conuly

Part of the problem may be the way Chinese writing evolved and is constructed. What you have heard about it being a lot of ideograms which came from pictograms, each representing a whole concept, is only partly true (http://books.google.com/books?id=gQF8kvWmFJkC&dq=The+Chinese+language+fact+and+fantasy&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=-pXwSfW0PJKctgP3laTyCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPA24,M1).

Try as they might, today's government officials can't get around the fact that Chinese is not just one language, it is several languages, sometimes mutually exclusive. The so-called "obsolete" characters are traditional ones that have been abandoned in the search to create a simplified form of writing. Even the simplified character system still has two or three thousand characters. And many people respect the traditional forms and wish for their children to learn and use those.

What Betty Brown said is not so much a racist statement as an assimilationist one. She is probably not aware of the fact that the last time people were made to do this, it was part of one of the most shameful episodes of U.S. history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanization_(of_Native_Americans)). Her mind may deliberately not be making the connection. Anyway, it's not going to happen.