Kaitlin HuemerSpring 2016

A Comparative Analysis of Language Reform Movements in China and Taiwan

Far from being homogenous monolingual societies with a single ‘Chinese’ language or

writing system, China and Taiwan are composed of multiethnic populations who speak a variety

of mutually unintelligible languages. From the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912,

ruling powers have used language reform in China and Taiwan for the purpose of overcoming

ethnolinguistic barriers to national unity and achieving modernization.1 The Nationalist and

Communist governments, however, took significantly different approaches to language reform,

such as the extent to which they advocated and enforced the use of a common language, the sim-

plification of the ideographic writing system and the development of phonetic alphabets. As a re-

sult of language reform movements throughout the twentieth century, Mandarin was adopted as

the common speech (Putonghua) of China and the national language (guoyu) of Taiwan, but the

Chinese and Taiwanese remain divided in their use of different phonetic writing systems and

simplified and traditional Chinese characters.2 I argue that the different approaches to language

reform and their outcomes in China and Taiwan were due to the vastly different ethnolinguistic

compositions and historical experiences of the two countries, as well as the conflicting ideologies

of the ruling governments which played a key role in determining their priorities and goals in im-

plementing language reform.

This paper first presents an ethnolinguistic overview of China and Taiwan to show how

language has influenced the sociopolitical climate of the two countries and set the context for

1 Feng-fu Tsao, “The Language Planning Situation in Taiwan” (Clevedon: Short Run Press Ltd., 2000), 82.2 Paul L-M Serruys, “Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-Illiteracy Movement in Com-munist China” (Studies in Chinese Communist Terminology, no. 8, Feb 1962), 8.

1

twentieth century language reform movements. From there, I compare the Nationalist and Com-

munist approaches to the three main components of language reform and analyze how their poli-

cies were shaped by their ideologies. Lastly, I examine the lasting consequences of language re-

form movements in China and Taiwan and offer explanations for their current sociolinguistic

state.

The Ethnolinguistic Background of China and Taiwan

The ethnic and linguistic diversity of China and Taiwan’s populations was considered to

be a major problem that obstructed national unity and modernization, therefore necessitating ef-

forts towards language reform. China and Taiwan’s different ethnolinguistic and historical back-

grounds were key factors which helped determine how the different approaches used by the Na-

tionalist and Communists governments were received by various ethnic groups as well as what

consequences it had on the population as a whole. In understanding the effects of language re-

form, it is important to first look at the ethnolinguistic background, as it provides insights about

the existing linguistic hierarchies and how they affect societal relations within a country.

By the end of the Qing dynasty, China was composed of more than fifty ethnic groups,

each speaking one or more languages, representing the Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Altaic, and

Indo-European linguistic stocks.3 While the Han ethnic group accounted for more than 90% of

the Chinese population, its members were further divided into speakers of seven major ‘dialects,’

dozens of mutually unintelligible forms of speech and hundreds of sub-dialects. Mandarin was

the largest dialect group in Mainland China; speakers of its sub-dialects accounted for 70% of

the total Chinese population and spread from Manchuria and the capital city Beijing in the north

3 Tsao, “The Language Planning Situation in Taiwan,” 65.

2

to Yunnan and Lower Yangzi in the south.4 Other major dialects and their population percent-

ages were Wu 8%, Xiang 5%, Cantonese 5%, Min 4.2%, Hakka 4% and Gan 2.4%.5

While speakers of different Chinese dialects would have found it impossible to communi-

cate orally, they likely would have been able to understand each other through writing. This is

because Chinese characters are not phonetic representations but ideographic symbols that are

used throughout China to convey the same meaning although they are pronounced differently de-

pending on the dialect.6 This unique writing system originated thousands of years ago as pic-

tographs or diagrams, but over the past thirty-five or more centuries, characters have become so

modified and stylized that they often no longer resemble their original forms and must be learned

through rote memorization.7 Chinese characters are also much more numerous and complex

compared to Western alphabets, and it was argued that the complexity of Chinese characters was

responsible for China’s low rate of literacy compared to Western nations and Japan. The late

Qing scholar Song Shu estimated that only around one out of a hundred men and one out of ev-

ery forty thousand women could read.8 This high illiteracy rate, in addition to the mutual unintel-

ligibility of dialects, created major problems for national unification and political, economic and

social development in China while at the same time solidified the structural class divisions.

