The Chinese Script in the Chinese Scriptworld
The exclusivist ideology characterizing the Chinese writing system as “ideographs” was constructed in the West, and later reimported into China where it influenced popular and nationalistic understandings of the characters. For the West, the Chinese script held out the promise, embraced particularly eagerly by the literary and artistic worlds, of a visual language not complicated by questions of sound, and thus by the arbitrary impositions of individual languages (Bush). For China, the Chinese script came to function as one of the key cultural characteristics marking the Chinese off from the rest of the world (Shen). This paper will attempt to provide some conceptual groundwork for understanding these complex and overlapping discourses, and set out the fundamental graphological basis through which the differing functions of Chinese characters in both the historical and the contemporary Chinese Scriptworld (Handel) can be understood.