities. In 1964, Lin Handa published Can Ten Thousand Common Characters be Cut by Half in the Guangming Daily (June 24, 1964). About a month later, Zhou Youguang wrote his Delimiting and Reducing Characters in Modern Chinese for the same newspaper, appealing to the public only to use hanzi within a 3,500 character limit. Unfortunately, these suggestions were made just before the Great Cultural Revolution started, and they did not draw much attention from either the authorities or the public. In 1982, Zheng Linxi, a well respected senior LP professional, brought out an influential work on the topic, The Practice and Theory of Reducing the Total Number of Hanzi. He proposed eight ways that could be adopted as part of a future project, and emphasized the possibility of reducing numbers through the combined efforts of the public, LPers and the government. In addition to these suggestions put forward by individual scholars, there were two other serious attempts by groups and these were more significant in a practical sense. In 1953, the CCSR had launched an experiment to test if a List of 1,469 Characters would be sufficient to deal with the wide variety of texts in twelve areas of modern life, but the results were found to generate more problems than they resolved. Despite of the negative evidence that had accumulated, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, another set of standard hanzi was created by publishing house workers and tested with a variety of samples. The outcome showed that the misunderstandings that occurred in the sample texts (mainly because of homophonous replacement), printed with the prescribed 3,260 characters, were beyond acceptable limits.

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155

Tentative Summary

Reflecting on a century-long pursuit of a writing system with a small number of fixed characters, Su (2001b: 56) points out that despite the failures, in an era dominated by increasingly frequent information exchange over the Internet, creating a writing system with a relatively small number of characters is even more desirable than it was previously, and cutting the numbers “would be one of the most important tasks in LP for quite a long period into the future”. However, in comparison to half a century ago, this goal has become even more difficult to achieve today for the reasons set out in the following section. In Chapter 2, we saw how the Chinese characters’ cultural movement directly influenced the strong resurgence of traditional characters. In order to make the Party’s slogans, icons, policies and language use more acceptable to the masses, the traditional heritage has been revitalized to combat the negative influence of the Western capitalist spirit, and its products which have monopolized the cultural market. The public’s cultural life has been recognized as equally important as education in the war of ideologies. There has been an official push to strengthen the legitimacy of present policies by looking back to past glories and this traditional pantheon is reflected in publications, celebrations, films and other visual arts. Taken together with the spirit of nationalism, the whole population appears to be devoted to its cultural heritage. Historical epics, depicting past glories of dynastic China, are shown nightly on TV and bookshops are flooded with various forms of traditional publications which have had deleterious effect on language planning. These activities have had such an intense impact on young people that a national newspaper invited a 98-year-old linguist to try to persuade writers to give up their fondness for old style hanzi (Zhou 2003). Traditional revisionism can be seen in other domains, such as architecture, dress and economic activities, and it is probable that this trend has not yet peaked. The relationship between character reduction and the public’s attitude towards their cultural heritage and their culture consuming habits has drawn a lot of attention from the LPers. When speaking about the use of political manipulation of the traditional culture, i.e., moving from an antitraditional to a pro-traditional view, Wang (2002: seminar; Note 10, Chapter 1) briskly and acidly criticized the campaign to promote classical literature by organizing Classical Work Recitation Competitions6 saying that encouraging children to over-focus on these dead things was a kind of historical regression.

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Standardization as a Solution

Shape – Developing a Higher Standard for Physical Uniformity

Broadly speaking, there are two issues related to physical uniformity: structural consistency and the co-existence of more than one variant form for the same character, i.e., yiti zi. The issues related to structural consistency, which are quite technically complicated and would require a lengthy and complex explanation to fully investigate here, are summarized in the next section (But, see Zhao 2005). This is followed by a discussion of issues related to the standardization of yiti zi. 2.2.1

Fixing the Structural Component to Improve the Internal Consistency

Stroke and component consistency is a recent concern arising out of a need for higher levels of standard forms to meet technological requirements. It refers to the minuscule differences in stroke length or the composing position in different characters. These may not make much difference to the human eye and would not have become an issue if not for computer applications. As shown in Figure 4.1, there are only subtle differences in similar parts of component pairs, but the computer, which is very sensitive to structural differences, will put them in different categories. Some strokes or components might not have been originally identical or related in any way, but it is better that they be unified as a single standard unit for accurate computer processing. For instance, for the second and the third examples listed in the left column, if the two similar components in two characters are made identical, for input schemes it would mean less complex hardware and software storage and retrieval, and the OCR software recognition rate would also be much improved. Much of this type of inconsistency occurs between the characters when they are used as separate independent characters and when the same element is used as a radical or component in other compound characters. Merging these similar sets of strokes and components has been considered an effective means to disambiguate the graphic representations. Because structural distinctions have increasingly become a focal concern as handwriting activities are being replaced by more extensive use of computers, these changes would also improve the quality and efficiency of OCR. Deng Caiqin and Zhang Pu (1997: 116) consider that the very large number of forms, the complex structure and the indistinct shape are three big obstacles that make Chinese one of the most difficult scripts to which

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to apply OCR technology. Inconsistencies that are of little consequence for handwriting and human reading can pose a grave threat to computer recognition. According to Fei and Xu’s (2003) research, out of 7,000 characters listed in the Table of Commonly Used Characters (1988), there are over 400 characters (6%) that need to be re-standardized from the technological point of view. To unify the discrepancies and standardize them would require just a mini surgical treatment as the right column in Figure 4-1 suggests. But as emphasized in previous chapters, the hanzi system as a whole has developed over a long period of time and is an interrelated and interdependent structure. Any small individual alteration risks destroying this fragile balance, possibly resulting in undesirable outcomes. Therefore, this kind of standardization could only be accomplished as part of a well-coordinated overhaul of the whole system. Shared part

锯锯锯

Shared part

锯

锯

锯 锯

锯 锯 锯

锯 锯 锯 锯

锯

锯 锯锯 锯 锯 锯 锯 锯 锯 锯 锯

Differences Lower horizontal stroke is shorter Lower horizontal stroke is longer Left-falling stroke does not break through the vertical stroke Left-falling stroke breaks through the vertical stroke Inside stroke is a dot Dot breaks through the left-falling stroke Touches; last stroke is right falling Doesn’t touch; last stroke is left falling Left corner stroke is a tick Upper left corner is a horizontal stroke Up and down structure Right side is half enclosed

Possible forms after standardization

锯顾颁锯

锯

锯顾颁锯 锯

锯顾颁锯 锯 锯顾颁锯 锯 锯锯锯

锯顾颁

锯

锯

锯锯锯锯顾颁锯 锯锯锯锯

Figure 4-1. Examples of structural inconsistency in Chinese Characters

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Many of these discrepancies stem from differences between handwriting and printed forms. Since the Song Dynasty (960-1279), when typographic printing technology was invented and began to be extensively used, the character font mould has been modeled on handwriting styles, so handwriting forms have had a strong influence on forms of printing. Another important source is the difference in the range of stylistic printing fonts. In 1965, the promulgation of the General List for Printing Font of Chinese Characters brought the chaotic state of font style in formal publications to an end. The standard form for 6,196 characters in Song style (originating during the Song Dynasty) was fixed in this list. Since then, only the standardization of the shape of the Wei- and Li- style characters have been commissioned by the SCLW (2004a, b) and the Education Ministry (1999). There are several other well-developed, highly used font styles. This standardization has proven to be extremely complex, because it has involved compiling a standard from a very rich body of historical and modern publications. This has necessitated interdisciplinary collaboration between hanzi specialists, psychologists, calligraphy masters, industrial art experts and font designers (Zhang W.B. 2003). To improve the internal consistency of the hanzi system has been an abiding endeavor of LPers, but it is technological development that has broadened the context of this task and makes it an urgent matter that cannot be further delayed. Component optimization requires systematically reducing and standardizing some components, the aim of which is to make the building blocks or units that are simple and distinct. By doing that, it will enable both humans and machines to ‘spell’ characters in the way alphabetic scripts are used letters to spell words. For instance, in the following examples, the lower part of the first character and left parts of the second character do not act as indicative symbols for general users, and they are not consistent within the system either, i.e., they are only used for these two characters. So, to make these two parts more rational, they could be replaced by existing frequently used components. (ye, night) (yin, surname)

(a component) + (bai, white) +

(dan, but) = (li, strength) +

(a component) =

Reformed structures such as these have been discussed for quite some time, and this change was first suggested by Hu Qiaomu in a closed-door discussion in 1982, but met strong resistance from some participants as

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well as from a few SCLW members. The reason was “they do not look like hanzi anymore” (Fu 2002: personal communication). At the same meeting, Hu pointed out, The current script we are using is neither phonetically spelled script nor physically spelled script. If we want to reform the way hanzi is structured, we should try to make it spelled by its graphic shapes, or by independent components, thus facilitating the teaching, information process and mechanization (Wang 1995: 112-113). A number of scholars have explored ways to make hanzi more structurally logical and mechanically accessible over the last decade or so. Chen Abao (2000: 176-177), for example, suggests three ways to achieve this: (the right upper component Unify some components: , which is a whole character, meaning ‘small’). Also changed to is an ‘non-character’, (zhou) to . Because the inside component of not only can stand for itself as an but the suggested replacement independent character but is a composing unit as well. Reform some infrequently and hard-to-write components: (the reformed upper component is a highly used semantic compound (yue) to . meaning ‘weed/grass’). Using the same rational, also , Amalgamate some similar components: Combine with , so , , , . 2.2.2

Reducing/Merging Variant Forms of Characters (Yiti zi)

To reduce yiti zi has been the fundamental undertaking in the standardization of the physical shape of characters. To understand the complexity of the task, it is necessary to look at how difficult it is to tell the differences between the absolute yiti zi and other kinds of yiti zi, which may have their own semantic values. Thus, the argument arises as to whether they should be eliminated from the lexical system. The type of yiti zi is categorized by the relationships between the characters in the same group. Supposing a range of different forms of a lexical entry (hanzi) were found to exist in various sources, the prospective standard character is A, and the remaining ones are B, then the three possible relationships between them are as follows (the entries for each character are listed according to the Modern Chinese Dictionary, Beijing: Commercial Press, 1989; and Ciyuan , or Etymological Dictionary of Chinese Characters, Vol. I, Beijing: Commercial Press, 1997):

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• Absolute Yiti zi. A is identical to B, both semantically and phonetically. The B characters are those that were discarded as variant forms of A, e.g., where: (chuang, bed) = B – ;A– (chuang, window) = B – A– 逻锯 逻锯 逻锯 . • Containing a Relationship. A is more extensive than B in meaning but all the meanings of B are included in A. (Bu): 1 Clothing; 2 To declare or to issue; 3 To spread or to A– distribute; 4 To arrange or to plan; 5 A kind of ancient currency; 6 Surname. B– (Bu): 1 To declare or to issue; 2 To spread or to distribute; 3 To arrange or to plan. • An overlapping relationship. A and B are overlapping semantically or can be pronounced in two phonetically. In the following example, ways. When A is pronounced as ‘yu’, its meaning is not included in B – (tou). (tou): 1 To steal; 2 Stealthily; 3 To spare time; 4 A – Perfunctory, being content with temporary comfort. (tou): 1 Perfunctory, being content with temporary comfort. B1 – (yu): 1 Delightfulness; 2 To look down upon, to despise. B2 – Absolute yiti zi represent the pure duplicates without any functional role in semantic differentiation from its standard counterparts. In 1950s and 60s, removing a large number of such yiti zi was done in parallel with efforts to reduce structural complexity and lower the number of characters in use, but these efforts hit a snag when lexical factors were involved. Hanzi users have idiosyncratic ways of expressing subtleties. This makes a large number of such characters a necessity and thus is an important contributing factor constraining the effectiveness of character reduction. As Coulmas (1989: 242) has pointed out, “character standardization is hence first and foremost a lexicographic task”. Doing away with yiti zi is essentially a matter of striking a balance between distinctness in meaning and simplicity in number, as the following two intriguing examples show: •

(beì) means ‘back’, or when read as ‘be ’ means to carry on one’s back. Some people add a semantic compound (the hand compound) to indicate that this is an action that also involves hands ( ); 锯(cha, a fork or fork-shaped thing) • Following the same reasoning, has evolved three variants to signify a ‘vent or slit in the sides of a garment’ ( 鹉锯 = cloth compound), a branch of a river ( 鹉锯 = = wood/tree radical). water compound), a tree branch ( 鹉锯

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Because it is very simple to create a new character by adding a readily available radical to an existing character, many people are tempted to do so. While many such yiti zi may be coined to signify what are considered to be necessary differentiations in meaning, more often than not they are created to show off erudition and skills in discerning subtle semantic differences. To optimize Chinese characters, the CCSR and the Ministry of Culture jointly promulgated the FTVVF in 1956, and 1,053 yiti zi were eliminated through careful selection. (Some 26 have since been resumed.) This number represents only the commonly used modern characters, and increases dramatically when all characters are examined. For example, there are 47,035 characters in the Kangxi Dictionary, of which over 20,000 are yiti zi, accounting for 40 percent of the characters (Gao 2002: 276). In the Great Dictionary of Modern Characters (Hanyu Da Cidian), wellknown for its inclusiveness in amassing as many characters as possible, of the over 56,000 characters presented, approximately 20,000 are yiti zi. Given these dramatic statistics, eliminating or merging variant forms has been seen as an effective way of reducing the total number of characters. But if too many are deemed to be yiti zi and are eliminated from the writing system, the ability to make distinctions may be curtailed, increasing ambiguity in meaning, and potentially limiting the expressive power of the language. The most discussed issue is the handling of a number of variant forms that have their own semantic or phonetic value. Discharging the less prestigious and more complex variants inevitably gives raise to homophonous substitution, so the essence of the matter is to test to what extent the general population would tolerate semantic ambiguity. For the majority of yiti zi, the semantic compound that bears the subtle difference in meaning or category is involved. In terms of actual operational procedures, to identify the relationships between the components is unimaginably complicated. For instance, the pure or absolute yiti zi is the least complicated type, but Qiu Xigui, one of the best-known hanzi specialists in modern China, sub-divides this category into eight further sub-categories. Oversimplified and ideological ways of dealing with different categories of yiti zi have been blamed for creating many problems7. The FTVVF was the first and only attempt to rectify yiti zi in hanzi’s evolving history, and after nearly fifty years of use, the rationalization has proven to be basically successful. However, in the new linguistic environment, its deficiencies have become more and more apparent. Zhang Shuyan (2003) mentions three reasons that account for this increasing inappropriateness. First, in the past half century vast changes have occurred in China and, as a result, every new thing must be reflected in the vocabulary

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and be recorded in hanzi. Yet, the standard is not regularly updated and, consequently, we should not be surprised that things go wrong when we use a 50-year-old standard to control today’s character use. Second, the major original purpose of the table was to improve the poor quality of printed characters through the elimination of the non-standard ones, thus ending the chaotic state of character typecast used by the printing industry. This goal was achieved long ago. Third, the FTVVF had no intention, nor ability, to systematically overhaul the more problematic forms occurring in publications more generally, so it should come as no surprise that clashes occurred with other official tables/lists subsequently promulgated by the government (Editors 2001). The first two factors should be examined in their historical perspective; only the third reason has as its root shortsighted guiding principles. As the FTVVF targets only the modern highly active characters, it gives little consideration to the older contexts, blatantly ignoring the fact that variant forms are phenomena shaped by history. There has never existed a clear-cut boundary between different historical periods in the hanzi forms. Currently, Unicode is being gradually established with every visible unit in the writing system being given a unique space. For Chinese, this means any new reforming plan about hanzi will no longer be limited to 2,000 or 3,000 characters. The flaws of previous yiti zi, rationalized in the 1950s, have been looming large as the vision for reform has expanded to examine a much wider range of characters. To review the FTVVF is, inevitably, an imminent undertaking in any forthcoming government mandated measure to standardize hanzi. The three outstanding difficulties, regarding the physical shape and composition of hanzi are: Complex forms vs simplified forms; standard forms vs variant forms; and old print fonts vs new print fonts. Verifying the standard form and eliminating other variant forms involves a complex identification and selection mechanism. Therefore, to define the variant forms of characters has become the top priority in creating the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters (see the discussion that follows in this chapter), the most important language planning activity currently being undertaken.

2.3

Sound – Reducing Pronunciation Variation

In the Prologue, we saw the evolutionary process of Chinese characters from pictogram and ideogram to phonogram. This tendency to move from meaning-representation to sound-representation was realized through the increase in the number of semantic-phonetic characters. Although the

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phonetic compound in semantic-phonetic (or picto-phonetic) characters provides some degree of pronunciation for the character as a whole, its accuracy ranges from perfect to negligible. Hanzi is a writing system that cannot by itself provide for accurate pronunciation since like its physical make-up, its pronunciation is also marked by instability and unpredictability, and thus needs to be standardized. Two issues arise with regard to the standardization of pronunciation: heterophonic characters and regionalects. 2.3.1

Heterophonic Characters

Yin and Rohsenow (1997: 162) are right in saying that the majority of hanzi have a fixed, generally agreed upon pronunciation among putonghua speakers, “so the main object of standardization is the remaining minoritypolyphonic characters.” In the following discussion, while ignoring the other more complex issues concerning polyphonic characters, we focus on the central concern related to heterophonic characters, those Chinese characters which express the same meaning using different pronunciations. Because sounds related to Chinese characters cannot be phonically determined from their form, as with alphabetic languages, the same character can be read in different ways. Broadly speaking, and leaving aside for the moment the most important factor – geographical differences, how a person reads a character is determined by the three following factors: • Age. Pronunciation has changed radically, but older people tend to keep the pronunciation they learned when growing up. This is evident from the discrepancy in pronunciation between the old generation and younger people in daily communication. • Education. Pronunciation is related to ways of speaking and writing. There tend to be two standards: oral sounds for oral communication, and reading sounds for written language. The well educated are much more conservative in their pronunciation, while the illiterate say a character as they like, using the ‘least effort principle’. For example, the polyphonic character is pronounced differently in different contexts making slight lexical demarcations. A large number of characters have more than one pronunciation – while these are discerned by intellectuals, commoners do not pay much attention to, or just ignore, such peculiar features. • Misleading information provided by the phonetic compound. Skilled adult Chinese readers use the phonological information found in the phonetic compound of the hanzi to assist with pronunciation, making

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their pronunciation more accurate. But there is a growing tendency for the phonetic function to weaken, to the extent of becoming misleading8. Yin and Rohsenow (1997: 170) noted that “of the three situations in which characters are liable to be misread, this drawing of false analogies from the phonic component is the most common cause of mispronunciation”. The degree to which hanzi provide phonetic representation and effectiveness in pronunciation is a matter of disagreement, and is further elaborated in the discussion which follows in this chapter. In an analogy to yiti zi in terms of hanzi’s writing form, a character that has more than one variant form for the same meaning is called yidu zi, or a heterophonetic character. Yidu zi form the main focus for the standardization of characters, and the difficulty of the problem is just as great as that of yiti zi. As part of modern LP activities, the government has enacted two sets of official standards aiming at unifying the pronunciation of yidu zi. The first standard, The First Draft of Three Combined List of Authorized Pronunciations for Heterophonic Words in Putonghua9, took seven years to finalize. It was completed in 1963, but it was never shown to the public, although it serves as the official standard that is incorporated in most dictionaries. The second standard was jointly published by SCLW and the Ministry of Radio and TV in late 1985. This is the revised version of the first one. The biggest change in principles of appraising pronunciation is that it adopted a pragmatic or ‘masses line’ approach that recognized societal realities by giving more importance to popularly accepted usages, rather than those based on etymological rationality and systematic logic. The discrepancies in principles of fixing the pronunciation, as illustrated by the differences between the two tables, have resulted in confusion among both the general population and professionals (i.e., actors, broadcasters, TV presenters). Furthermore, the government standard manifested in the tables and those used in dictionaries, also contradict each other. Thus, when it comes to unifying pronunciation, the following questions remain unresolved: • Which should carry more weight: popular pronunciation which is promass but very irregular or systematized pronunciation which is rather ‘scientific’ and consistent with the historical development? The Second Table of Official Pronunciation Standards (1985) cited previously gives greater consideration to the mass line than the earlier standard. That is, once a new pronunciation is well established among the masses, it should be acknowledged by the authorities, even if it is found to run counter the evolutionary direction of the Chinese phonological

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system. This also results in a widening the gulf between the younger and older generations and with other regions, predominantly Taiwan. • Should dialectal pronunciation continue to be tolerated? In the past, ‘Speaking Putonghua, Maintaining Dialect’ has been the propaganda strategy used to defuse resistance from local areas to the promotion of putonghua. However, in the digital era, hard and fast standards are needed to deal with the unforgiving nature of machine usage. This is a problem that will be brought up again in the discussion which follows and in the next chapter as well. • How to enforce the government-sanctioned pronunciation norms? Even the dictionary compilers and editors have not paid much attention to the governmental standard. For example, the government sanctioned and largest selling dictionary for many years, the Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (Modem Chinese Dictionary) reflects state-set standard, but did not adopt this latest sanctioned standard until 1992 (Peng 1999). According to the same research, most dictionaries now on the market still use the old pronunciation standard decreed in 1963. Peng reported that only 6 of 22 dictionaries surveyed that were sold in bookshops adopted the 1985 official standard. This demonstrates the conservative nature of dictionary compliers and the editors who have failed to take up the 1985 governmental standard10. Each of these questions itself raises further questions – each of which points to important issues which can help us to better understand this major problem. One thing is clear; the disregard of the official standard by the public is a reflection of a more general problem: that most reform programs are implemented without a maintenance mechanism. In examining the history of language planning in China, one finds that in the programming, coding, legalization, execution, evaluation processes that complement the language planning program, scholars have done excellent research at the stage of coding the norms (their implementation basically can be completed by government organs), but the subsequent evaluation and assessment of the implementation has been the most neglected area. 2.3.2

Regionalects

The standard pronunciation for modern Chinese characters is putonghua, or Guoyu (Mandarin or, national language), as it was called before 1950s – this is still the official name used in Taiwan, and a more popular name than putonghua among overseas Chinese communities. The modern standard pronunciation is based on the phonetic system of a local dialect, i.e.,

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Beijing dialect. During the last three Chinese imperial regimes – the Yuan (1206-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1616-1911 10) – or for over 700 years, Beijing was the national capital. In dynastic times there was no attempt to spread the use of a national language throughout the empire. Despite the fact that since the 13th century the language spoken in the North in the area surrounding Beijing has become a sort of administrative and intellectual lingua franca, its official status was not formally established until 1923 during National Language Movement when the desirability of having a standard vernacular to reduce language barriers became self-evident as the various parts of China were becoming more economically interdependent and politically integrated. The term of putonghua was first put forward and defined at the second conference of the CCSR in 1954. It was defined as consisting of the pronunciation of the Peking dialect, the syntax of the Northern dialects, and the vocabulary of modern well accepted literature (Baihua). It was to be the single language for teaching in the Han region regardless what local dialects were spoken and was to serve the purpose of communication among speakers from across the country. Linguistically, seventy percent of Han Chinese speak a variety of putonghua; the area covered stretches from the Northeast bordering on Russia and Korea to as far as the region south of the Yangtze River in the southwest. However, even among the four major sub-groups of putonghua speakers, there is evident divergence in their speech that often poses a great barrier to oral communication. The rest of the Han Chinese people speak a variety of regional Chinese dialects that are unintelligible to other groups. Frustrated by the unbalanced achievement of the spread of putonghua in different regionalectal areas, and as well the increasingly evidence that showed that it was unrealistic to expect that even many Northern Mandarin native speakers would observe all the phonological distinctions in Beijing speech, a debatable new term – mass or local putonghua – was developed in late 1990s (Yao 1998). Thus, the discussion on the extent to which the local accent can be tolerated in putonghua promotion has been a combustible topic in LP circles, and as accent is important in accurate computer input, this debate is likely to deepen. There are a wide range of explanations about what the Mass Putonghua should be, but the central point is that the standard should be more variable so as to pertain to different people with different occupations in different regions. Those advocating the use of Mass Putonghua at the local level get strong support from eminent LP researchers such as Zhou Youguang and Wang Jun. The idea of Mass or Local Putonghua is nothing new. In fact,

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the need to adopt a set of flexible standards for different learners according to their professions has been long acknowledged since the very beginning of putonghua campaign (Barnes 1977: 259). What makes this issue significant is that it is being raised after half a century of putonghua-spread experience. Given the lukewarm support that the government gets from regional China in its putonghua promotion, incorporating Mass Putonghua promotion into the national LP work is a pragmatic policy worthy of being further explored. The emergence of a more flexible and universally respected norm across dialectal regions has already been given official recognition, and a multi-level model of putonghua standard testing system has been in use for some years. However, dialectal variation has become an impediment for pronunciation-based software. Unlike English and most other alphabetic scripts, where spelling errors can be either tolerated or automatically checked and corrected, characters, encoded in phonetic-based input programs, are represented by the exact pronunciation, thus requiring a high degree of precision in pronunciation – misspelling results in different characters appearing on the screen. This leads to problems when the concept of multilevel standard putonghua is applied. For instance, the vast majority of the population, including most parts of the Mandarin-speaking areas, are not able to tell or pronounce the differences between ‘z, c, s’ and ‘zh, ch, sh’. Which means when using word processing program, the users from the area where there are no retroflex sounds ‘zh, ch, sh’ will fail to get the desired characters on the screen if their first guess is wrong – a rather annoying experience for every dialect speaking user. However, despite strong opposition from LP regulators, almost all phonetic-based input systems are designed to accept standard pronunciation with dialectal accents, which is considered a flagrant violation of the national language policy. From a language planner’s perspective, the tolerance of dialect pronunciation in the software market discourages the people from further improving their putonghua level, leading to disastrous long-term results by potentially undermining language planners’ efforts to unify the national language. These provisions contrast sharply with other professional efforts at language unity in the rapidly marketizing China. For example, The National Centre for Putonghua Testing Training, which is comprised of research staff from the Putonghua Promotion and Research Section in the Research Institute of Applied Linguistics and other linguistic academics, is the highest level institution authorized at the ministerial level to regularly organize nationwide putonghua testing activities for language intensive professions, such as school teachers, tourist guides, bus conductors, and waitresses/waiters in star-graded hotels. A certificate issued by this centre,

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showing the level of the holder’s putonghua standard, is an asset in applying for a range of professions. In sum, the putonghua promotion campaign that started in 1950s is a continuation of 1920s’ National Language Movement. Unfortunately, putonghua popularization perhaps has been the least successful aspect in the modernization of the Chinese language, and the nation-wide popularization of putonghua by 2050 is only an optimistic goal (Li 2004c: 65). “[B]efore we could say ‘to popularize Putonghua’, now we do not dare to say ‘popularization’, we only say ‘promotion’”, complains Zhou Youguang (2004: 71). Therefore, the ultimate goal of pronunciation standardization of putonghua on a nation-wide basis remains a long term goal. The urgent realworld objective of pronunciation standardization is to standardize the characters with divergent pronunciation that cause the greatest confusion in oral speech among the whole population, and particularly those that create endless troubles in the area of education and technology.

2.4

Ordering – Standardizing the Referencing Methods

As Gao Gengsheng (2002: 351) arguably points out, “[character] ordering standardization is a prerequisite of [Chinese] language modernization. It is a precondition for dictionary compiling, library cataloging, character databases devised for computers and Chinese language automatic processing”. Ordering is an issue related to computer technology in two respects: information processing and character input. Linguistically, the word is the most basic unit of information and in the Chinese language, words are composed of characters. In other words, in the classification system of any dictionary or vocabulary inventory, words are grouped under the heading characters11. Therefore, the character is the sole entity providing access to information in an IR system or corpus, or a library catalog, to look up a word in a dictionary, or even to find a personal name in roll book12. As for character input, the essential task in designing a hanzi input scheme is to devise a hanzi ordering system. In this sense, like the categorization of input methods, we can categorize hanzi ordering methods into two streams: the phonetic and ideographic approaches. The phonetic approach is the most convenient and popular method among the general population, as a character/word can be instantly located if one knows the character’s pronunciation and has a functional knowledge of pinyin, or any other alphabetic system used for classification purposes. Just like the disadvantage of phonetic input schemes, the biggest problem with this method is that it is only valid for pronunciation of known characters, but in

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many cases, the characters or words people want to check are not common, and a major purpose for using the reference may be to check pronunciation, this being a common purpose for non-putonghua speakers. Therefore, many medium size or big dictionaries and reference book are not indexed phonetically, although most dictionaries come with more than one index method. The Table of Commonly Used Characters (7000 characters, 1988) and GB 2312-80 (6763 characters, 1981) use a pinyin index for half of the more often used characters and a stroke index for another half less used characters. While it should be acknowledged that the introduction of pinyin has provided an important alternative way to sequence Chinese characters, for various reasons, including the shortcomings just mentioned, Chinese character referencing is an issue that is far from being resolved, and sequencing has become even more problematic with the increase in popularity of computer use. Among the traditional ideographic methods, the dominant one is the so-called radical method. As the name suggests, this method classifies characters by the radicals they contain. More than eighty five percent of hanzi are semantic-phonetic characters, and all other compound characters also are semantic in nature, thereby containing at least one semantic component13. This aspect of hanzi’s structure creates the conditions whereby almost all individual characters can be classified according to a more limited number of radicals, creating groupings of tens and often hundreds under the same radical. For example, in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, which is a medium size dictionary, there are more than 400 entries under the radical (kou, mouth) and more than 100 entries under (mu, eye) (including traditional forms), so other structural features of hanzi such as stroke number and stroke shape to have to be employed to locate a specific characters. Hanzi was first classified using 540 radicals for Xiaozhuan characters by Xu Shen in his Shuowen jiezi, and this ordering system continues to be used. But, there is no universally accepted standardized system. The most long standing and influential system consists of 214 radicals. This system was the result of the radical reduction from Xu’s 540 by Mei Yingzuo in his Zihui (Glossary – ) in 1647 and was retained by a more prestigious Kanxi Dictionary which was collectively compiled in 1716. This de facto standard continues to be used by major large-sized reference books today in Chinese character using countries including Taiwan. But, in mainland China the newly published lexicons and dictionaries use a range of radical systems. Most follow one of three systems: 250 radicals represented by new edition of Cihai (Ocean of Vocabulary), or 189 radicals represented by Modern Chinese Dictionary,

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or 201 radicals standardized and recommended by LP authorities. However, in today’s China, reference book publishing is a big and flourishing industry, and no one can tell how many systems are used by countless dictionaries and reference books. Even greater divergences are seen in ideograph-based computer input systems. To accommodate the features and novelties of their own schemes, everyone devising a new system creates an input scheme to meet their specific technical requirements, adding virtually hundreds more systems to the existing stock. Insofar as official standardization is concerned, in 1961 the CCSR, supported by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education and the Linguistics Research Institute of China Science Academy, set up special task team – Working Group to Rectify Character-Referencing Methods, and after three years of intensive research and consultation with those concerned, the research team recommended four systems of character referencing methods. They are i.) the radical method, ii.) the four-corner code method, iii.) the stroke method, and iv.) the Pinyin method. Then, in 1983, in collaboration with organizations from editing and publishing institutes, the Working Group to Unify Radical Referencing Method, authorized by the SCLW and the Ministry of Culture, put forward a modified 201 radical system that aimed to serve as the standard system for both simplified and traditional characters. But, once again, this was not embraced even by government-sponsored dictionaries. For instance, Modern Chinese Dictionary, which is the most authoritative dictionary in promoting the standard usage of lexical codification, pronunciation and writing in modern Chinese, has come out with its own set of 189 radicals. As we have just seen, the radical method is not self-sufficient; it depends heavily on the other two determinants – stroke number and the stroke shape – which can also stand as independent ordering methods in their own right if one is dealing with a small number of characters. But in actual use, most of the time a character or word can only be located through the combined use of all three of these methods. Thus, if one wants to look up a character, identifying the radical is the first step in a typical process. Then, one has to count the stroke number because there are too many characters under the common radicals. If the intended character can not be defined by these two elements, then the third element – stroke shape – has to be used. The stroke shape method puts characters in a sequence according to the order of the five basic stokes, i.e., the horizontal stroke ( ) goes first, the vertical stroke ( , ) second, left-falling stroke 贷 霸 third, the dot ( , ⎝ ) fourth, then curving strokes ( , ) fifth. This order (zha), so this ‘five-stroke’ referencing is typified by a character method is also known as the Zha Method.

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Thus, searching for a character can be a time-consuming task that often ends up in failure. A minor error in any part of the whole process may lead to a breakdown of the entire effort. In real life, checking for unpronounceable characters is something that individuals try to avoid. But in an increasingly digitalized society, there is a frequent need to access such characters by a growing segment of population either when using computer input programs or to access electronically stored information. As part of IToriented LP standardization activities, relevant standards to facilitate the application of character referencing methods and hanzi education have been formulated by language authorities. In 1997 the SCLW and the Department of Media and Press jointly commissioned the GB 13000.1 Standard of Character Components for Information Interchange – GF 3001-1997. Two years later (on 1st October) two further national standards concerning hanzi ordering, the 13000.1 Standard of Stroke Ordering of the General Modern Characters – GF 3002-1999 and GB 13000.1 Standard of Chinese Character Order (by stroke) – GF 3003-1999, were also put into effect by the SCLW in conjunction with the relevant departments. But these standards are applicable only to characters included in Standard Character Set GB 13000.1, i.e., for 20902 characters. However, perhaps not unexpectedly, character ordering is still a problem. For instance, in Xinhua Chinese Character Dictionary (1998 edition) and Modern Chinese Dictionary (2002 edition), the two most influential dictionaries, three stroke characters under the same component ‘ ’ are found to be arranged in different order (Gao 2002: 352), i.e.: Xinhua Chinese Character Dictionary: 锯 Modern Chinese Dictionary: 锯 Some standardization work has proved to be sociolinguistically complex. The divergence and confusion about how to call the radicals and components of hanzi are major obstacles in using the radical referencing method. Since the 1960s, it has been accepted that there has been a need for a convention on how orally to refer to hanzi components, particularly for educational purposes (see Note 6 in Chapter 6). On February 26, 2001, in the course of drafting the National Standard for Components’ Calling Names for Standard Character Set GB-13000.1 for Information-Processing, to further solicit public opinions on the debatable issue, an open letter stating this need was published under the heading of ‘Norms and Standards’ on the government website ‘China-language.gov.cn’. But no further new developments have been reported on this standard (for further discussion, see Section 3.3.3, Chapter 6). More complex work on standardizing hanzi’s ordering relates to how to regulate people’s handwriting. In ancient times, brush writing was effecttively

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governed by the models in works of calligraphy masters. In modern times, no standards targeting peoples’ handwriting have been attempted in mainland China14, despite the repeated calls by scholars for this to happen (e.g., Fei 2000b), and it might have remained this way were it not for the demand generated by technological advances. As stated in Chapter 3, OCR input technology has a promising future in the Chinese IT software market. Various OCR products have been on the market for quite some time and have proved to be most welcome by particular segments of population, such as old generations, cooperation managers and non-putonghua speakers. But, to further upgrade the recognition speed and accuracy of OCR programs requires considerable input from linguists and LP involvement. Particularly for the simultaneous OCR method, users’ handwriting behavior is sometimes central in improving the system’s operating quality. Handwriting irregularities and individual peculiarities, such as unpredictable stroke ordering, are major factors that account for the reduction in the OCR success rate when trying to reproduce hanzi on screen (Gu 1997). The operating principle of the simultaneous writing OCR method is that the computer can only process strings of lines. In the process of transforming the stroke trace into single dimension signal (a string line), the machine has to pick up all information sent through the special stylus (a kind of light pen). The influential factors include: the stroke number and direction, the stroke ordering and writing speed, even the pressure of the pen point. “By constantly gauging such abundant graphic aids and moving signals, the simultaneous OCR gains a higher quality than the scanning OCR method, thus upgrading the recognition speed” (Zhao 2005: 355). However, if something unexpected happens during this process, then “one character can be recognized as two or more different characters if a nonstandard stroke order is input” (Wu and Ding 1992: 176). We illustrate this process with following figure: Y

X

Y

0 X 0 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 Figure 4-2. The principles of recognizing Chinese character by OCR

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Figure 4-2 illustrates the importance of standard ordering for OCR. When the computer is trying to read the graphic signs ‘ ’ and ‘ ’, they both have a stroke ‘ ’ which can be seen as a 45-degree oblique line. The correct stroke order for the former is left-down to right-up, for the latter it is the other way around. The machine distinguishes these two lines by measuring values on the X axis. If the machine reads a trace from big to small (4 0) on X axis, it can easily and quickly identify it as right-rising stroke, and matches it with the correct one, stored in the internalized character database. Otherwise, if the numbers on X axis change from small to big (0 4), then it must be a left-falling stroke from top-right to bottomleft (Gu 1997: 107). Wu and Ding (1992: 177) consider the unstable stroke shape and writing order to be “two key issues for simultaneous OCR”. They argue that “it is necessary to impose somewhat standardization on people’s handwriting habit” (p. 147). Otherwise, “it would be very unlikely that the system can yield any high quality OCR products on those unrestrained handwritten text” (p. 150). In recent years researchers have concentrated more on emerging non-keyboard developments. A growing number of computer software manufacturers have been promoting input by voice and input through handwriting, and it is predicted that non-keyboard input will be the best and most popular method, although this solution seems most unlikely to arise any time soon, given the current fact that it is still too slow and too error prone. However, OCR technology is seen as ‘return to nature’. As Gu Xiaofeng (2000: 44) observes, the international input trend is ‘pencomputer-pen’. Some vendors claim that with computers becoming smaller and smaller, the keyboard is increasingly just inconvenient equipment. One unique feature of Chinese characters is that the handwritten representation of thousands upon thousands of different graphical signs can generate billions of ideolectical configurations of these characters. There can be no question that with the emerging generation of more powerful computers it is theoretically possible to program billions of individual writing types, one for each of the billion individual writers. But this is obviously an impractical process. Somehow, to make possible accurate pattern matching, grouping of forms of writing needs to occur in order to reduce the number of variations. This is precisely the area where LP can contribute to the modern handwriting technology through the standardization effort. Standardizing stroke ordering, whether targeting the printed form or handwriting habits, is the type of principle-based LP planning that needs governmental coordination. But, this is a weak area of national LP work partly because of its complex nature. The unofficial, selfproclaimed standard found in the dictionaries in the marketplace has been

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an important step towards removing the inconsistency caused by nonstandard handwriting, but whether such dictionary publishers should be allowed to claim their individual work as a “Dictionary of Standard …” goes back to the foregoing debate concerning LP.

3.

CURRENT STANDARDIZATION PROJECTS

While it is important to identify some of the issues facing character development, it is also important to look at what projects the government is currently undertaking to address these problems. China is a country that has a long tradition of state normative intervention in language development (Shi 1997; Chen P. 1999), and this has been considered one of the factors that has enabled hanzi to survive throughout history. Historically, government-initiated reform measures fall into two general categories: (1) standardization and unification by setting up the models while keeping the physical shape of hanzi intact; and (2) optimization and systematization through alteration, or surgical operation in metaphorical terms. Although these two types of reforms are often interconnected in their implementation, the latter takes greater effort and is more risky to implement. This is because writing is a set of conventions that, once they have been established, develop slowly and mature over centuries, and even thousands of years. To make the majority of people change or give up their ancestral writing heritage and adopt a reformed writing system is perhaps one of the most difficult jobs in the world. However, a writing system is a tool for communication, and historically there have been a number of successful cases of script reform, e.g., Turkish (Dogançay-Aktuna, 1995). Since the beginning of the new millennium, it has become clearer that to release the immense constraints put on the Chinese IT industry by the deficiencies of the Chinese writing system, some more fundamental LP work needs to be done at the national level. This section focuses on two such government endorsed projects developed to meet that objective. One aims to formulate a comprehensive table of standardized characters to further a clinical treatment to some of Chinese hanzi, and the other, to launch a series of research programs to overhaul Chinese ancient scripts.

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Systematic Optimization and Modification: CTSC15

By putting all standards and tables together, the ongoing Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters is actually the embodiment of the foresaid Four Fixations. The composition of a complete table of hanzi started in earnest as early as the 1960s (Chen 1981), and this is the third time that it has been formally established as the key LP research project at the national level. Being the foremost national language task for many years to come, the plan has been implemented according to well-defined research objectives, an overall framework, and fieldwork operational principles. Since its inception in April 2001, task research teams have been in full operation, nation-wide conferences have been conducted consecutively16, pilot projects, such as hanzi for personal names, have started to solicit opinions from the public (see Section 3.3.3, Chapter 6), and a few draft tables of separate standards have been presented to academics across the country for comment. As we have already seen, quantity reduction has long been regarded as a hard nut to crack in hanzi research. As the ultimate summary of the all standards and tables promulgated by the national language authorities about hanzi, the CTSC has been the most significant LP program ever developed for Chinese characters. To arrive at a fixed number by delineating what characters should be included in the table is the first step and the foundation for the three other fixations. However, when considering the total number of hanzi to be included in the CTSC, differences exist among the key protagonists (see Li 2004b, Wang T.K. 2004, Zhang 2004). In short, there are two competing views on total number determination: 1) a number of scholars are of the view that the chief purpose of the CTSC is to serve the modern hanzi users, i.e., there is no need to standardize the RC, so the total number should be restricted to a fixed number ranging between 8,00012,000; 2) another group argues that the CTSC at least should be able to cover the extant standard codes for information exchange. The following number of characters, totaling 12,000 and arranged in three hierarchical stratified levels, have been suggested by Li Yuming (2004c): • Grade I, 3,500 highly used characters, roughly commensurate with the Table of Most Used Modern Characters published in 1988; • Grade II, 4,000 commonly used characters; and • Grade III, 4,500 rarely used characters for special purposes such as proper nouns.

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added to discriminate between homophonous characters, when in its early history Chinese was dominated by single syllabic words. In modern Chinese an overwhelming majority of words are polysyllabic, so these additional strokes no longer have lexical significance. Moreover, the methodology used to distinguish homophonous characters makes characters structurally complicated, failing to comply with the general trend toward simplification. Influenced by Liushu tradition, logical elements of Chinese characters have often been improperly exaggerated by hanzi reform opponents and other linguistic purists. A dispassionate examination of the evidence reveals that the predictive ability, of both the semantic and phonetic compounds, has become weakened rather than strengthened during the process of language development. For some characters, the information conveyed through their graphic make-up and the way they are constructed only serves to mislead, or impedes judgment the meaning and sound from their composite elements. For example, the horse was very important in ancient life, and a large number of characters contain the horse components, but neither the meaning nor pronunciation have anything to do with horses in the modern context, or if they do, they have only a very remote relationship with the intention for which the characters were originally created. Some characters with wood and stone compounds are also difficult to explain by looking at their visual composition. The rationalization of the compound, to make the semantic indicator more logical and acceptable to modern life, although not a stated outcome was (jing, extensively used in the TSC. For example, when simplified from , the (horse) was changed to psychological startle/surprise) to (hu, radical (heart/mind); the semantic compound in the character = (word) to (hand), thus to protect) was also simplified from . Many characters were formed or (mistakenly) reformed based on previous perceptions of the world, or due to a lack of linguistic sophistication. To understand or write these characters now causes a great deal of difficulty for people, despite their anthropological and archaeological significance17. While there are vast resources available to improve these malformed and defective characters at the disposal of reformers, the number of characters to be physically repaired should be limited to a minimum, and this can only be done on the basis of a thorough and systematic study of the characters. For instance, Qi Chongtian (1997: 394) discussed 25 characters in the Table of Standard Shapes of Modern Characters (1988) that are in conflict with other standards, those in dictionaries or have aspects that are subject to re-evaluation. The CTSC project provides a valuable opportunity

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to correct defects in hanzi, regardless of whether they rooted in their original creation or come from more recent developments. 3.1.2

Making Phonetic Signifiers More Accountable

As explained in the Prologue, hanzi are normally a combination of both ideographic parts and phonetic parts, with the semantic element providing information about the meaning and the phonetic element an indication of the pronunciation. Experience shows that the dynamic phonetic compound is the logical element in hanzi to be used to create new simplified characters, but this characteristic has not yet developed sufficiently to make every hanzi acceptably accurate. Fei (1991: 116) indicates that it has been suggested for quite some time that, to make them more precise in signifying the meaning and pronunciation, the phonetic and semantic compounds need to be systematically rationalized, to enable 80–90 percent of compounds to be more suggestive without ambiguity. Today, the people doing research on this are by no means rare. Hanzi are ambiguous because “it has not been manipulated and refined like the Japanese syllabaries but throughout its history right down to today has evolved in a more or less haphazard manner” (DeFrancis 1989: 111). According to Xu Chengmiao (1974: 29), in classical Chinese the ideographic-phonetically meaningful characters accounted for over ninety percent of the total. In modern Chinese, the degree of haniz’s phonetic representation and effectiveness is a matter of disagreement. Yuen Ren Chao (1976: 92) says hanzi are only 25 percent phonetic, Zhou (1986c: 144) claims 39 percent, and the claim of 49.9 percent is a relatively new estimate (Wang 1998: 33). Gradations depend on differing definitions of what a phonetic compound is and how many hanzi are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, in terms of modern standard characters, around 40 percent would be an approximation acceptable to most scholars. Li Yan’s (cited in Su 2001b: 103) study shows that out of 7,000 commonly used characters, only 56.6 percent are ideographic-phonetic characters, with the phonetic side pronunciation indicator ranging from 100 percent accurate to merely providing a faint hint. As part of character systematization, the semanticphonetic characters should be optimized as much as possible to make the phonetic part a more accurate reflection of modern pronunciation, and more effective in its ability to represent the pronunciation of the whole character. Zhou (1979: 332-338) proposed three ways to enhance phonetic function. He saw the use of new semantic-phonetic characters as a promising

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method to create new characters and an important idea that deserves encouragement. Although it appears unrealistic to restructure characters in a way that indicates each syllable by only one phonetic marker, this ambitious goal has been mentioned from time to time in relevant discussions, and perhaps is not too whimsical to suggest as a possibility. Yang (1999) and Chen Ping (1999) draw our attention to the possibility of recreating a “modern phonetic-semantic system”. Chen notes that “to improve the sound and meaning indicating capability of characters” is one of three ways to optimize hanzi. The so-called New Semantic-Phonetic Characters scheme, first envisaged by Tang Lan (1949), proposed a reclassification of the totality of characters, and a reform of the phonetic side using a prescribed number of the best-known characters, so as to achieve the goal that characters with the same pronunciation have the same phonetic compound and that the same phonetic compound in different characters is always pronounced alike. Wang Li (1938), who was very instrumental in the editing of the revised list of the SSS, was not supportive of this idea but did not rule out the possibility that Chinese characters, at least to some extent, could be restructured in a logical and systematic way. These attempts have faced various difficulties, but they have also given some valuable inspiration to the production of new characters. A number of semantic-phonetic characters in the TSC were based on these principles and some weak phonetic ones were improved. It has been subsequently shown that these are the best ones in the Scheme (Gao 2002; Qiu 2004). At the same time, some were adversely effected by being arbitrarily created by the masses, thereby creating a need for amendments at the next opportunity, e.g., by the CTSC. Theoretically, there are two difficulties that need to be overcome before new semantic-phonetic characters can be put into practice. One is the form of the phonetic indicator. Wang rejected one that would create an obvious problem, the long proposed hybrid form, i.e., using Latin letters in Chinese characters as a phonetic indicative. The second difficulty is more critical and complex. Because of thousands of years’ development in a vastly complex and changing set of circumstances, the sound compound has long ago lost its function for a majority of character users. As Chao (1976: 92) notes, “The so-called phonetic compounds represented sounds fairly closely when they were first developed, but often are no longer appropriate for modern pronunciation.” In other words, the same sound compound has taken on a different pronunciation; with the example given by Wang Li (chi, shame or humiliation). If it is restructured as , being Mandarin speakers can precisely predict its pronunciation, but to people and from at least six other provinces it is not a sound compound as

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have nothing to do with pronunciation. But Wang was optimistic about a resolution to work out a kind of standard sound compound. He listed three conditions, which must be met to give sound compounds similar pronunciation by the entire population. Despite his lukewarm attitude, Wang admitted that, theoretically, New Semantic-Phonetic Characters would be more acceptable and would succeed more easily than Romanization, since it would only be character reform rather than a revolution. From current perspectives, when looking at the problems faced sixty years ago, Wang’s worry about dialectic divergence is rapidly disappearing under the relatively successful Putonghua promotion scheme. In discussing ways of modernizing hanzi in the information era, Hung Hin-chung (1997: 150) enthusiastically considers it “as the future direction for hanzi development, because it serves as a bridge leading to phonetic characters, when the new semantic-phonetic character throws away its semantic cap”. However, if to comprehensively renovate or optimize the entire system of hanzi has traditionally been seen as too idealistic (Fan 2000: 165-166), it does not mean that something systematic can not be done to improve the system. Following international experience, there have been cases where remedial reform measures were taken to narrow the existing divergences between the language and its phonetic representation, such as in Korean in the 16th century and in Finnish and Czech in modern times (Gelb 1979). In fact, it is such a fascinating topic, so fantastic and irresistible, despite the acknowledgement that it has little chance of getting off the ground, that interested researchers have never stopped exploring the feasibility of at least partially making the hanzi system more rational, particularly in view of the constant technological change (see e.g., Zhou 2004; Wang 2004a). 3.1.3

Optimizing Input Schemes Through Standardization

It is expected that the completion of the CTSC will also provide the environment to end the unhealthy competition between the overly large number of input programs. Xu Shouchun (Xu and Zhao 2000: 385-391) lists deficiencies of hanzi that severely constrain computers from playing a larger role in automatic information processing. He contends the foremost problem is the unavailability of one, or a few, highly efficient input programs. Decades of fruitless efforts to optimize the national input scheme have resulted in a malicious impact on society, and with the increasingly wide-spread use of computers, the problem is creating a social dilemma. Zhang Pu (1997: 41) calls the situation of a plethora of co-existing different schemes in a chaotic state, “input scheme pollution”.

