Meaning and Semantics in Literary Chinese

The language of Old Chinese, which roughly corresponds to the period of 600 BCE- 0 CE became the standard grammar and script for Literary Chinese. The great classical works of ancient China including the Analects of Confucius 論語 and Sun Tzu’s Art of War 兵法 were written using this language. As the spoken language changed, Old Chinese served as a kind of standard from which a strictly written form of Chinese organically evolved, thus preserving in much detail the grammar of Old Chinese. Literary Chinese went on to serve as the official written language outside of China in places such as Korea, Vietnam and Japan.

Before delving into grammar of the language itself, we first need to examine the written script which, in itself, conveys meaning in its own right.

The origins of Chinese characters can be found in pictographs written on various materials dating back into pre-history. These symbols usually depicted the message they conveyed, or tried to use combinations of symbols to convey more abstract ideas. These symbols were said to have been systematized by the Yellow Emperor 黃帝 in ancient times. The characters were later catalogued and their calligraphy forms fixed by the grand recorder Chou in the year 800 B.C.

Around this time characters were still being drawn with a pen-like instrument, but over time it was replaced with the brush, which came to make Chinese characters what we know them as today.

There a six categories of characters. The first character class is called imitative drafts, which are rough sketches representing the object.

山 mountain　

水 water

人 person

三 three

The second category is indicative symbols. They are figures that suggest the meaning. These symbols often suggest an idea of motion.

ノ action of the authority which exerts itself up and down

The third category is logical aggregates which are made up of two or more characters made simple, coming together as one. Their signification results from the meanings of the various parts.

占　fortune telling;ト>divination + 口>mouth; to consult fortune tellers.

The fourth category is phonetic complexes, which are made up of two or more simple characters. One character conveys meaning, while the other one holds no meaning but conveys the pronunciation. One should note that the pronunciation element is no longer absolute in the modern day as the phonology of Chinese morphemes has changed considerably.

楚　a woody land; 林>forest + 疋 phonetic ‘chu’¹

The fifth category is the acceptation of the character in a meaning more extended, derived, generalized, metaphorical, analogous, adapted, figurative, etc.

网 a fishing net. By extension it can refer to a network, cobweb, reticulate design; to catch with a net, to catch in general, to gather, etc. All these meanings are an extension from a concrete object.

The sixth and final category refers to ‘mistake characters’ which are characters with false borrowings. Sometimes these came to exist because of scribal errors, or more commonly on account of assigning an existing character to an idea, place or person that at the time held no character.

The meanings of many characters over time have shifted and often differ greatly from their original meanings. Moreover, other languages which adopted Chinese characters came to assign different meanings to characters. An example would be the character 使 which in the Confucian Analects means, ‘to make someone do [something]’/ causative. In modern day Japanese, the character is a verb which means ‘to use’.

It should also be noted that readers of languages that use Chinese characters do not read nor come to directly understand the meaning of characters through their archaic semantic elements. While these semantics elements help as memory aid they are by no means absolute in conveying meaning. Each character represents a word. These characters are graphic representations of ideas which are further represented by a vocalized utterance associated with each particular symbol. In some ways, they are not that different from something like roman script, only that they are more immediately derived from their pictographic roots.

Literary Chinese is essentially a terse monosyllabic language following the general Subject-Verb-Object pattern. One character refers to one syllable, which refers to one word, though there are a few exceptions.

人 person/populace/man/human

去 to depart/leave/go

芙蓉 lotus (the individual characters mean nothing on their own)

Literary Chinese uses two-word compounds. These compound words work as one single noun within the syntax of a sentence. It makes use of a process called reduplication. This is a process where repeating a word creates a meaning extended significantly beyond the meaning of the original word.

人 person 人人 all people

年 year 年年 year after year

Literary Chinese uses polar binomes where a pair of words (synonyms or opposites) came together to refer to a whole set of things as a single compound noun.

少長 young + old > people of all ages

動静 move + be still > all [one’s] activities

草木 grasses + trees > all vegetation

Pluralization of words is accomplished with affixation. These are suffixed or prefixed onto nouns, or any other word class that behaves as a noun within the syntax of a sentence.

