Let's rock

[T]he committee could not have chosen a more polarising chairman than Wu Zhihui, a linguist, anarchist and one of the founding fathers of the Kuomintang (KMT). Wu was a notorious intellectual firebrand, and a harsh critic of Confucian values who famously called for China to ‘flush all classical literature down the toilet’. He did not hide his contempt for the Qing government, either, deriding the Manchus as a ‘dog-fucked race’, and the Empress Dowager as a ‘withered old hag’ and a ‘whore’. His appointment did not exactly bode well for the overall civility of the proceedings.

Narrator:  It did not go well.

Once the standard pronunciation was completed [after years of confusion and acrimony] and ready for dissemination, it became obvious to everyone involved that the task of recruiting and training teachers alone would be insurmountable. The ‘experts’ who had arrived at the system had not fully considered its implementation. The first attempt at a national language standard was stillborn.

Narrator:  Eventually they just went with Beijing dialect instead.


A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language - (link)