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"Tsu, Jing"
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Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
In this original and interdisciplinary work, Jing Tsu advances the notion of “literary governance\" as a way of understanding literary dynamics and production on multiple scales: local, national, global. “Literary governance,\" like political governance, is an exercise of power, but in a “softer\" way - it begins with language, rather than governments. In a globalizing world characterized by many diasporas competing for recognition, the global Chinese community has increasingly come to feel the necessity of a “national language,\" standardized and privileging its native speakers. As the national language gains power within the diasporic community, members of the diaspora become aware of themselves as a community. Eventually, they move from the internal state of awakened identity to being recognized as a community, and finally exercising power as a community. But this hegemony of the “national language\" is constantly being challenged by different, nonstandard language uses, including various Chinese dialects, multiple registers, contested alphabet usage, and Chinese men and women who write in foreign languages. “Literary governance\" reflects both the consensus-building power and the inherent divisiveness of these debates about language and is useful as a comparative model for thinking about not only Sinophone, Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanophone literatures, but also any literary field that is currently expanding beyond the national.
eBook
Kingdom of characters : the language revolution that made China modern
\"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. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language-with its many dialects and complex character-based script-accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold and cunning innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world defined by the West and its alphabet: the exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, the Chinese Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a tea cup, among others. Without the advances they enabled, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. The revolution of the Chinese script is just as breathtaking as China's transformation into a capitalist juggernaut, in large part because those linguistic innovations literally enabled China's reinvention. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle yet potent power to be exercised and expanded\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Historians of Science Translating the History of Science
Every discipline of inquiry takes certain tasks for granted. They are not seen as the big questions that inspire and guide the field, even though they have been the practices that shape and imprint its deepest presuppositions. The question of translation, having been the focus of other humanist disciplines for decades, has come to the history of science only as of late. This essay, as a final review of the issues raised in a Focus section entitled “Historians of Science Translating the History of Science,” discusses the underlying struggle between elegant renditions and literal accuracy and opens up larger and comparative questions about the reflexive capacity of a discipline, its conditions for knowledge, and the historical mishaps and shared labor that can connect or thwart the process beyond local origins. The essay offers comparative cases in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China as a counterpoint, where the Western history of science became world knowledge through unintended readership.
Journal Article
Variation in the growth and toxin production of Gymnodinium catenatum under different laboratory conditions
The chain-forming dinoflagellate Gymnodinium catenatum is the only known gymnodinioid dinoflagellate that produces paralytic shellfish toxins (PST). Dense blooms caused by the dinoflagellate have been frequently reported in coastal waters of Fujian, China since 2017. While there is still limited understanding of the major physiological characteristics of G. catenatum isolated from Fujian coastal waters, the growth and toxin production of the G. catenatum strain were examined in batch cultures with different levels of irradiance, temperature, salinity, nitrate, and phosphate conditions. The results indicated that the highest maximum cell density of the strain was achieved at 70 µmol m−2 s−1, with the highest growth rate at 120 µmol m−2 s−1. The strain grew well within the temperature range of 15–30 °C, with maximum growth rate and cell density achieved at 20 °C. The dinoflagellate also showed higher tolerance to salinity variation (20–40), with the highest growth rate at salinity 25. Meanwhile, G. catenatum showed higher demand for nitrogen and phosphorus as indicated by its higher half-saturation constant. A decrease in nitrate and phosphate greatly inhibited the growth of G. catenatum. The toxin profile of the G. catenatum strain was conservative and dominated mainly by the N-sulfcarbamoyl C-toxins (> 95%), indicating its hypotoxicity. The cellular toxicity increased with the algal growth, with the highest cellular toxicity observed at the stationary growth phase. The cellular toxicity of G. catenatum also responded to environmental variations including lower temperature (15 °C), lower salinity (20), nitrate-repletion, and phosphate-depletion conditions which enhanced the cellular toxicity, while irradiance exerted non-significant influence. The present study depicted the physiological characteristics of the particular G. catenatum strain and provided valuable insight on the ecophysiology of G. catenatum in natural coastal waters.
Journal Article
Sounds, Scripts, and Linking Language to Power
1 A veteran of China’s modern language reforms and the main engineer behind the national romanization system, Hanyu pinyin, Zhou is the oldest surviving witness to the longest revolution in twentieth-century China: a quest for linguistic modernity that has taken more than 400 years to unfold. Since the first Jesuits arrived in China in the sixteenth century, the Chinese language has been transcribed, romanized, phoneticized, shortened, relengthened, and—most recently—digitized in its long road to modernization into a global language. There are pieces of this modernization story in the increasingly ignored field of what we think of as sinology proper, where the historical changes in rhyme tables and phonological schemes are discussed in the utmost technical detail but in terms that few any longer have the training to appreciate.2 Other parts can be found in the studies of missionary linguistics or regional sinicization, in which the Westerners’ fascination with the Chinese language, or the Chinese script’s former role as a lingua franca of East Asia and Vietnam, is treated as a separate phenomenon, although the two are complementary in their patterns of diffusion.3 In more recent times, the language policies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been a topic of interest for evaluating the efficacy of ethnic management and national literacy campaigns.4 Chinese language teaching has also become a controversial topic, with now nearly 500 Confucius Institutes on six continents.5 Elsewhere, scattered in the history of science and technology, are narrower topics like telegraphy and communications. [...]language is treated as a modern infrastructure, imported much like anything else that is Western—under unequal terms—but analysis has gone little past the familiar Orientalist critique.6 While the Chinese language’s modern transformation has come in and out of focus in different pockets of study, it has also emerged in new debates. On that cover, soldiers, intellectuals, and the masses each brandished a particular script (Western alphabet, seal script, or phonetic alphabet) as their weapon as one group slaughtered its way through the other.14 The intensity of the conflicts between speakers and institutions, nationalization and localization, technology and modernity in the twentieth century has been as great as those concerning race and gender in our time.
Journal Article