Essence of China
Simplified
Beyond Sense:
The Travesty
of Modern
Chinese Writing
By Leo Timm
Epoch Times Staff
eartless love, depopulated
villages. Flying with one
wing, falling into a well—we are
told this is “progress.”
The above may sound like
opening lines to stories about
calamities or Kafkaesque dystopias, but they are in fact all
valid and perhaps unavoidable
interpretations of modern Chinese writing.
Chinese script denotes meaning rather than sound, setting it
apart from nearly all the world’s
other living languages. But in
today’s China, where communist authorities introduced simplified characters in the name of
modernization, even basic concepts have been undermined
by the altered forms of written
words.
One of the things the communist officials did when they
took power in China 65 years
ago was to attack whatever they
saw as “counter-revolutionary.” This assault mainly concerned social relations and religious faith, but the language was
affected as well.
Following reforms, the character for “love” had the “heart”
removed; the symbol for “flying” lost one of its wings, and
the character meaning “to
enter,” which used to contain
a symbol meaning “bird,” was
changed to include “well” (the
kind used to draw water, or for
throwing oneself into). “Village” had two-thirds of its volume exacted—the part meaning “person.”
Other examples: The character for “sage” or “holy,” no longer
features its “mouth” and “ear,”
suggesting a mindless intellectual. “Flour” has been voided of
“wheat.” The word for “son” or
“child,” which once symbolized
an infant’s developing skull, was
beheaded. “Buy” now consists
of a “knife” hanging ominously
over a “head.”
Simplified Script,
Severed History
To find how this callous desecration of China’s traditional
script occurred, we must look
at recent history.
Chinese characters date back
to legendary times, and were
codified by the First Emperor
of China around 220–210 B.C.,
over 2,000 years ago. Though
some calligraphic or epistolary styles facilitated the use of
unofficial shortcuts according
to the writer’s personal taste,
official forms remained mostly
unchanged until recent history.
In the 20th century, however,
China suffered culturally devastating wars and revolutions.
The final imperial dynasty, the
Qing (1644–1911) collapsed
and was replaced by a republic
that struggled against warlords
May 28–June 3, 2015
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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Stone rubbing of the preface of the Sacred Religion of the Yan Pagoda,
written by Chu Suilang.
“Smash the old world, create a new world.” Simplified Chinese posters
like this were common during communist political movements in China.
Chinese script
denotes
meaning rather
than sound,
setting it apart
from nearly all
the world’s other
living languages.
SPECIALIZING IN FINE
CHINESE PAINTINGS & WORKS OF ART
to govern the country. Trying to diagnose China’s weaknesses, some radical intellectuals directed their frustration at
traditional culture itself.
Among these scholars, the
scholar Fu Sinian called Chinese characters the “writing of
ox-demons and snake-gods.”
Lu Xun, a novelist later made
famous by the communist
establishment, summed up his
view of his country’s writing in
the statement, “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, China
will perish.”
When the Chinese Communist Party decided to simplify Chinese characters, many
intellectuals were against the
changes, but it was no good—
Chairman Mao himself was in
favor of simplification, followed
by complete eradication of the
traditional ideographic Chinese script. The first documents
promulgating simplified Chinese characters for official use
appeared in 1956 and then 1964.
The scholar and famous
archaeologist Chen Mengjia,
who had spoken out against
simplification, was labeled a
“rightist” and sent to a labor
camp in 1957. In 1966, at the
start of the Cultural Revolution, he was severely criticized
and driven to suicide.
While simplified characters
have become ubiquitous in
mainland China, traditional
scripts remain in use in Taiwan
and Hong Kong. Furthermore,
the plans to do away with Chinese characters altogether (as
was the case in Vietnam, where
the Sino-Vietnamese script was
replaced by a romanized system
devised by the French colonists)
never came to fruition.
Simplified or Traditional?
As the world’s most populous
nation makes more connections
with the rest of the world, study
Chinese antiques wanted,
especially painting, porcelain,
jade, bronze, furniture etc.
Collections purchased.
MARK RALSTON/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
A wall showing simplified Chinese characters on Sept. 9, 2012, after
a series of earthquakes hit Yiliang County, Yunnan Province
of Chinese as a foreign language
is quickly gaining in popularity.
More often than not, students
of Chinese in American universities and high schools get a
choice between simplified and
traditional, but the massive size
and influence of the mainland
means that most people learn
simplified by default. Studying
traditional characters means
going against the grain.
However, traditional Chinese
script is essential for a deeper
understanding of the language. Many characters were
simplified with only the modern spoken language in mind,
ignoring the ancient styles that
stressed subtlety and multilayered meaning. This holds true
Xiāng
Comparison
between
traditional
and simplified
Chinese
Jìn
֔
֖
Scholar Under
Under Pine
Pine Tree
Tree
Scholar
ಊ
Ӱ
ຮ
ະ
“Jin,” meaning “to enter” or “to
advance,” contains “zhui,” a
character meaning “bird.”
Its simplified counterpart
replaced the “bird” with “a well.”
‫ڽ‬
‫ھ‬
“Xiang,” meaning “village,” has
a character meaning”man” in it.
In simplified form, the dwellings have been cleared of their
occupants.
This simplified one has a face
but no wheat.
࿵
࿷
М
О
“Love,” or “Ai” in Chinese, is a
complex emotion with a heart
at the center.
The simplified version retains
everything but the heart.
Ér
“Fei,” “to fly,” originally contained two wings and a symbol meaning “ascent.”
Only one wing remains.
ַ
ּ
“Er” means “son” or “child.”
Note the infant’s developing
head situated atop two limbs.
The simplified variant does
away with the head altogether.
Mâi
Shèng
In the character “mian,” combining “wheat” and “face” gets
you “flour.”
especially for the core texts of
the great philosophers and writers of antiquity, who chose their
words carefully and sparingly.
Historically, Chinese characters helped maintain a unified identity across diverse
ethnic groups and linguistic
communities in a nation the
size of Europe, and were used
as a written lingua franca even
among the literati of non-Chinese nations. The everyday Japanese language still uses thousands of Chinese characters in
conjunction with its own phonetic script, and when Korean
and Vietnamese scholars study
their own histories, they must
first achieve literacy in the old
Chinese script.
Ài
Fēi
Miàn
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B5
“Sheng,” meaning “sage” or “holy,”
includes characters meaning
“ear,” “mouth” and “king,” evoking Platonic imagery.
This simplified “sage” neither
speaks nor hears, and the king
has been replace with “dirt.”
‫׀‬
ֵ
The character “Mai,” meaning
to buy, contains a “net” above
the symbol for “article.”
It has been ominously simplified to a knife blade looming
over a symbol meaning “head.”