In 1973, thousands of people flocked to the streets of Hong Kong to witness the motorcade carrying Bruce Lee’s body down the street to the location where his funeral ceremony would be held. One of the billboards on display to commemorate the event bore the image of the young Mr. Lee in a tan suit with a caption that read, “Tsīng-nyén-rén duh Ǒh-syàhng, Jōng-gwóugh-rén duh Yīng-syóhng” (青年人的偶像，中国人的英雄—i.e. “a youth idol, a Chinese hero”).1 On the surface, this seems completely normal until one reflects upon Bruce Lee’s qualifications to be considered a “Jōng-gwóugh-rén duh Yīng-syóhng.” He was born in San Francisco. He lived and died in a Hong Kong that was British territory, not Chinese. He never went to the mainland and nobody in the mainland ever knew who he was until long after he was dead. Why was he not a “Mǎy-gwóugh-rén duh Yīng-syóhng” (美国人的英雄—i.e. “American Hero”), or even a “Yīng-gwóugh-rén duh Yīng-syóhng” (英国人的英雄—i.e. “British Hero”)? If we are to speak of him in terms of what country he belonged to in the sense of “shǔn-muh gwóugh-jyāh duh rén” (什么国家的人—i.e. “what country’s person”), then these were really the only two countries to which he ever had any connection. The claim that he was a “Chinese hero” requires a certain type of logic that presupposes that membership within the category of “Chinese” does not consist in citizenship provided by the People’s Republic of China or even territorial ties, but rather it consists in some kind of metaphysical connection with the notion of “China” itself. In fact, this was exactly the reasoning behind why all through his life Bruce Lee was indeed considered to be “Chinese.” Ironic it would seem, then, that as recently as October 1st, 2015, Time magazine would report that a group of protestors were carrying signs that read “Syāhng-gǎhng bú shr̀ Jōng-gwóugh” (香港不是中国—i.e. “Hong Kong is not China” ), a slogan that went viral on the Internet in a series of illustrations during the Occupy Central protests of 2014.2 On the other hand, in 2008 during the international portion of the Olympic protests, one of the common themes of the anti-Beijing protests was the slogan “Free Tibet,” calling for Tibetan independence. In response to the Anti-Beijing Olympic protests, massive crowds of pro-Beijing counter-protestors in Australia gathered, wearing white T-shirts with red lettering that said: “We are Brothers; We are Sisters; We are in One Family.”3 Such an inter-ethnically inclusive message stood in direct contrast to the online/social media firestorm that occurred the following year in 2009 in the wake of the Lòe Jīng (娄婧) phenomenon.

Lòe Jīng, who was born and raised in China her entire life, is the daughter of a Chinese woman and a black man. According to the CNN news special that published her story, her parents were not a married couple, and she grew up never knowing who her father was. By the time she made it to the semi-finals of the TV show Jyāh-yóe! Dōng-fāhng Tyēn-shř (《加油！东方天使》—i.e. “Come On! Eastern Angel”), she had become an Internet sensation in China that attracted an onslaught of racial prejudice and hate. Lòe Jīng herself in her interview with the CNN reporters said that growing up, people who always ask why her Mandarin was so good, to which she would reply “because I’m Chinese”, as if that was an obvious fact. This sentiment, however, stood in direct contrast to the claims of her online attackers who said that she should “get out of China” and that “she should have never been born.”4 On the surface, these four seemingly disparate events appear to be talking about different things. Yet, why is it that the locutions that served as the force behind these incidents have such common traits? That is to say, the core of all these cases seems to evoke a single common question—viz. under what criteria can an individual be legitimately considered to be a part of this mysterious category that common parlance calls “Chinese”? And perhaps more importantly, what is the philosophical significance of these differing definitions?

One factor, at the very least, that seems to be at the core of this controversy is essentially a language problem. Now, what exactly does this mean? As a point of initial reference, it would be prudent to examine this issue from the perspective of how it manifests itself in English. If the question at hand can be summarily described to be an issue of what or who is or is not “Chinese,” the anglophone is immediately beset upon by a dire conundrum. Similar to how a single context-less syllable in Mandarin can correspond to any wide number of characters, so too does the English word “Chinese” connote at the very minimum twelve different words in characters.

That is to say—

• Jōng-gwóugh-rén (中国人)

• Hwá-rén (华人)

• Hàn-dzoó-rén (汉族人)

• Hwá-tsyów (华侨)

• Hwá-yì (华裔)

• Jōng-gwóugh-hwàh (中国话)

• Jōng-wén (中文)

• Hàn-wén (汉文)

• Hwá-yéw (华语)

• Hàn-yéw (汉语)

• Jōng-hwá-mín-dzoó (中华民族)

• Hwá-dzoó (华族)

all translate into the single English word Chinese. The difficulty that confronts the English-speaker when addressing this question at this point becomes irrevocably clear. Assuming the absence of the aforementioned vocabulary distinctions, any claim made in English with regards to whether or not something is or is not “Chinese” is rendered essentially meaningless by the ambiguities inherent in the word, because each one of these twelve distinctions—as speakers of Mandarin will readily recognize—are defined along radically different parameters and invoke radically different implications depending on which of the twelve “categories” a speaker references.

Unfortunately, the immense difficulties caused by this kind of linguistic ambiguity—as counter-intuitive as it may initially seem to the anglophone—are not gracefully cast off by abandoning English in favor of Mandarin to deal with these categorical difficulties. This is because, even in Mandarin, there are only two methods one may choose from regarding the system of terminology that one employs to analyze and quantify the aforementioned set of questions. The first is called “Semantic Equivalence,” and is by far the most widely used method among most non-academic circles in China. Unfortunately, it is also the most problematic and the most prone to clashes in categorical parameters—viz. the separating lines that differentiate one category from another are unclear, flexibly negotiable, and thereby inevitably result in contradicting ambiguities. The second method—the method that I emphatically prefer and indeed utilize for the purposes of this paper—is called “Literal Translation.” This method is predominately characterized by a rigid adherence to the implications inherent in the terms themselves, nearly bordering on the level of etymology. This kind of rigidity allows for the construction of a system of terms, labels, and reference points that are both internally consistent and relatively resilient against subjective interpretation or contextual inferences. But first, a brief word about Semantic Equivalence is warranted in order to firmly establish the logical process of this paper and clearly demarcate the cavernous pitfalls this paper seeks to avoid and the motivations to do so.

Semantic Equivalence, simply stated, is an approach to language usage that seeks to translate a concept from one language into another on the basis of understood meaning. The particular word is wholly inconsequential so long as this function is served—viz. it is the meaning, as opposed to the word, that is being “equated” across languages. Expedience and practicality in communication is really the only operating criterion in word-selection under this framework. Ergo, a word like mín-dzoó (民族) becomes “nationality”; a word like Hán-gwóugh (韩国) becomes “Korea”; a word like gwóugh-jyāh (国家) becomes “country,” etc. It is a system that is deceptively elegant and indeed, in the realm of common parlance, it gets the job done for the most part when the central concern is merely “getting the meaning across.” However, what happens when finer distinctions are required, when the slightest ambiguities in a term’s definition can instigate endless equivocation? If mín-dzoó means nationality, then how does one say “ethnicity” in Mandarin? Is a “nationality” different from a “nation”? And if nation is also translated as gwóugh-jyāh, then how does Mandarin differentiate between a “nation” and a “country”?

Carrying this illustration further, people often speak of Korean Culture, Korean Media and Korean History; however, if Mandarin equates these things to “Hán-gwóugh Wén-hwà” (韩国文化), “Hán-gwóugh Máy-těa” (韩国媒体), and “Hán-gwóugh Leè-shř” (韩国历史) respectively, then is the implication that the Mandarin language framework understands “Korea” to be a super-category that subsumes “North Korea” (朝鲜), implying that the former is more philosophically paramount than the latter? If not, and the Mandarin language regards “Korea” and “North Korea” to be parallel categories on equal footing, then why does Mandarin refer to the events of the Imjin War (壬辰战争) as “Hán-gwóugh Leè-shř” as opposed to “Chów-syěn Leè-shř” (朝鲜历史)? These issues perfectly illustrate the inescapable deficits of Semantic Equivalence. This is particularly true when it comes to questions regarding China, because the stakes are so astronomically high. That is to say, because China is so ponderously vast both materially and conceptually, there exists a massive spectrum of diversity and variances within the category of what properly defines “Chinese” that one must account for in a rigidly consistent fashion. To illustrate this point, consider the following example:

The word for China in the Mongolian language is Hyatad Uls (хятад улс). Although Uls does mean gwóugh (国—i.e. “country), Hyatad very conspicuously does not mean Jōng (中—i.e. “middle”); rather, it means Hàn (汉). Now, under a Semantic Equivalence framework, these details are not even remotely important, because both terms convey a general idea of “China” to their respective audiences. However, the implications of this kind of discrepancy are immediately problematic from a philosophical perspective. Is “China” indeed justifiably understood to be “Hàn-gwóugh” (汉国)? Depending on how one answers this question, the parameters of what or who may be properly considered to be “Chinese” drastically changes. This is exactly the reason why Semantic Equivalence, even in Mandarin—with its twelve distinctive vocabulary words—is still extremely problematic.

Furthermore, Mandarin is also faced with another awkward language problem regarding term labeling. Namely, the relationship between Jōng-gwóugh (中国) and Jōng-hwá Rén-mín Gōng-húh-gwóugh (中华人民共和国) is also not clearly defined. Are these two things independent concepts, or is the former or an abbreviation for the latter? It’s a discrepancy that even exists in English—viz. is “China” strictly reducible to a shorthand reference for “The People’s Republic of China”? The difficulties of this ambiguity are actually the same in both languages. If the two are synonymous, then it is impossible to say that there was any such thing as “China” prior to 1949. The layman—when presented with this dichotomy—may attempt to suggest a context-based solution. That is to say, depending on the context of a given claim or statement, the word China can mean “The People’s Republic” or can mean the metaphysical entity serving as the common connecting thread through history that prevents one from saying that the various Chinese dynasties—like the Han (汉), Tang (唐), Song (宋), Ming (明), etc.—were separate “countries,” thereby forging an understanding that subsumes all these disparate historical periods as a part of a single entity known as “China.” But again, by forcing a single word to do double-duty on representing two different meanings is extremely problematic, not only because distinguishing which definition is being referenced becomes dependent upon inference, but also the lack of immediate clarity often prevents a lucid investigation into the definitive criteria that separate the two meanings.

