Textual transmission is viewed in the West typically as a destructive process that results in ever greater corruption and error in a text, and the enterprise of textual criticism in correspondingly seen as the task of restoring the damaged text to a form as close to its original as possible. In China such a negative view of the process of textual transmission does not normally obtain, and textual criticism therefore does not carry the image of being primarily a rehabilitative procedure.

An important part of the reason for the different perception of the consequences of textual transmission and of the goals of textual criticism lies with the nature of the writing systems involved. Western texts in alphabetic scripts directly reveal errors at the level below that of the word, e.g., spelling errors, grammar errors, pronunciation errors, etc., for which no interpretation is available save that of seeing them as mistakes. Orthographic errors in Chinese texts, written in logographic script, are not prone to such immediate identification as mistakes. All variants in a text written in a logographic script have the potential to be meaningful and therefore are perceived as different, but are not stigmatized automatically as wrong.

西方人多半把版本流傳看作是一錯訛不斷增累的帶有破壞性的過程, 同時以修正傳本中的訛誤,使之盡可能地接近原本爲校勘的終極目標.在中國,人們通常對版本的傳流過程沒有這種消極的看法, 因而校勘亦不常以恢复版本的原始面貌爲其主要宗旨.中西之所以對 版本的流傳及校勘的目標看法不一主要是因爲二者使用的文字系統在性質上截然不同.西方以字母表音的拚音文字能直接顯示低於詞一層之錯誤.諸如拚寫、語法、以及發音之錯誤,這些錯誤顯而易見, 除了把其視爲錯誤外別無其他的解釋.而用漢字書寫的文字中如有訛誤則不易馬上被覺察,當某一漢字爲其同音字所替代時, 常有可能在意義上講得通, 因此在中國人看來, 該字僅是不同而已, 並不一定就是錯誤的.