A simple plan Making the Chinese characters easier to read incited more judgments than literacy It can be argued that few recorded languages in the world have a history as rich as Chinese. Spoken for more than three millennia, the language is spoken by nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide and is studied in all of the world's major universities and characterized by a logographic script dating back to the fourteenth century BCE. It has been motivated that Chinese is simply a pictographic language, that the characters are somehow a picture of the figure represented in speech. This is a basic misconception, since few characters overall are a picture of the signified sign. For instance, the characters for 'sun', 'tree', and 'moon' can be traced to pictorial roots. Most are pictophonetic or ideographic, and there is little connection to the concept solely from its depiction; for instance, the character for 'often' has few if any visual cues to its meaning. Due to the somehow cryptic nature of the Chinese script, despite its inherent beauty, scholars of the language have for just over a hundred years have advocated either modifying or abandoning the script for a romanized alphabetic system that mirrors the letter-to-letter sound correspondences that are characterized by the European languages. Although a phonetic transcription of the Chinese script inventory, pinyin, has been used as a learning tool for nearly fifty years, it has been abandoned as a replacement to the script despite seeds planted with the onset of the Communist government of Mao Zedong in 1949. Precedents were established, though, since in the thirties the Arabic script was effectively discarded for the Roman alphabet in Turkish. However, a script reform movement advocated by Western-trained intellectuals was motivated successfully, recommended strongly by Qian Xuantong in 1923 to encourage literacy and the spread of universal education in China. This is seen today in the simplification of thousands of characters that has successfully been used in mainland China and the world since its implementation in the fifties and sixties. Individual characters until this point could have as many as 25 to 30 discrete strokes, and the simplification changed the face of Chinese orthography. The simplification was not entirely logical to a point. Questionable simplifications were made (see inset) that obscured the original phonetic and semantic impact of the characters and a large number of inconsistencies between characters were created, undermining the goal of making Chinese characters easier to learn; a total of 3,000 are necessary to read a standard newspaper out of a total of around 50,000. Mao Zedong, the most widely recognized advocate of script reform, was quoted by Edgar Snow in 1936 as saying that, "[The Roman alphabet] is a good instrument with which to overcome illiteracy. Sooner or later, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate". The Association for Chinese Language Reform in July 10, 1950, ordered that writing reform should start with simplification of the characters, a task that had been productively completed. Full romanization was not possible though, since academics and cultural critics were not fully behind the process, and it was placed on hold indefinitely. Zhou Enlai was more subdued, stating that "the immediate tasks in writing reforms are simplifying the Chinese characters, spreading the use of the standard vernacular, and determining and spreading the use of phonetic spelling of Chinese". Changing the script was a hot political issue at the time. Today, for instance, the simplified script, jiantizi, is used in mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and in many university settings. But two Chinese cultural centers, Hong Kong and Taiwan, retain the use of the traditional characters, fantizi. The story of Hong Kong's use of the characters is muddied by history; the use of English was standard course throughout the 1990s and left Chinese endangered as a lingua franca. But in Taiwan, where the relations with China have been coarse for decades, the characters were initially entangled with controversy. From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was occupied by Japan, and the Japanese government took steps to ensure the dominance of their language over the native languages of the island, most conspicuously Chinese. After 1945, Chinese was reinstated as the high language of the island, just before its extinction. Depending on whom you ask, the acceptance or rejection of the characters is determined by the viewpoint inured to Taiwan's history. The Nationalist Government, headed by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek) moved into Taiwan in 1949, taking the resentment of the Maoist regime with them. Many believe that Taiwan has always resisted the use of the simplification standards, at least those demanded by Mao, due to the political rift between the mainland and Taiwan but this is not entirely the case. The Legislative Council of the Taiwan Province in 1950 requested that the government endorse the use of simplified characters on the recommendation of linguistic experts. Jiang Jieshi himself stated in 1954 that, "for the education and convenience of the masses, I believe that the nation can greatly benefit from the introduction of simplified characters". In an about-face, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education issued a 1956 directive stating that it forbade the use of simplified characters, in order to counteract the "vandalism of the Communists on the mainland in destroying the traditional script through the promotion of simplified characters"; 1956 was also the year that Beijing instituted its first round of simplified characters. As late as 1980 the Language Planning Institute of Taiwan expressly advocated the retention of traditional characters. A few simplified characters have seeped into use in Taiwan, but these are reserved for informal purposes only. Even pinyin has gained currency as a phonetic learning tool only in last two decades. Not much is said today about the current attitudes toward the simplified script in Taiwan in the English media; one can assume it either does not take precedence or the acceptance of traditional characters is a given. In 1790s America, dictionary author Noah Webster is single-handedly responsible for replacing, among many other spellings, 'honour' with 'honor' and 'gaol' with 'jail', but there are not popular movements to move back to the original 'British' spelling. But with the anti-mainland attitudes expressed in the past and today in Taiwan, it would seem easy to acknowledge that any reform passed down from Beijing, be it linguistic or otherwise, would not be an easy pill to swallow. Today, use of traditional characters in Taiwan is more of an accepted truth than a resistance to mainland influence, but advancing simplified characters in Taiwan has been undertaken by an altogether silent voice, if that voice exists at all. J. Everett R.