Hanyu Pinyin as a public relations tool

By Michael Riches

I lived in China for three months before coming to Taiwan. I have now been here for six years. Considering that I quickly turned my back on a good career opportunity in Shanghai and have lasted so long in Taipei should make obvious where my allegiance lies.

Although China was not my cup of tea, some aspects of the culture rubbed me the right way. One was its universal use of Hanyu Pinyin. Having an effective, consistent pronunciation system helped me sound like an ace to those who listened to my basic Mandarin. It also helped locals teach me new words on the back of a napkin.

If someone told me to meet them on Zhongbei Lu, I knew what to look for on a street sign or a map. I would not look at Chung Pei Lu and think I was in the wrong place — a phenomenon not uncommon in Taiwan.

Despite feeling pushed away from China by other factors, the positive interactions within the language environment boosted my confidence and drew me into the culture. The fondness that remains demonstrates how Hanyu Pinyin can be an incredible public relations tool for Mandarin-speaking cultures.

Taiwanese have been warm and welcoming in all the ways that match their reputation, but this society’s refusal to use a standardized system for romanizing Mandarin has been a mild insult to foreigners. It has forced me on occasion to mispronounce names of people, places, political parties and historical events, to the point where listeners doubted my ability to speak their language.

Conflict was not unusual in my first months in Taiwan. In one instance, I explained to a friend that I wanted to visit a place I pronounced as kow-see-ung.

“No such place exists,” he said.

I kept repeating the name more slowly and with different syllable stresses. When the penny dropped, he told me I was trying to say gow-shee-ong (Kaohsiung). I then told him he was pronouncing “k” incorrectly, which did not soothe our frayed nerves.

I chose to study the effects of Chinese romanization on cultural interactions for my postgraduate research in Taiwan from 2016 to 2018. I looked at the way functional transliteration welcomes a person into the language culture, while haphazard use has the opposite effect.

I approached my research through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, popularized by the maxim “The medium is the message.” In this case, transliteration systems such as Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, or the “mixed spellings” used in Taiwan, are media that convey a number of linguistic and cultural messages to listeners, speakers and language learners.

Some of those messages, though, can be political. When Taiwan began discussing the need for a universal transliteration system about 20 years ago, unresolved debates erupted between those who recognized the benefits of adopting the globally recognized Hanyu Pinyin system, and those who found Hanyu’s “look and feel” objectionable based on its origins in communist China.

The government in 2002 proposed a Taiwan-made compromise called Tongyong Pinyin, which eliminated the supposedly Maoist-looking “x” and “q” from its order, but was officially discontinued in 2009.

The transliteration debate partly occurred within the pages of the Taipei Times, whose editorial board in 2008 was in favor of Taiwan adopting Hanyu Pinyin, but today continues to change Hanyu-spelled place names to Tongyong. Disentangling romanization’s communicative effects from its political associations was tortuous for many, and today the establishment would rather leave the topic buried.

I return to it, though, because I was struck in my research that the pundit class fighting Hanyu Pinyin did not seem to ask foreigners — the people who need to read signs and understand that “Sindian” and “Xindian” are not two separate places — which system would best facilitate their ability to function in the national language.
 
One part of my research was to discover if Hanyu Pinyin’s supposed Maoist message was shared by average Taiwanese.

I drafted a survey, completely in Chinese, that presented a list of Taiwanese place names along with their Hanyu Pinyin equivalents — Kaohsiung/Gaoxiong, Taitung/Taidong and so on. Without mentioning the phrase “Hanyu Pinyin,” I proposed a hypothetical situation in which the government adopts these “new” spellings. I presented a list of 16 positive, negative and neutral adjectives to associate with the change.

The 30 Taiwanese undergraduate participants most commonly chose “confusing” and “unnecessary” (they could select as many options as they saw fit). About half as many chose “friendly” and “modern,” but only one selected “communist” (presented as 共產黨人 in the survey).
 
When asked why such a change would take place, the written comments emphasized standardization and foreigners’ needs. None mentioned Chinese influence.

The result seems to show that the anxiety over Hanyu’s association with China simply belongs to establishment elites.

Another survey, which had 88 respondents and five follow-up interviews, showed that about 45 percent of Chinese were comfortable using Chinese names in Western communities, mostly based on pronunciation issues, but also because Hanyu Pinyin would mentally map to Chinese characters.

Even when mispronunciations occurred, the survey participants identified the misspoken name as being generated from within the Chinese language culture. As with a respondent named Qing, after years of being called king with no complaint, he decided to teach people the pronunciation of the “Chinese Q,” helping draw local Canadians toward his culture.

Only 7.4 percent of Taiwanese survey respondents — two — said they used Chinese names among foreigners, and one used a Hanyu Pinyin spelling.

I conclude from this that a lack of Hanyu Pinyin pushes locals away from their language culture when interacting with foreigners, as when places such as Taipei or Taichung are intentionally mispronounced to be understood.

The heart of my research, though, was an experiment in which I recorded five Canadians speaking Mandarin from Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles text. The participants were based in Canada and had no prior Chinese-language experience. The three native Mandarin speakers who evaluated the recordings in Taiwan found 73 percent of the Hanyu Pinyin pronunciations were intelligible, while Wade-Giles scored 52 percent.

The raters looked uncomfortable hearing certain words mispronounced, while the speakers developed positive impressions of Chinese when associating articulation with Hanyu Pinyin.

Another survey presented a similar group of participants with Hanyu and Wade-Giles text, categorized by each system, along with a pronunciation chart. The words selected focused on each system’s most unique phonetic aspects. When asked which system they believed would elicit the most accurate pronunciation, 11 of the 12 participants chose Hanyu Pinyin.

The benefits of the system extend beyond foreigners being able to read signs. Locals also would likely enjoy hearing place names and personal names spoken correctly, and perhaps Taiwanese would have fun teaching newcomers new words using the alphabet.

Using Hanyu Pinyin is not akin to bowing to China. It is bowing to the rest of the world and welcoming newcomers into the local culture, creating lasting first impressions for foreigners and locals alike.