Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture

BEYOND SINOLOGY

GLOBAL CHINESE CULTURE

GLOBAL CHINESE CULTURE

David Der-wei Wang, Editor

Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film

Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China

Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: A Century of Cultural Exchange

Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, editors, Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader

ANDREA BACHNER

BEYOND SINOLOGY

CHINESE WRITING AND THE SCRIPTS OF CULTURE

Columbia University Press    New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53630-1

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this series.

This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Hull Memorial Fund of Cornell University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bachner, Andrea.

  Beyond Signology : Chinese writing and the scripts of culture / Andrea Bachner.

         pages cm. — (Global Chinese Culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16452-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53630-1 (e-book)

1. Chinese language — Writing — History.   2. Chinese characters — History.      3. Inscriptions, Chinese — History and criticism.   4. Chinese in literature.   5. Chinese in motion pictures.   6. Mass media and language — China.      7. Chinese in art.   I.   Title.

PL1171.B25 2013

495.1'11—dc23

2013016490

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

A Note on Characters, Romanization, Translations, and Images

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: SCRIPT POLITICS

1   CORPOGRAPHIES

Death and the Sinograph

National Calligraphies

2   ICONOGRAPHIES

Poetics of Visuality

On (Not) Writing Chinese

3   SONOGRAPHIES

Muteness Envy

Sinographic Glossolalia

4   ALLOGRAPHIES

Crypto-Chinese

Graphic Parasites

5   TECHNOGRAPHIES

Radical Design

Under E(rasure)

CONCLUSION: BEYOND SINOLOGY

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 0.1   Chinese Characters, Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou (2008)

FIGURE 1.1   Zhang Huan, Family Tree (2000)

FIGURE 1.2   Reading Sword in Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou (2002)

FIGURE 3.1   Poster campaign for Tsingtao Beer, San Francisco (2007)

FIGURE 5.1   Printing block for the title page of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1987)

FIGURE 5.2   Lu Boru’s pseudo-Martian poem

FIGURE 5.3   Hsia Yu, The Disappeared Image

FIGURE 6.1   The invention of REN, from BIG’s Lost in Translation

A NOTE ON CHARACTERS, ROMANIZATION, TRANSLATIONS, AND IMAGES

ABOUT CHARACTERS

Somewhat counter to the importance adduced to script specificities in this book, the need to limit typographic complexity made it necessary to settle on one set of Chinese characters. Since most sources consulted for this book are in traditional characters, traditional characters are used for all Chinese text, with the exception of examples that illustrate the difference between traditional and simplified characters.

ABOUT ROMANIZATION

This book generally follows the Pinyin system per scholarly convention in the United States, but uses other transcriptions if they are more common, for instance, in some names.

ABOUT TRANSLATIONS

Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. To ensure a smoother reading process for an audience in an English-speaking publishing context, as well as to limit the book’s word count, I had to omit most original versions of quotations not in English, though I still provide references for the original passages. Where appropriate and important, I include key terms in the original.

ABOUT IMAGES

Pragmatic considerations have made it necessary to limit illustrations to a minimum. However, I generally provide references (often to websites) for images not reproduced in this book, though mentioned in my text.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Beyond Sinology began as a side project. I had written about Malaysian-Chinese writing as part of a comparative work on figures of inscription in different cultural contexts (including Latin America and Europe) in my dissertation, but decided to let it rest and explore links between mediality and interculturality in Sinophone cultures during a postdoctoral fellowship year at Stanford University instead. The participation in a conference on global Chinese cultures in late 2007 at Harvard University served as a catalyst for what was to become Beyond Sinology, as Rey Chow, Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, Shu-mei Shih, David Wang, and others welcomed and challenged my claim that a reflection on Sinophone literature and culture needed its complementary other: a thought on the sinograph. Hence, what had begun as a project on Chinese medialities in general began to turn squarely to the question of Chinese script. In the following years, the book grew from a short theoretical reflection into a vast project with multiple chapters and a plethora of examples, before I rewrote it in its current, slimmer shape for the sake of conceptual emphasis and readability.

