User talk:Maowang

Re: Taiwan
Taiwan has never been " rumored as the "Island of Dogs", "Island of Women" ". If you cannot show us any evidence, please stop the nonsense. Thank you. &mdash; Instantnood 19:41, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Alright. If you're sure these are valid evidence, talk:history of Taiwan is the place to go and present. Thanks. &mdash; Instantnood 04:52, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Please leave your comments at appropriate locations of talk pages, and sign them with a time stamp. &mdash; Instantnood 05:16, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Taiwan Aborigines
Hi Maowang, Thanks for the message. I don't plan to move anything else from that page onto other pages. However, I'm hoping to go through the article bit by bit, finding references & updating info wherever possible.

Ling.Nut 22:13, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

migrations etc.
Hi again Maowang,

I just got around to creating the "migrations to highland" section. You mentioned in your earlier message to me that you might want to share resources/discuss on that topic. So I guess it's the appropriate time now, if you still wish to do so. Thanks. Ling.Nut 00:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

hold on there.... Naruw'an very unsourced and very very very POV
Whoa, whoa, do you have proof that Naruw'an is not an Amis word? Also "The Naruwan campaign also demonstrates the continued colonization of Taiwanese indigenous peoples by the R.O.C. " is extremely POV. This is not a political forum for editorials etc.; this is an encyclopedia...

I'm not trying to start a disagreement, but I need to remove some of this. Please read this:
 * Jimmy Wales. "WikiEN-l insist on sources", WikiEN-l mailing list, July 19, 2006.

--Ling.Nut 15:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

--Ling.Nut 04:11, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Get Dr. Li to publish that statement, and I'll back you to the hilt! Otherwise it's a primary source, and primary sources are not acceptable as Wikipedia references. :-) But excellent work &amp; initiative on asking him that question. Kudos for the elbow grease.


 * Well, I honestly don't think that any of the emails are suitable sources for Wikipedia. You can mention the fact that the word does not appear in the Amis dictionary. If you have a secondary source regarding its prior use in songs, that would be good. But comment about "colonization of Taiwanese indigenous peoples by the R.O.C." must be deleted. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant; all that matters is whether or not it's verifiable (since truth is a slippery construct). If you find a secondary source in which notable person X says something like "colonization of Taiwanese indigenous peoples by the R.O.C.," then you can quote that person &attribute the thought to him/her.
 * I'm hoping you'll tear into the article and fix its many patchy spots. But we must keep it WP:NPOV ...
 * Thanks! --Ling.Nut 15:35, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

re: written chinese
i have replied to your latest comments on the "raw and cooked" discussion. let me say that i would not tread into waters with which i am unfamiliar with, such as more detailed anthropological and cultural research on taiwanese aborigines, which you obviously have some background in. similarly, i would advise that you also do not tread into places you are unfamiliar with. as has become apparent to me, one of those areas is chinese linguistics and even written chinese as a whole. my commentary has been re-edited to include relevant wikipedia links to help you at least gain a cursory understanding of that which you had little of prior. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.232.100.151 (talk) 20:44, 13 March 2007 (UTC).

insults, tone of voice, etc
Brain Fart: It probably would have been easier to simply change the offending word.


 * the fact that you call chinese a "pictographic" language shows to me that you have even less understanding of it than i previously thought. chinese has very few, if any, "pictograms" in the real sense of the word.  nor does it have many "ideograms".  written chinese is a phonetic writing system, albeit a complicated and "flawed" one.  anyone worth their salt in chinese language studies or linguistics knows this.  scholarship by Y.R. Chao, B Karlgren, John DeFrancis, and Jerry Norman, etc, who are central figures in chinese linguistics, can attest to this.


 * "生" as a pictogram?! ha! sir, you make me laugh.  a "pictogram" should be able to convey its meaning, no matter the fluency of the reader/viewer in the language of the original writer/artist.  a real pictogram would be, for example, a picture of eating utensils (knife, fork, spoon) on a highway roadsign to designate that there is a hotel/restaurant nearby.


