REFORMED CHARACTERS
Every day, a billion or more Chinese speakers will send a message using Chinese characters on their phone. For an English speaker using the Roman alphabet, it seems like quite a feat: English has 26 characters, Chinese has tens of thousands, and phones have small screens. Yet Chinese is flourishing on the internet.
It wasn’t always obvious it would, writes cultural historian Jing Tsu in . For decades, modernisers thought Chinese script was too inefficient, too hard to learn and too complex to survive in the modern world. The novelist