To a certain extent, English is able to dodge this difficulty by making use of a single abbreviation—i.e. the “PRC.” This shorthand allows anglophones to very concisely reference a clearly demarcated entity in time and space whose parameters are essentially universally agreed upon, leaving a relatively sterile space to determine what does or does not constitute “Chinese” or “Chinese-ness” in the broader sense. Hence, while “China” may have 5000 years of continuous history, the PRC does not; Confucius may be said to be a man of “China”, but not a man of the PRC; to say that Taiwan is a part of “China” has very different implications than saying that Taiwan is a part of the PRC; and so on and so forth. This kind of shorthand distinction does not currently exist in Mandarin. When the Mandarin-speaker needs to make a strictly clear reference to only the PRC, his only recourse is to write out the full name in its entirety (ie. 中华人民共和国)—a practice that is exhausting to both the writer and the reader, and indeed, is exactly the reason why the term Jōng-gwóugh (中国) is functionally useless in the context of a philosophical investigation that must begin from first principles.

The necessity for this kind of distinction is by no means a new problem. Even dating all the way back to the Warring States Period (战国时代), there was always an overarching idea of Hwá-syàh (华夏). Furthermore, who and what properly fit into that category was also a major question in both the literature of that time, as well as the political and philosophical thought that developed from that literary canon. The traditional dichotomy between “Chinese vs. Barbarian” (夷夏) was born out of this exact intellectual climate. The situation, in many ways, is directly comparable to that of the ancient Greeks. Long before Alexander the Great created a single monolithic political entity known as the Greek Empire, during the time when the Hellenic Peninsula and assorted islands were nothing more than a collection of independent city-states, there still nevertheless existed an idea of an overarching “Greece” that served as the common thread that connected them all; a common “identity” the city-states voluntarily rallied around during the Peloponnesian War. The same was also true for China. This is extremely significant, because according to the modern political emphasis on “sovereignty” and the definition typically attached to the word, the seven warring kingdoms in China’s Central Plains region were all independent kingdoms or “countries.” Under the modern paradigm of “state-sovereignty” über alles, this naturally begs an awkward question—viz. which one was “China”?

However, if one assumes—as the literati did during the Warring States Period—that the metaphysical idea of “China” stands independent of whatever the political borders of the time may be, then these sorts of questions are essentially a moot point. Under this model, questions of “state sovereignty” or the de facto or de jure status of any particular entity have no bearing on whether or not something was a part of “China”. Just as Athens, Sparta, Corinth and the other city-states were “Greek”, so too were Wáy (魏), Yēn (燕), Chěw (楚), and the other kingdoms “Chinese.” It is a powerful idea; and indeed, it is the idea—as I argue later in this paper—that allowed the idea of “China” to endure as an intact concept when the state split into three separate countries at the end of the Han Dynasty, into more than ten independent countries at the end of the Tang Dynasty, or any of the other times that the land was subdivided along political lines. For this reason, the inventory of more than twelve vocabulary terms previously mentioned are both incredibly valuable and incredibly useful.
Specifically, the distinction between Jōng-gwóugh (中国) and Jōng-hwá (中华) possesses the potential to create a platform upon which the two senses of the single word “China” can be adequately distinguished from one another—a distinction that is nearly impossible to make in English. However, despite such fantastic potential, the distinction between these two terms—i.e. Jōng-gwóugh versus Jōng-hwá—is not a perfect remedy, which further reinforces the previous point about how using Mandarin does not automatically evade the ambiguities of English terminology. The problem is essentially threefold. At this juncture, this paper has already expounded upon the first fold at relative length—viz. the deficiencies of Semantic Equivalence plague the word Jōng-gwóugh much in the same way that it plagues the English word China. The second problem, however, rests in the word Jōng-hwá. Unlike the word Jōng-gwóugh, which is simultaneously imbued with two separate meanings due to the Semantic Equivalence framework, the word Jōng-hwá suffers from a condition in which the parameters of its meaning have no clear demarcations. Now, what exactly does this mean? Simply stated, the word Jōng-hwá sees such limited use in common parlance that there does not really exist any sort of consensus on its exact definition. To be sure, most citizens of the PRC know that Jōng-hwá means “China” in some broad or general sense; however, how exactly one ought to differentiate Jōng-hwá from Jōng-gwóugh is far from clear, let alone universally agreed upon. Initially, this may appear to be a golden opportunity from the perspective of a scholar seeking to comprehensively address these issues. On this kind of relatively sterile platform, all one needs to do is propose an internally consistent definition for the word and then carry out the analysis accordingly. After all, human language is by its very nature arbitrary and really only derives its value from transmitting meaning from one party to another; ergo, any definition can be acceptable provided that it is both coherent and understood. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that language use, even in the context of Literal Translation, is not as clinically sterile as initial consideration may seem to suggest, which segues directly to the doorstep of the third problem.

From the inception of the PRC in 1949 all the way until Mao’s death in 1976, PRC-based academics had no choice but to shoehorn scholarly discourse on nearly any topic into an explicitly Marxist-Leninism framework. By way of simple example, “Social Realism” determined the value of artistic expression; wars and instances of social unrest in China’s history universally became classified as “proletariat activity,” and even trans-ethnic interactions suddenly became instances of “class struggle.” Hence, it should come as no surprise that any topic pertaining to how people groups were defined also needed to conform to a Marxist-Leninist framework. In particular, it was the machinations of Stalinist thought that had the greatest impact on how PRC citizens came to understand these terms. Indeed, it was on the basis of Stalinist thought that a fixed schema arose to encircle and subsume the very paradigm upon which these ideas interact and interrelate. In 2011, a research fellow and lecturer on Chinese politics at the University of Manchester named Elena Barabantseva published a book entitled Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism with Routledge—an English multinational publisher specializing in academic books and journals—in which she had the following to say regarding this subject:

Chinese communists developed their position on the national issues in line with the positions of Soviet leaders, especially Stalin. These positions significantly differed from Western Weberian interpretations of an ethnic group or nation. The Weberian approach emphasizes self-ascription as a main characteristic of an ethnic group, while Soviet and Chinese communist approaches saw the nation as an objective type of social group which could be measured by a set of criteria…According to this interpretation, the nationality question reflected the class struggle within society and was a manifestation of “a peasant question.” Stalin saw its solution in the unity of the world proletariat.5

In this context, the Soviet legacy is at the very least undeniable, and has the capacity to inject significant equivocation into the philosophical discourse at hand, much in the same way that the Semantic Equivalence does. This is readily observable in such innocuous cases like the word mín-dzoó (民族). The astute Mandarin-speaker—upon encountering the earlier correlation between mín-dzoó and nationality—may have potentially taken issue, suggesting instead that the word nationality is more appropriately rendered as gwóugh-jeé (国籍) in Mandarin. This is, after all, the way it is noted on the Entry-Exit cards one fills out when passing through PRC immigration at the airport. To a certain extent, it would almost seem to be more appropriate to render mín-dzoó as “ethnicity” in English, were it not for the awkward reality that Mín-dzoó Wén-hwàh Gōng (民族文化宫) is rendered as the “The Cultural Palace of Nationalities,” Mín-dzoó Chēw-bǎhn-shùh (民族出版社) as the “Publishing House of Minority Nationalities,” and even according to the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English Edition (汉英双语现代汉语词典) published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2002—one of the most academically authoritative dictionaries in current use—the word Mín-dzoó Jěw-yì (民族主义) is defined as “Nationalism.” Now, this is not to say that there are no instances in which the word Mín-dzoó is rendered as “ethnicity” (e.g. the State Ethnic Affairs Commission—viz. 国家民族事务委员会), but the central point here is that Soviet influence on these words and terms is inescapable and must be adequately recognized and accounted for in order for any discourse on these questions to be successful. In particular, how this kind of “Soviet ambiguity” negatively affects coherent analysis on the meaning of Jōng-hwá (中华) and its sister term Jōng-hwá Mín-dzoó (中华民族) will be further discussed at length in the following section.

At this point, the immense difficulties inherent in this enterprise should be abundantly clear. The task of clearly, coherently, and consistently establishing the meanings of the words that all collapse into the singular English catch-all term “Chinese” and evaluating the philosophical implications of those meanings is exactly what this paper seeks to undertake. To that end, this paper will be roughly divided into three broad sections—

Part One will address the question of how people have commonly understood the meaning of being “Chinese,” especially starting from the late 1800’s and even up until today. That is to say, I intend to analyze the idea that “Chinese” is tied to a specific ethnicity and the philosophical implications and problems that such a model entails; both in the context of the early Republic of China all the way to the modern PRC “mainstream narrative.”

Part Two, which emphasizes a more “historical” vantage point, addresses the traditional understanding of what it meant to be “Chinese”—specifically, from the perspective of so-called “acculturation” and acceptance of certain ideas. Now, what exactly does this mean? The deficiencies of the first part, quite often, are openly acknowledged, particularly by those with deeper understanding of China’s history. What usually arises in response to this is an appeal to what I term the “Confucian Cultural Model,” by which I mean that, through emphasizing Confucian thought and philosophy, one may seemingly bypass the logical problems contained in this paper’s Part One to arrive at a truly “universal” understanding of what it means to be
“Chinese.” However, what I seek to demonstrate in Part Two is that this model also possesses some profoundly fatal flaws; flaws that irrevocably undermine the “universality” that this model ostensibly professes, which is extremely problematic, particularly from a contemporary perspective.

