The Historical Significance of Chinese Character Simplification

Chinese characters are the scripts that the Chinese nation has used to record civilization since ancient times. From the original symbols carved on stone flakes and pottery to the more than 6,000 commonly used Chinese characters today with a history of over 3,000 years. The emergence of writing was needed for social life and has also changed with the development of society. Therefore, Chinese characters have undergone several important changes in history, which can be mainly summarized as oracle bone script - seal script - clerical script - regular script - Song script. During this process, the main trend of Chinese characters has been simplification. Before the 20th century, the simplification of Chinese characters was mainly in the form of changes in shape and reduction of strokes, adapting to the need for rapid learning and writing of Chinese characters. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a movement for script reform in China. Intellectuals demanded to change Chinese characters to Latin script and created many schemes for this purpose. Although it was not successful, it also reflected the practical needs of that era. Finally, Chinese characters adopted the pinyin of Latin letters to solve the pronunciation problem. The simplification of Chinese characters also basically ended through two reforms after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In summary, the simplification of Chinese characters is beneficial. As a tool for recording Chinese civilization, it is unlikely that the role of Chinese characters can be replaced by other scripts.