alternatehistory.com

When Mao and the CCP were doing the whole crush the old ways, one of the things that they did was to try and simplify the traditional characters by lowering the stroke count and striping a lot of the meaning from the characters. However, the original plan was to just do away with the characters and strokes and replace the writing system with the latin alphabet Pinyin. However, it was quickly deemed impractical due to massive disruption it would bring, and the many homophones and dialects that the language has.

So, what would have been the effects if in a revolutionary zeal, Mao orders the replacement of traditional characters with Pinyin. problems be damned.
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