When it comes to simplified characters, many people will immediately think that these are the characters used by the "Chinese Communist Party". But did you know that in fact, Taiwanese people almost use simplified subtitles, but the promoter actually hates the Chinese Communist Party's "Chiang Kai-shek"! Let us talk about "Simplified Chinese" today! Hiho~ Hello everyone, I am Zhiqi! Do you usually use simplified Chinese characters? From school days to now, you may have written in simplified Chinese to some extent . Sometimes even teachers will write in simplified Chinese for the sake of speed when writing on the blackboard in class. But in recent years, it is obvious that people have written less and less with pens. When typing on mobile phones or computers, we still often see people using simplified Chinese characters. Many young people say that simplified characters can communicate with more people and are easier to use than traditional Chinese characters! Some people criticize this situation as being caused by China's "Cultural United Front" who believes that Taiwanese should use "traditional Chinese characters" and should not use the "residual Chinese characters" promoted by the CCP . But you know, in fact, when Chiang Kai-shek came to Taiwan, he also thought Simplified Chinese characters should be promoted in Taiwan! What is the charm of simplified Chinese characters and why does everyone want to recommend them? Later, why did Taiwan and China choose to use different characters? Will using simplified Chinese characters lead to unification? Let’s talk about “Simplified Chinese” today! But before we start today’s discussion, let’s go into some business service time! [Simplified Chinese characters have been around since ancient times? 】 What exactly are simplified Chinese characters? Nowadays, when we talk about simplified characters, we usually think that they are a type of writing invented by the Chinese Communist Party, that is, words with simpler strokes than "traditional Chinese characters" . But in fact, this type of writing is not entirely an invention of the Chinese Communist Party. The ancients would write like this a long time ago. From the definition of philology, "simplified Chinese characters" simply means that the strokes in the different writing methods of the same character are relatively simple , such as "gift" is written as "present", "past" is written as "past", etc., which is true in history. The ancient character "国" and the "国" used today are really just "almost", and the writing method of simplified characters like "龙" is actually the so-called "cursive script" , which means that it has always been like this in the past. The way it is written is that the ancients usually wrote like this when writing in cursive. In other words, whether they wanted to be lazy or simply thought it looked good, the ancients had been using simplified Chinese characters for a long time , and if you really want to talk about it, the invention of modern simplified characters is actually Nor was it the CCP. The first person to start promoting simplified Chinese characters was actually the Kuomintang government! [The earliest promoter of simplified Chinese characters was the Kuomintang? 】 Everyone should have read in history textbooks that China has faced many internal and external troubles since the late Qing Dynasty. At that time , many intellectuals believed that one of the reasons why China lagged behind Western countries was that Chinese characters were too difficult and complicated, which hindered ordinary people. The public cannot receive education, so education cannot be popularized. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of popularizing education, people including Hu Shi, Lu Xun or Fu Sinian, who are familiar to everyone , strongly advocated simplifying Chinese characters to make China more progress . Lu Xun even wrote a ruthless saying : "Chinese characters will not be destroyed, China must Perish!" Under this trend, the Kuomintang government actively wanted to implement the policy of "simplifying Chinese characters" after it came to power in the early years of the Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek himself also made early remarks in support of simplifying Chinese characters. After a long period of collection and investigation, in 1935, The Chiang Kai-shek government officially announced the first batch of simplified characters. At that time, some primary schools, newspapers and magazines actually started to use these newly promulgated simplified characters. It seemed that everything was going well. The so-called traditional Chinese characters may be almost broken, but under this policy After it was launched , a group of people felt very unhappy because at that time there was a group of literati who believed that Chinese characters were the essence of Chinese culture. Simplifying Chinese characters was tantamount to destroying Chinese culture, bad . Moreover, many of the intellectuals who opposed Chinese characters in this group had well-established backgrounds, including those at the time. The examination dean aka KMT veteran Dai Jitao Dai Jitao was very strong-willed at the time and opposed the implementation of simplified Chinese characters. He tried several times and found that he could not persuade Chiang Kai-shek . Faced with these huge opposition pressures, Chiang Kai-shek finally had to admit defeat and withdraw the executive order on simplifying Chinese characters . However, Chiang Kai-shek did not completely give up on this goal. After retreating to Taiwan, he decided to do it again! [Taiwan almost uses simplified Chinese characters! 