This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Simplified and Traditional Characters
The first choice to make in learning Chinese is whether to learn simplified characters or traditional characters. Below is an outline of the origins, development, advantages and disadvantages of simplified and traditional characters.
The term “simplified characters” derives from the “Chinese Character Simplification Scheme” promulgated in mainland China on 1956/1/28 (January 28, 1956). Only once there were simplified characters did people speak of simplified and traditional characters; in Hong Kong they are called “reduced-stroke characters.” In Taiwan, because the Republic of China had once promulgated a Table of Simplified Characters — corresponding to popular forms, ancient forms, cursive forms and so on — the original forms were at that time called the correct (standard) forms. At present, simplified characters are used mainly in mainland China and among overseas Chinese from the mainland, while traditional Chinese is used mainly in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and in some overseas Chinese communities.
To weigh the strengths and weaknesses of simplified and traditional characters, we must also review the evolution of Chinese script. As said in an earlier article, Chinese characters originated with Cangjie’s creation of writing. Cangjie, the court historian of the Yellow Emperor, created writing from the shapes of the sun and moon and the footprints of birds and beasts, whereupon “Heaven rained millet and ghosts wailed at night” (Huainanzi). The Xunzi·“Dispelling Obsession” records: “Many loved writing, yet Cangjie alone was handed down, because of the One.” By Xunzi’s time more than two thousand years had passed since Cangjie created writing, yet Xunzi still knew that there had been many creators of characters and many schemes of writing; evidently these ways and schemes of writing were still heard of at that time, and possibly were even still actually in circulation.
In the histories there are many different understandings of “because of the One”; some, for example, understand it as “single-minded concentration.” As mentioned in an earlier article, in Cangjie’s time the Yijing and the principles of change held a dominant place in society. Although the Lianshan then current has been lost, the Zhou Yi says: In change there is the Supreme Ultimate, which gives birth to the Two Modes; the Two Modes give birth to the Four Images, and the Four Images give birth to the Eight Trigrams. And later still the Daodejing says: the Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to the myriad things. Both speak of the meaning of “One.” “One” is the embodiment of the Dao and the principles of change, a basic rule of the universe. So this “because of the One” should mean that Cangjie’s characters accord with the Dao and the principles of change and have their inner laws and rules, and for that reason were handed down. According to historical records and present research, after Cangjie created characters, the shapes and styles of the characters kept changing. But this inner law of character creation did not change, so however the script changed in later ages, there is nothing improper in revering Cangjie as the “Sage of Character Creation.”
The ancient script created by Cangjie passed through the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. By the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, as writing spread from the royal court to the common people, popular forms of characters developed greatly. In the mid-Warring States period, because the popular forms were so widely used in the eastern states, they all but defeated the standard forms, and each state developed its own different script. The state of Qin, established on the ancestral lands of the Zhou, inherited the most from Zhou writing, and its script changed more slowly. Its standard form later became the small seal script, while its popular form developed into clerical script. After the First Emperor of Qin unified the six states, he carried out the policy of unifying the script. The preface to Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi of the Eastern Han says: “When the First Emperor of Qin first united the realm, the chancellor Li Si memorialized that the script be unified, abolishing those forms that did not accord with the Qin script.” By the Han dynasty, clerical script had replaced small seal script as the main style. After clerical script, the structure of Chinese characters became basically fixed; the regular script of the Tang, the Song typeface used for printing, and the Ming typeface derived from it after it reached Japan, all have basically the same character structure as clerical script.
As the structure of Chinese characters became fixed, the inner laws of character creation came to matter less, and over thousands of years of evolution people gradually forgot the background of Chinese characters in the principles of change. Xu Shen’s Six Scripts (liushu) were a popular explanation of these fixed shapes and styles, and basically severed the inner connection between Chinese characters and the study of the Yijing.
In modern times, Chinese characters underwent another great change. As the Western industrial revolution struck at traditional Chinese culture, a group of people took advantage of China’s period of adjustment and reform to put forward some extreme views, even proposing to romanize Chinese. In the spring of 1935, the cultural circles of Shanghai launched the “Handy Characters Movement,” meaning that books should be printed the way ordinary people wrote, on the grounds that this would make characters easier to write and recognize and easier to popularize. In August of the same year, the Nationalist government announced the first batch of simplified characters, 324 in all, but this immediately met with strong opposition, and their use was abolished in 1936/2 (February 1936). Thereafter the Nationalist government never again promoted simplified characters.
