Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief—summer vacation edition.
I’m currently traveling, and in lieu of our usual format, I thought we might take a break from the news and enjoy some lighter fare. This week, I would like to dispel, once and for all, one of my greatest pet peeves. I hope you enjoy—and join me in this mission.
The Long Arc of “Ji Jinping”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in power for over 12 years. In that time, he has become a household name in global politics, and his actions regularly make headlines. Yet that hasn’t stopped many Americans from mispronouncing his name.
It’s less amusing than the unfortunate Indian news anchor who called him “Eleven Jinping,” but no less wrong: Americans are strangely persistent in calling one of the world’s most powerful leaders “Ji Jinping.”
Xi’s family name is easy to pronounce with reasonable accuracy in English; it sounds like “she.” (If you want to get it even closer, put your tongue just behind your top teeth.) In conventional Mandarin Romanization, the letter X represents the “sh” sound, but English speakers often associate it with “zh,” which in Mandarin is close to the English pronunciation of J and perhaps is the source of some of this confusion.
But where does that mysterious X, so counterintuitive for English speakers, come from? And how did the names of Chinese revolutionaries Mao Tse-tung and Teng Hsiao-ping become the now familiar forms of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? The answers lie in the history of transliterating the Chinese language.
It has never been easy to render Chinese in the Roman alphabet. This is due in part to the largely non-phonetic nature of Chinese characters themselves. (For a fuller explanation of characters, read the classic—and very funny—essay by David Moser, or at book length, John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.)
At the risk of sounding obvious, Chinese characters are not an alphabet. They do a poor job of transcribing the sounds of spoken language, but they do a better job of preserving meaning.
Characters were such an effective tool of empire that they were adopted in places such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, which spoke only distantly related languages. Educated men from these countries could “chat by brush,” sitting comfortably with each other and writing messages on a scroll that both understood, even if they had no language in common.
Picture a “No Smoking” sign—the familiar cigarette with a diagonal line through it. Ask an English speaker what it means, and they would say, “No smoking.” Ask a Portuguese speaker, and they would say, “Proibido fumar.” The meaning is the same, but the words are different. Characters work a little like this: They communicate meaning, not phonetics.
Take the two characters that are written the same in both Chinese and Japanese and mean “the Eastern capital.” A Japanese speaker would read it as “Tokyo,” whereas a Chinese speaker would read the same city name as “Dongjing.”
Unfortunately, when China came into modern contact with the West, initially through Jesuit missionaries in the late 16th century, this presented a fundamental problem. The Jesuits wanted to render Chinese into European languages, both to create dictionaries for missionaries heading to China and to aid in the translation of the Bible into Chinese—and eventually the Chinese classics into other languages.
But if one rendered Chinese phonetically, whose pronunciation should be used? Even within Mandarin, accents varied wildly, and the difference between dialects was vast. On top of that, Chinese spoken languages are tonal, meaning that the pitch and inflection of a word can alter its meaning. The number of tones in each language varies; there are six in Cantonese and four in Mandarin.
The Jesuits made their best efforts to transliterate Chinese, as did many other Western visitors over the years. But every choice about how to render Chinese came with political and linguistic biases. Until the 20th century, when Chinese speakers in the early Soviet Union devised the Latinxua Sin Wenz system, every model was created by foreigners, not native Chinese speakers.
Initially, Romanization systems were based on pronunciation in the major city of Nanjing, closer to southern trade ports. In the mid-19th century, the Wade-Giles system, initially developed by British diplomat Thomas Wade and then refined by his fellow diplomat, Herbert Giles, and based on the Beijing dialect, emerged as one of the most dominant variants and became used in Western newspapers.
However, in 1906, when the Imperial Post Office devised its own “postal Romanization,” it returned to the Nanjing pronunciation, partially because the French officials who ran the postal office at the time disdained the Anglicized Wade-Giles system.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over in 1949, it needed its own system—not just for foreigners but as part of a wider effort to impose a single set of linguistic and educational standards on a new nation. Some of the new national standards were inherited from the republican governments of the early 20th century, such as the use of Beijing dialect as “standard Chinese,” or Putonghua—the language now known as “Mandarin” in English.
But there were heated debates over whether the traditional writing system should be abandoned altogether in favor of the Roman alphabet, as other modernizing nationalists had done in countries such as Turkey. In the end, however, the language modernization committees opted to merely simplify Chinese characters.
A team of Chinese intellectuals, led by the great scholar and later dissident Zhou Youguang, devised a new Romanization system in the 1950s. Their creation was dubbed Hanyu Pinyin. It was introduced into national use between 1956 and 1958 and taught starting in elementary school.
That brings us back to “Xi,” written as “Hsi” in Wade-Giles, or “Syi” in the Yale Romanization devised in 1943, or “Shyi” in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the system adopted by the Republic of China in 1928. It’s Pinyin that gives us that elusive X in Xi Jinping, or in the city of Xian (roughly “shee-an”), or the Chinese word for thanks, xiexie (“shyeh-shyeh”). It’s a common sound in Chinese languages.
There’s some debate about this, but it seems most likely that the X was borrowed from the earlier Romanization systems by Portuguese Jesuits. Think of it as the sound of “sherry”—or in Portuguese, “xerez.”
Pinyin’s creators were aiming not just for a way to represent Chinese to foreigners, but also for a system that could be taught to Chinese children to help them with literacy and pronunciation. Wherever they could, then, they aimed for simplicity over comprehensibility to outsiders—such as using one letter for the “sh” sound, instead of two or three, or “Z” for “Zedong” instead of “Tse-tung.”
Pinyin has become deeply embedded into modern Chinese first through education, then the typewriter and the computer. When typing in Chinese, the most common method is to type in Pinyin and then choose from a range of characters.
During the Cold War, Pinyin’s status as the official Romanization system of China, however, often made it politically unacceptable outside the Eastern Bloc. When Taiwan was internationally recognized over China by everyone except the Soviet Union and its satellites, the Western world used Wade-Giles and other systems.
After countries switched to recognizing China in the 1970s, Western media and international institutions switched to Pinyin, and hence “Mao Tse-tung” became “Mao Zedong.”
The adoption of Pinyin was less than perfect. A lot of Pinyin’s features were essentially dropped, for practical or aesthetic reasons. Tiananmen Square, for instance, should be Tian’anmen under the original rules of Pinyin, and Xian written as Xi’an. But no Western media regularly uses diacritic marks that indicate tone, and even Chinese outlets are often inconsistent in using formal rules to render words.
Before its widespread adoption, using Pinyin as a Western scholar sometimes indicated sympathy for the communist government. Equally, after the institutional switch, many Western writers continued using older systems either because of familiarity, as a mark of anti-communist sentiments, or because they were more used to Cantonese than Mandarin.
And while the Chinese mainland insisted on standardization, for decades Taiwan couldn’t pick a system. The issue was drawn into Taiwan’s own political and linguistic battles, leaving a bewildering variety of choices—especially for names. Taiwan eventually settled on Pinyin for official government documents in 2009, but it continues to use several Romanization systems, just as it now embraces its multi-linguistic heritage.
However, even after a century and a half of transformation, in none of these languages or systems is Xi pronounced Ji. Please stop doing that.