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  • Maney Publishing is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Monumenta Serica.

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    Maney Publishing

    A CONTINUITY OF CONSTRAINTS ON ORTHOGRAPHIC CHANGE: CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION Author(s): Dayle Barnes Source: Monumenta Serica, Vol. 38 (1988-1989), pp. 135-166Published by: Maney PublishingStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40726863Accessed: 11-11-2015 07:27 UTC

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  • Mon. Ser. 38 (1988-89)

    A CONTINUITY OF CONSTRAINTS ON ORTHOGRAPHIC CHANGE: CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION*

    Dayle Barnes

    University of Pittsburgh

    ". . . Script reform does not depend on whether or not it is possible to do something, but on whether or not people are willing to do it" [Wang] Liaoyi (1936: 6).

    Content 1. Script and Society in Chen Guangyao's Time 136 2. An Uncelebrated Script Reformer 137 3. Chen's Contributions to the Simplification Movement 140 4. Chen's Controversial Positions on Simplification 143 5. The Continuity of Constraints on Character Simplification 156 6. Chen Guangyao in the 1950s 159

    References 161

    * My introduction to the relationship between ethnicity and attitudes toward language, the theme of this article, came in the form of a course taught by Joshua A. Fishman at the Linguistic Society of America's 1977 Linguistic Institute, sponsored by the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center.

    The emphases of that course are reflected in this paper, the earliest form of which was entitled "Ethnic Constraints on Orthographic Change: Character Simplification in China, 1935-36," read at the panel on Language Change in China at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in Washington, D.C., February 24, 1978.

    Acknowledgement must be made to the following for financial assistance: the East-West Center, for Professional Associate awards to attend the Language Planning Program of the Culture Learning Institute in 1977, and to participate in the Conference on Linguistic Modernization and Language Plan- ning in Chinese Speaking Communities, sponsored jointly by the Department of East Asian Languages of the University of Hawaii and the Center's Culture Learning Institute, Honolulu, Hawaii, September 6-14, 1983; the Faculty Grants Committee of the University of Pittsburgh, for a 1982 award for the conduct of parallel research; and the University's Asian Studies program and its Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.

    For having read and commented on the pre-publication draft of this paper, or for having other- wise rendered assistance, I wish to register my appreciation to Robert L. Cheng, Chu Wen-djang, John De Francis, Lloyd E. Eastman, Helmut Martin, S. Robert Ramsey, Donald S. Sutton, James L. Watson, and Zhou Youguang. Final responsibility for the content of the paper remains my own.

    (For the characters of names which are not given in the text, the readers are referred to the Refer- ences at the end of the paper. - The Ed.)

    135

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  • 136 DAYLE BARNES

    1. Script and Society in Chen Guangyao's Time

    China entered the twentieth century a nation and a culture on the defensive. The abdication of the Manchu-dominated Qing ruling house in 1912 brought an end to dynastic government in China. Sorely tested during its final years, the Qing house endured humiliation at the hands of western nations and three separate rebellions at home.1

    Casting about for an explanation for their country's foreign and domestic troubles, many concerned Chinese identified adult illiteracy and a scanty school sys- tem as major contributors to national weakness. The first twenty years of this cen- tury saw more of the young in school, but the number still did not exceed fifteen per cent of those of school age.2 Of these, fewer than ten per cent completed a full six year program: over ninety per cent overall spent four or fewer years in elementary school.3 In the 1930s, it was said that those who learned to read and write in rural schools were as rare as "phoenix feathers and unicorn horns."4

    Western peoples seemed overwhelmingly literate.5 But in China the label of illiteracy was worn by four people out of every five, seventy-five per cent of them above the age of thirteen.6

    The task of meeting China's educational needs would have required many years under the best of conditions. Actual improvement was modest.7 Some thought it glacial. Others saw nothing at all happening.8 Some of the dissatisfaction with the pace of achievement was transferred to the character script, which radical critics found a major impediment to both regular and adult education.9 The remedies pro- posed to ameliorate the difficulty of the script since the 1920s have included (1) pro- grams to identify and promote practically oriented and distinctly limited character inventories for basic literacy, (2) calls for the retirement of the character script and its replacement by a phonetic system, and (3) simplification of the character script,

    1) This brief sketch is condensed from Sheridan 1977: 18. 2) CNAAE 1923: 35. 3) Ibid., 37. 4) TJYSB, June 10, 1935: 1. 5) Chu 1965: 109; Fu Baochen 1930: 1-2. 6) JYBGB II, 7: 81 (Feb. 23, 1930). This, of course, is a comprehensive figure. Adult illiterates,

    ages 13-49, were estimated at 46%, but most of the elementary school-aged youth, ages 6-12, were believed illiterate, too.

    7) Cameron 1963: 86. 8) [Li Jinhui] 1922: 157. 9) Qian Xuantong 1920: 111; Gao Fushen 1935: 44-46.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 137

    by which is meant the acceptance of the simpler variant of an extant complex graph and its uniform use in all domains of publication.10

    Today, China retains its character script but in a simplified form. This paper examines the principal cultural and linguistic constraints that shaped the course of character simplification. Even more important, it demonstrates the continuity of thought regarding these constraints from the 1920s, when the discussion of simplifi- cation began in earnest, through the 1930s, when it was first attempted under gov- ernment auspices, until 1956, when it was implemented in the People's Republic of China. The consensus which developed on these issues is contrasted point by point with the work of Chen Guangyao ^3fcfi whose views, comprising all that his con- temporaries rejected, provide clarity and definition to the positions of the majority.

    2. An Uncelebrated Script Reformer

    Chen Guangyao (1906-1973/74) was not a seminal intellectual figure of his time.11 He could not boast a degree from a prestigious western university.12 Since he did not even complete a university education in China,13 he lacked the credentials to obtain a university teaching position or to hold a government post in his own coun- try.14 Despite his profound familiarity with the evolution of the character script, he played no role in the work of the government's language commission in the 1930s.15

    10) Descriptions of these include (1) the "basic character" literacy campaigns of James Yen [Yan Yangchu] 1923; (2) the proposals favoring adoption of Roman letter phonetic scripts (cf. De Francis 1943, 1950); and (3) [Cao Bohan] 1960.

    11) Chen Guangyao was born in 1906, in Chenggu, Shaanxi Province, near the border with Sichuan (Chen 1931: 1; ffi^SttBII [The Simplified Character Movement in Retrospect], Chen 1933: 58-62, see pp. 61-62) and died in 1973/74, in Beijing (Zheng Linxi 1988, also Zhou Youguang 1983). His father's name was Chen Yi WBt, whose style name was Chen Xiaoyun BtBKS^uNt t^WiM [Aesthetic Evolution in the Evolution of the Character Script], Chen 1931: 172-183, see p. 180).

    12) Chen Guangyao, fgj^Fp^H^^H [The Problem of Simplified Characters - Response to a Reader], 1933: 43-57, see p. 48.

    13) Chen Guangyao attended a middle school operated by the army through 1926 (S^-SlJfnB [A Record of (My Early Years in) the Simplification Movement], Chen 1931: 14-30, see p. 17). After two years in Shanghai, he returned to Beijing and during 1928-29 continued his formal education, presumably in college (Chen 1931: 1). Chen's lack of a university degree was confirmed by Zheng Linxi (1988).

    14) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi wenti da ke nanM (n. 12), 1933: 48. 15) Chen (ibid.) stated he occupied no government position. Neither was he a member of the

    Guoyu tongyi choubei weiyuanhui lgl;- itS 31 # "Preparatory Commission for the Unification of the National Language" (CBWYHMD 1929: 29-31). Two sources give him the title xi-jing choubei weiyuanhui zhuanmen weiyuan "member of the Preparatory Commission for Xi'an," an honorary appointment relating to the war effort. See ^ Cffi [Da-gong newspaper], May 27, 1934; Wu Zhihui 1935. This appointment is consistent with Zheng Linxi's identification of Chen as a member of the

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  • 138 DAYLE BARNES

    Writing about language was his principal passion.16 Language was also the basis of his livelihood; he mentioned working as a newspaper reporter and as an editor for a book publisher.17

    His youth alone limited his capacity to influence others. Most of the principal figures in simplification were twice his age. The bulk of his writing and related activ- ities took place in the ten years preceding the Ministry of Education's character sim- plification initiative in 1935, before Chen had attained the age of thirty.18 In a country as deferential to seniority as China, a man of twenty carried little weight.

