Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 9781108478281

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DIALECT AND NATIONALISM IN CHINA, 1860-1960 GINA ANNE TAM

Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960

Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform “peasants” into citizens, Gina Anne Tam’s pathbreaking work centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan – languages such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. She traces how, on the one hand, linguists, policy makers, bureaucrats, and workaday educators framed fangyan as nonstandard “variants” of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. She simultaneously highlights, on the other hand, the folksong collectors, playwrights, hip-hop artists, and popular protestors who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China’s national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation – one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many – interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself. Gina Anne Tam is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Trinity University, San Antonio.

Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 Gina Anne Tam Trinity University, Texas

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108478281 DOI: 10.1017/9781108776400 © Gina Anne Tam 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tam, Gina Anne, 1986– author. Title: Dialect and nationalism in China, 1860–1960 / Gina Anne Tam. Description: 1. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019038302 (print) | LCCN 2019038303 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108478281 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108776400 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language policy – China. | Chinese language – Variation. | Language and languages – Political aspects – China. | Language spread – Political aspects – China. | Language planning – China. | Language and culture – China. Classification: LCC P119.32.C6 T36 2020 (print) | LCC P119.32.C6 (ebook) | DDC 306.44/951–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038302 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038303 ISBN 978-1-108-47828-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my parents, Sam and Toni Russo, and my husband Tam Wing Sun

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments A Note on Romanization and Characters Introduction

page viii ix xiii 1

1 A Chinese Language: Fangyan before the Twentieth Century

35

2 Unchangeable Roots: Fangyan and the Creation of a National Language

72

3 The Science of Language in Republican China

111

4 The People’s Language: Fangyan under Communism

147

5 The Mandarin Revolution: Fangyan in Maoist China

186

Epilogue

210

Works Cited Index

231 256

vii

Figures

0.1 Zhongguo Hanyu fangyan (the dialects of China) page 22 1.1 Bible publications organized by language 49 1.2 Hymnal in Ningbo dialect with romanized script and characters 54 1.3 Book of Genesis in Fuzhou dialect 55 1.4 T. P. Crawford’s phonetic symbols for Chinese dialects 57 1.5a August Schleicher’s Stammbaum model 62 1.5b Detail of August Schleicher’s Stammbaum model 62 2.1 A picture of the Han people’s miserable situation 106 2.2 Diagram showing the evolution of Chinese for the last four millenniums 109 3.1a Initials of thirty-two Wu dialects from Yuen Ren Chao’s Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect 129 3.1b Detail of first five rows of the initials chart of Yuen Ren Chao’s Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect 130 3.2 A comparison of initials in the Zhongxiang dialect and Guoyin 132 3.3 A comparison of initials in the Nanjing dialect and Guoyin 133 3.4 A recreation of Luo Xianglin’s Hakka finals 143 3.5 An abbreviated sketch of the place of articulations in the Hakka language 144 4.1 Example of a Chinese fangyan survey organizational card 174 4.2 Diagram of the human mouth to guide instructors in Putonghua phonology 178 6.1 Beijing-ese: “leng shenr” 215 6.2 I love Cantonese, I don’t speak “stewed winter melon” 222 6.3 What is a fangyan? 224 6.4 Cantonese is my mother tongue 226

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Acknowledgments

One of the joys of researching this book was reading letters between the men featured in its narrative. They wrote to one another about phonological patterns they discovered; they asked one another to read drafts of manuscripts. They offered praise, support, and affection; they inquired about health and sent love to each other’s families. It is and always has been entirely obvious to me that this book was the product not of my own mind, but of the assistance, encouragement, and support so kindly provided by dozens of people whom I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with over the past decade. But as I read the letters that floated between and among these Chinese linguists, from Upsalla to Kunming, the process of writing this book began to feel as though I was participating in a grand scholarly tradition of garnering inspiration from the people whom I am lucky to know. I wish I could thank every single person who made this book possible. I will start with this list. First and foremost, I am indebted to Thomas Mullaney, whose role in my academic career could not be overstated. For over a decade, he offered pointed criticism, tireless encouragement, and unwavering support. This project would be nothing like it is today without his guidance. Matthew Sommer taught me to never forget that history is ultimately the story of people – histories of cultural constructs, new ideas, and political structures are meaningless without attention to the erudite magistrate, the passionate rebel, or the determined daughter who created these intangible structures or were affected by them. In its early stages, this project also benefited greatly from the thoughtful comments of Haiyan Lee, who pushed me in new directions, and Miyako Inoue, who offered insight into expanding this project’s implications. Kären Wigen’s years of exacting critiques made me a better writer. Before I began this project, I was privileged to begin my training as a historian at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Robert E. Cook Honor’s College. In particular, Alan Baumler was an inspiring mentor, who taught critical thinking and passion for history through example. ix

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Acknowledgments

Also at Stanford, I was fortunate to be surrounded by my very own shuren hui – a group of inspiring individuals who challenged me to be a more thoughtful scholar. A debt of gratitude is thus owed to Wesley Byron Chaney, for our long shop-talk coffees, Alexander Statman, for endless gchat discussions on the argument and scope of this project, and Y. Yvon Wang, for their patient encouragement and feedback on chapters. This book – indeed, my life as an academic – would never have taken form without their support and friendship. Jeffrey Weng, cofounder of the (unofficial) Yuen Ren Chao fan club, introduced me to new sources, new directions, and new ideas. In this manuscript’s final stages, the introduction benefited from the thoughtful feedback of Rachel Leow, Sajida Jalalzai, and Zachary Smith, and Fang Xu aided me in my translations of Shanghainese rap. Many others gave me feedback and perspective while writing, including, though of course not limited to, Yumi Moon, Jun Uchida, Victor Mair, Andrew Elmore, David Fedman, Melissa Inouye, Russell Burge, Joseph Seeley, Sarah Pittock, Molly TaylorPolesky, Lisa Wilcut, Madihah Akhter, Wu Yulian, Philip Thai, and Hirata Koji. As I edited this manuscript from a dissertation into the book you hold today, I have been privileged to work within my new intellectual home of Trinity University. Carey Latimore has offered unwavering support for fieldwork and research, and fiercely protected exceedingly precious free time for me to complete this project. Anene Ejikeme, Ken Loiselle, and David Lesch have been supportive and thoughtful neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Thanks to Margaret Alvarado for always so graciously granting my last-minute requests to use databases at the UT library in Austin, and Michael Hughes for his excellent advice on images, copyright, and Hong Kong waffles. And finally, my delightful students at Trinity, whether they knew it or not, have consistently inspired me to hone and reevaluate key concepts related to this project. In particular, I want to thank Nathanial Pigott, Alex Liu, and Linus Chan for their insightful discussions and careful work helping me organize piles of notes from the archives. I’d also like to thank my First Year Experience students in 2016–2018 for indulging in sustained discussions about the meaning of Chinese-ness and authenticity, conversations that shaped my thinking as much as I hope it shaped theirs. While in China, I was blessed with the help of Sun Yat-Sen University professors Li Aili, Huang Tianji, and Shi Qisheng, as well as Hou Jingyi at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Rulong at Xiamen University, Xu Baohua at Fudan University, and Li Xingjie at Qingdao University. Guo Hong’s tremendous generosity with sources saved me months of work in the archives. I am grateful for Xu Ting’s hospitality in

Acknowledgments

xi

Shanghai, and Yang Yongyan’s delightful conversation in Guangzhou. I am also forever fortunate to have serendipitously stumbled upon Amy O’Keefe and Christopher Tang in the reading room at the Shanghai Archives. Our lunchtime conversations encouraged me out the door on those days when I felt burdened and overworked. Thanks are also owed to Stephanie Tang, who, besides inspiring me to investigate Liu Bannong’s role in my narrative, was also a wonderful roommate and kayaking partner. I have had the privilege of sharing parts of my work at a series of conferences and workshops with brilliant colleagues, each of whom has helped sharpen my argument and read my sources more deeply. In particular, I am indebted to Robert Culp, Farina Mir, Jie Zhang, and Fati Fan, all of whom took part in an inspiring manuscript workshop that took this book’s potential to new heights. I was extremely fortunate to serve on a panel with Flora Shao, Jin Liu, Janet Chen, and Jing Tsu in 2015 at the annual Association for Asian Studies meeting, and grateful for the opportunity to continue our exciting discussion the following year at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting with the addition of Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Ming-Huei Wang, Zhang Han, Miya Xie, and Michelle Pan. Thanks are due to Jeff Wasserstrom, Melissa Dale, Jason Johnson, Kolleen Guy, and Wing Chung Ng for providing opportunities to share my research and offering insightful feedback. Wen Hsin Yeh extended suggestions on sharpening my argument on 1950s language policy and also, with Peter Hanff, generously helped me gain access to the Yuen Ren Chao papers at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Financial support for this project was provided by Stanford University and Trinity University. Language study in Taiwan and Hokkaido was made possible by several Foreign Language Area Studies grants and generous support from the Blakemore Foundation. My fieldwork was supported by Fulbright IIE and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grants. Writing was supported by the Mellon Foundation Dissertation fellowship and the Weter fellowship. I’d also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful, detailed, and compassionate feedback, and Jenny Gavcas for helping me hone the argument and make my sentences shine. Lucy Rhymer has been an incredible editor; thanks are owed for her hard work in getting this published. Of course, not all assistance comes in the form of feedback on chapters or shop talks. Without companionship, this project would have permanently stalled. Friends across the country, including Erica Goodenough, Sarah Kuiken, Yuen Yuen Ng, Ramya Mishra, Sakura Christmas, and

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Acknowledgments

Joshua Brett, have both inspired me and reminded me of the importance of friendship. Caroline McTeer was the most wonderful writing partner, always ready with a coffee and a smile. Thanks to Shana McDermott, Jessica Nowlin, Lydia Kneer, Lauren Turek, Erin Kramer, and Sarah Erickson for fighting the patriarchy with me over coffee, yoga, hikes, trampolining, Thai food, manicures, spa days, and brunch, and thanks to Sam Miller, Joseph Kneer, and Jonathan MacLellan for great food, music, and conversation. I would be remiss to neglect my indefatigable team of Pokemon Go raiders who frequent the San Antonio northwest district; their joyful company punctuated my long days of writing for over two years. A significant portion of this book was composed at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital café and the Huebner Oaks Starbucks; immense thanks are owed to the staff for their daily big smiles and kind words. My big, loud, loving family has been a bedrock of support for my entire career. My incredible aunt Velma Williams, ninety-nine years old with thousands of stories to tell, kept my passion for history alive while also offering me a place to stay in Oakland whenever I needed it. My baby sis Camille reminds me of the importance of family, my Nana exuded warmth and instilled in me the spiritual value of a good meal, and my Papa inspired me from an early age to think about language in creative, whimsical ways. My father taught me the value of hard work and perseverance. My mother is my hero – a paragon of strength and compassion. And of course, I owe to Tam Wing Sun a debt beyond measure. How, in only a few words, do I begin to express thanks to someone with whom I shared millions of moments that not only made this work possible, but meaningful? For the daily bitmojis and the caramel macchiatos (double shot, nonfat, one pump vanilla, extra caramel drizzle), for making me better with thoughtful criticism, for injecting me with confidence when I was bereft, and for reminding me daily why I love what I do – for this and so much more, I dedicate this work to Team Tam.

A Note on Romanization and Characters

This work uses Hanyu pinyin for romanization of Chinese sources except in the case of individuals or political parties who commonly use names with alternate romanizations. To the best of my abilities, characters accord to the style found in my sources – simplified when the source uses simplified, and traditional when the source uses traditional characters.

xiii

Introduction

How deeply this notion of one’s own language seems to be connected to our feelings for our own country . . . Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

What language represents the Chinese nation? Seemingly a straightforward question, the simplest answer would be what in English we call “Mandarin.” Known as Putonghua (普通话), or the common tongue in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is the nation’s official language. Putonghua is the language PRC children learn in schools. It is the language that broadcasts on the nation’s television and radio, that blares in shopping centers, and announces subway stops. It is also the titular Chinese language abroad. Today it is taught in millions of “Chinese” language classes across the world. At the United Nations, translators asked to render speeches delivered in Russian or Arabic into “Chinese” would recite them in Putonghua’s four tones. But on a day-to-day basis, remarkably few people within the PRC’s borders speak this language exclusively. Nearly 80 percent of PRC citizens grew up speaking one or several fangyan (方言): local Chinese languages that are often mutually unintelligible with spoken Putonghua. This group includes the well-known fangyan Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Sichuanese, but also dozens of others. For millions of Chinese citizens from Qingdao to Kunming, fangyan are what is most commonly spoken at home, on the street, and among close companions. For them, Putonghua is often not the language they use to joke with neighborhood friends. Putonghua is often not the language they use to greet their mothers or fathers, or the language they use to ask for their grandmother’s signature dish. It is often not the language they use to express frustration or to yell profanities. We thus begin with a contradiction. It is well established that the language we speak helps form our identity – and by extension, a national language forms national identity. But when so much of a country’s citizenry regularly choose not to speak its national language, wherein lies the nation? Specifically in the case of China, how did a Chinese 1

2

Introduction

national identity get constructed when fangyan – languages that are decidedly not the national language – often served as the languages of daily life? And if most people regularly speak fangyan today, how ought we to frame, or reframe, the role of Putonghua in the nation’s creation and perpetuation? These questions animate this book. I propose that the answers are interred in a history of Chinese nation building and national identity that places fangyan at its heart. A study of Chinese national identity from the perspective of fangyan seems to propose solving one contradiction with another: fangyan are much more associated with the local than the national.1 Literally “languages of place,”2 they are often given monikers associated with a province, a city, or a region – Sichuan fangyan, Shanghai fangyan, Panyu fangyan, and so on. Indeed, they are rarely thought of as languages at all, most commonly directly translated into the English term “dialect.” A dialect carries with it a connotation of subordination. They are variants of another language – a “dialect” is amorphous until we understand what it is a dialect of. In China, this presumption of subordination is a cornerstone of the country’s current language policy. Putonghua is proclaimed the “common language” of the Chinese people; fangyan are described as “variants” of the Chinese language; they simply “orbit” around its core.3 The assumption of fangyan’s subordination is not limited to linguistic structure alone. Calling Putonghua a national “standard” and fangyan 1

2

3

While uncommon several scholars have confirmed and adopted thinking of Chinese language in the plural. Victor H. Mair, “The Classification of Sinitic Languages: What Is ‘Chinese?’,” in Guangshun Cao, Hilary Chappell, Redouane Djamouri, and Thekla Wiebusch eds., Breaking Down the Barriers: Interdisciplinary Studies in Chinese Linguistics and Beyond (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2013), 735–754; Margaret Mian Yan, Introduction to Chinese Dialectology (Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006), 2; John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 39; Dana Funywe Ng and Juanjuan Zhao, “Investigating Cantonese Speakers’ Language Attitudes in Mainland China,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 36, no. 4 (2015), 357–371; Gerald Roche, “Articulating Language Oppression: Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Erasure of Tibet’s Minority Languages,” Patterns of Prejudice 53, no. 5 (2019) (forthcoming); David Moser, A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Melbourne: Penguin Randomhouse, 2016). This was a number given to me by Hou Jingyi, the editor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences journal Zhongguo yuwen (Chinese Language) in an interview in 2014. It is also quoted here in Dexter Roberts, “400 million Chinese can’t speak Mandarin and Beijing is worried,” Bloomberg, September 23, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014–0923/in-china-say-everything-in-mandarin-please This quote comes from Gao Mingkai and Shi Anshi, eds., Yuyanxue gailun (Introduction to linguistics) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), 229. But such implications still are seen in common textbooks for the Chinese language. Li Xiaofan and Xiang Mengbing, Hanyu fangyanxue jichu jiaocheng (Fundamentals of Chinese dialect studies) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 2013); Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–4.

Introduction

3

“variants” implies that Putonghua can represent a unified sense of national identity and citizenship in a way that no fangyan could. It is not difficult to locate rhetoric that grants Putonghua this outsized significance. Seasoned linguists hail Putonghua as the “common language of the Chinese Han ethnicity,” without which society can neither “be preserved, develop, or progress.”4 A children’s periodical in Fujian held a competition in which elementary students submitted suggestions for “promulgate Putonghua” advertisements. “Speak Putonghua! It is the language of our people!” the children wrote.5 In the western province of Xinjiang, where much of the population speaks neither Putonghua nor any fangyan, zealous journalists write of ethnic Uighurs exclaiming, “We are Chinese, we should therefore speak Putonghua.”6 Whether or not these quotes are authentic is beside the point. State and popular discourses presuppose that Putonghua is the sole representative of Chinese national identity, and that fangyan are incommensurate local variants and nothing more. Yet this ubiquitous rhetoric marking Putonghua as the nation’s representative language belies how frequently and poignantly fangyan function as symbols and stewards of national identity, not just of local pride or regionalism.7 Cantonese and Fujianese speakers habitually claim their fangyan is the “oldest” Chinese language, offering a more direct link to the nation’s imagined archaic history than Putonghua. Rappers in Chengdu, Sichuan, hurling jingoistic rap disses at foreigners for historical injustices against the Chinese nation, claim that only the emotional authenticity of their gritty fangyan can capture the passion 4

5 6

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Tang Qiyun, “Nuli tuiguang Putonghua, jiji tuixing pinyin fangyan: Jinian quanguo wenzi gaige huiyi he xiandai Hanyu guifanhua wenti xueshu huiyi sishizhou nian” (Arduously promulgate Putonghua, actively carry out pinyin program: Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the conference on language reform and the academic conference on the problem of the standardization of Hanyu), Yuwen yuekan zazhi 3, no. 4 (1995). “Yao shuo jiu shuo Putonghua” (If you want to speak Putonghua, just speak it) Chuzhongsheng xuexi, August 8, 2012, 66. Xinjiang guniang: Wo shi zhongguoren, weishenme bu xue Putonghua? “Xinjiang woman: I am Chinese, why wouldn’t I study Putonghua?” Huanqiu shibao, October 24, 2018, http://china.huanqiu.com/article/2018–10/13345644.html; “Wu Shiqing huiwang gaige kaifang licheng: Shenhuai zhongguoxin wei guojia fazhan chu li” (Wu Shuqing remembers the opening up reforms process: Embodying the heart of China, put forth effort to develop the country). Zhongguo xinwen wang (China News), December 23, 2018, www.chinanews.com/gn/2018/12–23/8710308.shtml There is extensive research on the limits of “Mandarinization” both within and outside China. See Kevin Zi-Hao Wong and Ying-Ying Tan, “Mandarinization and the Construction of Chinese Ethnicity in Singapore,” Chinese Language and Discourse: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 1 (January, 2017), 18–50; Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, “Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign: Language Ideological Debates in the Imagining of the Nation,” in Jan Blommaert, ed., Language Ideological Debates (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), 235–265.

4

Introduction

of patriotic fervor.8 Shanghai natives insist that China’s 1980s economic transformation is best captured by memories of crowded alleyways with communal kitchens torn down in the name of progress, memories that live in the sounds and syntax of their fangyan alone.9 These diverse languages all represent national belonging, making the narrative of assumed uniformity at odds with lived reality. Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Putonghua – linguistically approximately as dissimilar as French, Spanish, and Portuguese – all have the capability of denoting a singular category of identity. Returning then to the question of which language represents the Chinese nation, we see two possible lines of interpretation: a loudly proclaimed narrative that promotes a homogenous Chinese identity represented by a unified language, and a more subtle narrative that lives in the quotidian, where heterogenous expressions of that national identity are represented by a plethora of other so-called nonstandard variants. These narratives of Chinese national belonging, and the central role fangyan played in their making, constitute the subject of this book. I argue that fangyan shaped Chinese nationalism and national identity from the late Qing (1644–1911) through the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which I trace through the history of these two distinct but interdependent narratives. The former narrative emerged as late-Qing linguists, reformers, and educators emphasized that fangyan were not independent languages themselves, but rather subsidiaries or variants of a broader Chinese language. Fangyan for them were an obstacle to a homogenous identity, a problem to be solved. The latter narrative was sustained by contemporaneous opposing groups who revered fangyan as having a historical and emotional connection to the nation that felt unfathomable for the common tongue. These groups juxtaposed the emotional authenticity of fangyan against the stark artificiality of the official tongue, the historical richness of local languages against the modern contrivance of the national standard. These narratives each tell their own story about Chinese nationalism as a whole. The former tells us how forces of homogenization subsumed 8

9

Rob Schmidt, “Chengdu emerges as a new home for Chinese hip-hop,” NPR, February 1, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/02/01/576819311/chengdu-emerges-as-a-new-home-for-chi nese-hip-hop. Fat Shady, one of the more famous Sichuan rappers, says this frequently to foreign media outlets. He made his feelings clear similarly to his fans in his song “Sichuan Pride,” Chengdu Rap House, YouTube video, December 15, 2015, www.you tube.com/watch?v=d8yDA9jo3wA Fang Xu, “Only Shanghainese Can Understand: Popularity of Vernacular Performance and Shanghainese Identity,” in Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng, eds., Revealing/ Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the 20th and 21st Centuries (Albany: State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 2020, forthcoming), 20.

Introduction

5

and discredited visions of the Chinese nation that ran counter to the standard; the latter emphasizes the persistence of a bottom-up declaration that national culture can be flexible and heterogenous. When taken together, however, we see that these two narratives informed and shaped one another and, in the process, collective identity as a whole. I thus propose that we study these two narratives not as simply coexisting, but as mutually co-constructive. In a word, I see their relationship as dialectical: while these opposing narratives argued for different framings of fangyan vis-à-vis the nation and its official language, the debate itself and its history of occasional resolution that collapsed into new debates were what truly constituted the ideology of nationalism. I emphasize the dialectical nature of these debates to suggest that the nation and the ideology prescribed to it was never static – its meaning changed over time. It also moves our analysis beyond the simple fact of struggle itself. A dialectic implies that from opposing positions something new emerges; its emphasis is on the generative quality of debate. What I thus suggest is a radical reconception of what the nation is and how it was formed. Certainly scholars have long noted that there were diverse voices promoting multitudinous visions of what the nation was and could be. But by focusing on the dialectical process that manifested as an ongoing series of debates rather than the results of those debates, I not only place these diverse voices at the center of the national narrative, I also lay bare the mechanisms by which the assumption of homogeneity became accepted as constitutive of the nation in the first place. Both sides of the evolving debates over language and nation insisted that language, standard or not, was an essential part of Chinese national identity. The existence of these two divergent narratives shows that Chinese nationalism neither forced nor required linguistic conformity, and indeed, that nationalism thrived even in opposition to forces of homogenization. The story of fangyan therefore encourages us to flip order of causation on its head, asking not how standardization created a nation, but how nationalism influenced debates about standardization. Arguments for and rejections of the homogenizing power of standardization, not standardization itself, defined what it meant to be Chinese in the modern period. Language and Nationalism The idea that standardized languages foster national belonging has long been inscribed in histories of China. Almost seventy years ago, John DeFrancis’s Nationalism and Language Reform in China detailed how late-Qing scholars, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries, inspired by a

6

Introduction

global panoply of language reform models, created a national language in order to foment a spirit of citizenship.10 Since then, studies of the creation and promulgation of a Chinese national language have abounded, and among these works, few have questioned the basic assumption that the language was designed to, and successfully did, create Chinese citizens. Indeed, parallel narratives linking national languages to nation building are recounted around the globe. Following a Hobsbawmian model that regards a unified language as one of the “decisive . . . criteria of nationhood,”11 histories of the standardization of languages from French to Tamil, Italian to Japanese, have long noted how states use language unification to, in the words of Eugen Weber, transform “peasants” into citizens.12 These narratives are not perpetuated solely by historians exploring them in retrospect. The engineers of national language proposals themselves also saw their creations as instruments for molding a cohesive citizenry. Since the Chinese nation’s earliest imaginings, a vocal group of reformers passionately insisted that their new nation required a unified language. The year 1895 was a turning point, when a humiliating defeat by Japan inspired late-Qing elites to see their empire as woefully inadequate for facing the modern world and its threats. These elites believed that their multiethnic, polyglot empire lacked many of the defining markers of modern nationhood, and that a unifying identity could literally save the Chinese people

10 11 12

John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950). Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). Dozens of similar studies have followed Weber’s influential study, particularly in locations with both a high level of linguistic diversity and strong state control over language. An exhaustive list of titles inspired by Weber can be found in the footnotes of Alexander Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 1–3. Other examples of this kind of narrative about language standardization include Nannette Gottlieb, Language Policy in Japan: The Challenge of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jasna Cˇ apo Žmegač , “Anton Radić : Peasants into Croats,” in Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, ed., Ethnology, Myth and Politics: Anthropologizing Croatian Ethnology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 35–46; James Stergios, “Language and Nationalism in Italy,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 1 (2006), 15–33. Several works in South Asian history have challenged this particular narrative. See Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013); Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

Introduction

7

from extinction.13 Yet few agreed on what constituted its core. Some saw unity radiating from a shared imagined past, which had the dual effect of emphasizing a powerful historical “China” while distancing it from the alien Qing.14 Others believed that unity could be culled and cultivated from the empire’s people through education and civic engagement. But regardless of whether they sought unity in the past or present, all of their visions were aspirational. These late-Qing elites agreed that a Chinese nation and a language to match it were necessary, but few believed it already existed.15 Their intoxicating aspirations for Chinese unity ushered in a subtle if not insidious amnesia among the next generation of reformers. China’s continuous history became normative – not critically analyzed as an invented narrative, but spoken about as fact. Such an imagining of China’s history imbues most descriptions of the nation today. In China itself, popular culture and government rhetoric consistently make timeless unity a central point of nationalism, from the refrain that the country has “five thousand years” of unbroken history, to movies like Red Cliff that portray third-century military leaders as fighting for “the nation.”16 Scholars within China and outside it also popularize these generalizations. Within academic circles, comparative studies of global nationalism habitually describe China as a “historic nation” like France or England that emerged from a partially invented, partially real unified past.17 In scholarship, journalism, popular culture, and art, China appears as a 13 14

15

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17

Peter Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 5. Tze-ki Hon, Revolution as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China’s Path to Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95. John Fitzgerald, “The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism,” in Jonathan Unger, ed., Chinese Nationalism (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 57. Flipping Ernest Gellner’s concept of “stateless nations,” or communities of people who see themselves as nations without a state to represent them, on its head, John Fitzgerald argues that China was a “nationless state,” in which the state “presumes that the nation it represents is an autonomous entity which could conceivably exist in the forms in which the state has chosen to represent it but independently of the state” (emphasis in the original) when in fact the early twentieth-century Chinese state claimed to operate for a nation that was not only imaginary, but was ultimately summoned into being by that state. Fitzgerald sees a clear bifurcation between a state narrative of a homogenous nation and other narratives about nationhood that preceded or emerged independently from that state narrative – that the homogenous nation was not just imagined and invented, but was nearly nonexistent without the state itself. A good example of this can be found here: “What China claims to have invented,” The Economist, December 20, 2016, www.economist.com/china/2016/12/20/what-china-cla ims-to-have-invented Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 66; Jim Maclaughlin, Reimagining the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building (London: Pluto Press, 2001).

8

Introduction

singular perennial entity regardless of whether such unity was, or is, actually represented in lived experience. Recently, however, several works have challenged the premise that nation building forged a homogenous China. These studies show how early twentieth-century state-sponsored drives to eliminate “popular superstition” did little to convince locals to abandon their religious rituals.18 They narrate anarchic communist movements that imagined a Chinese nation with little, or no, central state coexisting with the autocratic Communist Party in the post-May Fourth era.19 And this book itself highlights movements celebrating local languages as signifiers of an idealized national past and present that flourished alongside language standardization campaigns throughout the Republican and Maoist periods. Ultimately, cultural and political practices that have suggested a more diverse vision of the Chinese nation were just as common as those practices that seemingly accorded with idealized homogeny. This body of scholarship does not simply reveal a multiplicity of narratives; it compels us to ask how we interpret the contradiction between the claims of national homogeneity and the reality of national heterogeneity.20 Here, Prasenjit Duara offers us a way forward. Duara conceives of national identity not as singular or monolithic, but rather, as something produced within a “network of changing and often conflicting representations.” We are not solely our national identities – our identities are comprised of an array of collective representations demarcated by gender, age, locality, ethnicity, and religion. With such crisscrossed modes of constructing the self, no identity, national or otherwise, is static or unified. For Duara, nationalism is best conceived not as “nationalism of the nation” (emphasis in the original) but “the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with one another.”21

18

19 20

21

Eminent historian Joseph Levenson, for instance, describes the transition from the Qing empire to the Chinese nation as “culturalism” to “nationalism” in such a way that subtly validates a coherent Chinese culture maintained since antiquity. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Margaret Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 95–105; Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63–75; Joan Judge, The Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality and Experience in Early Chinese Periodical Press (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power Identity and Change in Shanghai’s News Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 4, 16.

Introduction

9

I take as my starting point Duara’s conceptualization of nationalism as a site of negotiation. I use his framing not simply to celebrate multitudinous understandings of Chinese collective identity – it also brings into sharp relief how some notions of collective identity become hegemonic as they arbitrated with or tried to suppress alternative visions. By writing a history of Chinese nationalism centered on fangyan, I argue that those terms to which we attach the adjective “national” – a national language, a national song, a national dish – often hold significance, but are neither a prerequisite for national sentiment nor the be-all-and-end-all of a national culture. Rather, nationalism is defined by how different kinds of people understood, tethered themselves to, and excluded others from a putative nation. For some, that nation is, was, and must be homogenous. Others imagined it in heterogenous, multitudinous expressions. By not assuming that a nation is monolithic, regardless of its own rhetoric, we can make space in our histories for a multiplicity of Chinese identities being expressed and defended without ignoring those who seek to maintain it as a homogenous concept. Chinese-ness, Ethnicity, and Nation The celebration of and tolerance for diverse expressions of Chinese nationalism has always had limits. Those nationalists trumpeting the significance of fangyan were not simultaneously claiming that just any language – existing or invented – could represent China. Nationalists agreed that there had to be some boundaries circumscribing who could be considered part of the nation and who ought to be excluded. These boundaries were inextricably linked to questions of ethnicity and race. Fangyan are habitually called Hanyu fangyan (汉语方言), or “fangyan of the Han (people’s) language.” Arguably the largest collective identity group in the world, Han is a complex term; it overlaps with, though is not entirely synonymous with, the English adjective “Chinese,” a more multivalent term that can be used to denote an ethnic identity, a racial category, or a nationality. The state today claims that Han is China’s largest ethnic group – or minzu (民族) – constituting over 90 percent of the country’s population.22 Yet work in the nascent but growing field of “Critical Han studies” has questioned this designation. 22

Han as identity also overlaps with numerous other monikers, such as Hua and Tangren. Each of these terms has its own history, and each of them, at various points in time, referred to inhabitants of the geographic space that today we call China. Mark Elliott, “Hushuo 胡说: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese,” in Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 173–190.

10

Introduction

These scholars point to the “incomparable immensity” of Han, both in sheer numbers and geographic breadth, and its notable cultural diversity to argue that Han functions “less like a coherent category of identity and more like an umbrella term encompassing a plurality of diverse cultures, languages and ethnicities.”23 I will leave aside the question, “Is Han an ethnicity?,” which lies outside the purview of this book, and ask instead, “How has the term functioned in relation to nation building?” Indeed, the modern transformation of Han and the construction of China as a nation occurred in tandem.24 Late-Qing reformers started planning a nation in response to warnings from Western imperial powers that only nation-states could survive global modernity, while Han as an ethnicity emerged as those same men earnestly adopted claims they read in European and American texts that the world was divided, hierarchically, into racial categories. Some Chinese reformers and revolutionaries mobilized racial theories to prove the superiority of the Han over the Manchu founders of the Qing dynasty.25 Others used them to refute the claims of an increasingly militaristic Japan that both groups were biologically branches of the same race. Still others endorsed Sino-Babylonian theories that connected the contemporary Han to the Bak tribes of ancient 23

24

25

Thomas Mullaney, “Critical Han Studies: Introduction and Prolegomenon,” in Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 2. Other works include Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism and Tradition in China Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Joniak-Luthi Agnieszka, The Han: China’s Diverse Majority (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). Scholars like Mark Elliott have noted that Han has described a collective identity since the Ming (1368–1644), but many argue that the term transformed in the late Qing in response to both nation building and the introduction of racial theories from Europe and the United States. Elliott, “Hushuo 胡说”; Kai-Wing Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture: Imagining the Hanzu Identity in Modern China,” in Kai-Wing Chow, Kevin Doak, and Poshek Fu, eds., Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 48–83; James Leibold, “From Subjects to Han: The Rise of Han as Identity in Nineteenth-Century Southwest China,” in Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 191–209. Kai-Wing Chow, “Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han “Race” in Modern China,” in Frank Dikkoter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997) 34–52; Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture”; James Leibold, “Searching for Han: Early Twentieth-Century Narratives of Chinese Origins and Development,” in Thomas Mullaney, James Patrick Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 210–233; Julia Schneider, Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 120–125.

Introduction

11

Mesopotamia, thus grounding Chinese civilization in an antiquity that predated predatory imperial powers.26 Ultimately, our current understanding of Han emerged as these late-Qing intellectuals made the case that a “Chinese” nation was and should be a “Han” nation. In Mark Elliott’s words, “the ethnic unity of the Chinese as seen in the adoption of Han to describe themselves is really more the product of repeated efforts to create and foster political unity than it is the source of that unity.”27 Early-twentieth century narratives about Han emphasized its bio-racial nature, but bloodlines and phenotypes were never the only determining factors that distinguished the Han from other would-be kinsfolk. Cultural practices were also often markers for inclusion and exclusion, making Han, in the words of Thomas Mullaney, a “fugitive concept” that can “retreat into biology when pursued from the side of culture, and can retreat into culture when pursued from the side of biology.”28 And no cultural practice was considered more important than language. Indeed, language was so central to the designation of ethno-racial groups in the late Qing it was frequently portrayed as constitutive of them. As famed anti-Qing radical Liang Qichao (梁启超) paraphrased German philologist Max Müller in 1905, “it is more fitting to define human races by their language than by their skin and bones” ( yi pifu guge ban renzhong buru yi yanyu ban renzhong 一皮膚骨骼班人種不如以言語班人種).29 This insistence on Han unity in the early years of the twentieth century presents historians today with a paradox: though a common language was often imagined as the primary foundation for Han-ness, members of the Han unequivocally and uncontestably spoke different languages.30 To unriddle this historical paradox, I draw on scholars of the contemporary Chinese diaspora, whose rich discussions on the problems of ethnic essentialization provide theoretical inspiration for this work.31 Debates 26

27 29

30

31

Tze-ki Hon, “From a Hierarchy in Time to a Hierarchy in Space: The Meanings of SinoBabylonianism in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern China 36, no. 2 (March, 2010), 139–169. Elliott, “Hushuo 胡说,” 174. 28 Mullaney, “Critical Han Studies,” 8. Müller’s original quote is “Blood is thicker than water, but language is thicker than blood,” which Liang also quotes before offering his own summary. Liang Qichao, “Lishi shang Zhongguo minzu zhi guancha” (Observations on the history of minzu in China), Yin bing shi heji, Vol. 8 (1905) (Reprint, Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 2 (essay no. 41). This was, indeed, something that Liang Qichao himself acknowledged. See Liang Qichao, “Zhongguo lishi shang minzu zhi yanjiu” (Research on minzu in Chinese history), Yin bing shi heji 8, no. 42 (1907) (Reprint, Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 9. These include works such as Andrea Louie, Chineseness Across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and in the U.S. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001); Kevin Zi-Hao Wong and Ying-Ying Tan, “Mandarinization and the

12

Introduction

in that field have centered on the term “Chinese-ness” – a term initially suggested to de-emphasize nationalism by celebrating an ethno-cultural China, but has subsequently come under fire from scholars who believe that the term sustains an assertion of a homogeneous “China” and “Chinese culture” without acknowledging that both are historically constructed and diverse.32 These debates over how to study Chinese-ness without essentializing the individuals who subscribe to that identity have encouraged a disaggregation of ethnicity from any necessary criterion of belonging. In the words of Ien Ang, any study of Chinese-ness must “depart from the mode of demarcating [it] through an absolutist counterposing of authentic and inauthentic, pure and impure, real and fake.”33 From this broader goal of disaggregation, resulting in what I conceive of as a more multivalent approach to Chinese-ness, two lines of inquiry emerge. First, this approach emphasizes how individuals have adapted a collective identity to local circumstances to be Chinese, as Ang expresses, “in their own way.”34 Second, it requires that we critically examine how and by whom commonly cited metrics of ethnic belonging are created and enforced, and the types of power negotiations that dictate who has the right to determine belonging and exclusion, and who does not. Multivalent Chinese-ness critically analyzes the sustained importance of the political center: powerful players within and outside of China, past and present, who have attempted to control expressions of Chinese-ness and, often, tether them to national loyalty.35 We see several historical examples for which an application of this approach would be analytically fruitful. In the 1930s, the Republic of China launched outreach programs that sent educational materials to ethnic Han communities in Southeast

32

33 34 35

Construction of Chinese Ethnicity in Singapore,” Chinese Language and Discourse 8, no.1 (January, 2017), 18–50. The term was first offered by Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” in The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27. It has simply received criticisms from Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese; Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity,” Boundary 2, no. 23 (1996), 111–138. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 38. Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” Boundary 25, no. 3 (1998), 227. Elena Barabantseva, “Trans-nationalising Chineseness: Overseas Chinese Policies of the PRC’s Central Government,” Asien 96 (July, 2005), 7–28; Leo Suryadinata, “Blurring the Distinction between Huaqiao and Huaren: China’s Changing Policy towards the Chinese Overseas,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2017), 101–111; Prasenjit Duara, “Nationalists among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900– 1911,” in Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39–61.

Introduction

13

Asia, North America, and Europe, all of which closely tied ethnic pride to state-led nationalism.36 The PRC has only intensified these efforts. Since 1977, the PRC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) has quietly consolidated influence over diasporic media outlets, financed pro-Beijing political candidates in democratic countries, and, germane to the subject of this book, financed overseas educational centers such as the ubiquitous Confucius Institutes to teach Putonghua.37 These multifaceted but interconnected actions imply a singular goal: to blur the distinctions between ethnicity, nation, and culture, encompassing them all into an essentialized identity forged by those powerful forces seeking to enforce its homogenization and aggregation. These two goals of a more multivalent approach to Chinese-ness – to study collective identities without presuming they embody essential qualities, and to study how and in what contexts homogenizing forces insist upon those essential qualities – are theoretically relevant to my work on the history of language and Chinese nation building. First, part of what this book does is explore how individuals adapted a collective identity to local circumstances and pushed for flexibility in its boundaries. But perhaps more importantly, the attention that scholars of Chinese-ness place on excavating the processes by which homogeneity is imagined and enforced frames an operative question for our studies here: how did the near-universal insistence that the Han were a distinct ethno-racial group despite their internal linguistic diversity dovetail with concurrent debates over the extent to which the Chinese nation needed to express a similar homogeneity? Among late-Qing reformers, unity within the Han was considered by many “the key to evolutionary survival,” and that a “Chinese language” was the cornerstone of that unity.38 But rather than concede that differences among fangyan exploded the homogeneity the Han label seemed to imply, late-Qing constructors of Han-ness stubbornly maintained that Han unity was irrefutable. These reformers offered two ways to resolve the contradiction that linguistic diversity 36

37

38

Robert Culp, The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Interestingly, we also see this phenomenon in reverse as Chinese overseas impacted language policy within China. Siew-Min Sai, “Mandarin Lessons: Modernity, Colonialism and Chinese Cultural Nationalism in the Dutch East Indies, c.1900s,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2016), 375–394. Andrea Louie, “Reterritorializing Transnationalism: Chinese Americans and the Chinese Motherland,” American Ethnologist 27, no. 3 (August, 2000), 645–669; Julia Bowie and David Gitter, “Abroad or at home, China puts party first,” Foreign Policy, December 5, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/05/abroad-or-at-home-china-pu ts-party-first-global-influence-united-front/ James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 37.

14

Introduction

posed, which grafted neatly onto the two sides of the twentieth-century debates between advocates of a homogenous national identity and defenders of a heterogenous national identity. On the one hand, those who argued that the Chinese nation needed to have a homogenous cultural expression harnessed an assumed Han unity to promote it. Put plainly, they believed a unified nation should be composed of one ethnicity speaking a single national language.39 This position appeared and reappeared throughout the twentieth century – from ethnologists in the 1930s who claimed that linguistic surveys proved that fangyan were variants of an overarching Han language; to Maoist-period state rhetoric that proclaimed that the “common language of the Han nationality” propelled national progress and fangyan, mere dialects, languished in obsolescence. The contradiction of a multilingual Han was to be resolved by simply promulgating one national language as the “common language” of the Han ethnicity and reframing all fangyan as subsidiary to it. But the assumption of a unified Han-ness was not upheld by champions of national homogeneity alone. It also quietly insinuated itself into the arguments of those who rejected the notion that the Chinese nation needed to be represented by one national language. To sustain their claims of Han unity without sacrificing their commitment to the nation’s linguistic diversity, these scholars, statesmen, and thinkers, largely from the south, purported that even though fangyan were contemporaneously diverse, they shared a historic phonological core that demonstrated fangyan’s connection both to one another and to an imagined ancient past.40 The paradox of a multilingual ethnic Han was solved through historical creation: a well-crafted story that diverse languages emanated from a singular origin. Thus despite deep disagreement over the extent to which the nation must be homogenous, both sides of the debate agreed that ethnicity was the key to defining its borders. Fangyan were something that both those who saw the nation as homogenous and those who saw it as heterogenous viewed as unequivocally Han, if not unequivocally markers of nationhood. Those exalting fangyan as markers of national identity imagined the nation as more polyphonic than their detractors, but they were no less committed to proving a different kind of commonality – in this case, a historic, ethnic one. 39 40

Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture.” Another way of resolving this contradiction was by contending that the unified script provided a unified “tool for the exchange of thought,” which is what Liang Qichao did. Given that the focus of this book is on oral languages, however, our focus here primarily will be those scholars who made the argument of unity through phonology. Liang, “Zhongguo lishi shang minzu zhi yanjiu,” 33.

Introduction

15

This book positions fangyan at the intersection of the Chinese nation and Han ethnicity. On the one hand, this study sheds light on how fangyan reinforced multitudinous notions of national identity, supporting diverse groups as they adapted that identity to local circumstances and embodied it “in their own way.” But while fangyan supported more flexible boundaries circumscribing national identity, they simultaneously bolstered a more rigid perimeter around ethnic identity, and as a result, ensured that the reification of the nation-state hinged on ethnic unity. Fangyan made the nation more inclusive by ensuring the ethnicity that supported it remained exclusive. Language, Science, and Sentiment A dialectical exchange by definition precluded a permanent consensus, its productive quality sustained through consistent opposition. But it did require common ground. This book argues that for much of the twentieth century, the nation was the primary focus for debates about language; as a result, language was framed as valuable insofar as it defined, bolstered, and celebrated the nation. Based upon this goal, those invested in proving either Putonghua or fangyan’s value to the nation drew upon shared rhetorical strategies – an agreed-upon set of paramount values that set the terms for debate. The two main frameworks in China’s national development were a shared confidence in linguistic science to objectively prove hierarchical relationships among Chinese languages, and a collective respect for linguistic authenticity. In China’s national genesis, science, broadly defined and ambiguously applied, was seen as the antidote to China’s myriad ailments. Its importance was amplified after the 1919 May Fourth movement, an iconoclastic rebellion that called for the radical transformation of Chinese social, cultural, and intellectual life in the name of “national salvation.” The movement’s supporters labeled indigenous modes of knowledge seeking and knowledge organization insufficient, instead exalting information gleaned through scientific methods. In particular, academics in postMay Fourth China championed the use of statistical social surveys to study their nation, viewing them as the only way to “seek truth from facts” and create knowledge that was useful, objective, and modern.41 For these intellectuals, science was more than a methodological approach. They 41

Recent interest in this topic sparked a lively scholarly conversation on how and to what ends information was constructed worldwide. Mary Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Bernhard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). In the Chinese field, the history of information has largely been forged by Grace

16

Introduction

believed that knowledge gained through scientific inquiry had the power to “transform the people and their stale, ineffectual culture.”42 This included the study of language. Comparative linguistics, a field dedicated to classifying language systems and mapping their connections from antiquity through the present, swept into China’s academic community on the heels of an epistemological reorganization that permeated post-May Fourth academic life. A field that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, comparative linguistics was supported by a number of interlocking premises concerning what languages were and how they furnished valuable knowledge: that languages – the organization of sounds, grammatical patterns, and syntax – could be distilled into units; that these units could be juxtaposed side-by-side and compared in objective, even quantifiable, ways; and that comparisons of these units could serve as the basis for (re)constructing a linguistic family tree that represented a diachronic history of human languages.43 Comparative linguistics, with its emphasis on empirical data and scientific comparison, fit naturally with the post-May Fourth “seektruth-from-facts” approach to knowledge production. Beginning in the 1920s, Chinese scholars organized China’s languages into hierarchical models similar to the European-constructed Indo-European language family tree. Not all scholars in China, however, employed these models for the same ends. Some proclaimed that their hierarchical models definitively proved that fangyan were subsidiary to a broader Chinese language; as branches, fangyan were simply offshoots of the tree (the supposed broad Chinese language). Others mobilized the authority of science to claim that their fangyan could be traced back to an ancient past; the branches, in this reading, were indispensable and constitutive of the broader Chinese language. In other words, though groups disagreed on how to interpret their data, the comparative model and its insistence on the irrefutable objectivity of linguistic taxonomies was taken as sacrosanct.

42 43

Shen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Shen, Unearthing the Nation, 5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publishing, 1970), 234.

Introduction

17

Historians today rarely critically examine these hierarchical models and the assumptions upon which they rest.44 Our histories often presume that Chinese languages and dialects existed in a natural hierarchy, and our job is to simply describe them. This book probes the black box of these scientific models, uncovering the hidden assumptions they masked when they were presented as objective truth. My goal, in other words, is not to prove or disprove linguistic taxonomies. Rather, I uncover how these taxonomies were created, how they informed national policy, and how they were wielded to promulgate a particular vision of collective identity. I treat them as human creations, imbued with and mobilized to further human agendas. The authority of “science” was not the only paramount value that demonstrated a language’s worth. Those upholding the relative value of either a national language or fangyan also recognized the power of authenticity. Though it is an illusory term, in general, to call something authentic is to proclaim a purity of origin, potentially describing a thing (e.g., a church relic or a Ming vase), a cultural practice (e.g., “authentic” cuisine or a tea ceremony), or a mode of self-representation (e.g., the authentic voice in hip-hop or the “real me”).45 I shall not try to summarize the complex literature on authenticity here, but instead draw from it two important concepts. First, it is often defined by what it is not. “Issues of authenticity most often come into play when authenticity has been put in doubt,” explains Richard Peterson.46 A vase is authentic when compared to a replica, a cuisine is authentic when compared to its reinterpretation in different contexts for different audiences, and a language is authentic when compared to an invented standard. Second, it emerges from the complex tension between desire for and anxiety about the modern.47 As Regina Bendix argues, authenticity invokes a nostalgia for originals in a 44

45

46 47

DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform. Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language Education in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Moser, A Billion Voices. One exception to this is Jeffrey Weng, who shows how Mandarin was an “invented” language. Jeffrey Weng, “What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China,” Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 3 (2018), 611–633. Maiken Umbach and Mathew Humphrey, Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1–2; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music, Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Richard Peterson, “In Search of Authenticity,” Journal of Management Studies 42, no. 5 (July, 2005), 1083. Lionel Trilling was the first to note this peculiar modern fixation, pinpointing authenticity as an outgrowth of the moral necessity of sincerity as understood in early modern Europe. But authenticity, he argues, was a particularly twentieth-century concern. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity.

18

Introduction

world of imitations and a longing for a fantastical past untouched by modernization’s “demythologization, detraditionalization, and disenchantment,” all the while never recognizing the irony that only through modernity is loss realized and recovery made possible.48 This nostalgia at the heart of authenticity – the desire to reclaim some shred of old ways even while luxuriating in the spare newness of the modern – was integral to the making of the nation-state. As Duara explains, the nation “stakes its claim to sovereign authority, in part, as custodians of authenticity.” A nation without an authentic claim to either its citizens’ lived experience or its people’s imagined past is, essentially, hollow.49 When a Chinese national language was first proposed in the early twentieth century, one of the most powerful criticisms against it was its seeming artificiality; foreign to most of the country’s citizens and devoid of historical significance, it was lambasted for having emerged from the cold halls of government offices and ivory towers, not the lives of everyday people. Fangyan’s authentic connection to an idyllic shared past, on the other hand, could help the new nation navigate the treacherous terrain of the modern by offering a salve to the fact of its own invention. Declarations of fangyan’s authenticity were powerful because of what they were juxtaposing themselves against. Those extolling the significance of fangyan proclaimed that an authentic nation was multilingual, and that a top-down enforcement of a homogenous language would result in a nation inauthentically expressed. Permutations of these criticisms saturated twentieth-century discourse, putting champions of a national language on the defensive as they combated the perception that the language they claimed could represent the nation did not genuinely do so. Their defensiveness belies a keen awareness of the threat authenticity could pose: a national culture that appeared to lack an authentic connection to the nation’s people, when endorsed, could ultimately result in its undoing. The tension between authenticity and standardization drove narratives about fangyan and nationalism just as much as claims over scientific objectivity. In the early years of Chinese nation building, architects of a standard language relied upon linguistic science to prove its worth, while those defending diversity pointed to fangyan’s inherent authenticity. But these rhetorical strategies did not stay the exclusive privilege of one side or the other for long. Rather, by the middle of the twentieth 48 49

Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 8. Prasenjit Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China,” History and Theory 37, no. 3 (October, 1998), 287.

Introduction

19

century, both sides increasingly capitalized on each other’s claims, transforming scientific objectivity and emotional authenticity into equally powerful and available authorities to leverage. I draw attention to the persistence of these paramount values for two reasons. First, an examination of how these two values were brandished suggests the need for a repositioning of China’s epistemological revolution in the history of national creation. While a rich body of scholarship has shown how science became viewed as the “key” to China’s national salvation and the lens through which Chinese modernity was conceptualized, my work emphasizes that science was not the only value according to which the modern nation was conceived.50 By examining not just the role of science in national construction, but rather, how scientific claims responded to, or adopted the language of authenticity – something rarely seen as scientific – we see how those insulating their claims about the Chinese nation within the protective shield of objectivity recognized that there were limits to what their irreproachable facts could prove. Empiricism was often considered unimpeachable but, ultimately, not always sufficient. The persistence of these rhetorical strategies also raises essential questions about how we critically examine the processes by which knowledge from outside China – usually “the West” – was made legible within it. This is a thorny problem we must all face in Chinese studies: how do we, as historians, narrate and analyze the discourses of modernity and nationhood without falling back on West/East, Traditional/ Modern dichotomies that have the propensity to simplify, distort and silence? The best way forward, I argue, is to focus on the processes and mechanisms of translation. My approach approximates that of Lydia Liu, whose Translingual Practice examines “the processes by which new words, meanings, discourses and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter’s collision with the guest language.”51 In other words, when examining how authenticity and science were mobilized, it is not enough to speak of borrowing – our focus needs to be on how that which was borrowed was reinterpreted, the logic that granted it legitimacy, and the contradictions its significance aroused. Just what counted as authenticity or legitimate science lays bare the collisions that translation provoked. 50 51

See Shen, Unearthing the Nation; Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China; Lam, A Passion for Facts. Lydia Liu. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26.

20

Introduction

The Chinese Language: Sound and Script “Few language names are as all-encompassing as that of Chinese.” So wrote dialectologist Jerry Norman in his 1988 book Chinese, a title that at once captures and belies the subject’s complexity. Chinese refers to the languages of the past – “the literary language of the Zhou dynasty sages, the language of Tang and Song poetry and the early vernacular language of the classical novels” – and present – “both its standard and dialectical forms.” It can refer to a singular common spoken tongue or an entire branch of a language family. And, as Norman reminds us, “this list is by no means exhaustive.”52 The official definition for the “Chinese language” (Hanyu) from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is the “language of the Han minzu.” It encompasses oral approximations garnered from Tang and Song dynasty texts, current Hanyu fangyan, and the “official common language” of the Han Chinese people, Putonghua.53 Yet this official definition conceals how the relationships between and among the dozens of potential referents for the “Chinese language” are often fluid, changing with context, environment, and perhaps most critically, political need. This has led many scholars today to question official designations of terms such as “dialect” or “ancient Chinese,” or even the very notion that there exists only one Chinese language at all.54 As Victor Mair claims, the loose usage of the word “Chinese” and its conflation with both other distinct terms and lived phenomena has made our current understanding of Sinitic languages “chaotic, impenetrable, or functionally absent.”55 Given the complexities of these categories and their historical contingencies, concretely defining terms like “Mandarin,” “fangyan,” or “Chinese language” feels not only impossible but historically artificial. I will thus not try to do so. Rather, this section will briefly describe debates over the meanings of these terms as they are relevant to this book. Studies of Chinese language(s) generally focus on three separate components: oral pronunciation, script, and the vocabulary and syntax of its written prose. Given that the topic of this work is fangyan and its role in the construction of national identity, I will primarily be concerned with the first of the three. Yet, given that the latter two necessarily implicate the way we understand the former, it is important to first establish a succinct history of how all three elements of Chinese language(s) are defined today. 52 53 54

55

Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1. Graham Thurgood and Randy LaPolla, eds., The Sino-Tibetan Language (New York: Routledge, 2003). John DeFrancis, Chinese Language, 39; Gerald Roche, “Articulating Language Oppression.” David Moser also writes that we should not be thinking of “the Chinese language” in the singular. A Billion Voices, 3. Mair, “The Classification of Sinitic Languages,” 735.

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What Is a Fangyan? Let us begin with fangyan, a term whose scale, translation, and popular usage are subject to fierce debate. The first problem is scope. Linguists divide fangyan into broad geographic regions, and further divide the various patois within those regions into smaller variants (see Figure 0.1). Fangyan often refers to both.56 Yue fangyan (粵方言), for instance, refers to the linguistic category of all the different tongues spoken in the province of Guangdong in South China. Yet the mutually unintelligible variants within the Yue fangyan region are also called fangyan, such as the Taishan fangyan or Gaozhou fangyan. The variation is similarly wide in the north, where the Guanhua fangyan region stretches across the length of the country. Ultimately, the category includes a number of different phenomena – from broad linguistic groups covering vast regions to variants that differ only slightly from one another.57 Translation further muddles the term. Most Chinese scholars take as fact that the Chinese word fangyan equates to the English word “dialect.” While popularly accepted inside of China, the translation has many detractors. One of its most outspoken critics is Mair, who in his 1991 article deems “dialect” an egregious mistranslation of the word fangyan.58 Since 56

57

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For a detailed explanation of the various mappings of Chinese fangyan see Liu Zhenfa, “Zailun Hanyu fangyan de fenqu yu fenlei” (Discussing again the division of Chinese fangyan regions and types), Xiamen Daxue Zhongwenxi 90 nian xiqing xueshu wenxuan (1921–2011) (Selected articles from the ninety-year anniversary of Xiamen University’s Chinese Department) (Xiamen: Xiamen Daxue chubanshe, 2011), 394–395; Maria Kurpaska, Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Great Prism of the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouten, 2010), 36–62. To some extent, this classification and categorization is in large part what Chinese linguists focus on in the discipline today. Jerry Norman, argues that, while thinking of “Chinese” as a language family like romance languages and Latin is a valuable metaphor, it is limited, and asks instead to look more broadly at the historical linkages among Chinese fangyan. Jerry Norman and W. South Coblin, “A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics,” Journal of American Oriental Society 115, no. 4 (1995), 576–584; Jerry Norman, “The Chinese Dialects: Phonology,” in Graham Thurgood and Randy LaPolla, eds., The Sino-Tibetan Languages ( New York: Routledge, 2003), 72–83. Beyond this, see the following for a limited biography: JohannMattis List, “Network Perspectives on Chinese Dialect History: Chances and Challenges,” Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics 8, no. 1 (2015), 36–63; Jerry Norman, “Hanyu fangyan tianye diaocha yu yinyunxue” (Phonology and fieldwork on Chinese fangyan surveys), Beijing Daxue xuebao 44, no. 2 (1988), 91–94; Li and Xiang, Hanyu fangyanxue jichu jiaocheng. Some scholars use the term “fangyan region” (方言区) and then speak of subdialects (方 言片 or 次方言), but referring to them all as fangyan is also common. David Prager Branner, Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999); Zhan Bohui, Hanyu fangyan ji fangyan diaocha (Chinese dialects and dialect surveys) (Hubei: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991), 28–29. Mair, wary of translating fangyan as “language” due to the term’s political implications, suggests a new term, “topolect,” which he claims “renders the literal semantic content of fangyan.” Victor Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms,” Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September, 1991), 7. John

22

Introduction

Figure 0.1 Zhongguo Hanyu fangyan (the dialects of China). Source: Li Rong and Stephen Wurm, The Language Atlas of China, Australian Academy of Humanities, 1987, A2. Reprinted with permission of the Australian Academy of Humanities. This map is also available as an additional resource at www.cambridge.org/tam

The Chinese Language: Sound and Script

Figure 0.1 (Cont.)

23

24

Introduction

many of China’s fangyan have their own distinct structure, vocabulary, and phonology, Mair claims, to call them “dialects” is to attempt to fit incongruous phenomena into one taxonomical category. Alternative English terms are hardly better. Due to the intrinsic connection between language and nation-state, translating fangyan as “language” subtly ignores, or outright denies, the state’s claims of national unity.59 Today, even if many linguists in the PRC acknowledge that fangyan are linguistically more analogous to the taxonomic category of language than that of dialect, alternative terms such as “language” have political implications.60 Thus the question of vocabulary is not only relevant to introspective academics. Each choice carries implications that radiate inside and outside the academy. The problem of translation has plagued language enthusiasts since the late sixteenth century. Matteo Ricci, the first European Jesuit to reside in China, used the word “colloquial” to describe local variants. Later Jesuit and Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century added “vernacular” and “dialect” to the growing list of terms. While some were careful in their use of these terms, many others used them interchangeably and with little reflection.61 Such inconsistencies drew the criticism of Carstairs Douglas,

59

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DeFrancis also proposed a similar neologism, “regionalect.” John DeFrancis, Chinese Language, 53–67. Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’?,” 7. This is a claim that stems as far back as the nineteenth century, when the handbook for the American Presbyterian Mission claimed that Chinese “dialects,” despite the fact that they were mutually unintelligible not unlike many European languages, could not actually be called languages because “they belong to the same empire, making them dialects of the mother speech.” P. G. von Möllendorf, “On the Foreign Languages Spoken in China and the Classification of the Chinese Dialects,” in The China Mission Handbook (Shanghai: American Presbytarian Mission, 1896), 48. Mair told a story during the panel “National Language, Dialect and Identity” at the 2015 annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies about a Chinese linguist who excoriated him for implying that fangyan should be called languages. While anecdotal, evidence suggests that calling fangyan languages is politically sensitive. Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’?,” 10. Before the nineteenth century, many Europeans built their conceptualization of the Chinese language from the writings of Matteo Ricci. Ricci pointed to the discrepancy between written and local Chinese, using the term vernacula, or as translated by Gallagher, “colloquial idiom,” to discuss oral languages. See China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. Louis Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 26. The earliest source I found that mentioned European inquiries into Chinese phonology that were not based on written sources comes from Portuguese in Taiwan, who wrote a dictionary of the “lengua China cheo que contiene los vocablos tambien simples que compuestos, con los caracteres generales y peculiars a questo dialecto.” This dictionary, dated approximately to the early seventeenth century has unfortunately been lost. But its very title implies an early use of the term dialect. Piet van der Loon, “The Manila Incunabula and Early Hokkien Studies,” pt. 2, Asia Major 13 (1967), 97. Similarly, though originating in a broader travelogue about living in China, Jean Baptiste Du Halde, a French Jesuit in Beijing, mentioned that each city in Fujian spoke a “dialecte particulier,” implying a very early attribution of the term “dialect” to

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a Scottish missionary stationed in Fujian Province, who offered perhaps the most thorough explanation of the connotations of these various translations. In the introduction to his Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, he explained, Such words as “dialect” or “colloquial” give an erroneous conception of its nature. It is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois; it is spoken by the highest ranks just as by the common people, by the most learned just as by the most ignorant . . . Nor does the term “dialect” convey anything like a correct idea of its distinctive character; it is no mere dialectical variety of some other language; it is a distinct language, one of the many and widely different languages which divide among them the soil of China.62

Douglas’s criticism speaks to the inherent associations attached to each English term.63 The term “dialect,” he claimed, implied a branch or auxiliary, a category or entity only made comprehensible through its relationship to its root language. “Colloquial” and “vernacular” connoted languages that were oral and non-elite. All of these translations were inherently problematic. Other sojourners from the West, however, remained untroubled. Faced with the unknown, most felt comfortable drawing parallels between observable phenomena in China and known phenomena at home. Europeans were certainly not unfamiliar with the concept of local languages, nor was an elite written style used in sacred texts an alien conceit. Because of this, mental shortcuts were taken, resulting in portraits of China that used categories and historical trajectories that were familiar to European spectators. To the best of my knowledge, the first written source to directly translate “dialect” as fangyan was British diplomat Herbert Giles’s 1892 A Chinese–English Dictionary.64 But the pairing became normalized by the

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local languages. Yet it must be stressed here that Du Halde speaks not of broad dialects such as that of Canton, but particularly local ones. Jean Baptiste Du Halde, Description gé ographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, enrichie des cartes gé né rales et particulieres de ces pays, de la carte gé né rale et des cartes particulieres du Thibet, & de la Coré e; & orné e d’un grand nombre de figures & de vignettes gravé es en tailledouce, Vol. 1 (The Hague: H. Scheurleer, 1736), 154. Carstairs Douglas, Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (London: Trübner, 1873), vii. Generally speaking, Douglas’s criticisms fell on deaf ears. Few scholars took the time to defend their use of the English terms. One exception was the authors of the China Mission Handbook, who conceded Douglas’s points but chose to retain the term nonetheless. Their answer, rather than reject the term altogether, was simply to break local languages into smaller categories: “principle dialects” to describe large regions, and “sub-dialects” to describe smaller, more closely related dialects. The China Mission Handbook (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission, 1896), 50. Herbert Giles, A Chinese English Dictionary (London: B. Quaritch, 1892), 374. Samuel Wells Williams’s 1874 dictionary, rather, translates “dialect” as tuhua. Samuel Wells Williams, Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission, 1874). Two decades later, in 1916, Yuen Ren Chao similarly called local languages in China “dialects.” Subsequently, in Chinese translations of Bernhard Karlgren’s 1915 Études sur la

26

Introduction

early twentieth century as a group of Chinese students took up the study of linguistics, literature, and social science in Europe and the United States. When they returned from abroad to conduct research on their own country, they filtered it through the disciplinary vocabulary of their training, choosing or inventing Chinese words that could grasp the phenomena that their education had compelled them to describe. Translation shaped new understandings of what a fangyan was. Translation is never simply a one-to-one transfer of meaning. The way that one word is rendered in another language is shaped by cultural and conceptual frameworks, which impact the semantic meaning of words in both languages. In discussing this phenomenon, Lydia Liu suggests the term “super-sign” – “not a word but a hetero-cultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of the recognizable verbal units.”65 Liu’s point, that the very process of translation of words transforms the phenomena those words represent, compels us to consider how cross-cultural interactions affected how fangyan were conceived. It also underscores the relative novelty of the fangyan/dialect supersign. Fangyan was not always translated as, imagined as, or framed as the equivalent of a dialect. Given the complexity of the term’s definition, writing a history of fangyan poses a unique challenge. Indeed, it runs the risk of implying that all fangyan are equally distinct languages or equally branches of some larger Chinese language. It is tempting to solve such complexities by simply moving the goalposts – for instance, declaring Cantonese an independent “language” due to its mutual intelligibility with Mandarin while reserving “dialect” (or the dialect/fangyan supersign) for other local languages that are far more easily understood by Mandarin speakers. But the history I write here does not seek to confirm or falsify the dialect/ fangyan supersign, nor do I make my own claims about what was or was not a fangyan, dialect, or language. My focus, put plainly, is the history of fangyan as a category, and in order to study it as a category, it is imperative that we take seriously the historical actors who treated it as such. By studying the complex negotiations over the boundaries of the term, we can trace concurrent negotiations over the identities, cultural signifiers,

65

phonologie chinoise (Studies on Chinese phonology), Karlgren’s term dialecte was translated by both himself and scholars such as Yuen Ren Chao as fangyan. Gao Benhan (Bernhard Karlgren), Zhongguo yinyunxue de yanjiu (Études sur la phonologie chinoise), trans. Yuen Ren Chao, Luo Changpei, and Li Fang-kuei (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1940). In 1924, Lin Yutang similarly uses both the terms fangyan and “dialect” in the same text. Lin Yutang, “Wei fangyan jinyi jie: Fuji” (Further explanation on fangyan: Addendum) Geyao zhoukan 49 (April 6, 1924), 2–3. Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 13.

