During a chat this past June 9th with a visiting group of overseas compatriots, conversation turned to the ongoing controversy in overseas compatriot communities about whether to teach orthodox or simplified Chinese characters. I suggested that even in mainland China, where people write simplified characters, it would still be worthwhile for them to know how to read orthodox characters. This suggestion sparked a highly polarized debate within society at large. I would like to explain in a bit more detail about why I think it would be good if more people from mainland China, even after over 50 years of writing simplified characters, could recognize orthodox characters.

1. Why I care about the state of the Chinese language

Some are sure to ask why I should care about the state of the Chinese language. My answer is very simple. First, Chinese is the official language of our nation, and I am a long-time user of Chinese. Second, I am the president of the Republic of China. And third, I am the chairman of the National Cultural Association. In each of these three capacities, I have an unshirkable duty to preserve and develop Chinese culture. And there is an inextricable link between written language and culture. Promoting the use of orthodox characters wherever there are ethnic Chinese populations is an integral part of the effort to preserve Chinese culture.

After mainland China entered the United Nations in 1971, the UN adopted simplified Chinese as its official Chinese script. Simplified characters have been gaining increased acceptance for over 30 years, and are now used by more than 1.3 billion people. By comparison, only a minority of Chinese speakers use orthodox characters. Users of orthodox characters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas compatriot communities together number less than 40 million. For every user of orthodox characters, there are 33 who use simplified. And over half of those using orthodox characters are in Taiwan. For this reason, Taiwan plays a decisive role in maintaining the use of orthodox characters. We simply must not sell ourselves short on this point, or neglect the tremendous responsibility we bear to preserve Chinese culture. In the publishing industry, a total of 45,445 new titles were published in Taiwan in 2007, as compared to 136,226 in mainland China. Despite having 57 times our population, they only published three times as many titles, so Taiwan's influence within the Chinese-speaking world is out of proportion to the size of its population. Orthodox characters have been used in Chinese society for the past 2,000 years. For anyone who would seek a strong grounding in traditional Chinese culture, simplified characters cannot replace the orthodox forms. If we can encourage more people from mainland China to learn to recognize and use orthodox characters, it will deepen their familiarity with Chinese culture and strengthen mutual understanding across the Taiwan Strait, especially given the growing strength of cross-strait ties today. Moreover, Taiwan's cultural and creative industry would find it easier to make inroads into mainland Chinese markets. All these things would be beneficial to Taiwan.

2. Calls in the mainland to do away with simplified characters

Simplified characters have become the global standard over the past few years, yet in the very place where they were born over half a century ago, more and more intellectuals have begun to advocate an end to the use of simplified characters.

When the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee (CPPCC) met in March of last year, Song Zuying, Guan Mucun, and 19 other cultural luminaries sitting on the CPPCC signed a proposal to have elementary school students learn orthodox Chinese characters. Then in March of this year, at the same venues once again, Pan Qinglin and a number of other CPPCC members formally submitted the proposal, and put forward three main supporting arguments. The proposal called for the mainland authorities to phase out simplified characters over a ten-year period and go back to orthodox characters. In fact, people that pay attention to cross-strait cultural issues are aware that more and more mainland Chinese intellectuals have publicly advocated doing away with simplified characters and resuming the use of orthodox forms. The list of those supporting such a move spans many different generations, and includes Professor Ji Xianlin of Peking University (a noted linguist and the only surviving member of the Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written Language of 1956), Dr. Li Jingyi (a renowned professor of sinology from Wuhan University), and authors such as Wang Gan and Er Yue He. The idea of returning to orthodox characters is a hot topic on the Internet in mainland China. In an opinion poll carried out by the mainland Chinese search engine Sohu, 41% of all respondents supported "doing away with simplified characters," while 54% were opposed. And mainland authorities responsible for the Chinese writing system have also begun to show some signs of interest in the question. Discussions of the possibility of doing away with simplified characters have been more frequent and showed more depth in recent years than at any other time since they were adopted in 1956.

3. The advantages of orthodox characters

I have always attached a very special importance to orthodox characters. The subject first really entered my consciousness when I became involved with mainland affairs work over 20 years ago. Then after I took office as mayor of Taipei ten years ago, my interest in this question intensified, and I began taking frequent concrete steps to address it. I do not approach this matter from a political perspective, however. It is just something that I care about from the standpoint of culture.

