China Popular Itineraries |
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The Status Quo and Prospect of Chinese Characters |
The Chinese characters in use today are results of series of reforms which have lasted for almost 100 years. Because of the shortcomings of Chinese char-acters, which include its large size (over 50,000 characters ), the consider-able amount of strokes needed to write one word (some have over 30 strokes), the complicated structure of many characters and the difficulties in learning them, some men of insight have set out to carry out reforms. Starting with the end of the Qing Dynasty, their efforts have provided precious experiences for later renovations of Chinese characters.
Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, reform of Chinese characters has become the major task of culture construction. Under the prin-ciple of acceptability through common practice and steady progress, the state publicized in 1958 "List of the First Batch of Variant Forms of Chinese Let-ters, " abolishing 1,055 variant forms. Since 1956, four other batches of sim-plified characters have been published, resulting in "the General List of Sim-plified Chinese Characters" summarized in 1964. This list simplified the strokes of over 2,000 Chinese characters. In 1965, "List of Printed Chinese Characters " containing 6,196 characters in print hand was published. Then Regular Scripts in print hand and handwriting were in agreement. All these plus the well-popularized Chinese Character Pinyin Scheme have enabled peo-ple to learn and use Chinese characters more easily and conveniently.
In the information era, it has been very difficult for Chinese people to know how to solve the problem of Chinese characters' use in computers. As early as the end of the fifties of the 20~h Century, China had begun the re-search work on automatic translation from Russian to Chinese in domestic computers. By the end of the sixties, Chinese telegraph encoder had been in-vented. In the seventies, China began to study and develop Chinese informa-tion processing technology systematically. In order to unify a standard Chinese code, the country publicized in 1980 "Domestic Standard Exchange Codes of Chinese." Since then the problem of Chinese characters' storage, display and printing in computers has been worked out. However, people were still con-fronted with the problem of how to type Chinese characters quickly into com-puters. Through dauntless efforts, various input methods have been invented. With the further application of such technologies as handwriting input and pronunciation input, the ancient Chinese characters have gained a second youth in today's information society and have a more promising future.
Data indicate that among the files kept by the U.N., it takes the least room to record documents in Chinese. Furthermore, with the increase of Chi-na's role in international affairs, there' 11 be more and more people desirous of learning and studying Chinese characters.
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