Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology [MIT Tech Review]

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Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually type the pronunciation of a character and then pick it out of a selection that pops up, autocomplete-style—it’s hard to think of anything more quotidian. The software that allows this exists beneath the awareness of pretty much everyone who uses it. It’s just there.

MIT PRESS, 2024

What’s largely been forgotten—and what most people outside Asia never even knew in the first place—is that a large cast of eccentrics and linguists, engineers and polymaths, spent much of the 20th century torturing themselves over how Chinese was ever going to move away from the ink brush to any other medium. This process has been the subject of two books published in the last two years: Thomas Mullaney’s scholarly work The Chinese Computer and Jing Tsu’s more accessible Kingdom of Characters. Mullaney’s book focuses on the invention of various input systems for Chinese starting in the 1940s, while Tsu’s covers more than a century of efforts to standardize Chinese and transmit it using the telegraph, typewriter, and computer. But both reveal a story that’s tumultuous and chaotic—and just a little unsettling in the futility it reflects.   

RIVERHEAD BOOKS, 2022

Chinese characters are not as cryptic as they sometimes appear. The general rule is that they stand for a word, or sometimes part of a word, and learning to read is a process of memorization. Along the way, it becomes easier to guess how a character should be spoken, because often phonetic elements are tucked in among other symbols. The characters were traditionally written by hand with a brush, and part of becoming literate involves memorizing the order in which the strokes are made. Put them in the wrong order and the character doesn’t look right. Or rather, as I found some years ago as a second-language learner in Guangzhou, China, it looks childish. (My husband, a translator of Chinese literature, found it hilarious and adorable that at the age of 30, I wrote like a kindergartner.)

The trouble, however, is that there are a lot of characters. One needs to know at least a few thousand to be considered basically literate, and there are thousands more beyond that basic set. Many modern learners of Chinese devote themselves essentially full-time to learning to read, at least in the beginning. More than a century ago, this was such a monumental task that leading thinkers worried it was impairing China’s ability to survive the attentions of more aggressive powers.

In the 19th century, a huge proportion of Chinese people were illiterate. They had little access to schooling. Many were subsistence farmers. China, despite its immense population and vast territory, was perpetually finding itself on the losing end of deals with nimbler, more industrialized nations. The Opium Wars, in the mid-19th century, had led to a situation where foreign powers effectively colonized Chinese soil. What advanced infrastructure there was had been built and was owned by foreigners.  

Some felt these things were connected. Wang Zhao, for one, was a reformer who believed that a simpler way to write spoken Chinese was essential to the survival of the nation. Wang’s idea was to use a set of phonetic symbols, representing one specific dialect of Chinese. If people could sound out words, having memorized just a handful of shapes the way speakers of languages using an alphabet did, they could become literate more quickly. With literacy, they could learn technical skills, study science, and help China get ownership of its future back. 

Wang believed in this goal so strongly that though he’d been thrown out of China in 1898, he returned two years later in disguise. After arriving by boat from Japan, he traveled over land on foot in the costume of a Buddhist monk. His story forms the first chapter of Jing Tsu’s book, and it is thick with drama, including a shouting match and brawl on the grounds of a former palace, during a meeting to decide which dialect a national version of such a system should represent. Wang’s system for learning Mandarin was used by schools in Beijing for a few years, but ultimately it did not survive the rise of competing systems and the period of chaos that swallowed China not long after the Qing Dynasty’s fall in 1911. Decades of disorder and uneasy truces gave way to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in northern China in 1931. For a long time, basic survival was all most people had time for.

However, strange inventions soon began to turn up in China. Chinese students and scientists abroad had started to work on a typewriter for the language, which they felt was lagging behind others. Texts in English and other tongues using Roman characters could be printed swiftly and cheaply with keyboard-controlled machines that injected liquid metal into type molds, but Chinese texts required thousands upon thousands of bits of type to be placed in a manual printing press. And while English correspondence could be whacked out on a typewriter, Chinese correspondence was still, after all this time, written by hand.      

Of all the technologies Mullaney and Tsu describe, these baroque metal monsters stick most in the mind. Equipped with cylinders and wheels, with type arrayed in starbursts or in a massive tray, they are simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. Because Chinese characters don’t have an inherent order (no A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and because there are so many (if you just glance at 4,000 of them, you’re not likely to spot the one you need quickly), people tried to arrange these bits of type according to predictable rules. The first article ever published by Lin Yutang, who would go on to become one of China’s most prominent writers in English, described a system of ordering characters according to the number of strokes it took to form them. He eventually designed a Chinese typewriter that consumed his life and finances, a lovely thing that failed its demo in front of potential investors.

