Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters

The debate on traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters is an ongoing dispute concerning Chinese orthography among users of Chinese characters. It has stirred up heated responses from supporters of both sides in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities with its implications of political ideology and cultural identity. Simplified characters here exclusively refer to those characters simplified by the People's Republic of China (PRC), instead of the concept of character simplification as a whole. The effect of simplified characters on the language remains controversial, decades after their introduction.
The sheer difficulties posed by having two concurrent writing systems hinders communications between mainland China and other regions, although with exposure and experience a person educated in one system can quickly become familiar with the other system. For those who know both systems well, converting an entire document written using simplified characters to traditional characters, or vice versa, is a trivial but laborious task. Automated conversion, however, from simplified to traditional is not straightforward because there is not always a one-to-one mapping of a simplified character to a traditional character. One simplified character may equate to many traditional characters. As a result, a computer can be used for the bulk of the conversion but will still need final checking by a human.
The writer Ba Jin, in his 1999 essay "Thoughts: Reform of Chinese characters" (simplified Chinese: 随想录·汉字改革; traditional Chinese: 隨想錄漢字改革; pinyin: Suí xiǎng lù hànzì gǎigé), urged caution in any reforms to the written Chinese language. He cited the inability of those educated in Hong Kong or Taiwan to read material published on the mainland, and vice versa, as a great disadvantage of simplified Chinese. He also cited the ability to communicate, not just with Chinese peoples of various regions, but also with people from across the Chinese cultural sphere—countries such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—as a great advantage of the written Chinese language that should not be undermined by excessive simplification.
Proponents say that the Chinese writing system has been changing for millennia: it passed through the oracle script, bronzeware script, seal script, and clerical script stages. Moreover, the majority of simplified characters are drawn from conventional abbreviated forms that have been used in handwriting for centuries such as the use of 礼 instead of 禮, and some simplified characters are in fact restorations of ancient forms that had become more complicated over time. For instance, the character for "cloud" was originally 云 in early inscriptions, but the character was borrowed to write a homophonous word meaning "to say". To disambiguate the two uses of the character, the "rain" radical (雨) was added on top when it meant "cloud", forming the current traditional character 雲. The homophonous word meaning "to say", however, has become archaic in modern Chinese, though 雲 continues to be used for "cloud". The simplified version simply restores 云 to its original use as "cloud".
While some simplified characters were adopted from conventional abbreviated forms that have existed for a long time, those advocating the simplified forms often fail to point out that many such characters in fact had multiple vernacular forms out of which just one was chosen, arbitrarily, and then privileged by the designers of the simplified character scheme. Many of the changes can be seen as ideological, such as the removal of the "heart" (心) radical from the word "love" (愛) into the new character (爱) without heart. To some, the new 'heartless' love character is an attack on Confucianism, which emphasizes the virtues of filial piety and humanity in relationships so as to maintain a harmonious society. Supporters of simplification argue that the removal of the heart radical occurred in the context of calligraphy in ancient times and was not viewed in an anti-Confucian light.
Pro-traditional commentators argue that the changes through the history are almost exclusively alterations in writing styles, especially vernacular writing, and not in the fundamental structure of the characters—especially after the Qin standardization. They have alleged that simplified characters were arbitrarily schematized and then imposed by the PRC on its people with the intention of subverting and eradicating selected elements of traditional Chinese culture, in order to carry out what the PRC viewed as necessary revolutionary modernization. These critics point out that many of the fundamental characteristics underlying Chinese characters, including radicals as well as etymological and phonetic elements, were deliberately omitted in their simplified form at least partly for this reason (i.e., disrupting continuity with traditional Chinese culture). One frequently-cited example is the character for "sage" or "holy", 圣 in simplified and 聖 in traditional. The simplified character lacks the king radical (王), replacing it with soil (土). Supporters of simplification appeal to the fact that 圣 was often used, in handwriting, as a simplified variant of 聖 long before the PRC itself came into being. The Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) furthermore classifies 聖 as a xíngshēng (形聲) character with phonetic component 呈. Thus, the origin of the character may have nothing to do with any cultural connection to kings or royalty.
Even among supporters of simplification, some make the argument that Classical Chinese texts should not be printed in simplified Chinese because of the complexities involved in the use of tōngjiǎ (通假) or phonetic loan characters. Ancient texts for instance might use the character 女 (nǚ, "women") when the character 汝 (rǔ, "thou") is intended semantically because of their similar pronunciation in Old Chinese. The interpretation of ancient texts is often complicated by the presence of these phonetic loans, for which several very different meanings could be read. Generally, the more ancient the text, the more numerous the phonetic loans, since separate characters were slowly introduced as the written language evolved, in order to disambiguate these loans. For instance, the preclassical Book of Odes and the early classical Analects always uses 女 for 汝, while texts from the Han dynasty or later nearly always use 汝.
