Talk:De-Sinicization/Archive 1

The article in question

Why is the article on Desinicization focusing so much on Taiwan and China? According to the Chinese version, it is simply the removal of chinese influence and customs from other countries/regions. In this case wouldn't it make more sense to address Vietnam, Korea, and Japan separately? AKFrost (talk) 04:25, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

airport comment

"Hence for the past 30 years or so, the mainland Chinese never knew that there was an airport in Taiwan that is called "Chiang Kai-shek airport."

- what a crock of sh_t. with a massive populace like China's, to generalize them as "the mainland Chinese" who "never knew" about CKS airport, is problem enough. then to say that this lasted for 30 years (and implying that perhaps it even continues?) is even stupider. let's assume that, for the first 15 years, the PRC was somehow indeed such a closed-information society that something like this could not have reached the ears of the general populace. but to then claim that such a state of affairs persisted another 15 years, during which business, travel, communication, and media links have been ever present and only increasing, is preposterous.221.222.224.41 (talk)

actually, we should probably delete that whole section "by the chinese communist party"

"desinicization" is not even the applicable term for most of the phenomena and events described in that section.221.222.224.41 (talk)

Kuomintang

Need citation for this since, I don't think it is true.

In 2005, a delegation of Kuomintang went back to China. The Chinese government usually likes to add the word Chinese in front of everything from Taiwan, such as Chinese Taipei, which is opposed by Taiwanese. However, this time, the government referred to the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, as a "Taiwan political party". Hence, to the Chinese government, the Chinese Nationalist Party is not an official Chinese political party..

Roadrunner (talk) 16:21, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Changes

1) The politically-neutral term of the ideology as used by both sides on Taiwan is "Chinese unification" 2) Most of the changes were changes in tense 3) The last section is just unsupported editorializing (and it's also not true)

President Ma is expected to reverse all of the desinicization campaigns, which would no doubt incite animosity from ethnic Taiwanese.

Change terminology since the official policy of the Kuomintang is "no independence, no unification, no use of force." Roadrunner (talk) 14:47, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Sinicization

In the "Taiwan" section of the article there should be some mention, as background, of the Sinicization that occurred under the KMT. For example, the renaming of the streets of Taipei from their original Japanese names to names designed to reflect the geography of China. Readin (talk) 02:09, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Remove this because this is wrong

Remove the assertion that Ma's "resincinzation" will incite ethnic animosity. If you have verifiable sources that say that it will, put in back. Otherwise it's just editorializing (and wrong). Roadrunner (talk) 03:32, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

You need to refrain from labelling others edits as "wrong".

It's factually incorrect. If you have a verifiable source that justifies it then we can discuss it. Roadrunner (talk) 05:54, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Please come up with more convincing excuses for your POV pushing endeavors in the future. Of course Ma's policy would incite racial conflict. Most ethnic Taiwanese despise Chinese culture especially half a century of oppression.

No they don't. My wife is a benshenren Taiwanese from southern Taiwan. My kids spend the summers in Taiwan. You are just incorrect about what people in Taiwan think about Chinese and Chinese culture. Under wikipedia rules, my experiences is "original research" but I've tried to put up citable sources that justify my edits. Roadrunner (talk) 05:54, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

It is obvious that you support Kuomintang's oppression of ethnic and enslavery of ethnic Taiwanese.

I support the Kuomintang and so I am happy to say that 60% of Taiwanese voters also did in the last election. Yes I'm human and I have political causes that I support, but I try to work with people that disagree with me. Roadrunner (talk) 05:54, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Too bad 'pedia is not the right forum to express your hatred toward Taiwanese and your faulty assumption that Taiwanese are somehow a subordinate to Chinese.--Certified.Gangsta (talk) 04:30, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is supposed to be an accurate summary of what the state of scholarly research is, and I happen to think that you are extremely misinformed about what Taiwanese people think, but again this is original research and not citable, but I've provided a lot of citations that justify my views here. Where are your citations. Roadrunner (talk) 05:54, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Japan

I removed the line below because I'm not sure what it is saying or how it relates to desinicization. If someone decides to put it back in, the term "Japs" should be changed because some people may find it offensive.

