I was just thinking about the history of logographic writing systems vs alphabets, and how both of the two times alphabets have emerged (with the vulgarization of Egyptian hieroglyphs into a phonetic script which later became the Phoenician alphabet which was then the ultimate basis of all European alphabets*, and with the creation of hangul in Korea to replace Chinese logograms with something easier to attain mass literacy in) it was because of the direct problem of logograms being obtuse and requiring tons of education to become literate in, then thinking about the crisis the CPC faced with the extremely low literacy rates immediately following the revolution and the lengths they had to go to to address that.
To be clear I'm not asking "why did they not simply do better?" because they objectively succeeded in attaining mass literacy despite the difficulties posed by logograms. Instead I'm wondering if anyone's well read enough to explain what their reasoning was? Because I can see several possibilities, ranging from "it was genuinely less work to just go ahead and do that despite the extra education logograms require when you're building a mass education system anyways," to something like "despite the difficulties it was politically and culturally important to make even the elite writing system that previous Chinese governments had systematically denied to the public into something everyone could use," or even to "the thought literally never even came up: it was a foregone conclusion they'd stick with the existing system and the only question was how to teach it as fast as possible," but the extent of my knowledge on the subject is that their desperation for literate functionaries led to them recruiting a bunch of former elites (educated professionals, business owners, and even landlords - absentee ones who lived in cities and who were thus spared the justice at the hands of their erstwhile tenants that happened in rural areas) despite their dubious backgrounds, and that they launched a mass literacy campaign which was ultimately successful.
There's also the possibility that what qualified as basic literacy education in the classical or early modern periods was just of a materially different enough character that meant logograms weren't as viable as a popular system even when there was a political will to try to spread literacy, whereas mass education was a solved problem by the mid 20th century and intensive enough that there was little difference between teaching full literacy in an alphabet and teaching full literacy in logograms. "Literacy" for a 17th century Korean peasant could have just been being able to read some short text with some difficulty (something that could be attained with next to no training in hangul, but would require years of education in Chinese characters), while literacy for someone in the 20th century entailed both reading and writing with complete fluency alongside a large vocabulary.
* This category includes things like Norse runes, despite their radically different appearance, as well as the creation of alphabets for Native American languages from characters that were commonly used in printed materials (that was an intentional material choice, so that existing press characters could be repurposed instead of needing new, bespoke ones in order to print in their own language).
Simplified Chinese only really exists because the party adopted it, so they did address one writing system barrier.
I don't have an explanation that I feel fully confident in, so I'll just leave some notes that add context:
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China is huge and diverse, with many dialects using the same characters and words but pronouncing them very differently. Therefore, a phonetic character set would need to capture multiple words for the same thing and ensure effective translations into dialects.
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There were efforts to adopt a unique phonetic approach and one that was just a romanized pinyin. Neither took off as an official system. Pinyin is going in that direction, though, imo.
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The need to increase literacy ASAP is inherently at odds with taking time to make decisions. I would not be surprised if expediency was an important factor. The party wanted to develop the country ASAP and address a ton of issues at once.
China is huge and diverse, with many dialects using the same characters and words but pronouncing them very differently. Therefore, a phonetic character set would need to capture multiple words for the same thing and ensure effective translations into dialects.
Fuck that completely slipped my mind. That's another very strong reason to stick with what already existed.
I've heard when Sun Yat-sen first went to Japan, he didn't know spoken Japanese. But, he could communicate with his hosts thru writing.
The same was true throughout the world for the literati also of Vietnam, Korea and so on.
My in-laws have told me that written Mandarin and written Cantonese are different, but probably not as different as they would be with an alphabet, as you say.
Probably because of Hong Kongers still using traditional. AFAIK, Guangzhou and other southern mainland China towns use simplified.
There are Cantonese exclusive characters like this, but they both share the vast majority of characters.
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I'm not an expert, but China is a big country with a lot of people speaking local dialects that are practically their own languages. Using a writing system based on meaning rather than the sound the words make allows all of them to use the same system.
Just chiming in to say that learning Chinese characters isn't actually all that difficult, like for basic literacy you will need to memorize 3500 characters and for university level reading about 6500 characters. Chinese characters also follow some general rules so it's not just purely memorizing symbols.
A lot of the diversity in Chinese vocabulary comes from combining two or more separate characters, it's somewhat confusing for non-native speakers becuase the combinations aren't always intuitive but a native Chinese speaker will know them already and just need to learn to write the characters that make it up.
