e-flux | Jia. The Chinese Version Part of the GLOBALE exhibition Infosphere

Curated by Peter Weibel with Daria Mille and Giulia Bini. The cultural atrocity of Chinese character simplification that began in the 1950s and remains, by force of law, in the People’s Republic of China through the present day, has not only degraded the aesthetic properties of the Chinese written character: the program has also gravely hindered literacy in all but recent official texts by means of a haphazard formal reduction of the number of  strokes, eliminating two-thirds of the characters from the lexicon of those allowed for publication.