Today, Chinese characters are described as a national treasure, the core
of the nation's civilizational identity. Yet for nearly half of the
twentieth century, reformers waged war on the Chinese script. They
declared it an archaic hindrance to modernization, portraying the
ancient system of writing as a roadblock to literacy and therefore
science and democracy. Movements spanning the political spectrum
proposed abandonment of characters and alphabetization of Chinese
writing, although in the end the Communist Party opted for character
simplification.
Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and
containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking
account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and
lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and
nonalphabet worlds. Yurou Zhong explores the growth of competing
Romanization and Latinization movements aligned with the clashing
Nationalists and Communists. She finds surprising affinities between
alphabetic reform and modern Chinese literary movements and examines the
politics of literacy programs and mass education against the backdrop of
war and revolution. Zhong places the Chinese script revolution in the
global context of a phonocentric dominance that privileges phonetic
writing, contending that the eventual retention of characters
constituted an anti-ethnocentric, anti-imperial critique that coincided
with postwar decolonization movements and predated the emergence of
Deconstructionism. By revealing the consequences of one of the biggest
linguistic experiments in history, Chinese Grammatology provides an
ambitious rethinking of the origins of Chinese literary modernity and
the politics of the science of writing.
