Ahmet Demirhan
Born in 1881 and died in 1938, Lu Xun—regarded by some as the second most important figure in modern China after Mao, and praised by Mao not as a great writer or literary figure but as a revolutionary—has a famous essay titled “Voiceless China” (“Voiceless China”; “Wushengde Zhongguo”), which is considered one of the cornerstones not only of modern Chinese literature but also of modern Chinese thought. Interestingly, the speech “Voiceless China,” the text of a talk delivered at the Hong Kong Young Men’s Christian Association (Hong Kong YMCA) on February 16, 1927, was given during a time when conflicts between communists and nationalists were ongoing. Although he never explicitly professed Christianity, Lu Xun—who is said to have been well-versed in Christian literature and the Bible and to have had many Christian friends—also touches upon these conflicts at the very beginning of his speech. However, his subject is entirely different. Lu Xun is of the opinion that China has no “voice.”
Here, “voice” is in fact directly related to “writing” as well; it is not merely about having a say in the face of political developments or the pervasive influence of modernity. For Lu Xun believes that the Chinese lack a “writing” that would serve as a means to “convey their thoughts and feelings to a broad audience.” Because the Chinese do not possess a “writing” suited to the conditions of the day, they are in a “voiceless” state. However, this is not a “fault” of his own generation; for “our written script is a dreadful legacy left to us by our ancestors. Even after years of effort spent learning it, using it correctly remains very difficult” (for Lu Xun’s essay “Voiceless China,” see Jottings Under Lamplight, edited and translated by Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk A. Denton; p. 165).
In fact, it can readily be seen that Lu Xun employs arguments similar to those we know from the alphabet debates that began with the Tanzimat in our own historical context; however, he does not actually propose a direct change of alphabet. What he proposes is a reform that will bring China to a “civilized” “voice” in the face of the fact that “even though China possesses a writing system, it has become irrelevant to the majority of the people.” Because (as a contrast that will also appear in later writings), “the primary difference between the civilized and the barbarian is that the civilized possess a writing system and are able to use it to convey ideas and emotions to the masses and to future generations.” Moreover, although there are discussions about China conducted by other countries, Lu Xun also possesses a nationalist sentiment to the extent that he complains that “China’s voice” is not heard in these discussions. China must free itself from being “voiceless” and find its “voice”. “We have a people, but we have no voice, and we feel alone.” The problem is not merely being “alone.” Because the “voiceless” are “dead”: “Is it possible for a people to live without a voice? If a people has no voice, we can say that it is dead.”
What, then, is Lu Xun’s solution to revive this “voiceless” people who are almost “dead,” if it is not a direct change of alphabet? “We no longer need to direct all our efforts toward learning the language of the ancient, dead people; on the contrary, we must speak the modern language of the living. We do not wish to treat language as an antique; we want to write it in an easily understandable spoken language [vernacular].” These are themes that can easily be seen, for example, in Ömer Seyfettin’s writings on “language,” and like him, he seeks to base his approach on the spoken language found in the “living” mind and “living” life of the people: “If we wish to revitalize ourselves, the first thing we must do is ensure that the young stop speaking the language of Confucius, Mencius, Han Yu, and Liu Zongyuan” (p. 168). We know Confucius mentioned here; the others can be replaced with our own writers who used Ottoman Turkish. In short, Lu Xun calls for the abandonment of the traditional language—heavy, no longer connected to modern life, and already considered detached from the life of the time in terms of its subject matter—and a return to the simple and plain spoken language of the people.
Therefore, the fact that Chinese writing uses characters and is ideographic does not seem to pose a problem—at least in the context of this essay and on the surface—for Lu Xun, who is also in favor of the alphabetization of Chinese writing. Here, Lu Xun appears to take a middle path between ancient Chinese writing and alphabetization. Because his main concern is not a “literary revolution,” but rather “literary renewal.” In China, “as soon as the call for literary renewal was voiced, a counter-reaction emerged. Yet the local language gradually became popular and encountered very few obstacles. What was the reason for this?” The reason was, in fact, the reaction against those who advocated “the abolition of Chinese writing and its replacement with the Latin alphabet.” The Chinese – as if recalling Geoffrey Lewis’s characterization of the alphabet reform in Turkey as a “Catastrophic Success” – considered the Latinization of Chinese writing to be “a catastrophe” since they thought it would be “a real disaster,” and in response, they consented to a “literary renewal” based on the “spoken language.” In other words, “the spoken language [vernacular] used by the people took advantage of this opportunity and, unexpectedly, reduced the number of its enemies and triumphed by overcoming the obstacles before it” (p. 167). It is within this framework that Lu Xun argues that by taking the spoken language used by the people as the basis, the “voiceless” Chinese can gain a “voice”: “Young people must first transform China into a China with a voice. They must speak boldly, forge ahead boldly, set aside their personal interests, set aside the ancients, and express their true feelings” (p. 169).
