A Blogchina article discusses the 1977 round of simplified Chinese characters, which was rescinded in 1986. The details of the characters won’t mean much to non-readers of Chinese, but the Unicode situation might:
Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China’s Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.
The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle among China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or a simple indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.