Task 2: Others’ Stances and Ideas

Shown below is an excerpt from Chen Ping. Development and Standardization of Lexicon
in Modern Written Chinese. Language Planning and Language Policy: East Asian
Perspectives, edited by Nanette Gottlieb and Ping Chen, Routledge, 2015, pp. 49-75.

The first serious attempt to curtail the free inflow of vernacular words into Modern Written
Chinese was launched in the early 1950s in a comprehensive endeavor to codify the spoken and
written standard of Chinese. It started with the publication from June 6 to December 5, 1951, in
Renmin Ribao ‘People's Daily' of a series of articles by two eminent linguists to redress what was
perceived as substandard usage of written Chinese. The articles were afterwards published as Li
and Zhu (1952), which was greeted with enthusiasm and served as the standard “writer’s manual"
for many years to come. The undertaking culminated in the convention of the National Conference
on Script Reform and the Symposium on the Standardization of Modern Chinese in 1955, which set
the agenda for the language planning work in the next decades.
While acknowledging the necessity of borrowing words from dialects, old Chinese and foreign
languages under certain circumstances, language planners viewed the unrestrained use of
expressions from non-Northern Mandarin dialects as well as localisms from the Beijing dialect as
undesirable. Such a practice, they maintained, resulted in the "lowering of quality" of Modern
Written Chinese, as it led to incomprehension or misunderstanding on the part of readers (Luo and
Li 1955: 92). Since the promotion of a written as well as a spoken standard, called Putonghua
‘common speech' (formerly guoyu) across the land presumably contributed to general socio-
political progress in a new China, any argument or practice not in conformity with the
standardization efforts met with disapproval. At that time, Stalin’s view that, with the development of
a national language for the entire population of a country, dialects would gradually die out was
upheld as an indisputable guiding principle in the formulation of language policy. Given the
inevitable demise of dialects, the argument went, it would be inappropriate to write in dialects
instead of the standard national language, or borrow heavily from dialects other than the one upon
which the national language was based. It was even asserted that while the use of localisms in
writing had a revolutionary significance before 1949, it could lead to disintegration of the country
after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (Zhou 1951). Writers of non-Northern
Mandarin were urged to rid their writing of expressions which were used only in their own dialects.
Those speaking the Beijing dialect were also advised to avoid localisms in favor of equivalent
expressions of wider circulation in Northern Mandarin.
Although the campaign to purge localisms from Modern Written Chinese was spearheaded
by linguists, it apparently won general support from writers. Lao She, an outstanding writer who
had been well known for his adroit use of the Beijing vernacular, was among the first to announce
that he would answer the calls for standardization and refrain from using vernacular expressions
that were not part of putonghua. While admitting that it was much easier for him to write completely
in the Beijing dialect, he argued that a written style based on putonghua is accessible to more
readers than one that has too many Beijing localisms. More importantly, according to him, it
contributes to what he called "purity" of the Chinese language with the assumption that all those
localisms will only corrupt the language, and contributes to linguistic uniformity across the country,
and as a result makes the language serve the people better (Lao 1959: 168, also cf. Schiffman 1996:

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