A review by highestiqinfresno
Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist): The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

4.0

A fascinating history of Chinese language modernization from the mid-19th century to the present. Tsu successfully maps debates about simplifying Chinese to China's fraught history moving from the Qing period through the Republic and finally PRC eras. This is not merely an intellectual history, however. Tsu also examines the way that interest in technological development - typewriters, telegraph, and computers - galvanized language reformers and added fuel to conflicts between traditionalists who viewed Chinese language (and the complex calligraphy of Chinese characters) as a vital part of Chinese cultural identity and modernizers who saw the ways linguistic complexity isolated China from the rest of the world and made the democratizing goal of mass literacy difficult. For those familiar with the work of Jonathan Spence, they will find many continuities between "Kingdom of Characters" and Spence's histories examining China's long struggle with modernity. The last chapter didn't work for me - it is a bit too ambitious acting as a conclusion, epilogue, and case study - but Kingdom of Characters is a must read for those interested in the history of modern China.