The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  These three novel conditions combined to catalyze the transformation of the tray bed into unprecedented linguistic configurations. The possibilities for such experimentation were practically boundless. With roughly 2,500 characters on the tray bed, typists had an unimaginably large number of different arrangements to try, making possible a total democratization of character organization in which each typist organized characters as he or she saw fit. More specifically, the possibility emerged of a system completely suited to two things simultaneously: one’s own body, including its deeply personal and varied idiosyncrasies of movement; and the increasingly standardized Maoist discourse of the period.

  Decentralization, Centralized?

  Having witnessed the celebration of Zhang Jiying, Shen Yunfen, and other model taxonomists in the popular press, we might be tempted to imagine that Party, state, and industry elites saw the virtue of this new, decentralized taxonomic experiment and encouraged the nation’s typists to stride forth toward this brave new future. What transpired was something altogether different. Party and industry elites may have celebrated Zhang Jiying, but ultimately they had little faith that his methods could be adopted in any widespread manner by Chinese typists. Zhang and Shen were models, to be sure, but not ones that Party and industry leaders believed it possible for all compositors and typists to emulate. Rather than lending support to further user-led experiments in vernacular taxonomy, the early Mao-era typewriter industry instead set off down a path common to other branches of media in the early PRC: centralization. Specifically, they set out to standardize and centralize this new phenomenon of vernacular taxonomy.

  We gain insight into the minds of early PRC typewriting circles through the minutes of a 1953 meeting held in Tianjin. At the “Meeting for the Improvement of the Typewriter Character Chart” (Xiugai daziji zibiao huiyi), fifty-two representatives convened on August 30: representatives from manufacturers, typing schools, the Tianjin City Committee of the CCP, the Tianjin municipal government, and some thirty other work units. Here participants reflected upon the recent past of the Chinese typewriter industry, and their visions for its future.

  The preeminent concern among participants was the problem of standardization. There were problems with the Chinese typewriter, one participant argued, “with regard to the old tray bed, as well as the selection and arrangement of characters. These have adversely affected the improvement of the efficiency of the typewriter.”46 More broadly, complaints were expressed about the general lack of standardization across typewriter manufacturers, noting that each manufacturer used a different character layout chart. In an age of standardization and rationalization, such a tendency could hardly be permitted to continue unchecked. Cited favorably at the meeting was the Party’s campaign to simplify Chinese characters and to abolish “variant characters” (yitizi).47 If a comparable level of standardization could be brought to bear within Chinese typewriting, participants agreed, the positive effects would be manifest. Once Chinese typewriter tray beds were set up in a unified way, for example, editors could in turn publish character indexes and typing textbooks to be used by one and all. “This would be extremely helpful for both study and usage,” as one participant summarized.48

  The typing reform committee in Tianjin was well aware of the experiments then underway with vernacular taxonomy, moreover. They just did not imagine them implementable across a wide community of practice. In their reports they referred to these as “radiating compounds” (fangshe zituan), defined as “taking one character as the core, then arranging specially related compounds to the top, bottom, left, and right.” Offering a measure of praise for the system, the committee was also quick to outline no fewer than three problems with it. First, it provided no “set sequence” (yiding de cixu), relying instead upon “rote memorization and groping around” (qiangji mosuo). Second, because Chinese characters connected with one another to form an exceedingly large number of compounds, the radiating method could hardly hope to achieve comprehensiveness. The third and most critical problem, however, was its unmistakably idiosyncratic and individualistic quality. Were a typist using such a method to depart her post, or were a clerk to fall ill, it would prove difficult to replace her. This system would not suffice, it was decided—it was not “absolutely good.”49 In sharp contrast to the stories of Zhang Jiying, Shen Yunfen, and others, a core principle came to be shared by those in attendance at the Tianjin meeting: Chinese typewriters should maintain the industry standard radical-stroke system of organizing characters.

  As if in consolation, however, the committee did put forth its own, far more moderate proposal for the tray bed. Within a given radical class, the sequence of characters need not adhere strictly to stroke count, they conceded. If two characters within a given radical class tended to appear together in Chinese words or phrases, it was reasonable to organize them adjacently on the tray bed—even if this meant violating stroke count.50 The earliest manifestation we encounter of this “relaxed” radical-stroke tray bed was the Wanneng (“All-Purpose”) Chinese Typewriter, manufactured circa 1956—the machine once built by Japan, but now under control of Chinese manufacturers.51 Far more reserved than Zhang Jiying’s character rack, this tray bed featured what can be thought of as at most an “adjustment” rather than abandonment of the radical-stroke system: radical classes were maintained, but within them characters could be placed out of order in terms of stroke count.