Literary Chinese, like most languages, uses the topic-comment sentence. The topic is what you want to talk about, and the comment is what you want to say about it. Literary Chinese has two types of comments and two corresponding types of sentences: the nominal and the verbal. These are distinguished in that a nominal sentence has a noun phrase as its comment and a verbal sentence has a verb phrase as its comment.

The nominal sentence is essentially a statement of identity. For example:

A, B 也 A is a type of B.

宋、小國也 Song is a small state. [Song, small state it is]

無父無君、是禽獸也 With no father and no ruler: this is a wild animal. [no father no ruler, this wild animal it is]

The verbal comment is a nominalized verb following the pattern verb + 也. Verbs serving as topics are nominalized, as all topics are nouns. When verbs serve as nominal comments, they refer to a general category of action that defines the identity of the topic. Modern English does not have this kind of structure. Observe the following sentence:

王之不王、不爲也　The King’s not ruling (correctly) is a matter of not trying. [King’s (王之) not ruling, not try it is.]

Note that the character 王 (king) functions as a verb by virtue of the negation particle 不. All nouns following 不 become verbs, though there are at times exceptions. In this sense the word 'king' becomes a verb meaning ‘kingly way/actions of a king’, and from the context of the sentence one can gather it means ‘not being kingly’. The later half is where we find the copula 也following the verb: to try 爲, which is negated by 不.

One should also observe that quite frequently in Literary Chinese the tense is usually not explicitly mentioned. The reader is assumed to gather from the context of the sentences when in time the action took place.

However, in Literary Chinese, as in any language, one must create sequences of actions if one wants to tell a story or make an argument, and for this reason Literary Chinese uses coordinate verbs to mark the sequence of events. The first verb in a sentence is typically the antecedent condition. It influences how the second action occurs or if it occurs hypothetically or not at all. Observe:

宋　人　有　耕　者、　田　中　有　株、兔　走　觸　株　折　頸　而　死

Song Person Exits Plow AN² Field Inside Exists Stump, Rabbit Run Strike Stump Broke Neck and/then Die

 Here 有 is a transitive verb of 'existential predication': it says that its direct object exists. When有 has a topic it generally indicates a general, though not precisely specific, time. “There exists in the people of Song one who plows” and “Within the field there is a stump.” Note that the direct object of all normal transitive verbs comes after the verb.

The later half of the sentence reads, “The rabbit ran, struck the stump, broke its neck [and as a result而] died.” The而 explicitly indicates coordination between two verbs:

A而B = A and [as a result] B.

A question arises as to how a native speaker of Old Chinese would have perceived the sentence. Is the narration in the present? The rabbit strikes the stump and dies. Or is it in the past? The rabbit struck the stump and died. It is not explicit which tense is being used. An English speaker might expect it to be in the past tense. Though there is the possibility that the notion of an exact tense did not exist in the narrative speech in Old Chinese.

Another interesting semantic feature of Literary Chinese is its use of the particle 所. It is a particle that points to the object, without explicitly naming it. It is the label that allows one to refer to a set of objects selected simply for their role as objects of verbs. Observe:

李 子 往 市

Li　　　Master Go Market

Master Li went to the market.

李 子 所 往 市 也

Li Master >object< Go Market It is

Where master Li went was the market.

In the first sentence we do not know where the emphasis is placed. In the second sentence the Verb-Object has been split, and the verb has been shifted into being the topic. Naturally, the comment about the topic follows: the market. Observe the following interrogative sentence:

李 子 所 往 何　也

Li Master >object< Go What/Where? It is

Where is it that Master Li went?

 This article has hardly touched the surface of Literary Chinese, but hopefully it has provided the reader with an idea of how fascinating both the grammar and script is. Indeed, the history of the language runs from ancient China until even the modern day. It holds many qualities which should be of interest to any person interested in linguistics.

Further Reading:

Fuller, Michael. An Introduction to Literary Chinese. Cambride: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Pulleyblank, Edwin G. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995.

Wieger, S.J. Chinese Characters: their origin, etymology, history, classification and signification. Trans. L. Davrout. New York: Paragon, 1965.

Notes:

1 Note that the phonetic reading given is the modern Mandarin pinyin romanization. Reconstructed readings of Old Chinese are available but are still considered tentative in general. The pronunciation of characters is generally done using one’s mother language. For example, Cantonese speakers will read it using Cantonese, Japanese will use on-yomi (Sino-Japanese readings) and Mandarin speakers will use modern Mandarin.

