The debate on traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters is an ongoing dispute concerning Chinese orthography among users of Chinese characters. It has stirred up heated responses from supporters of both sides in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities with its implications of political ideology and cultural identity.Keller, Andrée Tabouret. (1997). Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation. Oxford University Press. Simplified characters here exclusively refer to those characters simplified by the People's Republic of China (PRC), instead of the concept of character simplification as a whole. The effect of simplified characters on the language remains controversial, decades after their introduction.

Problems The sheer difficulties posed by having two concurrent writing systems hinders communications between mainland China and other regions, although with exposure and experience a person educated in one system can quickly become familiar with the other system. For those who know both systems well, converting an entire document written using simplified characters to traditional characters, or vice versa, is a trivial but laborious task. Automated conversion, however, from simplified to traditional is not straightforward because there is not always a one-to-one mapping of a simplified character to a traditional character. One simplified character may equate to many traditional characters. As a result, a computer can be used for the bulk of the conversion but will still need final checking by a human.

The writer Ba Jin, in his 1999 essay "Thoughts: Reform of Chinese characters" (), urged caution in any reforms to the written Chinese language. He cited the inability of those educated in Hong Kong or Taiwan to read material published on the mainland, and vice versa, as a great disadvantage of simplified Chinese. He also cited the ability to communicate, not just with Chinese peoples of various regions, but also with people from across the Chinese cultural sphere—countries such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—as a great advantage of the written Chinese language that should not be undermined by excessive simplification.Ba Jin. (1999) "随想录·汉字改革".《汉字文化》.Issue 4, 1999. Beijing.

Culture

Simplified characters Proponents say that the Chinese writing system has been changing for millennia: it passed through the oracle script, bronzeware script, seal script, and clerical script stages. Moreover, the majority of simplified characters are drawn from conventional abbreviated forms that have been used in handwriting for centuries such as the use of 礼 instead of 禮, and some simplified characters are in fact restorations of ancient forms that had become more complicated over time. For instance, the character for "cloud" was originally 云 in early inscriptions, but the character was borrowed to write a homophonous word meaning "to say". To disambiguate the two uses of the character, the "rain" radical (雨) was added on top when it meant "cloud", forming the current traditional character 雲. The homophonous word meaning "to say", however, has become archaic in modern Chinese, though 雲 continues to be used for "cloud". The simplified version simply restores 云 to its original use as "cloud".

Traditional characters While some simplified characters were adopted from conventional abbreviated forms that have existed for a long time, those advocating the simplified forms often fail to point out that many such characters in fact had multiple vernacular forms out of which just one was chosen, arbitrarily, and then privileged by the designers of the simplified character scheme. Many of the changes can be seen as ideological, such as the removal of the "heart" (心) radical from the word "love" (愛) into the new character (爱) without heart. To some, the new 'heartless' love character is an attack on Confucianism, which emphasizes the virtues of filial piety and humanity in relationships so as to maintain a harmonious society. Supporters of simplification argue that the removal of the heart radical occurred in the context of calligraphy in ancient times and was not viewed in an anti-Confucian light.

Pro-traditional commentators argue that the changes through the history are almost exclusively alterations in writing styles, especially vernacular writing, and not in the fundamental structure of the characters—especially after the Qin standardization. They have alleged that simplified characters were arbitrarily schematized and then imposed by the PRC on its people with the intention of subverting and eradicating selected elements of traditional Chinese culture, in order to carry out what the PRC viewed as necessary revolutionary modernization. These critics point out that many of the fundamental characteristics underlying Chinese characters, including radicals as well as etymological and phonetic elements, were deliberately omitted in their simplified form at least partly for this reason (i.e., disrupting continuity with traditional Chinese culture). One frequently-cited example is the character for "sage" or "holy", 圣 in simplified and 聖 in traditional. The simplified character lacks the king radical (王), replacing it with soil (土). Supporters of simplification appeal to the fact that 圣 was often used, in handwriting, as a simplified variant of 聖 long before the PRC itself came into being. The Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) furthermore classifies 聖 as a xíngshēng (形聲) character with phonetic component 呈. Thus, the origin of the character may have nothing to do with any cultural connection to kings or royalty.