Wang Zhao, another early language reformer, emphasized that “the literati and the commoners

are like two different worlds” and that China could only strengthen itself by “educating the com-

mon people, not by having an outstanding elite.”9

4 Ibid., 66.5 J-H Yuan, A Survey of Han Dialects (Peking: Wenzi Gaige Chubanshe, 1960), 22.6 Yu-Kuang Chu, A Comparative Study of Language Reforms in China and Japan (Saratoga Springs: Skidmore College, 1969), 7.7 Ibid., 88 William Theodore de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 2. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 303.9 Ibid., 308.

3

Similar to China, by the twentieth century, Taiwan was predominantly Han Chinese, al-

though it differed significantly from the Mainland in its ethnolinguistic composition due to his-

torical and geographical factors. Taiwan was first inhabited by several groups of aborigines of

Southeast Asian origin with Malayo-Polynesian languages, but starting from the second half of

the sixteenth century, fishermen, peddlers and adventurers from Fujian began migrating to Tai-

wan and often engaged in ethnic conflicts with the aboriginal population.10 Migration was further

encouraged by colonial policies throughout Dutch rule of Taiwan from 1624 to 1662, as well as

after Taiwan became incorporated as a dependency of Fujian province in the Chinese empire in

1684.11 By the end of the seventeenth century, Han Chinese settlers dominated the island with the

majority being Hok-lo from Southern Fujian province followed by the Hakka settlers from

Guangdong. After Taiwan was restored to Chinese rule after Japanese colonialism, there was the

addition of a fourth group of ‘Mainlanders’ consisting of people from various different regions of

China, followed by a huge influx of about two million Mainlander refugees and the Nationalist

government in 1949 after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War (306). A 1991 estimate listed

these four major ethnic groups and their population percentages as Minnanren (Hok-lo) 73.7%,

Mainlanders 13%, Hakka 12% and Austro-Polynesians 1.3%.12

Unlike Mainland China, where Mandarin was spoken natively by 70% of the population,

the majority language in Taiwan prior to language reform and spoken by over 70% of the popu-

lation was Hokkien (also referred to as Taiyu or ‘Taiwanese’) native to the Hok-lo. Therefore, to

the native ‘Islander’ population of Taiwan, spoken Mandarin was a foreign language despite

their common Han Chinese ethnicity and shared writing system. The sociolinguistic distinction

10 A-chin Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2000), 3.11 Ann Heylen, “The Legacy of Literary Practices in Colonial Taiwan. Japanese-Taiwanese-Chinese: Lan-guage Interaction and Identity Formation” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 26:6, 2005), 497.12 Ibid., 329.

4

between the Mainland and Taiwan was further exacerbated during the Japanese colonization of

Taiwan from 1895 to 1945.13 Japanese colonizers also used language reform as part of their na-

tion building ideology to attempt to make Taiwan linguistically and culturally united with Japan.

Japanese was officially made into the new standard language used in education and official busi-

ness, however, for the majority of the colonial period, Japanese authorities did not interfere with

the widespread customary use of Taiwanese (and Hakka) in society for practical considerations.14

This resulted in a diglossia, where the colonized subjects replaced Classical Chinese with Japa-

nese as the ‘high’ variety in writing and in formal situations, and Taiwanese as the ‘low’ variety

for use in their daily life.15 This consequently strengthened the Taiwanese identity as the is-

landers shared a common colonial history not experienced in the Mainland, and aided in modern-

ization as the Taiwanese had greater access new ideas and information through their understand-

ing of Japanese. From outside Taiwan, however, particularly after Japan implementing its policy

of ‘imperial subjectification’ in 1937, it appeared that the Taiwanese had lost their Chinese her-

itage and had become ‘Japanized.’16

As I discuss further in later sections, the differences between China and Taiwan’s histori-

cal and ethnolinguistic backgrounds played a key role in determining the long-term conse-

quences of language reform. Depending on their majority or minority status prior to and after

language reform movements, ethnic and linguistic groups tended to react differently to National-

ist and Communist language reform policies.

