Simplified Chinese characters

Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters. Their widespread adoption during the 20th century was part of efforts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy. Today, they are the standard forms used in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore, while traditional characters are officially used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Simplification of Chinese script typically involves reducing a character's total stroke count or streamlining which strokes appear in a given component. By systematically simplifying radicals, large swaths of the character set are altered at once. Many simplifications were drawn from popular cursive forms, while variant characters with identical pronunciation and meaning were consolidated into a single standardized form, usually the simplest available. Many characters were left untouched and are thus identical in both orthographies. The PRC government has never officially declared the simplification process complete. A second round of simplified characters, promulgated in 1977 in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, was largely composed of artificial new variants designed to reduce stroke counts rather than drawing on existing cursive forms. It proved unpopular and confusing before being retracted in 1986. In 2013, China's State Council implemented the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters, listing 8,105 characters including a small number of revised forms.