Character Writing Dysfunctional?

Modern Chinese literacy depends on alphabetic scaffolding (pinyin, input systems, predictive text), yet characters are still surrounded by an almost ancient reverence. Why? 1. Deep Cultural Memory: Characters as Civilizational Core From the Han dynasty onward, Chinese literati framed writing as sacred: characters were not just tools but embodiments of order, cosmology, and tradition. This view was institutionalized through Confucian education, calligraphy, and state examinations. To write characters was to participate in civilization itself. That reverence is a cultural reflex with over 2,000 years of inertia. It doesn’t vanish just because modern literacy is scaffolded by alphabets. 2. Characters as Identity in a Globalized World In the 20th century, China faced the risk of being “swallowed” by Westernization. Characters became symbols of survival: unique, untranslatable, unassimilable. Abandoning them would have been seen as cultural self-erasure. Today, the soft power dimension amplifies this: characters are marketed as “mystical,” “artistic,” “ancient” — something no alphabet can rival in terms of global branding. 3. The Alphabet as a Hidden Prosthetic Pinyin is used daily (typing, teaching pronunciation, indexing), but it is invisible in public consciousness. It’s a scaffolding: necessary, but not acknowledged as equal. Once the character is chosen, the scaffolding disappears. This allows the illusion that literacy is “still in characters,” even though the actual mechanism of literacy has shifted to a hybrid model. 4. Reverence Sustained by Taboo Criticizing characters = criticizing the cultural essence of China. Even though everyone knows handwriting is collapsing (提笔忘字), nobody frames this as proof of the system’s dysfunction. Instead it is cast as a moral failing of individuals (“kids don’t study hard enough”), not of the script. This taboo preserves reverence while hiding dependence on alphabetic infrastructure. 5. A Kind of “Civilizational Doublethink” On one level, modern Chinese are perfectly aware they rely on pinyin input, spell things alphabetically in daily life (from URLs to brand names), and even teach English from childhood. On another level, they hold characters as beyond critique, icons of cultural pride. The reverence, then, is less about functionality and more about performing continuity: characters anchor the past in the present, even if the actual functioning literacy system has been quietly modernized. So: Alphabet = hidden skeleton (functional, pragmatic, never glorified). Characters = skin and face (sacred, aesthetic, revered). That’s why the reverence persists: it’s not about how people really write or read, but about what characters symbolize — China’s own story of itself.