13 Tsao, “The Language Planning Situation in Taiwan,” 63.14 Heylen, “The Legacy of Literary Practices in Colonial Taiwan,” 500.15 Ibid., 49816 Ibid., 506.

5

The Ideological Basis of Language Reform

While the Nationalists and the Communists both initiated language reform movements to

achieve the same goals of national unity and modernization, their main priorities and approaches

to language reform were greatly influenced by their respective ideologies. This section focuses

on three major components of language reform, adoption of a vernacular, character simplifica-

tion and development of a phonetic alphabet, and then analyzes how each party approached each

component based on their ideological beliefs. The Nationalist approach tended to focus most on

the first component of language reform because their primary concern was to develop a unified

Chinese national identity centered on Mandarin while upholding other aspects of traditional Chi-

nese culture in order to legitimize its claim as the true representative government of China. When

applied to the Taiwanese, however, language reform policies were coercive and intolerant of ex-

isting cultures, rejecting Taiwan’s colonial Japanese past and promoted the ‘Sinocization’ of the

people.17 The Communist government’s implementation of language reform was a more radical

break from traditional Chinese culture, but for the most part it was more gradual and tolerant

than the Nationalist approach as their priority has been strengthen their regime by improving lit-

eracy and promoting economic growth through modernization.

Adoption of a Standard Language

As I have discussed in the previous section, the great linguistic and ethnic diversity of

China and Taiwan made the adoption of a standard vernacular language a requirement for na-

tional unification and modernization. The Nationalists first addressed the problem by establish-

ing the Committee for the Unification of Pronunciation (CUP) in 1913 to decide on a national

language (guoyu) for the country. As the committee was represented equally by province and

17 A-chin Hsiau, “Language Ideology in Taiwan: The KMT’s Language Policy, the Tai-yu Language Movement, and Ethnic Politics” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 18:4, 1997), 309.

6

special district, they decided on an artificial form of Mandarin that contained features from other

major dialects. While this compromise had satisfied the representatives of the committee, there

were no native speakers of this artificial language and consequently there was much controversy

over the standard pronunciation and how it should be taught. Eventually it was decided in 1932

to settle on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin as the national language of China.18 Although the log-

ical choice from the beginning would have been to select the Beijing dialect of Mandarin be-

cause of its majority language status, cultural associations and connection with the government

capital in Beijing, it is worth noting that the Kuomintang government was interested in appeasing

minority language speakers as it worked to build a distinct Chinese national identity during its

rule on the Mainland.

When Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II, the Nationalists

took a much more heavy-handed and less tolerant approach at spreading their national language

to Taiwan. By the end of the Japanese colonial period, about 70% of Taiwanese were literate in

Japanese, but very few could read or write the national language of the Mainland.19 The Tai-

wanese were in fact eager to learn the national language of their ‘motherland,’ as they were

happy to be liberated of the oppressive Japanese rule, however, this enthusiasm soon faded away

as they became subject to coercive Nationalist policies that treated them as second-class citizens

and devalued their Taiwanese language and culture.20 The reasons that had been used to justify

the choice of Mandarin as the national language could not apply to Taiwan because it had an en-

tirely different ethnolinguistic background. However, rather than adapt the national language for

use in Taiwan or allow multilingualism like during the earlier part of Japanese rule, the National-

ist government began a campaign of “Sinocization” to make Taiwan linguistically and culturally

18 Tsao, “The Language Planning Situation in Taiwan,” 67.19 Hsiau, “Language Ideology in Taiwan,” 300. 20 Heylen, “The Legacy of Literary Practices in Colonial Taiwan,” 507.

7

united with the Mainland and to wipe out the legacy of Japanese colonialism.21 Particularly after

the February 28 Uprising in 1947, Nationalist rule deified the national language and enforced a

policy of strict monolingualism to suppress Taiwanese resistance, achieve national unity and de-

stroy the Communist ‘bandits.’22 Examples of language policies include the exclusive use of

Mandarin in education, government and court of law, and the restriction of non-Mandarin lan-

guages on television.

