China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday.
China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday.
The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said.
Photo: Taipei Times
The documents “reflect cross-strait historical ties and exchanges, and carries the memory of Chinese, attesting to the fact that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait originate from the same root… and belong to one China,” she said.
The act says that the document preservation units “may collect documents on Minnan-Taiwan relations through donations, purchases, replication and other approaches,” while non-state museums would be encouraged to “take part in the preservation and use of Minnan-Taiwan relations documents via collection, compilation and exhibition.”
“People from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, as well as overseas Chinese people, are encouraged to actively promote the documents on Minnan-Taiwan relations and take part in the preservation and use of the documents,” it says.
In Taipei, Hung Chin-fu (洪敬富), a professor of political science at National Cheng Kung University, yesterday said these are attempts to tie Taiwan to the Minnan region ethnically and culturally through efforts such as the demonstration zone for cross-strait integrated development set up in China’s Xiamen City.
The act is an escalation of cultural warfare against Taiwan to the legislative level and constitutes “lawfare,” a type of influence operations, he said.
Beijing attempts to prevent Taiwan from culturally separating itself from China by using laws to strengthen ties between Minnan and Taiwan in terms of cultures, customs, traditions and festivals, Hung said.
While threatening to take Taiwan by force using “guns,” Beijing also uses “pens” to claim that Taiwanese culture is “part of Chinese culture” and Taiwan and China “share the same ancestry and bloodline,” he said.
By emphasizing the Chinese origins of Taiwanese religions and cultures, such as the sea goddess Matsu (媽祖) and god of war Guan Gong (關公), Beijing attempts to form and fuel public opinion that could influence the political views of people in Taiwan, Hung said.
“This is ‘united front’ tactics without gunfire,” with the goal of undermining Taiwanese subjectivity and subsuming its cultural sovereignty under China, he said.
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