Instead, each word is represented by a symbol or character.

(air whooshing)

- How on Earth did a language with tens of thousands

of characters fit onto this keyboard?

- [Narrator] Here is a world of communication,

tailored for your needs of today and tomorrow.

- [Narrator] What really accounts for China's meteoric rise

as a major global power?

- This is Shenzhen.

It's a city in the south of China.

I've actually been there.

But back in the 1980s,

this was just a sleepy fishing village

with less than, like 100,000 people.

Today, it is home to 12.5 million people,

a giant metropolis with huge buildings

and home to some of the largest tech companies

on the planet.

This city is emblematic of China's technological rise

over the last 40 years.

It's an explosion in technology and development

that has really never happened before in human history.

From an agrarian society to a technological powerhouse

in just a couple of decades.

- That's fast.

- This almost didn't happen.

China almost didn't become the technological powerhouse.

And what held them back is something

I have thought about a lot,

which is this keyboard.

This keyboard has like, 80 or so keys,

and the Chinese language has like

tens of thousands of characters.

So how did they fit their language onto this keyboard?

To answer that question,

you have to dive deep into modern China,

into Chairman Mao,

into the divide between Taiwan and mainland China,

who despite speaking the same language

use very different typing methods,

all because of geopolitics.

It's a story of how China took a keyboard

that was developed for a vastly different language system

and mastered it, mastered it better

than we did here in the West.

It's a fascinating story of culture and history

and technology, and I want to share it with you.

- [Narrator] Here is China.

- [Narrator] It's become a keystone

of national economic policy.

- [Narrator] A large part of China's population

lives in large cities.

- [Narrator] I really don't quite understand

everything that's happening.

(upbeat music)

- To understand how Chinese speakers type on a keyboard

like this, I talk to my friend Mangle Kuo,

who's currently in quarantine in Taiwan.

- I just came back and quarantine

in Taiwan's quarantine hotel.

- Oh, my gosh. Wow.

Mangle has lived in both China and Taiwan.

He's technologically savvy and helped me understand

how people type, not just on their keyboard

but on their phone.

- So basically growing up as a Chinese or Taiwanese,

you have to learn how to write those characters.

That's kind of the first thing first.

And then you learn the, like the pronunciation system

behind all the characters.

And in China, that's pinyin, and in Taiwan, that's zhuyin.

- So let's break this down.

Most languages are written with an alphabet.

Each letter in that alphabet represents a sound.

And when you string those sounds together, you make a word.

It seems so intuitive as if like

this is the only way to do it.

But in Chinese,

- There's another way.

- Chinese uses complex characters for each word,

so every word is a character.

Each one of these characters represents a different thing,

an object, the feeling, a concept, a verb.

All in all, there're upwards of 70 or 80 thousand

of these characters.

This system was just fine.

It worked in China for a really long time

because you can use a brush or a pen to write stuff out.

- I like that. It's like if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

- This is the qwerty keyboard.

It's called the qwerty keyboard

because I mean, just look at it.

This is the mechanism to which people not just communicate

with each other, but code the world,

the software and programs that we all use all the time.

When this started to take over, China had a real problem.

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Let's get back to the story.

They had to figure out how to fit this onto this,

and fast, because the world of computing

started to explode in the 70s, and 80s, and 90s.

- Hello, I'm Bill Gates.

- Here in the United States, the qwerty keyboard

was a very natural tool.

We were able to use our alphabet and our symbols

that we all are very used to,

to develop programming languages

so that we can make software.

And soon, more and more computers were showing up

into American homes.

(pop songs from the '80s)

- [Narrator] The Commodore 64 now in a family pack.

- Meanwhile on the other side of the planet,

China, a country of almost a billion people

only had 3000 computers in the entire country.

They were so far behind the West

when it came to computer literacy.

The Chinese government begins to freak out.

And it's like, guys we're getting absolutely destroyed

by the West because of this whole computer thing,

and you're telling me that is because we can't fit

our language onto this keyboard?

Are you kidding me? What we're gonna do about it?

So the Chinese government made this a huge priority.

And they finally started to develop somethings that worked.

(door opening)

- I got it.

(audience laughing)

- The first major system of typing used the qwerty keyboard

to build the shape of the characters.

- We call it Cangjie.

- Cangjie, and it was pretty darn complicated.

- It's basically like, puzzles.

- Like Legos.

- Yeah, kind of, like a brick. You just put them together.

I can write basic characters using that.

- The system was clever but it was complicated

and not very fast at first.

Luckily, China had a wild card up its sleeve

that will help get Chinese speakers

typing on a qwerty keyboard.

It had to do with this guy, Chairman Mao.

- [Narrator] The great Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong.

- History time, here we go.

- [Narrator] The Communist Party's propaganda machine

portrays the Chairman's Great Leap Forward

as a dazzling success.

- Mao was really bullish about modernizing China.

And one of his pet project was scrapping

the entire Chinese character system and replacing it

with a Western-style alphabet that sounds out Chinese words,

sort of like how we sound out our English

or Italian or Spanish words.

Now it was like learning thousands of Chinese characters

is hard and complicated so why don't we just have a Latin

or Romanized alphabet like the rest of the world.

So by 1949, Mao was like ready to roll, scrapping the entire

Chinese writing system in the name of a Roman alphabet.

But then, one of its close buddies,

former Communist dictator Joseph Stalin, convinced Mao

not to totally kill off the Chinese characters.

Stalin was like, dude, don't, dude you're gonna regret it.

And Mao was like, fine.

So he kept the Chinese characters as the main writing system

but for teaching literacy in school, he developed a written

alphabet called pinyin.

- Pinyin, P-I-N-Y-I-N.

- Where you can use the Roman letters

to spell out Chinese words by the way that they sound.

So right now you're typing out this sentence

in Romanized charcters in the way

that it would be phonetically spelt in Roman,

like "wo" is W-O, right?

- Yes.

- Okay. So you typed it all out,

- Yeah.

- and down there it renders it, okay. Wow.

So now if you want to write the word "beef",

which is "niu-rou".

- How to say "beef"?

- I think "niu-rou".

- "NIU-ROU"

- I've no idea, "niu-rou", "niu".

- "NIU-ROU"

- "R-rao, niu-rao". I've no idea.

Instead of memorizing these characters which means "beef",

you can just spell it out by the way it sounds.

This romanization of Chinese, again it's called pinyin

would become really helpful years later

when the Chinese government is trying to figure out

how to get people to type on Western computers.

But wait a minute.

We can't go on before we mention

a little bit of geopolitics.

(canon firing)

Okay, it's 1940s.

Mao and his Communist revolutionaries are taking over

mainland China in a bloody revolution and civil war.

And the Chinese government that they overthrow

and are fighting with, end up losing and retreating to

an island nearby called Taiwan to continue with

their non-Communist version of China.

And they both think that they're the real China

and they start this war that has never stopped

and they're still fighting this war

and they both think they're China.

Anyway, that's absolutely a story I want to tell