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and lived realities connected to the diverse phenomena to which that label was applied. What Is Mandarin? Like fangyan, the term “Mandarin” also presents a rather thorny problem of translation. Stemming from the Sanskrit mantrin, it first entered the English language through the Portuguese term mandarim, referring to the “language of the Mandarins,” or of the imperial officials. More recently, “Mandarin” has migrated to represent the contemporary national languages of the PRC and the Republic of China (Taiwan [ROC]), termed Putonghua and Guoyu (國語) respectively. Before the twentieth century, the word “Mandarin” hewed most closely to the Chinese word Guanhua (官話). Literally the “language of officials,” Guanhua was used to denote what was spoken at court.66 The actual linguistic phenomena to which Guanhua or Mandarin referred was not consistent, influenced by the center of power and seat of government.67 Because Guanhua was not a strictly codified or widely-spoken language, it is difficult to recreate its exact pronunciation, or determine if it was ever even imagined as being exact. One of the only attempts to enforce oral standardization before the twentieth century was a decree by the Yongzheng emperor demanding all officials speak Guanhua with “correct pronunciation” (zhengyin 正音), and the efficacy was rather limited.68 Missionaries and diplomats who attempted to learn the language of Chinese officialdom also took notice of this ambiguity. Early attempts to study what they interchangeably called “Mandarin” or the “official language” involved recording the phonetic systems and basic vocabulary of what they learned from the Chinese elites with whom they interacted. Before the mid-nineteenth century, this was the language of Nanjing, or “Southern Mandarin.” Yet in the 1860s, Thomas Wade, a British diplomat living in the capital, popularized the designation of “Mandarin” as the language of 66

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To further add complexity to these terms, since the twentieth century Guanhua also refers to a particular fangyan region, which includes the primary languages of most of China’s territory, from Heilongjiang to the north, Xinjiang to the west, and Yunnan to the south. This includes, of course, the language of Beijing, but also several dozen others. This led Jesuit missionaries to distinguish between “Northern Mandarin” as the official language in Beijing and “Southern Mandarin” as the language of Nanjing. As Hirata Shoji has shown, it was not until the eighteenth century that “Northern guanhua, or the language spoken in Beijing, became the language of officialdom.” Hirata Shoji, “Qingdai Honglusi zhengyin kao” (An investigation of correct pronunciation in the Qing Honglu Temple), Zhongguo yuwen 6 (2000), 537–544. Weng, “What is Mandarin?” 613–615. For a detailed explanation of the Yongzheng emperor’s edict on standardizing oral language, see Paola Paderni, “The Problem of Kuan-hua in Eighteenth Century China: The Yung-cheng Decree for Fukian and Kwantung,” Annali 48, no. 4 (1988), 257–265.

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Introduction

Beijing. Within years, many missionaries and diplomats equated the “Chinese” with this so-designated “Northern Mandarin.”69 The crisis of the late Qing compelled reformers to reimagine the role of language through the lens of nation building. While some reformers simply suggested that Guanhua be reframed as the national language, the suggestion was hardly popular. Instead, it was eclipsed by rival proposals – some wanted to replace Guanhua with fangyan of other regions, others suggested that reformers amalgamate the country’s fangyan into one composite phonology. After decades of debates, a beleaguered group of linguists in 1925 officially threw their support behind a national language, called Guoyu, with a phonology “based on the language of Beijing,” quickly winning over other intellectuals and, two years later, Chiang Kai-shek and his party, the Nationalists (KMT). In 1956, the new ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) slightly adapted the definition and structure of Guoyu and renamed it the “common tongue,” or Putonghua, defining it as “Beijing’s pronunciation as standard pronunciation, Northern dialect as the base dialect, and modern vernacular literature as standard structure, vocabulary, and grammar.”70 The English term “Mandarin” subsequently replaced its association with the language of imperial officialdom to denote the current national languages of the PRC and the ROC. Because Putonghua, Guoyu, and Mandarin all denote an official language tethered to the seat of government, it is easy to imagine a continuity between the Guanhua of imperial China and the language patronized by the Chinese state today. Yet to treat the creation of China’s national language as a simple process of promulgating what was spoken in the capital not only simplifies the history of the national language, it also distorts linguistic realities. Despite the fact that Putonghua is based upon the phonology of Beijing, it is not just the language of Beijing, either linguistically or in the ways it is culturally imagined. It is also not, linguistically or imagined, the zhengyin of the Yongzheng emperor’s court. More importantly, while Guoyu would eventually be crafted with Beijing’s phonology, vocabulary, and syntax at its center, few scholars, reformers, or legislators saw this choice as a foregone conclusion during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories told in these pages will show the complex history of how Guoyu and Putonghua came to be tethered to the language spoken in the capital. It 69

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Thomas Wade was actually inspired by the work of Thomas Taylor Meadows, Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, and on the Chinese Language: Illustrated with a Sketch of the Province of Kwang-Tung, Shewing Its Division into Departments and Districts (London: W. H. Allen, 1847), 48–50; Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 58–60. Zhou Enlai, Guowuyuan guanyu tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi (State Council announcement on the promulgation of Putonghua), February 10, 1956, File B1-2–1901, Shanghai Municipal Archives.

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will also show how that connection was neither direct nor naturally foreordained. As will be made clear, various groups imagined a language for China in highly divergent ways, and these disagreements left legacies. Presupposing the ending of the story blinds us to how history transpired. Sound and Script In the definition of Putonghua, the third clause is notable: it takes “modern vernacular literature as standard structure, vocabulary, and grammar.” The language’s very definition underscores that reform of China’s oral language occurred in tandem with its written counterpart. Any discussion of oral Chinese languages, fangyan or Putonghua, must take into account concurrent changes to its written prose. The writing system used for most Chinese languages is comprised of tens of thousands of graphemes, commonly called Chinese characters.71 Neither exclusively phonetic nor semantic ideographs, the relationship between oral Chinese languages and their common script is complicated. In the first century CE, scholar Xu Shen’s (53 CE–121 CE) Shuowen jiezi (說文解字, “Explication of written characters”), organized Chinese characters into six categories. Of the graphs Xu organized, he characterized over 80 percent of them as phonetic compounds, or characters comprised of a semantic element (often called a radical) and a phonetic element. The character 河 (he, “river”) can serve as an example. The left-hand portion of the character, 氵, provides semantic information, meaning “water”; the right-hand portion, 可 (pronounced ke in Mandarin, but often a homonym to the character 河 in other fangyan), provides its phonetic value.72 These are clearly not simply semantic scripts. To offer a metaphor, the nonsemantic parts of characters often operate like rebuses, used as stand-ins for homophonous sounds regardless of that portion’s original meaning. Chinese characters have long captured the Western imagination. Often described as hieroglyphics, the script was at once esteemed for its artistic expression and demeaned for its primitiveness. Beginning in the late 71

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Many in the fields of Chinese literature and sociolinguistics use the term “Sinograph” to refer to the script particular to a spoken Chinese language. See, for instance, Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Victor Mair, ed., The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xxiv. The other five include simple ideograms, or characters that represent visually an abstract idea; pictographs, or characters that visually represent concrete phenomena; compound ideographs, or two combined ideographs; derived graphs, or characters whose shape is derived from another semantically identical character; and loan graphs, or characters whose shape is derived from semantically unrelated but phonetically homophonous characters. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi (Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987).

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Introduction

nineteenth century, however, late-Qing academics and Western missionaries alike began criticizing the country’s historic script because they believed it was divorced from its oral counterparts. They called Chinese characters cumbersome, outdated, and too numerous for the majority of people to learn efficiently – the very essence of why China could not modernize.73 By the early twentieth century, such claims had transformed into what Yurou Zhong calls the “phonocentric turn” of modern Chinese writing, defined by the eradication of characters and a complete reinvention of script, literature, and grammatology.74 While the goal of dispensing with characters altogether was abandoned in 1958, the insistence that the structure of script could stimulate or hinder progress has remained markedly resilient.75 It was not only the script that reformers deemed incompatible with the modern world – it was also the semantic and grammatical structure of its prose. Since the later years of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE), the primary method of official and scholarly communication used what we often lump together today as “classical Chinese.”76 A category that describes the formal writing system in use for nearly 2,000 years could hardly have a static, standardized form. Indeed, it is often best defined as an antonym to the similarly imprecise “vernacular Chinese” than as a language with distinct, clear characteristics. Despite this, early twentiethcentury reformers deemed nearly all elite communication – from the Confucian Analects of the fifth century BCE to nineteenth-century court proceedings – equally “dead,” endorsing instead a “living” vernacular language (baihua 白話) that hewed closely to common speech. They pointed to vernacular novels of earlier dynasties, such as Outlaws of the Marsh or Journey to the West, as paragons of China’s living language, largely because their whimsical dialogue seemed closer to everyday speech than the poetry and prose of the philosophers of dynasties past.77 But this so-called living language proved to be a moving target. A written language that “reflected the way people speak” made for a hopelessly vague 73 74

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Janine Hartman, “Ideograms and Hieroglyphs: The Egypto-Chinese Origins Controversy in the Enlightenment,” Dalhousie French Studies 43 (Summer, 1998), 101–118. Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity 1916–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 2–3. Andrea Bachner calls this belief that Chinese characters are divorced from oral languages a “silencing” of the Chinese script. Bachner, Beyond Sinology, 96. John DeFrancis was famous for declaring that the Communist Party had “failed” because of its decision to not abolish the Chinese character system. DeFrancis, Chinese Language. More recently, see general audience publications like this one: Geoffrey Pullum, “The Awful Chinese Writing System,” Chronicle of Higher Education (January 20, 2016), www .chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/01/20/the-awful-chinese-writing-system/ Shang Wei, “Baihua, Guanhua, Fangyan, and the May Fourth Reading of Rulin Waishi,” Sino-Platonic Papers 117 (May, 2002), 1–10. Hu Shi, “Wenxue gailiang chuyi,” (Preliminary thoughts on literature reform), Xin qingnian 2, no. 5 (January, 1917), 10–11.

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definition. This was not only a political and academic problem in the late Qing; it continues to trouble scholars today. “There is no such thing [as baihua],” exclaims scholar Shang Wei, “unless we refer to an extremely broad range of regional languages and dialects, which rarely entered the realm of writing.”78 In part, Shang argues, defining a “vernacular” is so vexing because it is sustained by assumed corollaries between China and the West. The tendency among vernacular literature advocates of the early twentieth century to filter their understanding of language “through and distorted by the early modern and modern European model of vernacularization and nation-state formation” made baihua into something that was at once unattainable – any living language, to be written down, had to have some sort of static standard and thus was no longer “living” – and antithetical to the goals its champions had set for themselves.79 A commonality among all aspects of the Chinese language – lived, imagined, or aspirational – is that there is a historical rupture at the end of the nineteenth century, when earlier notions of how language should relate to its speakers were suddenly upended by a generic, universal definition of what made a language compatible with modern nationhood. This imagined universal linguistic modernity promised that all modern languages have particular qualities, insinuating the existence of an uncompromising standard against which all languages were to be measured.80 According to its logic, the European continent eschewed its elite language – Latin – and so must China. Countries of the modern world used an alphabetic script, and so must China. Italy and France were standardizing their spoken languages to facilitate communication and foster unity – and of course, so must China. Yet inherent in these universals are global power dynamics, hiding linguistic imperialism, Eurocentrism, orientalism, and a host of other cultural hierarchies within the false promise of a globally shared belief about what a language should be. These hierarchies are smuggled into acceptance by promoting the notion that there is no hierarchy at all, and that there are universal global models that transcend the cultural context from whence they came.

78

79 80

Shang Wei, “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” in Ben Elman, ed., Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 258. Shang Wei, “Writing and Speech,” 255; Shang Wei, “Baihua, Guanhua, Fangyan,” 9. Indeed, while Mullaney argues that each of these terms helps to explain the history of “false universalisms” that sought to define the Chinese character as fundamentally incompatible with modernity, he finds each falls short, since they do not capture the binary of “cenemic vs. pleremic” scripts. At the same time, when looking at the Chinese language as a whole, including its spoken form and its grammar, these false universalisms are, indeed, couched in Western-European context terms. See Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Boston: MIT Press, 2017), 10–12.

32

Introduction

In China, however, the introduction of these global models and shared concerns about linguistic modernity did not necessarily create a singular narrative. Rather, they incited debates about what this linguistic modernity looked like when Chinese reformers applied its principles to their own nation. Western prescriptions were often contradictory or impractical, leading different groups within China to advocate for those prescriptions they found integral to nation building while ignoring or refuting those they found irrelevant. What emerged was not a linguistic modernity, but modernities, whose compositions and characteristics were fluid and contested. The sheer diversity of prescriptions that the debates produced warn us against assuming that modernization necessarily generated unity or standardization. Structure of This Book I trace the evolving debate over the role of fangyan in Chinese nation building in five chapters. Chapter 1 establishes the foundation upon which these debates were built by discussing premodern conceptions of fangyan and dialect. It begins by summarizing the two primary ways oral languages were studied and rendered in Qing China: first, as phonologies categorized in rime tables and dictionaries that supported philological studies of classical texts; and second, as representatives of localized vernaculars in songbooks, theater, or fictional writings. The second half of this chapter turns to Western sojourners granted access to the Qing’s interiors through Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars (1842 and 1860). Protestant missionaries, who studied local languages so as to proselytize to non-elites, filtered the Qing’s linguistic landscape through their own histories: they branded the written classical Chinese as a Latin-like dead language, and reframed local languages as “dialects” or “vernaculars.” By offering their own theories on the origin of a Chinese language, these missionaries simultaneously highlighted the lack of a standardized Chinese national language and made dialects a central point of access for finding or inventing one. Chapter 2 moves forward to analyze late-Qing and early Republican efforts to construct a Chinese national language. Late-Qing reformers debated how best to modernize their nation through language by drawing upon philological studies of their own and the Western criticisms of Chinese society explored in Chapter 1. From their discussions, two narratives emerged, thus initiating the dialectical process regarding fangyan’s role in Chinese nationalism that this book traces. Some elites proposed that, because fangyan were an indispensable part of the nation, the national language should represent their shared, historical core. Others, drawing on the example of France or Japan, contended that one fangyan should be chosen as a national representative and others should be demoted to variant status. Although in 1925 a language

Structure of This Book

33

based almost entirely on the phonology of Beijing was chosen as the bedrock of the national language, earlier failed proposals created a precedent for centering Chinese collective identity on fangyan and, as a result, a basis for envisioning a more heterogenous notion of national belonging. From local village bureaucrats to textbook producers, fangyan were portrayed as “roots” of a shared past, critical to forming a basis for a shared ethnic and national community. Chapter 3 takes us from politics in the early Republic to the academy. It argues that the emergence of the intertwined fields of folksong studies, dialectology, and ethnography after the 1919 May Fourth movement each suggested a distinct role for fangyan in China’s national invention – respectively, a medium to express authentic emotion, subsidiaries to the national language, and representative of a Han ethnicity. Folksong collectors sought to immortalize the oral culture of China’s countryside, thereby designating fangyan an authentic rendering of the nation’s culture. Dialectologists inspired by Western comparative linguistics sought to organize China’s languages into hierarchical taxonomies. Ethnographers juxtaposed fangyan surveys with research on Chinese ethnic minorities in order to draw strict boundaries between the Han and China’s other ethnic groups. Together, these three disciplines set the terms for debate over the cultural and social roles of fangyan in policy, education, and art. Chapter 4 examines how the CCP co-opted these coexisting narratives about fangyan and the nation for their revolutionary goals. On the one hand, the CCP’s increasingly efficient bureaucracy, buttressed by linguists at the state-sponsored Chinese Academy of Sciences,81 declared Putonghua the Chinese national language and framed fangyan as obsolete remnants of a past that would naturally disappear on their own. On the other hand, those in theater, radio, and literature proclaimed that fangyan were indispensable to their objective of spreading revolutionary messages. Together, the coexistence of these two narratives shows that despite the CCP’s national language agenda, there were powerful voices declaring that a revolution “from the people” should be presented in the language of those people. Official tolerance for this debate shifted within the decade. Chapter 5 begins in 1958 when Chairman Mao Zedong called upon citizens of the PRC to take a “Great Leap” forward in national development, which required that its citizens constantly partake in revolutionary behavior. The policy affected all aspects of life – as grain production quadrupled, so, too, should literacy rates; as steel mills expanded, so, too, should school buildings; 81

Scholars of linguistics were housed in a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences called the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences (zhexue shehui kexue bu 哲学社会科学 部). In 1977 the department became its own independent organization, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which oversees the study of linguistics today.

34

Introduction

and as technology was perfected, so, too, should children’s Putonghua pronunciation. In an environment where all nonrevolutionary behavior was considered counterrevolutionary or subversive, there was no space for thinking in any language but the national one. Fangyan were exiled with other socalled feudalistic behaviors of the past, destined to fade away, and dangerous to revive. Yet this chapter does not end on a somber note. Rather, the final section draws upon oral histories and strategic readings of official sources to uncover a secret life of fangyan. It shows that the CCP was unsuccessful in ending the evolving debates that defined the dialectic. On the contrary, the party’s approach to fangyan ensured the process continued. Finally, a word about methodology. This work is concerned with the composition of categories and the names that got attached to them. Calling something a language, a dialect, a mother tongue, a standard, or a fangyan gave it an inherent limit, tethered it to a nexus of sociocultural representations, and assigned it a role in an implicit, contested hierarchy. To untangle this web of ever-shifting cultural signifiers, I take the approach of scholars such as Ruth Rogaski, Leon Rocha, or Raymond Williams, whose works center on how the “semantics of [words] change[d] in response to new sociopolitical situations and needs, and the way historical actors negotiated and struggled with their use of language to express new experiences.”82 By tracing the shifting meaning of the word fangyan, and in turn other words like language, ethnicity, Han, Chinese, and nation, that were affected by those shifts, we can grasp how historical actors thought of, shaped, and were shaped by the phenomena those vocabulary described. In essence, this is not a history of fangyan. It is a history of why and how things were called fangyan, how the boundaries that circumscribed them were drawn, and what the evolving constitution of that category reveals about the Chinese nation. Since this is a history of how a constructed category shifted over time, I would like to resist the inclination to use one consistent term for the subjects of this work throughout, be it fangyan, dialect, Mandarin, National Language, Putonghua, Guoyu, or any other term, translation, or supersign. Rather, to the best of my abilities, I use the terms my historical actors used. Often, this means simply leaving terms like fangyan and Putonghua untranslated, or, when quoting foreign missionaries or linguists who wrote in English, using their preferred English terms. It is an imperfect method, but one that I hope will result in a history more carefully rendered.

82

Leon Rocha, “Xing: The Discourse of Sex and Human Nature in Modern China,” Gender & History 22, no. 3 (November, 2010), 604; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976).

1

A Chinese Language Fangyan before the Twentieth Century

That there exists a problem with the Chinese language hardly needs to be justified. Yuen Ren Chao, “The Problem of the Chinese Language”

Introduction Elites at the end of the Qing dynasty saw the Chinese language as a problem. A sequence of military defeats beginning with the First Opium War in 1842 made many of them question where their empire had gone wrong. They began with the obvious suspects. They noted that their empire’s military technology lagged behind that of their foes, and that its soldiers lacked the training and discipline necessary for modern warfare. But nearly half a century of wars had left the Qing beleaguered, forcing many elites to wonder if their problem was much more foundational – that their weakness lay not in something concrete like infrastructure, but rather, the country’s very cultural anatomy, of which language was a central part. When it came to language, these men discussed a myriad of defects, articulated in a myriad of terms. Their written style was outdated, they cried, leading to backward thinking; oral languages were fractured, they moaned, hindering communication. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the only consensus they had reached was that the linguistic landscape they saw before them was fundamentally flawed. The problem was difficult to define, in part, because the object of their fixation was itself enigmatic. The idea of a “Chinese language” – a language unified in its sound and script used by and representative of a “Chinese nation” – was a foreign concept to Qing elites in the nineteenth century. The impact of the Opium Wars throughout the Qing empire was slow to be felt, but among its earliest consequences was the introduction of new frameworks for imagining a new world order and the Qing’s place within it. The wars and their treaties granted Western missionaries, scholars, and diplomats unfettered access to the Qing heartland, and once there, these foreign observers produced a wealth of literature about what they saw. In their writings and 35

36

Fangyan before the Twentieth Century

descriptions, they filtered their narratives through their own histories, deeming the Qing a nation-state called China. With such a designation, the absence of a “Chinese” language to represent it felt palpable. Perhaps because Western imperialism introduced the dream of a nationstate and a language to match it, histories have tended to emphasize, even overemphasize, how the West galvanized a transformation of the Chinese language. John DeFrancis, for instance, tellingly titled his first chapter of Nationalism and Language Reform in China “The West Shows the Way,” arguing that it was European missionaries who taught Qing elites how to change their language and even provided the model to do so. Certainly, it is difficult to ignore the influence of missionaries and diplomats on late-Qing efforts at language reform – from proposals for an alphabetic script to excoriations of classical references in written prose, many of those interested in language reform were borrowing their framework from either the West or Japan. Indeed, language reform and nation building in the late Qing made little sense without understanding the Western texts upon which Qing elites drew. In the words of Haun Saussy, these “cultural bilinguals affect[ed] the societies whose periscopes they [were].”1 But to argue that anyone showed Qing elites “the way” erases how they imagined their own past and present. Scholarship on the nature of the Chinese script and its oral counterparts dates back millennia. And while their significance changed over time, texts from as early as the Han dynasty remained foundational for linguistic study through the early twentieth century. As late-Qing reformers began to imagine a new nationstate and a language to match it, they looked to their own indigenous histories for a Chinese past that could be reinvented to serve its present. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the pre-twentieth-century narratives, epistemological frameworks, and cultural meanings that provided a foundation for the invention and simultaneous twinning of a Chinese language and a Chinese nation in the final decades of the Qing. In particular, it examines how Qing scholars and Western sojourners looked specifically at the vernacular languages spoken in the Han heartland of Qing China. I first trace the significance of oral languages as they emerged in written sources before the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how evidentiary scholarship in the eighteenth century privileged phonological research in making sense of ancient texts. The chapter subsequently examines the work of Protestant missionaries who, granted access to China’s interiors through Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars, studied China’s local languages in order to proselytize to 1

Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13.

Seen and Unseen: Language in Qing China

37

non-elites. A small but influential group of innovative philologists had established a firm precedent for centering philosophical and linguistic research on phonology, thus introducing a detailed methodology for tracing oral languages back in time – components of which are still influential today. Missionaries, on the other hand, simultaneously highlighted the lack of a Chinese standardized national language comparable to those around the world, and made dialects a central point of access of finding or inventing one. The eighteenth-century Qing methods for diachronically studying oral language, given new purpose by the prescriptions of Western sojourners, served as inspiration for nation-building projects initiated at the dawn of the twentieth century. Seen and Unseen: Language in Qing China Interest in the oral origins of the Chinese script has deep historical roots. Chinese philology, called xiaoxue (小學), originated in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). A dynasty that legitimized its rule by claiming connections with the past, Han scholars were driven by a desire to, as Michael Lackner writes, “bridge the linguistic gap that separated them from the language of the canonical texts” that were written several hundred years prior.2 These Han dynasty scholars produced several “word philologies” to record, compare, and dissect the texts of Chinese antiquity.3 This included dictionaries such as Yang Xiong’s firstcentury Fangyan (方言), the first recorded study of regional language, and Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi.4 The Shuowen jiezi provided scholars a systematic way to philologically analyze the meaning of individual characters in the philosophical canon – a character that was a “loan graph” had different interpretive possibilities 2

3

4

Michael Lackner, “Reconciling the Classics: Two Case Studies from the Song–Yuan Exegetical Approaches,” in Sheldon Pollack, Benjamin Elman, and Ku-Ming Kevin Chang, eds., World Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 138. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 212–221; Ori Sela, China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Benjamin Elman, “Early Modern or Late Imperial? The Crisis of Classical Philology in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Sheldon Pollack, Benjamin Elman, and Ku-Ming Kevin Chang, eds., World Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 225–244. Yang Xiong, Fangyan (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1993) (Original first century BCE). An analysis of the work in English is Paul Serruys, The Chinese Dialects of Han Times According to Fang Yen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). For commentaries, see Hua Xuecheng, Yang Xiong “Fangyan” xiaoshi lungao (A revised and annotated commentary of Yang Xiong’s Fangyan) (Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011).

38

Fangyan before the Twentieth Century

than a pictograph. It also emphasized how deeply semantics were tied to phonetics. Xu Shen indicated pronunciation by pairing a character with a homophonous counterpart, a method that would be replaced in later centuries by a more precise system of transcribing sound. The system, called fanqie (反切), indicated the pronunciation of one character by using a separate set of characters to denote its initial, final, and tone. As an example, the character奔, pronounced “beˉ n,” would be indicated with the characters 榜 (baˇ ng) to indicate the initial b, and 跟 (geˉ n) to indicate both the final “eˉ n” and the high flat tone (ping 平 tone, most closely correlated to the first tone in Putonghua).5 While this method did not describe absolute pronunciation, it was effective in drawing phonetic relationships among and between characters, as well as separating each morpheme into smaller phonetic elements. It also relied upon a clear method for categorizing Chinese characters by their phonetic value, the groundwork of which was laid by scholars such as Xu Shen and Yang Xiong. Later dynasties saw the emergence of dictionaries and rime tables, which offered more precise phonetic data than Han dynasty texts.6 The earliest of these sources for which we have evidence is the Qieyun (切韻, 601 CE), though it only exists in scattered records. The oldest complete rime dictionary still extant is the Guangyun (廣韻, 1008 CE), which recorded the phonological categorization of 26,000 characters.7 The dictionaries separated characters first according to tone, and then by their riming finals.8 Over the centuries, scholars continued to amend and add to these existing works. Sweeping rime categories became more specific as authors further separated rimes by place and manner of articulation, such as open mouth/closed mouth (kaikou/hekou 開口/合口), or “sound pronounced with the teeth meeting/sound pronounced at the tips of the teeth” (zhengchiyin/chitouyin 正齒音/齒頭音).9 The Qing was a turning point. Beginning in the seventeenth century, a fractious group of intellectuals began to challenge epistemological methods that had been made popular by mainstream Qing scholars who 5 6

7

8 9

It is important to note that this was Bernhard Karlgren’s analogy, and he was quite critical of fanqie. Gao Benhan (Bernhard Karlgren), Zhongguo yinyunxue de yanjiu, 4. David Prager Branner, “Introduction: What Are the Rime Tables and What Do They Mean?,” in David Prager Branner, ed., The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2006), 2. For a more complete explanation of how these texts influenced scholars in the Qing and Republican periods, see N. G. D. Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2011), chapter 8. These include pingsheng (平聲), shangsheng (上聲), qusheng (去聲), and rusheng (入聲). Branner, “Introduction,” 7–11. There is a fair amount of debate about the dating of these dictionaries and tables. For a summary of these debates see Branner, “Introduction,” 13–18.

Seen and Unseen: Language in Qing China

39

enjoyed government patronage. Calling their work kaozheng (考證) or “evidential scholarship,” they contended that since the Song dynasty (960–1279), the true meaning of classical texts had been obscured by the hegemony of Neo-Confucian philosophy, its mysticism encouraging inattention to precision and disregard of evidence. This could be remedied, they argued, by returning the study of the Classics to philological analysis of the words in those texts.10 Among kaozheng scholars’ numerous methods of uncovering hidden truths shrouded in text, one was diachronic studies of phonology. To understand how oral language changed over time, men such as Jiang Yong, Duan Yucai, and Dai Zhen used texts like the Shuowen jiezi and other dictionaries and rime charts as tools to analyze character phonologies with increasing detail, dividing Chinese morphemes into narrower groupings.11 Beyond this, interest in phonology in the Qing was not limited to one group of scholars. Rime tables served as the foundation for popular games, which, among other uses, likely taught phonology in early education.12 Imperially authorized books in the late eighteenth century used characters for their phonetic value to “spell” pronunciation, which, in the 1860s, were used to teach the Northern pronunciation to Manchu elites – an early precedent for the language reform of the following decades.13 In a word, phonological research in the High Qing was widely used, widely known, and far from rudimentary. As Benjamin Elman warns us, we ignore the sophistication of their scholarship “at our own peril.”14 Yet this sophistication notwithstanding, their research was nonetheless framed by their worldview. Kaozheng scholarship aimed to create knowledge that buttressed the dynastic system, a system that politically and culturally organized their world. Their goal was consistently in service of understanding the past, not the present. By the early nineteenth century, when kaozheng xiaoxue research had reached its height, an intellectual revolution was brewing in Europe. The promise of the nation-state violently upended the presumption that the only knowledge valuable to society was its elite historical canon. For this and many other reasons – including the disbanding of the Jesuit order and the arrival of Protestants in China interested in plebeian culture – the 10 11 12

13 14

Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 215–220. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 220–221. Mårten Söderblom Saarela, “‘Shooting Characters’: A Phonological Game and Its Uses in Late Imperial China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 138, no. 2 (April 2018), 327–359. Mårten Sö derblom Saarela, “Alphabets Avant La Lettre: Phonographic Experiments in Late Imperial China,” Twentieth-Century China 41, no. 3 (2016), 234–257. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 221.

40

Fangyan before the Twentieth Century

strides made in Chinese philology during the High Qing and the new directions of nineteenth-century Western Sinology developed largely independently. It was not until the early twentieth century that the intellectual trajectories of Western and Chinese scholars finally converged. Influenced by the nation-state framework, Chinese intellectual movements dismissively claimed that Qing scholars’ research, with its focus on understanding elite antiquity, was irrelevant in a new China. But these kaozheng methods hardly disappeared. Instead, despite their own rhetoric, twentieth-century Chinese scholars gazed upon these methods Janus-faced, discrediting kaozheng scholars’ assumptions while actively relying upon the groundwork they built. Kaozheng research found new life in service of the nation-state in a way that had a particular bearing on the culture of fangyan. Their contention that Chinese phonology linked past to present was mobilized by twentieth-century scholars to prove certain fangyan had an empirically determined connection to antiquity. In this way, kaozheng methods were used to show which fangyan groups could claim cultural ownership over the imagined Chinese past – and which could not. Fangyan Literature before the Twentieth Century Rime tables and character compendiums supported a unique conceptualization of the relationship between sound and script in imperial China. Popular conceptualizations of oral and local languages before the nineteenth century were also formed and sustained through literature. Some of the earliest examples of vernacular vocabulary emerged in translations of Buddhist chant booklets at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (617–907).15 The use of fangyan in these religious texts were rooted in common Buddhist practice; like Protestant missionaries several centuries later, Tang dynasty Buddhist clergy privileged the oral transmission of scriptures over the use of written texts.16 Such conventions encouraged a tradition of “faithfully preserv[ing] and replicat[ing] spoken language in written language” in the centuries before the modern period.17 15

16

17

Liang Peizhi (Leung Pui-Chee), Xianggang Daxue suo cang muyu shu xulu yu yanjiu (Woodenfish books: Critical essays and an annotated catalogue based on the collections in the University of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1978), 245–247. According to Victor Mair, there was nothing inherent within the Buddhist canon that demanded the vernacular; it simply privileged oral, rather than written, teachings. Victor Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (1994), 707–751. Though considered by scholars today as an example of early “vernacular” text due to the preponderance of polysyllabic words, fangyan-specific words are few. Without information about how individual fangyan were spoken centuries ago, it is difficult to pinpoint the localisms as belonging to a particular region. Don Snow, Cantonese as Written Language:

Seen and Unseen: Language in Qing China

41

The late-Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw a broad expansion of printed materials for upper and lower classes alike. The period saw a proliferation of “woodenfish books,” popular songbooks that included ditties such as “southern songs” (popular love ballads penned by elites), dragon boat songs (folksongs sung by the poorer masses), and woodenfish songs (long, often religiously inspired, narratives).18 These songs were often composed in the local vernaculars where they were sold. The provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, which held the lion’s share of the publishing market, gained the power to both dominate the book market and set linguistic precedent. Books such as Zhao Ziyong’s Cantonese Love Songs, printed in 1828, were widely circulated throughout the Qing dynasty, both within and outside Cantonese-speaking areas. Another genre in which fangyan vocabulary and grammatical patterns were commonly used was opera.19 Kunqu (崑曲), a style of opera popular near Hangzhou and Suzhou beginning in the late Ming, often weaved together phrases and vocabulary from Guanhua, classical texts, and local patois.20 In Kunqu scripts, Chinese characters were once again applied like rebuses: as stand-ins for phonetic pronunciation, and thus largely incomprehensible without using the oral language as a metric. Vernacular vocabulary, moreover, rarely accurately depicted local speech. They were used to exhibit stereotypes of regional cultures, thus serving more as a symbol of a particular characteristic than a transcription of common speech. Fangyan thus served a variety of purposes in literature – as phonetic stand-ins, as the chosen language for popular non-elite literature, and as symbols of local stereotypes. But one commonality emerged from woodenfish booklets and opera scripts to dialogue in some of the most famous novels, such as Outlaws of the Marsh: they always denoted orality. This is

18

19

20

The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 78. Snow, Cantonese as Written Language, 86–90; Glen Dudbridge, “The Goddess Huayue Sanniang and the Cantonese Ballad Chenxiang Taizi,” in Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture: Selected Papers on China (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 309–320. What made these materials “fangyan” literature is somewhat debatable. In general, scholars have called these works “Cantonese” or “Wu dialect” literature because of the featured fangyan-specific characters or grammatical patterns. Yet we must be aware that the lines we draw between linguistic styles are quite fluid. In the case of opera scripts, for instance, vocabulary, sentences, and grammatical patterns were often weaved into texts that employed a wide variety of literary styles. Similarly, in woodenfish books, songs ranged from transcriptions of oral folk songs to literary poems; most were somewhere in between. Even the Cantonese opera, which took pride in its use of local dialects, would often employ different linguistic styles to emphasize various literary tropes. Zhang Han, “Vernacular Chronotope: The Philological Jiangnan in Late Imperial Chinese Drama,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Boston, MA, May 17–20, 2016.

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largely because fangyan were, and still are, considered solely oral languages. As Mair explains, “it remains almost unthinkable to write down any of the topolects [fangyan] in a relatively integral form.”21 Just as late-Qing scholars would question the very goals of kaozheng research while drawing upon its methods, they reimagined pre-twentieth century literature in similarly contradictory ways. As fin-de-siècle artists and scholars argued that the gap between oral and literary language needed to be eliminated, denouncing earlier literary forms for their decadence and obsolescence, they gazed with new eyes upon art forms with local vernacular language at their center such as opera, novels, and folksongs. For these reformers, the fact that fangyan carried the connotation of the oral made them an ideal vehicle for a language reform that sought the end of the distinction between script and speech altogether. In other words, in the process of exalting a literature that connoted fangyan as exclusively oral, these late-Qing reformers simultaneously made fangyan inspiration for a new written tradition. In responding to Western prescriptions, late-Qing elites drank deeply from the history with which they were familiar. This section has attempted to introduce that history. Kaozheng methods of mobilizing phonologies to make sense of their cultural heritage, and pre-nineteenth century ways of rendering local language into written forms offered models for a new literature. Ultimately, what Western narratives did was highlight a problem – a problem that seemed very visceral to Qing elites after its military defeats. Understandings of oral and written languages, accumulated, debated, overturned, and exhumed from the Han dynasty through the Qing, provided a roadmap for solving them. It is to those who proclaimed the problem in the first place that we now turn. From Hierolect to Dialect In 1703, George Psalmanazar, a native of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) wrote a detailed chronicle of the geography, history, customs, and language of his home.22 Published in London, he described for his English audience how the Formosan people tamed rhinoceroses for labor and beat snakes to extract their poison before consuming them as a food source. He recounted 21

22

Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia,” 725. I would add that, while Mair’s contention is generally true, Cantonese speakers beginning in the early twentieth century have held, and still hold, that their fangyan can be written as a language distinct from Mandarin, as will be discussed in later chapters. George Psalmanazar, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan (London: s.n., 1704).

From Hierolect to Dialect

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Formosan funeral processions, wedding rites, and religious rituals, which he complemented with sketches of intricate gold plates with which the men adorned themselves. And he presented a detailed description of the Formosan language, including its phonetic alphabet and core vocabulary. The book took England by storm, selling out all copies within a year of its publication. Psalmanazar then took to the tour circuit, soon after which he was given a position at Oxford to translate biblical works into Formosan and begin work on his book’s second edition.23 What was so remarkable about Psalmanazar’s account was that it was pure fiction. A blonde haired, blue-eyed Frenchman, Psalmanazar had never traveled east of Germany. Yet while some suspected the veracity of Psalmanazar’s account, none had the knowledge to discredit him. When he claimed that his complexion was pale because Formosan elites lived underground, or that the towering cities he described were erected using elephant labor, skeptics could not prove otherwise. Thus Psalmanazar went undetected for years, an expert of a society living only in his imagination. The success of Psalmanazar’s con rested upon his capitalization of Europe’s cultural and intellectual landscape. He tapped into a fascination with the Far East that had begun pulsing through Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century.24 This enchantment was intricately tied to a religious conviction that humanity had a singular origin, and the associated belief that remnants of this shared antiquity could be found scattered across the globe. He also took advantage of gaps in popular knowledge. Europeans had hardly ventured beyond the coasts of Japan, China, Korea, or Taiwan, and could little attest to the lives of inland populations.25 But the most significant lacuna that Psalmanazar exploited was linguistic. Europeans in the eighteenth century, while having a strong grasp of Asian written traditions, knew little of languages spoken on the ground. Knowledge of Eastern empires was limited to the tales of a few select sojourners who translated and transmitted texts from abroad, shining a light on distant lands for audiences back at home. The nearly exclusive dissemination of classical texts produced an uneven focus on script over sound, and on ancient literary traditions over contemporary vernaculars. Cognizant of this disparity, Psalmanazar claimed that the Formosan 23 24

25

Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 6. This is a phenomenon Raymond Shwab called an “Oriental Renaissance.” The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880, trans. Gene PattersonBlack and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 6.

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language was “the same with that of Japan” but with a distinct pronunciation.26 In claiming that his invented language was essentially a dialect of a known language, Psalmanazar built his deception on a foundation of his audience’s ignorance. At the time Psalmanazar was touring Europe, most knowledge about Qing China came from Spanish and Italian Jesuits.27 These residents served as cultural arbiters; they presented Western science, religion, and art to the Qing court, and transmitted knowledge of the Middle Kingdom back home.28 Only permitted to reside in two or three select cities, all the while under the watchful eye of the Qing state, they saw little outside their provided compounds.29 Their writings reflected these strictures. They spilled ink on the intricacies of the Qing bureaucracy or novel inventions they witnessed, but could speak little on anything besides the texts and objects to which they were exposed.30 This was not to say that Jesuits in the Qing court knew nothing of local languages; Psalmanazar’s well-spun deception proves that Europeans were aware of the existence of linguistic diversity within the countries of Asia themselves. But the depth and focus of that knowledge was restricted by both the authors’ interests and the source material to which those authors had access. Any information they had on oral languages was guided by the classical scholarship to which Western sojourners had access and in which they expressed interest. Such restrictions would not last. Over the following two centuries, epistemic shifts and political upheavals in Europe offered new imperfect metaphors through which these men could understand Asia, whereas imperial exploits changed the stakes for reimagining the region’s significance. The Protestant Reformation marked the rise of the oral vernacular as the ideal vehicle for religious practice and literary style. The eighteenth-century emergence of comparative linguistics, driven in part by the expansion of linguistic knowledge through colonialism, buttressed the belief of humankind’s commensurate road to progress. Finally, the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth 26 27

28 29

30

Psalmanazar, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, 266. For summaries of Matteo Ricci’s life and work, see R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Chinese Science 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The extent to which their movements were limited varied from emperor to emperor. Jesuits were perhaps the most constricted during the Qianlong period. See Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China 1574–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 191–198. Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City.

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century encouraged Europeans to see the roots of nation-states across the globe – and social Darwinism encouraged the placement of those nationstates into a global hierarchy. By the time Western settlers had gained access to the Qing through military fiat, these events in Europe had transformed into a coherent, if still ever-evolving, worldview. Sojourners in China placed their observations of everyday life in the Qing into an existing narrative, one informed by centuries of European history. Scribes of the Vernacular In 1839, British ships landed off the coast of Guangdong to fire the first shots of what would be a three-year war that irrevocably changed the course of history. The Qing, plagued by domestic decline, could hardly fend off the British navy – a powerful force fueled by the British Empire’s increasing colonial resources. The humiliating defeat ended with a string of “unequal” treaties, granting Western countries unprecedented access to the empire’s resources, land, and people. The First Opium War was a watershed moment for one group in particular: the Anglophone Protestant. Evangelistic opportunities of which Jesuits could only dream soon became tangible for Protestants as they established churches and schools for the Qing’s rural inland masses. To aid their proselyzation efforts, these missionaries and the societies that backed them directed resources toward language study, the publication of proselytization tracts, and the translation of the Bible and biblical texts. Translation projects sparked a debate about linguistic style. The first Bible was translated into Chinese in 1807 and published in 1823 by Robert Morrison and William Milne, translated into what they called “High Wenli” (文理), or what we today might call classical Chinese.31 Both men were guided by the belief that only the elite classical tradition 31

Parts of the Bible had been rendered into Chinese before Morrison. Jesuit missionaries from France and Italy had translated parts of the scriptures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the entire Bible was translated in 1821 by Joshua Marshman, but failed to gain support for publication before Morrison’s. Morrison’s was the first one to gain traction, and set a precedent for future translations. See Alexander Wylie, “The Bible in China,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 1, no. 7–8 (1868), 121–129, 145–157; George Kam Wah Mak, “‘Laissez-Faire’ or Active Intervention? The Nature of the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Patronage of the Translation of the Chinese Union Versions,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 20, no. 2 (2010), 167–190. It is also worth noting that, while Morrison claimed to have been writing in the High Classical, his version was roundly criticized for its “awkward prose.” Patrick Haan, “The Bible as Chinese Literature: Medhurst, Wang Tao, and the Delegates’ Version,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 1 (Summer, 2003), 197–239.

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could serve as an appropriate vessel for sacred texts. Morrison professed a deep respect for the written classical language, deeming it the only language appropriate for the word of God. This language alone, he argued, “possesses something of the gravity and dignity of the ancient classical books,” and was the sole language that was understood across geographic space, if not social class.32 Walter Henry Medhurst, another of these early translators whose versions were published in 1834, also proclaimed admiration for written Chinese and a generalized disdain for translation into “vulgar dialects.” “There is perhaps no people who are more partial to reading than the Chinese, or who better appreciate beauty of composition and purity in style than their books.”33 But once Protestants moved beyond Guangzhou, missionaries in Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo found themselves in disagreement with Medhurst’s dismissal of local patois, arguing that translations in High Wenli were inaccessible to their potential converts. As Reverend John Gibson, stationed in Swatow (present-day Shantou), proclaimed, “We cannot . . . reach the millions of China by one version of the Scriptures. They must be translated into all the vernaculars before we shall be able to say that the people have the Word of God in their own tongue.”34 Missionaries’ views on translation styles were undergirded by a host of commonly held assumptions about language in China. Their assumptions were based in part upon their own empirical observations – individual experiences they gathered, collected, and disseminated through periodicals and books. But these scattered observations became coherent narratives through the use of imperfect metaphors. Without what felt like a full picture of China before them, and emboldened by European notions that human history was commensurate around the world, missionaries filtered the fragmented information they collected through the lens of their own histories, making sense of what they saw by inserting it into streamlined narratives of historical progress modeled on the European experience.35 32

33 34

35

Robert Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, comp. Elizabeth Morrison (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1839), 330. Walter Henry Medhurst, The Foreigner in Far Cathay (London: Edward and Stanton, 1872), 43. John C. Gibson, “Appendix: How Best Are the People of South China to Get the Word of God in Their Own Tongues?,” in James Johnston, ed., Report of the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World, Held in Exeter Hall (June 9th–19th), London, 1888, Vol. 2 (London: James Nisbit, 1888), 309. The field of missionary linguistics in China is rich. See Edwin Pulleyblank, “European Studies on Chinese Phonology: The First Phase,” in Ming Wilson and John Cayley, eds., Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995), 339–367; van der Loon, “The Manila

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In particular, missionaries spoke of language in the Qing in reference to two disparate analogies. First, many Protestant missionaries saw classical Chinese as an ancient, religious language, one that “stood pre-eminent . . . [occupying] the same position as Latin and Greek [did] among Europeans.”36 Such an analogy stemmed from the history of Protestantism in Europe. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther lambasted the excesses of the elite Catholic order and suggested that individual Christians bypass the priesthood to form a direct relationship with God. Given the paucity of Latin speakers in Germany and other areas of Europe during that time, God’s ears were suddenly filled with prayers in the plethora of local vernaculars spoken in hamlets and villages across the continent.37 Thus the Protestant Reformation fundamentally revolutionized the very language through which the divine spoke: from a classical language to a vernacular one. Having seen no evidence of a comparable Chinese vernacular language movement, Protestants drew parallels between the nineteenth-century Qing and sixteenth-century Europe, awarding themselves the same starring role in both histories. Others, however, were quick to argue that a written tradition used throughout the whole empire functioned like a national language –

36 37

Incunabula and Early Hokkien Studies,” 1–43, 95–186; David Prager Branner, “Notes on the Beginnings of Systematic Dialect Description and Comparison in Chinese,” Historiographia Linguistica International Journal for the History of the Language Sciences 24 (1997), 235–266; John DeFrancis, “A Missionary Contribution to Chinese Nationalism,” Journal of the North Asia Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 83 (1948), 1–34; Chen Zhe, “Cong Dongfangxue dao Hanxue: Ai Yuese de bijiao yuyanxue yu Hanyu yanjiu” (From Eastern Studies to Chinese Studies: Joseph Edkins’s comparative linguistics and Chinese language research), Guangdong shehui kexue Online Edition 4 (2011), n.p.; Zheng Mengjuan, “Zhongguo Yanfa: Xifang zaoqi zhongyao de wenyan yufa yanjiu zhuzuo” (Elements of Chinese Grammar (1814) by Joshua Marshman: An important monograph of Classical Chinese grammar during the early stage in the West), Shijie Hanyu jiaoxue Online Edition 3 (2009), n.p.; You Rujie, Xiyang chuanjiaoshi de Hanyu fangyanxue zhuzuo shumu kaoshu (A bibliography of works on Chinese dialectology by Western missionaries) (Harbin: Heilongjiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002); Guo Hong, “19 shiji zhongqi chuanjiaoshi yu Ningbo fangyan pinyin” (Mid-nineteenth-century missionaries and the phoneticization of Ningbo fangyan), in Tao Feiya, ed., Zongjiao yu lishi: Zhongguo Jidujiaoshi yanjiu (Religion and history: Research on Chinese Christianity) (Shanghai: Shanghai Daxue chubanshe, 2013), 130–144. This also extends to the study of missionary linguistics globally. For an excellent summary of scholarship so far, see the introduction to the first edited volume, Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, “Introduction,” in Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, eds., Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Volume 106: Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004); Otto Zwartjes, “The Historiography of Missionary Linguistics: Present State and Future Research Opportunities,” Historiographia Linguistica 39, no. 2/3 (2012), 185–242. The China Mission Handbook, “Introduction,” xviii. Elizabeth Einstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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the second European analogy that missionaries projected onto the linguistic landscape they observed. Since the eighteenth century, Europeans understood languages and nations as being “parallel.”38 Based on this, many missionaries claimed that the unity of its written tradition supported granting it a title derived from its place of origin: the “Chinese language.” This was certainly Morrison’s contention. For him, it was the only language that webbed China to all corners of its empire and all epochs of its history. Oral dialects, on the other hand, were “so widely numerous that persons of neighbouring provinces . . . are frequently unable to carry on a conversation of any length without having recourse to writing.”39 As European empires gave way to nation-states, a unified language was seen as integral to a nation’s survival.40 European missionaries like Morrison thus assumed that language in China could, and should, inspire a similar historical consciousness. Since the Chinese were a “singular people with a singular history,” the only unified option for a “Chinese language” was, in fact, the written classical.41 These two imperfect metaphors for a Chinese language shaped translation projects. Some missionaries accepted Morrison’s metaphor of classical Chinese as the Chinese national language, and thus sought solely to edit and improve his 1823 biblical translation. Twelve delegates from Europe and the United States completed the so-called Delegates version of the Bible in 1852, with subsequent classical versions published in 1863 and 1890.42 Yet the perceived elitism of the classical language inspired missionaries to search for alternatives. Some attempted to balance the contradiction between the unity and inaccessibility of classical by translating the Bible into “Easy Wenli.”43 A categorization invented by missionaries which reflected the variety in literary styles they encountered, Easy Wenli emerged in the late 1870s as a response to the perceived class barriers of High Wenli, imagined to be easily understood by those with minimal classical training.44 Still others believed that the most broadly comprehensible vernacular was

38 39 40 41 42

43 44

Thomas Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1. Morrison, Memoirs, 330, 500. Richard Watts, Language Myths and the History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33. The China Mission Handbook, 50. I-Jen Loh, “Chinese Translations of the Bible,” in Sin-wai Chan and David E. Pollard, eds., An Encyclopaedia of Translation: Chinese–English, English–Chinese (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1995), 55–59. Loh, “Chinese Translations of the Bible,” 59–61. It is important to note that the terms Wenli and Easy Wenli were both missionary terms. See Yuen Ren Chao, “The Languages and Dialects of China,” Geographic Journal 102, no. 2 (August, 1943), 66.

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Figure 1.1 Bible publications organized by language. Source: J. A. Silsby “The Spread of Vernacular Literature,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 26 (November, 1895), 509.

Mandarin, which is why the Union Delegates sponsored that biblical translation in the first years of the twentieth century.45 Yet hundreds of thousands of variations abounded as missionaries individually embarked upon their own translation projects (Figure 1.1). In 1894, while the vast majority were in Mandarin, Easy Wenli, or classical, over 53,000 partial or full translations of biblical materials were in local vernaculars.46 This is largely because, while most major Biblical societies aimed toward breadth of use, individual missionaries believed that translation into dialect was the only way to truly fulfill the Protestant mission. In the words of Reverend C. Leaman, an American missionary in Nanjing: Before the [Protestant] Reformation the local dialects, jargons, and effete modes of speech were probably as numerous . . . and as widely different . . . as those which are now fostered within all this Mandarin district. Yet Luther’s province was to show them that what was pure and good in all these “German jargons from the rasping gutturals of the Swiss Rhine to the lisping sibilants of the half Slavic 45 46

Loh, “Chinese Translations of the Bible,” 61–63. J. A. Silsby, “The Spread of Vernacular Literature,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 26 (November, 1895), 509. Also discussed in Federico Masini, The Formation of the Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36; Alexander Wylie, Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese Giving a List of Their Publications and Obituary Notices of the Deceased (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Missionary Press, 1867), 326–331.

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Drina,” could be gathered up and made a vehicle of accomplished verses upon every theme . . . Now, in this have we not a prophecy of what the missionary is to do for China and her language?47

Like Europeans on the cusp of the Protestant Reformation once argued, the power of the vernacular lay as much in what it was – the language of the common people – as in what it was not – the ancient and stilted language of a higher class. When Leaman beseeched missionaries to follow the “prophecy” of what “the missionary was to do for China,” he beseeched them to embrace the use of dialects in their teachings. As a statement from the Christian Vernacular Society of Shanghai tells us: “The importance of the Vernacular lies in the fact that the chief object of the Christian Church is to convey Christian truths. Now, these truths are entirely strange to the Chinese, whether highly or plainly educated in their own literature . . . the putting of strange truths in a plain dress helps the understanding of them.”48 Among those who believed that dialects represented the true “vehicle” for the Protestant gospel, debates ensued about how best to render exclusively oral languages into written forms. Many claimed that, like the classical Chinese language, the characters themselves were elitist and outdated. Their criticisms portrayed characters as an indictment on the country’s relative development: modern nations, in their view, had a phonetic script. Some advocated the replacement of the sinograph with the Roman alphabet, which they believed would make vernaculars more widely accessible to missionaries and their illiterate congregants alike. Yet advocates of Romanization, while quite vocal, were not the only missionaries who believed that a novel way of rendering vernaculars into text could remedy China’s backwardness. Indeed, the diversity of their answers to what they perceived as China’s plight is made plain by the variety of methods for translating the Bible that Protestants employed . Romanization “The usefulness of Romanization is becoming apparent as the number of Christians increases, and the minds of the Chinese (and shall we say missionaries?) are awakening to a keener realization of China’s needs.”49 So declared a letter to the editor in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary 47 48

49

C. Leaman, “A Missionary Tour Through the Province of Sze-Chu’en,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 9 (March–April, 1878), 99. Y. K. Yen, “The Shanghai Vernacular: Address of the Reverend Y. K. Yen at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Vernacular Society of Shanghai,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 23 (August, 1892), 387. Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, July, 1902, 358.

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Journal in 1902. Though short, the letter laid bare the underlying ambitions behind romanization efforts in China at the twilight of the nineteenth century.50 Romanization was not simply a practical solution for translating Chinese dialects. Those who translated biblical works into roman orthographies did so out of a firm belief that they were solving a “need” that stemmed beyond language alone. This sense that missionaries were destined to solve “needs” in the countries in which they proselytized had obvious colonial undertones. Around the world, romanization advocacy and colonialism went hand in hand.51 While missionaries in China did not have the same incentives as those in India or Kenya, in which a comprehensible script would aid Britain’s economic conquests, their desire to both increase their own access to foreign lands and “save” residents from themselves bear similarities.52 In Qing China, traces of these global colonial linkages can be found in various missionaries’ chosen orthographies, many of which have origins in British exploits into India and the Near East.53 Arguments presented in favor 50

51

52 53

For a list of when the first version of various vernacular biblical texts first appeared in each region, see You, Xiyang chuanjiaoshi, 13–21. A list of works published before 1890 can also be found in Rev. S. F. Woodin, “Review of the Various Colloquial Versions and the Contemporary Advantages of Roman Letters and Chinese Characters,” in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 89; “Appendix B: Table of Colloquial Versions of Scriptures,” in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 706. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Derek Peterson, “The Rhetoric of the Word: Bible Translation in Mau Mau and Colonial Kenya,” in Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 165–182; Ross King, “Western Protestant Missionaries and the Origins of Korean Language Modernization,” Journal of International and Area Studies 11, no. 3 (2004), 7–38; R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed.,The Bible in the Third World: Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial Encounters (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85. Robert Morrison’s 1815 Chinese–English dictionary, a compendium of Chinese characters organized alphabetically, used an orthography inspired by the “Manuscript Dictionaries of the Romish Church,” or the Chinese–English dictionaries derived from the manuscripts and documents of Portuguese Catholic missionaries to China in the eighteenth century. Later descendants of the Morrison orthography tapped not into the Jesuit global network, but rather, the British Empire. “Church romanization,” first popularized by William Medhurst in his dictionary of the Hokkien (present-day Fujian) dialect, added diacritic marks to Morrison’s orthography to note tones, a system used in eighteenth-century Sanskrit studies. The influence from Sanskrit was all the more prominent given that Medhurst first learned the Hokkien dialect in Malacca, a central node on the British colonial network. Amended slightly to accommodate the eight tones of the Hokkien spoken language, this orthography, later known as Pe̍h-ō e-jı¯, was popular well

52

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of romanization similarly echo European colonial discourse calling them to “fix” non-European societies. First, romanization advocates often extolled the benefits of romanized script in promoting literacy. A prominent advocate of this position was John Gibson, an English Presbyterian missionary based in Swatow.54 Gibson wrote several treatises highlighting the ease and speed with which Chinese people became literate through exposure to romanized biblical material: roman letters were easier to use, easier to learn, and easier to write, therefore making the scriptures more accessible to a wide range of audiences.55 There was also the question of access – many of these missionaries touted the advantages of a romanized script in reaching nonliterate people, of whom the majority were women.56 While no exact statistics exist,

54

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into the twentieth century in Taiwanese churches. Ann Heylen, “Missionary Linguistics of Taiwan. Romanizing Taiwanese: Codification and Standardization of Dictionaries in Southern Min (1837–1923),” in Ku Wei-ying and Koen de Ridder, eds., Authentic Chinese Christianity: Preludes to Its Development (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 144; Henning Klöter, The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 47. Several other missionaries to China drew upon the “Asiatic orthography” created by eighteenthcentury British Calcutta circuit judge Sir William Jones. The Asiatic Orthography found patronage among missionaries in China with Elijah Bridgman’s orthography of Cantonese in his Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect. E. C. Bridgman, A Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect (Macao: S. Wells Williams, 1841). It also inspired Samuel Wells Williams, first in his 1856 Tonic Dictionary and then two decades later in his Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. In the latter, he used the Asiatic Orthography to render eight different dialects into romanized script: Southern Mandarin, and the dialects of Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Swatow, Guangzhou, and Amoy. Samuel Wells Williams, A Tonic Dictionary of the Canton Dialect (Guangzhou: Office of the Chinese Repository, 1856); Williams, Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. In the early twentieth century, the teaching of phonetic scripts is well documented. As one example, in 1902, a letter to the editor by Ms. E. Black described her attempts to teach a classroom of twelve and thirteen year olds Roman script. Ms. E. Black, “Teaching Romanized Vernacular,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 33 (February, 1902), 90–91. There is evidence that this was occurring earlier as well. In the same issue that Ms. Black crowed her accomplishments, notes from the editor describe a congregated effort to establish the successes and failures of teaching the romanized script. “Notes,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 33 (February, 1902), 91. John Gibson, in his effort to encourage all missionaries to adopt a romanized script, recounts several examples. John Gibson, “Review of the Various Colloquial Versions and the Comparative Advantages of Roman Letters and Chinese Characters” in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 88. Gibson, “Review,” 88. In 1888, Reverend Robert Stewart reported his desire to use romanized forms of Fuzhou dialect to give access to biblical material to women and children. This did not mean that women were solely taught the romanized script; descriptions of girls’ schools in China mentioned instructions in characters. Miss Laura Haygood, “Essay: Girl’s Schools,” Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 227; C. M. Ricketts, “How to Reach the Women of China,” Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 235.

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these efforts clearly shaped the culture of Protestant missionary work for decades. Nearly seventy years after Reverend Leaman wrote his defense of romanization, his daughter Mary, in reference to a looming decision concerning the reprinting of the phonetic Bible, proclaimed, “the phonetic script gave us the bible-reading church.”57 The belief that missionaries were spreading literacy and, by extension, modern citizenship extended outside the church. Several missions opened what were called local vernacular schools or missionary schools, which often opted to teach in roman characters. To the best of my knowledge, earliest reference to these schools was by August Hanspach, who founded several in Guangdong in 1863. In his report to the Berlin Society, he discussed how the children in his twelve schools learned several religious texts by heart. He described teachers who believed that teaching the romanized script was successful in reaching “even the poorest men and women.”58 Missionaries thus not only considered their ease of use – consumption by the local population was also taken into consideration (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3). Ultimately, romanization proponents presumed that linguistic modernity was the foundation of the modern nation state. As missionary W. A. P. Martin proclaimed, “our alphabet is readiest gradus ad parmassun [steps to Parnassus], a stepping stone alike to Mandarin and to Wenli. Our alphabet will do for this Babel of dialects what steel braces do for deformed limbs.”59 These missionaries, who were observing efforts in Germany, Italy, and France to turn “peasants into citizens” through language standardization, believed that the only way that China could achieve a similar standardization was through a phonetic script. Some even went as far as to argue that the script caged the country into a monarchical hierarchy, portraying the script itself as antithetical to a modern republican or democratic system. By limiting literacy to the educated elite – which, romanization advocates argued, occurred naturally with the complex Chinese script – the imperial government excluded the masses from public life. It is important to recognize that romanization advocates were not necessarily representative. Yet their strong advocacy, and financial support from powerful institutions, allowed them to set the tone for debate. 57

58

59

This speech was found amongst a series of papers by Mary Leaman to Yuen Ren Chao, Y. R. Chao Papers, folder “Chinese National Language: National Phonetics,” box 27, University of California Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. August Hanspach, Report for the Years 1863 and 1864 of the Chinese Vernacular Schools (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede, 1865), 7. The extent to which these schools affected the general population is unknown, but it is unlikely that the impact was widely felt. Hanspach places his numbers in 1863 as 260 pupils, a relatively negligible number for the city of Fuzhou, let alone the entire empire. W. A. P. Martin, “A Plea for Romanization,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 38 (September, 1907), 502.

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Figure 1.2 Hymnal in Ningbo dialect with romanized script and characters. Source: Edward Clemens Lord, Tsan shen yue chang (Hymns and tunes compiled by E. C. Lord, Ningbo) (1856).

Their belief that language was weakening the nation was posed as both practical observation and humanistic concern. As such, when other missionaries crafted their arguments against romanization, they did so on romanization advocates’ terms. These opponents of romanization did not reject its supporters’ central premise – that the way language was spoken and used in the Qing made it fundamentally unfit for the modern world. Other Orthographies T. P. Crawford, a proto-fundamentalist Southern Baptist who came of age in pre-Civil War Kentucky, found the use of the roman alphabet in China a fundamentally flawed concept. Crawford was one of the more controversial missionaries to develop a church in nineteenth-century China. Those who knew him describe him as stubborn and single-minded. Deeply conservative,

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Figure 1.3 Book of Genesis in Fuzhou dialect. Source: Seng ging du siok kie mung (sheng jing tu shuo qi meng) (n.p., 1890).

he vehemently protested missionaries engaging in all non-evangelistic activities, which caused disputes with his wife when she created a general education school in Shandong.60 Yet as conservative as he was, his ideals about the Chinese language were rather radical. From his perspective, there was nothing in the Chinese language worthy of conservation. Chinese characters were beyond impractical; for Crawford, they represented Chinese racial inferiority. “Already China’s ponderous works on military tactics, medicine, religion, philosophy and astronomy are obsolete, while her other heathen productions – the Confucian Classics not excepted, are hastening to that bourne from which hieroglyphics never return.”61 Crawford found his colleagues’ solution similarly unfitting; as English, French, and Spanish 60

61

While Crawford protested his wife’s activities, he himself engaged in plenty of nonreligious activities, from real estate ventures to Chinese language studies. Lovelace Savage Foster, Fifty Years in China: An Eventful Memoir of Tarleton Perry Crawford (Nashville: Bayless-Pullen, 1909). T. P. Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols for Writing the Dialects of China,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 19, no. 3 (March, 1888), 101.

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speakers each pronounced the script differently, the letters alone could not guarantee a singular pronunciation among different speakers. “English speakers pronounce the word “day” in six different ways, but they all write it with the same three letters.”62 As such, Crawford crafted his own phonetic script to serve in lieu of Chinese characters.63 Invented during his first winter in Shanghai in 1852, the system transcribed Chinese initials, finals, and tones in a series of interconnected strokes. Each initial and final was reflected with two to four horizontal strokes, connected together by one perpendicular stroke (see Figure 1.4).64 His character system, he claimed, accommodated China’s linguistic realities. Mainly, they were intentionally phonetically flexible like Chinese characters, but were not born of the country’s socalled backward history. With a little editing, Crawford explained, he could adopt his system to different dialects. “Phonography does not require a separate sign for every shade of articulation, but only for those which distinguish words according to the perceptions – not of foreigners, but of natives.”65 Crawford employed the same metaphors as romanization advocates but mobilized them to very different ends. Like Gibson and Leaman (see the previous section), he imagined China’s history would follow the path that Europe and the United States had forged. But he did not see linguistic unification as a necessary stop on that path. “Neither Greek nor Latin became the medium of communication in modern Europe . . .. Only the dialects have life, and out of them must come future China.”66 For Crawford, a “modern” language was both living and coupled with a phonetic script. Unification and roman letters were not necessary conditions. Crawford’s phonology, though limited in its dissemination, was well known by other missionaries, inspiring praise and imitation.67 Perhaps 62

63 64

65 66 67

Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols,” 101–110. This complaint about roman characters was by no means new. Robert Morrison, “Introduction,” Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts, Vol. 1, pt. 1 (London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1823). Foster, Fifty Years in China, 67–69. Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols,” 101–102. For an analysis of how his system translated into Shanghainese, see Guo Hong, “‘Shanghai tuyinzi yufa’ yu Gaodipi de fangyan pinyin tixi” (“The grammar of Shanghai vernacular characters” and Crawford’s dialect phonetic system), in Tao Feiya, ed., Zongjiao yu lishi: Zhongguo Jidujiaoshi yanjiu (Religion and history: Research on Chinese Christianity) (Shanghai: Shanghai Daxue chubanshe, 2013), 120–129. Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols,” 109. Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols,” 101–102. Rev. Harlan P. Beach, “Another Chinese Phonology,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 19 (July, 1888), 293–298.

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Figure 1.4 T. P. Crawford’s phonetic symbols for Chinese dialects. Source: T. P. Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols for Writing the Dialects of China,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 19, no. 3 (March, 1888), 103.

