94-648: Li Lisan ( Chinese : 李立三 ; pinyin : Lǐ Lìsān ; 18 November 1899 – 22 June 1967) was a Chinese politician , member of the Politburo , and later a member of the Central Committee . Li was born in Liling, Hunan province in China in 1899, under the name of Li Rongzhi. His father, a teacher, taught Li Chinese traditional poems and classics. In 1915, he arrived at Changsha for high school and saw an advertisement in
188-512: A boilermaker to earn his tuition. His boss was a member of Communist Party and Li was influenced in accepting communism , taking part actively in the struggles for Chinese labour rights in France. For his active and fearless revolutionary work, Li was labelled as a trouble-maker. In 1921, Li was expelled along with more than 100 other Chinese by the French authorities. When Li returned to Shanghai , he
282-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
376-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
470-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
564-601: A Russian noblewoman and typesetter named Lisa Kishkin (Elizaveta Pavlovna Kishkina; Russian : Елизавета Павловна Кишкина ; Chinese : 李莎 , d. 2015), who would later migrate to China with Li. But Li's old friend Mao did not forget about him. Li was elected as member of the Central Committee of CCP in the 7th National Congress of the CCP held in Yan'an . In 1946, Li was sent back to China. Li first came to northeast China to work for
658-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
752-518: A Work-Study Program to send students to France who would finance their study by working in French factories, he and other members of the Society went to Beijing to seek their help. In 1919, he traveled to France for the Work-Study Program with his mother and his sister Cai Chang ( 蔡畅 ). On the ship he met and fell in love with Xiang Jingyu . At a time when "free love," that is, individual choice,
846-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
940-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1034-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
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#17328370274281128-419: A final letter to Mao. Li's biographer, Patrick Lescot, has cast doubt on the nature of Li's death. Li Sishen ( 李思慎 ), Li Lisan's personal secretary, later wrote he did not believe it possible Li Lisan could have had access to sufficient pills to kill himself. Li Sishen had been responsible for overseeing the issuing of the sleeping pills. He recalled arguing with Li Lisan, who wanted an extra pill each night as
1222-638: A job in the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, where Cai was born, March 30, 1895, the fifth of six children. Cai's mother, left her husband, apparently angered at his taking a "secondary wife." She returned to Hunan in the spring of 1899, taking Cai and his younger sister, Cai Chang ( 蔡畅 ), and refusing to live with her husband even when he too returned. The family had little money but Cai found his apprenticeship in his father's business to be unbearable. Cai's mother sold her personal possessions to enable Cai to attend
1316-606: A long time of redemption. In the next 15 years, Li suffered from rounds of reprimand, criticism , and purge . The Communist Party of the Soviet Union even refused to accept Li as a CCP member for several years. Moreover, when Wang Ming and Kang Sheng came back to Moscow as representatives of the CCP to the Comintern, they persecuted Li by every means available. The only comfort was that in the Soviet Union Li met, and later married,
1410-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1504-402: A missionary cramming a religious belief into a worker's head. At first they focused on literacy and basic knowledge. Every week they convened lectures as well as workers' debate societies and study groups. In 1926, Li came to Wuhan , the labour work center of China to lead the labour work. Although Xiang Zhongfa , who later became general secretary of the CCP, was the top leader at that time, Li
1598-704: A newspaper written by a student from First Normal School of Changsha with the pen name 28 Strokes. Li met and then became friends with the young man, whose real name was Mao Zedong . Later, Li joined the army of a local warlord in Hunan . One of the Division Commanders, Cheng Qian , who was both Li's father's townsman and alumni, sponsored Li to study in Beijing . When Li reached Beijing, he applied to study in France and arrived there in 1920. He worked part-time as an assistant to
1692-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
1786-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
1880-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
1974-491: A telegram to call Li to Moscow for repentance. Pavel Mif , president of Moscow Sun Yat-sen University and mentor of the 28 Bolsheviks, went to Shanghai as an envoy of the Comintern also. Under Mif's direction, the 4th Plenary Meeting of 6th National Congress of the CCP was held. Li was replaced by Mif's protégé, Wang Ming , and his associates in the 28 Bolsheviks took other important jobs. Li went to Moscow for his confession and repentance. But he did not know it would be such
