Interesting facts about pinyin and Simplified Mandarin -- Mao and his cadres were interested in spreading the gospel of Communism, but with high illiteracy rates, people were generally not as susceptible to propaganda.
Both initiatives, pinyin and Simplification, were designed to more easily bring literacy rates up, for the purpose of spreading Communist teachings.
So you invent an essentially new language, make it accessible via Roman letters to even non-Chinese people, and all documentation and literature produced in that new language talks about the glory of the CCP. Pretty brilliant (if sinister).
Silly revisionism. You think Mao engaged in a national literacy program for the sole purpose of inculcate people with Communist propaganda? I don't think so. That's equivalent to saying Hitler built railroads solely so people could get to Nazi party gatherings and transport Jews to camps.
It's possible for Mao to simultaneously be a disastrous autocrat who committed atrocities and to have engaged in projects of national and economic development. Some of them were debacles. Others, like pinyin for Romanization and simplification of writing, were complete successes.
Do you know anything about Chinese? What "new language" are you talking about? Simplified characters and pinyin are not new languages.
The persistence of traditional characters in Hong Kong/Taiwan or diaspora doesn't say anything about the success of simplified characters, which brought literacy to over a billion in the Chinese mainland.
I have some personal experience in this matter; I do not have a natural aptitude for foreign language learning. I learned oral Mandarin as a second language as as a child. I was taught reading and writing Chinese with traditional characters and with Zhuyin/bopomofo (still used in Taiwan, at least until recently), not Romanization.
I studied Chinese in college, learning introductory written Chinese again with simplified characters and pinyin. My personal experience as a native English speaker was that pinyin and simplified characters were substantially easier to get to a functional level of literacy level.
It's not really rocket science, just from a human memory perspective, simplified characters have many fewer strokes and radicals, and many homonymous characters are united so there are fewer of them. This also makes keyboard entry somewhat faster and makes smaller characters legible on displays (or even in print).
I'm not arguing that simplified characters necessarily reduce the effort in achieving a very high level of literacy, but for basic literacy, simplified writing/spelling systems are effective.
Agreed that Pinyin is a great help for the learner.
However, have to disagree on the character simplification.
While it would sure make sense to make characters simpler, simplification really only made some characters faster to write (by hand), by reducing the number of strokes. It is very unclear whether it makes things easier to read (in print), or easier to write/remember (when you use a keyboard to type it).
On the other hand, traditional characters retain more of the etymological components which are helpful for creating mnemonic devices to more easily memorize the characters.
Would you be willing to say how long you have been learning Chinese? Just curious. I am taking classes and a lot of outside focus/study. Native English speaker too.
Do you have any evidence for this at all? I'm by no means a Maoist, but this is a McCarthyist "sinister Commie plot" level of conspiracy theory.
Of course propaganda is one of the motivations behind higher literacy. But I do not think it was the main motivation. I will grant that perhaps my cynicism for your idea stems from the fact that I am a Communist.
Pretty much no material is produced entirely or even mostly in pinyin except material intended for children, learners, or Chinese diaspora who can speak but not read the language.
Regardless of the material you want people to read I think it's hard to call increasing literacy rates "sinister."
Both initiatives, pinyin and Simplification, were designed to more easily bring literacy rates up, for the purpose of spreading Communist teachings.
So you invent an essentially new language, make it accessible via Roman letters to even non-Chinese people, and all documentation and literature produced in that new language talks about the glory of the CCP. Pretty brilliant (if sinister).