As Taipei mayor, in May of 2002 I instructed the Taipei City Department of Education to send out letters to all city government agencies, schools, and private-sector computer firms to ask them to refer to "traditional" characters in Chinese as "正體字" [i.e. "orthodox characters"] rather than "繁體字" [i.e. "complex characters"], since the latter term has a negative connotation. This marked the beginning of a long-term project to promote "orthodox characters" as the proper way to refer to traditional characters. In the years following, the city government issued a number of proposals, position papers, and plans to promote the use of this more positive-sounding term. In 2004 I personally helped to write the Taipei City Government Position Paper on the Use of 'Orthodox Characters' for Referring to Traditional Characters. The Taipei City Department of Education then printed 3,000 copies of the position paper. And in 2006 the Department of Education further printed 8,000 copies of the Taipei City Government's Efforts to Promote Use of the Term 'Orthodox Characters' to Refer to Traditional Characters. In the meantime, in October 2004 I personally visited Microsoft Taiwan and gave a speech there on this subject. While at the company, I suggested that in their Chinese version of the Windows operating system they should discontinue their use of the term "complex characters" and start referring instead to "orthodox characters."

Why am I so concerned about what term we use? Confucius long ago gave the answer to that question: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." The Chinese characters handed down to us over the past 2,000 years are orthodox Chinese characters. No one ever added a single stroke to them, and using them is not a complex matter, so why should we tag them with the negatively nuanced "complex characters" appellation? The term "orthodox characters," on the other hand, suggests that the characters are "standard," "true to tradition," and "the real thing," as opposed to written forms that are "variant," "popular versions," or "simplified." The word "orthodox" is not weighed down by any value judgment whatsoever, either positive or negative. After the efforts of the past few years, the term "Taiwan orthodox characters" has begun to be used throughout the Chinese-speaking world both in the mass media and on the Internet, and support for their use is on the rise.

4. Seeking World Heritage status for orthodox characters

The Taipei City Government held the 1st Chinese Character Festival in 2005, inviting scholars, writers, calligraphers, and artists to celebrate the beauty, utility, and contemporary significance of orthodox Chinese characters. As of this writing, Taipei City has now held the festival five times. During the first festival we held an international conference on Chinese characters and globalization. During the second festival we held a conference focusing on the debate over the use of orthodox or simplified characters, and over this past Chinese New Year I took part at the invitation of the Taipei City Government in a big calligraphy event at the 5th Chinese Character Festival, where I wrote out two Chinese characters: 漢 (Han) and 安 (peace). Mainland China's simplified characters are now the official Chinese script of the United Nations, so Liao Hsien-hao, then the director of the Taipei City Cultural Affairs Department (and now a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at National Taiwan University) suggested that I think about applying to the United Nations to obtain World Heritage status for orthodox Chinese characters. He said this would be a means of preserving Chinese culture. I was very much in favor of this idea. After I took office as president, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan and Ovid Tzeng, a Minister without Portfolio in charge of cultural affairs, also indicated support for the proposal. Dr. Tzeng is now working on plans to submit an application. We may want to address this topic in future cross-strait talks, so that some other nation in East Asia doesn't beat us to the punch.

In addition, as mayor of Taipei I instructed the Taipei City Department of Transportation to use orthodox characters in brochures on Taipei that are provided to tourists from mainland China. I did that not because I'm uncomfortable with simplified characters. Rather, it simply seemed to me that since these people have decided to visit Taiwan, they ought to understand Taiwan, and Taiwan is, after all, the most populous place on earth where orthodox characters are used. Our decision to use orthodox characters in the brochures gave them more opportunities to come in natural contact with orthodox characters. However, they were also our guests, so we also needed to come up with some way to help them in cases where they really couldn't understand the orthodox characters. That is why we also printed up comparison tables showing orthodox and simplified characters side-by-side. We gave them out to mainland tourists, and they were very appreciative of this approach. Since I became president, the Tourism Bureau has also begun to print out the same kind of comparison table.

