The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (review)

Western views of Chinese-derived writing systems are often extreme. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz extolled the virtues of what he believed was a script that directly represented thought. Today we know that character-based writing is, like every other writing system, a representation of language, not thought, and that, in its use in Chinese at least, it is basically phonographic. But the system is unwieldly, and this has led many—from early reformers like Lu Xun onwards—to propose the complete elimination of characters in favor of simpler phonographic systems. William Hannas takes this view several steps further: not only is character-based writing inefficient, but by its nature it has severe social consequences, sapping the scientific creativity of an entire quarter of humanity. Clearly such a dramatic conclusion requires extensive support: while H is not the first to make this general claim, the seeds of which can also be found in his 1997 monograph, he has certainly made the most serious attempt to argue for it.

The first four chapters (8–112) are devoted to arguing that Japan, China, and Korea lack the capability of true scientific innovation. (Taiwan, oddly, is not discussed.) In support, H documents the institutions that the governments of these countries have established to reap the fruits of Western research. These include ‘joint ventures’ with Western institutions, the strategic placement of research labs near major Western universities, the hiring of foreign experts, campaigns for Western-educated expatriates to funnel information to the ‘motherland’, and outright industrial espionage. In discussing expatriates, H stresses that he is not claiming that East Asians are incapable of innovation: as he notes, East Asian scientists working overseas are among the most creative people in their disciplines; rather, something is sapping their creativity when they stay at home. For readers of Joseph Needham (1954–), who might object that China was once the most scientifically advanced nation on earth, H notes that even Needham felt that China was always very practically oriented and lacked the Western notion of abstract science.

But what IS creativity anyway? This is the topic of the fifth chapter (113–38) entitled ‘The anatomy of creativity’. The title is to be taken literally, since H argues that true creativity is a process that starts in the more analytical left brain, migrates for a period of rumination to the more fanciful right brain, where connections to ideas in possibly unrelated areas are explored, and then returns to the left, where the various strands of thought are synthesized into a coherent, implementable whole. In this, H intends to exclude the pop-psychological notion that any unconstrained ‘right-brain’ activity is creativity. Curiously though, one of H’s supporting citations is Julien Jaynes’s (1976) pop-psychological book on the ‘bicameral’ mind.

The connection of this to writing systems is introduced in Ch. 6 (139–67), where H explores the role of the alphabet in fostering creativity. Alphabets represent phonemes, and phonemes are an abstraction. Even illiterates are consciously aware of syllables, but phonemes require special training, such as one gets by learning an alphabet (cf. Faber 1992). Children acquiring alphabetic literacy engage in an analytic process that is highly unnatural. The alphabet thus becomes a ‘cognitive facilitator’, exercising the left/right-brain interactions that H claims are needed for creativity.

East Asian writing systems are the topic of Chs. 7–10 (168–262). East Asian writing, unlike alphabetic writing, is organized around the syllable. This is strictly true for Chinese characters as they are used for Chinese and Korean, as well as for Korean Hangul since, even though that system is segmental, the segments are organized into syllable-sized chunks. It is also mostly true for the Sino-Japanese pronunciations of kanji, though Japanese in general is more complex. But no matter: what Asian systems all share is their representation of linguistic units that supposedly require no analysis on the...