The Characters That Built China

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, China is a global superpower. But less than two hundred years ago, the nation was in a state of decline. After what became known as the 'century of humiliation' at the hands of Western imperialist powers, its very survival was in question. A movement arose to fight off foreign interference and preserve Chinese culture in the face of intense pressure from a rapidly-changing world. And the key to that movement was language.

In this episode, we follow three key reformers who worked to modernize written and spoken Chinese, sometimes risking their lives to do so. Their work simplified Chinese, standardized it, and took it from an inaccessible language built for the elite to a modern language for the masses. It was a struggle that spanned generations, changed the fate of millions of people, and helped create the powerful modern nation-state of China.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The oldest theory we have of how Chinese characters came into being is actually this myth of this
0:19.2	fore-eyed sage who spent his days looking up at the clouds and noticing the formation of patterns
0:35.2	and then he looked down on the ground and look at how the birds were leading tracks on the sand.
0:41.2	He noticed that there are these recurrent patterns in the universe that kind of tied the world together
0:47.2	and then the lore has that from that that's how he developed characters.
0:51.2	China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world.
1:19.2	And the language is the oldest living language we have that is still used.
1:25.2	And the earliest records we have is really from the third millennium BCE.
1:31.2	Those records are pictographs carved on turtle shells from thousands of years ago.
1:35.2	Writing was and continues to be a fundamental part of Chinese identity.
1:41.2	Today China is a global superpower but that disguises the fact that less than 200 years ago
1:47.2	the nation was in a state of decline and its survival was in question.
1:51.2	And a movement arose to fight off foreign interference to bring China back from the dead.
1:57.2	The key to that movement was what the fore-eyed sage saw in the clouds, language.
2:03.2	It's the desire to see China survive the modern age.
2:09.2	This is Jing Su.
2:11.2	I teach at Yale University.
2:13.2	I work on modern China from 19th century to the present.
2:16.2	She wrote a book called Kingdom of Characters.
2:19.2	The language revolution that made China modern.
2:22.2	Jing says that the fight to modernize Chinese as a language represents the beginning of China's climb to being a superpower.
2:29.2	Because if you ask linguists, they will all tell you that if you look at Chinese system by all counts, it should not have survived.
	...

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