The irony of it though, China will be releasing a new list of characters instead of re-training millions of Mianland Chinese people Traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese, as name suggests, has less strokes than Traditional Chinese, in effect losing some of the meanings of characters/ideographs.
I don't know how to read/write Chinese as fluently as I can speak Cantonese, but I can read more than I can write (self-taught), and it's all Traditional Chinese. I have always wondered how people understand Simplified, as there are so many Chinese words out there and some characters are down to 3 strokes. Even my mom, aunts (here and in Hong Kong) sometimes find it difficult to read, they have to have it in context and guess the meaning. So in the end, Simplified Chinese may have caused more confusion than anything else.
I'll try and find out more about this list, and post an update on it.
(via Irish Times)