Should China reuse traditional Chinese characters
By admin on 2014-12-22

In the past few years, a debate has emerged as to whether China should resume the old way of writing Chinese characters to preserve its culture. This year, Pan Qinglin, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top advisory body, made an aggressive proposal, calling to abolish the use of current simplified Chinese characters within 10 years.

The contemporary Chinese written language has two standard sets of characters—traditional and simplified. The Chinese mainland first introduced simplified characters in 1956, which were created by decreasing the number of strokes to make the writing easier.

Pan listed three reasons for his proposal: First, the simplified characters were too roughly created in the 1950s; second, although traditional characters are a bit complicated to write, nowadays, computers can make the process very simple; and third, the resumption of traditional characters will facilitate the communication between Chinese mainlanders and people in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan where traditional characters are being used.

In response to Pan's proposal, officials from the Ministry of Education said that simplified characters were widely used in all sectors of social life and they would not be abolished without legal revisions. Li Yuming, Deputy Director of the State Language Commission, stressed again in August that the government had not considered the overall resumption of traditional characters.

Although the government holds an explicit attitude toward this issue, heated debate among ordinary people, particularly on the Internet, has never faded.

Supporters of the resumption believe that simplified characters are a result of the pursuit of higher efficiency. In order to make characters easier to learn, the use of simplified characters was reasonable during a certain historical period. But the time of handwriting is over, having been replaced by computer keyboards. Now it doesn't matter how difficult Chinese characters are. Besides, traditional characters are more closely connected with history and tradition.

Opponents argue that, if traditional characters are resumed, dictionaries, books and many other things will need to be revised, which will cost huge amounts of manpower and money. Others say that characters are a kind of tool; so as long as they are easy to read and write, it's okay.

Questions:

1) When the traditional characters were simplified and why?

2) Based on a questionnaire designed by State Language Commission, nearly 1% of mainland Chinese people prefer writing traditional characters everyday. Far as the mainland's 1.3 billion people, the nearly 1% of the users of traditional characters is still a very large group. So who do you think insists on using traditional characters nowadays?

3)Did you ever know traditional characters before you came to China?

4) As a foreign student, what do you think of Pan's proposal?