Technology and Culture

Comrade Yaobang:

Only when we give up the international alphabetization and Pinyinization of Braille […] can we create a Chinese Braille that meets our national conditions.

(p. 133)

This is an excerpt from a letter from Huang Nai—"Father of Chinese Braille," son of the revolutionary leader Huang Xing, and one of the highest-ranking blind officials in China—addressed to Hu Yaobang in 1983, then general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, quoted in Huang's Building Chinese Braille with Chinese Characteristics.

The book is a Chinese-language collection of Huang's manuscripts, personal correspondence, and collaborators' writings, spanning forty years (1955–95) with one consistent theme—a blind linguist's quest for the most scientific tactile code tailored to the nonvisual epistemology of his fellow blind Chinese. It is a rare primary source for historians of socialist technologies, Chinese languages and codes, and disability and sensory studies.

Chronologically organized, the book reflects the tumultuous evolution of Chinese Braille. China before the People's Republic lacked a unified Braille system, with multiple tactile codes inconsistently used across the country. Influenced by a visit to the Soviet Union, Huang created the Current Chinese Braille (CCB) in the 1950s, widely celebrated as the first standardized Braille in mainland China. The CCB is a phonetic representation of Chinese, largely corresponding to Pinyin (the official alphabetization of Mandarin), rendered in the six-dot cells of international Braille. By granting it grammatical rules on grouping and separating phrases, Huang lifted CCB from the mere transliteration of Chinese scripts (p. 59). Two decades later, however, Huang decided to overhaul the CCB to correct a major deficit he felt responsible for (p. 221). [End Page 414]

Initials, finals, and tones form the basic components of a Mandarin syllable. Tones are key to distinguish the frequent homophones in Chinese. In CCB, initials, finals, and tones each take one cell. To speed up reading and save space, tone is omitted 95 percent of the time (p. 58), which Huang saw as a dire barrier to blind people's literacy. How to optimize for both accuracy and efficiency within the constraints of the sixty-three finite combinations of Braille? The final decades of Huang's life, represented in the bulk of this book, were devoted to his efforts to solve this puzzle.

For radical compression, Huang abandoned the unwieldy one-to-one mapping with Pinyin. Breaking down dot elements into first principles and deploying statistical, psychological, and linguistic theories, Huang's 1975 Two-Cell Chinese Braille (TCB) successfully rendered each syllable within two cells—first, the initial and the medial; second, the final and the tone. Initials and finals could take the same shape, and dots were rearranged to fit tactile epistemology. For instance, the fingertip is most sensitive, so the tone mark, containing lower priority information, should take the bottom dots (p. 117). Nonvisual temporal-spatial considerations like dot density and location and finger movement angle and speed abound in TCB. Contrary to disabled people serving as objectified metaphors in mainstream technologies, a pattern Mara Mills calls "assistive pretext," Huang's meticulous unpacking of "tactile reading psychology" presents actual nonnormative approaches to information processing, showcasing the value of embodied knowledge and disability expertise.

The technical is political. Huang's ultimately "scientific" Braille was effectively an independent phonetic alphabet of blind people's own, unmediated by sighted people's Pinyin. Objections followed. His 1983 plea was intercepted and never arrived in the hands of Hu Yaobang (p. 136). This ill-fated letter foreboded the short-lived reform of TCB (1995–99). Today, CCB is soon to be fully replaced by the "Universal Chinese Braille," a new system planned by the state.

Historians of Chinese language and its phonetic, digital, or computational representations will find this book an important contribution. Similar to Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter (2017), this is a story about resolving the technical tensions between the Chinese language and the affordances of a technology, while searching for a uniquely "Chinese" language representation system...