Why does Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters

Question 1: Why do Taiwanese use traditional Chinese characters

Because our country has always used before, and mainland China is only after the founding of the country to implement the simplified Chinese characters, Taiwan did not implement, and has been retained to use traditional Chinese characters.

Currently, traditional Chinese characters are still used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and overseas Chinese communities such as Malaysia, where both traditional and simplified Chinese characters coexist, and in Mainland China, where traditional Chinese characters are retained or used for cultural relics and monuments, family name variations, calligraphy and seal-carving, handwritten inscriptions, special needs, and so on.

In January 2001, the Law of the People's Republic of China on National Common Language and Writing Systems came into force, specifying the implementation of standardized Chinese characters and the scope of traditional characters to be retained or used, and on June 5, 2013, the State Council of the People's Republic of China announced the "Table of Standardized Chinese Characters for General Purposes," including the attached table of comparison between standardized Chinese characters and traditional Chinese characters and variant Chinese characters. The use of Chinese characters in general application areas is based on the Standardized Character List.

Question 2: Why do Taiwan and Hong Kong still use traditional Chinese characters

Simply because there is no movement to simplify Chinese characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong, nor in Macao, and Singapore adopted simplified Chinese characters only after a long period of time.

Because mainland China only implemented simplified characters after the founding of the country, while Taiwan Province of China did not, so it has been using traditional characters. The regions that still use traditional characters are Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia.

Throughout Chinese history, from ancient times to the Western Han Dynasty, there were significant differences between the official standardized fonts and the modern traditional Chinese fonts. It was not until the Qin Dynasty that the official script, prevalent in the Eastern Han Dynasty, emerged and became closer to the modern traditional Chinese script. The standardized characters issued by the imperial court through the preparation of "character books" have official authority over the various simplified characters spontaneously used by the people.

Question 3: Why are traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan

The simplification of Chinese characters was a process of simplifying thousands of commonly used Chinese characters in the mid-1950s by combining hundreds of experts under the direct supervision of Premier Zhou Enlai. The starting point at that time was, shall we say, an analysis of China's national conditions. China had experienced hundreds of years of internal and external troubles, and the country was weak and the people were poor. China has been an agricultural country for thousands of years, with more than 80% of the population in the countryside, and more than half of the population was illiterate or semi-illiterate at that time. In order to develop culture and build the country on such a basis, literacy became an important historical task. The purpose of simplifying the written word at that time was to enable hundreds of millions of people to become literate as soon as possible, to improve the speed of using the written word, to raise the level of literacy, to make it easier for students to study in school, and to take this as the most basic foundation for learning science and technology and building a rich and powerful country.

Some Taiwanese are probably surprised to see simplified Chinese characters at first glance. Mainland China's characters have changed so much, especially for veterans who have been away from home for decades and see that their hometown has changed, and so has the writing. Some people hate to look at simplified characters and call them "bandit books" or "bandit writing" when they see them. Some people even compared the simplified character movement to the Manchu *** Sfa, saying that *** in order to reform the people, forced the people to read the simplified characters, but in fact, it is not true.

Since ancient times, Chinese characters have been written in both traditional and simplified forms. In the oracle bone inscriptions and gold inscriptions, we can find traces of simplified Chinese characters, for example, "车", which has been written in a variety of ways. Later on, after the seal scripts were simplified, more and more characters were written in both styles. From the Sixth Dynasty to the Sui and Tang dynasties, the Chinese characters were gradually scribed in regular script, and at that time, perhaps for the sake of aesthetic symmetry, many of the ancient characters were written with more strokes, and the simplified characters began to be known as "vulgar", "small-case", "broken", etc. In civil society, the simplified Chinese characters are still used as "common", "small-case", "broken", and so on. "

Simplified Chinese characters are still widely spread in civil society.

However, sometimes words are simplified and complicated, and there are pseudo-referential characters in Zuozhuan and Oracle, when something we want to express is very abstract, and initially it is impossible to create a word, so we find a word that sounds close to it to borrow, and then later, or if we can create a word, we will have the original character for this abstract concept. Sometimes later, when it was still impossible to create a character, a character was used to add radicals and aliases to indicate that it was different from the original borrowed character. Sometimes a character became more and more complicated, and people found it troublesome to simplify it, so in the Wei and Jin dynasties, there was popular literalism, i.e., popular characters. There are also words that are more and more simple, and it is not easy to see the original meaning of the word, so they go to add strokes for it, so the complexity of the word.

