The Polyphonic Condition: Sin Wenz, Topolect Writing and the Linguistic Limits of Nation-building in Revolutionary China, 1933–1956

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the Latinxua Sin Wenz movement, which was launched in China in 1933 by CCP-affiliated activists as a means of promoting topolect writing in a variety of Latin-based alphabets. Seeing the imposition of a national language across polyphonic societies as an integral part of the violence of capitalist developmentalism, the Sin Wenz movement opted instead to promote local linguistic empowerment in Latin-based alphabets. Seen in relation to China’s various attempts at script reform in the early 20^th century, the Sin Wenz movement is notable for its pluralist attitude towards the prospect of China’s regional languages gaining discrete orthographies. After 1949, however, the PRC government abandoned topolect writing in favour of the promotion of a standardised Mandarin, which was one element of the regime’s multinational approach to state-building. Sin Wenz sought to produce orthographic empowerment in the interests of linguistic diversity within Han communities, but post-1949 discussions of language reform emphasised linguistic standardisation for the entirety of the Han people. Sin Wenz is thus a spectral presence in the modern Chinese cultural landscape, a discourse that struck out at linguistic centralisation only to see a new discourse of Han linguistic unity assert itself forcefully in the early years of the new regime.

本文旨在分析發難於中國 1933年的 ‘新文字’ 運動. 此運動的主要提倡者為與中共有密切關係的知識份子. 其欲推動以拉丁字母為主的 ‘新文字’ 作為中國各地方言的書寫方式, 並最終將漢字廢除. 此運動認爲現代國家的 ‘國語’ 與資本主義擴張產生的暴力之間有著密不可分的關係; 在反對充滿暴力的資本主義擴展的過程的論述上, 提倡中國各地方言該透過拉丁字母 ‘文字化’, 在解決中國文盲的問題上有極大的助益, 且當地人可以使用母語作為書寫和教育的工具. 本文將 ‘新文字’ 運動放在更廣泛的歷史脈絡進行考察: 中國從清末開始的各種文字改革的運動. 與其他的文字改革的方案相比, 新文字運動的突破點是對方言的包容性和開放性. 在1930, 40年代, 新文字運動得到中共的大力支持. 惟在1949年後, 中華人民共和國中央人民政府決定不推行新文字, 而改推動以北方話為基礎的 ‘標準漢語’ 作為漢民族的普通話, 同時也推動以北方話為基礎的「白話文」作為共同的書寫工具. 如何了解中共對新文字運動的政策的大逆轉, 需先理解中華人民共和國的國家建設的模式: 多民族主義 (multinational approach to state-building). 1949年之前的新文字運動試圖提倡漢人之間的語言多元性, 將漢人各地方言看成是獨特, 需被文字化的地方語言. 1949年後, 政府重視全國漢人都需要一種於書面和口語上統一的語言文字. 因此, 在中國的現代語言史當中, 新文字運動相當獨特, 甚至可以將其視爲一種幽靈的存在 (a spectral presence): 其為一種中共自身支持反對語言中心化的運動; 其去中心的傾向在1949年後因不受政府歡迎, 隨即迅速消失. 儘管如此, 此運動對方言理論的立場皆對當代語言學家, 教育學者和文學家而言充滿參考價值.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinisation
• Sin Wenz
• dialect
• baihua
• Chinese socialism
• polyphonic condition
• national language
• China

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the three peer reviewers for Asian Studies Review for the invaluable feedback provided throughout the revision process.

Notes

1. Both biahua and wenyan used the Chinese-character script, but they differed in the underlying oral languages they sought to represent. Baihua was based on the Mandarin dialect group, some of whose sub-dialects served variously over the longue durée of imperial Chinese history as a shared “official speech” (guanhua). Wenyan, meanwhile, was a highly erudite prose style which, while enjoying official prestige, was disconnected from any of the vernacular tongues spoken across any Chinese region, and such disconnection was more or less present from the beginning of its use (Chen, 1999, pp. 67–70).

2. This and all subsequent translations from Chinese-language sources are the author’s own.

3. For institutional and social histories of the Sin Wenz movement, see De Francis (1950, pp. 85–136), Ni (1948; 1987), Wu (1949) and Wang (1995, pp. 25–36). For recent English-language work about the movement, see Zhong (2014).

4. Early 20th-century China shared the same challenge regarding the accelerated promulgation of a national oral and written language that other post-imperial spaces such as Soviet Russia (see Martin, 2001, pp. 182–209), post-Ottoman Turkey (Erturk, 2011), and colonial and post-colonial Egypt (Mitchell, 1991, pp. 128–160) did as they negotiated their own conditions of linguistic unevenness.

5. The forum took place in late 1921 and early 1922 in the pages of the Literary Fortnight, the literary insert of the China Times in Shanghai. Reprints of the articles contributing to the discussion can be found in Jia et al. (2010, pp. 208–231).

6. For more on the question of script reform throughout China’s 20^th century, see De Francis (1950), Zhong (2014) and Chen (1999).

7. Language planners in Soviet Russia had originally planned to develop Latin alphabets for five separate Chinese dialects, although only an alphabet for northern Shandunski (Shandong Mandarin) was approved and put into use for Chinese living in the Soviet Far East (Martin, 2001, pp. 199–200).

8. The 1936 chapbook introducing Sin Wenz also addressed such objections (Zhi, 1936, p. 26).

9. Reserved GMD support for Sin Wenz would be short-lived, however, as by April 1939 it would once again outlaw the new writing mode as part of the guidelines introduced in its “Methods for Limiting the Activities of Opposition Parties” (Ni, 1987, pp. 23–24).

10. This did not mean, however, that writers using baihua gave up on efforts to render regional speech within the system of writing they had at hand. Their awareness of the limitations of baihua, coupled with their lack of scriptural alternatives, pushed them to carve out a place for regional speech within this mode of writing (see Gunn, 1991, pp. 204–216).

11. The party’s embrace of Sin Wenz was in fact consistent with the cultural policy of the party going back to the early 1930s, which emphasised “massification” in educational and cultural work (Holm, 1991; Wang, 2011).

12. The committee was preceded by the short-lived Chinese Script Reform Association (Zhongguo Wenzi Gaige Xiehui), founded in October 1949 with the support of leading political figures of the new republic, whose work lasted until the founding of the committee 15 months later (see Wang, 1995, pp. 53–92). Much of the historical information provided in the following section relies on the summary provided therein.

13. The conversation was hardly uni-directional, though, and differences soon emerged between the stagist understanding of natsia as articulated in Stalinist theory and Chinese ethnographic practice (see Mullaney, 2010, pp. 11–12, pp. 72–74).

14. For a sustained discussion of the complex nature of ethnic discourse surrounding the concept of the “Han” in pre-modern and modern China, see Mullaney et al. (2012). In 1955, Mao warned party cadres at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China against Han chauvinism (see Mao, 1977).

15. When one examines contemporary demographic research on China, one cannot but recognise that the baihua written form, when promoted by educational state apparatuses over a long period of time, has been successful in largely eliminating illiteracy throughout the country. By the year 2000, China’s adult literacy rate was 90.9%, and its youth literacy rate was 98.9% (Ross, 2005, p. 5).