Chinese grammatology: script revolution and literary modernity, 1916–1958

Yurou Zhong’s ambitious book attempts to account for a bifurcated revolution in both ‘script’ and ‘literature’ during the modernist period in China spanning roughly the first six decades of the 20^th century. This is just one of many binaries the book seeks to establish and work through, including ethnocentrism versus ‘identitarianism’ (18), Romanisation versus Latinisation, and intellectualisation versus massification. The book subsumes these binaries under a tripartite structure where script and literary revolutions betray a certain order of ‘Provenance’ in Chapter 1, undergo several ‘Transmutations’ in Chapters 2–4, and are finally ‘Contained’ in Chapter 5 and the book’s Epilogue. The book’s success is contingent on how naturally a narrative structure foisted upon a period by the author (for the sake of drawing out salient lessons on script reform) fits. Either script and literary reform in China were a catalyst for the revolutionary moment at hand, or these reforms were offshoots of pre-existing revolutionary fervour. Zhong seems committed to the former proposition:

Synchronizing the provenance of modern Chinese script revolution with the disciplinary independence of linguistics, the year 1916 seems like one of those golden moments of serendipity when history makes full sense. To be fair, such serendipity was long in the making with the rise of phonocentrism at the turn of the twentieth century (4).

The revolutions and wars of the early 20^th century take a backseat to the more pressing historical issue of phonocentrism’s rise. Neither 1917 nor 1949 counts as much as the dates acting as two ‘historical bookends’ (8) to Zhong’s study. First, 1916 saw the publication of Saussure’s A Course in General Linguistics, and Yuen Ren Chao’s ‘The Problem of the Chinese Language’, which energised efforts at scrapping Chinese characters entirely in favour of a phonocentric alphabetic writing system. Second, however, some four decades later, Zhou Enlai’s 1958 speech on ‘The Current Task of Script Reform’ (7) reintroduces and restores some lost philological or ‘grammatological’ promise to China’s script reform mandate by ‘conspicuously leaving out the institution of a Chinese alphabet’ (7). By retaining the use of characters (albeit in simplified form), the Chinese state releases, in Zhong’s view, new metaphysical possibilities that deny the primacy of spoken over written speech that may, for example, allow ‘subaltern workers [to] write’ (114). Via characters, writing is not simply an imitation of speech sounds but provides an added ‘surplus’ (183) to meaning; each character contains a phonetic and ideogrammatic (‘ideo-phonographs’, 182) relationship to the world. Thus Zhong would have it that some part of Derrida’s critique of metaphysics took hold in and around the script reform campaign in 20^th-century China.

Yet, overall, Zhong’s thesis seems forced. The main reason for titling the book Chinese Grammatology is not simply to pay respects to Derrida but to include Chinese script reform in Western academic debates on poststructuralism. For example, Zhong insists that Tang’s term wenzi xue (文字學) most closely matches the English ‘grammatology’ or the French ‘grammatologie’ (179). Yet Zhong acknowledges that Tang never intended any sort of conversation with Derrida or any other Western poststructuralist, as his 1952 proposal on script reform predates Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) by 15 years.

Such caveats appear throughout the book. Clearly Zhong is attempting to fight off charges of anachronism, but I am not so sure she succeeds. If Tang had no idea who Derrida was, why equate script revolution in China with a critique of Western metaphysics? Zhong’s prose would work much better were she more candid about her approach. She is herself providing a possible critique of Western phonocentrism (from Tang Lan and others) which in many ways coincides with Derrida’s later treatment. But to suppose from there that Chinese script reform either a) foreshadows Derrida or b) is itself a practical critique of metaphysics is simply beyond the pale.

Indeed, after her sustained and impassioned discussion of Tang and his work, Zhong concedes that ‘Zhou Enlai’s announcement of the state policy in 1958 had likely little to do with Tang’, although his ‘new ideo-phonographs charted a veritable path for the containment of the script revolution’ (205). Zhong focuses on the revolution’s marginal voices (including Tang) while eliding how the mainstream consensus was established at all. Tang, who appealed to ‘Marxist – more precisely, Stalinist – linguistic theory’ (171) directly, does so as a way of pleasing authoritative bureaucrats. If the revolution as Zhong describes it is successful, it is so only via a superficial connection to non-Western linguistic theory. Indeed, the possible sincere import and application of Soviet theory on script and literary reform in China is ignored. The script revolution’s greatest heroes for some reason are its detractors, which makes one wonder if the revolutions as Zhong describes them were successful, necessary, temporary, or all three – which further makes one wonder if the story’s ending as told by Zhong is happy, unhappy, or left hanging.