2 者 is an abstract noun with a bound form. It generally means the thing or action of the preceding statement.

Ryōkan - "Begging for Food" 乞食

十字街頭乞食了
八幡宮辺方徘徊
児童相見共相語
去年痴僧今又来

Having begged for food at the crossroad,
I wander by the Hachiman Shrine.
The children come see me and we talk.
Now the stupid monk of last year has come again.

-Ryōkan 良寛 (1758–1831)

A Japanese Death Poem in Chinese

The Kaifūsō 懷風藻 is oldest known extant collection of Chinese poetry by Japanese authors. Its compilation dates to 751 during the Nara Period 奈良時代 (710-784). In it we find poems written primarily by the aristocracy of around that time. The editor's identity is unknown, though some suspect it was Ōmi no Mifune 淡海三船 (722-785). Altogether the work comprises 120 works by 64 authors.

Reading it I found a poem that I would like to translate and analyze here. The author of it was Ōtsu no Ōji 大津皇子 (663-686) or Prince Ōtsu, the third prince son of Emperor Tenmu 天武天皇 (d. 686). The young man was unfortunately executed on charges of rebellion at the age of 24, shortly after his father died. His death poem, or at least one attributed to him, is included in the Kaifūsō. The title is translated as “Facing the End” 臨終. As follows:

金烏臨西舍　鼓聲催短命　泉路無賓主　此夕誰家向

The golden crow approaching the west building,

The sound of the drum shortening my life,

The road to the underworld is with neither guest nor host,

This evening whose house shall I turn to?

This poem is written in the Chinese jueju 絕句 style, which is four lines of either five or seven characters. The four lines are respectively the introduction 起, development 承, twist 轉, and conclusion 結/合. In the case of five characters the second and fourth lines will rhyme (see highlighted parts below). In the case of seven characters, the first, second and fourth lines will rhyme. There is also the matter of level 平 and oblique 仄 tones in Middle Chinese (different from modern tones) which are indicated in the table below. This style was quite popular during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and naturally found its way into Japanese literati circles.

This poem is written with five characters per line, so the second and fourth lines should rhyme. However, if you read it with modern Mandarin Chinese readings it does not. Although this is of course a Chinese poem written by a Japanese author, they were still using character readings from China. Fortunately, the Japanese preserved the pronunciations for Chinese characters from various time periods. These are called the on-yomi 音読み as opposed to the kun-yomi 訓読み readings. The latter are the native readings assigned to characters. The former are broken down into three time periods:

• Go 吳 – Readings from before the 7^th / 8^th centuries. Possibly from the Korean peninsula or southern China. Often used in Buddhist texts.

• Kan 漢 – Readings from the mid Tang Dynasty (618-907). Generally reflect the pronunciation of Chang'an 長安.

 

• Tō 唐 – Readings from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Often used in the Zen school. Here tō 唐 refers to China rather than the Tang Dynasty.

For our purposes we will compare the Mandarin to the Japanese on-yomi readings in the aforementioned chronological order. Given that Prince Ōtsu died in 686 the kan reading might be better reflective of what the author had in mind when composing the poem, though the go reading also seems to make sense. Again, the second and fourth lines are supposed to rhyme.

		平仄	Mandarin 中文	Japanese On-yomi (go吳/kan漢/tō唐)
起	金	平	jin	kon / kin
	烏	平	wu	u / o
	臨	平	lin	rin
	西	平	xi	sai / sei
	舍	仄	she	sha
承	鼓	仄	gu	ku / ko
	聲	平	sheng	shō / sei
	催	平	cui	se / sai
	短	仄	duan	tan
	命	仄	ming	myō / mei
轉	泉	平	quan	zen / sen
	路	仄	lu	ru / ro
	無	平	wu	mu / bu / mo
	賓	平	bin	hin
	主	仄	zhu	su / shu
結	此	仄	ci	shi
	夕	仄	xi	jyaku / seki
	誰	平	shei/shui	zui / sui
	家	平	jia	ke / ka
	向	仄	xiang	kō / kyō