"Kanji characters were simplified in their own program, to make it easier for Japs to learn Kanji."

Readin (talk) 23:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

"Nationalists"

When did we start using "Nationalist" (or the more neutral and clearer "Chinese Nationalist") instead of "Kuomintang" or "KMT"? Readin (talk) 14:13, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

disparate topics

This article covers a somewhat strange grab-bag of miscellaneous subjects... AnonMoos (talk) 00:52, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

How can China desinicization itself?

There's no way for a country to go opposite of itself. e.g the European were baptized around the first century A.D,so they had changed their culture to an then alien one,and from 16th century,a great number of the Catholic became protestant,so you cannot say the European deeurorized themselves.--Ksyrie(Talkie talkie) 03:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Which term do you suggest for "de-ancient-Chinese-ization" or "Chinese detraditionalization"? --Yejianfei (talk) 03:22, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

YOLO Swag's recent additions

I for one do not see a problem with Quigley's recent additions to the article. They increase the depth of the content, as well as filling in relevant links. I can't see the "NPOV" push as User: YOLO Swag has pointed out. I would like to start a discussion to prevent further edit warring. Dengero (talk) 06:53, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Comparing the last two edits, I see a few problems:

• "ROC forced Chinese cultures on Taiwanese." became "ROC promoted Chinese cultures on local residents who were mostly descendents of Han Chinese who had been immigrating to Taiwan since the Dutch period." "forced" became "promoted". "Promoted" sounds much nicer, but the correct word is "forced" because in many cases the residents were given no choice in the matter. The name changes were not voluntary. The children being punished in school for using their native language in school were not voluntary. The restrictions on the use of native languages on TV and radio were not voluntary. The contextual information about Taiwanese people being descendants of Han immigrants has some value, but in this case it is unbalanced if no mention is made of the years of development of a separate Taiwanese culture or the influence of other countries such as Japan. The goal of the desinization movement was the destruction of Chinese cultural practices retained from long-dead ancestors, but the removal of recent forced Chineseness from the Kuomintang. To the extent that those handed down cultural artifacts were involved, it was as targets of destruction by the KMT (such as the limitations on use of sinitic languages that the Kuomintang's Mandarin). However Japanese artifacts were even more targeted by the KMT.
• This was added: "As part of this movement, some Taiwanese historians downplayed the abuses of Japan's colonial administration, referring to it as "rule" rather than "occupation"; and the Taiwan History Association claimed that Taiwan's history was a part of Japanese, rather than Chinese, history."Although this is cited, it is not neutral since no mention is made of the same thing occurring with regard to the ROC's occupation of Taiwan which some historians make a point of not calling an "occupation".
• "Desinicization accelerated under the Chen Shuibian administration (2000-2008), with the pro-Taiwan independence Democratic Progressive Party in power." This is misleading as the DPP controlled only one of the 5 yuan and was very restricted in what it could do by an uncooperative legislature. It would be better to change "in power" to "in control of the executive yuan" (or "executive branch").
• "In 2003, the government abolished the longstanding policy of using Mandarin as the sole language of government, which in practice promoted the second-largest dialect on the island, Fujianese, to the status of a national language, which became increasingly known as "Taiwanese"." Since the cited source is not readily available, I'm not sure what the source is being used to support in the sentence, but the idea that the language became increasing known as "Taiwanese" does not fit at all with my experience. From the time I first started meeting Taiwanese people in the lat 80's, including the early 90's when I lived in Taiwan, and for all the time going forward until I first encountered the term "Hokkien" on Wikipedia, "Taiwanese" was what I and everyone I knew called the language in English, and "Taiyu" was the term used in Chinese. Unless someone can confirm the source actually says that the term "Taiwanese" for the language became more common only after 2003, I think we should that part of the sentence. If someone does confirm it they should provide the relevant quotation from the source.

