When was it mandated in China to start using simplified characters, and when did traditional characters come into being?

Simplified characters are fonts created after the 1950s when the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) simplified traditional Chinese characters. This also gave rise to the symmetry of traditional characters, meaning the way the character was written before the simplification. Simplified characters have fewer strokes than traditional characters. Simplified characters are nowadays standardized in mainland China. However, there are many traditional Chinese characters that have not been simplified, such as: "To do a good job, one must first sharpen one's tools". These Chinese characters are called heritage characters and are neither traditional nor simplified.

There have always been two completely opposing views on the simplification of Chinese characters. In recent years, reflections and debates on the simplification of Chinese characters have begun to heat up.

Those who agree with the simplification of Chinese characters believe that:

1. From the oracle bone script to the regular script, Chinese characters have been simplified in the course of evolution. In addition to mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries are simplifying Chinese characters, which is a general trend.

2. The simplified characters prescribed in mainland China are basically derived from writing styles that have already been passed down in folklore, some of which are derived from ancient styles and not created out of thin air.

3. The simplification of Chinese characters has reduced the number of strokes and characters, thus making it less difficult to learn Chinese characters, and at the same time speeding up writing, which is conducive to popularization of education, and the abolition of variant characters in the traditional form facilitates communication among the public.

4. Publishers specializing in ancient texts, such as the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House and the China Bookstore on the Chinese mainland, usually use the traditional form, and traditional texts are easy to find.

5. Most mainland Chinese educated in simplified characters do not have significant comprehension difficulties when reading traditional characters.

6. In digital devices such as computers, cell phones, and PDAs, where the size of the text is limited, simplified Chinese characters are displayed more clearly because of their simpler strokes.

Opposing views mainly focus on:

1. The simplification of Chinese characters is not conducive to the inheritance of China's traditional culture over the past 5,000 years, and after the promotion of simplified Chinese characters, many modern Chinese people can no longer read ancient texts directly. Even when ancient books are reprinted in simplified characters, they are often ambiguous and misunderstood by readers. What many people overlook is that since May 4, there have been voices advocating the abolition of Chinese characters in favor of the Latin alphabet - the ideology behind China's promotion of simplified characters. As the last living ideographic writing system in the world, simplified characters are the first step in eliminating part of a culture.

2. It is not conducive to cultural exchanges between mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and further disconnects the Chinese characters used in foreign countries, such as Japan, making them artificially "written in different languages". And Singapore, Malaysia and other places, mainly in view of the mainland region in the world's position is becoming increasingly important, so with the use of simplified, the so-called trend, to trace its roots, is still from the Chinese government's political power.

3. Simplified Chinese characters violated the principle of the Six Books, but instead of establishing a complete system of character creation, they greatly weakened the scientific and logical nature of Chinese characters. Many Chinese characters have lost their denotative structure, thus depriving the learning process of the Chinese language of the learning path of inferring the meaning of a character by its denotative structure. The current simplified characters have a confusing system of extrapolation, often with exceptions or inconsistencies, and there is a high degree of randomness as to what characters follow the analogies and what characters do not. As a result, it makes the system more complicated and increases the burden of learners.

4. The development of Chinese characters is not just simplification. Characters such as "又、有、右、手、佑、佑" are written only as "又" in the oracle bone inscriptions, so it is clear that the process of simplification has also been going on in Chinese characters, and has accounted for a large part of the development of Chinese characters. This is mainly a natural development for the practical needs of meaning recognition, not a forced transformation by political force. It has been nearly two thousand years since the Regular Script was roughly finalized. To say that "simplification" is the main way of development of Chinese characters is careless and too much of an "assumption".

5. From the point of view of the aesthetics of calligraphy, the design of many simplified characters is not rigorous enough, and in the case of the seal script and the official script, the simplification loses the special aesthetics of the original script.

6. Multiple meanings of one character, many similar glyphs produced after simplification, and the lack of phonetic and semantic structures make it difficult to read and recognize the characters.

7. Many media, such as newspapers and websites, are forced to set up two different versions of traditional and simplified Chinese characters and/or related tools for converting traditional and simplified Chinese characters, which cost a lot of manpower and material resources.

8. In computerized processing of Chinese characters, the input speed is similar for both traditional and simplified Chinese. It is not necessarily true that simplified characters are more efficient. However, the design of the simplified characters, in which one character is used as a substitute for a number, increases the difficulty of computerized conversion and makes the conversion result less satisfactory.

9. Simplified characters are not directly related to the eradication of illiteracy. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, where traditional Chinese characters are used, the proportion of illiterate people is much lower than that in mainland China, so it is clear that the focus of literacy work lies in the allocation of resources to education and education policy, not in simplified characters.

10. Simplified characters created by the morpho-sound method may not be able to take into account various dialects or ancient sounds, making it difficult for people in some regions to understand these simplified characters. For example, the character "舰" has "监" as its sound side, which takes into account the ancient sound system and many dialects around the world, while the simplified character "舰" has "见" as its sound side, which is only a part of the simplified character. The simplified character "舰" is written with "见" (see) as the sound side, which only takes care of Mandarin and cuts off the relationship between the sound side and the dialects and ancient sounds. Simplified Chinese characters are often not credible when studying ancient sounds or the harmonic system of a dialect.

11. Even in mainland China, it is impossible to abolish orthographic characters completely. Not only because of the need for ancient books and languages, but also because of the many more Chinese characters inscribed on monuments and buildings, which cannot be replaced. Since the orthographic characters are irreplaceable and vice versa (because the orthographic characters can fully accommodate the simplified characters in terms of their meaning), the emergence of the simplified characters creates a burden on the Chinese characters, increasing the number of characters by a large amount and creating a burden on learning.

12. The fact that Hong Kong and Macao have continued to use traditional Chinese characters for many years after the reunification also illustrates some of the realities of the Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese debates.

13. When people read Chinese characters on the screen, they don't need to look at each stroke carefully, but can recognize them by seeing their outlines. No matter how simple or traditional, the display of Chinese characters cannot be as small as that of the English alphabet, so it does not necessarily mean that simplified characters have a special advantage. On the contrary, simplified characters produce a large number of similar characters, which makes it more difficult to recognize them in a small-print environment.

14. Technology can be improved, and appropriate technology should be developed to meet the needs of Chinese characters, rather than being forced to cut the feet to fit the shoes.

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