Aargh

Is it me? Is someone playing with my mind?

ADDED: Grammar argh
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Culture Wars: China vs Taiwan

Taiwan presents multiple challenges to China -- a democracy where China claims Chinese societies are not ready for that form of government -- and a culture that acknowledges Chinese roots but calls itself Taiwanese -- and, at least from the DPP side, a vision of multilingual, multicultural society where citizenship is rooted in a lawful relation to the national polity, not a racial classification. Not to mention its economic prowess, brand monikers, and its culture industries, which reinforce Taiwan's independent identity. And which sell big in China, too.

Naturally, all this annoying independence of thought and behavior brings out the inner Borg of the thugs across the Strait. It. must. be. assimilated.

This week Locutus of Borg the Culture Minister from China was visiting Taiwan to propose Borgness with Chinese characteristics. To wit:

Cai Wu, the highest-ranking mainland official to visit the island in 12 years, said on Sunday details of the plan have not been finalised but suggested building on a sweeping trade pact the two sides forged earlier this year.

"For instance, I'm wondering if it is possible to sign an agreement patterning after the ECFA (Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement)... it is still under discussion," Cai said during a press conference while touring Taipei's National Palace Museum.

Cai will attend a seminar in Taipei on Monday, according to its organisers, the Shen Chun-chih Culture Foundation, a non-profit Taipei-based body focused on cultural exchanges with the mainland.

To go with economic integration and financial integration, China is essentially proposing cultural integration -- assimilation. Taiwan News put it well today:

In the wake of the signing of a controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement," the authoritarian People's Republic of China has launched drives to push President Ma Ying-jeou's rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government to accept political negotiations and help promote "cultural unification" under a "Chinese national identity."

While Ma appears committed to delay political talks until after the crucial Nov. 27 municipal mayoral elections, the KMT government seems to have fewer qualms about cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party - ruled PRC's intention to subordinate Taiwan culture under the reactionary umbrella of "Chinese national culture."

This agenda was showcased yesterday in the second KMT-CCP "Cross-Strait Cultural Forum" held yesterday in Taipei under the theme of "seizing the opening and creating a new situation."

National Cultural Association Secretary-General and former premier Liu Chao-hsuan set the tone by reaffirming that "Chinese culture is the common denominator between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait," followed by Council for Cultural Affairs Minister Emile Sheng's parroting of Ma's denigrating definition of Taiwan culture as "Chinese culture with unique Taiwanese characteristics."

Platitudes aside, the main course of the conference was PRC Culture Minister Cai Wu's upfront demand for the rapid signing of a "cross-strait culture cooperation agreement" under the ECFA umbrella in order to establish an "institutional mechanism" to promote "comprehensive cooperation" in fields including resource integration, financing, talent cultivation, content creation and global marketing and even participation in the "re-examination of culture policies and regulations."

Statements by Cai and other PRC delegates showed that Beijing's short-term objective is to appropriate the fruits of Taiwan's higher development in cultural creative industries, including artistic creation, techniques, commercialization and marketing, and turn our cultural assets into "local content" for the PRC to market globally as "Chinese culture."

Besides predicting that "cross-cultural industry will become a new economic growth point and provide a pillar industry for the national economy," a term which surely did not refer to Taiwan, Cai settled any doubts about the ultimate purpose of "cross-strait cultural cooperation" with a resounding call to "commonly plan for the great revival of the Chinese race nation!"

"Chinese race nation" is Han chauvinist code that Ma uses as well -- see his inaugural speech. The common ground that enables the KMT and CCP to overcome whatever minor inclinations they may have not to cooperate is this race-based vision of the Chinese nation. It is in direct opposition to the formal DPP goal of a national citizenship independent of ethnic considerations in a constitutionally defined independent and democratic republic.

Taiwan News argues that Taiwan's distinctive historical, political, and cultural experience is a wellspring of its creative power. In PRC hands this distinctiveness would be -- as Ma himself puts it -- "Chinese culture with unique Taiwanese characteristics" -- assimilated. The latter half of Ma's formulation would be instantly lost under a PRC rubric, since distinctiveness must be carefully mediated by Chineseness in the PRC cultural lexicon, to fence in the unruly habit of other ethnicities to develop their own identities.

The PRC program is clearly aimed, as Taiwan News observes, at subsuming Taiwan's cultural industries under the rubric of China and eliminating a potentially important source of Taiwanese "difference." Not to mention -- as always -- the practical goal of eliminating Taiwanese industries where they compete with Chinese firms. Elimination of "Taiwan" as a "brand" is also a key goal; media reports suggest that things with the "Taiwan" label on them are popular in China and that what Taiwan sells is its distinctive culture -- accessible, yet different.

