Characters at hand
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We've been discussing simplified characters, both official and unofficial (believe you me, they're all out there). They come and go as people find them useful or not. This is one thing that makes characters very different from alphabets and syllabaries. The latter two types of writing systems tend to settle down to a more or less fixed number of elements / letters / symbols (generally around 50-100 symbols for a syllabary and 20-40 or so for an alphabet, whereas morphosyllabographic / logographic writing systems tend to keep burgeoning out of control if they are a living, functioning script.
For one reason or another, governments may seek to limit the numbers of graphs in their national writing system within manageable limits, but, if they're morphosyllabographic / logographic, they never seem to settle down to a stable limit, instead just keep growing and growing.
Individuals may create / modify hanzi for personal, idiosyncratic reasons, but if these new / altered graphs are not in some manner "standardized", others who read them may not understand what they've written. The same is true for "shēngpì zì 生僻字" ("obscure characters") they may have dug up out of who knows where. Such rare, esoteric characters may have historical precedents dating back a thousand or more years, but may never have been used once in the intervening centuries.
When the writing system becomes too clogged with such uncommon, even bizarre, characters, the government may outlaw them for official purposes, but they still exist in specialized lexica, a few old texts, etc.
Another way to keep the blood flowing in the scriptal circulatory system is for the people to take matters into their own hands, as it were, and resort to what are called "shǒutóu zì 手头字" ("characters at hand"), bypassing the authorities altogether. That is to say, they use ad hoc characters without seeking the sanction of the government.
As a teacher and scholar of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, I am not a fan of the simplified characters. Yet, for contemporary Chinese Studies, they are a fact of life, so I have no choice but to use them when discussing matters related to the People's Republic of China, where they constitute the official writing system. My peeve is that, inasmuch as the PRC simplified thousands of characters, I can't understand why they didn't also simplify the jiāng 疆 of Xīnjiāng 新疆. Since I spent about twenty years of my life travelling extensively in that part of the world and having to write that character by hand countless times, I actually grew to detest it. Not only does it have 19 strokes (some people count it as having even more strokes), they are arrayed in such a way that they are very troublesome to write clearly (you have to pick your pen up many times, cross other strokes carefully, make numerous angular strokes, and so on). It's so time consuming and annoying to have to write jiāng 疆 that many people (even on signs) simply substitute the simple, homophonous, 6-stroke character jiāng 江 ("river") for it. And while they were at it, why didn't they simplify jiē 街 ("street"), which people often have to write when noting down addresses? And wǔ 舞 ("dance"). And hundreds of other troublesome, relatively high frequency characters of this sort? All of them have informal abbreviated forms, but the character police and teachers will penalize you if you use them in a public setting, in school, and so on. (See "A confusion of languages and names" [7/8/16].)
Sometimes, if enough people come together and agree to this sort of cauterization of useless or inefficient symbols in the writing system, it might amount to a movement, whether formal or informal. This happened with the "shǒutóu zì 手头字" ("characters at hand") mentioned above.
Here's a newspaper article about their promotion well before 1949:
Shíshì xīnbào 時事新報 (The China Times) (July 22, 1932)
If you click here, you can see that a number of celebrities in the cultural circles of the day endorsed this "progressive movement". These are really big names:
Cài Yuánpéi 蔡元培，
Lǎo Shě 老舍
Bā Jīn 巴金
Yù Dáfū 郁達夫
Zhāng Tiānyì 張天翼
Yè Shèngtáo 葉聖陶
Táo Xíngzhī 陶行知
Xià Miǎnzūn 夏丏尊
Zhū Zìqīng 朱自清
From these links, you can get more information. I note that some 40 newspaper reports / articles can be found and heartily recommend this as a good topic for students to write a paper, thesis, or dissertation.
Incidentally, I like the name "shǒutóu zì 手头字" ("characters at hand") very much. It gives a sense of the spontaneity and immediacy that these characters evoke
Selected readings
- "Unofficial simplified characters" (10/18/25)
- "Simplified characters defeat traditional characters in Ireland" (8/9/21)
- "National Security Law eclipses Hong Kong" (6/2/20)
- "Hong Kong: language, art, and resistance" (5/24/20)
- "Eruption over simplified vs. traditional characters in Hong Kong" (2/24/16)
- "Simplified vs. Complex / Traditional" (4/23/09)
- "Simplified Bomb" (6/9/09)
- "'Chinese — Traditional'" (1/30/11)
- "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13)
- "The vocabulary of traditional Chinese thought and culture" (6/13/21)
[Thanks to a long-time Language Log reader]