- [Narrator] There's no Chinese alphabet.
Instead, each word is represented by a symbol or character.
(air whooshing)
- How on Earth did a language with tens of thousands
of characters fit onto this keyboard?
- [Narrator] Here is a world of communication,
tailored for your needs of today and tomorrow.
- [Narrator] What really accounts for China's meteoric rise
as a major global power?
- This is Shenzhen.
It's a city in the south of China.
I've actually been there.
But back in the 1980s,
this was just a sleepy fishing village
with less than, like 100,000 people.
Today, it is home to 12.5 million people,
a giant metropolis with huge buildings
and home to some of the largest tech companies
on the planet.
This city is emblematic of China's technological rise
over the last 40 years.
It's an explosion in technology and development
that has really never happened before in human history.
From an agrarian society to a technological powerhouse
in just a couple of decades.
- That's fast.
- This almost didn't happen.
China almost didn't become the technological powerhouse.
And what held them back is something
I have thought about a lot,
which is this keyboard.
This keyboard has like, 80 or so keys,
and the Chinese language has like
tens of thousands of characters.
So how did they fit their language onto this keyboard?
To answer that question,
you have to dive deep into modern China,
into Chairman Mao,
into the divide between Taiwan and mainland China,
who despite speaking the same language
use very different typing methods,
all because of geopolitics.
It's a story of how China took a keyboard
that was developed for a vastly different language system
and mastered it, mastered it better
than we did here in the West.
It's a fascinating story of culture and history
and technology, and I want to share it with you.
- [Narrator] Here is China.
- [Narrator] It's become a keystone
of national economic policy.
- [Narrator] A large part of China's population
lives in large cities.
- [Narrator] I really don't quite understand
everything that's happening.
(upbeat music)
- To understand how Chinese speakers type on a keyboard
like this, I talk to my friend Mangle Kuo,
who's currently in quarantine in Taiwan.
- I just came back and quarantine
in Taiwan's quarantine hotel.
- Oh, my gosh. Wow.
Mangle has lived in both China and Taiwan.
He's technologically savvy and helped me understand
how people type, not just on their keyboard
but on their phone.
- So basically growing up as a Chinese or Taiwanese,
you have to learn how to write those characters.
That's kind of the first thing first.
And then you learn the, like the pronunciation system
behind all the characters.
And in China, that's pinyin, and in Taiwan, that's zhuyin.
- So let's break this down.
Most languages are written with an alphabet.
Each letter in that alphabet represents a sound.
And when you string those sounds together, you make a word.
It seems so intuitive as if like
this is the only way to do it.
But in Chinese,
- There's another way.
- Chinese uses complex characters for each word,
so every word is a character.
Each one of these characters represents a different thing,
an object, the feeling, a concept, a verb.
All in all, there're upwards of 70 or 80 thousand
of these characters.
This system was just fine.
It worked in China for a really long time
because you can use a brush or a pen to write stuff out.
- I like that. It's like if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- This is the qwerty keyboard.
It's called the qwerty keyboard
because I mean, just look at it.
This is the mechanism to which people not just communicate
with each other, but code the world,
the software and programs that we all use all the time.
When this started to take over, China had a real problem.
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Let's get back to the story.
They had to figure out how to fit this onto this,
and fast, because the world of computing
started to explode in the 70s, and 80s, and 90s.
- Hello, I'm Bill Gates.
- Here in the United States, the qwerty keyboard
was a very natural tool.
We were able to use our alphabet and our symbols
that we all are very used to,
to develop programming languages
so that we can make software.
And soon, more and more computers were showing up
into American homes.
(pop songs from the '80s)
- [Narrator] The Commodore 64 now in a family pack.
- Meanwhile on the other side of the planet,
China, a country of almost a billion people
only had 3000 computers in the entire country.
They were so far behind the West
when it came to computer literacy.
The Chinese government begins to freak out.
And it's like, guys we're getting absolutely destroyed
by the West because of this whole computer thing,
and you're telling me that is because we can't fit
our language onto this keyboard?
Are you kidding me? What we're gonna do about it?
So the Chinese government made this a huge priority.
And they finally started to develop somethings that worked.
(door opening)
- I got it.
(audience laughing)
- The first major system of typing used the qwerty keyboard
to build the shape of the characters.
- We call it Cangjie.
- Cangjie, and it was pretty darn complicated.
- It's basically like, puzzles.
- Like Legos.
- Yeah, kind of, like a brick. You just put them together.
I can write basic characters using that.
- The system was clever but it was complicated
and not very fast at first.
Luckily, China had a wild card up its sleeve
that will help get Chinese speakers
typing on a qwerty keyboard.
It had to do with this guy, Chairman Mao.
- [Narrator] The great Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong.
- History time, here we go.
- [Narrator] The Communist Party's propaganda machine
portrays the Chairman's Great Leap Forward
as a dazzling success.