This movement to simplify Chinese characters suffered a setback in the areas governed by the Nationalists, but was carried on in some of the Communist “red base areas”; the newspapers and magazines of the “red areas” used existing or newly created simplified characters, which were also called “liberation characters.” After the Communist Party established its regime, on 1956/1/28 it adopted simplified characters numbering 515 together with simplified side components numbering 54. In 1964 the State Council announced the General List of Simplified Characters: the first table had 352 simplified characters not used as side components, the second table had 132 simplified characters that could serve as simplified side components, and the third table had 1754 characters derived by analogy from the second table, 2236 characters in all — these are the simplified characters current in the mainland today. The third simplification scheme promoted afterwards was abolished after the Cultural Revolution.
Here is a passage quoted from Wikipedia: In 1935/8 (August 1935), the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China published the First List of Simplified Characters, containing simplified characters numbering 324. Unlike the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China did not force the people to use simplified characters; it merely “legitimized” handwritten forms, that is, it was an “addition,” which differs from the PRC’s abolishing the “traditional form” of the same character, eliminating “variant characters” and merging Chinese characters.
China has an idiom, “to wipe out with one stroke of the brush” (一笔抹杀), and Hegel too has a famous saying: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. As discussed earlier, Cangjie’s creation of characters was based on the Yijing. In ancient China the Yijing was revered as the first of all the classics; the ethics and morality, literature, art, architecture, medicine and so on of thousands of years of Chinese civilization were all based on the Yijing, and the sound, form and meaning of every Chinese character accord with the principles of change, carrying the content of Chinese culture. But the nine principles of simplification established in the simplification of Chinese characters in mainland China proceeded entirely from practical considerations such as ease of writing and recognition, without considering the cultural content carried by the characters themselves. One really does get the feeling that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
On the other hand, after the Communist Party established its regime in 1949, everything it did aimed at replacing traditional Chinese culture and thought — labelled “feudal, capitalist and revisionist” — with socialism and communism, which originated in the West; so deleting the traditional Chinese cultural content from Chinese characters was an inevitable step.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the debate between simplified and traditional characters has suddenly flared up. People keep proposing that traditional characters be restored, offering many reasons. Here are one or two.
First, traditional characters play a vital role in carrying forward Chinese civilization. Everyone knows that Chinese civilization is the only civilization in the world handed down for five thousand years without interruption, but people may not realize that this transmission is directly related to traditional characters. Many Western historians do not accept that Chinese civilization has been handed down for five thousand years. Why? Because by certain criteria, the nationalities and ethnic groups of China’s successive dynasties were not all the same; if one divides by nationality and ethnicity, Chinese civilization has been replaced many times. But everyone who studies Chinese knows that reading histories from two thousand years ago, learning idiom stories from two and a half thousand years ago, reciting the Book of Songs from three thousand years ago, and recognizing characters from five thousand years ago are the normal process of learning Chinese. In other words, Chinese civilization is not a transmission of race or nationality; it is a transmission of culture. Why can we still read ancient books from two or three thousand years ago? Because of the traditional Chinese characters and Classical Chinese that have remained stable and unchanged over the past two or three thousand years. It is precisely these characters, unchanged as a whole, that as one of the pillars have upheld the unbroken five-thousand-year cultural lineage of Chinese civilization.
Second, traditional Chinese characters contain a great deal of knowledge of traditional Chinese ethics and moral norms, historical allusions, astronomy, geography and so on; in learning traditional characters one naturally learns this knowledge and builds these concepts. For example, entering a good state is “進” (jìn, “to advance”): the traditional form of this character already tells people that becoming better and turning toward goodness is “進,” whereas the simplified “进” is walking into a well (井), which obviously loses this content.
Third, because traditional characters have content, stories and consistent rules of construction, they are easier to remember than simplified ones. Today the difficulty of writing them has been made up for by computers. With the pinyin input everyone is used to, simplified and traditional characters are typed in exactly the same way.
Fourth, the countries and regions that now use traditional characters all have lower illiteracy rates than mainland China, which shows that the educational environment and conditions matter more, and that simplified characters have not given more help to the learning of Chinese.
There are many more such arguments for and against. The benevolent see benevolence and the wise see wisdom. For Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, it is natural to continue learning traditional characters. For children whose parents come from mainland China, living overseas amid a mixture of simplified and traditional characters, being able to read both simplified and traditional characters while writing simplified ones is a reasonable choice under present circumstances. For learners of Chinese of other ethnic backgrounds, learning traditional characters is of great help in understanding traditional Chinese culture.
