The Chinese need subtitles

 As we were sitting in the couch watching the 1994 Schwarzenegger movie "True Lies," my father complained about the awkwardly rigid translation (a substitute for the original audio track) delivered by China Central Television Channel 6 as a standard move of the institution. It really was annoying, seeing a bunch of westerners moving their mouth, while the voice that came out was like someone always hoping to make a very superficially strong impression on whoever was watching them, either being too frisky or being unneccessarily up tight. I mean, you don't ever, ever hear anyone say anything close to "我的老伙计" (literal translation for my old pal) in Chinese, not now, not ever in history. So, my father's discomfort was more than understandable.

Yet this time I troubled myself with the question "why would anyone make such horrible audio translation mandatory even till today, with all the subtitles right at the bottom of the screen?" You could, much like any lazy "institutionists," always blame it on "institutions' path dependency," but that still does not explain how the problem originated in the first place. Maybe back in the 90s their technology was still crappy, the digital revolution was still to be propagated, and the safest way was to do a voice-over than to put a subtitle on; maybe some loggerhead senior cadres dislike all things foreign so much that they could not even stand hearing foreign language; maybe they were caring for those with bad eyesight (but why would they, or how would they, watch movies? forgive my ignorance)... and, it seems quite natural to me that the obvious way out of this dilemma is just a decent subtitle, without the voice-over. But then, why do we Chinese so desperately need subtitles anyway?

The strangeness of this fact came to me when I was told that western people went to the movies normally without subtitles -- that was cultural shock alright. I could not even watch a Chinese or Cantonese movie without subtitles, because otherwise I would miss some lines and then unable to understand the plot. So I imagined English-speaking people were like great listeners (in the physical sense) that they never miss anything other English-speaking good people spoke, however subtle. 

The problem of subtitle came to me not right after the Schwarzenegger experience (by the way, that movie was as corny as a Hollywood blockbuster could be), but after I read Benedict Anderson's discussion on language and nationalism, in his book The Imagined Community (1983):

All the great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power. Accordingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language – the farther it was from speech – the better: in principle everyone has access to a pure world of signs.)

Well, the written language of the Chinese nation was quite pure in the sense that the signs did not change much over 3000 years of time, up until the 20th century. I wonder if the stability of the Chinese writing system and the relationship between Chinese writing and speech had anything to do with its lack of nationalistic development (or too late a development). This surely is too loose an articulation, but it bears some significance both historically and contemporarily, with nationalism being one major (yet according at least to some scholars failing) source of legitimacy for the current regime, replacing Marxist ideology in the cultural sphere. Yes, even in the self-claimed socialist China nowadays, Marxism is to quite an extent marginalized. My articulation goes like this:

The Chinese writing system started as a major part of the ruling toolkit of the Shang regime, both providing administrative power for the ruling class and intimidating effect on the subjects. After the establishment of the Qin Dynasty, by the "unification of written characters" (書同文), the administrative side was emphasized but the ideological and psychological effect was not eliminated but retained, later enhanced by a series of intellectuals and gradually became the basis for an imagined community of Chinese literati. These 士 (Patricia Buckley Ebrey quite correctly translated as scholar-bureaucrats) were largely immersed with classical studies, and even though they must've had very different speech, that is, vernaculars, the fact that they shared a common writing system, together with all the conceptions and frameworks, made it possible for them to recognize and support each other. The process described by Anderson as a Western bureaucratic "journey" within the absolutist monarchies was quite felt for their Chinese counterpart.

The subtitle problem is just the symptom of the divergence of the Chinese writing language and its spoken language. The Chinese writing system underwent only partial phonetization, unlike English or even Japanese, matter of fact, unlike any other major writing systems in the contemporary world. This means that, by looking at the visual signs (the characters), you almost always fail at guessing their pronounciations. It also means that, in China, there exists hundreds if not thousands of vernaculars but only one official writing system (some vernaculars like Cantonese have their own writing system, but the usage was quite limited). The writing system becomes the common ground as well as the differentiating point for all vernaculars. A Cantonese not speaking the Wu vernacular would find it impossible to watch a traditional Wu opera, but would find it no trouble reading a Wu writer's novel at all. But as it is often the case that many characters share the same pronounciation (so much so that you can find a poem-story containg only the "Shi" and "Si" pronounciations which goes like this: 石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮……), it would be impossible, especially if people are not speaking in an ordinary daily fashion (like most movies did. At this point it must be mentioned that Abbas Kiarostami was well aware of this problem that he intentionally had his actors pardon each other to say it again, see for example "The Taste of Cherry"), to know exactly what the other is saying without the help of the subtitle. It is, I guess, just because of this linguistic feature or weakness of the Chinese spoken language that we Chinese need subtitles for literally all movies so desperately.

But what has this anything to do with nationalism? If I understand Andersons's point correctly, I think nationalism is first and foremost a product of a new mindset, which requires a drastic change both in the "apprehension of time" and of space. For the Chinese the former change is easy; we always boast about our history of many thousand years, although most people cannot even recite the series of the dynasties correctly, and such pride in antiquity is, much the same as what Anderson judged other nations, imagined than actual. But the latter is the hardest part: for we Chinese, even though not unconscious of a bigger external world, always conceived the space of the world by putting ourselves in the center, not by realizing the plurality of peoples dwelling in different parts of the world, in which China is only a part with no inherent special position. The common writing system reflected this mindset perfectly: all vernaculars (including foreign ones) are peripheral, only the classical writing system is the center. And the bureaucratic and ideological power supported this point strongly. It really is the center, because it controls all, not all of the world, but "All-under-Heaven."