The merging of several traditional characters into one simplified character (e.g., 願 (yuàn, "desire", commonly used) and 愿 (yuàn, "honest", archaic and rare)) to 愿 (both meanings) during the simplification process can be thought of as the modern introduction of phonetic loans. This complicates an already complex landscape of tōngjiǎ characters appearing in classical texts, introducing additional possibilities for misinterpretation, particularly for beginning students. Personal names of historical individuals are also problematic. For example, there are two Six Dynasties period generals whose names are 王濬 (206–286) and 王浚 (252–314), both of which are pronounced as Wáng Jùn. However, according to the current PRC simplification scheme, the character 濬 is considered to be an obsolete variant of 浚, so to conform to standard orthography, these names should be written identically using 浚. Against this argument, proponents of simplified characters respond that simplified characters are more practical in all domains other than ancient literature and that it is uneconomical to introduce high school students, already burdened by schoolwork, to a new character set for the sole purpose of teaching the classical language. Any potentially confusing usages can be remedied by providing appropriate annotations and glosses in footnotes, which are needed anyway for student editions of classical texts. When the need arises, history and language majors in colleges and universities gradually learn to read scholarly editions of texts set in traditional characters without too much difficulty. Nevertheless, classical texts set in traditional Chinese can be hard to find in mainland Chinese bookstores. The Zhonghua Publishing House (Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 中華書局) and several other specialist scholastic publishers are the only ones to routinely publish works in traditional characters.
The long history of Chinese characters and the role of the Chinese Communist Party in the design and adoption of simplified characters means that there is often a strong political aspect to the debate on the usage of traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
In recent years, the official Campaign of Simplification of Chinese Language has caused many controversial discussions in the general public to higher level of the government in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and among some international organizations.
In November 2007, scholars and representatives from Japan, Korea, mainland China, and Taiwan came to Beijing and joined the Eighth Annual International Conference of Chinese Language Study. The conference was conducted and hosted by the National Office of International Promotion of Chinese Language and Board of Language Usage & Applications of the Ministry of Education of China. Immediately after, Korean media reported that the scholars and representatives reached a few conclusions after long discussion in the conference. One of those conclusions was that scholars would be using Traditional Chinese characters to standardize 5000 common Chinese characters across the countries and would continue to allow the use of Simplified Chinese characters if there happened to have one across those different areas. However, Chinese officials claimed that they did not reach such an agreement but would like to see the harmonious coexistence of Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Still, to many, that was the approval from Chinese Government because they were no longer absolutely opposed to the use of Traditional Chinese.
In March 2008, a Mainland author, Wang Gan, published a review article on his personal blog about the possibility of the reintroduction of Traditional Chinese, What About Abolishing Simplified Chinese within the Next 50 Years?. Later Sina.com invited Wang Gan for an interview on his views on the history reasons and deficiencies of simplified Chinese characters.
Twenty-one members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) delivered a proposal to add Traditional Chinese characters to the primary school curriculum. The proposal was rejected by the Minister of Education, who explained, "Our nation has its fundamental governing principles. [One of them, by law, is] to promote the usage of Simplified Chinese and Mandarin. This is the basic condition.... Thus, we will not consider reintroducing Traditional Chinese education in our primary school curriculums."
On 5 July 2008, on his visit to Taiwanese writer Koarn Hack Tarn's home, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou promised that he would not introduce the usage of Simplified Chinese into the territories just because of the local newly passed policy to let Mainland tourists visit Taiwan but to provide side-by-side translation so that Mainland visitors could appreciate the aesthetic nature of Traditional Chinese. And he also told journalists that he wished all Chinese people would eventually be using Traditional Chinese in the near future.
In early 2009, the ROC (Taiwan) government launched a campaign to obtain World Heritage status for Traditional Chinese characters in a bid to preserve them for the future. At the Eleventh National People's Congress, a representative from Taiwan, Ms Chen Jun, called for the Chinese government to support the world heritage campaign. She also suggested the introduction of Traditional Characters education into mainland primary and secondary education to improve passion for and understanding of traditional Chinese culture and language.
During a March 2009 CPPCC meeting, member Pan Qinglin proposed that simplified characters should be abolished and Traditional Character usage reimplemented over the course of ten years. His proposal was widely criticized as frivolous.
At the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences China Studies Forum in April 2009, it was announced that some adjustments would be made to the simplified characters. Experts acknowledged that some of the earlier character simplifications were problematic and inhibited understanding. Academics expressed support for the concept of "know traditional, write simplified" and specifically rejected the idea of reintroducing traditional characters as too costly and impractical. They cited a survey of ninety-one top-ranked senior classical Chinese literature and Chinese language students from Beijing Normal University testing their ability to write Traditional Characters, which only three students passed.
During the 2014 Two Sessions, Wu Shimin deputy to the National People's Congress, proposed the PRC should "restore traditional Chinese characters and inherit traditional culture" for discussion.
During the 2019 Two Sessions, a member of the CPPCC put forward the "Proposal on the Education of Traditional Chinese Characters in Primary and Secondary Schools", the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China published a response letter to the proposal emphasizing that Chinese characters have undergone great changes over its thousands of years of history. Additionally, more than half of the population surveyed in government studies "understand the general meaning" when presented with text in traditional Chinese characters. According to current PRC education standards, traditional Chinese characters will be involved the education of classical Chinese reading and calligraphy in primary and secondary schools. The response ends acknowledging that traditional characters in China will still play a role in the development of the literary arts and strengthening communication with Chinese communities that still use traditional characters.
^a In Taiwan, traditional characters are officially known as "proper characters" (traditional Chinese: 正體字; simplified Chinese: 正体字; pinyin: zhèngtǐ zì), while most Chinese speakers outside Taiwan, whether using simplified or traditional characters, refer to traditional characters as "complex characters" (simplified Chinese: 繁体字; traditional Chinese: 繁體字; pinyin: fántǐ zì).