Simple arguments for character standards

Simplified characters have been used on the mainland for the last half-century, but not everyone believes that they will continue to be viable in the future.

At this year’s CPPCC session, representative Pan Qinglin submitted a proposal to abandon simplified characters in favor of traditional forms.

His reasoning:

1. The first round of simplifications in the 1950s was accomplished too hastily, producing a result that betrayed the fundamental aesthetic and scientific principles underlying Chinese characters.
2. They’ve outlived their usefulness, since flexible computer input methods have been developed that handle simplified and traditional characters equally well.
3. Reviving the use of traditional characters would foster cross-straits unity by bringing the mainland in line with Taiwan, which still uses what are called “standard characters” (正体字).

Pan supplemented these reasonable-sounding arguments with an example of how simplified characters have lost the deep meaning that the traditional versions still contain: the “heart” component (心) in the traditional character for “love” (愛) is lacking in its simplified version (爱), leaving it “heartless” (and presumably contributing to the breakdown of society).

Pan’s proposed transition would take ten years, far faster than the fifty year time period that cultural critic Wang Gan called for last year in a widely-discussed essay, “How about discarding simplified characters over the next five decades?” In a more recent blog post, Wang linked the writing system debate to another hot topic by calling simplified characters “shanzhai characters,” implying that they were knock-off cultural artifacts that should be stamped out in favor of an authentic expression of Chinese culture. The clash between high and low culture is taken even further by Xu Jinru, a self-described “poet, scholar, and conservative thinker,” who frequently argues that simplified characters are directly responsible for social decay: “The more literacy spreads, the further culture declines.”

As you can imagine, Pan’s proposal stirred up quite a bit of debate in the print media and online. ChinaSMACK rounded up a broad spectrum of online reactions, the majority of which appears to favor the status quo.

In a recent op-ed titled “We shouldn’t have simplified back then, but we shouldn’t return to traditional now,” commentator Shen Dalin advanced a pragmatic argument that acknowledged the “castration” of Chinese culture by the simplification scheme while at the same time arguing that it’s too late to do anything about it:

However, to say that characters should not have been simplified does not mean that we should revive the use of traditional characters. One factor which did not exist before simplification but which cannot be overlooked today is that simplified characters have been in use on the Chinese mainland for more than half a century. At least two generations of Chinese (excluding people in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) have grown up after the simplification, and even those people who had completed their language education fifty years ago have learned how to use simplified characters. Writing is made up of symbols established by usage, and since they have been in use for a long time, it is not easy to change them. And changing again and again will inevitably lead to new confusion.

When we speak of simplified characters, we are referring to the scheme promulgated by the State Council in 1956. In fact, the Script Reform Committee issued a draft Second Simplification Scheme in 1977 which included simplifications such as 亍 for 街, 仃 for 停, 午 for 舞, and 卩 for 部. These second round characters were only used in newspapers for eight months before their time came to an end. Yet lots of second round characters remained in circulation for a long time afterward. In September 1986, the State Council issued a notice specifically retracting the second scheme and emphasizing, “a cautious attitude ought to be adopted toward simplification to maintain relative stability in the form of Chinese characters for the sake of their use in society.”

Indeed, the form of Chinese characters ought to maintain relative stability, and a cautious attitude ought to be adopted toward both simplification and a return to traditional forms alike. We must admit to the presence of some carelessness in the two rounds of simplifications, but since they’ve been in use and widely accepted for so many years, we ought to defer to history and reality. I personally believe that the previous simplification was a mistake, but returning to traditional characters today is also a mistake. Regardless, any action requires careful consideration so that we don’t act rashly again.

Indeed, a revival of traditional characters would negate all of the work that administrative bodies have put into establishing the current standards for simplified characters.

Radical index from the Kangxi Dictionary

Just last month, the Ministry of Education held a press conference to announce the release of a standard categorization of characters and the section headers (部首, or “radicals”) they fall under. The preparation of this standard has taken three decades, but the list of section headers has actually been in flux for millennia, as Director of Language Administration Li Yuming explained:

The number of section headers to use is one issue, and Chinese characters should be classified under what section headers is another. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, the genius lexicographer Xu Shen started off with 540 divisions in his Shuowen Jiezi. However, as Chinese characters developed through a process of conflict between meaning and form, changes in form became more prominent, resulting in considerable variation. The radicals themselves changed substantially as well. The Ming Dynasty Zihui had 214 section headers, as did the Kangxi Dictionary. The Xinhua Dictionary, prior to the 9th Edition, had 189 section headers. And so forth. This situation presents certain difficulties for education, dictionary editing, and information lookup. Therefore, the needs of cultural heritage and social development require that section headers be unified according to Chinese characters as they are today.

The new standard lists 201 main section headers and 99 variants (including traditional/simplified pairs, such as 車 and 车, and meaning-based variations, such as 王 and 玉). A second document, GB13000.1, standardizes the categorization of 20,902 Chinese characters according to these 201 section headers.

During the Q&A session at the end of the press conference, the Ministry revealed that these new standards wouldn’t really affect students at all, because the majority of student dictionaries followed the 1983 draft standard and use 201 section headers.

After introducing the new standard, Director Li took some time to offer his own views on the need for further standardization of component names and mnemonic devices:

We will soon issue two standards, one for character components and another for irreducible characters. In the past, character components have been known by different names. The 纟 component, for example, is called 绞丝 in some regions but 扭丝 in others [both mean “twisted silk”]. The 亻 component is sometimes called the “standing person” (立人) and sometimes the “single person” (单人). These need to be standardized. Sometimes, the basic meaning of a character is entirely disregarded so that students can more easily remember it. For example, some teachers will describe the word 饿 (“hungry”) like this: they’ll say, look, “hungry” is easy to remember. See the 饣 radical (“eat”) on the side? “I” (我) want to “eat” (饣)! But if you continue along those lines and encounter a similar character with a bug radical (蛾 “moth”), do “I” want to become a “bug”? Does a “single person” and “me” (俄 “momentarily”) mean that “I” want “somebody”? Does a “woman” and “me” (娥 “beautiful”) mean. . . ! We can easily see that there is a lot more work to be done on the cultural and informational aspects of Chinese characters.

The standards for character components will presumably define how characters are composed, which is important for shape- and component-based input methods. Li’s concern is that students who are taught to remember a character by breaking it apart into components will run into trouble when trying to type using an input method that understands the character a set of different components. For example, Is 兵 (“soldier”) formed like 丘+八, as the colloquial term for soldier, qiuba (丘八), would suggest, or is it 斤+一+丿+丶?

Li Yuming says it’s the latter. The Wubi input method uses 斤+一+八. Historically, the character 兵 was formed from 斤, an axe-head, and 廾, outstretched hands. So there’s a definite limit to how far back the structure-meaning connection can be traced before it ceases to be useful in the modern era.

Li introduced his personal remarks with the term 余言, a pun that relies on the two meanings of 余 to give interpretations of either “extra words” or “personal words.” In the traditional character set, the character 餘 is used for the “surplus” meaning, so the pun would be significantly less effective in a non-simplified setting. The ambiguity caused by multiple traditional characters corresponding to the same simplified graph is often cited as one major drawback of the mainland’s simplification scheme, but imagine the opportunities for wordplay that will be lost if representative Pan’s proposal to the CPPCC is successful!