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Today, Chinese characters are described as a national treasure, the core of the nation's civilizational identity. Yet for nearly half of the twentieth century, reformers waged war on the Chinese script. They declared it an archaic hindrance to modernization, portraying the ancient system of writing as a roadblock to literacy and therefore science and democracy. Movements spanning the political spectrum proposed abandonment of characters and alphabetization of Chinese writing, although in the end the Communist Party opted for character simplification.Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and nonalphabet worlds. Yurou Zhong explores the growth of competing Romanization and Latinization movements aligned with the clashing Nationalists and Communists. She finds surprising affinities between alphabetic reform and modern Chinese literary movements and examines the politics of literacy programs and mass education against the backdrop of war and revolution. Zhong places the Chinese script revolution in the global context of a phonocentric dominance that privileges phonetic writing, contending that the eventual retention of characters constituted an anti-ethnocentric, anti-imperial critique that coincided with postwar decolonization movements and predated the emergence of Deconstructionism. By revealing the consequences of one of the biggest linguistic experiments in history, Chinese Grammatology provides an ambitious rethinking of the origins of Chinese literary modernity and the politics of the science of writing.
Chinese language --- Chinese literature --- Politics and literature --- Reform --- History --- Writing --- History and criticism.
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"In premodern East Asia, Chinese dominated everything from poetry to international trade, but by the early twentieth century, the ancient Chinese script began to be targeted as a roadblock to literacy, science, and democracy. Its abolition and replacement by the Latin alphabet came to be seen as a necessary condition of modernity. In China, both the Kuomintang Nationalist government in the 1920s and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s had active movements for replacing Chinese script with Latin characters. Nonetheless, when script reform was taken up by the party in 1958, simplification, not latinization, was instituted, and today Chinese script is alive and well. Yurou Zhong argues that just as broader international currents swept the latinization movement in, a postwar anti-imperial critique of Western ethnocentrism was responsible for the retention of the script. She also relates these political movements to the birth of modern Chinese literature and to similar movements in other--mostly socialist--countries at the time"--
Chinese language --- Chinese literature --- Politics and literature --- Reform --- History --- Writing --- History and criticism
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"In premodern East Asia, Chinese dominated everything from poetry to international trade, but by the early twentieth century, the ancient Chinese script began to be targeted as a roadblock to literacy, science, and democracy. Its abolition and replacement by the Latin alphabet came to be seen as a necessary condition of modernity. In China, both the Kuomintang Nationalist government in the 1920s and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s had active movements for replacing Chinese script with Latin characters. Nonetheless, when script reform was taken up by the party in 1958, simplification, not latinization, was instituted, and today Chinese script is alive and well. Yurou Zhong argues that just as broader international currents swept the latinization movement in, a postwar anti-imperial critique of Western ethnocentrism was responsible for the retention of the script. She also relates these political movements to the birth of modern Chinese literature and to similar movements in other--mostly socialist--countries at the time"--
History --- Chinese language --- Chinese literature --- Politics and literature --- Reform --- Writing --- History and criticism
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