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By Root 506 0

One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fashioned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of wényán, which went back to the fifth century BC, came báihuà, ‘white speech’, the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual pronunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature,* since at least the middle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business.†

China is now in a period of extremely rapid economic development, in which it has consciously adopted Western methods. In a sense this is the third Western-inspired revolution in a century, since the foundation of the republic in 1911, the communist revolution in 1949 and the initiation of capitalist reforms since Mao’s death were all applications of Western ideas. All this in a country that had not internalised a major Western idea since the widespread take-up of Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. If China succeeds in adopting and adapting these ideas in its own long-term interests, it will once again have turned the apparently conclusive victory of its adversary into a longer-scale triumph of its own. New beams and pillars indeed.

But if we take up again our comparison with the Egyptian case, the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance. The common feature we have found, which explains both Egyptian and Chinese persistence over so many millennia, is the maintenance of a distinct centre of identity and loyalty within the language community.

Gradually losing aspects of its historic centre, in the form first of its monarchy, then of its political independence, then of its own national religion, and finally of its national form of Christianity, Egyptian weakened steadily over the ages, and has now, as a language simply recited in formal liturgy, come close to disappearing altogether. If the analogy is valid, Chinese, despite its billion speakers, might consider that it too has now entered on a perilous path. To accommodate the challenge from the modern, European-inspired, world, it has already given up the link with its own monarchy, an ideal with which it had identified for over two millennia. It has not given up its political independence, but it has, at least officially, resigned its own religion: since the fall of the monarchy, it has no longer actively sustained the value of Confucian, much less Taoist, ideas.

China’s political independence may yet save its language from the downward slide of Egyptian. And even under foreign rule, Chinese has shown itself much more resilient, and indeed absorbent, than Egyptian ever was in its last two millennia. It has the advantage, which Egyptian never had, not just of high density but also of vast absolute population size. In its written mode, there is nothing yet in the history of Chinese to compare with Egyptian’s loss of its indigenous writing system and adoption of the Greek script, though romanisation may yet come.

In sum, the cultural retreats that we identified as leading to Egyptian’s demise all have their analogues in the recent history of Chinese, except for political conquest. The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind.

* This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin pronunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.

† In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the pīnyīn zìmŭ ‘phonetic alphabet’ system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents (v,v,v,v) denote tone patterns,