The Sounds of Mandarin: Learning to Speak a National Language in China and Taiwan, 1913–1960 by Janet Chen

The national language movement in modern China is usually viewed as closely tied to nationalism, a concept that first emerged in Europe and gained wider prominence in the nineteenth century.¹ Inspired by powerful nation-states such as England, France, Germany, and Japan—each with established national languages—leading Chinese intellectuals and language reformers in the early twentieth century advocated for the creation of a unified national language.² They believed that such a language would bring national unity and strength and that building a standard national language should be an integral and vital part of the process of constructing a modern nation-state. In recent years, scholars in Chinese literature, culture, and history have shown a growing interest in language issues, producing an increasing number of interdisciplinary and intellectually informed book-length works. Chen’s book in the field of modern Chinese history makes an invaluable contribution by focusing on speech and the standard spoken national language. Her work engages with yet departs from existing scholarship, which has largely concentrated either on written script reforms³ or on nonstandard dialect issues in modern and contemporary contexts.⁴

Built upon impressively rich and solid archival sources, Chen’s book provides an extremely detailed account of the social and political history of China’s spoken national language—guoyu in the Republic of China and Taiwan and putonghua in the People’s Republic of China—during the country’s turbulent twentieth century. Taking a “from the ground up” approach (p. 3), Chen focuses on the practical question of how the spoken national language was taught and learned, especially in the first half-century after the 1913 Conference on the Unification of Pronunciation, which sought to establish a standard national pronunciation for the newly founded republic. Instead of a straightforward progress toward a unified speech as usually assumed, Chen reveals a bumpy and protracted journey, characterized by “quotidian negotiation and voluble contestation” (p. 3) and “heterogeneous realities of a national language” from the outset (p. 7). Her research vividly and meticulously illustrates the gaps, fissures, and disjunctions between the rhetorical visions of elites in education, government, and cultural arenas and the micro-realities and lived experiences of ordinary learners in classrooms and local communities during this process of transformation and implementation.

Although the umbrella term “Mandarin” appears in the book title and one chapter title, Chen dissects it and explores the histories of two specific Chinese terms, guoyu (national language) and putonghua (common language), which represent “historically specific moments of linguistic change” (p. 4). In the Introduction, she reviews the spoken language of imperial officialdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Qing court, guanhua (language of the officials), from which the Western term “mandarin” was derived. Chen highlights the crucial difference between guanhua, the informal lingua franca of the late imperial era, and the national language of modern times: the former was based on “a set of loosely articulated and generally accepted conventions,” while the latter is preoccupied with “fixing the standard and defining its normative properties with precision” (p. 15). The subsequent chapters, organized in chronological order, tackle the complex and daunting question of how the standard speech was defined, taught, and learned in the world’s most populous country, with its vast territory and thousands of regional dialects and speech varieties.

Surrounding the compromised, hybrid, and unnatural national pronunciation (the so-called old guoyin) set by the 1913 conference, chapter 1 explores the confusing and chaotic early efforts to define and teach the spoken national language during the 1910s and 1920s. Chen discusses the prolonged conflicts of the conference participants, illustrated by figures like Wang Pu, who “reinforce[d] his northern faction’s position” by claiming Beijing Mandarin “as the standard of the national language” in 1916 (p. 27), and Wu Zhihui, whose 1919 dictionary of national pronunciation was criticized “to further the southern faction’s agenda” (p. 36). Chen also analyzes the unstable and heterogeneous zhuyin zimu (“phonetic alphabet”). It was ostensibly created to spell out the national pronunciation, yet in practice, even staunch guoyu advocates effectively taught it using local dialect, a practice that Chen argues “presented a fundamental challenge to the coherence of the spoken national language” (p. 40). Far from achieving the “uniform and homogeneous” vision (p. 26), the national pronunciation(s) were varied and divergent in the pedagogical realities: Zhang Shiyi rejected the inauthentic guoyin and insisted on teaching Beijing pronunciation, while Li Jinxi adopted an “inclusive and adaptable” approach to aim for “mutual intelligibility” (p. 51); other educators either “excused the students from learning to speak it” or ignored the government mandate and “retained the classical language curriculum” (p. 54). Recognizing the significance of education in promoting guoyin, Chen highlights the crucial role played by publishers in developing and marketing learning materials. For instance, the first phonograph recording by Wang Pu in 1920 was supported by Lufei Kui of Zhonghua Books (featured on the book’s cover), while the rival Commercial Press recruited Chao Yuen Ren to produce a competing phonograph in 1921. Chen’s detailed research on these phonographs enriches our understanding of the old guoyin, which is inauthentic yet “intelligible” (p. 60).

