Why I Write
Simplified Chinese Is Dying
Throughout human history, many languages have been created, used by people, and eventually disappeared.
And now, I think—or perhaps I am sure—that Simplified Chinese is dying.
I do not mean that people will stop speaking Chinese, or that Simplified Chinese will disappear.
I mean another kind of death.
When I was a student, I loved surfing the Internet. Compared with today, those years were wonderful. In the Simplified Chinese world, there were many websites, forums, and all kinds of online communities. The Internet was much freer than it is today. You could talk about anti-CCP ideas online, and you could search for this kind of information using Chinese search engines.
In the early days of the Chinese Internet, we could access Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube. We also had PPLive—I remember watching some Korean pop shows there—Tianya, Tieba, and countless forums across the Chinese Internet. We could freely discuss many topics that are no longer allowed in today’s Chinese Internet.
Even around 2013 and 2014, we could still download and use many international apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram, and others.
Was this a gift that the CCP gave to the Simplified Chinese world?
No.
The CCP simply did not have enough power or capability to fully control and suppress freedom in mainland China. It was not a gift. And that is just a fact.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Eastern Europe changed dramatically, and the Soviet Union collapsed. China at that time was still poor, and the CCP was far less powerful than it is today. It had far fewer technological and financial resources. There were many things it wanted to control but simply could not.
During this period and the years that followed, many Internet products were created.
Decades later, what has the Simplified Chinese world become?
When Chinese people want to talk about politics or other serious subjects, sometimes they cannot even use Simplified Chinese directly. They have to use pinyin instead. Sometimes even that does not work. An Internet service may prevent them from posting the information, delete what they have written, or even delete their account entirely.
Over the years, a huge amount of information in Simplified Chinese has been created and then disappeared because of totalitarianism.
I have seen this happen many times.
In today’s Simplified Chinese world, every website and app allowed to operate in China has effectively become part of the Chinese government’s system of control. At the same time, much of the information on these services is inaccessible to people with foreign phone numbers.
As a result, the Simplified Chinese Internet is becoming isolated from the rest of the world.
I think that in a communist country, memory itself can become illegal.
If people study this carefully, they may find fewer records of real everyday life in the Soviet era than in the era of Tsarist Russia. The same thing is happening in the Simplified Chinese world.
People do not remember what happened a hundred years ago. They do not know what society was really like before China’s Reform and Opening Up. They are even losing their memories of 2020–2022, as if the lockdowns had never happened.
As one of the Party’s slogans in 1984 puts it:
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Not only can thought become illegal.
Memory can become illegal.
When the ecosystem of a language is dying, the language itself is dying. Simplified Chinese is now in this situation.
I think a language has depth.
What people write, discuss, create, and record becomes part of that depth. It is what people leave behind. It is proof that they were here.
When those things keep disappearing, the language becomes thinner and thinner.
There is another thing I have noticed as an engineer.
A free Internet is naturally decoupled. People can create their own websites, forums, communities, and products. They can grow, change, fail, or disappear independently.
Censorship works in the opposite direction.
Censorship is like a huge middleware layer inserted between what people freely create and the users who want to access it. It tries to decide what is allowed to reach users and what is not.
As more and more products, communities, forms of expression, and special cases appear, this middleware grows with them.
It becomes a huge and chaotic coupling layer.
Censorship becomes technical debt.
And the entire ecosystem has to keep paying interest on that debt.
When information, memories, arguments, records, and everything else within a language keep disappearing, what remains is only a thin surface.
That surface becomes thinner and thinner.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was a child, older people told me that Chinese society had been much more open and free in the 1980s and 1990s.
I listened to them, but I had never lived through that time myself.
Years later, I grew up and started working.
Then something strange happened.
Younger students started telling me about the time when I was young.
They told me how lucky my generation had been. They said that back then, we could use Google and access many parts of the global Internet directly. To them, the Internet of my youth seemed much freer than the one they had grown up with.
And suddenly, I realized that I had become the older generation in the same story.
I did not tell them that my time was freer.
They told me.
Isn’t that ironic?
The freer China of the 1980s and 1990s was something I knew through the memories of people who had lived through it.
Now, the freer Internet that I lived through is becoming a memory too.
When the records of a time disappear, a living past gradually becomes a story—something one generation tells the next.
This is what I mean when I say that a language becomes thinner.
What was once there becomes a memory.
Then even the memory begins to disappear.
So I want to write down some truths and preserve them for people in the future.
This is why I write.
This piece is a tribute to George Orwell’s Why I Write.
