Far Outliers

In the introduction to a new reader in traditional Chinese culture, Victor H. Mair suggests that the culture embodied in the unique Chinese writing system has served as the “glue” that maintained continuity in the face of constant buffeting from every direction.

China’s society was not static and its culture was far from unvariegated. Coupled with the cyclical collapse of dynasties, this sociocultural volatility might well have led to the utter disintegration of Chinese civilization. What, then, held it together? What was the quintessential glue that prevented the dissolution of “this culture [of ours]”? We have no hesitation whatsoever in declaring that it was none other than dedication to the hallowed culture itself, bearing in mind that wen [Ko. mun, Jp. bun] means both “culture” and “writing.” That is to say, it was the traditional culture (wenhua) [Ko. munhwa, Jp. bunka] and all its attendant values, as embodied in the sacred script (wenzi) [Ko. munja, Jp. mo(n)ji] that bound Chinese civilization in a cohesive and enduring whole. By dint of diligence and through the good fortune of privilege, approximately 2 percent of the populace in premodern China attained full literacy and all the perquisites that pertained to it, which were not inconsiderable.

Given that full literacy normally brought with it both prestige and pecuniary benefit, it is small wonder that many men devoted their lives to the acquisition and exercise of the ability to write well. (With a few very rare exceptions, women were excluded from the enterprise of fine writing.) Those accustomed to universal literacy using an alphabetic script and a living, vernacular language, may find it hard to imagine the exceptional effort required to gain an advanced degree of competency in a highly allusive, dead (i.e., not used for speech) language written with an elaborate logographic script. For those who did put forward the required exertion, their command of the script, plus the satisfaction of knowing that they were contributing to the preservation of Chinese culture, made it all worthwhile.

In a footnote, Mair notes that “strictly speaking, the Chinese characters are not logographs, because not every character is equal to a word. Much less are the characters ideographs, a term that is often irresponsibly applied to them. Technically speaking, the Chinese script may be designated as morphosyllabic or semantosyllabic. The grounds for such a designation are outlined in John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language” (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984).

With the twentieth century, however, the combination of culture and script began to unravel. With the overthrow of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1911 by revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the institutional support for the examination system that upheld “this culture [of ours]” evaporated. By 1919, progressive intellectuals were promoting writing in the vernacular, and radical activists were proposing the adoption of an alphabetic script. A direct assault on the script itself came with the promulgation of thousands of simplified characters by the Communist government during the 1950s and 1950s. An outrageous affront to those who cherish the script and all that it embraces, the simplified characters were seen by reformers as essential for expanding literacy to workers and farmers and necessary for the sake of efficiency in diverse types of communication.

By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new threat to the traditional script was emerging: the computer. IT (information technology) specialists are acutely aware of the tremendous stumbling blocks in the way of free and easy access to electronic data processing by users of Chinese characters. The input, storage, and management of a script consisting of tens of thousands of discrete elements poses mind-boggling problems in comparison with the couple hundred letters and typographic characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The economic costs in terms of vastly larger memories, slower manipulations, more frequent crashes and bugs due to overly intricate programming, and so forth are staggering.

One of the most poignant ironies of the saga of characters in computers is that the alphabet has come to their (partial) rescue. Of the hundreds and hundreds of schemes that have been devised for inputting Chinese characters in computers, by far the most popular are those relying on the alphabet. And, of the alphabetic schemes, those that rely on whole words rather than single syllables are much more user-friendly and computer-friendly. For example, both computers and human beings find it easier to analyze the following eight syllables of a journal title as Zhongguo lishi dili luncong (Collected Papers on Chinese Historical Geography) than as zhong guo li shi di li lun cong (central kingdom successive scribe/history ground principle discussion cluster). Herein lurks a danger. Once computers and human beings get used to parsing strings of syllables into words rather than resolutely keeping them separate, alphabetic inputting is on its way to becoming an independent script.

The defenders of the characters, who also view themselves as defenders of the last bastion of Chinese culture, have not been slow to recognize this threat, and they have been adamantly opposed to any hint of a move toward legitimation of the formal establishment of what is called fenci lianxie (‘word division’). Throughout history, Chinese scholars have always resisted the insertion of spaces between words. In fact, until the twentieth century, there was no concept of ci (‘word’), only that of zi (‘[syllabic] graph/character’). Despite the vociferous opposition of the defenders of characters, the Chinese government has officially established a set of Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography and private software companies and individuals are producing their own refinements apace.

