-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Zhao Lu, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu. Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 411–412, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae543
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
If you learn Mandarin Chinese nowadays, the chances are that you will encounter two writing systems: Chinese characters and its romanization, Pinyin. The former contains tens of thousands of characters, and the latter uses the Roman alphabet. You might wonder about the relationship between the systems, and, bearing the toil of memorizing the characters, even wonder why Pinyin has not already replaced the characters, as they are seemingly much easier to learn and more reflective of the sound of Mandarin. After all, shouldn’t a script conform to what the language sounds like? Indeed, previous scholarship has assumed a hierarchy between language and script, prioritizing the former (3). Particularly in this context, the complexity of Chinese characters was perceived as an obstacle to mass literacy and even “modern scientific progress” (3, 60). This narrative decisively favors Pinyin or other romanizations of Chinese to Chinese characters.
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu’s book Codes of Modernity challenges this hierarchy and profoundly complicates the phonocentric narrative by exploring how phonocentrism emerged in the first place. It explores the script reforms in China from the late 19th century to 1986. Instead of treating script reform as secondary to language reforms, Kuzuoğlu argues that script reforms had their own logic that was independent from language reforms, namely, the modern political economy of information (7). Building on James Beniger, Kuzuoğlu points out that in the making of a global information age, information and capital were intimately related (9), and labor efficiency was prioritized and maximized (10). To Kuzuoğlu, this global information age was not even; it was structured through alphabetic technologies as it came from Western historical experiences (12). Chinese script became ill-fitting in this infrastructure, which disassembled the institutionalized practice of knowledge production and de-skilled mental and clerical laborers in China (11). Reformers of Chinese scripts thus sought ways to respond to the challenges provided by this new global infrastructure.
