Would literacy rate in China be this high today without simplified Characters?

Berkeley2017

Simplified Characters were introduced in an effort to make it easier to improve Chinese literacy rates. If China stuck to traditional characters, could China still achieve the literacy rates it has today by TTL's 2017?
 

Nivek

Berkeley2017 said:
Simplified Characters were introduced in an effort to make it easier to improve Chinese literacy rates. If China stuck to traditional characters, could China still achieve the literacy rates it has today by TTL's 2017?
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Possible might be the same, are not ideograms too, maybe adopting a more simplify alphabet might work better?(either latin or Cyrilic?)
 

Arkenfolm

Well, Japanese still shares a few characters with the traditional Chinese characters, and in general Japanese shinjitai simplifies less than simplified Chinese.

But as a Westerner who knows a bit of CKJV characters, I doubt it would have much of an impact on literacy rates as long as the education system is functioning.

The biggest issue to me is writing the traditional characters by hand, which is a pain in the ass because of how many strokes they have. I'm speaking of handwriting some of the aforementioned Japanese kanji which Chinese simplified, it's quite a pain, literally. But I don't think people who have weak hands like me when handwriting would affect literacy much, but who knows what the butterflies might do.
 

samcster94

Banned
Berkeley2017 said:
Taiwan's pretty small though and had a head start in development due to Japan's rule.
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True, indeed(HK and Macau, under British and Portuguese rule, also had them). South Korea also industrialized, albeit Korean characters are much simpler to write than Chinese or Japanese ones AFAIK.
 

Arkenfolm

There's also the fact that pre-Meiji Japan had a relatively high literacy rate despite using basically the same thing as traditional Chinese characters.
 
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