Symbolic Revolutions

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Xu Bing, Jesse Coffino-Greenberg and Gregory Lee for encouraging this project and offering insights at an early stage, and Suman Gupta for his substantial contributions. Notes 1. Peter Hessler Hesler , Peter . ‘Oracle Bones’ . The New Yorker 16 and 24 Feb . 2006 : 125 . [Google Scholar], ‘Oracle Bones’ in The New Yorker, 16 and 24 Feb. 2006 observes that, according to Yin Binyong: the committee considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic. Yin remembered one system that employed numbers to convey Chinese sounds. In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new ‘Chinese’ systems. The idea of simplifying Chinese script, which this committee ultimately achieved, has a long history. The earliest official use of simplification was during the Taiping Tianguo, when government seals and documents adopted ‘vulgar’ characters – i.e. simplified characters with fewer strokes that were used by the common people. From the early twentieth century there were numerous scholars of different ideological persuasions who suggested that simplifying the script would lead to general educational advantages (children would be able to learn to read quicker) – e.g. Qian Xuantong in 1922 proposed the first systematic simplifying methods, and numerous others involved in the New Culture Movement. In 1935 the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formally published the first official list of simplified characters. There were a complex series of debates and researches extending over a decade before the Committee of Chinese Character Reform in 1964 provided the full list of simplified characters – altogether 2235 characters of more than 10,000 in ordinary use. Every one of these simplified characters was finalised by experts according to popular forms widely used outside the official realm and highly stylised forms of various calligraphic norms. These simplified characters were later adopted in Chinese teaching in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan. (125) 2. When the author visited Xu Bing in his Williamsburg studio, he showed her the ink prints he had created during the Cultural Revolution. These books are over half a century old, but the clarity of the prints remains on the thin and brittle paper. 3. See ‘Oracle Bones’ by Peter Hessler, which asserts how Mao was so influenced by Stalin that he almost considered converting characters to alphabet. 4. Significantly, the first evidence of the Chinese language was discovered on oracle bones, which were interpreted by priests who believed that the script was of divine origin. 5. These experiments include a project for the blind called Brailliterate (1993) and Post-Testament (1992–1993). See Erickson, 53.