As one of the four ancient civilizations, China has a history and culture of more than 5,000 years. Besides some excellent spiritual connotations and ethics of right and wrong, the most important thing is Chinese character culture. From everyday language to the introduction of famous articles, it is inseparable from Chinese characters to express. As one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world, Chinese has many cultural connotations behind it. What we are talking about today is the academic uproar caused by a slogan in the May 4th period during the evolution of Chinese characters. Chinese characters almost withdrew from the historical stage because of this incident.
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Due to the corruption and incompetence of the Qing government in the old society, the imperialist powers oppressed and exploited China people endlessly. China people, who have been in a passive position, have to start to reflect on whether their backwardness is the reason. After careful consideration and discussion, finally, some elites in China came to the conclusion that "China is backward because the old traditional culture has blocked the way forward". Chinese characters have existed since ancient times and are regarded as an ancient traditional culture. If China wants to make better progress, it will abolish Chinese characters.
The slogan "Chinese characters die, China dies" was widely circulated during the May 4th Movement. This idea may seem incredible now, but people at that time stubbornly regarded it as the most important reason. 191920s, after a group of patriotic new cultural elites blamed the backwardness of the country on Chinese characters, they launched a series of discussions on how to abolish Chinese characters and what to replace them after abolition.
At that time, because of the war, many families couldn't even eat, let alone read and write, so the number of illiterate people in that year was only much higher. The proposal to abolish Chinese characters and replace them with pinyin or westernization has won the support of all walks of life. The number of people who support the abolition of Chinese characters is also increasing.
On the question of what to replace Chinese characters, some people put forward the suggestion of keeping pace with the west. Changing all the complicated strokes into simple letters will definitely greatly reduce the illiteracy rate after easy recognition. This suggestion was very popular at that time. In addition to the people's livelihood cry, there is a very important reason, that is, many China scholars agree. Such as money, Qu Qiubai and others. As a result, the standard of 193 1, "Latinization of Chinese characters" was formally determined under the trend of the times, and the Chinese character culture that has been circulating for thousands of years officially ushered in a crisis.
Those who support it will definitely have objections, among which Zhao Yuanren is the most famous team that supports the protection of China's traditional culture. Zhao Yuanren was born in Tianjin on 1892. He is a descendant of the famous poet Zhao Yi. The environment is superior and the talent is extraordinary, which can be said to be a genius at that time. In Zhao Yuanren's view, every Chinese character has its own story, and no Chinese character is redundant.
As a loyal Chinese language researcher, his feelings for Chinese characters are also different from ordinary people. In order to resist the trend that Zhai Qiubai replaced Chinese characters with Pinyin at that time, he wrote many homophone stories that can reflect the profound Chinese character culture, among which Shi's History of Eating Lions is particularly famous. In this article, all the short 96 words have the same pronunciation, but the meaning of each sentence is quite different. People who read the article can't help but marvel. And the performance effect of this kind of culture and art is beyond the reach of Pinyin.
Obviously, Zhao Yuanren has seriously hurt the face of Latin Chinese character theory with only one short article. Zhai Qiubai's method is very simple, but it will collapse one day without a solid historical background. In this way, Zhao Yuanren suppressed the prevailing ideological wave of abolishing Chinese characters with a strange article full of homophones.
1958, in order to eliminate illiteracy and let people know Chinese characters better, simpler and more intuitively. Promulgated the "Chinese Pinyin Scheme". In this program, the combination of Chinese characters and pinyin makes it easier for more people to understand, which has a great positive impact on the literacy movement.
Conclusion:
Language is not only a tool for a country or a nation to communicate, but also a carrier of culture. Culture is the soul of a country and a nation. There is no country without history and culture. It is precisely because the rise and fall of writing is related to the lifeblood of national development that its success or failure cannot be generalized.