Editing Chinese Characters

[[File:汉字.jpg|thumb|Different fonts of the Chinese character "字"]]
[[Chinese Characters]], also known as [[Hanzi]], [[Kanji]], is a hieroglyphic script of [[People's Republic of China|Chinese]] origin.

== History ==
Legend has it that in ancient times, [[Cangjie]] created characters based on the footprints of birds.
[[File:甲骨文与现代汉字的对比.jpg|thumb|Modern Chinese characters versus oracle bone inscriptions]]
In 1600 BC, the [[Shang dynasty]] created the [[oracle bone script]]. Modern people have found that these scripts can be linked to modern Chinese characters.

In the development of Chinese characters, they have gradually become square in order to make them easier to write and decipher.

Throughout history, Chinese characters have spread to [[Japan]], [[Korea]] and [[Socialist Republic of Vietnam|Vietnam]] and have been used on a large scale. However, due to the prevalence of [[nationalism]] and the need to improve literacy rates in modern times, Chinese characters were modified or restricted in both China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

== The contribution of Chinese characters to the course of East Asian history ==
Chinese characters are an ideographic script, so that even after thousands of years of geographical separation, people across China who use different dialects can communicate through them. This is why China can still be a unified country today. This is true even in Japan, Vietnam and Korea. This allows advanced ideas to spread rapidly across national boundaries using Chinese characters as a medium. In 600 AD, for example, Japan stepped into [[Feudalism|feudal]] society by learning the Chinese system. And in the second half of the 19th century, [[Empire of Japan (1868–1947)|Japanese]] ideas of modernisation were introduced into China, contributing to its progress.

Chinese characters are in fact transnational characters, and each country that uses them can create new words and spread them to other countries through Chinese characters, although historically most words have been created by China and Japan. In the 19th century, [[Black Ship Turmoil|Japan]] was the first country to learn from the Western [[Capitalism|capitalist]] system. The spread of capitalist ideas with words to China, Korea and Vietnam accelerated the collapse of the feudal system in these countries.