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this was in part because his solution to China’s “backward” language was not to simply impose his own native script, but rather, construct something new for Chinese people to use; as a unique script that had no ties to foreign nations or cultures, missionaries like Crawford believed it would be more readily accepted by the Chinese as indigenous. As Crawford claimed, his renunciation of roman letters demonstrated a commitment to allow the “living dialects of the land” to flourish.68 This was Crawford’s definition of linguistic modernity: a standardized phonetic script that promoted oral diversity. Vernacular in Characters On the other side of the spectrum were those missionaries who did not feel that China was destined to shed its so-called hieroglyphs to modernize its language. With our best estimates, character-based vernacular translations were far more common than romanized texts or those in other phonetic scripts. In 1894, Reverend Silsby estimated that nearly 50,000 of these publications, including the entire Bible, individual testaments, or individual books, were written in “character vernaculars other than Mandarin” (see Figure 1.1).69 In contrast, this number was just over 6,000 for romanized publications.70 Thus despite the campaigns by people such as John Gibson, or the creativity of people such as T. P. Crawford, missionaries overwhelmingly interpreted their duty to “put strange truths into plain dress” as using the native script. There were also those who believed that characters were actually well suited to the country’s linguistic landscape. A commentator in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, Reverend A. Sydenstricker, claimed that the host of pronunciations for one single character made the language incompatible with a phonetic script. Even in the same locale, he argued, pronunciations varied widely, not to mention the thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects outside the cities of Nanking or Beijing. Moreover, he argued, the script itself had adapted to its numerous homophones. He wrote, “It is a well-known fact to us all that a large number of characters have the same sounds. And this peculiarity would be immensely augmented if . . . aspirates and tones were ignored.” A romanized script “would be about as difficult to interpret as the enigmatical responses of the Delphic

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Crawford, “A System of Phonetic Symbols,” 101. Silsby, “The Spread of Vernacular Literature,” 509. While it must be noted that these numbers only include publications from the three main biblical societies – the National Bible Society of Scotland, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the American Bible Society – they dominated the market.

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oracle.”71 Others contended that pushing for romanization would do little to aid in mutual intelligibility, as there was no evidence that a romanized script would actually create uniformity. Sydenstricker again made an argument for characters – since characters of the same class followed the same phonetic rules (i.e., all characters pronounced li counted as one “class” of characters and therefore had identical pronunciations in other dialects), the characters actually aided learners studying multiple different vernaculars.72 Beyond this, opponents raised the possibility of “Chinese prejudice,” or the fear that a foreign script would necessarily signify a foreign ideology. Protestants prided themselves on the universality of their faith, and to advertise the Bible’s foreignness was to defy the very premise of their religion. Similarly, missionaries were actively aware of the dangers they faced as strangers in a strange land – their exotic foreign scripts drew unwanted attention to their oft-perceived as heretical religion. And finally, there were those who maintained that these debates over script were quite irrelevant to their assigned task. As Sydenstricker scoffed, “I fail to see how the question at hand has anything special to do with the work of evangelism.”73 Character proponents’ opposition to romanization did not mean that they did not share concerns with romanization advocates. It was not that they considered the Chinese language sufficient as it was. Rather, they believed that the vernacular languages – the living, contemporary Chinese languages that defined local society – were best expressed with characters. For these missionaries, linguistic modernity simply meant a written language that reflected local vernaculars at the full extent of their authenticity. This required the native script. The Introduction of the Comparative Method In 1889, Thomas Watters, an Irish diplomat with a penchant for botany, wrote a summary of recent scholarship on the Chinese language: Within the last fifty years . . . the production of Manuals for learning Chinese, Grammars, Dictionaries, Translations of Chinese books and other works of miscellaneous character on the language and literature, by European scholars, has increased very quickly. Of those books, many have been compiled to meet practical wants . . . But the Science of Language has lately taken up Chinese, and

71 72 73

Rev. A. Sydenstricker, “Romanizing the Official Dialect,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (January, 1888), 36–37. Rev. A. Sydenstricker, “Variations in the Spoken Language of Northern and Central China,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (March, 1887), 105. Sydenstricker, “Romanizing the Official Dialect,” 38.

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men trained in that Science have tried to fix the place and worth of Chinese among the languages of the world.74

Watters summarized here the publication accomplishments of the Protestant missionaries described in the previous section. He also highlighted a contemporaneous intellectual pursuit: a linguistic genealogy of world languages that could include the languages of China. The search for a globally inclusive taxonomy inspired the “science of language” to “take up Chinese,” delivering China hands the perfect opportunity to mobilize their expertise in the service of knowledge.75 At its heart, the global linguistic taxonomy alluded to in Watter’s reference to the “Science of Language” represented a quest to unearth the origin of human language, a task energized by an Enlightenment desire to craft a universal path of human progress.76 For Enlightenment thinkers, the so-called East revealed central human truths: traces of monotheism that resided in ancient India, or philosophies of ideal governance exhibited by Confucianism.77 The pursuit of humanity’s origins inspired an upheaval in how European intellectuals studied language. From the rubble was born an academic field that would constitute the backbone of the study of languages in the modern era: comparative linguistics. This epistemic shift did not simply interest language curios. It quickly became weaponized for the purposes of gaining and wielding political power. Under the guise of discovery, Europeans supported their colonial endeavors through empirical research, which gave them the tools to subjugate not only populations but also their histories and identityexpressions.78 From the eighteenth century to the present, it is difficult to separate the construction of linguistic models from Western imperialism. 74 75 76 77

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Thomas Watters, Essays on the Chinese Language (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1889), 3. Frederick J. Newmeyer, The Politics of Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chapter 1. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Shwab, The Oriental Renaissance; David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994); Hartman, “Ideograms and Hieroglyphs”; Bradley L. Herling, German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 60. Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001), 19–39; Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning and Power (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Lisa Lim and Umberto Ansaldo, Languages in Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Bernhard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Siraj Ahmed, “Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative Literature,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (Winter, 2013), 296–326.

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The father of comparative linguistics is often said to be British Calcutta circuit judge and well-traveled linguistic savant Sir William Jones.79 Jones spent much of his career traveling the reaches of the British Empire, collecting texts and artifacts along the way. In his travels, he recorded and catalogued the languages he encountered – Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Hebrew. Based upon his observations, Jones proposed that the comparative study of languages could reveal a common ancestral “protolanguage,” today known as the IndoEuropean language family.80 Later generations of linguists, while accepting Jones’s main premise, were inspired by an entirely new conceptual framework: evolutionary theory. This transition was exemplified by the work of German linguist August Schleicher, most well known for what is called the Stammbaum or “family tree” model.81 He crafted complex linguistic taxonomies in which languages, like organisms, related to one another via a network of common roots and ancestors (see Figures 1.5a and 1.5b). The trunk of Schleicher’s model was the Indo-Germanic primitive language (analogous to Jones’s Indo-European language family), from which were born stock languages, languages, and finally, dialects. Dialects thus occupied the lowest order in the hierarchy, and like a species, depended upon its 79

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Many scholars have pointed out that he by no means invented the methodology; he simply popularized it. See, for instance, Lyle Campbell, “Why Sir William Jones Got It All Wrong, or Jones’s Role in How to Establish Language Families,” Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca ‘Julio de Urquijo’ 45 (2006), 245–264. For biographies on Jones and his works, see Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Garland Cannon and Kevin Brine, eds., Objects of Inquiry: The Life, Contributions and Influence of Sir William Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1995). Jones’s work is also heavily criticized by Edward Said, who calls him “Orientalist Jones.” As he summarizes, “to rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident: These were Jones’s goals, which, with an irresistible impulse to codify and subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to ‘a complete digest’ of laws and figures, customs, and works, he is believed to have achieved.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 78. For a broader discussion of Said’s perspective on Sir William Jones, see Haruko Momma, “A Man on the Cusp: Sir William Jones’s ‘Philology’ and ‘Oriental Studies,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 2 (Summer, 1999), 160–179. This new global episteme that privileged the taxonomic organization of natural phenomena was accompanied by a new power dynamic in the construction of knowledge – one in which European colonists collected information of the non-Western world to buttress Eurocentric science and colonial power. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. This was introduced in his famous “philologer” passage. See Sir William Jones, “On the Hindus,” Asiatic Researches 1 (1788), 422–423. Other summaries of William Jones’s proto-Indo-European language family can be found in W. P. Lehmann, ed., A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967); Holger Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John W. Spargo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). Allan Bomhard, Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008).

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Figure 1.5a August Schleicher’s Stammbaum model.

Figure 1.5b Detail of August Schleicher’s Stammbaum model. Source: August Schleicher, Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (The Darwinian theory and the science of language), reprinted in August Schleicher, Linguistics and Evolution: Three Essays (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1983). Reprinted from their reprint with permission.

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genus for definition. Within this model, it became impossible to discuss the phonological properties of a dialect without understanding the language from whence it branched (see Figures 1.5a and 1.5b). Schleicher’s work, like that of Jones, reflects the epistemic frameworks of his time. As Schleicher presented his theories on evolutionary linguistic taxonomies on the European lecture circuit, his work was traveling across a global network of missionaries, diplomats, and scholars living abroad. In China, Schleicher’s theories held sway over the influential generation of missionary language enthusiasts, who adapted their knowledge of China to fit into his comparative framework. Their application of Schleicher’s model reinforced Europeans’ preconceived notions about linguistic modernity in China and grounded their prescriptions on how they thought it could, and should, be achieved.82 The Biblical Theorist Gloucester-born Joesph Edkins began his nearly sixty-year career as a Protestant missionary in China soon after the First Opium War. In addition to his evangelical work, he was a prolific writer, the editor of several periodicals, and the author of Chinese translations of key Western texts and textbooks on basic philosophy, natural science, geography, and logic.83 Yet while he was alive, it was his work on linguistics that garnered the most attention. He advocated the application of the theoretical framework of European linguistics – Schleicher’s theory in particular – to Chinese languages, a belief crystalized in his 1871 manuscript China’s Place in Philology: An Attempt to Show That the Languages of Europe and Asia Have a Common Origin.84 Edkins’s primary thesis, grounded in his belief that the scripture “asserts the unity of the human race,” was that the “Chinese language” shared a common ancestor to ancient Hebrew, Sanskrit, Mongolian, and Latin.85 He proposed that ancient civilizations 82

83

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Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” 19–39; Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World; Lim and Ansaldo, Languages in Contact; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Ahmed, “Notes from Babel,” 296–326. Joseph Edkins, Xixue qimeng shiliu zhong (Sixteen Primers of Western Knowledge) (Shanghai: Tushu jicheng shuju, 1885). For more information on these translations, see Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2011); Iwo Amelung, “Naming Physics: The Strife to Delineate a Field of Modern Science in Late Imperial China,” in Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 1999), 381–418. Joseph Edkins, China’s Place in Philology: An Attempt to Show That the Languages of Europe and Asia Have a Common Origin (London: Trübner, 1871). Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, 3; Joseph Edkins, “Chinese Philology,” China Review 1, no. 3 (1872), 181–190, and 1, no. 5 (1872), 293–300.

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originating in Babylon traveled across Eurasia to China, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea. Once groups settled into the space that would house their civilizations, they developed into separate ethnicities. Chinese people, Edkins claimed, presumably came across the Himalayas quite early, around 3000 BCE, as evidenced by their philosophical and civilizational similarities with ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon.86 The mainstay of his thesis was based on Schleicher’s theory of “sound laws.”87 Schleicher’s Stammbaum model assumed that human phonology developed upon a commensurate path, beginning with simple sounds that evolve into more and more complex sound systems, running parallel to the evolution of the human mouth.88 Edkins took this one step further, arguing that since “sound laws” dictated that “the history of one language is the history of any other,” the reconstruction of one language’s roots over time would illuminate the development of all languages.89 Speech began with labial sounds, which Edkins deemed the easiest to pronounce. Next came nasals, and then voiced and unvoiced aspirants. The last stage was the harmony of sound and script, namely, a written tradition that reflected colloquial patterns. Put simply, Edkins assumed language evolved from simplicity to complexity. According to Edkins’s interpretation of the sound law theory, the roots of all languages, ancient and contemporary, were monosyllables. “As in matter there are indestructible atoms, so in language there are indestructible roots,” which were naturally smaller and more compact than the multisyllabic words we speak today.90 Logically speaking, therefore, monosyllabic languages best embodied the original human language. Chinese, Edkins argued, was still measurably monosyllabic, which indicated that the origin of human language could be most closely detected in 86

87 88

89 90

Joseph Edkins, “Babylonian Influence on China,” China Review 16, no. 6 (1888), 371. For a discussion on Sino-Babylonianism in China, see Tze-ki Hon, “From a Hierarchy in Time to a Hierarchy in Space: The Meanings of Sino-Babylonianism in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern China 36, no. 2 (March, 2010), 139–169. While Edkins certainly drew upon Schleicher, he most often cited Schleicher’s successor, Francis Bopp. Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, 6. E. F. K. Koerner, “Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: 19th and 20th Century Paradigms,” in Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: Selected Essays (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1978), 33. Henry M. Hoenigswald, “On the History of the Comparative Method,” Anthropological Linguistics 5, no. 1 (January, 1963), 6; John P. Maher, “More on the History of the Comparative Method: The Tradition of Darwinism in August Schleicher’s Work,” Anthropological Linguistics 8, no. 3, pt. 2 (1966), 1–12. Joseph Edkins, Evolution of the Chinese Language, as Exemplifying the Origin and Growth of Human Speech (London: Trübner, 1888), vii. Joseph Edkins, “The Roots of Chinese and All Other Languages,” China Review 22, no. 6 (1897), 776.

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Chinese.91 This was the reason Edkins championed research on Chinese languages. Chinese could not only help enrich reconstructions of the Indo-European protolanguage; it was the key to unlocking humanity’s linguistic past. Edkins often used the term “Chinese” as a singular entity. It was not that he was unaware of China’s oral diversity; as an expert in Cantonese dialects, he wrote extensively on China’s myriad vernaculars in other venues. Rather, Edkins thought of the “Chinese language” not as the written tradition, but the phonology of ancient Chinese.92 He maintained that during the Han dynasty, dialects in the north and west merged with the “old middle dialect” of Suzhou and Shanghai, which evolved into Southern Mandarin. This singular language, emerging in the Tang dynasty and recorded in ancient rhyming dictionaries, was for Edkins the only language that could serve as “Chinese.”93 For him, since language was of a higher taxonomic order than dialect, the Chinese language could not simply be chosen from among its vernaculars: it had to be a link that connected them all. Edkins’s solution, therefore, was to assume that China’s first recorded ancient phonology preceded its dialects, and could therefore logically be the ancestor to the dialects that existed in Edkins’s time. He shifted the definition of language from a mode of communication used throughout a unified territory to a phonological system that embodied the genealogical link between all of China’s vernaculars. Though Edkins’s efforts were praised, his conclusions were summarily dismissed. Many had trouble following his logic, and others rejected his equivalence of monosyllabic with primitive. Dr. O. Franke, for instance, criticized Edkins’s methodological sloppiness. Franke admonished Edkins for claiming to closely follow Europe’s comparative linguists such as Schleicher while running slipshod over the parameters they outlined.94 Watters accused Edkins of neglecting deductive reasoning, arguing that he engaged in an impossible task, assumed the conclusion, and found data

91 92

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Joseph Edkins, “Monosyllabism as Presented in Chinese,” China Review 24, no. 6 (1900), 274. There are times where Edkins uses the word “language” to refer to what he believed to be a unified language in ancient China, which subsequently broke into dialects during the Song dynasty (he called this the “Age of Dialects”). See Joseph Edkins, “The Age of Chinese Dialects,” China Review 16, no. 5 (1888), 304. Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, 36–37. Dr. O. Franke, “China and Comparative Philology,” China Review 20, no. 5 (1894), 310–312. It is rather ironic since, as Thomas Trautmann notes, comparative linguistics was inextricable from the religious task of tracing the origin of man. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 13–21.

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that supported his logic. “Our author sets out with a theory and collects facts or quasi-facts to agree with and prove his theory.”95 Franke’s and Watters’s criticisms marked an important turning point in the history of Chinese studies in Europe and the United States: the introduction of Sinology as a professional discipline. While earlier students of Chinese philology, such as Robert Morrison or Joseph Edkins, took up these studies as avocation, soon there was a crop of China hands that turned to academic study of China as vocation.96 Importantly, many of these first professional Sinologists began not as missionaries but as consular officers, whose goals and experiences were decidedly dissimilar from the missionaries preceding them. Edkins had come to China in the 1850s, when few Westerners had ever set foot inland. He established churches in villages to which other missionaries had not traveled, founded schools, and wrote textbooks for illiterate children, and bore personal witness to the governance of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.97 Men like Watters, however, were diplomatic representatives of their home countries. They had the benefit of learning languages through their country’s consular service, often remained in China’s major cities, and had little interest in engaging with the masses. It is impossible to know the extent to which Edkins’s vocation or personal beliefs impacted his research. But it is clear that many consular officers saw Edkins’s submission to biblical claims just cause to dismiss him. Watters excoriated Edkins for assuming that all languages had a single origin due to his “religious convictions,” accusing him of bringing in the “bugbear of the Bible as the ultimate authority on the subject of the origin and diffusion of language.”98 In case his disdain was not clear, he stressed, “one had thought that it was now generally acknowledged that the Bible does not teach any science.”99 Today, Edkins is remembered for his authorship of a Chinese textbook collection. His work on language has been largely forgotten. Yet his 95

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Watters found this cherry picking a common problem among other Chinese philologists, lamenting that they “take the languages as they find them, and indulge in the sport of picking out similarities of words ‘en masse,’ never minding the modern origin or the local obscurity of a sound.” Thomas Watters, “China and Comparative Philology,” China Review 20, no. 5 (1893), 319. The most famous example of this was Herbert Giles, diplomat-turned-academic and cocreator of the Wade-Giles system of romanization. Edkins’s narrative of his visit to the “rebel capital” can be found Joseph Edkins, “Narrative of a Visit to Nanking,” in Jane R. Edkins, Chinese Scenes and People: With Notices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of China (London: J. Nisbit, 1863), 239–307. Thomas Watters, “China’s Place in Philology: A Review of Mr. Edkins Last Work,” China Review 1, no. 1 (1872), 55. Watters, “China’s Place in Philology,” 55.

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arduous defense of modern linguistic theory calls attention to how European frameworks shaped early Sinology. Even his critics had to admit, “it is more natural to suppose that the language or languages of China is or are lineally connected to other so-called stocks than to suppose that the contrary is the case.”100 Edkins set a precedent for including Chinese dialects in a global linguistic framework. More importantly, Edkins’s work inspired new directions in Chinese linguistic research. Emboldened by the major flaws in Edkins’s work, scholars came to question his single-minded attempt to find the origin of language, seeking instead to study contemporary languages as they existed in the present. This new path would be forged by Edward Parker. The Dialectologist Edward Parker first entered China in 1869 as a young consular student of twenty years. A broad man with piercing blue eyes, he was curious, cheeky, and meticulous.101 A man with a knack for languages, he was perhaps best known for his scathing wit, on full display in his multiyear brawl with Herbert Giles over his characterizations of Chinese languages in his Chinese–English Dictionary.102 His writing style was graceless but informative, indicative of a man who had more passion for the discovery of things than for the art of presentation. Yet Parker ought to be remembered for more than his brashness. During his time in China, he embarked on an ambitious retinue of linguistic research, much of which was quite radical for its time. A postmortem denouncement from distinguished Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren invalidated Parker’s contributions in the eyes of his contemporaries, but Parker’s work – both its unique contributions and its insight into the time in which he lived – is worth taking seriously. One of the ways Parker’s research diverged sharply from his colleagues was his belief that contemporary phonology should be the sole focus of linguistic research. He criticized attempts to retroactively reconstruct extinct phonologies as pure speculation, scoffing “it is impossible to conclude that there ever existed such alleged ancient sounds.”103 But more importantly, Parker also believed this retroactive reconstruction 100 101 102

103

E. H. Parker, “The Chinese Language,” Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 15 (May, 1884), 151. Edward Werner, “Obituary Notice for Prof. E. H. Parker,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 57 (1926), ii. For a summary of battles with Herbert Giles, see David Prager Branner, “The Linguistic Ideas of Edward Harper Parker,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 1 (1999), 13–14. E. H. Parker, “Reply to Dr. Edkins,” China Review 21, no. 4 (1895), 276.

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was far less useful than the study of contemporary languages. For him, the entire purpose of learning a language was to communicate, which in China required facility in its dialects. “What is the object of the Englishman in learning to speak French? It is not to scramble through a number of sentences, regardless of genders, numbers and cases . . . but to speak the language as nearly as possible as do the natives of France themselves.”104 Moreover, if scholars wished to create a linguistic taxonomy, the best way to approach it, Parker contended, was to start with local, living languages.105 His reasoning was rooted in the inexactitude of script. If scholars used written sources as a metric to gauge how people spoke in the past, they had to assume that script was a transparent and unchanging representation of sound. If this was a rather specious premise for alphabetic scripts, the nonphonetic nature of Chinese characters and the diversity of dialect phonologies made ancient Chinese all the more opaque. He wrote, It will not do to take supposed foreign sounds, and attempt thereby to erect a standard, for we can never be certain what those foreign sounds were 2,000 years ago. Nor can we be sure whether the sound thus recorded was recorded in standard or local Chinese . . .. We cannot be even approximately sure how the ancient Greeks and Romans pronounced their languages; how much less, then, the Chinese?106

Ultimately, because of the inherent ambiguities of script, the passage of time, and the sheer variety of transcription methods, Parker concluded that any approximation of ancient sounds was impossible. Thus for Parker, it was highly implausible that Edkins’s “Chinese language,” the phonology represented by Tang dynasty written sources, could be grafted onto the branches of Schleicher’s tree. Yet if no extant or extinct language could scientifically serve as a genus to the dialects’ species, then how could Schleicher’s model be applied? Parker explained: The essential principle, inherent in all Chinese dialects . . . is that each Chinese word is a single independent unchangeable root, having a power x, or a shifting potentiality which cannot be ultimately expressed in letters. Though this power varies . . . it remains constant as an abstraction, from which each variant may draw inspiration. Like the planets, all Chinese words have a fixed relation, but none have a fixed spot.107 104 105 106 107

E. H. Parker, “The Comparative Study of Chinese Dialects,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 12 (1878), 23. Parker, “The Comparative Study of Chinese Dialects,” 26. E. H. Parker, “Philological Essay,” in Herbert Giles, Chinese–English Dictionary (London: B. Quaritch, 1892), xviii. Parker, “Philological Essay,” xviii.

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Parker’s Chinese language was x, an “abstraction,” conceptual rather than material. Whether Parker believed such an abstraction ever existed, or if he imagined that it was and always will be conceptual is left ambiguous. But such considerations are beside the point. What was important was that, for Parker, the Chinese language first and foremost had to fulfill scientific constraints – namely, it had to epitomize the root of all of China’s dialects. Moreover, if each dialect was a “planet” following a particular pattern of movement, then the only way to understand this pattern, the enigmatic x, was to collect and organize dialect phonological data. In a sense, he knew not what the Chinese language was, but he knew where to find it. And find it he tried. He spent much of his life surveying dialects around the country. Though his methodology and data are largely lost to us today, his few publications expose his unique approach to Chinese linguistics.108 Parker outlined several dialect phonological charts, preceded by in-depth explanations of how various sounds differed from other dialects he surveyed.109 His most unique contribution was his study on “characterless words.” In 1880, Parker published in the China Review a four-page list of dialect-specific words in the Beijing, Hankou, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, and Hakka dialects to which there were no character corollaries.110 Numbering no more than a few dozen, his list of words included onomatopoeic words such as “cough,” plebian action words such as “to dig up” or “to flop down,” and localized versions of everyday phenomena such as “bride” or “cicada.” These rather small studies were in keeping with his own “real point of interest”: a comparison of the characterless words among dialects.111 This made Parker far ahead of his time – to question in a scientific capacity the sanctity of written sources was essentially inconceivable. Yet this study was revolutionary in other ways. Parker never claimed that Chinese dialects were not connected to some root. What his emphasis on non-character words implied, however, was that the language that connected dialects was not the written tradition. The essence of Chinese, its abstract value of x, could only be unearthed through oral speech. 108

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His data are buried in a scattering of phonologies published in the China Review, as well as Herbert Giles’s Chinese–English Dictionary. The data in Giles’s dictionary, however, are limited in their reliability, given the fact that Parker himself accosted Giles for how Giles used his own notes. For his phonologies, see E. H. Parker, “The Dialect of Eastern Sz-Ch’uan,” China Review 11, no. 2 (1882), 112–121; E. H. Parker, “The Dialect of Wenchow,” China Review 12, no. 5 (1884), 377–390; E. H. Parker, “The Dialect of Yangchow,” China Review 12, no. 1 (1883), 9–18; E. H. Parker, “Canton Syllabary,” China Review 8 (1880), 363–382. E. H. Parker, “Characterless Chinese Words,” China Review 9, no.2 (1880), 85–88. Parker, “The Comparative Study of Chinese Dialects,” 28.

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To the best of my knowledge, there is little evidence that Parker’s ideas were commonly known among Chinese scholars. But Parker suggested something that would prove rather profound. The idea that a language did not have to be commonly spoken to be meaningful, that invented amalgamations could better capture the spirit of a people than extant speech, would find new life among Chinese reformers who, like Parker, believed that the true Chinese language was “an abstraction.” As we will see in the next chapters, many in the twentieth century contended that invented languages could serve roles that languages currently spoken on the ground could not. Just as nation builders would work to reinvent China’s past to fit its present needs, so, too, did men like Parker and a handful of twentieth-century Chinese language reformers believe that an ancient, idealized past could be reconstructed to serve as a contemporary national representative. Parker presaged the expansion of what language could be. Conclusion In 1961, Berkeley Professor of Linguistics Yuen Ren Chao (趙元任) wrote a short article titled, “What Is Correct Chinese?”112 It was a paradoxical question for Chao to ask: a central part of his long career was as a member of the language unification committee that defined and standardized national languages in China in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet rather than discuss the language that he himself had a hand in crafting, Chao instead flipped the question on its head and wrote of the language he spoke as a child in the 1890s, a time before there was such thing as a “standard Chinese.” There was a script used largely by elites, he explained. There were archetypes for grammar, vocabulary, and syntax modeled on texts written hundreds of years before. Rhyming dictionaries approximated shared phonological principles by grouping characters together based upon phonetic characteristics. But these commonalities could hardly be called a standard. Chao recognized the irony. He began his essay with a rather tongue-incheek, “To err is human, to correct is worse,” intimating that his definition of “correct” defied expectations. But since he had been asked the question, he answered it by challenging his audience to reconsider what defined the language of a place, a culture, or a nation. Was it what most people spoke? Was it the historical traditions that defined and constrained it? Was it what the government claimed it was? 112

Yuen Ren Chao, “What Is Correct Chinese?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 81, no. 3 (September, 1961), 171–177.

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The esteemed intellectual that he was, Chao’s narration of how elites conceived of language in the final decades of the Qing was insightful, serving to dissuade his audience that the “Chinese language” of 1961 had timelessly existed. But what goes unmentioned was the extent to which the moment he pointed to, the moment he was born, was a watershed moment for the very question whose answers he sought. The language of his childhood was one in flux, as late-Qing scholars were imagining new ways to conceptualize not only their language, but the entire basis of their collective identity. As they did so, the frameworks they absorbed from their high-Qing predecessors, Western observers, and by the 1890s, Japan, forced them to reconsider the role of fangyan in its construction. This chapter has focused on the historical threads that led to that moment of crisis. It established how fangyan before the nineteenth century were primarily used as local vernaculars and representatives of oral speech. It outlined how phonetics were treated as tools to uncover the wisdom of ancient texts. And finally, it introduced new observers, with power gleaned through imperialism, who wrote new histories and defined new roles for oral languages in the context of a swiftly changing modern world. In the late Qing, these narratives – a long tradition, built and reinvented over generations, and a new world order that made many of the assumptions undergirding that tradition seem inadequate – converged. As such, the story in this chapter is a modern one.113 Its purpose is to establish how these crisscrossed narratives inspired a diverse group of late-Qing patriots who began imagining China after empire. They imbued these earlier traditions with new meanings, combining them together in diverse ways: as prescriptions for policy, as valid intellectual frameworks, as artistic inspiration, and as traces of shared ethnicity, culture, and identity. These men, to whom we now turn, would initiate the dialectical process of creating a new vision of what it meant to be Chinese.

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Sheldon Pollack so poignantly claims about South Asia that “Language was never an ‘indispensable pole of identification’ . . . before modernity made it such.” While I would argue no such sweeping claims for China, it is worth noting how modernity shifted the relationship between language and identity. Sheldon Pollack, The Language of Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 511.

2

Unchangeable Roots Fangyan and the Creation of a National Language

Introduction The previous chapter ended with European and American travelers preoccupied with a multitude of “China problems.” Through their colonial gaze, many Western sojourners found the Chinese hopelessly backward – their cold reception to Christianity, their eating habits, their creaking bureaucracy, and their superstitious religions all constitutive of a weakness born of stagnation. They agreed that the Chinese needed to drastically reform the entire foundation of their government, culture, and society if they were ever to join the modern world. This criticism was not lost among a new generation of Qing reformers, whose attention to the “China problem” arose from rather different concerns. Their empire’s defeat in multiple wars encouraged them to consider foreign narratives about the nature of their society. These men translated texts from missionaries and diplomats, and, filtering them through the goals of self-strengthening, weighed which criticisms were worthy of their attention and which criticisms, framed by strange foreign intellectual methodologies or frivolous interests, were best left ignored. The fall of the Qing in 1911, which many hoped might provide a panacea for existential threats, quickly brought into sharp relief the increasingly urgent sense among elites that the empire and its replacement lacked many of the ingredients needed for a powerful nation – those things that could launch “China” from dream to reality. On the topic of language, one particular narrative rang true: the absence of a unified national language signaled the new nation’s vulnerability and potential collapse. Thus began the decades-long construction of a Chinese national language. This story is well worn, and traditionally told as such:1 At the turn of 1

The creation of the national language in China was first narrated in 1934 with Li Jinxi’s Guoyu yundong shigang (A history of the National Language movement) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1934). It outlined the work of himself and his colleagues. The earliest in English is John DeFrancis’s Nationalism and Language Reform. It has since been given more nuance and technical attention by Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education; Richard Vanness Simmons, “Whence Came Mandarin? Qing Guanhua, the

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the twentieth century, China had just endured half a century of rebellion, war, and semicolonialism. Convinced that the best way to strengthen and save their nation was to mold the subjects of their fallen empire into a citizenry culturally united, reformers and revolutionaries, supported by the new Republican government placed the creation and promulgation of a national language at the forefront. Men came from north and south to gather in the capital, where they chose, by vote, a fangyan to serve as the national language. Though contentious, Beijing was ultimately victorious. The actual narrative of how Beijing “won” is far more complex than this retelling may suggest. The journey toward linguistic standardization cannot be narrated solely as Beijing’s victory in a battle between north and south; to do so ignores how these men actually conceived of a “Chinese language.” An analysis of the debates, meetings, and proposals as they unfolded shows that powerful contingents believed that one fangyan could not represent the whole national body; they suggested instead that all fangyan could be combined into a hybrid amalgamation that embodied the heart of what made Chinese citizens Chinese in the first place. These well-laid national language plans reveal a commitment to encapsulating China’s shared cultural core. And once reformers abandoned their idealized language in favor of simply making Beijing’s language their national tongue, the unrealized dreams of earlier proposals did not simply disappear. These dreams reemerged in new contexts, repurposed to advance fangyan as a more historic and pure cultural representative of the Chinese nation. This chapter retells the story of the national language with fangyan at its center. Through the invention, adoption, revision, and abandonment of multiple proposals, a clear divide emerged between those proposing a language that incorporated China’s linguistic diversity and those who believed it best to simply choose one representative out of the existing regional languages. Though a consensus was never reached, these debates were productive. They created a shared basis for a Chinese national language policy: one that balanced the tension between cultural representation and practical politics, harmonized the strengths of both invention and authenticity, and heralded the power of both national unity and local diversity. Beijing Dialect, and the National Standard in Early Republican China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137, no. 1 (2017), 63–88; and Weng, “What Is Mandarin?” See also Wang Dongjie, “‘Daibiao quanguo’: 20 shiji shangbanye de Guoyu biaozhun lunzheng” (“Representing the whole country”: Controversy over a Mandarin standard in the first half of the twentieth century), Jindaishi yanjiu 6 (2014), 77–100; Yuan Xianxin, “Yuyin, Guoyu yu minzu zhuyi: Cong Wusi yundong de Guoyu tongyi lunzheng tan qi” (Pronunciation, national language, and nationalism: Talking on the May Fourth movement national language unification debate) Wenxue pinglun 4 (2009), 136–142; Li Yuming, Language Planning in China (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

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Language Unification Conferences: History and Myth Most histories of the national language point to the year 1913 as a pivotal moment.2 That year, nearly all of the eighty nominated delegates, chosen by the two-year-old Republic of China’s Ministry of Education and provincial legislative assemblies, met in Beijing for the first national Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciations. The conference was convened and overseen by linguist and political activist Wu Zhihui (吳稚暉), who led the delegates as they read through proposals and subsequently voted upon the pronunciation and orthographies for a spoken Chinese language. Myths about this meeting abound. People from Guangzhou, for instance, love to lament that their own mother tongue (Cantonese) lost the status of national language by only a handful of votes.3 Perhaps the most salient tale was that this conference was the final battle that secured a “victory” for Beijing in the contest to represent the nation.4 While it is indeed true that Beijing’s fangyan would be chosen only a decade later as the basis for China’s national language, a closer look encourages us to think of this conference as something more than a regional power struggle. Rather, delegates in Beijing sought to promote not their own region’s dominance, but rather, their vision of the Chinese nation. The Coming Storm The year 1898 was a watershed. That year, the Guangxu emperor initiated a wave of aggressive reforms targeting perceived shortcomings in the Qing military, government bureaucracy, and education. The movement was christened the Hundred Days Reform, so named because of the time period within which the policies began and were subsequently aborted. Juxtaposed against Japan’s Meiji Restoration, these reforms and their abrupt termination have gone down in history as the quintessential moment at which the Qing failed to prove itself capable of bringing 2

3

4

What they noticed was what Joshua Fishman has called the “first congress phenomenon,” a common government response to what was perceived as ineffectual language policy. Joshua Fishman, ed., The Earliest Stages of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993), 3. In China, Li Jinxi spends a great deal of time on the committee meeting. Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 53–58; Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 413. One example of this myth can be found here; though anecdotal, it highlights its broader presence: “Cantonese almost became the official language,” South China Morning Post, October 6, 2009, www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-officiallanguage John DeFrancis, for one, names it as such. Nationalism and Language Reform, 58.

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about meaningful change.5 Yet while the Hundred Days Reform was labeled a failure by contemporaries and their posterity, it was a significant turning point in how Qing elites perceived the root of their problems and avenues for reform.6 In a sense, it brought the very role of government to the center of debate. From education to customs, local governance to banking, the reforms welcomed a brief moment of experimentation, where reveries of a new era could be entertained.7 The Hundred Days Reform also launched the first wave of overseas students to Japan, Europe, and the United States.8 It had not gone unnoticed in Qing elite circles that, under the Meiji government, Japan had effectively rebuffed Western colonialism, industrialized its economic base, increased popular participation in politics, and achieved universal education. Though intermixed with complex feelings, including fear, prejudice, and a sense of cultural superiority, many elites nonetheless viewed Japan as an archetype of a modern nation. The Hundred Days policies were only the tip of the iceberg; the interactions between Meiji Japan and the Qing manifested transformations in Qing society that have encouraged historians to characterize the movement as the only true “revolution” of the turn of the century.9 In particular, late-Qing reformers saw Meiji Japan as a model for education reform. Kang Youwei, an intellectual at the helm of the Hundred Days Reform, was deeply impressed by the Japanese education proposals that transformed subjects of the Tokugawa into literate and 5

6 7

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For an excellent summary of the contemporary interpretations and the historiography of the Hundred Days Reform, see Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow, “Introduction,” in Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in the Late Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Karl and Zarrow, “Introduction,” 10. Weston shows how not only was the institution Beijing University founded out of the Hundred Days Reform, but also particular formats of knowledge and information gathering that would become central to later years, such as the epistemological regimes I analyze in Chapter 3. Timothy Weston, “The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Chinese Modernity,” in Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in the Late Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 99–123; Tze-ki Hon, “Zhang Zhidong’s Proposal for Reform: A New Reading of the Quanxue Pian,” in Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in the Late Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 77–98. Approximations of these numbers can be found in Shu Xincheng, Jindai Zhongguo liuxue shi (The history of study abroad in modern China) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1927), 15–19, 66–77. Douglas Reynolds draws a distinction between violent and “quiet” revolutions, the socalled Xinzheng revolution representing the latter. He calls it such because “China intellectually and institutionally underwent a shift away from long-established paradigms to paradigms radically new, introduced from the outside.” Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 12.

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politically active Meiji citizens seemingly overnight. He spearheaded a call for imitating Japan’s educational policies in an 1895 petition that became famously known as the Gongche shangshu. It claimed that the strength of Western countries and Japan lay not in their “cannons, machines, armies, and soldiers” but in their “promotion of education.”10 Subsequently, in 1898, Kang dedicated a full-length work to discussing how Japan should serve as a blueprint for a Chinese nation.11 Kang’s endorsement of the Japanese model cohered to the beliefs of the thousands of Chinese students abroad.12 Many of them spent their free time working with political organizations focused on problems plaguing their own country.13 This included the question of language – a problem that Japan had also recently faced.14 Like their Qing counterparts, Japanese elites after the Meiji Restoration maintained that cultural disunity hindered national development, embarking on an aggressive program of standardization. In 1902, Japan’s Diet created a National Language Research Council, tasked with standardizing kokugo (国語), a term embraced by scholars in the Qing as Guoyu (國語). These Qing language reformers quickly endorsed many of the measures enacted by Japan’s Diet.15 Similarly, when Japan’s National Language Research Council based their standardized language on Tokyo’s dialect, Chinese students abroad took notice.16 Many of them, who would subsequently return to the Qing Empire, believed that their new nation should follow suit and promulgate the language 10

11 12

13 14

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Kang Youwei, “Gongche shangshu” (The scholar’s memorial to the throne), original 1895, reprinted in Zhongguo jindai wenxue da xi (The comprehensive collection of early modern Chinese literature, 1840–1919), Vol. 12 (Shanghai: Shanghai shidian chubanshe, 1992), 395. Reynolds, China 1898–1912, 43–47. It was not only Chinese students, but also study tours involving Chinese officials. See Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), chapter 2. Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, chapter 4. It is important to note here that the attitude toward Japan in China was not entirely positive; many held distinctly anti-Japanese positions. See Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 335–341. Many scholars began to propose a phonetic script mimicking Japan’s kana system. Xing Dao, “Duyin tongyihui gongding guoyin zimu zhi gaishuo” (Summary of the collectively discussed national language script at the conference on language reform) Dongfang zazhi 10, no. 8 (1914), 11–15. There is also a summary of these systems in Sun Ying, Lu Xunzai Jiaoyu bu (Lu Xun in the Ministry of Education) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1979), 32; Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 91–92. Noriko Kamachi Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). See Nanette Twine, Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 8.

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of its seat of government.17 Several years later, two conferences were convened, the General Conference of Education Associations of the Provinces and the Central Education Conference, during which time delegates from across the country determined the need for a national language based upon the language of Beijing, a research council to standardize it, an accompanying phonetic script, and a standardized vernacular grammar.18 Thus despite the Qing’s anemic responses to the 1898 proposals, language reform proponents found the government an eager audience. It was, after all, to the state’s benefit to promulgate the language of the imperial capital, which could only serve to aggrandize its power. Yet it did not take long for the tide to turn. For the growing number of intellectuals opposed to not only Qing governance but also the very idea of a multiethnic nation, Beijing was a region geographically and culturally distant from the Han heartland. Moreover, in the intellectual imagination of many elites, Japan was quickly shifting from a paragon of modernity to an existential threat.19 When the empire crumbled the following decade, the Qing’s tacit support for proposals that emphasized Beijing as the center of power incited opposition. This made the 1911 revolution a turning point. It created new space to reimagine the new nation’s linguistic future. Zhang Binglin’s Xin fangyan and the 1911 Revolution Among the late-Qing reformers opposed to making Beijing China’s linguistic representative was Zhang Binglin (章炳麟).20 Zhang is something of an enigma to contemporary scholars – neither conservative, reformer, or radical, but at once all three. He was enamored with classical texts and an anti-monarchy insurgent. He wrote in classical prose to express modern nationalism. He was also not alone. Beginning in the early twentieth century, he allied himself with a similarly contradictory group of culturally conservative radicals who argued for the revitalization of the Confucian tradition with the explicitly political purpose of ousting the Manchu rulers.21 Called the “national essence” (guocui 國粹) school, these scholars endorsed what Elisabeth Kaske calls an “alternative 17 18 19 20 21

Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 368. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 292. Kai-Wing Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture,” 47–84. For a biography of Zhang Binglin, see Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan. Peter Zarrow, “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China,” History and Memory 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004), 67–107.

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antiquity,” harkening back to an imagined past in which Han Chinese were both unified and powerful.22 The group was known for its antiManchu sentiment, but Zhang was particularly vociferous. His vocal opposition to Manchu rule forced him to spend much of his youth in exile, moving from his home to Taiwan, to Japan, and back again. Throughout his travels, he remained a prolific writer, drafting treatises on diverse topics such as contemporary politics, religion, ancient philosophy, and linguistics.23 The national essence scholars buttressed their invented past with a complex combination of kaozheng philological inquiries and Western conceptualizations of race. Zhang’s work embodies the blending of these two influences. He argued that xiaoxue was a window into society’s past – that comparisons of sound and rhyme, character formation (zixing 字形), and script evolution, could reveal a diachronic history of the Han race that separated it from the Manchus. His works gleaned evidence from millenniaold dictionaries and language texts, including Xu Shen’s aforementioned Shuowen jiezi, the Erya (爾雅), the oldest known dictionary of Chinese characters, and Yang Xiong’s regional dictionary the Fangyan. Yet decidedly unlike his High Qing xiaoxue practitioners, Zhang was just as interested in excavating the past as he was in revolutionizing the present. With his mind weighted by current crises, he was one of the first scholars to use kaozheng philological methods not to analyze the core meaning of Confucian classics, but rather, to define a Chinese ethnic nation.24 The argument that the Chinese language was defined through its ability to reveal a shared, united Han past was argued most forcefully in his Xin fangyan (新方言, New dialect).25 Published in 1907, this collection of articles sought to uncover the origins of a “Chinese” language by tracing the etymology of 370 regional phrases back to the Han dynasty. In it, Zhang attempted to show that all fangyan had a shared core – that contemporary fangyan were time capsules, within which lay a common Chinese past. With these connections, fangyan were not, as some reformers argued at the time, a hindrance to China’s national unity, but rather 22 23

24

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Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 324. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 323–389; Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 27–28. Kaske points out that Zhang often contradicted himself. He would sometimes use Xu’s accepted etymology of a character based upon its syntax and character construction, and other times reject Xu’s categorization, relying instead on phonology over the form of the character. Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 353–354. Xin fangyan was originally published as a periodical under the name Zhang Jiang. “Xin fangyan” (New dialect), Guocui xuebao 34 (October 26, 1907) through 43 (August 12, 1908).

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evidence of it.26 For Zhang, the preservation of this shared Han past had the potential to transform the nation’s people from a “sheet of loose sand” to a cohesive ethnic group. This labor of patriotism directly informed Zhang’s prescriptions for a Chinese national language.27 Guided by his anti-Manchu politics, his opposition to Beijing as standardbearer for the Chinese national language was supported by his belief that northern fangyan were no longer purely Chinese, contaminated by the invading “barbarians” across China’s border. His Han ethnocentrism similarly steered him away from southern fangyan, which he believed had also been heavily influenced by seafaring outsiders. Wedding his desire for unification to his allegation that fangyan enshrined the core of the Chinese language, Zhang pursued a national language that radiated from the speech of Han people. Much like Edward Parker imagined the Chinese language as a distilled essence of all of China’s fangyan (see Chapter 1), Zhang believed that the national language should be precisely what his Xin fangyan attempted to trace: the root of a Han language. He thus proposed the construction of a language that embodied the historical pith of the country’s diverse fangyan. In his words, “Our ten lands have a unified script, if we want to have a unified oral language, we must use the sounds of the (states of ) Qin, Shu, Chu, and Han.”28 Zhang wrote Xin fangyan while in exile in Japan, fleeing the watchful eye of the Qing state. Yet after the Manchu rulers had been ousted, proposals like Zhang’s seemed much more attuned to the needs of the new nation. His ideas attracted prominent supporters, including Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培), the man who would eventually father the May Fourth movement as president of Beijing University. Cai promoted 26

27

28

For summaries on this work, see Jin Liu, Signifying the Local, 27; Shimada Kenji, Pioneer of the Chinese Revolution: Zhang Binglin and Confucianism, trans. Joshua Fogel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 15–18; Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 357–358. A man with a deep respect for China’s past, Zhang was appalled at proposals to replace or supplement Chinese characters with a Japanese-inspired kana system, and even more so by proposals to eliminate Chinese characters altogether and shift to an entirely phonetic system, or to adopt as the national language a foreign tongue such as Esperanto. For research on these movements, see DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform, 112–135; Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 348–366, 381–386; Jin Liu, Signifying the Local, 29. His discussion on how he conceived of his ideal national language can be found in Zhang Binglin, “Fangyan di ershi si” (Fangyan 24) Qiushu (A book of urgency) (1904), in Zhang Taiyan quanji (Complete works of Zhang Taiyan), Vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe), 203–207. See also Zhang Binglin, “Bo Zhongguo yong wanguo xinyu shuo” (A repudiation of the use of Esperanto in China), Minbao (21) (1908), in Zhang Taiyan quanji (Complete works of Zhang Taiyan), Vol. 4 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe), 337–338.

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national modernization as an educator, local administrator, and revolutionary organizer before 1911, which earned him a position in the Republican government as minister of education. In his first act as minister, Cai called a formal meeting to reform China’s education system. A year later, in February of 1913, eighty delegates were invited to Beijing to determine the standardized pronunciation of the Chinese national language.29 At first blush, these meetings echoed efforts only years earlier by the new Qing bureaucracy to standardize the Chinese language. But with an entirely new group of reformers in charge, Beijing’s language met fierce resistance. As many argued for an entirely new image of the Chinese nation marked primarily by an ethno-racial Han, the stakes and priorities for language standardization had dramatically shifted.30 Fangyan and Guoyu at the 1913 Conference Compared to earlier conferences, the goals of the 1913 meeting were highly modest. Vernacular grammar, character reform, and even orthography were contentious topics; Cai chose to avoid them, tackling the less controversial problem of standardized phonology. Delegates organized along regional lines, endorsing proposals alongside other members from their respective provinces. This very fact alone has led historians to see this as a regional struggle, even relying upon geographic terms to describe member loyalties (the “Zhejiang camp” and so on).31 Yet this characterization fails to withstand scrutiny. The depiction of a regional struggle implies that the delegates were loyal first and foremost to their own regions. A close examination of the proceedings offers a more nuanced view of how these representatives imagined a Chinese language, calling into question the assumption that standardization was the equivalent of simply choosing a dominant region to represent the nation. First, the proposals for pronunciation standards indicate that few delegates simply patronized their own fangyan.32 Many delegates supported an abstract amalgamation of phonetics based upon older rhyming dictionaries and regional traditions, an ideal that echoed Zhang Binglin’s advocacy.33 Indeed, Zhang’s ideas found broad support in the newly 29

30 31 32 33

For information on these, see Guan Xiaohong, “Qingmo zhongyang jiaoyuhui shulun” (A narration and analysis of the late-Qing central education conference), Jindaishi yanjiu 118, no. 4 (2000), 116–140. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 292–293, 404–406. Wang Dongjie, for one, calls this “regional struggle,” “Daibiao quanguo,” 99–100. Of the nearly 150 proposals for potential pronunciations, only a handful were based upon contemporary vernaculars. Xing Dao, “Duyin tongyihui,” 13–15. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 386.

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formed linguistics department of Beijing University, whose work deeply impressed the 1913 conference. The department was spearheaded by Hu Yilu (胡以鲁). A native of Ningbo, Hu echoed Zhang’s concerns about linguistic disunity. In the final years of his life before passing in 1916, Hu wrote an extended treatise about what China’s national language should be.34 His arguments relied upon the xiaoxue methodologies that Zhang had utilized, but also drew heavily upon nineteenth-century European comparative linguistics.35 Hu tied Chinese phonological categories from rhyming dictionaries to similar sound groups in other world languages, making the case that Chinese belonged to Schleicher’s family tree. In particular, he drew parallels between the fangyan of Chinese and what he called “fangyan” of Latin: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French. Chinese fangyan were thus a product of a natural splintering of a unified Han culture.36 Logically, Hu then contended, the national language ought to represent the essence of that Han culture, or, the “cultural center” of the Chinese nation.37 Like Zhang, Hu opposed using the language of the capital for political reasons. The language of Beijing, put bluntly, was inextricable from the non-Han rule of the previous dynasty. “This so-called Beijing Guanhua, it is the language of officials, it is not the common language.”38 Hu represents a bridge between the xiaoxue approach and Western linguistics, drawing upon the authority of both to support his argument. His conclusion still mirrored Zhang Binglin’s proposal: that the national language should represent the shared historical and cultural core of the Han Chinese heartland. In order to develop this idealized language that best represented the Han ethnic nation, Hu proposed that scholars form two committees, a National Language Unification Survey Committee and a National Language Unification Research Committee. Their purpose was to first survey China’s existing fangyan, and to use this data to recreate each fangyan’s shared cultural core.39 According to Kaske, there is no evidence that Hu verbalized at the 1913 conference the views he outlined in his own book; indeed, he was only one 34 35 36

37 38

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Hu Yilu, Guoyuxue caochuang (The creation of national language studies) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1913). Zhang Binglin, “Xin fangyan,” “Zixu” (Author’s introduction). Hu Yilu, Guoyuxue caochuang, 72–73, 83–84; Zhang Yumei and Li Boling, Hanzi Hanyu yu Zhongguo wenhua (Chinese characters, the Chinese language, and Chinese culture) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2012), 194. Hu Yilu, Guoyuxue caochuang, 84. Hu Yilu, Guoyuxue caochuang, 97; He Jiuying, Zhongguo xiandai yuyanxue shi (The history of modern Chinese linguistics) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2005), 34. Hu Yilu, Guoyuxue caochuang, 98; Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 409.

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voice out of dozens.40 But if we examine how the eventual National Language pronunciation was actually chosen, we can see that Hu’s general premise was quite popular. Rather than ask delegates to vote upon a cohesive extant phonetic system, Chairman Wu Zhihui and ViceChairman Wang Zhao (王照) instead grouped delegates by their home province and asked them to suggest ideal pronunciations for 6,500 characters in Li Guangdi’s seventeenth-century rime dictionary, the Yinyun chanwei (音韻闡微). This gave delegates the freedom to propose phonetic systems that were neither cohesively extant nor their own mother tongues.41 Wu and Wang used each province’s proposal to determine a pronunciation. The result was no commonly spoken local language, but rather, a phonology most closely resembling Southern Mandarin – the guanhua based on Nanjing – as it was recorded both in nineteenthcentury Protestant scholarship and among xiaoxue scholars. While it retained many of the phonological characteristics of Beijing patois, it was also infused with key features specific to southern fangyan. These characteristics included, most importantly, the rusheng (入聲), or the “entering tone,” defined by the stop endings present in many southern fangyan.42 This retelling of the 1913 conference raises several points of contention concerning conventional histories of the national language movement. First, it challenges the standard presumption that Beijing’s language was destined to become the language of China. This chapter thus far has focused almost exclusively upon Zhang Binglin and his protégés, but Beijing had few champions at the 1913 conference. With the attendance of Zhang Binglin’s other students, including the aforementioned Hu Yilu and author Zhou Shuren (周树人, better known under his pseudonym Lu Xun), racially motivated disdain for the former Manchu capital undergirded many of their discussions.43 The debates between those who emphasized unity emanating from China’s political center and those 40 41

42

43

For a list of various scholars who then drew upon Hu’s work, see He Jiuying, Zhongguo xiandai yuyanxue shi, 34–39. Wenzi gaige chubanshe, Yi-jiu-yi-san nian duyin tongyihui ziliao huibian (Collection of materials from the 1913 conference on reading pronunciation unification) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1958), 35. In his oral history, Chao called all rusheng glottal stops. Yuen Ren Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, Composer and Author. Interview by Rosemary Levenson. Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1977, 76, but other linguists refer to them as final stops, unreleased stops, and other more specific designations depending on the fangyan. A detailed explanation of the characteristics of this Guoyin can be found in Weng, “What Is Mandarin,” 622–624. In fact, Cai Yuanpei himself complained of internal discord due to waning support for the language of Beijing. Cai Yuanpei, “Quanguo linshi jiaoyu huiyi kaihuici,” Jiaoyu zazhi 4, no. 6 (September, 1912).

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who celebrated multitudinous expressions of the nation’s cultural heart galvanized the emergence of Chinese nationalism. By assuming Beijing’s victory as inevitable, we ignore the complex process of how the language came to be seen as “national” at all. This story also raises doubts about the connection between Guanhua and Beijing’s language. There are many ways to define a language’s boundaries – by its phonology, by its history, or by its identifiers (i.e., the people who claim to speak it). Under scrutiny, the slippage between the language of Beijing, Guanhua, and Guoyu becomes problematic. Each term represented a distinct history, a distinct phonology, and a distinct community – whether it be the imperial elite class, the political capital, or the Chinese nation in aggregate.44 A realization of these distinctions does more than encourage us to be more careful with the terminology we use to discuss Chinese languages; it also reminds us that there existed no teleological line from Guanhua to Guoyu in terms of the actual languages under discussion or the history of how they developed. Third, this history forces us to reexamine the role of geography in China’s linguistic standardization. Certainly, regional tensions played a role in the making of the national language – it explains why the language of Beijing became controversial. But most delegates felt compelled to choose a language to represent China, not simply to exhibit loyalty to their home regions. While many members from Jiangsu and Zhejiang suggested a language that included elements from their native Wu fangyan in the Yangzi River Delta, as far as we know they did not propose the exact phonologies of their mother tongues, but rather, a phonology with characteristics generalizable to a region these provincial groups likely felt represented the nation’s cultural heart. Similarly, for champions of Beijing’s fangyan, few of whom actually came from Beijing proper, and some of whom came from Southern provinces such as Fujian, their commitment to Beijing seems to have been driven by the belief that the capital represented a particular national ideal. These examples warn us against assuming that geographic loyalties were the primary driver behind people’s linguistic crusades. The nation often came first. This brings us to our final point: that the imagining of the Chinese nation was tied deeply to the construction of a Han ethnicity. Zhang Binglin’s imagined linguistic ideal reflected the idealized culture of his ethnic identity – the origin of Chinese civilization, language, and script. His historic language, free of the impurities of northern and southern languages, embodied the Han in its most refined state; like a pure 44

The difficulties in defining Mandarin are discussed in Ekaterina Yurievna Chirkova, In Search of Time in Peking Mandarin (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2003), 5–18.

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bloodline, Zhang saw the language of “the states of Qin, Shu, Chu and Han” as similarly pure. Zhang and his followers imagined a national language crafted through a unique patchwork of frameworks, from new theories about race, language, and history, to a belief in the supremacy of High-Qing kaozheng methodologies. Zhang and his allies’ lobbying was successful. Even those who were not as outwardly concerned about the question of ethno-racial purity, such as Cai Yuanpei, dismissed the language of Beijing as representative for China because it was too closely associated with the Qing dynasty. Indeed, while many of these men – Zhang aside – maintained their commitment to the broad and inclusive borders of the Qing dynasty in the making of their new Republic, their 1913 proposals focused primarily on how they could construct a language that at once represented their nation’s present while also embodying their shared ethnic past. It is here where fangyan played a central role. Fangyan were, to these men, relics of a historical ethnic China. Delegates were not championing a whole-scale adoption of their particular fangyan, but rather, suggesting the committee selectively choose those phonological characteristics that best embodied the nation. Southern delegates who vowed they would perish without the rusheng most likely did not submit their exact patois as alternatives. A conglomerate language that included key parts of their speech was, in many ways, a more authentic representation of Chineseness. In other words, what made the Chinese language Chinese was that it represented the diverse Han ethno-racial identity in its entirety.45 Fangyan were not branches or subsidiary versions of a monolithic Chinese-ness, defined only by their relationship to a national representative. They were, rather, pieces of a puzzle, without which the full pictures of Chinese-ness would remain woefully incomplete. Science, Practicality, and the End of Guoyu While delegates at the 1913 conference established a phonology for Guoyu, the task of making it a functional national language remained ahead. Yuan Shikai’s feeble central government made policy enactment sluggish, with little movement on education for another seven years. Frustrated delegates, however, remained indefatigable. In 1920, the Ministry of Education announced that Guowen (國文, “national literature”) classes must be heretofore called “Guoyu” (“national language”), 45

Tellingly, though the conference included representatives from Tibet and Mongolia, the languages of those regions did not, to the best of my knowledge, figure prominently in their discussions.

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representing a move toward emphasizing education in not just literature, but oral language as well.46 The year before the Ministry of Education founded a Preparatory Committee on the Unification of the National Language (Guoyu Tongyi Choubei Hui 國語統一籌備會), which, for one of its first measures, published an official dictionary for national pronunciation, thus creating a blueprint for teaching phonology in schools. That this language would soon be taught to children raised the stakes. Critics attacked the new language from all sides.47 Some of the harshest criticisms came from Chinese students overseas, particularly those studying in the United States. Though these students agreed with Zhang and Hu and other delegates in China that the national phonology should be crafted anew by intellectuals like themselves, they felt as though the approach of the 1913 delegation was illogical. Armed with their training in the United States, these students claimed that science – defined by quantifiable facts gleaned through empirical observation and decidedly Western methodologies – was the way to create the ideal language. They were far less interested in proving ethnic unity than creating an efficiently promulgateable language through quantifiable data. Back home, there were those in China who felt as though the entire concept of a hybrid language defied logic. Articulating their views using May Fourth rhetoric that demanded the eradication of outdated cultural practices, these men felt as though any language that took history as inspiration was invalid in a new China. Moreover, like Japan and France had done before them, they believed that China should choose the language of the seat of government; if a country’s capital could represent the nation in its entirety, the language of that capital could as well. From their perspective, a “blue-green Guoyu” with no native speakers and a connection to a now-dead past, was only doomed to fail. Ultimately, in 1925, the Ministry of Education and, two years later, the new KMT government would discard the 1913 Guoyu to patronize a national language based on that of Beijing. But the interim battles over language choices reveal how, within only a decade, seismic social and cultural changes had altered the relationship between language and nation. In the years after the 1911 revolution, linguistic experts absorbed these shifts: the import of Western scientific methods, contrasting definitions of 46

47

Robert Culp, “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China,” TwentiethCentury China 34, no. 1 (November, 2008), 18. Practitioners of the 1913 conference adhered to a kana orthography inspired by Zhang Binglin, due in part to the vehement support of his protégés, but the system was far from settled. Indeed, among the dozens of proposals given for a phonetic Chinese system, the vast majority of them were of Roman letters. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 410.

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the Chinese nation-state and its citizens, new conceptualizations of linguistic modernity, and the limits of bureaucratic efficacy. Their loyalties to different iterations of national languages reflected their reactions to the whirlwind of changes surrounding them. A Perfectly Scientific Language China’s first dialectologist, Yuen Ren Chao discovered his natural aptitude for language learning at the age of ten.48 He had a consistent fascination with the linguistic landscape of his native country. He reflected on how he “discovered the laws of Chinese tones” through meditation while fighting the flu, and recalled the flattery he felt when he was mistaken for a local in Hunan after only a cursory attempt to speak the local tongue.49 This preoccupation soon became his vocation. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Cornell University and a PhD in philosophy at Harvard, Chao returned to Beijing’s Qinghua University in 1920, where he began his lifelong academic career. Unlike most of his colleagues at Cornell and Qinghua, Chao paid little attention to the baihua movement.50 Even in his personal diaries Chao chose to write in classical Chinese or English, stating his discomfort with the Chinese vernacular. In part, this was because he never really saw himself as a reformer; in his words, he was “more interested in finding out how things were than advocating how things should be.”51 This was in contrast to his classmate and friend Hu Shi, who would become the face of the revolutionary May Fourth movement. Their friendship blossomed at Cornell as they collaborated on joint projects, went boating in New York, or traveled to California – Hu was even a witness at Chao’s wedding.52 Through this relationship, Hu would inspire Chao to play a key role in government policy during the Republican period, advocating language reform first as a graduate student at Harvard and as a member of various government committees in China in the 1920s. Chao’s ideas about language reform reflect his image of himself as a scientist. In 1916, he outlined the state of Chinese linguistics in the 48 49 50

51 52

Yuen Ren Chao, “My Fieldwork on the Chinese Dialects,” Computational Analysis of Asian and African Languages (July, 1975), 3. Yuen Ren Chao, diary, September 11, 1920, notebook for September 11–October 7, Yuan Ren Chao papers, carton 35, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. Yuen Ren Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, interview by Rosemary Levenson. Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1977, 76. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 56. Yuen Ren Chao papers, carton 21, folder “Autobiographical materials, 1911–1920,” Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA.

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Chinese Students Monthly, a periodical produced and written by Chinese students living in the United States. The three-part article had a clear agenda: to help establish the ideal language for China based upon what Hu and Chao called “scientific” principles. Emboldened by classmates whose faith in linguistic engineering was so strong that they assumed Esperanto names, Chao contended that intellectuals could, and should, craft the perfect language. He wrote, Some philologists insist that languages must grow naturally and therefore must not be tampered with. But how do they grow? Is it not by the changing usage of the individuals under the influence of change and growth of ideas? It is true that the actual course that the evolution of a language takes is always the resultant of the individual preferences and no learned society or governmental authority can successfully impose arbitrary standards of orthography, grammar, or pronunciation on the people. But this does not exclude the fact that if intelligent and expert reformers furnish the leadership, others will be better able to decide their preferences by the merits and demerits of the reforms than by their unguided prejudices. There is therefore no real conflict between systematic reform and natural growth.53

For Chao, a language crafted with scientific efficiency in mind was not only possible but preferable. He rejected the dichotomy between socalled natural and unnatural languages, and in so doing, claimed that the promotion of a national language needed both scholars and the state: the state to create an apparatus for promulgation, and scholars to create the ideal language to promulgate. In a follow-up article, Chao explained just how such a language might be crafted. First, it needed “maximum distinctions.” This suggestion deserves some explanation. Different fangyan have unique ways of pronouncing particular phonological distinctions. An oft-cited example is that many southern fangyan still maintain distinctions between characters with and without rusheng. In today’s standard Mandarin, both the characters 富 (“wealth”) and 福 (“good fortune”) are pronounced fu. In Cantonese, however, 富 is pronounced fu, whereas 福 is pronounced fuk. This distinction between the appearance and lack of a final stop is carried in fangyan other than Mandarin. Throughout Chao’s continued advocacy, his emphasis on distinctions between sounds was fundamental; it became, in fact, the primary justification for supporting an invented language in the first place. His reasoning was that a language with more distinctions would be “easier to learn.” For Chao, language learning should primarily focus on linguistic rules – namely, if we were to group all characters into phonological categories, 53

Chao, “The Problem of the Chinese Language, 438.

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each category would contain as many of the same characters as possible across all fangyan, even if different fangyan pronounced each category differently. What Chao created, therefore, was not a language that sounded the most like any particular fangyan, but rather, had the same rules as most fangyan. When people from Shanghai, Fuzhou, or Chengdu learned the new national language, they could immediately draw connections between the sounds of their own languages and those which they were attempting to learn. Thus for Chao, if the rules of the national language corresponded to the rules of one’s native fangyan (for instance, if all characters in the national language that carried the rusheng also carried it in one’s native fangyan) students could easily attain linguistic proficiency. He offered his own experience watching people from Nanjing learn the language of Beijing as an example: the struggle was attempting to understand not the phonology of the new language, but how the rules of that language corresponded to the language(s) they knew.54 For Chao, language was almost mathematical – written or oral symbols that could be compared and quantified. In addition to including maximum distinctions, Chao explained, an ideal language must take ease of pronunciation, clarity, euphony, and maximum agreement among dialects into account. Upon explaining the minute details of how he would edit the national language already being promulgated in China, Chao proposed reforms to its syntax, vocabulary, grammar, written style, and orthography, all in the name of efficiency. “The articles are concluded, the problems are not,” he closed. “I should consider my labors amply repaid if I have succeeded in putting a few thoughtful minds on the right track in judging and working on this most technical and apparently most popular of problems” (emphasis in the original).55 After graduation from Cornell, Chao continued his education at Harvard. In the fall of 1920, Chao had returned to China as a lecturer in the Chinese language at Qinghua University, when his old friend Hu Shi invited him to drink tea with other vanguards in China’s language reform movement. At Hu’s house, Chao met men who would soon lead the charge for a standardized Chinese language, including Li Jinxi (黎錦 熙), and Qian Xuantong (錢玄同). “I discussed very rapidly and at great length various points with them,” Chao later reflected. “I am surprized [sic] at the comparative soundness & thoroness [sic] with which they have thought out things . . . Some of their ideas were exactly as I thought of 54 55

Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 81. Chao, “The Problem of the Chinese Language,” 591.

