And then there's Christianity's (partial) success in Korea where it was seen as anti-colonialist. So maybe the best way to get more Chinese Christians would be more Japanese colonialism.
How Much Of China Can Be Effectively Colonized?
- Thread starter AltoRegnant
- Start date
And then there's Christianity's (partial) success in Korea where it was seen as anti-colonialist. So maybe the best way to get more Chinese Christians would be more Japanese colonialism.
They might, either through Romanization or a variation of characters or both. The usual explanation is the old Yiddish phrase that אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט (a language is a dialect with an army and navy), which goes to explain why linguists in general are very wary of using terms like "dialect" and all that. In China at this time, because the written language was a wényán that nobody really understood, and since báihuà at that time was still an élite phenomenon, the missionaries found it easier to use local varieties and teach literacy that way, as well as encouraging new missionaries to learn to speak the local varieties so they could be more understood by the people. In a situation where China is more extensively colonized, no matter what form it takes, this situation would probably be ramped up beyond the control of the missionaries (as can be confirmed, more or less, by the case of Việt Nam). There could still be "high" vocabulary from wényán and guóyǔ that could remain, but it would still be standardized local varieties with different degrees of Europeanization to make life easier for Westerners to understand/speak in a way comprehensible to other Chinese.
I mean, Christianity has already made significant headway in the Chinese diaspora, and even in China itself (under an officially atheist government, no less). It's not that hard, even if they'll still be outnumbered, demographically.
Just a point of reference, the Dungans in Central Asia, descended from Hui Chinese, speak a language based on Central Plains Mandarin and uses Cyrillic without issue. I still believe Romanization or Cyrillization of Chinese is kinda ridiculous, but I feel it can be done, since you'd simply be applying context-reading into writing the same way you'd do it in conversation. You can't read spoken speech, after all.
Definitely, and Dungan was part of what I had in mind because I've always been fascinated by their language.
Well, I don't want to give the CCP any credit, but didn't Britain invade Tibet in 1904? Could this have gone more successfully for them? Like at least an independent protectorate or something?
Christianity in Korea achieved its success due to association with the independence movement, not the colonialism movement.
All science and math in Malay schools is taught in English. I believe Indonesia is heading the same way.
To be fair, the British didn't particularly try to Christianize India.
RousseauX
Donor
The modern Chinese government doesn't give a shit about Atheism, it cares about organizations outside of party control. But that in turn means as long as the actual "organized" part of organized Christianity is under Party control you get to worship however you want.
Maybe Christianity in ttl China is kinda like otl Indian Christianity in % terms (around 2.3%).
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Kaze
Banned
I would say quite a bit. But I doubt it will last long under colonial controls.
1. - India had had numerous attempts at independence movements. It is likely that the colonial possessions in China will want to rebel or have movements for "freedom" by outside powers.
a. in IRL - Germany and Japan sent agents to India to cause an Indian uprising in both World War One. It is likely they would do the same in china. (see letter b)
b. in IRL - India and Australia both wanted Independence in their own way from Mother Britain. With the sacrifices of the great wars, they will get it one way or another.
c. in IRL - the Soviet Union sent agents into India, Middle East, and elsewhere - to bring about many independence movements -> so in theory you could see a Mao China anyway.
2. - Leads to world war one. The rush for colonies in China and Africa and the rest is one of the lesser known factors for the start of the Great War. When all the fighting does start see #1.
1. - India had had numerous attempts at independence movements. It is likely that the colonial possessions in China will want to rebel or have movements for "freedom" by outside powers.
a. in IRL - Germany and Japan sent agents to India to cause an Indian uprising in both World War One. It is likely they would do the same in china. (see letter b)
b. in IRL - India and Australia both wanted Independence in their own way from Mother Britain. With the sacrifices of the great wars, they will get it one way or another.
c. in IRL - the Soviet Union sent agents into India, Middle East, and elsewhere - to bring about many independence movements -> so in theory you could see a Mao China anyway.
2. - Leads to world war one. The rush for colonies in China and Africa and the rest is one of the lesser known factors for the start of the Great War. When all the fighting does start see #1.
By the time we can realistically expect colonization (around the early 19th century) , written communications in Chinese are too standardized and socio-economically entrenched to diverge it short of mass reeducation camps (and the magic of written Chinese is that it is pretty interchangeable no matter the dialect, since it isn't a phonetically based written language).
That's pretty much false, Chinese public schooling (i.e. just about the only schooling there is) drills atheism into people's heads, minors aren't allowed to go to places of worship in many areas, and so on. The spread of Christianity in China is certainly stunted due to official policy.
The CCP's estimate of the number of Christians is somewhere above 40 million. Assuming the real number is 60 million, that's already several percents of the population despite the government's anti-religious persecutions.
I think it's still doable. Modern written Cantonese has tons of differences from written Mandarin, and other dialects have their own specialized vocabulary as well. It is possible to write Hokkien with Chinese characters, but it's incomprehensible if you only know standard Chinese.
If multiple vernacularizations are promugulated in different parts of China, then you'll have a bunch of nascent nation-states throughout the country. The question is whether such promulgations are plausible, or if the colonial authorities would stick to using some universally standard variant of Chinese.