The generosity of the Mellon Foundation accompanied the beginning phase of the book (during a postdoctoral Humanities Fellowship at Stanford University in 2007–2008), and allowed me to finish a draft of the manuscript, while I was working on a second project as a fellow at the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010–2011. A grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation enabled me to conduct necessary research during several trips to Taiwan between 2009 and 2011. The Pennsylvania State University generously supported my year as a Humanities Forum fellow, as well as granted me a semester of teaching release in Fall 2012 so I could concentrate on manuscript revisions. I would also like to thank Kirk Denton, editor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Sheila Sager from the Pennsylvania State University Press for their kind permission to use parts of already published articles in my book: Graphic Germs: Mediality, Virulence, Chinese Writing, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 197–225; and ‘Chinese’ Intextuations of the World, Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 3 (2010): 318–345, respectively. I am also profoundly grateful to artists and editors for permission to reprint artwork, especially to Ah Weng, Hsia Yu, Daria Pahhota from BIG, Xu Bing, and Zhang Huan

Now that the time has come to let go and release the book to a larger audience, I would like to acknowledge the many instances of dialogue, exchanges of ideas, and textual circulations, in person or virtually, that have nourished my book: with colleagues and students at Stanford, Ohio State, Penn State, and Academia Sinica, as well as during various conferences and talks and in personal conversations. Without the kindness, intellectual generosity, and critical acumen of all of you, Beyond Sinology would not exist in this form. Special thanks go to Peng Hsiao-yen, host extraordinaire during my various research stays at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, whose insights importantly shaped the structure and conceptual ideas of my project; to Wang Ban, who had the time for countless inspiring conversations during my Stanford year, and thanks to whom the project took a more political turn and includes more reflections on PRC culture; to Christopher Bush, who generously shared his own work and allayed my anxieties about European modernism and the publishing industry; to Tsai Chien-hsin, who has been a steadfast friend and staunch supporter of my ideas since our graduate student days and who creatively translated the book title into Chinese; and to Eric Hayot, without whose kindness, intellectual insight, and pragmatic common sense the manuscript might not have emerged from the de profundis of academic publishing.

Though only the unwavering support and love of my family and my partner Itziar—for whom much of Beyond Sinology sounds either Spanish or Chinese, descriptors of all things arcane in their respective languages of German and Spanish—give sense to all my work, I would like to dedicate this book in particular to my teachers of Chinese literature and culture: Eileen Chow, who believed that I had something to contribute to Chinese studies from my first seminar on Chinese literature onward; Carlos Rojas, who never ceases to convince me by his own example that Chinese literature and theory go well together; and David Wang, whose kindness, erudition, and inspiration have allowed me to find a place at the intersection of critical theory, comparative literature, and Chinese studies.

INTRODUCTION

SCRIPT POLITICS

FIGURE 0-1  Chinese Characters, Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou (2008).

On the auspicious date of August 8, 2008, the opening ceremony of the twenty-ninth Olympic Games in Beijing set the stage for an unexpected spectacle: the reinvention of the Chinese script. Under the minimalist title Chinese Characters (Wenzi 文字), a centerpiece of the lavish showcasing of the accomplishments of Chinese culture redefined China’s writing system as a medium uniquely suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century.¹

While spectators might have expected to see Chinese writing celebrated as the aesthetic flow and refinement of Chinese calligraphy, Chinese Characters, part of the spectacle masterminded by the well-known film director Zhang Yimou 張藝謀, elected to portray a different facet of Chinese writing: its technological use. (See figure 0.1.) After a tribute to Chinese painting, embodied in the elegance of the Four Treasures of the Study—brush, ink, ink stone, and paper—as well as in the controlled grace of the dancers’ movements as they painted ink traces onto a gigantic scroll, Chinese writing, couched in mechanistic shape, introduced a sharp contrast between two aspects of Chinese culture that share profound aesthetic and philosophical links.

