1.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
2.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
3.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
4.
Jyutping
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Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme, the LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. The name Jyutping is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5, only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. ^ ^ ^ Referring to the pronunciation of these words. There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese, however, as three of the nine are entering tones, which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping. Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they differ in the following, The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, the initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale. The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale, the initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale. In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel, in Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances. Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/ and these three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6, lem2, and gep6. To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they have differences, The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping. The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu and i are used in Jyutping, the initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping. The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping. To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, however, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping
5.
Run Run Shaw
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Sir Run Run Shaw, GBM, CBE, also known as Shao Yifu and Siu Yat-fu, was a Hong Kong entertainment mogul and philanthropist. He was one of the most influential figures in the Asian entertainment industry and he founded the Shaw Brothers Studio, one of the largest film production companies in Hong Kong, and TVB, the dominant television company in Hong Kong. A well-known philanthropist, Shaw donated billions of Hong Kong dollars to educational institutions in Hong Kong, more than 5,000 buildings on Chinese college campuses bear his name, as does Shaw College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also established the Shaw Prize for Astronomy, Life Science & Medicine, Run Run Shaw was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, Qing China, and moved to Shanghai as a child. He was the youngest of the six sons of Shanghai textile merchant Shaw Yuh Hsuen and his name at birth was Shao Renleng, which was later changed to Shao Yifu because he thought that the average Chinese person would not know how to pronounce the character 楞. There is some confusion surrounding Run Run Shaws exact date of birth and he celebrated his birthdays on the 14th day of the 10th month of the Chinese calendar, which fell on 23 November in 2007, his 100th birthday. Many sources use 23 November 1907 as his birthdate, however, the 14th day of the 10th month of the Chinese calendar in 1907 corresponds to 19 November 1907 on the Gregorian calendar, which, according to China Daily was his birthdate. He graduated from the Shanghai YMCA School, where he learned English, in 1925, Shaws brothers, led by the eldest brother Runje Shaw, established Tianyi Film Company in Shanghai, and Run Run began his film career doing odd jobs for the company. In 1927, Shaw, then 19 years old, went to Singapore to assist his elder brother Runme Shaw in their business venture there. They established the company that would become the Shaw Organisation. Tianyi produced what is considered the first sound-on-film Chinese talkie in 1931 and it was highly successful, and Tianyi established a branch in Hong Kong in 1934. Just before the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, Tianyi moved its operation to Hong Kong, shipping its equipment from Shanghai and its studio in Shanghai was destroyed when the Japanese occupied the city. In Hong Kong, Tianyi was reorganised as Nanyang Studio, which later became Shaw Brothers Studio, Shaw was credited with scripting and directing the 1937 comedy film Country Bumpkin Visits His In-laws. In his early days in Singapore, Run Run Shaw supervised the business while Runme travelled north to Malaya to establish ties with local theatre owners. In 1927, having noticed that there were few cinemas in Malaya, by 1939, the brothers owned a chain of 139 cinemas across the region, the chain would later include Singapores first air-conditioned cinema, at Beach Road. They also established a number of amusement parks throughout the region, including Borneo, Thailand and Java, the brothers began to make Malay films in Singapore in 1937. Inspired by the success of films intended for Malay audiences, for example Leila Majnun in 1934, and other films from the Dutch East Indies, the brothers established Malay Film Productions. This company would produce over 160 Malay films, many of them starring and directed by P. Ramlee
6.
Ni Kuang
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Ni Cong, courtesy name Yiming, better known by his pen name Ni Kuang, is a Hong Kong-American novelist and screenwriter. He has written over 300 Chinese-language wuxia and science fiction novels, Ni was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, but grew up in Shanghai. He worked as a security official under the Chinese Communist Party government in the 1950s in Inner Mongolia and was tasked with writing death sentences. He once questioned the party chief about why a particular man was sentenced to death. The chief threatened to execute him if he continued to ask questions, according to Ni, he complied with the order because he feared for his own life. This was not the instance in which Ni wrote a questionable death sentence which was categorised under others by the CCP government. These experiences made Ni decide to escape from China to Hong Kong in 1957, nis science fiction novels usually take the form of detective/mystery stories featuring extraterrestrial life as a deus ex machina to explain the impossible and implausible. His best known works are the Wisely Series and Dr Yuen novel series and his criticism of communism is evident in some of these works. Ni also co-wrote scripts with Chang Cheh for the Shaw Brothers Studio, including for the films One-Armed Swordsman, The Assassin, as the screenwriter for the 1972 film Fist of Fury, he received credit for creating the protagonist, Chen Zhen, who was played by Bruce Lee. Chen Zhen became a popular Chinese culture hero and the subject of numerous remakes, notable actors such as Jet Li and Donnie Yen have portrayed Chen Zhen on screen after Bruce Lee. Ni is a friend and fan of the wuxia writer Louis Cha and he wrote at least one extended segment in Chas novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils when Cha was on holiday in Europe, although much of his additions were excised in Chas first revision. Ni, while helping Cha write nearly 40 days of serialisation while Cha was abroad, made Azi, Cha has since edited his novel. In 1992, Ni migrated to the United States, where he continued his writing career, however, he returned to Hong Kong in 2006 because he could not adjust to the lifestyle in the United States. Ni has four brothers and two sisters, Ni Yifang, Ni Yixiu, Ni Yijian, Ni Yiping, Ni Yishu and he is married to Li Guozhen while his younger brother, Ni Yiping, is married to Lis younger sister. Ni and Li Guozhen have a son and daughter and their son, Joe Nieh, who works in the Hong Kong entertainment industry, is married to actress Vivian Chow. In an interview, when asked about his feelings regarding injustice in China and he mentioned that the most important value in the world is individual freedom, which includes respecting others personal freedom as well. Ni Kuang at the Internet Movie Database
7.
Lo Lieh
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Wang Lap Tat, better known by his stage name Lo Lieh, was an Indonesian-born Hong Kong actor. Lo was perhaps best known as Chao Chih-Hao in the 1972 film King Boxer, Miyamoto in the 1977 film Fist of Fury II, in the 1970s, Lo played Kao Hsia in the 1970 film Brothers Five, alongside Cheng Pei-pei. Lo played Ho Chiang in the 1974 film The Stranger and the Gunfighter, Lo starred in the 1972 cult classic King Boxer a. k. a. In 1977, Lo portrayed Pai Mei in the Executioners from Shaolin and Miyamoto in Fist of Fury II, Lo played General Tien Ta in the 1978 film The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, alongside Gordon Liu and Lee Hoi San. In the 1980s, Lo directed and starred in the 1980 film Clan of the White Lotus, Lo played Triad Gangster Boss in the 1988 film Dragons Forever, alongside Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. Lo played Fei in the 1989 film Miracles along with Jackie Chan, Richard Ng, in the 1990s, Lo played Chor Kun-lun in the 1991 film Sex and Zen alongside Lawrence Ng, Kent Cheng and Elvis Tsu. Lo played The General in the 1992 film Police Story 3, Super Cop alongside Jackie Chan, in the 2000s, Lo played Wei Tungs Uncle in the 2001 film The Vampire Combat, with Collin Chou and Valerie Chow. Los last film was 2001s Glass Tears, before retiring from acting at the age of 62, Lo married Grace Tang Chia-li on April 15,1976. Lo and his wife later divorced, on November 2,2002, Lo died of heart attack, he was 63 years old. Lo Lieh - Fan Website Lo Lieh Filmography Lo Lieh at the Internet Movie Database
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