    Chen felt keenly the condescension of older men and was not scrupulous about concealing his resentment.19 If he was not particularly well liked by them - and one suspects he was not - this scarcely disguised resentment may have been part of the explanation. He delighted in taunting his enemies - the old scholars who stolidly defended the traditional characters and intransigently resisted any attempts to simplify them - displaying at those times a substantial gift for histrionics and adroitness in generating ill-will. He railed at opponents of simplification who had "shallow but pedantic minds," who were "incapable of rethinking matters," and who were "only too ready to sacrifice their time, wealth, effort, and vitality [for the tradi- tional character script]."20

    The sharp point of his pen was not aimed only at such obvious villains. Friends of simplification were not necessarily safe from it, either. Essays he did not like were summarily dismissed as "one-shot affairs, pieces that are unreasonable or outrageous."21 Without complaining, he accepted the need to subordinate personal modesty to the strict requirements of professionalism: reviewing the work of another scholar did not preclude reaffirmation of the superiority of his own work.22 The sins of officialdom, in particular a resolute determination to avoid abetting anything revolutionary like character simplification, were firmly noted.23

    Nationalist Party during this period (Zheng Linxi 1988). Later in the 1950s, he was a staff member of the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language (Zhou Youguang 1983).

    16) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi wenti da ke nan" (n. 12), 1933: 48. 17) Chen Guangyao 1938c: 22. 18) Chao [Qun] 1928: 39. 19) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi wenti da ke nan" (n. 12), 1933: 48. 20) For examples of this, Chen Guangyao, ^^M'^M&W^m.B [Provisional Declaration

    Initiating the Character Simplification Movement], 1931: 1-13, see p. 12; also fS^9iHf& [Simplified Characters and Slogans], 1931: 48-58, see p. 57.

    21) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi wenti da ke nan" (n. 12), 1933: 48. 22) Chen Guangyao, ft m [SES 3^5fcII]rfBl^tSJ [Introducing (Hu Huaichen 1928) Jianyi

    zi shuo], 1933: 110-122, see p. 112. 23) Chen Guangyao 1934a.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 139

    It is not hard to appreciate why a man so evenhanded in his exposure of others' errors, even a man without status or position, could become fairly well-known. The list of people he knew, or who knew of him, included most of the leading script reform figures of his day. He was personally acquainted with Qian Xuantong (1887- 1939) and Li Jinxi (1890-1978), co-architects of the Ministry of Education's ill- starred 1935 simplification plan.24 Hu Shi (1891-1962) and Liu Fu SOU (1891- 1934) read and commented on his work.25 He was in communication about matters related to simplification with Wu Zhihui (1864-1953), head of the Ministry of Edu- cation's language commission, and Wang Yunwu IS (1888-1979), of Shanghai's Commercial Press.26

    Others came to know him through his writings, two of which stimulated Lin Yutang (1895 - 1976) to launch a public campaign for simplification in his widely- read journal, Lunyu, beginning in 1933. 27 By the time Chen was thirty, he was acknowledged as the leading representative of one of the two principal schools of character simplification.28

    No one published as much or as often about simplification as Chen Guangyao, and his passionate commitment to this cause led him beyond advocacy to activism. He promised a journal (it did not appear).29 Two organizations to promote simplifi- cation were announced (neither, it seems, ever actually functioned).30 He wrote to

    24) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong shiji" (n. 13), 1931: 20; Li Jinxi 1934. 25) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong shiji" (n. 13), 1931: 18, 22-23. 26) Chen Guangyao, ffi^MiS- +H [Twenty Items of Correspondence about Simplified Char-

    acters], 1933: 141-161, see p. 147; also "Jianzi yundong zhi huigu" (n. 11), 1933: 60. 27) [Lin] Yutang 1933: 215. Chen was recognized as a leading contributor to simplification

    together with Qian Xuantong, Lu Feikui, Hu Huaichen, Ai Wei, and Xu Zemin (Li Congzhi 1930: 4; Zhou Gan 1935: 133); Zhuo Dingmo J^fS and Rong Geng ggg (Li Jinxi 1934).

    28) Xiao Dichen 1935: 43; Wang Liaoyi 1940: 54; Du Zijin 1936: 70-71. 29) Chen Guangyao 1930b: 8; also "Jianzi tongxun ershi pian" (n. 26), 1933: 161. The journal

    was to have been named fg^Mfl] [The Simplified Character Weekly]. 30) The first of these, the Hanzi gaige yanjiuhui 9t^gfc:03# "The Research Association

    for the Reform of the Chinese Script," was conceived during the early 1930s. Erroneous reports about its membership appeared in ^ ^f$g [Shi-shi new newspaper], May 24, 1934 (see Chen Guangyao 1934c: 296), and in Da-gong bao, May 27, 1934. Its charter, naming Chen as the convener, appeared in Chen Guangyao (1936: 70-74). The second, Zhongguo wenzi gaijinhui c^BI^t 3fel# "The Society for the Improvement of the Chinese Script," was disclosed in the journal Jin lun heng (Editor 1938) and mentioned subsequently by Ai Wei (1965: 147), who reported that the Society's charter members comprised thirty well-known personalities but did not name them. Wang Ju (1951: 74-75) reported a communication by the Guangxi Provincial Government in 1938 requesting the Ministry of Education's support to forestall efforts to gain support for character simplification. The relationship between this event and Chen's attempt to form the Society is unclear.

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  • 140 DAYLE BARNES

    the Literacy Association in Beijing, urging it to adopt simplified characters in its work (its chairmain, He Qigong M^ [b. 1898], was politely noncommittal).31 He criticized the work of scholars in the National Academy of Beijing who were con- temporaneously investigating simplified characters.32 And after several unanswered letters calling upon the Ministry of Education to assume the leadership of the simpli- fication movement, he finally took his case directly to President Chiang Kaishek (the President acknowledged Chen's letter and forwarded it to the Ministry).33

    Perhaps the most convincing proof of Chen's impact on the men of his time is the enduring impression he left among the conservatives he fought so combatively. They remembered him decades later as one of the archenemies of China's traditional script.34

    In view of the extent and depth of his involvement, one might reasonably ask why the labor of this prolific, inventive, indefatigable champion of script reform has been cloaked in such obscurity? The answer emerges readily from an examination of Chen's views about character simplification. Without intending to do so, Chen wrote the textbook on how not to simplify the character script. By industriously fol- lowing his heterodox notions to their jarring conclusions, he succeeded in demonstrating how totally unacceptable those notions really were. Almost single- handedly, he drew into focus the boundaries outside which assent to character sim- plification was sure to be withheld.

    3. Chen's Contributions to the Simplification Movement

    Chen Guangyao's advocacy of simplification began in 1926 when he was still in mid- dle school and only twenty years old. It took the form of an essay entitled "A Pro- posal Looking toward the Promulgation of Simplified Characters."35 He soon dis- covered that his idea had been anticipated by the scholar Qian Xuantong, who ad- vanced the first mature proposal for simplification in 1920. Qian regarded simplification as a temporary measure to be employed in the interim before prepara- tions for a phonetic script were completed.36

    31) Chen Guangyao, Bg- fg H^Htfr [Some Remarks on the Literacy Movement], 1933: 67-70, see p. 69.

    32) Chen Guangyao, fljj^S^ftSC^ [The Story of Simplified and zhang Style Cursive Char- acters], 1933: 83-89, see pp. 85-86.

    33) Chen Guangyao 1936. Chen's behavior may be explained in part in terms of his standing as a member of the Nationalist Party (Zheng Linxi 1988).

