The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Taiwan still clings to it, like they cling to the "Traditional" characters; apparently mostly for political reasons.

The main political reason is that reform is hard, expensive, and unpopular and they don't have a Mao to put everyone who doesn't go along with it in a grave. But the practical reason is that it increases the number of radicals and exceptional characters because the simplified reform was incomplete. There is an unresolved debate if that actually hurts reading comprehension or if it speeds up learning, but it certianly is not conceptually "simplified".

Underdiscussed in these conversations is also that Simplified is hideous and off-balance and asking people to volunteer to learn to read again so that the script could look significantly worse has always been a non-starter outside of Mainland China.