‘If Chinese characters are not destroyed, the
Chinese
state is lost’: attempts at script reform
From his highly critical late twentieth-century vantage point,
Shen characterises what he calls ‘the phoneticisation of Chinese
characters’ as the ‘historical badge of an outmoded ideal of
language revolution’. The issue of writing systems for Chinese,
more perhaps than any other problem of language reform, has gone
through a series of bewildering turnarounds in the course of the
century. During the May Fourth modernisation period of the 1910s
and 1920s, many of the most progressive reformers were convinced
that Chinese characters were part of the feudal heritage holding
China back from joining the modern world (a view more recently
revived in the work of one of the Western sinologists critiqued in
Chapter 4 ‒ see Jenner 1992) as summed up in the aphorism of famous
writer and polemicist Lu Xun: Hànzì búmiè, Zhōngguó bìwáng 漢字不滅,中國必亡
‘If Chinese characters are not destroyed, the Chinese state is
lost’ (Lu Xun 1936).
The roots of the three phonemic writing
systems officially introduced in the twentieth century lie in
the qièyīnzì 切音字 or
‘alphabetisation’ movement of the last decades of the Qing dynasty
between about 1890 and 1910, where numbers of attempts were made to
devise phonemic writing systems for Chinese: some based, like the
Japanese kana syllabary, on simplified forms of Chinese
characters; others on the Roman alphabet. The first, promulgated by
the young Republican government in 1918, only six years after its
founding, indeed looks very similar to the kana and was initially named Zhùyīn zìmǔ 注音字母 or
‘Phonetic Alphabet’. This quasi-syllabary, following the analysis
of the syllable in traditional Chinese philology, uses separate
symbols to represent the shēngmǔ 聲母 ‘sound’,
i.e. initial consonants, and yùnmǔ 韻母 ‘rhyme’, i.e. vowel(s) plus final consonant, of
each syllable, along with diacritics to represent tone marks. Still
widely used in Taiwan, where it is popularly known after its four
initial symbols as the bo-po-mo-fo, it is
introduced there in the first year of primary education as an aid
to learning the characters, and also used as a way of annotating
Chinese characters in dictionaries and the like, with the ‘letters’
written alongside each character, very like the Japanese system
of furigana used to
indicate the pronunciation of rare characters. Although initially
intended to function independently, in 1930, just over a decade
after its introduction, the official designation of this system was
changed from Zhùyīn zìmǔ ‘Phonetic
Alphabet’ toZhùyīn fúhào 注音符號
‘Phonetic Symbols’, in order to stress that it was not intended to
be used as an independent writing system.
The second system, Guóyǔ Luómǎzì 國語羅馬字
‘National Language Romanisation’ spelled using its own system
as Gwoyeu Romaatzyh, uses letters of
the Roman alphabet to represent the lexical tones, as well as the
vowels and consonants of the standard language. This insistence on
including tones was widely attacked at the time, particularly
because of the complexity of the ways in which it was indicated,
and despite being arguably the most efficient of the three systems
from a purely linguistic point of view, the National Language
Romanisation was never widely adopted outside scholarly circles; it
survives only vestigially in contemporary usage in the distinction
between the spelling of the two Chinese provinces Shanxi and
Shaanxi, i.e. Shānxī 山西
and Shǎnxī 陝西, where
the doubling of the vowel in the latter indicates the third, or low
dipping tone. These first two systems were introduced in the
political instability of the Republican era (1912‒1949), and for
neither was their relationship with the traditional character
script thoroughly addressed, nor did either receive the
institutional support needed in order to become established as
fully fledged writing systems.
