It can be seen that the original intention of simplifying Chinese characters is not for other reasons, but for some political purpose.
Modern 1909 Lu Feikui published a paper "Common Words Used in General Education" in the first issue of Education magazine. This is the first time in the development and changes of modern China that simplified Chinese characters were publicly advocated.
During the May 4th Movement, Qian actively advocated that there were too many strokes of Chinese characters, which were too complicated and inconvenient to use. He began to study the simplification and pinyin of Chinese characters and published the first batch of simplified characters in 1935.
With the introduction of western culture, the difficulty in writing and reading Chinese characters is considered as one of the main reasons for the low literacy rate in China. There is even a fierce view that Chinese characters have led to the decline of China, so it is necessary to reform Chinese characters.
Qian was the first person who proposed to abolish Chinese characters. Fu Sinian, the leader of the May 4th Movement, once criticized Chinese characters, saying, "Chinese characters are extremely barbaric in origin, extremely strange in shape, extremely inconvenient to understand and uneconomical to apply. It's really stupid and crude, and the ghostly writing is really the most inconvenient instrument in the world. Mr. Lu Xun once said, "Chinese characters will not die, but China will die. ".
Other Asian countries that use Chinese characters, such as Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, also have a history of simplifying Chinese characters or using simplified characters.
The development history of simplified characters
In February 1920, 1, Qian published a proposal to save Chinese characters in New Youth.
1935 On August 2 1, the Ministry of Education of the National Government published the first batch of simplified word lists, which were abolished in February of the following year.
195565438+ 10 The China Cultural Reform Commission drew up a draft scheme for simplifying Chinese characters.
1956 65438+1On October 28th, the State Council, China revised and adopted the simplified Chinese character scheme.
1964 in may, China cultural reform commission published a summary of simplified characters.
1977, the second batch of simplified Chinese characters scheme was announced. After a period of experiment (about eight years), it was abolished because the font was too simple and confusing.
Evolution of the number of Chinese characters
In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and many things were represented by interchangeable words, which caused the ambiguity of text expression. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large number of words. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters makes it difficult to learn Chinese characters, and the meaning that a single Chinese character can express is limited, so the meaning of many single Chinese characters is expressed through Chinese characters, such as common double spelling words. At present, the development of China characters tends to create new words instead of new words.