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several years ago.” After their cups were empty, Chao wrote, “they proposed to make me a member of the National Language Research Society.” Wistfully, he ended his diary entry with an outpouring of emotion, marveling at the implications of the meeting in which he had just partaken: “With men like those I just met, I think the Chinese language has hope.”56 Their discussions went beyond the construction of an ideal language – they also deliberated on how to promulgate it. Hu and Chao outlined some proposals in their 1916 articles, which described the ideal teaching methods for speech mechanics. The men also expressed dissatisfaction with the recording made by Wang Pu (王璞) of the new invented national language; Chao, in later reflections, said that Wang had “made a mess of it.”57 At Hu Shi’s request, Chao, who had recently decided to move back to the United States to teach at Harvard, spent the winter of 1921–1922 completing the recording of, and the accompanying textbook for, his Guoyu liushengpian keben (國語留聲片課本 A phonographic course in the national language).58 Chao’s textbook, which, along with a recreation of Chao’s recording from the 1960s, gives us an approximation of how Chao imagined his countrymen might learn Guoyu. Like the methods expressed in his 1916 article, the phonographic course expected Guoyu learners to attain fluency by carefully studying the correct pronunciation of each initial, final, and tone. The lessons instructed teachers to pay attention to each Chinese morpheme, teaching not vocabulary, but phonological rules to which learners could attach and easily attain fluency – methods Hu Shi touted as scientific.59 The textbook and accompanying recording emphasized what both Hu and Chao had contended years before: what made a language ideal as a national communicative tool was its ability to be learned and spoken efficiently. This meant dividing each sound into learnable parts, and then practicing each morpheme one by one. Chao’s approach gained little traction. While claiming that he had more interest in “how things are” than “how things should be,” the 56

57

58 59

Yuen Ren Chao, diary, September 11, 1920. Some of these quotes are also included in Zhao Xinna and Huang Peiyun, eds., Zhao Yuanren nianpu (The yearbook of Yuen Ren Chao) (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1998), 100. Thanks to Jeffrey Weng for originally giving me notes on this diary entry in 2016. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 79; he also mentions this in Yuen Ren Chao, “First Green Letter,” page 16, April, 1921, carton 29, folder “First Green Letter: Manuscript,” Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. Yuen Ren Chao, Guoyu liushengpian keben (A phonographic course in the national language) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1922). Hu Shi, “Xu” (Introduction), in Yuen Ren Chao, Guoyu liushengpian keben (A phonographic course in the national language) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1922), 1.

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truth remained that Chao was deeply committed to a unified national language. But Chao’s synthetic, hybrid language was not a symbolic creation meant to achieve a particular vision of Chinese cultural unity like it was for Zhang Binglin; it was the most efficient means to an end. This commitment to efficiency and accuracy – the ideals that grounded his national language proposal in the 1910s – would lead him to abandon this project only a few years later. From Beijing Fangyan to National Language Back in China, the 1913 Guoyu seemingly born of compromise had produced a solution that pleased few people. Those who had been tasked with the practical work of promulgating it quickly saw its shortcomings, casting doubt on the feasibility of promulgating a language that had few native speakers. But perhaps more importantly, with distance and time, those who objected to the use of the language of the national capital on anti-Manchu grounds saw their voices slowly fading from the national conversation. Men such as Zhang Binglin who favored a Han ethno-state proved vital to the revolutionary efforts before 1911, inciting popular momentum against the Qing state. But once Sun Yat-sen’s Republic was formed, government leaders largely advocated a multiethnic nation. Manchu relics were quietly tucked away in favor of new national symbols of modernity. With them, the ethnic xenophobia that would have seen China’s current territory truncated by half was also discarded.60 In addition, after the disintegration of the Republican government in 1916, many radicals begrudgingly acknowledged that they could no longer pin responsibility for China’s weakness on the Manchus. With the Qing gone, these revolutionaries began targeting the nation’s own historic cultural canon as the culprit for its backwardness. With the stirrings of the New Culture movement out of Beijing – a city formerly demonized for its connection to the Qing Manchus – the nation’s capital was thrown into a new light. To choose Beijing’s language was now to choose a language associated with revolutionary fervor, not the failed dynasty. One such voice in favor of Beijing fangyan was Zhang Shiyi (張士一). Like many of his colleagues, Zhang was educated in the United States at Columbia, after which he returned to teach English at Nanjing Higher Normal University. Known for numerous accomplishments – including 60

Joseph Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young, eds., Empire to Nation-State: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006), 229–259; Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism, 29–47.

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publishing one of the first Chinese–English dictionaries – he was one of the nation’s most vocal critics of the 1913 Guoyu. He penned several fierce and detailed disavowals of the amalgamated national language, spearheading a nationwide debate on language unification that would become known as the “Pronunciation Dispute” (Jing Guo zhi zheng 京 國之爭).61 The debate began with Zhang’s 1920 article in Xin jiaoyu (New education). Put plainly, the article insisted that it was “impossible” for the 1913 Guoyu to succeed (buneng chenggong de 不能成功的),62 and adopting the phonology of the language spoken in the capital (jingyin 京音) simply made more sense. Beijing was, after all, the nation’s seat of government, and therefore was ultimately the nation’s political and cultural center. Beyond this, however, Zhang also maintained that the language of Beijing best encapsulated the nation’s new modern identity. The 1913 Guoyu was based upon what was called nanjingyin (南京音), or the “old Guanhua” of the Qing dynasty. Inverting earlier claims against Beijing fangyan that associated the language with the former ruling dynasty, Zhang branded the phonology of the 1913 Guoyu (which he called Guoyin 國音, or “national pronunciation”) a “dead language” associated with China’s old society.63 He drew upon verbiage that spanned from late-Qing missionaries to May Fourth intellectuals, arguing that a national language needed to be a “living language,” not a dead one, a language of the people, not a language of the officials. Since Guoyin was grounded in this older phonology, it was not, in Zhang’s view, a living language of the people. Zhang also argued for jingyin according to another metric of linguistic modernity that echoed criticisms hurled by nineteenth-century missionaries: that a modern written language should exactly mirror its spoken one. It was not only missionaries that argued this: the Japanese Genbun ichi (言 文一致) movement, “or speech and writing as one” movement,” proclaimed that any modern language had to be a near transcription of its spoken counterpart. By 1920, the vernacular literature movement launched out of Beijing University had galvanized an abundance of vernacular writing, which was quickly setting an unofficial new standard for literary Chinese. Using the same phrase (Yanwen yizhi 言文一致), Zhang argued that Beijing fangyan could best encapsulate its spirit. 61 62 63

This is described in detail in Wang Dongjie, “’Daibiao quanguo”; Yuan Xianxin, “Yuyin, Guoyu yu minzu zhuyi,” 136–142. Zhang Shiyi, “Guoyu tongyi wenti” (The problem with national language unification), Xin jiaoyu 3, no. 4 (1920), 436. Zhang Shiyi, “Guomin xuexiao yi er ji bujiao zhuyin zimu de zhuzhang” (Not advocating zhuyin zimu in national schools in the first and second year), in Zhu Linggong, ed., Guoyu wenti taolun ji (Shanghai: Zhongguo shuju, 1921), 73.

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Zhang’s claims about what made a language modern were clearly influenced by global models – from France to Japan, modern language was understood as one in which writing mimicked speech. Yet Zhang’s proposal was also rather novel. Historically, changes in written language followed spoken ones. In vernacular language movements across the globe, proponents emphasized how literature should be based upon how people spoke. This was certainly true even in the Qing, where vernacular literature newspapers had been imitating local speech for years (see “Radical Nationalism at the Fringe,” later in this chapter). But Zhang cleverly proposed that this process could be reverseengineered: that a speech could be chosen for its parallels to an existing vernacular literature rather than the other way around. After Zhang’s polemic was published, others began to openly agree. Amalgamating all of the nation’s fangyan into one language was not only impractical, but unnecessary. Articles mocked the Guoyin as “blue-green Guoyu,” neither donkey nor horse.64 “Just because the majority of people have superstitious [beliefs] does not make them truth,” claimed Beijingpronunciation advocate Zhou Mingsan (周铭三); not everything, in other words, had to be the will of the majority.65 The 1913 conference participants were forcing too many different elements into one – north and south, old and new. How could such a Frankensteinian monster be a viable national representative? More importantly, how could they effectively promulgate it if no one spoke it? National pronunciation advocates came to its defense. One of the phonology’s creators Li Jinxi railed, “The national language was not supposed to be the language of the capital – it has to be a language for the entire nation.”66 He further warned that choosing one location above others would provoke a backlash, thwarting their efforts to inspire a common sense of identity among the nation’s citizenry. Famed linguist and ardent advocate of the 1913 Guoyu Qian Xuantong declared, “What is so special about the capital? What qualifies it to don the imperial crown of the entire country?”67 Both sides volleyed arguments back and forth 64

65 66

67

See for example Zhang Shiyi, “Sanlun ‘jiujing zenyang qu tongyi Guoyu,’” (Three theories on “How do we unify the national language?”) Shishi xinbao (May 14, 1922), 3; Qian Xuantong also responded to the “blue-green Mandarin” charges. Qian Xuantong, “Reply to Qu Shengbai,” Xin qingnian 6, no. 1 (January, 1919), 86. Zhou Mingsan, “Guoyu wenti yi” (The problem of the national language, 1), Shishi xinbao (January 29, 1921), 4. Li Jinxi, “Guoyu san sa gang ji Guoyin zhi wu da wenti” (Three grand proposals for the national language and five big problems with national pronunciation), Shishi xinbao (October 14, 1920), 1. Qian Xuantong, “Guoyin yange liu jiang” (Speaking of the evolution of the national pronunciation), Qian Xuantong wenji (Collection of works by Qian Xuantong) Vol. 5 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1999), 118.

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until many decided to meet in person in Nanjing in November of 1920 to settle their differences. In the end, the conference did little to create immediate consensus.68 But those touting Beijing’s pronunciation had effectively sown seeds of doubt on the grand dreams of the Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciations. Beijing advocates’ arguments offered a new metric to determine what made a language national. In essence, to make something into a national representative, it did not necessarily have to include elements from across the country; other considerations, such as political symbolism, efficacy in promulgation, and manifestation of linguistic modernity, were all given their due. Thus while the creators of Guoyin presented an innovative idea – that a national representative could be constructed – those who advocated for Beijing suggested that an existing language could extend beyond itself to transform into something new. The language of Beijing did not have to be Beijing fangyan. A fangyan could, in theory, be transformed into something else, including a language for the nation. The End of the Dream Within a few years, even those who forcefully argued against the language of the capital as the nation’s official language were reconsidering their positions. Qian Xuantong wrote in support of changing the national language to Beijing fangyan only a year after publically denouncing it.69 Yuen Ren Chao seemed to express doubt in the early 1920s. In February of 1924, Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren wrote Chao a letter strongly encouraging him to abandon an invented language for a “living language” with a large group of speakers who “speak it naturally as their mother tongue.” “You cannot make up, artificially, a language forming an average between a group of strongly divergent fangyan and then make it to be freely spoken,” he admonished. He ended with a forceful appeal, emphasized with a jeer at Thomas Wade: “If you do not step forward in time and lead the movement in such a practical and reasonable direction but use up your force in utopian endeavors to carry through something still more desirable and historically elaborate – a new artificially made language – then evolution will go its own way over your heads and carry through, with the force of necessity, something infinitely inferior still, e.g., a modern literature written in Wade’s system! Videant 68 69

Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 96–97. Qian Xuantong, “Zhuyin zimu yu xiandai guoyin” (Zhuyin zimu and modern national pronunciation), Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 1 (February 20, 1922), 2.

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consules!”70 A year later, Chao expressed his doubt in a “Green Letter,” a summary of the year’s activities that he had published and sent to friends and family. He had spent the previous year creating a second set of phonograph records to teach the Chinese language to foreigners, within which he defined Guoyin as a language that “sounds like” the language of Beijing.71 In his explanation to his family and friends, he said, “I used a pure Pekingese pronunciation instead of the national pronunciation or Kuo Yin (Guoyin, 國音) as, between you and me, I think the pure Pekingese of an educated native of Peking has a better chance of success in the future than the Kuo Yin pronunciation. However my attitude towards this is not yet well defined enough for a public statement.”72 Later in life, he expressed that, while he remained committed to his ideal of a perfectly scientific language for decades, he recognized that the artificial nature of that first Guoyu created too high a barrier for effective promulgation.73 Reflecting on his experience, Chao laughed, “for thirteen years I was the sole speaker of this idiolect, meant to be the national language of 4, 5, or 600 million speakers.”74 The shift became official only months after Chao wrote his Third Green Letter, when members of the Preparatory Committee on the Unification of the National Language met to determine a new Guoyu pronunciation. These earlier defendants of the hybridized national language, Yuen Ren Chao, Qian Xuantong, and Li Jinxi, christened their group the Shuren hui (數人會, “the society of a few men”) a reference to a Sui dynasty linguist who saw himself as an elite tasked with a heavy burden.75 The Shuren hui’s first decision was to abandon the hybridized Guoyu of 1913, advocating instead the language of someone from Beijing with a middle school education.76 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

Bernhard Karlgren, Letter to Yuen Ren Chao, February 26, 1924, Yuen Ren Chao papers, carton 5, folder 19, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. Yuen Ren Chao, A Phonograph Course in the Chinese National Language (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1925), xiii. Yuen Ren Chao, Third Green Letter, pages 64–65, Yuen Ren Chao papers, carton 29, folder “Green letter,” Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 78. Chao, “What Is Correct Chinese?” 175. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 77–78. For an explanation of the origin of their group’s name, see Qin Xianci, Xiandai wentan binfen lu: Zuojia jianying pian (The rich records of modern literary circles: Author essay highlights) (Taipei: Xiuwei zixunkeji gufenyouxiangongsi, 2008), 7–9. This happened with little fanfare. In 1926 a National Language Movement Assembly met in Beijing and announced, “we wanted to choose a fangyan used in a modern society, and that is the fangyan of Beiping . . .. Beiping is at the center of transportation, culture, scholarship, art, and politics, and a standardized language usually needs to be connected to these various elements.” Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 24–25; Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 78.

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It may seem ironic that these men of science and practicality did not recognize in the 1910s that a lack of native speakers would present a problem. Indeed, this was a question Chao was asked decades later in an oral history interview. He defended his original position, arguing that learning a hybrid, standard language was not anything new for the people of China. Beijing opera singers had been learning this type of language for years, he mused; it seemed rather possible for all the country’s citizens to do the same. When his interviewers pressed him, he retorted, “speakers of other dialects would have to learn a new dialect anyway.” Moreover, he added, the language he created with maximum distinctions between and among particular sounds was “useful.” Since Chinese citizens were going to learn to speak a standard language, he reasoned, it made sense to teach them a language in which “more distinctions could be made.”77 Yet, he explained, as the impracticality of trying to teach a language with no native speakers became apparent to him, it was perfectly natural to conclude that another method might be more efficient. The Chinese language thus stood at the crossroads as reformers found themselves torn between competing images of national representation. Those who supported the 1913 engineered language, while maintaining their commitment that this language better represented a national culture, found themselves convinced by the argument of practicality. But by abandoning the idea of a hybrid language that represented the ethnically Han, Chao and his colleagues were forced to defend that this language represented the cultural essence of the nation’s people when, from their perspective, it baldly omitted many of its citizens. As a national language was determined, the languages that most citizens spoke suddenly were given new categorization – as nonstandard. Making Guoyu a Language for China By 1925, the ink had dried on the Shuren hui’s proposal. With little love lost, the members sought immediately to sell their vision. Indeed, their support of the new national language bordered on maudlin. In 1926, at the National Language Movement Assembly in Beijing, Yuen Ren Chao and Li Jinxi sang a national language song, which rang, “ten years of the National Language movement has succeeded just today. Today the sun rises in the east, illuminating the National Phonetic Alphabet with a soft red glow.”78 77 78

Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 77–80. Yuen Ren Chao and Li Jinxi, Zhonghua Minguo Guoyu Yanjiuhui Shizhounian Jinian Ge (Quanguo Guoyu Yundong Dahui Beijing yong) (Republic of China’s National Language Research Society Ten-Year Anniversary Commemorative Song [For use at the National Language Movement Assembly in Beijing]), Guoyu zhoukan 29 (1925), 8.

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One year later, Chiang Kai-shek launched his Northern Expedition, bringing much of the former Qing under the rule of the KMT. After solidifying his hold over Nanjing, he quickly ordered that the language of Beijing be taught in schools, used in official communication, and promulgated through popular media.79 As the language itself had already been chosen, the task ahead was promulgation. This goal sparked its own set of debates. Where should resources be directed? How was phonology to be taught? How were fangyan to be reframed? What would become of the relationship between this new national language and contemporaneous efforts to reform script, literature, and grammar? From the outset, policy makers and intellectuals agreed that the starting point for any nationalizing project had to be education. From John Dewey’s tour of China in 1919 to the Rural Education movement of the 1920s, education was consistently identified as the keystone of the nation’s modernizing project. It is no wonder, then, that much of China’s language unification policies centered on translating the decisions made in the capital into pedagogy for the classroom, the “supreme headquarters” of language reform.80 In April of 1919, the Ministry of Education’s Preparatory Committee on the Unification of the National Language demanded that all textbooks should start converting to vernacular Chinese and include an indication of phonetic pronunciation.81 Like pronunciation, an accompanying phonetic script was also a contentious topic. Leaving aside for now those who supported the elimination of characters altogether – a radical proposal that gained few followers in the early years of the twentieth century – most conceded the country needed a way to visually represent the national language’s phonetics. Indeed, choosing a phonetic script was the primary goal of the 1913 pronunciation conference, where several dozen different phonetic scripts were suggested by the participants. The one ultimately chosen, called zhuyin zimu (注音字母), was a system of thirty-nine characters similar to Japanese kana, the archetype of which was created by students of Zhang Binglin. Unlike the actual phonology of the Guoyu, this kana script had remained nearly unchanged since 1913, with only a few characters reformed to adapt to the different oral pronunciation 79

80 81

This is a topic of extensive conversation among historians, but for some examples, see Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925–1937 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (1975), 945–980. Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 109. Culp, “Teaching Baihua,” 62; Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 109.

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after 1925.82 Once the Nationalist government came to power, it was slimmed down to thirty-seven characters and renamed zhuyin fuhao (注 音符號) and the Ministry of Education set up training institutions to instruct teachers to promulgate both the script and the national pronunciation it reflected.83 Policies passed in the capital always took time to filter down to localities, and never did so in a uniform way. Due in part to the monumental task of developing a functioning bureaucracy in a country threatened by invasion and revolution, the ability of the Republican government to enact policies ranged from mildly effective to negligible. Beyond this, policy outcomes often relied upon the actions of a diverse network of actors, including independent publishers, educators, and administrators, each of which had their own agendas. Thus while most educators from the capital to the local level agreed with the concept of a national language in theory, its promulgation was sporadically applied. Teaching materials, for instance, were written by local intellectuals and published by commercial presses. By the second decade of the Republic, the textbook market was dominated by two publishing houses: the Commercial Press (Shangwu chubanshe 商务出版社) and Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju 中華書局). Their authors – a group Robert Culp calls “petty intellectuals” – had a fair amount of autonomy to publish materials to which they were either ideologically committed, or simply thought would be the most profitable.84 While they often followed central government policies, they were also swayed by intellectual trends outside of government spheres. When it came to language policy, textbook publishers clearly saw profit in acting quickly on government directives. Zhonghua Book Company published two separate readers that included zhuyin zimu in 1920, and one year later they published a supplementary textbook to exclusively 82

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The difference between the zhuyin zimu and the zhuyin fuhao promulgated by the Nationalist government beginning in 1930, is slight, but reflects the different phonetics of the jingyin and Guoyin. This system was edited to the one that it is today in 1930, when the Nationalist government officially promulgated it. For a history of these romanization systems see Feng Qinghua, “Lun 《Xin qingnian》yu zhuyin zimu de faqi” (A discussion of the origin of the phonetic national letters in “New youth”), Chongqing Sanxia Xueyuan xuebao 27, no. 11 (2007), 84–89; Li Jinxi, “Sishi duo nian lai de ‘zhuyin zimu’ he jinhou de ‘pinyin zimu’” (Forty years of zhuyin zimu and today’s pinyin zimu), Beijing Shifan Daxue xuebao (1956), 189–224. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 442. Robert Culp argues that the fact that both of these presses continued to publish textbooks in classical Chinese implies that these publishers’ minds were never far from their profits. See Culp, “Teaching Baihua,” 18; Robert Culp, “Mass Production of Knowledge and the Industrialization of Mental Labor: The Rise of the Petty Intellectual,” in Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asia Studies, 2016), 207–241.

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teach the new script.85 The introductions of each of these textbooks touted the importance of zhuyin zimu for nation-building purposes, proclaiming that this “new education” taught progress and the freedom to develop new abilities.86 After 1930, the Ministry of Education began to publish their own textbooks with zhuyin fuhao.87 In these textbooks, pictures of Sun Yat-sen and lessons about respecting the national flag replaced earlier drills on flora, fauna, or homelife. Yet beyond these politically overt units, by including pronunciation in Chinese language textbooks, publishers indicated that pronunciation was part of language education, not something to be taught separately from reading, writing, and grammar. Placing pronunciation alongside Chinese script visually tethered one to the other. This sent a powerful message: the Chinese language was, as earlier reformers had wished, yanwen yizhi, unified in sound and script. Textbooks, however, only give us a foggy picture of how policies were enacted. While several textbooks included the zhuyin zimu throughout the 1920s, others neglected phonetic pronunciation altogether.88 Beyond this, we have little sense of how language was taught in the classroom. Since Ministry of Education textbooks were by no means required, we have no idea how many students were actually introduced to the phonetic system. Similarly, we do not know how many teachers were trained in the national language, or if they were, how they taught it.89 And while national pronunciation education was closely tied to language education, it was not necessarily emphasized or even given attention beyond classes 85

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Wang Pu, Zhonghua guoyin liusheng jipian keben (Republic of China national pronunciation recording textbook) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1920); Yi Zuolin, Guoyin duben (Reader of the national pronunciation) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1920). These textbooks include the earlier zhuyin zimu instead of the zhuyin fuhao. Li Jinhui and Lu Yiyan, Xin jiaoyu jiaokeshu: Guoyin keben (New education textbook: National pronunciation textbook) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1921). Yi Zuolin, Guoyin duben; Xu Delin, Zhuyin Guoyu xuesheng huihua (Student dialogues in national language pronunciation) (Shanghai: Chongwen shuju, 1924). There were two series published by the Ministry of Education. Chen Hongqin, Ertong Guoyu keben (Children’s national language textbook) (Shanghai: Ertong shuju, 1936); Shen Baiying, Shen Binglian, Fuxing Guoyu jiaokeshu (Revitalized national language textbook) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1933). Zhao Jingshen, Chen Bochui, Lin Lan, and Li Xiaoling, Beixin Guoyu jiaoben (Beixin national language textbook) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1932). Zhang Jingwen, Liu Zao, Xiong Changling, Gu Jie, Xin guomin Guoyu jiaokeshe (New citizen’s textbook on the national language) (Shanghai: Guomin shuju, 1925). In an interview with Li Rulong, professor of linguistics at Xiamen University, he reflected upon his own language education in the 1930s. He commented on how he had the opportunity to learn national pronunciation, but that was in part based upon his own personal fortune of growing up in a city with a relatively wealthy family. Even so, he said, his teachers could often not speak it. Li Rulong, interview with the author, tape recording, October 21, 2013, Xiamen, China.

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dedicated to language itself. Pronunciation was also presumably a peripheral concern – relevant only to the extent that a career may have forced students into a linguistically diverse environment. In this sense, spoken language was deemed a relatively marginal skill in classes that prioritized literacy, for those to whom it was introduced at all. To the best of my knowledge, therefore, it seems that these proposals did little to change the fact that fangyan remained the primary languages of the Chinese nation. The seemingly limited efficacy of national language promulgation, I believe, encourages us to question the extent to which a national language was deemed important to anyone besides the linguists creating and promoting it. As we will see in the next chapter, groups working among grassroots populations understood how a standard oral language was not a priority – even within language policy, literacy was considered a far more critical goal. Beyond this, the national language seemed to be understood as something practical, not something that was indicative of patriotism or national belonging. In later decades, the KMT state would push a policy of uniformity, targeting Cantonese movies in particular. But these policies languished with little popular support or institutional enforcement capabilities. This made it possible, indeed, popular, to imagine a national culture that was not reliant upon standardization. Guoyu lived in the background, a practical solution to a tangible problem, but certainly not the embodiment of what it meant to be a Chinese citizen. The environment was ripe for alternative imaginings of national identities, and indeed, many of them thrived. National Unity and Its Limits Attempts to graft a rigid policy onto a complex lived reality often generated paradoxical effects. Sometimes, central government actions inspired an intense form of patriotism that was often more extreme than rhetoric from the capital. Other times, they inspired outright protest. Perhaps most often, local groups mobilized broad nationalistic goals and cultures from the center in piecemeal ways, usually to suit the kinds of national pride that made sense to their specific locality. This final section will explore how the creation, legitimization, and application of national language policies created local expressions of nationalism in spaces far away from the country’s political center, expressions that were often affected by, but by no means identical to, the idealized nation being crafted in central government offices and elite universities.

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Once we move away from the policy makers and academics who left substantial paper trails, our source base becomes murkier. We rely largely upon shadows. Let us then begin with what we likely know about everyday life in Republican China. First, we know that fangyan were the lingua franca of most of the population. Within the village, few people likely gave much thought to a national language.90 We also know that by the turn of the twentieth century, people were becoming more mobile. From an entirely pragmatic standpoint, individuals had to adapt. Bilingualism, code-switching, and selective, or case-specific, language use was not only common but critical for anyone traveling far from their hometowns. To restate what Yuen Ren Chao explained (mentioned earlier), learning new languages for new contexts was nothing new for the citizens of China. We know much less about how groups or individuals imagined their own identities before the promulgation of a standard language. Of those who gave the question of identity thought or articulation, very few people wrote those thoughts down. Nevertheless, sources that were created for and circulated among smaller, more local audiences allow us to trace what nationalism looked like outside of the capital. What we see is that Guoyu promulgation became less of a central priority and more of a faraway project seeping into their communities that either needed to be accommodated, mobilized for local purposes, or resisted. In this way, nationalism at the fringes offers a glimpse of alternative ways people expressed Chinese national identity, one that was often in sync with, but unique from, nationalism at the center. Local Governments and Linguistic Pride One of our best sources for how individuals on the ground historically imagined their local province, township, or village comes from gazetteers. These compendiums, or “records of a locality,” were regularly produced as early as the Song dynasty. They usually included information considered relevant to both the local government and the Beijing rulers who sent 90

Scholars have noted that in rural reconstruction projects, the priority was normally literacy. As Ulug Kuzuoglu mentioned, national language unity was often an “aftereffect of information infrastructures and the political economy of mental and clerical labor.” Ulug Kuzuoglu, “Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution” (diss., Columbia University, 2018), 105–106. See also Kate Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 23–55. The Communists also noted that there was little emphasis on this outside of government circles, and in fact, did not make it much of a priority themselves. Qu Qiubai championed arguing that laborers and villages often came up with ways to communicate with people of other districts through finding homonyms or other methods, not by all learning a common tongue, which I discuss in Chapter 4.

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orders for their compilation: geographic features, local products, population, customs, literary productions, and “exemplary” models of behavior. These gazetteers served two key purposes: to aid magistrates in enacting policies and to exalt local pride. The latter purpose can often call into doubt the accuracy of its information – compilers were incentivized to offer glowing reports of the region that highlighted beautiful landscapes and esteemed residents. If we assume that compilers of gazetteers wanted to pay homage to their own localities, then the content is how those compilers wanted their localities to be seen from the outside. Several gazetteers in Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian included sections on fangyan, a topic that seemed to increase in frequency in the early twentieth century.91 Approaches varied. Some included a long list of unique vocabulary, which usually began with the local words for family members, occupations, and local products. Others included a few sentences on pronunciation systems. A late Qing gazetteer from Panyu county (番禺縣) in Guangdong Province, for instance, explained how the phonology of Panyu mirrored that of the city of Guangzhou, whereas a Republican-period gazetteer from Yangjiang county (陽江縣) compared the local language to the neighboring province of Fujian.92 Some compilers, however, offered painstaking descriptions of the languages spoken within their borders. A gazetteer from Rong county (融縣) in Guangxi detailed the long history of officials living in the county during the Ming and Qing dynasties to prove that the language of the county’s “common people” (baixing hua 百姓話) was quite similar to Guanhua.93 The authors accompanied the text with a chart outlining the linguistic relationship between Guanhua and Rong county fangyan, complete with a comparative phonetic chart. Another gazetteer from Qingyuan county (清遠縣), spent several dozen pages connecting their region’s language to 91

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May-bo Ching shows that in the city of Guangzhou, gazetteers discussed local fangyan in the High Qing. This seemed uncommon in other regions. May-bo Ching, “Literary, Ethnic or Territorial? Definitions of Local Culture in the Late Qing and Early Republic,” in Tao Tao Liu and David Faure, eds., Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996), 53–57. Gazetteers that have sections on fangyan include Liu Xiangpin and Liu Zongshao, Qianjiangxian zhi (Qianjiang gazetteer), 10 vols., 1935; Xiao Dianyuan and Tang Benxin, Liujiangxian zhi (Liujiang gazetteer), 10 vols., 1937; Huang Chengyuan and Yu Zhongyin, Gutianxian zhi (Gutian gazetteer), 38 vols., 1942; Zhou Xueshi and Ma Chengtu, Luodingxian zhi (Luoding gazetteer), 10 vols., 1935; Zhang Yicheng and Liang Guanxi, Yangjiangxian zhi (Yangjiang gazetteer), 39 vols., 1925. Liang Dinfen and Ding Renchang, Panyuxian xuzhi (Panyu gazetteer), 44 vols., 1931; Zhang Yicheng and Liang Guanxi, Yangjiang zhi (Yangjiang gazetteer), 39 vols., 1925. Huang Zhixun and Long Tairen, Rongxian zhi (Rong County gazetteer), 9 vols., 1936, 51–54.

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the history of the Chinese nation.94 First, drawing extensively on the work of Zhang Binglin, the authors situated the Qingyuan language within the broader Yue fangyan – “the most complicated of all of the Chinese languages” due to the region’s complex history, they wrote. From the collapse of the state of Qin (221BCE–206BCE) and the development of the state of Zhuang (204BCE–111BCE) – a kingdom that stretched from Vietnam into today’s southern provinces of China – through the invasion of the British and French during the Opium Wars, history has made its mark on the Yue language. The authors approached this history with ambivalence. On the one hand, they complained of “foreign adulteration” of the language. Yet given that China’s history is hardly one of isolation, the authors took pride in the Yue fangyan’s preservation of China’s past, hewing more closely to the rhymes of the Tang dynasty poets than any other language in the empire. The local Qingyuan fangyan, the gazetteer explained, sounded similar to the language of Guangzhou, which they referred to as the “language of the provincial assembly.” At the same time, rhyming pairs showed that the Qingyuan fangyan was closer zhengyin – here referring to the phonology of the Tang and Song – than was the language of Guangzhou, the provincial capital. This, again, could be explained through history: Qingyuan was far more inland than Guangzhou, and, the authors explained, was thus less likely to be adulterated by invading outsiders. This was clearly a point of pride. Their language represented an ideal Chinese-ness, enshrining the long history of the country’s tumult and glories.95 This Qingyuan gazetteer’s explanation of the relationship between language and regional history was among the most extensive. But many others demonstrated a generalized contention that language could represent local histories. Buttressing their explanations with Zhang Binglin’s conceptualization of fangyan as time capsules, gazetteer compilers used language to trace the origins and experiences of their populations. Yet while their focus was on their hometowns, they consistently situated these local narratives within the history of the nation, using connections to past events, texts, or historical spaces to claim legitimacy in China’s national story. For those in the south, their local language embodied both the accomplishments and the humiliations of the country’s common history, moreso than any other fangyan. This competitive spirit did not reflect identity apart from nationalism; nationalism was an integral part of it. National and local pride were not mutually exclusive. 94 95

Xu Fengsheng and Zhu Ruzhen, Qingyuan xianzhi (Qingyuan gazetteer), 20 vols., 1937. Xu and Zhu, Qingyuan xianzhi, 50–53.

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Radical Nationalism at the Fringes Both the authors and the audiences of local gazetteers would have been highly educated, well connected, and dedicated to the broader goals of national strengthening. With this in mind, the local appropriation of the nation-building project is to be expected. Yet such efforts spanned class and regional lines. Among the less erudite, many used local language to express their loyalty to their imagined Chinese nation. Here, nationalistic rhetoric could take on a much more radical tone. In the first decade of the twentieth century, revolutionaries began engaging their local, non-elite compatriots with appeals to nationalism in a new form of literature: vernacular periodicals. Called suhuabao (俗話報) or baihuabao (白話報), over 100 of these periodicals were published during the dynasty’s final years.96 These publications are often portrayed as hotbeds of anti-Manchu sentiment, a perhaps fair characterization considering that many, including the the Fujian baihuabao (福建白話報), Shaoxing baihuabao (紹興白話報), and Anhui baihuabao (安徽白話報), were founded by known anti-Qing radicals.97 But many others were political if not strictly revolutionary, seeking to “raise the educational level of the people and awaken their spirit.”98 Most of these periodicals were short-lived, some lasting only a few issues. Indeed, many had irregular publication records as their creators furtively avoided persecution. Yet despite their brief existence, they had the effect of expanding the reading public, allowing individuals not trained in classical texts to participate in China’s nascent public sphere.99 Unlike gazetteers, these newspapers were designed to be read widely. Their audience was the local everyman. For the authors, providing Chinese history and contemporary events in a readable medium was an act of patriotism – especially in the late Qing, when periodicals were a recent phenomenon. 96

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Cai Yuesu is one of the earliest scholars to count these periodicals. He puts the number at 114, whereas Liu Xiaoti lists an additional twenty. An exact count, however, is difficult given that most of these periodicals were short-lived, limited to local markets, and not currently extant. See Cai Yuesu, “Qingmo minchu de yibaiqishi yu baihua baokan” (Over 170 vernacular periodicals in the late Qing and early Republican periods), in Ding Shouhe, ed., Xinhai geming shiqi qikan jieshao, Vol. 5 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1987); Li Xiaoti, Qing mo de xiaceng shehui qiming yundong 1901–1911 (Lower class enlightenment in the late Qing) (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1991), 17–18. Kaske, Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 176–183. “Jingao Yuepao Zhugong,” Hangzhou baihuabao 1, no. 33 (June, 1902); Li Xiaoti, Qing mo de xiaceng shehui qiming yundong, 19. Li Xiaoti calls it the “enlightenment movement of the lower classes.” Qing mo de xiaceng shehui qiming yundong.

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The editors of the Ningbo baihuabao (寧波白話報, “Ningbo vernacular newspaper”) in particular imbued their newspaper with nationalism through localism. In its short tenure from 1903 to 1904, its most frequently discussed topic was the impending Russo-Japanese war, hostilities of which were a long distance from the periodical’s subscribers, but were of direct concern for the nation as a whole. “Japan and Russia are about to wage war, this is a danger to China we cannot fathom . . . and still our people loathe to show conscience, loathe to show patriotism.”100 The root of China’s complacency, an early editorial argued, was its people’s inability to read. Other articles taught its readers the geographic features of distant places in the national geobody.101 On the occasion that the Ningbo baihuabao published stories of local interest, the emphasis was still on the relationship between Ningbo and the nation. In a short article by a “Prophet of vernacular language” (Baihua daoren 白話道人), the author praised the women of Ningbo, who were ideal patriots, “the only Chinese women to show hope, to follow rules, and to express conscience.”102 The authors of the Guangdong baihuabao had similar goals. In the first issue, an author with the pen name Lu Ya (盧亞) wrote, “Chinese people are sick . . . the causes are many. But there is an elixir that will save us. What is this elixir? It is our vernacular newspaper. When I say this, it begs refutation. But as you do not believe me, you wait and continue to get sicker.”103 The Guangdong baihuabao was rather unique, however, in how they expressed their patriotism through localism. They imbued their stories with visceral examples of personal experience with national humiliation. “Why do I cry for Guangdong?” wrote Gong Zhuang (公壯). “I have lived in Guangdong for several lifetimes, reincarnated countless times. And now I cry . . .. When we think of Guangdong, its geography, its military, its riches, and its people, what comes to mind? . . . They say that a man should shed blood not tears, but still I cry.”104 His stirring dichotomy between tears and blood juxtaposed emotion with corporeal sacrifice – claiming the latter was done in vain without the former. He blamed foreign invaders for shedding the blood of Cantonese, and wished his 100 101 102 103 104

“Zhongguo baihuabao fakanci,” (Forward for Chinese vernacular newspapers), Ningbo baihuabao 2 (1903), 8–10. Song Sun, “Dili: Lun Zhongguo gesheng caiyuan” (Geography: On the natural resources of each of China’s provinces), Ningbo baihuabao 1 (1904), 15–20. Baihua daoren, “Gao Ningbo de funü” (Calling the women of Ningbo), Ningbo baihuabao 6 (1904), 1. Lu Ya, “Baihuabao xi Zhongguoren gaisheng yao” (Vernacular newspapers are the elixir for the Chinese people,” Guangdong baihuabao 1 (1907), 7–11. Gong Zhuang, “Ku Guangdong” (Cry for Guangdong), Guangdong baihuabao 1 (1907), 12–14.

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people would rise up much like the Tokugawa samurai Takayama Hikokuro (1747–1793), a little-known samurai who traveled to Kyoto and, upon seeing the palace of his emperor fallen into ruin and disrepair, swore to help overthrow the Tokugawa and restore the rule of the Japanese emperor.105 His indefatigable spirit and willingness to criticize a failing government resonated with those anti-Qing forces in South China, who saw the Tokugawa and the Qing alike as illegitimate rulers. By Gong’s argument, Takayama lived in a Japan that was weaker than China “by nearly one hundred times,” but was able to strengthen Japan to its “current state,” because, in Gong’s words, Takayama shed tears.106 Gong’s history is a local one – he focused upon the shame and sadness brought upon the people of his province, not the nation as a whole. But that does not erase the national from this story. Guangdong’s humiliations at the hands of foreign nations made it a surrogate for the national body; Chinese must grieve for both. Stories about Takayama seemed to have had particular prominence in the south of China, where frustration with the Qing government often took on a rather ethnic tint. This Han ethnic chauvinism appears in radical texts such as Zou Rong’s Revolutionary Army, in which he declared the Chinese people slaves of the ethnic Manchus.107 Such emphasis on these racial chasms also appear in the Guangdong baihuabao. In the article “An image of the Han people’s Miserable Conditions” (漢人慘狀圖), artist Ya Zhuo (亞拙) drew the character 漢 (Han) in large, bulbous strokes (see Figure 2.1). A rope wraps itself around the character, sharp lines on its hilt showing the speed at which it shackled the character and its intentions to stifle it still. The rope is labeled 專制 (zhuanzhi, “authoritarianism”). In Ya Zhuo’s explanation, “Manchuria is Manchuria,” and “the Han People are the Han People,” and without an ethnic state, the Han people will continue to suffer.108 105

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While few details exist about this low-ranking samurai, his travel writings from the lateeighteenth century seemed to have made an impact among late-Qing critics in the first decade of the twentieth century. References to Takayama are few, though monuments to him are erected near Kyoto as a symbol of those emperor loyalists who railed against the Tokugawa several decades before the revolt in 1865. Yet he appeared to have a significant following among antiQing writers from Guangdong in the first decade of the twentieth century. In their writings, he appears as 高山正芝 in books such as Hong Kong writers Hu Liyuan and He Qi, “Nanhai Kang Youwei yan Shunde Mai Menghua biji” (A written record of Nanhai’s Kang Youwei and Shunde’s Mai Menghua’s writings), in Xinzheng zhenquan, Vol. 4 (Guobaoguan zhongkan, 1901), 33; Gong Zhuang, “Ku Guangdong,” 13. Zou Rong, Geming jun (Revolutionary army) (originally published in 1903, republished in Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958). Ya Zhuo, “Hanren can zhuang tu” (A picture of the Han people’s miserable situation), Guangdong baihuabao 1 (1907), 6.

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Figure 2.1 A picture of the Han people’s miserable situation. Source: Ya Zhuo, “Hanren can zhuang tu,” Guangdong baihuabao 1 (1907): 6.

In the late Qing, few publications addressed language. When they did, they advocated writing in baihua, which, in places such as Ningbo, Hunan, and Fujian, was often a version of Easy Wenli or Chinese common in earlier vernacular novels. In Guangdong, the baihuabao were composed in vernacular Cantonese, using grammatical structures that would be unrecognizable to literate audiences outside the province. For them, what mattered more was that local citizens could read and engage with their writings – fangyan were chosen to express nationalism on the sheer virtue of their assumed legibility. Just as local gazetteers began painting language as not simply a vehicle for communication but a phenomenon to be studied in its own right, discussions of language qua language simultaneously appeared in local periodicals. For example, Li Andang (黎安當), writing for Sacred Heart

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Education Monthly (Shishi gongjiao yuekan 石室公教月刊), fiercely proclaimed that the language spoken in Guangzhou predated the language in the north. It was a language, he argued, that epitomized Han ethnicity, significantly more than those spoken in the former Qing capital.109 A third approach was that of practicality. In a 1919 article in the Guangqi zhoubao (廣肇周報), someone writing under the pseudonym Li made a short plea for people of Guangdong to learn the national language.110 Their reasoning was pragmatic: people were moving around the country at unprecedented rates, and locals needed to remain connected and informed.111 While this short article offered practical advice with little effect, their appeals to the practicality of code-switching demonstrates precisely the emotional connection many had to their own local languages. Though difficult to prove, I think it is fair to argue that this kind of pragmatism was likely more widespread than this seemingly innocuous article might suggest. It was possible to express nationalism without abandoning the local, and not everyone had to do it actively. Bilingualism offered a solution. The local responses to the nationalizing project were quite varied. In truth, few questioned the importance of nationalism. From Hunan to Guangzhou, the rhetoric of nation building seeped into governmental sources and local periodicals alike. Yet all proclaimed that their localities were integral to the makeup of the Chinese nation. Adopting Zhang Binglin’s argument that a national culture was embodied in local diversity, they publicized their local languages, customs, and histories, encouraging national pride through the immediately observable. Once the national government began promulgating a more unified vision of nationalism, these overtures toward local pride did not fade. While many continued to extol the unique and even superior cultures of their local tongues, others appealed to what they saw as logistical realities – Chinese have been, and always will be, multilingual, and accepting the state’s version of a national culture was for all intents and purposes learning a practical skill. Indeed, this idea helps us understand the present. Many Chinese today speak of the national language as public and political. Other spaces for expression, even patriotic expression, could be 109 110 111

Li Andang, “Guangdonghua nai Zhonghua zhi yuanbenyu” (The language of Guangdong is the original language of China), Shishi gongjiao yuekan 4 (1929), 37–38. Li Andang, “Guangdongren du baihuawen de haochu” (The advantage of Cantonese people reading vernacular Chinese), Guangqi zhoubao 22, no. 3 (1919), 3. We see a corollary to this today in Hong Kong. Alex Lo, for instance, argued in 2018 that learning Mandarin is simply “the job.” Alex Lo, “Learning Mandarin could be just the job,” South China Morning Post (January 27, 2018), www.scmp.com/comment/insightopinion/article/2130811/learning-mandarin-could-be-just-job

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left to the local, where emotional, historical, and cultural patriotism could be articulated in a unique, but entirely Chinese, way. Conclusion In 1926, the Chinese language made its debut at the Philadelphia World’s Fair. Li Jinxi, who had spent the previous decade creating and editing national language proposals, presented a graphic depicting what he called the “evolution” of the Chinese language (see Figure 2.2).112 Consonant with the spirit of the venue, the theme of Li’s diagram was progress. The image was dense, colorful, and byzantine, packing several different charts, timelines, and graphics into one diagram. But each part visually and textually emphasized how a wide variety of linguistic traditions and forms were all flowing toward the same terminus. Indeed, at the bottom of the diagram was a hand-sketched web of blue crisscrossed lines that, like streams flowing to the mouth of a river, all converged. Each line was labeled as a part of the Chinese language – from phonetic scripts developed from Sanskrit to Tang dynasty poetry, from vernacular novels to calligraphic styles – and they merged at a final destination labeled “national language.” Despite its crowded text and complex organization, the blue rivers made his point perfectly clear. The Chinese language converged to a singularity, a process that was both natural and a cause for celebration. The consummation of China’s linguistic modernity was achieved through unification. Li Jinxi’s image subtly implies an easily believable narrative about languages – that they tend inevitably toward unification and standardization, often along nationalist lines. But this chapter shows that the road to the Chinese national language was not so teleological. It was not, as popular knowledge assumes, a simple process of “choosing” one language to represent all of China. It involved defining and subsequently promulgating a particular ideal for what China was or could be. Was the language of its political capital sufficient in capturing what could make China a modern nation, like it was for France or Japan? Or was a manufactured hybrid a better representative? For the first decade of the new Republic, the question of cultural representation guided debates about the national language. It was not enough to have a common tongue. The language’s very structure had the immense power to shape what it meant to be Chinese – its form fundamentally mattered. But while authentic representation remained a central 112

Li Jinxi, “Guoyu si qian nian lai bianhua chaoliu tu” (“Diagram showing the evolution of Chinese for the last four millenniums”) (Beiping: Wenhua xue she, 1926).

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Figure 2.2 Diagram showing the evolution of Chinese for the last four millenniums. Source: Li Jinxi, “Guoyu si qian nian lai bianhua chaoliu tu.” Reprint of digital copy from City University of Hong Kong.

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concern, critics soon began to cite other markers of a successful national language. Criticizing the champions of the 1913 Guoyu for their idealism, these detractors referenced both politics and practicality. Beijing’s language both reinforced the power of the capital and had a body of native speakers to help promulgate it. Their Guoyu could claim to do neither. A renewed interest in Beijing’s language was also shaped by wider shifts in the nature of Chinese nationalism. The ethnic nation was falling out of favor. As China began asserting itself on the world stage, the fledgling Republican government, along with other contenders for political power, realized that the exclusion of non-Han ethnic groups threatened the country’s stability. Unlike intellectuals such as Zhang Binglin, most nationalists understood the symbolic and tangible significance of territory.113 Defenders of the geographic nation remained dedicated to upholding the political borders of the Qing Empire, believing that any sort of capitulation of territory would result in loss of power and status. This chapter highlighted a brief moment of consensus, where most voices in the debate agreed that the nation needed a national language. But it quickly collapsed into new dialectical exchanges. The priority of cultural unity, the importance of broad inclusion, and the indispensability of cultural heritage did not disappear; they were simply siphoned into other symbols of Chinese nationalism. In the end, it was fangyan that, reimagined as relics of history and as an authentic means to communicate with everyday citizens, allowed these priorities to be maintained. They reemerged in debates about Chinese nationalism, embodying a national culture that Beijing’s language could not claim to personify.

113

For an explanation of how the Han ethnic nation was disposed for “Great China-ism,” see Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” 229–259.

3

The Science of Language in Republican China

Children, truth always exists. When you discover it, it will give you knowledge. When you cannot discover it, it still exists outside of what you know. Zhou Zuoren, “Xin de he jiu de” (Old things and new things)

Introduction The early twentieth century in China was marked by revolution. Wars and coups abounded as idealists and power seekers fought for the right to rule the struggling nation. Yet the consistent hum of revolution imbued the everyday lives even of those far removed from the battles over political power. As idealists became disillusioned with the limited revolutionary potential of government, they turned their sights to other targets of overhaul. From peasant economy to education, from fashion to work culture, nearly all aspects of Chinese life became objects of their fixations. Emblematic of this revolutionary fervor was the nation’s first cultural revolution: the May Fourth movement.1 On that day in 1919, students from Beijing University took to the streets to express their indignation over Japan’s retention of Germany’s concessions in China after the First World War and demand that the Chinese state stand up for national sovereignty. But what began as a protest over Japanese imperialism quickly expanded as students introspectively considered how their nation came to embody such weakness in the first place. The problem, they decided, was Chinese culture itself. These students saw themselves as heralds of a “Chinese enlightenment,” burdened with unfettering their country from the shackles of tradition and helping it embrace a modern future.2 They poured ink onto the pages of an ever-growing number of 1

2

The best explanation of the movement can be found in Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 270–288. This term, “Chinese enlightenment,” was both self-designated and used by historians. See Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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periodicals, writing about sexual liberation, the benefits of anarchy, and the joys of individualism.3 At the heart of the May Fourth movement was an exaltation of the modern – the one thing that could “save” the Chinese nation. The May Fourth generation drew an inpenetrable line between the past and present, seeking to trigger a historical rupture that would separate the modern savior from the traditional anathema. Its effects were incalculable. Its clarion call for modernization in the name of national development inspired a generation to view modernity as the only way to fix the nation’s problem areas – literary modernity, educational modernity, and hygienic modernity all served as a panacea for national weakness.4 It also forced those stalwart guardians of older traditions to frame their cultural prescriptions defensively. Because the movement’s effects were so extensive, its members have written themselves into the historical rupture they wished to see, taking credit for opening the chasm between the “modern” society May Fourth created and the “traditional” society that preceded it. Their insistence of their own role in the making of Chinese modernity ushered in a sweeping erasure, effectively negating any historical continuity or “precursors” to modernity, those messy negotiations between old and new in the years before the May Fourth movement that made its fruition possible. Our current definitions of “linguistic modernity” in China reflect this erasure. It often begins and ends with vernacular literature advocate Hu Shi. Hu is seen as the “face” of the vernacular literature movement, and his contemporary Lu Xun, author of well-known stories such as Diary of a Madman and The True Story of Ah-Q, the father of it. Yet Hu Shi and Lu Xun hardly invented vernacular literature. Experimentation with vernacular genres emerged around the time of the Hundred Days Reform, with nearly two hundred presses publishing short stories, poems, essays, and novels written in a diverse array of writing styles, from romance novels to detective thrillers – this included, as discussed in Chapter 2, the late-Qing vernacular periodical. In this way, as David Der-Wei Wang explains, the May Fourth movement was a watershed not because it initiated China’s “modern” literary movement, but because it wrote a new literary history that dismissed as irrelevant all that came before it.5 3 4

5

Yeh Wen-Hsin, “Middle County Radicalism: The May Fourth Movement in Hangzhou,” China Quarterly 140 (November–December, 1994), 903–925. Some examples include Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; Margharita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Michael Gibbs-Hill, Lin Shu Inc., Translation and the Making of a Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wang argues that what makes this late-Qing fiction “modern” was that the “writers’ pursuit of novelty was no longer contained within indigenously defined barriers but was inextricably affected by the multilingual, cross-cultural trafficking of ideas, technologies

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This repression of modernities extended beyond literature. The May Fourth movement is similarly credited with overseeing an epistemic revolution in the way that language as information was researched, organized, and mobilized. This epistemic revolution was represented by “Mr. Science,” one of the two foundations of a modern society advocated by May Fourth leader Hu Shi. Kexue (科學), or “science,” was at once widely applied and narrowly protected.6 Ultimately, it privileged knowledge that could be considered “facts,” epistemological units that could be gathered, compared, and analyzed to reveal human truths. As Tong Lam argues, Chinese academics after the May Fourth movement engaged in a concerted effort to gather these facts so as to “affirm a set of emerging claims about society, nation, culture, and history . . . inseparable from the particular conception of time and space vital to the operations of the nationstate.”7 In other words, any piece of information’s value was determined both by the methods by which it was garnered and by the usefulness of that information to the project of Chinese nation building. This chapter links China’s linguistic and epistemic revolutions in the post-May Fourth period to debates over language reform and nation building. It argues that conversations concerning the meaning of fangyan in Chinese academia inspired a new paradigm of linguistic modernity, which shaped conceptualizations of the nation-state in turn. I track the emergence of three scholarly fields that had their own distinct approach to the study of fangyan: folklorists, dialectologists, and ethnographers. Each group viewed fangyan as a unique kind of data, and each wielded that data to debate the proper role for fangyan in a new China. For some, research exalted fangyan and fangyan alone as the center of authentic lived experience of the nation’s people. For others, their research on fangyan undergirded linguistic hierarchies, providing evidence of a scientifically determined boundary around who was ethnically Chinese, who was a Chinese citizen, and who was not. This chapter’s focal point is academia. While the work of intellectuals rarely radiated far from the ivory tower, each of these unique guises for

6

7

and powers in the wake of nineteenth-century Western expansionism.” David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late-Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5. The definition of science in Chinese history has been a concern of scholars since the 1960s. These early studies largely assumed the May Fourth narrative, which painted all scholarship after the mid-1910s as scientific, modern, and forward-thinking, and all that came before as backward and feudalistic. Newer studies have focused on excavating the lateQing roots of the intellectual pursuits that defined the modern era, and in doing so, better define what the term “science” meant to Republican-period elites. See Benjamin Elman, “New Directions in the History of Science in Modern China: Global and Comparative Perspectives,” Isis 98 (2007), 517–523. Lam, Passion for Facts, 3.

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fangyan – of articulations of authenticity, of subsidiaries to the national language, and as representative of a Han ethnicity – bled throughout Chinese society over the following decades. They informed state standardization projects, inspired authors, and drove the production of educational materials. Similarly, the information and conclusions featured in these academics’ works represent a crystallization of the historical trajectories developing before their research even began. These scholars built upon global epistemological frameworks, the concerns of anti-Manchu radicals in the late Qing, and the long tradition of vernacular literature and kaozheng research. In a word, they were shaped by the debates that emerged before their disciplines were founded, and their disciplines would subsequently shape it in turn. The focus here is narrow; the implications are broad. Fangyan as Authenticity: The Folksong Collection Movement Liu Bannong and Zhou Zuoren’s Folksong Collection Movement In 1917, Hu Shi wrote an excoriation of China’s “outdated” literature and presented an eight-point plan for its reform. He called on authors to reject flowery language and obscure references, strive for substance, and embrace the vernacular literature of the past. Suddenly, novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber and Outlaws of the Marsh became paragons of literary excellence, stock models for other artists to emulate.8 Others looked beyond the more popular works. Within the hallowed halls of Beijing University, a group of budding intellectuals proclaimed that it was not China’s literary history, but its oral one, that provided a model for a vernacular literature based on how people spoke. These men came together to bring this oral art to the attention of scholars and artists alike through Beijing University’s Folksong Collection Group. The group was founded by Liu Bannong (劉半農), remembered today primarily as champion for what he called “low-grade” fiction. Born in Jiangsu, Liu discovered this passion for literature working for Zhonghua Book Publishing in Shanghai in the early 1910s. The freedom and fluidity of genre and style that marked the 1910s Shanghai literary scene, scholar Michel Hockx argues, encouraged Liu to develop his own personal style.9 He spent his days reading the popular fiction of the Saturday school, 8 9

Hu Shi, “Wenxue gailiang chuyi,” 1–11. Michel Hockx, “Changing One’s Style: Liu Bannong and Modern Chinese Prose Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, no. 2 (2000), 83–117.

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translating the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, and composing his own contributions to literary magazines such as Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshuo Hai 小說海).10 In 1916, Liu received an invitation from New Youth founder Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀) to move to Beijing, and a year later, he joined the faculty at Beijing University. Liu quickly became a part of elite academic circles, spending time with men such as Hu Shi who swept him into the fervor of the vernacular literature movement. Liu joined with some hesitancy, often expressing ambivalence toward these May Fourth renegades. In 1917, Liu felt scorned by his lack of formal education and his literary styles that May Fourth practitioners considered hopelessly outdated.11 His feelings were not baseless; even Liu’s own obituary characterized his work as “shallow.”12 Despite these expressed insecurities, Liu remained a staunch supporter of this so-called low-grade fiction, what he believed was a valuable model for a new Chinese literature.13 He also wrote poetry, for which he is most well-known today. His work was characterized by how he bent the rules of poetic composition, playfully experimenting with length, character numbers, and rhyme. For inspiration, he looked outside of the Chinese classical canon – from Tang dynasty Buddhist sutras to songs sung by boatmen on the currents of the Yangzi River. In a sense, Liu presumed the country’s best poetry existed beyond elite traditions. The Folksong Collection movement began with a simple conversation in 1918. Liu Bannong had just delivered a lecture on lowbrow literature at Beijing University, when he began to contemplate the vast troves of poetic inspiration right outside his office window.14 He casually observed to his friend Shen Yinmo (沈尹默), “there are many fine items among folksongs, why don’t we start collecting them?”15 Soon after, Shen, with the 10 11

12 13 14

15

Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature 1918–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 34. See Zhou Zuoren, Zhitang huixiang lu (Memoirs of Zhou Zuoren) (Hong Kong: Sanyu tushu wenju gongsi, 1970), 503. Much work has been done by scholars to undo the historical erasures committed by the May Fourth movement, which drew a thick inpenetrable line between the vernacular fiction produced after 1915 and nearly everything that came before. In particular, David Der-wei Wang has demonstrated how late-Qing fiction was instrumental in creating the literary modernity for which the May Fourth movement practitioners claimed credit. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor. Lu Xun, “Yi Liu Bannong jun” (Remembering Liu Bannong) Qingnian jie 6, no. 3 (1934), 3. Liu Bannong, “Wo zhi wenxue gailiang guan” (My perspective on literary reform), Xin qingnian 3, no. 3 (1917), 18–30. Liu Bannong, “Guowai minge yi zixu” (Introduction to translations of foreign folk songs), reprinted in Bannong zawen erji (Miscellaneous writings of Liu Bannong, second series) (Shanghai: Shanghai liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), 9. Liu Bannong, “Zhongguo zhi xiadeng xiaoshuo” (The modern novel in China), Taipingyang 1, no. 11 (April 15, 1919), 1–21.

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help of a few other enthusiasts, founded the Bureau for Collecting Folksongs (geyao zhengjichu 歌謠徵集處). Liu published one of the bureau’s first works: a collection of twenty folksongs sung by the boatmen of Jiangyin.16 Liu’s ambitions found an eager audience with another intellectual similarly entranced by the charms of the rural local: Zhou Zuoren (周作 人). An essayist, his accomplishments were, and still are, often overshadowed by those of his older brother Lu Xun. Like his brother, Zhou was introduced to the world outside Qing borders at an early age. He entered Jiangnan Naval Academy in 1901, and traveled to Japan to study with his brother in 1906.17 In Japan, the world’s greatest intellectual works lay at his fingertips. He studied ancient Greek and he learned Chinese philology. He gained exposure to cutting-edge scholarship in Western cultural anthropology, leading him down a path that would eventually encourage him to focus on folklore studies. Zhou quickly became enamored with scholars such as Edward Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Sir James Frazer.18 Lang in particular supported a global comparison of worldwide customs and practices that could reveal a universal human culture.19 Yet it was the works on Japanese folklore that spoke most deeply to Zhou. He was swept away by the ghost stories and the salty tales of brothels of the Edo floating world he read in Japanese fiction. With his emotional attachment to Japanese folk culture and his intellectual reverence for the methodologies espoused by British theorists, Zhou found an ideal model in Yanagita Kunio (柳田国男).20 Born in 1875, Yanagita began as a bureaucrat in the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce before shifting to a career in Japanese ethnography. He believed that the best way to illuminate the national was 16 17

18

19 20

This was later published in the periodical Geyao zhoukan itself. Liu Bannong, “Jiangyang chuan ge” (The boat songs of Jiangyang) Geyao zhoukan 24 (1923), 2–5. For biographies of Zhou Zuoren, see Ernst Wolff, Chou Tso-jen (New York: Twayne, 1971); Zhang Juxiang, Zhou Zuoren nianpu (Yearbook of Zhou Zuoren)(Tianjin: Nakai Daxue chubanshe, 1985). Zhang, Zhou Zuoren nianpu, 28–50. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 84– 92. Zhou discusses it often in his writings. See, for example, Zhou Zuoren, “Shenhua yu chuanshuo” (Myths and legends), in Zhou Zuoren quanji (Complete works of Zhou Zuoren), Vol. 2 (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2003), 23–26; Zhou Zuoren, “Rongguang zhi shou” (Hand of glory), in Zhou Zuoren quanji, Vol. 1 (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2003), 232–237; Zhou Zuoren, “Chongkan nichang xupu xu” (Preface to the republication of Nishang Xupu) in Zhou Zuoren quanji, Vol. 1 (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2003), 290–294. Zhou was inspired here by the several lectures he attended in Japan by Zhang Binglin, whose approach to Chinese fangyan is discussed in Chapter 2. Zhao Jinghua, “Zhou Zuoren yu Liaotian Guonan” (Zhou Zuoren and Yanagita Kunio) Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan 9 (2002), 33–43.

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through the local. Works like Kagyū kō (蝸牛Snail), which traced iterations of this one vocabulary word across more than 300 localities in Japan, demonstrated his commitment to celebrating the diversity of Japanese folklife.21 Yanagita’s unique brand of patriotism was attractive to Zhou, who himself was skeptical of a Chinese nationalism that demanded the submission of the village, the locality, the family, and the individual to the needs of the national whole.22 Zhou saw these smaller communities as the core of Chinese civilization and, unlike many of his May Fourth brethren, did not assume their inferiority to Western counterparts. Like Yanagita, Zhou felt that local practices, folklore, and language represented the heart of authentic behavior and culture, and remained wary of the hegemony inherent in the national.23 Yanagita, Frazer, and Lang all also shared in common their romanticization of the “savage mind,” or what they called “primitive” cultures untouched by modernity’s unassailable influence.24 They offered an idyllic view of the village, a landscape Zhou saw mirrored back at home. Zhou was similarly suspicious of the national, a position Susan Daruvala characterizes as an “alternate response” to modernity as it privileged the locality and the individual over the nation state.25 This is not to say Zhou was opposed to the modernizing project; rather, Zhou was wary of prevalent presumptions concerning what constituted that modernity and which parts of the world epitomized it. This belief seeped into Zhou’s writings: from short stories peppered with local vernaculars, to collections of saucy jokes from across the country, Zhou never strayed from his belief that the local made literature and culture come to life. Zhou did little to further the Chinese Folksong Collection movement until 1922, when, in conjunction with other followers, he began publishing 21 22

23 24

25

Yanagita Kunio, Kagyū kō (Snail) (Tokyo: Shogensha, 1943). Yanagita’s legacy is rather mixed. While few could deny his literary genius and careful scholarship, many dismiss him as, at best, a “relic of his time.” His critics argue that his studies of the Japanese countryside display primitivist leanings, seeping his work with elitism. Others decry his ethnocentrism, an attribute easily assumed by the militarist and nativist leanings of Japanese right-wing militarists of the 1930s. For a summary of these criticisms, see Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation and Modernity in the work of Yanagita Kunio (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2–9; Ronald Morse, Yanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement: The Search for Japan’s National Character and Distinctiveness (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), xvi. Zhou Zuoren, “Ye du chao” (Copies de lectures nocturnes), Zhou Zuoren quanji, Vol. 2 (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2003), 569. Yanagita in particular is credited with forging a field of “salvage ethnography,” whose primary goal was to save and preserve local practices. Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yō kai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 245n. Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity, 14–35.