However, among non-government organisations
during this period, particularly on the left of Chinese politics,
calls were widely made for the replacement of Chinese characters by
a system that was easier to learn. The best known of these
‘unofficial’ systems was the script known, using its own spelling,
as Latinxua ‘Latinisation’, i.e.Lādīnghuà 拉丁化
or Latinxua Sin Wenz ‘Latinised
New Script’ i.e. Lādīnghuà Xīn Wénzì 拉丁化新文字, a
Roman-based script quite similar to the current official
romanisation Chinese Spelling, but without indication of tone
marks. This system was implemented first in the Chinese-speaking
parts of the Soviet Union, and then introduced into various parts
of China, particularly the Communist-held areas, in the late 1930s
and early 1940s. Typical of progressive thinking of this period was
Mao Zedong’s 1936 statement to the American journalist Edgar Snow:
‘Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters
altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the
masses fully participate’ (DeFrancis 1984: 248). Many on the left
strongly supported a gradual phasing out of Chinese characters in
favour of a Roman-based script, and such a move was seen as
essential for solving the widespread problems of illiteracy in
China.
However, in the early 1950s, soon after the
establishment of the People’s Republic, official policy suddenly
started to move in reverse, marked initially by a 1950 statement by
Mao that seemed to signal a return to the principles of the earlier
Phonetic Alphabet: ‘The writing system must be reformed, it should
be national in form, the alphabet and system should be elaborated
on the basis of the existing Chinese characters’ (DeFrancis 1984:
259). Over the next few years, the requirement that it should be
‘national in form’ was quietly dropped, and the new phonemic syste,
using the Roman alphabet that was eventually
adopted, Hànyǔ pīnyīn 中文拼音 or
‘Chinese Spelling’, was downgraded in status
from wénzì 文字 ‘script’ to fāng’àn 方案
‘scheme’, with the characters retained as the main writing system,
this time in a simplified form similar to that originally
promulgated by the Nationalist Government in 1935 but withdrawn
less than a year later due to conservative opposition (Fei (ed.)
1997: 64).
By the time of the promulgation of this
third official writing system in 1958, the official list of
‘immediate tasks in writing reform’ announced by the Premier, Zhou
Enlai, put in first and second place ‘simplifying the Chinese
characters’ and ‘spreading the use of the standard vernacular’,
with ‘determining and spreading the use of phonetic spelling of
Chinese’ coming a distant third. Faced with the necessity of
significant reforms in a wide range of other areas, with no
consensus on exactly how script reforms should be carried out, and
a huge weight of conservative inertia opposing any changes at all,
the Government had decided to make some smaller reforms, such as
simplifying the characters to make them easier to use, and leave
the issue of their long-term viability to a later stage. The
Chinese Spelling scheme, far from being envisaged as an autonomous
writing system, like in origin at least to its predecessors the
National Romanisation and the Latinised New Script, was to be
downgraded to the auxiliary role in character learning still
performed in Taiwan by the earlier Phonetic Alphabet to this
day.
The official use of this ‘scheme’, commonly
known as pinyin, is limited in
current practice to signs, maps and dictionaries, and in education
to only the first year of the primary school system. In the early
1960s, not long after its introduction, one of the older generation
of language reformers, novelist Mao Dun, commented ironically on
how his granddaughter, having become fully literate in pinyin in
the first year of primary education, then became illiterate in
Chinese characters for the remaining years of primary school that
it took her to learn the requisite number of characters! (DeFrancis
1984: 268). In contrast, in the early 1990s, linguist Shen
Xiaolong, from a younger generation but far more conservative,
noted with horror that his son was fluent in pinyin but still
didn’t know enough characters to read a simple text (personal
communication). A large amount of linguistic research and
ideological position-taking of the Chinese Cultural Linguistics
movement, of which Shen has been a major figure, has centred around
the characters and their supposedly deep links with the ‘Chinese
nation’ and ‘Chinese culture’. The issue of the status of Chinese
characters in language reform and modernisation is one that has
much broader implications, not only in the scholarly areas examined
in this and previous chapters but in sinophone culture more
broadly.