    34) For example, see Liao Weifan 1965. 35) In Chinese, "Qing banxing jianzi yi'an" IffSSirffi^^ in Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yun-

    dong shiji" (n. 13), 1931: 17. 36) Qian Xuantong 1920. The earliest publications on the subject, of course, were Lu Feikui

    1909a, 1909b.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 141

    Qian had just spent the previous year engaged in the creation of a Latin letter phonetic system, designed to represent the speech of Beijing and subsequently known as National Language Romanization (Guoyeu lomatzyh S&fi^?). This system was a collaborative effort of the "Committee of Six," all of whom were pho- nologists who belonged to the Ministry of Education's advisory commission on lan- guage matters (Guoyu tongyi choubeihui fS$!c;-^1Sl#), and included Qian, Zhao Yuanren 7r;f (1892-1981), Li Jinxi, Lin Yutang, Liu Fu, and Wang Yi Efn.37

    In 1927, Chen and Qian met. Enthusiastic and committed, the youthful Chen was ready to march under the banner of simplification. But all the most prominent script reformers were just then engrossed in National Language Romanization. Sim- plification, never more than a second magnitude star in the script reform firmament, had all but been eclipsed. The older man was courteous but, perhaps uneasy with the direction of Chen's work, distanced himself from the eager volunteer. Chen was soon thereafter also in contact with Zhou Zuoren (1885-1966), Hu Shi, and Li Jinxi, all of whom had endorsed the practical utility of simplification. His reception was polite, but cool; they did not recruit him into their ranks.38

    Chen, for his part, was convinced that romanization was premature. His think- ing echoed many gradualists of his day: first, a practical and technically adequate phonetic system was not yet available; second, no single phonetic script could serve China's linguistically heterogeneous population; third, the public would not relin- quish its ethnically distinct script for an alien surrogate.39 Given this situation, Chen argued, the sensible course was to support simplification until the social and technical preparations for a phonetic script were complete.40

    His movement deserted by all others, Chen determined to raise its drooping colors and advance the cause of simplification entirely by his own effort. He launched this crusade with a sudden assault on public awareness, writing six short pieces in 1927 and nine more in 1928.41 Thereafter and for the ensuing decade he produced more than any other author on this subject. In 1931, he brought these early essays together and republished them in book form (Manzi lunj). This was followed two years later by a second such volume (Jianzi lunji xuji). As part of this campaign,

    37) Li Jinxi 1935a: 164. 38) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong shiji" (n. 13), 1931: 20-24. Li Jinxi co-sponsored Qian's

    simplification proposal when it came before the Preparatory Commission for the Unification of the National Language in 1922 (Qian Xuantong 1922: 163). Zhou Zuoren (1922: 71) associated himself with Qian's view at about the same time.

    39) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 6. 40) Chen Guangyao 1929. 41) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 4.

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  • 142 DAYLE BARNES

    he appointed himself unofficial reviewer of the literature on simplification, demon- strating his familiarity with its bibliography,42 and devised a classification scheme for the arrangement of simplified characters in dictionaries of the future.43

    Paralleling, but in his view of more importance than, these short pieces which appeared regularly in journals and newspapers, was a monumental effort of a differ- ent sort, that of compiling an exhaustive inventory of extant simplified characters. As Chen and every other simplifier knew, it was impossible even to experiment with public acceptance of publications in simplified characters because lead type engraved with simplified character faces was unavailable. Custom dictated that only the typi- cally more complex form of character tacitly sanctioned by prevailing scholarly stan- dards should appear in print. Since only these zhengtizi JE ^ (hereafter, called tra- ditional) characters were used in printing, complete fonts of simplified type had never been cut. (Publishers, serving a predominantly traditionally-oriented adult readership, declined to invite public derision and risk loss of revenue by taking the initiative. Which of them, after all was sufficiently audacious to challenge frontally a two thousand year old script regarded in conservative quarters as a national treasure?) Furthermore, at a practical level, individual publishers could not very well act in the absence of a consensus on which traditional characters to simplify and which of the competing simplified variants of a traditional character to adopt.44 In these matters, only government authority could prevail.

    Chen assigned himself the task of mining China's deep orthographic veins to amass a store of simplified characters from which a final selection under government auspices could proceed. The several components of this immense project included: (1) a Plan for Simplification, to serve as a basis for the standardization process; (2) a Table of Simplified Radical [meaning-indicating] Elements, for application wher- ever the same radical appeared in several characters; (3) the Table of Chinese Simpli- fied Characters, the cornerstone of his endeavor; (4) the Selected List of Important Simplified Characters, based on the foregoing; (5) a Dictionary of Chinese Simplified Characters', and (6) a Table of Frequently Used Characters in Simplified Style. Only the last of these was completed and published, although parts of the others appeared in abstracted or condensed form elsewhere.45

    42) Chen Guangyao 1930a, passim, also "Jieshao Jianyi zi shuo" (n. 22), 1933, passim. 43) Chen Guangyao, fgj^jf^ft [An Indexing System for Simplified Characters], 1931: 154-

    171. 44) [Lin] Yutang 1933: 217. Chen's May 2, 1928, correspondence with Wang Yunwu of the Com-

    mercial Press, makes it clear that these factors interfered with Qian Xuantong's earliest attempt to pro- mote simplification in 1922 (Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong zhi huigu" [n. 11], 1933: 60; "Jianzi wenti da ke nan" [n. 12], 1933: 50; "Jianzi tongxun ershi pian" [n. 26], 1933: 147).

    45) Chen Guangyao 1938c: 18. These were: (1) Jianzi fang 'anf^r~)5 M , (2) Jianzi pianpangbiao

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 143

    These extraordinary exertions on behalf of his countrymen were, Chen fre- quently reminded his readers, necessarily limited to an avocational pursuit by his need to earn a livelihood. The incontrovertible benefits derivable from simplifica- tion, only fleetingly and imperfectly sensed by others, presented themselves to Chen in a vivid and kaleidoscopic array. Torn between the wish to serve and the need to survive, Chen took the unusual step of seeking through the press a patron willing to underwrite the cost of his one-man simplification program. On three separate occasions he appealed publicly for funds to meet the personal and promotional expenses necessary to bring his dream to fruition, and to build a plant where simpli- fied character publications could be printed.46 No benefactor appeared, but Chen's conviction and dedication are apparent in this excerpt from one of these appeals:

    For the negligible sum of 4,500 [ 250 per month for 18 months] to be able ulti- mately to improve the Chinese script (the script used by more people than any other in the entire world); to provide [a list which would contain] more than 20,000 simplified characters for half a billion Chinese to select from and use as they please - you cannot say that this is not one of the world's most beautiful bargains.47

    4. Chen's Controversial Positions on Simplification

    Chen Guangyao was not the sort of person whose presence could have gone unno- ticed. Yet in China, where simplification is now a centerpiece of national language policy, his name, preserved only in scattered footnotes, is rarely mentioned. How can this anomaly be accounted for?

    The answer to this question is not to be found in his general outlook toward script reform, which was unremarkable. He could not accept the conservatives'

    f^U^fS, (3) Zhonghua jianzibiao tJ^llB^S. (4) Shiyong jianzi xuan fflJ^, (5) Zhonghua jianzidian c^MB^, (6) [Chen Guangyao 1936] Changyong jianzibiao Sfflffi^il. A good exposi- tion of his technical approach to simplification is Chen, |g/ft;fS&f|&|fl|j^ [Politically Informed Educa- tion and Simplified Characters], 1931: 31-47. A selection of nine hundred simplified characters, illus- trating the application of Chen's approach, can be found in Chen Guangyao 1934b. Chen also authored four volumes of miscellany, four of stories and a dozen on literature and art. Underway, but unfinished in 1933, were works on songs, dialect terms, and phonetic scripts (Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong zhi huigu" [n. 11], 1933: 60-62).