Here “golden crow” 金烏 refers to the three-legged crow residing in the sun, or as an allusion the sun itself. As it approaches or arrives at the western building we are informed that the sun is setting in an estate or urban area. The sound of the drum is perhaps not unlike in China where it signaled the closing of the city gates for the night. The character quan 泉, which I have rendered as “underworld” here is an abbreviated form of huang quan 黃泉 (in Japanese yomi). The term bin zhu 賓主 here is a standard binomial term employed in the classics like the Liji 禮記 meaning guest and host. Finally the last line wraps up the sentiments accompanying a dreadful journey into the lonely darkness of death. It seems there is no intonation pattern, so perhaps this is not the regulated style 律絶, but instead the looser ancient style 古絶 (the latter are limited to five syllable lines). Bear in mind the poems in this collection are not noted for being exquisite specimens.

Assuming Prince Ōtsu wrote this shortly before his execution, it is quite remarkable and expresses the feelings surrounding such unfortunate circumstances. It is of course possible it is just attributed to him, though I will not go into the academic discussions on that matter at the moment.

I find the Asuka and Nara periods quite fascinating. It was in the mid-7th century that Wakoku 倭國 formally changed its name to Nippon 日本 (Japan). The Chinese histories suggest this was because they disliked the former name. It literally meant "country of the dwarfs". This would have been around the time
Prince Ōtsu lived and died. The famous Battle of Baekgang occurred during the year he was born. Japan had dispatched fleets in support of Baekje on the Korean peninsula against Silla and their ally Tang China. The Japanese suffered tremendous casualties. A few years later Silla was in control of the whole of the Korean peninsula. This incident and the Tang expansionism quite likely prompted a lot of fear and concern in Japan while also sparking a pressing need to adopt Chinese forms of government, statecraft and culture. Simultaneously Japan was receiving refugees from Korea. This led to the rapid sinicization of Japan, most prominently seen in the Nara period. It was in such an environment that Prince Ōtsu was raised and much of the rest of the Kaifūsō as well. The historical background for reading any kind of classical material indeed enriches the experience.

We will explore more of the text later on.

Nepal in the Book of Tang

Many of the ancient Chinese histories, starting with the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian) compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (d.86 BCE) and published around 91 BCE, are useful not only when studying Chinese history, but also the history of other contemporary countries.

The dynastic histories over the last two thousand years contain records of contacts between the court and foreign states as well as brief descriptions of those foreign cultures. In some cases, these short accounts are invaluable witnesses when recreating the history of a country named in the chronicles. At a basic level they also offer a glimpse into the perspectives of contemporary peoples. The accounts of foreign cultures speak as much about those cultures as they do the authors'.

One example of this is the account of Nepal in the Book of Tang 舊唐書, a history of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). It was published a few decades following the collapse of the dynasty. Like the earlier dynastic histories it also provides brief details on foreign realms. Its account of Nepal is as follows.

泥婆羅國，在吐蕃西。其俗翦發與眉齊，穿耳，揎以竹桶牛角，綴至肩者以為姣麗。食用手，無匕箸。其器皆銅。多商賈，少田作。以銅為錢，面文為人，背文為馬牛，不穿孔。衣服以一幅蔽布身，日數盥浴。以板為屋，壁皆雕畫。俗重博戲，好吹蠡擊鼓。頗解推測盈虛，兼通歷術。事五天神，鐫石為像，每日清水浴神，烹羊而祭。其王那陵提婆，身著真珠、玻璃、車渠、珊瑚、琥珀、瓔珞，耳垂金鉤玉榼，佩寶裝伏突，坐獅子床，其堂內散花燃香。大臣及諸左右並坐於地，持兵數百列侍其側。宮中有七層之樓，覆以銅瓦，欄檻楹栿皆飾珠寶。樓之四角，各懸銅槽，下有金龍，激水上樓，註於槽中，從龍口而出，狀若飛泉。那陵提婆之父，為其叔父所篡，那陵提婆逃難於外，吐蕃因而納焉，克復其位，遂羈屬吐蕃。

