When the People's Republic of China was formed in 1949, the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong wanted to help the Chinese people read and write. Before 1949, most Chinese people could not read. The government hoped that by using fewer strokes to write characters, along with many other changes in the education system, the Chinese language would become more standardized like Japanese. The Empire of Japan had brought changes to the Japanese writing system during the earlier Meiji Restoration to make literacy and education more widely available to all Japanese citizens. Mao also hoped that simplifying Chinese characters would begin to shift Chinese people away from using the character system itself and that eventually Chinese-speakers would only use a phonetic alphabet to write.