The tower of logo-babel

THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN are two countries separated by a common language, observed George Bernard Shaw, but at least the written matter in one country can be read by the people in the other. Those two countries, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, use the same writing system.

Imagine how much greater the separation must be in the Sinosphere, where there’s more than one way to write Chinese. Many languages are spoken throughout the region that might be called Greater China, but different approaches to the lexicographic system for the written Chinese language are one manifestation of the perennial battle royale in Taiwan over the question of how closely they should associate with the Mainland. On one side are those who want to adopt the PRC’s standard writing system (now that they’ve already adopted the PRC’s Romanization system). Arrayed against them are those who think that’s just a ploy to promote unification on PRC terms. The latter group is using an argument based on the unusual combination of preserving tradition and maintaining ethnic diversity to support their claim.

First, here’s some historical background to get everyone on the same page. The Chinese have been using ideographic characters since at least the 11th century BC. They’ve developed several writing systems throughout their history, but the characters they use today became roughly standardized about 2,000 years ago. Other people throughout East Asia adopted (or adapted) them to write their own language. They were used in the earliest documents written on the Korean Peninsula, and the Koreans used them until they developed their own alphabet. The Korean writing system was formally adopted in 1446, but did not come into common use until the late 19th century. Thus, literacy in Korea until fairly recently required the ability to read Chinese characters.

The Japanese used Chinese characters to write their own language at first, but only as phonetic symbols to express Japanese pronunciation and not necessarily for their meaning. While those early texts appear to be superficially Chinese, no Chinese reader would understand them because it’s still the Japanese language. Japan later developed two phonetic alphabets to use in conjunction with the characters to express vernacular grammatical elements, and these alphabets came into general use from the 8th to the 12th centuries.

The Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese (which is now also an accepted English word), hanja in Korean, and hanzi in Chinese, but they all mean the same thing: Chinese (Han) letters.

Some of the traditional Chinese characters are quite complicated and require many individual strokes to write. In 1946, the Japanese started modifying their written language by reducing the number of kanji they required students to learn and simplifying their written forms. For example, the character gaku, which appears in such words as daigaku, or college, and gakko, or school, once had 18 strokes, but now has only eight. Some of the modifications were so extensive it would be impossible for contemporary readers to identify the connection. (Here’s a chart comparing the old and the new, for Japanese readers.)

The Chinese started simplifying the same characters in the 1950s, but their modifications were different than those the Japanese adopted, making the divergence between written Chinese and Japanese that much greater. The Koreans still use the traditional form of the characters for hanja when they do use them, but that is seldom. The Taiwanese are the only people to have retained the traditional form of the characters in everyday applications.

But now some people want to change that.

The current president of the Republic of China/Taiwan is Ma Ying-jeou of the reconstituted Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT). That was Chiang Kai-shek’s party of the Chinese who fled China when Mao and the Communists took over to set up a government in Taiwan.

Earlier this month, the president proposed that Taiwan adopt the Beijing government’s simplified character set for writing only and retain the traditional characters for reading. The skeleton of the story is in this AFP article.

Said Mr. Ma:

“We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones…It is also our hope that the standard characters can be listed as World Heritage by the United Nations one day,” he said in a statement.

AFP is perhaps the least-bad of the major media outlets reporting on Northeast Asia, and this article gets the basic facts right. Yet they still manage to tilt perceptions in the direction they want all right-thinking people to support.

Relations with China have improved dramatically since Ma’s Beijing-friendly government was inaugurated in May 2008, vowing to promote reconciliation and trade ties.

Note that the Taiwanese president also wants the standard characters to become a “World Heritage”. He does not explain why any Chinese should think a UN imprimatur would enhance the prestige of a written language several millennia old and still in daily use by more than a billion people.

Though it’s not mentioned here, Mr. Ma also hopes that the PRC will implement two United Nations human rights covenants (the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in Tibet in the future.

Add his Harvard Law degree to his wishful thinking about Chinese behavior and it’s easy to see why Time Magazine chose him as one of their top 100 “Leaders and Revolutionaries” for 2008.

