In 2012, for an undergraduate reading report, I submitted an analysis of Lin Yutang’s The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Tungpo. It was in that book I first learned how close Lin Yutang had come to being the inventor of the first Chinese electro-mechanical typewriter.
It was precisely because of this prior knowledge that upon reading Professor Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter, I was struck by the realization that nearly all contemporary information on the internet about this subject originates from his work. I was, and am, profoundly impressed by the book’s ingenious analytical entry point.
In the early 20th century, as technical modernity identified alphacentric (p. 9) technologies like the telegraph and the typewriter as standard features, a profound anxiety permeated Chinese intellectual circles. One response was to advocate for complete Westernization, abandoning the Chinese script entirely to embrace Western writing systems and thus adapt to this new standard of modernity. Cultural leaders, including Lu Xun (p. 13), Chen Duxiu (p. 12), and Qian Xuantong (p. 190), all entertained such ideas.
Behind this lay the anxiety of a pre-modern Chinese civilization confronting modernity, a seemingly common phenomenon in such cultural collisions. However, this abolitionist faction remained a minority. Many more firmly believed in the principle “Chinese characters are innocent” (p. 10), arguing that the correct path was to achieve the modernization of Chinese input through technology.
From the 1920s to the 1930s, a greater number of technical experts and inventors emerged to solve the problem of modernizing Chinese input. Figures like Zhou Houkun (p. 137), Qi Xuan (p. 147), and Shu Zhendong (p. 167) all insisted on preserving the Chinese language and emphasized solving the problem through technology. From this perspective, this was a form of techno-nationalism, perhaps China’s earliest. I had long assumed techno-nationalism was simply an obsession: “If other nations have a (good) thing, we must have it too.” Yet, when this lens is applied to the typewriter, it becomes clear that the foreign “good thing” was not applicable to the native culture (p. 124). Therefore, in the context of the typewriter, this phenomenon was perhaps less about mimicry and more about a vision for national modernization. Compared to later forms of techno-nationalism, which often involved state mobilization to master a specific technology, the techno-nationalism of this era was primarily a vision of national modernization—a persistent attempt to turn towards modernity.
However, once Japan had successfully implemented a form of tray-bed typewriter, this sense of national crisis became even more acute. Coupled with the ensuing marketization, the typewriter of the 1940s increasingly became a national symbol. Japanese typewriter companies (seemingly the precursor to today’s Canon Inc.) entered China alongside the war, competing with domestic Chinese companies by leveraging their already mature Japanese-language machines. It seems China’s nationalists required a truly “native” typewriter, not only to realize their modernizing attempt but also to complete the project of nation-state building.
Although Lin Yutang’s MingKwai typewriter (p. 244) was not commercially successful (p. 278), it became a genuine conceptual breakthrough. It was a rebellion against and an upgrade of the traditional Western-dominated “keyboard-is-input” philosophy. By pioneering the concept of search-writing (p. 267), it became the precursor to modern Chinese input methods (shurufa) (p. 239). This was an immense innovation, the ultimate solution that Chinese nationalists had continuously attempted to complete. Its commercial failure, however, ultimately prevented the MingKwai from becoming mainstream.
Despite Lin Yutang’s conceptual breakthrough, its practical failure meant that the Chinese typewriter continued to inherit and follow the technical solutions and logic of the Japanese Wanneng (“All-Purpose”) company (p. 233).
After the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Double Pigeon (p. 195) typewriter remained consistent with the machines from the Commercial Press era; the vast majority of typewriters still used the tray-bed (p. 163) model. This involved placing roughly 2,500 common characters on a tray, and then selecting, grabbing, and striking the character onto the paper. Clearly, this typewriter differed fundamentally in both principle and design from the familiar Western Roman-alphabet-based machines. This machine perfectly fit the long-standing Western stereotype (p. 320) of Chinese input: the need to retrieve and grab characters one by one.
It is easy to imagine, therefore, that the input efficiency of such a typewriter was comparatively low. Consequently, the pursuit of efficiency became the primary direction for optimization in the post-1949 era.