True, the rhythmic chants of an army of scribes in outlandish costumes carrying bamboo-slip scrolls and intoning sections of the Sayings of Confucius (Lunyu 論語) that formed the soundtrack to Wenzi invoked Chinese tradition.² But the Chinese script appeared in the hypermodern shape of a gigantic writing machine: a printing press with movable type. Flanked by archaic-looking scribes and framed by two LED panels, the apparatus at the center of the stage began to undulate as the individual type boxes moved up and down. Even though the type of the printing press featured individual characters, difficult to distinguish in the mirror-reverse of print type, even though the pulsing of the machine ceased from time to time to shape Chinese characters—three different forms of the graph 和 (he), which designates peace, harmony, and unity—Wenzi put no emphasis on Chinese characters themselves. Rather, the spectacle mechanized writing and translated written signs into pixels, expressing the digital binary of 1 and 0 through a difference between raised and lowered types. The contiguity with the electronic patterns on the screens that flanked the printing press reinforced the link to new media. The way in which the machine produced the Chinese character 和—the two versions in ancient seal script and the modern one—did not differ in the least from how it shaped patterns or images, such as that of the Great Wall toward the end of the piece. Text there was not written, traced, and inscribed so much as virtually present as pixels upon a screen. Even though archaic script forms, such as seal script, and a traditional Confucian worship of learning were invoked, the emphasis was on tradition only insofar as it had been integrated into the present, and insofar as it represents a competitive edge for the future.

What was showcased, then, was not merely, not even primarily, the millenarian accomplishment of a writing system, but rather, its technological potential. Not Chinese writing itself, but some of its specific medial possibilities, the material and technical means that embody a script, were at stake. Of course, writing, much as language in general, can itself be defined as a medium of communication, an instrument for transmitting knowledge. And yet, writing always comes in specific cultural shapes, it always needs concrete media for its expression. To our imagination, writing does not exist as an abstraction, but only as specific scripts, writing styles, typographies, and their material carriers: books, scrolls, papyri, steles, or computer screens.

To talk about mediality in concrete cultural and material terms is of central importance to an understanding of writing. At least since Marshall McLuhan’s slogan the medium is the message, we have understood the intricate connections between content and carrier, indeed the impossibility of distinguishing neatly between them. However, speaking of the medium in the singular is yet another abstraction, since each mediated representation is really multiple. For instance, Chinese writing, and indeed writing in general, has myriad medial possibilities: each sign or group of signs teems with different reading possibilities for its semiotic content, its sound, and its graphic shape, even before we pay attention to historically specific forms, calligraphies, or writing styles on the one hand, and to its media in a more literal sense, such as possible textual, visual, and computational avatars, on the other.

Mediality understood in such a way plays a key role in the ideological makeup of a writing system, especially whenever one of its multiple facets is downplayed or highlighted. Frequently, the metonymic substitution of a writing system by one of its medium-specific expressions is crucial for its symbolic charge, since the value of a script has always been determined by its potential to fulfill specific social and ideological functions. Mediality, understood as multiple, lies at the heart of writing. The manipulation of writing’s mediality lies at the heart of script politics.

Consequently, the performance of Chinese writing during the Beijing Olympics was not a reinvention of the script as such, but rather an attempt at changing the ways in which we visualize its medial form. Distancing the Chinese writing system from the prevalent imagery of its aesthetic, even esoteric, power and emphasizing its most technological embodiment—that of print with movable type—serves a clear ideological aim. A spectacular marriage of progress and tradition performed for the eyes of the world during the Beijing Olympics infused the Chinese script with new energy. It became a living script in its most literal sense: the Chinese term for print with movable types, huo zi yinshua 活字印刷, expresses the idea of movement as life, in contrast not only to immobility but also to death.