The Chinese Communist Party continued to use Mandarin as the standard vernacular

speech following their victory in the Chinese Civil War; however, they began referring to it as

the ‘common speech’ (Putonghua) as opposed to the ‘national language’ (guoyu) used by the Na-

tionalists. Under Marxist thought, language is not considered to be a superstructure of society,

but a part of the base, as it performs its role regardless of class distinction. It is an instrument of

the entire people, and should be one for the whole of society, common to and meaningful to all

the members equally, not just for one class.23 Therefore, unlike the Nationalists, whose goal was

to use of a national language to promote a national identity and suppress resistance, the Commu-

nists were more interested in using language reform to develop a tool for social communication

that could be used by the masses and to provide them with information and propaganda to further

the cause of the continuing Communist revolution and the realization of the true Communist so-

ciety.24

This Marxist view of language was reflected in the Chinese Communist Party’s official

approach to language reform. For example, in a speech given at the National Committee of the

Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in 1958, Zhou Enlai acknowledged the great

21 Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, 152.22 Hsiau, “Language Ideology in Taiwan,” 306.23 Paul L-M Serruys, “Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-Illiteracy Movement in Communist China” (Studies in Chinese Communist Terminology, no. 8, Feb 1962), 59-60.24 Ibid., 61.

8

linguistic diversity in China and argued that the most important political task was to popularize

the common speech in order to attain the common goal of socialism.25 He emphasized that the

aim was not to eliminate local dialects through force, but to bring about change gradually

through persuasion, such as by educating language teachers to teach using the common speech

and exposing the people to films, TV and the radio in the common speech. 26 Expectations were

flexible according to the different populations; elderly people were not expected to learn the new

language and ethnic minorities were initially allowed to coexist through bilingual language poli-

cies.27

Simplification of Chinese Characters

The main argument for the simplification of Chinese characters was concern for China’s

high illiteracy which was believed to be a consequence of Chinese characters being too numer-

ous and complicated and therefore too difficult to be learned by the masses.28 The ideological

differences between nationalism and communism discussed in the previous section can also be

applied to understand the two parties’ different approaches to solving the problem of illiteracy

and their attitudes toward simplification.

The Nationalist Government in China was initially open to the simplification of charac-

ters and in 1934 promulgated a list of 324 simplified characters for compulsory use. However,

the government chose to rescind this order due to fierce opposition by conservative officials and

scholars who feared a cultural break with the past.29 By the late 1930s, the Nationalist govern-

ment had turned against simplification in the interest of preserving traditional Chinese culture,

25 Reform of the Chinese Written Language (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1958), 14.26 Peter Seybolt and Gregory Kuei-Ke Chang, Language Reform in China: Documents and Commentary (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1979), 26.27 Minglang Zhou, “Language Policy and Illiteracy in Ethnic Minority Communities in China” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 21:2, 2000), 131.28 de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 303-308.29 Chu, A Comparative Study of Language Reforms in China and Japan, 21.

9

and further efforts at simplification were left to the Communists.30 After moving to Taiwan, the

Nationalists approached the illiteracy problem by compiling basic word lists to be taught in the

lower grades but made no effort to regulate the number of characters that could be used by the

press or in popular reading matter. The decision to continue using traditional characters was in

part due to their nationalist pride in the Chinese writing system which they associated with tradi-

tional Chinese culture. Continuing to use traditional characters even after moving to Taiwan was

therefore used to justify the claim that the Nationalists were the true representatives of China and

Chinese culture, in opposition to the Communists who were obliterating the past through their

radical reform of the written language. To this day, the Nationalist government in Taiwan does

not encourage the simplification of characters to not incur a serious break with China’s cultural

heritage but most people tend to use a certain amount of abbreviation in their everyday writing.31

