This thesis focuses on the educational experiences of children from Mainland Chinese families in the UK. Familiarity with Chinese language, culture and literacy practices is often limited among western readers. This chapter will therefore attempt to offer a range of background information which will be useful for the interpretation of the issues raised in coming chapters. It will begin with a description of the larger Chinese community in the UK before considering the particular characteristics of the Mainland Chinese community. It will then examine salient features of the Chinese language, including its typology, phonology and grammar and its complex interrelationships with Chinese culture. Finally, it will attempt to explain both the principles which underlie its logographic writing system and the wider political issues which inform debate on the subject of reading and writing Chinese．

The Chinese community in the UK

People in Britain of East Asian origin are mainly ethnic Chinese, though there are also smaller numbers of Malays, Indo-Chinese and Japanese (LMP, 1985). According to HAC(1985), Chinese settlement in the UK can be divided into three distinct phases: pre-war (WWI) arrivals; post-war (WWII) arrivals(until the mid-1960s) and reinforcement (until the Mid- 1970s). Most pre-war arrivals were seamen. Due to the imbalanced ratio of men and women in the UK at that time, many Chinese men married non-Chinese women. They tended to distance themselves from other Chinese people, both physically and socially (Ng, 1968; Li, 1994).

As a result of the post-war economic boom in the UK and the limited profitability of products in the less fertile land in Hong Kong, many Hong Kong farmers came to Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s to seek catering jobs. HAC(1985) indicates that over 90 percent of the Chinese who came to Britain during the decade between 1956 to 1965 were from the rural areas of Hong Kong.

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, there was a marked increase in the number of Chinese emigrating from Hong Kong to Britain (Li, 1994: 45). Elaborate emigration networks developed, based on common birthplace or shared dialect. Many new arrivals were engaged in the catering trade, working either in Chinese restaurants or takeaways (Watson, 1975, 1977; Wong, 1991a, 1992). During the same period, a small number of Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong came to Britain to pursue a further education. More recently arrived Chinese migrants include political refugees from Vietnam (Jones, 1983; Wong, 1991b). 

By the mid-1980s, the Chinese population of Britain was estimated at approximately 150,000 (LMP, 1985: 50) and formed the third largest ethnic group after the African-Caribbeans and Asians (OPCS, 1983; HAC, 1985; Taylor, 1987; Wong, 1992). Since the 1970s, the number of Chinese children in Britain grew considerably as dependents have come to be reunited with their families. Wong(1992) reports that 72.5 percent of her sample of 178 immigrant children of Chinese origin arrived in the UK at school age. This growth in the numbers of school aged children is also reflected in statistics collected in four lnner London Education censuses of children whose first language is not English: the average increase for Chinese children between each of these censuses was 26 percent (ILEA, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987). 

Academic and official interest in the Chinese community in Britain came much later and has been much more limited than is the case for many other immigrant groups. The Community Relations Commission produced what was probably the first official report to focus exclusively on Chinese children in the UK in 1975. Over the next decade the only activity in this area seems to have been in the form of national conferences organised by several different groups - the National Educational Research and Development Trust (Garvey & Jackson, 1975; NERDT, 1977, 1978); the National Children's Centre(NCC 1979, 1984); and the Quaker Community Relations Committee (QCRC, 1981). 

The first work of any substance, however, was Taylor's(1987) Chinese pupils in Britain which provided the most comprehensive source of references to date on the education of pupils of Chinese origin in the UK.  Taylor reviews Chinese pupils' knowledge of language, both English and Chinese, and identifies their language attitudes and use at home and in school. She discusses the mother-tongue teaching, the relationship between parents and school teachers, making reference to factors such as parents' education, parents' knowledge of and attitudes to the British educational system and their children's schooling, and home-school contact. 

The next major contribution to the debate on Chinese children is Wong's (1992) comparative account of the Education of Chinese children in Britain and the USA. She analyzes academic and psychological problems experienced by Chinese children in a British context, using case studies of children who have joined the system at different ages to examine the impact of factors such as culture shock, lack of understanding on the part of parents and inappropriate support from school. She also describes developments in mother tongue teaching in the Chinese community and Chinese language education in British state schools.

