[英语学习]beijing_review.doc

Should China Resume the Use of Traditional Characters ? (LI SHIGONG) In the past few years, a debate has emerged as to whether China should resume the old way of writing Chinese characters to preserve its culture. This year, Pan Qinglin, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, the countrys top advisory body, made an aggressive proposal, calling to abolish the use of current simplified Chinese characters within 10 years. The contemporary Chinese written language has two standard sets of characters—traditional and simplified. The Chinese mainland first introduced simplified characters in 1956, which were created by decreasing the number of strokes to make the writing easier. Pan listed three reasons for his proposal: First, the simplified characters were too roughly created in the 1950s; second, although traditional characters are a bit complicated to write, nowadays, computers can make the process very simple; and third, the resumption of traditional characters will facilitate the communication between Chinese mainlanders and people in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan where traditional characters are being used. In response to Pans proposal, officials from the Ministry of Education said that simplified characters were widely used in all sectors of social life and they would not be abolished without legal revisions. Li Yuming, Deputy Director of the State Language Commission, stressed again in August that the government had not considered the overall resumption of traditional characters. Although the government holds an explicit attitude toward this issue, heated debate among ordinary people, particularly on the Internet, has never faded. Supporters of the resumption believe that simplified characters are a result of the pursuit of higher efficiency. In order to make characters easier to learn, the use of simplified characters was reasonable during a certain historical period. But the time of handwriting is over, ha