Over the past three decades people here have enjoyed the highest levels of prosperity, peace and health in the two millennia of Chinese history, reaching a "Materialistic Golden Age." Yet there is nothing we can show for all this effulgence. In culture, arts and education, we have hit one of the darkest nadirs ever reached in during this time frame. Why, in a society that claims five thousand years of uninterrupted civilization, should this be so?
It is because our civilization has in fact been interrupted, not by any foreign conquests of which we have seen plenty, but because of an internal cultural suicide committed in the May Fourth Movement led principally in 1919 by Dr Hu Shizhi (
First, they had a good thing: popular education. With new democracy won in 1911, China won universal literacy. Everyone had a right to education. Then came the breakdown: Reformers found classical Chinese (
In fact it is just as hard to master written characters in the vernacular as in the classics. To speak in the vernacular was not enough; these monstrous pundits had to bury the past with this overblown May Fourth Movement -- and our too-fragile link with it. Classical Chinese became a hated, optional class taught by uninspired people who themselves had lost touch with its subtleties, its cultural uniqueness, its elegance and unequalled beauty -- qualities that made Chinese literature "civilized."
My generation is deprived of this precious link with the past that had been a palpable reality only a generation previously. Each May 4 I am in mourning (as much later I have come to mourn also June 4). Returning to a Chinese environment after some 40 years in Western climes, I find colleagues and students in Taiwan entirely alienated from that magnificent and irreplaceable heritage that should have been their birthright. No one in their fifties or below here has command of their past as had my father's generation. Instead, there is overblown self-interest generated by misguided notions of democracy which here is taken to mean "my rights and privileges." But never "my obligation to society." Not what I can and must contribute to society but always what I can get out of my present situation. How to make or take the most out of my job. So students want a quick degree, and teachers exploit their position to advance their standing outside, garner lucrative commissions, or move to a more prestigious university. Never in my 20 years teaching, from Taiwan University, Tsing Hua University to the College of Graduate Arts Institutes, have I witnessed meetings where faculty discuss the future of students, standards of excellence we should set, the relative position of our graduates in either the microcosm of Taiwan or the global one. There is nothing like an "educational policies committee" or a "faculty academic standards evaluation committee" as there are in the West. Why should this be so?
Because it is believed that in a democracy, a new PhD holder, no matter of what academic level or quality or from what type of university, equals PhDs who may be of considerably higher academic standards or from far better institutions. (I have examined to my horror a passed PhD thesis that has virtually no footnotes and only half a page of bibliography consisting of general surveys.) Here degree equals degree. Taiwan's vernacular democracy has obliterated all differences in standards or in quality, and Taiwanese justice has become impartial to wisdom or experience. Thus the voice of a new teacher has weight equal to that of academics long versed in research, teaching and administration. A new PhD without teaching experience joining a department can insist on exercising their "equal rights" in decisions affecting the long-term future of the institution or matters of standards and quality. They even have the gall to pretend they are able to evaluate far more senior and experienced colleagues. Less competent faculty (or even legislators) are always in the majority, they always decide the vote, and usually drown out the wisdom, the well-considered judgment or counsel of senior members. Is this irresponsible democracy worth it?
This so-called educated nation, with its banal vernacular school texts devoid of any trace of China's magnificent literary heritage, with its built-in dedication to higher spiritual values and to an aristocratic giving of one's best for the public good, has made a country of cowardly self-serving mediocrity, with uninspired and irresponsible cultural leaders who unthinkingly stick to paths of least resistance and avoid the threat of responsibility.
The tragedy of the May Fourth Movement is the complete severance with our past, the total denial of nobler aspects of Chinese civilization, for all Chinese, and for all generations to come.
Joan Stanley-Baker is a professor at the Institute of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National College of the Arts, Kuantien.
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