In comparison with the prevalent symbolism that defined the sinograph for more than a century, namely, that Chinese writing was a script system unsuited to the challenges of modernity, this constitutes a radical change of attitude. In the era of modernization and nascent national awareness, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, Chinese writing came under harsh criticism. Under the spell of Western influences, as new social and political structures asserted their power, Chinese writing was increasingly perceived as failing to live up to the expectations that European models had produced. The comparison with the alphabetic script suddenly threw the shortcomings of the Chinese character into high relief: it had too many letters, took too long to learn, and did not accurately represent speech—typically, the phonetic components of the Chinese script were overlooked outright. Since Chinese intellectuals and reformers could not recognize their own country in the overpowering mirror of Western modernity and nationalism, the Chinese writing system ceased to be seen as an adequate medium for communication. In a turn from the veneration of Chinese culture to a sinophobic attitude in the age of imperialism, Western thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had already commented on the complexity of an ideographic system that compared negatively with the rational simplicity of the alphabet because of its small group of phonetic symbols.³ By the end of the nineteenth century, a similar view was prevalent among many Chinese intellectuals themselves.

What led the Chinese to this negative appraisal, when contact between Europe and the Middle Kingdom from the thirteenth century onward has set the West to dreaming of the mysterious sinographs and their uncanny signifying power without causing a remotely similar attitude in China vis-à-vis alphabetic writing?⁴ What triggered the sudden change from cultural superiority to a sense of linguistic inferiority so strong that Chinese intellectuals developed multiple proposals of phonetic scripts to either supplant or supplement the sinograph at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth?⁵

The change is typically attributed to the semicolonial position of China. Marked by defeats at the hands of Western imperial forces during the two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), as well as in contrast to Japan’s reinvention as an imperial power, China became the sick man of Asia, the example of a power in decadence, because of its inability to evolve. The Chinese writing system seemed to cause much of China’s inflexibility: it was out of joint with modernity, since it symbolized a venerated tradition that offered no answers to contemporary predicaments and was apparently unable to adapt to a radically changed situation.

Language and its symbolic functions were crucial for modern nationalism according to Western standards. In the West, language became increasingly expressive of, even constitutive of, national identity. The bind between language and community that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was formulated most forcefully in the context of the nationalist agenda of German romanticism, for instance, in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s famous definition of Volk (the people) as a cultural and linguistic community.⁶ Of course, the knot that ties language and national community is not of the order of a spiritual essence, as Herder believed. Rather, it obeys the logic of contiguity, in which a partial, if always problematic, coincidence of a linguistic community with the prospective national territory leads to an identification of both. As a basis for nationalism, this proved compelling, since it forges and naturalizes the vital link between the abstract idea of the nation and its real body, its citizens, cemented by the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.⁷

Tying language to nation, however, has several important implications. The substitution of the different European vernaculars for Latin, a process so instrumental to the idea of national identity, also brought about the need to standardize the languages that were growing into their new rightful position. In the interest of print capitalism, the very medium that allowed a community to imagine itself as such, namely, a nation’s written language, had to be unified as much as possible. Benedict Anderson insists that "print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se."⁸ The obverse is actually true: it is not language that defines the nation as a community of native speakers; the need for unification under the spell of the idea of nationalism predetermines what can count as a language, and what will be relegated to a dialect. Not the real languages of a nation’s citizens but the imposed ideal of one national language crafts the illusion of national community. The two inventions of language and nation underpin each other in precarious ways, stabilized by the phonetic mystique of the continuity between the living, breathing national bodies and the national language as transliteration of their speech. This made enough ideological sense in Europe. Beyond Europe, however, its tautological as well as paradoxical structure comes into plain view, without, however, losing any of its symbolic power.

