Feb. 21 is the UN’s International Mother Language Day. It is a day dedicated to promoting the protection of languages and cultures of smaller peoples and groups around the world. Over the last 60 years, the languages and cultures of Taiwan’s Aborigines, and the Hakka and Hoklo people, which make up 90 percent of Taiwan’s population, have been all but destroyed. The government has never realized that this constitutes human rights abuse.
During the presidential elections, everyone kept talking about “Taiwan,” but after President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was elected president for the first time, the “Taiwan” in “Taiwan Post” was immediately changed back to “Chunghwa.” Immediately after the Jan. 14 elections, the government launched a Chinese Language Knowledge Database and Ma proclaimed that the Chinese writing system had once again been standardized. Why didn’t he say anything about how great the languages of Taiwan are? Preserving Taiwan’s local languages should be a primary task for the government, so why has Ma spent time and effort on standardizing the Chinese written script used by Taiwan and China?
Standardization of script and other items was a measure employed by Qin Shihuang (秦始皇) to cement his control over China. China’s version of the database includes a statement that says its goal is to involve more young people from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, create a more patriotic education and establish a platform for the common spirit of the Chinese people. However, just which country are young people from Taiwan supposed to feel patriotic toward? Surely this database was designed for unification purposes.
Everyone knows that eventual unification is Ma’s ultimate goal. Standardizing the written script, then, is a major part of Ma’s unification policy.
I recently mentioned three things the Ma administration might do. First, I suggested that they would replace the use of the Zhuyin fuhao, or bopomofo, system with China’s Hanyu Pinyin. Second, I said they might promote simplified characters in school alongside traditional characters. Third, I said they might change the English spelling of names on Taiwanese passports to Hanyu Pinyin across the board.
The Presidential Office only responded to one of my concerns, saying they were not going to scrap the Zhuyin fuhao system.
The use of a romanization system representative of Taiwan’s unique qualities is closely related to Taiwan’s sustainable development, but I oppose the use of Hanyu Pinyin. Zhuyin fuhao is a feasible system and it is currently in use. Ma wants standardization and pushes the use of Hanyu Pinyin, which means that he will first have to get rid of the Zhuyin fuhao obstacle.
The Presidential Office only responded to my first proposal. Can we believe what they said? What about my second and third proposals? Will they put these policies into effect? Ma himself has said on TV that he hopes in future Taiwanese students will be taught to read traditional characters and write simplified characters.
What Ma wants is a system in which both traditional and simplified characters are used, but at what cost to Taiwanese? The truth is that Hanyu Pinyin is already widely used around Taiwan and there is nothing we will be able to do about the government changing the English spelling of the names on our passports.
Less than 10 percent of Taiwanese want unification with China, but Ma still sees his historic mission as handing over the free and democratic Taiwan to authoritarian China. This is both worrying and infuriating.
Chuang Wan-shou is an honorary professor at Chang Jung Christian University.
Translated by Drew Cameron
The diplomatic dispute between China and Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments in the Japanese Diet continues to escalate. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong (傅聰) wrote that, “if Japan dares to attempt an armed intervention in the cross-Strait situation, it would be an act of aggression.” There was no indication that Fu was aware of the irony implicit in the complaint. Until this point, Beijing had limited its remonstrations to diplomatic summonses and weaponization of economic levers, such as banning Japanese seafood imports, discouraging Chinese from traveling to Japan or issuing
The diplomatic spat between China and Japan over comments Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made on Nov. 7 continues to worsen. Beijing is angry about Takaichi’s remarks that military force used against Taiwan by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” necessitating the involvement of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Rather than trying to reduce tensions, Beijing is looking to leverage the situation to its advantage in action and rhetoric. On Saturday last week, four armed China Coast Guard vessels sailed around the Japanese-controlled Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), known to Japan as the Senkakus. On Friday, in what
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Nov. 5 recalled more than 150,000 eggs found to contain three times the legal limit of the pesticide metabolite fipronil-sulfone. Nearly half of the 1,169 affected egg cartons, which had been distributed across 10 districts, had already been sold. Using the new traceability system, officials quickly urged the public to avoid consuming eggs with the traceability code “I47045,” while the remainder were successfully recalled. Changhua County’s Wenya Farm — the source of the tainted eggs — was fined NT$120,000, and the Ministry of Agriculture instructed the county’s Animal Disease Control Center to require that
On Nov. 8, newly elected Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) and Vice Chairman Chi Lin-len (季麟連) attended a memorial for White Terror era victims, during which convicted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spies such as Wu Shi (吳石) were also honored. Cheng’s participation in the ceremony, which she said was part of her efforts to promote cross-strait reconciliation, has trapped herself and her party into the KMT’s dark past, and risks putting the party back on its old disastrous road. Wu, a lieutenant general who was the Ministry of National Defense’s deputy chief of the general staff, was recruited
RSS