Gregory (1993a) offers a case study of Tony, a little boy whose family had come from Hong Kong and who failed to thrive on starting school. She draws attention to the differences in learning to read in a British and Chinese school. In Chinese school, for instance, children

divide the page into columns and practise ideographs over and over again until they are perfect. This attention to detail is particularly important, for the misplacing or omission of a sigle stroke will completely alter the meaning of the symbol (p.57). 

Chinese families, usually hold books in the highest esteem, but believe that children must first learn to identify separate characters, and only after having commanded this skill will they be able to read stories or books. Gregory emphasizes that British teachers should be conscious of the main features of Chinese culture and language and be aware of the different ways of teaching in order to understand their students better. 

Sham (1997) focuses on cultural differences in teaching and learning styles in Chinese adolescents. She points to the importance of promoting interaction between Chinese and British pupils; encouraging Chinese pupils to participate in extra-curricular activities and, at the same time, giving the Chinese community opportunities to meet together. She mentions the importance for British school teachers of understanding and appreciating Chinese culture and learning styles which emphasizes a respect for and obedience to parents and the need to succeed in education and points out that, although Chinese children was present as quiet and obedient, they do not necessarily understand lessons.

Sham argues that Chinese pupils need to be taught how to reflect on the learning process, and that British teachers should encourage them to describe how they approach problem solving, making their own decisions and reading and writing assessments．

Li's (1994) focus is more on language maintenance and shift than on Chinese children within the British education system. He pays special attention to perspectives on bilingualism and language choice in ten Chinese immigrant families in the north-east of England, analyzing changes in language choice preferences and code-switching over three generations．

However, all these researchers are concerned exclusively with Hong Kong Chinese. The newest arrivals are Mainland Chinese who have only been present in the UK as students and scholars since the late 1970s. Towards the end of 1970s, the People's Republic of China opened its doors to the west. Many Chinese scientists and scholars have come to the developed countries to enlarge their knowledge and improve their academic qualifications. As a result of this more open policy, wives and children have been permitted to go abroad to accompany their husbands and fathers since the mid-1980s. Their ideology and philosophy may differ in some respects from traditional approaches because of their exposure to both eastern and western higher education. They are therefore experiencing a transition in their own right, an area which will be explored in more detail in chapter three．

The Chinese language

Examples of Chinese words, phrases and sentences will be given throughout this thesis with transliterations, glosses and translations, as appropriate. Given the linguistic distance between Chinese and English, however, it is important to provide background information on the Chinese language and to outline some important features of phonology and grammar in order to aid the understanding of the examples in the text for English-speaking readers．

Because of its geographical location, Chinese has characteristics of both the non-tonal, polysyllabic Altaic languages in North Asia and the tonal, monosyllabic languages of south-east Asia. For example, adjective-noun order is typical of all the Altaic languages(Norman, 1988) while tonal grammar is one of the most distinctive characteristics of the south east Asian languages. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. According to Crystal (1987: 310):

The Sinitic languages are spoken by over 1,000 million people. The vast majority of these are in China (over 980 million) and Taiwan (19 million), but substantial numbers are to be found throughout the whole of South-east Asia, especially in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially in the USA.

Traditionally, Chinese was divided into eight main varieties - Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, Xiang, Gan, Putonghua (Mandarin), Min Bei, Min Nan and Wu - each consisting of a large number of dialects. The Chinese refer to themselves and these main language varieties as Han - a name derived from the Han dynasty(202 BC-AD 220). There are also about 50 non-Han minority languages, such as Tibetan and Russian spoken in China by about 6 percent of the population．

Figure2．1: Languages of China． (Source: Crystal, 1987: 321)






Mandarins were the high-ranking and influential officials of old China. The term 'Mandarin' was later used to describe the language used by officials and educated persons in China. In the west, Mandarin is now the name given the major language group in China which was adopted as the standard for the whole of China when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. It is based on the pronunciation of the general Peking dialect, the grammar of northern Chinese language varieties, and the vocabulary of modern colloquial Chinese literature. Since 1956 it has also been used as the medium of instruction in schools. It is spoken by some 700 million people in the People's Republic and also by large numbers of people in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other communities throughout the world (Horvath & Vaughan, 1991). In China today it is called as Putonghua, or common language. Future developments will no doubt include the emergence of new varieties of regional pronunciation which may well give rise to problems of intelligibility (Crystal 1987). There may well be a tension between respecting popular usage and ensuring national communication.

