The Chinese Alphabetization Movement In The Late Qing Dynasty And The Republic Of China From The Perspective Of Linguistic Nationalism

In this paper,the Chinese alphabetization movement from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China was divided into five parts: the Dialect Romanization by missionaries,the Chinese Alphabet Movement,the scheme of National Phonetic Alphabet,the Standard Chinese Romanization(Gwoyeu Romatzyh)and the Chinese Latinization.This paper reviewed the different categories and orientations in this movement.On the one hand,this paper intended to restore the bifurcated history of linguistic nationalism in the late Qing and the Republic of China.On the other hand,from the perspective of linguistic nationalism,this paper analyzed the characteristic of the alphabetization movement in China and the logic of its failure.This paper pointed out that the outbreak of the linguistic nationalist movement followed phonocentrism in form,and its deeper foundation lied in the rejection mechanism in the center-periphery structure.The periphery called the national community through the way of rejecting the center.But the center cannot get subjectivity by excluding itself.As the geo-centre of East Asia,China's national language movement can only find spoken language at the secondary dialectal level and alphabetize on this basis in order to construct the main body of the nation.But if the alphabetic writing is not combined with local nationalism,it has no necessity of existence.So in the end,there was only a substitution between Chinese written language systems.The language movement in modern China can be called "polyphonic linguistic nationalism".Various trends were rising and falling in the history.They imitated each other in confrontation and had various orientations.From the perspective of the Chinese alphabetization movement,there are spelling schemes in both Mandarin and dialects.This showed the miscellaneous situation of linguistic nationalism in modern China,and there was no mainstream way to eliminate diversity.However,it was obvious that the language movement in China had never been rid of the influence of uniting power,and it revealed a strong imperialistic character.Local language movement was reversed by the attractive force of political reality: The alphabetization movement with a lot of ambiguities had gradually been naturalized into official nationalism.