I think most of the added content is good, but the problems mentioned above should be addressed. Readin (talk) 04:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Readin gave a pretty unbiased view. Moreover, the label of Han Chinese is a flawed concept. There is no shared unified DNA between Northern and Southern Han Chinese and if Han is a cultural identification, most Taiwanese in 1945, when most people spoke Taiwanese and Japanese and did not speak any Chinese and women wore kimono, did not qualify or even self-identify as "Han" and were forced to adopt an unwanted culture. I'm gonna quote this from admin User:Bishonen's input in a Taiwan vs. China arbitration case in which I was involved in Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram/Evidence#Reply_to_Sumple_about_Certified.Gangsta. As for CG's supposedly "unreasonable" editing of this list: one basic disagreement is whether the ethnic distinction betrween Taiwanese and Chinese is a matter of self-identification or of biology ("blood"). CG says the former, his opponents the latter. Thus Ben Aveling: "Even if every Taiwanese citizen stopped speaking Chinese they would still be ethnically Chinese (aboriginies excluded). It's in the blood."[1] As far as I know, CG's opposite view of ethnicity is the dominant one today, when we don't talk so often about what is and isn't in the blood. See Ethnic group#Ethnicity, nation, and race: "While ethnicity and race are related concepts (Abizadeh 2001), the concept of ethnicity is rooted more in the idea of social grouping, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal affiliation, shared genealogy/kinship and descent, religious identification, language use, or specific cultural and traditional origins, whereas race is rooted in the idea of a biological classification." --YOLO Swag (talk) 04:44, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the edit you made at about the same time you added this comment went too far. It introduced a lot what I could call non-NPOV. The version checked in by Dengero was, I think, reasonable but not perfect and I think it is the version we should work from. We should use that version and only make changes by consensus so that the edit-warring doesn't continue.

The concept of "Han Chinese" does have have some technical problems, but its meaning is clear enough for describing "desinification". Indeed, whether the concept is artificial or not, it does exist in the minds of the people involved and that mental existence has real-world effects due to the behaviors of the people who have it in their minds. It really isn't possible to talk about "desinification" without using the concept of "Han Chinese". Readin (talk) 06:44, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, first let's clear up some confusion about who-edited-what. I did not change the "promoted Chinese culture" bit as part of my initial edit.[2] YOLO Swag first reverted my new content,[3] and then made a separate edit[4] which changed the longstanding text from "promoted" to "forced". I reverted YOLO Swag's edits in total,[5] because he provided no valid justification for reverting me, and because his second edit produced an unacceptable bias into the text.

As for the introductory text: If you go far enough back, anybody can be a victim in Taiwan: the mainlanders, Hakkas, and aboriginies are (today) the victims of forced Hoklo culture; the Hoklos were victims (yesterday) of forced mainlander culture; the Han Chinese were victims (the day before) of forced Japanese culture; the aboriginies (before that) were victims of forced Han culture, and so on. That's why I think that the unsourced paragraph, with no source tying it to the "desinicization" concept, should be removed entirely. Here's all we need for the purpose of this article, "desinicization": At one point in time (our source says the 1980s), a large portion of the people in Taiwan identified as Chinese. Because of subsequent government policies, which are described in sources as "desinicization", that number dropped dramatically. All the rest of the Oppression Olympics can go into the Sinicization, Taiwanization, Japanization, and Hokkienization articles.

As for the "ROC occupation of Taiwan" issue, yes some radical Taiwanese nationalists believe that the ROC is as foreign a power as the Japanese were. The problem is that this article describes the desinicization government policies of the ROC, one of which was to rehabilitate Japanese rule, but even Taiwanese nationalists like Tu Chengsheng would have a problem delegitimizing their own government. We follow the wording of the reliable sources. About the "one of the 5 yuan" issue, contrasting what the DPP did to what it could have done is original research. The fact is, the DPP did a lot of stuff (detailed in the article) that only required control of the executive yuan, such as renaming organizations.

Regarding the language issue, here's the quote from page 56 of the book.