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The current bewildering variety of schemes to input/output hanzi script on computers is definitely an unusual phenomenon. The public and education system still anticipate that there will be a single widespread scheme, which should be user friendly, conform to compulsory education standards, and have an overwhelming advantage over others. With more than twenty popular schemes in China competing in the software market, there is a need for comprehensive standards to govern language use. If the notion of ‘letting the market sort it out’ was appropriate as part of the solution in the initial stages of IT development, it does not work in the current context as the various self-defined software standards for using hanzi, pinyin and keyboards have added to public confusion and resentment. To make progress on these issues any new round of standardization must remove these arbitrarily devised schemes from the market place and reward those that comply with official prescribed standards. Since the mid-1990s computing activities have expanded from an individual enterprise to a social behavior, with a future tendency toward internationalization. Individual contributions to the IT industry have greatly diminished and are virtually disappearing, or have become an impeding factor if they are in conflict w ith national or international standards 18. It is particularly important to realize that, although the IT related language standard is not always identical to the written form used by the public, in some respects it can function as a cohesive bridge between the relevant sectors. Currently, there is a fundamental discrepancy between the two camps; input software developers focus on technical convenience and commercial interests, whereas school textbooks and dictionaries tend to take a rationalist position, giving more importance to rigid principles, explanatory logic, established practice and etymological origins and correctness. As a result, the skills and rules that students are taught in classes differ from the training courses or operational manuals offered by software companies (Xu C.A. 1999: 132). It is inappropriate and inefficient that the same character can be described in different ways in the classroom, in society, in the dictionary, and on the keyboard; or that the same component is given different names by different constituencies. The problem emerges most clearly when software buyers are confronted with differences between old knowledge about writing hanzi, and the method for operating their software. Wan Yexin (1999: 95) reports that the ideograph-based software users “are very irritated when, in order to type, they have to get rid of all of their established knowledge and habits about hanzi”. To ensure that the current script is the effective instrument required by a modern society, there is a need for an interdisciplinary consensus based on a universally accepted standard of how to treat the discrepancies in

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hanzi. Fei Jinchang (1996: 444) notes that due to the lack of interdisciplinary communication, “there is a tendency that the differences of understanding about what are the basic hanzi units and how to disassemble them between the IT industry and linguistic circles are widening”. Standardization, in this context is in its essence a set of rules to enable a member of a given community to reliably communicate their written utterances through an encoding/decoding process on a machine. An effective approach would be to create guidelines for the official requirements, with dispute procedures so disagreements could be resolved once the relevant standards had come out. These operational standards have to apply universally in three domains: the IT industry, public writing and literacy education, requiring the authorities to subject the market to rigorous central control of usage. A natural outcome should be that the number of input schemes is gradually reduced as IT-oriented standards establish themselves more fully. 3.1.4

Some Thoughts about the CTSC

Since the announcement of the plan to draw up the CTSC, there has been an enthusiastic response from the public, and a number of laypersons (through unofficial channels, e.g., Chen M.G. 2004; Li 2004) and scholars (through formal channels) have put forward their opinions and suggestions (e.g., Gong 2004; Liu 2004). Prompted by the evolving discussions, as summarized in the previous sections, and more generally by the issues that we believe the CTSC should have been considering, we make the following comments, noting, however, that the CTSC project is nearing completion. Readers interested in this topic may want to compare the CTSC mandated outcomes against these suggestions. 3.1.4.1 Flexibility and pragmatism A standard is characterized by its rigid and top-down nature; all too frequently, change is prone to undermine the standard. By contrast, standardization is a process. Given the dynamic nature of language, we cannot expect, nor do we want these standards to ever become finalized as there will always remain some relevant questions to be answered. A practical solution is to set up a model to be followed, leaving room for it to develop over time and allowing users to choose, as some limited flexibility would make the standard more acceptable and its implementation easier to operate in practice. Specifically, whenever a dispute on indeterminate divergence arises and a choice has to be made, there is no harm in leaving it to users as long as there is no obvious possibility to erode the status of

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the standard. To strike a balance between flexibility and the standard’s status is a vital part in the entire process of making standards. Therefore, it would be very useful to list alternative forms or sub-standards under the standard for some period of time, and by doing this, remind the public which hanzi are non-standard variants as a way to help develop a definition of what is standard. 3.1.4.2 Public involvement The enthusiastic public response to some sub-projects of the table has enforced the notion that LP activity is quintessentially a social process. It now seems certain there is a climate of social expectation that people will be treated as a stakeholder on big issues that affect every one. There are many ways to provide an appropriate role for public participation while standards are being developed. One can propagate them through public media, such as by holding public hearings or news briefings on a regular basis by a representative spokesperson, as has been the practice in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The purpose is to extensively involve as much of the population as possible, in addition to the usual closed LP circle of teachers, linguistic experts, dictionary makers and calligraphy artists. Second, it is important to work out appropriate ways to use public opinion as a sounding board. Admittedly, given the sheer size of the population, and the fact that the majority of Chinese are not mature or experienced democratic participants, the public opinion pool can only serve as a starting point and their participation could be seen as a symbolic or token. Nevertheless, a limited discussion is better than none as there is an essential distinction between public opinion and expert comments. This is particularly the case since there have been lessons to be learned from dealing with the pronunciation of some hanzi. Unfortunately, in all three of the key papers presented by official scholars about the tentative plan, little mention has been made about measures to guarantee public acceptance, or about maintenance mechanisms as part of implementation. 3.1.4.3 About SSS characters As previously indicated, over two decades after their wholesale rejection, some SSS characters “have already taken root in the hearts of the people. At least some of them should be listed parallel to official standard characters in state-sanctioned dictionaries” (Wang 1992: 19). This has also been acknowledged in the Tentative Plan of the CTSC, which states that “some SSS characters are quite successful”. Furthermore, from the findings of the handwriting style investigation (Chapter 3), it is tempting to assume that ordinary people’s acceptance of SSS characters is not an

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isolated event, but pervasive, found in nearly every rung of society. This is also strongly and vividly supported by the photographic evidence in Huang Peirong’s (1992: illustrations on pages 5-21) research taken across China over a span of three-and-a-half years, from August 1988 to April 1992. The CTSC offers a good opportunity to re-think and re-assess the SSS. Some of the best-accepted SSS hanzi obviously deserve recognition in some form, even if they cannot be accorded full official status. Unwillingness or further delay in recognizing these facts fails to reflect the reality of character use in the current context, and risks creating public vexation if other seemingly implausible characters are likely to be included in the would-be standards. This suggestion reflects the fact that while standards provide ‘leadership’, they also need to reflect public usage if they want to gain widespread acceptance. A delicate balance needs to be struck. Public resistance to LP change can undermine standards and their use. This issue is further discussed in Section 3.2, Chapter 6. 3.1.4.4 Computability and internationality IT motivation and international compatibility have been repeatedly cited as the major reasons for this project, but no concrete actions to address these two objectives can be found in the three aforementioned articles, despite there being constructive and insightful proposals put forward as early as 1982 by Hu Qiaomu (Editing Team 1999: 288-289, 299). In order to make the hanzi components more transferable, conveyable and decomposable, the most desirable outcome is to reduce the total number of components through merging, altering or discarding some variant forms. Hanzi’s internationality is another topic that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, and the project’s first and seventh operational guidelines were that “the CTSC should have no effect to broaden the discrepancy with other hanzi-using communities” (Zhang S.Y. 2003). Since in the medium term, a unified system is not an achievable goal, a small step in that direction could be taken by unifying the physical shape of some commonly used hanzi, i.e., to standardize traditional characters and the so-called inherited hanzi in conjunction with LP authorities in Taiwan. However, it is noticeable that no overseas standards have been mentioned in any publication discussing the Table. Although in theory nobody doubts that conscious efforts will be made to narrow the graphically based differences, without tangible measures, such as a liaison body to tackle the issue through explicit coordination, it is reasonable to cautiously predict that divergence across the Strait may unavoidably widen and permanently fossilize. As will be discussed in the following section, a hanzi standardization operation of a similar scale is going on in Taiwan,

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and it will be too late to coordinate these projects if it is not done at this stage. The reason is simple, putting political factors aside, because both sides have invested a great deal of effort and manpower, and a huge budget as well, the outcomes, if they are allowed to develop separately, are almost irreversible.

3.2

Overhauling the Repertoire of Chinese Writing System: Corpus of Whole Chinese Characters

Paralleling the CTSC, another even more ambitious LP infrastructure project – the Corpus of Whole Chinese Characters (CWCC) – was conceived at about the same time. As part of the modernization process, a number of corpuses have developed through linguistic statistics in the different domains of its use. The following discussion examines the building a corpus of Chinese characters. The purpose of this project is to build a platform to standardize all Chinese characters not included in the CTSC and to secure a place for them in the future extension of Unicode. As Zhao (2005: 365) has observed, the ultimate aim of the CWCC is to: assemble all signs and symbols that have ever existed, and then to standardize them in a systematic framework. It is hoped that one day, through the overhaul and integration into an international standard, scholars will be able to turn all characters from oracle bones, bronzes, silk and bamboo, into a magnetic and optical format of a Unicode system. While mainly targeting the ancient scripts of Chinese writing system (e.g., jiaguwen, jinwen; see Prologue 2.1.1), the character corpus also includes the obsolete hanzi-derived scripts of all the non-Chinese minorities that have ever existed in Chinese history, Chinese dialectal characters and all those symbolic signs containing vital historical information that are considered to be of importance in recording the Chinese cultural heritage. From an organizational point of view, although listed as one of the working agendas of SCLW in 2004, it is different from the CTSC in that it is not being carried out by a well-coordinate research team, and the final outcome of the CWCC will be one, or a number of corpuses that integrate the outcomes achieved by the relevant projects that had been going on for quite some time. These projects “have been spread over a number of universities and research institutions across the country, and are being carried out in a piecemeal manner by researchers in different academic areas” (Zhao 2005: 365).

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Every one agrees that human written communication is experiencing a revolutionary transformation from paper-based data to magnetic and optical formats, from a static to a flowing and changing existence, where existing forms of data are constantly being transmitted around the world over international communication networks. For this transmission to occur in the international community, all scripts that want to participate in this transmission circle have to be encoded using certain conventions and standards. At the moment, the emerging standard designated to breaking down the language barriers erected by the divergence of orthographies is Unicode, although there are a number of rival standards (see Section 4, Chapter 7). For those scripts that plan to be included in Unicode, no matter how ancient or modern, they need to get permission to enter the Unicode family. A standardization-oriented overhaul is the first step in this process as the Unicode Consortium has determined that it does not accept nonstandardized scripts. Starting with GB 2312-80, in collaboration with offices of technological standards and the departments concerned, Chinese language LP authorities have promulgated a series of character tables and standard character code sets in the 1980s and 1990s. If one takes into account of submissions from other Chinese character-using countries and regions, it can be said that basic parts of the massive hanzi system have already been Unicoded. So far, the joint research team of ideographical orthography under ISO 10646, consisting of scientists from China, Japan and Korea has completed over 71,000 hanzi for codification purposes. At present, these East Asian ideographs are encoded using abstract characters instead of a glyph, which could be conveniently understood as the actual character in print medium (i.e., paper, screen). The future direction for Unicode is that it will be able to provide a language-base glyph for defining distinct graphic peculiarities for every individual character of each specific hanzi system. To use Cook’s term (2001: 3), this approach is called “text-based” or “source-based” encoding, which seeks to document the historical context from whence the glyph used is derived, so that the individual shape of each character in specific texts and inscriptions can be preserved in cyberspace. To provide Unicode with a glyph description of those special hanzi requires a great deal of standardization and typologization revitalization work. As stated previously, a core part of the CWCC project is providing standard forms for either local dialects or historical hanzi. The majority of these characters, plus other unorthodox folk hanzi and culturespecific symbols, are facing extinction as most are not available even in the paper-based medium. It is clear that we are rapidly approaching a Unicode-based society in which a lack of standardization is fatal. Li

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Yuming (2004a), director of the RIAL, aptly points out that the only way to preserve these unique graphics in their original form is “to integrate them into the Unicode system, and to assign each sign a sole and individual code point”. The sheer scale and complexity of the proposed CWCC can be seen from the diverse sources of characters: • All currently used hanzi, specifically and scientifically, all hanzi used as written communication tools to record mainstream Han culture after the Li-Change (see Section 2.1.6, Prologue), i.e., simplified and complicated characters as well as legacy characters. Noteworthy is that SSS hanzi, which are supposed to be listed in this category, are intentionally not mentioned here. • Unofficial but popular hanzi and locally used hanzi in some areas, including dialectal hanzi, unorthodox/folk hanzi, whether historical or in current use, even the variants, miswritten/mis-structured hanzi by accidental error and adulterated or irregular form hanzi, found on stone tablets and rubbings, which are an important source of unofficial hanzi in history. • Archaic/ancient characters, including jiaguwen, jinwen, Warring States characters, characters on bamboo slips, silk and seals, Small Seal Characters (213-206 BCE.) and all other hanzi before the Li-Change. • Derivative hanzi, used by other nationalities living in China in ancient times or today, e.g., the ancient script of Zhuang, Western Xia script (existent in Northwest China from 1038 to 1227), big and small characters of Khitan, which were derived from hanzi. • Non-hanzi characters used by other ethnic groups in ancient and today’s China, for instance, the Nakhi nationality (inhabiting parts of Yunnan Province). • Phonetic scripts of minority nationalities such as Mongolian script, Tibetan and Uygur (or, Uighur) scripts (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region), etc. • International phonetic symbols annotating Chinese ancient and modern languages (putonghua, dialects, Archaic Chinese and scripts for minorities), as well as other phonetic symbols unique to China’s languages. • Strokes, components, radicals and all other composing units of all ideograms. • Culture-relevant signs and symbols, such as signs found on pottery ware, divinatory symbols in the Book of Changes (Yijing, Chinese classical philosophy; its hexagram symbols already encoded in Unicode 4.0), signs and symbols for Daoism (the only Chinese indigenous

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religion formed during the Tang Dynasty on the basis of Daoist theory), signs and symbols in Chinese ancient mathematics and music. So far, only Women’s Script and Tao’s hexagram symbols have been encoded in Unicode. The ambitious plan of the CWCC, characterized by its inclusive marshalling of all representations of the Chinese ideographic system is in its very essence the encoding of the past for the future. It recodes the life experience of the Chinese writing system from the oracle bones to the computer. In this sense, it is a major LP revision of the language to make it accessible in the information age. It is indisputably the most important infrastructure project ever established for the Chinese writing system. The best way to understand why the launch of the CWCC as a platform to deliver Chinese culture online is becoming an administratively determined target, and has become a hot topic for the past few years, is through its implication for national pride and political sensitivity. While taking account the political implications for national unification, if China wants to integrate into the international mainstream the various ancient forms of non-Han culture, represented by hanzi-derived characters, it must make sure that none will be ignored or missed in its continuing efforts to secure more space in Unicode. Unicode’s growing impact on the development of IT has also entered the political arena. The authors predict that political considerations will inevitably be encountered with a pluricentric language, where the same orthography serves as writing system in more than one polity. For most nation-based writing systems, standardization can be successfully done without causing much trouble in relation to legitimacy and ownership, but in pluricentric languages the possibility arises for hostile confrontations because of inherent ideological antagonisms or historical complications. A specific example in the case of China would be the formulation of the first international hanzi encoding standard CCCII. The CCCII, which was unilaterally submitted by a semi-official research team in Taiwan in 1981, and was kept secret from those on the Mainland until it was published and came into force (Hsieh and Huang 1989: 5). These days, playing the cultural card is a newly emerging feature in the fight to win over the public across the Strait. Taiwan has always seen itself as the legitimate owner of the Chinese traditional heritage and the Communist Mainland as its destroyer. On the linguistic front, the competition was previously played out over simplified hanzi vs traditional hanzi, and now the two rivals are competing with each other by claiming to preserve Chinese traditional culture in the digital media. A project similar to the CWCC, a 5-year national project (2002-2006), called the ‘National Digital Archives

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Program’ (NDAP), was launched in Taiwan on January 1, 2002 (Hsieh 2002). The output of NDAP will be a centralized database called ‘the Taiwan Digital Archives (TDA)’, which is technically compatible with international databases, and readily collaborates “with any project that cares about cultural heritage and digitalizes it as shareable precious resource for all mankind”. A tentative comparison found that while the Mainland’s CWCC is still in its embryonic stage, Taiwan’s NDAP is already partly available, probably because it is relatively modest in scale, while the CWCC is too ambitious and ambiguous to see any concrete result in the near future (see Zhao 2005: 365). It was also found that major parts of the two projects overlap with each other, and both are targeting the potential market of encyclopedic referencing and archiving, the two top-ranking areas in a list of ten functions of the World Wide Web of the future (Crystal 2001).

4.

TENTATIVE SUMMARY

Generally speaking, as a common code for communication, a writing system is different from other tools serving human use. To ensure communicative efficiency it needs to be standard with as little variability as possible; yet, since language is a dynamic process and is continuously being subjected to change and diversification, it needs to be flexible. Wright (2004: 53) has summarized the dilemma saying, “there is a perpetual tension as centripetal forces of convergence compete with centrifugal forces of differentiation”. Hanzi is a writing system that is notorious for its variety and irregularity in shape, but instability of structure aside, a still greater problem is its unstable number of characters because of its openness to invention, making it impossible to rule out new, instantly created members of the system. Lin Yun (1988: 147) makes the point that new characters are created and used by the public whenever they want every day. In Wang Fengyang’s (1989: 573) words, “stability is only momentary [in historical terms], change is invariable and never-ending.” This suggests that the openness of the hanzi system requires some degree of standardization in order to maintain communicative efficiency. In most cases this is seen as a gradual process that occurs automatically. Yet, it also opens the possibility that in some rapidly changing situations there may be a need for outside intervention because changes are greater than natural development can accommodate. In history, as Huang (1956:

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33-38) observes, in order to control the chaos in character creation and use, Chinese governments have carried out orthographic modifications and rectifications every few hundred years, and it has been common practice to implement these standards through legal requirements. An example of this occurred in 1986, when urgent technological demands pushed the government to reassess its LP agenda, and IT-oriented standardization was identified as a priority in the new context. Important as it is, there seems to exist a perpetual conflict between the standardization required by mechanical application and the flowing nature of language as a human communication system. As a result, standardization is on the one hand conditioned by various external factors of human activities, and on the other hand, by fact that the planned outcome of standardization has to be acceptable to the target population. These two topics will be addressed respectively in next two chapters.

Chapter 5 INFLUENCING OUTCOMES Sociolinguistic Analysis of Non-Character-based Issues

1.

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter, the possible future directions for hanzi change were examined from a linguistic perspective. However, to plan language is to plan society, and this chapter focuses on the socio-political factors that provide the environmental conditions for programs to be planned and policies to be implemented. As Cooper (1989: 177) indicates, “to understand the impact of any given instance of language planning one must understand the general social context in which it is embedded”. Baldauf (1990: 16) identifies some of the intervening variables which have been suggested as influential in planned language change or language maintenance as they are related to LP. He further points out that “in differing situations, these variables may influence to varying degrees the character and development of language planning policy”. The intervening variables suggested were: • perceived economic demand (e.g., trade, tourism, Grin 2003); • the need for information and scientific exchanges (e.g., Grabe and Kaplan 1986, Jernudd and Baldauf 1987, Ammon 2001); • nationalism (Fishman 1973; Maata 2005); • ethnic identity (e.g., Edwards 1985); • religion (e.g., Das Gupta 1971; Schiffman 1996); • historical circumstances, the growth of urbanization (Jourdan 1990); • bureaucracies and education (Shuy 1988, Sommer 1991, Moore 2001, Baldauf and Ingram 2003). 191

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As can be seen from the previous chapters, since 1949 Chinese language reforms have followed a zigzag course. The past years have witnessed many a reversal of policy and official pronouncement on the issues being debated. While many may be only short detours from the main course, some shifts seem to be a change of direction. The developing course has been largely a result of interaction between Chinese language characters’ features and other complex but relevant influential factors. However, what aspects should be taken into consideration when further reform becomes necessary in the new century remains to be explored. While acknowledging that formation and development of script reform have been conditioned by numerous factors, seven of these have been identified here, which we suggest can be arranged along a cline related to the degree of profoundness of change. Less profound 7. International Environment the more profound the change in dimension, the more likely the influence

6. Domestic Politics 5. Socio-cultural Context 4. Political Climate across the Strait 3. Demographic Picture 2. Technology and Economic Impact

More profound 1. Achievement of the Relevant LP Work Figure 5-1. Hierarchical layers of seven sociolinguistic dimensions

The seven sociolinguistic dimensions1 presented in Figure 5-1 are not all equally important to character reform. In the following discussion, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how each of these sociolinguistic dimensions might be associated with each of the possible programs of reform. It is generally agreed that for script reform to happen, it is the

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external enabling conditions that determine internal permitting conditions, rather than the other way around. In the Chinese context, it can be contended that the likelihood and degree of character change totally depends on some combination of these external enabling factors. A sound technical base is certainly crucial for any attempt at script reform, but the impact or resistance that could lead to failure is most often related to factors that are less profound in the hierarchy of the seven dimensions. In the past, when reform programs were initiated, inner-linguistic, or technical factors were given the most attention by planners. In the future, more weight will need to be given to the societal constraints, particularly those less profound factors which are easily ignored but tend to have a big impact in certain circumstances, particularly in an unpredictable polity. For instance, users’ attitudes are closely related to cultural values and sociopolitical settings, which also have been important in script reforms implemented in other parts of the world. But some seemingly trifling matters that may not pose a problem in other polities have the possibility to create catastrophic consequences under certain circumstances in an implicit but fundamental manner in the Chinese context. This can best be understood by following a careful analysis of the characteristics of the Chinese situation and a variety of Chinese linguistic features. Thus, each dimension is examined by applying one of the following research methodologies: 1) generalizations from historical experience, 2) an examination of the current trends and future directions using analytic approaches, 3) international comparisons, or 4) empirical evidence. The influence of these non-linguistic factors may be quite uneven on each of the specific reform dimensions, with some having more weighty consequences in conditioning the proposed changes, or in some cases, the relationship might be distant or have a neutral effect. In other words, it may be that the existence of an impinging factor is more apparent in some cases than in others, depending on the particular sociolinguistic circumstances. Generally speaking, overt change is more explicit than covert, while indirect change seems to be more implicit.

2.

LINGUISTIC RESEARCH AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF LP

This section examines how the bottleneck in hanzi computerization can be addressed to a significant extent through a linguistic approach, the effectiveness of which in turn depends on how successfully putonghua

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popularization, one of three major tasks of LP since the 1950s, can be accomplished. But before proceeding to see how computer technology is related to linguistics and LP issues, it would be beneficial to provide some relevant background about the phonological features of Chinese characters. The phonetic system for Modern Official Chinese is composed of three spelling elements: 21 initials and 39 finals plus four tones. The combination of these three elements can produce a total of 417 valid pronunciations for modern Chinese. In other words, a limited number of sounds need to represent over 3,000 (most frequently used characters), or nearly 80,000 (the total number in a published dictionary) graphically different character forms. Given Chinese characters are monosyllabic, and the tremendous discrepancy between the number of characters and the number of syllables, it is only to be expected that there are a vast number of characters that are represented by homophonous syllables2. This suggests that when characters are phonetically input by using the 26 letters on the international standard keyboard, the result would be an unintelligible conglomeration of strange or irritating homophonous characters, i.e., chongma, as highlighted in Section 2.2.1, Chapter 3. In the following section, attempts are made to see how the chongma dilemma can be partly resolved through developments in linguistic research and computer applications.

2.1

New Functions for Pinyin and Putonghua

After nearly three decades of chaos and market competition, people have increasingly come to recognize that among the various types of input systems, the phonetics-based software is more productive and therefore has been gradually gaining the upper hand in the competitive marketplace (Lu and Xie 1995). But the ultimate success of phonetics-based schemes depends on a population that has a good command of putonghua and can easily use pinyin on an international keyboard. This is a new phenomenon that enables both pinyin and putonghua to gain a place in public daily life. To be able to use typing software based on putonghua, the speakers of the myriad forms of non-Mandarin Chinese first have to adapt their pronunciation to the official norm. In these terms, the popularity of phoneticsbased input software is becoming instrumental in the spread of putonghua, and conversely, the popularity of putonghua is in turn becoming very critical for IT popularization. Another IT sector that strongly highlights the importance of pinyin and putonghua is the development of speech recognition technology (SR). SR is one of the most interesting future developments, as just like pen input, SR provides one more alternative to keyboard

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input for Chinese users. Its great potential could be another factor to fuel the urgency of standard pronunciation promotion. In this context, the importance and necessity of putonghua promotion for the national development has never before been so acutely felt. Another by-product brought about by computer applications is the emerging function of pinyin. Thus, the long debated issue of digraphia (see Section 2.1, Chapter 7) – the partial move to an alphabetic system – will be strongly boosted by the rapid increase of computer users. In an information intensive life, as shown by the findings from our online survey, pinyin is unquestionably the handiest tool for either using the computer as a character processor and/or for the purpose of information search through the Internet. Chinese LPers are welcoming this opportunity, as an ever-growing computer population is going to greatly facilitate pinyin education. At the same time, given the current status of pinyin, there is also a great deal of work to be done in improving its technical aspects (Zhou 2004: 243). This is because the official orthography for spelling pinyin still is not firmly established, as errors can be seen even in linguistic journals and on the most important national TV programs, and are more widespread in the general population.3 The unimpressive outcome of the pinyin and putonghua promotion over the last five decades has attracted extensive criticism, but the advent of the IT age has unexpectedly brought a renewed focus to Chinese LP work. This reminds us of an interesting recurring phenomenon in LP history: it is not uncommon that what has been gained by conscious but fruitless efforts appears insignificant in comparison with a groundbreaking outcome accomplished by unexpected outside forces. As a result, under certain conditions, a seemingly insurmountable difficulty in LP is not a problem at all. For example, people talk about Bollywood’s unexpected yet vital role in spreading Hindi. In contrast, the Indian federal government’s promotion of Hindi has suffered repeated defeats, often developing into bloody fighting in non-Hindi-speaking areas (De Silva 1998). We see a similar scenario in Taiwan (Tsao 2000: 77), where in comparison with the government’s coercive measures, the 2-year compulsory military service requirement, together with other such outside LP or covert factors, has become a more important part of the successful Mandarin promotion policy. The strong impact that Thai TV has had on the unintentional but unstoppable spread of Thai in Laos serves as another apt example (Keyes 2003).

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Influencing Outcomes

Implications of Linguistics Science

The conflict between the technological development and the Chinese language is characterized by the constraint of character/word processing on the wider application of AI and CIP. Around the mid-1990s there had been a widespread recognition, in the linguistic domain that a hanzi encoding (input) and decoding (output) technology was the first step for AI and CIP development. But the obvious is often easy to miss, leading to the failure to give adequate attention to the relationships between AI development, input method upgrading and linguistic study. AI benefits linguistic studies, whereas enhanced input efficiency in turn pushes AI development forward – it is a chain reaction effect for the development of the IT industry. 2.2.1

The Ultimate Solution to the Homophonous Quandary

As described in Chapter 3, a major problem to be faced by all phonetic input schemes and natural language processing systems is that of resolving ambiguity, namely, the selection from two or more possible orthographic transcriptions of a match for a given acoustic input. The problem of chongma used to be regarded as a fatal disadvantage and an irresolvable drawback for phonetic schemes. Thus, how to disambiguate the homophonous syllables has been the biggest hindrance that IT developers have been trying to overcome. There are two underlying principles that can be used to automatically differentiate the homophonic syllables: statistics/ corpus-based and principle-based. Prior to the mid-1980s, character differentiation was mainly done through the statistics method. The system’s ability to distinguish the desired characters from other phonically identical syllables depended entirely on the character’s occurrence rate in the static text. The statistical system works, because unrelated characters are unlikely to come together to form lexically correct words or phrases. There is a statistical likelihood that characters paired in the internalized data bank (dictionary) with other characters are the ones most likely to be linked with them. In corpus linguistics, these are called collocations, which are statistically significant because the articulate unit can be identified through collocational probability, or co-occurrences of words in the corpus. The linguistic principle-based method is also known as the Intelligent Encoding Scheme (Zhineng Fa), because of its ability to intelligently identify the specific characters with a relatively high accuracy rate, and this is achieved through understanding the wider coherence of input texts. The development of this kind of input system is based on the linguistic fact that the majority of ambiguous symbols can be easily disambiguated in

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context. Intelligent schemes pick characters according to their understanding of whole sentences by using linguistic principles involving a more sophisticated process of automatically analyzing the syntactic structure of the whole sentence, such as a large size parsed corpus (grammatically annotated) that is fairly accurate in dividing input strings of phonetically represented hanzi into syntactically correct units, or applying the preinternalized grammar tree which provides a labeled analysis for each sentence to show how various words function in context. The best way to illustrate how this process works is by looking at an example. If the following sentences are phonetically input into the computer, statistics-based systems would fail to identify the individual characters due to their inability to disambiguate each pinyin syllable, which usually represents more than ten characters. Intelligent schemes do not attempt to guess individual characters until the last word is input. In other words, once the whole sentence is completed, the computer, through its built-in global knowledge database and automatic processing algorithm, can systematically identify the syntax structure of the whole sentence. Once ambiguity is automatically ruled out, the program immediately will be able to translate and transcribe phonetic pinyin input into Chinese characters in one pass. A. Ta kan shu kan dao le ban JIE. . (He chopped the tree and half of the tree was cut off.) B. Ta kan shu kan dao le ban YE. . (He was reading until midnight.) The collocational nature of the Chinese language is linguistically significant in deciphering acoustic input strings. There has been an increasing awareness of the potential which linguistics can offer for tackling a number of problems in phonetic disambiguation; this quickly emerging method has succeeded to a great extent and is the most promising one among all existing input schemes. The designers’ confidence in this effort is based on the observation that since the homophonous characters have never been felt to be an obstacle in oral communication, they should not be misunderstood by computers either, as computers eventually gain humanlike intelligence. In 1996, Zhou (1999: 224-225; 232-233) observed that input methodology could be considerably enhanced by applying four intrinsic linguistic features of the Chinese language:

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• Syntax study will reveal more rules about how Chinese sentences are being generated; • Frequency statistics help the system to narrow down the most probable characters that the homophonous syllables may represent; • Context has one of the most important roles in accurately identifying the intended characters; • Convenience, present initials and finals. In pinyin orthography, each hanzi is phonetically spelled by two parts: initial and final. Most schemes use only initials to transcribe disyllabic and polysyllabic words. If more phonetic information were input, chongma would be greatly reduced. Jernudd and Das Gupta (1971: 205), believe that “[o]rthographic innovation is fundamentally a speech problem. This is so because orthography is primarily motivated by phonological and morphological rules, in case of alphabetic or syllabic scripts; or by derivations, in case of logographic scripts”. Concurring with this view, Zhou holds that homophones are a linguistic problem rather than a problem of the script, so the homophone-related chongma problems can be effectively dealt with by linguistic means. With the exclusion of the following four categories that should not be considered as homophones, the number of homophones that worry people is not as enormous as has been assumed: • Characters that are not independently used as a word. In modern Chinese, only a relatively few of the most-used characters are actively employed as monosyllabic words4. Research shows that disyllabic input by words or phrases reduces the problem of ambiguity that comes with homophony by thirty percent; • Characters with different tones. For example, there are 48 characters in the Modern Chinese Dictionary with the sound ‘shen’, but if tones are input, ‘shen3’ matches only two characters; • Homophonous characters exclusively used in classical texts should not be seen as homophones in modern Chinese5; • Words and phrases that happen to be pronounced alike. 2.2.2

From Corpus-Based to Principle-Based

The growing importance of principle-based input schemes in CIP parallels the general trend that is occurring in language study; modern linguistics has developed from treating language as a static system to considering it as an active system which takes meanings as crucial. This change has led to a growing consensus in computing linguistics circles in China that in the future, AI is unlikely to take significant steps without a

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quantum leap in Chinese linguistics research, specifically in semantics and pragmatics, or to use a more recent term, lexical pragmatics. Unlike the corpus-based approach that determines characters in words or phrases according to their frequency of occurrence, the principle-based approach identifies the characters in a sentence according to their grammatical functions and syntactic relationships, which are more similar to the way humans understand a sentence. The fact that Chinese is not less efficient because of so many homophones in the actual oral communication presents people with the exciting possibility that the homophone dilemma ultimately can be overcome with a breakthrough in the area of linguistics (Xu J.L. 1999: 124-129). The integration of linguistic knowledge has made the phonetic input approach appealing and effective, and moderate success has been achieved over the last decade or so. More accurate and efficient systems are waiting for the solution to fundamental questions of the dynamic theories of computational linguistics. This is an instance that shows how linguistic research will affect the quality of the input method. Bates and Weischedel (1993: 7) argue that “the modeling of context and using context in understanding language is the most difficult, and therefore the least well-understood area of natural language processing”. The notion that linguistic science is indispensable to hanzi automated processing has been manifested in the heavy reliance on how many rules about the language can be discovered and to what extent the nature of language is revealed. Many experts in the area of hanzi processing and Chinese AI have noticed that every step the CIP takes goes hand in hand with achievements made in the study of language per se. Previously, this kind of study had concentrated on the lower level statistics, such as stroke incidence, corpus building and the so-called expert knowledge bank construction. This kind of work was basically completed during the 1980s and 1990s. To make fuller use of linguistic achievements calls for further collaboration, for which the academic circles have not been ready, because few computer professionals have training in linguistics, and the existing computing linguistic methodology, developed abroad, has little application value because of the unique features of the Chinese language. Now, for the second time, the IT industry has turned to linguistics science to jointly overcome language difficulties as a long-term strategy. Therefore, “starting to focus on teaching the syntactic rules that were intended for the human brain to an electronic brain (computer) was an important turn in strategy for hanzi encoding studies” (Zhang 1997: 80). To restart from a more fundamental level, training the so-called amphibious talents with double degrees in linguistics and computer subjects, has been stated as a goal of LP decision makers, and has become a hot topic.

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Sentence Phrase/vocabulary Character

Character

Phrase/Vocabulary

1970s to 1990s

Knowledge Used Input System

Orientation Technology

Analysis

After the 1990s

Corpus/statistics

Character-based Individual

Character Focused

Future Tendency

Linguistics

Integrated

Phonetic-based Collective Multipurpose /Compatibility

International

Systematic View

Dependency on advance in computer science increased Figure 5-2. The development of input methods and linguistics research

Influencing Outcomes

Organization/ Developer

Text Dependent

Sentence

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The diagram in Figure 5-2 provides a brief overview of the development that Chinese input researchers have undertaken. It also demonstrates the role that linguistic study plays in enhancing character input systems in the future. All in all, the limited results achieved in this area, using traditional corpus-based models of language, have led to an increasing interest in linguistics models. Previously this was based on drawing upon probabilities that were calculated based on frequencies in corpus data, but the real attraction of the computer of the future lies in intelligent systems, and the computer will gain its intelligence for these systems predominantly through the achievements of linguistics research. The rapid advances in computer science provide enough high-speed operation and very large hard disk storage and memory to enable computers to technically gain limitless power and capability. The aggressive intervention of cyber culture into people’s daily lives makes processing hanzi on the computer ever more important. In this sense, it might be appropriate to say that the future of the IT industry in China is more or less determined by linguistics rather than by computer science per se. In saying this, we understand that hanzi modernization is still at the initial stage of providing ideal solutions for CIP.

3.

TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AS A CATALYST

3.1

Conflict between the IT Industry and Hanzi

Technologically inspired change can be understood from the perspective of the Instrument Determinate Theory (see Section 2.3, Chapter 7). In rebuking the attack on the 1956 simplification, Lin Yanzhi (1995: 1), the former vice-director of the SCLW, said: “The gain and the loss of character simplification can only be judged by the computer”. Chinese character computerization includes three composite parts: input, output/ display and CIP. As the examples in the chapters of this book illustrate, the conflict between the latest technology and the oldest surviving writing system (along with ancient Hebrew), is to a greater or lesser extent manifest everywhere. It would be very hard to find a country other than China that has spent a comparable amount of time and intellectual energy on modernizing its

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writing system. Chinese AI projects have been included in the national development plan since 1956 (Feng 1989: 6). It is widely acknowledged that computational linguistics began no later in China than in any other country, but the limited results achieved in computer science are not only disproportional to the manpower and effort Chinese scientists have invested, but also are in sharp contrast with Chinese scientific ability. As an international study report shows6, Chinese scientists have thorough competence across many fields of inquiry and do well in international comparisons. However, while the world has moved into the electronic age, benefiting from the storage, retrieval and manipulation of script-based knowledge, Chinese people – in the home of printing technology and paper making – are still struggling with how to get an intelligible representation of their script on the screen. The cost of this is beyond quantification. As early as the 1980s, Qian Xuesen, one of the major architects of the national defense research infrastructure in China, said, “computer software pertains to the work of language and script”, an insightful proposition signifying the close correlation between technology and LP. Computer popularization not only presents new opportunities for input software developers, but will also act as a driving force in speeding up script reform progress, and standardization in particular.

3.2

Conflict between the IT Industry and LP

The conflict between the market-driven forces and the credibility of the state language policy is a matter of concern in LP circles. One topic of debate is the unintended encouragement of unofficial pronunciation by phonetics-based input systems, targeting certain groups of users, but at the cost of compromising the authenticity of the standard pronunciation of putonghua. In order to cater for potential users in the vast dialect speaking areas, pinyin-based input software developers make their products tolerate a variety of accents reflecting dialectal pronunciation, the very problem that language teachers in schools, universities, and the putonghua training centers are helping their students to overcome; such as the differences in pinyin between zh : z, ch : c, sh : s, n : l, f : h, an : ang, en : eng, in : ing, or j : q. More ironically, in some schemes, when there is a character with more than one pronunciation, the user is often forced to use the wrong spelling in order to get a ‘right character’7. This is like saying that in order to effectively type Chinese on a computer, you need to learn and get used to using incorrect or inaccurate pronunciation! This creates the potential

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risk of unnecessary future problems when the level of language standardization improves. Some of these shortcomings are mistakes caused by the linguistic ignorance of the scheme developers, but most dialect-tolerant software is deliberately designed to accommodate the uncertainties of those customers who do not have confidence in using pinyin because of their poor putonghua ability. Dialect tolerance is promoted as a sales incentive and a system feature in advertisements, in much the same way that American or British speech recognition is touted for English speech recognition programs. Although no investigation has been made to assess to what extent the position of putonghua is influenced or devalued in the public’s eyes by the compromised version of putonghua adopted by the IT industry, LPers in China are not only just standard setters and norm definers, but their work is also vital in the spread and management of the coded products. For officials in the National Centre of Putonghua Testing and Training and experts in the Putonghua Promotion and Research Section in the RIAL, this malfeasance is a flagrantly mischievous challenge to the national language policy. However, while Chinese language management authorities are upset, these violations have not been shocking enough to cause genuine public concern. So language standardizers repeatedly warn that the national commitment to unifying the language is now in danger of being jeopardized by the de facto recognition of dialectal pronunciation in the software market. “[T]he state promotes putonghua as the national standard speech” was enshrined in the 1982 Constitution and was reiterated in the Law of the National Common Language and Script of the P.R. of China (2000).

3.3

The Outcome of Economic Development

Nothing has played a bigger role in shaping China’s LP landscape than the rapid economic transformation that has taken place over the last two decades. Talking about the impact of economic development on LP in China, Yao (2001: 135-136) noted that in the past, national policy could efficiently get to every basic social cell through administrative means and propaganda campaigns, and this was the major reason for the success of previous language reform movements. This highly institutionalized social structure is currently in the process of disintegrating, and people’s behavior is more governed by economic mobility. In comparison with vocabulary and pronunciation, the relationship between economic development and hanzi change is not as noticeable or straightforward. However, the

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writing system was born out of social need and the economy is the foundation of society. When pondering the new social background of character standardization, Wang Tiekun (2003) argues that the rapid technological and social development stimulates an ever more active linguistic life. 3.3.1

Economic Activities and Character Use

Li Junqun (2000: 184) describes three characteristics of the market economy that had not been seen before China’s embarkation on the road to economic reform: unification, openness and competitiveness. In applying these emerging characteristics to analyze the impact of economic development on hanzi reform and evolution, it can be seen that during the period when the last standardization campaigns were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese socialist economy was best developed. This not only created the preferred conditions for implementing a series of reform activities to modify characters, but the resultant simpler standardized orthography was also a positive contributing factor in the country’s rebuilding process. Today, the Chinese market economy has entered its third decade and the current LP program is the outcome of trying to address the contemporary requirements for social development. LP will face even bigger challenges as it has to address more drastic change in economic areas. These changes can be seen in the three challenges mentioned previously: unification, openness and competition. (1) Unification means nationalization and integration in an economic sense. A unified economy will eventually bring an end to piecemeal local and individual economic activities. Xu (1998) and Yao (2001) note that, as a result of economic development and market maturity the people are no longer confined to their native location as they used to be, living there for generations and generations. Ager (2003) observes that in the development of English standardization history, “the urbanization and the population shift from an agrarian society toward industry [meant] drastic changes”. China has seen an ever bigger and dynamic circulation of the whole population with extensive travel and frequent interaction of a large number of migrant workers (70 million) requiring an ever higher level of language and script standardization to guarantee competent communication. Printed products have never before played such an important role in facilitating economic activities. This is creating a favorable environment for written communication, and will put increasing pressure on regional influences, predominantly the dialectal characters and rare characters for geographical

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names. At the same time, this also provides opportunities for some necessary dialectical words to enter putonghua, as well as for a number of local, culture-specific characters to gain currency (Lin 1998: 13-19). The result of economic integration and ever more frequent regional contacts may have the potential to change the status of some characters (e.g., Wang 2004a: 42). For instance, while some rare characters may lose their fertile environment and finally fall into disuse, a number of uncommon hanzi are likely to become more frequently used in daily life across the nation. Thus, the likelihood of their promotion to higher use positions in a future table of standard characters has increased. (2) Openness refers to economic internationalization. Mutual linguistic influence is in essence an economic competition. It is always the case that the language of the dominant economy has the advantage over that of a less developed economy. This has happened again and again, both within the country and in contact with the outside world. Zhou’s (2001a) study shows that promotion of Putonghua in the Shanghai and Guangdong areas has experienced greater difficulty than in any other regions in the country. He attributes the conflict between local speech and putonghua to economic reasons. As Chen Songcen’s (1991: 31-32) study reveals, since the opening-up policy was adopted in 1978 through to the 1990s, the Cantonese accent was fashionable and traditional hanzi flooded the country. Character standardizers in LPP authorities have always been alert to the impact of character forms from outside, mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong, including non-Chinese hanzi. In the future, overseas investment will continue to increase rather than decrease. However, it is too early to say whether an insurrection of traditional forms, on the scale seen in the 1980s, will happen again. On the other hand, with the radical growth of the domestic economy, the indigenous industrialists have become more aggressive in seeking overseas markets. This will lead to wider geographical distribution of simplified characters and spread their influence beyond China’s borders. (3) Competition. As the Chinese economy continues to mature, the increasing competition in the economic arena will force the industrial and commercial sectors to care more about overall quality in order to promote their commodities. There is no doubt that linguistic factors, particularly writing, can win a company the competitive edge in a cost-cutting marketplace. The linguistic role in building up the company’s image, the corporate culture and product reputation has been increasing. The decorative character is used as the face of the company and its product. It is commonly believed that non-standard characters are associated with shabby and fake brands made by small businesses. Increasingly, quality-conscious

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consumers have come to understand that one important practical method of judging a commodity’s quality is the degree of standard character use. Script quality also affects the advertising and propaganda effort; ignoring it risks dissuading the public from buying the product. Misuse of characters on advertisements and instructions tends to have a deleterious effect on product sales. Therefore, hanzi use increasingly is becoming an issue that business cannot afford to ignore. On the other hand, characters used in commercial areas, despite their small number, contribute significantly to the nation’s language policy due to their high visibility. The commercially motivated misuse of characters is an important battlefield for social awareness campaigns that promote standard hanzi. This topic is touched on in the sections which follow, e.g., in examining the role of calligraphy in shaping the image of character forms. 3.3.2

Economic Development and the IT industry

The economic effect on script reform can be related to more specific examples. When talking about the public’s preference in choosing phonetics-based or ideography-based input software, Mair (1991: 2) notes, “the availability of virtually unlimited cheap labor means that cost effecttiveness is not yet a significant factor within China proper ...”. This situation has changed. While there used to be a time when some ‘fast’ input schemes required up to a year of sustained training and memorization (Thompson 1991: 124), increasing competitiveness in economic activities is speeding up the pace of life, making people more hesitant to spend time attending computer input training courses. Thus, the appetite for ideographic input schemes has significantly diminished due to people’s unwillingness to invest time just to gain typing skills. This scenario will undoubtedly give a new boost to the mainstream position of phoneticsbased input methods, and then give a significant push to the three basic tasks of LP. At a higher level, the more the economy develops, the more important linguistic affairs will become. It was impractical to expect the government to vigorously initiate more meaningful LP operations before the economy was about to take off. In the following discussion about the effect of economic prosperity on Japanese LPP, Gottlieb and Chen (2001: 11) outline a relationship that is perfectly applicable to the Chinese situation: Economic prosperity can be a factor in determining the degree of importance which governments attach to language planning. A government bent on turning around a failing economy is unlikely to consider

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language planning a high priority, unless it can be shown that a direct economic benefit is likely to result. More significantly, as economic reforms are going to intensify the demand for IT products, the outcome of LP has in turn begun to carry increasingly greater weight in building up national strength. With the distance between the computer and the average population narrowing, due to the improvement of living standards, IT development has increasingly become an essential attribute of a country’s economic success, especially the capability of a country’s competitiveness in the international economy. It is hard to imagine that a modern society can develop its potential without a sound foundation in the IT industry. As identified in the Fifth Annual Conference by the National Association of Chinese Information Processing (Feng 1995: 87), “CIP is the foundation and core of the Chinese IT industry, and the basic building block of CIP is the technology of Chinese character processing”. In order to participate fully in the international information network as a modern state, obtaining a means to facilitate smooth and rapid transmission of information must be the most important motivating force, leading to the ultimate resolution of the script issue. The evidence available lends support to the claim that by 2010, China will have one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in the world. If we look at the key elements of developing the IT industry, China has trained a large number of qualified programmers (some 325,000 new engineers were graduating from Chinese universities every year in the 1990s) and has the potential to produce international standard hardware. China aims to “match and eventually exceed other nations in the region as a prime exporter for software development, IT services and product testing” (Shidner 2004). The obstacle that has yet to be overcome is the writing system. Being regarded as the weak link in the IT industry’s development, hanzi has long been prone to criticism from specialists and society as a whole (Feng 1997). After a century of struggle to modernize the Chinese language and script, in Chinese intellectual circles the following simplified linear model of the effect of hanzi inefficiency on national modernization has long been accepted. Inefficiency of script system (mass illiteracy) Difficulties of hanzi computerization (incompetent automatic processing of information, unimpressive achievement in AI) IT industry bottleneck Poor performance in science and technology Impact on economic development Slow-down in national modernization process.

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The passing of time has seen a fundamental shift in the way that LPP has been related to the nation’s economic endeavors. Before the advent of computers, the central concern of hanzi’s impact was on the quality of manpower – a modern nation cannot be built by an illiterate population. Today, LP’s massive directional impact on the economy takes a new form. It contributes to the nation building more through technological development than literacy rate, although a mass-accessible script system is equally desirable. Therefore, current script reform shoulders a two-fold task: first, the vast rural areas are still dominated by a large population of illiterate peasants. Thus, the problems facing the LPers in the 1950s still need to be addressed. Second and more importantly, given the centrality of the IT industry for the national economic future, educating all computer illiterates is the new mission of technology-centered and future-oriented LPers, which is no less difficult a problem to solve than the former assignment.

4.

SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC FEATURES

As we have seen in this monograph, a top-down LP model has dominated in the past as language reforms were always initiated by intellectual elites or dictatorial authorities on behalf of the entire society. Since the beginning of the 1980s, as a result of economic development, an overwhelming change has occurred in the population composition and social structure. Among these changes are a higher literacy rate, greater educational opportunities and, most obviously, a democratic awareness of the need to defend collective rights and to be able to access information, to protect the local culture and even to gain legal rights for greater freedom of speech. The success rate of LP programs depends on a number of demographic variables based notably on group solidarity and the cohesiveness of a community. The following discussion explores how these new difficulties can be confronted by ever widening segments of the population.

4.1

Widespread Literacy

The most evident and direct factor in the demographic dimensions that tend to exert an effect on a writing system is literacy. Population make-up and literacy have changed due to the government’s commitment to birth control and the improvement of living standards, combined with efforts in mass education to eradicate illiteracy. These changes have created at least three new scenarios in the area of script reform.

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4.1.1

Questioning the Basic Reasons for Simplifying Characters

When New China was established, it is estimated that the illiteracy rate was above eighty percent. Since then the illiteracy rate has been steadily reduced from 38.1 percent of the population in 1964, to below 15 percent at the end of last century, with the current illiterate population being mostly non-urban elderly. Vast illiterate masses have been the target of every literacy education campaign, and simplified characters were most welcomed by the less educated population. By the year 2000, according to an official figure, China had basically obtained a universal 9-year compulsory education, with youth illiteracy reduced to 4.8 percent and adult illiteracy down to 8.72 percent (Ministry of Education 2002: 101102)8. The reduction of the illiterate population has greatly reduced the desire for simplification (see the following section). Related to this, new studies indicate that the ‘three difficulties’ of learning traditional characters are only applicable to beginning learners, and members of the most supportive group of simplification are predominantly those who have only a mediocre command of character reading and writing. Li (2004c: 64) asserts in a recent research paper that “illiteracy elimination will no longer be the major concern in a new round of hanzi overhaul”. 4.1.2

The Overall Desire to Change the Script Might Dwindle

Because previous script reform beneficiaries oppose any further reform that would make their acquired skills obsolescent, wide-spread literacy may possibly have a reverse effect on further character reform. The literati are considered a reactionary force in the cause of script reform in any polity, and low literacy, as a factor favoring reform when such reform is being considered, has been shown to be a key factor contributing to the successful accomplishment of script reform. For example, Totten (2004: 349, also see Nie 1998: 208) observes that when the pro-masses phonetic Hangul was adopted in Korea in 1443, it was opposed by the conservative bureaucracy (literate class of Chinese hanzi), since “it would undermine their monopoly of reading and writing”. Zhou (1986c: 182-183) comments, “Quite a few people, who used to support simplified characters two decades ago, change their mind nowadays. The implication of this kind of change is worthy of research.” He goes on, “Once a person is in command of characters, he would like them to be standardized and stabilized.” Zhou (1986a) and Yu Xialong (1978: 128) hypothesized that the unacceptability of the SSS occurred because of the success of the previous simplification – a large number of the current generation have been

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educated in this scheme and got used to it. In Geerts’ (1977: 230-231) terms, the ‘possession-instinct’ plays some part in this kind of writing conservatism: “Spelling conservatism is a very natural thing: its adherents fight for the maintenance of ‘their’ spelling, i.e., a spelling which they have learned, which they have ‘mastered’, and of which they ‘have a perfect command’.” A well-known account, written by Hu Shi (1923: 1-2), can be regarded as another supportive argument: “in my studies in history and the writing evolution, I’ve found a common rule: in language reform history, more often than not, ordinary people are the reformers and scholars and literati elitists are conservatives”. The analysis of attitudes of acceptance or rejection of language reform shows that attitudes among different social groups toward script reform may vary greatly. Generally speaking, less literate people and those in lower occupational strata are radical reformists, while professionals are rather moderate and cautious toward any change made to the script. It seems that a direct correlation exists between resistance to simplification and the education one has. This fact was also reflected in the then Premier, Zhou Enlai’s comment to a French educationist: “In the 1950s, we tried to Romanize the writing. But all those who had received an education, and whose services we absolutely needed to extend education, were firmly attached to the ideogram” (DeFrancis 1984b: 258). 4.1.3

Adding a Factor to Character Stratification

Frequency of use is the first criteria needed to formulate various character tables; a society with a high-rate of literacy requires a larger prescribed number of commonly used characters9. The steady increase of the literacy rate and education level of the general population provides a new dimension in character table formulation. Not only the number of the commonly used characters has to be reviewed and enlarged, but more significantly, the matrix positions of some characters may have to be adjusted. For instance, some less used characters should be upgraded to a more prominent position. Noticing this, Wang Tiekun (2003: 5) pertinently points out, [N]ationwide compulsory education, an apparent uplift of education standards for the general population and also a higher level of cultural life for the whole nation has been achieved. All these factors provide new parameters and context to stratify the number of hanzi by their frequency.

