Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter: A History is a rich, insightful, and captivating transnational exploration of not only the subject proper but also Chinese language and culture, Sino-foreign interactions, and the global pursuit of what he calls technolinguistic modernity. As the first in an expected two-volume study of modern Chinese information technology, this book takes the reader from the rise of “alphabetic universalism” in the late nineteenth century, with the invention of the Western-style typewriters, to the various attempts, some more successful than others, to develop a typewriter for the Chinese script in the early Republican period, during the War of Resistance against the Japanese, and finally in the Communist era under Mao Zedong. Mullaney plans to cover Chinese computing from the 1970s to the present in the sequel.
In this volume, Mullaney argues that the early difficulties in inventing a Chinese typewriter, due mainly to its large number of...