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#17328370274282068-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2162-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2256-628: A village school at the age of sixteen. He then studied at Hunan First Normal School and at the Hunan First Normal University in Changsha. Cai studied under Yang Changji , and joined student movements with his fellow student Mao Zedong . In June 1917, he graduated. In April 1918, Cai, Mao Zedong, and a dozen others organized the New People's Study Society (Xin Min Xue Hui) in Changsha. It
2350-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2444-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
2538-763: Is because in the past the Communists carried out comprehensive 'red education' at Anyuan. Six or seven years ago, the Anyuan workers were all country bumpkins…Not one of them could stand up at a meeting and say a word, let alone deliver a speech. Still less had any of them ever heard of organising anything. It was only after the Communist bandit Li Lisan went to Anyuan…that the knowledge of how to organise became widespread. Now workers were speaking up at public meetings and even giving lectures! The Communists at Anyuan greatly valued education but they did not mechanically evangelise Communism like
2632-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
2726-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
2820-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
2914-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
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3008-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3102-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3196-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
3290-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
3384-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
3478-735: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
3572-520: The 6th National Congress of CCP held in Moscow , Li's old friend Xiang Zhongfa was elected as General Secretary with the support from the Comintern and the Soviet Union. During the reign of Xiang, Li Lisan played a gradually more important role. Xiang sacked Cai Hesen , the incumbent standing member of Politburo of the CCP and Minister of Propaganda Department of the CCP for Cai's extremist way in directing
3666-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
3760-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
3854-579: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
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3948-767: The labour union . Li was dedicated to his old cause and brought forth guidance on democratic management measures in industry, which was later called the Constitution of Anshan Steel Mill by Mao. At the same time, Li Lisan was one of the founders of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference mechanism. During the Korean War , he was appointed as the secretary general of Anti Air Defence Council ranking as vice-premier, due to his WWII anti-air attack experience during his stay in Moscow. Li remained an advocate for independence of
4042-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
4136-591: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
4230-671: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Cai Hesen Cai Hesen (March 30, 1895 – August 4, 1931)
4324-693: The Chinese Communist Party was founded, Cai wrote and gained permission to establish an official branch in Europe. In the latter half of 1921, Cai was arrested by the French government for organizing a wave of protests against the Work-Study leadership over admissions to the Sino-French Institute at the University of Lyons, and was deported soon after. Cai and Xiang Jingyu returned to China to work in
4418-511: The Chinese Communist Party's central organization. He founded the first newspaper, The Guide ( 向导 ), of the CCP's central authority. Cai was a member of the 2nd , 3rd , 4th , 5th , and 6th Central Committees of the Chinese Communist Party , as well as a member of the 5th and 6th Central Political Bureaus and other important positions. In 1925, he served as the CCP's representative to the international Communist movement in Moscow. While in Moscow, his marriage with Xiang broke up. (In 1928 she
4512-724: The Chinese authorities in Guangzhou , which was controlled by the warlord Chen Jitang . He was tortured and executed in August 1931, aged 36. The ex-wife of Cai, Xiang Jingyu, was arrested a few years earlier in the Shanghai French Concession in Wuhan on 20 March 1928 due to the betrayal of members of her group to the police. The French officials turned her over to the Guomindang in April 1928. On
4606-479: The Chinese revolution was in its peak period. Li turned this blindness into extremism, which was later known as Li Lisan line (立三路线), calling for armed uprising in the cities leading by workers and the extension of the revolution to the whole country. From June 1930, Li Lisan line became mature under the support from Xiang. The CCP gave the daily operation from its headquarters to divisions in all provinces, setting up action committees in all provinces and preparing for
