WI: The Manchus impose their syllabary on the Chinese language

There are a multitude of very good reasons why Chinese characters, hanzi, work within the context of writing in China. To name a few: the Chinese languages are basically made of homophones which would be harder to parse written only in letters; each character carries its own meaning, so it's easy to read a sentence even if you haven't seen all the words before, it was written by a speaker of a different dialect, or was written so long ago that sound shifts have changed the pronunciation from what the original author had in mind; despite the complexity of the system and the apparent uniqueness of each character, they're actually constructed in an ordered and predictable way, so that the more hanzi you learn, the easier it is to pick up, understand, and remember new ones.

So I don't wonder why no native Chinese dynasty ever tried to replace them, even after they started seeing alphabet- or syllable-based writing systems in use by other peoples. Even apart from the fact that other peoples were barbarians with nothing to teach the people of the Middle Kingdom, the simple fact is that hanzi work just fine for the Chinese.

But when the Manchus conquered China in the 17th century, they already had their own, much simpler writing system. Wikipedia tells me it is a syllabary, with diacritic marks to weed out potential ambiguities. It may not have all the advantages hanzi carry, but it would have certain advantages of its own. It would be faster to learn, so children and non-Native speakers alike could achieve literacy faster. Non-logogrammic writing systems are more flexible, allowing the writing of foreign words with greater accuracy. (Japanese, with its kana syllabaries, is much better than Chinese at approximating the sounds of foreign words. Korean and Western languages, with their alphabets, are better still.) And through the use of diacritic marks, even the tones that are so important to distinguishing meaning in Chinese could have been represented so that a written word, while not looking as immediately unique as it would in hanzi, could still be distinguished from similar words as readily as they are in speech. (Vietnamese took this approach IOTL; it used to be written with a system adapted from hanzi, but during the age of French rule they switched to using the Latin alphabet with loads of additional marks over the words. Today hanzi are as relevant to the lives of an ordinary Vietnamese as they are to an ordinary Westerner, and the people can read their language just fine.)

I'm sort of curious why the Qing dynasty didn't try to force the Chinese to start writing with the Manchu system, and how things would be different now if they had. (Or did they try, and it failed miserably?) It isn't as though the Manchus didn't already impose much of their own culture on to the Chinese as it was (there's a reason 19th-century Westerners came to think of topknot-wearing as a Chinese custom), so I doubt there was any feeling among the leadership that abolishing hanzi would be too disrespectful to their new subjects. Unless they just thought keeping the peasantry ignorant was worth the trouble of learning to use that unwieldy writing system themselves (entirely possible!), why didn't they insist that everyone abandon the use of hanzi and put everything into Manchu writing instead?

If they had, would subsequent history have been different apart from the mundane fact of "things written in Chinese would look different"?
Would there have been an increase in literacy that might have kept China more competitive on the world stage?
Would other nations in the Sinosphere have followed suit, even without being conquered by the Manchus?
Would the Nationalists or the Communists, if they weren't somehow butterflied away, have tried to restore hanzi and all the inconveniences that come with them in the name of shaking off all things Manchu, and could that have worked so long after their use had stopped being standard?
If the PRC weren't butterflied away, and they were using Manchu writing today, would the relative ease of use mean more foreigners would commit to learning Mandarin, accelerating its rise to the status of a must-know international language of business and politics? It's generally accepted that China is going to join, or replace, the U.S. as a global superpower before long anyway. Could they have done that even faster with a writing system that didn't look so intimidating to foreigners?
 
It isn't as though the Manchus didn't already impose much of their own culture on to the Chinese as it was (there's a reason 19th-century Westerners came to think of topknot-wearing as a Chinese custom), so I doubt there was any feeling among the leadership that abolishing

Inposing physical distInguishers on a subject population is a lot easier than trying to impose an entirely new writing system on the existing bureaucracy and intelligentsia you need to actually run your newly acquired Empire.
 
It may not have all the advantages hanzi carry, but it would have certain advantages of its own. It would be faster to learn, so children and non-Native speakers alike could achieve literacy faster.