The nature of Chinese phonology

Like many of the languages of east Asia, Chinese is largely monosyllabic.That is, each character is pronounced as one syllable and each syllable in oral form matches one character in written form(Lee, 1990). However, there are some exceptions in modem Chinese, but these almost always consist of strings of monosyllabic morphemes (Norman, 1988). For example, dian-hua 'telephone' is made up of two morphemes meaning 'electric' and  'speech' respectively. According to govemment sources, standard Chinese or Putonghua has 405 basic monosyllables(Ramsey, 1987). When these monosyllables are used in conjunction with the four different tones, it is possible to produce approximately 1,200 syllabic distinctions(not all instances of the 1,600 possible syllables are actually attested with all four tones). Each syllable consists of two parts - the initial and the final. For instance, in fang, the word for 'square', f  is the initial and-ang the final.

There are twenty-one initial consonants in Modern Chinese. The usual Chinese order is: /b, p, m, f, d, t, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, n, I/.  Two semi-vowels, /w/ and /y/, behave as consonants in this initial position and as variants of the medial vowels /u/ and /i/-in final position. Some people treat /y/ and /w/ as graphic variants of the medial vowels /i/ and /u/. Thus /Wai/ consists solely of a final. There are thirty-five finals in standard Chinese. The final part of the syllable can be divided into three parts: a medial, a main vowel and an ending. The 'medial' is a short vowel sound such as /i, u/ that comes before the main vowel. The 'main vowel' is the main carrier of the syllable. The 'ending' is a short vowel sound or consonant such as /i, u, n, r/ that comes after the main vowel.

For example, in the syllable jiong the final-iong contains the medial /i/, the main vowel /o/ and the ending /ng/.

Table 2:2  Putonghua finals (Source: Ramsey, 1987: 44) 



It should be noted that the Chinese language has large number of vowel sounds and a small number of consonant sounds. The dominant pattern is for one consonant at the beginning of a vowel, and every word must have a vowel or a semi-vowel sound. The dominance of vowel over consonant sounds leads to many homophones (Leong, 1978). According to Li (1994), in the pocket-size Chinese dictionary (新 华 字 典 Xin Hua Zi Dian 1980), there are 131 different characters pronounced as yi, of which 39 are pronounced with the falling tone. Meaning depends on both tone and context.

As already indicated, Chinese is tonal. This means that each syllable is characterized by a fixed pitch pattern. Such pitch movement may be level, rising, falling or a combination of the two. Standard Chinese has four tones - first, second, third and fourth - and a change in tone will produce a change in meaning, as illustrated in figure 2.3. Tone is an integral part of the syllable and is not used for emphasis as is commonly the case in English.

Figure 2.3  Tone differences for the syllable 'ma'. (Source: Leong, 1978: 163)





The nature of the Chinese grammar

A number of features can be singled out for special comment including word formation, word order, function words, predicates, nouns and measures and ellipsis.

Word formation

Chinese words are formed in variety ways:

1．Reduplicated words where a morpheme is repeated, eg 等 等 deng deng  (wait)、 常 常 chang chang (always), 人 人 ren ren  (everybody).

2．Morpheme plus suffix, eg 第 di (ordinal number marker), 第 一 di yi(first), 第 二 di er (second), 第 三 di san (third); 不 bu (not), 不 好 bu hao (not good), 不 干 bu gan (not to do), 不 信 bu xin (impossible)．

3.   Compounds. There is a very wide range of possibilities for combining words in Chinese, eg 地 震 di zhen 'the earth shakes' (earthquake)［consist of a subject and predicate］, 奇 怪 qi guai 'strange-strange' (strange)［coordinate elements with similar meanings］, 大人 da ren 'big person' (adult) ［one morpheme modifying another can be transformed into a single word］, 吃 饭 chi fan 'eat-meal' (eat)［verb plus an object］, 改 良 gai liang 'correct better' (improve)［verbs plus a complement］, etc.

