Note on Chinese Spellings
THIS BOOK MAKES frequent reference to Chinese names
and terms. Well-known alternative spellings exist for many Chinese
words, based on two particularly widespread methods of
transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet: the
Wade-Giles method, prevalent through much of the world until the
1980s, and the pinyin method, adopted officially in the People’s
Republic of China in 1979 and increasingly common in Western and
other Asian publications thereafter.
For the most part,
this book employs pinyin spellings. For example, the pinyin
spelling “Deng Xiaoping” is used rather than the Wade-Giles
spelling “Teng H’siao-ping.” Where other, non-pinyin spellings
remain significantly more familiar, they are retained for the
reader’s convenience. For example, for the name of the ancient
military theorist “Sun Tzu,” the traditional spelling is used,
rather than the newer pinyin spelling “Sunzi.”
Occasionally, in the
interest of achieving consistency throughout the book’s text,
quoted references to names originally listed in the Wade-Giles
format have been rendered in their pinyin spellings. Such changes
are further noted in the endnotes. In each case, the underlying
Chinese word remains the same; the difference is in the method of
rendering the word in the Roman alphabet.