A national political advisor advocated strengthening the digitization of Chinese characters, which she believed would help promote Chinese culture internationally.

Wang Jing, a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and CEO of Newland Group, said at the just-concluded annual session of the top political advisory body that at present, there are more than a thousand kinds of schemes and applications of Chinese character digitization in China. Still, there are very few solutions to the difficulties in learning Chinese characters. Various applications are like isolated islands and go their own ways, bringing different obstacles to Chinese character teaching and learning, as well as innovative breakthroughs, and hindering the efficient spread of Chinese culture.

The development of Chinese character digitization technology, which can tackle teaching and learning difficulties, is of great significance for introducing Chinese characters, Chinese culture, and Chinese literature and science to the world, Wang said.

Wang Jing put forward three suggestions in her proposal: First, carry out a unified "national Chinese character digitization" initiative, establish a national Chinese character engineering research institute, and turn static Chinese characters into "living characters" that can interact with people based on Chinese character all-information digital technology which has already been in wide application. The technology, through innovative encoding methods and approaches, makes it possible for people to acquire complete information on Chinese characters, such as pronunciation, components, meaning, etymology and interrelations, all stored in a character library or database.

The second is to promote the building of a platform on supervision of Chinese character digitization services, which is led by authoritative departments, and developed and operated by social sectors with the help of the Chinese character all-information technology underpinned by the national standards, so as to bring all applications of Chinese character digitization under unified management. 

The third is to make targeted efforts to solve the difficulties in Chinese character teaching and learning, and promote the development of various products and services to facilitate learning, which will focus on immersive cloud learning, online education, games, cultural knowledge, and all-round study. 

"In such a way, we can make it easier for people to learn Chinese, especially for self-regulated learning, and share the wisdom of Chinese characters with the world," Wang said.