 * therefore "生" is actually just the written representation of the morpheme shēng. (and please notice that i use the word "representation", because even back then, the "pictograph" was highly stylized and is not easily discernable as a "picture" to someone unacquainted.)  even its ancient "pictographic" meaning does not mean "raw" - shang dynasty oracle script shows that it was originally the representation of a sprouting plant/shoot.  eventually, this graph was borrowed to represent other uses of the homophonous morphemes shēng (or more accurately, their pronunciations in shang-era old chinese) - uses with very different essential meanings. - 71.232.100.151 20:03, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

My fault for the slip I couldn't find the right word at the time, see... since I speak Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese for the majority of my day, it is easy to forget the English, but if you don't change your tone from the aggressively insulting I will reccommend you be blocked. It is funny you cite Jerry Norman... he was my professor in Chinese many years ago, I think he retired.

alright, fine, we can calm down before things get out of hand, but let me first bring to light some examples of confrontational language on your part.

may i remind that you entered the argument quite bluntly with the statement, in capital letters, "You Are Not Correct". you want to talk about sounding smug? perhaps keep an eye on yourself as well!

then, prior to my last rejoinder, you concluded with your own sense of superiority, declaring to have "put the matter to rest." ok, perhaps you have not been writing in english as much lately, but may i remind you that this can be perceived as a provocation as well?

this is especially since you had not yet cited your most recent source, re: chinese cosmogony, but instead went on about "pictograms". it is sincerely wonderful to know that you were a student of prof. jerry norman. but perhaps you were just a regular (speaking+writing) chinese language student of his, and not a student of the more specific field of chinese linguistics? his writings on the latter should leave no doubt in any reader's mind that "pictographic" or "ideographic" are gross mischaracterizations of the chinese writing system. this fundamental concept may only get passing mention in a regular language class, if at all. but i cannot easily imagine an english-fluent student of chinese linguistics ever losing sight of that concept, whether or not they are currently in the habit of writing in english day-to-day anymore. so if you were indeed a linguistics student of prof. norman, then i can only suggest that you apparently lost sight of a cornerstone concept within the field, and perhaps need to re-read his and other's writings on. i try to say this with all due respect.

you also argued earlier about how even the english word "raw" has other tangentially related meanings such as "unrefined, bare, etc". but the same cannot be said about "cooked". the only other meaning for "cooked" in english might be the slang usage "his goose is cooked", as in "he is doomed". by translating 熟 as "cooked" in english, this precludes ascribing to the original 熟 any other meaning than the culinary one.

so, while i can agree that the most recent source you cited might begin to shed some light on the possible merit of your position, it remains contingent on the fact that the original chinese 熟 and 生 can have these double meanings. to which i might say "fine, so maybe the Qing era classification might have alluded to the pure culinary senses of the words as well," but they obviously also intended to convey the meanings "familiar/assimilated" vs "unfamiliar/unassimilated". (and my arguement has been that this was primarily what they meant to convey, even if the other "essential" meanings of the original characters were also meant to be alluded to.) however, in the english translations of "raw" and "cooked", only "raw" has the potential to allude to the quasi-suitable secondary meanings. thus again, it is the english translations which are problematic.

therefore an english-only reader of the article will come across the terms "raw" and "cooked", and thus think that the chinese were just obstinately ethnocentric overlords willing to just classify non-han tribes in the same vein as things and objects. that they were or were not this chauvinistic is not the issue (and i would agree that they were indeed quite chauvinistically ethnocentric). but by simply translating the terms as "raw" and "cooked", one loses the more "nuanced", shall we say, ethnocentrism of the chinese literati from that period, because an english reader of the article will assume that only the culinary senses of the word were intended. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.232.100.151 (talk) 03:23, 14 March 2007 (UTC).

Kinmen and Matsu
Kinmen and Matsu are part of Fujian province. They still regard themselves as Fujian people. They are definitely not Taiwanese, by their own definitions and by others interpretations. An unregistered user added Kinmen and Matsu. Alex678 02:57, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

GA, Blusse
Hi,

The GA failed, but I think the reasons are completely bogus. Have listed the failure for review at WP:GA/R. While the article is on review, please don't alter/edit/remove the images (I think they are licensed correctly, despite what reviewer said).

