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In 1917, Hu Shi published an essay in New Youth magazine. Its title was eight Chinese characters: 文学改良刍议 — “Humble Suggestions for Literary Reform.”
It changed civilization.
China in 1917 was a country where the written language and the spoken language were two different things. Scholars wrote in Classical Chinese (wenyan), a literary language fossilized around the Han dynasty. The grammar was different from spoken Chinese. The vocabulary was different. You needed years of classical education just to read a newspaper.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Chinese people — peasants, workers, women — spoke their regional dialects and could not read what their own country’s elite were writing. The written word was not communication. It was a gate.
Hu Shi’s argument was devastatingly simple: write in vernacular Chinese (baihua). The language people actually speak.
“A dead language can never produce a living literature,” he wrote. “From now on, if you want to write something meaningful, write in baihua. Don’t write in classical Chinese.”
This was not a grammar proposal. It was a declaration of linguistic democracy.
**What happened next**
The May Fourth Movement of 1919 turned Hu Shi’s essay into a mass movement. Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, and a generation of intellectuals abandoned classical Chinese. Lu Xun wrote “Diary of a Madman” — the first modern Chinese short story — in baihua. The effect was electric. A nation that had been locked out of its own written culture suddenly had the key.
By the 1920s, all major newspapers had switched to baihua. By the 1930s, the education system followed. In roughly one generation — thirty years — China went from a civilization with a two-tier literacy system to one where the written language was the same as the spoken language.
This is one of the most consequential linguistic reforms in human history. And almost no one in the English-speaking world has heard of it.
**Why it matters for English**
English has its own Classical Chinese. It’s not called Classical English. It’s called a dozen different things — legal register, academic style, corporate jargon — but it does the same job: it separates written English from spoken English, and it turns that separation into a gate.
Consider:
– “Prior to departure” vs “Before leaving”
– “Commence operations” vs “Start work”
– “Facilitate discussion” vs “Help the conversation”
– “Subsequently modified” vs “Later changed”
– “Ascertain the facts” vs “Find out the facts”
– “The parties hereto agree” vs “Everyone signing this agrees”These are not synonyms. They are class markers. The longer, Latin-derived version signals education, professionalism, authority. The shorter, Germanic version signals… speaking like a human being.
Just like Classical Chinese, this register split is not neutral. It determines who gets taken seriously. Who gets the loan. Who wins the court case. Who gets the job.
When Hu Shi said “a dead language can never produce a living literature,” he was saying the same thing George Orwell said in “Politics and the English Language” — that bad writing is a political problem. When the written word is designed to exclude, the people it excludes are not bad readers. They are victims of a linguistic power structure.
**The question English hasn’t faced**
China asked itself: should the written language belong to everyone or to the educated elite?
And China answered: everyone.
The cost was real. Classical Chinese poetry, court documents, pre-1917 scholarship — all rendered inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t learn the old language. That loss is mourned by scholars to this day.
But the alternative — keeping the gate closed for another century, another millennium — was worse.
English has never asked this question. The gate is still open for the educated and closed for the uneducated, and we call this “standards” and “tradition” and “precision.”
China’s vernacular movement proves that linguistic reform is possible on a civilizational scale. Not easy. Not quick. But possible.
The question Zhonglish asks is: if a civilization of a billion people could democratize its written language in thirty years, why can’t English even start the conversation?
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