Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.