TELEGRAPHY OF THE CHINESE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XI, 12 September 1896, Page 319

TELEGRAPHY OF THE CHINESE.

According to the ‘Statesman’s Year Book,’ all the principal cities of China are now connected with one another and with Peking, the capital, by telegraph. Recent visitors to China say, however, that telegraphing there is a laborious and an expensive process, and that the lines are a charge upon the State treasury instead of a source of revenue. The dispatches are, of course, sent in Chinese, for not one in many thousands of the natives knows any language except his own. But the Chinese have no alphabet. Their literary characters, partly ideographic, partly phonetic, number many thousands. It is simply impossible to invent telegraphic signals that would cover the written language. Here was an obstacle in the way of using the telegraph at all. The difficulty was obviated by inventing a telegraphic signal for each of the cardinal numbers, and so numbers or figures might be telegraphed to any extent. Then a code dictionary was prepared, in which each number from I up to several thousands stood for a particular Chinese letter or ideograph. It is, in fact, a cipher system. The sender of the message need not bother himself about its meaning. He may telegraph all day without the slightest idea of the information he is sending, for he transmits only numerals. It is very different with his friend, the receiver. He has the code dictionary at his elbow, and after each message is received he must translate it, writing each literary character in place of the numeral that stands for it. Only about an eighth of the words in the written language appear in the code, but there are enough of them for all practical purposes. But the Chinese system has its great disadvantages. Men of ordinary education have not sufficient acquaintance with the written language to be competent telegraph receivers, and the literati are not seeking employment in telegraph offices any more than our college professors are. So the Government recruits its employes with much difficulty. Besides, the patrons of the telegraph are comparatively few in number. There are almost no Chinese who have business relations all over the country, as is the case with many thousands of our business men. The public is not invited to buy stock in the Chinese telegraph lines, and if it was, nobody at present would buy with a view to dividends. The receipts do not equal the expenses, and the Government makes up the deficit. There is another great disadvantage of the Chinese telegraph system All over the world the movements of railroad trains are regulated by telegraph. The orders received by the station agent are filed in plain view of the employes, and if need be the switchman may take temporary charge and carry out the instructions from the central office. Railroads have been introduced into China to a very small extent, and there is talk of greatly extending the service. But how about running the trains ?

A writer in Z,e Mouvement ColonicU of Paris says that if railroads are introduced to any extent in China the personnel must be exclusively European and American, or recruited from the literary class. He says the Chinese Government will not take foreigners into its service, and that the educated men of China, who alone among the people have sufficient knowledge of the written language to be intrusted with the actual running of trains, would refuse most emphatically to be either train hands or station agents. This is one of the many small stumbling blocks in the way of China’s progress, but it is quite effective in its way.