The terms "Taiwanese" and "national language" -- the former referring to the Taiwanese language, or "Hoklo," and the latter Mandarin Chinese -- would trade their official meanings if the Cabinet's national language development bill were to become law, Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (
"Taiwanese" would refer to Chinese Mandarin as spoken locally and the "national language" would refer to Taiwanese, Tu said while answering lawmakers' questions -- posed in Mandarin -- in the legislature's Education and Culture committee yesterday.
"The national language would no longer be what we're speaking now," Tu told lawmakers.
Unveiled as a draft bill last week, the national language development bill seeks to preserve the nation's many languages, particularly Aboriginal ones, amid a dying out of numerous local mother tongues, Su said last week.
But all local languages, including Mandarin, would be regarded as "national languages," even though there would only be one "official language" according to the bill, Su added, referring to the status of Mandarin as the nation's official lingua franca.
Tu yesterday all but negated the premier's remarks with his comment that Mandarin would no longer be a national language if the bill were to pass, invoking the ire of pan-blue lawmakers.
"Minister Tu, your whole career as education minister has revolved around de-sinicization, ideology and politicking," Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Ching-hua (
"Don't leave the education ministry with all your education policies amounting to nada, nothing, zero! Zero!" Lee added.
Seeking clarification of how the bill seeks to designate Mandarin and Hoklo, KMT Legislator Diane Lee (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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