Politics of Letters: From the Chinese Romanization Movement in the Era of the Republic of China to the Hanyu Pinyin in the Era of the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

The Romanization of Chinese characters was a concept used to convert Chinese scripts into Latin alphabets. This notion had been extensively discussed among the progressive Chinese intellectuals since the beginning of the 20th century due to the state of weakness and demoralization resulting from the early establishment of the new republican form of government. The Chinese society itself, as well as the intimidation from the West and Japan, expedited the need to reform the country. Certain intellectuals aimed to build the country to appear modern and powerful. The traditional Chinese scripts were believed to be a part of the obstacles to modernization as they were logographic and seemed arduous to communicate. The effort to modernize the Chinese logographic characters was propelled considerably by the Chinese progressive intellectuals and even caused controversy among some of them. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong, defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang: KMT) in the Civil War, it brought an announcement of the new official name of the country as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, there was no promise of applying Latin characters as a complete substitute for Chinese characters. Instead, the numbers of character strokes were lessened and simplified. As for the prior suggestion to completely replace the Chinese letters with the Latin letters, the Hanyu Pinyin system was now introduced to transcribe the Chinese words into Latin alphabets. This article presented an overview of the Chinese historiography of the romanization of the Chinese characters, which later catalyzed into the standardized Hanyu Pinyin system. Nowadays, the Hanyu Pinyin system has easily assisted language learners in enunciating Chinese characters.