Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Within this ring of hostiles, the Chinese saw themselves at its centre, with a shared conception of civilised values, and a persistent aspiration to bring willing neighbours into their fold.

There were three features of the Chinese situation that kept their vast community not only centred but also united, socially and linguistically. The first was a fact about their human environment, which quite literally came with the territory that they inhabited. The second was an institution invented quite distinctively by the Chinese, which turned out to be remarkably persistent. And the third was the paradoxical result of the barbarian conquests when they came.

The fact was the periodic influx of hostile marauding nomads, speaking languages radically different to Chinese, and preying on settled Chinese farmers. This had an objective effect on the language, and a subjective effect on Chinese consciousness. Linguistically, the periodic influxes kept the northern Chinese population on the move, preventing it from settling into distinct dialect areas. But even when, as in the golden ages of the Han and the Tang, the barbarian threat was effecively countered for centuries at a time, the consciousness of barbarians at the gate still remained, naturally causing a greater sense of unity in the population. The external threat of invasion kept the Chinese focused on what they had to lose; and recurrent partial failures of the centre’s defences against it kept the north of China in flux, and so perversely maintained the cohesion of its spoken language.

The institution was the system of public examinations, persistent over thirteen centuries, where success was the key to a career in government. This meant that from a very early era China could boast a formally constituted civil service. When it was working, this had an effect on social order analogous to the influxes of invaders on the linguistic order. Both tended to reduce local groupings, and emphasise higher-level loyalties. The meritocratic civil service built loyalties to the state, and undercut the personal loyalties which, when the central government was weakening, tended to develop and split the country into the power bases of contending warlords. But it also had a further effect, bound up with the Chinese language.

The syllabus was almost entirely literary, including composition of classical poetry (introduced under the empress Wu at the end of the eighth century) and of the notorious bāgŭwén , ‘eight-legged essays’, which rigorously elicited clear expression of the ideas from the classical texts and their application to contemporary problems. As such, it could only promote national standards for the major language in which it was conducted, wényán , classical Chinese.

In this sense it is fair to say that the Chinese state, outside the imperial court, was constituted as the political manifestation of the Chinese literary elite. Cai Xiang, himself a brilliant product of the system, remarked negatively in the middle of the eleventh century:

Nowadays in appointing people it can be observed that they are advanced in office mainly on the basis of their literary skills. The highest office-holders are literary men; those attending the throne are literary men; those managing fiscal matters are literary men; the chief commanders of the border defences are literary men; all the Regional Transport Commissioners are literary men; all the Prefects in the provinces are literary men. [363] Translated by Mote (1999: 156), from Lin Tianwei (1977): Bei Song jiruo de sanzhong xin fenxi. Song shi yanjiu ji 9, 147-98.

Accounts of the examination system are full of caveats about the distance between its meritocratic theory and its aristocratic and plutocratic reality. It could hardly have been otherwise in an institution that lasted for over two thousand years, every so often dropped or reconstituted. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory it may often have been for the vast number of bright individuals whom it failed to favour (all women, for example, were excluded), it was never a dead letter: it always existed as a potential means which could be resurrected or reformed to bring new talent into power and influence, a built-in agitator of the sediments of the Chinese establishment, a perpetual grain of sand in the government oyster.

Just as invasion by Altaic hordes kept northern China’s populace on the boil, so the examination system, and appointments based on it, kept the power structures open. It therefore promoted the cohesion of the body politic as a whole, with a common language whose standards were clearly defined by the examination syllabus.

The paradoxical result was the fact that although China was ultimately unable to stem the pressure from militarised pastoral nomads, and had to yield its throne to the Mongols and the Manchus, China remained Chinese. The struggle with the barbarians was, in the last analysis, lost—yet it did not matter for the future of the language, or of the culture that it conveyed. In a way, Chinese showed that it could transcend the most fundamental defeat.

Strategically, this may be characterised—in Chinese terms—as:

— tōu liáng huàn zhù

Steal the beams, change the pillars. [364] Gao (1991: 145).

This maxim from the Chinese ‘36 Strategems’ refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy’s organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols—who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lordships—it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese institutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese. [365] Ramsey (1987: 224).

It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.

After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style. One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fashioned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of wényán , which went back to the fifth century BC, came báihuà , ‘white speech’, the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual pronunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature, [81] The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably Hongloumeng , “The Dream of the Red Chamber’, by Cao Xueqin, Sanguozhi Yanyo , ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyouji , ‘Journey to the West’, by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese. since at least the middle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business. [82] There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.