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Folksongs Weekly (Geyao Zhoukan 歌謠週刊), first as an addendum in Beijing University Daily (Beijing Daxue ribao 北京大學日報) and then as its own periodical.26 Folksongs Weekly was originally purposed to publish the backlog of materials scholars had collected since 1918.27 The dissemination of these materials was guided by two distinct but inseparable goals: the scholarly study of folklore (minsu xue 民俗學) and artistic inspiration. Editors in the inaugural issue argued that a more thorough understanding of the “emotions” expressed in folksongs revealed the “heart of the people,” which ultimately inspired the development of folk art as a genre.28 This meant, the introductory article warned, that there existed no song that was too “inferior, coarse, or vulgar.”29 Over the next year, contributors experimented with a wide range of approaches to the study of folksongs. The periodical’s first several issues read much like anthologies, featuring songs from the mountaintops of Fujian, the rice fields of Guangdong, and the dusty villages of Anhui – much how Liu imagined the movement could provide inspiration for artists. But quickly, the periodical moved from anthologies to discussions about the “science” of folksong collection. Front-page articles articulated how a researcher ought to record songs, where to find them, and the types of hardships one might experience “in the field.” In part, this was because other members of the movement were drawn to folklore for diverse reasons. Early attempts to narrow down the interdisciplinary contributions of folksong studies listed four: to understand popular customs, to understand ancient phonology, educational studies, and aesthetics.30 These purposes were hardly mutually exclusive, and the patrons of the movement were often motivated by all four. Yet they centered on one core belief – that folksongs had much to teach China about creating a national culture. Folksongs checked all the boxes of a newly defined linguistic modernity: they were oral, they violated the strict rules of elite poetry, and they emanated from the experiences of the people. But perhaps most importantly, they represented the ineffable authenticity of everyday life, that which the May Fourth literary movement tried so desperately to grasp. These pieces of authentic life were all expressed in fangyan. 26 27

28 29

30

Hung, Going to the People, 49–57. Shen Jianshi, “Geyao Zhoukan yuanqi: Beijing Daxue congshi geyao de zhengji” (An account of the founding of Folksongs Weekly: Beijing University engages in the collection of folksongs), Beijing Daxue rikan: Geyao 1 (December 17, 1922), 1. Hung, Going to the People, 178. “Fakan ci: Ben xiao faqi zhengji quanguo jinshi geyao” (Forward: This university initiates the collection of contemporary folksongs from across the country), Beijing Daxue rikan: Geyao 1 (December 17, 1922), 2. Yang Shiqing, “Zenyang yanjiu geyao” (How to research folksongs), Geyao zhoukan zengkan (December, 1923), 19–23.

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Pathos and Ethos Shao Chunxi (邵純熙) began his reflection on folksongs with a memory. In his 1923 article, he recalled how his interest in folksongs developed: I remember when I was six or seven, I would get together with my little brother and sister and a couple of neighborhood friends to play. At that time, we were together under the vast sky, the moon was bright and the stars scarce, and the shadows of the trees made patterns on the ground. A light breeze shook the trees in a beautiful way. Two or three branches of bamboo were natural and at ease as if they were arranged for a painting. When we saw this scene of natural beauty, we became lively and excited. We then noticed someone sitting nearby; he was singing and pointing to his feet . . . at that point we all stood there, took each others’ hands to make a big circle, and in the middle was this stranger, and we all put one hand on the man’s head, and began to sing.31

This scene was Shao’s love of folksongs embodied – full of spontaneity, happiness, and freedom. “In my heart,” he confessed, “I have always loved beauty, and the sounds of nature have always filled my heart with limitless happiness.” This “natural sound,” he argued, was constitutive of an authentic culture. To capture the beauty of folksongs, they had to be heard, experienced, and lived.32 In short, Shao praised folksongs because they were an oral art. Others praised folksongs for similar reasons. Wei Jingzhou (衛景周), for instance, declared folksongs the “most superior” form of poetry because of their spontaneity.33 They “emerged from emotion,” he wrote, and were expressed with little regard or restraint. Wei wrote, Poems are a product of emotion, [they are] music that are naturally revealed, how can we possibly say that we need a script to preserve them? If, in order to preserve songs, we must record them with script, then is poetry not then controlled by script? Does it not then become debased poetry? So when Qin Shihuang burned all the books and ancient records, leaving only the Shijing and golden vessels intact, are we saying that the Shijing was not simply an expression of sound, but instead of the various Han scholars in a wave of emotion etching it out? Obviously good poetry does not need to be written to be preserved; its oral preservation is already sufficient.34

Because the best poems were outbursts of emotion, spontaneous and fleeting, their oral utterance was what made them valuable, not their 31

32 33 34

Shao Chunxi, “Wo caiji geyao de xingqu he jingguo ji benkan jianglai de xiwang” (“My interest and experience in collecting folksongs, and my hope for the future of this periodical), Geyao zhoukan zengkan (December, 1923), 40–41. Shao Chunxi, “Wo caiji geyao de xingqu,” 41. Wei Jingzhou, “Geyao zai shi zhong de diwei” (The status of folksongs in poetry) Geyao zhoukan zengkan (December, 1923), 33–34. Wei Jingzhou, “Geyao zai shi zhong de diwei,” 34.

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preservation in written text. In other words, the oral nature of folksongs made them worth studying in the first place. Zhou Zuoren generally agreed with this characterization, but he clearly felt discomfort about how they were recorded for prosperity. Given that folk art was inherently oral, Zhou lamented, a songs’ sounds – the rhymes, alliteration, or musicality – were lost in their transcription.35 The sounds of the songs sung in local fangyan would not be immediately obvious to a reader. Moreover, they often included vernacular vocabulary that lacked corresponding characters. Researchers attempting to record oral fangyan in written form were thus left with little recourse, leading Zhou to regard the authentic preservation of these “fangyan poems” (fangyan shi 方言詩) a nearly impossible task.36 The crux of Zhou’s discontent was that current methodologies failed to address the disconnect between oral songs and the non-oral way scholars recorded them.37 For now, Zhou wrote, researchers should record local slang and colloquialisms, adding extra explanations if necessary.38 But the future demanded a separate field dedicated to phonetics. Zhou insisted that a rudimentary understanding of China’s major fangyan, and a system to phoneticize their pronunciations, would streamline research methods. With training in fangyan phonologies, researchers could transcribe songs in their entirety, including colloquialisms and phrases without corresponding characters. Zhou’s first demand was a new phonetic system. The “national language phonetics” developed by Qian Xuantong only a few years earlier, was impractical, Zhou wrote. “With only twenty-six roman characters,” he lamented, “and one or two characters for fangyan phonologies,” it was largely only useful for transcribing the sounds of the national language.39 More broadly, however, Zhou believed a field dedicated to fangyan could reveal a fuller and deeper picture of his country’s cultural heritage. Like Yanagita Kunio’s study Snail, Zhou imagined an entire field of ethnic studies that could synthesize information about local languages, music, poetry, and ritual.40 Zhou gave several examples of local colloquialisms, 35

36 37

38 39 40

Zhou Zuoren pointed out that really the only fangyan to have corresponding characters for vernacular slang was Guangdong. Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” Geyao zhoukan 31 (November 4, 1923) 2. Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 1. Indeed, this is a problem that plagues scholars of oral art from across the globe. See Elizabeth C. Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 1–2. Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 2. Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 1. It is very likely, though he does not explicitly state it, that his vision was something akin to Yanagita Kunio, who collected not only folksongs but also information on Japanese dialects and other folk practices.

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demonstrating that some expressions for particular phenomena were better, more accurate, or more refined than others. There are so many crude words, I feel they are not suitable, and I cannot find good replacements for them. For instance, jiewen (接吻translated as “kiss,” but means literally “to connect lips”), I feel rather suspicious that this should become part of the modern national language, the sound and the meaning are both not very good; but if we are to search fangyan, we will often find a more suitable word there (such as qinzui [親嘴, literally, “to kiss one’s mouth”] is much better).41

For Zhou, the study of fangyan offered possibility. It had the potential to enrich folklore studies by offering a better methodology and more cultural context. Fangyan studies even had the possibility to make the national language richer, offering an untapped resource to improve expression, art, and self-reification. It was nationalism from the ground up. Zhou encouraged collectors to think critically about language even though he admitted that any systematic study of it fell outside their purview. “The Folksong Collection movement is just beginning, it is something about which society does not yet know, [they] have not yet completely grasped it,” he wrote. “I fear if we raise too many topics at once, it will contrarily cause distraction, and we will get no results whatsoever.”42 Zhou’s words sparked a debate about how best to approach fangyan studies. Chen Jianshi (沉兼士) published the first proposal.43 Chen’s primary thesis was that, in fangyan studies, there was no need to reinvent the wheel. From the sages of the Zhou dynasty, scholars had researched fangyan for centuries. Granted, these earlier works had their shortcomings; they lacked nuance and attention to key historical facts.44 For that reason, Chen argued, the time was right for a “new direction” in fangyan studies, one firmly rooted in a well-established body of scholarship. Dong Zuobin (董作賓) offered another perspective. In his article “The Question of Folksongs and Local Pronunciation (fangyin 方音),” Dong drew a distinction between fangyan, the “language of a place,” and fangyin, the “phonology of a place.” What Dong advocated instead was a fangyin survey, a study that would concentrate on pronunciation differences rather than those of vocabulary. It was for Dong a distinction between sound and meaning. Both types of comparisons were valuable, Dong opined, but it was only through the study of sound that scholars 41 42 43 44

Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 3. Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha,” 3. Chen Jianshi, “Jinhou yanjiu fangyan de xin qushi” (New directions in the future study of fangyan), Geyao zhoukan zengkan (December, 1923), 16–19. In this, he included Zhang Binglin’s Xin fangyan, discussed in Chapter 2.

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would be able to grasp the local flavor (dangdi secai 當地色彩). A perfect recording of a fangyan’s phonetics, which could only come from detailed comparative studies, completed the folksong’s meaning, without which each became stiff, dull, and boring.45 This tension between the immediacy of the oral and the concreteness of the written language highlights an important contradiction that folksong collectors could not entirely solve. Indeed, this would be a problem for many May Fourth writers, who exalted the vernacular oral while simultaneously calcifying it as written text. Though they were left with imperfect methods that could capture only imperfect data, these men emphasized the relevance of folksongs and, by extension, fangyan, in the creation of a national literature. Most critically, their recognition that folksongs were largely a fangyan art form indirectly implied that fangyan alone could express authentic emotion. Folksong collectors who privileged the role of sentiment in China’s national culture emphasized that it could only be expressed in local speech. The Folksong Collection movement burned out quickly. Folksongs Weekly folded within two years, and its founders moved on to other pursuits. Anthologies of folksongs found new homes in periodicals dedicated to other fields, including ethnology, folklore, or literature. But as the movement quietly dispersed, their work imbued other areas of public and intellectual life. The equivalency of authentic everyday life and fangyan proved difficult to sever. From literature to ethnology, theater to comic books, the belief that fangyan alone could reveal the true lived experience of the people became significant to any discussion about language and language reform. It made authenticity a metric that any national language both needed to but could never achieve. Fangyan as Subnational: The Advent of Dialectology From Ditties to Data Within a year of the founding of the Folksong Collection movement, the relevance of fangyan research to their goals became rather overwhelming. Some insisted fangyan studies needed its own experts, institutional support, and intellectual framework. One of these men was Beijing University’s Professor of English Lin Yutang (林語堂). Lin was a latecomer to the Folksong Collection movement, having completed a second doctoral degree in Chinese philology at the University of Leipzig in 1923. 45

Dong Zuobin, “Geyao yu fangyin de wenti” (The problem of folksongs and fangyin), Geyao zhoukan 32 (November, 1923), 1–2.

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That year, Lin returned to China, and became a regular contributor to Folksongs Weekly from the end of 1923 through 1924. Lin was quick to point out that of all the discussions about language and folksongs, the periodical’s contributors had failed to take into account scientific methodologies being practiced in Europe and the United States.46 Fangyan studies could not be simply an extension of folksong studies – about this he was resolute. Rather, fangyan should be studied according to the methodologies of comparative linguistics. Such a field would focus on the evolution of phonology, using ancient rhyming dictionaries and fangyan surveys as sources to trace the diachronic history of the Chinese language and all of its contemporary variations.47 Lin’s position about the necessity of a separate field of fangyan studies was laid plain in a short response to a 1924 article in Folksongs Weekly concerning the etymology of the titular term.48 The article’s original author, Dong Zuobin, approached his analysis by defining the individual characters 方 (fang) and言 (yan) in isolation, which he suggested meant that fangyan were simply the “typical languages spoken by the people of a certain place.” He added, within the context of a concrete field of study, fangyan ought to be defined as “languages spoken within a country particular to a place . . . [whose] phonology can be expressed using a phonetic system, and whose vocabulary can be expressed in characters.”49 Lin’s critique was only a short paragraph long, but that was all it took for him to thoroughly and harshly denounced Dong’s take. Lin’s statement is worth quoting in its entirety (all of the English terms Lin uses in the original are noted in brackets): There should be no confusion as to the definition of fangyan. The world’s languages are connected in one system, called a yuyanxi [family of languages]. Language families are then divided into yuyan [languages], and within each language there are divisions of fangyan [dialects]. That fangyan’s two characters encompass its fangyin, or that yuyan’s two characters emcompass its yuyin, does not even need to be said. Today, it is unfortunate that because books such as Yang Xiong’s Fangyan are named fangyan, everyone has been prejudiced. We ought to declare that when we speak of fangyan today that we are using it [with the] meaning from modern 46

47

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Lin Yutang, “Yanjiu fangyan ying you de jige yuyanxue guanchadian” (A few observations from linguistics that research on fangyan should include), Geyao zhoukan zengkan (December, 1923), 7–11. The only element of Lin’s proposed approach that touched upon ethnography or culture was research on how particular vocabulary words developed through cultural exchange. Any study of the Chinese words 茶 (cha, “tea”) and 絲 (si, “silk”), he suggested must take into account that both products were introduced to the Western world from China. Lin, “Yanjiu fangyan,” 8. Dong Zuobin “Wei fangyan jinyi jie” (Further explanation on fangyan), Geyao zhoukan 49 (April 6, 1924), 1–2. Dong Zuobin, “Wei fangyan jinyi jie,” 2.

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linguistics, not the term that Yang Xiong uses. In reality, the purpose of all of the [past] studies from Yang Xiong to Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin) (1907), which survey the relationship between ancient phonology and contemporary phonology, and the purpose of our group’s survey are fundamentally different. Vocabulary surveys are just one tiny part of the dialect survey.50

In just one short paragraph, Lin disregarded nearly two millennia of linguistic tradition, as well as the approaches of many of his colleagues. For Lin, there was no room in a nascent field of dialectology for these older methods. He similarly dislodged the study of language from the study of literature. All explorations of the spontaneity of oral art, of the “natural music” of the countryside, or of the colloquialisms that revealed local cultural practices, lay outside his purview. Lin maintained that the only proper way to study language was through careful phonological research, treating them as branches on the Schleicher linguistic family tree. We will never know whether Lin’s intention with that short paragraph was one of historical erasure. It nevertheless had that effect, severing fangyan studies from many centuries of precedent. That same year, in 1924, Lin created a fangyan survey research group out of Beijing University. The Beijing University Fangyan Survey Study Group (Beijing Daxue Fangyan Diaocha Xuehui 北京大學方言調查學會), later renamed the “Beijing University Fangyan Society”(Beida Fangyan Hui 北大方言會), was comprised of sixteen independent and ambitious students.51 At their first meeting in January of 1924, they articulated their goal to map out and record all of China’s fangyan. They also outlined a plan of action. First on their agenda was the construction of a standardized phonetic script to record fangyan pronunciation. Subsequently, they would use the upcoming summer holiday to write down the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical structures of fangyan in “every place” across the country. They would then mobilize this data for two ends: to create a broad foundation of knowledge about China’s contemporary fangyan, and to reconstruct ancient Chinese to uncover the “origin of language.” They then planned to publish their findings in a yearly periodical similar to Folksongs Weekly.52 50 51

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Lin Yutang, “Wei fangyan jinyi jie: Fuji,” 2–3. “Yanjiu suo guoxuemen fangyan diaocha hui chengli jishi” (Records from the foundation of the Fangyan Survey Society of the National Studies Research Institute) Beijing Daxue ribao (January 31, 1924), 2. Also summarized in “Guoli Beijing Daxue yanjiusuo guoxuemen fangyan yanjiuhui jianzhang” (Summary of the Fangyan Research Group of National Beijing University National Studies Research Institute), Xue deng 6, no. 20 (June 19, 1924), 4. For a history of Beijing University xuehui, see Fabio Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 115–121. “Yanjiu suo guoxuemen fangyan diaocha hui chengli jishi,” 2.

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This group quickly fell short of its goals, dissolving only a few months later. But Lin Yutang’s rigid framework found a willing audience in a small group of language enthusiasts, drawn to fangyan because of their exposure to Western linguistic science while living abroad. They returned to China at the tail end of the May Fourth movement with extensive knowledge of social survey methodologies. It was these men who realized the goals set by the Beijing University students. The Influence of Bernhard Karlgren As Lin Yutang’s scathing rebuke put on display, China’s first generation of dialectologists (fangyan xuezhe 方言學者), approached studies of language that took high antiquity as their focus with suspicion. It is ironic, then, that the work that most deeply inspired their methodology was Bernhard Karlgren’s 1915 Études sur la phonologie chinoise (Studies on Chinese phonology), which sought to reconstruct ancient, not contemporary, Chinese languages. When Karlgren began his studies in 1907, the field of linguistics was fixated on confirming, complicating, and expanding Schleicher’s Stammbaum model (see Chapter 1). Karlgren believed that China and Japan contained untapped resources for uncovering diachronic history of human speech.53 Karlgren subsequently spent nearly eleven years composing his magnum opus which, at nearly 800 pages, traced the historical evolution of a so-called Chinese language by reconstructing Chinese phonology at various points in history.54 To execute this project, Karlgren primarily consulted the aforementioned Guangyun and parts of the Qieyun. He supplemented this data with Tang dynasty translations of Buddhist texts – which provided a phonological approximation of foreign words – and surveys Karlgren himself conducted of contemporary Chinese dialects. Why did Karlgren even include contemporary dialects? Like HighQing kaozheng scholars and nineteenth-century Western enthusiasts 53 54

Malmqvist, Bernhard Karlgren, 54. Mamlqvist, Bernhard Karlgren, 72. Just years before, Hungarian-British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein had returned to Europe with nearly 10,000 documents from the caves in Dunhuang, a wealth of thentofore unexplored materials about the art, religion, culture, and languages of China and Central Asia from the first millennium. This investigation led Karlgren to propose the subcategorizations of archaic Chinese (from 600 BCE) and ancient Chinese (from 600 CE). He wrote of this theory first in his Études, but articulated it more clearly in Bernhard Karlgren, “A Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26 (1957), 211–367. Notably, few scholars today agree with either his periodizations or his reconstructions. For a summary of why, see Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Middle Chinese: A Study in Phonology (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984); Norman, Chinese, chapter 2. For more information on Sir Aurel Stein, see Jeannette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein, Archaeological Explorer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 253–283.

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Joseph Edkins and Edward Parker, Karlgren saw contemporary oral speech as evidence of Chinese language’s diachronic history. Yet he distrusted his predecessors’ methodologies and frequently lamented the dearth of accurate linguistic recreations.55 For Karlgren, the best method for recording phonologies focused on places of articulation, using tools to measure how speech organs created particular sounds. He explained, If we take the tongue position to make the “t” sound in Beijing dialect, we would need to compare it to the “t” in English, Parisian French, Southern French, German (both North and South), Scandinavian, and Slavic. Then we would take the various ways of writing this sound, such as ta, tu, te, ti, etc., and use a palatogram to record its pronunciation. It would also be important to clearly measure to a fraction of a second the length of the syllable and measure on an occiligram how many millimeters the aspiration moves the pen (on the machine) . . . We would then use a tuning fork and a Lioret device to research the “a” sound, using mathematical principles to study its curve, allowing me to find its “particular pitch” – then can we declare how close the “a” in Beijing dialect would be to the “a” in any particular French word, (or) on the other hand we can say how [the Beijingese “a”] is quite different from the “a” found in the languages of the Ainu, Madagascar, or Southern Russia, or how different it might be from an entirely different character in Greek.56

This complex methodology was deeply corporeal, supported not by recollections but by weights and measures. It was built upon numbers, cutting-edge equipment, and the practitioner’s sweat, blood, and tears. It relied upon precision: a millimeter of movement, or a slightly inclined curve. In this way, what Karlgren described was not just a methodology – it was a philosophy. Every element of each datum should be distilled to its pith, and then quantified for purposes of comparison. It was also impossible in Karlgren’s meager surroundings. With no occillograms or ampoule exploratrice at his disposal, he had to improvise. He began by compiling a list of several thousand characters, which he based on the Qieyun zhizhangtu (切韻指掌圖), a table of 3,125 characters from the Qieyun likely composed in the eleventh century. He then sought out representative speakers of various dialects, asked them to pronounce each character, and recorded the pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet. To organize the data, Karlgren took the phonetic categories of the Qieyun zhizhangtu and granted them new designations according to places of articulation.57 Finally, he triangulated this data with older rime tables. 55

56 57

Indeed, simply observing puzzled travelers trying to pronounce “Tsim Sha Tsui” on Hong Kong’s subway platform is proof enough that a roman alphabet does not a singular pronunciation make. Karlgren, Zhongguo yinyunxue, 139–140. Karlgren explains his phonetic distinctions in Zhongguo yinyunxue, 153–160.

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Though the surveys constituted only one small part of Karlgren’s larger work, it had a deep impact on Chinese scholarship. It was foundational for one group in particular, led by Yuen Ren Chao. Chao and his colleagues, impressed by the scientific precision of Karlgren’s work, subsequently adopted his quantitative tables for contemporary surveys.58 The study of language in China would subsequently be irrevocably changed, as scholars shifted their views from the past to the present, from philology to phonology, from analysis of ancient texts to data gathered from living, breathing speech. Yuen Ren Chao and the Science of Linguistics It took over fifteen years for Karlgren’s study to make its way to Chinese markets, yet its influence could be felt years before its 1940 publication date.59 Among the most notable scholars who cited it was Yuen Ren Chao in his Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect (現代吳語的研究 Xiandai Wuyu de yanjiu) (1928), the first full-length fangyan survey published in China. It is hard to understate the significance of Chao’s work on the history of linguistics. The work standardized fangyan survey methodology for an entire generation of scholars who founded the field.60 Contemporary reviews praised its progressive nature, and today, linguistics departments across China continue to express the depth of their intellectual debt to Chao.61 Current professor of linguistics Shi Qisheng, for instance, extolled to me in an interview the originality of Chao’s study. From his survey character list to his use of the Aesop’s Fable “The North Wind and the Sun” to test grammatical differences, Chao essentially created the field in which linguists work today.62 58

59 60 61 62

David Branner has noted that Karlgren’s innovation here is rather overstated in the history. David Prager Branner, “Some Composite Phonological Systems in Chinese,” in David Prager Branner, ed., The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2006), 212. Yet while it is true that Karlgren inherited much of his methodology from earlier scholars and subsequently sought to erase their contribution, such erasure was perpetuated by Chinese scholars who repeated Karlgren’s claims. Chao and Karlgren exchanged letters for nearly two decades before Chao’s translation hit Chinese markets. Yuen Ren Chao, Xiandai Wuyu de yanjiu (Studies on the modern Wu dialect) (Beijing: Qinghua xuexiao yanjiuyuan, 1928). Zhang Jiang, “Ping Zhongxiang fangyan ji” (A criticism of notes on the Zhongxiang fangyan), Tushu jikan 2, no. 3 (1940), 416. Shi Qisheng, interview with the author, tape recording, September 23, 2013, Guangzhou, China. Other scholars, such as Li Rulong of Xiamen University, also point to Chao as the origin of the list pronunciation methodology. Li Rulong, interview with the author, tape recording, October 21, 2013, Xiamen, China. Others, however, saw the origins of their methodology in Karlgren. When I discussed the origins of the

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For Chao’s Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect, he asked representatives from thirty-two different localities in the Jiangnan (江南) area near Shanghai to pronounce a list of over 3,000 characters. Using wax cylinder phonographs to record sounds and self-invented pitch pipes to measure tones, he isolated each character’s morphemes: the “initial” of the morpheme (the beginning consonant), the “final” of the morpheme (the subsequent vowels or vowel/consonant combination), and then the “tone” (the intonation with which the morpheme is pronounced).63 Chao then arranged the data into comparative charts that juxtaposed the relative pronunciation of each phoneme with the same phoneme in other surveyed areas (see Figures 3.1a and 3.1b). Yet to be truly scientific, Chao needed a constant to which to compare his data. He gave several points of reference, but his primary “constant,” so to speak, was an “abstract phonological classification” based upon the fangyan he surveyed (see Figure 3.1b). This classification was a “purely categorical” (chuncui biaoleixing 純粹標類性) heuristic comprised of the basic phonological characteristics of the region as a whole – a system that David Branner refers to as a “diasystem,” or “an artificial composite, created by a linguist through comparison of different dialects, which it serves to reconcile (wholly or partially) within a single phonological framework.”64 As a categorical, abstract conceptualization rather than a commonly spoken tongue, it constituted a distillation of his data to a summation of their shared characteristics, using that as a metric against which all of his data could be measured. The category also had a hierarchical implication. As a phonological amalgamation, it rested on the assumption that his surveyed fangyan existed on a lower taxonomic plane, ultimately derivative of the more broadly constructed “Wu phonology.” This diasystem ultimately designated Chao’s thirty-two fangyan branches of a broader phonological system, a system that encompassed the diversity of sounds among the fangyan of the taxonomic category.

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character list with Professor Hou Jingyi, the current editor of Chinese Language magazine and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he smiled with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Ah, so many linguists think it was Yuen Ren Chao but it was really Bernhard Karlgren.” Hou Jingyi, interview with the author, tape recording, December 5, 2013, Beijing, China. In later surveys, most obviously the 1956–1957 nationwide survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Ministry of Education, grammar and syntax were noted by asking survey participants to translate naturally into their own fangyan the Aesop’s Fable “The North Wind and the Sun” (Taiyang yu beifeng 太陽與北風). Chao was the first one, to the best of my knowledge, to use this particular story in linguistic surveys. For an explanation of how these phonemes were divided historically, see David Prager Branner, “Introduction: What Are the Rime Tables and What Do They Mean?” in David Prager Branner, ed., The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and HistoricalComparative Phonology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2006), 1–36. Branner adopts this from Uriel Weinreich’s description of a similar suggestion in Yiddish. Branner, “Some Composite Phonological Systems in Chinese,” 209.

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Figure 3.1a Initials of thirty-two Wu dialects from Yuen Ren Chao’s Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect.

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Figure 3.1b Detail of first five rows of the initials chart of Yuen Ren Chao’s Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect. The first two rows indicate the phonetic categories. Rows three through five indicate phonetic categories as they correlated to rhyming dictionaries. The sixth row indicates Bernhard Karlgren’s ancient Chinese phonology, and row seven indicates Guoyin. Source: Yuen Ren Chao, Xiandai Wuyu de yanjiu (Studies on the modern Wu dialect) (Beijing: Qinghua xuexiao yanjiuyuan, 1928), 29.

The creation and subsequent canonization of Chao’s study was a continuation of the larger epistemic revolution forged by the Beijing study group. The vague prescriptions stipulated by Mr. Science – the widespread collection of statistics and quantifiable data sets gathered from research that involved direct, empirical observation, well-articulated procedures, and replicable methodologies – found their full expression in Chao’s standardized phonetic charts. Since the phonological data was derived from a predetermined set of characters, Chao could compare the phonology of several different fangyan side by side. He could then deduce phonetic systems by quantifying which and how many initials and finals differed among unique fangyan. These charts created a unified field of comparison, whereby the distance among fangyan could be measured based upon how many morphemes differed from one to the other and in what way. Fieldwork, in this regime, was dominated by charts and equations, and language was reduced to fragmented phonological data.65 Chao was largely alone in his use of an amalgamated heuristic as a constant, though it parallels his adulation of manufactured languages for their scientific efficiency that we saw him praise in Chapter 2. Just as he had once argued about an invented national language, Chao felt as 65

This treatment of language is traced in Europe in Foucault, The Order of Things, 234–235.

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though invented linguistic amalgams served purposes that extant languages could not. In the case of his Wu categorical phonology, his reasoning was similarly rooted in accuracy and efficiency. By inventing a linguistic category that captured all of the potential phonetic characteristics and distinctions, he could more easily chart cleavages among and between the fangyan within the Yangzi River Delta. By the early 1930s, however, the promulgation of Beijing fangyan as the national language was in full swing, inciting scholars to look afresh at what could constitute the Chinese language. Indeed, we see evidence that this national language decision affected how scholars measured fangyan differences. Unlike Chao’s amalgamated phonological system, most scholars after 1930 used Beijing fangyan, relabeled as “national phonetics” (Guoyin) as either the sole or primary scientific constant against which other fangyan were measured. Chao in his later studies followed suit, and, with few exceptions, generally dropped his diasystem and used either only Guoyin or Guoyin and archaic Chinese (guyin 古音). He published two full-length studies on fangyan in the province of Hubei in 1931, and several other short articles on the fangyan of Dingxian, Changsha, and Nanjing.66 In Figure 3.2, we see the phonetic systems for initials in the Zhongxiang County fangyan on the left, and to the right are direct corollaries to the same initial in the national phonology, or Guoyin, on the right. Figure 3.3 shows the same organization: on the left we see initials in the Nanjing fangyan, while Guoyin is rendered on the right. A key difference in his Nanjing study, however, was that his examples pinpointed key areas where a speaker of Nanjing fangyan could become confused while learning to speak the national language. His charts were mimicked by other scholars: Zu You’s (袓祐) work on the fangyan of Wuchang and Chen Changming’s (陳昌明) survey of Kaifeng also compared their data with Guoyin.67 Even a 1940 fangyan survey handbook that explained survey methodology used Beijing’s phonology as its example.68 66

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Yuen Ren Chao, “Nanjing yinxi” (The phonology of Nanjing’s language), Kexue 13, no. 9 (1929), 1005–1036; Yuen Ren Chao, “Changsha fanyin zimu” (A phonetic script for the Changha dialect), Guoyu zhoukan (May 2, 1936); Yuen Ren Chao, Zhongxiang fangyan ji (Records of Zhongxiang fangyan) (Institute of History and Philology Individual Publication, Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1939). Zu You, “Hubei fangyan: Wuchang yin” (Hubei dialect: The phonology of Wuchang), Minzhong xunkan 4 (1931), 34–44; Chen Changming, “Guoyin yu Kaifeng fangyin zhi bijiao (fubiao)” (A comparison of the phonologies of the national language and Kaifeng [chart attached]), Henan jiaoyu 1, no. 21 (1929), 6–12. Zhang Shilu, “Yanjiu Zhongguo fangyin de fangfa (fubiao)” (Methodology for researching Chinese phonology [chart attached]), Xin Kexue 2, no. 6 (1940), 6–25.

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Figure 3.2 A comparison of initials in the Zhongxiang dialect and Guoyin. The y-axis indicates initials, while the x-axis (shown in row two) indicates corresponding finals. The second column indicates characters representing those combinations of initials and finals in Zhongxiang dialect, while the third column indicates guoyin. Source: Chao, Zhongxiang fangyan ji, 59.

In his Nanjing yinxi, Chao explained that because Guoyin was “commonly used,” it made for an excellent point of comparison. But in so doing, Chao and his colleagues inadvertently made Guoyin their constant, granting it the same status as the taxonomically superior “purely categorical” diasystem or Chinese ancient phonology, complete with all of the implications of using one standard to measure all data. This may seem natural – Guoyin was, after all, the phonology of China’s national language. But this slippage between “national language” and system of comparison only served to reconfirm Guoyin as the default representative of Chinese phonology. In a methodology where all fangyan were compared to Guoyin, Guoyin was subsequently granted the same status as

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Figure 3.3 A comparison of initials in the Nanjing dialect and Guoyin. The horizontal axis represents initials as they correspond to characters in the National Language, whereas the vertical access reflects those initials in Nanjing fangyan. Source: Chao, “Nanjing yinxi,” 1021.

other linguistic “root” constants, and thus occupied a higher rung on a hierarchy. Its phonology was deemed the scientifically ideal point of reference for even comprehending all other fangyan data. It is that assumed quality that made Guoyin appropriate for comparison and augmented its very scientific meaning.69 In the words of Thomas Trautmann, “the brute facts of language similarity do not interpret themselves.”70 The organization of Chao’s phonetic charts, the hegemony of replicable data in the social sciences, and the promulgation of the national language were inextricably intertwined. China’s first generation of dialectologists were deeply invested in promulgating a unified language. Treating the phonology of this language, Guoyin, as a controlled standard shifted the language’s intellectual prominence and buttressed its political clout. Like a nation where localities were subsidiary to the national whole, local phonologies were outlined and interpreted based upon their relationship to a national standard. Shapeless and unintelligible

69 70

Gina Anne Tam, “Orbiting the Core: Politics and the Meaning of Dialect in Chinese Linguistics, 1927–1957,” Twentieth-Century China 41, no. 3 (July, 2016), 280–303. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 18.

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without a constant to frame them, dialectologists thought fangyan were best studied not on their own terms. Fangyan as Ethnicity: Non-Han Languages and the Boundaries of Chinese The edifice of comparative linguistics was erected on the assumption that genealogies of languages represented genealogies of people. According to Republican-period academics, the relationship between the Chinese linguistic trunk and its fangyan branches revealed more than similar phonologies and vocabularies – it represented a shared history, a shared geographic space, and a shared cultural tradition. In short, linguistic genealogies ultimately mirrored connections between and boundaries around groups of people. Because of this, the work of folklorists and dialectologists soon began bleeding into a new discipline: ethnology. Chinese ethnology saw its birth in Guangdong at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology. The institute was born of a marriage between Fu Sinian (傅斯年), a May Fourth radical from Beijing who sought institutional support for systematic linguistic research, and the fledgling Nationalist government, which wished to buttress its political legitimacy with a commitment to modern intellectual pursuits. The institute’s creation dovetailed with the disbursement of China’s intellectual class in the 1920s. After the May Fourth movement, the domestic turmoil that followed caused an exodus of scholars and the movements they founded. Famous writers such as Lu Xun moved to Shanghai, and the struggling Communist Party found fertile ground for their movement in rural Yan’an. As for the founders of Folksongs Weekly and the Beijing University Fangyan Society, they settled at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University – the home of the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) when it was founded in 1928.71 Under Fu’s leadership, the IHP was highly centralized and systematic. Researchers had specific instructions on how fieldwork was to be conducted, how conclusions were to be published, and which topics were considered appropriate. The institute demanded the use of methods that could be universally applicable.72 Fu sought to combat the notion that the 71

72

Early members of the institute included Luo Changpei, Yuen Ren Chao, and Americantrained linguist Li Fang-kuei. Many of these scholars then went on to publish full-length works with their survey data independent from the Institute’s periodical and publishing ventures. Fu Sinian, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu” (The purpose of historical and philological research) Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 1, no. 1 (1928), 4–8.

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Chinese nation was backward and undeveloped because it lacked scientific knowledge about itself. With Fu as its guide, China would no longer be, as Western critics had often suggested it was, a “country without statistics.”73 A Chinese ethnological society was officially made into a section of the IHP (the Minzu xuezhe民族学者) in 1928. Armed with translated works on ethnology from the United States and Europe, such as the works of Tylor and Lang that Zhou Zuoren so praised, budding scholars developed a methodology for the ethnographic survey. These ethnologists traversed the Chinese countryside to record a standardized list of cultural practices, which they published both in the official bulletin of the IHP and other specialized periodicals such as Folk Studies (Minsu xue 民俗學), founded in 1930. From folksongs to funeral rituals, costume and music, this was the data they used to define what made an ethnicity an objective collective identity. But of all of the metrics ethnologists relied upon to distinguish between one ethnic group and another, language was the primary one.74 Early Chinese ethnologists took as fact that the boundaries circumscribing languages directly mapped onto boundaries circumscribing ethnicities. Because of this, the work being done on Chinese dialectology was crucial to their research. Chao’s methods had normalized the presumption that differences between languages – and the difference between a language and a fangyan – could be quantifiably determined. With the belief that language and ethnicity defined one another, such quantifiable methods could be wielded to define not only how languages related to, or were separate from, one another, but also how peoples related to, or were separate from, one another. The designation of local tongues as fangyan, or dialects, made their speakers scientifically and uncontestably Han, something few ethnologists disputed. This section offers two examples of how linguistic research implicated the making of ethnicity in China. The first examines scholars who researched ethnic groups in China’s southwest. Li Fang-kuei’s studies of the Tai language in Longzhou adopted new survey methodologies for the study of the languages of the ethnicities of Southwest China. By contending that the difference between language and dialects corresponded to the difference between an ethnic group or geographic variants within one ethnic community, Li’s work reinforced the boundaries between and around Han and non-Han peoples. The second example 73 74

Lam, Passion for Facts, 24–38. This is detailed in Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation.

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explores debates over the categorization of Hakka. Defined as both a Han Chinese fangyan and as a separate language, scholarship on Hakka in the early twentieth century reveals how different groups wielded linguistic date to argue for the inclusion in and exclusion of Hakka from the Han ethnic group. The practice of using one kind of survey to research ethnic languages and another for Chinese fangyan revealed the extent to which categories of ethnicity and language mutually defined one another. It buttressed the assumed boundaries of Han with scientific data. “To the West!”: Li Fang-Kuei and the Ethnographic Approach European “China hands” were a common sight in the late Qing, when men such as Joseph Edkins and Edward Parker conducted their linguistic studies. Only a decade or so later, a Chinese ethnologist was conducting similar fieldwork on the North American frontier. Born in Guangzhou, Li Fang-kuei (李方桂) traveled to Chicago in the 1920s, where he studied linguistics under Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. While under their tutelage, Li learned the particulars of worldwide phonologies and grammars, from ancient Germanic languages to contemporary Tibetan, Old Norse, and Lithuanian.75 He also became familiar with how Sapir and Bloomfield conducted fieldwork. He put this knowledge to use in Northern California while completing his thesis, where he introduced the Mattole language to ethnologists, a language that they had deemed extinct.76 He returned to China soon after the beginning of KMT rule. He was immediately contacted by Cai Yuanpei and Yuen Ren Chao, both of whom expressed enthusiasm about including Li in their coterie. Yet Li’s interests never centered on the languages of the Han Chinese heartland. While he was moderately familiar with fangyan survey methodology, having been introduced to Karlgren’s work by Sapir, he maintained throughout his life that he only had a very shallow understanding of Hanyu.77 Indeed, upon reflection, he laughed, “I don’t want to study Chinese dialects. There’s one person, that’s enough.”78 He continued his work on the ethnic minority languages of the southwestern provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan. From surveys he conducted 75

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For information about Li Fang-kuei’s life, see Li Fang-kuei, Interviews by Ning-Ping Chan and Randy La Polla, Linguistics East and West: American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, 1986). Li Fang-kuei, Mattole: An Athabaskan Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930). Li Fang-kuei, Linguistics East and West, 12. Li Fang-kuei, Linguistics East and West, 32.

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in the autumn of 1935 in Nanning, Wuming, and Longzhou in Guangxi Province, he outlined the phonetic systems of two different dialects of the Tong language, a branch of the Tai language family. Li’s work clearly shows the influence of Edward Sapir. Never one for prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach to research, Sapir taught through example. He began his own research of Native Americans by asking his informant how to say key words and phrases.79 Some of these were derived from a predetermined list, but often his lists were edited in the moment as he allowed his informants’ answers to guide his interviews. The method was rooted in Sapir’s insistence that he encountered a new language having little familiarity with its vocabulary or grammatical patterns – he tried not to initiate the survey with any preconceived notions. Sapir’s free-formed approach stood in sharp contrast to the standardized survey forms championed by Yuen Ren Chao. In part, this was because Sapir aimed not as much to draw phonological distinctions as to “unravel cultural sequences.”80 Among his many subjects of study, language was central: he believed that lexicographical parallels would allow scholars to best reconstruct individual cultures as well as the genealogical connections among them.81 Li’s first study was on the Tai languages of Longzhou, a city on the border of Vietnam. Soon after he finished that project, he began surveying north of Longzhou in Wuming. He bestowed upon the two regions the categories of “Northern Tai dialects” and “Southern Tai dialects,” respectively, together granting him a solid foundation for discussing the breadth of the Tai languages. Both surveys were divided into two parts: vocabulary and phonology. The phonological surveys were designed to highlight distinctions among dialects, whereas vocabulary surveys were used to draw distinctions among languages. These two separate surveys were necessary, he claimed, because “several attempts have been made to classify these dialects, principally on the basis of phonology, but none have been quite successful . . .. If classification based upon lexicographical elements is supported by phonological criteria, or vice versa, it would have more validity.”82 Yet ultimately, Li made this distinction because when he studied these languages based on their 79

80 81

82

Sapir himself confirms this in his own writings. Edward Sapir, “Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method,” in David Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 460. Sapir, “Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture,” 432. For a summary of the Franz Boas school of anthropology, and Sapir’s interpretation of it, see Douglas Cole and Alex Long, “The Boasian Anthropological Survey Tradition: The Role of Franz Boas in North American Anthropological Surveys,” in Edward Carlos Carter, ed., Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 225–249. Li Fang-kuei, “Classification by Vocabulary: The Tai Dialects,” Anthropological Linguistics 1, no. 2 (1959), 15–16.

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phonology alone, the boundaries he presumed existed proved difficult to highlight. In a sense, phonological data could imply that these languages were not independent languages. This implies a reciprocal relationship: not only did language note ethnicity, but to some extent, ethnicity also denoted language.83 Though never stated outright, his work implied that what made a dialect a dialect, and a language a language, was the self-identification of those who spoke it more so than differences among language structures. This was further emphasized by the study’s nonlinguistic material. Of the 290 pages of The Vernacular Language of Longzhou, only the first thirty emphasized phonological structure.84 The remaining sections recounted several folk stories, songs, and specialized vocabulary, complete with international phonetic notation and English translation. These folksongs, Li explained, revealed marriage practices, burial practices, and other folk traditions. Li organized his work on the Mak language and Wuming dialect of the Tai language, published in the 1940s and 1950s respectively, in a similar fashion; indeed, for the Wuming dialect, Li published an entirely separate volume on folksongs.85 This constructed distinction between Tai dialects and Han dialects was further entrenched through a separate study on Han loanwords in the Tai languages.86 Li was somewhat circumspect about the study’s conclusions; it was difficult to know when certain words were borrowed, and nearly impossible to know which words were borrowed from Guanhua and which from other Hanyu fangyan. Nevertheless, this particular aspect of his work, unique among studies of Chinese ethnic minority languages, highlights how Li imagined both the groups he studied and the Chinese nation as a whole. He stated specifically in his article that Tai was “related to Chinese,” and as such, a study of loanwords could illuminate both ancient Tai and ancient Chinese. At the same time, however, he suggested caution – since the Tai languages were related to Chinese, loanwords could easily be mistaken for cognates. Despite this stated complexity, the difficult-to-draw distinctions among languages seemed to have done little to dissuade him of the already presumed categories. After completing his studies in Guangxi, Li fled the Japanese invasion and went to the United States. He returned to China during the war, where he completed more fieldwork of non-Han ethnic languages in KMT-occupied 83 84 85 86

Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation. Li Fang-kuei, Longzhou tuyu (The vernacular language of Longzhou) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1940). Li Fang-kuei, Wuming tuyu (The Tai dialect of Wuming) (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1956). Li Fang-kuei, “Some Old Chinese Loan Words in the Tai Languages,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 8, no. 3/4 (March, 1945), 333.

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areas such as Yunnan. He then returned to the United States, where he remained until his death over thirty years later. Though he left China before 1949, his research was highly influential to the new state, and indeed, helped to set the stage for the ethnic classification survey supported by the Communist Party in 1953. The example of non-Han linguistic research helps to highlight how the creation of these methodologies was as much driven by cultural and political considerations as it was by these scholars’ commitment to scientific, quantitative research. Despite the fact that the Tai languages of Longzhou exhibited phonological similarities with Chinese fangyan in the region, researchers consistently regarded overlapping vocabulary as loanwords. Such a framework confirmed the identities – sometimes self-defined and other times imposed – of their speakers.87 It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: languages denoted ethnic categories, which ultimately solidified the very non-Han nature of the spoken languages themselves. Defining the Han Ethnicity: The Case of Hakka Generally speaking, ethnologists such as Li Fang-kuei did little to challenge commonly accepted boundaries around ethnicities.88 Yet there was one group where the line between ethnicity (minzu) and regional expressions of Han-ness became blurred: the Hakka. A group that lives throughout South China, the Hakka today have large populations in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Though they originally migrated south from the Yellow River Plain sometime during the Song or Yuan dynasties, it was not until the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) that the term “Hakka,” meaning “guest people,” emerged in written documents.89 In these records, Hakka were often treated as outsiders – hostile groups with whom locals fought for resources and opportunities – and 87

88 89

Chao, Zhongxiang fangyan ji; Yuen Ren Chao, Ding Shengshu, Yang Shifeng, et al., Hubei fangyan diaocha baogao (A report on a survey of Hubei fangyan) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1948). The creation of a system to classify China’s ethnic minorities is best detailed in Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation. To the best of my knowledge, the first historian to make the case for this migration based upon genealogical evidence is Luo Xianglin, whose work will be discussed at length later in this section. For scholarship on Hakka migration and a critical analysis of Luo’s work, see Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Nicole Constable, “What Does it Mean to Be Hakka,” in Nicole Constable, ed., Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 3–35; Ethan Christofferson, Negotiating Identity: Exploring Tensions between Being Hakka and Being Christian in Northwestern Taiwan (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publishing, 2012), 11–13. For summaries of debates about Hakka and Chinese identity today, see Jessica Leo, Global Hakka: Hakka Identity in the Remaking (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 116–144.

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referred to as non-Han barbarians.90 This emphasis on difference was further entrenched by Western missionaries who, prejudiced by consistent rumors from local Chinese about the strange customs of the Hakka and the Hakkaled Taiping Rebellion, categorized the Hakka as a “peculiar race or tribe” distinct from Chinese.91 By the final years of the Qing, questions of ethnic difference gained resonance as popular anger against the dynasty took on a racial tint (see Chapter 2).92 Revolutionaries claimed that the new Chinese nation had to be based upon pure, Han lineages. Within these debates about the nature of Han, Hakka found their own identities being thrust into controversy. In 1907, one native-place textbook published by the Guangdong Preservation Society created a chart that identified the Hakka as a “race coming from the outside” (wailai zhu zhong 外來諸種) along with the Yao, Li, Liao, Hoklo, and Dan.93 The author, Huang Jie (黃節), claimed his chart of Guangdong’s ethnicities educated students and bolstered local pride. Rebellions in the mid-nineteenth century had ravaged the region; from the Taipings led by the Hakka Hong Xiuquan to the Hakka-Punti clan wars, Huang purported that the “Hakka bandits” from the outside had been responsible for much of the violence the local Cantonese had endured.94 Huang Jie’s textbook was not the only text that portrayed Hakka as dangerous outsiders. Several local gazetteers similarly cited “Hakka bandits” as a consistent threat to the region’s locals.95 But Huang was one of the first to appeal to racial difference. The Guangdong Preservation Society’s tacit approval of this portrait of Hakka locals caused an uproar among Hakka elites. These men fought information with information, creating alternative narratives to counter those casting doubt on the purity of their ethnic origins.96 90

91 92 93 94

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Sow-Theng Leong argues that Hakka in the High Qing often embraced these claims of difference. They crowed of how they did not bind their feet, for example, or lived in unique structures called tulou (土楼), round fortresses ideal for guarding against roaming bandits. Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History, 69–80. Nicole Constable, Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 23–25. Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture,” 47–84. Huang Huiwen, Guangdong xiangtushi jiaokeshu (Guangdong native-place history textbook), n.p., n.d. This episode was outlined by May-bo Ching, in which she argues that this was the beginning of an ethnic consciousness among Cantonese in the late Qing. See May-bo Ching, “Classifying Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Late-Qing Native-Place Textbooks and Gazetteers,” in Tze-ki Hon and Rob Culp, eds., The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 69; Zhang Yingbin, “Kejia yanjiu de qiyuan: Cong Songxiang, Huang Zunxuan dao Luo Xianglin” (The origins of Hakka studies: From Song Xiang and Huang Zunxuan to Luo Xianglin), Jiaying xueyuan bao (Journal of Jiaying University) 25, no. 5 (October, 2010), 5–10. Ching, “Classifying Peoples,” 70–71. 96 Ching, “Classifying Peoples,” 74–75.

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Hakka intellectuals attacked claims of their own foreignness from multiple angles, but their defenses centered on a common theme: Hakka were not only Han Chinese, but more Chinese than the very Cantonese locals who saw them as outsiders. Some offered anecdotal evidence that Hakka were more hardworking and genial than local Cantonese. Others, however, took a more genealogical approach, arguing that history and migration, not current cultural practices, definitively proved Hakka’s Han-ness. The Hakka, these works claimed, originally migrated from Henan centuries prior, allowing them to lay claim to roots in the Han Chinese heartland that local Cantonese could not.97 To prove historical genealogies, many of these scholars looked to Zhang Binglin’s Xin fangyan. A methodology that effectively established the genealogy of the Han ethnicity through etymology could, similarly, demonstrate Hakka affinity to it. The first to draw upon Zhang’s framework to make the case for Hakka’s belonging to the Han ethnicity was Luo Huiyun (羅翽雲), whose 1922 work Hakka dialect (Ke fangyan 客方言) outlined an etymology of Hakka vocabulary.98 Through several hundred pages of data, Luo demonstrated relationships between contemporary Hakka and rimes recorded in the Song dynasty Guangyun, and, beyond that, showed that those relationships were closer than what could be established between older texts and the Yue fangyan. In other words, just as Zhang had attempted to do with Xin fangyan, so too did Luo use xiaoxue methods to show that Hakka were ethnically Han. Zhang himself wrote an introduction to Luo’s volume: Those who are Hakka have lived in the Yue region for a long time. Those who live in Guangdong who speak a different language are often called ‘Hakka.’ [The people of Guangdong] are narrow minded and look down upon them, saying that [the Hakka] are outsiders or barbarians, and they broadcast this in their history books.99

The fight to prove Hakka were ethnically Han was continued ten years later by Luo Xianglin (羅香林). Born in Guangdong in 1906, Luo Xianglin followed the path of many of the scholars whose biographies are detailed in these pages – first to Beijing where he taught literature at Qinghua University through the 1920s, and then in the 1930s became a fellow at the Institute of History and Philology. Over the course of his life, Luo Xianglin wrote nearly forty books about Hakka heritage, making him one of the foremost historians of Hakka people to this day. 97 98 99

One of the earliest examples was Zou Lu, Hanzu kefu shi (A history of the Hakka and Hokkien of the Han ethnicity) (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, n.d.) Luo Huiyun, Ke fangyan (Hakka dialect), Vol. 1 (Guangzhou: Guoli Zhongshan Daxue Guoxueyuan congshu), 1922. Luo Huiyun, Ke fangyan, 1.

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Like Luo Huiyun before him, Luo Xianglin’s first book sought to objectively place Hakka under the umbrella of Han ethnicity. A multifaceted work, it was a carefully researched anthology of Hakka migration patterns, genealogies, customs, and language. In the ten years between the publication of these two men’s works, the May Fourth movement can be deeply felt: Luo Xianglin insisted that any claims concerning Hakka ethnicity needed to be supported by scientific methods. He offered praise to those scholars who responded to Huang Jie’s claims against Hakka’s kinship with the Han ethnicity, lauding that, because of their work, it was “generally accepted”100 that the Hakka were a branch of the Han, the superior ethnicity among the yellow races of the world.101 But in the same breath, he criticized their lack of intellectual rigor – particularly when it came to studies of Hakka fangyan. “Naturally, we cannot efface the value of their methods and the examples found from their methods. But if we speak from a strict standard, these scholars who spoke of fangyan, generally speaking they did not do fieldwork, and their materials were not sufficient, their concepts were not well defined . . . and they therefore could not find fangyan’s systematic location.”102 Luo Xianglin, however, did not believe that his claims about Hakka could be proven entirely through methods gleaned from outside China – it rested upon a historical affinity between Hakka and an imagined Chinese antiquity. In his section on language, therefore, Luo employed methodologies from both Western linguistics and Chinese philology to offer a complex, multidimensional picture of the Hakka fangyan. This hybrid approach matched his two goals: the former offered Luo a scientific description of phonology that could be compared with other Han fangyan, while the latter provided evidence of Hakka’s connection to China’s ancient texts. Even his choice of survey location reveals this underlying goal: he situated his research in Xingning, a majority-Hakka location that had been home to Hakka lineages since at least the Song dynasty.103 100

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This consensus was born out of the “authority of empirical facts” he claimed. Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun (An introduction to Hakka research). Reprint. (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 14. Luo Xianglin’s commitment to science was further emphasized by the foreword written by philosopher Wu Kang (吴康). In his first sentence, he introduces us to Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who divided all of humankind into four races: white, red, yellow, and black. Wu then divided the yellow race into several branches. The most superior of these was the Han, a branch of the Mongolian racial group, whose primary descendent was the mythical Yu, the founder of the Xia dynasty. Over centuries, these descendents of Yu who traveled south to Fujian and Guangdong, such as the Hakka and the Hoklo, have preserved the language and customs of their ancestors from the Han heartland. Interestingly, Luo Xianglin uses the term “Hakka language” and “Hakka fangyan” interchangeably. Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun, 123. Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun, 126.

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Luo Xianglin was quite aware of the fangyan research being conducted in China at the time. He had affiliation with Sun Yat-sen University and cited China’s premier dialectologists by name. His footnotes were extensive, representing the global breadth of his reading on the topic of fangyan studies, Cantonese linguistics, and Hakka studies. Luo notably demonstrates the influence of Yuen Ren Chao. Their phonology charts look remarkably similar, with sample characters whose phonologies were noted with several different annotations and metrics for comparison. With his own goals in mind, Luo Xianglin made edits to Chao’s charts so as to better outline historical lineages between Han languages and Hakka fangyan. For instance, Luo made a point to organize his charts by phonological categories from the Guangyun and the Song dynasty’s Yunjing (韻鏡). Luo also provided each phoneme in several scripts: the International Phonetic Alphabet, what he called the “most accurate”; fanqie categorizations, which highlighted Hakka’s consonance with ancient phonological categories; Gwoyeu Romatzyh; and zhuyin zimu. Finally, his charts noted

Type of rhyme

Simple-rhyme type Open mouthed (開口)

International Phonetic Alphabet

o

Zhuyin zimu

ㄛ

Gwoyeu Romatzh

o

Yin/yang tone distinction

Yin tone (陰聲)

Four tones for each character in this rhyme category

Substance of each rhyme type

Ping (平)

哥

Shang (上)

果

Qu (去)

過

Ru (入)

各 In the Guangyun, of the characters that belong in the categories of 戈, 哿, 果, 箇, in Hakka language, 70–80% of them are also in those categories. Similarly, those characters in the category of 媧緺蝸, also belong in those categories in the Hakka language.

Figure 3.4 A recreation of Luo Xianglin’s Hakka finals. Source: Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun, 138.

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how quantifiably similar Hakka phonologies were to the phonologies recorded in the Guangyun, Yunjing, and Erya. For example, the “open-mouth” class of characters 哥果過各 (pronounced ge, guo, guo, and ge in contemporary Mandarin, respectively see sample chart recreated in Figure 3.4), Luo provided the “class of phonologies” according to the Shuowen jiezi, the International Phonetic Alphabet, zhuyin zimu, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and finally, an explanation of how these characters were pronounced in the Guangyun. To inject his charts with further accuracy and clarification, he drew his own sketch of the places of articulation for the Hakka fangyan, claiming that this erased any potential ambiguity in the four different spellings he offered (see Figure 3.5). Luo’s hybrid methodology reveals the unique nature of the claims for which he was mobilizing his data. Luo’s task was not only to provide a phonology of the Hakka fangyan, but also to prove its affinity to Han-ness. Xiaoxue methods made for a diachronic argument, highlighting the historical relationships between various Hanyu fangyan and their ancient phonologies. Chao’s contemporary fangyan survey, on the other hand,

Figure 3.5 An abbreviated sketch of the place of articulations in the Hakka language. Source: Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun, 134.

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provided the accuracy and definition that buttressed his claims of scientific rigor. Today, few argue against Hakka’s inclusion in the Han ethnicity. Beyond Hakka scholars, the governments of the PRC and the ROC do not recognize them as an ethnic minority, and their language is officially deemed a Hanyu fangyan. Many scholars today attribute this definitive categorization to Luo Xianglin and his decades of diligent scholarship. Yet Luo’s first labor of love – this thorough testament of Hakka’s relationship to the nation’s imagined ancient history – represents how different treatments of fangyan and language in the Republican-period scholarly world inscribed and hardened boundaries between the Han ethnic group and others living within China’s borders. Luo knew that one of the most definitive ways to ensure ethnic belonging was to prove linguistic affiliation, past and present. With quantifiable phonological genealogies, and clear relationships to ancient texts considered central to Han ethnic identity, Luo insured the inclusion of the Hakka in China’s dominant ethnic group. Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to highlight three distinct approaches to the study of language in the wake of the May Fourth movement. It involved rearranging vestiges of past knowledge under a new conceptualization of truth. Tearing their gaze away from China’s past toward the present, Republican-period scholars rejected knowledge that focused solely on revealing the nation’s antiquated traditions, seeking instead to systematically know its land, people, resources, and culture. Whether they were driven by the romanticization of discovery inherent to early twentieth-century ethnography, or the shame generated by derisive Western characterizations of China as a “country without statistics,” these post-May Fourth responses to reimagining China’s language were framed both by patriotic sentiments and a fear of national decline. Fangyan became central data points for three interrelated, but ultimately distinct, academic disciplines within this new epistemological regime: folk art, linguistics, and ethnology. These disciplines respectively saw fangyan as embodying three unique features: authentic, subnational, and ethnic. For members of the Folksong Collection movement such as Liu Bannong and Zhou Zuoren, it was fangyan’s embodiment of authentic emotion that made them so valuable. For linguists such as Yuen Ren Chao, committed to forging a field of Chinese dialectology on a groundwork of scientific principles, fangyan were data that could be organized on hierarchical taxonomies, taxonomies that proved fangyan’s subordination

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to a “Chinese language.” Finally, for Chinese ethnologists, language served as the foundation for drawing boundaries around ethnic groups. Fangyan were evidence of ethnic affinity, whereas language connoted ethnic difference. It is difficult to know how much any academic study impacted everyday life. While scholars touted the significance of their work, rarely were their studies read outside of academic circles. Nevertheless, I would argue that in 1920s and 1930s China, these studies shaped what could be considered legitimate knowledge. Rhetoric that claimed fangyan represented the emotions, humor, and character of the everyday people reappeared in later debates of the 1940s and 1950s. The transformation of fangyan into phonological equations by dialectologists guided how language was taught in schools. And today, China’s ethnicities must negotiate their own identities within a classification system approved by the state – one still largely determined by the distinction between fangyan and language. Through what they privileged, what they disregarded, and what they allowed to fade into obscurity, these scholars constructed a baseline for what languages were, what they signified, and how they should be studied.

4

The People’s Language Fangyan under Communism

The language of the people is rich. It is lively and it is vivid. It reveals the realities of life. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), June 6, 1951

Introduction After their victory in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), the CCP wasted little time launching their new language policy. The very month the People’s Republic was founded, an Association of Language Reform in China (Zhongguo wenzi gaige xiehui 中国文字改革协会) was formed, which, after a name change and a brief tenure as a research committee, was renamed the Committee for Language Reform in China (Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui 中国文字改革委员会) in 1954 and brought directly under the State Council.1 Formed to provide policy makers with linguistic expertise, the Committee drew many of their members from the newly formed Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a research institute that doubled as a government agency. For three years, the Committee worked tirelessly to standardize the pronunciation, script composition, and romanization system of a new Chinese national language. A language reform retinue – a standardized oral language called Putonghua, a scaffolded approach to simplifying Chinese characters, and plans for a romanization Hanyu pinyin – were outlined in a resolution produced by a National Conference on Language Reform held in 1955 and subsequently reaffirmed through official channels and popular sources such as the People’s Daily.2 There was a notable amount of continuity between these official PRC standards and language policies or common practices under the 1 2

The Committee for Language Reform in China is one of many English translations of this committee, the other most frequent being the Committee for Script Reform in China. State Council, “Quanguo wenzi gaige huiyi jueyi” (Resolution of the meeting on language reform in China), October 23, 1955, B105-7-18-1, pages 8–9, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. A summary was also written by Hanyu pinyin’s creator Zhou Youguang, Hanzi gaige gailun (On the reform of Chinese characters) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1961).

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Republic of China. Simplified characters had their roots in earlier efforts to standardize the Chinese script. Hanyu pinyin drew upon orthographies developed in earlier decades. The basic phonetic rules and vocabulary of Putonghua differed very little from the KMT-sponsored Guoyu. CCP policy makers also drew upon their predecessors’ basic presumption about the role of standardized languages in modern societies. The CCP’s program, like that of the KMT, was framed by the belief that a national language could create a nation and mold its citizenry. But the Communists differed from their Republican forebearers in one key regard: their vision of a Chinese nation was built upon and strengthened through Marxist–Leninist principles. Ideology guided and justified policy decisions. This is not to say that ideology was static, homogeneous, or applied haphazardly. Even after the party line was set, multiple proposals for official policies, many of which stood in contradiction with one another both in terms of practical application and ideological interpretation, coexisted through the years in Yan’an and the first decade of CCP rule. Out of this messy state-building process emerged two narratives about fangyan, which interacted dialectically to offer a renewed vision of the Chinese nation under socialism. The first was promulgated by linguists who, cloistered behind closed doors, were charged with finalizing the standard language that would subsequently serve as the “common tongue” of the People’s Republic.3 These scholars were also responsible for ideologically justifying that language’s existence. Many of them translated, commented on, and interpreted scholarship from the Soviet Union, using them to illuminate China’s complex linguistic history in a way that was consonant with a Marxist worldview. These scholars found themselves at odds with other powerful voices who declared not only that there needed to be tolerance for linguistic diversity, but that that diversity was sine qua non of the national culture. Indeed, in the early years of the CCP, this celebration of heterogeneity constituted the core of their movement, setting the Communist rebels apart from the government in Nanjing. Chinese Communists in Moscow condemned the KMT language policy for its rigidness and intolerance for fangyan speakers. Left-wing artists argued that fangyan should be the primary medium for a national literature reflective of the lives and 3

On the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, see Cong Cao, “The Changing Dynamic between Science and Politics: Evolution of the Highest Academic Honor in China,” Isis 90, no. 2 (June, 1999), 298–324; Yao Shuping, Luo Wei, Li Peishan, and Zhang Wei, “Zhongguo Kexueyuan fazhanshi” (A history of the Chinese Academy of Sciences),” in Qian Linzhao and Gu Yu, eds., Zhongguo Kexueyuan (The Chinese Academy of Sciences) Vol. 1 (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 1994), 1–230.

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experiences of the masses. And performers and playwrights, entrusted with bringing the party message to rural populations, implored that only performances in fangyan could make their plays resonate. In these early years, a core thread of Communist ideology characterized a standardized language as erasing the multifaceted lived experiences of “the people,” and thus ran counter to the very ideals of a party with “the people” at its heart. The purpose of this chapter is to trace the evolving debates between these two narratives. Their conversations reveal a clear divide on how language could represent the masses. Were the masses a citizenry united through state policy, connected by a new standard Chinese language? Or were they a polyglot population united by shared ideals and experiences, defined not by the language they spoke but by their role in the socialist revolution? It seemed an unsolvable contradiction – any unified language had to, by definition, be inconsistent with what was spoken on the ground. But this did not make their conversations unproductive. Debates among and between these groups revealed a shared belief that a national language that failed to resonate with or represent its people could not embody the principles upon which the CCP stood. The task, then, was to prove how one standard language could represent the masses – and determine the contexts in which this standard language was necessary – or abandon a policy that promoted a unified language altogether. Mass Language or Language of the Masses Founded in Shanghai in 1921, the CCP was a more decentralized movement in its early years. Branches in many of China’s major cities focused on mobilizing workers in factories, while other factions, the most famous of which was spearheaded by Mao Zedong, formed in the countryside. The party’s split with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in 1927 forced urban Communists underground, while those mobilizing peasants found their followings increase. By 1935, heroic tales told of Communist leaders fleeing KMT troops on a harrowing journey from Jiangxi to Yan’an, a now legendary expedition that helped to enshrine Mao as the party’s primary leader. Once in Yan’an, the party began solidifying its priorities and ideological approach that would, theoretically, guide policy once they had the chance to rule. The party did not have an official fangyan policy in these early years, simply broadly stressing accessibility and inclusivity. Indeed, they primarily focused on script. Building upon mass literacy drives in the 1920s, many in the party’s upper ranks saw the complexity and sheer number of characters as a hindrance to development. A phonetic script would promote literacy and

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“expedite access to information” – what Ulug Kuzuoglu calls the “proletarianization” of the human mind.4 For their part, the KMT state officially patronized zhuyin fuhao as their phonetic system, a script based loosely on Chinese characters.5 But debates still swarmed, in particular from those who stressed that a romanized script was more practical in an increasingly globalized world. Zhuyin fuhao was unrecognizable outside of China, the argument went, thereby erasing the possibility that foreigners could transcribe or even learn their language. For this reason among others, support for romanization remained popular. In 1928, the KMT state officially recognized a romanization system inspired by Lin Yutang and created by Yuen Ren Chao called Gwoyeu Romatzyh (國 語羅馬字, or G. R. for short), though such support waned in favor of zhuyin fuhao within a few years.6 It was notable for its precision. Not only did it give concrete values to Guoyu morphemes and phonemes, but it also included additional letters to indicate tone (in the name Gwoyeu Romatzyh, as an example, the “e” is added to indicate the third tone, while the “h” is added to the end of the second word to indicate the fourth tone). It was, Chao claimed “just intended to be a practical system of writing,” primarily because it indicated on sight the distinct pronunciation of words that already sounded distinct to an ear trained in a tonal language.7 According to his logic, the words Shànghaˇi (上海, the Chinese city on the eastern seaboard) and Shā nghài (傷害, “to harm”) (both romanized here according to Hanyu pinyin) look nearly indistinguishable to the novice unfamiliar with diacritical markings. Writing these same words as Shanqhae and Shanghay, like his system G. R. advocated, visualized how distinct these two words might sound to a person acclimated to differentiating phonemes by pitch. While Chao admitted his system was a bit more complicated than alternate systems, it gave, in his words, “an individuality to the physiognomy of words, with which it is possible to associate meaning.”8 4

5

6

7 8

Ulug Kuzuoglu, Codes of Modernity, 145; Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Kate Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern, 23–55. Chao claims the date is 1930 here, though John DeFrancis gives a date of 1928. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 86; DeFrancis, “The Alphabetization of Chinese,” 230. For histories of zhuyin zimu, see DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform, 57–65; “Zhuyin Zimu biao,” Jiaoyu zazhi 11, no. 3 (1919), 5–6; Kaske, Politics of Language Education, 442. G. R. was officially sponsored by the KMT as an official romanization system, but was meant to be used for foreign transcriptions alone. Yuen Ren Chao (Jaw Yuanrenn). Shin Gwoyeu Liousheng Piann Kehbenn (New Gwoyeu Romatzyh Phonographic Textbook) (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, n.d.). Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 89. Yuen Ren Chao, Mandarin Primer: An Intensive Course in Spoken Chinese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 2.

