During the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) one-party era, many seemingly democratic institutions were actually manipulated and well-crafted illusions. Although votes were held, the entire system had been carefully engineered, reducing democracy into little more than a formality.
This history of fake democracy explains why transitional justice has not yet been fully implemented in Taiwan.
If transitional justice had truly been implemented, authoritarian symbols such as roads named “Zhongzheng” (中正) — a name adopted by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), implying the qualities of uprightness, rectitude and orthodoxy — would have been changed long ago.
However, the reality is that nearly every area in Taiwan has a major road by that name. The nation still has the signs of that dark piece of history.
Yet, whenever someone advocates for renaming, they are labeled as divisive.
As Liu Che-ting (劉哲廷) wrote in his Chinese-language piece — “Settling the score with Chiang Kai-shek: Justice 70 years too late” — for the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Friday, such accusations are the “most elegantly incorrect rhetoric.” They appear to promote harmony, but are an excuse to avoid reform.
Taiwanese do not reject Chinese culture, but that does not mean every Chinese character should be viewed as the exclusive property of the Sinosphere. Many familiar modern Chinese terms — such as “popularity” (人氣, renqi), “industry” (產業, qiye), “economy” (經濟, jingji), “legal entity” (法人, faren) and “telephone” (電話, dianhua) — were actually established during Japan’s 1868 to 1912 Meiji era and reintroduced into Chinese as loanwords.
Japan adopted Chinese characters into its own writing system long ago, called kanji. For example, the character “tai” (臺) was simplified to “台,” and “ti” (體) was simplified to “体.” Japan also created its own kanji characters, such as the Japanese words tsuji (intersection) and toge (mountain pass). The two written characters are unique to the Japanese language.
While traditional Chinese medicine originated in China, it was refined in Japan through scientific and institutional development, eventually becoming a key component in Japanese traditional medicine. This example demonstrates how culture can be transformed and localized, and tradition can become part of a modern national identity.
Unfortunately, any discussion of localization or cultural reinterpretation in Taiwan is often immediately dismissed as “desinicization,” a term that refers to the intentional removal of Han Chinese cultural influence.
These ideological shackles are a large reason that transitional justice has yet to take root.
The education system has neither clearly explained the truth about history, nor worked to demolish long-standing false rhetoric. If these issues were properly addressed, young people would be less easily misled by the language strategies of the pan-blue camp.
The KMT reframes China’s plans to annex Taiwan as “unification” and refers to a foreign adversary as the “motherland.” Countries such as Canada, Australia, the US and others were formerly British colonies, but which among them refers to the UK as the “motherland?”
In Taiwan’s case, such a term is even less appropriate.
As Elliot Yao (姚文邦) wrote in “Language is sovereignty, winning hearts is key: the Chinese Communist Party’s [CCP] language system has fully saturated Taiwan,” his Chinese-language piece for the Liberty Times on Tuesday: “If we continue to use vocabulary and logic defined by the CCP, Taiwan will ultimately and unknowingly lose the ability to define itself.”
Language is so much more than a tool for communication — it is a means of establishing identity. When the nation’s vocabulary is manipulated, thoughts and value judgements are inevitably influenced.
From the KMT’s strict regulation of handwriting to its present-day crafting of rhetoric and manipulation of language, the multiple challenges Taiwan faces in its democratic transition and cultural self-identification are clear. When education and history are explained honestly, and when language and logic are thoroughly clarified, Taiwan would truly be able to break free from the dense fog of confusion surrounding rhetoric and identity, and finally begin to establish its own values and cultural subjectivity.
Jane Ywe-hwan is an associate professor at National Pingtung University.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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