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1. Introduction
Hanji (Han character) cultural areas, such as Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China, used Han characters and the classical Han writing1 (wenyan (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)) before the twentieth century. However, there were great changes before the advent of the twentieth century. In Vietnam, Han characters and its derivative characters, Chu Nom (...), which had been adopted as writing systems for more than a thousand years in Vietnam, were officially replaced by the romanized Chu Quoc Ngu in 1945, the year of the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. The Chu Quoc Ngu was developed on the basis of romanized Vietnamese writing, which was originally developed by missionaries in the seventeenth century. In Korea, Han characters were finally replaced by Hangul (...) after World War II. Hangul, the Korean phonemic writing system, was originally designed and promulgated by King Sejong in 1446. In Japan, the syllabary Kana (...) system was gradually developed after Japan's adoption of Han characters; although Han characters are not completely replaced by Kana, the number of Han characters used by Japanese decreased from thousands to 1,945 frequently used characters in 1981 (cf. Hannas 1997).
In Taiwan, there are currently three types of Taiwanese writing schemes: 1) using only Han characters, 2) using Han characters and roman scripts, and 3) using only roman scripts (cf. Cheng 1990; TiuN 1997; Chiung 1999). The chaotic situation of writing Taiwanese reflects the complex of political claims and relation between Taiwan and China. That is, unification with China, maintaining current political status, or independence. In Hong Kong, people keep using Han characters with minor revision of Han characters to write Cantonese. It reflects their fate that Hong Kong had to return to China in 1997. As for China, although writing reform has been in progressing since the late period of the nineteenth century, Han characters are still widely used and taught in the national education system. It seems that Han characters will still be the dominant orthography, at least for the present (cf. DeFrancis 1950, 1990; Hannas 1997).
Among these countries, Vietnam and Taiwan were both introduced to romanized writings by Western missionaries in the seventeenth century. However, they have different consequences today. That is, Chu Quoc Ngu eventually...