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The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
What does it take to reinvent a language?
After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.
"The linguistic and historical threads the author weaves together are complex, but her engaging tone makes the book accessible for general readers. An engaging, relevant work that delves into the linguistic past in order to predict China's future success in the world." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Tsu's humanistic, big-picture sensibility makes an otherwise obscure thread in the history of information technology vivid and compelling." - Booklist
"Jing Tsu wears her erudition lightly and gives us a fascinating and moving story. It shows the passionate struggle of generations of pioneers. It's a story of desperate strife, unflagging dedication, and ultimately, triumph." - Ha Jin, author of Waiting and War Trash
"A deeply engaging and revealing narrative of the Chinese language in modern times. Meticulously researched and beautifully written." - David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
"Seldom have I read a book about modern China so informative, revelatory and enjoyable." - Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and The Man Who Loved China
This information about Kingdom of Characters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jing Tsu is John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. She specializes in Chinese literature, history, and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton institutes.
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