- Mao was really bullish about modernizing China.
And one of his pet project was scrapping
the entire Chinese character system and replacing it
with a Western-style alphabet that sounds out Chinese words,
sort of like how we sound out our English
or Italian or Spanish words.
Now it was like learning thousands of Chinese characters
is hard and complicated so why don't we just have a Latin
or Romanized alphabet like the rest of the world.
So by 1949, Mao was like ready to roll, scrapping the entire
Chinese writing system in the name of a Roman alphabet.
But then, one of its close buddies,
former Communist dictator Joseph Stalin, convinced Mao
not to totally kill off the Chinese characters.
Stalin was like, dude, don't, dude you're gonna regret it.
And Mao was like, fine.
So he kept the Chinese characters as the main writing system
but for teaching literacy in school, he developed a written
alphabet called pinyin.
- Pinyin, P-I-N-Y-I-N.
- Where you can use the Roman letters
to spell out Chinese words by the way that they sound.
So right now you're typing out this sentence
in Romanized charcters in the way
that it would be phonetically spelt in Roman,
like "wo" is W-O, right?
- Yes.
- Okay. So you typed it all out,
- Yeah.
- and down there it renders it, okay. Wow.
So now if you want to write the word "beef",
which is "niu-rou".
- How to say "beef"?
- I think "niu-rou".
- "NIU-ROU"
- I've no idea, "niu-rou", "niu".
- "NIU-ROU"
- "R-rao, niu-rao". I've no idea.
Instead of memorizing these characters which means "beef",
you can just spell it out by the way it sounds.
This romanization of Chinese, again it's called pinyin
would become really helpful years later
when the Chinese government is trying to figure out
how to get people to type on Western computers.
But wait a minute.
We can't go on before we mention
a little bit of geopolitics.
(canon firing)
Okay, it's 1940s.
Mao and his Communist revolutionaries are taking over
mainland China in a bloody revolution and civil war.
And the Chinese government that they overthrow
and are fighting with, end up losing and retreating to
an island nearby called Taiwan to continue with
their non-Communist version of China.
And they both think that they're the real China
and they start this war that has never stopped
and they're still fighting this war
and they both think they're China.
Anyway, that's absolutely a story I want to tell
but I'm not going there.
Now again blinders, we're talking about qwerty keyboards.
- If we're trying to figure something out,
now we need to focus, okay?
- So you have this "two Chinas", the Communist one,
and the non-Communist one.
Mao is pushing the Romanized alphabet
in the Communist version of China.
And Taiwan is like, no, this Romanized pinyin thing is
an invention of the Communist Party, and a total sell-out
of the Chinese traditional writing system, no way.
But Taiwan is secretly like,
we loved the idea of having an alphabet for our
Chinese language
because it made it a lot easier to teach literacy.
So they adopted an alphabet, but it's not the pinyin,
Romanized alphabet.
It is an old alphabetic system that was developed
in the early 1900s.
- It's zhuyin. They did it before pinyin.
They're completely newly-invented a set of symbols
for this purpose.
- Wow. That is wild.
So because they hated their Communist enemies,
Taiwan rejected the Romanized alphabet that Mao was pushing
and stuck with this traditional alphabet
that had been developed a few years earlier.
And that's still how it is today.
(woman speaking Chinese)
So this gets to a pretty satisfying answer to the question
of this entire video
which is how do Chinese speakers type on a qwerty keyboard.
The answer is, if you go to mainland China
you're going to see keyboards like this.
People in mainland China use this keyboard to type out
the sounds of their words, and the computer takes that
and renders it into Chinese characters.
If you live in Taiwan, you'll see a keyboard
that looks more like this,
but you basically do the same thing.
Use these characters to type out the sounds of the word
and the computer will render it into a Chinese character.
Both of these are new writing systems
that were developed in the past 100 years
to help Chinese speakers spell out their words
and move away from a character-based system.
- [Narrator] Now what are the key features
that you think should be in an ideal laptop.
- [Woman] Standby for the software transmission.
Better start your recorder now.
- Okay, back to our timeline here.
It's the '80s and '90s. China is starting to really adopt
technology and they're using these typing methods
to use the qwerty keyboards to actually participate
in the computing world.
But they're still lagging so far behind the Western world.
They're way slower in their typing so the Chinese government
went back to the drawing boards and was like,
how can we make it faster.
And boy, they found a solution in the '80s
that will change everything.
(woman speaking Chinese)
And this is the work that's kind of juicy, in my opinion.
This is the part that is like, I don't know,
really helps me to understand how people type today.
You know when you go to Google
and you start typing a sentence,
and it fills out the rest of the sentence for you,
or even on Gmail these days, like I'll be typing
and suddenly it'll like predict what I want to say.
It's pretty cool. It's not life-changing.
It's sort of like saves me maybe a couple of
milliseconds every day.