From gelangma to yufa: adapting Western frameworks
to the Chinese language
Ma’ grammar of 1898 sparked a whole series of grammars of
Chinese from the 1910s into the 1920s and 1930s, supplementing Ma’s
description of classical Chinese with analyses of the
emerging báihuàwén 白話文 or
vernacular written standard which had been adopted as part of the
reforms of the May Fourth modernisation movement. By the late 1930s
when a fair literature on grammar had been built up, a new
generation of linguists began to turn a critical eye on what they
saw as the Indo-European biases of many of these descriptions of
Chinese. A lively debate was carried on in linguistics journals
under the banner of wénfǎ géxīn or
‘renewing grammar’, one of the main protagonists being Chen Wangdao
from Fudan University in Shanghai (Chen 1939/1987). During the
years of the anti-Japanese war (1937‒1945), a string of major new
descriptions of Chinese grammar were produced by linguists such as
Lü Shuxiang (1942/1990) and Wang Li (1944/1985), who both went on
to become major institutional figures in the linguistics
establishment of the People’s Republic, being associated
respectively with the two main seats of institutional power, the
Chinese Department of Peking University and the Linguistics
Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
However, while such descriptions by Chinese
linguists within China, including less mainstream approaches like
that of Gao Mingkai (1948), as well as work from outside the
People’s Republic like Chou Fa-Kao on classical Chinese (Chou
1959‒1962) and Yuen Ren Chao (1948, 1968) in the United States, did
go a long way towards the goal of a description of Chinese grammar
on its own terms, the lack of a native grammatical tradition in
Chinese linguistics meant that these descriptions were still
effectively carried out within Western-derived frameworks. Indeed
the main difference between earlier descriptions of Chinese
like Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar (Ma
1898/1953) and A New Grammar of the National Language (Li 1924)
with ‘renewed’ descriptions like Modern Chinese Grammar (Wang
1944/1985) was that the latter not only had the advantage of
several decades of debate and descriptions seeking to look at
Chinese grammar through Chinese eyes, but also drew on a more
sophisticated understanding of Western grammatical theory, as well
as developments in the still emerging field of Western linguistics
in the first half of the twentieth century. The term itself had
also undergone evolution over this period, with Ma’s sound
translation gēlángmǎ 葛朗瑪
replaced by the ‘calque’ (loan
translation) wénfǎ 文法 ‘rules
of writing’, e.g. in Li (1924), and then
by yǔfǎ 語法 ‘rules
of language’, e.g. in Wang (1944/1985) (wénfǎ remains standard on Taiwan,yǔfǎ on the mainland).
Although various Western theories of
language were taken up and applied to Chinese by various Chinese
linguists, often after overseas study, the most influential was the
brand of American structuralism (Bloomfield 1933) developed by Chao
Yuen Ren in his pedagogical work Mandarin Primer (Chao
1948). In origin a language textbook developed at Harvard as part
of the US war effort, it contained an opening section on grammar
which summed up with great conciseness, consistency and elegance
the major features of Chinese grammar as Chao saw them. This
grammatical section of the book was quickly translated into Chinese
(Li 1952) and had an enormous impact, perhaps not least because of
Chao’s impeccable credentials both as a linguist and a major figure
in the language reforms of the 1910s and 1920s.
Just at this time, major educational
reforms were being undertaken on the mainland as part of the
general reforms of the early period of the People’s Republic of
China, and a framework very close to Chao’s was adopted in
the Zànnǐ hànyǔ jiàoxué xìtǒng 暫擬漢語教學系統 Provisional System for Teaching Chinese
Grammar published in 1956, which became the basis of the
grammatical knowledge taught in schools and universities. After the
more than a decade-long hiatus in higher education caused by the
Cultural Revolution (1966‒1978), it was this framework which became
fossilised in mainland linguistics and endures essentially
unchanged to this day. The type of grammatical knowledge it
provides is used largely for the kind of ‘parsing and analysis’
exercises associated with traditional (Latin) grammar in the West,
and it is perhaps doubtful that it has helped to fulfil Ma
Jianzhong’s original patriotic aim for the teaching of
grammar.
The type of linguistics represented by this
grammatical system is thus vulnerable on a number of fronts.
Practically speaking, it is limited to a basically passive or
analytical knowledge of the language which arguably has limited
value in solving problems of literacy or language teaching. In
Shen’s ‒ admittedly biased ‒ summing up of the situation, put
forward in an article addressed to language teachers:
[M]any experienced teachers of Chinese grammar feel, in
varying degrees, that students benefit little from the current
grammar teaching in terms of their comprehension and use of
Chinese. Some teachers propose that our teaching would be much more
effective if we asked students to read some literary classics
instead of teaching them grammatical rules.
