A 20-day solicitation of public opinions over the proposed revisions of 44 Chinese characters ended on Monday, with disputes still raging, including some 30 experts who have collectively called to suspend the revisions.

China's Ministry of Education earlier unveiled a list of standardized Chinese characters in common usage, including 44 characters that were slightly revised to solicit public opinions on them since August 12. The move soon sparked widespread criticism.

The ministry stressed that the revisions involved only 44 characters in their print formats in the Song style, a popular Chinese character style in book printing format, and would not affect people's daily life in using them.

However, critics remained skeptical.

On one hand, they criticized the revisions will lead to confusion of characters in print and hand-writing formats. On the other, the huge cost of the 44 words' revisions which had reportedly taken a team of experts some eight years to finish is also a focus of controversy.

The revisions of the 44 characters would lead to the readjustment of computer systems and print machines, and further, amendments in books, dictionaries, signboards, company names, ID cards and an unknown numbers of documents, costing further huge amounts of money and time, the critics argued.

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