"Kingdom of Characters" by Jing Tsu

China is one of the world’s most powerful nations but just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few.  In "Kingdom of Characters," Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.Her book follows the innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their efforts, China might never have become the dominating force we know today, noted Jing Tsu.One has to consider history when looking at the Chinese language since the country's written characters date back 5,000 years, she told Steve Tarter.