Festival/conference on Chinese characters

Arts & Sciences Culture & History
1

Taipei is going to host the “2004 Taipei Chinese character festival.” This begins with various exhibitions and children’s activities but will conclude with the International Academic Conference on Chinese Characters and Globalization, to be held January 28-30 at the National Library.

According to Liao Hsien-hao (寥咸浩), the head of Taipei’s Cultural Affairs Bureau and one of the main people behind Taipei’s adoption of Hanyu Pinyin:

[quote]the most important task for the conference was to identify and discuss the threats facing the Chinese writing system. Scholars and professionals from various fields will discuss the status of Chinese characters in the “Confucian sphere of influence,” which extends throughout East and Southeast Asia. Although Japan is the only non-Chinese society that still uses Chinese characters in its writing system, both Korean and Vietnamese were written using Chinese (or Chinese-based) characters in the recent past.

What are the benefits or drawbacks of switching to Latin or phonetic scripts (as Korea and Vietnam) did or simplifying characters as China has? As the Chinese script that can be used to write very different languages, it has historically been a symbol of China’s will to unite and rule “all under heaven.” But in today’s very different world, is the use of this ancient script still practical or meaningful?[/quote]
I suspect this conference is not going to be as probing as this article makes it sound. But I could be wrong. I’ll be out of the country then, so I won’t be able to find out in person.

2

I wonder why the Conference organizers don’t address such practical problems as:
(1) Establishing one standard format for the printed Chinese page (i.e. either left to right, right to left, or whatever … )
(2) Establishing one PRIMARY ordering system for Chinese character data
(3) Simplifying all characters over a certain “stroke-count”, etc.

3

[quote=“Hartzell”]I wonder why the Conference organizers don’t address such practical problems as:
(1) Establishing one standard format for the printed Chinese page (i.e. either left to right, right to left, or whatever … )
(2) Establishing one PRIMARY ordering system for Chinese character data
(3) Simplifying all characters over a certain “stroke-count”, etc.[/quote]

I don’t understand how any of these matters can be considered “practical problems”. Could you elaborate?

4

God I get sick of hearing about how beautiful Chinese characters are. Would it be such a sacrilege to admit that a lot of the time they are pretty ugly. In the article that cranky laowai posted for example there is that large white canvas with that sloppy mess scrawled across it. What nonsense to call that art. A drunk monkey could do better. And then there are all those mechanical looking characters you see on signs all over the place. Really difficult for me to see any beauty there. What is beautiful quite frequently is the way that Chinese characters are sometimes written by your average Joe or Jane with a pen.