How that must annoy the CCP in Beijing.
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Daily Links

• Fake chips from China threaten all sorts of devices
• The Formosa Foundation ad on Youtube
• Can we stop with this rhetoric? "The Chinese" are not a subspecies, whatever you may think of how they treat animals. Or anything else.
• China Times editorial on Taiwan's structural problems and Ma not doing anything for the poor.
  
• First phase of wetland purchase in Changhua done.
  
• Way cool: scientists have argued for years that the Amazon jungle was inhabited by millions prior to European contact and is the result of human creation and construction. Now the evidence is overwhelming. See also Charles Mann's 1491 which will completely change the way you think about the history of the Americas.
  

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RDEC Fail

Taiwan What's Up, which is trying to become an info source for foreigners in Taiwan, sent around a survey about local web portals, which Forumosa then disseminated to the wider expat community (it's originally from the RDEC). The survey is weirdly designed as it is, but Feiren alerted me to a marker of the underlying racialist construction of ROC identity in question 26. Among the choices for defining yourself, you can be a Foreigner with ROC Nationality.

UPDATED: Decided to change it to RDEC to better reflect the origin of it
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Chunghwamintzu Rulz: thanks for making my point

One of the things I wanted to point out in my piece in the Asian Wall Street Journal was the way in which, in the minds of all True Chinese^(tm) the idea of chunghwamintzu functions as a cultural claim whose automatic assumption is that all those in the chunghwamintzu belong together in one polity because they are a race-nation. One of the two letters published in response to my piece show this mentality hard at work. The first, from David Ting, notes:

It is true that 60 years of separate rule across the Taiwan Strait since 1949 has produced some distinct cultural differences in the huge salad bowl of Chinese culture. But blood is thicker than water. While it is true that "the majority of Taiwan's citizens see themselves as Taiwanese," as pointed out by Mr. Turton, many of them also see themselves as Chinese, just like Texans are Americans and Scots are Britons. The Taiwanese won't forget their roots.

Blood is thicker than water... he even uses the phrase "the collective heritage of the Chinese nation" to describe the way the idea of chunghwamintzu functions to mystically bind all Chinese together. Ma used a very similar phrase in his inaugural address.

Another point I made is that the current KMT strategy is to concede a degree of uniqueness to Taiwanese culture (alas, reality, so hard to make disappear) while handling the ugly reality of Taiwanese culture by locating it as a mere variant of the great stream of Chinese culture -- this is a deliberate political strategy whose purpose is to legitimate -- by the implicit assumption that all chunghwamintzu people belong in one polity -- Chinese control over Taiwan. Sure enough, Ting takes that exact approach in the last paragraph as well, noting mere cultural differences in the "huge salad bowl" of Chinese culture -- safely dealing with the annoying uniqueness of Taiwan culture by pushing it back into the great stream of Chinese culture. Ting's letter takes exactly the same stance that Ma does. Clearly wielders of the chunghwamintzu ideology are terrified by Taiwanese dissent from the idea that everyone of chunghwamintzu identity must be in the same polity. Ein volk, ein reich! And don't you forget it!

Reference: Dikotter's awesome book on the discourse of race in modern China is available in PDF.

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Ma Worships the Yellow Emperor

The CNA had a report which AFAIK failed to make the English papers this week, but is nevertheless a crucial indicator of the way that the KMT is attempting to reshape Taiwan so it is "Chinese". On Friday Ma Ying-jeou, President of the Republic of China, hosted a ceremony honoring the Yellow Emperor, the mythical ancestor of the Chinese, just as Amaterasu Omikami is the mythical ancestor of the Japanese imperial house, at Yuanshan in Taipei.

The report notes that this was the first time ever that any ROC President here in Taiwan had hosted this ceremony, which had hitherto been the responsibility of the Interior Minister. The KMT had never been comfortable with the feudalistic overtones of the ceremony, noted the friend who alerted me to this tale, and had thus delegated it to a lesser official. The report stated:

總統府發言人王郁琦表示，黃帝是中華民族的共同始祖，政府為紀念黃帝，將清明節定為「民族掃墓節」。基於「慎終追遠」對中華民族有重要的意義，馬總統決定親自主持，表達政府對相關傳統文化的重視。

Presidential Office spokesman Wang Yu-chi said that the Yellow Emperor is the common ancestor of all the Chinese people. In order to commemorate the Yellow Emperor, Tomb Sweeping Day will be designated "民族 Tomb Sweeping Day." Based on the importance of "being thorough in the funeral rites and worship of the ancestors" to the Chinese (race/nation) (中華民族), President decided to personally lead the ceremony, showing the emphasis the government places on culturally relevant traditions.

