The Undying Chinese Writing System

Colin Marshall reviews two books about the past and present of the Chinese writing system.

By Colin MarshallJune 27, 2025

• Cultural Studies

IN JANUARY 2016, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum published a post at Lingua Franca, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog on language and writing in academe, bemoaning “the awful Chinese writing system.” To his mind, that system’s thousands of “discrete graphic symbols”—around 3,000 of which must be memorized “just to be able to read the morning paper”—constitute “a millstone round the neck of the whole Sinophone world, and should have been ditched decades ago.” The post drew enough attention that some of the lay readers to whom it circulated may have imagined the argument as the first of its kind. In fact, Pullum was making a minor, irritated contribution to a civilizational debate that had begun at least 120 years before. In 1896, a medical student in Shanghai named Shen Xue published a treatise declaring that Chinese characters “blocked the telegraphic wires, clogged the arteries of the brain, and prevented the advancement of scientific knowledge,” thus marching the once-mighty Qing Empire down the road to ruin.

It is with an account of this dubious but telling proposition that Uluğ Kuzuoğlu opens Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (2023), a study of the efforts to reform the Chinese writing system that flowered amid the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all such efforts had withered by 1986, the year that the State Council of the People’s Republic of China officially put an end to script reforms with a declaration that characters (a few thousand of which the Communist Party had ordered simplified, ostensibly for the sake of nationwide literacy rates and education levels, in the 1950s and ’60s), would not be replaced by pinyin, the approved system of rendering Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. Three decades thereafter, observers like Pullum were still ruing the fact that such an “obvious alternative” had been consigned to “purposes like teaching, writing foreign names, and machine-assisted character entry. It’s the awful character system that is central and revered.”

The phrase “machine-assisted character entry” sounds more trivial than perhaps it should, given that reading and writing with digital computers made possible Chinese characters’ ultimate salvation. That, in any case, is one interpretation of the story Kuzuoğlu, a history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, tells in Codes of Modernity, which is concerned for most of its length with the already millennia-old Chinese writing system’s imperilment in the age of trains and telegraphs. To the formidable early challenge posed by the dominance of Morse code, nobody in China could come up with any better adaptation than assigning each character its own four-digit number, which necessitated slow and cumbersome processes of encoding on one end and decoding on the other. “In a new capitalist and alphabetic world order that upheld the industrial values of efficiency and productivity,” Kuzuoğlu writes, “the Chinese writing system turned out to be a linguistic coprolite.”

Many and varied solutions were proposed, Shen Xue’s call for phoneticization being only one of several ideas for reform advanced at the time. Subsequent decades saw a variety of character simplification schemes (reducing either the number of characters in total or the number of strokes required to write them), shorthands, Latinized alphabets, and even arguments for replacing Chinese with another language entirely. In the early 20th century, a coterie of Chinese anarchists in France “turned to the universal values of science and started propagating what they believed to be the most scientific language for all humankind: Esperanto.” Whatever its claims to rationality, Esperanto had the advantage of belonging to no nation in particular, which—according to the anarchists’ line of reasoning—would suit a country that had no particular national language of its own.

“[T]he spoken languages of Beijing in the north, Shanghai on the central coast, and Hong Kong in the south are at least as different from each other as are spoken French, Italian, and Portuguese,” writes University of Washington professor Zev Handel in his new book Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. “That is why linguists often refer to them as ‘Chinese languages’ rather than ‘Chinese dialects.’” The need for one standard spoken Chinese language became apparent as the Qing dynasty collapsed in the early 1910s, but only under the Communist Party was Beijing Mandarin finally elevated to that position. Luckily, a standard written Chinese language could be said to have existed since the 13th century BC—or at least since the fifth century BC, with the consolidation of Classical Chinese. “For approximately two millennia, Classical Chinese, written in Chinese characters, was the vehicle for the textual transmission of cultural knowledge throughout East Asia and adjacent areas,” writes Handel. “Like Latin in medieval Europe, it was a living ‘dead’ language.”

Handel stresses the parallels between Classical Chinese and Latin, in part to correct the popular Western belief that Chinese characters, or hànzì, stand not for words or parts of words—morphemes, in the jargon of linguistics—but for entities and even ideas themselves. Such a misperception surfaces in the journals of no less a pioneering authority than the 16th-century Jesuit priest and proto-Sinologist Matteo Ricci. “Any book written in Chinese,” he declared in a passage quoted early in Chinese Characters Across Asia, “would also be understood by the Japanese, the Koreans, the inhabitants of Cochin China, the Leuchians [inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands] and even by people of other countries.” For “while the spoken languages of these different races are as unlike as can be imagined,” Ricci writes, “they can understand written Chinese because each individual character in Chinese writing represents an individual thing.”

