Our nation can take the highest position among the nations of the world. Therefore, this newspaper must seek to take the highest position among all of the newspapers in the world. The favor that the people of our nation will owe us is unlimited! The favor that the people of our nation will owe us is unlimited!
[Shibao, June 12, 1904; Xinmin congbao, #44–45—JJ]
ADVOCATES OF SCRIPT REFORM
Among the important radical reform issues in the late Qing was the proposal to replace Chinese characters by an alphabetic script. This was by no means the first time the question had been raised. In the Song, the encyclopedic scholar Zheng Qiao (see chapter 19), from his study of Sanskrit, had already noted the cumbersomeness of Chinese characters and the advantages of an alphabetic script. Then in 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published The Miracle of Western Letters (Xizi qiji) in Beijing. This was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write a Sinitic language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, wrote on the same subject in his Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati [Xiru ermu zi] at Hangzhou. Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which the Chinese people thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese, but their eventual impact on China was enormous.
One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to react to and evaluate Western alphabets was the late Ming, early Qing scholar-official Fang Yizhi (1611–1671). A progressive, scientifically minded individual, he criticized the sinographs for being too numerous and too complicated, in contrast to Western systems of writing that were more economical and elegantly analytical in their mode of composition.
Fang Yizhi understood well the implications that these complicated and ambiguous methods of character formation had for the script as a whole: “The confusion of characters is due to their interchangeability and borrowing but, if a concept pertained to a single word and each word had a single meaning, as in the distant West where sounds are combined in accordance with concepts, and words are formed in accordance with sounds, so that there would be neither duplication nor sharing, wouldn’t that be superior?” (Tongya 1: 96–97).
It was not until more than two hundred years later that the concept of spelling planted in China by the Jesuits had sufficiently matured for the Chinese themselves to begin proposing its application for the design of new and more efficient scripts for their own languages.
SONG SHU: ILLITERACY IN CHINA
The first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu (1862–1910). A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the stunning effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning there. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script. While Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion of the idea proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts in the following years. The following is excerpted from an essay, “Civilizing,” in a tract by Song titled “Accommodating to Circumstances.”
Among men and women of white nations who can read, in cases where they are many they amount to more than nine out of ten, and in cases where they are few they still amount to almost two out of ten. Among yellow peoples, Japan has the largest number of people who can read. India . . . today also has four out of a hundred.
In China, . . . if we compute those who can read today, among men there are approximately one out of a hundred and among women roughly one out of every forty thousand. This is far removed from India, not to mention Japan and the white nations. With so few individuals able to read, how will the people ever be liberated from their accumulated distress? Now, we should emulate Japan and issue orders for education. Orders should be given that all boys and girls between the ages of six and thirteen should enter school. The parents of those who do not would be fined. Every county, village, settlement, and hamlet would uniformly establish one boys’ and one girls’ school for each district. The expenses for the schools would be paid for by the counties, villages, settlements, and hamlets themselves. Textbooks would give consideration to the merits of foreign nations, while readers would exclusively use Chinese characters. (Note: According to the laws governing Japanese schools today, instruction is given first in kana and only later in sinographs. If we learn from this example, then we need to devise many spelling systems for the [dialects of the] area south of the Yangzi and Huai Rivers to facilitate the studies of our children. The implications of this matter are so great that I dare not discuss them here.)
[Song Shu, Liuzhai beiyi, in Song Shu ji 1: 135–136—VM]
LU ZHUANGZHANG’S ATTEMPT AT ROMANIZATION
The first Chinese to propose a system of spelling for Sinitic languages was Lu Zhuangzhang (1854–1928). Lu was from Fujian and he grew up in Xiamen, where romanized writing of the local language was used widely after it was introduced by Christian missionaries (a romanized Chinese translation of the Bible had already been made in 1852). At age twenty-one, Lu moved to Singapore, where he studied English. After he returned to Xiamen four years later, he assisted an English missionary in compiling a Chinese-English dictionary.
Lu’s First Steps in Being Able to Understand at a Glance (Yimu liaoran chujie), published in Xiamen in 1892, was the first book written by a Chinese that presented a potentially workable system of spelling for a Sinitic language. His script was based on the Roman alphabet with some modifications. Among other improvements over the sinographs that Lu’s alphabet possessed was the linking up of syllables into words and their separation by empty spaces. Although he believed that all of the local languages should be written out with phonetic scripts, Lu advocated that the speech of Nanjing be adopted as the standard for the whole nation as it was when Matteo Ricci had come to China three centuries earlier. Altogether, Lu worked for forty years to bring an efficient system of spelling to China. He is now viewed by Chinese language workers as the father of script reform in their country.