The final section of this paper, Part Three, is arguably the most ambitious of the three parts, perhaps even bordering on the audacious. Generally speaking, the standards of formal academic writing regard apathetic examination to be the hallmark of a scholar. The zeitgeist of modern academia seems to suggest that by doing so, the apathetic examiner increases the epistemic value of his work, ever aspiring to attain the unequivocal apogee of objectivity. However, philosophy—unlike many other disciplines within the humanities—does not permit the practitioner any kind of repose within the realm of mere analysis. Philosophy, by its very nature, demands the assertion of normative truth, limited not to merely what is, but venturing into what ought to be. It is upon this act that the philosopher creates, and it is here, on this ground, that I commit myself to go beyond simply descriptive, historical, and anthropological analysis. With the questions clear and the deficiencies of the traditionally common solutions laid bare, what this paper will propose, in essence, is a philosophical model based on Taoist cosmology that can parse out the various meaning of the word Chinese in a way that is both logically consistent and philosophically significant—viz. a series of interconnected categories and subcategories that uses philosophical first principles to justify the architecture of their interrelationships. Technically speaking, the “names” that this paper ascribes to the labels attached to the various parts of the proposed model are insignificant. What is vital is how the various parts of the system interlock and relate to one another, and it will be upon this metric that one must determine whether the model proposed herein succeeds or fails.

跨过范围之垒：论“中国性”的哲学含义

导言

1973年，数以千计的民众涌上香港街头，目送载有李小龙遗体的车队缓缓驶过，前往举行葬礼的地点。现场一块展示于追思活动的广告牌上，印有年轻的李先生身着淡褐色西装的图像，其下附有一行题词：「青年人的偶像，中国人的英雄」。6表面看来，此事似乎理所当然，然而一旦深究李小龙究竟凭何资格被称为「中国人的英雄」，便不禁令人陷入沉思。他生于美国旧金山，居住于彼时仍是英国殖民地的香港，并在那里去世。他从未踏足中国大陆，并且大陆人直到他去世很久之后才知道他这个人。何以他不被看成「美国人的英雄」，抑或「英国人的英雄」？若从「什么国家的人」这一意义上论及其所属，则他与这两个国家才是真正有所关联的。声称他是「中国人的英雄」，需要借助一种特定的逻辑——这种逻辑预设了：「中国人」这一范畴的成员资格，并不取决于中华人民共和国所授予的公民身份，亦不取决于地缘纽带，而在于与「中国」这一概念本身之间某种形而上学的连结。事实上，正是出于这样的逻辑，李小龙一辈子都被视为「中国人」。然而耐人寻味的是，就在2015年10月1日，《时代》杂志报道称，有一批抗议者手持「香港不是中国」的标语走上街头——这一口号曾在2014年占领中环抗议运动期间，通过一系列插图的形式在网络上广泛流传。7另一方面，2008年北京奥运会时，在国际圣火传递期间的抗议浪潮中，「藏独」成为国际上针对北京奥运的示威见主题之一。与此同时，在澳大利亚，大批北京支持者则穿着印有「我们是兄弟；我们是姐妹；我们是一家人」红色英语字母的T恤聚集，以便回应那些反对北京的示威。8这一超越族裔界限、涵盖各族群的讯息，与翌年2009年「娄婧」现象所引发的网络舆论风暴形成了鲜明对比。娄婧自幼在中国出生、成长，是一位中国女性与一名黑人男性所生的女儿。据CNN播出的相关专题节目报道，其父母并非夫妻关系，她自幼便不知道生父是谁。待她晋身电视节目《加油！东方天使》半决赛之际，她已在中国成为引发大规模种族歧视与仇恨的网络热点人物。娄婧本人在接受CNN记者采访时表示，成长过程中，当人们询问她为何普通话说得如此流利时，她就回答「因为我是中国人」，仿佛这是一个不言而喻的事实。然而，这一感受却与她的网络攻击者的言论大相径庭——那些人叫嚣她应该「滚出中国」，声称「她根本不应该出生」。9表面上看，上述四件看似毫无关联的事件，似乎各自谈论着迥然不同的议题。然而，为何驱动这些事件的话语表达，竟呈现出如此高度的共性？换言之，这些事例的核心，似乎共同指向同一个问题——亦即：究竟依据何种标准，一个个体才可以被正当地视为属于那个通称为「中国人」的神秘范畴？也许更重要的是，这些关于「中国人」的不同定义在哲学方面上有什么意涵？

至少有一个因素，似乎是这场争议的核心所在，而这本质上是一个语言问题。然而，这究竟意味着什么？作为初步的参照，从英语视角审视这一问题如何呈现，或许不失为谨慎的切入点。若将这一议题概括为「何物或何人是或不是『Chinese』」的问题，以英语为母语者便立刻陷入一个严峻的困境。正如普通话中一个脱离语境的单音节，可能对应数量繁多的不同汉字，英语中的「Chinese」一词，亦至少涵盖以下十二个汉字词语：

• 中国人

• 华人

• 汉族人

• 华侨

• 华裔

• 中国话

• 中文

• 汉文

• 华语

• 汉语

• 中华民族

• 华族

以上词语皆可译为英语的单一词汇「Chinese」。英语使用者在面对这一问题时所遭遇的困境，此刻已清晰可见，无可回避。如果他们不知道“Chinese”可以代表12个中文词组，“Chinese”这个单词的先天歧义使得任何用英语来界定一样东西是或者不是“Chinese”在本质上毫无意义。因为不知道说话者指的是“Chinese”这个单词12个中文翻译的哪一个，每一个的定义以及所引发的暗示都存在巨大差别——尽管说普通话的人轻而易举能够辨别。

遗憾的是，这种语言歧义所造成的重重困难——尽管对英语使用者而言，起初或许显得有悖直觉——并不会因为舍弃英语、改用普通话来处理上述类别问题而迎刃而解。这是因为，即便在普通话中，用以分析和量化上述问题的术语体系，亦仅有两种可供选择的方式。第一种称为「语义对等法」，是迄今为止中国大多数非学术圈最广为采用的方式。然而，它也是问题最多、最容易引发类别冲突的方式——换言之，区分各类别的边界模糊不清、具有弹性，因而不可避免地导致相互矛盾的歧义。第二种方式——本文明确偏好并采用的方式——称为「字面翻译法」。这一方式的主要特征，是对词语本身所蕴含的内涵近乎严格的恪守，在程度上几乎近于词源学的层次。这种严谨性允许构建一套术语、标签与参照点的体系，使其既具有内在一致性，又相对能够抵御主观诠释或语境推断的干扰。但首先，有必要就「语义对等法」略加说明，以便确立本文的论证脉络，并清晰地标示出本文力图规避的重大逻辑陷阱及其缘由。

所谓「语义对等法」，简而言之，是一种以理解意义为基础、将某一概念从一种语言译入另一种语言的语言使用方式。在这一框架下，只要能够达到传递意义的目的，具体选用何字词完全无关紧要——即被「对等」的是意义，而非词语本身。可以说，在选词方面，便捷性与实用性是这一框架唯一的运作标准。因此，「民族」一词译为“nationality”；「韩国」译为“Korea”；「国家」译为“country”，如此等等。这套体系表面看来颇为优雅，在日常话语层面，当核心诉求仅在于「传递意思」时，它确实大体能够胜任。然而，当需要更为细致的辨析，当某一术语定义上最细微的歧义都可能引发无休止的含混时，又当如何？若「民族」意指“nationality”，那么「族裔」（ethnicity）在普通话中如何表达？“nationality”与“nation”是否有所不同？若“nation”亦被译为「国家」，那么普通话又如何区分“nation”与“country”？

进一步推演这一例证：人们时常谈论韩国文化、韩国媒体与韩国历史；然而，若普通话将这些概念分别对应为「韩国文化」、「韩国媒体」和「韩国历史」，则其言下之意是否意味着，普通话的概念框架将「韩国」视为一个统摄「朝鲜」的上位类别，从而暗示前者在哲学上较后者更为根本？若非如此，而普通话将「韩国」与「朝鲜」视为地位对等、并列的范畴，那么何以普通话将壬辰战争中的相关事件称为「韩国历史」，而非「朝鲜历史」？这些问题恰恰揭示了「语义对等法」难以摆脱的根本缺陷。这一点在涉及中国的问题上尤为突出，因为其中的利害关系极为重大。换言之，由于中国在物质与概念两个层面均具有庞大的体量，「中国人」这一范畴的恰当定义所涵盖的多样性与差异性极为广泛，必须以严格一致的方式加以处理。为说明这一点，试考虑以下例子：

在蒙古语中，「中国」一词为「хятад улс」（Hyatad Uls）。尽管「улс」（Uls）确实对应「国」，但「хятад」（Hyatad）显然并非「中」的意思，而是对应「汉」。在「语义对等法」的框架下，这些细节根本无足轻重，因为两个词语都向各自的受众传递了「中国」的大致概念。然而，从哲学角度而言，这种出入所蕴含的意义却立刻令人感到不安。「中国」是否确实可以合理地被理解为「汉国」？如何回答这一问题，将从根本上改变何物或何人可被正当地视为「中国人」的定义范围。这正是「语义对等法」即便在普通话中——尽管拥有十二个各具特色的词汇——依然问题丛生的根本原因所在。

此外，普通话在术语标示方面还面临另一个令人尴尬的语言问题，即「中国」与「中华人民共和国」之间的关系并无明确界定。这两者究竟是相互独立的概念，还是前者不过是后者的缩略？这一分歧在英语中同样存在——亦即，“China”是否严格地只是“People’s Republic of China”的简称？这一歧义所造成的困难，在两种语言中实际上如出一辙。若两者同义，则1949年以前根本不存在所谓「中国」，便成了无可回避的结论。面对这一二元对立，普通读者或许会尝试提出一种基于语境的解决方案，即依据特定表述或陈述的语境，「China」可指「中华人民共和国」，也可指那一形而上学的实体——作为贯穿历史的共同纽带，使人们不至于将汉、唐、宋、明等各个中国王朝视为各自独立的「国家」，从而形成一种将所有这些纷杂的历史时期都统摄于「中国」这一单一实体之下的理解。然而，强迫一个词语承担两种不同含义，同样是极为有问题的做法——不仅因为辨别究竟援引哪种定义只能依赖推断，而且词义本身缺乏清晰直接的界定，往往妨碍对两种含义之间确定性区别标准的深入探究。

