William C. Hannas - The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity

The Writing on the Wall

Encounters with Asia

Victor H. Mair, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity

William C. Hannas

Copyright 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hannas, Wm. C., 1946

The writing on the wall : How Asian orthography curbs creativity / William C. Hannas.

p. cm. (Encounters with Asia)

ISBN 0-8122-3711-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Creation (Literary, artistic etc.). 2. Creative ability. 3. East AsiaLanguagesWriting. I. Title. II. Series.

P381.E18 H36 2003

for H Thi nh Thu

whom history spared these

linguistic travails

The following chapters explore language, creativity, the brain, technology transfer, Chinese writing, and the processes that link these elements together. A personal anecdote will help bring the relationship into focus.

In 1997 I sat through a presentation on intracompany teams, the latest panacea hawked by management consultants for making America more competitive. The facilitator was giving her pitch for the new program and offered the following proof of its superiority.

Think back four decades ago to Japan, she said. How would you characterize that countrys products then?

Cheap. From one of the attendees.

Imitative. Another voice.

Do I hear low-tech?

Low-tech.

The ritual continued until the facilitator elicited a host of unflattering stereotypes that described the sort of production done in Japan in the immediate postwar period, before its manufacturers adopted a team approach. What came next was mostly predictable:

And how would you describe Japanese products today?

First-rate. Superior technology. High value-added. And so on around the room, until one wag blurted out:

Imitative.

Imitative?

Theyre still copying from everybody like before.

A lively exchange followed, ending in a consensus among the attendees that creativity is a part of the entrepreneurial act not necessarily served by a team approach, and one that has not been mastered by Japan even now. The conclusion clearly was out of step with the facilitators agenda, and a year earlier the wag wouldnt have gotten away with it. All indications then were that Japan was satisfying the worlds appetite for high-tech novelty better than any other country.

But this was 1997, and signs of trouble were showing. Massive evidence painstakingly compiled by U.S. lawyers and trade experts confirmed what revisionist authors like Prestowitz (1988), van Wolferen (1989), and Fallows (1995) had claimed about Japans export drive being artificially subsidized by a closed and captive domestic market. Bankruptcies, a falling stock index, and lackluster economic growthnew phenomena in Japancame to be viewed in some quarters as the outcome of structural problems when repeated attempts at piecemeal reform failed to revive the economy. That something was basically wrong with the worlds leading model of economic development had become grimly apparent.

What was true of Japan was also true elsewhere in Asia. On the same day that the facilitator was scribbling outdated descriptions of the Japanese miracle on her flip chart, the Seoul media were reporting the dramatic end to economic prosperity in South Korea, a country that had followed Japan in all particulars. Within a few weeks corporate insolvency quadrupled, the won fell to an all-time low, and the stock market was nearly shattered. A new government, elected to remedy the failed policies, began laying plans for across-the-board fiscal retrenchment mandated by the International Monetary Fund, which had barely rescued the nation from default.

Amid the scramble to meet IMF guidelines, the only program to escape Seouls budgetary ax was basic science and research. Although product R&D was being slashed, moneys allotted for pure science were kept in place, indicating the importance South Korea now attaches to this area. I have watched this trend toward greater science and technology (S&T) expenditures in Korea with much interest over the past few years. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that these new programshosting international research projects, funding local centers of excellence, targeting specific future technologiesare usually announced in paranoid terms that suggest Korea has gone as far as it can with imitation, needs to create new technology, and worries that it is unable.

Still, there are signs that the creativity gap between Japan and the West is not being closed. According to a 1997 Science and Technology Agency report, Japans basic science expenditures are half those of the United States, with the gap widening. The report noted, Japan is more dependent on technology than any other major country yet has the strongest tendency to acquire technologies from other countries.

China, too, has been engaged in a similar quest for scientific creativity, despite the fact that the countrys industrial technology has not yet reached the stage where licensing and imitation are no longer viable means for sustaining a growing economy. Awareness of this issue seems to have penetrated the highest levels of the bureaucracy. For example, in June 1997 Vice-Premier Li Lanqing was quoted as saying that China must focus on basic research and on cultivating creative scientific personnel to achieve the breakthroughs needed for competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

I believe, with many Asians, that the areas present economic difficulties stem in large part from a lack of scientific innovation, of which these countries are acutely aware but that they are addressing with only limited success. In fact, I will go a step further and argue in this book that East Asias economic development has relied to a great extent on its ability to exploit scientific breakthroughs made in the West and to maintain these advantages by incrementally improving process and product technologies, leaving the real innovative workwith its economic and social coststo their foreign competitors. These intellectual property transfers, sanctioned in policy, are carried out deliberately, systematically, and even cynically through a variety of mechanisms and metaphors that Westerners richly deserve to know more about. The real victims, however, are East Asians themselves, since imitation holds the seeds of its own demise as Asians run out of things to copy and improve. This is approximately where Japan and South Korea are today, and where China is headed.

Ironically, this thesis will be challenged only in the West, and in the United States especially, where East Asias technical skills are typically confused with real creativity, and where the people have little clue about the degree to which their creative resources are utilized abroad for commercial profit. Asians themselves are cognizant of how much they depend on Western innovation and, until recently, had not even bothered to hide it. Accordingly, one of this books tasks is to document the practices used by East Asians to relieve foreign firms and institutions of proprietary technology. My purpose is to convince Westerners inundated with clichs about Asian ingenuity that the truth is almost exactly the opposite and to persuade others who might be sympathetic to the linguistic arguments made later in this book that the creativity gap on which these subsequent arguments are based does in fact exist.