section_path: Reform and standardisation/People's Republic of China
section_name: People's Republic of China
paragraph_text: People's Republic of China
  
  The project of script reform in China was ultimately inherited by the Communists, who resumed work following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In 1951, Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) ordered the formation of a Script Reform Committee, with subgroups investigating both simplification and alphabetisation. The simplification subgroup began surveying and collating simplified forms the following year, ultimately publishing a draft scheme of simplified characters and components in 1956. In 1958, Zhou Enlai announced the government's intent to focus on simplification, as opposed to replacing characters with Hanyu Pinyin, which had been introduced earlier that year. The 1956 scheme was largely ratified by a revised list of 2235 characters promulgated in 1964. The majority of these characters were drawn from conventional abbreviations or ancient forms with fewer strokes. The committee also sought to reduce the total number of characters in use by merging some forms together. For example, 雲 (' cloud ') was written as 云 in oracle bone script. The simpler form remained in use as a loangraph meaning 'to say'; it was replaced in its original sense of 'cloud' with a form that added a semantic ⾬ 'RAIN' component. The simplified forms of these two characters have been merged into 云.
  
  A second round of simplified characters was promulgated in 1977, but was poorly received by the public and quickly fell out of official use. It was ultimately formally rescinded in 1986. The second-round simplifications were unpopular in large part because most of the forms were completely new, in contrast to the familiar variants comprising the majority of the first round. With the rescission of the second round, work toward further character simplification largely came to an end. The Chart of Generally Utilised Characters of Modern Chinese was published in 1988 and included 7000 simplified and unsimplified characters. Of these, half were also included in the revised List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese, which specified 2500 common characters and 1000 less common characters. In 2013, the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters was published as a revision of the 1988 lists; it included a total of 8105 characters.