在一定程度上，英语可以借助一个缩略词来规避这一困难——即「PRC」。这一简称使英语使用者得以简洁明确地指涉一个在时间与空间上均有清晰界定、其范围获得普遍认可的实体，从而留下一个相对纯净的空间，用以确定何物或何人在更广泛意义上构成「中国」或「中国性」。因此，「中国」或许有五千年连绵不断的历史，而PRC则没有；孔子或可谓「中国」之人，但并非PRC之人；说台湾是「中国」的一部分，与说台湾是PRC的一部分，所指涉的含义截然不同；如此等等。这种简称区分在普通话中目前并不存在。普通话使用者若需严格且清晰地单指中华人民共和国，唯一的选择便是将全名逐字写出（即：「中华人民共和国」）——这对写作者与读者而言都极为繁琐，也正是「中国」一词在任何必须从第一原则出发的哲学探究中实际上毫无用处的根本原因。

这种区分的必要性绝非新兴问题。早在战国时代，便已有一个统摄性的「华夏」概念广泛流传。此外，何者可以恰当地纳入这一范畴，也是当时文献及由此文学典籍所衍生的政治哲学思想中的重大命题。传统意义上「夷夏之辨」的二元对立，正是在这一思想氛围中应运而生的。这一情形在许多方面与古希腊的境况直接可比。早在亚历山大大帝建立起一个统一的单一政治实体「希腊帝国」之前，当赫勒尼半岛及周边岛屿不过是一系列独立城邦的集合之时，依然存在着一个统摄性「希腊」的概念，作为联结各城邦的共同纽带；一种各城邦在伯罗奔尼撒战争期间自愿凝聚于其旗帜下的共同「认同」。中国的情况亦然。这具有极为重要的意义，因为依据现代政治对「主权」的强调及其通常所附的定义，中国中原地区的七个交战诸国均为独立的王国或「国家」。在「国家主权」至上的现代范式下，这自然引出一个令人尴尬的问题——即其中哪一个才是「中国」？

然而，若像战国时期的士人那样预设「中国」这一形而上学观念独立于彼时任何政治疆界之外而自足存在，则此类问题便几乎成为无从置喙的伪命题。在这一模式下，任何「国家主权」问题，或任何特定实体的事实或法理地位，对于其是否属于「中国」均不具任何决定意义。正如雅典、斯巴达、科林斯及其他城邦皆为「希腊」的组成部分，魏、燕、楚及其他诸国亦同样是「中国」的组成部分。这是一个强大的观念；事实上，正是这一观念——正如本文后文所论——使「中国」这一概念得以在汉朝覆亡后三国鼎立、唐朝终结后十数国分立，乃至其他任何土地沿政治疆界遭到瓜分之际，依然作为一个完整的概念得以延续。有鉴于此，上文所列十二个以上词汇的存在，既弥足珍贵，亦大有裨益。

具体而言，「中国」与「中华」之间的区别，具有创建一个平台的潜力，使「中国」这一单一词语所承载的两种意涵得以充分区分——这种区分在英语中几乎是无从实现的。然而，尽管潜力如此可观，「中国」与「中华」之间的区别并非完美的解决之道，这进一步印证了前文关于使用普通话并不能自然规避英语术语歧义的论点。这一问题本质上涉及三个层面。就此，本文已就第一个层面作了相当篇幅的阐述——即「语义对等法」的缺陷，使「中国」一词陷入与英语「China」相似的困境。然而第二个问题存在于「中华」这个词本身。与「中国」不同，后者因「语义对等法」的框架而同时被赋予了两种各异的含义；「中华」的问题则在于，其意义的边界缺乏清晰的界定。这究竟意味着什么？简而言之，「中华」在日常话语中使用频率极低，导致其确切定义至今并无广泛共识。固然，大多数中华人民共和国的公民都知道「中华」在某种宽泛或概括的意义上指「中国」，但如何将「中华」与「中国」加以区分，远未有清晰的答案，更遑论普遍的共识。初看之下，这或许为寻求全面处理上述问题的学者提供了一个难得的机遇。在这样一个相对纯净的平台上，所需做的只是提出一个内在一致的词语定义，并在此基础上展开分析。毕竟，人类语言在本质上具有任意性，其价值实际上仅在于将意义从一方传递至另一方；因此，任何定义都可以是可接受的，只要其既连贯、又可被理解。然而事实上，语言的使用——即便是在「字面翻译法」的语境下——并不如初步考虑所呈现的那般在临床意义上纯净无染，由此直接引出第三个问题。

自1949年中华人民共和国成立，直至1976年毛泽东辞世，中国大陆的学术界别无选择，不得不将几乎任何议题的学术话语都强行纳入明确的马克思列宁主义框架。举几个简单的例子：「社会现实主义」决定着艺术表达的价值标准；中国历史上的战争与社会动荡无一例外地被归类为「无产阶级活动」；就连跨族裔的互动，亦突然摇身一变，成了「阶级斗争」的表现。因此，凡涉及人群如何被界定的议题，同样必须符合马克思列宁主义的框架，亦就不足为奇了。就影响而言，尤以斯大林主义的运作机制，对中华人民共和国公民理解相关术语的方式产生了最为深远的影响。正是在斯大林主义思想的基础上，形成了一套固定的图式，将这些观念相互作用与关联的整个范式加以围拢与统摄。2011年，英国曼彻斯特大学中国政治研究员兼讲师埃琳娜·巴拉班采娃（Elena Barabantseva）在学术出版机构Routledge出版了一部题为《海外华人、少数民族与民族主义》的著作，书中就这一课题作出了如下论述：

中国共产党人依循苏联领导人尤其是斯大林的立场，发展了自身在民族问题上的立场。这些立场与西方韦伯主义对族群或民族的诠释存在显著差异。韦伯主义的方式强调自我归属是族群的主要特征，而苏联及中国共产主义的方式则将民族视为一种客观的社会群体类型，可以通过一套标准加以衡量……依据这一诠释，民族问题是社会内部阶级斗争的反映，是「农民问题」的一种表现形式。斯大林认为其解决之道在于全世界无产阶级的团结统一。10

在这一脉络下，苏联遗产的影响至少是无可否认的，且有能力像「语义对等法」一样，向当前的哲学话语注入大量含混。这一点在「民族」这一看似无害的词语中便清晰可见。敏锐的普通话使用者——在读到早前将「民族」与“nationality”相对应时——或许已提出异议，主张“nationality”在普通话中更恰当的对应词应为「国籍」，毕竟这正是在机场办理中华人民共和国出入境手续时所填写的入境卡上的用语。从某种角度而言，若非因为「民族文化宫」被译作“Cultural Palace of Nationalities”、「民族出版社」被译作“Publishing House of Minority Nationalities”，乃至2002年外语教学与研究出版社出版的《汉英双语现代汉语词典》——现行使用中学术权威性最高的词典之一——亦将「民族主义」界定为“Nationalism”，则将「民族」译为英语中的“ethnicity”，似乎几乎更为恰当。此处并非要表明「民族」从未以“ethnicity”的形式出现（例如「国家民族事务委员会」即State Ethnic Affairs Commission），而是要强调：苏联对这些词语及术语的影响无处不在，必须得到充分的认识与正视，方能使相关问题的任何话语讨论取得成效。尤其是这种「苏联式歧义」如何对「中华」及其姊妹词「中华民族」的连贯分析产生负面影响，将在以下章节中进一步详加讨论。

至此，这一论题所固有的重重困难，应已清晰可见。清晰、连贯、一致地确立那些在英语中全部归并为「Chinese」这一笼统词汇的词语之含义，并评估这些含义的哲学意涵，正是本文所致力完成的任务。为此，本文大体分为三个宏观部分：

第一部分将探讨人们对「中国人」含义的普遍理解，尤其是自十九世纪末直至今日。换言之，本文意图分析「中国人」与特定族裔相关联的观念，及这一模式所蕴含的哲学意涵与问题；考察范围涵盖中华民国早期直至现代中华人民共和国「主流叙事」的整个脉络。

第二部分以更具「历史」视角为重心，审视「中国人」传统意涵的理解——具体而言，从所谓「文化习化」（acculturation）与对特定观念之接纳的视角切入。这究竟意味着什么？第一部分的种种缺陷，常常被那些对中国历史有更深理解的人公开承认。由此通常引发的回应，是诉诸本文所称的「儒家文化模式」——即通过强调儒家思想与哲学，似乎得以绕开本文第一部分所含的逻辑困境，从而抵达一种对「中国人」之意涵真正「普遍」的理解。然而，本文第二部分所意图揭示的，是这一模式同样具有若干深刻的致命缺陷——这些缺陷从根本上动摇了这一模式表面上所宣称的「普遍性」，在当代视角下尤为令人忧虑。

本文的最后一部分，即第三部分，可以说是三个部分中最具抱负的，甚至不乏大胆进取之意。一般而言，正式学术写作的规范，将超然中立的审察视为学者的标志。当代学术的时代精神似乎表明，超然的审察者借此提升其研究的认识论价值，始终致力于攀登客观性的至高峰。然而，哲学——有别于人文学科中的诸多其他领域——不允许实践者在纯粹分析的层面安于现状。哲学就其本质而言，要求主张规范性真理，不仅限于描述「是什么」，更需涉及「应当是什么」。正是在这一行为中，哲学家得以创造；也正是在这片土地上，本文立志超越纯粹描述性的历史与人类学分析。在问题已然厘清、传统常见解决方案的缺陷已悉数揭露之后，本文本质上意图提出一种以道家宇宙论为基础的哲学模型，能够以逻辑一致且哲学上意义深远的方式，解析「中国人」一词所承载的各种意涵——即一系列相互关联的类别与子类别，以哲学第一原则为其相互关系的架构提供正当性依据。就技术层面而言，本文赋予所提议模型各组成部分的标签名称，并不具有根本意义。至关重要的，是这一体系各部分之间的咬合方式与相互关系；也正是依据这一标准，才能判断本文所提议的模型究竟成功与否。