(Shen 1988a: 40)
Ideologically speaking, moreover, the history of the development
of this system is irredeemably associated with introduced Western
concepts and frameworks which successive generations of Chinese
linguists have struggled to adapt to the ‘reality’ of Chinese. The
door was thus wide open for an iconoclast and patriot like Shen
Xiaolong to take a sledgehammer to the whole edifice.
Foreign versus native: the paradox of reactive
relativism
Of
all the academic salvos fired over language reform in the last
hundred years, Shen’s aggressive announcement of the arrival on the
scene of Chinese Cultural Linguistics in a 1989 essay must at least
be one of the most unconventional. It is hardly a coincidence that
it was published, not in a linguistics journal but rather in the
literary journal Shulin, and in a column
devoted to authors writing about their own work, since it reads far
more like the manifesto of a literary movement than a serious
scholarly statement:
Almost a hundred years after [the publication
of Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar], not one of the
Western grammatical categories introduced by Ma Jianzhong accords
with the linguistic intuition of Chinese speakers. … On the verge
of a new century, Chinese linguistics has fallen into unprecedented
bewilderment. In the normal course of things, this bewilderment
should have become a turning point, sparking philosophical
reflection and a paradigm shift in linguistics. Chen Wangdao, Zhang
Shilu, Guo Shaoyu, Qi Gong, Zhang Zhigong, Gao Mingkai and other
language scholars have all issued thought-provoking warnings about
the ‘foreign framework’ of modern Chinese linguistics, but these
efforts have all been nullified by the wily old gentleman in the
capital of Chinese linguistics. Into a Chinese linguistics beset
with crisis he has injected the tranquilliser of ‘dealing with
facts’.
(Shen 1989a: 347)
Shen contends that, despite all the revising and ‘refining’ of
the system of grammatical categories introduced by Ma Jianzhong,
the basic framework is still a ‘formalist’ Western one and
therefore unable to deal with what he dubs the ‘humanistic’ nature
of the Chinese language. Shen characterises the current ideology of
grammatical description in China as one of wùshí 務實 or ‘dealing with facts’, whereby the younger
generation of linguists are encouraged by their masters, as
represented here by the ‘wily old gentleman in the capital of
Chinese linguistics’ (code for Lü Shuxiang, longtime Head of the
Linguistics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) to
mechanically collect the ‘bricks and tiles of linguistics’ and not
to worry about the reasons for doing so. As Shen sarcastically sums
up the supposedly atheoretical current practice (Shen 1989a: 349):
‘“dealing with facts” means acting according to the blueprints
provided by the people who earnestly exhort us to “deal with
facts”!’
Shen’s earliest work was on classical
Chinese (Shen 1988b), and he possesses great familiarity with the
traditional methodologies of xiǎoxué ‘philology’. This background still carries a certain
amount of scholarly authority in Chinese linguistics, not yet a
hundred years since the classical language ceased to be the
official written medium, and features of the classical language
such as monosyllabism, lack of morphology and the seeming lack of
formal, as opposed to semantically based rules of grammar ‒ all of
which are in sharp contrast to the paradigm ‘Indo-European’
languages like Classical Greek and Sanskrit ‒ seem to set it apart
as a special case, at least viewed through European eyes. In fact,
the earliest forms of Chinese known to us do contain vestiges of
morphological variation in related morphemes, commonly written with
the same character, such as the example of
長 cháng ‘long’ and zhǎng ‘to become long, to grow; senior’ that we saw in
Chapter 4.
As was also pointed out there, the
monosyllabism of Old Chinese is also a general tendency rather than
an absolute rule. And as for whether the rules of Chinese grammar
are better understood as ‘form-based’ or ‘meaning-based’, that
would seem to be as much a function of the kind of framework used
to describe them as of any supposedly inherent feature if the
language itself. In any case, such features are far less evident in
the modern language, but with the popular conflation of all
historical forms of Chinese as ‘the same language’, one to which
Shen seemingly subscribes, in Shen’s eyes neither classical nor
modern Chinese should be subject to the so-called ‘universal rules’
of Western grammar.