Moving to the 1930s, chapter 2 surveys the changing linguistic soundscape under the rule of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [KMT]). While the 1932 dictionary established Beijing Mandarin as the standard national pronunciation (the so-called new guoyin), the implementation in textbooks proved inconsistent, described as “a tangle of conflicting approaches and contradictory information” (p. 68). Meanwhile, the new standard faced persistent challenges from various dialects, such as the rustic tuhua in the rural areas and Cantonese in Guangdong due to its “separatist regime” (p. 80). Moreover, leftist Latinxua advocates, who championed linguistic democracy and dialect accommodation, vehemently criticized the “hegemony of the national language” (p. 83), with some even proposing “the common language of Shanghai” as the basis for national speech (p. 85). In terms of sound technology, radio became a new medium for promoting the national language. However, Chen observes that on Central Broadcasting Station (with the call sign XGOA), the mouthpiece of the government and the largest radio station in the 1930s, “the national language made up only a small fraction” of the programming, which was largely dominated by entertainment shows in Cantonese, Southern Min, and other dialects and languages (p. 92). The early 1930s also witnesses the emergence of domestically produced sound movies in China. Chen offers a fascinating analysis of the actress Hu Die, whose proficiency in guoyu granted her “an exceptional advantage” (p. 97) in the pioneering “national language films” in urban Shanghai. Chen also discusses the popularity of Shanghai pop songs, rendered in the national language, such as Zhou Xuan’s theme songs featured in sound films. Still, the scarcity of dialogue in Chinese sound films, coupled with the uneven integration of guoyu, an “overdone” performance style (p. 99) and the “linguistic discordance” (p. 101), hindered the aspiration of using film as “the vanguard for promoting the national language” during that period (p. 98). In addition, in contrast to the strong authority of Mustafa Kemal’s Republic of Turkey, admired for its “earth-shattering” script reforms (p. 87), the KMT government struggled to effectively enforce its ban on dialect cinema, which flourished due to its profitable market and “audience preferences” (p. 106).

Chapter 3 delves into the divergent trajectories of the national language during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). For many, the foreign invasion was viewed as an opportunity to promote the national language for the sake of national salvation and unity. Drawing on extensive historical documents, Chen examines official efforts and personal experiences in teaching the national language across diverse locations, including Wuhan, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Chongqing, Sichuan, and Gansu. One of the most striking motivations for stressing linguistic unification in Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing regime was to serve the Japanese imperialist vision of a Greater East Asia. As Chen incisively comments, speech “could be subjected to a different calculus of loyalty or betrayal” (p. 127). Paying special attention to language pedagogy, Chen scrutinizes textbooks, teacher training programs, and teaching methods, including a creative proposal of a mahjong game to teach zhuyin fuhao (renamed as “phonetic appended symbols”) (p. 131). In the realm of artistic practices, spoken drama (huaju) distinguished itself with wenmingxi (“enlightened theater”) through its use of the “national language” in cities (p. 138), yet dialect drama proved most effective “to propagate the message in the countryside” during wartime (p. 139). Amid the language dilemmas in drama, the guoyu cinema with the message of national resistance gained much growth with the commercial success of Mulan Joins the Army (1939). Chen also contrasted film production in Shanghai and Chongqing, where Esperanto was even proposed as “the universal cinematic language” to reach rural audiences (p. 144). Regarding zhuyin fuhao, its pronunciation standard was relaxed to a principle of “not wrong” (p. 148) during the mass literacy campaign. In the multilinguistic border regions of the Northwest and Southwest, zhuyin fuhao was accommodated to annotate ethnic minorities’ languages to strengthen border security. However, this effort could be interpreted as “reinforcing linguistic divisions” (p. 160).

