The “ideograph” and the 漢字 hànzì

In the Anglophone sphere, according to popular and most academic understandings, the term “ideograph” is regarded as an unproblematic synonym of 漢字 hànzì ‘Chinese character.’ On graphological grounds, i.e. as applied to writing systems, it can easily be shown that the concept of “ideograph” is both theoretically incoherent and practically unfeasible (McDonald 2016McDonald, Edward. 2016. “The Chinese Script in the Chinese Scriptworld: Chinese Characters in Native and Borrowed Traditions.” Journal of World Literature 1(2): 195–211. .); while historically it is clear that the notion was founded on an imperfect understanding of Chinese characters as a writing system, and grew out of a European obsession with the notion of a “universal character” at a particular historical moment (Mungello 1985Mungello, David. 1985. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.; Saussy 2001Saussy, Haun. 2001. Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China Harvard East Asian Monographs 212, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center. ). Nevertheless the concept has become deeply embedded in European understandings of Chinese language and culture, to the extent that it is, in effect, a valuable conceptual possession of Western modernity (Bush 2010Bush, Christopher. 2010. Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.), and promoted alike by those with a detailed knowledge of Chinese writing, such as H. G. Creel (1936)Creel, Herrlee Glessner. 1936. “On the Nature of Chinese Ideography.” T’oung Pao xxxii1: 85–161. , as by those in blissful ignorance of it, like Jacques Derrida (1967Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press./1976). In the Sinophone sphere, while for most practical purposes, as well as in a large proportion of scholarly work, more grounded understandings of Chinese characters as a writing system operate either implicitly or explicitly, the traditional emphasis on characters as a link between civilization and the cosmos (O’Neill 2013O’Neill, Timothy. 2013. “Xu Shen’s Scholarly Agenda: A New Interpretation of the Postface of the Shuowen jiezi .” Journal of the American Oriental Society 133(3): 413–440. ), as well as a long tradition of pedagogical “just so stories” about the construction of individual characters (e.g., Zuo 2005Zuo, Min’an. 2005. Xishuo Hanzi: 1,000 ge hanzi de qiyuan yu yanbian [Chinese Characters in Detail: The origins and evolution of 1,000 Chinese Characters.] Beijing: Citic. 左民安著《細說漢字:1000個漢字的起源與演變》 中信出版社，北京。), provide a key point of contact with Western notions of the “ideograph” as symbolizing not a word, but an idea or an object. The situation may thus be described involving a type of inversion of the phenomenon of faux amis or “false friends,” where two different words are understood as being more or less synonymous; or alternatively as an example of Lydia Liu’s (2004)Liu, Lydia H. 2004. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. notion of a cross-lingual “supersign” where two comparable terms exercise an influence on each other across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This article will attempt to trace the genealogy of these complex and overlapping notions, and see what differing understandings of Chinese characters have to tell us about notions of cultural specificity, cultural production, and cross-cultural (mis-)communication in the contemporary globalized world.