In addition [to the Tongyong switch], the government policy of having Mandarin as the official language was abolished in 2003, and fourteen languages have all become "national languages" since then, including eleven Aboriginal languages, [Hakka, Hoklo, and Mandarin]. From this latter move it would appear that the state was following an individualistic ethnic nationalism, in which every language is equal. But in reality, it might be mainly for the purpose of expanding the use of Hoklo language to compete with Mandarin, since very few people can speak the other languages anyway, but the majority can speak Hoklo. It is common now for peple to refer to minnan hua as the language of Taiwan, or Taiyu, taking on the importance of a "national language." This is a typical example of collectivistic ethnic nationalism by virtually viewing other languages as not Taiyu, again contradicting the state's own language policy set in 2003.

By the way, personal experience in general is not the best source of information. A lot of people in the pan-Green camp have created a nationalist self-victimizing mythology that Hokkien was completely suppressed under the KMT (and that is written into our articles on the subject). I read some books on national language policy in Asia, and found that the KMT had mandates like at least 45% Mandarin in television; a far cry from 100%. There are also reports of street violence from Hoklo chauvinists against Hakkas and aboriginals who don't want to speak Hokkien. I'll add this to the relevant articles later, but the issue is definitely more complex than the reductive "Taiwanese vs. Chinese" narrative.

Shrigley (talk) 14:07, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• Regardless of the question of who is a victim and who is not, "forced" is the correct word.
• It sounds like you're saying we should remove the statement about most Taiwanese having Han Chinese ancestry, along with a lot of the other historical background, and focus on the period immediately before and during the desinification. However I think we at least need to talk about the motivation for the de-sinification movement which was at least in part of a rejection of the sinification program of the Kuomintang.
• "As part of this movement, some Taiwanese historians downplayed the abuses of Japan's colonial administration, referring to it as "rule" rather than "occupation"; and the Taiwan History Association claimed that Taiwan's history was a part of Japanese, rather than Chinese, history.[1]" Regardless of whether it is true that some Taiwanese historians began to talk less about Japan's colonial rule and began to call it a "rule" rather than an occupation, the description of this is not neutral and is not necessarily desinification. In the source indicates that it is without further evidence then it suggests the source may have reliability problems. Did the Taiwanese historians "downplay" Japan's abuses, or they merely correct an too great a focus on those abuses that had long been emphasized by the KMT? Was it a "rule" or an "occupation"? It was clearly both! Calling it a "rule" isn't necessarily desinification - it may be simply correcting a long-standing bias. The author of the source provided is Chinese and the article is published in a Hong Kong Chinese book; it is likely to have his own biases. Even if it isn't biased, the wording in our article is. When you say "As for the "ROC occupation of Taiwan" issue, yes some radical Taiwanese nationalists believe that the ROC is as foreign a power as the Japanese were." you indicate some bias of your own. What is radical about believing the ROC, with no roots in Taiwan when it sent it's armies, were a foreign army occupying Taiwan? "but even Taiwanese nationalists like Tu Chengsheng would have a problem delegitimizing their own government." Up until the end of WWII, "their own government" was the government of all Japan. If the government being "their own government" makes it impossible for the government's action to be an "occupation", then the same should apply to the Japanese rule of Taiwan.
• From the quote, the key sentence is "It is common now for peple to refer to minnan hua as the language of Taiwan, or Taiyu, taking on the importance of a "national language." " This appears to be carefully worded to say when people started doing this. It only says that they "now" call Taiwanese "Taiyu". Perhaps the writer was unable to determine when this started happening. I know that personal experience isn't authoritative, but it can be important for judging the reliability of a source. The idea that I was surrounded by people in the "pan-Green camp" is ridiculous given the part of Taipei I was living in and the known political leanings of most of the people I knew. If we can agree that the writer chose his words carefully to avoid saying something he wasn't sure of, then ok. If the contention is that he clearly meant to say that "Taiyu" started to become prominent after 2003, then please show why he's a reliable source because it seems clear to me that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
• "I read some books on national language policy in Asia, and found that the KMT had mandates like at least 45% Mandarin in television; a far cry from 100%." I did choose my words carefully when I said "restrictions" on the use of native languages on TV and radio rather than saying "bans". You are right that it wasn't a 100% ban, but nor was it a voluntary choice of how much of each language to use.