Lu Xun’s essay is interesting in several respects. To state the most important point for our purposes by saving it for last: this shows that there is also a movement for alphabet reform in China, and that this is independent of the efforts of the Jesuits, and subsequently Protestant missionaries, who, being unfamiliar with Chinese writing, sought—according to their own logic—to develop new writing systems in order to convey the Bible to the Chinese. These efforts are carried out by the Chinese themselves. However, there are significant differences between the attempts ranging from the phoneticization movement known as fanqiu at the very beginning of the Common Era, to the phoneticization inspired by Sanskrit during the Tang dynasty – which corresponds to the Middle Ages in Europe –, to the efforts of missionaries, and then to the phoneticization undertaken by the Republic of China established after the 1911 Revolution, and finally the phoneticization efforts of a period that may be termed “alphabet universalism.”
“Alphabet universalism”—that is, phoneticization within a framework in which a Western writing technique and the linguistics based upon it are taken as central—has two important phases (as emphasized in Yurou Zhong’s Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Chinese Literary Modernity, 1916–1958), and these can be regarded as important stages in the transition from phoneticization to grammatology. The first phase in fact corresponds to a general period of efforts observed worldwide to shift to the Latin alphabet. This alphabetization initiative—which overlaps with our own period of alphabet reform, but also with efforts to alphabetize the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, the writing system known as chữ nôm written with Chinese characters in Vietnam, and the Japanese kana system—was also supported by the nationalist Chinese government. However, not only nationalist Chinese, but also—likely encouraged by the initiatives of Soviet authorities who compelled the Turkic communities they occupied to adopt not the Cyrillic alphabet they themselves used (and had at one time considered changing), but the Latin alphabet—Chinese communists also supported efforts to alphabetize Chinese writing; yet these efforts did not develop everywhere as expected. Of these efforts, only Turkey emerged with “catastrophic success.” The Soviets ultimately settled on the Cyrillic alphabet and directed the Turkic communities under their occupation—whom they had previously encouraged to Latinize—to write in Cyrillic as well. The Vietnamese example was partially successful; however, this was largely due to the adoption of a writing system called quốc ngữ (national language), which had been developed by Western missionaries as early as the seventeenth century on the basis of the chữ nôm system.
In China, however, Latinization efforts aligned with “alphabet universalism” failed to break the dominance of Chinese characters. Nevertheless, the “linguistic” evaluations put forward through the organizations and publications established by Chinese who had emigrated to or traveled to the United States for educational purposes—particularly studies influenced by an Anglo-French linguistics resembling French structuralist linguistics, which, as exemplified by Ferdinand de Saussure, marked a break from the German philological tradition and still occupies an important place in linguistics today—left traces regarding how Chinese and Chinese writing were perceived. Thus, a general acceptance emerged that phonetic writing constitutes an ideal system for linguistics. Put briefly, the understanding of writing as a visualized sign of a “sound” produced by the mouth led to the placement of Latin script at the very top of a hierarchical ranking of writing systems. The underlying motive behind the alphabetization initiatives in China, therefore, was this hierarchy that prioritized Latin and, consequently, the “alphabet.” Those who sought to transform Chinese writing into an alphabet aimed to eliminate an ancient Chinese script and to modernize it by turning the spoken language into a written language. Transitioning to an alphabet also meant democratization, liberation, and revolution.
However, the second phase is more intriguing, and although it is again based on a trend felt on a global scale, it relies neither on the theses of “alphabet universalism,” nor on the positive qualities of the “alphabet” identified with the Latin alphabet, nor on certain linguistic criteria. The announcement in 1958 that an alphabetization initiative—which had been dominant among Chinese intellectuals and, whether nationalist or communist, among political elites in the first decades of the twentieth century—was officially terminated, and the declaration that, apart from minor simplification efforts, writing would continue in a system belonging to ancient China, is not a purely linguistic decision. In fact, the communist administrators who had, through revolution, transformed the nationalist Republic of China into the People’s Republic of China made a strategic decision that deserves consideration at least as much as, if not more than, the Chinese Revolution itself. Behind this decision, the emergence of a Non-Aligned Movement—if not as an alternative to, then alongside, a bipolar world order that had begun to take shape after 1945—played a significant role. This marks a phase shaped by decolonization, anti-imperialism, calls for international solidarity, and most importantly, the Bandung Conference of 1955 (as well as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference held in Cairo in 1957 and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent in 1958).
The effects of the Non-Aligned Movement are also felt on writing systems. To put it roughly (as Derrida would judge in his famous Grammatology in the late 1960s), a phonocentric writing is regarded as ethnocentric (nearly ten to fifteen years before Derrida). Peoples are encouraged to speak and write in their own “voices.” To express it in terms of Yurou Zhong’s observations in Chinese Grammatology, at this stage, “the unsustainability of the phonocentric regime—namely, a system based on the alphabet—and its attempts to suppress all non-Roman-Latin scripts in the world is declared.” Nor does it stop there; “national forms” that do not conform to the Latin alphabet are valued as a form of “ethnocentrism”; yet this “ethnocentrism” is “an ethnocentrism that serves as an antidote to Western ethnocentrism” (p. 8).