    46) In his first appeal, around 1932, Chen sought a research stipend of 150 per month for two years plus 2,400 to promote simplification nationally through public lectures in major cities (Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi wenti da ke nan" [n. 12], 1933: 50). In 1934, he appealed for a 250 monthly stipend for 18 months and 30,000 to establish a simplified character printing plant (Chen Guangyao 1934a). In 1938, he asked for 5,000 to support two years of work on his unfinished publications (Chen Guangyao 1938c: 24).

    47) Chen Guangyao 1934a.

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  • 144 DAYLE BARNES

    insistence that the entire traditional character corpus had to be retained inviolate, likening such people to superstitious individuals clinging to the bones of something that had passed away.48 That sort of antiquarianism was detrimental to China because it placed society in the service of the script rather than the other way around.49 On the other hand, neither did he believe that the apocalyptic annihila- tion of the characters that phoneticizers clamored for was a realistic alternative for his time.50 These views, however, were commonplace among moderate script re- formers of his day and did not distinguish him from men such as Qian Xuantong, Li Jinxi, Hu Shi, and Zhou Zuoren, all of whom stood foursquare for simplifica- tion.

    Rather, it was his approach to simplification that deprived him of a seat in the councils where decisions about character reform were fashioned in the 1930s,51 and which won for him virtual anonymity in later times. What, then, were the posi- tions Chen defended with respect to simplification which proved so unacceptable to his contemporaries? They can be addressed under five headings: (1) the stroke issue, (2) the size of the target inventory, (3) the matter of fabricated characters, (4) the treatment of cursive characters, and (5) the scope of the reform.

    4.1. The Stroke Issue

    The demand for script reform has typically been justified in terms of its contribution to the spread of education.52 Chen's unremitting advocacy of simplification was sustained by his conviction that it would unlock China's vast human resources.53 He wrote movingly of the debilitating effects of tradition on education.54

    But readers of his work came away convinced that ends had been subordinated to means. In particular, it seemed that the entire enterprise had become a narrow, technical exercise in reducing the number of strokes in a character to the lowest pos- sible level.55

    48) Chen Guangyao 1938b: 10. 49) Chen Guangyao 1934a. Chen's language on this point is remarkably similar to that of Zhou

    Zuoren (1922: 71-72), whose advocacy of simplification Chen had read. Interestingly, both men had the same style name, Qiming^H^.

    50) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi jian zi fa" (n. 43), 1931: 154-171. 51) Li Jinxi (1934), for one, said he would have been able to work with Chen except for the latter's

    attitude toward character fabrication (see text, following). 52) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 9-10. 53) Ibid., 5. 54) Chen Guangyao 1938b, passim. 55) Zhou Gan 1935: 137; [Wang] Liaoyi 1940: 54.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 145

    Chen helped to create this impression by regaling his audience with data about the iniquitous stroke. He frightened innocents with the knowledge that the most complex of all characters, although a rarely encountered one, comprised fifty-two strokes, and reminded the complacent that even a very common one had no fewer than thirty-two.56 Warming to his theme, he demonstrated that characters in ordi- nary dictionaries averaged sixteen strokes, and that fully half of the characters in such works required from ten to fifteen strokes to write.57 As for the cumulative historical inventory of 50,000 or so characters, he estimated their average number of strokes per character at twenty-two.58

    Chen's concern for stroke reduction powerfully influenced the selection of sim- plified characters he recommended for adoption. In the corpus he had accumulated through 1938, sixteen was the largest number of strokes of any character, nine was the average, and the majority had from six to seven.59 Qian Xuantong, by compari- son, had originally proposed to simplify only characters with more than ten strokes, leaving those below ten untouched.60

    Chen never answered the challenge to his assumption about the overriding priority of stroke reduction posed by research on the relationship between complex- ity and character recall. Ai Wei (1891-1965), for example, showed that the perceived difficulty of characters in the ten-to-fifteen stroke category was not determined by reference to the quantity of strokes alone. Equally important in promoting recall were overall symmetry, proportion among characters with several components, and adherence to a vertical or a horizontal orientation. Characters in the one-to-ten stroke group were not inherently difficult to recognize.61

    It was also noted that Chen's strategy of proving his case by reference to the undifferentiated contents of dictionaries tended to magnify the actual dimensions of the stroke hazard for the typical learner. A more discriminating sample of charac- ters, selected by reference to their frequency of appearance in printed material, for example, revealed that nine-tenths of an eight hundred character corpus contained

    56) The first graph features four lei ft 'thunder' characters, is pronounced pin and signifies the sound of thunder; the second graph is the yu in huyu fEf gg 'to appeal (for)' (Chen Guangyao, St^i^ftfcH- [Statistical Data on Character Strokes], 1931: 126-140, 139; Xu Zemin 1931: 45). Xu Zemin (1931: 43) on the other hand, noted that only 116 characters of a total corpus of 42,239 contained more than thirty strokes, and none did in his selection of 800 most frequently occurring characters.

    57) Chen Guangyao, "Hanzi binhua de tongji," 1931: 131. 58) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 4. 59) Chen Guangyao 1938c: 20. 60) Qian Xuantong 1920: 112. 61) Ai Wei 1965: 13-14.

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  • 146 DAYLE BARNES

    fifteen or fewer strokes, and sixty per cent of them had ten or fewer.62 In other words, the presumption that learning would be made easier simply by eliminating strokes throughout the entire inventory ignored the fact that simplification yielded highest dividends in characters used all the time and proportionately little benefit among those appearing only infrequently.63

    Others objected that exclusive preoccupation with strokes was linguistically naive and resulted in putting characters on a collision course with respect to reading. Wang Li zEJ (b-. 1900) observed that, given a finite number of stroke types - characterizable as horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling, dots, and hooks - limiting characters arbitrarily to a quota of six or seven strokes would eventually cause too many graphs to resemble each other too closely.64

    4.2. The Size of the Target Inventory

    It was widely believed that, although the cumulative historical total of characters was approximately fifty thousand, only a small subset of these routinely occurred in modern publications. These intuitive judgments were confirmed in statistical tabu- lations of contemporary reading matter undertaken in the 1920s. The greatest num- ber of single characters ever counted in any of these surveys was 5,500.65 Of these, perhaps half occurred with significant regularity.66 Qian Xuantong in 1920 thought it sensible to simplify approximately three thousand characters in daily use.67 Fif- teen years later, when he set about drafting a tentative list for the Ministry of Educa- tion, Qian scaled back his target slightly, to 2,400 characters.68

    Chen Guangyao was well apprised of these data and cited them in his writ- ings.69 But he elected not to exempt from simplification those one-to-ten stroke characters which Qian had excluded and Ai Wei's research indicated were not partic- ularly difficult.70 In doing so, he increased the size of the character inventory targeted for simplification by one-fourth.71

    62) Xu Zemin 1931: 43. 63) Shen Youqian 1936: 15-16. Shen proposed a "benefit index," based on stroke reduction and

    frequency of occurrence, by which the advantage accruing to the simplification of any character could be calculated.

    64) [Wang] Liaoyi 1940: 57. Wang reiterated this point and stressed the limitation it places on further simplification, in an interview with this writer on June 25, 1981, in Beijing.

    65) Zhou Youguang 1960. 66) Barnes 1974: 18. 67) Qian Xuantong 1920: 112. 68) Li Jinxi 1935e. 69) Chen Guangyao 1934a; 1938a: 11. 70) Chen Guangyao 1927: 391. 71) This is my calculation, based on estimates in Chen Guangyao, "Hanzi bihua de tongji" (n.

    56), 1931: 129-130.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 147

    The effect of this decision was to qualify every character for simplification, those with just a few strokes as well as those with many.72 The following excerpt from a letter he wrote to Hu Shi expressed his goal very clearly:

    At the very least I seek to provide a maximally simple graph for every one of the char- acters in current usage (approximately 5,000 of these) . . . and in addition to insure that these simplified forms are each aesthetically appealing and procede from demon- strable antecedents.

