The ultimate goal was to transition Mandarin to Roman letters (which had happened naturally in Vietnam, so there was precedent).ao's party realised that going straight from Chinese characters to Roman letters would be too abrupt, so took a first step of swapping out complex characters for characters that look simpler but are easier to write. This was surprisingly well-received, and became standard in mainland China (but Taiwan did not adopt the new system on the entirely reasonable grounds of fuck the CCP). The CCP intended to do a second round of simplification, but the people balked at this on the grounds that it made the written language to difficult to read, and so they stopped at the current set.