Article full of falsehoods
Dear editor,
I suppose you have a duty to report all sorts of opinions, but when I started reading Kengchi Goah’s (吳耿志) essay (“Mandarin an obstacle to progress,” Sept. 13, page 8), I thought it was hilarious satire.
Then I stopped laughing and became incredulous.
Since there are approximately 1.2 billion Mandarin speakers (according to Wikipedia), Goah’s claim that it is “a representational language that few can master” is clearly false.
Assuming Goah has access to sources like Wikipedia, it appears that we must call it a lie.
The silly claim that gunpowder was used in the V-2 rockets is similarly false and probably a lie.
These ridiculous claims and the further claim that “a representational language” is holding back Taiwan’s (and China’s) development ignores an important new reality.
In the past several decades, computers, artificial intelligence and related technologies have made all languages (including Mandarin Chinese) available to everyone (including a 75-year-old native English speaker).
I can write Chinese using pinyin and read Chinese using many, many programs.
If once upon a time, a representational language held back the Chinese (a dubious proposition), it is nonsense to say that it still does.
Jim Walsh
Taipei, Taiwan
Investigative report
As an avid reader of the Taipei Times whenever I am in Taiwan, which is almost one week per month, and having compassion for Taiwan (not “Chinese Taipei”) and its friendly people, I felt that I should contact you with an idea I had recently.
China spends a huge amount of money each year belittling Taiwan, actively blocking entry to international organizations and bodies, supporting protest groups, funding overseas students groups, indoctrinating Chinese citizens against Taiwan and a whole host of other activities.
While it is prudent to engage with Taiwan’s local and international friends so that a balanced view can be presented, why not try a less direct countermeasure where it could do some paying back? My suggestion is this: If the Taipei Times was to put together an investigative group to estimate and collate these costs for a one-year period and feed the results both domestically and to “big brother” in an article that shames China as wasteful and bullying, and perhaps suggest where the money could have been used for the betterment of Chinese citizens, one can imagine the carnage it might cause. Just a thought.
Name withheld
New South Wales, Australia
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