By "(Blusse 2000)" do you mean "(Blusse & Everts 200)" I think that would be cited as Thanks a billion for the tons of sweat you have poured into the article! :-)

--Ling.Nut 00:29, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Hope we aren't bumping heads.. is there a Blusse 1999, or is that the same as the others? Thanks!!! --Ling.Nut 00:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

European period

 * I rewrote the European rule section to sharpen, clarify and save 100 words... but I didn't post it to Taiwanese aborigines 'cause it deletes info (the landdag, of course, and perhaps one or two other things). I posted it here: User:Ling.Nut/European rule. --Ling.Nut 21:31, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Note also that if we add a Zheng Era section, some of the stuff from the Dutch section could perhaps be moved there.... the Dutch system was advantageous to the Han, etc... --Ling.Nut 21:37, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Approaching saturation point..
Hi,

After this recent burst of activity (starting with the lengthy process of converting refs), I'm starting to feel sick of looking at the article again. I do wanna look over whatever you do to the Japanese section tho...

Some thoughts:


 * Please do me a favor... don't even mention landdag in the Euro section. :-) The article is too fat already, and the landdag is just a bit too detailed for our overview. [Moving it to the "Taiwan under Dutch Rule" article would be fine...]. Besides, if I see that word again, I just may rip my eyeballs out. We don't want that, now do we?
 * Please do me another favor... keep an extremely sharp eye on the wordcount as you revise the Japanese section. Less is more, less is more...
 * After rewriting/polishing the Japanese section, are we done until after GA? Done for a month or so? I think (or at least hope) that we are.
 * After some thought, I don't think "relocation" should be given a separate section. It took place in both the Japanese and KMT eras, so it should get one or two sentences in each of those sections.. but that's for after GA. :-) As I mentioned earlier, I have many good quotes on this topic...
 * That's all for now. :-) --Ling.Nut 04:14, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

oh what the heck ... requested peer reviews

 * WikiProject Ethnic groups/Peer review/Taiwanese aborigines
 * Peer review/Taiwanese aborigines/archive1
 * --Ling.Nut 04:10, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

redirect
Just use Mudan incident. I made a redirect --Ling.Nut 00:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Taiwanese people draft page

 * Here's a draft page, below. Knock yourself out. Edit 'til you drop. :-) Try to interlace your ideas with Nrtm81's, as much as possible. I may start kicking in ideas later....
 * User:Ling.Nut/Taiwanese people --Ling.Nut 01:06, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

geography

 * Talk:Taiwanese_aborigines --Ling.Nut 00:52, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What do I think.. check your email. :-) --Ling.Nut 01:51, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Can do? Please comment...
Please comment: Talk:Taiwanese people--Ling.Nut 22:49, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

I think he thinks..
I think he thinks the "maowang" page, which wasn't written by you, actually was... I moved that page to my userspace, y'see... --Ling.Nut 06:07, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Did you see my reply on your misconceptions about the "blueshirts" on Ling Nut's talk page? For some reason he archived it. If not it's here. Blueshirts 18:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I got my infor from Crozier and White. Theodore White was an eye witness as a journalist following the KMT during WWII.Maowang 08:15, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

which book is that, thunder out of china? How did they arrive at their opinion about this organization? Did they use the exact name? Blueshirts 09:23, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Thunder out of China by Theodore White. He's the same guy who wrote the acclaimed "Presidents" series. Maowang 13:01, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

T.A.: useful picture?

 * useful? --Ling.Nut 02:59, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

redlink to "aboriginal Autonomous Areas"

 * I bet we can find something if we look.. like Land rights, aboriginal land claims, terra nullius, native title... --Ling.Nut 01:30, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

tai abor
... I'm busy. Thanks!! Ling.Nut 15:15, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Can you take care of the issue raised in the reviewer's comments (except for splitting the article) and reply?
 * Thanks for doing all that! Ling.Nut 03:14, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Dounan, Yunlin
Alright, I'm trying to improve this article. I think it has the potential to become at least a B-class article. First I want to start of by getting a picture. I putted a link of a photo in the discussion page. The photo belongs to the government of Dounan, and I don't know how to get the permission to use it. So...I need your help.

Also, if you would, please help me translate the page New Ten Major Construction Projects.--Jerrypp772000 20:36, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Battle of Red Cliffs
I saw the work you did on the article &mdash; stirling, as per usual. I really appreciate your help!

