台湾における簡体字論争

菅野敦志の台湾における「簡体字論争」―国民党の「未完の文字改革」とその行方によると，台湾でかつて50年代中頃と60年代終わりの2度，真剣に漢字の簡体化を議論した時期があって，蒋介石も漢字の簡体化に積極的だったようだ。しかし，台湾の文字改革は失敗に終わってしまった。

I won't go into the details of Sugano's paper here but essentially he talks about the fact that Taiwan's nationalist government was at one point very serious about reforming the characters. He focuses on two reform movements, one in the mid 50s and a second one in the late 60s. In both cases, there was heated discussion amongst scholars, government committees, and also a lively involvement by Taiwan's newspapers press, which I found surprising given the repressive controls on Taiwan's media. Ultimately, both movements failed, and I fear Sugano doesn't fully explain why, but throughout his paper he brings up some fascinating little tidbits about the debate
[...]
One thing I found very surprising was that apparently Chiang Kai-shek was strongly for the simplification of the characters

また，ニューヨークタイムズの記事によれば，スターリンは毛沢東に漢字の完全なローマ字化を思い止めさせるのに一役かったという。同じ記事の中で，文字改革委員会は2000以上の文字体系の案を審査して最終的にラテン系文字，キリル系文字と全く新しい4つの中国文字の6つに絞られた。しかし4つの中国文字は文化大革命の中で失われてしまったという。

writing reform committee ... [which] considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic.... In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new "Chinese" systems....
I asked Zhou what had happened to the four Chinese alphabets, and he told me that all records had apparently been destroyed. "It was easy to lose things like that during the Cultural Revolution," he said.[...]
In hindsight, Mao's 1950 command doomed writing reform; without the search for a national-in-form alphabet, China likely would have adopted Latin script before the Cultural Revolution. When I asked about Mao, Zhou said that the turning point was the Chairman's first state visit to the Soviet Union, in 1949. "Mao asked Stalin for advice about writing reform," Zhou said. "Stalin told him, 'You're a great country, and you should have your own Chinese form of writing. You shouldn't simply use the Latin alphabet.' That's why Mao wanted a national-in-form alphabet."

http://www.muninn.net/blog/archives/000175.html
http://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_faroutliers_archive.html#108286192290665647