The Simplification of Chinese Characters

 "The written language must be reformed; it must move in the same direction as other written languages of the world, i.e. phoneticization." This is the right path for the work of reforming the written language, and it is also the ultimate goal.” -Chairman Mao

During my Mandarin class last week, my instructor and I got into a discussion of how and why the Traditional Chinese characters were revised to become Simplified Chinese characters.

I deal with Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese daily in my work day and I had already well understood that the words “Traditional” and “Simplified” refer to the written characters and have nothing to do with whether SPOKEN Chinese dialect is Cantonese or Mandarin. When mentioning Traditional and Simplified Chinese, we are strictly referring to the written language. I had also understood that in the localization industry, we typically translate Simplified Chinese for clients with customers in China (PRC) and Traditional Chinese for clients with customers in Taiwan. However, both Mandarin and Cantonese can be transcribed into either Simplified or Traditional.

In 1949, a political separation divided Taiwan from the PRC. In the 1950s, Chairman Mao and the Communist Party in China wanted to decrease the amount of illiteracy in Chinese, so a studious attempt to simply Chinese characters to a few strokes began. Many Traditional Chinese characters were replaced and the majority of the population was saved from illiteracy. This language revision is still touted as one of China’s most successful undertakings.

These Simplified Characters have been in use for over 50 years in China and are now the “standard”.  In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Traditional Characters are still in use. Singapore and Malaysia had adapted to Simplified Characters ages ago.

According to my research, most of the Simplified Characters were already in existence as found in very old manuscripts and medieval books. The reform in the 1950s legitimized these characters.

While the Simplified Characters (known as jiantizi) are easier to learn, many linguists feel that the Traditional Characters (fantizi) are more closely related and in tune with the rich history of the Chinese language.

According to my research, one issue of the simplification process of the 1950s is that it sometimes resulted in two different Traditional characters becoming identical in Simplified form. For example, the Traditional characters 發 (“develop”) and 髮 (“hair”) are both written as the Simplified character, 发. 

The major differences between the two written languages are terminology, characters, style and character encoding for computing.

I am learning Simplified Characters and those are difficult enough for a Westerner to learn and remember; I can imagine how difficult Traditional characters would be.