“To maintain our role as the pioneer in Chinese culture, all government bodies should use traditional Chinese in official documents and on their Web sites, so that people around the world can learn about the beauty of traditional characters,” Presidential Office spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) quoted Ma as saying.

On Tuesday, the Executive Yuan urged retailers and other businesses to refrain from replacing traditional characters with simplified characters in product descriptions or on menus to cater to FITs ["Free Independent Travellers" from across the Strait]….

Fan Chiang yesterday repeated the Executive Yuan’s call for businesses to stick to traditional characters, saying Taiwan has opened its doors to Chinese tourists for three years and most have no trouble reading traditional characters.

“Chinese tourists come to Taiwan to experience the different culture and traditions here, and we should not take this experience away from them,” Fan Chiang said.

Ma’s political opponents argue that the policy is inconsistent with his position on romanisation:

Ma’s endorsement of traditional Chinese characters met with criticism from DPP Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠) and a group of activists who advocate the use of the Taiwan Tongyong Pinyin system. They accused Ma of adopting a double standard by promoting traditional Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin, which was developed by China.

The government should remove road signs that use Hanyu Pinyin before tearing down store signs written in simplified Chinese characters, they said ….

The Hanyu pinyin system was adopted in Taipei City when Ma served as Taipei mayor in 2002. At the time he insisted that Taipei City Government would continue using Hanyu pinyin as its Romanization standard despite the central government’s decision to make Tongyong pinyin the official system for the Romanization of street signs.

Hanyu pinyin has been adopted as part of a global trend so that Taiwan does not needlessly isolate itself from the international community, the decision had nothing to do with seeking closer ties with China, Fan Chiang said, urging the DPP not to politicize the issue.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ma Ying-jeou, pinyin, simplified characters, Taiwan, tourism, tradition
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Inside-Out China‘s author Xujun Eberlein has re-posted on an previous milk scandal comment:

The Chinese expression “quede” (缺德) , meaning “short of virtue,” used to be one of the most vicious insults in verbal arguments. Nowadays, the expression seems to have lost its admonishing power and has simply become a portrait of reality. Last year, a Chinese blogger cyber-named “David” attempted to analyze this. In his widely read article “Why have Chinese become ‘quede’ now?” he lists a few representative views on the Chinese moral sphere: all citizens worship money; no more baselines exist for minimal morality; today is the worst time of moral degeneration in China’s history; China should return to its traditional values.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis comments at China Brief on the moral valence of the recent tainted milk scandal, as well:

I find it hard to believe the Chinese executives at Sanlu, when faced with the request to recall their defective products deliberately set out to hospitalize or kill Chinese babies. Yet their actions, in not recalling product, and those also of the local government officials who failed to act, demonstrate a deep rooted inability to determine between right and wrong. They were amoral.

Earlier on in the article, Devonshire-Ellis accounts for this moral insufficiency in citing a lack of religious education:

[...]the deeper implication however is an essential lack of morality within Chinese society. With China being an atheist state, religion is strictly controlled. There is no religious education in Chinese schools, a situation completely at odds with most of the rest of the world. The impact of this has been to create a society largely amoral, ignorant of the differences between right and wrong.

Religious education notwithstanding, Eberlein also offers the contemporary Confucianist Jiang Qing‘s take:

To [Jiang Qing] the essential problem is the lack of state ideology and a corresponding political system. Since the Cultural Revolution led to the self-destruction of Communism, that once ideological monopoly has lost its past aureole, and common Chinese have been unable to find the ultimate meaning and value for their individual lives.

“The problem isn’t that people don’t follow moral standards; the problem is that there no longer exist moral standards,” says Jiang Qing. He attributes the loss of morality to five decades of atrophy under Communist political power, plus two decades of corrosion under the money and wealth brought by the Western market economy.

See also CDT guest blogger Josie Liu’s recent post.

© browland for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Confucian, moral crisis, morality, religion, tradition
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Just southwest of Tiananmen square the ancient Xie Fangde temple is nearing the end of its 600 year existence. Professor Zhang Bo gives us a tour of what’s left of the temple before it disappears forever, another casualty in Beijing’s ever-shrinking hutong neighborhoods.

