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The Prisoner Who Revolutionized Language With a Teacup

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Jing Tsu

Ideas
Jan 23, 2022 8:00 AM

The Prisoner Who Revolutionized Language With a Teacup

While imprisoned for being a "reactionary," physicist and engineer
Zhi Bingyi began devising a system to help computing machines read
Chinese characters.

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collage of images of mandarin keyboard Mao communist rally and
computer
Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

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This story is adapted from Kingdom of Characters: The Language
Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu.

It was 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai was in
the middle of an unseasonal heat wave, and its people cursed the
"autumn tiger." Zhi Bingyi had more to worry about than the heat. He
had been branded a "reactionary academic authority," one of the many
damning allegations that sent millions of people to their deaths or
to labor camps during the Cultural Revolution. Was it still
appropriate for Zhi to think of himself as one of the people? Hadn't
he betrayed them, as he'd been told?

TopicsBook ExcerptChinalanguageliteratureinformationlinguistics
History
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