Meanwhile, AFP chose an over-the-top yardbird to provide the only dissenting quote in the article.

“Ma is seeing China as his master. He is even trying to change our writing habits to please China, which is absolutely unnecessary,” said Cheng Wen-tsang, spokesman for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP.)

It’s not as if they didn’t have other people from whom to choose. Take this editorial from the Taipei Times:

Since taking office, Ma has been leaning toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as can be seen in many things, from his statement on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to his plans to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement with China.

This may be the trend of the times and Ma may not have a choice, but this does not mean that Taiwanese should learn only to recognize traditional Chinese while writing with simplified characters, because there is a thin line between this and unification — or, rather, being unified.

In ancient China, the standard for unification included standardized wheel width for carts and a standardized script. Today, Ma is promoting simplified Chinese without receiving any goodwill from Beijing.

This is not far from unification as seen by ancient Chinese — how can we not be worried?

And:

Ma may see an acceptance of simplified Chinese characters as part of cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges, but it constitutes a form of political recognition.

Mr. Ma’s statement on Tiananmen, incidentally, praised the Chinese for the progress they’ve made on human rights. (One of these days, perhaps we’ll understand why the people for whom Harvard Law degrees, Time Magazine lists, and the UN are so important think it’s commendable to be friendly with the maleficent Chinese regime, yet were so outraged by the existence of the South African apartheid government, or even the comparatively benign Chile of Augustin Pinochet.)

But the KMT wanted to quickly ameliorate any concerns. They explained:

President Ma Ying-jeou yesterday proposed a concept of “reading in traditional characters, writing in simplified characters…The Office of the President today explained that the suggestion was aimed at 1.3 billion simplified character users in China, not Taiwan. (emphasis mine)

The concept aims to make Chinese people get to know the traditional character symbolizing authentic Chinese culture, said the Office. Traditional characters should be used in publications, but simplified ones are allowed in writing. It is not necessary to promote the concept in Taiwan as Taiwanese are familiar with traditional characters, the Office noted.

The Presidential Office explained that some media misunderstood that Ma intended to push forward the use of simplified characters in Taiwan, and thus clarified that the use of traditional character in Taiwan, a token of preservation of Chinese culture, will not be altered.

Most Taiwanese people are accustomed to using traditional characters in writing. But, for the sake of convenience, it is difficult to ban the use of simplified ones in writing. However, schools, government agencies, and military units should still use traditional characters at all time, according to the Office.

Do we have that right? The KMT wants people to believe the president suggested adopting the simplified PRC writing system in Taiwan so that the people on mainland China will reconstitute its entire educational system for 1.3 billion people and have them turn back the clock and recognize traditional characters?

Did they really think anyone would believe that, or, as seems to becoming common for politicians these days, did they just say it because they had to say something and didn’t care if anyone believed it or not?

But that still leaves another question: if all the books and documents in Taiwan are going to be in traditional characters; the schools, government, and military will use all trad/all the time; and since most people today usually communicate in writing by using the Internet and text messages…

What’s the point?

The Taiwan News has some other objections:

Despite hasty denials by a presidential spokesman, such an interpretation (promotion of unification) is by no means far-fetched given the apish decision by the restored KMT administration to officially adopt China’s Hanyu Pinyin romanization system and exile to the margins Taiwan’s home-developed Tongyong system on the grounds that Hanyun Pinyin was the “international standard,” presumably because of the PRC’s rising global clout. This conclusion was based less on Hanyu Pinyin’s questionable advantages than on an ideological drive to “link” the PRC’s “putonghua” with “Mandarin,” which the KMT defines as the unitary “national language” of the “Republic of China,” and ignored Taiwan’s multilingual environment, in which Tongyong could well be more suitable.

Their concerns are not unfounded. While the advocates of Tongyong pulled off some backdoor maneuvering of their own to get it adopted a few years ago, the Ma administration quickly rolled that back, ditched Tongyong, and adopted the PRC Romanization standard after taking office.