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Continuing improvement in more people’s cultural wellbeing has heralded a change in perceptions of the nature of hanzi. One benefit is that an increasing number of the literate population is liberated from production-related activities, which makes it possible for them to allocate more leisure time to cultural activities. Furthermore, traditional heritage appreciation tends to play an emphatic part in an individual’s life, which may cause a complete turn around towards the value of traditional culture, and likewise traditional characters. The sole justification for Chinese script reform lies in its benefits for the majority, the vast illiterate working class. Peng Xiaoming (2001), a Germany-based Chinese LP critic, is probably right in saying that this majority, as defined in the past, has now steadily become a minority. He further points to a world-wide trend, where people spend less time on basic survival needs and more time on education and cultural activities. Increasing freedom from compulsory, laborious working hours is expected to create an impact on hanzi reform in at least two respects: First, it will enable people to have more time to acquire writing skills, either through formal education or self-study. Secondly, considerable time and money are available for spiritual pursuits indicate a degree of comparative leisure to reflect on one’s own past and culture, including an appreciation of Chinese classical literature and other valuable traditional heritage, which, for some, would prove impossible to access without the requisite knowledge of traditional hanzi.

4.2

Awareness of Democracy

Another emerging relevant consequence of the improvement of living standards, brought about by the economic development is that awareness of democracy among the general population, and their desire to participate in national affairs, will make character reform even more complex. The rising awareness of indigenous languages and cultures, as well as the resurgence of local dialects (e.g., Min speech) in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law, serve as a striking example (Tsao 2000: 101; Chen 1996: 234235). Another notable case is provided by the movement, unleashed by the break-up of the Soviet Union, to remove all traces of Russian influence from the languages of former non-Russian speaking communities (Thomas 1991). The theme of current LP in China focuses on standardization programs, but democracy is synonymous with diversity and pluralism. While technological advancement requires society to engage more with standards, the population at the same time has become increasingly eager for diversity and more set against uniformity. Take the situation of

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hanzi use described in Section 2, Chapter 2 as an example. The initial years of the 1980s, when economic reform and opening-up were first launched, saw a decline in the use of officially sanctioned characters with a greater tolerance towards writing mistakes and individual writing peculiarities. Language is a national resource and public property as well, but in the past, language affairs were arranged and disposed of by default, as it were. As Yang Duan-liu (cited in Barnes 1988) has argued, writing reform depended entirely on a favorable consensus, secured from the favor of a tiny social elite composed of a disproportionate minority. In an information-driven society, new technology advances have been a leveling force in the information monopoly. This has not only created a new breed of youthful and restless citizenry, armed with a fashionable consciousness of distrust in any authority, but the common citizens are also better informed and suspicious about the propaganda fed to them. There is a prevalent assumption in Taiwan that “the Mainland has become more open and progressive. A democratically conscious and wealthy population will come to realize the simplicity and vulgarness of the simplified system and, in consequence, return to the orthodox forms” (Huang 1992: 83). Since, the decision-making process is now more democratic, the oneway top-down tradition of LP is no longer compatible with the new ethos. Radical change in the qualities of the population plus easy access to scholarly research and public opinion have also enabled the general population to articulate their personal concerns. Much more openness now can be found even if one goes to the official government website (www.chinalanguage.gov.cn). Even fairly lengthy ‘reactionary’ arguments can be found on this government-sponsored publication whose declared aim is ‘to spread governmental language policy’.

4.3

Regionalism

Chinese are known to share a sense of linguistic and cultural unity. However, as a result of unbalanced economic development, the gap between different regions is widening. Scattered geographically and defined by monolingual topolects and dialects of extensive divergence, regional loyalties have very deep emotional roots in China. To a considerable extent, these are proving to be the greatest deterrent to any state-mandated measure aimed at advancing homogenous unification and cohesion. Local sentiment is another controversial topic that cannot be overcome easily without sparking a sharp debate. An extreme example of this is the Old

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National Pronunciation. In the conference of National Language Unification in 1913 – a chaotic period when the Manchu empire had just been overthrown and the disintegrating country was ruled by constantly shifting, short-lived governments, maneuvered by regional warlords – the representatives from across the entire country were plagued by quarrelling and decided that the National Standard Pronunciation should be settled by allocating one vote to each province. Over a period of more than a month, phonology experts were engaged in recording pronunciation variants for 6,500 sounds (each associated with a particular character) provided by the provinces, and the so-called Old National Pronunciation was fixed by casting ballots on each one (Wang 1995: 16). This example illustrates that LP is a vulnerable institution, subject to many influences including regional feudalism10. In recent years, one of the side effects of regionalism has been a dangerous undercurrent boosting the enthusiasm for local characteristics, particularly in the relatively rich regions. Local culture preservationists use dialect as vehicle to emphasize local distinctiveness; as a result, standardization is seen as an unnecessary constraint. The manifestation of localism in putonghua promotion is the proposal for an adulterated putonghua with local accent; local/dialect putonghua has been a hotly debated topic since the beginning of 1990. The strongly contested question of the legitimacy of substandard putonghua, in the wake of a heightening regional awareness, has forced the pragmatic national language authority to develop compromise criteria for the pronunciation standard, and the previous mono-norm has been categorized into six grades on three levels on the putonghua proficiency test. However, when lower level putonghua is used for input with software applications, this new classification system only promotes more incompetent computer users. Regionalism also has an impact on the physical shape of hanzi. Dialectal characters are non-official characters and there is an official straitjacket to confine their use in the modern Chinese language. However, their actual existence in local publications is widespread and dynamic, and their gradual permeation into official texts is increasingly unstoppable in some regions. The question of how to absorb the dialect-specific characters into common speech has been a long debated topic with no consensus ever being reached. Cantonese characters are the only dialect-specific characters used in printed publications in Hong Kong. When official censorship was loosened during the 1980s and 1990s, regional sentiment, stemming from rapid economic development, brought these non-official forms to every corner of the country. This created an important paradox in the new era. While machines demand were demanding a more precise linguistic standard, society was

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becoming more democratic and diversified, creating momentum to resist any form of standardization. The confusing situation of different character sets being designated for the local dialect characters in Hong Kong offers a good lesson. Meyer (1998: 35) says, “[a]s if the shortcomings of existing standards and systems were not enough”, the various standard character sets, trying to accommodate the local shapes of characters, released by industry and government offices, “further aggravate the situation, … even a complete implementation of Unicode would not be the solution for the problems …”.

4.4

Down to Reality

An important emerging demographic factor that is very relevant to LP is the high growth rate of the computer literate population in recent years. The growth of families with computers and the expanding number of websites have had an impact on Chinese LP in two respects: First, for the urban population, which accounts for 40 percent of the total, the need to produce handwritten manuscripts is rapidly disappearing, whereas the time they spend on reading websites is increasing daily. This implies, “With the increasingly widespread use of personal computers equipped with Chinese word processing facilities, learning and writing characters may well be less daunting now than it used to be” (Chen 1994: 377). But making hanzi intelligible and displayable on the computer screen has become a practical concern. Second, the impact of technology on most ordinary Chinese should not be overemphasized. If to serve the majority population is still the central task for today’s LPers, demographic figures need further analysis. Thus, the revolutionary change in the national graphic life, caused by the computer, is very limited in the vast, remote rural areas. It is also important to note that in the cities omniscient and ubiquitous telecommunications and other media technology have had an impact only on the computer-literate young, while the older members of society are reluctant to embrace know-how that threatens their established habits (Wang 2001). In essence, script reform is a LP job serving the disadvantaged, and is considered the right course for the majority of the population in a developing country. Just in the very recent past, only a tiny minority of Chinese could afford a computer and even fewer people could get access to the Web. According to an internet source (Yesky.com), the latest survey that sampled 48,704 families in some major cities, found that only 11.7 percent of urban families have computers. The rate of installing a modem, the

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internet and email is 7 percent, 18.4 percent and 13 percent respectively, showing that computers at home are underutilized. According to the World Almanac and Book of Facts (2004), there are 5.9 million internet users. This analysis suggests that while future-oriented technology-based LP policy is the focus of reform activities, there is a danger of loosing sight of the objective if the wider realities and issues are not kept in mind.

5.

POLITICAL CLIMATE ACROSS THE TAIWAN STRAIT

While having basically the same language and script, the variation in language use between the Mainland and Taiwan has a multitude of linguistic manifestations, among which the most visible and controversial is the discrepancy in character form. The extent of the difference between those on either side of the strait is an area of dispute among the common people and among scholars. Those on the Taiwan side exaggerate the divergence while those on the Mainland understate it11. The beginning of the new century saw a desire for unification and leveling of differences. In their elaboration of the future, both sides have agreed that outright acceptance or rejection is not practical. Instead, they should each cling to their own standard and future unification should be carried out on the basis of integrating the best elements of the existing standards based on neither wholesale adopting nor starting again from scratch. The basic consensus is that the two sides are longing for a unified system and that the academic and semi-official contacts to achieve this goal are becoming more frequent. Differences in how to accomplish the goal of orthographic unification exist, but the gap is getting smaller rather than larger.

5.1

The Source of the Difference: Political Rift

The central differences in LP policy across the Strait lie in the choice between traditional and simplified forms of characters. In political terms, simplified forms or traditional forms of hanzi are related to the issue of legitimate ownership. The Nationalist party fled to Taiwan in 1949, but has never officially given up its commitment to resume rule over China proper, at least in terms of its propaganda. Both Chinas, the Republic and People’s Republic, claim to be the legitimate government of China and call each other ‘bandit’ (communist/red bandit vs Chiang (Kaishek) bandit). Simplified

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characters were branded as ‘bandit characters (fei zi – )’ in Taiwan, while orthodox characters were linked to the orthodox government. For the Nationalist Party, which sees itself as the savior of Chinese traditional culture and the owner of the national language, to legalize simplified characters is tantamount to recognizing the legitimacy of the Communist Party. By way of contrast, the absence of politics in LP is perhaps the major reason why Singapore had the self-confidence to simplify hanzi in the 1950s and 1960s, eventually adopting wholesale the Mainland scheme of simplified characters. Taiwan has refused to give official status to ‘bandit characters’ – It did not lift a ban on the unconditional importation of publications in simplified hanzi until very recently. Ironically, since the first free presidential elections in 1996, Taiwan’s political outlook has changed dramatically: the Mainland-rooted nationalist party is now sitting in opposition, and the current government refuses to identify Taiwan with the Mainland. As the language is a recognizable facet of nationhood, the pro-independence ruling party spares no effort to root out any Mainland influence. The change of power has made LP issues doubly complex. Some scholars hypothesize quite reasonably that the Communist government in Mainland China would have had a similarly embarrassing situation in accepting the simplified characters had the Kuomintung government promulgated them first. This hypothesis supported by the latest rejection of pinyin as the official Romanization system in Taiwan in 2002. Given the unshakable international position of pinyin, this reactionary language policy has produced a great deal of brouhaha within the island. In spite of the various justifications given, it is apparent that in formulating LP policy, politics still overrides any other consideration, including economic benefits. The chasm of the orthographic difference across the Strait has been widened because of ideological disputes. Divergence appears in even the least debated areas of how to define the modern national standard. Two decades ago, Chao (1976: 105) crowed that the language “has been largely independent of political development … In matters linguistic, therefore, nobody even raises the question of ‘two Chinas’.” Today, phonological and grammatical standards are also moving rapidly apart. Undoubtedly, under the current circumstances, the intermingling of national unification with LP issues makes doing LP messier and more explosive12. Feng Shouzhong (2006), the president of the Research Association for Common Script, a non-official organization composed of scholars from both Mainland and Taiwan, might be right to some extent in saying that “whenever a new [language planning] scheme is drawn up on the Mainland,

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there would be one coming out from the Taiwan side to counteract it”. Politically, as long as Taiwan remains apart from the Mainland, groping for a new national identity, the case of simplified vs complex hanzi will remain a point of disagreement. Looking at the factors that may influence the LP reform in Mainland China, the Taiwan issue may be far from the script reformers’ minds. Yet at times it can be a decisive influence – national security or unification can suffice as the most eminent reasons for decisions whenever special or unexpected circumstances arise.

5.2

Stability and Unification: From Maintaining the Status Quo to Moving Closer

As we have seen, during the hanzi culture debate “writing unification before the national unification” was one of the slogans that the traditionalists vehemently promoted, and the two sides made some groundbreaking linguistic contacts during the 1980s and 1990s. This mutually welcoming climate was maintained for a period prior to 1996, after which the relationship between the Mainland and Taiwan came to a standstill because of missile testing, and the previously frequent contacts were suddenly interrupted. Since then, although from a Mainland perspective unification is an issue of ‘when’ rather than ‘whether’, in official discourse, the Mainland side has taken a laissez-faire attitude to avoid further sensationalizing the problem. This was expressed in a speech by the former Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, made on December 14, 1992, where he indicated that “both sides should adhere to their own standards, discrepancy should be left to future discussions” (Education Office 2001: 293). Considering that the difficulty of working out a unifying list of standard characters across the Strait is more about ideological differences than sheer linguistic appropriateness, this declaration is obviously a pragmatic strategy. Notwithstanding this position, two factors have made scholars rethink their position over the last few years. Firstly, there is the inconvenience of dealing with Chinese communities outside China. Both, Hong Kong and Macau, have come under Chinese sovereignty, but in terms of characters, the two regions resolutely cling to the traditional system. The need for a unified standard is increasingly becoming an unavoidable topic since the contact between the two script-using areas is, in every respect, increasing at an unprecedented rate – the same trend applies also partly to Taiwan. Before contact was resumed and then increased, people living on either side of the Strait had little idea about the language use of the other. Now,

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that the public is fully aware of the differences, there are hopes that the academics involved will bring change in the direction of unification rather than alienation from each other. As Huang Diancheng (1988: 121-122) has argued: Now that the Mainland and Taiwan have been separated by human intervention, the things that can unify the two sides are language (putonghua and Min dialect) and writing (must be traditional characters). If we do not make use of the existing conditions to link the two sides, it will add another man-made barrier.” The second factor that can be attributed to writing unification is more urgent. In the globalized era, characters are becoming increasingly international, thanks to economic regionalization and the free flow of information over the Internet. The necessity to have a unified standard for each script, imposed by the Unicode consortium, demands immediate action. Despite the prediction that as long as there is political rivalry, language integration is unlikely, the forces at work to unify the hanzi across political boundaries are more vigorous than ever before. In saying this, however, technological reasons have, in the last few years, been playing a growing role in pushing the two sides toward narrowing the gap.

5.3

Looking into the Future: Planning for Unification

The study of language planning requires an identification of major language problems facing a national community, and the situational imperative, generated by developmental needs of the national community, may lead to possibilities of language uniformity by a conscious choice (Jernudd and Das Gupta 1971). In the new era, a positive change on the Mainland side of the Strait has already begun. There has been a growing awareness that a small number of traditional characters were unnecessarily simplified in the first place, of which only eight were resumed in 1986. Since then, there have not only been traditional character lovers that would like to see more elements of the original forms come back into use, but the call to resume at least some carefully selected original characters also comes from a wider range of different specialist areas, especially from IT experts. Hu Shuangbao (1998: 52) points out, “The traditional character can promote the exchange between the two sides, and benefit the peaceful unification of the motherland; that is the pragmatic role and contribution of

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the traditional character. This was probably the thing we did not think of in the 1950s, but we will be more perceptive in the future”. From a Mainland perspective, the importance of the unification with Taiwan is a political cause. Therefore, surprising latitude can be allowed in order to woo compatriots from across the Strait, sometimes stretching the imagination a little bit, as when Fei (1991: 122-123) proposes: If, in the future, the need arises from our Great Course of Unifying the Motherland, we may have to carry out a larger systematization of simplified characters. My personal premature opinion is, that our Mainland can re-simplify those improperly simplified characters, even returning to their traditional forms, while, at the same time, adopting the sound elements from the experience in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In the new historical conditions, simplification or complication will not be a question when it comes into direct conflict with the greater course of national unification. In a high pressure situation, idealism is forced to give way to more practical pursuits, where something else may be of higher priority, rather than the physical forms of the writing system. As Wang Fengyang (1989: 683) argues, “It is always true that at any time the interest of state and nationality comes first …” It can be presumed, therefore, that hanzi could be put to a newer and higher purpose than has hitherto been the case. If a resolution of the writing form was one of the first things on the agenda leading to national unification, it will be easy for the Mainland side to reach a compromise at any time. It appears that those on the mainland have been more active in narrowing the differences needed to standardize hanzi, since compatibility between simplified characters and traditional characters was adopted as one of seven basic principles for formulating the CTSC (Zhang 2004: 230). Another important example is evidenced in the preface of Standardized Stroke Order for GB 13000.1 Character Set (1999), the national standard. It clearly states that “as for some complex characters of 20902 [characters], while taking traditional factors into consideration, where possible, the stroke order should be established under the guidance of the principle of being the same as those existing practices in Taiwan and Hong Kong” (Gao 2002: 360). However, so far, no liaison office or organization has been set up for formal and regular contact. No official personnel or specialists have visited the island, but there have been frequent discussions among linguists about the best way to work out a unified list of modern Chinese hanzi.13 Symposia, concerning the Chinese writing systems, have been held in academic circles from time to time over a number of years. Some non-governmental specialist organizations have been established by

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scholars from both sides (see Note 10 in Chapter 6) with the hope that Chinese, living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, can unify their scripts before they come together politically.

6.

POPULAR CULTURE – SHIFTING ATTITUDES TOWARDS CULTURE AND CHARACTERS

The culture-related factor in LP is one of many manifestations of linguistic purism in its most obvious form. Zhou (1986c: 182-183) argues when we look at the implications of people’s attitude shift toward simplified characters, “we probably should not simply impute methodological flaws to some individual cases, … In my opinion, we should broaden our horizon and delve into people’s popular culture and the social effect of simplification.” Any proposal to reform the writing habits of the people without reference to the value system of the entire society would send the wrong message to the masses. Most typically, cultural elements function through a kind of unconscious self-censoring mechanism. The probability to engender this mechanism is higher when the change comes into conflict with the psychological stereotype of cultural perception. It has been a tradition in China to manipulate cultural issues for political purposes. Ji (2004: 283) said that “when the communist party came to power in 1949, it was determined not merely to rule [by force], but to transform the lives and consciousness of the Chinese people”. Modern Chinese history has been characterized by incessant political campaigns, which have invariably ended up as social and cultural movements. Since the beginning of the last century, China has seen two cultural revolutions that have broken cultural continuity and, consequently, have resulted in remarkable progress in language modernization. The first revolution was the May Fourth Movement in 1919, which was initially politically motivated, but eventually developed into a cultural movement aimed at strengthening the nation, and resisting further infiltration of Western culture. Intellectually, it was characterized by the search for the underlying causes of China’s backwardness. Traditional institutions and ideology were found responsible for a series of national humiliations at the hands of the Western powers, and the result was a drastic reformation of the culture, starting with language and script. The second upheaval was accompanied by the establishment of the PRC and reached its peak during the Great Cultural Revolution, ending in 1976. Confucianism and tradition were denounced as the sources of the

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most vicious values of society, which the Party sought to replace with new socialist thought for building a brand-new modern country, guided by genuine Marxist-Leninist theory. This provided ideal conditions for radical changes in the language, and three language reform tasks were accomplished without much difficulty in the 1950s and 1960s. Later on, the more radical SSS was developed, at a time when revolutionary zeal reached its peak, marked by the Red Guards’ toppling of everything old. In contrast to the two previous political upheavals, in the wake of the June Fourth Movement of 1989, culture has been seen as a resource for national unity and national rejuvenation as part of an undeclared cultural renaissance movement. The enthusiastic revival of past glory in the mid1990s as a political tactic, has characterized this period. The extent to which the official propaganda of patriotism can be attributed to traditionalism is an open question; it is at least partly the result of a shift in the Party’s strategy to minimize the negative influences coming from the West. Except for the interest generated by traditional characters, the new trend in popular culture has had a negative impact on the latest efforts to reduce the overly large number of hanzi. The flame of reviving enthusiasm for teaching and learning classical texts has been rekindled by the urban elites and has rapidly gained momentum since the 1990s. Traditional culture goes hand in hand with traditional writing. Characters in classical publications are the most elusive ones among eight registries of rarely used characters, and as a result, they have made the efforts to delimit the number of characters enormously difficult. Quite contrary to the situation prior to the 1990s, the emerging archaic style writing, in the form of dry, bookish erudition, has now been regarded by readers as well-intentioned and harmless pedantic eccentricity. In the 1950s, simplified characters were not intended for use in classical publications. A fundamental principle of simplification was to defuse the claim by conservatives that simplified characters incapacitate the spread of traditional culture. But facing the aggressive trend of reviving the past, it has to be acknowledged that in reviewing simplification, “we not only have to make it convenient for modern language, but also conducive for the use in classical texts” (Su 2003: 122). As cultural factors work in an implicit way, their prominent influence on script reform is apt to be ignored. Policy makers have not given adequate importance to matters such as what factors of popular culture are related to script reform, and in what way these cultural factors are going to affect the discussion of reform programs. Recently, Li Yuming (2004c: 64) wrote,

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[w]ith the globalization of the world economy, people are ever more aware of cultural diversity, and the research and study of traditional culture has attracted considerable interest. There should be no need for reticence; the role of hanzi in preserving the traditional heritage had not been given appropriate consideration in the previous script standardization. This is the first time the impact of cultural trends on hanzi reform programs has been recognized by a LP decision maker. Second, this cultural trend has created obstacles to elevating pinyin to a parallel position with characters, or replacing them, where pinyin is more appropriate or effective. Wu Wenchao (2000), the President of the North American Association of Chinese Language Modernization, notes that today’s Chinese society has not been ready to psychologically and culturally accept pinyin as a writing system. “Generation after generation, deeply rooted in everyone’s mind is that characters are seen as prestigious and an important indicator of scholarship. Many people are very proud of being able to use rarely used characters, whereas pinyin is regarded as a second class skill.” It is in this sense that Su (2002: Seminar; see Note 10 in Chapter 1) says, “In the past one-and-a-half decades since the Conference in 1986, the general direction has been backward. Today is not the time to take a big step forward”. LP professionals should look into how the shift in popular culture has changed people’s perception of the traditional culture and the potential impact that change may have on script reform. Zhou (1992) and Taylor and Taylor (1995) believe that the new social values are mainly responsible for the failures of the second reform scheme of 1977. Much more investigation is needed to reach a better understanding of the nature of of these intricate mutual interactions.

7.

THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNAL POLITICAL CLIMATE

The fact that LP has to serve political ends in various ways has long been recognized by LPP researchers. Political needs and context are central to LP in any country. In China, political presence is perhaps stronger in magnitude and exemplified in a more explicit but diversified form than elsewhere. Yiqie wei zhengzhi fuwu (‘Everything must be in the service of politics’) is the key piece of communist jargon for understanding the way that things happen in China, and academic activities are no

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exception. The political factor in LP manifests its presence in three forms: First, ideology indoctrination is the most explicit way in which LP works and was seen as a constituent element in the Party’s ideology. This was clearly evidenced in the description of the background of the SSS in Section 5.1, Chapter 1. The second form works in a more indirect and passive way. Although politics does not influence LP work itself, the change in Party power structures or policy shifts in the Party propaganda agenda provide the conditions for drastic changes in LP policy. Most often this situation was exploited by a particular interest group for their own political ends. This form was typified in the manipulation of the political situation by the CCCF in the Hanzi Culture Debate and is examined a bit further in the following section. The third form integrates LP issues into political tasks and thus makes them relevant to the current political circumstances as a whole. In the past, this was called zhengzhi guashuai (politics in command). In most situations, as we will see in Section 7.3 of the current chapter, there is an art of knowing how to keep the balance between political policy and LP policy. In the following discussion, emphasis is placed on personal influence and individual intervention in shaping hanzi planning policy as we assume that the strong presence of personal power and individual influence can be seen as a very unique aspect of Chinese LP.

7.1

The Shift of the Party’s Propaganda Strategy

Since the early 1980s, there has been a marked tendency to update the style of Party propaganda, and the post-June-1989 development of a more diversified cultural atmosphere has received an increasingly enthusiastic response. Guo (2004: xi) has pointed out that “[t]he focus has clearly shifted from the liquidation of ‘backward traditional culture’ and the ‘ugly national character’ to the ‘reconstruction of the national culture’ and ‘the rediscovery of the national spirit’”. As we saw in Chapter 4, the image of traditional knowledge as valuable cultural heritage, in need of careful cultivation, is a popular theme in the Party’s ideological strategy. While struggling to manipulate hearts and minds of the masses, the Party propaganda machine has been anxious to exploit the mass wave of nostalgia for the past that arose in the l990s. This can be seen very clearly from Jiang Zemin’s letter (Dai and Gong 2001: 3) to Bai Shouyi, a top Chinese history authority, congratulating him on April 25, 1999, upon the completion of his Complete History of China:

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Both the entire society and the Party should attribute appropriate importance to the study of Chinese history, particularly the promotion of the spread of basic knowledge about history among the younger generation, in order to equip them with the excellent heritage of Chinese nationality, to firmly consolidate their patriotic spirit, and to acquire a correct world outlook and the right view of values, thus helping them draw inspiration from traditional culture, impelling them to contribute to the great revival of China’s past glory. As suggested in Section 2.3.2, Chapter 2, the direct reason triggering the 1990s debate on hanzi’s future was an expression of political expediency rather than an isolated linguistic event. The repercussions of this debate on national language policy can still be felt from time to time, and many believe that this drama can be reopened at any time should the political climate change. For example, there was a ‘Pinyin Incident’14 in 2000, which re-enforced the notion that LP was nothing but a handy instrument, easily changed under certain social circumstances, reminding people of the fragility of LP in the current political confusion in China. It was frightening for LPers to think that a proposal threatening pinyin in school education could be taken seriously by the education authorities and nearly be adopted nationwide. This happened at a time when it was manifest to them that the acquisition of pinyin was widely seen as a precondition for the entire population’s transformation into an information society. It can be said that in China language struggle is a political struggle, and Chinese intellectuals have yet to develop collectively as an independent force. Despite the close relationship between script reform and national development, language affairs are unpredictable – all principles and policies will be unhesitatingly compromised or even sacrificed if they run against a perceived higher interest. In China, in contrast to the general direction in other countries, politics has a determining role, but is strongly influenced by the traditional heritage. The socio-cultural aspect is also more noticeable and influences script reform more than it does in other countries. The economic factor plays a role only where it is in line with the political need, or in other words, it does not contradict the Party’s ideology, which is the superstructure and determines the economic foundations.

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7.2

Leadership – Political Individual Involvement at the National Level

Internationally, the positive promotional role that politicians play has been widely acknowledged by LP researchers, and sometimes rhetorically supported. Such instances include Lee Kuan Yew’s role in Mandarin promotion in Singapore (Shepherd 2005: 59), Ataturk’s revisions and innovations in Turkey in the 1920s (Landau 1993), Sukarno’s charismatic influence in unifying Bahasa Malay (Anwar 1980: 176), and Julius Nyerere’s role in promoting Swahili in post-colonial Tanzania (Wood 1985: 13, 89). More examples of high-profile individual’s role in language promotion in a number of other countries are given in Gonzalez’s (2002: 18) observations. While arguing that “it is difficult in general for individuals to influence language policy”, Kaplan and Baldauf (2003: 224) cite a number of cases in Pacific Basin countries where high status individuals linked to government power have had powerful positive or negative effects on language policy development. The unfortunate impact of particular political actors has less frequently been examined. In what follows, we will discuss some instances in the Chinese context, but there are no shortage of comparative cases in other countries, including two of China’s neighbors, for example, Kim I1 Sung’s extensive and intensive intervention in Korean, based on his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and personal preferences (Moon 2000; Kaplan and Baldauf 2003: 41-44). Even in democratic systems, pernicious eventual failure can befall political figures. To give two examples, in 1954 Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, ordered that the 1933 unified orthography be simplified, but the beleaguered Rhee “had to rescind his decree within a little over one year” due to a public outcry (Kaplan and Baldauf 2003: 34-35). In 1999 the Prime Minister of Japan, Keizo Obuchi, appointed a Commission which came up with a plan to make English an official language of Japan. This unrealistic goal was quietly dropped in 2000, following the death of Obuchi, perhaps because it committed some grave mistakes “that would be obvious to any language-qualified specialists” (Baldauf and Kaplan 2003: 23). Dennis Ager (2001: 175) points out, language policy making represents the actions of those who hold power in society. The power, exercised by those influential individuals, often reflects a quite personal view of what should be done, or, at a less extreme level, a key member with a particular interest can exercise considerable influence. These individuals’ policies depend on their own ideologies, preferences and likings, and sometimes

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even on their quirks. In Chinese LP history, there are many examples illustrative of Ager’s argument that politically powerful individuals have the capacity to impose their personal likes and dislikes on the script issue. 7.2.1

Personal Influence vs Public Interest

The issues of “who are the planners and actors” and “what are their roles” in planning language have generated wide interest in LPP since it was first raised by Cooper (1989). Individual politician’s powerful roles in language policy implementation are an interesting topic and have drawn some attention over recent years. In the modern history of Chinese LP, there have been about a dozen individuals, either persons with legitimate power (politicians) or individuals with social status (intellectual elites), who have played crucial roles in shaping LP in some momentous ways. There are no clear-cut differences between persons with political power and individuals with social status. The critical point that separates the two groups of individuals is the nature of the decision-making. While the former has the legitimate power to take decision-making action, the latter does not. However, as LP is a complex, long-term process aiming to change human behavior, it is hard to say who is more powerful in creating effective outcomes in this process. The two dominant central themes in LP are decision making and power. Power is not confined to the power of being able to impose. If power can be seen as the ability to influence the behavior of others, insofar as language planning attempts to change human behavior, it is useful to examine the role of elites in their ability to influence others. Furthermore, the elite class, called intellectuals in China, is, to some degree, inevitably engaged in political affairs. A significant number of towering intellectuals hold positions in the administration, typically at various levels of Zhengxie, or the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – composed of the so-called Eight Democratic Parties. Insofar as script reform is concerned, these roles vary from intervention (e.g., roles of Dai Jitao, Chiang Kaishek, Mao Zedong), involvement (e.g., roles of Zhou Enlai, Hu Qiaomu), to influence (e.g., roles of Qian Xuantong, Luxun, Guo Moruo). It would be worthwhile to study the magnitude of these individuals’ ability to influence the direction of Chinese script reform. We are aware of only four such case studies. The most recent one is a historical study, done by Yu Jin’en (2003), that assessed an education minister’s role in the vicissitude of the Phonetic Symbol (Zhuyin Zimu, 1918) promulgation and concluded that the “politician’s ideological value is the determinative factor in the failure or

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success of the particular LP program’s implementation” (p. 99). The other three cases are related to Chen Guanyao’s major efforts in collecting and promoting simplified characters before and after the FSS (Barnes 1988); Guo Moruo’s role in starting the process of the SSS (Milsky 1973) and Mao’s extensive involvement in script modernization movements from the 1940s to the 1950s (DeFrancis 1979). The following two cases show the magnitude of the influence that a powerful individual, consciously or unconsciously, can have in character planning work. 7.2.1.1 The case of calligraphy culture Regarded as a means of personal communication, handwriting is immune from simplification and standardization (the Office of Standard Work 1997: 11; Education Office 2001: 7). However, it becomes a debatable topic where the handwriting of national leaders is concerned. Tici is a kind of calligraphy or handwriting for public demonstration, written by leaders (sometimes cloned from the handwritten texts of ex-leaders), calligraphers or social celebrities, and it is a unique form of Chinese traditional art derived from Chinese characters. Tici can be found on institutional name plates, or as a few words of encouragement and commemoration by the most influential members of society. Individuals, particularly business people, industrialists and power-brokers, cherish the opportunity to obtain tici for its great potential commercial value or other personal ends. Tici are most frequently used in the names of journals, magazines, periodicals, tourist spots, trademarks, institutions or corporations. For instance, almost all university’s names in China have handwritten tici by luminary personalities. The iconic handwritten characters are a traditional heritage and are so loved by the general population that they have become a part of people’s lives. Both the TSC in the 1950s and the Law of the National Common Language and Script of the P. R. of China have included a clause, stating that calligraphy is exempt from the rules governing simplified characters – but this ruling has not gone unquestioned. It is disputable whether tici should be seen as a kind of calligraphy and how many officials should be defined as ‘national leaders’. In the 1990s, the dispute about tici developed to the point that a secretarial office of the central government had to announce a policy, dictating at which level national leaders were allowed to use traditional characters in their tici (Luan 1992: 14). Some LP proponents (Wang 2001, 2002: personal communication) strongly oppose ubiquitous traditional and non-standard characters written by state and Party leaders, simply because of the bad impression it creates among the public as a result of their high visibility in sensitive domains of language15,

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and because it makes ‘Writing Standard Characters’ campaigns much harder. As noted by Huang Peirong (1992: 51), a hanzi reform researcher from Taiwan, “Nowadays, after thirty-seven years’ promotion of simplified characters in Mainland China, most books, journals and newspapers use standard hanzi. Exceptions are only seen on commercial brands, advertisements and on signboards.” Jiang Zemin’s tici have been criticized repeatedly by LP officials for his overuse of traditional characters. With fourteen years in the top position, his tici far outnumbered even Mao Zedong’s, who ruled the country for 27 years16. As a result, the central government had to set up a tici office to deal exclusively with such affairs (Sun 2003). It is not an exaggeration to say that the tici written in unofficial hanzi by China’s president have been a force for reversing the permanent removal of non-standard characters. When talking about how hard it is to deal with the tici culture, Wang (personal communication 2001, 2002) said that, during his directorship of the SCLA, he wrote letters to the office of the CCP and State Council leader respectively, and the leaders’ secretarial staff promised to raise the matter with their bosses. Wang feels displeased that tici written in traditional characters remain unchanged and can be seen everywhere. But he was happy that in the campaign to wipe out miswritten characters in the country’s capital, he was able to remove the nonstandard characters from the shop sign of Wangfujing Department Store, the country’s Number One shopping center for nearly one century.17 But Wang failed to achieve the same result with the Xidan Department Store, which is second only to Wangfujing in popularity. “Because its name is [written in] the tici from Dong Biwu [a widely respected former leader], so it is still there today”. The display of language transmits a symbolic message about the legitimacy, relevance, priority and standard of languages. Shohamy (2006: 111) points out, “the public space as a focus of attention in language policy as well as in language use is a relatively new area of attention, as most research on language use tends to focus primarily on speakers and not on their environments”. Elaborating on Landry and Bourhis’ (1997) notion of Language Landscape, which originally referred to the visibility of languages as objects that mark the public space in a given territory, Shohamy (2006: 110) argues that “the presence (or absence) of specific language items, displayed in specific language, in a specific manner, sends direct or indirect messages with regard to the centrality versus the marginality of a certain language in society”.

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According to Shohamy, language in the public space refers to all language items that are displayed in a variety of contexts in the environment. The public space is therefore a most relevant arena to serve as a mechanism for creating de facto language policy, so that the ideological battles that are taking place in the new nation-state can be turned into practice. Thus, language in the public space needs to be recognized as one of the major mechanisms affecting policies, to effect, manipulate and impose de facto language practices in hidden and covert ways. While Chinese calligraphy and tici are probably more ubiquitous, they largely overlap with Shohamy’s examples of language landscape, such as names of buildings, places and institutions, advertising billboards, newspapers, the Internet, titles of books, documents, names of streets, commercial and personal visiting cards, labels, instructions and public forms, names of shops and public signs. The number of such language items to be found in the public space is almost endless and unlimited. An important characteristic of language landscape is that it is shaped by public authorities as well as individuals, associations or firms. Accordingly, the language landscape of a country, region or urban setting may function as an informational and symbolic marker of the relative power and status of the linguistics communities. The case of Chinese calligraphy culture’s impact on hanzi standardization, particularly tici use, highlights the significant implications of language landscape arguments and the issue of public space as a focus of attention in language policy implementation. 7.2.1.2 Name crisis Another example, illustrative of a powerful individual’s personal influence on script policy, is the crisis of former PM’s name. As mentioned previously, the FTVVF in 1955 dictated that except characters for surnames, all yiti zi used for given names in the table, including historical figures, should be replaced by the standard characters. One character (rong) in Zhu Rongji’s given name is a discharged character in the above table. This character is in some media publications replaced with another homophonous character, but one that has an opposite meaning, with explanations in brackets, indicating that rong here should be the one with a metal compound – other publications just leave it blank. Right to use names are culturally charged taboos in Chinese culture, and Zhu Rongji wanted to keep intact the original character’s meaning, ‘to lay down the foundations’. When he was still the Mayor of Shanghai, he opposed the way his name was written in official characters in newspapers, because it could be taken to have the opposite ominous meaning.

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By 1993, when he became the second-most powerful man in the country, it inevitably had become a public issue, attracting national and international attention. In September 1993, the language management authorities adopted a low-profile approach, adding it into the GB 2312-80, without declaring a change in the total number of 6,735 characters18 (Fu 2002: personal communication; Hu 1998: 50). This incident is indicative of personal agency because the national standard had to be amended just to include a character in a high ranking personal name. Zhu left Chinese politics after the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held in November of 2002. Although he was one of the widely respected prime ministers in the Republic’s history, now people seldom hear his name. In critiquing the impropriety of making alterations to the national standard to accommodate an individual’s name, Wang Ning (2004b: 6), a renowned hanzi scholar, uses Figure 5-3 to illustrate this character’s (Rong) rapid decline in social use, during a span of three months, in the national media. 32

17 11 0

2 A

B

C

D

A: One month before the ‘16th CCP National Congress’ B: During the month of the ‘16th CCP National Congress’ C: One month after the ‘16th CCP National Congress’

Figure 5-3. Drastic change of the frequency of use of a character over three months

7.2.2

Current Pain

In discussing the bureaucratic structures of Chinese script policymaking, Blachford (2004: 101) says, “the top leaders of the CCP have, no doubt, shaped the general directions of any given policy in the PRC. Rule by absolute power of an individual or a group of individuals has long been the Chinese tradition.” In the milestone NCLW, there was a sharp debate on how to deal with the problems found in the GLSC after three decades’ use. The arguments were polarized among the delegates. The conservative

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side insisted that it should be maintained intact as it was, but republished, in order to show the government’s determination to maintain the status quo and clear up any confusion in society. The radical advocates, on the other hand, contended that since this table was the outcome of that special era and a large number of characters were poorly simplified, we should make use of this historical occasion to carry out a substantial amendment (the initial proposal was sixty characters) after an overall review, including the incorporation of 111 characters of the SSS. The final consensus was: make either a big change, or not change anything at all. However, according to Chen Zhangtai (2001: personal communication), only six characters were reintroduced in the republished GLSC, which was proposed by Hu Qiaomu, China’s unquestioned czar of propaganda and cultural affairs. As expected by opponents, this decision caused endless trouble and chaos in society. These six characters, although statistically insignificant, have become an important source of character use confusion in today’s publications. It has attracted trenchant criticism even by some official scholars since the death of Hu Qiaomu in 1992 (Yu 1992; Gao 2002). Fan Keyu (1996: 7) is at great pains to describe the injudicious withdrawal of the SSS and the change made to the promulgated GLSC as “unforgettable heartbreaking pain” and “pretty soul destroying”. The official explanation of why the badly needed amendments failed to get approved was that there were worries and concerns about public confusion and the technical inconvenience. But this justification was not convincing and was greatly weakened by the way the change was made as only the six characters proposed by Hu Qiaomu were added. If the failure to make major modifications was about preventing unnecessary public confusion and loss for the typesetting industry, or about opposition from some major dictionary and reference book publishers, what difference is there between six or sixty characters? In criticizing the theory that big changes would result in a huge waste of published books, Lin Yanzhi (1996: 9), the vice-director of SCLW between 1994-1995, asked, Which kind of loss is bigger: several ten thousands of books, or the communication convenience [for the entire population]? … Is there any parent stupid enough to say, ‘Oh, baby, I don’t want you to grow up; if you grow taller, all of your shoes and clothing will be of no use anymore’. Fortunately for our understanding of events, that episode and dispute have been well documented and copies were published following Hu’s death. Ordinary readers are now able to get access to the details about the intense argument between Hu and some language policy makers, as well as

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Hu’s incredible stubbornness in forcing the SCLW to accept his proposal to resume six characters (Editing Team 1996: 291, 353-357). A number of letters and research material, written by Hu Qiaomu, that were discovered in 2002 by Chen Zangtai (2002: personal communication), the then vicedirector of the SCLW, provide us with a very interesting insight into Chinese LP history and provide a good case study of the role of individuals in LP decision making. Hu’s displeasure with the SCLW’s work had been long-standing, he was very critical about the latter’s manner of work (see e.g., Editing Team 1996: 301, 338, 343, 350). This tension came to a head during the TSC revision period, leading up to and including 1986. The dispute between Hu and SCLW, on the inclusion of six resumed variant or traditional characters in the republication of the TSC, became so fierce that it finally had to be put to the top national leaders, including the Chairman of the CCP and Premier, for resolution. The case was discussed in the regular meetings of the CCP and the State Council (Journalist 2006). The stand-off was superficially broken through the principle of “Democratic Centralism” (Minzhu Jizhong Zhi, the organizational tenet of the Party and the state, namely, centralism on the basis of democracy and democracy under centralized guidance). However, as national leaders had neither the knowledge nor interest in linguistics or LP that the previous generation of leaders before the 1980s had had, it was no surprise that Hu’s opinion prevailed at the highest levels. Baldauf and Kaplan (2003: 20) point out that while language specialists are involved when the plan is being contemplated, “it is an entirely different group of people who actually make the policy decisions that constitute the language policy, both explicit and implicit”. A further series of events that happened during the revision of the TSC in the 1980s serves as another case in point. 7.2.2.1 Mao’s Personal View and Influence on Language Reform Mao Zedong was Chairman of the CCP for 27 years. In examining his personal role in conditioning the direction of Chinese LPP, it is clear that no one has wielded more direct authority or exerted a greater influence than Mao Zedong. His influence and intervention was extensive and dynamic, varying from the policy level to the fate of a specific character19. Mao Zedong had shown great interest in script reform, in spite of his intensive agenda during the first days of the PRC. One of Chairman Mao’s better-known quotations was, “Characters must be reformed and we should follow the common direction of phoneticization adopted across the world” (1951). This pronouncement was the guideline for Chinese script reform

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and it sparked a lot of speculation about the future of Chinese characters until 1986, and the continuing confusion it caused has yet to be cleared up today. His statement, “Our script must be reformed under certain conditions” (1940), had started language reform movements in Communist-controlled areas in the 1940s. As we saw earlier, the problems subsequently discovered with the SSS, stemmed from the belief that simplification was not the ultimate reformation of hanzi, which emanated from Mao’s aspiration for Romanization. “Phonetic orthography is a comparatively convenient writing system. Chinese characters are too difficult and complex and the current reform focuses on simplification, but sooner or later there will be a fundamental reform” (1955). For these phoneticizers, simplification was just a temporary measure before the embarking on the predestined road to alphabetization. It was Mao’s persistence on the national form for the Chinese Alphabetic Scheme that delayed the adoption of the Western alphabet for pinyin letters in the 1950s. Premier Zhou Enlai admitted, “Beginning in 1952, the Committee on Chinese Writing Reform devoted three years to the task of creating our own alphabet (including revising the Phonetic Alphabet), but without being able to achieve satisfactory results, and only then was the decision finally reached to abandon it and to adopt the Latin alphabet” (DeFrancis 1979: 146). Before pinyin, two of three predominant alphabetic systems, Luomatze and Latin sinwenz, designed by Chinese scholars in 1928 and the 1930s respectively, were Latin based and were of historical importance in China’s Romanization history. Thus, it appears that Latin letters were a natural choice for the phonetic transcription system when the Communist Party decided to promulgate a new alphabetic system. But the proposed Latin-based pinyin scheme was turned down several times when it was submitted to the highest authority, until in 1953, Chairman Mao agreed to give up his request that pinyin should be indigenous in its form. The confusion over what kind of forms – Western letters or character strokes – should be used to transcribe Chinese characters was not cleared up until 27 January, 1956, when a clandestine official document of the Central Committee of the CCP declared, “the Central Committee of the CCP holds that Latin letters are suitable to be adopted in designing the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet”. It is for this event that Mao’s role in Romanization during the 1950s was dubbed, by DeFrancis (1984b: 257), as the ‘great leap backward’. This information was first released in the 1980s by Ye Laishi (1981: 60), a life-long pinyin activist and one of the early key leaders in the LP organization. Before this, even people inside the LP circle did not know that the reason why the pinyin scheme was delayed by

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three years was purely because of Mao’s personal preference for an indigenous writing script20. Ironically, in retrospect, some scholars attribute this delay to the wisdom of national leadership (e.g., Wang 1995: 3), ignoring the fact that the opposite might well be true. 7.2.2.2 Leadership in linguistics Perhaps no other country in the world but China has an IT industry so closely interrelated with its writing system and its study of linguistics. LP has become increasingly sophisticated and an interdisciplinary subject. To obtain a high quality system of CIP, the IT industry is unlikely to generate any substantial results without the coordination and cooperation of LPers. This requires not only the financial support from government participation, but also large-scale interdisciplinary cooperation for which linkages initiated by higher-level leadership, have proved to be very essential. It should be made clear that fundamental research, with its non-profit orientation, cannot produce straightforward results nor be done by using industry partnering. The success of the linguistically inspired CIP programs depends vitally on the ability of the leadership within the LP circle to communicate the strategy and vision of projects on a continuing basis to national policy makers, and at a political level, to lobby for the resources and support for some strategic projects. The initial achievement of encoding hanzi for computers was largely due to a few individual pioneers such as Qian Xuesen. In recent years this tradition has continued and there are some like-minded LP policy makers who play a beneficial role in pushing script reform forward, such as Xu Jialu, the linguist-turnednational-leader, and Li Yuming, the director of the Language and Information Department in the Education Ministry. They themselves have a strong personal interest in LP and the capacity to get easy access to the top leaders to argue for support for these issues. Xu (2000: 490) argues that, “Only when CIP is going ahead on the basis of linguistics, can we say that the Chinese language can be automatically processed”. As early as 1996, Xu (1996: 44) pointed out: The government’s and public’s growing awareness of the applied value of language research to the IT industry will lead us to the discovery of the importance of linguistics. This is the condition creating the ground for linguistics to flourish and helps to make it one of the leading academic subjects in the new century. Zhang Zhigong, a senior language educator and the late president of China’s Language Modernization Association, said in the spring of 1992,

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at the Symposium of the Fortieth Anniversary of Chinese Linguistics Study, if he gets the opportunity to talk to the national top policy makers for half an hour, he is confident that he is able to strengthen their determination to carry out language reform (Ma 2000: 108). According to Liu Yongquan (1997: 393), an AI pioneer in China, an individual’s letter, being passed to Deng Xiaoping and Hu Qiaomu, was one of the coincidences that led to the organization of the hallmark First National Conference on Input Schemes in Qingdao in December 1978. The saddest thing in Chinese computing linguistics has been, that in the last quarter of a century, due to the lack of communication between linguists, IT experts and leaders at the highest level, similar research projects have been carried out by individual units isolated from each other and scattered across the country. Research projects, funded by government but carried out in guerrilla style, overlap at the research level, resulting in huge waste. A number of the first author’s key informants felt somewhat disappointed about their unsuccessful efforts to convince and draw leaders’ attention to this issue. Li (personal communication: 2002) was particularly aware that it was a critical time for obtaining governmental support in order to achieve some constructive results. He argues that after decades of development in CIP, it appears that the time has now arrived to return to fundamental studies on some theoretical issues. 7.2.3

A Tentative Summary

The discussion in this section shows that after 1949, largely because of the political implications and ideological foundation, the Communist leaders have taken a keen interest in language issues and have played an active and substantial role through heavy-handed official LP bodies. These individuals have either had compelling political power or a high prestige in society. While persuasive influence is a positive factor, most of the time individual intervention has had a malicious effect on LP. It is also a fact, though, that not all individual influence by a politician or a prestigious society member is consciously exerted, as, for example, the change of the character ‘Rong’ made to accommodate Zhu Rongji’s given name. However, individual intervention, despite of its negative and unfavorable connotations, is not necessarily always a harmful element, and the observations made in the aforementioned cases should not be taken as a universal condemnation of intervention per se. While being fully aware of the potential danger of such individual intervention, it should be pointed out that in Chinese LP history, active involvement of some national leaders has played a conducive role, ensuring the smooth implementation of some

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LP programs. In January 1958, for example, the Premier of the State Council, Zhou Enlai, made an important speech titled Directives on Language Work in the New Era, delivered to the National Political Consultative Conference. This speech has been seen as the most authoritative official document in script reform history, and “provided a major boost for language reform work” (Seybolt and Chiang 1979: 5). On another occasion, Zhou’s role was even more direct and concrete, since “Without Zhou Enlai’s personal intervention, no pinyin would have appeared in the 1971 version of the Xinhua Character Dictionary” (Zhou 1982: 6). Nevertheless, ideally, decisions concerning language issues should be made on the basis of scholars’ advice based on a careful analysis of the situation. In a totalitarian system, where language struggle is a form of political struggle, and where Chinese intellectuals have yet to develop collectively as an independent force, decision making power is still invested in individuals, and unfavorable reports are often suppressed. Too much power in too few hands is still a potential threat in the future. In comparison with the older generation of leaders, present national leaders have reduced their responsibilities to a minimum, as has been acknowledged by Hu Qiaomu when talking with the five major LP academics working on script reform work. “Not only are the central leaders too busy to care about the LP work, at the provincial level there are even fewer leaders concerned with script reform” (Editing Team 1999: 301). In retrospect, ambiguous and inconsistent remarks from the highest levels of the decision-making apparatus were also responsible for the strong comeback of traditional complex hanzi in the 1980s. This uncharacteristic high level political apathy has, over a lengthy period, made language officials too indecisive to take substantial action and respond forcefully to their critics.

