The Chinese alphabet: the evolutionary dynamics of a meme

Great Debates
1

I remember years ago, in taking a class on Chinese history, hearing this argument that the complexity of the Chinese alphabet, along with practices like the civil service examination, served (and perhaps were even intended) to prolong the dominance of the Chinese empire. The idea was that there was such a high and arduous threshold to “getting” Chinese culture that a conquered nation couldn’t fake it, i.e. warlords couldn’t simply pay lip service to Shanghai until a power vacuum allowed them to revolt, in contrast to let’s say the Goths vis-à-vis the Romans. Distant outposts would conform to Chinese cultural homogeneity while their native cultures languished and were forgotten, resulting in an empire that managed to be geographically vast yet unified for a very long time.

Furthermore, a corollary to this argument was the idea that unlike in Western societies, China in this period (guesstimating from vague memories here, but maybe around the 1300s?) was surprisingly progressive and non-racist, in the sense that you could be “Chinese” in spite of non-ancestry, as long as you were culturally Chinese.

This argument sounds plausible on the surface, but I would like some input about the actual facts supporting it or not, as well as a more precise setting of the dates, from anyone who’s looked into the matter. I’m also interested in hearing any counterarguments to my points.

Also, to me, what I’m describing sounds a bit like Richard Dawkin’s conception of a meme, and I wonder if any insight can be gained from thinking about it in this way. Basic question, but how does the concept of risk vs. reward play into the idea of memes? Clearly, the ‘Chinese meme’ is a huge risk and investment, but if it works, you get a thousand year empire.

Finally, assuming this concept is a valid one, does it have anything to say about the reputation China has today for xenophobia? And is this xenophobia distinct from and unfairly lumped in with racism since its basis is in culture rather than race?

2

Ancient Chinese “we”-script, huh?

3

This may sound like nit-picking, but I don’t think it is.

“Alphabet” is not only the wrong word, it’s the wrong idea.

This is probably oversimplified, but Chinese ideographic characters were developed to stand for concepts, rather than for sounds. Once these ideographs were established, this allowed written Chinese to be used across different cultures, who had the same concepts, but those concepts were represented by different spoken sounds. Hence the notion that Mandarin and Cantonese (or whatever they’re calling them these days) verge on different languages, rather than different dialects of one language. I don’t speak or understand either language, but I have read that they are far more different than, say, the varieties of English spoken in Yorkshire vs. Mississippi.

Chinese characters were even imported into Korean and Japanese for the same sort of reason: the concepts could be understood by reading, even if the reader would not understand spoken Chinese.

Your thesis assumes that someone could have developed a simplified, non-ideographic written language that would have achieved the same purpose. But I don’t believe that any alphabetic-type of written language would have been able to retain that universal applicability that ideographs have. Alphabets (or syllabaries, as in Japanese) are designed to replicate sounds, not concepts.

I don’t know anything about memes, or at least not enough to understand that part of your post, so I can’t speak to that question.
Roddy

4

Yeah, I know it’s not an alphabet, mispoke there. But that only reinforces the point I’m making about complexity.

ETA: However, your counterpoint about the possible universality of Chinese writing is an intriguing counter-argument to my point, one that I hadn’t considered.

5

This one is definitely not true. China remains shockingly racist in ways you would have a hard time understanding even today. Slavery and racially-toned superiority complexes weren’t considered abnormal; there was no argument over it. It simply was. There wasn’t necessarily racism between all ethnic groups, of course, but the Han Chinese assumed they were superior.

However, something which may not have been clear is that there was no real Chinese Empire in this period. The Song dynasty was utterly crushed by the Mongols, who established the Yuan dynasty… but it wasn’t so much a new Chinese government as a Mongolian Empire, which happened included China as a significant but not dominant, force. China and its resources served the Great Khan in this period. The Mongols were more accepting over other cultures - they were frequently a minority everywhere they went, and the Mongols themselves were a rather expansive and eclectic bunch of tribesmen from many regions.

Even to the previous point, Dynasties turned over in China fairly frequently, once every few generations, and the central governments were rarely all that stable. There were usually competitor states trying to take over, various rebellions, and control of outlying areas was often entirely fictional. Internally, there was often bitter rivals inside the bureaucracy, and also between bureaucrats and military officers and eunuchs.

I’m not saying the argument is totally wrong - but it’s simplistic to the point where I’d need a lot more before I’d even call it plausible on its face.

6

(I lack any relevant expertise but, as usual, won’t let that deter me from posting. :wink: )

I don’t know if there’s a special name for it, but there is a “First Technology” effect – once an adequate method is entrenched, it is difficult to supplant. By happenstance the Chinese developed a powerful pictographic writing system early on, so never had the motive to replace it with an alphabet. It’s true that guilds (incl. scribes) have fostered their uniqueness by introducing difficulties deliberately, but I don’t think Chinese writing requires that explanation.

A system of writing invariant across languages would seem to promote unity.

Finally, calling attention to China’s feudal periods, invasions from the North, and even the Han conquest itself, to argue against long-term Chinese unity is misleading, IMHO. Traditions can be maintained despite dynasty change or political fracture. One sees this in today’s Western Europe, where there is some commonality traceable to the Roman Empire, despite that Roman dominance was far shorter-lived than that of Chinese Empires.