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Despite KMT sponsorship of zhuyin fuhao, Chao’s system still appeared in textbooks and periodicals in China and abroad. Chao’s daughter taught it in her Chinese classes at Harvard after the Second World War.9 Yet within China, romanization was always contentious. It was, after all, disagreements over script, not pronunciations, that sparked infamous altercations, one of which involved participants hurling teacups at one another.10 The decision to do away with diacritical marks in favor of silent alphabetic graphs to indicate tones created a storm of controversy. While some attacked its practicality, others criticized the system on political terms – because it was made exclusively for the KMT’s Guoyu, it was not flexible enough to annotate other fangyan.11 The environment was ripe for alternatives. While some intellectuals continued to push for extant systems, such as Wade–Giles or the International Phonetic Alphabet, a new system, called Sin Wenz (Ladinghua xinwenzi 拉丁化新文字, or “New Latin Script”) was sold as a direct anathema to Chao’s G. R.12 Originally called Latinxua, or the “New Latinized Language,” it emerged out of the literacy campaigns in the border regions between China and the Eastern Soviet Union. Emboldened by Soviet latinization projects in the 1920s – which themselves were appropriations of the work of Turkic intellectuals to latinize all Turkic languages beginning in the late nineteenth century – Chinese Communists in Moscow proclaimed that latinization was a necessary step on the path toward socialism.13 Latinxua itself was developed by Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), who boldly brought it to the attention of the Communist Party. Its key benefit, according to its sponsors, was that it was more flexible than the “bourgeois” G. R.14 Like characters, it could be adapted to transcribe all fangyan, not just Beijing’s.15 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

Historians Lyman Van Slyke and Harold Kahn both recall learning the system when they began studying Chinese early in their careers. Unofficial interviews with both historians. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 87. Chao claimed that he does not remember other people criticizing his system, or claiming that those criticisms did not really affect him. It is impossible to know how he felt about the contentiousness of these debates, but his reticence on the subject potentially implies that it was controversial at the time. Chao, Yuen Ren Chao, Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, 86–92. Summaries of this movement can be found DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform, 87–108; Ni Haishu, Ladinghua xinwenzi yundong biannian jishi (A yearbook summary of the Latinxua Sin Wenz movement), (Beijing: Zhongguo wenmin daxue yuyan wenzi yanjiusuo, 1979); Jin Liu, Signifying the Local, 45–48. Kuzuoglu, “Codes of Modernity,” chapters 6 and 8. Qu Qiubai, Zhongguo ladinghua de zimu (Chinese Latinized script) (Moscow: KYTY chubanshe, 1929). Jing Tsu offers an alternative interpretation of the movement by tying it to a broader push to divorce Chinese language reform from a purely nationalist perspective. She argues that, like the contemporaneous romanization of Dunganese, a Sinitic language spoken by

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Once it began to make inroads in the mainland, Sin Wenz became a lightning rod for the partisan debates over the role of fangyan in a modern nation. Some linguists balked at a system that could not reflect tones, arguing that it would lead to disunity. Li Jinxi, the biographer of the National Language movement, decried the Sin Wenz movement as “meddling foreigners” who did not understand the nature of the Chinese language. On the opposing side were some of China’s most impressive literary minds. Lu Xun, for one, was a vocal advocate for Sin Wenz, and translated many of his works into the script. It also drew support from the fledgling Communist Party slowly growing its base in Yan’an. Capitalizing upon public frustration with Chiang Kai-shek’s rigid approach to unification, the progressively powerful party embarked upon a retinue of trial-and-error policies that sought to reform the country’s economy, bureaucratic structure, and culture.16 Sin Wenz adhered nicely with the Communist Party line. A language conceived by elites in the capital, entirely foreign to the masses’ experiences, could hardly be considered representative of the nation’s workers, peasants, and soldiers. As such, Mao declared that Sin Wenz would be given the same legal status as Chinese characters in official documents.17 Members of the party in Yan’an created pocket dictionaries, textbooks, and limited translations of famous foreign works. The party’s choice of Sin Wenz speaks to their attitude on fangyan; not only was oral standardization simply not a priority, they actively disdained it on ideological grounds.18 Qu Qiubai confirmed this. In addition to his endorsement of Sin Wenz, he was also one of the first to habitually use the term Putonghua, or the “common tongue.” Here, he referred not to what would become the official language of the PRC, but to the everyday modes of speech within the public sphere – at factories, shipyards, stations, and inns. It was how everyday people, traveling across the country, found common ground among their fangyan to communicate with one another without entirely abandoning their mother tongues. Standardization, according to people such as Qiubai, was the work of

16

17 18

Chinese Muslims in the Soviet Union, Latinxua Sin Wenz represents a “globalist vision” of language, forcing us to reconsider the assumed relationship between language and place. Jing Tsu, “Romanization without Rome: China’s Latin New Script and Soviet Central Asia,” in Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 321–353. Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an zuotanhui shang de jianghua” (Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art) (1942) in Mao Zedong ji (The works of Mao Zedong) Vol. 8 (Hong Kong: Jindao shiliao gongyingshe, 1975), 111–148. DeFrancis, Chinese Language, 254–255. Glen Peterson, The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China, 1949–95 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 106–107; DeFrancis, Chinese Language, 248–255.

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an overbearing bureaucratic state out of touch with the common people. Guoyu implied the rigidity of the state, not the tools of the masses. Putonghua so defined, and with it, Sin Wenz, implied flexibility, a language and script able to accommodate the everyday people’s lived experience while offering common ground for them to communicate.19 By 1942, wartime efforts had essentially halted the CCP’s cultural work – like the KMT, military survival preoccupied their efforts. Their interest in romanization would be renewed in the early 1950s, by which point the CCP was China’s ruling party. As the official state, they shifted their approach from one of inclusiveness to one of increasing intolerance for diversity, heavily promoting a new romanization system, a unified oral language, and a standard set of characters. Yet if we put aside for a moment their about-face, the CCP’s initial patronage of Sin Wenz highlights that they were once unwilling to accept the hierarchical nature between Guoyu and fangyan. Rather, as rebels, the Communists distinguished themselves by promoting a philosophy of local expression. Chinese national identity under Communism was once idealized as diverse in its manifestation, a legacy that policies of the 1950s could not immediately erase. Fangyan and National Forms At the height of a multifront war with Japan, Mao Zedong and the party leadership held a forum on arts and literature at their base in Yan’an. “Comrades!” Mao Zedong declared in 1942, “In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts.” But guns, he warned, were not enough. “We must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy.”20 Over the course of this forum, Mao emphasized that no art could be apolitical. It had to promote the right message and represent the lived experiences of the right kinds of people. Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” were a turning point in solidifying the party’s approach to artistic production. 19

20

“ Luomazi de Zhongguo wen haishi roumazi Zhongguo wen” (Romanization of the Chinese language or rottenization of the Chinese language), in Qu Qiubai wenji: Wenxue bian (Collected works of Qu Qiubai: Literary works), Vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), 229; Wei Mengke, “Putonghua yu ‘dazhongyu’” (Putonghua and “popular language”), in Ren Zhong, ed., Wenyan, baihua, dazhonghua lunzhan ji (Collected debates on classical language, vernacular, and popular language) (Shanghai: Minzhong duwu chubanshe, 1934), 57–58; Wang Dongjie, “Guanhua, Guoyu and Putonghua: Politics and ‘Proper Names’ for Standardized Language in Modern China,” Chinese Studies in History 49, no. 3 (2016), 152–174. Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an,” 116.

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Its ideas emerged out of a long, protracted debate on the nature of art and literature in a new China. The debates began in 1938. Mao gave a report to the Sixth Central Committee of the CCP in which he outlined how Marxism was to be applied in China. Marxism had to be nativized, he claimed, and become something that had a “Chinese flavor” and “Chinese style” that the everyday people of China would “love to see and hear.”21 After Mao uttered these words, the conditions he listed – Chinese flavor, Chinese style, and everyday people love to see and hear – were interpreted as applicable to not just philosophy, but also art. They became catchphrases that artists across the country picked apart, analyzed, and debated in newspapers from Xi’an to Hong Kong, and the subsequent discussion coalesced into what became henceforth known as the “national forms” debate. At its heart, the debate was concerned with defining a truly modern, and representatively Chinese, art form. These debates described a national form as “new wine in old bottles” – a metaphor that compelled artists to draw upon styles that resonated with the masses while delivering didactic messages that would help to dissuade the masses of old thoughts, attitudes, and cultural practices. But implicit in the national forms debates was a sense that the old bottle was not really all that old. The search for national forms was aspirational; the old bottles still needed to be constructed from existing precedents.22 Which influences from outside China would not obviate the fundamental “Chinese flavor and style”? Which elements of local art forms could resonate with the masses as a whole? And which forms that the “masses love to see and hear” remained inseparable from feudalistic or backward attitudes the Communist Party and the artists sympathetic to their cause found so pernicious? As the debates unfolded, it became clear that the bottle of this metaphorical drink was language. Mao’s insistence on the nativization of foreign forms was interpreted as an implicit critique of the May Fourth definition of baihua, a critique that was directly articulated by Huang Sheng (黄绳), a leftist scholar in Hong Kong. Huang asserted that when the May Fourth movement discredited the elite, “feudal” artistic forms of the past, they had merely replaced it with a foreign-inspired literature, 21

22

Mao Zedong, “Zhongguo gongchandang zai minzu zhanzhengzhong de diwei” (The status of the Communist Party in the national war), Xin Zhonghua bao (February 7, 1939), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 4. This speech was given in October of 1938, though it was put into print in 1939. Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 100; Jin Liu, Signifying the Local, 48–57; Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 100–103.

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a “Europeanized vernacular, the proprietary material of capitalist intellectuals that has nothing to do with the masses.”23 For him, the fact that May Fourth literature drew so heavily on these foreign models discredited it as constitutive of a Chinese national form. A national art for a modern, Communist nation needed to incorporate other models. In 1939, Xiang Linbing (向林冰), an enthusiastic early Communist recruit, offered an alternative. Drawing upon the work of Liu Bannong and the Folksong Collection movement (see Chapter 3), Xiang argued that the only artistic form with Chinese flavor and Chinese style was “folk forms” – the “central wellspring” of national forms. Xiang did not offer a concrete definition of “folk forms,” but implied that it was literature intimately connected with and reflective of oral culture.24 This position put Xiang on the defensive against those who criticized folk forms for being too local, too backward, or both. Several authors associated with the May Fourth movement asserted that “folk forms” were inseparable from the feudalistic ideas of the society from whence they came.25 Hu Feng (胡风), a close friend of Lu Xun and a fierce advocate of the globally inspired literature of the May Fourth movement, turned Xiang’s argument on its head. He wrote, “What is the living language of our nationality? That which can reflect the content, color, and rhythm of the lives of our citizens (the masses), a method that can express the feelings of the people, express the thinking of the people, a method that can understand life; in other words, it is a concrete living form that can reflect the reality of our nationality.”26 This, for Hu, was not folk forms, but Europeaninspired realism. The form’s origin was irrelevant. Hu contended that 23

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Huang Sheng, “Minzu Xingshi he yuyan wenti,” Da gong bao (December 15, 1939), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 103. Xiang Linbing, “‘Guocui zhuyi’ jianyi” (A short explanation of “nationalism essenceism”), Xin shu bao (March 27, 1940), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 163; Xiang Linbing, “Lun minzu xingshi de zhongxin yuanquan” (On the central wellspring of national forms), Da gong bao (March 24, 1940), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 157. Mao Dun, “Jiu xingshi, Minjian xingshi, yu minzu xingshi” (Old forms, folk forms, and national forms), Zhongguo wenhua (September 25, 1940), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 346 Hu Feng, “Lun minzu xingshi wenti de shiji yiyi” (On the real meaning of national forms), Benliu wenyi congkan (January 15, 1941), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 421.

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realism had proven its ability to transcend borders and capture lived experience across cultural lines. Another criticism hurled at Xiang’s “folk forms” was their lack of coherent unity. China had too many mutually unintelligible folk forms, expressed in fangyan few outside a particular region could understand. Intellectuals struggled to argue that art that incomprehensible to much of the masses could truly be massified. Huang Yaomian (黃藥眠), a writer and a party member, explained. “If we really want both massification and Sinification, we must use local vernaculars, this is clearly correct. But if authors only use their own languages, then the result is that only their neighbors can fully understand them . . . is this really massification?” A firm supporter of the “folk forms” camp, Huang suggested a third option: a vernacular prose that included some of the best of China’s regional vocabulary but excluded its European influences. “The solution is that our current popular common language (Putonghua) will be the bones, and we will relentlessly supplement it with local fangyan, and every day it will become a richer language.”27 Xiang often conceded these points. Folk forms were not yet national forms. They still included the “sediments of reactionarianism.”28 They were too local, often closer to “the individual’s flavor and individual’s style” than “Chinese flavor and style.” But Xiang persisted in his defense. To put old wine in new bottles did not implicate the inclusion of all folk forms in their entirety; rather, Xiang insisted that folk forms could be “used for their benefits and improved.” “Take that which is useful and discard that which is not” Xiang proclaimed.29 While perhaps persuading few, his thoughts forced critics to confront head-on that fangyan and folk literature had a Chinese-ness and authenticity that a strictly unified national form might struggle to capture. In his defense of the use of fangyan in literature, Huang Yaomian offered a personal anecdote. “If I take myself, for instance, although I’ve been away from home for ten years, there are many things that I cannot use Putonghua to express. This shows that my vocabulary is insufficient, I need to use fangyan and local language to express it.” For Huang, fangyan evoked the comfortable feeling of home. The absorption of fangyan into Putonghua was not simply an intellectual exercise in linguistic enrichment – it was breathing life into a national language. A national form of 27

28 29

Huang Yaomian, “Zhongguohua he dazhonghua” (Sinification and massification), Da gong bao (December 10, 1939), reprinted in Xu Naixiang, ed., Wenxue de [minzu xingshi] taolun ziliao (Materials about the literature debate on national forms) (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 84 Xiang Linbing, “Lun minzu xingshi,” 158. Xiang Linbing, “Guocui zhuyi,” 163–164.

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literature could not escape fangyan because it was there where personal experiences with the nation lived. Xiang’s argument also revealed an important contradiction. If national forms should be “what the people love to see and hear,” to what extent did this national form need to have an inherent unity? Was a national form a concrete language, or merely just a set of loosely connected, but ultimately distinct, forms? Though not explicitly stated, Xiang implied that national forms could be heterogeneous – that the process of rectification, of taking that which was useful and discarding that which was not, did not mean that one, single uniform language had to be immediately adopted. His detractors, for their part, were clear that national forms needed to be widely comprehensible. But this contradiction forced debators to recognize the impossibility of their goals. According to their own principles, any unified language would necessarily involve creating something new, and something so invented would necessarily lack the authenticity inherent in the languages used by, and representative of, the people. The tensions between heterogeneity and homogeneity, between authenticity and invention, produced two new agreed-upon assertions among CCP allies that shaped nationalism and language after 1949. The first was that the national language of a new China had to be more than simply a regional representative; it had to include and acknowledge the best of China’s regional forms. As Huang Yaomian implied, the only way a national form could resonate was if it could “absorb that which was useful” from the local experience. The second was that fangyan best reached and represented “the masses.” There were contexts for which a unified national language was not the ideal medium. These two reimagined positions would reemerge in the construction of a national language under socialism in the following decade. To see how the dialectic unfolded, we must cross the 1949 divide. The Birth of a Language Policy Governance required more than simply ideals. Before 1949, the CCP discussed the significance of fangyan to a modern nation as largely an ideological exercise. But after the Civil War, the same men expounding on the proper form for a national literature were now responsible for creating specific policies for nearly a billion people. Translating ideology into concrete action required a new approach, and few of these men had experience. And so they looked outside their borders. Only two months after the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong took his first trip overseas to visit Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. In following years,

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thousands of Soviet advisers traveled to China, offering legislative agendas, propaganda techniques, and execution methods for policies ranging from economic planning to architecture. These Soviet advisers also introduced a Marxist approach to social science. In short, Soviet advisers did not simply teach the CCP how to write policy; their theories guided academic scholarship, which in turn created knowledge that could bolster and legitimize that policy. While the marriage between academia and government clearly has its roots in earlier periods of Chinese history, the CCP state, with Soviet advisement, made that relationship more explicit.30 The CAS, for instance, was based upon a similar institution in Moscow. Yet this did not imply that CAS scholars were nothing more than party rank and file.31 For intellectuals who remained in the PRC after 1949, a state ideology offered new possibilities, and placed new constraints, on their intellectual expression, but generally speaking, this scholarship emphasized “seeking truth from facts” more than adhering to a party line. While the proverbial noose around the necks of academics would tighten as the decade wore on, it is difficult to assess the extent to which these academics considered the application of Marxist principles a noose at all.32 Such was the case for early PRC linguists. They seemed to generally accept canonization of Soviet approaches, but did not adopt them wholesale.33 As we will see, Chinese scholars adjusted Communist canon to suit both the realities of the country and the specific needs of the state. It was through this process of adaptation, interpretation, and negotiation that new conceptual frameworks were born. Language Planning in the USSR The czars of pre-Bolshevik Russia approached their polyglot empire with a strict policy of Russification. But as non-Russian national cultures 30

31

32 33

Scholars have frequently acknowledged the significance of the pre-1949 era on the CCP state. This approach, pioneered by William Kirby in his 1990 article on economic planning, upends the assumption that the KMT period “was not without heirs.” William Kirby,”Continuity and Change in Modern China: Chinese Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24 (July 1990), 121–141. Christopher Leighten, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture in 1950s China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010). Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz, “The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China: An Introduction,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 233, 255. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, 69–91.

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became more politicized in the mid-nineteenth century, discriminatory measures increased noticeably, only exacerbating the political and social schisms that threatened to rip the empire apart.34 In the waning years of the Romonov Empire, the Bolsheviks capitalized upon these dissatisfactions, openly voicing their opposition to the crackdowns on ethnic expression. Once in power, Lenin favored liberalism and autonomy for the various ethnic groups living within the USSR’s borders. The party introduced new non-Russian languages into public life; schools, art, and local administration suddenly became polyphonic.35 This, leaders believed, would facilitate the emergence of a universal “Soviet” culture, an inclusive anathema to the Russification that had characterized the old regime.36 By the 1930s, concerned by nationalist movements in Ukraine and Belarus, Stalin’s government reversed course. They purged dialect and non-Russian vocabulary from dictionaries, schools, and public speeches, and demanded that all foreign languages in Russia be romanized with Cyrillic rather than the Latin alphabet. This policy carried through the Second World War, as the Bolshevik state aggressively promulgated Russian as the national language. By the 1950s, the so-called Soviet culture they thought would emerge from their nation’s diversity, in fact, became a thinly veiled code for Russian – which, as Henry Kucera notes, “hardly deceive[d] anyone.”37 There were other considerations. The threat of separatism, though perhaps a boogeyman to us, seemed to feel real for many at the time. Leaders feared that too much freedom of cultural and ethnic expression would create a “linguistic Frankenstein” and cause their fragile empire to crack.38 But the ways the policies were enacted and justified inspire us to look beyond simple pragmatism. Language policy in Stalin’s Soviet Union were legitimized with very specific academic interpretations of linguistics, philosophies that were debated for decades until Stalin himself gave the final word in a 1950s editorial, a text still widely circulated today.39 34

35 36 37 38

39

Edward Thaden has argued that the policy of “Russification” had several iterations: the active, “To Russify” and the passive “To become Russian,” the former replacing the latter in the middle of the nineteenth century. See Edward Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 7–8. Henry Kucera, “Language Policy in the Soviet Union” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1952), 98. Kucera, “Language Policy in the Soviet Union,” 221. Kucera, “Language Policy in the Soviet Union,” 305. Jacob Orstein, “Soviet Language Policy: Theory and Practice,” South Atlantic Bulletin 24, no. 4 (March, 1959), 12; Erich Hula, “The Nationalities Policy of the Soviet Union: Theory and Practice,” Social Science Research 11, no. 2 (May, 1944), 168–201. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics (New York: International Publishers, 1951).

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Stalin’s Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics began with a negative. Language, he claimed, could not be considered as part of either a society’s base (i.e., its economic mode of production) or superstructure (i.e., political, social, religious, and philosophical structures of any society). Rather, all modes of linguistic communication were a “means of intercourse” among people spanning both class and epoch.40 This meant that speech belonged to the entirety of individualized societies – and mirrored their histories. As societies grew and developed, individual modes of communication became more widely spoken. As societies withered away, so too did their modes of speech fade, amalgamating into the languages of other, more powerful groups.41 The category of language was unique among other speech patterns due to its inextricable link to the natsia. A term taken from the writings of Marx and Engels, natsia is often translated into English as “nation.” It refers to a society that has a common language, territory, economic production, and psychology, and has reached a high stage of Marxist historical development – a standard path from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and finally, socialism.42 Not only was a common language a prerequisite for a nation; a nation was a prerequisite for a language. Their relative evolutions were concurrent, modern processes. Given that Stalin’s model limited one nation to one language, dialects (written in the Russian dialekt or plural dialekty), colloquialisms, ethnic languages, and other tongues that were not the national language had to be imagined quite differently. Modes of speech placed into these categories, Stalin claimed, were subordinate, “dominated” by the common national language.43 For Stalin, then, dialekty were not to be thought of independently; they were “offshoots of the common national language, devoid of all linguistic independence and doomed to stagnation.”44 This categorization placed them outside of the parallel developments of societies and languages – essentially, outside of history.45 Stalin’s pamphlet, widely circulated and praised, upended the work of Nikolai J. Marr, whose Japhetic theory had dominated linguistic studies in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s.46 Marr’s work began in Georgia, 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 11–14. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 22–23. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 15. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 15. This arboreal metaphor, called the Stammbaum theory, had served as the foundation for comparative linguistics since the 1860s. See Chapter 1. For explanation of how this conceptualization of “offshoot” relates to the earlier work of Yuen Ren Chao, see Tam, “Orbiting the Core.” For Marr’s biography and an explanation of his theories, Lawrence L. Thomas, The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Also

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where his dialekt surveys inspired a model of languages and protolanguage akin to Schleicher’s Stammbaum theory (see Chapter 1).47 Yet in his “New Theory of Language,” Marr proclaimed that Japhetic languages actually preceded Indo-European languages, making the languages spoken in the Caucasus the true inheritors of the oldest archaic protolanguage. Years later, he expanded his model, arguing that human languages develop alongside societies according to a prescribed path of development. Each society’s relative stage of linguistic progress was determined by its economic superstructures. And, like Marx would predict for human’s social and political organization, so too were languages speeding toward impending unification, a process Marr encouraged Moscow to artificially accelerate. The Soviet state and academy seemed to appreciate Marr’s rhetoric more than his content.48 Marr was unapologetically hostile toward what he saw as “bourgeois” science from Western Europe. In particular, he repudiated the Indo-European language framework, hegemonic in its influence, as advocating Western superiority. In one of his more colorful speeches, Marr proclaimed “Down with the Venus de Milo!” – asking her to “yield her place on the throne of culture.”49 In a sense, Marr was well received because he adapted his theories to the political climate of the time – he not only recentered the history of Western Civilization, he questioned the entire framework upon which it was built. Given Marr’s political agenda and the content of his theories, it seems as though Stalin had little to refute. Both concurred that languages streamlined and unified diachronically, and both believed that individuals and the state had a role to play in galvanizing that process. Nor did Stalin reject Marr’s emphasis on the living speech of the hoi polloi – when Marr denounced the Venus de Milo, Stalin joined the choir. Rather, Stalin contested the placement of language in the broader web of society’s economic superstructure. He dismissed the contention that language was class-dependent, declaring it a “social phenomenon which operates throughout the existence of society.”50 Stalin’s contention with Marr’s writings was thus the lack of a national framework. Marr filtered his historical theories through class relationships, dismissing national boundaries as largely unimportant.51 Because

47 48 50 51

see Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 201–223; Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 89–107. Clark, Petersburg, 212; W. K. Matthews, “The Japhetic Theory,” Slavonic and East European Review 27, no. 68 (December, 1948), 177. Clark, Petersburg, 213 49 Clark, Petersburg, 216. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 22. Matthews, “Japhetic Theory,” 173.

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Stalin so strongly associated language with the nation-state, Marr’s very definition of language was incongruous with his. Marr saw dialekty as representative of the fragmented nature of language as it related to class structure, while Stalin interpreted their diversity as the fragmentary nature of social organization. As Stalin claimed, national languages were “a higher form, to which dialekty, as lower forms, [were] subordinate.”52 In Stalin’s view, the distinction between language and dialekt was independence. The cornerstone of Stalin’s argument was that dialektspeaking communities did not, and could not, form a nation because they “borrowed” their grammatical structure and core vocabulary from their root language.53 They did not write their own histories or propel human progress, indebted as they were to the larger language-speaking communities to which they were connected for their very existence. Without independence, therefore, dialekt-speaking communities were not the primary subjects of history. And with that logic, dialekty were stripped of their own histories, enveloped into the natsia from which they drew life. Stalin in China On the other side of Eurasia, Stalin’s thoughts on language, natsia, and dialekty became canon. Translated versions of Stalin’s tract appeared almost immediately in the CAS periodical Zhongguo yuwen (中国语文 Chinese Language) followed by a flurry of articles praising, summarizing, and analyzing Stalin’s ideas.54 Yet the Soviet Union was not China, placing the burden on Chinese scholars to adapt Stalin’s theories to their local context. The first problem they tackled was translation. Stalin’s “national language” was translated as minzu yu (民族语), and natsia was equated with minzu. This choice would be fateful. Since the late Qing, the term minzu had commonly been translated as ethnicity, not an independent nation-state, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the entire discipline of ethnology had focused on China’s minzu populations. But in the 1950s PRC, the party committed to the minzu/natsia supersign, thus requiring that all minzu adhere to a certain set of characteristics. First, they needed four commonalities, as mentioned earlier: a common 52 53 54

Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 22. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 16. Liu Jin, “Tan minzu gongtongyu” (On the common language of nationalities), Zhongguo yuwen (December, 1953), 16–17; Wang Li, “Lun Hanyu biaozhunyu” (On the Chinese Standard Language), Zhongguo yuwen (August, 1954), 8. Zhongguo yuwen also published translated works by Soviet scholars, including Nikolai Iosifovich Konrad, Lun Hanyu (On Hanyu), trans. Peng Chunan (Beijing: Zhonghua chubanshe, 1954).

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territory, economy, psychology (often interpreted as culture), and language.55 These criteria on their own were not particularly unusual. But Stalin’s definition also required that minzu have a highly developed community with a capitalist mode of production, something that the minzu Li Fang-kuei surveyed in Yunnan could not claim to have attained. This, in particular, caused trouble for China’s ethnologists, who had been trained to organize ethnicities based upon a standardized list of criteria – language, customs, religion – that had little relation to Marxist metrics.56 Yet linguists were less concerned with ethnic minorities than how Stalin’s theories could be applied to Chinese languages. The most comprehensive explanation came from Soviet scholar Nikolai Iosifovich Konrad, whose “On Hanyu” (Lun Hanyu 论汉语) was published shortly after the appearance of Stalin’s work. An expert of Japanese, Konrad made no claims about the specifics of Chinese philology. Rather, the purpose of his work was to illuminate how Hanyu was a minzu yu.57 Applying Stalin’s theories, Konrad argued that the moment of historical rupture when Hanyu became a minzu yu was the May Fourth movement, when China “not only overthrew foreign imperialism, but also domestic feudalism.” That, according to Konrad, was when China emerged in a capitalist mode of production, and thus fully became a natsia.58 Once the Han became a minzu, defined by Stalin’s parameters, so then did Hanyu become its minzu yu. What of fangyan? Early PRC linguists, like those who trained them in the 1930s and 1940s, had long committed to the fangyan/dialect supersign and found that it easily annexed the Russian dialekt. And on dialekt, Stalin was clear: “anyone who believes that dialekty and jargons can develop into independent languages, that they are capable of ousting and supplanting the national language, has lost all sense of historical perspective and has abandoned the Marxist position.”59 Linguistically, however, if Stalin’s dialekty were “dependent” upon languages for their core structure and vocabulary, Chinese fangyan could not conform to such a standard. As Konrad recognized, Cantonese and Fujianese were even more dissimilar than Italian and Portuguese. Konrad found his answer later in Stalin’s tract. If the independence of a language could be determined not solely from its grammatical structure but also from the cultural and social organization of its speakers, then Chinese fangyan were suddenly far less autonomous. Since the Chinese natsia, birthed during the cultural upheaval of the May Fourth movement, never splintered into 55 56 58

For a more detailed discussion on the translation of minzu to “nationality,” see Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, 11–12. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, 73. 57 Konrad, Lun Hanyu, 8–10. Konrad, Lun Hanyu, 10. 59 Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, 16.

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tribes, Hanyu made the prescribed transition from colloquial, vernacular, or other proto-communicative types into language.60 Fangyan never made this transition, its speakers never distinct from the Han minzu in their territory, economy, and culture. Ethnic minority languages, however, threatened to undo this logic. Were Mongolian, Tibeten, or Lolo minzu yu? This was a problem not just for linguists, but for ethnologists. The same year Konrad published “On Hanyu,” teams of Chinese ethnologists began preparations to conduct a nationwide survey of the country’s non-Han populations. Like the linguists charged with applying Stalin’s theories to China, these ethnologists discovered that China’s ethnic minorities – most of whom could not viably be described as having a capitalist or socialist mode of production – did not accord with Stalin’s parameters. In response, ethnologist Lin Yaohua (林耀华) created a model that allowed for what he called “precapitalist” nationalities, or societies who had a common language, territory, and culture but had not yet reached the capitalist stage in the Marxist model of development. The key was the notion of potentiality. Lin interpreted the unifying qualities of these “pre-capitalist” nationalities as evidence of those groups’ capacities to eventually reach later stages of development. This made the possibility of a capitalist mode of production, not the existence of that mode itself, sufficient for deeming a group a minzu.61 Konrad’s “On Hanyu” predated Lin Yaohua’s lecture, but the rhetoric he employed to prove that fangyan were not minzu yu strikingly resembled Lin’s framework of potentiality. Konrad explained, “admittedly, it is true that fangyan can, sometimes, develop into independent languages, but as Stalin points out, this can only happen under one condition: before a tribe becomes a nation, the country [within which they reside] collapses.” Since history “has clearly proven that the Han natsia was formed in ancient times, it has demonstrated its supreme completeness.”62 In a word, the Han was a natsia because of its historical unity, whereas Guangdong or Fujian never developed into viable states because they never even had the potential to do so.63 Konrad’s determination of Hanyu as a minzu yu was readily accepted by CAS scholars. But Hanyu was not China’s national language, and 60 62 63

Konrad, Lun Hanyu, 14–17. 61 Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, 83. Konrad, Lun Hanyu, 10. Konrad was somewhat inconsistent when it comes to other ethnic languages, such as Mongolian. He claimed that the Mongols had reached tribe status, but the instability of the Song provided them the opportunity to develop their own language. He treated this almost as an accident of history, explaining away the current Mongolian language as a fortuitous moment for the Mongolian people. This seems to contradict his comment about the unity of the Chinese nation, but he barely dwelled upon this. Lun Hanyu, 9–10.

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Guoyu was, linguistically, a variant of Hanyu like any other. According to Stalin’s logic, the language of the natsia had to be, and always had been, more than a fangyan; it had to represent the entire people of the country and have a history of doing so. But this left the relationship between Hanyu and the standardized language of the state unsettled.64 If the national language was just a fangyan, how could it represent the natsia? On the flip side, if Hanyu was the language of the natsia, how were they to account for its lack of oral unification? Konrad offered a way forward. He explained that just as Hanyu was a minzu yu, so had it always had, and had now, a “common language.” This common language, he argued, had two parts – its oral part, and its written counterpart. Since the Yuan dynasty, Konrad argued, China has had a common tongue, Guanhua, based largely upon the language spoken in the north (Beifanghua 北方话). But the true synthesis – the moment where Hanyu, the Han minzu, and the common language coalesced – was the May Fourth movement. It was then that “modern literature,” first materialized by men such as Lu Xun and cultivated by Mao Zedong, that the common language of imperial China dissolved into a modern literary Han language. “The minzu yu of the Han people developed on the foundation of Beijing’s fangyan, but within this new stage of history, its foundation has expanded. The prevalent vocabulary and grammatical structures of other important fangyan have been embedded into [the Han minzyu]. In other words, some degree of each fangyan has amalgamated into it and given it expression.”65 Not everyone agreed with Konrad. Several members of the party feared that promulgating a standardized language would undercut the founding policies of the party in Yan’an, which celebrated Qu Qiubai’s conceptualization of multitudinous “common languages.” Young scholar Zhou Zumo (周祖谟), however, explained why these critiques were wrong. Putonghua defined as Qu did, he wrote, had no standard pronunciation. “If we want to make Putonghua the common tongue,” he wrote, “then which tongue will serve as the basis for pronunciation? We must not forget the significance of Stalin’s ‘oral language’ (yousheng yuyan 有声语言); we cannot forget the regularization of a standard language.”66 According to 64

65 66

For information on the how the Committee imagined this problem at its founding, see “Zai Zhongguo wenzi gaige yanjiu weiyuanhui chengli hui de jianghua” (Speech at the founding meeting of the Committee on language reform research in China), in Wu Yuzhang, ed., Wenzi gaige wenji (Collection of documents on language reform) (Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin Daxue chubanshe, 1978), 89–90. Konrad, Lun Hanyu, 32. Zhou Zumo, “Genju Sidalin de xueshuo lun Hanyu biaozhunyu he fangyan wenti” (The problem of Chinese standard language and dialect according to Stalin’s theories), Zhongguo yuwen (March, 1954), 21.

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Stalin, Zhou wrote, standard national languages had “base fangyan” that were “not exactly the same” as the language itself. Rather, standard national languages absorbed vocabulary, sounds, and elements from a variety of fangyan: “A standard language is richer than any fangyan, its level of refinement, its normative nature, is entirely different from fangyan.”67 Fangyan, on the other hand, will always “lose their independence and be absorbed into language, and ultimately, disappear.”68 While their vocabulary made the standard language richer, their phonologies, lacking independence, were destined to fade away. Another contributor to Zhongguo yuwen, Shao Rongfen (邵荣芬), put the final nail in the coffin for Qu Qiubai’s linguistic potpourri. In an article titled “The formative process of unified languages of nationalities (民族语 minzu yu),” he drew upon Stalin’s concept of independence. Bestowing languages an almost anthropomorphic quality, Shao maintained that the key difference between a national language (minzu yu) and a fangyan was struggle. His logic is worth quoting at length: As societies struggled to develop from feudalism to capitalism, from tribe to nation, so too did the languages of nationalities struggle. It was through the process first of struggle, then of amalgamation, that languages became the communicative tools of a modern nation. This cannot be said of fangyan. Fangyan absolutely cannot produce anything similar to the type of differences we see among languages of nationalities. [Their] minute differences will inevitably be integrated into the unifying nature of the language itself or its race, economy, and politics.69

For Shao, phonetic differences among fangyan, downplayed here as “minute,” mattered little; rather, what was important were differences among the social organization of speakers. He imagined languages behaving like the populations that spoke them, and as these populations modernized, their languages either amalgamated or disintegrated. Fangyan, on the other hand, never struggled. They neither struggled to separate nor struggled to unify. Within this social-Darwinistic framework, to promote fangyan to the status of language was to fight against natural historical processes. “Now that we know the rules by which fangyan develop . . . we can only follow or promote this rule, we cannot violate or destroy this rule.”70 Soon, the voices of those who endorsed a more flexible notion of the “common language” faded away. Other Chinese scholars followed suit, proclaiming 67 68 69 70

Zhou Zumo, “Genju Sidalin de xueshuo lun Hanyu biaozhunyu he fangyan wenti,” 20. Zhou Zumo, “Genju Sidalin de xueshuo lun Hanyu biaozhunyu he fangyan wenti,” 22. Shao Rongfen, “Tongyi minzu yu de xingcheng guocheng” (The formative process of unified languages of nationalities), Zhongguo yuwen (September, 1952), 20–21. Shao, “Tongyi minzu yu,” 21.

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that a unified national language was the product of historical progress, and that its absorption of fangyan was both natural and beneficial to the national language itself. As fangyan melted into the languages from which they stemmed, their vocabulary would similarly fuse with the national language, leading to a more fruitful mode of communication. Armed with their interpretations of Stalin’s theories on language and nation, CAS scholars realigned the framework within which scholarly research was conducted and language policy was crafted. They were bound by the idea that language and natsia – both as a political entity and as an ethnic one – mutually defined one another: for one to exist, the other must accompany it. Similarly, as these scholars equated languages with human communities, the national community was placed on a higher taxonomical order than localities. This taxonomy was not only hierarchical but diachronic. Historical trajectories were streamlined onto a singular path, and those communities lower on the taxonomic order were left absent from history altogether. Shao’s interpretation of Marxism thus allegorized fangyan as relics of China’s feudalistic past – remnants of a bygone era. Like Joseph Levenson claimed in his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, the end of China’s dynastic system meant that China’s past was placed in a curio case, to be looked upon with a removed and objective gaze. Confucianism’s legacies, and with it the philosophical foundation of traditional China, were relegated to a museum, preserved for the sake of constructing a national past. Fangyan were committed to a similar space, no more alive than the stuffed figurines of diaramas, facsimiles of ecosystems long extinct.71 They were stagnant vestiges of history that the modern nation left behind in its march toward progress. There would never be a full-throated proclamation from the PRC state or its academic allies that Hanyu and the national language were exactly the same thing. But Shao Rongfen had provided them an important ambiguity: the slippage between natsia, state, and ethnicity had allowed them to make the claim that linguistic standardization of Hanyu was simply a natural process of history. He did not erase the distinction between Hanyu and standard national language; he simply made that distinction unimportant. Thus people such as Shao ideologically justified Putonghua’s metamorphosis from the everyday language people spoke, as Qu Qubai had so described, into a standard national language that differed little from the KMT’s Guoyu. This gave CAS scholars the groundwork they needed. In the years 1952–1954, those in charge of creating a standard pronunciation 71

Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate.

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for this newly defined Putonghua met to finalize the language’s phonology. The linguists involved sporadically published their work in Zhongguo yuwen, explaining how Putonghua accommodated characters with more than one potential pronunciation or characterless vocabulary. The plans for the rollout of a new standard – Putonghua one of three key components – were formally announced in October of 1955, first by a report by the Minister of Education, then by an academic conference held by CAS the week after.72 The committee’s attention was subsequently directed to the practical work of promulgation. The following year, several government organs issued directives outlining the roles and responsibilities of state and local agencies in ensuring that Putonghua became the nation’s common language.73 A particular emphasis was placed on training teachers and military personnel, many of whom were given instruction through “freetime” or night classes. These classes had a dual purpose – to teach Putonghua’s pronunciation, syntax, and grammar, and to prepare future instructors to reinforce the language’s significance to the new nation. Pronunciation drills were paired with talking points, giving teachers the tools to correct both tones and the misguided concerns of their students. On fangyan, the party line was mixed. Official materials and propaganda instructed new teachers to emphasize that Putonghua promulgation was not meant to be at fangyan’s expense. “To promulgate Putonghua does not mean the extermination of fangyan,” wrote linguist Wang Li (王 力) in Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) in 1956, a refrain he would repeat in public speeches, teaching manuals, and academic journals.74 “When 72 73

74

Quanguo wenzi gaige huiyi jianyi (A proposal from the Committee for Language Reform in China), October 23, 1955, B105-7-18, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Zhou Enlai, Guowuyuan guanyu tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi; Jiaoyubu (Ministry of Education), “Guanyu zai zhongxiaoxue he geji shifan xuexiao dali tuiguang Putonghua zhishi” (A directive on the energetic promulgation of Putonghua in all primary, secondary, and normal schools), November 17, 1955, B105-7-18, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Gaodeng Jiaoyubu, Jiaoyubu (Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Education), “Guanyu zai gaodeng xuexiao he zhongdeng zhuanyu xuexiao tuiguang Putonghua de lianhe tongzhi (Notice on the the promulgation of Putonghua in higher education and specialized secondary education schools), May 15, 1956, B105-7-18-11, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Jiaotongbu (Ministry of Transportation), “Guanyu tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi” (On the promulgation of Putonghua), B1057-18-16, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Wang Li, “Lun tuiguang Putonghua” (On the promulgation of Putonghua), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), February 13, 1956. See also Wang Li, Zenyang Tuiguang Putonghua; Wang Li, Guangdongren Zenyan. Janet Chen also discussed this policy in a conference presentation on her upcoming work The Sounds of Mandarin: Janet Chen, “Please Don’t Laugh: Learning to Speak a ‘Common Language’ in 1950s China,” “Knowledge in Motion: Global Circuits, Evolving Mediascapes and New Pedagogy in Twentieth Century China” (presentation, International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) 11, Leiden, the Netherlands, July 18, 2019).

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fangyan finally dissipates into our minzu’s common language, that will be one or two hundred years from now; those who love their fangyan needn’t worry. All that is required now is that members of the Han speak a second language besides their native tongue, and that is Putonghua.”75 But other actions belie such a full-throated defense of a multilingual socialist China. Central government directives, when applied, often had a chilling effect, diminishing the significance of fangyan in everyday society rather than promoting or protecting them. One of the clearest examples of the party’s Janus-faced approach to fangyan was a state-sponsored nationwide fangyan survey. Part of the October 1955 directive from the Committee for Language Reform in China, each province was required to participate in a nationwide fangyan survey, the purpose of which was to “facilitate the learning of Putonghua for each fangyan region” by addressing policy makers’ lacuna of knowledge about on-the-ground oral realities.76 In the summer of 1957, scholars descended on the countryside to record the local language of each township, village, and district. Within the year, the data they collected was organized into easy-to-understand handbooks, which were quickly distributed to local elementary school teachers, supervisors, and government bureaucrats with the expectation that it would aid their Putonghua promulgation efforts. On its face, a national fangyan survey does not seem contradictory to the party’s stated commitment to a multilingual China. But a close examination of the survey’s methodology and the application of the survey’s data in the classroom makes clear that it was not designed for academic pursuits alone. Rather, it was meant to facilitate the promulgation of Putonghua at fangyan’s expense, expediting a vision of China’s linguistic future that was remarkably consistent with the Stalinist ideals outlined in the previous section. Yet this survey also granted fangyan a new significance beyond simply disposable “variants” of the nation’s common tongue. By studying fangyan not on their own terms, but in the context of Putonghua promulgation, these linguists, bureaucrats, and educators inadvertently framed fangyan as obstacles to nation-building goals. In a word, fangyan became little more than problems to be solved. 75 76

Wang Li, “Lun tuiguang Putonghua.” This was not the first time the Chinese central government had proposed such a database for the purposes of language reform. The KMT government, in an eight-part plan to promulgate Guoyu, planned a systematic survey of China’s dialects in 1948. Guangdongsheng tuixing Guoyu jiaoyu shishi jihua (An educational implementation plan for the promulgation of Guoyu in Guangdong Province), attached to Guangzhoushi zhengfu jiaoyuju xunling, Jiao si yi zi di wubaqiqi hao (An order from the Guangzhou Municipal Government’s Education Bureau, Education Bureau four, second notice, number 5877), May 22, 1947, Guangzhou Municipal Archives.

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Creating a Database Once the nationwide fangyan survey was officially announced, the rank and file responded quickly. That year, the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with the Ministry of Higher Education, adopted the Committee’s recommendations and issued joint instructions for a nationwide fangyan survey (quanguo fangyan diaocha全国方言调查).77 In 1956–1957, universities and normal schools in each province, overseen by each province’s education department, were instructed to recruit scholars to collect data on the fangyan spoken in each county or municipality within their province’s borders.78 These institutes looked to their Chinese departments for researchers. The early 1950s saw widespread restructuring as universities discarded disciplines seen as too “bourgeois,” while privileging disciplines whose methods and inquiries accorded with the party’s ideological shift. Some disciplines were abolished altogether, but the field of linguistics saw its ranks swell. Chinese language departments nationwide divided their departments into two specialties, literature and linguistics,79 and those specializing in linguistics received training in a survey methodology that closely resembled that of Yuen Ren Chao.80 Universities also began widely recruiting faculty to teach these methods, many of whom had their start working with former members of the IHP. In 1954, the Department of Linguistics at Beijing University facilitated the transfer of several of these academics, including famous classical linguist Wang Li, to universities throughout the country. With this groundwork in place, in 1957 departments began preparing their fresh graduates to participate in the nationwide survey, fieldwork for which they were expected to complete by the year’s end.81 After returning from the field, researchers were subsequently responsible for compiling a compendium of the key pronunciation differences between their subject fangyan and Putonghua. Their formula for pronunciation differences were then to be published in concise “language study handbooks” (xuehua

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Gaodeng jiaoyubu, Jiaoyubu (Ministry of Higher Education, Ministry of Education), Guanyu Hanyu fangyan diaocha de lianhe zhishi (Joint directive on the Chinese dialect survey), March 30, 1956, B105-7-298-1, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Gaodeng jiaoyubu, Jiaoyubu, Guanyu Hanyu fangyan diaocha de lianhe zhishi. One such university was Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), where Wang Li founded one of the first departments of linguistics in China. Gaodeng jiaoyubu, Jiaoyubu, Guanyu Hanyu fangyan diaocha de lianhe zhishi. According to official records, most were said to have completed their work within six months of the deadline; meetings and notes in the archives imply otherwise. “Quanguo Hanyu fangyan chubu pucha jiben wanzheng” (Nationwide Chinese dialect preliminary survey is basically completed), Zhongguo yuwen 10 (1959), 507.

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shouce 学话手册), intended for use by language teachers in each relative fangyan region. This was no ordinary research project; it was exceptional in its purpose and scope. First, its comprehensiveness meant that areas of the country previously neglected in dialectological research were included in its informational universe. The survey embraced the indigenous knowledge of tucked away villages and towns, expanding both the breadth of valuable information and the individuals included in its construction. Similarly, while it would be impossible to draw generalizations about how research was conducted in 1950s China, the event itself represented a significant moment in which those ideological frameworks developed by CAS linguists were put into widespread use. As for the researchers themselves, they were under no illusions about the project’s goals. They knew that this was not knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Participants nonchalantly described to me why they joined the project: they were young and searching for opportunity, and the survey provided full funding. Some actively wanted to help the state promulgate Putonghua.82 Yet despite the fact that this survey was baldly political, its conclusions became a database of knowledge upon which researchers today still rely. The survey’s abnormality was immaterial. Its sheer magnitude ensured that it would be enshrined in the scholarly canon. Life in the Field Researchers conducting the 1957 survey had little academic freedom to design their own methods, set their own schedules, or select personnel. From start to finish, the Committee for Language Reform in China dictated the standard to which researchers across the country would adhere. After researchers completed training either at a university or a study course organized by CAS, universities assigned teams and sent the researchers into the field. According to their standardized timetables, they spent several days collecting data and several more organizing and proofreading them, after which they prepared their findings for publication.83 In the field, local 82

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This was discussed in several interviews with current dialectologists, some of whom (Xu Baohua and Li Rulong) participated in the 1957 fangyan survey. It was Li Rulong in particular who mentioned the importance of promulgating a national language, and in fact was responsible for establishing local pronunciation schools to prepare teachers to instruct in Putonghua. Shi Qisheng, interview with the author; Xu Baohua, interview with the author, tape recording, March 24, 2014, Shanghai; Li Rulong, interview with the author. These standard schedules are summarized in Yinfa Guangdong fangyan diaocha shidian gongzuo huibao zhaiyao (A distributed report and summary of the Guangdong dialect

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education bureaus chose their “pronunciation collaborator.” Beijing required that they be a local person – not too young or too old – with a basic education and little interaction with the world outside their hometown.84 The most important standard, however, regarded the organization of data. The methodology for completing data sets was set by CAS researchers Li Rong (李荣) and Ding Shengshu (丁声树), former colleagues of Yuen Ren Chao. Their methods were published as an abridged Chinese Fangyan Survey Handbook, culled from a collection of articles in Zhongguo yuwen.85 The handbook began with an introduction on how each syllable could be organized according to its initial, final, and tone, and was followed by training on how to notate these sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The subsequent sections clarified how to identify common phonetic variations among fangyan, including tonal categories or voiced and unvoiced consonants. In addition to the handbook, researchers were given two texts to guide data collection: a Chinese Fangyan Survey Simplified Table (Hanyu fangyan diaocha jianbiao 汉语方 言调查简表, or jianbiao for short) and corresponding Chinese Fangyan Survey Pronunciation Organizational Cards (Hanyu fangyan diaocha ziyin zhengli kapian 汉语方言调查字音整理卡片).86 The jianbiao was a list of 2,136 characters derived from survey books Yuen Ren Chao created in 1934 as an archetypal questionnaire for fangyan surveys. The book was divided into five sections.87 The first three sections guided scholars to isolate particular elements of each phoneme. The focus in section one was tones: researchers recorded only the tones of a list of characters paired in homophonic groups. The second and third sections were similarly arranged, focusing

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survey preliminary work), February 2, 1957, 314-1-170-198-203, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Guangdongsheng fangyan diaocha gongzuo zongjie (A summary of the dialect survey work from Guangdong Province), September, 1956 – June, 1957, 314-1-170-185-190, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Although this book was not published until 1957, its contents were distributed earlier than this. Sections of the handbook were published periodically throughout 1956 and early 1957 in Zhongguo yuwen. Li Rong, Hanyu fangyan diaocha shouce (Chinese fangyan survey handbook) (Beijing: Keji chubanshe, 1957). Ding Shengshu and Li Rong, Hanyu fangyan diaocha jianbiao (Chinese fangyan survey simplified table) (Beijing: Zhongguo kexueyuan yuyan yanjiusuo, 1956); Ding Shengshu and Li Rong, Hanyu fangyan diaocha ziyin zhengli kapian (Chinese fangyan survey pronunciation organizational cards) (Beijing: Zhongguo kexueyuan yuyan yanjiusuo, 1956). Other materials were available, but research notes from teams in Guangzhou and Shanghai indicate that they primarily used the jianbiao and the corresponding cards. While the books themselves lack authorship, they are typically attributed to Chao. They are listed as his publications in his yearbook, and dozens of marked ones are held in his own personal papers. Zhao and Huang, Chao Yuen Ren nianpu, 170; Yuen Ren Chao papers, 83/30, carton 31, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA.

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exclusively on initials and finals respectively. The fourth section listed approximately 300 “phonology foundational” characters. Unlike the previous sections, these characters were not arranged by homonym, but instead were meant to encompass the full breadth of potential morphemes. The last section of nearly 1,600 characters helped researchers fine-tune the basic sounds they had already recorded, offering a mixture of single characters, homonym groupings and multicharacter word compounds. The final section covered syntax and grammar, but were, according to the handbook, of secondary importance. The organizational cards supplemented the jianbiao. For sections 2–5 of the jianbiao, each character chosen for pronunciation was given a number corresponding to one organizational card: one card for each character or sets of characters. Written upon each card were the characters and their phonologies in Putonghua (see Figure 4.1).88 These materials facilitated three research outcomes: an outline of the fangyan’s phonetic system, a list of homonyms between Beijing pronunciation and the relative fangyan, and a comparative formula to explain major pronunciation differences, what Yuen Ren Chao called “distinctions,” between each fangyan and Putonghua. The jianbiao outlined a step-by-step process that guided researchers chronologically through each section. The cards facilitated the arrangement of identical sounds into piles, making phonological patterns “obvious at a glance (yimuliaoran 一目了然).”89 Researchers then entered these patterns into blank homophone charts (tongyin zibiao 同音字表), which were provided with the other materials.90 Looking exclusively at CAS handbooks and materials we see a clear, simple standardized project: record fangyan pronunciations, compare them to Putonghua, notate a formula that captures key differences between the two. But as any researcher knows, the execution of a project is rarely as smooth as its plan may suggest. One aspect of the project seemed to be uniform among teams across the country: their data was recorded with the jianbiao and the organizational cards. Yet 88

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These materials, and their instructions, were not simply abstract guidelines. Research notes indicate that they dictated the ways that researchers conducted their work on the ground. A sampling of reports from Guangzhou Province shows them following the procedures. See Shaoguanshi fangyan diaocha zongjie (Summary of the dialect survey of Shaoguan City), n.d., 314-1-170-143-150, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou; Chengmaixian fangyan diaocha shidian zongjie (Summary of the preliminary dialect survey of Chengmai County), March 23, 1957, 314-1-170-237-242, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Jin Youjing, “Zenyang shiyong Hanyu fangyan diaocha ziyin zhengli kapian” (How to use the Chinese fangyan survey pronunciation organizational cards), Zhongguo yuwen (March, 1957), 40. Jin, “Zenyang shiyong,” 40–43.

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Figure 4.1 Example of a Chinese fangyan survey organizational card. Top row (left to right): the numbered character, its pronunciation in Beijing pronunciation written in Hanyu pinyin, its pronunciation in Beijing pronunciation written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Bottom row (left to right): the character’s pronunciation in the subject fangyan, and the survey location. Source: Jin, “Zenyang shiyong,” 40.

their notes also describe interactions with local governments, research subjects, and the towns they visited, and these notes imply a far more erratic, colorful, and variable experience. The problems researchers faced and successes they boasted provide a window into the environment within which information was constructed. Some groups faced problems at the outset. They arrived to find that the local education bureau had not found them a pronunciation collaborator.91 Other groups found the partitioning methods deficient: their region of study lacked a dominant fangyan, forcing them to simply choose one among many to serve as a representative.92 Once the groups returned home to write handbook manuscripts, their task seemed rather muddled. Several survey group leaders from Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang complained that instructions for preparing their manuscripts – the purpose, the directed audience, and the content – were hopelessly vague.93 A second problem these groups faced was their relative preparation. Access to resources was inherently uneven. Those completing fieldwork in well-surveyed areas, such as Shanghai or Guangzhou, could draw upon a wealth of earlier phonologies as a frame of reference. In contrast, some groups reported that they lacked the training to record pronunciation 91

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Wuhuaxian fangyan diaocha wuhua shidian gongzuo zongjie (Work summary for the preliminary survey of Wuhua in Wuhua County), 1957, 314-1-170-209-214, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou; Chengmaixian hanyu fangyan diaocha shidian zongjie. Ruyuanxian fangyan diaocha shidian gongzuo zongjie (Work summary for the preliminary survey of Ruyuan County), 1957, 314-1-170-251-256, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Shanghaishi Jiaoyubu (Shanghai Education Bureau), Shanghaishi Jiaoyubu guanyu fangyan diaocha wenti huiyi jilu (Records from the Shanghai Education Bureau Conference on the problems of the fangyan survey), February 8, 1957, B105-7-293, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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properly, making their work excruciatingly slow.94 Still others complained that, despite being supposed “native speakers” of their subject fangyan, they could not even understand the local variant.95 Finally, research notes reveal how the shifting winds of national politics impacted the project’s completion. The Anti-Rightist campaign – Mao Zedong’s crackdown on intellectuals – struck the academy in the summer of 1957, just as the fangyan survey was getting underway.96 Written records of how this campaign affected the survey are scarce, but some information can be grasped from notes. Yang Yichun (杨义春) from Subei Normal University, for instance, explained that his manuscript was delayed due to the actions of his partner, “the Rightist Wang Xiwen” (youpai fenzi Wang Xiwen 右派分 子王希文). Wang was eventually removed from the project, Yang said, but not before “groundlessly” (haowu genju 毫无根据) redistricting their research area, causing them significant delays.97 It is unclear whether Wang’s interposition was as malicious as Yang believed, or if his redistricting was simply an impromptu decision. We also have no evidence to reveal Yang’s underlying state of mind or ulterior motives – nor do we have evidence that Wang actually interfered. And while historians normally abstain from counterfactuals, it is entirely possible that, if Wang did meddle, it would not have affected the data at all. In any case, their work was clouded by politics. While we are once again in hypothetical territory, it is logical to assume that researchers considered the stakes of straying from their standard methodology. Questioning the way data was collected, or the CCP’s policy as a whole, was not risk-free. The Anti-Rightist campaign also subtly altered the status of the individual in the construction of knowledge. A researcher I spoke with in 2014 who conducted fieldwork in South China laments today that his work went unrecognized – scholars published their work not as individuals but as organizations.98 While this likely affected the researchers’ pride and commitment, the implications go beyond personal glory. Scholars contextualize their work in part through conversation, an 94

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Lingaoxian shidian fangyan diaocha gongzuo zongjie (Work summary on the preliminary survey of Lingao County), 1957, 314-1-170-215-221, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Ruyuanxian fangyan diaocha. Shanghai Jiaoyubu, Shanghaishi Jiaoyubu guanyu fangyan diaocha wenti huiyi jilu. Yang Yichun, “Wo dui bianxie shouce de yixie kanfa” (My thoughts on writing and editing handbooks), Shanghai Jiaoyu yu guanyu fangyan diaocha wenti huiyi jilu (Records from the Shanghai Department of Education’s conference on the problems of the fangyan survey), February 8, 1958, B105-7-293, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Anonymous, interview with the author.

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environment much more difficult to recreate when names are erased. Removing the individual stymied intellectual conversation. Moreover, anonymous works took the focus off individual creation, making it easier to presume the conclusions were objective fact, not constructed knowledge. Suddenly, those involved in research were “scholars,” “the state,” and “the people” – designations that erased individual perspectives. This practice of erasing the names of scholars reveals a larger truth about this project: it removed personality and humanity from the study of language, both in terms of who spoke the language and who created the data. Researchers described attending the homes of their pronunciation collaborators, where they sang songs and told stories to one another.99 Pronunciation collaborators proofread the researchers’ work, and provided important historical context for how researchers connected their data to the rest of the region and the country.100 The songs these young scholars sang, the books they read, and the people who inspired them would all illuminate the academic decisions they made. But they were never published. Like a crumpled rough draft shoved on a dusty shelf, these experiences were scrubbed from the final published product, existing only on scribbled notes and in human memories. By reducing fangyan to their phonetic systems, and reducing researchers to nameless faces filling out forms, languages became devoid of humanity and sentiment. The researchers of the 1957 survey were given a task that was inherently paradoxical – to prove that fangyan were representatives of subnational communities, researchers had to erase the individuals in those communities from the knowledge they helped create. The erasure of humanity in the construction of linguistic knowledge would subsequently permeate pedagogy. CAS researchers already established that speech represented communities, and that fangyan were “dependent” on national languages for their form and content. By relying upon and standardizing the scientific methods of earlier work of dialectologists, the supposed dependence of fangyan upon the Putonghua became synonymous with the hierarchical relationship between their phonetic systems, enshrined in the charts through which data was organized. Ultimately, this survey made it difficult for any researcher to conceive of fangyan as anything more than their systems of initials, finals, and tones.

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Shaoguanshi fangyan diaocha zongjie (Summary of the fangyan survey of Shaoguan City), 1957, 314-1-170-143-150, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Chengmaixian hanyu fangyan diaocha shidian zongjie.

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Fixing the Fangyan Problem Once the surveyors returned home, they were commissioned to complete handbooks for their respective regions.101 Usually only a few dozen pages, these handy manuals were normally titled something similar to “How People from Shandong Learn Putonghua” or “A Handbook for People from She County to Learn Putonghua.” Meant for primary school instructors, the logic undergirding the handbooks was simple: an algorithm that pinpointed the vowels and consonants that differed between their native tongue and Putonghua would increase the efficiency and efficacy of language instruction. In short, they targeted the nonspecialist, and were kept short and written in “easy to understand language.”102 The introductions to the manuals, all identical, reiterated the party line: Putonghua was key to the country’s future success and development, and as such, all people must “overcome their obstacles in thought (sixiang zhangai 思 想障碍) and embrace Putonghua as the future.”103 Subsequent chapters were organized like the jianbiao, outlining how the initials, finals, and tones of each fangyan differed from Putonghua. Pronunciation was explained in terms of physiology: a diagram of the human mouth provided a visual for teachers on “how big or small the mouth ought to open, how high or low the tongue ought to be placed, and how flat or round the lips ought to be” (see Figure 4.2).104 101

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As of 1966, sixty-two of these handbooks were formally published. Later estimates put that total over seventy. See Lin Liantong, Xiandai Hanyu shiyong shouce (Modern Chinese use manual) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2009); Qian Zengyi, Hanyu Guanhua fangyan yanjiu (Research on Chinese Guanhua dialects) (Jinan: Qilu chushe, 2010), 158–159. “Fangyan diaocha shishi fangan” (File on the implementation of the dialect survey), Jiangsu Province Education Bureau, Jiangsusheng Jiaoyuting Guanyu fangyan diaocha zhidaozu kaihui tongzhi (Jiangsu Province Education Bureau notice on the meeting of the leader’s team of the dialect survey), October, 1956, B105-7-287-1, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. A non-exhaustive sampling of the texts I consulted: Hunan Shifan Xueyuan Zhongwenxi Hanyu fangyan pucha zu bian (Edited by the Hunan Normal University Chinese Department’s Chinese fangyan survey team), Hunanren zenyang xuexi Putonghua (How Hunanese people learn to speak Putonghua) (Hunan: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1961); Jiangsusheng Shanghaishi fangyan diaocha zhidaozu (Leader’s team of the Jiangsu Province, Shanghai City’s fangyan survey), Rugaoren xuexi Putonghua shouce (Handbook for the people of Rugao to study Putonghua) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1959); Jiangsusheng Shanghaishi fangyan diaocha zhidaozu (Leader’s team of the Jiangsu Province, Shanghai City’s fangyan survey), Nantongren xuexi Putonghua shouce (Handbook for the people of Nantong to study Putonghua) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1959); Shandongsheng fangyan diaocha zhidaozu zhubian (Edited by Shandong Province’s fangyan survey leader’s team), Jiaodongren zenyang xuexi Putonghua (How the people of Jiaodong learn to speak Putonghua) (Shandong: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1960). Shanghaishi chuxi disici quanguo Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmohui cailiao (Materials from the fourth Putonghua teaching achievement exhibition hosted by the City of Shanghai), 1964, B105-8-268, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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Figure 4.2 Diagram of the human mouth to guide instructors in Putonghua phonology. Source: Jiangsusheng Shanghaishi fangyan diaocha zhidaozu (Leader’s team of the Jiangsu Province, Shanghai City’s fangyan survey), Rugaoren xuexi Putonghua shouce (Handbook for the people of Rugao to study Putonghua) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1959): 6.

Succinctly put, the handbooks were meant to inculcate proper speech. This, in turn, made fangyan the subject of correction. “When studying Putonghua,” the handbooks instructed, “one must integrate the characteristics of [fangyan]’s pronunciation. We ought to emphasize the study of the [pronunciation] differences.”105 With the two linguistic categories apposed, one branded as a “common mistake,” the handbooks reinforced 105

Jiangsusheng Shanghaishi fangyan diaocha zhidaozu, Rugaoren, 9.

