by JING TSU
This story is adapted from Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu.
It was 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai was in the middle of an unseasonal heat wave, and its people cursed the “autumn tiger.” Zhi Bingyi had more to worry about than the heat. He had been branded a “reactionary academic authority,” one of the many damning allegations that sent millions of people to their deaths or to labor camps during the Cultural Revolution. Was it still appropriate for Zhi to think of himself as one of the people? Hadn’t he betrayed them, as he’d been told?
Just four years earlier, Zhi had gone to work every day as director of the newly established Shanghai Municipal Electric Instrument and Research Office under the government’s First Ministry of Machinery Industry. It was one of the most secure jobs one could have. First Ministry was in charge of building heavy industrial machines in the early period of New China, and later split off a Fourth Ministry to oversee electronic communications technology. Zhi’s specialty was electric metering—focusing on precision meters and electronic modeling by enhancing the performance of a device’s various parts.
Quiet, cautious, and insistent, Zhi was also highly qualified. He earned a PhD in physics from Leipzig University but declined a job offer in the United States in order to return to China. He taught at two Chinese universities and later helped to devise China’s landmark 12-year Plan for the Development of Science and Technology of 1956. It was a hopeful time for scientists and technicians who were deemed useful for their contributing roles in a state-guided socialist economy.
Since his arrest in July 1968 for being a “reactionary academic authority,” Zhi had been cut off from his research, the news, and his devoted German wife. He was used to working on equations and engineering problems with teams of colleagues. No longer. His only company was the eight characters on the wall of his cell reminding him that prisoners faced two options from their minders: “Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse.”
The purge of the intellectual class had just begun, and anyone who was educated had to bow to the tenets of class struggle and the will of the Gang of Four—the radical contingent of the Chinese Communist Party. Many were sent to the countryside to be reformed through backbreaking labor, picking through manure and tilling fallow fields in the heat and rain with little to eat. They were held to the strictest military discipline in camps that doubled as “reeducation” centers. So successful was Mao’s anti-intellectual campaign that it inspired Pol Pot to launch a similar crusade in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, killing anyone who wore eyeglasses—incriminating evidence of bourgeois intellectualism.
In the cowshed, Zhi stared at the eight characters on the wall. One day, he no longer saw the ominous message but instead the strokes and characters of which it was composed. He began to notice where the ink thickened, blotched, or trailed off at the ends of each character. Every stroke appeared to him anew, each an enigma with a fresh riddle. Though they were created by a human hand, he realized, each character was essentially repeating combinations of the same abstract strokes and dots.
How would one translate and turn these human-made brushstrokes into a coded language that could be entered into computing machines? It was not the first time someone had thought of rendering Chinese characters systematically into codes, of course. The same question had crossed Count d’Escayrac’s mind more than a century earlier in another prison—the urine-soaked cell of imperial Beijing. And coded language was fiercely defended as a question of national sovereignty in the marble halls of Paris in 1925 and attempted as telegraphic encryption.
But it never would have occurred to any of them to come up with a solution for a machine. Every solution of theirs had been oriented toward the human user—how to organize characters so they are easier for people to write and to learn, less taxing and time-consuming to memorize or look up. The question in Zhi’s mind burned to a different purpose: How could one render Chinese in a language that computers can read—in the zeros and ones of binary code? Having been used to building computer models of his electrical devices, he would have come across the problem many times.
To bridge to the state of technology in the advanced world in the 1970s, China had begun to build machines that could handle mass-scale calculations, sieve through huge amounts of information, and coordinate complex operations. The data for calculating and controlling flight paths, military targets, and geographical positioning, or tracking agricultural and industrial output, had to be collected first. Yet all the existing records, documents, and reports were in Chinese. It became clear that in order to be part of the computing age at all, the Chinese script would have to be rendered digitally. Western computing technology was also moving in the direction of text processing and communication, not just running large-scale calculations. Converting human language scripts into digital form was the next frontier. The arms race during the Cold War was advancing the state of computing technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Getting Chinese inside the machine was critical to ensuring that China was not left out.
Requiring precise inputs, computing machines are unforgiving of inconsistencies and exceptions. All the characteristics of Chinese that stymied earlier innovators—the unwieldy size of its character inventory; its complex strokes, tones, and homophones; the difficulty of segmentation—created new challenges in the digitization of the script. Executable commands could only be in the form of a yes or a no, an on-or-off switch of an electric current running through the circuitry of a computer control board. No partial solutions or patches would help China get by, this time. During Zhi’s incarceration, China was in the throes of its biggest social and political upheaval yet and hardly had the resources to make such a bid for the future. But for a country so far behind the Western world, science and technology were not just a barrier. They were viewed as essential for helping China leapfrog out of backwardness and speed up the process of modernization. The challenge was multifaceted: to devise a code for Chinese that is easy for humans to remember and use and that can be entered into a machine via punched tape or keyboard; to find a way for the machine to store the massive amount of information required to identify and reproduce Chinese characters; and to be able to retrieve and restore the script with pinpoint precision, on paper or on a screen.
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