I find linguistics fascinating now, but I'm sure if I studied it I would hate it. This post has nothing to do with linguistics.

So I just read an article (中国今后的文字问题 The Problem of Present-Day China's Writing System) written in 1918 by a Chinese intellectual (钱玄同 Qian Xuantong), where he promotes the wholesale and complete replacement of the Chinese language with Esperanto.

It's hard to understand today the extent of Chinese self-loathing at the beginning of the 20th century. The author explains how "99.9%" of historical Chinese literature is composed of "confusing, dreamy" nonsense (that incorrigibly messes up children for their entire lives), and in order for China to progress and modernize as a nation it is absolutely imperative for China to abandon both its language, spoken and written, and its culture, namely Confucianist ideals of loyalty and piety which push a morality of "slavery". Similarly, prominent contemporary writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) claimed “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die.” (漢字不滅，中國必亡。)

For Qian Xuantong, complete romanization of the Chinese language was not enough. He died in 1939, ten years before the Communist takeover of China, and this article, written some 38 years prior to the official introduction of Simplified Characters, reveals that the simplification policy was pretty moderate on the spectrum of Chinese linguistic reform.