"Through the centuries, waves of revolutionary iconoclasts have tried to smash everything old; the Red Guards, in the nineteen-sixties, were following an ancient tradition. The Chinese seldom built anything for eternity, anyway, nothing like the cathedrals of Europe. And what survived from the past was often treated with neglect.... As Jing Tsu, a scholar of Chinese at Yale, observes... China had long equated writing 'with authority, a symbol of reverence for the past and a talisman of legitimacy.' This is why mastery of classical Chinese used to be so important. To become an official in imperial China, one had to compose precise scholarly essays on Confucian philosophy, an arduous task that very few could complete. Even Chairman Mao, who incited his followers to destroy every vestige of tradition, proudly displayed his prowess as a calligrapher, establishing himself as the bearer of Chinese civilization.... The classical style of the language, elliptical and complex, was practiced by only a small number of highly educated people.... A linguist, Qian Xuantong, famously argued that Confucian thought could be abolished only if Chinese characters were eradicated. 'And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking,' he went on, 'the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.'... Dictatorships shape the way we write and talk and, in many cases, think.... I still shudder at the memory of reading, as a student in the early nineteen-seventies, Maoist publications in Chinese, with their deadwood language, heavy Soviet sarcasm, and endless sentences that sounded like literal translations from Marxist German—the exact opposite of the compressed poeticism of the classical style."
From "How the Chinese Language Got ModernizedFaced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive," by Ian Buruma (The New Yorker).
