Some Critical Issues

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, we have looked in some detail at the development of the major episodes in modernizing the Chinese writing system. This chapter draws together and describes three seemingly disparate but essentially interactive threads: the revised interest in expanding areas of pinyin; the possibility of further simplification by bringing some of the banned traditional characters back for technological convenience; and hanzi unification in cyberspace with other hanzi-using polities. These issues have been touched on briefly in previous chapters, and the repetition of that information here would serve no purpose, nor do we wish to rehearse the many arguments and debates that have already been discussed and understood. Rather we wish to highlight some outstanding critical issues that have ebbed and flowed as elements of successive movements in recent history, affording us an opportunity to reflect on them in depth from a broader perspective. These are also issues that may need to be addressed as part of the approach to standardization proposed in the previous chapter.