  A sign of the Wanneng’s partial loosening of organization can be seen when we look at the characters categorized within the “water” radical. Directly to the left of the character ze, we find mao: the typist could thus proceed directly between two of the three characters that formed the name of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. At the same time, the third character in Mao’s full name—dong, meaning “east”—was located where it tended to be located on all typewriters to date: in the “special usage” region, positioned alongside the three other cardinal directions. With the Wanneng machine, then, we encounter the industry’s first response to the bottom-up experiment with vernacular taxonomy. Unwilling to break with the radical-stroke system, typewriter manufacturers and industry leaders instead put forth a compromised vision in which typists would have to content themselves with refinements only slightly more suited to the rapid production of common compounds and names. At the same time, industry leaders cautioned that even this relaxation in the radical-stroke system needed to be undertaken slowly, and that it would take users time to learn. While a limited amount of individual personalization was “feasible” (kexingde),52 the Tianjin committee noted, “it’s best not to make any more big changes” (zuihao buyao zai da gaizhuang).

  No doubt challenged and inspired by local-level experiments well underway by the mid-1950s, the typewriting industry decided to undertake a slightly more dramatic departure: the “Reformed” Chinese typewriter of 1956, which constituted the first machine to be outfitted with an “out-of-the-box” natural-language tray bed. In this tray bed arrangement, radical-stroke taxonomy was no longer obeyed, with the manufacturer instead developing its own vernacular arrangement based upon the same principles then circulating among everyday users.53 In one sense, this move constituted an endorsement of local-level experimentation, while at the same time, it redoubled the industry’s commitment to centralization and standardization. On this machine, the arrangement of Chinese characters would be subordinated not to the body of any individual typist per se, but instead to that of a hypothetical, average typist to be defined by the manufacturer itself—a kind of homme moyen not unlike those we encountered in chapter 6. Once this transition to vernacular arrangement had been made, presumably, textbooks could continue to be edited and published en masse, as could character tray bed charts. Once incorporated into typing institutes and programs, moreover, typists could be expected to memorize this new layout precisely as they had the earlier radical-stroke system. Phrased differently, the industry attempted to standardize the vernacular, exhibiting the same impulse as Chinese elites in
the first half of the twentieth century during the country’s first and more famous vernacularization movement.

  The Typing Rebellion

  Manufacturers may have been content to stop at the “reformed” tray bed, but typists were not. In a historical development that further highlights the importance of user-driven technological change, individual Chinese operators pushed nascent ideas of tray bed reorganization toward what in many ways was its logical extreme: a total democratization of character organization in which each typist organized his or her tray bed as he or she saw fit, in accordance with the many particularities of his or her own, individual body.54 There would be no standards, no centralization, and, indeed, effectively infinite potential variation (with 2,500 characters being amenable to approximately 1.6288 × 107528 different arrangements).55

  In this sense, Chinese typists took centrally issued propaganda about “model typists” and “model typesetters” more seriously and literally than central authorities had anticipated, creating machines that were at once deeper extensions of their bodies into Chinese Communist rhetoric, and deeper ingestions of this rhetoric into their bodies. Departing entirely from the radical-stroke system, and from the dictates of any centrally authorized taxonomic “starting point” to the tray bed, the goal became the development of organizational systems completely suited to one’s own body and to the discourse of the Maoist period. What ensued was the development of a practically infinite number of deeply personal pathways to an increasingly rote, standardized political discourse. By means of this comprehensive subordination of the machinery of language to the body—not to one centrally determined, hypothetical body, but to all bodies, democratically, empirically, and privately determined—what became possible was a more perfect and ever more personal connection and commitment to the rhetorical apparatus of Maoism.

  Confronted by dizzying possibility, typists hardly engaged in blind or random rearrangements of characters. There was an emerging logic to vernacular taxonomy, as well as an emerging community of practice in which one could share and learn principles. Indeed, decentralized, user-driven reorganization became so important within Chinese typewriting that, beginning in the 1960s, we begin to see a formalization of natural-language experimentation—an attempt not to centralize it, but to set down certain “best practices” in writing. In a fascinating explanation of natural-language tray bed arrangements from 1960, authors Wang Guihua and Lin Gensheng drilled down into the question of how one should go about setting up a vernacular tray bed.56 They outlined for their readers the different factors that influenced when one should undertake such a renovation, as well as certain spatial-linguistic factors that should be kept in mind during the process.

  The authors contrasted two strategies for setting up a vernacular machine: “gradual improvement” (zhuri gaijin) and “all-at-once rearrangement” (yici gaipai). Gradual improvements of the tray bed, they explained, involved making incremental changes each day, taking careful notes about which characters one used more and less frequently, selectively moving these higher- and lower-frequency characters around the tray bed, and taking detailed notes about any changes one made. “Gradual improvement” was ideally suited to work units with only one typist, Wang and Lin suggested, because it would minimize disturbance to the unit’s workflow, and because the redistributed characters would be simpler to remember. There were disadvantages to the method, however. With more than two thousand characters on the tray bed, it could take an exceedingly long time to complete the process—as long as a year if one changed between six and seven characters every day. Perhaps most importantly, the gradual method was unsystematic, since it was carried out in piecemeal fashion. The typist in this method did not engage in extensive preparation or consideration, thereby raising the risk of making poor taxonomic decisions that, while seemingly appropriate at first, could later prove detrimental and difficult to remedy.

