November 12, 2006
China Deploys Quotation Marks Against Renegade Province
First, I’d like to assure my readers and whatever government censors are unfortunate enough to be assigned to read this blog (career progressing more slowly than you’d like, Agent Zhang?) that I’m no troublemaker. I know that nothing gets folks here more riled up than talking about Taiwantheprovince. I realize that, for whatever reason, Taiwantheprovince stirs deep nationalist feelings in even the most otherwise open-minded Chinese citizen (see Archduke Assassination), and I agree that whatever tensions might exist between the Chinese and the Taiwantheprovince-ese peoples (the latter being a subset of the former, in case there was any confusion) are really none of my business as a cultural outsider. My contract specifically forbids me to discuss the subject, and I’d be happy enough to comply if people would just stop confronting me about it.
There are probably better ways to duck the inevitable question, “Do you think Taiwan is its own country?” but my stock response has become, “What’s a country?” (unless the conversation is in Chinese, in which case I usually fall back on “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” which I guess is less an evasion and more an embarrassing disclosure).
The question of what exactly constitutes an independent nation exposes many of the problems faced in even framing the Taiwantheprovince Issue. After all, how can China be “reunited” with an island that never ceased to be a part of its sovereign territory in the first place? This semantic dilemma probably falls hardest on the state-run media, who must denounce “secessionist” actions on the other side of the strait while being careful not to imply that Taiwantheprovince might have many of the institutions that we typically associate with nations.
I’m not qualified to comment on the Chinese language newspapers, but China Daily at least is forced into some truly ridiculous grammatical pussyfooting. Even as the paper gloats about the legislative actions being taken against President Chen Shuibian, it must be careful to enclose the words “legislative” and “president” in quotation marks, along with other seemingly innocuous terms like “diplomatic,” “parliamentary,” and “law.” Since almost no sentence in an article about Taiwaintheprovince is free from questionable words, these otherwise dry political stories take on a delightful sneering tone. I really hope that news anchors on TV have to make little quotey-quote fingers whenever they talk about the island.
Should a place with its own “military,” its own “currency,” its own “government,” and its own “laws” be considered a country? It’s frankly not a question that interests me that much. All I can hope is that, in the near future, neither side feels the need to settle the ambiguity with weapons more formidable than punctuation.