Willy-nilly, pinyin orthography is becoming a reality.

Does that mean the cultural glue is cracking apart?

The following excerpt from the introduction by Victor H. Mair to a new reader in traditional Chinese culture now in the works emphasizes the multiethnic nature of traditional China.

Linguistic multifariousness is only one of the more obvious features of “the Chinese mosaic.” The same may be said of almost any other aspect of Chinese culture and society. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of Chineseness in the larger world is cuisine. Yet it is impossible to point to any particular type of fare that stands for Chinese cooking in general. Hot pots have a Mongolic ancestry, pasta products are derived from Central and Southwest Asia, tea is ultimately from the hills of the Assam-Burma-Yunnan “Golden Triangle,” and so forth. Milk products are anathema to most lactose-intolerant denizens of the Central Kingdom, yet they are a staple of the people living along its northern reaches. The more sophisticated American aficionado of Chinese cooking knows very well the difference between Szechwanese and Cantonese cooking, staying clear of the former if he or she does not like spicy hot food and avoiding the latter if his or her palate is not attracted to gelatinous, gooey comestibles.

When we watch a Chinese film and see the heroine encased in a tight sheath slit to the thigh, she is basically sporting an item of Manchu dress. Some Chinese (those who wanted to ride horses) began to wear trousers in the latter part of the fourth century B.C.E., but only because they wanted to ward off the steppe peoples who introduced the domesticated horse (and the trousers) to their land, with devastating consequences. In premodern times, it would not have been difficult to recognize the ethnicity of a citizen of the Chinese empire by his or his costume.

As for Chinese empires, there was not one of them, but a long series of dynasties, more often than not erected on the ashes of their predecessors. Also more often than not, those who established new dynasties were–a supreme incongruity–groups from the north and northwest who either were themselves “barbarians” dreaded for their awesome military prowess or who had exceptionally close affinities with them. Numerous recent archeological discoveries have led to a salutary reconsideration of the nature of the millennial interactions between the inhabitants of the East Asian Heartland (EAH) and their septentrional neighbors. As a result, it is no longer possible to think of the latter only as “traders or raiders.” Instead, what we are finding is that–already at least from the late Neolithic period and continuing right through to the twentieth century–the northern peoples were involved not only in state formation, but also in the importation of vital cultural elements such as bronze metallurgy and the chariot. Consequently, in this Reader we place far greater emphasis than is usual upon the northern peoples, for we believe that, unless one takes them duly into account, one’s comprehension of Chinese history and appreciation of Chinese culture are bound to be flawed.

The intricacy of Chinese involvement with wide-ranging steppe peoples can be demonstrated by the derivation of Gesar … from Caesar. How, why, and when this originally Etruscan title of the Roman emperors came to be applied by the bards of a Central Asia nomadic confederation to their greatest hero is an intriguing story. What is not in doubt is that the Tibetans contested with the Chinese for hegemony during the Tang period (618-907). Indeed, the Tibetans not only occupied the strategically crucial Gansu Corridor for a century, but even invested the capital, Chang’an [= Xian, see map], for a while during the year 763 in western China and were dislodged only when the Tang authorities pleaded with the Uyghurs … to drive them off. Thus, a dynasty that was initially founded by individuals in whose veins ran nomadic blood and who maintained intimate ties with their northern ancestors found temporary salvation from destruction at the hands of northwestern nomads by a confederation of Turkic tribes (whom the Tang actually detested)–a typical series of events that recurred over and over again during the more than three thousand years of known Chinese history. We should remember, moreover, that the Tang dynasty represents the acme of cultural cosmopolitanism in East Asia. It should further be noted that the location of the Tibetans was by no means restricted solely to that of their current nation, which is occupied by Chinese troops. During the medieval period, they were also identified with the border areas to the northwest of the East Asian Heartland, and still today there are large concentrations of Tibetans in the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.

Just as due consideration of the non-Sinitic peoples of the north and northwest is essential for any adequate study of the development of Chinese civilization, the same may be said for the non-Sinitic inhabitants of the south. Chinese culture (including Sinitic languages) marched southward slowly during the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E., gained momentum during the first millennium C.E., and was far from reaching its culmination even by the end of the twentieth century. The large and small pockets of non-Sinitic speakers that pepper all of the provinces south of the Yangtze River attest to the ongoing presence of peoples from radically different traditions within the territory of the modern Chinese state. The fusion of Chinese culture with the indigenous populations has led to a distinctive mix of regional cultures and ethniticities that is conspicuous in customs, languages, surnames, and physical types.

