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"Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms-the effort to alphabetize and/or simplify the writing system-from the 1890s to the 1980s. During this era, Chinese intellectuals attacked the extant writing system as the main culprit for backwardness and invented dozens of new scripts for Chinese languages. Whereas previous scholarship has examined this subject as an extension of nationalist language reforms, this book argues that Chinese script reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Precipitated by telegraphic networks, printing technologies, and industrial, educational, and bureaucratic exigencies for information management, new scripts were reckoned as the primary medium to increase labor efficiency and engineer alternate political futures in China. This information age was truly global in nature, and the book moves beyond the West/China dichotomy to understand its genuine impact. It situates Chinese script reforms within a comparative and integrative framework, and in doing so, demonstrates for the first time that Chinese script engineers were in close dialogue with American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all experimenting with new scripts for similar purposes of informational efficiency. Engaging with a wide range of Chinese, Russian, and Turkic-language sources, Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer an alternative approach to writing modern Chinese history and ultimately to rethink the shared experiences of a global information age"--

Chinese language --- Reform --- History --- Writing --- Political aspects

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History