Comments on: Are debates over linguistic rights erasing diversity?

By: Paul Desailly

Paul Desailly — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 05:56:24 +0000

David’s right but I look at the lingo issue in East Asia in a very broad sense and in an historic perspective because it’s modern Sino-Japanese relations that are still simmering, potentially so dangerous for the whole region and because America is involved and because powerful languages ebb and flow.

Consider imperial Manchu’s abrupt demise: Though for generations throughout Old Cathay a primary language of the Qing dynasty (1636-1911), neither the last emperor (Pu Yi, 1906–1967) nor his brother Pu Jie (1907-1994) spoke it at all. Today, neither their relatives residing in Japan, nor any one in China outside Xinjiang or academia retains mastery of that Semitic language. Despite the edicts and efforts of Pu Yi’s imperial ancestors to foster, and later to revive, the once mighty Manchu tongue, a mere handful of fluent speakers of pure Manchu resides today in Beijing, Shenyang (formerly Mukden) and a few locations bordering the Bohai Sea. (On Sino Japanese history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident )

Praise be to God, I’ve been back in Oz for a decade now, after spending ten years teaching English, French and Esperanto in 30 Chinese cities. It astounded me that so many English majors on most Chinese campuses despise Japan, half a century after WW2. It didn’t help that a CIA maverick blew up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during my tenure. I don’t think those same majors love the language of Shakespeare much either.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1954, 1975, 1978, 1982) protects language rights of its 55 minorities. Esperantism and its internal idea more than nominally uphold equality of rights irrespective of one’s politics, religion, nationality, class, wealth, or gender, all of which explains why the Chinese government and people see Esperanto as a friend and engage two teams of Esperantists in Beijing’s public service producing (a) one of the best Esperanto magazines in the world, and (b) quality programmes broadcast in Esperanto several times per day and telecast from the ultra-modern studios of China Radio International. And, as the nation’s economic star blazes once more, a nongovernmental Esperanto movement is increasingly active in China. An adage from antiquity resonates yet in the southern provinces of the People’s Republic: “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.”

By: David Marjanović

David Marjanović — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 23:14:04 +0000

China is reluctant to recognize more languages because its ideology on such matters comes straight from Leninism, which took it straight from 19th-century Romanticism: to recognize a language means to recognize a distinct people. Thus, China would have to recognize a lot more than the 56 nationalities it does now. And it is reluctant to do that, because:
– That would make it look like a nationality (let alone dozens!) had been overlooked, and seeming admissions of incompetence are hard to make. The last time a nationality was newly recognized was a few decades ago, and those people live in such a remote area that the government could make it plausible that they really had been overlooked without anybody being at fault here.
– Each recognized nationality must have a complete Communist Party apparatus. It’s a lot of work to set that up.
– If the official Tibetans speak a whole bunch of languages, how many do the official Hàn Chinese speak? That question probably implies threats of separatism at best, and of a chaotic crumbling of the country to dust at worst, to some of the people in power.
– Excuses are available. The speakers of the Rgyalrongic languages in Sìchuān – which are more closely related to Qiang, the medieval Tangut language and probably even to Burmese than to Tibetan – are classified as Tibetans not only by the government, but also by themselves; they are Tibetan Buddhists, their cultures are largely Tibetan, and their languages contain enough Tibetan loanwords that they generally consider the languages Tibetan, too, not much more different from Written Tibetan than the Amdo Tibetan spoken on the other side of the mountains.

By: Paul Desailly

Paul Desailly — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 03:58:26 +0000

As far as the hundreds of self-immolators are concerned, whether in Tibet or Tienanmen Square (Falun Gong), a typical response voiced by the atheistic Communist Party is that religious administrations are responsible for misleading those heroes, martyrs and lovers of democracy. A particularly horrid incident occurred about 15 years ago under Mao’s famous portrait when one of Beijing’s ‘finest’ in mufti appeared out of the blue to extinguish the flames. In famous tourism centres it’s rare to see police officers any where in the world with fire extinguishers at the ready under their overcoats. BTW, what Mao’s people succeeded in doing to Inner Mongolia’s culture a generation or two ago has inspired the current regime.