China’s Dialects: Not Going Quietly

In this deeply learned monograph, Gina Anne Tam explores an understudied aspect of modern Chinese history — what she calls “linguistic nationalism.” The language known as Mandarin Chinese, or putonghua, is just one dialect (if that is even the right word) among many, known as fangyan. Tam traces the heated debates among Chinese language reformers — with occasional interventions by missionaries and Western scholars — that date to the 19th century.

Her big finding is that well into the 20th century, various fangyan had prominent advocates arguing that their regional “dialect” was the true voice of Chinese nationhood. The Beijing standard won out, but it was by no means an inevitable triumph. Tam, a professor at Trinity University in Texas, ends her story with the Mao-era efforts at putonghua promotion — none of which eliminated fangyan. To this day, most people living in the People’s Republic of China speak a native tongue as their language of choice at the dinner table and in the neighborhood “to express frustration or to yell profanities.”

The persistence of dialect against the hegemony of Mandarin emerges from Tam’s study as a largescale example of what James Scott calls “the weapons of the weak.” As Tam hints in the conclusion, fangyan also keeps alive the possibility of alternative notions of Chinese national identity, including the subversive possibility of a pluralistic nationalism — “China” as meaning something more analogous to “Europe” than “France.” The reader finishes Dialect and Nationalism looking forward to a sequel that brings the story into the 21st century.