Elijah said:

James:

 

Romanization of chinese characters started well before Mao of course, no one doubts that. It was a necessity as most of the rest of the world uses the Latin alphabet. Ironically enough Taiwan has also managed to keep that original system which is why the spelling in Hong Kong and Taiwan is so strange compared to Pinyin. (Beijing/Peking, Taipei/Taibei, Kaohsiung/Gaoxiong etc. etc.). So that fails to prove anything except that Taiwanese culture indeed does have the traditional system(s) of writing.

 

As for simplified characters and Pinyin, they were introduced by the ccp on Mao's behest in 1956 and 1958 respectively. I don't need to explain what else was going on in china during that time. All just another form of control that happened to have useful side-affects. I'm not understating the usefulness of Pinyin at all, because without it communication between china and the rest of the world would pretty damn difficult. On the other hand, the traditional characters were fine the way they were, there was no reason to get rid of them. BIM is quite correct in his analysis that it is and was an attempt to re-write history. Face it, most chinese people of the 1980 and 1990 generations can't read the traditional texts, so their education depends entirely on books written in Simplified chinese which has only been in use in china for the last 50 years…. I wonder what people in china in the last 50 years would write……

 

It's not as crazy as you think dude.

 

Cheers!

Simplified characters were considered by the Nationalist goverment before the CCP took power, and was championed by numerous academics and scholars as part of the literary revolution ahead of that (it was a less extreme version of total romanization, which some supported).

I haven't seen anything credible to suggest that the first simplification phase was part of the movements that most Chinese will agree started to go bad. It was something that had been planned for a long time by multiple people, simply as a tool to improve literacy. Simplified characters are not powerful enough to be a tool of control.

Here's a little secret: it's possible to find older texts that would have originally been printed in traditional characters, translated into a simplified characters! The idea that the CCP would seek to destroy all traditional texts is a little absurd, and that they could possibly succeed is even more absurd. It's all just fearmongering nonsense. Yes, Mao's China 1956-1976 wasn't a very nice place. But there's no need to exaggerate.

It's true that simplified characters have basically been made obsolete by computerization. One of the main purposes of simplification was to reduce stroke numbers, but that's irrelevant now that no one ever writes characters out by hand.