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RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series #6 - Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age

Talk series 6Dr Ulu Kuzuolubanner
  • Date

    23 Feb 2024

  • Organiser

    Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture

  • Time

    12:00 - 13:30

  • Venue

    Online via Zoom  

Speaker

Dr Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Enquiry

Ms Carmen LAW 34008979 rcchc@polyu.edu.hk

Summary

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.

Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system—from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.

Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

 

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia University Press, 2023)

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/codes-of-modernity/9780231209397

Keynote Speaker

Dr Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Dr Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Assistant Professor of History

Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Kuzuoğlu is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. He works at the intersection of science and technology studies and media studies to explore the social and political history of information technologies in China and the world. His first monograph, Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), examines the political economy of information in China through a history of Chinese script reforms––the effort to alphabetize and simplify the writing system––from the 1890s to the 1980s.  

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