In the late nineteenth century, a new invention completely revolutionized the world, breaking down barriers once thought of as impassible for both the human body and mind. No, I’m not talking about the airplane or the automobile. No sir, I’m talking about the fricking typewriter. It can’t be understated exactly how much typewriters changed the world. Previous to the invention of typewriters, businesses, government offices, and researchers had to write everything by hand, which was tedious as all get out and often resulted in nearly unreadable documents depending upon the clarity of the writer’s handwriting. Typewriters could produce documents at twice the speed in always readable block letters. Typewriters made documentation and records keeping a breeze, allowing for a quicker and greater accumulation of institutional knowledge. It can’t be said enough how much this revolutionized the world. In fact, it was of such great importance that even the most sexist asshats of the day threw out their so called morals in order to hire droves of women in order to get enough typists. For whatever stupid sexist reason, typist was seen as one of the few careers acceptable for women at the time, and they flocked to it by the thousands, many earning their own money for the first time. Yes sir, typewriters were most certainly a revolutionary device.
Unfortunately, such wonders as the typewriter were completely unavailable to the people of China. The issue lay in the structure of the Chinese written language. Most written languages in the world are phonetic, meaning that different letters represent different sounds. Since there are a limited number of sounds any person can make, it was easy to fit all of the needed letters on a keyboard. In comparison, Chinese is a pictoral language, meaning each word is represented by a different character. Altogether the Chinese language utilizes some 50,000 different characters, with even the most basic writing requiring some 6,000 characters, which is pretty damn impossible to fit on a keyboard. This problem was unique to China, with even most other Asian nations with pictoral languages still having some type of phonetic alphabet that could be relatively easily converted to a keyboard.
China’s inability to effectively utilize typewriters was most certainly a problem, though this was not something the Chinese government would ever willingly admit. After all, they had hundreds of millions of people at their disposal, so of course they could just strong arm their way through many problems. Unfortunately, this was only partially effective, and though many different factors came into play, the inability of the Chinese to quickly and clearly convey information played a role in the technological malaise that helped lead to the collapse of Imperial China, which in return resulted in decades of chaos. Tiring of such shit, the Chinese eventually began designing their own typewriters. However, these machines were so complex and convoluted, that it at times took teams of people to run them and they were little faster than just writing things out by hand. As a result, even as late as the 1970’s, most government documents were still written by hand. The various Chinese governments, dealing with civil wars and then converting the entire country to communism, had much higher priorities than dealing with the country’s inability to use a typewriter.
The perceived importance of the issue began to change rapidly in the 1970’s. In the western world, new fangled contraptions called computers were becoming all the rage, with their ability to handle complex calculations promising to revolutionize the way the world worked. Unfortunately, as more and more powerful computers were developed, the main source of input for them increasingly became the standard keyboard. This put China in a definite bind, leaving it unable to utilize technology developed in other countries, or even effectively utilize its own computers to their full potential. As a result, finding a solution became a major national security concern for the communist government.
For the autocratic government of China, which ruled by telling people what to do and then making anyone who disagreed disappear, the obvious answer was to completely shift Chinese writing to a phonetic system, a daunting task to say the least. However, this solution was not favored by many of the more traditionalist minded Chinese, who viewed China’s unique written language as an important part of its cultural heritage. One of these was a man by the name of Wang Ma, who spent over five years of his life working with a team categorizing the symbols which made up the various Chinese characters. Eventually he managed to create a system where a standard keyboard could create any character by combining at most four key strokes. Named the Wubi method, which is short for a longer name that isn’t important, Wang unveiled his creation to the Chinese government in 1984. They of course initially accused him of being a fraud, but soon after realized that Wang and his team had basically saved China from technological obscurity.
Again, there are so many interconnected factors that come into play for any change in history. However, with that being said, it is undoubtedly true China would not have been able to begin its rise to global economic prominence if it had been unable to use freaking computers. Today China utilizes numerous keyboard setups, both pictoral and phonetic, but it all began with a man who really liked Chinese characters and didn’t want to see them go away.