After the founding of the People's Republic of China, representatives of intellectuals, such as Guo Moruo, put forward a proposal: to change the way of writing Chinese characters from the original "vertical right row" to "horizontal left row". This change was taken seriously at the 1955 National Conference on Character Reform, which was supported by the Ministry of Education's Joint Cultural Improvement Association. Once this proposal was implemented, it immediately broke the thousands of years of Chinese character writing Xi in traditional Chinese culture, which can be called a huge cultural change.
At the beginning, this suggestion caused many people to wonder and question. But then, the People's ** and other important newspapers in the country took the lead in changing the layout method, and it gradually began to be promoted among the people. Since then, the traditional Chinese way of writing has gradually disappeared, and only a very small number of calligraphers and character lovers still adhere to the traditional "traditional vertical right row".
In order to understand why such a major change occurred, it is first necessary to understand how the ancient Chinese formed and maintained the way of writing for thousands of years. In the earliest days, the writing tools used by the Chinese were not paper, but bamboo and wooden slips. These bamboo slips are usually naturally formed, made of pieces of bamboo connected together, and when writing, because of the limitations of this carrier, they can only be written vertically, and horizontal writing is not convenient. Until the later Eastern Han Dynasty, although Cai Lun improved papermaking, the Chinese, who were Xi used to writing vertically, did not change this method and continued to use it.
As for the controversy over the simplification of characters, it is actually a process of historical evolution, and there is no requirement to remain unchanged. The change in the way of writing in modern China originated in modern times. Some literati, such as Liu Shien, proposed to keep up with the West and called for a change in the way Chinese characters are written, but they were not approved by the Qing ** and were instead criticized. Later, Qian Xuantong, a writer who studied in Japan, began to publish articles after returning to China, advocating a change in the way Chinese characters are written. Starting from the structure of the human body, he pointed out that the human eye is arranged horizontally, not vertically as in the traditional way of writing. Therefore, he criticized writing Chinese characters vertically as a violation of the human anatomy.
After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, this issue was shelved, and until the end of the war, these intellectuals still remembered to change the way Chinese characters were written. Eventually, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this change was formally implemented through an executive order. At present, most of China has adopted a new way of writing, and only a few calligraphy works, ancient books and Spring Festival couplets have retained the traditional "traditional vertical right row".
Overall, the fact that Chinese characters have been passed down to the present day and undergone many changes is a miracle that cannot be ignored. In modern times, there have been people who advocated the abolition of Chinese characters, but they were opposed by the people of the whole country, and there were also people who advocated the Latinization of Chinese characters, which was resisted. Eventually, through modest reforms and simplifications, Chinese characters were written in a way that has not survived much in comparison to ancient scripts such as Egyptian script and cuneiform, which have disappeared to this day.