No written form?
As a Taiwanese-American, I feel it is my solemn responsibility to educate the public and often times “correct” misleading information pertaining to Taiwanese culture and history on an “overseas representative level.”
On Thursday last week, I was Web-surfing and came across what I deemed to be a misleading statement issued by the Tourism Bureau with regards to the Hoklo language (also known as Taiwanese) as it relates to mainstream Mandarin Chinese: “Mandarin is the most widespread and commonly used language. The Taiwanese language has no written form, which has prevented it from becoming as sustained and easily used as Mandarin.”
I find this statement offensively misleading, especially coming from a government agency; stemming from the Government Information Office. Whether deliberate or unintentional, this misrepresentation portrays the Taiwanese language as lacking a written form, false information that is disseminated throughout the World Wide Web in English. If the action is indeed intentional, the goal would maliciously perpetuate the idea that Taiwanese do not have their own distinct identity in the international community.
As for Mandarin Chinese becoming the sustainable and easily used “national language” (since the late 1940s), this is a separate issue. I ask that the Tourism Bureau and the Government Information Office retract the statement that “the Taiwanese language has no written form, which has prevented it from becoming as sustained and easily used as Mandarin” that appears on www.go2taiwan.net/chinese_language.php or any other mass-distributed information forum, and offer a formal apology and explanation for their belittlement and misrepresentation of the Taiwanese language to Taiwanese.
Please spread the word.
ANDY CHANG-CHIEN
Irvine, California
[Editor’s note: This passage has since been removed from the Tourism Bureau’s Web site.]
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS