We Chinese wish to say that the privilege of a mere typewriter is not tempting enough to make us throw into waste our 4000 years of superb classics, literature and history. The typewriter was invented to suit the English language, not the English language the typewriter.
—“Judging Eastern Things from Western Point of View,” 1913
As we mark the spectacular rise of the People’s Republic of China, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in 2008 have become a new node on our timeline. Observers of China were already familiar with the country’s economic achievements over the preceding two decades, and perhaps with its advances in science, medicine, and technology. Never before had the world witnessed the full scale of China’s twenty-first-century strength and self-confidence all in one sitting, however. August 8 was a theater of superlatives. The ceremony culminated the longest torch relay in Olympic history to that point (eighty-five thousand miles over 129 days), enrolled some fifteen thousand performers, and boasted a production budget of 300 million US dollars, all for the opening day pageantry alone.1 If we include the games as a whole, and the massive infrastructural build-up in Beijing and other cities, the total budgetary outlay was somewhere in the neighborhood of 44 billion dollars.2
When we consider the towering cost of the spectacle—the cast, electricity bills, catering, costume design, construction crews, director Zhang Yimou’s paycheck, and more—it might seem curious to suggest that its one and perhaps only truly revolutionary moment was its least expensive and most easily overlooked. This was the Parade of Nations, the procession of national teams around the grounds of the Bird’s Nest.
The first team to enter the Bird’s Nest was Greece, as per Olympic tradition. Greece is the perpetual ur-host of the games, an event historically rooted in veneration of ancient Greek society and its esteemed place as the fount of Western democracy, science, reason, and humanism. The parade pays homage to Greece in a second, subtler way as well: the alphabetic order by which national teams enter the field of play. In his Origins of Western Literacy, Eric Havelock nominated Greek alphabetic script as a revolutionary invention that surpassed all prior writing systems, including the Phoenician from which it and all alphabets originate.3 For historian, philosopher, and former president of the Modern Language Association Walter Ong, the Greek adoption and adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet was a force for democratization, as “little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were very young and their vocabulary limited.”4 Still others have ventured into dubious neurological claims, arguing that the invention of the Greek alphabet activated a hitherto dormant left hemisphere of the human brain and thereby inaugurated a new age of human self-actualization.5 Greece gave us “Our Glorious Alphabet,” and so every two years, we honor it in the opening ceremonies of both the summer and winter games.
The rules governing the Parade of Nations were first set down in writing in 1921 by the International Olympic Committee.6 “Each contingent participating in the games,” the regulations read, “must be preceded by a sign bearing the name of its country, to be accompanied by the national flag.” Following this was a parenthetical note: “(countries proceed in alphabetical order).”7 Such phrasing carried through to 1949, when the charter was adjusted slightly to take on the distinctly cosmopolitan form it maintains to this day. The revised regulations stipulated that it was the prerogative of the host country to organize the opening parade according to alphabetic order as it functioned in the host country’s language.8 With this adjustment, the IOC had taken clear steps to relativize, and thus universalize, the rules governing this international ceremony.
In the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, global television audiences might have been exposed to a non-Western and nonalphabetic script for the first time, were it not for Japan’s decision to use English alphabetic order rather than kanji—the subset of the Japanese written language based upon Chinese characters—or kana—the syllabic part of Japanese writing, encompassing hiragana and katakana. Instead, it was not until the Seoul Olympics of 1988 that the world first witnessed a non-Western alphabet applied to this venerable Olympic tradition. Here in Korea, where ga (가) is the first syllable in Korean hangul, Greece was followed by Ghana (가나 Gana) and then Gabon (가봉Gabong).9
In 2008, with the Greek national team entering the Bird’s Nest—the architectural wonder designed in part by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei—the parade in Beijing was following a conventional script. Television commentators Bob Costas, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, and others droned on in an unbroken stream of synthesis, as their roles demanded. They riffed on subjects as diverse as Confucianism, Tang dynasty cosmopolitanism, taiji, the Ming dynasty eunuch seafarer and explorer Zheng He, calligraphy, Buddhist iconography of the Dunhuang cave complex in northwest China, and the colorful diversity of China’s non-Han ethnic minority peoples, among a mash-up of others.10 The synthesis stumbled from time to time, tripping up in awkward turns of phrase (references to China’s “long, long march” and “great step forward” come to mind). Endearing lapses notwithstanding, these play-by-play commentators were in rare form.
This constant hum of commentary contrasted sharply, however, with a forty-five-second span of complete exegetical breakdown that ensued when the second national team took the field: Guinea. Suddenly, Costas and his colleagues lost their groove.
Costas:
Guinea follows them in. There is no alphabet here, so, y’know, if you’re expecting one nation to follow the other the way they generally do at an opening ceremony, think again.
Lauer:
Yeah, you’re out of luck. It goes based on the number of strokes in the Chinese character [a shimmer of quiet laughter] that represents the country’s name, so you could easily see a country that starts in ‘A’ followed by a country that starts in ‘R’ or vice versa. So we’re gonna have the graphics at the bottom of the screen which will give you an idea … which countries are approaching the tunnel.
Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Maldives, Malta.
G, T, Y, M?
There is no alphabet here.
If Costas was at a loss for words, one can hardly blame him. 2008 was the first time in history that the Olympic Games had been hosted in a country that did not organize the Parade of Nations according to alphabetic order of one sort or another—because it was the first time that the games had been held in a country whose language possessed no alphabet at all.
For over a century, IOC regulations had only appeared to the world as capacious, embracing of cultural difference, or in a word, universal. In 2008, the bylaws of the International Olympic Committee were unmasked as false pretenders to the throne of universalism. Predicated on the idea of choice and cultural relativism, the regulation’s foundation in the idea of “alphabetical order as it functioned in the host country’s language” brought the Olympic Games and their Chinese hosts to an embarrassing impasse. IOC regulations afforded China “permission” to undertake something that was, by definition, a logical impossibility: to organize the parade according to a “Chinese alphabet,” which does not in fact exist.
The 2008 parade was not sequenced at random, however. There was a Chinese dao to match the Greek logos, one that functioned according to a two-part organizational system well known in China. In the first of these, Chinese characters are ordered according to the number of pen- or brushstrokes needed to compose them, an organizational scheme that had been a mainstay in China for centuries. The three-character Chinese name for Guinea (几内亚 Jineiya)—the first country to follow Greece—begins with one of the simplest characters in the written language, orthographically speaking: 几 ji, composed of only two strokes. By comparison, the three-character Chinese name for Turkey (土耳其 Tu’erqi), begins with the character 土 tu, whose composition requires three strokes in all. Consequently, Guinea preceded Turkey in the parade.
By itself, stroke count is not enough to arrive at an unambiguous order for the simple reason that many characters are composed of the same number of strokes. For example, the Chinese name for Yemen (也门 Yemen) begins with another three-stroke Chinese character, 也 ye (figure I.1). Who would enter the Bird’s Nest first, then: the Turkish national team or the Yemeni?
The second level of organization is based upon a centuries-old principle of Chinese calligraphy dating back at least to the Jin dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361). According to this principle, all characters in Chinese are composed of eight fundamental types of brushstrokes, ranked in a simple hierarchy: the dian (dot), heng (horizontal), shu (vertical), pie (left-falling diagonal), na (right-falling diagonal), tiao (rising), zhe (bending downward/rightward), and gou (hook) (figure I.2). When we return to the question of Turkey and Yemen, then, we find that “tu” (土) of Tu’erqi (Turkey) is composed of the strokes horizontal/vertical/horizontal, or 2-3-2 in terms of the ranking of each stroke; while the “ye” (也) of Yemen is composed of the sequence bending downward/vertical/bending downward, or 7-3-7. The sequence 2-3-2 outranks 7-3-7, and so Turkey entered the Bird’s Nest before Yemen.
I.2 The eight fundamental strokes of the character yong (eternity)
Being unfamiliar with Chinese orthographic tradition, some in the Western viewing audience resorted instead to conspiracy theory. “Did NBC Alter the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony?,” user techmuse posted on Slashdot on the evening of August 9, 2008, triggering a cascade of just under 500 responses over the course of 48 hours.11 A working thesis quickly formed that the sequence of national delegations—which so clearly violated anything remotely resembling an orderly procession—must have been garbled and resequenced as part of a profit-driven decision by television executives. Anticipating that American viewers would tune out following the appearance of the US team, the conspiracy theory held, NBC had cut up the original sequence and reorganized it so as to place the US delegation toward the end of the procession, and in doing so ensured a more enduring viewing audience. “American media alters the truth to boost ratings! Movie at 11,” quipped kcbanner just moments after the opening salvo by techmuse.
Notwithstanding a scattered few who attempted to highlight the obvious—that the Chinese language has no alphabet, and thus that there might be an alternate explanation—online commentary traipsed further into the abyss of speculation, as if taking Costas’s admonishment to “think again” with the utmost seriousness. Some believed the theory yet pardoned it, drawing upon a kind of gritty, world-weary cynicism. “Olympic Events have always been rearranged when on a Tape delay,” interjected wooferhound. “I expect it, and why not? It is not even displayed in correct order when it’s hosted in the USA.” More extreme and jocular speculations surfaced in a comment by Minwee, likening NBC’s supposed act to “the practice started with the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the German newsreels showed only negatives of all of the track and field events, so that a white Jesse Owens could be seen beating the pants off of all the black athletes.”
It was not until the second day of commentary that the fraudulence of the original theory began to receive treatment. NBC had not doctored the 2008 Parade of Nations; the sequence had simply followed a different organizational logic. What started with fury and excited speculation, then, ended limping, with one final rhetorical exclamation from smitth1276:“it doesn’t bother any of you that this is an entirely inaccurate claim? The order wasn’t changed at all, and whoever alleged that it was is smoking crack.” And so the storm ended exactly two days after it began, on the evening of August 11.
Table I.1 SEQUENCE OF THE 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES PARADE OF NATIONS (FIRST TEN COUNTRIES)
Compared to the pageantry of August 8, 2008, 8:08 pm—a decadent onslaught of wireworks, fireworks, synchronized shouting, levitating LCD screens, Han Chinese toddlers donning non-Han minority outfits, an intense cardiovascular workout in the form of human-powered Chinese movable type, and child model Lin Miaoke lip synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the angelic, prerecorded voice of her more talented but apparently less aesthetically acceptable counterpart, Yang Peiyi—the nonalphabetic sequence of the Parade of Nations was more like an astute, Banksy-esque prank carefully crafted to perplex and subvert:
Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Maldives, Malta.
G, T, Y, M.
There is no alphabet here.
Beijing’s prank is even more delicious when we consider that China could have easily played along with IOC mythology by organizing the proceedings according to the Latin alphabet. For four decades or more, scarcely any Chinese dictionary, reference work, or indexing system on the mainland has employed the stroke-count organization used in the parade. To the contrary, in the 1950s mainland China developed and promulgated a Latin alphabet–based phoneticization system known as Hanyu pinyin, or pinyin for short. Designed by Chinese linguists shortly after the Communist revolution of 1949, pinyin is now ubiquitous in China, functioning as a paratextual technology that runs alongside and supports character-based Chinese writing, but does not replace it. Pinyin is not a “Chinese alphabet,” thus, but China’s use of the Latin alphabet toward a variety of ends. When Chinese toddlers first learn to read and write Chinese characters, for example, they learn pinyin at the outset in order to assist them with the memorization of standard, nondialect pronunciation. When computer users in mainland China sit down at their laptops, moreover, the keyboard they use is of the standard QWERTY variety, but is used to produce screen output entirely in Chinese characters (more on this subject later).12
Beijing could have spared Costas and Lauer their embarrassment, and avoided bewildering the global viewing audience, and yet chose not to. Clearly, Chinese organizers did not want to spare us, and herein resides Beijing’s subtle act of defiance—the one truly revolutionary moment in the 2008 ceremonies, and perhaps the only one that did not contribute to their towering budget.
Chinese in the Age of the Alphabet
This is the first of two books charting out a global history of modern Chinese information technology. Divided into seven chapters, this book moves across roughly one century, from the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s to the advent of computing in the 1950s. In the forthcoming book, we will carry this history into the present age of Chinese computing and new media. Over the course of this history, we will see that the encounter between Chinese script and the International Olympic Committee in 2008 was but one of its many encounters with false alphabetic universalisms of one form or another. Whether Morse code, braille, stenography, typewriting, Linotype, Monotype, punched-card memory, text encoding, dot matrix printing, word processing, ASCII, personal computing, optical character recognition, digital typography, or a host of other examples from the past two centuries, each of these systems was developed first with the Latin alphabet in mind, and only later “extended” to encompass non-Latin alphabets—and perhaps nonalphabetic Chinese.
As these information technologies spread around the world, a process of globalization greatly facilitated by European colonialism and later American global dominance, they came to be viewed by many as language-agnostic, neutral, and “universal” systems—systems that worked for everyone and every tongue. In truth, however, such myths of “universality” held up only to the degree that Chinese script was effaced or erased from the story. Remington and Olivetti, as we will see, proudly declared universality on behalf of their typewriters, as did Mergenthaler Linotype and Monotype on behalf of their composing machines, all despite the fact that not one of these companies ever succeeded in breaking into the Chinese-language market—a rather substantial omission in an otherwise triumphal story. Every time Chinese script did show up, as in the 2008 opening ceremonies, it could only lead to awkward situations. Just as engineers in China and elsewhere reconciled Chinese script with one or another of these technologies, moreover, the invention and circulation of a new alphacentric technology rebooted the struggle, again placing Chinese script at risk of being denied entry to and participation in the “next big thing” as it further transformed the worlds of economics, politics, warfare, statecraft, science, and more. Threaded together, then, we are confronted with a 150-year history of “Chinese information crisis, redux.”
Throughout our exploration, we will pay close attention to engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, language reformers, and everyday practitioners who struggled to usher character-based Chinese writing into a modern age of global information, and who subscribed to a common belief that, as one of our historical actors will phrase it, “Chinese characters are innocent” (hanzi wu zui).13 For these individuals, the responsibility for China’s technolinguistic challenges during the modern period rested squarely, not with Chinese characters per se, but with people—engineers who had yet to discover the key to what, in their estimation, was an eminently solvable puzzle, and perhaps everyday users of the language who, if Chinese writing was to survive in the modern age, would need to be willing to engage with this language in unprecedented and perhaps radically new ways. This puzzle would have to be solved quickly, though, for it constituted nothing short of a civilizational trial by which to judge once and for all whether Chinese script was compatible with Modernity with a capital M.
What name shall we give to this long history of false universalisms? Linguistic imperialism leaps to mind, and at first seems to fit the bill. The history of these encounters is inseparable, after all, from the broader history of China’s engagement with Euro-American imperialism. Beginning in the nineteenth century, as we will see, Chinese script was enmeshed within a novel global information order whose infrastructure depended increasingly upon something China did not possess, and could not simply “adopt”: namely, an alphabet. Linguistic imperialism is a short-lived candidate, however, for one critical reason: the issue at hand here is not the dominance or hegemony of any one specific language—be it English, French, or otherwise. This was not a case of a dominant language being imposed upon a subject population, as witnessed in certain colonial language policies during the modern period.
The terms Western imperialism and Eurocentrism are also not quite right. In a counterfactual universe, after all, had the IOC chosen Cairo, Yerevan, Bangkok, or Yangon to host the 2008 games, the pseudo-universalism of IOC regulations would have been compatible, at least linguistically, with any such hypothetical situation. Arabic and Armenian are alphabetic scripts. Thai and Burmese are alphasyllabaries, or abugidas. The Parade of Nations could have unfolded according to existing regulations, and the universalist myth could have lived to mystify another day.
The hegemony at play, then, is not primarily a matter of Occident and Orient, West and East, Roman and Exotic, or even Europe and Asia. It is not reducible to any such crude binaries. Instead, the divide is one that pits all alphabets and syllabaries against the one major world script that is neither: character-based Chinese writing. It is a new hierarchy of script that tells us: while some alphabets and syllabaries are more compatible with modernity than others, all alphabets and syllabaries can take pride in their superiority over Chinese. There is a missing term in our discussion, it would seem: one that would enable us to pay keen attention to the historic origins of this hegemonic system in Euro-American imperialism, while at the same time recognizing how this hegemony enrolls a wide diversity of scripts, both Western and non-Western, into its configurations of power. The true fault line at play here is not the West and the rest, but pleremic and cenemic. So long as a script is cenemic—a writing system in which graphemes represent meaningless, phonetic elements, based on the Greek term kenos, meaning empty—then the IOC’s claim to universality stands, as will those made by the likes of Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, Mergenthaler, IBM, Adobe, and more. It is only in the case of pleremic script—writing systems like Chinese in which graphemes represent meaningful segments of language, based on the Greek plērēs, meaning full—that this universalism breaks down, as it did on August 8, 2008. Thus, while the origins of this hegemony are undoubtedly connected to the history of modern imperialism, nevertheless its expression takes the form of a different kind of binary altogether, one that divides the diverse multitude of cenemic scripts on one side from a singular pleremic script of immense scope and historical span on the other: Chinese.
To Be or Not to Be, That Is Not the Question
China has undergone profound changes over the past five hundred years. At the midpoint of the last millennium, Ming dynasty China was one of the engines of the world economy, one of its largest population centers, and a sphere of unparalleled cultural, literary, and artistic production. Over the ensuing centuries, China witnessed a transformative conquest by a non-Chinese dynasty from the northern steppe; a doubling of the empire’s size, as the consequence of immense Eurasian military campaigns into present-day Mongolia, Xinjiang, and beyond; a period of unprecedented economic and demographic growth during the eighteenth century; the emergence of ecological and demographic crises that spawned the largest and most destructive civil war in human history; colonial incursions by multiple Western nations that rewired the circuitry of global power; the demise of an imperial system over two millennia old; and a period of widespread political and social experimentation and uncertainty.
During the anxiety-ridden nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, Chinese reformers of multiple political persuasions engaged in thoroughgoing critical reevaluations of Chinese civilization in an attempt to diagnose the cause of China’s woes, and to identify which aspects of Chinese culture would need to be transformed to ensure their country’s transition into a new global order intact. Targets of criticism included Confucianism, government institutions, and the patriarchal family unit, among many others.
For a small but vocal group of Chinese modernizers, some of the most impassioned criticism was trained on the Chinese language. Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, famously called for a “literary revolution” to overthrow the “ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy,” and to promote the “plain, expressive literature of the people!”14 “In order to abolish Confucian thought,” the linguist Qian Xuantong (1887–1939) wrote, “first we must abolish Chinese characters. And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking, the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.”15 The celebrated writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) was yet another member of this anti-character chorus. “Chinese characters,” he argued, “constitute a tubercle on the body of China’s poor and laboring masses, inside of which the bacteria collect. If one does not clear them out, then one will die. If Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish.”16 For these reformers, abolishing characters would constitute a foundational act of Chinese modernity, unmooring China from its immense and anchoring past.
To abolish character-based writing invited serious peril, however. What would become of China’s vast corpus of philosophy, literature, poetry, and history, all written in Chinese characters? Might not this inestimable heritage be lost to all but the epigraphers and specialists of tomorrow? Were China to abandon characters, moreover, what would become of the country’s pronounced linguistic diversity? Cantonese, Hokkienese, and other so-called “dialects” of Chinese are as mutually distinct as Portuguese and French. Indeed, many have argued that the coherence and persistence of the Chinese polity, civilization, and culture have in no small part been predicated upon the unifying influence of a common character-based script. Were China to go the route of phonetic writing, would not these linguistic differences in the oral realm be made more insurmountable, and politically charged, once formalized in writing? Might the elimination of character-based writing precipitate the breakup of the country along fault lines of language? Might China cease to be one country, and instead become a continent of countries, like Europe?
The puzzle of Chinese linguistic modernity would appear, then, to be a perfectly irresolvable one. Characters held China together, but they also held China back. Characters maintained China’s connection with its past, but so too did they isolate China from the Hegelian sense of historical progress. How then was China to make this seemingly impossible transition?
Returning to the twenty-first century, where the passages of Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu continue to bejewel the syllabi of countless undergraduate lecture courses on modern Chinese history (and scholarly writings alike), a world presents itself that hardly anyone could have anticipated at the dawn of the twentieth. Chinese characters were not exterminated, and yet China did not perish. Not only are Chinese characters still with us, clearly, but they form the linguistic substrate of a more vibrant world of Chinese information technology than even its most avid defenders could have dreamt of: a spectacularly large and growing presence in electronic media, widespread literacy, an ever-increasing network of Confucius Institutes and early education immersion programs propelled by foreign interest in the acquisition of Chinese as a second language, and continued popular fascination with Chinese characters that has manifested itself in not a few regrettable tattoos. More than ever before, Chinese is a world script. Throughout most of the past century, most assumed that such an outcome was conceivable only if China abandoned character-based writing, and underwent thoroughgoing alphabetization—which it did not. This outcome was not supposed to have been possible, and yet here we are. What happened? What did we miss?
