Road signs can take us to places we would never have imagined.
The Ministry of the Interior is researching renaming roads — spelled variously as Zhongzheng (中正) in Taipei and Jhongjheng in other parts of the nation — named after former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). The difference in spelling itself has an ideological basis.
It is the name that adorns the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂) in Taipei — the monument to the former dictator is spelled Chiang Kai-shek in English, but uses Zhongzheng in Chinese.
According to a study by the Transitional Justice Commission, 316 roads are named Zhongzheng or Jhongjheng; another 28 are named Jieshou (介壽), an abbreviation of the slogan “long live Chiang Kai-shek”; and 11 are named Jingguo (經國) after Chiang’s son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Chiang Kai-shek chose Zhongzheng, which implies the qualities of uprightness, rectitude and orthodoxy, for himself. The name, glorifying the former dictator, is all around us.
All street names in Taiwan honoring Japanese or the state of Japan were changed in 1945 after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government assumed control of the former Japanese colony. Just as the Japanese had created names to glorify their colonial rule, so the KMT sought to erase this memory and establish a national narrative of its own.
Criticism about the plan to change the names centers on the projected cost of the endeavor. It is not about money. It is about ideology. Words and names matter. They frame collective memory and consciousness, they shape understanding. The degree to which this affects our cognitive understanding of our world depends on how wide we draw the circle, or how far we step back to observe, from the local to the international.
On this page, Yu Ming (嶼明) writes about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “discursive engineering,” the selective creation and use of names and terms to form its preferred narrative, and to change perceptions of history and truth regarding Taiwan.
On the local implications, Yu uses the example of a speech by Zhang Weiwei (張維為), a professor in China about how Taiwanese, and especially the younger generation, could be easily controlled through the targeted use of discursive engineering channeled through social media and short-video apps. Zhang said that this could “pave the way to eventual unification.”
The Taipei Times dealt with concerns over penetration of the Taiwanese consciousness through these apps in an editorial (“Use Chinese apps with care,” May 30, page 8), but the problem goes so much deeper.
The ministry has said that the reason for changing the road names is to emerge from the authoritarian past and to promote Taiwan’s local languages and culture, including those of indigenous communities. It is a way of returning the nation and, to use Yu’s phrase, “the boundaries of sovereign thought,” from the KMT regime to Taiwanese in the modern, democratic era.
Drawing the circle much wider to the international level, look at the words of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered in Moscow on May 7 in a speech entitled “Learning from History to Build Together a Brighter Future” to mark the end of World War II. Even within that context in a short speech, Xi devoted an entire paragraph on the “restoration” of Taiwan, citing the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and UN Resolution 2758 as having “affirmed China’s sovereignty” over “the Taiwan island” and how they “legitimize” its “inevitable reunification.”
Multiple levels of vigilance against attempts to shape the narrative and collective thought are required. It starts in our own backyard, and with an awareness of the importance of names.
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