Nepal is west of Tibet. It is their custom to cut their hair and arrange their eyebrows. They pierce their ears and stretch them with bamboo tubes and cow horns. Those that link them to their shoulders are considered most beautiful. They eat using their hands and have no spoons or chopsticks. Their vessels are all copper. There is a lot of trade and little agriculture. They use copper for money. On the front is a man and on the back horses and cows. They do not pierce holes in them. For clothing they use one stretch of cloth to cover the body. Several times a day they bathe. They use planks of wood for housing and the walls are all carved and painted. Their culture values games and they enjoy blowing flutes and striking drums. Many understand lunar predictions as well as being well-versed in calendrical sciences. They serve five deities and carve into stone their images. Everyday with pure water they wash the deities and cook mutton as an offering. Their king Narendradeva wears on his body pearl, crystal, agate, coral, amber and necklaces. From his ears hangs golden hooks with jade caps. On his girdle are gem adornments and a dagger. He sits on a lion throne. The inside of his hall is scattered with flowers and burning incense. The great ministers and retainers sit on the floor. He maintains hundreds of soldiers serving at his side. In the palace there is a tower seven stories high and covered with copper tiles. The railings, handrails, pillars and beams are all decorated with pearls and gems. On each of the four corners of the tower there are copper tanks, beneath which there are golden dragons spitting water on the tower which collects in the tanks. The water is ejected from the mouths of the dragons and its shape resembles a fountain. Narendradeva's father was usurped by his uncle and Narendradeva fled away. Tibet took him in and restored his position. Thereafter they became subordinate to Tibet.

Nepal here refers to what is now the Kathmandu Valley. Historically this is what “Nepal” itself referred to. This was a time when Nepal was actually quite wealthy due to trade, unlike today when it is one of the poorest nations in the world.

The authors of the history likely thought the elongated earlobes and cut hair were noteworthy features of this foreign culture, the Chinese themselves doing neither. They note things that would have been different from their own native culture. For example, they point out that, unlike the Chinese, the Nepalese did not punch holes in their coins or use utensils when eating.

The use of planks for building materials and elaborate carving and painting of buildings can actually still be seen in Nepal today. Unfortunately, the traditional architecture is now largely overshadowed by utilitarian concrete structures.

Narendradeva (d.683), son of Udayadeva, was indeed an actual king of Nepal. His rival Viṣṇugupta dethroned him and in 641 he was restored with the help of the Tibetans. Inscriptions of Ancient Nepal by D. R. Regmi (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1983) details ancient inscriptions which provide rich historical resource material for Nepal and there are inscriptions which validate the Chinese record.

Curiously, there is no mention of Buddhism. Xuanzang (602-664) arrived in India in 633 and returned back to China in 645, so he would have been on the subcontinent during the civil war which saw Narendradeva restored to the throne. It seems he did not visit the Kathmandu Valley, though in his journal he records some details about Nepal, in particular mention of both Hindu and Buddhist temples alongside each other. He stated there were over two-thousand monks. The Tang history above only makes mention of the worship of five deities. We know that in the 7^th century Buddhism was in the Nepal just as Xuanzang recorded. Some stūpas like Swayambu and Boudhanath, still extant today, date from this period.

Histories like this are indeed invaluable resources, of course with their limits, when attempting to reconstruct the cultures and events of the past.

All the dynastic histories are now digitalized and are available at Chinese Wikisource here.

Vernacularization of Chinese

The Vernacularization of Chinese in the Early 20^th Century

In the early 20^th century China was faced with many internal and external problems. The collapse of the Imperial Qing Dynasty and the rise of the Republic of China heralded the end of many customs and practices, but also gave birth to many new ideologies and customs. Many of these new ideologies focused on building China into a modern, capable and unified nation. Many scholars and statesmen sought to selectively cut away archaic customs and practices in favor of new so-called modern ones. Language reform was generally deemed to be absolutely necessary in order for China to remove archaic and aged practices, which were at times regarded as being causes for China's various social problems and political failures of the time. For the first time China officially adopted a written language based on the colloquial grammar and vocabulary called báihuà 白话 and at the same time largely dismissed the classical writing style (wényánwén 文言) which had been in use for nearly two millennia. The push in the 20^th century towards an official language based on the colloquial vernacular was brought on by a myriad of factors including modernization, nationalism, Europeanization and the need for a unified literate populace and nation in the face of China's ongoing problems with civil war, imperialism and balkanization.