Modern Chinese linguistics is in fact
unthinkable without Western borrowings. This is not making some
sort of imperialistic claim about Western scholarship, which was
after all itself heavily influenced by the discovery by European
scholars in the eighteenth century of historical links between many
European and Indian languages ‒ hence the ‘Indo-European’ family of
languages often invoked by Chinese linguists as an opposite ‒ as
well as by the highly developed Indian traditions of syntactic and
phonological analysis (Robins 1997: 163). Chinese linguistic
scholarship had earlier been profoundly influenced by Indian
phonological theories during the period of the introduction of
Buddhism from the fourth century CE. However, for many Chinese linguists past and present,
one of the prominent members of the latter group being Shen
Xiaolong, the current Western-derived framework poses huge
practical and ideological problems:
Once this theory and method have completely discarded the
spiritual shackles of though it may still draw on the experience
of) the Western grammatical framework, it will still have two
scientific reference points: firstly, the cultural determinism
existing between the Chinese language and Chinese philosophy, art,
literature, aesthetics, and even way of thinking … secondly,
categories and methods used in the ancient Chinese traditions of
language analysis. These categories and methods are much closer to
the linguistic intuitions of Chinese people, and after scientific
systematization and interpretation can be transformed as the basis
for the analysis of modern Chinese. To this new linguistic paradigm
for Chinese, which takes the humanistic nature of Chinese as its
ontology, and the cultural nature of Chinese and the scientific
analysis and exegesis deriving from the Chinese linguistic
tradition as its methodology, I have given the name of ‘Cultural
Linguistics’.
(Shen 1989a: 353‒354)
Shen’s manifesto for a ‘new linguistic paradigm’ shows a
significant ambivalence about the Western roots of modern Chinese
linguistics, particularly in the area of grammar. Shen’s
unconscious reliance on Western standards is revealed by such
self-contradictory statements as ‘Once this theory and method have
completely discarded the spiritual shackles of (though it may still
draw on the experience of) the Western grammatical framework’.
There are good reasons, as pointed out above, for the lack of a
native grammatical tradition in China, and the fact that modern
Chinese is still a very different language from an Indo-European
language like English does not mean that the two are totally
incommensurable. The main problem with influence from one
linguistic tradition to another is not that it happens at all ‒
after all, how could it be prevented? ‒ but rather that it takes
place on far too specific a level (Halliday 1993), such as earlier
European attempts to analyse Chinese sentence structure in terms of
the traditional noun ‘cases’ of Latin grammar (e.g. Mullie 1932).
Shen’s ideologically driven need to prove that Chinese is ‘different’ only ends up trapping
him in a superficial and reactive type of
relativism that cannot deal with the actual similarities and
differences between languages.
A good example of this is the claim,
continually made by Shen and others in the Chinese Cultural
Linguistics movement, that the Chinese language is ‘unique’ (that
word again!), a term that also figures largely in popular discourse
about the language. If we take such a claim seriously, that is, if
we accept that there is only one language in the whole world quite
like Chinese (in itself a rather fuzzy concept), we may seem to be
doing nothing but stating a rather obvious truism. On purely
linguistic grounds, if we take the Chinese group of languages,
commonly referred to as ‘dialects’ (Chinesefāngyán 方言 or
‘regional (forms of) speech’), ‘regionalects’ (DeFrancis 1984),
‘topolects’ (Mair 1991), or more recently in scholarly circles as
‘Sinitic languages’ (Chappell 2004), as a whole, it is not
difficult to show, despite some obvious links with related
languages such as Thai or Burmese on the one hand, and some
features shared with neighbouring languages like Vietnamese or
Mongolian on the other, that Chinese exhibits a particular mix of
phonological, grammatical and semantic features that is not
replicated in any other language of language group.
