Chinese Cursive Script and Serving the U.S. Armed Forces

I think I snapped up one of the last in-stock Amazon copies of the wonderful Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese by Fang-yü Wang. We are using it in my class on 20th Century Chinese History Research Methods. It is essentially a class to help history students deal with Chinese documents and sources.

This wonderful little primer covers only 300 Chinese characters but has already helped me decipher all sorts of handwritten scribbles that painfully remind me of how far I have to go in Chinese and the reading of primary documents from China, Japan, and older documents from Korea.

I was so happy to see that such a book on Chinese handwriting even existed for English-speaking students of the Chinese language. Even the preface notes that up until its publication, “Perhaps the demand has never been great enough to stir anyone to what seems at the outset a hopeless task.”

The book was published in 1958 by Far Eastern Publications, a publishing company which no longer exists (some of its books are now available through Yale University Press). 1958 was a turbulent year in the relations between the US and China, and a year of military crisis for cross-straits relations between the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan. China launched a massive military bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu beginning in August. Things had been hot in the region for years though since the “first” Taiwan crisis of 1954-5. This was a time when Eisenhower famously declared publicly that the US was considering the use of nuclear weapons against China, “as you would use a bullet.”

It thus wasn’t that surprising for me to find this in the Preface to Chinese Cursive Script:

The Institute of Far Eastern Languages had been serving the needs of the U.S. Armed Forces for some years before a request was received that we provide instruction in the reading of cursive script such that might be used in informal personal communications.

I think this is a nice reminder (dated November 1958, Institute of Far Eastern Languages, Yale University) of the ways in which academic departments were often in very close relationships with governments and their militaries. These relationships continue to exist today but seldom advertise themselves in quite the same manner.