    He believed that in practice it might not be possible to simplify more than eighty per cent of the characters in actual use. But, he wrote, "those who aspire to the top may succeed in attaining the middle; those who [only] aim at the middle [only] reach the bottom. Those who try for the bottom get nothing."74

    This self-imposed mandate to simplify every possible character helps to explain why Chen's voluminous aggregations of simplified variants were never finished. They grew from 7,000 characters in 1926 -2775 to 30,000 in the following years76 to 60,000 in 1938 and were supposed to total 100,000 in their final form.77

    4.3. The Matter of Fabricated Characters

    Chen Guangyao elected to treat all the characters in the 5,000-6,000 item corpus of commonly used graphs as legitimate objects of simplification. For each of these he pledged to provide, wherever feasible, an alternative comprising fewer strokes than did the original.

    How was this pledge to be redeemed? It was common knowledge that there were but three primary sources from which simplified characters could be derived: (1) "popular" characters (su zi f ), shorthand forms increasingly prevalent in informal writing since the tenth century Song period; (2) the sweeping "cursive" characters (cao zi ^) of the calligrapher, which could be rewritten in the conven- tional angular style of type; and (3) the "ancient" characters (gu zi ~^ ), originally very simple graphs later superseded by more complex forms.78 Yet no one had

    72) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi tongxun ershi pian" (n. 26), 1933: 161. 73) Chen Guangyao, fffi^uHJil J? [(Author 's) Introduction to >4 Collection (of My Writings)

    on Simplified Characters], 1933: 105-109, see p. 109. 74) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 11. 75) Chen Guangyao, f ^ ^ffg^jgj g ^ [(Author's) Introduction to the Table of Chinese Simpli-

    fied Characters], 1933: 95-104, see pp. 95, 99. 76) Chen Guangyao 1936: 44, 51. 77) Chen Guangyao 1938c: 18. 78) Chen Guangyao, "Danghua jiaoyu yu jianzi" (n. 45), 1931: 39.

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  • 148 DAYLE BARNES

    imagined that these sources even in the aggregate could be made to yield 5,000- 6,000 simpler counterparts of the originals.

    Chen himself did not think this possible.79 Instead, he conceived a fourth source to supply what history had withheld:

    [This source] makes up for the deficiencies in those areas which can not be covered in the popular, cursive, and ancient character categories; it is appropriate, on the basis of [principles in] the first three categories, and considering all theories, to settle upon [either] a form which approximates customary usage [or] upon an authentic-looking simplified character which convincingly suggests in its outline the original one.80

    The possibility of fabricating characters had been considered by others, but the prospect of creating them on such a scale had never been entertained.81 To the contrary, Hu Shi at a very early stage had defined the work of simplification as that of giving system and organization only to characters already sanctioned by pop- ular usage.82 By the 1930s the prevailing attitude toward fabrication was that char- acters invented by a single mind, no matter how ingeniously constructed, were idio- syncratic and necessarily arbitrary. They lacked historical justification and were for- eign to the reading public. Gaining acceptance for them could not be easy.83

    Chen himself recognized the disadvantages in fabrication.84 He in fact validat- ed these when he objected to dubious characters constructed by others.85 He even expressed dissatisfaction with some of his own work in which the quest for simplicity entailed aesthetically unappealing results.86 But overall, in his estimation, the extra effort to promote and acquire such characters was justified by a simpler script.87

    Most simplifiers eschewed fabrication in preference for extant or historically attested simplified characters. This preference, reflected in the expression shu er bu zuo rfn^f "to transmit and not to create," became the cardinal principle of the

    79) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong zhi huigu" (n. 11), 1933: 58-59. 80) Chen Guangyao, "Danghua jiaoyu yu jianzi" (n. 45), 1931: 40. 81) Qian Xuantong (1920: 112; 1922: 162) first adumbrated this possibility, but by 1934, as Du

    Zijin (1936: 67) pointed out, he had completely rejected it. 82) Hu Shi 1922:1. 83) Qian Xuantong 1935a: 365. 84) Chen Guangyao, "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 8. 85) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yu zhangcao de gushi" (n. 32), 1933: 85-86. 86) Chen Guangyao 1936: 8, 24. 87) Chen Guangyao, "Jieshao Jianyi zi shuo" (n. 22), 1933: 121-122. My reference is to the first

    appearance of this publication as follows: Chen Guangyao, ^Vfirgi J^I&J [Introducing (Hu Huaichen 1928) On Simplified Characters], Jiaoyu yu minzhong III, 1 (July 1931): 113-120, 119.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 149

    Ministry of Education's simplification program in 1935. Chen's approach meanwhile came to be satirized by the formula zi wo zuo gu S feffcl "doing what no one else has done before." Certainly nothing so conclusively ensured his exclusion from the mainstream of script reform as his steadfast adherence to fabrication.88

    Simplification in general and fabrication in particular predictably altered the face of many familiar characters. This ran afoul of the axiom that traditional charac- ters uniquely and directly convey semantic information to the reader by virtue of the meaning-indicating radicals which they embody and the "six principles" of struc- ture according to which the characters were believed organized. To the conservative mind, the traditional script was superior to all others because it possessed this mani- festly scientific property.89

    Chen was only one of several figures to insist that evolutionary change had long since rendered the "six principles" invisible to all but a specialist and that they were functionally irrelevant to the modern reader.90 But he had a flair for bringing his work to the attention of the public in ways certain to provoke consternation among traditionalists. Thus, rather than choosing a culturally innocuous text as a showcase for his simplifications, he elected instead to exhibit them in his own ver- sions of such hallowed treatises as the will of Sun Yatsen and the Confucian classic, the Great Learning (see illustration). This spectacular irreverence guaranteed his work a measure of exposure which would have been otherwise impossible, thereby ensuring that his would be a name lastingly engraved on the minds of conservatives as one of the chief desecrators of China's sacred script.91

    Content always to abandon the "six principles" in order to save a stroke, still Chen did not fabricate capriciously. Quite the contrary, he accepted the responsibil- ity for imposing internal coherence on the new system he sought to build, and for guaranteeing for the new simplified orthography a kind of consistent application of structural principles that the old characters had long before ceased to display.92

    88) See the comments of G Hai (1934: 655), Wu Zhihui (1935), Zhou Gan (1935: 137), Xiao Dichen (1935: 43), Fang Tianyou (1935: 407), and Wang Liaoyi (1940: 54). Also note Li Jinxi's remarks in n. 51 above.

    89) Wu Xinheng 1935: 117. 90) Chen Guangyao, fB^JIS - MMHMiM [An Exemplification of (My) Simplified Char-

    acters - the Testament (of Sun Yatsen) Rewritten in Simplified Characters], 1931: 59-68, see pp. 61-62; also "Hanzi jinhua zhong de yishuhua" (n. 11), 1931: 177; He Zhongying 1922: 126; Bing 1935; Hu Huaichen 1928; Li Jinxi 1935a: 26.

    91) Franke (1970: 145) observed that "in areas dominated by the KMT and later throughout China Sun Yat-sen's will and portrait became symbols. In all official ceremonies of party, government, or school his will was solemnly read and all school-children had to learn it by heart."

    92) Chen Guangyao 1938b: 10-11.

