Efforts to simplify Chinese characters never ceased during the development of the Chinese language. When it entered the modern period, more efforts were put into this move and simplification of characters became a new trend.

Educationist Lu Guikui became the first person to advocate the use of simplified characters. He published an essay titled Sutizi Should Be Employed in General Education in the Education Magazine in 1909. After the May Fourth Movement, Qian Xuantong was the scholar who made great contributions to simplification of Chinese characters. He came up with a plan to reduce strokes of current characters together with Lu Ji, Li Jinxi and Yang Shuda, suggesting using simplified characters in all regular written materials. In 1932, the Education Department of that time released the list of characters commonly in use.

In 1934, Qian Xuantong compiled the draft of the Table of Simplified Characters, which included 2,400 characters. In 1935, the education department of the Nanjing government published the table of the first batch simplified Chinese characters, which was significant to China's educational development. During this period, many other works on simplified characters were published, including Dictionary of Simplified Characters and The Table of Simplified Characters.

After the founding of new China in 1949, the government attached great importance to the simplification of Chinese characters. In 1950, the Education Department of the central people's government compiled the registration form of simplified characters in common use. In 1951, the first batch of simplified Chinese characters was published, which included 555 characters. On January 31, 1956, China officially published The Plan for Simplifying Chinese Characters on the People's Daily. In 1964, China published The Glossary of Simplified Characters, which included 2,261 complicated characters and 2,235 simplified characters.