4700-718: The Comintern rose greatly. Suspicion and criticism of the CCP towards the Comintern was the same as betrayal in the eyes of the Comintern. In July 1930, the communist army under the leadership of Li Lisan captured Changsha in Hunan province, but KMT troops defeated his forces just a few days later. Uprisings in other cities were quickly put down by KMT forces. Furthermore, Li had turned many CCP members into enemies with his authoritarian style. Some of these were old CCP members, such as labour activists He Mengxiong and Luo Zhanglong, who were blamed for their rightism only because they were against Li's extremism. Wang Ming and his group of 28 Bolsheviks came back from Moscow, designated to take
4794-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
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#17328370274284888-561: The Party? It's simply laughable. In 1980 the central Organisation Department finally allowed Li Lisan's family to read his autopsy report. It listed his height incorrectly by 15 cm and contained other errors which added to the family's doubts over the accepted version of Li's death. The Central Committee also held a memorial meeting for Li. In 1983, the Hubei Provincial Committee carried out an investigation on Li's suicide. But it
4982-577: The Sunzi Division of CCP, which resulted in extreme democracy and discontent at the CCP center. Xiang chose Li to replace Cai. Li became one of only four standing members of the politburo and minister of Propaganda Department of the CCP in October 1928. When the Far East Bureau of the Comintern issued an order for anti-rightism and blamed the CCP for not being active enough in 1929, Xiang protested
5076-436: The decision. He knew Li was an appropriate candidate for doing the communication work because of his eloquence and energy. Thus, Li took the job of handling conflicts with the Comintern. When Xiang sent Zhou Enlai to Moscow for further instruction, Li took on Zhou's work in organisation too, which gave Li a large enough stage to prove his talent. When Xiang learned of the Comintern's decision on anti-rightism, he claimed that
5170-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
5264-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
5358-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
5452-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
5546-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
5640-406: The full-scale uprising in October. But the Comintern expressed its discontent, stating that it was working out systemic policies for the Chinese revolution and that the CCP should concentrate on the uprising in one or several provinces instead. Xiang supported Li and stood by his idea that it was the zero hour of the Chinese revolution. In several rounds of discussion, the tension between Xiang, Li and
5734-599: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
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#17328370274285828-531: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
5922-408: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
6016-477: The leadership of the CCP by their mentors in Moscow, but they only received a cold shoulder from Li. With so many opponents both inside and outside the CCP, Li's doom was sealed. The Comintern sent Qu Qiubai and Zhou Enlai back to China to enforce its policy. And the 28 Bolsheviks took advantage of this opportunity to denounce Li. Xiang, and Li still did not realize the clear danger he was in and criticised these young immature students severely. Then Comintern sent
6110-428: The local division of the CCP as Minister of the City Work Department. At the resumption of the Chinese Civil War , Li was appointed as chief representative of the CCP to the military arbitration panel consisting of members from the KMT and the United States. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Li went back to the field of his main expertise, being appointed as Minister of Labour to lead
6204-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
6298-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
6392-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
6486-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
6580-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
6674-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
6768-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
6862-456: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
6956-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
7050-444: The struggle sessions were affecting his sleep. Li Lisan dismissed the notion he might kill himself as ridiculous: 这简直是笑话，几十年风风火火我都过来了，难道还经不起这次考验？你不就怕我自杀吗？自杀是叛党行为，这点我明白，难道我能走上叛党的道路吗？简直是笑话。 This is a joke! I've made it through all these decades of strife and turmoil and you think I can't get through this? Are you worried I'll kill myself? Suicide would mean betraying the Party, I know that well enough; am I going to turn renegade against
7144-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
7238-645: The trade unions, which brought him into conflict with Mao. He was the Vice Chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions until 1958 and the first president of China Institute of Industrial Relations . After the Chinese-Soviet Union split in the 1960s, Li's life turned tougher and tougher again. Although his wife, Lisa Kishkin, handed in her Russian passport and took Chinese nationality to show her loyalty to her husband and his country, there still
