Latinxua Sin Wenz between Russia and China

This study presents Latinxua Sin Wenz (“Latinised New Writing”), a Latin-based orthography devised for Chinese in the 1920s, in its early developments on both sides of the Soviet-Chinese border. In scholarly literature, the system and its history have been covered, among others, by Ni Haishu 倪海曙 (1949; 1950; 1987), whose detailed works are to a certain extent too much clad in the author’s nostalgy for the cause he had once espoused, and in the detailed account of the Chinese language reform in its relation to the development of Chinese nationalism by DeFrancis (1950). From the same viewpoint of language and politics, Latinxua Sin Wenz has also been addressed by Zhou Youguang 周有光 (1961), Zhong Shaohua 鐘少華 (2017) and Cui Minghai 崔明海 (2018) in China; Šprincin (1959; 1962a; 1962b) and Dacyšen (2009) in Russia. Assembling evidence from primary and secondary sources in Chinese and Russian, this study outlines the beginnings and early developments of Latinxua Sin Wenz as seen from China and the USSR: its invention by Qu Qiubai and improvement with the help of Soviet sinologists, its implementation among the Chinese population of the Russian Far East and its eventual disappearance, its introduction to China by Shanghainese Esperantists and its role on contemporary debates surrounding the Chinese language reform.