Toward the end of the book, Handel imagines Ricci’s Asian equivalent, a 13th-century Mongol soldier separated from his company and left to spend his days wandering through Europe. In his own diary, this forlorn figure might well have marveled at Latin:

This marvelous language expresses not spoken words but Things or Notions. That this must be so is apparent, because any book written in Latin will be understood not only by the inhabitants of Rome and its surrounding regions where numerous dialects are spoken but also by the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, even the Iberians, who all read it as ably as the Romans.

But he, too, would be wrong to do so. “We already know how it is that educated medieval Europeans could read Latin, despite speaking different languages,” writes Handel, not without betraying a certain exasperation. “The reason they could communicate with each other in Latin is because they had all learned Latin.”

By the same token, the people of various Asian lands, or at least the educated elite of those lands, could read and write in Classical Chinese because they’d all learned Classical Chinese. For quite some time, it was the only written language extant in the region, even outside China proper, and Chinese Characters Across Asia traces its spread to other parts of the continent from the fifth century onward.

East Asia’s ever-growing presence in global popular culture may have spread misconceptions about its languages but not without certain accompanying pieces of genuine knowledge. Some Westerners with no understanding of either Mandarin or Cantonese (the only other Chinese language of which they tend to be aware, thanks to Hong Kong’s economic prominence) know that, even if Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking monolinguals can’t converse with each other, they can communicate relatively easily in writing. Some Westerners with no understanding of Japanese know that its writing system incorporates a great many Chinese characters (kanji). And some Westerners with no understanding of Korean know that its writing system is not pictographic, nor ideographic, nor even composed at all of “characters” in the Chinese sense, but is, rather, an alphabet-like phonetic script.

That represented the limits of my own knowledge of the Korean language once, before I took up its study some 20 years ago. At the time, I had no idea that, not so very long before, Korean had been written in a Japanese-style mixed script using both Chinese characters and hangul, the “Korean alphabet” (with syllabary-like characteristics). Nor could I have guessed that hangul itself, like the Japanese phonetic scripts hiragana and katakana, shows signs of having been gradually adapted from the graphic elements of hànzì. That last is one of the more illuminating episodes of the “story of the global history of Chinese characters” Handel tells in Chinese Characters Across Asia (and in more detail in his 2019 book Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script).

In this century, the so-called “Korean wave” has spread Korean popular culture, primarily in the form of music videos and television dramas, across the rest of Asia and, subsequently, the world. One knock-on effect has been a much-increased interest in the Korean language as a subject of study. When I first signed up for a proper Korean class in the mid-2000s, it ended up being canceled for lack of student interest; today, it can still be hard to get into such a class in the United States, but for the opposite reason. While the avid consumption of Korean media explains some of this, so do perceptions of the language itself: a young person who enjoys both K-pop culture and Japanese anime may well choose to study Korean rather than Japanese due to the impression that the former won’t necessitate the arduous process of learning kanji. That isn’t a false impression exactly, but it is a misleading one, liable to result in a shallow understanding and uncertain command of the language.

One can indeed read most any modern Korean book without encountering a single hanja (Chinese characters used in the Korean writing system), a legacy of the push for the use of the Korean hangul alphabet alone that was initiated under the developmentalist dictator Park Chung-hee, ruler of South Korea for much of the 1960s and ’70s. But the fact remains that at least 60 percent of the Korean vocabulary currently in use is adapted from Chinese, which also holds true in different proportions for Japanese and Vietnamese. “How did these Chinese words get into these non-Chinese spoken languages?” Handel asks. “The process was driven by literate elites,” who were proficient in Classical Chinese by definition, and who eventually developed ways to repurpose its characters to record their own spoken languages as well. “They began to insert some of the Chinese words they had studied into their speech. These eventually spread beyond this community into the speech of the general population, a process that took place over many centuries.”

In most of the languages Handel examines, this Chinese vocabulary has survived the characters first used to write it. Vietnam adopted the Latinized chữ Quốc ngữ script (now familiar from phở joint and nail salon windows around the world) under French colonial rule in the early 20th century. At that point, it no longer had everyday use for Chữ Nôm, the library of repurposed, modified, and even newly invented Chinese Characters once used to write the Vietnamese language. Hangul, as anyone who exhibits even a passing interest in Korean culture is soon told, was created in the year 1443 by King Sejong the Great, the most venerated monarch of the half-millennium-long Joseon dynasty. Though it didn’t become respectable before entering literary use in the 16th and 17th centuries, today its dominance—apart from the perfunctory, often wholly decorative English scattered across Korean cityscapes—is near-total. Handel does note that, in 21st-century Korea, “Chinese characters occupy a place of prestige in the collective imagination and in cultural notions of proper education,” but chances are that only “a limited number of them will persist within Korean writing, perhaps only a few hundred,” seen primarily in news headlines, in the names of certain buildings, and on banners announcing especially august events.