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  • 150 DAYLE BARNES

    Chen Guangyao's Simplified Version of The Great Learning9*

    A T # * IS * *t fe ' ' ^ ^ A B g) # ) ^ ; fli fl A -k x ? + n n- %r fe ik & & & ; ^ t' ff) % ; ^ 7 ft ; ^ 4? f " ib f- 7T ^ ; g ; " f to 11 7T ff & t " rb *V * + 7T -f- i & * * % ir *> + it * ? " Jr E " 3K. -4t B ^ 5 " T ft ' fe -fr r^ * IT E *,

    93) Source: Chen Guangyao 1927: 389-392. Chen calculated that his rewriting of this 205 charac- ter text resulted in a savings of 943 strokes, or a 38 per cent reduction in complexity.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 151

    ' 7T * T

    B ? ft 7T * * --

    ti & ti * ** * : -fc, I^r *7 # nNI

    S r " & FF5 1^ || fi h Tf b &

    X il Pf y ^

    Text in Traditional Characters

    m 3c s * ti tf f l'i MX

    ^ ^ B

    o m ai ^ ^ B^ w f is t i I M I * I g a 551 I f?g A1 E f ^ T W I m & m ^^^^i^ti ?& ^ f $ it ^*ffiiEtl5fe^5t o

    t I o ft g fcj

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  • 152 DAYLE BARNES

    Often, this led him to argue his opinion about a character on the basis of its conformity to characteristics or patterns internal to the script. Chen's fealty to orga- nizing precepts that he recognized in the script was noted by many men. Li Jinxi's first reaction to reading Chen's work was to advise him against attempting "to sei up a flawless [internally consistent] system [of simplified characters]."94 Elsewhere, he was reminded that the sacrifice of an organizing principle in return for a simpli- fied character that people would use was good script reform, even if messy.95

    This advice was not taken. His persistence in purging the script of its impuri- ties and demanding the restoration of logic and symmetry led him to take positions at variance with those of a practically oriented modern simplifier. He preferred to rewrite widely recognized simplified forms so that they bore more accurate witness to their historical antecedents.96 The significance of these exertions would have been lost on an ordinary reader and could only have been appreciated, said Ai Wei, by a specialist in the early script.97

    4.4. The Treatment of Cursive Characters

    The inventory of simplified characters that Chen sought to compile included popu- lar, cursive, ancient, and fabricated forms. Cursive forms, in particular, played a major role in the composition of that inventory and his allegiance to them was unfal- tering throughout the years of his activity on behalf of simplification.98 This com- mitment was reflected in his works. Cursive characters accounted for thirty per cent of the several thousand simplified graphs he had collected in the earliest draft of his never finished magnum opus, the Table of Chinese Simplified Characters." A similar fraction of the nine hundred character sample based on the Table, and pub- lished in Lin Yutang's Lun yu column devoted to simplified characters, were cur- sives.100 By 1936, when Chen's Table of Frequently Used Characters in Simplified Style was published, the proportion of cursive characters to all other kinds had risen to forty- five per cent.101

    94) Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong shiji" (n. 13), 1931: 21-22. 95) Chao [Qun] 1928: 40. 96) Chen Guangyao 1936: 21, for ju B 'to raise' and Chen Guangyao 1938c: 21, for ting H

    'to hear'. 97) Ai Wei 1965: 147. Ironically, Chen ("Jieshao Jian yi zi shuo" [n. 22], 1933: 116-117) earlier

    found fault with Hu Huaichen's Jianyi zi shuo (1928) for its attempt to reconstitute modern characters so as to conform better structurally with their ancestors.

    98) Chen Guangyao 1930b: 7; "Faqi jianzi yundong linshi xuanyan" (n. 20), 1931: 8; 1938c: 17. 99) Chen Guangyao, "Zhonghua jianzibiao zixu" (n. 75), 1933: 99. The estimate is Chen's own. 100) Chen Guangyao 1934b: 513-514. Again, the calculation is Chen's. 101) Chen Guangyao 1936: 15. Ditto above.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 153

    The special significance Chen attached to the use of cursive characters is manifest in his review of Hu Huaichen's (1886-1938) Jianyi zi shuo (1928), the earliest modern monograph on simplification. Chen criticized Hu's refusal to draw upon cursives as a source for his simplifications, a decision Chen charged that was primarily responsible for restricting the number of characters in Hu's book to fewer than five hundred.102 Cursives, Chen said in this review,

    are indeed an extremely important and the most effective means toward achieving sim- plification of the Chinese character. To talk about simplifying but shrink from con- siderable use of cursives is simply to cut one's self off from simplification.103

    Chen was not alone in recognizing the importance of cursive forms in script simplification. Rare, in fact, was the writer who endorsed simplification without alluding favorably to the need to incorporate cursives.104 Qian Xuantong, for exam- ple, endorsed them consistently105 and culled through a dozen earlier works on cur- sives in compiling the Ministry of Education's list of simplified characters in 1935. 106

    Where the opinions of Chen and most of his contemporaries diverged was not over acceptance or rejection of cursive shapes but on the question of how to present them. Ought they to appear, in print and in classrooms, in the form they would normally assume in handwriting? Or should they be refashioned in order to conform to the shape of traditional characters in print?

    The difference between the two styles was patent: not only were the strokes of cursive graphs predominantly curved rather than linear, but they characteristically flowed into one another without interruption, testifying to unchecked movements of the Chinese writing brush. The configuration of traditional characters in print, by contrast, inclined toward squarishness, owing to the strong tendency toward hori- zontal and vertical orientation of their components, and their strokes were marked by discreteness and a propensity toward angularity.

    Could the swirling, aesthetically elegant cursive strokes of the calligraphic masters be tamed to uniformity and suitably standardized to meet the requirements of mass instruction in reading and writing? One group, answering in the affirmative,

    102) Chen Guangyao, "Jieshao Jian yi zi shuo" (n. 22), 1933: 121. 103) Ibid., 118-119. 104) He Zhongying 1922: 130; Hu Xingzhi 1935: 51-52; Xu Zemin 1934: 963; Zhou Qipeng 1922:

    143. Also see text. 105) Qian Xuantong 1920: 112-113; 1922: 162; 1935a; CBWYH 1934: 255. 106) Qian Xuantong 1935b: 398.

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  • 154 DAYLE BARNES

    argued that the solution lay in the application of government authority to fix the shape of cursive strokes.107 After that, institutionalization of the writing program from kindergarten through the elementary grades would guarantee a disciplined mastery over the apparently unruly forms.108 Chen Guangyao was of this persua- sion, and he published many experimental pieces in which angular and cursive com- ponents are routinely juxtaposed.109

    But Qian Xuantong, Lin Yutang, and others took the view that characters of cursive origin should be angularized for printing.110 Convinced that only in this way could graphs of cursive origin acquire shapes of sufficient definition and individual- ity both to ensure pedagogical success and to comport with the technical demands of engraving, Qian early took the attitude that

    in the standardized form [of these cursive components], every effort should be made to achieve discreteness in every stroke, to the extent that without exception strokes which are cursive in origin are refashioned in accord with the angular style found in print.111

    4.5. The Scope of the Reform

    So precocious was Chen the man and so atypical were his ideas that his most radical departure from the accepted wisdom about simplification seems to have been only imperfectly perceived. The record clearly shows that he was a consistent and uncom- promising exponent of total simplification of the entire active character inventory. The unavoidable corollary of this stance is that the changes in the Chinese script would affect all of its users, accomplished ones as well as beginners. Neither the illiterate majority nor the comfortably and commandingly literate minority would be exempt from these changes.

    107) Bian Gaotian 1935: 12-13; Hu Xingzhi 1935: 52; Wen Tisheng 1935: 4; Xu Zemin 1934: 963; Zui Zhu 1935: 8.

    108) Bian Gaotian 1935: 11. Less convincingly, Bian proposed a grammatical basis for determin- ing the style in which characters occurred in print: content words in traditional form; intensifiers, relaters and connectors, exclamations, and grammatically significant terms in cursive (1935: 11-12).

    109) Chen Guangyao 1927: 389-390; "Jianzi li shuo - jianxie zongli yizhu" (n. 90), 1931: 65-66; ffi^S^!l:Zl - fB rggfr_l[An Exemplification of (My) Simplified Characters, no. 2. - The Strains of the Pipa Rewritten in Simplified Characters], 1931: 75-81, see pp. 78-81; ffi^S^feH -ffiSPF ? 5tJ [An Exemplification of (My) Simplified Characters, no. 3. - The Thousand Character Classic Rewritten in Simplified Characters], 1931: 82-89, see pp. 86-89; M^B$iPB - fB r^fi^ JIJ [An Exemplification of (My) Simplified Characters, no. 4. - The Pingmin Dictionary Rewritten in Simplified Characters], 1931: 90-96, see pp. 93-96. See also Chen Guangyao 1953: 6, for his explicit endorsement of this position.

