The Chinese Typewriter Read online

  Research for this book was possible thanks to the generous support of many institutions. The author wishes to express thanks to the Hellman Faculty Fund, the Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute China Fund, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies, and sabbatical support from Stanford University and the Department of History. In particular, I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to Fred Kronz at the NSF, whose patience and encouragement saw me through what otherwise would have been a discouraging process of revision and resubmission (not to mention one bizarre political witch hunt). I also wish to thank the MIT Press, and especially Katie Helke. I am thankful to Amy Brand, Katie Hope, Michael Sims, Matthew Abbate, Colleen Lanick, Justin Kehoe, Yasuyo Iguchi, and David Ryman. At the Weatherhead Institute, special thanks go to Carol Gluck and Ross Yelsey.

  And now let me begin. Why we authors wait until the end of our acknowledgments to thank the ones who mean the most is a convention I have never understood—and yet here I go again. When I try to remember writing this book—to really remember—all I can summon to mind are thousands of fragmentary moments strewn between the true episodes of my life. I wrote this book as a conversation with you, Chiara, somewhere in between samphire and St. Ives, scala quaranta and Sudtirol, Battlestar and Black Bear Inn, Mission Pie and Mendocino, pie shops and Project Snow, road trips and rose milk tea, birthday cakes and Beijing, Drolshagen and dandelion, Lincoln and Lego models, City Hall and Cuochi e fiamme, Torcello and Tempesta d’amore, Purple Bamboo and Puccini, belonging to you and being your husband. This book is for you. You teach me bravery and balance. You shelter friends and slay vampires. I love you beyond all comprehension—including my own. Despite what strangers sometimes think, I honestly have no idea what I’m doing in life, and I’m anxious all the time. But when I’m by your side, I simply don’t care. You run my hurt away.

  Introduction: There Is No Alphabet Here

  We Chinese wish to say that the privilege of a mere typewriter is not tempting enough to make us throw into waste our 4000 years of superb classics, literature and history. The typewriter was invented to suit the English language, not the English language the typewriter.

  —“Judging Eastern Things from Western Point of View,” 1913

  As we mark the spectacular rise of the People’s Republic of China, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in 2008 have become a new node on our timeline. Observers of China were already familiar with the country’s economic achievements over the preceding two decades, and perhaps with its advances in science, medicine, and technology. Never before had the world witnessed the full scale of China’s twenty-first-century strength and self-confidence all in one sitting, however. August 8 was a theater of superlatives. The ceremony culminated the longest torch relay in Olympic history to that point (eighty-five thousand miles over 129 days), enrolled some fifteen thousand performers, and boasted a production budget of 300 million US dollars, all for the opening day pageantry alone.1 If we include the games as a whole, and the massive infrastructural build-up in Beijing and other cities, the total budgetary outlay was somewhere in the neighborhood of 44 billion dollars.2

  When we consider the towering cost of the spectacle—the cast, electricity bills, catering, costume design, construction crews, director Zhang Yimou’s paycheck, and more—it might seem curious to suggest that its one and perhaps only truly revolutionary moment was its least expensive and most easily overlooked. This was the Parade of Nations, the procession of national teams around the grounds of the Bird’s Nest.

  The first team to enter the Bird’s Nest was Greece, as per Olympic tradition. Greece is the perpetual ur-host of the games, an event historically rooted in veneration of ancient Greek society and its esteemed place as the fount of Western democracy, science, reason, and humanism. The parade pays homage to Greece in a second, subtler way as well: the alphabetic order by which national teams enter the field of play. In his Origins of Western Literacy, Eric Havelock nominated Greek alphabetic script as a revolutionary invention that surpassed all prior writing systems, including the Phoenician from which it and all alphabets originate.3 For historian, philosopher, and former president of the Modern Language Association Walter Ong, the Greek adoption and adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet was a force for democratization, as “little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were very young and their vocabulary limited.”4 Still others have ventured into dubious neurological claims, arguing that the invention of the Greek alphabet activated a hitherto dormant left hemisphere of the human brain and thereby inaugurated a new age of human self-actualization.5 Greece gave us “Our Glorious Alphabet,” and so every two years, we honor it in the opening ceremonies of both the summer and winter games.

  The rules governing the Parade of Nations were first set down in writing in 1921 by the International Olympic Committee.6 “Each contingent participating in the games,” the regulations read, “must be preceded by a sign bearing the name of its country, to be accompanied by the national flag.” Following this was a parenthetical note: “(countries proceed in alphabetical order).”7 Such phrasing carried through to 1949, when the charter was adjusted slightly to take on the distinctly cosmopolitan form it maintains to this day. The revised regulations stipulated that it was the prerogative of the host country to organize the opening parade according to alphabetic order as it functioned in the host country’s language.8 With this adjustment, the IOC had taken clear steps to relativize, and thus universalize, the rules governing this international ceremony.

