Basic Chinese: Cognitive Management, Communication Engineering, and Mass Literacy in China

This article explores the transnational history of the science behind the mass literacy movement in China in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, it investigates the reformers’ attempts to reduce the number of Chinese characters to a “basic” set of around one thousand in an effort to promote mass literacy. In contrast to earlier literature that examined the history of mass literacy within the context of nation-building and citizenship, this article approaches the issue as a product of communication engineering and information management. It demonstrates that the effort to reduce the number of characters was deeply tied to the birth of behavioral psychology and statistical sciences in China as well as Euro-American theories of language and communication. Many of the leading Chinese figures in mass literacy campaigns were well informed by the methods of American behavioral sciences, which they employed to reduce the number of Chinese characters and optimize the learning process. This effort to invent a basic Chinese, however, gave birth to a critical question: which characters, after all, were “essential” for communication? The Chinese reformers’ search for information efficiency quickly turned into an ideological inquiry into the politics of language and writing in a modernizing China.