Word order in a sentence

According to Chao (1968: 57), most Chinese sentences take the following five forms: declarative sentences, commands, questions, vocative expressions and exclamations. Normal sentence order in Chinese is subject-verb-object.

Chinese is not an inflecting language. It has no declensions or conjugations, no genders, tenses or moods, and not even the distinction between singular and plural nouns, or agreement between adjectives and nouns (Simpson 1987: 28). The shape of a word is unchangeable regardless of its function or place in the sentence. Grammatical relationships are shown partly by word order and partly by grammatical function words. Different word order signals different sentence structure and expresses different meaning. For example: '吃 鱼 chi yu (eat fish)' is different from '鱼 吃 yu chi (fish eat)'; '我 爱 他 wo ai ta (I love he)' is different from '他 爱 我  ta ai wo(He love I)' . This contrasts with English, for example, which makes use of both word order and inflection: eg He loves her and She loves him．

Function words

A range of function words is also used to make grammatical distinctions．For example: 'my pen' and 'your book' in Chinese are '我 的 笔 wo (I) de bi (pen)' and '你 的 书 ni (you) de shu ' respectively.  Here the function word 'de' indicates the relationship between the possessor and the possessed: there are no words which correspond to my, your, etc.Many Chinese words can be used as various parts of speech, for instance, 苦 ku means suffer from as a verb, bitter as an adjective, hardship and pain as a noun, and painstakingly as an adverb.

Predicates

Chinese has three kinds of predicates: verbal, adjectival, and nominal. For example, 我 上 学 wo shang xue(I go to school), 他 是 老 师 ta shi lao shi(He is a teacher). Nominal predicates have no verb: they link a noun or noun phrase to the subject. Take for instance:

他     女 儿     两 岁 ［ta de nu er liang sui］

Her daughter two year

(Her daughter is two years old)

这 个   包   十 块   钱 ［zhei ge bao shi kuai qian］

This   bag            ten     yuan

(This bag is ten yuan)

Nouns and measure words

In Chinese, each noun has a specific measure word associated with it, defined by Chao (1968: 584) as 'a bound morpheme which forms a D-M (determinative and measure) compound with [a] determinative.' When the noun is used with a demonstrative pronoun, the measure word must always intervene. For example:

一 张 纸 yi zhang zi (one piece of paper), 

六 张 桌 子 liu zhang zhuo zi (six tables)．

五 把 刀 wu ba dao (five measure knives), 

三 把 花 san ba hua (three bunch of flowers).

两本书 liang ben shu (two books), 

四 本 杂 志 si ben za zhi (four journals)

The specific measure word selected is determined by the nature or shape of the noun. The nearest equivalents in English would be a sheet of paper, a glass of water, etc.

Ellipsis

One of the shared characteristics of the languages of east Asia is the use of ellipsis. For example, when people play cards, they say 'I'm red peach 3' rather than the more formal '(The card) I(gave) is red peach 3' or 'I'm square 2' instead of '(The card) I (gave) is square 2'. Ellipsis of this kind in Chinese frequently causes difficulties in understanding for speakers of non-east Asian languages.

Chinese language and culture

Language and culture are inextricably linked. Culture influences language and language, in turn, reflects the culture which it serves. A quick overview of the ways in which Chinese culture influences the Chinese language provides a useful backdrop for much of the philosophical discussion which forms the focus for chapter three.

The history of China is clearly reflected in Chinese language and culture. China is an agricultural nation and many words associated with the land and nature have rich and important meanings. Cai(1990) has shown one such example: 社 稷 she ji (state). The original meaning of 社 she is god of the earth; 稷 ji was one of the main foods in ancient China.

People in Zhou Dynesty (B.C.771-256) regarded 稷 ji as the god of food. 社 稷 she ji has become the symbol of the power in China and is used to represent the nation because the importance of these two characters and feelings which people have for them.

China has been ruled by a feudal patriarchal clan system for thousands years. Such a system pays special attention to blood relationships and emphasizes rigid stratification which is reflected in language use: for instiance, 悌 ti(love and respect for one's elder brother) and 孝 xiao (filial piety). 孝 悌 xiao ti (filial piety and fraternal duty) forms the basis of Chinese traditional ethics.