Readin (talk) 14:57, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

We're veering into off-topic territory here, in material that should be discussed on Taiwan history articles. Nonetheless:

• Force is not a correct word, because it implies that the Taiwanese were not seeking their Chinese roots; that they were not Chinese; or that preceding (Japanese) and subsequent (Hoklo) cultural promotion policies were somehow more congruent with the populace. Every nation-building process is in some way coercive, although we would not describe the Italian government's promotion of Standard Italian over the mutually unintelligible dialects as "force".
• It is always the case that within one country, competing nationalisms choose to emphasize different glories, humiliations, enemies. But here's the catch: this article is about the POV concept of Desinicization. It is by design that we're not putting equal weight towards the viewpoints of Taiwanese nationalists, because they would not agree with the premise of the desinicization concept that the Taiwanese were "sinitic" in the first place.
• The question of rule or occupation is blurred in common parlance, but in legal terms it is more clear. Military occupation is by its nature temporary, conservative of most existing laws, and not a claim to sovereignty. However, certain annexations can be retroactively considered occupations if the transfer of sovereignty was illegal, like the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. This is what happened with the Japanese occupation of Taiwan by the Potsdam Declaration.
• It is just not true that the ROC did not have any connections to Taiwan before 1945. Since 1900, the Revive China Society and Kuomintang have been organizing on Taiwan for Chinese nationalist goals and to subvert the Japanese occupation, with organizations such as Taiwan People's Revolutionary Alliance, Taiwan Revolutionary Party, Taiwan Recovery Corps, etc. What little Chinese connections remained on the island came at a great cost to the Taiwanese people, because of Japan's extremely thorough and violent Japanization and Desinicization policies (which, if considered across southeast Asia, killed almost as high a percentage of the overseas Chinese in its area as the Khmer Rouge). Also keep in mind that before the United Nations decided that the Axis could not keep territory gained by aggression, most Chinese had fatalistically assumed that Taiwan would go the way of Outer Manchuria.
• The upshot is, it's all about scope. Think about how out of place it would be to put an equal amount of text in "228 Incident" about Japanese abuses under the guise of "context" in order to be "NPOV" about the Kuomintang abuses. Desinicization is primarily about the Hoklofied KMT's and DPP's efforts to eradicate the symbols and discourse of a Chinese national culture. My text already describes how they do it: by delegitimizing the rule of the Qing Dynasty, rehabilitating the rule of the Japanese, etc. These policies may or may not be justified; what preceded these policies may or may not be justified, but in either case, this article is not the place to make such polemics based on original research. If you can find a source specifically about the desinicization concept which perhaps refutes it, then feel free to discuss or integrate it. But I don't feel that - going back to the original dilemma of this discussion - the text before my additions is any better. Shrigley (talk) 18:17, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Under the principle of "moving forward under the roof of the area in which we all agree", I have modified the text to acknowledge DPP's less than complete government control, and to emphasize Minnan's increasing functions as a national language, rather than what it was called. Shrigley (talk) 21:32, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Shrigley/Quigley, do NOT lie about having consensus in the edit summary. There was no consensus and no resolution. We are better off leaving the article in the status quo until we reach a resolution on all the relevant issues here in the talkpage with objective cool-headed editors without their personal bias. Stop the unnecessary drama--YOLO Swag (talk) 22:13, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Readin suggested changes in opposition to mine, and I agreed to them. You endorsed Readin's message, saying that he gave a "pretty unbiased view". By implementing them I am - to a sane observer - implementing the consensus of all three of us. The only thing that has not been resolved were Readin's objections not to my own new material, but to the restoration towards consensus of your POV-changing edits,[6] which were independent of reverting my edit.[7] In other words, it's not my addition that is the subject of discussion now, it is your edits. Therefore, I have renamed the section title "YOLO Swag's recent additions".