Who cares? The Manchu don't need children and non-native speakers to write. Bureaucrats can just learn hanzi. This isn't an age of mass literacy.

Non-logogrammic writing systems are more flexible, allowing the writing of foreign words with greater accuracy.

Why would you want to write foreign words? You're glorious China. What use do you have for foreign words when all foreign nations are inferior barbarians? You can call everything whatever the hell you want.

And through the use of diacritic marks, even the tones that are so important to distinguishing meaning in Chinese could have been represented so that a written word, while not looking as immediately unique as it would in hanzi, could still be distinguished from similar words as readily as they are in speech.

It could, sure. But no one would want to.

I'm sort of curious why the Qing dynasty didn't try to force the Chinese to start writing with the Manchu system

Because there's no point. All the bureaucrats write in the traditional way. All documents are written in hanzi. Anyone who really needs to be able to write can learn them. Why would you bother changing it?
 
Using a phonetic system to write a logographic language means that you have to choose one dialect as the 'standard' or 'prestige' dialect. Spoken Chinese is a staggeringly diverse set of languages (yes, languages!), so if the Manchus chose, say, Beijing Mandarin as the standard, they would alienate and lose the chance to recruit talent from a huge chunk of the country. This isn't the 20th century and the Manchus aren't the communist party, so they can't exactly use universal education to get everyone on the same level. Every scholar from every part of the country knew Chinese characters already, so it was easier and more effective to just use those.
 
The Jurchens actively attempted to abandon their language beginning as early as the 11th Century. This is why Old Jurchen is dead and Manchu has like 10-20 speakers.
 
Who cares? The Manchu don't need [. . .] non-native speakers to write. [. . .] Why would you want to write foreign words? You're glorious China. What use do you have for foreign words when all foreign nations are inferior barbarians? You can call everything whatever the hell you want.

I feel like the parts I've quoted here are really looking at the question from the Chinese point of view. I've already addressed some of the myriad reasons why the Chinese themselves never wanted to change, up to and including the point that other nations are barbarians. The question I'm more interested in is why the Manchu didn't seem to want to impose the change.

Theoretically the Manchu should have had more interest than the Chinese had in making the language accessible to foreign speakers, inasmuch as they themselves were foreign speakers, at least initially. China does have a habit of assimilating its conquerors rather than the other way around, but the first generation of Qing rulers would not have spoken Chinese natively. Even if they didn't care about facilitating trade with the Portuguese and Dutch traders already operating in East Asia at the time, one might think they'd at least want to make things easier for themselves.

YLi said:
The Jurchens actively attempted to abandon their language beginning as early as the 11th Century.

Why were they so eager to abandon their language? I've heard of peoples abandoning their language out of sheer pragmatism, but I don't believe I've ever heard of an entire people actively wanting to drop their language before.

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If the answer to the question of why the Manchu conquerors didn't try to streamline Chinese writing, even for their own benefit, is as simple as the fact that Chinese held all the prestige in East Asia and they felt that forcing themselves to learn to use its cumbersome writing system was worth the trouble, I'm perfectly willing to accept the explanation. But I'm still curious about the alternate history scenario. What if they had felt more motivated? Without straying into ASB scenarios of their having the foresight to think it would be better for China in the long run, and acknowledging that they probably didn't care about foreign traders, what if they had simply decided that, for their own sake, they were going to make Chinese writing easier for Manchu-speakers to use? So that a few generations later, when even the Manchus were speaking Chinese natively, the use of Manchu writing was firmly established and, consequently, learning to read Chinese was faster for everybody? Could they have done it if they had really wanted to? And if so, would the course of Chinese history have changed in any meaningful way?
 
