The other part of the linguistic revolution is that computers and mobiles mean that children are spending less time slogging away at the rote learning of characters. That used to mean that students had little space left to think of anything else. It is often said that by the time a child has mastered writing characters, he has lost the ability to use what he has learned to be original. Now, though, people no longer need to learn so many characters, as they just need to be able to recognise them, once typed using pinyin on a roman-letter keyboard.

This means Chinese people, young and old, increasingly have “character amnesia”, says Mr Mair. No longer emphasising the writing of characters by hand can free up cognitive resources for other things, he says, like thinking for themselves, and is part of the empowering of the Chinese mind that could have political implications. The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The reason Xi Jinping can have total control over China is because the education system underpins all the mechanisms of the police state, says Mr Mair.

Criticism of China’s writing system has also provoked debates among Western scholars. Thomas Mullaney of Stanford University has accused those who say Chinese characters are a stumbling block to literacy of being “Orientalist”, a fighting-word in modern academe. But, says Mr Moser, it is Chinese people themselves who have always been the most critical of their own script. And now they are able to go beyond the script, using alphabets, emojis, invented characters and foreign languages, or bypassing the written word altogether by speaking into their phones and computers—in their own languages and dialects.

The growing use of pinyin, and the continued tension between spoken regional “dialects” and Chinese characters, will continue, even though, for reasons of national and cultural pride, it now seems unlikely that characters will ever be replaced with an alphabet. With the help of technology, more people are thinking for themselves, outside the boxy prison of Chinese characters—one more part of the steady empowerment of the populace that is challenging orthodoxy in Beijing. The Mandarinisation of the nation will continue; the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world. But even if the party achieves linguistic unity under Mandarin, says Mr Moser, it may still find social and political unity as elusive as ever.