Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: UluÄŸ KuzuoÄŸlu, "Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Description: In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to a...