Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts In an Age of Global Information Revolution Ulug Kuzuoglu Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 ©2018 Ulug Kuzuoglu All rights reserved ABSTRACT Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution Ulug Kuzuoglu This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word- frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought. Table of Contents List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One Late Qing Efficiency: Telegraphic Wires, Phonetic Scripts, and Cerebral Consciousness 24 Chapter Two Capital, Empire, Letter: Romanization in Nineteenth-Century China 67 Chapter Three Alphabet Democracy? Grammatological Sovereignty and Vernacular Activisms 104 Chapter Four Cognitive Management: Intelligence Tests, Linguistic Engineering, and Mass Literacy in the 1920s 144 Chapter Five Architects of the Page: Text Mining, Creative Destruction, and Simplification of Chinese Characters 189 Chapter Six The Typographic Mind in the Russo-Ottoman World: A Pre-History of the Chinese Latin Alphabet 241 Chapter Seven Revolutionary Informatics: Latinization across Eurasia 290 Chapter Eight Alternative Information Societies: The Chinese Latin Alphabet, Phonetic Symbols, and Vernaculars, 1930-1937 336 Chapter Nine Empire of Pinyin 381 Epilogue: Toward Digital Codes 417 Bibliography 422 i List of Illustrations Fig. 1.1 Chuanyin kuaizi 34 Fig. 1.2 Chinese and Manchu Telegraphy from Philosophical Almanac 40 Fig. 1.3 “Eight Principles of yong 永” 42 Fig. 1.4 Viguier’s Dianbao xinshu 電報新書, 1872. 43 Fig. 1.5 Wang Bingyao’s Phonetic Letters and the Morse Code 47 Fig. 2.1 Alexander M. Bell, Visible Speech (1867) 82 Fig. 2.2 Crawford’s Syllabary 88 Fig. 2.3 “The Book of Happy Sounds” - Gospel of Matthew in Ningbo dialect, 1853 (Courtesy of the American Bible Society) 92 Fig. 3.1 The National Phonetic Alphabet 125 Fig. 3.2 Peill’s Mandarin Syllabary 129 Fig. 3.3 Typeface for the National Phonetic Alphabet, approved by the Ministry of Education in 1922 132 Fig. 3.4 “Illustrated posters to advertise the Phonetic Script and to show how the Bible meets the need of the individual and the nation.” 138 Fig. 3.5 The Truth: Biweekly periodical published in the NPA (1921) 139 Fig. 4.1 Charles H. Judd’s hand tracer, reproduced from Genetic Psychology for Teachers (New York: Appleton and Company, 1909 [1903]), 171) 157 Fig. 4.2 An example of the hand tracer’s recording 157 Fig. 4.3 A handwriting with “zero merit” 159 Fig. 4.4 A handwriting sample that Thorndike rated 14 160 Fig. 5.1 The President’s Will by Cheng Guangyao 200 Fig. 5.2 C: Character; F: Form; S: Sound, M: Meaning 206 Fig. 5.3 The distribution of characters according to the number of strokes 208 ii Fig. 5.4 26 characters chosen by Liu Tingfang 209 Fig. 5.5 The distribution of stroke-numbers according to the number of characters 212 Fig. 5.6 Reproduction of characters with different stroke numbers 213 Fig. 5.7 Dotted line shows the character/stroke ratio in 800 most frequently-used characters; straight line shows the same ratio in 42,239 characters 215 Fig. 5.8 A Sample from Xu Zemin’s 550 suzi 217 Fig. 5.9 Zhou Xiangeng’s example of an English poem 221 Fig. 5.10 English poem turned upside-down 221 Fig. 5.11 English poem’s mirror-image 221 Fig. 5.12 The mirror-image of each individual letter turned upside-down 221 Fig. 5.13 Chinese Sentence-Gestalt 222 Fig. 5.14 Psycho-physiological habits of reading Chinese 226 Fig. 5.15 Du Dingyou’s root-radicals, character-roots, and simplified characters 227 Fig. 5.16 A selection from the 300 handy characters 234 Fig. 5.17 A Sample from 324 Simplified Characters 237 Fig. 6.1 Malkom Khan’s Separate Letters 259 Fig. 6.2 Akhundzade’s Latin-Cyrillic Letters 259 Fig. 6.3 Ebüzziya’s critique of Şinasi’s typeface 263 Fig. 6.4 The first 282 signs from a total of 519 that Ebüzziya’s press used 265 Fig. 6.5 Gasprinskii’s typeface and pedagogy 269 Fig. 6.6 Shakhtakhtinskii’s Alphabet in comparison to Arabic, Russian, French, and German letters and pronunciations 273 Fig. 6.7 Shakhtakhtinskii’s Alphabet in 1902 275 Fig. 6.8 The shapes of letters as accepted by the Scientific Council of the Committee of Alphabet Reform (1914) 283 iii Fig.