The answer to this question is complex. At the outset, however, one key element can be outlined plainly: In sharp contrast to the popular trope that winners write history, in the case of modern Chinese language reform it is the losers of history who have managed to command the greatest attention of scholars—the Chen Duxius, Lu Xuns, and Qian Xuantongs. Collectively, we have been enamored of this vocal minority’s brand of easy iconoclasm: incandescent, seductively quotable, yet ultimately naive calls to abolish characters, or to replace Chinese writing wholesale with English, French, Esperanto, or one of a variety of competing Romanization schemes. Meanwhile, we know virtually nothing about those who made possible China’s contemporary information environment: iconoclasts who were no less passionate, and yet whose work was grindingly technical, dogged by intractable challenges, but ultimately of unparalleled success and significance. Unlike their celebrated and well-known abolitionist counterparts, the builders and users of the modern-day Chinese information infrastructure never appear on course syllabi, nor are their writings canonized within source compendia on the history of modern China. Indeed, they were often anonymous even in their own times, leaving behind fragmentary sources about their work, and in all but a very few cases never achieving any celebrity.
For these language reformers, the question of Chinese linguistic modernity was never the stark binary advocated by Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu: In the modern age, are Chinese characters to be, or not to be? Theirs was a far vaster, more open-ended, and thus more complex question: In the modern era, and particularly in the modern information age, what will Chinese characters be, and how will the “information age” itself be transformed in the process? Seductive though it may be, To be or not to be? was never the primary question of Chinese linguistic modernity. The question was: To be, but how?
When we move away from the simplistic iconoclasm of character abolitionists, an entirely new history of the Chinese language comes into focus. No longer in the realm of Confucian ethics or Daoist metaphysics, where Chinese characters were criticized by some as the very repositories of antimodern thought—as the “the very nests and lairs in which poisonous and corrupt thoughts reside,” to pull another gem from Chen Duxiu’s abolitionist jewel box17—we find ourselves in the admittedly less sensational yet decidedly more vital realm of Chinese library card catalogs, phone books, dictionaries, telegraph code books, stenograph machines, font cases, typewriters, and more—the infrastructural subbasement of Chinese script whose systems of inscription, retrieval, duplication, categorization, encoding, and transmission make it possible for the above-ground “Chinese canon” to function. We find ourselves in the plumbing and the electrical grid of Chinese.
Throughout the early twentieth century, just as some language reformers were critiquing the Confucian classics, many publishers and educators decried the average time required to find Chinese characters in the leading dictionaries of the era; library scientists lamented how long it took to navigate a Chinese card catalog; and state authorities bemoaned the inefficiency of retrieving names or demographic information within China’s immense and growing population. “Everyone knows that characters are hard to recognize, hard to remember, and hard to write,” one critic wrote in 1925. “But there is a fourth difficulty in addition to these three: they are hard to find.”18 These were problems, moreover, that could not be solved through mass literacy, the simplification of characters, vernacularization, or any of the other lines of action so often treated as synonymous with “language reform.” And if these problems proved insoluble—if it proved impossible to build a telegraphic infrastructure for Chinese, or a Chinese typewriter, or a Chinese computer—then arguably even the most well-meaning efforts at mass literacy and vernacularization would not be enough to realize the ultimate goal: to usher China into the modern era.
Continuity Is Strange
One of the few celebrated explorations of Chinese characters that dwells completely within the space of To be, but how? comes not from the world of scholarship, but from conceptual art. In 1988, the artist Xu Bing unveiled Book from the Sky (Tianshu), a work composed of four thousand fake Chinese characters. Despite their uncanny resemblance to actual Chinese, the graphs that formed the Book from the Sky resist all attempts to be read, offering the viewer no knowable sound (yin), meaning (yi), or shape (xing).19
This triad—yin-yi-xing—is of very old provenance in China, and many would say constitutes the three fundamental dimensions through which to define and understand Chinese writing in all its structural, stylistic, phonemic, and heuristic qualities. For the paleographer and the calligrapher, the most significant part of this triad is the xing or shape, the axis along which it becomes possible to engage with different historical forms of the Chinese character—such as seal script of the first millennium BCE, or clerical script of the Qin and Han dynasties—or with different calligraphic styles, such as “running script” or “grass script.” For the poet and the philologist, by contrast, it is perhaps the yin or sound that stands paramount, being the ontological axis along which one can think about and engage with archaic pronunciations of Chinese words, or craft passages of great lyrical elegance. For the journalist and essayist, meanwhile, yi or meaning is at the core of one’s concern, being the axis along which it becomes possible to find le mot juste or perhaps invent “new terms for new ideas.”20 These axes coexist and cooperate, no doubt: the poet cares for the yi and xing as well; and the essayist concerns herself arguably as much with yin as with yi. Important for us is not to distinguish these three axes, but to note that—in popular conceptions—they seem to exhaust all of the myriad possible understandings of what Chinese writing is, and thus can be.
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky explodes this idea. Exiting the three-dimensional, yin-yi-xing universe altogether, Xu carves a moat of infinite depth between his faux Chinese graphs and anyone—be they poet, essayist, calligrapher, philologist, or mere reader—who would seek to commune with them by means of sound, meaning, or shape. Fundamentally, they should not be “Chinese” at all. Something is wrong, however. If Book from the Sky constitutes a total rupture of the yin-yi-xing triad, and if this triad constitutes the entirety of what makes Chinese Chinese, how then are we still able to recognize Book from the Sky as somehow unmistakably Chinese?
The answer is that the yin-yi-xing/sound-meaning-shape triad does not, in fact, exhaust the entirety of what makes the Chinese character. This three-dimensional space, while accounting for many of the aspects of Chinese script that have occupied our attention for the greater part of history, is nested within further dimensions of writing that are largely invisible, inaudible, and unconcerned with meaning. In this book, I will refer to these dimensions collectively as the technolinguistic.
To inaugurate our discussion of the technolinguistic realm, I draw inspiration from typographer and type historian Harry Carter, who once reminded a somnolent world of a basic fact:
Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand. Bibliographers mostly belong to a class of people for whom it is an abstraction: an unseen thing that leaves its mark on paper. For their convenience it has long been the practice to talk about a typeface, meaning, not the top surface of a piece of type, nor even of many pieces of assembled type, but the mark made by that surface inked and pressed into paper.21
In describing the process of creating Book from the Sky, one as compelling as the finished work, Xu Bing helps us gain a clearer sense of what these dimensions entail. “My requirement of these characters,” he begins by explaining, “was that they resemble Chinese characters to the greatest extent possible, while still not being Chinese.” To achieve this objective, Xu set out on a painstaking analysis of real Chinese characters in order to extract those qualities he would imbue in his fake font. To begin, the particular number of fake characters he chose to produce—four thousand, as compared to one hundred or perhaps one million—came not at random but because it mimicked the statistical realities of character frequency and common usage within actual Chinese. “I decided to make just over four thousand fake characters,” Xu explained, “because average reading material is also made up of around four thousand different characters.” “When you’ve learned four thousand or more characters, that is to say, you can read and thus you’re an intellectual.” Structurally, Xu explained, the creation of his fake characters “required me to observe the internal structural principles of characters.” To that end, Xu carefully examined the Kangxi Dictionary to determine the average stroke count of real Chinese characters, as well as their distribution across a curve from lower- to higher-stroke-count characters—all of which would then inform his production process. Stylistically and aesthetically, meanwhile, Xu Bing did not develop a “fake” font for Book from the Sky, but instead patterned his character forms after one of the most conventional Chinese fonts of all: the Song-style character or songti, widely used in printed Chinese matter well into the present day. “As for the font,” he explained, “I thought to use Song-style characters. Song-style is also called ‘court-style.’ Often being used in important documents and in serious matters, Song-style is the font with the least individual flavor to it—the most standard font.”22 Xu Bing even pushed his exercise in verisimilitude into the realm of taxonomy. He created his own system for organizing his movable type blocks, so that he could retrieve them during the printing process—just like a real compositor.