The story of how my master’s thesis came to be is an odd one, particularly in the realm of academic research. The paper that would eventually earn me my graduate degree from one of China’s top two universities was not the product of sober contemplation spent pouring over dusty tomes in the Peking University library—though I did do plenty of that during my time at that institution. Rather, in the semester leading up to my final year, I awoke in the middle of the twilight hours one night and sat straight up in my bed, possessed by a frenetic energy I had not felt in many years. There were times, when composition played a more active role in my life, wherein similar circumstances would overtake me, waking from deep slumber having dreamed of music that resulted in a fully-formed orchestral symphony playing in my head, compelling me to rush to my piano and write everything down as fast as I could before the memory evaporated. This, however, was the first time I had ever experienced such comprehensive inspiration in the context of discursive prose. Regardless, the procedure was identical, and so for the next several hours I wrote frantically. There was no outline; there were no notes; my pen moved with a frenzy that completely defied the typical stop-and-go pacing of my usual writing. The words gushed forth in a straight line, charging from one point to the next. By the time I had finally set down my pen, the sun was already high in the sky. What resulted from this scribal flurry was a philosophical tractate on the Chinese cultural identity, individual masculinity, and motorcycle riding—a stream of consciousness that probably would have made the likes of Hunter S. Thompson grin at the very least.

It is very possible that I will eventually share that writing here. Despite the text’s intellectualism, it is a manic description of vision, and so it lacks the cross-examined vigor of a self-referentially coherent argument. This attribute, by itself, is not necessarily a defect, but it did create a conundrum in the context of my academic life. I was approaching the time when I needed to submit my thesis topic and initial draft to my academic advisor, but there was no way I could submit a treatise that concludes with an injunction to Chinese men to use the motorcycle club subculture as a tool to revitalize the Chinese identity and its cultural sphere. Nevertheless, I knew that this fever dream masquerading as a monograph contained the essential substance of my thesis topic; I just did not know how to frame it yet—and so over the course of several months, I simply sat with it.

The philosophical question I needed to answer was itself simple—what is the fundamental element or principle that sits at the core of all expressions and variations of the Chinese cultural identity, thereby clearly delineating who does or does not count as “Chinese”? If I could provide an answer to this question that did not have any exceptions to the rule I proposed, then I had a thesis. I was already awash with various status quo explanations, but every single one of them was riddled with logical holes and edge cases that demonstrated that their standards were not comprehensive, which—to be sure—was enough to start writing my thesis, but insufficient to present the case for which I would ultimately need to argue. Eventually, I stumbled upon Liáng Shùmíng’s 1921 book Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies as well as his 1949 book The Substance of Chinese Culture. In these texts, he explains that the essential function of a culture is to establish a framework that determines how members of that culture relate to existence itself. The term that I extrapolated from his argumentation was “spiritual posture,” which enabled me to argue that the core idea at the center of Chinese culture was the Taoist conception of, well, the Tao (道). In other words, I argued that “being Chinese” was a byproduct of Taoist cosmology and metaphysics. Any people group that possessed a cultural understanding that mankind’s relationship to Being was governed by the Tao, by this metric, qualified as a subcategory of “Chinese.” However, despite the fact that I successfully passed my thesis defense, I would later realize that couching my argument within this framework was ultimately a mistake, not because my conclusion was inaccurate per se, but rather because Liáng Shùmíng’s theory of cultural substance was not actually deep enough to demonstrate what I was trying to argue, which is something my academic advisor warned me about when I first proposed my topic to him. Although I did not know it at the time that I was writing the original version of my thesis, the essential idea I was looking for was actually contained in a separate book written by one of Liáng Shùmíng’s contemporaries—viz. The Spirit of the Chinese People by Ku Hung-ming. Initially, this thin collection of essays appears to be even more superficial than Liáng Shùmíng’s two publications; however, Ku Hung-ming’s cursory exposition anticipated the philosophical tour de force that would, just a couple generations later, collapse the entire Western intellectual tradition upon itself—viz. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Although Ku Hung-ming used English to write the original text of his book, it is functionally impossible for a Western audience to actually understand what he was talking about in The Spirit of the Chinese People without first having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which means that between 1915 and 1974—the publication dates of these two books—it was essentially infeasible to explain the core of Chinese civilization without immediately defaulting to mysticism. Given the tools that I had available to me at the time, I understand why I constructed my argument the way I did, but to quote one of my modern Western philosophy professors that I had during my undergraduate work, I had inadvertently “slapped the ‘mystery button’ too early.”1

There is now something very peculiar beginning to arise in public discourse—something that I never expected to see—viz. Open discussions and normative argumentation about the Manchu legacy, the coherency of the Chinese as a category of people, and even the implications of miscegenation in diaspora—questions over which I have obsessively ruminated throughout the majority of my intellectual life, and the commentary as it currently exists is not what it needs to be. There is much that I have to contribute, but the substance of that contribution—at least in its clearest form—comes from the material I presented at my thesis defense, which is in turn merely a byproduct of the sudden inspiration that nearly bordered on psychosis in the middle of the night all those years ago.

Ergo, reproducing that work as a serialized online monograph is my opportunity to rectify a previous error. By default, my thesis consists of an introduction and three main sections, the first two of which seek to dismantle the commonly proffered explanations about what it means to “be Chinese.” None of these parts require extensive revisions. By contrast, the third main section is where the majority of work awaits me. Regardless, by the end of this project, what I hope to complete, and indeed ultimately share, is my thesis as it should have been—the argument that I should have presented at my master’s dissertation defense. Only time will determine whether I succeed.

Let’s get started.

跨过范围之垒：论“中国性”的哲学含义

网络版序言

我的硕士论文究竟是如何形成的，这个故事颇为离奇，尤其是在学术研究的领域中更是如此。那篇最终使我从中国两大顶尖高校之一取得研究生学位的论文，并非源于我在北京大学图书馆中埋首故纸堆、冷静沉思所得——尽管我在那所学校求学期间，的确也做了大量这样的工作。相反，就在我升入最后一年之前的那个学期里，某天深夜时，我忽然从睡梦中惊醒，猛地从床上坐起，浑身被一种多年未曾体验过的狂热能量所支配。过去在作曲仍然是我人生中更为核心的一部分时，我也曾多次经历类似的情况：从沉睡中骤然醒来，梦中所闻的音乐竟在脑海中化作一部完整成形的交响乐，于是我不得不立刻冲向钢琴，以便能够尽快将一切记录下来，唯恐记忆转瞬蒸发。然而，这是我第一次在论述性散文的领域中经历如此全面而完整的灵感爆发。尽管如此，其过程却完全相同。于是，在接下来的若干小时中，我近乎疯狂地不停书写。没有提纲；没有笔记；我的笔势狂乱奔涌，彻底违背了我平日写作那种停停走走的节奏。文字如洪流般沿着一条直线倾泻而出，从一个观点猛冲至下一个观点。等到我终于放下笔时，太阳早已高悬天际。而这场书写狂潮最终所产生的，是一篇关于中国文化认同、男性个体气质，以及摩托车骑行的哲学论述——一种意识流式的文字，其风格至少足以让像｜亨特·汤普森｜这样的人露出会心的微笑。

我很有可能终究会在这里将那篇文章公开。虽然文本的书卷气极为浓重，但它本质上仍是一种近乎狂躁的“异象描写”，因此缺乏经过反复熟思而形成的、内部一致论证所应有的严密力量。这一特征本身未必构成缺陷，但它却在我的学术生涯中制造出一个困局。当时，我已经临近必须向导师提交论文选题与初稿的阶段，但我显然不可能递交一篇最终以号召中国男性利用摩托车俱乐部亚文化来复兴中国身份认同及其文化领域为结论的论文。然而，我同时也意识到的是，这场伪装成学术专著的高烧幻梦，确实包含了我论文主题最核心的实质内容；我只是不知道该如何对其进行理论框架化而已。于是，在接下来的若干月份中，我只能不断地与它共处、反复沉思。

我所需要回答的哲学问题本身其实比较简单——究竟是什么样的根本性元素或原则，位于一切“中国文化认同”表现形式与变体的核心，从而能够明确划定谁应当、谁不应当被归类为“中国人”？如果我能够对这一问题给出一个不存在任何例外情况的答案，那么我便拥有了一篇毕业论文。当时，我已经被各种既有的主流解释所包围；然而，这些解释无一例外都充满了逻辑漏洞与边缘案例，足以证明它们所提出的标准并不完备。诚然，这已经足够让我开始撰写论文，但却不足以支撑我最终所必须提出并捍卫的论证。后来，我偶然读到了｜梁漱溟｜于1921年出版的《东西文化及其哲学》，以及他1949年的《中国文化要义》。在这些著作中，他指出的是，文化最本质的功能，在于建立一种框架，以便决定文化成员应当如何与“存在”本身共存。我从其论证中进一步引申出的术语，是“精神姿态”。借助这一概念，我得以主张的是，中国文化核心处的根本观念，其实正是道家思想对于“道”的理解。换言之，我当时的论点是：“成为中国人”乃是道家宇宙论与形上学的副产品。任何一个民族群体，只要其文化理解中包含“人类与存在之间的关系乃受‘道’所支配”这一观念，那么依照这一标准，它便应被视为“中华文明”的一个子类别。然而，尽管我最终顺利通过了论文答辩，后来我却逐渐意识到的是，将我的论证安置于这一框架之内，终究是一种错误。这并不是因为我的结论本身不准确，而是因为｜梁漱溟｜关于“文化本体”的理论，其实并不足以深入到足以证明我真正想要论证之事的程度；而这一点，其实在我最初向导师提出选题时，他就已经提醒过我了。当年撰写论文初稿时，我尚未意识到的是，我真正寻找的那个核心思想，其实存在于另一位与｜梁漱溟｜同时代人物的著作之中——即｜辜鸿铭｜的《春秋大义》。起初，这本薄薄的随笔集看起来甚至比｜梁漱溟｜的两部著作还要浅显。然而，｜辜鸿铭｜那种看似粗略的阐述，实际上却预示了一个后来足以令整个西方思想传统自我崩塌的哲学壮举——即｜罗伯特·波西格｜的《禅与摩托车维修艺术》。

