Jin Hu will discuss the legacy of the Chinese writing reform movements that occurred from the closing years of the Qing dynasty through the mid-twentieth century. Special attention is given to the major figures in the New Culture Movement, who advocated changing from Classical to vernacular Chinese, Chinese character simplification, and using Roman letters to phonetically write Chinese. Arguably, the rallying cry of the 19th-century scholar Huang Zunxian 黄遵宪 (1848–1905), “My hand writes what my mouth says 我手写我口” (1868) was realized through these reforms. These changes have allowed written Chinese to make the transition from a literary language written with ink brushes by scholars to today’s Chinese, in which everyday citizens type characters into their cell phones. This talk assumes no background in Chinese history or language and will be accessible and interesting to general audiences.

Sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese Department and co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, Philosophy Department, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.

About the Speaker

Jing Hu completed her graduate studies in Linguistics and Chinese at Peking University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ms. Hu is currently teaching Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Penn, she was a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Prior to that, she taught Chinese at Smith College for almost a decade. She has also served as the Program Director and Language Director of Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL) in Beijing for three summers and was an advisor for Oral History Projects for the Chinese Overseas Flagship Program of the American Councils for International Education. She has given numerous presentations and has many publications as an author, translator, or editor on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, Chinese film, and modern and classical Chinese literature, including translations in Anthology of Tang and Song Tales: The Tang-Song “Chuanqi ji’ of Lu Xun (World Scientific, 2020) and Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). She has co-edited (with Fangfang Ding et al.) Appreciating Contemporary Chinese Film Classics (Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe, 2021).