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Computers may spell the end for Chinese writing By David Rennie in Beijing

CHINESE characters, painfully memorised by generations of Chinese children, are facing their gravest peril yet - from the computer.

Members of China's educated elite, who always prided themselves on knowing the 6,000 characters by heart, are forgetting how to write. They can still read, but take away their computers and many find their minds go blank.

The syndrome is known as "ti bi wang zi" - or forgetting the character as you lift the pen - and is causing alarm among linguists, psychologists and parents. Scholars predicted doom years ago when the first computers reached China. How could a language with thousands of characters work with keyboards limited to a few dozen keys?

Clever software may have saved China's writing from extinction. Up to the Eighties, almost everything was hand-written. Now there are dozens of computer programs allowing Chinese characters to be entered on an ordinary keyboard. Because of them, however, writing by hand is dying out.

Li Chunyan, The Telegraph office assistant, said: "Yesterday I forgot how to write 'greedy', that's a hard character. But last week, a friend rang me to ask how to write Wei [a common surname]. She was embarrassed, but she had written several versions and none looked right."

To the Chinese, your handwriting reveals your very soul. They believe they are the brightest race on earth, and widely credit the study of characters with training their children to be brilliant from infancy. Writing handsome characters is a prized skill. A good character should have "li" - or force.

It should also be balanced and fit within an invisible square. When I write my Chinese name, Ren Dawei, it still looks like a toddler's scrawl after two years in Beijing. My Ren wobbles, and my Wei is far from balanced. Da - one of the most common characters - should resemble a proud man, legs confidently astride. My Da has knock knees.

Even to outsiders, Chinese writing offers glimpses of the inner man. Mao Tsetung's wild calligraphy is a bit mad, but is also oddly impressive, much like the late Chairman. China's current leader, Jiang Zemin - a small man with imperial ambitions - inscribes his calligraphy wherever he can.

It appears on monuments, bridges and at the source of the Yangtze. In 1999, his characters were carried into orbit on China's first space capsule.

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2001