216 CultureShock! China
Dynasty, was the so-called ‘Vernacular Movement’ (baihua
yundong). This movement, led by the writer Hu Shi and
others, sought to abolish Classical Chinese grammar, in favour
of writing that was structurally and grammatically closer to
spoken Chinese, as an aid to literacy and toward shaking off
the shackles of ‘imperial thinking’.
The second major break, following the 1949 revolution
that created the People’s Republic, was to create simpler
versions of the traditional characters as an aid to popular
literacy. These so-called ‘simplified characters’ (jiantizi)
require memorising significantly fewer strokes to write
than their ‘traditional character’ (fantizi) equivalents. For
instance, the traditional character (zang), which means
‘dirty’, requires 22 strokes to write. The simplified version
is ᄪ, which takes just ten strokes. To further aid literacy,
China’s post-revolution Communist government established a
‘National Standard’ set of the ‘most crucial characters’ (6,766
of them, according to the latest standards), and required
that all official documents, including government-funded
newspapers, confine themselves to this character set.
Many traditionalists deplore the simplified characters
and the National Standard character set as cutting the
Chinese people off from their traditions. This is especially
true in Taiwan—partly for political reasons—which has
steadfastly continued to teach traditional characters and
has no limitations on the number of characters that can
be used in official documents. In Taiwan, an island with a
population of some 23 million which now has first-world
per-capita incomes, these decisions to hold to tradition have
not come at a significant cost to literacy: today, literacy on
Taiwan is over 96 per cent, one of the world’s highest rates.
But when the Nationalist ( KMT) government, which built up
those literacy rates on the island, instead ruled China’s vast
and densely populated mainland, literacy was estimated to
be below 10 per cent.
The effectiveness of the simplified characters and the
National Standard character set as aids to literacy is pretty
hard to deny. Between these, vernacular writing and better
rural education, China current mainland government