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Not quite; even during the 18th and 19th centuries, Written Chinese was changing and was not that entirely entrenched. Wényán was becoming more and more eclipsed by báihuà, despite the best efforts of the Imperial authorities, and even then basing it entirely on Mandarin was not that certain - not to mention the shite-ton of variant characters and alternative writing styles which distorted the shapes of the characters, the fact that even in Mandarin there are morphemes which do not have adequate representation in characters (and even more so the case during the early 19th century), and illiteracy was very high. It was even possible to not use characters entirely, as use of Arabic-based scripts among Chinese Muslims or the use of Nushu demonstrated within China itself. On top of that, dissatisfaction with the Confucian-style educational system which undergirded the characters was growing - which could be easily used by the colonizers. So Written Chinese is not as monolithic as it looks at first glance.
Wrong. Even in its modern Vernacular form, Written Chinese is not that interchangeable (and no, Chinese is not made up of "dialects" - that's a false interpretation of the regional varieties and an incorrect translation of fāngyán which misses that in objective analyses they are actually closer to languages, so the preferred terminology now is to reserve "dialect" only for what used to be traditionally referred to as sub-dialects and use compromises like regionalects or topolects to cover the upper tiers) and is predicated only on knowledge of Classical Chinese before the Xinhai Revolution and on Modern Standard Mandarin (often inaccurately called "Standard Chinese") after the Xinhai Revolution. That places non-Mandarin speakers at a disadvantage and makes it equivalent to learning a foreign language, creating a diglossia sort of effect. What would be needed here would be to disassociate Written Chinese from its Northern bias, which can be done because the characters themselves, in actuality, are grounded on a phonetic basis. To be fair, the phonetic basis is on Old Chinese, and thus the phonemic-grapheme correspondence is as problematic as is, say, English, but it's still there. If any interchangeability exists, it's on the basis of the phonetic core of the characters, which once formed an unsystemized ancient syllabary that could have formed the basis for an even more standardized written language than now if the number of characters was kept very low at the beginning. All written languages are meant to represent speech of some kind, and it does show by trying to find some way of representing how to pronounce the characters, since speech is always prior to writing and speech dictates how the written language eventually changes. In this way, that Chinese characters are to syllabaries what English orthography is for alphabetic languages does not take away that at its heart, there is a phonetic core which makes the characters no different from other written languages - indeed, when new characters have been historically formed, or when old characters (standard or variant) are reappropriated for representing foreign loanwords, from Sanskrit on down to European languages and Japanese, it is almost invariably on the basis of phonetics (for example, how else are there two different Modern Standard Mandarin renderings for Barack Obama's surname, with Àobāmǎ preferred in China while Ōubāmǎ is preferred in Taiwan?).
So Written Chinese, then, is not that special, and under colonization could be used, on its own and/or alongside Romanization, as a family of scripts no different from the Brahmi-based ones once the phonetic bases undergirding them change. For example, a Standard Written Cantonese could emerge on the basis of regional calligraphic styles and variant characters and promoted as the bahcwuá for that part of southern China, and it would look nothing like characters and/or Romanization elsewhere (Romanization would be preferred by the colonizers, but alternative character-based orthographies would not be a problem as long as they're not based on the Imperial standards). Or it could be using a different phonetic-based script akin to bopomofo.
While @Dan1988 's post is an excellent argument in favor of the linguistic possibilies of splitting up Chinese, I think it's important not to understate the ideographic component of Chinese characters, which has existed since the pre-imperial age. In OTL usage, it's rather uncommon outside of loanwords or informal localisms for characters to have wildly divergent meanings even in modern language. Even in Japanese, upwards of 95% of kanji are used roughly the same way they are used in Chinese, or the usage makes sense if you think about it a little bit. Also, a huge amount of prose, poetry, technical language, and abbreviation relies on the meanings beyond the phonetic content of Chinese characters.
In order for parallel vernacularizations to become extremely divergent from each other, you would have to remove the influence of Sino-Japanese loanwords (i.e. vocabulary created in Japan using Chinese characters based on meaning), introduce lots of Western loanwords in lieu of the above, and eliminate or greatly reduce study of Confucian classics and other ancient works (such as the Four Great Novels), including classical poetry.
The latter especially might be very difficult, as the Chinese who are very likely going to be the ones tasked with lower and middle-level colonial administration will be precisely the >5% of Chinese who knew how to read. At any point of pre-1900 history, the written Chinese language is inseparable from the literary tradition. It would take massive upheavals for them to give up Confucius, Lao Zi, the I Ching, Li Bai, and so on, all of which live in wenyan.
In order for parallel vernacularizations to become extremely divergent from each other, you would have to remove the influence of Sino-Japanese loanwords (i.e. vocabulary created in Japan using Chinese characters based on meaning), introduce lots of Western loanwords in lieu of the above, and eliminate or greatly reduce study of Confucian classics and other ancient works (such as the Four Great Novels), including classical poetry.
The latter especially might be very difficult, as the Chinese who are very likely going to be the ones tasked with lower and middle-level colonial administration will be precisely the >5% of Chinese who knew how to read. At any point of pre-1900 history, the written Chinese language is inseparable from the literary tradition. It would take massive upheavals for them to give up Confucius, Lao Zi, the I Ching, Li Bai, and so on, all of which live in wenyan.