.. are you ever gonna put anything on your user page, or is this whole minimalist thing a statement against the shallow, pathetic attempts we frail human beings make to impress/relate to one another? I should make up a hyphenated word: impress-relate.. umm.. Ling.Nut 03:02, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Ummm... I'll think about it. It just seems like one more thing to do. Maybe after I get a new computer and want to mess with images and graphics. We'll see... Maybe I'll just put up a Haiku...or do an interpretive dance...Maowang 03:15, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * :-) Ling.Nut 03:16, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Culture of Taiwan
Well, I like to copyedit, so let me know when I can help. --Calde 01:35, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Your writing style
Several people have told you now that your writing is difficult to read. You don't seem to take these objections seriously. You always have some reason why your hard-to-read prose is the right thing to do. I'm sorry, but I don't think you are listening. Just because you are good at finding sources (and indeed you are very good at that) doesn't mean you are a good writer. I get the impression you are hard to work with. --Calde 04:31, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

For a user with one day of Wiki-experience, you seem to have a lot of opinions about my work. I have been involved in some very fruitful collaborations with other users and I am looking to do the same elsewhere in the spirit of wikipedia and in the spirit of NPOV, which is my driving force. Furthermore, every wiki-page is a collaboration and the work of many individuals, so it is not my writing style, but the style of countless contributors and editors. I have been attached to the Taiwanese Aborigines project since 2003 and thus I understand the changes which have been made and how many people have been a part of making that page GA status and now ready for FA.Maowang 04:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

re: culture of Taiwan
Hi, I'm sorry if I sounded terse or disrespectful in my message. I haven't constantly followed the discussions on that page, at least partly because I try not to get into conflicts with User:Certified.Gangsta. If I watched the page I'd probly be there reverting every time he made an edit... a situation I want to avoid.

However, I would like to discuss with you the style of the lead paragraph. Terms like "discourse", while common to the academic discourse (=D), are not part of the everyday lexicon for the average reader, and do not contribute to the accessibility or the "inviting"-ness of the opening. I think there is room for reworking it to remove those terms. Your thoughts?

As for the plural "cultures" -- I understand your rationale for choosing that term. Nevertheless, it is not consistent with the general treatment of similar subjects on Wikipedia.

As a crude proxy for the "common names" test (Common names), Google returns 18,100 results for "Culture of Taiwan" but 13,700 for "cultures of Taiwan". For the latter, most results are about the prehistoric or indegenous cultures of Taiwan, whereas the former term is mostly used in the context of the contemporary or modern culture. Your thoughts?--Sumple (Talk) 10:30, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I will probably rework some of the language, when I have a better handle on how the article will turn out. For the time being, it beats the pants off the old one. I hope you can see where I am going with the whole article. I think a huge idea like "Culture" can be treated with a little more insight than "bubble tea". Thanks for your response, I am listening...:-)Maowang 10:36, 5 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I have no doubt your additions are and will make this much more comprehensive and overall a better article than it was previously (which was like, "we have seven elevens, and bubble tea. oh, and everyone goes to coaching colleges" -_-).
 * For future reference though, a user subpage (e.g. my User:Sumple/Forbidden City) is a useful way to manage a major revision while it is in progress. When you finish working on it, you can invite comments on that, to further edit it before replacing the existing mainspace article. It lets you work in freedom and saves a lot of reverting. --Sumple (Talk) 13:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hello, and thank you for the invitation to collaborate on Culture of Taiwan, but it is really outside my area of expertise. I am a psychiatric anthropologist who works in the US and Central Europe, with a background in European history and literature. I know a bit about Chinese psychiatry, mainly through colleagues, and can comment on how the articles look to an anthropologist, but otherwise it's not my area. I will mention this to a former professor of mine who has done extensive fieldwork in Taiwan and China, but I don't know if he spends time on Wikipedia. Good luck. Mccajor 14:05, 6 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for incorporating some of my suggestions. I certainly think your latest version reads much better (as you might expect) =D. --Sumple (Talk) 09:04, 8 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hey, I don't know if you have been following the edit history on the main page, but if you go there you might have noticed Certified.Gangsta again blindly reverting edits, with the result of re-introducing previously deleted vanaldism/undoing good faith edits.
 * He seems to be under the impression that you are on the same side as him. Would you be willing to dispel that notion in so far as destructive edits are concerned the next time the issue arises? --Sumple (Talk) 03:58, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi, just wanted to let you know that I am leaving Wikipedia for a while, maybe for ever, after what happened here. It was good working with you on Culture of Taiwan. I wish you all the best, and I hope I will be around to see the finished product. --Sumple (Talk) 05:41, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Thunder out of china
Hi, can you point out to specific pages that mentions the blue shirts, and the leadership of Chiang Ching-kuo. I did not find any mention in the book. The two weren't even in the index. Did you quote out of context from the reference or something? Blueshirts 21:42, 5 May 2007 (UTC)


