Is the art of handwriting on way to death?
- By Wu Yixue
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E-mail China Daily, September 5, 2014
For Chinese people, calligraphy, or the art of writing Chinese characters, has long been viewed as a mirror to a person's behavior. Such a perception reflects the importance the Chinese have traditionally attached to handwriting. It's our cultural heritage, our national treasure, and we have to protect it.
The authorities, however, have already noticed the worrisome trend. In 2008, the Ministry of Education conducted a survey covering 3,000 teachers across the country, and 60 percent of them complained about the declining ability of students to write Chinese characters. To correct the situation, the ministry launched a writing competition the next year, which attracted 10 million participants, and promoted pilot programs to popularize the art of handwriting among students. In this context, primary school students across the country are demanded to practice calligraphy using both hard and soft pens.
That the authorities' efforts are bearing fruit is evident from the popularity of some TV programs on uncommon Chinese characters and handwriting competitions, which usually test viewers' knowledge of Chinese.
In this era of computerization, it is not possible for all the people to write Chinese characters equally well. Given their increased exposure to (rather dependence on) electronic gadgets, even highly educated people could fumble with or forget some Chinese characters. So the education authorities should introduce a mandatory Chinese handwriting course for students to help carry forward a heritage that has been passed from one generation to another.
We should, however, not be too worried about the decline in people's ability to write in Chinese using pen and paper, because that is one of the inevitable side effects of the age of electronics and digitization in which computer and smartphone screens have replaced paper to become the main carrier of language. And that should be seen as social progress, despite a decline in our ability to write with pen on paper, computerization has helped broaden our visions considerably.
The author is a writer with China Daily.
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