Chinese characters are perhaps the most difficult of all characters in the whole world today. Tracing them back to the time of the Yellow Emperor, Cang Jie23 created characters as pictographs, indicatives, associative compounds, figurative extensions, pictophonograms, and phonetic loans. Up to today, successive transformations of the forms of the characters have already been taking place for more than forty-five hundred long years. In antiquity, they used “cloud writing” and “bird tracks.” Later, they used the tadpole script and pictographs. Still later there were the seal script, the clerkly script, and the eight divisions. By the Han, they had changed to the eight methods and, in the Song, they changed to the Song style. All these changes have been in the direction of replacing the difficult with the easy. . . .
In the Kangxi Dictionary (1716), there are 40,919 [sic, > 47,043] separate symbols. . . . Normally, when one writes poems and essays, one uses only a little over 5,000 of these characters. But if one wants to recognize these several thousand characters, even the most intelligent person will have to spend more than ten years of hard work. Herein lies the suitability of spelling.
In my humble opinion, the wealth and strength of a nation are based on science;24 the advancement of science is based on the desire for learning and understanding principle of all men and women, young and old. Their being able to desire learning and understand principle is based on the spelling of words. Once they have become familiar with the letters and the methods of spelling, they can read any word by themselves without a teacher. Because the written and spoken words are the same, when they read with their mouths they comprehend in their hearts. Furthermore, because the strokes of the letters are simple, they are easy to recognize and easy to write, saving more than ten years of a person’s life. This time may be dedicated to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and all kinds of practical learning. What worry would there then be for the wealth and strength of the nation?
&nb
sp; In the whole world today, except for China, all the other nations mostly use twenty or thirty letters for spelling. . . . Therefore, in the civilized nations of Europe and America, all men and women over the age of ten, even in remote villages and isolated areas, are able to read. . . . What is the reason for this? It is because they spell their words, because the written and the spoken word are the same, and because the strokes of the letters are simple. Japan also has been using Chinese characters, but more recently some particularly intelligent person devised letters for spelling that are forty-seven simple graphs. Consequently, culture and education have flourished greatly there. . . . That men and women of foreign nations all can read is due to spelling.
[Lu, preface, Yimu liaoran chujie—VM]
SHEN XUE’S UNIVERSAL SCRIPT
In 1896, Shen Xue’s (1871–c. 1900) brilliant “Original Sounds for a Flourishing Age” (“Shengshi yuanyin”) was published in two Shanghai newspapers. These were the Shanghai Journal (Shenbao), the oldest newspaper of modern China founded in 1872 by an English merchant, and China Progress, whose publisher was Huang Zunxian (1848–1905). The editor of the latter was Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and another of Kang Youwei’s (1858–1927) disciples was its manager. Shen, a medical student, had originally written the work in English under the title “Universal System,” but it was never published. The Chinese version is but a partial translation of the English work. Shen’s original preface begins as follows:
Those who discuss the affairs of the times nowadays either call for the restoration of the old Zhou rituals or for renewal through Western learning. Although what they speak of seems different, their determination is the same. They all cherish accommodation to circumstances, just as with officialdom, military strategy, agricultural policy, commercial affairs, manufacturing, mining, and schools. I, however, consider the accommodation of script to circumstances to be primary.
Script is an instrument of intelligence, conveying as it does the language and thoughts of antiquity and the present. The difficulty or ease of a script is that which separates the intelligent from the stupid, the strong from the weak. . . .
From the time when Cang Jie created the characters until today, it has been more than forty-five hundred years. There are three different ways to divide up the characters into groups: by category, by rhyme, and by strokes. Radicals may be as many as 544 or as few as 214. Altogether, we may count more than 40,900 character forms. Those commonly used by scholars are only 4,000 or 5,000. Unless you earnestly read the thirteen classics, you cannot be considered smart, and unless you spend more than a decade, you cannot do it. How many decades does a person have available for use in one life? Consequently, those who read books are few, while those who embrace the ancient and the modern or survey China and abroad are even fewer!
At this deeply painful juncture when civil affairs are in disarray and foreign calamities are raging, everyone wishes to devise a plan for self-strengthening. The first is that of the strength of the separate nations of Europe. After Rome lost the Way, Europe broke up into separate nations. The reason why the separate nations of Europe are strong is because they have Roman letters for spelling. This makes it easy for people to read, and thus it is easy for them to understand principle. Having understood principle, they can distinguish clearly between advantage and disadvantage. Those above and those below share the same intention to seek wealth and strength.
