A Billion Voices Quotes

“Another piece of the puzzle comes from author Peter Hessler’s interview with Zhou Youguang (known as ‘The Father of Pinyin’), in which Zhou suggests that it was a remark made by Stalin to Mao during a visit to the Soviet Union that caused the change of focus.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“This streamlining yields a reduction of 12.5 per cent in the average number of strokes for the 2,000 most common characters, but even this simplified system still requires years of practice to master.42 The PRC government attempted a second round of character simplifications in 1977 but these met with strong resistance by the linguistic community as well as the general public. Can the character simplification program be considered a success? The general consensus is that the streamlined graphs represent marginal progress – in the way that flyswatters help to decrease the fly population – but are woefully inadequate for ultimately addressing the real problem, which is literacy. Some”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced, ‘At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“In China, every statistic is an astronomical number. This”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“Indeed, the dialect is disappearing from the Shanghai streets. Beginning in the early 1990s, in compliance with the Department of Education’s Putonghua drive, and in an effort to make Shanghai a more cosmopolitan city for the twenty-first century, Shanghainese was actively discouraged in schools. Now an entire generation of Shanghai residents is forgetting how to speak the local dialect.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“Under the government’s policy of a monolingual media and educational system, some regions of the country are beginning to realise that, as the local dialect fades, so does the local culture.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“In fact, some might say that the growth of television and radio has done more to promulgate Putonghua than any of the official government-instigated promotion programs.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“Kissinger: Chinese culture is so particular that it is difficult to assimilate other cultures.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“Once implemented, the method played a crucial role in increasing literacy rates, and making Chinese more accessible to Western media and scholarship.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“The Kuomintang had been clear about the answer to these questions, and were always opposed to the notions of autonomy and equality for the local dialects. They banned dialect-based phonetic writing and literature after 1928, charged advocates of such positions as ‘cultural traitors’, confiscating their literature and arresting them, in parallel with other anti-CPC purges.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special

“Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic; technically true but in practice not the most salient thing about it.”
― David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special