The history of the Sinograph (zi 字) goes well beyond the confines of China proper. Its geographic and technological movements exceed the limits of the Sinosphere and have been directed towards other linguistic and medial spheres—in some cases, even the entire world. In modern times, such efforts have become entangled with political agendas of national unification. In premodern East Asia, however, Chinese, as a scripta franca, transcended linguistic boundaries both within a diverse empire and across the region. Its dominance was continually challenged by other languages (i.e., Sanskrit, Sogdian, Manchu) and by advocates and critics of multilingualism. Debates over whether to use Literary Chinese in language contact situations, to numerically “unicode” Chinese characters, to devise mechanical systems for typesetting, to apply Chinese as a common scholarly written language, or, conversely, to replace it with an international language (and/or to abandon it altogether), suggest that the past and present of the Sinograph remained strikingly relevant to the search for standards and universalisms. Today, this search is not only complicated by national language policies but also increasingly by linguistic, technological, or logical factors.

The European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) Autumn School 2025 places emphasis on interactive learning approaches. In addition to plenary lectures, scholars will provide interactive workshops and poster sessions in order to discuss and reflect on central subjects with the participants. Finally, the EACS Autumn School also offers time and space for participants to enter into discussions of their own projects based on a sample chapter as well as network with others.