TPD: Messrs. Wade and Giles

Over at TPD, guest host Lisa has a great post from Salon (Andrew Leonard, “Choosing Giles over Wade” 9/29/06) on the tangled history of the Wade-Giles system for romanizing Chinese. For those unfamiliar, it’s the difference between “Mao Tse-tung” and “Mao Zedong” or “Teng Hsiao-p’ing” and “Deng Xiaoping.” Attempts to find roman letter equivalents of Chinese sounds has a long history, and not just for westerners. Some early May Fourth reformers advocated ditching Chinese characters in favor of Roman letters to improve literacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a brief revival of the movement and on posters from that period (see right), you can see pinyin written underneath the Chinese characters. While pinyin never did replace Chinese characters, in the last 20 years it has emerged as the dominant form of romanization except, of course, in Taiwan.

In our UC classes, we almost always use pinyin if only because it has become the standard romanization for the major journals and university presses as well as the standard in most English-language journalism about China. We have a few profs who still put both spellings on the board, but the textbooks all use pinyin.

Like most people who commented over

CDT: Foreign Scholars Protest China Policies

Via CDT, the Boston Globe has an article today on a petition signed by over fifty scholars and activists calling for a stop to the persecution of human rights activists in China.

“The Sept. 29 open letter posted on the Web site of the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization chiefly bore the signatures of some 40 well-known China scholars, including the Council on Foreign Relations’ Jerome Cohen, Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Yahuda of the London School of Economics.

‘We note with concern the sharp increase in official retaliation against such advocates and their families through persistent harassment, banishment, detention, arrest and imprisonment,’ the letter said. ‘We … write to urge your commitment to ensuring the civil rights of advocates for social justice.’

As the article notes, these kinds of public denunciations from foreign scholars of China are quite rare, especially for historians who don’t want to lose access to valuable archival materials. It’s a sad compromise, but one that most of us make.

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