Like of the non-native speakers I've met, the hardest thing about learning Chinese is always speaking and pronunciation. Like if you aren't born speaking a tonal language it's quite difficult to rewire your brain to speak one when your older.
like for basic literacy you will need to memorize 3500 characters
literally impossible
i couldn't memorize sound for 40ish hiragana or 10-15 dumbass
conjugation rulesfrankly with how unable to learn any other language i am, i'm retroactively gobsmacked my brain worked properly long enough to learn the first one.
I think that having a way for everybody to communicate with each other was really important for national unity. So they followed through on the push for a Simplified character set, but left that in place so people who spoke different varieties of Chinese could still understand each other in writing.
There was probably also an aspect of national pride going there. They'd just concluded their Century of Humiliation and were beginning to build up their domestic industries; it would be a little demoralizing if they were to adopt the script of all the countries that had occupied them.
Yeah but something like Hangul or Hiragana/Katakana could have been an option as something new and easier, but still uniquely Chinese.
eye think yu kud iven meyc de kays þat inglish is beysikli un eyedeeohgrafik raydeng sistem wið ol dose arkeyn speling rools. it's dzhust a lot wuhrs wan. if alfabetik sistemms wur trooly alfabetik we wud hev no nid fr standadizd spelin
@Shitbird@hexbear.net shoud as de wei
sheyks iu bay iur showldrs IU MAST LURN T BRAYC FRI FRUM ARBITRERI HIURARKIK ANGLOW LANGWAJ IMPIRIALIZM
It's because characters
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Are mostly topolect agnostic. There are topolect unique characters, but those are relatively few compared with thousands of characters that are shared.
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Connects Chinese culture with their literary past. Not everything in Chinese literature is Neo-Confucians patting themselves on the back about how well-read and virtuous they are. There are political works and poetry.
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Are already familiar with a certain strata of Chinese society. Introducing something like pinyin means you have to teach everyone pinyin, including those who are already literate in Chinese.
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Fits pretty well with Chinese as a language. Chinese lacks inflections like verb conjugation and grammatical gender, so a character just needs to represent a root, prefix, infix, or suffix. Chinese, especially Mandarin, is also filled with homophones.
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I'll go against the grain of the other answers and point out that both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party had factions, including at one time Zhou Enlai, that supported the full replacement of Chinese characters by Latin ones. There were similar attempts in the Soviet Union. But in the end, just like the second round of simplification of Chinese characters, it was deemed too radical, too leftist, or interest in it was simply lost and inertia prevailed.
So first, they did create a new phonetic system called hanyu pinyin, which is still in use today. There were some attempts to fully replace hanzi with it, but that didn't end up happening.
Second, the reason China had mass illiteracy really wasn't cuz the Chinese writing system was too hard for most people to learn, it was cuz there had been no effort made to educate the people. Just like most of Europe used to be illiterate while using an alphabet.
Third, I think you are waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy off here: I think calling the Chinese writing system obtuse and elite is borderline chauvinism (or maybe not even borderline), though I don't want to accuse you of that and I assume was done out of ignorance and not malice. As an English speaker trying to learn Chinese, I think their writing system is one of the easier aspects of the language to learn, and I don't think it is deficient or inferior to western ways of writing in any way.
Did you actually read the text of the post, or just the title? Because I'm not challenging the use of Chinese characters, but asking what the CPC's reasoning was after the revolution when they desperately needed mass literacy as soon as possible. That's not a criticism: like I said, they succeeded in their mass literacy program. I was curious about why they chose the path they did, not second guessing them. I even offered my own guesses (that when you're doing a mass literacy program anyways you may as well shoot for full literacy rather than just the most basic ability to use written language, and that it would have been culturally and politically important to attain mass literacy in Chinese characters instead of abandoning their history and shooting for an easier new system) when asking what the actual history was.
As an English speaker trying to learn Chinese, I think their writing system is one of the easier aspects of the language to learn
But it does require education and study. That's the crux of it, that it requires more education to attain a baseline of usability than (true) phonetic systems (that don't have weird archaic features due being frozen at the time industrial mass printing really took off like English was) where someone can just sound out words (why hangul was created to replace Chinese characters in Korea, for example), even though once past that initial hurdle there's probably not much difference in total education required for full literate proficiency in either system.
That's also why logographic systems are historically an "elite" thing: they needed formal schooling, something that was restricted to more privileged classes basically everywhere on Earth; they're something difficult that the ruling classes valued and took pride in as something that set them apart from those they forced to be beneath them, which as I mentioned was also the direct catalyst for both emergences of alphabets, in ancient Egypt (to create something more accessible to clerks and tradesmen than the elite hieroglyphic system) and in 15th century Korea.
