Unfinished Media Revolution:Latinization Of Chinese Characters In The Period Of The Republic Of China

Chinese language and characters have a long history and are widely used in the region.But by the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China,Chinese characters were severely criticized by some intellectuals,and then the voice of "abolishing Chinese characters" was endless,and the Latinization of Chinese Characters was also in full swing.From the end of the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China,China struggled to modernize and seek national progress in politics,economy and culture in the "unprecedented changes for thousands of years".During this period,new ideas,new knowledge and new technologies from the West were quickly introduced to China.Some people of insight,especially intellectuals,deeply feel that China,which has experienced ancient civilization,is not adapted to this era.They attributed some problems in the transformation of China's social structure to "sins" of language and characters,and carried out a lasting Latinization Movement of Chinese Characters.The Latinization Movement of Chinese Characters aims at transforming Chinese Characters with ideographic functions into Latinized Characters with phonetic functions.Essentially,it is to realize the transformation of media.The Latinized new media of "auditory" is used to replace the old media Chinese Characters of "visual".They want to promote a media revolution in a short time.The purpose of this paper is to explore how the media revolution came into being,what to do,for what purpose,who is doing it,what disputes,what institutions are promoting it and what problems it encounters.To study this revolution from the perspective of Media Ecology Theory and return to the historical context of the "Latinization Movement of Chinese Characters Media Revolution" more than a hundred years ago,to explore what the purpose and focus of Latinization of Chinese Characters is,how the promoters understand the value of Latinization of Chinese Characters as a medium,and what problems they encounter in the process of promoting media transformation.This paper first describes the history of Latinization of Chinese characters.At the end of Ming Dynasty,missionaries came to China to introduce Latin symbols to mark the pronunciation of Chinese characters,and made an early attempt to annotate the pronunciation scheme.At the end of Qing Dynasty,intellectuals began to create a scheme to label the pronunciation of Mandarin and dialect,and many schemes spread among the public.In 1913,the Ministry of Education set up a unified pronunciation committee to stipulate standard pronunciation,and then determined the national unified pronunciation alphabet(Gwoin Tzyhmuu)based on ancient Chinese characters.In 1928,the official announcement of the second scheme of the national pronunciation alphabet,Gwoyeu Romatzyh(G.R.),used 26 Latin letters to annotate and spell.Around the 1930 s and 1940 s,Folk Intellectuals advocated simplifying Chinese characters to promote education.Left-wing cultural intellectuals and student groups led by the Communist Party of China vigorously promoted Latin new words to eradicate "illiteracy" and failed to continue for various reasons.Then,it explores how Chinese historical participants understand the characteristics of Chinese characters and Latinized Characters in the media revolution from ideographic to phonetic,and makes a dialogue with Western media theory.The Esperanto Movement,Gwoyeu Romatzyh(G.R.)Movement and Latin New Words Movement are selected to explore the structural changes brought about by the revolution from the media aspect,and to show the media characteristics(phonetics and ideographic,auditory and visual)and the political and cultural connotations involved in the media revolution.Back to the historical context to clarify the core demands of the media movement and the values of the promoters,and back to the social,political,historical and cultural environment at that time to explore the significance of the media aspect and the extensive changes of social and cultural brought about by the new media.Finally,the media revolution of Latinization of Chinese characters is analyzed from the sociological point of view.The media revolution is not only the transformation of words or expressions,but also involves the factors of material,organizational strength,history,culture,social habits and so on.It will encounter many problems of Media Ecology Theory to try to interpret in reality.This paper uses Media Ecology Theory to explain the history of Latinization of Chinese characters,to find out the problems to be faced in the media transformation of Chinese characters,and to explain the particularity of the experiential attempt provided by China.