Chapter 4 shifts to postcolonial Taiwan and explores the triangular competition between the colonial language (Japanese), the national language (Mandarin), and Taiwan’s diverse tongues (Southern Min, Hakka, and the Austronesian languages spoken by the indigenous mountain peoples), aptly aligning with the chapter title, “Taiwan Babel.” Challenging the simplistic conventional narrative of a compulsory Mandarin-only language policy in Taiwan—which did not intensify until the 1970s—Chen unpacks the complexity and contradictions of the national language campaigns by focusing on the formative years of the post-retrocession period, particularly from 1945 to 1959. First, the use of the former national language, Japanese kokugo, was authorized as a medium to learn the new national language, Chinese guoyu, during the transitional years, although the new regime tried to “wipe out the linguistic vestiges of colonial rule” (p. 167). Second, by framing Southern Min/Taiwanese as “mother tongue” and a sibling to the national language, the local dialect was temporarily positioned as a partner to guoyu, with “an instrumental role to play in expunging Japanese” (p. 170). Chen observes that the gendered concept of the mother tongue was “activated as an emotive trope of maternal nativism” in late 1940s Taiwan. This rhetoric was employed to "coax" islanders to return to the fatherland, a term she translates from the Chinese zuguo (p. 173). Focusing on “temporal specificity” (p. 165), Chen recorded the brief period when mainlanders (waishengren) were also encouraged to learn the language of the local islanders (benshengren) during Wei Daoming’s governorship (1947–1949) to ease insider/outsider conflict following the 28 February incident (pp. 193–194). However, after the KMT’s ultimate defeat in the civil war, speaking either Taiwanese or Japanese was increasingly regarded as linguistic infidelity and disloyalty. Yet, despite repeated bans and criticism of a “slave mentality,” Japanese and Taiwanese persisted in schools, government offices, public spaces, and local assemblies—whether due to volition or ability.

The last chapter returns to Mainland China and investigates the political project and historical history of promoting putonghua in the socialist state since 1955, when the speech campaign was launched. The official narrative on the new term putonghua emphasizes its political and ideological distinction from the imperial guanhua and the KMT’s guoyu: the former “putatively originated from the masses” and the latter two are associated with “the bureaucratic and urban privilege” (p. 225). However, as Chen argues, putonghua was “saddled with the burden of several decades of linguistic aspirations and conflicts” and has accumulated “multiple and contradictory meanings over time” (p. 225). This makes it difficult to disentangle the guanhua-guoyu-Beijinghua-putonghua nexus. For example, speaking putonghua was often mocked as “putting on bureaucratic airs” (p. 231). Moreover, ridiculing someone who attempts to speak putonghua can either “buttress the status of the prestige language” or “signal a denial of putonghua’s claim to higher status” in a community, rather indexing emotional alienation and group exclusion (p. 233). In contrast, dialect is closely linked to a sense of belonging. Chen identifies an interesting discordance in the military metaphor of “know yourself and know your enemy, and you will be victorious in every battle” in using dialect-as-self to learn Putonghua-as-enemy/antagonist/adversary. On the real battlefield, the People’s Liberation Army became a key site for the putonghua campaign. However, Chen identifies “contradictory thoughts” and “linguistic divergence” in the official propaganda reports (p. 254). In a subsection titled “A Losing Battle,” Chen discusses the waning enthusiasm for putonghua, as political upheavals such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Movement diminished its prominence. Conversely, some political movements, like the Great Leap Forward, reinvigorated revolutionary zeal to popularize putonghua. Chen highlights the model villager Chen Jisi, who famously “conquered speech” (p. 269). Yet Lei Feng, the most celebrated role model of socialist China, “could not speak the common language” (p. 273). Chen concludes that while the Party achieved unprecedented “uniformity of expression” in political discourse at the lexical and semantic levels, its phonetic speeches “remained stubbornly resistant to uniformity” (p. 275).

In the epilogue, Chen briefly reviews the development of the national language in mainland China and Taiwan during the 1980s and 1990s. Given the book’s considerable length of over 400 pages, it is understandable that the author “could not give comprehensive treatment to the entire universe of concerns” (p. 295). For instance, Chen acknowledges that she did not analyze the significant role of mass media “such as television and film beyond the 1950s” in speech standardization (p. 295). She also briefly touches on how economic and trade developments accelerated the spread of a common language, with the example of Shenzhen in the 1980s. These factors, coupled with massive demographic migration facilitated by a nationwide infrastructure network, played an increasingly decisive role in promoting the use of putonghua nationwide as China entered the new millennium—a trend further reinforced by the enactment of the country’s first language law in 2001. In the Introduction, Chen updates readers on the penetration of putonghua, noting it reached 70% in 2013 and 80.72% in 2020. While she invites readers to interpret the data “through the lens of deficiency or achievement” (p. 2), her focus on the formative years of national pronunciation standardization highlights the unevenness, confusions, conflicts, and incoherence that characterized the journey of “making and unmaking a national language” (p. 295). From another perspective, however, the (over)promotion of putonghua in contemporary China has contributed to the sharp decline of diverse dialects, including the possible demise of the Shanghai Wu dialect—a topic explored by Fang Xu⁵ through the lens of urban sociology. The countermovement to preserve dialects, assert linguistic diversity, and resist the dominance of a monolingual education system resonates with Taiwan’s “give me back my mother tongue” campaign (pp. 288–294), albeit with less political substantiveness by comparison.