7.3

Integration of Ongoing Political Campaigns into LP Work

In a highly coercive political system, the general public learns to adapt to political practice in order to survive. To be successful in life, it is customary to identify the course to be taken in one’s field with the party political line, and what is going on in a particular field can be best justified by the current propaganda and must fit into the terms used by the Party, even if it is only done as a form of lip service. The constant repetition of revolutionary formulae through the use of political slogans and stock

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phrases that expressed ‘correct’ thought, which was used to penetrate people’s minds and engender belief in the value of Marxism, has been a successful part of what Ji (2004) called ‘linguistic engineering’. DeFrancis (1979: 151-152) has pointed out, that discussions of the complex issues underlying all aspects of language reform rarely went beyond the polemical level of quoting a few phrases from Mao in support of a particular stand, and attributing to those currently in disfavor a few phrases in opposition to the currently accepted position. During the hanzi culture debate in the 1980-1990s, the long winded ‘scholarly papers’ written by both sides were centered around the question whether a rival’s view was in accordance with the Party’s line on language and script affairs, rather than if it was factual or accurate. This was perhaps truer for the CCCF side, since Yuan Xiaoyuan (1992: 11-24) and Shi Fan (pseudonym, 1992: 5758) quoted leaders’ speeches or official documents at some length to either justify their positions or to support an argument. In rebutting the accusation that he was deliberately obstructing the national LP policy, Xu Dejiang (2002: 5-6), a central figure involved in triggering the debate, defended himself by saying, “Our effort to spread Chinese culture nationwide and worldwide well complies with the policy of vigorously promoting Chinese traditional culture [put forward by the Party propaganda after the June Fourth Movement in 1989]”. As we have seen, language problems in China are, like art and literature, components of the superstructure, hence they are generally viewed as political vehicles. The relationship between political ideology and linguistic dimensions began to be established in the mid-1950s, when intellectuals were targeted by the Anti-Rightist Movement. During this period and later in the Cultural Revolution, linguists could not say anything without referring to quotations from Mao’s works, which was the source rationale for every kind of action. It was the characteristic of Chinese linguistics of that special period; it was also a basic skill for individual survival. Even after constraints on people’s lives and academic issues had loosened, justification of the importance of a specific area needed to be aligned closely to precepts laid out in an ideological treatise set on the current political theme. In today’s China, linguistics is in a fortunate position in that it is associated with CIP and hence with economic development, which, together with the so-called Knowledge Economy, is also the central concern of the Party. The dominant overarching ideology operating at the moment (2006) in China is that of the Three Representation Theory, a political ideology designated to be the core of the CCP’s leadership by former Party head, Jiang Zemin, and embodied in the

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official document of the CCP’s 16th Congress. This ideology is overarching in the sense that it permeates and defines all socio-economic relations in the society. Alongside and frequently connected to this overarching ideology are a range of other dominant ideologies, concerning education, culture, minority work, family planning and so forth, and their accompanying practices coexist with other marginalized ideologies. People from all walks of life discuss and try to find a way to make the Three Representation Theory central to their respective trades and professions. The first representation requires, that what we are undertaking should represent the forward direction of the productive forces and the progress of the social development. Its manifestation in LP is to directly associate the outcome of LP with this representation, as language issues make an important contribution to facilitating economic activities. The following is a translation of the Principles Guiding the Working Agenda (2002) of the Department of Language, Script and Information Management of the Education Ministry. It is a typical, heavily politically tinted statement, setting out the goal of science research (SCLW 2004d), and showing how a particular academic subject takes its cue from the Party. Holding higher the great banner of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s theory and working under the guidance of the important thought of ‘Three Representations’, [we are] to carry them out in the spirit of the important speeches delivered by Comrade Jiang Zemin in the 5th and 6th plenary of the 15th National Conference of the Chinese Communist Party, and to further enforce the ‘Law of the National General Language and Script’ 21. Steadily implementing the Language and Script Development Plan in the 15 th National Economic and Social Development Plan by liberating thought, seeking the truth from facts, focusing on the infrastructure, reforming the working culture, progressing with the time [these are political slogans – author], enabling the language and script standardization and information work to better serve the IT industry, also education and social language life, striding to achieve outstanding achievement to usher in the opening of the 16th National Conference of the Chinese Communist Party. The political climate is unpredictable, but being adaptable to political circumstances and watching for the alignment between the LP activities and party politics and political correctness, is a skill that Chinese LPers have had to learn. In the future, whether Chinese LP can develop along its own track in solving language- and script-related problems depends to a very large extent on how language affairs fit in with the political ideology.

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8.

INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

The international factor is probably on the lowest rung of the hierarchy that drives script reform, but from a historical perspective, under certain circumstances it has had a decisive influence. Many of the significant shifts that happened in Chinese script reform after the end of the Cold War cannot be imagined without taking into account the radical changes in the world, although most of the time these influences may not have been explicit and straightforward. Generally speaking, having only mild fluctuations in the international political environment can provide favorable conditions to ensure that the language reform movement continues unimpeded.

8.1

International Comparison and Cooperation

Writing system reform (i.e., simplification) was justified by hanzi’s impeding role in building the national economy. But, from a comparative international perspective, there is no definite link between hanzi and national development. This can be best exemplified by the experience of North and South Korea: the former abolished Chinese characters after WW II while the latter did not. The same applies to Taiwan and Hong Kong, where original Chinese characters were kept in current use. Vietnam is a good example illustrating the reverse effect, while Turkey is a further case in point from a non-character-using polity. Looking over a longer time frame, the high literacy rate in character-literate Japan and a low literacy rate in countries that have used alphabetic scripts for centuries, such as Bangladesh (over 70 percent), India (over 60 percent) and Indonesia (over 40 percent), make it very doubtful whether scripts are a determining factor in producing mass literacy. Even some relatively developed countries do not have vastly superior literacy rates to those in China. Countries such as Portugal and Peru have illiteracy rates of over twenty percent. Although the coming of the digital age may change the impact of these comparisons as the definition of literacy changes, if taken at face value, this kind of international comparison has the potential to put the brake on any further language reform. Chinese is a pluricentric language with several interacting centers, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) norms. The influence of international experience can be seen at both theoretical and practical levels. Script reform experience gained in other countries was extensively explored as a reference point in the 1950s. At that time, LP, as a subject, was just beginning and research about LPP was in its embryonic

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stage. Weinreich first coined the term LP in 1957, and from then on a great deal of experience in LP has accumulated, both within and outside the country (Eastman 1983: 130). When carrying out planning programs in the past, linguistic factors from the neighboring regions, including Taiwan and Hong Kong, have been largely ignored – the regrettable result can be felt today. Presently, the script reform issue in Chinese character-using countries is closely and complicatedly intermingled with that of China. It can be predicated that the developments in writing reforms, seen in other hanzi-using regions, will have an increasing impact on China’s script reform. In the future, any reform proposed for the Chinese writing system, be it simplification, standardization, or its possible replacement by a Romanized script, is going to be an important issue in the Chinese-speaking world and in the world at large. No matter how dramatic political shifts may appear to be, no script reform of a pluricentric language like Chinese can be carried out effectively solely within its own polity borders. More dynamic interaction is needed from all groups on the hanzi culture rim, and in particular the participation from the approximately 30 million overseas Chinese scattered across the world, who are equally legitimate character owners. People are increasingly questioning those in power about their continuing lack of concern for this steadily more influential group of Chinese. Although they are a very small minority quantitatively, their significance is undeniable in an era of digitalization and globalization, and this tends to lend weight to their inclusion in the official considerations of LP policy makers (Li 2004c, Wang T.K. 2003, Zhang S.Y. 2003). Joint consultation in spelling reform by Germany and German-speaking countries can be cited as a good example in regard to international deliberations for pluricentric languages (Clyne 1995). Cooperation and adjustment among Chinese language and Chinese character using countries, which were not possible during the cold war era, have become inevitable for the future. This is a very complex, but equally, a very desirable development (Zhou 1986a), eloquently argued for by Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 300): LP activities need to consider the language situation not only in the polity for which planning is under way but also the language situation in proximate polities as well. Further, it is important to consider the relative permeability of the border between the planning polity and the proximate polity.

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Ideological Factors from a Historical Perspective

One event, related to the international influence on the history of Chinese LP, is the decision-making process underlying the graphic representation of pinyin in the 1950s. Until very recently, few people, including the majority of LP experts who were directly involved in devising pinyin, knew what the real reason was for the decision to adopt Latin alphabetic letters as the basis for pinyin orthography, and why that decision changed from using the Latin alphabet to character strokes, and then back to alphabetic representation again (see VI 8.1.3). Recent information (Zhou 1999: 195; Wang 2001: personal communication) has revealed, that Mao’s idea about a national form for representing Chinese phonology came about as the result of his first trip to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Stalin suggested that China should develop its own unique script form. Another cause that delayed the Latinbased pinyin proposal was the persistent self-interested effort of some academics from the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences, who worked as academic advisors in the China Academy of Sciences. They did not miss a single opportunity to lobby those in power to adopt Cyrillic letters instead of Latin ones (DeFrancis 1972, Chen P. 1999, Zhou 2004). The standoff was tactically resolved by Chen Yi22. The proof that the pinyin scheme was the product of the international communist movement comes from Wang Xuewen (1974: 21), who contends that it was adopted because of the high praise of Latin letters in a Russian advisor’s speech, made at the First Nationwide Conference of Language Reform, that “ruled out the possibility of adopting indigenous forms”. In any case, it appears that foreign influences played a big role in the discussion and selection of the phonetic form of Chinese Romanization23. Ideologically, the Soviet Union was the yardstick for Chinese Communist policy in the 1950s, and language was no exception. Repeated quotations of Lenin’s “Latinization is the greatest revolution in the East”24 and Leninist predictions of an age when all languages will be written phonetically, made people mistakenly believe that the Communist government was going to abolish characters sooner or later. Another international ideological event, discussed in Section 5.1, Chapter 1, was the impact of the academic debate on linguistic theories. The comment from the world’s greatest proletarian leader (Joseph Stalin), holding that language does not serve one class to the exclusion of other classes, lent timely and authoritative help to the ‘non-class nature’ camp of linguists, reducing the endless arguments and paving the way for the 1950s reform (Barnes 1974: 460). The impinging effects of the international ideological struggle on

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defining the language and dialects during the 1950-1960s, were also evidenced from the involvement of foreign experts from the Socialist Block (DeFrancis 1972: 462-465). However, it should be pointed out that even though a particular reform was significantly influenced by the international environment, major programs of Chinese script reform were often followed by a period of reflection and subsequent modification, to bring them in line with traditional Chinese values and the country’s political ideology.

8.3

Coping with Recent Reality

Two events of worldwide significance have happened in China recently: China’s entry into the WTO and its successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games. Related to these two occurrences are imminent LP tasks. Obviously, in the preparations for the 2008 games, providing linguistic services is a key concern. There is a tremendous challenge to reduce the language barrier for the Olympic athletes and those attending the games. In discussing how to take up the challenge, Li Yuming (2002: personal communication) said, China’s further opening up and internationalization should be taken as an opportunity for LPers. CIP can serve in a leverage role, as he further explained: The ultimate goal of what we are trying to do for Olympic athletes coming to China in 2008 is, in the short term, to provide linguistic convenience, such as interpreting facilities, and to assure them of relatively free communication, wherever and whenever, at least for the purpose of daily life, sports and traveling. In the long run, we must play a key role in substantially reducing the script- and language-related occupations. For example, the number of secretaries has been decreasing owing to the progress made in CIP technology. China’s further economic incorporation into the world economy forces Chinese character standardization to come into contact with international practice. One urgent job of the Department of Language and Information is to provide policy guidance on issues such as character use for commercial trademarks and printed instructions for imports from hanzi-using regions. China is one of few countries where foreign investors are not allowed to register their company and product names in their own languages (the government also imposes a ban on imported products without Chinese instructions). Another controversial topic is whether imports from Taiwan

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and Hong Kong, and the products produced in the Mainland, must use simplified characters in their labeling.

8.4

National Interest

The globalization has made LP more complex and sophisticated. As Yao (2001: 130-131) aptly pointed out, in today’s digitalized world, with international competition increasingly switching from the military, political and economic arena to ‘soft areas’ (culture and religion via language), there has been a silent war on the linguistic front. “The cultural infiltration and anti-infiltration has become a major content of scrambling for national power and interest among countries.” This is simply because language is the vehicle for information, and information is an important source of national wealth as well as an important sector for the national defense industry. In this sense, Li Yuming (2004b) has dubbed language expansion on the Internet as language imperialism or script supremacy. In China, moreover, orthographic effectiveness is very closely related to the technological advance. 8.4.1

Script Reform and National Security

In the course of implementing economic reforms and the opening-up policy, China has sought to lift its scientific capacities and economic levels to equal those of developed nations. The initial motivation in developing CIP was in the interest of national security, and was initiated in the early 1970s by military technology scientists, such as Qian Xuesen and Qian Weichang. At that time, research received support from the top because of its importance for the national interest, and its results were not applied for civil use until the 1980s. Not coincidentally, the need to develop a Chinese character codification system in Taiwan also arose out of its application for military purposes25. Extensive infiltration into all aspects of the Chinese IT industry by foreign interests, particularly from the US, has deeply worried the government and CIP community (Xu 2000: 494). More and more people are becoming skeptical whether the core technology of the CIP will be in Chinese scientists’ hands if the present situation continues. This opening up has left China virtually economically defenseless as it moves in the direction of a free market, and this sense has been heightened by China’s admission to the WTO which requires further openness and free access. One more disquieting topic, which has been talked about for quite some

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time, is the fear that the Chinese information software market is being dominated by foreign products. This would not only be a great economic loss, but also a humiliation to the country and its intellectual elites. What is happening to the lucrative input software market shows this concern is becoming painful reality26. In general, of course, this trend is a reflection of the nature of the modern globalized world, where large businesses often have become more powerful in terms of economics and intellectual property than many countries. 8.4.2

Microsoft’s Role: Marketing Strategy or Strategic Conspiracy?

At the turn of the last century, discussions about the so-called harmful impact of Microsoft’s activities in China were very heated. Of great interest in this connection is the account given by Mi Alun, an AmericanChinese IT analyst and column writer, who was particularly critical of Microsoft’s Chinese marketing strategy. Mi (1999) argues that Microsoft should be held partly accountable for the unimpressive development of Chinese IT. Microsoft’s involvement in character processing was blamed for having intentionally misled both the government and the general public, into believing that hanzi were no less efficient than any other writing system for computer applications. According to Mi, Microsoft’s real intention is to monopolize the Chinese software market. Mi (1997) convincingly warns that Microsoft’s activities in China do more harm than good to Chinese IT development, and has inferred that this may go beyond economic implications. It is worthy of special attention from the perspective of international strategy, in the sense that an information war is the most likely form of an actual war in the future. His view has been mirrored by other scholars. Zhang Feipeng (2001: 5), an active young language modernization promoter, contends, “The efficiency speed of hanzi is much lower than that of phonetic scripts, and easily breaks down or crashes when it is applied in information processing. The outcome is unimaginable, once a war breaks out.” Zhang is one of the fiercest critics of Microsoft’s activities in China, accusing it of seeking short-term profits at the cost of the Chinese IT industry’s future. Zhang (1999) states: The direction that was shown by the allegation of Microsoft is: this firm has already overcome all the difficulties [concerning hanzi processing]. What is left to be done is to decide how to market the existing software products. ... This engages many other Chinese software

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developers in a fight for survival, leaving no time for doing infrastructure work and the whole Chinese IT industry has been stifled. Mi Alun (2001) has said that there was some evidence to show that Microsoft, when it first entered the Chinese market, had a ‘two birds with one stone’ marketing strategy: i.e., through manipulating business situations, it deliberately egged on Chinese developers to commit copyright infringements and then resorted to court action. Its two-pronged goal has been to promote its products by spreading its reputation during the legal process, and on the other hand, to swallow numerous small and medium size software companies. Through this process it has tried to draw public attention to intellectual copyright disputes rather than to infrastructure construction of language research projects. The idea that hanzi script would be a great military disadvantage for China and, by implication, that Chinese defense modernization is somewhat impeded, is also very popular among other computing linguists and defense experts. Giving expression to this conviction, Qian Xuesen (Zhang F.P. 1999) says, “How to improve Chinese language information effectiveness is a big matter related to national security”. As information control has increasingly become the focal point in global power politics, China is facing a monumental task in building up a viable system of information networks and to bring in much-sought online information. From a broader perspective, in a digital war, information is the critical resource for war and the most fatal weapon. In this sense, the military significance of China’s effort to free itself of dependence on imported technologies is self-evident. 8.4.3

Interaction Between External Change and Internal Politics

The analyses in Chapter 3 and previous discussions in this chapter have shown that the debate in the 1990s on hanzi’s superiority was actually born out of traditionalism, which was fashioned by propagandists as a weapon to counter Western cultural expansion. Chapter 4 emphasized that the first difficulty in putting restrictions on the total number of hanzi are the rare characters, occurring in literary expressions and archaic words, which had been flourishing in the stepped-up nationalistic sentiment occurring since 1990. Thus, nationalism and traditionalism are two issues that are vulnerable to the influences of the international environment. International political change is one of the major contributing factors that has shifted the public’s awareness of their traditional heritage. In the past few years, increasing evidence has shown that Chinese nationalism

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has been stimulated by a concatenation of international incidents. The foremost is the ending of the cold war, which has created new forms of national aspiration and interest throughout the world. Following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, CCP culture designers eagerly cloaked the Party in traditional dress to bestow legitimacy on the present regime, thereby keeping the population immersed in a sense of Chineseness. Furthermore, national confidence has strengthened because of rapid economic development, improved living standards, and the remarkable economic achievements by Chinese-culture-influenced countries in East and Southeast Asia. Guo Yingjie (2004: xii) considered the ‘booming’ economy and the “success of the ‘four small dragons’ in Asia” as attributable to the ‘positive aspects’ of Confucianism. Undoubtedly, the previously mentioned political and economic events, happening in an international context, are the fundamental factors that have propelled the whole population into a wave of blind nationalism, leading to the renaissances of indigenous culture and native knowledge, and hence to a renewed interest in archaic-style language and traditional characters. The nostalgic remembrance of Mao’s time has also been reflected in these popular sentiments. This was particularly evident from the overwhelming popularity of fictional works like A Beijing Man in New York, China’s most-watched television series in 1993, and the heavy-handed political reportage, China Can Say No, in 1996. These kinds of cultural products express an irritation among segments of the population, the intelligentsia and young students in particular, about their perceived position in the new world order and the attitude of the West toward China.

9.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Chapters 4 and 5 have explored the internal and external factors related to Chinese hanzi reform. In Chapter 4, we examined in detail the four fixations, their technical requirements and the difficulties encountered in efforts to repair the unstable attributes of Chinese hanzi. This linguistic examination of the future prospects for hanzi did not take into account social enabling factors that are found in current language planning theorizing, i.e., language change does not occur in a social and cultural vacuum, but is part of a linguistic ecology, a social and political ecology (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997; 2003). This chapter was devoted to influential external outcomes. There are two sets of forces that influence the future directions of Chinese script

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reform: one is to sketch a future scenario related to specific language reform-based programs and schemes; another is to look into the factors that are likely to influence the future trends in a more general sense. This chapter identifies seven sociolinguistic dimensions that are believed to be valuable for constructing a trend line for predicting hanzi development and reform measures. We have shown that these seven areas are not merely different in terms of their significance to the future script reform, they are also different in the ways (implicit/explicit) they will affect particular aspects of this reform. The discussion of these seven dimensions is presented through an examination of a combination of these interdependent factors, aimed at identifying cause-and-effect patterns that might be anticipated to result. Having looked at the variables that contribute to the directions such changes might take, we look in the next chapter at how some of these changes might occur.

Chapter 6 ENVISIONING THE FUTURE Trends and Strategies

1.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter is devoted to addressing the foremost issue in the current set of LP undertakings – standardization, and how standardization can be achieved. In Chapter 4, we have analytically described the main content of standardization – the four fixations, and their technological implications for Chinese computerization. In addition, elsewhere in this volume we have suggest that standardization is not only the key for enhancing all types of language software products, particularly those facilitating hanzi’s input and output, but that it also is a significant factor in the increasingly essential computerization of hanzi. Thus, the standardization issue has become the central tenet of modern Chinese LP. To address the question on how to make the LP compatible with socio-political changes, and the products of LP acceptable to an increasingly savvy population, this chapter synthesizes historical experience and the current situation, providing to a theoretical and descriptive framework for a further examination of the standardization issue. The major portion of this chapter deals with four important issues related to standardization: • The difficulty of standardization in terms of its compatibility with social development and technological advancement;

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• Standards categorization and their compatibility with societal conditions, with a multi-standard model being advanced; • A discussion of the latest thinking about standardization and an attempt to find a theoretical model in order to address the practical problems arising from standards implementation; and • An exploration of the alternative ways to make standardization-oriented LP work compatible with the new historical conditions. Briefly, this chapter is structured around two main themes: the usefulness of a new standardization model in explaining the past and ongoing LP ventures, and the importance of building a consensual model for language standard complementation. We first propose a pluricentric set of standards and argue that these and other standardization changes will only come about if there is a more open attitudinal consensus building approach to LP in China as part of the new socio-political context. Then, drawing upon historical experiences and international references, we explore the possibibility of establishing a stable and reliable mechanism that guarantees democracy and transparency for future reforms in a normalized fashion.

2.

TOWARD A PLURICENTRIC STANDARD MODEL

The most notable phenomenon in modern life has been the commoditization of products where business and governments increasingly impose greater regulations to standardize the practice of social activities. In an attempt to enhance the linguistic environment for modern computerization technology to serve society better, Chinese language authorities have identified standardization as one of the major options that LP can contribute to the national technology development. However, the desire for language standardization is somewhat irreconcilable with the inherent human nature of pursuing novelty in language use. As noted by Wright (2004: 53): The political and institutional influences that lead us to acceptance of standardization (education, conscription, bureaucracy, patriotism, etc.) are in constant contradiction with an individual’s decision to employ poetic and creative styles that deviate from imposed norms, and the group choice to employ codes, registers or jargons that mark it as distinct.

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Standardization activities risk being seen as robbing the public of freedom by enforcing laws just for the convenience of computer applications. This suggests that trying to standardize people’s die-hard writing habits is to inevitably run into conflict with social trends, as standardization activities are seen to impose unifying standards that will inhibit language use, particularly in a society that is rapidly changing from a totalitarian polity to democracy, and where individualism and creativity are highly cherished. These qualities, people fear, will be diminished or lost if rigid standards impose sameness and normative rules over an increasingly colorless life. As the creative use of language, or literary language, is in its very nature antithetical toward rigid standards, it has become fashionable to concoct standard-challenging language.

2.1

The Socio-political Context: Diversification and Democratization

In this section, the relationships between standardization and modernization are examined in the context of the conflicting trends found in China. 2.1.1

Standard – Precondition of Modernization

Language researchers are cautious in using the term modernized language or language modernization. Ferguson (1996: 41), for example, while pointing out that judgments on “backwardness or limited development of a language cannot be made on the basis of linguistic structure”, also adopts the view that “there are at least three dimensions relevant for measuring language development”, standardization being one of them. In China, many LPers take a developmental point of view that a language without sets of clearly articulated and stated standards on language and script use cannot be a modern language. In Chapter 4, we have seen the technological implications for hanzi’s computerization at the micro level. From a macro level, language standardization and codification are the prerequisites for the development of a new industry. Jernudd and Das Gupta (1971: 203-205) argue that orthographic reform and change of the written discourse are also functions of modernization. Orthographies are reviewed successively during the development of modern society. The kind and intensity of the relationships (see Figure 6-1) will change as society develops.

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Standardization

Language

Figure 6-1. Fundamental relations between modernization, standardization and language

In the context of living in a world characterized by globalization and digitalization, standardization is the basis for today’s modern society. If we take a further and broader look, standardization is an inexorable trend in the history of modernity, happening in all aspects of society. It is expected that the globalization of information exchange on international communication networks will have a growing homogenizing effect on orthographic repertories – a trend many purists would like to see reversed. Standardizers believe that the inherent defects of the Chinese script in mechanic application can be partly counteracted by standardization. As noted previously, international communication networking in Chinese is more effective when there is a certain degree of writing homogeneity among the Chinese character-using world. Standardization means quicker and more reliable exchange of digital messages, and such regional unification can only be accomplished on the basic premise of national or international standards. 2.1.2

Conflicting Trends in Society: Moving and Developing Hanzi

Nevertheless, human language functions in a paradoxical manner, with two of its most fundamental characteristics diametrically opposed. On the one hand, language must be systematic and static; consistency and stability are basic requirements for a communication system, and all languages need users’ support to maintain those conventions. On the other, it is subject to constant change and to an obsession with the idea of newness and oddness. This paradox is intensified by the contradictions between technology-oriented standardization and the democratic development in China’s modernization process. Talking about this inevitability, Thomas (1991: 207) points out that the pressures to identify with homogeneity tend to evoke a powerful emotional reaction in which traditionalist and local viewpoints may be paramount:

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Conversely, modernization has brought pressures on people of many cultures to conform to a single, homogeneous, international culture dominated by a unified world economic system, based on a universal technology and obsessed by a materialist, utilitarian philosophy. One the one hand, the sociolinguistic consequences of the IT impact present an unprecedented opportunity for LP workers to have a thorough look into what should be done to overhaul the total stock of characters; on the other hand, standardization involves many disciplines and all social levels; it is more socio-political than linguistic. It goes without saying that a flourishing democratic LP culture needs strong public involvement in the decision-making system (a topic to be discussed in the following section). This implies that when Chinese people are about to embrace democracy on the way to modernity, LP efforts will face more resistance. Standardization and governmental intervention have always been a hotly contested topic that has polarized both laypeople and scholars. Given the phenomenal change that has occurred in the past 15 years in people’s cultural life, the public is left with the impression that the culture of LP belongs to a past age, that it is not appropriate for the new era. If we see standardization as occurring on a continuum (i.e., a standardizing process) of research, propagandizing, implementing and assessing, it can be argued from the Chinese experience that LP is, at most, concerned with the less important part of that process. The evidence discussed in this volume suggests that propagandizing and implementing, which mainly involves the management of societal consensus, was a weak link in the whole process. One very important social factor that should be taken into account is the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution, which are still very visible in every aspect of Chinese life. Having analyzed the social resistance, Su (2004: 2) reminds us that in the mid-20th century, Chinese people’s spiritual life suffered severe inhibition through an extreme form of Chinese-style collectivism. “Since the policy of economic reform and opening-up was introduced, human personality and creativity is now being released and the old restraint broken. Currently, the problem is to prevent it from changing to the opposite.” This adds a new dimension to standardization-centered LP activities. Diversity and localism obstruct an ever more pervasive tendency for nationalization and internationalization, thus effectively leaving the society in many instances faced with a choice between cultural pluralism and technological efficiency. The correlation between technological development and the socio-cultural settings needs to be treated as a philosophical inquiry. Coulmas (1992: 241) proposes four positions that show the people’s attitude towards societal norms:

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First, from a norm-positive point of view, it is more important that there is a norm than that there is a good norm, whereas the adherents of a rational-normative view insist that a norm should be well motivated in order to be accepted. Plain conservatives, on the other hand, hold the opinion that the traditional is worth preserving as a value in its own right, no matter how cumbersome or irrational it may appear from a synchronic point of view. Finally, there is the anarchistic position which holds that norms are unnecessary constraints of individual freedom and creativity. In an increasingly diversifying society, LP work is expected to confront various forms of reactions that may go well beyond Coulmas’ categorization of standard implementation. It would seem clear, however, that finding a more viable approach to standard planning should be deemed very desirable.

2.2

Framework of a Pluricentric Standard

Script standardization must be appropriate for the times and be a servant of the times rather than its master, as it previously was. In the past, standardization practices assumed standards to be static “once-and-for-all” and to reflect prescriptive norms, regardless of the fact that language is a system subject to a constantly changing world. Rigidly prescribed standards, as well as flexible ones, are found to exist in parallel by nature within societies. Hanzi is in the process of entering a more diversified social and educational system as a result of the far-reaching socialcultural-political changes that are occurring in its speech community, and these changes invariably create disruption of the classical planning pattern to accommodate the increasingly diversified structural needs. The standardization movement of the 1950s worked well along with the political structure of that time. But, in a digital society, the notion of language standardization is required to go beyond what was previously required, and furthermore, standardization is many times more difficult to achieve in a heterogeneous society than it was in a homogeneous one. While LP implementation could be successfully carried out as a mass movement in the 1950s, in the more open and heterogeneous society of today’s China, it is important to take into account hanzi’s diversified social use. This social reality provides the justification, from this broader perspective, for examining the feasibility of planning for a multi-standard for the script’s future (see Table 6-1). This is also in line with the planning of multiple

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standards that exist for other languages, e.g., English, where highly standardized language is required for specific purposes.1 Table 6-1. Relationship between sociolinguistic context and standardization Society

Homogeneous

Political Environment Highly central controlled

Heterogeneous Democratic, diversified

Vision

Static conservative, relatively stable

Dynamic, radical, in constant change

Goals

Status quo

Future oriented

Linguistic Base

From historical linguistics

From sociolinguistics

Policy/Methodology

Prescriptive, covert, rigid

Descriptive, overt, flexible

Table 6-1 contrasts the various aspects of present-day conditions with some of the major reasons why script standardization was able to take a traditional approach in a very homogeneous sociolinguistic environment. In the new historical context, pluricentric or multi standards are the trend, not only in the script reform, but also for the definition of the standard for putonghua. Mass putonghua is comprised of a flexible standard, characterized by local dialectal phonological features, taking into account such factors as region, sector, occupation, school, and age (see Section 2.3, Chapter 4). The old standard has been further divided into three bands and six levels (for a detailed description of levels and proficiency degrees as measured by the National Putonghua Proficiency Test, see Sailard 2004: 176). Old standardization was concerned only with a standard that was as historically accurate as possible; it failed to note that it was supposed to deal with more than one goal. In light of the diversity of modern society, orthography reform practice has been seeking to find the best solution to the current problem. Ferguson (1996: 268-269) points out that establishing a standard can be very complex because of the varying degrees of difference between the standard form and all other varieties of it. The ‘ideal’ standardization “refers to a language which has a single, widelyaccepted norm which is felt to be appropriate with only minor modification or variation for all purposes for which the language is used”. Where this ideal condition does not exist, the standard “requires considerable subclassification to be of any use”. This is the situation Chinese character standard setters have to face, as we can see from discussions in the subsequent sections – Chinese characters are increasingly used in wider

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areas at different levels for varying purposes. Ferguson suggests that “in case of more than one norm, the nature of the norms must be treated”. So the standardization can be unimodal, or bi- or multimodal. Socio-political grounds would suggest the necessity for creating separate standards or systems of writing for different domains, with there being a need for no less than three distinct standards. The proposed multistandard model in Figure 6-2 has as its aim the modification of old practices, rendering them more fit for the new functions required of the script. To actually implement such a model, a sociolinguistic survey needs to be done in order to find out what scripts are being used for what purposes to provide a sound basis for policy development. In this framework, the script reform direction turns predictably to a multi-standard model to accommodate diversity. The possible relationships among standards are illustrated in Figure 6-2.

2.3

Deliberation on the Notion of Standardization

In the sections which follow, we examine the three minimum standards needed to meet China’s script requirements, these being ‘Standard A’ for the general public, a substandard for personal use and a substandard for machine use. To make the proposed tripartite standards of what we call the ‘pluricentric model’ more workable, they also might be defined in terms of a function specific multilayered process that included socio-political sets of characters for areas like classical studies and specialist disciplines. 2.3.1

‘Standard A’ for the General Public

Much has been done in China in the area of theoretical construction and normative codification for a ‘Standard A’. This traditionally human-oriented standard can also be defined as the General Standard, and the standard that has codified characters for computer use as the IT-Oriented Standard. In Zhou’s (1986c: 50) terms, our Standard A can be understood as his Basic Standard (BS), and all our remaining standards can be put under his Application Standard (AS). The Standard A is the centre of standardization work and serves as the central common denominator for other sub-standards. As to the relationship between the two categories of standardization, Zhou (1986b: 51) argues that, while AS should be defined on the basis of BS and should cluster around it, AS is allowed to “adjust to some extent” to satisfy the various requirements in specific application areas. Furthermore,

Substandard for Personal Use

Chapter 6

Stylized Handwriting

Parts of Second Scheme Parts of Traditional Forms Standard A

General Public

Official Publication (Official Standard Characters)

GB2312-80 Code Set IT-Oriented Script Other international Standard sets

Pinyin and other alphabetic systems

Substandard for Machine Use

257

Figure 6-2. Pluricentric model for Chinese script standardization

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“AS can be formed prior to BS. If AS is found at variance with BS when the latter becomes available, then AS can be amended accordingly in due course.” No government has ever attempted, or been able to provide, a complete official table of hanzi, even though the hanzi inventory has been systematically modified many times throughout history. This lack of a complete official table of all characters makes agreement on the definition of the official form of standard characters almost impossible. But this disorganized state of hanzi does not deny or negate the existence of the historic notion of standard hanzi; rather, it demonstrates that the notion of standardized hanzi has been variously defined in different dynasties. Standard characters, necessitated by computer application, are a modern idea, with a history of only some sixteen years (Wang T.K. 2003). Various definitions can be found in different research publications. The circulars concerning the issuance of the “Guiding Standard for Assessing the Management Work of Public Character Use in the Cities” (on a trial basis) and the Management Decree of Character Use in Publications (the Office of Standard Work 1997: 65, 73) are the first official documents that have attempted to define standard and non-standard characters. In 2000, this issue became a major problem in formulating the Language Law (1/2001) (see Appendix D). The attempt to give a clear and official definition in the Law was abandoned, and a covert policy was adopted. The consensus reached during these discussions was documented in the official reports, and the agreed-upon definition (Education Office: 2001: 43-44) is as follows: Standard characters include two types: simplified/verified characters and characters having a historical legacy. The latter refers to historical characters still in active use in modern Chinese; they constitute the major part of standard characters and do not need to be verified. Simplified and verified characters include those in the five subparts decreed by the Mainland government from 1955 to 1995, with the aim of regulating official publications. They are: • • •

Simplified characters in the General List of Simplified Characters, approved and reissued by the State Council in October 1986; Rectified characters in the First Table of Verified Variant Forms, decreed by the Culture Ministry and the CCSR in March 1955; The Table of Common Chinese Characters, issued in March 1988 by SCLW in conjunction with the State Department of Press and Media;

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• •

2.3.2

Characters replaced by rectified characters in the nine tables of Verified Rare Characters for Geographical Names above County Level, released between 1955 and 1964 by the State Council; Characters replaced by rectified characters in the Announcement of Unified Characters for Some Names of Measurement Units (metric units such as kilometer, kilogram), broadcast in July 1977 by the CCSR, in conjunction with the State Bureau of Measurement Standards. Substandard for Personal Use

As a descriptive standard, recognition should be given to popular forms that are already in current use; it is less rigid and more flexible and encompasses a wider variety of hanzi forms for use in certain social domains. The Substandard for Personal Use provides everyday users with a legitimate and standard form, but it should not be seen as a restriction on personal usage. On the contrary, it gives more freedom to choose one’s own way to write in a characteristic style. Another advantage in having a descriptive Substandard is that it is a good way to raise public awareness about standardization. In a sense, it legalizes the unofficial hanzi, and thus is a pragmatic means to recognize the actual situation. As discussed in Section 2.2, Chapter 2, a number of non-official characters have been in wide use for quite some years. Scholars have called for years for these to be collected, described and to be promulgated in order to regulate the laissez-faire state of their use. Many popular SSS characters, for instance, are still widely used but have been kept out of the official standards. Li Jianguo (2000: 11), a language standardization researcher, is also very critical of the ineffectiveness of LP policy in addressing the change of public hanzi use. He points out, the official standard Modern Chinese Dictionary was the standard in the 1960s, and there is no mechanism to modify it to take into account new norms so that it can keep abreast of language development. From a technological perspective, the first beneficiary of a Substandard for Personal Purposes would be the prospective users and developers of OCR technology and handwriting input software. As previously stated, OCR technology is very attractive to the majority of the population who are pinyin illiterates, poor putonghua speakers, or those older people who are unable to cope with the alphabetic keyboard. But those working in the field assume that it will take at least a decade before OCR is working at essentially the same level as keyboard typing, because of the irregular nature of handwriting, with everyone having their own handwriting

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features, including personal preferences. A thousand people may write a character in a thousand different ways, but underlying these thousand variants there is a basic outline that defines the essence of the character which can be and should be standardized. Traditionally, the recommended standard guiding people’s handwriting was based on popular calligraphy copybooks. Developing a Substandard for Particular Purposes requires some well-coordinated and planned systematic work. The opinion is that the basis for the Substandard should be the most commonly used forms selected from among the people, and that scholars should set about the codification of that norm in semi-official dictionaries to provide recommended alternatives, so that there is an orthographic convention to which users can refer. This was done through an Official List of Handwriting Characters in Taiwan two decades ago, but no steps have been taken in this direction in Mainland China. To solve the dilemma of how to maintain the official norm while there is more than one form for the same character, particularly when the substandard has become more acceptable than the official norm, is an important task of standardization. 2.3.3

Substandard for Machine Use – IT-oriented

Rather than clear-cut boundaries there would be a great deal of overlap between the standard for humans and the IT-oriented standard for machines. The latter may be defined as a system of technologically implementable features with static and quantifiable elements, concentrating particularly on those features that are indispensable to technological development. The IToriented standard has been regarded as working at a basic level and the standard for human beings as a sort of superstructure for any language community. The pro-machine standard is embodied in the general standard (Standard A) with its attributes of flexibility, ambiguity, accommodation and adaptation to particulars. The machine, on the other hand, functions on principles opposite to these: it demands an absolute and higher-level standardization of form. In many cases the machine is zero-tolerant of divergences and deviations, and, having been constructed for industrial convenience, follows coercive and prescriptive rules. The differences between the general standard for humans and the IT-oriented standard reflect the use of characters in differently functioning spheres and domains – IT-oriented protocols are overtly pegged to quantitative criteria and precise measurements. In contrast, although standards play an essential role in human communication, people can accommodate variation, so that the standard for humans will always be more nebulous, relativistic and

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subjective, and may often involve a choice between alternatives, and the abandonment of less qualified candidates. Most IT-oriented standards, despite some being more linguistically neutral, are based on conventional standards. In other words, an IToriented standard also requires linguistic justification to make hanzi more logical and acceptable. Therefore, most IT-oriented standards are formulated on the basis of society-targeted standards. Within the Chinese legal framework, a sub-commission (the Approval Commission of Standardization Work) was established under the SCLW in 2003, and detailed provisions were developed for how a standard is proposed, submitted, assessed and approved. But a language standard does not become an industrial standard until it is passed by the State Standards Bureau and is put into effect in the market. If the process of making the standards for human use is seen as normalization and for computers as standardization, the relationships and differences between the two categories can be described with reference to a number of criteria as set out in Table 6-2. Table 6-2. Differences between norm and standard

Methodology

Normalization

Standardization

choose from existing variants

set up quantitative features

Orientation

human and society

machine and industry

Complementation

flexible and changeable

stiff and fixed

through propaganda

through market

Locus/context

domestic

International

Definition

describable and qualitative by researchers

prescriptive and operational by engineers

Emphasis

system and process

detail and result

Consideration

rational and acceptable

Computer-friendly and mechanically convenient

There are three kinds of IT-oriented standards in terms of their relationship with the General Standard: 1. The first kind is a purely IT-oriented standard that is defined in terms of quantitative measurements without any linguistic consideration, so a significant part of these standards falls completely outside the linguists’ concerns; e.g., the GB/T14720-93 256X256 Grid Code of the Bold

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Characters for Information Interchange, issued by the State Bureau of Technology Supervision in 1993. 2. The second kind has nothing to do with public language use and has little implication for human language activities. This standard is defined on the basis of linguistic description, but is supposed to ensure that software programmers work in accordance with generally recognized standards, thus enabling their products to serve all members of the community effectively; e.g., the Standard of Stroke Ordering of the General Modern Characters, issued by the SCLW and the Department of Media and Press in 1997, and the GF3001-1997 Standard of Character Components for Information Interchange, issued by the SCLW in 1997. 3. The third kind is intended to facilitate IT development and its major function is for technological convenience. There might have been no need to enforce these standards had they not been demanded by the IT industry, but once fully in place, they also restrict human language behavior. For example, GB 2312-80: the characters included in the code set are official standard characters that are also circulated in society. On the other hand, in order to accommodate the need to automatically process large texts on machines and to provide an interface between domestic standards and in international standard in cyberspace as well as in some of the so-called Big Set encoding standards, such as the series of GB-2312’s supplementary sets that was put in use in the mid1990s, GB 13000.1 and some other character standard sets mentioned in Appendix F, the characters included are well beyond the official standards for human use, i.e., a large number of traditional characters and variant forms are integrated.

Figure 6-3. Sample page of GB 2312-80

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During the past 47 years, LP workers and IT experts have done important work in using the power invested in government to fix the language problems. Starting in November 1954, with the Directive on Discussing the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, issued by the Centre of the CCP through October 2001, when the Law of the P.R. China for General Chinese Language was promulgated, various government agencies at the state level have issued 101 laws, regulations, directives, decisions and guidance on the use of language and hanzi (SCLW 2004c). By 2001, eighteen laws had provisions about language use. In May 1981, the first IT-oriented standard, GB 2312-80, was formulated (Figure 6-3), and by December 2001 The Chinese Character Turning Stroke Standard of GB 13000.1 Character Set came into effect. Over a period of 20 years, 81 IT-oriented technical standards have been promulgated. (A few of these standards concern non-hanzi scripts such as Mongolian and the Uygur orthography.) There are seventy ‘Class GB Standards’ issued by the State Bureau of Technology Supervision, or by the Chief Bureau of National Standards, eight ‘Class GF Standards’ issued by the SCLW and two ISO standards. The new link between the detailed standards for hanzi use and IT advancement has gained an increasing degree of recognition. Standardization has never before been as pivotal to the success of digital survival. A report from the American Embassy in Beijing (US Embassy 1997) observed that: Poor technical standard compliance resulted in inferior character alignment and display of the wrong character … Greater compliance with PRC national technical standards will improve the Chineselanguage information product quality and make these products much easier for people to use.

2.4

The Ongoing Exploration – Toward a Framework for the Future

Some years after this pluricentric model was advanced, similar views about the nature of language standards were becoming predominant among some key language policy researchers. The change originated primarily through the necessity to address the practical problems arising out of defining standards for various aspects of hanzi, particularly to deal with the criticism that the current framework was inadequate to accommodate exceptions in standards formulation. As an example, let us take the difficulty of

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standardizing total character numbers in the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters. Since 2002, the ongoing effort to formulate the CTSC has been the foremost task for LP practitioners. Important as it is, the quantity determination has proved to be a hard nut to crack as discussed in Section 2.1, Chapter 4. According to Wang Tiekun (2004: 190-191), there are three key factors that define the characters to be included in any standard table: whether they are: i) for common use in modern times, ii) for general communication purposes, and iii) within mainland China. Based on this assumption, Wang proposes that instead of trying to work out a one-fits-all standard, the characters included in the CTSC could be clustered into three hierarchic levels: characters in Level-I (approx 3,500) are the commonest, Level-II (approx 4,500) are less frequently used characters and Level-III are designated to serve for the special purposes. Considering that the CTSC would be the most important national standard governing character use for both human and machine for at least several decades to come, a relatively small number of characters is convenient for general hanzi users, but computers are expected to be able to process all characters in a world characterized by a borderless information flow. However, either case would inevitably lead to an apparent paradox: a small operational number, say about 3,500 from an educational point of view, would undoubtedly cover more than 99.99 percent of modern publications. But this number would be error prone if the written text extended to wider domains. For example, for computer applications, it would be inadequate to reproduce ancient texts, or it would appear awkward in dealing with the hanzi-wrapped information circulating on international communication networks. On the other hand, technologically speaking, a bigger number – in which most hanzi are only necessary for very special purposes – would not only waste cyberspace resources, but also create an unimaginably large piece of work from the perspective of LP. To include more characters (some standard code sets range between 20,000-30,000 characters) in the national standard would result in not only bringing more RC, variant forms and non-Mandarin characters into circulation for common use, but would also require reviving a large number of obsolete characters which long ago ceased to be used in modern life. One aspect which was not discussed previously is that, once a government-mandated standard is put into force, it tends to trigger a ‘the more, the better’ competition (largest is best) among dictionary compilers, input program devisers and software venders, because the inclusiveness of dictionaries and the data processing ability of a larger number of hanzi – while practically valueless – offers a selling point and mark of differentiation in the marketplace.

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Faced with this kind of paradox and particularly with frequent criticisms of the failures of various official standards to deal with increasingly diverse situations over recent years (and after extensive reflection and review of previous practices in managing character use, as well as foreseeing possible problems deriving from more complex circumstances in the new historical context), a new model of what can be called functionspecific multilayered standards has become accepted among mainstream LP decision makers and has been received very positively by many researchers. First proposed by Wang Tiekun (2003), it was elaborated in greater detailed by other predominant scholars such as Fei and Xu (2005) and Wang Ning (2004b). The multilevel approach attempts to provide theoretical explanations for understanding the limitations of previously published tables, as well as to develop a paradigm to define the characters that are going to appear in the CTSC that is being formulated. The best feature of such a function-specific multilayered standards model is that it discerns the previously intermingled relationships between the past and the present, the inside and the outside, the majority and the minority and the human and the machine in character use. Take the General List of Simplified Characters (2235) for example. The table, which was created in the 1950s and officially promulgated in 1964, was originally targeted at the common user who was struggling to gain a basic ability to read and write characters encountered in daily life. Due to a failure of understanding the functional area and the sociolinguistic underpinning of the table in question, some scholars inferred by analogy the principles of simplified components and used them to simplify a rather large number of characters in compiling dictionaries (Wang 2002: 62). Likewise, reprinting classical texts, which are normally read by a relatively small number of so-called intellectuals, requires many times more characters than the 2,235 that were simplified. As a result, a number of ‘simplified characters’ – that were neither included in the official simplification tables nor have existed historically – were coined through overgeneralization, causing a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion among readers. Similarly, in machine applications, people currently are frequently annoyed by the inability of simplified characters to match their traditional counterparts on a one-to-one basis in automatic conversion. Again, according to the model of function-specific multilayered standards, this occurs because character simplification is designed for the convenience of human written communication which covers only the most-used hanzi. Computer applications fall beyond the functional area they intend to serve, which includes the expectation of processing texts of large size. Fei and Xu (2005) emphasize the notion of level specificity, and

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argue that most of the previously formulated standards about character use are in essence aimed at the level of the majority, i.e., public users. These standards have no responsibility, nor the ability to regulate exceptional occurrences which applied most commonly only to a minority of privileged social groups. This notion has never been explicitly articulated by the standard setters, but within a framework of this kind, using a relative and multidimensional model, many usages that were considered illegal or inappropriate in the past can now be treated individually, and thus the discrepancies between the majority and minority are readily resolved. The fact that the new model has been cogently expressed in a number of recent articles shows that, in order to address a discrepancy between the prescribed standards and the variations found in real life, the problems born out of earlier transformations need to be looked at from a new perspective. However, a number of issues are far from being settled, and some of these relate to rather fundamental questions. For instance, in a digital society modern day users are exposed to a body of written communication of unlimited scope, which cannot be defined or constrained by a fixed number of characters. Even so, having only a fixed number of characters that define this domain tends to overly restrict the needed variations. The specific interest in the multilayered theory is to a large extent due to the fact that it defines the role of standards for more flexible development, giving due consideration to individual rights in character use and recognizing the need to strike a balance between four sets of relationships, i.e., the past vs the present, the inside vs the outside, the majority vs the minority and the human vs the machine. The authors believe the model has become popular because the notion of functions and levels has been understood as offering a particularly useful solution for the unsatisfactory outcomes of previous standardization practices. New paradigms for new concepts could lead to new ways of thinking about these demarcations in an increasingly diverse and complex society. In this sense, it is quite legitimate to proceed in this manner and to operate temporarily with a relatively defined concept of hanzi. This description highlights the common ground between our pluricentric model and the thinking currently being explored in academic circles. It shows that this multilayered standards approach shares insights with the framework proposed in Figure 6-2, enabling LPers to reflect on the more profound principles needed to standardize hanzi.

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3.

