This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
In general sources and in common understanding, the main reasons given for modernizing the Chinese language are that simplified characters are easy to write, pinyin letters are easy to remember, and so on. In fact there is a deeper theoretical and cultural background. The two main theoretical views involved seem unrelated to reality, yet they have had an enormous influence on Chinese society over the past half century and more. These two views are:
1. Ancient China had no abstract thinking, only concrete thinking; it had only logical thinking, but no systematic logic;
2. Chinese characters were not designed or divinely imparted, but developed and evolved gradually in human society over thousands of years.
After modern Western linguistics was introduced into China, its various definitions were applied to Chinese characters, the most widespread being the notion of pictographic script. Although later there were also terms such as ideographic script, logo-phonetic script and, now, morphemic script, to this day most people, when Chinese characters come up, still call them pictographs. Although Shuowen Jiezi, two thousand years ago, had already explained in detail the Six Scripts (liushu) method of forming characters, of which the pictographic is only one, in modern times the view that Chinese characters are pictographs has prevailed throughout.
After Western learning spread to the East, Chinese scholars, having encountered Western philosophy, logic and certain scientific theories, found that a core method of thought in these theories, abstraction, seemed not to exist in ancient Chinese learning. Following the views of these theories, they therefore held that ancient China had no abstract thinking, only concrete or imagistic thinking, and only logical thinking but no systematic logic. This view has occupied the minds of Chinese scholars from the late Qing until today.
Without a systematic method of abstract thinking, there can be no systematic abstract expression of the world, and so there cannot be a systematic ideographic writing system. From this point of view, then, Chinese characters can only be pictographs representing the “primary stage of writing”, or else scattered, isolated ideographic symbols. The internal semantic structure that arises from abstract thought could not be reflected in the structure of character forms, and Chinese characters would have no unified, systematic structure relating sound, form and meaning.
This amounts to denying that there are general internal design principles of Chinese characters. In that case Chinese characters could not have been designed; they could only have been enriched and evolved gradually through pictography, from images of various physical objects, accumulated and developed by millions of people over thousands of years.
Put figuratively, if one holds that Chinese characters took shape gradually, accumulating day by day and month by month over thousands of years, with no design blueprint or plan, then it is as if one person throws down a mountain stone today, tomorrow another person adds a tile on top, and a year later a crowd comes and adds a heap of earth. One could build a village of mud huts and cave dwellings that way, but one cannot imagine building a rigorously structured mansion.
Because evolutionary thinking has to a great extent dominated human thought in today’s society, and Marx’s historical materialism has been a theory forcibly imposed in mainland China, this view of the gradual evolution of Chinese characters, being consistent with it, became the only theory of the origin of Chinese characters permitted to exist in China.
These two views, coming from logic and from historical materialism, support each other and have greatly reinforced the view of the natural evolution of Chinese characters. In addition, this view is also supported by modern linguistics.
Modern linguistics originated with phonetic scripts. In its later development it extended to the understanding of other kinds of languages, but the foundation of the discipline is still a set of concepts and views drawn from phonetic scripts. For example, one view of modern linguistics is that pictographic writing is the primary stage of writing and alphabetic writing the advanced stage. Another basic view is that all scripts go through a process of development from simple and primary to complex and advanced.
When scholars of the late Qing and early Republic encountered modern linguistics, they generally held that Chinese characters, as a pictographic script, were a primitive, elementary script that would ultimately have to give way to an alphabetic script.
The phonetic scripts of other languages did indeed go through a process of development and evolution from the primitive to the refined. Hence it was assumed, very arbitrarily, that the origin and development of Chinese characters must likewise have gone through a process starting from simply scratched pictures, developing and evolving step by step, and finally forming today’s system of Chinese characters.
Likewise, there are systematic misunderstandings in the understanding of Chinese grammar, of the rules governing the pronunciation of characters, and so on. These misunderstandings are all related to present-day theories of logic and linguistics and to the basic views on the origin of Chinese characters.
Today’s various theories and views of writing all bear the hallmarks of modern science and technology, tending to analyze and judge using single-factor, linear logic. When Chinese characters are taken as the object of study, one enters a state of great bewilderment.
In recent years people have also found that these understandings really cannot reflect the full picture of Chinese characters. So, starting from various linguistic theories and views, Chinese characters have been held to be a morphemic script, an ideographic script and so on; there are more than thirty such views of every kind, yet none can yet sum up all the features of Chinese characters.
Under the view of natural evolution, the system of Chinese characters is treated as a natural phenomenon, and the study of Chinese characters, like the study of nature, aims to discover whatever regularities may exist in it. Discover a regularity today, and one concludes that Chinese characters are like this; discover a principle tomorrow, and one concludes that Chinese characters are like that. Hence there are dozens of interpretations, but all of them take a part for the whole, like the blind men feeling the elephant.
Thousands of Chinese characters have become thousands of pictures, thousands of compositions, and learning Chinese characters means memorizing these thousands of compositions. Characters with simple forms are then easy to memorize, and complex ones hard; learning Chinese characters has become a standard test of human memory.
The compulsory scheme for simplifying Chinese characters was produced precisely under the guidance of this view . Under this understanding, rather than understanding the structure of the characters and the way they are composed, people relied merely on simplifying their strokes to aid memory and on understanding the meaning of characters from the words they appear in, and Chinese characters gradually degenerated into simple ideographic and phonetic symbols.
To deny that Chinese characters originated in design is necessarily to deny that there are general, overall design principles of Chinese characters, and then we need not search for such principles. In fact, this is the theoretical background and mainstream view of Chinese character research today.
But when we examine the structure of Chinese characters carefully, we find that the features of their graphic structure themselves make principles of character structure compulsory. That is, the very structure of Chinese characters determines that there must have been an overall design blueprint; otherwise such a structure should not exist. This accords with the logic behind the account of Cangjie creating the characters; or, put another way, the records of Cangjie’s creation of the characters are consistent with this structural feature of the characters themselves.
If one holds that Chinese characters were created by Cangjie, then Cangjie certainly did not create them at random; he must have had a method, rules and a design scheme. And the structural features of the characters themselves determine that this scheme could not have been based merely on simple bird tracks and animal prints or pictographic drawings, but had to be built on a profound understanding of the world.
The question that follows is how such a profound understanding could exist in a very primitive society.
(To be continued)