One of Tongyong’s advantages, by the way, is that it allows foreigners who don’t know Chinese to better pronounce family and place names. For example, non-Chinese speakers are at a loss how to deal with the Q in Qingdao (青島) and the X in Xian (西安). Tongyong used other spellings.

The opposition might also have a point that the PRC will see this as a concession without making any of their own:

Ma’s proposal received immediate applause Wednesday morning from PRC Taiwan Affairs Office Spokesman Fan Liqing, who gushed that “both simplified and complex characters were rooted in Chinese culture” and proposed that “experts on both sides can actively discuss how to make mutual interchanges in writing more convenient.”

Notice that Mr. Fan said nothing about restoring the use of traditional characters for reading in the PRC. He knows that isn’t going to happen.

“(A) most objectionable facet of Ma’s remarks concerned his implicit privileging of Mandarin, “the” national language in Taiwan, and his complete lack of mention of the fact that Taiwan has at least three Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Hoklo and Hakka), which do not entirely use the same Han characters, and over a dozen Austronesian languages which have no relationship whatsoever to Han characters but are equally or even more entitled to be considered as “Taiwan languages.”

The anachronistic attachment of Ma and KMT ideologues to Mandarin and Han characters as an unitary “national language” reflects their continued colonialist imposition of a racial and patriarchal conception of “Chinese” culture on Taiwan’s multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual democratic society, as reflected by the arrogant and false declaration of his inaugural address last May 20 that “all the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race nation (zhonghua minzu).”

How refreshing to see the bogus concept of multiculturalism put to a positive use for a change. And then they drive the point home:

Instead of compromising Taiwan’s cultural sovereignty and democratic pluralism, the KMT government should demand that the PRC should fulfill its own international commitments and “converge” with the world community by implementing full freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of thought.

Writing in the August 2008 issue of Voice, Omae Ken’ichi suggested that the ties between the constituent elements of Greater China will loosen, and that the Sinosphere will eventually become a confederation rather than a single nation. The article itself was poorly written and poorly argued (and a disappointment, because that’s why I bought the issue), but this lexicographical dispute presents some of the reasons that confederation might come into being.

Kangolian?

Meanwhile, as the Chinese argue about how to best write their own language, a native of Inner Mongolia—also part of Greater China—studying in Japan is creating art by combining two different languages.

A graduate student at Shikoku University conducting research into calligraphy is presenting an exhibit of his creations in Naruto, Tokushima.

Usually I include names with these stories, but in the article this man’s name was written in katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for foreign names (other than Chinese and Korean names, for which kanji is used). It’s not possible to track back the katakana and come up with an accurate Romanization of the man’s name–and doesn’t that dovetail perfectly with the theme of this post?

His calligraphic art is the combination of the 800-year-old Mongol script with kanji. Mongolian also has a calligraphic tradition, and he is studying ways to fuse kanji with that script. Written Mongolian is one of the few vertical scripts in the world read from left to right. (You can read more about it at this website.) The student has also created some works with the two scripts side by side that show identical words and phrases.

To create a bit of Mongolian atmosphere for the exhibit, the museum is serving chai, or milk tea, and playing tapes of horsehead lute in the background.

He came to Japan five years ago and began attending a calligraphy class to improve his Japanese. He was fascinated by the strength of the brushes and the beauty of the work, so he enrolled in college to focus on those studies. He’s now in his first year of grad school.

So to sum it all up, two countries with the same basic language want to impose their own lexicographical views on each other because they can’t read what the other has written, while in Japan a man can combine two entirely different writing systems, call it art, and hang it in a museum to be viewed while drinking tea and listening to music.

And some people wonder why I don’t read fiction any more!

An American view of a nuclear-armed Japan

RICHARDSON OF DPRK STUDIES does us all a favor in this post by bringing our attention to the Congressional Research Service report, Japan’s Nuclear Future: Policy Debate, Prospects, and U.S. Interests, (PDF, 16 pages), dated 19 February 2009.

