Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Mr. Ma, People on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are NOT all ethnic Chinese.

From the Taiwan Democracy Movement blog:

President of ROC in Exile -- Ma's new years speech: "The people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are all ethnic Chinese..."

Why do the Austronesians of Taiwan still vote for the KMT?

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We could add, that unless the Austronesian peoples begin to do something about their children going to Chinese language schools, in 50 or 100 years, the Austronesian cultures will be virtually obliterated. This is the intent of the ROC government education policy. One hour a week of language class in a mother tongue is not enough. It is enough to lull people into complacency while their language and culture dies.

If you are in Taipei, visit the National Taiwan University Library. There is one room that is supposed to be for Austronesian / Aboriginal cultures and languages. Almost all the books are in Mandarin. The children's books that tell traditional stories from Taiwan's Austronesian peoples are also in Mandarin. They did not even bother to try to write the Austronesian language of the story alongside the Mandarin. When there is some Austronesian language included, it is often included as a simple "gloss" for sounds, but without any order that would show the Romanization to be true written language -- that is, capitalization and punctuation of sentences.

P.S. Also please remember that even the Hakka and the Hoklo "Taiwanese" speakers of Taiwan are ethnically mixed, that is, they have both Austronesian and Chinese ancestry with a little Dutch thrown in.

1 comment:

Martin Krenz said...

There is no pure Han race, either - it's a political construct. Ma is a believer of 中華民族 and "Chinese" is usually the English equivalent (one could say simplification) for that concept. If you only read the English Taipei Times, then I'm not surprised your knowledge on this issue is so poor.