Chinese characters and Orientalism

The debate between western sinologists over the origin of Chinese characters reflects the orientalism of the past, and the present. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Dec 23, 2024

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”

Edward W. Said, Orientalism

Not long ago on my podcast, I shared a piece of Sinology history that almost no one cared about. During my Sinology Master’s at SOAS, we were forced at knifepoint to learn the ins and outs of one of the most boring debates ever: the Boodberg-Creel debate on the origin of Chinese characters.

The debate, which was carried out in a series of academic articles written between 1936 and 1940, can be summarised as two clearly very bored men going back and forth over whether Chinese characters evolved as phonetic representations of the spoken language, or as ideographic representations of the words they represented.

As I have no linguistic training whatsoever, I found this topic excruciating, and it took me the better part of 2 weeks to get even the basics right (I was in charge of presenting to the class, which was why I was so invested).

Maybe it’s because I poured so much time and dedication into getting it right that it sticks with me till this day, phoneme charts appearing in my dreams, hovering menacingly out of reach until I can decipher their meaning. But while the debate itself is silly and dramatic, I think it serves to illustrate another point quite well – namely the prevalence of orientalist thought in the western sinological tradition.

The two men in question clearly didn’t care about Chinese perspectives on the issue, and in fact one whole side of the debate rested on the idea that Chinese was an inherently inferior language system to basically every other language in the world. But they were a product of their time right? Surely their outdated views on the backwards nature of Chinese culture and society don’t persist today?

Well, I’m here to tell you that they do.

While many well-meaning writers, journalists and explorers of the Middle Kingdom believe their writing is respectful and reveals the ‘true’ China for the layman to understand, in reality their writing often comes off as patronising, and even passive aggressive. In fact, I just gave you an example in the last sentence – who the hell calls it the Middle Kingdom (a lot of people, it turns out)! Why does every white paper on modern Chinese politics start with ‘well, in 1812”, and why does every China travel blog have to qualify their adventures as “the real China” that “no one wants you to see”?

I’m not arguing that these resources aren’t valuable (at least 3 of them are). But I think it’s worth discussing how the orientalist view of China has not evolved as much as some people might think, and how to potentially escape from a permanent prism of ‘China head’ obsequiousness, allowing us to form nuanced understandings of China based on multiple sources both familiar and ‘other’.

But first I have to tell you about this really boring linguistics debate.

The debate in brief

Here’s the TL;DR of the debate between Boodberg and Creel.

1Creel: Chinese characters are not mainly phonetic, and are not mainly a combination of phonetic and ideographic. Instead, Chinese characters are almost all ideographic because each word has a meaning, and “every one of these above meanings has its separate character, brimful of meaning, immediately and unmistakably distinct to the eye.”

Chinese has evolved an ideographic script that originated from pictographs, so instead of drawing, say, a picture of a horse, they draw a representation of that picture: “The course which the Chinese have chosen has also been to conventionalize and reduce, but they then use the evolved element for the most part not phonetically, but to stand for the original object or to enter with other such elements into combinations of ideographic rather than phonetic value.”

(This article is 77 pages long btw, so assume heavy redactions)

2Boodberg: Epigraphers typically emphasise the form of characters, but that this misses the crucial feature of writing, which is their sound. In linguistic terms: (1) Any single symbol (or Graph) in so-called 'ideographic' writing should ideally have only one significance (represent only one Semanteme) expressed in the living speech by only one vocable (or Phoneme); (2) Pictograms [graphic representations of natural objects] and symbolic signs do not constitute in themselves Graphs; (3) The habitual association of a graph (G) with the corresponding semanteme and phoneme (SP) which culminates in the apprehension of the graph by the reader of the language of which it forms an element as a single complex GSP can be achieved only through a long usage of the language.

So basically a picture only equals a word when it takes on meaning, which is imparted to it via a spoken word. Analysis of characters should proceed on etymological grounds rather than ideographic grounds, i.e. characters are compositions of earlier forms of the same words or compounds of existing words, rather than being graphs in and of themselves, representing an idea as a whole.

Creel: Boodberg thinks he disagrees with me, but the fact that he points out that China never moved to a fully phonetic form of writing and in fact used sounds to help differentiate meaning for words that share a character but have different meanings.

Chinese writing also has a lot of semantographs (huiyizi 會意字), which are formed by combining two semantic components to create a new character. These characters, like pictographs, also do not represent the pronunciation. While we can trace with a good degree of accuracy the images of Chinese characters over time, we cannot trace the spoken Chinese language nearly as easily, and even worse is our understanding of how archaic and ancient Chinese characters were pronounced.

Boodberg: HOW DARE YOU DISAGREE WITH ME IDEOGRAPHY IS A CROCK YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LANGUAGE I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE ALLOWED TO TEACH ANYONE ANYTHING YOU USELESS PIECE OF S-

And the debate is cut short there. Wow, wasn’t that fascinating.

The debate was brought to a close because the main journal publishing their argument, T’oung Pao, basically refused to publish any more of their vitriol. It was continued by some of their students and followers, but ultimately it’s left to fizzle and sort of remain as an annoying buzz in the background of China studies.

The reality

What’s left out of this debate is the fact that Chinese linguists had already come to their own conclusions about the development of the Chinese writing system, but western sinologists just didn’t care to read or include them in their work.