  In the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, global television audiences might have been exposed to a non-Western and nonalphabetic script for the first time, were it not for Japan’s decision to use English alphabetic order rather than kanji—the subset of the Japanese written language based upon Chinese characters—or kana—the syllabic part of Japanese writing, encompassing hiragana and katakana. Instead, it was not until the Seoul Olympics of 1988 that the world first witnessed a non-Western alphabet applied to this venerable Olympic tradition. Here in Korea, where ga (가) is the first syllable in Korean hangul, Greece was followed by Ghana (가나 Gana) and then Gabon (가봉Gabong).9

  In 2008, with the Greek national team entering the Bird’s Nest—the architectural wonder designed in part by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei—the parade in Beijing was following a conventional script. Television commentators Bob Costas, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, and others droned on in an unbroken stream of synthesis, as their roles demanded. They riffed on subjects as diverse as Confucianism, Tang dynasty cosmopolitanism, taiji, the Ming dynasty eunuch seafarer and explorer Zheng He, calligraphy, Buddhist iconography of the Dunhuang cave complex in northwest China, and the colorful diversity of China’s non-Han ethnic minority peoples, among a mash-up of others.10 The synthesis stumbled from time to time, tripping up in awkward turns of phrase (references to China’s “long, long march” and “great step forward” come to mind). Endearing lapses notwithstanding, these play-by-play commentators were in rare form.

  This constant hum of commentary contrasted sharply, however, with a forty-five-second span of complete exegetical breakdown that ensued when the second national team took the field: Guinea. Suddenly, Costas and his colleagues lost their groove.

  Costas:

  Guinea follows them in. There is no alphabet here, so, y’know, if you’re expecting one nation to follow the other the way they generally do at an opening ceremony, think again.

  Lauer:

  Yeah, you’re out of luck. It goes based on the number of strokes in the Chinese character [a shimmer of quiet laughter] that represents the country’s name, so you could easily see a country that starts in ‘A’ followed by a country that starts in ‘R’ or vice versa. So we’re gonna have the graphics at the bottom of the screen which will give you an idea … which countries are approaching the tunnel.

  Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Maldives, Malta.

  G, T, Y, M?

  There is n
o alphabet here.

  If Costas was at a loss for words, one can hardly blame him. 2008 was the first time in history that the Olympic Games had been hosted in a country that did not organize the Parade of Nations according to alphabetic order of one sort or another—because it was the first time that the games had been held in a country whose language possessed no alphabet at all.

  For over a century, IOC regulations had only appeared to the world as capacious, embracing of cultural difference, or in a word, universal. In 2008, the bylaws of the International Olympic Committee were unmasked as false pretenders to the throne of universalism. Predicated on the idea of choice and cultural relativism, the regulation’s foundation in the idea of “alphabetical order as it functioned in the host country’s language” brought the Olympic Games and their Chinese hosts to an embarrassing impasse. IOC regulations afforded China “permission” to undertake something that was, by definition, a logical impossibility: to organize the parade according to a “Chinese alphabet,” which does not in fact exist.

  The 2008 parade was not sequenced at random, however. There was a Chinese dao to match the Greek logos, one that functioned according to a two-part organizational system well known in China. In the first of these, Chinese characters are ordered according to the number of pen- or brushstrokes needed to compose them, an organizational scheme that had been a mainstay in China for centuries. The three-character Chinese name for Guinea (几内亚 Jineiya)—the first country to follow Greece—begins with one of the simplest characters in the written language, orthographically speaking: 几 ji, composed of only two strokes. By comparison, the three-character Chinese name for Turkey (土耳其 Tu’erqi), begins with the character 土 tu, whose composition requires three strokes in all. Consequently, Guinea preceded Turkey in the parade.

  By itself, stroke count is not enough to arrive at an unambiguous order for the simple reason that many characters are composed of the same number of strokes. For example, the Chinese name for Yemen (也门 Yemen) begins with another three-stroke Chinese character, 也 ye (figure I.1). Who would enter the Bird’s Nest first, then: the Turkish national team or the Yemeni?

  I.1 Stroke order of ji and ye

  The second level of organization is based upon a centuries-old principle of Chinese calligraphy dating back at least to the Jin dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361). According to this principle, all characters in Chinese are composed of eight fundamental types of brushstrokes, ranked in a simple hierarchy: the dian (dot), heng (horizontal), shu (vertical), pie (left-falling diagonal), na (right-falling diagonal), tiao (rising), zhe (bending downward/rightward), and gou (hook) (figure I.2). When we return to the question of Turkey and Yemen, then, we find that “tu” (土) of Tu’erqi (Turkey) is composed of the strokes horizontal/vertical/horizontal, or 2-3-2 in terms of the ranking of each stroke; while the “ye” (也) of Yemen is composed of the sequence bending downward/vertical/bending downward, or 7-3-7. The sequence 2-3-2 outranks 7-3-7, and so Turkey entered the Bird’s Nest before Yemen.