If the answer to the question of why the Manchu conquerors didn't try to streamline Chinese writing, even for their own benefit, is as simple as the fact that Chinese held all the prestige in East Asia and they felt that forcing themselves to learn to use its cumbersome writing system was worth the trouble, I'm perfectly willing to accept the explanation. But I'm still curious about the alternate history scenario. What if they had felt more motivated? Without straying into ASB scenarios of their having the foresight to think it would be better for China in the long run, and acknowledging that they probably didn't care about foreign traders, what if they had simply decided that, for their own sake, they were going to make Chinese writing easier for Manchu-speakers to use? So that a few generations later, when even the Manchus were speaking Chinese natively, the use of Manchu writing was firmly established and, consequently, learning to read Chinese was faster for everybody? Could they have done it if they had really wanted to? And if so, would the course of Chinese history have changed in any meaningful way?

They really had no reason to. And it would make an already hard administration of China even harder.
That was the influence of Chinese glory in East Asia. Any 'barbarian' conquering it were that willing to abandon their culture for China's.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I feel like the parts I've quoted here are really looking at the question from the Chinese point of view. I've already addressed some of the myriad reasons why the Chinese themselves never wanted to change, up to and including the point that other nations are barbarians. The question I'm more interested in is why the Manchu didn't seem to want to impose the change.

Because the way you rule as a minority in China is to gain the support of the landed gentry class and bind them to your rule. China's governments throughout history have being fairly weak and the gentry are essentially the intermediary mechanism between the state and the peasantry. Once you go below a certain level, there are no more government officials and the gentries are basically the local government. Plus the government bureaucrats are also recruited from this class of people so they form most of the central government as well. They also have significant military potential (the Qing survived the Taiping rebellion because the gentry sided with them and raised armies to fight the rebels). When a dynasty loses the support of this class (as the Qing did by the early 1900s) falls fairly rapidly.

Changing and attacking the literati tradition inevitably and instantly alienates this class of people because the Chinese gentry sees themselves as upholding the Chinese literati tradition. Thus the acceptance of Chinese language and culture is pretty much the prerequisite for stable rule over China. This continued to be true all the way up until 1949 probably.
 
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I'm sort of curious why the Qing dynasty didn't try to force the Chinese to start writing with the Manchu system, and how things would be different now if they had. (Or did they try, and it failed miserably?)

What's the point of changing the Chinese language to become more Manchu-oriented? The reason of 'it makes administration easier' doesn't cut it as far as the Qing is concerned, because the Qing dynasty at the level of the decision-makers has Manchu as its court language (since all the upper posts were staffed by Manchus). Chinese officials nearing that level would have to learn Manchu rather than the other way round.

Besides, changing such an important cultural marker (as far as the Chinese are concerned) would have lost them the support of the literati and the common gentry, who were a pretty powerful 'interest group' for these things (their patronage of study halls, monopolization of the bureaucratic system and all that).

We also shouldn't forget that the Manchus themselves would have desired to keep their 'separateness' from the wider Han polity as well. Qing Chinese cities generally had a 'Manchu quarter' where Bannermen would be kept separate from the broader mass of Han, and of course the Qing homelands of Manchuria were pretty much off-limits to Han settlement. The development of indigenous Vietnamese and Korean writing systems also stems from a similar desire.

Would the Nationalists or the Communists, if they weren't somehow butterflied away, have tried to restore hanzi and all the inconveniences that come with them in the name of shaking off all things Manchu, and could that have worked so long after their use had stopped being standard?

I think they'd be more likely to just skip Hanzi and just Romanize the entire Chinese language, especially after a May Fourth Movement-analogue (a proposal that was seriously considered OTL). After all, both the KMT and the CCP saw themselves as the vanguards of Chinese modernization, and it's not that big a leap to argue that learning the Latin alphabet is going to make absorbing Western ideas easier, especially as the cultural attachment to hanzi doesn't exist in this scenario.

If the PRC weren't butterflied away, and they were using Manchu writing today, would the relative ease of use mean more foreigners would commit to learning Mandarin, accelerating its rise to the status of a must-know international language of business and politics?

