Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter: A History is a rich, insightful, and captivating transnational exploration of not only the subject proper but also Chinese language and culture, Sino-foreign interactions, and the global pursuit of what he calls technolinguistic modernity. As the first in an expected two-volume study of modern Chinese information technology, this book takes the reader from the rise of “alphabetic universalism” in the late nineteenth century, with the invention of the Western-style typewriters, to the various attempts, some more successful than others, to develop a typewriter for the Chinese script in the early Republican period, during the War of Resistance against the Japanese, and finally in the Communist era under Mao Zedong. Mullaney plans to cover Chinese computing from the 1970s to the present in the sequel.

In this volume, Mullaney argues that the early difficulties in inventing a Chinese typewriter, due mainly to its large number of non-alphabetic characters, not only challenged the universalist claims of Western typewriter manufacturers such as Remington, but also fanned criticisms of the Chinese script itself. The attacks on the Chinese writing system took place both inside China, especially by iconoclasts associated with the May Fourth movement of 1919, and abroad in places such as the United States, where the impossible Chinese typewriter became a symbol of Chinese technological and civilizational backwardness. In response, a wide range of often transnational figures—from American missionaries in China and Chinese students and scholars in the United States, to Japanese manufacturers and Mao-era typewriter operators—took up the challenge to invent, design, and customize Chinese typewriters, with social, cultural, economic, and political implications. In the end, Mullaney makes a convincing case that the Chinese typewriter is an ideal object to “think with” in exploring the political and cultural shaping of technological changes in China, the infrastructural underpinnings of modern society, and the transnational and multidirectional trajectories of contemporary information technology.

An unabashed defender of the Chinese script, Mullaney writes spiritedly and lucidly about the heated Chinese debates over its nature and modern suitability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it survived anti-traditional and alphabet-centric critiques and threats of imported Western technologies, such as the telegraph and Western-style typewriters. While the use of numerical codes for characters served to transition Chinese into telegraphy, two rivaling approaches were proposed for the typewriter: “common usage,” which would reduce the needed characters by prioritizing frequently used ones on a tray bed, and “combinatorialism,” which would try to “spell” characters using their composite parts much like a machine based on the alphabet. The former won out in part due to aesthetic concerns dating back to at least the famous fourth-century Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi. A Shu model machine, named after its designer Shu Zhendong, using common usage, and sponsored by the influential Commercial Press, became the first mass-marketed Chinese typewriter in the 1920s and 1930s, spawning numerous schools for typists all over China. Based on training manuals and other materials he meticulously collected, Mullaney paints a fascinating portrait of these young women and, surprisingly, men as they engaged in this new technolinguistic profession.

In one of the most original and complex chapters in the book, “Controlling the Kanjisphere,” Mullaney describes not only the Japanese and Korean dimensions of the story of the Chinese typewriter, but also how the wholesale Japanese invasion of China in 1937 changed the political economy of typewriting. With much of the country under Japanese occupation, the Shu machine was muscled out of the Chinese marketplace by the Japanese-designed Wanneng (“universal”) model, which claimed capacities in handling Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and Mongolian. The technological device, thus made successful in part by political and military factors and with impact even into the Mao era, marked, as Mullaney aptly puts it, “the very materialization of Japan's ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’” (p. 224).

In the early postwar era, the well-known Chinese writer Lin Yutang, living in New York, poured all his resources and energy into inventing the revolutionary MingKwai Chinese typewriter. More in the combinatorial mode, Lin designed his machine with a conventional keyboard not to type the characters directly but to call up a list of eight candidates, from which the typist would then choose the right one. Despite its many advantages, the MingKwai failed to catch on, however, due, Mullaney believes, to the ever-growing hostility between the United States and China during the Cold War. Yet, the two-step process it pioneered would later become known as “input,” widely used today in creating Chinese characters via their pinyin spellings on computers, cell phones, and other digital devices.

The breadth and depth of Mullaney's research are evident, especially in his short chapter on typists in the early Mao years. Mining local Chinese archives, which have tended to be more open than central ones, Mullaney details how such model typists as Zhang Jiying changed the placement and proximity of characters on the tray bed to better suit the increasingly politicized and routinized public textual productions under Mao. Such practices would be continued in the digital age by “predictive text,” widely used today in input methods for Chinese and other languages.

With this wide-ranging, engagingly written, and provocative history of the Chinese typewriter, Mullaney has whetted our appetite for expanded research on Chinese and global information technology in the computer era. Indeed, he uses the conclusion of the present volume to outline the next one. While useful, I would have liked to see the conclusion also contain at least some further analyses of interesting issues raised in the book. For example, how does this history of text-based technolinguistic communication compare with that of those based on audio and video, such as radio and television? Do we risk presentism if we fault the early advocates of Chinese language reforms, including the “abolitionists,” for their radical positions because they did not anticipate that the digital revolution could and would eventually make Chinese “a world script”? What does it mean when we see parallels in practices between analog and digital technologies such as “input” and “predictive text”? Likely we will learn more about these and so many other intriguing subjects that Mullaney has pioneered in future works by him and others.