Exhortations to “write standard characters” appear on banners and billboards throughout Beijing. This clever full-page spread in The Beijing News on Tuesday announces itself as a “public service advertisement,” (公益广告), only the composer has mistakenly replaced “public welfare” (公益) with the homophone “justice” (公义), [and his editor has called him on it].
The copy (click the image for the full thing) reads:
Chinese characters are among the world’s oldest writing, and are a treasure of cultural riches for the Chinese people as well as all of world civilization. Every Chinese person should respect Chinese characters and use Chinese characters properly. At present, there are a multitude of non-standard uses of Chinese characters in society; mistaken and variant characters are relatively common, harming the elegance and purity of Chinese characters. The Commercial Press is world-renowned for the quality of its books. During the long course of its experience in editing, and with reference to the national standards on Chinese characters, the editing department has collected a register of easily confused and misused characters that appear relatively frequently. Listed below is an excerpt for the reader’s perusal.
An image of the list of one-hundred misused characters is here; errors are in red and corrections are in parentheses. The characters are judged according to the 5th edition of the Dictionary of Modern Chinese, published by The Commercial Press, so there may be more wrong with the “public service advertisement” line than just a mistaken character.
- More PSAs on Danwei: Images of socialist morality
- More characters: Acceptance for obscure characters, Jilin kills non-standard characters