This holds especially true in a Chinese context, in which a multiplicity of spoken languages—both Sinitic and not—as well as regional dialects was pitted against a highly standardized written form: classical Chinese.⁹ What happens when we replace speech with writing as the foundation for the idea of nationalism? Can we claim, with David Damrosch, that China has had a national script rather than a national language?¹⁰ Throughout the centuries, Chinese writing had indeed come to symbolize an idea of cultural, but not necessarily ethnic, unity. Nevertheless, from the vantage point of a phonetic mystique, there is no such thing as a national script. Apart from the fact that the idea of a Chinese nation is a relatively recent importation, not much older than the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese script seems to constitute a rather dubious basis for an imagined community. On the one hand, the Chinese writing system had become the medium of a script world that stretched well beyond the boundaries of the PRC’s national territory today, including most of East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.¹¹ On the other, as the vehicle in which members of the cultural and administrative elite communicated with their peers, the Chinese script was relegated to a tiny fraction of society, rather than existing as a print language in which the community under construction could envision itself as such. But, from a Western vantage point, yet another compelling reason bars a script from becoming the vehicle of a national community: it cannot participate in the phonetic mystique necessary for nationalism’s illusion of communitarian presence—at least not in Anderson’s imaginary that synchronizes life and languages under the sign of the mother tongue: "What the eye is to the lover—that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with—language—whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue—is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.¹² For Anderson, written Chinese falls under the category of sacred languages of a prenational idea of community instead: the spiritual, transcendent medium that creates a community out of signs, not sounds."¹³

The affective sublime of the mother tongue cannot function for a writing system, and least of all for the sinograph. Instead, the embodiment of nationhood in a writing system threatens the phonetic mystique, and underscores the paradox at the heart of national language politics. While, in Anderson’s theory, only the idea of a shared, living speech can bring about the integration of a community, in practice the national language is always already written, since national unity assigns it the task of normalizing the different spoken languages that coexist and vie with one another in any given national territory. The perfect correlation between written and spoken language so crucial to a national ideology à la Anderson is thus, largely, an illusion, albeit a necessary one.

It might be true that the alphabetic (or any other phonetic) script is better suited to register speech than the sinograph, but, in its coupling to a national language, its thrust is usually much more prescriptive of what proper, standardized speech should sound like than it is transcriptive of the actual, often regionally varied, subnational tones. In nuce, the question of the writing system plays a secondary role with regard to the real stakes of the prevalent type of national language politics, which lie in the creation of a hierarchical diglossia: between the standard spoken language, modeled according to its fixed, written form, and all other forms of linguistic communication. From a political perspective, the script used to write down a national language interests more on symbolic than on pragmatic accounts. In the interest of nation building, the Chinese script does by no means prove too rigid. Rather, it lacks the power to regulate speech: its failure to transcribe speech matters only insofar as it is unable to notate spoken language unequivocally and thus cannot become an effective tool of normalization. Behind the harmony of the mother tongue, of the communion between national citizen and native speaker, lurks the dissonance of linguistic unification: seemingly, as most examples show, the nation cannot be dreamed or sung in more than one language.

From this perspective, rather than treating the Chinese case as the example of a truncated language reform, we might want to reconsider it as the logical outcome of the parameters of national language politics. In spite of continued, often competing schemes to replace the Chinese script with phonetic writing systems well into the 1940s, the sinograph stood its ground.¹⁴ Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its status is less at risk than ever. What did happen during the first decades of the twentieth century was a reform of the form—but not the script—of the written language. Reformers such as Hu Shi 胡適, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, and Lu Xun 魯迅, to name but some of the cultural heroes connected to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, replaced classical Chinese with a written vernacular, baihua 白話. Even though discussions about a reform of the Chinese language in the interest of modernization and nationalism went so far as to question the existence of the Chinese writing system itself, in the end, all reflections on the need to write the emerging vernacular—a written language modeled on the spoken language, no longer a mere vehicle for the communication of the elite, in theory, if not in practice—in an alphabetic or other phonetic system remained without consequences. Rather than making the written language really conform to any spoken expression, a standard spoken and written language was created that had not been in place before—a hybrid of classical and vernacular Chinese with influences from European languages and Japanese that gradually crystallized into the standard Chinese commonly spoken and written today.¹⁵ The very shift in names for this new language is revealing: eager to hide its roots in the official language (guanhua 官話)—the spoken language of administrators and officials, hence the Western term Mandarin Chinese—the newly fledging language claimed ties to the speech of the people as vernacular language (baihua 白話), showed its unifying aim as national language (Guoyu 國語), and finally aspired to linguistic sovereignty as the common tongue (putonghua 普通話).¹⁶