】 After the defeat of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Chiang Kai-shek's government retreated to Taiwan , but his idea of simplifying Chinese characters did not disappear. At that time, some intellectuals and local governments in Taiwan also proposed that Chinese characters were practical for Taiwanese and aborigines who had received Japanese education. It’s too difficult. In order to popularize education and accelerate the Chinese characterization, Chinese characters should be simplified. The Chiang Kai-shek government also took this matter very seriously. Later, the Ministry of Education established a committee to study and promote simplified Chinese characters , and even brought it to the Legislative Yuan for discussion . It seems It was just the last step. Why didn't Taiwanese people use simplified Chinese characters later? The answer is because in the middle of the discussion on simplified Chinese characters in Taiwan, the Communist Party of China on the other side of the Taiwan Strait actually announced that we would use simplified Chinese characters! Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party’s reference text model at that time was the simplified Chinese characters compiled by the Chiang Kai-shek government. It was equivalent to taking away half of the achievements at that time! At this time, Chiang Kai-shek changed his attitude and said that the abbreviated Chinese characters were "the CCP's conspiracy to destroy Chinese culture." We in the Republic of China will never use them! Since then, simplified characters have become "exclusive to the CCP". The characters on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have also taken very different routes. But for the CCP, our current simplified characters are actually just a semi-finished product [Simplified Chinese characters, what has been simplified? 】 In fact, when the CCP first implemented simplified Chinese characters in 1956, the first version proposed only had more than 700 characters. At that time, Mao Zedong was very dissatisfied and felt that the number of Chinese characters should be reduced more to achieve the goal faster. Therefore, in addition to the font image, Simplification also involves combining different characters to reduce the number and strokes of Chinese characters as a whole. Therefore, in 1964, the Chinese Communist Party officially released the "Simplified Character List", which contains about 2,000 simplified characters. Many of these new simplified characters appear in it. "Homophone replacement" or "similar phonetic replacement" of words, such as "cereal" becomes "cereal", "bullfight" becomes "fighting bull", etc., which greatly reduces the number of Chinese characters. It seems very radical , but for the CCP, it is still It was far from enough because their ultimate goal at that time was to completely abolish Chinese characters step by step and completely "pinyinize" Chinese. What does this mean? The idea is to make Chinese characters look like the 26 English letters or the 50 Japanese syllables, so that all words can be spelled out with just a few letters. They believe that this will not only make education more popular and promote better, but also eliminate Chinese characters. The feudal legacy is still a problem. Decades have passed, and China’s simplified characters will still look like this in 2023. Why are there no simplified pinyin characters? 【Pinyinization of Chinese characters? 】 As mentioned earlier, one of the goals of simplifying Chinese characters is to make it easier for the general public to receive education and stop being illiterate. Judging from the data provided by the Chinese government From the literacy campaign in 1950 to the promotion of simplified characters in 1964, China's illiteracy has indeed decreased rapidly. The proportion of illiterates has dropped from the original 80% to less than 10% in 2000. Judging from these data, simplified characters seem to be really important for the popularization of education. Therefore, in 1977, seeing that the results were good, the CCP launched two simplified character drafts of the "Second Chinese Character Simplification Plan" in order to continue the road to simplifying Chinese characters. But here comes the question. If education is popularized and illiteracy is almost eliminated , is it really necessary to continue simplifying Chinese characters? Obviously, most Chinese people don’t think so. After the release of the second simplified character draft, there was a lot of opposition. It seems that now that the general public has finally learned to read and write, why should they change the characters again ? Isn’t this meant to make everyone learn it again? ? Under the pressure of these objections, the State Council of China finally announced the abolition of the "two simplified characters" and also stated that "we should be cautious about the reform of Chinese characters in the future." Therefore, the simplified characters at that time have been used until today , and even a few traditional characters have been restored. The question arises , does this mean that simplified characters that are only half-simplified are a worse form of writing? [Remnant Chinese characters? Simplified Chinese characters? Simplified characters? 