Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Nakashima Mika - Oborozukiyo ~Inori
Entry tags:	china, politics, taiwan, taiwan independence

save traditional chinese
Unlocked because I plan to link this to outside sources, and this is something very important to me.

After my brief dismay at finding out most universities (LSU included) only teach in Simplified script, I convinced myself it wouldn't be such a bad thing to learn it and just learn Traditional on my own.

However, it may be that Traditional will be of no use in the future, at least on a macrocosmic scale. The UN has officially decided that in January of 2009, they will no longer recognise Traditional Chinese as an official language script.
The implications of this are mindboggling, the most troubling being that the nations that use this script are in jeopardy of being internationally forced into "One China."

The US itself rides the fence on this issue, proclaiming support for "One China" while continually offering arms packages to Taiwan (in order to "test" Taiwan's commitment to its own defense) and then retracting them when China kicks its heels like a churlish toddler.

The fact is, Taiwan is NOT part of China. Nor is Singapore, Tibet, or any of the disputed areas of land surrounding the PRC.

We humans have always lived at odds with the world; we continually fight against its diseases and Mother Nature. We believe we are the pinnacle of evolution and that this world was made for man.
Indeed, the only universally intolerable act we can do is to encroach on another human's right to life.
We find it right, and okay, to conquer the seas, skies, flora and fauna around us, but we cannot step on fellow men.

So why has China been allowed to continue its pseudo-Communistic tyranny for decades?
The answer is simple, and it's because the only other superpower capable of waging war with them has had its hands in the cookie jar for far too long, and they don't care to pull out. Of course, this could be no other nation but the United States of America, a country not unexperienced itself in imperialism.

Maybe you've never known, or maybe you've closed your eyes to the situation.
People still disappear in unmarked vans for anti-China ideals, and women are forced to get literal alleyway abortions by the government; even the people living outside of the large cities find it hard to claim any allegiance to the country they live in, and Big Brother is always watching.

Even in my own Chinese class, I feel the weight of the "People's Republic" breathing on my neck.
I am continually forced to repeat my words, to speak "properly" in a Northern mainland accent, my tongue twisting uncomfortably as I tack 兒 (or 儿 as I am forced to write) onto the end of many words.
My teacher even comments, quite often, that if one does not speak with such an affectation, one does not speak "true and proper" Chinese.

How long must I bite my tongue?
China will not stop until the blood fills my mouth and chokes my throat.
China will not stop until we are all rendered voiceless, for the loss of our culture.

Can you believe Photobucket and even Wikipedia are banned in China?
There is a board of government devoted specifically to scanning the internet and blocking sites with possibly "treasonous" views. You may have heard about the recent PR disaster when Google agreed to let China block searches of Tiananmen Square except regarding the general history (the Massacre excluded, of course).

But it goes so much farther than that.
Can you imagine writing an unlocked LiveJournal entry with the words "Tiananmen Square Massacre" in it while in China, and then refreshing your page not even 10 seconds later to find the Chinese equivalent of, "404 Error. This page cannot be found."?
I was in Zhuhai, China, when that exact situation occurred to me. I cleared the cache and refreshed again, again, again. I surfed onto other sites, and they all came up. I logged into LiveJournal, deleted the entry in question, and suddenly, two minutes later, my main journal page is mysteriously working again.

My own aunt is currently hiding in her apartment because she is pregnant with her third child. In a few months, she will come to the US and will finally be able to walk around outside, and go to the grocery store with a visibly pregnant belly. But now, she hides with the shades closed all day long, for fear a neighbor will see her and rat her out.

The loss of Traditional as an internationally recognised script has consequences far greater than any of us can imagine. It is a nail in the coffin for the war many of us have been waging since we were sentient.
Some of you may say, "So what? Simplified IS easier. Why not just adjust to it?"

Shorthand English is easier, too. In fact, why don't we just submit our next term papers in netspeak entirely? That's certainly easier than trying to fumble with pesky punctuation and Godawful grammar, right?
Of course, we'll lose thousands of years of cultural connotations, but as long as it saves us a few seconds of the day, right?

The UN is primarily a political organisation, therefore it will move as the world government moves it. Interesting how they chose 2008 as their last year of using Traditional. Couldn't possibly coincide with something huge and international like the Olympics happening in China at that time, could it?
Pshaw.

Taiwan is not part of China, like it or not. We speak differently and we see life differently. Our writing is different, and our government is different. Our trends, our technology, and our society are different.

YES, we are Chinese. We do not deny our heritage.
But we are NOT, never HAVE been, and NEVER WILL BE, part of the "People's Republic of China."

We are Taiwan.

I found an online petition to the UN, to ask it to retract its decision, but the fact is, online petitions do very little good, and this is a decision that's had its wheels rolling long before I was aware of it.

http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/say-no-to-united-nations-abolishment-of-traditional-chinese-in-2008.html

Despite everything, though, we can't give up hope.

信奉革命.
"Believe in revolution."


[ I posted the following in a different location originally, but I felt it had enough information as to be relevant. ]

The problem arises because the simplification of characters is an artifact of Mao's China. In an seemingly innocuous effort to unite all of China, he threw away our culture in a perverse misuse of power.

By removing certain strokes from words, it completely changes the history of the word. There's a popular myth that Chinese characters are comprised of the characters which make up its meaning, and while this is true for some characters, it is not the overwhelming majority. Rather, the characters evolved over thousands and thousands of years and several different scripts (and in all honesty, a few Simplified characters were in use before Traditional) and reflect the changing history of our culture.

In addition, when the characters were simplified, Taiwan was not and HAD NOT been under Chinese rule for many years. The Dutch and Spanish held imperial rule over it, before Japanese invasion.
After the Japanese relinquished control of it, that coincided with the peak of the Cultural Revolution and from there, a huge Chinese civil war broke out on Taiwanese and mainland China soil over just who held sovereignty. In the end, Chiang Kai-Shek was forced to retreat to Taiwan.
Whether or not you agree with Chiang Kai-Shek's ideals (my maternal grandfather was his personal bodyguard for a number of years, so my family is pro-Chiang Kai-Shek, but I am not), the fact remains that China had absolutely NO legal right to the land. The Japanese did NOT sign it over to China, as Great Britain did with Hong Kong in 2000.
In addition, DNA testing shows the native aborigines of Taiwan are NOT Chinese.

In summary, because China does NOT control Taiwan, it should NOT have the ability to control world events as though it did.

This is a DIRECT correlation between America and Great Britain. Imagine if Great Britain suddenly, after all these years, said, "We never gave up control of you. Start writing everything with a UK spelling, and submit to Parliament."
If the physical size of America were smaller than Louisiana (as Taiwan is), America would have very little militarily to defend itself.

All we have is our culture, and China has slowly, over the years, been trying to hammer that out of us.