In a patriarchal system, the husband's relatives are considered closer than the wife's. The English word brother-in-law, for instance, corresponds to six different words in Chinese: 伯 伯 bo bo (husband's elder brother), 叔 叔 shu shu(husband's younger brother), 内 兄 nei xiong (wife's elder brother), 内 弟  nei di (wife's younger brother), 姐 夫  jie fu (elder sisters husband), 妹 夫 mei fu (younger sisters husband). Similarly, six different words correspond to English sister-in-law. 

Because of Confucian ethics, Chinese emphasises harmonious relationships with others. The Chinese believe that everyone has a specific role in society and in order to have peace one must know one's precise social position and behave accordingly. According to some writers (Watson, 1977;Redding, 1990; Li, 1994), this belief has resulted in the Chinese being the most acceptable ethnic minority in Britain. This harmony is reflected linguistically in the choice of words such as 您 nin [the respect form for you] instead of 你 ni [you]. 

It is socially unacceptable for the Chinese to call relations by their names: instead they would use 'uncle',  'aunt',  'grandma', etc. to show the nature of the relationship. Even people who are not related will be addressed using kinship terms such as brother, uncle/aunt or grandpa/grandma which pay attention to age. In Chinese, people make a range of subtle distinctions between the ways in which older and younger interlocutors are addressed. In order to show respect, some speakers use expressions such as 贵 姓 gui xing (What's your respected sumame?)—鄙 姓 bi xing (My humble sur name is...); 府 上  fu shang (your mighty house)—寒 舍 han she (my poor house). 

The centrality of the group rather than the individual is another important feature of Chinese society which is reflected in the use of language. As Lu(1955) points out, the Chinese emphasis on family means that everything which relates to family is described in terms of ours and yours instead of I and you. Chinese people also tend to say 'we' instead of  'I' .  

Another characteristic of spoken Chinese which relates to culture is the demonstration of friendship and kindness by asking 'Have you eaten your meal?' 'How old are you?' 'How much do you earn?' 'How many children do you have?' For the Chinese, these questions are not seen as personal intrusions. Rather they show people's concern and warmth for each other.

The nature of the Chinese writing

In order to appreciate the discussion of Chinese literacy in chapter six, it is important to prepare the ground with a review of issues concerning the Chinese writing system, as discussed by writers such as Martin (1972) and Crystal (1987). 

Chinese is written using logographs which preserve a direct relation to morphemes themselves rather than the pronunciation of the morphemes. This is a feature not only of Chinese but of the Japanese writing system where kanji  (Chinese characters) are used alongside two different kinds of syllabic writing (hiragana and katakana), and also of Korean, Where Chinese characters are sometimes inserted in the alphabetic hangul writing (devised in Korea in the middle of the fifteenth century during the reign of King Sejong) (Tzeng & Wang, 1983) and traditional Vietnamese writing. Norman (1988: 22) points out that:

For many centuries, the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese employed literary Chinese as their normal vehicle of written expression. [They] even now are literally inundated with elements of Chinese origin, and all three languages continue to draw on their rich store of Chinese roots in creating new vocabulary. In these areas of the Far East, Chinese has come to play a role analogous to that of Latin and Greek in many European languages. 

There are four segments in written Chinese (Lee, 1990: 1-2). That is, 

(a) Strokes:笔 画 bi hua, the smallest written element in a radical or character which is not independent itself graphically, phonetically, or semantically. 

(b) Radicals: 部 首 bu shou, the smallest, independent graphic element in a Chinese character, which functions as a graphic root of the character. 

(c) Character: 字 zi, refers to each complete individual written unit in Chinese. It can be a free or bound morpheme. 

(d) Word: 词 ci, refers to the meaningful semantic unit, including base morphemes and compound words. It can contain one, two or more characters. 

Generally speaking, Chinese radicals are composed of strokes, and characters are composed of radicals. In most cases they correspond to morphemes and not words(Lee et al, 1986). Although they have their own independent meanings, this meaning is often changed when they are combined to form a word. 