LANGUAGE REFORM MODERNIZATION

In this chapter, the socio-political aspect of standardization has been emphasized by drawing attention to the conflict between language use standardization and societal diversification. Xi (2004: 81-85) has argued that Chinese language modernization includes four dimensions: (1) to modernize the language and script per se, (2) to modernize language application, (3) to modernize research methodology, and (4) to modernize linguistic theory. He notes that to accommodate the changing social environment, both ways of implementing standardized forms and the role of the standard setter have to be redefined. In this section, we put forward the fifth modernization – to modernize the way to modernize language. After 1986, the focus of LP work has shifted from creating (simplification and Romanization) to selecting (standardization), a process which has been getting evermore sophisticated. Standardization work normally involves making a decision where choices have to be made from more than one variety of the same occurrence. As Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 123) point out, “the ‘standard’ language is really no one’s ‘first’ language. On the contrary, the ‘standard’ language must be acquired through individual participation”. This shift has made it essential to get as wide a consensus as possible from the targeted population on the selections made, to gain acceptance of the new products of corpus planning. A new type of survey, propagation and evaluation mechanism is required to accommodate this change. However, the official functions of LP agencies do not accommodate this as they remain basically unchanged within the current LP framework. A description of this official policy toward standardization can be gleaned from Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying: “Crossing the river by sensing the stones” [mo zhe shitou guo he]. It would be desirable to have a legislative procedure that would act to prevent higher-level power struggles from interfering in LP and using it as a political weapon to abuse the ‘people’. Given the economic and social changes that have occurred in China in the 1990s, finding appropriate mechanisms for script reform are now the central concern of LP modernization. In the following discussion a number of representative issues, critical to character standardization in this context, are examined. But first, Cooper’s (1989) accounting scheme is used to summarize the changes required in current and future LP work, as a way of relating knowledge about complex relationships to the social environment and LP ventures in the Chinese context.

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3.1

Theoretical Framework

In pursuance of a descriptive, predictive, explanatory and theoretically adequate framework for understanding LP, Cooper turns to four instances in human science disciplines that generally had previously not been seen as related to language study, including: (1) the management of innovation, (2) the instance of marketing, (3) language as a tool for the acquisition and maintenance of power, and (4) the instance of decision making. Based on the similarities in the purposes and operational principles between LP and these four overlapping disciplines, Cooper proposed a framework which he called an accounting scheme for the study of LP. In this scheme, he sets out eight components which, omitting the sub-rubrics, are: (1) what actors (2) attempted to influence what behaviors, (3) of which people, (4) for what ends, (5) by what means, (6) and with what results, (7) under what conditions and (8) through what policy making process. If we map the Chinese LP process into Cooper’s eightfold accounting scheme, we can compare the nature of the new historical LP conditions after 1986 with those prior to this period (see Table 6-3). The comparison shows, multiple changes have occurred that clearly characterize script reform under the new historical conditions. Corpus planning operates in real-world contexts in conjunction with the social, cultural, political and economic forces (see Chapter 5). Among the challenges created by the interaction of these forces is that the impact on hanzi planning, made by communication technology and computing, seems to have been foregrounded, which has necessitated a shift in the focus of hanzi planning from reforming (simplification and phoneticization) to standardization, where the latter means making choices between varieties. The promotion of standardized forms has become the new task put before LPers. This requires the “planning authorities to engage more in active promotion of the products and standards among the potential user public” (Das Gupta and Ferguson 1977: 5). As Fishman (1983: 112) has argued, “to have a ‘model of goodness’ accepted, liked, learned and used by the target population”, the audience “needs to be told why what is being offered is desirable, admirable, and exemplary”. This task would seem to be more challenging in the current context, with a population that has a growing awareness of its rights, which presupposes that the exercise of power in today’s China is being increasingly achieved through democratic means, involvement and consensus. The authoritarian support and compliance for policies that could be

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Table 6-3. Changes to the Chinese LP process after 1986 according to Cooper’s framework

Before 1986

After 1986

What actors

High level government bureaux and institutions, largely ‘bottom-up’ with limited users’ participation

Basically the same as before 1986, but with wider participation of official or semi-official organizations and academics

To influence what behaviors

Interpersonal communication; masses’ access to knowledge

Humans’ interaction with computers

Of which people

The majority population – illiterates and semi-illiterate adults, most reside in rural areas

Literate young and urban population, future oriented

For what ends

To liberate huge productive human resources for nation building; language reform; domestic

To empower the significant citizen with technological advantages; standardization; international

Under what conditions

Typical agricultural economy; socialist system; highly controlled society; cultural life is simple

Market economy; society is getting diversified with a new dimension of culture; revitalization and preservation of tradition

By what means

Large scale; radical change; political campaign; state mandate

Status cultivation and institutional promotion

Through what policy decisionmaking process

Centralization and coercion; top-down model

Developing toward democracy and transparency; involvement; bottom-up model

With what effects

Simplification and phoneticization; a simple and convenient modern script system was obtained

Standardization; mechanical efficiency of hanzi is improved and hanzi is more digitally maneuverable

generated in a totalitarian society, now involves tremendously complicated socio-cultural sensitivities that most LP professionals are ill-equipped to deal with. Working in this area must inevitably involve the use of prestige and image planning, which are largely unheard of in the Chinese LP community. (see Ager 1999, 2001, 2005, Baldauf 2004, Haarmann 1990,

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Kaplan and Baldauf 1997, 2003; and related theoretical concepts such as ‘communicative competence’, ‘language intellectualization’ and ‘high prestige domains’) It may be useful, therefore, to briefly describe the importance of these issues to provide a theoretical base for the second theme of this chapter – LP modernization. This, then, may lead us to think that prestige and image planning might be, in fact, of some practical value in the Chinese context. LP activities can be examined from different perspectives. Haugen (1966a) conceived the LP process as a four-stage activity, and his wellknown fourfold problem areas arranged in matrix form have been widely accepted and applied in LP practices. He subsequently revised his model (Haugen, 1983), taking into consideration the two additional dimensions suggested by Neustupný (cultivation, 1970) and Rubin (evaluation, 1971). In 1989, Cooper argued for acquisition or language-in-education planning to be made a separate activity, while in 1990, Haarmann (1990) suggested a fourth range of activities – prestige planning, to supplement Haugen’s fourfold problem areas model. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, 2003) argue that Haarmann’s typology enforces the notion that LP occurs at different levels and for a variety of purposes. Corpus and status planning represent the productive venture at the one end of the continuum, while prestige planning serves as a receptive or value function. Nevertheless, some significant changes have begun to emerge since the 1990s. Scholars have come to look at LP implementation as a two-way model: the planner and the recipient, where emphasis is now given to the acceptance of language products, the recipient’s attitude and to methods of persuasion. Cooper (1989) draws an analogy between the market promotion of commercial produce and the societal acceptance of the planned language product. Haarmann’s (1990) prestige planning dimension attaches importance to those factors that influence how the varieties chosen are accepted, learned and used by the target population and, emphasizing the assessment of the value of stakeholders’ views, particularly the process of participation. In his words, “[t]he individual’s control of planning measures is the most basic force in the language-planning process in terms of acceptance and rejection of its implications” (p. 121), and “a planned standard variety finds its genuine support in a positive evaluation by its potential users who may attribute prestige values to its structure and function” (p. 118). Haarmann’s arguments concur with psychologists’ research on people’s perception on the fairness of policy making. Policy success shows that “individuals tend to perceive that policies are fair, not if outcomes of

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the policy are fair and equitable, but whether they have been adequately consulted in the process of constructing the policy” (Schiffman 2004: 6). The ramifications of this emerging tendency raise the need for us to seek an alternative understanding and interpretation of the related planning efforts. In the context of today’s China, the major content of LP modernization, required by the new feature of script reform, involves a functional transformation from productive and regulative planning to indicative and promotional planning (see e.g., Das Gupta and Ferguson 1977: 5), or prestige cultivation and image building of the planned products – various officially sanctioned standards. The future success and effectiveness of the planning endeavor depends to a great extent on this transformation. Image and prestige planning is a long, delicate and arduous process (Ager 2005: 1041). In the Chinese context, this also suggests that image and prestige planning may need to be undertaken at a local (Canagarajah 2005) or micro (Baldauf 2006) level to deal with regional issues (see Section 4.3, Chapter 5).

3.2

The Importance of Language Planners and Stakeholders Agreeing on a Standard

It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of language planning for determining either the degree to which goals have been fulfilled, or the relative contribution of various factors to the outcome since its ultimate effect can only be shown by social use over a long period of time (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 4-5). However, the unpredictable nature of script reform should not be taken to suggest that little or nothing can be done to reduce the risk. An ideal decision-making model should maximize the advantages of a democratic process and public involvement. The rationale for conducting a large-scale public opinion survey in a systematic manner can also be justified by the following points: 1. There is no such thing as a minor issue when it comes to script change; even the trial use of some feature has a great impact on society. As Cohen and Kraak (cited in Geerts 1977: 202) have said, “the problem of so-called spelling simplification can hardly be called simple”. When a writing system remains unchanged, few people think about the problems inherent in it. But, if an alteration is made, be it major or relatively minor, it will draw nationwide attention and trigger a debate, e.g., the recent debates over spelling reform in France and Germany (e.g., Ball 1999). The controversial nature of even small changes to a language’s orthography can be seen from the German example where,

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despite extensive consultation and relatively minor changes being made, controversy over the changes remains strong (Coulmas 1998; Ohlendorf 1997). The case of efforts to alter some American spellings for words related to the metric system also shows “how much heat can be generated by even a minor change in our habits of English spelling” (Haugen 1983). 2. Geerts has (1977) demonstrated that “In spelling matters much more is claimed than proved” (p. 180). No hard and fast criterion can determine a clear-cut advantage or disadvantage for script reform. “Discussions of spelling are notorious for generating more heat than light”, lamented Gregersen (p. 421). 3. Script reform is a very sentimental issue. Language problems are discussed in every community, by linguists as well as non-linguists, and every stakeholder has a strong point of view and some expertise (Baldauf 1994: 82). Coulmas (1989: 241) aptly concludes, that discussions “often resemble a religious war more than a rational discourse”, because the “writing system is the most tangible part of a language, often being the subject of emotional attachment and irrational attitudes”.

3.3

Challenging Existing Practices – Experiences and Realities

Chinese linguists keep in mind the well-known saying about the process of standard formation: once a few peers do it, it is done to all (wu bei shu ren, ding ze ding yi – ).2 The implication of the saying is that sometimes it is almost impossible to come to a consensus on creating a standard. Furthermore, past experience shows that sometimes it may not be a simple matter of democracy and representation, like it is in politics, where things can be settled by voting. The case of the Old National Pronunciation illustrates how a democratically arrived standard for pronunciation met a devastating fate (see Section 4.3, Chapter 5). However, the subsequent experiences of pronunciation standardization demonstrate that its validity will be challenged by the public if an agreedupon standard is not based on sound support from the masses. To appreciate this, one only has to examine the two major pronunciation standardization programs in New China, those of 1957 and 1985. The top-bottom approach is a common feature of both of these pronunciation standards and the principal reason why they have drifted away from demotic speech. The resulting confusion, seen in the glaring difference between the official standard and the common parlance, highlights the huge gap between the

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standard on paper and actual use in society. For example, the evidence of divergent reading of characters is too obvious to ignore; it is very common for public figures to appeal to the community to correctly pronounce their names when using them in the media.3 After grouping some highly used characters with contentious pronunciation, Li Yuming (2004c: 67) asks an important question: Should we re-standardize them, and if so, on what basis? 3.3.1

Misusing ‘the People’

The success of script reform is commonly recognized as being highly dependent on the societal preferences, or the masses’ attitude, to use Communist terminology. In a sense, the effectiveness of script reform is actually a matter of the majority embracing it – as they did with the reforms programs in the 1950s, so the extent and the manner in which ‘the people’ are represented becomes truly important, at least for non-technical standards. An immediate empirical task of LP should be to find out under what conditions and to what extent decisions regarding the implementation of LP programs are determined by public feeling. ‘The masses’ is a very important entry in the Communist dictionary; without a theory-based and large-scale survey or experiment, the indiscriminate use of ‘the masses’ and ‘the people’ becomes vulnerable to serve political ends. In the literature discussing the social acceptability of previous reform measures, the Second Scheme in particular, ‘the people’ and ‘the masses’ are the most frequently recurring terms, but they are used without supporting data, indicating that the use of these terms is not well grounded in fact. Broadly speaking, the need to reform the language is decided by two groups of people in China, the vast ‘masses’ and the ‘Central’ (government). No attempts are made to give a clear definition of either of these two vague concepts. History shows that conflicts about linguistic affairs are customarily resolved by a high profile speech by a national leader, as was the case in the debate about the hanzi’s future that was discussed in Chapter 2. Most of the time, this kind of speech is collectively written by the official scholars. When such directives from the top are delivered to scholars for implementation, it is always a guessing game as to whether they come from the Central Committee (zhongyang) or from the Leadership above (shangbian). As Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 55) aptly point out, we just know that “these are people with power and authority who make language related decisions for us, often with little or no consultation with the ultimate language learners and users. Exactly who

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these planners are is often left in general terms [emphasis added by authors]”. In 1950, the people could be more certain: the versatile and multitalented Mao did not hide his interest in language and script affairs, neither did the premier Zhou Enlai, who was actively involved and was the ultimate authoritative source. But from 1986 onwards, the people were unsure who the ultimate decision makers were. While it is politically appropriate that various schemes are commissioned and given final approval by the Leadership, the people cannot help but question who in the Leadership is making the decisions when schemes are unexpectedly rejected. The term ‘vast masses’ (guangda qunzhong), a much loved catchphrase by language planners, has been so habitually misused and is so ambiguous that no one pays any attention to it any more. It is analogous to the term ‘the Australian people’, used so casually as a justification by politicians in parliament house. In the Chinese context, without an effective means to channel public opinion, only the views of highly organized minorities are effectively presented through the printed page, radio and television. In some circumstances, if the terms were used in a relative sense, ‘vast masses’, in the broadest terms, represents the people working in the cliques of linguistics, education, the media and IT industry, such as language teachers, relevant scholars and experts, dictionary compilers, media workers, and so on, who have frequent contact or are in close relationship with LP workers. The term would be confusing to the real masses, when it is used as a synonym for this cohort of professionals. In sum, the validation mechanism currently employed by LP authorities is at best tokenism when implemented on this basis. 3.3.2

Exploring the Possibility of a Public Opinion Poll

Those involved in theorizing LP recognize the need for wider involvement, for example, Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 55) observe that A number of authors have questioned the role of traditional language planners or actors and have argued for the inclusion of a broader participation base, i.e., the people for whom language is planned should have a say in its actual planning and implementation. The use of sociolinguistic surveys or other such methods means that the traditional planners have the means to collect information about the impact of potential planned language changes at the macro level. Whether there is a polity will to do so, is another matter.

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Schiffman (2004: 6) criticizes the ignorance of the public about language policy formation as a ‘father knows best’ approach. He points out that “[e]ven in societies where language policy formation is thought of as more ‘democratic’, the policy rarely involves consultation”. Based on cultural and political analysis, users’ feelings about script reform can be cautiously forecast. The most scientific and reliable way, however, is undoubtedly through public opinion polls. Public support prior to implementation can reduce the risks of rejection to a minimum. In China, where all propaganda apparatuses are almost entirely financed by the state, it is particularly important to find a mechanism through which public feelings can be channeled. An opinion poll conducted by the media is a widely adopted means used in a number of countries to do this. Before proceeding with further discussion on the importance of public involvement in Chinese script reform, a historical example might be helpful. In order to collect competing public views about the script reform, the Language Weekly section in the Shanghai Times conducted a key informant interview in July, 1947, and written feedback was obtained from 28 influential members of the intelligentsia in various relevant fields on ten questions about hanzi Romanization. The result was that all respondents chose the adoption of Latin letters, instead of Japanese Kana, a self-created hanzi stroke scheme, or Cyrillic script (Ye 1949: 519-555). When the Romanization issue was put forward in the first days of New China, a sharp debate arose on what form should be chosen for the forthcoming phonetic scheme. None of the papers mentioned the Shanghai Times survey, suggesting that this potentially valuable information, collected just a few years earlier, was ignored. Because Mao Zedong and some prestigious scholars insisted on a nationalist-style scheme, three years were wasted in devising a hanzi-based national script form (see Section 7.2.2, Chapter 5). Today, with hindsight, Chinese feel fortunate to have chosen to use Latin letters for pinyin, but may regret that useful empirical information was bluntly ignored. There are many international examples of LP where decisions are arrived at with input from public opinion polls, particularly when there is disagreement on some aspects of script reform within the community. For example, Ferguson (1996: 273) argues that: In fact, decisions on language questions are notoriously influenced by emotional issues such as tribal, regional, religious identifications, national rivalries, preservation of elites, and so on. They may even go directly against all evidence of feasibility. The fact remains that the availability of accurate, reliable information on the language situation

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of a country can be influential in making policy decisions and is of tremendous value in planning and carrying out the implementation of the policies. The importance of public surveys has been emphasized anew over recent years (e.g., Baldauf 2002; Baker 2006), but language attitude and language-use surveys (known as sociolinguistic surveys; see Whiteley 1984; Kaplan and Baldauf 1997) are a tradition in LP research and implementation. The majority of articles in Language Planning Process by Rubin et al (1977) were devoted to LP surveys, although how they were used, and the role they played in the policy-making process, depended on the socio-political setting of each country. When, during the early 1990s, spelling reform was proposed in Germany, a series of public opinion surveys were conducted. Based on the results, the authorities were initially dissuaded from continuing the reform program (Clyne 1995: 248-252).4 In Turkey, those involved in the “reform went to great length in consulting the public, for example through questionnaires published in the media” (Boeschoten 1997: 375). Attention should also be drawn to Japanese examples. During the formation of the Table of Common Characters, the authorities convened 202 meetings within a span of eight years, and two surveys were conducted. In order to get the ordinary peoples’ opinions about the desirable total number in the table, the Propaganda Ministry carried out a public opinion poll among ten thousand people in 1977 (He 2001: 128, 131). In 1995, concerned with the public’s complaints about the / (used unavailability of the traditional form for some Kanji, such as for personal names), the Culture Ministry launched a survey to see if the public would accept computer processing of rare characters on a limited basis (He 2001: 162). Poll (1973: 55-56) sees the attitudes of the masses as playing two crucial roles in implementing language planning: First, in all situations, mass attitudes will have an effect on the degree to which policies calling for change in mass language behavior are implemented; and second, in certain situations, mass opinion will have an effect on the initial official adoption of various language policies. He goes on to say that the latter situations presumably exist whenever two conditions are fulfilled: (1) the country is governed by competitively selected politicians who respect mass opinion; and (2) language policy is one of the salient political issues discussed by the mass media at the time. The conditions described by Poll are certainly not present in China currently, but public opinion polls are nevertheless a fascinating topic that has attracted increasing attention from LP workers since the SSS.

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The Communist Party grew out of a social movement; thus its rule was characterized by an emphasis on mass propaganda. Liu (1986) points out, “after 1949, almost every policy was accompanied by a campaign to involve all the population in its implementation. Most were highly orchestrated affairs instead of genuine involvement”. The present politicians attach more importance to building consensus rather than on pure political mobilization and administrative coercion. Technical specialists, employed by the state ministries, are also given more authority than they were granted in the early extreme leftist atmosphere. In the new century, as the iron curtain-style rule in China draws inevitably to a close, the democratic forces are more vigorously at work than ever before. Applying public opinion as a modern measure of risk reduction in LP projects would be a logical consequence of current directions in socio-political change. An overall review of the various forms used to seek public consensus when an obvious divergence of opinion has occurred, revealed that since 1949 the following five approaches have been taken: 1. Organizing symposia and seminars: This is the most common form of consultation, by bringing all those involved together. Normally, it is done at the initial stages to conduct a feasibility study. Typically, the conference is under tight government control and is confined to linguists and relevant experts. In the formulation of the TSC in the 1950s, a large number of linguistic experts were fully consulted using this mechanism. 2. Convening an informal discussion forum (zuotan hui – ) or tea party (chahua hui – ): During the 1960s, in order to repair the GLSC, over 300 non-communist members from the National Democratic Political Consultative Organization attended nine informal forums, convened by the Modifying Team of the Table of Simplified Characters. It organized six Teachers’ Forums with over 100 participants to discuss the modified table (Wang 1995: 151). In October, 1956, the Examination Commission of the Pinyin Scheme, under the State Council, organized a forum with invited representatives of language education, literature and the arts, journalism, the press, science and technology, translation, the army and non-governmental organizations, to discuss the scheme (Zhou 1980b: 72-73). 3. Sending out notices, circulars and directives: At the end of September, 1950, during the preparatory work leading to the TSC, those in authority sent out a Registry Form of Most Used Characters, and the Principles of Collecting Simplified Characters, to the relevant institutions and language-related professionals. Eleven institutions and 52

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language-related professionals responded with a specific feedback (Zhang et al 1997: 21). To canvass specialists’ suggestions, the authorities collected written opinions from 100 language educators in 39 cities before the Pinyin Scheme was submitted for promulgation (Zhou 1980b: 72-73). 4. Conducting interviews and investigations: In 1962, the CCSR established a research team responsible for summarizing and mending the TSC. Apart from some luminaries, such as Dong Biwu, Guo Moruo and Hu Qiaomu, the team also went to interview workers, peasants, businessmen and teachers living in the Beijing area (Wang 1995: 151). In December, 1984, Wang Jun and Chen Zhangtai, the Director and Secretary, personally went to visit members of the Standing Commission of the National People’s Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference, to solicit their comments on whether 111 SSS characters should be retained (Wang 2002: personal communication). 5. Distributing or publishing surveys through the media: It was reported that before the TSC was issued, 30,000 copies of the pamphlets were distributed to survey public opinion. Over 20,000 people from all walks of life throughout Mainland China participated in the discussions, with 97 percent of them favoring the table. In addition, in a period of about six months after the Draft Table of Simplification was issued in January, 1955, the CCSR received 5,167 letters from interested members of the public (Chia 1992: 212; Fei 1997: 220). A detailed description of the opinion collecting process shows that what makes the above five approaches different from the public opinion surveys we have seen in most modern democracies, is their token nature. A former Director of the SCLW (2002: seminar; Note 10, Chapter 1), has uncharacteristically acknowledged that opaque references to the public are actually … confined to certain select groups, mostly to academic circles, and the targeted correspondents know very well that the purpose of the meeting is to praise the issue, or at least to say something positive and encouraging about it. As a result, even when we genuinely like to know their true feelings, most of the general public customarily agree rather than disagree, or simply shut their mouths. Even for opinions within academia, transparency is very limited, something which was criticized by some linguists in the first debate on LP issues in the 1950s: “the CCSR did not publicize the divergence on some heatedly debated issues – this is a grave loss” (Wang 1995: 476). And

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more than that, when key issues were unable to be resolved, more often than not they would be turned over to ‘leading comrades’. This can be seen best in some of the decision-making processes in the 1986 NCLW. There was unquestionably a huge sense of discontent about some of the regressive changes made at the Conference, and when grumbling LP workers announced their dissatisfaction with the Conference decision to tone down the phoneticization direction, the organizers gave the following explanation (Chen 1986: 52): About the decision on this matter, the SCLW has already asked for instructions from the leader comrades in the CCCP and State Council. As for the participating comrades’ opinions, we also reported to the CCCP and the State Council, and yesterday afternoon, the SCLW received the written instruction from the above (author emphasis) saying they agreed with the decision. 3.3.3

Two Cases of Current Efforts at a Public Opinion Poll

The first case was the Table of Standardized Characters for Naming, one of the important sub-projects under the CTSC. It is debatable whether it is practically possible to standardize every character for everybody’s name in such an enormous country with such a long recorded civilization?5 To propagandize the Table, the Education Ministry set up an online forum (http://www.china-language.gov.cn/webinfopub/list.asp?id=1042, 30/8/2003) that invited Chinese Internet citizens to give their opinions and to provide examples of the rare characters from their own names, or of names they know. In the meantime, soho (com.cn) and sino (com.cn), two of the country’s most popular websites, conducted a public opinion poll on June 2, 2000 (www.shyywz.com/page/jsp/showdetail.jsp?id=1080, 30/8/2003), on ‘Shall We Have a Restriction on Name Giving Rights?’. In just a few days, 30,000 of the Internet constituency cast their votes. The second case was an online bulletin, launched to solicit nationwide public opinion on the unified, logical and convenient set of names to call hanzi’s component roots. The variant names, indicating the composing units of hanzi, often cause confusion in a range of areas: education, oral communication and dictionary indexation (Fu 1986: 97). It also causes problems for hanzi-based input systems for which the components are used as basic blocks to reconstruct hanzi. On February 26, 2001, in the course of drafting the National Standard for Components’ Calling Names for Information-Processing Hanzi Code Set GB-13000.1, an open letter was published under the column of ‘Norms and Standards’ on the government

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website at ‘china-language.gov.cn’. It was more symbolic than practical, as it largely targeted scholars and experts, and allowed only two weeks to respond. However, given the borderless power of the Internet in spreading information, it can be regarded as the first time that a LP agency openly canvassed public opinion on script reform issues from the broader society. Unlike the forums or meetings held for similar purposes, this approach was not limited to a closed circle of selected insiders.6 These cases are just two of many standards that require public consensus, and technological advances make it technically operational and financially efficient to canvas opinion in this manner – although this does limit the poll to computer users. The first nationwide LP survey in China was carried out in 1999 under the joint sponsorship of the State Council (Chinese Cabinet), the Ministry of Education and the SCLW. The objective was to assess the LP achievement in the past five decades and the current situation of language and script use, to provide evidence for LP policy making in the future. Another stated purpose was to help to predict trends by gathering information about the actual situation of nearly 100 Chinese dialects and over 60 languages of other ethnic groups living in Mainland China. The target population was 600,000 Chinese citizens aged between 15 and 69. The survey was completed at the end of 2004, three years after its projected completion date. This is a well publicized national research program. However, except for a news briefing at a grand ceremony celebrating its completion and acknowledging the survey workers, its outcome remains unanalyzed and unreported (at the end of 2006). It was supposed to be used in LP policy formulation and to inform the Language Law, which was passed in 2001. Therefore, a suggestion should be presented to the authorities to establish a public opinion office, preferably placed in the RIAL, with the aim of dealing exclusively and expertly with public opinion as a valuable source of input for LP issues.

3.4

Looking for a Way Forward

IT-oriented standardization is the new central feature of Chinese LP. Any possible future reform of the functions of the LP agency should focus on two aspects: 1) minimizing the harmful intervention of non-professional factors, and 2) deregulating LP agencies and management to make the standardization work transparent and acceptable.

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3.4.1

More Freedom, Less Intervention

It is a well-worn cliché that the state intervention in language is a powerful force in language planning. Language planning theory has given a lot of importance to the role of the state in the decision making process. Schiffman (1996: 13) points out that “[I]nterventionism is also inevitable where an overt model of language planning is accepted”. But intervention is an issue enmeshed in politics. The political environment has been a key element in the definition of the actors in the language planning process. Undoubtedly, in a totalitarian polity, there is no difference between state intervention and personal intervention, and this attests to the necessity of depersonalization in the future. Most LP decisions are ultimately political, or in Baldauf and Kaplan’s (2003: 21) words “the underlying motivation of language policy is almost invariably political rather than linguistic”, although the degree to which this is the case varies. In fact, political intervention is not always a necessarily harmful element, and if the political environment is healthy, it can become a much-desired force. Lewis (1982: 250) says, “in an authoritarian or a democratic country, it is the attitude and effort of the state which are most influential in promoting or restricting the spread of a language”. In a highly coercive political system, external interference constrains the work of competent scholars, particularly when a reform program is being forced to go in an undesirable direction. This undermines the role an LP agency should be playing in creating various standards that are well-devised and documented. In China, the national LP agency has been reorganized many times, and partially due to the lack of a definition of responsibility, disorder in the leadership has caused confusion among those involved7. Under the current political structure and bureaucracy, a higher level LP or independent governmental organ is also desirable. The current top level LP agency has two obvious disadvantages. After the 1998 restructure, the SCLW was placed under the Education Ministry, but its LP activities have nothing to do with the language-in-education planning work. At present, the SCLW is not a self-defined administrative body. Its activities, as previously mentioned, are mostly confined to research in the area of linguistic application and research funding administration. It is not able to promulgate any LP program without the concurrence of the relevant bureaucratic offices. What is more, LP researchers emphasize the continuous progressive development of LP practice, in which the last stage of planning is an evaluative check to determine whether the change planned for occurred and the plan worked. But as the regulation setter, the SCLW, under the current administrative bureaucracy, has no power to monitor implementation or to evaluate

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the outcomes. Pan Defu (2004) is critical of the fact that each time different standards are decreed by more than one authority, it makes these standards look weak and ineffective. For instance, the SSS was promulgated by the State Council, but suddenly nullified by the Ministry of Education only a few months after its promulgation, which violated the basic principle that when a reform program is cancelled, it has to go through the same legislative procedure that promulgated it (Wang T.K. 2003; Zhou 1983). This uncertainty at the highest levels of the decisionmaking apparatus shares a distinct similarity with North Korea’s abolition of its characters (Moon 2000). Another unprofessional external force is the internal fight among feudal political forces or interpersonal conflicts that put LP affairs in a vulnerable position. In Chapter 1, the authors have argued that the final withdrawal of the SSS was partially a consequence of conflicting forces, between the protagonists and antagonists of the Scheme, within LP circles. A classical case in Chinese LP history were the personal verbal attacks that occurred among the regional representatives in the National Conference of Pronunciation Standard in 1913 (DeFrancis 1950: 58; Yu 2003: 103). LP always involves a certain degree of collaboration between specialists and administrators, and rapport between them is crucial for its success. Fishman et al (1971: 296) argue that the nature of interpersonal ties (within and between agencies) influences agency goals and operation. Yu Genyuan (1996: 179) is also aware of the “destructive force of inharmonious interpersonal relationships” and warns, it “is an aspect of great importance among the factors that cause a setback in the progress of Chinese language work”.8 3.4.2

Proposed Solution – Deregulation and Diversification

Experts assign great importance to spontaneous support from the social elites in forming and spreading the standard. Su (2001b: 219) categorizes the standard as: (a) governmental standard; (b) expert standard; and (c) societal standard. He contends that during the formative period, when all three kinds of standards are formed by establishing the specific requirements, only the governmental standard is coercive, but its success depends heavily on whether the target population is supportive. While corrective and prescriptive standards are manifest in dictionaries, a societal standard forms and exists unconsciously in people’s language habits, supporting the living language of the people. Above all, it is a reflection of deeper historical factors. Therefore, the societal standard, with its wider implications and effects, is more fundamental in the long term. It has spontaneously taken shape over a relatively long period, in which social practices by prestigious

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personages are followed and imitated. Dai Zhaoming (1998: 190-191) also sees automatic standardization through self-regulation as an important device to advance the natural development of new standards. Dai (1998: 155-156), as well, categorizes a standard in terms of its standardization process. In his system, there is a spontaneous and a regulated standard, and the former is spread through the influence of prestigious writers and literary works. In Bambose’s (1990: 105) three-type framework of language norms (code norm, feature norm, behavioral norm), Su’s societal standard and Dai’s spontaneous standard can be roughly equated to his behavioral norm, which refers to the “expected patterns of behavior while interacting with others, the mode of interpreting what is said, and attitude in general to others’ manner of speaking”. As repeatedly emphasized in this volume, IT-oriented LP activities will remain a fundamental feature of most of the ensuing language reform, and development to date already indicates that technology has increasingly become a major dynamo for this linguistic growth. Corresponding to this transformation, the focus of LP work after 1986 has shifted from reforming (simplification and Romanization) to standardization, which involves a decision to make choices from more than one variety of the same occurrence. As one of the most important factors for successful standardization is the consensual decision and acceptance of the standards by the public, if future reform activities are not to be inhibited by a largely unwilling and ever better-informed populace, a participatory model for LP policy deliberation will become an ever increasing necessity. Promotion of the standard requires efforts to persuade potentially targeted users to adopt the one variety over others. A new type of survey, propagation and evaluation mechanism is required to accommodate this change. Because the LP agency is an agent of the state, it gets used to employing the coercive power of the state to enforce decisions. Cooper (1989: 78) stresses that “the coercive power of the state rests, in the long run, on the consent of the governed, even in totalitarian states”. Transformation from regulator and standard setter to promoter and trend-setter is the road that must be taken in LP modernization, which implies that the planners need to consider how they will create a climate of opinion favorable to the adoption of the planned innovation. In the future, the possible reform of the functions of the LP agency should focus on two aspects: minimizing any harmful intervention of nonprofessional factors; deregulating the administration and diversifying the agencies to include the non-governmental sectors, and encouraging public involvement. The existing ‘top-down’ structure was designed when China was an authoritarian and simple society. The centrism, or what Schiffman

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(2006: 120) termed the Jacobinism and dirigisme, might have functioned well with the gullible population in those credulous years before the opening up to the outside world. DeFrancis (1979: 152) observes that “the major decisions regarding writing reforms have been made essentially on the basis of discussions within the confines of the government or the Party and beyond the purview of the public at large”. In the past, the LP programs were imposed by coercion solely depending on official promotion (activities of government), while in an increasingly opening and democratic speech community, the need to apply Haarmann’s (1990: 120-121) typology of prestige planning, including institutional promotion (activities of agencies), pressure group promotion and individual promotion, would be not only viable, but may be unavoidable. To foster and propagate the new language use, it is necessary to encourage and cultivate the nongovernmental or semi-governmental organizations, and to foster locallybased organizations. Lehmann (1975: 44-45) was one of the first researchers to see the drawbacks of the Chinese LP agency, and envisaged the need for an autonomous and prestigious organ. He pointed out that other countries carry out their LP activities through different types of LP agencies. In some instances, the principal agency is an autonomous, prestigious academy consisting of a limited number of outstanding individuals selected for life. Quasi-governmental sectors are often represented by long-standing national language academies and language planning boards or councils with great prestige. From an international perspective, it may be worthwhile to explore the possibility of introducing Academie Française-style bodies (French Literary Academy)9, that serve to assure certain kinds of standardization through prestige and image building. An unofficial agency with such a purpose could parallel the existing SCLW, be complementary to it, and be relatively independent from heavy political interference. Chinese society is characterized by its patriarchal and oligarchic traditions. In terms of Bem’s (1970: 79-88) Modeling Theory, we are heavily influenced by the views of groups with which we identify, whose approval we want, or we regard as authority. There are reference groups to which we refer for cues when we are deciding what to think, groups whose frames of reference we adopt as we analyze the world. Language practice represented by influential citizens serves as a reference point for the whole society, because it provides the population with prestigious models to imitate. Such a voluntary organization should be

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composed of highly prestigious personages and well-known citizens in the fields of arts and sciences, and must be designated to provide chiefly cultural and social input. To break the organizational monopoly governing the Chinese LP apparatus and to provide a wider opportunity to air diverse views, including divergent voices, is another important form of deregulation. Lü Guanxiong (2003), a freelance LP critical commentator, openly criticizes the way state-controlled LP bodies deal with non-linguist scholars’ opinions, and he calls for opening research journals and even government funding to test individual schemes. The top-down modus operandi of LP decision-making has caused concern even for some official scholars (see e.g., Wang 1989; Su 1991). It is not surprising, then, that so many unofficial voluntary organizations relating to Chinese writing reform have come into being, such as Yuan Xiaoyuan’s International Association of Chinese Character Studies and Research Institute of Language, Culture and Science (1980, Beijing); the Common Script Association (1997, Shanghai); and the American Association for the Promotion of Chinese Script Reform (1997, New York).10 Ducke (2003) has pointed out that the Internet provides new, informal and horizontal ways of communication on an unprecedented scale, between the powerful political actors and the masses struggling below. Although most communication is currently still screened and sometimes censored in China, the Internet provides a convenient channel for more robust individual involvement that enables ordinary script reform activists with limited power and resources to compete with larger, well-financed organizations. For countless maverick intellectuals and amateur enthusiasts who are interested in LP and struggling to find a democratic voice, Internet use is a sign of public empowerment in domains that were previously monopolized by official bodies.11 As they are random individuals, working independently rather than as a coordinated force, it is as yet too early to foresee how long it will take to produce results, or whether they will be widely accepted by the academics and society. However, it can be predicted that this process will foster greater transparency and allow for the creative imagination of the vast masses. Although these emerging nongovernmental organizations and websites have been developing very fast, with some eventually growing into a force that cannot be easily ignored, in general they work virtually unnoticed and few big names from the mainstream LP community participate in any of them. This shows that the individual participation in non-official promotional roles has not been well recognized.

Chapter 7 SOME CRITICAL ISSUES Historical and Current

1.

INTRODUCTION

In the preceding chapters, we have looked in some detail at the development of the major episodes in modernizing the Chinese writing system. This chapter draws together and describes three seemingly disparate but essentially interactive threads: the revised interest in expanding areas of pinyin; the possibility of further simplification by bringing some of the banned traditional characters back for technological convenience; and hanzi unification in cyberspace with other hanzi-using polities. These issues have been touched on briefly in previous chapters, and the repetition of that information here would serve no purpose, nor do we wish to rehearse the many arguments and debates that have already been discussed and understood. Rather we wish to highlight some outstanding critical issues that have ebbed and flowed as elements of successive movements in recent history, affording us an opportunity to reflect on them in depth from a broader perspective. These are also issues that may need to be addressed as part of the approach to standardization proposed in the previous chapter. Two of the three topics set out in this chapter, simplification and Romanization, are century-old questions. The conclusion of the 1986 Conference superficially brought about a degree of closure on these two unsettled issues. Nevertheless, this closure should not be understood as being an ostrich-like policy, based on top-down dictates. The topics are still ongoing and central to the LPers’ concerns, and theoretical research and debate on these two complex and contested issues, by both academics

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and policy analysts, have never stopped. It is not surprising, that people feel a need to rethink these old controversial questions in the new broader context. This chapter details some of the critical issues that have arisen, seeking to explain how these new developments are being underpinned by changes occurring in the socio-political domain and on the technological front. Hopefully, this analysis will cast some new light on, and provide a better understanding of, these old questions. Since the 1986 conference, language policy has undergone some subtle changes with the stress on stability for the foreseeable future. However, due to the strong combined effects of technological impetus and political change, these problems continue to come to the fore with increasing frequency. At first, the three issues we deal with seem to reflect the consequences of technological problems, but as our analysis will show, a final resolution of the issues – almost without exception – ultimately directs us to the underlying sociolinguistic dimensions associated with the manifest ideologies.

2.

ROMANIZATION – OLD QUESTION, NEW CHALLENGE

Since the start of last century, tossed on the tide of modernity, hanzi’s future has been regularly questioned. The Romanization movement in China reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, with the explicit goal of replacing hanzi with an alphabetic system, but the debate about the nature of a Romanization system lasted up to the 1950s. It was just before the formal promulgation in 1958, when the official name of the current pinyin system was changed from ‘script scheme’ (Wenzi Fang’an) to ‘annotation scheme’ (Pinyin Fang’an). But speculation on phoneticization remained rife until the mid-1980s, when a halt finally was decreed on a century’s efforts to alphabetize the writing system. Of all the radical criticisms of hanzi, none was more sharply expressed than the warning by Lu Xun, a great modern Chinese writer, when he said in the 1930s, “either Chinese characters die out, or China dies out”.1 Lu Xun devoted all of his life to fighting Chinese traditional culture. Although his words on this topic may sound overstated today, they inspired Romanization advocates well into the 1950s. As we have seen in this volume, in the 1950s simplification was treated, at best, as a palliative, not a definitive cure. No one opposed the official prescription that the ultimate solution to China’s orthographic

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problem lay in the direction of a phonetic script. But since 1986, the government has held officially and firmly to the decision for an indefinite postponement of alphabetization. Nevertheless, historical experience shows that more often than not the simple reiteration of immutable principles by authorities does not ensure consistent policy. There exists a possibility, even the likelihood that Romanization will again become a Chinese LP priority. Today, the advocates of Romanization see an inherent conflict between the oldest writing system and the latest advances in technology, providing China with the opportunity to plan a solution to the problem through the introduction of a ‘two-tier system’ of ideographic and phonetic scripts. Such a system even could provide another layer to the multi-standard scheme proposed in last chapter (see Figure 6-2 in Section 2.3, Chapter 6). Radical IT specialists would like to see characters eliminated altogether and the adoption of a completely phonetic script. Their adamant stand was reflected in the much-quoted position of Chen Mingyuan (1980: 71), a CIP researcher, “The computer is the gravedigger of the square-shaped character, and midwife of the alphabetic script”.

2.1

Renewed Interest in Romanization and Digraphia

First coined by DeFrancis (1984a: 59), “Digraphia is the use of two or more different systems of writing for the same language”. This has occurred in some languages, for ethnic or religious reasons (e.g., Hindi – Urdu; Serbian – Bosnian). In today’s China, the imminent decision to adopt digraphia is purely based on technological considerations, prompted by the maleficent impact of hanzi on the IT industry. Su (2001a: 120) makes the position on digraphia at the present time very clear, “Chinese characters will be the first writing system and hanyu pinyin will be the second system”. Unofficially, some individual schemes of phonetic writing have been vigorously propagated. A few even have had intellectual rights registered inside and outside of China, and are using the Internet to get easy access to national and worldwide media attention. In an exact replication of the 1950s trend to devise alphabetic schemes (Zhao 1998: 155), some newly devised schemes are poorly designed and show a general hobbyist approach, which often appears to lack any sense of direction. In reality, much of the effort in devising an alphabetic writing system is directed at making better use of the existing pinyin system. This was consolidated by the issuance of the CF 3006-2001 Standard for the

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Table 7-1. Four functions of some major Romanized systems Functions

Representative Schemes

Designers/Proponents

Year

Explanations/Examples

English

Auxiliary

Pinyin

Phonetic Alphabet

A group of linguists and renowned scholars organized by the Education Ministry

1958

To facilitate the learning and use of Chinese characters mainly by providing a set of phonetic symbols that indicate the pronunciation of the characters in a clear and straightforward fashion. Other major roles of this system include: to deal with the place names and personal names; to aid the spread of putonghua; to store and retrieve information with traditional printing materials and computers; to encode hanzi in telegrams; etc.

Supplementary

Zhuyin Zimu

Sound-Annotating Alphabet

Collectively/government

1918

Gwoyeu Romatzyh

National Language Romanization

Linguists appointed by the Government

1928

To be used together with the traditional script in the texts, seeking to improve on the latter or performing functions for which the latter is ill-suited. There are two different ways: Phonetic symbols are either in juxtaposition with characters, creating a new kind of symbol that is composed of two parts (i.e., the character and the phonetic symbol to annotate its sound); or they are used in partial replacement of characters, resulting in a mixed writing system in the same text, which can be best exemplified by kana in Japanese.

Some Critical Issues

Chinese

Chapter 7

Alternative

Guanhua Zimu

Mandarin Alphabet

Wang Zhao

1892

To serve the full range of purposes expected of a writing system, thus enabling it to stand as an alternative to the traditional script.

Superseding

Latixua Sin Wenz (LSW)

New Writing of Latinization

A group of Communist scholars in exile in the Soviet Union

1931

To supersede the traditional script, making it obsolete, following the example of the Vietnamese Quoc Ngu and the Korean Hangul, which purged Chinese characters from their respective languages.

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Scheme of Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Input with Universal [Standard] Keyboard, by the Chinese LP authority, on February 26, 2002. However, pinyin was not designated as a writing system. Its inability to discriminate accurately between homophonous syllables poses the foremost problem to its elevation to a full-fledged orthography. From a historical perspective, there has been the lofty aim of liberating the vast illiterate population from the cumbersome ideographic writing system (Su 2001a). According to Chen Ping (1994), during the heyday of the Romanization movement, before the establishment of the PRC, phonetic writing schemes that intended to offer the masses of illiterates an alternative reading and writing system, ended up having one or more of the following four functions: auxiliary, supplementary, alternative and/or superseding the traditional logographic script. These functions are summarized in Table 7-1, but only those intended for an auxiliary role have achieved success. Because “schemes to perform each of the other three functions would affect the traditional script in one way or another, they have to overcome the resistance stemming from linguistic, psychological, pedagogical, political, and socio-cultural factors” (Chen P. 1994: 368). There are valuable lessons in historical experiences. When the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Scheme was proclaimed, Mao’s well-known proposition was that Chinese writing “should follow the common direction in the world of phoneticization”. Thus, it was designated as ‘phonetic spelling’ (pinyin) instead of ‘phonetic writing’ (pinyin wenzi), as originally strongly advocated by some radical pioneers of the Romanization movement. This affirmed China’s monographic policy of Chinese character use: pinyin is only employed where hanzi is inconvenient or cannot be resorted to, mainly in the following seven areas: • • • • • • •

For teaching pronunciation to Chinese children and substituting for characters that are too complex to write; Teaching Chinese to foreigners; Trademarks, street signs, and signage at railway stations, bus stops, etc.; Telegraphic codes, broadcasting and TV system; Braille for the blind and figure spelling for the deaf; Dictionaries and indexes; Creating scripts for minorities and documenting the previously unwritten languages of many ethnic groups.

Interestingly, the most used area today, mechanical application, was not included. Even at the 1986 Conference, at which LP was reoriented toward

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computer application, no document or research paper emphasized pinyin’s use in the IT industry. In the ‘Language Law’ (2000), pinyin’s status was not only legitimized, but its application area was also officially expanded to “all areas where hanzi is not convenient or unable to meet the need”. Since then, expanding the application area of pinyin has become a recurrent topic among scholars (e.g., Fan 2003: 173-174). The two-script system for IT in China was first initiated in 1997 by Feng Zhiwei,2 a distinguished computing linguist. The fact, that this proposal appeared as the lead article in the first issue of Chinese Language and Linguistics in 1997, signaled two messages: Romanization is a topic that can be openly talked about, at least in the academic community, and second, there is no strong official objection to the idea of developing an independent alphabetic system exclusively for computer applications. Considering the fact that pinyin is the most convenient interface to use with computers, including public and personal Internet domain names and email addresses, phoneticizers claim that digraphia is already a daily reality in cyber life for every Chinese computer user. This is partly true as well for the overwhelming majority of computer users who employ pinyinbased methods for facilitating Chinese character computer input. It is in this sense that Zhou Youguang (2001: personal communication), said, when talking about the graphic situation in China today, “[N]o matter whether you acknowledge it or not, today the ‘two-script system’ is a selfevident reality on computers”. This observation is true to some extent as Unger (2004: 12) notes that “[T]hough not officially acknowledged, digraphia is a practical fact of life for Japanese and many other Asian computer users even though they seldom read texts in their native language in Romanized format”. Currently, the indispensability of a digraphic writing system for IT convenience is also manifest in solving three concerns: • Inputting and outputting: Encouraging achievements have been obtained in speeding up hanzi computer input. However, even in this most successful area, there is still a great deal of work to do before it can satisfactorily serve the needs of the whole population. Outputting refers to decoding and displaying hanzi on the Internet. With the unexpectedly massive increase of the Internet population, the global flow of Internet information encoded in hanzi has exploded, making computerized transmission and display of hanzi more important than ever. • Higher level applications: In comparison with encoding and decoding hanzi, little has been achieved in addressing the conflict of hanzi with AI (artificial intelligence) and CIP (Chinese information processing).

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After so many years of development, Chinese AI scientists and linguists are still struggling with segmentation, which is the prerequisite in parsing Chinese sentences and automatically understanding Chinese text. The current dissatisfaction in dealing with computerized hanzi data has given rise to a small but widely recognized campaign of promoting interworded texts,3 which has the twofold goal of facilitating text automation and laying down the foundation for an alphabetic orthography. • Computing with hanzi: Computer technology works most effectively in an alphabetic language environment. In order to make software originally written in alphabetic script usable on Chinese language computers, Chinese IT engineers and international software vendors have to hanzi-nize (localize) new software products, which even today is still a major undertaking. Su (2001a: 109) argues that “some forms of digraphia between Chinese characters and hanyu pinyin Romanization is imperative for China’s success in the twenty-first century”. Rohsenow (2001: 137), a Chinese LP researcher from America, has shown greater interest in China’s digraphic future than anyone else and optimistically outlines a possible scenario of hanzi and pinyin digraphia for the future: [I]f computers with Latin alphabetic keyboards become more and more widespread throughout China, and if the general knowledge of Mandarin and of Hanyu Pinyin continues to improve such that the general populace decides to elect to use Hanyu Pinyin input systems, then it is possible that Chinese writers may begin to ignore the conversion function of Pinyin input into Chinese characters and simply communicate using Hanyu Pinyin itself … Thus Hanyu Pinyin might finally attain a working status as an alternative writing system equal to Chinese characters for the population as a whole.

2.2

Technological Impact and Technological Issues

The early Romanization advocates, such as Lü Shuxiang (1946), saw that, while hanzi is attached to classical Chinese (wenyan) and dialects of the past, Romanization is indispensable for vernacular Chinese in modern society. The new interest in Romanization stems totally from the frustrating experience with Chinese computerization in the information age. Central to the argument is whether hanzi have already been successfully

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computerized or not, which is a topic no less arguable than the merits and demerits of a logographic script. Conservative ideologues argue that the hanzi input issue was resolved long ago, that the IT industry is a developing industry, and that technology will, at last, be powerful enough to resolve the problems currently facing hanzi. Abandoning hanzi for pinyin would be doing something like cutting the feet to fit the shoes (xue zu shi lü). Furthermore, they claim, just as there is no necessary correlation between the alphabetic system and the literacy rate, the correlation between IT advancement and the writing system is another murky question. However, the argument on the other side of the debate is that in the new technological setting, the underlying basis for Romanization has changed from eliminating illiteracy in the population to catching up with the latest developments in the information era. The consensus that has already been reached is what is known as technology or instrument determinant theory. The theory holds that the future of hanzi depends to a great extent on hanzi’s compatibility with the computer. Hanzi have hampered the progress of the information processing and as long as it does so, other advantages become trivial. There is nothing in language work that cannot be reversed if that is the only alternative solution to the irreconcilable clashes between traditional heritage and modernization. A noteworthy characteristic of Chinese linguistics is its pragmatism, as an American linguistics’ commentator has observed (Orleans 1980: 490). He points out that linguistic studies in China are nearly always justified in practical terms, which usually means that they must have immediate and practical relevance to China’s needs. These contextual factors suggest to phoneticizers that because of its critical role in all areas of science and technological development, the script issue has never before been so closely associated with the fate of the nation. If the Chinese IT industry is to stay abreast of international developments, hanzi faces the stark choice of adaptation or abandonment. Reflecting on the Japanese experience, Unger (2004: 147 wonders “whether Chinese can ever become a language of international electronic communication unless Romanization becomes an alternative to customary script, at least in cyberspace”. The effort to survive in an increasingly competitive and technologically world has generated an inevitable pressure to adopt such pragmatic considerations. In addition to senior LP practitioners and intelligentsia in academic circles, who, in the late fifties and early sixties, did an enormous service for LP, another group of specialists from the IT industry has been acting as uncompromising promoters of phoneticization. This group has proposed to either further develop the pinyin scheme of 1958 into a full-fledged

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orthography or to create a new phonetic system, on which many currently are actively engaged.