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that fangyan were merely iterations of a standard. They were, in a word, subsidiary forms of national culture. By targeting audiences outside the academy, the handbooks underscored the idea that fangyan emerged from and would inevitably dissolve into Putonghua. They also defined fangyan as linguistic abnormalities, robbing them of their independence and belittling their value to society. The portrayal of fangyan as mistakes to be corrected heralded a new phase in the conceptual relationship between them and the national language. The Great Leap Forward, murmurs of which were only starting to stir, would only harden this association. The conflation of fangyan and abnormality would take on new life as nonacademics, swept away by the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s, led mass-movements in support of the national language. These movements redefined language once again, fastening linguistic choices to the speaker’s political loyalty. The Old Bottles Survive: Language and Theater in the Early People’s Republic Professionals are often susceptible to tunnel vision. The linguists, educators, and policy makers involved in the promulgation of the national language focused on their corner of the universe, privileging their goals above all else. Other departments, professionals, and experts, however, had their own projects to pursue. It should be no surprise that, on occasion, professionals in other fields came into conflict with those who approached Putonghua promulgation as an absolute and uncontested national priority. One of those fields was the theatrical arts. Like language, CCP operatives viewed theater as both a target for reform and a tool for their cause.106 Local opera in particular was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the party feared that local entertainment idealized problematic or backward ideas about work, family, and religion. At the same time, they realized it was a vibrant way to make their message entertaining and palatable. They began articulating the significance of theater to their cause in the 1930s. After establishing their base in Yan’an, the party sent local troupes to the countryside to promote through preformance messages consonant with party goals – operas or dramas that taught the benefits of land reform and gender equality or moralized about the dangers of footbinding and opium smoking.107 These performances 106 107

The most commonly referenced speech on the topic was Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an,” 111–148. Brian DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Merkel-Hess, Rural Modern, 89–101.

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often took songs, dances, costumes, or formats drawn from common rural practices and reimagined them to serve a didactic purpose.108 They were written with local intelligibility in mind. As such, almost all performances were done in the local fangyan.109 The revolution bestowed the party increased means to implement reforms and heightened stakes for success or failure. In 1950, the central government established the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, charged with the research and reform of the dramatic arts. This became the basis of a theater reform campaign in 1951–1952. The campaign had several goals, but essentially it required local troupes to revise their own productions to match party goals while also introducing new dramatic forms more suitable to promulgating the CCP’s message.110 The consequences of this policy varied from region to region. In places such as Fujian and Guangdong, local opera forms became extremely popular in the countryside.111 In places such as Hebei, troupes performed yangge (秧 歌) plays, spoken plays, Beijing operas, and other local forms of performance, to varying degrees of popularity.112 Many other cities, out of fear of crossing the central government, banned all plays besides Beijing opera.113 Ultimately, “theater,” “drama,” or “opera” were hardly unified things – they were localized and diverse. Such diversity encouraged extraordinary experimentation and creativity as artists across the country “attempted to figure out what parts of the canon were key and how art 108

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In particular, scholars have pointed to the yangge format as one that, while certainly having older precedents, was an invention of 1940s Yan’an. See Ellen V. P. Gerdes, “Contemporary Yangge: The Moving History of a Chinese Folk Dance Form,” Asian Theater Journal 1, no. 138 (2008), 138–147. As Zhuo Liu points out, the one exception to this was the didactic plays performed for military troops by soldiers, which were often performed in Mandarin. Zhuo Liu, “Fanshen Culturally: The Emergence of People’s Literature in the Late 1940s” (PhD diss., New York University, 2012),35–36. This is explained in full in DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army, 209–237; Bell Yung, “Model Opera as Model: From Shajiabang to Sagabong,” in Bonnie McDougall and Paul Clark, eds., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 144–164; Franklin W. Houn, “The Stage as a Medium of Propaganda in Communist China,” Public Opinion Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Summer, 1959), 223–235; Emily Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Liu, Siyuan, “Theatre Reform as Censorship: Censoring Traditional Theatre in China in the Early 1950s,” Theatre Journal 61, no. 3 (2009), 387–406. “Tan yueju xiandaihua wenti” (On the problem of modernizing Cantonese opera,” 1956, 312-1-4-80-91, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Brian DeMare, “Local Actors and National Politics: Rural Amateur Drama Troupes and Mass Campaigns in Hubei Province, 1949–1953,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 24, no. 2 (2012), 129–178. Zhang Hongliang, “Jin xi wenti yu xin Zhongguo xigai yundong chuqi zhengce shijian” (The problem of banning plays and the practice of policy in the early years of new China’s theater reform movement), Shehui kexue 6 (2016), 181–191.

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could be redeployed to resonate with contemporary concerns – all while dealing with unsettled and often contradictory policies.”114 Perhaps as a result of Beijing’s opacity, there was no clear expectation that the State Council’s language reform goals would implicate theatrical performances after 1949. Thespians and playwrights thus looked elsewhere to both determine and justify their linguistic choices. Out of a combination of practicality, tradition, and the goal of bringing art to the people, theater in local fangyan was the norm. It was not, however, the only option. Some artists outside the capital, encouraged by city or provincial governments and their nation-building goals, attempted to introduce Beijing opera.115 One man even invented his own approach to making theatrical performance comprehensible for the masses. Ma Jianling (马健翎), cofounder of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Masses Troupe, created a “generalized” Northern Dialect – something akin to a diasystem – that he believed would have broad appeal throughout northern China while maintaining the local flavor of the towns he visited.116 Writings on language in theater explicitly cited the National Forms debates from the 1940s. In a series of essays in 1954, playwright Li Yuenan (李岳南) echoed Xiang Linbing, arguing that “folk forms” represent one of the only genuinely Chinese forms of national heritage. “Language itself is the result of life itself reified,” he wrote. “The language of the working class forever has animated life.”117 Li was clear that the language used in local theater was a living language. Fangyan folksongs exemplified language’s anthropomorphic value, he argued; an abundance of living culture resided within them. Though Li Yuenan clearly drew upon earlier precedents, the new context in which he wrote was clear. To bolster his argument, he cited the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who claimed “All language emerges from our actions and our labor, because language is the bones, the tendons, the nerves and the skin of all things.”118 Like the linguists at CAS, Li understood the kind of legitimacy Soviet theorists could offer his argument. Others, however, drew upon Stalin’s theories of language to argue that the cultural significance of folk theater did not spare them from reform. Ma Shabo (马少波), who, in 1949, served in a variety of leadership positions 114 116

117

118

Greene, Resisting Spirits, 19. 115 DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army, 185. D. L. Holm, “Local Color and Popularization in the Literature of the Wartime Border Regions,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1986), 7–20; Greene, Resisting Spirits, 97. Li Yuenan, “Ruhe xuexi minjian wenyi zhong de yuyan” (How do we study the language in folk literature?), Minjian xiqu geyao sanlun (A discussion of folk theater and songs) (Shanghai: Shanghai chuban gongsi yinxing, 1954), 177–178. Li Yuenan, “Ruhe xuexi,” 177.

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in the National Committee for Opera Reform (Quanguo xiqu gaige weiyuanhui 全国戏曲改革委员会), the Ministry of Culture, the National Beijing Opera Company, and others, explained why. Ma agreed with Li Yuenan that local theater productions were a product of the people, their “oral literature.” But Ma broke with Li’s analysis by drawing upon Stalin’s Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics. Ma explained that, since linguistic changes echo societal shifts, languages should discard words, phrases, and structures that have already become obsolete. This required playwrights to purge their works of “unhealthy” words, phrases, or structures. Folk forms could not remain untouched. For Ma, fangyan were not unhealthy by definition. Rather, Ma’s comprehensive reform proposals suggested the elimination of “inappropriate” uses of fangyan. His definition of inappropriate largely centered on the potential of miscommunication. A line that used an idiom to describe a character “spit[ting] out blood which flows like yellow sand,” could cause audiences unfamiliar with the phrase to mistakenly presume the person described was literally spitting sand.119 Ma also insisted that new operas or dramas should be held to a different standard than plays already in existence. The new forms needed to “strictly follow the rules of the common language of the people”; older operas or dramas should be reformed in a “careful, scientific” way.120 The end result was contradictory expectations – an insistance that performances be in a language that conformed to the authentic oral language of “the people” but also ensured mutual comprehension and avoided outdated or obscure vocabulary that general audiences could not understand. Though Ma and Li differed in their specific prescriptions for including local languages in theater, neither advocated that they be banned or eschewed entirely. They also never mentioned promulgating the national language outright. Ma and Li drew upon the same Soviet thinkers, indeed, the same texts, that led CAS linguists to argue for an aggressive national language policy, but came to drastically different conclusions. Ideology clearly mattered, but its interpretation was often shaped by material and social concerns. Ma and Li were writing for a small audience of experts; their works would probably not have been widely circulated. But their arguments about local theater, which clearly articulate a significance of fangyan to the Chinese nation under Communism, are reflected in broader policy.121 119 120 121

Ma Shabo, Xiqu gaige san lun (A discussion on opera reform) (Beijing; Yishu chubanshe, 1956), 127. Ma Shabo, Xiqu gaige, 129 Mention of these plays can be found in announcements for fangyan plays in the early 1960s. Zhonggong Shanghaishi Baoshanxian weiyuanhui xuanchuanbu huaju (fangyan

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Indeed, throughout the early 1950s, local opera and drama seemed to be exempt from language reform altogether. In 1955, the State Council made an announcement to anticipate its rollout of Putonghua in 1956. In it, they listed all potential areas of public life that they anticipated would be affected – including schools, universities, service industries, the military, and forms of entertainment such as cinema and radio – and those that would be excluded, including “local fangyan theater.”122 The Ministry of Culture had already implied such an exemption when they held a National Opera Exhibition in 1952. The spectacle, meant to introduce the nation’s “theatrical heritage,” lasted for twenty-three days and showcased such famous performances as kunqu “Escorting Lady Jing” from the Jiangsu area and a Cantonese Opera version of the “Legend of White Snake.” Of the dozens of performances, almost none were in the national language.123 The exemption of theater from national language policies highlights the unsettled debates between those who saw a standard language as natural, historical progress and those who exalted fangyan as the true language of the masses. The former were certainly powerful – after all, they wrote language policy, dictated pedagogy, and often controlled public propaganda. But they were neither unrivaled nor hegemonic. Public entertainment, folk culture, and entertainment guidelines were still animated by an oppositional narrative that saw fangyan as a primary marker of Chinese “national forms.” The interaction and tension between narratives of homogeneity and narratives of heterogeneity continued to shape Chinese nationalism under Communism, revealing a striking continuity between the “new China” they sought to build and the “old China” they sought to leave behind. Conclusion Who were “the people” and what was their language? This question lay at the heart of language policy within the Communist movement, a movement centered on speaking for and representing the masses. As

122

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huaju) huiyan jihua (Plan for the performance of a fangyan play by the Chinese Communist Party in Baoxian County in the City of Shanghai’s Propaganda Department), June 18, 1960, B172-5-276-44, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Jiaoyubu, “Guanyu zai zhongxiaoxue he ge shifan xuexiao dali tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi” (Directive on the aggressive promulgation of Putonghua in middle schools, elementary schools, and normal schools), October 23, 1955, B105-7-18-1, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Zhongguo xiju jia xiehui bian (Edited by the Society of Chinese Theater), Diyi quanguo xiqu guanmo chu dahui (The first national opera exhibition) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953).

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multiple stakeholders, each with distinct priorities, grappled with this question, they settled into two camps. For some, “the people” were those in villages and townships speaking in a caucophony of languages, enriched with vocabulary and pronunciations accumulated over decades of authentic lived experience. For others, “the people” were a unified nation boldly marching toward progress, leaving behind the backward remnants of their feudal past. These narratives diverged in the role they gave fangyan – the former framing them as obstacles to progress and dead weight on national development, the latter viewing them as true expressions of the masses. Amidst the debates between these two seemingly contradictory positions emerged a basis for a shared vision of a Chinese national identity centered on the plebian experience. According to this shared vision, any language patronized or celebrated by the state had to be connected to and representative of “the masses.” Along with a shared vision, so too emerged a shared commitment to Marxist principles, both sides upholding it as the only ideology to guide the nation’s development. Marxism prevailed in its malleability, strengthened by its capacity to weave its way into and subsequently buttress both sides of the evolving debates. Language reform is not the only realm in which these processes unfolded. Across the country, state actors were struggling with how to reframe the everyday practices of local society into something congruent with a Marxist vision.124 Religious practices were refashioned as “philosophies” with historical relevance and scientifically driven application. Folktales such as the “Ballad of Mulan” were revitalized, infused with new significances that suited the national agenda. Movies celebrating life in the idyllic countryside paralleled the simultaneous construction of “cultural activities halls” meant to stamp out “illicit and unhealthy” practices in the countryside.125 These movements reveal a dissension between the goals of uniformity, sold as modernization, and the lived experience of heterogeneity. In a word, this was not happening in the world of language reform alone. These tensions were ubiquitous. As the nation cascaded into a new era and the meaning of mass participation took a revolutionary turn, such tolerance for diverse expressions of nationalism quickly waned. The height of the Maoist period was marked by increasing efforts on the part of the Party-state to both control 124

125

David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9–13; Chang-tai Hung, “Female Symbols of Resistance in Chinese Wartime Spoken Dramas,” Modern China 15, no. 2 (April, 1989), 149–177. Matthew Johnson, “Beneath the Propaganda State: Official and Unofficial Cultural Landscapes in Shanghai, 1949-1965,” in Matthew Johnson and Jeremy Brown, eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 199–229.

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and unify acceptable cultural practices. From appropriate dress to entertainment, policies were designed to ensure that lived experience lacked anything potentially at odds with how the state defined nationalism, Chineseness, and socialism. And under the shadow of the Great Leap Forward, the stakes for publically rejecting the state’s model for collective identities were dangerously high.

5

The Mandarin Revolution Fangyan in Maoist China

To obey the party is never wrong. To speak the national language is to obey the party. “Gao ju zongluxian de hongqi, yongyuan zuo tuiguang Putonghua de cujinpai” (Raise high the red flag of the mass line, forever be promoters of the promulgation of Putonghua), Shanghai Municipal Archives

Introduction The year was 1960. China was two years into the Great Leap Forward, a policy meant to demonstrate the people’s “superhuman endeavors” in economic production and cultural rejuvenation.1 At the policy’s outset, the nation seemed to exude euphoria; like the fabled “foolish old man who moved the mountains” ( yu gong yi shan 愚公移山), both party and people were high on the conviction that Chinese citizens could do the impossible through sheer interminable will. But by 1960, the policy meant to generate exponential growth in grain and steel production had instead caused a famine that would claim tens of millions of lives. The country grinded to a halt, making clear that enthusiasm was always limited by tangible realities. In the city of Shanghai, the world of language reform seemed blithely unaware of the limits of enthusiasm politics. That same year, the city government hosted its annual National Putonghua Teaching Achievement Exhibition, the third one to date. During the proceedings, a teacher from Jingye Middle School took the stage and made an impassioned speech about the importance of language reform: I have deeply and personally experienced that the promulgation of Putonghua is an arduous task in political thought. We must unremittingly take political command, deeply know our thoughts, repeatedly educate ourselves, rely upon the masses, prescribe the right remedy to the illness, unceasingly overcome our conservative [nature], our backward thoughts and our sense of complacency . . . Promulgating 1

Roderick Macfarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 91.

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Putonghua is a process of unceasingly engaging in thought education. Only when we have painstaking, penetrative thought education can we fully popularize and improve.2

Mass mobilization had been a hallmark of Communist governance since the revolution. After 1958, however, the performance of mass participation was privileged as highly as, if not exalted above, tangible results.3 The Great Leap Forward was characterized by paper tiger stories of model rice fields producing yields ten times the average, falsities that contributed to the ecological and humanitarian disaster of 1958. This emphasis on enthusiasm over modest practicality defined policy outside the economic realm as well. From the mass poetry movement that popularized revolutionary ditties to the creation of “landlord exploitation” statue gardens, citizens across China were “building a socialist utopia” in ways that extended beyond steel production and commune living.4 The rhetoric of our middle school teacher mimicked those speeches that promoted backyard furnaces and the elimination of everyday pests. It framed speaking the national language as a cornerstone of national development, encouraged listeners to devote every thought, word, action, and ounce of their energy to the project, and presented speaking Putonghua as a struggle against conservativism, backwardness, and complacency. The Great Leap Forward continued unabated in Jingye Middle School. This chapter examines the national language policies executed after 1958, focusing upon both official rhetoric and local interpretations of that rhetoric. Within this new era, the performance of revolutionary behavior became representative of patriotic dedication; consequently, the language that people spoke was thought to reveal political loyalty and devotion to the CCP cause. The conciliatory rhetoric emphasizing the importance of fangyan and assuaging worries that they might be replaced by Putonghua, 2

3 4

Shanghaishi Jingye Zhongxue (Shanghai City Jingye Middle School), “Gao ju zongluxian de hongqi, yongyuan zuo tuiguang Putonghua de cujinpai” (Raise high the red flag of the mass line, forever be promoters of the promulgation of Putonghua), Shanghaishi jiaoyuju guanyu Shanghai chuxi quanguo disanci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui de huibao cailiao (Materials from the Shanghai City Education Bureau-hosted third National Putonghua Teaching Achievement guanmo hui ), July 26, 1960, B105-2–249-10, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. For a summary of the Great Leap Forward, see Macfarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward. Professor of Chinese literature at Berkeley S. H. Chen railed in 1960 that the campaign privileged quantity of participation over content, resulting in a flurry of derivative, plagiarized poems that had little artistic value. S. H. Chen, “Multiplicity in Uniformity: Poetry and the Great Leap Forward,” China Quarterly 3 (July–September, 1960), 1–15. For an explanation of the “landlord exploitation” statue gardens and the museum in which they were displayed in the 1960s, see Haiyan Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 197–200.

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discussed in the previous chapter, while still given lip service, was quickly eclipsed by a new, more revolutionary discourse. In the throes of the Great Leap Forward, Putonghua was no longer simply the national language, and fangyan were no longer simply subnational; the former became the sound of revolution, the latter the sound of complacency or, even, resistance. Language Reform at Teaching Achievement Exhibitions The year 1957 was a turning point in the history of the People’s Republic.5 The Anti-Rightist campaign, launched that summer, spilled into the Great Leap Forward only a year later, signifying the moment in which ideological conviction began to outweigh technocratic pragmatism, and impassioned appeals for enthusiasm began to displace tempered policy announcements.6 It also coincided with a renewed push for Putonghua promulgation. Though schools began training language teachers and soldiers to use Putonghua for instruction in 1956, by the end of 1957, internal memos convey a general malaise that popular enthusiasm for the policy was languishing.7 Encouraged by the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, by the fall of 1958, memos from central government ministries and city offices collectively called for renewed efforts in the spread of the common tongue. Teachers were encouraged to increase their use of Putonghua in the classroom. Bus drivers, hotel receptionists, and store clerks were told to attend early-morning Putonghua classes.8 Radio 5

6 7

8

This approach, pioneered by William Kirby in his 1990 article on economic planning, upends the assumption that the KMT period “was not without heirs.” Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China,” 121–141; Brown and Pickowicz, “The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China,” 1. Roderick Macfarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Contradictions Among the People 1956–1957 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Jiaoyubu (Ministry of Education), Shanghai shi tuipu gongzuo huiyi jilu ji gongzuo gangyao (Notes and work plan on the Shanghai conference on Putonghua promulgation), August 28, 1958, B105-7–297, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Lin Gongle, “Xuexi Putonghua de yixie tihui” (My experience learning Putonghua), in Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju guanyu zhongyang tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo weiyuanhui zhaokai quanguo Putonghua Jiaoxue chengji guanmohui de chuxi daibiao mindan, zhuyi shixiang, guangmohui jiemu deng cailiao (From the Shanghai Education Bureau, representative names, important points, program, and other materials from the Central Committee on the promulgation of Putonghua launching a national Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui ), July 26, 1958, B105-7–289-37, page 106, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju, “Guanyu ‘Shanghaishi tuiguang Putonghua liangnian’ (1957–1958) guihua” (On Shanghai City’s two-year plan to promulgate Putonghua (1957–1958)), January 15, 1958, B105-7–17-15, pages 6–7, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. These Putonghua schools are mentioned throughout official memorials and in public forums, as well as in oral interviews. Putonghua promulgation among service industry workers was mentioned in official workplans beginning in 1958. Zhejiang sheng tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo weiyuanhui (Zhejiang Province Putonghua Promulgation Work Committee), Zhejiangsheng tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo chubu guihua (Preliminary plan for the work of promulgating

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broadcasts that instructed listeners in Putonghua phonology were blasted in public squares. And looking to capitalize upon the national fervor, the Committee for Language Reform in China began planning what it called “Putonghua Teaching Achievement guanmo hui ” (Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui 普通话教学成绩观摩会): interactive conferences or exhibitions meant to connect, inspire, and instruct.9 The guanmo hui had been a central facet of education reform since the early twentieth century. One of the earliest mentions referred to local school exhibitions in June of 1915, where students from Changping County just north of Beijing gathered to view student projects in botany and weaving, competitions in song and oral performance, and military exercises, but similar events were common through the 1920s and 1930s.10 The events declared the arrival of “China’s modernity” through education.11 Beyond this, the exhibitions, performances, special lectures, ceremonies, and group sessions were meant to include the general public in educational progress. As the successes of education must, in the words of Chinese Educational World (Zhonghua jiaoyu jie 中華教育界), “deeply penetrate society but also be well understood by society’s members,” these events facilitated this bilateral interaction.12 The spirit of these early guanmo hui carried over the 1949 divide.13 These events aimed for spectacle. Each municipality and province sent representative students, teachers, and members of local bureaucracy

9

10 11

12 13

Putonghua in Zhejiang Province), May 10, 1958, B105-7-291, pages 26–27, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. See “Sannian lai tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo de qingkuang” (The situation on the promulgation of Putonghua after three years), Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui guanyu zhaokai bufen shengshi Putonghua gongzuo huibao de cailiao (Materials from the records of the Committee for Language Reform in China on initiating certain provincial and municipal work on Putonghua), July 27, 1963, B105-8–46-50, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju (Shanghai Education Bureau), “Guanyu 1963 nian Shanghaishi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo gangyao” (Outline of the 1963 work on promulgating Putonghua in Shanghai City), January 15, 1963, B105-2–652-1, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. On supplementary schools, I was pointed to information by Li, interview with the author. Zhongyang tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo weiyuenhui (Central work committee on the promulgation of Putonghua), “1958 tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jihua gangyao” (1958 Outline for the work plan of promulgating Putonghua), March 20, 1958, B105-5–1688-5, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. “Tang Shangshu jiang kai da guanmo hui” (Minister Tang to hold a large guanmo hui ), Shenbao (May 6, 1910). Wu Yulin, “Canguan Jingzhao Changpingxian jiaoyu chengji guanmohui jilüe” (Records on observing the educational achievement guanmo hui in Changping County in Jingzhao district), Zhonghua jiaoyujie 4, no. 7 (1915), 1–2. Wu Yulin, “Canguan,” 2. Records from the first guanmo hui are few. Official sources claimed that Shanghai should hold a citywide event every half-year. Shanghai Jiaoyuju (Shanghai Education Bureau), “Shanghaishi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo gangyao” (Outline of the work of promulgating Putonghua in Shanghai City), November 4, 1959, B105-2–121, Shanghai Municipal

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who had demonstrated excellence in the study of Putonghua. The guanmo hui featured speakers such as Renmin University president Wu Yuzhang (吴玉章), deputy director of the Committee for Language Reform in China Wei Que (韋悫), and deputy mayor of Shanghai Jin Zhonghua (金仲华). After opening ceremonies, participants presented songs, poems, essays, and stories; shared successful experiences in learning, teaching, and promoting Putonghua; and challenged one another in speech competitions. Pictures of the events peppered local and national newspapers. And after the guanmo hui’s conclusions, victors were brought to Beijing to receive accolades from Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来) and Foreign Minister Chen Yi (陈毅).14 While participants numbered only in the hundreds, their influence emanated beyond the walls of the convention centers in which they were housed. The speeches, competitions, and roundtables dictated the party line on language reform – where the priorities should lie, which behaviors should represent language-learning excellence, and how language policy should reinforce economic, social, and cultural development. Leap Forward and Then Leap Forward Again Shanghai’s first National Putonghua Teaching Achievement guanmo hui coincided with the official launch of the Great Leap Forward. It was an obvious outgrowth of the national zeitgeist. Keynote speeches, promotional material, and performances accentuated the core principles of national policy. Perfect proficiency in Putonghua was the ultimate goal, which, keynote speakers claimed, could only be made possible if the Chinese masses would “leap forward and leap forward again” to usher in a “Putonghua-promulgation Great Leap Forward.”15 Consonant with the Great Leap Forward’s focus on economic development, the promulgation of Putonghua was portrayed as necessary for national progress. Reframed in these terms, language was a “tool for the struggle for society and production” akin to oxen or steel mills.16 It also had to be enacted through mass mobilization. The state delegated all of its

14

15

16

Archives, Shanghai. The national announcement was made by the Zhongyang tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo weiyuanhui, “1958 tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jihua gangyao.” “Zhou Zongli he Chen Yi Fu Zongli jiejian quanguo tuiguang Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmohui daibiao” (Premier Zhou Enlai and Deputy Premier Chen Yi meet representatives from the teaching excellence in promulgating Putonghua guanmo hui ), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), August 5, 1958, 4. Shanghaishi Jingye zhongxue, “Gao ju zonglixian”; Representatives Du Guoxiang, Luo Jin, “Tuiguang Putonghua hai yao da da yuejin” (The promulgation of Putonghua needs a great leap forward), 1958, Memorial to the Guangdong Province Putonghua Promulgation Work Representatives, 235–1-21–188-189, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Jiaoyubu, “Guanyu zai zhongxiaoxue he ge shifan xuexiao dali tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi.”

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citizens to arduously promote Putonghua in their everyday lives, filling their schools, streets, and homes with the sounds of the national tongue.17 This was central not just for economic labor but also for mental labor. These same sources that framed Putonghua as a tool for struggle and production also deemed it an instrument for securing a deep understanding of Marxism18 and “ascending to the peak of scientific and cultural knowledge.”19 If Putonghua was a tool to acquire knowledge, then as Putonghua’s opposite, fangyan were hindrances – “problems” (wenti 问题),20 or “obstacles” (zhang’ai 障碍)21 in the struggle to learn the national language. The key to removing such obstacles, as the foolish old man learned, according to Maoist-period retellings of the dictum, was overcoming “thought problems.” According to Beijing, “thought problems” had always been the root cause of sluggish implementation. To preemptively combat these thought problems, the People’s Daily ran an aggressive campaign in 1955 to educate people on the impending national language policy, recruiting several notable figures such as famed author Lao She, Wu Yuzhang, and 17

18

19

20

21

Wei Que, “Dierci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui kai mu ci” (Opening speech at the second national Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), Quanguo dierci Putonghua Jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui cailiao (Materials from the second national Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), August 10, 1958, B105-7–571-8, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Jin Zhonghua, “Zai dierci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui kai mu dianli de fayan” (Presentation at the opening ceremony of the second national Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), Quanguo dierci Putonghua Jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui cailiao (Materials from the second national Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), August 10, 1958, B105-7–571-19, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Wu Yuzhang, “Guanyu wenzi gaige de wenti” (On the problem of language reform), Shanghaishi renmin weiyuanhui jiguan shiwu guanliju zhuanjia gongzuochu guanyu wei zhuanjia zuzhi baogao hui de qingshi baogao ji shouzhang yanjiang gao (Drafts of speeches and invitations on the reports from expert organizations from the experts’ department of the Shanghai City Government Offices Committee for the People’s Council), January 31, 1956, B50-2–939, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju guanyu diwuci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui de tongzhi ji daibiao fayan gao (Shanghai City Education Bureau’s notice and drafts of representative’s speeches from the fifth Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), November, 1962, B105-7–1269, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui fuzhuren Ye Laiwang tongzhi de zongjie fayan (Deputy director of the Committee for Language Reform in China Comrade Ye Laiwang’s summary speech), Zhongguo wenzi gaige guanyu zhaokai fangyanqu chengshi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui cailiao (Materials from the Committee for Language Reform in China on hosting a conference for sharing experience about the work of promulgating Putonghua in dialect regions and cities), October 29. 1965, B105-8–499-113, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai; Shanghaishi Jingye Zhongxue, “Gao ju zongluxian de hongqi”; Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui yinbian (Published by the National Committee for Language Reform in China), “Quanguo tuiguang Putonghua qingkuang jianbao” (A short report on the national promulgation of Putonghua), October 26, 1954, B1-2-1901, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Du and Luo, “Tuiguang Putonghua hai yao da da yuejin.”

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Wang Li, to make their case.22 These men derided those in the “Southern fangyan regions” who viewed a national language as unnecessary, claiming that their “thought had fallen behind the development of current events.”23 For the CCP’s champions, fangyan were essentially backward, their speakers clinging desperately to China’s feudalistic past. If speaking fangyan signaled backwardness, what might compel people to speak them anyway? A pamphlet titled Common Knowledge about Putonghua, featuring articles from prominent linguists and statesmen, argued that resistance was attributed entirely to “thought problems.”24 Some worried about the “thought problem” of nativism, or the fear of being ostracized by fellow locals, editor of Language Reform (Wenzi gaige 文字改革) magazine Du Songshou (杜松寿) suggested. Others, Du claimed, falsely presumed that the language was “too hard” to speak well. In northern areas, some insisted that Putonghua and their native tongue were “more or less” the same – an assumption, Du implied, that was incorrect at best, insidious at worst.25 The underlying contention was that no one lacked the ability to learn Putonghua: success or failure was contingent entirely on attitude. Teachers who complained about a lack of resources did not understand how to use the materials available effectively. Those who clung to their fangyan had fallen prey to “feudalistic” thought. And those who worried that Putonghua was too hard to learn did not understand that their very misgivings stymied their progress. As the Great Leap Forward fervor swept through China, and citizens were asked to sacrifice their time, comfort, and work for national development, the strength to answer the party’s call had to come from the content of their minds. In other words, the “Great Leap Forward in Putonghua promulgation” married mass mobilization with thought reform. Doubling Down The Great Leap Forward, Roderick Macfarquhar declared, ended with “not a bang but a whimper.”26 It is true that its conclusion had little 22 23 24 25

26

Many of these men served on the National Language Committee, an obvious coup for the party searching for the legitimacy scholars of such repute might bring to their project. Wang Li, “Lun Hanyu guifanhua” (On the standardization of Chinese), Renmin ribao, October 12, 1955, 3. Wenzi gaige chubanshe, Putonghua changshi (Common knowledge about Putonghua) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957). Du Songshou, “Xuexi Putonghua you shenme juti de kunnan he youli tiaojian” (What are the concrete difficulties and advantageous conditions of studying Putonghua?), in Putonghua changshi (Common knowledge about Putonghua) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 30–31. Macfarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward, 326.

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fanfare. But its aftershocks – China’s leader humiliated, development projections stalled, and tens of millions dead – were in some ways more momentous than the initial “bang.” As the party began its soul-searching, its leader lay in wait. In the ensuing years, it became increasingly clear that, rather than retreat from the belief in the power of revolutionary enthusiasm, Mao had evaluated that what was needed was more dedication to the Great Leap spirit.27 Rather than revise, the party doubled down. Histories of the years between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution have focused upon how pressure to adhere to the party line was coercive – how citizens, under threat, observed dictates from on high.28 Certainly many acted under duress. But the Cultural Revolution’s ferocity was garnered not just through intimidation, but by successful “emotional mobilization.”29 After the failures of the Great Leap Forward had been officially buried, the Maoist propaganda machine sought to channel emotions like euphoria, guilt, righteous indignation, and ambition into their cause. Such appeals encouraged rhetorical flourish. No longer was speaking the national language a question of practicality, a concern that hardly mobilized emotional engagement. Rather, the meaning of Putonghua was magnified, festooned with the stakes of national survival. At the opening speech of the eighth Shanghai City Putonghua Teaching Achievement guanmo hui, Deputy Mayor Jin demonstrated how that looked in practice: Putonghua has become a language tool, its use within the context of the three great revolutionary movements has become more and more clear. If we have a common language, then we can promote connections between the people and cadres, we can strengthen unity among the people; with a common language, we can exchange our production experiences, we can facilitate the development of the ‘compare, study, catch-up, help, and drive’ movement on the battlefield of production.30 27 28

29 30

Macfarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward, 336 Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010); Macfarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, trans. Stacey Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Macmillan, 2012); Kimberly Ens Manning and Felix Wemhheuer, eds., Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). Yu Liu, “Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China,” Modern China 26, no. 3 (May, 2010), 334. Jin Zhonghua, “Jin Fushizhang dibaci Shanghaishi Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmohui kaimu ci” (Opening remarks by Deputy Mayor Jin Zhonghua at the eighth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), Shanghaishi dibaci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmohui cailiao (Materials from the eighth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching

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The stakes, Jin claimed, were extraordinarily high. Production was a battlefield, and Putonghua was a weapon needed for China’s survival. The country must be united through a shared language so citizens could effectively fight the battle against class enemies. The transformation that would conspire, Jin emphasized, was also a two-way street. As the national language transformed the country, the language itself would also “acquire a new vitality.” Like Stalin had predicted, language and nation developed concurrently. What, then, was to become of China if all the nation’s people did not speak Putonghua? Even before the Great Leap Forward, not speaking Putonghua was associated with thought problems. Once Mao had made clear just what was at stake if citizens did not continue class struggle, these thought problems became much more menacing. By the early 1960s, thought deficiency was commensurate with betrayal. Logical reasoning, therefore, would dictate that every utterance was a statement on political commitment. Public speeches made this assumption explicit. The opening ceremony at the fifth annual Putonghua Teaching Achievement guanmo hui included the following reasoning: If we say that the work of promulgating Putonghua is for the revolution, that it is revolutionary work, there might be many people who are not conscious of it. There are those who believe, when the liberation army is at our defense can it be considered “doing revolution,” or to participate in the socialism education movement is to “do revolution,” or they say that developing the Daqing oil fields is “doing revolution.” But as for promulgating Putonghua for the revolution, is it placing [its value] too high? Actually, in this age of our great revolution, in this country of our great revolution, on every front, whether it is a large-scale movement or everyday activities, it is all a part of revolutionary work. To put it concretely, to do educational work is to do revolution, to do cultural, or cinematic work is to do revolution, to be a clerk, a serviceperson, a ticket seller, a train attendant, or a radio broadcaster is all to do revolution, and when young people study in school it is also for the good of the revolution.31

In essence, language policy in the 1960s sought to fuse thought, speech, and behavior together to forge a blunt weapon that could effectively achieve revolutionary ideals. To speak and think in Putonghua was to live revolution. Within this environment, those who felt learning

31

achievement guanmo hui), October 31, 1965, B105-8–498-65, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. “Zai dibaci Shanghaishi tuiguang Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui shang de jianghua” (Speeches at the eighth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), Shanghaishi dibaci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmohui cailiao (Materials from the eighth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), October 31, 1965, B105-8–498-68, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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Putonghua was too hard, or unnecessary, or “more-or-less” similar to their own language were committing crimes against not just the country, but the idea of revolution itself. Moreover, if the language one chose to speak was essentially a political act, then any language besides Putonghua became counterrevolutionary. Such rhetoric placed fangyan in direct conflict with Putonghua: to speak one is to “do revolution” while to speak another is to not. The nonchalance toward fangyan’s inevitable demise linguists expressed in the early 1950s had transformed into an active push to hasten it. In comparing fangyan to feudalism – the very thing that revolutionaries were supposed to struggle against – China’s soundscape had become a battlefield.32 Those who spoke fangyan were contributing to the “fangyan protectionist environment,” ceding it territory on the battlefield for the national soul.33 Coupled with the Great Leap Forward rhetoric, speaking fangyan was seen to produce counterrevolutionary thoughts. According to the party line, socialist China could no longer be polyphonic. Revolution of the Mind: Putonghua in the Classroom One of the primary goals of the guanmo hui was to encourage participants to take its fervor and enthusiasm into the classroom.34 As ground zero for language policy, schools were under enormous pressure to make concrete the abstract directives from the capital. Policy making in the People’s Republic was often neither stable nor consistent. It was heavily top-down as the central government announced sweeping mass movements; at the same time, it was also highly subject to local interpretation – a flexible, fluid process that Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry have described as “guerrilla policy style.”35 Most central government policies were vague; rather than stipulate numbers, 32

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Li Rulong, “Putonghua yu fangyan – tantan fangyanxue de gaizao” (Putonghua and fangyan: On the transformation of dialectlogy), in Jiji tuiguang Putonghua (Enthusiastically promulgate Putonghua) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1976), 62–63. Shanghaishi gonggongjiaotong gongsi dianche yi chang (Bus Route 1 of the Shanghai City Public Transportation Company), “Cong sanjuhua rushou, jiehe shoupiao yewu tuiguang Putonghua” (Start with three words, unite ticket sellers to promulgate Putonghua), Zhongguo wenzi gaige guanyu zhaokai fangyanqu chengshi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui cailiao (Materials from the Committee for Language Reform in China on hosting a conference for sharing experience about the work of promulgating Putonghua in dialect regions and cities), October 20, 1965, B105-8–499-75, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Julia Kwong, “The Educational Experiment of the Great Leap Forward, 1958–1959: Its Inherent Contradictions,” Comparative Education Review 23, no. 3 (October, 443–455. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerilla-Style Politics and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, eds.,

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budgets, or curricula, Beijing issued broad goals. When Mao asked citizens to surpass the steel production of the United Kingdom, or implored artists to privilege the stories of the masses, the nuts and bolts of these policies were often configured at the local, or even individual, level – their interpretation confined by the threat of censure from on high. This was also the case in schools. Without specific instruction, many schools aimed to make their educational output impressive on paper. Municipalities and provinces trumpeted the increased use of Hanyu pinyin script, while others publicized increases in their students’ Putonghua fluency. An arms race developed as localities attempted to meet and surpass Beijing’s educational objectives – first in achieving concrete goals such as proficiency, and then in more opaque goals, such as instilling correct thought. In their fervor, Putonghua became a goal to be achieved with more efficiency, accuracy, and fluency each passing year. And as Putonghua became so intricately tied to national goals, fangyan became marginalized, occupying an increasingly smaller corner of public life. Comparison of Sound Let us say we were to sit in on a language classroom in China in 1958, overseen by a teacher who has tried, to their best efforts, to adhere to central government directives. Our day would most likely begin with a resounding “good morning” from our teacher in Putonghua. While it is difficult to predict what the students would have spoken, there were clear expectations for instructors. Commands from Beijing declared Putonghua the language of instruction, first in language classes and then, within two years, other subjects as well. This policy prompted a widespread demand for teachers, inspiring normal schools to shift their curricula and compelling local governments to introduce intensive summer crash courses in Putonghua phonology. The requirement also affected students – in theory, if we suppose these teachers were strictly following state expectations by teaching solely in Putonghua, students’ ability to absorb content in any subject hinged on their language competency. The next thing we might notice in our hypothetical classroom would be the script on the board. In year one of primary school, the principle focus in language class was supposed to be Hanyu pinyin, or the approved romanization system for Putonghua developed by the Committee for Language Reform in China. Still in use today, pinyin’s advertised purpose Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 1–29.

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was to facilitate the teaching of correct pronunciation.36 Even before the Committee announced Hanyu pinyin’s rollout in 1956, publishers began experimenting with textbooks using romanized scripts. Many of these transitional texts were called shiyongben (试用本), or “probationary books,” often first tested on teachers at Putonghua training classes, which included alternative romanization schemes or the KMT’s phonetic system zhuyin fuhao.37 But after 1957, the use of pinyin in classrooms was expected. If our teacher was following instructions from Beijing, it would have been a cornerstone of their pedagogy. After a hearty greeting, the class would begin instruction. The Committee for Language Reform in China entrusted our teacher with two primary responsibilities: “promote literacy and encourage accurate pronunciation.”38 With this directive, a focus on phonetics undergirded nearly all of China’s language curricula. Reports from Ye Laishi (叶籁士), the deputy director of the Committee for Language Reform in China in the late 1950s, pushed teachers in Shanghai to emphasize oral performance in classroom activities, suggesting the recitation of plays, songs, and poems as possible ways to encourage students to practice their pronunciation.39 Textbooks also suggested orations, pinyin exams, and other methods.40 36

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Scholars and the state alike had been trying to create a phonetic system for Chinese since missionaries landed in China’s newly opened treaty ports after the Opium War. A wide variety of systems were introduced during the initial meetings of the Preparatory Committee on the Unification of the National Language, but when the KMT swept into power in 1927, they began promulgating their own system, zhuyin zimu. For a summary of the romanization of Chinese, see Ni, Ladinghua xinwenzi. In the early 1950s, pinyin was also sold as a way to expedite the elimination of Chinese characters altogether, but such plans were abruptly abandoned leading up to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, in no small part because many romanization proponents were criticized or sent to labor camps. Ulug Kuzuoglu, Codes of Modernity, 414–416. This history of romanization is also covered in Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology. These include the following texts. Wenzi gaige chubanshe, Hanyu pinyin keben (Textbook on Hanyu pinyin) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957). Putonghua huayin yanjiuban (Research group on the phonetics of Putonghua), Putonghua langdu cailiao (Putonghua recitation materials) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1958). These texts divided sounds not by the Chinese categories of “initials” and “finals,” but rather by the Western categories of vowels and consonants. They also borrowed symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, the consonants represented in Hanyu pinyin as zh and sh were written as ʐ and ʂ, respectively. Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui (Committee for Language Reform in China), Hanyu pinyin fangan caoan (Draft of the proposal on Hanyu pinyin) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 4. Zhongguo wenzi gaige xiehui Ye Laishi Fuzhuren guanyu tuiguang Putonghua he yuwen jiaoxue wenti baogao (Report from the deputy director of the Committee for Language Reform in China Ye Laishi on the question of the promulgation of Putonghua and language education), May, 1956, B105-2–405, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Jiangsusheng jiaoyuting jiaocai bianjishi (The Jiangsu Province Education Bureau department on publishing educational materials), Jiangsusheng shifan xuexiao keben: Xiaoxue yuwen jiaoxue fangfa (Textbook for the normal schools of Jiangsu Province:

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It is thus of little surprise that the hierarchy between Putonghua and fangyan outlined in the previous section was similarly featured in classrooms. The best way to ensure correct pronunciation in Putonghua, these materials claimed, was to compare its sounds to the students’ native fangyan. Shanghai’s Education Bureau stated, “Teaching methodology should adopt analysis, synthesis, and comparison. First, [the teacher] should teach pronunciation and phonetic writing . . . For instance, to teach “ba,” first [students] should study the way to write it, then they should compare differences in each element, each syllable, and each tone.”41 Another example came from a report from three teacher’s schools in Shanghai. They claimed, “when we teach pronunciation . . . we must also address students’ pronunciation difficulties . . .. Even though the students at teaching colleges are not necessarily from Shanghai, the majority of us speak Shanghainese . . . we must help students understand the differences between Shanghai fangyan and Putonghua, and grasp the difficulties.”42 The comparison charts rendered in the “Language Study Handbooks,” discussed in the previous chapter, became the basis for actual pedagogy. The extent to which teachers adhered to this shift in priorities was put on full display at the guanmo hui. Awards in oral competitions where students performed plays, poetry, and monologues were granted almost exclusively on the basis of correct pronunciation: 70–80 percent of their score was based upon accuracy of initials, finals, and tones, with the remaining 20–30 percent determined by the contestant’s political content.43

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Elementary school language teaching methods) (Jiangsu: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1959). Jiaoyubu, Putonghua yuyin xunlian jiaoxue dagang (Proposal on the teaching of Putonghua phonetics training), August 8, 1955, B105-7–32, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. “Shanghaishi diyi shifan xuexiao, Shanghaishi disi shifan xuexiao, Shanghaishi diliu shifan xuexiao deng danwei guanyu Shanghaishi shifan xuexiao tuiguang Putonghua de gongzuo baogao” (Shanghai’s first normal school, fourth normal school, and sixth normal school and other work units’ report on the work of promulgating Putonghua in normal schools in Shanghai), Shanghaishi chuxi disici quanguo Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui cailiao (Materials from the fourth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), August 8, 1964, B105-8–268-50, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Shanghaishi disanci Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui pingxuan jiangli banfa (Prize selection method for the third Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), in Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju guanyu Shanghaishi disanjie Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui wenjian (Documents from the Shanghai City Education Bureau’s third Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), June 30, 1960, B105-2–250-66, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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The emphasis on pronunciation in and of itself could have represented a wide variety of underlying goals from the central government, many of which they themselves articulated – perfect pronunciation improved communication among the country’s citizens and helped citizens avoid potential miscommunications. Yet in many ways, these explanations are not entirely satisfying. The goal of perfect pronunciation meant that language was more than simply a “tool” for communication; logically speaking, those who spoke with nonstandard accents could still (and can still) communicate. Phonology, rather, became the linchpin of language education in China because of how it was imagined to reflect adherence to political thought. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the direct relationship between good pronunciation and good politics had become the bedrock of language education. Learning Language through Thought If the Great Leap Forward sought to popularize the use of China’s national language, the mid-1960s sought to perfect it. In 1965, the Shanghai Municipal Committee on Promulgating Putonghua made this clear. “If we want to change people’s fangyan habits, and cultivate the habit of speaking Putonghua, we must change the people’s self-awareness. If we strengthen the work of political thought, only then can we adjust the political enthusiasm that the people have toward learning to use Putonghua and awaken the people’s consciousness.”44 Such logic was already established during the Great Leap Forward Teaching Achievement guanmo hui, but here, the Committee encouraged it in the classroom, where teachers swapped speeches and competitions with more prosaic activities. The Committee had suggestions. For younger students, reading aloud from textbooks, the pages of which were filled with stories of revolutionary heroes, could forge the association between correct thought and pronunciation.45 Indeed, a frequently mentioned assessment for 44

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Shanghaishi Minbeiqu Jialu youshe (Shanghai City Minbei district Jialu travel company), “Yong Putonghua jiedai youke, tigao fuwu zhiliang” (When we use Putonghua to treat travelers, we raise the quality of our service), Zhongguo wenzi gaige guanyu zhaokai fangyanqu chengshi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui cailiao (Materials from the Committee for Language Reform in China on hosting a conference for sharing experience about the work of promulgating Putonghua in dialect regions and cities), October 20, 1965, B105-8–499-75, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. In fact, attempts to create synaptic shortcuts is well documented. As Ji Fengyuan has shown, the Communist Party exacted an aggressive campaign to “remake people’s minds by compelling them to participate in a totalizing discourse.” While deeming “brainwashing” too strong a term, Ji shows that by associating certain vocabulary with “schemas,” or a “complex of concepts and beliefs associated with a central concept,” the party essentially engineered language to influence thought. This “linguistic engineering,” my

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linguistic proficiency required students to “tell the story of the revolution” in flawless Putonghua.46 By impregnating curricula with references to the Party, the revolution, and national strength, students would naturally associate Putonghua with the state. For continuing education students who experienced the revolution, one touted method was “memory comparison.” In practice, the teacher would emphasize the hardships of pre-1949 China through narrative. In a carefully crafted portrait of China before 1949, the instructor would expertly show how the disunity, backwardness, and weakness students associated with the old China were all induced by the lack of a common language. Lei Bo (雷勃), in an article, “It’s a miracle, and a precious experience,” explained, “Through comparative memory education, the people can think of all of the bitterness they experienced due to language barriers, understand the benefits of learning to speak Putonghua, and they will be able to take the negative aspects and make them positive, and studying Putonghua will become an activity . . . of group consciousness.”47 By manipulating memory, Lei associated fangyan with feudalism and bitterness. Putonghua not only tied people to a particular time period and historical trajectory, but also to a broader social group. It facilitated a “group consciousness.” In a more lighthearted way, Putonghua promotional materials often emphasized how homonyms could be disastrous.48 These jokes are still common today. One tells of a man on a boat who, upon hearing that a child had gone overboard, jumped into the river to retrieve him. Frantically swimming, he asked, “Where is the child?” and the other confused passengers clarified that they had said “shoes” (鞋 xie), not “child” (孩 hai ) – two characters pronounced as “hai” in many fangyan. In the 1960s, the owner of Jialu travel agency similarly warned of potential mix-ups. While teaching his employees Putonghua, he explained the following methods:

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research suggests this could potentially be extended to the very language spoken. Just as Mao Zedong became linked to concepts such as “liberation, wisdom, and struggle,” so did the sounds of Putonghua become associated with Chinese development and continual revolution. Ji Fengyuan, Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 4. Yue Huanwu, “Tuan zhongyang weiyuan, zai disici Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui de jianghua” (Communist Youth League speech at the fourth Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), Shanghaishi chuxi disici Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui cailiao (Materials from the fourth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), August 17, 1964, B105-8–268, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Lei Bo, “Shi qiyi, ye shi baogui de jingyan” (It’s a miracle, and a precious experience), Renmin ribao, August 25, 1958, 7. This claim is common in the introduction of many of the Handbooks. As one example, see, Jiaodongren zenyang xuexi Putonghua, 3.

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We want to [do] this difficult task of serving the people. If those of us in the proletariat do not do it, who will? If we do not step up, who will? Through this kind of revelation, us laborers continuously remember the oppression we experienced in the old society, and we discuss how much of it is because linguistic differences caused mix-ups.49

To our ears, the correlation between language mix-ups and oppression seems hyperbolic at best. But in 1965, the owner of a travel agency would not have been immune to the heightened rhetoric so common in public forums in the 1960s. Whether he made this declaration due to political pressure or sincere belief, his logic was that the diversity of fangyan was symptomatic of the harsh realities of life before the CCP, whereas Putonghua was paradigmatic of progress the Party had achieved. Regardless of the age or location of the student, Putonghua promulgation continuously returned to the relationship between language and thought. Sometimes this connection was portrayed as imminently physical. Body and mind were inseparable. Song Xinwen (宋信文), a third-year student at Guiyang Normal University, articulated an example of this approach in his chronicle of his experience learning Putonghua. When he first began studying, he wrote, he merely imitated the “melodic voices” he heard on the radio with little thought of “the fundamentals of pronunciation.” He would imitate and imitate, but because he did not understand how or why pronunciation mattered, he “lost [his] motivation and confidence and studying, and slowly regressed back to [speaking] fangyan.” He had yet to comprehend, he claimed, that learning Putonghua was a cornerstone of the revolution, and like all revolutionary behavior, ought to be a long, arduous journey. His turning point came when he read the words of Chairman Mao, who wrote, “language, this thing, is not something you can casually study; you must put forth laborious effort.’” This gave him the clarity and vision he needed to effectively learn Putonghua: In order to cross the bridge of pronunciation, one must listen more, practice more, and correct more. For listening, listen to teachers, listen to classmates, listen to songs with correct pronunciation. For correction, consult teachers, consult classmates, and consult books for correct pronunciation. For practice, this is the central part, practice more, practice over and over. For instance, for me, pronouncing [the initials] zh, ch, sh, and r required a lot of effort, my tongue did not listen to my commands when I told it to not twist so much, but I had to overcome this 49

Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju geweihui guanyu 1973 nianlai jici zhaokai tuiguang Putonghua he Hanyu pinyin gongzuo jiaoyu zuotanhui de qingkuang (Shanghai Bureau of Education’s Cultural Revolution Committee on the situation of hosting a conference on the education work of promulgating Putonghua and Hanyu pinyin from 1973), April 9, 1973, B105-4–962, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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difficulty. Every time I encountered these consonants pronounced on the back of the tongue, I would consciously pronounce them very strongly, and consciously train my tongue to do this action.50

For Song, correct pronunciation, correct behavior, and correct thought were cultivated in concert. Even the movement of his tongue and lips would suddenly adjust to the phonology of Putonghua if he had the write mindset. This meant that the more correct his Putonghua became, the more correct his thought became, and vice versa. These examples are anecdotal. It is impossible for us to know how frequently teachers practiced “memory comparison,” and equally impossible to measure the synaptic responses induced or subtle changes in individual thinking induced by reciting revolutionary stories in the party’s language. But these anecdotes offer a glimpse of how national policy could be interpreted – interpretations that, notably, received public commendation. At their core, each of these interpretations accepted central government rhetoric that fused thought, speech, and behavior. According to these pedagogical suggestions, pronunciation mistakes and heavy accents led to more than potential misunderstandings. They represented, or even caused, derelict thought, an inability to recognize how the party had transformed China. In other words, some interpretations of central government rhetoric made the relationship between language and thought reciprocal. Correct political thought could inspire language-learning success, but just as importantly, speaking the national language dictated thought. Within the logic of this framework, fangyan no longer had a role to play in Chinese society. If speaking Putonghua both represented and facilitated correct thinking – and the more “correct” a person’s Putonghua was, the more correct that person’s thought was – how could anyone justify incorrect thinking? If Mao called upon his people to constantly be doing revolution, how could one refuse to speak the very language that had the potential to galvanize that revolution? As the party radicalized every

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Song Xinwen, “Weile tigao jiaoxue zhiliang, weile geng hao de wei renmin fuwu” (To raise the quality of teaching, to better serve the people), Wenzi gaige (August, 1966), 10–12. The concept of “continued correction” is also mentioned frequently in archival material concerning continued efforts to promulgate Putonghua. See “Shanghaishi diyi shifan xuexiao, Shanghaishi disi shifan xuexiao, Shanghaishi diliu shifan xuexiao deng danwei guanyu Shanghaishi shifan xuexiao tuiguang Putonghua de gongzuo baogao” (Shanghai’s first normal school, fourth normal school, and sixth normal school and other work units’ report on the work of promulgating Putonghua in normal schools in Shanghai), Shanghaishi chuxi disici quanguo Putonghua jiaoxue chengji guanmo hui cailiao (Materials from the fourth Shanghai City Putonghua teaching achievement guanmo hui), August 8, 1964, B105-8–268-47, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai.

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aspect of Chinese society, making thoughts public property of the nation, fangyan could only safely exist in the past. The Private Life of Fangyan “The range of influence or power of fangyan is right now enormous, but because fangyan and the direction of development of the entire Han people is not the same, it will naturally shrink. The power of Putonghua is not strong right now, but due to the pressing needs of the country’s economic, political, cultural, and national defense construction, it will necessarily grow.”51 So did linguist Lin Xi warn of the dangers fangyan could bring. He framed the relationship between Putonghua and fangyan as adversarial, fighting for control of spatial realms. Languages, in Lin’s imagination, defended territories. But if we were to momentarily accept the premise of Lin’s metaphorical world, we could ask an alternative question that might allow us to peel back layers of rhetoric and hyperbole to reveal lived experience at the height of Maoism: if the battle was still being waged, which areas of everyday life lay within fangyan’s “realm of influence”? The grand pronouncements of the guanmo hui paint a picture of perpetual Putonghua victory. If we were to take them at face value, fangyan spaces would be rare, and citizens of the PRC today would sound much like the automated announcements of Beijing’s subway stations. In reality, most citizens, especially those old enough to have experienced the policies described, do not speak standard Putonghua. In a college class I witnessed in 2014, a group of nearly a hundred Chinese students were asked if the definition of Putonghua described the language they regularly spoke; the audience rippled with nervous laughter and shaking heads.52 The sounds on the streets of big cities such as Guangzhou and Shanghai are often a cacophony of multiple fangyan, Putonghua, English, and a code-switching mixture of all three. These easily observable realities stem from the implementation of language reform nearly half a century ago, reminding us that there was a significant gap between rhetoric and practice. This final section will try to unveil those realities of language reform disparate from the CCP’s vision. Here, sources are few. No secret cameras loomed in classrooms, bus terminals, or private homes in Maoist China. Relative adherence to oral standards is difficult to measure, and even more difficult to relay through 51

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Lin Xi, “Xuehui le Putonghua, yao dadan de jingchang yingyong” (To become proficient in Putonghua, one must boldly and frequently use it), in Putonghua changshi (Common knowledge about Putonghua) (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 72. Sun Yat-sen University, September 1, 2014.

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text. Yet there are several windows into the soundscape of the early PRC. The first is oral interviews. Most of the individuals who came of age during the CCP’s language policy launch are alive today, and can describe what they learned, what they spoke, and how they felt. These interviews, however, have as many limitations as they do possibilities. While drawing conclusions about national policy are more straightforward, patterns become more obscure at the local level. Not only did experiences differ from person to person, or from school to school, but China is a diverse sprawling country – speaking Putonghua in Qingdao carried different connotations than it did in Chengdu. We must, therefore, be cautious in the conclusions we draw from these perspectives. Official sources, when read against the grain, can also reveal inconsistencies between Beijing’s policy goals and the realities of their implementation. In the ten years between the rollout of the PRC’s language policy and the Cultural Revolution, the rhetoric changed tremendously. When rhetoric replaced practical explanations with emotional appeals to national service or heightened the stakes of noncompliance, the authors of that rhetoric were responding to changes – real or perceived – in the world around them. These shifts in emphasis reflect histories we cannot see or hear. All of these sources lay bare that execution of national policy was highly uneven. This unevenness could extend one of two ways. As already mentioned, central government dictates were not concrete curricula, but rather, broad goals or guiding principles that localities then interpreted. Since a wrong interpretation could mean disaster, many local bureaucrats tripped over one another to show their dedication to the revolution. This was often done at the expense of reason, leading to the extremism that so often characterized the decade.53 Since many goals were impractical or impossible, sometimes they were unevenly ignored. Residents of Qingdao I spoke with who attended school in the 1950s, for instance, remember that their teachers did not emphasize pinyin, and often relied on Qingdao fangyan to teach.54 Certainly, they told me, they never spoke Putonghua outside the classroom, despite periodicals and national conferences that encouraged them to do so. Even in official documents, this unevenness is apparent. Guanmo hui representatives were overwhelmingly from eastern provinces, whereas those from the western regions were mostly absent. Documents claimed that these absences were due to the potentially exorbitant travel costs, but 53 54

Kwong, “Educational Experiment,” 453–454. This source has requested to remain anonymous. Interview with the author, tape recording, November 25, 2013.

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they also implied that citizens of the rural west would not have been able to compete with their east coast counterparts. The state, in fact, advised that urban areas be held to a higher standard than rural areas, that northern regions should be held to a higher standard than “fangyan regions,” and younger citizens should be expected to retain better language skills than older citizens.55 Such a tiered application implies asymmetries on the ground. Thus despite rhetoric that compelled people to swiftly acquire fluency in the national language, most people were slow to change their habits. The extent to which schools adhered to the regulations set by the central government varied based upon the school’s geography, financial capabilities, and student body. It is possible that local rhetoric – not necessarily local practice – tended toward extremism. Just as national policies did not necessarily reflect compliance, so too must we approach with suspicion the idea that, to use Lin Xi’s framework, fangyan’s “range of influence” was shrinking. But if Lin’s assessment was more complex than it appeared, where did fangyan thrive? Fangyan most likely lived in the private home. A speech at a 1973 guanmo hui, almost two decades after the policy’s launch, raised this as a potential problem. A representative from Guangming Elementary School outside Shanghai explained that encouraging children to practice Putonghua in the home was imperative to ensuring the continued success of Putonghua promulgation efforts.56 The implication of this proposal was that private conversations in fangyan among students beyond the walls of the classroom were common practice – something that even a cursory observation of China today would support. Oral art was another. The previous chapter highlighted how theater was one of the rare spaces of public life where fangyan were not only permitted, but celebrated. By the height of the Great Leap Forward, however, even the performing arts could not escape crackdowns. In the early 1960s, a new campaign renewed efforts to “revolutionize, popularize, and nationalize” local theater. This campaign resulted in widespread bans on 55

56

Guangdongsheng 1956 nian tuiguang Putonghua zongjie (Summary for the promulgation of Putonghua in Guangdong Province in 1956), February 11, 1957, 215-1-254-285-293, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Fengxianxian, Wuqiao gongshe, Guangming xiaoxue (Fengxian County, Wuqiao commune, Guangming Elementary School), “Women nongcun xuexiao ye yao tuiguang Putonghua” (Our rural elementary school still should promulgate Putonghua), Shanghaishi Jiaoyuju Geweihui guanyu 1973 nian lai ji ci zhaokai tuiguang Putonghua he Hanyu pinyin gongzuo jiaoyu zuotanhui de qingkuang (Shanghai City Education Bureau Cultural Revolution Committee on the situation of hosting a few conferences on the educational work of promulgating Putonghua and Hanyu pinyin since 1973), May 26, 1973, B105-4–962, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Also in Jiaoyubu, “Guanyu zai zhongxiaoxue he ge shifan xuexiao dali tuiguang Putonghua de zhishi.”

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popular productions, which only intensified through the Cultural Revolution.57 By the late 1960s, just as only a few select written works were considered permissible literature, only a dwindling number of approved revolutionary “model operas” could be performed.58 Documents beginning in the late 1950s show attempts to ensure that all theater was performed in Putonghua. The Ministry of Culture sent notices to the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, among others, claiming that because fangyan were “hard to understand,” the actors should use the common language.59 According to a professor of Chinese theater at Sun Yat-sen University Huang Tianji (黄天骥), to follow such orders would have been close to impossible. Plays were written acutely attuned to how various lines would sound when sung; substitutions would strip them of all their artistic features. When pressed further, Huang simply shrugged and pointed out that, at that point, whether or not fangyan art was permissible was beside the point – the permitted model operas were from Beijing.60 Perhaps for this reason, we see limited but effective rebuffs against these measures in the Maoist period. In Fujian, local officials who pushed back against Putonghua adaptations were given an indirect exemption, told instead that rather than initiate the reforms right away they should simply “further study” the matter.61 In the 1970s, there were even limited attempts to adapt the model operas into local styles such as Cantonese or Shaanxi opera, in part due to local demands for familiar entertainment. These performances were quite few in number, but their existance during the Cultural Revolution at all demonstrates the continued relevance of fangyan in art.62 In other words, when fangyan theater had been 57

58

59

60

61 62

Guangdongsheng xiju chuangzuo zuotanhui jiyao (Summary of the talks on theater production in Guangdong Province), February 5–13, 1966, 307–1-370–163-194, Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou. Yung, “Model Opera as Model,” 147; Lei Ouyang Bryant, “Flowers on the Battlefield Are More Fragrant,” Asian Music 38, no. 1 (Winter–Spring, 2007), 88–122. Paul Clark, “Model Theatrical Works,” in Richard King, Sheng Tian Zheng, Scott Watson, eds., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 167–187. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhuabu (Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China), “Qing duiyong Putonghua yanchu minju wenti jinxing zixi yanjiu buyao mangyu haozhao tuiguang” (On the problem of using Putonghua to perform Min theater, please continue to study the manner but do not concern yourself with the calls for [Putonghua] promulgation), April 29, 1959, B172-5–30, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Huang Tianji, interview with the author. Paul Clark notes how through 1967 there were local versions of these model operas, but they were quickly replaced by Beijing versions. Clark, “Model Theatrical Works,” 176–178. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhuabu, “Qing duiyong Putonghua yanchu minju wenti.” Clark, “Model Theatrical Works,” 180.

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significantly limited, it was censorship of substance, not language, that winnowed the number of acceptable plays down to only a handful.63 Other evidence that local art remained an area where language policy was limited in its success includes public lambastes of artists. Steel worker Yu Zhangjin (俞掌金) railed against those who insisted upon using fangyan characters in novels to give their work local flavor. He wrote, “I think that fangyan should be used sparsely or not at all, [one can] use Putonghua to replace it completely.”64 Similarly, several editorials in the People’s Daily discussed the use of standard Putonghua in Beijing opera. Lin Xi argued that when artists used local language, they sacrificed clarity and comprehension for local flavor or historical authenticity. These editorialists thus echoed the same arguments used in the 1940s during the national forms debate: how could art be “for the people” if the people could not understand it?65 Yet their concerns reflect the fact that artists were making these linguistic choices – if no artists used fangyan in their work, then what was there for these men to castigate? Finally, we must account for the fact that Putonghua and fangyan existed on a sliding scale. Official documents made little mention of this, instead drawing a sharp divide between fangyan and Putonghua. In today’s China, however, hybrid mixes of fangyan and Putonghua are quite common. In Qingdao, residents often claim they speak in “Qingpu” (青 普) or “Puqing” (普青), both terms referring to hybrid languages that mix the local Qingdao fangyan and Putonghua.66 Moreover, while anecdotes and policies stressed “accuracy in pronunciation,” there were few discussions of “accent.” The line between speaking Putonghua with a thick accent and speaking another fangyan was often a sliding scale, in particular in northern areas where vocabulary rarely differed from the national 63

64 65

66

Yung, “Model Opera as Model,” 144–164. It is true that some of these were adapted into Cantonese, substantiating the claim that content, not language, was the primary concern. According to Yung, in the translation, they sacrificed much of the tonality of the original play. Yu Zhangjin, “Buyi guoduo shiyong fangyan” (It is not good to use too much fangyan), Renmin ribao, May 12, 1959, 7. This was also echoed in the “Women dianyingyuan shi zenyang tuiguang Putonghua de” (How we at the movie theater promulgate Putonghua), Zhongguo wenzi gaige guanyu zhaokai fangyanqu chengshi tuiguang Putonghua gongzuo jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui cailiao (Materials from the Committee for Language Reform in China on hosting a conference for sharing experience about the work of promulgating Putonghua in dialect regions and cities), October 20, 1965, B105-8–499-128, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai. Similarly, we see this in various articles in Zhongguo yuwen. For example, Ma Shaobo, “Xiqu yuyan yu Putonghua” (The language of theater and Putonghua), Zhongguo yuwen (October, 1959), 483–485. Qingdao fangyan expert Li Xingjie confirms this. He explains that “standard” Qingdao fangyan is an enigma: most people in Qingdao speak some sort of hybrid. Li Xingjie, interview with the author, tape recording, December 12, 2014, Qingdao, China.

