Traditional vs. Simplified: The Battle for China’s Soul

In the 1900s, there was a linguistic civil war that would tear the Chinese-speaking world apart and rage on until this very day. This was the battle of traditional Chinese versus simplified Chinese and how the soul of the language was almost destroyed for good. Let me tell you the tale of Word War II. It might not be what you're expecting. As I've talked about before, Chinese writing has a long history. Traditional Chinese characters aren't just strokes on a page, they're living, breathing relics with 3,000 years of inner meaning. Take the classic example, Ai, or love. Right in the middle, there's this character, Xin, which means heart. Coincidence? You tell me. True love comes from the heart and ancient China reminds us that love without heart isn't love at all. Or the character, Yi, which roughly translates into righteousness and being noble. It puts the character, Yang, for sheep, a classic symbol of humility and goodness, over the character, Wa, for oneself. It is the noble act of putting higher values and the well-being of others above our own selves. And this kind of depth is everywhere. Traditional characters are essentially time capsules that have passed down layers of history and meaning through countless generations. Learning them isn't just acquiring a skill, it's inheriting wisdom written right into every word. But by the end of the Qing dynasty, some felt like this beauty was becoming a barrier. A whopping 80% of China was illiterate, locked behind the intellectual paywall of traditional characters. Knowledge was stuck, innovation was stifled, and all the while, the country was crumbling from drug wars, foreign invasions, internal rebellions, and political decay. At this rate, China would never catch up to a world that was rapidly leaving them behind. And so, people started whispering about simplification. Sacrilege, sure, but perhaps a necessary one. The first serious attempts actually came before communist rule. In 1935, the Republic of China government published a list of 324 simplified characters. Nothing revolutionary, just adaptations from cursive and shorthand that had been popular for centuries. But even this modest evolution was too much. Scholars instantly fired back, arguing that simplification would sever China from its culture and alienate it from its own philosophy, traditions, and literature. And that was enough for the old government to fold. The plan was shelved within a year, and before long, they had bigger fish to fry anyway. World War II, Japanese invasions, and the Chinese Communist Party. With one Mao Zedong, he and the communists built their support from the working class and saw traditional characters as elitist gatekeeping that barred the common man from knowledge and education. The CCP laid low, watched Japan cripple the ROC, and swept in to take over in 1949, which then allowed Mao to mandate a massive simplification scheme in 1956 that updated over 2,000 characters all at once. But this wasn't just some grand invention, it was a disparate compromise patched together from a century of failed attempts. From the Qing period, the communists took informal cursive shorthand that was commonplace among the populace. From the Republican era, they took that 1935 list, as well as other experiments of the time, and then they copied Japan's homework. After World War II, Japan swiftly started their own simplification scheme in 1946, called the Xinjitai, which in Chinese is 新字体, or New Word Font. Much of it actually consisted of shorthand from past Chinese dynasties. For example, they turned the character for country, 国, into the Han era, 国, the character for learn, 学, into the Jin era, 学. All in all, about 30% of Mao's scheme was directly copied from Japan's choices. And this is why some simplified Chinese characters also appear in Japanese. And so, with all these bits and pieces, Mao combined them into one evolutionary mishmash and made it official. But here's the million dollar question, did it work? Within decades, China's literacy rates went from 20% to over 90%. Simplified objectively made the characters quicker to learn, faster to write, and easier to remember. But that wasn't the whole story. The simplification scheme was accompanied by three critical policies and one stroke of luck. At the same time, the communists also ordered compulsory public schooling, forced literacy classes for farmers and workers, and commissioned the truly revolutionary invention, pinyin. These made a much bigger difference than simplified characters alone. The stroke of luck, the country wasn't busy fighting wars anymore and could actually stop and rebuild. This was the perfect storm that the issue of literacy was finally settled. But the debate between traditional and simplified wasn't. On one hand, Taiwan and Hong Kong never gave up on traditional and they actually achieved higher literacy rates faster than mainland China did. Of course, it's not an apples to apples comparison since mainland China is over 200 times bigger than Taiwan, but it does suggest that simplified wasn't the magic bullet that many make it