Whither Handwriting in China?

Stan Abrams is a Beijing-based IP/IT lawyer and law professor. Whether you're interested in Chinese or the effects of technology, this is a fun topic: Students from South-Central University for Nationalities in Wuhan, Hubei Province, recently conducted a survey of college students' abilities to write Chinese characters by hand. Of the 143 college students who participated, only 12 could write all 10 characters in the test correctly. I should point out that the test involved characters that are commonly written incorrectly, so the results may make the problem appear somewhat larger than it really is. Of course, there is a problem, and not a new one; moreover, it may be getting worse.