The usage of Chinese characters never ceases during the long period of development. The continuous existence of Chinese characters relies upon its feature of “expressing meanings with formats”. Such feature is one of a kind among different characters all over the world. This feature also greatly influenced the peripheral countries and ethnics. The developments of Chinese characters form all kinds of complicated relationships. Such relationships are so sophisticated that scholars studying Chinese characters are exhausted in exploring records of Chinese characters’formats thus have no time to build up a scientific system of Chinese language. The study of the history of Chinese characters has been stopped on the documentary level for a long time and falls behind the research of the history of Chinese language. In this case, the researchers could not even figure out the specific time and using contexts of Chinese characters. Objectively speaking, such situation is due to the lack of a stage for researchers to conduct study on Chinese characters. Such shortage prevents researchers from knowing the development of Chinese characters, understanding the needs of using Chinese characters, and formulating regularities of Chinese characters.

• 臧克和