![]() ![]() They hoped for a complete overhaul of Chinese tradition. In this cultural panic, many intellectuals were ashamed of the poverty and the illiteracy of the rural population, and of the weakness of a decadent and hidebound imperial élite. Could the Chinese language, with its difficult writing system, survive? Would Chinese civilization itself survive? The two questions were, of course, inextricably linked. Chinese intellectuals, influenced by then fashionable social-Darwinist ideas, saw China’s crisis in existential terms. After bloody uprisings, humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars, and forced concessions-predatory foreign powers were grabbing what spoils they could from a poor, exhausted, divided continent-the last imperial dynasty was falling apart. Tsu begins her story in the late nineteenth century, when China was deep in crisis. Learning to write is a feat of memory and graphic skill: a Chinese character is composed of strokes, to be made in a particular sequence, following the movements of a brush, and quite a few characters involve eighteen or more strokes. To enjoy a serious book, a reader must know several thousand more. To be literate in the language, a person must be able to read and write at least three thousand characters. How the Chinese language and its writing system have weathered the modern waves of iconoclasm and been renewed since the turn of the past century is the subject of Tsu’s book.Ĭhinese certainly presents unique difficulties. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Chinese worried that the complexity of the language’s written characters would put China at a hopeless disadvantage in a world dominated by the Roman alphabet. It was under the Qin emperor that the Chinese script was standardized.īut, if the endurance of written Chinese is a civilizational achievement, it has not always been seen as an asset. Mao’s only criticism of his hated predecessor was that he had not been radical enough. He wanted to destroy all the Confucian classics, and supposedly buried Confucian scholars alive. One of Mao’s models was the first Qin emperor (259-210 B.C.), a much reviled despot who ordered the construction of the Great Wall and was perhaps the first major book burner in history. But zealots, intent on erasing old incarnations of Chinese civilization in order to make way for new ones, have often targeted the written language, too. Leys was right about the continuity of the Chinese written word. Even Chairman Mao, who incited his followers to destroy every vestige of tradition, proudly displayed his prowess as a calligrapher, establishing himself as the bearer of Chinese civilization. To become an official in imperial China, one had to compose precise scholarly essays on Confucian philosophy, an arduous task that very few could complete. As Jing Tsu, a scholar of Chinese at Yale, observes in “ Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern” (Riverhead), China had long equated writing “with authority, a symbol of reverence for the past and a talisman of legitimacy.” This is why mastery of classical Chinese used to be so important. So what accounts for the longevity of Chinese civilization? Leys believed it was the written word, the richness of a language employing characters, partly ideographic, that have hardly changed over two thousand years. And what survived from the past was often treated with neglect. The Chinese seldom built anything for eternity, anyway, nothing like the cathedrals of Europe. Through the centuries, waves of revolutionary iconoclasts have tried to smash everything old the Red Guards, in the nineteen-sixties, were following an ancient tradition. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains-far less than in Europe or India. The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. ![]()
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