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....
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