Chapter 11 (PDF, 11.99MB)

Tribute and Trade China and Global Modernity, 1784–1935 Edited by William Christie, Angela Dunstan and Q. S. Tong First published by Sydney University Press © Individual contributors 2020 © Sydney University Press 2020 Reproduction and communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below: Sydney University Press Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia [email protected] sydneyuniversitypress.com.au A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia. ISBN 9781743326008 paperback ISBN 9781743325995 epub ISBN 9781743326916 mobi ISBN 9781743327050 pdf Cover image: The waterfront at Canton with the American, British and Danish factories and the Protestant church, Studio Tingqua, c. 1847–56. Caroline Simpson Collection, Sydney Living Museums. Cover design by Nathan Grice. 11 Linguistic Nationalism and Its Discontents: Chinese Latinisation and Its Practice of Equality Lorraine Wong In Addresses to the German Nation (1807), Johann Gottlieb Fichte suggested that the German people had an ‘original language’ that could articulate the cultural distinctiveness and native superiority of this people.1 ‘To begin with, and above all else’, Fichte maintained, ‘the first, original and truly natural frontiers of states are undoubtedly their inner frontiers. Those who speak the same language are already, before all human art, joined together by mere nature with a multitude of invisible ties’.2 Amidst the crisis of Napoleon’s conquest, Fichte celebrated the German language as an inner frontier more original and fundamental than territorial frontiers sanctioned by a sovereign state. Language was singled out among other criteria, such as race and territory, as the embodiment of the German nation, when ‘Germany’ was nothing more than an ambivalent geographical idea, or a non-state being made into the satellite of Napoleonic imperialism. Fichte believed that the German people, in the absence of sovereign power and territorial statehood, could gather their own continuous history in their living national language and in so doing they could practise a form of freedom more original than those made possible through Realpolitik. 1 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60. 2 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 166–67. 273 Tribute and Trade The perceived inherent tie between language and nation constitutes the ideological backbone of modern nationalism, which began to appear in Europe during the nineteenth century and came to define the norm of political, economic and cultural life around the world in the twentieth century and beyond. Critiques of linguistic nationalism suggest that national language does not embody individual and collective freedom from statehood, as imagined by Romantic nationalists such as Fichte. According to historian Hugh Seton-Watson, language is central to what he calls ‘official nationalism’ in the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Russian empire in the nineteenth century. The liberal-minded nobility and educated philologists acted as a nationally conscious elite and imposed a sense of nationality on all imperial subjects, regardless of their religion, language or culture. In doing so, the nationalist elite would strengthen the state under the authority of which they launched their nationalist-linguistic projects.3 Eric J. Hobsbawm, another historian of nationalism, points out that nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries claimed to be the guarantor of the equality and freedom of all citizens. Citizens were equal since they were given the same chance of receiving national education, which was conducted in a living national language accessible to everyone. The greatest patron of linguistic nationalism was historically the lower middle class, or what Hobsbawm calls the ‘vernacular middle strata’.4 They learned enough of the official national language to get by and function in modern nation-states. Hobsbawm considers national language to be a means through which the lower middle class, or ‘the petty bourgeoisie’, functioned as a cog in the state machine. While the state has a stake in linguistic nationalism, the market also capitalises on the existence of a national language. Benedict Anderson reminds us that nation as political collectivity was historically embedded in the rise of print capitalism in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. People recognised their shared identity as co-nationals through their consumption of newspapers and 3 Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 148. 4 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 118. 274 11 Linguistic Nationalism and Its Discontents: Chinese Latinisation novels in urban centres. Individuals were bound together as an imagined community, even though they came from diverse regional and social backgrounds and were never in face-to-face communication. A standardised national language created a sense of national cohesion; it was also required by the reproductive logic of capitalism.5 This essay picks up where these critiques of linguistic nationalism leave off, namely at the point of the simultaneous rise of linguistic nationalism and communism in the non-Western world, as is found in China. In such a situation, linguistic nationalism was complicated by the struggle for social equality and the communist revolution against capitalism. The problematic relation between linguistic nationalism and communism is articulated into the Chinese Latinisation movement in the 1930s and 1940s. As a mass literacy campaign, Chinese Latinisation sought to create a Latin-alphabet-based phonetic writing system, known as ‘New Writing’ (新文字 xin wenzi), in China. It was expected that previously unrecognised linguistic demands of the commoners, who had little right to literacy and literature under the pre-modern imperial system and contemporary statehood, could be articulated into the Chinese national language (國語 guoyu), if this national language was to be written by an alternative script unburdened by the graphic baggage of Chinese characters and accessible to both the cultural elite and the commoners. The Latin alphabet was held to be this ideal script, one that was able to facilitate national awakening and social equality simultaneously. According to Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), creator of New Writing and translator of Marxist philosophy into Chinese, Chinese characters traditionally brought out the ‘effects of assimilation’ (同化作用 tonghua zuoyong) in the Far East. In the past, foreign races such as the Jurchen, the Tangut, the Mongol and the Manchurian had to live with Chinese characters and the feudal economic order of the Han. Reflecting on the contemporary condition of Euro-American imperialism, Qu suggested that China was reduced to the position of an oppressed people comparable to the former tributaries under the Chinese territorial empire. For Qu, China 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006), 24, 46. 275 Tribute and Trade was left with no choice but to give up on the policy of common writing (同文政策 tongwen zhengce) and of assimilation (同化政策 tonghua zhengce). This would allow Chinese people to realign themselves with other oppressed peoples around the world, in their common resistance against European, American and Japanese imperialisms and in their shared struggle for national independence.6 Upon its arrival in 1930s China, the Latinisation movement quickly won the support of left-wing intellectuals, within and outside the CCP, who agitated for the right to literacy and literature of those they considered to be the toiling masses. What distinguished the Latinisation movement from other proposals for script reforms in late Qing and early Republican China is not its reduction of writing to the propaganda of an international communist revolution but this movement’s augmentation of the power of writing in reconfiguring the existing discursive order. This movement certainly had its practical goals, like the political mobilisation of ordinary folk into the communist cause, and the smooth communication of new information to the ordinary folk who were expected to understand this information through a writing system that represented their speech. However, merely focusing on these speech-centred practical goals would make us believe that Latinisation subscribed to a phonocentric and logocentric view of writing, which considers speech to be closer than writing to the referent, and that it is no different from other nationalist projects that sought to alphabetise and vernacularise writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This essay explores the primacy of writing and grammar in the Latinisation movement, questioning the ideology of orality that seems to define this movement’s goal of representing speech directly. It probes linguistic nationalism by dislodging the idea of national language from an abstract imaginary realm to the discordant material realm

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