Undoing simplified characters: Traditional Chinese on the rise in China?

My wife draws my attention to the Sunday, Nov. 4 edition of the Chinese newspaper she reads -- the 世界日報 (World Journal). The top article on the front page describes the proceedings at the 8th International Chinese Character Seminar in Beijing, and the discussions surrounding a 15-year-old international effort to standardize Chinese characters in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

What's the big deal? Well, the proposal supposedly has received a major boost -- a department of China's Ministry of Education apparently agrees in principle with the proposal to standardize on mostly traditional characters (fantizi, or 簡體字).

If it's true, and the government follows through, this is major news. For the past 51 years, China has standardized its writing and printing systems using 2,751 simplified characters (jiantizi, 简体字) that are easier to remember and write than their traditional counterparts used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in East Asia. Most of the simplified characters were invented by high-level scholarly committees in 1956 and 1964 as part of an effort to spread literacy among China's largely rural and uneducated population. The inset photo (from a Chinese language primer hosted by Gonzaga University in Washington) shows the stroke order for a collection of simplified characters. The simplified version of "gate" is the first character in the second row.

The simplification movement has always been a bone of contention for purists of written Chinese, who treasure the traditional characters for their beauty and connection to ancient Chinese literature and history. Even in China, the simplified characters have been weakened by the spread of Taiwanese and Hong Kong media in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the rise of what I call "historical nationalism". Some younger Chinese we know say that they prefer the traditional characters. I suspect that this sentiment could be one reason why the proposal is now apparently being taken more seriously by the government in Beijing.

According to the article, the proposal calls for traditional forms to be adopted among member countries, except for certain simplified forms which were used in antiquity. For instance, the traditional character 門 ("gate") was simplified to 门 by some calligraphers in dynastic times, and this was adopted as the official simplified character form in China in the 1950s and 1960s (with Mao's blessing -- as Richard Curt Kraus has noted in his 1991 book "Brushes With Power," Mao was a great fan of some classical literature and calligraphy, and directed the simplification committees to use these alternate historical forms when possible). Because of this historical usage, the character 门 would supposedly remain in the proposed international standardization scheme.

However, many of the thousands of other simplified forms used in China for the past four or five decades would allegedly be discarded, as they have no historical precedent.

This is far from being a done deal. This is second-hand news, and I suspect many of the facts were not checked with the relevant authorities in China. Additionally, the article notes that more discussions still need to take place at the ninth meeting of the International Chinese Character Seminar next year to iron out key details of the proposal, and get more buy-in from Vietnam and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Lastly, I am skeptical that the government in China is seriously considering such a move in the near future. The implications for China's educational system -- not to mention the local publishing industry, software developers, and government bureaus -- would be too much. A billion people have been brought up learning the simplified forms, and almost all books, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, street signs, manuals, and recent records created in China use simplified characters. The complexity and expense associated with such an effort would be unparalleled, and at the end of the day, it would be a lot easier to just live with the simplified characters.