A new reader in traditional Chinese culture is in the works that places long-overdue emphasis on just what a complex, multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious place it always has been and will continue to be. Here’s an excerpt about China’s multilingualism from the introduction by the indefatigable Victor H. Mair:

For many students, this book will be part of their first systematic exposure to learning about China. As such, we wanted to make it as comprehensive as possible within the limits naturally imposed by the amount of material that can reasonably be absorbed within a single semester. One of our main goals has been to help the student realize that China is not a monolithic state with a monotonous culture and a static past. The myth of a thoroughly homogeneous, ultrastable empire, although widespread and persistent, is far from true. China never existed as a “nation of uniformity.” To the contrary, we are faced with a multifaceted country that possesses an extremely complicated history and a richly varied mix of regional and ethnic traditions.

Take language, for example. When one thinks of what defines “China,” perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a place where the people all speak “Chinese.” But what is this “Chinese” that everyone is supposedly speaking to each other? Unfortunately, China does not today possess, nor has it ever in the past possessed, such a universally understood tongue. For starters, we have to take into account the tens of millions of speakers of non-Sinitic languages who make up a significant proportion of the population of the Chinese nation as it is currently configured…. These languages belong to such disparate groups and families as Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Turkic, Tungusic, Iranian, and Slavic. These are the “minorities” of the Peoples Republic of China, all of whom have roots that lie deep in the past of East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia.

And then there is the so-called majority group who, it is claimed, speak a language called “Hanyu” or “Chinese.”…

However we ultimately choose to define it, Hanyu is related in some fashion (not yet well understood by scholars) to Tibeto-Burman. Since the combined family is customarily styled Sino-Tibetan, we may–for the sake of linguistic precision–refer to Hanyu as “Sinitic” in English. Sinitic is often said to have eight (or more) major fangyan (‘topolects’ …). Among these fangyan are “Northern” (i.e., Mandarin in the broadest of terms; it actually stretches to the far southwest), Wu (typified by Suzhou and Shanghai), Xiang (Hunanese), Gan (spoken in Jiangxi), Hakka (the language of those displaced “guests” from the north who have played a particularly important role in modern Chinese history), Northern Min, Southern Min (including Amoy and Taiwanese), and Cantonese. If analyzed by the standards applied to languages in Europe or South Asia, these fangyan would be classified as branches of the Sinitic group.

Speakers from any one of the major fangyan are incapable of conversing with speakers from those of any of the other major fangyan. Even within the major fangyan or branches of Sinitic, there are numerous more or less unintelligible varieties of speech. What is more, it is essential to note that, throughout history, the fangyan have never been written down in their unalloyed form, except latterly by missionaries using alphabets. Traditionally, there have been only two acceptable forms of writing in China: Literary Sinitic (wenyan or Classical Chinese), strictly a book language …, and Vernacular Sinitic (baihua[wen]), a written manifestation of Mandarin that developed–largely under the influence of Buddhism–out of a presumed Tang-period koiné. Despite their lack of a written form, the fangyan are still vibrant. As clear indications of the continuing vitality of fangyan, Taiwanese is now the preferred mode of expression on Formosa, and the Chinese government on the mainland is constantly threatening to cashier officials and teachers who fail to learn Mandarin.

As an aside, let me note that during the graduation ceremony at Sun Wen [= Sun Yat-sen] College (now affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University [= Zhongshan University]) I witnessed in 1988, all of the administrators and teachers spoke in Mandarin, while the mayor and other local politicians spoke in Cantonese (Sun Wen = Sun Yat-sen = Sun Zhongshan).

Sinitic evolved through a complex process of interaction with the non-Sinitic languages mentioned above, borrowing (and lending) not only words, but also structures and phonemes. The internal development of Sinitic is equally intricate, such that historical linguists are still seriously puzzled over the relationships among the various fangyan, the phonology of their earlier stages, and the identification of the fundamental etyma for the group en masse.

UPDATE: Language hat adds, “Incidentally, anyone who wants a more detailed look at the linguistic situation should get hold of S. Robert Ramsey’s The Languages of China (reviewed here).” I second that endorsement. Ramsey’s book (Princeton U. Press, 1987) gives a lot of attention to the minority languages. Language hat‘s entry has also attracted a nice range of comments. See also the follow-up entry above, The “Cultural Glue” of Chinese Writing.