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language. In this way, both linguists and government officials attempted to flatten and homogenize linguistic forms when, in reality, the lines between and among them were often difficult to grasp. Ultimately, what we can say is that the existence and prevalence of multitudinous linguistic forms in Maoist China – from numerous fangyan to hybrid languages and accents – meant that the standard Putonghua exalted in local sources was likely uncommon. Indeed, it was well known that the CCP’s own leadership rarely spoke standard Putonghua – even Mao Zedong, the man whose quotations were used to justify strict Putonghua promulgation policies, spoke it with a very thick accent. These contradictions within official rhetoric did not diminish its power. Rather, they reveal how the debates between official narratives and local practice created new ways of expressing Chinese nationalism. While Putonghua could not completely supplant decades or even centuries of local tradition, it changed the public soundscape. The rise of hybridized languages highlights this well. The CCP obviously never intended for the language to be hybridized or flexible. But as policy enactments intersected with increased urbanization, migration, and cross-regional communication, communities adapted. These unintended consequences of language reform, in other words, reflect just how messy and unpredictable policy implementation at the national level can be. Conclusion The Cultural Revolution was, in many ways, a revolution of rhetoric.67 Certainly, propaganda and linguistic engineering facilitated its advent and longevity.68 Yet as much as the content of what people uttered, the language that people spoke was similarly integral to the manifestation of revolution. By imbuing language reform with the vocabulary and spirit of mass political movements, the connotations of linguistic choices shifted. Nationwide conferences made learning Putonghua a mass political movement that linked individual, Party ideology, and nation to speech. Similarly, teaching methodologies such as phonology correction and memory reformulation encouraged the coalescence of action, speech, and thought, thus aiming to erase mental space for fangyan. Awarded an entire new set of significances, fangyan were made antithetical to Putonghua and everything it stood for – nation, revolution, and loyalty to the Party. In essence, they became subversive. 67 68

Shaorong Huang, To Rebel Is Justified (New York: University Press of America, 1996), 4. Ji, Linguistic Engineering, 3.

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This is not to say that rhetoric was a transparent window into reality. Broad pronouncements from Beijing were interpreted at the local level with a high degree of variability. Yet the rhetoric still mattered. Policies guided by a belief in the inevitable disappearance of fangyan, coupled with the designation of language speaking as a political act, rearranged the metaphorical and physical space within which fangyan ought to be spoken. When this dovetailed with a political environment in which disregard for the Party line was dangerous, local interpretations of central Party philosophies tended toward the extremes. It may be difficult in this particular chapter to detect the dialectical process this book has traced. This is, in large part, a question of sources. After 1958, the Party line on Putonghua was broadly set, and those who disagreed had to tread carefully or, as was more common, not tread publicly at all. Despite this, I do not believe this marks a complete victory for the narrative of homogenization. The stubborn persistence of fangyan demonstrates that expressions of Chinese ethnic and national identity that placed fangyan at the center continued to play a role in identity construction. Moreover, though fangyan defenders were more detectible through subtle action or passive resistance rather than outright articulations in the public record, state fears of nonstandard language suggest their ubiquity. Calls to root out dangerous or counterrevolutionary behavior belied a belief in the existence of that behavior in the first place. This indirect debate created insurgency – it gave rise to an expression of national belonging that positioned itself in opposition to the state. The full effects of the CCP’s politicization of language would not be grasped for decades. The initial chaos of the red-guard movement brought normal bureaucratic functions to a standstill, during which time most official policy enforcement ceased as well. After the Cultural Revolution came to an end, the liberalism of the 1980s gave rise to new opportunities for linguistic expression. Dialectologists resumed their work after years of socialist education in the countryside; artists capitalized upon the liberal environment to express themselves in new ways. In this new era, debates over the role of language in the construction of national identity resumed. But undergirding both sides was a new framing: an understanding that language use was often tied to political loyalties. Even long after the Maoist period had ended, the cartography Beijing created could not be so easily erased.

Epilogue

Introduction This book has placed fangyan at the heart of modern Chinese nation building from the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period. It argues that diverse groups united in their desire to create a Chinese nation – from missionary trailblazers to ethnocentric revolutionaries, intrepid field researchers to intransigent policy makers, romantic poets to workaday educators – imagined two distinct roles for fangyan within it. To those increasingly aligned with state goals, fangyan became subsidiary branches of the national language, defined both by their supposed scientifically determined subordination as well as their cultural triviality. But to others, fangyan were the embodiment of a historical and contemporary authenticity, capturing sentiment, culture, and history in a way that a national language could not. These two narratives sustained two Chinas: one spoken in a unified voice, the other spoken in many. And for nearly a century, these narratives interacted dialectically, informing, shaping, collapsing into, and reviving one another. I use the term dialectic to emphasize how Chinese nationalism emerged and evolved from debates between those who envisioned the Chinese nation as a homogeneous community, and those who argued for a more diverse, flexible notion of national belonging. It is an imperfect model. There were not consistently only two sides of any debate about language. Sometimes the debates between the two were implicit rather than explicit; sometimes, advocates of these narratives talked past one another. We see the same individuals articulate support for both sides; we also see narratives that disappeared or collapsed into newer ideas about language and nationhood. A clear, constant two-sided debate over the course of nearly a century is impossible to trace. Nevertheless, I believe that a dialectical model is useful for understanding the nature of Chinese nationalism. First, it forces us to consider the relationship between standardization and nationalism in a way that departs substantially from the conventional view. A dialectical model 210

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highlights how debates were constructive, each side developing their own national subjectivities by engaging with, adopting from, and specifically rejecting the opposing framework. It is also predicated on the endurance of at least two visions of the Chinese nation, one of which did not require a standard language for its expression and perpetuation. The story of how those groups opposed to a homogeneously envisioned nation remained nationalistic in spite of standardizing efforts forces us to reconsider the causality inherent in the “peasants into Frenchman” narrative. Rather than presume that standard languages create citizens, this history shows how groups already driven by nationalistic concerns reimagined language in relation to the nation without assuming that standardization was a foregone conclusion. A dialectical model is also useful because, grounded as it is in the persistence of opposition, it allows us to pinpoint the brief moments of consensus that forced the debates to evolve. It also allows us to clearly see the existence and evolution of the unspoken values that both sides shared. I see several points of agreement that made their debates productive in the first place. First, while one side argued stridently for the exaltation of one national representative and the other promoted multitudinous expressions of national identity, both sides agreed that languages represented nations, in one form or another. Both sides blurred the boundary between ethnicity, culture, and nation, collectively believing that fangyan, whether conceived of as local subsidiaries of a broader Chinese language or representatives of the Chinese nation in their own right, were constitutive of a Han ethnicity. And finally, both sides capitalized upon two rhetorical strategies that they agreed proved a language’s worth to the nation: the discourse of scientific objectivity and the discourse of emotional authenticity. The story I tell here came to a climax during the Maoist period. There is a fair amount of continuity before and after 1949; rather than invent entirely new ways of imagining nationalism and language, the CCP refashioned the existing positions to fit within a new ideological framework. But the Communist period adds two important new dimensions to the story of fangyan. First, the implicit politicization of fangyan in the Republican period became explicit. The Great Leap Forward represented a discursive climax, the moment when official rhetoric crowned Putonghua as the only Chinese language that could represent the Chinese nation and relegated fangyan to symbols of an old, divided, and anti-progressive Chinese past. In a word, the continuation of this story under communism reveals an overt goal of exclusivity, in which one part of the debate tried to eliminate the other. Similarly, it underscores how the CCP took an existing “Chinese” identity that blurred

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nation, culture, and ethnicity and tied it to the state, defining nationalism as much by loyalty to the regime as by cultural practice. But perhaps most importantly, the story of fangyan under Communism demonstrates the resilience of the dialectical model. In the throes of perhaps one of the most invasive and far-reaching policies in China’s history, fangyan did not disappear. Instead, they continued to serve as the primary languages of daily life. This dialectic has never come to a close. Far from resolved, the tension between these two visions of the Chinese nation are just as relevant to Chinese nationalism now as they have ever been. I would thus like to spend these final few pages in the present day, exploring the history narrated in this book by way of its contemporary legacies. These loosely connected vignettes, moving from local journalism to underground hiphop to protest flash mobs, are not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of fangyan in contemporary China. That is deserving of several monographs on its own. Rather, they present a thematic epilogue, highlighting through example the significances of fangyan I traced here that continue to shape Chinese nationalism today. The Homogeneous Nation: Fangyan as Subnational In 2003, a local journalist filed a report on language reform in seaside Qingdao. The largest city in Shandong Province, it is known among linguists as a distinct branch of the Guanhua fangyan – mutually intelligible with Putonghua but unique in its phonetics and tones.1 The journalist was tasked with measuring the effects of Putonghua promulgation by interviewing a line of workaday bank tellers, hotel concierges, and nurses. “Why are you not speaking Putonghua?” the reporter asked a bank teller incredulously. The equally perplexed man stated, “I am speaking Putonghua, no?” She moved on to a handful of middle-aged workers, demanding to know why they did not speak in the national language. These things come slowly, they maintained with a hint of defensiveness. Some remained confused as to why a journalist would challenge their claims about the language they were speaking. Still others simply laughed sheepishly at her questions. In concluding the piece, the journalist interviewed a younger Qingdao resident, who, in perfect Putonghua, expressed outrage over falling standards. If its residents could not properly speak the nation’s common language, she asked, “how could Qingdao claim to be 1

According to dialectologist Li Xingjie, pure “Qingdaohua” or “Qingdao fangyan” is quite rare, and only common among one generation – those born in Qingdao after its population had expanded into a larger city, but before the promulgation of Putonghua. These individuals are largely in their sixties and seventies now. Interview with the author.

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a modern city, ready to be featured on a global stage?” Qingdao, the two surmised, was falling short of its responsibility to properly represent the Chinese nation.2 This report, a bizarre mix of investigative journalism and public shaming, had a clear message: speaking Putonghua was an expectation for being part of modern Chinese society. It is clearly indicative of the times. After the end of the Maoist period, the push for Putonghua promulgation became more targeted, ubiquitous, and aggressive than it was in the early years of the PRC. The 1982 Constitution declared that the state was responsible for promoting Putonghua as the nation’s language, paving the way for a series of local and national policies targeting education, public service, and art.3 Today, Putonghua is taught in all schools, dominates public announcements, and is the sole focus of language learning initiatives abroad. Teachers and broadcasters are required to pass a Putonghua proficiency exam with high marks. These measures have been matched by crackdowns on nonstandard language use in the early 2000s. Local policies targeted improper use of pinyin or traditional characters on street signs. In 2001, an announcement from the department of education designated Putonghua for public use, and fangyan for private use.4 In 2005, a series of new regulations sought to crack down on vernacular language, code-switching, and use of fangyan outside of specific, approved contexts. While content performed entirely in some fangyan is permitted in certain contexts, journalists, media personalities, and actors are no longer permitted to pepper their language with phrases or slang from other tongues.5 2 3

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“Tuiguang Putonghua, nin zuodao le ma?” (Have you promulgated Putonghua?), c0053-007–00406–002, Qingdao Municipal Archives, Qingdao. This includes Jiang Zemin’s Order of the President, which outlines in detail how the responsibilities of the Constitution are to be accomplished. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhuxi ling sanshiqi hao” (Order of the President of the People’s Republic of China number 37), October 31, 2000, published August 31, 2005, www.gov.cn/ziliao/flfg/2005– 08/31/content_27920.htm The evolution of this relationship is noted in Longsheng Guo, “The Relationship between Putonghua and Chinese Dialects,” in Minglang Zhou and Hongkai Sun, eds., Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and Practice since 1949 (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 2004), 45–55. “Wo shi guangdian xitong juxing guojia Putonghua shuiping ceshi” (My city’s broadcast and television system administration holds a nationwide Putonghua level examination), c0053-006–01719, Qingdao Municipal Archives, Qingdao. This was part of a broad policy that eventually became so strict that it caught the attention of foreign journalists, who derided it as the “war on puns.” Tania Branigan, “China bans wordplay in attempt at pun control,” Guardian, November 28, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/28/ china-media-watchdog-bans-wordplay-puns; Zhenzhi Guo, “Dialects and local media: the case of Kunming and Yunnan TV,” in Wanning Sun and Jenny Chio, eds., Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality (New York: Routledge, 2012), 50–53.

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It would be easy to interpret these policies and accompanying media reports as state attempts to minimize the role of fangyan in China’s cultural landscape. Despite laws explicitly permitting fangyan use, it is entirely unambiguous which one the state sees as the national representative. Yet it is equally obvious that the central government has not attempted to eradicate fangyan altogether. In contrast, local governments, with support from Beijing, have unveiled events meant to “save the dialects” from the fast-paced urbanization threatening the vagaries of local culture. In Suzhou, some primary schools, in collaboration with a “Suzhou fangyan training center,” began experimenting with short daily lessons in Suzhou fangyan.6 In Beijing in 2014, the subway was adorned with public service announcements teaching passersby vocabulary particular to “Beijinghua” (or “Beijing-ese”; see Figure 6.1). In 2015, the city of Leizhou, in conjunction with hot-sauce syndicate Modocom, hosted its first annual “Zurong Dialect Film Festival.” Offering awards for films made exclusively in Chinese fangyan, they summarized their goals in a short sentence: “Zurong Dialect Film Festival from beginning to end expressed the following idea: Love fangyan, love cinema, love home.”7 Chinese academia has also contributed to these efforts. In 2013, the State Council’s National Social Science Fund of China approved a research project to create a “sound digital database of Chinese fangyan.”8 The database, designed to “save” China’s fangyan, is guided by the belief that it is the responsibility of the scholars and the state to protect their nation’s heritage.9 While at first blush these “save the fangyan” measures seem antithetical to state efforts to promulgate Putonghua, I argue they represent the contemporary legacies of national language policies initiated in the late Qing. Turn-of-the-century Chinese reformers and academics, informed by Western comparative linguistics, deemed fangyan subsidiary branches 6

7 8

9

Suzhou fangyan peixun jin xuexiao yinfa Zhengyi, nanda jiaoshou jili fandui (Suzhou fangyan cultivation entering schools causes controversy, a Nanjing University professor strongly opposes), Zhongguo xinwenwang, February 25, 2012, www.chinanews.com/edu/ 2012/02–28/3703111.shtml Zurong Dialect Film Festival, “About us,” 2016, http://5ifangyan.com/portal/page/index/ id/2.html Quanguo Zhexue Shehui Kexu Guihua Bangongshi (National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science), “Hanyu fangyan ziran kouyu bianyi yousheng shujuku jianshe: Zhongqi jiancha qingkuang” (Sound digital database of Chinese fangyan natural spoken language: Midterm report), July 10, 2015, www.npopss-cn.gov.cn/n/2015/0710/ c359232-27286621.html; Quanguo Zhexue Shehui Kexu Guihua Bangongshi (National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science), “Hanyu fangyan ziran kouyu yousheng jichu yuliaoku jianshe” (The building of a sound digital database of Chinese fangyan natural spoken language basic language database), March 19, 2013, www.npopsscn.gov.cn/GB/352519/359230/ Hou, interview with the author.

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Figure 6.1 Beijing-ese: “leng shenr.” Source: Taken by author.

of a broader “Chinese language.” After the designation of Beijing’s language as the national standard, research shifted with policy. Whereas fangyan were previously studied as branches of a linguistic tree, with the

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unspoken but stark influence of National Language policy, phonetics of the national language became a scientific constant – not just another fangyan on the same taxonomic order as all the others, but the standard to which all fangyan were compared. After 1949, the Communist state supported a similar project that explicitly compared each fangyan to the national language in a comprehensive centralized survey, further entrenching fangyan’s unequal relationship with Putonghua. In a word, the way language was studied in academia reinforced and calcified a hierarchy between a national language and fangyan. This strict separation between language and fangyan is what drives state policy and media practices today. The central government has not sought to eradicate fangyan altogether. It is code-switching and seamless mixing that the state sought to outlaw; it is poorly spoken Putonghua, not Qingdaohua, that the media sought to disdain; and it was a strict separation of languages and fangyan that the state and the media sought to promote. In a similar way, the “save the dialects” movements contain echos of the Stalinist framing of language and nation explored in Chapter 4. Linguists in the early Maoist period drew upon Soviet models to argue that only a minzu yu, or language of a nationality, could represent a community progressing forward in history; fangyan, on the other hand, were deemed stagnant remnants of a nonnational past. Such theoretical structures resonate today. Today’s CCP seeks not to save fangyan in order to make them serve the same communicative, cultural, or subjective roles as Putonghua. Rather, the measures they support are geared toward preserving historical legacies. Like Shao Rongfen maintained in his 1954 article in Zhongguo yuwen, fangyan serve essentially as museum artifacts relevant only for constructing a shared past. In much the same way, the “save the dialects” activities have attempted to fashion fangyan into historical relics, part of the nation’s history but only significant insofar as they contribute to a teleological narrative of eventual national unity. Even those advocating for the preservation of Suzhou fangyan confirm this distinction: “Putonghua and fangyan, one is our country’s common language and script, the other is an important linguistic resource.”10 In short, aggressive Putonghua promulgation strategies, including though certainly not limited to on-camera shaming, exalt Putonghua as the national language, while measures to “save” China’s dialects subtly institutionalize fangyan exclusively as local cultural heritage. These policies are but two sides of the same coin. They draw a clear divide between the language that serves as national representative and local 10

“Suzhou fangyan peixun.”

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manifestations of that national culture that should be preserved for posterity and little more. As the state and its allies have actively promulgated Putonghua as an archetype of of Chinese-ness and carefully curated fangyan as little more than data, heritage, or private curiosities, the apotheosis of the hierarchy between national language and fangyan lives on. The Heterogeneneous Nation: Fangyan as Authentic “Do you think you live in the world of a Korean drama?”11 Papi Jiang, the viral Chinese vlogger whose short, pithy videos have taken the Chinese internet by storm, often finds herself scolding hypothetical interlocutors. The “satirical internet queen,” as she is so named in US media outlets,12 fetches millions of yuan for each ad on her five-minute commentaries on gender roles, family relations, and Chinese millennial living. Among some of her more popular series include imitations of Shanghai tropes, including a no-nonsense urbanite who sassily lambasts her friends in rapid Shanghainese. In this particular video, titled “Shanghaihua + Yingyu disidan” (上海话 +英语 第四弹, Shanghainese + English, episode four) alone in front of her camera Papi acts out a scene in which she reprimands an imaginary “Gary” for taking advantage of another imaginary friend “Sophie.” Viewing only Papi’s side of a phone conversation, the audience sees her rail against Gary for manipulating Sophie with fake cancer scares until Papi finds out he is actually sick, leaving her in the humorously humiliating position of having to walk back her original rebukes. Yet the content in this video is largely irrelevant. The point is to poke fun at how Shanghai women speak: a sinuous mix of Shanghainese, English, Mandarin, and even Japanese. She yells, “Ni yiwei ni live in a Hanju de shijie li lo?” (你以为你 live in a 韩剧的世界里咯?, Do you think you live in the world of a Korean drama?), which flawlessly inserts the rather banal English words “live in a” into her Shanghainese diatribe, after which she angrily exclaims, “Aiya wocena” (哎呀我册那), a local phrase used to vent frustration that can translate to an agitated sigh or even an exasperated “Ugh, what the fuck!”

11

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Papi Jiang, “Shanghaihua + Yingyu disidan” (上海话+英语 第四弹, Shanghainese + English, episode four), YouTube video, April 26, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch? v=2-VZ6yGs6WI Zheping Huang, “China’s satirical internet queen just sold her first video ad for 2.4 million,” Quartz, April 21, 2016, https://qz.com/666657/chinas-satirical-internetqueen-just-sold-her-first-video-ad-for-3-million/

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Certainly, Papi Jiang’s videos are exaggerated for comedic effect, meant to playfully mock Shanghainese women who demonstrate their globalized linguistic prowess through language performance. They target the Shanghai millennial urbanite like herself, who, for most of the Chinese population unaccustomed to this level of code-switching, probably sounds as ridiculous as Papi implies. Yet just as importantly, the virality of Papi Jiang’s videos reveals that the linguistic realities of China are far messier than state narratives would have us believe. Though the hybridity she employs captures Shanghai’s culture enough to lampoon it, what she parodies likely reflects some element of truth. The popularity of her videos also shows how wide an audience there is for fangyan entertainment. Despite the fact that state censorship often strictly limits the number of permitted programs in local languages, fangyan media are quite popular. Music, movies, and television programs produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan in Cantonese and Taiwanese, respectively, are widely consumed within the PRC’s borders, and locally produced television shows are regularly dubbed into fangyan.13 Artists from Hong Kong who sing in Cantonese have large followings within the Mainland. But beyond this, Papi Jiang’s videos also imply something deeper. Her videos are one example among many that there is clear desire for opportunities of self-expression not just in fangyan, but in linguistic modes that do not neatly fall into the constructed categories of fangyan or national language – or adhere to the strict hierarchies between them that the state seeks to enforce. The way she seamlessly code-switches or overtly uses local languages tests the boundaries of the Party line. Few genres demonstrate the desire to challenge state restrictions on self-expression more than rap. Originating as an underground movement that gained prominence through local performances and streaming services such as ximalaya, Chinese rap and hip-hop now enjoy major recognition domestically and internationally, promoted through top-rated TV series such as The Rap of China (Zhongguo youxiha 中国有嘻哈, or Zhongguo xinshuochang 中国新说唱 beginning with season 2 in 2018), or collaborative albums with artists from South Korea and the United States. Below ground and above, rapping in fangyan is incredibly popular. Underground artists, many of them from Sichuan, will point to the fact that their fangyan – gritty, consistently changing, and full of emotion – is 13

Liu Jin, Signifying the Local, 66–76. Certainly, local-language television and cinema is also produced in the mainland, but it often puts artists into conflict with state censorship authorities, who frequently cite the 2001 National Language Law as reason to reject projects not performed in Putonghua. Edward Gunn, Rending the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 141–144.

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particularly well suited to an art form centered on authentic selfexpression. Even for popular artists with clear state approval – such as Er Mao (二毛), a contestant on season 1 of The Rap of China, or Higher Brothers (Haier Xiongdi 海尔兄弟), whose 2019 album featured a collaboration with US rappers ScHoolboy Q and Soulja Boy – they often prefer to rap in Sichuan fangyan, which they see as more authentic than Putonghua. As Er Mao explained in an interview, Sichuan fangyan is a “natural fit” for hip-hop’s philosophy of self-expression.14 Sometimes, these rappers explicitly use fangyan as a statement about identity. Mr.weezy, a Shanghai rapper, is known for using Shanghainese to express Shanghai pride. His songs, often sad love letters to his hometown, wax nostalgic about the narrow alleyways, old neighborhood haunts, and Shanghainese stand-up. They almost always carry a connotation of loss, and frequently point to the disappearance of local fangyan as evidence of a city quickly vanishing. His song “Shanghai language” (Shanghai yanhua 上海言话) lovingly calls his mother tongue the “root” of Shanghai identity, claiming that it is “Shanghai culture.” It is something he sees parallel to other places in China, occasionally switching away from Shanghai to discuss fangyan in the aggregate. Fangyan “flows through every person’s veins,” he raps, and thus is the only way to achieve full self-expression.15 From Mr.weezy’s perspective, fangyan are indispensable to both Chinese culture and the identities it supports. Mr.weezy’s song makes it easy to assume that rappers use fangyan to communicate local, not national, pride. Certainly, there is truth to this – Mr.weezy has made clear that he views Shanghai as unique a place to be exalted and protected. But other lyrics imply that Mr.weezy’s pride in Shanghai comes from a place of nationalism as filtered through the local. He explained in an interview, “If a place or a nation can’t even protect its own local culture, how can it talk about cultural development?”16 From his perspective, as is also true for other rappers whose lyrics eulogize local noodle dishes or their hometown’s street life, the locality is an indispensable part of what constitutes the nation. This point was similarly implied when Mr.weezy directly criticized the national language. In a verse dedicated to Shanghai language in his piece “Lost ShangHai Culture,” 14

15

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Yi-ling Liu, “Chengdu cool: The rise of Sichuan’s homegrown hip hop,” Guernica, August 29, 2018, www.guernicamag.com/chengdu-cool-the-rise-of-sichuanshomegrown-hip-hop/. Kendrick Davis, “Hip-hop gives Chinese dialects fresh expression,” Sixth Tone, September 16, 2017, www.sixthtone.com/news/1000871/hip-hop-giveschinese-dialects-fresh-expression Mr.weezy, “Shanghai yanhua” (Shanghai language), written by Mr.weezy, produced by Ma Muyi and soundwave, April 9, 2019, available on Ximalaya, www.ximalaya.com/yi nyue/6349855/174698845 Yi-ling Liu, “Chengdu cool.”

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he raps, “There is nothing ‘common’ about the ‘common tongue,’” deriding Putonghua as simply unable to represent him and his Chinese identity.17 Other fangyan rappers have made nationalism a direct topic of their songs. Take, for instance, Chengdu rapper Xie Di’s (谢帝, Fat Shady) 2017 “Stupid foreigner” (Gua laowai 掛老外), a viral invective in Chengdu fangyan about China’s foreign-born residents, who he derides as barely worthy to shine his Timberlands.18 As Fat Shady bounces to his mellow beat down the streets of Chengdu, he not only insults foreigners’ propensity for teaching English and dating Chinese women – a point he counters by crudely suggesting that it is he who can improve upon their gene pool. He also ties their “invasion” to parallel moments in Chinese national memory. He harkens back to a key moment in China’s “century of national humiliation”: the eight-axis alliance of foreign powers that came to Beijing and suppressed the pro-Qing Boxer Uprising of 1900. Xie’s antagonism toward outsiders, culminating in a final scene in which he violently knocks the head off of a mannequin labeled “stupid foreigner,” is shrouded in xenophobic nationalism. But this nationalism is not something he expresses in the national language; it is an emotion he feels he can only express in fangyan. These examples, a paltry few of innumerable ones, are multifaceted, complex, and anecdotal. They reveal the layers of context that define who speaks which language, when, and for which audiences. But together, they are a powerful rebuke of the presumption that fangyan are culturally subsidiary or exclusively local. What unites them is that they reflect a desire to express a Chinese culture outside of the state-determined framework. Papi Jiang has presented herself just as Chinese as Fat Shady or Mr.weezy. They are not solely seeking to carve out an alternative to Chinese-ness; they are expressing, rather, alternative Chinese-nesses. From Zhang Binglin and the Folksong Collection movement to Papi Jiang and Fat Shady, fangyan have served as a medium for the expression of Chinese ethnic and national identity for over a century. The reason largely lays in the fact that, then and now, fangyan are understood as a truly authentic connection to Chinese subjectivities. Expressing an identity, national or otherwise, requires a medium imbued with

17 18

Mr.weezy, “Lost ShangHai Culture,” written by Mr.weezy, November, 2017, available on Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/mrweezy-2/lost-shanghai-culture To the best of my knowledge, the original video was taken down on both YouTube and Weibo. It is archived here, though information about it is sparse. Xie Di (Fat Shady), “Gua laowai (Stupid foreigner),” July 7, 2017, https://archive.org/details/youtubeO5z10P6qX-g

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emotional power and a historical consciousness that many believe only fangyan can have. The Tension Continues: Fangyan as Subversive In July, 2010, a protest gathered in Guangzhou’s People’s Park. A group of demonstrators, adorned in t-shirts proclaiming “Sing praises for Canton (Guangzhou),” spontaneously broke into verses of the 1993 Cantonese song “Boundless oceans, vast skies” (Haikuo tiankong 海闊 天空) by the Hong Kong group Beyond.19 One of several demonstrations that month, the impromptu concert was a response to a decision by the municipal government to increase television offerings in Putonghua, thereby reducing its programming in Cantonese. The sense among Guangzhou locals that Cantonese was under threat had been bubbling for some time. The week before, news broke of an elementary school that was forcing its students not only to speak the national language in the classroom, but to also continue speaking it at home. This story was cited in the 2010 protests to “Save Cantonese” (Cheng Yueyu 撑粤语) as local residents decried that the policy made children and their grandparents “chickens talking to ducks.”20 Cantonese netizens voiced their concerns online, joined by well-known intellectuals who extolled the historic significance of Cantonese to the Chinese nation. The editorial board of the online periodical Yuyan wenzi (語言文字), for instance, claimed that Cantonese, like all Chinese fangyan, has a vocabulary just as rich as the national language. The significance of these fangyan to the Chinese nation is clear: “each fangyan of the Han minzu has nourished the Chinese national language.”21 What is unique about this episode is not that Chinese citizens in Guangzhou longed for fangyan content, or that they exalted their local language; it was that it was an expression of outright protest against government policy. It was, in a sense, the dialectical process I trace in 19

20

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Zhu Danting and Tan Weishan, “Yue chang Yue you ai, heku baodonggua” (The more one sings, the more there is love [a pun for when one sings Cantonese, the Cantonese have love], why bother with “stewed winter melon” [a pun for Putonghua]), Nandu wang, July 12, 2010, http://gcontent.oeeee.com/9/ad/9adeb82fffb5444e/Blog/89a/b53716 .html Xiao Yu, “Xuexiao yaoqiu xuesheng jiang Putonghua, zusun liang jingbian ‘ji tong ya jiang’” (School requires students to speak Putonghua, grandparents and grandchildren become “chickens talking with ducks”), Yangcheng wanbao, July 9, 2010, http://news .ycwb.com/2010-07/09/content_2571999.htm Editorial Board at Yuyan wenzi, “Cong Guangzhou ‘baowei yueyu’ youxing kan ‘baohu fangyan he tuiguang Putonghua’” (Examining “protect fangyan” and “promulgate Putonghua” from the perspective of Guangzhou’s “protect Cantonese” demonstrations), Yuyan wenzi, March 20, 2011, www.yywzw.com/n1861c152.aspx

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Figure 6.2 I love Cantonese, I don’t speak “stewed winter melon.” Source: Getty Images.

this book come to life. The music choice screamed defiance. One of the most popular Cantonese rock bands in history, Beyond is deeply embedded in the identity of Cantonese speakers within and outside the borders of the PRC. The untimely death of their lead singer Wong Ka Kui only weeks after the release of “Boundless oceans, vast skies” placed a tragic and romantic veneer over its haunting melodies – a rising Hong Kong star snatched before his time. Beyond’s trailblazing role in the popularity of Cantonese music has made the song symbolic for many Cantonese speakers today.22 It was not the music alone. Signs at the protest in Guangzhou were also provocative. One protester, for instance, proudly held a poster over the crowd that read “I love Cantonese; I don’t speak ‘stewed winter melon’” (see Figure 6.2). Several elements of this sign are worth noting. First, it used the term “stewed winter melon” (baodonggua, or bodonggwa in Cantonese, 煲冬瓜), a derogatory slang homophonous in Cantonese for Putonghua (Poutungwa in Cantonese). Such a statement, meant to mock the national language, hardly envisioned harmoniously accepting the 22

Gina Anne Tam, “Tongue-tied in Hong Kong: The Fight for Two Systems and Two Languages,” Foreign Affairs (August 3, 2016).

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status quo. Yet at the same time, the heart in his “I love Cantonese,” took the form of the PRC flag. His meaning was clear: the PRC’s statesponsored national language did not represent his own sense of national identity. In a rare move, the Guangzhou municipal government conceded to protestor demands. They compromised by adding an entirely new channel for additional Mandarin programming, leaving the existing Cantonese listings untouched. But these protests were about much more than television programming. The subtle symbolisms make clear that demonstrators were rejecting the central party line that exalted Putonghua as the sole representative of Chinese nationalism and downplayed the representative significance of fangyan such as Cantonese. They show, in other words, popular cognizance and subsequent rejection of the discourse conflating national language, nation, and state. As argued in Chapter 5, this political connotation was forged at the height of the Maoist period, when central party rhetoric, often echoed or even magnified through local campaigns, insisted that speaking the Chinese national language indicated loyalty and adherence to the CCP’s ideological goals. While official pronouncements rarely explicitly state this today, Putonghua is still strongly associated with the party. The extent to which Putonghua connotes central government-led nationalism is even clearer in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, where residents are launching their own parallel protests against Putonghua promulgation efforts. For instance, in 2016, a packet of supplementary information sent to Hong Kong schools to guide language pedagogy surreptitiously included a declaration that Cantonese could not be called a “mother tongue.”23 This curious addition buried in a series of articles was written by Song Xinqiao (宋欣橋), a consultant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Research and Development of Putonghua Education. Song premised his argument on the United Nation’s definition of “mother tongue,” which claimed it for an ethnic group. He argued, “The mother tongue does not only belong to a person, but also to an ethnic group,” and because Cantonese is not an ethnic group, its language is a fangyan, or a “variant” of the Chinese language. What normally would have been workaday bureaucratic paperwork elicited a fierce backlash. Protests blazed online as Hong Kong residents took to social media to express their outrage. Graphic artists such 23

Song Xinqiao, “Qian lun Xianggang Putonghua jiaoyu de xingzhi yu fazhan” (A short discussion on the quality and development of Putonghua education in Hong Kong), 227–228, www.edb.gov.hk/attachment/tc/curriculum-development/kla/chi-edu/resour ces/primary/pth/jisi4_24.pdf

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Figure 6.3 What is a fangyan? Source: Reprinted with permission from artist Ah-To, Me hai fong jin (咩係方言) Facebook drawing, May 4, 2018.

as Ah-To (阿塗), author of Illustrating Cantonese (Tujie Guangdonghua, or Tougaai Gwongdungwa in Cantonese, 圖解廣東話), mobilized his character “primary school chicken” (xiaoxue ji, or siu hok gai in Cantonese, 小學雞) to announce that “Cantonese is my mother tongue” (see Figure 6.3). The incendiary Apple daily (Pingguo ribao 蘋果日報) declared a “Cantonese crisis.”24 Journalists excoriated Song, attempting to disprove his contention by attacking his very definition: a “mother tongue” is learned from 24

“Guangdonghua weiji: 88 .1% ren muyu xi Guangzhouhua, 3 nian die 2.2%” (Cantonese crisis: 88.1% of people say that Cantonese is their mother tongue, down

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birth, they claimed, making the size or composition of the group it represented irrelevant.25 Even Chief Executive Carrie Lam weighed in to dismiss Song’s argument, surprising from a leader who is often reticent on issues that could draw Beijing’s ire.26 Both Song Xinqiao and his detractors asserted that what was and was not a mother tongue could be determined empirically. Song’s argument rested on the assumption that a “mother tongue” was objectively based upon the classification of the language’s speakers – Cantonese was not an ethnicity, he reasoned; given that only ethnicities could claim mother tongues, it was simply factually impossible for Cantonese to be one. His detractors refuted him with similar rhetorical strategies. In a comic series, Ah-To’s chicken stands in front of a sketched-out chalkboard, teaching his readers the “objective” definitions of “dialect” and “language” according to linguists: accepting the fangyan/dialect supersign, his graphic insists that if fangyan are “mutually intelligible” with the language from which they came and lack a distinct linguistic structure, then Cantonese, mutually unintelligible with Putonghua and containing its own distinct grammar, is not a fangyan. Neither side of this debate relied upon the words of scholars alone. Ah-To’s final image was a simple drawing of his childlike chicken declaring “Cantonese is my mother tongue” (see Figure 6.4). Its sweet facial expression reveals affection, communicating in cartoon form that his mother tongue is something akin to a relative or friend. Small silhouettes of horses, lightning bolts, and hearts form a soft yellow halo around his head, reminding us that language is the tool we use to express the most basic phenomena we encounter – objects, elements, or feelings. But its ingenuous sentimentality disguises a strident defensiveness. Song Xinqiao spoke for a powerful state seeking to enforce a homogenization that would devalue Ah-To’s native language. The emotional connotations of his image make plain that these forces of homogenization threatening language simultaneously threaten identities, that policies that diminish the value of native tongues diminish the subjectivities of its speakers. Indeed, Song Xinqiao’s decision to attack the much more

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2.2% from three years ago), Pingguo ribao, May 5, 2018, https://hk.news.appledaily.com /local/daily/article/20180505/20382122 Kris Cheng, “Cantonese a dialect, not a mother tongue, says Hong Kong Education Bureau supporting material on Mandarin,” Hong Kong Free Press, May 2, 2018, www .hongkongfp.com/2018/05/02/cantonese-dialect-not-mother-tongue-says-hong-kong-e ducation-bureau-supporting-material-mandarin; Yonden Lhatoo, “Mandarin may be King but it can’t sideline Cantonese in Hong Kong,” South China Morning Post, May 5, 2018, www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2144817/mandarin-may-beking-it-cant-sideline-cantonese-hong-kong Sun Xinqi, Sum Lok-kei, “Should Mandarin replace Cantonese? No, says Carrie Lam,” South China Morning Post, May 3, 2018, www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/arti cle/2144578/should-mandarin-replace-cantonese-hong-kong-says-no

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Figure 6.4 Cantonese is my mother tongue. Source: Reprinted with permission from artist Ah-To, Gwong dung waa hai ngo mou yu (廣東話 係我母語), Facebook drawing, May 2, 2018.

emotionally-laden term “mother tongue,” as opposed to the more neutral “language,” insinuates that this was likely a calculated charge against Hong Kong’s emotional attachment to Cantonese. Much of this episode resonates with the history told here.27 Two sides stood opposed: one argued for a homogeneous vision of Chinese identity that was barely tolerant of so-called “variants,” the other argued that the 27

Jing Tsu, whose book analyzes the “hidden assumptions that support the governance” of linguistic meaning, culture, and power, analyzes how claims over linguistic nativity reveal struggles over the right to own and arbitrate a language’s authenticity. See Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3–14, 129.

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very word “variant” devalued both the language itself and the identity of its speakers. Both relied upon claims of objective scholarship and appeals to authenticity and emotion to make their case. And finally, both saw the political implications inherent in their altercations. Song Xinqiao’s proclamation about mother tongues smacked of the Great Leap Forward rhetoric that demanded uncompromising unity; the city’s response suggested a practiced intolerance for these kinds of exclusivity politics. Yet the fact that this unfolded in Hong Kong makes it a rather special case. A British colony until 1997, and a Special Administrative Region guaranteed autonomy from domestic Chinese policy since, Hong Kong’s past and present diverged considerably from the rest of China. Hong Kongers often express that they feel worlds apart from their counterparts in the Mainland. “Despite the fact that we’re all Chinese, we’ve been brought up in a different culture,” explained Anson Chan, the chief secretary directly after the 1997 handover.”28 Since 1997, protests against Beijing’s influence in the city have been frequent, and with each movement, it becomes progressively clearer that the city’s residents fear the PRC’s cultural encroachment as much as its political domination – having had its own space to develop a Chinese identity on its own terms, the loss of that identity now feels imminent. Reports frequently portray the city as shrouded in malaise, overcome by a helpless feeling that a strong homogenizing force will quietly replace a Chinese identity to which they so fiercely adhere with one they fiercely oppose. Sometimes, their fears are portrayed in dystopian terms. The five short films that make up the 2015 feature Ten Years explore a future Hong Kong under complete control of the CCP. Though most of the film depicts state violence and oppressive national security laws, one short, “Dialect,” traces the effects of a draconian CCP-led national language law in which a Hong Kong taxi driver is marginalized for speaking Cantonese – customers will not take his cab, servers will not take his drink order, even his wife insists that he stop speaking to his son in Cantonese. The looming loss of Hong Kong’s linguistic culture is portrayed as an end to the city’s very identity.29 The rhetoric used to tie collective identity in Hong Kong to Cantonese implies that it is not simply a “Hong Konger” moniker many seek to defend; rather, it implies a reclaiming of a multivalent “Chinese-ness” constituting an ethnic and, for some, even a national identity.30 As one 28 29 30

Nash Jenkins, “A city apart: Hong Kong marks 20 years of Chinese rule,” Time June 27, 2017, http://time.com/4836134/hong-kong-20-anniversary-china/ Ten Years, directed by Kwok Zune, Wong Fei-pang, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai and Ng Ka-leung, Ten Years Studio, 109G Studio, Four Parts Production, 2015. The question of “Chinese nationalism” in Hong Kong was and is complex. For some, lacking a national identity is itself a source of pride, as Hong Kongers have been more

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young person interviewed by the New York Times explained, “I would see myself first as Hong Konger . . . but this cannot violate my Chinese identity. Hong Kong is a place, and China is a country.”31 While those who profess Chinese nationalism outright are decreasing in number, many Hong Kongers still seek to reassert the right to be Chinese, to recall Ien Ang’s phrase, “in their own way.” And this “in-their-own-way” Chinese-ness increasingly connotes a Chinese identity that is separate from, or even directly opposed to, the Chinese Communist Party. This fight to reclaim Chinese-ness from the forces of homogenization that seek to enforce Putonghua as the sole representative of China has transformed Cantonese, to use the words of Hong Kong Baptist University Professor Lian-Hee Wee, into the “language of resistance.”32 For example, in 2014, Hong Kong students took to the streets to protest the August 31 decision from the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to backtrack on promises of universal suffrage and democratic elections by essentially prescreening candidates for key Hong Kong positions; five years later, millions marched for the withdrawal of a bill that would allow for the extradition of accused criminals to the mainland.33 These displays of defiance against Beijing’s interference

31 32

33

comfortable with being “nationless” than most places. But for others, Hong Konger is only one part of their identities, something that does not negate an alternative sense of Chinese nationalism. The Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests, however, currently ongoing as this book goes to press, have created seismic changes in the way Hong Kongers see themselves, in particular precipitating a sharp decline in identification with “Chinese” at all. For explanations of earlier surveys about Hong Kong identity before the 2019 protests, see Gordon Mathews, Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (London: Routledge, 2000), 134–164; H. Christoph Steinhardt, Linda Chelan Li, and Yihong Jiang, “The Identity Shift in Hong Kong since 1997: Measurement and Explanation,” Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 110 (2018), 261–276; Terry Kastelijn, “Democracy and Mother Tongue: The Role of the Cantonese and Mandarin Language in the Socio-Political Relationship of Hong Kong and Mainland China” (MA thesis, Leiden University, June, 2018). For information on how these numbers have changed in 2019, see preliminary data at Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program, “Rift widens between Chinese and Hongkong identities, national pride plunges to one in four,” press release, June 27, 2019, www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/release/release1594.html Austin Ramzy and Alan Wong, “Young people have their say about the future of Hong Kong,” New York Times, June 30, 2017. Mary Hui, “Cantonese is Hong Kong protestors’ power tool of satire and identity,” Quartz, June 20, 2019, https://qz.com/1647631/extradition-law-hong-kong-protestsdeploy-cantonese-as-satire-tool/ “Wanren da hechang ‘Hai kuo tian kong’ @yu ze geming” (10,000 people sing together ‘Boundless oceans vast skies” at the Umbrella Revolution), YouTube video, October 4, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTDKCO-WWoY; Chong Zi Liang, “5 things about Canto-rock band Beyond’s Boundless Oceans Vast Skies, unofficial anthem of Hong Kong protesters,” Straits Times, October 2, 2014, www.straitstimes.com/asia/eastasia/5-things-about-canto-rock-band-beyonds-boundless-oceans-vast-skies-unofficialanthem.

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in Hong Kong’s local affairs were full of overt Cantonese phrases, peppered on banners, posters, online memes, and graffiti.34 Like protestors across the border in Guangzhou, they, too, sang Beyond’s “Boundless oceans vast skies.”35 By making Cantonese a symbol of defiance, protestors have not refuted the notion that speaking Putonghua connotes affiliation with the Party. Rather, they seek to sever the presumed connection between Putonghua and Chinese identity as a whole, thereby denouncing the CCP-promoted essentialized “Chinese-ness” that conflates Chinese ethnicity, Chinese national identity, and political loyalty. While the protestors in Guangzhou’s People’s Park hardly addressed this head on, they were likely aware of the broader political narratives they heralded. Shared symbols and common rhetoric show that the use of fangyan to counter state narratives is not exclusive to the Hong Kong SAR. The legacies of the politicization of fangyan during the Maoist period inform the present: proclaiming fangyan as a primary source of identity remains an act of political subversion. The Future of Fangyan in China Embarking on this project, I was often asked to ponder the implications of this history for China’s future. Alas, though the adage that history repeats itself remains fashionable, historians rarely offer predictions. The history written here cannot provide a road map for China’s linguistic future. What it can do, however, is unpack how the underlying meanings behind language performance were constructed, and use this to guide us in imagining what is possible. In whatever comes next, this book reminds us that language was, is, and always will be intrinsically tethered to identity. Arguments about Chinese languages’ inherent incompatibility with modernity, so popular in the early twentieth century, have had enormous staying power. Because nonphonetic alphabets are 34

35

While certainly it is natural for Hong Kong citizens to speak in their native tongue, written Cantonese is significantly less common in the city, as most books, periodicals, and news media chooses to write in a language that largely grammatically indistinguishable from Mandarin. Therefore, the choice to create written materials in Cantonese demonstrates a deliberate decision to emphasize Cantonese identity. Tam, “Tongue-tied in Hong Kong”; Victor Mair, “Cantonese protest slogans,” Language Log blog, October 26, 2014, http:// languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15416 As this book goes to press, Hong Kong attitudes toward Chinese ethnic and national identity are changing rapidly as a result of the crackdowns on protestors in the summer of 2019. While I would argue that the historical narratives I trace in this book are deeply relevant in Hong Kong, it would be impossible for me to know exactly what that relevance looks like at the moment of this book’s publication. I urge readers to consider the history written here as we all watch the events in Hong Kong unfold.

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“inefficient,” because tones are “weird,” because phonological variety is so vast, these arguments hold, Chinese languages will either need to reform or they will keep from progress those cultures that stubbornly cling to them as they are.36 These arguments subtly moor the backwardness of Chinese languages to the backwardness of the nation itself, just as men throughout this manuscript, from Hu Shi to Mao Zedong, have explicitly done.37 Despite the questionable assumptions of such claims, they are used still today to offer predictions about China’s fate. This work does not necessarily disprove these arguments. Rather, it emphasizes concepts of efficiency are just as constructed as categories of identity, and therefore cannot explain why individuals, groups, or nations promote, ignore, or reform particular languages. In this way, the most important, if not unspoken, argument I wish to make here is that any discussion about languages absent the identities they represent misses the point. To view languages solely through the lens of practicality is to miss the textured ways people defend, use, and attach meanings to them. Any future of languages in China will be shaped by how the subjectivities on which they hinge shift in tandem.

36

37

These are common tropes, in particular in language-learning literature. These arguments are explicitly articulated, however, in the following recent examples: DeFrancis, Chinese Language; Moser, A Billion Voices, 69–71; David Moser, “Why Chinese is so damn hard,” Pinyin.info blog, 2010, http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html; Jonathan Kaiman, “Learning Mandarin is really really hard, even for Chinese people,” LA Times, June 3, 2016, www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160603-snap-story.html See Thomas Mullaney, “Chinese is not a backwards language,” Foreign Policy May 12, 2016.

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Primary Periodicals Beijing Daxue ribao 北京大學日報 (Beijing University daily) Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal China Review Geyao zhoukan 歌謠週刊 (Folksongs weekly) Geyao zhoukan zengkan 歌謠週刊增刊 (Folksongs weekly supplementary issue, December 23, 1923) Guoli Zhongshan daxue yuyan lishixue yanjiusuo zhoukan 國立中山大學語言歷史研 究所周刊 (Weekly periodical of the National Zhongshan University’s Institute of History and Philology) Renmin ribao 人民日报 (People’s daily) Xin qingnian 新青年 (New youth) Zhongguo yuwen 中国语文 (The Chinese language)

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Index

Academia Sinica. See Institute of History and Philology Anti-Rightist campaign, 175, 188 authenticity and national language, 19, 73, 157, 165, 183, 184 and nationalism, 18 definition of, 17–18 fangyan, 18, 146, 156, 157, 211, 219, 220, 225 fangyan and folksongs, 114, 118, 122 in theater, 179–183, 207 national forms, 156 vernacular literature, 155 baihua, 154 and living language, 30–31 definition of, 30–31 baihuabao. See vernacular newspapers Ballad of Mulan, 184 Beijing fangyan, 90, 91, 93, 131 Beyond (band), 221 Bible fangyan, 59 romanization of, 58 translation of, 45, 48, 58 Cai Yuanpei, 79, 80, 84, 136 Cantonese and nationalism, 102, 107, 221, 222 as archaic Chinese language, 102, 107, 221 as language of resistance, 228 as mother tongue, 224, 225 cinema, 99 vernacular, 106 Chao, Yuen Ren, 35, 53, 70, 86, 93–95, 100, 127, 136, 137, 143, 150, 172 Chinese Students Monthly, 87 Hu Shi, 86 national language, 86–90

256

Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect, 127–134 survey methodology, 127–134, 170–173 characterless words, 168 Parker, Edward, 69 Chen Jianshi, 121 Chiang Kai-shek, 96, 149 China’s Place in Philology (Joseph Edkins), 63–67 Chinese Academy of Sciences, 33, 147, 158, 168 Chinese characters, 29 Chinese language. See also national language, Guoyu, Putonghua, Hanyu, Mandarin, fangyan as abstract, 69, 70 as archaic protolanguage, 63, 68 as classical Chinese, 48 as Guoyu, 108 as invented language, 157 as living language, 155 as Mandarin, 49 authenticity, 59 definitions of, 20, 31, 35, 70–71 missionary conceptualization of, 45–50 Chinese nation as Han, 9–15, 77–84, 105, 139–145 as heterogenous, 5–9, 14, 19, 99, 100–102, 103–108, 179–183 as homogenous, 5–9, 14, 19, 48, 72, 77–80, 83, 90, 177–179, 210, 212–217, 225, 227 making of, 6 Chinese Students Monthly, 87 Chinese-ness, 11–13 classical Chinese as Latin, 32, 47, 50 definition of, 30 Easy Wenli, 48, 49 High Wenli, 45, 46 Committee for Language Reform in China, 147, 168, 171, 189, 190, 196, 197

Index comparative linguistics, 33, 214. See also dialectology Europe, 59–63 fangyan, 123 in Europe, 16 Western imperialism, 60 Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciations, 74, 80–84, 85, 92, 93, 96 Crawford, T. P., 54–58 Cultural Revolution, 4, 161, 186, 193, 199, 201, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209 dialect. See also fangyan as stagnant, 160 as subsidiary to national language, 158–162 dialectology, 33, 127–134 folksong studies, 121–122 in the PRC, 170–176 places of articulation, 126, 144 diaspora Chinese, 11–13 diasystem. See fangyan: amalgamations of Ding Shengshu, 172 Dong Zuobin, 121, 123 Douglas, Carstairs, 24 Du Songshou, 192 Edkins, Joseph, 63–67, 68, 126, 136 education in Republican China, 95–99 in the PRC, 177–179, 188, 195–203 literacy, 149 national language promulgation through, 95–99 Enlightenment, 60 entering tone (rusheng), 82, 84, 87, 88 ethnicity. See also minzu as language, 134–139, 146, 160 as nation, 48 potentiality, 164 ethnography, 33 ethnology, 134–139 Études sur la Phonologie Chinoise (Karlgren), 125, 127 evidentiary scholarship. See kaozheng fangyan. See also dialectology, dialect, Hanyu 1957 nationwide survey, 170–179 amalgamations of, 73, 92, 181 and code-switching, 207, 218 and dialectology, 16

257 and emotion, 107, 118, 119, 122, 145, 146, 211, 218, 221 and hierarchy with Guoyu, 95–99 and hierarchy with Hanyu, 167 and hierarchy with national language, 124, 215 and hierarchy with Putonghua, 170, 172–173, 176, 177–179, 198, 203, 212–217 and nationalism, 2, 77–80, 99–108, 148, 153–157, 179–183, 219, 220, 223 and struggle, 166 and theater reform, 179–183, 206 as backward, 192, 200, 201 as Chinese languages, 2 as dependent, 163, 166, 167, 176 as dialect, 2, 123, 163–169, 225 as disappearing, 219 as evidence of archaic language, 14, 33, 40, 68–70, 73, 77–80, 84, 100–102, 107, 143 as evidence of ethnicity, 135 as Han, 77–80, 84, 107, 135, 136, 137, 139–145, 146, 221 as heritage, 203, 216, 217 as living language, 68, 119–122, 181, 183, 205, 212 as obstacles, 177–179, 198 as stagnant, 33, 167, 184, 202 as subversive, 34, 188, 195, 208, 223–229 as the language of the masses, 33, 153–157, 179–183, 184 as thought problems, 177, 191, 192 as variants, 3, 127–134, 145, 223 authenticity, 18, 79, 110, 118, 122, 146, 153–157, 207, 219, 221, 225 definition of, 1 folksongs, 41, 119–122 in media, 218 in the home, 205 May Fourth movement, 113 opera (pre-20th c), 41 oral, 42, 119, 120, 122, 155 save the, 214, 216, 221 surveys, 127–134, 136, 137, 143, 170–179 vernacular literature, 114 vernacular newspapers, 103–108 vernacular novels, 41 Fangyan (Yang Xiong), 37, 78 Fangyan Survey Pronunciation Organizational Cards, 172 Fangyan Survey Simplified Table, 172 fangyin, 121

258

Index

fanqie, 38, 143 Folksong Collection movement, 33, 114–118 folksongs, 41 emotion, 119–122 Folksongs weekly, 118, 122, 123, 124, 134 Frazer, Sir James, 116 Fu Sinian, 134 gazetteers, 100–102 Genbun ichi, 91, 98 Giles, Herbert, 25 Great Leap Forward, 190–195 and Putonghua promulgation, 33, 190–195 Guangdong, 104, 105, 134, 139–145, 164 Guangyun, 38, 125, 141, 143, 144 Guanhua, 138 as Chinese language, 165 as distinct from Guoyu, 83 as language of Beijing, 81 as Mandarin, 27 guanmo hui. See Putonghua: and Teaching Achievement Exhibitions Guoyin, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 131, 132, 133 See also Guoyu Guoyu, 96 “maximum distinctions”, 95 1913 version, 80–84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 110 1925 version, 33, 85, 94, 96, 148, 150, 151, 153, 167 and hierarchy with fangyan, 153, 165 as invented language, 79, 80, 82, 87, 90, 92, 108 blue-green, 85, 92 definition of, 31–32 invention of, 72–73 jingyin (language of the capital), 91, 93 living language, 91, 93 promulgation under the KMT, 95–99 pronunciation dispute, 91 recording of, 89 Gwoyeu Romatzyh, 143, 150 Hakka, 69, 136 as Han, 139–145 as not Han, 140 Han and anti-Manchu sentiment, 105 and Guoyu, 79, 81 and Putonghua, 203

as Chinese nation, 9–15, 77–80, 81, 105, 139–145 as ethnicity, 140 as minzu, 163–169 definition of, 9–15 ethnology, 136 fangyan, 77–80, 84, 107, 134–139, 221 Guoyu, 95 Hakka as, 139–145 historic unity of, 79, 81, 139–145, 164 nationalism, 80–84, 211 Hanyu and Hakka, 145 as minzu yu, 163–169 as Putonghua, 167 as standard language, 166 as vernacular literature, 165 Hanyu pinyin, 147, 148, 150, 196, 204 Hong Kong, 223–229 Hu Feng, 155 Hu Shi, 86, 88, 89, 112, 114, 115, 230 Hu Yilu, 81, 82 Huang Sheng, 154 Huang Yaomian, 156, 157 Hundred Days Reform, 74, 75, 112 Indo-European language family, 61, 65, 161 Institute of History and Philology, 134, 141 ethnology, 135 science, 134 International Phonetic Alphabet, 126, 172 invented languages. See Guoyu: as invented language; fangyan: amalgamations of Japan, 77 dialectology, 117 folk studies, 116 Meiji Restoration, 74, 75 national language, 32, 76, 91 Japhetic language group, 160, 161 Jones, Sir William, 61, 63 Kang Youwei, 75 kaozheng, 39, 40, 42, 78, 84, 114, 125 Karlgren, Bernhard, 67, 93, 125, 126, 127, 134–139 Konrad, Nikolai Iosifovich, 163–165 Lang, Andrew, 116 language study handbooks, 170, 177–179, 198 Lao She, 191 Legend of White Snake, 183 Leonard Bloomfield, 136

259

Index Li Fang-kuei, 135, 136, 139, 163 Li Jinxi, 88, 92, 94, 95, 108, 152 Li Rong, 172 Li Yuenan, 181 Lin Xi, 203, 205, 207 Lin Yutang, 122, 125, 150 linguistic modernity, 31–32, 108 and Guoyu, 86, 91 and science, 86–90 folksongs, 118 May Fourth movement, 112 missionaries, 46, 47, 53, 56 Liu Bannong, 114, 115, 145, 155 living language. See vernacular literature; national forms; Guoyu: as living language; fangyan: as living language local pronunciation. See fangyin Lu Xun, 76, 82, 112, 116, 134, 152, 155, 165 Luo Huiyun, 141, 142 Luo Xianglin, 141, 142, 143, 145 Ma Jianling, 181 Ma Shabo, 181 Mandarin as Guanhua, 27 comparison with Latin, 81 definition of, 31–32 fangyan, 28 Mao Zedong, 33, 175 Marr, Nikolai J., 160–162 Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics (Stalin), 160, 182 Marxist-Leninist ideology, 148, 154, 158, 184, 191 on language, 169 Matteo Ricci, 24, 44, 240, 243 Mattole, 136 May Fourth movement, 33, 111–114 and definition of Hanyu, 165 and linguistic modernity, 112 and national forms, 154 and national language, 85 and nationalism, 112 as epistemic revolution, 113 Medhurst, Walter Henry, 46 Milne, William, 45 minzu as nationality (Stalinist), 162–164 minzu yu. See national language: as minzu yu; Hanyu: as minzu yu missionaries Biblical translation, 45–50, 59 comparative linguistics, 63–67

Jesuit, 24, 39, 44, 45 Protestant, 24, 32, 39, 45 romanization, 50–54 Morrison, Robert, 45, 46, 48, 56, 66 National Drama Research Institute, 180 national forms, 153–157, 181, 183 as folk forms, 155, 156 authenticity, 156 May Fourth movement, 155 new wine in old bottles, 154 national language, 108. See also Hanyu; minzu yu “maximum distinctions”, 87 and independence (minzu yu), 166 and standardization, 6 and struggle, 166 anti-Manchu sentiment, 82 as invented language, 94 as minzu yu, 163–169, 216 authenticity, 18 definition of, 165 in Soviet Union, 158–162 movements in Europe, 53 Zhang Binglin proposal, 79 nationalism and fangyan, 99–108, 220, 228 and Guoyu, 91, 110 and Han, 9–15, 77–84, 90, 105, 110 and national language, 48, 83, 95–99 anti-Manchu, 77–80 as defined by the PRC, 185 as dialectical, 5–9, 19, 32, 34, 73, 110, 148, 149, 183, 208, 209, 210–212, 221 as loyalty to the CCP, 223 as loyalty to the PRC, 195–203, 212 as speaking Putonghua, 195–203 at the local level, 99–108, 121, 157, 219 authenticity, 18 definitions of, 5–9 Guoyu, 92 in Europe, 44 science, 135 nationality (Stalin), 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167 as minzu, 162 natsia. See nationality (Stalin) New Youth, 115 Opium War, 32, 35, 36, 45, 102 Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, 13

260

Index

Parker, Edward, 67, 68–70, 79, 126, 136 philology. See xiaoxue phonetic script. See also Gwoyeu Romatzyh; Hanyu pinyin; zhuyin fuhao; Sin Wenz; romanization Crawford, 54–58 Folksong Collection movement, 120 incompatibility with Chinese script, 58 Republican period, 96 places of articulation. See dialectology, schools Protestant Reformation, 44, 47, 50 Psalmanazar, George, 42, 43, 44 Putonghua, 147 accent, 199, 208 and correct pronunciation, 199 and Great Leap Forward into, 190–195 and Guoyu, 148 and hierarchy with fangyan, 170, 172–173, 177–179, 198, 220, 222, 223 and nationalism, 3, 178, 190, 195–203, 209, 223 and Teaching Achievement Exhibitions, 186, 188–190, 198 as amalgamated language, 166 as correct thought, 177, 192, 194, 199, 200, 201, 202 as evidence of political loyalty, 179 as representative of the CCP, 223 as revolutionary, 188, 195 as sole representative of the Chinese nation, 3, 209, 212–217, 223 as tool for nation-building, 190, 191, 193, 199, 200 before 1955, 152, 153, 156, 165 creation of, 168 definitions of, 3, 29, 31–32 in media, 213 in schools, 196, 204, 213 promulgation of, 168, 171, 183, 186, 188–190, 195–203, 205, 212–213, 216 Putonghua Teaching Achievement Exhibition. See Putonghua:and Teaching Achievement Exhibitions Qian Xuantong, 88, 92, 93, 94, 120 Qieyun, 38, 125, 126 Qu Qiubai, 151, 152, 167 Rap of China, 219 Revolution of 1911, 77, 80, 85, 86, 90 rime (dictionaries, tables), 40, 82, 141, 144. See also Qieyun, Guangyun romanization

CCP, 151–153 fangyan, 152, 153 literacy, 53, 152 missionaries, 50–54 textbooks, 151 Western imperialism, 51 Russification policy, 159 Sapir, Edward, 136, 137 Schleicher, August, 61–64, 65, 68, 81, 124, 125, 161. See also staummbaum schools and promulgation of Putonghua, 177–179, 188, 195–203 in Republican China, 85, 95–99 in the PRC, 196 missionary, 53 places of articulation, 177 Putonghua promulgation, 213 science and comparative linguistics, 66 and dialectology, 15–17, 125, 126, 127–139, 160–162, 177–179, 214 and fangyan, 127–134, 142 and folksong collection, 118 and language in the PRC, 158, 170–179 and linguistic modernity, 86–90 and May Fourth movement, 111–114, 145 and national language, 84, 85, 86–90 and nationalism, 15–17, 86–90, 135 and theater reform, 182 definition of, 15–17, 113 Mr. Science, 113, 130 Shao Rongfen, 166, 167 Shuowen jiezi, 29, 37, 78 Shuren Hui, 94, 95 Sin Wenz, 151–153 Soviet Union, 148, 151, 157, 159, 160 Speech and Writing as One. See Genbun ichi Stalin, Joseph, 157, 158–169, 181, 182, 194 stammbaum, 61, 64, 125, 161 standard Chinese, definition of, 70 standardization and authenticity, 18, 149, 152, 165 and Hanyu, 166 and linguistic modernity, 31, 32 and nationalism, 8, 149 and nation building, 99 and pronunciation, 177–179, 199 as a requisite for a nation, 37, 68, 77–80, 108, 148, 166, 167 of characters, 147 of Guoyu, 73, 77–84, 88

261

Index of Hanyu pinyin, 147, 148 of Japanese language, 76 of language, 5, 31 of language in Qing China, 27 of Putonghua, 147, 167 of survey methodology, 124, 130, 171–176 of vernacular language, 31, 91 Students Chinese in Japan, 76 Studies on the Modern Wu Dialect (Yuen Ren Chao), 127–134 Sun Yat-sen, 90, 98 Sun Yat-sen University, 134 surveys fangyan, 69, 127–134, 170–179 Hakka, 143 standardization of methodology, 171–176 Tai language family, 137

vernacular literature movement, 91, 122, 154, 165 May Fourth movement, 112 vernacular newspapers (baihuabao), 103–108

Tai, 134–139 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Arts and Literature, 153 textbooks and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, 151 and Hanyu pinyin, 197 and national language promulgation, 96 and zhuyin fuhao, 97, 98 publishing, 97 theater reform, 179–183, 205 model operas, 207 Tylor, Edward, 116

Zhang Binglin, 77–80, 96, 102, 107, 110, 124, 141, 220 and national language, 80–84 anti-Manchu, 78, 79, 90 national essence, 77 national language, 90 Zhang Shiyi, 90 Zhou Enlai, 190 Zhou Zumo, 165 Zhou Zuoren, 116–118, 120–122, 135, 145 zhuyin fuhao, 97, 150 zhuyin zimu, 96. See zhuyin fuhao Zou Rong, 105

Wang Li, 170 woodenfish books, 41 Wu Zhihui, 74, 82 Xiang Linbing, 155, 181 xiaoxue, 37, 39, 78, 81, 82, 141, 144 Xin fangyan (New dialect), 77–80 Xinhai geming. See Revolution of 1911 Xu Shen, 38 Yanagita Kunio, 116, 120 Yanwen yizhi. See Genbun ichi Yunjing, 144 Yunnan, 136, 139, 163