When viewed through the yin-yi-xing framework, then, Book from the Sky might strike us as an exercise in rupture and discontinuity. When viewed within the technolinguistic realms of taxonomy, instrumentality, statistics, and materiality, however, we see that Book from the Sky was just the opposite: an exercise in continuity,or more accurately, an exploration of just how far one could push technolinguistic continuity and at the same time produce a Chinese script that violated everything that a Chinese script was supposed to be within the confines of the classic yin-yi-xing triad.
Rather than pursuing the history of Chinese script through the conventional fiction of the yin-yi-xing triad, a fiction in which script “comes loose from the metal” (to draw again from Carter), our examination will dwell primarily in a technolinguistic realm that makes the sound-meaning-shape triad possible.23 We will climb into the manholes, crawlspaces, and airshafts of Chinese, exploring all of the complex and fascinating meaninglessness that makes meaning tick.
In concrete terms, what happens when we shift our attention to the technolinguistic? What happens when, following Carter’s observation, we do not let the face come loose from the metal? First, we find ourselves less prepared. Traditionally, scholars of China are exceedingly well-trained at excavating meaning from the sound-meaning-shape triad, and attuned to detecting shifts therein. Indeed, as soon as the words “Chinese language reform” are broached, the thoughts of the historian turn almost instinctively to familiar subject matter: the deluge of newly coined Chinese words derived from other languages; the vernacularization movement of the 1910s and its call for greater congruence between written and spoken Chinese; the widespread development of specialized and professionalized Chinese-language discourses in fields as diverse as paleontology, aesthetics, law, constitutional reform, ethnology, feminism, and fascism; and efforts to forge a “national language” (guoyu) out of the welter of mutually unintelligible dialects. Other common invocations include calls for the Romanization of Chinese and the simplification of Chinese characters for the purposes of mass literacy.
If scholars of China are conditioned to think critically about changes such as these, transformations in the technolinguistic realm find us far less prepared. Changes in the organization of a Chinese phone book, the application of Western-style punctuation marks to Chinese texts, the reorientation of Chinese texts from vertical to horizontal alignment, the employment of numerical coding schemes to transmit Chinese characters over filaments of wire, the statistical analysis of character frequency in order to refine the parameters by which computers retrieve Chinese characters from memory—in short, the humble yet immense information infrastructure that enables the Chinese script to “work”—all seem to constitute “nondestructive” edits within the history of the language. They are changes, to be sure, but not ones that transform Chinese characters in any essential sense, whether in terms of structural makeup, phonetic value, or semantic meaning. What does it matter that a Chinese text is adjusted to read left-to-right where once it was read top-to-bottom? What does it matter that Western-style punctuation marks have been added, or an index, or page numbers, or a bar code? What does it matter that a once paperbound Chinese text is now found in proprietary digital formats like PDF? As long as the structures of the characters, their phonemic values, and their meanings remain the same, has not Chinese stayed the same—and with it the still unbroken, 5000-year hitting streak of the world’s “oldest continuous civilization”?24
The answer is no. The technolinguistic domain does not stand apart from the better known yin-yi-xing triad; in fact, the historical transformations that take place within it—and especially those that throw it into crisis—are arguably more critical than those of sound, meaning, and shape. Consider, for example, what happens when we take a technolinguistic view of three of the subjects that China historians treat as synonymous with the subject of “Chinese language reform”: the simplification of Chinese characters, the vernacularization of Chinese, and the pursuit of mass literacy. When viewed through cognitivist and sociocultural approaches, these three initiatives constitute the very core of language reform, pursuits around which the very question of language crisis seems to pivot. What happens, however, when we are faced with historical actors who were no less passionate about language reform, but whose goals included the creation of a Chinese telegraph code, a Chinese typewriter, Chinese braille, Chinese stenography, Chinese word processing, Chinese optical character recognition, Chinese computing, Chinese dot matrix printing, and more? For these reformers, many of the conventional topics of language reform actually made the problem of Chinese linguistic modernity even harder to solve—or at best had no impact on their pursuits one way or another.
Simplified characters are a case in point. While these were no doubt pertinent to questions of literacy and language pedagogy, a character reduced from sixteen strokes to a mere five—as with “dragon” (long), in its transformation from the graph 龍 to 龙—was no easier to transmit across telegraphic wires, set in movable type, or type on a Chinese typewriter than its “traditional” counterpart. “Simplification” here simplified nothing.
Vernacular Chinese, or baihua, actually made things palpably worse. Vernacular Chinese texts are invariably lengthier than equivalent messages in literary or “Classical” Chinese, and so this movement in the early twentieth century quite literally multiplied the challenges of transmission, inscription, and retrieval. To send a message in vernacular Chinese meant having to send longer messages, which in turn exacerbated the fundamental question even further: namely, of how to transmit, type, save, or retrieve a Chinese character—any Chinese character—in the first place.
Most counterintuitively, mass literacy—that preeminent concern of language reform—exacerbated the problem of Chinese information technology most of all. No longer able to rely upon certain kinds of assumed literate subjects—the literati and Civil Service examinees of old, for example—developers of the modern Chinese information infrastructure not only had to build all of these new and challenging technolinguistic systems, but they had to do so with only vague, imperfect, and constantly shifting understandings of what the millions of new Chinese users of their systems would be like. How literate would these users be, and in what ways? What dialects would they speak? What would their professions and educational backgrounds be? Would they be men or women, girls or boys? In what kinds of technical environments would they be operating? These questions would impinge upon the systems being built, and yet at no point in this history would anyone have a stable answer.
