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How China Changed Its Language From Archaic Confucian Bureaucracy to the Lingua Franca of Globalization
After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind.
Today’s guest is Prof. Jing Tsu, author of “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.” She argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the Chinese language—with its many dialects and complex character-based script—accessible to the modern world of…
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