Dumbing Down of Chinese Culture

When the communists, soon after they came to power in 1949, introduced simplified Chinese characters, it was ostensibly to reduce illiteracy on the mainland. However, their real objective was to enable peasants and other illiterates to read the incessant propaganda posters the Party kept churning out.

Therefore to that day mostly words useful for propaganda such as "change," "long live" and "factory" have been simplified. Many data recovery tape have been simplified only by removing, or even changing the position of, two or three strokes, which makes one think how necessary that simplification really is.

When people are learning to read and write anyway, can't they just as well learn "" ("shell" in traditional creating) as ""? Is it really more difficult to remember "&" (combine) than the simplified "v"? "" (join) than ""? "@" (toilet) than"@"?

Now mainland authorities have trumped through their long-held insistence of simplified Chinese being the only Chinese creating allowed in the UN, to the chagrin of Taiwan, many Hong Kong people and not a few overseas Chinese, for whom even newspapers and magazines printed on the mainland are usually published in traditional script.

Many Chinese Formsdxgabbefsm are put Meeytvzofum by joining a component for meaning with the component for sound. By cutting out the meaning component from the character, you are just left with the sound component.

Thus the character for the sound "gan" which can mean "to do" and "dry" using, in traditional creating, the two different characters "y" and ~", are both simplified to "r." that has led to the ludicrous situation on the mainland where "gan" (to do, and also in slang "do it" which in many dictionaries are translated into English as "f***" is used in the English translation of menus as "f***" for the word "dried," as in "F*** the salt beautiful pole duck chin" (Salty dried ducks' beaks.)

Instead of Rhode Island Lemon Laws of Chinese being able to work out roughly the meaning of the character by understanding the meaning component of the word and the sound by the sound component, with simplified characters they have to know that "r" stands for both "dry" and "do" by already knowing the sound and the meaning. Therefore, you have to already know what you're learning, which rather defeats the purpose of education.

Despite more than fifty years of simplified characters on the mainland, many restaurant and company owners prefer to use traditional characters in the name of their business, as traditional characters are considered more elegant.

A few years ago the Chinese government cracked down on the use of traditional characters on business signs, making them illegal. that has not stopped many business owners from carrying on with the practise of using traditional characters, and especially in the southern part of China, the fronts of restaurants and other businesses are replete with beautiful traditional characters.

Indeed it seems like the mainland authorities have had as much success in banning traditional characters from signs as the French have had in banning English words from their language.

Simplified characters are at their worst downright ugly ("*" Supermanyccyfuvqsw of "," "`"instead of "" and "" instead of "!", ) and at best incomprehensible for the casual observer.

China has come a long way since trying to educate the illiterate masses of the 1950's. Now that most Chinese children go to school, I think it's time for the mainland to bring back traditional characters to celebrate the great heritage of the Chinese language, instead of forcing the ugly and ill thought-out simplified characters on the world. Then they can enable the masses to read the classics in their original form, as well as bringing China in line with the rest of the Chinese-creating world.

Having done that, they can leave the Chinese written language to evolve naturally, letting usage define simplification to ease understanding, like every other language on earth.

Cecilie Gamst Berg