Readers conversant in Chinese can see how difficult it is to translate "民族 Tomb Sweeping Day." It comes out sounding truly bizarre: Race Tomb Sweeping Day? Ethnic Tomb Sweeping Day? Obviously the "race/ethnicity" meant here is Chinese.

There's a rich vein to mine here. It starts with the construction of everyone on both sides of the Taiwan Strait being "Chinese", comments that have been in the news lately with the Buddhist Master Hsing Yun, but which, since Ma's election, date back to his May 2oth inaugural address (readers are encouraged to re-read the analysis I posted against this report on Ma's sacrifices to the Yellow Emperor). In my discussion of the speech, which uses the term 中華民族, I noted:

Two other translation points to make: the English text says "our common Chinese heritage" but the Chinese is explicit -- the people on the two sides of the Strait both belong to the Chinese race" (兩岸人民同屬中華民族).The second translation issue is even more interesting. Entirely dropped from the English text is the very next sentence, which says 中華民族智慧之高 which translates "the great intelligence/wisdom" of the Chinese race." As I noted, Ma's thinking treads the well-worn path of Han chauvinism in which other ethnicities are arranged in order below the dominant and wisely benevolent Han. The DPP, by contrast, offered "proto-state to state" and "partnership" with all the original peoples.

The DPP also had a completely different idea of how to define citizenship, one not based on belonging to a specific ethnicity/race, but on being a citizen of a Taiwan nation. Racial chauvinism, demonstrated in Ma's personal honoring of the Yellow Emperor with its Yasukuni-like implications, is a powerful component of Ma's thinking, and his fostering of a retrograde Han chauvinism/superiority is an important affirmation of the remarks of people like Hsing Yun or GIO master blogger Kuo Kuan-ying. Indeed Ma criticized Kuo's comments by saying that everyone was a Son of the Yellow Emperor, affirming the Han Chauvinism that drove them even as he distanced himself from that chauvinism's more odious expressions. In terms of creating a civil society with a Taiwan identity at its heart, this is a step backwards.

After Ma made that statement in his inaugural address, an aboriginal legislator stormed out of the audience and convened a press conference on the spot to denounce it. Not everyone in Taiwan is a Son of the Yellow Emperor.

Second, this construction of everyone on both sides of the Strait as being Chinese is obviously and intentionally a colonialist one. If you have ever had the (mis)fortune to argue with a Chinese nationalist, they will blithely inform you that Tibetans, Manchus, Mongolians, etc, are all Chinese. Indeed, the claim that "X is Chinese" should be taken as a presumptive declaration that X is about to have their territory incorporated into China. In this light, there was something deeply symbolic about the revelation that the "ethnic" performers at the Beijing Olympics were all actually Han.

Ma's treatment of Chinese symbols shows his ideological identification with them. Recall this event from October of 2008?

The Taipei Confucian Temple marked the 2,558th anniversary of the birth of Confucius yesterday amid criticism from some city councilors that the temple performed the bayi dance — traditionally performed to pay homage to an emperor — to “fawn” over the presence of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).

At that ceremony Ma strode through the Central Door of the Temple (中門), which only emperors are supposed to use.

I said then, it was only going to get worse. It is.

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Ma Government Seeks World Heritage Status for Traditional Characters

The government of Taiwan is seeking UNESCO World Heritage status for traditional Chinese characters, with a task force erected for that purpose in Feb. I can imagine what a debate that will set off among linguists of Chinese over what constitutes a "traditional" character -- since many characters not accepted by the government are in common use as shortcuts among the ordinary people -- but it is clear that Ma government seeks to use the KMT idealized version of "Chinese" as the definition. Note the claim:

It was not clear whether Taiwan's not being a member of the United Nations would hinder the effort, but Taiwan's government does not believe China would oppose the move because the complex characters are part of the Chinese heritage, the News said.

When the Chinese Communists won the Chinese Civil War and founded the People's Republic of China in 1949, they introduced simplified Chinese characters beginning in 1956 to make it easier for farmers and workers to learn to read and write.

But the Chinese Nationalist Government, which lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan to set up its government-in-exile, preserved the complex characters in the name of preserving the Chinese culture, and today Taiwan is the only place in the world where the complex characters are still being used.

Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Macau as well. Note the rendering of the idealized faux Chinese culture of KMT ideology as "Chinese culture". Traditional characters had been in use on Taiwan since the arrival of the first colonists from south China four centuries ago, yet the paragraph is constructed so as to give the reader the impression that their use in Taiwan owes nothing to that past. Into the memory hole with ye, Taiwan culture! A CNA article gives a fuller discussion of the campaign:

The academics, led by Lee Hsien, a retired Chinese literature and language professor from National Taiwan Normal University, made the appeal via a written petition that says traditional Chinese characters – the vehicle that carries the venerable and profound Chinese culture – have been in use for more than a millennium without evident changes and that through traditional Chinese characters, users can understand what the ancient Chinese people said and how they were thinking.

This actually reflects a living miracle in human history in terms of any written character usage, Lee said. At present, only 50 million people around the world use traditional Chinese characters, while 1.3 billion people, mostly people in China , use simplified Chinese characters, Lee noted.

Chinese calligraphy has also been targeted for UNESCO status.

UPDATE: A-gu points out in the comments:

The KMT was responsible for most of the early simplification research. But once the Communist Party adopted simplified characters on the mainland, the KMT did an about face. Their motivation was not to preserve traditional Chinese culture, but to throw away their own project just for the sake of being anti-Communist.

Right on! The first simplified character set was released by the KMT Ministry of Education in the 1930s. This China website actually is clearer on that than Wiki. In other words, the KMT position of preserving the writing of 牛鬼蛇神的文字 is completely bogus.

[Taiwan]

What's Chinese?

An excellent post by Andrew Leonard over at Salon.com in his column How the World Works points to two very intertwined phenomena -- what is globalization, and what is Chinese culture? Leonard, who posts from time to time on Taiwan in its global context, writes:

One of the oddities of history is that although Taiwan is separated from mainland China by only about 100 miles, the first outside power to exert political control over the island was the Netherlands. Even more peculiar, and delightful, is the thesis articulated in Tonio Andrade's "How Taiwan Became Chinese": The Dutch are ultimately responsible for the Sinification of Taiwan; the transformation of an island populated predominantly by Austronesian aborigines into a culturally Chinese domain.

Andrade's book looks fascinating; he views the early colonial period, with trade networks extending around the globe, as the first real era of globalization. Leonard went on to excerpt a portion of his book:

... I worried that my title might help hawks in mainland China argue that Taiwan belongs to the People's Republic of China, and I strongly believe that Taiwan belongs to its people and should be whatever they decide. They're doing a great job ruling themselves.

Yet there is no doubt that Taiwan today is culturally Chinese... Indeed, in many ways Taiwan is more Chinese than its assertive neighbor. Three decades of Maoism stripped away parts of mainland China's traditional culture, but Taiwan preserves customs, festivals, and schools of thought that were extinguished across the strait....

Anyone who has been around Taiwan for any length of time knows that the claim that "Taiwan preserves Chinese culture better than the mainland" is an old KMT propaganda chestnut. Such claims of "preserved" cultures that view traditional culture as both identifiable and unchanging are romantic fantasies of the western colonial era, but more fundamentally, they beg the question of what is meant by "Chinese culture."

Looking at Taiwan, what does one see? Taiwan has a democratic government -- there is nothing else like it in Chinese history, and a growing awareness and appreciation for democracy -- also a rarity in Chinese history. The educational system and police structure are European filtered through Japanese colonialism and postwar authoritarianism. Japanese influence is enormous, from food and fashion to technology. The business culture is an ecletic blend of imported ideas like double entry bookkeeping and local ideas like guanxi networks. For breakfast I can get a "western" breakfast of a layer sandwich that is entirely a local cuisine, or I can eat a Chinese breakfast consisted of foods updated by modern technology and altered thereby, whose ancestral dishes stem from the continent next door. I drive on western-style roads, in western-style cars....well, I could go on forever. Just what's "Chinese" about Taiwan? (Purely as an aside -- why does technology always disappear when we talk about culture? None of the tech now used on Taiwan is of recent Chinese vintage. The major shaping influences are all western).

Well, on the other hand, just about everything, one could answer. The local languages are all Chinese languages, except for the aboriginal tongues. Cultural ideals about women, the family, child-raising, male and female relations, politics, sex, religion, power -- many deriving from "Chinese culture," (again, except for aborigines) but as for actual culture practices? Your mileage may vary. What people say about themselves, and how they actually behave, are very different things.