However, once we start looking at it in
more detail, and attempt to enumerate the supposedly ‘unique’
features of Chinese, this claim begins to look a bit shakier. Take,
for example, Shen’s claim that ‘in my Masters thesis, I put forward
a uniquely Chinese sentence type ‒ the topic‒comment type’ (Shen
1989a: 351). Apart from the dubious procedure of implying as his
own ‘discovery’ an analysis of Chinese first suggested, to my
knowledge, by Yuen Ren Chao in his Mandarin Primer of 1948,
explicitly stated in the same author’s Grammar of Spoken Chinese in 1968,
and then developed by Charles Li and Sandra Thompson in their 1976
paper ‘Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language’, what exactly
does such a claim entail? Chao’s understanding of the topic‒comment
distinction was that it replaced the subject/predicate distinction
familiar from the European grammatical tradition. In other words,
Chinese sentence structure, rather than being given the
actor‒action interpretation that seems to work for many European
languages, is better understood as consisting of a relationship
between a topic for discussion and something said about that topic
(Chao 1948: 35, 1968: 69‒75). Li and Thompson interpreted this
distinction differently, claiming that both subject and topic were relevant to the analysis of Chinese, with
the former understood as identifying the actor, and the latter as
setting the framework for discussion. They then classified certain
languages like Chinese as ‘topic prominent’, other languages like
English as ‘subject prominent’, and still others, like Japanese and
Korean, as ‘both topic prominent and subject prominent’ (Li and
Thompson 1976).
Shen does not argue for his own analysis in
detail, simply stating that ‘in the recognition of [the
topic‒comment sentence type], not only is it impossible to start
from form, there is no way of finding it among the categories of
Western grammar’ (Shen 1989a: 351). The positiveness of this
statement is rather staggering, especially as the earliest
formulation in the writings of the Greek sophists of the concept
which eventually developed into ‘subject’ was one much closer to
‘topic’ than to ‘actor’ (Robins 1951; Halliday 1977); and the
related concept of ‘theme’ has been widely applied in the twentieth
century by linguists of the Prague School and other functional
schools in linguistics (see Hasan and Fries 1995). A puzzling
feature of Shen’s claim is that he is in some measure well aware of
this. An earlier article of his, ‘Topic‒Comment Sentences in
Chinese and their Typological Significance’ (Shen 1984), written in
a much more sober style, discusses the origin of what he calls the
‘subject‒predicate binary’ in Greek linguistics; although he is
seemingly unaware of its original use by the Sophists, referring
only to the actor‒action interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, and
its application to Chinese philosophy and linguistics from the late
nineteenth century. Here too, however, although correctly
noting that ‘subject and predicate are grammatical categories
abstracted from Western language facts’ (Shhen 1984: 144), he seems
determined to prove that such an analysis could not possibly be
applicable to Chinese because of the ‘essential typological
difference between Indo-European languages and Sino-Tibetan
languages’ (Shen 1984: 145).
This ‘essential typological difference’
hinges on the supposed lack of morphology in Chinese, as opposed to
the rich morphology of ‘Western languages’ ‒ plausible if we are
comparing, say, Old English to Old Chinese but not so obvious for
Modern English and Modern Chinese ‒ which he argues calls for a
‘humanistic’ rather than ‘formalised’ approach to the description
of Chinese. The basis for such a claim is made clear in the
following passage from his 1989 ‘manifesto’:
I believe that all the characteristics of Chinese are a
manifestation of its strongly humanistic nature. This is a
fundamental difference between Chinese and Western languages. The
fact that Western languages are rich in morphological markers means
that Western linguistics can easily come up with a set of
formalised analytical procedures and theoretical goals and systems
compatible with formalisation. However, once a tradition deriving
from the scientistic nature of Western descriptive linguistics is
applied across the board to the analysis of the facts of a language
like Chinese that is non-morphological and strongly humanistic in
nature, it will inevitably become intolerably
restrictive.
