Long Story of Short Forms : Simplified Chinese characters from A to Z

Chinese characters were simplified in 1956, ten years after their Japanese counterparts. This book traces the origins of simplified form and compares it with rejected alternatives. It concludes that 90 to 91 percent of the new official Chinese forms were in use before the reforms, compared with nearly 100 percent of the Japanese ones.

About 80 characters were simplified differently in China and Japan. Our survey shows that these differences existed already before the reforms, and that the differing outcomes were thus predestined.

One declared aim of the Chinese reform was to unify short forms by eradicating existing variants, leaving just one short form of each character. It turns out that this aim was accomplished. However, the years following the reform saw a wave of newly created short forms of other characters. As a result, the total number of short forms increased rather than decreased. In 1977 many of these "spontaneous" new short forms were proposed for official use, but that proposal was abandoned after six months. From 1986 campaigns against irregular writing were carried through, effectively ousting irregular short forms form the public space. A quiz among different generations shows that the campaign has eradicated irregular short forms not only from public space, but also from human memory, as hardly anyone of the younger generation can identify these forms today.