out to be. Now, the other more contentious argument is whether simplified gutted China's soul. Remember love, I. In simplified, the heart was cut out to become I, replaced with a simple yo or friend. Remember righteousness, eat. China switched to the ancient two-stroke shortcut, which did have history but lost all of its depth anyway. Fly, fate, was once an entire bird with a complete body and two wings, but it was dismembered into a single sad wing, fate. To listen, ting was the combination of an ear, r, and an eye, mu, the number one and a heart, xin, implying that listening required one's complete singular attention, but that at least visually became ting, literally a mouth and an ax, an apt metaphor for the brutal axing of the language. And you can't point fingers at Japan either. Even with Shinjitai, Japanese kanji kept the first three of those completely untouched and only tripped to, to listen slightly, which means this character carnage was purely a Chinese thing. So when critics lament that Mao's scheme would cause future generations to not know love once contained a heart, you can't deny there's some poetic injustice in that. But before you run to comments to specifically deny that, sit tight and buckle up first. There's still another twist. What most people don't know is that Mao actually looked at this entire debate and said, you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Yep, Mao didn't actually want simplified. He wanted Chinese characters completely dead, freaking dead, not reformed, not streamlined, murdered. This wasn't just some empty talk. All the way back in 1931, the communists already made latinized new script, which was an early attempt to replace characters without tone markings. Yeah, just look at this and this. I don't know about you, but trying to read a tonal language without tones gives me a headache. Nevertheless, in 1940, the CCP's official documents adopted this new script all the same. Then after taking power, Mao issued a directive in 1951, declaring that Chinese must take the phonetic direction of the world's alphabets. Think about that for a second. Every poem by Li Bai, every great classical text, every piece of calligraphy, gone. Chongqing's Neolit signs, your neighbor's Chinese tattoo, also gone. All permanently replaced by the standard Latin alphabet. Wǒ ài nǐ, replaced by wǒ ài nǐ, forever. Some might argue, didn't that happen to Vietnamese? It works fine over there. Yeah, well, Vietnamese has four times more unique sounds than Mandarin does, which means that the tongue twister with all the shers I talked about in this video, that entire tail, which looks like this in Chinese, becomes this clusterfudge in pinyin. Yeah, good luck with all that. So if the situation was that dire, what stopped this linguistic apocalypse? I'll give you a second to guess, but you'd be wrong anyway, because it was Joseph freaking Stalin. No, seriously. According to Zhou Youguang, the very guy that created pinyin, Mao visited Stalin in 1949 and told him about his big dream of wiping out Chinese characters for good. Stalin's response? Have some self-respect, bro. China's cool. Don't just copy someone else's alphabet. Think about the cosmic irony here. Stalin, Stalin, the man who exiled entire populations, evaporated entire cultures, and wasn't even Russian, convinced Mao to preserve Chinese characters, to save the Chinese written language. Maybe he just appreciated style. Once Mao returned to China, the official policy pivoted immediately. Everything was put into simplification instead of elimination, and pinyin was born as a supplement, not a replacement. But privately, Mao wasn't happy with it. He never got over having his dreams dashed, and he still died lamenting the failure. But maybe that was for the better. Even though traditionalists had to watch their language get eviscerated, even though radicalists still had to learn thousands of characters, even though the rest of the world now has to pick a Maybe we should step back and look at the bigger picture. Because while we're busy arguing which is the better way to write, whether you think there's no love without a heart, or no modern China without simplified, we should probably be grateful that we still have characters to argue about at all. Because for one terrifying moment in history, we almost didn't. So here comes the can of worms. Which side are you on? Traditional? Simplified? Alphabet soup for life? Start your flame wars in the comments below, hopefully using the character set that doesn't trigger you. And maybe thank deadbeat dad joe while you're at it. Remember when I said Mao nearly wiped out every poem by Li Bai? Now, Li Bai wasn't just China's greatest poet. People thought he was a literal god, an immortal that heaven kicked out and sent down to live with the rest of us. And the way he died? It's the strangest, most beautiful thing you'll ever hear. An old man, drunk, alone in a little boat on the river at night, who leaned out over the black water to wrap his arms around the moon. What actually happened to him is on your screen right now, click it to watch. And until next time, Zaijian!