The font of 44 characters is revised in this proposal.

A proposal of the Education Ministry to readjust the font of 44 Chinese characters has triggered controversy in the country on whether the traditional way of writing should be altered. After eight years of efforts, the Education Ministry unveiled a list of 8,300 standardized Chinese characters in common usage to solicit public opinion from August 12th to 31st in hopes to regulate the way of characters writing.

Ministry officials and some experts said the revisions would only target 44 characters printed in the Song typeface on publications, in other words, the revised characters would only be used by computers and printing machines.

But they soon gave rise to disputes and as the public suddenly found the characters look different from what they used to be, which means they have to change their former way of identifying them. An online survey conducted by a major Internet portal Sina.com showed 90.2 percent of more than 340,000 respondents opposed the revisions as of August 22nd, while only 5.1 percent voted for them.

"The characters printed in our textbooks adopt the Kai typepace, and we don't need any change. But students would be easily confused by the revised characters on other publications," said Wang Jiayu, a Chinese language teacher at a primary school in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Many of the 44 characters are used frequently, which would undoubtedly pose challenges to people's habits of reading and writing, she said.

"The change is only a slight change of one stroke for a character, but if a pupil asks me which one of the same character is correctly written, I don't know how to reply," she said. "There will be many confusions if different ways of writing the same character exists, especially for children."

To Tang Yunlai, chairman of the Tianjin Municipal Calligraphers' Association, it is needless to make such revisions.

"The way of writing characters should better remain in a stable state within a long period of time," he said.

Objections also emerged as the costs of the revisions would be huge.

"The revisions of the 44 characters would lead to amendments on books, dictionaries, signboards, company names, ID cards and others," said Prof. Wang Laihua, of the Tianjin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences. "That will cost lots of money and time."