A FEW YEARS AGO, statues of Sun Yat Sen began disappearing from Taiwan's public parks. In 2004, the Taiwanese government announced it would remove questions about Mainland Chinese geography from its general knowledge exam for civil servants. And last fall, the government renamed the country's largest international airport. Once named for the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai Shek, it is now simply called Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, after the county where is it is located.
The ruling Democratic Progressive Party's latest initiative has ruffled more feathers of officials on the Mainland and in the KMT opposition bloc: Revised high school history textbooks will for the first time devote an entire volume to "Taiwanese" history. The People's Republic of China, previously referred to in classrooms as "our country," "this country," or "the mainland," will be identified as "China," and its history will be condensed from two or three volumes down to one.
The changes don't stop there. The island nation's 50 years of Japanese rule is no longer an "occupation," but an "administrative period." The 1911 Wuhan Uprising that brought an end to imperial rule in China will now be called a "Qi Shi" or riot, which carries a less righteous connotation than the old term, "Qi Yi," or revolution.
The new textbooks, which will reach classrooms in March, even go so far as to address the taboo subject of Taiwanese independence. One version reads: "Taiwan's future remains a big question mark. Will Taiwan independence bring war? How to protect Taiwan from being swallowed?"
CHINESE OFFICIALS
have taken umbrage at the changes, calling the DPP's "De-sinicization" a provocative attempt to politicize education. A February 1 editorial in the PRC-controlled China Daily began: "History is made by man but not man-made. Such a truth foretells the doomed Taipei secessionist attempt to rewrite the island's history through promoting pro-independence culture."
But in a nation with a history as contested as Taiwan's, there is no neutral version of events. Every word choice suggests a bias, real or perceived, regarding Taiwan's status as a nation. Different versions of Taiwan's history have been competing since 1949, when Chiang Kai Shek's provisional government in Taipei and Communist forces on the mainland both claimed sovereignty over China. The cross-strait tug-of-war has intensified since 2000, when the independence-minded President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party ascended to power. The DPP has undertaken an aggressive campaign to emphasize Taiwan's national identity as distinct from the People's Republic of China in public museums, parks, and schools.
Domestically, the new textbooks underscore the polarization between the Pan-Blue political coalition, which favors unification with China, and the Pan-Green coalition, which advocates eventual independence. Leaders of People First, a party under the Pan-Blue umbrella, have called for the resignation of Tu Cheng-Sheng, the Education minister who oversaw the changes. "This whitewash of history cannot be tolerated," said Jacob Chang of the KMT-PFP Representative Office in Washington.
The DPP characterizes the changes as an apolitical effort to teach Taiwanese children about their heritage. Past generations of Taiwanese students were required to study obscure railway routes and names of rivers in Mainland China. For today's Taiwanese teenager, who probably has no relatives living in China, such information is increasingly irrelevant. "The revision of textbooks is unrelated whatsoever to the independence/unification issue," Eddy Tsai, a spokesman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Washington, said in an email. "The revisions were made based on a respect for the status quo . . . and historical accuracy."
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