  The “all-at-once” method was a more extreme alternative. After extensive mapping and planning, the typist would use his or her spare time to empty the tray bed completely, and then build it back up, cell by cell, in accordance with a carefully determined lexical blueprint. In a single, concerted exertion of mental and physical labor, the process could be completed in its entirety. An all-at-once transformation incurred obvious risks, however. First, it placed a tremendous onus on the typist’s memory, requiring him or her to memorize an entirely new organizational layout right away (a challenging task, even if we are speaking of a system that the typist would have developed personally). To cope, Wang and Lin explained, it was advisable for the typist to spend his or her spare time memorizing the new layout as rigorously as possible, once the new layout was established. Either the whole arrangement had to be memorized from day one—an improbable feat—or the typist’s productivity and speed would necessarily suffer for a period of time. As such, this method was less advisable than the “gradual method” for work units that relied upon a single typist. “Rearranging a tray bed must be done with care and attention, and assiduously,” Wang and Lin summarized. “You must not engage in such a thing carelessly. But at the same time, you must overcome all kinds of conservative thinking.”57

  Wang and Lin also provided a detailed overview of the best systems one could use, focusing on five spatial-linguistic approaches in particular: association style, radiating style, fortress style, connecting verse style, and repeating character style (chongfuzi shi).58 Within association style (jituanshi), the typist started by placing a character within the tray bed matrix, and then surrounded it on all sides with related characters—building further associative clusters from there, using each of those characters as a new starting point. The example given by the author was that of shi (时), indicating “time” in a general sense. With this character as epicenter, a typist using association style would then surround it with characters such as ping (平), tong (同), ji (及), zan (暂), xiao (小), sui (随), lin (临), and so forth. Each of these characters, when concatenated with shi, formed common two-character Chinese words: “normally” (pingshi), “at the same time” (tongshi), “timely” (jishi), “hour” (xiaoshi), “at a time of one’s choosing” (suishi), and “temporarily” (linshi). In fortress style (baoleishi), by comparison, the typist combined place names, personal names, or technical terms in one dedicated zone of the tray bed, even if these terms could not be combined with one another to any significant degree. One simply knew in this technique that all country names, for example, were to be found in the lower right zone of the tray bed, whereas personal names were to be found in the lower left.59

  The principles outlined by Wang, Lin, and others were adopted and elaborated upon by typists throughout the Maoist period, and indeed beyond. From the evidence of two machines manufactured in mainland China, and used by mainland Chinese typists during the 1970s and 1980s in two separate locations—the United Nations in Geneva, and the offices of UNESCO in Paris—we discover both shared patterns and idiosyncratic differences that reveal the factors and strategies guiding this vernacularization movement.60 As these examples illustrate, these typists were engaged in ongoing, situated processes of “tinkering and making ad hoc arrangements” and “reconfigurations” not unlike those described in other user-machine contexts examined by Adele Clarke, Joan Fujimura, and Lucy Suchman.61 Starting with the character mao (as in “Mao Zedong”), we can juxtapose each of these two machines against one another and against a machine from the pre-Communist period configured according to radical-stroke arrangement (figure 7.6).

  7.6 The location of the character mao (毛) on three Chinese typewriters

  As shown here, the character mao was arranged according to the radical-stroke system on the Republican-era machine, just above the character hao (毫) built out of the same “hair radical” component (毛). On the UNESCO and UN machines, by contrast, the placement of the character mao makes clear that these two typists were weighing an entirely different and new set of considerations. Rather than placing the character where it b
elonged within the radical-stroke system, the UNESCO typist placed mao within a specifically political configuration: directly above the characters ze (泽) and dong (东) (forming Mao’s full name); and directly to the left of the characters zhu (主) and xi (席) (forming “Mao zhuxi” or “Chairman Mao”). Owing to this rearrangement, the production of the name “Mao Zedong” on the UNESCO machine now required the operator to traverse only two units of space. By comparison, the same three characters typed on the popular Commercial Press machine of the 1930s would have required the user to traverse some 57.66 units of space: from mao at (34,37) to ze at (54,5), and finally to dong at (35,11). A survey of the tray beds reveals hundreds of other similar examples, including “Chairman Mao,” “committee member” (weiyuan), “independent” (duli), “plan” (jihua), “to attack” (gongji), and “nationality” (minzu).62