Technology with characters

摘要

Chinese characters, in use by the second millennium BCE or even earlier, have functioned longer than any other script, including Egyptian hieroglyphs. Yet they have tended to isolate China, including its science, from other cultures because of their baffling complexity, especially compared to alphabets. To quote a celebrated early 20th-century Chinese writer, Lu Xun: “If the Chinese script does not go, China will certainly perish!”