grew significantly. The bulk of the work is believed to have been performed by staffers without proper oversight. The Second Scheme's subsequent rejection by the public has been cited as a case study in a failed attempt to artificially control the direction of a language's evolution. Indeed, it was not embraced by the linguistic community in China upon its release; despite heavy promotion by official publications, Rohsenow observes that "in the case of some of the character forms constructed by the staff members themselves" the public at large found proposed changes "laughable." Political issues aside, Chen objects to the notion that all characters should be reduced to ten or fewer strokes. He argues that a technical shortcoming of the Second Scheme was that the characters it reformed occur less often in writing than those of the First Scheme. As such it provided less benefit to writers while putting an unnecessary burden on readers in making the characters more difficult to distinguish. Citing several studies, Hannas similarly argues against the lack of differentiation and utility: "it was meaningless to lower the stroke count for its own sake." Thus, he believes simplification and character limitation (reduction of the number of characters) both amount to a "zero-sum game" — simplification in one area of use causing complication in another — and concludes that "the 'complex' characters in Japanese and Chinese, with their greater redundancy and internal consistency, may have been the better bargain." Effects While the stated goal of further language reform was not changed, the 1986 conference which retracted the Second Scheme emphasized that future reforms should proceed with caution. It also "explicitly precluded any possibility of developing Hanyu Pinyin as an independent writing system (wénzì)." The focus of language planning policy in China following the conference shifted from simplification and reform to standardization and regulation of existing characters, and the topic of further simplification has since been described as "untouchable" in the field. However, the possibility of future changes remains, and the difficulties the Chinese writing system presents for information technology have renewed the Romanization debate. Today, second round characters are officially regarded as incorrect. However, some have survived in informal contexts; this is because some people who were in school between 1977 and 1986 received their education in second-round characters. For example, eggs at markets are often advertised as "鸡旦" rather than "鸡蛋," parking venues may be marked "仃车" rather