ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses both aspects with a focus on the process and outcome of the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) script reform. Script simplification under the PRC government incorporated work along two major dimensions: reducing the number of strokes within characters and downsizing and standardizing the overall inventory of characters. Although modern efforts to simplify the Chinese script did not come to fruition until the PRC's writing reform in the second half of the 20th century, they began about half a century before and had a significant impact on the reform. By the time when the PRC government on the Mainland had successfully implemented their script reform, the issue of character simplification quickly became politicized for Taiwan. The PRC government pushed forward their writing reform and published an official list of simplified characters in 1956. Singapore implemented script simplification of its own in 1969, but in 1974, the country officially adopted the PRC’s version of simplified script.
