Character amnesia
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
Luo Xian Xiang
When the communists continued to march on to win territory after territory, Luo Xian Xiang left for Hong Kong, where he lived a spartan, quiet life. He died of illness in 1968 at the age of 78.Chinese characters are complicated and depending on how the string of characters is put together, the meaning can be quite different. Post 1950, to speed up the education of the masses, People's Republic of China has implemented a Simplified Chinese characters set of over 2,300 characters. This is a version with less stokes per character, taken from the entire pool of the more complex tradition Chinese characters. The easier to learn simplified version covered the needs for written communication in the daily life of the general public.