Chinese Characters and the Problem of Literacy
Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).