That is not, I would suggest, all to the good. However dubious its claim to being the “most scientific” writing system in existence, hangul is indeed an impressive creation, and the justifiable national pride surrounding it has probably done more than its part to prevent total Latinization. Yet in a language with a majority Chinese-derived vocabulary, it makes sense that such a descent should be represented visually. Chinese characters also offer aesthetic advantages over purely phonetic writing: as The Fall of Language in the Age of English author Minae Mizumura once said, to read a passage describing a flower garden in Japanese is to see the “names of flowers jump out at you,” and “since flower names in ideograms usually have poetic connotations, looking at the page, it really seems as if you are looking at a garden filled with clusters of fragrant and beautiful flowers.”

Chinese characters offer these advantages, that is, to readers who have mastered them. But in the internet age, such a high bar to entry can be desirable: in the Sinophere’s public conversations—or at least those permitted by the censors—it to some extent prevents the intrusion of outside parties not directly invested in the matters at hand. (By contrast, few high-profile social media discussions of American affairs fail to attract the participation of the strange, self-styled global pundit class who in some cases develop uncanny American English without ever having set foot anywhere in North America.) For those reform-minded intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century who held Chinese characters to be the cause of neurasthenia, decadence, and so on, this difficulty was precisely the problem: as Kuzuoğlu writes, they “believed that illiteracy plagued close to 90 percent of the population and constituted the greatest obstacle to building a nation.” Yet a glance at the modern literacy rates of China, Taiwan, and Japan, all of them considerably higher than that of the United States, suggests that it wasn’t such an obstacle after all.

With its three coexisting scripts—four counting rōmaji, the imported Latin alphabet—written Japanese may well be even more complex than written Chinese. “But treating the Japanese writing system as a problem in need of a solution is the wrong way to think about it,” Handel argues. “The current writing system must have some practical advantages for Japanese readers, or it would not have persisted through so many centuries of trial and error. Indeed, scientific studies suggest that the use of kanji in Japanese writing provides efficiencies for readers.” Nor can we assume “some overarching march toward progress and modernization that will inevitably eliminate the use of characters in China and Japan,” a mindset formed in the now-distant era when, as Kuzuoğlu puts it, “the entire world lost its mind” amid the onrush of industrial-scale information technology that briefly made entire societies cutting ties with their own history seem not just a viable action but also one necessary for survival.

In many societies, pressure to “modernize” the national language seems to have been displaced by pressure to acquire English. South Korea spends an especially great deal of time and money to that end, with little to show for it apart from the inflation of its recent and deranging self-conception as a displaced province of the West (to which the virtual elimination of Chinese characters also contributed). Here as elsewhere, popular belief holds English to be the global language, and though it may not fulfill that function to the letter, it does appear to be the closest thing currently on offer. “Some people talk as if Mandarin Chinese was gaining on English. It is not, and it never will,” Geoffrey Pullum wrote in another Lingua Franca post, this one in 2014. “A Tamil-speaking computer scientist explaining an algorithm to a Hungarian scientist at a Japanese-organized scientific meeting in Thailand calls on English, not Chinese. Nowhere in the world do we find significant numbers of non-Chinese speakers choosing Mandarin as the medium for bridging language gaps.” Yet there was a time in Asia when Classical Chinese bridged a variety of such gaps, a time long enough to leave the languages involved permanently transformed.

Perhaps only the most overheated speculation about the rise of “the Dragon” drifted into visions of a future in which American and European businessmen have no choice but to conduct their professional conversations in Mandarin. But even if the Chinese economy isn’t surging ahead quite like it used to, China’s rulers, who clearly have no intention of overseeing a civilizational decline, can hardly be accused of ignoring the long game. A few years ago, anthropologist Joseph Henrich popularized the acronym WEIRD, referring to the class of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. As China has steadily become more educated, industrialized, and rich, it’s becoming neither more democratic nor—in a greater affront to the worldview of many foreign observers—more Western in any nonsuperficial respect, its language included. “It is difficult to imagine now, in this era of Unicode, high-resolution displays and printers, and adaptive-predictive character input systems, the degree to which technological changes in the twentieth century threatened—or were perceived to threaten—the survival of Chinese characters in China,” Handel writes. Whether AI-assisted translation, the latest in this march of technologies, will ultimately endanger or entrench Chinese characters remains to be seen. But it may be pertinent to note, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently did, that half of all the world’s AI researchers are Chinese.

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Notes

This essay refers to several adaptations of Chinese characters across East Asia. Hànzì (漢字) are Chinese characters, kanji (漢字) are their counterparts in Japanese, hanja (한자/漢字) refers to their use in Korean, and Chữ Nôm refers to the historical Vietnamese scripts based on Chinese characters.