"Did Phonocentrism Drive Modern Chinese Script Reform and Chinese Cultural Modernity?"

Yurou Zhong's Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958 is a complex and ambitious examination of the role of script reform in the literary and cultural tides of early- and mid-twentieth-century China. A useful first step in summarizing and critiquing the book's arguments will be to explicate, with reference to the introductory chapter ("Introduction: Voiceless China and Its Phonocentric Turn"), some of the elements of the title: grammatology, script revolution, and the period 1916-1958.

In 1952, as the author notes, I. J. Gelb used the preexisting term "grammatology" to designate "a full science of writing." For modern linguists, thus, grammatology generally refers to the study (theory and history) of scripts and writing systems. In the realm of critical theory, however, the term is inseparable from its use in Derrida's 1967 Of Grammatology. Here—and we can only apologize for oversimplifying a complex, highly influential work—Derrida surveys and critiques a Western tradition, stretching from Plato to Rousseau to Saussure, that understands writing as a linguistic system derivative of speech and intrinsically incapable of fully and authentically reproducing its parent medium. This (mis)understanding informs a sense of lack and an impulse toward supplementarity, in both of which the Western understanding of language echoes and drives tensions more widely obtaining in Western metaphysics and hermeneutics. "Grammatology" refers to the deconstructive critique of this received understanding and to the possibilities such a critique opens up for a new science of the written language. The grammatology of our book's title, then, is not the Chinese writing system, nor the academic study of the Chinese writing system, but rather grammatology in this Derridean sense. And Derridean grammatology is present in two ways. First, it informs the author's definition of her object of study as the Chinese "script revolution," and the analytic approach she takes to this object. Second, it serves as the denouement of a chronological narrative, in which the author traces the script revolution's provenance, transmutations, and containment (the titles for the three parts into which the book's chapters are organized), and finds the end point of her tale in writings that she analyzes as prefiguring the Derridean critique and the alternatives it evokes—in the genesis of a Chinese grammatology.

The book's "script revolution" is a movement that "aimed to eliminate Chinese characters and implement a Chinese alphabet" (p. 1). Its motivating force is phonocentrism, "the systematic privileging of speech over writing" (p. 2). In other words, it is a twentieth-century Chinese instantiation of the understanding of the written language as properly representing speech, one that led to attacks on the traditional Chinese character-based writing system as failing in this function, and hence irredeemably backward, impractical, and unscientific. It also refers to attempts to replace Chinese characters with a writing system better suited to the needs of a nation joining the modern world under the aegis of science and democracy. Although Zhong finds precedents for phoneticization as early as the Han dynasty fanqie 反切 system (an annotative mechanism for precisely indicating the pronunciation of a Chinese character), she sees the twentieth-century script revolution as departing from its antecedents both in its radical rejection of character-based script and in its alliance with the New Culture and May Fourth movements' fundamental challenges to the texts, cultural values, and epistemology with which the traditional writing system was implicated. The script revolution was not a unitary movement but an impulse that took various forms. There were in the first place competing schemes for phonographic writing, different systems of alphabetization, and varying deployments of the privileged Latin alphabet toward phonocentric ends. None of these programs were capable of transcending the tensions and...