Did Multiethnic Empires or Logographic Writing Come First in China?

Logographic writing, where characters simply stand for concepts rather than having any direct relation to sound, has its most complete expression in Chinese characters. This system of orthography has large disadvantages of difficultly of comprehension, unnecessary complexity, and manifold other issues. Its one great compensating virtue is that it can be read equally easily everywhere where the script is used, even if the actual languages are not even related. This is obviously a massive boon to administration and unification of multiethnic, multilinguistic empires. China has historically been dominated by such polities. Did early Chinese empires, such as the Shang, promote logographic writing to cement their hold on power, or did already-existing logographic writing merely set the stage for their rise?
 
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Logographic writing, where characters simply stand for concepts rather than having any direct relation to sound, has its most complete expression in Chinese characters. This system of orthography has large disadvantages of difficultly of comprehension, unnecessary complexity, and manifold other issues. Its one great compensating virtue is that it can be read equally easily everywhere where the script is used, even if the actual languages are not even related. This is obviously a massive boon to administration and unification of multiethnic, multilinguistic empires. China has historically been dominated by such polities. Did early Chinese empires, such as the Shang, promote logographic writing to cement their hold on power, or did already-existing logographic writing merely set the stage for their rise?
I don't think the Shang were a multiethnic empire. Except maybe for captured prisoners, it seems more to me like they were just one ethnic group by themselves. So by that alone, I'd say logographic writing came first.

I don't think the Shang ever promoted their writing system. I'd be surprised if anybody in the Shang state, outside of a few members of the royal family, even knew what was written on those oracle bones.
 
I don't think the Shang were a multiethnic empire. Except maybe for captured prisoners, it seems more to me like they were just one ethnic group by themselves. So by that alone, I'd say logographic writing came first.

I don't think the Shang ever promoted their writing system. I'd be surprised if anybody in the Shang state, outside of a few members of the royal family, even knew what was written on those oracle bones.
I just said the Shang because the Zhou clearly were multiethnic, I didn't know when the nation-to-empire transition occurred.
 
Its one great compensating virtue is that it can be read equally easily everywhere where the script is used, even if the actual languages are not even related. This is obviously a massive boon to administration and unification of multiethnic, multilinguistic empires. China has historically been dominated by such polities.
This is incorrect. Written Chinese is only really good for writing Chinese. It doesn't even really work all that well for representing non-Standard Mandarin Chinese languages. Yes, it's used to write Japanese, a completely unrelated language, but the result is one of the most convoluted writing systems commonly used and kanji proficiency is declining.

The only reason people from different cultures could communicate back in the day in written Chinese was that they essentially learned a new language in order to write. Using the Chinese writing system is no different than having a lingua Franca.
 
Logographic writing, where characters simply stand for concepts rather than having any direct relation to sound, has its most complete expression in Chinese characters. This system of orthography has large disadvantages of difficultly of comprehension, unnecessary complexity, and manifold other issues. Its one great compensating virtue is that it can be read equally easily everywhere where the script is used, even if the actual languages are not even related. This is obviously a massive boon to administration and unification of multiethnic, multilinguistic empires. China has historically been dominated by such polities. Did early Chinese empires, such as the Shang, promote logographic writing to cement their hold on power, or did already-existing logographic writing merely set the stage for their rise?


Chinese characters, or characters in any other know historical script, do not normally stand for ideas and concepts: they usually stand for words or, more precisely in the case of Chinese, for morphemes. This is actually what is meant by "logographic" (which more precisely describes writing systems such as the Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic of Ancient Middle East; "morphosyllabic" has been suggested as a better fit for Chinese, but this is not very important).
It has been shown that many Chinese characters have a graphic component that provides, or originally provided, a clue to phonetic content (in several cases, this phonetic connection went obscured in subsequent divergent evolution of spoken and written forms).

The diffence is crucial: while ideas can be conceived as detached from specific languages, words are parts of specific linguistic systems. What writing (of any type) does is to graphically represent linguistic form, that is, actual words, sentences, and entire texts. This representation may be largely (but, it turns out, never entirely, at least in historically documented cases) detached from phonetic reality, but not from all other levels of linguistic reality such as syntax, morphology and semantics.
It is possible to adapt Chinese characters to write other languages, including completely unrelated ones: this has been done with considerable success in Japan and elsewhere. However, the result is not, it seems, necessarily semantically transparent to a untrained reader that is literate in Chinese.
It is also possible (and it historically happened) to have the Chinese characters used as a written medium that overcomes local differences in pronounciation; but in this case, they still represented the same grammatical system. Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic and, in modern times, arguably English, among others, all have similar situations; words are spelled the same while pronounced differently (this is not with reference to Indic and Romance languages, or spoken colloquial Arabic: these are different systems who differ from Classical/Standard languages in much more than phonetics).
You might (very roughly) compare with words of Latin or Greek origin that may be written the same in German, French and English, albeit pronounced very differently in the three languages; an English speaker may be able to recognize them (and their meaning) in a French text and therefore maybe guess at what the text is about, but this is no substitute for actual knowledge of French.
Finally, Chinese early states do not seem to have been about being "multiethnic" in any meaningful way. Multiethnic probably they were, but AFAIK there is no evidence that the Shang or Zhou court ever put any thought into that.

As a point of comparison, the Persian Empire was multiethnic and multilingual; it made use of several written languages, many of those with logographic (well, logosyllabic in the case of cuneiform) writing systems; but, it seems, they more or less settled upon Aramaic (and it alphabetic consonantal script) as the main administrative language of the Empire as a whole, regardless of what the people of any particular region spoke. While some Aramaic words were read in Persian as logograms and used as such in subsequent Middle Persian scripts, that was a matter of scribal training (and the cumbersome writing system that resulted for Middle Persian may have contributed to the seemingly very limited written record we have for the Parthian and Sasanid empires). It did not create a supralingual writing system for the Empire as such.
 
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