As one such scholar, Ming Dong Gu, writes:

“Contrary to the view that Chinese writing is a handmaiden to spoken Chinese, I argue that Chinese writing is a master who controls speech. My argument finds support in the views of learned scholars in China. Liang Shuming, a Chinese erudite regarded as the "last great Confucian" in China, observes: "Chinese language and writing developed in their separate ways. At the beginning, writing did not depend upon language, but language came to be dominated by writing."
The foremost Chinese thinker Li Zehou has expressed a similar opinion on a number or occasions and in several books. His view is based on a good deal of evidential research that he has conducted to prove that Chinese characters were not the written records of spoken discourse. He points out that "Chinese language does not give precedence to sound but emphasizes meaning. . . . From the very beginning, the function of Chinese characters is to control, dominate, and regulate language, and not to record Language.
Among Chinese scholars, this view is largely common sense, but it has been problematized because it goes contrary to a dearly held principle of Western linguistic theory: writing is not language, but only a duplicate of language.”

If the debate is so settled among Chinese scholars, why the need for the debate in the first place? Simply because orientalism was so normalised. After all, Boodberg’s main argument is couched in orientalist thought, as he writes himself:

“the concentration of native scholars in China on epigraphical research to the neglect of 'phonetics ' is easily understandable. It is less excusable on the part of western epigraphists”

How could one expect Chinese scholars to be sophisticated enough to tackle something as complex phonetics? Creel, in his defense, tries to rebuff this viewpoint, recoiling at his peers’ dismissal of the Chinese language as primitive:

“we Occidentals have come, by long habitude, to think that any method of writing which consists merely of a graphic representation of thought, but which is not primarily a system for the graphic notation of sounds, in some way falls short of what writing was foreordained to be, is not indeed writing in the full sense of the word… If Chinese does not fit into the predetermined top of the scale, then it follows that Chinese is primitive.”

It’s telling that the debate itself ended inconclusively, with neither side conceding, and in fact with their peons picking up the gauntlet and continuing the battle after their passing. It shows that neither side is particularly interested in the truth, but rather in furthering their own beliefs about Chinese culture and, perhaps, China’s potential. The fact that debate continued even after the original combatants had moved on shows the enduring legacy of such orientalist thinking.

It’s still alive and well.

This is partly because of the way sinology or China studies more broadly is conceived and structured. This is concretely defined in Bob Hodge and Kam Louie’s book The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture, in which they write:

“[T]he China constructed by Sinologism is not simply a Western invention. The key assumptions of Sinologism are partial truths, which makes it especially important to address them and disentangle them from the forms in which they are packaged in classic Sinology. Sinologism takes major tendencies within Chinese culture and turns them into absolute values, essential truths about Chineseness or ‘sinicity’: an ideology above dispute, not a set of provisional, contested hypotheses and generalisations in need themselves of further examination and enquiry.”

These partial truths are then picked up by western experts as sources in their work too. Whether it’s in the mainstream news sources, or the substacks written by western authors proclaiming the approaching demise of the Chinese state, or the podcasts you listen to professing a nuanced take on Chinese history and culture, the orientalist approach to China cannot be avoided, because the foundation of China studies is inherently orientalist. China can only be understood in west (occidental) terms and terminologies – your [superior?] culture determines how you view the rest of the world.

The reason that China is so interesting in the first place is because it’s ‘other’. They’re not like us, if you will. China is something to explore, Chinese politics is something to dissect, Chinese culture is something to analyse, Chinese history is something to appraise.

Also if you’re not from a certain place, sometimes the only way to understand it is by comparison to your own place. Perhaps this isn’t what Said meant by Orientalism in the purest sense, but it is still the practice of making a place valid by its comparison to the ‘known’. And if you think China’s isn’t essentialised – filtering out the main dynamics of its culture, history and society in order to make it more palatable – in everything you read then I don’t know what to tell you. Except that it’s amazing that everything right or wrong or weird in China can be linked back to either the CCP or ‘ancient Chinese culture’, and that Chinese newspapers should be ignored because they’re just ‘propaganda’ incapable of relaying the truth.

This newsletter is also practising Orientalism

While I try to avoid starting every newsletter with a call back to the First Opium War or the fall of the Qing dynasty, I believe am guilty of orientalism merely by the fact of trying to explain China. I’m not trying to be overly self-flagellating here – I think there’s a lot of value in having China explained to you in terms that you understand, especially if you haven’t had the chance to visit China yourself.

Some people will never be able to read Chinese texts in the original language or see the difference between a township and a tier 1 city in person. China can be difficult to understand without specialised training, a knowledge of the language, and an extensive period living or travelling on the mainland. I would argue that even having a lot of Chinese friends and reading The Three Body Problem or watching Raise the Red Lantern, while valiant efforts, also don’t count. These are filtered perspectives: friends can only tell you what they experience themselves, and diaspora experiences of culture are often far removed from what is practiced back home. Films, books, music, even documentaries can only provide a narrow glimpse into what a place is really like, not to mention they’re also stuck in a certain point in time.

That’s why sometimes the best thing you can do is have multiple sources on a single topic, especially if it’s one you want to understand well. The news can be guilty of scaremongering and over-selling issues in pursuit of wider political gains, while in contrast this project in particular is only really interested in discussion and entertainment. However, I don’t expect you to agree with my takes, and I don’t think this should be the only source on China you read!

Having said that, there are plenty of good sources on China that can give you a better understanding of the country from the perspective of those living within it. I use a lot of these sources myself when researching this newsletter!

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