Codes of Modernity

A brilliant book on the political economy of script reforms in modern China. For the first time, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu clarifies how the technologies of writing, such as the making of new or simplified scripts to manage labor, information flow, and so on, became increasingly central to the political struggles over the future of China and its place in the world. This rich and well-researched study is a major contribution to the fields of Chinese history and global history. -- Lydia H. Liu, author of <i>The Freudian Robot</i> Kuzuoğlu’s achievements in Codes of Modernity are unmatched. Analyzing a dazzling array of transnational historical, linguistic, and communications phenomena, he presents nothing less than the ascendancy of China’s twentieth-century political economy of information. Kuzuoğlu proves convincingly that it both shared features with and departed from global labor regimes of economy and efficiency. -- Christopher A. Reed, author of <i>Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937</i> Uluğ Kuzuoğlu's Codes of Modernity is not only one of the most rigorous and fascinating histories of Chinese scripts ever written, it is also a story of media, of the conditions of thought and language, and of the technological mythologies structuring the goals of 'modernity' that were central to China's ongoing transformations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a field-defining book, as rich in analysis as it is in archival insights. Kuzuoğlu brilliantly reframes the history of China's efforts at language and script reform as part of a much larger economy of information and knowledge work. Codes of Modernity brings questions about the evolving conditions of Chinese orthography into conversation with the rise of information capitalism, computation, and global politics. Codes of Modernity will be indispensable to scholars of Chinese writing, but it also deserves a much wider readership—a book of archival treasures and powerful synthesis for anyone interested in the evolution of information technologies over the past two centuries. -- R. John Williams, author of <i>The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West </i>