尽管｜辜鸿铭｜当年使用英语来撰写《春秋大义》的原文，但事实上，若西方读者没有先读过《禅与摩托车维修艺术》一书，那么他们几乎不可能真正理解｜辜鸿铭｜所谈论的意思。这意味着，自1915年至1974年——即这两本书的出版年代之间——人们几乎不可能在不立刻诉诸神秘主义的情况下，真正解释中国文明的核心。对我当时所拥有的理论工具而言，我能够理解自己为何借助那种方式构建论证；但借用我本科时期一位现代西方哲学教授的口号来说，我当年无意中“过早按下了‘神秘按钮’”。2

如今，在公共舆论中，正开始浮现出某种极为奇特的现象——一种我从未预料会出现的情况——亦即人们开始公开讨论并规范性论证关于满清遗产、中国人作为一种人群类别的内在一致性，乃至于海外离散群体中的混血问题。这些问题，几乎贯穿了我大半个思想生涯的反复沉思；然而，当下存在的相关评论与讨论，却远远没有达到它本应达到的水平。关于这些问题，我有许多内容可以贡献；而这些贡献中最清晰、最核心的部分，其实正来源于我在硕士论文答辩时所呈现的材料；而这些材料，本质上又不过是多年以前那个深夜里，那场几乎逼近精神错乱边缘的突发灵感的副产品而已。

因此，将那项工作重新整理为一部连载式网络专著，对我而言，正是一次纠正过去错误的机会。按照原本的结构，我的论文由导论与三个主体部分构成，其中前两部分旨在拆解人们对于“何谓中国人”所提出的各种常见解释。这些部分基本无需大幅修订。相较之下，真正等待我投入大量工作的，则是第三主体部分。无论如何，我希望在这一项目结束时，最终能够完成并公开分享的，是“那篇本应存在的毕业论文”——也就是我原本就应该在硕士答辩中呈现出来的论证。至于我是否能够成功，则唯有时间能够给出答案。

那么，开始吧。

See Hwayih Woen Project

Abstract

This document provides an overview of Hwayih Woen (华裔文), a system that uses Chinese characters to write the English language.1 This system is composed of two primary layers: the Junior Script and the Senior Script. The Junior Script contains 48 phonetic characters that represent the 48 sounds of the English language, while the Senior Script mixes standard Chinese characters with phonetic characters to enable Chinese characters to represent English words on the basis of their meanings. This white paper highlights the benefits of using Chinese characters to represent the English language, including the ability to acquire a vast Chinese character vocabulary without having to first learn a second language, while also emphasizing the accessibility of Hwayih Woen to monolingual English speakers who do not have access to traditional language learning environments, whether inside or outside the classroom.

Part One: Development History

The genesis of this project began in 2017, when the author was teaching English to native Mandarin speakers in southern China. Despite Chinese having zero connection to any alphabetically represented language, the use of Roman letters, since the dawn of the 21st century, is universal across the mainland. In no small measure, this is largely because the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn romanization system, by central edict, is entrenched in every elementary and secondary school in the country. However, despite this universal familiarity with the names of the Roman letters, the students’ ability to understand the sound values inherent to the letters was consistently dysfunctional, a situation easily predicted from the fact that the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn system ascribes non-English sounds to Roman letters, which, when combined with the idiosyncrasies of the English orthographic system itself, created a multi-layered problem that the generic Mainland student had to simultaneously overcome in order to make the meaningful progress required to avoid frustration, and ultimately quitting.

Arguably, the most immediate problem facing the students was the inability to visually represent, on paper, the aural phenomena that the classroom environment expected them to recognize and vocally reproduce. The inconsistencies of English spelling created a situation in which written English provided zero visual aid to the students; instead, creating greater learning difficulties as opposed to serving as a legitimately effective pedagogical tool. Compounding this problem even further, the traditional American diacritic system (e.g. “ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ,” to indicate short vowel sounds) used to teach native English speaking kindergartners phonics was also ineffective in the classroom, because the students were too young to adequately differentiate between what was a phonetic symbol versus what was an English letter, a problem deriving from the simple fact that both systems are based upon the Roman alphabet, resulting in extreme visual similarity (to say nothing of the mainland students’ propensity to consistently and reliably mistake the short-vowel diacritics for Hànyǔ Pīnyīn third-tone annotation marks). This, combined with the Roman alphabet basis of the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn system itself, confounded Chinese students as young as 7 and 8 who faltered underneath the requirement to simultaneously juggle three completely different orthographic systems that, from their perspective, were visually indistinguishable from one another, in addition to the quadrate script of their own native language, as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet—a system as equally problematic as Hànyǔ Pīnyīn due to visual similarity with the general Latin script, but nevertheless still serving as the universal default go-to within the Chinese education system for notating English pronunciation when the spelling is unreliable.

The classroom needed a system that could: A) adequately represent the sounds of the English language on a 1:1 sound- to-symbol ratio basis and B) was visually distinct from the Roman alphabet. After some research, the author discovered that there did indeed exist historical systems that explicitly sought to accomplish this goal, the more notable ones being Deseret in the United States—a completely original alphabet developed by the LDS church under Brigham Young—and Shavian in the United Kingdom—an orthographic script developed by Ronald Kingsley Read in the mid-1950’s. The objective of both these non-Latin scripts was the same: to provide a simple, phonetic orthographic alternative for the English language to replace the vagarious vicissitudes of conventional spelling, while avoiding the visual impression that the newly reformed spelling standards were simply “misspellings.” According to these parameters, either Deseret or Shavian would have been perfect pedagogical tools for the mainland Chinese ESL student. However, when the instructor employed either Deseret or Shavian in the classroom, the students immediately resisted due to the visual unfamiliarity of the script. In other words, having to learn an entirely new writing system from the perspective of the students was a task so daunting that the mental resources necessary to memorize the shapes of each new symbol impeded their ability to memorize the sound values those symbols were supposed to represent.

Fortuitously, this was exactly the time when the author discovered the work of Jonathan Stalling, a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma who created the Stalling Chinese Character Phonetic Transcription System, colloquially referred to as “Pinying” (拼英)—an obvious play on the word Pīnyīn. Like Deseret or Shavian, Pinying also seeks to account for all the sounds of the English language based on a 1:1 sound-to-symbol ratio. However, unlike the former two systems, Stalling’s system ascribes the English sound values to the square logographs of the students’ native language—viz. Chinese characters. Upon discovery of Professor Stalling’s work, the genius of his system was immediately apparent. By using Chinese characters to represent English phonetics, the mainland ESL student had a way to fully reproduce sound on paper in a way that was visually distinct from the Latin alphabet, yet also immediately accessible by virtue of his native language. But even more curious was the way in which Stalling’s system handled English sounds that did not exist at all in Mandarin (e.g. both variants of the “th~” sound). For those sounds unique to English, Professor Stalling invented brand new and wholly original characters that do not actually exist within the standard Chinese lexicon—a practice that has historical precedent from Russian Orthodox priests who also “invented” new characters to represent sounds unique to the Slavic languages back in the 19th century as a pedagogical tool. But even more astonishing was the fact that mainland ESL students— including those as young as 7 and 8 years old—did not reject Stalling’s artificially generated characters as they did the Deseret or Shavian phonetic symbols, a phenomenon readily explainable given the requirements for literacy in the students’ native language. But what exactly does this mean? The Jōng-hwá Dz̀-hǐgh (中华字海), the largest in-print Chinese character dictionary compiled in 1994, consists of 85,568 different characters. This means that most monolingual Chinese speakers go to the grave without having learned how to read, write, or speak anywhere between 80~85% of their own language. Ergo, encountering wholly unfamiliar characters is a recurring fact of life that begins in kindergarten and technically never ends, regardless of how much schooling the native speaker may or may not achieve. What this creates in the mind of the native speaker is a disposition that is receptive to Chinese characters even if the character’s sound value is unknown. Whenever the native Chinese speaker encounters an unfamiliar character, he never asks himself: “what is this?” —as he would with Deseret, Shavian, or any other non-Latin or non-Chinese based script. Rather, the question is always: “how do I pronounce this character?”— followed immediately by reaching for a dictionary. This kind of reaction becomes so predictably entrenched that it, in a sense, transforms into a meme. The brilliance of Stalling’s system is that it uses this peculiar feature of the native Chinese speaker’s mind as a self-reinforcing mechanism to impel the student to focus on unique English sound values based on a 1:1 sound-to-symbol ratio while simultaneously avoiding the inherent psychological rejection of unfamiliar symbols!

