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The Sounds of Mandarin is the definitive study of the modern Chinese quest for a unified spoken language. Janet Chen transports readers into the meeting rooms where linguistic models were debated and the classrooms, movie theaters, and military units where the national language was taught. She captures the elusiveness of crafting a single national standard and the challenge of making it a living language. -- Robert Culp, author of <i>The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism</i>

The Sounds of Mandarin is the definitive study of the modern Chinese quest for a unified spoken language. Janet Chen transports readers into the meeting rooms where linguistic models were debated and the classrooms, movie theaters, and military units where the national language was taught. She captures the elusiveness of crafting a single national standard and the challenge of making it a living language. -- Robert Culp, author of <i>The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism</i> This absorbing narrative traces efforts to establish a common spoken language across China's national expanse. Ingenious reformers, determined state authorities, and beleaguered teachers were no match for China's cacophonous soundscape. Placing spoken language at the heart of historical explanation, The Sounds of Mandarin is by turns hilarious and sobering. -- Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz In The Sounds of Mandarin, Chen explores the complex process by which Chinese nation-builders struggled to define and promulgate a shared national language, to enable the state to talk to its citizens and its citizens to talk to one another. The result is a surprising and fascinating window onto the politics of modernizing China. -- Michael Szonyi, coeditor of <i>The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations</i>

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Janet Y. Chen is professor of history and East Asian studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (2012).

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