5. "Simpler variants on orthodox characters" vs. "simplified characters"

The non-orthodox characters used in mainland China are generally referred to in Chinese as "jian ti zi [簡體字]," but I have always felt that most of them should actually be called "jian hua zi [簡化字]." The only characters that can properly be referred to as "jian ti zi" are those in a set of 324 characters adopted by the Nationalist government's Ministry of Education in 1935. These "jian ti zi" characters are all simpler variants on orthodox characters, and have been widely used in society at large for a very long time, in some cases since the Song Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.). Because I prefer to define "jian ti zi" in this way, I would refer to them in English as "simpler variants on orthodox characters" rather than "simplified characters." The characters adopted by mainland China in 1956, by contrast, are indeed "simplified" versions of orthodox characters, created by taking the 324 "jian ti zi" of 1935 and going a step further with the simplification process. The great majority of the 2,288 characters on today's publicly announced list of simplified characters are "jian hua zi," i.e. "simplified characters," not "jian ti zi." The "jian hua zi" used today in mainland China are a superset of the "jian ti zi" that arose naturally over the course of time, but we still see a need to make a distinction between "jian hua zi" and "jian ti zi" because "jian ti zi" were already in popular use for centuries before the mainland China designed and adopted its "jian hua zi." These latter have only been in use for a bit over five decades. There is a difference.

6. The cultural function of orthodox characters

In calling once again for people to learn orthodox characters, we are doing something of great cultural significance. The language we call "Mandarin" did not even exist in China until the 1920s. Orthodox characters once enabled communication among Chinese people whose spoken languages were often mutually unintelligible. The written language functioned as a vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture across time and space. More recently, the resurgence of mainland China has triggered a wave of interest throughout the world in the study of Chinese. It is estimated that some 30 million people around the globe are now studying Chinese as a second language. Mainland China has opened 260 Confucius Institutes and 67 Confucius Classrooms throughout the world to teach Chinese to foreigners. However, most of those studying Chinese overseas have been learning simplified characters and ignoring orthodox characters. As a result, many people have been deprived of the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture via orthodox characters. After embarking upon the policy of reform and opening-up 30 years ago, the mainland Chinese authorities departed sharply from the Cultural Revolutionary bias against traditional Chinese culture. This shift has been gratifying, to be sure, but it is unfortunate that they haven't also considered resuming the use of orthodox characters.

In actual fact, nearly 90 percent of all orthodox characters are picto-phonetic and therefore easier for either Chinese or foreigners to learn than simplified characters, which require rote memorization. Learning orthodox characters constitutes a key step toward understanding traditional Chinese culture. Anyone with the ability to read Chinese can directly appreciate all the best of our 5,000 years of culture, and can commune with the most brilliant minds from the past via our history, poetry, prose, language, and thought. What a beautiful thing that is! On June 4th this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) and mainland China's State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine held a joint press conference to announce the release of the WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region, in which 3,543 terms from Chinese medicine are translated into English. They went with orthodox characters throughout. So why didn't they use simplified characters? Because practitioners of traditional Japanese, South Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uighur medicine, all of which have been deeply influenced by traditional Chinese medicine, use simplified Chinese character sets that do not match the simplifications adopted in mainland China. The experts finally decided to use orthodox characters for the sake of uniformity. As far as I know, this may be the first time since mainland China joined the United Nations in 1971 that any UN document has made large-scale use of orthodox Chinese characters. The UN has adopted simplified characters as its official Chinese script, yet for the sake of professional considerations and the need for globalization, the WHO and the mainland Chinese authorities still decided in this case to break with precedent. They are to be commended for this decision. What they did provides convincing proof that study of orthodox characters is necessary in order to understand traditional Chinese culture.

7. Why mainland China might want to promote a reading knowledge of orthodox characters

When I suggested on June 9th that mainland China promote the ability to read orthodox characters, my main thought was that there ought to be some change in policy on language in mainland China so that more people there can develop a direct understanding of their own history and culture. At the conferences held during Taipei's Chinese Character Festivals in 2005 and 2006, participants from both Taiwan and mainland China reached a general consensus on the advisability of "writing in simplified characters while maintaining a reading knowledge of orthodox forms." More recently the same basic idea has been formulated in mainland China, and some have called for a critical second look at simplified characters with the aim of eliminating certain types of simplifications that have introduced confusion into the language. Others think it would be a good idea to include comparison tables in the backs of elementary school textbooks showing orthodox and simplified characters side-by-side. Still others advocate resuming the use of orthodox characters at historic sites, in classical poetry, and in museum displays. All of these ideas are very workable and constructive, and deserve serious consideration. Education was not so widely available in mainland China over 50 years ago, which is why there was so much illiteracy at that time. The authorities back then felt that switching to simplified characters would eliminate illiteracy. Setting aside the question of how much this switch has contributed to the elimination of illiteracy over the past 50 years, the fact is that mainland China now has a literacy rate of 91% (versus 98% in Taiwan). Illiteracy is no longer such an urgent problem on either side of the Taiwan Strait, so the main advantage of simplified characters now is only that they can be written faster, but a high percentage of writing today is done on computers, and the speed of keyboard input is the same either way, so there doesn't appear to be any clearly pressing need to teach children simplified characters.

