The stifling practice of giving classical Chinese pride of place in school textbooks did not start at the end of World War II, when China under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) first occupied Taiwan. It arose in 1949, when the KMT’s China died at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This historical fact becomes clear when looking at the way Taiwanese studied the Chinese language in 1945 and teaching materials used in schools after the KMT started governing Taiwan on Oct. 25 of that year.
The KMT’s Republic of China (ROC) perished at the hands of what the KMT called an illegitimate bandit regime — the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Given the CCP’s emphasis on vernacular Chinese, the KMT came to see classical Chinese as a cultural life-saver for shoring up its party-state apparatus.
IMPOSING
The KMT thought that by imposing the shackles of classical Chinese education on the public, it could claim to be the legitimate guardian of Chinese culture, in contrast to the CCP’s “bandit regime.”
When the CCP launched the Cultural Revolution, the KMT responded by launching the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement.
However, no such efforts could bring the ROC back from its moribund state. Eventually, even some Chinese culture advocates who had called the CCP “bandits” crept over to the PRC’s side.
From the outset, Taiwan’s national language education was smothered by the stodgy mindset of those who believe in China’s cultural superiority and give priority to classical Chinese.
STIFLING
Children’s and teenagers’ language learning is nearly suffocated by this stifling approach, but their deteriorating language proficiency is blamed on the dwindling proportion of classical Chinese content in textbooks.
Those who hold such a view are confusing the cause with the result. Each time an appropriate adjustment is made to the proportion of classical Chinese in Taiwanese middle-school students’ language books, there is instant resistance from self-interested teachers who maliciously impede reform.
The Chinese state has changed from the old ROC to the PRC, and a newer China might still emerge. The ROC died at the hands of a new China in 1949, but — having occupied Taiwan — it has managed to exist as a residual and artificial China, clinging stubbornly to its otherness.
CHAUVINISTS
Democratization has brought Taiwanization in its wake, but the residual China cannot face this cultural reality. The crux of this denial is tied up in the knots of Chinese cultural chauvinism.
Classical Chinese has become a cultural pathology — or psychopathology — for Taiwan’s national reconstruction. This is a lesson to which people who live in Taiwan must pay heed.
Where in the world, be it the PRC or any liberal democracy, are such shackles imposed on the way high-school students learn their national language? Which other modern nation puts such emphasis on traditional scripture while disdaining modern and contemporary authors’ works?
Even China is not still stuck in the classical Chinese rut like some academics of the ROC.
Some academicians at Academia Sinica and many conservative Chinese-language teachers teach ancient texts in an indigestible way. It would be better if they cast off the shackles and let Taiwan’s students fly free in the vernacular tongue.
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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