Note that's not the only time phonetic systems emerged, obviously, because abjads, syllabaries, and abugidas (I'm still not entirely clear on what distinguishes an abugida from a syllabary tbh) and whatever cuneiform was (just looked it up and apparently it included both logographic and syllabic systems) all showed up separately, it's just sort of funny that every alphabet is either derived from simplified Egyptian hieroglyphs or is hangul, and in both cases they came about as a response to needing something faster to teach than the dominant logographic systems they emerged under. Ok, and technically the vulgarized hieroglyphs were an abjad, and the Phoenician "alphabet" was also sort of an abjad as I understand it, but it developed into the alphabet that Latin and Greek scripts were derived from. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I'll just end it here.
I don't really agree with your premises. I don't think the writing system really that obtuse, intentionally or otherwise. Sure there's a lot of characters, but there's a lot of stuff you don't have to worry about compared to English. Think about all the special rules with pronunciation, like how "ti" can be pronounced as "sh" (as in "motion"), or how an e at the end changes vowel sounds except when it doesn't. English is full of exceptions and arbitrary, inconsistent rules like that that make it very difficult to learn, and you have to memorize correct spellings of words just as you'd have to memorize characters. The Chinese characters are also made of distinct components so you might see something with like 18 strokes but really you just have to remember like 4 components.
Is there an objective way to determine the difficulty of becoming literate in a given language, as a native speaker? I'd be interested in grounding this in evidence.
I don't think the writing system really that obtuse, intentionally or otherwise.
In a historical context it definitely is intentionally exclusionary compared to strictly phonetic systems, especially when one considers that phonetic writing was usually, well, phonetic and written rather arbitrarily based on how the writer thought it would sound - famously even personal names would get spelled differently by the same person because spelling wasn't a thing so they'd just be sounding it out as they wrote. It's only comparatively recent that "spelling" rules became a thing, with English for example being frozen at a point when it was phonetic and then kept static as the spoken language drifted.
I personally don't believe there's a meaningful difference in the education required for full literacy in a modern alphabetic language and full literacy in a logographic language, with the understanding that that education is over a decade of schooling and constant use*. But the education required to reach "can sound out a simple text and with effort write something legible" is much lower with phonetic systems. There's even a good example with Japanese in how kanji and hiragana are treated culturally: where it's expected that a literate person be able to use kanji, while writing phonetically in hiragana is looked down on as something children and poorly educated people do, similar to how writing English phonetically is legible but seen as childlike or a sign of poor education.
There's also the origin of hangul as a direct solution to the education requirements that Chinese characters posed: those needed formal schooling, while anyone could pick up enough hangul to use it almost immediately.
* For children. Despite the common belief that kids learn languages faster or easier than adults, it's actually the other way around: adults learn faster but spend less time learning and generally have less motivation to learn a new language, while children learn slowly but spend a massive amount of time learning (both formally and through constant immersion) and have a desperate need to learn in order to communicate and exist socially.
There's even a good example with Japanese in how kanji and hiragana are treated culturally: where it's expected that a literate person be able to use kanji, while writing phonetically in hiragana is looked down on as something children and poorly educated people do, similar to how writing English phonetically is legible but seen as childlike or a sign of poor education.
Speaking from experience, kanji can make things much easier to read. You can see a character and instantly know what it means as opposed to having to slow down and sound it out and try to figure out where words begin and end and which of the similarly pronounced words is being used.
Sure, just like it's easier for us to read formally spelled English (despite its idiosyncrasies and archaic features) over phonetically spelled English which is understandable but requires conscious effort. My point was just about how these are markers of education and full literacy: because of how much education and time gets spent learning written language that's not (at least purely) phonetic it's normal and accessible, while the pure phonetic spelling is seen as something uneducated, that it's what children who have just started learning to read and write do (or adults who never got to learn the formal system). Which obviously ties into the historical use of phonetic scripts that I talked about where they were used in haphazard and purely phonetic ways because that was what was attainable for the average user, even when even that level of literacy was still not particularly common.
I feel like if you asked them why they didn't replace one of the most commonly used languages on earth with something like what worst people in history use they would tell you to fuck off.
This seems gratuitously loaded when there are many good reasons to keep logographs, not the least of which being that Chinese text allows for easy communication among different sinitic languages whereas an alphabet would not, and dealing with China being huge and lacking a lot of useful infrastructure to overcome that hugeness was already a problem, so creating a crisis of communication by inventing a language barrier that meant Cantonese speakers can no longer read your writing seems like it would be a bad idea.
So you either create multiple alphabets for the several different languages and fracture the country further with deepened language barriers or you just eradicate everything that isn't Mandarin, which seems, uh, not cool.
