Hong Kong

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Alas, there is no “correct” way to render the Chinese language into English. Prior to the Communist takeover of China, the widely used Wade-Giles system of transliteration gave us Hong Kong, Peking, Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Kai Shek, etc. The Communist bureaucracy spawned a new system, Pinyin, to transliterate Mandarin, which the bureaucrats decreed would be putonghua, or “common speech,” i.e., the “official” language of China. (Mandarin is the language of northern China; the language of southern China is Cantonese.)

Unlike Wade-Giles, Pinyin often fails to present phonetic clues to English speakers, or, amazingly, the speakers of any language that uses the Roman alphabet. For example, qi in Pinyin is pronounced chee. We anglicize or transliterate Paris, Rome, and Moscow, and the French, Italians, and Russians seem unruffled. Why must Hong Kong become Xianggang?

For reasons we can only speculate about, in the last two decades American and British newspaper editors have embraced Pinyin with remarkable fervor, which leads to nonsense such as “The President ate Peking duck in Beijing.”

In his excellent book, The Making of Hong Kong Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Dr. W. K. Chan points out that there are at least fifty-four different ways of presenting any Cantonese name in English. Faced with this plethora of choices, the author has spelled the names in this book in a way that seemed to him easiest for an English speaker to pronounce. Any complaints should be addressed to the Pinyin troglodyte in Peking, or Beijing, or wherever.