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Fri, Feb 28, 1997
Taiwan Remembers '2-28'
also: China moves closer to the WTO; bombers arrested in Urumqi; and a look at a new Chinese-language learning toolTaiwan: today in Taiwan a new national holiday is being observed for the first time, but already the New Holiday Sparks Business Complaints, as the Inside China headline says. The holiday, known as "2-28", attempts to remember the thousands who died in 1947 during a KMT extermination campaign against Taiwanese elites and intellectuals, as well as many others.
It was on this day in 1947 that government Monopoly Agents, responsible for enforcing government laws on tobacco and alcohol products, seized upon a woman selling illegal cigarettes on the black market. The agents beat the woman and shot a bystander who protested against the agents' actions. This apparently was the spark that set off a powder keg of grievances within the population at large, as crowds which formed the next day in protest were mainly comprised of Taiwanese. They attacked mainlanders and their supporters. The government quickly tried to settle the matter by negotiation, and a stand-off ensued. It lasted until May, 1947. Then over ten-thousand KMT troops landed in Keelung and Kaohsiung, and waged war against Taiwanese intellectuals and social elites, although many others died as well. Using today's parlance, we may term the terror campaign as "ethnic cleansing." Estimates of those killed run between 10,000 to 20,000.
Many of these details were omitted from the Inside China story.
According to the article, business groups warn that the holiday was enacted hastily and without due consideration to its impact on the national economy. Taiwan's Parliament created the commemoration just three days ago. Business leaders complain that "this symbolic healing of past wounds comes at the expense of today's economic productivity", explains the paper. But for many Taiwanese the government's decision to make "2-28" a national holiday was, according to one Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker, a "dream of Taiwan's people for the past 30 or 40 years", reports the paper.
Trade: the director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) , Renato Ruggiero, will travel to China in April as part of an effort to speed up the admission of mainland China into the organization, reports Inside China. Ruggiero says that it is important for mainland China, Taiwan, Russia, and Ukraine to enter the world body as soon as possible.
Mainland China submitted its application to the organization a decade ago, but with the events of 1989 the application was suspended. Since then many nations, notably the U.S., have argued that China must remove or lower tariffs on a number of products and services before the application may be accepted. Also, at issue is the fate of China's state-controlled economic systems, writes the paper. Ruggiero says, Beijing must satisfy member nations that this system of control has been modified sufficiently to bring Beijing within compliance of WTO "rules."
Beijing would like to enter under "developing nation" status, which would permit it more time in complying with a number of the trade rules. When Ruggiero arrives in mid-April, his Chinese hosts will be sure to tour him not only around the coastal provinces, where the crux of economic development has been concentrated, but to the poorer hinterland, largely untouched by the striking prosperity on the coastal periphery, says the paper.
Ethnic problems: the Urumqi bureau of public security has made several arrests in connection with the bombings there on Tuesday, reports Inside China. No further details have been provided.
Computers: students of Chinese may be interested in the forthcoming Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese. Devised by the Wenlin Institute, the software promises to make learning Chinese "more interesting, enjoyable, and successful." The University of Hawaii has the software installed on their Macintosh network in the language laboratory, and I had the opportunity to play around with it yesterday.
For students of Chinese the software provides an impressive system for centralized, organized and quick learning of characters and words. Chinese text files, including those published on the internet and on-line newspapers, can be read. The system appears to work by scanning documents as they are opened, and then by moving the mouse cursor over individual characters, one may have a dictionary definition, reading, and usage guide instantly given. The system also will sound out the character or word, although I have not investigated this feature. Another interesting and useful feature is the flashcard authoring and review system, whereby one may use existing stacks of flashcards or devise new ones and have the system quiz one's mastery of each.
Please don't take this as a review of the system, for I have not used it enough for a proper evaluation. I mention it here because Wenlin has the potential of transforming the process of how one learns Chinese. As anyone who has studied the language knows, dictionary work consumes much of one's learning, and Chinese dictionaries can be quite cumbersome and slow to use. Wenlin is an exciting development in Chinese-language learning aids. Wenlin has not been released yet, but it promises to run on both PC's and Mac's.