Of course, it would not be easy for mainland China to resume the use of orthodox characters after having used simplified for over 50 years, but orthodox characters could be phased in gradually, starting first by eliminating certain simplified characters that tend to cause confusion, and beginning to use orthodox characters in some printed materials. Or they could make widespread use of orthodox/simplified comparison tables to help people gradually get used to orthodox characters. After a period of time, orthodox characters could be used across the board in printed materials. But when it comes to writing characters by hand, people could still be free to write simplified characters. That is what I mean when I speak of "writing in simplified characters while maintaining a reading knowledge of orthodox forms."

8. Taiwan need not promote simplified characters

Students in Taiwan have always studied Chinese using orthodox characters, which has given our people a stronger grounding in Chinese culture than their counterparts anywhere else in the Chinese-speaking world. Mainland scholars who visit Taiwan are frequently impressed by the ability of young students in Taiwan to read classical literature, and express praise for the strong grasp of culture displayed by the people of Taiwan. We should appreciate the advantage we have in this area, and nurture it. Where our orthodox characters are concerned, there is no need to change a thing. We need not make any special effort to teach simplified characters, because many of them we already use frequently as simpler variants on orthodox characters. All we need in order to figure out the remaining simplified characters is a comparison table of the two written forms.

In the 20-odd years since cross-strait ties were established, people from Taiwan have made tens of millions of trips to mainland China, and people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait have discovered that is easy for a user of orthodox characters to recognize simplified forms, but more difficult the other way around. That is why Taiwan does not need to make any special effort to deal with simplified characters. Some people, noting my suggestion that people in mainland China write in simplified characters while maintaining a reading knowledge of orthodox forms, have jumped to the conclusion that I am advocating the use of simplified characters in Taiwan, but nothing could be further from the truth, as I've explained in this essay. Premier Liu Chao-shiuan has always attached great importance to orthodox characters. Just last week he said to me that he had never seen another politician who cared as much as I do about orthodox characters, and that it seemed the height of irony that some should mistakenly believe I was pushing for adoption of simplified characters in Taiwan. I must make one thing perfectly clear here: "writing in simplified characters while maintaining a reading knowledge of orthodox forms" is a suggestion directed toward the mainland, not Taiwan. There is no need for it in Taiwan.

9. Chinese characters as a vehicle of cross-strait exchange

The study of orthodox characters carries with it great significance on many different levels. We learn characters more efficiently, and in the process become familiar with the history of our written language while acquiring a stronger grounding in our culture. We develop cultural creativity, and a deeper connection to East Asian civilization. And it can simply be a matter of enjoying aesthetic beauty. Cross-strait relations have improved a lot over the past year. We have signed nine cross-strait agreements, but they focus primarily on transportation, business, trade, and law enforcement. In the future we ought to pay more attention to culture and education. The divergence between our Chinese characters is an issue that both sides must face, and in fact it provides an excellent point of departure for cross-strait interaction. The recent controversy within intellectual circles in mainland China over the idea of abolishing simplified characters has created a historic opportunity for a critical reappraisal.

When I was campaigning for the presidency two years ago I issued a white paper on cultural policy in which I proposed the compilation of a cross-strait Chinese dictionary in a project to be carried out by non-governmental participants from the two sides. The dictionary would show how Chinese characters and expressions have diverged over the past 60 years, and would spur increased cross-strait cultural exchange. A cross-strait conference on culture will take place next month in Changsha, Hunan Province, and it should be a good opportunity to discuss the issue of orthodox and simplified characters. I hope that more and more experts with a concern for the development of the Chinese language will get involved in a serious, even-tempered, fact-driven dialogue on this important subject.

These are just a few thoughts that I wanted to share with everyone out there who cares about Chinese culture and the future of Chinese characters.