Continued simplification throughout history

Zhou Youguang. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Summary

Most of the current list of official simplified characters in use by the PRC today have ancient origins. Out of the 2,235 characters on the list 521 are directly from ancient sources, and most of the others are derived from them. These different derived forms were in use during the height of the standard script, but used mostly in the cursive form for faster writing. Many of these simplification have become standardized over history thus making characters easier to write and remember. As a general rule with characters, they should not possess more than seven strokes for left to right  and more than eight from top to bottom. This rule allows for the clear rioting of characters at any size being legible (some of the more complicated characters need to be written larger in order to distinguish the many individual strokes found within). Simplified characters add another advantage to reading, the simplified characters have clearer radicals and are therefore much easier to classify.

Although the advantages are many, there are equally as many disadvantages to this process of simplification. As the meanings of characters are combined and reduced, the number of look-alike characters is increased. An example of this is 巳,已, and 己. This is just one of the long list of look-alike characters that need to be carefully identified due to simplification. A second disadvantage is that some of these characters are created without thinking of the flow of the brush (classically), but just with how they look. This causes characters to be formed awkwardly as the strokes do not blend together as they should. Also many of these same characters (such as 长，为) contain no clear radical and are therefore harder to distinguish and order. The third problem with these simplifications is that previously they were not standardized. The standard script filled books, while these simplifications filled notes. With the Founding of the PRC and the official simplification of the character script, many books have been cast off as essentially being written in a foreign language.

Of the current PRC characters in use about 1/3 are simplifications with the majority still being in their transitional format. 

There had been a move to simplify the characters two times previously by the communist government but each timed failed. It was not until the government replaced the typeset that the simplification caught on. Once the typeset was changed, then all typed material had to use the simplified characters and now longer had a choice between the two scripts. As the majority of the works were then published in simplified characters the population just became used to reading and eventually writing it. Many people thought that this simplification would adversely affect the calligraphic tradition so prevalent in China. At first there was not any backlash as only a 1/3 of the characters actually changed, but as more and more calligraphers used them they realized that a good number of the characters do not lend themselves to calligraphy (for the reasons noted above).