Thus [咢] pronounced with a low falling tone and written as [e] in pinyin has several different meanings. For instance, 'blade of a sward' is represented as 锷 in which the radical element of the character relates to  'metal'; 'surprise' is represented as 愕 in which the radical element means 'heart'; and osprey is represented as 鹗 in which the phonetic element is  'bird'. 

Chinese characters can be divided into six main kinds. A small group of characters, estimated by Martin (1972) to represent about 5 percent of Chinese words, retains a close relationship with the original pictographic representation and are sometimes known as 象 声 xiang sheng. For example, a 'man' was first shown as two legs marching with '人' . Over a period of thousands of years, pictographic signs of this kind have been conventionalised slowly into modern Chinese characters and man is now represented as '人' . The relationship of characters of this kind is clearly to meaning and not to sound. 

Another group of characters, 指 事 zhi shi - includes 中 zhong (middle), 大 da (large), 小 xiao (small) and 一 yi (one) - represents abstract ideas. These characters come closest to ideograms. In contrast, 转 注 zhuan zhu are characters formed by changing the shape or orientation of a character to produce a word with a related meaning, for instance 尸 shi  (corpse), is derived from 人 ren (people). 

As already mentioned, Chinese has many examples of homophones, such as sun and son, and two and too in English, and a small number of characters known as 嫁 接  jia jie have been borrowed from others with a similar pronunciation. For example, 来 lai, was originally used for wheat, but is also used to refer to come; 求 qiu, originally refereed to fur, but has been borrowed for to ask for something。

Other characters are made up of compound elements. As pointed out above, it is commonly assumed that each Chinese word is represented by a single character. This, however, is not the case. 会 意 hui yi, for instance, are compound elements which have a semantic connection. For instance, 明 ming (bright) is formed by the combination of 日 ri (sun) with月yue (moon). 

All the categories of characters discussed so far represent meaning, and not sound. One final possibility, 行 声 xing sheng, however, is a combination in which a semantic element known as the radical occurs with a phonetic element which gives guidance as to how the word should be pronounced. For example, the Chinese word for mother 妈 ma - combines the radical element 女 nu (woman) with the phonetic indicator 马 ma (horse). The word for scold is also 骂 ma (pronounced wth a different tone) and this is written as 骂, which consists of the semantic element for mouth(口  kou) followed by the same phonetic indicator. This mechanism makes it possible to generate an unlimited number of new signs. Martin(1972) estimates that nine-tenths of Chinese characters are constructed according to this principle and Chinese dictionaries have thousands of compounds of this kind. Tzeng & Wang(1983) offer a slightly lower estimate, proposing that 80 percent of the logographs in Chinese script are formed using this principle. 

In some cases, however, the right hand phonetic element carries only partial information about present day pronunciation. This is the case, for instance, 红 in which the phonetic element is pronounced gong, but the character itself is pronounced hong. In other cases, there is no relationship at all between the phonetic element and the actual pronunciation. For instance, in 信 xin, the left hand element of the character means person (人 ren), the right hand element is speech (言  yan) and the whole character is pronounced xin (believe).  As Lee et  al (1986: 127) point out:

We are not necessarily given cues about the pronunciation from the components of the character, and only in some cases can we deduce meaning from the contribution of elements within or between characters. Learning one meaning and one pronunciation for a character is only the beginning. A much more complex, rich and subtle set of meanings must be acquired in order to become a skilled reader of Chinese. 

Writing reform in China

Over the centuries there have been many attempts to reform the Chinese language so as to unify the very large numbers of speakers. Wén-yán which means 'literary speech' or 'body of classical writing' can be traced back to around 1, 200 BC(Boltz, 1994), and is the traditional unifying medium for all varieties of Chinese. It differs markedly from everyday speech in both grammar and vocabulary. In Packard's (1997: 1) opinion:

The term 'classical Chinese' is used generally to refer to pre-modern Chinese language written in the classical versus vemacular style. Modem Chinese refers to the vemacular language used since 1900. 