Unlike the Nationalist government, the Communist regime did not fear opposition from

officials and scholars and freely promulgated lists of simplified characters determined by special-

ized language reform committees.32 Similar to the Marxist view on spoken language, written lan-

guage was also considered to be an instrument to be used by the entire people, but from the feu-

dal era the Chinese writing system had been monopolized by only the upper educated classes. Its

traditional form and structure consequently could no longer be said to represent the sounds of the

language in its current form, as spoken language evolves more quickly than written language,

and in that manner, it fell short of alphabetic systems.33 For the Communists there was no point

in having a written language that could be read by only certain classes, and so their attempts at

language reform were for the purpose of making it more accessible for the masses. The primary

30 Seybolt and Chang, Language Reform in China, 2.31 Chu, A Comparative Study of Language Reforms in China and Japan, 31.32 Ibid., 22.33 Serruys, “Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-Illiteracy Movement in Communist China,” 62.

10

goal was to have the written language become a tool through which they could educate the peo-

ple and continue the revolution. This was demonstrated by the Communist Party’s increased use

of simplified characters in their publications and their literacy campaigns in northwest China

during the War of Resistance against Japan.34

Methods of character simplification included phonetic borrowing, the removal of ele-

ments, and replacements based on meaning to reduce the number of strokes. In his evaluation in

1958, Zhou Enlai stated that the “broad mass of people have found them useful and convenient”

as they are easier to remember for the working people and children, and easy for the intellectuals

to relearn.35 While the Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written Language was at first open

to suggestions, especially during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, it became less tolerant to criti-

cism over the years and even denounced challengers of Communist language reform as rightists.

Discussions of language reform ceased entirely during the Cultural Revolution, but were revived

in the post-Mao period, as a new table of simplified characters was released in 1977 and simpli-

fied characters were made the standard for all published books and articles.36

While the major argument for language reform among both Nationalists and Communists

was the concern for higher literacy among the masses of the people, it is interesting that little was

said about the school system and methods of instruction in China. The illiteracy of the masses in

China was often exclusively attributed to the complexity of Chinese characters, however this

does not take into consideration the Chinese people’s economic conditions, standard of living,

and opportunities to learn.37 Comparing the current literacy rates of China and Taiwan, in 2010,

the Taiwanese had a higher rate at 98% despite their use of traditional characters, compared to

34 Seybolt and Chang, Language Reform in China, 2.35 Reform of the Chinese Written Language, 12.36 Seybolt and Chang, Language Reform in China, 7.37 Serruys, “Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-Illiteracy Movement in Communist China,” 55-56.

11

the 95% of Chinese who use simplified characters.38 This is more likely due to socioeconomic

factors than the results of language reform.

Phoneticization

The most radical component of Chinese language reform was the proposal to replace Chi-

nese characters with a phonetic alphabet. The idea that an alphabetic script is easier to master

and therefore preferable to the complex Chinese ideographic characters had existed since the

scholar Zheng Qiao studies of Sanskrit during the Song dynasty.39 Jesuit missionaries like Matteo

Ricci and Nicholas Trigault were the first to develop systems of writing Chinese in Latin letters,

but these were romanizations intended mostly for Westerners and did not have much immediate

impact. Qing scholars including Lu Zhuangzhuang built on the argument for phoneticization and

introduced their own proposed alphabets, but it was not until official government efforts at lan-

guage reform that phoneticization became more widely adopted.

The Nationalist priority during the early years of language reform was to decide on a na-

tional language and then standardize its pronunciation in order to build a unified nation. Phonetic

alphabets were therefore not seen as a replacement for characters but as a tool that could help

promote the study of Mandarin in non-Mandarin-speaking areas of the country. The Nationalist

government appointed a committee to standardize Chinese pronunciation and in 1918 promul-

gated a system known as the National Phonetic Letters (zhuin) which consisted of forty symbols

derived from parts of Chinese characters and based on Beijing Mandarin (27). These symbols

were written alongside Chinese characters to aid in character pronunciation but were unsatisfac-

tory for phonetic transcription because it divided each syllable into three parts. In response to the

May 4th movement in 1919, the Ministry of Education appointed a Research Committee for Ro-

38 The Globalist, “11 Facts: China’s Improving Literacy Rate” (2014).39 de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 302.

