Short Biography

Chan Koonchung is a Sinoscript (Huawen) writer of novels 盛世 (The Fat Years), 裸命 (The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver), 建丰二年 (The Second Year of Jianfeng,) 北京零公里 (Beijing Zero Point), and 香港三部曲 (Hong Kong Trilogy). He is the 2013 Writer of the Year of the Hong Kong Book Fair, and winner of two The Dream of Red Chamber awards. A Fellow of the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University, his nonfiction books include一种华文多种谂头 (One Huawen Many Attributes), 马克思主义与文学批评 (Marxism and Literary Criticism), 乌托邦恶托邦异托邦 (Utopia Dystopia Heterotopia), 中国天朝主义与香港 (China‘s Tianchaoism and Hong Kong), and 活出时代的矛盾 (Living Out the Contradictions of Our Time).

Project

What Is In A Name？
Let’s Try To Be More Precise About Huayu (Sinophone), Huawen (Sinoscript), and Some Other Labels (Xia, Hua, Zhong, Han, China, Chinese, Zhongguo, Zhongguoren) Related to the Script-Centric World of the Hua-Han People

1 Hua-Han civilization is said to be script-centric as opposed to “logocentric” civilizations.

2 To correct a putative “Euro-centric” bias in the academia, Sinophone literature studies could be renamed Sinoscript literature studies.

3 Unlike modern Europe, Hua-Han civilization has only one surviving written language: Sinoscript, better known as Huawen, Zhongwen or Hanzi, while its people have many “mother tongues”, including ay least seven major phonologically different “topolects” (each with numerous dialects), and often in addition to a “lingua franca” constructed by ruling elites that changed as regimes changed.

4 What contributes more to defining and even holding together the Hua-Han identity over the two millenniums is its script (written words), more than its spoken languages.

5 With the help of archeological findings and philological scholarship, one now has a better map of the multiple sites of various non–XiaShangZhou “civilizations” in the Continental East Asia outside “Zhongyuan” the Central Plains, and one can almost delineate the emergence of the Hua-Han ethnic and cultural (albeit hybridized) identity from early Western Zhou time to its consolidation during Qin-Han “empire” time.

6 Qin was an expansionist superpower that conquered all of Central Plains and beyond. It probably inspired the Sanskrit word Cina and then the Persian word Chini, or Latin words Sina and Sinae, and eventually the English word China. China is a concocted “foreign” word.

7 Xia, Hua, Zhong – these words were articulated since Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn period, much contested in the Warring States period, and defined during Qin and especially Western Han period a century before the Common Era, as interchangeable nomenclatures for the ethnic-cultural self-identity of an integrated (albeit “mixed”) people: Huaren, Hanren, Hanzu, later often indiscriminatingly known as Chinese and Zhongguoren, though its people had never called themselves “Chinese”, and they rarely identified themselves as Zhongguoren, not to mention Zhonghuaminzu, until the twentieth century,

8 Confusing? Yes, but it is possible to be more precise. It is also about time to re-examine the expression “duoyuanyiti” (multi-origin integration).