 * On your long comment, all I have to say is give me a break, you're beating a dead horse. Every book on Chinese history that labels the blue shirts as "fascists" based this conclusion solely on Lloyd Eastman's article in China Quarterly. The same thing is carried over to Eastman's book Abortive Revolution. I've read many books and when you check the notes section, almost all of them cite the above work by Eastman as reference. Thus, it makes absolutely no difference at all how many references you can drum up with, because all of them are derived from the same work. After some heated discussion with Maria Chang in the China Quarterly, and particularly after the revelation and exposure of the group by former members in the 1980s, Eastman has profoundly changed his views, and this is reflected in an article published in the journal Republican China, now "Comtemporary China" I believe. Research in these areas is always changing, please. And you still have not verified which part of Thunder of China elucidates the role of "Chiang Ching-kuo" with the Blue Shirts. Blueshirts 03:38, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

You seem to be trying to blame Eastman for all the research on the Blueshirts. I'm sure Mr. Eastman would be flattered that he could have so much influence and the singular authority. I haven't seen his name in any of the notes. I did see a report from a magazine article from 1936. I also see a book here called "Fascism in China 1925-1938: A Documentary Study, by Michael Lestz and Cheng Pei-kai pp. 311-314. This does not seem to rely on Eastman for any "documentary evidence".

I'm trying to think of where I saw that connection...maybe in Formosa Betrayed or something.


 * That is so much misinformation. The passage from Barbara Tuchman's book on Stilwell says the organization was founded in 1932, when in reality it was 1931 before the invasion of Manchuria. It also says they were Chiang's "storm troopers", when the influence of fascism was minimal. The entire passage also had only one passing mention on the oganization, "...leaders of group which founded the Blue Shirts, the Kuomintang's storm troopers". And the sentence itself was not referenced and carried no citation at all. And you're using this weak reference as a source to call them fascists? As for the information from Crozier's The Man Who Lost China, it's a popular history book with very little research value. Crozier is a journalist, not a historian. This is from the review of this book on Pacific Affairs (v. 51 no. 1) by James Sheridan "...the sparsity of sources shows up not only in obvious errors in Chiang's main public activities, but also in gross over-simplifications and errors in his treatment of the political context". The only good thing about this book is that it was the first English biography about Chiang's entire life, but carries too many mistakes and too little analysis for the specialist, especially in an area as complicated as the blue shirts. The same thing can be said for "Soong Dynasty" and this popular history books, which are good the the general readership, but probably would get a graduate student marked for his use in his term paper. And I'm surprised that Eastman was not mentioned as he was the head guy in creating this notion in western scholarship, with his seminal article in the China Quarterly in 1972, as most previous sources that called the blue shirts fascists were Japanese intelligence propaganda aiming to undermine Chinag's negotiations during the pre-war period. And the 1991 book by Eastman was not a new book, it was a collection of essential chapters from the Cambridge History of China. It does not reflect any changes in his views due to his discussions with various historians and former members of the group. Seriously, I hope you don't make this kind out-of-context edits and quote mining on any of the articles you make on wikipedia, and maybe find better specialist sources than general history books that you find in barnes-and-nobles. Blueshirts 04:36, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I know Seagrave is "popular history"I'm just grabbing off the shelf behind me and I really don't care that much to actually go into the next room and look :-). What about Spence's Fascism in China? The documentary sources are forging documents?

