Guowen diyi--the literacy crisis in postwar Taiwan

Below I mentioned Gao Ming's article "Guowen diyi" from Weixue pian. The text of Chiang Kai-shek's message about the importance of studying the National Language has somehow managed to hide from me so far, although I've looked for it in several collections of his speeches (general speeches, speeches on education, etc.). I imagine (though I can't be 100% sure) that Chiang refers to the influence of Japanese language and culture on the people of Taiwan. This is mentioned by Gao, and it was something of a commonplace among representatives of the Nationalist government that the Japanese language and culture that was leftover from the time that Taiwan was a Japanese colony was something of a pollutant or infection that needed to be eradicated in order for Taiwanese people to become fully Chinese (again).

Hsu Hsueh-chi, in her article "The Language Problem in Postwar Taiwan, 1945-1948" (台 灣光復初期的語文問題), cites several sources from the period immediately preceding and following Japan's surrender where Taiwanese people are characterized as "slaves" of Japan. She quotes a 1944 letter from Chen Yi (陳義), infamous for his role in the 228 Massacre, to Chen Lifu (陳立夫), which demonstrates Chen Yi's strong desire to use the National Language policy to "uproot 'the old enslaved psychology and build a revolutionary psychology'" (根絕「奴化的舊心理,建設革命的心理」). Evidently, by the time of Gao's article (1955), despite 10 years of carrying out the National Language policy in Taiwan, government representatives still considered the Japanese language a threat to the Sinification of the Taiwanese people.

In "Guowen diyi", Gao argues that using the same writing system gives people from different parts (東西南北各地區) a unified ethnic/national (民族) identity (意識) (39), and that the same writing system gives people from different historical periods a unified ethnic/national spirit (一貫的民族精神) (39). He argues that occupiers and traitors all know that in order to conquer (征服) their subjects or enemies, the language and writing of the conquered needs to be exterminated. He continues,

日本人佔領臺灣的期間，不准我們的臺灣同胞學習中國文字，並用 種種方法(或鼓勵，或強迫)促使我們的臺灣同胞學習日文，便是這種作用。……現在臺灣從日本人的手上，回到祖國的懷抱，已經十年了。但是日文在民間，不僅 沒有絕跡，還相當的流行。我們總感覺到，過去一個侵略者的幽靈， 時時在威脅我們。(39-40)

Roughly, Gao is arguing that when the Japanese occupied Taiwan, they didn't permit the Taiwanese people ("our Taiwan compatriots") to study Chinese writing, and used various methods (encouragement and coercion) to make the Taiwanese learn Japanese. When Gao was writing this, Taiwan had already "returned to the mother country's embrace" for 10 years, but, he claimed, Japanese had not only not been exterminated, it was still popular. "We constantly feel the ghost of a previous invader threatening us." (Gao goes on to speak favorably of how the Korean government had outlawed the Japanese language after the Japanese invaders left.)

But Eika Tai argues that Japanese language and culture had not "enslaved" nearly as many people as the KMT believed. In fact, she limits the kinds of people who were really proficient in Japanese to the elites:

To be sure, many Taiwanese elites did learn to use Japanese superbly. Yet, even for those people, whether as a result they were Japanized is a different issue. They studied Kokugo [(Japanese) National Language] as a language of civilization so that they could acquire modern knowledge and succeed in colonial society to the fullest extent possible. But there were also Taiwanese who used their competence in the colonizer's language to liberate themselves and to challenge the goal of assimilation that Kokugo education was supposed to achieve. (529)

The use of Japanese, then, rather than being simply the sign of a "slave mentality" or a colonized psyche, became for Taiwanese people a tool for resisting domination by the KMT government. As Jiu-jung Lo notes, there is some irony in the fact that "many Taiwanese forged a close bond under political symbols smacking of Japanese colonial rule, an experience that was by no means wholeheartedly embraced by all the Taiwanese throughout fifty years of Japanese occupation" (280).

Mei Wen-Li, writing in 1963, also points to older Taiwanese intellectuals as the primary users of Japanese--in this case to point out how these people were the victims of the anti-Japanese movement in postwar Taiwan because of their lack of access to sources of knowledge. Of these older intellectuals, she writes:

Their first difficulty is language. With restricted imports of Japanese language publications these intellectuals, most of whom were educated in Japanese and can read neither Chinese nor English well, have been living in something of an intellectual vacuum. Moreover, they have no rich intellectual tradition from which to draw. When part of the Manchu empire Formosa was one of its acknowledged underdeveloped areas. Under the Japanese the percentage of Formosan students who received higher education was extremely low and those who did receive higher education were discouraged from developing an interest in the humanities or the social sciences. Many of the most talented intellectuals later sacrificed their lives in the cause of self-rule either in the struggle with the Japanese or in the massacre following the February 28th incident of 1947.

Works Cited

Gao, Ming 高明. "Guowen Diyi" 國文第一. Weixue Pian 為學篇. Taipei: Ziyou Qingnian Chuban, 1958.

Hsu, Hsueh-chi 許雪姬. "Taiwan Guangfu Chuqi de Yuwen Wenti" 台灣光復初期的語文問題 ["The Language Problem in Postwar Taiwan, 1945-1948"]. Si yu Yan 思與言 [Thoughts and Words] 29.4 (1991): 155-84.

Lo, Jiu-jung. "Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian or War Criminals and the Postwar Search for Taiwanese Identity." Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia. Ed. Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. 279-315.

Mei, Wen-Li. "The Intellectuals on Formosa." China Quarterly 15 (1963): 65-74.

Tai, Eika. "Kokugo and Colonial Education in Taiwan." Positions: East-West Cultures Critique 7.2 (1999): 503-40.

[updated 1/4/05, 12:26 a.m.; 1/17/04, 2:15 a.m.]