Writing is the greatest strength of a nation and an important inheritance in culture. However, Lu Xun's sentence makes people look very "eye-catching": "Chinese characters do not perish, China will die", why did Lu Xun say this? Let's first understand the background at that time.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, both Opium Wars ended in defeat, and the Eight-Power Alliance invaded Beijing; then, the Sino-Japanese War was also lost to Japan, a series of unequal treaties, just the gold and silver owed, the Qing court even if it emptied the treasury several times.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the cabinet was in chaos, and the biggest "danger" during the Republic of China period was illiterate people, who were as illiterate as high as 80%. In this context, Lu Xun understood better than anyone how powerful the power of words was. But as many as eighty percent of illiterates, they do not even have the ability to read, in order to change people's spirits in a short period of time, where is it so easy to break this situation?
In 1918, Lu Xun discussed with several friends in the literary circles in Beijing, hoping to find a breakthrough and change the status quo for these illiterates. They think the reason why there are so many illiterate people is because Chinese is really too difficult. In the past, the structure of Chinese characters was very complex, unlike the current simplified characters, which were unified and standardized.
In addition, the dialects of various places are a state in which no one obeys anyone, and even pinyin does not have a standardized standard, people have no rules when learning, and rote memorization is even more difficult.
Therefore, Lu Xun, Hu Shi and other intellectual elites in the literary circles decided that if they wanted to change such a situation, they should start from two aspects: First, Hu Shi launched the vernacular literature movement, calling on people not to read the whole text so that others could not understand it and could not understand its meaning; second, the Chinese character reform movement, represented by Qian Xuantong, Zhao Yuanren, Cai Yuanpei and others.
Later, Lu Xun recalled: In 1913, the Ministry of Education wanted to make letters, Mr. Lao photographed a representative surnamed Wu, Mr. Wang personally came, in order to enter the problem of waste, Wu Wang and the two gentlemen fought, the battle made Mr. Wu's stomach a hollow, and the cotton pants also fell.
It can be seen that at the "pronunciation of the same meeting" that year, the representatives of the two sides of the north and the south quarreled bitterly, and they all felt that their dialect was the "right lord", and Lu Xun also participated in this conference.
Lu Xun and others replaced those difficult to understand texts with vernacular characters that were easy to learn and understood at a glance. Only by reducing the probability of illiteracy and raising the level of literacy can we talk about other things. For this practice, linguists also feel that Lu Xun is not wrong. Lu Xun knows very well that Chinese characters are important to people, and if they are changed, they will also bring harm to Chinese culture.
"If Chinese characters do not perish, China will perish", these eight big characters are prominently written in the book "Lu Xun on Language Reform". Don't look at how easy it is to speak Mandarin now, how simple it is to see Chinese characters, if you change it to the people of that year, it will be even more difficult to read and write.