12

manizing Chinese Characters that produced the National Romanization (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) sys-

tem in 1926. This system incorporated the tones of the spoken language directly into the writing,

but was found to be difficult to learn and of little use. By the late 1930s, the KMT had become

more interested in maintaining the existing character system and later suppressed efforts to alter

the traditional script.40

The Communists, on the other hand, were most concerned with making the masses liter-

ate and so their greatest priority was reforming the written language to achieve modernization,

rather than maintain the cultural legacy associated with Chinese characters. Mao Zedong, in a

speech promoting modernization, stated in 1951, “we must proceed in the direction of phoneti-

cization being taken by all languages of the world” and that simplification of characters was a

preliminary step to ultimate alphabetical writing.41 The goal for a Chinese phonetic alphabet was

to annotate the characters phonetically to popularize the common speech pronunciation, make it

easier for the masses and foreigners to learn.42 It was argued that using a Latin script would facil-

itate international exchange and could also help unify the various ethnic groups within the coun-

try by giving them a script to use in writing their own languages. In 1930, the Communists de-

vised a Latinized New Script (Latinxua Sinwenz) as an alternative to Gwoyeu Romatzyh that

was easier to learn and did not indicate tones thereby not limiting to a single dialect. By 1936,

Latinxua was promoted by over 70 associations including the League of Left-wing Writers and

the Mass Language Movement.43 During the war with Japan, the Communists also used Latinxua

to launch a major campaign to eliminate illiteracy in northwest China. In 1958 the First National

People’s Congress adopted a more suitable replacement for Latinxua known as the Scheme for a

40 Chu, A Comparative Study of Language Reforms in China and Japan, 19.41 Ibid., 28.42 Reform of the Chinese Written Language, 18.43 Seybolt and Chang, Language Reform in China, 20.

13

Phonetic Alphabet (pinyin) that used Latin letters to phoneticize only the northern dialect in ac-

cordance with a government decision to promote a standard vernacular. Pinyin continues to be

used to this day in Mainland China as a supplement and aid in teaching simplified characters.

Efforts at using phoneticization to replace Chinese characters were met with the greatest

resistance because of the culture and history associated with China’s writing system as well as

arguments over the suitability of a phonetic alphabet for the Chinese language. The Nationalists

preferred the use of zhuyin as it was a noninvasive supplement based off of Chinese characters

and did not harm the patriotism of the people. The Communists responded that Latin letters did

not belong to any one country as they were being used all over the world. Other arguments

against phoneticization were that Chinese has too many homophonous characters, it would be

difficult to know where to group words or compounds, and there was too much variation in pro-

nunciation, vocabulary and grammatical structure within Mandarin spoken in different regions.44

As a result, Chinese characters continue to be the primary form of writing in China and Taiwan,

and pinyin and zhuyin are used mostly in teaching pronunciation and in typing.

Consequences of Language Reform

This last section focuses on minority language movements in Taiwan and China, in par-

ticular the Taiyu language movement in Taiwan and the situation of ethnic minorities in China.

Based on my comparisons in the previous sections, I argue that the current situation of minority

languages and politics relates directly to the ethnolinguistic backgrounds of China and Taiwan

and the different language reform approaches taken by the Nationalist and Communist govern-

ments.

44 Chu, A Comparative Study of Language Reforms in China and Japan, 31.

14

The Nationalist government’s complete disregard to existing languages and cultures in

Taiwan after World War II fostered the growth of a greater ‘Taiwanese’ identity and Taiyu inde-

pendence movements centering on language as their basis. Throughout Taiwanese history, lan-

guage has been a ‘contested object,’ from the Japanese Imperial Subjectification language poli-

cies to the Kuomintang policy of ‘Sinocization’ through enforced Mandarin monolingualism.45

Although the Hoklo Taiwanese compose the ethnic ‘majority’ on the island, the dominant Man-

darin speaking Mainlanders treated them as a ‘minority’ group, relegating Taiyu and Hakka to