But you have a lot of people who believe the "myth", so don't be upset if it maked you look bad and people think you have a POV. It is what they are reading.Maowang 04:43, 7 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Nah, the name's cool and I'm not upset that people believe in the first lie they hear. I cherish it lol. Spence probably is not a specialist in this area either, and he probably like most other historians also only made a passing reference and people grabbed it up as a credible reference. Don't believe anything you hear, especailly from these people on this difficult subject. Blueshirts 04:48, 7 May 2007 (UTC)


 * like i said, the earliest sources to call them fascists were from pre-war Japanese intelligence, and from the archives of the international police in the shanghai concessions. Eastman was not the first one to label them fascists, but he was the main force behind this whole debate in western scholarship, and it was in direct response to his "denigration" of the organization that former members came into the limelight and published memoirs and articles in journals like "chuan chi wen shuei" in Taiwan. Wakeman goes into more length in Reapprasing Republican China and invents this term "confucian fascism", which he calls "iconically amibiguous". Their "ism" was the Three Principles of the People, and they did not need a foreign "ism" to reinvigorate China. Basically they were a nativist group, where anti-foreignism and ethnic revival were of utmost importance, not necessarily "fascism". And can you please tell me where you found that Chiang Ching-kuo was the leader of the blue shirts, thanks, as this is very interesting. Blueshirts 17:27, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

FAC
Hi—no problem! However, I don't usually do edit jobs on FACs; otherwise, I wouldn't have time to review them and encourage nominators to network on WP to locate suitable collaborators. Start with the edit-history pages of similar FAs. The edit summaries and compare function will soon reveal who's doing the linguistic refinements. Ask them to help on yours. A little flattery goes a long way. Tony 02:27, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

List of Taiwanese People
It's been a while since my comment on that page. I'll try to take a look at it over the weekend. -Loren 05:16, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

non-controversy, roadrunner
See Roadrunner's second comment on my talk page about the non-controversy over tai abor.. See my reply on his.. I copy/pasted a section of the Tai abor article that I had cut out a long time ago.. you two can work out a compromise on re-adding the info... later! Ling.Nut 18:28, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

NPOV
The problem is that the whole concept of invoking "colonialism" with respect to Taiwanese aborigines is a POV. I'm reasonably familar with the literature on colonialism and orientalism, and while I always enjoy learning new things, this doesn't change the fact that you are describing things in a controversial POV, when more neutral terms are perfectly reasonable.

I agree that the view of Taiwanese aborigines within the framework of colonialism needs to be discussed, but I strongly object to framing the article with "anti-colonialism" having a privileged frame of view.

To keep from this turning into an edit war, let me put up a NPOV tag and then wait for comments from other people.

Roadrunner 06:31, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

More bits of info:


 * I am going to have to revert the references to the coloniality of the various cultural projects in Taiwan. That is exactly what the sources claim and support.

The curious thing is that I've read a lot of the same books as you seem to have, but I think that they are saying something different. Perdue certainly doesn't use the language of colonialism, and I don't think that Crossley does either.


 * I realize Chinese nationalism is threatened by assertions that Qing era expansion was colonial.

It's much more complex than that. Sun Yat-Sen argued that the Manchus were a colonial power which enslaved Han Chinese. Part of the problem is that I don't object very much when "colonial" is used in a clinical value-neutral sense. Which is why I don't have any objection to a lot of what is written in the literature because it is clear that the author isn't expressing a value judgment on the legitmacy of the Qing enterprise. However, I do object to a bait-and-switch in which a term is used both in a value-free and then in a value-laden sense.


 * The Chinese nationalist model includes many ethnicities as "Chinese" minorities, buy they are viewed by a sense of "denial of co-evalness", which is one mark of coloniality, where a dominant culture determines another culture to be subordinate and backward, lacking the modernity of the colonizing culture. This can be shown on Taiwan and in China when ethnic "minorities" are often asked to "be ethnic" by dressing in the traditional costumes their ancestors wore at first contact, frozen in time, where the Han wear "western" style suits as a symbol of their own "advancement" and their ability to use nationalism to "advance" the "backward peoples" toward madernity.

The trouble with that statement is that this presumes that you can neatly divide things into "cultures", and this runs into conflict with a lot of the literature that deconstructs the idea of a monolithic Han culture. If (as I believe to be the case) the idea of a monolithic Han culture is a myth, then the notion of a dominant culture disappears. The other thing that is problematic is that Han Chinese also have traditional costumes which reflect an ahistorical and imagined past, and there is a lot of "self-hatred" literature which regards Han Chinese as backward and feudalistic.


