Talks by Jeff Wasserstrom in Heidelberg

With more than 750 posts at China Beat, a glance at something from our archives.

“The Chinese Typewriter”
By Thomas S. Mullaney
May 14, 2009

“For over a hundred years, writers in the United States and Europe have derived a unique sense of cultural and technological superiority by portraying the apparatus as absurdly large, painfully slow, and prohibitively complex.

Others have simply assumed that the machine never existed—that it is a mechanical impossibility, and thus, that China is incapable of reaching a level of modernity equal to the West for the simple reason that Chinese characters are inherently incompatible with modern technology.

Contrary to media representations, however, the past century has witnessed the development of nearly five dozen different models of Chinese typewriter, each one representing an ever more sophisticated attempt at solving a puzzle that makes the more familiar QWERTY typewriter look like child’s play: the puzzle of how to fit a non-alphabetic language containing tens of thousands of characters on an apparatus of a manageable size and a user-friendly design.”