(Shen 1989a: 353‒354)
This statement reveals some interesting ideological sleights of
hand. First there is the semantic slippage from ‘formal (i.e.
morphological) markers’ to ‘formalised procedures’ which implies
that the nature of Western languages makes them supposedly more
amenable to either a formal analysis, i.e. concentrating on form
rather than meaning, and/or analytical procedures that are
formalised, i.e. performable automatically by a computer. Apart
from mixing together two very different concepts under (almost) the
same label, this implies that the so-called ‘Western languages’ (a
very vague concept in itself) are somehow ‘essentially’ oriented to
form, while ‘Chinese’ (another vague concept, at least in Shen’s
usage) is ‘essentially’ oriented to meaning, ignoring the fact that
all languages work by linking form to meaning.
Second, and perhaps more significant from
an ideological point of view, is the fact that the supposed
‘unique’ (that word again!) characteristics of Chinese ‒
non-morphological and humanistic ‒ are both
defined negatively in contrast
to the ‘morphological’ and ‘scientistic’ Western languages: in
other words, Shen can only say what
Chinese is by saying
how it is not like Western languages. Much of the rhetoric of
Chinese Cultural Linguistics and other more recent manifestations
of Chinese cultural nationalism fall into this trap of what I have
called ‘reactive relativism’, and these sweeping claims, and the
impatience with the details of linguistic analysis which often go
hand in hand with it, all seem to stem from the same patriotic
compulsion to claim an unassailable status for the Chinese
language, like the Chinese state, on the world stage.
Can China say ‘no’?: homegrown versus imported
solutions to language problems
The sorts of questions agonised over in the language arena are
not confined to linguistic problems alone.
Perhaps the major question faced by Chinese thinkers in the
modern era has been: How to modernise? ‒ can we do it in a way that
grows out of and respects our own traditions, or do we need to
follow the path already blazed by the West? Shen reflects on this
situation in his typically high-minded rhetoric:
The vicissitudes of 20th century Chinese linguistics are a
kind of cultural phenomenon which reflects a common failing in the
borrowing of Western learning among the human sciences in recent
Chinese history: that is, inadequate preparation in thought and
cultural theory. We have never had the opportunity to carry out a
thorough and profound self-examination in regard to our native
cultural traditions. Not only have we been unable to grasp the
particular patterns of Chinese culture, we have also been unable to
understand the quintessence of Western culture. Gazing from afar on
the deep-seated tradition of the West, we see only the harvest and
not the sowing; yearning for its surface glories, we have not
sought to thoroughly understand it, but merely enjoyed its
benefits. Today in researching this cultural faultline we must
dissect this morbidity in cultural psychology. This not only
relates to a critique of the value of Chinese and Western culture,
but also to the self-confidence of the race.
(Shen 1989b: 282)
Shen’s concluding remarks in hsi 1989 book come back to the
paradox from which he started ‒ the contradiction between the
‘humanism’ of the Chinese language and the ‘scientism’ of Chinese
linguistics ‒ but broaden his critique from a ‘crisis’ of a
particular discipline to a ‘morbidity’ of a whole intellectual
tradition. Shen’s arguments, with all their exaggerations, do
represent a serious attempt at the ‘thorough and profound
self-examination’ he calls for. Moreover, the sorts of nationalist
sentiments espoused by Shen are not confined to academic or
educational spheres but have resonances with nationalistic
movements in China and abroad. This development is well represented
by the title of a book published in the
mid-1990sZhōngguó kěyǐ shuō ‘bù’ 中國可以說‘不’ China can say ‘No’ (Song
Qiang et al. 1996; a
more recent book including one of the same authors has the equally
childish-sounding title Zhōngguó bù gāoxìng 中國不高興 China isn’t happy (Song
Xiaodong et al. 2009).
The tenor of this book, ironically based on
a Japanese original written by then current Mayor of Tokyo arguing
that Japanese should come out from under the shadow of the United
States and ‘say no’ to a number of other countries, including
China, is well summed up by the following slogans from its
Foreword:
America can’t be led by anyone, it can only lead
itself.
Japan can’t be led by anyone, sometimes it can’t even lead
itself.
China too doesn’t want to be led by anyone, it only wants
to lead itself.
