There has been a lot of discussion whether a phonetic alphabet or syllabary would be more
convenient to record Chinese writing than its traditional symbols (characters). During the
1950's, China was undergoing significant economic and cultural changes, in the course of which
the necessity of the simplification of Chinese writing was also debated. Below is an excerpt
from the opinion of Chen Mengjia, one of the major scholars in the field of the history of Chinese
writing. In the following passage, Chen is trying to answer the question whether Chinese
writing was defective as it was in 1957.
"What are the disadvantages of Chinese writing? In the past, foreign devils said the Chinese language was not good. Today, progressive scholars in capitalist countries do not believe anymore that Chinese language is defective...
"If we decide to convert to phonetic writing we must join multiple-character words together and indicate tones, otherwise we cannot write precisely. Li Jinxi wrote his diary using the national phonetic alphabet and after some time he could not read what he had wrote himself. However, he is always able to read letters written in Chinese, regardless of the form of characters he used.
"Phonetic writing must indicate tones. At first, I could not learn how to do this myself. In the Cantonese dialect there are eight tones, converting them to the four tones of the standard Mandarin would create problems.
"Spreading the use of the Mandarin as the standard spoken language is beneficial for standardizing the Chinese language. But while this sounds easy in theory, it can be a difficult task in practice. Those who advocate this standardization have been studying the lofty and profound theories of phonology for years. Still, with the exception of Mr. Luo Changpei, none of these scholars speaks Mandarin well. Li Jinxi, Lu Zhiwei, Wei Jiangong, and Lu Shuxiang still use their own dialect in speech.
