On Feb. 8, the Ministry of Education set the tone for the future of education in Taiwan by saying that next year, the Four Books, or four Confucian classics, will become a compulsory subject in the Chinese curriculum for senior high school students.
As of next year, senior high school students will have to take one class per semester on the Four Books during their three years at senior high. This will make students spend more time on the study of classical Chinese.
The question is are the Four Books so important that students should study them for six consecutive semesters?
Vice Minister of Education Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興) said that this policy change is necessary because recently “social problems such as school bullying, gangs and drugs have become very worrying problems.”
These comments show that the vice minister believes such behavior to be the result of not reading the Four Books or having a poor understanding of Chinese culture.
Small wonder students are incapable of improving when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has education officials such as Chen in his government.
I think the officials should go back to university and take courses in basic logic before they make any further statements. They need to differentiate between “sufficient conditions” and “necessary conditions” before they say anything else.
In my opinion, classes in logic are inestimably more important than a curriculum including the Four Books.
The Four Books have been used as textbooks for Chinese officials since the Southern Song Dynasty (960 to 1279). They are considered classics in Chinese culture and as a result, the promotion of that culture inevitably also involves reading the Four Books.
However, if the Four Books were really all that beneficial, why is it that in the 700-year period from the Southern Song Dynasty up until the May Fourth Movement (1919), China was unable to develop values like freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law, values that modern societies consider to be universal?
To be blunt, many of the teachings in the Four Books are meaningless to people living in the modern world and some of the teachings are even negative.
As such, listing the Four Books as an elective subject, rather than making them compulsory, would make more sense.
Amidst the global development toward democracy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has discovered that the greater China-thinking embedded in Confucianism, which is often little but nationalism in disguise, is beneficial to the consolidation of their regime.
As a result, the Chinese government has started to establish Confucius Institutes all over the world. This kills two birds with one stone by first increasing the power of Confucianism, while encouraging and promoting its study within China.
Beijing is doing this in an attempt to merge Confucianism with Communism because both ideologies are essentially concerned with despotism and absolute power.
Apart from actively pursuing economic and political integration with China, the Ma administration’s policy of “eventual unification” also needs to mimic Beijing’s cultural policies, thereby making Taiwan and China as similar as possible in preparation for unification.
After all, “Mr. Ma” is just the “chief executive” of the “Taiwan Region.”
Chang Bing-yang is a professor at the National Taipei University of Education.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
Two weeks ago, Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) raised hackles in Taiwan by posting to her 2.6 million Instagram followers that she was visiting “Taipei, China.” Yeoh’s post continues a long-standing trend of Chinese propaganda that spreads disinformation about Taiwan’s political status and geography, aimed at deceiving the world into supporting its illegitimate claims to Taiwan, which is not and has never been part of China. Taiwan must respond to this blatant act of cognitive warfare. Failure to respond merely cedes ground to China to continue its efforts to conquer Taiwan in the global consciousness to justify an invasion. Taiwan’s government
This month’s news that Taiwan ranks as Asia’s happiest place according to this year’s World Happiness Report deserves both celebration and reflection. Moving up from 31st to 27th globally and surpassing Singapore as Asia’s happiness leader is gratifying, but the true significance lies deeper than these statistics. As a society at the crossroads of Eastern tradition and Western influence, Taiwan embodies a distinctive approach to happiness worth examining more closely. The report highlights Taiwan’s exceptional habit of sharing meals — 10.1 shared meals out of 14 weekly opportunities, ranking eighth globally. This practice is not merely about food, but represents something more
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of