Scholars from home and abroad have reportedly worked for eight long years on revising the way some of the language's 8,300 standardized characters are written.

The proposal to tinker with 44 characters was made public by the Ministry of Education and State Language Commission on Aug 12.

Those behind the proposed moves say they have received waves of support for the changes, while those in the publishing industry as well as netizens have overwhelmingly shot down the plan, with many citing the financial implications and potential impact.

Suggested revisions include changes to the angles and length of the writing strokes of the 44 characters, which include commonly used words such as cha (tea), chun (lip), sha (kill) and qin (intimate).

So far, there has been no clear reasons given by the ministry or experts who suggested the changes.

"According to our studies, 67 percent of respondents favor the proposed revisions of the 44 Chinese characters, while those opposed to the proposals account for only 6 percent," said Wang Ning, a professor at Beijing Normal University who worked on revising the vocabulary, during an online chat with netizens at News.cn on Saturday.

She did not reveal how many people had been involved in the study but officials at the Ministry of Education, who invited the public to air their opinions about the proposals via email, letter or fax before next Monday, said the statistic was from the near 1,500 respondents.

"We proposed the revision according to the principle of Chinese traditional calligraphy practice," said Wang, who explained the new standard 44 characters would conform to the typeface for printing during the Song Dynasty (960-1276). "The revision of 44 characters accounts for less than six per every 1,000 characters in the glossary."

"Revising 44 Chinese characters would immediately lead to a total overhaul of dictionaries, textbooks and all other books across the country," said a spokesman for the State-run Xinhua Bookstore, one of the publishing companies in China responsible for a combined output of around 330 billion yuan ($48.32 billion).

The company has printed, on average, 8 million volumes of the Xinhua Dictionary annually for the past 50 years, he said. If the proposals get the green light from the State Council, all the dictionaries already produced would need to be recalled, retyped, reprinted and rebound.

"Imagine how mammoth the costs would be," he added and estimated that, with one Xinhua Dictionary costing around 10 yuan ($1.4), the impact could run into billions of yuan.

And the effects will not just be confined to the publishing industry. Citizens would have to change their bank accounts and identity cards, which cost 20 yuan for every new application, and companies would have to change their name and signage.