The only reason anyone even raises the "Is Taiwan Chinese" issue is because Taiwan's alleged "Chineseness" is a claim that is part of the package of assertions that Beijing makes about Taiwan to support its drive to annex the island. Definitions like "Is Taiwan Chinese?" are a matter of values, not facts, only worth arguing about over beer -- unless some predatory power decides to base a foreign policy on them. It's a shame that an academic who says he knows better has nevertheless chosen to use a highly debateable title that is so useful to Beijing.

[Taiwan] [China]

Crazed Ad in the Washington Post

Some guy paid $30K to have this baby put in the Washington Post. I especially like the crack that "Taiwanese" sounds like "Taiwan Ni Sui" = "Taiwan You Die". Glad somebody is making money off this stuff.

Click on it to see the full size version on my Flickr account (click on ALL SIZES).

[Taiwan] [US] [China]

"Chinese" New Year?

Maddog at Taiwan Matters points to the debate on whether Lunar New Year should be Chinese New Year...

First, from the Liberty Times, the Chinese language Green publication:

范嘉芬提到農曆年，如果要用英文表達，幾乎絕大部份的人都會說成「Chinese New Year」（中國年），但這是錯的。正確的說法是Lunar New Year。

Fan Chia-fen observed of the agricultural new year, that if we use English to express it, most people say "Chinese New Year", but this is an error. The correct way to say it is Lunar New Year.

因 為太陰曆法（簡稱陰曆）依循的是月球運行週期所計算制定，所以如果要說成英文，就是Lunar（Moon） Calendar，過的新年就是Lunar New Year。而相對於此曆法當然就是以太陽之運轉為曆法計算基礎的太陽曆（Sun Calendar）了；也就是目前世界多數國家所通用遵循公元紀年，是根據阿拉伯的太陽曆法編製的。但使用到現在全世界沒有人會說是阿拉伯新年 （Arabic New Year）。

Because the solar-lunar calendric system (the lunar year) uses the movement of the moon as the basis for its calculations, if we say it in English, we should use Lunar (Moon) Calendar, so new year is actually Lunar New Year. The solar calendar, in which the sun is used as the basis for calculation, is used by many countries, but it is originally based on an Arab solar calendar. However, currently nobody on earth calls it "Arabic New Year."

全球不只一個國家在過農曆年，這並不是中國專屬的年節，所以不適合說是Chinese New Year。

（作者從事服務業）

Around the world more than one nation celebrates lunar new year. It is not appropriate to call it Chinese New Year.

The subject has also come up in the English papers. Here's caustic columnist Johnny Neihu receiving a letter about it:

Saturday, Feb 17, 2007, Page 8

Politically correct pork

Dear Johnny,
Is saying "Happy Lunar New Year" politically correct nowadays in Taiwan or will a group of irate "trade unionists" attack me if I say it?

Also, if the coming year is the Year of the Pig, will it be possible to buy decent bacon instead of the crap streaky bacon sold here?

Pete Jones

Taipei

Johnny replies: I've never been one to advocate political correctness. But I've never been one to advocate political incorrectness either. The actual content of both are vulnerable to whoever has the power to induce guilt or outrage at any time.

But I can tell you that "Chinese New Year" is a politically incorrect expression at this newspaper, not just because Taiwan isn't part of China, but also because China is not the only state or national "culture" that marks the lunar calendar.

So if some demented "trade unionists" (politically polite code for pro-blue-camp labor bosses) take you to task for daring to name a calendar event after the moon, refer them to me and I will find out why it is exactly that the Republic of China is averse to politically correct pork.

I've been discussing this privately with maddog. Frankly I think these analyses both err. The reason we call it "Chinese New Year" is (a) because the Chinese celebrate it at this time; and, (b) we celebrate it Chinese style. The second is far more important. I'm not waiting for the 25th of Kislev, I'm not doing Seollal with tteokguk, and I'm not observing a "Day of Silence." I'm preparing red envelopes for the kids, cooking up Chinese specialties, and decorating the house with red banners.

This is on the level of "freedom fries" or "victory cabbage." The whole point of Taiwan independence is political independence from China, opening up the world to the idea that a people can partake of the great Chinese cultural stream without necessarily being ruled by Beijing, and that Beijing is not the sole arbiter of what constitutes "Chinese culture." We need to destroy the way Beijing uses Chinese culture as an imperialist tool. We can do that by redefining it as something Taiwan owns too, in its own way, not by reifying its power through renaming cultural events away from China.

Your thoughts? Me, I'm off to celebrate Chinese New Year, hand out red envelopes to my nieces, and overeat.

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