(Song et al. 1996: 3)
The sorts of nationalist political rhetoric put forward in this
tract and many other similar ones in recent years is of a piece
with the whole edifice of Shen’s arguments for the ‘uniqueness’ of
the Chinese language. Both these political and cultural
nationalisms argue, in effect, for the need to treat China as a
special case, a theme that goes back to official mainland rhetoric
of the 1970s and 1980s about Zhōngguó guóqíng 中國國情 or
‘Chinese characteristics’ (Barmé and Jaivin 1992: 366‒367); see
also McDonald 1995). Both are manifestations of a continuing and
uneasy accomodation in Chinese political and intellectual circles
to the ‘decentring’ of China since the incursions beginning with
the Opium Wars of the 1840s. The unfinished nature of this
accommodation is aptly summed up in a superficially neat division
of labour recommended by the late Imperial reform
slogan Zhōngxué wéi tǐ, Xīxué wéi yòng ‘Chinese
learning as essence, Western learning as application’.
The problem is that after the huge foreign
borrowings of the intervening period, borrowings which have
fundamentally transformed Chinese culture, no-one is quite sure any
more exactly what the ‘Chinese essence’ might look like, a paradox
reflected in the schizophrenic world view of both Chinese Cultural
Linguistics and popular nationalistic rhetoric.
Conclusion: orientalism versus occidentalism in
understandings of Chinese
We
saw that the kinds of rhetoric explored in Chapters 4 and 5 under
the label of ‘character fetishisation’ also extend beyond the
writing system as such into discussions of the grammar of Chinese,
and more broadly into characterisations of Chinese society and
culture. I noted briefly in Chapter 4 the existence of a similar
phenomenon in Japan known as Nihonjinron, i.e. 日本人論 or
‘Discussions on Japaneseness’. Although in China there is no fixed
term for such discourse, we could perhaps follow the Japanese
example and coin the term Zhōngguórénlùn 中國人論 or
‘Discussions on Chineseness’. Both kinds of discourse would,
paradoxically perhaps, count as types of ‘orientalism’ in Said’s
terms, since although they are being produced by the ‘natives’
rather than by the ‘foreigners’, their roots lie in the historical
pressures on the native sense of self in these countries, and on
the whole East Asian region which long had China at its core,
stemming from the incursions ‒ military, economic, social,
intellectual and cultural ‒ by the modernising West.
Such examples of Zhōngguórénlùn are
recurrent best-sellers in China, and sometimes even come from the
pens of non-Chinese authors: as witness the work of retired British
naval officer Gavin Menzies on the Zheng He naval expeditions of
the 1400s to the 1420s, which neatly turns the tables on Da Gama,
Columbus and their European imperialistic ilk by
proclaiming 1421 as The Year China Discovered the World (Menzies
2002 ‒ in the USA the book was published with the
subtitle The Year China Discovered America, which perhaps
made the trumping of Columbus more pointed). Although Zheng He’s
actual achievements in leading a Chinese fleet as far as East
Africa are impressive enough, Menzies’ extrapolations from the
historical record have about as much historical justification as
the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, for which Zheng He, also known as
San Bao, was apparently the inspiration. In relation to the kind of
evidence Menzies adduces in support of his claim that Chinese
explorers ‘discovered’ parts of the globe well before their
European counterparts, a sceptic might note that the famous Piri
Reis map which Menzies uses to good effect in his first book was
explained by an earlier author as based on a photograph taken by
aliens from a spaceship (see von Däniken 1971)!
The sort of historical revisionism and
cultural triumphalism characteristic of Menzies and his Chinese
counterparts finds its equal and opposite reaction in the highly
critical re-evaluations of Chinese history, culture and even
national character found in the 1988 mainland TV
documentary River Elegy (see Barmé
and Jaivin 1992: 366‒368), or Taiwanese controversialist Bo Yang’s
book The Ugly Chinaman (Bo 1992).
This historical roots of such ideas lie in the agonised national
self-critique of the May Fourth period, when the fortunes of the
Chinese state were almost at their lowest ebb, but enough remains
of that lack of self-confidence, even now when China is playing a
much more assertive role on the worl
