Description: A New York Times Notable Book of 2022After 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 and 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, and 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 and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
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End Time: 2024-12-26T23:19:37.000Z
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Literary Movement: Modernism
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Book Title: Kingdom of Characters: Language Revolution That Made China Modern
Narrative Type: Nonfiction
Author: Jing Tsu
Features: Dust Jacket
Publisher: Riverhead
Genre: History
Original Language: English
Topic: Languages
Country/Region of Manufacture: China
Edition: First Edition