Báihuà and wényánwén are wholly different categories of language and upon thorough investigation one could consider them to be more dissimilar than are Latin and Italian or Sanskrit and Hindi. ¹ Wényánwén, or sometimes called Classical/Literary Chinese, is a written language based primarily on pre-Han Dynasty books and the grammar, vocabulary and style of those works. Conversely, báihuà is a written vernacular that reflects the contemporary spoken language rather than the classical. Mair believes that báihuà started to develop in the medieval period.² He more specifically proposes that it became a full-fledged literary language in the Ming period, especially with the emergence of the “Four Masterworks” (si da qishu四大奇書).³ However, Wang notes that various works dating back to the Han Dynasty, including the Heng Chui Qu Ci横吹曲辭 and the Gu Chui Qu Ci 鼓吹曲辭, were superb examples of popular literature and that the majority were written in báihuà.⁴ Indeed, báihuà has been both in the background and foreground of Chinese literature for some amount of time. However, it was only after the May Fourth Movement (wǔ sì yùn dòng五四運動) of 1919 that it was recognized as being a proper literary language by the upper-class literati.⁵

Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) was one of the Chinese Republic's most creative, if not the most controversial, and established intellectuals. He felt that the Chinese language itself was the greatest barrier to the modernization of China.⁶ It seems that he believed that Classical Chinese was an obstacle to modernization as it generally carries a conservative tone and frequently makes references to the supposedly glorious ancient past. He was also a key figure in the báihuà yùndòng 白話運動, or the “Vernacular Language Movement,” which was part of the greater Literary Revolution (wenxue geming 文学革命). In 1917 he published in the influential magazine Xin Qing Nian 新青年 eight particular slogans to promote the use of vernacular poetry styles over classical ones:

文學改良芻議 Arguments For Literary Reform

1.須言之有物 What you write should be meaningful.

2.不摹仿古人 Do not imitate the ancients.

3.須講求文法 Follow literary grammar.

4.不作無病之呻吟 Do not write that you are sad or sick when you are not.

5.務去濫調套語 Discard stale, timeworn expressions.

6.不用典 Do not use classical allusions.

7.不講對仗 Do not use parallel constructions.

8.不避俗字俗語 Do not avoid using vernacular speech.⁷

Essentially, Hu Shi was eager to demonstrate báihuà's feasibility as a viable literary tool.⁸ His eight slogans are quite clearly critical of classical poetic practices. He promoted a new 'living' form of poetry to replace what he considered to be anachronistic and dry poetry styles that long for a bygone era as opposed to something reflecting the present modern era and its language, peoples and culture. Hu Shi appears to have wanted to encourage something of a Chinese Renaissance. In his lifetime he saw the impact of western imperialism against China – he had to essentially question why the West, and westernized nations like Japan, were able to have such strong governments, militaries and successful campaigns of conquest around the world. The West since the Renaissance had been pushing forward scientifically and socially, while China, once the supreme power on Earth, was quickly losing ground to nations it once considered inferior and not worthy of any attention. The West glorified innovation. The Protestant movement cut away archaic Latin from their religion and replaced it with the contemporary language of the time. England at this time controlled a third of the world's landmass. Indeed, Hu Shi, quite familiar with the West, would have taken these kinds of thoughts into consideration.

The new language reforms were not only designed to reform the literary world, but also everyday conventional writing. Standardized punctuation, which was almost entirely absent in Classical Chinese, was added using the western model. New characters (xinzi新字) were created to properly reflect the contemporary spoken language. For example, the 3^rd person female pronoun ta 她 was devised for this purpose. Most of these new vernacular forms were made standard after 1920.⁹

As one might expect there was opposition to the vernacularization of Chinese. Some classicists insisted that the spoken language changes too often and that it would be unsuitable for literary masterpieces, which if written in the classical form would be comprehensible for ages to come. Lee notes this as “condescending distrust of the vernacular language”.¹⁰ The classicists, however, did possess a valid point. Classical Chinese had been in use for thousands of years – including the so-called golden age that was the Tang Dynasty – and had worked fine. Did the official writing style have that much to do with China's constant failures in the 19^th and 20^th centuries? Nobody was postulating that it was the absolute sole cause, but the feelings of failure and disappointment were encouraging lines of thinking that basically wanted to cut away the old ways for the sake of finding some equal footing with the West at the time. In this case, it was thought that literary language, and all the cultural traditions and assumptions that come with it, should be replaced with something that looks forward to the future rather than back at the ancient Sage kings and figures like Confucius.

