In "Chinese Characters, beauty or burden?" (October 23-29), Mr Bisterfeld argues that "the multi-stroke, one word per character, Chinese-style way of writing was complicated, time wasting, hard to learn and inflexible...", and therefore drastic reform is badly needed.

These views are by no means novel.

Early last century, a number of Western-educated Chinese scholars experimented with the Latinization of Chinese, and much of their efforts are embodied in the Latinized phonetic transcript (pinyin).

The existence of so many Chinese dialects makes a writing system based purely on phonetic representation impractical. For instance in rural China one villager can observe marked difference in the accent of another villager who lives only a few kilometres away.

Pinyin proves to be of considerable value to school children purely because Putonghua is set as the medium of instruction at elementary and high schools. But as Putonghua is based on northern speech, southerners can find pinyin a headache.

Mr Bisterfeld may go on to propose an abolition of all dialects in favour of Putonghua, but this will not solve the problem either, because pinyin representation can cause tremendous ambiguities not only at the phrasal, but also at the syntactic level.

The superimposition of the four tonal diacritics helps, but not much.

Mr Bisterfeld observed that computer input of Chinese characters is most efficient with pinyin. Wrong. The most efficient means is based exactly on the strokes of Chinese characters.

But the biggest resistance to Latinization does not come from the technical side.

Traditionally, Chinese scholars have had to spend many years practicing Chinese calligraphy and learning by rote the Chinese classics. The efforts required by this process are so enormous that adult Chinese can be clearly classified into the educated and the uneducated.

A scholar (or pseudo-scholar) could be recommended or discredited purely on account of a piece of his calligraphy.

Nowadays the art is largely consigned to the hands of dilettantes and the only practical purpose that can be associated with it is its reputed health benefit.

As these barriers to literacy are gradually lifted, there are an increasing number of people who can read and write tolerably well but remain uneducated.

As a Westerner, Mr Bisterfeld should be well aware of the evils of a society dominated by philistines.

For instance a housewife can talk glibly of liberty, democracy, or terrorism without knowing the first thing about what they are talking about.

Mr Bisterfeld is concerned about the speed of computer input, but I think more concern should be directed to the contents thus generated.

In the computer age we have no lack of information. Of more importance is how to avoid becoming desensitized to it.

Psychologists warn that the human mind can absorb and retain only so many bits per second. Today, Shanghainese can access 50 TVs channels, but TV viewers' boredom is at an all time high.

We never get the old questions answered because we are too busy formulating new allegations.

Mr Bush started the Iraqi war for WMD. When he failed to deliver, the average American's memory span is such that they have forgetten the cause of the War.

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