Richardson has a different perspective than ours because he uses his site to follow North Korean affairs, which means that he also closely follows South Korea. Still, he offers these two quotes:

The previous taboo within the Japanese political community of discussing a nuclear weapons capability appears to have been broken, as several officials and opinion leaders have urged an open debate on the topic. Despite these factors, a strong consensus—both in Japan and among Japan watchers—remains that Japan will not pursue the nuclear option in the short-to medium term.

And:

Any eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula could further induce Japan to reconsider its nuclear stance. If the two Koreas unify while North Korea still holds nuclear weapons and the new state opts to keep a nuclear arsenal, Japan may face a different calculation.

The report was written specifically to provide background information to members of the U.S. House and Senate. There are two authors; the first is Emma Chanlett-Avery, identified as a Specialist in Asian Affairs, and the second is Mary Beth Nikitin, cited as an “Analyst in Nonproliferation”. Ms. Chanlett-Avery has written several Congressional reports on Asian issues, though it’s not clear what territory is covered by Asia. (One of her reports was on Southeast Asia.) Ms. Nikitin also has written Congressional reports on non-proliferation.

Despite turgid prose, poor organization, and one serious flaw, the report is worth reading because it provides a basic overview of the many aspects involved, including:

• Japan’s civilian nuclear power program

• The historical background of Japan’s non-nuclear stance and governmental studies for creating a nuclear deterrent.

• What Japan would need (and not need) to develop a nuclear arsenal

• The difficulties in dealing with the substantial bloc of domestic public opinion opposed to nuclear weapons

• The legal restrictions and obstacles to a nuclear program

• The growing sense of nationhood among younger people

• The possible effect on the U.S-Japan alliance, regional security, and Japan’s standing in the world

While most of the report is straightforward, here are some passages that raised my eyebrows:

Regionally, Japan “going nuclear” could set off an arms race with China, South Korea, and Taiwan.

I doubt that Taiwan would think it necessary to bulk up its military capabilities because Japan had nuclear weapons. China, yes; Japan, no.

Bilaterally, assuming that Japan made the decision without U.S. support, the move could indicate a lack of trust in the U.S. commitment to defend Japan.

The Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons would almost certainly be due to a lack of trust in the U.S. committment to defend Japan.

An ascendant hawkish, conservative movement—some of whom openly advocate for Japan to develop an independent nuclear arsenal—has gained more traction in Japanese politics, moving from the margins to a more influential position.

Japan is as likely to start an aggressive war as shrimp are to learn how to whistle, regardless of the definition the authors choose for the word “conservative”. Therefore, the acquisition of the atomic bomb would be strictly as a deterrent, or in only the most dire threat to national security.

The description of this approach as “hawkish” in this context is curious.

…(F)ew dispute that Japan could make nuclear weapons if Tokyo were to invest the necessary financial and other resources.

“Few”? Does anyone dispute it at all?

…(I)f Japan manufactured nuclear warheads, then it would need to at the minimum perform one nuclear test—but where this could be carried out on the island nation is far from clear.

If there was a consensus on pursuing a nuclear program–a very big if–testing might–and that’s a very big might–be performed at an underground location at one of the remote islands to the south. Hatoma, for example, has a population of only 60 people that a determined government could relocate with the approval of an alarmed citizenry. There are other uninhabited islands scattered throughout the archipelago. This is very speculative, of course.

Japan’s nuclear materials and facilities are under IAEA safeguards, making a clandestine nuclear weapons program difficult to conceal.

If Japan felt threatened enough by North Korea or China to build a bomb, why would they want to conceal the program? And in the face of what such a threat would entail, why would they feel constrained by either the IAEA or the need for secrecy? I think the report would have been improved had the authors considered in greater depth the environment required to produce the events they suggest might occur.

Many observers have recognized a trend of growing nationalism in Japan, particularly among the younger generation. Some Japanese commentators have suggested that this increasing patriotism could jeopardize closer cooperation with the United States…

Subtract points for credibility due to the false equivalence of “nationalism” and “patriotism”.