Even among supporters of simplification, some make the argument that Classical Chinese texts should not be printed in simplified Chinese because of the complexities involved in the use of tōngjiǎ (通假) or phonetic loan characters. Ancient texts for instance might use the character 女 (nǚ, "women") when the character 汝 (rǔ, "thou") is intended semantically because of their similar pronunciation in Old Chinese. The interpretation of ancient texts is often complicated by the presence of these phonetic loans, for which several very different meanings could be read. Generally, the more ancient the text, the more numerous the phonetic loans, since separate characters were slowly introduced as the written language evolved, in order to disambiguate these loans. For instance, the preclassical Book of Odes and the early classical Analects always uses 女 for 汝, while texts from the Han dynasty or later nearly always use 汝.Ironically, 汝 itself is also a phonetic loan, the original meaning being the name of a river. This meaning is, of course, rarely used, compared to the character's use as the second-person pronoun.

The merging of several traditional characters into one simplified character (e.g., 願 (yuàn, "desire", commonly used) and 愿 (yuàn, "honest", archaic and rare) to 愿 (both meanings)) during the simplification process can be thought of as the modern introduction of phonetic loans. This complicates an already complex landscape of tōngjiǎ characters appearing in classical texts, introducing additional possibilities for misinterpretation, particularly for beginning students. Personal names of historical individuals are also problematic. For example, there are two Six Dynasties period generals whose names are 王濬 (206–286) and 王浚 (252–314), both of which are pronounced as Wáng Jùn. However, according to the current PRC simplification scheme, the character 濬 is considered to be an obsolete variant of 浚, so to conform to standard orthography, these names should be written identically using 浚. Against this argument, proponents of simplified characters respond that simplified characters are more practical in all domains other than ancient literature and that it is uneconomical to introduce high school students, already burdened by schoolwork, to a new character set for the sole purpose of teaching the classical language. Any potentially confusing usages can be remedied by providing appropriate annotations and glosses in footnotes, which are needed anyway for student editions of classical texts. When the need arises, history and language majors in colleges and universities gradually learn to read scholarly editions of texts set in traditional characters without too much difficulty. Nevertheless, classical texts set in traditional Chinese can be hard to find in mainland Chinese bookstores. The Zhonghua Publishing House (Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 中華書局) and several other specialist scholastic publishers are the only ones to routinely publish works in traditional characters.

Literacy

Arguments for simplified characters Proponents feel that simplified Chinese characters with fewer strokes make learning easier, and is evidenced by the rapid decline in illiteracy in mainland China.Gunde, Richard. (2002). Culture and Customs of China. Greenwood Press.

Arguments for retaining traditional characters Users of traditional characters point out that the literacy rate of Taiwan and Hong Kong is higher than that of mainland China, compared for the same year. It is also argued that the fact that mainland China is much larger and more populous than Taiwan or Hong Kong does not excuse a lower rate of literacy, as by definition a literacy rate represents the proportion of literate people—not the sheer quantity of literate people living in the country's territory, though mainland China spends much less on education per capita than both Hong Kong and Taiwan. There is also a false dichotomy in comparing the effect of simplified Chinese characters on an illiterate populace between two vastly different time periods. Early proponents of script reform during the period of Republican China such as Lu Xun and Lufei Kui have been mischaracterized to retrofit contemporary narratives in illiteracy reduction. This is because it was specifically functional illiteracy of adults which was rampant throughout this era, caused by a lack of systematic education, and was a major cause of concern at the time for the intelligentsia. Their now obsolete rationale also unambiguously involved the complete abandonment of the Chinese script and the full transition into an alphabetical script (such as Cyrillic or Hanyu Pinyin), which placed unprecedented emphasis on rapid modernization and is largely unfounded in science or linguistics. Even if it is possible to correlate the adoption of simplified Chinese characters with increases in literacy rates, given the consistently high literacy rates in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and not to mention the fact that correlation does not imply causation, such correlations do not prove that the simplification of characters alone is determinant of literacy success any more than the many other factors involved in cultural change and educational reform. The increase in the accessibility of education from the aforementioned factors is also a strong contender for the credit of increased literacy rates in mainland China. Aside from correlational arguments, the only other form of evidence offered in support of script reform success through character simplification is anecdotal.

Ambiguity

Clarity of simplified characters Proponents feel that some traditional characters are too similar in appearance, such as 書 (shū) "book", 晝 (zhòu) "daytime", and 畫/畵 (huà) "drawing": in contrast, the simplified forms which are 书, , and respectively are much more distinct.