7332-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
7426-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
7520-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
7614-508: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
7708-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
7802-844: Was an early leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and a friend and comrade of Mao Zedong . Cai was born in Shanghai but grew up in Shuangfeng County in Hunan Province of China . He helped Mao organize the Changsha New People's Study Society . In 1919 he went to France on the Work-Study program , and his letters of advocacy were important in convincing Mao of the Bolshevik revolutionary approach . On his return to China, he
7896-469: Was an important leader and organizer for the young Communist Party, spent several years in Moscow, and returned to China again in 1931. While organizing revolutionary activity in Hong Kong, he was arrested and given over to Canton authorities, who executed him in August 1931. Cai's family included both merchants and scholar-officials, but his father had not done well in the family business and instead obtained
7990-556: Was at this time that Li showed his great talent in labour work and organisation in conjunction with Liu Shaoqi , who later became his deputy. The Nationalists had a high opinion of Li's organisational skills; a secret report prepared during their rural pacification campaign in 1928 explained why they were having particular difficulties in Anyuan: The reason the Communist Party has such a deeply rooted and firm foundation at Anyuan
8084-545: Was betrayed to the police of the French concession in Wuhan and executed.) In 1927, Cai returned to China, but went to Moscow again in 1928 to cure disease. In 1931 Cai returned to Shanghai to support the Guangdong provincial People's Committee. He then went to Hong Kong to direct party work there. He was betrayed by Gu Shunzhang when attending a meeting in Hong Kong. He was arrested in British Hong Kong and extradited to
8178-446: Was considered indecent, the two discussed political problems and theories, leading to a romantic relationship. In Paris, Cai organized the Work and Study Cooperative Society (Gongxue huzhu she) and advocated Marxist communism. In May 1920, Cai and Xiang Jingyu were married. Cai's conviction that only violent revolution could solve China's problems fractured the Work-Study student group, but Cai
8272-529: Was determined to form a Marxist party among his Hunan fellow students. Cai's letters to Mao Zedong, who was then in Beijing, were influential in their advocacy of Bolshevism. Mao replied, "there is not one word with which I do not agree." In July 1920, Cai and leaders of the New People's Study Society publicly attacked the leaders of the Work-Study Movement for their optimistic anarchist belief in cultural change, education, and communal values. After
8366-554: Was fruitless and his death remains unsolved. [REDACTED] Communist Party / [REDACTED] Soviet Republic ( [REDACTED] Red Army ) → Liberated Area ( [REDACTED] 8th Route Army , New Fourth Army , etc. → [REDACTED] People's Liberation Army ) → [REDACTED] People's Republic of China Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
8460-481: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
8554-541: Was introduced by Chen Duxiu to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party assigned him to organising labour activities in Anyuan Coal Mine (安源煤矿) in Pingxiang, Jiangxi. Being the most important labour work leader there, Li greatly increased the number of CCP members and perfected methods of organisation. By the end of 1924, there were only 900 CCP members throughout China, 300 of whom came from Anyuan Coal Mine. It
8648-559: Was no way to ease the situation. Especially when the Cultural Revolution came, Kang Sheng spared no effort in denouncing his old rival. Li was labeled an agent of the Soviet Union and was tortured both mentally and physically by the Red Guards . His wife and daughters were also imprisoned. Supposedly unable to face this humiliation any more, Li was said by his tormentors to have committed suicide by taking sleeping pills after finishing
8742-429: Was said that "Hesen is the theorist and Mao the realist". Yang Changji had urged his students to stay away from holding public office and to serve society by maintaining independence and moral purity. Cai rejected this Neo-Confucian position. He declared that "what I advocate is to commit wrongs in order to achieve a greater good." When he heard that the anarchists and educators Cai Yuanpei and Li Shizeng had organized
8836-622: Was the man who actually made the decisions. In 1927, after the split of the alliance between the Kuomintang (KMT) with the CCP, Li was the first one to propose the Nanchang Uprising against the KMT and took the job as director of the security guards. Although the uprising proved to be imprudent and poorly planned, and its failure unavoidable, Li was thrust into the central stage of the CCP for his prominence in labour work and his courage under fire. At
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