China’s Digital Soft Power Play
This op-ed written by Jing Tsu, Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center, appeared online in The New York Times on October 24.
Looking at Chinese script, you might empathize with the words of an 18th-century Jesuit missionary: “One can only endure the pain of learning it for the love of God.” The piety may be gone, but the Chinese have heard this kind of complaint for over four centuries and are finally doing something about it.
This month, the Chinese government plans to introduce codes for some 3,000 Chinese characters as part of a grand project, known as the China Font Bank, to digitize 500,000 characters previously unavailable in electronic form. Until now, only 80,388 characters have been encoded in the international computing standard, Unicode.