Gina Tam's book Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 is an outstanding work that provides crucial historical insights for understanding language in contemporary China. Tam has already been awarded the 2020 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize for a first book in any field of history, and there will hopefully be more accolades to follow for this important book.
Dialect and Nationalism's central question concerns the role of fangyan in Chinese nationalism. Tam examines how fangyan came to be defined as “dialects” in the making of the Chinese nation, and the complex, fluctuating tensions between authenticity and standardization that accompanied this process.
This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the role that language plays in Chinese nationalism, from the mid-19th century until today. A great deal of scholarly and media attention is currently given to the assimilatory drive behind the promotion of Mandarin to national minorities in China, such as its teaching in the “re-education” camps in Xinjiang. Tam's work provides crucial historical insights for understanding this situation and fitting it within global circulations of key concepts of modernity such as race, nation and (standard, national) language.
The book's narrative proceeds in linear fashion, with some fuzziness and overlap between the periods under discussion. Chapter one covers from the end of the Opium Wars until the late nineteenth century. Chapter two examines the final years of the Qing, from the Hundred Days Reform (1898), up to the early Republican period, extending to the mid-1920s. Chapter three begins with the May Fourth movement (1919), and focuses particularly on academic debates. Chapter four again takes us back to the 1920s, this time looking at the treatment of fangyan by the emerging Communist movement as it swept to power. Chapter five looks at language ideologies and policies under the CCP in power, especially during the Great Leap Forward and early years of the Cultural Revolution. An epilogue brings us to the present day.
Two elements give this narrative flow and coherence, and support a compelling and integrated analysis. First, Tam looks at the continuities in terms of ideas, practices and personalities that stitch these diverse historical moments and regimes together, and examines how tensions between standardization and authenticity pervaded contestations around fangyan throughout the period. Secondly, in doing so, Tam consistently shows how China's language politics, and the role of fangyan within them, were informed by global circuits of knowledge production that included debates about historical linguistics, racial theories, and Marxist ethnology.
The historical narrative and its analysis are built by drawing on a range of source materials. These include municipal and provincial archives in China (Guangdong Provincial Archives, Guangzhou Municipal Archives, Shanghai Municipal Archives and Qingdao Municipal Archives), and archives outside China (Yuen Ren Chao Papers, University of California Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California and the Chinese Gazetteer Database, University of Texas Libraries, Austin), as well as interviews with a number of scholars in China with intimate understandings of the country's linguistic situation and language politics. Tam also draws on a variety of published materials from throughout the specific historical periods she examines. The combination of published, archival and interview materials provide a firm foundation for producing rich insights into the issue of dialect and nationalism in China.
Methodologically, Tam's study rests on a “keyword” approach developed by cultural studies theorist Raymond Williams and applied in China by scholars such as Leon Rocha and Ruth Rogaski. Tam describes this methodology as examining the shifting meanings of terms like fangyan, Han, Chinese and nation over time. Beyond this, Tam also weaves a number of analytical approaches into her narrative, from history, anthropology and cultural studies.
This book is full of useful materials for the classroom. The introduction section on “The Chinese language: sound and script” should be required in any introductory course on China, or broader survey courses on Asia. The book's epilogue would make a useful addition to courses on contemporary China, or units on Chinese pop culture, given its rich discussion of language in popular music. The individual chapters, covering the historical periods outlined above, would make useful additions to courses covering those periods, providing a unique angle on the politics, culture and society in each of those windows of time.
Beyond Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, Tam's book will also make important contributions to the interdisciplinary study of language in fields such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. As an anthropologist, I see Tam's work as contributing to important conversations about the circulation of language ideologies within the world system, and the ongoing political dynamics that are transforming global linguistic diversity. This book therefore also helps demonstrate the importance of understanding China for any truly global approach to an historically informed understanding of the present.
