People born after 1980 may have never heard of the "Second Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters" (commonly referred to as Erjianzi). Those in their 40s or 50s might have heard of it, but likely possess only a vague impression.
What are Erjianzi? They are the characters from the Second Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters published by the Committee on Chinese Character Reform. Almost everyone knows Simplified Chinese, but what we usually refer to is the First Scheme (the "First Simplification" or Yijianzi). Nowadays, no one discusses the Second Simplification; it is as if it never happened in history. Yet, from its announcement in 1977 to its abolition in 1986, it existed as the official formal script of China for nine years. In those years, it appeared in newspapers, books, textbooks, slogans, and plaques. But today, it has vanished so completely that most young and middle-aged people are unaware it ever existed.
To discuss the Second Simplification, we must first look at the past and present of character simplification. In the late Qing Dynasty, the self-satisfied, isolationist empire suddenly realized how fragile and vulnerable it was. It was easily defeated by Western powers and even crushed by Japan, a country it had always looked down upon. It was forced to sign many unequal treaties, pay reparations, cede territory, and humiliate the nation. Why did this happen? Many people, especially intellectuals, began searching for the cause. Besides discovering that China’s technology was inferior—for instance, the Qing used wooden boats while the West used steel warships; the Qing used broadswords and spears while the West used cannons and rifles—some intellectuals sought causes on a cultural level. A large group, including Lu Xun, Qian Xuantong, and Zhou Youguang, believed that the complexity of Chinese characters was the main reason for China's backwardness. Lu Xun even shouted the slogan: "If Chinese characters are not eradicated, China will perish." The social outcry to simplify characters, adopt a phonetic system, and ultimately abolish Chinese characters was very high. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919, this became almost a consensus among intellectuals. Some had already begun the work of simplifying characters.
The outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, followed by the Civil War, shelved the simplification of characters. By the 1950s, the Chinese government immediately launched a government-led character simplification project. On January 7, 1955, the Chinese Character Reform Research Committee published the "Draft Scheme for Simplifying Chinese Characters," launching a government-led, nationwide campaign to enforce simplified characters. It started with trial use in major newspapers and eventually required all newspapers and textbooks to use them.
The First Simplification was based primarily on the Running Script (Xingshu), along with a small amount of Cursive Script (Caoshu). To write faster, Running Script connects many strokes or simplifies them, so compared to the Regular Script (Kaishu), it is effectively a simplified form. Intellectuals at the time, having grown up writing with brushes, all recognized Running Script. Standardizing it into a printed font presented no reading difficulties. Some intellectuals voiced opposition to the simplification, but most of them were labeled as "Rightists" in 1957. From then on, no one dared to publicly voice dissent. It became a policy that had to be executed, essentially enforced by the government.
Objectively speaking, because most ordinary people had seen or even used the First Simplification characters, they didn't feel too abrupt, so there wasn't much resistance. For children in school—like when I started primary school in 1964—there was no concept of Traditional characters; we were taught Simplified characters directly, so it was easy to accept.
Meanwhile, the promotion of Pinyin was also successful, but this success was mainly in helping people learn characters, not in achieving the phoneticization that would replace characters—the goal the May Fourth intellectuals had desired.
The government then prepared the Second Simplification to further simplify characters.
The Running Script forms had already been used up, so the Second Simplification had to borrow more from Cursive Script and extremely rare variant characters; some were likely even invented by the experts themselves. The massive introduction of Cursive created reading problems. Cursive was never a standard script; its excessive simplification and connected strokes meant that people without long-term specialized study and practice of Cursive simply couldn't understand it. The self-invented simplified characters had absolutely no foundation of social recognition, naturally creating huge obstacles for the general public.
"On October 31, 1977, the State Council issued an instruction stating that the 'Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (Draft)' could be published in the People's Daily and provincial-level newspapers to 'solicit opinions from the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers and people from all walks of life.' It claimed that the simplified characters in the first table were 'already widely popular among the masses' and should be put into trial use immediately after the draft was published."
This time coincided with the eve of the Class of '77 college entrance exams (Gaokao). The attention of the whole nation was drawn to the restoration of the Gaokao, so the Second Simplification did not attract much focus. Unlike the First Simplification, where the "solicitation of opinions" phase lasted only a year before full enforcement, the Second Simplification never moved past the "solicitation" stage. The reason might be that the experts themselves felt uncertain and lacked confidence. Additionally, with the start of Reform and Opening Up, different opinions were permitted, and those offering criticism were no longer labeled as Rightists. Consequently, dissenting views could be voiced, and the forced implementation of the First Simplification style seemed out of place.
Below are some Second Simplified characters found in newspapers and books from that year:
Reference News
Unidentified book
Geography textbook
Propaganda poster
Below is part of the Second Simplification chart. They appear in pairs; the left side of each column is the standard character after the First Simplification, and the right is the corresponding Second Simplified character.
To learn more about Second Simplified characters, please click the link below:
For full list of the second simplified characters, please click the link below.
At first, when all newspapers used the Second Simplification, it looked strange and uncomfortable. Places where these characters appeared frequently were street restaurants, slogans, and notices. I was studying at Peking University at the time. The Class of '77 had no textbooks that year; we used mimeographed materials carved by professors, which did not contain Second Simplified characters. Some textbooks were published after 1979, but I don't recall them using Second Simplification. We basically never used them, and none of the professors used them when writing on the blackboard.