The common name for Minnan Hua is an objective and easily solved issue, whereas whether culture was "promoted" or "forced" is a much more delicate POV issue. By solving the superficial, I was removing "unnecessary drama". By reverting me (apparently because of personality issues, because you have still not raised content objections), you are guilty of exactly what you accuse me of. There is no Wikipedia rule that justifies your blocking of the consensus of at least Readin and me - I had good reason to believe you too. You can't keep reverting because you just don't like it and force the continuation of "discussion", because eventually a discussion reaches resolution. And we've reached resolution on two out of the four points, so any more reverts from you against this new consensus is pure disruption. Shrigley (talk) 22:46, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

We don't need to be in a hurry here. The section we've been discussion is in reasonable shape. A few days or even a week's delay in making improvements isn't catastrophic. There was a pretty big edit war going on, let's slow down and make sure we really have consensus before making changes. I wouldn't hurt to post big paragraph changes here before committing them to the article.Readin (talk) 19:19, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The majority of inhabitants of Taiwan are descendants of Han Chinese who had been immigrating to Taiwan since the 17th century. After Japan took Taiwan from China following the First Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan experienced a state-sponsored program of desinicization followed by Japanization, which involved purging Taiwan of its Chinese culture and teaching only Japanese language in its schools. A distinct Taiwanese identity emerged in resistance to Japanization and Desinicization, oriented towards the mainland Chinese "fatherland".

The text above was added (but without consensus. I think we should discuss it. I think the language is is not neutral. For example, while the language in the following paragraph says the Chinese "promoted" Chinese culture, the above paragraph uses the much more negative word "purge". As for "teaching only Japanese" - prior to the Japanese there was very little schooling at all in Taiwan. Elementary school attendance rose from the single digits to around 70%, so it's not like Japan stopped people from learning Chinese in school - they weren't learning anything. The source quoted (at least the part quoted) simply says the Japanese had a "desinicization" program. It doesn't say it was a "purge". It doesn't even include information about Japanese being the only language of instruction.

As far as giving weight to various efforts, I think the more recent efforts should be given greater weight because they have a more direct effect on the main topic. Aboriginal conditions need not be mentioned directly. The sinification of large parts of Taiwan by the immigrating Chinese should be mentioned. The effect of Japanization should be described more than that. The sinification efforts of the KMT - the most direct cause of the recent desinification efforts - should be given even more description. Prior to the reversion I just did the Japanese and KMT efforts were given equal weight even though they are not equally relevant to the recent desinification. Readin (talk) 19:48, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Japan's policy was not merely to promote Japanese alongside the islanders' native Chinese language - as the Kuomintang did - but to supplant it completely. This policy difference has something to do with the fact that under Japan's racial ideology, the "Altaic languages" (taken to include Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, etc.) were superior to Chinese, while the Kuomintang viewed the Hoklos as family, not untermensch. One source that I cited makes it clear that desinicization came first, and then Japanization later. The reason why there should be an emphasis on Japan's policies is because that was desinicization too; this article should cover the Japanese desinicization efforts as well as the Hoklo desinicization efforts.