The literary revolution quickly grew into the national language movement (guoyu yundong 國語運動). This should be noted as particularly noteworthy due to the fact that at the time China had no official national language. Classical Chinese might have been the default written lingua-franca, but as far as a formal standardized language for the nation went, there was nothing like it. Lee notes Hu Shi's reaction: “Hu Shih's response was characteristically experimental: new writers should try to write by employing all available vernacular possibilities. They could use the language of traditional popular fiction, supplemented by present-day spoken expressions and, if need be, even a few wen-yen words.” The reforms Hu Shi had actively promoted were endorsed by the Ministry of Education and in 1921 it was announced that báihuà would be used in primary school textbooks. Hu Shi's personal objectives were a resounding success. ¹¹

In later years the reforms were held in contempt by some communists. In 1949 Cao Bohan declared that báihuà was a tool for the elite of society: “Except for literary works and magazines, very few people used the vernacular. Business writing in particular was almost monopolized by classical prose. In fact, vernacular literature itself, using the language of the intelligentsia, contained many elements of the classical language or Europeanized forms. Obscure characters were used, and themes had no relationship to the lives of the workers and peasants. Vernacular literature went no further than the desks of society's elite; it could not reach the masses.”¹² His statements were likely issued in an attempt to further discredit the achievements of the Chinese Republic during the early years of communist rule. It is interesting to note that his statement regarding the new vernacular language not reaching the masses seems to conveniently ignore the fact that it was on paper and in practice the official national language taught in schools under the sanction of the Ministry of Education. However, considering the circumstances in China during this period and the lack of stable central government due to warring factions, the reforms were not able to immediately spread across the entire country. The vernacular style being largely limited to the educated elite was certainly not intentional by any means. Indeed, the literati likely quite enjoyed their new ‘modern' style, but judging from the education ministry's support of the reforms and the eventual dissemination of the vernacular language, the original purpose of bringing literacy to the masses was eventually carried out. It simply took time. Cao Bohan did not take this into account in his written remarks.

Hu Shi's literary revolution sparked two particular schools of thought: that of westernization/Europeanization (ouhua 歐化) and popularization (daizhonghua 大衆化). The Europeanization movement was primarily concerned with developing expressive word power in China. Chinese was said to be lacking in scientific and predominately European social-political terminology. The popularization movement sought to cut class boundaries and create a literate social system for all.¹³ The socialist influence in this line of thinking is readily apparent. Again, the need for an up-to-date language to accommodate not only new sciences, but also new abstract concepts and ideas, clearly existed at this time. Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), a prominent Chinese communist revolutionary, wrote a thesis on popularization (daizhonghualun 大衆化論), which later incidentally helped to strengthen the communist party movement. He proposed that written Chinese should be based entirely on báihuà: the language of the proletariat. The basic ideas of popularization were essentially in-line with the communist agenda. Needless to say, the popularization movement was largely an extension of socialist activities. Language reform began getting intermixed with non-academic agendas. The proponents of westernization were at odds with popularization supporters, but fundamentally their positions supported the same thing: the propagation of a vernacular language and the opposition to the classical one. ¹⁴ Few insisted that China should lose its entire culture and completely adopt western ways. The intelligentsia of this time seemed predominately more concerned with catching up to the West technologically and scientifically – and in order to do so language reform of some kind was necessary to reflect the rapid changes in the modern world. Conversely, the socialists were more concerned with destroying class and uniting the proletariat for the purpose of achieving a communist utopia.
It could be said that the vast language reforms undertaken in the 1910's and 1920's contributed to the cultural reformist mindset that would eventually give rise to the Cultural Revolution. As noted before, the communists had a very keen interest in language reform well before the Cultural Revolution. In 1956, about three decades after the widespread language reforms, there was an even stronger consensus on the need for further widespread cultural reform. Lu Dingyi insisted that China had a rich heritage that “must be studied seriously and accepted critically.” However, his suggestion in dealing with the cultural heritage was that one should “carefully select, cherish and foster all that is good in it while criticizing its faults and shortcomings in a serious way.”¹⁵ His views seem to echo those of the cultural reformists in past decades who, like Hu Shi for example, sought to get China up-to-date for the modern world and able to survive the many pressures it was facing while retaining the strong features that distinguishes Chinese civilization from the rest of the world.