 * This type of cultural chauvinism is very well documented. We designed this page to put the dirt out on the table so the topic could be discussed as we are not Aborigines. We need to discuss the coloniality of Taiwan's indigenous people, so we can expose how most of our knowledge and definitions are not from the indigenes themselves but rather they were defined by an ethnic "other"...another mark of coloniality.

Who is this we? The trouble here is that you run very close to political advocacy which is not the point of wikipedia. I agree with you that the point needs to be made that the definitions that we use are not reflective of the people involved, and part of the reason I'm complaining is that you are falling into that trap. By describing things in terms of colonizer versus indigene, you are imposing a definition which the people involved may find alien.


 * Steven Harrell's Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Prasenjit Duara's Rescuing History from The Nation, Emma Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography, Charles F. Keyes Ethnic Change, Edward Said's Orientalism, Susan Blum and Lionael Jenson's China Off Center, Peter Perdue's China Marches West to name a few.

I've read Said, Blum, Jensen, and Perdue. Teng is on my reading list. I need to add Harrell, Duara, and Keyes. Part of the reason I find this topic fascinating is that I have my own "project" of trying to create a transnational, multicultural Chinese identity. But frankly I think that you are reading into some of these authors points of views which they don't necessarily hold.

My own view is that truth is complicated and to adequately describe a situation, you need multiple narratives and multiple perspectives (which wikipedia provides), and it is dangerous to try to understand something from the point of view of a single perspective. The notion of Taiwan being "colonized" by Han immigration should be mentioned, but at the same time I frankly don't think that this view is more objective or historically accurate than views of the situation that see Han settlement as a process of the unification of the motherland. The problem is that *both* are post-facto descriptions colored by recent history, and neither may provide any particular insight into what people at the time thought about what was happening.

As far as my own agenda. I'm very proudly and unapolegetically a Chinese nationalist, and one thing that I've found is that there is a tendency by some in academia to consider nationalists to be backward, uneducated, and closed-minded, and to associate nationalism with goose-stepping anti-intellectual thugs, and to associate nationalist narratives of history to be mere propaganda.

Trouble is that this isn't the case.

Roadrunner 07:55, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

aborigine representation
thanks, maowang, for your comment. i've read all your recommendations. emma teng's work is excellent. i highly recommend bulag's work on the representation of the mongolians traditionally and under communism, the masculine minority as opposed to the female aborigine in the south. shidailun

Chinese transnationalism
I don't think that language works as a uniting factor because there are "Chinese communities" that don't speak Chinese, and there are communities that speak things that are linguistically related to Chinese that aren't considered Chinese. Also the definition of a "Chinese language" is interesting since Chinese is defined as a "language" only because people who speak it have a common identity, which makes the whole thing tauntological.

Personally I subscribe to Benedict Anderson's notion in "Imagined Communities" that there doesn't need to be any objective unifying factor to form a national community, and that "imagination" is a sufficient ground to form a national community. The only thing people in a national community have in common is the idea that they have something in common.

One thing that I find very interesting is the degree to which the modern Chinese identity was influenced and perhaps even created by the Manchus who were trying to form the basis for their ruling a multi-ethnic state. Even the idea of a "Han ethnicity" was formed in reaction to the Manchus, and includes diverse sets of people that in another context would be considered "separate nations." While one of the ideas of a Chinese nation is that it has a very ancient history, the idea of Chinese really quite recent, and the fact that the Manchus successfully created the idea of "Chinese" while the Ottomans, Romanovs and the Habsburgs ultimately failed in creating a pan-national identity is why I find them quite fascinating.

Roadrunner 22:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Taiwanese aborigines
Hi Maowang. Aquarius converted WPFORMOSAN into a workgroup, and I don't really want it to be because I don't know what it is. I mean it doesn't look like a task force (it's not a subpage under the main project), but it doesn't look like an independent project either (see the new project banner). So I think this is not a good way to organize those projects. Can you please give me your opinion?-- Jerry 14:41, 25 June 2007 (UTC)


 * It's a WikiProject, it doesn't matter anymore because they are separated now.-- Jerry 15:45, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Taiwanese aborigines FAR
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Taiwanese indigenous peoples at FAR
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