Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist): The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

ISBN: 0735214735

Author: Tsu, Jing

Condition: New

PULITZER PRIZE FINALISTA New York Times Notable Book of 2022What does it take to reinvent a language?After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the worlds 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 Chinas 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.With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of Chinas 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.