The early half of the 20^th century in China was one of great change. Essentially, a civilization of several thousand years was forcibly driven into a new world dominated by powers it once considered inferior. Among the vast amount of changes in Chinese civilization at this time there were a number of changes to language, which is the most basic intellectual tool of any human society. Reformists at this time utilized this tool and successfully changed the language for the purpose of strengthening, if not saving, a much weakened China, which was facing the prospects of balkanization and large scale cultural destruction. Nevertheless, although the use of Literary Chinese for formal purposes has all but died out, the study of it is still undertaken in the classroom and in universities. The intelligentsia may not be as adept as their predecessors once were with the language, but it still remains part of any scholar's toolkit who undertakes research into not only pre-modern China, but also the greater East Asian cultural sphere as well. In an ironic turn of events, the spoken language written on paper used to really be something of an anomaly as most authors wrote in the literary form, but come the early 20^th century the two changed places with the colloquial language, or something based heavily on it, becoming the official language while Classical Chinese was relegated to the status of a curious pursuit undertaken by scholars and a required subject for high school students.

Works Cited

Cao, Bohan. “Language Movement since the May Fourth Period”, Language Reform in China Documents and Commentary. Ed. Peter Seybolt and Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang. New York: M.E. Sharp Inc., 1979.

Dingyi, Lu. “The Hundred Flowers Campaign, May 1956”, The Search for Modern China. A Documentary Collection. Ed. Pei-kai Cheng and Michael Lestz with Jonathan Spence. New York: WW Norton, 1999.

Ge, Liangyan. Out of the Margins The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

Lary, Diana. China's Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927”, An Intellectual History of Modern China. Ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee. Cambridge: The University of Cambride Press, 2002.

Mair, Victor H. “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages”, The Journal of Asian Studies. Vol.53, No.3, Aug.,1994.

Tokuya, Ito. “Kindai chugoku ni okeru bungaku gengo 近代中国における文学言語(Literary Language in Modern China)” Kanjiken no Kindai Kotoba to Kokka 漢字圏の近代ことばと国家 (Words and Nationalism in the Modern Sinosphere). Ed.Yujiro Murta and Christine Lamarre. Tokyo:University of Tokyo Press, 2005.

Wang, Che-fu. Zhong guo xin wen xue yun dong shi Hushi ti 中国新文学运动史胡適题. Beiping: Jiechang, 1933.

Footnotes

1 Victor H. Mair. “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.53, No.3, (Aug., 1994), 707.

2 Ibid., 707.

3 Liangyan Ge, Out of the Margins The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 2.

4 Che-fu Wang, Zhong guo xin wen xue yun dong shi Hushi ti 中国新文学运动史胡適题(Beiping: Jiechang, 1933), 18.

5 Ito Tokuya, “Kindai chugoku ni okeru bungaku gengo 近代中国における文学言語,” Kanjiken no Kindai Kotoba to Kokka 漢字圏の近代ことばと国家, ed. Yujiro Murta and Christine Lamarre, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2005), 99.

6 Diana Lary, China's Republic, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67.

7 Ito Tokuya, Kindai chugoku, 94.

8 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927”, An Intellectual History of Modern China. Ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, (Cambridge: The University of Cambride Press, 2002), 157.

9 Ito Tokuya, Kindai Chugoku, 97.

10 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, An Intellectual History of Modern China, 162.

11 Leo Ou-Fan Lee, An Intellectual History of Modern China, 161.

12 Cao Bohan, “Language Movement since the May Fourth Period”, Language Reform in China Documents and Commentary, ed. Peter Seybolt and Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang, (New York: M.E. Sharp Inc., 1979), 32.

13 Ito Tokuya, Kindai Chugoku, 100.

14 Ibid. 103.

15 Lu Dingyi, “The Hundred Flowers Campaign, May 1956”, The Search for Modern China. A Documentary Collection, ed. Pei-kai Cheng and Michael Lestz with Jonathan Spence, (New York: WW Norton, 1999), 390.