I'm not sure what more "sinicization" mention you want, but you have to relate every one to desinicization. For example, the Guomindang introduced Beijing opera to Taiwan, and the Hoklo government is trying to replace that with Fujian opera. But then we run into trouble: could we say that the ROC "sinicized" by establishing institutions with "China" in the name that didn't exist before? You seem to hedge blame on the schools that only taught Japanese because, there was "very little schooling" in Taiwan. We need to mention Japan's desinicization and Japanization before what existed before the ROC weren't Hoklo institutions, but Japanese institutions or none at all. Shrigley (talk) 21:37, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Some references: I list the references and their quotes because some of these references really should be in the desinicization article and I'm not sure why their not. In any case, I'm not sure what to make about the claims of Japanese efforts to desinicize the island. You say that the Japanese were attempting to eliminate the use of native languages while the Chinese simply wanted to encourage the use of Mandarin alongside the native languages. However at the end of 50 years of Japanese rule nearly everyone still spoke their native language most of the time. After 50 years of Chinese rule Mandarin was very common especially amoung children (at least in Taipei where I lived - that may have something to do with the large number of Chinese people who settled in Taipei). What sources do we have that say the Japanese tried to eliminate the use of other languages while the Chinese encouraged bilingualism? Readin (talk) 21:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I'm not saying I doubt that the Japanese were trying to impose Japanese culture on Taiwan or that the effort necessitated de-emphasizing Chinese aspects of Taiwan's culture, but I question the severity of it. I would like to know more and to have some reliable sources to back it up. Readin (talk) 03:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the direction of this discussion is encouraging. I am leaving the article page alone for the time being. The main POV problem with the article is portraying the Chinese nationalist government in a favorable light while attempting to portray the Taiwanese people in a patronizing, even belittling, way. Readin has pointed out many instances of such. For example, the use of "force" versus "promote". Taiwanese never had a choice in the face of 228 massacre and White terror. Chinese language and culture were forced on them. That's a known fact. There are other instances of similar semantics in the article. The semantics of the article is too POV and needs to be addressed in a fair and balance way.--YOLO Swag (talk) 23:44, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Shrigley wrote, "The reason why there should be an emphasis on Japan's policies is because that was desinicization too; this article should cover the Japanese desinicization efforts as well as the Hoklo desinicization efforts." That's a good point. Perhaps we should break the section into two subsections, one for "Desinicization by the Japanese" and one for "Desinicization by the Taiwanese" to be clear we're talking about two separate instances. Readin (talk) 03:05, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

How could Japan "desinicized" Taiwan when Taiwanese's exposure to Chinese culture was very limited (more so than even Korea) until 1945? The inclusion of that is NPOV and without basis. The Manchurians were not interested in forcing Chinese culture on Taiwanese and mostly left Taiwan alone after the Dutch and Koxinga. It's true that Japan's policy in Taiwan was assimilation unlike the brutal colonization tactics in Korea and China but the assimilation campaign still allowed a certain level of autonomy (more so than their Chinese nationalist counterpart) and the assimilation was more about integrating Japanese customs into Taiwanese culture rather than forbidding Taiwanese to speak Taiwanese. Many Taiwanese still recall the Japan era fondly. In fact, Taiwanese volunteered and fought for Japan during World War 2 against China and the United States.--YOLO Swag (talk) 05:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The reason it could be "desinicized" is that people from China, mainly Fujian province, had been immigrating to Taiwan since the Dutch era. They of course brought their culture with them. By 1895 the majority were considered "Chinese" either because of the culture they had learned from the ancestors or because they had assimilated. An explicit attempt to remove the Chinese elements of Taiwanese culture (as opposed to a general attempt to replace all Taiwanese culture whether aboriginal, imported, or developed in Taiwan by the Hoklo/Hakka) can be fairly called "desinicization". Readin (talk) 14:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The same can be said for Korea. The people from Shandong province had been emigrating to Korea. No one call these people Chinese. In fact, China migration to neighboring countries impact not just Korea and Taiwan but also Vietname, Thailand, and almost all the countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia. The same could be said about the relationship between Fujian and Taiwan. The fact that you are insinuating and insisting on making Taiwanese Chinese without doing the same for other Chinese migration from centuries ago (some more recent than the Fujian to Taiwan migration) is double standard and a violation of NPOV. There are Chinese elements in many Asian culture and Chinese migration to many different Asian countries. You can't just say in 1895, Taiwanese were considered Chinese when the Manchus largely left Taiwan alone and the dynasties that preceded them didn't even include Taiwan as part of their territory. The fact of the matter is almost no Taiwanese understood a word of Chinese until the forced assimilation campaign starting in 1945 by Chiang Kai-shek.--YOLO Swag (talk) 19:57, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Interesting that you bring Vietnam and Korea up, because the articles on the origins of those peoples have suffered from the insertion of nationalist historiography which denies Chinese influence. We'll shine a spotlight on that later. Still, the fact remains that the Taiwan migration was much more recent, much less diluted with the local people, and the Hoklos on Taiwan retained their Chinese names, Chinese dialect, Chinese religion, Chinese food practices, etc. The mainstream sources are all unanimous on this point, so I don't think we need to discuss this extreme-green revisionism. Readin, we could use a similarly negative word for the GMD cultural program as for the Japanese cultural program if you like, but we would have to note that it was primarily directed at eradicating Japanese influence, rather than at Hoklo influence (which was not institutionalized and accessible to the government). Another thing to note is the prevalence of the sources - that even Readin cites - which use "resinicization", rather than simply "sinicization". Shrigley (talk) 14:21, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Pretty much everything I've ready about Taiwan's history in the 1800s referred to the people as some form of "Chinese", whether the document was written recently or at the time. For example, [8] is a quote from an 1885 edition of Popular Science.