The implementation of Stalling’s system into the classroom proved to be an immediate success, providing the students with exactly the tools they needed to visually represent, on paper, new and/or unfamiliar sounds. However, technical compatibility issues immediately surfaced when the author attempted to scale the system across the entire teaching staff under his management at the time. Specifically, while Pinying was perfectly feasible in the context of a single instructor writing examples on a whiteboard or students writing out exercises on sheets of paper, it was nearly impossible to create any kind of digitized documentation or customized teaching material simply because the characters Professor Stalling created did not exist in Unicode. The initial measures taken to address this issue were simply to hard substitute the characters that did not exist in Unicode with extremely rare characters that, nevertheless, did exist in Unicode—the rational being that by using rare characters that most native Chinese speakers did not themselves know, the instructor could surreptitiously supersede the dictionary mandated Mandarin pronunciation with an English phonetic value in the minds of the students (much in the same way that, for example, the letter Q in Hànyǔ Pīnyīn bears absolutely zero resemblance to how the letter is actually pronounced in English). This workaround, while viable, was technically a departure from Professor Stalling’s system. At this point, a design decision had to be made. If only a portion of Stalling’s lexicon was modified for Unicode compatibility, there would be a version tracking problem introduced to both the instructors as well as the students; videlicet, it would be visually unclear as to whether a string of Chinese characters was using Stalling’s original system or the author’s “customized” version of Pinying. Furthermore, the vast majority of Stalling’s lexicon consists of commonly used characters—the justification being that they provide pronunciation “hints” to the students. Consequently, rather than alter Pinying’s original form, the author decided to create a parallel structure that mapped over Professor Stalling’s formulation, one that consisted entirely of rarely used characters that still nevertheless existed in Unicode. In other words, every sound in the English language can be represented by one of two different characters: the Pinying original, and an obscure yet Unicode compatible character selected by the author based on shared pronunciation with the former, similar to how each letter in the English alphabet also can be represented by two different forms— capital and lowercase. Professor Stalling’s original character map was—for the most part—left unchanged and regarded as the majuscule form, while the Unicode friendly character is regarded as the minuscule form.2

This here was the seeding genesis of the entire Hwayih Woen (华裔文) system. It began as nothing more than a parallel structure founded upon Professor Stalling’s work to facilitate digital input as well as weening students off visual hints to reproduce English sounds.

Part Two: Implications & the Case for Use

Given the development history just elaborated in the previous section, the utility of the system to the mainland ESL student should, at this point, be patently obvious. However, after the author completed the original majuscule-miniscule binary structure, a further utility began to emerge, a utility directly applicable to the inverse demographic of the author’s original target audience: Anglosphere Overseas Chinese.

Throughout the entire Anglosphere, long-standing Chinese enclaves define the landscape of any sufficiently large metropolitan area, a fact proven by the existence of some form of “Chinatown” in every major urban center in the West. Entire generations of Chinese people have been born and raised inside these Chinatowns, giving rise to colloquialisms—such as ABCs (American Born Chinese), BBCs (British Born Chinese), CBCs (Canadian Born Chinese), etc.—to refer to the native populations of these enclaves. Within these communities—often, but not always, centered around some variant of church congregation— language attrition is an inescapable fact of life, and is the typically the earliest indication of wholesale assimilation, a process that typically achieves irrevocable completion within about three to four generations. This predictably repeated process arises from several concurrent factors.

First, the linguistic environment of the Anglosphere is oppressively monolingual. This does not mean that there do not exist large populations who speak non-English languages. On the contrary, the English-speaking countries by and large use the word “multiculturalism” as a tool to exalt themselves. However, these linguistic populations do not perpetuate themselves. If one already speaks a non-English language, one can certainly find opportunities to use it in the Anglosphere. However, if one does not already understand the language, the barrier of entry to these language populations is functionally impossible to surmount because there does not exist a clearly defined pathway by which one can gradually increase linguistic prowess and eventually become a full standing member of any given language community.

Second, education in the Anglosphere guarantees that the only language that possesses such a systematic path to proficiency is English and English alone. Dual immersion private schools are a phenomenon that arose in the United States only after the year 2000, and even twenty years après, dual immersion schools still remain a tiny fraction of the private education industry, to say nothing of how much further the percentages become suppressed when taking into account the lion’s share of the public education system in the general education market. By and large, the Overseas Chinese born into these enclave communities go to English medium schools starting from kindergarten all the way to university, whether public or private—a significant contrast to the Overseas Chinese communities in places like Malaysia or Indonesia, where Hwá-yěu Shyué-shyàw (华语学校) have a long and entrenched history. This kind of environmental pressure massively incentivizes individual families to make English the language of the home in order to accord with the requirements of their children’s education (to say nothing of the commonly seen phenomenon in which children of immigrant parents refuse to speak their heritage language even if the parents attempt to make it the language of the home). The traditional counterbalance to this issue—assuming the enclave is centered around a church or other religious and/or community organization—is to provide what is known as “Chinese school” over the weekend, stereotypically after church services finish on Sunday afternoon. However, these programs are rarely effective, because the students see little purpose in expanding what is already a packed school and extracurricular schedule, which in turn renders parents forcing their children into weekend Chinese school an unsustainable practice that usually ends well before the students even get to middle school.

Third, contrary to the assumption of nearly every single mainlander, Mandarin is in fact NOT the lingua franca of these enclave communities—it’s usually Cantonese. But even then, linguistic uniformity is far from guaranteed because of the massive sprachbund differences between the Hakka, Fukienese, and Teochew, all of whom have representation in the Overseas Chinese populations (to say nothing of the Mandarin speaking minority from Taiwanese immigration). This creates a situation in which children born into these enclaves are not necessarily able to use the language they learned from their parents (assuming they bothered to learn it at all) with their peers, forcing a default to English among the children even further because it’s the only available common language. All these factors coalesce to create the commonly seen archetype of the Overseas Chinese individual who is conversationally functional in neither Mandarin nor regional dialect; or if he is, he is essentially guaranteed to be wholly illiterate in characters, save for the three that comprise his own name. But ultimately, what does any of this have to do with the Hwayih Woen system?

As was already explained in the previous section, the Junior Script exclusively uses the majuscule phonetic characters. However, what such a system provides—being able to phonetically represent any word in the English language—is the ability to incorporate any number of known characters into writing that is immediately deployable. The significance of this cannot be understated. Countless Overseas Chinese students in the Anglosphere leave their Sunday afternoon Chinese school tenure no more literate than when they entered in large part because there is no way for the characters they learn in class to be reinforced via repeated use. When a student memorizes Chinese vocabulary, he has no idea how to use it because a lack of sufficient grammatical and syntax knowledge prevents him from doing so, which leads to forgetting previously learned vocabulary in the process of studying new ones. Japanese and Koreans traditionally never had this problem because they both used Chinese characters to write their own languages, a feat made viable due to the overlapping tolerances of their own domestic quadrate orthographies. But what exactly does this mean? The astute reader will immediately recognize that neither Japanese nor Korean uses Chinese characters exclusively. Neither Japanese nor Korean are isolating languages like the Sinitic languages are. Rather, they are syntactically synthetic, requiring verb conjugations and case endings to indicate various parts of speech. Both these cultures indigenously developed phonetically representative orthographies based on the structural principles of Chinese characters (in the case of Hangul), if not directly upon Chinese characters outright (in the case of Hiragana). Taking written Japanese as the most relevant example in the modern era, one can technically write the entirety of the Japanese language using Hiragana alone, because all possible sound combinations are already accounted for within the system. However, the Japanese people do not actually do this, still preserving the use of Chinese characters in daily use to this day, in large measure because their orthographic scripts—Hiragana and Katagana—are both quadrate graphemes, meaning that one can write both Chinese characters and the kana systems within the same line of text. Up until the 1970’s and 80’s, the situation was identical in South Korea, a country whose constitution is still formally written in a character-Hangul “mixed script” system. To put it as bluntly as possible, this is exactly what Hwayih Woen has accomplished for English.

To the astute observer, this promises a massive boon to those Overseas Chinese individuals who are attempting to become literate in characters but are failing because they have neither the educational nor the environmental reinforcement mechanisms to solidify vocabulary acquisition. As already mentioned previously, the Junior Script enables the user to immediately and fully employ the language they already know (i.e. English), and then gradually intersperse logographic characters into their lines of text to represent English words, much in the same way as the Japanese intersperse Chinese characters into their lines of kana to represent Japanese words, which is the very definition of the Hwayih Woen Senior Script. However, the purposes of such an orthographic system are far from just educational. A commonly asked question in response to the Hwayih Woen system usually formulates as: “why would one go through all the trouble of writing English in Chinese characters rather than just directly write in standard English orthography?” After the exposition above, it should be obvious that the majority of Overseas Chinese born and raised in the Anglosphere are functionally blocked from their own language communities, rendering them without any language community uniquely their own. Historically speaking, this was exactly the predicament in which the Ashkenazi Jews found themselves in medieval Europe. By that time, Hebrew had already been a dead language for several centuries, preserved only in text for liturgical purposes—much in the same way that very few people today “speak” Latin in any functional sense despite active preservation on the part of the Roman Catholic clergy. The daily language of these Ashkenazi Jews was middle German, and so it remained for their descendants all the way into the modern era, facilitated at least in part by the linguistic evolutionary pressures motivating the community to use their ancestral script to transcribe and represent their adopted—though technically foreign—living language. The binding of a Semitic script to a Germanic language was so successful that Yiddish eventually became an inseparable artifact of Ashkenazi Jewish identity, so successful in fact that the Zionists actually referred to it as “the language of the exile” prior to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in Israel. In this context, it should be obvious why the question of “just writing standard German” becomes irrelevant. Indeed, an enormous number of Jews, especially in the modern era, were native German speakers themselves, writing an extensive corpus of work in standard German. Nevertheless, Yiddish remained an identifying marker of who belonged to the Jewish community, used among themselves on a daily basis. There was never any ontological contradiction between Yiddish and German, let alone an imperative that the former ought not to exist because the latter “already existed.”

