Commentary

China Watch

Forum Digests

Columnists

Letters

By Li Hongmei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-12-24 17:47

It has been reported recently by some Taiwanese media that Taiwan intends to set up a task force in February, 2009 in a bid to apply for world heritage status for the complex Chinese characters, which the Chinese mainland stopped using after 1949 but Taiwan continues to use today. Actually speaking, scholars from either side of the Strait have all for these years steadily put forward the similar proposals involving heritage application for the Chinese characters to UNESCO. But they can seldom reach the consensus on priority of simplified or original complex forms of the Chinese characters and whether to hand in the application by unifying the both forms into one entire system.

The simplified and complex forms have descended in one continuous line. As early as 1909, Lu Feikui, the publishing veteran, publicly advocated simplifying Chinese characters for the first time in his article. After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, in light of the large illiterate population, prompting the simplification of complex characters admittedly assist more farmers and workers in learning and mastering Chinese characters.

According to Professor Wang Ning with the State Language Committee, a general principle was strictly observed while assuring the simplification: only to give permission to the characters handed down from the ancient times and those folk ones, without self-creation. So far approximately 95.25 percent of the non-illiterates in the Chinese mainland are used to writing in simplified form. The Chinese mainland has promoted the simplified form for more than 50 years and it has proved a success. Now the form has also been adopted in Taiwan and Singapore. A noted Taiwan scholar was once cited as saying, ‘virtually half of the books on my shelf are printed in simplified Chinese characters.’

Even in the Chinese mainland, simplified and complex forms are at present used simultaneously, as there is no compulsory regulation regarding personal calligraphy, a phenomenon which can be easily found in the website posts. This practice is generally beneficial to character development as it will naturally judge which would be simplified and which had better be complex.

Highly individual as it is, the writing form of Chinese characters has been carrying on the same origin dating back to 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. And some scholars now insist that Chinese characters should be standardized for real life applications. This must be addressed from basic primary education onward in order to teach the children to use the standardized characters. On the other hand, they also deem it desirable for school children to recognize the complex characters, for the simple reason that if one knows the complex characters, it is easier for one to read ancient Chinese characters and savor the classic wisdom recounted in written form.

As a matter of fact, the complex characters are also used by the Chinese-language newspapers in the Chinese Special Administrative Regions Hong Kong and Macau besides Taiwan. When receiving an interview from a Taiwan-based newspaper, Mr. Liu Chao-Shiuan, head of Taiwanese Administration Department, said that the Chinese characters were like a living fossil.

Indeed, as a treasure in the Chinese civilization and a carrier of the Chinese culture, the Chinese characters are truly prized as a living fossil. And they can also be a precious invisible heritage to bestow upon the following generations. But hopefully, they would be relayed from generation to generation as a living force, which serves to mirror, bequeath and even propel the ancient civilization, not merely as a cultural mummy, a dead treature.