And who precisely had the authority to make such decisions? As party to this vexed transition from Qing imperial subject to informed (and informational) citizen of the new Republic, Chinese intellectual and political elites were undergoing a tortuous transition of their own. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, and most notably in 1905 with the abolition of the Civil Service Examination system, controls that the state and establishment intellectuals enjoyed over the Chinese language steadily crumbled, eliciting acute anxieties over when and how a new regime of language would take shape, what it would look like when it did, and who would be positioned at the apex of this new hierarchy. The uncertainty of this period was further compounded by the rise of an entrepreneurial cultural class, one that rushed into the vacuum left by disintegrating state power in hopes of establishing private and profitable cultural enterprises. Just as concerns over modern information management were reaching fever pitch, then, the combined absence of state control and the rise of the “business of culture” made this an ever giddier and more unsettled time.25
Above all, by turning our attention to the technolinguistic we begin to appreciate just how strange continuity truly is—a point that returns us to Xu Bing and his Book from the Sky. Continuity is strange because, despite commonsense understandings, it is in no way synonymous with conservatism. To continue something—in this case, to continue character-based Chinese script—can be avant-garde, iconoclastic, radical, and even destructive. Phrased differently, while it is virtually a cliché to speak of the “destruction” often entailed in acts of creativity, rarely do we pause to reflect upon the destruction central to acts of continuation. What is more, continuity and discontinuity are not antithetical concepts, as we see with Xu Bing and his fake characters. The question is not to continue or not to continue. The question is what to continue, and which kinds of discontinuity will be essential for achieving that goal. If the diverse actors in our history could be said to share one worldview in common, it could be summarized through recourse to a famous passage from the twentieth-century Italian novel Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Uttered by Tancredi Falconeri, a young prince in a wealthy aristocratic family in Sicily, and nephew to the book’s protagonist, the brief passage contemplates how his family’s position within society might ever hope to survive the tumultuous and unificationist impulses of the Risorgimento as it swept through their Sicilian homeland on its way northward:
Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi.
In order for everything to stay the same, everything must change.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was no turn-of-the-century Chinese language reformer, and yet this passage elegantly captures a belief and impulse that propelled many of the protagonists we will meet in our history. Like Tancredi, they too believed that in order for everything to stay the same, everything must change. “Everything”—or tutto—is the operative term here, of course, which in its repetition corresponds to two separate referents. The first tutto—the one we want to stay the same—is the very yin-yi-xing/sound-meaning-shape triad discussed above: that part of script that lies above the surface, and through which the immense Chinese-language corpus is inscribed, read, appreciated, and more. This is the part of the script that naive iconoclasts would have done away with, whose utterly impractical schemes would have seen it replaced with Esperanto, or French, or one or another alphabetic scheme. By contrast, the second tutto corresponds to something else entirely, something which through its wholesale transformation might enable the salvation of the yin-yi-xing triad. This tutto corresponds to our technolinguistic: the infrastructure of language that, in its modest immensity, enables the language to work in the first place. If this tutto could be ripped apart, broken down, and reconstituted—the way that Chinese characters were categorized, retrieved, transmitted, materialized, ontologized, and indeed conceptualized—then perhaps the Chinese script could survive and even thrive despite our age of alphabetic hegemony.
Field Notes from the Abyss
In this book, we will focus on one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese technolinguistic innovation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Chinese typewriter. In addition to being one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology, so too is this machine—both as object and as metaphor—a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity.
If only it were peppered generously with moments of success and triumph, the story of the Chinese typewriter, and modern Chinese information technology more broadly, would be simpler and more joyous for the telling. If the Western typewriter marked a “revolution in production,” as one historian phrased it, and one that “greatly increased the speed and reduced the cost with which a written document could be produced,”26 our hope would be to make similar claims for the Chinese typewriter—to establish it as the unrecognized equal of its better-known Western counterpart. Another strategy might be to follow the path carved out by wildly popular “object histories,” a veritable cottage industry in which “authors attribute to their chosen commodities an exaggerated, mysterious, almost godlike power,” as Bruce Robbins has phrased it.27 If tulips, codfish, sugar, and coffee have all changed the world, it stands to reason that perhaps the Chinese typewriter did, too.
No such triumphal story awaits the reader. While it might be tempting to identify one or another of our historical figures as the “Chinese Charles Babbage,” the “Chinese Grace Hopper,” or perhaps the “Chinese Steve Jobs,” this would amount to little more than a distracting parlor trick. While the Chinese typewriter did find its way into major Chinese corporations, as we will see, as well as metropolitan and provincial governments across the country, the Chinese typewriter did not transform the modern Chinese corporation or the functioning of Chinese government. For better or worse, no history of the Chinese typewriter can stake its claim upon the idea of “impact.”
With all of this in mind, then, a fair criticism at this point might be: Did China need the typewriter at all, and if not, why do we need a history of it? Would it not be more accurate to say that China “skipped” the typewriter, moving directly to the computing age in the same way that certain parts of the world “leapfrogged” landline telecommunication, and entered directly into the world of cellular phones?28
In one respect, the answer is yes. To the extent that we demand certain things of a technology prior to admitting it into the category of “typewriter”—that it will have transformed the history of modern business communications and record-keeping, that it will have become a fundamental part of the feminization of the clerical workforce, that it will have become a cultural icon whose impact in popular culture extended far beyond its role as a business appliance—then the Chinese typewriter we are about to examine will not seem like much of a “typewriter” at all. Would it not be best simply to come clean, then, and admit that Chinese script is unsuited to the technology of typewriting, and that between the alphabetic and the nonalphabetic lies what has been called a “technological abyss”?29
In another more important way, the answer is resoundingly no. Chinese typewriting may not have approached the scale or centrality of its counterparts elsewhere in the world, and yet in many ways China experienced and engaged with the age of typewriting—and indeed telegraphy and computing as well—much more intensively than did the alphabetic world. As early as the 1870s, the novel inscription technology was known in China, and looked upon with admiration. In his account of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Chinese Customs official Li Gui wrote of the “ingenious” device:
It was set up on a small square table and was only about a [Chinese] foot high and eight inches wide and made of iron. In the middle of it was a clever device embedded with ink, and an iron plate was set up under which were arranged all the letters of the foreign alphabet, twenty-six, like chess pieces, operated by a woman on the staff [i.e., a type-writer]. Paper is placed on the iron plate then, using a technique similar to that of playing the piano in foreign countries, it prints certain letters by means of her hands pressing certain alphabetical keys, while inside the machine an impression of each letter is struck. These are connected together to form words very nimbly and quickly. Offices all buy one, since its uses are many and its cost is only in the range of a little over one hundred dollars. Unfortunately, however, it does not print Chinese characters.30
To build a Chinese typewriter—a sentiment and desire just beneath the surface of Li Gui’s closing remark—would be no small feat. To bring a nonalphabetic script into a technological domain that was built with alphabets in mind, engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, and everyday users had no choice but to bring both script and technology into a shared critical space, posing questions that today might sound like irresolvable Zen kōans, but which in their original contexts were deeply practical ones: What is Morse code without letters? What is a typewriter without keys? What is a computer where what you type is not what you get? The Chinese typewriter was not a new type of mining drill, nor a new type of artillery, nor anything like most of the technologies being imported from abroad during the modern period—technologies that, while they undoubtedly demanded their own forms of intangible cultural, political, and economic practices and worldviews, could at the very least be “switched on” the moment they reached Chinese soil. As linguistically embedded and mediated technologies, Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, and computing explode conventional narratives of “technology transfer” and “diffusion” that have long guided our understanding of how industrial, military, and other apparatuses and practices circulated from Western loci of invention to non-Western loci of adoption.31 Technolinguistic systems such as typewriting, telegraphy, stenography, and computing came with much steeper requirements. Because these systems were conceptualized and invented in direct association with alphabetic script, even the most basic functionality of a Chinese typewriter or a Chinese telegraph code required inventors, manufacturers, and operators to subject both the Chinese script and the technologies themselves to unprecedented forms of analysis and reconceptualization—to scrutinize both Chinese and typewriting, telegraphy, computing, and more. In order for everything about Chinese characters to stay the same, that is, everything about Chinese characters and modern information technology would have to change.