Realist-minded security observers cite the danger of threatening China…

A nuclear deterrent is not a threat to China. Japanese actions in this regard would depend on Chinese behavior, and the leaders of China know it. The leaders of China also think it’s in their best interests to feed their public a different story, however. (Let’s not bring up the North Korean threat; if the Chinese were serious about stopping North Korean nuclear ambitions, Pyeongyang’s program would have ended long ago.)

Perhaps the “realist-minded security observers” might give greater consideration to the more realistic threat of Chinese nuclear weapons and ever-growing armed forces to Japanese security.

If Japan withdrew from the NPT, it would likely be subject to UN Security Council-imposed sanctions and economic and diplomatic isolation.

The only reason Japan would withdraw from the NPT would be due to a serious external threat that it was convinced the UN and the U.S., among others, were incapable of dealing with. Under that scenario, if the UN were to impose sanctions and economic and diplomatic isolation–which haven’t worked so well with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–global security conditions would have become so perilous that Japan would probably need nuclear weapons.

Acquiring nuclear weapons could also hurt Japan’s long-term goal of permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.

Japan isn’t going to become a permanent member until the South Korean state reaches diplomatic adulthood, which means not in the foreseeable future.

Some in Japan are nervous that if the United States develops a closer relationship with China, the gap between Tokyo’s and Washington’s security perspectives will grow and further weaken the U.S. commitment.

As well they should be.

To many security experts, the most alarming possible consequence of a Japanese decision to develop nuclear weapons would be the development of a regional arms race. The fear is based on the belief that a nuclear-armed Japan could compel South Korea to develop its own program.

It wouldn’t “compel” South Korea to develop its own program, but the current state of South Korean nationalism–not patriotism–would demand it. Just because Japan did it.

The counter-argument, made by some security experts, is that nuclear deterrence was stabilizing during the Cold War, and a similar nuclear balance could be achieved in Asia. However, most observers maintain that the risks outweigh potential stabilizing factors.

“Most observers”? Did they count the observers? Whom do they consider to be “observers”, and why? The authors tend to be vague throughout with their use of expressions such as these, despite what appears to be some lightness in the footnoted material.

Japan’s development of its own nuclear arsenal could also have (a) damaging impact on U.S. nonproliferation policy. It would be more difficult for the United States to convince non-nuclear weapon states to keep their non-nuclear status or to persuade countries such as North Korea to give up their weapons programs.

The United States and its European allies haven’t been very successful in convincing states with malevolent intent to remain non-nuclear. If it isn’t clear to the authors by now that nothing the Americans do (short of total warfare) will convince North Korea to give up its weapons programs, it never will be.

The first justification, by the way, is one cited by the Obama Administration for its sophomoric efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons. As George Jonas points out here, that is potentially more dangerous than anything a hawkish, conservative nationalist would do: “The genie is out of the bottle; good luck to anyone trying to stuff it back.”

The serious flaw of this report is that it assumes the existence of a marvelous policy control panel with hundreds of switches, and the operation in question is to turn only that switch marked “Japanese nuclear weapons” to the ON position. But that switch will not be turned on unless the current position of many other switches in the imaginary control panel also change; that much should be obvious. What, therefore, is the point of examining a single switch in isolation? One would have hoped the authors of Congressional reports were more imaginative when examining hypothetical scenarios.

The full report is here.

Taiwan’s pig bile shampoo

‘Twas a brave man that first ate an oyster.
- Jonathan Swift

WHILE LOOKING FOR something else, I stumbled across this article explaining that Taiwanese merchants have created a shampoo out of pig bile.

“Using pig bile as a shampoo is not a new invention. It had just been forgotten about for a while. In fact, it is an ingredient that the older generation is quite aware of,” said Chen Chih-hao, the manager of the meat market in Nantou.

Mr. Chen says that his grandmother would visit the home of people in the neighborhood who slaughtered a pig and ask specifically for the gall bladder.

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of women when it comes to discovering and using without hesitation new beauty aids or cosmetics, regardless of the source.

It’s not surprising that people would use something once it was shown to be safe and effective, but think about this: Who was the brave woman who had the idea to put that stuff on her head to begin with? And why did she do it?