Whence came Mandarin? Qing Guanhua, the Beijing dialect, and the national language standard in early Republican China.

• Author: Simmons, Richard Vanness
• Position: Essay

While the language of Beijing served together with Manchu as the court vernacular in the Qing dynasty, the city's dialect was not widely accepted in China as the standard for Guanhua even in the late nineteenth century. The preferred form was a mixed Mandarin koine with roots going back much earlier, such as that represented in Li Ruzhen's mid-Qing rime compendium Lishi yinjian. A similar form of mixed Mandarin served briefly as the National Pronunciation of China in the early twentieth century and came to be called lan-qing Guanhua 'blue-green Mandarin'. This heterogeneous norm incorporated features of a variety of Mandarin dialects and eventually came to be disparaged as an unrefined cousin of the pure Beijing standard. Yet in origin the old National Pronunciation was designed to encompass a mix of regional forms and intended to contain the most broadly accepted elements of various Mandarin types. The evolution and development of the composite Guanhua norm reveal much about Chinese linguistic attitudes of the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and shed light on various perspectives about what standard Chinese should be and what a Mandarin-based norm should represent. Broad popular acceptance of Beijing as the governing norm for pronunciation began slowly to take hold only after the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China finally officially promoted Beijing as the national standard in the 1930s. Yet it then had to compete with a new mixed vernacular orthography called Latinxua sinwenz Beijing was not firmly established as the norm until the People's Republic of China definitively declared the city's dialect as standard in the 1950s.

INTRODUCTION

Contact with national language standards in Europe and elsewhere produced a strong call for the development of a national language standard in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just one year after the collapse of Imperial China and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, the Ministry of Education convened a committee to study the issue of a unified standard pronunciation and a set of symbols to represent it. The pronunciation standard the committee came up with was a compromise drawn on the basis of competing regional linguistic interests. It was a mixed language that came to be known as lan-qing Guanhua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'blue-green Mandarin' because it included disparate features from several Mandarin dialects, such as the ru [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'entering' tone and the jian-tuan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'sharp-round' distinction. (1) This mixed nature meant that it was a language that had no native speakers, which thus proved impossible to implement as a national spoken standard for the modern age.

But the mixed 'blue-green Mandarin' type was not without precedent in Chinese history. It can be seen to have been heir to a practice in traditional times that struck a compromise between competing forms of prestige Mandarin koines, including both a southern type and a northern type. A detailed and comprehensive representation of the traditional heterogeneous practice is found in the Lishi yinjian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Mr. Li's discriminating appraisal of pronunciations) by the Qing scholar Li Ruzhen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (c. 1763-c. 1830). (2) This work presents a mixed phonology that incorporates the commonly accepted contemporary norms of both northern and southern forms of Guanhua, which Li Ruzhen refers to as beiyin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and nanyin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] respectively. This mixed form has led to its critical dismissal by scholars of Chinese language history, who note that it thus does not purely represent a single historical dialect. (3) However, the koine phonology that the Lishi yinjian outlines shares a great deal with the mixed standard for the first version of the National Pronunciation (which came to be known as Lao Guoyin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] established in 1913, which was lan-qing Guanhua.

Comparing the phonology of the Lishi yinjian with the Lao Guoyin standard of 1913, we can discern a popular preference for a composite standard that allowed for variation as well as including a set of features thought to be indispensable in the aggregate, but not found collectively in any single spoken dialect. Qing (1644-1911) period Guanhua broadly conceived, including its maligned cousin lan-qing Guanhua, thus conforms well in its nature to a true koine. (4) Below we undertake detailed examinations of the Lishi yinjian and the Guoyin standard, taking a particularly close look at the heterogeneous set of features shared between the two. We find that while the Lishi yinjian and Lao Guoyin both represent artificial, highly idealized phonologies, they provide a decidedly authentic picture of the Guanhua of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as conceived by literate Chinese; and we find therein a view of the koine that was the native vernacular of no one but that served as the common supra-regional prestige form of many. Before proceeding we present a brief overview of the place of the Beijing dialect as a prestige norm in the history of Mandarin. (5)

OVERVIEW OF THE RISE OF BEIJING AS STANDARD

Although the dialect of Beijing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is widely (yet erroneously) held to have served as the spoken language standard for several centuries, its identification and common acceptance as the official standard language for China actually came very late. It can be said that the situation was not fully finalized until the 1950s after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Both the spoken and written forms of Mandarin had well established de facto standards much earlier; both of them took recognizable form in the Song (960-1279) and by the Ming (1368-1644) were widely accepted and used. Yet these de facto norms were not based on the dialect of Beijing. In the Song dynasty, Beijing had not yet been established as the capital of all of China, and the language of Kaifeng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and the central plains was the dominant form of Mandarin, even after the transfer of the capital to Hangzhou [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Southern Song (1127-1279). When the Yuan (1271-1368) established their capital in Dadu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (in the area of modern Beijing), that city's language grew in prominence, but likely still had to compete with a literati preference for the previous Song variety of Mandarin, which had since migrated southward and come to dominate the southern Yangtze watershed region. After the Yuan, this newly evolved southern, or Jiangnan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Mandarin was brought to preeminence when Zhu Yuanzhang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1328-1398) expelled the Mongols and set up his Ming capital in Nanjing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the heart of the Jiangnan region.

Still, it is generally believed that Beijing came again to linguistic prominence soon after the Ming capital was transferred north to the city of Beijing by the third Ming emperor in 1421. But it did not. Southern norms for Mandarin prevailed all the way through the Qing and into the Republican period. It was not until the early 1920s that this southern preference finally collapsed in the face of practicalities that, it seemed, only the language of Beijing could resolve. Thus in 1924 the Ministry of Education officially designated the pronunciation of Beijing the national norm. Yet the new standard did not begin to be widely taught until the 1930s, at which time it was forced to vie with a competing Mandarin model developed by a group of communist scholars that came into wide use in north China beginning in 1929: Latinxua sinwenz. But sinwenz was in fact also a mixed system that contained elements from many dialects and was not based on the speech of any single dialect.

The issue was finally definitively settled following the Chinese communist victory in 1949, when the new People's Republic of China (PRC) clearly reaffirmed the status of Beijing pronunciation as the national language norm. On October 23, 1955, the National Convention on Script Reform (Qudnguo wenzi gaige huiyi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] made a resolution calling for the "widespread promotion of Putonghua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] that takes Beijing pronunciation as standard." The convention's resolution was brought forth following the lead of a speech by the Minister of Education (jiaoyubuzhang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Zhang Xiruo [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], titled "Vigorously promote the Common Language that takes Beijing as its pronunciation standard." (6) Three days later on October 26, 1955, the People's Daily echoed this resolution in an editorial and expanded upon it: "The common language of the Han [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] people is Putonghua, which takes northern dialects as its foundation and takes Beijing pronunciation as its standard." (7) Then, early the following year on February 6, 1956, the State Council of the PRC (Guowuyuan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) further refined the definition with an indication of the grammar standard, adding that it "takes model writings in modern vernacular prose as its standard for grammar." Explaining the State Council's directive, Premier Zhou Enlai [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] summed up the various components of the full new language standard in one complete statement, saying that "the foundation for the unification of Chinese already exists; it is Putonghua, which takes Beijing pronunciation as its phonetic standard, takes northern vernacular as its dialect foundation, and takes model writings in modern vernacular prose as its standard for grammar." (8)

This is at once the final word and the most forcefully promoted designation of the national language standard now current in...