This is a video of someone using an electromechanical Chinese typewriter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM -- it's hard to appreciate the topic without seeing one used.
The spectre hanging, however genially, over every attempt to create a Chinese typewriter is Lin Yutang. While others repackaged Japanese machines, the Tsinghua and Harvard-educated Lin was inventing his own. A brilliant and congenial figurehead with two English-language bestsellers in the 1930s, in the 1940s Lin came up with his MingKwai (Clear, Quick) typewriter. Roughly the size of an English-language typewriter, and equipped with a recognisable keyboard, the MingKwai’s appearance belied its complexity. Its compact chassis concealed 43 rotating cylinders, and featured a viewfinder (‘the Magic Eye’) that allowed users to select characters by depressing keys marked with character components – some radicals, some strokes, and some bold and intuitive groupings of Lin’s own devising. IBM and Remington expressed their interest, and Lin’s typewriter was celebrated in dozens of newspapers across the US, from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. But it was never mass-manufactured: the plans were undone partly by the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, which didn’t seem to bode well for patent rights, and partly by the invention of the phonetic system Pinyin, which briefly threatened, at least in the eyes of American manufacturers, to make Chinese typewriters obsolete. Today if you open a laptop or unlock a phone to type in Chinese, the first thing you’ll notice is how intent the software is on doing all your work for you. The letters typed on your keyboard trigger the on-screen display of several dozen likely possibilities, arranged in order of frequency. This seems so obviously computational it is a surprise to learn that it originated with the actuating keys Lin devised for his typewriter, and with the fervour of the typists in the early days of the Revolution.
In 1951, typesetter Zhang Jiying shattered speed records by arranging characters in associative clusters, which he called lianchuan – ‘chain’ or ‘free-association’, later adopted as the term for what is now called predictive text. Zhang recognised how much of language is cliché. ‘Liberation’ (jiefang) was likely to be followed by ‘army’ (jun), ‘American’ (Mei) by ‘imperialist’ (di). While it is true that grammar and word-order impose certain expectations on form in every language, it is particularly true of Chinese, where collocations influenced by tone, metre and rhythm have, by a centuries-long process, migrated towards one another. Typists and typewriter manufacturers rejigged their keyboards in the wake of Zhang’s discovery. And so while typewriters became more attuned to the language of people generally, they became less like people personally.