2.3

Romanization or Hanzi? Still a Question

Two hypotheses have served as the driving force and theoretical groundwork behind the Romanization movement: the ‘Three Developing Phases Theory’ before 1986, and the ‘Instrument Determinative Theory’ after 1986. Before the 1986 conference, partly under the influence of Mao’s belief that phoneticization was the general direction of script development for all languages in the world, “in discussing writing reform in China, it is an unchallenged axiom that all languages have developed from pictograph to ideograph to phonetic script” (Seybolt and Chiang 1979: 17). Zhou Youguang and some other central figures in the LP administration believed that this Three Developing Phases Theory is a generalized rule for script evolution, taking it for granted that hanzi will evolve through the three phases, proceeding towards an alphabetic system (see Prologue 3.1). Arguing that development of hanzi’s shape has been determined by the evolution of writing tools, Instrument Determinative Theory views the movement towards simplification and phoneticization as the natural result of the requirements for the means for evolution of human visual communication. From a historical perspective, this interactive relationship between script change and the evolution of communication instruments can be summarized as in Table 7-2. Pan Defu (2004), a freelance Chinese LP online critic, proposes that in the information era, notions about software and hardware should be introduced into the study of Chinese script development: Script, as the tool to record and transmit information, can be seen as the software, and the pen, paper and printing machine the hardware. Looking back at history, Chinese people used knives to engrave and inscribe on bamboos. This kind of script is called Zhuanshu, and after that came the paper and brush. Zhuanshu was replaced by Lishu. In the Song Dynasty, movable type case was invented, thereby the Song-style characters evolved. Historical experience shows that the change happening to the hardware was bound to cause a revolution to software. The emergence of computers is a kind of hardware revolution.

Era

Writing tools and materials Writing

Style change (samples)

Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE)

Knife (of stone and jade), turtle shells, bronze utensils

Jiaguwen (Oracle bone inscription) Jinwen (bronze inscription) Zhuanshu (seal script)

Writing at its embryonic stage and character shape greatly varied

Qin Dynasty (221-205 BCE)

Brush, bamboo, wood, silk, natural color paintings

Lishu (clerical script)

From round to square, from picture to symbol, greatly reduced the character complexity and made writing faster and easier (transient period from pictograph to ideograph), the shape was confined by wood texture.

Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220CE)

Brush, paper, Chinese traditional ink

Caoshu (grass style writing)

Caoshu is a running-hand writing style used for rapid writing. This became possible due to invention of paper (soft fabric) in 105. This made cursive style connect many of the strokes and simplified elements technically possible. Less stylized Kaishu is basically the traditional form used today.

Song Dynasty (960-1279)

Huoban printing (typographic printing)

Kaishu (square script) and Songti

The use of movable printing blocks, type case, invented by Bi Sheng, made the official standard possible.

Modern China (Qing Dynasty) (1644-1911)

Pen, modern ink

Traditional and simplified characters

Writing had become easier with high quality tools. Writing became a way of daily life for every one. Simplification was generally required.

21st Century

Computer (keyboard and mouse)

Standardization?

Unicode, web pages, internet…?

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Table 7-2. Instrument Determinative theory about Hanzi’s change and script evolution

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Admittedly, in the current situation the ‘Three Developing Phrases Theory’ and the ‘Instrument Determinative Theory’ face two major challenges: culturally, the immovable societal resistance, and technically, homophone disambiguation. Even so, some encouraging progress has been made. On the one hand, there was the official acceptance in 1996 of the ‘Pinyin Orthography’, which is the prerequisite for a full-fledged alphabetic writing system. This was seen as a significant step in furthering pinyin’s role in national cultural life. On the other hand, numerous Romanization schemes have been devised by both professionals and educated dilettantes, and, over the past two decades, these have been widely propagated with the aid of the borderless Internet. While most of these systems were developed for computer typing purposes, some were proposed as alternate graphic systems. All of this, including the successful pedagogical experiments4 and the growing importance in expanding areas of pinyin’s indispensability for Chinese computerization, attests to the explanatory adequacy of digraphia for the present status of pinyin, which prompts the phoneticizers to argue that the ‘two-tracks’ script system is already in evidence in reality, if not in name. When it comes to the societal resistance, there have been tremendous difficulties in dealing with the complex social and political realities evident at the start of the new millennium. As Su (2001a: 121) warns, “the difficulties in realizing digraphia lie not in technology, but in ideology. First we must overcome the strong conservative thinking about language prevalent in China.” The demise of Chinese characters is such a specter among many Chinese, that even Mao Zedong and his rebellious colleagues, who made so many impossibilities possible in revolutionizing traditional things, had to abandon the idea eventually. The continuing question that arises is: which is going to play a larger role in shaping the future, the socio-political situation or technological advancement? In modern China, hanzi are supposed to linguistically and culturally shoulder two missions as a writing system. The politically motivated cultural arguments have overstressed its culture transmission role while ignoring its communication function. The latter is an important component of the emerging world culture in the post-modern age in which we are living. From the viewpoint of Instrument Determinative Theory, the past pursuance of an alphabetic system was to facilitate the use of typewriting, and to accelerate typesetting for the publishing industry. Today’s IT industry has developed to a point where the international information exchange network represents the highest formal level of an information access system, and also where the computer can contribute most to human

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knowledge increase and exchange – which is precisely the most difficult part of Chinese script integration. However, the view that one cannot ignore the formal roots of the past legacy with impunity is fiercely held. In the absence of a major cultural turnaround, future attempts at script reform will be just as modest and pragmatic; there may be reforms, but only on a limited basis. Even for ardent advocates of phoneticization, any form of phoneticization is seen as a distant goal. When criticizing some linguists for their keenness to go for Romanization in the nearest future, Hu Qiaomu, the architect of Chinese LP after 1986, says, “In my opinion, a full-fledged phonetic orthography will not be realized in a hundred years” (Guangming Daily December 27, 1999). The twenty-first century is believed to be a time in which idealism gives way to pragmatism. The development from the idealist monographia of Romanization towards a more achievable digraphia of pinyin and hanzi is not only a practical solution to meet personal and technological needs, but also a reflection of prevailing ideology of the time of a multi-standard pluricentric model. Characters or Romanization was, and will be, a ‘to be or not to be’ question for all Chinese in the foreseeable future.

3.

CRACKING THE HARD NUT: DEALING WITH THE RESCINDED SECOND SCHEME AND BANNED TRADITIONAL CHARACTERS

3.1

Keep the Baby, Throw out the Bath Water: Resume Some 2nd Scheme Characters

Since the 1986 conference, hanzi simplification has become an untouchable topic in LP. Nonetheless, two facts are indisputable: first, never has a government document or official scholar declared that the simplification work is completed, indicating that “it is impossible to assure no further simplification” (Chen P. 1999: 80). Second, it has been an undeniable fact that new simplified characters, namely, abolished characters in the SSS or newly created ones, are very common and can be seen everywhere. To legalize some unofficial simplified characters only “is a matter of time” (Fei 1991: 124). If the conditions are right and society demands it, further simplification can certainly be done, although it may take several decades (Yang 1999: 323). To systematize the totality of hanzi officially has been projected as one of the pressing LP tasks since the mid-1980s, and what is

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also worthy of notice is that simplification is still a recurrent theme, and policy makers again have taken a consistent stand on the need for continuous optimization and simplification of characters (e.g., Li 1995). Wang Fengyang’s (1989: 645) suggestion on character reform not only reflects the depth of his conviction about the need for further simplification, but also is an assertion that has been uppermost in many people’s minds: The first reform was to legalize all existing simplified characters. This is the general practice we have seen in the past, and as a universal rule every script reform in history ended up granting the official status to the handwritten characters. The next simplification will be simplifying the uncompleted simplified characters by using the methods inferred from how existing simplified characters got simplified. The second simplification should focus on dealing with the problems left over from history, and the number will not be very big, but we must prepare to go through an unstable period of character use. That is a start-well-andend-well choice for the Second Scheme, and we thus can formally declare that the simplification effort for Chinese characters comes to a close. Then, character shape will finally stabilize after two major surgical operations. In the next four sections we examine issues on which the possibility of further simplification could be based. 3.1.1

Historical Trends

Zhou (1986b: 14) says, “it is always a natural tendency to simplify the characters” (see also Wang 1999: 84). Historically, systematic simplification goes back at least to 213 BCE, when the centralized Qin empire was established. Scribal work significantly increased for the first time, many variant forms that had previously circulated across the seven states were eliminated in writing unification, and the simplest form of writing was retained as the standard. The trend towards simplification went on along with the development of Lishu (clerical script) as an alternative to the official Xiaozhuan (small seal script) in the later Han Dynasty (25 to 220 CE) – it made writing even faster and easier. Another important justification for the simplification direction is that the official standard font for printing purposes is based on the handwriting form used by ordinary people, and “naturally, over time, there were more simplified characters created in handwriting than those officially listed” (Zhou 1979: 2). The physical difference between the

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printed and the handwritten form is much greater than that of most other languages in the world. Coulmas (1991: 230) argues, “All languages share a number of important properties which can be attributed to the fact that human beings behave in accordance with the ‘Principle of Least Effort’”. If we use the horizontal axis to represent time (in years) and the vertical axis to show the natural change direction of the character simplification trend, the general relationship between change and time can be demonstrated on a single graph (Figure 7-1). The message of this simple graph is clear: Although the differential acceptance rates between AB and BC should be considered as necessary, there is a contradiction between the general direction of hanzi development and the pivotal turn in government policy. General public acceptance lags behind the factual simplification speed, because the general simplification scale is the total number of simplified characters covered by vast geographic and professional use over a relatively lengthy period of time, in which government policy has increasingly gone from caution to conservatism. Wang Fengyang (1992: 14) observes that, “Generally speaking, the script standard supported by the government is often conservative and conditioned by the traditional forces and established practices. The government and official standard aims at keeping the unity and continuity of the writing system and checks any deviation from the orthodox mode.” Direction of Change A Actual Simplification Trend B Public Willingness to Accept Simplified Characters

C

Government Policy Change

Times (Years) 1956 -76

1977-1986

After 1987

Figure 7-1: Analysis of character simplification trends

D

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Simplification trends are also supported by the following factual figures from the period leading up to the First Scheme (Chen P. 1999; Fei 1997). In 1930, Liu Fu and Li Jiarui, two Chinese language reformers, published A Glossary of Popular Chinese Characters since the Song and Yuan Dynasties, which was an important database from which the simplified characters for official recognition were selected. It contained 6,240 simplified characters found in twelve publications in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. In 1935, Qian Xuantong prepared a table of 2,400 simplified characters, but only 324 simplified characters were adopted by the government in the simplification table. Another case in point, Rong Geng’s Dictionary of Simplified Characters (1936, by Harvard-Yanjing University Press) included 4,445 characters. In the following simplification, during the preparatory period for the TSC, over 1,934 simplified characters were included in the draft scheme presented by the Research Committee for Language Reform in February 1955 (Fei 1997). This number was reduced to 515 when the Scheme was officially promulgated in January 1956. 3.1.2

The Uncompleted Simplification Job

It is widely acknowledged that some frequently used characters are still quite complex and need to be further simplified (Bao 1993; Su 2003). Some forty characters were listed for discussion, but their accepted simplified forms could not be worked out during the course of simpli(wu, fication in 1956. Some of these characters in daily use such as (fan, complex), (ying, to win), (jiang, boundary), dancing), are subject to further but careful simplification. More to the point, when the SSS was published (draft) by the CCSR on December 20, 1977, 42 of (heng, balance), the most frequently used complex characters, such as (sui, marrow), were again picked to be urgently simplified. A nationwide discussion was subsequently launched that still remains to be resolved. Take the Modern Chinese Dictionary (the most popular modern Chinese dictionary) as an example: there are still fifteen characters that use (seventeen strokes) as a phonetic compound (Liu 1988: 154). Under current conditions, as a result of technological development, the number of characters that need simplification is much bigger than was thought in the 1950s or 1970s. As discussed in Section 4.1, Chapter 5, a growing literate population and much more dynamic cultural life have exposed the public to more language and script, and some structurally complex hanzi, categorized as less frequent or specialty characters may have become common in the wider population.

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There are still a number of characters that cannot be accurately displayed on the computer. For example, of 6,763 characters in GB 231280, over one hundred characters that do not properly fit in the 16-dot matrix needed for Latin letters. If the matrix is increased to 25 dots, there (liang, weight), (zhong, heavy) and are still 38 characters, such as (zhi, straight), that need to be compressed. Furthermore, representing Chinese characters requires bigger font sizes to ensure readability, “especially for complex traditional characters. Smaller point size drastically reduces the ability of the font rendering engine to place discrete strokes with a character” (Turley 1999: 30). After special techniques are introduced to obtain a higher monitor resolution, Turley continues, “[t]he TrueType screen font rendering engine that is native to Microsoft operating systems does a very poor job of displaying Chinese characters in sizes less than 12 points on screen”. In theory, the screen resolution can be unlimited, but more space means less speed. So the visual intelligibility is achieved at the cost of the operating capacity, and in an irreversible tendency, more information is being transmitted through smaller screens. In the last few years, strong supportive evidence for further simplifying character strokes has originated in the reduction of the size of computers and the new functionality of the mobile phone. Anticipating nanotechnologies that will be in place in 5-10 years from now, mainstream IT assumptions indicate that computer power is also dispersing into small objects and smart artifacts – this implies that hanzi’s present existing environment will be totally changed. The poor performance of characters with complex strokes (above 12 strokes) for displaying information on a small screen, which often results in unpleasing muddy characters or simply gibberish, presents a major problem for their use in emerging means of information transmission. As a result, information that is sent to and displayed on the mini screen will be limited due to character unintelligibility, as Lu Chuan (2002: seminar), a noted Chinese AI expert, has convincingly pointed out: “Both, the complexity and the size of the computer [electric brain in Chinese – authors], are getting closer to the human brain”. Some characters, (see Figure P-5 in the Prologue) in the Modern Chinese such as Dictionary, still have 36 strokes – the most complex Chinese character has 64 strokes. They must be further simplified in the next reform simply because of the impossibility of displaying them on a small screen. The challenge of size reduction and hence limited character space (about 160 characters), as well as the small keypad, provides the motivation for the evolution of even more abbreviation in both the language and its

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script system; an apt example to illustrate how a new technology brings on immediate linguistic consequences. 3.1.3

The Debatable 111 Characters in the Second Scheme

As discussed in Chapter 1, there were actually two distinct parts of the simplified characters listed in the SSS of 1977. Since the 1950s, over one hundred characters were carefully collected and studied free of political interference. Some were categorized as ‘characters in discussion and to be simplified’. These characters, together with the previously mentioned forty characters, formed the core of the SSS, before political enthusiasm expanded it to cover over 2,000 characters. When an ad hoc review committee, headed by some of the best linguists and senior LP experts, such as Wang Li and Zhou Youguang, reassessed the SSS, one of their tasks was to see how many characters in this reform were genuinely and indisputably welcomed by the masses. As a result, 111 characters were agreed upon for further consideration. When the Review Committee of the SSS put forward these 111 characters to the NCLW in 1986 (Chen 2002: personal communication), there was a heated argument about whether they should be kept and formally adopted. The idea to retain them was given up at the last moment, when the decision was made to republish the GLSC with changes being made to only six characters. But since these well established, approximately one hundred hanzi were seen as the ‘core reform’, they needed to be treated separately rather than be thrown out with the rest. The fact that they have not been publicized, due to the fear that this would cause confusion and bring on further chaos, in itself suggests their popularity among the public. The demand by academics to officially recognize these characters has never ceased (Chen 1988, Chen 2000, Gao 2002, Jin 1997, Wang 1992). The authors’ investigation (see Note 12, Chapter 2) into the public’s writing habits also shows a strong presence of SSS characters in people’s handwriting, particularly among the less-well educated. For instance, for 890 sample texts produced by a group of farmers, 55 types were SSS characters, and their occurrence was as high as 1,012 times (tokens) in these samples. LPers’ efforts to stop the continued social use of some 100 SSS characters has been so far proved to be desperately futile, showing that re-correcting people’s behavior can be even harder than influencing it. Internationally, some hanzi have been further simplified in Japan, and similar cases can also be found in Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. When analyzing the popularity and the confusion caused by the SSS in

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Singapore, Lim (1996: 123-133) points out, “Hanzi simplification has not reached its limit by far and there is a necessity of further simplification”. In the current standardization program being undertaken for information interchange purposes, characters officially standardized and encoded include characters that are nowhere near as popular or even as widely circulated as those in the SSS. It is unusual, that the thorny SSS process has become such a sensitive taboo and has suffered discriminatory treatment in this new round of changes, just because of their complex background at birth. In his Hanzi Study, a benchmark book in the field, Wang Fengyang (1989: 645-646) is very insistent on emphasizing the primacy of the SSS characters in the new reform programs, and argues that hanzi’s shape will not be stabilized until the SSS issue is resolved. As a way of addressing this issue and fitting it in with the multistandard model, the authors would argue that before some publicly welcomed SSS characters gain official status, they should be given ‘sub’standard status and be made legally accessible to the public in the following ways: • Included in all dictionaries. Put in brackets in parallel with the standard characters, in the same way that traditional characters are dealt with in most dictionaries. • Promoted as part of the handwriting standard. To recognize and regulate handwriting, as has been the case in Taiwan since 1988, is a practical way to create an interface, moving private and public use closer to each other, and eventually resulting in a unification of the two. At present, the lack of a standard for handwriting and the worldwide difference in the graphical shape between handwritten and printed fonts is a severe obstacle to upgrading the quality of OCR software for handwriting. • Made available in the handwriting OCR software. On the Mainland, neither traditional nor SSS hanzi are official standard characters, but when it comes to software, the National Bureau of Software Supervision allows traditional characters but has resisted introducing SSS characters. 3.1.4

Questioning the ‘Unacceptability’

The unacceptability of the SSS by the public has been frequently cited as the most formidable obstacle to their reintroduction. However, the opponents’ awkward justification that it was not supported by society has

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been seriously contradicted by some published data provided by its advocates. Zheng Linxi (1988a) argues that after the CCSR was resumed in 1972, it solicited public opinion three times. When people from across the whole country were invited to discuss the Scheme in forums organized by political consultancy bodies, the feedback from teachers, workers and peasants was basically positive. The main disagreements were confined to the simplification method of twenty or so characters. Tao Lun (an obvious pseudonym, 1978: 62), who was obviously a defender of the SSS, argued, “It is true that these characters were not used as long, nor as widely, as those in the First Scheme. But all of them were from the masses, thus the Scheme reflected the mass line and mass base.” He revealed that simplified characters in the SSS were solicited from three sources: • From the masses and the army in the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country, collected in 1960 by the Education Ministry, Culture Ministry and the CCSR; • After the TSC was published in 1956, the masses provided new simplified characters to the CCSR; • From the provinces, collected by the CCSR in 1972. In contrast to the claim of ‘unacceptability by the masses’, there is evidence of the public’s warm embrace of the Scheme. Tao (1978: 62) has indicated that of the 8,348 letters with opinions and suggestions for revisions received in the first month after its inauguration, the overwhelming majority was supportive and only three opposed further simplification. One year after the publication of the SSS, a survey of even greater scope was conducted to assess the public reaction to the SSS. Of the 10,785 letters received from the masses, over 99 percent were in support of the Scheme and welcomed the trial use of the SSS characters, and only fifteen letters, or 0.14 percent, opposing the Scheme. As for the 248 characters in the first Table, only twelve characters were thought to be in need of reconsideration (Zheng 1988a: 297-298). Therefore, Zheng’s conclusion is: “If, in the simplification issue, democracy is what it implies, the cancellation is groundless; if democracy is applied, then history will serve as testimony: genuine interest from the masses will carry on the simplification.” This quotation might be criticized for presenting a biased view, because it was published as a token representation in support of the SSS. However, the divergent views among the experts and the public can also be seen in some official documents. The report, Request to Abolish the Second

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Simplification Scheme (draft) and Check the Chaotic Situation in Character Use by the Public, which was prepared by the CCSR just one month after the Scheme was officially repealed, states (the Office of Standard Work 1997: 19): For the past few years, the former CCSR has been collecting opinions from personages of all walks of life through various channels, and we have revised this Scheme many times. However, no consensus has been reached, neither by ordinary people, nor by scholars, on whether this Scheme [SSS] should be formally promulgated or stopped circulating. What is important and significant is that ‘unacceptability’ was deliberately avoided in the official explanation for the formal withdrawal. Since it was recognized that differing views still existed, why was it that the request to abolish the Scheme was made? Cheng (1979: 3) also concluded that the articles, published in 1977 and 1978, give both positive and negative views of the Scheme. The combined issue of Script Reform Correspondence (13, 14), published on May 5, 1979, is an important primary source to gauge the public response at the time, nearly one-and-a-half years after the Scheme’s publication. This is so far the only publication on the topic and it provides 25 well-documented, factual reports, collected from 24 provinces, directive municipalities, autonomous regions and the army. This valuable documentary information was blatantly ignored and not mentioned in publications discussing the SSS. Despite the possibility of serious political bias, the unique historical value of the document in question is unquestionable. All statistics showed that a great majority welcomed the SSS, for example, in Tianjin, 1,5005 people attended 24 forums and discussions; 99.3 percent of the total participants said they strongly or basically agreed (Script Reform 1979: 7). Different views and even criticism were also extensively provided in the reports, but these dissident voices should not have been strong enough to serve as a catalyst to reject the whole scheme.

3.2

Small Compromise for Big Convenience: Partial Re-Introduction of the Traditional Characters

The most direct concern for the resumption of abolished traditional forms stems from the so-called unmatched simplified characters, those which cannot be correctly converted into their traditional forms when the text is being automatically processed by the automatic conversion software. Of 6,763 characters in the GB 2312-80, 117 pairs of characters cannot

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be correctly converted between simplified and traditional text. These characters are labeled as ‘trouble makers’ by software clients of automatic conversion software. To correct some of the problems, caused by oversimplification in the 1950s, a total of 31 original form characters were resumed when the Table of Commonly Used Characters was re-promulgated by SCLW in 1988. However, from the point of IT, this has been a kind of ‘treat the head when the head aches, treat the foot when the foot hurts’ (tou teng yi tou, jiao teng yi jiao), and these passive, stopgap measures do not provide a solution. To restore one of the original forms, thus making them different from the source version of simplified characters, seems like the only plausible option. The problem of how to tackle the unmatched characters was selected as the central theme for the Symposium on Common Script across the Strait, organized by the unofficial language reform organization, Association of Common Script, in Shanghai in 2000. As previously mentioned, one of the major achievements in simplifying characters in the 1950s was the reduction of the total number of hanzi. Despite the moderate scale of the reduction, this was done at the cost of lexical accuracy. Broadly speaking, the reduction was achieved through two approaches: one was the elimination of the variant forms of the same characters; the other to merge different physical shapes of homophonous (mian, face/surface) and (mian, characters, for instance, merging wheat flour) into a single character to stand for two original meanings. To was for (fazhan, to develop) give another example, originally meant (toufa, hair). In the simplification, (fa) is the and homophonous replacement for these two forms. In other words, after simplification, two, or more morphemes in the traditional character system were represented by only one simplified character. When traditional characters are needed, simplified text cannot be automatically converted into the traditional forms, because, at present, the hanzi processing software has no capability to identify the intended character in the traditional system. According to Shen Kecheng and Shen Jia (2001: 107), of the 2,235 characters in the GLSC, there are 102 such simplified characters, accounting for 4.5 percent, representing two or more traditional counterparts that cannot be correctly converted without intervention. This has a significant negative impact on typing quality where a conversion is required. Shen and Shen (2001: 279) note that, “If some thirty simplified characters are slightly altered, an ideal accuracy can be expected”. But the unmatched numbers would greatly increase if the quantity of characters examined is enlarged and the investigation is expanded to cover further domains. The percentage would reach an unacceptably high level if we were to look at classical texts, as Guo Xiaowu’s (2000) research shows.

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Zhengzhang (2003) suggests that misunderstandings in classical publications could be most conveniently reduced through the resumption of approximately 100 characters, a specific number that is coincidental to the numbers suggested by other scholars (Ni 2003). However, some researchers are not so optimistic. In another research study, carried out by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Dictionary Institute, a Japanesebased non-governmental developer of CJK character processing software technology, showed that in the first 2,000 most-used hanzi, which cover 97 percent of modern texts, 238 simplified characters (about 12 percent) were found to be the type of one-to-many hanzi. A more alarming finding is, that of 97,000 highly used common WORDS (please note, not characters), more than 20,000 cannot be correctly converted (Halpern and Kerman 2004). The situation appears to be most severe in dealing with classical texts. In an experimental study, converting simplified characters to complex characters by using a converting device attached to Microsoft Word 2000, which is considered of high quality in terms of its successful conversion rate, Guo Xiaowu (2000: 80-82) investigated four Chinese classics (Er Ya , Zuo Zhuan , Shi Ji , Zhuzi Yu Lei ). The total number of characters in the four books is 2,265,964 tokens, the number of unconvertible characters is 6,364 types and they occur 81,585 times (tokens). This implies that in a continuous text consisting of 2,265,964 characters, the possibility of misunderstanding or difficulty of understanding caused by inaccurately converted characters is 8.6 percent, which normally would be considered to be unacceptably high. Remedial correction by typists was found to be necessary in the automatic processing of classical texts. Their task, which requires considerable effort from typists, is to identify the unconvertible characters at the input stage and then make them recognizable by adding ‘determinatives’, to provide a visual clue for the software in dealing with Chinese classical literature. The first original characters that should be restored are those that were replaced by other simple homophonous characters that already had their own individual meaning. These simple characters now have more than one meaning, and in some contexts their meanings cannot be easily deter(mian, flour) was replaced by (mian, face), so the mined, e.g., , whether it means face or flour, cannot be always be meaning of (hou, after/behind) which was replaced by (hou, confirmed. dowager empress), is another very visible instance that has been repeatedly proposed to be resumed. In fact, for the convenience of some users, some input software already has restored these original forms, thereby causing some confusion, particularly for overseas Chinese learners.6

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Pondering ways to overcome the difficulty, the first author has explored other remedial alternatives with the experts he visited during the fieldwork for this research. For instance, adding an extra element (a significant stroke) onto the simplified forms, corresponding to their original forms, to function as a tag to direct computers to differentiate. This kind of stroke does not have the usual function of suggesting the semantic category, but merely serves as a means of visually distinguishing one identically written character from another. This, however, would be a kind of extra pro-machine measure, and any artificial human interference in the hanzi system would risk triggering a public outcry. Another approach that readily comes to mind is to define the particular character by the lexical clues provided in the context. This is obviously the best way to solve the problem, but it depends on the context and involves a morphological differentiation, which normally requires a device, such as Chinese Morphological Analyzer (Halpern and Kerman 2004) to segment the text stream into meaningful units (such as lexemes). The CJK Dictionary Institute treats the false conversion between two hanzi systems at three levels of sophistication. Its orthographic conversion method (mid-level) tries to resolve ambiguities by employing a kind of orthographic mapping table at the word level, but this involves other difficulties, even more fundamental, that Chinese computing linguists have confronted and have been currently trying to resolve in AI areas more generally. As Hannas (1997: 275) has pointed out, “We are a long way from building computers intelligent enough to understand the meaning of a text and to make informed choices on the basis of that understanding”. Another, equally important rationale for the reintroduction of traditional forms, is the misunderstanding caused by these characters in communication between users of the two different systems. The general public has little knowledge about language. Failing to identify the intended traditional hanzi is the immediate reason that currently ridiculous traditional forms can be seen everywhere; from subtitles for TV plays targeted at overseas Chinese, to product manuals for the export of goods; from shop signs or window displays to official documents. Such usage produces a bad image of simplified characters, and becomes a public eyesore for visitors from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In some circumstances, it looks preposterous and ignorant, and is a professional embarrassment for the government (Goundry 2002). There might be a dispute as to how many of such characters should be brought back into use, but resuming unconvertible traditional characters appears to be the area of least disputed among those involved in technical affairs and policy making, and may be an unavoidable undertaking in the

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next reform. At least from the Mainland perspective, for some enthusiastic optimists, it is widely considered a good starting point that the two sides could use to bring their writing systems closer to eventual reunification.

3.3

Tentative Summary

The two main themes that run through this section seem to contradict each other methodologically, but the two pairs of contradictions are the driving force reflecting the dialectal features of the historical development of hanzi. A brief reflection on past experience identifies some debatable areas that provide an understanding of the present circumstances. As summarized in the force field analysis diagram in Figure 7-2, the debate between simplification and complication has, in the past, focused on three aspects, that establishes a view of the relationship between language and society. This chapter emphasizes that, while some forces analyzed in Figure 7-2 will continue to be robustly at work in driving change or supporting processes, there are others opposing change or restraining developments. Hence, the advent of computerization brings into focus a new dimension, which tends to act as an instrument for creating imbalance and facilitating change. The momentum behind these developments is essentially technological. When looking at the plausibility of potential contributions for justifying any further simplification and partial resumption of traditional characters, we have structured the discussion around some more tangible matters that may act as catalyst in bringing change into being. The SSS was not only academically disputed upon its abandonment, but a number of SSS characters have been taking deeper root in the society, providing indisputable evidence of their overwhelming popularity and wider recognition among academics. Over-complex characters continue to be subjected to enormous societal pressure to be simplified in order to be easily written and clearly represented on the screen; a small number of ill-simplified characters have created unlimited trouble in automatic conversion between simplified characters and traditional characters. These characters are not significant in quantity, but the following analogy helps to make the point: these wrongly converted characters sit in a text just like a few grains of sand randomly mixed in a big bag of rice. As we have argued in preceding chapters, compared to the previous policy that was preoccupied with idealistic and abstract approaches, the LP authorities today are increasingly technologically oriented and ascribe more significance for their work to economy. Therefore, the suggestions made in this section can be read as a contribution to the debate from a point of view which is different from some of the old thinking.

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Figure 7-2. Force field analysis – Pressure vs resistance to change

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4.

‘COMMON SCRIPT’ ACROSS CYBERSPACE

Common script (shutongwen) is originally a historical term, first used when referring to the unifying efforts that occurred after the establishment of the Qin Dynasty (see Section 2.1, Chapter 1). All governments in China’s history have regarded setting official standards through state mandates as one of the most important measures to effectively control and rule over the vast Chinese territories. In modern times, as the writing system became polarized across the Taiwan Strait, after the simplification movement on the Mainland in the 1950s, the term shutongwen again has gained political currency. As described in Section 5, Chapter 5, the status quo in current graphic life across the Strait is more about political tolerance than technical resolution. Since 1996, the atmosphere has gone from bad to worse, particularly after 2000 when the pro-independence party took power in Taiwan. As part of the island’s gradual move away from a Mainland identity, Taiwan’s government has striven to institutionalize both the language and script as a separate variety from that used on the Mainland. More significantly, many scholars have also gone to great lengths to define and document these differences in dictionaries, style manuals, and grammars specific to Taiwanese Mandarin. Consequently, in addition to the ideological complications, there is also a distinction neatly paralleling the political differences among both official scholars and amateur researchers from both camps. Thus, while admitting that it is not a good time to talk about a common script, all the sides concerned, not only the people across the Strait, but all stakeholders of Chinese characters in the East Asia region, see a need to unify script differences to make cyber life for hanzi users a reasonable possibility. The Unicode provides Chinese computer specialists with the hope that a viable solution can gradually be found to overcome the plight of creating and viewing Chinese hanzi on web pages. However, as Jordan (2002: 111) has pointed out, “the Unicode standard presupposes that each language has a script consisting of a finite number of agreed-upon characters”. As a pluricentric script, Chinese hanzi have grown into a huge and complex writing system, used in different geopolitical regions of the world. Unicode has, for the first time, brought hanzi-using professionals together to work out an initial agreement on hanzi’s number and forms. In the final section, we examine the difficulty of Unicode application in the complex socio-political context of East Asia, particularly the special role played by Japan, another big user of the hanzi encoding standard. While the section as a whole may seem like a technological digression to the current hanzi

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standardization movement that is analytically discussed in Chapter 4, it provides an emphatic technological justification for standardization, and therefore becomes the driving force and starting point for every step taken by hanzi reformers. This section also explores some common problems encountered by Chinese users in decoding Chinese data. It is both a retrospective glimpse at the past, and an overview of the present.

4.1

Han-Unification – Diversity and Difficulty

When talking about the existent regional disparities of hanzi’s shape in some major hanzi-using countries, Zhou (1999: 78) says, now there are differences in hanzi’s form among China, Japan and Korea; among Chinese people, mainland China is different from Taiwan. This causes difficulty and waste for learning from each other and for electronic communication. If the unnecessary differences can be gradually overcome, it will benefit all hanzi-using communities. In contrast to people’s expectation and as a matter of fact, it appears that the wider use of computers and the Internet have not brought the physical differences of hanzi any closer together. Rather, as the result of the emphasis all developers have place on their own features and identity when drawing up their own standards, differences in the national character standard sets of each individual country are being perpetuated. It should be noted that the encoding standards for each hanzi-using individual community have been developed “independently, or with only limited mutual awareness” (Cook 2001: 4). Unicode has come into being in a world filled with such existing standards for various scripts. The large number of preexisting standards in East Asia was perhaps the most complex aspect that the Unicode consortium had to deal with, underpinning the need for compatibility with existing character standard sets through what was called Han unification – an international standardization activity to unify all of the character standard sets into a single large character set. This can be done through the process of assigning single code points to the Han characters, with the resulting repertoire of coded ideographs referred to as Unihan. To carry out Han unification, two international organizations, composed of IT experts from hanzi-using polities, were set up consecutively7, to work with the over 20 character set standards and telegraphy codes introduced by the USA, Taiwan, mainland China and Korea that existed when Han unification started, with 121,403 as the total number of characters encoded in these standard sets. The considerable work done by

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Unicode in collaboration with IRG has so far resulted in 70,207 unique ideographs. The following information, provided by Lunde (1993: 49-53), is very helpful in understanding how the Unicode consortium processes CJKV characters in their Han unification efforts. Unicode mainly applies two rules to identify a valid character: the Han Unification Rule and the Source Separation Rule. The former is a process of eliminating redundant characters, through merging of characters that have identical or near identical structures and the same meanings, so more of the otherwise wasted space can be freed up. The sources separation rule states, that unification of two characters cannot take place if they have different encodings within a single standard set source (in the case of CJK, there are four sources from which the Unicode hanzi set is derived). For instance, (ken in Japanese and jian in Chinese) has five the Japanese character , each having its own unique encoded position variants: in JIS X 0208-1990 (one of the above-mentioned 20 standards), and as such are not unified. Source separation is to ensure that round-trip conversion is successful for cross-locale Unicode fonts. Considering the immensity and complexity of the work carried out to identify and unify such a large number of characters from so many standard sets, sometimes compromises had to be made in order to make this process work well with other script systems outside East Asia. For instance, the aforementioned source separation rule cannot be carried out consistently. It is not surprising, therefore, that problems developed during the unification process and complaints about over-unification have been frequently raised by users – mostly by users and software developers from the East Asian cultural hemisphere. Resistance towards these changes remains particularly high in Japan, as the subsequent discussion indicates. The most criticized problem, as Topping (2001) aptly points out, “stems from the fact that Unicode encodes characters rather than ‘glyphs’, which are the visual representations of the characters”. There are four basic types of East Asian character shapes: traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While the original character may be from the same root for CJK languages, the glyphs in common use for that character may be different in evolution, and a large number of new characters were independently invented in each country. Cook (2001: 4) observes: Graphic differences emerged between the different scripts, so that a given character in one locale was no longer identified with the character to which it was historically related to each other locale. What

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had once simply been stylistic variations in print or handwriting gradually crystallized into hard irreconcilable difference. Although Han unification unifies the codes for abstract characters instead of the concrete characters per se, the identification depends “on the sights of unifiers and the version of standard used” (Wada 1991: 4). In other words, in many cases, the amalgamation/differentiation is determined by appearance of the character in the code tables of a given version of standard sets. The separation rules, outlined in the various versions of Unicode working principles, are just a high conceptual ideal, due to limitations of both the cyber source and technical resolution that relate to the operating efficiency – it cannot always be firmly adhered to or strongly enforced. Therefore, despite the alleged involvement of IRG’s Asian members, the unification has been frequently blamed for lacking native familiarity and orthographical comprehension of the subtle variations by hawk-eyed native users. As a result of constraints within source separation rules, necessary distinctions, or variants of the same characters at the glyph level, were typographically unified and then rendered as one ‘character’, so that they could be assigned a single code point. That is to say, different forms (glyph in Unicode typology) in the real world or on paper that should actually be assigned more specific code points (as they might be in their respective source standard sets), were all put together in Unicode. Some of these differences are admittedly minuscule and are unidentifiable to most users in one community, but not in another community, particularly, in processing inscriptional ancient text produced in different historical times, where the maximal details of graphical expression are supposed to be preserved. For example, to ancient canon researchers and digital library/museum developers, this kind of unification is parallel to some letters on the keyboard being missing for alphabetic language speakers. This is presumably the major reason for the refusal of the East Asians to fully embrace the Unicode. How problematic is it, then, to satisfy tradition-obsessed individuals and those developers involved in the digitalization of East Asian ancient heritage? According to Meyer (1999: 2), unification is achieved, “In order to represent the Chinese characters of the different Asian locales [source standard sets of individual communities – authors] in a culturally adequate and typographically correct way with the help of Unicode”. Preliminary research shows that, at least for the 21,204 Unihan ideographs (Unicode version 2.1) in the portion of BMP (Basic Multilingual Panes), “roughly 50 percent of CJK characters need more than one glyph representation”. In Mayer’s term, this process is

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‘Unihan disambiguation’, to de-Unihan in order to disambiguate those seemly superfluous but sometimes necessary subtle distinctions. Related to this ambiguity problem caused by Han unification, is the inability of Unicode to address the issue concerning font style or typeface (referring to Prologue). Font style is more language specific than glyph, in terms of the sophistication level of graphic distinction. China has four widely used basic font styles (Heiti style, Song style, Intimate Song style and Kaiti style), and each other hanzi-using polity has a series of fonts of their own. This implies that even if the character and glyph are all the same, the characters may look different when displayed by language-independent browsers. When you read a page in a language-dependent environment, all the characters will be in the same font style, but if a Unicode application is utilized, such as to input data online, the characters might be shown in a totally different style, and one would feel ‘this is not my character’. This is because if the individuals browser (e.g., Internet Explorer) does not have the font for Unicode that one is familiar with, “it will map each character to some other character set, such as GB, CNS, JIS, or KSC, and the web page appears in a patchwork of styles” (Cheong 1999: 4). People normally feel irritated when they see alien fonts on the screen, partly because these characters are less recognizable, but more probably for sentimental reasons8. The analogy given by a Unicode critic (i.e., Goundry 2001: 12) is that it is like being like compelled in a Western language setting to use the French alphabet to write German, or to force the English to use the French. Some cross-locale font technologies have been proposed and advanced (e.g., Open Type, Meyer 1999 and Typological Encoding, Cook 2001), but it is still a serious challenge for Unicoders to make Unicode technology serve CJKV script users with their diversified requirements well. Moreover, even when technological solutions are available, there are many external issues that have to be addressed, which we will turn to presently.

4.2

Socio-Political Dimensions

Many issues become problems for non-technical reasons. The best way to assign numerical codes to characters is a seemingly very straightforward technical undertaking, but very often socio-cultural, and sometimes, political factors are involved. The formulation, adoption, and encoding standards adopted were afflicted by conflict between various interest groups right from the very beginning. First it was between ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and the industrial standards led by IBM due to different marketing strategies, and then it was between

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the ISO/IEC DIS 10646, supported by European countries and Japan, and the Unicode Consortium, established by big American computer firms mainly for geopolitical reasons. When it comes to the promotion of Unicode in East Asia, Japan stands as the fiercest opponent to its adoption for two reasons. 4.2.1

Japan’s Opposition

Culturally, Japan’s unhappiness with Unicode is due to the latter’s inability to prescribe variations of hanzi’s details. As Unihan focuses only on the shape of Chinese characters instead on the concrete typological representation-glyphs, this resulted in ‘it’s not my characters’ sentiment among culturally aware Japanese users. More seriously, the surnamespecific kanji in Japanese is more open to individual creativity than hanzi, and since Japanese care very much about uniqueness as a genealogical value, the government actually failed to persuade the population to sacrifice any details of the physical variation of these kanji for technological convenience (He 2001: 162). Japan’s JIS standards prescribe the shape of the glyphs for each character. Even though Unicode has a ‘Private Use Area’ mechanism that allows entry of newly coined characters, due to the lack of an internationally agreed-upon convention among hanzi stakeholders on how to use such mechanisms, these so-called private characters are not created and then encoded in the same way. In other words, while they are only locally viewable (also printable), they can not be digitally processed. More significantly, they are not transmittable and decodable in other applications, nor over the Internet. As a result, these characters all end up as garbage in the course of online transmission. It is from this perspective, that “Unicode has been criticized as being little more than an exercise in cultural imperialism on the part of Western computer manufacturers” (Searle 2004). It has been perceived of as “destroying Japanese culture with Anglo-centricity thinking” (Goundry 2001). The second reason that accounts for the lukewarm support from Japan is more political and economical. Unger (1991: 134) says that “because national standard are ultimately political in nature, the promulgation of UNICODE will probably do more to delay than to hasten genuine international standards, even if giants like IBM decide to opt for it”. As the leader in technology in the East Asian area, and possessing a couple of well developed Japanese systems that were precursors and prototypes of other later-coming standard sets formulated by other hanzi-using polities, it is understandable that Japan is eager to take the lead in counteracting the Unicode influence. Some Japanese achievements, such as the TRON

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character code and its TRON Multilingual Environment, developed by Sukamura Laboratory at Tokyo University in the 1980s, is not only a rival coding system in Asia; it is even in a strong position to threaten Unicode, vying for worldwide acceptance. There is general acknowledgment that TRON does have some features that make its approach to multilingual processing unique and superior over Unicode. It is not only more EastAsian-script friendly, the TRON character set is also infinitely extendable, thus it is capable of including all scripts that have ever been used, and will accommodate even new scripts that have yet to be invented (Sakamura 1992). Nevertheless, so far TRON’s application mainly has been confined within Japan, “because it has not been given the blessing of certain American software houses that want to control operating system software far into the future” (Searle 2004). Japan is a member of the IRG, but it warns that even if it were to become the international standard, Unicode “will be solely for multilingual application, not for domestic use” (Wada 1991: 2, 5). This implies that, at least within Japan, all software made in Japan will be preinstalled with a Japanese code system; when Unicode has to be used, the system will be operable only in an isolated environment. As the only country in East Asia that has strongly resisted Unicode from the very beginning, Japan’s negative attitude towards Unicode, at both governmental level and in industry circles, is in stark contrast with China’s enthusiasm for it. 4.2.2

Rivalry Between Japan and China

Being the home of Chinese characters, China is the most important stakeholder and naturally wants to play the leading role in this process. However, China did not draw up its own big set standards during the 1980s (the series of GB-2312’s supplementary sets were not put in use until much later). Taiwan had developed good standards, but it is obviously impossible to promote Taiwanese standards on the Mainland. Turning to international ones, China prefers Unicode over the Japanese standard and its TRON system. As indicated in the Appendix F, China not only has a strong belief in the possibilities of the Unicode, but has been a strong supporter of Unicode promotion since the beginning of the 1990s. China also has spared no effort in striving to make its various internal standard encoding sets compatible with Unicode conventions in order to push internationalization of the standard. Japan has been very disappointed about China’s extraordinary enthusiasm in promoting Unicode’s spread outside the Unicode group (Wada 1991: 1). As noted in Chapter 4, in an attempt to make China’s rich traditional heritage globally digitally

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deliverable, China hopes that Unicode will provide the platform for uploading its gigantic set of Chinese classics and archaic characters. Appendix F shows that China has made a great effort to cooperate with Unicode through making its existing standard sets compatible with the Unicode system. Unicode has also been widely adopted in academic and private sectors, domestically and internationally. There have been serious commercial commitments to encode a good part of Chinese classic canons and ancient human knowledge with Unicode characters. For instance, Siku Quanshu (1772), which has 79,337 volumes and is the country’s largest surviving Chinese Encyclopedia, has been Unicoded for a number of years using original character forms (Zhang 2005) as has the Shuowen Jiezi (Cook 2001). Another important dimension of the political implications in the encoding standard issue relates to which set of standards or individual characters in the international standards is related to membership rights. Goundry (2001: 3) has pointed out perceptively, “to have your language left out of the Internet is definitely a case of being ‘denied membership’”. A very telling story is the competition among Japan, Taiwan and Mainland China at the end of the 1970s, for the right to represent hanzi-using nations in international standard-making organizations. In a decision-making conference, held in March of 1980 at Stanford University, the Taiwanese system defeated the rival system – lobbied for by an eight-member Japanese delegation – and succeeded in gaining the right to offer their hanzi coding system as the international standard system. As discussed in the last section of Chapter 5, toward the end of the 1970s, both Taiwan and the Mainland aggressively competed to gain the opportunity to set the hanzi standard. In his accounts about this first Chinese-initiated Chinese character encoding system (CCCII), Hsieh (2001) said that in order to permanently elbow out the potential rival system, proposed by Mainland China, CCCII include wholesale all simplified characters. However, this justification was not strong enough to persuade the authority, under heavy political pressure to withdraw all bandit [Communist] characters, and the research team had to present another two justifications. The politicians were finally convinced by two questions: “Don’t we need to process intelligence from the bandits by computer?” and, “Shouldn’t we conduct cultural and political propaganda, once we reclaim the Mainland?” Now, the Mainland has no objection to the inclusion of over 3,000 Cantonese dialectal characters in Unicode, but it will do its outmost to oppose the inclusion of any Hokkien dialectal characters, which is the ‘mother tongue’ of 70 percent of Taiwan’s population (Jordan 2002: 127).

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In sum, the problems found with Han unification, readily encountered by its clients, confirm that the ultimate resolution must occur across human communities before any unification in cyberspace can take place. Over the last couple of decades, the dangers of each polity unilaterally developing rival systems have lead to ever-increasing discussions on the creation of an international standard for hanzi, with the hope of achieving only one global standard. Unicode provides a starting point for international collaboration, and the IRG should be seen as a semi-governmental international expert body. The working members of the IRG are either appointed by member governments, or are invited experts from other countries. The authors have not been aware of any serious collaborative efforts among hanzi-using polities in unifying hanzi’s forms in human communities. Over the last two or so decades, the standardization requirement from the IT industry has spurred a flurry of activities in formulating hanzi standard encoding sets by different governments in adjacent countries, which on the one hand share commonalities in script issues and similar cultural backgrounds, but are simultaneously divided by political, economic and social developments. These polities have promulgated legacy standard sets which seem similar at first glance to the code table. However, considering the extremely complex relationships between the semantic meaning and physical variation in hanzi (regardless of the variation in font style), different degrees of compromise in shape and sound have been applied within each individual country. Then the characters in the different systems were classified and arranged by different methods9. It is in fact hard to conceive of a standard as being adequate when it does not address all of these issues. An ideal versatile mechanism is clearly at odds in some ways with the practical limits of Unicode. Moreover, the situation is further complicated by the fact that no character code standard is able to cover all characters. This is largely because hanzi have been so widely circulated geographically for such a long time while the writing system, like language per se, has been constantly evolving. New characters continue to form and old ones to change. The unification of encoding standards calls for the input from encoding experts, IT engineers, language educators and linguistics researchers, which inevitably draws in the polities which sponsor such experts. In sum, expecting a satisfying long-term solution to the practical problems of international CJKV encoding issues without further interaction among all hanzi stakeholders at the international level is not a viable proposition.

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5.

HANZI REFORM: A BATTLEFIELD FOR SOCIAL FORCES IN LANGUAGE PLANNING

5.1

Rearticulating Some Underlying Issues

In Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume, we called attention to the fact that “even in the best circumstances, the language planner will be captured in the inevitable tension between political, linguistic and societal goals in the language planning environment” (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 309). Reflecting this, an underlying thesis of this monograph has been that language planning and policy, which has as its focus standardization, generally can be said to be influenced by the societal forces of evolution, revolution and reaction. In this sense, the monograph raises issues, albeit in a particular context – China – and with a particular focus – on one aspect of the language planning and policy process, i.e., script reform – that mirror the problems with which language planners in a variety of contemporary contexts struggle. Furthermore, the monograph re-energizes the problematic question of what is meant by ‘language modernization’ – especially as it is affected and redefined by the quickening pace of technological change. This issue is highlighted because Chinese writing occurs through characters (or hanzi) that are part of an open ended logographic script system that generates unique complex technological problems. Thus, the study presented in this monograph suggests that issues related to standardization and modernization, which have been traditionally relatively linear and able to be encompassed by the language planning categories of status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education planning, and/or prestige/ image planning (see e.g., Kaplan and Baldauf 2003), may no longer be adequate to conceptualize the field, i.e., examining the language issues under these categories may not satisfy the new requirements of language modernization in an increasingly global age of technological communication. While one hesitates to suggest yet another language planning category – technological planning – as another focus for language planners, this monograph indicates that issues raised by technology go beyond evolutionary ways of working, and therefore, that there may be a need to develop revolutionary ways of thinking about the impact of technology on the language policy and planning. While Chinese hanzi may provide an extreme case of the interface between language – especially writing systems – and technology, the way that language is used for technological

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communication is a problem that all languages and cultures share to varying degrees – if we believe that the ultimate survival of languages may depend on their representation in cyberspace. Although there are unique issues to be resolved, if a large and powerful language and culture like Chinese is finding it difficult to find its voice in cyberspace, what are the implications of this issue for other less powerful languages and cultures? It is in this context that we briefly turn to summarize the three underlying themes running through this monograph, and their relationship to communication technology. For Chinese characters, as for other language planning sites, evolution, revolution and reaction represent trends in societal forces which impact on what has traditionally been seen as the rational and scientific approach to language policy and planning. Although critical studies of LPP have placed a greater emphasis on the micro or the local (see e.g., Baldauf 2006; Canagarajah 2005) and on societal issues, these societal forces and the particular values and ways of thinking about the role of technological change to LPP still largely remain to be explored. For many of the less powerful languages and cultures, this is an issue yet to be realized and yet to be addressed. It is our hope that Chinese experience highlighted in this volume may aid to understand the issue in some depth. Thus, having looked at the detailed process of consecutive attempts at Chinese script planning and drawing on the background, history, and processes that have intrigued LP scholars and practitioners for years, in the following sections we briefly summarize Chinese hanzi reform attempts through a discussion of the interaction and balance between the three forces of evolution, revolution and reaction.