‘dialects,’ and use of these languages was considered a threat to national cohesion and unity. Be-

ginning during democratization in the 1980s, many native Taiwanese speakers responded by

forming movements to revive Taiyu as a means of recognizing their distinctive cultural tradition

and promoting a new national identity. Its objectives include the rejection of Taiyu as a dialect,

bilingual or multilingual education, and the establishment of a Taiyu pronunciation and writing

system.46 Taiyu, because of its lack of social acceptance, symbolizes the growth of local identity

awareness and Taiwanese culture which posed a threat to the status of Mandarin as the symbol of

Chinese identity and the political dominance of the Nationalist Party.47

Unlike in Taiwan, non-native speakers of Mandarin and ethnic minorities make up a mi-

nority of the population in China and have had to varying degrees greater amounts of freedom in

using their own languages. Although Mandarin is the official language of China, the Communist

government has tried to balance their goal of a national “One China” identity with allowing mi-

norities a limited decree of autonomy in order to quell potential rebellion.48 From the beginning

of Communist rule until 1957, the Communists had a pluralistic language policy that allowed for

45 Hsiau, “Language Ideology in Taiwan,” 304.46 Ibid. 302.47 Heylen, “The Legacy of Literary Practices in Colonial Taiwan,” 508.48 Keely, Nelson. “Language Policies and Minority Resistance in China” (Languages, Communities, and Education, Spring 2005), 25.

15

bilingual education, but from 1957 education became more focused on Mandarin. This was

found to be a mistake as minority groups began rebelling by rejecting Chinese education which

decreased their literacy, and education returned to being more pluralistic from 1977 up until the

present.49 While the Communists also have the goal to achieve a unified nation, they are less con-

cerned with achieving this through nationalism as the Kuomintang in Taiwan. Non-native Man-

darin speakers also make up a smaller proportion of the population so they face less of a threat

and choose to appease minority groups by offering them limited linguistic autonomy to avoid re-

bellions rather than coercively reject their languages and cultures to impose a new national iden-

tity.

Conclusion

Language reform movements have played a crucial role in shaping the current sociopolit-

ical environments of China and Taiwan. The different outcomes of the two countries are largely

a result of their different ethnolinguistic compositions, historical experiences and ideologies. The

Communist government’s implementation of language reform was focused more on improving

literacy and modernization than on unifying the entire population through a ‘Chinese’ language

and its culture. While their approach was a more radical break from traditional Chinese culture, it

was more gradual and tolerant in its implementation, and therefore had a less marginalizing ef-

fect on the non-native Mandarin speaking populations. The Nationalist approach to language re-

form was determined to uphold traditional Chinese culture and created a unified national identity

through Mandarin but was coercive and intolerant in its implementation as it sought to ‘Sinocize’

the non-Mandarin majority populations of Taiwan. As a result of these harsh measures, Taiwan

was able to achieve national unity and rapid economic growth but at the cost of marginalizing the

49 Zhou, “Language Policy and Illiteracy in Ethnic Minority Communities in China,” 129.

16

Taiwanese majority and devaluing their existing culture, which has given rise to ethnic and lin-

guistic countermovements which continue to this day.

A key ideological difference between the Nationalists and Communists in this issue is the

extent to which they associate language with culture. The Communists value the strictly func-

tional use of language, and in the interest of educating the people, simplified Chinese characters

and adopted a phonetic Romanized alphabet, compared to the Nationalists who chose to retain

traditional characters in the interest of preserving culture over functionality. It is ironic that the

traditional ‘Chinese’ culture that was preserved by the Nationalist government was used linguis-

tically oppress the non-Mandarin speaking majority in Taiwan. While having a standard vernacu-

lar language has certainly aided in the modernization and economic growth of both countries, it

has also led to ethnic tensions and countermovements. In order to prevent rebellions and political

disorder, China has allowed minorities greater autonomy in language education, whereas in Tai-

wan, Taiyu has become the ‘language of elections’ and has played a major role in the shifting of

power from the Kuomintang to the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party.50 Now that the

Kuomintang no longer defends itself as the ‘real’ China, the Taiwanese have much greater free-

dom in expressing their own languages and expressing their Taiwanese identity.

50 Hsiau, “Language Ideology in Taiwan,” 309.

17

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