  I.2 The eight fundamental strokes of the character yong (eternity)

  Being unfamiliar with Chinese orthographic tradition, some in the Western viewing audience resorted instead to conspiracy theory. “Did NBC Alter the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony?,” user techmuse posted on Slashdot on the evening of August 9, 2008, triggering a cascade of just under 500 responses over the course of 48 hours.11 A working thesis quickly formed that the sequence of national delegations—which so clearly violated anything remotely resembling an orderly procession—must have been garbled and resequenced as part of a profit-driven decision by television executives. Anticipating that American viewers would tune out following the appearance of the US team, the conspiracy theory held, NBC had cut up the original sequence and reorganized it so as to place the US delegation toward the end of the procession, and in doing so ensured a more enduring viewing audience. “American media alters the truth to boost ratings! Movie at 11,” quipped kcbanner just moments after the opening salvo by techmuse.

  Notwithstanding a scattered few who attempted to highlight the obvious—that the Chinese language has no alphabet, and thus that there might be an alternate explanation—online commentary traipsed further into the abyss of speculation, as if taking Costas’s admonishment to “think again” with the utmost seriousness. Some believed the theory yet pardoned it, drawing upon a kind of gritty, world-weary cynicism. “Olympic Events have always been rearranged when on a Tape delay,” interjected wooferhound. “I expect it, and why not? It is not even displayed in correct order when it’s hosted in the USA.” More extreme and jocular speculations surfaced in a comment by Minwee, likening NBC’s supposed act to “the practice started with the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the German newsreels showed only negatives of all of the track and field events, so that a white Jesse Owens could be seen beating the pants off of all the black athletes.”

  It was not until the second day of commentary that the fraudulence of the original theory began to receive treatment. NBC had not doctored the 2008 Parade of Nations; the sequence had simply followed a different organizational logic. What started with fury and excited speculation, then, ended limping, with one final rhetorical exclamation from smitth1276: “it doesn’t bother any of you that this is an entirely inaccurate claim? The order wasn’t changed at all, and whoever alleged that it was is smoking crack.” And so the storm ended exactly two days after it began, on the evening of August 11.

  Table I.1 SEQUENCE OF THE 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES PARADE OF NATIONS (FIRST TEN COUNTRIES)

  Compared to the pageantry of August 8, 2008, 8:08 pm—a decadent onslaught of wireworks, fireworks, synchronized shouting, levitating LCD screens, Han Chinese toddlers donning non-Han minority outfits, an intense cardiovascular workout in the form of human-powered Chinese movable type, and child model Lin Miaoke lip synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the angelic, prerecorded voice of her more talented but apparently less aesthetically acceptable counterpart, Yang Peiyi—the nonalphabetic sequence of the Parade of Nations was more like an astute, Banksy-esque prank carefully crafted to perplex and subvert:

  Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Maldives, Malta.

  G, T, Y, M.

  There is no alphabet here.

  Beijing’s prank is even more delicious when we consider that China could have easily played along with IOC mythology by organizing the proceedings according to the Latin alphabet. For four decades or more, scarcely any Chinese dictionary, reference work, or indexing system on the mainland has employed the stroke-count organization used in the parade. To the contrary, in the 1950s mainland China developed and promulgated a Latin alphabet–based phoneticization system known as Hanyu pinyin, or pinyin for short. Designed by Chinese linguists shortly after the Communist revolution of 1949, pinyin is now ubiquitous in China, functioning as a paratextual technology that runs alongside and supports character-based Chinese writing, but does not replace it. Pinyin is not a “Chinese alphabet,” thus, but China’s use of the Latin alphabet toward a variety of ends. When Chinese toddlers first learn to read and write Chinese characters, for example, they learn pinyin at the outset in order to assist them with the memorization of standard, nondialect pronunciation. When computer users in mainland China sit down at their laptops, moreover, the keyboard they use is of the standard QWERTY variety, but is used to produce screen output entirely in Chinese characters (more on this subject later).12

  Beijing could have spared Costas and Lauer their embarrassment, and avoided bewildering the global viewing audience, and yet chose not to. Clearly, Chinese organizers did not want to spare us, and herein resides Beijing’s subtle act of defiance—the one truly revolutionary moment in the 2008 ceremonies, and perhaps the only one that did not contribute to their towering budget.

  Chinese in the Age of the Alphabet

  This is the first of two books charting out a global history of modern Chinese information technology. Divided into seven chapters, this boo
k moves across roughly one century, from the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s to the advent of computing in the 1950s. In the forthcoming book, we will carry this history into the present age of Chinese computing and new media. Over the course of this history, we will see that the encounter between Chinese script and the International Olympic Committee in 2008 was but one of its many encounters with false alphabetic universalisms of one form or another. Whether Morse code, braille, stenography, typewriting, Linotype, Monotype, punched-card memory, text encoding, dot matrix printing, word processing, ASCII, personal computing, optical character recognition, digital typography, or a host of other examples from the past two centuries, each of these systems was developed first with the Latin alphabet in mind, and only later “extended” to encompass non-Latin alphabets—and perhaps nonalphabetic Chinese.