Saturday, August 8, 2009

Save Taiwan's Creative Industries -- Keep China Out ; Keep China's Investment (enslavement) Money Out



In this video, you can see that Taiwan is capable of competing globally in music, videography, fashion and design. And you can see that the Taiwanese language also has an expressiveness not captured in Mandarin. Notice also the occasional splashes in the background of the main writing script for Taiwanese (apart from Han characters) -- a romanized alphabet, in which most of the books using the Taiwanese language over the past century have been written.

Now imagine what would happen if Ma Ying-jeou's ECFA and other schemes of causing Taiwan to be dependent on China were to be put into effect. This continued growth of creative expression cannot be sustained in an authoritarian environment such as China's. To allow Chinese music and film industries to invest in Taiwan's would be to allow China's government to control some of Taiwan's leading industries in Asia. What will keep China's government -- which makes decisions based on increasing its own power -- from taking steps to marginalize Taiwan's music and movie industry? Nothing would keep them once they leverage Chinese government controlled money in getting power over the direction of Taiwan's companies. And they will do it. So anyone in the industry who has visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads need also have those dollar signs linked by shackles of slavery. You will end up leaving your homeland and being forced to move to Shanghai or Beijing and also to self-sensor.

Over time, Taiwan would diminish. Anything "happening" would be "happening" across the strait. All the young folks would have to move their to make it big... Over time, the harsh-sounding Mandarin of the north would be imitated in the way the Chow Yun-fat has done in his interviews for the DVD's Pirates of the Caribbean -- At World's End. Though he could have spoken in English, or his mother tongue of Cantonese, he chose to use Beijing Mandarin, a language that was not in use at the era portrayed by the Pirates movies, but a language that already is infecting Hong Kong as the language of power and the language to toady to the dictators in Beijing. Maybe he's proud of the JUAN-SHR harsh curled sounds that he made. But it is sad that a native of Hong Kong would not use his own mother-tongue now that Hong Kong has been controlled by China for ten-plus years.

China would be even more harsh if it were to annex Taiwan some time down the road. It would attempt what the KMT started -- an eradication of any identification with Taiwan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I were you I wouldn't be so worry about the "infiltration" of the Mandarin into Hong Kong (I'd have more concern about the 簡體 in for instance) for few reasons (level is not so good and the northern 兒話 is still a way to make fun of mainlander). The cantonese still have a huge weight in the society (much more than the 台語 in TW.

I'm leaving here for a while now and my Mandarin level sharply decresed mainly because I never hear/practice it.

Anonymous said...

Very pop-syrup kind of melody, but that video is very cool, Amei/Amit is a really good natural singer and Taiwanese is really, really nice when it's sung. I like the shock with the bouncing dress. Something different.