Mandarin is one of the most-spoken languages in the world. But when it was codified as the new national language in China between the 1910s and 1930s, its artificiality was such that only a handful of people could speak it with any fluency. The state-led creation and spread of China's national language is thus arguably the largest instance of social engineering in human history. What took centuries to accomplish in Europe was compressed into a mere three decades in China. How did this national linguistic unification happen? And, more broadly, what can this process teach us about the role of language in society? Based on research conducted in libraries and archives across the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, Jeffrey Weng examines the Chinese state's efforts to codify and elevate a new national language during the transition from Classical Chinese to modern standard Mandarin in the early twentieth century. The ultimate form of the language was not inevitable. It was the concatenation of a multitude of disputes and decisions made in the early years of the republic, and, as Weng argues, represents a particular vision of Chinese society: unitary and egalitarian. Weng both reconstructs and reinterprets events in early twentieth-century China to give us a fresh view of how social change take place and how nations are made through cultural reinvention.
