The Politics of Language focuses more on language rather than on education to make three valuable contributions. Firstly, it moves beyond Chinese exceptionalism to situate language politics in a global context. The gap between China's classical writing and regional vernaculars present an archetypal dilemma known as “diglossia.” In diglossia, a rarified classical language is required for public life while spoken language remains denigrated and unwritten, creating an enormous barrier to literacy.
Parallels emerge with Europe's centuries-long development of vernacular replacements for Latin, including a standard German which bridges very diverse dialects. In Greece, the official use of the demotic rather than classical form was accepted only after the fall of the generals in 1976. And gaps remain between Q'uranic Arabic and the many forms of vernacular Arabic which are largely unintelligible from Morocco to Cairo to Riyadh. In this volume, Elisabeth Kaske fills in the missing links in China's struggles over whether and how to achieve “a congruence between speech and writing” (yan wen yi zhi).
The book's second contribution is to show that Japan's promotion of the vernacular Japanese provided the strongest model for China, for ten times more Chinese studied in Japan than in the West. Chinese scholars are generally unwilling or unable to explore this contentious relationship, while Westerners are either ill-equipped professionally or over-emphasize the missionary contribution. Kaske provides a nuanced account of how late-Qing school reformers worked with prominent Japanese advisors to the Ministry of Education and the Commercial Press, which developed China's official textbooks.
Third, Kaske faces politics head on, a refreshing contrast to the many language histories that are mere lists of policy dates. Historians from both left and right make the politically safe, emotionally comforting decision to date the rise of vernacular Chinese and universal education to the May Fourth student protests against Confucian elitism in 1919. Starting from May Fourth is also technically easier, for by then the vernacular battle had been won, and most materials are written in it. Kaske uncovers much earlier roots. Even Zhu Xi (1130–1200) had no objection to vernacular writing (p. 39), but Kaske focuses especially on the idealists of the 1890s who made radical proposals in an eye-stopping variety of scripts. Famous reformers such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Hu Shi joined a wide range of southern-dialect speakers, as well as some much-reviled figures. President Yuan Shikai supported phonetic writing for mass education before he discredited himself and Confucianism by trying to claim the monarchy. Zhang Binglin, an ultra-conservative Confucian defender of the “national essence,” nonetheless imported modern Western linguistics to defend classical style, supported a national vernacular, and edited a vernacular journal. Yet he rejected a Beijing standard as “foreign” and “Manchu,” promoting a Hubei standard as culturally primordial.
Defenders of classical education argued that classical writing both united the southern and northern dialects and formed the moral foundation of the nation. Elite educators are gatekeepers to power. The first publicly funded primary schools prepared older male students for classical exams. Even early public schools for girls focused on the classics, with vernacular education as an afterthought. Many conservatives opposed mass literacy and vernacular writing. Dialect writing drew even stronger denunciations as a step backwards, to “make a written civilization into a savage again, and to teach the Chinese with ignorance” (quoted on p. 109).
Journalism mediated the classical–vernacular divide, as documented by Kaske's wide-ranging archival research on Chinese, Japanese and missionary publications, policy statements, and correspondence. Rare popular newspapers and magazines, published in a staggering range of scripts, are examined for content and readership. Further media studies might consider the development of print materials from rare commodities to scarce ones and then mass media, as Jeffrey does for India's Kerala press (see “Testing Concepts about Print, Newspapers, and Politics: Kerala India, 1800–2009,” Journal of Asian Studies, 26(2), 2009, pp. 465–90).
This volume is carefully produced, with characters and Romanizations for Chinese and Japanese. A few tiny flaws appear (such as the decision to cite linguist Yuanren Chao only by the pinyin spelling of his name, Zhao Yuanren, rather than by the better known spelling he used in the US). The style is clear, chronological and easy to follow, but heavy on detail and low on dramatic interest. More quotations from correspondence might have enlivened the narrative, as well as more of the well-designed example boxes, such as that which shows phrases judged as “standard,” “too local” and “too antiquated” on p. 264.
This volume will be most valuable as a reference volume for linguists and cultural historians. The extensive appendices of newspapers, press runs, circulation and editorial stance offer valuable chronicles of modern journalism. Scholars of language and script reform will find useful perspectives on how even the most popular reforms attract multiple and contradictory antagonists and innovators.