In reference to using the same word for the efforts of the KMT and the Japanese, we should use the same word if it was the same and use different words if it was different. It is clear that the KMT did more than just "promote" an identity, they forced it. The forced it through schools, through renaming, through expulsions, through martial law limits on freedom of speech, through limitations on TV and radio. We have references for these things and for those of us with experience living in Taiwan we have first hand knowledge and we have direct contact with people with first hand knowledge to back up the reliability of those sources. As for Japanese efforts to desinicize the country, all we have are a couple sources whose reliability is questionable based on at least one inaccurate statement and which, in any case, simply say that the Japanese were trying to desinicize the country, not that they were doing so forcefully. As for me, I don't know how strict the Japanese were in their efforts. Please get some reliable sources that have more details. Readin (talk) 16:37, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

The stuff you read is either Chinese communists propaganda or Chinese nationalist propaganda. There is a serious lack of Taiwan-centric view (especially English ones). My point remains, there are a high number of Taiwanese that never have self-identified as Chinese and my aforementioned point from Bishonen remains from admin User:Bishonen's input in a Taiwan vs. China arbitration case in which I was involved in Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram/Evidence#Reply_to_Sumple_about_Certified.Gangsta. As for CG's supposedly "unreasonable" editing of this list: one basic disagreement is whether the ethnic distinction betrween Taiwanese and Chinese is a matter of self-identification or of biology ("blood"). CG says the former, his opponents the latter. Thus Ben Aveling: "Even if every Taiwanese citizen stopped speaking Chinese they would still be ethnically Chinese (aboriginies excluded). It's in the blood."[9] As far as I know, CG's opposite view of ethnicity is the dominant one today, when we don't talk so often about what is and isn't in the blood. See Ethnic group#Ethnicity, nation, and race: "While ethnicity and race are related concepts (Abizadeh 2001), the concept of ethnicity is rooted more in the idea of social grouping, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal affiliation, shared genealogy/kinship and descent, religious identification, language use, or specific cultural and traditional origins, whereas race is rooted in the idea of a biological classification."'--YOLO Swag (talk) 04:30, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the Chinese (whether Nationalist or Communist) makes it difficult to find modern neutral sources. However that doesn't explain why everything I see that was written in the 1800s also called the non-aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan "Chinese". Readin (talk) 15:27, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the question of culture vs ancestry, when the two become indistinguishable the question loses its importance. A significant number of the Han Chinese in Taiwan were of aboringal ancestry - either because of intermarriage or because aborigines chose to adopt the Chinese lifestyle (which was seen as being higher status and which produced more wealth). The aborigines of the relatively flat west coast were not killed off by disease and warfare to the extent happened in America. A lot of them just assimilated. Readin (talk) 15:27, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Taiwanese plains aborigines warned Hoklo and Hakka ("native taiwanese") to stop claiming aboriginal ancestry for political purposes (Taiwan independence)

Plains aboriginals are against Hoklo and Hakka claiming aboriginal identity for Taiwan independence.

http://udini.proquest.com/view/how-han-are-taiwanese-han-genetic-pqid:1668343911/

http://gradworks.umi.com/33/43/3343568.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=I2OMVmp-7mwC&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=I2OMVmp-7mwC&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=I2OMVmp-7mwC&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 14:04, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

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