】 You may have heard a saying that simplified Chinese characters are worse "remnant Chinese characters" and traditional Chinese characters are "traditional Chinese characters". The main reason behind this statement is that traditional Chinese characters retain the character structure and culture of Chinese characters, so they are "Orthodox" characters and simplified characters are "incomplete" and "uneducated" characters . However, there is a problem. The ancients actually also used simplified characters . Did the ancients also have no culture? Therefore, there is another explanation that we should distinguish between two different concepts: "simplified Chinese characters" and "simplified Chinese characters." The "simplified Chinese characters" promoted by the CCP and the "simplified Chinese characters" that developed naturally in history cannot be compared. However, some experts and scholars disagree with this statement. I don't entirely agree with them that the so-called "simplified Chinese characters" and "simplified Chinese characters" are more like political distinctions. In fact, the functions they can play are not necessarily very different . For example, people often say that it is easy to create ambiguities and the appearance is difficult to distinguish. Problems such as these are not big problems for users who are familiar with simplified characters. However, no matter whether the "simplified characters" are good or bad, in 1971, as the People's Republic of China joined the United Nations, the United Nations also changed all Chinese official documents to simplified Chinese characters. Singapore and Malaysia, which have a large number of ethnic groups, have also followed suit and taught simplified characters and pinyin in the education system . Until now, only Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and a few overseas Chinese communities in the world use traditional Chinese characters. Altogether , less than 1/10 of the population uses simplified characters. In recent years, due to the popularity of Douyin, Little Red Book and Chinese dramas, many young people in Taiwan have begun to use simplified characters . This makes many people worry that if this continues Will traditional Chinese characters be eventually eliminated and Taiwan be united by Chinese culture? [Our point of view] When we were collecting information about "Simplified Chinese", we found that there are two camps with very clear positions on Simplified Chinese. On the one hand, some people think that using Simplified Chinese is just for convenience and has nothing to do with cultural identity. But people on the other side If we think that China is now the main user of simplified characters, writing simplified characters will subtly be united by culture. Then we think this issue can be divided into two levels: "instrumentality" and "cultural identity". Let's talk about instrumentality first, from the perspective of linguistics and philology. From a perspective, glyph simplification is a very common thing. After all, human beings have always been lazy. In order to facilitate communication and learning, most languages and cultures will naturally move towards "simplification". Therefore, it is common for these people to write simplified Chinese characters. It’s just for convenience and save time. It doesn’t necessarily have a cultural problem . For example, Taiwan also has some simplified characters that are not used in China and are unique to Taiwan , such as these: (Guan, 咡,奌,対) It seems difficult to say that just using these simplified characters means identification. China may be united , but this does not mean that writing is just a tool. Most experts will agree that there are certain political and cultural implications behind choosing which writing to use. For example, some ethnic groups who strongly advocate the aboriginal identity of Taiwanese identity will also emphasize Use the Roman characters of Taiwanese and Aboriginal languages to express your uniqueness through the way you speak and write. If you look at these two points together, you will find that people who write the same simplified characters may care about different aspects. Whether he is united may still depend on the context of his use, the information he uses to convey, etc. It may be a bit too fast to jump directly to using simplified Chinese characters, which means he is united. However, this is also our team's own opinion. Finally, I would like to ask. What do you think of "simplified Chinese characters"? Finally, if you like today's video, please share it to let more people know about the "Simplified Chinese" discussion! In addition, you can also click here to read the discussions on "Phonetic Symbols" and "Chinese Class" . So, today's Zhiqi Qiqi comes to an end here . See you tomorrow night!
