Fri, Jan 05, 2024 page8

• Revisiting the classical texts debate

  • By Lee Min-yung 李敏勇
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  Chinese language education in Taiwan, mired in a dispute over classical Chinese texts and content under curriculum guidelines, is stuck in the feudal, conservative ideas of classical Chinese, morals and discipline, which hinders the cultivation of a national Taiwanese character.

  The difficulties of national reconstruction after Taiwan’s transition to democracy are rooted in how culture and cultivation of its national character is shackled. How Chinese is taught is the root of the problem, and a certain Chinese-language teacher embodies this impediment.

  Language education is a process of character formation and morals, from elementary through high school, all major stages in which language and individual character are developed.

  The feudal, conservative and dogmatic nature of classical Chinese grows more pronounced in this process, being most serious in high school.

  Bias toward classical Chinese, morals and discipline held by Taipei First Girls’ High School literature teacher Alice Ou (區桂芝) reflects this problem.

  In 1915, the New Culture Movement began in China, in which urban intellectuals advocated for vernacular over classical Chinese. Also called the Literary Revolution, its leading figures — Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀), Hu Shih (胡適) and Tsai Yuan-pei (蔡元培) — promoted Western concepts, including science and democracy.

  In 1919, the movement entered a new stage: the May Fourth Movement, initiated by Chinese students protesting imperialism.

  While the New Culture Movement was a cultural push to enlighten the masses, the May Fourth Movement was a political movement to protect China.

  Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) saw the former as toadying to Western ideas; Mao Zedong (毛澤東) interpreted it as China’s bourgeois revolution against feudalism.

  Chiang saw the May Fourth Movement as patriotic; Mao viewed it as a “new democracy.”

  In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) toppled the Republic of China (ROC) led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

  Socialist and communist ideas and the unified culture formed in the New Cultural and May Fourth movements were key to the CCP’s takeover of China.

  In 1945, Japan surrendered Taiwan to the Allied powers and the ROC’s KMT government retreated to Taiwan. The KMT-ROC government then became a government-in-exile and declared martial law, establishing authoritarian rule in Taiwan.

  Politically, the KMT government used the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion (動員戡亂時期臨時條款) legislation to suspend ROC citizens’ political freedoms. Culturally, the party-state and military brainwashed Taiwanese through education.

  The KMT instilled Confucian thought and feudal ideas via Chinese literature and civic education, but never focused on literacy or the broader function of language. Teaching was a political tool.

  In the 1960s, while China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, the ROC government promoted the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement in Taiwan in opposition to the PRC. The ROC said it was to revive traditional Chinese culture, but it was essentially political propaganda.

  In 1971, the PRC was recognized as China in the UN and replaced the ROC. The ROC government on Taiwan has remained mired in the ROC-PRC struggle, initially hoping to “recapture the mainland,” even after democracy was introduced to Taiwan.

  Thus, slow or no progress has been made to build a national Taiwanese character due to the KMT’s authoritarian rule.

  Ou seems unaware that the establishment of the PRC was led by its people’s support of pragmatism rooted in the two movements of the 1910s, while the ROC insisted on outdated formalism in classical Chinese texts.

  Ou identifies the PRC as her motherland. She has no reason to criticize the ruling party in Taiwan, a democracy, as being shameless due to the reduction in the number of recommended classical texts. Her doing so is absurd.

  She was even found fomenting anti-US and Japanese sentiment and promoting China’s potential annexation of Taiwan.

  Does Ou not know it was the CCP that expelled the ROC, eliminated classical texts and denounced the literati?

  Disputes over honesty and morality were born out of political implications. Ou’s intention is to confuse voters and help the CCP achieve its preferred outcome for Taiwan’s elections.

  Lee Min-yung is a poet.

  Translated by Hsieh Yi-ching
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