From the significant vantage point of 1949, after the Communist victory on the Chinese mainland, the Communist intellectual and Esperantist Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之 wrote in his retrospective appraisal of the May Fourth Movement that the script reform, though at the center of the reform movement as such, remained largely unsuccessful:

The New Culture movement of May Fourth came out of the script reform movement. In truth, at first the Literary Revolution invoked by the journal New Youth was really a script reform movement. Its aim was to abolish the old Chinese characters (jiu wenzi 舊文字) of the feudal society and to create new letters (xin wenzi 新文字) suited for the masses of the common people; to abolish classical Chinese writing (wenyan wen 文言文), and to create a vernacular close to the spoken language (jiejin kouyu de baihua wen 接近口語的白話文); to abolish or reform the Chinese square characters (fangkuai zi 方塊字), and to create a new language (xin yuwen 新語文) that could be easily learned by the masses of the people.¹⁷

A possible reason for an outcome that disappointed many supporters of the script reform movement can be located in the divergent objectives of the reform movement, indeed of the national idea, itself: popularization and unification. In an earlier diatribe against Chinese writing in his essay The Crisis of Script Reform (Xin wenzi yundong de weiji 新文字運動的危機), published in 1936, Hu Yuzhi explicitly singles out these two ideals to critique the shortcomings of the Chinese script.¹⁸ And yet, in view of the paradoxical relation of nationalism to the speech of its citizens, both principles clashed in the Chinese context, since the propagation of phonetic scripts also seemed to involve the emancipation of different Sinitic languages and their advent to writing as a logical second step.¹⁹ Whereas classical Chinese presupposes—but does not linguistically impose—a standardized pronunciation, applying the phonetic principle to create a new Chinese script might radically challenge the idea of Chinese as one national language. This fear was especially warranted since many of the ideas for script reforms originated in the context of other Sinophone languages, for which Christian missionaries had set an example by using phonetic transcription systems.²⁰

Where, according to many critics, the language reform had stopped short of complete success, from a different angle it had actually accomplished its aims. Prototypes of phonetic scripts had laid the necessary foundations for the idea of an official phonetic transcription system—a role that is now assumed by Pinyin 拼音 in the PRC. Not intended as an independent new script, phonetic transcription, used as a tool in language instruction and dictionaries, implemented the Beijing dialect of Mandarin as the standard pronunciation for the new written vernacular. The fact that this phonetic script remained supplemental, however, in conjunction with the construction of a privileged tie between the sinograph and its standardized pronunciation (as the only truly legitimate way in which Chinese characters should be voiced), aborted a possible extension of a (phonetically) written status—as real language—to other Sinophone languages. From this perspective, it becomes understandable why the Chinese script seems to have become a linguistic untouchable—even under Communism, even under the influence of another cultural revolution decades later.²¹ The radical step of doing away with Chinese writing and its symbolic benefits of rejecting China’s political, social, and cultural backwardness as an antipode to modernity did not outweigh the menace of linguistic and regional disintegration. Consequently, the sinographic writing system as such was left intact, even as the introduction of simplified characters apparently satisfied the ideological claim of creating a language (both written and spoken) suitable for the use of the masses.²²