Chen’s research is impressively solid and rigorous, yet I have noted a few minor issues that warrant further discussion. First, the author argues that “nationalism is a necessary but insufficient lens for understanding the national language” (p. 6). However, the gap between the elites’ ideals and the conflicting realities of ordinary people in the nascent years—such as the national language being ridiculed or ignored—does not necessarily undermine the legitimacy of linguistic nationalism, as the author suggests. Instead, her argument could have been strengthened by emphasizing more compelling evidence of this insufficiency, such as the use of the zhuyin alphabet by Christians to spread the Gospel, as discussed in chapter 1, and the preference for dialects over the national language for more effective mass mobilization against Japan, as covered in chapter 3. Second, although the author explicitly differentiates between the imperial guanhua and the modern national language at the beginning of the book, guanhua—with its connotations of bureaucratic privilege and officialdom—frequently resurfaces in the subsequent chapters. While Chen briefly addresses the interchangeable use of these terms in chapter 5, a deeper exploration of its implications would be valuable. For instance, does this recurrence suggest that modernity is not an abrupt break from tradition? Or, in the context of the People’s Republic of China, does it expose the hypocrisy of Chinese Communist Party officials and cadres, who ostensibly claim to represent the masses? Third, the subtitle indicates the book’s scope spans from 1913 to 1960. While the starting point of 1913 is clearly defined, the rationale for choosing the specific year of 1960 as the endpoint is not thoroughly explained to readers. Fourth, on a fact check, the author claims that zhuyin zimu drew “from several different systems, including one that Wang Zhao had designed in 1900” (p. 24). However, she cites Kaske as a reference⁶, which instead primarily describes the differences between the old national pronunciation and the Beijing dialect. Moreover, according to Kaske (2008, p. 412), zhuyin zimu was based on a phonetic system originally designed by Zhang Binglin (Zhang Taiyan) and “revised or added [to] by his disciples.” Jing Tsu (2022), Chen’s second reference for this claim, similarly agrees that the Bopomofo zhuyin zimu ”overtook Wang’s Mandarin Alphabet,” which is Japanese kana-inspired (p. 40). In addition, Wang Zhao’s 1901 Mandarin Syllabary included forty-nine initials and fifteen finals, with the medial vowel incorporated into the initial—a structure that differs significantly from Figure 1.1 in Chen’s book (p. 25), which features twenty-four initials, three medial vowels, and twelve finals. Finally, there are several minor mistakes and typos to note. On p. 48, the name Li Jinxi is misspelled as “Lu Jinxi” (second paragraph), and the same error appears in note 56 on p. 302. On p. 308, note 76, Chen mentioned only the volume on dazhongyu edited by Xuan Haoping in 1935, but an earlier volume on the topic, Yuwen lunzhan de xian jieduan (the present stage in the debates on language and literature), was edited by Wen Yi in 1934. On p. 311, Zheng Zhengqiu’s article cited in note 144 is missing from the bibliography. In addition, on p. 361, Jiang Baigang’s article title should be spelled as “Shuo langsong” rather than “Shuo songlang,” with corresponding typos in four notes on p. 316. Given the extensive 100+ pages of dense notes and a comprehensive bibliography, these small errors are ultimately negligible.

Overall, The Sounds of Mandarin is an ambitious project and a monumental undertaking. Chen meticulously maps out a richly detailed history of the spoken national language across time and geography. Admirably, she has conducted extraordinary and painstaking archival research. Her invaluable primary sources encompass not only major cities like Beijing and Shanghai but also provinces, countless cities, counties, towns, and even villages across Greater China's vast landscape. These rich materials include not only various Han-dialect areas but also border regions inhabited by non-Han ethnic minorities, not only formal school and classroom settings but also battlefields, assemblies, silver screens, and radio broadcasts. Furthermore, she strikes a thoughtful balance between prominent figures, regional elites and intellectuals, local educators, and ordinary learners—both those in the North, who have a natural advantage in learning Mandarin, and those in the South. Chen is a highly skilled storyteller, demonstrating exceptional bilingual proficiency. With vivid and engaging language, her book offers lively, slang-filled accounts of diverse experiences and testimonials of (not) learning to speak the national language. It is an enjoyable and enlightening read. I highly recommend this book to scholars and students of modern Chinese history, Chinese (socio)linguistics, and language pedagogy. Finally, this book itself serves as a valuable historical record, and I strongly advocate for it to be translated into Chinese in the near future.