And clearly something did change—radically. In today’s world, China is not only the largest IT market on the planet, but also home to a script that is among the fastest and most successful within our era of electronic writing—despite being nonalphabetic. Even if we accept, then, that from the nineteenth century onward the “technological abyss” between alphabetic and nonalphabetic was real, the fact remains that something happened in this abyss that has entirely escaped our attention. Indeed, if this book can be said to have one primary argument, it is that we must venture into the technological abyss to recover something of great importance that took shape here while the world was not paying attention—something that cannot be captured through conventional, celebratory, impact-focused histories of technology. This expedition, however, requires us to dispense with the easy iconoclasm of the character abolitionists, and equally so with any implicit desire for all histories of technology to be histories of triumph. Our story will be composed of what can only be called a long cascade of short-lived experiments, prototypes, and failures, where even the most successful devices lived only brief lives before disappearing into obscurity. Indeed, many of our Chinese telegraph codes, character retrieval systems, and typewriters were little more than speculations, wild ideas about how Chinese script might survive and function in the age of alphabetic hegemony. Counterintuitively, however, it is precisely within these speculations, short-lived successes, and outright failures that we witness the intensity of China’s engagement with questions of technolinguistic modernity most clearly, and where both the material and semiotic foundations of the modern Chinese-language information infrastructure were slowly and unconsciously being laid. The history of modern Chinese information technology is not one that derives its importance and relevance from the magnitude of its immediate effect, but from the intensity and endurance of its engagement.
Can We Hear the Chinese Typewriter?
As we stand at the rim of the abyss, making final arrangements and provisions for our expedition down into its depths, a troubling question remains: When we finally encounter the myriad elements that populate this abyss—bizarre codes and speculative machines—will we be able to engage with them seriously, as anything other than pale imitations of their “real” counterparts elsewhere in the world? When we learn how many characters per minute a typical Chinese typist could manage in the 1930s, will our minds not immediately juxtapose this against the speeds we know to have been achieved by operators of Remingtons and Underwoods? When we see the chassis of a Chinese typewriter, will our aesthetic sensibilities not instinctively contrast it with the elegant, downright sensual design of the Lettera 22 by Olivetti? And when we first begin to listen to Chinese typewriters, will we be able to hear them through anything other than a soundtrack of modernity that, in our minds, is synonymous with the rat-a-tat cadence of the QWERTY keyboard? Our question is not Can the Chinese typewriter speak? but rather When it speaks, will we be able to hear it?
In 1950, American modernist composer Leroy Anderson (1908–1975) debuted a frenetic piece called “The Typewriter” in which he transformed this Western business appliance into a musical instrument. A soloist—the symphony percussionist, most likely—took his place at the most downstage position, in front of the orchestra, seated before a mechanical typewriter. Nested in an accompanying melody, the typist-percussionist set off on a blazing, nearly unbroken run of staccato thirty-second notes, punctuated by artfully placed rests and, to great comic effect, strikes of the typewriter bell indicating that the end of the line had nearly been reached. The piece was played “allegro vivace,” or “bright tempo,” with its 160 beats per minute evoking Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” Slightly less known than his “Syncopated Clock,” Anderson’s 1950 work found its way into popular consciousness, and has remained an infrequent yet always warmly received part of the cultural repertoire (it was recently performed in Ludwigshafen, Germany, by the Strauss Festival Orchestra Vienna, as well as at the Melbourne Fringe Festival). Perhaps its single greatest promoter came from outside the world of symphony: comedian Jerry Lewis, who performed a mimed rendition in his 1963 film Who’s Minding the Store?
Anderson’s mid-century piece is revealing, for it alerts us to the fuller spectrum of the alphabetic typewriter as an icon of twentieth-century modernity. The typewriter’s day job might have been as an inscription machine and a business appliance, but it also moonlighted as one of the auralities of mass modernity: a sixteenth- and thirty-second-note soundscape in which we have lived now for over a century, continuing to absorb its cadences in the age of computing to the point where it is a taken-for-granted feature of our world. This soundscape was a long time in the making, moreover. In 1928, two decades before Anderson, someone attempted to capture in language the awesome and awful sound of the King Arms Thompson machine gun. While some called it the “Tommy Gun,” riffing on its namesake, others dubbed it the “Chicago Typewriter”—the rat-a-tat of the typewriter likened to the rat-a-tat of bullets fired from a gun. This nickname inadvertently closed a historical circle, it bears noting, with the first mass-manufactured typewriters coming off the assembly line of the one-time Civil War–era weapons-maker Remington—a fact that prompted Friedrich Kittler to draw his famous analogy of the typewriter as a “discursive machine gun.” By the 1930s, it was no longer the typewriter that took its name from the machine gun, however, but the machine gun that took its name from the typewriter.32
Aurality is only one part of the typewriter’s iconography. Within the history of film, the typewriter was promoted long ago from mere set piece to all-but-dues-paying cast member. Whether in His Girl Friday, The 400 Blows, The Shining, All the President’s Men, Jagged Edge, Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, Misery, Schindler’s List, The Lives of Others, or any number of other examples, the typewriter has become an agent of narrative, sometimes even the fulcrum around which entire scenes and stories revolve. One of the machine’s most audacious appearances was in the 1970 Bombay Talkie, in which one scene finds actors dancing on a gigantic typewriter as part of the film’s culminating musical number. Referring to the typewriter as a “fate machine,” the film expands upon this dramatic moniker by explaining that “typewriter keys represent the keys of life and we human beings dance on them. And then when we dance, as we press down the keys of the machine, the story that is written is the story of our fate.” The film’s famed Bollywood number, “Typewriter Tip Tip Tip,” captures this same sentiment with evocative onomatopoeia:
The Chinese typewriter we will meet in this book sounded nothing like Anderson’s virtuoso, and it did not go tip tip tip. Neither did it leave its mark on a single famous Chinese writer. You will find no Chinese coffee table books featuring the likes of Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, or Mao Dun at their faithful Chinese machines, cigarettes drooping James Dean–style from their lower lips. Likewise, there are no museums dedicated to the Chinese typewriter (yet), and with a few exceptions, nothing on par with the global network of collectors and nostalgics that has formed around its alphabetic counterpart. In more ways than one, then, the Chinese typewriter might not strike us as much of a typewriter at all.
As we set out to examine and understand this machine, and the broader history of modern Chinese information technology, the question that must constantly be invoked is thus: are we capable of doing so? To return to the metaphor of sound: if the Chinese typewriter cannot be heard except through Anderson’s score, the Tommy Gun, and the tip tip tip of Bollywood, is it in fact possible to hear this machine at all? This is the principal methodological challenge of this book.
