When did the Chinese Change Peking to Beijing?

Back in the dark ages of my grade school years we were taught that Peking was the capital of China.  TV advertised canned Chinese food named after the city of Chungking.  The maps showed the little town of Soochow just west of Shanghai.

Then, when I was in college, I remember hearing Walter Cronkite talking about Beijing as the capital of China.  "Why had China moved its capital?",  I wondered.  Months later, I finally realized that nothing had moved.  They had just renamed Peking to Beijing.  I just chalked it up to some strange decision on the part of the Chinese government.

Now I realize that the Chinese have never changed the name.  The name is now and has always been 北京.  The tricky part is figuring out how 北京 is pronounced by the Chinese people.

Written Chinese, you see, is not phonetic.  The characters don't represent sounds, but rather represent ideas.  北 represents the concept of North.  京 represents the concept of a capital city.  So taken together, 北京  represents the concept of the Northern Capital.  

This idea-based written language seems strange, until you consider that the country of China did not have a single language until very recently.  Even today, many people learn the official language - Mandarin - as a second language after their regional dialect.  So, historically, people from 5 different places would pronounce 北京  in 5 different ways.  But the beauty was that they would all write it the same.  So even if they could not speak to one another and be understood, they could all communicate in writing.

This was all well and good until the Westerners came along and wanted to represent the Chinese language.  We do phonetics.  So the simple approach was to use the phonetic rules of our Roman alphabet to represent the sound of the Chinese words....Romanized spellings of Chinese.   This great idea has two big problems though.  First, whose pronunciation do you use?  (Remember, every region of the country has a different dialect.)  Second, how to you represent the sounds that don't exist in English?  (A problem similar to written French and German, which have all those pesky accent marks and umlauts for their weird pronunciations.)

Different solutions evolved until, around 1900, a system called Wade-Giles romanization won out over the rest.  Wade-Giles was a scholarly thing with all kinds of accent marks and rules for precise pronunciation.  Though great for scholars, it was a bit tricky for the Post Office.  So a simplified version of Wade-Giles was adopted under the poetic name "Chinese Postal Map Romanization Spelling System". 

In the CPMRSS 北京  was Peking.  The English speaking world was happy with that.  And the newly established Republic of China was OK with it too.  Maps were printed.  Textbooks were written.  Everyone was happy and got along.

Well, actually, folks did not get along.  The Republic of China chafed against Western colonialism and struggled with internal revolutions.  There was also this thing called World War II.  In 1949 the mainland passed over to the control of the People's Republic of China.  The first half of the 20th century had bigger arguments than the ones over spelling.

In the 1950s, after the PRC was consolidated under Mao Tse-tung, almost everything about Chinese culture was debated and changed. The centuries-old traditional written characters were simplified to promote literacy.   Traditional Chinese Opera was labeled as bourgeois and discouraged.  And an effort was initiated to replace the Wade-Giles romanized spelling system with a new and improved system.  (In other words, an effort to replace a British-created solution with a native Chinese-created solution.)

The new and improved solution was a system called Pinyin.  Pinyin was published as the new standard by the Chinese government in 1958.  Well, at least by the People's Republic.  There were folks from the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan who had differing opinions.  (Actually, when I was in grade school they called the island Formosa.  But that is another story.)  The status quo remained for a few more years.  Then Nixon visited the mainland in 1972 and the PRC gradually started winning the political stand-off.  The U.N. adopted Pinyin as its official spelling system in 1977.  The International Standards Organization, or ISO, adopted Pinyin in 1981 or 1982.

And so the maps were changed, the geography textbooks revised, and a million globes became obsolete in schools around the world.  Peking became the pinyin Beijing.  Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze Dong.  Chungking became Chongqing.  Soochow became Suzhou. All was finally settled.

Settled for Westerners, that is.  To the Chinese people there was never any question. 北京  is still 北京 just as it has been always and forever.