This phase also constitutes the basis of the Korean scholar Byung-Chul Han’s attempt to understand China through the notion of the “fake” and of his evaluation of Chinese thought as inherently “deconstructive” through the concept of “process.” For, in the declaration by Chinese authorities that they abandoned efforts to alphabetize ancient Chinese writing in order to establish solidarity with the Non-Aligned Movement, a grammatological critique can be observed. That is to say, to abandon an alphabetization initiative which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was grounded in “sound,” which assumed that the “sound” produced by the mouth—no matter how arbitrary or conventionally invented—stood in a relation of correspondence with its sign, and which maintained that “sound” precedes writing; and, in contrast, to declare that the Western logic of the “alphabet” has suppressed all non-Western writing systems in the world—this is regarded as a critique of phonocentrism.
It is indeed a matter that requires further investigation whether China, within a grammatological framework, has developed serious critiques of Western phonocentrism and its ethnocentrism. However, although Lu Xun—who, in the text “Voiceless China,” says “We have a people, but we have no voice, and we feel alone”—may have found companions for the Chinese people’s sense of “loneliness” in the Non-Aligned Movement, the relationship—implicitly present in his speech—between the “voiceless” and the “alphabetless” must not be overlooked. Lu Xun provides an interesting example in his text: due to the difficulty of ancient Chinese writing, many people do not even know whether their surnames—such as “Zhang”—are written as 張 or 章, or do not know how to write them at all, and can only say “Zhang” (p. 165). This is, in fact, a typical “alphabetism” argument and is similar, for example, to Nergis Ertürk’s observation in Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey that, in Turkish written with the Arabic script, a word written as “اول” is ambiguous as to whether it should be read as “ol” or “öl” (p. 23 ff.). In this case, it appears as if the phonetically distinguishable difference between “ol” and “öl,” together with the ambiguity in the spelling “اول,” constitutes the focal point of phonocentrism. However, the real issue lies not in the relationship between “sound” and “letter” as such in writing (or, if you prefer, in unwritten speech), but rather in the place where it is recorded. Lu Xun’s essay also contains an element that disrupts the grammatological moment (and, at the same time, Derrida’s deconstruction in Grammatology) said to underlie the decision in China to abandon the attempt to adopt an alphabet and to remain within its own writing system.
In fact, when Lu Xun speaks of “sound,” he means it in its general sense, rather than the linguistic phōnē. That is, he does not mean “sound” as the linguistic phōnē, but rather “sound” in a broader, general sense. From Yurou Zhong’s book, we learn that the word Lu Xun uses in Chinese is “sheng 聲.” Zhong notes that this word means “voice,” “speech sound,” and also “sound” in the sense of any kind of noise. However, it is also evident that when he speaks of giving a “voice” to a “voiceless” China, what he means is the spoken language. Yet the spoken language does not merely remain a language ordinarily spoken by the people who do not understand such texts, as opposed to ancient texts or modern essays that imitate them; rather, it is in fact the “authentic” one. Indeed, “only an authentic voice can move the Chinese people and the peoples of the world; in order that we may live together with others in the world, it is necessary that we possess an authentic voice” (p. 169).
But where is this “authentic voice” recorded? Zhong shows that an answer to this question can be found in one of Lu Xun’s early essays, not included in the collection published under the title Jottings Under Lamplight, namely “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices”: the “authentic voice” is “the voice of the heart (xinsheng 心声 ).” That is, the “authentic voice” that can be observed in spoken language is recorded in the “heart,” or, if you prefer, it is written in the “heart” (interestingly, the name of an advocacy group established in 2020 to counter misinformation within the Chinese diaspora and to produce content among Chinese communities in the United States, Canada, Britain, or elsewhere is the Xīn Shēng Project). In this case, spoken language will in fact arise from the “authenticity” of the “sound” recorded in people’s “hearts,” and in this sense, it will already be written.
It is precisely here that both the claims that the abandonment, in 1958, of efforts to adopt the Latin alphabet—which had also emerged as a movement in China in the early twentieth century, and which was relinquished in order to defend its own ethnocentrism against an ethnocentric West—marked a shift from phonocentrism toward grammatology, and Derrida’s own conception of grammatology, reach their limit.
As we shall see in the next essay, the difficulties of Derrida’s attempt, in Grammatology, to draw upon a figure of China—most likely from the Western canon (or from the Western “process” of thought about China)—while discussing Chinese ideographic writing and, of course, Egyptian hieroglyphs, that is, to rely on a figure such as the characters of Chinese writing, also become evident here.