80年代滇北楚雄州民委以平反「老苗文」為由推出規範苗文，號稱是最科學的阿卯文字。然而，儘管已經投入大量推廣與教學資源，規範苗文卻不受歡迎，尤其基督徒始終認為改革支持者藉規範苗文打壓教會。本文以文字道德性的破壞與重建作為闡釋文字改革事件的敘事框架，探討滇北阿卯社區被捲入民族體制後的世俗化歷程。本文主張，對一個社會生活幾乎離不開教會的地域社群而言，當文字改革的浪潮進入到滇北阿卯社群當中，從消滅柏格理文字、平反老苗文、規範阿卯文字到苗文建設，文字改革的政治行動與滇北阿卯社群的「去基督教化」運動緊密結合，成就了一個屬於他們的俗世運動。本文指出，文字改革涉及共和國阿卯與基督教阿卯的意識形態辯論，參與改革展現出社群菁英對民族語境的理解、對語言學知識的掌握，凸顯他們與國家對話的能力；其中壯大族群自我的改革企圖，更是反映了社群菁英對自身處境的認識，以及對族群未來的倫理負擔。

In the early 1980s, the Ethnic Affair Commission of Chuxiong Prefecture in northern Yunnan began promoting a reformed version of Pollard script, or Formalized Ahmao Orthography (規範苗文), claiming that it was the most scientific Ahmao writing system of all existing versions. However, despite the massive investments in promotion and teaching resources, the FAO was not popular, especially among Christians who believed that the script reform was intended to suppress the church. With the purpose of assessing this seemingly unsuccessful effort at formalizing Pollard script, this paper takes script reform as a historical event with specific social and cultural consequences and proposes to articulate this event against the background of the Ahmao secular movement in post-revolutionary China. For a Christian community like the Ahmao in northern Yunnan, whose social life has been seriously disturbed by church-state politics, the secular movement of the community has proceeded along the pathway of de-Christianization, loaded with moral ambitions of the state-lead civilizing projects, and mixed with ideologies of anti-imperialism, ethno-nationalism, development, and socialism. In order to demonstrate how the formalization (規範化) of the Pollard script would have been oriented to the “de-Christianization” of Ahmao community had it become popular, this paper joins linguistic anthropological studies with an emphasis on semiotic ideology paying attention to the indexicality of script. Particularly, three different “labels” for script are identified, each of which called for reflexive actions as the event progressed toward the moral transcendence of script unity: imperial script (帝國主義文字), old script (老苗文), and socialist script (社會主義文字). The “imperial” label called for the patriotic action of destroying the Pollard script during the Cultural Revolution; the “old” label called for the rehabilitation that resumed the relation between the Ahmao and Pollard script, and was projected onto the formalization that transformed the “old” script into “socialist” script. Moreover, this paper identifies three mechanisms that facilitated the formalization and allowed the Pollard script to become a socialist Ahmao script, those are: intension (溯源, identifying the original sources of the graphemes), extension (正名, applying the writing system to state-authorized texts), and completion (完善, totalizing the language with sufficient phonemes/graphemes). Overall, in this paper, I describe how the reformers made the formalized version of Pollard script into the one that deserved the “socialist” label. At the same time, I describe the rejections and resistances undermining the formalized script’s popularity and circulation. Thus, this paper shows the irony of the script reform project as this project resulted in the proliferation of varieties of “formalized” script rather than script unity, and thus failed to achieve its moral transcendence. While realizing the dominance of secular ideology in framing a public ethnic sphere, this paper points out that the formalized version that bears socialist values, such as being scientific (科學), progressive (進步), and developed (發展), mediates the “de-Christianization” of Ahmao ethnicity in two ways. On the one hand, it is specifically concerned with the transformation from unruly ethnic Christians to new socialist men. On the other hand, it also refers to the purification of a social and cultural space to reveal Ahmao authenticity. The ethical dialectics of Ahmao elites and Christians show their understanding of the national context, mastery of political language, awareness of their situation, and even the ethical burden on the Ahmao living world, fully demonstrating their ability to dialogue between the Ahmao community and the Chinese state.