What emerges after a closer look at the vicissitudes of language reforms in China’s age of modernization is consequently a complex constellation of language politics with and against the Chinese writing system. The conservation of the sinograph allowed Chinese nationalism to tap into an age-old cultural tradition, reconstructed as a cultural whole, as a basis for political unity.²³ In contrast, the appeal to speech in the creation of the new written medium of vernacular Chinese satisfied the phonetic mystique at the heart of the idea of nationhood as community. On the one hand, the Chinese writing system bore the brunt of diatribes against linguistic rigidity—unjustly so, I would claim. On the other, under the sinographic cover, phonetic unification in the form of supplemental phonetic notation de facto elevated one Sinitic language—the one spoken around Beijing—to the status of national language. Consequently, for decades, Chinese writing has displayed a double taboo character: ideologically tied in complex ways to linguistic unity, yet disavowed according to the phonocentric values imported from the West—until recently.

This background renders the focus on Chinese writing in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing particularly spectacular: here, Chinese writing has a comeback, albeit in a radically different garb. Whereas at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth the Western model forced China to reevaluate its script negatively as not close enough to or sufficiently representative of spoken language, in the current digital age, the sinograph can be put on display as the perfect expression of writing transubstantiated into a computerized image on the basis of bits and bytes. The celebration of the printing press during the opening ceremony rewrites cutting-edge media, such as the computer, in terms of a secondary graphology, highlighting not sound, but graphics.²⁴ It also rewrites, implicitly, the hierarchies operating in the contrast between the sinographic script and the alphabet.

The performance during the opening ceremony contains a sly reminder that the Chinese invention of printing predated Johannes Gutenberg’s much-touted medial quantum leap by several centuries. In this context, the emphasis on printing with movable type is revelatory. It is true that China invented this method of printing as early as the eleventh century—actually a commoner named Bi Sheng 畢昇 developed individual, reusable character types made of ceramic.²⁵ And yet, movable type printing in China was not widely used until after the (re)importation of Western print technology in the nineteenth century, whereas xylography, the method of printing entire pages from carved woodblocks, had already reached a high level of sophistication in the Tang dynasty and was used routinely. In a Eurocentric gesture, Western scholars of print history and theorists of the incipient field of media studies of the renown of a Lucien Febvre or a Marshall McLuhan were quick to dismiss China’s advanced technology as secondary.²⁶ The imputed backwardness of China’s print technology—verily a strange twist to the genealogy of print culture—is anchored firmly in an alphabetic bias. Since China lacks the ultimate script technology, a script that consists of a small number of combinable letters (or so the argument goes), any technological advances remain inevitably truncated. From the vantage point of the Gutenberg era in the West, print with movable type counted (and still counts for many) as the all-important cultural achievement and elided the sophistication of woodblock printing more suited to fulfill its cultural and social functions in China at a given historical moment.²⁷ In this vein, the alphabetic bias led Thomas Francis Carter in his reflections in 1925 on the possible influences of Chinese printing technology on European culture to conclude as follows: It is a strange fact that the nations the symbols of whose languages present more difficulties to the typographic printer than those of any other languages in the world, should have been the first nations to invent and develop the art of typography.²⁸ Rarely did it occur to Western scholars to see beyond their bias and perceive a positive connection in which a supposedly backward script enabled a so-called advanced technology.²⁹ Even a technologized version of writing, such as typography, then serves to reiterate a phonocentric bias: only now the living presence of speech is symbolically transferred to the moving and movable letters of Western print technology. Even on the side of writing, it seems, some languages are more written than others.

Small wonder, then, that the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics showcased the superior technology of print with movable type, rather than the tradition of woodblock printing looked down upon by the West. The gesture of having the sinograph compete on ground long claimed by the alphabet shows a new sense of cultural confidence. Long bygone are the days in which the Chinese script lived under the pall of a strange disavowal: both crucial to Chinese culture and the self-definition of a Chinese essence