Depending upon the reader’s disposition, this book puts forward answers to this question that might seem either naively optimistic or crushingly pessimistic. I do think it is possible to write a history of the Chinese typewriter, and with it the broader history of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, but only to the extent that we abandon any and all fantasies of hearing this machine “on its own terms.” No such aural space exists or has ever existed: no autonomous, unspoilt soundstage waiting to be reconstructed by the historian that, when rediscovered, will redeem the Chinese typewriter by returning it to its rightful place. The aurality of the Chinese typewriter was and has always been a compromised space, at all times somehow related to, completely ensphered within, and yet distinct from the global soundscape of the “real” typewriter of the West. In listening to the Chinese machine, we can never hope to isolate ourselves in the peace and quiet of an anechoic chamber, dwelling upon the fine texture of its sounds through high-fidelity speakers. The analytical space we occupy is more like a crowded café, music blaring throughout, in which we are straining to hear faint sounds. There exists no such thing as a “China-centered” history of the Chinese typewriter—nor of Chinese modernity.34
Methodologically, the posture I adopt in this book can best be described as agonistic: a posture in which our ultimate goal is not to arrive at a singular, harmonic, conflict-free, and final description of the history in question, but one that makes ample space for, and even embraces, dissonances, contradictions, and even impossibilities that are understood to be productive, positive, and ultimately more faithful to the way human history actually takes shape. To hear the Chinese typewriter, I argue, it is necessary both to interrogate and deconstruct our own longstanding assumptions about technolinguistic modernity—a practice that by now comes naturally to the historian—and to eschew all expectations that the act of critical reflexivity has the power to liberate us from these assumptions. No matter how intently I have listened to the Chinese typewriter over the past decade, and no matter how intently I have sought to denaturalize the cadences of the Remington machine and the QWERTY keyboard that play on perpetual loop in the recesses of my mind, there has never been a point during that time when I could hear the Chinese typewriter all by itself.
Chinese typewriters make sound, of course. They even have their own onomatopoetic counterpart to the tip tip tip of Bombay Talkie, and yet this counterpart cannot be found so easily, and is certainly not celebrated in popular culture. The sound of Chinese typewriters, as it was experienced by those who worked and lived with them, is instead buried in archival documents, where I found that the distinct rhythm and tonality of the Chinese machine was sometimes captured through the clip-clopping term gada gada gada (嘎哒嘎哒嘎哒). In this formulation, the ga refers to an initial sequence of movements entailing the depression of the typing lever, the resulting insertion of the metal slug into the type chamber, and the striking of the platen; while the da refers to a second sequence, entailing the type chamber falling back to its original position, and the ejection of the metal slug back into its original location on the tray bed matrix.
Sound is not the same thing as aurality, however. Even when I heard the machine for myself, with its gada gada gada rhythm, it was Anderson’s typewriter that continued to set the sonic backdrop against which this sound was playing. Gada gada gada has its own rhythm, to be sure, but as for its velocity, my mind could not help but hear it as a half- or whole-note accompaniment to the thirty-second-note-clip of the real typewriter with its tip tip tip and rat-a-tat-tat.
What I steadily came to realize over the course of this research was that the Andersonian score was not something that my historical actors or I had a “view of” or “feelings about”—expressions that suggest some kind of critical distance between the object and the person. More accurately, the technolinguistic consciousness of the modern age is Remington, and to engage the Chinese typewriter is at all times to do so inside the Remington field. To undertake our exploration critically and productively, then, requires engaging with the question of agonism introduced above, beginning with a basic observation: Within and of itself, the deconstruction of our assumptions and categories does not rid us of these assumptions or categories. To historicize and deconstruct something is merely to destabilize it momentarily, to open up brief and fleeting windows of time in which something—anything—might happen that would be impossible if a given concept were allowed to reside in numb, dumb slumber. But the act of deconstruction does not endure. At most, it serves to contribute a tiny pulse of energy to a collective and sometimes exhausting struggle to keep a given concept or configuration “in play” just one moment longer. In this act we perpetually exert ourselves to drag concepts back mere inches from the precipice toward which everything slides inexorably: the precipice that separates the realm of critical thought from the vast wasteland of the given. Pessimistic as this may sound, I consider this invigorating struggle to be what gives critical thought its primary meaning—and to be one of the most pointed answers I can give when, particularly in the present day, humanistic thought is placed beneath the interrogator’s lamp and demanded to justify its existence in our technophilic, anti-intellectual age. Furthermore, I would argue that to eschew or retreat from this agonistic process is to deplete historicism and deconstruction of their only real power. For the scholar who demonstrates the constructedness of a thing, and in any way pretends to have transcended or made unreal the thing thus deconstructed; the scholar who proclaims the decenteredness of his or her approach, and in any way pretends to have smudged this center from our maps; the scholar who dislodges a “master narrative” by multiplying or pluralizing it (modernity/modernities, enlightenment/enlightenments), and imagines that anything has happened other than a consolidation of the master narrative by other means; such acts amount to exiting the field of intellectual struggle altogether, abandoning one’s post, and leaving one’s comrades immersed in a struggle now made incrementally more difficult by being “one intellect down.” As we move forth to understand the history of the Chinese typewriter and Chinese information technology, we must adopt a critical relationship with our own “Remington selves,” to be sure, but at all times remind ourselves that the mere act of critical self-awareness cannot by itself free us from this heuristic and experiential framework. We are not Remington, and we are.
A Word on Sources
This book is based on an eclectic body of sources, compiled over the course of ten years. It encompasses oral histories, material objects, family histories, and archival texts from more than fifty archives, museums, private collections, and special collections in nearly twenty countries. The global scale and diversity of this archive merits attention in at least two ways. First, it speaks to the challenges and inequalities built into writing the history of modern Chinese information technology, especially in constituting the archives one requires to build our histories in the first place. While the history of the information age in the West enjoys countless museums and archival collections dedicated to the subject, nothing comparable is enjoyed by the historian of the information age in China, and arguably in the non-Western world more broadly. For that reason, I had no choice but to build an archive from the ground up, working in collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The history of the modern Chinese information infrastructure has to be pieced together from across a diverse, transnational, and all-but-overlooked cast of characters who fashioned an immense and complex repertoire of coordinated technolinguistic systems that by now govern the Chinese-character information environment in the form of indexes, lists, catalogs, dictionaries, braille, telegraphy, stenography, typesetting, typewriting, and computing.
Second, the scale and diversity of this archive speak to the fundamentally transnational nature of the history in question. Although we will be discussing the “Chinese typewriter,” the term Chinese should not be taken as an adjective describing the nationality, mother tongue, or ethnicity of all our protagonists. Defying simple categorization, the actors in our story comprise a diverse and unusual cast of characters who hailed from all over the world, and yet endeavored to solve the puzzle of Chinese writing in the modern age. To tell the story of the Chinese typewriter requires us to travel, not only to Shanghai, Beijing, Tongzhou, and elsewhere in China, but also to Bangkok, Cairo, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Porthcurno, Philadelphia, and Silicon Valley. As it turns out, by writing the history of the Chinese typewriter, one necessarily sets out upon a global history of the information age.
To begin our exploration of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, in fact, we first head to San Francisco, where we will examine the invention of a Chinese typewriter that will enjoy worldwide fame and transform popular ideas about modern Chinese information technology—all despite the fact that this particular Chinese typewriter will never actually exist.
