Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade & digital technology.

Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, & a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.

With larger-than-life characters & an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected & a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised & expanded. 

Jing Tsu is John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures & Comparative Literature & Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale.  She specializes in Chinese literature, history, & culture from the nineteenth century to the present, & received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships & distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, & Princeton institutes.