The second is that of the strength of America. The reason why America is strong is because the Europeans moved there and planted the seeds of reading on a large scale. Now, American’s sciences, wealth, and strength are running abreast of Europe’s. This, too, is because they have letters for spelling. Letters for spelling make it easy to communicate one’s innermost feelings to each other so that there are no barriers between those above and those below.
The third is that of the strength of Russia and Japan. The Russian czar, Peter the Great, set about studying Europe when he was young. All affairs pertaining to wealth and strength were imprinted in his heart and written in his books. When he ascended to the throne, his new government was magnificent, and now Russia is feared throughout the world. In the twenty years since Japan has been engaged in trading, it has vigorously flourished because it is courageous in learning from others. . . .
The Chinese people occupy one-third of the whole world. Since the people are so numerous, it is appropriate that the method for becoming literate should be all the more convenient. Otherwise, the vast majority of them would be a bunch of blockheads. Although they have eyes and ears, it is as though they have no vision or hearing. . . .
In the present situation where the Chinese script is compelled to change but the conditions are such that the change cannot be too abrupt, what can be done? There is no principle in the world that cannot be investigated and there is nothing in the world that cannot be done. Through clarification of form and function (tiyong), I have obtained these eighteen letters, which constitute the Original Sounds for a Flourishing Age. They can be presented to the whole world and can spell all the sounds in the world. . . . Obtaining the shortcut of script is the fountainhead of self-strengthening.
[Preface to “Shengshi yuanyin”—VM]
WANG ZHAO’S “MANDARIN LETTERS”
Another influential late Qing script reformer was Wang Zhao (1859–1935?), who hailed from Hebei province. As a boy, he liked to read translated books that were popular in China at the time. This penchant was one of the reasons his relatives and neighbors said that he was possessed by strange spirits. Nonetheless, he became a high-ranking scholar and official in the Qing government, and in 1897 he founded the first modern primary school at the district level in China. After the failure of the 1898 reforms, in which he had taken part, he fled to Japan. He stayed there for two years, during which he created a sort of kana-like syllabary for Chinese in imitation of the native Japanese syllabic writing system. It was called Mandarin Letters (Guanhua zimu). In 1900 he returned to China and published his first book introducing this new system of phonetic writing. It was titled Letters for Combining the Sounds of Mandarin (Guanhua hesheng zimu). In the preface he wrote:
The Chinese script was among the earliest created. In my view, the earliest is the foremost. For explaining essences and revealing secrets, it would seem that the Chinese script is far superior to those of other nations. Although the scripts of the other nations are shallow, however, each of the people throughout those nations is thoroughly conversant with them because language and script are consistent. Their letters are simple and convenient and, for even the dullest youths, the age they can speak is the age when they become conversant with writing. . .
But not even one out of a hundred of the people in our nation can comprehend the meaning of a text. After they have spent ten years, if you ask them what they’ve learned, they say, “I’ve learned how to read characters.” The dullards may study for half their lives without being able to write a letter because it is so difficult. . . .
The literati and the commoners are like two different worlds. Whatever may be the grand intention of the government, the general outlines of geography, the connections between above and below or the vicissitudes of China and other countries, there is no way to make them comprehend even the rudiments.
No matter how trenchantly the officials issue their orders, the common people are obtusely ignorant. Should one attempt to exhort the people to learning, to manage finances, to drill troops and so forth, in contrast with other nations east and west, one becomes aware of the vast disparity between the difficulty for us and the ease for them. . . .
Now, in the various nations [of the West], education prospers greatly, the arts of government flourish day by day, and even in Japan commands are unified and changes are rapid. Surely there are reasons for this in each case. The identity of speech and writing and the simplicity of their scripts are actually the most important factors.
An administration that leads to wealth and strength lies in each of the common people
becoming adept in his career, broadening his knowledge, and knowing his position, not in having an outstanding elite.
[Preface to Guanhua hesheng zimu, pp. 1–3—VM]
The debate over the fate of the traditional writing system is still waged to this day. In their early revolutionary days, the Chinese Communists were champions of romanization, for reasons similar to those presented in the foregoing, but after coming to power they contented themselves with adopting a system of simplified characters for words in common use. Nevertheless, if the role of simplified characters expands and the applications of spelling increase, the future of the sinographs may become more doubtful. It is certain, however, that calligraphers will continue to practice them and classicists will always study them. The dawning of the information age may radically alter the way Chinese communicate with each other, but it cannot completely eradicate the heritage of the sinographs.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 46