In 1917, Hu Shih, the literary reformer, introduced a simplified, vemacular style of writing, in an attempt to make the language more widely known to the public and easier to express new ideas. The 'May Fourth Movement', which followed political demonstrations on 4 May 1919 after the Paris Peace Conference, adopted Hu Shih's ideas. This coiloquial language is called bái-huà, and was recognised as the national language in  1922. 

Other writing reforms include the publication in 1950 of a list of commonly used simplified characters; the abolition of many words in 1956; the simplification of characters by reducing the number of strokes from an average of sixteen to eight, and the reduction of the traditional 214 radicals to 189 in 1964; and the publication of a dictionary including newly simplified characters in 1973(Liu, 1978). As Chinese fornner premier Zhou(1958: 228, cited in Seybolt, 1979) pointed out: 'The immediate tasks in writing reform are simplifying the Chinese characters, spreading the use of the standard vernacular, and determining and spreading the use of phonetic spelling of Chinese' . 

While China is currently using simplified characters as the basis for the written language, many overseas Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the USA and Britain continue to prefer traditional writing. Here are some examples of traditional (complex) and simplified characters:

Complex form     Simplified form

deng (1ight) ［high level］    燈 灯

you (post)［high rising］           郵 邮

dao (guide) ［low rising］     導 导

hui (bad)  ［low falling］          晦 晦

Not all observers accept that the simplification was altogether necessary. Hayes(1987), for instance, found no evidence that character complexity affected the recognition of characters. 

The introduction of pinyin in 1958 to facilitate the spread of Putonghua also deserves attention. Mao Zedong(1951: 1, cited in Seybolt, 1979) justified its introduction in the following terms: 'The written language must be reformed; we must proceed in the direction of phoneticization being taken by all languages of the world'. Lee et al(1986: 128) defines pinyin as:

An alphabetic form of writing with consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Markers indicating the four tones of Mandarin Chinese are further aids to pronunciation. 



Again, not all observers are convinced that the introduction of pinyin was a wholly necessary development. Zeng(1983), for instance, argues that Chinese square-formed characters are easier to identify and remember than pinyin or English words, supporting his position with evidence from numerous comparative studies using very young children, pre-scholars, primary-school pupils and adults as subjects. The teaching of reading and writing using pinyin will be revised in chapter five. 

The major changes which have taken place within a relatively short period of time are reflected in the various appendices to dictionaries. The Chinese-English Dictionary, published in 1980, illustrates the original complex forms of Chinese characters and their simplified versions; a scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet; consonants and vowels of the Chinese phonetic alphabet and their corresponding international phonetic symbols. 

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to review the literature on the Chinese communities in the UK and to provide a description of the Chinese language and writing system, all essential background information for an understanding of the fieldwork described later in this thesis. 

As we have seen, the Chinese are not a homogeneous community.  O'Neill(1972, cited in Li, 1994: 51), for instance, points out that first-generation Cantonese speakers see the later-arriving Hakka-speaking emigrants as 'flighty and unreliable and not showing due respect', while they themselves are perceived as  'old-fashioned'. While the Hong Kong-born generations are more aware of regional differences attributable to their place of origin, Liverpool-born Chinese are concerned more about their relationship with the host community. None of these internal differences, however, can be compared to the dichotomy between Chinese and non-Chinese. Redding(1990) makes a similar point, observing that the majority of the Chinese people living overseas have not psychologically left either China, or the somewhat ideal and romanticised notion of Chinese civilisation. 

The same notion of local difference but overarching similarity which applies to Chinese culture is also useful in discussions of the Chinese language and writing system. There are, of course, important differences in the varieties of Chinese spoken both within and outside the People's Republic of China. However, the logographic writing system has the effect of minimising these differences and uniting the Chinese peoples. This unity, of course, is not complete. The writing reforms which have taken place in Mainland China in recent decades have not been met with enthusiasm by the overseas Chinese who have preferred to retain the teaching of traditional characters. The development of the People's Republic and the growth of economic cooperation with other countries are also likely to have important implications for written Chinese. It seems probable that improved communication and increased efficiency in the work place will reinforce the perception that simplified characters offer the best way forward; traditional characters may well be reserved as objects of great beauty to be appreciated in art galleries, rather than taught in schools.