    110) Qian Xuantong 1935a: 365; [Lin] Yutang 1933: 217; Zhou Gan 1935: 137; Tong Zhonggeng 1934: 3.

    Ill) Qian Xuantong 1930: 74.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 155

    A moment's reflection should confirm that every component in Chen's vision of a simplified orthography would disproportionately, and no doubt adversely, affect literates. Thus, for example, common sense suggests that, while changing the shape of all the characters in common use could not but help the man aiming at rudimen- tary literacy and control over the some hundreds of characters that this required, still it would have entailed major adjustments in the reading behavior of educated Chinese whose hard-won literacy was predicated on automatic recognition of existing forms of the many characters that Chen proposed to alter. In this regard, note that not even the most frequently occurring characters - the very characters most often seen by mature readers - would be immune from alteration, even those written with relatively few strokes. And for every stroke saved through fabrication it would be literates who paid the price, because the need to fabricate implied the unavailability of a simplified variant already in common use: a sure sign that the traditional char- acter was the special property of the cognoscenti.112

    Chen's detractors never drew these inferences into clear focus. To be sure, they often derided him for writing simplified characters that literates could not read.113 But they were content to fault him for a perverse obduracy or to dismiss the offend- ing parts of his work as freakish. His iconoclasm was perceived without presenti- ment as quaint, zany. Its effect was to amuse rather than to alarm.

    Perhaps the reason he was lampooned but not pilloried was because he did not phrase his ambitions for simplification in martial terms. But a more plausible reason for the leniency accorded him by his critics may be found in the underlying presuppositions about language reform in general that influenced their particular reactions to Chen. Simplification answered the need for an expedient around which a sufficient core of progressives could rally in order to alleviate illiteracy in the coun- tryside and among the uneducated urban masses.114 Its benefits to illiterates were admittedly modest, but then the costs to the literate community were on the whole quite negligible, too.

    Viewed through this prism, Chen's work simply appeared off the mark, his views those of a man on a binge. Men missed the point of what he was saying because Chen, for all his bizarre notions about simplification, upheld a script

    112) See his examples in Chen Guangyao, "Danghua jiaoyu yu jianzi" (n. 45), 1931: 42-44. 113) By Hu Shi (Chen Guangyao, "Jianzi yundong shiji" [n. 13], 1931: 23-24); G Hai 1934:

    655; Gao Zhi 1934: 425; Zhou Gan 1935: 136; Shen Youqian 1937: 96. 114) My reading indicates that, by the 1930s, the leaders of the simplification drive supported

    the eventual use of simplified characters uniformly in all publishing domains. The size of the inventory they planned to simplify, however, was approximately half that of Chen Guangyao's.

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  • 156 DAYLE BARNES

    based on characters. Unlike the phoneticizers, he was not a loony who sought to overturn the elite and their culture. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that as a script reformer his views place him among the most egalitarian of his day.

    5. The Continuity of Constraints on Character Simplification

    The several positions Chen took in the 1930s with respect to character simplification were at variance with those of most men sympathetic to simplification. The most influential of these men belonged to the government's language commission which advised the Ministry of Education. When the Ministry of Education formulated a plan for character simplification in 1935, their views naturally became the policy of the government. An examination of the principal features of that plan underscores the extent Chen was out of step with his contemporaries.

    5.1. The Policy of the Ministry of Education, 1935

    The Ministry of Education rejected the proposition that each and every character, even characters with relatively few strokes, should be considered eligible for simplifi- cation. It took the position that existing characters which were already sufficiently simple need not be further simplified.115 This, of course, was a rejection of Chen's conviction that no characters should be exempted if another character having fewer strokes could be found to replace it. Since a character already simple might not for that reason have a simplified variant, the attempt to supply one for it might well involve recourse to fabrication. This, the Ministry ruled out, and in so doing under- lined its intention to concentrate only on troublesome characters, including both characters with too many strokes as well as those considered difficult because of their particular mix or balance of components.

    Neither was the total inventory marked for simplification to include all the characters in modern use, minus only the very simple ones. The Ministry adopted the attitude that simplification was worthwhile only if the character in question was both difficult to write and frequently used.116 By subscribing to the criterion of use, the Ministry indicated that its primary concern was with that character corpus deemed essential for a group whose reading needs and reading facility were both modest. Qian Xuantong's target on behalf of the Ministry of Education's 1935 plan was 2,400 characters, to be released in several lists over time. This was approximately the same number of characters supposedly taught in the elementary school system,

    115) MOE 1935: 3. 116) Wang Shijie 1935.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 157

    implying that the chief beneficiaries of simplification would be those whose educa- tions terminated with, or did not exceed, six years of schooling.117 Simplification was not to extend beyond that to include all of the 5,000-6,000 characters serving principally the mature reader with an advanced education.

    Having decided upon simplification only for the minimally educated segment of the population, and confident that the 2,400 simplified characters for this pur- pose were already available indigenously, the government did not need to look else- where for additional sources of simpler characters. It specifically renounced any intention of using fabrications, explaining that their lack of a basis in the history of the script deprived them of the legitimacy necessary for their acceptance.118 It was, of course, the acceptance of limited simplification by those already literate which would have been imperiled by fabrication. Thus did the progressive men of Chen's time express their own aversion to graphic concoctions alien to their elite culture.

    Lastly, the Ministry of Education elected not to intermix cursives with tradi- tional angular style characters. Qian Xuantong, compiler of the original list, ex- plained that his choice of character constituents reflected a bias in favor of those which would be easy for "children, [uneducated] adults, and those without any special calligraphic talent" to acquire. Guided by this principle, Qian was willing to accept a certain number of cursive elements provided that the "dots and lines were clearly distinguishable and that the linkages between elements were both level and straight."119 His draft of 2,440 characters was submitted to the Ministry with its graphs written in the traditional angular style characteristic of printed material,120 the same style in which all but a handful of the 324 characters in the Ministry's First List of Simplified Characters were issued.121

    5.2. The Policy of the People's Republic of China

    When character simplification became the policy of the government of the People's Republic of China in 1956, the positions taken by most simplifiers in 1935, and by

    117) Gu Liangjie 1935: 404. The /J^UHRffl?* [Provisional List of Characters for Elemen- tary School] compiled by the Ministry of Education in 1935 contained 2,711 characters. See Ai Wei 1965: 57-58.

    118) Wang Shijie 1935. 119) Qian Xuantong 1935a: 365. 120) Li Jinxi 1935e. 121) MOE 1935: 18-19; Anon. 1935: 74. Owing to the subsequent cancellation of the Ministry's

    program, only the First List of 324 characters was ever published. The bulk of the characters displaying components of cursive origin had been deferred at the request of the Shanghai publishing community for promulgation in subsequent lists and did not therefore appear. Li Jinxi 1935b.

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  • 158 DAYLE BARNES

    the Chinese Nationalist Government's Ministry of Education and its language advi- sory commission, were ratified anew. The reaffirmation in 1956 of positions taken in the 1930s revealed a continuity of thinking with respect to simplification that was not altered by obvious differences in time and circumstances. The cultural signifi- cance of that continuity is underscored by the fact that in 1956 none of the twenty- two members of the government's commission on script reform (Zhongguo wenzi gaige weiyuanhui 43l3t?Sfc^3l#) was involved in simplification prior to 1935, excepting Li Jinxi, and none was a member of the government's language commis- sion in the 1930s, with the exception of Li Jianxi and Wei Jiangong lio.122 Fourteen of the twenty-two held appointments in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1955.123

    Among the 2,238 characters officially designated as replacements for their tra- ditional forms in the People's Republic of China, the average number of strokes per character is approximately ten, reduced from an average of sixteen per character prior to simplification. This result was achieved by a more than fifty per cent reduc- tion in the number of characters originally written with eleven and more strokes, rewriting them as characters with ten or fewer strokes. This level of simplification increased by ninefold (from 141 to 1,267) the number of characters in the group which required ten or fewer strokes to write, nonetheless stopping well short of Chen Guangyao's ambition to reduce the average number of strokes in the entire active inventory to six or seven.124

    In 1956, the government, speaking through the chairman of its script reform commission, accepted the earlier research indicating that the number of characters in actual use number between 6,000-7,000 and further stated that approximately half of them should be considered candidates for simplification.125 The decision to simplify that number of characters reflected the policy of the Ministry of Education, which as early as 1950 adopted the strategy of simplifying only that portion of the actually used inventory which displayed the highest incidence of use.126

    Fabrication was rejected as a means of simplification. Language authorities in the early 1950s explicitly characterized their approach to script reform in terms of

    122) For membership of the Preparatory Commission for the Unification of the National Lan- guage, see CBWYHMD (1929: 29-31), and for that of the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language, see Wang Xuewen 1967: 15.

