Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar ed. by Li Feng and David W. Branner (review)

One of the most fascinating subject areas in historical research is the origin of writing and literacy in human civilizations; it is also one of the most difªcult intellectual ventures in historical studies. First of all, what is "writing" or "literacy"? Second, should "writing" and "literacy" be treated as one subject or two separate intellectual domains? If we deªne writing as the process of creating symbols that allow concrete or intangible subjects to be remembered instantaneously and literacy as an instantaneous mental cognition of such symbols in a structured text, these two "actions" comprise a single subject area, though they progress separately. Yet, apart from this theoretical construct of the initial stage of "writing" and "literacy" in history, the fundamental questions about where and when writing and literacy began in China remain undeªned and unanswered.

Any endeavor purporting to cover all of the research about these issues has to be interdisciplinary, involving, at least, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, mythology, demography, and several branches of the natural sciences. Furthermore, since the constituent elements and dimension of literacy change with temporal and geographical contexts, any type of research design to measure literacy in a given time period can be no more than a working deªnition. Literacy is a function of deªned cultural and socioeconomic conditions in a delimited historical period. To achieve a deªned goal, researchers need to have a thorough grounding in the history, literature, intellectual diversity, and political and socioeconomic development of the period under investigation. Under the circumstances, the 2004 unesco deªnition of literacy, for example, is only a work of twenty-first-century hegemonic culture, not to be considered a universal standard for measuring literacy outside its narrow conªnes.

A number of scholars have accepted the challenge of studying writing and literacy in Chinese history, especially in China since the early twentieth century and in North America since the 1970s. To achieve their goals, they have employed different kinds of ªeldwork, designed different techniques of analysis, undertaken innovative research grammars, and utilized interpretive insights from various ªelds of comparative studies. In recent decades, various historical monographs about Chinese culture, state structure, popular literature, and urban development contain comments, inferences, and suggestions about the conªguration of literary abilities and possible literacy rates in different periods of Chinese history.¹

A theoretical construct for the period of Early China—from about 4000 B.C. (or the late Neolithic age) to the third century A.D.—based on these works and this reviewer's research, has established four developmental phases and stages: (1) the primary phases, the origins of writing in varying forms of graphs and designs and elemental (primitive) literacy in diverse regions of late Neolithic China (c. 4000 to 2000 B.C.); (2) the formation of a simple writing system from diverse groupings of mostly "regional" logographs and symbols and of the second stage of literacy (marked by a relatively large working vocabulary) during the Xia (Hsia) and Shang dynasties (c. 2000 to 1000 B.C.); (3) the progressive and transformative stage of Chinese writing and literacy from around 1000 B.C. into the 230s B.C., from the Shang-Zhou (Chou) transition to the beginning of feudal-imperial transformation; and (4) the mature and sophisticated stage of Chinese writing and literacy in the Qin (Ch'in) and Han eras (221 B.C.-220 A.D.) when the standardized script system comprised more than 9,500 words, and literacy had reached an estimated 0.8 to 1.2 percent of the population. Further archaeological discovery and ethnographic and linguistic ªeldwork will certainly enrich the many critical issues in this preliminary four-part construct.²

Writing and Literacy in Early China is a welcome contribution to this work. Stating the central theme of the volume to be "writing as...