5.2

Evolution

Language change is inherently conservative, as language forms a part of human identity that individuals have some reluctance to change. Left to their own devices language users change the internal structures of their languages only to the extent necessary to meet new and emerging needs – languages evolve slowly over decades or even centuries. For example, the English of 500 years ago, while somewhat different from that being used today is still comprehensible to current English readers; Classical Chinese had served as written vehicle for over 2,500 years until the Vernacularization Movement that occurred at the beginning of last century. While language planning and standardization, and the introduction of

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various technologies have shaped language and literacy practices, change has generally been evolutionary. In the prologue, we described the extreme long process in the evolution of hanzi’s physical shape. Hanzi as a writing system took root in jiaguwen about three thousand years ago, changing several times in next one thousand years. The last major change (kaishu) occurred 1,800 years ago and since then hanzi physically and officially remained substantially unchanged until the 1935 simplification. This long-standing stability provides evidence that any radical change will have the inevitable fate of meeting reactionary forces as demonstrated in the failure of the FSS. The failure of the first simplification efforts also shows that, revolutionary attempts are not only constrained by hanzi’s built-in features, formed during its historical evolution, but by external forces, or enabling conditions. Since the 1986 conference and under the pressure of reactionary forces, there has been a gradual return to an evolutionary process through standardization in Chinese hanzi reform. The emphasis has been put on stability characterized by standardization reorientation, which is required by technological development. The replacement of reforming measures by standardization as the core concern about script system is significant. As Zhao (2005: 369) observed, in the past, the masses, which were chiefly referred to as character learners or illiterates, and users with little education were targeted by simplification and Romanization reforms. Now the entire country is in rapid transition from a socialist ideology to an increasingly elite-dominated society. Language planners are more concerned with a literate population, or it is perhaps truer to say for a steadily expanding computer-literate population. LP implementers previously were driven by a desire to solve social problems through plan implementation as part of the socialist goal of simplification for mass literacy to strengthen political power and commitment to the Communist government. Ironically, with the advent of computer, LP activities are increasingly largely propelled by the technological demand, the relative success of this revolution and the command of characters in computation have returned the skill base to the control of the relatively few in the course of country’s modernization efforts. In this sense, the LP policy turnaround after 1986 can be considered to be reactionary in comparison with pre-conference development. In an evolutionary sense, as the French would say, “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”

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5.3

Revolution

Given the embedded nature of language in culture and human identity, revolution normally only occurs as the result of some major societal change, or the urgent need to solve a particular problem, or the cooptation of the elites into the ranks of the revolution. In other words, there is a tendency to let nature take its course, or for language development to go down an evolutionary path without the enabling revolutionary conditions. The three rounds of character simplification movements that were carried out by post-imperial Chinese governments (Nationalist and Communist), had as their ultimate goal revolutionary reform of the script system. From the very beginning, as one of the three pillars of the grand tripartite LP project (hanzi Simplification, Promotion of national language and Romanization) initiated during the early days of the cultural revolution, script reform as a way of simplifying hanzi was deemed to be an interim method to get from an ideographic writing system to a spelling system. However, seeing themselves as the soul of the nation and the saviors of its cultural heritage, the elite class tends to act as a reactionary force in the LP process, holding back revolution. When the simplification was raised again in the 1950s, after its failure in 1935, and the Scheme was formulated, a significant part of the elite group had become members of ruling class which was a revolutionary party, leaving the opposing forces without the intellectual strength to counteract the change. This is the fundamental reason accounting for the successful implementation of the TSC. However, the revolutionary forces had not developed to the extent necessary to allow more radical change to the script system, i.e., fullfledged Romanization. The Second Scheme in 1977, turned out to be the central stage where all these three forces were intensively played out. It was formulated during the period of revolutionary zeal when everything had to be treated as part of political ideology – a very unusual period in the history of any polity. The scheme was revolutionary LP at its best as it was actually the work of language users themselves instead of language planners as all elite intellectuals had been subjected to physical labor (for brainwashing) in the remote country areas for a greater part of period of the Great Cultural Revolution. This created rare conditions where, in the absence of restraining forces, i.e., evolutionary laws of hanzi development and the reactionary forces, the revolutionary forces (commoners) prevailed and the Scheme was passed. When the Great Culture Revolution came to an end, the SSS Scheme was rejected despite the lack of hard evidence of public opposition – the principal reason given for the abandonment of the

Some Critical Issues

326

SSS. The 1986 conference was a milestone in LP history in that it was marked by this conservative feature. The elites had returned and it was very obvious that some key members of national LP body played reactionary roles in reversing policy direction, i.e., the formal withdraw of the SSS and abandonment of Romanization pursuit. With the ending of the revolution through reaction, a moderate evolutionary pattern as shown graphically in Figure 7-1 emerged, while the seeds of another revolution – a technological one – were just beginning to be planted.

5.4

Reaction

For most language users, or at least for some of those in positions of power and authority with regard to language within societies, there is a desire to either maintain or return to a pure form of the language. The developing course of Chinese script reform documented in this volume shows that, in a certain sense, it might be appropriate to say that every reform goal points to the revolution, but none can overcome the social reaction that stems from cultural conservatism. Language purism (see e.g., Jernudd and Shapiro 1989) movements can be found in many countries, and are particularly strongly related to religious ideals and other notions of the language (and its texts) embodying sacred values and meanings (Schiffman 1996). This is perhaps best illustrated in the belief that God spoke to Mohammed in (Classical) Arabic and therefore the Koran should only be read and spoken in God’s language. This phenomenon can also be observed among many Christians who still prefer the King James Version of the English Bible to modern retranslations. Formal religion may not play a substantial role in Chinese life, but as richly enunciated in Section 3.2.2, Chapter 1, hanzi have been long sanctified, and when one’s heritage is viewed as sacred, it is not an easy thing to give up. If evolution emphasizes the long term eventual process with history showing that script development occurs as evolutionary process, revolution represents a sudden radical change and reaction to resisting forces. However, if we look at the three major simplification programs, particularly the failures in 1935 and 1977, it seems to suggest that elite class have tended to act as a reactionary force against the demands of commoners, who are almost always are the ones pushing for reform, thus the interaction between these two forces prevents revolutionary changes from being made to the Chinese writing system. From the viewpoint of autonomous or pure linguistics, a script is just the form of written communication and language can be served well by any form. Thus, revolutionary change can

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be made to the script system, i.e., change to another more convenient system, as occurred in Malay, Turkish and Vietnamese. But in the Chinese case, although Romanization movements achieved a lot during the 19201930s and the 1950s, it continues to be the most inflammable topic in the history of Chinese language modernization. The planners failed to Romanize Chinese script due to strong reactionary forces from a significant segmentation of intellectual elite. Even before the appearance of the Romanization movement of the 1920-1930s, the goal of promoting an alphabetic system to replace hanzi (“the venerable oldster” in Romanization advocates’ terms) had been seen by traditionalists as a stab directed at the heart of Chinese culture. Therefore, no alphabetic system, no matter whether devised by Chinese or Westerners, has gone beyond an auxiliary role in Chinese graphic life.

5.5

Conclusion

In most societies, the forces of evolution, revolution and reaction have played a part in the way that languages have developed. What is interesting in the Chinese context is that these forces have been so clearly in play over the last 100 years and that their interaction, particularly revolution and reaction, have been accelerated by technology, and recently by the need for digital technology for script transmission on the internet. The analysis in this monograph has focused largely on the linguistic dimension and its relationship to political issues, but language reform normally occurs in association with socio-political upheaval, attesting to the huge revolutionary impact on the language and script system that can be brought about by social conditions. In the case of China, by the late 1800s after the first and second opium wars (1840, 1859), the military defeats at the hands of the Western Powers provoked demands within China for mass education. Educational reform inevitably brings with it literacy campaigns and script reform. Thus, the debate on language reform was heard with increasing frequency as the Manchu Dynasty came to an end in 1912, providing a catalyst for the initial reforms discussed in this monograph. When script reform first started during the early days of the Communist revolution, LPers had no way to anticipate many of the problems the authors have described in this volume. More recently, advances in communication technology have created a new way to examine LPP in its new historical context, with broader perspectives extending beyond the polity borders. The impact of current computer technology described in Chapters

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Some Critical Issues

3 and 4 in light of the problems of Chinese standardization has raised new considerations that have become so important that the future success and even continuation of script reform may depend on them to a very significant extent. While the ongoing extensive standardization ventures (Section 3, Chapter 4) will not be likely to bring a drastic change in hanzi’s physical shape, they may have a far-reaching impact on character use. Thus, the forces of evolution (standardization projects), revolution (the urgent need for a computer friendly script similar to pinyin) and reaction (the nationalistic forces of traditional culture and writing) are still in play. In this monograph we argue that how those forces play out may determine not only the fate of hanzi, but also the ultimate role of the Chinese language in the world language ecology.

Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to many people. We would like especially to thank the following individuals for their input. First, the empirical findings obtained from the qualitative research approaches have complemented the lack of reliable critical information needed to write a book like this. We would like first to extend our gratitude to the scholars who accepted an invitation to give key informant interviews and/or who came to speak at the special focus seminar. They include: Prof. Zhou Youguang (RIAL, consultant of SCLW), Prof. Hu Mingyang (Renmin University of China, former Vice-president of All-China Association of Chinese Linguistics), Dr. Guo Longsheng (researcher at RIAL), Prof. Wang Jun (RIAL, consultant of SCLW), Prof. Li Yuming (Director of RIAL and Department of Language and Information Management of MOE), Prof. Chen Zhangtai (RIAL, consultant of SCLW, President of AllChina Association of Applied Linguistics), Prof. Su Peicheng (Beijing University, President of Association of Chinese Language Modernization). Prof. Yin Bingyong (RIAL), Prof. Fei Jinchang (RIAL), Prof. Dong Kun (Vice-director of Linguistics Research Institution, China Academy of Social Sciences), Prof. Fu Yonghe (RIAL), Prof. Feng Zhiwei (Chinese Information Processing scientist at RIAL), Prof. Lu Chuan (Chinese Information Processing scientist at RIAL), and Prof. Wu Tieping (Beijing Teachers’ University). These scholars are all well-recognized authorities in Chinese language planning and their willingness to share their insights and experience has made a unique contribution to this book. Of course, we take full responsibility for any inaccuracies or misinterpretations that may have occurred.

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Acknowledgements

Our thanks also go to the following individuals who offered their valuable assistance at various stages of doing the research and writing of this book: Mr. Rudolf Salzlechner and my colleagues at Nanyang Technological University (Miss Wang Yimin, Mr. Goh Hock Huan, Mr. Zhao Chunsheng, Ms. Wendy Toh and Ms. Joan Gan) for proofreading some draft chapters of the book; Mr. Zhang Dongbo (Carnegie Mellon University) for helping us create all the self-created hanzi characters in this text; Ms. Bryde Dodd (Instructional Designer at University of Sydney) for her technical support in the online survey; Ms. Zhao Yanhui (the Principal of the Northeast Normal University’s Affiliated Primary School), Ms. Wang Jing (China Central TV and Radio University), Mr. Shao Honghua (editor of Unity Newspaper), and Mr. He Dingmeng (the chief-editor of Planting and Raising Magazine) for their help in collecting Chinese handwritten materials; Prof. Michael Walsh (University of Sydney), Prof. Chen Ping (University of Queensland), Prof. John Rohsenow (University of Illinois), Dr. George Zhao (University of Toronto), and Prof. Liu Haitao (Media and Communication University of China) for their comments on various parts of the text and/or help in document and information access. Our thanks also go to Simon Ager, Ellie Crysta, and Imre Galambos for permitting us to use their illustrations in this book. We’d also like to thank a number of anonymous referees for their valuable comments on this book and related materials. These comments have helped us clarify our thinking on a number of issues. To undertake this kind of research outside China relies heavily on Chinese resources. Therefore, we greatly appreciate the excellent library support offered by the Fisher Library of the University of Sydney. We also would like to extend our thanks to all the quoted scholars and sincerely hope that our translations have not seriously distorted their views. In this book, the translations, unless otherwise noted, have been done by the first author, including the translations of names in the references to pinyin when the original Chinese titles were given characters. However, due to the acute lack of unified standards for Romanizing names for Chinese living outside Mainland China, the Romanization of names can be quite haphazard and unsystematic. It is very common that the same Chinese surname has three or four variant Romanized forms. Therefore, in this book, these authors’ names were written in pinyin when their original transliteration could not be located. We apologize for not being able to use an individual’s own preferred Romanized form.

Appendix

APPENDIX A: THE FIRST SCHEME OF SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS (1935)

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Appendix

Appendix

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Appendix

APPENDIX B: THE SECOND SCHEME OF SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS (1977)

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Appendix

Appendix

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Appendix

Appendix

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Appendix

APPENDIX C: TABLE OF MOST USED CHINESE CHARACTERS ( )

2500 Part 1 Most Used Characters (2500) By Stroke Order

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APPENDIX D: THE LANGUAGE LAW OF 2001 (Rohsenow 2004: 41-43) The Law of the National Commonly Used Language and Script of the PRC (Passed by the eighteenth meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ninth Session of the National Peoples Congress on October 31, 2000) CONTENTS: Section 1: General Principles Section 2: Applications of the Law of the National Commonly Used Language and Script Section 3: Administration and Supervision Section 4: Note Section 1: General Principles Article 1: In accordance with the Constitution, this law is formulated in order to promote the regularization and standardization of the national commonly used language and script, as well as its healthy development, to cause the nation’s commonly used language and script to become even more widely used in society, and to accelerate economic and cultural exchange between various nationalities and regions, Article 2: The national commonly used language and script referred to in this law are Putonghua and standard Chinese characters. Article 3: The state will promote Putonghua and employ standard Chinese characters. Article 4: Citizens have the right to study and to use the national commonly used language and script. The state will supply the necessary conditions for citizens to study and use the national commonly used language and script. The People’s government offices and other departments at the various local levels shall adopt measures to popularize Putonghua and to put standard Chinese characters into practice. Article 5: The use of the national commonly used language and script shall be beneficial to maintaining the national sovereignty and the dignity,

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be beneficial to national integrity and unity and be beneficial to the growth of socialist material and spiritual civilization. Article 6: The state will issue regulations and standards for the national commonly used language and script, administer the use of the national commonly used language and script in society, support teaching and scientific research of the national commonly used language and script, and promote the regularization, enrichment and development of the national commonly used language and script. Article 7: The state will encourage and reward organizations and individuals who make outstanding contributions to the cause of the national commonly used language and script. Article 8: The various nationalities all have the freedom to use and develop their own languages and scripts. The use of the ethnic minorities’ languages and scripts will follow the regulations [set] in the Constitution, the Law of Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities and other national laws. Section 2: Applications of the Law of the National Commonly Used Language and Script Article 9: The state takes Putonghua and standard [simplified] Chinese characters as the language and script for public use. The law also provides for regulated exceptions. Article 10: Schools and other educational organizations will take Putonghua and standard Chinese characters as the basic language and characters to be used in teaching and study. The law also provides for regulated exceptions. Schools and other educational organizations will teach Putonghua and standard Chinese characters using a Chinese language curriculum. The Chinese language materials used shall meet the regulations and standards for the national commonly used language and script. Article 11: Publications in Chinese shall meet the regulations and standards for the national commonly used language and script. Foreign languages and scripts used in Chinese publications shall employ the national commonly used language and script to make the necessary notations.

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Article 12: Radio and television stations will take Putonghua as the basic language of broadcasting. Those who wish to use foreign languages to broadcast must have the approval of the Office of Radio and Television Broadcasting of the State Council. Article 13: The public service industry will employ standard Chinese characters as the basic script to be used in public service. When needed for public service, signs, advertisements, announcements, and trade brand logos, etc. which use foreign language scripts as well as Chinese, shall use standard Chinese characters. The use of Putonghua as the language of service in the public service industry is encouraged. Article 14: The national commonly used language and script shall be used as the basic language and script in the following situations: (1) The language and script used in radio, film and television; (2) The script to be used in all publicly used facilities; (3) The script on signs and advertisements; (4) The names of for profit and non-profit organizations; (5) The wrappings and instructions of all products sold domestically. Article 15: The national commonly used language and script used in all information processing and information technology products shall meet the regulations and standards for the national commonly used language and script. Article 16: Under the relevant regulations of this section, dialects may be used in the following situations: (1) When really necessary to carry out public business by national level government personnel; (2) Language used in broadcasting approved by the Office of Radio and Television Broadcasting of the State Council; (3) When needed for use in artistic forms such as stage, film and television; (4) When necessary in publications, teaching, and research. Article 17: Under the relevant regulations of this section, [old style] complex characters and variant characters are permitted to be used in the following situations:

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(1) On historical relics and sites; (2) Variant characters in personal names; (3) Artistic works such as calligraphy, seal carving, etc. (4) Handwritten characters on inscriptions and signs; (5) When needed for use in publications, teaching and research; (6) Under special conditions approved by offices of the State Council. Article 18: The national commonly used language and script will employ the Scheme for Chinese Phonetic Writing (Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an) as the instrument for spelling and sound annotation. The Scheme for Chinese Phonetic Writing is the uniform standard for the spelling in the Latin alphabet of Chinese personal names, place names, and literature and documents in Chinese, and is to be used in places where Chinese characters are inconvenient or impossible to use. Elementary education shall use the Scheme for Chinese Phonetic Writing [Hanyu pinyin] in teaching. Article 19: In all positions in which Putonghua is the working language, those personnel should possess the ability to speak Putonghua. The level of Putonghua of broadcasters, program hosts, and film, television and stage actors as their working language should conform to different standard levels as fixed by the state; those who have not yet met the standard levels set by the state should undertake training at the appropriate level. Article 20: Chinese language teaching for foreigners shall teach Putonghua and standard Chinese characters. Section 3: Administration and Supervision Article 21: Planning, assistance, administration and supervision of work on the national commonly used language and script is the responsibility of the Offices of Language and Script Work of the State Council. The ministries and offices of the State Council will administer the use of the national commonly used language and script through their own [administrative] system. Article 22: Local language and script work offices and other related offices will administer and supervise the use of the national commonly used language and script within their own administrative areas. Article 23: The commerce departments of People’s governments above the level of county will carry out the administration and supervision of the

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use and use of language and script in commercial names, product names, and advertisements according to the law. Article 24: The language and script work office of the State Council will issue standards for the [Proficiency] Grading System for [Spoken] Putonghua [Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi Dengji Biaozhun]. Article 25: The translations of such proper nouns as foreign personal names, place names, etc. into the national commonly used language and script will be systematically examined and approved by the language and script office of the State Council or other relevant offices. Article 26: Citizens may make criticisms of and suggestions to those who violate the regulations of Section 2 of this law and who do not use language and script according to the regulations and standards of the national commonly used language and script. For those who violate the relevant sections of Section 2 of this law in terms of the use of language by [broadcast, teaching and government] personnel [as specified] in Section 2 of Article 19, the work units concerned shall carry out criticism and education of those personnel directly responsible; those who refuse to make corrections will be dealt with by the units concerned. Those who violate the relevant regulations of Section 2 of this law concerning the use of [proper] script in urban public facilities, signs and advertisements will be ordered to make corrections by the relevant administrative offices; those who refuse to make corrections will be warned and officially urged to make timely corrections. Article 27: Those who violate the regulations of this law, interfering with others’ study and use of the national commonly used language and script, will be ordered to make timely corrections and given warnings by the relevant administrative offices. Section 4: Note Article 28: This law will take effect on January 1, 2001. (This unofficial translation is by J. S. Rohsenow, with supplementary information added [thus])

APPENDIX E: IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONAL NAMES 1. Ann, T. K. ( , 1917-2000): Shanghai native Hong Kong businessperson, chair of Hong Kong Industry Association. Ann was the vice-chairman of Chinese People’s Consultancy. The inventor of Ann, T. K. Chinese character writing machine and the author of Cracking the Chinese Puzzles (five volumes), Chinese Character is the Fifth Invention of China, the 21st Century, Is the Chinese Character Century, Chinese Character is the Root of Chinese Cultural Heritage. 2. Chen Zhangtai ( , 1932-): Linguistic Professor, graduated from Xiamen University. The posts he has held include: vice-president of All-China Association of Linguistic, the president of China Applied Linguistics Association, vice-director of the Linguistic Institute, China Academy of Social Science, vice-chief editor of Chinese Linguistics, director of RIAL, and vice-director of SCLW. 3. Guo Moruo ( , 1892-1978): Writer, politician (country’s VicePremier), chairman of the All-China Federation of Literacy and Art Circle, President of Academy of Science. Studied in Japan. 4. Hu Qiaomu ( , 1912-1992): Born in Jiansu Province. He joined CCP in 1935. Graduate of Qinghua University. He was one of the political secretaries of Mao Zedong from 1945. Vice minister of Propaganda Department of the Centre of CCP and the editor of Collected Works of Mao Zedong from 1950 to 1966. His political life was limited by his poor heath after 1961, but he became the chief theorist of CCP after Mao’s death and chairman of Secretariat of CCP Centre and the president of China Academy of Social Science, the director of Xinhua News Agency. 5. Hu Shi ( , 1891-1962): Leading intellectual in the decades following the May Fourth movement. Influential in promoting the use of vernacular script to replace classical Chinese. Disciple of John Dewey under whom he studied at Columbia University. President of Beijing University, Kuomintung government’s ambassador to America. Attacked by the Communists for his liberal views. 6. Hu Yuzhi ( , 1897-): Writer and Journalist. Editor in chief of Guangming Ribao (Guangming Daily) 1919–1957. Director of the CLR. Active in foreign affairs. Pioneer of Romanization Movement in the 1930s and the 1940s.

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7. Li Yuming ( , 1955-): Chinese Linguistics professor, graduated from Zhengzhou University and the Normal University of Central China (NUCC), vice-president of NUCC (1998-2000). He has been the director of the Department of Language and Information, Education Ministry since 2000 and the Director of RIAL since 2001. 8. Lü Shuxiang ( , 1904-1998): Linguist. He graduated from Foreign Language Department of the National South-eastern University in 1926 and studied at Oxford University in 1936-1937. The vicedirector of CLR, the president of All-China Association of Linguistic and the director of Institute of Linguistics, China Academy of Social Science. Lü was the author of numerous influential works on linguistics. 9. Marr, Nikolai Y. ( , 1864-1934): Russian linguist, philologist and revolutionary. Educator of several generations of sinologist and linguists in USSR He misinterpreted Marxism and advocated the creation of a ‘new Russian language’. His theories on linguistic kinship dominated Soviet Union linguistics for nearly 30 year until they were criticized by Stalin in Marxism and Linguistics in the 1950s. 10. Wang Jun ( , 1922-): Linguistics professor, graduated from Southwest Provisional University. Academic positions he has held include: vice chief-editor of Chinese Ethnic Languages, the chief-editor of Script Reform, Language Construction, vice-president of Beijing Linguistics Association, the president of Association of Chinese Language Modernization. He was the vice-director of CLR and SCLW from 1984-1990. 11. Wang Li ( , 1901-1986): Pseudonym of Wang Liaoyi. Writer and linguist. Professor of the Department of Literature and Language, Beijing University. Wang was the vice-director of CLR and the honorary president of All China Association of Linguistics, author of numerous works on linguistics. PhD in experimental phonology, studied in France in 1927-1932. 12. Xu Jialu ( , 1937-): Chinese Linguistics Professor. Graduated from Beijing Normal University (BNU). He was vice-president of BNU (1987-1994), Chairman of the National Central Committee of Democracy Progress Party, he has been Vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress Conference since 1998. Xu was the Director of SCLW between 1994 and 1997.

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13. Xu Shen ( , 58 -147): Famous for his study of the Confucian classics and especially for his Shuowen jiezi ( ), a collection with explanations of all the characters then found in Chinese literature. It is the oldest known Chinese dictionary and is the basis for all etymological research. 14. Yuan Xiaoyuan ( ): Professional diplomat, the founder and the president of the Research Association of Chinese Character Modernization (1980) (later changed to Beijing International Association of Chinese Character Studies and Yuan Xiaoyuan Research Institute of Language, Culture and Science). Yuan gave up her American citizenship and settled in Beijing in 1985. 15. Zhou Youguang ( , 1905-): Most prolific Chinese reform researcher. Member of the CLR. Author of Wenzi Gaige Gailun (An Introduction to Chinese Character Reform, 1961) and a large number of works on Chinese LP. Zhou is also a well-known essayist. Zhou is the graduate from the University of St. John (Shanghai), and he worked in the banking sector in New York and London and was an economics professor before he formally became a LP professional at the request of the Government.

APPENDIX F: CHARACTER CODING SET – MOVING TOWARDS INTERNATIONALIZATION Chinese computer experts and LPers are strong believers in Unicode. They argue if this standardization does not succeed, namely, the standards cannot be integrated into Unicode, then the productive future for hanzi is problematic. In the following discussion, a brief introduction is given to China’s official commitment to the integration of the existing encoding standards into the future international standard, i.e., Unicode. While this issue may appear too technical, a description of it may help readers who want to gain some background knowledge of Chinese standardization issues as it clears up the confusion over why so many national standards have been promulgated in China over the last two decades. According to Gu Xiaofeng (2000: 23-25), since the release of ISO 10646-1/Unicode 2.1 in 1993, the Chinese government has given strong support to the combined efforts of the ISO/IEC and the Unicode Consortium. The new Chinese National Standard – GB 13000.1 is compatible with ISO 10646-1/Unicode 2.1. Whenever the ISO and the Unicode Consortium have changed or revised their common standard, GB 13000.1 subsequently adopted these changes. However, the coding mechanism used for ISO 10646.1 was totally different from the one used in the older GB 2312-80, which meant that if the ISO was made the standard in the Chinese market, all computers that used the GB 2312-80 standard would be paralyzed. To accommodate all additional hanzi characters specified in GB 13000.1 that are not included in GB 2312-80, a new specification, known as GBK, was introduced to bridge the standards. GBK defines 23,940 code points, containing 21,886 characters, and provides mapping to the code points of Unicode 2.1. It is an extension of GB 2312-80, and its fundamental function is to leave all characters and codes as defined in GB 2312-80 intact, but to position all additional characters in ISO10646/GB 13000.1 around that standard – these characters are what are so-called the 20,902 East Asian Ideograms. Although it adopted the 20,902 characters wholesale as well as the codification principles of a two-byte mechanism, as an extension of GB 2312-80, the code points for each individual character are compatible with this existing national standard, but not identical to those in ISO10646.1. Thus, code and character compatibility was guaranteed between GBK and GB 2312-80, and at the same time, the complete Unicode unified character set in Unicode 2.1 was made available in China. GBK covers whole characters encoded in these two character sets, and is not only much bigger than GB 2312-80, but also goes beyond

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the character repertoire of ISO 10646. Therefore, at the time when GBK was defined, other characters not available in Unicode 2.1 were added. The introduction of GBK increased the number of characters available on computer from 6,763 specified in CB 2312-80 to the 20,902 in ISO 10646.1. These characters were conveniently positioned on the favorite and much eyed Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) in the Unicode. It also ensured that the software, encoded by the BG 2312-80 standard before GBK, operated as it had done previously without any disruption. However, as it is fully backward compatible with GB 2312-80, it missed the opportunity to be compatible with the Big5 coding system. Gu (2000: 26) has pointed out that these 20,902 hanzi characters, also known as CJK sinographs, include various forms of Chinese characters. Therefore, with the gradual introduction of GBK in more software, the abolished complex and variant forms of characters will effectively be legalized, which could inevitably pose a grave threat to current official language policy. Indeed, the first author’s personal observation is that over years of use, although there has not been an overwhelming emergence of illicit characters on the mainland, compared with the more universal situation prior to the release of GBK, the number of long prohibited unofficial characters has been increasing. In another development, the government decided to create a new national standard for large character sets – an extension of GB 2312-80 – known as GB 18030-2000 – to prepare for international information communication in the future. Although linked to the indigenous national standard by GBK, ISO10646.1/GB 13000.1 itself was not compatible with the Chinese software that internalized GB 2312-80 as their regular encoding standard, and it will be a long time before ISO10646.1/GB 13000.1 is fully adopted by the Chinese IT industry. However, with the rapid spread of computer use in all spheres of modern Chinese society, and especially considering the urgent demand from communication, population administration, banking systems and geographical data processing, there is a growing need to have a larger set of encoded Chinese hanzi. The new GB 18030-2000 standard had to be backward compatible with ISO10646.1/GB 13000 and with GB 2312-80 so as to update existing systems and ensure the effective use of programmed information resources. In October 1998, the relevant authorities organized a preparation committee consisting of research institutes, major Chinese computer manufacturers and China-based international software companies, to look into the feasibility of making such a standard. On March 17, 2000, the Ministry of Information Industry and the former State Bureau of Technological Quality Supervision jointly issued a new national encoding standard for

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27,484 hanzi, GB 18030-2000. Because it is the most fundamental encoding standard after CB 2312-80, it will define the country’s computer system for an infinite period in the future. The government automatically suspended the application of GBK with the formal release of GB-180302000. The new standard has some tough conformity requirements. It is illegal to sell products in China that do not conform to this standard, and failing to embrace official standards will incur a penalty. Specifically, all computer products manufactured during the interim period between March 17, 2000 and August 31, 2001, had to observe the new standard. Any products not in conformity with the standard must take remedial measures approved by the National Commission of Information Technology Standardization otherwise they will be treated as illegal, non-standard products. All information products made after the deadline are required to go through detailed standard testing criteria, formulated and implemented by the Testing Centre of Standard Conformity for Information Processing Products, which is affiliated with the Research Institute of Electronic Industrial Standards under the Ministry of Information Technology Industry (Lin 2004). Therefore, GB 18030-2000 was created as an update of GBK for Unicode 3.0 with an extension that covers all of Unicode. It was described as compatible, open for extension and future orientated, maintaining full compatibility of GB-encoded text with GBK and GB 2312-80. The lookup table it uses to go from GB 18030-2000 to Unicode is backward compatible with the look-up table from GB 2312-80 to Unicode. Another important feature of GB 18030-2000 is that, as is the case for Unicode, it does not concern itself with graphic forms of the code and only assigns encoding numbers to the glyphs. This flexible measure leaves room for font typographers to add graphic details to the code position, when in the future, the standardization is completed, and the consensus on the characters’ graphic form is reached among hanzi-using societies. GB 18030-2000 has 1.6 million valid byte sequences, but there are only 1.1 million code points in Unicode, so there are about 500,000 byte sequences in GB 18030-2000 that are currently unassigned. It provides the ultimate resolution for problems caused by the lack of character forms and code points, thus providing a unified encoding platform for a possibly larger Chinese character set, including the future archaic characters as discussed in Section 3.2, Chapter 4.

Notes

PROLOGUE 1. This Prologue provides a brief introduction to the historical origins and development of hanzi and a description of their basic characteristics. While this section provides some essential background for those not familiar with hanzi, it is an area of study in its own right (see e.g., Boltz 1994, Qiu 2000, DeFrancis 1984b and Wieger 1965) and we only briefly summarize some key aspects here. 2. The discovery of jiaguwen was a matter of serendipity rather than an archaeological find, so versions differ about the circumstances surrounding the first discovery. One recounting (Wong 1990: 59) indicates that a scholar, Liu Yau, visiting his sick friend Wang in Anyang, Henan, and saw on the prescription for the medical brew to cure his friend, an item called ‘Dragon Bones’. Liu was curious and bought some pieces for closer examination. To his great surprise, he found that some of these bones bore what looked to him like an incised primitive inscription. In his excitement, he went on a wild spending spree, buying up all the ‘Dragon Bones’ he could lay his hands on. Back in his study, he looked closely at every piece for the faintest incision, and what he saw was indeed the work of humans. He had stumbled upon a discovery that shook the scholastic world of his time, and opened a new vista for research into the study of an ancient script. 3. A baffling classic, titled ‘Book of Changes’ ( ), was devoted to this Yinyang Bagua system and thus laid the philosophical foundation for the Chinese classical mindset. 4. The name is a bit misleading as it was not originally associated with seals. People did have this style of character engraved on their seals for its artistic beauty, but this occurred much later historically, after the seal script had come into being. The use of seal style on seals/stamps (exactly as it occurs in Western counterpart forms) is still a very common practice today. Another explanation is that zhuan (seal) means ‘to pull or

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stretch long’, and seal characters are characterized by elongated strokes (Yin and Rohsenow 1997: 33). 5. Some scholars (e.g., Wang and Zou 1999: 68) argue that the 1950s’ simplification did not cause any change to the style and shape of hanzi. This is true to a great extent, as the simplification change is in quantity rather than quality. 6. Although the shapes are placed in chronicle order, in actual use the scripts overlap. Thus, the purpose of this diagram is not to show an evolution consequence, but to illustrate some representative and distinct shapes that have historically exited. 7. DeFrancis (1984b: 92) holds that ‘radical’ is a ‘quite misleading’ term, and he suggests it be called ‘significs’. Later on (1989: 279) he further introduces ‘key’ and ‘determinative’ to refer to this semantic element in hanzi. Other terms, such as side components, primary elements, can also be found in some books. 8. The number of characters listed in the dictionary is an important parameter to measure the size of a dictionary. This is because, in ancient times, dictionaries used the character as the entry, instead of the word as is done today. A dictionary was called Zidian, literally meaning ‘book of characters’. 9. Kangxi Dictionary: One of the most popular Chinese dictionaries, compiled by Zhang Yushu and his associates, under the patronage of Great Emperor Kang Xi in 1716. With 49,174 entries (characters), it was designated to be the most authoritative and exhaustive dictionary available at that time. 10. For example, Mao ordered the simplifiers in the 1950s to make bold use of handwriting/calligraphic style to formulate their simplification scheme. Many of the characters included in Taiwan’s Official List of Standard Handwritten Characters (1982) are the same as, or similar, to the mainland’s simplified characters (Zhang et al. 1997). Examining the origin of simplified characters is the first step in understanding how today’s simplified characters are historically derived from various forms of handwriting.

CHAPTER 1 1. Chinese historians begin their study of ‘modern China’ in 1840, with the start of the opium war. This year is seen as a turning point in Chinese history. After the war, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. At the same time, a series of self-strengthening movements, combined with the necessary adoption of Western technology and educational methods, marked the rise of modern China. The movement, in which language reform was seen as an integral part, subsequently developed into a cultural revolution, eventually coming to its peak in 1919. For this very reason, ‘Modern China’, as a cultural term, customarily refers to the time after the second decade of the 20th century. Therefore, ‘Modern China’, as used in this volume, is not the same as the chronological term used by Chinese historians. 2. Prior to the last century, two written forms existed in China: Wenyan ( ) Chinese, an archaic stylized usage, practiced by elite Chinese intellectuals, and Baihua ( ), literally meaning ‘plain language’, the written medium based on vernacular speech for common people. In the early 20th century, China went through a period of transition from dynastic to modern history, marked by constant reforming and revolutionary movements. Concurrent with simplification and Romanization were efforts to establish

Notes

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

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a vernacular written form that achieved dramatic success during the New Culture Movement culminating in 1919, and won massive support from the majority of the population. Vernacularization is one of the most significant changes both in Chinese linguistic as well as cultural life. It marked the end of a 3000 year tradition separating written and oral language, although Wenyan did not completely die out until the founding of the PRC in 1949. According to Han Dynasty law, a person above 17 years was sentenced to imprisonment or death if a wrong character was found in his memorial to the Emperor (Sun 1991). Similar laws were applied in other dynasties. Liao (916-1125), a regime founded by Khitan in northern China that used a Chinese hanzi-derived writing system, imposed capital punishment on people who took books out of the country, making it extremely difficult for scholars to study Khitan (Xixia in Chinese) characters (Nie 1998). Qian’s eight methods are: 1) Only an outline of the original character remains, with deletion of the extra components: (shou, longevity); 2) Adoption of the existing cursive handwritten characters to replace those that are not only the most used, but also the most complex ones: (shu, book); 3) To represent the whole character by one part of its components. This is to use a portion of the original character to represent the original form: (hao, number); 4) To replace complex parts with simple parts: (guan, to look for); 5) To adopt its ancient form, which is simpler: (li, ritual); 6) To use the phonetic principle by regulating the phonetic compound: (xiang, hometown); 7) To create a new one as a substitution, based on the established principles. Established principles refer to the well-accepted methodologies in public to simplify characters throughout history, such as to substitute the complex part of characters by a simpler phonetic compound: / (zao, cooking stove); 8) Replacement of the character with a homophonous one: (ji, tea table). A Romanization advocacy organization composed of some distinguished linguists, sponsored by the former government. Except for the CCSR, which was reorganized as the State Commission of Language Work at the NCLW, held from January 6-13, 1986, all other organizations were abolished when their replacement groups came into being. From May 1956 Mao called, with increasing vigor, for intellectuals to express their opinions more freely and asked them to criticize the cadres and the Party constructively under the slogan ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom together; let a hundred schools of thought contend’ ( , ). However, when in May 1957 some intellectuals began to take him at his word, and there followed a torrent of criticism of the Party’s policies, calling for greater intellectual freedom, even democracy, Mao and other leaders were shocked at the response and crushed the critics with the Anti-Rightist campaign, which was the biggest disaster to befall China’s intellectuals before the Cultural Revolution (Ji 2004: 75-76). Much of the research shows little academic independence and is heavily politically charged. Wang Xuewen, a prolific LP writer and researcher, is typical of those doing this kind of research. For instance, his Comprehensive Critique of the Communist Bandits’ Simplified Characters (1974 ) is imbued with political jargon and accusations. Hung is a Cambridge educated mathematician. He used to teach mathematics at Hong Kong University and is now a philosophy professor at Waikato University, New Zealand. Hung has been an enthusiastic overseas observer of Chinese script reform and his name is well-known among overseas Chinese scholars/expatriates for his series

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of articles, titled ‘Cursing My Ancestors’ (Ma Zuzong – ), in which he is extremely critical of the shortcomings of the Chinese language and its characters, and vigorously spreads his radical views about reforming the Chinese language and writing system. He has devised a number of Chinese alphabeticization and input schemes. 10. It was assumed that because of political and personal sensibilities, a great deal of valuable information would be known by these key figures in Chinese LP history. To get reliable information from this primary source, two rounds of key informant interviews and a personal seminar were conducted in Beijing in July 2001 and July 2002 respectively. Sixteen LP professionals, policy makers and researchers were interviewed or invited to speak in our personal seminar. Unpublished information, gained in this unique set of face-to-face conversations, was substantial and valuable. Some of the insights and data contributed would otherwise not have come to light or have been available to the authors. This empirical information is cited as ‘personal communication’ throughout this book, and contributors’ names can be found in the Acknowledgement. Given the situation just discussed, this type of qualitative data collection technique – personal communication – as a method to access information has been very commonly practiced by researchers studying Chinese LP (e.g., Rohsenow 1986, 1996, 2001, Lehmann 1975, Barnes 1977). 11. The four members of the ‘Gang of Four’ were Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife) and Yao Wenyuan. They were the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution. By the end of the Cultural Revolution they had ascended to key positions in the central government, but were suddenly ousted from power in a bloodless coup, plotted by Deng Xiaoping in October 1976. 12. He was the commander-in-chief of China’s army, the PLA, and the constitutional successor of Mao Zedong, but he fell out of favor with Mao in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. He died when his plane crashed in Mongolia, on an aborted flight to the Soviet Union. 13. In September 1974, the State Planning Commission approved the application made jointly by the previous 4th Machinery Ministry (a national defense organization), China Science Academy, State Publication Bureau, and Chinese Xinhua News Agency to launch a research scheme abbreviated as ‘748 Project’. The project was a statistical program of research on hanzi’s coverage in modern texts. Xinhua News Agency’s Printing Plant was commissioned as the organizer (because at that time, the working class had to be the leader). The organizer recruited over 1000 people from nine institutions, including students in middle schools and the workers from other printing plants in the Beijing area, to do the statistics manually. 2.160 million characters (tokens) from four categories of publications (science and technology, literary works, political theories and news/journalism) were analyzed. After two years, 6374 character types were tabulated by frequency. This forms the database for the national standard code set for information exchange GB 2312-80 (Su 1994: 29-30). 14. Ni Zhifu, born in Shanghai in 1933, was the vice-chairman of the Great People’s Congress, the president of the All-Nation Workers’ Union, and was later elected to the Politburo by the 11th CCP Congress in August 1977. 15. Liu’s position was only second to Mao when the GLSC was introduced in 1964. Framed by the Mao-cult, along with Deng Xiaoping, as the foremost ‘Capitalist Roader’ and Revisionist within the Party, he was later physically persecuted and put to death during the Cultural Revolution.

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16. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, to convert ‘bad elements’ from their ‘wrongs’, all academic members of the CCSR, criticized as being ‘scholar tyrants’, and ‘counter-revolutionary authorities’ in academic fields, were sent to the countryside as part of a brainwashing campaign, and were not allowed to return until the mid-1970s. 17. For example, (lán, basket) was simplified as in the TSC. In the SSS, three homophonous characters: (lán, basket), (lán, blue) and (lán, orchid) were merged as one: . At the same time, this also meant that the former two were abolished.

CHAPTER 2 1. After half a century of practical use, there are some individual studies that can offer a number of valuable insights in assessing the outcome of the simplification. Some overseas researchers have studied the simplified characters one by one, from an allround aspect, grouping them into various tables by their acceptance; such as ‘ready for immediate adoption’, ‘acceptable’, ‘propose to re-simplify’. In a research project, aimed at assisting traditional hanzi users to effectively use simplified characters and to achieve a breakthrough in the written communication barrier across the Strait, Tsang (1996: 33; 97-107) listed 459 characters in a table, titled ‘Hard to Recognize and Hard to Learn Simplified Characters,’ and suggests that people from traditional character regions postpone their learning of these characters until future modifications are completed. Interestingly, Tsang (25-31) does a case study of 22 characters selected from the TSC by examining their historical development and analyzing their convenience in current use; then 22 new simplified forms were suggested. 2. In parallel with this argument, stylistic and lexical simplification has been advocated by the ‘plain English’ movement, and various documents in a variety of jurisdictions are required to be written in simple English. However, good communication is not synonymous with simplicity, and critics argue that simplification can lead to texts which are actually less precise, thereby putting the burden of comprehension back on the user (see Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 75). 3. For details of how representation efficiency is calculated, one may refer to Zhou (1986a: 141-151) or Shi (1991). 4. But it has been argued that as Wang ( ) is a very common Chinese surname, ‘Wang’ inside Guo ( ) can also be interpreted as representing ‘People’, instead of King (Ye 1995: 10-11). According to Lin Yanzhi (1996: 4), the former Party head of SCLW, it was Zhou Enlai who personally changed to . More details about the debate on how to simplify this heavily culturally and politically enmeshed character from the TSC can be found in Xia (2004: 273-274) and Gao (2002: 258). 5. Recently, for the first time, the appropriateness of homophonic replacement for some geographical names has been questioned by Li Yuming (2004c: 66). 6. Interestingly, the illegal character for the Chinese Premier’s given name is a legal character in Taiwan. has official status in the Table of Standardized Shapes for Hanzi, promulgated by the Taiwan authorities in 1982. 7. The changing of names is a very sensitive issue worldwide and is often linked to the issue of human rights. Neustupný (1983), for example, discusses this in the context of a Japanese law enacted shortly after WWII, which specified that ‘common and easy’

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characters must be used for the names of children. Fu and Kataoka (1997) discuss the issue of naming in relation to Hong Kong. 8. One of the more significant cases is that of Ye Gongchao, the standing member of the CCSR and the person (director) who was in charge of the Section for Hanzi Optimization. Ye was very upset about his family name being merged into the simplified Ye ( , leaf). He was so unhappy about it that he refused to be addressed by the new form of Ye ( ) and said with a touch of bitter irony: “I’m surnamed Ye ( ), not Ye ( ). If you want to take your step-father’s surname [a very strong insulting expression in Chinese], it’s your own business and nothing to do with me” (Chia 1992: 351). When as a surname was simplified as by applying homophonous substitution, it was so controversial that it had to be ultimately determined by Premier Zhou Enlai (Gao 2002: 131). 9. An ethnic group of over four million people, living in the mountainous southwest region of China. 10. The province just across the Taiwan Strait and one of the most vulnerable areas in China to typhoons. 11. On April 26, 1993, in order to examine the implementation of the ‘Regulation on Character Use in Publications’, jointly issued by the Media and Publication Department and SCLW, the two authorities organized an investigation into the character use in fourteen central and local newspapers, published on February 4, and 526 characters were found to be against the regulations. The worst case was one local evening newspaper, in which 1,173 unofficial characters were found during that month (Fei 1997: 560). 12. The authors carried out a small scale investigation in July 2001, in two Chinese cities, Beijing and Changchun, the provincial capital of Jilin province in northeastern China, to assess social attitudes towards simplified characters, especially those that were adopted in the SSS and subsequently banned by the authorities. Another aim was to get firsthand data about the public preference for character use, in a situation which is independent from official influence and external pressure. Handwritten materials were collected from four categories of character users, representative of various strata in today’s Chinese society: a) Farmers (3,517 magazine subscription forms from readers); b) Adult students from China TV and Radio University (60 students’ assignments); c) Intellectuals educated in traditional characters (50 readers’ letters); and d) Primary school teachers (115 teachers’ annual working reports). 13. This bi-monthly journal, despite strong resistance from a number of influential scholars, was appraised as being a ‘First Class Linguistics Journal’ by the official media and press department, and continues to be published today (in 2006). 14. This claim of linguistic superiority is hardly unique. At one time or another, advocates of various languages have preached a version of this nationalistic self-centeredness. For example, according to Rudbeck, a President of the University of Uppsala during the 17th century, “Swedes were direct descendants from the first humans in the Bible. Swedish was also said to be closely related to Hebrew or even the first language of the human race, and the first literal language of the world” (Winsa 2005: 297). Schiffman (1996: 59), whose main thesis in his book is that “if language policy is not deeply rooted in linguistic culture, it is not going to fit the needs of its speakers very well”, provides a number of other examples of this phenomenon. 15. The Three Loves Campaign: Love our country, love our people and love our Party.

368 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes The number was increased to 1,945 in the Table of Common Characters issued in 1981 (He 2001: 131). Some researchers do provide some statistics (e.g., Ding 1990:14, Wang 2002: 66), but these are all based on brief surveys. For details of the Analects and Classics Recitation Campaign that has been sweeping the whole country over the last decade or so, see Zhang Limin (2001). The following incident was cited by Zhu Xuefan, the former minister of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (Fu 2002: personal communication): A lady, named Xia Xiaoyu, was loudly called ‘thief Xia’ in her working place, because a telegram addressed to her, in official characters, was written as ‘Xia Xiaotou’ ( petty thief) instead of Xia Xiaoyu. is read as Yu, which means delightfulness when used in a female name. Most of the time, though, it is pronounced as ‘tou’ and means ‘to steal’. During the 1950s, when the women’s liberation movement was one of the most important concerns in communist propaganda, a number of characters with female compounds ( ), that were seen as anti-female discrimination, were simplified, or cancelled. Hence, only the human compound ( ) was kept as a standard one, while the one with the woman compound was eliminated as yiti zi. But for Xia Xiaoyu, this decision meant that in its printed form the one distinguishing character in her first name disappeared. Out of 428 characters in the book, Characters That Are Easily Mispronounced (Beijing: People’s Press), over half (246) are semantic-phonetic characters. For instance, among four characters, (jian), (chan), (xian), (qian), with the phonetic compound (qian), only one is pronounced as ‘qian’. (pozhanpoding), (yili-qili) and (tingzhi-tingdai) are some other typical examples of mispronounced characters that frequently come to people’s attention. As the individual character’s pronunciation can only be determined in a word, the majority of which are in modern Chinese disyllabic or polysyllabic, yiti zi is known most of the time as yiti ci (heterophonic words). Qing was a regional government established in 1616. Its rule was confined to the Northeast area, inhabited by the Manchuri ethnic population beyond the Great Wall. The Manchuri Qing breached the Great Wall and took Beijing in 1644. Contrary to classical Chinese, modern Chinese language is dominated by polysyllabic words. If a word is monosyllabic, then the character equals the word. Exceptions are a few newly created characters, especially coined for scientific metric terms (measuring units). For instance, (nautical mile) is a ONE character word, but is read disyllabic ‘hai li’. These words had been cancelled in a 1960s standardization measure, but are still very popular both inside and outside Mainland China. In an account of his personal experience in China, Mair (1991: 1) observed that it might take hours to locate a friend’s name in the housing office of apartment complex in Beijing. Most radicals are independent single component characters or the derived forms of these characters, e.g., is from (xin, heart), is from (dao, knife), is from (shou, hand). There are many radicals that are not characters in their own right, meaning that they are used exclusively as radicals, e.g., (hot), (cold) and (ill). The Official Guidelines for Handwritten Characters was published by the Taiwan LPP authority in 1976; the Japanese educational administration has tried to impose

Notes

15.

16.

17.

18.

369

stringent standards on students’ handwriting behavior, but stopped after confronting strong resistance (He 2001: 135). The Chinese language does not make a distinction between STANDARDIZED and STANDARD characters, both are biaozhun in Chinese, but they are not equivalent. It is anticipated that a number of the characters standardized in the future CTSC will not be STANDARD CHARACTERS for public use in Mainland China – e.g., traditional hanzi and variant forms – but in this table they are STANDARDIZED CHARACTERS. After the Conference on Character Standardization, held in Shanghai from 21 to 22 December 2001, the Conference on Variant Forms of Characters was held in Jinggang Shan (Jianxi Province) from 16-17 May 2002, followed by the Hefei (Anhui Province) Conference on Issues of Character Simplification from 22 to 23 June, 2002, and Yantai (Shandong Province) Conference on the Graphic Shape of Printed Characters from 22-23 August 2002. The purpose of the last three conferences was to exclusively deal with the difficulties that were arising in making the CTSC. More examples are: Is whale ( = fish) a kind of fish? Should ‘bat’ ( = worm or insect) be categorized as a kind of insect? For proud ( = horse); what is the relationship between a horse and proud or pride? For bridge ( = wood); bridges are not necessarily made of wood. How can laughing ( = bamboo) be related to bamboo? Wooden cups ( = wood) are rarities today (Research Team of Chinese Department 1974). Many linguists and scientists have been input scheme designers, e.g., Zhou Youguang (1999: 232), Liu Yongquan (1997: 394), Qian Weichang (Zhang 1997: 73), Zhang Pu (1997: 74), but they all eventually discontinued or gave up the promotion of their schemes.