Primary and middle school textbooks likely used them, though I am not sure of the situation there.
Likely benefiting from the relaxed political environment at the time, we faced no pressure to use the Second Simplification, so nobody did. I don't know when the characters outside slowly decreased, nor do I know when they vanished from the newspapers.
Wikipedia states:
On June 24, 1986, the "Second Simplification" was abolished by the State Council. Later, the "Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language" stipulated that "Second Simplified characters" were not standard characters. Subsequently, the State Language Commission republished the "General List of Simplified Characters," totaling 2,235 characters. It only made adjustments to 6 characters from the 1964 list, and this remains in use today.
The Second Simplification lasted about nine years from birth to declared death. After the announcement, the country remained calm. No one around me discussed it.
The abolition of the Second Simplification declared that character simplification had reached its end. Replacing characters with Pinyin encountered insurmountable problems due to homophones. From then on, the movement to phoneticize Chinese characters died down.
Chinese characters were not abolished, yet China did not perish. If the elites who once believed "If Chinese characters are not eradicated, China will perish" could see this from the afterlife, one wonders what they would think.
The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of continuous simplification and natural, gradual change. Characters accepted by the populace remain; those rejected are eliminated. There have been two instances in Chinese history of government regulating characters: once with the Small Seal Script in the Qin Dynasty, and once with the Character Simplification of the People's Republic. The Qin Dynasty's Small Seal basically followed the structure of the Large Seal; it was neither a success nor a failure, as the Qin Dynasty perished before it could be fully promoted. Small Seal never became a popular script in China, but it didn't disappear either. The success of the First Simplification was built on the foundation of Running Script and succeeded in mainland China, though it remains unrecognized overseas. Even in China, since the 1980s, the widespread use of Traditional characters in advertisements, art, and signboards demonstrates their vitality. Why such vitality? Certainly not because they are hard to write, but because of the culture behind them.
When we see "外婆的澎湖湾", what do we think of? Childhood, old friends, grandma's smile, kites in the sky, shells on the beach...
If written as "Wai Po De Peng Hu Wan," what do you think of? Nothing. If your Pinyin isn't good, you might not even know what it means—is it English? Just like when I took the Class of '77 Gaokao, the first question in the Chinese exam was:
Our Tang poetry and Song lyrics use Chinese characters as a vessel to fully display their beautiful artistic conception.
白日依山尽，
黄河入海流。
欲穷千里目，
更上一层楼。
You visualize the setting sun, great mountains, rivers, the sea, pavilions, a view stretching to the horizon. Calligraphy is the artistic beauty produced by combining the elegance of characters with the beauty of poetry, a beauty distinct from any other form in the world.
If written as
"Bai Ri Yi Shan Jin, Huang He Ru Hai Liu.
Yu Qiong Qian Li Mu, Geng Shang Yi Ceng Lou."
What do you think of? It has no flavor at all.
Chinese characters are saturated with culture, imagery, history, and tradition. Behind Pinyin, there is nothing.
An article written entirely in Pinyin not only loses the traditional culture contained in the characters but, due to homophones, one sound can correspond to several or even dozens of characters. It is extremely difficult to figure out which character a Pinyin word refers to, so the path of phoneticizing Chinese characters is impossible to continue.
Looking back at the original intention of simplifying characters—the belief that "Chinese characters are the main reason for China's backwardness"—is this claim correct?
Blaming the difficulty of writing characters as the main cause of China's backwardness is a completely wrong diagnosis.
Now, let's talk about why further character simplification is a dead end.
Chinese characters are the only existing logographic script in the world and possess artistic properties, which is why we have the unique art of calligraphy. Characters are artistic, but they are also language. As a language, characters require standardization, consistency, and stability; otherwise, they cannot serve as a language for social communication or a carrier of culture across generations. Ancient characters were very pictographic and artistic, but Qin Shi Huang unified the script because language must be standardized to function as a communication tool. Historically, the standard scripts (official scripts)—Small Seal (Qin), Clerical (Han), Regular (Tang), Song typeface (Song)—were all highly standardized with stable inheritance. That is why even ordinary people today can read documents written in Clerical script from two thousand years ago. Art, however, demands flexibility, creativity, and variability; standardization is its enemy (uniform characters have no artistic value). Cursive script meets these requirements perfectly, so it has immense artistic value. But Cursive cannot become a standard script because it lacks consistency, stability, standardization, and heritage, and it has very poor legibility (the masses generally don't recognize it). Trying to "Regularize" Cursive doesn't solve these problems, so naturally, it's hard for the public to accept. For a long time, society—including the elite—did not understand the distinction between the linguistic and artistic nature of characters. Research in this area was lacking, leading to the attempt to simplify characters by regularizing cursive, which inevitably failed.
From a pictographic perspective, our ancestors created characters with extreme ingenuity; every stroke has meaning, and any deletion damages the meaning. When we simplified the character too much, we destroyed the pictography, culture behind the forms. Most important, the people don't accept over simplified forms.
With the prevalence of computer input today, the difficulty of writing characters is no longer an issue. The abolition of the Second Simplification was wise; otherwise, Chinese characters would have lost their characteristics and failed to maintain their heritage and cultural foundation. The unparalleled pictographic nature of Chinese characters is their core. One day, people will discover the magnificent beauty of Chinese pictographs. They are not only the pride of Chinese people but also a precious cultural heritage of the world.
Written on July 12, 2024