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Post tags: Beijing, construction, development, temple, tradition
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People are walking to a cemetery in the west of Beijing on Friday, April 4, 2008. The Chinese traditional Qingming Festival falls on Friday this year, which is the occasion for Chinese people to pay respect to past ancestors by cleaning their graves, presenting offerings of food, and burning joss paper. [Xinhua]

Some 600,000 people visited graveyards in the suburbs of Chinese capital Beijing on Friday, about triple last year’s figure of 189,000, according to official statistics.
On December 16, the State Council (cabinet) revised the nation’s official holiday schedule to add three traditional festivals — Qingming, Duanwu and Zhongqiu — in response to public calls. It also changed the length of other holidays.

The holiday marked on Friday was Qingming, or grave-sweeping day.

The change was intended to allow more people to pay their respects to deceased relatives on what would otherwise be a workday like Friday. No national figures on this year’s tomb visits were immediately available.

A citizen mourns her relative in a cemetery in Guangzhou, capital of southern China’s Guangdong Province, April 4, 2008. The Chinese Qingming Festival, a day two weeks after the vernal equinox, is also called the Tomb-sweeping Day, when Chinese people usually mourn their deceased relatives, pay homage to martyrs and sweep the tombs of the departed. [Xinhua]

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Every weekend, lusty college couples make a beeline past greasy spoon restaurants and bootleg video game shops for the dim hotel lobbies to book three-hour blocks of privacy. Students fill half the simple but tidy rooms at the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, a 10-minute walk from Beijing Normal University.

China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm.   

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Post tags: modern life, sex, tradition, youth
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Workers strung red lanterns and spruced up parks across the city for Tuesday night’s celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which for centuries has marked the end of harvest and the time in the lunar calendar when the moon is at its brightest.

It is a time for family reunions, for moon-gazing and especially for moon cakes, the round pastries traditionally filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and often containing an egg yolk to represent the moon….[Full Text]

[Image: Visitors pass by massive moon lanterns at Beijing's Lugou Bridge, which was decorated last week in preparation for the Mid-Autumn Festival, via WP]

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Post tags: festival, food, tradition
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In the run-up to Mid-Autumn Festival, today, the war for mooncake sales is heating up in stores and restaurants. Meanwhile, a discount mooncake market is booming on the Internet, with the number of related posts hitting 551 on a Beijing sub-BBS alone.

One advertiser surnamed Wu said, “Mid-Autumn Festival is synonymous with mooncakes, which symbolizes the really close relationships between customers, colleagues, friends and family. “Mooncakes are more a symbol of the Mid-Autumn Festival than something to eat. A few bites are enough to taste the tradition.” [Full Text]

[Image of Häagen-Dazs mooncakes via Shanghaiist]

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For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple…

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants ” or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one. [Full text]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marriage, superstition, tradition
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It has taken almost 2,557 years, but the family tree of Confucius, the philosophical father of Asia’s male dominated society, is finally going to acknowledge women. Female descendants will be recognised in a new lineage chart of the Chinese sage’s family – forecast to grow to more than three million people by the time the survey is complete in 2007.

The change, announced ahead of today’s birthday celebrations in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, reflects a growing move to reinterpret and apply the ancient teachings, as the world’s most populous nation moves further and further away from Marxism. [Full text]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Confucianism, Confucius, tradition, women
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For dozens of years, many Chinese people, especially the young, have been proud of speaking good English and being familiar with foreign culture. Such people are considered knowledgeable.Suddenly, the situation has changed.

Just one or two years ago, a long forgotten word guoxue (State study, which mainly means the Chinese ancient classics) has become a source of pride that is sweeping China: Guoxue classes have opened around the country, young people have organized clubs to wear Han clothes with long gowns and big sleeves, even the Chinese lover’s day was hyped by both the media and shops.

Chinese people are eager to study traditional culture now. [Full Text]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: guoxue, Shanghai, tradition
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