7

Counting from the First Punic War to the fall of Constantinople, I wouldn’t call it “far” shorter-lived.

Also: logographic. Thank you.

8

It’s important to note that many Chinese languages cannot be accurately written down in any simpler script.

Take Mandarin for example. I’m sure you know it is tonal, but what most people don’t know is that there are still many homophones. Take the syllable “shi” with the fourth tone (a falling tone). My learner’s dictionary alone contains over 44 words with that exact syllable. In an alphabet based system, 世 (world) and 事 (thing) are spelled the exact same. This is why it is very tiring to read transliterations of Mandarin.

So yes, I am not smart enough to weigh in on the rest of this argument, but it does seem to play into the misconception that Chinese is written in a complicated way just to be confusing and it could easily be written using an alphabet. This is not so.

[edit] I know they were not speaking modern Mandarin in that time period, I’m just pointing out that not every language is best suited to being written down using an alphabet.

9

But “世” and “事” are almost never used in isolation, but as part of other words, e.g., “世界” and “事情”, pronounced shijie and shiqing. From looking at the word as a whole, and not just the chopped up individual syllables, it wouldn’t be that hard to read, I think. You might as well say that English is full of homophones like “en”, as appearing in “English”, “entitlement”, and “broken”. Fact is, in the majority of cases, Chinese characters don’t represent words at all, but syllables.

10

You’re right. In many cases that’s true.

Nonetheless, it is still much harder and less accurate to read Chinese with any transliteration scheme than it is with the characters.

Take this random passage from some material I happen to have open:
Xíngshì bù zhòngyào, guānjiàn shì, wénhuà hé chuántǒng de qūbié shùlì le bùtóng de yōumòguān.

I’m sure a native Mandarin speaker could figure out what that says through context clues, but there are a lot of potential sources for confusion. For instance, there are multiple words pronounced *xíngshì, bù, shùlì, * etc.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to understand Chinese that is written in an alphabet, just substantially more difficult. And a lot of people seem to think that it is not true; the only reason Chinese is written with Chinese characters is to be different and they could easily switch to an alphabet.

11

I don’t buy it. For one thing, Deaf Chinese use Chinese Braille. That is letters and tone indicators. They don’t seem to have a problem writing in Chinese with that. And, of course, just tossing out one word isn’t how people generally write–they write full texts. For example, if I were to just write the one English word below, what would you think I meant by it?

Now, if I write the word in a full text, you shouldn’t have a problem with it.

Oh, Vietnamese also has an incredible number of homophones and used to be written with Chinese characters. A few hundred years ago, a Latin alphabet-based writing system was developed and is the only one in current use. Again, they don’t seem to have a problem with determining which meaning the word has when it’s part of a full text.

ETA: Alphabets and logograms are not the only two choices for writing the world’s languages. Hie on over to Omniglot to see what the other choices are.

12

There’s clear disagreement here about counts as an empire and how unity is defined. Whatever standard is used, it’s the comparison to nations without a logographic system that will tell us if there’s any weight to this argument, keeping in mind that the writing could be a red herring and there’s some other cultural factor explaining the phenomenon, for example the civil service exams I mentioned in my OP.

With that said, was there even a Chinese empire?

What makes an empire Chinese? Who’s in charge of it, maybe? In which case Han Chinese count, while the Mongols don’t? What about the Jin and the Manchus?

If not the ethnicity of the people in charge, is there some cultural profile that makes a nation Chinese? The same difficulty arises with defining the Romans. I don’t know nearly enough about Chinese history to answer that question.

If we’re going by major shifts in regime, revolutions, etc. It seems to me that there was a period from 206 BC to 1279 AD when the Han were in power (I haven’t looked into every dynasty to confirm that). Then the Mongols took over for 100 years, then the Han ruled again for another 300 years. Then the Manchus took power and reigned from 1644 until 1911. Bear in mind that I’m being lazy by not looking too hard at the geography of the places being conquered. But at the very least, there are two contenders for the epithet ‘empire’: The Han dynasties from 206 BC to 1279 AD, and the Manchu rule from 1644-1911. Clearly the argument about writing maintaining unity would only apply to the Han.

For all I know that misconception I heard about non-racism could be describing the attitudes of the Mongols.

Besides the writing, one can also examine the shift from aristocracy to bureaucracy. In theory, a meritocratic system enables and encourages people from the outer regions of the empire to gain power by adhering to Chinese values, but I have no idea if this played out in reality.

Context: high ranking government positions were contingent upon passing a brutally difficult examination where you would be tested on your knowledge of not only Chinese history and law, but even its poetry. I think in some instances you even had to compose poetry conforming to some structure on the fly in the exam room. And of course you had to be able to write in Chinese to do all of that.

In any case, the Imperial exam wasn’t introduced until the Sui dynasty (581-618) and apparently weren’t a big deal until the Song dynasty (960-1279), so if it played a role in unity, it was unity in the medieval era only, a period of regime flux, thus it wasn’t the sort of unity that depended on who was ruling. And given that it’s a standardized exam, that sorta makes sense.

What would be really interesting to know is if and how the content of exams changed over time to cater to the sensibilities of whomever was ruling.