Therefore, the characters written with more and more complicated strokes are definitely not less than those written with more and more simple strokes.

Complicated and simplified characters existed in ancient times. Some of the new characters were made and later came into common use. For example: Yang Jian in the Northern Zhou Dynasty, aided by a relative, into the "Sui Wang", but he suspected that "Sui" has the meaning of "go", so change "Sui" to "Sui". But he thought that "Sui" had the meaning of "go", so he changed "Sui" to "Sui". Wu Zetian's favorite character creation, she made more than ten characters in her life. One of them was "Guo", which she changed to "□" with "武" in the middle, but she stopped using it when she felt that she was surrounded by a walled city. After the unification of Chinese writing by Emperor Qin Shi Huang, traditional, simplified, common, and variant characters appeared as times changed. For official documents, the traditional style was used, and other scripts were difficult to get into. During this period, the use of folk characters is mostly taken by convention, until the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom period, only began to simplify the text.

The modern movement to simplify Chinese characters

"The modern movement to simplify Chinese characters originated in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, where, in order to improve literacy, the seal of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and official documents were written in simplified characters. By unofficial count, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom used more than one hundred simplified characters in total ***, 80% of which were adopted by the later ***" (Word Reform in Contemporary China P.38). The most famous character of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was the change of "or" from "Guo" to "Wang", but the movement to simplify the characters also stopped after the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, China was facing a serious crisis of partition by the great powers. In this era of national upheaval and change of heart, many intellectuals were worried about the country and the people, and they advocated for a change in the law to make it stronger. During the Restoration Movement, some patriotic intellectuals considered that if they wanted to save the country and make it strong, they had to popularize education and cultivate talents, and they had to overcome the obstacles posed by the complexity of Chinese characters. Under this trend of thinking, the pinyinization of Chinese characters began. The main figures of the Restoration Movement, such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong, all advocated the romanization of Chinese characters, but the Restoration Movement only lasted for a hundred days, and the romanization movement was aborted. (Word Reform in Contemporary China P.5-6)

The vernacular language movement of the May Fourth Movement is well known. In fact, the movement to simplify the written language should be compared with the vernacular language movement, because both were part of the New Culture Movement. During this period, many people proposed ways to raise the level of knowledge of the people of the country. To raise the level of knowledge, the first step is to raise the literacy rate and increase ...... >>

Question 4: How is Taiwan written in traditional Chinese characters?

The word "Taiwan" in Taiwan is written in both formal writing (used in official documents or *** machine units...) and general everyday usage.

Question 5: Why are traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan?

Because there is no campaign to simplify Chinese characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Question 6: Why does Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters

It used to be traditional Chinese characters After the civil war, *** went to Taiwan. The mainland decided to simplify the Chinese characters in the 1950s for better use of the Chinese language, so there were two kinds of Chinese characters

Question 7: Why does Taiwan use traditional characters

You should ask why the mainland uses simplified characters. Simplified Chinese is a kind of artificial 'reformed' character. Taiwan is just following the tradition, which is the most normal situation~

Question 8: Why is the traditional Chinese character prescribed by the mainland different from that of Taiwan?

The traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan are orthographic characters, standardized in the "Standard Character List for Commonly Used National Characters", "Standard Character List for Less Commonly Used National Characters", and "Rarely Used Characters", whereas the mainland's is based on the "Simplified Character List" and the "Xinhua Dictionary" (Traditional Chinese version), and the standardized ways of writing the characters are indeed different. I can't say why, but it's normal for traditional Chinese characters to vary from region to region, and there are also differences between Taiwan and Hong Kong. Another reason is that after China's text reform to use simplified characters, the standard part of the traditional Chinese writing style will be similar to the simplified Chinese writing style, so it's not so similar to Taiwan's traditional Chinese characters, and doesn't really match the etymology.