    123) HKDGB, June 6, 1955. 124) Wang Xuewen (1967: 295-298), citing Liu BohuangSlHS, ffift^ ^Wffi [The Merits

    of the Comprehensive List of Simplified Characters], %$ft B$g [Guangming newspaper], July 21, 1965. 125) Wu Yuzhang 1956. 126) Yi Xiwu 1952: 32.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 159

    the principle of shu er bu zuo "to transmit and not to create." Departures from this practice were permissible only in instances where no simple form was available in popular usage to replace a demonstrably important complex character.127

    No special attempt would be made during the process of reform to bring the simplified forms into conformity with the "six principles" of structural organization manifested in the formative period of the script. According to government language authorities, the script had centuries earlier in its evolution already ceased to express such a pure system, and it was thought that, apart from being a hopeless task, trying to remodel today's script along yesterday's lines would simply increase the number of characters that literate people would have to relearn.128 China's script was like a charming old house: posts no longer plumb, lintels no more true, porch aslant, windows askew, roof awry, it could not be put straight, but, for all that, it was still serviceable and those familiar with its quirks could live in it compatibly.

    Finally, the government endorsed the printing style as the normative shape of its simplified characters.129 The motivation to simplify rested on the conviction that the abbreviated forms would be easier for learners - first, to acquire initially, and after that to write. The common intuition judged that, for learners, the plane geometry of the printed form was more practical than the graceful but unpredictable whorls of the cursive.130

    6. Chen Guangyao in the 1950s

    A comparison of Chen Guangyao's writings in the early 1950s with his earlier work reveals that the salient aspects of his thinking survived the war years essentially intact, although not entirely without modification.131

    127) Anon. 1954: 91. Later, the formula shu er bu zuo was changed to yue ding su cheng $3 fOc "acceptance based on common practice."

    128) Wu Yuzhang 1978: 95-96. See also Ye Gongchuo 1957: 26-27. 129) Anon. 1954: 91. Despite this, Chen Guangyao as late as 1953 continued to argue the case

    for cursive elements in print (1953: 6). 130) Ye Gongchuo 1957: 34. 131) I have been unable to obtain information on Chen Guangyao's life and activities on behalf

    of simplification during the period 1939-1949. By the end of the war he was making a living by operat- ing a drugstore. In spite of Chen's past membership in the Nationalist Party, Zheng Linxi secured a staff position for him in the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language, where Chen remained until his death in 1973/74, in Beijing. Chen's influence continued to be limited by his lack of a university degree and by his pre-war association with the Nationalist Party, as well as by his dedica- tion to a far more comprehensive program of simplification than others regarded as either necessary or acceptable (Zheng Linxi 1988).

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  • 160 DAYLE BARNES

    His attacks on characters with too many strokes might easily have been xeroxed from earlier articles. In the government's 1952 list of 2,000 traditional characters, an irreducible minimum for literacy, Chen calculated that nearly three-quarters required nine or more strokes to write.132 Among the simplified variants Chen offered to replace them, ninety-nine per cent comprised no more than eight strokes, and none required more than ten.133 Borrowing an argument from his critics, he suggested again that characters with fewer than ten strokes - such as shi 'to be', he fP 'and', and de H/ fi 'marker of attribution' - be simplified provided that they met the criterion of frequent use.134

    Resigned now to the inevitability that simplification would be confined to the existing body of simpler graphs, components, and reasonable extrapolations of these, Chen tacitly acquiesced in assigning the greater part of his fabrications to an orthographic limbo. This decision implied that only 2,000-3,000 characters would ever undergo simplification, but that concession could be justified by reference to the government's contention that simplification was but a transitory stage on the path leading to eventual phoneticization. More, it acknowledged that the interests of the literates in the stability of the character inventory would be respected.135 And it followed as a corollary that there could be little justification for reestablishing internal congruence in a script with only a transient role to play in the future.136

    Chen jettisoned his insistance that cursive forms be taught to beginners at the outset, agreeing with the majority that geometric shapes were easier to teach and learn than curvilinear ones.137 That, however, left him free to champion even more strongly the advantages in speed and economy of execution to be derived from generalized use of suitably standardized cursive characters by more accomplished writers.138

    This picture of Chen's views in his forties lacks the tidiness he displayed in his twenties. Did he really mean to propound two types of cursives, one for abece- darians and one for mature writers? And was his apparent surrender of fabrications compatible with the studied way in which he cached some of his favorites in places

    132) Chen Guangyao 1955b: 11, 17. 133) Ibid., 35. 134) Ibid. y 16. He was even prepared to rewrite a limited number of such often used terms in

    zhuyinfuhao fff (the Chinese National Phonetic Alphabet), interspersing these among characters in the text.

    135) Chen Guangyao 1955c: 18. 136) Id. 1955b: 37; 1955c: 18. 137) Id. 1955b: 19, 34; 1955c: 18. 138) Id. 1955b: 15, 17.

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  • CHEN GUANGYAO AND CHARACTER SIMPLIFICATION 161

    where others might later find and care for them?139 Or, if that surrender was un- conditional, why did he so carefully specify the conditions under which the govern- ment did have a mandate to invent characters?140 These ambiguities were to go unresolved. Even as he wrestled with them, the reality of character simplification in China caught up with him and swept on by, making the answers to all these ques- tions both speculative and no longer pertinent.

    Chen's career as a script reformer must be appraised in terms of the choices available to him from his culture and the selections he made from that tradition. He began by complaining that the traditional script was too cumbrous and difficult for ordinary people to learn. His solution was a technically simpler script requiring, however, more of those already literate. His redesigned orthography alienated not only the hard-core of conservatives implacably opposed to any change whatsoever. It also failed to attract the much larger group of moderates receptive to modest change upon whose support simplification depended. Chen's design offered them an orthographic utopia maximally parsimonious of line and purged of extraneous ornamentation in exchange for the asymmetry and occasional jumble of nevertheless familiar and readily manipulable shapes.

    Chen assumed the role of an engineer, accepting responsibility for drawing the right line, drafting the correct angle, inscribing the proper degree of arc. Slighted in this tour de force of ratiocination and technical wizardry was the organic quality of the characters and their capacity to command loyalty from their users. His work offers a striking demonstration of a mechanistic solution to script change which subordinates cultural affinity to efficiency.

    A river can be dredged, its banks shored, its flow channeled in new directions; husbanded, harnessed to new tasks, raised or lowered, purified or polluted. But one cannot change the water, for that is what a river is. A script is what it means and what it signifies in the minds and in the hands of those who use it. That is the message embodied in Wang Liaoyi's words that began this article. Not hearing it, Chen Guangyao created a script his contemporaries were unable to recognize as Chi- nese. Guided by voices from within themselves and ultimately within their common culture, they made choices more at ease with both.

    139) For example, see Chen Guangyao 1955c: 29, footnotes 9-11, also 1955b: 35, where fabrica- tions are simply reclassified under unobjectionable rubrics.

    140) Chen Guangyao 1953; 1955a: 12; 1955b: 29-30.

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  • 162 DAYLE BARNES

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