CHAPTER 5 1.

2.

3.

4.

In this volume, sociolinguistic dimensions or factors/conditions are alternatively used with non-linguistic, extra-linguistic or external factors, when referring to the impact of social change while discussing hanzi development. To illustrate the fact that characters are indispensable for understanding Chinese text, Y. R. Chao has playfully written a well-known passage using over forty characters, each pronounced by using only the one phonetic word ‘shi’. It makes no sense to the ear, reading ‘shi’ aloud more than 40 times, but makes an interesting story when read silently in Chinese characters. Another similar play with the syllable ‘xi’, created by Chao, was cited in DeFrancis (1984b: 192). “Every evening, the whole country would see two wrong spellings for Xinwen Lianbo (‘News Across the Country’, the most-viewed TV program in China) in one second”, Zhou (2002: personal communication) complained. It is estimated that the correct rate of pinyin spelling in publications is around 85 percent (Li and Fang 2004: 139). E.g., ‘wen’ (warm) is rarely used as monosyllable, and is almost always used in concatenation with another syllable, such as ‘wennuan’ (warm), or ‘tiwen/wendu’ (temperature).

370 5.

Notes

In archaic Chinese, monosyllabic words were dominant. The overwhelming majority (over 90 percent) of modern words are polysyllabic. Classical texts should be dealt with by using discipline-oriented input software. 6. Research done by a Canadian agency (International Development Research Centre 1997: 20-21, 45, 109) indicates, that with more than four million scientists and engineers and 20,000 science and technology institutions, China has the capacity not only to undertake ventures in big science but also to develop a strong tradition of strategic research that is closely linked to China’s short-term technological development. China is the only country with the potential to compete with the USA and the EU on all fronts of science and technology before the middle of this century. 7. For instance, in the best-selling computer input program New Pinyin Scheme, one cannot find the word ‘have/has ( )’ or ‘dislike ( )’ by their correct pronunciation ‘dei’ and ‘wu’. Lin (2003: 306) gives more examples of the same problem with some other input schemes. They are represented by pronunciations corresponding to other meanings (which are used by some people with little education or in certain social strata). When one fails to get the correct character, a very time-consuming process often ensues to guess or to try out all other possible pronunciations. 8. According to the World Almanac and Book of Fact-2004 (1996), China has a literacy rate of 86 percent; according to the China Statistical Yearbook-2004 (2004: 109), the illiteracy and semi-illiteracy rate of those aged 15 or above is 10.95 percent of the total population. 9. This can be substantiated by the following data (if the yiti zi factors can be disregarded): 3,500 characters are included in the Table of Most Used Characters (Mainland, 1, 1988), The Standard Forms Table of Most Used Characters has 4,808 characters (Taiwan, 9, 1982); the standard encoding sets for computers, GB 2312-80, has 7,445 mapped code points, while Big 5, its equivalent in Taiwan, has 13,053 mapped code points. The official General Character Encoding Set for Information Interchange (3, 1986) also includes 13,053 characters, almost double the size of the character set used on the Mainland. 10. This artificial ‘elected’ standard, which is without basis in living speech, is a motley assemblage of sounds from different dialects, “nearer to Nanjing but far from Beijing, different from all dialects, not living on lips of any person in China” according to Zhou Youguang (2001b: 10). The result is, as was jokingly put by Chao, the linguist who made the recording of the standard pronunciation, “in 13 years, I am the only person who has ever spoken this kind of national language, which was intended for the whole population of 400 or 500 or even 600 million people” (Fei 1997: 39). In 1924, controversy over the issue was eventually subdued by the emergence of the New National Pronunciation, advocated by some predominant linguists such as Li Jinxi, adopting the Beijing dialect as the exclusive standard speech for the whole country. 11. The first comprehensive study on the Mainland of this issue was carried out by Fei Jichang (1993: 42). According to this research, in 4,786 comparable characters, 1,941 characters (41 percent) are totally the same in shape, and 1,864 characters (39 percent) are slightly different. The 975 different ones that have the potential to cause a barrier in written communication cover 20 percent of the total if the contextual factors are disregarded. 12. Since the pro-independence DPP (Democracy Progress Party) took power from the Kuomintung in 1996, there has been a growing interest to stress or even exaggerate the linguistic differences between the two polities across the Strait, with the unconcealed

Notes

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

371

aim of developing the local dialect as a replacement for Guoyu (Mandarin). The first step was to officially reject the widely expected use of pinyin as the official transliteration system in 2002, and adopt Tongyong Pinyin, a much disputed dialectoriented scheme designed by some Taiwanese linguists. Pinyin was only allowed to be used in public places in Taipei for international convenience. Huang Peirong (1992: 93-96) deals at great length with this in his four-step proposal to unify the writing system. The reports about discussions at ministerial level to reduce pinyin teaching in primary schools nationwide caused a great panic among the LP professionals. “We are worried about the possibility of pinyin’s gradual phasing out from the compulsory education. We wrote to the Ministry, we also wrote to the Guangming Daily and Education Daily, to point out the potential harmful result of reducing teaching hours in schools and to appeal for support from the public. These two papers dared not publish it, but finally we managed to have it published in China’s Youth Daily and the proposal was withdrawn” (Wang 2002: personal communication; Chinese Youth Daily, May 2, 2000). For example, according to one random sample survey conducted in Beijing, out of 58 higher institutions, 25 (52%) universities and institutions use traditional hanzi to write their name; 43 out of 51 (84%) restaurants/hotels use traditional hanzi for their brand names (Zhang and Xia 2001: 263). The figures from the following Google.com search of Chinese Party and state leaders’ tici (Sun 2003) show the tremendously negative impact these most visible and everpresent tici can have on the public conception of standard hanzi: by 2003 Jiang Zemin has written 33,800 pieces, Mao Zedong 22,800, Deng Xiaoping 19,400 and Li Peng 11,800. After his failure to do it in his capacity as a LP official, Wang had to turn to the commerce administration authority. “I was told that it would cost the store one million RMB, but they had to do it, because of its influence. No tourists from the provinces leave Beijing without a visit to Wangfujing Department Store”. It is calculated that the cost of a name change is very high. For instance, for some nationally important banks it would be in the tens of millions of Chinese RMB (Li 1992: 29). It was reported that to implement the Directive on the Management of Character Use in Publications of July 1992, which was issued by the SCLW in conjunction with the National Department of Media and the Press, campaigns were launched in some regions, for a period, to wipe out the traditional forms of characters from the signboards and Bian’e (inscribed boards above or on the two sides of a door) (Liu 1992: 19). The reason for the failure of this campaign was more because of their historical significance than the financial affordability. This was first implicitly revealed in written form in the Instructions on Using Language Standards, compiled by the editing team of Standard Modern Chinese Dictionary, published by Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe in 2002. (see also Fei and Xu 2005: 33-34.) Hu Qiaomu (Editing Team: 294) revealed that due to Mao Zedong’s ‘suggestion’, the character Yi ( ) for Yi nationality, had to be changed into , because was used in classical Chinese to imply a chauvinist sentiment. But is a rather rare character, not used in modern life, and few people know how to write it. “Now we cannot change it back, lest it will attract criticism [because of the possible confusion it may cause]”, Hu said.

Notes

372

20. For details concerning the discrepancies in Mao’s directives, readers are referred to DeFrancis (1984b: 295). A succinct review of Soviet/Stalin’s influence on Mao’s thinking about Chinese Romanization can be found in Rohsenow (2004: 39). 21. The Law of National General Language and Script, People’s Republic of China, was passed on 31st October 2000 and came into force from the first of January 2001. An unofficial translation of this law is available in Appendix D. 22. Chen explained to the Soviet experts, “From the international revolutionary point, the Soviet Union is in charge of East Europe, and China gets more involved in the affairs in the South East Asian region, where Latin-based scripts are used.” (Feng 2001: personal communication.) Chen Yi (1900-1972), a Sichuan native, joined the CCP when he studied in France and became Mayor of Shanghai, vice-premier and foreign minister of the PRC. 23. Some of these influences did become reality. The Chinese government designed six New Script minority languages using the Cyrillic alphabet. But, except the one for Mongolian, which was cancelled in 1958, none of the others were promoted (Nie 1998: 227-228). 24. According to Duan (1990: 2), ‘East’ was originally a reference to the other ethnic groups living within the Soviet Empire at that time. It has nothing to do with China or any other ‘Eastern’ countries. 25. According to the account by Zhu Bangfu (2000), one of the pioneers of hanzi computerization, at the end of the 1970s, in order to get support from the industry, he visited almost all computer companies in Taiwan and was given the same negative response everywhere: they cannot afford the risk of investing money in something that is impossible. In addition, he was told hanzi is a kind of antique relic that will be abandoned very soon in the computer age. After repeated failures, he turned to the public sector at a time when the defense force was in desperate need of developing an automatic communication system. His research team was employed with the full support of the National Defense Academy. 26. Chinese Central TV (CCTV.com 2004) reported statistical data on 5 December 2003 that the long dependency on foreign technology for inputting hanzi on mobile phones meant that Chinese companies had to pay seven US cents more per mobile phone set for the use of hanzi technology. Given the huge consuming capacity (the current number is at 200 million sets) and 30 percent growth rate, the payment for hanzi input technology, owned by foreign companies, reaches as much as 700 million RMB every year.

CHAPTER 6 1.

2.

That is, for air traffic control, for use with international shipping (Seaspeak – Strevens and Weeks, 1985), for police forces (Policespeak – Johnson, 1994) or for the English Channel tunnel. The original sentence first appeared in Sun Mian’s Preface for Qieyun (Sound Spelling) in the Qing dynasty. Qieyun, written by Lu Fayan during the Sui Dynasty (581-618), was used as the governmental standard of pronunciation in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Since then the saying has become a proverbial reference in resolving contentious issues when a language standard has to be made. ‘A Few Peers’

Notes

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

373

Association was the name of a linguists’ salon composed of some renowned linguists in the 1920s, including Chao, Liu Bannong and Qian Xuantong. They were the key members of the Preparatory Commission of Unified National Language Promotion, who were appointed by the then government to standardize the National Language. “We, a few peers, do it and it is fixed” was their principle when they were caught up amidst endless debates and felt helpless to agree upon some issues. The rising superstars that have occupied Chinese screens for the past decade are N Y ng ( ), N ng Jìng , Z ng Ti nshuò and Wéi Wéi . They all are the most talked about names in China in the 2000s, but in public life hardly any of their fans nor the TV and radio announcers across the country pronounce these four top entertainers’ surnames correctly, according to standard pronunciation – that is the one found in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the de facto official standard. If one asks any ordinary Chinese to pronounce their names, they would call them Nà Y ng, Níng Jìng, Zàng Ti nshuò and Wéi Wéi. Except for a few linguists and language teachers, perhaps even the pop stars themselves are not aware that the pronunciation of their surnames is non-standard (Liu 2003)! Modest changes have been introduced in schools and administrations since 1996 (Coulmas, 1998; Stillemunkes, 2000). In Japan, the government decreed a Supplementary Table of Characters for Name Giving in 1951 with 92 characters, increased to 166 in October 1981. But the law was challenged and questions concerning individual rights were raised in a court case (Neustupný, 1983). A similar proposal from the Taiwan IT industry failed to be passed in the legislature in the 1980s (Tse 1983: 16). This is not the first attempt to standardize the names that components are called. The issue was put to the public through the launch of a nationwide discussion from September 1965 to April 1966 by Script Reform, the affiliated monthly journal under the CCSR and Script Reform, the bi-weekly specialist section of Guangming Daily. The discussion was basically confined to a circle of specialists, notwithstanding that the initial purpose of the discussion was to seek popular component names to facilitate teaching and learning hanzi for regular education, and to eliminate illiteracy. The whole event was conducted in quite an appropriate manner: special sections were vacated and an editorial with seven suggestions and two guiding principles was written to formally kick off the discussion. In order to avoid influencing the discussion, Script Reform discontinued the publication of the Table of Calling Names of Chinese Character Components (draft) for a period of over 6 months. Eventually, 19 papers were published on the topic, but the uncompleted discussion came to a sudden halt when the Cultural Revolution broke out on May 16, 1966 (Fei 1980). The fieldwork involved in doing the research for this book gave the first author the rare opportunity of getting extensively acquainted with the consultative members in SCLW. The author had a strong feeling that the SCLW does not have a system in place to guarantee that all legislative regulations are arrived at consensually by its members. What members complained about most was that they were only approached or consulted shortly before a LP program was carried out. Take the National Standard for Numeral Use in Publications as an example. It had evoked an outcry on its publication as the Standard was the work of only two scholars. More ironically, some members of a previous SCLW did not know that their membership in this organization already had been terminated! This failure to confront change directly is evidenced in some other features of the organization.

Notes

374 8.

In Chinese society, the handling of interpersonal relationships is given more attention than in some other countries. The sensitivity and complexity of this can be seen from the frequent use of pseudonyms when discussing disputable topics. Examples of this can be found in articles published on Chinese Character Culture during the 19801990s’ debate, as well as for papers discussing the SSS in Chinese Linguistics in 1978. 9. The Academie Française was established by the French First Minister, Cardinal de Richelieu, in 1634 and incorporated in 1635, and has existed, except for an interruption during the era of the French revolution, to the present day. Its original purpose was to maintain standards of literary taste and to establish a literary language (see Cooper 1989). 10. Yuan Xiaoyuan International Language Modernization Research Forum has been in operation for two decades. Chinese Character Culture, its institutional journal, was in the forefront of the battle that sparked the polemic of Hanzi Culture in the 1990s, and has frequently published unorthodox views and disputed papers that openly challenge the official policy. The Common Script Association was established in Shanghai in December 1997 by Zhou Shenghong, a retired Chinese language teacher, and Huang Zuohong, an entrepreneur from Taiwan. It has organized seven international symposia, aimed at unifying hanzi across the Taiwan Strait, with refereed conference proceedings published from each symposium. It is one of the most active nongovernmental associations in this area and it also runs a Chinese Script Research Information Library located at the same venue in Shanghai, besides its own website (http://hzdt.xiloo.com/stw.htm). The American Association for the Promotion of Chinese Script Reform (http://www.wengai.com), with the aim of promoting ‘One Language, Two Scripts’, was founded in 1979 by a group of enthusiastic Chinese language reform scholars and interested students based in New York. Its current sponsor is Apollo Wu, a retired translator at the UN. Through 2006, eighteen issues of its journal Language and Information have been published. It also maintains an online language reform forum (http://www.hpwwzm.com/YuiceYuXsoxva/YuiceYu Xsoxva 02.asp). 11. Many websites that we have come across in searching for material on language reform provide a glimpse on how vibrant non-governmental LP activities are. Pan Defu works through his own website (http://www.yywzw.com/pan/pan-03d-002.htm) to publicize his books and papers, critiquing orthodox theories about hanzi reform and challenging the government’s LPP; Shen Kecheng (http://hzdt.xiloo.com) produces a wellmaintained website specializing in input systems; Su Chengzhong (http://hzdt.xiloo. com/wgyy01.htm) focuses on exploring a common script for all languages; Zhang Shizhao founded an online Hanzi Research Institute (http://www.chancezoo.com/) to promote the idea of a ‘Chineseized Computer’. A number of non-governmental organizations, forums and online journals/magazines on Chinese LP can be found at http://www.yywzw.com/ and http://www.china-language.gov.cn/webbbs/index.asp.

CHAPTER 7 1.

Chen Yuan, a famous Chinese encyclopedist and former director of SCLW from 1987 to 1989, said that he created these two phrases and spread them in Lu Xun’s name (Li 1992: 14). Nevertheless, “to sacrifice ourselves for hanzi, or to sacrifice hanzi for

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

375

ourselves”, and similar phrases, can be found throughout Lu Xun’s eight articles, collected by Language Reform Press (1974: 36-38; 39-41). In China, the policy of ‘walking on two legs’ was first put forward by Mao Dun, Chinese novelist and then Minister of Cultural Affairs in the early 1960s (DeFrancis 1984b: 8). The notion of digraphia was raised in a sinographic IT context at the International Symposium on East Asian Information Processing, held at the University of Pennsylvania in October, 1990 (Mair 1991: 7). Initiated by Professor Peng Zerun, some books and web pages have been published in an interword text (spaced by words rather than hanzi) on an experimental basis over the past few years. For more details, see http://www.yywzw.com/jt/zerun/. A large-scale experiment, “Phonetically Annotate Character Recognition to Promote Earlier Reading and Writing”, has been ongoing in Mainland China since 1982. In this innovative pedagogical program, primary school children (and adult illiterates) are taught to read and write standard Mandarin Chinese, using the pinyin alphabet in addition to Chinese characters for the first two years of their education. Under this experiment, beginners are encouraged to use pinyin where they have found their reading and writing development being hampered by their hanzi limitations. More than two million children across the country are involved, and the result shows that the language skills of the majority of participants are greatly improved; for most of the students who were taught with the more traditional method in the standard curriculum, pinyin is just taught and used for the first two months as a phonetic notational device, purely for a pronunciation purposes. For details, see Rohsenow (1996, 2001) and Su (2001a). The ‘thousand’, in the cited statistics, was misprinted as ‘hundred’ in the documents. For example, some characters, printed in their traditional forms in two currently popular computer-typed textbooks and published by prestigious and influential publishers, namely Integrated Chinese (simplified version, Boston: Cheng and Tsui Company, 1997), and Chinese for Today (Hong Kong: Commercial Press Hong Kong, 1998, also simplified), bewilder overseas Chinese learners. They are the Chinese/Japanese/Korean Joint Research Group (CJK-JRG, 1990-1993) and the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG, after 1993). Member nations also include Vietnam, although it was not invited as an initial party. IRG advises the Unicode Consortium on Han character additions to the repertoire of the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646-1 character set standards, and on Han unification. For example, as Cheong (1999) has noted, a person from Hong Kong would be quite displeased to see characters appear in a Japanese font style, although there are many Japanese books sold in original packaging in Hong Kong. In Japan by shape, or ideographic components; in Korea by sounds, or phonetic representation and in China, the prototypical GB 2312-80 was indexed half by sound for a more frequently used character and half by shape for rarely used characters, which made recognition by pronunciation difficult for most people.

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Content Index

character input, 73, 106, 114, 122, 137, 168 Chen Yi/Chen, 241, 372 Chiang Kaishek/Chiang, 38, 215, 226 Chinese calligraphy, 2, 8, 19, 229, 381 Chinese Character Cultural Faction (CCCF), xi, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 223, 227 Chinese character processing software, 115 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), xi, 37, 41, 42, 44, 52, 53, 54, 69, 72, 88, 101, 102, 228, 230, 232, 233, 237, 238, 246, 263, 279, 355, 364, 372 Chinese computer (s), xvii, 106, 116, 128, 132, 249, 293, 294, 298, 313, 358, 359, 392, 406 Chinese computerization, xvii, 106, 128, 249, 294, 298 Chinese culture, 25, 33, 34, 49, 82, 188, 229, 237, 246, 327, 378, 403 Chinese economy, xiii, 205 Chinese entropy, 97, 105, 403 Chinese information processing, xi, 73, 106, 111, 114, 207, 293, 329, 382, 391, 312, 404 Chinese intellectuals, 113, 224, 236, 362 Chinese language authorities, 139, 250

748 Project, 59, 60, 364 All China Character Preservation Congress, 33 alphabetic language (s), 130, 132, 163, 294, 316 alphabetic script (s), 12, 115, 289, 294, 392 alphabetic writing system, 42, 289 Ann T.K./T. K. Ann, 99, 102, 355 archaic-style language, 221 Artifical Intelligence (AI), xi, 84, 114, 115, 118, 196, 198, 199, 202, 207, 235, 293, 294, 303, 310 automatic conversion, xviii, 265, 307 automatic information processing, 145, 180 automatic recognition, 145 automatic standardization, 283 bamboo slip(s), 26, 187 Big5, 129, 131, 132, 359 black market, 95 bottom-up, 80, 269 bronze inscription (jinwen), 2, 3, 297 bushou, 13 Cangjie, 2, 16, 25, 55 centripetal forces, 189 centrism, 283 Chang-effect, 71, 75, 80, 81

407

408 chongma, xvii, 111, 112, 115, 119, 120, 126, 194, 196 Civil Service Examinations, 34 CJK sinography/character/script, 142, 309, 316 classical Chinese, 34, 83, 96, 150, 151,178, 294, 323, 355, 368, 371, 389 clerical script (lishu), 3, 7, 8, 12, 276, 297, 300 clinical treatment, xvii, 71, 174 code set (s), 126, 144, 186, 257, 262, 264, 279, 364, 390 Cold War, 239, 240, 246 collectivism, 253 Commission of Chinese Script Reform (CCSR), xi, 35, 46, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 102, 146, 154, 161, 166, 170, 258, 259, 278, 302, 306, 307, 363, 365, 366, 373 common script, xviii, 134, 216, 285, 308, 313, 374, 393, 398, 402 Communist propaganda, 51, 368 Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters (CTSC), xi, xvi, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182,183, 184, 185, 219, 264, 265, 279, 369 computer technology, 20, 111, 113, 127, 168, 194, 294, 327, 389 computerized hanzi, 111, 294 Confucian classics, 357 Confucianism, 26, 220, 246 consensual model/decision, 250, 283 conservatism, 40, 210, 301, 326 Corpus of Whole Chinese Character (CWCC), xi, xvi, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 corpus planning, 35, 138, 267, 268, 322, 379, 384, 387 corpus-based/corpus method (s), 118, 196, 198, 199, 201 cultural heritage, 32, 36, 84, 87, 100, 106, 143, 155, 185, 189, 223, 312, 325, 355, 387 Cultural Revolution, 29, 47, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 89, 92, 93, 103, 104, 105, 116, 151, 154, 220, 237, 253, 325, 362, 363, 364, 365, 373

Content Index cyberspace, xix, 186, 262, 264, 287, 295, 313, 321, 323 Cyrillic letters/script/alphabet, 241, 275, 372 Dai Jitao/Dai, 31, 33, 226 Daoism, 187 data bank, 122, 196 Deng Xiaoping/Deng, 66, 235, 238, 267, 364, 371 deregulation, 282, 285 dialectal characters, 140, 185, 204, 213, 320 digitalization, 112, 240, 252, 316, 404 digraphic writing system, 293 dirigisme, 284, 395 East Asia/Asians, 49, 98, 100, 112, 135, 186, 246, 304, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 358, 367, 372, 375, 385, 392, 394, 395, 400 East Asian ideographs, 186 Education Ministry/Ministry of Education, 40, 43, 74, 152, 158, 234, 238, 279, 281, 290, 306, 356, 383 ethnic minorities/groups/population, 89, 140, 149, 185, 187, 274, 280, 292, 351, 368, 372 evolution, 3, 6, 9, 11, 67, 84, 204, 210, 296, 297, 303, 312, 315, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327, 328, 362, 377, 387, 399, 400 First Simplification Scheme (FSS), xi, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 67, 227, 324 First Simplification, xi, 24, 28 First Table of Verified Variant Forms (FTVVF), xi, 46, 87, 89, 161, 162, 229, 258, 385 folk hanzi, 186, 187, 388 font style (s), 19, 158, 317, 321, 375 Four Fixations, xvi, 73, 138, 139, 175, 246, 249 function-specific multilayered standards model, 265 Gang of Four, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 69, 364 GB 13000.1, 14, 129, 141, 171, 219, 262, 263, 358, 359

Content Index GB 2312-80, xi, 12, 186, 262, 358, 359, 360, 364, 375 General List of Print Font of Chinese Characters (GLPFCC), xi, 46, 54, 146 General List of Simplified Characters (GLSC), xi, 46, 51, 80, 230, 231, 277, 304, 308, 364 geographical names, 88, 145, 149, 152, 259, 365 Germany, 211, 240, 271, 276, 367, 378, 394 globalization, 222, 240, 243, 252, 400, 402 Gou-phenomenon, 71, 75, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89 grass style characters (caoshu), 18, 45, 297 great seal script (dazhuan), 6 Guangming Daily, 55, 56, 62, 75, 154, 299, 355, 371 Han Ja, 367 Han Unification, 314, 315, 316, 317, 321, 375, 381 handwriting standard, 305 hanzi computerization, 112, 116, 137, 193, 207, 372 hanzi culture debate, 104, 217, 223, 237 hanzi processing, 125, 199, 244, 308 hanzi simplification, 18, 24, 30, 47, 71, 75, 101, 111, 299, 305, 325, 383, 389, 396, 399, 403 Hebrew, 201, 366 heterophonic character (yidu zi), 164 Hindi, 195, 289 Hokkien, 320 homophones/homophony, 10, 80, 115, 119, 198, 199 homophonous character (s)/word (s), 10, 120, 123, 177, 194, 197, 198, 229, 308, 309, 365 homophonous substitution/ replacement, 79, 154, 161, 308, 366 homophonous syllables, 194, 196, 198, 292 Hong Kong, 31, 92, 95, 96, 103, 131, 141, 205, 213, 214, 217, 219, 239, 240, 243, 310, 355, 363, 366, 375,

409 377, 385, 387, 390, 391, 392, 396, 397, 399 Hu Qiaomu/Hu, 44, 75, 86, 88, 102, 158, 184, 226, 231, 232, 235, 236, 278, 299, 355, 371, 383, 386 Hu Yuzhi/Hu, 60 ideographic input, 79, 120, 122, 206 ideographic system (s), 97, 100, 188 ideographic-based script (s), 82, 372 image planning, 269, 270, 322, 377 imperialism, 243, 318 India, 26, 239 individualism, 146, 251 Information Retevial (IR), xi, 114, 168 information technology, xi, xxi, 73, 352, 403 intellectualization, 66, 385 interdisciplinary cooperation, 234 international (standard) keyboard, 117, 123, 126, 194 international environment, 239, 245 international standard(s), 112, 117, 123, 126, 129, 142, 181, 185, 194, 207, 252, 262, 314, 318, 319, 321 intervention, 6, 23, 31, 41, 104, 174, 189, 201, 218, 223, 225, 226, 232, 235, 236, 253, 280, 281, 283, 308 ISO standards, 263 IT expert (s), xvii, 79, 218, 235, 263, 314 IT industry, 115, 123, 124, 144, 174, 181, 182, 196, 199, 201, 203, 206, 207, 208, 234, 238, 243, 245, 262, 274, 289, 293, 321, 359, 373 IT-oriented standard (s), 182, 190, 256, 260, 261, 263, 280 Japan, 18, 29, 37, 151, 152, 153, 186, 225, 239, 304, 313, 314, 315, 318, 319, 320, 355, 373, 375, 381, 387, 398, 399 Japanese, 37, 65, 83, 86, 87, 91, 140, 141, 151, 178, 206, 275, 276, 290, 293, 295, 309, 315, 318, 319, 320, 365, 367, 368, 375, 382, 392, 397, 398 Jiang Qing/Jiang, 58, 364 Jiang Zemin/Jiang, 104, 217, 223, 228, 237, 238, 371, 397

410 June Fourth Movement, 221, 237 Kana, 87, 275, 290 Kanji, 276, 318, 367 Keizo Obuchi, 225 Korea, 142, 166, 186, 209, 225, 239, 314, 375, 393, 399 Korean, 140, 141, 180, 205, 291, 309, 315, 367, 375, 389, 397 Kuomintung, 36, 37, 216, 355, 370 language (management) administration, 41, 141, 203, 230 language authorities/authority, 139, 171, 175, 213, 250 language maintenance, 191, 379 language market, 96 language-in-education, 270, 281, 322, 378 Latin (-based) script, 128, 372 Latin alphabet/letter, 35, 42, 179, 233, 241, 275, 294, 303, 353 Latinization, 41, 42, 241, 291, 402 Lee Kuan Yew, 225 Li Peng, 371 Li Si, 25 Lin Biao, 55, 62 lingua franca, xv, 166 literary characters, 149, 150, 151, 152 Liu Shaoqi/Liu, 55 logographic script (s), 292, 295, 322 LP authorities, 92, 152, 170, 184, 186, 274, 311 LP workers, 43, 50, 72, 253, 263, 274, 276, 279 luanma, xvii, 111, 112, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134 Mainland China, 37, 46, 50, 91, 93, 94, 102, 125, 131, 142, 169, 216, 217, 228, 260, 264, 278, 280, 314, 320, 330, 368 Mainlander(s), 131 Mao Zedong/Mao, 20, 35, 42, 55, 148, 226, 232, 275, 298, 355, 364, 371 Maoist, 101 Marr, 53, 54, 356 Marxism, 54, 84, 225, 237 Marxist, 52, 221 mass line, 55, 83, 92, 164, 306 mass-accessible script, 208

Content Index May Fourth Movement, 32, 107, 220, 355 Microsoft, 119, 120, 127, 130, 244, 245, 303, 309 Ming Dynasty, 27, 28, 30 Ministry of Culture, 161, 170 Ministry of Information Industry, 142, 150, 359, 360 minority language (s), 372, 392 model style characters (kaiti/kaishu), 8, 19, 20 Mongolian, 187, 263, 372 monosyllables, 92 morphemic script, 147 Morse, 113 multidimensional model, 226 multi-level model, 167 multi-standard model, 250, 254, 256, 289, 299 National Conference on Language Work (NCLW), xi, xvi, 64, 71, 235, 238, 282 National Digital Archives Program, 188 National Standard Pronunciation, 213 national standard, 68, 123, 126, 144, 203, 216, 219, 230, 264, 318 nationalism, 8, 36, 101, 104, 107, 109, 155, 191, 245, 246 natural language processing, 114, 120, 196, 199 Northern Mandarin, 166 obsolete characters, 88, 140, 146, 264 official characters, 213, 229, 259, 368 Opitical Character Recognition (OCR), xi, 21, 118 oracle bone script (jiaoguwen), 2, 3, 4, 5, 185, 188, 297 overseas Chinese, 46, 47, 48, 80, 85, 95, 96, 101, 102, 126, 128, 134, 165, 184, 205, 240, 309, 310, 363, 365, 375 paradigms, 266 Party propaganda, 104, 223, 237 Party propagandists, 101 People’s Republic of China (PRC), xi, xiii, xv, 8, 41, 42, 54, 72, 85, 92, 102, 109, 142, 220, 230, 232, 263, 292, 363, 372

Content Index personal names, 84, 149, 152, 175, 276, 353, 354, 355 phonetic compound, 10, 12, 13, 14, 45, 88, 163, 178, 179, 302, 363, 367, 368 phonetic script (s), 289, 296 phonetic symbol (s), 226, 290 phonetic/phonetics-based input, xvii phoneticization, 10, 12, 72, 93, 232, 268, 279, 288, 292, 295, 296, 299 phonetics-based schemes, 194 pinyin orthography, 198, 241, 298 pinyin scheme, 233, 241, 277, 278, 295, 370 pinyin-based methods, 125 pluricentric language, 188, 239, 240 pluricentric model, xviii, 256, 263, 266, 299 pluricentric script, 313 polyphonic character, 163 prestige planning, 270, 271, 284 printing industry, 18, 39, 146, 162 pronunciation standard, 165, 213, 282, public media, 103, 183 public opinion (s), 183, 212, 271, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 306 public participation, 183 public space, 228, 229 public support, 275 purism, xvi, 28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 220, 326 putonghua popularization/promotion, 73, 166, 167, 180, 195, 203, 213 Qian Weichang, 243 Qian Xuantong/Qian, 30, 40, 45, 226, 302 Qian Xuesen, 202, 234, 243 Qin Dynasty/government, 7, 25, 82, 297, 313 Qin Empire, 7, 25, 300 Qin Shihuang, 25 Qing Dynasty/period, 27, 140, 297 rarely used character (s) (RC), 20, 89, 120, 122, 143, 145, 148, 153, 175, 221, 222 reformers, 36, 66, 72, 81, 89, 93, 96, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 177, 210, 217, 302, 314 regulator, 283

411 Republic of China, xi, xv, xvi, 30, 31, 32, 41, 86, 367 Research Institute of Applied Linguistics (RIAL), xi, 74, 167, 170 revolution, xv, xix, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 87, 89, 92, 93, 103, 104, 105, 107, 116, 151, 154, 180, 220, 237, 241, 253, 296, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328 revolutionary change, 52, 214, 326 rights, 150, 208, 266, 268, 279, 281, 320 Romanization history, 233 Romanization movement, 288, 292, 296, 327 Romanization, xvi, xviii, 30, 37, 43, 46, 49, 53, 72, 73, 102, 109, 122, 180, 216, 233, 267, 275, 283, 287, 288, 289, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 299, 324, 325, 326, 327 Romanized script, 240 running style characters (xingshu), 17, 20 Russian, 211, 241 script modernization, 46, 109, 227 script standardization, 25, 26, 204, 222, script worship, 238, 254, 255 seal script (zhuanshu), 3, 6, 7, 8, 17, 25, 300 Second Simplification Scheme (SSS)/ Second Scheme, xviii, 55, 60, 62, 66, 67, 94, 273, 299, 300, 325 self-evident script, 53, 99, 166, 245 semantic compound, 13, 14, 85, 159, 160, 161, 177, 367 semantic-phonetic characters, 6, 10, 13, 80, 162, 163, 169, 178, 179, 180 semantics, 118, 199 Shanghai Times, 275 Singapore, ix, 47, 131, 216, 225, 305 small seal script (xiaozhuan), 6, 7, 8, 25, 300 socialist ideology, 324 socialist, 52, 53, 83, 204, 221, 242, 324, 351 socio-cultural factors, 292 socio-cultural settings/context, 253

412 Song Dynasty/period, 27, 88, 158, 296 Southeast Asia, 246, 304 Soviet, 53, 211, 241, 246, 356 specialty characters, 149, 152, 302 speech recognition (SR), xi, 124, 194, 203 spiritual life, 33, 253 square script (kaishu), 3, 8, 9, 18, 19, 41 Stalin, 241, 356 standard pronunciation, 121, 126, 165, 167, 195, 202, 213 standardization process, 138, 283 State Bureau of Technology Supervision, 142, 262, 263, 305, 353, 359 State Commission of Language Work (SCLW), xi, 14, 74 State Council, 46, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 72, 91, 149, 228, 232, 258, 259, 277, 279, 280, 352, 353, 354 Sui Dynasty/period, 8, 26, 372 superstructure, 52, 53, 59, 224, 237, 260 Swahili, 225 Table of Simplified Characters (TSC), xi, xviii, 24, 39, 45, 265, 277 taboo (s), 87, 88, 305 Taiwan, 31, 36, 37, 47, 65, 85, 90, 92, 95, 96, 103, 131, 141, 142, 165, 183, 184, 188, 189, 195, 205, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 228, 239, 240, 242, 243, 260, 305, 310, 313, 314, 319, 320 Tang Dynasty/period, 27, 188 Tanzania, 225 text automation, 294 Thailand, 389 Three Developing Phases Theory, 296, 298 Three Representation (Theory), 237, 238 tici, 227, 228, 229 Times New Roman, 18 tokenism, 274 top-down interfence, 41 top-down model, 269 top-down nature, 182 top-down policy, 41 top-down structure, 283 top-down tradition, 212

Content Index traditional culture, 83, 93, 101, 155, 188, 211, 216, 221, 222, 223, 224, 237, 328 traditional heritage, 36, 90, 93, 104, 106, 151, 155, 188, 211, 222, 224, 227, 245, 295, 319 traditional script, 292 traditional treasures, 17 traditionalism, 36, 101, 107 traditionalist (s), 221, 245, 252 Turkey, 225, 239, 276 two-way model, 270 typesetting, 18, 20, 60, 231, 298 Unicode Consortium, 142, 186, 218, 314, 315, 318 Unicode, 128, 131, 134, 135, 142, 143, 162, 185, 186, 187, 188, 214, 218, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 359, 360 United Nations, 97 unofficial characters, 91, 176, 359 urbanization, 191, 204 Uygur, 187, 263 variant form(s) (yiti zi), xi, 17, 28, 30, 46, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 140, 146, 147, 150, 159, 160, 161, 162, 176, 184, 258, 262, 264, 300, 308, 359, 367 vernacular Chinese, 294 Vernacularization Movement, 58, 151, 323 Vietnam, 239, 375 Wang Yunwu, 113 Western powers, 30, 220, 327 Westernization, 107 word processing, 106, 114, 127, 167, 196, 214 Wu Yuzhang/Wu, 42, 43 Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (Modern Chinese Dictionary), 165 Xinhua News Agency, 60, 355 Xinhua Zidian (Xinhua Chinese Character Dictionary), 171 Xinjiang, 187 Xu Dejiang, 102 Xu Shen/Xu, 7, 169, 357 Yuan Dynasty, 39, 302 Yuan Xiaoyuan, 101, 237, 285, 357 Zhang Chunqiao/Zhang, 57, 58, 60

Content Index Zhang Zhigong, 234 Zhao Ziyang/Zhao, 88 Zhonghua Zihai (Ocean of Chinese character), 140

413 Zhou Dynasty/period, 6 Zhou Enlai/Zhou/primier Zhou, 43, 58, 226, 233, 236, 274, Zhu Rongji/Zhu, 229, 230, 235

Author Index

Chen, E. S-h., 100 Chen, M.G., 182 Chen, M.J., 85 Chen, M.Y., 289 Chen, P., 41, 90, 146, 174, 179, 241, 292, 299, 302 Chen, S.C., 205 Chen, W.Z., 103 Chen, Y,C., 79, 241 Chen, Y.S., 65, 87 Chen, Z.T., 278 Cheng, C.C., 46, 66, 307, 367, 375 Cheng, R., 138 Cheong, O., 317, 375 Chia, S.Y., 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 83, 278, 366 Chiang, G.K., 33, 38, 41, 55, 57, 215, 226, 236, 296 Chiang, Y., 5, 17 Chinese Youth Daily, 371 Chu, M., 120 Clyne, M.G., 37, 240, 276 Cobarrubias, J., 2 Collective Editors, 102 Cook, R.S., 314, 315, 317, 320 Cooper, R.L., 2, 30, 35, 191, 226, 268, 270, 283, 374

Ager, D., 37, 204, 225, 269, 271, 330 Ager, S., 3, 11 Ammon, U., 191 Ann, T.K., 102 Anwar, K., 225 Ao, X.P., 144 Baker, C., 276 Bakken, B., 100 Baldauf, R. B. Jr., 45, 50, 85, 191, 225, 232, 240, 246, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 281, 322, 323 Ball, R., 66, 271 Bambose, A., 283 Bao, M.W., 116, 145, 302 Barme, G.R., 101 Barnes, D., 167, 212, 227, 241, 364 Bates, M., 199 Bem, D.J., 284 Blachford, D.Y.R., 57, 230 Bluesea, 132 Boeschoten, H., 276 Boltz, W.G., 361 Bourhis, R.Y., 228 Canagarajah, A.S., 271, 323 CCTV.Com., 372 Chao, Y.R., 87, 178, 179, 216, 369, 370, 373 Chen, A.B., 159, 379

415

416 Coulmas, F., 84, 98, 100, 253, 254, 272, 301, 373 Crystal, D., 4, 189 Dai, J., 31, 33, 132, 226 Dai, Y., 31 Das Gupta, J., 191, 198, 218, 251, 268, 271 De Silva, K.M., 195 DeFrancis, J., 10, 17, 41, 45, 55, 57, 59, 86, 97, 99, 107, 109, 151, 178, 210, 227, 233, 237, 241, 242, 282, 284, 289, 361, 362, 369, 372, 375 Deng, C.Q., 156 Ding, C., 89 Ding, F.H., 368 Ding, X.Q., 102, 145, 172 Dogançay-Aktuna, S., 174 Du, Z.J., 31, 37 Duan, S.N., 43, 212, 372 Ducke, I., 285 Eastman, C.M., 66, 240 Editing Team, 77, 86, 88, 184, 232, 236, 371 Editors, 162 Education Office, 217, 227, 258 Fan, K.Y., 180, 231, 237, 293, 302 Fang, S.Z., 18, 369 Fei, J.C., 31, 43, 58, 63, 64, 89, 149, 157, 172, 178, 182, 216, 219, 265, 278, 299, 302, 329, 366, 370, 371, 373 Feng, S.Z., 216 Feng, W.J., 126, 207 Feng, Z.W., 105, 207 Ferguson, C.A., 26, 47, 85, 86, 251, 255, 256, 268, 271, 275 Fishman, J.A., 33, 34, 191, 268, 282 Fu, K.H., 366, 368 Fu, Y.H., 18, 329 Galambos, I., 5, 330 Gao, G.S., 80, 161, 168, 171, 179, 219, 231, 304, 365, 366 Gao, J.C., 89 Gao, M.C.F., 10 Geerts, G., 66, 210, 271, 272 Gelb, I.J., 11, 180 Geng, Z.S., 26, 28, 39, 87 Gong, J.Z., 182, 223

Author Index Gonzalez, A., 66 Gottlieb, N., 206 Goundry, N., 310, 317, 318, 320 Gregersen, E.A., 272 Grin, F., 191 Gu, X.F., 16, 120, 172, 173, 359 Guo, M.R., 54 Guo, X.W., 308 Guo, Y.J., 97, 103, 246 Haarmann, H., 269, 270 Halpern, J., 309, 310 Han, J.T., 367 Hannas, W.C., 76, 115, 121, 310 Haugen, E., 137, 270, 272 He, Q.X., 65, 83, 87, 152, 276, 318, 330 He, Y.L., 83 Hook, B., 1, 35 Hsieh, C-c., 65, 188, 189, 320 Hu, S., 177 Hu, S.B., 34, 102, 184, 210, 226, 230, 231, 232, 235, 236, 278, 299, Huang, D.C., 218 Huang, K.D., 65, 188 Huang, P.R., 47, 81, 88, 176, 184, 212, 228, 371 Huang, Y.Z., 189 Hung, H-c., 65, 188 Ingram, D.E., 191 International Development Research Centre, 370 Jackson, R., 11, 61 Jernudd, B.H., 32, 191, 198, 218, 251, 326 Ji, F.Y., 220, 237, 363 Jin, G.T., 19, 89, 304 Johnson, E., 372 Jordan, D.K., 140, 313, 320 Journalist, 60, 232, 355 Kan, J.Z., 147 Kaplan, R.B., 45, 50, 85, 191, 225, 232, 240, 246, 267, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276, 322, 365 Kataoka, S., 366 Kerman, j., 309, 310 Keyes, C.F., 195 Kim, C-W., 52, 225 Krzak, M., 98 Kwong, J., 53

Author Index Landau, J., 225 Landry, R., 228 Language Reform Press, 56, 375 Lehmann, W.P., 57, 284, 364 Leng, Y.L., 16, 84 Lewis, E.G., 281 Li, C.X., 182 Li, J.G., 15 Li, J.Q., 204 Li, J.X., 58 Li, L.Q., 300 Li, M.S., 54, 102, 103, 374 Li, Y.M., 143, 175, 178, 186, 221, 234, 243, 273, 365 Li, Y.Y., 86 Li, Z.H., 38 Lim, B.C., 305 Lin, L.L., 205 Lin, N., 142, 360 Lin, Y., 189 Lin, Y.F., 370 Lin, Y.Z., 201, 231, 365 Liu, A.P.L., 56, 277 Liu, C.Y., 373 Liu, M.C., 86 Liu, Q.E., 371 Liu, Q.L., 182 Liu, S.Z., 302 Liu, Y.Q., 65, 235, 369 Lu, B.F., 43, 83, 85, 89, 144, 153, 194, 285, 288, 294, 295, 303, 329 Luan, L., 227 Lunde, K., 140, 142, 315 Lü, G.X., 16, 43, 285 Lü, S.X., 294 Ma, Q.Z., 34, 42, 81, 122, 235, 364 Maata, S.K., 191 Mair, V.H., 116, 117, 121, 206, 367, 368, 375 Mao, Z.D., 148, 226, 228, 232, 275, 298 Meyer, D., 214, 316, 317 Mi, A.L., 244, 245 Milsky, C., 54, 227 Moon, H -h., 225, 282 Moore, H., 26, 191 Neustupný, J.V., 270, 365, 373 Ni, Y.Y., 43, 60, 85, 309, 364 Nie, H.Y., 209, 363, 372

417 Ohlendorf, H., 272 Orleans, L.A., 295 Ouyang, Z.S., 80 Pan, D.F., 282, 296, 374 Peng, H., 34, 36, 105, 211, 371, 375 Qi, C.T., 177 Qiu, X.G., 161, 179, 361 Rahman, T., 95 Reley, J., 83 Research Team of Chinese Department, 369 Research Team of Computer, Information Processing, 16 Rohsenow, J.S., 6, 30, 58, 59, 60, 64, 113, 121, 163, 164, 294, 330 Rubin, J., 270, 276 Sailard, C., 255 Sakamura, K., 319 Schiffman, H.F., 33, 95, 191, 271, 275, 281, 283, 326, 366 SCLW, 74, 102, 158, 159, 164, 170, 171, 185, 201, 231, 232, 238, 258, 261, 262, 263, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 308 Searle, S.J., 318, 319 Seybolt, P.J., 33, 41, 55, 57, 236, 296 Shapiro, M.J., 32, 326 She, K.C., 83, 367 Shen, J., 75, 90, 308 Shepherd, J., 225 Shi, F., 237 Shi, Y.W., 80, 174 Shi, Z.Y., 92 Shidner, T., 207 Shohamy, E., 228, 229 Shuy, R.W., 191 Sommer, B.A., 191 Stillemunkes, C., 373 Strevens, P., 372 Su, P.C., 67, 80, 83, 86, 89, 105, 107, 146, 150, 154, 155, 178, 221, 222, 253, 282, 285, 289, 292, 294, 298, 302, 329, 364, 375 Sun, J.X., 363 Sun, W.J., 228, 371 T’sou, B.K.Y., 11, 61 Tang, L., 8, 9, 16, 26, 27, 83, 179, 188, 372

418 Tao, L., 306 Taylor, I., 33, 222 Taylor, M., 33, 222 The Office of Standard, 91, 227, 258, 307 Thomas, G., 30, 211, 252 Tompson, P.M., 125 Topping, S., 315 Totten, G.O., 209 Tsang, Y-h., 45, 47, 365 Tsao, F-f., 195, 211 Tse, J.K.-p., 373 Turley, J., 303 Twine, N., 151 Twitchett, D., 1, 35 Unger, J.M., 84, 97, 293, 295, 318 US Embassy, 263 Wada, E., 316, 319 Wan, Y.X., 91, 181 Wang, B.X., 367 Wang, F.Y., 10, 38, 147, 183, 189, 219, 301, 304, 368, 371 Wang, H.Y., 178 Wang, J., 42, 44, 48, 159, 213, 234, 277, 278 Wang, J.S., 214, 241 Wang, L., 40, 179 Wang, N., 5, 7, 230, 265, 300 Wang, S.Y., 122 Wang, T.K., 27, 152, 175, 180, 204, 205, 210, 240, 258, 264, 265, 282 Wang, X.W., 31, 241 Wang, Y.W., 88, 144, 265, 278, 368 Weeks, F., 280, 372 Weischedel, R.M., 199 Whiteley, W.H., 276 Wieger, L., 361 Winsa, B., 366 Wong, Y.K., 25, 33, 89, 361 Wood, J.D., 225 Woon, W.L., 11 Wright, S., 119, 189, 250 Wu, C.A., 16, 87, 89, 150 Wu, W.C., 222 Wu., Y.S., 120, 145, 172, 173 Wu, Y.Z., 44, 54 Xi, B.X., 267 Xia, Z.H., 83, 104, 146, 187, 365, 368, 371

Author Index Xie, T.W., 27, 194 Xin, Bao., 145, 368 Xu, C.A., 81, 178, 181 Xu, C.M., 178 Xu, D.J., 237 Xu, J.L., 85, 143, 199, 243, 356 Xu, L.L., 265, 371 Xu, S.C., 140 Yan, Y.M., 16, 86 Yang G., 150 Yang, H.Q., 179, 299 Yang, R.L., 146 Yao, D.H., 31, 166 Yao, Y.P., 203, 204, 243 Ye, L.S., 35, 197, 233, 275, 365 Yin, B.Y., 6, 30, 87, 113, 158, 163, 164, 329, 362 Yu, G.Y., 239 Yu, J., 231 Yu, J.E., 226, 282 Yu, X.L., 209 Yuan, X.Y., 101, 237, 285, 357 Zeng, X.C., 80, 104, 105 Zhang, F.P., 244, 245 Zhang, J.Q., 84, 244 Zhang, L.M., 368 Zhang, L.Q., 98 Zhang, P., 117, 122, 156, 180, 199, 369 Zhang, S.Y., 34, 136, 148, 156, 186, 204, 235, 312 Zhang, W.B., 158 Zhang, X.T., 60 Zhang, Y.J., 102, 362 Zhang,Y.M., 122, 126 Zhang, Z.C., 320 Zhang, Z.G., 34 Zhang, Z.R., 101 Zhao, S.H., 66, 67, 87, 97, 156, 172, 180, 185, 189, 289, 324 Zhao, F.F., 180 Zhao, W.Z., 85 Zheng, L.X., 2, 61, 154, 306 Zheng, Y.L., 306 Zhou,Y.G., 30, 31, 39, 50, 65, 66, 67, 68, 80, 89, 117, 125, 140, 144, 145, 146, 147, 155, 178, 180, 195, 197, 205, 209, 220, 222, 240, 241, 256, 277, 278, 282, 300, 314, 357 Zhu, B.F., 372 Zou, X.L., 5, 7, 362

Language Policy 1. M.H. Amara and A.A. Mar’i: Language Education Policy: The Arab Minority in Israel. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0585-7 2. R.B. Kaplan and R.B. Baldauf Jr.: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-1062-1 3. L.A. Grenoble: Language Policy in the Soviet Union. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1298-5 4. M. Zhou (ed.) Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-8038-7 5. T. Clayton: Language Choice in a Nation under Transition: English Language Spread in Cambodia. 2006 ISBN 0-387-31193-9 6. A.L. Rappa and L. Wee: Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4510-7 7. M. Berns, K. de Bot, and U. Hasebrink (eds.): In The Presence of English: Media and European Youth. 2007 ISBN 0-387-36893-0 8. W.P. Rivers (ed.) Language Planning in the Former Soviet Union: Internal and External Perspectives. (Planned) 9. S. Zhao and R.B. Baldauf Jr.: Planning Chinese Characters: Reaction, Evolution or Revolution? 2008 ISBN 978-0-387-48574-4