PUBLIC DOMAIN/COURTESY OF THOMAS S. MULLANEY

Technology often seems to demand new ways of engaging with the physical, and the Chinese typewriter was no exception. When I first saw a functioning example, at a private museum in a basement in Switzerland, I was entranced by the gliding arm and slender rails of the sheet-cake-size device, its tray full of characters. “Operating the machine was a full-body exercise,” Tsu writes of a very early typewriter from the late 1890s, designed by an American missionary. Its inventor expected that with time, muscle memory would take over, and the typist would move smoothly around the machine, picking out characters and depressing keys. 

However, though Chinese typewriters eventually got off the ground (the first commercial typewriter was available in the 1920s), a few decades later it became clear that the next challenge was getting Chinese characters into the computer age. And there was still the problem of how to get more people reading. Through the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, systems for ordering and typing Chinese continued to occupy the minds of intellectuals; particularly odd and memorable is the story of the librarian at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, who in the 1930s came up with a system of light and dark glyphs like semaphore flags to stand for characters. Mullaney and Tsu both linger on the case of Zhi Bingyi, an engineer imprisoned in solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, who was inspired by the characters of a slogan written on his cell wall to devise his own code for inputting characters into a computer.

As the child of a futurist, I’ve seen firsthand that the path to where we are is littered with technological dead ends.

The tools for literacy were advancing over the same period, thanks to government-­mandated reforms introduced after the Communist Revolution in 1949. To assist in learning to read, everyone in mainland China would now be taught pinyin, a system that uses Roman letters to indicate how Chinese characters are pronounced. Meanwhile, thousands of characters would be replaced with simplified versions, with fewer strokes to learn. This is still how it’s done today in the mainland, though in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the characters are not simplified, and Taiwan uses a different pronunciation guide, one based on 37 phonetic symbols and five tone marks. 

Myriad ideas were thrown at the problem of getting these characters into computers. Images of a graveyard of failed designs—256-key keyboards and the enormous cylinder of the Ideo-Matic Encoder, a keyboard with more than 4,000 options—are scattered poignantly through Mullaney’s pages. 

In Tsu’s telling, perhaps the most consequential link between this awkward period of dedicated hardware and today’s wicked-quick mobile-phone typing came in 1988, with an idea hatched by engineers in California. “Unicode was envisioned as a master converter,” she writes. “It would bring all human script systems, Western, Chinese, or otherwise, under one umbrella standard and assign each character a single, standardized code for communicating with any machine.” Once Chinese characters had Unicode codes, they could be manipulated by software like any other glyph, letter, or symbol. Today’s input systems allow users to call up and select characters using pinyin or stroke order, among other options.

There is something curiously deflating, however, about the way both these books end. Mullaney’s careful documenting of the typing machines of the last century and Tsu’s collection of adventurous tales about language show the same thing: A simply unbelievable amount of time, energy, and cleverness was poured into making Chinese characters easier for both machines and the human mind to manipulate. But very few of these systems seem to have had any direct impact on the current solutions, like the pronunciation-led input systems that more than a billion people now use to type Chinese. 

This pattern of evolution isn’t unique to language. As the child of a futurist, I’ve seen firsthand that the path to where we are is littered with technological dead ends. The month after Google Glass, the glasses-borne computer, made headlines, my mother helped set up an exhibit of personal heads-up displays. In the obscurity of a warehouse space, ghostly white foam heads each bore a crown of metal, glass, and plastic, the attempts of various inventors to put a screen in front of our eyes. Augmented reality seemed as if it might finally be arriving in the hands of the people—or, rather, on their faces. 

That version of the future did not materialize, and if augmented-reality viewing ever does become part of everyday life, it won’t be through those objects. When historians write about these devices, in books like these, I don’t think they will be able to trace a chain of unbroken thought, a single arc from idea to fruition.

A charming moment, late in Mullaney’s book, speaks to this. He has been slipping letters in the mailboxes of people he’s found listed as inventors of input methods in the Chinese patent database, and now he’s meeting one such inventor, an elderly man, and his granddaughter in a Beijing Starbucks. The old fellow is pleased to talk about his approach, which involves the graphical shapes of Chinese characters. But his granddaughter drops a bomb on Mullaney when she leans in and whispers, “I think my input system is a bit easier to use.” It turns out both she and her father have built systems of their own. 

The story’s not over, in other words.    

People tinker with technology and systems of thought like those detailed in these two books not just because they have to, but because they want to. And though it’s human nature to want to make a trajectory out of what lies behind us so that the present becomes a grand culmination, what these books detail are episodes in the life of a language. There is no beginning, no middle, no satisfying end. There is only evolution—an endless unfurling of something always in the process of becoming a fuller version of itself. 

Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist based in England. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and many other publications.