Abstract For over three decades, the dominant narrative of Unicode has been that it is a technical solution to a technical problem of global communication. This article argues that this narrative has dominated the discourse about Unicode because it is the narrative of the victors. Understanding the social and political interests at stake requires returning to the battle that yielded the Unicode Standard as the sole universal encoding standard: a period from 1988, when a draft proposal of the Unicode Standard was first made public, to 1993, when the Unicode Standard effectively conquered the dominant encoding standard, ISO/IEC 10646. Whereas Unicode was an organization consisting mostly of engineers at large American software companies, ISO was an international standard organization comprising representatives from member nations. Their confrontation over the encoding of Sinographs pitted big tech against the big state, with significant national and financial interests at stake. The last section discusses how a recent attempt by the Chinese state to rapidly encode a large batch of Sinographs used in proper names reveals some of the stakes of this ongoing negotiation between big tech and big states.
Raja Adal (Thu,) studied this question.