Time: Thursday, May 21, 2:00 p.m.
Location: Conference Room 3109, Department of Philosophy
Topic: Goliath and David in Modern China: The Phonetic Promotion Committee and Literacy Education in the Early Republic
Abstract: In 1918, the Protestant “China Continuation Committee” established the “Phonetic Promotion Committee,” tasked with promoting the use of the “Phonetic Alphabet” created in 1913 by the “Unified Pronunciation Society” under the Ministry of Education of the Beiyang Government. The goal was to improve the public’s ability to read the Bible and increase national literacy rates. This lecture will explore how the Phonetic Promotion Committee leveraged the resources and networks of the “Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment” to advance literacy education, thereby illustrating how Chinese Protestant believers and foreign missionaries used their enthusiasm, expertise, and experience to promote the dissemination of Mandarin as the national language.
Speaker Profile
Prof. George K. W. Mak, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society; Associate Editor of the academic journal Jingfeng. His primary research interests include Protestant Bible translation into Chinese, religious publishing and printing culture in modern China, and the history of modern Sino-Western cultural exchange. He is the author of *The British and Foreign Bible Society and the Mandarin Translation of the Union Version Bible* (2010) and *Protestant Bible Translation and Mandarin as the National Language of China* (2017).