It is here that Professor Mullaney introduces a captivating narrative framework: how post-1949 typists used such machines to achieve a bottom-up optimization and rebellion (p. 286).
As mentioned, the arrangement (paibu) of 2,500 characters became a massive cultural phenomenon. To achieve more efficient input, a typewriter’s layout had to align with both the typist’s habits and the cultural parlance of the time. In terms of cultural usage, post-1949 typists functioned as the “scribes” of political propaganda (p. 300). Phrases frequently used in political rhetoric were, in the name of efficiency, placed together (p. 291)—including the three characters for “Mao Zedong” (p. 307) and the characters for “Marx.” In terms of typist habits, they memorized the positions of the 2,500 characters, while also rearranging them—in their minds and physically on the machine—according to their own preferences and habits.
Professor Mullaney sees this as a technological democratization (pp. 300, 304), where the user became the subject of technological innovation. However, this conceptualization of “technological democratization” raises inherent questions. While Mullaney likely uses “democratization” to refer to user agency over machine layout, from a diffusion perspective, the term remains debatable given the extremely limited user base. A largely illiterate general public could not be the subject of this democratization. In the book, Professor Mullaney does not mention specific sales figures. However, based on data from an article by Yang Jiansheng (Guangzhou Stationery Industry Co.), the average annual sales of all Chinese typewriters from 1952 to 1978 was slightly over 6,000 units. The estimated total sales over 25 years would be merely 160,000 units. Therefore, inferring “technological democratization” from 160,000 units (a user base almost exclusively composed of state employees, as Mullaney notes (p. 284)) has always raised doubts for me as a reader. Of course, the geographical and situational use of these typewriters was extremely broad, and their significance remains immense. Furthermore, the subject of innovation on the typewriter expanded from a tiny elite in the past to a significant number of users.
During this period, the typists’ personalized layouts and the serial arrangement of common phrases became the earliest embodiment of predictive text (p. 288) technology. From this perspective, these basic users did indeed constitute a form of bottom-up innovation.
Therefore, I summarize that the development of the Chinese typewriter implies two aspects of modernity:
- Symbolic Modernity (The Compatibility of Hanzi with the Modern Image): This refers to the modernization process of the Chinese script itself. The typewriter was a Western, modern, and “progressive” image; therefore, the Chinese language had to be reformed to fit this tool. From the Remington monoculture (p. 42) onward, there were constant attempts to either reform the Chinese language or optimize the typewriter to achieve modern Chinese input.
- Instrumental Modernity: This refers to the pursuit of efficiency, excellence, and the “assembly line” logic of modernity, reflecting a constant drive for higher input speed and quality. Whether it was the Shu-style typewriter from the Commercial Press emphasizing efficiency, or the national-level recognition of typing speeds in the Mao era, the pursuit of efficiency was paramount. Of course, a rebellion against this modernity also existed here: the pursuit of efficiency in the Mao era was precisely built on a rebellion against the concepts of the assembly line and “interchangeable typists” (p. 302). It achieved efficiency through radical individualization (p. 302, 304).
Finally, regarding technocrats. The book also addresses the struggle for control and discursive power among technocrats. In the early Mao era, model workers (p. 288) like Zhang Jiying (p. 290) and Shen Yunfen (p. 297) became prominent due to their outstanding performance, even being received by Mao Zedong (p. 298). Technocrats gained political capital by “discovering” such typists, and these typists, in turn, often became part of the technocracy. This perfectly suited Mao’s “mass line” (p. 300) political values.
However, as typists’ personal influence grew and they engaged in highly personalized customization of their machines, this “individualism” (p. 302) presented a political risk by conflicting with the “socialist line,” placing immense political pressure on these technocrats. At the 1953 “Meeting for the Improvement of the Typewriter Character Chart” (p. 301), they attempted to manage and standardize this innovation, defining the terms of the struggle for discursive power over the typewriter itself.