Owing perhaps to predictions of the imminent rise of China, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a “China fervor” is taking the world by storm: worldwide, the rush is on to acquire Chinese language and learn Chinese characters, a trend that shows no signs of abating. But in the rush to master the simplified characters in use in mainland China, how many learners are genuinely aware that what they are acquiring is but the carcass of a cultural heirloom, an empty shell of a script, the tragic result of a systematic dismantling of Chinese folkways by cultural agents of the Chinese Communist Party?
    The onset of this movement is documented in Yuzhang Wu’s “On Simplifying the Chinese Script,” published in the April 7, 1955 issue of the People’s Daily:
    Chinese block characters are difficult to learn, difficult
    to write, and difficult to remember. . . . The difficulty of
    Chinese character acquisition has led to primary and
    secondary school education being longer than is necessary.
    Furthermore, high school and college graduates are still
    found to be misreading, miswriting, and misusing characters—
    the difficulties presented by character instruction stand in
    the way of government efforts to promote education and build
    a more civilized society. . . .
    True, China’s large illiterate masses have been a problem throughout history, and any increase in literacy rate is likely to be in the national interest. But is the difficulty of writing and remembering characters really foremost among the causes of illiteracy? Can the difficulty of character instruction really be linked to the failure to promote education and civilized society? Even if we were to acknowledge the fact that block characters are structurally complex, the solution lies not in altering the characters themselves, but in devising more creative methods of instruction. To ignore the more obvious aspect of instruction methodology and push instead to radically alter the form of characters in use for thousands of years is, to say the least, preposterous.
    Wu (1955) writes:

    In as early as 1940, we were instructed by Chairman Mao to
    bring a degree of reform to the Chinese script (see Selected
    Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, p. 701). In recent years,
    the Chairman has further made clear that Chinese script
    reform is to follow the worldwide trend of romanized
    spelling. In other words, Chinese characters need to be
    recast as alphabetized words. . . . But before full
    romanization is achieved, we must first seek to inventory
    and simplify the block characters currently in use, so as to
    remove impediments to reading, writing and language
    instruction. The simplification of block characters is the
    first step to Chinese language reform.
    We can see from this passage that the promotion of simplified characters was carried out in part to pander to Chairman Mao’s personal preferences—a politically-motivated maneuver that is hardly justifiable. The end result, the full romanization of the Chinese script, would add insult to injury to the Chinese orthographic tradition.
    In 1952, a “Chinese Script Reform Committee” was formed, charged with the research and design of simplified characters, and the formulation of a Chinese romanization system. In 1955, the committee published a “Chinese Character Simplification Scheme,” which included an explanatory text and three tables: “Table of 798 Simplified Characters,” “Table of 400 Obsolete Character Variants,” and “Table of Simplified Radicals in Handwritten Form.” Over a thousand Chinese characters were to undergo simplification according to the new scheme: the characters for “beard” (鬍鬚) would be simplified to the nonsense string (胡須) “barbarian must”; “noodles” (麵) would now share a character (面) with “face”; and the character for “clown” (丑) is now identical to the word for “ugly.”
    As for phasing out traditional character variants, Wu (1955) writes that “those traditional characters to be phased out will be treated as archaic script, to be used only in specialized contexts, in reference to ancient works. It may be worthwhile to compile a Dictionary of Archaic Characters for the use of specialists in classical literature.” Orthography is an important link in the transmission of culture. Granted, over time scripts may become obsolete, just as old technologies are replaced by newer ones, and as this happens, the older, more dated versions are relegated to reference dictionaries and museums—repositories to which only specialists have access. But gradual elimination over time is different from what is being proposed here by Wu, which involves “the total elimination of traditional characters for which a simplified character is in place, or for which a different character variant has been selected as standard,” and the compulsory “simplification of handwritten character radicals.” Let us explore this issue further using the six principles of character formation.
    Chinese characters are constructed using six design principles: pictographic representation, ideographic representation, ideographic compounding, phono-semantic compounding, metaphorical extension and phonetic loan—the “six principles” of character formation (六書) that are held in highest regard. As such, any alterations to existing form, including the elimination of character variants and the simplification of radicals, must be in compliance with the “six principles” —for as we know, with the Chinese script, the addition or omission of a stroke in any character will easily result in misrepresentation. In the dispute over whether to adopt the artificially mandated changes to the Chinese writing system, we should be considering not the issue of whether the changes are practical, but rather whether it is right or wrong.
    Wu (1955) goes on to say that:
    The masses have had a history of simplifying the strokes of block characters to make writing less tedious—simplified characters of this nature are an unspoken norm, and are in wide circulation....