This is the theoretical framework in which the author constructed the Hwayih Woen Senior Script system. This project—in addition to being a pedagogical ESL tool—seeks to provide a way to the Overseas Chinese trapped within the Anglosphere by which they can maintain a connection to their ancestral language community, just as Yiddish did for the Ashkenazim (or Ladino for the Sephardim). When it comes to the question of preserving the integrity of a group identity, the Overseas Chinese will always face a dichotomy: find a way to return to their ancestral lands, or assimilate wholesale into the local environment, because generational amalgamation guarantees it. However, in light of the Jewish example, this whitepaper suggests that perhaps there might exist a third option. After centuries of Byzantine and later Ottoman rule, returning to the Holy Land on any kind of permanent basis was simply not an option for the vast majority of Jews, a situation that parallels what the predominant cohort of Overseas Chinese face today. Hwayih Woen by no means purports to be a comprehensive solution to the question of assimilation. However, it might be a small contribution to help preserve what it means to be Chinese for now and future generations to come as we, like the Jews under Moses and beyond, wander in exile across the many nations on Earth, so that maybe there might still remain Overseas Chinese who can indeed “return home,” should such a day ever come for some far-flung generation.

Part Three: General Design Characteristics

Broadly speaking, there exist three primary factors that characterize the Hwayih Woen system. In no particular order of importance, those three factors are:

1. Junior script unity across Simplified and Traditional character sets

2. Phonetic division based upon the “General American” accent (a.k.a. the Pacific Northwest accent)

3. Extensive overlapping tolerances for phonetic representation

The first simply means that the phonetic characters are to be identically written in the context of both simplified and traditional character usage.

The second is fairly self-explanatory, particularly since the creator of this system is a native speaker of English as it is spoken in California, which in turn is a sort of de facto national standard, thanks to the centrality of Hollywood in the absence of any variety of official language regulatory body in the United States; however, it is still worth mentioning because what point #2 presents is a future opportunity for the Hwayih Woen system to grow. But what exactly does this mean? While there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, there are more than 45 different sounds in the English language as it is spoken in California and, by extension, more generally across most of the United States. The characters listed in Mastering the Junior Script: A Hwayih Woen Worktext3 represent all the sounds in general/standard American English on a 1:1 symbol-to-sound ratio basis; which is to say, these characters are assigned one of these 45+ sounds, which— when combined together—can accurately and phonetically represent any word in general/standard American English (in keeping with Professor Stalling’s previously mentioned work). Being geographically specific in nature, this phonetic map, by definition, is incapable of fully representing—on a strictly phonetic basis—the full spectrum of English regional variances, for the simple reason that there exist sounds in, for example, Australian English or the Queen’s English, that simply do not exist in the United States. However, should this system gain traction among its target audience, Hwayih Woen is perfectly poised to take on any number of “extension” lists to incorporate more characters with phonetic values that represent regional variances, so that in addition to the original phonetic map, there might also be an “Australian extension” or “British extension” to the phonetic roster. But as stated before, such a project remains a future opportunity beyond the current scope of the Hwayih Woen project.

The third is arguably the most peculiar aspect of this system. While the phonetic map provides a 1:1 ratio between character and sound, this does not mean that there is only one way by which the user can graphically represent any given word. In fact, there are often multiple ways to do so, and the implications of this fact slightly shift depending upon whether one is examining the Junior Script versus the Senior Script. In the context of the Junior Script, it is often the case that a vowel within any given word can be substituted out for another vowel without resulting in what would conventionally be considered a mispronunciation or an “accent.” This is simply because within any given language, idiolects do in fact exist. As a point of comparison, what makes spoken English unique from a language like Modern Standard Mandarin is that there has never been a comprehensive dictum from a central authority regarding how every word in the dictionary ought to be pronounced. A dictionary might have a pronunciation guide appended to each entry, but Anglosphere society and education regards these entries to be suggestions from the publisher—assuming the annotations are even understood— with the more authoritative pronunciation guide for any given word being regional convention—to say nothing of the fact that different publishers have different pronunciation recommendations! As an example, William F. Buckley Jr. and Robert Kennedy Sr. were both white American men whose accents sounded nothing alike. But more significantly, neither man was ever in a position to regard the other’s accent as “mispronounced” or “non-standard.” The same cannot be said of the comparison between, for example, Aisin-Gioro Puyi and Chiang Kai-shek, because the former’s pronunciation clearly aligns with the universal phonetic annotation found in every Chinese dictionary while the latter’s is clearly divergent prima facie. The purpose of this comparison is to demonstrate that Hwayih Woen, or rather its “Junior Script,” is not a system of standardization, nor could it ever be. Even among native English speakers from the same geographical region, the way certain vowels and consonants are handled is not identical, which is the very definition of what constitutes an idiolect. As previously stated, there does not exist an objective authority in English to which an individual can appeal to arbitrate pronunciation differences as there does in Modern Standard Mandarin, and there probably does not need to be, given how long English has gone without it. But more importantly, mapping the entirety of the English language is unnecessary for a new orthographic system to be functional. This is where the Senior Script demonstrates one of its many advantages over the Junior Script. By incorporating the logographic use of characters beyond the base phonetic map, the Hwayih Woen user can side-step the question of how to accurately represent the pronunciation of a given word much in the same way that languages as different as, for example: Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese can look at the same character for the word “white” (i.e. 白) and arrive at completely different pronunciations, which is exactly the advantage of using a logographic system at all! This here is precisely the meaning of “overlapping tolerances.” By leaving the question of how to accurately represent the pronunciation of a given word to the discretion of the individual user, Hwayih Woen incentivizes the user to increase Senior Script logographic character usage.

Part Four: Regarding Input Methods

All Chinese character input methods divide into two broad subcategories: phonetic based and shape based. The categorical names are sufficiently self-explanatory. Phonetic input methods are based upon a character’s pronunciation, which makes for an easy learning curve, enables writing when one has forgotten how to write a character by hand, and is therefore the preferred form of input method among those who already “speak” the language—the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn input method being by far the most popular among contemporary Mandarin speakers. However, due to the nature of the Chinese language, phonetic input methods are dialect specific. Because most phonetic input methods are based upon Mandarin (in the context of Chinese), if a computer user is literate in characters but does not know Mandarin, he is completely unable to use something like the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn input method. Alternatively, shape-based input methods are based upon how a character is visually constructed. As a general principle, a character is deconstructed by stroke and/or component according to the decomposition rules unique to the input method in question. The advantages of a shape-based input method are numerous, but the two most salient ones in this context are: A) swift input of obscure characters and B) linguistic polycentrism.

Because of the massive number of characters within the canonical Chinese lexicon, homophones literally number in the thousands, resulting in a situation where a single phonetic input results in a massive list of characters that are all pronounced identically. Modern phonetic input methods get around this problem by including a predictive algorithm that filters the most commonly used characters to the top of the list, a solution that works perfectly well for writing Modern Standard Mandarin; however, if a character is not commonly used, or not used in Modern Standard Mandarin at all, then the input method will invariably bury the relevant character somewhere at the bottom of the list, a problem that is all too apparent for professional typists attempting to use the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn input method to write Cantonese, because while they often know the Mandarin dictionary pronunciation of a Cantonese specific character, having to alternate between keyboard and mouse for nearly every word makes the process extremely cumbersome. Shape based input methods negate these problems entirely because, by definition, a character’s visual construction is unique to that character alone, thereby allowing shape-based input methods to input even the most obscure characters with (mostly) unique key input combinations, making the input of non-Mandarin based text very smooth and straightforward. One need not even know Mandarin or any Chinese dialect to effectively use a shape-based input method, which means that speakers of languages as different as Korean, Japanese, and even Vietnamese to a limited extent (for the Chữ Nôm script), have equal accessibility to shape based input methods that phonetic input methods simply cannot provide. This is precisely what the term “linguistic poly-centrism” means.

In the advent of the personal computer and the proliferation of mass consumer digital technology, Oriental technologists have invented a wide variety of shape based input methods; however, at the time of this writing, only two remain supreme in the arena of common use and cross-platform availability: Tsāhng-jyéh (仓颉; also Romanized as “Cāngjié” in Pīnyīn) and Wú-beě (五笔; also Romanized as “Wǔbǐ” in Pīnyīn). A full exposition into the history and development of both these input methods is technically beyond the scope of this text, seeing as other sources and authors have already sufficiently covered the subject. Nevertheless, a general review of the differences between these two systems is warranted. The Tsāhng-jyéh input method was invented in the 1970s and is therefore the older of the two systems, even long predating Unicode itself. Because it is primarily used for writing Traditional characters, the primary user base of Tsāhng-jyéh is located in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. On the other hand, the first generation of the Wú-beě input method did not come out until 1986, and because its inventor designed it around deconstructing Simplified characters, the primary user base of Wú-beě is in Mainland China, though today it holds a fraction of the personal computer user market due to the popularity of the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn input method, itself a result of state mandated reliance upon Mandarin across the country. The key point that the reader must note is this— both Tsāhng-jyéh and Wú-beě can write their opposite default character sets. In other words, although Tsāhng-jyéh was primarily designed for Traditional characters, it can write Simplified characters on the same keyboard. Conversely, although Wú-beě was primarily designed for Simplified characters, it can write Traditional characters, likewise, on the same keyboard.

Although Tsāhng-jyéh and Wú-beě are both perfectly viable options to study, this white paper strongly recommends that new users who are wholly unfamiliar with any shape-based input method prioritize the former over the latter. This is because as of this writing, the Wú-beě input method is still not natively available on the iPhone, despite both being available on Android as well as Windows, Mac, and Linux computer operating systems—to say nothing of the former’s visual accessibility, because the latter by and large still relies upon the Roman lettering of the QWERTY keyboard to demarcate its input codes. By prioritizing Tsāhng-jyéh, the reader can develop true cross-platform usability regardless of whether he intends to use Hwayih Woen to write either Traditional or Simplified characters.

Part Five: The Role of Sinology Unbound

Sinology Unbound, the entity behind the creation of the Hwayih Woen Project, provides students seeking to learn Character-based languages with tangible pedagogy through the production and distribution of course material via online distribution methods. Sinology Unbound’s online language learning materials are designed with a focus on Quality and detail uber alles, ensuring that they are effective for students who lack access to traditional language learning (i.e. “immersion”) environments or even a native speaker.