Codes of Modernity - by Uluğ & Kuzuoğ & lu (Paperback)

About the Book

Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s.

Book Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.

Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.

Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

Review Quotes

Codes of Modernity stands powerfully as a contribution to the field and draws due attention to the knowledge economies and communication technologies that undergirded twentieth century Chinese linguistic reforms.--Coraline Jortay, CNRS "China Perspectives"

Kuzuoğlu's book intricately shows that the reforms of Chinese scripts had a life that was related to but also independent from that of language...I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the relationship between language and scripts.--Zhao Lu New York University, Shanghai "American Historical Review"

This book will find an eager readership among scholars interested in the interpretation of script as a technology and in the fraught transition of all cultures to industrialized informational modernity.-- "Technology and Culture"

This book is a most welcome addition to our histories of language and script in China, a must-read for scholars of the topic as well as for China historians in all fields.--Ian M. Miller, St. John's University "Twentieth-Century China"

[An] excellent book.-- "Journal of Chinese History"

Kuzuoğlu's achievements in Codes of Modernity are unmatched. Analyzing a dazzling array of transnational historical, linguistic, and communications phenomena, he presents nothing less than the ascendancy of China's twentieth-century political economy of information. Kuzuoğlu proves convincingly that it both shared features with and departed from global labor regimes of economy and efficiency.--Christopher A. Reed, author of Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu's Codes of Modernity is not only one of the most rigorous and fascinating histories of Chinese scripts ever written, it is also a story of media, of the conditions of thought and language, and of the technological mythologies structuring the goals of 'modernity' that were central to China's ongoing transformations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a field-defining book, as rich in analysis as it is in archival insights. Kuzuoğlu brilliantly reframes the history of China's efforts at language and script reform as part of a much larger economy of information and knowledge work. Codes of Modernity brings questions about the evolving conditions of Chinese orthography into conversation with the rise of information capitalism, computation, and global politics. Codes of Modernity will be indispensable to scholars of Chinese writing, but it also deserves a much wider readership--a book of archival treasures and powerful synthesis for anyone interested in the evolution of information technologies over the past two centuries.--R. John Williams, author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West

A brilliant book on the political economy of script reforms in modern China. For the first time, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu clarifies how the technologies of writing, such as the making of new or simplified scripts to manage labor, information flow, and so on, became increasingly central to the political struggles over the future of China and its place in the world. This rich and well-researched study is a major contribution to the fields of Chinese history and global history.--Lydia H. Liu, author of The Freudian Robot

About the Author

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.