Comment by contingencies

One of the amusing 20th century historical anecdotes which I am constantly pointing out to mainland Chinese is that the lauded literary figure Lu Xun of Shaoxing actually advocated for the replacement of written Chinese with an alphabetic/romanized writing system based on phonetic transposition. China then invented pinyin, which is a relatively well conceived and elegant system, but refused to support the replacement of characters and instead advocated for "simplified" characters (which are approximately as hard as the originals, but provide a convenient cultural gap). While Lu Xun is now taught in all mainland Chinese schools, they conveniently leave out the part where he advocated for leaving characters in the past. His primary argument was the years wasted on rote learning that Chinese students require as a precondition to literacy.