Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, an Assistant Professor and historian at Washington University in St. Louis, dives into the intriguing world of Chinese script reforms from the late 19th century to the 1980s. He discusses how reformers viewed traditional Chinese characters as barriers to modern communication and education. The conversation highlights the political, technological, and societal shifts that influenced script modernization, including experiments with phonetic alphabets and the collaboration between various international linguists. Kuzuoğlu's insights reveal the complex interplay between language and national identity.
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Personal Script Reform Journey
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu shared his personal journey from Turkey, studying Chinese and fascinated by script reform due to Turkey's own script change in 1928.
He discovered that script reform was a global phenomenon linked to modernization, beyond just China or Turkey.
insights INSIGHT
Script Reform & Global Information Age
Script reforms in China were more about adapting to the global information age than language unification.
New communication technologies reshaped clerical labor and demanded efficient information management.
question_answer ANECDOTE
1913 Phonetic Script Conference
A 1913 Chinese conference tried standardizing pronunciation and creating a phonetic script amid political chaos.
The attempt mixed Northern and Southern pronunciations, causing confusion and political conflict.
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Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age
Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age
Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu's "Codes of Modernity" delves into the global history of Chinese script reforms, spanning from the 1890s to the 1980s. The book examines the political and economic factors driving these reforms, arguing that they were crucial to the emerging information age. Kuzuoğlu analyzes various proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets and character simplification schemes, within a transnational context. He highlights the contributions of diverse figures, such as American psychologists and Soviet revolutionaries, who sought to enhance informational efficiency through script innovation. The book offers fresh perspectives on scripts and the shared experiences of a global information age.
In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.
Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age(Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.
Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.
New Books in East Asian Studies