In China, this technology of predictive text,
predictive typing, was life-changing
because regardless of what method you use
to start building your characters in the computer,
the computer now starts to guess
what characters you want to type.
For example, let's say someone is using one of these systems
that we're gonna use to build these characters,
and they type this character.
This is the root of a Chinese word and it means "water".
The computer sees this and says,
okay, you just typed "water".
There's a bunch of characters that are derived
from this root, this "water" root.
For example, here's the one for "river"
or maybe you actually want this one
which is the word for "wash".
So if you just type water, you can look at these options
and decide which one you want.
This was an algorithmic, predictive typing system
that was happening in the late 1980s in China,
three whole decades before anything similar
surfaced in the West.
And it is this technology of predictive text
that changed everything for China.
- [Narrator] Before computers, there was no practical way
to type the thousands of characters called kanji.
To deal with the complexity of these symbol words
different systems have been adopted.
- They started to refine this algorithm to make it
more and more clear that as soon as you start
typing anything, the algorithm says,
do you want to do this, or this, or this, or this?
I mean I've been watching a great deal of competitions,
typing competitions.
(woman speaking Chinese)
This is the thing in China,
and if you zoom in and look closely at this competition,
you'll see that as soon as these competitors start typing
a pop-up box comes up, giving them
an algorithmically generated menu of options
that predicts what they're trying to type.
So typing in Chinese is as much about choosing from
this predictive menu as it is about pressing the keys.
It is a combination of both.
And this competition has pushed developers to make
better and better predictive algorithms
so that people can communicate very efficiently
using the keyboard.
So how fast are these people typing right now?
Well, the average English speaker can type at
around 43 words per minute.
I work on a computer all day so I'm probably more like
60, 65 words per minute.
There is an English typing competition in Las Vegas
and the typists here are mind-blowing 163 words per minute.
But if you head back to these guys, these people are typing
at a score of 242 words per minute,
four times faster than I can type,
and almost double what they're typing in English
at the best competition in Las Vegas.
Whoa!
- Wow, that's fast.
- Yeah, it's fast.
- So China used this technology
that was developed in the West
mainly designed for languages
that are very different than Chinese,
and they mastered it, but guess what?
The Chinese government still has the need for speed.
They're like, how can we make it faster?
So predictive typing in China went from letting you start
a character and predicting
what character you want to choose,
to then going to seeing what character you just put
and predicting the next one,
the next word in the sentence that you want to say.
And now in the last few years
they're pushing it to the next level,
which is Cloud-based predictive texting.
- A cloud?
- Again, the closest thing we have in the West is like
the Google Auto-complete.
You go to this search engine.
You start typing and the Internet is like,
a lot of people are searching this
so we think you're searching this, too.
But imagine, instead of just a search engine,
imagine this concept for everywhere.
As you're typing your WORD documents,
as you're texting your mom,
anywhere in the digital space that is connected
to the Internet is now feeding you sentences
that they think maybe you want to say
based on an AI-generated web of information of
what everyone else is texting, and emailing and writing.
So an example of this,
let's say that there's a Chinese movie star
that just got into a big car accident.
It's all over the news and everybody is talking about it.
You've never typed this movie star's name before
but as soon as you do start typing it
your phone starts talking to the Cloud
and not just the Internet but other people's text messages.
So then the algorithm says that I think
you probably want to text about this movie star
and the car accident.
And this seems like a great time-saving technology
that helps Chinese speakers type.
- It's a good idea.
- But just imagine some scenarios here.
Let's say that you're not writing about
a movie star and the car accident.
But let's say instead you are texting a friend about
June 4th 1989, Tiananmen Square.
- [Narrator] The noise of gunfire rose
from all over the center of Peking.
- [Narrator] China is a nation at war with itself.
- There's one major company that owns the software.
This one company determines most of
what shows up in predictive text.
And in a country where there's not a lot of hesitation
to control citizens' access to information,
it's not far-stretched to see how subtle manipulation
can start to occur with this Cloud-predictive text.
Algorithm deciding sort of what should go next.
For example, if you type in "Taiwan is China",
the algorithm will suggest to you
"Taiwan is an inseparable part of China".
Anyway, this is not a major problem right now.
And I'm not saying that the government is manipulating
every individual in China with predictive text.
All I'm saying is that, the story of how Chinese speakers
have been able to type on the qwerty keyboard
is the story of really clever and amazing
technological advancements,
and a huge part of that has been predictive algorithms.
And all I'm saying is that algorithmically presented
information can lead to some dangerous outcomes
in terms of making people think a certain way.
But at the end of the day, let us just end on the fact that
China has developed a really amazing technology
for getting their language into the computer,
and by doing so,
have been able to pass any typist in the West,
helping fuel the rise of China
as a technological powerhouse.
(mysterious music)
That's the story here and I really learned a lot.
Thank you all for watching. I will see you soon.
And thanks for being here.