I don't believe for a moment that Mandarin is ever going to displace English as a language of business. The fact is that Mandarin is spoken in one/two countries, whereas English is an official language for more than 60 and a de facto business language for the rest. More Mandarin speakers learn English than the other way around and in a sense, speaking English well is a mark of prestige in China (means you're rich enough to study/emigrate overseas). The global business/cultural infrastructure is just biased in English's favour and I doubt learning Mandarin will ever be necessary beyond as a cutesy way of ingratiating yourself with Chinese businessmen.
 
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T





If they had, would subsequent history have been different apart from the mundane fact of "things written in Chinese would look different"?
Would there have been an increase in literacy that might have kept China more competitive on the world stage?
Would other nations in the Sinosphere have followed suit, even without being conquered by the Manchus?

I would imagine so- without hanzi having the prestige of being used in China, I imagine Korea, Japan, and Vietnam would have used their own systems more.

Would the Nationalists or the Communists, if they weren't somehow butterflied away, have tried to restore hanzi and all the inconveniences that come with them in the name of shaking off all things Manchu, and could that have worked so long after their use had stopped being standard?

Depends on when, how deeply it is adopted, and whether the anti-Manchu nationalists made it a point by i.e. having underground schools teaching it.
I mean, that's a lot of Chinese writing to erase. OTOH, if you've switched to a syllabic system totally, it would be an awful pain to switch back.
 
I doubt it would replace the existing script entirely, but it could be a "companion script" similar to the writing systems of modern Japanese (IIRC there is a syllabury script but the character/word type script is still much more common).
 
We also shouldn't forget that the Manchus themselves would have desired to keep their 'separateness' from the wider Han polity as well. Qing Chinese cities generally had a 'Manchu quarter' where Bannermen would be kept separate from the broader mass of Han, and of course the Qing homelands of Manchuria were pretty much off-limits to Han settlement.

That's basically what I wanted to say.

Unless there is a religious\ideological reason, like Islam, Korean Nationalism, Roman Catholicism, or Vietnamese Nationalism, I don't see why anybody would push for such an extensive change in writing system.

BUT, there is an intermediate group between the Manchus and the Han Chinese, they were the Ujen Cooha, or Han Bannermen. I could see them adopting the Manchu alphabet for their spoken Chinese.
 
That's basically what I wanted to say.

Unless there is a religious\ideological reason, like Islam, Korean Nationalism, Roman Catholicism, or Vietnamese Nationalism, I don't see why anybody would push for such an extensive change in writing system.

BUT, there is an intermediate group between the Manchus and the Han Chinese, they were the Ujen Cooha, or Han Bannermen. I could see them adopting the Manchu alphabet for their spoken Chinese.
The thing is Classical Chinese was the universal written language of East Asia, just like Latin in Medieval Europe. If you can write Classical Chinese, you'd have no communication problem with any literate person from Japan, Korea, or Vietnam. Even though Chinese had used the spoken language (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) to write novels and plays, but everything else was written in Classical Chinese, I just don't see the practicality of this change.
 
A land where everyone can be easily literate is a land that is potentially a lot harder to rule. Even in the west, mass literacy didn't really become a thing except when was useful for the ruling classes for mass literacy to happen. There are definite disadvantages to mass literacy from an emperors point of view.

And while it does result in potentially greater learning and technology development, again, that is not necessarily something that an emperor wants. An emperor wants, more than anything else, to remain emperor. Lots of ongoing change in society (technology development) is in theory inimical to that idea. If any development on those lines is to happen, he'd far rather it happen with those scribes and scholars whom he can be sure are loyal to him. That's not so easy to ensure with mass literacy.

This is quite aside from the fact that there are numerous Chinese languages (especially in the southern half of China, and ESPECIALLY in the Yunnan area). Using hanzi means the meaning of a document can be discerned even where the writer has no mutually-intelligible spoken language with the reader.

So the question is, what's in it for the emperor to create mass literacy?

Obviously, Korea actually did this. However, in their case, hangul remained the script for the lower classes; official documents would continue to be written in hanja (Chinese script). It proved so effective as a means for mass literacy that in 1504 the then-king banned its use, as it was inviting political instability through mass education.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_hangul
 
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