What language represents the Chinese nation? To answer this question, Gina Anne Tam offers a superb analysis of how China's intellectual and political elites responded over a century-long period. Focusing on dialects, an imperfect translation for fangyan, Tam explains how the national speech known as Mandarin or Putonghua was less an end result and more an unending process in which elites debated the true nature of the Chinese nation, be it central or local, scientific or emotional, singular or diverse. These dialectics form the core of the study, which rejects the common assumption that Chinese languages exist in a natural hierarchy. Replacing that hierarchy with a framework of “linguistic modernity,” Tam illuminates the process over a long historical arc, showing how the national language was repeatedly defined and contested, while fangyan both aided and contradicted national projects. Lucidly written, Dialect and Nationalism is a sharp yet nuanced look at the power of language and the language of power in modern China.
Organized into five chapters, the book builds a sophisticated case that visions of Chinese nationhood and languages were as shifting as they were inseparable from each other. Chapter 1 introduces the efforts of High Qing scholars to categorize oral languages, followed by those of Western missionaries and diplomats after 1860 to pioneer Romanization and posit an essential link between modern nations and languages. Chapter 2 revisits the creation of a national language (guoyu) after 1911, revealing that fangyan served as a constant foil. Interestingly, the meanings of the northern and southern fangyan kept switching on a winding path interrupted by anti-Manchu Han nationalism and May Fourth radicalism, but the choice of Beijing's language led to an obfuscating teleology that all languages flowed toward this final end.
Against the backdrop of late Qing and early Republican forces, chapter 3 further illustrates how the language of science permeated new knowledge about fangyan. It discusses how folklorists, dialectologists, and ethnographers plotted their data in a scientific mode, each supposed to reveal the value of fangyan to the nation. Their labor resulted in three enduring formulations of fangyan as authentic, subnational, and ethnically Han.
Extending the analysis beyond 1949, book chapters 4 and 5 explore how fangyan remained an open possibility in socialist China. Acknowledging the legacies of the Nationalist Kuomintang language policy, chapter 4 brings into focus how Soviet ideals favoring linguistic diversity caused the early Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic to embrace the same. In the 1950s, even as a national language policy was implemented, a broad agenda to represent the lived experiences of the masses created space for fangyan to exist among the national forms. Chapter 5 turns to high socialism under the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, during which fangyan mutated into “problems,” “obstacles,” and “incorrect thinking” in the context of a threatened revolution. The conclusion draws together the earlier described formulations of fangyan and how they continue to resonate today.
Empirically and conceptually robust, Dialect and Nationalism is critical of Chinese language debates without losing sight of subtle shifts and connections. Tam is most successful in deconstructing complex models, uncovering learned assumptions, and interpreting hidden continuities in a lengthy periodization. A thread that runs throughout the book is the irony that after a century of struggles, the national language has taken root, but fangyan has also persisted. In that sense, Tam powerfully illustrates how the two were in fact twinned constructions. Despite being fully convinced, I wonder what is lost when fangyan is so often defined against the national language. What does this concept of fangyan include and exclude?
While Dialect and Nationalism is usefully grounded in the work of policy makers and knowledge producers, future studies could also explore other social actors inside and outside the territory of China. As Chinese leaders and thinkers imagined a new language that few of them even spoke, the question “What language represents the Chinese nation?” also lies in who tries to represent it and where the nation begins and ends.
