The Chinese Typewriter: A Century-Long Struggle to Make Chinese Characters Fit

Focusing on the Chinese typewriter, this book traces the history of how Chinese adapted to modern information technology. Since the modern era, Chinese characters, as a non-alphabetic writing system, have faced numerous obstacles in the modernization of technical language, many of them stemming from the dominance of alphabetic writing. One such obstacle was that Chinese could not be accommodated by Western-style typewriters. By recounting the invention of the Chinese typewriter, this book presents the mechanical revolution in the Chinese-speaking world and explores the history of how Chinese sought to survive, adapt to, and influence technological change. It describes the many experiments Chinese speakers undertook over nearly a century to invent a Chinese typewriter, along with their failures and successes. In doing so, it shows how Chinese broke through the dominance of alphabetic writing to enter the global information age and reclaim a distinctive position.